Joe Rogan Experience #2092 - Mariana van Zeller

(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music) Hello.

Hi.

Good to see you my friend. How's things?

So good to see you. Great. Thanks so much for having me again.

I'm so happy every time I see you that you're alive and well.

(laughs)

'Cause you do some wild stuff, lady. (laughs) You get involved in some, some situations.

I do. This, this past year was crazy.

Yeah?

Yeah. This, uh, we just had season four come out and it's my favorite season for many reasons, but, um, also because it was quite the adventure.

What did you get involved with this season?

Oof. Um, (laughs) well, uh, it ended with a military coup in Africa, where my team and I-

Oh, boy.

... got stuck. Mm-hmm. So that was sort of the-

What part of Africa?

... kickoff to all of it. Um, it was in Niger, so it's in the Sahel region of Africa. The US has actually a military presence. Remember a few years ago when there were these, uh, four US marines that were killed in the Sahel in Niger, and nobody even knew they were there?

Mm-hmm.

Well, there's actually over 1,000 troops stationed in Niger. And, uh, we were there in a little town called Agadez, which is in sort of the southern border of the Sahara Desert, and we were doing a story about gold mining. So the story itself was incredible. We had to, you know, we had, uh, con- military co- convoy with us because it's incredibly dangerous part of the world. You've got terrorism, you've got ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, you've got kidnappers, so it's very, very dangerous.

Mm.

We'd gone there with the permission of the government, but only if we, we had to have a military con- uh, convoy with us at all, all times. So we're talking about four tru- armored trucks, uh, with lots of trained soldiers that every time we stopped, they'd get out of the trucks and basically point their guns all around. They were very well-trained.

Wow.

A lot of them are actually trained by the American military. And, uh, we went out into the desert and visited these gold mines which are crazy. It was an eight-hour off-roading into the desert to arrive at these illegal, unregulated mines. We're going down these tunnels and it's, you know, h- uh, a hundred meters down, hand, uh, dug tunnels with no, nothing to buttress them, no safety precautions or anything.

Oh.

But we filmed it all and we get to the end, and there's people basically mining for gold. And, and again, constantly with the idea that the military is telling us, "Okay, we have to film fast, we have to do this fast. We can't be out at night." So we went to a sort of safety, uh, more safe location to sleep that night under the stars. And then the next day, it's time to come back to Agadez, the town, which is about 100 miles but takes anywhere between, like, three to 12 hours to get because you can, lots of things can happen along the way. And we arrived in Agadez and we got word that there had been a military coup and the president had been deposed, and, uh, he was now being kidnapped inside the presidential palace, basically was stuck there with his family, and that we were about to lose our military compound and security. And they closed all the land borders and the airspace, and we were stuck, uh, with no way out 'cause you can't travel by road without security in that part of the world, and there were no planes leaving, so we were stuck.