All episodes of The Jordan Harbinger Show

The Jordan Harbinger Show · 2026-03-24 · 95 min · 21,583 words

1302: Mariana van Zeller | The Drug Cartels Running Small-Town America

Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional war correspondent, neuroscientist, or investigative journalist If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I love it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs.

These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit JordanHarbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, cartels in small town America, gangland executions in places with one stoplight and a dairy queen. Today's guest is one of those people whose job makes some of us envious and the rest of us grateful for our little cubicles.

My friend Marianna Van Zeller is a journalist and the host of Trafficked on National Geographic, a show where she just casually hangs out with cartel members, human traffickers, armed robbers, people who would absolutely murder most of us within five minutes. She's been embedded, if you can call it that, with drug cartels in Mexico. followed human trafficking routes from Vietnam into China, investigated rehab scams that literally kidnap Native Americans and lock them up in houses, and filmed armed heist crews in South Africa who blow up cars like it's fast and furious but without the CGI. Oh, and that's just season five of the show. And somehow through all of that, she's still empathetic, curious, shockingly calm,

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