Inside the World of Assassins, Drug Lords, and the Woman Who Interviews Them - Mariana van Zeller
Everything is the Best
Dear Media, Pia Baroncini
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2026
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I went into this interview a little nervous - because let’s be honest, Mariana van Zeller is famously serious. She interviews assassins, drug lords, traffickers, and people living in the darkest corners of the world. I was fully prepared for an intense, heavy conversation. Instead… we laughed. A lot. This episode ended up being funny, warm, surprising, and genuinely joyful - while still being jaw-dropping. Mariana shares what it was like moving to Syria right out of college to become a reporter, the surreal moments of being picked up in the middle of the night, blindfolded, and driven somewhere unknown, and an interview where she wasn’t allowed to bring a phone and had no idea where she was going. We also talk about the personal side of a life spent taking massive risks - how her husband and family support her completely, how she manages fear, and what it really takes to walk into dangerous spaces with empathy instead of ego. This conversation reminded me that the bravest people aren’t hardened - they’re human, curious, and often unexpectedly funny. Mariana is all of that and more, and this ended up being one of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done.
Listen to Mariana's Podcast The Hidden Third HERE
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast is a Dear Media production. |
| 0:03.8 | So nice to meet you. |
| 0:17.4 | I feel intimidated by the depth and the intensity of your career and you being on this |
| 0:24.7 | podcast. But then I saw you're on Theo Vance and I was like, it's okay. Like, we can, we can talk |
| 0:29.3 | about fun things. That's the problem with doing the kind of reporting that I do is that people |
| 0:33.0 | then think I'm just very, very serious and dark person. And you're not. Yeah, no, you're not, which |
| 0:38.1 | probably helps with your work, right? Because there's a lightness about YouTube and you need to |
| 0:42.0 | like get. I'm a human being who also likes have fun and drink wine and talk. I know one of the |
| 0:47.9 | things you said that I really loved and related with, which was this like universally smoking |
| 0:51.9 | a cigarette with somebody like early breaks. |
| 0:56.2 | Really, it is the best. |
| 0:57.9 | It's I travel with cigarettes when I'm in the field, basically. |
| 1:00.8 | We always have somebody in our team always has a pack of cigarettes. |
| 1:04.1 | And they're a great way to bright people. |
| 1:06.9 | Yeah. |
| 1:07.4 | But also mainly, it's a great way to basically when you're starting a conversation with somebody and you're trying to convince them to go on camera, which is very hard in the kind of reporting that I do, to get to say, look, do you want to have a cigarette first and we can talk about this? Amazing. And it sort of really breaks the ice. And I don't smoke regularly. I actually don't smoke. This is a work, fig. Yes, absolutely. Let's get this clear. I'm not a smoker. But it feels like you're in like some sort of like detective makes it really like cinematic to be like, okay, here's the dig. Tell me about trafficking women. It also looks really good on camera. When the other people, I don't usually do it on camera ever, but when the other people, my camera people always say, can we get them to smoke cigarettes while they're being interviewed? The drama of it all. The drama. Yeah, it's just so funny. Very Hollywood. Well, I'm just going to get right into it. So you witnessed 9-11. Yeah. I was in high school. So I mean, you know, |
| 2:02.7 | it's so funny as an American, oh, I mean, I'm sure internationally too, but everybody has like their |
| 2:08.7 | story of what you're doing that day, right? What you were doing that day. So you witnessed it as a student. |
| 2:14.1 | And so when you think back on witnessing, you know, the most horrible thing that's |
| 2:19.6 | happened in American history, does that feel almost like fate? Or was that like, was that |
| 2:25.8 | level of trauma something that you think was able to like push you into the field that you're |
| 2:29.9 | in? Do you think it had anything to do with that? Oh, 100%. It is interesting how things happen |
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