{"podcast":{"title":"Mayim Bialik's Breakdown","slug":"mayim-bialik-s-breakdown-1365756","podcast_index_feed_id":1365756,"rss_url":"https://rss.pdrl.fm/a88a08/feeds.megaphone.fm/MASL6091580855/","website_url":"https://art19.com/shows/mayim-bialiks-breakdown","image_url":"https://content.production.cdn.art19.com/images/98/32/cd/36/9832cd36-19ab-4c6a-a982-7e2768ef2084/69d4cff5b20534ff089282b519c732e0340b84584b5e42509f26531f533befd95d851ffc1d7ddaf4600441c4d7be830e9ed5178e07ddd84120961b1e90b3e822.jpeg","author":"Mayim Bialik","episode_count":472,"summary":"Consciousness. Spontaneous healing. UAPs. Near Death Experiences. Manifestation. Psychic phenomena. Angels. Nothing is off limits if it can be approached with curiosity and rigor. MBB started as a conversation about mental health — and quickly became something much bigger. Because the deeper you go into what it means to be human, the faster you run into questions science hasn’t fully answered yet. Hosted by neuroscientist and cultural icon Mayim Bialik and spiritual explorer Jonathan Cohen, MBB is a multi-award-winning podcast where science and spirituality meet. Together they break down the assumptions, the misperceptions, and the boundaries between disciplines — and every breakdown is a breakthrough. This is where the biggest questions get taken seriously — and where you realize you’ve never been alone in asking them. Can the mind actually heal the body? Can quantum physics explain psychic phenomena? What do Near Death Experiences reveal about the nature of consciousness and the seat of the human soul? What if the only thing separating you from your own intuition - or even God - is the assumption that it’s out of reach? And if governments are publicly acknowledging the existence…","last_synced_at":"2026-07-17T16:20:27.664994+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/mayim-bialik-s-breakdown-1365756"},"episode":{"title":"She Spent 20 Years Inside Cartels, Scam Factories & Black Markets. Investigative Journalist Mariana van Zeller On The $12 Billion Industry Stealing From Americans & Why Everybody Is Scammable","slug":"she-spent-20-years-inside-cartels-scam-factories-black-markets-investigative-journalist-mariana-van-zeller-on-the-12-billion-industry-stealing-from-americans-why-everybody-is-scammable","published_at":"2026-05-01T07:30:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/mayim-bialik-s-breakdown-1365756/she-spent-20-years-inside-cartels-scam-factories-black-markets-investigative-journalist-mariana-van-zeller-on-the-12-billion-industry-stealing-from-americans-why-everybody-is-scammable","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/mayim-bialik-s-breakdown-1365756","url":"https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdst.fm/e/claritaspod.com/measure/pscrb.fm/rss/p/arttrk.com/p/PMMIC/prfx.byspotify.com/e/mgln.ai/e/1047/traffic.megaphone.fm/MASL2467455928.mp3?updated=1777403282","audio_url":"https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdst.fm/e/claritaspod.com/measure/pscrb.fm/rss/p/arttrk.com/p/PMMIC/prfx.byspotify.com/e/mgln.ai/e/1047/traffic.megaphone.fm/MASL2467455928.mp3?updated=1777403282","summary":"What really happens inside the world’s most dangerous underground economies? And why do the people running them trust a journalist enough to talk? Mariana van Zeller — Emmy- and Peabody Award–winning investigative journalist, host and executive producer of Trafficked on National Geographic, and host of The Hidden Third podcast — has spent years embedded with scammers, smugglers, cartel members, assassins, and black-market power brokers. In this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, she pulls back the curtain on the shadow systems that quietly shape the global economy. Mariana breaks down the difference between the black market vs. the grey market, why understanding these hidden economies is the only way to create real change, and how she manages to gain access to some of the most secretive and dangerous players in the world. She explains how empathy, not judgment, is often the key to getting people labeled “the worst of the worst” to open up, and why many of them speak with her because of something surprisingly simple: a deep human need to be heard and understood. She also addresses critics who say she shouldn’t give criminals a platform, revealing why listening to these voices is essential to exposing the systems behind global crime. We dive into her most harrowing experiences in the field — including the terrifying moment she and her team weren’t sure they would make it out alive, and the time they had to escape a country in the middle of a life-threatening military coup while filming. Mariana also unpacks the current climate in Mexico’s drug war, explaining why violence often escalates when major cartel kingpins are taken down, and the troubling implications of the fact that many of the weapons used by cartels originate in the United States. We get into one of the fa…","meta_description":"What really happens inside the world’s most dangerous underground economies? And why do the people running them trust a journalist enough to talk? Mariana…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":4436,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/mayim-bialik-s-breakdown-1365756/episodes/she-spent-20-years-inside-cartels-scam-factories-black-markets-investigative-journalist-mariana-van-zeller-on-the-12-billion-industry-stealing-from-americans-why-everybody-is-scammable/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/mayim-bialik-s-breakdown-1365756/she-spent-20-years-inside-cartels-scam-factories-black-markets-investigative-journalist-mariana-van-zeller-on-the-12-billion-industry-stealing-from-americans-why-everybody-is-scammable.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}