Manuel Noriega

He was in his early 80s, very much so, on his deathbed, even though he was still quite strong and very fiery and full of life.

But

We start with the funnel, and then as time progresses, we start to get into the more controversial information.

He starts to get testier and testier.

He doesn't love when you bring up narco trafficking or weapons trafficking, anything like that.

And especially if you bring up anything bad that Noriega did, which there's a lot of stuff there, his entire mood would shift, right?

And he would completely deflect all of that stuff.

A lie, right?

So I knew he was lying to me a lot, right?

And I can pick that up.

Even though I was a blank slate, I already did a lot of research and reading during this time, right?

Still early days.

This was going to be a really long-term thing.

I'm there for a few weeks in this rural beach house, and then we get news that the country has broken out into civil unrest.

So the Panamanian government, it was sort of released that they had accepted this major bribe from this huge mining excavation company that essentially would allow this company to excavate all of this land in Panama and would destroy natural wildlife and that sort of stuff.

Basically, just like gringos coming into Panama,

fucking up the country right you know and people were really pissed so the uh the country completely stops people take to the highways and all supply chain and travel seizes so gas stations had no gas grocery stores had no groceries it was a mess the u.s embassy is telling u.s citizens to get the hell out of there and i'm a u.s citizen i'm a dual citizen i was born in the u.s so

i listen to them right and uh but carlos and i and diego and his and uh carlos's colombian girlfriend we're all seven hours from panama city from the airport and so we have to flee in the middle of the night and we have to uh leave the beach house at like 11 p.m travel down this like really long dirt road as soon as we get onto the main road it's it's it's clogged up by like all of these protesters in the middle of the night

So we sort of just have to wait there.

Carlos is telling me that, you know, this is normal for Panama.