Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 59

Episode Date: November 12, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can make your own decisions. In 2020, millions of Americans took to the streets to protest police violence. They were met with police violence on a massive scale. Shootings, vehicle attacks, and assassinations occurred alongside these protests, often in defense of the police, and in total at least 25 Americans died. We now know that President Trump repeatedly urged General Mark Milley to deploy U.S. military forces to crack down violently on demonstrations.

Milley claims that Trump told him to have his soldiers crack skulls, the fuck out of, and just shoot protesters. In the end, we were all lucky. Military leaders, including General Milley, resisted calls to use their men to suppress domestic dissent. National Guard were called into police several major cities, but in many cases, their behavior was tame compared to the militarized police who more reliably shot and beat protesters. For millions of Americans, 2020 was their first exposure to the violence the state will do to avoid change.

And then, Trump lost the election. He and his followers tried to carry out a coup but failed. For now, and millions of Americans who'd taken to the streets mostly went back to their lives. Some were satisfied justice had been done. Others were furious to have stopped short of instituting real change. But at the end of the day, business went on as usual, a version of normal prevailed. In 2021, the military of Myanmar, known as the Tatmadaw, overthrew the elected government in a coup. Hundreds of thousands of citizens, most of them young, Gen Z and millennial men and women, took to the streets.

Police responded with tear gas, water cannons, and eventually bullets. The international community expressed its horror at the brutality of the Tatmadaw, but that's all they did. Over the course of several months, the military pushed protesters mostly out of the cities and the protest movement against the military coup turned into a civil war. Now those same protesters, mostly kids who wanted nothing more than a normal life, have become revolutionaries. With homemade guns, 3D printed rockets, and stolen rifles, they battled the Tatmadaw. Some of them fight in the jungles, some of them fight in the cities, and some of them fight on the internet. This is their story.

We're sitting in a large suburban home in Mysot, Thailand, a small city on the border of Myanmar. The boys singing and playing music around us range in age from 17 to 22. Their existence in Thailand is a crime. If they are caught here, they'll be forced across the border into Myanmar, whose government executed their friends and sold the organs for profit. But tonight, they're playing music. We're drinking beer. James Stout and I will play pool with them and get our asses just catastrophically wrecked. We met Andy, aged 22, and head of the family through his Instagram page. That's not his real name, but for obvious reasons we can't identify him.

We first met when I sent him a DM asking if we could buy one of his photos for our first series on Myanmar. He was a bit skeptical, but I tried my best to get him to see we just wanted to give him money and promote his work. Over the next six months or so, we went from talking on the phone, to messaging almost every day, to Robert and I booking tickets to Thailand, to sitting on the top floor of their house. It used to be his landlord's office, but now it's home to Andy and his partner Sarah. That's also not her real name, because she's a citizen of a Western nation working in Thailand. The boys we talk about are his brothers, his cousin, and friends. They live at a small building across the garden, and in the daytime they sit under a gazebo and play their guitars.

The first night we met Andy and Sarah, we sat behind a bar in an unpaved alleyway. We drank beer out of sippy cups, because selling beer is still banned at the local COVID regulations, but apparently the cops don't check sippy cups. We drank far too much in fact, and the next day I woke up with a headache and a blurry photo of me, Robert and Andy, engaged in a pose which was half-hug and half-mutual support structure. We walked home, and according to my phone, at some point we took photos of a puppy, and in a hopefully unrelated incident, at some point I started bleeding. It was immediately obvious that Andy needed the chance to blow off some steam.

Over the last year in change, he has chronicled every stage of the coup and its aftermath. In early videos, we see joyous protests, moments of resistance and splendour in the streets of cities like Miao-wadi. Later, we see violence, death and guerrilla warfare. Andy didn't have what you would call an easy childhood. Thanks in part to Myanmar's long history of revolutions being crushed by the army, people there, like people everywhere, want to be free and determine their own futures. And so each generation has its own uprising, and each generation has its own massacre and very little progress to show for it.

I was born in 2000, so when I was 7, 2007, there was a revolution. It's called the Saffron Revolution. It wasn't like this. It wasn't like what happened now, but there were a lot of people that were involved in it. A lot of people got killed, and a lot of people left Myanmar and came to the refugee camps in here, and we were one of the families that came to the refugee camps. In Maesat? Yeah, in Maesat, Thailand. Andy's mother is Bumma, the dominant ethnic group in Myanmar,

due to their decades-long control of the military and government. His father is Karin, the ethnic group once used by the British government as soldiers. Since 1949, the Karin have fought a war in the mountains against the Taat Medaw. Their name is often anglicized to be spelled just like the English name Karin, which, given present internet trends, makes explaining the conflict sometimes awkward. Andy primarily identifies as and was raised Bumma. His family left after the Saffron Revolution. They did not flee to escape political repression, but because the economy had collapsed.

This put them in an awkward position in the camps, which were filled mostly with Karin people who had fled state violence. We weren't refugees, right? We were more like, how do you say, like, economic refugees? We go because- not because our village has been burned down and our family has been killed, you know? So then if we were to go back to Yangon, we still could find a job, we still could find, you know? But then for these Karin people, like, this place is the only place that they could exist at that moment, right? Yeah.

And probably still now, too. So, yeah, so they said that- but that education wasn't very good there. The life wasn't good, you know? It wasn't- it wasn't- it was very bad, honestly. It was very bad. It was a lot of violence, a lot of hate, a lot of- understandable, you know? Like, these people have gone through so much shit and so much trauma that- and nothing- no one is coming there to fix that.

So they had a lot of anger, they had a lot of problems. But my mom said, yeah, we're going back because the education here is very bad. And if you go back to Myanmar, at least, you know, if you do- like, the thing that people do, maybe you'll get somewhere, yeah, in the future. Here, there's no future. That's what she said. So we went back. And I stayed in Myanmar for, like, four years.

Andy had never been very political. His family was more or less neutral, tending to side with the military more often than not out of a sense of inertia. Myanmar tended to cartwheel between attempts at democracy and military dictatorship. So when the world media celebrated their first democratic elections in 25 years, in 2015, Andy was not particularly excited. Yeah, so, I mean, we did realize that there was a change in the country, right? Because we grew up in the military dictatorship.

But then when Al-Sansuji took over, there were some changes. Like, the phones got cheaper, the internet got cheaper. And if you look back, then you can see big, big changes. But the thing is, it was never real democracy. And I think a lot of people in the Western countries thought that it was democracy when Al-Sansuji took over. Al-Sansuji came to prominence during a 1988 uprising against the military, which ended in bloodshed in the streets of Yangon, and she'd been a long time democratic activist. As Andy noted, Westerners celebrated her election as the first democratic head of state for Myanmar.

She even won a Nobel Prize. But the agreement her party had made with the military gave the general significant permanent control over the government. But I think most of the people in the country knew it wasn't real democracy. Because the military always had 25% seats, 25 seats in the parliament. They were in charge of electricity, all these big things, weapons, army, like the military itself. They are in charge of all these things, and they make it very clear. And even with a Nobel Prize,

Aung San Suu Kyi did not fight to stop the Top Meda from pursuing their decades-long wars against the ethnic armed organizations in the hills. Nor did she act to stop their ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people. In fact, she and others in her party didn't even call them Rohingya. They called them Bengali and insisted they were illegally residing in Myanmar despite mountains of evidence documenting a group by that name living in what is now the Rakhine state. I think most Americans and Westerners in general

can empathize with the feeling of electing someone who promises change and then getting very little of what you'd expected. I think Aung San Suu Kyi used to be this hope that was the opposition against the military. But I think when she got power, she couldn't do all the things that she promised to do. Or like, we looked at her before, we looked at her as something, something hope for everyone, for all the ethnic groups and for everyone in the country. But then when she became in power, she mainly focused all these changes for the Burma people, you know, the mainland people.

The military was still fucking killing people and killing ethnic groups. Did they do something, you know? So for the ethnic groups, what's the difference? And so, while Andy was hopeful that his country might take a better path, he was not exactly convinced that things were going to get better. The conflict within his family eventually pushed him to make the decision to leave. My dad was very abusive. He would be the shit out of my mom every day like that.

It was fine. Like, it was fine when we were younger. We couldn't do anything. You know, we just kind of watched it, right? But the older we got, the more we involved, the more we tried to stop it. But then we would fight with him too, you know, and that. So at some point, it became too much. And so I left my home, I think, in 2016 just by myself. And I was like, I've been to Mesaad. I will go back here, you know? So Andy lived across the border on his own for more than five years.

He'd fallen in love, gotten a home with his own, and set himself up in the sort of odd jobs you can do without papers or legal residency. And that's where things were for him when the top Madaw carried out their coup in early 2021. 2021, February 1st, I was in Mesaad. I was here. And yeah, in the morning, I woke up, called me my girlfriend and she said, the military just did a coup in your country. You should call your family. The military claimed voter fraud and use that as the pretext to stay in power. It's a situation that should be unsettlingly familiar to most of our audience.

For a while, safe in Mesaad, Andy watched it in horror as he texted with friends and family across the border. They arrested Aung San Suu Kyi and all the big leaders right at the top. We were kind of like, okay, is someone going to tell us what to do? And especially for us, we didn't have any experiences. We didn't know anything about any of this that I'm talking about right now. I didn't have any knowledge of that. But yeah, so after I think six days, the military cut off the internet for like two days, and I've lost all contact with everyone inside my family, my friends,

and that's the night I started planning it. Like, I started thinking, oh, fuck, I should go back. And I saw the protest photos from Yangon. They looked amazing, right? And I'm like, I'm a photographer. I should be there and, you know, document that. While Andy was staring at the protest photos from the capital of Myanmar, Napidor, as well as Mewadi, and the largest city, Yangon, wondering he should take his camera and document yet another rising for democracy in his home country. A young woman named Umira was in the thick of those protests in Yangon. When the coup started, Umira, aged 17, had just finished high school.

She was looking forward to university, and more pressingly looking forward to playing futsal with her friends. She liked to spend her days crafting, she says, and making little things to gift or to keep. Like every other day, when she woke up, she spent 10 minutes in medication before facing the world on the 1st of February. Aung San Suu Kyi was her hero, she says. In our interview, her boyfriend translated for her. We'll get to their story later.

But when the coup began, they lived a world apart, but they joined their whole generation in feeling enraged by Tap Mador trying to rip the freedom their parents had fought for from them. Umira took her rage into the street. Someone gave her a bullhorn. Because of her voice, she became the leader with the bullhorn. What kind of stuff would you say to the bullhorn? I'd say 80% of the bullhorn is from the Aung San Suu Kyi. 80% of the bullhorn is from the Aung San Suu Kyi. 80% of the bullhorn is from the Aung San Suu Kyi.

80% of the bullhorn is from the Aung San Suu Kyi. She's saying this is Enfield. And then… This is what? The arrest in the Aung San Suu Kyi is Enfield. Not fair. Oh, okay. Oh, got you, got you.

Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah. And then she believed that. She believed in what the Aung San Suu Kyi said. Like, everything is possible. And we haven't done anything, we haven't studied yet. But when we study and then we can finish it, so everything is possible.

So that's what she believed in. So she went on the road and then she protested. Across the city from Amira on Kudei, Meowke's girlfriend woke him up with the news that the government they'd voted for had been arrested. We're calling him Meowke here because that's his name in the revolution.

Everyone has one. Amira's his baby because she's so young and yet so fierce. Meowke, if you're wondering, means monkey. These revolutionaries who have risked life and limb for each other didn't know the legal names of the people they call their revolution family because it's safer that way.

And we don't either. Meowke had spent the night. Well, I'll let you hear how he phrased it, actually. I was just like, I was chilling with my ace girlfriend, you know, I was chilling. And we were, you know, you know, Netflix and Chae, Netflix and Chae, like 31, 31 January, Netflix and Chae.

I think it's a Sunday. I think it's Sunday. Netflix and Chae, we sleep together. If you didn't catch that, they were Netflix and chilling. You know, I was literally not wake up by any louder show. I was so asleep. But at the full AM, there's a phone ring

and I suddenly wake up. There's a phone ring from my girlfriend. Her auntie called her and she said, there's a coup d'etat. She told me there's a coup d'etat. I didn't, you know, I don't believe it. I didn't believe it. So other than that, I chatted social media.

Oh, shit. Meowke accurately do this. I'm so angry and I'm so angry, you know, I was called downstairs and I told to my family that everyone's angry. At those times, the internet cut off. The next revolutionary we're going to meet is a fellow we'll call Dr. Wanda

because that's his revolution name. When the coup started, he was just waking up after a 24-hour shift at the hospital in Yangon where he worked. Doctors were some of the earliest and most visible dissidents in the protest. Their rarity and therefore their relative value to the regime made them a potent symbol

of the pro-democracy movement. But as Dr. Wanda made clear, many older medical professionals were not at all certain that resistance was the right move here. At the morning, I saw the news. That bad news, really, really bad news for us. It was, how could I say that?

They broke, you know? They broke our future. Doctors were some of the earliest, most visible dissidents in the pro-democracy protests. Their rarity and relative value to the regime made them a potent symbol of the pro-democracy movement. But as Dr. Wanda made clear,

many older medical professionals were not at all certain that resistance was the right move. On that morning, we go back to our our society, our hospital. We, our shen guys, you know, old professors, old consensus, did not much interest about that.

Because they told us, you know, whoever rules our country, it's not our business. It is one of our seniors doctors from our society, from our department, who let's like that. But we replied him, no, it should be the last time.

If he didn't catch that, he said it should be the last time. The last time kids had to die on the streets. They didn't want another generation to have to go through the same thing. So they got together a proposal, a sort of manifesto for peaceful nonviolent resistance.

And they submitted it to their seniors. We negotiated with our, you know, young resident, our society, and we discussed about that. And we plan to start with one of our prior movement before civil disobedience. We have got a red ribbon movement. Because we want to try peacefully

on the media. Okay, we started like that. And then some of our seniors from our society, they were from Mandalay hospital. Okay, they accept our proposal. Yes, because our generation has already passed that difficulties before.

But not your generation shouldn't accept that. Three days before the coup, TK got off a plane in San Francisco. He's from Myanmar, but he lives in the Bay Area now. Before you ask, he says that the Burmese restaurant there

has been stuffed back home. It's only three days. Three days before. Three days before. I went back to the United States. And I wish I stayed in the jungle and doing the revolution. And I participate in everywhere that I can.

But I couldn't do from the long distance. So that's all I can do for now. TK had just been in Myanmar. He had connections to many people on the ground there. His friends were there. His family were there. When the government cut off internet access, he remained able to get good international reporting

on the situation in his home country. Slowly, he found ways to communicate with his friends. And a growing core of the protesters taking to the streets. I was a keyboard fighter. I have no idea about the politics. I have no idea about the military stuff. This is a single most common sentiment we've heard.

Across all the revolutionaries we've met. None of them consider themselves to be very political prior to the coup. They started marching in the street because a military coup was obviously bad. But they stayed there because the violence dished out by the state was so horrific. Safe at their house in Mesok,

we talked to the boys and his brothers and cousins. All of whom were living in Napidor when the coup kicked off. It didn't take him long to try and join them. Then I went to Nyawati which is across the border in Myanmar side. I was there for a week. It was something else. I've never been to protests.

I've never been involved in any of this thing. I never thought I would be. I always thought I wasn't going to be a part of it. But when I went there, the first day I arrived, there were 200,000 people on the street protesting. Then this big group of people walking streets after street, and everyone coming out of their house.

We have this symbol, like three fingers, from Hanger Gang, I think. That's our symbol for democracy now, our movement now. Everyone come out of their house doing that. Giving us water, food, everything. It was beautiful. It was something else.

From that day, I was like, okay, this is what I'm going to do now. I'm going to be a photographer, and I'm going to end this. I'm going to take photos of these people and their stories, and I'm going to share it. That's my part. That's my role. Soon, he found friends among the protesters.

Within a few days, he was feeling a feeling that so many people felt in 2020. It's a feeling you felt if you've ever been in the thick of a crowd of people filled with righteous anger and facing down overwhelmed police or soldiers. It's a sensation I can't really describe to you. You haven't experienced it,

but I can say that there's no time that I've ever felt more empowered than the times I've been crushed shoulder to shoulder with strangers, toe to toe with state violence, and watch cops break and retreat. It's incredible. It's addictive. And if I'm honest, it's probably why Robert and I booked a flight to visit a stranger I've been DMing on the ground.

I think after three days, I met this group of people, young people, like students, trying to be lawyers and so on. And I figured out that they were the ones trying to organize these big protests, like 200 people, 100,000 people. They were the ones that's making that happen.

So I started kind of following them, trying to get close, because I wanted to get stories from them. And then they became, and they realized what I've been doing. They've been watching. So they were very welcome, and they took me to this hideout that they go to, and then we will have discussions,

meetings about what we should do the next day. But then, because it's a small town, right? Slowly, I think police and military started realizing that we are that group too. Music So by now, you're probably wondering why we're so much more of dust in the wind.

It's a song the boys learned when they first took to the streets. But it tells a story of a previous revolution, one that didn't succeed. Music Can you tell us what that song's about? Do you know what the lyrics are and stuff in English? Yeah, we can try.

I heard their word democracy in there, I'm pretty sure. It's like all the lives that we're lost in fighting for democracy. Yeah. Do people use it for the spring revolution as well as the 88s? Yeah, because it's the same thing. We can use it. Come on, let's do it. Tell the world, and that's the name of the song.

Tell the world it's called? Yeah, like, tell the world. Tell the world, and okay. So basically, the song is like, yeah, they sang it back in the 88, and then it's like, we used it quite a lot when we were in the protest too. Yeah, and the lyrics are,

we'll keep fighting until the end of the world for the sake of history and revolution in our blood and of the fallen heroes who fought for the democracy. Oh, our dearest heroes, this is the land of, like, heroes. Like, yeah. And yeah, it goes on and then, yeah, basically saying, like, something, like, that history went wrong along the way,

but we have to fix it. Yeah. Like, the country has shed its blood, and how could they commit such violence to its own people, you know? Yeah. And yeah, like they say, like, the blood on the roads and the streets are not dried yet. And for the sake of these people who have died

for the democracy, for fighting for democracy, for the sake of them, we have to keep fighting. Basically, yeah. Now, in their exile, they keep singing it to remember the first day of the revolution, when the fights were in the street, not the jungle, and before they lost so many of their comrades. Yeah, and then there was a night protest

in front of the police station. Tendles, yeah. Oh, this is, they're singing the song with the same. Yeah. It got very, very heated. The protest sufferings we're just talking about occurred in reality, but the song popped up all across the country.

When you played it in Yangon, did you all sing it? Yeah, they, in Yangon, it wasn't one guitar, it was a whole band. We'll have, like, protesters sitting down, and then there's a group of people who are playing this, and repeatedly there are a bunch of songs that we'll play, and then there's, like, words that we would say, and, yeah, like, so you know what I'm saying.

Yeah. And you'll see from the footage how it's, yeah. How does it make you feel to be in Yangon? It's scary, you know, it's like, yeah. The song is... The song is very real. So, like, at first, we didn't want to play the song.

It's too dark, it's too intense, right? Yeah, like, yeah. But it's not, like, the livers are there, like, you can see it, you know, it's like, because we've been through it too, so it's very intense. And, yeah, I think the first time I heard it, like, I heard the song, I remember that weird feeling of, yeah,

still have it, like, every time we sing it now. This is not one of the songs that we usually sing. It's not a fun song, but yeah. MUSIC PLAYS MUSIC PLAYS On the next episode, which you'll be able to download tomorrow, we'll talk about how the Hunter began to clamp down on the protests, and how the protesters decided this struggle was too important to abandon,

and decided to fight back. MUSIC PLAYS During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series,

Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man

who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus?

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Like many people in Myanmar,

the boys weren't usually political before the protests. But what they saw in the streets changed them. This wasn't about the minor disagreement between two parties. It was about fighting for the right to live their lives without a boot on their necks. The 2021 election had delivered a victory to Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy and delivered a resounding vote of no confidence

in the political arm of the Tupper Door, the nation's military. It's worth noting here that yes, we are compressing some complex things. The elections weren't perfect, and people in areas that were largely non-Burman tend not to support the NLD. The NLD had failed to prevent a genocide, but in a country that was well accustomed to harsh military rule,

there remained a better option than a military which saw ruling as its right, and its soldiers as separate from the citizens. So, when the military lost a record number of seats, everyone knew what would happen next. The same thing that happened in 1988, the same thing that always happened when the people came a little too close

to taking power from their military. So, that happened on February 1, 2021, and the first few days, we didn't know what to do. I mean, we knew the military was going to make a coup, because when the NLD won the election, that's how it started, right? And the military is saying that they, you know, they cheated. They, like, I don't know how to say it.

They, like, fucked up the votes, and, you know, they make themselves win. It wasn't true. The military was not going to win at all. Like, it was... Because, like I said, there were changes. You know, people saw those changes, and people were saying,

yes, if she had one more, you know, like, four more years, five more years, she could make a real difference. Those first few days of protest, everyone says, felt hopeful. Just like our protagonists, and Zor, who we met in a previous episode, thousands of young people ran into the streets

and found solidarity in a simple politics of, fuck that guy. There were so many people, man. It's insane. So, in reality, there was, I think, 200,000 people that day. The marches got bigger every day, and it seemed like nothing could stop them.

Briefly, western news organizations published stories, and everyone hoped that the U.N. or the U.S. or the E.U. would show up, and the top middle would be dealt with, once and for all. I was trying to film, and then one of the guys pointed the gun at me, and I was like, ooh. But none of that happened.

The story stopped. The West never sent a single bullet or soldier, and the Top Medaugh deployed thousands. Even after a year, all the boys remember the first time they saw the force of the state turned against them. Even before he got out of the border town of Milwadi, Andy saw the Top Medaugh begin to fight back against the movement that had grown up to oppose them.

It's a story we heard from everyone we spoke to. Once they began organizing, the cops started trying to infiltrate their groups. I think police and military started realizing that we are that group too. So then they started trying to track down. So it was one night where two of the guys almost got arrested, and then they ran away.

And then we were like, okay, they were kind of following us. Yeah, yeah. And so after a week, same thing happened. I was living, because I wasn't from Milwadi. They didn't know. I was just in new face, and I didn't really know where I live. And I always take two, three taxis just to get to where I was staying.

You're staying with a friend or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it the same place, or are you switching? No, that was the same place, but it was out of town. Three of his friends got arrested. They're still in jail. Actually, in jail is the best case scenario, because the Top Medaugh make a habit

of executing captured activists. The stakes were life and death at every moment, and covering the movement on a daily basis was the biggest toll on Andy and his brothers too. So my younger brother, they were in the capital city, and the first time the military killed someone, they were there. They were in the same protest.

So they saw the whole thing, and they were traumatized. And so I thought the second time I went back in, I thought, well, you know, like, it's better to bring them all together with me, like in the same place that we do it together, and all of that spread out everywhere, you know? And like I say, my family's military, on the military side.

So they didn't like that my brothers were going out to protest. So then I was like, okay, I'm going to bring you guys. And yeah, so we did all, we did the young protest together, six of us. They came face-to-face with the potential cost of their struggle. They were in Nipidaw when that happened.

The capital city of Myanmar, and it's military city. So it's very heavily controlled by the military. And the first time they went out to the protest, the military shoot people. And he was... Yeah, there was like these trucks with the water cannons. So he got hit by one, and like he wasn't feeling well,

so they took him to the ambulance. But then once he got in there, there was a guy without his eyes, because they shot like bullets into him. He was fucking traumatized with that, yeah. I remember him. When Andy says Nipidaw is a military city, he isn't just saying it's a city like Colleen, Texas,

or San Diego. Nipidaw is a city created out of nothing, starting in 2002 to be a capital for Myanmar. If you've seen it at all, it's probably in a TV show that mocks the totalitarian excess of building seven-lane motorways in a city that was, until recently, only populated by the people building it.

Top Gear played car football on the empty freeways, and the TV show Dark Tourist also featured the city. Today it is a real city with a real population, but everything about it was designed to reinforce authority. And yet the boys and thousands of others took to the streets here, streets built to reinforce the power of the people they were fighting, to demand that the military listen to them. Andy shows us a picture of the man with his eyes shot out.

It looks how you think it would, and it is worth noting that shooting people's eyes out is a time-honored international policing tactic. In 2020, U.S. cops shot more than 115 people in the face with less lethal munitions. 30 suffered permanent damage to their eyes. But in Myanmar, everything escalated several levels higher than that. Shooting out eyes wasn't radical violence for the top mid-aw.

They treated it more like stretching before a run. In one protest, the boys saw some drunk people tossing water bottles at the police. The police responded with live gunfire. When the police come forward, the people are turned to the backside. And they retreat. Yeah, it's a very intense situation.

People are running. There are also some guys throwing rocks back to the police. That's when the police started shooting. Andy translated the next part for us. He was in the protest. And then they started shooting. And he ran away. But he was not in his neighborhood or in his area of the city.

He was somewhere else. So when they started running, he didn't have anywhere to go. And then someone, like, sucked him at the house. They say, come and come in. And he hid. And I don't... He hid in the house for like two hours until the shooting stopped. It wasn't until they got home that they realized the police had killed someone.

In the early days of what became the revolution, people formed tight bonds and made radical commitments in the form of legal activity, while the top mid-aw was still scrambling to counter the counter coup. Everyone felt the clamp-down bite at a different time. It took longer than average for the cops to find a mirror in her corridor of revolutionaries. But eventually that day came.

It came as she and her friends were gathered in a tea shop preparing for an action. At that time, on that day, they are trying to protest in a Xinjiang provenience. So before the protest, they gathered the people at the tea shop. They sat in the table with her team

including her five people. But she had to go and give the banner to the other groups. So she was leaving just about this much. Then the soldiers came into the tea shop and then arrested her teammates. She's lucky to escape it. It really narrowed the trade. So did she leave immediately?

Yeah, so that's how she came here. Because her teammates know where she lives, her house and everything, so she had no choice to stay in the jungle, but she stayed organizing her teams to protest in the jungle. What did her parents think when she had to leave? Her parents told her the survival is the first.

So she can do whatever she wants, but she has to be on her own. They agree if she wants to leave, just leave. If she wants to do the protesting or whatever she wants, they don't say a no to her. But they're not supporting either. They're just saying she's on her own.

Yeah, she's on her own. That's how last night I told you guys that she lost her inheritance. She had to give up on everything. Ever since San Francisco, TK could see what was happening through his scouts on the ground and soldiers' posts on Facebook. He started to amass a huge amount of intel.

He also knew where the underground groups and civil disobedience movement centers were in the cities. And when he saw the cops of the military coming for them, he was able to give them a heads up. So whenever we have information from the CDM soldiers, the CDM police, they give the information a hat. So we got the information.

So those guys go into this place within one hour. So from that place, whoever lives in the underground teams, move out. Get out. Yeah, get out. Yeah, so that kind of thing. With that, we saved a lot of people too. And we got arrested people too,

but we also saved people. I'm shocked, though. Everyone we spoke to told us the same story. They went into the street thinking that if they made enough noise, the world would listen. And that the US, or the EU, or the UN would defend democracy and evoke their responsibility to protect innocent people being gunned down in the street.

To quote from the online publication The Diplomat, Induced by all member states of the United Nations in 2005, R2P advances a potentially revolutionary idea that state sovereignty entails a responsibility for a government to protect its population from mass atrocity crimes and human rights violations. When a nation fails to exercise this responsibility, R2P grants the international community the legal warrant to intervene. The doctrine authorises the use of a range of coercive tools, with military intervention as a last resort.

People in Myanmar thought that if they were peaceful, civil and respectable, the government of the world would do the right thing. The government of the world, however, didn't give a fuck. But yeah, so the protests are very, very peaceful. You know, it's when you go into the protests, it's very peaceful, very organized, very, it's, they try to make it look so clean, so nice, because I guess, you know, no, it was at the beginning, they were trying to get attention from the international community, and they were hoping that someone will come in and say, you know, take down the military

and put our government back. Yeah, a lot of people die, just like there was a saying like to UN, you know, people were saying how many, like how many dead people do you need for you to take action, right? And there are people saying, I will, if you need one more, I'll be that person, I'll just fucking die. I'll just get killed by the military so that you will come in and fix that and change the situation in the country, right? Amira felt the same.

She even organized a protest of 500 people displaying a map of the whole country on the river in Yangon. She called it a suicide mission, but she thought it would send a visible signal to the world, and that it was worth risking her life to make the statement. At the time, she didn't know anything about politics. So she believed in an R2P because people are protesting peacefully, but the government take the action. So other countries are not going to wait and see, and they're going to take the actions

about that. That's what she believed in, and then she decided to go protesting peacefully to the end. Okay. Did she think that other countries, the United States, whatever, were going to come in and intervene? Yeah, yeah. That's what she thought.

Like, you know, when the wall seal, the government take the actions and the government killing people, and if the wall knows, then we can get a half from the other countries. But they did find support within other countries in Asia fighting against dictatorship. They formed the so-called Milk Tea Alliance and drew on the example of Hong Kong to learn how to stay in the streets when the government doesn't want you there. But then when it happens in our country, it's like, oh, fuck, where does it happen before? And then we went back to Hong Kong, and it's not just us. There was so much infographics and how to be in the protest, how to do certain things

depending on the situation. So we had a lot of information. We were looking through, and I think that these are the same thing that people in Hong Kong used, I think. But Hong Kong didn't have snipers shooting kids in the head, or cops firing rifles blindly into crowds. But then later on, by the time we got to Yangon, people were sitting down and there were little protests.

What the military does is they would come in and they would just start shooting everyone. There was no negotiation, there was no, hey, guys, can you move? And then, you know, any of that stuff, they would come in and they would treat this as a battlefield. And it didn't take a while, well, it did take a while, I think. It took about a month and a half for us to finally say, fuck the peaceful protests, fuck the international community, they're not coming. If they would have come, they would have come a long time ago, you know, and we started fighting

back. But when we say we fight back, it's like Molotov cocktails, slingshots. Dr. Wonder knew exactly when and how police were killing people. He would spend his days triaging people who would survive from those who might not make it. Soon, the worst nightmares of his medical team were coming true as the police began seizing his colleagues, the alleged crime of saving lives. I remember before the military, military police and military men, totally, totally intruded

our hospital. One day, I think, at the middle of the May, they totally intruded our hospital because they have had our CDN doctors doing operations at that hospital because we have no other place like that trauma center. We could give good treatment for that trauma situation because we have to take a risk. So we cannot take a risk. Soon, one of our consensors was arrested at that emergency unit because he took also his risk because if he wasn't here, his junior can't handle that situation, you know.

Yes, he had to go. So many tens, hundreds, injured patients on that day, mostly are cancer patients, you know, some are open abdomen, open limbs, so we have so many crises on that night. Things only got worse. Yeah, yeah, there was a pregnant woman who got shot and obviously with a kid inside her and she died because she accepted like 20 protesters in her house and when they came, they shot her dead. And she wasn't like five weeks old, you can see that she was pregnant.

The military used straight up real bullets, like they don't give a shit. They don't give a shit that the way the military controlled people is fear, right? So then they want people to see that if you go against me, you'll die horribly. And they shoot the head. We saw so many faces with holes, you know, so many people with holes in their face and it was fucked up and it was scary because every time you go out, you're saying that could be me, that could be my brothers, that could be, you know. Very quickly, the revolution organized itself, not with hierarchies, officers or vanguard

parties. The people who'd existed in those roles had already been arrested or fled. So instead, the revolution started with people giving whatever they could to the struggle and taking whatever they needed to get by. The revolutionaries re-interviewed, all initially thought that the struggle would be short, that the world would come to their aid. But even when it became clear that this was not the case, they continued to fight under the logic that it's better to die than live with a bullet on your neck.

They took all the leaders from the opposition side, so there was no one to tell us what to do. There was no instructions, right? So there was like two days of, okay, what the fuck do we do, you know? And then people started protesting, but small, like very small, and then I think after like five days then, there was like 200,000 people everywhere, like, know that I remember the first day we arrived. I mean, we haven't seen each other since COVID started, so it was like, ah, brothers, you

know, back again and together. And then, yeah, it was quite fun for like one night, and then we were all hanging out and trying to plan what we're going to do the next day. So basically, we kind of planned that, like, each of us have a role. And our plan was to go out and kind of be like a media crew, right? So we're filming, we're writing news, we're posting on the internet so that everywhere else people can see it. So yeah, two of us are like the camera people, and then these two, they look out for the

roads and streets. Like, because these places, we've never been, right, in these areas, so whenever we go to protest, we'll sit down or we'll walk around and take photos while these twos go around and look for the fastest escapes. You know, if the military come in, what would be the best way to go, you know, escape? And then him and another one, they kind of look after us, they look at the news to see what's happening around us, so that if there's a post on Facebook saying, oh, there's a military truck heading towards you, we kind of be prepared, you know?

But yeah, that was... They don't have energy trucks, yeah. Yeah, so we had a lot of energy at that time. It was like constant, we were going out, out, out, and... You can see like, always following me. Like, that's me and him. And he's always following me everywhere I go, so that if something happened, you can just grab me and run.

While the boys and Andy were reporting, Amira found her calling on the front lines. It's almost impossible to stress how incredible she is. Before we recorded, she casually dropped into conversation that she also trained in knife fighting sometimes. We met her at a shooting range near Mysot and blasted a few paper targets together with a 12-gauge shotgun we'd been using for a bit of target practice. When it jammed, and it always jammed, she cleared the chamber and got it back into action with a practice deficiency that any formally trained soldier would have recognized.

In the Revolution, it didn't take long for her to find her way to the front lines, and she's got the scars to prove it, including some from hucking a tear gas grenade bare-handed back at the cops. Others adopted roles, too. Some picked up shields and took on the police toe-to-toe. Others supported protesters with medical aid and food and water. So you can see the shield, two, three, four, five, two, yeah, to make it... And then you can see, like, they have these wet, like, plastic bags to, like, wash people's

faces when they're tear gas, or, like, to kill the smokes with the wet towels, too. And then there's someone always watering it, like, as you see here, yeah. And this is all from the neighborhood, like, they provided to us. They built barricades and even developed a system of communications for when things were getting violent. This allowed folks who were not comfortable to get away, or at least, that was the goal. So the white flag means, like, we have this place, like, this is our... But then the black flag means we'll fuck you up back.

Like, if you've done so much that we're going to fuck you up, you know? I have video of it, I want to change from white to black. Their tactics improved over time. When one group got kettled, another group would pop up nearby and draw soldiers away. Oh, wait, yeah, so wait. And then there was one time when one part of the city was under attack by the military. A lot of protesters were trapped in there, and so we decided to go out. So every other part of the city came out at night time to protest so that these soldiers

have to kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah. Amira, too, came face-to-face with state violence. She wants to take the action back because they are all protesting peacefully. And at that time, she wants to have a superpower. Yeah, maybe she does. What did she decide to do? What did they do? At that time, she feels like she's going till the end, and then she will keep moving,

and then she will participate in every role that she can, and then she will do as much as she can. That's what she decided to do. We saw that picture of her in front of the car, it was burning. Yeah. We're half in there. Were they throwing Molotov cocktails? Yeah.

Okay. They were like smoke bombs and something like that, and then she's trying to throw them back. Oh, I've seen the picture. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she picked it up, and then she threw them back. Did it hurt your hand? Yeah, you have a scar, fuck.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. Then she got hit by the smoke bomb like twice, and then at that time, she lost everything. She lost her bags, she lost her phones, and then someone had her to hold and then took her back. Okay. That's how she escaped.

Wow. They helped you. Do you know who helped you? Was it a friend or just a stranger? Her friend is with her, and then when the tear gas hit them, and then the other strangers had them, and then she got hit by the tear gas, and then she almost fainted and blacked out. Wow.

Wow. Our doctor, who goes by wonder, faced a difficult choice. Returning to the hospital meant risking arrest. The military could come in at any time to arrest injured protesters and the doctors helping them. But not going back meant letting his comrades die. State violence increased. He decided he needed to help.

They killed so many peaceful protesters on that day. I think around about, nearly around 100 or more, might be more than that. Yes. On that day, you know, because we have already started this OVDM movement on that time, because we didn't go to the hospital. That was ruined by that generous. Okay. Okay.

So, we did outside the hospital, you know, we managed temporary camps like that, because for emergency injured patients. At that time, I was involved in one of the campsites, but actually we can't deal. Some of the injured people, that may need for emergency operations, like that bullet go through, yeah, go to break the bombs and open wound. So, but we have to take the risk, because we have to operate that patient. We go to hospital, trauma emergency department. We did our operation.

I remember at that night, one of the patients was shot down by police, and they chased, they followed that patient. We kept that patient in our hospital, in our ward. We emergency, we did emergency operation at that night, on that night, and we immediately moved him out on that night, because we can't keep him on that hospital, because soon he just left our hospital. The police just came and searched for him. Okay.

That's one of our experience, because they just point their gun. Yeah. Where is that gun? TK got on telegram. Lots of people couldn't be on the ground fighting, but they still wanted to be part of the struggle. He had developed good connections with people on the ground, but first that was just him desperately trying to stay informed.

But soon he realized that he was well placed to be doing the informing, with internet access cut off, and VPNs flowing down, only someone outside the country with blazing fast bay area Wi-Fi could collate all the info coming in, and turn it into useful actionable advice for protesters on the ground. At that time, we don't know nothing about it, no one's teaching us what to do. So we have to do it, like I said, we have 70 people, so we have a meeting every day, every night. So we try to brainstorm what we're going to do.

And then so we're making the plans, and then we're making like, okay, we're going to get the informations from every single detail that we can get, and that's what we're going to show to the people, that's what we're going to show to the underground teams and other people. Within a few weeks, it had become clear that a diverse range of people, tactics and tools were going to be needed in the fight for freedom in Myanmar. Next time, we'll talk about how that fight took shape, and tell you what it's like today.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. Standing inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way, and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sitting at a pool bar in Mesa, listening to covers of credent songs by the house band and losing at pool against Andy and the boys, it's hard to think of them hold up behind a barricade, clutching molotovs. But not so long ago, the choices the boys faced were pretty stark.

Every day, every time they went out from their little apartment, they knew they might not come back. When Andy says, like we did earlier, he's talking about a small stop-the-bleed type course that we had given the boys. Most journalists operating in war zones will take, at minimum, a week-long hostile environment and first aid training, or Heathat course. Many of us will take extra courses. James and I both refreshed our wilderness first responder certificates once we had

this trip planned. Andy and his brothers didn't have access to any of this. They learned what they could off the internet and tried to protect themselves as best as they were able, with gear they purchased from an airsoft store. The afternoon we spent practicing skills wasn't nearly enough, but until they can travel safely more than a few miles from the border, it was better than nothing. Their little apartment had one way in and one way out. If the cops came, there was no escape.

They had a plan for that, too. Yeah, so our plan was literally just to burn that fucking door down so then it would be difficult for them to come in and then, you know, we'll do, I don't know, whatever we came with a weapon we had, but we weren't going to make it out, you know, and having to plan all that with these kids, like, it's like fucked up. There were times that like they wake up at night screaming, like they, you know, they, I think now it's better, right? It's been a year and a half, and we are, like, we're better at coping with it.

But at that time it was very, very scary. So that they'd be prepared to burn their door and the rest of their apartment down around themselves, the boys kept a stockpile of Molotovs mixed and ready by the front door at all times. They lived in a state of permanent readiness to commit revolutionary suicide for weeks on end. Eventually, they decided they had to flee. We should probably talk history here for just a little bit. Myanmar is a new name for a very old land.

Over the centuries, it's been ruled by a series of empires and dynasties. The Mongols took over for a while in the 1200s and 1300s, and when they left, lower Burma had a warring states period of its own. The modern nation of Burma didn't start to come together until the 1600s and 1700s, and things didn't really congeal into a state until the reign of the last two Burmese kings, who industrialized the country and reformed its military enough to win a series of wars against neighboring groups, like the Urakan. This is what brought them into conflict with the British Raj, right at the turn of the

19th century. Their wars were sending refugees into India, and the Burmese king's designs on Thailand and British-controlled Bangladesh led to a policy wherein the Brits supported insurgent fighters who struck out at Burmese positions. A series of near clashes between British and Burmese forces followed, and in January of 1824, the Burmese king Baghidda gave his generals the order to attack. A pair of brutal jungle wars followed, and despite winning several victories early on, Burmese troops were crushed comprehensively whenever they engaged British forces in conventional

battles. In January of 1886, British forces entered the capital, Mandalay, and brought an end to Burmese independence for almost sixty years. These are the broad strokes of the story, as you'll find them summed up in almost any history book. As with most colonial history, the reality is somewhat messier than that. The Burmese Empire, the British destroyed, was dominated heavily by the Buma people who gave the colony its name.

But there were other peoples in the territory they claimed, the Shinn, the Karin, the Rakan, the Rohingya, and dozens more. Like most empires dominated by a single ethnicity, they were brutal. Father San Germano, who lived in pre-Raj Burma, wrote of the king, He is considered by himself and others absolute lord of the lives, properties, and personal services of his subjects. He exalts and depresses, confers, and takes away honor and rank, and, without any process of law, can put to death not only criminals guilty of capital offenses, but any individual

who happens to incur his displeasure. It is here a perilous thing for a person to become distinguished for wealth and possessions, for the day may easily come when he will be charged with some supposed crime, and so put to death, in order that his property may be confiscated. Every subject is the emperor's born slave, and when he calls anyone his slave, he thinks thereby to do him honor. Hence, also, he considers himself entitled to employ his subjects in any work of service, without salary or pay, and if he makes them any recompense, it is done not from a sense

of justice, but as an act of bounty. And while Baguio was a fairly modern king, brutality like this went back hundreds of years in the region. Most of the kings and princes and other people who ruled the land we now call Myanmar did so with brutal force and an awful lot of conscription. This is broadly true of much of Southeast Asia. Western histories of this region tend to flatten life into kingdoms and empires, and assume life in their region coincided politically with the lines drawn on maps.

This was never the case. Much of mainland Southeast Asia, from the central highlands of Vietnam through Myanmar, northeast India, and several southern Chinese provinces, is filled with terrifying mountains and brutal hills, covered with the densest jungle imaginable. Standing in Mesaat and staring across the border into Myanmar, all you see is a vast expanse of jagged, deep green peaks, rolling endlessly on. James and I are both experienced backpackers, and neither of us would have wanted to take on that terrain without quality gear and weeks of endurance training.

In an era before planes, helicopters, or satellite communications, this area was practically ungovernable. People were aware of this at the time, and for roughly the last 2,000 years, this chunk of highland Southeast Asia, known to political scientists as Zomia, has been a refuge for people pushed out and put down by the great state powers of the area. Empires and kings would stick to the coasts and the flat plains, perfect for cultivating rice. When they taxed their subjects too hard or conscripted too many of them into the military,

some would flee to the hills to take their freedom. As James C. Scott, a Yale Polypsi professor, writes, The frontier operated as a rough and ready homeostatic device. The more a state pressed its subjects, the fewer subjects it had. The frontier underwrote freedom. He calls the people who chose to inhabit this stateless zone, barbarians by choice. While many of these ethnic groups were mocked for their lack of so-called civilized values, like widespread literacy, Scott argues that this lack was actually a conscious rejection.

The refusal to educate themselves in a manner acceptable to the powers of the day was a rebellion against the legitimacy of those powers and their standards. Human history and our modern globe is filled with places like this, muddied areas at the borders of great powers where the detritus of war, refugees and beaten soldiers can congregate without fear of the state. The term for these places is Shatter Zones. Rojava, the radical feminist enclave in northeast Syria, would be one example of a Shatter Zone and the unique political potential such places have.

Myanmar is, by land mass, mostly Shatter Zones and since 1949, different ethnic armed organizations have existed in a more or less constant conflict with the state. This includes the Karin people whose territory borders Thailand. When the young millennial and Zoomer protesters in the cities realized they were going to have to flee their homes to continue the fight, Karin territory was a natural place to retreat to. They had been making versions of the same decision for 2,000 years. The current situation between the Karin and Myanmar's military junta actually owes a lot

to the British Empire. When they took over in Myanmar, they had to figure out how to govern it and they went with the tactic that had served them well all across India and Africa. They picked a minority ethnic group to act as their colonial shock troops. In Uganda, their preferred warrior race were the Khakwa people from whom future dictator Idi Amin descended. For their colonial troops in India, the Brits used Sikhs and Gurkhas, and in colonial Burma, they used the Karin.

Ever since the British left, the Karin have wanted as little as possible to do with the central government in Nipgada. Instead, they fought to maintain Kadule, a land without darkness, as they were promised in Burma's 1948 constitution. Today, they might not be recognized by the UN or the US, but the Karin have their own schools, hospitals, and army. They have been at war since 1949. Andy, whose father is Karin, only really found out about the struggle for Kadule, a home

for the Karin-language peoples, when he became a refugee. He moved into the camps along the border after the Saffron Revolution. He was only eight years old. The border is dotted with camps, some of them more like towns, but they're always temporary, and while the Thai government tolerates the Karin presence, people there are seen as temporarily displaced. They can't build solid homes and don't have the identity documents they need to travel, even internally in Thailand.

Despite not growing up there, Andy's identity card says Karin. It doesn't take a PhD in history to know that ethnic identity cards issued by imperial and formerly post-colonial governments are bad news. But if you need more information about that, maybe Google ID cards, Rwanda. Like most people in most places, the young people from Myanmar we talked to had thought relatively little about the injustices on the edge of their world. They tended to think of the Karin as terrorists up in the hills, rather than freedom fighters. But once the top-model started unloading machine guns into crowds, people were confronted

with the reality of a situation that they'd been able to ignore before. Suddenly, they saw that the Karin and other marginalised ethnic groups were victims of the same government violence that they now faced, and now that the scales had fallen from their eyes, they were going to do something about it. The main majority of groups, they are Karin people, which is another ethnic group from Myanmar, and they had a different view, because obviously the military, because we were born in the city, we didn't suffer that much, even though it wasn't that great. For them, the military come to their states, the military come to their villages, they

burn the villages, they kill the people, they rape the people, they do all these atrocities. So then they have a very different view on the Myanmar military and how the country is working and doing. So that's when I started learning, oh shit, there is some other stuff going on in the country. But you kind of just live with your life, you're a kid, you're trying to get by day to day, so you didn't really think about it. And for me, that went on for a long time until the military could happen in Myanmar. The present revolution is not the only flare-up of inter-ethnic violence in the country.

In 2017, the Taat Madore under Ming An Clan began a concerted campaign of genocidal ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people, a largely Muslim ethnic group who live in the country's Rakhine state. The Taat Madore, claiming the Rohingya were variously terrorists or illegal immigrants native to modern-day Bangladesh and hence not native to Myanmar, spent months raping, killing, and burning the villages of the Rohingya people while the world, perhaps distracted by a neoliberal consensus which demonizes both migrants and Muslims, did fuck all to stop them.

In Myanmar, nobody spoke about the genocide, at least not in those terms. Most people didn't even speak about the Rohingya in those terms because Taat Madore propaganda was so effective that citizens in Yangon really believed that the Rohingya were migrants and terrorists coming from Bangladesh. Government newspapers like the New Light of Myanmar published daily stories linking them to groups like ISIS or Al Qaeda who, despite their best efforts, remain totally irrelevant in this story. It's popped up on Facebook, which is basically synonymous with the internet for many people

living in Myanmar, and fed a steady diet of anti-Rahingya hate speech into the political discourse, gradually shifting the Overtune window towards genocide. And without better information, most people believed them. Andi's Western friends, probably weirdos like me who'd crept into his DMs at some point, started to ask him questions. So the Rohingya thing happened in 2017, I was 17, and I started getting phone calls from my friend in the Western countries, like Westerners, they would be like, hey, what's happening in your country?

Why are you killing all the Muslims? And I mess out tightly, and I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. I've never heard anything like that, right? And so yeah, and then I try to learn a little bit more, but everyone had so intense opinions about it that at some point I'm like, ah, fuck, I don't know anymore, you know, because the military was in control at that time still, kind of. So they control the news, they control the media, they control, it's the same thing, you know, like they control who we're saying what.

And so we never hear about it that much. If you only, if only you care so much and you're following everyone that is saying, you know, the truth, then you know. But otherwise you didn't know. It was all very blurry, very, so that's another time when I'm like, ah, fuck, like, I don't know what to do. I'm just gonna, you know, and then one hour in my life. And yeah, I never, I never realized how much, like, how much they had to suffer and they

are still suffering, right? No number of international protests had stopped the ethnic lending of the Rehengia. As they huddled, hidden in their apartment, Andy and his brothers began to embrace the need for deadly violence against their oppressors. We never had any plans, actually. We were just like, no, I think, I remember, it's like, that was not really planned. It was like they killed our people who will fucking hurt them back, you know, it wasn't to get their guns or shoot them back.

Like we didn't even know how to use any of that, you know, and honestly, we didn't even want to kill them. We just want to be like, you can't do these things and not feel, not feel any, anything, you know, not, not feel any consequences of that. Like we're not fucking, we're not animals, you know, you can't just come in and killed one of our friends and think that we're not going to do anything back, you know, like if we let that happen, then they're never going to stop, you know, you, they were trying to scare us and we were trying to scare them back, but they actually killed people.

We didn't, we never wanted to kill anyone, you know. Andy's situation felt hopeless at this stage, trapped at the Capitol and watching his friends disappear one by one. It seemed like he was running out of options. Thousands of young people in Myanmar felt the same and some of them decided to take an option they hadn't even known existed a few weeks earlier. While we were in Mesaat, we conducted a phone interview with a former rebel fighter named Alex.

Like everyone else we talked to, he woke up on the 1st of February to find out that his phone didn't work and the internet was out. Yeah, I thought it was just, you know, like something wrong with my phone and then like I started talking to my friends and all my friends are having the same problem. So we looked down and everybody is like rushing down to the market because we live close to the market. And like they were like, you know, like doing like, like buying lots of rice and like food to like store because no one knows what's going to happen.

Like everyone else, he wasn't that into politics, but he was absolutely known into having the military fuck with every aspect of his life. So he got into the streets. At first, like we are not like that into the politics and stuff. So we didn't know, but you know, like, they can even like shut down the internet is kind of like controlling our life. Right. So like if they can even do that, like, you know, like we cannot imagine like what other

things they can do and which they did, like killing the innocent civilians and stuff. So yeah, at first we just like, oh, yeah, we need to do something about this and then enjoy the protest. He and his friends later found a shop to buy gas masks, tasers and goggles. But even with all their gear, they were powerless against soldiers with guns and tear gas. He said that the next few weeks were hard. Protests were less and less safe, but nobody dared to talk about their plans to take the fight to the military.

Everyone was worried about informants and snitches. We didn't really like actually talk about those stuff. Like we're only like discussing about, you know, like a protest and also like how to get attention from the like embassies and stuff, but for like fight fighting back and you know, like going on the walls are like, I think like almost everyone, they just decide on their own unless they have super like trust difference. By April, he says he'd seen people die in the streets. He decided that protesting wasn't working and he needed to pick up a gun.

The only problem was he didn't have one, nor did his friends. He knew some people who had guns and hated the Tatmador, but he'd been raised his whole life to think of them as terrorists. Before this, we've been, you know, like brainwashed by the military, like pretty much our whole life. So, you know, we always think all ethnic groups are like, like, you know, they're okay, like whoever they see or anything like, they're just terrorists, terrorists, right? That's what like the military like make us believe our whole life.

And I was kind of scared to like trying them because like, yeah, I didn't know like, you know, how to live there or like if they're gonna came in just because like I don't speak current. So, yeah, it was bizarrely, his boss who hooked him up with the rebels in the hills, but he couldn't tell anyone he was going in case they got captured or turned out to be a snitch. Instead, he packed his bag with some resort clothes, didn't even say goodbye to his family and took a bus. He got off that bus and waited until a man in the car picked him up.

By that night, he was in the jungle. During the first night there, like, you know, we have to go God, like one of the leader from the jungle, like, you know, like train us by you're like walking in the dark in the forest, so we have to walk to like somewhere we don't even know. We have to sleep in the like the jungle. He'd read about the PDF on Facebook, but suddenly found himself among them. Technically, they were distinct unit fighting for a return to democracy. But in practice, they were trained and equipped by the Korean National Liberation Army, who

have been fighting for federal democracy for decades. Pretty soon, his opinion of the Korean had changed. But like during my time, I did some observation about them. Yeah, it was like, obviously, like the government is not the current people fighting the military. The military has been like, you know, like invading the current villages, like current land. And, yeah, they've been like banning down the like villages, like raven the woman's, you know, like killing the people for like many years.

So they cannot do anything but to fight back, you know, they have to fight back to protect their land. Just like Xor, the now deceased rebel soldier who he interviewed for our last series, Alex received rudimentary training. He'd never fired a gun before and supplies were very limited, but he's still got a kick out of sending a few rounds down range. Like not even in my dream, like I never thought like I would be like holding it again or like shooting shooting it.

So it's been pretty good. Do you what kind of gun was it? Was it a point two, two or was it yes, the first one was point two, two. Was it hand homemade handmade or was it, you know, no, it's not handmade, but it's kind of pretty old. Even in the jungle, they were worried about moles. It took a while to make friends, he says, but eventually he fell in with a cop who had defected, a photographer and a construction worker.

Their plan, he says, was to train up in the jungle and then go home and fight in the cities. Like our idea was, you know, like we went there and trained for a few months and then go back to the city. And like, we thought like it's going to be like a huge war in the cities like in Yangon or Manila and also like everywhere in Myanmar. But yeah, it didn't turn out like that. But instead, he found himself pulling sentry duty in the jungle. For a city kid, it was scary alone out there in the night with a gun surrounded by potential

threats. I felt like, you know, like, okay, like it's going to happen tonight, like they're going to come to our base tonight, so we I'm going to have to shoot that I have to protect my people. They found it out, but it didn't happen. Yeah. Alex spent eight months in the field pulling sentry duty and learning the skills of a soldier.

Without arms and ammunition, there wasn't much you could do, and his whole time training, he says he only fired five shots. I felt kind of useless because we don't have like enough guns, you know, like, so by the time like there was like a strike happening in Likiko, I thought like, oh, we're going to have to like go and, you know, like fight them now, but instead like we have to pack our stuff and move to a deeper jungle. So we're like kind of like refugees with uniforms, but yeah, you know, if I'm just keep staying there, like we if we are just going to keep running away like this, like

I don't want to stay there. I want to do something about the needs, like the main needs in our campus that weapons against. So I want to like come here and like work for that. The transition was hard for eight months, he hadn't seen a light bulb or a flushing toilet. Now he crossed a river and everything seemed normal. Every kind of way, like, you know, from the jungle, I met how it just a small river across

and then like the life here is totally different, like people are living their normal life and not having to like worry for like any things or like it was like the whole time I was in jungle, you know, like we have to worry about our country and like we don't want to live a normal life until the military is gone. So like, but then like here, everyone is living a normal life and it just only one river cross. Now that he's across the river, we won't say where he's still part of the revolution. He's raising money and doing interviews like this, trying to organize medical supplies and hoping that one day he can return to his country.

Not as a refugee with a uniform, but perhaps as a soldier liberating his people or better yet as a citizen in a free democracy. Mjok wasn't ready to be a refugee quite yet. He quickly found a role for himself in the militant side of what had become a full fledged civil war. Before the coup, he'd been studying engineering at university and he liked to understand how things worked. Although Alex and his comrades had a critical shortage of weapons, Mjok didn't only make

guns at first. He made bombs too, using knowledge that he'd gained after traveling into the jungle and getting training from Korean experts and explosives. And as he told us, they were very effective. Do you think the explosives took out any soldiers? Of course. Some explosives. These are for the beating, some explosives for the abuse, some of the trouble.

So you know, they came and picked the ball and trying to cut off the ball and just explode. So they died. So my... Cut off the what? Cut off the wire. Bone wire. Okay, gotcha. Yes.

But they died. Yeah. Anyway. So it's like... My best memory is that we are using the very first ETN, ETN in Tinganjong. Now this revolutionary thing is the Holdings Arresta, Holdings Arresta is very sad. And they made the EDM ball. We had the Ambulance...

Ambulance... Ambulance quite... Ambulance land. Yeah. Ambulance land. It's like... Five Ambulance tracks is coming here. Oh, wow.

Okay. I think this is my best memory. Yes. Wow. Okay. Wow. So the bomb goes off and they have to send in five Ambulance. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Was it soldiers or police? Soldiers. Soldiers. Soldiers who checked the role. Yeah. It was just bombs that the young rebels learned about.

They also shattered many of their misconceptions about the roles of men and women. As women like Amira stepped up to the front lines and fought alongside their male comrades, it became hard to ignore the sexism which underpinned much of traditional Burmese culture. The music you just heard from a yangon punk band called Rebel Riot, they gave us permission to use it here. They have some great songs about the spring revolution and this one focuses on the role of women. In the video, you see young women in the streets and then you see them in the jungles carrying

M16s. Myanmar might previously have had a woman leader, but gender equality had been far from universal. Many told us a story about this and we recorded it, but it was our last night in the country and we were on our way to another spectacular hangover. One that would see me vomiting with such ferocity on our flight, the neldly Thai lady took pity on me and gave me her shopping bag once I filled up my sick bag. In the second month of the revolution, Andy said, when they were in yangon, the protesters would build giant barricades to keep the police back.

We've seen videos of these, they're pretty impressive. Huge mounds of pallets, boxes and burning tires. We got some other audio of him describing them. No, we could never get close to the military. It was never attack, it was always defense. So later on, when we started seeing how military cracked down these protesters, we started building these gates and sandbags in our every base in yangon, melody, whatever, all across the country.

We started building these barriers so that the military trucks cannot just come in. And it's actually crazy because sometimes to build these things, you have to take over the road first. So like a main road or a highway. So then what we do is all these little groups will gather. So one street, two street, three street, you know, and then we will go to that street or we will walk down the street saying, we're going to try to take over the street, please come join.

People will come down, people will come down from the streets, from the buildings, and then we go to the next street, we say the same thing, and then people will join. Nothing they did could stand up to a tank, though, just as that shopping bag couldn't stand up to James's vomit. The military started using human shields to get through the barricades and the groups of people throwing molotovs. Usually we would defend our places, right? We would use molotov, slingshots, and we would resist, like we would attack, like we will

be in the behind the gate, but we will kind of make them cannot come too far, you know? But when the military have someone that they're gunpointing, just a normal civilian, and making him move, we can't do anything, man, like we can't go through a molotov, like, you know? So that's when the military cleaned out all of that in Yangon, I think. There was a time when it was packed, it was every road had it, every street had it, and everyone was guarding that, right? But then when the military started, and they said it in the statements, they were saying, if that's near your house, you're responsible.

Then they came up with a better idea. In Burmese culture, men fear passing under women's clothing. If it's hanging on a washing line, they'll go around rather than under it. It is, as Andy told us, bullshit. So they decided to turn that bullshit back on the troops, and they grabbed as many women's launchees, a traditional garment worn around the waist like a sarong, as they could, and hung them up above their barricade. It worked, he said, and just like that, a generation of Burmese kids realized that sexism

hurts everyone who perpetuates it. Miok told us an interesting story about this. He said the first time he met his fiance, he thought that she was pretty sharp for a girl. That, he says now, was his bad. Myanmar, he says, has some gender hangups, but he soon realized that she was the bravest person he knew. They went to protest together, and when something needed moving from one town to another, they

took advantage of those gender hangups and her bravery, and she risked her life carrying weapons and her bags on inner-city buses. We'll let him tell you how they met. It's like, we met on the meeting, like, you know, we started making, maybe it's in the very first week of match, we're making very, very, very, very respected memories. The name of the meeting is very strong. Okay. Very strong.

The name of the meeting is brainstorming. Adulstine, she is very, you know, respected. She said the very thoughtful things, oh, she is, you know, so thoughtful. I don't even think, you know, in the Myanmar culture is there's a China, you know, so wines always go like, beautiful, there's a China, you know, something like that. So I thought, oh, she's really good, or she's okay. That's my bad. I have some China, Adulstine, but later, I met with her on the product, so I saw, oh,

she is so beautiful. I thought she was just 20 years old, but later we knew, and later, later, so we keep doing together the things, and she is my backer. I was on ground like this, and whatever I have, I have dangers, I only contact her. We asked him if he worried she'd get arrested while she was making trips into the mountains with guns and bombs, but he said no. Was it hard to leave her to go to the jungle, because she could get arrested, you could get arrested?

No, no, she is very clever, so I never worry about her, I just worry about myself because she is more, you know, secret, and she is more clever than me, so she only teaches me how to be clever. Much like Meowk, Amir was falling in love as well. Her relationship was a bit different though. At first, we were in a group chat. Yeah, but then did you make a private chat? Yeah.

Who made the private chat? Yeah, who started the private chat? Who started the private chat? I think I did, because at that time, I feel like, oh, she is so young, at that time, she is not even 18, she is 17 years old, and she is leading the one of the products team, so I am like, wow, this girl is like, amazing, right? So that is how I met her, and that is how I, you know, tried to hit her. Now admittedly, TK, the security guy, is translating here.

He is also her boyfriend, and for now, he is here with her to make sure she is okay. When we met them both, it was just weeks after he arrived in Thailand, and the two had met in person for the very first time. It is a kind of story you cannot help but find touching. Two people on opposite sides of the world, united by a fight for justice and the bonds of revolutionary care. At least it is a nice counterweight to all the stories of death and violence. Which will have more of you tomorrow on Part 4 of this series.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we are revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. But the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good-bad-ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. During the time we were reporting this story, Robert and I walked miles and miles around the streets of Mesaot. Being the only two journalists in town, and also both giant white guys, we kind of stood out and taking a taxi to a sensitive interview isn't always a smart choice. Even when it was, they frequently dropped us off in the wrong place and we'd end up walking anyway. Everyone in Mesaot rides scooters, but riding without a helmet can get you a fine.

We figured that as relative novices to the world of scooting, we'd probably fuck something up, and it'd probably be better off walking. When the time came to meet Meowk though, he offered us a ride. That was very nice, but it put us in an interesting position. What exactly do you say when a guy you've never met, who is a friend of a guy you DM'd on Reddit, who you know is engaged in the illegal production and smuggling of guns into a war zone, offers to pick you up at the cafe so you can go out for dinner? We decided to call our friend, a long-suffering guy we go to when we have a security question,

Paul. At his request, we're keeping him anonymous, but he works in security and has an extensive professional background, dealing with situations just like this, or maybe mostly like this. Yeah, so basically Paul, we're meeting with these people. We don't have an established human chain with them of trust, they're just a Reddit account that James has been talking with, but for like 6 or 7 months, it doesn't really seem like there's much else we can do besides keep our eyes open and try to meet in a neutral place.

Yeah, I mean, the big concern is that it would be the government, which is not. From what you guys have said, the government simply doesn't have the wherewithal to do operations like this, and I mean rebel groups like this, they're trying, they want to get everything out there they can. So yeah, is there a concern about the fact that you don't have a chain of people that can vouch for each other? Yeah, but the situation there and everything's in your favor. Even minor cultural faux pas shouldn't be an issue.

With Paul's help, we came up with a watertight plan. I should note here that he was at least as concerned with our fate as he was with the fate of the pair of pants he'd loaned James for the trip. And I mean, it's a story that needs to get out, so being slightly lax on the rules while knowing that it's in everybody's favor that it goes well, I guess you gotta bend the rules sometimes. Yeah. I guess we'll check in with people trying to do proof-of-life on time?

Yeah, we'll do a proof-of-life. I will send you a picture of James holding a piece of paper that says big wife guy. And if we are kidnapped, I'll send you a picture of me that says Elon Musk will be a good custodian of Twitter. Yeah. Okay, I'll know that that's the sign. Yeah. I'll get a black-cocked-out.

Yeah, yeah, I'll figure out something. Yeah, me and a few friends will be on our way. That sounds awful. Yeah. James has my favorite pants. Yeah, yeah, you gotta get those pants back. Right, yeah, I'll wet them. Oh, yeah.

This is all about the pants. If I find James's dead body, I'm getting those pants off. Luckily, both I and Paul's trousers made it back that night. The only damage was to several delicious plates of food. Miaoq, his fiancé, and their godfather were the most gracious hosts, and we decided not to record that first night. Instead, we met up the next day, but there is one thing from that night that I want to share with you.

Rather than explaining it, I'll let the song Miaoq played for us talk to you to the beautiful medium of punk music. Bella Chao, of course, is an anti-fascist anthem. The Nits original version tells the story of a young partisan who says goodbye to his girlfriend before he goes off to fight Italian fascists. If he dies, he says he wants to be buried under a flower in the mountains, so people don't go. After a few months of revolution, all our characters found themselves mourning their friends, and

many of them were in the mountains. Their struggle is one they see in the same vein as the Italian partisans who fought fascism in their mountains. The anti-fascist who came from around the world to fight the Spanish Civil War. I first heard that song, Bella Chao, from a Spanish Civil War veteran. And it's a strange closing of the loop to be here, sitting, hearing it, with young people who, just like the Spanish Republicans, are fighting a coup, with next to no international support, and a critical shortage of weapons.

But Miaoq was trying his best to fix their shortage, a month into what would become the spring revolution. And the stakes would become clear when the first protestor would shot, and they kept marching. When people decided to go back into the streets, they showed that the future of their country was worth dying for. A few weeks later, some of them decided it was also worth killing for. It was about them that Miaoq's buddy, and keen Reddit user daddyumcd, said he'd been

online, and he reckoned they could use their 3D printers, a steel pipe, and the expertise of some strange on the internet, to arm themselves. The promise of revolutionary technology would take quite some time to have any kind of battlefield impact in Myanmar, but the effects of a different kind of revolution would be felt immediately. But the nation's young activists took up arms against their government. I was like, I'm interested in hardware and 3D printing, especially my profession is augmented some virtual reality, and want to test 3D printing is my hobby, so I just download some files from Thinkie Bass or other 3D printing criminality and just do it for

my desk, not especially, not especially. Yeah. Like desk toys and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just twice, yes. What did you think of guns then? I have never imagined of a cab because, you know, we have been living in a military booth for a long time, so we're afraid of soldiers, especially not the soldiers, especially

the guns that they hold, so we are so afraid of that. So we never imagined, like, like we are the same as in North Korea, we are so afraid of that. So we never imagined of making guns, but after that, the story began. At first, Miao and his team felt safe. Despite the dangerous nature of their work, he felt that Tamp Madal was so behind the times they wouldn't even know what a 3D printer was. Like at those times, the military didn't know or didn't give a fuck about 3D printing, so

it is okay at those times. It's really okay. When they come, we need to hide the campus. If they see 3D printer, that's okay, because we will say this is for our job or this is for some hobby that we can see at those times, but not this time. Next time, if they find 3D printer, yes, cam cam, go to jail like this, or headshot. Headshot, yeah. Soon, that headshot became a lot closer to being a possibility.

It's like, as soon as we finished the second FGC-9, we tried to test it in Yangon, and we sent it to our warehouse, but unfortunately, this warehouse is exposed and ambushed by the military, and this gun is taken by the military, and they announced this on the news by picturing this like hammock guns, and they don't give a fuck about this, just a hammock gun. They just did it at the very first time, but later and later, later and later, the second time, they were arrested, at those times, they arrested my revolutionary from my team, so I told him about the efficiency and how to use the history of the cam at the time.

Maybe he was an investigator, and he told the truth, at those times, it says like the FGC-9, yeah, announced the name FGC-9, like this, before the very first time, they announced the cam from the Turkish. If you missed that, they thought the guns were Turkish, the reason we giggled at this is that whenever we see videos of combat in Myanmar, James and I send them to a group chat and try to work out what the weapons are and where they came from. Nearly every time we're stumped, the guns turn out to be some kind of niche Turkish shotgun made to look like an AR-15.

It seems the military were operating on the same assumption, only this time, they were very wrong. Like Alex, Miaoq started the second, more deadly phase of the spring revolution by taking a trip out to the jungle, and he stayed for several months to learn some of the skills he was going to need to fight back against the Taut Medaugh. I was going the mountain as a culminator, so I'm not like, I'm not have a PDF training or something like that. I was just going as a culminator, so I met with some guns specially, or some trainer,

and I said, I want to know how to shoot a gun, how to ask this and by the gun, so they teach me. I said, say I'm in a culminator, I can do the training, but I want to learn from folks and other things, so they send me some videos like this to learn by myself, yes. Later, he went back to carry prototype printed guns to the EEOs for testing. We asked if it was scary being an undercover gun runner in a dictatorship. He says it was, but he found that he had a powerful ally in his fight, homophobia. Yeah, of course, of course, but we need to discus it, so you know, disguise it, yeah,

disguise it. I just thought I have a long hair, so I act like a gay, so you know, that the military has so China and equality, so they hate gays, that's why, this is our advantage. The military, assuming Miok was gay and therefore incapable of fighting, let him go. Miok kept his mouth shut and let their homophobia help him smuggle the guns with which he hopes to help topple the regime that places so much stock in values like these. Miok said he had to go to the jungle to prove that his guns worked, because at first, the EEOs didn't believe him.

About the gun, no one believed that, no one believed that. So we have to make it fast and show them. So we made it fast, we got the gun, it's a self-full, we lied, we need to lie and we send this to the EEO, then they made it and it didn't work out and they adjust and it worked out. Okay, yeah. How did they feel when they found it? Oh, one of my revolutionaries in EEO states said, oh, they're really, really happy, they

said, all of the printer and can't make much for this thing, let's do it. Right now, yes, like this. Almost everyone we met spent time in the jungle. Rooney, that's a nom de guerre, not a given name, started off as a protester and just like everyone else, he fled into the jungle to avoid being murdered by the government and to learn from the ethnic armed organizations how to fight back. When we tried to make peaceful protesting and it's pretty rarely burned down then, we, he decided, like he, also we, so we decided to choose to have an anus and to make a revolution.

So at those times, he goes to the EEO states and he lands the trainees, you know, even especially the explosive trainees and he got back to the top and he's still making this exclusive with the head of the EEO teachings. After learning from the EEOs, he came back to Yangon to put his knowledge to use. Of course, just like Miao's gun making team and the street protesters who learned from Hong Kongers, he took to YouTube and Google to try and find a better way to build killing machines. So it's like the EEO teaches the very business explosives, just come out and you can put

your CDN and sugar like this, but after they land the very business thing and they want to improve. So they land by themselves, just like DIY, they land by themselves with Google, with YouTube. So later on and later, even they can make TNT and ETN. Using YouTube, he looks like YouTube. Yes, of course. Nearly everyone we met at some point Googled something like how to make gun or how to make bomb.

Now, this is not ideal opsec, but it speaks to the desperation of the times. They used crowdfunding websites to raise money for ingredients and Rooney soon started putting his knowledge into practice. What that meant was that people died. He killed human beings with the explosives that he made. Now those people would have killed Rooney or anyone else we've spoken to in this series. He was defending himself and others by making killing machines. But still, if you're a decent person, it's not easy to watch your work result in a stranger

being blown into a pink mist. He is not proud of that, but you know, or you know, he is never trying to kid event a cat or anime. But he is sad, but he have to do because of revolution, yes, of course. Revolution was in Rooney's blood. The military had stolen his house as a kid and he'd grown up with his uncle sharing memories of the 1988 pro-democracy uprising and its violent repression. He'd seen his family, his cousin, brothers and their parents harassed for his whole life.

Now he had a chance to fight back. He carried out hundreds of missions before he eventually had to flee the city when an accident led to serious injury. Like in June, June 7th, there is a nine mission. So he has to make nine bombs, really big bombs. So they try to assemble this ball, one of his friends is smoking, and this fire is called a gunpowder. After the blast, he had to run away from his house before the police arrived.

His friend was not so lucky and is in jail now. Rooney is mostly recovered, but it's not safe for him to go back, so he's hoping to make a new start in Maison. The fight didn't stay in Yangon or Napid or either. For villagers living outside, the coup was just as real, but so was the desire to fight back. People outside of town found themselves in the crosshairs of the top of Maduro as well. The military employs a strategy which they call four cuts.

It's designed to alienate the rebels from local support. It doesn't work. This kind of scorched earth stuff has never worked. It didn't work when the Nazis tried it in Europe. It didn't work when the US tried it in the Middle East or Vietnam. It doesn't work when Israel keeps doing it. And it doesn't work in Myanmar. What it does do is drive people who lose their families to pick up a gun and kill soldiers.

And it's not hard to see why. I just want to play you our conversation watching one of Andy's videos, about one of hundreds of massacres that have happened since last February. And as a warning, the stuff we're going to talk about is about as horrible as stuff can be. But yeah, basically about, I think, 28 people were killed that day. They just came into a village and shot everyone. That's a handmade gun that these villagers had.

But it was just, they weren't shooting anyone. They just had it. Yeah, that's all the, everyone died. All these guys died. Shit. Fuck. Look at that. This hand's tied?

Yeah, yeah. Fuck. It looks like they gave up, trying to tie their hands in the shot. Yeah. It's an electrical cable. And they burned the whole village now. Yeah, they did. Fucking hell.

Yeah. The fights. You guys okay? Yeah. Yeah, I mean. Fucking hell. And that's why we say massacre, because it's fucking, look at all the brains out, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, all these kids, they weren't even 18. So all the villagers that ran away, they took a photo of the village from afar. They burned their relatives and then left. Yeah. Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah. It was all.

Every bit of fucking horrible shit. And he says a non-profit called Liberate Myanmar supports the families every month, keeping them fared and sheltered. Because however hard the government tries to divide the people from one another, it always seems to fail. Instead, it just pushes them closer and closer together. While we were in Thailand, having a drink on a rooftop actually and talking about some kind of meditation retreat that a guy we'd met had gone on, we got to see some of the

action for ourselves. That night was a fun one. We were hanging out with some non-profit folks and we had acquired some pretty terrible whiskey. At various points in the evening, we would ambush one of the boys and tell them they'd been shot in the arm or the leg and have the others rush in to practice and stop the bleed skills. Robert and I demonstrated some improvised carrying techniques and how to effectively

turn and drop to the floor when you're in the intimate presence of a grenade. Everyone else at the party probably thought we were pretty strange, but we were having fun. Then, in the distance, we saw a huge yellow flash. It took a few seconds of us all wondering if that whiskey had sent us blind before the boom reached us. At first, we thought it was one of the airstrikes that had been happening in the border region. But it was close and it was just one huge boom, not the rockets or cluster bombs that

helped the door like to drop on civilians. Good minutes, minutes of nervously waiting on the rooftop to see what was coming next, and his phones started buzzing. It was a car bomb and it had gone off about a hundred yards from the border while we stood earlier that day. Immediately we had questions, but very few answers. Car bombs hadn't been the thing thus far in the revolution. This was new.

Car bombs are also extremely scary. It's hard not to be around cars in a city, and when any one of those cars might kill you, it's hard to do anything, feeling any semblance of safety. I want to know who did, well, I mean, yeah, no car bombs, I've never heard of it. Is it somebody who's driving it or do they kind of like, I don't think it's someone driving it, is it, like, you don't see anything there, like, uh, no, I mean, it could have been. Wait, is it by the, um, because if there was a person in there, there wouldn't be anything

left of that. Yeah, they wouldn't, you wouldn't see anything. No, no, no, but the thing is, look, there's the fence, like that, that looks like it was there when it hit. Oh, like it was parked? Yeah, it was. Looks like it's by the shocks. It's the way in front of it, it's right by the bridge.

But I don't know why, what this, what happened. We still aren't sure who set off the car bomb, or if anyone died. In a conflict like the one in Myanmar, it's sometimes as confusing as it is scary. The military are more than capable of a false flag style attack, killing civilians and then blaming the PDF, and it has done this before. That's what totalitarianism does. It aims to control every aspect of everyday life, even the truth. The jungle haunted us the whole time we were there, unattainable, but right next door.

Just a few miles away, in Laquikaw, the fight was raging. Laquikaw is what's called a friendship town. It was built with Japanese money as a place for K and U fighters to live after they put down their arms. It was supposed to be a symbol of hope in a new peaceful and democratic Myanmar. Now it's a battlefield. But while we couldn't get there, we could walk along the riverbank and look at the jungle and imagine what it must be like up in those mountains, which we did almost every day.

Myanmar itself looms like a mountain over the town of Maesot. It's a border town without a border. But the city is surrounded by refugee camps, non-profit offices, and even museums for political prisoners that can't exist on the other side of the river. One day, we took a cab to see a monastery on a bluff overlooking the river. Down into Myanmar, we could see a casino still doing business with Chinese tourists despite the bombing nearby. On the walls of the monastery were colorful but horrific scenes of rape and murder, Buddhist

stages of hell. A reminder that, according to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, all life is suffering and greed is the cause of suffering. The same thing could be said for the refugees and fighters forced to hide in the endless green of the jungle, driven away from their homes by the greed of men who worship power. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus? It's all made up. Head to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. It's not easy to leave your home, even when people there are trying to kill you. Dr. Wander, like everyone else, struggled with the choice. His hospital had next to no supplies, COVID's third wave was ravaging the population, and he couldn't even get oxygen to treat sick patients. All around him was death and fear, but he still wanted to stay. Actually, I don't want to leave my country, because if we just live like that, our country will be, will go back to before centuries, you know, they control everything.

We have to just queue, we have to just make a queue to get a petroleum. We have faith in our young age, I don't want to feel that feeling again. Not for me, not just for me, not for our people, for our new generation. I've got two younger sons, yes, one is a five year, one is eight years. So I just want to fight until my last breath, but I can't tolerate, because they are trying, you know, as an underground movement, I am trying my best. From Yao, the decision to go was made for him, by the top model. We are making the meeting with him, he is in under control at those times, we are making

the meeting, asking him, did he save or not, you know, at the end of the meeting, he told me the thing, he was going to the inside, oh shit, holy shit, he was arrested. So at those times, I was living in the jungle, and you know, the government, sorry, the military also announced that they remain to arrest, I think, all of my things that you have to go, because you have all of the data, you have to go, so I decided to go. Andy and the boys made the decision to abandon their apartment and head for Karin Territory, and eventually Thailand, once one of their protest friends, was arrested by the government. His phone was on him when he got caught, potentially exposing all of them.

After a harrowing drive into the jungle, and several days among the Karin, they succeeded in finding a people smuggler to get them across the border without getting stuck in one of the refugee camps operated by the Thai government. Three days later, we were trying to cross at night time, and these guys said, okay, you know, you go in, you cross, you get to Thailand at the same night, and we thought, okay, you know, and we stream across the river. It was very scary, but for me, I've done it like three times, so it was a little bit, I thought it was going to be better, but it was more stressful because I had them, right?

So I was like, if it was me alone, maybe I could, you know, whatever happened, I would find a way out. I'm not sure if I could do that with three other people, you know? So I was quite nervous. We paid, what, $5,000 in bodies? Hold on. Jesus Christ. It's not cheap.

It is not cheap. It is not cheap. That's a significant bribe. It's not cheap. No, no, because that's the thing. It's not just one person. Yeah, it's not just one person. He, the person that crossed us from the river, from Yawadee to this side is one, and then

from there to the No Man's Land is another one, right? So. Yeah. We saw the soldier were like, we're fucked. They stayed in fort or attempted to fight with the current, but most of the time all he did was stand sentry. Worry about getting enough to eat or wonder when he'd get his hands on something better than a squirrel rifle.

I feel kind of useless because we don't have like enough guns, you know, like, so by the time like there was like a strike happening in Likiko, I thought like, oh, we gonna have to like go and, you know, like fight them now, but instead, like we have to pack our staff and move to a deeper jungle. So we're like kind of like refugees with uniforms, but yeah, you know, if I'm just keep staying there, like we, if we are just going to keep running away like this, like I don't want to stay there. I want to do something about the needs.

Like, you know, like the main needs in our countries, weapons, guns. So I want to like come here and like, you know, like walk, walk for that. He called his unit refugees with uniforms, and that's about what they were. This is why rebels like Miok and daddy UMCD are so motivated to find a way to reliably print functional semi-automatic weapons. The Corinne are desperately underarmed, and yet they've been able to hold off the military for decades. If the Corinne and other ethnic organizations were able to build functional arms production

infrastructure alongside the new rebels with the PDF, they'd have a real chance at victory. If they succeed in building this, the repercussions around the world could be massive. That is, however, a story for another day. Seeing this kind of conflict isn't good for you. Nobody's supposed to live through this kind of stuff. And certainly not when they're just kids. Being in a rich country replete with therapists and VA clinics, thousands of U.S. veterans live every day with PTSD.

The difference for them is that they went to war. In Myanmar, war comes to you. And then there's another one, which is this one. And I did the first part, and I'm too scared to do the second part. Yeah. I mean, this is fucked up. Like every time I have to do it, my head gets fucked. That's one of the guys.

And so that's in Yangon, in the protest. That's one of the night way. That's one of the day. But yeah, about 100 people would kill, over 100 people. You can see in the video, they come in, and you will see how the military came in and how they were trying to, I'm not sure if I have it anymore, maybe here. What they've seen has bonded the boys. They do anything for each other, and have already done things that most of us can't

imagine. When their mothers wanted to take him home, he felt helpless without them. When the rest of them crossed, one of their moms came back to get him. Without them, and stuck in a country falling apart, he didn't want to keep going. Every day, he worked soldiers outside himself, popping Yabba pills. Yabba's a meth-based drug that soldiers are often given by the military. He worried they'd kill him. His brother-in-law was arrested and tortured, just for having a lighter.

Can you remember what it felt like when your mom came to take him home? He kept saying he was going to fucking kill himself for a long time. For a long time. I know my mom. I will come to Yangon. I will pay all the fees. I killed myself. He wasn't in a good space.

Yeah. I lived in Tianjin, Yangon. That's really dangerous. I didn't like the military space. I didn't like that. He was saying that if he has to go back, he was telling us, now he's alone. He doesn't even have us anymore. He was saying he's going to go out to the protests and he's going to try to kill the

cops, the soldiers, the police. It was very difficult. For us too, because we know his mom can't really help him with that stuff. We can, but she really wanted to take him. Over time, they chatted on the phone and he felt better. But now he's here with the boys. It's him playing his guitar and the music you heard. He got a little better at coping with this in a good way.

If you're young and you see people killing people like this terribly, you have some dog-fucked up thoughts yourself too, right? I could do this to someone too and stuff like that. He's struggled a lot with that for a long time. I think the worst thing was being alone. He was alone. He couldn't talk to his mom about all these things. He was paranoid.

He was scared. He was traumatized. It's been five months since he was here, but the first few months, it was very difficult. I talk to them all the time about this because I know talking helps with these stuff. Especially when you all feel the same thing. I think our ways of coping with this is like we talk about it in a joking way. That's the best way to deal with it. To get through those hard days on his own, looking down at men who wanted him dead, he

picked up a cheap acoustic guitar. When he got back, he began teaching the others. If you hadn't picked it up, they're pretty good. When we went out to the pool bar at night, in between kicking our asses, the boys would look up at the stage. It was occupied by a pretty second rate cover band. For whatever reason, probably not helped by the incredibly rough Taijin we've been smashing back.

I looked at them looking at the stage on our last night, and I wanted to cry. Teenage kids shouldn't be caught picking up guns to fight, or picking up cameras to film their friends dying. They should be doing what I was doing when I was a teenager, which is making a complete prick of myself on a stage with a guitar. One day, hopefully soon, they'll be able to sing happy songs again, and the war will just be a memory. Their bond is so close now, and they're barely ever apart.

It's a lot of responsibility for Andy, who's just 22 himself, but he wouldn't want it any other way, and neither would they. One night, Andy and Sarah have appointments, and so Robert and I take the boys for dinner. It's a lot of fun, and actually a lot of food, but when we talk to them about their options as refugees, who might be able to come to the US, one thing is clear, they don't want to be apart. For me, it's like, I rather fucking take bullets than any of them, because if something happened to them, I am in so much trouble.

But I know that's what they want to do. If the mom trapped him in Yangon, and he doesn't do anything, and the revolution's over, he's going to feel so much regret for not being involved in this, and for me, it's like, if people want to fight, we shouldn't keep them. We shouldn't just say, yeah. It's been a few months since we got back from Mesaught. It's the rainy season there now, and that makes fighting and reporting harder. Amira is still stuck in Mesaught.

It's not safe for her to go back to a country where her family wants her dead, but it's not possible for her to leave Mesaught either. Without travel documents, something the UNHCR would have to issue, she's stuck in a little room in a hotel. It's not a great place for a young woman, and it's even worse when she has to watch her friends continue to struggle without her. We both wrote to the UN and the various embassies on her behalf, but months later, we've heard nothing.

This is typical of a lot of refugees. They're often presented as a faceless mass of humanity bereft of hope, but each of them has a story, and those refugee camps along the border between Thailand and Myanmar are full of stories. Some of those are stories of fear, some of heroism, and some of tragedy. But until things change at the UN, all of those stories aren't being told. The 3D-printed firearms Miao and his colleagues are working on have made massive progress over the last few months.

But even though 3D-printed guns cost a small fraction of the price of an M16 or an AK-47, the pro-democracy forces are still desperately underfunded. They're at war with the state, but they don't have any of the apparatus of the state with which to fight back. Instead, the Gen Z rebels have turned once again to the internet. Alongside crowdfunding campaigns like Liberate Myanmar, they've developed a more innovative fundraising method that allows for donations even from people who don't have any money. Instead of soliciting cash donations, risking exposing their donors, they began using a

method that they call Click to Donate, where supporters could help the rebels by clicking on adverts on certain videos and websites in order to generate advertising revenue. It's used to find everything from weapons purchases to shelter for the 10-thousand eternally displaced people in Myanmar. I spoke to several people in Myanmar who asked not to be named for their own safety, but are very familiar with the funding of the PDF. One of them told me, Click to Donate started to support government staff who had decided to join a civil disobedience movement.

Government staff are always low paid, and so they were not very financially stable in the beginning. The funds from Click to Donate allow these workers to strike without pay. After a few weeks of being on strike, financial concerns were weakening the movement and people were being forced to work or starve. Younger pro-democracy activists responded by setting up YouTube channels and then using the anti-coup telegram channels to direct millions of views and ad clicks to them from across the country and from supporters abroad.

The resulting advertising revenue allowed them to fund the civil disobedience movement and later to equip the PDF. By December of 2021, these clicks were yielding an income of about 500 million kuyats, about $28,000 every day. The military junta responded to this, an international indignation at videos of protesters being massacred in the street by tripling data prizes and throttling internet connection speeds. Pro-democracy keyboard warriors responded with viral content that required less bandwidth, including writing personal finance blogs to attract a U.S. audience that was unknowingly

supporting a revolution with its clicks. People in Myanmar also began to use VPNs to access the internet. This helped them get around some of the junta's restrictions and also yielded a higher advertising payment per click on a given advert. Websites like Digital Revolution allow users to find content that supports pro-democracy rebels and click on it, lending their support with nothing more than a broadband connection and a few seconds of their time. Inside their videos and websites, the Jinzi rebels also launched games.

At first, they were just simple little online phone app games that would let you throw darts at the coup leader or something. One source told us that these games didn't just support the rebels through funding, but also provided a little bit of mental health care. At least people could virtually kill the folks in their city, in their home, who were ruining their lives. And at the same time, the games earned the money, and that money went to fund the PDF. The most impressive of these games is the recently launched War of Heroes, which you

can buy for just $1 on the Apple and Google App stores if you want to check it out. In the game, which is available in Burmese or English, a player can fight as a man or a woman and take on government troops and even zombies. The money donated by these games and adverts doesn't just go into a black hole, according to the sources I spoke to. We have a click to donate Facebook page, they said, and regularly we release financial statements on the Facebook page, saying, like, this month we gave 10 million kiapps to that group.

I spoke to Billy Ford, a program officer for the Burma team at US Institute of Peace. He says this kind of innovation is what's allowed the pro-democracy movement to survive in Myanmar since it was last violently suppressed in 1988. Activist and resistance movements in Myanmar have, historically, been an example to the world of creative, strategic and resilient models of activism, he said. This post-2021 movement has taken that to a new level, enabling it to defy all historical precedent and sustain an anti-coup movement for more than 18 months now, actually gaining ground against a regime with an enormous structural advantage.

Rather than seeing their lack of weapons and funds as a fatal flaw, Ford says that the highly online rebels have looked for areas where they could outflank the aging generals who stole their futures from them. The movement has leveraged it to comparative advantages, large numbers of people with time and tech savvy to raise money, he says. This tactic, although unusual, has been a great success according to Ford. The approach has grown enormously, with one of the video games, for example, rising to become the number two paid app on the App Store at one point.

However, all the clicks in the world might not be enough to sweep the rebels into Mandalay and return the country on its path towards democracy. Prices inside Myanmar say that less and less revenue is generated by a Myanmar IP address, and that they have had to encourage members of the people's click force to install VPNs to make their clicks appear to come from the US or Europe. Sometimes the traffic is so massive that YouTube's algorithm mistakes it for an artificial intelligence botnet. They're looking, they tell me, at pivoting towards affiliate links and the sort of content-driven

commerce that has swept the US media thanks to the success of sites like the Wirecutter. Meanwhile, on the ground, PDF forces are regularly getting the better of the Tatmadaw and small arms conflict, but coming off worse when they can't defend themselves against the Russian jets which the Hunter uses to bomb civilian and military targets. Without man-portable anti-aircraft systems, the rebels are sitting ducks. The world has sent thousands of these to Ukraine, and none to people in Myanmar fighting the same battle for democracy against the same Russian jets. Despite this, they're not discouraged.

Life rebels tell me they have been scouring the Internet, and they're working on a solution that doesn't need the apparatus of support of a state, and instead relies on stable broadband and the increasing ingenuity they've shown in 18 months of revolution. Hi everyone, it's me again, James, don't worry, I'm not coming to you at the end of the video, I'm just recording this little message at the end to say that we're very grateful to Dan O'Neill and Ian for all their hard work on this, and we've gone through countless edits for this particular project, and they've done a lot of hard work to get it to you in the form that you listened to it today and for the last week.

We also want to say that although this appears to be a podcast written and recorded by Robert O'Neill, that Andy is very much a co-author, and that none of this would have been possible without him. As we said, Andy's not his real name, and we can't put his real name in the credits because we're worried for his safety, but his work has been invaluable, and without him, none of what you've heard would be possible. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass.

And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space, with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.