Hey, everybody, it's me Josh and for this week's s Y s K Selects, I've chosen did Reagan Star Wars program Win the Cold War, which we originally released back in August of two thousand and twelve. It's a pretty good look at the time Ronald Reagan bled the Soviet Union dry so badly that it actually brought an end to communism basically all over the world. It's a pretty good episode and I hope you enjoy it. Let's listen now. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuckers Bryant sitting across from me. Hi. Yeah, have you ever seen Hunty Darko? Oh dude, that's one of my favorites. You know when he takes that mescaline and like that thing comes out of his chest and he starts following it. Yeah, he doesn't take mescalin. But yeah, sometimes I feel when we're sitting across from or another, we're connected by one of us, like a warm hole of fellowship. Yeah, like from the Abyss that's what it sort of looked like. Yeah, it did look a lot like that. I love that movie. Yeah, when um, when Ed Harris takes all that mescaline that movie and sees the sees that thing come up out of the water, it was just like that. No mescaline, no movies. How's it coming in which people take mescalin? Ah, there's plenty of those. Sure, this is what people have been complaining about lately. Who's been complaining? Tell me their names, the various people people have been complained. Oh, you bring something up. I feel like we should address something. We haven't done this in a really long time. It appears to me that we have a lot of newcomers. Yeah, welcome, Yes, welcome, um, And I think anyone who's been following the whole time it kind of gets the stuff you should know jam right. Yeah, But it seems like there's a lot of people who don't quite understand what we're doing and think that we purport to be infallible experts on everything and that we don't just get things wrong from time to time. We're just a couple of guys who are pretty decent at researching. That doesn't mean like we invented the topic that we're talking about, or that we didn't just walk right past. Um a fact or something that we missed in our research. It comes up. It happens from time time, So I guess if you're just joining us, that's probably something good to keep in mind. We don't claim to be experts, so don't hold us to that standard because we're not trying to reach that standard. We're just trying to impart some really great information as factually as possible. Um and uh, we love science and wonder great. Are you good? Ah? Yeah? Alright, how are you doing? I'm awesome. Do you have anything to get off of your chest? No, just welcome the pamina cheese. Many sandwiches are in the corner. Help yourself, so chuck. Yes. Do you remember a while back we talked, well, we've talked about this stuff a lot, Mutual assured destruction. We did a podcast on that, specifically, didn't we we did? Um? We did one on who who won the Cold War? Did one on how to steal a nuclear bomb? Yeah, like we've done. It's just a fascinating period of world history, the Cold War, agreed, incredibly tense, incredibly scary, and this is our history. It is in part because you're half Russian. No, but Um, I was alive and well and young war kids, weren't we. Yeah, yeah, we've talked about this before, Ruskies, little risk. Um. So uh, the central I guess, the fulcrum of the Cold War, the fact that the reason we're all still here is that was the doctrine of mutual is sure destruction, Yes, which is basically like, we had enough nukes to wipe out the entire world. The Soviet Union had enough nukes to wipe out the entire world. So we were just there in a tense, fragile they taunt, how about a nice game of chess? Exactly, That's why we're still here. So um, this was I guess this accepted reality for every president and every premiere um from well, I guess who for us from ke On, this mutual assured destruction doctrine was just kind of a part of daily life. Um. But when Ronald Reagan came into office, he came up with a different plan. He did in need, so instead of a tense standoff, he found that untoward. I guess I think he found it. From my understanding of Reagan, he would have found it untoward because it didn't give America a clear advantage. Well, the article says he found it morally and politically distasteful. I agree with in that Reagan didn't like mutual or shore destruction for one reason or another. So we came up with something a game changer, you would call it today. If you read books that of an airplane is also reading at the same time, that's right, what is it, Josh? He came up with the Strategic Defense Initiative, which the press like to call start the star Wars program. And I remember this very very well because it was largely derided in the press for a bunch of reasons. Uh, we're going to talk about Yeah, I remember very well too. It was all over Mad magazine. Um, it was all over time. There were awesome illustrations of like satellites with laser shooting out of them that like you could see in the mainstream media a lot. Sure, Um, But yeah, I also remember it kind of just basically being generally disliked by the public. Yeah, as well. Pretty much it was. It was to be laughed at in many circles, although it was a very serious thing. It was, and it was laughed at for a lot of reasons. But that we're gonna go over. So Reagan On March twe he held an address to the nation, little televised speech, and in it he challenged the um scientific community UM, who he said had created nuclear weapons, to make those very same weapons quote UM, impotent and obsolete. And that kind of became the rallying cry, like, let's make nukes impotent and obsolete. And the way you do that is to make it so that we have a missile defense system that can shoot down every single nuclear warhead that Russia has in its arsenal, all at once, if need be. Yeah, after launch. Um, that is so like if they launched their missiles, we can shoot them down in space and UM. In Reagan's view, which you know, I can see his point at the time, UM, there would not be any more need for He thought, it would like neuter the Cold War in its tracks. Soviet Union thought that's not too cool. They thought, yet, and yet, and yet, because well a lot of a lot of people felt like it was going to escalate the arms race, the Soviets thought, this just means you have a clear advantage over us. This doesn't neuter like it neuters us, It doesn't neuter you. Right, And Reagan said as many times as the Soviets could stand to hear it that, Um, this was strictly a missile defense system, a net or a shield if you will, Um, that that would only be used in the event that a Soviet nuclear launch was detected. Right, But the Soviets were saying, or you could just shoot all of our missiles down and then launch a strike, a first strike where we would have no way to retaliate. So, yeah, this is totally unacceptable. And yeah, the Russian rallied against it, but not just them the here at home, there are a lot of people who didn't really care for it, including the public who thought it was a pipe dream, or who thought it would escalate a new arms racist Soviets, or who just thought it was going to be a huge like money pit. Yeah, and it was a lot of those things. Um. And when we say, Soviets, let's go ahead and call out the premiere that I didn't remember Yuri and drop off. I didn't remember him. I don't remember him either, and I looked him up. He was only I mean that it seems like there was a lot of premiers there for a while that like died thereafter. I think he was in like like less than a year and a half. H he was like the KGB had something to do with it in vodka o um. So he was the premier at the time. He wasn't a fan. They launched a big propaganda campaign, it says sevent Their propaganda went toward UH poopoo ing the Star Wars defense program, even though they didn't think it was gonna work. Our Congress apparently right Apparently the Soviets were like, this is not a feasible program. Well, and they said it violates a couple of important treatise UM the a b M, the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty of seventy two, which the Soviet Union in in UH the United States were both a part of, said that at the time that was two ground based missile defense systems you were allowed. Later on it was one, and I guess this would have been more than two. Not only that ground based is a an operative term in this case, because this was going to be this the strategic defense initiative was going to be space based, and that violates another treaty. N seven Outer Space treaty says that you cannot use weapons of mass destruction in space, and that's pretty much what was going on or that was what was planned, right? So UM, all right, so that's that's why they don't like it, right why And Congress didn't like it. Congress didn't like either. Most people in Congress they they apparently the UM, the Missile Defense Agency attributes UM coining the term star wars to describe the strategic convinced the nation initiative to mock it, really UM to Ted Kennedy and an interview in the Washington Post, like almost right after Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, and Reagan spent the rest of the time he was in office trying to simultaneously get this push through and to get everyone to stop calling it star wars, because luck had had it caught the American public's imagination like, oh, yeah, star wars, let's just go ahead and blow up Russia with star wars, he would have been like, yeah, let's call it star wars. It's awesome. But it was like Reagan star wars, that crazy old kok he's got all time, and he wants to put weapons in space and just shoot lasers around and all that. So he spent a lot of time lobbying against people calling it star wars. But it didn't work. Uh No, he tried to go by the name Strategic Defense in Initiative. And you know how the press is. I think he is to get ahold of something. It's all over. He was probably even willing to to um allow it to be called the sd I. I'll bet he was even like sd I. So Europe wasn't all in favor the Allies. They had some concerns about the balance of power and how this would affect it. Obviously, and like you said, Congress, Um, not everyone was against it, but they had some major issues, largely a the cost and be is it even possible? Like are we just pipe dreaming here on these lasers? And they were kind of right well at the time, they were so in in Reagan's defense, he said from the outset like this can take years, decades. This is not going to be an overnight thing. And he also said, we're going to test a lot of different stuff. Right that he was like he was well aware of the technology didn't exist, or if it did exist, it was like a glimmer in some national laboratory scientists eyes and it was just in the nascent stages. So um, from the outside he commissioned some reports, and the one that kind of got picked up was the Fletcher Report. And the Fletcher Report basically said, here are eight things you need to build the Strategic Defense Initiative, everything from sensors that can detect when uh intercontinental ballistic missile launch is launched because they don't phone you up and say we've launched exactly right, and you need to make sure that they're accurate. And it's not going to be like a wargames thing where it's like whatever. Um, you also need to come up with some incredible guided miss systems. Um. Just this, Like I think there were like eight different different aspects that basically either needed to be created or needed to be refined to the point where they might as well be created from scratch. And Reagan said do this. Yeah, he said, press on. And I think a lot of people at the time in Congress at least we're saying, good idea, let's use this as a bargaining tool in the arms race, like we don't really have to do it right there, like everyone thinks you're serious exactly, And he said this could work as a bargaining chip and he was like, no, I really want the Star wars. Uh, I'm sorry, sd Ift. So apparently um Gorbach got Reagan to meet him for UM Arms Limitations talks in Iceland in October, and Reagan went and they had this great talk and like basically Gorbach was like, let's end mutual sure destruction. Let's basically get rid of our arsenals. And the Soviets were just throwing like bone after bone out the table, and Reagan just can't believe his luck. And then all of a sudden, gorbacho at the end is like, okay, so we'll go ahead and sign off on this, but all of this is contingent that you give up Star Wars, right, And Reagan stood up in the left. Really he left, yeah, which is kind of like that's a little crazy maybe, but that's the level of commitment. He apparently had two Star Wars. Well yeah, not too long after, the Soviet says, well, you know what, we got to do something. We can't build a Star Wars. And it's actually a pretty good idea they said we can, well, at least they thought they could. UM undertake what they called the Polus Skiff, which was will invent a network of weapons to destroy your Star Wars machine UM, which was Hey, that's pretty good thinking. But they didn't have the funding, and uh, it was not very successful either. No, they didn't. And that leads us to um a point if I may skip around a little chuckture, but um, history is kind have vindicated Reagan in one way, Like his Star Wars program didn't go anywhere, but it wasn't given very much time. And the reason why is because the fall of the Soviet Union happened within less than a decade after he announced the star Wars initiative. The program, Uh, the Soviet Union fell collapsed entirely. Uh. And some people attribute that to the defense spending that he immediately caused them to to start expending because of the Star Wars program. True, so he did kind of ratchet up this arms race, but the Soviets couldn't keep up. This came on the heels of US bleeding them dry in Afghanistan secretly funding the muja Hadeen which became the Taliban by the way, but we I don't know how much Reagan knew, but the the Soviets were hurting financially, and then all of a sudden he introduced Star Wars and they couldn't keep up. Yea, and the follow Soviet union. With that came obviously the at least huge threat of all out nuclear war because they were the major players. Um you didn't have to worry about the smaller countries, you know, as far as M A. D goes, right, but you had to worry about rogue states and all that, right, making sure that the Russians could hang onto their arsenal, which they didn't do very well necessarily. But yes, the mutual sure destruction just went the way the dinosaur. When the Soviets fell. Um, H W. Bush comes along, people get annoyed by the way, and when we don't say President so and so, who does here? Are you see as this on Facebook? Now, I've seen people right in before, and I've heard other people say you should always address them as President so and so. But I hear all the time people say Obama, Clinton, Reagan. So no no disrespect intended, folks. H W. Bush comes along, Soviet union has fallen, So he's like, you know what, we need to really cut back on this scope of this sd I. He probably would have just scrapped it all together. But he was pretty loyal to Reagan, of course, and um so he refocuses a program, cuts it back. Clinton comes along President Clinton and refines it even more and cuts it back even more. And by the time that happened, it wasn't anything like Reagan's initial Star Wars program. No, not at all. No, but it would become handy, which we'll get too. So let's talk about what Star Wars was. We've kind of given like a little bit of a broad overview. But um, until I started researching this, I hadn't really thought about it. But intercontinental ballistic missiles once capable of saying, traveling from Moscow to New York, I have to leave Earth's atmosphere and enter orbit. And so the idea was we would have something up there that could shoot it down when it entered orbit, That's right, Which meant that we had to place. We had to weaponize space. Yeah, and I wonder if they ever gave any thought to what nuclear bomb is going off in space would mean. I mean, surely there's repercussions there. I know it's space, But you can't just go willie nilly setting off nuclear bombs in space? Right did in Nevada? Well, that's that's true, but Kin Toll, Yeah, and look what happened there? What happened there? Well, I'm just saying it. It's it's got to cause some kind of harm to space even though it's space, right, or does it just suck into it? Like, I have no idea. This is something I could not find. I mean a research that couldn't find anything. Yeah. No, I understand what you're saying. In space is a vacuum, so it should have some effect or no effect whatsoever, but it's got to and got to do something. There's someone out there really smart that hopefully is going to email me. I guess though. The the idea behind this was fairly utilitarian, where it was like, okay, this possible consequence in space or saving millions of lives here on Earth, and they just said whatever, that's fine, of course. Um, But so you have something up in space that's capable of shooting down an intercontinental ballistic missile, like an X ray laser. That's this is like where we kind of come to some of them, Like there were a lot of proposals that were kind of out there, but they went ahead and spent a lot of money testing these things like the X ray laser, And that was a physicist Edward Teller. Um it was created the hydrogen bomb. Yeah, I saw that. It was his proposal, so they obviously listened to him, and um, it was gonna use power generated by a nuclear blast. And it never performed well, and it really became the focus point for the press and for David Letterman and for Johnny Carson to make fun of because it was an X ray laser and this is coming off the heels of the Star Wars movies themselves with their X ray blasters. Actually they were star blowing up yeah, or the dust star blowing up that planet Aldern. I think they focused the laser and boom, Um, you just saved me from a lot of ire because I was gonna say, tattooing, I might have got it wrong. I think it was all the wrong. Man. I hope you got it. If there's one thing that I ever hope you got right, it was that one. So so many Star Trek fans would be writing in so that there's the X ray laser and it doesn't go over very well, which was very much the focus of the media, and they were being chided for the fact that they you know, sounded really far out right, but they they tested it it just wouldn't work. The idea behind it was that they were going to have a small controlled nuclear explosion that would power this laser right to create a massive amount of X rays, a concentrated amount of X rays UM that would be focused on a missile and the go kaboom. It was called Project X Caliber, so it had a cool name to but apparently Teller or the people behind it were accused of falsifying the initial UH test the result. Yeah, so it kind of went down and scandal and mockery and everything. So in the little boxes said worked or didn't work, they just checked worked and like we shuffled away with cartoons to it like coming off. And therefore, so some of the other ideas that they tried UM and spent billions of dollars trying um kinetic warheads, apparently they would collide in the orbit. It's like shooting a shooting a missile at another missile UM And that one actually was like the big dog on the block for a while at first in the early stages of Star Wars, because they figured out that you could have this thing like basically a satellite based garage with like ten missiles in it, and you just have it floating up there and then shoot at a missile. You know. When one came up and it was a good idea, they're like, we can actually do that, Like, I think we can do this. The problem is that somebody pointed out that all the Russians had to do is shoot a missile at your garage, and for their one missile, they took out ten. So people said, okay, let's get back to it, and they started exploring other one. It's like bringing a knife to a gunfight. It's like bringing a missile to a multi missile fight. No that I don't think that analogy works at all. I know. I think it's like a sitting duck. Okay. Uh. The other thing they wanted to try, Josh, was US rail guns mounted on satellites. Did you see the popular mechanics drawing of it. I did, and it's pretty wicked. Yeah. I gotta admit. It looks like an I beam coming out of this out of like, but it's shooting like a three ounce slug at two hundred miles a second. It's pretty wicked. Yeah. Um, that one didn't go very far because of the um energy requirements. Yeah, it was just way too expensive in an energy sense. Uh. And then the m I R A C L miracle laser. Um. It was another laser, but it was ground based using mirrors. Right. It was a chemical laser. It wasn't like an uh, nuclear X ray laser. It's like they just started to try to throw cool sci fi terms of the time together, like let's make laser, but let's make it a nuclear X ray laser, and we'll shoot missiles out of this guy with tron laser Tron, let's ad that. Um. So then this article doesn't really go into it. But after after some of these were kind of asked and answered. Um. Up until and even beyond the fall of the Soviet Union, the Shining Star and all this became the these things called bright pebbles. Does that ring a bell? It did for me when I ran across it, I was like, Ahi, those two words sound very familiar. So bright Pebbles was the little garage with ten missiles. These were very small ones, like say, um, twenty to fifty pound mini garages that would shoot slugs or would ram themselves. But I think they would shoot slugs. And rather than having one garage with ten missiles, you would have thousands of these little things all over the country, all over the all over space. They're in space. Yeah, so they were hoping for a constellation of up to like four thousand of these things just floating around in space. The cool thing about him was if you took one out, there were still three thousand nine left right. They were autonomous, so they could attack on their own if they if they wanted to. They could also coordinate and communicate with one another to launch coordinated attacks against missiles. It would be very tough to overwhelm these things, um and they would have been designed to protect US space based assets like satellites, and if the Soviets ever launched anything like it, these things were trained to just go right after them and blow them out of the sky too. So basically they were like little sentinels in space and they were going to be cost effected to It was gonna cost about eleven billion in UM in nineteen eighty four dollars I think, which is about twenty billion a day. It was considering that they were looking at like twenty billion, which is about forty three billion in UH today's dollars, just to get some of the other ones off the ground. So to get a thousand off the ground that you could mass produce just eleven billion dollars at the time was quite a bargain and had the fall of the Soviet Union not coming gone, we probably would have bright pebbles up in space right now. And as a matter of fact, they were proven. They were tested. Um the Clementine probe which mapped the Moon in that was a bright pebble that they basically redesigned instead of uh well as a weapon. They used it to map the Moon and it did so successfully, so they would have worked. And lastly, yes, a computer model of bright pebbles found that had they been in operation during the first GO four um, they would have shot down Saddam scuds scud missiles with accuracy. Pretty crazy, but well cheap. I was gonna say expensive, No, they're cheap. They just didn't have time to come along. Well, the problem with the rest of the plans is I saw one quote that said that at the time they were just sort of taking these ideas almost from science fiction, and they felt like they were or some scientists felt like they were a decade away from even like they're saying, we can't even start this for ten years. We need to research for ten years to see if any of this is even feasible. But I think instead of sort of like trying these things out, Reagan was encourageding that though. I mean, I'm sure he was like, hurry up. But at the same time, and I think he got the impression he was saying, like sky's limit, guys like us, your imagination, do whatever you can come up with. Definitely, the sky's the limit beyonda So did any of these ever work at all? So apparently a couple did. Like they shot down three, they shot down a stationary object on Earth, they shot down, um, a mock warhead in the Earth's atmosphere, and they shot down another mock warhead in space. And one of those things was going twenty one an. So so some of these technologies, because they had a bunch of different groups testing all these different things, and some of them were successful for the most part now, but it eventually led to a different sort of defense system that we still had today, right or is it that what some people say, yeah, like the ballistic missile defense system, um is it's the out growth of star Wars. Like the idea that we have a missile defense system comes from Star Wars. So even though we're not using X ray lasers, a lot of people say it had some benefit in the end after all. Yeah, because we're using sensors, those same sensors like a lot of the research that was not like X ray lasers, but that still had practical applications. We're still doing the day and apparently in Pearl Harbor last month, a missile shot down another missile over the Pacific successfully as a test. Yeah. I was like, somebody's attacking Pearl Harbor again. You don't really want They figured the American public doesn't wunt here. But yeah, the Chinese shot a missile at us and we shot it down. So everything's cool. Was close. So I guess that's about it. Huh yeah, Um, that's all I got. Okay, So if you want to learn more about Star Wars, I think it bring up a bunch of crazy stuff. If you type star Wars in the search bar, how stuff works, Like the one Man Star Wars. Uh, Star Wars one Man show. Yeah, that's pretty good. Uh, Landau Dr Pepper calories Ian remember that one? I do. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff. Just type star Wars in the search part how stuff works. Dot com and I said that, which means it's time for a listener mail. Josh and Louid listener mail. We're gonna do a little Facebook question to stuff that we like to do from time to time. And this is happening live, which is pretty exciting. That is scary because I didn't have a listener mail ready and this was a good thing to do. So let's just look through some of these and you let me know what you want to read. Uh. Our friend Kubi don Kuby says, uh, is there a particular side of the recording booth that you each always sit on? The answer to that is yes. Um, I guess if you were facing from here, Josh, it's on the right. I sit on the left, But you really come in from the other side, So Josh sits on the far side and I sit on the near side. It's the best way to say it. That's very well put. Yeah, and I think all the podcasters probably no one ever sits in a different seat. That'd be really weird. Yeah, I'm sure everybody sits in there same seat. Like if I said over there, they'd be disconcerting. It'd be you'd have to be a like bona fide nihilist to do that, that would just be odd. Um. I've got one from Jerome Hanson. I would say Jerome right. Uh, who is your favorite Marvel superhero? Uh? I guess I would say Punisher, And I know he's not a superhero. He's just a straight up hero because he doesn't have any superpowers. But he's definitely the comic I was into the most as a youngster. I'm gonna go spider Man really yeah, yeah, I identified with Peter Parker, not spider Man. Um favorite band of all time. I feel like we they through that many times. Okay, I'm going with Pavement Still, Pixie's still okay. Um. I would like to know your opinion of and Margaret. That's from Brian Throckmorton. I think and Margaret in her day was one of the most smoking hot women on the planet. So my only familiarity with and Margaret was from The flat Stones when they had that character and Mark Rock and she always seemed like she was on lithium. So I don't have a great opinion of and Margaret. Gotcha, Oh this is good. William Bear, if you were speed Limit, what would you be and why? You know what I would be, Well, I would be one of those special speed limits in state parks. It's like five miles an hour. Do you know that there's the parking garage here is four and a half? Is it really? Yeah? Yeah, that's what I would be. Then four and a half miles an hour. It's like they're showing off because just take your foot off and let the idol take you. Man, that's where. That's where I'm at. What would you be? This is arguably the strangest question and I've ever been asked. I would say, Okay, that's good. Okay, it's fast, but it's not super dangerous. I'm not even to read into it. I just that's what comes to mind. Okay, gotcha, you got one. Uh, let's see. Lisa to Shaa asks us, what's our least favorite food? Lisa's a big regular too. If I read that, I recognize the name here you there? What are you going with? Least favorite food would have to be Oh, I was just talking to hear me about this the other day. It's like one thing I really don't like and I can't remember it because I generally like everything. What's yours? Let me think about it. Probably mushrooms on anything. I'm just not a fan. Yeah, I know they say they don't have taste, but then I'm always like cold. Then why are you putting it in something they can virtually ruin? Um? The pizza? Yeah? Yeah, Oh I've got it. Cream cheese cream cheese with stuffed in it. Like she's spread a cream cheese ball, cream cheese on just about anything. Like if you have a plain bagel hot with cream cheese, that's fine, that's just a regular and your man. Once you put like a garden style cream cheese with something else, yeah, I don't like that stuff either, Okay, Matt sailor boxers or briefs. We've been asked that before. I'm a boxer guy. Katie Hart favorite punch line to a joke. Uh, those aren't pillows. I don't. I can't say anyone's I know. Uh, you got any more on here? Why don't we do like two more? Let's see Charlotte Jean asks, how do we take our coffee? I take mine black at two? So there you go, that's kind of boring. I got a lot of hair on the old chest from it, and you know, Jason Domini from our friends at Uh, back Doorphin Bronson, the amazing coffee makers. Yeah, and roasters, which you should not coffee makers roasters, you should support them by the way. Um. He says. He gave me a personal tour of the thing and a coffee one on one and he says, if you drink good coffee and it's roasted properly, you don't want sugar. Oh yeah, I definitely don't want milk, but you definitely don't want sugar. Because he's like, it's really sweet. He's like, coffee beans are exceptionally sweet and when you roast it right, um, and he called it char bucks, which I thought was kind of funny. He said their stuff is just like bitter because they char it too much because they get beans from all over the place and when they do that, they want to make them all taste the same, and the way to do that is to over roast. This is our friend Rob Pointer who's telling us that, like there's he goes to a coffee place in l A where like they don't even have creamer sugar. I really like, they don't even offer it if you want it, like they tell you to leave. Awesome. When he made his coffee Daday it was great. Yeah. Um, all right, so I think that that's good enough for now. We'll hit this up on the next one, are we will? Yeah, okay, we'll be back people in the meantime. You can contact us at s Y s K Podcast on Twitter. You can hit us up on Facebook dot com whether we have a question out or otherwise at Facebook dot com slash stuff you should know, and you can send us an email to

Hey, everybody, it's me Josh and for this week's s Y s K Selects, I've chosen did Reagan Star Wars program Win the Cold War, which we originally released back in August of two thousand and twelve. It's a pretty good look at the time Ronald Reagan bled the Soviet Union dry so badly that it actually brought an end to communism basically all over the world. It's a pretty good episode and I hope you enjoy it. Let's listen now. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuckers Bryant sitting across from me. Hi. Yeah, have you ever seen Hunty Darko? Oh dude, that's one of my favorites. You know when he takes that mescaline and like that thing comes out of his chest and he starts following it. Yeah, he doesn't take mescalin. But yeah, sometimes I feel when we're sitting across from or another, we're connected by one of us, like a warm hole of fellowship. Yeah, like from the Abyss that's what it sort of looked like. Yeah, it did look a lot like that. I love that movie. Yeah, when um, when Ed Harris takes all that mescaline that movie and sees the sees that thing come up out of the water, it was just like that. No mescaline, no movies. How's it coming in which people take mescalin? Ah, there's plenty of those. Sure, this is what people have been complaining about lately. Who's been complaining? Tell me their names, the various people people have been complained. Oh, you bring something up. I feel like we should address something. We haven't done this in a really long time. It appears to me that we have a lot of newcomers. Yeah, welcome, Yes, welcome, um, And I think anyone who's been following the whole time it kind of gets the stuff you should know jam right. Yeah, But it seems like there's a lot of people who don't quite understand what we're doing and think that we purport to be infallible experts on everything and that we don't just get things wrong from time to time. We're just a couple of guys who are pretty decent at researching. That doesn't mean like we invented the topic that we're talking about, or that we didn't just walk right past. Um a fact or something that we missed in our research. It comes up. It happens from time time, So I guess if you're just joining us, that's probably something good to keep in mind. We don't claim to be experts, so don't hold us to that standard because we're not trying to reach that standard. We're just trying to impart some really great information as factually as possible. Um and uh, we love science and wonder great. Are you good? Ah? Yeah? Alright, how are you doing? I'm awesome. Do you have anything to get off of your chest? No, just welcome the pamina cheese. Many sandwiches are in the corner. Help yourself, so chuck. Yes. Do you remember a while back we talked, well, we've talked about this stuff a lot, Mutual assured destruction. We did a podcast on that, specifically, didn't we we did? Um? We did one on who who won the Cold War? Did one on how to steal a nuclear bomb? Yeah, like we've done. It's just a fascinating period of world history, the Cold War, agreed, incredibly tense, incredibly scary, and this is our history. It is in part because you're half Russian. No, but Um, I was alive and well and young war kids, weren't we. Yeah, yeah, we've talked about this before, Ruskies, little risk. Um. So uh, the central I guess, the fulcrum of the Cold War, the fact that the reason we're all still here is that was the doctrine of mutual is sure destruction, Yes, which is basically like, we had enough nukes to wipe out the entire world. The Soviet Union had enough nukes to wipe out the entire world. So we were just there in a tense, fragile they taunt, how about a nice game of chess? Exactly, That's why we're still here. So um, this was I guess this accepted reality for every president and every premiere um from well, I guess who for us from ke On, this mutual assured destruction doctrine was just kind of a part of daily life. Um. But when Ronald Reagan came into office, he came up with a different plan. He did in need, so instead of a tense standoff, he found that untoward. I guess I think he found it. From my understanding of Reagan, he would have found it untoward because it didn't give America a clear advantage. Well, the article says he found it morally and politically distasteful. I agree with in that Reagan didn't like mutual or shore destruction for one reason or another. So we came up with something a game changer, you would call it today. If you read books that of an airplane is also reading at the same time, that's right, what is it, Josh? He came up with the Strategic Defense Initiative, which the press like to call start the star Wars program. And I remember this very very well because it was largely derided in the press for a bunch of reasons. Uh, we're going to talk about Yeah, I remember very well too. It was all over Mad magazine. Um, it was all over time. There were awesome illustrations of like satellites with laser shooting out of them that like you could see in the mainstream media a lot. Sure, Um, But yeah, I also remember it kind of just basically being generally disliked by the public. Yeah, as well. Pretty much it was. It was to be laughed at in many circles, although it was a very serious thing. It was, and it was laughed at for a lot of reasons. But that we're gonna go over. So Reagan On March twe he held an address to the nation, little televised speech, and in it he challenged the um scientific community UM, who he said had created nuclear weapons, to make those very same weapons quote UM, impotent and obsolete. And that kind of became the rallying cry, like, let's make nukes impotent and obsolete. And the way you do that is to make it so that we have a missile defense system that can shoot down every single nuclear warhead that Russia has in its arsenal, all at once, if need be. Yeah, after launch. Um, that is so like if they launched their missiles, we can shoot them down in space and UM. In Reagan's view, which you know, I can see his point at the time, UM, there would not be any more need for He thought, it would like neuter the Cold War in its tracks. Soviet Union thought that's not too cool. They thought, yet, and yet, and yet, because well a lot of a lot of people felt like it was going to escalate the arms race, the Soviets thought, this just means you have a clear advantage over us. This doesn't neuter like it neuters us, It doesn't neuter you. Right, And Reagan said as many times as the Soviets could stand to hear it that, Um, this was strictly a missile defense system, a net or a shield if you will, Um, that that would only be used in the event that a Soviet nuclear launch was detected. Right, But the Soviets were saying, or you could just shoot all of our missiles down and then launch a strike, a first strike where we would have no way to retaliate. So, yeah, this is totally unacceptable. And yeah, the Russian rallied against it, but not just them the here at home, there are a lot of people who didn't really care for it, including the public who thought it was a pipe dream, or who thought it would escalate a new arms racist Soviets, or who just thought it was going to be a huge like money pit. Yeah, and it was a lot of those things. Um. And when we say, Soviets, let's go ahead and call out the premiere that I didn't remember Yuri and drop off. I didn't remember him. I don't remember him either, and I looked him up. He was only I mean that it seems like there was a lot of premiers there for a while that like died thereafter. I think he was in like like less than a year and a half. H he was like the KGB had something to do with it in vodka o um. So he was the premier at the time. He wasn't a fan. They launched a big propaganda campaign, it says sevent Their propaganda went toward UH poopoo ing the Star Wars defense program, even though they didn't think it was gonna work. Our Congress apparently right Apparently the Soviets were like, this is not a feasible program. Well, and they said it violates a couple of important treatise UM the a b M, the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty of seventy two, which the Soviet Union in in UH the United States were both a part of, said that at the time that was two ground based missile defense systems you were allowed. Later on it was one, and I guess this would have been more than two. Not only that ground based is a an operative term in this case, because this was going to be this the strategic defense initiative was going to be space based, and that violates another treaty. N seven Outer Space treaty says that you cannot use weapons of mass destruction in space, and that's pretty much what was going on or that was what was planned, right? So UM, all right, so that's that's why they don't like it, right why And Congress didn't like it. Congress didn't like either. Most people in Congress they they apparently the UM, the Missile Defense Agency attributes UM coining the term star wars to describe the strategic convinced the nation initiative to mock it, really UM to Ted Kennedy and an interview in the Washington Post, like almost right after Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, and Reagan spent the rest of the time he was in office trying to simultaneously get this push through and to get everyone to stop calling it star wars, because luck had had it caught the American public's imagination like, oh, yeah, star wars, let's just go ahead and blow up Russia with star wars, he would have been like, yeah, let's call it star wars. It's awesome. But it was like Reagan star wars, that crazy old kok he's got all time, and he wants to put weapons in space and just shoot lasers around and all that. So he spent a lot of time lobbying against people calling it star wars. But it didn't work. Uh No, he tried to go by the name Strategic Defense in Initiative. And you know how the press is. I think he is to get ahold of something. It's all over. He was probably even willing to to um allow it to be called the sd I. I'll bet he was even like sd I. So Europe wasn't all in favor the Allies. They had some concerns about the balance of power and how this would affect it. Obviously, and like you said, Congress, Um, not everyone was against it, but they had some major issues, largely a the cost and be is it even possible? Like are we just pipe dreaming here on these lasers? And they were kind of right well at the time, they were so in in Reagan's defense, he said from the outset like this can take years, decades. This is not going to be an overnight thing. And he also said, we're going to test a lot of different stuff. Right that he was like he was well aware of the technology didn't exist, or if it did exist, it was like a glimmer in some national laboratory scientists eyes and it was just in the nascent stages. So um, from the outside he commissioned some reports, and the one that kind of got picked up was the Fletcher Report. And the Fletcher Report basically said, here are eight things you need to build the Strategic Defense Initiative, everything from sensors that can detect when uh intercontinental ballistic missile launch is launched because they don't phone you up and say we've launched exactly right, and you need to make sure that they're accurate. And it's not going to be like a wargames thing where it's like whatever. Um, you also need to come up with some incredible guided miss systems. Um. Just this, Like I think there were like eight different different aspects that basically either needed to be created or needed to be refined to the point where they might as well be created from scratch. And Reagan said do this. Yeah, he said, press on. And I think a lot of people at the time in Congress at least we're saying, good idea, let's use this as a bargaining tool in the arms race, like we don't really have to do it right there, like everyone thinks you're serious exactly, And he said this could work as a bargaining chip and he was like, no, I really want the Star wars. Uh, I'm sorry, sd Ift. So apparently um Gorbach got Reagan to meet him for UM Arms Limitations talks in Iceland in October, and Reagan went and they had this great talk and like basically Gorbach was like, let's end mutual sure destruction. Let's basically get rid of our arsenals. And the Soviets were just throwing like bone after bone out the table, and Reagan just can't believe his luck. And then all of a sudden, gorbacho at the end is like, okay, so we'll go ahead and sign off on this, but all of this is contingent that you give up Star Wars, right, And Reagan stood up in the left. Really he left, yeah, which is kind of like that's a little crazy maybe, but that's the level of commitment. He apparently had two Star Wars. Well yeah, not too long after, the Soviet says, well, you know what, we got to do something. We can't build a Star Wars. And it's actually a pretty good idea they said we can, well, at least they thought they could. UM undertake what they called the Polus Skiff, which was will invent a network of weapons to destroy your Star Wars machine UM, which was Hey, that's pretty good thinking. But they didn't have the funding, and uh, it was not very successful either. No, they didn't. And that leads us to um a point if I may skip around a little chuckture, but um, history is kind have vindicated Reagan in one way, Like his Star Wars program didn't go anywhere, but it wasn't given very much time. And the reason why is because the fall of the Soviet Union happened within less than a decade after he announced the star Wars initiative. The program, Uh, the Soviet Union fell collapsed entirely. Uh. And some people attribute that to the defense spending that he immediately caused them to to start expending because of the Star Wars program. True, so he did kind of ratchet up this arms race, but the Soviets couldn't keep up. This came on the heels of US bleeding them dry in Afghanistan secretly funding the muja Hadeen which became the Taliban by the way, but we I don't know how much Reagan knew, but the the Soviets were hurting financially, and then all of a sudden he introduced Star Wars and they couldn't keep up. Yea, and the follow Soviet union. With that came obviously the at least huge threat of all out nuclear war because they were the major players. Um you didn't have to worry about the smaller countries, you know, as far as M A. D goes, right, but you had to worry about rogue states and all that, right, making sure that the Russians could hang onto their arsenal, which they didn't do very well necessarily. But yes, the mutual sure destruction just went the way the dinosaur. When the Soviets fell. Um, H W. Bush comes along, people get annoyed by the way, and when we don't say President so and so, who does here? Are you see as this on Facebook? Now, I've seen people right in before, and I've heard other people say you should always address them as President so and so. But I hear all the time people say Obama, Clinton, Reagan. So no no disrespect intended, folks. H W. Bush comes along, Soviet union has fallen, So he's like, you know what, we need to really cut back on this scope of this sd I. He probably would have just scrapped it all together. But he was pretty loyal to Reagan, of course, and um so he refocuses a program, cuts it back. Clinton comes along President Clinton and refines it even more and cuts it back even more. And by the time that happened, it wasn't anything like Reagan's initial Star Wars program. No, not at all. No, but it would become handy, which we'll get too. So let's talk about what Star Wars was. We've kind of given like a little bit of a broad overview. But um, until I started researching this, I hadn't really thought about it. But intercontinental ballistic missiles once capable of saying, traveling from Moscow to New York, I have to leave Earth's atmosphere and enter orbit. And so the idea was we would have something up there that could shoot it down when it entered orbit, That's right, Which meant that we had to place. We had to weaponize space. Yeah, and I wonder if they ever gave any thought to what nuclear bomb is going off in space would mean. I mean, surely there's repercussions there. I know it's space, But you can't just go willie nilly setting off nuclear bombs in space? Right did in Nevada? Well, that's that's true, but Kin Toll, Yeah, and look what happened there? What happened there? Well, I'm just saying it. It's it's got to cause some kind of harm to space even though it's space, right, or does it just suck into it? Like, I have no idea. This is something I could not find. I mean a research that couldn't find anything. Yeah. No, I understand what you're saying. In space is a vacuum, so it should have some effect or no effect whatsoever, but it's got to and got to do something. There's someone out there really smart that hopefully is going to email me. I guess though. The the idea behind this was fairly utilitarian, where it was like, okay, this possible consequence in space or saving millions of lives here on Earth, and they just said whatever, that's fine, of course. Um, But so you have something up in space that's capable of shooting down an intercontinental ballistic missile, like an X ray laser. That's this is like where we kind of come to some of them, Like there were a lot of proposals that were kind of out there, but they went ahead and spent a lot of money testing these things like the X ray laser, And that was a physicist Edward Teller. Um it was created the hydrogen bomb. Yeah, I saw that. It was his proposal, so they obviously listened to him, and um, it was gonna use power generated by a nuclear blast. And it never performed well, and it really became the focus point for the press and for David Letterman and for Johnny Carson to make fun of because it was an X ray laser and this is coming off the heels of the Star Wars movies themselves with their X ray blasters. Actually they were star blowing up yeah, or the dust star blowing up that planet Aldern. I think they focused the laser and boom, Um, you just saved me from a lot of ire because I was gonna say, tattooing, I might have got it wrong. I think it was all the wrong. Man. I hope you got it. If there's one thing that I ever hope you got right, it was that one. So so many Star Trek fans would be writing in so that there's the X ray laser and it doesn't go over very well, which was very much the focus of the media, and they were being chided for the fact that they you know, sounded really far out right, but they they tested it it just wouldn't work. The idea behind it was that they were going to have a small controlled nuclear explosion that would power this laser right to create a massive amount of X rays, a concentrated amount of X rays UM that would be focused on a missile and the go kaboom. It was called Project X Caliber, so it had a cool name to but apparently Teller or the people behind it were accused of falsifying the initial UH test the result. Yeah, so it kind of went down and scandal and mockery and everything. So in the little boxes said worked or didn't work, they just checked worked and like we shuffled away with cartoons to it like coming off. And therefore, so some of the other ideas that they tried UM and spent billions of dollars trying um kinetic warheads, apparently they would collide in the orbit. It's like shooting a shooting a missile at another missile UM And that one actually was like the big dog on the block for a while at first in the early stages of Star Wars, because they figured out that you could have this thing like basically a satellite based garage with like ten missiles in it, and you just have it floating up there and then shoot at a missile. You know. When one came up and it was a good idea, they're like, we can actually do that, Like, I think we can do this. The problem is that somebody pointed out that all the Russians had to do is shoot a missile at your garage, and for their one missile, they took out ten. So people said, okay, let's get back to it, and they started exploring other one. It's like bringing a knife to a gunfight. It's like bringing a missile to a multi missile fight. No that I don't think that analogy works at all. I know. I think it's like a sitting duck. Okay. Uh. The other thing they wanted to try, Josh, was US rail guns mounted on satellites. Did you see the popular mechanics drawing of it. I did, and it's pretty wicked. Yeah. I gotta admit. It looks like an I beam coming out of this out of like, but it's shooting like a three ounce slug at two hundred miles a second. It's pretty wicked. Yeah. Um, that one didn't go very far because of the um energy requirements. Yeah, it was just way too expensive in an energy sense. Uh. And then the m I R A C L miracle laser. Um. It was another laser, but it was ground based using mirrors. Right. It was a chemical laser. It wasn't like an uh, nuclear X ray laser. It's like they just started to try to throw cool sci fi terms of the time together, like let's make laser, but let's make it a nuclear X ray laser, and we'll shoot missiles out of this guy with tron laser Tron, let's ad that. Um. So then this article doesn't really go into it. But after after some of these were kind of asked and answered. Um. Up until and even beyond the fall of the Soviet Union, the Shining Star and all this became the these things called bright pebbles. Does that ring a bell? It did for me when I ran across it, I was like, Ahi, those two words sound very familiar. So bright Pebbles was the little garage with ten missiles. These were very small ones, like say, um, twenty to fifty pound mini garages that would shoot slugs or would ram themselves. But I think they would shoot slugs. And rather than having one garage with ten missiles, you would have thousands of these little things all over the country, all over the all over space. They're in space. Yeah, so they were hoping for a constellation of up to like four thousand of these things just floating around in space. The cool thing about him was if you took one out, there were still three thousand nine left right. They were autonomous, so they could attack on their own if they if they wanted to. They could also coordinate and communicate with one another to launch coordinated attacks against missiles. It would be very tough to overwhelm these things, um and they would have been designed to protect US space based assets like satellites, and if the Soviets ever launched anything like it, these things were trained to just go right after them and blow them out of the sky too. So basically they were like little sentinels in space and they were going to be cost effected to It was gonna cost about eleven billion in UM in nineteen eighty four dollars I think, which is about twenty billion a day. It was considering that they were looking at like twenty billion, which is about forty three billion in UH today's dollars, just to get some of the other ones off the ground. So to get a thousand off the ground that you could mass produce just eleven billion dollars at the time was quite a bargain and had the fall of the Soviet Union not coming gone, we probably would have bright pebbles up in space right now. And as a matter of fact, they were proven. They were tested. Um the Clementine probe which mapped the Moon in that was a bright pebble that they basically redesigned instead of uh well as a weapon. They used it to map the Moon and it did so successfully, so they would have worked. And lastly, yes, a computer model of bright pebbles found that had they been in operation during the first GO four um, they would have shot down Saddam scuds scud missiles with accuracy. Pretty crazy, but well cheap. I was gonna say expensive, No, they're cheap. They just didn't have time to come along. Well, the problem with the rest of the plans is I saw one quote that said that at the time they were just sort of taking these ideas almost from science fiction, and they felt like they were or some scientists felt like they were a decade away from even like they're saying, we can't even start this for ten years. We need to research for ten years to see if any of this is even feasible. But I think instead of sort of like trying these things out, Reagan was encourageding that though. I mean, I'm sure he was like, hurry up. But at the same time, and I think he got the impression he was saying, like sky's limit, guys like us, your imagination, do whatever you can come up with. Definitely, the sky's the limit beyonda So did any of these ever work at all? So apparently a couple did. Like they shot down three, they shot down a stationary object on Earth, they shot down, um, a mock warhead in the Earth's atmosphere, and they shot down another mock warhead in space. And one of those things was going twenty one an. So so some of these technologies, because they had a bunch of different groups testing all these different things, and some of them were successful for the most part now, but it eventually led to a different sort of defense system that we still had today, right or is it that what some people say, yeah, like the ballistic missile defense system, um is it's the out growth of star Wars. Like the idea that we have a missile defense system comes from Star Wars. So even though we're not using X ray lasers, a lot of people say it had some benefit in the end after all. Yeah, because we're using sensors, those same sensors like a lot of the research that was not like X ray lasers, but that still had practical applications. We're still doing the day and apparently in Pearl Harbor last month, a missile shot down another missile over the Pacific successfully as a test. Yeah. I was like, somebody's attacking Pearl Harbor again. You don't really want They figured the American public doesn't wunt here. But yeah, the Chinese shot a missile at us and we shot it down. So everything's cool. Was close. So I guess that's about it. Huh yeah, Um, that's all I got. Okay, So if you want to learn more about Star Wars, I think it bring up a bunch of crazy stuff. If you type star Wars in the search bar, how stuff works, Like the one Man Star Wars. Uh, Star Wars one Man show. Yeah, that's pretty good. Uh, Landau Dr Pepper calories Ian remember that one? I do. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff. Just type star Wars in the search part how stuff works. Dot com and I said that, which means it's time for a listener mail. Josh and Louid listener mail. We're gonna do a little Facebook question to stuff that we like to do from time to time. And this is happening live, which is pretty exciting. That is scary because I didn't have a listener mail ready and this was a good thing to do. So let's just look through some of these and you let me know what you want to read. Uh. Our friend Kubi don Kuby says, uh, is there a particular side of the recording booth that you each always sit on? The answer to that is yes. Um, I guess if you were facing from here, Josh, it's on the right. I sit on the left, But you really come in from the other side, So Josh sits on the far side and I sit on the near side. It's the best way to say it. That's very well put. Yeah, and I think all the podcasters probably no one ever sits in a different seat. That'd be really weird. Yeah, I'm sure everybody sits in there same seat. Like if I said over there, they'd be disconcerting. It'd be you'd have to be a like bona fide nihilist to do that, that would just be odd. Um. I've got one from Jerome Hanson. I would say Jerome right. Uh, who is your favorite Marvel superhero? Uh? I guess I would say Punisher, And I know he's not a superhero. He's just a straight up hero because he doesn't have any superpowers. But he's definitely the comic I was into the most as a youngster. I'm gonna go spider Man really yeah, yeah, I identified with Peter Parker, not spider Man. Um favorite band of all time. I feel like we they through that many times. Okay, I'm going with Pavement Still, Pixie's still okay. Um. I would like to know your opinion of and Margaret. That's from Brian Throckmorton. I think and Margaret in her day was one of the most smoking hot women on the planet. So my only familiarity with and Margaret was from The flat Stones when they had that character and Mark Rock and she always seemed like she was on lithium. So I don't have a great opinion of and Margaret. Gotcha, Oh this is good. William Bear, if you were speed Limit, what would you be and why? You know what I would be, Well, I would be one of those special speed limits in state parks. It's like five miles an hour. Do you know that there's the parking garage here is four and a half? Is it really? Yeah? Yeah, that's what I would be. Then four and a half miles an hour. It's like they're showing off because just take your foot off and let the idol take you. Man, that's where. That's where I'm at. What would you be? This is arguably the strangest question and I've ever been asked. I would say, Okay, that's good. Okay, it's fast, but it's not super dangerous. I'm not even to read into it. I just that's what comes to mind. Okay, gotcha, you got one. Uh, let's see. Lisa to Shaa asks us, what's our least favorite food? Lisa's a big regular too. If I read that, I recognize the name here you there? What are you going with? Least favorite food would have to be Oh, I was just talking to hear me about this the other day. It's like one thing I really don't like and I can't remember it because I generally like everything. What's yours? Let me think about it. Probably mushrooms on anything. I'm just not a fan. Yeah, I know they say they don't have taste, but then I'm always like cold. Then why are you putting it in something they can virtually ruin? Um? The pizza? Yeah? Yeah, Oh I've got it. Cream cheese cream cheese with stuffed in it. Like she's spread a cream cheese ball, cream cheese on just about anything. Like if you have a plain bagel hot with cream cheese, that's fine, that's just a regular and your man. Once you put like a garden style cream cheese with something else, yeah, I don't like that stuff either, Okay, Matt sailor boxers or briefs. We've been asked that before. I'm a boxer guy. Katie Hart favorite punch line to a joke. Uh, those aren't pillows. I don't. I can't say anyone's I know. Uh, you got any more on here? Why don't we do like two more? Let's see Charlotte Jean asks, how do we take our coffee? I take mine black at two? So there you go, that's kind of boring. I got a lot of hair on the old chest from it, and you know, Jason Domini from our friends at Uh, back Doorphin Bronson, the amazing coffee makers. Yeah, and roasters, which you should not coffee makers roasters, you should support them by the way. Um. He says. He gave me a personal tour of the thing and a coffee one on one and he says, if you drink good coffee and it's roasted properly, you don't want sugar. Oh yeah, I definitely don't want milk, but you definitely don't want sugar. Because he's like, it's really sweet. He's like, coffee beans are exceptionally sweet and when you roast it right, um, and he called it char bucks, which I thought was kind of funny. He said their stuff is just like bitter because they char it too much because they get beans from all over the place and when they do that, they want to make them all taste the same, and the way to do that is to over roast. This is our friend Rob Pointer who's telling us that, like there's he goes to a coffee place in l A where like they don't even have creamer sugar. I really like, they don't even offer it if you want it, like they tell you to leave. Awesome. When he made his coffee Daday it was great. Yeah. Um, all right, so I think that that's good enough for now. We'll hit this up on the next one, are we will? Yeah, okay, we'll be back people in the meantime. You can contact us at s Y s K Podcast on Twitter. You can hit us up on Facebook dot com whether we have a question out or otherwise at Facebook dot com slash stuff you should know, and you can send us an email to