Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: Did Reagan's Star Wars program win the Cold War?

Episode Date: July 7, 2018

Putting lasers in space to blast Soviet missiles out of the air was a very real part of Ronald Reagan's defense policy. While his "Star Wars" program was derided at home and abroad, historians are beginning to wonder if it didn't help win the Cold War after all. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, and for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen Did Reagan Star Wars Program Win the Cold War? Which we originally released back in August of 2012. 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 HowStuffWorks.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 Donnie Darko? Oh dude, that's one of my favorites. You know when he takes that mescaling and like that thing comes out of his chest and he starts following it? Yeah, he doesn't take mescaling, but yeah.

Sometimes I feel when we're sitting across from one another, we're connected by one of us. Like a wormhole 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 Ed Harris takes all that mescaling.

Oh, that movie. And sees that thing come up out of the water. It was just like that. No mescaling. No movies. How's it going? And which people take mescaling. There's plenty of those, pal.

Sure. This is what people have been complaining about lately. Who's been complaining? Tell me their names. Various people. People have been complaining, 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. And I think anyone who's been following us the whole time 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 we invented the topic that we're talking about or that we didn't just walk right past a fact or something that we missed in our research. It comes up. It happens from time to 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 factual as possible. And we love science and wonder.

Great. Are you good? Yeah. All right. How are you doing? I'm awesome. Do you have anything to get off of your chest? No.

Just welcome the pimento cheese mini sandwiches are in the corner. Help yourself. So Chuck, do you remember a while back we talked what we talked about this stuff a lot? Mutual assured destruction. We did a podcast on that specifically, didn't we? We did.

We did one on who won the Cold War. Yeah. Did one on how to steal a nuclear bomb. Yeah. Like 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 I was alive and well. Yeah. And a youngster. Cold war kids, weren't we? Yeah.

Yeah. We've talked about this before. Sure. Ruskies. Little Ruskies. So 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 assured 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 detente. How about a nice game of chess? Exactly.

That's why we're still here. So this was, I guess, this accepted reality for every president and every premier from, well, I guess, who? For us, from IKON, this mutual assured destruction doctrine was just kind of a part of daily life. But when Ronald Reagan came into office, he came up with a different plan.

He did indeed. 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 him in that Reagan didn't like mutual assured destruction for one reason or another. So he came up with something, a game changer, you would call it today if you read books that 80% 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 the Star Wars program. And I remember this very, very well because it was largely derided in the press for a bunch of reasons we're going to talk about. Yeah, I remember very well too. It was all over Mad Magazine. Oh yeah.

It was all over time. There were awesome illustrations of satellites with laser shooting out of them that you could see in the mainstream media a lot. Sure. But yeah, I also remember it kind of just basically being generally disliked by the public. Yeah.

As well. Pretty much. 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 going to go over. So Reagan, on March 23rd, 1983, he

held an address to the nation, a little televised speech. And in it, he challenged the scientific community who he said had created nuclear weapons to make those very same weapons, quote, 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, that is. So if they launch their missiles, we can shoot them down in space. And in Reagan's view, which I can see his point at the time, there would not be any more need for it.

He thought it would like neuter the Cold War in its tracks. Soviet Union thought that's not too cool. They thought, yet, yet, yet. Because, well, 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 this was strictly a missile defense system, a net or a shield, if you will, that would only be used in the event that a Soviet nuclear launch was detected. 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 Russians rallied against it. But not just them. Here at home, there were 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 race with the Soviets,

or who just thought it was going to be a huge money pit. Yeah, and it was a lot of those things. And when we say Soviets, let's go ahead and call out the premier that I didn't remember, Yuri and Dropoff. I didn't remember him. I don't remember him, either. And I looked him up, he was only, I mean, it seems like there was a lot of premiers there

for a while that died shortly thereafter. I think he was in less than a year and a half. Sounds like the KGB had something to do with it. In vodka. Oh, yeah. So he was the premier at the time. He wasn't a fan. They launched a big propaganda campaign.

It says 70% of their propaganda went toward poopooing the Star Wars defense program, even though they didn't think it was going to work. Yeah. So yeah, apparently. Neither did 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 treaties. The ABM, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 72, which the Soviet Union and 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 an operative term in this case, because this was going to be, this strategic defense initiative was going to be space-based. And that violates another treaty. 1967 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. All right, so that's why they don't like it. Right, and Congress didn't like it. Congress didn't like it either. Most people in Congress, apparently the missile defense agency attributes coining the term Star Wars to describe the strategic defense initiative,

to mock it really, to Ted Kennedy in an interview in the Washington Post, 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 pushed through, and to get everyone to stop calling it Star Wars. Because. With no luck.

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's Star Wars, that crazy old gook, he's got Alzheimer's, 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. No, he tried to go by the name strategic defense initiative and you know how the press is. I think he was. He was supposed to get ahold of something that's all over. He was probably even willing to allow it to be called the SDI. I'll bet he was even like. I bet he'd be down there.

Just call it SDI. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like Poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is the story of my life.

So tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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, not everyone was against it, but they had some major issues, largely A, the cost, and B, is it even possible?

Like are we just pipe dreaming here on these lasers? Right. And they were kind of right. Well, at the time they were. So in Reagan's defense, he said from the outset, like this can take years, decades, this is not going to be an overnight thing. Yeah. And he also said we're going to test a lot of different stuff.

Right. He was, like, he was well aware the technology didn't exist, or if it did exist, it was like a glimmer in some national laboratory scientist's eyes. And it was just in the nascent stages. So from the outset, 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 an intercontinental ballistic missile launch

is launched. Yeah. Because they don't phone you up and say we've launched our missiles. Exactly. Right. And you need to make sure that they're accurate and it's not going to be like a war games thing where it's like, you know, whatever. You also need to come up with some incredible guided missile systems.

Just this, like, I think there were like eight 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. Right. And Reagan said, do this. Yeah. He said press on. And I think a lot of people at the time in Congress at least were 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. I think you're serious. It's awesome. Exactly. And he said this could work as a bargaining chip. And he was like, no, I really want the Star Wars, I'm sorry, SDI in effect.

So apparently Gorbachev got Reagan to meet him for arms limitations talks in Iceland in October of 1986. And Reagan went and they had this great talk and like basically Gorbachev was like, let's end mutuals, sure destruction. Let's basically get rid of our arsenals and the Soviets were just throwing like bone after bone under the table and Reagan just can't believe his luck. Then all of a sudden Gorbachev 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 and 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 to Star Wars.

Well, yeah, not too long after the Soviets 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 undertake what they called the Polyus skiff, which was, we'll invent a network of weapons to destroy your Star Wars machine. Which was, hey, that's pretty good thinking, but they didn't have the funding and it was not very successful either. No, they didn't. And that leads us to a point, if I may skip around a little, Chuck, but history has kind

of 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, the Soviet Union fell, collapsed entirely. And some people attribute that to the defense spending that he immediately caused them to start expending because of the Star Wars program. So he did kind of ratchet up this arms race, but the Soviets couldn't keep up.

So this came on the heels of us bleeding them dry in Afghanistan, secretly funding the Mujahideen, which became the Taliban, by the way. But I don't know how much Reagan knew, but the Soviets were hurting financially. And then all of a sudden you introduced Star Wars and they couldn't keep up. Yeah. And the fall of the Soviet Union with that came, obviously, the at least huge threat of all out nuclear war because they were the major players. You didn't have to worry about the smaller countries as far as MAD goes.

Right. But you had to worry about rogue states and all that. Making sure that the Russians could hang on to their arsenal, which they didn't do very well necessarily. But yes, the mutual assured destruction just went the way the dinosaur when the Soviets fell. H.W. Bush comes along. People get annoyed by the way when we don't say president, so and so.

Who does? Where are you see? Is this on Facebook? No, I've seen people write 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 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 SDI.

He probably would have just scrapped it all together. But he was pretty loyal to Reagan, of course. And 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 to. So let's talk about what Star Wars was. We've kind of given like a little bit of a broad overview. But until I started researching this, I hadn't really thought about it, but intercontinental ballistic missiles, one's capable of saying traveling from Moscow to New York, 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 weaponize space. Yeah. And I wonder if they ever gave any thought to what nuclear bombs going off in space would mean. I mean, surely there's repercussions there. I know it's space, but you can't just go willy-nilly setting off nuclear bombs in space, right?

Did in Nevada. Well, that's true. In the Bikini Atoll. Yeah. And look what happened there. What happened there? Well, I'm just saying 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. Space is a vacuum, so it should have some effect or no effect whatsoever.

But it's got to. A nuclear explosion has got to do something. There's someone out there really smart that hopefully is going to email me. I guess though 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. But so you have something up in space that's capable of shooting down an intercontinental

ballistic missile. Like an X-ray laser. This is like where we kind of come to some of the, 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. He created the hydrogen bomb. Yeah, I saw that.

It was his proposal, so they obviously listened to him. And it was going to 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 or actually they weren't X-ray. The Death Star blowing up? Yeah. Or the Death Star blowing up that planet?

Alderaan I think. They focused the laser and boom. You just saved me from a lot of ire because I was going to say Tatooine. I might have got it wrong. I think it was Alderaan. Man, I hope you got it. If there's one thing that I ever hope you got right, it was that one. So many Star Trek fans would be writing in.

So 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 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 to create a massive amount of concentrated amount of X-rays.

That would be focused on a missile and it would go kaboom. It was called Project X Calibur so it had a cool name too. But apparently teller or the people behind it were accused of falsifying the initial test result. Oh really? Yeah. So it kind of went down in scandal and mockery and everything. So in the little box it said worked or didn't work.

They just checked worked and like shuffled away. The cartoon sweat like coming off of there for you. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the

nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh man. And so will my husband Michael. Um hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Uh huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So some of the other ideas that they tried and spent billions of dollars trying, kinetic warheads, apparently they would collide in orbit.

Yeah, it's like shooting a missile at another missile. 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 10 missiles in it and you just have it floating up there and it'd shoot at a missile and one came up and it was a good idea. They're like, we can actually do that. I think we can do this. The problem is, as 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 10. So people said, okay, let's get back to it and they started exploring other ones. It's like bringing a knife to a gunfight. It's like bringing a missile to a multi-missile fight. No. I don't think that analogy works at all actually. No. I think it's like a sitting duck.

Okay. The other thing they wanted to try, Josh, was this rail guns mounted on satellites. Did you see the popular mechanics drawing of this? I did and it's pretty wicked. Yeah. I got to admit. It looks like an I-beam coming out of the satellite but it's shooting like a three ounce slug at 200 miles a second.

Yeah, it's pretty wicked. Yeah. It doesn't go very far because of the energy requirements. Yeah. It was just way too expensive in an energy sense. Right. And then the MIR-ACL Miracle Laser. It was another laser but it was ground based using mirrors, right?

Yeah. It was a chemical laser. Oh, okay. It wasn't like a nuclear X-ray laser. Gotcha. It's like they just started to try to throw cool sci-fi terms of the time together like, let's make a laser but let's make it a nuclear X-ray laser and we'll shoot missiles out of the sky.

Tron. Laser Tron. Right. Let's add that. So then this article doesn't really go into it but after some of these were kind of asked and answered, up until and even beyond the fall of the Soviet Union, the shining star in all this became these things called bright pebbles. Does that ring a bell?

It did for me. I went across it. I was like, those two words sound very familiar. So bright pebbles was the little garage with 10 missiles. These were very small ones, like say 20 to 50 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 10 missiles, you would have thousands of these little things.

All over the country. All over space. Oh, they're in space. Gotcha. So we're hoping for a constellation of up to like 4,000 of these things just floating around in space. Wow. The cool thing about them was if you took one out, there were still 3,999 left, right?

Yeah. They were autonomous so they could attack on their own if they wanted to. They could also coordinate and communicate with one another to launch coordinated attacks against missiles. Yeah. So it'd be very tough to overwhelm these things. 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-effective too. It was going to cost about $11 billion in 1984, I think, which is about $20 billion today. That's a bargain. It was considering that they were looking at like $20 billion, which is about $43 billion in today's dollars, just to get some of the other ones off the ground. So to get 1,000 off the ground that you could mass produce just $11 billion at the time

was quite a bargain. And had the fall of the Soviet Union not come and gone, we probably would have bright pebbles up in space right now. And as a matter of fact, they were proven, they were tested the Clementine probe, which mapped the moon in 1994. That was a bright pebble that they basically redesigned instead of, as a weapon, they used it to map the moon and it did so successfully. So they would have worked.

And lastly, a computer model of bright pebbles found that had they been in operation during the first Gulf War, they would have shot down Saddam's scud missiles with 100% accuracy. Wow. Pretty crazy. But well, cheap. I was going to 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 10 years. We need to research for 10 years. We see if any of this is even feasible instead of sort of like trying these things out. Reagan was encouraging that though. I mean, I'm sure he was like hurry up.

But at the same time, I think he, I got the impression he was saying like sky's the limit guys. Like use your imagination, do whatever you can come up with. It's definitely the sky's the limit because, yeah, there's some wacky ideas. 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 a mock warhead in the earth's atmosphere and they shot down another mock warhead in space and one of those things was going 2100 miles an hour. 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 have today, right? That's what some people say. Yeah, like the ballistic missile defense system, it's the outgrowth 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 it 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 know, really, they figured the American public doesn't want to hear this, but yeah, the Chinese shot a missile at us and we shot it down, so everything's cool. That was close. So I guess that's about it, huh? Yeah, that's all I got.

Okay. So if you want to learn more about Star Wars, I think it'd bring up a bunch of crazy stuff if you type Star Wars in the search bar at How Stuff Works, like the one man Star Wars. Star Wars one man show. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty good. Landau, Dr. Pepper Calrissian, remember that one? I do.

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff. Just type Star Wars in the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. And I said that, which means it's time for Listener Mail. Josh and Lou of Listener Mail, we're going to do a little Facebook question 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 Listener Mail ready and this is a good thing to do. So let's just look through some of these and you let me know what you want to read.

Our friend Coby, Don Coby, says, is there a particular side of the recording booth that you each always sit on? The answer to that is yes. I guess if you were facing from here, Josh sits 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. Yeah. That'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 would be really weird. Yeah, I'm sure everybody sits in their same seat every time. Like if I sit over there, they'd be disconcerting. You'd have to be a bonafide nihilist to do that. That would just be odd. I've got one from Jerome Hansen.

I would say Jerome, right? Who is your favorite Marvel superhero? I guess I would say Punisher. I know he's not a superhero. He's just a straight up hero because he doesn't have any super powers, but he's definitely the comic I was into the most as a youngster. I'm going to go Spider-Man. Really?

Yeah. I identified with Peter Parker, not Spider-Man. Favorite band of all time? I feel like we've answered that. Many times. Okay. I'm going with Pavement. Still?

Pixies still. Okay. I would like to know your opinion of Ann Margaret. That's from Brian Throckmorton. I think Ann Margaret, in her day, was one of the most smoking hot women on the planet. My only familiarity with Ann Margaret was from the Flintstones when they had that character Ann Margaret. She always seemed like she was on lithium, so I don't have a great opinion of Ann Margaret.

Gotcha. Oh, this is good. William Bayer, if you were speed limit, what would you be and why? You know what I would be? I would be one of those special speed limits in state parks. It's like five miles an hour. Do you know that 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 in. That's where I'm at. What would you be? This is arguably the strangest question I've ever been asked. I would say 75.

Okay. That's good. Okay. It's fast, but it's not super dangerous. Not even to read into it. That's what comes to mind. Okay. Gotcha.

You got one? Let's see. Lisa Tashara asks us, what's our least favorite food? Lisa's a big regular too, but I read that. I recognize the name. Hey there. What are you going with? Your least favorite food would have to be, I was just talking to you 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, well, hold them while you put it in something. They can virtually ruin the pizza. Yeah. Yeah. Cream cheese. I love it. Cream cheese with stuff in it, like a cream cheese spread, a cream cheese ball, cream

cheese on just about anything. If you have a plain bagel hot with cream cheese, that's fine. Just a regular plain chmere. But man, once you put like a garden style cream cheese with something else. Yeah, I don't like that stuff either. Matt Saylor boxers or briefs. We've been asked that before. I'm a boxer guy.

Katie Hart, favorite punchline to a joke. Those aren't pillows. I know. I can't say anyone's I know. 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. I do too. So there you go. That's kind of boring. Got a lot of hair on the old chest from it. You know, Jason Domini from our friends at Backdorff and Brunson, the amazing coffee makers and roasters, which you should, not coffee makers, roasters, you should support them by the way.

He says, he gave me a personal tour of the thing and a coffee 101. And he says, if you drink good coffee and it's roasted properly, you don't want sugar. Oh yeah. Definitely don't want milk, but you definitely don't want sugar because he's like, it's really sweet. Yeah. And the beans are exceptionally sweet. And when you roast it right, 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. Yeah. 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 LA where like they don't even have cream or sugar, like they don't even offer

it. If you want it, like they tell you to leave. Awesome. Yeah. When he made his copy that day, it was great. Yeah. All right. So I think that that's good enough for now.

We'll hit this up on the next one. Oh, 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.com, whether we have a question out or otherwise at Facebook.com slash stuff you should know, and you can send us an email.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.