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Stuff You Should Know

How Lasers Work

Stuff You Should Know

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture

4.582.7K Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2026

⏱️ 47 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It turns out that lasers are even cooler than they look. And as far as acronyms go, they’re pretty solid in that respect too. There’s way too much cool stuff about lasers to tease here so listen to this old school SYSK episode and let lasers blow away.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is an I-Heart podcast.

0:02.5

Guaranteed Human.

0:05.6

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio.

0:15.3

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

0:17.2

I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too.

0:20.6

And she was making too many laser

0:22.4

noises, so we asked her to please go on mute. She did. And I assume she's still making

0:27.0

laser noises. We just can't hear her right now. She had a little attitude about it, too.

0:31.7

She did. I mean, I was really mean and Kurt, but she didn't have to be that way back.

0:37.4

Yeah. This is a one- be that way back. Yeah.

0:38.1

This is a one-way street.

0:40.0

Right.

0:41.3

It's my way or the highway.

0:44.0

You know, it's about time we did an episode on lasers.

0:47.9

Mm-hmm.

0:48.8

This seems like something that we would have tackled in those first formative, in that first formative decade.

0:55.0

And I'm glad we didn't, because I think it's good to still do like a traditional, you know,

1:00.0

how X works episode.

1:03.0

We should do one on how X works.

1:06.0

It depends on what kind of X you're talking about.

1:09.0

Ruby used to give us an X when she was little, when she was like two years old, if she didn't like something, she would do her fingers as an X. And she just keeps getting cooler and cooler. She forgot that. She lost that one along the way. I told her to bring that back. Yeah, that's a good one. Uncle Josh likes it. That's like talk to the hand, but way better.

1:27.8

Yeah, exactly.

...

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