Probably Science

Record producer, audio engineer and professor Dr. Susan Rogers' remarkable recording career included working as a staff engineer for Prince in his Purple Rain heyday, not to mention projects with David Byrne, Barenaked Ladies and Crosby, Stills & Nash. After two decades in the business, she shifted her focus to the science of music cognition, and she brings her extensive knowledge of all things audio to the new book This Is What It Sounds Like: What The Music You Love Says About You, digging into concepts including beat deafness, authenticity, musical visualization, Prince's insane charisma, turning down Lou Reed, music and identity, the outsider magic of The Shaggs and Snowball the dancing cockatoo.

Comedian Charles Greaves (@Greaves_Charles) joins Matt, Jesse and Andy to discuss Jam In The Van, Nashville Armored Combat, chess boxing, spinlaunching a payload to 30,000 feet, how spinlaunching works, trying to solve the mystery of squirting, microwaving fish to make sustainable LEDs, and the dog Andy found on the road in Joshua Tree.

Comedian/magician Harrison Greenbaum (@harrisoncomedy) joins Andy, Jesse and Matt to talk about doing comedy in Cirque du Soleil, the overlap between psychology, comedy and magic, men making riskier bets after a positive foretune-telling, dogs sniffing out stress in humans, successfully crashing DART into an asteroid and the heyday of vector graphics in the arcade.

Matt, Jesse and Andy are back together to talk about Matt's wedding, the chess tournament anal bead rumors, how to cheat at roulette, batteries made from crab shells, finding organic matter on Mars, making super hot stuff, breakthroughs in carbon capture, the real story behind Catch Me If You Can's Frank Abagnale and where to find quaaludes these days.

Auggie Smith joins Matt and Jesse to discuss his new Dry Bar special, Tasmanian Tigers, plants that love booze, finding a massive fossil in your garden and leaky rockets.

Comedian Shane Mauss (@shane_mauss) returns to the show to talk with Jesse, Matt and Andy about his upcoming Mind Under Matter science/comedy festival, Dan Ariely's study of pain, Peak-End Theory, advances in nuclear fusion and self-pleasure in space.

Comedian JC Currais (@jcstandup) joins Andy, Jesse and Matt to discuss using dead spiders as robots, returning samples from Mars, a chess-bot that broke a little boy's finger and the miracle of OpenAI's DALL-E and the more lightweight version that we used to generate way too many pictures based on text prompts.

UC San Diego astrophysicist, podcaster and YouTuber Brian Keating (@DrBrianKeating) joins Matt, Jesse and Andy to talk about the inflation model versus the cyclic model of the universe, multiverses, how an astrophysicist conducts an experiment, working on BICEP at the South Pole, Brian's books Losing the Nobel Prize and Into the Impossible and joining Brian's mailing list for your chance to win an actual meteorite from SPACE. 

Anthropologist/comedian Natalia Reagan (@natalia13reagan) joins Jesse, Matt and Andy to discuss her path from acting to the sciences, childhood fear of King Kong, primatology, a harrowing car accident, mites having sex on your face, rocket craters on the moon and spider monkey genitalia. This episode is brought to you by Manscaped, offering Probably Science listeners 20% off and free shipping by using the promo code PROBABLY

Comedian Andrew O'Neill (@destructo9000) joins Matt, Jesse and Andy just before Andrew and Matt head off to Glastonbury to talk about Andrew's new BBC Radio 4 sitcom Damned Andrew, summoning the writing gods, working with Alan Moore, the feasibility of breathing through your butt, reverse mermaids and a fluffy crab that wears a sponge as a hat.