This week's episode was recorded live at SF Sketchfest, with guests including sleep expert Professor Matthew Walker of UC Berkeley's psychology department, comedian Kurt Braunohler (twitter.com/kurtbraunohler) and a surprise drop-in from a Hollywood superstar!
Comedian and host of the Comedy Film Nerds podcast Graham Elwood (twitter.com/grahamelwood) joins Matt, Andy and Jesse to discuss: Volunteer firefighters! Squarespace's Super Bowl ad! The Ear Buds podcasting documentary! Jesse's multimedia promise for the upcoming live Probably Science! Suing NASA for not looking hard enough for aliens! Negotiating with scalpers! Marijuana lowering suicide rates! Bill Nye debating a creationist! Jesse finds out that Squarespace sponsors the podcast! The reason s...
The delightful Karen Gillan (twitter.com/karengillan2) of Doctor Who and the upcoming films Oculus and Guardians of the Galaxy returns to the program this week to help Matt, Jesse and Andy celebrate the 100th episode of Probably Science, covering a wide range of topics including: Matt’s electrical problems! Andy's sugarfree gum-loving rats! The wonders of the number 100! Ab inflation! A message from Brooks Wheelan! Why does no one remember that Jesse lives at Bluebell? Karen hanging outside with...
The hilarious Dwayne Perkins (twitter.com/funnydp) joins the crew this week to talk about: Piscopo-ing and Carrot Topping! Texting parents! Depressing 99 cent store purchases! Dogs aligning themselves with the earth's magnetic field to poop! The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island! A computer 1,500 years ahead of its time! Learning to drive as an adult! Squarespace's Care Bear Lair! Gigantopithecus brought down by sweet, sweet fruit! Dying carnivores changing the courses of rivers! Jesse's attempts...
Science and comedy collide once again this week as Dr. Peter McGraw (twitter.com/petermcgraw), author of the upcoming book The Humor Code, and Man School podcast host Caleb Bacon (twitter.com/CalebEatsBacon) join Jesse, Matt and Andy to talk about: Jesse’s near death polar vortex experience! Whatever the Fahrenheit scale is based on! Pre-ordering The Humor Code! Michael McDonald’s Probably Science backing vocals! An audiophile rendition of Probably Science! Ramona Quimby’s street! Recording an a...
Comedians Emily Heller (twitter.com/MrEmilyHeller) and Auggie Smith (twitter.com/auggiesmith) join Matt and Andy on the first episode of the new year, discussing: Suck My Dick, New Yorker! Two and one half dollars! Cheat sheets! Eighth grade listeners and science fairs! Making belly button cheese! The polar vortex! Throwing boiling water in the air! The lack of great comedy sequels! Eclipsing binary asteroids! Cliche dorm room posters! The unicycling guy on campus! River blindness! Doing comedy ...
This week Matt, Jesse and Andy are joined by Caltech Planetary Science Postdoctoral Scholar Bjoern Benneke and author Lee Billings to talk about the many topics covered in Lee's new book, Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars, including: Hunting for exoplanets! Dating sites for farmers! The Drake equation! Earth's recent trend toward radio silence! Oxygen: The first great pollution crisis! Harold Urey's pessimistic time capsule predictions! Energy-hungry alien civil...
This episode kicks off two weeks in a row of real science, as Matt, Jesse and Andy welcome Dr. Ainissa Ramirez, author of Newton's Football, and comedian/football fan Sarah Tiana (twitter.com/sarahtiana) to discuss Dr. Ramirez's new book, and more specifically: Footballs in humidors! Football suicide pools! Andy's football ignorance! The brutal early days of the sport! Football's concussion epidemic! A new style of safer tackling! Refrigerator Perry's rapping prowess! Desperation giving rise to ...
Scottish comedy wunderkind Daniel Sloss (twitter.com/daniel_sloss) is here in the US to perform on Conan, and he stopped by Bluebell Ranch to talk with Matt, Jesse and Andy about: British comedian intros! Doing comedy at a rave! Scottish pride! Upkilt photographs! Ben and Jerry-inspired homophobic slogans! Bot Out Of Hell: Daniel and his father's Robot Wars competitor with a diamond sawblade! A new drug that fixes bent boners! Everyone's fingers connect! Adolescent mice that drink alcohol becaus...
This episode is a complete shambles. With Andy out of town, Canadian/British comedian Jason John Whitehead (twitter.com/jjwhitesnake) drops in on Matt and Jesse attempting to make a Thanksgiving bonus episode in Jesse's bedroom. Topics include: Birthright trips to Israel! Thanksgiving stuff! Jesse's typewriter collection! Mighty hunters! Genetic inheritence of fears! Seahorse fluid dynamics! Illegal koala handling! Goosing!
British comedian/actor/writer Andi Osho (twitter.com/andiosho) now lives here in the US, where she's recently appeared on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and @midnight, and she joins Matt, Jesse and Andy this week for a listener-centric episode focused on topics sent in by our lovely fans, including: The speed of gravity waves! How to pronounce Trygve! Andy's Nicaraguan rental car! Jesse and Andy's roommate's iTunes woes! Jesse's dad was a mall Santa! The gray area of children's photos! R...
Actor Samm Levine (twitter.com/SammLevine) who made a name for himself on Freaks and Geeks and Inglourious Basterds and comedian Susan Burke (twitter.com/ThatSusanBurke) who's received rave reviews for writing the film Smashed join Matt, Andy and Jesse this week to discuss: All-night comedy shows at UCB! Halloween robot costumes! Samm's Short Circuit 2 nostalgia! Samm playing doctor as a kid! Losing to Jon Hamm in the Leonard Maltin game! Monkeys who are hardwired to be scared of snakes! Hotel l...
Hilarious writers/comedians/producers Scotty Landes (twitter.com/MarylandMudflap) and Heather Thomson (twitter.com/CasualVelvet) join Matt, Andy, and Jesse this week for the show. Man about town James Austin Johnson (twitter.com/JAustinJohnson) sits in for color commentary! Together, they dive deep into: Pepto Bismol! Scientific Hippie poetry! Sitting in the shower! Women are better multitaskers! Self-pleasuring in cars! Rubbernecking! Professional hugging! The science of Captchas! Second rate s...
Caltech and LIGO physicists Jamie Rollins and Larry Price (www.ligo.caltech.edu) join Andy, Jesse and Matt to up the Science:Probably ratio for just one week as they discuss: Why we don't go straight through tables! What's inside an atom! Why chemistry isn't their forté! Dark matter and WIMPS! Gravity waves and what LIGO actually is! How to measure something that's smaller than the smallest thing you can think of! Putting experiments in space! What inspired Einstein to come up with relativity (h...
Edinburgh Comedy Award-winner Brendon Burns (twitter.com/brendonburns) sits in with Matt, Jesse and Andy this week to dig into: Worrying about your Google-ability! LA streets named for celebrities! Orange people in the Australian outback! Making "Be a Lady" T-shirts! Naked children on giant slip-n-slides! Underwear that filters your flatulence! Learning how to pronounce "awry"! Finding bombs with dolphin-inspired radar! The four-disc Flaming Lips experimental album! Whatever killed the dinosaurs...
You've seen comedian Nate Craig (twitter.com/NateCraig1) on truTV's World's Dumbest and Comedy Central's Mash Up, and he joins Matt, Andy and Jesse to discuss: Jesse's new co-host status! Lowball podcast donations! Exchanging a million pennies! Fake IDs! Figuring out what Yetis actually are! Farting into tissues! Ancient human ancestry! Youtube videos of Danny Devito cuddling with Michael Jordan! Los Angeles coyotes! Flushing out brain toxins while you sleep! Matt's experience with colonics! And...
Star of Doctor Who and the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy Karen Gillan (twitter.com/KarenGillan2) joins Matt, Andy and Jesse this week to talk about: Being on the cusp of superstardom! Andy and Jesse's rat problem! Growing up as a Scottish serf! The parade of bad accents! Kaisers of the Cosmos! Dealing with nerdy fans! Criticizing the physics of the movie Gravity! Closed captioning for grandparents! Alfred Nobel's personal ad! Karen's Carmina Burana funeral plans! This year's Nobel Prize winne...
This week's episode comes to you from the second annual LA Podcast Festival (lapodfest.com), with Matt and Andy welcoming Rhys Darby of Flight of the Conchords and Brandon Fibbs of New Race For Space and the reboot of Cosmos, to discuss: An explanation of winglets! Rhys's knowledge of Morse Code! The technological prowess of the New Zealand Army! The Cryptid Factor podcast! Sea serpents: The guardians of Atlantis! Rhys Darby: Sasquatch Whisperer! The upcoming return of Cosmos with Neil deGrasse ...
Matt, Andy and Jesse welcome podcasting pioneers Keith Malley and Chemda of Keith and The Girl fame to the show this week, covering a variety of topics including: Brooks's debut performance on SNL! The LA Podcast Festival! The wild west days of podcasting! Fan tattoos! Peter McGraw's upcoming Humor Code book! Estranged parents! What is clean comedy? The perfect musical ending to Breaking Bad! Having an intern clean the DNA off of your keyboard! Messing up the scientific studies of KATG! The hell...
It's sports week here at Probably Science HQ, as Matt and Andy welcome to the show Sports Illustrated journalist and author of The Sports Gene David Epstein, as well as comedian Paul Morrissey, who played and coached college basketball, to dig into the meaty topics that David's excellent books discusses, including: Major league hitters who can't touch a 60mph softball! Being a short, white hustler at Venice Beach pickup basketball games! The excellence of Jamaican sprinters and Kalenjin distance...
Matt, Andy and Jesse welcome paleontology PhD candidate Kathleen Ritterbush to the show this week to discuss: Being the third man on The Dating Game! Roommate update: Stu's birthday is 9/11! Falling for the testicle-biting fish hoax! PhD superstitions and paperwork! Using fossils to determine skin and hair color! Teaching science to a boatload of evangelical kids! Thinking dinosaurs and humans coexisted! Paleontologists with Indiana Jones props! Kathleen comes bearing gifts of fossils! How fossi...
Matt and Andy are back together this week, welcoming British writer/comedian Humphrey Ker (twitter.com/thehumphreyker) and American writer/comedian Bryan Cook (twitter.com/bryancooking) on the program to discuss: Going on strike against Joan Rivers! Fallacious labor dispute arguments! The hilarious Competitive Erotic Fan Fiction show! Moving someone else's hand with your mind! Swedish fish -- not the candy ones, the testicle-biting ones! The Sharknado finale! Asylum movies! Andy's summer adventu...
Matt's still out of the country, but luckily he was able to record a remote episode with the very funny Nick Doody (twitter.com/nickdoody), his co-writer on the BBC Radio show Bigipedia. We'll be back soon with more new episodes!
Matt's been in the UK and Andy's been in Portland, so rather than leave the audience twisting in the wind for a few weeks, they decided to record some remote bonus interviews. These weren't supposed to be very science-y, but in the course of talking with Jesse Case, Dr. Richard Flower, Dr. Anna Collu, Jeff Mounts and Emily Mounts, the discussions actually ended up having a fair amount of legitimate science, and a bit of history as well. Keep your standards low, and enjoy!
Hank Thompson is a comedian and producer at The Young Turks (youtube.com/TYTComedy), and his brother Dr. Chris Thompson is a post-doctoral fellow at Scripps Research Institute in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience. This powerful comedy/science sibling duo join Matt and Andy this week to discuss: Sibling rivalry! Vocal communication in animals! Learned vocalization! Dolphins who know their own names! Inverted commas! Everything you ever wanted to know about songbirds! Chicago l...
Theoretical cosmologist at Caltech, author and blogger Dr. Sean M. Carroll invited Matt and Andy to his Pasadena office this week to lend some insight into his areas of expertise, including: Being the house cosmologist on a paleontologogical dig! Dark matter! Defying what you thought you knew about the conservation of energy! The fixed density of dark energy! What happens a quadrillion years from now! Boltzmann brains! You might not have existed before this very instant! The arrow of time! Entro...
Comedian Virginia Jones (twitter.com/badiniadones) made a name for herself in Portland before heading to Los Angeles, and she joins fellow Portland transplant Auggie Smith (twitter.com/auggiesmith) this week to help Matt and Andy dive headfirst into: More vegan goth discussion! Punctuating your punchlines! The world's worst comedy show sound guy! A stranger interrupts the show to take a shower! Academic decathlons! Virginia and Andy's trivia prowess! Making things levitate using sound waves! The...
San Francisco-based comedian Colleen Watson (@colleen_watson) and Portland-based festival producer/podcaster Charlene Conley (@PatiohPatino) herald Matt's triumphant return from Convergence Con, digging into meaty topics including: The vegan/goth Venn diagram overlap! Portland-based Sasquatch clubs! Choosing to major in biopsychology to spite an ex-boyfriend! Hoods in the woods! Married guys have less AIDS! High-definition porn: Too much definition! Cutlery's affect on perceived flavor! Pineappl...
Matt Kirshen takes Probably Science on the road this week for a live taping at Convergence Con (convergence-con.org) featuring The Physics of Superheroes' own Dr. James Kakalios, Minneapolis comedian Tommy Ryman (@tommyryman) and Dan Schlissel from Stand Up Records (@StandUpRecords). Dr. Jim is a professor of experimental physics at the University of Minnesota, and was both a scientific consultant, and a DVD extra feature on the Watchmen movie. This week's episode gets into superconductors, soli...
Comedian and Emmy-nominated writer David Angelo (twitter.com/dwangelo) made a name for himself on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon before moving out west in 2012, and he joins Matt, Andy and Jesse Case this week to discuss: Fiscal responsibility! eEconomics! Apprenticing as a sandwich artist! Martial arts legend Benny The Jet Urquidez! Yngwie Malmsteen! The effects of light and darkness on cabbage! Curing cancer! A listener microwaves grapes! Science advances courtesy of Denny's! Traveling to Mars v...
