Adam, where have you been? I joined the Air Force and it did not go well. Terrible inner ear issues, afraid of heights. No, I did not join the Air Force. I actually was promoting the big short,

but I am happy to be back and surprisingly awesome with you Rachel, Adam Davidson, our whole amazing team.

I feel like I should give you the honors, you should introduce our guest.

Our guest actually is from the big short.

He's our composer, Nicholas Bratel, was a concert pianist, a degree in psychology from Harvard, who's also done music for 12

years a slave, give me the loot, and he wrote this. From Gimlet Media, this is surprisingly awesome.

I'm Rachel Ward.

And I am Adam McKay.

And joining us is Nick Bratel. I am incredibly honored to be here.

And Nick, we brought you here to help us understand this very specific idea from music theory.

New You proposed this as a topic of our episode because this concept is everywhere.

It's a tool that composers are always using

because it evokes a very specific set of emotions in us.

And it can help us understand what exactly it is

that you do for a living. It's called the Circle of Fifths for me is this incredibly, it's a very beautiful

core progression and hopefully by the end of the episode it will be clear what it is, how it feels

when you hear it.

And also I think it's a cool lens through which we can understand a lot of issues

around music theory like starting with things like

pitch and intervals and chords and leading all the way through kind of how composers and songwriters

write music. So that's why the circle fists I think is pretty

pretty amazing. I actually had a horrible musical education when I was in

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