No Such Thing As A Fish · No Such Thing As A Fish

No Such Thing As Supercritical Hot Rock Music

February 12, 2026·55 min·5 clips

Kellogg's once included a Polonium-210 ring in cereal, letting kids watch atomic decay.

Maddy Mote comes in as the guest, and the episode gives her BBC work on kid shows immediate weight. Her YouTube channel is framed as curiosity first. Animals are part of it. So are plants. Travel shows up too. Technology does as well. The show clearly likes how far her work ranges. That breadth fits the table well. The conversation then moves to Shapley. He was an incredibly clever kid. He advanced through school early. He was also very good at basketball. Not just good. He was a major basketball player for his college. People said he might have gone professional in more than one sport. Instead, he chose astronomy. He rejected archaeology because he could not pronounce it properly. That story gives the episode one of its strangest little turns. The panel then shifts into his work helping scientists escape Nazi Germany. Jewish scientists in Germany are part of that story. He brought them to America and presented them as people who would matter to universities. The claim is that he saved at least a thousand families. His own line about the stars not being of much use unless minds are preserved lands as the moral center of the segment. The episode then folds in the later accusation that he was a communist. It connects that to the idea of being a premature anti-fascist, which the show treats as the kind of historically tangled phrase it enjoys worrying at in public. The whole thing moves quickly, but it keeps landing on details that are specific enough to feel slightly unsteady in the best way. A guest with a curiosity channel, a basketball star turned astronomer, and a rescue operation aimed at scientists give the episode a lot of motion without forcing it. The show does what it does best here, letting a fact arrive, getting distracted by its odd edge, and then coming back with another one.

As heard by us

Maddy Mote and Shapley give the episode its sharpest turns.

No Such Thing As A Fish opens on Maddy Mote, and the mix of BBC children's science work and a curiosity-led YouTube channel gives the episode a bright, busy start.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Maddy Mote turns this Fish episode into a curious, sideways sprint.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from No Such Thing As A Fish