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He's been a waiter, a grill cook, and a bouncer at big gigs (Kurt Cobain was surprisingly chatty). He's sold handmade hippy clothes at markets and thrown executives off cliffs (in the name of teamwork). He even dabbled in the corporate world for a whole seven months — definitely long enough.

Eventually he realised his true calling: being a furious-but-fun advocate for science, scientists and other useful expertise. His mission became making "complex egghead knowledge" available to anyone who wants it, in ways they can access, understand and enjoy. That's probably why he did a PhD in science communication and was made an honorary Associate Professor at the Australian National University.

Rod has been talking with experts out in the world for years — on stage, on radio and in podcasts. Although he has enormous respect for these people, he believes no person or idea is beyond question, and that in the right context, literally anything could be funny.

Rod loves a bit of snowboarding, thinks growing veggies is interesting, and is an embarrassingly bad guitarist. He knows 500 Italian words, 350 in German and maybe 100 in Japanese (but can swear in many more languages). He is convinced that creativity is the only truly infinite resource in the world — and that everyone benefits when we make it a top priority.

He was the first student captain in his school to quit before completing his exams — to learn radio production, the core of which apparently involved washing executives' cars. After three years he decided to attend an audition for a laugh, but ended up being offered an eight-week gig as a kids' TV presenter.

It was a role he continued for six years, in Australia and later in the UK, where memorable highlights included — for real — helping to rescue a baby elephant in Uganda, competing in a demolition derby with Spandau Ballet, and getting a personal tour of the Kremlin from Raisa Gorbachev. An incredible time working with wonderful people — but ultimately, with the loss of TV-am's franchise (and his once-boyish head of hair), Mike returned to behind-the-scenes production.

His production credits were "weirdly diverse": from hiding cameras in people's homes for Noel Edmonds' House Party, to devising insanely embarrassing beach games in Mallorca for Prickly Heat with Julian Clary. From producing a talent series in Farsi to be broadcast into Iran (where women are banned from singing), to overseeing the British Comedy Awards with Jonathan Ross.

Realising he was addicted to sports — well, watching it — Mike has spent the last 10 years producing live sports events around the globe. But now, driven by frustration at a world in which irrefutable science and sound expertise is being overwhelmed and diminished as elitist by people even dumber than Mike, he's proud to join Rod in forming Kinda Thinky — and helping to create platforms for educated boffins to connect entertainingly with the podcast masses.

Science is easy to misunderstand if you don't read past the headlines — and it's even trickier now that most modern media will favour clickbait over detail and context. Everywhere you turn, legitimate expertise is drowned out by ill-informed, sensationalist "dumb takes". Nowadays, it seems everyone has a "valid" opinion.

An iconic example of this appeared in 2007, when researchers at the Grice Laboratory at Charleston College, South Carolina were experimenting with the effects of water pollution on marine life. To compare a shrimp's ability to function in various polluted water tanks, one part of the program involved building a small motorised treadmill, placed in the tank to keep the shrimps active. It cost less than $50 to make.

When the now-famous video of a shrimp running on a treadmill hit social media, pundits with "particular" political views grabbed it with both hands — misrepresenting both the purpose and the costs of the experiment. They denounced it as "a $3 million waste of taxpayers' money to see how fast a shrimp can swim". None of that was true.

Shrimp on a Treadmill is a podcast which unpacks examples of expertise that have been misunderstood, misrepresented and sensationalised — accidentally or intentionally — to trivialise a whole enterprise. The show makes complicated subjects easy to understand by doing what experts often find hard: communicating the value of their work in simple, relatable, memorable language.

In doing so, SOAT brings clarity to the mis- and dis-information drowning out our confidence in reality. From wind turbines causing cancer to the latest AI deepfake scam — and with the help of a different weekly guest expert, we'll take a deeper dive into one of hundreds of specialist subjects, from living on the moon to medical misinformation, with a mission to discover:

Each weekly episode features honest, entertaining, plain-language conversations with legitimate experts who know what a Shrimp on a Treadmill experience is like from the inside. They've seen the damage that mis- and dis-information can do firsthand — and they get to vent, correct, rant and lament with us about their examples that became part of the flood of bullshit now threatening to engulf the modern media landscape.

The SOAT podcast is a place that champions sound evidence, legitimate expertise and the right of everybody to have access to rigorous, trustworthy information that matters to them — in ways they can access, understand and use. Our promise is to intrigue and inform listeners with entertaining, memorable stories from insiders that they will be bursting to share with others.