David was a 17-year-old volunteer firefighter who was caught lighting fires along Australia's southern coast. Over a course of two years, David thinks he lit around 50 fires. In this episode, we'll ask what drove him to such reckless behaviour.

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Ben McMahon learned Chinese in a Melbourne high school, but, like a lot of people who learn languages at high school, he didn’t really. But years later, when Ben was involved in a car accident, he woke up inexplicably speaking Chinese.

Ben didn’t fumble or hesitate when he spoke. He didn't even have to translate from English in his head. Somehow the parts of his brain responsible for language had mysteriously flipped to Chinese.

On this episode of Extremes we unpack Ben’s belief that destiny put him in that car accident. That he was supposed to learn fluent Chinese and ultimately appear on the world’s most-viewed dating show, "If You Are the One."

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Peter Bland is a Australian businessman who was almost the first person to cross the Antarctic Peninsula unsupported. But on the home stretch, he was hit by an avalanche and washed down a crevasse. We talk to Peter about ego. The things it can propel us to achieve, and the pain it puts us through.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2003, John Rusnak became briefly famous for pulling one of the biggest cases of bank fraud in US history. We talk to John about how he got himself into so much trouble, why he turned himself in, and whether it was worth the prison time.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the 1960s Reg Spiers was a professional javelin thrower. He’d gone all the way from Australia to London to make the Olympics, but when he didn’t make the cut he was left stranded without enough money to get home. Rather than saving for a plane ticket, Reg decided to mail himself via international post. That meant three days inside a wooden box, traveling via Paris, Mumbai, and Singapore, all the way to Perth.

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Annette Herfkens was 31 when she and her fiancé boarded a Vietnam Airlines flight in November of 1992. It was supposed to be a romantic trip. A surprise getaway from her fiancé who was working as a banker in Ho Chi Minh City. But instead of reaching the resort town of Nha Trang as planned, the plane hit severe turbulence, clipped a mountain, and disintegrated into the jungle.

Thirty people lost their lives in the crash, including her fiancé, and when Annette came to she found herself alone in the ruined fuselage, surrounded by luggage and bodies. And there she stayed, for a total of eight days, waiting to be rescued.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Extremes is a show about people who’ve lived through extraordinary situations. These are big stories with enormous stakes. There’s no pattern to the stories that our guests tell: some are funny, others are sad; some situations were accidents, others were created deliberately—but all provide a window into human behaviour.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.