Easter Island is about as tiny and remote as you can get on the surface of our planet. It’s just 23 kilometres long (on its longest side), and as close as you can get to the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. So you’d be forgiven if you’ve never heard of it.

Ok... to people who don't do it, it's weird and gross and wrong. But to people who do do it, it's basically the golden fountain of youth.

Talking with animals and aliens is the stuff of children’s stories and conspiracy theorists. But for John Cunningham Lilly, it was his life's work.

Humans really love a hobby and it seems the more obscure the hobby, the more obsessed we become. But if you’re looking for the gold medal in obscure and obsessive, you need look no further than Victorian salmon fly-tying.

Battleships are very large, belch smoke and move pretty slowly. If you were tasked with hiding one out on the open water, how would you go about doing it?

Today we explore some of the most extreme stories of heroes and scientists who have experimented on themselves in the name of science (though some of these experiments will make you wonder - in the name of… science?).

Sexual performance, in particular impotence, is something that’s plagued chaps since they first crawled out of the swamp, rose up onto our hind legs, looked down, and bellowed WHY WON’T YOU WORK YOU BASTARD!

If you have listened to the previous episode “What The Hell Happened To The Left-Handers?”, you’ll know that National Geographic sent out a survey using scratch and sniff cards back in 1986. The scents they included were: banana, musk, cloves, rose, androstenone (a chemical found in sweat) and… mercaptans.

If you’re left-handed you're part of a group that makes up about 10% of the population. And this rate of left-handedness has been consistent. Historical and archaeological records, reaching as far back as the Neanderthals, tell us that we’ve had this background rate of left-handedness for quite literally all of human history.

This story begins with a strange observation. After the Civil War in America, soldiers of all ranks, abilities and backgrounds often spoke of drenching drain after battles. This apparent connection rose to the level of received wisdom. In essence — many believed the powerful explosions of battle brought rain.

The way the story goes, the Summer of 69 was when all hell broke loose in Cleveland.

It was the summer the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. Choked with industrial effluent and chemicals it burst into flames. It is said that this is the event that birthed the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Authority. America was galvanised by this shocking event. Things started to change

The car has been around for over a century, which makes it easy to forget that there were real-life humans behind its invention, not to mention a messy, complex journey of invention.

There are of course some well-meaning gentlemen that were involved in the invention of the automobile. But, possibly one of the most important figures was a woman by the name of Bertha Benz.

Scurvy is zero fun. We’re not sure how much you know about this disease but it’s not a walk in the park. Okay, it’s fair to say that not many diseases are a gentle stroll through a pretty field of flower-filled gardens, but scurvy really is an incredible bastard. The only thing going for it is that you’re generally dead pretty quick.

If you were knocking on death’s door and the door wasn’t opening quickly enough, would you want to be able to give it a shove yourself?

To have agency over your death is a tricky subject, but that hasn’t stopped Philip Nitschke from diving into it head first.

In August 1968, a rather innocuous letter to the editor was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr Ho Man Kwok had written in speculating on the reason he felt so ghastly after eating at a Chinese restaurant. Was it the soy sauce, or the cooking wine? Or perhaps, he offered up, it was the monosodium glutamate seasoning - MSG?

Our episode today begins in the 1960s with László Polgár and his hot and saucy epistolary courtship with a foreign language teacher named Klara.

Correction here. László’s letters were less hot and saucy and more….precise and instrumental. There was no time for detailing THE karma sutra. László was on a mission. He wanted to raise child geniuses. So, in his letters to Klara, he outlines the pedagogical experiment he intends to carry out with his future progeny.

László clearly knows how to woo a lady.

Our goal here at The Wholesome Show is to make you feel happy, amused and entertained. But a fair warning that we must sometimes journey through a rather astonishing volume of grotesque and sad death to get you there.

We won’t apologise for it. It is our duty.

In this episode, we travel back to the 18th and 19th centuries - a generally dire time to be alive. Infanticide - the killing of unwanted children - was a horrifyingly common reality.

Have you ever had a dream that you just had to do no matter how crazy or how dangerous it might sound to anyone else? A dream so core to your being that nothing was going to stop you from realising it no matter the obstacles? Neil Armstrong sure did. As did Marie Curie. Edmond Hillary too.

But recently, we found out about a human who eclipsed all those wannabes.

That man was Larry Walters.

You may have heard the story of tulip mania in the Netherlands. How an entire country goes mad over a single flower. And how it all collapses in a matter of days. But almost all of the popular history around this time is erroneous - an oversimplification. A bit like judging the 90s on just Blink 182 albums.

There is a much deeper story here.

Join Rod and Will on this wild ride - did anyone win, or did it turn into a robotic graveyard? And learn how that 1894 race turned into the ultimate inspiration for the autonomous vehicles we (almost) have today.