There is no better way to conquer things than with great big explosions. The thing to be conquered in this episode? Rain (humans just love punching on with nature). 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. This idea really took of...
Oct 20, 2022•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. But the thing is, this was not the first time the Cuyahoga River had burst into flames. We feel like the most ...
Oct 13, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Bertha Benz’s husband was a locomotive engineer, Karl Benz. After getting into a good deal of debt in an iron manufacturing bu...
Oct 06, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. You start off feeling a little tired, sore and short of breath. Your gums start to hurt and your legs swell. Then, your darkening, swelling legs develop purple, bla...
Sep 29, 2022•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. To understand why Nitschke felt compelled to go down such an onerous path, let’s first give you a sense of his personality as a young chap. When he was 18, someone stole Nitschke's car radio. The police weren’t too concerned about it so Nit...
Sep 22, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. The prominent symptoms, as he described them, were numbness at the back of his neck, general weakness and heart palpitations. Surely Dr Kwok hadn’t just overea...
Sep 15, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our episode today begins in the 1960s with Laszlo Polgar and his hot and saucy epistolary courtship with a foreign language teacher named Klara. Correction here. Laszlo'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. Laszlo clearly knows how to woo a l...
Sep 08, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Luckily at the time, there was a relatively liberal emp...
Sep 01, 2022•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 realising it no matter the obstacles? Nail 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. Even as a very young lad, Larry imagined himself flying. His inspiration? Balloons. His idea first took flight w...
Aug 25, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Six friends gather around a patch of dirt in the Netherlands. Cornelis, Dirk, Symon, Reynier, Other Cornelis and Andries (clearly this is not 2022). They’re digging up something that is meant to be worth 30 guilders. That is, the price of a pretty modest house back in 1637. A whole house worth of value in a small buried item. Gold? Gemstones? An incredibly well bred and fanciful horse? No dear reader, it was nothing of the sort. It was in fact, a single tulip bulb. You may have heard the story o...
Aug 18, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this daring episode, Rod and Will take us back to 1894 Paris, when a small newspaper had a brilliant idea to boost circulation. A wacky endurance race that would take no prisoners. In this race there were no fewer than 20 different methods of propulsion from steam, petrol, compressed air, clockwork, a system of pendulums through to a mechanical motor. From a four tonne monster tractor right down to a tricycle. With one steering wheel in the whole race (steering wheels were not a thing back th...
Aug 11, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast There's a whole bunch of reasons to not be fans of the Proud Boys. In the words of the Southern Poverty Law Centre they're a 'general hate' group, their members played key roles in the January 6 attack on the US capitol, and they're pretty goddamn misogynist. But it's rule number two of their by-laws that's just weird. It states “No heterosexual brother of the Fraternity shall masturbate more than one time in any calendar month". Or maybe it's not weird... So here's the question we're asking thi...
Jun 17, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the olden times people used to climb mountains wearing all sorts of odd things - wool, leather, or just in the nude! But George Finch was an ideas man... Rod tells Will the story of the invention of the puffer jacket! The Wholesome Show is Dr Will Grant and Dr Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Jun 10, 2022•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Guess what listener - it's possible that people alive today might live a very long life... like 1200 years maybe. That sounds fun, but maybe it might lead to dystopia? Will agonises with Rod about what we should do about longevity treatments! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! Sources: Aeon: What are the ethical consequences of immortality technology? https://aeon.co/ideas/what-are...
Jun 03, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast At the end of the 19th century in Paris there were a range of weird and wonderful acts - but one stood out... Rod tells Will the story of Le Pétomane! The Wholesome Show is Dr Will Grant and Dr Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! Le Pétomane By The Wholesome Show is licensed under a Creative Commons License. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
May 27, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Old timey people put a lot of stock in maps, but they didn't always get things exactly right. They joined Tasmania to mainland Australia, got Africa in the wrong place, and moved Siberia a long way to the east. But was this by accident? Or design? Will tells Rod the story of lying with maps! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! Sources Bar News: Review of Lying for the Admiralty by M...
May 20, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast We all go to the movies right, we see the sights, we hear the sounds! But what if we could smell the smells? Rod tells Will the history of Smell-O-Vision! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
May 13, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast People have been cooking food for as long as they've been people - and for almost as long other people have been pushing against it. Will tells Rod the history and science of raw food evangelists! The Wholesome Show is Dr Will Grant and Dr Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! Sources Bismark Daily Tribune: Apostle of Raw Food Explains Sect: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042242/1913-10-09/ed-1/seq-3/ Carnivor Aur...
May 07, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ettore Majorana was a physics genius who really could have won the Nobel Prize... but in 1938 he disappeared. The question is, what happened to him? Rod tells Will the story! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Apr 29, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ok, the Americans won the race to the moon - but do you know what the Soviets actually did land on the moon? It's something a little bit special. The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Apr 22, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast You might not know this but ozone has a bizarrely 'clean' smell - so much so, there's a long history of people using it to 'clean' things that they really shouldn't... Rod tells Will the story! The Wholesome Show is Dr Will Grant and Dr Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Apr 14, 2022•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast We at The Wholesome Show of course want to live forever. But if you have to go, there are a hell of a lot of worse ways than dying in the saddle. Will tells Rod the science and history of dying on the job! The Wholesome Show is Dr Will Grant and Dr Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Apr 08, 2022•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tycho Brahe is one of the most important astronomers of all time - but he died under super mysterious circumstances. So who killed him? Rod tells Will and special guest Hans the story of the murder of Tycho Brahe! The Wholesome Show is Rod Lamberts and Will Grant, proudly brought to you by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Apr 01, 2022•1 hr 22 min•Transcript available on Metacast We all have... unique ways of looking at the world. But what if two mutually contradictory views of the world are put in the same room? Rod tells Will the story of the ethically dubious Jesus experiments of Milton Rokeach! The Wholesome Show is Dr Will Grant and Dr Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mar 25, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast There are a few places around the world where a large number of people live to over 100 - do you want to know how? Well, Will tells Rod exactly what the secret is! The Wholesome Show is Dr Will Grant and Dr Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mar 18, 2022•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast What evidence would we need to confirm that Bigfoot exists? Photos? Hair sample? A pool of blood? Rod tells Will the story of Melba Ketchum's quest for the Big Foot! The Wholesome Show is Dr Will Grant and Dr Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mar 14, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the middle of the 20th century it became totally normal - at a 21st, a wedding or a confirmation - to give people the special present of the total removal of their teeth. Was science to blame? Will tells Rod the story! The Wholesome Show is Dr Will Grant and Dr Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! Sources: - Brides.com: The 34 Must-Have Items to Add to Your Wedding Registry: https://www.brides.com/gallery/best-wedding-regi...
Mar 04, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast The early days of nuclear science were very much a... move fast and break things world. And some people? They ended up in some dangerous spots. Rod tells Will about the risky world of nuclear science at the 1940s Los Alamos National Laboratory! The Wholesome Show is Dr Will Grant and Dr Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Feb 25, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Do you get sick of waiting for your packages from your online retailers of choice? Have you ever wanted to get your mail just that little bit faster? Yes? Yes! Then might I interest you in... rocket mail? Will tells Rod and special guest CJ Josh the story of rocket mail! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, joined today by @cjjosh and proudly brought to by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Feb 18, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast Is English spelling needlessly complicated? Should we fix it? Som pepl say yes! Will tells Rod the story of the Simplified Spelling Board! The Wholesome Show is Dr Will Grant and Dr Rod Lamberts, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Feb 11, 2022•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
