Lives after the impossible moment.
Extremes (VICE) is a measured, interview-led series built from intense first-person accounts. Its stories move from bushfire arson and bank fraud to a plane crash survivor, a coma-linked language shift, and a man mailing himself home in a box.
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Extremes (VICE) treats shocking premises as openings, not punchlines. Each episode begins with a life that has gone badly off the expected track. The show then stays close to the person who lived through it. A firefighter called David describes lighting bushfires as a teenager, facing court, and confronting trauma that sat beneath the behavior. John Rosnack recounts the unraveling behind a major bank fraud, then the quieter punishment of prison and separation from family. Annette remembers surviving a plane crash in Vietnam, waking in the jungle, and trying to think through grief, injury, and rescue. Reg Spears tells the wild, practical story of mailing himself from London to Australia inside a box. Ben McMahon describes waking from a coma speaking Chinese, then following that strange turn into television, travel, and ideas about destiny. The episodes are interview-centric and spare. Julian Morgans provides enough framing to orient the listener, but the emotional force usually comes from the guest's own sequence of memory. That gives the series a rawer texture than a heavily narrated documentary. It leaves in the awkward turns, the plain questions, and the small physical details that make an extreme situation feel real. The tone can be grave. It can also be dryly funny, especially when necessity turns into improvisation. What holds the show together is not one category of disaster or triumph, but a curiosity about behavior under pressure. People panic, hide, rationalize, calculate, confess, endure, and sometimes find meaning long after the event. The series does not rush to make them heroic or monstrous. It lets consequences stay complicated. For a discovery listener, Extremes is best understood as intimate survival-and-aftermath storytelling with a VICE edge: blunt enough to include ugly facts, restrained enough to let the person inside the story remain visible.
Made for: For listeners drawn to intimate true stories about survival, consequence, crime, trauma, and strange human decisions. Best for those who prefer patient interviews over polished narration or tidy inspiration.
What sets it apart: The show pairs sensational premises with restrained, guest-led storytelling. It lingers on practical details and emotional aftermath instead of reducing each episode to spectacle.
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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Extremes turns extraordinary first-person accounts into careful conversations about how people understand survival, wrongdoing, loss, and the choices that changed them.
Julian Morgans starts with an event that sounds almost impossible, then keeps asking until it becomes a story about decisions under pressure. Each episode centers one person's account: a banker's escalating fraud, a sole survivor rebuilding after a plane crash, a man traveling…
A $700 million fraud and a human-sized shipping crate make your comfort zone look suspiciously roomy.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A disturbing true-crime episode that keeps returning to what was broken long before the fire.
A convicted bushfire arsonist recounts the first match he struck, the fires that followed, and the violence he says shaped his childhood. The episode's strongest stretch stays with David's own timeline, letting the unease build from one small burn to a much larger pattern, then…
A coma, a language switch, and one improbable accident that reroutes a life.
The episode follows Ben McMahon through a serious car accident that becomes a life-changing hinge: he wakes from a week in a coma speaking fluent Chinese.
A prison story about the point where denial stops working.
Extremes frames John Rosnack’s $700 million bank fraud as a confession that opens in the middle of the wreckage: a snowing Christmas dinner, a drunk banker, and losses already too large to unwind.
A box, a bond shed, and one determined trip home.
Reg Spears tells the story of mailing himself from London to Perth inside a box, and Extremes stays close to the practical audacity of it. The episode keeps its feet on the ground: the cramped ride, the bond shed, the thirst, the beer that goes down wrong, the improvised escape,…
A survival story that stays close to the terror, then lets grief settle in without softening anything.
The episode follows a domestic flight in Vietnam that crashes into a mountain, leaving Annette alive in the jungle with a collapsed lung, a dead fiance, and the ugly math of being the only survivor. It does not reach for easy sentiment.
Ira Glass frames weekly theme-driven segments spanning family secrets to Portland's protest conflict.
Jonathan Goldstein tracks down people from someone's past to engineer real reconciliation.
A man identified only as David describes lighting approximately 50 bushfires along the southern New South Wales coast in the 1980s while working as a volunteer firefighter, allowing him to be first on scene to the fires he set.
Ben McMahon woke from a coma speaking Chinese.
$700 million had eaten Christmas.
Reg Spears mailed himself home.
Annette wakes up alone in the jungle.