1369: Trepanation & Castration | Skeptical Sunday

1369: Trepanation & Castration | Skeptical Sunday

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today, I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher Nick Pell. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. During the week, we have long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers. On Sundays, though, is Skeptical Sunday. A rotating guest co-host and I will break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic such as acupuncture, the death industry, homeopathy, sovereign citizens, e-commerce scams, diet supplements and more.

And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, disinformation, junk science, crime and cults and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

Just visit [00:01:00] jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Okay, today it's 2026 and just about everybody has some kind of body modification. Tattoos are everywhere and even if that's not your thing, most women have their ears pierced at the very least. It's not shocking anymore and unless somebody is super heavily tattooed or has a lot of facial piercings, nobody even bats an eye.

But some people are into some pretty extreme body modification. There's scarification, subdermal implants where they put silicone beneath your skin to reshape your body or things like tattooing the eyeballs. That's a thing if you haven't been watching Nightline or whatever. Even beyond that, however, is what we're going to talk about today.

Now before I go any further, I just want to say we're going to be talking about some pretty intense stuff here today so if you have small kids, grandmas, maybe you're squeamish or just easily offended, maybe it's time to switch to another episode because it gets gross kind of quick on this one. Today we're going to talk about people who want to drill holes in their head and cut off their body parts for fun including their junk.

I swear guys, [00:02:00] I wish I was making this stuff up. This is real. And so how many people are doing this? How did this become a thing in the first place? And of course, the question everybody's asking at home already, why? Why? Why? Here to help me drill into the facts is who else? Writer and researcher Nick Pell.

Of course I had to pick you for this one. Nick, it's time for another deep dive into the world of the absolutely bizarre and I'm guessing you've got all your body parts but I've never really inquired as to whether you've still got your penis. So was this the casualty of your love of body modification as well?

Nick Pell: Dude, I think piercings hurt too much. I am not cutting off body parts.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. What about drilling a hole in your head?

Nick Pell: Going to pass on the hole in the head as well.

Jordan Harbinger: So you originally pitched this to me as just being about the hole in the head thing, which apparently has a name because of course it does.

Nick Pell: Yeah, it's called trepanation, trepanning, or burr holing.

It's very ancient, and there's even a joke about it in Ghostbusters.

Ghostbusters Clip: Egon, this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole through your head. You remember that? That would've [00:03:00] worked if you hadn't stopped me.

Nick Pell: We have evidence that people have been trepanning for between 7,000 and 10,000 years.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so it's old, but damn, does that make it a good idea?

I don't know.

Nick Pell: To be clear, right off the bat, nothing that we're going to talk about today is a good idea in the least. Please do not do any of this. I also want to say that we're going to talk about why people do this and provide some answers that are more interesting than, "They're insane."

Jordan Harbinger: And just because the people doing it might not be insane doesn't make it a good idea any more than the old, "Hey, it's very ancient" thing makes it a good idea.

Nick Pell: Absolutely. Again, do not do this. But I want to provide some answers for this that are maybe a little more nuanced and in depth than just calling them crazy. So getting back to trepanning, it's possibly the oldest surgical procedure in the world. In some parts of the world, it was actually very common, [00:04:00] and there's one burial site where a third of the bodies were trepanned.

Jordan Harbinger: How many people were surviving this? Because, okay, anyone can drill a hole in someone's head, but getting them to actually heal from that is a, a whole different story.

Nick Pell: About 40% of surgery participants survived.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. You know what? Those aren't the best odds in the world, but that is a whole lot better than what I thought you were going to say.

Nick Pell: Yeah. In some pre-modern European populations, you saw survival rates of 78%, which is honestly pretty damn good. But that's the high water mark, and only available in a specific region at a specific time. It's also on par with surgery survival rates across early modern Europe, so someone really knew what they were doing pretty early on.

It's comparable to very complex cancer surgeries, the difference being that you actually need those.

Jordan Harbinger: Right, yeah.

Nick Pell: And also, they're extremely complex, whereas this is just [00:05:00] drilling a hole into your head.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. How can you tell if someone survived a surgery like that or not if you're just looking at their bones?

Nick Pell: We know because there's new bone growth around the hole. Like, the hole's never going to close, but there's new bone growth if the person survives. If they didn't survive, there's just a hole.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, okay, that makes sense. B- so before we go through the nickel tour of 10,000 years of drilling holes in the human head, I want to get a sense of how this is done, and maybe more importantly, why.

There's a whole saying, "I need that like I need a hole in the head," but apparently a bunch of people really actually do think that they needed a hole or need a hole in their head. It, it reminds me of that Family Guy episode.

Family Guy Clip: I need another expense like I need a hole in the head, and I don't need that.

I'm telling you, this thing has turned out to be nothing but a burden.

Oh my God, Peter. When did you get that?

Eh, a few of the fellas at work talked me into it, said it was something I might need.

Well, it's horrible.

And the worst thing is I found out I got it on the gay side.

Hey, are you coming out tonight?

I'm not gay. They put the hole in the wrong side.

Nick Pell: So in [00:06:00] ancient times, the tools aren't terribly sophisticated, but it's worth noting that there are flint tools from the Stone Age sitting in the British Museum that if you touched them, you would cut yourself pretty badly. Stone Age tools are a lot more precise than you'd probably think.

That said, they're nothing like a modern scalpel or probably even a box cutter. In any event- Cultures are using the dominant material they have around at the time. That could be stone, it could be bronze, it could be copper. There's some island tribes who made knives from shells.

Jordan Harbinger: There are ceramic knives, and they're some of the sharpest blades around.

So it wouldn't surprise me if a flint tool at one point before being buried in the sand for 5,000 years or something, that could have been sharper or as sharp as a metal knife. There's no reason it couldn't have been. You're chipping the end of that thing, right? So those things can get ridiculously sharp.

Anyway, it, it does sound like they're using all-purpose stabby things to get through your skull. That sounds promising.

Nick Pell: [00:07:00] Yeah. The Greeks and Romans were the first to invent specialized tools for trepanning. And to be clear, Europe is still trepanning into the Renaissance, so if you have any notion that this is savages or the ancients, that's most definitely wrong.

By the Renaissance, they have drills dedicated for the purpose.

Jordan Harbinger: This is probably a dumb question, but w- here- that's probably a, a lot of the show anyway. Was there any kind of anesthetic applied? Because especially on people during the Stone Age, I know they didn't have what we have now, but tell me they had something.

I don't know.

Nick Pell: But we can surmise pretty reliably that as soon as they figured out opiates, cocaine, and alcohol, they were probably just using whatever of those they had.

Jordan Harbinger: If you're cutting a hole in my head, I want all of them. Like, I want the fruit wine, I want the coca leaf, and I want the poppy whatever.

I don't know how you would apply that. I want all of it if I'm getting a hole in the head.

Nick Pell: Yeah. A lot of times, though, it was used to treat head wounds, which makes a lot of sense.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it does kind of sound counterintuitive to [00:08:00] treat a head wound by giving somebody a head wound, but I'm guessing they're trying to relieve pressure in the skull from a hematoma, from a brain bleed, right?

So you get bashed in the head with a rock during battle or something like that, your brain is bleeding, and you show whatever signs they know to look for, and they're like, "Oh, he's going to die if we don't cut this patch of skull off of his head."

Nick Pell: Yeah, so the reason for bringing this up, head trauma's kind of an anesthetic. If a person is already out of it from getting whacked in the head, it's probably going to be easier to drill a hole in their head.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, okay. Yeah, after a massive head wound, I'd imagine they'd be a bit out of it. So are they just walking around with an open hole in their skull for the rest of their life? Or are you just, "Hey, you should probably wear a hat from now on"? Doesn't sound like a good idea. Because I'm thinking ancient times were dirty, right?

You're walking around dirty streets and defecating in the open with no sewage, and then you can't go swimming or anything. I mean, I don't know. Do you just have a hole in your head?

Nick Pell: No. The skin grows back, but the [00:09:00] hole in your skull is going to be there forever because they remove tons of bone to make it.

Where on the head they do this varies from place to place. It's typically the frontal and occipital bones, so that's your forehead and the bump on the back of your head. We found people who had multiple surgeries. Sometimes they got more than one hole at once. Sometimes they got holes at different times.

Jordan Harbinger: Geez. This is probably a silly question, but you think after you had one hole in your head that if you needed another hole, they'd be like, "No, no, no. We're in luck. This guy's already got a hole in his head, so his brain is going to be able to, I don't know, vent or whatever you want to call it," right? Like, why would you need more than one hole?

I guess I'm probably going too far down this particular thread here, but all right. Let me skip to another silly question. Is there a safe way to do this?

Nick Pell: If you're a neurosurgeon, maybe, and even that's super risky. There's very little tolerance for error. Once the dura mater is penetrated, it's [00:10:00] likely going to be fatal.

Jordan Harbinger: What is the dura mater? Is that the little bag your brain is in, kind of?

Nick Pell: I don't really know. It's, it's like the outermost layer of your- Meninges, which I don't know what that is either.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's the- But- I think that's a sheath for the brain, right? It's a sheath for your-

Nick Pell: Yeah. I guess it's your brain bag.

Jordan Harbinger: Your brain bag, yeah. If you're in, studying to be a doctor, you should definitely maybe do some further research. But for the rest of us, it's a brain bag.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Fortunately for everyone involved, neither of us are doctors. Yeah. It does, though. It pro- it provides your main line of defense against trauma, and it keeps the blood and the waste out of your central nervous system.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's probably a good idea. So got it. So once that's penetrated, there's basically zero chance for survival, because all kinds of gross stuff's getting in there, and then you got a problem.

Nick Pell: It's a major medical emergency.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, so infection and bleeding also going to be big risk factors, I'd imagine. I guess if you don't bleed to death, infection seems like the way that you're going to get [00:11:00] taken out.

Nick Pell: Yeah. You need an experienced neurosurgeon right away if you have a big hole in your head.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, okay. So let's get back to the history of trepanning. So you mentioned that head trauma was a reason for people doing this during the Stone Age. What are other reasons the ancients were drilling holes in their skulls?

Were there other reasons? Because of course there were, right? There's going to be some reasons where it's like, "Oh, that made sense," and then there's going to be some reasons where you go, "Oh yeah, that was a bad idea."

Nick Pell: They've got to let the evil spirits out.

Jordan Harbinger: All right. I both love and hate that I can't tell if that's a joke.

That's not a joke, right?

Nick Pell: So sometimes it would be done after the person died to let their soul out. In ancient China, there was some belief that it opened up communication with the dead or with spirits. By the way, fun fact, we didn't have any archeological evidence that trepanation existed in China until 2007.

Jordan Harbinger: So they just dug some people up in 2007 from thousands of years ago, and they're like, "Yeah, they got holes in their head."

Nick Pell: Yep.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Nick Pell: Yep. And it was, like, the one [00:12:00] place where they hadn't found it yet.

Jordan Harbinger: Huh. Yeah. That's pretty neat. So basically every major ancient civilization had figured this out. That is actually interesting.

Nick Pell: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: That's why we tune in to Skeptical Sundays, folks, for useless trivia like this.

Nick Pell: This is going to be a question at your bar trivia night, and you're going to be glad you listened to this episode.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right.

Nick Pell: The classical world, the Greeks and the Romans, by the time we get to that part of human history, it's the main treatment for epilepsy and other similar disorders.

Hippocrates and Galen both recommended it for the purpose of treating epilepsy. My epileptic father, I bet, is real glad he grew up in the age of phenobarbital and not trepanation.

Jordan Harbinger: I bet. I actually never knew your dad had epilepsy. Wow.

Nick Pell: He does, but it's more like the Julius Caesar falling on the ground and then wondering where the hell you are type than the convulsive kind of epilepsy.

He has, like, the falling sickness, [00:13:00] as it's called in Shakespeare-

Jordan Harbinger: Huh ...

Nick Pell: version of it. So yeah, he just falls to the ground, and then he's dazed and has no idea where he is or what's going on.

Ghostbusters Clip: Which is great when you're a ironworker.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I was going to say people at work need to know what's going on. I was at a gym, I've told this story on the show before so I'll keep it brief.

I was at a gym back when I lived in New York, and I heard a bunch of people screaming, and my old business partner, he ran in and he's like, "Jordan, this guy's having a seizure." So I ran out there, and everyone was just standing around as this dude convulsed on the floor. And so I moved a weight off of him that he had, I, I think holding, and luckily it didn't hit him in the face or anything, it just sort of landed on his chest.

It was like a dumbbell. And then I, like, made sure that nothing else could fall on him, and then he sort of at that point, I don't even know what you would call it, woke up or, like, came to. And I said, "Hey, man. Hey, you're ha- you had a seizure. We need to call an ambulance." And he goes, "No, no, no, no, no. Don't call an ambulance."

And I was like, "Okay, but like, you had a seizure. You should go to the [00:14:00] hospital." And then he goes, "Oh, man. Hey, do you want to get outta here? Let's get outta here, bro." And I was like, "I don't actually know you, and you're on the floor at the gym, and you just had a seizure." And he looked around and everyone was looking at him, and he looked really embarrassed almost, and he's like, "I should go home."

And I was like, "I think you should probably go to the hospital, because I don't know anything about epilepsy, but you just had a seizure at a gym." And he's like, "Don't call an ambulance," and he just left. And I was like, I can't tell if he's still out of it or if he's just so incredibly embarrassed that he doesn't want to be here anymore.

And I, it still haunts me because I'm like, should I have let that guy go? I don't know. I was like 25, so I don't know if I did the right thing. I have no idea why I'm telling you this.

Nick Pell: Allow me to assuage your conscience. He was probably fine.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Thank God.

Nick Pell: He was probably fine. '

Jordan Harbinger: Cause it was scary. I mean, it wasn't like what you see in the movies.

He wasn't, like, foaming at the mouth and, like, flailing around like crazy. I don't even know if that's real. Like, maybe that's like a certain kind.

Nick Pell: It is, but it's not, like, everybody with epilepsy doesn't do that. Okay.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it was just [00:15:00] more like he was on the bench and then he fell, and I think his buddy thought, "Oh, dude, you fell off the bench."

But then he, like, didn't get up. Yeah. And then everybody stood there like a frickin' idiot. Even though everybody had a cellphone in their pocket, nobody called 911, nobody did anything. Everybody just screamed and stared at him, and then AJ ran in and got me. I thought that was the weirdest reaction. Like, there were 20 people in there.

Not one person did anything. I couldn't believe it

Nick Pell: Yeah, there's a guy at my gym who regularly has seizures and, like, I've seen him have a seizure. There's not a hell of a lot you can really do, because falling is the main thing that's going to-

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, holding a weight and falling was what I was concerned about.

Nick Pell: So you did pretty much everything you could do by moving a weight off of him, and assuming that he didn't drive home, which given that the story took place in New York- He

Jordan Harbinger: didn't drive

Nick Pell: home ... he didn't drive home.

Jordan Harbinger: Unless he's a taxi driver, he didn't drive home because nobody in Manhattan has a car. Yeah, okay.

Nick Pell: Yeah, so unless he drove home, he's fine.

Jordan Harbinger: It was one of those residential build- He probably lived in that exact building and just walked up to his apartment. All [00:16:00] right, that makes me feel a little bit better. All right, 20-plus years later, I can shake that one off. Okay. In fact, our engineer Jase, the man editing this show right now, he has epilepsy.

He gets photosensitive grand mal seizures, or tonic-clonic seizures, which are the full convulsive kind, although thankfully he doesn't have them very often. He told me that his are normally very short, and he generally doesn't want to go to the hospital after a typical seizure either, so maybe that guy at the gym wasn't acting as strangely as I thought.

Jase did point out a couple useful things, though. Clear anything dangerous away from somebody having a seizure. Put something soft under their head, a coat, a hoodie, whatever, and once the convulsions stop, put them on their side in the recovery position to keep their airway clear. Don't put anything in their mouth.

Contrary to the movie myth, they're not going to swallow their tongue. They actually will not do that at all, and you can injure them by trying to shove something in their mouth. Time the seizure if you can. Stay with them while they recover. Seizures can last anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on the type, and if the seizure reaches five minutes or another [00:17:00] starts before they've recovered or they're injured and they're having trouble breathing, then it's an actual medical emergency, so call for help.

And when in doubt, call for help. I mean, they can always refuse the ambulance when it gets there if they want to here in the United States, but you'd hate to have somebody need help and you're just sitting there wondering what to do. I think this could actually save somebody or help somebody witnessing a seizure, so forgive this little aside, but we wanted to clarify that for everybody.

And anyway, we are way off track. Take us somewhere.

Nick Pell: Yeah, the, th- there was a guy in my old man's union whose daughter was having something like 50 grand mal seizures a day. Oh my God. Like, they would do fundraisers for her. So to kind of, like, bring it back to what we're talking about, yeah, there's people who have epilepsy that's so bad that drilling a hole in your head can seem like, "Shit, if that's going to stop this, I'll give it a shot."

Jordan Harbinger: If you're having 50 seizures a day, that's one every half an hour. It's more, because theoretically you're sleeping for half of that. So you're having a seizure, like, every 15 minutes?

Nick Pell: She was having seizures constantly. Yeah, [00:18:00] it was bad. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: You can't function. You're just basically at home waiting for the next one at that point.

Nick Pell: Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God. That's awful.

Nick Pell: So some people have, like, really bad epilepsy where you're like, "You know what? Drill a hole in my head."

Jordan Harbinger: So basically you're like, "Kill me or drill a hole in my head and try to make it stop" at that point, because they didn't have medication back then. My God, these poor people. Holy moly.

Nick Pell: So the, the ancients, like, in addition to the, the epilepsy thing, they thought it was good for migraines and other chronic pain disorders.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: No one is really sure of the extent of it. Maybe common, maybe rare. We don't really know. Sometimes in tribal societies, people would keep the bones as an amulet.

It was believed it could ward off evil spirits.

Jordan Harbinger: Look, if the takeaway from today's episode is maybe don't drill holes in your own skull, congratulations, you're already ahead of a shocking number of people in human history. Speaking of making better decisions than medieval brain surgery, let's hear from the sponsors who keep this show running.

We'll be right back.

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I don't mean to laugh, but as a treatment for migraines and pain, like, "Hey, with this giant hole on the back of my head, I barely even feel the headache I had in the front. Thanks, Doctor. Thank you."

Nick Pell: Other times it was a, a rite of passage.

Sometimes this was into a secret society. Sometimes it was into the shaman class, and other times still it was part of becoming a warrior.

Jordan Harbinger: It's not much of a secret if you can tell who's in it because they're the guys that have holes in their head.

Nick Pell: Told you the skin grows back.

Jordan Harbinger: Uh, it's like, "Hey, I think he might be part of the, uh, Illuminati."

What gave it away? Well, he's got a giant hole in the back of his head, and so does that other guy, and it- they're both oozing green pus every time. You can smell them coming. It's a real secret society. Oh, God. You said a warrior kind of thing as well? Becoming a warrior?

Nick Pell: Yeah. I'm... It's worth kind of mentioning in passing that the warrior class throughout [00:22:00] most of ancient civilizations is the most prestigious class to belong to, even more so than the, the priestly class.

If you're wondering why somebody would do this to be a battlefield grunt, you're kind of missing the point. It's like this is how people got rich in the ancient world and owned a lot of property and stuff like that, so.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. Okay. I didn't realize that. I actually thought that being the priest or whatever, the clergy, was the highest.

So warrior was above that. I did not realize that. I kind of figured-

Nick Pell: Read Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche. He details the transition between societies that prize priests over warriors. That's cool. Yeah, and, like, very early human civilization, it's much better to be a warrior than a priest.

Jordan Harbinger: I guess you'd want that, right?

Because if you want your society to survive and expand, you want your best to reproduce and go out there and figure out ways to get more stuff as opposed to just like, "Hey, I'm going to be gone for a month at a, in a monastery meditating with no kids ever."

Nick Pell: Tripping my face off and-

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. "No, actually, we want you out there pillaging another village and stealing all of [00:23:00] their stuff and bringing it back here.

That's where we need you." It seems like a bad idea, though, to take all your strongest warriors and drill holes in their head, especially seeing as they were probably going to be fighting other people at some point and getting hit a bunch, maybe in the head, but what do I know?

Nick Pell: But if they survive, think about how strong they must be.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you got me on that one. Okay, what about in later times? I'm not going to start down the path of all ancient cultures were pig ignorant savages that cut holes in their head, but obviously there's a lot more knowledge and scientific know-how during the Renaissance in Europe than there was during the Stone Age or the Classical period.

So why are people still drilling holes in other people's heads or their own heads during the age of Michelangelo? Why did this persist?

Nick Pell: Some of it is for the same reasons. It persists as a cure for migraines and epilepsy. You might think that's pretty drastic for a headache, but you've got to remember there's a type of migraine called a suicide headache that's so bad that people literally want to [00:24:00] kill themselves to stop it.

It's not a euphemism. People would literally rather die.

Jordan Harbinger: I've heard of this. I've actually... I dated a girl in college, and she had headaches that were... They weren't suicide headaches, but they were so bad she had to take pills, and I remember she didn't want to keep taking the pills. And I was like, "How bad can they be?"

And this is early Google, right? So I remember Googling it, and it was like, basically she was on some sort of hardcore narcotic. And when she took the pills, she was like a s- You know when people are all pilled out? You've seen it. You lived in H- Hollywood. It was like that, where it's just like you're like an annoying, very drunk-looking and sounding person that is off their rocker, and you don't want to be around them.

And that was what these pills did.

Nick Pell: They're like a drunk toddler.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. And that was what these pills did. And it, and she was 20 years old, and she didn't want to be like that around other people all the time, so she stopped taking them. And then I remember she just couldn't leave her room, because she would be burying her head in the corner of the couch waiting for the headache to go away.

It's just terrible.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I'm terrified of these because they're common among [00:25:00] middle-aged chronic insomniacs, so every time I get a headache I'm just like, "Oh, shit." But I don't have them.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I see. You're waiting for that to... Hey, you know what? If that happens to you, call me. We'll drill a hole in your head and we'll do an update to this episode.

We'll see if this works. So wait, those, those headaches, though, those are the ones that people would take acid to treat, right? They would take drug, like crazy stuff to try and treat that?

Nick Pell: Yeah, that's another reason why I'm- I'm good with the cluster migraine. Hard pass on having to take LSD daily. Let's also not overvalue what people knew during the Renaissance.

They didn't have germ theory. A bunch of people thought that bad smells were what made you sick.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, Drakkar Noir makes me want to kill somebody, but usually not myself.

Nick Pell: I do not understand the Drakkar Noir hate, man. I love it. It's the scent of a generation.

Jordan Harbinger: It is the scent of a generation. I actually used to wear it, and the reason was, I've said this a bazillion times, I used to be the only white guy at work, and I remember all the guys, they would be [00:26:00] like, so I got some because I wanted to smell like all my coworkers, because that was like the in thing.

So we all used to wear Drakkar Noir. This

Nick Pell: is like the male version of periods syncing up.

Jordan Harbinger: I guess, yeah. I didn't think about that. Yeah. And maybe it's the smell of shame that's really getting to me. But I later switched to Lacoste when I was 17 or 18. So I basically went from a middle-aged Black man to a middle-aged white man between the ages of 14 and 18 in terms of scent.

Because-

Nick Pell: Yeah ...

Jordan Harbinger: Drakkar Noir, that was like, yeah, if you were like a cool Black dude in 1993, like that's what you wore, and then l- then I switched to Lacoste.

Nick Pell: Yeah, back home it's like you're a Italian guy who goes clubbing a lot, I guess. For the record, my daily driver is Angel because I like to smell like a Reno hairdresser.

My wife loves it. She's nodding in agreement off-camera- Yeah, I love it ... as I speak.

Jordan Harbinger: You just have to have the afterglow of cigarettes and [00:27:00] burned hair along with the

Nick Pell: Angel. Dude, if I added Newports- Yes ... Newport Lights into this scent, I would have it nailed. I walk around a d- I'm like Pig Pen. You can see the scent lines.

Jordan Harbinger: There f- there's a cloud following you. Ugh, it's so gross.

Nick Pell: But anyway, getting back to the Renaissance, there's a transition.

Jordan Harbinger: There's a tr- yeah, awkward transition.

Nick Pell: So like educated medical scholars during this period thought that wounds needed to be kept dirty to heal properly.

Jordan Harbinger: Wait. Hey, don't wash that wound.

Do not wash that. Don't get any water on there. It needs to heal. Rub some goat feces on it. There you go. That's better. Yikes.

Nick Pell: It was called laudable pus, and it was considered evidence of proper healing. So the point is- That people knew a lot more in the past than we maybe oftentimes think they did, but they also didn't know a lot.

So one of [00:28:00] the reasons why they're trepanning in the Middle Ages is because they believe in this thing called the stones of madness, and this is what allegedly causes insanity. And educated men, not illiterate potato farmers, think they can open someone's head and dig them out.

Jordan Harbinger: By the way, potato farmers, we mean ancient potato farmers because right now there's a potato farmer who is taking that personally.

So let's- ... let's make sure we clarify that. This sounds nuts, but I get... Yeah, you don't know what you don't know. I can see why they thought having pus on a wound was healing because wounds that were healing would sometimes have pus on them, right? Because you're beating that infection. But, like, you don't want to make that worse, and they made a hard left where they should have made a right.

Okay.

Nick Pell: Yeah, and it's fair to say the ancient people were getting one thing about trepanning totally correct. It's basically the only [00:29:00] treatment for hematoma, for brain bleeding. My half-brother had his skull drilled after a keg stand went wrong.

Jordan Harbinger: Yikes. I've definitely done some dumb crap when I was younger and drinking, but that's next level.

Nick Pell: He was, like, 45 years old.

Jordan Harbinger: I know. I'm sorry. I should not laugh. Oh,

Nick Pell: God. Yeah. It's, uh... Oh, it's fine. We can laugh about it, but yeah, he's a really bad alcoholic, and he-

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God ...

Nick Pell: decided to do a keg stand when he was 45 years old and- fell face-first into the pavement of a garage and- Ah ... needed to get a hole drilled in his skull to release the brain bleeding and-

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.

Nick Pell: Yeah, that and losing his CDL for drinking in one year did not cause him to stop drinking. Not a lot of good choices being made there.

Jordan Harbinger: No. Holy moly. That's awful. I guess you think, oh, you can get a traumatic brain injury or you'd need this because you get in a car accident, or you're in an ancient battle and you get hit with a rock, or you get hit with a sword or a mace on your head or something like that.

I didn't realize [00:30:00] you could just fall on your head while doing a keg stand and g- and suffer this much trauma to your brain. That's actually really scary.

Nick Pell: There's a Japanese wrestler named Katsuyori Shibata who got a brain hematoma from a headbutt in professional wrestling. Jeez. Yeah, they need to drill a hole in his skull.

Family Guy Clip: My God.

Nick Pell: You're a lot more fragile than you think you are. But it's really, it's amazing that 10,000 years ago they had that figured out. If you think about it, it's pretty crazy. I mean, the other stuff, it sounds nuts today, but you just kind of file it under people trying to understand things and doing a bad job of it.

But the brain trauma treatment is wildly accurate. They don't have the right tools. They don't have antiseptics. They don't have anesthesia. But- They make it work, and they save lives doing this. I mean, if you go back far enough, they probably saved one of your ancestors doing this.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's... Wow, that's really good insight, actually.

Sure, they killed more [00:31:00] people than they saved, but they kind of gave it a shot. And again, pretty amazing that they even figured this out 10,000 years ago. "Okay, we're noticing that people die when they get hit in the head. Let's see what's going on in there. Oh my God, look how swollen this thing is. Hey, here's an idea.

What if we cut their head open before they're dead to see if this thing swelling has something to do with them dying?" And, like, sure enough, they were right. Unbelievable. Actually pretty cool.

Nick Pell: Yeah, and surgery in general killed more people than it saved until around the turn of the 20th century. It's an absolute miracle that we live in an age where more people survive surgery than die of it.

Jordan Harbinger: It's interesting to think about that. Surgery is still a last resort even today, so back then it was like, "Hey, you are going to die. If we try this totally dangerous thing, you're still probably going to die, but you do have a better chance than zero, and those are your odds right now. So let's do it."

Nick Pell: It's verifiably true that more [00:32:00] people died of surgery than lived up until the late 19th, early 20th century.

That's when surgery becomes a net lifesaver rather than just a Hail Mary when you don't have any other options. And the Hail Marys saved some lives, but without germ theory, antiseptics, long-lasting anesthesia, antibiotics, there's only so much you can do. So trepanation today, when it's done as a legitimate surgery, is called a craniotomy.

It's much more sophisticated, much more antiseptic, surgical, but the basic premise is the same. You cut someone's head open and you save their lives, which again, it's nuts that some caveman figured this out.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that is crazy. So why are people still doing this today? I mean, I get it. If you got a traumatic brain injury and this is the prescribed treatment for such, you go to the hospital and a neurosurgeon does it.

But what's the deal with people who want it done... I'm not sure what they want it done [00:33:00] for. Why are people doing this as sort of an elective thing? I don't get it.

Nick Pell: There's a persistent myth about headaches, migraines. We know that trepanation is not going to fix this, but if you're getting cluster headaches or you're having 50 grand mal seizures a day, I can see why you would be willing to try just about anything.

Jordan Harbinger: But now we know that that doesn't work, so why keep doing it?

Nick Pell: We have a Dutch librarian, name of Bart Huges, I believe I'm saying that correctly, but he also goes by Bart Hughes, so I'm just going to refer to him as Hughes because that I know how to pronounce for the rest of the episode. He's the guy we mainly have to thank for that.

He popularized trepanation in the 1960s. In fact, he drilled a hole into his own head with a dentist drill. Oh

Jordan Harbinger: my gosh.

Nick Pell: The belief is that you have too much blood in your brain, and that opening things up is going to relieve the pressure and make it better.

Jordan Harbinger: It kind of sounds like bloodletting, where they would just cut people or stick leeches on [00:34:00] them for certain illnesses.

Like, "Oh, you have too much blood. Let's get rid of some of that."

Nick Pell: It's really only similar in that it's a quack treatment involving blood. Bloodletting has to do- With a separate theory that illness is caused by bad blood.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, okay. It's not too much blood, it's bad blood.

Nick Pell: Yeah. I believe that's it. It's you get rid of the bad blood and good blood comes in.

Jordan Harbinger: It- that doesn't matter if you get it right because it's total bullshit. So it's like they made it up- ... you might as well do the same. Okay.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I had to do a deep dive into why, uh, they stuck leeches on George Washington and killed him.

Jordan Harbinger: You know what we should do a Skeptical Sunday on, dude? You know how barbers used to be the people that did bloodletting- Yeah

and they would also do all kinds of weird medical treatments that were like- Tooth extraction ... now you get your hair cut there. But they would take teeth out, they would do bloodletting. We should do an episode on barbers, and just not modern barbers, but barbers from, like, two or thr- whatever hundred years ago, and all the stuff that they actually had.

Basically they were the doctors back then. Like- Yeah,

Nick Pell: barber-surgeons.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Let's do one on that. Because that stuff is bizarre. When you hear [00:35:00] about it you're like, "Wait a minute. What?" You don't go there to get a haircut, you go there to have them, I don't know, scrape the wax out of your ears with a scalpel, and then take a tooth out that's bothering you, and cut some veins open because you got the bad blood.

And I don't know, burn you with acid. I don't know what else they did, but I'm sure there's more. I'm positive there's more weird stuff that you would never do today in any medical setting.

Nick Pell: Skilled barbers can still, if you got, like, a crazy ingrown hair, a barber can get that right out, man. You're not going to like it.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, man.

Nick Pell: They will get it out. Oof. I've seen it. It's a sight to behold.

Jordan Harbinger: I'll stick to watching Dr. Pimple Popper handle those.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Oof. So Hughes didn't specifically trepan for the purposes of relieving headaches. He did it because he thought it was some magical life hack that helped people achieve their full potential.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Self-help by way of drilling a hole in your head. Probably worth noting that this guy, by the way, not a doctor.

Nick Pell: Well, he [00:36:00] did go to medical school at the University of Amsterdam, but they refused him a degree because he was an advocate of marijuana and LSD.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, so almost kind of a doctor. He kind of, like, made it through the hard part.

Nick Pell: Yeah, he made it through medical school. In 1964 he published a scroll. Yep, a scroll- Okay.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay ...

Nick Pell: called The Mechanism of Brain Blood Volume, BBV, AKA Homo Sapiens Correctus, where he details his theory on balancing the amount of blood in the brain with the amount of spinal fluid.

Jordan Harbinger: I know wellness culture is out of control, but burr hole for mental clarity feels like a bit of an overcorrection.

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Jordan Harbinger: Don't forget about our newsletter, Wee Bit Wiser. It is a two-minute read, highly practical, something you can apply right away: jordanharbinger.com/news is where [00:39:00] you can find it. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday. Might have been a little bit ahead of his time though on the cannabis and LSD thing.

I mean, I don't know what he advocated using it for, but cannabis and LSD are very low on the list of harmful drugs. Very low. Uh, might pass though on the dentist drill through the skull thing. Maybe I'll just stick to the LSD.

Nick Pell: Amanda Feilding, also not a doctor, but a British artist who followed Hughes and lobbied the British National Health Service to begin offering trepanation as a covered medical treatment.

She was not successful in these efforts. Her partner, Jo Mellon, tried three times before he successfully trepanned himself.

Jordan Harbinger: That's dedication, but I would say you should probably have someone else trepan you 'because it's going to hurt if you do it yourself. It's going to hurt when somebody else does it, but maybe you're strapped down.

I think the problem is trying to do something like this to yourself. It's going to be a bit tough. Wow.

Nick Pell: Or give him some ether [00:40:00] or something. Damn.

Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned ingrown hairs before. You're having someone else do that, but you're going to drill the hole in the head yourself? I don't know, man. Maybe have your barber do it at that rate.

Nick Pell: His second attempt was such a failure that he needed to be hospitalized. He was really committed to the bit.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, drill joke. Like it.

Nick Pell: Wasn't meant to be, but sure, why not? All

Jordan Harbinger: right.

Nick Pell: Feilding was a countess. She passed away in June 2025. She was also very pro LSD. So I think it's maybe safe to say that modern trepanation has more to do with the whole psychedelic drugs are going to optimize my life and Whatever, then it does body modification.

Jordan Harbinger: Tell me more about this crackpot theory about spinal fluid and blood in the brain, though. What are they trying to rectify?

Nick Pell: So like a lot of quack theories, it starts with this premise that humans are supposed to be doing some other thing. Our natural state-

Jordan Harbinger: Is wrong.

Nick Pell: Yeah. So in this case, Hughes says that when people [00:41:00] began to walk upright, the blood in their brain started draining into the rest of their body, and the c- way to correct this was to trepan because it increases the blood flow to the brain.

He thought that it worked as a sort of vasodilator in the manner of ginkgo biloba.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow, okay. So this is wildly unscientific. Also, why not just try some ginkgo biloba instead of drilling a hole in your head? Maybe start there. I mean, vasodilators, cool. So you take Cialis. "No, no, no, no, I drilled a hole in my head.

I don't need Cialis." I'm going to go ahead and stick to the Cialis, thank you.

Nick Pell: Love Cialis. Love Cialis. It

Jordan Harbinger: sure beats an, a hole in the head. Am I right? All right.

Nick Pell: Yes. We have a whole episode about Cialis and other dick pills- That's right ... coming up, by the way, for anybody interested. I don't need to do the research to know-

this is a wildly unscientific theory.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, we don't need the citations to show the lack of citations on this particular crackpot theory.

Nick Pell: Yeah, this is like Bu- [00:42:00] Buckminster Fuller saying that humans are evolved from dolphins. Like, nah, I don't think we are. But it's the basis of the modern trepanation movement, I guess we could call it.

There's also some stuff about how children don't have fully fused skulls, and we can return to this more innocent and childlike state of consciousness by drilling holes in our heads.

Jordan Harbinger: It's so easy to... I was going to say poke holes in this. That, that's a bad pun. I don't really follow the logic. Look, babies, they don't have teeth either.

Sure, their skulls aren't fused, but they don't have teeth, okay? Do I return to a baby-like state if I rip all my teeth out with pliers? No, I doubt it. Somebody try that and let me know. But you know what? I'm applying for some insurance. My insurance broker's going to be like, "No!" Don't try that. Don't do that, I have to say.

Or go ahead and do it, but realize that you should not take my advice because I'm as much of a doctor as the people we're talking about right now. That's my point here. Unbelievable.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Hughes has at least been to medical school.

Jordan Harbinger: That's true. I'm [00:43:00] even less of a doctor than the guy who's recommending that you drill a hole in your head.

So put the... Do that math.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Hughes thought that trepanation cured psychosis, among other benefits. You can find pictures of him online with a hole in his head, as gross as it sounds.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, wait. I have to look at this right now.

Nick Pell: Oh, you're going to regret it.

Oh God.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh God. Oh, wow. Okay, you're right. This is grosser than I thought. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't that

Nick Pell: I warned

Jordan Harbinger: you ... you. Oh, man. Oh, because he did it himself. Because I was like, "Why would you pick that place to do it?" And the answer is because he can reach it. Oh, man. Folks

Nick Pell: Don't Google this.

I'm telling you, don't Google it.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my gosh, dude. These people are insane. Come on. Anyway, continue. You've got to get me away from

Nick Pell: this. The segment of the show where Jordan makes grossed-out [00:44:00] noises. We're going to have a whole supplementary B-roll

Jordan Harbinger: that's just- Jordan going like a-

Nick Pell: Oh,

Jordan Harbinger: God ... groaning. Yeah, I mean, ugh.

So disgusting

Nick Pell: He eventually dies of heart disease at the age of 70.

Jordan Harbinger: All right.

Nick Pell: So he lived a full life-

Jordan Harbinger: Sure ...

Nick Pell: and he died from causes completely unrelated to drilling a hole in his skull. If you're feeling especially brave, you can watch a short documentary that Fielding made called Heartbeat in the Brain, where you can watch her partner getting trepanned.

Oh

Jordan Harbinger: gee, after that image search? Gee, I hope they have that in 4K. I will... I've got to go download that right now. That's disgusting.

Nick Pell: I'm silently woozy over here just hearing you talk about these pictures, which I have seen. I have not watched the video. I am all set with that.

Jordan Harbinger: No, I'm good.

Nick Pell: Hughes talked about achieving a higher state of consciousness, and this is one of the main reasons why someone would voluntarily drill a hole in their head when there's nothing wrong with them.[00:45:00]

No real statistics on modern trepanations, which again, separate from necessary craniotomy.

Jordan Harbinger: Right, so not like a surgery that you get at a hospital- Yes ... for a reason, like a brain tumor. This is just people drilling holes in their head for funsies.

Nick Pell: Yeah. We have one very unreliable source that says it's between 40 and 100 people.

That sounds way high to me, like extra zeros high.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, th- this is like Van Gogh cutting his ear off. Yes, more than one person has probably done it, but is it thousands of people? Probably also no. Okay, so you're saying this is probably more like maybe b- four in 10 people have done this in the United States?

Nick Pell: Until somebody gives me evidence to the contrary, and believe me, I looked, I'm going to be shocked if you can find 10.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I'm actually shocked that you of all people have never met anybody who was into this. I feel like you were on some forum or went to some meetup with somebody who did this at some point in your life.

Nick Pell: I used to be on a [00:46:00] body modification social network y- ages ago called BMEzine, and there were people on there who were either interested in it or did it. This is 25 years ago, so I genuinely don't recall that anybody actually went through with it, but that's also a sample that is ultra correlated to people who are going to go, "Hey, YOLO, drill a hole in my head."

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. If you're super into body modification to the point where you're on a forum for talking about it, you're innovating in the space theoretically, right? Potentially. Oh my goodness.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I mean, I was one of the first people to, in America to be dermal punched.

Jordan Harbinger: What's that?

Nick Pell: You know people who got big holes in their ears, big gauged-out holes in their ears?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's pretty normal, right? I mean-

Nick Pell: I didn't stretch mine, and I didn't pierce it with a large needle. I had skin cut out of my ear. Ugh. I, like, still have holes in my ears, and I haven't had anything in my ears since I was 20 maybe.

Jordan Harbinger: S- so it's like a giant [00:47:00] piercing, but they used a cookie cutter instead of a, a needle.

Nick Pell: They use a biopsy punch.

Jordan Harbinger: Ah. Oh my God. That sounds extremely painful.

Nick Pell: Uh, yeah, it didn't feel good. Didn't feel good.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God. Okay.

Nick Pell: So the other thing too is if people are getting it done, presumably they're living because we would hear about it on the news. Like, this is news of the weird.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

Nick Pell: This is a total, like, fun little headline.

So it's all taking place outside of the medical system. People aren't really advertising it when they do it because it's illegal.

Jordan Harbinger: This kind of reminds me of a more extreme version. You've heard of people... In fact, the- we do a soundbite on Feedback Friday where this guy says-

Lip Filla Clip: I am addicted to lip filler.

Jordan Harbinger: So this guy, he actually was giving somebody a BBL using, I think, hyaluronic acid, which is, like, the filler that people get in the lips, and she died. So in the UK there's a different word for it, but basically he was supposed to answer bail, which I think is go back after being bailed out of jail, something pretrial.

[00:48:00] Anyway, now he had passed away a couple of weeks ago from also getting some kind of cosmetic procedure that also went wrong, so it came full circle, and he has also passed away. And it makes, like, international news headlines because people are dying from cosmetic surgery that they're performing legally in London.

They're just doing it negligently, and people are going to prison for it for manslaughter. But it's not like, "Oh my God, somebody's doing this." It's like you're just allowed to do this at certain clinics. So trepanning, probably not legal because super, super dangerous, but it- that doesn't mean that people aren't offering to do it or trying to do it.

I don't know. I'm so curious. Actually, what law is being broken by choosing to drill a hole in your own head? Anything? It's not a good idea, and I'm sure it's against the law. I just can't put my finger on exactly which one.

Nick Pell: Most people don't quite have the gumption to drill a hole in their own head, so they outsource it to someone else.

Yes. And that someone else is the one who's going to get prosecuted for [00:49:00] practicing medicine without a license. In fact, this happened in Utah in 2000. Two guys were arrested on just that charge.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God. So for trying to drill h- holes in someone's skull? How did the cops find out he was drilling holes in somebody else's skull?

Somebody dart.

Nick Pell: Well, he was very discreet about it and sent the footage to

Jordan Harbinger: 20/20. Okay. Man. All right.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Peter Halverson was his name. He's a trepanation advocate who founded the International Trepanation Advocacy Group. I tried to find their website, and it's gone, so I'm guessing that didn't-

Pick up a lot of traction. Surprise. Which is... No, it's not surprising at all- ... because they arrested him as soon as the segment aired.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, they, they aired it? Oh, God, and then the police were like, "We should probably do something about this. We have it on tape."

Nick Pell: Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.

Nick Pell: His patient, I guess we can call him, decided that he wanted to drill a hole in his head because, drum roll, John Lennon once thought about it.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my... God, these people, [00:50:00] man. That's a ringing endorsement. I love that John Lennon didn't even do it, he just allegedly thought about it, and that alone was enough for this yutz to be like, "Who's going to do this for me? Who's going to get this done?" Where

Nick Pell: do I sign up?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: This was, like, the only news story I could find about trepanation that wasn't- archaeological.

And then there's Fielding's obituary from 2025. There's a profile about her. There's a story about how John Lennon wanted a hole drilled in his head.

Jordan Harbinger: I hope no one reads that story and decides to actually follow through. I mean, this is just, like, so crazy to me.

Nick Pell: Yeah. Please do not do anything John Lennon wouldn't do.

Jordan Harbinger: If there's no evidence that this actually works, and indeed all of the evidence says that it does not work, what are the people who actually went through with this, what are they saying about the results? Is there anybody out there that's like, "S- I swear by this. People need to do this. They need to get into this.

This needs to be widespread"?

Nick Pell: Yeah. They say that it creates mental clarity, increases [00:51:00] metabolism, cures depression, heightens consciousness, that sort of thing. You could attempt to quantify all of this, but it's mostly going to be self-reported. It's going to be very subjective. So it's nearly impossible to study on in any truly scientific sense.

You can track people, how do you feel on a scale of one to 10, but it's not falsifiable. You just have their subjective feelings to go by. They could be lying.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. If I got a hole in my head and someone said, "Hey, what are the results?" I probably wouldn't be like, "You know what? I shouldn't have done this."

Turns out it didn't do anything. I would be like, "Oh, you have no idea what you're missing. This is amazing. I, my IQ has gone up." So I was going to ask why people lie about it, but I don't even know, man. Maybe it's psychosomatic, right?

Nick Pell: It could be lying. Like you said, that's a good reason to lie, but lying implies that it's an intentional effort to mislead.

Maybe they feel something.

Jordan Harbinger: I think I would convince myself that I felt something that wasn't- Yeah ... just ouch if I got a hole in my head. So if they [00:52:00] feel better in some subjective sense, maybe in that way it's kind of worth it. I mean, placebo effect of course, but maybe it's better than wanting to kill yourself all the time if you have horrific epilepsy that's untreatable or insanely painful headaches or some other real issue.

And I honestly cannot believe I just deployed this argument about drilling holes in your own head, but here we are. I guess I'm trying to steel man. I'm trying to give people the benefit of the doubt here.

Nick Pell: Trepanation is extreme by any measure. It carries a great deal of risk, even when it's performed by a qualified physician, which again, we're calling that, um, craniotomy.

But it's dangerous when they do it. The guy drilling a hole in your head is almost certainly not a qualified neurosurgeon. Listeners can go check out the ketamine episode if they want to get a sense of how open I am to experimental or heterodox medical treatments. The issue is that you do ketamine infusion therapy, you're there with a, a [00:53:00] minder who knows emergency medical stuff, and you're having your vitals taken.

It doesn't get much safer than that. Now compare this to an amateur surgeon using a dental drill to bore a hole in your skull. These are not remotely comparable, especially given the low tolerance for error.

Jordan Harbinger: I have to say, a dental drill sounds like it's too small to do this, but maybe that's what you want so you don't actually hit someone's brain by mistake.

But still, like, it just sounds like it would take forever. I'm so curious how long this... It must be hours of drilling and doing this and pain management. Ugh, yikes. Y- I mean, you, l- look, you did also talk about how it was possible to die from ketamine in that episode that we did.

Nick Pell: And we got a bunch of people that were upset that we didn't acknowledge that Matthew Perry died of a ketamine overdose.

First of all, we were, we taped that episode before Perry's cause of death was fully established. Second of all, he was not in any way, shape, or [00:54:00] form in ketamine therapy. His doctor was just selling him ketamine.

Jordan Harbinger: Allegedly. Or is that all wrapped up?

Nick Pell: No, he, the doctor's convicted. It's not alleged anymore.

Jordan Harbinger: Got it.

Nick Pell: The point is that, uh, I, I feel like I may be overstating it, but I don't think there's any... This isn't the ketamine episode, so I didn't verify it, but I'm pretty sure there's not been any fatalities related to ketamine therapy as opposed to recreational ketamine abuse, which are very different. There was a study in 2022, anyway, from the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse that found that there weren't any, so maybe there have been some since then, but up until 2022, no.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, interesting. So are there any examples of somebody dying from a botched trepanation? Of course, in history, that's probably happened thousands of times, but-

Nick Pell: Yeah ...

Jordan Harbinger: anything that we know about?

Nick Pell: Since Hughes got people doing it. A physician watched Fielding's video of self-trepanation and was amazed that she didn't kill herself.

Jordan Harbinger: Whew. Okay, but she didn't.

Nick Pell: Jordan, there's a [00:55:00] mortality rate north of 25% when doctors do this for medically necessary reasons.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God, I didn't know that.

Nick Pell: So if we don't have tons of people dying from botched trepanations, it's because it's such a bizarre and viscerally offensive procedure that almost no one is going to do it unless they need to do it to survive.

If this became a TikTok phenomenon- Yeah. ... you would have teenagers dying every other weekend from it.

Jordan Harbinger: So the treatment plan was opiates, alcohol, maybe a little cocaine, and then a hole in your skull, which to be fair, still sounds like more fun than a wellness retreat. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show.

Your support of the advertisers keeps the lights on around here. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. So what you're saying [00:56:00] is that we have no reason to think home trepanation is actually dangerous.

Nick Pell: Yes, and your sponsors are going to love that.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a, that is a good point. Thank you for mentioning that. Don't try this at home, kids. Really, you're right, my sponsors are going to be like, "You didn't hammer this one home enough." Yeah. You know what's funny? My sponsors have never said, "Hey, we don't want to be in this kind of episode, that kind of episode."

I've never had a sponsor tell me what kind of episode to make or not make, but I, I still feel like I should probably say, "Don't drill a hole in your head." I don't know. The trepanation thing, that went on way longer than I would've thought. I thought, "Okay, we'll do a split episode on these two topics," but I guess let's abruptly transition to people cutting off their junk.

Nick Pell: Which iteration of that?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: This is another thing that doctors will also do for you.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, that's true. People who are cutting off their junk because they think it's fun and cool and trendy?

Nick Pell: That also does not narrow it down.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. All right. I know you're giving me a hard time on purpose. People who are not doing this through any kind of medical professional or under any kind of medical supervision.

How's that?

Nick Pell: Yeah, man. So we're [00:57:00] going to talk about DIY castration now, which is something else. If you thought people drilling holes in their head was bizarre-

Jordan Harbinger: I've never in my life wanted to cut my wang off or drill a hole in my head. They're both on the same level for me. They're on the same rung of the ladder that I will never touch

Nick Pell: So gun to your head, which one do you do?

Jordan Harbinger: I don't know. No, I don't... I mean, look, survivable, like it depends. Do I want to survive this? Because if so, then I guess I have to cut off my junk, but that really sucks. But if it's just you're going to die from this, then just drill the hole in my head and get it over with. I don't know. Oof. By the way, are we talking...

I can't believe I'm asking this, but I guess I have to. Are we talking about just the balls, or are we snipping the wee-wee as well?

Nick Pell: It's difficult to tell because, again, there's like shadowy scant evidence and research on this, but it seems to be the balls.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: Mostly just seems to be the balls.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So that changes the equation for me then, too.[00:58:00]

Nick Pell: It's easier to pee anyway, I guess.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I don't want to have to learn how to pee through, without it. But now there's modern medicine, right? So if you didn't have your balls, like I know guys that have had testicular cancer, and they just take pills and s- shots. It's not the end of the world for them. In fact, one of my buddies said that underwear fits way better and I don't know what I'm missing.

And I'm like, "Well, I'll have to take your word for it, man." Because not to go on too much of a tangent here, but he had one of his testicles removed, and I guess the other one also there was some risk or something like that. I don't know. Maybe that's common with testicular cancer. And they're like, "Don't worry, we'll give you these prosthetic balls."

And he was like, "No, thank you. I don't need that." Because one, it's another procedure, and two, it's purely cosmetic. And I guess after he had had them removed, he was like, "Oh my God, everything fits better. They're not like moving around weird in my pants." So he just elected to not have anything in his scrotum, which I thought was funny.

Talk about body modification. Are you jealous, Nick?

Nick Pell: Man, I'm so like, I don't feel good right now. Castration [00:59:00] is also one of the oldest surgeries known to man, but it's usually a way of punishing or enslaving people. So we're like at the other end of the, the social spectrum in ancient society from drilling a hole in your head.

This is not a thing people elect to do for the most part.

Jordan Harbinger: For the most part?

Nick Pell: The cult of Cybele in ancient Rome around 200 was the earliest example that I could find of people doing this just because. It was part of religious ecstasy. In the Eastern Roman Empire, there were castrated courtiers who were somewhat privileged, and it wasn't unheard of men to castrate themselves to gain access to this social layer.

There's also early Christians who practiced castration based on a sort of peculiar understanding of scripture. That's known, by the way, as voluntary religious castration, and it pops up again in the 18th century in Russia under the Skoptsy sect. [01:00:00] Thankfully, the American Shaker movement just stopped having sex and didn't decide to cut their balls off.

The castrati were boys who were castrated to maintain boyish voices, but these were- prepubescent children, so I don't think we can really say that they were doing it voluntarily.

Jordan Harbinger: No. Oh, man. Is that for so they could sing? Is that what that's for?

Nick Pell: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, man.

Nick Pell: It's not confined to Italy either. It's kind of the only country in Western Europe that doesn't really do it is France.

France, in an era where this was normal, was the outlier by being, like, absolutely not. And it's not a humanitarian thing. They just thought it was too Italian or too English or something. It was too foreign.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. Is this during Roman times, or is this... How, what-

Nick Pell: No, man.

Jordan Harbinger: No?

Nick Pell: This is, I think the last castrati died in the 20th century.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh. Oh, man. Oh, my goodness. Yikes. Okay.

Nick Pell: Yeah. But in modern times, it's usually criminal punishment, [01:01:00] or as you mentioned, treatment of cancer, and that's it. But there wouldn't be an episode-

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, there's got to be more to it than that. We got some time left on the clock. Okay

Nick Pell: Yeah. There's between 8,000 and 10,000 voluntary eunuchs in North America today, according to the experts, because yeah, there's experts in how many guys are cutting their balls off.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, my gosh.

Nick Pell: To be clear, this has nothing to do with transgender identity. This is just guys who don't want balls.

Jordan Harbinger: Ah, yeah, okay. Thank you for clarifying that because I know it was in the back of my head like, "Wait a minute. Is that trans people?" Because that's not what I'm asking. So this is just guys who are still like, "Hey, I'm a guy.

I just don't want balls." And it's not, "I'm a guy who had cancer, so I don't have balls." It's a guy who just didn't want them anymore and had them removed. Okay, so now we're back to the question of why. Again, underwear probably fits better. You're saving a ton of money on Gold Bond. What am I missing here?

Nick Pell: So unlike trepanation, we actually have enough people doing this that we've got studies and statistics. [01:02:00] The Oxford University journal Sexual Medicine did a study on the men choosing to do this, and by do this, I mean perform the castrations.

Jordan Harbinger: So there are guys doing this to other people who are not doctors.

Okay.

Nick Pell: Yeah, they're called cutters.

Jordan Harbinger: Ugh. And I'm guessing those, once again, not a licensed medical professional in any way, because we would call those people surgeons.

Nick Pell: They are not surgeons. The Oxford study found something that was very specific and maybe a little surprising. It does not shed light on the why, but it does shed light on the who.

Men who voluntarily castrated had 10 characteristics that kept popping up again and again.

Jordan Harbinger: Is that a dick joke?

Nick Pell: Again, unintentional.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: They tended to be very masculine. They were primarily homosexual in orientation, grew up on a farm, witnessed animal castrations, had a history of sexually [01:03:00] inappropriate behavior, were threatened with genital mutilation as a child.

Jordan Harbinger: Holy cow. Okay, this... Oof. All right.

Nick Pell: Yikes. That took a dark turn, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: They also had a history of self-harm. They were raised in devoutly Christian households, but what that means isn't... That can mean a lot of things. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Nick Pell: So we don't know what that means. And they themselves were often castrated in underground, off-the-books rituals.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.

Nick Pell: And had body piercings and tattoos.

Jordan Harbinger: What the heck? So okay, gay, tatted, pierced bodybuilders with childhood trauma who were raised on farms. That's a super weird Venn diagram. Very specific. And I have to admit, a lot of that seems random and surprising. Do you think there's an element of, like, a kink to this or something?

Are there guys who have a sexual fantasy about castration? I can't wrap my mind around this.

Nick Pell: I think that that explains part of it, but not all of it. The study from the Journal of the Archives of Sexual Behavior that gets into the motivation of men who have been [01:04:00] voluntarily castrated, as well as the ones who are just interested in it.

17% of the participants were asked about their actual castration, 78% were asked about their desire to be castrated. The problem with the study is that it has a very low N. The 17% that we mentioned is 23 guys. So it's not a lot, but probably hard to find guys who cut their balls off and want to talk to you about it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Oh my God. Okay. So wait, wait, 78 and 17 don't add up to 100. What's up with that? I don't understand. How do you have that?

Nick Pell: It wasn't clear to me when I read the abstract and the summary, but my guess is the remaining 5% are some kind of control group of guys that are just completely uninterested in castration.

I don't know.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: The prevailing reason for wanting it was what's called eunuch calm, which is total freedom from all sexual urges.

Jordan Harbinger: Got it. Kind of an extreme way to go about things, [01:05:00] but maybe would've been useful for me in college to be able to switch that off. I don't know. Kind of want to switch it back on, though, at some point.

Nick Pell: Yeah, I was going to say, you're probably going to want to turn it back on. About a third of them, it was a sexual fetish. This is kind of maybe weirdly the one that makes the most sense to me, not because I have a castration fetish, to be clear. But I think that given that most of the study participants hadn't actually done it, that it checks out that it could...

It's just a weird fantasy they have, and maybe it's nothing more. Maybe it's just a weird fantasy they have. But about as many guys just are like kind of like your friend. They just thought they'd look better without balls, which the study interpreted to mean that they also wanted their scrotum removed.

The abstract says that the scientists were surprised by the results of the study because they had expected transsexualism and libido control to be the main drivers. The study also noted that online communities give these guys an [01:06:00] outlet- Rather than just going to a stranger who likes to cut off balls.

Jordan Harbinger: So the guys in the other study.

Nick Pell: Yeah. 40% said they would do it if it was cheap, safe, and easy.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Nick Pell: So the cutters are charging apparently. 25% wanted to try chemical castration first. 40% were afraid to talk to their doctor about it. It was unclear if this was 40% total or just 40% of the 25%.

Jordan Harbinger: When are they going to come up with a plan for cheap castration?

Am I right? God, that's so weird.

Nick Pell: I am absolutely dying to know what cutters are charging.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Inflation really has hit everything. Castration inflation. Do you think it should be cheap, easy, and safe? I don't know where to begin. Yikes.

Nick Pell: No.

Jordan Harbinger: Why not? Why not?

Nick Pell: Because there's a mental disorder associated with wanting to cut off your body parts, and we shouldn't be indulging people in it.

It's called body integrity and identity disorder, amputee [01:07:00] identity disorder, and xenomelia, which is a fun little word to say.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Wow.

Nick Pell: A 2017 Journal of Sexual Medicine study found that over 70% experienced sexual arousal when thinking about amputation. This group was significantly more likely to be male, religious, and homosexual, and to actually pursue amputation.

Again, this is all body parts, not just the balls. I bring this up because I think it means we may have a fair bit of overlap with guys who want to cut their junk off. And yeah, I'm pretty comfortable saying there should be some kind of roadblock in place preventing people from mutilating their bodies because of either a mental disorder or a sexual fetish.

Jordan Harbinger: So you're saying there should be laws against this? Or what do you mean specifically?

Nick Pell: I think it should be mercilessly and relentlessly gatekept [01:08:00] because being difficult and dangerous is going to do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of getting people to not lop body parts off, balls or otherwise. But no, I don't really think people should be going to prison for it, which is ultimately the question you ask when you say, "Should there be a law against this?"

I think it's disturbing. I think that we also have to respect somebody's legal right to bodily autonomy, but that doesn't mean that you make it easy for them to make irreparable changes to their body with long-lasting consequences. There are some people who try to add eunuchs to the LGBT category, which I think is really problematic for, like, a variety of reasons.

But I'm going to read a disturbing quote from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health on the subject of people cutting their balls off. [01:09:00] "Like other gender-diverse individuals, eunuch individuals may be aware of their identity in childhood or adolescence. Due to the lack of research into the treatment of children who may be identifying as eunuchs, we refrain from making specific suggestions."

I'm not okay with even really investigating children who want to cut their balls off in a way that's going to facilitate them doing it. People can gripe about this being a moral judgment. And you know what? I feel super okay making a moral judgment about this.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. To be clear, we're not saying anything about adults.

I can wrap my brain around how an adult can feel like they're another gender or whatever. I just can't wrap my mind around kids thinking that they're not supposed to have balls. That's a different thing. And I very much doubt many of our listeners today are considering either of these procedures, drilling a hole in their head or cutting off their balls.

But on the off chance that you are, talk to a mental health professional before doing anything irreversible, please. And hey, if you still do it, [01:10:00] mail me your balls preserved in a jar. I'll keep them on a shelf in my studio.

Nick Pell: That's an actual fetish, by the way, Jordan.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.

Nick Pell: They're called trophy hunters.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. W- uh, whatever. Maybe not a shelf in the studio, but I still want to see those. Anyway, sounds like another Skeptical Sunday episode. Nick, you're up. Trophy hunters.

Nick Pell: Jordan Harbinger, trophy hunter.

Jordan Harbinger: Ugh, God. I don't know. For the rest of you, this all comes as an instructive lesson in separating crackpot theory and quack explanations from real science.

And as far as trepanation goes, I personally think it's fascinating that human beings figured out so early that drilling a hole in someone's head can actually save their life. But hey, unless you're a neurosurgeon, maybe don't do that. Thanks again to Nick Pell for helping this episode make the cut. And thanks to you all for listening.

Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me Jordan@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm @jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with [01:11:00] PodcastOne.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Tadas Sidlauskas, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, we try to get these as right as we can. Not everything is gospel, even if it's fact-checked, so consult a qualified professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and wellbeing.

Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.

We're more connected than ever and somehow more vulnerable than we've ever been. Cyber crisis author Eric Cole explains how AI-driven attackers, corporate scale scam operations, and aging systems have turned everyday tech into an open door.

So you want to be 100% secure? You want your family to be 100% secure?

It's easy. Pack up your bags, sell everything, move to Pennsylvania, and become Amish. Because I'll tell you, [01:12:00] I hacked a lot of things in my life. I have not been able to hack a candle and a horse and buggy. If you have no functionality or no benefit, you can be 100% secure. And to give you a more realistic example, my smartphone.

As soon as you add any functionality, you're decreasing security. Security and functionality are inverse. 100% security is zero functionality. What is the value and benefit? What is the risk and exposure? Is the value worth the risk? If the value or benefit is worth the risk, do it. If the value and benefit is not worth the risk, don't do it.

And the reality is, and I always tell people, the most dangerous word on the internet is the F word, and it's not what you're thinking. The F word is free. Free is not free because all the times when you have a free app, you're basically allowing them to access your microphone or your camera or your pictures.

If they ask you and you say yes and you give them permission, that's actually an authorized app and it's allowed. And the reality is most people don't even realize when they install [01:13:00] these apps, they're hitting yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and allowing access. If I want to make my smartphone 100% secure, smash it, burn it, throw it in a ditch, turn it off, and it'll be 100% secure.

It's actually freaking scary of how much you're being monitored and tracked with your phones, and you don't even realize it.

Check out episode 1247 of The Jordan Harbinger Show with Eric Cole, and you'll start looking at your phone, your home, and even the power grid very differently.