1369: Trepanation & Castration | Skeptical Sunday

23:33If you're wondering why somebody would do this to be a battlefield grunt, you're kind of missing the point. And it's like, this is how people got rich in the ancient world and owned a lot of property and stuff like that. So I see. OK, 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. Read Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche. He details the transition between societies that prize priests over warriors. That's cool. And like very early human civilization, it's much better to be a warrior than a priest.

24:05I 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 in a monastery meditating with no kids ever. Tripping my face off. Yeah. No, actually, we want you out there pillaging another village and stealing all of 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.

24:39But what do I know? But if they survive, think about how strong they must be. Yeah, you got me on that one. OK, 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? Some of it is for the same reasons. It persists as a cure for migraines and epilepsy.

25:15You might think that's pretty drastic for a headache, but you got to remember there's a type of migraine called a suicide headache that's so bad that people literally want to kill themselves to stop it. It's not a euphemism. People would literally rather die. 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.

25:46And when she took the pills, she was like a, you know, when people are all pilled out, you've seen it, you lived in 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. They're like a drunk toddler. Yes. And that was what these pills did. 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.

26:21It's just terrible. Yeah, I'm terrified of these because they're common among middle-aged chronic insomniacs. So every time I get a headache, I'm just like, oh shit, but I don't have them. Oh, I see. You're waiting for that. 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 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. Yeah, that's another reason why I'm good with the cluster migraine.

26:54Hard 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. Yeah, Drakkar Noir makes me want to kill somebody, but usually not myself. I do not understand the Drakkar Noir hate, man. I love it. It's the scent of a generation. 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 like, so I got some because I wanted to smell like all my coworkers because that was like the in thing.

27:31So we all used to wear Drakkar Noir. This is like the male version of periods syncing up. I guess. 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 Drakkar Noir, that was like, yeah, if you were like a cool black dude in 1993, like that's what you wore. And then I switched to Lacoste. Yeah, back home, it's like you're an Italian guy who goes clubbing a lot, I guess.

28:10For 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 as I speak. You just have to have the afterglow of cigarettes and burned hair along with the angel. Dude, if I added Newport lights into this scent, I would have it nailed. I'd walk around. I'm like pig pen. You can see the scent lines. There's a cloud following you. It's so gross. But anyway, getting back to the Renaissance, there's a transition. Yeah, awkward transition. So like educated medical scholars during this period thought that wounds needed to be kept dirty to heal properly.

28:55Wait. 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. 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 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.

29:51By 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 make sure we clarify that. This sounds nuts, but I guess, 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've made a hard left where they should have made a right. Okay. Yeah, and it's fair to say the ancient people were getting one thing about trepanning totally correct.

30:24It's basically the only treatment for hematoma, for brain bleeding. My half-brother, his skull drilled after a keg stand went wrong. Yikes. I've definitely done some dumb crap when I was younger And drinking but that's next level He was like 45 years old I should not laugh Oh god It's fine we can laugh about it But yeah he's a really bad alcoholic Oh my god Decided to do a keg stand when he was 45 years old and Fell face first into the pavement Of a garage And needed to get a hole Trolled in his skull to release the brain bleeding Oh, my God. Yeah, that and losing his CDL for drinking in one year did not cause him to stop drinking.

31:10Not a lot of good choices being made there. 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 you could just fall on your head while doing a keg stand and suffer this much trauma to your brain. That's actually really scary. 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.

31:46My God. You're a lot more fragile than you think you are. But 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. Yeah.

32:22That's wow. That's really good insight, actually. Sure. They killed more 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's swelling has something to do with them dying? And like, sure enough, they were right. Unbelievable. Actually pretty cool. Yeah. And surgery in general killed more people that it saved until around the turn of the 20th century.

32:57It's an absolute miracle that we live in an age where more people survive surgery than die of it. 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 gonna die, but you do have a better chance than zero and those are your odds right now. So let's do it. It's verifiably true that more 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.

33:39And 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 yeah that is crazy so why are people still doing this today i mean i get it if you You got a traumatic brain injury and this is the prescribed treatment for such. You go to the hospital and a neurosurgeon does it.

34:21But what's the deal with people who want it done? I'm not sure what they want it done for. Why are people doing this as sort of an elective thing? I don't get it. 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 gram mal seizures a day, I can see why you would be willing to try just about anything. But now we know that that doesn't work. So why keep doing it? We have a Dutch librarian name of Bart Hooges. 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.

35:02He'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, my gosh. 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. It kind of sounds like bloodletting where they would just cut people or stick leeches on them for certain illnesses. Like, oh, you have too much blood. Let's get rid of some of that. 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.

35:39Oh, OK. It's not too much blood. It's bad blood. Yeah, I believe that's it. You get rid of the bad blood and good blood comes in. It doesn't matter if you get it right because it's total bullshit. So they made it up. You might as well do the same. Okay. Yeah, I didn't do a deep dive into why they stuck leeches on George Washington and killed him. 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, now you get your hair cut there. But they would take teeth out.

36:10They would do bloodletting. We should do an episode on barbers and just not modern barbers, but barbers from like two or whatever, a hundred years ago and all the stuff that they actually had. Basically, they were the doctors back then. Yeah, barber surgeons. Yeah, let's do one on that because that stuff is bizarre. And when you hear 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.

36:39I 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. 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. Oh, man. They will get it out. I've seen it. It's a sight to behold. I'll stick to watching Dr. Pimple Popper handle those.

37:05so 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 wow self-help by way of drilling a hole in your head probably worth noting that this guy by the way not a doctor well he 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 oh so almost kind of a doctor he kind of like made it through the hard part yeah he made it through medical school in 1964 he published a scroll yep a scroll okay 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.

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40:09Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Jordan. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash Jordan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. Don't forget about our newsletter, Wee Bit Wiser. It is a two-minute read, highly practical, something you could apply right away. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where 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. Might pass, though, on the dentist drill through the skull thing.

40:45Maybe I'll stick to the LSD. Amanda Fielding, 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, Joe Mellon, tried three times before he successfully trepanned himself. That's dedication, but I would say you should probably have someone else trip on 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.

41:22It's going to be a bit tough. Wow. Or give him some ether or something. Damn. 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. His second attempt was such a failure that he needed to be hospitalized. He was really committed to the bit. Oh, drill joke. Like it. Wasn't meant to be, but sure, why not? All right. Fielding 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 than it does body modification.

42:05Tell me more about this crackpot theory about spinal fluid and blood in the brain, though. What are they trying to rectify? 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 is wrong. Yeah. So in this case, Hughes says that when people began to walk upright, the blood in their brain started draining into the rest of their body. And the 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. Wow. Okay. So this is wildly unscientific.

42:48Also, why not just try some ginkgo biloba instead of drilling a hole in your head? Maybe start there. I mean, vasodilator is 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. Love Cialis. Love Cialis. Sure beats a hole in the head. Am I right? All right. Yes. We have a whole episode about Cialis and other dick pills. That's right. By the way, for anybody interested. I don't need to do the research to know this is a wildly unscientific theory. Yeah. We don't need the citations to show the lack of citations on this particular crackpot theory.

43:24Yeah. This is like 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 head. It's so easy to, I was going to say poke holes in this if it'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.

44:02No, I doubt it. Somebody try that and let me know. You know what? I'm applying for some insurance. My insurance broker is 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. Yeah. Hughes has at least been to medical school. That's true. I'm even less of a doctor than the guy who's recommending that you drill a hole in your head. So do that math. Yeah. Hughes thought that trepanation cured psychosis, among other benefits.

44:35You can find pictures of him online with a hole in his head, as gross as it sounds. Oh, wait. I have to look at this right now. Oh, you're going to regret it.

44:48Oh, God. 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. I warned 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 don't google this I'm telling you don't google it oh my gosh dude these people are insane come on anyway continue you gotta get me away from this segment of the show where Jordan makes grossed out noises we're gonna have a whole supplementary b-reel is just jordan going like oh god groaning yeah i mean uh so disgusting he eventually dies of heart disease at the age of 70 right so he lived a full life sure 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 your partner getting trepanned oh gee after that image search gee i hope they have that in 4k i will gotta go download that right now that's disgusting 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 no i'm good 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 no real statistics on modern trepanations which again separate from necessary craniotomy right so not like a surgery that you get at a hospital for a reason like a brain tumor this is just people drilling holes in their head for funsies 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 yeah this is like Van Gogh cutting his ear off?

46:55Yes, more than one person has probably done it. But is it thousands of people probably also know? OK, so you're saying this is probably more like maybe four in 10 people have done this in the United States until somebody gives me evidence to the contrary. And believe me, I looked, I'm going to be shocked if you can find 10. 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. I used to be on a body modification social network ages ago called BME zine.

47:31And 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. 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. Yeah, I mean, I was one of the first people in America to be dermal punched. What's that? You know, people who got big holes in their ears, big gauged out holes in their ears.

48:10Yeah, that's pretty normal, right? I mean. I didn't stretch mine and I didn't pierce it with a large needle. I had skin cut out of my ear. I like still have holes in my ears and I haven't had anything in my ears since I was 20, maybe. So it's like a giant piercing, but they used a cookie cutter instead of a needle. They use a biopsy punch. Oh my God. That sounds extremely painful. Yeah, it didn't feel good. Didn't feel good. Oh my God. Okay. 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.

48:46Yes. 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. This kind of reminds me of a more extreme version. You've heard of people. In fact, we do a soundbite on Feedback Friday where this guy says, I am addicted to lip filler. So this guy, he actually was giving somebody a BBL using, I think, hyaluronic acid, which is like the filler that people get in their 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.

49:25Anyway, 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 if that doesn't mean that people aren't offering to do it or trying to do it, I don't know.

50:03I'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. 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 practicing medicine without a license. In fact, this happened in Utah in 2000. Two guys were arrested on just that charge. Oh, my God. So for trying to drill holes in someone's skull, how did the cops find out he was drilling holes in somebody else's skull?

50:39Somebody darked. Well, he was very discreet about it and sent the footage to 2020. Okay. Man. All right. 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. Oh, they aired it? Oh, God. And then the police are like, we should probably do something about this. We have it on tape. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. 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.

51:23Oh, my God. These people, 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? Where do I sign up? Yeah. 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. I hope no one reads that story and decides to actually follow through. I mean, this is just like so crazy to me.

52:02Yeah, please do not do anything John Lennon wouldn't do. 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, I swear by this. People need to do this. They need to get into this. This needs to be widespread. Yeah, they say that it creates mental clarity, increases metabolism, cures depression, heightens consciousness, that sort of thing. You can attempt to quantify all of this, but it's mostly going to be self-reported.

52:33It'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. 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 gonna ask why people lie about it but i don't even know man maybe it's psychosomatic right 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 i think i would convince myself that i felt something that wasn't just ouch if i got a hole in my head so if they feel better in some subjective sense, maybe in that way it's kind of worth it.

53:31I 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 steal, man. I'm trying to give people the benefit of the doubt here 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.

54:24You're there with a 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. 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.

55:03Yikes. I mean, look, you did also talk about how it was possible to die from ketamine in that episode that we did. 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 taped that episode before Perry's cause of death was fully established. Second of all, he was not in any way, shape or form in ketamine therapy. His doctor was just selling him ketamine. Allegedly. Or is that all wrapped up? No, the doctor is convicted. It's not alleged anymore. Got it. The point is that I feel like I may be overstating it, but I don't think there's any.

55:41This isn't the ketamine episode, so I did 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's 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. 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. Yeah. Anything that we know about. Since Hughes got people doing it.

56:15A physician watched Fielding's video of self-trepanation and was amazed that she didn't kill herself. Okay, but she didn't. Jordan, there's a mortality rate north of 25 % when doctors do this for medically necessary reasons. Oh my God, I didn't know that. 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, you would have teenagers dying every other weekend from it. 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.

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57:54Missouri, it's the getaway that gets all of you. Plan your family fun at visitmo.com. 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 slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. So what you're saying is that we have no reason to think home trepanation is actually dangerous. Yes, and your sponsors are going to love that. That is a good point.

58:30Thank 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. You know, it'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 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 have 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.

59:00Which iteration of that? Yeah. This is another thing that doctors will also do for you. Okay, that's true. People who are cutting off their junk because they think it's fun and cool and trendy? That also does not narrow it down. Okay. 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? Yeah, man. So we're going to talk about DIY castration now, which is something else. If you thought people drilling holes in their head was bizarre. I've never in my life wanted to cut my wang off or drill a hole in my head.

59:34They're both on the same level for me. They're on the same rung of the ladder that I will never touch. So gun to your head, which one do you do? No, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, look, survival, 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 gonna die from this then just drill the hole in my head and get it over with i don't know 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 it's difficult to tell because again there's like shadowy scant evidence and research on this but it seems to be the balls okay mostly just seems to be the balls okay so that changes the equation for me then too It's easier to pee anyway, I guess.

1:00:24Yeah, I don't want to have to learn how to pee 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 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.

1:00:55And 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? Man, I'm so like, I don't feel good right now. castration 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 for the most part the cult of cybel 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.

1:01:54In 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 Skopsy sect. 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.

1:02:40No. Oh, man. Is that for so they could sing? Is that what that's for? Yeah. Oh, man. 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. I see. Is this during Roman times or is this how No, man. No? This is, I think the last Castrati died in the 20th century. Oh, oh man. Oh my goodness. Yikes. Okay. Yeah. But in modern times, it's usually criminal punishment, or as you mentioned, treatment of cancer, and that's it.

1:03:26But there wouldn't be an episode. Yeah. There's got to be more to it than that. We got some time left on the clock. Okay. 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. Oh, my gosh. To be clear, this has nothing to do with transgender identity. This is just guys who don't want balls. 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.

1:04:02And 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. OK, 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? So unlike trepanation, we actually have enough people doing this that we've got studies and statistics. 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. So there are guys doing this to other people who are not doctors. OK. Yeah, they're called cutters.

1:04:41And I'm guessing those, once again, not a licensed medical professional in any way, because we would call those people surgeons. 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. Is that a dick joke? Again, unintentionally. Okay. 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 inappropriate behavior.

1:05:24Were threatened with genital mutilation as a child. Holy cow. Okay, this... All right. That took a dark turn, yeah. Yeah. They also had a history of self-harm. They were raised in devoutly Christian households. but what that means isn't, that could mean a lot of things. Yeah, yeah. So we don't know what that means. And they themselves were often castrated in underground, off-the-books rituals. Oh, my God. And had body piercings and tattoos. 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.

1:06:02And 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. I think that that explains part of it, but not all of it. The study from the journal, the archives of sexual behavior that gets into the motivation of men who have been 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 end.

1:06:39The 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. Yeah, oh my God. Okay, so wait a minute, 78 and 17 don't add up to 100. What's up with that? I don't understand. How do you have that? 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. The prevailing reason for wanting it was what's called eunuch com, which is total freedom from all sexual urges. Got it.

1:07:20Kind of an extreme way to go about things, but maybe would have 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, 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.

1:07:52Maybe 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 outlet rather than just going to a stranger who likes to cut off balls. So the guys in the other study. Yeah. 40 % said they would do it if it was cheap, safe, and easy.

1:08:35Okay. 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%. When are they going to come up with a plan for cheap castration? Am I right? God, that's so weird. I am absolutely dying to know what cutters are charging. 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. No. Why not? Why not? Because there's a mental disorder associated with wanting to cut off your body parts and we shouldn't be indulging people in it.

1:09:17It's called body integrity and identity disorder, amputee identity disorder, and xenomelia. This is a fun little word to say. Yeah, wow. 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.

1:10:15So you're saying there should be laws against this, or what do you mean specifically? I think it should be mercilessly and relentlessly gate-capped 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.

1:11:00There are some people who try to add Unix to the LGBT category, which I think is really problematic for 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. 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.

1:11:49People can gripe about this being a moral judgment, and you know what? I feel super okay making a moral judgment about this. 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.

1:12:21And hey, if you still do it, mail me your balls preserved in a jar. I'll keep them on a shelf in my studio. That's an actual fetish, by the way. They're called trophy hunters. Wow. 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. Jordan Harbinger, trophy hunter. 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 it out so early that drilling a hole in someone's head can actually save their life.

1:12:57But 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 at JordanHarbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at JordanHarbinger.com slash deals. I'm at JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. in. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Tata Sidlowskis, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird, Gabriel Mizrahi.

1:13:28Our 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 well-being. 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.

1:13:56And 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 percent secure? You want your family to be 100 percent secure? it's easy. Pack up your bags, sell everything, move to Pennsylvania and become Amish. Because I'll tell you, 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.

1:14:32And 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.

1:15:19And the reality is most people don't even realize when they install 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 that 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.

1:16:16We'll be right back.

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