1369: Trepanation & Castration | Skeptical Sunday

Trepanation, voluntary eunuchs, and other things to never try at home. Nick Pell cuts through the crackpot science here on Skeptical Sunday. Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by writer and researcher Nick Pell https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/author/nicholas-pell! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1369 https://jordanharbinger.com/1369 On This Week's Skeptical Sunday: The oldest surgery on Earth: How humans spent 7,000 to 10,000 years drilling holes in skulls — and why survival rates reached 40 percent, climbing as high as 78 percent in some pre-modern European populations, rivaling the best of early modern Europe. When the ancients got it right: Why trepanation was sometimes sound medicine — relieving deadly pressure from a brain bleed — even as it was also used to release evil spirits, treat epilepsy and migraines, or mark warriors and shamans in rites of passage. The modern movement's quack roots: What drives voluntary trepanation today traces to Dutch pseudo-doctor Bart Huges, who drilled his own skull chasing a "higher consciousness" — a theory with zero evidence and a mortality rate north of 25 percent. DIY castration and the men behind it: How thousands of voluntary eunuchs and unlicensed "cutters" operate outside medicine, and why researchers tie the drive to body integrity dysphoria, sexual fetish, and the elusive pursuit of total "eunuch calm."How separating crackpot theory from real science comes down to asking what the evidence actually shows, respecting bodily autonomy without romanticizing harm, and consulting a mental health professional before anything irreversible. Connect with Jordan on Twitter https://twitter.com/JordanHarbinger, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jordanharbinger, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/THEJORDANHARBINGERSHOW. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] and let him know! And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/id1344999619?mt=2&ls=1 — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking https://jordanharbinger.com/course — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course https://jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser https://www.jordanharbinger.com/news/ newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanHarbinger/! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors https://www.jordanharbinger.com/deals/: FlyKitt: 15% off: flykitt.com, code JORDAN https://www.fount.bio/flykittAG1: Welcome kit: drinkag1.com/jordan https://drinkag1.com/jordanQuince: Free shipping & 365-day returns: quince.com/jordan https://www.quince.com/jordanZipRecruiter: Learn more at ziprecruiter.com/jordan https://www.ziprecruiter.com/jordanSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 1:34Speaker 02

  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

• 2:19Speaker 02

  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 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

• 3:00Speaker 02

  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, 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

• 3:45Speaker 02

  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?

• 4:01Speaker 03

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

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. What about drilling a hole in your head?

• 4:09Speaker 03

  I'm gonna pass on the hole in the head as well.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's called trepanation, trepanning or bur-holing. It's very ancient and there's even a joke about it in Ghostbusters.

• 4:25Speaker 04

  You got, this reminded me of the time you tried to drill a hole through your head. Remember that? That would have worked if you hadn't stopped me.

• 4:31Speaker 03

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

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Okay, so it's old, but dad, does that make it a good idea? I don't know.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  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."

• 5:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  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 and there's one burial site where a third of the bodies were trepanned.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  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 whole different story.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  About 40% of surgery participants survived.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Right, yeah.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  And also, they're extremely complex, whereas this is just drilling a hole into your head.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, how can you tell if someone survived a surgery like that or not if you're just looking at their bones?

• 6:37Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, that makes sense. 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 reminds me of that Family Guy episode.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  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.

• 7:15Speaker 06

  Oh my god, Peter, where did you get that?

• 7:17Speaker 05

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

• 7:21Speaker 06

  Well, it's horrible.

• 7:22Speaker 05

  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.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  So, in 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.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  There are ceramic knives and there's 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 does sound like they're using all-purpose stabby things to get through your skull. That sounds promising.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  This is probably a dumb question, but that's probably a lot of the show anyway. Was there any kind of anesthetic applied? Because, especially in 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.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:22Speaker 03

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

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it does kind of sound counterintuitive to 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 gonna die if we don't cut this patch of skull off of his head.

• 9:50Speaker 03

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

• 10:02Speaker 02

  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 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?

• 10:27Speaker 03

  No, the skin grows back, but the hole in your skull is gonna be there forever, because they removed 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.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Jeez, 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 gonna be able to, I don't know, vent or whatever you wanna 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?

• 11:20Speaker 03

  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 likely going to be fatal.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  What is the dura mater? Is that the little bag your brain is in, kinda?

• 11:35Speaker 03

  I don't really know. It's like the outermost layer of your meninges, which I don't know what that is either.

• 11:43Speaker 02

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

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess it's your brain bag.

• 11:49Speaker 02

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

• 11:57Speaker 03

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

• 12:12Speaker 02

  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 get a problem.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  It's a major medical emergency.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so infection and bleeding also gonna be big risk factors, I'd imagine. I guess if you don't bleed to death, infection seems like the way that you're gonna get taken out.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, you need an experienced neurosurgeon right away if you have a big hole in your head.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  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 gonna be some reasons where it's like, oh, that made sense. And then there's gonna be some reasons where you go, oh, yeah, that was a bad idea.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  They gotta let the evil spirits out.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  All right, I both love and hate that I can't tell if that's a joke. That's not a joke, right?

• 13:03Speaker 03

  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 archaeological evidence that trepanation existed in China until 2007.

• 13:23Speaker 02

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

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  Yep, and it was like the one place where they hadn't found it yet.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  Huh, yeah, that's pretty neat. So basically, every major ancient civilization had figured this out. That is actually interesting.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  That's why we tune into Skeptical Sundays, folks, for useless trivia like this.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  This is gonna be a question at your bar trivia night and you're gonna be glad you listened to this episode.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  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.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  I bet. I actually never knew your dad had epilepsy, wow.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  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, as it's called in Shakespeare-

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Huh.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  -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, which is great when you're an ironworker.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna 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, 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 think, holding. And luckily, it didn't hit him in the face or anything, it just sort of landed on his chest, he 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 having, you had a seizure, we need to call an ambulance. And he goes, no, no, no, no, don't call an ambulance.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  And I was like, okay, but like you had a seizure, you should go to the hospital. And then he goes, oh, man, hey, do you wanna get out of here? Let's get out of 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 wanna be here anymore. And 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.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  Allow me to assuage your conscience, he was probably fine.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Okay, thank God.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  He was probably fine.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  Because 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.

• 16:25Speaker 03

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

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Okay. Yeah, it was just 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 cell phone 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.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  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 gonna-

• 17:06Speaker 02

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

• 17:09Speaker 03

  Do 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-

• 17:17Speaker 02

  He didn't drive home.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  He didn't drive home.

• 17:19Speaker 02

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

• 17:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, so unless he drove home, he's fine.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  It was one of those residential buildings, he probably lived in that exact building and just walked up to his apartment. All 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 Jace, the man editing the show right now, he has epilepsy. He gets photosensitive grand mal seizures, or tonic clonic seizures, which are the full convulsive kind, although thankfully doesn't have them very often. He told me that his are normally very short and he generally doesn't wanna go to the hospital after a typical seizure either, so maybe that guy at the gym wasn't acting as strangely as I thought. Jace 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

• 18:10Speaker 02

  their airway clear. Don't put anything in their mouth. Contrary to the movie myth, they're not gonna 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 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.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was a guy in my old man's union whose daughter was having something like 50 grand mal seizures a day.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Oh my God.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  They would do fundraisers for her. So to kinda 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 gonna stop this, go give it a shot.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  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?

• 19:27Speaker 03

  She was having seizures constantly, yeah. It was bad, yeah.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  You can't function, you're just basically at home waiting for the next one at that point.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Oh my God, that's awful.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  So some people have like really bad epilepsy where you're like, you know what, drill a hole in my head.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:49Speaker 03

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

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  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.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  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 the show running. We'll be right back.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  At Lowe's this Veterans Day and every day, military members, veterans and their spouses get automatic Milo's Rewards Silver Status Benefits. Plus 10% off eligible purchases with no annual limit. It's one way we honor and give back to those who have served and still do. Learn more and verify now at Lowe's.com/military. 10% discount can't be combined with another offer. Exclusions, terms and conditions apply. Loyalty program subject to terms and conditions. Details at Lowe's.com/terms. Subject to changes.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Come join us on our subreddit, the Jordan Harbinger subreddit. You can interact with show fans. Me and Gabriel are in there. You can talk about the show, get some dank memes, joke around a little bit, get to know other show fans. It's kind of a fun time in there, most of the time, anyway. That's the Jordan Harbinger subreddit. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  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 can feel the headache I had in the front. Thanks, doctor. Thank you.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  Other times it was 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.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Told you the skin grows back.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  It's like, hey, I think he might be part of the 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 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?

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's worth kind of mentioning in passing that the warrior class throughout most of ancient civilizations is the most prestigious class to belong to, even more so than 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.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Read Genealogy of Morals by Frederick Nietzsche. He details the transition between societies that prized priests over warriors.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  That's cool.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  And like, very early human civilization, it's much better to be a warrior than a priest.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  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 gonna be gone for a month in a monastery, meditating with no kids, ever.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Tripping my face off and...

• 23:08Speaker 02

  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 gonna be fighting other people at some point and getting hit a bunch. Maybe in the head, but what do I know?

• 23:27Speaker 03

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

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, you got me on that one. Okay, what about in later times? I'm not gonna 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?

• 23:56Speaker 03

  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 gotta 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.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  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... 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.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  They're like a drunk toddler.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  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. It's just terrible.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  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. And 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?

• 25:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's another reason why 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.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, Dracar Noir makes me want to kill somebody, but usually not myself.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  I do not understand the Dracar Noir hate, man. I love it. It's the scent of a generation.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  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. So we all used to wear Dracar Noir.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  This is like the male version of periods syncing up?

• 26:22Speaker 02

  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 Dracar 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.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, back home, it's like, you're an 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 as I speak.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  You just have to have the afterglow of cigarettes and burned hair along with the Angel.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  Dude, if I added Newport's Newport Lights into this scent, I would have it nailed. I'd walk around, I'm like Pigpen. You can see the scent lines.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  There's a cloud following you. Ah, it's so gross.

• 27:27Speaker 03

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

• 27:30Speaker 02

  There's a, yeah, awkward transition.

• 27:32Speaker 03

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

• 27:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  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 trapaning 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,

• 28:34Speaker 03

  think they can open someone's head and dig them out.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  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 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'd made a hard left where they should have made a right. Okay.

• 29:04Speaker 03

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

• 29:20Speaker 02

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

• 29:26Speaker 03

  He was like 45 years old.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  I should not laugh. Oh, God.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  It's fine. We can laugh about it. But yeah, he's a really bad alcoholic.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  Decided to do a keg stand when he was 45 years old and fell face-first into the pavement of a garage.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  Needed to get a hole drilled in his skull to release the brain bleeding and

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  There's a Japanese wrestler named Katsuyori Shibata, who got a brain hematoma from a headbutt in professional wrestling.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  Jeez.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, they need to drill a hole in his skull.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  My god.

• 30:34Speaker 03

  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. If you go back far enough, they probably saved one of your ancestors doing this.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that'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.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  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.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  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. 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,

• 32:55Speaker 03

  again, it's nuts that some caveman figured this out.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  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 for. Why are people doing this as sort of an elective thing? I don't get it.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 33:32Speaker 02

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

• 33:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  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.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 34:26Speaker 02

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

• 34:29Speaker 03

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

• 34:34Speaker 02

  It 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.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I didn't do a deep dive into why they stuck leeches on George Washington and killed him.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  You know what we should do a Skeptical Sunday on, dude? You know how barbers used to be the people that did bloodletting? And they would also do all kinds of weird medical treatments that were like, now you get your haircut 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 whatever, 100 years ago, and all the stuff that they actually had. Basically, they were the doctors back then.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, barber surgeons.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's do one on that. Because that stuff is bizarre. 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. 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.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  Skilled barbers can still, if you've got like a crazy ingrown hair, a barber can get that right out, man. You're not gonna like it.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 35:42Speaker 03

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

• 35:46Speaker 02

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

• 35:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 36:05Speaker 02

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

• 36:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 36:22Speaker 02

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

• 36:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, he made it through medical school. In 1964, he published a scroll. Yep, a scroll, 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.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  I know wellness culture is out of control, but burr hole for mental clarity feels like a bit of an overcorrection. Now, let's open your mind to our sponsors. We'll be right back.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Don't forget about our newsletter, We Bit Wiser. It is a two-minute read, highly practical, something you could apply right away. JordanHarbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  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. Maybe I'll stick to the LSD.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  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 trepaned himself.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Or give him some ether or something. Damn.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:21Speaker 03

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

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Oh, drill joke. Like it.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  Wasn't meant to be, but sure, why not?

• 38:31Speaker 02

  All right.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  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 gonna optimize my life and whatever than it does body modification.

• 38:52Speaker 02

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

• 38:59Speaker 03

  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.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  Is wrong.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  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, 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 gonna go ahead and stick to the Cialis. Thank you.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  Love Cialis. Love Cialis.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Sure beats a hole in the head, am I right? All right.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  Yes. We have a whole episode about Cialis and other dick pills.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  By the way, for anybody interested. I don't need to do the research to know this is a wildly unscientific theory.

• 40:06Speaker 02

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

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, 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 heads.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  It's so easy to, I was gonna say poke holes in this, 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. You know what? I'm applying for some insurance. My insurance broker is gonna 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.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, Hughes has at least been to medical school.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  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 put the, do that math.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 41:26Speaker 02

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

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Oh, you're gonna regret it.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  I warned you.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  Ew. Oh, man. Oh, because he did it himself. Cause I was like, why would you pick that place to do it? And the answer is because he can reach it. Oh, man. Folks.

• 41:59Speaker 03

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

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, dude. These people are insane. Come on. Anyway, continue. You gotta get me away from this.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  The segment of the show where Jordan makes grossed out noises. We're gonna have a whole supplementary B reel that's just. Jordan going, oh, God.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  Groaning? Yeah, I mean, uh.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  So disgusting.

• 42:22Speaker 03

  He eventually dies of heart disease at the age of 70.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  All right.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  So he lived a full life.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  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 trepaned.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Oh, gee, after that image search? Gee, I hope they have that in 4K. I'll, gotta go download that right now. That's disgusting.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  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.

• 42:59Speaker 02

  No, I'm good.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  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.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, 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 four and 10 people have done this in the United States?

• 43:54Speaker 03

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

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm actually shocked that you of all people have never met anybody who is 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.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  I used to be on a body modification social network 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 gonna go, hey, YOLO, drill a hole in my head.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:46Speaker 03

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

• 44:50Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 44:52Speaker 03

  You know, people who got big holes in their ears, big gauged out holes in their ears?

• 44:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's pretty normal, right? I mean.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  So it's like a giant piercing, but they used a cookie cutter instead of a needle?

• 45:15Speaker 03

  They use a biopsy punch.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. That sounds extremely painful.

• 45:20Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, it didn't feel good. Didn't feel good.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Okay.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  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 pre-trial. 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

• 46:25Speaker 02

  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, cause 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. 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.

• 47:02Speaker 03

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

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  And that someone else is the one who's gonna get prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license. In fact, this happened in Utah in 2000. Two guys were arrested on just that charge.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  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? Somebody darted.

• 47:26Speaker 03

  Well, he was very discreet about it and sent the footage to 2020. Okay.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  Man, all right.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  Surprise.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  Which is, no, it's not surprising at all because they arrested him as soon as the segment aired.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Oh, they aired it? Oh, God. And then the police were like, we should probably do something about this. We have it on tape.

• 47:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 47:59Speaker 03

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

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Oh, 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 gonna do this for me? Who's gonna get this done?

• 48:23Speaker 03

  Where do I sign up?

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  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 is a profile about her. There's a story about how John Lennon wanted a hole drilled in his head.

• 48:42Speaker 02

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

• 48:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Please do not do anything John Lennon wouldn't do.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  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 outside that's like, I swear by this? People need to do this. They need to get into this. This needs to be widespread.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  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. 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.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Turns out it didn't do anything. I would be like, oh, you have no idea what you're missing. This is amazing. 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?

• 49:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 50:06Speaker 02

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

• 50:37Speaker 03

  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 minder, who knows, emergency medical stuff, and you're having your vitals taken. It doesn't get

• 51:18Speaker 03

  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.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  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. I mean, you, look, you did also talk about how it was possible to die from ketamine in that episode that we did.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  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.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  Allegedly. Or is that all wrapped up?

• 52:18Speaker 03

  No, the doctor's convicted. It's not alleged anymore.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 52:21Speaker 03

  The point is that I feel like I may be overstating it, but I don't think there's any. This isn't the ketamine episode, so I did verify, 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've been some since then, but up until 2022, no.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Anything that we know about?

• 53:00Speaker 03

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

• 53:09Speaker 02

  Okay, but she didn't.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  Jordan, there's a mortality rate north of 25% when doctors do this for medically necessary reasons.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, I didn't know that.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  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 gonna 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.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  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 is that we have no reason to think home trepanation is actually dangerous?

• 54:16Speaker 03

  Yes, and your sponsors are gonna love that.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  That is a good point. Thank you for mentioning that. Don't try this at home, kids. Really, you're right. My sponsors are gonna be like, you didn't hammer this one home enough. 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 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.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  Which iteration of that?

• 54:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:52Speaker 03

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

• 54:55Speaker 02

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

• 55:00Speaker 03

  That also does not narrow it down.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  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?

• 55:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, man. So we're gonna talk about DIY castration now, which is something else. If you thought people drilling holes in their head was bizarre.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  So gun to your head, which one do you do?

• 55:33Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't, I mean, look, survivable, 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?

• 55:56Speaker 03

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

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 56:07Speaker 03

  Mostly just seems to be the balls.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  Okay. So that changes the equation for me then, too.

• 56:12Speaker 03

  It's easier to pee anyway, I guess.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. 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. 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

• 56:58Speaker 02

  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?

• 57:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  For the most part?

• 57:32Speaker 03

  The cult of Cybell 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 Scopsi sect. Thankfully, the American

• 58:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 58:30Speaker 02

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

• 58:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:35Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 58:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  I see. Is this during Roman times or is this how?

• 58:58Speaker 03

  No, man.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  No?

• 59:00Speaker 03

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

• 59:03Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, man. Oh, my goodness. Yikes. Okay.

• 59:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. But in modern times, it's usually criminal punishment, or as you mentioned, treatment of cancer and that's it. But there wouldn't be an episode.

• 59:17Speaker 02

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

• 59:21Speaker 03

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

• 59:33Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 59:34Speaker 03

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

• 59:41Speaker 02

  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?

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  So there are guys doing this to other people who are not doctors. Okay.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're called cutters.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  Oh, and I'm guessing those, once again, not a licensed medical professional anyway, because we would call those people surgeons.

• 1:00:37Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  Is that a dick joke?

• 1:00:57Speaker 03

  Again, unintentionally.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  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, were threatened with genital mutilation as a child.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Holy cow. Okay, this, all right.

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  That took a dark turn. Yeah.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

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

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  And had body piercings and tattoos.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:02:03Speaker 03

  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. 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.

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

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

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

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

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  Got it. Kind 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 wanted to switch it back on though, at some point.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, you're probably gonna 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

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  So the guys in the other study?

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

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

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:04:25Speaker 03

  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%.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  When are they gonna come up with a plan for cheap castration? Am I right? God, that's so weird.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  I am absolutely dying to know what cutters are charging.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

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

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  Why not? Why not?

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  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 identity disorder and xenomelia. Which is a fun little word to say.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, wow.

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

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

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:06:50Speaker 03

  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. 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

• 1:07:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  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, mail me your balls preserved in a jar. I'll keep them on a shelf in my studio.

• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  That's an actual fetish, by the way. They're called trophy hunters.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  Wow. Whatever. Maybe not a shelf in the studio, but I still want to see those. Anyway, it sounds like another Skeptical Sunday episode. Nick, you're up. Trophy hunters.

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  Jordan Harbinger, trophy hunter.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  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. 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, [email protected], advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  Sanderson, Tadus Alaskis, 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 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. And we'll see you next time.

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:10:01Speaker 07

  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, 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 realist 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

• 1:10:43Speaker 07

  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 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

• 1:11:26Speaker 07

  and tracked with your phones that you don't even realize it.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  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.

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  Abercrombie Kids has every outfit they'll need for the holiday season. They're set for festive days ahead in mini Dylan dresses and put together trousers. And you can count on spending cozy nights in, thanks to A&F essential sets. For that classic family photo, pick out matching pajama sets everyone will agree on. Have a very Abercrombie Kids holiday. Shop in the app, online, and in stores.

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  The Greatest is the first authorized script series about the life of Muhammad Ali, offering unprecedented access and going beyond the amazing victories and moments that made Ali a legend, both in and out of the ring. From Ben Watkins, the creator of Cross, and executive producer Michael B. Jordan, discover the man who became the legend in a story never told before. Starring Jalen Best as the Muhammad Ali. New series now streaming only on Prime Video.