Nick Pell

speaker

6,131 appearances 17 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 13 Sep

Nick Pell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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head?

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

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

You gun

This reminded me of the time you tried to drill a hole through your head.

Remember that?

That would've worked if you hadn't stopped me.

We have evidence that people have been trapanning for between seven thousand and ten thousand years.

I don't know.

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.

Absolutely again, do not do this.

But

I wanna provide some answers for this that are maybe a little more nuanced and in depth than just calling them crazy.

So getting back to trapanning, 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

Yeah, in some pre modern European populations, you saw survival rates of seventy-eight percent, 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.

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