Noble Blood - ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL: The Tilly Cult

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

In 2001, a woman named Ghislaine de Védrines befriended a charming man named Thierry Tilly. The rest of her close-knit aristocratic family soon became close with him as well. For Noble Blood's one year anniversary, Dana is joined by her research assistant, Hannah Johnston to discuss the mysterious and bizarre brainwashing of the wealthy de Védrines family. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. One quick note before we start, I have a brand new podcast from IHeartRadio called Popcorn Book Club. I invited four of my smartest and funniest friends to join me discussing books that have gotten the Hollywood treatment.

So search for it now on IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. That's Popcorn. Book Club. Take a listen. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. For this episode of Noble Blood, I'll be doing something a little bit different. Usually the stories I tell are ones filtered through decades, if not hundreds of years. But sometimes I come across a story so bizarre, so fascinating, so, well, everything that I ever want an episode of Noble Blood to be, that even though we don't quite have

the established consensus of history yet, I can't resist talking about it. And that's why today we're talking about the strange and mysterious happenings that occurred in southwest France when an aristocratic family fell under the spell of a con man named Terry Tilley. But here's the thing. This story is from 2001. This is still technically with appeals, an ongoing court case in France. So take everything I say with the caveat that the truth isn't yet available to us or may never be available to us. So rather than reading a normal episode of Noble Blood, which I prefer to write for my position of relative finality and comfortable hindsight, for this one, I'll be talking with my wonderful research assistant, Hannah Johnston, and together,

We will try our best to get to the bottom of this strange, strange story. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. So, Hannah, what did you make of this story from what you read? What I made of the story, I think, is just that, you know, I've been studying history for a long time and have seen a lot of really absolutely bonkers, you know, stories from history. And this really drove home that people have always been and will always be extremely strange. And some of them may be evil a little bit. And one thing that I found very compelling about this story, which, again, we will get to in just a moment,

is I think their delusions of grandeur, obviously being a Protestant noble in France, doesn't mean much these days. But I think a sense of self-importance made them incredibly susceptible to falling into a cult and a plot that I think to anyone else would have sounded ridiculous. Absolutely. That was something that I was thinking a lot about, I think I wrote in my notes, that if someone told me that there were forces in the world that were trying to destroy me and my family, I would laugh in their face. There's nothing to make me believe that I'm that important. But yeah, I think that like the nostalgia of being a noble from a noble family and having this big long history, yeah, opens you up to being, believing that your actions have some like larger global impact. So the two main sources that I came to when I was trying to get to the bottom of this story were first a 2010 Vanity Fair article by Michael Joseph Gross called Aristocras.

called Aristocrats and Demons. That's very fascinating and I think does a really good in-depth job of getting to the bottom of the story and a memoir by one of the family members involved. But before we start, I just wanted to begin with the caveat that we're not consulting a wide variety of sources because I just, I don't think they're available. No. And whatever else beyond, I think there are a couple Guardian articles too is all in French, which I do not read yet. I have big dreams of learning it. I started this quarantine with some Rosetta Stone that is still very much in early days.

Yeah, my duolingo owl is very mad at me. But yeah, there is also another memoir I found. Oh. I'm going to really butcher her name, Guillain, the aunt or the sister, wrote a memoir with her husband that has yet to be translated. So there is more out there that if anyone reads French, I can't pronounce the name, but it looks interesting. Well, I think that is a great segue to who this family is. I think we should give everyone a family tree of the, oh, my God, and my French, I'm so sorry of my pronunciation. De Vidrian family?

I believe that. I was saying Vedrine. Vedri. That seems, if we say de vedri, is that sound totally? Sure. Apologies to anyone French. Yes, my deepest apology. The DeVedri family, which is a, as I mentioned, Protestant nobles in the southwest France, which basically means they have some established wealth. They live in a lovely chateau, or they lived in a lovely chateau with like a turret and three stories. But the family or the major players in this family, again, Hannah, please correct my pronunciation, the matriarch. Guimet, I believe that, yeah, who's, you know, an 88-year-old, older woman, and Guimette has three adult children, three children. There's Philippe, who is in his 60s, who was a executive at Shell Oil, her daughter, Giselaire. I ran it through a French text to speech, and I think it's Guilla.

Gila, thank you so much. But that's just from like TTS.com or something, so maybe not accurate. So Philippe, Gilaun, who was in her mid-50s and ran a secretarial school, and then Charles Henry, who was 53, early, young, you know, early 50s at the start of this story and was an obstetrician. So these are all professional, wealthy, established people in the world. And then the side characters will come in are the partners and children of these three main siblings. And I think the dynamic that we meet these siblings in is Charles Henry, who's the youngest of the three, is the one who lives at Chateau Martel, the family's estate because he has the income to support it. And, you know, as an obstetrician. And Philippe, the oldest, does feel like he's sort of entitled to it or should be.

But he's going through a divorce at this moment. I don't really know how successful he is at Shell Oil, but he didn't have the income to sustain a massive estate. And so it went to his brother. I think Michael Gross refers to him as a he exudes a sork-like bearing of wounded pride. Yeah. Yeah, it seems, I don't know, as in a noble family, being the oldest son and not getting the big castle is probably a big blow. So I get it. Yeah, and Guy Long, the daughter, is married to a man named Jean Marchant.

And she runs, as we mentioned, a secretarial school in Paris. And she also has a daughter named Gimette, also named after her grandmother, I assume, who is 24, and getting married to a concert pianist, which I found was lovely until it all goes wrong. Yeah, I was so excited for her. I feel like, and they had this beautiful wedding with all these, you know, Parisian performers, and then the next page, everything went to the garbage. So that was very sad to read. So I think that is probably where we meet. I've been saying Terry Tilley, but is it, is it? I don't think that I could make my mouth make the sound. I think the last name is like TIE or something like that, but it's just impossible for me. We'll just have to do the bastardized

American-Americanized version. But it's this bespeckled con man, or maybe not, just this bespeckled gentleman who begins working at Guilin's secretary school. He begins as an IT man and sort of works his way up until he's the second in command, getting paid the most, and befriending Guiland to such a degree that her husband is worried that she's having an affair. Yeah, I would be worried. I'd be worried, too, if I saw my wife, you know,

paying these massive amounts of money to some strange man who's sort of a jack-of-all-trades. I believe he got the school a whole new set of computers and nobody's really sure where they came from or, you know, where that money came from. And then he's taking all these secret meetings with her. So I absolutely get believing that there's an affair. fair going on. And then his behavior sort of starts getting even weirder at the school. He has

large imposing Polish security guards and Rottweilers patrolling. He sort of takes over the school in a way that reminded me a little bit of like Project Mayhem in Fight Club where you're like, who's running the ship? This former IT man now has Polish security guards and Rottweilers patrolling the school. But I think even more threatening. is this is where he starts telling Gila that there's a Freemason conspiracy that's out to get her family, that the Freemasons are trying to get,

first he just says, are trying to get property that the secretarial school is on, that they will stop at nothing to get this property. But then I think the suspicion sort of widened to there's this massive worldwide conspiracy there are agents of evil everywhere, and anyone can be a Freemason. So Gila starts seeing Freemasons everywhere, and she starts getting incredibly paranoid. Yeah, and I think in the Vanity Fair article, Jean is mentioned noticing that, you know, it's friends,

its family, who are suddenly agents of this Freemasonic cult or conspiracy to tear the family apart or destroy them somehow. And that's, you know, in the con man playbook, I suppose, is just the easiest, fastest way I can imagine to isolate a family really quickly and exert control. Paranoia. And especially if someone is secretly believes all along that they are special and that they are meant to hold some significance in the world order, I can understand why someone would be susceptible to that. But Terry Tilley doesn't end with his relationship with Gilin. I don't know whether the wedding was where he met the rest of the family, but I do like that sort of as a set piece as the idea where this is sort of where he infiltrates the rest of the family. So at Gilan's daughter, Guimette's wedding, where she's, as we mentioned before, marrying a, seems lovely, a pianist named Sebastian.

Terry begins befriending and flattering the other members of the family. And they mentioned that he is an excellent flatterer. Like he'll go up to Philippe, who's that Shell Oil executive and say, like, you should be running Shell Oil. He appeals to that sense of grandeur in a way that is interesting to me because looking at pictures of Terry Tilly, he's not a striking, conventionally attractive or imposing man. He's, he looks, you know, he's on the smaller side. He wears glasses. He looks like a regular, like, IT guy. And I wonder if because he doesn't seem as imposing, it's almost more seductive in a way.

Like, he doesn't look like a con man, right? He doesn't look like a handsome, slick, greasy guy. Yeah, I remember Christine in her memoir talking about she met him once before meeting him officially. like she met this guy who wasn't introduced by name and he looked slimy and greasy and disgusting and she remarks that if she had known at the time that this was Tilly she would have never gone near him

and he's never described as particularly handsome or dashing or even very charming he kind of starts out very shaking hands so hard that he's hurting people and I don't know normally these kinds of guys are very charismatic and often attractive, but he does not fit the part perfectly. No, which is, you know, makes it a little chilling. You know, cult I know is a loaded word, but it does seem, especially with Gilin, that she becomes brainwashed with with paranoia and really falls under Tilly's spell to the degree at which there's this bizarre incident.

where her husband, Jean, Jean Marchand, who had been skeptical to say the least about her paranoia, about the Freemasons, she confronts him with a wearing a cocktail dress with a fistful of dried flowers and a gardening glove. She throws the flowers and gloves in his face, tells him that he's an agent of evil, I believe it was, part of an evil network, rather, tells him that he has half an hour to pack and that she wants a divorce. He's physically restrained by then her two other brothers, Philippe and Charles Henry,

and forced to leave the house. And then in an incredibly chilling moment, he sees an email from Tilly to his now ex-wife telling her to do exactly what she said she was going to do. like telling her, okay, throw dried flowers and a glove in his face and tell him he's part of an evil network. So he has infiltrated her to such a degree that she's obeying him in these bizarre instructions to throw her husband out of the house. And it's really heartbreaking. Jean describes it as feeling like her brain had been replaced that Terry Tilly had stolen her brain.

Yeah, I really love the description of him as a brain burglar, which is a delightful, if upsetting phrase. Yeah, just wild. It seems to me that the next few events that happen with his family, we have Gislaas stop paying teachers at her secretarial school. And they just kept teaching. Yeah, they kept teaching. I guess they're, you know, hoped that it would stop eventually and she would start paying them, I imagine. I guess so.

But then she shut it down, right? Yeah. She just closed the whole thing. Shuts the school down. Stops paying electricity and power. Because then for a brief period after her divorce, which I could not make heads or tales of, she, her brother, Philippe, the Shell Oil one, and Philippe's girlfriend, Brigitte, all live on the top floor of this secretarial school with no power or electricity.

I mean, the only explanation I could have is that, you know, Terry Tilly told them, like, your house is being watched and, you know, you need to live off the grid for a little bit or something like that, because we don't really get an explanation of that brief period. No, and there are a couple of other episodes of various members of the family being forced to or, for some reason, choose to have their own accord, live in abandoned buildings, it seems. like the Christine and Charles Henri's son Amari. Yeah, one of the younger sons lived in an abandoned office building for several months, and that was played as some sort of punishment. But Guillain was never really punished because she was so close to Tilly. She was sort of the central point of contact between him and Gillen's, you know, family and not friends, just family.

Yeah, well, it's about this point. I would imagine that basically the entire family now moves in to the ancestral chateau, and everyone becomes isolated from their friends and the family that is not part of this. The young bride, Gimet, leaves her new pianist husband, like right away. Three months after the wedding, leaves him, moves back. Charles Henry, the obstetrician, just leaves his practice without warning to his partners or patience. Everyone just seems like leaves their jobs, leaves their significant others. Charles Henry's wife, Christine, who becomes a major player in this,

cuts off contact with her friends. And when her friends try to reach out to her, she's like, it's a family. It's a really important family thing that's happening right now. So at this point, all of them sell their external properties, the properties that aren't this house. So all the places that they had been living and all the savings and money they had and they give all of their money to Tilly.

Yeah. So now it's 11 people, I think, living at this of the castle, I guess. Yeah, like this nice medium-sized estate. Three generations from Gimet, the 88-year-old grandmother. I think the youngest is Diane at 16, who is Charles Henry and Christine's daughter.

So the children in play, we already talked about Guilin's daughter, the bride who leaves her husband. She has a brother, Francois. But I think the main child who becomes a character in this story for bizarre reasons is, and this is the problem with aristocratic French families that they all name their kids, the exact same things. Guillaume, right? Is that how you would say it?

I would suppose so. I think so. That's how I've been pronouncing it in my head. Guillaume, who is Charles Henry, the obstetrician, the oldest adult son, and Christine's oldest son. Yeah, he does a lot of crazy stuff that I am very excited to get into. So let's talk about this period where the family is living at the estate together. Sure. Yeah, I think I know, yeah, there were 11 of them living in the house. I know at some point Diane was sent away. She went to boarding school. And I think this may have been before Chau-Hs-Hen-Rie was kind of back in a picture.

For a while, he was in Bordeaux with, I guess, still with his practice at the time. And then there were 11 people at the estate at Martel. At some point, I think in somewhere between 2002 and 2003, Tilly ordered everyone to banish clocks and calendars from their chateau, which meant they had no reference of time or what day it was, which is another tried and true brainwashing tactic of just disorienting the people that you're trying to manipulate. So they're all living sequestered in this house, no idea what day it is. They're in the news for a while as like the famous recluses of their town, which is, I believe, pronounced mon flanca.

That seems right. Yeah, so basically the only interest in them up until this point is sort of tabloid interest where people are like, isn't it weird that this, you know, wealthy family is just all sequestered in their house and cut off contact with everyone? It's sort of like a, just a weird bit of news, but the true bizarre nature of the story doesn't really unfold until later. I mean, they stop, so they stop paying taxes. Yeah.

And so the French government reclaims furniture, just comes in and, you know, possesses everything. Repossess, that's the word, thank you, repossesses everything. And so then you just imagine this family of 11 formerly wealthy people living in creepy, abandoned squalor, terrified that Freemasons are going to kill them. and Terry Tilly sort of keeps his leadership by saying that he's a member of this organization and in touch with a character that I still do not understand. And I think the main reason that I'm very confused by this is he says that the leader of the

secretive organization is a man named Jacques Gonzalez. Oh, I have no idea what to make of him. Christine talks about him like once in her book and Vanity Fair article. talks about him like once or twice. He's an enigma. And Guiam will try to appear as him later or try to pose as him. I think my favorite incident of this story.

But so that's, I think part of the shadowy thing that Tilly does is he just makes them feel like something much bigger than them is going on where he'll take calls from like this mysterious leader, Jacques Gonzalez, who he says is connected to the Spain, Spanish king. So it doesn't seem like Tilly is the head of this. He's just the reliable go-between between this family and some legitimate, terrifying organization. But eventually then this family moves to Oxford. Do you want to take over and talk a bit about what happens when this family

moves to England? Sure. So by my count, we're now in around 2005. So at some point, Between 2003 and 2005, Tilly moved his family, his wife, Jessica, and they think he had a few children, and someone had a child from a previous marriage. They moved to Oxford, mostly because Tilly was facing some legal problems in France. I don't quite understand the French legal system, but it looked sort of like embezzlement or something adjacent to that. And it also seemed to me that, Tilly was getting a little nervous about the French tabloid interest in this family. I think that as a, as an organization or as a con, it thrived in secrecy. Absolutely. And I don't think he wanted the, you know, as a local rich family, they were, they were an object of interest. And he moves them in

various in drips and drabs, both to his shabby apartment. And when I say Oxford, we're not like, we're not at the university. This is like the bleak suburbs of Oxford. The outskirts. So he moves them in drips and drabs. And they've always been civilians, but become invisible working class people deeply embroiled in this cult. I mean, cult is so weird because it's one family, but I'm just trying to communicate like the, it seems the brainwashing and commitment to these beliefs. Yeah, I mean, I think a cult is a reasonable way of describing it or maybe a sect of some kind. They didn't have like a religious aspect, which maybe makes it different from other kinds of cults, but there are so few words to describe what was happening to this family.

It's an irrational set of beliefs that they are so committed. to that they forego the rest of their lives. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like the outside world, that they cut off their friends and their jobs. And they become deeply devoted to Tilly. So with them living, various family members come over at various points. And then they start working at menial jobs.

They had been, you know, working class professionals. And they all sort of get jobs like sweeping the floor at Nando's at fast food restaurants. Yeah, so by, I think it's 2006, there are Christine and Charles Henri and the rest of their children other than Guillaume, who had been there for a while, come and take these jobs. And, yeah, Diane, I believe, is the one working at Nando's. And they're all working these, yeah, these menial, manual labor type jobs. They're working insane hours so that they're sleeping maybe three or four hours a night. and they're giving, I think it's 90% of their pay went directly to Tilly without any, you know, any negotiation of any kind. So they're working, you know, some of them are working more than two jobs.

I think Yom was, he was the only one with a college degree in that of the children. So he's working, I think, a little bit more professionally. He was working at an archaeological firm of some kind. But he was also bartending at night. and he was responsible for caring for Tilly's children. That's just inhuman work schedule, which obviously was by design so that they're too exhausted to really consider their situation at all.

That is a real cult technique, the lack of the manipulation through lack of sleep. Yeah, and that comes into play later when Christine and the rest are all sequestered for two weeks in this creepy, empty house in Oxford. Yeah. So to set the scene, again, the members of the family that had formerly been white collar professionals, wealthy members of the French aristocracy are now in dingy apartments working one to two menial jobs,

constantly giving almost all their income to Tilly and listening to whatever he says, which I think as he teased very nicely would lead to them being sequestered. This is a dark period. And I think Christine, her memoir was definitely the source I went to for this story because she was the victim of a lot of this. Do you want to take over what happened here? Sure. So, yes, Oxford is kind of where, at least from my perspective, everything comes to a head. And it really all focuses on Christine, who, if you'll remember, is Charles Henri's.

wife and the mother of several of these children. She and Charles Henri had moved to Oxford in 2006 and pretty much immediately Christine was punished for being a liar or being dishonest with her husband and she was sequestered almost entirely alone in a room, a pretty, you know, threadbare furniture. She talks about this, I suppose, it's some sort of comforter that she really liked, that Tilly took away. And she was sequestered for, I think, from November 2006 until spring 2007, she was alone most of the time. And she was forced to write every day. And I believe it's around this time that the idea of the transmission and the L'Aquilibre du monde begins to come up And Christine is really at the center of that.

Yeah, le quibly demand, again, which I will not try to pronounce, to me just read as the big evil organization that Tilly sets them up that he says is out to get them in the world, sort of the free mason version of the story. And he has it in his mind and convinces the rest of the family, including Christine, that Christine is secretly the key and knows. deep down the numbers to this Belgian bank account that will have more gold and riches than anyone can ever imagine. And that for some reason, Christine either doesn't remember or won't tell them the numbers. And what happens now is her family, including her children and her husband, I mean, they torture her. Yes.

Yeah. They, I think, thankfully, her children were not there, or at least if they, They were there. It would have been just Guillaume. I think, I think, Guillaume was there. But they, for about two weeks in January 2008. And this is also after Tilly had made Christine go with, I believe, Guillaume to Brussels, and try to access safe deposit box at nearly every bank in the city. Because I guess that would be a way of getting around whatever number he believed or wanted her to believe that she, had in her, you know, the recesses of her mind. But eventually that didn't work. And for two weeks in this, you know, very empty, Christine describes it as completely neutral, very, very creepy house. Christine and the family are their deprived of sleep. And Christine in particular is not allowed to sleep at certain point. She's not allowed to use the restroom. She's forbidden from eating.

and at some point Tilly, in trying to get her to reveal this number that she is either suppressing or purposely hiding, he punches her several times in the back, at which point everything sort of falls apart and different family members are then accused of maybe they're the one hiding this special number that, you know, apparently this transmission is passed down through, you know, the most important families in, all of France or the worlds that will access them this money that would supposedly get them out of all the financial trouble they've been building up since their relationship with Tilly began. I believe it was Christine, but I might be incorrect and who said this, made an interesting point that you'd think with a large number of people that they wouldn't have been as susceptible to Tilly's like in the abstract, ludicrous things. But she points out like with a large number of people that you all trust, and it's your support system in the world that whenever anyone pointed out

that a thing seemed ridiculous, then there were immediately, you know, 10 other people who could tell you, no, no, you know, you're being silly and justified to yourself. It was sort of this self-reinforcing thing where the group itself convinced itself that these things were less ludicrous

than they sound when you just hear about them in the abstract in isolation. Yeah, absolutely. And I think by this time, too, they're, you know, they've been isolated from the rest of the world from really anyone who could tell them, hey, this is absolutely crazy for what, almost, you know, seven years, six years. And they'd been, you know, they'd already been through the rigamarole of sleep deprivation. And, you know, none of them had seen clocks or calendars for years and years at that point. So if I were in that position, I'd, believe anything anyone told me because that's their only point of reference for the world. And at this point, you have no friends, you have no job, you're heavily in debt back in France, you know, and in trouble financially. And your entire family and your support network is here

believing all these things. It would be, it's incredibly hard to get out of that. Yeah. And if you believed even for a second that you had something in your brain that could make it all go away and and the torture and, you know, get your chateau back and all the, you know, comforts that you've lost, I would, I'd believe it too. I would, I don't know, I'd try. That's the really heartbreaking thing is Christine, even as she's being tortured and not allowed to eat and not allowed to use the bathroom, she is angry at herself because she also believes that she does have that key, and she's just mad that she can't remember it. Yeah, that was very, very, very, very. hard to read. And I think Christine's writing obviously has the hindsight of, you know, now knowing

that it was ridiculous, which I think softened it a little bit, but realizing, I don't know, the feeling of thinking about being in that position was very hard. And there's one more thing that I wanted to point that happens at some point when they're in Oxford. But I take it with a grain of salt because I know that from what I've read, they're trying to challenge this legally to be able to get their chateau back. I read actually that that was rejected in 2018. So the story might be over it. They might not get it back. Oh, I don't think so. They're not going to get it back. So basically what happened is Charles Henry, who Charles Henry, again, my pronunciation, I'm so sorry, is depending what you believe, either tricked or voluntarily signs over the chateau to Tilly. This family estate that's

been in the family for generations. And I think in hindsight, when the family gets out of this, is the most heartbreaking loss. And as I said, I guess no longer ongoing court case, they tried to challenge it to get the Chateau back. But I guess it is gone. Yeah, I Google translated a French article that apparently they, obviously, they contested the sale because it was under false pretenses.

I believe they claimed that they were told that they were filing a mortgage or putting it in some sort of, trust or i don't know any financial buzzwords but they they believed that it was kind of waiting for them when they had the money to get it back um but then someone bought it and apparently it's a nice family lives there now or at least was uh at last at press time a mom with a kid it sounded like yeah but this article says that they the court of appeals rejected them in 2018 so i mean maybe they could buy it back someday. I don't think it precludes them ever getting it back, but not in the way that

they want, I think. And while they're in Oxford, this is also, there's a lot of complicated family infighting that happened that I don't think it's worth getting quite into that just because it becomes challenging, you know, various family members at different points are leaving and coming and challenging each other. Yeah, a lot of lawsuits that I couldn't quite follow. But one, One really strange thing that happened that I cannot wait to talk about is Guillaume, the 20-something son of Charles Henry and Christine, sort of becomes Tilly's right-hand man for a time period until he sort of cut himself off from Tilly, seems to be doing his own thing in a weird way. and then one day he shows up at the DMV wearing a latex mask that the Vanity Fair article Michael Gross, I think very generously refers to it as a like Mission Impossible style latex mask. But you look at the photos and it is a...

It's very scary to look at. It's a Mike Myers Halloween mask. Apparently it costs like $1,600 or I suppose the equivalent. And I'm like, I don't know who, you know, who sold him that mask, but it did not look worth almost $2,000 to me. And he said it was professionally, like, glued on. And you look at it and you're like, that does not look professionally glued on. That con.

The fact that he looked in the mirror and it's like, yep, people fall for this is just shows how out of touch he's been with the rest of the world. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, the Vanity Fair article, I think also has a security still. of Guillaume, he went to the DMV to try to take a driving test, and this mask was supposed to disguise him as the ever-elusive Jacques Gonzalez. He looks ridiculous. He shows up with this mask on to disguise himself.

They call the police because they're like, this is weird. A guy just showed up in a Halloween mask and is insisting it's his face. But he says his name is Jacques Gonzalez, which to me, This isn't really explored, but I think my gut was like, I think he was trying to pull like a Shawshank Redemption. You know how in Shawshank Redemption, if you've seen it at the end, Andy Dufrain uses the fake name and has all the fake identification to claim all the money that he stowed away? I feel like he was at, Guillaume was at the DMV to try to get like a fake driver's license for Jacques Gonzalez as himself so that he could claim. I don't know, some money, whatever money had been funneled his way,

like a sort of backwards con, I believe that. Yeah. I found it very strange that Christine did not mention this bizarre episode, I don't think, at all, in her memoir, which makes me think maybe it's not

as flattering of a motive as we would like to believe, or at least that was my first instinct, but I don't know. Absolutely. I did sort of sense the Vanity Fair article interviews a bunch of other, you know, auxiliary people to the story, people who were affected

by, like, you know, teachers at the secretarial school and friends who, the people who were still owed a lot of money by this family that was con. Yeah. And they do say like, okay, well, sure, this con, that's convenient, but like they were in on it to some degree and they owe us a lot of money. Although, you know, you do say, like, if this family was in it for money, they do not end up with money. They lose... No. Like almost 5 million euros. Five million euros.

They lose their chateau. But you do wonder what Guillaume is playing at with this whole charade because it's bizarre. Showing up in a Mission Impossible Style mask, trying to get a driver's license under a fake name and spending $1,600 on it, money that is, as he pointed out in some notes, we don't know where he got that money because it seems like for the most. part of the family was giving it directly to Tilly. So maybe Tilly was also in on this, or he sort of had siphoned things away from it?

There's a lot of money that's, as far as I know, still unaccounted for. And some of it actually seems to tie back to Guillaume, which I find also a little bit suspicious, interesting. Because he was the intermediary, I believe is the right word, in the sale of Martel that, you know, took the, rug out from everybody else. I don't wish to spin conspiracies, conspiracies on conspiracies, but I think Christine's memoir does, I read that before I read the Vanity Fair article, and I don't think that her memoir really dives into Geyon's role as much as, I mean, I would, don't fault

her at all, that's her son, but yeah, there's a lot left unsaid, I think. I think that's the reason why I felt like I couldn't make this a normal Noble Blood episode. One, because it's weirdly complicated, but also because there is that sort of pat narrative that Christine tells that I think is fascinating and makes sense, where it's this noble family, they fall into this con man's grasp, and then they get out, and that does paint them as the victims entirely when you read the Van de Fair story, which is more nuanced and more complicated, and you're like, okay, well, Guillaume was doing something. he sort of became Tilly's right-hand man.

Something was happening with him and with this shady Jacques Gonzalez figure who turns out to be a real person. Yeah, I was surprised. Me too. I thought he was just Tilly in a mustache, a fake mustache. In a hat, yeah. But no, he's a real guy. I loved the story about the journalist who wrote the Vanity Fair article showing up and the guy pretends to have no idea what's going. going on. And he's like, oh, maybe I went to the wrong shot Gonzalez. And then six months later,

he's arrested. Yeah. Maybe he did go to the wrong Shaq Gonzalez. And that's just a patsy. And that's just a patsy. Oh, my God, that another Jacques Gonzalez has been, has been framed in a double conspiracy. Yeah. But I think this is a good segue to talk about the rescue and end game. And I think the MVP of the story, Baron Bobby. Oh, my God. I was like, oh, I love you. The noble that this story deserves. I also feel like I've been to his, I studied abroad in Oxford one summer and I think I've been to his cheese cart.

Oh my God. In the covered market. I obviously never met him, but I had the cheese. Okay, so for context, the entire family is working these menial jobs. And Christine, the wife of Charles Henry again, is working in the back. kitchen of this cheese shop in Oxford's covered market run by a man named Baron Bobby. And that's just his nickname. His family had been bestowed a baroncy by Napoleon. So it's not, he's not old

aristocracy. And again, the title doesn't mean much to him. And I think it's, it's very interesting and charming to frame these two characters as ones who both have French titles. And, you know, Baron Bobby mentions that they love speaking friends to each other. But I feel like he sort of takes it with a good nature. He doesn't take it very seriously. And the Dividrine family maybe took it too seriously in a way that made them vulnerable. But basically, Christine sort of slowly over her friendship with Bobby, working there, speaking French, hanging out, starts revealing drips of her homeless.

life at this point and the story and the way that her family had succumbed to Tilly and the way they had, you know, tortured her for two weeks while she couldn't remember the bank account info. And she was saying how apologetic she was for not knowing the bank info. And Bobby is the one he was like, what are you talking about? That's insane. And she's like, no, Terry's incredibly powerful and connected. And I think Bobby at this point is like, no, he's just a little creep. Yeah, oh, I love that. What a good man. What a good man. And he's the one who facilitates Christine getting in touch with some of her old friends in France,

eventually escaping, returning to France, and reporting to the French government, everything that's been happening with Tilly. And then a warrant is put out for his arrest. Yes. But he does manage to avoid it for a little while. Yes, because he's in Oxford. Yeah. and the English government is less than helpful.

Yes. Which maybe isn't surprising. I don't know. He makes the terrible decision of taking a trip to Zurich. Yeah, that just seems stupid to me. Yeah, if you're about to, if you're engaging in a vast international conspiracy, you want to restrict your travel from countries that have extradition treaties. Exactly.

I don't know. After all, that was, I mean, I was glad he got arrested, obviously. but after almost nine years now, almost a decade of, you know, everything's planned to a tea, everything's so perfect, he has it all figured out, he goes on a trip. Yeah, he just goes on a little vacation because he wants to get away from this family for a bit, I guess. I don't know. Seems like a dumb move to me. But it also seemed like his entire thing was by the seat of his pants. I mean, this isn't. That's true. Because for a conspiracy, it's only focused on one rich family. Yeah, and not even a big time. It's not like they're the bourbons or anything.

No, I believe that. I mean, look, $5 million, $5 million, is nothing to shake your fist out. I wish I had $5 million. But for 10 years and this massive conspiracy, you're like, what is his endgame here? I guess he just wanted to have control over people? Yeah, because eventually he'd just milk them for all they were worth and was just continuing to be mean to them. And the whole matter with the transmission, I was also very confused because he has to know it's not real.

Like, did he think that he could get her to guess a magic number that would unlock someone else's bank account? And as you alluded to, there's a period where she and her son actually go to Brussels and go bank to bank on foot just every year. bank in Brussels. I wonder if he knows it's not going to work, but wants that like anxiety and that torture for the family. Maybe. Yeah. I mean, after every bank, when it was inevitably not the bank, he would call Christine and just, you know, verbally assault her. Yeah, right. So maybe it was just for the sake of being terrible. But he did so many things for his own gain. And I'm, I'm, I'm, just not sure what this would have done for him other than a sense of power. I think you're right, because you're at a sense, as soon as they sell the house,

they really have no material properties left. And at this point, it's just like a small collection of basically slaves working for him that he has complete control over. And I imagine to some sort of monstrous person, that's intoxicating. I guess so. I guess that's why he's the con man and we're not. And we are absolutely not. So he gets arrested.

But what basically happens next is Gilang's ex-husband, the one that she threw the dried flowers and gardening glove at, Sean Marchand, is still like sad and upset about how, you know, nine years earlier his wife had succumb to what he believes to be a brainwashing by a calm man. And he tells authorities that, like, he's worried that. that the family, which even after Terry's arrest, remained in Oxford, living at these places and just like going about their lives, he was worried that it was going to be like Jonestown that they would might kill themselves for Terry. And so he helps orchestrate with Christine,

who's back in France at this point, what Michael Gross and Vanity Fair calls in Ocean's Eleven style extraction. Yes, and it really, it feels accurate. Well, we have a team. They had the like code name and everything. They had like a cryptologist, a cultiebreaker. You know how in Ocean's 11 you need like one expert in everything? That is what it felt like they had. They're like we have the cult expert and the deprogramming expert and the transportation guy. Yeah, you got to have someone to do everything. John almost ruined it though. Yeah, do you want to talk about that? Yes, I do. Because I have a lot of love for Jean because I, I find it very admirable that he was so instrumental in getting this big lawyer, Daniel Picotin, picotin, maybe is the pronunciation. Getting this man involved in this case, I think in 2004 was the first time they made contact. So I admire him. But the first time that they tried to go to go back to Oxford and where at this point, I believe all of the rest,

the Vedrine were there, including Gillen and the now 90-something elder Guillemette. And they were successful in exit counseling and exfiltrating Guillaume, I believe. But Jean almost ruined it because he tried to confront his wife alone, which basically tipped everyone off and they closed ranks, which I feel for him. And I can completely understand not seeing your wife for that long after this, you know, really bonkers traumatic separation. But in her memoir, Christine was like, that ding-dong almost ruined the whole operation. They had to go and go back to France and wait a little while. And then because, of course, this whole outburst with Gilae tipped off the tabloids and, you know, the English tabloids.

They really jumped all over it, which again just kind of closed everything off. So they had to wait several more months, I believe, before they could go and get the rest of the family out. What does emerge for me is a very clear picture of how challenging it is and how you do need experts for a situation where people have been brainwashed. I mean, yeah, confronting someone in person and then allowing them to close ranks is, sort of the end result. You need experts. You need this to be carefully orchestrated to bring people back into the world. Yeah. And Christine talks about, and I didn't know this, the difference between deprogramming and exit counseling and how they were trying to exfiltrate the rest of their family with as little trauma as possible, because classic American deprogramming apparently is

very similar to being kidnapped. which I could imagine is not helpful. Yeah, it would be, I guess, re-traumatizing. Yeah, so apparently this is even more of a careful process than that, where it's, yeah, you really need, like, I believe they had a psychiatrist or a psychologist who, you know, you need someone who can pick apart what has become this family's reality for almost a decade without re-traumatizing them

and in all likelihood, you know, pushing them further towards. towards Tilly. Yeah, this expultration mission, which, as you mentioned, they had two of for reasons that were necessary, included a psychoanalyst, a criminologist, and then a transportation guy. So, like, they're professionals involved in this, and it is a hefty organization. And it takes a process the same way you're like, okay, I don't know if this is, you know, because people were involved in nefarious work to some degree, or just because

because it was their brainwashing. It takes a while for the entire family to come around, but by the end, they all come out against Tilly and to testify against him. They don't testify, but I mean come out publicly against him. Yeah, I think they do, they join the case, but I'm not sure how much they're supposed to testify. Yes, I just didn't know, I didn't want to say they all testified

because I'm not, I don't think they all did. Maybe they did. Yeah, I think only, I'm not sure. But yeah, so eventually, At a certain point, they all come out against Tilly, who goes to jail for fraud, imprisonment accompanied by acts of barbarism and torture, extortion of funds, and abuse of weakness. Yeah, I'm intrigued by that part. I would imagine it's a kind of clunky translation. Yeah.

But abuse of weakness seems like a strange way of putting it. I guess vulnerability sounds better to me, but... Yeah, vulnerability makes it seem less... subjective. Yeah. There's some, yeah, there's a weird bit of language there. But Tilly, I think, is still being held in Bordeaux, declined legal counsel and has given no interviews

and ferociously denies all charges. I mean, I suppose that's what I would do, but there's really nothing. I think at that point that I'm trying to think of the idiom, the coop has flown, the chicken's been cooked. Yeah, the cat's out of the bag. The cat's out of the bag. But with these two

exfiltration missions, after his arrest, the family was still in Oxford for, I believe, seven months. I think so. It was a long process. Yeah, which I can't imagine

being disillusioned of this awful reality that I'd been forced into and then just kind of hanging out for a while. That seems very difficult. I think you imagine that you, I don't think they were probably entirely convinced that it was, you know, a con at that point. I think they want to believe that the last decade of their life had had meaning.

And I'm sure when Tilly was first arrested that they were like, oh, the evil powers of the world have gotten to him. You know, the Freemasons have called in their favors and had him arrested. You know, I think that the challenge here for me is realizing that it's not like a Disney movie where when the villain is captured or killed, that the kingdom just magically, you know, a wave of color rushes over the kingdom and everything is reverted back to normal. Yeah. I'm sure for those seven months, it was incredibly confusing and painful. You know, that old saying, it's easier to con someone than convince them they've been conned.

I've never heard that, but that seems to apply here. Yeah, where it's like, I have. I imagine that for a while you want to believe that the secret order of the world that you had devoted yourself to with such a fervent, painful commitment was real for a while longer. Yeah, I believe Gilaun actually believed when Tilly was first arrested that he told her or she believed of her own volition that he had gotten himself arrested on purpose for some reason to serve the ends of. of protecting the family from, you know, this existential threat, which I can imagine them all, you know, sort of waiting with bated breath, even as they were being exit counseled to try to discover what was real and what wasn't. And of course, very cynically, him telling them that this was all part of his plan

would keep them from, you know, testifying against him. Absolutely. So that is sort of how the story ends in the sense that, Tilly is found guilty, although there is a very funny scene in Christine's memoir that I wanted to thank you for highlighting with the judge. Do you want to describe that? Yes. He tried to brainwash the judge, I think, is what he was trying to do. He starts telling his life story and, you know, the story is constantly changing and he's using essentially the same tactics that he had used with the family where, you know, he says that he can't talk about its work, his work because

it's top secret and, you know, I can't say anything more. And he's saying this to the literal judge, who at some point, I believe in perhaps nicer words, tells him to shut up. And again, as we mentioned before, he declined all legal counsel. So he's his own lawyer at this point. Yeah. And he keeps interrupting and just generally causing trouble, telling all these crazy lies he was in the Navy, and then, oh, I wasn't quite in the Navy, but I was pretty much in the Navy. And then I believe his father takes the stand

and is like, this is a load of crap. This is all false. Yeah. Which I find a little bit of cosmic justice just to have someone come up and be like, this is absolutely false. In Gross's article, he mentions that Tilly was married

to this beautiful blonde woman. woman who I could find no evidence of on the internet. Yeah, is this Jessica? Yes. Or is this, there's another woman, I think, in his past, or maybe they have saw Jessica. Yeah, I know nothing of her. Christine describes her as, you know, vaguely very nice, but there's no sense of how much she knew. Yeah. She's almost not in this story at all. At all. Yeah. Which is weird, but it's like this is his second family, maybe. Maybe. It was hard to just understand. how much, yeah, she knew about what was going on, to what degree Tilly was involved with his normal family. Yeah, I have no idea. I would love to know because she was sort of the

appointed babysitter for Christine at one point. And the kids, yeah. So she had to have known something. Or maybe she just believed that her husband was really a high up, you know, person in the world of espionage and that she just had to trust that he was saving the world and he couldn't tell her anything. I feel like this is a very easy cop out is like, sorry, I'm a spy, can't tell you. Yeah, it seems like he is a very convincing person if you're susceptible to him. And I guess to me, it's plausible where he's like, you know, these people are in like whatever the equivalent of witness protection is. I guess so. I mean, maybe Jessica didn't know, but I would imagine that in England or France, it would function similarly to the way in the U.S. where they, or the way on

U.S. television, which is my frame of reference, is that, you know, you start a new life, but not really move in with your secret agent. Secret agent guy. But again, she didn't seem to get in trouble. I found no real evidence of what happened to her, or it didn't seem like she got in legal trouble. Yeah, I mean, maybe she just didn't know anything. Or maybe she's like an even deeper agent than her husband was. Maybe she's Jack Gonzalez. She was Jack Gonzalez all along. But that basically is the end of the story. Tilly is sentenced to eight years. It's bumped up to 10, which means he is still in prison and will probably get out in, I think based on my math, 22. Okay. So we have two years before he listens to this podcast and comes for us.

And the family, they live in basically council estates in Bordeaux, like government housing in Bordeaux. They've tried to go back to their jobs. It does sound like Charles Zunry is back to being a doctor and they're trying to work again. But they lost all of their money, all of their possessions, their family estate. I was very sad to read that Christine had lost, like, cards from her parents and letters to and from her children that she has no idea where Tilly took them. And that was very sad. Everything, all of their possessions, all of their family heirlooms. But it does sound like Gis-Lon got back together with her ex-husband, John Marchand, which is a slightly happier ending. Which I love.

Yeah, I'm glad that everyone, like, ended up okay, except for that poor penis. I think is maybe he just escaped and maybe that's for the best. You know, he ended up better in that he didn't have to be a part of this. Yeah, but I think he did get married to a nice young Italian man, which, you know, what more can you hope for? I feel like in the, in the movie version of this, it's the pianist who saves the day because that's a little sexier. The pianist turns out to be Baron Bobby. Yeah, but you know what I mean? Like, I feel like the Jean Marchand character, the sexy peasant character, the sexy peasant,

Pianist, who his bride has been brainwashed three months after their wedding, is like a sexy rescuer than Jean Marchand, the 60-year-old divorcee. I, yes. I mean, you know, Jean-Marshan has his charms. Yes, not to despair, Jean-Marshan, yes. But yes, I would love to see this movie. Though, again, I think it's probably something that's going to have to wait until, like, 100 years from now when all the secrets can be unburied in archives and things like that.

Yeah, because that's the thing. When I'm doing an episode of Noble Blood and you're obviously so helpful with the research, you have to read everything and digest it and then wait for it to sort of make sense, wait for a cohesive narrative to come together. And I think there is a Pat narrative where this family fell into a cult, Tilly is the villain and he was caught. But there are details that just don't make sense. Like the mask, like what did Guillaume know?

What is the mask about? What is the mask about? Who knows what? Their family meetings that they take elaborate notes for. That just feels very French noble to me. I feel like, I don't know, there are a lot of things that I can't relate to in my normal, not, or aristocratic person life. Like Christine talks a lot about Charles Henri and his Protestant drive to, you know, defend himself or to like a, like a some sort of martyr complex. And maybe that's a French thing, like calling back to all of the religious conflict in, you know, what, the 16th century onward. Listen to my episode of Noble Blood, The Wedding ended in Blood. Exactly. But that's just not something that I have ever. experienced. I mean, I'm not Protestant. I'm not Christian at all. So maybe everyone feels this way. But there, yeah, just a lot of like strange habits and even one of the reasons I think that Baron Bobby noticed something was off with Christine is that she was

acting noble somehow. She had like the mannerisms of an aristocratic person, which I would love to know what those are. Yeah, what a good detail, the sense that what both what caused this family to be imprisoned and what made them susceptible to Tilly's brainwashing is the very thing that sort of allows Baron Bobby to see that something is wrong. I think it's because Christine mentions like, you know, she is well educated and I think her French is excellent and her English is probably wonderful. And she is educated and has mannerisms in the sense that he's like, well, why are you working in the back of a cheat? shop. Like you, you act as though you have money and then that's how the story sort of reveals

itself to him where she says like, okay, yes, we had money, but we lost it for these reasons. Yeah, but the, I don't know, I would love to, maybe it's the equivalent of like a very posh English accent. That's what I think, where you can sort of tell. Yeah, good posture maybe. I feel like I have good posture. Well, maybe, maybe you look rich. Yeah, maybe. There was also maybe an apocryphal story that I sort of half remember, but I remember someone, it could even be like a dumb joke. So I feel like I'm couching this. Someone once asked like a historian or an artist or a novelist or someone like, oh, was the French revolution good or bad in the scheme of history? And the person answers like, oh, well, it's far too soon to tell in the sense that you need so much historical perspective before you can be able to live.

look at a picture clearly. And I think that the nature of this case meant to me that Christine and the rest of the family did want to simplify it and paint Tilly as the perpetrator and their family as the victims. And I think that that effort to oversimplify for the sake of legal expediency clouds some complexity that I couldn't quite figure out. Yeah. I think, one of the big questions that I was left with, with particularly the Vanity Fair article where it was quoting the teacher from the secretarial school and I believe one of the landlords that Tilly and the family kind of possibly duped at some point. Oh, in Oxford, sorry, quick aside, they, I guess as punishment for some degree, they basically trashed an apartment in Oxford and then

sued the landlord. Like they put their landlord through legal hell. It was like 19 lawsuits or something absolutely crazy. And he, you know, this landlord and the one of the teacher who was quoted are

sort of like, okay, well, what a convenient excuse that they were brainwashed. And I think the question is, as time goes on, is going to be okay, to what extent should this family be held accountable for the that they've caused to other people. I mean, there's, you know, Charles-Len-Ree's partners in his gynecological practice and friends and business partners left behind, landlords,

duped, people sued. I think there are a lot of things to answer for. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's not that I don't believe that this story is true that this family was brainwashed. It's obviously, obviously, you know, pretty verifiably true. But I think Christine, especially in her memoir, I think is very willing to, I don't know, not forgive herself because I think she has a decent sense of, you know, the harm that she caused other, she and her family may have caused other people. But I think everyone's very quick to be like, well, we were brainwashed. We were under this guy's thumb. Yeah, he's the, he's the villain. We were under this guy's spell.

Which, I mean, again, it's not as if the Vigrine family gets off Scott Freight because, as we said, they lose absolutely everything in the world. And I think they lose 10 years of their life. So maybe that is punishment enough. Yeah. You know, they lost their family. They lost all of their money. And they lost a decade to this crazy conspiracy. So whatever the damage, I mean, that seems to be a pretty good sentence.

to me. Yeah, I think so. It's an incredibly strange story. Thank you for attempting to delve into it with me. Thank you for having me. This was very fun. And thank you for listening. I hope that this slightly different episode of Noble Blood gives you a glimpse into our process and I guess just illuminates a story that to me, I was very surprised that almost no Americans know or care about because it's so bizarre and so weird, you'd think more would be written about it. I was totally expecting tons of stuff. Yeah, everything's in French. Maybe now someone will, you know, hop on the scholarly work.

We are approaching a decade, I think, since this story, you know, officially closed. So maybe some, like, modern French historians will get to work. We can only hope. Well, Hannah, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you on, on this? social media or the internet. Oh my goodness. I am on Twitter at Norel H-A-N-O-R-E-L-E-H-A-N. And on Instagram at that, but with N-A-H at the end to spell Hannah. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining me and thanks for listening. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Vodom. My next guest, you know from

Stepbrothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo-woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with him one day. And I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you.

Which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're. banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right. It wouldn't be that.

There's a lot of luck. Listen to thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Iris Palmer and my new podcast is called Against All Od, and that's exactly what the show is about doing whatever it takes to be thoughts. Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns. I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Eva Longoria. I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, what are you going to do? And I was like, I'll figure it out. We got a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month and we all could not afford. Like, I was like, how am I going to make

$100 a month. I'm opening up like I've never before. For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me. Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick,

Alex Williams and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noblebloodtales.com. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Vodom. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell.

Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point, where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there.

Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.