Noble Blood - How Tycho Brahe Saw the Stars

Episode Date: September 1, 2020

Tycho Brahe was the heir to several lines of Danish nobility. Rather than spend his life as a bureaucrat, he devoted himself to astronomy and collected the data that would lead to a new era of discovery. He also had no nose, a pet elk, a dwarf, and a mysterious death. Just your typical scientist stuff. 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. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. There's an anecdote that's often included in biographies of 16th century astronomer Tico Brahe that, while almost entirely irrelevant to his life or scientific achievements, I think is worth talking about. You see, Tico Brahe had a pet elk. He had a few pet elks, we can determine that from primary sources,

but one in particular was tame. It would trot along at the side of his carriages and join him inside the house. He and his family would feed it beer and delight in the way that it lapped it up. One of Brahe's German friends wrote to him once, asking if it was true that in Denmark there was an animal called a ricks that was bigger and faster than a deer. Brahi knew his friend. He knew he was one of those wealthy aristocratic types who just wanted as many different animals as possible for his own private zoo. Bri wrote back saying, no, there's no ricks. You're probably thinking of a reindeer. But, hey, if you happen to want an elk, I have a tame one that you can borrow. The letter was sent off to Germany, and by the time the friend wrote back saying,

sure, it was too late. Brahe had already sent his tame elk over to a neighbor's house for a party. That party's guests were so amused by the animal that they kept giving it more and more alcohol. The elk made it to the top of a staircase, and then, drunk, It stumbled down and broke its neck. Now, I reiterate, the tame, drunk elk who fell down the stairs isn't relevant to Tico Brahe's scientific achievements. But the story's strangeness does sort of capture why Brahe has become such a figure of fascination for centuries. A drunk pet elk is a detail you expect to find in the biography of a romantic-era poet.

It's genuinely astonishing that it didn't happen to Lord Byron. It's debauchous and whimsical. And yet, Tika Bray's scientific legacy is basically the opposite of that. It's an incredibly precise and comprehensive data that he collected. He was the last of the major naked-eye astronomers, working in the era before telescopes. And for decades of his life, he pioneered equipment, that brought a brand new level of accuracy to the astronomical community in Europe.

But he was also the wildly strange figure that paraded around Europe with a brass nose, who became lord ruler of an entire island, who worked as an alchemist, and whose death was either humiliating and mundane, or a captivating murder of scientific jealousy, depending on who you ask. Personally, I believe this is.

science even when it disproves the fun murder theory. But as Tika Brahe taught us, a devotion to science doesn't have to be boring. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Ticobrahi was actually born by the name Tiga Brahe in 1546, but since starting university, he would refer to himself by the Latinized version of his name, Tico. And since that's the name by which most history refers to him, that's the name we'll go with here. He was the oldest son of an incredibly storied lineage of Danish nobles.

Almost every one of his male relatives had a prominent position in the Danish or Swedish King's Privy Council. They almost all had castles. He was the oldest of eight children who lived to adulthood, and all of his brothers went on to become well-respected government or military officials. Tico probably would have shared their fate. had it not been for the strange decision to send him off as a toddler to be raised by his aunt Inger and Uncle Jorgian.

Books often refer to the couple as childless, which paints sending them Tico as a polite act of charity giving them a child to raise since they didn't have one of their own. But that's an incorrect impression based on hindsight. At the time that they got the little Tyke, Tico, Inger was only 20. It's strange to think that they would have known at the time that they would have been childless. But Uncle Jorgen was a military hero and an intellectual. Maybe Tico's parents thought those were reason enough to have him raise a child. Jorgon valued education in a way that Tico's actual father might not have.

Tico attended a prominent church school and then at age 13, he was sent to the University of Copenhagen to study law as his uncle requested. It was at the University of Copenhagen that Tico's love of astronomy sparked into focus. On August 21, 1560, when Tico was 14 years old, the moon passed between the Earth and the Sun, resulting in a total solar eclipse. Even though the eclipse was only partial from where Tico observed it, it was incredible, the type of profound event that makes you wonder about the meaning of life, and mankind's place in the universe. But to Tico, even more fascinating was that it had been predicted.

By tracking the positions of the sun and the moon, astronomers had been able to predict that a solar eclipse would occur, decades or even centuries before it happened. It was the closest thing to actual magic in a world that did still believe in alchemy and being able to foretell the future. The problem, Tico realized, was that these predictions of the solar eclipse by astronomers had been a full day off. If only their observational tools had been more precise, Tico thought,

then humans could fully understand the universe. Tico's uncle Jorgon tried to get his nephew to focus on a more respected and conventional field, but Tico wouldn't be deterred. He had found his passion. At 16, Tico was sent on a tour of Europe to learn foreign language, and about the other major European courts. It was a rite of passage for nobleman who would need to become not only well-educated in intellectual matters,

but also matters of decorum and diplomacy. Escorting Tico on the tour was a 20-year-old middle-class student named Anders Sorensen-Vidal, hired to teach Tico and also to keep him in line. Vidal begrudgingly pretended not to notice when Tico secretly purchased books of astronomy and he also pretended not to notice the tiny fist-sized celestial globe that Tico would consult whenever he thought Vidal wasn't looking.

By the time the two boys returned to Denmark in 1565, they were met with two surprises. First, that Denmark was at war with Sweden, and also that Tico's uncle, Jorgon, was dead. Jorgon was vice-admiral of the Danish fleet, and he had achieved several prominent military vivant. victories, including sinking Sweden's biggest warship. But he died a hero in a different way. The king of Denmark, Frederick II, got drunk following a victory and fell off his horse into a canal in Copenhagen. Jorgon leapt into the icy water to rescue him, got pneumonia, and died two weeks later. Tico wouldn't stay in Denmark long. He left to go to Germany to study medical alchemy at the University of Rostok. It was there that Tico would experience one of the most

infamous events of his life, the duel where he lost his nose. The duel didn't actually start with a duel. It started with a lunar eclipse. Tico Bria, who had just turned 20 years old, analyzed the lunar eclipse of October 28, 1566, and decided that it foretold the death of the Turkish sultan Suleiman the Great. So certain was he about the accuracy of his interpretation that Tico wrote a long Latin poem about it and posted it publicly. There was only one problem.

Word came that Suleiman the Great did die, but he had died six weeks before the eclipse even happened. Brahe was humiliated, and the humiliation would continue for months. In December, Brahe's host in Germany threw a party and happened to invite along another Danish noble, Mandrae-Parsberg, who also happened to be Tico's third cousin. Parsberg mocked Tico for his hilariously earnest and completely wrong Latin poem, and Tico did not have a sense of humor about it.

The two almost came to blows, but they were pulled apart. Until a little over two weeks later, when they were, The two met again, this time in a dimly lit bar. Parsberg snorted at Tico's assertion that he was a better mathematician. Tico stood and touched the sword at his hips. In that dark bar lit only by candles with everything obscured by their smoke, the two decided to duel to decide once and for all who was the better mathematician. With a single stroke of his blade, Parsberg hacked off the bridge

of Tico Bari's nose. The injury led to weeks of lonely panic and uncertainty. The real danger was not the injury itself, but the deadly infection it could lead to. Besides, until the scar tissue formed, the extent of the disfigurement couldn't be known. Eventually, Tika Brahi came to terms with the fact that he was missing most of his nose.

Rather than get a wax prosthetic, he chose to instead of fission. fix a brass false nose. He had another nose made of a mixture of silver and gold as to be more or less skin-colored that he brought out four special occasions. Tico kept a small box filled with adhesive with him at all times for the moment that his nose began to slip in public. When he returned to Denmark again when his father was dying, it was as a new man, literally. Upon his return, he built an observatory at Herevard Abbey, a property belonging to one of his maternal uncles. And it was there that he would make the discovery that would turn him into an overnight scientific celebrity.

Ticobrahi had been memorizing the stars in the sky since he was a child. And so when on November 11, 1572, a brand new star seemed to appear in the sky right next to the constellation Cassie. Pia, Tico notice right away. First, he asked his sister, Sophia Bry, who worked alongside him as a research assistant. She confirmed that star definitely hadn't been there before. But Tika Braghi couldn't wrap his mind around it. He couldn't believe his eyes. He begged servants and passing peasants to look up at the sky. See that star there? That wasn't there before, right? My guess is the passing peasants and servants weren't much help. The thing is, nothing new was supposed to happen in the stars.

New things happened in the sky all the time. That was different. In Brahe's Day, there was an understanding that the moon revolved around the earth, and things could happen and change beneath the moon in the subluner space. But beyond the moon, that was supposed to be fixed and unchanging. And this new star, this was further away than the moon. the heavens were changeable. One quick aside to explain how Tico knew for a fact that the star was beyond the moon,

it was using the principle of parallax, or the idea that closer objects will move more relative to their surroundings when you look at them from a different perspective. It's a little tough to explain orally, but have you ever noticed that when you're driving in a car, the nearby scenery right alongside the window seems to whip past, while the further scenery moves incredibly slowly. That's an illustration of parallax. With his observation of the new star, Tico worked alongside his sister to write a short book called Destela Nova,

or, fittingly, the new star. He had found what we now know was a supernova. Tico Bri is where we get that name. This feels like the right moment to go back a bit and understand just a little about astronomy as it was understood before the 16th century. Bear in mind, this will be just a really cursory overview. In 360 BCE, Plato posited a version of the universe to explain the way the moon, stars, and sun all would move across the sky. The Earth was the center of the universe, obviously, and then the sun, the moon, and planets all moved around.

us in perfect celestial spheres. But if you actually observe the motion of the planets, there's a problem. They don't move consistently across the sky the way they were if they were in a perfect divine sphere. The planets, at certain points in their trajectory, move back and then forth again. It was Ptolemy who came up with a solution for this. Retrograde orbits along the root of a planet's main orbit. In simple terms, little epicycles are little loops that planets would make during their big loop. It made sense mathematically with the observations they were seeing sort of. But philosophically, it was a mess. God created the universe, and he created it to be divine and perfect. Circles were symmetrical and mathematically clear. These epicycles were complicated and

messy. It was Copernicus then who actually figured things out for European astronomers when he posited a heliocentric model, a model of the solar system with the sun at the center. For the record, there were Islamic astronomers who had more or less been figuring out the exact same thing, both concurrently and also a little bit before Copernicus. But in European circles, it was Copernicus and his controversial theory that scientists were butting their heads up against. Because while it flew in the face of the religious teachings that were accepted as gospel, science was seen as just a way to better understand God's divine vision. It would be absurd to conceive that we were not the center of the system that God created.

Copernicus died three years before Ticabrahi was born, and it's important to recognize Brahe was not a heliocentrist. He never believed that the sun was at the center of the solar system or that the earth revolved around it. He, the preeminent astronomer of his day, went to his grave thinking that the earth was stationary, 60 years after Copernicus published his more correct model.

Science is not a series of steady accomplishments at even intervals, where one great man takes on the mantle of a great man before him. That's a convenient way for some people to oversimplify and create a pretty narrow and a little sexist understanding of history, but it's also just not the truth. After his publication of Destela Nova, Ticobrahi was an established European astronomer. It was around this time that he almost completely rejected the responsibilities of his noble position.

He had no interest in a castle or lordship or fancy aristocratic marriage. Most of the scholars that he was engaging with weren't married for that very reason. An aristocratic marriage was an ordeal. It took time, energy, and attention away from science. But Tico didn't remain unmarried. He fell in love with a woman named Kirsten Jorgon's daughter, a commoner. Though they lived together for almost 30 years and had eight children, It was technically illegal for a noble and a commoner to get married.

Technically illegal, but not entirely unusual. There was an established term under Jewish law for what they had together, basically the modern-day equivalent of a common-law marriage. The main consequence of their relationship was that Tico's children would be commoners. They would have to enroll in school as commoners, and they wouldn't be allowed to inherit any of his noble property. Presumably, the 20-year-old Tico who just got his nose hacked off who met a pretty girl named Kirsten wasn't thinking about inheritance when they met.

And again, it wasn't scandalous necessarily or even uncommon that he took up with a commoner. It was more just seen as a rebuff to Danish high society. Another rebuff, Tico Brii was touring around Europe, looking for a year. better place to build a laboratory. When King Frederick II caught wind of Brahe planning on building a lab in Basel, Switzerland, he panicked. That simply wouldn't do. Bray had just become a well-known scientist, and he was Danish, for God's sake. Denmark needed to hold on to its scientific celebrities if it wanted to be a world player. And so King Frederick offered Brahe a number of castles in position. all of which Tika Brahe rejected.

And then the king made another offer, the island of Venn, a small island with 40 farms, which Brai could rule over like a fiefdom. Brahe thought about it. On one hand, Denmark was a little further north than he would have liked in terms of astronomical observations, and it was often wet and cloudy.

But Fenn was a tempting offer, It was isolated, that was a plus. Plus, Frederick II was prepared to give Tico whatever funds he needed to build a truly spectacular laboratory. And remember those farms on the island? The king would throw in their free labor. And so Tico Brahe accepted. Urania Borg was about to come into being.

Though the island of Venn had always technically been owned by the crown, the 40 or so families that lived there were freeholding farmers. They made their own community laws and interacted with the outside world in a very limited capacity, maybe when someone went to sell on the mainland. But when Frederick II gave Fenn to Tico Bribe, that all would change. Tico first insisted that they cultivate twice as much on their farms,

and he was allowed to make that insistence. Also, as part of his, his position as Lord, he was entitled to two full days, from sun up to sundown, a free labor from each of the farms every single week. These farmers were the foot soldiers who would help him build Urania Borg, the castle of the heavens, named for the Greek muse of astronomy, Urania. Uraniaborg was a Palladian-style castle meant to represent in its dimensions and architectural symmetry, the elegance and order of the cosmos. The castle itself was surrounded by a square wall, oriented perfectly to the north, south, east, and west. Diagonal paths cut through perfectly

manicured gardens towards the main central castle, which was three stories high, and home to dozens of people at any given time. On the top floor, Brahe built unheeded apartments where his servants and assistance lived. On the second floor, there was a summer room, the Queen's Chamber, where Queen Sophia of Denmark once came to stay, and the King's Chambers. The first floor had living quarters, four huge observatories, a kitchen, and a massive museum library, where Tico kept the giant brass celestial globe that he had personally commissioned. The globe took years to make and get to Brahe, but in a sense it would actually take 25 years to be completed. Brahe would carefully engrave it with the position of stars he measured one by one.

In the basement of Uranuborg were salt and wood cellars and also Tico's alchemy lab. For someone who became famous for the rigor of his mathematical precision and skills of observation, Brahe was also fascinated by alchemy and other scientists. sciences that are, let's say, dubious at best. He studied not just astronomy, but also astrology, for his entire life. He did readings of the lives of famous men from history and would sometimes perform them for the royal family. At some point, Tico Brai kept at Yeraniaburg a dwarf named Jep, who acted as a sort of court jester. Brigh would bring Jep out at parties to tell the future for his guest because he believed that he had psychic abilities. And Tico's guests were often

incredibly prominent people. The Danish royal family, famous writers and thinkers, even King James the 6th of Scotland, later King James I of England, came to visit Venn when he came to Denmark to pick up his new wife to be. If you're a long-time listener of the podcast, you might remember James the Sixth, the Witch Hunter King, and his trip to Denmark. Another of the visitors to Venn would be a young astronomy student named Johannes Kepler. He'll come back into the story later, so remember that name. And if you're listening to this podcast and planning a Mozart Salieri-Ami-Ais-style Oscar drama about these two men, I imagine the scene of a young Kepler entranced by the strange and enigmatic brass-nosed Tico Brii at the height of his power would make a good cold open.

Uraniaborg was sort of a Wonka's factory for science. There was running water, something Queen Elizabeth I didn't have at Hampton Court, nor did Henry III of France at the Louvre. And it wasn't just the castle. Uraniaborg became a compound. Brahe recognized the importance of publishing his own work, but he was also highly suspicious of thieves and copycats. And so he hired a printer and built his own printing press

on the island. When he couldn't find access to paper of a high enough quality that he demanded, he also built a paper mill that produced sheets with a watermark, the name and an illustration of his castle. The island also had a tannery that made the parchment for bookbinding, a grain mill, and a machine shop for Tico to continue to build new and better astronomical instruments. telescopes weren't in use yet, but Brahe designed and built large specialty equipment that would allow him to record measurements far more precisely than anyone else in Europe. His instruments out on balconies, though, were exposed to wind and the elements, and that could distort his readings.

And so Tico Brahe built another laboratory called Sernberg, or Castle of the Stars. This one dug under the ground, so he and his many assistants and protégés could measure angles and distances in the sky from beneath ground level where wind couldn't affect the readings. Along the halls of Sernberg, Tiko hung portraits of great astronomers throughout history, with the stated purpose of inspiring his students. Of course, one of the portraits was of himself. And the final portrait was of someone who hadn't even been born yet,

It was an imaginary person named Ticanitis, a descendant of Tico Brahe, whose inscription beneath his portrait read that he only wished to be worthy of his great ancestor. Modesty wasn't one of Tico Brahi's strongest suits. It was that ego that would eventually lead to trouble for Tico Brahe. His laboratory was renowned, but it was also a massive experience. fence. At 1.1% of Denmark's wealth was going to Uraniaborg. After Frederick II died, his son, Christian IV, was far less amused by Tico's science and his antics. Tico had already made a number of enemies at court, and these enemies were far closer to Christian IV when he came of age, Tico was just a thorn in his side, an incredibly expensive thorn.

For one thing, the peasants on Fenn kept complaining about Tico exploiting them, if you can imagine. The commoners would riot sometimes in front of Brigh's family home in Copenhagen. The winds were changing for Tika Brai, and he knew it. He tried, quickly, before he lost too much favor, to get the Dowellie's family home in Copenhagen. to get the Dowager Queen to put into writing that his kids could maybe be an exception to the no commoners inheriting noble property rule. But soon after, he left Venn and then Denmark. On his way out, he wrote one of his famous Latin poems about his exile, called An Elegy to Denmark, all about what fools they were for letting him go. It was the Latin poem equivalent of the email you write to

your ex who breaks up with you, the one that you're not supposed to send. Brahe spent a year at a friend's castle in Germany before he became court astronomer to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Tico and his family then moved to Prague, along with Tico's most famous assistant, Johannes Kepler. Tico Bray worked in Prague for a year before his death, and for that year, he and Kepler endeavored side by side. to create the most accurate astronomical tables possible. Kepler would eventually publish them after Brahi's death, and they'd be known as the Rudolphin tables,

named, of course, for their royal patron. Kepler kept all of Tico Brahe's incredibly important work and notes after Brahi died, no doubt taking advantage of the confusion when it came to the ability of Brai's children to inherit his property. Using Brahe's data, Kepler was able to make one of the most important scientific discoveries of the last thousand years. The planets don't move in perfect circles. Their orbits are elliptical. Tico Brahe in his lifetime had made his own model of the solar system,

a sort of compromise between Plato and Copernicus, where the sun does revolve around the Earth, but the other planets revolve around the sun. Depending on the size of those orbits and the way you draw it, Tico's model isn't too geometrically different from Copernicus's more correct theory, but it was a compromise that the church and established scientific community at large could swallow. Kepler disagreed with his boss. He knew, like Copernicus knew, that the Earth actually revolved around the sun. But Kepler also knew that Tico Brahe's measurements were extraordinarily precise.

Using Tico Brahe's measurements for the path of Mars, Kepler realized that his calculations for a circular orbit were off by about eight arc minutes. Now, eight arc minutes is not a lot to be off by. To put it in layman's terms, if you were to hold a penny out at arm's length and turn the penny sideways, the edge of the penny. That amount of space was the distance of the margin of error that Kepler got. But Brahe was more precise than that, and Kepler knew it. Brahe would never be off by more than four or five arc minutes.

And so Kepler tried again, this time with the calculation for an elliptical orbit. And there it was. It fit. Kepler became a scientific hero, and the idea that planets travel. in elliptical orbits became the first of his three laws of planetary motion. Kepler was a German man born to a struggling mercenary and the daughter of an innkeeper. Very convenient how Brahe died and then Kepler was able to use all of the data he left behind to achieve glory. Almost too convenient. Some posited just an idea that Kepler had poisoned Tico Brahe.

who died at age 54. Kepler, his assistant, would have had the opportunity. He would have had access to the poison, Mercury, and he definitely had the motive. In his writings, Kepler explained Brahe's death a little differently. He wrote that on October 24, 1601, he and Briah were at a banquet for Rudolph II. Brahe had to urinate,

but because royal decorum dictated that you couldn't leave the table before the king, he had to hold it in. Eleven days later, now unable to urinate and in extreme pain, Brahe died, but not before begging his pupil to finish his work and publish the Rudolfine tables. Of course, Kepler readily agreed. The Lord of Urania Borg died a urine-related death. Urania urine sounds like fate. Unfortunately, there is no etymological link between those two words, but, you know, doesn't make it any less interesting.

Tico Bari's achievements were vast and remarkable, especially when one remembers that all of his work was done with the naked eye. Galileo wouldn't use a telescope until eight years after Tico Bari's death. So Tico did all of his work just looking up at the sky. That's all it took. Well, that and the sponsorship of kings a near infinite supply of money and free labor. But just that. That's the life and death of Tico Bray, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear about when scientists decided to examine those pesky murder rumors. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Vodom.

My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and The Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell My dad gave me the best advice ever I went and had lunch with them 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. Yeah. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Iris Palmer and my new podcast is,

called Against All Odds, and that's exactly what the show is about, doing whatever it takes to be the odds. 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. out of Ford. 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. Tika Brahe's body was exhumed twice, first in 1901, and then in 2010, when scientists investigated once and for all whether those Kepler murder rumors had any truth to them. Unfortunately, the answer is no. Brigh did have a little bit of mercury in his hair follicles, but no more than the normal amount that an alchemist slash scientist in the 16th century would have.

Plus, the data didn't indicate a sudden amount of mercury flooding his system right before his death. Bri also had gold in his system, which people tended to drink at the time in their wine for medicinal purposes. So it was more likely, scientists decided, that Tico had some bladder or kidney issue before that fateful banquet that ultimately led to his demise. So, no murder by a jealous, ambitious assistant, exciting as that might have been. Thanks a lot, science. Noble Blood is a production of Eye Heart Radio, and Grimmin 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 Noble Blood Tales.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. 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 Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.