Noble Blood - Surgery of the First World War, with Lindsey Fitzharris

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

"[T]he science of healing stood baffled before the science of destroying." The consequences of World War I weren't limited to deaths on the battlefield. Men returned home disfigured beyond recognition, and the esteemed surgeon, Sir Harold Gillies—(hard "G" sound)—made it his mission to help. I interview the historian Lindsey Fitzharris about her new book, The Facemaker. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch! — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and pre-order its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong,

dance and then there's your body having its own program listen to a slight change of plans on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts welcome to noble blood a production of iHeart radio and grim and mild from aaron mankey listener discretion advised hi welcome to a very special episode of noble blood i am so excited to be joined here by dr lindsay fitz harris the amazing historian. She actually wrote a book called the butchering art about the Scottish surgeon Robert Lister, which was a huge help for me as I was researching and writing my novel, Anatomy, a love story. But she's written a new book, The Facemaker, A Visionary Surgeons Battle to Men the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, all about sort of, I would say, the unsung hero of

plastic surgery, Harold Gillies, who just, I mean, from this book, I knew nothing about him. He's an incredible man. Lindsay, hi, welcome. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm really excited to talk to you about this, as you say, really kind of unknown story about the grandfather of plastic surgery. So let's sort of back up a bit. How did you come to this story? I asked myself that many times. And it took five years to research and write. So with the butchering art, which was about Victorian surgery and all the horrible things we used to do before anesthesia and germ theory, you don't have to navigate complications like patient confidentiality, which you do in the 20th Sunday. And I wasn't really prepared to take that on.

What had happened was I have a PhD in the history of science and medicine from Oxford, but I call myself a storyteller these days. And I didn't know much about Harold Gillies or World War I, in fact, but I knew that there was a really harrowing story there. And I knew that when I started the book, I wanted to drop the reader right in the middle of the battle to see what that felt like and smelt like. And what was it like to be in those trenches? You know, they used to say that you could smell the front before you could even see it.

So I really wanted to build that vivid picture for readers. Oh, my God, there's an early on, I feel like the first thing I circled was you talk about like a bubbling mass of worms coming out of someone's wound. It's just so visceral. It's horrible. And I don't pull punches. I don't do it in the butchering art. But it's not because I relish the gore and the violence. It's because I feel like I wouldn't be doing these patients any justice if I wasn't explaining exactly what that was like for them.

And so private Percy Claire, who's hit in the face at the beginning of the book, he was. writes this amazing diary about his experiences, which is why I used him. And he talks about how this bullet went right through his face and he laid on the battlefield and he thought he was going to die. And it was a real struggle just to get the stretcher bears to take him off that field because they also thought he was going to die. It's that horrible thing where they have to protect the people they think of the best chance of survival. Yeah. And, you know, a face is very vascular. So anybody who's had a face wounded bleeds a lot, even a minor cut. You know, there are photos in the facemaker, and I didn't include those lightly. I actually consulted with a disability activist over

this. I didn't want it to be medical voyeurism, but I also think it's important that we look at these men's faces because during the war, they were often forced to sit on blue benches so that the public knew not to look at them. It was very isolating experience for them. So I think that we need to look at them today, and we need to not put them on that metaphorical blue bench in 2022. I thought that was a brilliant note that you wrote in the beginning of the, at the beginning of the book, explaining your decision to show the photographs. And yes, some of them are hard to look at, but I think they also go to show how amazing Dr. Jillies's work was. Yes. Yeah. And it's Gilles with a-Gillies. Oh, Jesus. I had asked you before, like right before this podcast started,

but I will give the excuse that it's 7 a.m. in Los Angeles. Yeah. It's 7 a.m. And also if you've read it with Jillies in your head, because there was my friend Karen Abbott also kept making that mistake when I was in New York. And I was like, once it's in your head, it's hard to kind of, Erase it, but yeah, it is Gillies. But yeah, the work he could do before antibiotics over 100 years ago with no textbooks to guide him to rebuild these faces is extraordinary. Plastic surgery did predate the first World War. In fact, the term is coined in 1798.

At that time, plastic meant something that you could shape or you could mold. So in this case, a patient's skin or soft tissue. Really, those early attempts focus on very small areas of the face, such as the ears and the nose. What Gillies is able to do is it goes much further beyond. restructuring entire faces that have been obliterated by war. So backing up to sort of your story, you're an American who then studied and got her Ph.D. at Oxford. What was that journey like for you? What was that decision like? And then how did you come to medical history specifically? So we both are from Illinois. You're from Highland Park. And I'm from Arlington Heights.

Oh my God. We're literally neighbors. We're literally neighbors. And I can't get rid of this Chicago accent. I've been in the UK now for 20 years. It's here to stay. Oxford tried to beat it. out of me. It's here to stay. I went to Oxford because they had a great program in medical history, which is a really niche subject. And I did my master's and my PhD, and then I got really burnt out intellectually. So I started a blog called The Surgeons Apprentice, and I started to write for a general audience, and I found that really rewarding. But what really happened that kind of was the catalyst into my career was my ex-husband left me in 2015 very abruptly. He wrote me an email. I was in Chicago. This was a 10-year relationship. An email. Yep. So I returned to the UK. His stuff is gone. He's

disappeared. He then reports me as he legally in the UK. He says that the marriage is over. She can't stay. So they take my passport. I can't work. So during that time, I worked on a 500-page petition to remain in the UK. I had no money. I fought him in court. And I ended up writing the proposal for the butchering art and selling it. And it changed my life. And, you know, I say that that, you know, Joseph, who the book's about, I say that he saved a lot of lives, but he also saved mine because this book just lifted me out into a whole new career in situation. And I love engaging the public about medical history now. Oh my God. I mean, that is an amazing story. I'm so glad for your sake, but also for all of our sakes that you're doing this work, what I think is so incredible about your

writing is it's deep, I mean, academic level history, obviously, but at a level that anyone can read. It reads like a novel. It's fascinating. The stories are just amazing. I mean, I love Eric Larson's books, and I'm good friends with him. If anybody's read his books, narrative nonfiction is what I love to do. It's, as you say, it reads like a novel. It's all true. I think that even people who don't like history might like medical history because everybody

knows what it's like to be sick, especially coming out of a pandemic. So you might not be interested in history and politics and war. You might know what it's like to be sick and you might be able to relate to medical history. you know, what would happen if you had a toothache in 1792 or what would happen if you had to have a leg removed in 1843? And that's kind of where I come in as a medical historian. So obviously, as you alluded to, the situation with Robert Lister was very different than it is in 1917. But what were the obstacles of surgery in 1917? Where sort of were we in technology?

And what did we still have to achieve? Well, so at the point of the First World War, surgeons understood, theory. So that was at least good. But actually, in a weird way, that created problems because they had grown up on aseptic and antiseptic techniques. So they weren't used to identifying infections. So at the beginning of the war, there is a high rate of infections. You can imagine the mud of the trenches. And it's just very unhygienic. And these surgeons are quickly and hastily stitching these wounds up to stop the hemorrhaging. And in doing so, they're literally sealing up these men's fate. They're stitching in this bacteria. So that does become a problem.

Also, anesthesia hasn't really progressed since 1846 when Ether was first discovered, which I talk about in the butchering art. And that was a wild time, by the way, guys, because when doctors discovered Ether, they started drinking it and taking it themselves and they had these ethereal experiences. That's where we get the term ethereal. So it was like the wild, wild west of medicine. But nothing had really progressed since 1846 with anesthesia. So you're talking about a rag with chloroform or a rudimentary mask. And in fact, Harold Gillies at one point in the facemaker is leaned over a patient, and the patient is breathing ether back into Gillies' face. So this is a real problem for your facial reconstructive surgeon.

So you have advances happening in anesthesia in parallel with plastic surgery for these very reasons, because putting a mask over a damaged face was problematic anyway. It would obscure the area that Gillies needed to work on, but also it caused other kinds of issues in the operating theater. Oh, my God, of course. So who was Harold Gillies? How did he come to be this preeminent surgeon? So he was an E&T surgeon before the war, ear, nose and throat. So he had a very good understanding of head anatomy. But what happens is he volunteers with the Red Cross. He ends up going to France and he meets this character named Charles Vladier. And anybody who's read The Butchering Art will know that I love telling the story about Robert Liston, who was the fastest knife in the West End. He could take your leg off in under 30 seconds. Vladier is the Robert Liston of.

of my story because he's bigger than life. He's an American French dentist. He has a Rolls Royce, which he retrofits with a dental chair, and he literally drives it to the front under a hail of bullets. This guy is a legend. I mean, there's so many weird stories, too, because people, they were just throwing themselves into these dangerous situations.

And it's Vladiae who teaches Harold Gillies about, one, the importance of dentistry when rebuilding a face and also just shows him this desperate need for facial reconstruction near the front. So that's really what sets it all off. You know, in the butchering art, you talk a lot about sort of the distinction between barber surgeon of the early 1800s that transitions into what we now consider surgery. Being a barber surgeon was not at like the same academic level as being a physician. Where sort of are we in that understanding in the early 20th century? Yeah. I mean, so as you say in the earlier periods, so you're looking at like the 17th, 18th centuries, you had these people called barber surgeons and they would pick the.

lice out of your hair and they would pull teeth. And most people would see the barber surgeon rather than a physician, which was very expensive. Also, the barber surgeons would bloodlet patients. And so that's where we get the red and white barbers pole because they would advertise by putting these bloody rags on the pole and it would twist in the wind and it would create that red and white pole that we're all familiar with. Oh my God. As I said, most, and I have, I have a barbers pole somewhere in this office. People can't hear me because we're on a podcast right now, but I have a lot of weird stuff in my office because I think that objects are a great way into the past. But the barber surgeons were sort of the first port-a-call for most people in that period. Surgeons in general were

seen as people who worked with their hands. So it was seen as less than being a physician, which was someone who worked with their mind. So the physician rarely touched the patient or laid their hands on the patient. It was a much more cerebral activity. By the time World War I comes about, you know, surgeons are much more respected, thanks in part to Joseph Lister and his work in the 19th century and this kind of professionalization of surgeons at this time. So Gillies was, you know, at the top of his game as an E&T surgeon. He was working in a very lucrative practice in London. But when the war starts, he finds his new passion, which is plastic surgery, which isn't a subspecialty of medicine at this point. And it's really after the war that it becomes quite tenuous,

because at that point, he has to decide whether he's going to pursue plastic surgery, because, again, at this point, it wasn't really a specialty in medicine. Amazing. What I'm always curious when I bring on historians, what was your research process like? Obviously, this book is a multi-year endeavor, and it absolutely shows in the detail and depth of research. But where did you start? Well, my process is a lot of tears and going, why did I take this on? I mean, I think that as a narrative, of nonfiction writer, a lot of my job is getting rid of material because I don't like to overwhelm readers. I don't know if anybody listening out there. For me, I get turned off if I go into a bookstore and there's like this huge tome on John Adams. I mean, that's too much of John Adams, right? So I like my books to be really fast-paced. I want people who never thought about facial reconstruction or World War I to enjoy it and not feel swamped by the material. Now, when you're dealing with World War I, there is

so much material. I mean, it's literally, there's so many letters and diaries. This is the time of war poetry, everybody's writing about their experiences. So you can get very overwhelmed by it. I said at the beginning of the book that the facemaker is not a definitive history of World War I. It's certainly not a definitive history of war medicine. And it's not even a definitive history of Harold Gillies. I really cherry picked a number of soldiers that really stood out to me. And so there's about 12 of them that are featured in the book. Because again, I feel like it would just get monotonous. It would get overwhelming. So a lot of what I do really is just absorbing material and then getting rid of it for everybody. So I kind of digest it for you so that you don't have to do all of that.

That's sort of the noble blood ethos. We try to condense it. It's like the sweet spot is 30 minutes. And I can tell the whole story in 30 minutes without getting bogged down in the extraneous details. No, we don't we don't have time. Who's got time for the big John Adams biography? I certainly don't. I mean, there's an art to those long-form biographies. But for me, again, like, you know, I write in the style of Eric Larson or hopefully people feel that way. And he writes such thrilling books. I mean, you forget that these are true stories. You know, he just wrote a book on Churchill and you think, well, I know everything there is to know about Churchill.

And yet he tells it in such a way that you forget in the moment. It feels very real. And it feels like you're actually there. And that's what I hope I can achieve with my books. I mean, it does. I read this in like two days. it does read like a novel, like a story, especially because you focus on the individuals as characters. They feel like real people. And sort of to that end, do you have a favorite case study that you went into in this book?

No, it's a good question. There's a couple of men who are featured in the book. I mean, Percy Claire, as I said, opens it. But I think if there was a favorite, it's this guy named Private Walter Ashworth. Ashworth is injured on the first day of the Battle of the Psalm, which if you don't know anything about World War I, you probably recognize the Battle of the Civil War I. you probably recognized the Battle of the Somme because it was a bloodbath. Of the 100,000 British soldiers who took place in the advance that day, 60,000 were killed or injured. Never before or since has a single army suffered such losses on a single day in a single battle. So it was horrible. Now, Ashworth survives, but in doing so, a bullet rips through his face and removes part of his jaw.

At that point, he falls forwards, which is key to his survival, and he lays on the battlefield for three days. people are like, how could you lay on the battlefield for three days? Well, first of all, he had no jaw, so he couldn't really scream for help. But the other aspect was that these structure bearers became targets themselves. So it took a lot to convince them that you were worthy of saving. It could take as many as 12 men to remove a single man off the battlefield. This was very laborious and dangerous. So Ashworth lays there for quite a long time. He's finally rescued. Now, as I said, key to his survival was falling forward. And that was because a lot of times these men

fell backwards and they would choke on their own blood or they would choke on their tongues because their tongues would slip back into their throat, which was awful. So just getting off the battlefield was literally half the battle for these men. He ends up in Gilly's care. His fiancé breaks off their engagement. That was not uncommon for these men. But then later, his fiance's friend gets word of this and she begins writing him at the hospital and soon they fall in love and soon they get married. But one of the sad bits about his story is that when he's discharged from the British Army, he goes back to work as a Taylor's assistant. And his boss makes him work at the back of the shop because he doesn't want Ashworth to frighten

the customers. And so I think one of the strongest themes in the facemaker is that not all wounds during the First World War are inflicted on the battlefield. That's so heartbreaking. When you think about the devastation that happened there and then also the devastation that came home. Yeah. And that's why I said Gillies didn't just mend these broken faces.

He mended their broken spirits. but I think it's really important also to remember that Gillies is a product of facial biases of his day. I mean, arguably, we wouldn't need a Harold Gillies if we could have accepted these men's faces as they were. There was a need to restore function, of course. You want to make sure that someone can swallow and to eat and to breathe. But Gillies was going far beyond this. I often say that this was a time when losing a limb made you a hero, but losing a face made you a monster to a society that was largely intolerant of facial differences. That's a great quote.

I mean, that really sums it up. It's the movie. Yeah. It's the movie tagline. Yeah. You're out in L.A. We're always thinking about movie taglines and, you know, how things can get adapted. That's always the big dream as the writer.

But all of that aside, I actually would love to see an adaptation because if you think about Hollywood, there's this really lazy trope about evilness within disfigurement. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. You have Darth Vader. You have Voldemort. You have Blofeld. You have Harvey Dent.

becomes evil after he becomes disabled Batman. Like, he's fine until he is injured. So I would love to see an adaptation if only because I'd love to see these disfigured men as the heroes of their own story, which they absolutely wore at the time. Oh, that's wonderful. You know, and another thing, I also read that Harold Gillies went on to sort of pioneer gender affirmation surgeries. Yes, this is amazing. So in the epilogue, I talk about his post-war career. And he does work through World War II. He's actually working on genital reconstruction of sailors who were injured during that war. And his cousin works very famously on the burned pilots. And they become known in Britain as the guinea pig club. In fact, I think there are still some guinea pigs still alive. It's like

the world's most exclusive club. And they got a ton of media at the time for these burns and for the reconstructive process. In 1949, Harold Gillies performs the first successful falloplasty on a trans man named Michael Dillon. This is an incredible story for so many reasons. Not least, it happened in 1949. What happened was Dylan eventually was outed by the British press. It was terrible. There was a media circus. Dylan ended up fleeing Britain. But Harold Gillies really stood by him. And I think that really speaks to his progressiveness at the time, both as a surgeon and a human being. Absolutely. I mean, being able to push the envelope in terms of just human dignity, it feels like he was like. Yeah. He really think that people should control their identities. He moves into the cosmetic realm as well,

because a lot of people ask, you know, what is plastic surgery become today? But if you think a plastic surgery is a heading and then underneath, you have reconstructive and cosmetic. And both of those continue to be very important to the practice of plastic surgery. But Gillings himself, he moved into the cosmetic realm after the war. And he would say that, you know, reconstructive surgery was about returning something to, quote, normal. That was his word. But that the cosmetic realm was about surpassing the normal. And he was excited by both of those challenges. Wonderful. You know, and as we spoke a little bit before we started recording, Gilles actually has a living relative. Can you talk about how you got in contact with him? This is really funny. So the butchering art, if people have listened to the audiobook of the butchering art, it's read by a voice actor named Ralph Lister. This just happened to be coincident. He just happens to be related to Joseph Lister. In fact, when my publisher came to me with various actors, I said, wait, is Ralph Lister related to Joseph Lister? And they said, oh, yeah, he is. And I was like, well, okay, I don't even care what he sounds like he's got to read it. That's just too weird.

And he's like a real like audiobook narrator. I'm looking at him up now. He's done like, you know, dozens of audiobooks. Yeah, it was just a total coincidence. It's not like, you know, I went and sought this guy out. So he did a great job with the butchering art. And then I found out that Harold Gillies has a very famous, great, great nephew named Daniel Gillies. He's been in the vampire diaries and various other television shows. And so I tweeted at him and I said, well, Daniel Gillies should read the audible book. And he tweeted back and said, yeah, let's do it. So he's actually recorded it. It's been brilliant. I guess as he was recording it, he would stop and occasionally say, oh, I didn't know that about my ancestor. He, of course,

knew a bit about Gillies. But, you know, and his father wrote me too and said that this book is so wonderful because Harold Gillies was about to cease to exist in people's imaginations. And now we can live again through the facemaker. That's so sweet. I imagine if you're an actor and you get to read a book and know that this is like a direct ancestor of you, that's probably just like a Weird. Yeah. Actually, we'd love to do like a joint event at some time and talk about this because I just think it would be so. Because, you know, Daniel Gillies being an actor in Hollywood, he is in the business of image. And so was Sir Harold Gillies. to some extent. Image is very important. So it would be interesting to kind of have a little chat with him about, you know, his process of learning about Gilles through this book. So yeah, it was just really a joy. And actually someone left a review of the audible book that said they thought that this was kind of a gimmick at first. But Daniel Gilles is such a pro and he did such a great job with the reading of it. So I think listeners have been generally very happy with it. I also have to say, I was like looking at his picture, like, where do I know this guy from? And he's in because I didn't watch the vampire diary. So maybe I should. He's in Spider-Man 2, the, like Sam Ramey one, and he plays Mary Jane Watson's, like, perfect fiance. He's like a football quarterback astronaut with like, oh, my gosh.

Oh, he's got a beautiful face. He has the face that is a platonic idea where you're like, oh, Harold Gillers would be proud. Right. And I said that. I said, what is the, you know, it's ironic that Harold Gillies has this great, great nephew who has this perfect masculine face. And as I dream up my adaptations and stuff, I used to think, like, oh, you should play. Harrow Gillies. And then I was like, no, he should play one of the soldiers. His face is ruined and restored by Harrogly's and then wrap it. And it's like this beautiful face. But yeah, he's a very

good looking man. Amazing. It's just like, what a perfect coincidence that it all comes together. Yeah, absolutely. So when you are not in the metaphorical trenches of this sort of, I don't want to say, like, gruesome research, but so much of World War I is so heavy and heartbreaking. What do you do to take care of yourself? What's your like a mental break? Well, with the pandemic, as you know, out in L.A., I mean, we were locked down and writing this book during that time was also terrible on some level. But my new husband, who I've been married to now for quite a few years, he's a caricaturist for a show over here called Spitting Image, and he's an illustrator. And so we're working on a children's book, which we're still working out the title for that book, which will be out next year. And it's going to be an illustrated romp through medical history, all the kind of grossest diseases and what doctors tried to do. So that's been a nice creative relief. And then also, I've now sold my third book, which is going to be called Sleuthhound. And it's about Joseph Bell, who was the real life inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. He was Conan Doyle's professor.

It's going to be a romp through Victorian forensics. So I can't wait. I hope we can have a chat about that because I think it's going to really be in your wheelhouse. Oh, my God. I already love it. Please send me a copy as soon as you get an advanced copy. And yeah, I'm excited about that one because it lets me go back to the 19th century. It feels like slipping into a comfortable warm bath.

I don't have to deal with patient confidentiality or anything. like that. And it's going to be really fun looking at the various crime techniques in their early infancy at that time. The one thing I do have to say sort of is like a myself disclaimer, because this is noble blood, and we usually find the noble connection. Harold Gillies was knighted. He was, yes, absolutely. So he was knighted a little bit late, I would say, actually. He should have received his knighthood a bit earlier after the war. Yeah. And there was a feeling amongst his colleagues that he had been sort of overlooked. But he did eventually receive his knighthood. And he was really pleased about it. And actually, that's how I came up with the name, the facemaker, because it wasn't until

I was working on the epilogue that I came across a letter to Gillies congratulating him on his knighthood. And it was addressed to Dear Facemaker. And I thought it's such a perfect title. I mean, you probably know the hell of titles and subtitles and all the things that go into kind of making a book successful. And with the Butchering art, I sold it as the butchering art. It remained the butchering art. But the facemaker, there were so many different titles. There was one that was war torn. And we went through a lot of different iterations, but I think I finally nailed it, the facemaker and the cover as well, which was designed by my husband, Adrian Teal. It pays homage to Gilly's book. The Principles in Art of Plastic Surgery in which the cover pictures Gillies hands holding the scalpel. So this cover is illustrated,

and it shows the hand of a surgeon, but in the blade, you see the reflection of a bandage soldier. So I like it because it gives the sense that this is a book not just about one man, but about many men. Oh, that's so great. And then there's also another cover, is that the British cover that the English cover, yeah. Yeah. So different publishers, as you know, you know, different covers. Everybody asked me that. The British Penguin really nailed this. So I had like really no notes on this one because again, this is a podcast so people can't picture it. But it's basically an illustrated cover and it's a silhouette of a Tommy from World War I and his face

is made up a composite of many different faces. Yeah. And it's kind of disturbing, which I think is good, you know. I think like, you know, people need to know that they're entering into this violent graphic book, but I do think that there's redemption and there's hope, but you know, you got to keep it real. It's the past and I don't like to sugarcoat it for people. And I will also say that like the fingers holding the scalpel on the cover are bloody, but it's like a cartoon blood. It's not like a, yeah. It's totally, you could read this book in public and no one's going to be, no one's going to get upset. Yeah, it has a bit of a like, you know, 1950s, the U.S. cover. It has like a movie poster feel to it.

Like one of those kind of like it was so hard again my US I don't know if you have ever had any cover issues where yeah I'm nodding sorry again right yeah every every writer is like oh we've always had like that moment where the publishers goes here's your cover and you're like oh no that's right yeah so the original iteration for the US cover looked like a puzzle book like that you'd buy your grandmother and it had Victorian font which was all wrong for this so I really kind of took control and thankfully Adrian is an artist and he could help guide me through that. It helps to have very visual people, you know, circulating around you. So we finally nailed it. But it will be interesting to see what the foreign covers are because it's going to be translated into about 15 languages. Oh my God. That's incredible. Well, thank you so much for, I mean, this book, for telling the story of Harold Giles in the world. Gilles, Jesus. Gilles. Oh, my God. Don't worry. It's because I read it and I didn't have his very handsome great, great grand nephew. It's in her head now. Telling the story of Sir. Harold Gillies to the world. And thank you so much for having this conversation. I've been such a fan

for so long. This is just like an honor. We got to get drinks when I'm in L.A. Oh, absolutely. Okay. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Wodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. 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. Listen to Thanks Dad on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and The Big Money Play Network. It's Will Ferrell.

Woo, woo, woo, 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 IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Noble Blood is a production of IHeartRour. Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz. Additional writing and researching done by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward,

Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is produced by Rima Il Kiali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change.

We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions, you can have like a strong stance. and then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast, guaranteed human.