Hey, Greeking Out fans, Kenny here with a quick update.
First off, a huge thank you to all of you.
Your love for Greek and world mythology is what makes this show possible and helps us keep growing.
And because of that support, we are officially bringing this show back to the podcast universe.
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Head over to Pinna, where subscribers can binge the full Greeking Out catalog and get early access to new seasons right now.
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They got great podcasts to discover like Grim Grimmer Grimmest.
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It's packed with surprising twists and classic fairy tales and lots of fun.
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The greatest stories in history were told in Greek mythology.
Gods and heroes, amazing feats.
Listen and you'll see it's breaking out.
The stories featured on Greeking Out are usually original adaptations of classic Greek myths.
This week's story features references to a volcanic eruption, a lost city, archaeological sites, a special guest, and fish guts left in the sun for a long time.
Welcome to this special bonus episode of Greeking Out.
We're kind of excited because the folks over at Nat Geo have asked us to do a special episode on Pompeii and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius to support their new show on Disney Plus called Pompeii Out of Time.
You have reached the Oracle of Wi-Fi's answering service.
Please leave your name and question for the Oracle after the beep.
Beep.
Oh, right.
Yeah, so the Oracle's not here at the moment, but Nat Geo did send us a Pompeii expert to take her place.
His name is...
Tim Huddleston.
It's Tom Hiddleston, but honestly, don't worry about it.
Oh, sorry about that.
I really don't worry about it.
It happens all the time.
Just to clarify, I'm not a Pompeii expert per se.
I just happen to find it really interesting.
You know...
You look really familiar.
I feel like I know you from somewhere.
You know it's probably just because I have one of those faces.
Yeah.
Right.
Okay.
Well, anyway, I'm glad you're here.
And I'm sure the Oracle has probably left you a bunch of notes, right?
Yes.
Although I have to say it's mostly diagrams of snake frescoes.
So I don't know what to do with that.
But there is a full page here of written permission to use the name Hercules instead of Heracles, which I know is kind of a bone of contention.
But Pompeii was a Roman city.
Right, yeah, definitely keep that one for your records.
That's important.
So, yeah, well, we are talking about the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum today.
Unlike last time when we did this, we went into history on the mythology podcast.
This time we have a single time and place to talk about, and that is the Bay of Naples, modern-day Italy, 79 CE.
And the reason that we know so much about Pompeii is actually because of the way it was destroyed.
It's quite a sad story, actually.
Yeah, it is.
In 79 CE, a volcano, Mount Vesuvius, erupted and destroyed...
Pretty much everything around it, including Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Unfortunately, a lot of people died because the eruption was so violent and so unexpected.
But because the city was covered so quickly in volcanic ash and other debris from the eruption, when archaeologists started uncovering it, they found a nearly intact Roman city.
People had left almost everything right where it was as they ran away to get away from the burning, falling rocks and superheated gases and stuff.
So Pompeii and Herculaneum have told us so much over the years about what it was like to be a Roman in the 1st century CE.
So what I thought we'd do today is talk about some of the things that show us what everyday life was like in Pompeii.
We get to learn about life in Pompeii before the great boom.
That's what I'm calling the volcanic eruption, the great boom, you know.
The Oracle has a note here that I'm not to let you call it the great boom.
What?
Because, well, that's not really a thing.
Yeah, but, you know, Tom, we could totally make it a thing.
I mean, we could just edit that part out and we'd call it the great boom from now on, right?
Yeah.
Unfortunately, the Oracle has made me sign a contract not to allow you to make any things in this episode.
Wow.
She lawyered up.
The Oracle is always one step ahead of me.
You know, I have to stop rehearsing in front of her.
I think that would be part of the problem.
But anyway, I'm just here doing what I'm told.
Moving on, the site of Pompeii was buried for generations, right?
Even though this really catastrophic event happened, the actual ruins of the city were mostly undisturbed.
It was only in the 1500 CE that archaeologists found the site.
And then it took until like the 1700s for any real excavations to happen.
In fact, during World War II, the ruins were actually bombed.
About 170 explosives were dropped by Allied forces on the site, destroying some really important archaeological artifacts.
Afterwards, archaeologists had to work around unexploded bombs found in the ruins.
Even though archaeologists have excavated a lot of the city by now, a large portion of it is still buried to this day.
I mean, literally anything could be down there.
Well, anything the Romans might have had.
Well, yeah.
I don't think we're going to find a roller coaster down there.
Right.
That's true.
Yeah.
I don't think they'd have any scuba gear.
No, probably not.
That's another one.
That would have come in handy.
It would have come in handy.
Yeah.
I mean, they didn't have all the stuff that we have.
Yeah, no surfboards, no toasters, water slide parks.
Right, we get it.
Phone charger cables.
Got it.
You don't find, the archaeologists aren't sort of chipping away and they find like, oh, look, there's a phone charger.
Yeah, no, that never happens.
Or like TV remote.
Although that would be good to know because I still don't know where mine is.
Maybe it's there.
Who knows?
Could be.
Good luck with that.
That's exactly right.
If it's set to Channel 4, it's mine.
Thank you.
Our audience actually already knows a bunch of stuff about Pompeii because...
We've mentioned the gladiator Marcus Attilis of Pompeii in our episode about gladiators or gladiators.
And one of the reasons we know so much about him is because of all the graffiti found in Pompeii that was devoted to him.
And graffiti refers to writing or drawing on walls or other surfaces.
And there are over 11,000 pieces of graffiti discovered so far in the ruins of Pompeii.
Okay, that's a lot of graffiti, but I don't know.
Ancient people didn't have a lot of ways to talk to each other without being physically in the same space, right?
So they left messages for each other on the wall.
You know, you could call it like...
An ancient form of social media.
I mean, today we have texts and emails and posts, so we don't need to inscribe our messages on walls for others to see it, which is one of the reasons why graffiti is generally frowned upon today.
There is such a wide variety of graffiti in pompeii there are advertisements bits of gossip declarations of love restaurant reviews even a child's drawing of gladiators that they saw in the arena
There's also graffiti of some of the famous Latin sayings that we still say today, such as amor, wink it, omnia.
Right.
OK, I'm going to be honest.
I'm not really up on my Latin here, so you're going to have to translate for me.
Sure.
So that one means love conquers all.
Oh, wow.
Love Congress.
I didn't know that saying was so old.
Wow.
Taylor's oldest time.
Yeah, my grandmother has that on a pillow.
Or there was quis custodiet ipsus custodes, which means who watches the watchman.
I have always wondered that.
You've wondered who watches The Watchmen or you've wondered where it comes from?
Well, I've wondered who watches The Watchmen, and I've also wondered why my grandmother also had that on a pillow.
My grandmother had a lot of really weird pillows, honestly, but wow.
There's also graffiti which reads, which you can see on modern houses all over the world, and that means, beware of the dog.
Oh, wow.
I wonder if they have that three times in the underworld, you know, right by Cerberus.
We have the dog and the dog.
Anyway, yeah, we do love glimpses of ancient dogs on this show.
That's for sure.
And graffiti is just one of the things that we have found that gives us a glimpse into the everyday lives of ancient Romans.
Another is a more recent discovery at the site, the Thermopolia.
Thermopolia is the plural of thermopolium, which are small stands that served food on street corners.
Right?
I mean, apparently a lot of homes in Pompeii didn't have their own kitchens.
Most regular people lived in wooden-framed apartments that couldn't safely cook indoors.
Fires in big cities like this can be really deadly, right?
So the people who lived there typically grabbed their food outside of the home.
Only really wealthy people had their own kitchens and ate at home.
The real people had street food and takeout.
Exactly.
And you can still see these stalls in Pompeii with large rounded bowls inset into the counters where the food was kept hot to be dished out to hungry passersby.
And over 80 Thermopolia have been found in the city of Pompeii, and they served a variety of dishes that included things like baked cheese, lentils, salted fish, and of course, garum to top it all off.
Right.
Okay.
And I already know what you're thinking as you're listening to this.
Okay, what is garum?
Well, garum is something that the city of Pompeii produced in great quantities.
It was basically the ancient world's ketchup.
People put it on everything from fish and soup to salads and pear souffle.
So garum is a sauce made from layers of herbs, whole fish, fish guts, and salt sitting in the sun and fermenting anywhere from a couple of days to several weeks.
Okay, that...
Doesn't really sound like ketchup, if I'm being honest.
Was it the fish guts that gave it away?
I think it is the fish guts, yeah.
But the Romans loved it.
And experts say the taste is a lot like the fish sauces we have today.
Okay, well, I have had some really delicious Vietnamese food with fish sauce, so I can definitely see that tasting excellent.
But the open vet in the sun situation should probably be reconsidered.
Not so much there.
Anyway, we haven't talked about the most important food-related discovery of all.
I'm sure it's something that really adds to the scholarship about the ancient people.
Oh, it definitely does.
It was found in Herculaneum, and it's a ham clock.
A ham clock?
Yeah.
Like a ham that you eat?
Yeah, yeah.
And a clock that tells the time?
Right, yeah.
A ham clock.
A ham clock, yeah.
See, archaeologists discovered a portable sundial, that's a clock that used the movement of the sun across the sky to tell time, and it was shaped like a ham.
And, you know, it's really important here because it shows us that people have always been people.
People have always been capable of making novelty clocks.
And I think that's something we can all get behind, right?
That's really beautiful.
Thank you.
I didn't – I told myself I wasn't going to cry and then –
Ham clocks.
Anyway, there's much more to discover about Pompeii, but the last thing we're going to talk about is the religious life of the people in this particular Roman city.
Many homes had wall niches with small shrines to the gods in them called lararia.
This was a spot to worship the household gods called lares and leave them offerings.
Venus, the counterpart to the Greek goddess Aphrodite, was the patron of the city of Pompeii, so you see a lot of images of her, but you see others too, including at least one temple to the goddess Aset...
Or as the Greeks called her, Isis.
Apparently she had a number of worshippers in the city.
And of course, you see representations of myths everywhere.
And if you're a listener of this podcast, I bet you could recognize a lot of the characters that were painted as frescoes on the walls of houses and businesses all over Pompeii.
A fresco.
Is a kind of wall decoration that's done by mixing paint with plaster so that the color is embedded into the wall.
And frescoes survive for thousands of years, if nothing damages them.
That's right, and that's why so many of them are still here.
We've got frescoes of Theseus abandoning Ariadne.
We have Ixion and his cloud wife Nephile.
Even Perseus and Andromeda.
There are also a lot of images of...
Hercules all throughout Pompeii because, well, he was a popular figure in the area.
Herculaneum was said to have been founded by Hercules himself, you know, the name thing.
And one of the frescoes shows Hercules as a baby battling snakes sent by Juno to kill him.
By the way, the Oracle would like me to point out that this is a misuse of snakes.
Duly noted.
Fair point.
Thank you for bringing that up.
There are also some spectacular mosaics, right?
Now, mosaics are patterns or illustrations created by putting together pieces of small stones or tiles.
And they're usually found on the floors of the houses of ancient people with lots of money.
Right.
And one of the mosaics that was discovered had archaeologists really confused because it seemed to be showing a character from mythology...
But they couldn't figure out who it was.
So here's the thing.
The mosaic is an image of a man who seems to be half scorpion with moth wings floating in the air.
And archaeologists think that this is the hunter Orion.
Yes, exactly.
That's what they eventually figured out.
Orion, in case you don't remember, was the hunter who hung out with Artemis sometimes.
Listeners can check back to our episode called Stories of the Stars for that particular story.
But the image in the mosaic is a version of his story that is much different than the version we told.
You see, in this version of the myth, Orion declares he is so good at hunting that he can kill any animal on Earth.
I think Orion needs to chill.
You know what?
I totally agree.
Yes, definitely some chill would be good.
It's a big statement.
It is a big... That's what they call hubris.
Am I right?
Yeah, and hubris is bad.
We know hubris is bad.
Never, ever anger the gods, even if you are a god.
That is the number one rule on Greeking Out.
Thank you, Tom Hiddleston.
Gaia, the goddess of Earth herself, agreed that this was, like, way out of line because she sent a giant scorpion after Orion to kill him.
Now, the scorpion was definitely too much for Orion, and in the mosaic, Orion is being saved by the gods from...
Well, himself, really.
He's grown wings to help him ascend into the stars so he can become a constellation.
And that's the fun part of these stories.
Almost every city has their own version.
I know.
I know.
The stories like this have a tremendous amount of excitement and great characters.
And even in true history, there's a lot of interpretation that goes into looking at something that happened, which he says segwaying into a promotional part of the interview.
Pompeii out of time on Disney plus.
Okay.
This is a really incredible show.
It's exciting.
It seems like it's an adventure story, but,
But it's true.
And you, Tom Hiddleston, Tom Hiddleston, sorry, are very involved in this.
But I got to wonder why you wanted to host, produce and get involved in a show that's about Pompeii right now because all the cool kids are talking about Troy, right?
Well, the first time I went to Pompeii, I was 17.
So back when I was a cool kid in the distant past, although a little bit closer than ancient Pompeii.
Not that distant.
In the summer of 1998, I was studying Latin at school and I had one year left
Before my final exams.
And with two friends, we got the train from Paris in France all the way through France down into Italy.
We went to Rome.
We went to see the Ancient Forum.
We went to see Hadrian's Villa.
And we went down to Naples.
I mean, three 17-year-olds, what's the first thing you do in Naples?
You climb the volcano.
And we climbed Mount Vesuvius.
And then we went to Pompeii the first time.
And up until that point, so I'm 17 years old, and I've been studying Latin at school.
Latin, ancient Rome, the ancient world has been, has existed solely in books.
It's schoolwork.
It's something I read about in a book.
I'm doing my declensions.
I'm doing my Latin translations.
And suddenly, beneath the shadow of this ancient volcano, I'm walking through a city that's been perfectly preserved for 2,000 years.
And it felt, at that time, and I know many people feel the same, it felt like time travel.
That I was walking through the physical reality that was almost identical to 2,000 years ago.
And I was stunned by it, that it had been preserved by what they call the pyroclastic surge, this avalanche of pumice and ash and...
And molten rock that came, which was the debris from the mountain that rolled down the hillside and buried the city for 2,000 years, that it's been perfectly preserved by and the buildings, the furniture, the frescoes, the mosaics, and also the people.
And what struck me is that in any study of ancient Rome, the documents that survive are about the important people, the senators, the generals, the emperors.
But when you go to Pompeii, they're ordinary people living ordinary lives.
And it struck me, it still strikes me now, that the details of Pompeii,
Are what create the time travel feeling.
In Herculaneum, they found bread still baking in the oven.
They found babies' cradles that look exactly like the cradles our babies sleep in today.
But this was 2,000 years ago.
That's why I think Pompeii is cool.
Is it's like time travel.
And Pompeii is a gateway which you can walk through and go back in time and observe ancient Romans who lived in Pompeii who were both just like us and also very different from us.
And that feeling...
I find thrilling.
The 2000 years compress immediately and the past and the present start to talk to each other.
It's a cool place.
You guys should go.
And it's all preserved from this volcano.
It's amazing what a little pumice can do.
I mean, it...
And really the whole world can stop.
But that's the neat thing is that I think you hit on something that I really find cool is that it's sort of the normal people.
And in the show Pompeii Out of Time, you tell the stories of real people like survivors that are like convicts.
Kind of normal people that just live their lives and were suddenly enveloped by something that nobody knew about, which was a volcano.
That's why I think it's so interesting is that there are people who would never have known that in 2000 years they would be observed.
Yeah.
Going about their ordinary life and it's such a resonant image you know there are very tragically we're aware of in our contemporary world
You know climate led natural disasters earthquakes tsunamis where people
People are in great distress and they have to make decisions very quickly to get away from danger.
And those human stories, I think, are what bind us together.
And so finding these...
Evidence of these real people.
And I pick three characters, a teenage boy who works at a bronze smiths on the edge of town, a businesswoman called Julia Felix, whose house you can visit.
It's her estate.
And she ran a bathhouse for quite fancy people, I think.
And a Praetorian soldier who was in Herculaneum.
And there is overwhelming evidence that they made specific choices after the eruption.
And I try to track those choices and bring them to life.
But I feel connected to them.
We all relate to it.
And the question that seems to come to mind is, if we were there, what would we have done?
Right.
What would you do if you were going about your daily life on your lunch break or going home from work or making a sandwich and a volcano erupted in the vicinity?
What would you do?
Where would you go?
Would you know you had to leave immediately?
Would you go and get your mum?
Would you think, I've got to go and pick up the dog?
Would you think, oh, we can ride this one out?
Just, you know...
So we really try to jump into the lives of people in Pompeii and imagine what it was like to be there during what must have been a really scary time.
And it's something that I had previously thought, obviously, it's a human story.
And I wanted to be...
Incredibly respectful to those human beings that this may be something that happened a long time ago but it doesn't make it any less tragic and i wanted to honor their lives
But what i learned in making the show
Was something much more hopeful, which is that in the wake of the eruption, there were numbers of people in their hundreds who made certain choices that they got out of there, that they were survivors.
And you can tell that from inscriptions, pieces of graffiti all over Pompeii, where they inscribed their names and outside the city.
Which are dated later than the eruption, you find the same names in different parts of the Bay of Naples, which means that there are people in Pompeii who found their loved ones, made the right choices, and survived.
And that message of hope is one that I was really left with.
So that's why I think it's an endlessly fascinating story.
Yeah.
I mean, in the series, you actually – this is some pretty intense stuff.
I mean, a city being destroyed and covered by a volcano is – there's probably not going to be very many happy endings.
But during this series, you go out of your way to kind of remind the viewers that you are retelling a story.
Yeah.
I mean, there are a number of times when you do something that's like seems like sort of cinematic and theatrical and you literally break the fourth wall to talk about how imagination was used to tell the story.
Why do you think that was important?
I think ultimately, when we study the ancient world, any historian will gather as much evidence and data as they can.
And you collect all the evidence and try and build a picture of what really happened.
But there will be gaps because there's not a totality of evidence available.
And so if the evidence, as it were, is like the alphabet from A to Z, some of those letters are missing.
And you have to make an informed guess.
If the letter C is missing, you know you've got to get from B to D. And you have to imagine it with what you have.
And so what I try to do is honor the process of studying history itself.
Is a combination of rigor and evidence with imagination.
And also acknowledging that I am an actor, that that's what I do for a living.
I imagine things.
And so when I go to work, this is kind of what I do, is you...
You will follow the trail of breadcrumbs of the archaeological record as far as you can, and then you will take an imaginative leap and fill in the gaps, and that's what we do in the show.
There's a really cool moment.
I don't want to give away any spoilers, but there's a very cool moment in the first episode where you're literally walking down the same street, and you show the kid walking, and you're literally walking in their footsteps, sort of thinking about it.
Yeah.
And that's really exciting.
And you also do this cool thing when you do the interviews where you can like hold up your hand,
You do this gesture thing with your hand where you can like pause and stop time and then flick it and rewind, which is pretty cool.
But you can't really do that, can you?
Unfortunately, I can't do that for real.
It's just something I could do in the show.
Yeah.
I wish I could.
It would be amazing to be able to stop time, wouldn't it?
And fast forward.
But that's what we do when we study the past or when we study something that's happened.
We can't change history, but we can reframe our perspective on it.
And when you say reframe your perspective, that means you can kind of change what you're thinking about it and challenge the idea of what you maybe thought it was like versus what it actually was like.
And that's the most important thing is to interrogate
Your own perspective and and because we can't help but bring ourselves to the study and i think any study of the past is as much a examination of the present we go back into the past to examine who they were to tell us about who we are now
It's fascinating the way you can kind of learn from what has happened and try not to make the same mistakes.
And I think the way we study Greek myths, the way we study Roman history, I think the meaning we find in these stories is the meaning that we find now from 2026.
And these stories would have meant very different things.
To the Greeks 2000 years ago.
Yeah.
Is that what it is about storytelling that you find sort of compelling or particularly interesting?
I mean, I think I've always found it fascinating that people use just simple stories and their imagination to sort of explain their place in the world and the world around them.
I think it comes for free with the experience of being alive.
I think we are meaning making storytelling spirits as human beings.
I think we've always needed stories.
You know, if you go back to the original story, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The local bard would come to the town and sing these old stories.
And somehow we need stories to make sense of what happens to our lives.
We always have and we always will.
Yeah.
I really believe that about human beings.
And it's one of the pleasures of what I do for a living is that I get to tell stories.
It's fascinating to me because a lot of the stories that we tell on Greeking Out are Greek myths, and they did not love a happy ending in Greek mythology.
There were not very many happy endings.
There's a lot of kind of – there's a body count.
I mean they just get kind of intense, and yet they're still really popular with kids.
And I wonder, like, what do you think that is?
What do you think the appeal is, even though it's not a fairy tale ending?
Why are they still popular with kids and families?
I think it's because of the scale.
They're so imaginative.
They're so grand.
They are the experience of being alive writ large on an epic canvas.
Tales of gods and monsters, of centaurs and minotaurs, and gorgons with snakes in their hair.
The scale of these stories is beyond reality.
It's a kind of super reality.
And yet the lessons that our heroes and villains in these stories have to learn, the things that gods are trying to teach the mere mortals or the feats of endurance and suffering that the mortals have to suffer to achieve what they need to.
It speaks to us, I think, and it speaks to our ordinary experience.
Maybe we don't have to endure the 12 labors of Heracles.
Hope not.
But we but human beings suffer.
And to know that Heracles suffered somehow feels easier on us, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I like that, too.
It does make there's an accessibility to a lot of the characters.
And they're moral tales, right?
You know, I always loved...
I still love the tale of Daedalus and Icarus.
Yeah, me too.
The moral lesson in that is, you know, don't fly too low, don't fly too high.
That's the...
Exuberance of youth is he tests the limit but it's it's a fatal test in the end
But what young person doesn't want to fly high right exactly
You want to
You want to stay up there that's for sure and you want to uh you want to challenge
Well i'm going to say challenge authority but maybe you don't want to challenge your dad's authority speaking as a dad
Yeah
If my kids are out there, I'm not talking about you, okay?
Right.
Question authority, just not mine, okay?
That's fine.
Exactly.
And remember your dad when you're going home.
Yes.
Like, change the color of the sails.
Thank you.
Don't forget that.
Right, right.
That is a great tip, Theseus.
Yeah.
So speaking of minotaurs and centaurs, this is the big question.
If you had to choose between being a centaur, half man, half horse, or minotaur, half man, half bull, bull head, horse body, what would you pick?
Centaur, always.
All day.
I'm kind of with you on that.
The centaurs are the good guys.
Yeah, yeah, they are.
Unless you're having a wedding or a party, don't invite them.
Otherwise, they're pretty good.
Tricky on the dance floor.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
You do not want that at all.
So when you were a kid, were you into this kind of stuff?
Were you into Greek mythology?
I loved it so much, yeah.
And that's what led you to classics?
Yeah, so when I was at school, we used to study the Greek myths, not in any kind of academic way.
They're just great stories.
I really remember those ones we've mentioned.
I remember...
I remember the Odyssey.
Probably before I was 10, we had this picture book and the story of the Trojan horse, the 10 years that it takes to get home, the Cyclops, Circe turning Odysseus' men into pigs.
And these are visceral images.
Yeah.
And then, of course, you grow up and you get older and you read more and you realize that these stories are the foundation of all of our stories.
Shakespeare was a great classicist.
His plays are full of allusions to these stories.
Great figures.
Once I started taking on classics at a deeper level, when I started at university, you realize every generation is standing on the shoulders of those who came before.
So
Virgil writes the Aeneid as a Roman version of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Then Ovid reads Virgil.
Then Shakespeare reads Ovid.
Then everybody that comes after Shakespeare is looking back.
And then the founding fathers of...
The United States of America are all classical scholars.
And the two political parties in the States are, if you boil those down, the Democrats comes from two Greek words, demos kratos, people power.
Republican comes from two Roman words, res and publica, meaning the affairs of the people power.
The ancient world is the foundation of the way we think, of our language, of our politics, of our customs, of our stories.
It gives me chills every time.
Yeah, I got chills now, too, and I don't have air conditioning, so that's not it.
So you have Pompeii out of time now on Disney+.
I got to wonder what you would like to do next.
I mean, I don't know that you could do a Pompeii part two.
I mean, I guess there's more to discover, so you probably could.
But is there another story you'd like to tell?
I think so.
I'd love to stay in the ancient world, but then maybe I jump forward into a different period in history.
I hope we will do one or the other anyway.
I think we found a really interesting way of telling stories with time.
Yeah.
You can experience history as time travel, which is really what it is.
Yes.
It's trying to put your mind into a place which is both familiar and unfamiliar.
And to live in the shoes of other people who lived in a different way, but maybe the same.
Maybe the past is a foreign country and they do things differently there, but they were more similar to us than we realize.
Are there other mythologies besides like Greek mythology and Roman mythology that you would be interested in learning about or studying?
I'd be lying if I didn't say that Norse mythology has been a feature of my life.
You know what?
You do have a Norse quality about you.
I don't know.
It's something Norse-ish.
It's not obvious.
It's very, yeah.
There's something in there.
I've always had a curiosity there.
It's an undertone.
It's kind of a low-key vibe, but it's definitely there.
I can't put my finger on it.
Yeah, I can't put my finger on it.
It's just low-key cool.
It's a marvelous area of study.
Yeah, it really is.
I'm not playing any tricks on you.
It's just always been something I'm interested in.
No, no.
Well, I think it's fascinating that you are this interested in the history and you want to stand as guard to a lot of the historical facts.
Yeah.
You know, and I respect that about you, Tom.
Thank you so much for joining us and for filling in for the Oracle.
Just a reminder, if you're interested in Mount Vesuvius, the eruption, the story of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Pompeii out of time is currently on Disney+.
Watch this space for an announcement about new episodes coming to the podcast feed in 2026.
This episode of National Geographic Kids Creaking Out is written by Jillian Hughes and Kenny Curtis and hosted by Kenny Curtis with Tori Kerr as the Oracle of Wi-Fi.
Audio production and sound design by Scotty Beam and our theme song was composed by Perry Grip.
Dr. Meredith Safran is our subject matter expert.
Emily Gammon, Beth Wasco and Giovanna Alimo are our producers and Emily Everhart
Is our senior producer.
