Camp Gagnon - DISTURBING Secrets Hidden in Pompeii

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

Today, we dive into the lost world and catastrophic destruction of Pompeii—the ancient Roman city frozen in time by the fury of Mount Vesuvius. From what daily life, vibrant street graffiti, and quirky culinary realities actually looked like before disaster struck, to the ignored warnings, the timeline of the fateful eruption, and the harrowing fate of its residents, we explore one of history’s most fascinating and tragic chapters. We also examine the groundbreaking archaeological digs, the haunting plaster casts of the victims, recent astonishing discoveries across Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the untold stories of those who managed to survive. Welcome to History Camp! 🏕️ Shoutout to our sponsors: Ultra and Morgan & Morgan --Don’t sleep on ULTRA Pouches. New customers get 15% Off with code CAMP at takeultra.com! #UltraPouches #ad Want the even WILDER theories? SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon 👕🧢 Shop CAMP Merch: https://camp-rd.com/collections/ufo 🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets: https://markgagnonlive.com 🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.com Timestamps: 00:00 Christos YAPPIN 04:25 Pompeii Before The Eruption 08:55 A Day in Ancient Pompeii 12:08 Pompeii Graffiti 14:49 The Warning Pompeii Ignored 18:38 When Did Vesuvius Erupt? 20:25 Eruption of Vesuvius 31:12 Archeological Digging Begins 33:53 Bodies of Pompeii 38:30 New Discoveries in Pompeii 41:35 Discovery of Herculaneum 45:52 The Survivors of Pompeii 50:50 Ancient Phallic Art 54:50 Ancient Rome Had No Tomatoes? #foryou #history #pompeii Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siaia and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll.

So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. There's a hidden city in Italy where you can still read the last thing that someone graffitied on the wall before the world ended. There was propaganda for a local politician, a joke about someone's love life, even bread, left in an oven that never came out. And for almost 1700 years, the city of Pompeii simply didn't exist. Not as a ruin, barely as a legend. It was just simply gone, forgotten, and erased. so completely that farmers planted crops over the rooftops of a buried city and never suspected

a thing. Until one day, it was miraculously rediscovered. Because when the world finally found out and dug it back up, they found something inside its walls that the world had never seen before. Bodies frozen in their final positions, a dog still straining against its chain, a perfect snapshot of one ordinary day almost 2,000 years ago, before a mountain that nobody feared erupted and swallowed an entire town. This is the story of Pompeii. But the thing is, the story is still being written because there is still so much left to be discovered,

and we have new evidence that Pompey actually continued on. So what happened to this Roman city? Who got left behind? And how did it forgotten little town become the most valued, fascinating, and honest window into the ancient world that we've ever had? And what is the city still hiding? Well, today we're going to find out.

We're walking through the streets of the city that lived three separate lives, a thriving Roman town, a silent grave, and a resurrected time machine. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up, people, and welcome back to history camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from all time forever and always, yes, that is what we do here. This is my personal journey.

This is my literal life project to try to understand everything that's ever had. happened. And oh boy, there's a lot of stuff. Literally every day there's new stuff happening and then there's new stuff to figure out. So, I mean, it seems like we're going to be doing this for a long time. So, no time to waste. Okay, before we jump into Pompeii and why this city is so fascinating. And also a place that I've been to, by the way. This is a little known fact about me. I've gone to Pompeii, not far away from Napoli, where I went with my parents when I was like 15. It was crazy. It's the coolest thing ever. And I'll tell you everything that I saw, which is very funny and shows how people don't really change that much. You look at Pompeii and you see the screenshot, you're like, oh, humans have kind of

always been human in for a while. But I want to say a few things. A couple camp bulletins before we begin. I want to say thanks to you, dude, or girl, whoever you are. I want to say thanks for tuning in and just being here and just listen and, you know, having this conversation with me. Because every time you tune in and you watch one of the episodes that we do, or you click, and your comment, like, any of that stuff, anytime you interact with the content, you just tell the algorithm overlords like, hey, Mark and Christos, those are good guys. guys and they try their best and they seem like, yeah, we should give them a chance. And you keep the lights on in the 10, you keep the fire burning here at the campsite.

Now, I just said a name and you're probably like, who's that? Yeah, Christos. He's the guy of my right. He's the Greek freak. He's the Orthodox legend himself. He's my little window into how the Greek mind works. And he's sitting right next to me. How are you, Christos?

Why wouldn't they know who I do? No time to waste, okay? I'm assuming there's a lot of people that are like, Christas, where have I heard that name before? They're maybe thinking of Jesus Christ. Maybe they're thinking of their friend, maybe an ex of. they have named Christos. Not you.

Not me. Not you. You're a faithful guy. Of course. Only be with one woman ever. That's not the here nor there. We're talking about ancient history. You know what I want to talk about recent history.

Anyway, we're talking about Pompeii. It's a fascinating place. And I'm sure you probably heard of it. You probably seen it in books. I guess I think it's one of those things that like, if you were vaguely a history nerd when you were in like elementary school, you probably got like a giant picture book. and it was like Pompey in a day and you got to like flick through it,

not really realizing that you're looking at the literal mass grave of thousands and thousands of people. That's what happened to me. I mean, I was like probably 10 years old being like, wow, history's amazing. Just looking at like people just frozen in time, screaming their last breaths, just getting consumed by pumice and volcanic rock.

It's kind of morbid when you zoom out. But as a kid, you're like, isn't history cool? So forget the ruins for a minute. Forget all the ash and the plaster bodies and all that stuff because before any of that, Pompeii was a real place. It was an ancient, productive town. Kind of like almost a vacation spot.

Hey, real quick, most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop. Religion camp, history camp and camp gagnon. Now let's get back to it. It sat in a region called Campania in the Bay of Naples. One of the most desirable stretches of coastline and basically the whole ancient Roman world. Like rich Romans would literally build like vacation houses there. Like, you know, you live in Rome and then you'd be like, well, we're going to, you know,

we're going to summer in Campania. We're going to go down to Pompeii. Nothing bad ever happens there. It's kind of like how, like, billionaires will have, like, houses in, like, the Hamptons or like Malibate or something. But Pompeii wasn't even originally a Roman city. The town was old. I mean, centuries old before Rome, like, took it over.

It had been shaped by a whole procession of cultures. You had the Italic peoples. You know, the Italic peoples. They're kind of like, you know, they kind of stand a little slant. They spoke a language called Oskan. And then the Greek showed up, of course, the Greeks, they're all over there, just putting their little swerthy fingers and everything. And then you have the Etruscans, each leaving like a different kind of imprint on this place.

And so Pompeii, like most of the Mediterranean region, kind of grows up with like this mixed sort of like hodgepodge of cultures and trade routes and all these different, you know, kind of like human affects that kind of leave a print on the place. So Rome only took full control of the city around like the first century BC. But like, again, it sounds like a long time ago. And it is. But if you look at the scope of everything, I mean, it was controlled by all these different cultures for thousands of years before they showed up. I mean, it's a beautiful coastline.

People are going to, if any time someone sees it, they're like, yeah, I'll just live here. This sounds pretty good. So Pompey backed the wrong side in a war against Rome. So that Rome pulls up. Pompey gets besieged. and was punished by being turned into a colony for Roman military veterans. So a bunch of retired soldiers kind of like move in. And then the whole town became thoroughly Roman on top of everything else that it had already been.

So the bay, if you actually go to it, is pretty warm. The sea is full of fish. The soil is like super fertile, which we'll find out is, you know, partially the effects of some volcanic activity in the, you know, far past that people didn't really realize. But regardless, you got great. and olives and grains and everything is growing. It's literally heaven on earth. It's like Eden. Like you're living in some other part of the southern Europe.

And all of a sudden you show up at this place, we're like, oh, there's an ocean full of food and ground that gives us food year round, and the weather is super temperate and awesome, and the coastline is beautiful and we can swim. It's like, yeah, this is exactly where we're on to retire. So the soil, like I mentioned, is extremely volcanic. And that is why it is so fertile. And again, people aren't really making the connection.

They're just like, wow, this ground is amazing. But as we know, volcanic soil generally is pretty fertile. But the mountain that is looming over the bay and basically casting a shadow onto the city of Pompeii is a mountain called Mount Vesuvius. And it had, over thousands of years, blanketed the whole region in this super mineral rich ash that made the land just like blossoming.

It literally was a garden. And this mountain was essentially feeding and fertilizing them. And it had been so good for so long, that nobody alive even thought that the mountain was a volcano. To them, it was just a mountain. Green, forested, it had, you know, like trees growing out of it and farms going right up on the slopes. It hadn't erupted in a super long time. So everyone was like, oh, wow, this is a beautiful mountain. And the ground is super fertile, nothing to see you here. So by the first century AD, that's all Pompey was. It was this old multicultural port town, a bunch of veterans,

maybe to like 10 to 12,000 people basically plugged into the largest economy of the world had ever seen, which is the Roman Empire at that point. And it wasn't super important. It's not like necessarily super famous. It's just kind of like a really busy kind of port town full of some wealthy people and some retired veterans. It's almost like Sarasota, Florida. It's kind of what we're talking about. You got old retirees and some rich people and it's kind of just like a nice little town. and it turns out is exactly why it was worth preserving. So let's have a look at what Pompeii was in its heyday, like the height of the boom and of the business.

So the streets are paved with these big flat stones. Again, this is not like dirt roads. This is not the Wild West. These are actual roads with actual, like, you could think of almost like ancient asphalt. And the roads are filthy because of how many people are actually traveling down them. If you go, you can see these crosswalks. And the crosswalks are raised so that the,

Pompeians of the time could walk across the street without having to step through any of like the, you know, horse or donkey excrement or any of the other excrement you might find. And you even have chariot ruts, like literally, like the wheels of the chariots going through the streets that are worn into the stone. The streets are pretty narrow. Again, we're not dealing with cars or anything. We're dealing with like little chariots and stuff. And they're loud and they're crammed with life. And there are bakeries with millstones and ovens, some of which were found with the last batch of bread still inside, just kind of showing how quickly this catastrophe happened. And there are, this is going to sound crazy, bars.

Like, just a bunch of dive bars. Like, just like, hey, this is where we go and drink and get hammered. My favorite thing is you see, like, these fast food counters. They literally called them a thermopolia. They're these big clay jars sunk into stone countertops. And you would basically pull up, you'd be wearing, you know, your toga or something. And you would just grab, like, a bowl. And maybe you'd bring a bowl from home.

And you'd take a ladle and you'd scoop up a bunch of hot, and maybe a cup of wine and you didn't have to go home to cook because maybe we were like a sailor coming into town. You're like, man, I'm so hungry. You pop into a little restaurant, have some stew. Later that night you go to a bar. And literally, it's a regular city. It feels like any place you could go today. There's like places you can do laundry. There's workshops or you can build stuff. There's brothels. There's temples to dozens of different gods. There's public baths where the whole city came to kind of like sweat and gossip and do business. And then, of course, there's an amphitheater. One of the oldest stone amphitheaters we know of anywhere in the

Roman world. The Pompeians loved their games and their plays so much. They loved the game so much specifically that in, I think, 59 AD, a riot broke out at the arena between locals and visitors from a neighboring town. And it got so out of hand that literally the Emperor Nero banned Pompeii from holding games for 10 years because he was afraid of, like, violent, you know, like ultras, basically battling each other and killing each other, and he didn't want to have some type of, like, rebellion caused in, you know, the southern part of his Roman Empire. Pretty crazy.

Now, you can see, like, Italian sports culture is, like, rooted in this. It's like, yeah, the Pompeians and, like, the southern Napoleons were like, hey, we're not, we're not going to get embarrassed in our home court. And so they would, like, fight each other. And we know this because there's literally a fresco of the riot painted on a wall. And it literally made its way into Roman histories by other later Roman historians. that wrote about it. So this little town was making national headlines for starting a sports brawl. This is like the Philly of the ancient world. They're just like crazy sports fans like to drink and

have brothels and just have a good time. You know what I'm saying? And the thing that brings Pompeii most vividly back into life isn't necessarily the buildings or how modern everything is. The thing that I even noticed when I went there as a kid is the graffiti. If you go there even to this day, like we went and the tour guide was like, yeah, you know, we're going to go down this alleyway and there's a lot of graffiti on the walls. Like the architecture is beautiful and the buildings are amazing, but it has been vandalized.

And I was expecting to show up and see, like, you know, like some guy tagging it with spray paint. That's not what I saw. It's like etchings and scratches and like murals that were painted literally in like one like BC. Like it's crazy. Like how old these actual pieces of graffiti are. And it's really interesting to see the ancient world's graffiti.

Because most of what we get from the ancient world, what survives is what historians write down or it's what, you know, like the emperors or the dictators or the statesmen would write down from their scribes. It was all very, like, proper. But what we see in the graffiti is what the actual average person was thinking about. And a lot of it is not very dignified. And it kind of shows, like, you know, dudes have always kind of been dudes.

Like, you'll see, like, election ads, like, hey, vote for Steve. He makes good bread. And then there's bar tabs and there's, like, insults. And there's people bragging about who they slept with. Someone else declaring, like, an undying love. of like, you know, like, oh, what's a good Greek woman name? Maria.

Oh, Maria, like, never forget me. Da-da-da-da. There's like a tired line scratched near a doorway that even translate to something like, I'm amazed wall that you haven't collapsed under the weight of so many writers nonsense. So it's literally people commenting about the commentary. 2,000 years ago, someone in this town

was already sick of graffiti and complaining about it. Like, it's an old guy, being like, man, it's a shame what they did to you, poor wall. This is the reversal at the heart of everything. This is what reminds us and shows us that Pompeii was alive and human. And not human in like the old sense where like we think of ancient Romans as like walking around and debating about politics and being very stately. Like, no, it's just regular dudes like writing random stuff. There's a lot of penis graffiti as well. Not to be crude here on history camp. I know we try to keep it pretty clean. But there's phallic graffiti all over the place. And there's,

actually a whole like phallic museum. We can talk about that a little later. But the grand Roman text that we inherit were, like I said, written by senators and emperors. And we never get to see the actual working class kind of affect, like the baker or the barmaid or like the kid talking about his crush. And so every bit of that is living in the shadow of a mountain that was without any of them even knowing coming close to some type of ultimate destruction. Now, as you probably know about this point, Pompeii gets destroyed. and completely covered by volcanic ash. But 17 years before that day,

the ground actually gave Pompeii and its citizens a warning. They just didn't really understand it. So 62 AD, there's a powerful earthquake that hit the region and did pretty serious damage to Pompeii. So temples cracked and some of the buildings came down. It was bad enough that they were still rebuilding a lot of it almost two decades later. So when Mount Vesuvius, aka volcano Vesuvius, finally erupted,

The city is full of scaffolding and like half-finished repairs and construction that had been dragging on for years, which is just another funny point to show how modern the ancient world was. Like renovations going over time and over budget is just a human error. It's just what it means to be human. Hey, you want to redo your bathroom? Add a year and add 10 grand because it's going to be longer and more expensive than you think. And people have been dealing with this ever since Pompeii. So to us, looking back, this earth.

is pretty obvious. It's like, hey, there's some type of seismic activity. There's some type of fault line going on. But for them, they didn't really know. They didn't have the same understanding of, you know, seismic geography that we understand. But Vesuvius was waking up and the tremors were the pressure building up deep underground underneath this mountain and ultimately under Pompeii. And that understanding is obvious, you know, to us now, especially because we know how the story ends. And we've learned how to read the signs over years, sort of in part because of what happened at Pompeii. But to the people living there, the earthquake was just an earthquake. They happen sometimes. They happen all throughout Italy. And you just kind of, you know, rebuild, move on.

And honestly, they probably didn't know what a volcano necessarily was. But again, at the time, there's no science of volcanology. Like, there was no cultural memory of Vesuvius in particular erupting because it hadn't done so in a really, really long time. Like the last major eruption of Vesuvius was centuries ago before anyone alive at that time was born. And I think partially because of the shifting of the region, a lot of the memory and sort of the history that was written down might not have been passed on to the new people that took over the land. So for them, the mountain was just a farm. And the idea that it would open up and pour fire and ash and magma onto the coast. It wasn't even a fear that they just dismissed.

it just wasn't even on their radar. So in the years and months before the eruption, the warnings got louder. There were more tremors, and the springs and the wells that they were sort of living off of were kind of drying up. The livestock, interestingly, were starting to behave, like, pretty strangely,

according to some later accounts. Every one of these things was an alarm bell, and every one of them was just completely incomprehensible that there was some other type of threat looming, because the people hearing them had no framework that turned like, hey, the ground is shaking again into, this is a mountain that's literally going to kill all of us.

We have one man to thank for the fact that we know any of this, and his name is Pliny. Specifically Pliny the Younger. He is a well-connected young Roman who happened to be staying across the bay at a naval base called Mycenum. And he was there basically when all of this happened. Years later, he wrote two letters describing what he saw, and they are the only detailed eyewitness accounts

of the eruption that survive from anyone who was actually there. But we have to use Pliny very carefully because he wasn't in Pompeii. He was watching from across the water, safe, miles away, and he gave us the scale and just how terrifying the actual size of this plume was. But he can't tell us what it was like being on the streets and in the bakery and just the actual emotional damage that happened when the sky literally just started falling. And for that, we don't have words as evidence, but we have bodies.

So let's go to 79 AD. And I want to just stop right here before we go on because it's a small mystery that historians are still trying to figure out. For centuries, everyone thought that they knew the date. They were like, ah, August 24th, 79 AD, and it came straight from Pliny's letters, right? Like Pliny wrote about it,

and he put this date, so case closed. Except the case is actually not closed. Because when archaeologists actually dig, they keep finding things that don't necessarily fit with that specific date. They find carbonized pomegranates and walnuts and chestnuts, which are autumn fruits, not summer fruits. So why, if the date is August,

are we finding things that show up into September and October? There are jars of newly pressed wine, suggesting that the grape harvest had already happened, which typically happens a little bit later. People are wearing heavier clothing, like things that you would wear typically in the autumn and winter months. And in 2018, on the wall of a house that was being renovated, someone found a line of charcoal graffiti dated to October 17th, which is interesting. But if it's October 17th of 79 AD, that date shouldn't exist. The whole city would already be gone by August.

So some experts now think that the eruption actually came in autumn of 79, not in the summer. And others point out that the fruit maybe was preserved. The coins are pretty ambiguous. and Pliny's manuscripts still say August. So it's just an interesting detail that this debate is still ongoing. And even with history where we have a first-person eyewitness account, there's still some room for error when it comes to how dating and the actual chronology of things really goes. But for now, we're just going to say for certain it was 79 AD.

And it didn't happen the way that a lot of movies or recreations will show it. There's no wall of lava that just comes down and consumes. everything. There's no single instant. What happened to Pompeii unfolded over the better part of like half of a day in stages and each stage is worse than the last. So from all the records that scholars and real historians can find, the explosion begins around midday. And again, a lot of people imagine that there's a big wall of magma that comes down and just sweeps the whole city up. It's not really what happens. There's just an explosion, like not a regular explosion, a nuclear bomb that happens just five miles away. And it blasts this column of gas and ash and pumice. Pumice is like,

they're kind of like these light little like volcanic stones. You can, you can think of it like, you can almost like scoop up a handful of them. And they're pretty light, but when you pile on, you know, literally feet of them, they can crush you. And they go 20 miles straight up into the sky, higher than you would see like a jet flying to this day. So Pliny, the historian we're talking about, He's sitting across the bay, and he said it literally looked like a tree, a massive trunk rising up and then spreading out at the top with branches. And he didn't have a word for what he was seeing. He just used a description that he was familiar with.

And then it all started to fall, not lava, but rock. And like I said, pumice is like this light, porous rock. And it starts raining down on Pompeii, literally by the tons. And at first, it was like a strange kind of like novelty, right? Like it's starting to fall. and it's not killing you. It's just kind of like almost like a light hail almost. And it's kind of like pelting you and, you know, it starts

to build up and all of a sudden the ground you're looking at is now covered in like these little rocks. And then it's ankle deep. And then it's knee deep. And then it's piling up against doors and pressing on roofs. An hour after hour roofs start to collapse under the weight and anyone who decided to shelter

inside to get away from the falling rock is now all of a sudden crushed by the weight of all the rocks stacked on top of them. And then there's a terrible calculation that the people of Pompeii had to make in real time. So they're just sitting there having a regular day. All of a sudden, nuclear bomb goes off, huge blast, massive tree, 20 miles into the sky, little rocks start falling on them. And now the whole sky is darkened with this ash. So all of a sudden, in the middle of the day, it goes to nighttime. And they think, do I run out into an open space where

these rocks are like hammering me? And I can't really see where I'm going. And I don't really know which way is safe and I don't even really understand what's going on, or do I just stay inside, light a candle, and live inside my roof and, you know, protect myself that way. Well, many of them ran, and we know that they ran because we have strong evidence that most of Pompeii actually got out, but some of them stayed. And for the ones who stayed, and for the ones who maybe ran too late, there is still another thing coming, an even worse thing, and it hadn't even started yet. So, of course, the falling rock, over enough time could kill you, but it was pretty slow

and it was survivable if you were running fast enough. But the next thing that came was not. After hours of this eruption and this ongoing explosion, the towering column of ash and gas above the mountain became too heavy to hold itself up.

And as a result, it just collapsed. And so instead of the blasting going upward, it came down the slopes of Vesuvius and all of a sudden you had a churning avalanche of superheated gas and ash and rock, now moving at the speed of a hurricane. And it's hugging the ground. And if you get too close, it is hot enough to kill you instantly.

And in the modern day, scientists will call this pyroclastic surges. And they are the deadliest thing that a volcano can do. Hey guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I got to tell you something. If you know me, you know I'm obsessed with finding ways to cheat biology without accidentally ruining my biology. And for a long time, I associated putting a pouch in with being focused and energized and like ready to attack the day. But the thing is, nicotine is a vasoconstrictor, which means it literally narrows your blood vessels and restricts oxygen delivery to your muscles. So I'm taking something

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to the gym, before a podcast. I have one in right now. And it sharpens me up without making me feel like I'm anxious or like I'm jittery. And when I'm fasting, you're trying to clean on my diet. it really helps quiet just the food noise and the cravings that I have. It's amazing. You get all the focus, you get all the energy. You still get the pouch experience, but again, there's zero nicotine and zero caffeine. So I'm not dealing with the same wired feeling or like the crash that I get from caffeine. My favorite flavor is blue raspberry. I got the watermelon right here because I already finished the blue raspberry. Ultra is the ultimate guilt-free pouch, delivering instant focus and mental clarity without nicotine and caffeine. And I have great news. If you are listening to this program right now when you use the code camp, you will get

15% off when you go to take ultra.com. That is take ultra.com. Use the code camp for 15% off. And after you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about them. Tell them that Mark and Christos from the campsite, Sancho. Do you have a friend that buys gold instead of crypto because he doesn't trust the internet? That's a power move. Do you got a buddy that has like a backup generator and a bunch of canned food and somehow knows that a blackout's coming before the power company does? That's a power move. And do you have a friend that hired Morgan and Morgan? Well, guess what? That's a power move. Yep, Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury law firm with over 100 offices nationwide and over 1,000 lawyers. They've recovered over $30 billion for more than

500,000 clients. In Florida, they secured a $644 million verdict after the defense argued that the victim and his wife should get nothing. That is a power move. So if you are ever injured, you can check out Morgan and Morgan. And their fee is free unless they win. Go to for the people.com slash Gagnon or dial pound law. That's pound 529 from your cell phone. That is for the people.com slash Gagnon. This is a paid advertisement. The first surge actually goes through another town, a town on the other side of the mountain called Herculaneum. And the heat there was so extreme that it did unspeakable things to any human being that was unfortunate enough to get caught in the surge. But then the surges came for Pompeii. And by the time they arrived, the city had already been

battered for hours and was now buried under feet of pumice and people were still there sheltering in cellars or huddled in backrooms or some of them even just trapped under debris or just too slow to escape. You can think of elderly or the very young, completely confused and they were overtaken by a wave of gas and of ash that filled every street and every doorway and most tragically every lung that happened to breathe it in. And this is the moment that the plaster casts that we actually see in the modern day capture. Not a peaceful city going to sleep, a city in its final chaotic, terrifying hour. And the thing is, the ash and the pumice doesn't stop. It keeps on falling and falling and falling long after the last person died. I mean, Vesuvius kept bearing the town layer

on layer until Pompeii was completely gone, like literally covered beneath like 20 feet of volcanic material. The tops of the tallest, tallest buildings of the town were completely covered. The street. were vanished hours ago, and the whole city was just packed and hidden as if it never existed at all. And when it was over, the sky finally cleared, and someone standing on the shore of the Bay of Naples would have looked toward where a busy city full of 10,000 people had stood that morning going about their normal day, and they would see nothing, except just a gray smoking plane. Now, Pompeii did not become a famous ruin. No one at the time went there, built a monument, no one made it a place of pilgrimage. I mean, the Romans knew that a disaster had

occurred. Like, the Emperor Titus had even sent some type of relief, but the city itself was just gone. Most of the relief that was sent was to help the survivors and the people that were the refugees and those that were actually able to escape. But as time went on, centuries kind of rolled over the top of Pompeii, just like the ash. And Rome rose higher than ever, and then ultimately Rome fell, and the empires kind of came and went, and pieces of the Roman Empire got broken off and then reintegrated, and new people kind of set up farms

on this big, sort of, you know, newly growing plane, and they started planting crops on the ground, and they never really knew that 18 feet beneath them there were bakeries with bread still in the ovens and people still in these cellars clutching each other in their final moments. And the name of Pompeii just kind of faded, and the location kind of bloated,

and it sort of became a legend that people kind of talked about, like, oh yeah, there was a place here and the volcano came and it covered it all up. But that's kind of all it was. It's just sort of a rumor that was kind of lost in the dirt. And for roughly 1,600 years, one of the richest archaeological sites in all of human history was just silent, just unknown under this farmland in southern Italy. It's an interesting thing to look at in hindsight because in the modern day, we have an understanding of archaeology or preserving history.

But for the Romans at the time, there was nothing really to preserve. I mean, some wealthy people actually went back and started to dig for their specific valuables. They went to the area maybe where their house was and they dug into it because they had gold or jewels or gems hidden underneath. But outside of, you know, taking care of the refugees and the actual people that survived and escaped and going back and collecting some of the valuable remnants, the land wasn't really something to excavate. I mean, think about it. It's tons and tons, literally 20 feet. deep of just rock and ash, that it wasn't really worth trying to excavate it and rebuild the city. They didn't have a concept of that. So they kind of just left it. And people were aware that

something happened there and there was a tragedy and life just kind of went on. And that's how it was for hundreds of years. And then slowly it started to emerge. And the first real breakthrough of the site came actually in the 1700s. It wasn't until 1748 when the Bourbon Kings ruling Naples at the time started digging. But we should be clear about what early archaeology actually was. It wasn't archaeology in the way that we think of it. It was treasure hunting. You see, the people that were digging were after beautiful things. They wanted to find statues and frescoes and marble and anything that could decorate a royal palace or a nobleman's collection. Again, thinking about it at that time, I mean, 1700 years ago, this is ancient history to them.

and if some guy's able to dig up stuff and sell it to a noble, he can make a lot of money. And they were aware that there was a rumor that there was a place that was covered up. And so they started to tunnel in and rip out what was valuable and really just kind of destroyed everything else around it. Like the context and the ordinary objects, the little clay pot that has food in it, the delicate record of daily life, it wasn't worth anything. So they were kind of mining Pompeii for loot. and it wasn't even confirmed to be Pompeii until 1763 when they finally dug up an inscription and found the name of the town.

But the actual turning point here, the moment that Pompey went from kind of just being a treasure hunter's dream to actually being a record came a century later when one guy, Giuseppe Fiorelli, who actually took the excavations seriously in 1860. Fiorelli was really a modern thinker. He was a different kind of person, He didn't want treasure.

He wanted to understand. So he divided the city into numbered zones and insisted on recording exactly where every object was found and dug from the top down instead of just tunneling in like a looter or a treasure hunter. And he really looked at Pompeii as evidence and kind of turned this treasure hunting idea into a science. And then Fiorelli suddenly noticed something that changed everything.

As his team started to dig through this, at this point, hardened ash, they kept on hitting empty pockets, like these weird voids, these hollow spaces in this solid rock. And Fiorelli, and this is a real flash of genius, he realized in that instance what these hollows were. When the surges buried the people of Pompeii, the ash had packed tightly around their bodies and then hardened. And over the centuries, the bodies inside just, you know, decayed away into nothing. But the ash held the shape. So each hollow was a perfect mold of a human being. in the exact position that they were in when they died,

frozen in that kind of negative space, almost as like a fossil for 1,800 years at this point. So in 1863, when Fiorelli's team found one of these voids, they stopped. They poured liquid plaster inside of it and they let it harden. And then they carefully kind of chipped away the surrounding rock and they found the shape of a real human being terrified and frozen in time. It was the exact outward form of a human being on that fateful day. in 79 AD. Literally everything, like the fold of their clothing, the way that their limbs were

laying, a hand raised to the face, trying to find any extra oxygen that they could breathe in, just a body curled around another smaller one, even a dog still twisted against the chain that kept it from running away. These are not sculptures that someone made. These are the shapes of real individual terrified people that were left in ash in the last seconds of their lives. and Fiorelli, in his genius and in his forward thinking, was able to fill them back in. And now, we have to be clear about what these casts are. They are not petrified bodies in the way that some people will call them. They are plaster poured into a hollow, and they are usually still real human bones inside of them.

You can think when a body decays, it's just the bones that are left. So these casts are actually two things. They are the single most powerful window into that day to really feel the tantal. tangible whore and to actually have empathy with people that lived almost 2,000 years ago. And there are also the actual remains of a real human being who died in terror, now being displayed behind glass for millions of tourists a year, with their actual bones, many of which still cast in this plaster. And the archaeological park of Pompeii holds the remains of more than a thousand victims

and around 100 of these different casts. And it's not a prop. Like, that's a Tuesday afternoon in the city's life. at the worst possible, most awful catastrophic moment. And it captures the shape in plaster of that memory. Now, here's a weird thing about those casts. For 150 years, we thought we kind of knew who these people were. But it turns out these scholars were wrong.

Because in 2024, a team of scientists did something that few really could have never dreamed of. They went into the cast, into like the real fragmented bones still trapped inside the plaster and they pulled something out. They pulled out DNA. Yeah, they really went into the bones and found any DNA that was still there. And what's interesting is that the DNA didn't necessarily match the stories. So you take the most famous group of all, right?

There's an adult with a child on their lap wearing a delicate gold bracelet. And for over a century, the label was obvious. Okay, this is a mother holding her child in the last seconds of both of their lives. It's in postcards. It's on textbooks. And it's very sad and very beautiful. It's almost like a modern version of the Pietta, you know, like a mother in English. holding her child, right as they're both about to die.

But the DNA came back. And what's interesting is that the mother isn't a mother at all. It was a man. It was an adult male. And it wasn't even related to the child that he was holding. Another pair locked in what looked like this final embrace. It was long described as two sisters or maybe a mother and a daughter. But two women that were in each other's arms holding each other in their final moments.

But at least one of these people in the casts were male. each one of these stories we kind of just made up like not maliciously but just you know researchers and historians they looked at the shape of the ash and they kind of interpreted it through their own modern lens and they kind of took you know general kind of measurings of the bone lengths and they were like yeah these are women right these are a mom and you know holding their child who else is going to hold a child at the end of times right this is going to obviously be the mom or you know these two people embracing each other they're probably both women they're kind of sisters like we projected our own world backwards 1800 years onto people

who couldn't correct us. What's fascinating is that the DNA didn't just stop there. It also revealed where these people came from, like originally, like their ethnicity. And the answer is everywhere. I mean, the people of Pompeii were largely descended from immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean. It wasn't some homogenous little Italian town

full of Pompeians that were born and raised there their whole lives. It was a genetic crossroads of the entire Roman world, exactly like the living, mixed, cosmopolitan port that we walked through at the start of this story, and in many ways, kind of like any metropolis to this day. So the cast turned out to be haunting for many reasons. It's not just that we can see these people and how they died,

but it's also that we've been kind of telling their stories wrong the whole time, and we're only now finally getting to the point where we know who they really were. And another interesting part. Roughly a third of the city is still buried right now. Under the litter of the same ash that fell on that same day in 79 AD and archaeologists are deliberately not in a hurry to dig it up because the modern understanding is that excavation can also be destruction. Now, why is that? If the whole point of excavation is to preserve it, how is it also destruction? Well, right now, the parts of Pompeii that are still

covered by this ash are preserved. They're frozen in time and they're not going to decay any further. And the moment you just expose Pompeii to sun and rain and air, it'll start to decay in a way that it never did while it was sealed. So they're leaving a lot of it underground on purpose and protecting it and waiting for future tools and future minds to figure out how we can actually excavate it, but continue to preserve it. So at this point, Pompey is kind of being saved for a technology that doesn't exist yet. But the small amounts of digging that does happen continue to rewrite the story every single year.

And the discoveries that keep coming out of Pompeii, even in just the last few years, have been extraordinary. So, for example, there is a region called Regio 9. And archaeologists recently uncovered that there's an entire grand house that they literally nicknamed the House of Theasos. And inside it is a banquet hall with a nearly life-sized painting running across three entire walls and it shows a wild procession for the god of wine. Literally, it shows its procession for Dionysus.

And there are dancers and hunters and musicians that are all in this like mid-frenzy. and it's only the second painting ever found in the entire city that's like it. They uncovered a private bath complex in the same house too, like a hot bath with like warm and cold rooms, and it's big enough for 30 guests to go in and soak before a feast. And the craziest part, they find laundry and they find a bakery with a fresco of something that looks kind of like pizza. Like it's crazy.

They find like this fresco that shows like a flap bread with like toppings. 2000 years literally the Italians have been on pizza for so long it's hard to even wrap your mind around it like in the final days of pompeii there was one guy that was like mixing a pizza oh mamma me and all the ashes fell in it's like it's crazy because it sounds so modern but this is two thousand years ago and there's also elements that are a bit darker as well there's a room in the same bakery with no view of the outside there's tiny windows that are kind of barred with iron and grooves that worn into the stone in a circle, were enslaved people and animals with blindfolds were forced to walk in an endless loop grinding grain hour after hour, and they had no way to escape.

The director of Pompeii called it maybe the most shocking face of ancient slavery, literally a prison built into a bakery, kind of hiding in plain sight behind a house decorated with gorgeous frescoes that contrasts kind of the beauty and the brutality separated by just a single wall. And it might be the truest thing that Pompeii has ever shown us about the ancient world. But the most incredible thing being pulled out of the ground right now isn't Pompeii. It's the city that I mentioned a little bit earlier called Herculaneum. And it's the town on the other side of the mountain, basically the other Pompeii. It was the one that was hit first by the blast of that, you know, superheated gas. Well, it actually did something horrifying and

miraculous at the same time. So in one building on the other side of the mountain, they found a man who had died in his bed. And when they examined, examined his skull, they found dark, glassy shards inside of it, like shiny black, kind of like obsidian pieces of stone. And it's not what you think. It was his brain. The heat had been so extreme and it cooled so fast that it literally turned the tissue in his brain into glass. It's maybe the only time that we've ever found a human being anywhere on earth with this type of condition. And to give you a sense of the force that we're talking about, the temperature needed to do that is well over 100 degrees Celsius. I mean, multiple hundreds of

degrees Fahrenheit. Now, some scientists still debate whether that's truly brain tissue that was kind of turned into trinotite, basically. But if it is, it's the single most extreme thing that Vesuvius maybe left behind. And that same heat that maybe turned a brain literally into glass did another thing in Herculaneum. It hit a library. This entire private library with hundreds and hundreds of papyrus scrolls, you could walk up and down the halls of this library and pull out letters from statesmen or historical records from scribes that wrote down, that wrote down, maybe some ancient history from thousands of years ago, but it got carbonized in a second. It turned basically all these scrolls into just lumps of charcoal. And they're so fragile that for 250 years, anyone who tried to

unroll these lumps of charcoal would just have a destroy in their hands and turn into black dust as they were looking at it. The only surviving library from the ancient world is just completely unreadable, and it's locked in a room full of books that no one can ever open until now. Because in the last few years, there's a project called Vesuvius Challenge that started scanning these charred scrolls, and with particle accelerators and literally artificial intelligence being let loose on the images, they are now training it to find the remnants of ancient ink on this carbonized paper and to literally unroll the scrolls virtually without ever having to touch them or break them down. And it's going to sound crazy, but it's working. Teams have already started pulling readable Greek texts out of the

scrolls that hadn't been opened in 2000 years. And in 26, literally this year, they recovered entire titles and authors that no one has ever read before. And not only that, we didn't even know they existed. Some of the works include a lost work of philosophy that had been sitting sealed and silent since the day that the mountain blew. I mean, think about what that means. Somewhere in the ash, there may be lost plays or history or technology or philosophy, words that no human being has ever read or experienced before the eruption.

And right now, we are developing the tools to actually read them. And that's kind of the gift of this whole place, and it's kind of this strange, uncomfortable dichotomy. Every amazing thing that we know about Rome and the Roman Empire is like the history of the It's the generals and the senators and the Caesar Augustus and the Julius Caesar and all these people that we cover like all the time. We cover them a lot even on history camp. But Pompey is the only place that really preserved everybody all the same time. It's not divided by class.

It's just all broken down, frozen into a single moment. You have the elite and the statesman and the wealthy and the enslaved. You have the banker and the banquet and you have the person actually. doing the work. And it didn't curate what to remember. It's not history written by the winners. It just took everything exactly as it was and just handed it forward. And to this day, we are still uncovering that mysterious gift. So let's just kind of summarize and go back to the very beginning of the story. You have a city frozen in a single moment of time with people trapped forever in horror. But that's only part of it. Because in the last few years, one researcher decided to

ask a question that no one had ever really asked before. What if, not everyone died. And he took names that were unique to Pompeii. Real family names chiseled on the stones, and he went looking for them in the surrounding towns after the year of 79 AD, and he found them. Over and over, he discovered Pompeian families turning up alive. And in nearby cities like Naples and Ostia and Paiotioli, and they're basically rebuilding their lives elsewhere in the years after the disaster. There's a family of fish sauce merchants who fled. Literally, like, think of just like a regular kind of like middle class family that makes fish sauce.

And they sell it to sailors and different merchants that come around. And they set up their business again in a new city. And they named their first child that was born there, the man from Putsioli. Like, literally to kind of like plant a flag. Like, hey, we're living in Pompeii. We almost got killed. Now we escaped and we're here. And this is who we are now.

There are records of women who lost their husband. and Pompeii, but they escaped. And in one case, a woman escaped with her baby daughter and made it to a port city and remarried. There are entire extended families who got out together and married into each other and prospered. And it's crazy because the evidence of this was kind of hiding in plain sight the whole time. Like, you just had to go through and find the names of the people in the city and search the records of the surrounding cities for the same names. Like the stables at Pompeii were found empty, like the carts and the horses. Almost all of them were gone. The dog. And were missing ships, the strong boxes were cleaned out of money and jewelry. There's not a city

that was caught completely by surprise. It wasn't like literally in one second, the whole thing froze. Like, it was a city that for hours, many of them saw the death coming and the ones that were free or brave enough or just happened to make the right decision ran before the worst of it hit. And thousands of them made it. And they lived lives that maybe didn't make it into a single history book until the modern era. And the ash didn't preserve the emperors and the victories. It just preserved normal people. The bread, the graffiti, the barred window, and the raised hands over the mouth. It buried this whole ordinary city so completely that for 16th centuries, humans just kind of forgot that it was really there. And in bearing it, it saved it more perfectly

and in a more honest and complete way than maybe any monument that any king ever built. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the beautiful and mysterious story of Pompeii so far. Because remember, there's still a lot more that is being uncovered. There's still a third of it that is still underneath the ground. And as we've seen, there might still be more about Pompeii and the ancient world surviving in places that we haven't even thought to look yet. And maybe technology is still being developed to uncover all of it. And the story is still, to this day, continuing to be told.

Now actually, ladies and gentlemen, that is the brief and abridged history of the city of Pompeii. I mean, it is a fascinating place and truly one of my favorite places in the world. If you ever get the chance of the opportunity to go on a vacation to Italy, I cannot recommend going to Pompey enough. If you are even remotely interested in history, you can spend multiple days there, my hot take. Like, you go to Naples, you enjoy Naples, there's all sorts of beautiful stuff in Naples. You know, you've got to hang with the Southern Italians, which, you know, it's its own thing. But then you go to Pompeii and you're like, oh, this is amazing. It's like truly the best thing ever.

And I will say a hot take, Naples has maybe my favorite food in all of Italy. I know the northern Italians like to kind of like bag on the southern Italians. I get it, right? There's like that old joke where like the northern Italians need the southern Italians and vice versa. Why? The southern Italians need the northern Italians because you need bankers and lawyers and stuff like that. And the northern Italians need southern Italians because they need barbers. That's kind of a funny joke.

But it does in a way to kind of summarize the relationship between the two. All that to say, Pompeii is a gem, and you should absolutely go. Now, there is an element about this that I sort of debated that we should talk about. But I've got it pulled up if you want it. Oh, are you already thinking what I'm thinking? I mean, you can't talk about the crystallized people without. Oh, yeah, this guy. Which I think that, I think this is just a bad moment, okay?

People think that he's grabbing his piece of deal. He could be scratching. He could be itching because maybe it's hot. Maybe he's burning. Maybe the rock is falling on him and he's like trying to cover his piece. He isn't like he's, you know, standing the wall against Andres Piero. You do hear so many stories, though, of people being on an airplane that's about a fall and being like,

we got 37 seconds here. I only need 20. Exactly. I don't think that's what's going on, but, uh, I mean, it is sort of funny. I wonder, like, when they got this mold, if they were like, huh, interesting. Like, I wonder if the research is kind of looked at each other, like, he's not, he's not, no. Is it? No, right? No.

The one I was going to talk about. And again, if you're watching this with your kids, and maybe if, you know, I know sometimes younger folks watches, there is a phallus museum. And if you want to skip this part, go ahead. You can jump three minutes. But there is a collection in Pompeii. It's actually technically in Naples,

but it contains 250 erotic objects, most excavated from Pompeii and Herculaneum. And they are phallus-shaped amulets and lamps and frescoes from brothels and fertility symptoms. symbols and some extremely explicit sculptures. The collection was considered so scandalous that after excavation, the authorities repeatedly locked it away from the public, and they were like, oh, mama me, we can't show the people, the penis,

this is a too too crazy. And then in 2000, they were like, all right, fine, we'll open it. I mean, it's covered in phallic imagery. There's literally the fresco of Priapis in the house of the Veti. Can you pull it up? This is specifically the, this is the Priapis. P-R-I-A-P-U-S in the House of the VETI, where the fertility god is literally weighing his enormous junk

against a bag of money. I mean, look at this. Oh, this is a multicultural city. They're not lying about Italians, huh? That's what I'm saying, dude. These are horse people. Good golly. I mean, I know they said the horse was rather stable,

but they left one on a fresco. I mean, look at this guy. I mean, so technically this is supposed to be like a fertility god, and there's a symbol of fertility and prosperity and abundance, and it's not just simply sexually graphic, but it is hilarious. Not only this image, there are other images. Like, apparently, this is what the guide told me, is that they had a different relationship with phallic graffiti, and that the way we see it, like, we kind of live through like a

Western kind of Christianized lens where we see, like, the sexual sort of art is, like, graphic or for a mature audience, so to speak. He claimed, and again, history is kind of. of just piecing together like context clues and making the best story we can. The way that they saw it, like, nudity was not something that they were as ashamed of. Like, they would have, like, public bathhouses

where the whole town would basically just, like, bathe together. I don't know if they were even gender specific at this time. I think it was just, like, everyone just showed up and, like, got naked and, like, bathed. And they saw, like, the, literally, like, the phallus is almost like a good luck little talism. There was kind of, like, an anti-evil eye thing or, like, a fertility thing.

or like sometimes even a joke or like a declaration of prosperity. It was just kind of like done as like a funny thing. Maybe teenage boys are actually the ancient Romans of the modern day. Because when I was drawing, you know, Willys in like my math book, I wasn't doing it to be like grotesque. I was just doing it because it was like funny. But it was inherently grotesque. No, I mean, you put veins on it, but you just do it for fun.

Like you're just like trying to like short and curleys. I mean, you're just trying to be silly, you know? You're not trying to, like, do some type of, like... Oh, you're trying to someone get that textbook in two years from now and be like, ah, Gagnon got me. Yeah, exactly. You want them to look at it and be like, that's fine. Good detail.

You got me. I'm just saying maybe that's what they were doing. Sometimes. I don't know. I find this to be fascinating. And if you ever get the chance, truly, put that on the list. You should absolutely go. Have you ever been?

No. It's not far from Athens. Yeah. You're already over there. It's like, what, two hours. flight. And $400. I'm just saying it's worth it. Yeah, for sure. To see a piece of history that has been there forever?

I want to go in all seriousness. Put it on the list. I get it's like a little out of the way. Like a lot of people that go to Italy, they go to Rome. And they're like, I'm going to spend a week in Rome. Go south. Go to Naples. Enjoy the real pizza of the southern Italians. Northern Italians, they're basically German. They're basically Swiss. Viva Southern Italy. I'm actually a big Southern Italy guy. What food did you recommend? Flatbread with toppings?

of it. 2,000-year-old flatbread with toppings, try to find an ancient piece of bread that's in an oven. You're going to have a 2,000-year-old piece of bread. And it probably is still fire. That's how good the Italians are at cooking. Okay. Another interesting, fun history fact.

At the time when they were doing these flatbreads with toppings, I know we kind of called it pizza. It technically wasn't pizza. You want to know why? They didn't have tomatoes. In Italy? No. You can fact check me on this.

I'm almost certain tomatoes come from America. And Italians didn't actually get access. tomatoes until around like 1500. Isn't that crazy? It is crazy because they've used the crap out of them since. I mean, good golly. They've gone crazy on the tomatoes. And I'm almost positive. And again, I need a fact check here because I don't want to lead our whole audience astray. The whole point of the shows that people got smarter and less dumb. But I'm pretty sure tomatoes are an American thing that were being farmed by the indigenous Americans of America. And Columbus and the rest of the boys go down. They, you know, have a haphazard little interaction with the natives.

And part of it is that they get tomatoes back. I think that's true. Tomatoes came from America and ancient Italy did not have them. What a world, right? The chicken parms, the pasta, the spaghetti. And now people will make the claim, which I think is actually fallacious, not a pun intended, but they'll make the claim that noodles came from Marco Polo going to China. Right.

I actually don't think that's true. And I'm almost positive that the Italians, like, figured out pasta and noodles kind of independently from the Chinese, but they both were sort of on the same noodle wave. Google's AI interview says likely originated in China over 4,000 years ago. But is it because Marco Polo went over there? Now, according to a little Google search for me, it says, no, it is a persistent myth that Marco Polo introduced pasta and Italy. Pasta was already being made in Italy before Markupola returned from Asia around 1295.

one particularly strong piece of evidence is that the Arab geographer Al Idrisi wrote in 1154 about how a town in Sicily is producing and exporting large quantities of dried stringy things that was basically pasta that he called itriya about 140 years before Marco Polo ever came. So again, I think, again, the Chinese were developing noodles, the Italians were developing pasta, and Maricopolo probably went over there and they were like, have some noodles. And he was like, bro, we already got noodles at home. Crazy, right? Yeah.

But all that to say, God bless the Italian. Italians, adrivedanchi, bonjourno. God bless the good Catholics that live in southern Italy to this day. The Sicilians, I don't care what people say about you. And I'm sorry for how America treated you guys when you came over, all right? That's one thing that I wish I could take it back. It wasn't nice. And I had nothing to do with it.

All right, I was up in Canada. As a Catholic in Canada getting persecuted by the English over there, the Protestants. Now, I just want to say, if you know anything about the story or you've done more research on Pompey than I have. Again, I'm not a historian. I'm just a comedian with a Wi-Fi connection. Please let me know. If I got anything wrong, please drop a comment. I'm sure it'll be productive to someone. I read all of them on YouTube and Spotify. But even if I miss it, someone else will enjoy it. If I don't get back to you, I'm sure it'll spark an interesting conversation that'll be useful for all the truth seekers of the world. Additionally, if you like religious content,

great news, we have Religion Camp. That's where we deep dive on everything that everyone believes. And if you like crazy deep dives onto modern mysteries and conspiracies and myths and stories and the unsolved. Well, great news. Camp Gagnon is the place for you. And if you just like to deal with the history vibe, you're in the right spot. At History Camp, we do these episodes every single Wednesday. So make sure you comment, like, subscribe, all of that good stuff. We also have a secret society called patreon.com slash camp gagdon where you get every episode of this show completely ad-free. You also get merch discounts. You also are going to get episodes that never got to the public. And you're going to get monthly zooms with me and the rest of the squad. So

make sure you check out the secret society over at patreon.com. And with all that out the way, I think we basically hit everything, Christos. This is a wonderful day that I got to spend with you and the rest of the good people here at the campsite. It was great. Anything else that we miss Christos, I feel like we covered everything. I had a great day with you and the person watching right now. Turns out that males are more caring of children.

Yeah, that's a good point. Let the record show people always give credit to the moms. Actually, dads are taking care of their kids as evidenced by Pompeii, or perhaps he was an enslaved babysitter and was forced to do it and died holding this child, which is potentially sad. But regardless, justice for the dads. Anyway, thank you all so much for tuning in. I appreciate you dearly.

This has been another episode of History Camp and I'll see you in the future to talk about the past. Peace. Hey, guys, if you love conspiracies and hypothetical history, well, I want to invite you to check out Signal 33. This is a companion pod to our podcast here at Camp.

It's made and edited by the same team that runs all of our shows, and I choose the topics every single week. So check it out, subscribe, and start. the dialogue in the comment section.