Short Stuff: The S7VEN Deadly Sins | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW

What this episode is about

The discussion explores the concept of the Seven Deadly Sins, their origins, and cultural significance, including their interpretation in media like the movie "Seven" and a fan theory relating to "Gilligan's Island." It also highlights the historical variations of the sins, noting that the commonly referenced seven were originally formulated from an eight-sin framework and how these ideas have evolved within religious contexts.

Key takeaways

• Seven Deadly Zins: a bold name, but hints at humanity's penchant for indulgence and irony.
• Gilligan's Island as a moral fable? The characters embody classic sins—proving pop culture's unexpected depth.
• The Seven Deadly Sins weren't always seven; they evolved from eight, showing humanity's struggle with moral categorization.
• Surprisingly, the Seven Deadly Sins aren't biblical. They originated from a monk's musings in 345 CE—piety meets pop culture.
• Vang Glory: a potential band name, but also the epitome of vanity's charm—who knew sin could rock?

Who speaks in this episode?

• Josh Clark (Host) · 7 min speaking
• Chuck Bryant (Host) · 5 min speaking
• Dave (Guest)

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: Seven Deadly Sins, Gilligan's Island, The Bible
2. 3:00 – 6:00: Seven Deadly Sins, Evagrias Ponticus, The Bible
3. 6:00 – 9:00: Pope Gregory the Great, Seven Deadly Sins, Evagrias Ponticus
4. 9:00 – 11:39: Seven Deadly Sins

Notable quotes from "Short Stuff: The S7VEN Deadly Sins | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"

• Yeah, there are some really great fan theories around Gilligan's Island, not just that one.

  about Gilligan's Island · at 1:26

• But there's not a list of like the ten commandments are in there but the seven deadly sins are not in there. The seven deadly sins came to be because of a particular writer who…

  about Seven Deadly Sins · at 4:08

• Yeah. Nice work. Yeah. [gasps] so Pope Gregory the 1, before he was a pope wrote his masterwork and it was basically sort of a real dissection of the book of Job called Moralia in Job.

  about Pope Gregory the Great · at 7:17

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Evagrias Ponticus — Person · Referenced expert / originator · 4 mentions · first at 4:16
  Cited as the early monk-theologian credited with formulating the original 'eight evil thoughts' that later evolved into the seven deadly sins framework.
  That's right. But he was the guy that gets credit basically as the first person to kind of write these things out and get it out on mass.
• Pope Gregory the Great — Person · Referenced expert / adapter · 2 mentions · first at 6:50
  Presented as the key figure who adapted earlier monastic lists into a more widely influential set of 'seven principal vices,' helping standardize the tradition in Western Christianity.

Books & papers

• The Bible — Book · Referenced work · 2 mentions · first at 2:30
  Mentioned in the context of the Seven Deadly Sins not being directly listed in it.
  And that's because they're not really in the Bible. the original sin when you know old Adam and Eve there in the garden of Eden in that book were described as disobeying God and establishing the sinful nature of.

Concepts & topics

• Seven Deadly Sins — Concept · Core topic · 8 mentions · first at 0:27
  Central theme of the episode, discussing the history and cultural impact of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Media & podcasts

• Gilligan's Island — Media · Case study · 2 mentions · first at 0:48
  Used as an example of how the Seven Deadly Sins have influenced pop culture and fan theories.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:04 Hey and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. Jerry's here for Dave and we're talking today about the Seven Deadly Zins.

0:11 Seven Deadly Zins. Did I say Zins? That's a wine brand. It is. I was thinking it's pretty bold to to label your wine as deadly.

0:21 Uh yeah, good point. Never thought about that. But I think what they're I think they're able to because the seven deadly sins are so widely known.

0:32 Yeah. That people don't normally stop and think it says deadly on this wine label. Uh because they know that they're talking about something else.

0:41 That's right. Uh it's a pretty widespread thing. If you've seen the movie Seven, obviously very prominent in that. Uh it's just a big thing in pop culture. It was even a a sort of interpretation of Gilligan's Island, which I had never really been too acquainted with. Oh, you haven't. That it's a it's a fan theory.

0:57 Yeah. That apparently Sherwood Schwarz is kind of backed up in some ways, but that the professor is pride. And of course, we're also going over the list of the sins with this list. Uh professor is pride, the skipper is anger or wrath. Uh Ginger obviously lust. Uh Mr. How obviously greed, Mrs. How gluttony, and um partially sloth is what this says. Maryanne is envy. And then of course Gilligan is sloth and he's the one that is keeping them trapped on the island through his sloth.

1:26 Yeah, there are some really great fan theories around Gilligan's Island, not just that one.

1:30 Yeah, I love that stuff. It's fun. I do too. Um but yeah, that's the seven deadly sins, the the skipper and and the rest. Um that's they haven't always been called the seven deadly sins. And as a matter of fact, seven is a trim down version of the original eight. They've been called everything from the capital vices, cardinal sins, capital sins.

1:53 Yeah. Uh vice sins, I think, if you want to combine everything together. And the Roman Catholics are nuts for this kind of stuff. Um and over the centuries, as the church has evolved, um the the the whole thing has just kind of been whittleled down or changed. There've been different names. I think um pride used to be called van gloriousness or van glory. Um instead of sloth they had melancholy like basically don't be sad. Um but regardless of how totally associated it is with with Catholicism and Christianity in general, it actually doesn't appear in the Bible.

2:32 Yeah, that's right. Uh by the way, I think Vang Glory is probably already a band name, but that would be a pretty good band name.

2:39 Metal for sure. Oh yeah, absolutely. Or unless it's Yeah. Or Yeah. Or I was going to say probably like a Nickelback type of thing. Maybe

2:48 whatever that is. Whatever kind of music that is. I don't even know what category that is.

2:52 I don't either. I poor Nickelback, but I think they're one of like the richest bands on the planet.

2:57 Oh, I'm sure. Anyway, Vang Glory coming to a theater near you. Uh or a concert venue near you.

3:02 Okay. Which you could also call a theater. I'm getting sidetracked. Uh, oh, speaking of theaters, everyone should uh should uh go out and get tickets for our live tour this year, right?

3:14 Oh, good one, Chuck. Yeah, you can get tickets on stuffyounow.com. All the links are up there. We're going to um Denver. We're going to Seattle. We're going to San Francisco. In April, we're going to Chicago, Madison, Wisconsin, Akran, Ohio, and then we're doing a whole tour of every single city with a population over 5,000 in Canada. That's not true. We're sorry we couldn't go everywhere in Canada, but we we did our best. Some theaters on the East Coast didn't work out, but we tried. Everybody.

3:43 Yeah. I think we're doing six six uh cities, though, which is, you know, it's pretty good. It's going

3:47 be fun. Yeah. Can't wait. Uh but go grab tickets. It's going to be fun. Happy to be back out on the road. And back to the seven deadly sins. I believe he said if you look in the Bible, you're not going to find them.

3:56 And that's because they're not really in the Bible. uh the original sin um when you know old Adam and Eve there in the garden of Eden in that book were described as disobeying God and establishing the sinful nature of humanity.

4:08 Uh but there's not a list of like the ten commandments are in there but the seven deadly sins are not in there. The seven deadly sins came to be because of a particular writer who was a monk in 345 CE named uh Evagrias Ponticus

4:24 which means Evan the Pontiac in English. Oh okay. According [snorts] to me, at least.

4:32 That's right. But he was he was the guy that gets credit basically as the first person to uh kind of write these things out and get it out on mass.

4:40 Yeah. But he had eight of them. The eight evil thoughts, right? Um he was a theologian, a monk who really put his money where his mouth is. The last several years of his life, he went out and wandered around the desert in Egypt and lived on herbs and barley. essentially he prayed, he fasted, he meditated, he did his best to not think any unholy thoughts.

5:03 I'll bet that was more difficult than you'd think. And he wrote a bunch of this stuff down in the antiicus, um, which is his celebrated master work. And this is where the eight evil thoughts first appear.

5:16 That's right. Uh, gluttony, lust, and of course, we're not talking just sexual lust here. It's kind of um lustly desires for worldly things. uh greed, which was avarous at the time, anger, sloth, uh sadness, vain glory, and pride are all in there.

5:32 Yeah. And although it we now think of the seven deadly sins as as applying to everybody, that's not at all um what Evan was was doing, at first he basically was creating this this list of um what to avoid if you're a monk essentially. That's who it applied to initially.

5:51 Yeah. Like if you really want to walk the walk like me, this these are the things you need to avoid. And I promise I'm not thinking of them. I'm just writing about them.

5:59 That's right. You want to take a break? Yeah. Okay, we're going to take a break.

6:05 Just like the number of stars in the sky, there you know. All right, Chuck. So, Evagrias Ponticus basically created these seven deadly sins or eight deadly sins as a road map for monks. Uh, and then some other people came along a couple centuries later and like this is great. like how can we um upscale this and really uh get the most out of it in our corporate world. Uh and one of the first people to do this was St. Gregory the Great who later became or no I guess probably first was Pope Gregory the first.

7:00 Yeah. Oh, and he became sainted later. Has to be. I don't I don't think anybody's ever been sainted. Yeah. You can't be sainted while you're alive because you have to perform at least two miracles after your death.

7:11 Yeah, that's right. Oh, boy. You really remember that stuff? I do. I do remember some of it.

7:17 Yeah. Nice work. Yeah. [gasps] Uh, so Pope Gregory the 1, uh, before he was a pope wrote his masterwork and it was basically um sort of a a real dissection of the book of Job called Moralia in Job.

7:34 And it was a very influential book. Um, and this is where his seven principal vices were laid out. And we're not going to read all the sort of gobbledygook, but it was, you know, vanglory, envy, anger melancholy aberous gluttony and lust. And then sort of deeper definitions of what all those meant back then.

7:52 Yeah. And like all the terrible behaviors that that come out of it, right? So like um like like reing in your neighbor's misfortune kind of thing like like these are the these are what you want to avoid, right? Um, and a few centuries after that in the medieval era, other Christian writers that come like Thomas Aquinas um really latched on to this. They're like, "This is great. Like, why didn't we think of this stuff earlier?" And one of the things that that um kind of became popular to to get this across as a conception is called the tree of vices. It's an icon with pride as the root of this tree and then the rest of the this deadly sins kind of coming off as branches. And it became very familiar because you you would paint this on the wall of your church somewhere.

8:41 Yeah. The reason you were painting it on the wall of the church is because the you had to confess these particular kind of sins at least once a year and then do whatever penance the local priest told you to do for them. or if you didn't do that, uh they're deadly because they were deadly for your mortal soul. Uh and after after that, you would um after you die, you would go to hell. That's why they're called deadly sins. It's not like they kill you here on earth. They kill you spiritually after you die. Um so to confess those sins though, you had to know what they were. And that's why they would paint the tree of vices on the church wall.

9:18 Yeah, that for some reason struck me as funny. Uh it was the fourth Lateran Council in 1214 where the you know you got to confess two times a year. That's where that came from. And uh I just love the idea of people like well all right. What are the sins and I'll let you know if I did any of them.

9:33 That's right. That Yeah. You just go up and like trace your finger and be like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, I guess I did that. I did revel in my neighbor's misfortune. That time you stepped into a bear trap. Oh my god. I thought that was hilarious."

9:45 That's right. The Germans would have a name for that one day. Uh so people were pretty obsessed, you know, during the black death of what happened after you die. That's I mean people were already heaven and hell wasn't a brand new thing, but that's when it was like people are dying all over the place and like where are we going? Like we're we're really kind of worried about this. So it became very ubiquitous talking about sins, talking about life after death. Sermons became obsessed with it. It was in the the Canterbury tales in the form of the Parson's tale. And so it was just kind of really latched on. um these seven deadly sins in particular is uh kind of the the hot thing in Catholicism.

10:22 Yeah. Um and it's still around in Catholicism. Apparently in 2008 the Catholic Church were like, "Hey, we've updated some more seven deadly sins."

10:32 Um for for the as I guess is probably how they put it. Genetic modification is one.

10:38 Yeah. Carrying out experiments on humans. Okay. Polluting the environment. I get behind that. Causing social injustice. Sure.

10:46 Heck yeah. Causing poverty. You know, becoming obscenely wealthy. Yeah. And then, of course, taking drugs.

10:54 Yeah. That doesn't seem like a deadly sin. Yeah. Well, you know, they were on a roll.

10:59 So, those are the seven modern deadly sins. Is that how they're framing it? That's That's what they tell me at the Vatican.

11:05 Fantastic. Uh, well, I guess that's about it. Um, go forth and look out for the seven deadly sins, I guess.

11:13 Yeah. I don't do those. Yeah, short stuff is out. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Short Stuff: The S7VEN Deadly Sins | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"?

Josh Clark (Host), Chuck Bryant (Host), Dave (Guest).

What is "Short Stuff: The S7VEN Deadly Sins | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW" about?

The discussion explores the concept of the Seven Deadly Sins, their origins, and cultural significance, including their interpretation in media like the movie "Seven" and a fan theory relating to "Gilligan's Island." It also highlights the historical variations of the sins, noting that the commonly referenced seven were originally formulated from an eight-sin framework and how these ideas have…

What is mentioned in this Stuff You Should Know episode?

5 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Seven Deadly Sins, Evagrias Ponticus, Pope Gregory the Great, The Bible, Gilligan's Island. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Short Stuff: The S7VEN Deadly Sins | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"?

The episode runs 12 min; the transcript is about 2,141 words in 46 timestamped sections.

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