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What if mind control is real?
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Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both?
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Hey, it's joel and matt.
From how to money, if your new year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back prices.
They're still high and the economy is all over the place, but 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress.
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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.
Seven deadly zins?
Did I say zins?
That's a wine brand.
It is.
I was thinking it's pretty bold to label your wine as deadly.
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 that people don't normally stop and think it says deadly on this wine label, because they know that they're talking about something else.
That's right.
It's a pretty widespread thing.
If you've seen the movie Seven, obviously very prominent in that.
It's just a big thing in pop culture.
It was even a sort of interpretation of Gilligan's Island, which I had never really been too acquainted with.
Oh, you haven't?
It's a fan theory.
Yeah that apparently Sherwood Schwartz 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.
Professor is pride.
The skipper is anger or wrath.
Ginger, obviously, lust.
Mr. Howell, obviously, greed.
Mrs. Howell, gluttony and lust.
Partially sloth is what this says.
Marianne 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.
Yeah, there are some really great fan theories around Gilligan's Island, not just that one.
Yeah, I love that stuff.
It's fun.
I do too.
But yeah, that's the seven deadly sins, the skipper and the rest.
They haven't always been called the seven deadly sins.
And as a matter of fact, seven is a trimmed down version of the original eight.
They've been called everything from the capital vices, cardinal sins, capital sins.
Yeah. vice sins, I think, if you want to combine everything together.
And the Roman Catholics are nuts for this kind of stuff.
And over the centuries, as the church has evolved, the whole thing has just kind of been whittled down or changed.
There have been different names.
I think pride used to be called vangloriousness or vanglory.
Instead of sloth, they had melancholy, like basically don't be sad.
But regardless of how totally associated it is with Catholicism and Christianity in general, it actually doesn't appear in the Bible.
Yeah, that's right.
By the way, I think Vainglory is probably already a band name, but that would be a pretty good band name. metal for sure oh yeah absolutely or unless it's yeah oh yeah or i was gonna say probably like a nickelback type of thing maybe whatever that is whatever kind of music that is i don't even know what category that is i don't either a poor nickelback but i think they're one of like the richest bands on the planet oh i'm sure anyway vainglory coming to a theater near you uh or a concert venue near you okay Which you could also call a theater.
I'm getting sidetracked.
Speaking of theaters, everyone should go out and get tickets for our live tour this year, right?
Oh, good one, Chuck.
Yeah.
You can get tickets on stuffyoushouldknow.com.
All the links are up there.
We're going to Denver.
We're going to Seattle.
We're going to San Francisco.
In April we're going to Chicago Madison Wisconsin Akron Ohio, and then we're doing a whole tour of every single city with a population over 5000 in Canada.
That's not true.
We're sorry you couldn't go everywhere in Canada, but we did our best.
Some theaters on the East Coast didn't work out, but we tried, everybody.
I think we're doing six cities, though, which is pretty good.
It's going to be fun.
Can't wait.
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.
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 humanity.
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 Evagrius Ponticus.
Which means Evan the Pontiac in English.
Oh, okay.
According to me, at least.
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 en masse.
Yeah, but he had eight of them, the eight evil thoughts, right?
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.
I'll bet that was more difficult than you'd think.
And he wrote a bunch of this stuff down in the Anti-Reticus, which is his celebrated masterwork.
And this is where the eight evil thoughts first appear.
That's right.
Gluttony, lust.
And of course, we're not talking just sexual lust here.
It's kind of lustly desires for worldly things.
Greed, which was avarice at the time, anger, sloth, sadness, vainglory, and pride are all in there.
Yeah.
And although we now think of the seven deadly sins as applying to everybody, that's not at all what Evan was doing at first.
He basically was creating this list of what to avoid if you're a monk, essentially.
That's who it applied to initially.
Yeah.
Yeah, like if you really want to walk the walk like me, these are the things you need to avoid.
And I promise I'm not thinking of them.
I'm just writing about them.
That's right.
You want to take a break?
Yeah.
Okay, we're going to take a break.
Just like the number of stars in the sky, there is so much stuff you should know.
I'm John Polk.
For years I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight.
Once upon a time, I was on 60 Minutes, Oprah, the front cover of Newsweek.
And you might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story.
So join me as I peel back the layers and expose what happened to me in the midst of conversion therapy, to shine a light on what the X Game movement does to people and the pain it continues to cause.
I had lost 150 pounds because if I couldn't control my sexuality, I was going to control my weight.
It sounded like, and this is the word I used, a cult.
And as I look, too, at the harm I did from within.
Listen to Atonement the John Polk story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?
Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
When you look at your car, you're gonna become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
It's about engineering consciousness.
Mind Games is the story of NLP, its crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits.
He stood trial for murder and got acquitted.
The biggest mind game of all?
NLP might actually work.
This is wild.
Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, my God.
All right, Chuck.
So Evagrius Ponticus basically created these seven deadly sins, or eight deadly sins, as a roadmap for monks.
And then some other people came along a couple centuries later and like, this is great.
Like, how can we upscale this? and really get the most out of it in our corporate world.
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 I. Yeah.
Oh, and he became sainted later.
Has to be.
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.
Yeah, that's right.
Boy, you really remember that stuff.
I do.
I do remember some of it.
Yeah.
Nice work.
So Pope Gregory I, 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.
And it was a very influential book.
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 vainglory envy anger melancholy avarice, gluttony and lust, and then sort of deeper definitions of what all those meant back then.
Yeah, and like all the terrible behaviors that come out of it, right?
So like reveling in your neighbor's misfortune kind of thing.
Like these are what you want to avoid, right?
And a few centuries after that, in the medieval era, other Christian writers that come, like Thomas Aquinas, really latched onto this.
They're like, this is great.
Like, why didn't we think of this stuff earlier?
Yeah.
And one of the things that kind of became popular 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 deadly sins kind of coming off as branches.
And it became very familiar because you would paint this on the wall of your church somewhere.
Yeah.
The reason you were painting it on the wall of the church is because 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, they're deadly because they were deadly for your mortal soul.
And 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.
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.
Yeah, that for some reason struck me as funny.
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 I just love the idea of people are like, well, all right, what are the sins?
I'll let you know if I did any of them.
That's right.
Yeah, you'd just go up and trace your finger and be like, oh, okay, yeah, I guess I did that.
I did revel in my neighbor's misfortune.
That time he stepped into a bear trap?
Oh, my God, I thought that was hilarious.
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.
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 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 parsons tale, And so it was just kind of really latched on, these seven deadly sins in particular as kind of the hot thing in Catholicism.
Yeah.
And it's still around in Catholicism.
Apparently, in 2008, the Catholic Church were like hey, we've updated some more seven deadly sins for the aughts, I guess is probably how they put it.
Genetic modification is one.
Yeah.
Carrying out experiments on humans.
Polluting the environment.
Awesome.
Can you get behind that?
Causing social injustice.
Sure.
Heck yeah.
Causing poverty.
You know it.
Becoming obscenely wealthy.
Yeah.
And then, of course, taking drugs.
Yeah.
It doesn't seem like a deadly sin.
Yeah.
Well, you know.
They were on a roll.
So those are the seven modern deadly sins?
Is that how they're framing it?
That's what they tell me at the Vatican.
Fantastic.
Well, I guess that's about it.
Go forth and look out for the seven deadly sins, I guess.
Yeah, don't do those.
Yeah.
Short Stuff is out.
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