Short Stuff: The S7VEN Deadly Sins

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Short Stuff: The S7VEN Deadly Sins"

Podcast: Stuff You Should Know
Host: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant
Date: January 21, 2026
Episode Type: Short Stuff (Mini-Episode)
Topic: The Seven Deadly Sins—Origins, Evolution, and Place in Pop Culture

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Episode Overview

This "Short Stuff" installment dives into the origins, history, and transformation of the Seven Deadly Sins. Hosts Josh and Chuck discuss how this famous catalog of vice has shifted meanings, explore its unexpected place in pop culture, and reveal its evolution from monastic self-help to a backbone of Christian moral teaching. The episode is characteristically witty, skeptical, and full of memorable asides and trivia.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Seven Deadly Sins in Pop Culture (01:10–02:24)

• The sins are a "big thing in pop culture" (01:19), infamously central to the film Se7en, and even linked to a fan theory about Gilligan’s Island.
• "The professor is pride... The Skipper is anger or wrath... Ginger, obviously lust... Mr. Howell, obviously greed... Mrs. Howell, gluttony and partially sloth... Mary Ann is envy... Gilligan is sloth." (01:51–02:10)
  • This theory received some backing from series creator Sherwood Schwartz.
• The idea is "fun," say both Josh and Chuck, demonstrating how the concept persists in playful places.

2. Name Changes and Early History (02:26–03:26)

• The sins weren't always called the "Seven Deadly Sins". Alternate names: "capital vices," "cardinal sins," "capital sins," and "vice sins."
• "They've been called everything... the Roman Catholics are nuts for this kind of stuff." (02:34)
• The original list was not seven—there were eight, and their names have morphed over time (e.g., "pride" was once "vainglory," "sloth" was "melancholy").
• "It actually doesn’t appear in the Bible." (03:18)

3. Origins Outside the Bible (03:26–05:18)

• Despite its connection to Christianity, the list is not in the Bible. The original concept of sin comes from Adam and Eve, but no enumerated list exists in scripture.
• The list was first developed in the 4th century CE by monk Evagrius Ponticus.
  • "He was the guy that gets credit as the first person to kind of write these things out and get it out on mass." (05:27)
• Vainglory is jokingly described as a great band name ("Metal, for sure." - 03:33).

4. Evagrius Ponticus and the Eight Evil Thoughts (05:35–06:54)

• Evagrius’s original list had eight vices: gluttony, lust (which included all sorts of desires, not just sexual), greed (then called avarice), anger, sloth, sadness, vainglory, and pride.
• He wrote this in his work Antirrheticus.
• Initially, the list was advice for monks, not laypeople: "He basically was creating this list of what to avoid if you're a monk." (06:27)
• Chuck jokes, "I promise I'm not thinking of them, I'm just writing about them." (06:46)

5. Transformation for the Masses (09:29–10:21)

• The shift from monastic guide to public doctrine happened thanks to later figures, especially Pope Gregory I (aka St. Gregory the Great).
• Gregory’s influential Moralia in Job (late 6th century) repackaged and clarified the list: "This is where his seven principal vices were laid out." (10:21)
• The episode highlights how definitions and included sins evolved, e.g., "melancholy," "avarice," and "vainglory" had slightly different meanings.

6. The Tree of Vices & Confession Culture (10:51–12:45)

• In the Medieval era, the "Tree of Vices" painted in churches helped parishioners visually identify and confess the correct sins.
• Confession became systematized (at least once a year after the Fourth Lateran Council, 1214).
• "You 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." (12:32)

7. Impact of the Black Death and Cultural Permeation (12:45–13:21)

• The Black Death amplified obsession with sin and the afterlife.
• Seven Deadly Sins entered the Canterbury Tales and European sermons: "It was just kind of really latched on these seven deadly sins in particular as kind of the hot thing in Catholicism." (13:21)

8. Modern Updates to the Sins (13:21–14:06)

• In 2008, the Vatican updated “deadly sins” to reflect modern concerns: genetic modification, human experiments, polluting the environment, social injustice, causing poverty, obscene wealth, drug use.
• "That's what they tell me at the Vatican." (14:02 – Josh)
• Josh quips on these modern additions: "It doesn't seem like a deadly sin. Yeah, well, you know, they were on a roll." (13:54)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Pop Culture’s Embrace:
  "It's just a big thing in pop culture. It was even a sort of interpretation of Gilligan's Island..." — Chuck (01:35)
• Origin Not in Scripture:
  "Regardless of how totally associated it is with Catholicism and Christianity in general, it actually doesn't appear in the Bible." — Josh (03:18)
• Monk Humor:
  "He did his best to not think any unholy thoughts. I'll bet that was more difficult than you'd think." — Josh (05:42)
• Confession Scene:
  "You 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." — Josh (12:32)
• Modern Sins List:
  "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." — Josh (13:21)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Seven Deadly Sins in Pop Culture: 01:10–02:24
• Name Origins and Evolution: 02:26–03:26
• Out of the Bible, Into the World: 03:26–05:18
• Evagrius Ponticus and the First List: 05:35–06:54
• From Monk's Guide to Church Law: 09:29–10:21
• Tree of Vices and Annual Confession: 10:51–12:45
• Obsession Post-Black Death: 12:45–13:21
• Modern Deadly Sins: 13:21–14:06

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Tone and Style

• The episode features the hosts' trademark informal, conversational banter. Joking asides, pop culture references, and self-deprecating humor make the history lively and accessible.
• There is a gentle skepticism about church authority combined with a clear enjoyment of historical trivia and oddities.

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Conclusion

Josh and Chuck wrap up by encouraging listeners to "look out for the seven deadly sins" and—tongue-in-cheek—"don't do those." (14:12) The episode provides a brisk, humorous, and insightful primer on the Seven Deadly Sins’ unlikely journey from ancient monastic self-help to universal shorthand for human moral failure—and pop culture trope.

Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, everybody. We're hitting the road again, starting in January 2026, picking up again in April 2026. And eventually, Canada will tell you year dates, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. We're gonna do at least three legs. And the first leg is starting out in Denver, Colorado, at the paramount theater on January 27th. We're gonna go back to our beloved Seattle at the Fairmount Theater there on the 28th, and then finally back at SketchFest on the 29th at the Sidney Goldstein Theater.

[Josh Clark]

Yep. And then April 16th, 17th and 18th, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois, and Akron, Ohio. And if you're not keeping up with all this or taking notes, don't worry. You can get all the info you need and buy tickets at Stuffyou Should Know Dot com, click on the tour button and thank us later.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. We can't wait to see everybody again out there on the road.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Seven Deadly Zins?

[Josh Clark]

Did I say Zins?

[Chuck Bryant]

That's a wine brand.

[Josh Clark]

It is. I was thinking it's pretty bold to label your wine as deadly.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, good point. Never thought about that.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, you haven't? It's a fan theory.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 partially sloth is what this says. Mary Ann 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.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I love that stuff. It's fun.

[Josh Clark]

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, 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've been different names. I think Pride used to be called Vaingloriousness or Vainglory. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Metal, for sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Or unless it's. Yeah, 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.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I'm sure. Anyway, Vainglory coming to a theater near you or a concert venue near you. Okay, but 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?

[Josh Clark]

Ooh, good one, Chuck. Yeah, you can get tickets on stuffyouchouknow.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 5,000 in Canada.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's not true. We're sorry we 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think we're doing six cities, though, which is pretty good.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's gonna be fun. Yeah, can't wait. But go grab tickets. It's gonna 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 gonna 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 345Ce named Evagrius Ponticus.

[Josh Clark]

Which means even the Pontiac in English.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, okay.

[Josh Clark]

According to me, at least that's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. Gluttony, lust. And of course we're not talking just sexual lust here. It's kind of lustily desires for worldly things. Greed, which was avarice at the time. Anger, sloth, sadness, vainglory and pride are all in there.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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

[John Paulk]

Just like the number of stars in the sky, There is so much stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

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[John Paulk]

I'm John Palk. 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 straight, 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 ex gay movement does to people and the pain it continues to cause. I had lost £150 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 to a cult. And as I look too, at the harm I did from within, listen to Atonement, the John Paulk story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Josh Clark]

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 the first.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Oh, and he became sainted later.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's right. Boy, you really remember that stuff.

[Josh Clark]

I do. I do remember some of it. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Nice work.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And like, all the terrible behaviors that come out of it. Right. So, like, reveling in your neighbor's misfortune kind of thing. 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? 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 this, 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. 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 that, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that for some reason, struck me as funny. It was the fourth Lateran Council in 1214, where you got to confess two times a year. That's where that came from. And 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.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. Yeah. You 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. The Germans would have a name for that one day. So people were pretty obsessed during the Black Death of what happened after you die. 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? We're really kind of worried about this. So it became very ubiquitous to talking about sins, talking about life after death sermons became obsessed with it. It was in the Canterbury Tales in the form of the Parson's 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.

[Josh Clark]

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 carrying out experiments on humans, polluting the environment. I can get behind that. Causing social injustice. Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Heck, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Causing poverty, becoming obscenely wealthy, and then, of course, taking drugs.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

It doesn't seem like a deadly sin. Yeah, well, you know, they were on a roll.

[Chuck Bryant]

So those are the seven modern deadly sins. Is that how they're framing it?

[Josh Clark]

That's what they tell me at the Vatican.

[Chuck Bryant]

Fantastic.

[Josh Clark]

Well, I guess that's about it. Go forth and look out for the seven deadly sins. I guess.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, don't do those.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Short stuff is out.

[Narrator]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show.