The Seven Deadlies: Lust!

Today's subject. What you've all been waiting for lust because I guess why we ended up situating it a little farther along in the roll call of sense, because because like I said, Dante listed rather early, you're walking into into hell, the realm of eternal punishment in Dante's epic for a Fit of Mine comedy, and the first circle you encounter are are basically the noble individuals who just happened to live before the age of redemption. So you

have all these philosophers. They are richly adored not only by Dante but by Western culture of the time. In the religious Due to technicality, they're not permitted to rise above hell, so they just kind of live on the outskirts of Hell, but they have their nice little circle. Yeah, yeah, it's it's a nice area, like if you had to live in Hell, like this is the place to be, even better than working there, because some of the guys

that work there pretty bad off. But it's like the white collar circle right, white collar color crime circle, yes, or the academia section of Hell. Right, it's a reasonably pleasant place, even though they two were removed from God, so they're kind of sad. But the second circles where we actually start getting a little hellish and then just a little because Dante seems to discount, not discount lust, but but lust is very much seen as a more of a minor and relatable infraction. It's one that that

Dante has a lot of sympathy for. So first you have to stroll past this monster that goes by the name of Minos, that has this long tail, and he'll wrap this tail around you, and the number of times this tail can loop around your body that informs circle of Hell you're bound for. Okay, I'm not sure exactly how the science of that works, but that's very dramatic. Yeah,

you know, it's not just like ha, go over there. Yeah, it's like you can meet all these sort of sad but otherwise noble intellectuals, and then the next thing you know, there's a monster wrapping up in its tail and then flinging you off to some circle of torment. Well, the second circle of hell is all about the lust. You see all these individuals caught in this maelstrom, it's just

wind everywhere blowing them around. The translation that I'm reading here, this is from Robert im Durling's translation to Divine Comedy, which I highly recommend if you end up wanting to dive into the Divine Comedy. The description goes, the infernal whirlwind, which never rests, drives the spirits before it's violence, turning and striking. It tortures them when they come before the landslide. There the shrieks, the wailing, the lamenting. There they curse

God's power. I understand that to this torment were damned the carnal sinners who subject their reason to their lust. And that's kind of this kind of Dante's whole take on it is that it's about reason becoming usurped by desire. The desire is expressed as as one's weight or dominant inclination. So this is we see the wind in this circle. It's the wind that drives the soul. It's the force

of the desire. You see such famous lusty individuals in this circle as Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Dido, Paris, Tristan Achilles, and he's by and large pretty sympathetic towards these people. And then if you if you end up going on up to Purgatory, which again is the mountain in the divine comedy that connects the earth to the earthly paradise and then onto Heaven, the middle ground between hell and Heaven, you see all these terraces that want has to climb

this mountain and purge themselves of a sin. For each level, well, you have to travel all the way up to a terrace seven in Purgatory, which makes sense because this is the terrace closest to the terrestrial heaven. So this is the last sin you have to get knocked off. They get some of the big ones first. So in this terrace, the individuals are purging themselves of lust, are walking around just immersed in like a world to fire, and it's

sort of burning the lust off of them. You find various turning the lust off, Yeah, burning themselves clean of it. We've all done and that at some point. I like this idea of the Maelstrom and the winds because I do think of lust like this. It's like the ultimate diversion.

It's this thing that sort of takes over your mind and completely scrambles your your cognitive abilities to some degree, and you can really go wild with I mean, it's easy to look at lust and think of it purely in terms of one's desire for the flesh, one sexual desires becoming the dominant force. You see lust ascribed to any number of things. So, for instance, one of my favorite books, The Name of the Rose, is very much a book about all the different types of lust they

can afflict a person. There's the lust for forbidden loves, the lust for flesh, the lust for knowledge, the luss for new things, uh, the lust for truth, the luss for adoration, the less for humility, the luss for pain, which ties in with our podcast about the martyrs and torture. And then in Buddhism we mentioned the wheel of Stamsara and our one of our our previous episodes about sin about how uh there are these three forces at the

center of this wheel of suffering. They're summarized by these three animals, and one of them is the cock, which represents greed. But also tied up in this animal are the forces of lust. So if lust is a force of desire, clearly that's the way Dante sees it, that's the way any number of commentators see it. Then it's

obviously serves as a hindrance to the Buddhist soul. So it's also tied in with some of the higher realms of reincarnation, such as the ashra of the Deva, and of course the human realms, where people become wrapped up in these emotions that are becoming the dominant force in their lives and end up delivering them again into suffering

and disappointment. Well, and speaking of the cock animals, right, the statyer, which is you know something that's a half human, half goat, like you think of pan, right, this is another really good symbol of lust and ancient Greeks. Ancient Greeks, in fact, there's a I don't know if I should actually describe this, but I'm sure everybody is familiar with this. She is a really juvenile term, like think how would

a kindergartener describe? Okay, so not that one should. All right, So you've seen the Greek pots, right that usually have depict certain seams, and we all know that they're kind of racy, Okay, using a juvenile term. There is a picture of a satyr who has his frank and beans exposed, and his frank is h is actually balancing a wine cup, which I think is kind of like the ultimate expression of not just animal sexuality, but lust and desire, because

I mean, you know, throw a little wine in there. Yeah, just total buccanal and nuttery. Yeah, exactly, because what fuels less more than than the one of the guts? Right, the simple search to make you think about, like what exactly is lust? You know, it is a state of nature. It's a state of mind, and perhaps that's why it doesn't get too bad a rap in terms of the

circle of hell it's placed in. Right. The Stater is interesting because on one hand, like clearly the Greek's love the sator, like the statter is this almost kind of a messcot at times, you know, and the way he's depicted and even looking at it now, you're like you kind of want to be the Stater, like the Staters having the time of the wine and music, wine, good food, love making, um, just totally living in the moment, and it's just you know, it's it's the hedonism bot of

of of ancient increase. But then on this at the same time, he's monstrous, he has be steel aspects to his body. And then I think it's worth noting that the monster comes from a monetary. The word dates back to the idea that it's demonstrating something to illustrate a point.

In every monster, there's something telling about the society that creates it, which is why we spend a lot of time in each of these sin podcasts talking about the imagined monsters of hell because they inevitent illustrate how we view a particular sin, and the the Sater is a great example of it. Yeah, it is the grotesque ory

of human nature. And we talked about this a bit and the Discuss podcast when we were talking about how part of what fuels our sense of discust can sometimes relate back to the fact that we don't necessarily want to embrace our animal selves. We try to divorce ourselves from that, at least most of us doing most of the time, and so when you think about the Stater, are yeah, fun time, but also you know, so so animalistic.

Couldn't be me, right, But you know when you talk about Less, you talk about the Stater, you wonder if it's really a sin, if it's essential to our nature, because it is part of the evolutionary machinery in terms of coupling right most of the time. But the way it works, right is that you have to have something fueling you to decide to couple with someone, to perhaps mate with them for life, and lust is sort of the glue of that arrangement. Yeah, I mean, it's very

much a part of the genetic mission. And that's one of the things that makes Less so resting because it's very difficult to combat. Like lust is this thing that makes perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint and from an animalistic standpoint, but then as animals we end up reaching this point where we create this culture around ourselves that lust doesn't necessarily jive with. We cannot be the Stater

in everyday life because we would we would. I mean there are people who try God bless them, I guess bocus maybe bless them, but it tends to be kind of destructive if you just let lust totally dictate every choice in your life. And do you know why, because it's not necessarily wine that is being balanced by those by the francopins that's in that cup. It's really a

cup of dopamine. Our friend dopamine showed up on the scene and every single one of these sins um but we'll talk about this a little bit later, but dopamine here is seriously, I guess you could say, manipulating our thought processes when it comes to lust. And I kind of call this the Yasa effect because it's not just dopamine, but you also have nora epinephrine released. And what happens is when you begin to lust, you see something that excites you as you have all sorts of craziness going

on with your vital signs. Your heart rate increases, your reward system is going ding ding in your brain, you're sweating a little, your limbic system is going, yeah, I give need more of that. And in fact, it's it's

pretty much a full brain event. Plus they didn't have some experiments where of course they booked people's brains up to monitoring imaging equipment and then they displayed some shall we say, erotic material for the individuals whose brains were being scanned, and they set back and watched what lit up, and they saw regions of light up there associated with reward, sensory and interpretation, visual processing. So it's lighting up the amigala,

the hippothalamus, which deals with emotional information. It's stimulating reward processing uh ventful stratum, probably due to the satisfying nature of the stimuli. It's just really setting everything ablaze, particularly with a with a mail you can look at their brain scan and tell at an m r I brain scan and tell if they are aroused. It is a much stronger response in men than women. Lust and this

reaction to images. Yes, And what I thought was really interesting about that is that the dopamine is being released. You can see this happening in the brain when someone sees of image that excites them. And not only that, you can you see what's happening in the brain and can say it's the all event thing going on. But you know, you've got parts of your brain that's saying let's act on this, let's go, And then milliseconds later, your frontal cortex, which has to mediate all of this

and bring reason into it. Has just a very small window to actually say, you know what, maybe this isn't the best idea. Last time we did this, we got into a lot of trouble and we acted on this

lust or whatnot. So that's what I think is fascinating about the fMRI I images that you see with men considering just these really split second photos, which by the way, are interspersed with with control photos like here's a picture of a woman's breast in a black lace bra, right, it's not too crazy, and a dog eating a birthday cake or something, right, yes, and hopefully that's not something that is exciting to them, but snow covered trees or

something like all these lines because there's the control there, so we can really see the brain in action. But again it comes down to these split second decisions that we make. Um And of course this isn't necessarily indicative of a real world scenario because we're not stuck in fm r I. Usually when we see images or think thoughts that really excite us, but still it gives us

a clue. Another thing that's fascinating about this is that, again, we we build this culture up around ourselves and these, uh, these various social systems, and our lust doesn't really jive with it. So we have to find ways to defeat lust, because otherwise we would be like tongue hanging out the cartoon Kyote more wolf rather with the eyes and the tongue, which is kind of a cartoon version of the stat or to a certain extent. So we have to find

ways to shut it down. Right. You can think of it as thinking about baseball, just saying up, we're not gonna think about this, We're gonna think about this. And they've actually studied this as well to see what's happening in the brain when someone is shutting down lust, and they're shutting it out as with a number of other powerful impulses in the brain, we attempt to shut it down by calling upon the right superior frontal gyrus and

right anterior cigulate gyrus. And this is according to research by Mario you Regard at the University of Montreal. He and others proposed these brain areas form a conscious self regulatory system. It's a network that provides us with the evolutionary, the unprecedented ability to control our own neural processing, which is pretty impressive. Another species right, you don't necessarily see this in other animals. This is very particular to humans.

And again, this ability to to take that split second and way whether or not you should act on it, and what the implications are. And we've talked about this before, like our brain is really constructed to try to see into the future and see ourselves into the future. So that's not aha moment, but still it's pretty impressive that we can do this, And I think it's interesting to to sort of take that out outside of the context

of lust. Two. Um, Like we've talked before about just sort of the quagmire of of thinking about your thing thinking you know, or or just letting your thoughts run wild taking it outside of lust, because you can get into some sort of weird, puritanical territory if you're thinking about like, oh, I'm going to shut down dirty thoughts in my brain. But I think it is a useful exercise to be able to shut down thinking in your brain, especially when it's sort of harmful. Let me drag out

the sad toys in my past kind of thinking. Yeah. I think it was Art who pointed out that if you think yourself, I wonder what my next thought will be to concentrate on that thought like that that has an easy and significant ability to sort of clear out all the processes. And that's going on whether you're thinking about something depressing that happened in your past, or something

intimidating in the future, or something lustful breathing through your brain. Well, I mean this is particularly important if you're a sex addic, right, you have to be able to shut down that thought process because that to me seems to be like a heightened state of desire, which is, you know, no longer productive, right from just seeking out is always thinking to come out in one and where conceivably like the picture of the trees could excite you because you're you're reading something

sexual into everything exactly, like I've seen that tendency in some people. Well, um, what I do want to mention too, and this is from Discovery Channels, The Science of Lust. Apparently women are much better at dialing down the lust factor. Yeah, because Dante and well you know, I mean women women just they're as lusty as men. But this is interesting differently, Okay,

they control the process in a different way. According to this, Right, there was this really interesting study in which women were asked to wear the sensors to monitor their heart rates, their blood pressure and I'm not going to get into how this happened, but their blood flow to their genitalium. Okay. In addition, the subject has a lever that she controls with her hand to indicate when she's aroused by what

she sees on the screen. Okay, So she's got this little device that she just kind of pushes up or down when she is aroused. So she's shown a nineties era promotional video for Russia and apparently this is like the most like neutral, non sexual footage that they could get, you know, no no offense, Russia, but apparently like your landscapes aren't all that sexually exciting. And then they show porn. Okay, so while watching the porn, the woman's vital signs are

clearly like going nuts. Her body is actually responding to this. But what is really interesting is that she is pulling the lever down to indicate that she is not at all aroused. In fact, she's like the negative of aroused. So meanwhile, they also do this with men, and they see the male subject also watching the same videos, and then they also have the same response to the videos. In terms of their vital signs and the flow of blood to their genitalia. The difference is that men report

that they are mentally aroused. Okay, so they take that lever and they push it up like full speed. And so the idea is that again women can control this. Perhaps the disconnect and some of this could be cultural too, right, because that really does have a bearing on how you perceive things, So you know, there's that aspect to it.

But the idea is that from an evolutionary point of view, women had have to be much more selective because they if they were to get into a situation where they become pregnant, than they are you know, of course bound to raise that child and that's a lot of resources. So this idea is that women are much more selective and able to take that part of their brain that the reasoning, the frontal cortex and say, you know what,

I'm not really invested in what I'm seeing. I might be around, but I'm not going to act on it. And again, this is pretty much pointing back to what you were talking about with Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal, who was saying that we have this self

regulatory system. The idea again isn't women have more? So, um, it would be really interesting to see more studies on this and also to take in the cultural context of it before saying, oh, women they're just they're awesome at this, you know, because I think there's a little bit more to that than just this black and white situation, this one experiment in a room. All right, Well, we should

probably take a break at this point. Yeah, yeah, because when we get back, we're going to talk about whether

some people are just born lusted. All right, we're back, and before we jump right back into the science, I thought of point out an interesting point that we're going across from a few different critics who pointed out that that since left is so ingrained in human nature, when organized religion condemns it, it's kind of like a spiritual speed trap, you know, like a small town generally in the United States, you only think of it like a small southern town where the speed limit ends up suddenly

dropping to such a low level that a large number of people are going to legally be speeding and therefore they caught and then they're you know, brought into the system to to pay into the system for their their traffic ticket. So that if you if you have a religious system that calls you out on something that you basically cannot help, it's guaranteed to bring you in. Okay, So you're saying that you begin to to think more about it, to actually subscribe to a little bit more

on on on the psychological level. Well, it's kind of like, hey, do you have a problem with less, Well, we've got the religion for you. Well, everybody has a problem with lust of you define it in these terms, you know, it's just an interesting, interesting way to interesting to me anyway way to look at it. You know, like, I'm thinking of it very much in terms of the speech trap, whereas like murder isn't as much of a speeed trap.

Now I'm seeing signs like lust ahead, yeah, next thirty miles less monitored by less detecting devices, some microdrones, lust less planes, a hood. So okay, I'm thinking about I'd always like to think about the opposite of what we're talking about, right in terms of the seven deadly since so what would be the opposite of lustiness? Unlustiness? Yes, thinking specifically in humans? A sexuality? Okay, Okay, So the reason I'm bringing this up is because in again this

was from disc Every Channels Science of Lust Um. They were saying that one percent of the population will report a lifelong lack of sexual attraction for either sex again known as their sexuality, and that this seems to be something that is hardwired in individuals. So I think it's so much done in a day. You know, it's possible that the people of the interviewed they seem to say, you know what, I don't have a problem with this one way or the other. It's just not something that

is present in me. And the researchers were saying there's nothing wrong. I think they just actually even used the term plumbing. There's nothing wrong with their plumbing. In other words, they are completely healthy individuals to just have a lack of lust in kind of life. It's like John McHale and Community talking about Paul Rudd as a comedian. He said, I see the appeal. It's just not for me. That's

right for them. It's all Paul Rudd all the time, no offense, Paul red because you know he's he's a cute guy. Um. God, this is going somewhere else. Um anyway, So the point of this. The reason why that we're we're talking about his sexuality is because if it is hardwired in individuals, you then take the opposite attack to say, could others be born overly lusty? Could they be hardwired

for lust, super luster super lusters like supertasters. I don't know. Uh. Dean Hammer, a geneticist, discovered that there are certain genes involved in the libido, and when he was trying to find correlations to DNA and personality, he gave people all sorts of personality tests and what he found is that people who reported a higher interest in engaging in risky sexual behavior have a mutation on a gene related to

dopamine dopamine. Again, if you have this mutation, you're more likely to respond to the dopamine released by new and different sexual experiences, and this leads to sexual thrill seeking. So I was actually thinking about that in terms of neophilia exactly. Again, neophilia the people that have these actual genes that in which they are hardwired to seek out

new experiences. Also, there's a mutation connected to the brain chemical sarah tone in and that's sometimes known uh to cause high anxiety at a different levels and is also known to be strongly correlated to a high sex drive, So there are different factors going on. Biological factors clearly that could dictate some someone's response to sexually charged images. Which isn't to say that you're not responsible for your own behavior, but if your tongue is always hanging out

on the floor, maybe you should look into this. I don't know well, and you can. You can easily imagine then where you you have the biological causes and then if you depending on what the specific culture one is born into or finds themselves living in, I mean that that has a drastic effect on human happiness, your ability to to have any kind of like satisfying sexual and

or emotional life. And speaking of cultural too, that reminds me to mention that we should probably take a look at the environment that we're living in today, right, And that reminds me of the article of the Internet is for porn. Let's start talking about it. It's a great article that talks about the fact that we live and it will just be a economists something. I don't believe it was Forbes. Forbes. Yeah, I know he was somewhere

he didn't quite expect you. Yeah, yeah, that it's another Jewelie, but I can't remember her last name, but not mine, but she says this was a quote from it. In the largest case of t mine recent history, computational neuroscientists O Giojas and PSI Gotham looked at a billion web searches, a million individual search histories, a million erotic stories, a half million erotic videos. That's a lot a million websites, and millions of online personal ads to conclude that literally

everyone is a sex freak. That's what that's what it would appear. Well, and I should point out that some of those searches were us researching this episode. You know. Yeah, I have to say when I was working in the coffee shop yesterday, I had a couple of red facing moments. I'm not kidding, because I mean some of the stuff that comes up when you were searching this title, like little children walking up and saying, Mommy, what is that goat man doing? Is that a cup of dopamine? And

then yeah, I mean think about it in these terms. Again, this is from the article. Fewer than ninety porn magazines published in the US today, more than two point five million porn sites. That's a lot of fuel for the fires have blessed. Now you've probably seen there's like a book series out there called Porn for Women and it's and it's pictures of men chores and doing things that supposedly women find sexy animal emotional level. What are your

thoughts on that based on the research? Uh, what are my thoughts on the book series and women in porn

and for real women I porn? Do you think that this is very much this is the kind of thing that they would push the level to that in that experiment where they had a little level that they adjusted depending on their no. I think that's a funny commentary on on you know, how women get excited by things like getting help in in the house, which is kind of sad actually right on one level like that that

would become porn for women. But I mean there's a lot of research actually to be done, um for porn for me, because that is an audience that is actually expanding quite a bit. This is some of the research that came on is the saying that you know, they're trying to crack the nut in terms of women and

what they want. And there are a lot of people who say the sort of porn that's out there for consumption, isn't what women are really attracted to because women don't necessarily want to see pictures of themselves being subjucated or some of the very let's say, the darker images that are out there. And yet here's this, you know, let's go back to the to that experiment with the woman who's watching porn as opposed to the Russian promo video, and she is seeing the act and she is still

aroused by it. So again, this to me, that boils down to more of a cultural aspect of it. So obviously there's a huge business opportunity for someone who really figures out what women want in terms of erotic stimuli visual stimuli. Uh yeah, And I was actually just thinking too that on thirty Rock there was a really good episode in which Jack was trying to figure out what women wanted in terms of like what turned them on, and very similar to the Porn for Women series, Uh

those books. They actually came up with a program in which, yeah, Liz Lemon would turn on the TV and I think there was a shirtless man saying how are you doing today? How are you feeling? Tell me about your day, which was kind of funny. So if anyone does figure this out and nails it, um, Yeah, so to speak, there'd be a lot of financial gain. It would fit in well with the overall lust economy. Yes, and in fact,

this is a little teaser. The next podcast topic that we are going to talk about speaking of lust economy is the future of virtual of sex. Yes, so put that in your pipe and smoke it. Yeah, a topic that I recently wrote a little on. I did a Stuff in the Future video about it. But we're covering all sorts of new stuff in this one, so it's it's gonna be amazing. Keep an ear out for that.

But yes, the lust economy basically is that lust, the ideas that lust drives our economy on virtually every level, like even the levels where you don't think about it, where it's uh when we talked about this before and I think our advertising episode right, yeah, eat more popcorn. There have been experiments actually focusing on men and what they choose to buy based on the environment that they're in. There. There was one again the Discovery Science of Lust episode

that talked about the street vendor with sunglasses. The one pair was like an Elvis flashy sun glass pair and the other was their most popular seller, so two to choose from, and when they had a neutral background, men overwhelmingly would buy the most popular option that you know,

one of two. But when it was placed in front of an erotic an erotica store where there was tons of stuff that was sort of fueling their imagination, they went from the flashier Elvis ones because the ideas that they're trying to peacock and stand out so overwhelmingly peacocking. You know, yeah, peacocking. Yes, Uh, they were trying to This is the idea at least that that they're extopolation, not mine. Is that where men were trying to be more unique so that they could perhaps get a meet

the whole lust economy thing. I keep thinking of it when I listened to various j nix podcasts because generally the podcast that I've subscribed to, like each week or something, there's a couple of times we will have a different DJ, and some of the podcasts as album mark for the mix will have a picture of said DJ. With the males.

It's generally find two types of DJs. There's kind of like ghastly looking or nerdy looking guys who generally these are the guys who want to listen to because they're so into the music that they really don't care what their head shot looks like. And then they're the guys that have like a really fancy or attempting to be cool headshot, and those can be pretty bad because clearly

they're really invested in the physical appearance. But then there will be the occasional female DJ, and I'll find myself sort of having the inner conflict of of seeing the thumbnail for the mix and thinking, oh, well, she's pretty hot off to listen to this, And then I have to tell myself that has nothing to do with the with the music at all, like even less so than you know, like someone like Madonna obviously, like the whole package is about the presentation of of how she looks

this persona in addition to or sometimes above and beyond the music. But with a DJ, it's like it's it should all be about the sound. So I'm constantly seeing these mixes, listening to these mixes by some very talented female DJs and uh and and feeling weird about the whole like how do I how am I supposed to compartmentalize the fact that someone like like a Maya, Jane Cole or an Eva be like these are they're attractive women?

You know, well, I mean you have an added problem of you know, mucking the waters here that for women

it's largely gender performance. Right, So there are some people that say that everybody is performing drag on some level, males and females, because if we didn't manipulate our our appearance at all, we'd be kind of hard to distinguish from other than obvious body parts, right, ok, bruss for women right, Otherwise everybody would be fairly hairy, you know, long hair, right, if you never cut your hair, if you never shaved, if you never plucked your eyebrow as

a woman to try to accentuate your eyes, or applied rouge or put you know, any sort of adornment on. So wow, there you go. Well you just blew my mind. I never really thought about that. You know. It's like we're all participating and dragged to some to some point, we're all attempting to fit under various classifications of what it is to be male or what it is to be female in various spaces in between. Yeah, and then performers are just like the uber gender performers, right, because

that's that's you have to project that image. So I think that's maybe some of the appeal of Lady Gaga on some level, although I feel like we we haven't had a Lady Gaga discussion lately. Yeah, she used to come up all the time. You all right, Well I'm

gonna I'm gonna close it out. I have one last just to bring us back around to Dante, the way he presented less not only as you know, definitely a sin and a stumbling block to human happiness and spiritual happiness, but also as something that was very romantic and very very very beautiful and and ultimately not nearly as as bad as these other sins. This is from a novel by Louise Erdrich titled The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, which is excellent. I highly recommend it.

There's this wonderful brief love story between two priests. One is a male priest and the other is a female living her life as a male priest, and they end up discovering who they really are. They end up having this physical and emotional relationship, and so there's there's just a few lines. Gregory kissed her forehead and cupped his broad hand around her face. The way the curve of her face fit into his hand took away his breath for a moment, and then he took a painful gulp

of air and laughed. I hope Dante was right about hell, he said, I don't think I would mind so much whirling in the d in that dark wind with you forever cut off from God, she says, and then he adds if we are cut off from God by sinning, he said, low, why do I feel so close to God when I touch you in this darkness, in this cloud? See you again? That is why it's very hard to judge less in that way, and when it contributes to the formation of love, which some would say is next

to godliness, right right. And the things that keep these two characters apart, and you read the book by all means to find out more about this, but I mean the things that keep them apart of very much this this culture that's built up around them, you know. Anyway, Well, let's call the robot over here and get some listener mail. All right, Well, we have a couple here related to our sin episodes. Karen writes then about envy and she says, Hey, guys,

I'm a communication major with an emphasis in media. So after listening to the episode on envy, I started thinking about how technology plays into envy. With the ever expanding social networking sites that are now, there are now infinite ways to become envious of others. Facebook, for example, and now seems to be less about keeping in contact with others and more about displaying your life. People become envious of others who are seeing all the good parts of

someone's f life. On the flip side of that is the humanizing of people as well. For instance, if a person you think has their life together, it gets tagged in an unflattering situation. Um, or just you're generally unflattering photos right um. As she continues, I have also recently joined Pinterest and found the same sort of envy producing so fill networking people were either pinning their own pictures or adding pictures of a lifestyle they wish to have.

I think I think it may be unhealthy to envy others so much, but what can I say? It is addicting at the same time. Love the show, Thanks Karen. Yeah, the picturest thing is really interesting because it does seem to be some sort of like uh, you know, I guess they call like dream borge or whatever, like things that you want in the future, that you create for yourself.

At the same time, it seems to be like the sort of meta expression of want, meaning that I don't see it as a serious like yearning for something, but more like, let's talk about these visual aspects of what makes this really cool or exciting to me? Yeah, sort of a celebration really of art to a certain degree. I don't know if some people would say that, you know, braided hairstyles qualify as art, but there's certainly a lot of interesting things that would, um that would arrest your

eyes in some of those photos, right. I remember, like back in college, just to bring that back around to lest I remember, everybody's out on their own for the first time for the part, and they'll have computers, and so everybody's putting you know, they're putting up posters. Sometimes for the guys, they'll be slightly sexual. But I remember there would be some guys who would as their desktop wallpaper, would have like really racy, if not pornographic material as

their desktop wallpaper. Yeah, And I remember, like he you know, even then, thinking wow, really like that's gonna be that's your Pinterest board, basically, is this lady? Yeah. I think we live in a in an age where sexuality and self expression are of changing quite a bit. And I was just actually thinking about my cousin who showed me a picture of his girlfriend on his iPhone and she was in her lace underwear and prov and I was like, you know what, maybe that's just that's okay, you know,

like you're twenty two and that's that's acceptable. Maybe she did not necessarily want him to do that, but it seems to me just a different level of sharing. It's one thing to keep in mind their generations and in and now that are adults and becoming adults. They do not know an age before total Internet. It's it's a different frame of mind altogether. Uh. Here's another bit of listener male related just sends, this time on the Gluttony

episode or note on absolutely discussed of gluttony. So I guess she's kind of she's tying together a couple of different things we've talked about. This is from Cam Camera and Senus is Hi, Julian Robert. I'm Cama, a recent listener to your podcast from Manila, the Philippines. Though I've been listening for a while now, it was only getting your podcast on gluttony that I got the urge and

the courage to drop you a note. As I was listening to your discussion on l Wingador's training regime, I found myself thinking back to your episode on Absolutely Discussed and realized that in my case, gluttony of that sort demonstrated by l Wingadore and Kobe Ashi triggered disgusting me. For some odd reason, the idea of eating my own weight and food makes me queasy. Don't get me wrong, I love a good meal as much as the next person, but the sheer volume of food food consumed by competitive

eaters is off putting. On the other hand, chili eating and nettle eating contest aren't his off putting, and I find those highly amusing. I guess in those contests it's not about how much a contestant can consume so much as it's about how much pain I can tolerate before they dissolve into a quivering wreck, which, as I said, I find exceedingly amusing. This is not I believe say anything flattering about me, but I promise I'm a very

nice person most of the time. Anyway, I just like to say thank you for the awesome job you do on the podcast, and I'll definitely be looking forward to your next mind blowing episode. So she's she's like, okay with the gluttony, as long as it's like transcending some sort of other challenge obstacle like pain. Now, what is a nettle? A nettle? I thought was an herb nettles to look up a nettal eating, I mean, I'm thinking

it must be not well. I think it's something that's very easy to to either digest or to chew, which you mean she said chili. She must she meant like hot show. Yeah, because when I first read it, I was thinking bowls of chili, and she was like, and so I thought her point was eating hot bogs. That's growth contests about eating pops of chili. Bring it on. No, I think she's just talking about the digger you have spiciness. Okay.

I would agree with that, that that while it's it's maybe a type of gluttony to just eat as many hot peppers as you can possibly stand, it's not it's a different type of test, like how much pain can you know how much mace can you eat for breakfast? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, it's an endurance thing. Yeah. Jonathan Strickling would probably go for that of tech stuff he seems to call he's a he's kind of a spice glutton. Yes, he's got like all sorts of bottles surrounding him at all times

on his test. That's a lie. Yeah. Yes, that that mask that he wears that has the sharaca bottles in it where he somehow breathes a liquid sharaca. Yeah, he's coated the saracha biosphere. Actually, I said it wrong. I a would say it wrong. I would say sharaca, but I don't. I guess there's not even an ancient there. Like, I don't know, I might be saying it wrong. One last point, I'm gluttoning I brought up in the podcast. Hey, I wonder if vegans have eating contests, and it turns

out there are vegan hot dog eating contests. A couple of different listeners throught that up, and unsurprisingly, one of them was in Austin, Texas, which a friend of mine, Becky Streepy, pointed out, like, that's the perfect place for it because Austin is kind of a convergence of like like sort of hippie do good y and um, you know, big text and indulgence right, plus the what's their logo? Keep custom weird, Yeah, keep Austin weird. Yeah, nicely. So

there you have it. We'd really love to hear from you about lust. I mean, make sure it's something. I mean, if you want to share something with us that we can't read on the air, you know, that's fine, let us know. Maybe it'll just be for our amusement. But the certainly things we can we can share with other listeners that are nice. What are you What are your thoughts on, say, the lust economy? Now it informs everything

we do. What are your thoughts on our ability to use our our brains to defeat lusty or or otherwise inconvenient thoughts? You know, any of us fair games? So let us know. You can find us on Facebook. We are stuff to blow your mind on that little website, and if you look us up on Twitter, we go by the handle blow the Mind and you can also drop us a line at Blow the Mind at Discovery

dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcasts, Stuff from the Future, Join how stufwork staff, as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.