East of Eden by John Steinbeck w/Tom Libby & Jesan Sorrells

East of Eden by John Steinbeck
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Exploring John Steinbeck’s magnum opus, East of Eden, Jesan Sorrells and Tom Libby break down how the novel’s multi-generational narrative reveals timeless truths of human nature, leadership, and morality. They discuss Steinbeck’s powerful depiction of rural California and the tension between rural and urban values, dissect the novel’s deep biblical allusions and the theme of free will, and examine how leaders can leverage the diversity of personalities within teams for collective success. The episode emphasizes the novel’s ongoing relevance and what modern leaders can learn from Steinbeck’s nuanced insights about character, motivation, and human dignity.

• Book Title: East of Eden
• Author: John Steinbeck
• Guest Names: Tom Libby, Jesan Sorrells

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Time Stamped Overview
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00:00 Interesting place names and history

05:22 Analyzing a timeless 1940s novel

10:45 Recording mishap and frustrations

16:23 Steinbeck's portrayal of characters

24:06 Post-war literary influences in Europe

26:33 Steinbeck's Nobel Prize and Retirement

31:45 Discussing the Northeast landscape

41:38 Samuel's intellectual pursuits

42:26 Samuel's early years in Salinas

48:11 Skepticism about AI's future impact

56:57 Understanding sin in the Hebrew context

01:01:19 Discussing unconventional views on the Bible

01:08:36 Urbanization trends and population growth

01:11:58 Commentary on author intentions

01:17:17 Finding Value in Team Members

01:20:43 Exploring physical and mental anomalies

01:28:16 Analyzing Kathy as a tragic figure

01:34:22 Confronting dishonesty in a team

01:36:24 Dealing with consequences and accountability

01:46:16 Misunderstanding narcissism and self-preservation

01:50:50 Discussing the appeal of rural stories

01:53:50 Discussing the timelessness of classic literature

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• Opening theme composed by Felipe Sarro - Bach - Silotti - "Air"  from Orchestra Suite No. 3, BWV 1068 
• Closing theme composed by Brian Sanyshyn of Brian Sanyshyn Music.

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Creators and Guests

Host

Jesan M. Sorrells

Host of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast!

Host

Thomas Libby

Producer

Leadership Toolbox

The home of Leadership ToolBox, LeaderBuzz, and LeadingKeys. Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast link here: https://t.co/3VmtjgqTUz

What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?

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Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells, and

this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,

episode number 186.

Opening up from our book today,

we're going to pick up in part one,

chapter one, and it's going to be part two

of. Of chapter one. And we're going to take

in the setting for today.

And I quote, and that was the long Salinas

Valley. Its history was like that of the rest of the state.

First there were Indians, an inferior breed, without energy,

inventiveness or culture. A people that lived on grubs and

grasshoppers and shellfish. Too lazy to hunt or fish, they ate

what they could pick and planted nothing. They pounded bitter acorns for flour.

Even their warfare was weary pantomime.

Then the hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through greedy and

realistic, and their greed was for gold or for

God. They collected souls as they collected jewels. They gathered

mountains and valleys, rivers and whole horizons the way a man might now gain title

to build lots. These tough, dried up men moved

restlessly up the coast and down. Some of them stayed on grants as large

as principalities given to them by the Spanish kings who had not the

faintest idea of the gift. These first owners

lived in poor feudal settlements and their cattle ranged freely and multiplied.

Periodically, the owners killed the cattle for their hides and tallow and left the meat

to the vultures and coyotes. When the Spaniards

came, they had to give everything they saw. Name this is the first duty of

any explorer, a duty and a privilege. You must name a thing

before you can note it on your hand drawn map. Of course

they were religious people, and the men who could read and write, who kept

the records and drew out the maps, were the tough, untiring priests who traveled with

the soldiers. Thus, the first names of places were

saints names or religious holidays celebrating

at stopping places. There are many saints, but

they are not inexhaustible. So that we find repetitions

in the first namings. We have San Miguel, St. Michael, San Ardo,

San Bernardo, San Benito, San Lorenz, San Carlos, San Francisco,

Ito. And then the holidays. Natividad, the Nativity,

Nacimiento, the Birth, Soledad, the Solitude.

But the places were also named from the way the expedition felt at the time.

A Buena Esperanza, Good Hope, Buena Vista because the view was

beautiful, and Chihuahuara because it was pretty. The

descriptive names followed Paso de los Robles because of the oak

trees. Los Laureles for the laurelsitos

because of the reeds in the swamp, and Salinas for the

alkali, which was as white as salt

Then the places were named for animals and birds seen. Gabalains of

the hawks which flew in the mountains. Topo for the mole, los gatos for the

wild cats. The suggestions came from the nature of the place itself.

Tasara, a cup and a saucer. Laguna Seca, a dry

lake, Corral de Tierra for offensive earth,

Parisio, because it was like heaven.

Then the Americans came, more greedy because there were more of

them. They took the lands, remade the laws to make their own titles

good and farmholts spread over the land, first in the valleys and then up the

foothill slopes. Small wooden houses roofed with redwood shakes,

corals of split poles. Wherever a trickle of

water came out of the ground, a house sprang up and a family began to

grow and multiply. Climbing cuttings of red geraniums and rose bushes were planted in the

doorways. Wheel tracks of buckboards replaced the trails, and fields of

corn and barley and wheat squared out the yellow mustard. Every

10 miles along the travel routes, a general store and blacksmith shop

happened, and these became the nuclei of little towns. Radley, King

City, Greenfield. The

Americans had a greater tendency to name places for people than had the Spanish.

After the valleys were settled, the names of places refer more to the things which

happened there. And these to me are the most fascinating of all

names, because each name suggests a story that has been forgotten.

I think of Bolsa Nueva, A New Purse, Morocco

Ho and Lay Moore. Who was he and how did he get there? Wild

Horse Canyon and Mustang Grade and Shirttail Canyon. The

names of the places carry a charge of the people who named them,

reverent or irreverent, descriptive, either poetic or

disparaging. You can name anything San Lorenzo, but

Shorttail Canyon or the Lane War is something quite different.

The wind whistled over the settlements in the afternoon

and the farmers began to set out mile long windbreaks of eucalyptus to keep

the plowed topsoil from blowing away. And this

is about the way the Salinas Valley was when my grandfather

brought his wife and settled in the foothills to the

east of King City.

So Cain went out from the Lord's presence and lived in the land of

Nod, east of Eden.

With this from Genesis 4:16, our author

today opens up a truly expansive novel

written in the 1940s, but of course based on a life of

experiences in the Salinas Valley and first published in

1952. The novel describes on an epic scale what it

really means to fall out of the utopian paradise created by a transcendent

God into the blood, sweat and tears

of the fallen. World we all now tragically

inhabit. This book has

never not been a bestseller since its first publication, and

this is because it touches on deeply human themes of loss,

regret, trauma, sexual immorality,

manipulation, greed, sociopathy, and

even the honest differences people can experience who grow up in the same family

raised by two people doing the best that they can.

For leaders, this novel is a very easy read, but it is unsettling

in its implications and truly groundbreaking in its assumptions about

human n. But not because human

beings have changed between the date of its original publication in

1952 and now in the year of our Lord

2026, but because in

2026 we seem to have lost the plot or at the

very minimum, the language to address the,

well, the perplexing and sinful behavior we see in

the humans around us. For

all of our technological sophistication, this book proves a

point we need hammered home to us in a society like

the one in which we live now. Many of us have

iPhones, the Internet, and social media, and

many of us do a lot of things with those things, but we still

aren't really sure what any of that actually

means. Today on

the show, we are revisiting the

Salinas Valley of California at the beginning of

the last century. You know, the one with

dates that began with 19. And we're going to try to

extract lessons for leaders that they can apply in this

century from John Steinbeck's

magnum opus, the second one in his long literary

life, east of Eden

Leaders. We've said this on the show multiple times

with my guests today, and we'll probably say it again

in this recording today, but the more things change,

the more they regrettably stay the same.

And today, of course, I am joined by my fellow traveler

whose computer has decided that it is going

to behave as if it's not

living its utopian best life, joined

by my co host and fellow traveler,

Tom Libby. By the way, if he cuts out, I'm just going to

keep doing this episode without him. We're, we're on a,

we got to be on a roll here. So how you doing today, Tom?

Well, I, I think as you've just said, I'm, you know,

the, my, Listen, I, I, I owe the computer nothing,

okay? It's, it's, it, it's,

it's, it's. Well, I think I bought it years before co even

happened. So that tells you about how old the computer is. It

owes me nothing. But I'm getting to the point where now I got to, I

got to figure out, you Know, do I try to, do I try to

continue the repairs and kick it down the sidewalk a little bit? Or do I

just bite the bullet and get a new computer? They seem to be commodity at

this point, so buying a new computer shouldn't be all that difficult, you know, etc,

etc. But I remember to get into the episode

today, just talk a little bit about your intro and get away from

my technology troubles.

I remember the first conversation, I remember the first conversation you and I had about

this opening. And I remember specifically saying to you

I was having a good day until I heard that. And like, like in a

fictional book, my people are still being like dumped

on because if you look at the natives eating grubs and we're too lazy. Whatever.

Like, come on, enough already. Can we figure out, can we just find a

book that says we're awesome? I. Just one, just one book that says that native

people are awesome. I'll be happy with that. But again, I understand this is a

classic book. And I, and, and you and I talked about this when we spoke

before too. I, and I actually love. Steinbeck is one of my favorite authors.

So it's, I, I'll, I'll give him a pass, I guess.

It's, it's, it's. The term I believe that he used

was weary pantomime. I, I, I believe

that was the, that was the descriptor that, that he used. Yeah,

he. Okay, so

just full disclosure to the folks listening today.

This is our second time around with this book and with this episode.

So we originally, this is a little bit of inside baseball. We, we

record, we tend to record on a Monday for a Wednesday release.

Normally we don't record on a Wednesday for a Wednesday release,

but because of, due to, due to operator error

this week, my operator error, we,

we had a two, we had almost two hour long conversation about Easter E did

on Monday and we recorded none

of it. So we're back

to bite the bullet again. And that's what Tom is referring to. So this is,

there's going to be a lot of references to a conversation that you never heard

but that we recorded. Actually wrote a blog post about this where

we behaved as if it were being recorded, which is actually the more

interesting thing to me, just at a sort of psychological level because I was thinking

about it afterward after I got past the initial sort of frustration and

anger at myself of my own operator error and again,

having no one to blame this week but myself.

And by the way, this has been one more thing in a series of things

that just have created a series of Mondays for me this week in my life.

It's just been Monday all week. It's always been the first day of the week.

It's gonna call you Lemony Snicket over here.

Oh, my gosh. I will be glad to get out of this week. Like, Friday

cannot come soon enough. But, but,

but this was one of those things where, like, the

fascinating thing to me is again, we, we acted as if we were being

recorded. We behaved as if, and we kind of had a little bit of a

disagreement about some of the aspects of the book. And that's all right. We're going

to explore some of that today. But we were, we were on our

behavior as if we were being recorded. And so, you know, it's

one of those chicken and the egg things, like, which came first? You know, the

good behavior and the respectful dealing with another person or the technology,

like, which one of those came first? So anyway, I wrote a whole blog post

about that. If you're following me on social media on LinkedIn, you should go connect

with me. I repost my blog posts on, on

LinkedIn. Lately, I've been kind of doing that. I'll be doing that for the whole.

All the next quarter. And it's called hitting the record button, so you should

go check that out. So anyway,

Just one of those things. I don't know. I don't know why I felt the

need to bring that up. Probably because, you know what? I want everybody to know

just how hard it is to put together the show. That's really, that's really what.

Ms. That's what everybody to, like, know that Tom is not the only

one having a crap week at this point. Plus,

today in America is for all those who are international listeners and

other places, today is tax day in America. This

is the day when you either pay the government money

and then there's no. Or after that. I mean, you might get a refund, but,

like, those are less and less as time has gone on. So

I have. I have not received a refund from the tax man in

15 years. Normally I'm paying in. So

it's been a good long time. I don't even remember what it feels like to

get a refund.

Anyway, enough said about that. Back to the book. So John

Steinbeck, right? I'm gonna let you. I'm gonna let you kind of go off like

you did last time. So talk to me a little bit about John Steinbeck. Talk

to me about what you think of him as an author. I know you said

that he was one of your favorite authors. Why is that?

I know why. He's interesting to me. He's sort of the anti Hemingway

and he sort of sits in that

pantheon of social realist writers. Right.

But he was unlike an Upton Sinclair or William

Faulkner who could probably be accurately compared with

his style was more about

seeing, at least in my opinion, seeing the

nature of who human beings are and just sort of letting them.

Letting them be who they were right on the page.

But. But what did you think of Steinbeck? What did you. What do you think

of? I know it's been 30 some odd years since you read east of Eden,

but what did you think of the book?

Well, well, to. To answer your question, first about

my thoughts on Steinbecker. And again as. As I have mentioned, see

I was just going to continue to say, as I've mentioned in the past, I

wasn't even going to point out that we had this faux power on Monday. That

was your fault. I wasn't even going to go there. But anyway,

that's fine. As I mentioned in a previous conversation,

I think one of the things about Steinbeck that stood out to me as you

know, and again this is. This was high school reading for me. So as you

mentioned, it was quite a. Quite a long time ago. But when I think about

the quote unquote required reading that we had

back then, the Harbor Lee's of the World author Millers

that like. I thought Steinbeck was more of

a. I thought he was more.

You even used the word realistic. So I think his characters are relatable.

I think that you can see either yourself or your fam. You're a family

member in that character. I think it was very. He's very. He's

very down to earth, salt of the earth kind of writing where in

way that he describes things is very

non whimsical I guess is the word I would. The thing. The way I would

describe it. Like when he describes the. The valley, like you can

picture that in your head. You're not picturing some Lord of the Rings thing

where it's like, you know, you know, created in

his brain. Like you can tell that it's something real to him. Like I

think that's. I think that's my favorite part. And his characters are

such. Right. Like whether you talk about east of Eden or the Grapes of Wrath

or Mice of Men. Mice of Men stands out to me even

more in that sense too because he didn't, he

didn't dance around the issue that George

was not Intelligent. Like, he didn't dance around the

issue that he was a special needs. Kind of like what we would consider special

needs person today or mentally challenged, however you want to word it. But

I think that he did that better than most of the people that I

enjoyed reading or I, that I read. And, and I, I do

think that, like, again, the, the two other authors that I just mentioned,

Harper Lee and, and, and Arthur Miller, I think they did a pretty good job

of it too, which is probably why I like them as well. But I thought

Steinbeck was just a cut above. I really do think that he,

you, you can truly get

a mind's eye because

you can relate to what he's writing, to something that you

yourself have either seen or experienced. Like, again, when he's writing

the, the characteristics of a character or the behavioral patterns of a character,

you're like, oh, that reminds me of my uncle, so and so. Or when he's

describing the, the city surroundings or the country surroundings, like, oh, I

remember visiting a place like that. Like, you know, he's very, like, it's very

relatable to, to, to people. And it's, it's very easy to,

to see yourself in the settings that he's describing in, in the environments.

And again, when I say in the settings of environments, I'm not talking specifically or

solely about physical environments like the Valley. I'm talking about being in the

social environments, being in the work. Like, you can see yourself

in those environments that he describes. And by the way, even reading through some

of the stuff now, like looking back

at some of the Cliff Notes, so to speak, or Spark Notes, I guess today

is the, the term. But like, even. Even though

it was written almost 75 years ago, it still

applies. Like, I'm fascinated by the fact that it still

applies. So that I think, I think for me,

I just think Steinbeck was a. I, I just think he would be. He's a

regular guy. Like, he just. I think he's a regular person that got out, that

had a way with taking what's in his mind and putting it on paper.

But if you read it, it's almost like you're looking directly into his experience

and his thought process is directly into his experience. So it's.

Again, and I don't. To me, it doesn't matter whether you're talking about E or

Grips of Wrath or Of Mice and Men or any of the other. What, 50?

I don't remember the number, but he wrote dozens and dozens

of things. So it was something like 50 or 60. Or I

remember the number being very large of his writing. So I just

think that most of them were part of his. And you notice,

too, and you mentioned Hemingway. We were talking about this, and I don't know if

you want to talk about this now or if. If that came later, later in

the show. But, but like Hemingway,

Faulkner, these guys, like, kind of traveled the world, right? So a lot of their

writings are about their experiences around the world. His

writings were all about here. Like, it never. He never wrote anything

that I remember seeing anyway. It was explicitly about Europe or

Asia or any of these other places where some of these guys have written about.

So again, if you're an American citizen

and you're. You're here, it's very relatable. Like, it's relatable because it's your. Like everything

he wrote about was your country. It was things that were happening in the moment

for, for him and, and what was going around the country. And I think some

of the. And we'll talk about this a little bit later because you're going to.

I know you're going to ask me, but some of the lessons are still relatable.

Like some of the things that they talk about under the way that you interact

with people, the way that you experience. The way that you experience human interaction

has not changed from the time that he wrote this. Now that's the part. That's

another part that I found fascinating. But. But it's like, timeless. His

writing seems to be. Seems to be timeless. Well, and this is something

that we're going to get into. This ties into something else that we're going to

get into. Because you talk about experience, right? So

Steinbeck's experience was very much a

rural experience, right? So, you

know, we kind of covered this in. In the shorts episode that precedes this

episode. We're at shorts number. I think it's number 219.

We talk about the myth of the city, and we're gonna get into a little

bit of this today as well, talking about Taylor Sheridan and Yellowstone and

cultural myths and things like this. Um, but Steinbeck, I

believe, fundamentally is the last or was

the. Not last, but he was the. The pinnacle of a breed of

writers that had no other choice

but to write about what they knew. And if what they knew was

the land or if what they knew was the rural area they had

been surrounded by, they were going to. They were going to

ruthlessly mine that.

They were going to ruthlessly mine that vein of experience, right? And

so, you know, he lived in.

He lived in the, you know, in the small rural valley of the Salinas Valley.

When he was a kid, he spent his summers working on ranches. He

labored with migrant workers on sugar beet farms. He

graduated from Salinas high school in 1919, literally at the

end of World War I, like, literally the year after World War I was over.

By the way, Hemingway had been in World War I,

right? And so, so Steinbeck

missed, you know, the big war, such as it were, of his

lifetime. But obviously around

for World War II, he reported on his. His son's,

I don't want to say adventures, but his son's experience in Vietnam

and reported on it not from the sense of, hey, I'm going to go to

Vietnam and visit him, but I'm going to write about this in a way that

sort of relates or is relatable to people who are

still, even in the 1960s, sending their kids

to. 1950s and 60s, sending their kids to this place

where they come from, you know, this, this. This rural area.

He studied English literature at Stanford University and left without a degree. In

1925, he traveled to New York City to try to write. Did

not make it in New York City, unlike Joan

Didion, who I think is his. His generational successor,

who did go from California to New York. And we'll talk about sort of the

geography of that in a minute. But then he

returned to work in California in 1928, and he began to

work as a tour guide and as a caretaker. And he spent a

lot of his time doing, quite frankly, what we would call these days

menial labor, menial manual labor.

His family supported him through the Great Depression so that he didn't

have to do that labor because the Great Depression happened every. All those jobs dried

up. He, you know, he lived in a cottage

and wrote ruthlessly, but he wrote about the things he saw.

And so you can see this in books from Cannery Row to.

Or from Tortilla Flat, actually through Cannery Row all

the way through much later on. His depiction of

the Okies coming from the Dust bowl to California and being

discriminated against in the Grapes of Wrath, you know, that was the book that made

him. And then, of course, the book that we are. We're talking about today, east

of Eden. He defined how rural America in the

early to middle 20th century thought about itself and

specifically how they thought about themselves. And I'm going to say this

directly and up front, thought about themselves in opposition to the city,

not as part of the city, but as a place that

was separate from an urban environment that was distinctly

separate from an urban environment. And Hemingway, not Hemingway,

sorry, Steinbeck leaned into that. Whereas guys like Hemingway, to your point,

Hemingway, Faulkner, John Dos Passos

even, who is probably the most Americanized out of all those guys?

Or not Americanized, but American centric, I should probably say that.

But those folks were, they, they did, they traveled

to Europe after they got out of World War I, you know, they, they were

like, how can I go back, how can I go back to Kansas

after I seen gay Paris? Right. And so I'm going to stay in Europe

and I'm going to sort of become part of that, that lost

generation. Steinbeck

was, was part, was the oldest member of the generation that

came after the lost generation. Right. And so he didn't have a

connection to any of that World War I experience other than

reading about it in his local newspaper. And for him, in the

Salinas Valley, the killing fields of, of,

of the killing fields and the trench warfare of Europe would have seemed like

10,000 miles away. I can absolutely see that as like a 15 year old, 16

year old reading about it in the newspaper, maybe hearing about it on the radio.

Sometimes, like we just, we underestimate

the distances that people had because everything now, you know, in our time

is so immediate, the impact of everything is so immediate.

And we see the impact of everything on our phones, whether it's happening

in Paris or Vietnam or Russia or,

you know, downtown in the city that's

the major metropolis in our state. Like, we can see all of it because of

the phones now. And so the divide between the rural and the urban has

shrunk quite a bit. But Steinbeck was probably,

like I said, the highest pinnacle of that writer who understood how to

write about rural environments and how to give those people pride,

while also, of course showing them being

exactly what they, what they are, which is just,

you know, human beings in another, another environment that's not an urban environment.

As he got older and his society continued to change well into the

post, post east of Eden as he went into the 50s and 60s,

society continued to change. The rural environment continued

to decline. And as that happened,

Steinbeck became infinitely grumpier.

And even though he won the, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1952

and later on found out that he was

sort of a best of the bad lot pick in the 19 in

1962 for that Nobel Prize for Literature and was kind of

resentful about that. And I can understand why

he, he wrote his travel book Travels with Charlie,

which I do believe we've covered on this show. And if we haven't, we will

because it is one of, one of his better books where he's just riding around

in this like RV with a dog looking at

the 60s getting ready to happen.

He, he, after he got that Nobel

Prize in, in, in 62,

he, he basically quit writing. He

basically put down his pen and he didn't write anything for the last remaining six

years of his life. He was, he is sort of one of those things where

like I think of the, I think of the Daniel Day Lewis character at the

end of There Will Be Blood, based on the book Oil, which we've

already covered. You should go back and listen to that episode where he sort of

where he, he kills the, the preacher kid,

Paul Dano in the, in the

bowling alley that he has built into his house. And then

he says, you know, come get me, I'm done. And that was basically John

Steinbeck to reality. Come get me, I'm done. I'm, I'm finished.

And it's sort of a, I think biographically sort of a

tragic end for to your point, a

man who was a towering talent.

Yeah. So I don't know. I don't know. That's

all the background on him. That's some of my thoughts on

Steinbeck. East of

Eden itself as a book though is.

Well, it's almost a thousand pages. It is

multi generational. It covers the two families

that have settled in this. That settled in the Salinas Valley, the Hamiltons or the

Trasks, and goes through three generations of their lives

and their interactions with each other,

their bear interactions with each other, but mostly their interactions with other

people, with the families and of course with the land.

Why don't we talk a little bit about California before I jump back into the

book? So California is a character

in this, in this book. What do you think of

California, Tom?

I've been there. It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live

there,

I think, you know, not for any reason other than I,

I don't know. Again, it. There, there are some very, very

beautiful areas in California. I mean there's no doubt that it's got, that it has

its, it has its attractions.

Right. And we, we kind of talked about this in one of our previous

conversations about how

like. But the, it's, it's not so much about the actual

physical land of California than it is about the, the

mentality and the, and the,

the personality of the land which leans itself, lend. Lends

itself to a much more relaxed Environment, a much

more

accepting environment. There, there's lots of, there's lots of

adjectives here that you can describe it. And

we had spoken too about, like, you know,

I remember I, I was, I'm trying, I was trying to remember the analogy here

that we were talking about the other day, but when we were talking about how,

like, we're all Americans here, right. So I live here in the

Northeast. Californians live in California. Somebody from California that

goes to New York doesn't really do all that well, but somebody from Boston that

goes to New York does just fine. Right. Like, it's. And it's not.

And by the way, California has plenty of cities. LA is one of the

biggest cities in the country. But people who live in LA

don't necessarily like being in Boston and New York. It's

just the, the, the, the personality of the

cities are different. Right. Like, so it's so. And, and we talked about this.

Like, even though we're in the same country, it's like people from the Northeast

are like, it's like France and Germany. Like, if you think about the

closeness of France and Germany, but yet somebody from France just

doesn't understand somebody from Germany. They don't get it. Like, there's, there's lots of

cultural things, language things,

behavioral things that are all different because Germany is Germany and France is

France. Well, within our own country, we have the same

dynamics. Like, think about the people poke fun at

the Boston accent all the time. And I try really hard

not to have one. And hopefully, you know, it's not

blatantly obvious when I speak that I'm from the Boston area.

But that, but that's on purpose on my part

because I want to be able to interact with people around the country and then

have them not know where I'm from just because my mouth opens. Like.

Right. But, but California. So that's this, like, that's the idea.

Right? Like, so somebody that was born and raised here in the Northeast, again, whether

you're Boston, New York, and by the way, I kind of wrapped Philadelphia into that

environment as well. When I think of the Northeast, I basically think of like Pennsylvania

up. And then, you know, so we got these sections of the country

that all have these different dynamics. So I get my point to this, I guess.

And the rambling nature of this is, I

think having the landscape as a

character in the books makes sense to me because it would be different if you

lived in different places in, Even in our own country. Yeah, like

you, you, you would have to have.

You would. Because Somebody who lives in the United

States would want to know that, like, what area of the country

is this based on? Like, how do I know that it's like that it's

realistic? If you're taking the same characters from California and they act

the exact same way, and you tell the reader that they're in New York, it's

unbelievable from our perspective. I mean, you're selling it worldwide, like, to other

countries. Sure. They don't know any different, so it's fine. But if you're selling it

within the borders of our country, you need to have. You need to have that.

That landscape as a character kind of situation for people, for the reader,

to make it believable. Well, and I also think that

from Steinbeck's perspective as a writer and as a

creator, the land itself as a

character has its own personality and it has its own

stuff going on. And we're going to talk about this when we get to. When

we talk about Kathy Ames later. Later on, we'll sort of revisit this.

But. But I think. I think a couple of things.

One, I think it's really interesting

how, because California is at the end of the continent,

that it is perceived as. Even in his description there that we opened up

with, it is perceived as this paradise by

people from back east, right? A place where,

you know, the water is, you know, always

blue. It's not dirty like the Atlantic. It's always blue.

The sun is always shining. Even when I've been to California. Like, I was in

California last year for. For a training that I had to do with a

client. And I got off the plane and

I. I looked around and even. And my wife says, I always say this

about places, but it's true. I said, the light even looks different here. The

sunlight looks different here. And of course, the first question that.

The first question that comes out of my mouth was. The same question that comes

out of my mouth when I go to Florida, by the way, is how do

people actually do work here? Like, if I lived here, I would never work.

I wouldn't. I wouldn't hustle at all. Like, there'd be no. What is the

reason? But that's the perspective. That's an east coast perspective

on. On a West coast sort of posture. And I know

they're hustling out there. I know all my California listeners, I know y' all are

hustling the heck off out of it. You hustle. You just hustled Eric

Sowell, you know, out of the Congress. So I know you're getting after it, like.

And I saw that just happened at the governor's race in California.

But so I know you could all can get after it, but

the getting after it is at a different speed at a different template.

Because. And I think Steinbeck was. Was be the

beginning of sort of setting the template for this. California is sort of the

last frontier. It's the last place in America where

you can go. Now, of course, people will say,

well, you can go to Hawaii. Not in 1952.

Now. Yeah, in 1952. That was not. For a lot of Americans, that was

not an option. And for Americans of

Steinbeck, Alaska wasn't a state until 1959. So.

Right. And for. And for. For. For Americans

of Steinbeck's generation. I mean, the continent ended at the

coast of California. Like that's where it ended. Like that was it.

And so it was one of those. It's one of those places where.

Well, I had a person from California sort of describe it to me recently when

a conversation we were having, he said, you know, Californians both love our state

and we hate our state at the same time. And I never heard

them sort of frame it that way. Somebody like that frame it that way.

He's like, we're in love with the natural beauty and the surfing and

the skiing and all of this and this and that, but we also, like,

hate it. And I said, well, how does, how is that possible?

Because I live in Texas now. And I will

tell you right now, people from Texas don't hate their state.

I can tell you that right now. And by the way, everybody else in America

knows we don't. The American, the Texans don't hate their state. Texans will

tell everybody who will listen that they don't hate their state. Everybody

knows. Nobody's surprised by this, but

to hear that from a Californian. And I've been. I've lived other places. I mean,

when I lived in. As an example, when I lived in Minnesota,

almost everybody that I ever met in Minnesota had this fantasy

dream of moving to like, Denver, Colorado. They're like, Colorado

is the place to be. They all wanted to move to Denver. Right. Or

when I used to go visit people in Colorado, they had this fantasy of living

in like, Idaho or Wyoming. There's always a place that's

better. But in Kepler, for Californians, there is no place that's better

because this is the butt end of. This is the butt end of the continent.

There is no place that's better. There's nowhere else to go, unless you're going to

go in the ocean. And so you sort of have to make it here,

right? But you also have to make it here in what is

perceived by others who are not from here as paradise.

And the way that Steinbeck describes the Salinas Valley with its

alkali sands, and he describes the wind,

and he describes, like, the. The harshness of the environment

when you're trying to farm and trying to pull something from it. It's not

paradise. It's. It's just as vicious as any other place where

you could go and try to try to make an agricultural living. And

yet in east of Eden, he describes it with a

certain. I'm going to use the term

here. A certain love, a certain affection for all of the

harshness, a certain affection for all of the

toughness that is required to be there. And it is

a rural toughness. As he presents

California as a character,

I also think that there's a

dichotomy going on here between the rural area and the

city's area. And we kind of see it in some of the families that. That

he describes at east of Eden, which. Back to the book,

back to east of Eden, we're going to read, like, different

pieces of this. We're not going to obviously read the whole book. It's a thousand

pages. Can't do that. Plus it's copywritten. So we have to be careful

how many pieces we actually read from it. But suffice it

to say, you want to go pick up this book, it's. It's worth

your time and you'll breeze through the almost thousand pages fairly

quickly. So we're going to pick up here

chapter. Let's see, part

one, Chapter five, Part one.

Describing one of the families, the Hamiltons, right on

the ranch, the little Hamiltons began to grow up. And every year there was a

new one. George was tall. Was a tall, handsome boy,

gentle and sweet, who had from the first a kind of courtliness.

Even as a little boy, he was polite and what they used to call, quote,

unquote, no trouble from his father. He inherited the neatness of

clothing and body and hair. And he never seemed ill dressed, even when he

was. George was a sinless boy and grew to be a

sinless man. No crime of commission was ever

attributed to him. And his crimes of omission were only misdemeanors,

by the way. Pause. I love that turn of phrase.

His crimes of omission were only misdemeanors.

Back to the book. In his middle life, at about the time such things were

known about, it was discovered that he had pernicious anemia.

It is possible that his virtue lived on a lack of energy.

I love that term phrase too. Behind George Will

grew along, dumpy and stolen. Will had little imagination, but he had great

energy from childhood on. He was a hard worker, if and if anyone

would tell him what to work at. And once told, he was indefatigable.

He was a conservative, not only in politics, but in everything. Ideas

he found revolutionary and he avoided them with suspicion and

distaste. Will liked to live so that no one could

find fault with him. And to do that he had to live as nearly like

other people as possible. Maybe his father had

something to do with. With Will's distaste for either change or variation, which.

Will was a growing boy. His father had not been long enough in the Salinas

Valley to be thought of as a quote unquote old timer, by the way. Pause.

So the Hamiltons were immigrants to. To California. They

were immigrants to this part of the Salinas Valley as.

As Steinbeck describes them. And they were.

Tom, you'll appreciate this, being from the Boston area, they were Irish

immigrants

which. Which back in the day meant they were already stamped

with. With the dirty end of the stick.

Back to the book. He was in fact a foreigner and an Irishman

at that time. The Irish were much disliked in America. They were looked upon with

contempt, particularly on the east coast. But a little of it must have seeped out

to the west. And Samuel not only had variability, but was a man of

ideas and innovations in small cut off communities. Such

a man is always regarded with suspicion until he has proved he is no danger

to the others. A shining man like Samuel could and can cause a lot

of trouble. He might, for example, prove too attractive to the wives of men who

knew they were dull. Then there were his education and

his reading, the books he bought and borrowed, his knowledge of things that could not

be eaten or worn or cohabited with his interest in poetry and

his respect for good writing. If Samuel had been a rich

man like the Thorns or the Del Mars with their big houses and wide flat

lands, and he would have had a great library.

The Del Mars had a library, nothing but books in it and paneled in oak.

Samuel, by borrowing had read many more of the Del Mars books than the Del

Mars had themselves. In that day, an educated rich man was acceptable.

He might send his sons to college without comment, might wear a vest and a

white shirt and tie in the daytime of a weekend of the weekday, might wear

gloves and keep his nails clean. And since the Lives and practices of Richmond

were mysterious. Who knows what they could use or not use?

But a poor man, what need had he for poetry or for painting or

for music not fit for singing or dancing? Such things

do not help him bring in a crop or keep a scrap of cloth on

his children's back. And if, in spite of this, he

persisted, maybe he had reasons which. Which would not

stand to the light of scrutiny. By the way,

I love that. I love that sort of

characterization and the sort of

juxtaposition that Steinbeck does. Again, understanding and

knowing who real people are

and how real people have to engage in the world.

Back to the book, just this last piece here. The first

few years after Samuel came to Salinas Valley, there was a vague distrust of him

and perhaps Will as a little boy. Her talk in the San Lucas store.

Little boys don't want their fathers to be different from other men. Will

might have picked up his conservativism right then. Later, as the other children

came along and grew. Samuel belonged to the valley and it was proud of him

in a way. A man who owns a peacock is proud.

They weren't afraid of him anymore for he did not seduce their wives or lure

them out of sweet mediocrity. The

Salinas Valley grew fond of Samuel, but by that time,

Will was formed. Now

there's other children in. In this family. It's not just George

and Will. So we.

We also have the third son, Tom, who's most

like his father. He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. I love

that. I love that phrase. Tom came headlong into life. He was a

giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn't discover the world and its people,

he created them. When he read his father's books, he was the first.

He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as

Eden on the sixth day. There's the biblical illusion there again,

right? And then

there were, of course, the little sister, Molly.

And of course, Samuel

had another. Had another child named Joe.

Joe was physically lazy and probably mentally lazy too. He

daydreamed out his life and his mother loved him more than the others because she

thought he was helpless. Actually, he was the

least helpless because he got exactly what he wanted with a

minimum of effort.

I love that from Steinbeck, by the way.

He understood the dynamics of human nature, right? Like, that's the. That's. I guess

I. I guess I'm. I kind of was. That's kind of what I was leading

toward earlier, right. When I was talking about, like, he Just. He just

got it. Like, he just got. He understood that. And by the way, this

is a really, really good example, but

something else that, like, I talk to my daughter about a lot. So my daughter,

for those of you who don't know, she's a psychology major, right. So she has.

She. Her and I talk a lot about behavioral. Behavioral patterning,

changing those behaviors and the difficulties behind changing behaviors that have been

around, whatever. Right? But think about this. She's just gone to school

for a good amount of time, spent a tremendous amount of money at a very

good university to get this insight into human nature.

Steinbeck seemed to have had it naturally that he just

understood people and the dynamics and their

behavioral patterns and what that meant as that behavioral

pattern interacted with society. If you think just the two excerpts that

you read right there, the difference between the two brothers,

Right. He understood that. That dynamic without having a

psychology degree. That's impressive. I'm sorry, that's just

impressive. Not only not having a psychology degree,

but going around, I

presume, in his town and in his environment.

And it's not just one example. He would have seen. Right? He would have seen

a pastiche of examples, and then he was able

to pull together. And this is an issue.

This is one of the reasons why I don't think AI will ever be the

thing that we think it's going to be. I think we've overblown it massively.

He took the pastiche of patterns, which AI can do, and he

can predict behavior, which AI can also do. But what

AI can't do is take the pastiche of patterns,

put them together, and then go, this is. What is. This is the

example of a whole human being and then make that whole human being relatable to

other human beings even better. And I don't remember which. I don't

remember which character it was, but there was. I remember seeing an article or an

interview written, an interview of

Steinbeck, and he was being interviewed. Sorry, I'm

sorry. An article about an interview of him. That's

okay. So the article written about an interview of him, and he was talking about

one of his characters, and I don't remember which book it was, but they asked

him where he got the idea for the character, and he's like, oh. And he

started explaining, like, these three different people that he grew up

seeing, that he said in his mind, if he could make them one person, they

would be dynamic. Was the. The phrase that he. Right. So to your point about

AI, AI is not doing that either. AI is not Taking three

different people, their, their behavioral patterns, their characteristics,

their actions, their thought processes, and then

blending that into one human being and then writing about them

as if they were that a new person. Like that's right. So

again, you know it. I, I don't know

if that's the only thing that AI is going to struggle with. I'm sure there

are other things. I, trust me, I believe that. To your point, I think

we've overblown what AI is going to create.

I literally had a guy tell me that, you know, between five and ten

years from now, not, not the next century, but

between five and ten years from now, no human being is going to work anymore

and we're going to have an AI avatar that works for us and they're. The

AI avatar is going to earn our money and we're just going to be dependent

on how good we can create our AI avatar. Guitar that is one of the

most absurd things I've ever heard in my life. That, that we're going to see

that in the next five years anyway, anyway, but to, to. Back

to Steinbeck, where I think you're right, but I think, I

think it goes a layer beyond that where like he said about

this one particular character, I wish I could remember which character, what book it was,

but he was like, yeah, I remember this guy in my,

my childhood. And then I met this guy over here and this guy. And he

goes. And I remember thinking to myself, if these three guys could be one person.

And by the way, people, I'm paraphrasing, this is not a quote from the article.

I read this article a long time ago, but, but I

remember if I could ever find it, I would send it to you. I think

you find it fascinating, but just the

way his brain worked, I feel like it was beyond his, his

time. I think, I think he was, if he were alive today, I think he

would still be read, I guess is my point. I think

if he was a brand new writer today, I think people would still read him.

Yes, I actually, I'll go a step further with you than that. This is actually

one of the conclusions that I sort of

came to not only reading east of Eden and us having a

conversation about it, but then also sort of looking at Steinbeck. And I've

read other things from him, obviously. And we'll bring Grapes of

Wrath. We're going to talk about that book on this show. I also want to

talk about Cannery Row. It is a fascinating little book. It's very,

very small, very, very compact,

but it is about. It's about, you know, these people who live

near and around a canning factory, you know, on the

shore. Well, on the shore on the. Right up. Right up

next to the beach of the water, where they can, like, go get fish. They

bring fish in and other, you know, seafood, and

they're packing it and canning it and sending it out. And

there's so much life embedded

in his descriptions of those people. I read that book

when I was probably

the age my youngest son is now, so probably nine years old.

I have not revisited that book since I was nine years old. And that's

damn near 40 years ago now. And I still

remember it in vivid detail. You know, there's the.

You know, the fishmonger wife, and then there's like, the guy who's. Who's

quite frankly lazy, but then there's the other guy who's really industrious. And then

we got. We got all this cast of characters.

And to your point about being able to combine things together,

you're right. That was his creative genius. I think that

creative genius still exists. The problem,

I think, in our time and the reason why so many

modern books, particularly postmodern

books, are

currently struggling against AI I think

the reason for that is the kind of

creative dynamism that is required to

pull a relatable care, a psychologically

and culturally relatable character together. That sort of

dynamism requires, number one, a lack of distraction, which means you got to put

down your phone, you got to get off the Internet, you got to stop the

dopamine stuff. Number two, I think it

requires time to write and to think and to engage

in critical thinking, which when you're distracted, you don't have that time because

you always feel crowded. And then there are the practical distractions of life as

well. But then the third thing, and I think this is huge,

we've made writing as a culture, and this is a cultural

thing, not an individual writer thing. We've made writing an act of

status. Look at the MFA programs and look at the writers workshops. We've

made it an act of status to be a writer, particularly a literary writer, like

what Steinbeck would be considered to be in our time. We've made that an act

of status rather than an act of, quite

frankly, the way Steinbeck was an act of grind and

hardscrabble struggle. Yeah. You know,

and I don't think we value that hardscrabble struggle as much as we. We

say we do, you know, and this gets back to.

To dynamics again, between the city and the country and a lot of other things

that tied together that, that Steinbeck was, was sort of sitting at the, at the

pinnacle of one other thing. I think that's interesting.

And we haven't really gone into this, but maybe this is the place to go

to if you read this book as a leader. There are biblical

illusions shot through this book.

And we talked a little bit about this in our conversation on Monday. Like to

re, Bring, bring this back up the Bible, right?

We did like maybe a five minute jog on the Bible, right. I was, I

was wondering, I was wondering if we're gonna, if we were gonna inject this because

on Monday it seemed to be a very lengthy conversation about it and we didn't

seem to get there today. But, but anyway, go ahead, Go ahead. No, we're there

now. No, we're there now. We're there now. So,

you know, the title of this book is, you know, it comes from the

idea in Genesis 4 that after Cain,

you know, kills Abel and, you know, the blood of Abel

cries out to, from the ground to God, or transcendence, however you want

to think of this. You know, Cain is of course

cursed and, and he. By the

way, there's a great line from Cain, number of great lines from Cain, but

one of the ones that I'm going to focus on this piece anyway,

he says to God, my punishment is too great for

me. If you cast me out into the world,

basically I'll be hunted and killed. And transcendence

agrees with him and puts a mark on him and basically says, if

anyone touches Cain, I'm going to do to you what Cain

just did to Abel, which is a weird sort of

armor and protection, at least weird

from our perspective.

And then he is cast out into the land of Nod.

Now when we think about the land of Nod, we tend to think of sleeping.

But the original translation of the word Nod, if I remember

correctly, I read this somewhere is wandering. It's a land of

wandering east of Eden. Well,

if Eden in Steinbeck's mind,

in a Californian's mind, if Eden is the east coast, you

know, what's east of Eden? Or if Eden is the west coast, what's east

of Eden, right? This. He would have juxtaposed this with geography,

even the way in which Steinbeck put together this book. So

the, the book ends with the last line from,

from Adam Trask, right? Who,

who, who, who dies? And

at the end of it to his, to his, his

Chinese American servant, right,

Named Lee. Lee, right. He says the

last word, his last Word. The last word of the book is Timshaw

T I M S H E L Now

if you go and you Google this word, you're going to see a whole bunch

of stuff about Tim Schultz. This has been pulled apart by a whole bunch of

different. You'll see a couple of different spellings of it as well. There's a couple

of different spellings of it that you know. Etc. But go ahead. Yeah,

exactly. And Tim Shell comes from the idea that

exists in. Also in the. In.

In Genesis 4. Let me go ahead and pull this up directly because I don't

want to, I don't want to miss this. But it

says. Or not. But it says, let me see.

So Genesis 4.

Here we go. Genesis 4, chapter 6.

So the Lord said to Cain, why are you angry? And why has your face

fallen? Verse verse 7. If you do

well, will you not be accepted? Then verse.

And this is. Continue on at verse seven. And if you do not do well,

sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for

you. And you must rule over it. That line right there at

the end, you must rule over it. That's the trans. The American.

Well, not the American. That's the ESV translation of this

word. Tim Shaw but if you go and look at some of the research

around it, the Hebrew, the definition

that's closer to the Hebrew is more of a thou

mayest rule over it, which indicates

a certain degree of.

And this is really interesting, a certain degree of autonomy in

creation and free will. It's not that

sin is going to have its way with you, although with that term, when he,

when he, when it's framed in that way, it is almost a.

And, and I'm not the first person to come across this term or not to

come across which is state this, this interpretation

of sin will have its way with you. You can find this a lot of

different places. But the way that is interpreted in the original

Hebrew is that sin will basically have sexual relations with you. It will

possess you right in that sort of meaningful way that we get

from. That we get when we think of sexual relations between two people. Okay?

But then it switches and it says you'll have.

Or transcendence says to Cain, if you

resist, you'll have the ability to have free will over that. You'll have

the ability to control yourself and have a certain amount of autonomy in

sp and a certain amount of choice right there.

And so it's interesting that that is the word Timshel. That is the word

that east of Eden ends on. And Steinbeck was

obsessed with this idea. He was so obsessed with it

that he carved a wooden box to

send to his publisher that had the manuscript, the original manuscript for east

of Eden inside the wooden box. And on the outside of the box, he carved

the Hebrew. The Hebrew sign for Tim Shull and

sent it to his. Sent it to his publisher. So I'm saying all of that

to say that when you read this book, there are biblical illusions

shot through it. There

are some subtle differences, though, too, right? Like. Yeah, you know, in the.

In the. In the Bible, Cain and Abel Kane kills Abel. In the book, you

have the two brothers Adam, and it's

Adam and I'll pull it up. Go ahead. It starts

with a. Starts with S. Yes. It was Adam and Charles.

Charles, Yep. Adam and Charles. Yep. Charles and. And Adam

dies, but Charles isn't the one that kills him. He dies in the war. Right.

And then. But. But the sin part, this is the part that I find interesting

about the book. I think the. The. The

metaphoric sin part was Charles going and

trying to kind of cozy up to Adam's wife.

Yes, right. Like, so, like, to your point, there's all. There's a lot,

but you need to interpret it like, there's some things in there that you like.

If I'm a. If I am a. A

true reader of the Bible, like, and I. And I know the Bible like the

back of my hand, I'm going to read this book and go, what are you

talking about? It's not the same. Right. But people like you and I

who read the Bible because we believe in a higher power, but we.

We don't necessarily.

I got to be very careful how I word this, because I'm. I want to

make sure that I'm respectful, because now anybody who has heard me

on this show knows that I'm not Catholic or Christian. I'm native, but I have

a lot of respect for other religions. So I try to choose my words

carefully when I'm gonna. When I say things, but, like, but to me,

this. The Bible is a collection of stories that

are both mythical and truthful in nature, and

human beings have kind of filled in the gaps where the. Where

the gaps needed to be filled. Right? So it's. It's not

verbatim, in my opinion. It's not verbatim the. The

literal words of God, but it. The purpose behind it is

the purpose of God. So again, I'm trying to be respectful here. I'm not saying

the Bible's a bunch of garbage. That's not my. I I would never in a

million years say that. But I want to be clear because when I read the

Bible, I was reading it like a story. Like, I read it as

if it was any other kind of literary story. And I found it fascinating

to read. And so, like, between Genesis, I always

tell people my Genesis and Revelations are my two favorite books.

Books in the Bible, right? Like, it's the beginning and the end, all the stuff

that happens in the middle. It's not, it's not important.

It's very important to Christians and Catholics. I believe that, but I. Believe me, I

believe that it's important, but to me, yes, I'm good with the

bookends. Like, I, like, I, like I, I found, I found

those two books in the Bible the most fascinating, I guess. Not

that they were the best to learn morals, not that they were the best for

the, you know, know, the, the moral compass perspective. Trust me,

there's plenty of Luke and John, like, there's plenty of

moral compass stuff that goes in the, the body of the Bible.

But when you look. But if you're all this to say if you are

real, if you love the Bible, you're going to think this book is, you could

put, you could potentially think of this book as blasphemy, right? Like,

because it basically, it turns, it turns, it turns biblical things

into like this, this thing that is not

directed to be a moral compass and not directed to teach you the right,

the difference between right and wrong and not to teach you what sin is. It's

just for fun. Like, you basically turn the Bible, you turn the

Genesis into a book about. I'm just gonna write this for fun

now. If you don't look at it that way and you look at it as

an interpretation, I think it's very, very well done. Right. Like, like

it's. But again, you have to be okay with it being an interpretation.

Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, as a person who does

believe the Bible is true. And we can

discuss. This is not a topic for today, nor is a topic for

Tom and I. And folks can, can come at me about this if they, if

they've, if they've made it this far into the show now, we're into some other

things because this is deep in the show now. But,

but I mean, like, I, we can have a conversation about what true

means because. Correct. That there's a whole bunch

of different things involved in true and true, in

my opinion, and I'm just one person with an opinion,

I want to be very clear on that. True, in my opinion, cannot be,

cannot be purely and ultimately

measured in a reductionist, Darwinist sort of

way. You just. You can't get there from here.

It minimizes reality too much and it

distills out to the point of

myopia, in many cases, important

truths and the important truth

that overwhelms and girds and

undercuts and covers our entire reality.

With that being said, I read east of Eden as the person

who's coming from that perspective. I read east of either. Not looking for

parallel allusions to Genesis 4 and everything else that happens after

Genesis, I read it for. Because

it comes from a time where

the audience that Steinbeck would have been writing to would have

caught on to the illusions and the parallels immediately because they were

much more biblically literate in the 1920s,

1930s, 1940s, 1950s than

folks are right now. Matter of fact, I'll go a step further and I

will say the rural people he was describing

were hyper biblically literate. And that's, by the way, been a trend in the United

States for, please, centuries. Since day one.

Yeah, since day one. And I think that's

a fundamental difference between folks who.

And I've lived in the city. But when you live in the city,

you get drawn into different distractions. Like I was just saying about writers.

Writers and creatives. You get drawn into different distractions and you get drawn

away in different directions. And you are drawn away from

the type of engagement with transcendence that a

biblical worldview provides you if you

are not drawn away from those things in a rural environment. Case in point,

there is a whole section in the book of

Genesis. It's Genesis 13, if I remember correctly, where

Abram, before he's Abraham, Abram and Lot are journeying

right in the. In the plane. And.

And they had just come out of Egypt, right? And Sodom and

Gomorrah hadn't yet been destroyed. And Lot and

Abram are having a. They're having a disagreement, right?

They're having a fight, and their herdsmen and the farmers

are having a fight. And finally Abram gets with Lot, who's his nephew,

who he took out of the land. Of the land that he came out of.

And when he was called by. Called by God takes

him out of the land with him and goes journeying off, you know, to. To

go on the adventure of his life at the age, by the way, of 75.

I always have to bring that up because. Proves that, you know,

the door ain't closed until the door is closed. You can Always go on the

journey of your life. It's just, you

know, your hips might be a little stiffer than they were when you were 20.

That's all. When I'm

75, I'm not walking across the desert. I'm just letting you know that. Right. Well,

well, well, well. If transcendence calls you, Tom, you might want to answer

the call. That's true. That is true. That is true.

The Creator gives me direction. I'm going to take it. But I'm. I just can't

see him asking me to walk across the desert.

He knows me better than that. Hasan. I'm just saying.

Well, he may ask. He may ask you to go on a different kind of

adventure. Maybe not walk across the desert. Right, exactly.

But. But when. When Abram gets this call, he

takes his nephew because he wanted friends and his wife and his stuff, and he

goes, right, okay, so they wandered. They've done the thing. They're getting ready to settle

down. And there's this massive plain, right? It's

described in the biblical account as the Plain of Jordan.

Right? And in the biblical account, it says it was

well watered everywhere. And by the way, the biblical account makes a

point of this. Before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah,

even as the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt, as thou comest

up to Zoar, then Lot chose him. This is. This is the

thing. All the plane of Jordan. So Abram got one

spot, and Lot looked at all the plane of Jordan and was like, I'm going

to take all of this now. Lot was. This is

an interesting point. This is the interesting point I'm going to

about cities. And Lot journeyed east, and

they separated themselves one from another. Abram dwelled in the land

of Canaan, and. And Lot dwelled not in the land of

Canaan, in the cities of the plain, and pitched his

tent towards Sodom. But the men of Sodom were wicked

and sinners before the Lord exceedingly.

That's also something that I think Steinbeck is trying to get to

in here. Not necessarily that living in

LA is wicked or living in San Francisco or whatever. No,

there's righteous people there. This is the whole point of Abraham, you

know, bargaining with God about the destruction of Sodom and

Gomorrah. Of course, there's 50 righteous people. And

if there aren't lots. Or Abraham's great question

to. To God, if there's not, shall not the judge of all the

earth do right? Shall we not have a. Shall we not have

a negotiation? Shall we not have an agreement to save the righteous? Shall the righteous

be destroyed along with the wicked? Right. Okay.

I don't think Steinbeck was saying that living in a city is a place of

wickedness, but I think he was addressing in east

of Eden the tension. And he was making a choice, by the way, the

tension between the rural and the urban. He was addressing

that tension because in 1952, post World War II America,

he could see that coming with the building of the suburbs,

people pushing out from the cities, but not quite going back to the country,

cities expanding. And by the way, there's something to this. So if you look up

the statistics going into 2050,

about, you know, 25 years from now, when,

when, when, when I will be still around, hopefully, good Lord

willing, and the creek don't rise by 2050,

89% of the US population and

68% of the world population is projected to live in

urban areas in 25 years.

That's a lot of people crammed into cities.

Yeah, and there's something that you lose

there. I'm not saying you become Sodom, but I'm saying there's something that you

lose. And Steinbeck understood that tension. And he was writing to an audience that

understood that tension and was on the other side of that tension

culturally and also psychologically.

And he was trying to appeal to them with, you know, appeal to them

in biblical terms. And so they would have gotten in terms they would

understand. He was giving them an opportunity to. Again, like I

said a second ago, he was giving them opportunity to interpret this in

their brain in a way that would, that made sense to them.

Right. And, and part of the reason why this book has never not been a

bestseller is because if you go past the rural urban divide,

part art, and you go up a scale level,

it's, it's, it's for everyone, regardless of where

you live, you're going to find something in this book that you're going to relate

to. Speaking of never been not a bestseller, did

you end up looking up any of that information about.

I saw somewhere, at least I, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that

literally Every single year, 50,000 copies of this book

are sold worldwide. Like, did you actually look that up? Is that

accurate? Yes, that's accurate. Somewhere around, Somewhere around that number.

That's. That, to me, that, that is, that is just simply incredible that,

like, to have that kind of staying power is insane to

me. Well, and it was also resurrected. Gosh,

what is it, like, 15 years ago now? Might have been

15 years ago. Now, remember when Oprah was doing her book club? She

had a book club? Yeah, yeah. I was hesitant to mention this, but

she, she glommed onto Easter beat. Right.

And, you know, there were a lot of people at the time who.

Jonathan Franzen was one of them, who, you know, didn't want,

you know, Oprah to even touch his book, which I'm sure

he's kicking himself now about that, but in some room

somewhere where no one's reading his books, but

poor bastard anyway. And actually, Jonathan Franz is a

good writer. Like I like. I like his books. I think that he's a good

magnum opus writer. But I also think that

you have to kind of understand the time in which you're in and sort of

really make some, Some cognizant decisions as a. As a writer and a

creator, sort of on. Not sort of, but on purpose and intentionally.

And I think he was a little too casual with the, with the anti Oprah

thing. I don't. I don't think he sort of understood sort of where the, where

that was going to go. But anyway, one of the points that folks like him

made was that if Steinbeck had been alive and

Oprah's book club had been stamped on the COVID of east of Eden, he

would have objected to that as well.

And I don't think they're correct on that. I. I

don't think that's true. I think Steinbeck would have said,

this black lady could. Has gotten enough cachet

to be able to bring my book forward. Okay,

that's fine. What's the problem? No, I agree with

that. I don't think he would have cared. I don't. Not that he would not

have cared. I. Quite the opposite. I think he might have even leaned into it,

to be honest, again, as we talked, as we talked before, about how

he saw the value in people for what their value, what they brought

to the table, not what he wanted them to bring to the table, not to

what he hoped they brought to the table. He saw value in people

for what they actually brought to the table. So I think if that. If

that is true in that entire conversation that

we had about that the other day is true, then you're right.

He would have saw Oprah and the value that she brought and just ran

with it. I don't think he would have questioned it. I don't think he would

have bucked it. I don't think. I think he would have just been perfectly

okay with it. And, And I think he would have. Again, he was such a

Good observer of people. I think he would have predicted that.

I think he would have started coming, so to speak. Yeah, before. Yeah, I, I,

my gut tells me that Steinbeck would have seen Oprah become Oprah before she even

knew what was, what she was doing. Like that she was Oprah, perhaps.

I think he would have seen it and I think he would have been okay

with it. I think it would have been more than okay with it. I think

he would have leaned into it. Well, and he, you know, he died before civil

rights really became, you know, sort of a thing. And,

and we didn't sort of mention this previously, but I'll mention it now.

He was fundamentally, at the end of the day, not just a person from

California, but he was a man of the west,

capital W, Regional west, like American West.

And in race relations in this country, we

never talk about regionality unless it's the south versus

everybody else. Right. But let me tell you something. I've lived in the west

and currently in Texas. I live in the western part of Texas, not the

southern part of Texas. That's east Texas. That's over there with those

people, and that's fine.

West Texas and the west in general. I mean,

first 12 years of my life, I spent in New Mexico,

the West. In the west, race relations are fundamentally different.

The battles are different than they are other

places because of the nature of,

as we opened up with, with east of Eden, the nature of who

settled that place and what their, what their, what their

posture was towards all of those kinds of issues.

You know, so he was a man of that, of

that time. And so I don't think he would have been to your point. I

think that's another reason why he would not have been opposed to

Oprah basically putting the, putting a stamp on his,

on his book. Okay,

let's talk about meaning. Let's talk about, we talked a lot

about this book. We've read some pieces from it. Talked about the influences.

We talked about Steinbeck coming all the way as part of that sort of mid

20th century pinnacle of

human nate, of understanding human nature. Being able to sort of bring everybody, to bring

dynamic personalities together and really make them creatively

interesting. Talked about the biblical illusions in this book and of course,

you know, the nature of the Trasks and the Hamiltons and the, the people that

are winding together through this multi generational narrative.

What can leaders take from all of this? If

I'm a leader and I'm listening to this podcast, what do I get from

east of Eden? What do I take why is it worth my while to read

this thousand page book? Well, I think,

honestly, I think I just, I just, I think I just said it. I'm

just like. Because I think from a leadership

perspective, I think that we as leaders have

got to stop trying to fit square pegs into round

holes and start leveraging the talents

and the, and the people that we, that we

have. Right? Meaning like, like I just said a second ago,

Steinbeck found value in people at

its face. He wasn't looking to change somebody into

something they weren't or move somebody from point A to point B because that's where

he thought they should be. He just didn't do that. He was able

to take people and

understand their value and then turn that value intrinsically

into active activity, into the, in the book. Right?

Like a character in the book or whatever. So if we're looking at, from a

leadership perspective and we're reading this book and we're truly understanding that

dynamic that he's talking about, then we can look at our teams, whether you have

one team or 10 teams, and start really identifying the

people in those teams and whether or not they bring value

to that team, team based on just who they are and not

trying to change them into something that we want. By the way, guys, that doesn't

mean that you have to keep everybody on your team. If they don't fit, fire

them and find, find somebody else. I'm not suggesting that you have to work with

what you got and you can never change it. But I'm saying that that

learning from Steinbeck's ability to, to

find value in every single person that he was able to encounter and

then turn that value into, to something amazing like that book.

We have that ability, we have that ability to look at the people that work

for us, the people that work with us and the people that we work for

understand who they are as people, their values, their morals, their.

Go back to the biblical sense. Whether you are Catholic or Christian or not.

That does not mean that you don't value a moral compass. Like,

I mean, you, whether I don't care what religion or what faith you, you, you

support. Support. I would imagine having a moral compass is going to be

important to you. Do people understand the difference between right and wrong? Are you going

to have that like, and making sure that those, the right people

fit the right circumstances for us? I, I just think

all of that is in there, right? Like that's,

I think all of it is in there and you can learn from it. If

you're looking to Learn from it. I think that's, you know, that's the,

the, that's the thing that, that I think people, I think people sometimes forget that

like if you, and again, you're probably one of the few people

that, and I know I, I try

to do this. I don't know if I do it really well, but you're one

of the few people that I know that will read a book and

not just read it simply for pleasure. You're

always looking at it from an angle perspective. Or maybe you have certain books you

do this with or certain books you don't. But I, from the, from what I've

learned from you, it's, there's always underlying tones

and underlying lessons to be, to be learned from these books and these authors that

you're reading. So to just simply read something because you just want to

have a mind numbing experience, to me, doesn't exist.

So. Yeah, yeah, I think, I think if you're, if you're taking

your time to read something, you should have some sort of

benefit from it, whether it's personal, professional,

whatever that is. And I think in east of Eden especially, and

Steinbeck in general, and I know we talked about this on Monday because quite

honestly, I don't care whether you're reading east of Eden or Mice of Men

or Grapes of Wrath or the Cannery, I don't care what any of those

Steinbeck books are going to tell you. That he

values people for what they are and who they are and what

they bring to the table. Naturally. And I think that if we can

learn from that, then we, we will become better leaders.

He even values people who we don't understand because you

can learn something from everything and something from

everyone. Let me pick this up here. This is a good segue into this.

East of Eden, Part two,

Chapter eight, Part one. He opens up with this line. I love this

line. I believe there are monsters born in the world to human

parents. Some you can see misshapen and horrible, with huge

heads or tiny bodies. Some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three

arms, some with tails or mouths. In odd places they are accidents and no

one's fault, as used to be thought. Once they were

considered the visible punishments for concealed sins.

There's that biblical illusion again, folks. And just as there are

physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born?

The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed

egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a

malformed soul? By the way? Pause. Clearly

Steinbeck was asking the question about do we have souls

or not? Which, by the way, is a worthwhile question for our

time right now. And we better get

real quick. We better get real clear on this one

real quick, because otherwise we're going to outsource

the best stuff from our souls to mechanical men.

We're already starting to see that happening. Back to

the book. Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or

lesser degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one

may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience.

A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust

himself to the lack. But one born without arms suffers only from the people who

find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them.

Sometimes when we are little, we imagine how it would be to have wings. But

there is no reason to suppose is the same feeling birds have. No,

to a monster, the norm must seem

monstrous since everyone is normal to himself.

That is a huge insight, by the way. Everyone is normal to himself.

To the inner monster, it must be even more obscure since he has no visible

thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul

stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is

foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a

variation and that to a monster, the norm

is monstrous. And this

is his introduction.

And I wrote at the beginning of this chapter because I make notes in all

my books that I read for this podcast and books that I read just for

my own to Tom's void pleasure.

The note that I made was the making of a sociopath.

This is what he is describing here,

which I think is also fascinating. You think about like

Freud. Freud, the, the father of modern psychology, died in

1939. 38, 39, 40. Somewhere around there. Yeah.

So like, so Steinbeck's writing, when all this stuff is coming out

new, like, this is all new to them about like the. What, what a sociopath

is like psychology. And like, I think

this is his inner turmoil about like science. And I think

this is where he starts going down the, the, the other side of the slope.

Because you talk about how, you know, when he was growing up, he was, he

was Christian growing up and he became agnostic later in life.

I think this is part of it because seeing what Freud

was doing and then being able to word what you just read,

that's his, that's his brain saying like,

like, do we. Should we be leaning more toward biblical or should we lean more

towards science? Right, right. How do we. Like, how do we. How do we square

this circle? Yeah. Yeah. How do we square this circle? How do

we. How do we make, as the kids say these days, make

it make sense. Right? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Back to the book for just a moment. He says, it is my belief that

Kathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and

forced her all of her life. Some balance

wheel was misweighted, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never

was from birth. And just as a cripple may learn to utilize his

lack so that he becomes more effective in a limited field than the uncrippled,

so did Kathy, using her difference, make a painful and

bewildering stir in her world. There was a

time when a girl like Kathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She

would have been exercised to cast out the evil spirit. And if after many trials

that did not work to Tom's point, she

would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community.

I'm going to go back to that in a second. Just keep going with the

book. The one thing that may not be forgiven a witch is her ability

to distress people, to make them restless and uneasy

and even envious. Then it goes

into a description of her and her. Her. Her body and her

hands. And it's. It's. It's a very graphic description, folks.

Just going to keep that in mind. And then.

And then we go to this.

Kathy was a liar, but did not lie the way most children do.

Hers was no daydream lying. When the thing imagined is told and to

make it seem more real, told as real, that's just an ordinary

deviation from external reality. I think the difference between a lie

and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of

truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller.

That is a great description, by the way, of what an author actually does.

A story. Back to the book. A story has in it neither gain

nor loss, but a lie is a device for profit or

escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to,

then a writer of stories is a liar if he is financially

fortunate. Kathy's lies were never

innocent. Their purpose was to escape punishment or work or responsibility, and they

were used for profit. Most liars are tripped up either because they forget what they

have told or because a lie is suddenly faced with an incontrovertible truth. But

Kathy did not forget her lies, and she developed the most effective method of

lying. She stayed close enough to the truth so that no one. So that

one could never be sure. She knew two other methods also.

Either to interland her lies with truth or to tell the truth as though

it were a lie. If one is accused of a lie and it turns out

to be the truth, there is a backlog that will last a long time

and protect a number of other

untruths. Talk about

the psychology of a sociopath,

the making of a monster. And then the very

next chapter is the making of a. Not a sociopath, but a psychopath,

because she eventually runs into a psychopath and which of

course answers the question what happens with a psychopath and a sociopath meet. It's

not good. Let's just frame it that way. Somebody has to lose. It's like, like

George. Like Henry Kissinger's quip

during the. The Iran Iraq War.

He said infamously back in the 1980s. Infamously.

It's a pity that both sides couldn't lose,

which has always sort of amused me in a geopolitical level.

And Kissinger, I have my own concerns about his mental health,

but anyway. Or had about his

mental health. But anyway,

the, the thing about Kathy, and this is why I

wanted to bring it up even close to the close here of our show today.

Kathy is on the one hand, yes, she's

clearly, I'm going to use the term here, demonically evil.

She is seeking to manipulate and gain power. She commits murder.

She is out for money and for greed. And she ruins a whole bunch of

people, including her own kids. She train wrecks a whole bunch of people.

And by the way, Steinbeck, basing this on people he saw,

right, and behaviors he actually saw, was trying to make

sense of this. But Kathy is also

just like all of the other characters in the book,

from the Hamiltons to the Trasks and their entire family and all the dynamics

that happen in there, including like deaths that just come out of nowhere,

failures of the land, failures of farming, failures of animals.

She's a tragic figure. And this is the part that I

think we've. In our current era, we have

a lot of movies that try to make the villain relatable

or even try to weirdly enough turn the villain into a hero. And I, I

have a problem with that as a storytelling trope because sometimes people are just evil

and you don't need to know that. Daddy didn't hug them. Like, it doesn't matter.

People are just evil. And that's okay to say. It's

fine. Now the reason we don't say that is because we want to have it

both ways. Because if there's Gray area then kind of

the things that I do well that I can't be judged. And it goes to

this whole like, you know, or, or, or we want the, we want the Deadpools

of the world. Right? Do bad things for the right reason or whatever. Right. Is

that really that much better? Is that better? I don't think so.

I don't think so. Yeah. No. We need

to get back to yes, you can know evil. Yes, there is

objective evil, just like there's objective good. And there's no

confusion about this. We actually know. And we, by the way,

you know how we know in our lives when objective evil is done

to us, we cry out for justice. That's how we know there's

objective evil. That's how we know anyway

and that's how we know we can identify it. But the

other, but the piece of it that we're missing, the part that we confuse with

the gray area in our time is the tragedy of evil,

the tragic nature of it. And not just the outcomes

of evil, but also the environment that

produces that evil. Because Kathy is not described as,

as learning how to be evil. She's described as being evil from

birth. That's why he opens up with the whole like comparison

to a malformed body. Right. Can you have a

malformed soul? Soul.

And that is a, I think

a extremely challenging question

specifically for our time because we don't even believe in the soul, much less

that it could be malfunction formed. Or we struggle with that belief and

then when evil happens to us or when there are genuinely evil people in

the world, we have no answer for them. We have no answer for their behavior

other than, and this is the failure of

Nuremberg, other than to appeal to some sort of morality

that comes from nowhere. And basically just to like, just

to like say, well, this morality that comes from nowhere, we're going to put upon

you and we're going to lock you up in jail. And of course the evil

person looks at that decision not

as justice but as the,

the, the, the leveraging

of power over them and thus learns nothing and changes

nothing. You have to have a moral element. You have to admit,

you have to admit that there's objective truth. You have to admit that there's objective

evil. You have to admit that there's objective good. And you have to say,

as Steinbeck struggled with, and it's okay to struggle with this question, but

you have to at least admit that this is the question by whose authority

are we determining these objectives? And we have to name that authority.

And in A book that has biblical illusions. Steinbeck was, was

clearly saying that that authority is a transcendent God. And

we can still wrestle with that. That's okay. And we

should. For leaders.

Thoughts on. Huh? What do you do,

what do you do if you have a narcissist? Because that's a term that's

thrown around quite a bit. Everybody's a narcissist these days. You know, if you

have a narcissist in your, in your organization, or maybe even you have

a sociopath or a psychopathic behaving person

without a clinic. And these are not clinical definitions, by the way. I want to

be very clear. These are not clinical definitions. We want to get a clinical definition

of one of my guests. I could bring on and give a clinical definition of

all this, but this is not what we're talking about Last, last time I checked.

Hey, son and I are not psychologists, psychiatrist or any of the like.

So. Right. Like, I have no degrees, no certifications.

Yeah. This is pure conjecture. Right. But if you're, but if

you're a leader and you're seeing behavior that's objectively

bad, objectively not good, how

do you deal with that on your team? How do you deal with that in

a world where, well, you know, Johnny just didn't get hugged.

Let me add, let me add to your question and see what you, how you

answer to this one as well. Because not only like, okay, so observationally,

watching somebody do things that are not bad. What? Fine. Okay, I get that. That's

bad inherently evil. We don't want people doing that. But what happens if you trust,

try to redirect them, you try to give

them corrective actions, you try to give them

opportunity to do the right thing and they choose not to.

Like how? Like, I mean, I, I, I, I know what I would do. I

think for me, the answer is very simple. That person's not on my team anymore.

I'm. See you later. You're no, you're no longer my problem. You're

somebody else's problem at this point. At that point. But should

I, am I wrong in doing that? Like, should I be thinking about ways to

be more lenient, to be more

inclusive, be more willing, be more

willing to be patient with those corrections? I, I, I don't know. But

I will tell you, I only have a certain tolerance level for that stuff. So

it's it, you know, and if I point it out to you and you have

no interest in correcting your behavior, then I have no interest in having

you on my team. Team. So

for me, because you're asking me this question, for me, if I'm

leading a team of folks and someone is doing something that's objectively bad,

right? For the team, I'm going to ask. There's

a series of cascading sort of questions I'm going to ask,

but I am going to see that as objectively bad and I'm going to confront

that person. That's one of the first things that I'm going to do because I've

learned that if you confront a person who is

a. Let's just start with the lying part, okay? If you confront a

person who's a liar with objective truth,

and by the way, a liar relies on everybody

going along with the lie, that's where they get the power because

everybody just goes along with the lie.

Well, the most dangerous person on any team and it doesn't

have to be the leader, the, the designated leader or the positional leader,

it can be anybody on the team. The most dangerous person on

that team is going to be the person who doesn't go along with the objective

lie. It doesn't go along with the, with the lack of

objective truth, that's going to be the most dangerous person. This is why

we have protections for whistleblowers and things like that. Because that person

not only is dangerous, but is in danger,

but is also in danger. Okay? So for me, what I'm

going to do is I'm going to confront that person first. Then the second

thing I'm going to do is I'm going to

not try to save that person, but I'm going to sort of take the

attitude of,

well, you know my favorite superhero, Batman. I don't have to save

you, okay? I'm not obliged

to rescue you and I'm not going to get out of the way of your

consequence. So as long as consequences are clear,

all I am is the deliverer of consequences. That's all. At the end

of the day, I'm not the boss, I'm not the leader. I am

the deliverer of consequences. That's the other

thing that people sometimes get caught up on.

They get caught up on do I have the power to deliver the consequence or

do I have the power to accept accountability if the consequence doesn't work and

it becomes a very power oriented mini

Nuremberg trial sort of weird,

sort of we're going to have the morality without the appeal to the objective sort

of kind of moment. And people don't use those terms, but that's basically what they're

doing. Right. At a psychological level, that's what they're doing. And

I think you have to. Think you have to let go of all of that.

I think you have to say no. You know what? It's tragic. This

is the tragic part. Part. It's tragic that you lied. It's

tragic that these are the consequences.

Have a good day. Goodbye. And by the way,

when your. Your future employer calls me

and asks me questions, and the final question, of course, will be, would

you rehire this person? I'm going to be honest, because

I'm not going to lie and I'm going to say, no, I'm not going to

rehire that person. And when they ask me why, because of course, none of

those. None of those interview questions. I've been through a few of those interviews for

former employees, and none of my former employees let me go on record. None of

my former employees have I ever had to have this sort of. Sort of

hypothetical conversation about. I never had any of these kinds of

problems. Right. I ran into people in other venues that have lied to me, but

not. Not who I was leading or teams that I was on.

But. But if, if I had, you know, those series

of questions they don't typically ask, did this person lie about XYZ

or abc? That's not typically something HR is looking for, but it's in that

rehire question. Would you rehire this person? And the answer, of course, is no.

No, I wouldn't hire. Rehire a liar. Well, why wouldn't you rehire this person?

Well, let me tell you a story, man. Not what I thought about

it, not what I felt about it, but here's what practically happened.

Here's a fun fact, though. In the state of Massachusetts, you're not allowed to answer

that question. Really? You

can answer, wow, would you rehire this person? And they can

say, no, I would not rehire this person. And you're. You. If they say

why and you answer it, you can get sued

very, very deeply in the state of Massachusetts, because that really,

that could be. It could be considered defamation. That could be considered, like, all

kinds of stuff, because if. If the

words that come out of your mouth next are closer

to opinion than fact, then

it opens up that company to a lot of liability.

Interesting. In the state of Massachusetts, they will tell you you are

allowed to answer three questions on a referral or on a

reference. Yeah. Did they work for you, yes or no. What was the

time frame that they worked for you? Can you vet and can you

verify their position? Like, what was their role and

would you rehire them? That's it. That's

it. That's. That is a reference in the state of Massachusetts.

Well, I guess in the state of Massachusetts even liars got to eat.

And I guess the state of Massachusetts is going to, is going to protect the,

is going to protect the liars because God forbid the liars don't

eat. But maybe if,

maybe my, my pushback on that and this is my only pushback thought

and the state of Massachusetts is going to do whatever the state of Massachusetts does

is well and I can tell you the theory behind it is. The theory behind

it is just simply if you and I are working together, you're my boss and

we just don't get along. You could and like I didn't

technically do anything wrong, but you, you replaced me because

we just weren't a good personality fit. Then you could go and then

vilify that person on, on the reference. Right. And the kinds of things

we're talking about, the Kathy Ames of the world are edge cases.

Right. I, I, I genuinely think there are exact. Yeah. At least in,

in the state of Massachusetts. In, and I'm not trying to defend them here, but

in, in their defense, they're thinking that those are outliers, that those

are statistical anomalies, that generally people will leave a job because

they weren't a good fit and you don't want to then penalize them and not

be to your point. They have to, they still have to feed their families. So.

Right. And if they're really not that good of a person, you're going to see

it on their resume anyway because they've had eight jobs in the last five years.

Right. Like you, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that

there's a problem there. But, but from a

But they, they just don't want to add fuel. They don't want to allow people

to add fuel to the fire, I guess is the, is the point to your

point A few minutes ago it's like, it's like working through Dragnet.

State the fact. Just the facts, ma'. Am. Just, just give me the facts. I

do not want to hear your opinion as to why that person doesn't work there

anymore. Right. I want to hear facts. Fact. Did they

work there? Yes. Fact is this how much money they made. Fact is this

the dates and times they work there. And would you rehire them? Should tell

you everything you need to know. If they say no,

I would not rehire them. Why it doesn't. What is the Reasoning does not,

does not matter. Who the hell cares? That is a red

flag to me that I'm not overcoming with a simple, well, but

why was it your fault or theirs? Like, who the hell cares? I don't care

if. Right. If they say no. If they say no, I move

on to the next candidate. Well, and I'm sure there's also some sort

of Title seven, Title nine.

Yeah. Some sort of Civil Rights act sort of

interpretation underneath,

underneath this as well, which, which I'm

sure is again, again, appealing to

what, like what are we appealing to here? And again, this is my, this is

my philosophical sort of perspective on this At a

practical level, again, I am

practically, I have not experienced an edge case like that.

Practically speaking, if I were, pragmatically speaking,

if I were to face an edge case like that, yeah,

I, I, I'd get rid of that person because that person has to go

now. Also, let's, let's be very clear. The

likelihood that that person is going to put me down as a reference where I'm

even going to get that call is probably going to be minimal

at best. At best. Which is so way when I

hire people, that's why I don't ask them for references. I just go straight off

their resume and just call random people on their resume. I don't even ask them.

Right. Yeah. I just want to know. And by the way, I, I don't

even care if like, so again, at our age,

can you remember the dates and times of all the places that you worked?

Probably not. I, I can give my best guess. So I don't even double check

that, to be honest with you. If somebody says they work there for two years,

I, that's usually the question I have. I don't say did they work there from

this date to this date. I would just say they worked there for about two

years. Yeah, something like that sounds about right. Okay. And then I move on. Like

I don't, I don't care what the actual dates are. But like, well, because again,

I, and it's not that I think they're lying. I just think sometimes your, your

memory fails you in, in remembering the actual

dates and time. So my only question I really want to know is

would you rehire them? If given the opportunity and the, and the

circumstances were, were right for you, would you rehire

them? And if they probably. Or

maybe that's good enough for me too. Like if I just

don't want to hear no. I just don't want to hear no. No, I absolutely

would not Hire them again. Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Have a

nice day. Right, right. You know what I mean? Like,

anyway, I know we're, we're a little off track here, but. No, no, it's okay.

It's okay because, because this gets into. So, okay, so that's the extreme edge case,

right? We're talking about the liar who's clearly lying. That, that's

Kathy Ames type. Let's go down the, the, the.

Let's go down the, the register of sociopathic. Sociopathic scale.

Sure. Let's go down the sociopathic scale to your garden variety

narcissist who takes credit for projects that aren't theirs,

talks over other people in the meeting, you

know, stays within the boundaries of whatever is approved in

HR language, of behavior, whatever,

but is always kind of riding the edge kind of slightly,

and also is loved by a certain cadre of

people. And thus. And by the way, those cadre of people are

influential. One of those cadre of people might be your boss and thus

feels as though they protected themselves from being fired. This

kind of person is rife in our organizations. Right.

And the term, of course, it's thrown around for this person is narcissist all of

the time. How does a leader do we deal with the narcissists? Because we

do see a lot of this. And I, by the way, I think we're seeing

more narcissists because of social media and because of the

impact of the Internet plus social media and the performative nature

of the way we live our lives out online that has now

spilled out into the real world. I think that's

the reason behind it. I think this is a relatively new thing.

And by new, I mean within the last 15 or 20 years of work culture.

I don't think. I think people were just as narcissistic in the 1980s, in the

1970s, 1950s, 1960s. Hell, they were just as narcissistic when they

were making straw without bricks

at the end of Genesis or at the beginning, actually, at the beginning of Exodus.

Sorry, they were just as narcissistic then. They just didn't

have as many outlets for their narcissism. We've given people

more outlets for narcissism. Thus the number of

times we see that behavior and can recognize it in real life and other

people has increased, particularly in our workplaces. What,

as leaders, do we do with the garden variety narcissist who we can't quite fire,

but we know they're going to be a problem at every meeting? I

Wonder also, like before I answer that, I wonder also if we sometimes

confuse narcissist with self

preservation. Right? Like, so you, if you, that's

good, you could come across as a narcissist if you are in

defense mode all the time or if you are in,

you know, you know, fight like that. If you're, if your

fight or flight is invoked and you decide to fight, sometimes you look like a

narcissist and you're just defending your position on something or. You know what I mean?

Like, I think sometimes we. To your point a second ago, I

don't know if we're truly seeing more narcissistic behavior or

if we're seeing more

behavior that feels like they need to be

that they're defending themselves or that they have to put themselves in a position of

detraction of attention, so to speak. Right? Like the boss is coming down on a

project. This isn't getting done. It's not my fault. I did this, this

and this. So don't look at me like it's, it's self preservation more than it

is narcissism. Now again, is that true or not? I don't know. I'm just, I,

I wonder about that though, if that, that is the case. Case. And in those

environments. I feel like that

because like again, the, the, the situation I just gave you, like if you have

a project going as a team, then you are

successful or you fail as that team. Stop singling people out.

Like, stop, stop allowing your team to say, well, I did my part, so

and so didn't do theirs. That's not relevant. If you are going to be

successful or failed and if you're going to be judged success or

failure by the team, then start allowing, start

forcing the team to view it that way. I think that's number one.

If it's not a team event and it's, if it's not a team activity

and you are simply judging people based on their own

merit, then it's not narcissism.

That like you're asking them, did you do this? Did you do it well enough

for me to recognize you? And if the answer is yes, then it's not narcissism.

It's a matter of fact, right? I think where we get, I think where we

get really caught up in the, in the jacks of narcissism is when we

look at a team and we are judging that team

as individuals and not as a team. Well then stop

calling them the team. Like, you know what I mean? Like

if it's not a team event, then stop calling it a team event. Maybe some

of that narcissism goes away. Yeah, maybe it does.

And you know what? And, and this is. We'll close out with this.

I think we have to be careful about language, right?

So words have power, people.

It may be the only. It may be only. It may only be the power

that we give it, but it's still we. We give words power. So words have

power. Words have power.

Yeah.

What can we take from east of Eden into

well into the next

25 years of growth in America? I mean, the vast majority of our

population is going to live in cities. If the, if the census

numbers are to be believed, if the trend lines, the demographic lines continue to go

in the same direction that they are predicted to go in.

We are going to have a culture, and I'm talking about a cultural level.

We're going to have a culture that is going to want to see and read

when they do read more stories

that are. That relate to the. The environments they

are in which is natural for human beings. And if you're in a city environment

or a suburban environment, you're going to want to see

stories, read stories, consume culture that reflects

that reality back to you. That way you feel like you have agency over

that reality. A

minority of people are going to live in rural areas, and

while they may be underserved in those areas,

they're of course going to have iPhones or whatever the phone is of the

day. They're going to be able to consume that content coming from,

from those city areas and those city creators.

I think of the writer Taylor Sheridan, the writer of Yellowstone, right.

Who, you know, infamously was, in his

hagiographic story of building Yellowstone, he was told that, you

know, we don't. We don't. You told by a Hollywood executive that, you know,

we don't accept stories that are set in rural areas because we can't

market them to an urban audience. And we've been doing that at least since the

1970s. So go back and try again and again how

much truth there is to that story. Who knows, right? It may just

be part of the hagiography of Taylor Sheridan, right? The

myth of Taylor Sheridan that he's building, right?

And because two things can be true at once, I do think that there

is a hunger or a thirst or a need for stories that

are set in rural areas like east of Eden that do

show nature and do show the land and

do show the struggles of the struggling against

the ruthlessness of the natural world to Remind people

who live in the cities that it's not all just smooth and

easy and all you got to deal with is these wackadoo other human beings

of which there are a lot of. There's also this other world that lives

out here that we're actually a part of.

We're just sort of cut off from it because of our technology and our

concrete and our buildings. And we need to.

As the. As the. Again, as the kids would say these days, we need to

touch grass. We need to get outside and like, get connected

back with that. So final thoughts on that. Do

we. Where. Where do we go with east of Eden? Will it still be a

bestseller in 25 years, do we think? I mean, I think it will because it

addresses human nature, but I wonder if there will be.

I wonder if the interest will wane. Maybe it won't sell 50,000

copies. Maybe it only sell 15,000. Right. Because there just

won't be a way for us to sort of relate to that anymore based on

our lived experience.

Well, I can't. I won't predict it. All I

can say is I hope that writers like

Steinbeck are still being read in 20, 20, 50,

because I think to. To what we talked about earlier, I.

I think his observation of human nature is

worth it. And I don't think I. I don't think human nature is going to

change all that dramatically in the next 25 years. I think, you

know, I think. I think so. I think it's going to be. I think it's

going to be relevant for a long time. And I think I.

Again, I'm not predicting this, but I'm fine. I'm saying this is a hopefulness.

Like I. Like I said, probably. Probably more than once already in this

episode here. I

think his magic power comes from being able to.

To find value in people

or, or. Or to find the value in people

and then lean into that value instead of trying to change people and

mood, people, motivate people. He doesn't try to do any of that. That he just

sees who they are and leans into it. And I think that.

I think that as the, the, as a society, if we can do a little

bit more of that and stop trying to mold people into who we want them

to be, we're going to be better off for it. So

hopefully, and again, I'm not saying this as a prediction, but hopefully,

writers like Steinbeck don't go away at all. And people just start, you know,

to your point about, you know, sometimes things

circle back, right. And sometimes Sometimes we, we, we

lose sight of something and somebody like Oprah comes along and says,

hey, by the way, if you've seen this classic book, you should read it. And

all of a sudden it's back in the bestseller, right? Maybe the next

Oprah does the same thing. I don't know who that's going to be, but you

never know. Maybe it's, maybe it's the, the writer or

the creative person that takes east of Eden and finally turns it into a

on screen event. Whether it's a miniseries or a movie or

whatever. I feel like we're,

I, I think Hollywood's doing us a disservice by not putting this on, on film.

And again, whether, again, maybe it's a miniseries, maybe it's not a movie in a

theater, but maybe Netflix grabbed a hold of it and turns it

into an eight episode series. Yeah, I would

watch that. Well, I would watch that more than once, I think, because

Grapes of Wrath was turned into a movie. It was fantastic. Mice of Men was

turned into a movie that was fantastic. I don't understand why this has not been

yet, but I think it should be. And I think that may be the

way that we get Steinbeck to be a little bit more sticky for the

next 25 years is to take east of Me and turn it into a film.

So if anyone's listening to this that has access to Hollywood, get this

on film.

You've got two viewers here. I'll watch it too. I will be,

I will be on that. I will be on that. And get a good writer.

Get a writer who actually like, loves,

not just California, I would say, but a writer who

loves the dichotomy, the tension

between the rural and the urban and understands that,

and understands the nature not only of the biblical illusions, but also

can fall in love with them. I'm not saying they have to believe in them,

but can fall in love with them and really do, do honor

to really do honor to Steinbeck's work and Steinbeck's efforts. All right,

that's all we got for today. I think we're good here. We've

now talked for four hours. This is the longest we've talked about one book. Four

hours total beating

Miyamoto Musashi's A Book of Five Rings where

I talked with John Hill, AKA Small Mountain. Four hours about the

book, about, about the Book of Five Rings. Most

downloaded episode the first two years of this podcast, but we've talked for

a total of four hours about east of Eden. So go out, grab east of

Eden by John Steinbeck. You will not regret it. I'd like to thank

Tom Libby for coming on our recorded podcast today.

Always my pleasure. It was so. It was so. It was so pleasurable for me.

I did it twice. There you go. And with that, I'm out.