George Saunders

And then that beautiful thing where I think specificity negates judgment.

So as I work harder and harder to know that guy through the things he's said and done and seen and remembers, my sense of wanting to judge him just becomes kind of, it seems juvenile.

Yeah, anybody can judge.

Let's just go deeper and deeper.

And I really cherish that feeling.

And, of course, it doesn't last beyond the page.

And I'm sure if I met his real-life corollary, I'd be sneering at him.

But what a blessing, you know, to for a few minutes a day kind of ascend up out of your habit.

That's a great question.

I think—here's the thing.

I don't think there's a person like that I couldn't generate the empathy for, but it might be facile empathy.

So I think if you look at someone who's really psychopathic or— I mean, I was wondering if you could write a fictional version of Trump.

Sure.

I mean, I think one could for sure.

And it would be very interesting because I see a lot of vulnerability in him and a lot of – but what I've noticed is – I haven't written about this, so I'm not sure I'm right.

But the tools that a writer brings to this thing tend to favor –

You're constantly putting yourself in that person's shoes, but in fact, you're not in their shoes.

You're you pretending to be in their shoes.

So I definitely think you could... Yes, and you could come up with a version that was a little too soft and didn't truly account for what was making the person...

behave that way that's something i'm really interested in so with this book especially i'm interested because i ended up liking this guy more than i thought i would and the question is is he an accurate representation of the people who actually did these things and that uh