George Saunders

And it's going to just be, just turn on MSNBC and Fox and let them, and everybody can go out and have lunch and the TVs can fight.

But if you said, okay, we've got $10,000 to fix potholes in our little town, and we've got $20,000 worth of potholes, what do we do?

Suddenly the politics is gone.

You know, you're like, well, we should probably fix the one in front of the ER.

And

And then as you start talking about individual potholes, it's just science, you know.

So I think that's what I mean by specificity squeezes out facile judgment.

I mean, you don't want to squeeze out judgment, but you want to squeeze out that kind of quality of empty, agitated, abstract opining that seems to be prevalent right now, which I don't think really produces much except angst.

Sure, but I think all those things are compatible.

I think the problem is when you start trying to understand your enemy,

Okay, I come from a scientific background.

So for me to say, can you understand a geological problem?

Of course, there's no problem.

And there's no limit to the lengths you can go to understand that problem.

It doesn't incriminate you.

It doesn't involve you.

So likewise, if the goal was to try to understand your enemies, I think the point of that is it's kind of strategic, right?

I mean, if you're a football coach and you're playing a team, if you could inhabit the mind of the other coach for five minutes, that would be unbelievably great.

So the problem, but the problem is, I think in that process of trying to understand, there's something, I certainly have it, where as I try to understand, I think I'm trying to quote unquote empathize.

That's where I think it gets a little, for me personally, it gets a little mushy because then you start to feel a kind of overinvestment