Stairway to Wisdom”) David Brooks detailed the needed ingredients to gaining a deep understanding of a social problem, beginning with the data and moving on to first-hand accounts. The highest rung on his stairway, though, went beyond those: “Empathy opens you up to absorb the good and the bad. Love impels you not just to observe but to seek union—to think as another thinks and feel as another feels.

I think that it's an arguable position, whether with Hamas and ISIS around, whether there should be a Palestinian state, but it's a defensible position, given the current circumstances.

Often, I go and see films where I can see the beats coming. So, if I read something where I don't see the beats coming and it takes me somewhere unexpected, that's a great thing to build upon.

What you hear in focus groups and conversations, people will give you 20 minutes of rage about how the borders are out of control. But then you start saying, practically, what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about the 11 million here? What are we going to do to get some workers we need for the farms? Then people start having a normal conversation.

There is the English language and then there's the Trump language.

One of the things this world is finding is that emotion is the basis of reason. We really have to trust our emotions, which are much smarter than our reason in some ways.

I do think economic and social anxiety is the number one issue. And I'm pretty confident Hillary Clinton will be really riding that train pretty hard.