David Brooks

You put Mutt Tricks in front of people, they will follow them.

And candidly, when I was a columnist, I would write some columns that wouldn't get, you know, they were columns that meant a lot to me.

And sometimes during the Obama years, I would write a column toward one person, toward Obama, and they wouldn't necessarily get big readerships.

But if I read a few in a row, which are not like super popular, I feel a little antsy, like, oh, I want to be up there on the leaderboard.

And so I would write one that I would know would do well with audience.

And that's just that's a corruption.

We're all in businesses where there's the right thing to do.

And then there's what the incentive structure wants you to do.

And we all have to navigate those kinds of differences.

And so I think that's been a problem.

And then for some reason, there's a lot of people out there who just want to hear that Donald Trump is a schmuck.

And they want to hear that.

They started wanting to hear that in 2015.

And it's now 11 years later.

They still want to hear that.

I don't quite get it.

I get a little bored with it, but the audience is out there for that.

And so I think that's one of the failings of the media.

And I should say, you know, it was a total honor to work at The New York Times.

It's a total honor to work at The Atlantic.