Endless Thread - Group Chats: The Dark Matter of American Politics

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

The thing about social media when it was created was that it was public. Ideas shared were debated for all to see. Today much of that is happening behind closed doors—in group chats. Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of the media outlet Semafor and co-host of the podcast Mixed Signals, speaks with Endless Thread about the elite group chats on Signal and WhatsApp that are shaping American politics. ***** Credits: This episode was produced by Dean Russell. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The co-hosts are Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Amory. Benjamin. How many group chats are you in? Ooh, it's pretty good. Just like text chats? Probably five. I want to say five. Okay. How about you?

I don't know the number off the top of my head, but I'd like to read you the titles. of some of them. Okay. And by group chat, we're talking like text. Group chats? Yeah, texting. Yeah, texting.

Group texts. I mean. Oh, I'm in some WhatsApp groups too. And I have a couple of signal groups. Okay. This is expanding. Yeah. All right.

How many you got? I have one called Chewy Orb's melted gel. And that's like the big, I don't even know. We've renamed it so many times. That has 27 unread messages in it right now. How many people are in that? Probably like eight or nine.

Wow. I have one called Billy Bob's hat grommet, which is a reference to a very ridiculous photo of Billy Bob Thornton. Thornton with a crazy hat grommet. I have one called East Coast Girls Are Hip for my friend who lives in L.A. when he comes to the East Coast Coast. That's how we organize around visiting him. I have one called The Brutalists, which is just about. discussing the movie The Brutalist. For real?

Yeah. That one's not very busy right now. Yeah, that one's going cold. Yeah. I have one called cardamom, et cetera. These all sound super nefarious. Yeah, well, they're nefarious. Dark deeds that you're organizing.

We're organizing war plans on Signal, no question. But they're like fun war plans. I have a group chat for the clothing swap group that I'm in. Mm-hmm. Because we post pictures of ourselves in the clothes that we got from other at the swap and it's just like I'm rocking someone's jumpsuit today. I had a group chat from when I went to Africa. Okay.

Because that group has sort of stayed in touch, which is fun. I love it. I've got my family text chain. I've got like two family text chains. Cool, cool, cool. And then I've got like my good high school friends, some of my good college friends. Okay. You know, the usual.

All right, cool. Yeah. Well, I will admit none of these groups it sounds like are the kinds of group chats that are as powerful as the ones we are going to talk about today. I mean, they have power in small form. Yeah, we need to really raise our stakes if we're going to. Yeah, the kinds of group chats that we're going to talk about today are at the highest levels of government in between the wealthy tech elite. The kinds of group chats like the now infamous one that led to Signalgate. in which U.S. national security leaders use the app signal to discuss military operations in Yemen.

From WBUR, Boston's NPR, this is endless thread, the group chat. Today, we got a conversation with a journalist who got a look into what he calls the group chats that changed America. Ben Smith is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the new media outlet, Semaphore, and he's host of the podcast Mix Signals. He recently published a piece documenting a network of elite political conversations revolving around the venture capitalist Mark Andresen and a circle of Silicon Valley figures.

The other Ben writes that these group chats, quote, are the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed. Put another way, these group chats, quote, constitute a dark matter of American politics. Group chats. All right, let's get into the group chat.

Ben Smith, thanks for joining us. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So you have written a whole piece. You've done a bunch of reporting on group chats. And yet, when I say the term group chats to maybe just a friend, they are not imagining the kind of group chats that you're talking about per se. You know, we might be imagining or the group chats that we might be imagining.

or the group chats that we might have with four or five of our close friends. Can you give us a sense of the size and the scope of the group chats that you have focused on in your reporting? Yeah, for sure. And in fact, of course, like all through human history, there have been elite conversations and side conversations and back channels, whether it's letters or email groups or, you know, the boys on the bus covering the old political campaigns. Who gets to hang out in one corner of the special. cave versus the other caves. Yeah.

Exactly, the special cave. Yeah. But what happened in the, I guess, the spring of 2020, really, was that a lot of particular, I mean, a lot of people, but certainly a lot of people in Silicon Valley felt that social media had become this very left-wing, social movement dominated space where they could no longer express their more right-wing views. and in particular that for a lot of Silicon people running these big Silicon Valley companies, that the culture of Slack, their own company's internal messaging tool, had been taken over by what they basically viewed as the woke mob, and they were being harangued by their employees to put up, you know, Black Lives Matters, flags and things like that.

And so they developed, they had developed a set of WhatsApp groups, you know, partly to gossip about their own industries, partly to exchange ideas, but also these very quickly became places where they could kind of discuss these political challenges that were new to them and that they were dealing with and coordinate and say, hey, what should I do?

What are you doing in this very politicized summer of 2020? And so I think a lot of them who'd been, you know, huge social media users, founders and creators of social media platforms and investors in them, led by a guy named Mark Andreessen, retreated into a set of WhatsApp and Signal Group. where they kind of, I think, you know, formed a new kind of politics and built this new set of relationships. You talk a lot about this specific chat, which is, which is named Chatham House.

And you write, you know, the Chatham House is this kind of giant, raucous signal group that forms part of this sprawling network of these influential private chats. They really started during COVID. And Chatham House is really at the center. of this and starts to fuel this new alliance between kind of tech moguls and the political right in the United States. So, you know, of all these chat groups, Chatham House specifically, why does this particular chat stand out to you? Yeah, so these groups started actually with the first group is called Build. And it was named after an essay Mark Andreessen had written called It's Time to Build, basically saying, you know, enough of enough of the software platforms,

we need are kind of big patriotic industries, building rocket ships and things like that. And had a sort of tiny, a little group of top, top Silicon Valley CEOs in it. And he liked it so much. And he's a very high energy, extremely communicative, curious guy that he asked an aide to create like dozens of other groups like it, one for each industry, one for software, one for engineering, one for, you know, AI, one for space. And he was in all of these groups, often kind of dominating the conversation in many groups at the same time. And a lot of them were very political, but also very focused on industry gossip.

Somebody talked about being in the AI group when the coup happened or the attempted coup happened at Open AI. And Sam Altman is in the group. And you're sort of like watching him, you know, react with emojis to certain posts and feel like, wow, I'm really like in it. Like, you know, people who were part of it felt like they're part of this secret elite chats. And then they spend a while talking about politics in this signal group. And at some point, Andresen and another guy who's in that particular group named Christopher. Rufo, who's sort of the leading anti-D-EI activist in the country, decide that these liberals are just like boring and all they want to talk about is free speech and this is going anywhere and they're

just talking in circles. And Andresen and Christopher Rufo basically blow up the group and that's it for that group. And Andreessen starts another group that is all, with, and ask, reach out to a right way, another conservative activist and says, you know, can you start me a group with some smart right-wing people so that he can learn more about right-wing stuff? And that group goes on for a while and then blows up. And then in the summer of 2024, a friend of Endreson's guy named Derek Torrenberg,

who now has since gone to work for Andreessen, starts a group called Chatham House, which is a lot of the people from all the other groups who are mostly at this point on the right, supporting Trump, but they also invite in some liberals to debate them,

maybe to convince them. And that group, you know, to some degree goes totally off the rails and is basically at this point, I think, an arena in which people have fights with Mark Kewson,

And so people pick fights with Mark Cuban and Mark Cuban argues back. And there was a perception that if you're good enough with arguing with Mark Cuban, that might get you a job in the Trump administration. Because David Sachs, who's a very powerful Trump advisor, is also in that group. I actually asked, after the story was published, I asked Cuban about it. He wouldn't comment for the story. And he told me he actually had no idea who a lot of these people were, who were picking fights with him. But he'll just take the bait every time. He'll just fight with the anonymous group chatters. They weren't, like, their numbers weren't in his phone, but he didn't mind. Yeah. Huh. So how does someone get invited to some of these groups? You know, I mean, I do think Mark Andreessen and a couple of people around him, a guy named Trem Krishnan, who's now the AI advisor to Sachs in the White House and this guy,

Eric Torrenberg, you know, really formed and shaped a lot of this. There are a couple other really big voices in it. one's a guy named Balaji, Srinivasan, who's another tech kind of investor and former executive at Coinbase. And they were, you know, they curate, to some degree, very carefully curated this. In Chatham House, it was a giant, less carefully curated space. But I don't know. I think it was people who felt that the public conversation was too left-wing, maybe it was too anti-Trump, and who were trying to lead a kind of counter-revolution out of these group chats.

And in your piece, you point out that Sriram-Krishnan, former president, partner at Mark Endresen's venture capital firm and Dresen Horwitz. Krishnan calls these group chats the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion, which to me means these kind of elite private conversations are ultimately, according to Krishnan, flowing into wider culture and mainstream discourse. Yes. And Trim Christian, who wrote a really interesting essay on his blog a few years ago about what group chats are and how, yes, that they're the memetic upstream of public opinion, about how you

have to curate them very carefully. Here's a couple of kind of amazing rules. One is that every group needs a nuclear reactor, which is like someone who talks all the time and has lots of energy. And Andresen, if you will. And he's obviously referring to Andresen. There are also cooling rods who can go in and like take the temperature back down at times. Yep.

And the other thing he writes, which I think is probably familiar to anybody who's in a group chat, that there's all, for every group chat of N number of people, there is a side chat of n minus one number of people where you discuss the most annoying person in the group and if you are not in the side chat, that is you. Wow. That sounds exhausting. I'm in a couple group chats and one of them sort of blew it.

Somebody was excommunicated from the group chat in 2020. And so it's interesting because they're these places where supposedly it sounds like the way that you're describing the story and the way that you've written about it, in some ways people flee to them or sort of reset in these group chats because they're more a safer space

to say what you really feel. But that also means that by their very nature, they are potentially very explosive. You know, it's funny because a lot of the people who I talk to describe them, you know, I think unironically as safe spaces, having felt kind of threatened by, you know, progressives on social media

by their employees and Slack. Right. But also there's a kind of, I think, in these, conservative ones, there's a kind of edge lord culture where you're trying to figure out exactly how obnoxious or extreme you can be for laughs. The hottest take. Yes.

Yeah, deliver the hottest take. And Andreessen said somewhere that, you know, you can tell because people will set the disappearing message to like 30 seconds or five minutes, or, you know, depending on exactly how spicy the take is. What they're about to say. Yeah, and I do think, I mean, one of the interesting things about these spaces is they really were enabled by WhatsApp and Signal in particular. And there is something interesting about, you know, we've been through this period where every thought, every stray thought is not only written down, it's documented forever.

And I was in a group years ago called Journalists. It was a bunch of kind of centrist and lefty journalists, you know, sending each other a stream of consciousness emails that eventually leaked and kind of, you know, really got a couple of people fired. and for sharing basically half-baked ideas that were more or less the same thing they said in public, but a little hotter. And I don't know. I mean, I actually think that the notion that you ought to have spaces where your half-baked thoughts quickly disappear

and aren't preserved forever seems actually like basically the right idea. Why the right idea? Because you want to be able to try out ideas as you do in spoken conversation. I mean, in some sense, like a lot of what is now written down is what used to be said aloud, right?

I mean, I think, you know, if you were talking to five friends over dinner, that wouldn't be transcribed written down and available for the rest of history. And I think there's been a shift over the last, what, 20, 25 years from oral to written communication for offhand remarks and jokes and speculation and workshopping. And I think that we're now that has peaked. And what you see is people are retreating into spaces where stuff isn't preserved. And yet, there is something different about. group chats like Chatham House. And that is the power and influence they hold over sectors

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Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. All right. We're back in the group chat with Ben Smith from Semaphore. I guess just the term group chat, and something you said kind of stirred this up for me, but just the term group chat to me sounds, it just sounds like inherently social. Like this is going to be a social, silly place.

And we don't think of anything that would, you know, feel remotely professional. We don't think of that stuff happening in group chats, which is maybe why when the news broke about members of the Trump administration using Signal to discuss military plans, my first thought was like, Signal. What? this is how they're doing things? I don't know. How surprised were you, given the reporting that you've already been doing on these kinds of group chats?

So it definitely kind of explained to me like, oh, okay, it makes sense that these guys are in Signal because they're always in Signal. This is a place where, you know, people, powerful people in politics and media talk to each other. By the way, that's, I think, broadly true. If you talk to Powerful people in politics and media, they're in a lot of group chats and some of them are Signal groups. I think among the kind of Donald Trump's orbit and the tech right, it really, over the last few years, become this central, central way of communicating, driven in a lot of ways by Andresen. Because, I mean, I did actually call around to other sectors of media and politics, you know, liberals and socialists and, you know, people in the center left and say, hey, are you in a bunch of group chats like this? And everybody, a lot of people, actually, Ezra Klein told me it wasn't really in any group chats, but everybody else told me, oh, yeah, there's some group chats. But there's nothing like this network that Andresen had very deliberately assembled.

And somebody described to me sitting next to Mark and just watched him like manically toggle from chat to chat to chat to chat to chat with and sort of immediate absorb it and write things in each one in kind of a wild way. Well, your use of the term deliberately assembled that Mark Andreessen deliberately assembled these groups makes me wonder, is there a goal to these group chats? like even an unspoken goal in bringing these particular groups of people together? Well, I mean, I think there were two goals. And the obvious one is that Andreessen, who's an investor and who's always been kind of an information junkie, had basically set himself up this incredible kind of intelligence gathering network, right? Like he was just, he had the sort of top executives in every field and any thinker that he wanted answering his questions all day.

And I think that's just sort of self-evidently pretty valuable. But I do think more subtly it was a, and maybe, and I don't, you know, I don't really know what his intention was, but it was very influential. And somebody in one of the groups said that you could just sort of see the sort of writers and thinkers and non-billionaires sort of gradually being drawn by the gravity of the billionaires

and their money and power toward their point of view. It's interesting, too, that it's not... It's sort of, again, one of the contrasts is it's not algorithmic. It's old-fashioned filter bubbles. You know, a filter bubble is idea that social media is filtering or some sort of outside force or algorithm is filtering what you see. I mean, this is more just an old-fashioned cabal, right? Right. And I guess that's

an interesting, also like an interesting difference between the public-facing stuff and the group chats to me. Like when I was reading your piece, I was thinking a lot about like the early blogosphere. Yeah. And the audience in that world, you know, was limited in how interested the general web surfing public was in what blogs had to say, but they were still publicly accessible. You could sort of like see what people in the tech world were talking about. And we seemed to be moving back towards these private forums. What does that make you think about when it comes to how we cross-examine ideas, how we push back? I mean, you know, I have mixed feelings.

I think each area is sort of reacting to the last. I loved early social media and, you know, was a blog. and found that kind of very earnest and open exchange of ideas incredibly valuable. But you could also feel on social media at some point that it became a place where that was sort of secondary. You could just feel that people were forming a consensus and manufacturing consent in other places and then coming to social media to kind of brigade and yell at each other. And it was like participating in a debate tournament.

Like nobody's being convinced. People are just scoring points. I want to get a sense of how something moves from the group. chat into the real world. So is there an example of an idea that started in one of these chats and then has now taken new real life outside of the chat? Yeah, I mean, I have a few examples. I mean, one is just a big idea, which is that Donald Trump is going to reverse the culture, is going to take the conservative side in the culture wars while, you know, basically protecting the American tech industry and supporting it.

And they really talked themselves into that. And I think it did turn out to be half true. I think in a more specific ways, you know, one of the, a sort of popular figure in these chats is this conservative, people call him a philosopher, Curtis Jarvin, who's sort of schick is that he doesn't believe in democracy. And he kind of, I think a lot of people met him there

and felt like he became a more mainstream figure from being seen as a really fringy figure through the chats. And then in a more sort of very noticeable thing, if you're in a certain part of social media, is that a lot of these tech people really, really hate this journalist named Taylor Lorenz in a somewhat obsessive way. And honestly, you can criticize her work,

and I don't know, I've agreed with her on things, I've had fights with her about things. But there is a sort of like, why are these people so focused on this person? It does seem like they've been talking about her somewhere else, and the conversation is spilled out into public because they have these really, like, developed theories about why they don't like her,

and that certainly came out of the group chats. How many of these chats are you in, Ben? So nobody invites me at any chats. I was in a journalist back in the day. But, you know, I write about this stuff, and so I think people don't totally trust me to be in their chats. Although I'm very pleased to say that after my story published a very prominent journalist, I won't name, created a chat called shadowy media elites. And there are now five or six of us in there. Nice.

Damn, I didn't get my invite to that. Sorry. So how did you go about reporting this then? You have these exclusive group chats with messages that disappear pretty quickly. What did this take? I basically learned of it from people I know who were in them and who I just sort of put two and two together. It was like, oh, this is all the same network of stuff. And then you look at social media and you're like, oh, you can tell these people are all talking to each other.

So it wasn't hard to figure out who was in the groups and I just started calling them. and I suppose the ones who wanted to be quoted in an article talking about their influence were willing to be quoted in an article talking about their influence. It's a classic journalism hoodwink. People, and a handful of people went on the record, although often talking in general terms, I think a lot of people actually felt that these were really important to their intellectual development. And so a lot of people talked to me because they felt like it was an important chapter in American intellectual history that was worth documenting, even though all the documents are gone, are almost. all of them are gone. It's not concerning that people would talk

to each other in private. It's not concerning that people would gather in large groups. And on the one side, I can see that that's like, yeah, that's what technology does. It's beautiful, man.

And on the other side, I guess I worry about large groups of people being able to communicate instantaneously about any number of things with each other all throughout the day.

You're just mad. You're not invited, Emery. You're just mad you're not invited. No. No, I'm not. I couldn't keep up with it anyway. Well, if you would like a politically neutral downside to this sort of communication, it's that it can create panics. And this happened with Silicon Valley Bank.

And I mean, no bank has 100% of its deposits, like, in hand in the vault. So any bank will collapse if all of its customers panic and show up in a line outside the bank. And the FDIC insurance is intended to prevent people from panic. There's a long... But Silicon Valley Bank, which had made some dumb decisions and was... not in great shape was and if you go back and read the stories you'll see what happened was that over the weekend and in the run up to the weekend in which it collapsed investors were talking to each other in what's up groups and it was a large part this network of groups where these tech

and executives whose company's treasury was at these this bank are texting each other and realizing that they're all in the same position and and working each other into a state of total panic very very fast and caused essentially a really high speed bank run that destroyed that. bank. That seems bad. It does seem bad. I mean, out of your hand, if your bank was going to, it was on the verge of collapse and your friend texted you that you'd probably be grateful that they'd done that. Yeah, you probably had over there to take your money out. Yep. Absolutely. So maybe it is just too soon to tell in many, in many ways, what, where this goes from here.

But do you have a thought on, on where the group chats are going from here and the potential that they can have? I mean, I think they represented a kind of political movement that, you know, realigned these tech billionaires and a lot of their people sort of fellow travelers around Donald Trump's campaign and that that is really totally splintered in the early months of the Trump presidency and probably isn't coming back. And I'm sure people will find all sorts of ways to communicate. I mean, I do think, and I guess this is a place where I am a little ideological. Like, I do think it's good that people have private, secure ways to communicate with each other and that the rise of signal is a real alternative to this kind of universal surveillance that's

being built around us. And so in that sense, it is pretty salutary. And I'm sure all sorts of different people and all sorts of different people in groups. And like some of them definitely like extremely unsafery will use that. That was Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of the new media outlet semifor. And the very soon invitee to Amory's in my group chat. Ben will be in touch. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR Boston's NPR. This episode was produced by Dean Russell, mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. It was co-hosted by group chat participants, Emery Sievardson, and myself, Ben Brock Johnson. The rest of our team is managing producer Summa Tojoshi, our production manager, Paul Vycus, Grace Tatter, Franny Monaghan, and our show is edited by Meg Kramer.

If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or some kind of wild story from the internet, some group chat that you want to let us. us in on. Hit us up. Endless thread at wbUR.org.