Group Chats: The Dark Matter of American Politics

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 https://www.semafor.com/ and co-host of the podcast Mixed Signals https://www.semafor.com/hub/mixed-signals-media-podcast, 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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:05Speaker 03

  WBUR Podcast, Boston.

• 1:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  Amory.

• 1:15Amory Sivertson?

  Benjamin.

• 1:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  How many group chats are you in?

• 1:20Amory Sivertson?

  Ooh, that's pretty good. Um, just like text chats, probably five. I would say five.

• 1:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 1:29Amory Sivertson?

  How about you?

• 1:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  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.

• 1:36Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, and by group chat, we're talking like text group chats?

• 1:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, texting, yeah, texting, group texts. I mean.

• 1:42Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, I'm in some WhatsApp groups, too. And I have a couple of Signal groups. Okay, this is expanding.

• 1:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 1:48Amory Sivertson?

  All right, how many you got?

• 1:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  I have one called Chewy Orbs 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.

• 2:00Amory Sivertson?

  How many people are in that?

• 2:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  Uh, probably like eight or nine.

• 2:05Amory Sivertson?

  Wow.

• 2:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  I have one called Billy Bob's Hat Grommet.

• 2:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Which is a reference to a very ridiculous photo of Billy Bob.

• 2:16Amory Sivertson?

  Thornton?

• 2:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  Thornton with a crazy hat, grommet. I have one called "East Coast Girls Are Hip", from my friend who lives in LA when he comes to the East Coast. That's how we organize around visiting him. I have one called "The Brutalists", which is just about discussing the movie "The Brutalist".

• 2:36Amory Sivertson?

  For real?

• 2:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, that one's not very busy right now.

• 2:41Amory Sivertson?

  That one's going cold, yeah.

• 2:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  I have one called "Cardamom, Et Cetera"?

• 2:44Amory Sivertson?

  These all sound super nefarious.

• 2:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, well, they're nefarious.

• 2:49Amory Sivertson?

  Dark deeds that you're organizing.

• 2:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  We're organizing war plans on Signal, no question. But they're like fun war plans.

• 2:57Amory Sivertson?

  I have a group chat for the clothing swap group that I'm in. Because we post pictures of ourselves in the clothes that we got from each other at the swap. And it's just like, "I'm rocking someone's jumpsuit today."

• 3:10Amory Sivertson?

  I had a group chat from when I went to Africa.

• 3:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 3:15Amory Sivertson?

  Because that group has sort of stayed in touch, which is fun.

• 3:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  I love it.

• 3:20Amory Sivertson?

  I've got my family text chain, I've got like two family text chains.

• 3:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Cool, cool, cool.

• 3:25Amory Sivertson?

  And then I've got like my good high school friends, some of my good college friends.

• 3:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 3:30Amory Sivertson?

  You know, the usual.

• 3:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, cool.

• 3:32Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah.

• 3:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  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're, we're gonna talk about today. I mean, they have power in small form.

• 3:44Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, we need to really raise our stakes if we're gonna.

• 3:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, the kinds of group chats that we're gonna talk about today are at the highest levels of government in between the wealthy tech elite.

• 3:58Amory Sivertson?

  The kinds of group chats like the now infamous one that led to Signal Gate, in which US national security leaders use the app Signal to discuss military operations in Yemen.

• 4:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  From WBUR, Boston's NPR, this is Endless Thread, the group chat.

• 4:17Amory Sivertson?

  Today, we got a conversation with a journalist who got a look into what he calls "the group chats that changed America."

• 4:29Amory Sivertson?

  Ben Smith is co-founder and editor in chief of the new media outlet Semaphore, and he's host of the podcast Mixed Signals. He recently published a piece documenting a network of elite political conversations revolving around the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and a circle of Silicon Valley figures.

• 4:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  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."

• 5:04Amory Sivertson?

  Put another way, these group chats, quote, "constitute a dark matter of American politics." Group chats.

• 5:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, let's get into the group chat.

• 5:28Amory Sivertson?

  Ben Smith, thanks for joining us.

• 5:29Speaker 06

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 5:31Amory Sivertson?

  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 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?

• 5:57Speaker 06

  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, you know, letters, or email groups, or, you know, the boys on the bus covering the old political campaigns.

• 6:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  Who gets to hang out in one corner of the special cave versus the other caves?

• 6:18Speaker 06

  Exactly. The special cave.

• 6:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 6:20Speaker 06

  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 Black Lives Matters flags and things like that.

• 7:01Speaker 06

  And so they developed, they had developed a set of WhatsApp groups, 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 huge social media users, founders and creators of social media platforms and investors in them, led by a guy named Marc Andreessen, retreated into a set of WhatsApp and Signal groups where they kind of, I think, formed a new kind of politics and built this new set of relationships.

• 7:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  You talk a lot about this specific chat, which is named Chatham House. And you write, 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 tech moguls and the political right in the United States. So of all these chat groups, Chatham House specifically, why does this particular chat stand out to you?

• 8:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, so these groups started, actually, the first group was called Build. And it was named after an essay Marc Andreessen had written called It's Time to Build, basically saying enough of the software platforms, what 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

• 9:12Speaker 06

  about being in the AI group when the coup happened, or the attempted coup happened at OpenAI, 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 are 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, Andreessen and another guy who's in that particular group named Christopher Rufo, who's sort of the leading anti-D E I activist in the country, decide that these liberals are just like boring and all they want to talk about is free speech and this isn't going anywhere. And they're just talking in circles. And Andreessen and Christopher Rufo basically blow up the group and that's it for that group. And Andreessen starts another group

• 9:54Speaker 06

  that is all with, reached out to a right, 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 Andreessen's, a 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

• 10:35Speaker 06

  Mark Cuban. 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 Sacks, 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.

• 11:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  He'll just fight with the anonymous group chatters.

• 11:06Speaker 06

  They weren't, like, their numbers weren't in his phone, but he didn't mind.

• 11:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 11:09Amory Sivertson?

  Huh. So how does someone get invited to, to some of these groups?

• 11:16Speaker 06

  You know, I mean, I think, I do think Marc Andreessen and a couple of people around him, a guy named Sriram Krishnan, who's now the AI advisor to Saks and the White House, and this guy, Eric Torenberg, you know, really formed and shaped a lot of this. There are a couple of 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 curated, 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 was too anti-Trump, and who were trying to lead a kind of counter-revolution out of these group chats.

• 11:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  And in your piece, you point out that Sriram Krishnan, former partner at Marc Andreessen's venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, 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.

• 12:21Speaker 06

  Yes. And Sriram Krishnan, 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 the memetic upstream of public opinion, about how you have to curate them very carefully, there, he has 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.

• 12:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  And Andreessen, if you will. Yeah.

• 12:42Speaker 06

  And he's obviously referring to Andreessen there, but also cooling rods, who can go in and like take the temperature back down at times.

• 12:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Speaker 06

  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.

• 13:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow.

• 13:08Amory Sivertson?

  That sounds exhausting.

• 13:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm in a couple of group chats and one of them sort of blew it. One, somebody was excommunicated from the group chat in 2020. And so it's interesting because there are 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.

• 13:40Speaker 06

  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.

• 13:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Right.

• 13:46Speaker 06

  Having felt kind of threatened by, you know, progressives on social media by their employees and Slack.

• 13:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Right.

• 13:55Speaker 06

  But also, there's a kind of, I think in these conservative ones, there's a kind of edgelord culture where you're trying to

• 14:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 06

  figure out exactly how obnoxious or extreme you can be for laughs.

• 14:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  The hottest take.

• 14:07Speaker 06

  And

• 14:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes.

• 14:07Speaker 06

  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, depending on exactly how spicy the take is.

• 14:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  What they're about to say.

• 14:20Speaker 06

  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.

• 14:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:37Speaker 06

  And I was in, I was in a group years ago called Journalist. It was a bunch of kind of centrist and lefty journalists, you know, sending each other a stream of consciousless emails that eventually leaked and kind of, you know, really got a couple of people fired and for, for sharing basically half baked ideas that were more or less the same thing they said in public, but a little, 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 is, seems actually like basically the right idea.

• 15:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  Why the right idea?

• 15:12Speaker 06

  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, Yes. 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.

• 15:52Amory Sivertson?

  And yet, there is something different about group chats like Chatham House, and that is the power and influence they hold over sectors that affect all of us. More on that in a minute.

• 16:24Speaker 00

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• 17:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, we're back in the group chat with Ben Smith from Semaphore.

• 17:28Amory Sivertson?

  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?

• 18:14Speaker 06

  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 Andreessen. 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 he wasn't really in any

• 18:58Speaker 06

  group chats, but everybody else told me, oh, yeah, there's some group chats, but there's nothing like this network that Andreessen 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, and sort of immediately absorb it and write things in each one in kind of a wild way.

• 19:20Amory Sivertson?

  Well, your use of the term deliberately assembled, that Mark Andreessen deliberately assembled these groups, makes me wonder...

• 19:27Amory Sivertson?

  Is there a goal to these group chats? Like even an unspoken goal in bringing these particular groups of people together?

• 19:35Speaker 06

  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, and maybe, and I don't, you know, I don't really know what his intention was, but it was very influential. And what, somebody in one of the groups said that you could just sort of see the, 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.

• 20:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  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.

• 20:28Speaker 06

  You know, a filter bubble is an 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?

• 20:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  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.

• 20:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 20:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  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 seem 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?

• 21:22Speaker 06

  I mean, you know, I have mixed feelings. I think each era is sort of reacting to the last. I loved early social media and, you know, was a blogger 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.

• 21:56Amory Sivertson?

  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?

• 22:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I have a few examples. I mean, one is just a big idea, which is that Donald Trump is gonna, you know, reverse the culture, is gonna, is gonna 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, 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 Yarvin, who, whose sort of shtick 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,

• 22:56Speaker 06

  a more sort of very noticeable thing, if you're in a certain part of social media, is that the, a lot of these tech people really, really hate this journalist named Taylor Lorenz in a somewhat obsessive way. And honestly, like, you can criticize her work, and I don't know, like, there are a lot, I've, 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.

• 23:28Amory Sivertson?

  How many of these chats are you in, Ben?

• 23:30Speaker 06

  So, nobody invites me to any chats. I was, I was in journo list back in the day, but, um, You know, I write about this stuff, and so I think people don't totally trust me to be in their chats, although I should, I'm very pleased to say that after my story published, a very prominent journalist who I won't name, created a chat called Shadowy Media Elites. And there are now five or six of us in there.

• 23:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Nice.

• 23:53Amory Sivertson?

  Damn, I didn't get my invite to that.

• 23:55Speaker 06

  Sorry.

• 23:56Amory Sivertson?

  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?

• 24:08Speaker 06

  I basically learned of it from people I know who were in them and who I just sort of put two and two together, was like, oh, this is all the same network of stuff. And then you look at social media, 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.

• 24:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  The classic journalism hoodwink.

• 24:34Speaker 06

  People, and a handful of people went on the record, although often talking in general terms, I think a lot of people, you know, 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, or almost all of them are gone.

• 24:53Amory Sivertson?

  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.

• 25:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  You're just mad you're not invited, Emery. You're just mad you're not invited.

• 25:22Amory Sivertson?

  No, no, I'm not. I couldn't keep up with it, anyway.

• 25:25Speaker 06

  Well, if you'd like, 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 panicking, there's a long, but Silicon Valley Bank, which had made some dumb decisions and was not in great shape. 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 WhatsApp groups. And it was a large part, this network of groups.

• 26:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow.

• 26:07Speaker 06

  Where these tech executives whose company's treasury was at this bank are texting each other and realizing that they're all in the same position and working each other into a state of total panic.

• 26:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow.

• 26:19Speaker 06

  Very, very fast and caused essentially a really high-speed bank run that destroyed that bank.

• 26:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  That seems bad.

• 26:25Speaker 06

  Does seem bad. I mean, out of your hand, if your bank was on the verge of collapse and your friend texted you, you'd probably be grateful that they'd done that.

• 26:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, you'd probably have had over there to take your money out. Yep, absolutely.

• 26:35Amory Sivertson?

  So maybe it is just too soon to tell in many, in many ways, where this goes from here. But do you have a thought on where the group chats are going from here and the potential that they can have?

• 26:49Speaker 06

  I mean, I think they represented a kind of political movement that realigned these tech billionaires and a lot of their people, sort of fellow travelers around Donald Trump's campaign and that that has 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 unsavory will use that.

• 27:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  That was Ben Smith, editor in chief of the new media outlet Semaphore and the very soon invitee to Amory's in my group chat. Ben, we'll be in touch.

• 27:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR Boston's NPR.

• 28:02Amory Sivertson?

  This episode was produced by Dean Russell. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

• 28:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  It was co-hosted by group chat participants Amory Sivertson and myself, Ben Brock Johnson. The rest of our team is managing producer Suma Tajoshi, our production manager, Paul Vikes, Grace Tatter, Franny Monahan, and our show is edited by Meg Kramer.

• 28:25Amory Sivertson?

  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 in on, hit us up, [email protected].

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast with Dr. Sharon Turbin, psychologist, executive coach, and a close listener to what lives beneath high performance. Here she is with Steve Paluca, who built Bain Capital and helped bring a championship back to Boston on the thing the best leaders do that most don't.

• 29:04Speaker 07

  The best leaders kind of give credit and take blame. When something goes wrong, they're the first ones to take responsibility for it. And they see the good in the other people on the team. They don't immediately try to deflect whatever problem there was, what went wrong, you miss the sales target on the salesperson. They reflect on themselves and what they could do better. Same thing, you know, what Joe Mazzulla does in basketball. If you see his press conferences and the Celtics don't play well, the first thing he says is, you know, I need to coach better. I made a mistake here. I made a mistake there. Not many coaches do that. But that's why the players love Joe, and that's another reason he's a great coach. So there are things like that that you learn. There are many, many more things like that I learned

• 29:47Speaker 07

  from people like Red Auerbach and my classmates from business school and sports and all the rest.

• 29:54Amory Sivertson?

  And really, what an array of leaders, because leadership is both the same and different.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Depending on the environment that you're in.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Listen for more of the quiet tension wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:10Speaker 02

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• 30:39Speaker 07

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