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The group chats that changed America. Before we get into it, it's great writing. But really, it's great editing. Who is the editor?

You know, as you may have been in this kind of situation where you're like a scrappy startup and you, and it's kind of like you just try to wrangle somebody. And so I just dropped the Google Doc into a chat and Max did a little bit of editing. Oh my God. But Liz Hoffman, Liz Hoffman did most of the editing. Liz had a joke was going to be that Max was the editing. I wanted to be clear.

Max told me privately that he edited it. I added some stuff. I did add a few little, I added a few little tweaks. You know, I had a really high-level conceptual stuff. We're top editing. I'm not in the weeds there. He was at the 30,000 foot level. Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right. So the thrust of this, and Ben, I want you to just kind of lay out both your reporting

process and also what you think the central takeaway here is.

But for me, it was that everyone is just shooting the shit on signal, including, like,

the masters of the universe.

And they have these crazy conversations.

But in this case, they're happening among people who have like direct lines to Trump and his minions.

And they're actually, as you say, navigating or orchestrating or whatever the verb is,

the policies of this country.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, basically what happened was that in 2020, when social media was sort of very progressive, very heated, a lot of these folks who were kind of, I would say, ranging from really quite pro-Trump and on the right, but mostly kind of center-right

tech entrepreneurs who typically supported Democrats, supported Republicans, kind of retreated

from social media into these group chats. Mark Andresen, the creator of the Netscape browser

and kind of iconic VC, venture capitalist, orchestrated a lot of these. He arranged them

first for his tech industry peers, who spent a lot of these. He arranged them first for his tech industry

peers who spent a lot of time talking about how woke their and annoying their own employees were.

This was a main feature of the chats. It was like my employees. Every boss does this. Yes.

But like my employees, but a lot of it was like my employees want me to put a Black Lives Matter logo up.

I don't want to.

I'm afraid that.

Like that was a big, that's sort of where they started.

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