Earlier this week, the news organization's semaphore broke the story of a group chat.

No, not the Pentagon one. This one has roughly 300 very powerful people in it.

They're Silicon Valley executives like Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, billionaires like Mark Cuban,

and right-wing media figures like the Daily Wires Ben Shapiro. But at the group's heart was one man.

Venture capitalist Mark Andresen. I called up journalist Zoe Schiffer to ask if she was surprised to see

Andresen at the chat center.

Not at all, no.

Zoe is the director of business and industry at Wired Magazine.

Mark Andresen is a really powerful figure in Silicon Valley.

And aside from just having literal power because he is quite wealthy, he also is kind of at the center of Silicon Valley culture.

And while the way that he impacted that culture might have been a little bit on the fringe like five years ago,

now it really has become the dominant flavor in Silicon Valley and I I would argue, kind of the entire country.

One of the group chats organizers, Sriram Krishnan, now advises the White House on AI.

He used to work with Andresen, and according to Semaphore, called the chat the memetic upstream

of mainstream opinion.

You know, the image of this group text very much feels like one where powerful people are kind of working behind the scenes to influence narrative and

opinion and outcome. How do you think Mark Andreessen would feel about being described that way?

That's a good question. I mean, I think that Mark likes being a provocateur. Like, he is pretty

vocal about his beliefs and I think takes pride, it looks like, in kind of setting the cultural

tone. He also, like, believes what he

believes very fervently. So I think there's a reason that his very, very long blog posts about,

like, the future of the tech industry and where the world should be heading go viral. Like,

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