'Chatham House Rule'

Torenberg launched Chatham House the summer of 2024,
naming it after a British think tank that formalized the insight that
trusted conversations require a degree of privacy.

Two of its conservative participants said they see the group as a way to shift centrist Trump-curious figures to the Republican side,
but its founder said he’d begun it to have “a left-right exchange where we could have real conversations because of filter bubble group chats.”

Chatham House includes high-profile figures like the economist
#Larry #Summers and the historian #Niall #Ferguson,
and more partisan figures like #Shapiro and the Democratic analyst #David #Shor.

#Andreessen lurks.

But several participants described it to me as something like a gladiatorial arena with #Cuban most often in the center,
sparring with conservatives.

(“no idea what you are talking about :)” Cuban emailed in response to an inquiry about his arguments on Chatham House.)

The Group Chat Era depended on part of the American elite feeling shut out from public spaces,
and on the formation of a new conservative consensus.

Both of those are now fading
(though Torenberg has invested in a company called #ChatBCC that wants to commercialize the heady experience of sitting in on texts among the power elite).

Since Elon Musk turned X to the right
and an alternative media ecosystem emerged on Substack,
“a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations can now shift back into public view,” Andreessen told Fridman.

“It’s much healthier to live in a society in which people are literally not scared of what they’re saying.”

And Trump’s destabilizing “Liberation Day” has taken its toll on the coalition Andreessen helped shape.

You can see it on X,
where investors joke that they’ll put pronouns back in their bios in exchange for a return to the 2024 stock prices,
and where #Srinivasan has been a leading critic of Trump’s tariffs.

“Group chats have changed on the economy in the last few weeks,”
said #Rufo.
“There’s a big split on the tech right.”

The polarity of social media has also reversed,
and while participants used to keep their conservative ideas off social media,
“now the anti-Trump sentiment is what you’re afraid to say on X,” one said.

By mid-April, #Sacks had had enough with Chatham House:
“This group has become worthless since the loudest voices have TDS,”
he wrote, shorthanding
“Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Then he addressed Torenberg:
“You should create a new one with just smart people.”

Signal soon showed that three men had left the group:
The Sequoia partner #Shaun #Maguire,
the bitcoin billionaire #Tyler #Winklevoss, and #Tucker #Carlson.

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america

Along with the tech-centric WhatsApp groups Krishnan had organized out of a16z,
Andreessen joined a slew of others,
including ones that Torenberg set up for tech founders and for more political discussions.

The tech chats tended to be on WhatsApp and the political ones on Signal, which is more fully encrypted,
and they had different settings.

(“Every group chat ends up being about memes and humor and the goal of the group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable without tripping it,” Andreessen told Fridman.

“People will set to 5 minutes before they send something particularly inflammatory.“)

After a group of liberal intellectuals published a letter in Harper’s on July 7, 2020, some of its signers were invited to join a Signal group called “Everything Is Fine.”

There, writers including #Kmele #Foster, who co-hosts the podcast
"The Fifth Column", Persuasion founder #Yascha #Mounk, and the Harper’s letter contributor Williams joined Andreessen and a group that also included the anti-woke conservative activist #Chris #Rufo.

The new participants were charmed by Andreessen’s engagement:
“He was the most available, the most present, the most texting of anybody in the group
— which shocked me because it seemed like he was the most important person in the group,” one said.

But the center didn’t hold.

The liberal Harper’s types were surprised to find what one described an
“illiberal worldview” among tech figures more concerned with power than speech.

The conservatives found the liberal intellectuals tiresome, committed to what Rufo described to me as “infinite discourse” over action.

The breaking point came on July 5, 2021, when Foster and Williams,
along with the never-Trump conservative #David #French and the liberal academic #Jason #Stanley,
wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing new laws against teaching “critical race theory.”

“Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education,
it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression,”
they wrote.

The conservatives had thought the Harper’s letter writers were their allies in an all-out ideological battle,
and considered their position a betrayal.

Andreessen “went really ballistic in a quite personal way at Thomas,”
a participant recalled.

The group ended after Andreessen “wrote something along the lines of
‘thank you everybody, I think it’s time to take a Signal break,’” another said.

The meltdown of this liberal-tech alliance was, to #Rufo, a healthy development.

“A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,”
he said.

“By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end
— so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.”

Rufo had been there all along:
“I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right.”

#MarcAndreessen #LexFridman
#ChrisRufo
#VivekRamaswamy #ErikTorenberg #Krishnan
#NoahSmith

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america