--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's been a huge week for the group chat. Not one of yours, certainly not one of mine. I'm talking about the Houthi PC small group chat, of course. But you've never talked to him before, so how's the number on your phone? I mean, I'm not an expert on any of this, but it's just curious. How's the number on your phone?
--:-- [Sound of a phone being dialed]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, if you have somebody else's contact and then somehow it gets sucked in. Oh, someone sent you that contact. It gets sucked in. Nobody's texting war plans. As a matter of fact, they even changed the title to attack plans. Now it turns out Judge Boesberg has actually been assigned to another high-profile case, this one surrounding the fallout from the Signal messages in the Atlantic article, which we've been talking about all day, right? Never before has the group chat been subject to this kind of scrutiny, and it's been a great reminder that we have lost our way. On Today Explained, we're going to talk about texting and how we kind of forgot how to do it right. Or maybe we never knew how to do it right in the first place.
--:-- [Sound of a phone being dialed]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from the FIFA World Cup, of all things. The FIFA World Cup 26 is coming to North America next summer. It is the ultimate celebration of sports and culture. You can get closer to the beautiful game with a hospitality package, closer to the action, the best seats, the best suites, closer to match day and that world-class food and that world-class entertainment, closer to the experience of a lifetime. Book a hospitality package at fifaworldcup.com slash hospitality.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained. And this is Sean Rameswaram from here with Max Reed of the Reed Max Substack. Max has been thinking about group chats for years. In fact, he wrote a piece for New York Magazine way back in 2019 called Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again. And since a certain group chat made the internet fun this week for at least some, we thought we'd ask Max, did we this week, at least in the United States, hit peak group chat?
--:-- Max Reed: Yeah, I mean, I have to say, you know, as a journalist and as somebody who writes about the future making predictions, it felt extremely vindicating to go from a kind of trend piece about how me and a bunch of my friends seem to be turning to group chats to revelations that national security operations at the absolute highest and most top secret level were also being conducted on group chats.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are you in any of those kinds of group chats? I mean, not to the best of my knowledge, but there's a couple group chats where I don't know every single phone number in there. And like maybe Michael Waltz is somehow infiltrated and is just waiting to drop some emoji.
--:-- Max Reed: It gets sucked in. What kind of group chats are you in, Max?
--:-- Max Reed: Well, you know, I'm a father and I would say most of my group chats these days are with other parents of similarly aged kids to coordinate play dates or to do the thing where, you know, it's 3 p.m. on a Sunday and you're going absolutely insane. and so you just have to throw a flag up and really hope that some other parent will meet you at the playground.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm in a group chat that's almost exclusively about the movie Hunt for Red October, though also sometimes about submarines and fighter jets if they appear in the news. Does it have a clever name?
--:-- Max Reed: It's called Ramias's Boys, after Captain Marco Ramias, who is Sean Connery's character in Hunt for Red October. A deep cut for the casual fan of the Hunt for Red October.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm also in a group chat dedicated to analyzing and reading Ross Douthat columns, the New York Times columnist. What's that one called?
--:-- Max Reed: It's called Douthat Chat Natalists Only. I want to be clear, that's an ironic name. I'm not a political natalist or anything. Though I have to admit, this is one of two Ross Douthat group chats I'm even aware of. There's another one called The Falcon's Children, which is named after Ross's fantasy series.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It sounds like I have a really disordered relationship to Ross Douthat.
--:-- Max Reed: I want to be clear, this is very common for millennials to have group chats about Rust Outfit. Does he know about them? I hope not. I hope someone sends this to him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Great. I'm also in a group chat with three former co-workers called The Executive Team, where we just pretend to be hustle-minded entrepreneurs and send each other motivational memes and quotes. And I find this group a little upsetting because I know the other three members of this group are in a group called the Giggle Kids that I'm not allowed to be in. So, you know, this is an example of the kind of social friction that group chats can create.
--:-- Max Reed: That's tough. I've never been in the case where I found out about a group chat that like all my friends were in that I'm not in, but presumably they exist.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What I think was special about this week is whether you have 40 different group chats on your phone or if you just have one called like family chat where you text with your parents or your kids. This week, it was clear that everyone has a lot of group chats going on. So many, perhaps, that they can't even keep track of who's in them. That this week became universal.
--:-- Max Reed: How did we get here? It's a good question.
--:-- Max Reed: For most of I would say the history of the kind of social internet that we all grew up on starting with Facebook and before it Myspace, most of the social networks and a lot of what you would do socially online was organized around the term of art is a social graph it was organized on networks of connections that you made in real life and you maintained a profile where you also had all those other connections. And you would post things, say, to a feed, a la Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, that would usually reach all of those people equally, which meant, you know, early on, I think that was sort of fun and new and strange to be, you know, posting photographs that your co-workers and your family and your close friends and your old college friends might all see.
--:-- Max Reed: But over the years, it also became clear that this came with some unpredictable externalities, let's say, that it was a lot of things that you might say to co-workers or to friends or to your family that you wouldn't want to say to one of those other groups. And we began to sort of experience a phenomenon that the academic Dana Boyd called context collapse, where the different contexts where you might interact with a bunch of different people are eliminated. And all of a sudden, you find yourself in hot water, say, for putting something on Facebook that was really meant for your friends, the kind of thing you would say, like if you're out you know on a night on the town with your friends and then your aunt and your uncle and your grandparents and your parents all see it and you realize that actually maybe this was not this was not something that you wanted them to see.
--:-- Max Reed: This sort of slow motion realization of the reality of context collapse is happening at the same time that Facebook and a bunch of other big tech companies are doing a lot of I guess I would call it soul searching about their role in the 2016 election in Brexit in the general kind of populist backlash of the mid So you have what was kind of termed at the time the tech lash you know, and there was a lot of writing and criticism. You know, all the tech CEOs had to go up in front of Congress and defend themselves. Senator, we run ads. I see. Everybody was really down on Facebook, Facebook in particular, but in general on all of these companies.
--:-- Max Reed: And I think you saw at that moment both a sort of bottom-up and a top-down move to take a lot of the social interaction that had previously been happening on public platforms like Facebook or Instagram or Twitter and move it into private group chats.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It feels like at some point the group chats got a little overwhelming. Is that the case for you with all these parenting group chats where there's just a new one? Oh, there's a new one for this birthday party and there's a new one for, I don't know, this school event. And then also while that one's blowing up, there's something going on with your family chain and there's something going on with your hug for Red October chain.
--:-- Max Reed: Yeah, it is. I mean, I am a writer who works from home, which means I'm always looking for reasons to procrastinate and not do my work. So I my full time job is keeping up on group chats. But my wife, with whom I'm in a bunch of these chats has a real job and works quite hard at it and constantly says she comes back to like 60, 70 unread messages. And she's like, this is too overwhelming. I just can't I'm not going to read all these messages. I'm not going to reply.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And when did that happen? Was that like the pandemic when we just decided we'd be like typing away all day?
--:-- Max Reed: I don't really know when it happened, but it happened and it felt like we weren't properly prepared for it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I think it's hard not to notice that the increase, at least the perceived increase in the amount of time we spend in group chats, the amount of messages we send in group chats seemed to happen during a time when most of us, many of us were trapped inside our houses, or at the very least sort of trapped inside our cities. We weren't visiting friends who lived far away. We were sort of desperate for socializing with people, and group chats were a really easy-to-hand way of doing that. And a little bit like working from home, it's something that hasn't gone away, even as the barriers to in-person interaction have gone away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then, of course, this week, one of those group chats somehow became the biggest story in the United States. I mean, we probably aren't at any danger, we common plebs, of being added to a national security group chat anytime soon. But it did feel like something about this story clicked for a lot of people because there was something innately just normal and dumb and human and relatable about it.
--:-- Max Reed: Oh, totally. I mean, I think about it compared with some of the other scandals about national security secrets, like improper classification and improper leakage, thinking about various security documents that ended up at Mar-a-Lago or in Joe Biden's garage or sort of infamously the like Hillary Clinton email scandal.
--:-- Max Reed: And none of the rest of us, very few of the rest of us at least, have access to reams of classified information that we might ever have in a box and put in a storage unit. Whereas mistakenly adding someone to a group chat who you didn't mean to or finding yourself in a group chat where people don't realize that you're in there, that's something that can happen to anybody.
--:-- Max Reed: There's a much clearer narrative about exactly the screw-up here that doesn't require you to kind of place yourself in the position of a president or whatever. You know, they could have been planning a surprise birthday party and accidentally like added somebody who the subject of the birthday or or just somebody who wasn't related at all who now can see all of it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Max Reed dot substack dot com. The group chats didn't come with a how to manual, but clearly people need one. So, the do's and don'ts of texting in the year of our Lord 2025, next up on the show of our Lord, Today Explained.
--:-- [Sound of a phone being dialed]
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash Explained.
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--:-- [Sound of a phone being dialed]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: from NPR. Life Kit offers real stories about common issues like relationships, finances, parenting, and your career. If you're looking to move with more intention or just need thoughtful guidance on living better, Life Kit delivers strategies to help you make meaningful, sustainable change. From fitness routines to mental resilience, navigating personal goals to tackling burnout, each episode is full of relevant insights and clear takeaways about things we all could use a little help with. LifeKit wants to help you approach your own life with confidence and clarity and walk away with a game plan you can implement right away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Enough from me. Go listen to the show Life Kit. It a podcast from NPR. I am Tatum Hunter and I am an internet culture reporter at the Washington Post. And you are brave enough to tell people how to text.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: Well, I think that our lives play out increasingly online. Today, when you say something like internet culture, that's just culture a lot of the time, right? You talk about texting etiquette, like, yeah, that's just how we communicate. So I'm super into etiquette because I report on how the internet trickles down into our lives and changes our relationships.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome back, ladies. Today, I really wanted to talk to you about the do's and don'ts of texting. This is how to text the guy that you like. First thing you're going to do is get rid of this idea that you can't text him first. If you text me longer than five sentences, that is now a phone call. You send really long text messages. If you multi, multi, multi text, all of those tend to be low value needy behaviors. If you're tired of having dry texting conversations, we all are. Let's fix that, okay? Should we start with the do's or should we start with the don'ts? Let's start with the don'ts because I think that's spicier for people.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: Okay, great. Let's go. For the haters, we'll start with the don'ts. Do you have a list? How do you want to get into this?
--:-- Tatum Hunter: I absolutely have a list. Okay, let's maybe like three big don'ts. All right. One don't is don't use group texts for something that they weren't created for. Who was texting me at 3 a.m.? Random question flies in the chat. Hey, man, if you run out of butter, what else can I put in a pan? What? Why am I in this group chat? If everybody has that group text from a bachelorette party in like 2018 that people will still pop into to like share photos of their kids or ask questions about, you know, Those have to die once you're done with the reason that you created them.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: So if you have a group chat with your parents because you're related, that can keep going forever because you'll always be related. But if you have a group chat to plan a project or a trip or do introductions, that needs to be laid to rest once that planning is over.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: Another don't is don't get all offended when people have a different texting style than you. Oh. I see this come up all the time. I write for an audience that's a little bit older, and people get really ruffled when people don't use, for example, like proper capitalization, punctuation. No way! A revolution against punctuation. Yeah, apparently the younger generation, the Gen Zs and millennials, don't trust the punctuation mark, period.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: I don't know how to end this sentence. Is it a period? Is it an emoji? Or is it like, sometimes I'll just do another exclamation point, or maybe I just leave it with no punctuation or no emoji. And then you can flip the script and you'll see younger folks getting frustrated and making fun of the way their boss is, their relatives text when they're spelling things out, using ridiculous acronyms, using the Gen Z, sorry, the Gen X ellipsis, where you're not sure Or if they're mad at you because they are putting ellipses into text messages where they don't belong.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: Like every generation has its quirks with the way that it is typing out messages. And I think we're past the point where we're going to argue about like, should we be spelling everything right? You know, should this be should this be formal? Should this be informal? You have to let everyone live.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: Number three, you said you had three big ones. Oh, OK. Oh, my gosh. I have so many don'ts. I have more don'ts than I have do's. And I guess that's I guess that's what etiquette is. If we all did everything right, we wouldn't need it. But don't be a wet blanket. Obviously, texting is going to be shorter, drier than sending a voice note, than having a phone call. But you want to be matching people's energy, especially if you use texting to stay in touch, to share something about your life.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: If you're using it like a conversation, don't be that guy who's sending OK or thumbs up. Lots of people see the thumbs up emoji as being passive aggressive. Really? React to my message is like, you know what, I saw your message, but you're not even worth me typing out a f***ing word. It's like a stab in the abdomen to me. What the hell was that?
--:-- Tatum Hunter: Can I tell you about one of my pet peeves when it comes to this particular don't? Yes. Is when you send someone you love something great you saw online, an article, a meme, a joke, a photo, and they go, seen it. I'm like, if you saw it, then why didn't you send it to me? Or if you saw it, just like, give me the reaction you had when you saw it. Seeing it is not useful to me. I don't care that you planted your flag on this meme before I did.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: Also, you were the goal was a discussion. Like, imagine if you were with somebody and you were like, hey, you know, I just saw a news story about the, you know, about these high level government people leaking their signal chat and someone was like, heard it. You're like, no, I get that. It's news. I want to talk about it. I feel like memes are kind of the same. Yes. And yes. And we've done our rants. Should we talk about some do's or do you have some more don'ts you really want to get off your chest?
--:-- Tatum Hunter: Oh, man. Oh, man. OK, I have one more don't. I actually need to hate more than I thought I did, which is no scary mysteries. Don't send a text. Don't send a text like, hey, can we talk? Oh, I hate that too. My parents do that. Oh, don't send a text. My mom does call me. Call me as soon as you can. And it's like, I call her. It's like, hey, so do you want to eat tacos or? Literally, same. Where the urgency is just not matched to the content. Yeah. No scary mysteries allowed. You should say why you're reaching out.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: Okay. We've done a lot of don't. Let's do a little do. Yes. Okay. One really nice thing to do when you're texting is to tell people what you want from them. Maybe one person wants to be in touch a lot and the other doesn't. Maybe one person wants to talk about more serious, heavy emotional stuff over the text and the other person is really uncomfortable with that. But exactly like your in-person relationships, people can't read your mind and you have to tell them what you want.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: So maybe that looks something like, I want to be in touch every day. I want to hear how your day was. Or hey, on weekdays, this is exhausting for me. Can we just, like, have a big old phone call on Saturdays? Whatever. You know what you're reminding me of is, like, the voice memos, or as I call them sometimes when I get them from Noelle King, my co-host, voice memoirs.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: Okay, I have started this message three times, and this is the fourth. Which, you know, can be really short and punchy and hilarious. I going to vent for two minutes because I been very positive lately and I feel like I have the right to complain to you for two minutes In Noelle case I never not loved one But sometimes they like eight minutes long not from Noelle but from other people And you're just like, this is like work now. You just sent me a whole podcast. I have to add to my queue. Like maybe we should establish at some point in the texting whether we want those or not, maybe.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: Absolutely. And again, just like any other thing in your friendships and relationships, it might require some compromise. So maybe for the person who's less texty, that means you're shooting an emoji, a thumbs up, a one sentence thing saying, saw it, care about you, I'll get back to this. Right? That's a nice compromise. Or maybe if you're the person who, you know, tends to get offended by this, you draw some boundary. You're like, hey, if you can't respond to me on time, maybe we should stick to phone calls. Right? Like, it's not embarrassing, I think, to talk about your texting life as if it matters, because it does.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: I like that. I like that. Be bold. OK, any more do's that you really want to, you know, share with the people out there? I would say do like stay grounded in reality. Remember the world we live in and remember that if you're in a, you know, encrypted signal chat, if you're in your private iMessage group with your best friends, That doesn't mean that you have carte blanche to say stuff that you would never want the world to see.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: We've seen again and again and again how screenshots of messages, it's not sacred. It can get out. It can get shared with the person you're talking about. In this chat, there was a moment where J.D. Vance questioned POTUS's judgment about this Houthi bombing. Vance said the plan was a mistake and was inconsistent with Trump's message. There was some analysis and shattering after those screenshots leaked from the Signal chat about, you know, how Vance had signaled that he might have a different opinion than Trump on a matter of foreign policy.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: Now he has to show up to work and be like, you know, hi, Donald. It's that Trump is a really bad candidate and, frankly, I think a really bad person. So it's important to remember that nothing is private, nothing is sacred once you have written it in a text. And of course, we're going to see where, you know, the blowback for this group chat getting out ends up with someone losing their job with a federal inquiry. Who knows? What's clear is it won't soon be forgotten.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: And the amount of tension on group chats has led us all maybe to, like, think a little bit more about how we communicate with our friends, with our colleagues, with with our family. Do you think it's for the best that we all had a moment to just reflect on the group chat? You know what? There's an optimist inside of me who likes to believe that this will be good for society, that we're all reflecting on the group chat.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: However, now I've lived too long, right? So like, you know, Bezos' text leak, we're like, oh, man, we'll never forget this. Biden leaves his Venmo public. Come on, man. Vance leaves his blog public and, you know, we're finding we're looking at Venmo transactions from Matt Gaetz. And most recently we saw that Mike Waltz of Signal Chat fame left his Venmo friends list public. It gets sucked in. And, you know, people people find it and they analyze it. And it happens again and again and again to politicians, to celebrities, to to CEOs.
--:-- Tatum Hunter: So now I'm like starting to lose faith. It's like how many high profile, embarrassing instances of our digital footprints getting out of our own control will it take before we everybody pumps the brakes? Because it's a hard learned lesson to just kind of remember that digital stuff is forever, even in the safest of places.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I have to say, in light of this week's news, Tatum, we are skipping a huge don't, which is don't add people to a group chat against their will. I need to add another bullet point to this guide and say, don't add the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to the group chats where you're gossiping, because there was some gossip happening. They were gossiping about Europe. They hate her. Tatum Hunter, you can read more do's and don'ts from her for you at WAPO.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Abishai Artsy and Gabrielle Burbay made our show today from California. Joey Myers edited, Laura Bullard fact-checked, Andrea Kristen's daughter mixed it. You heard from Noel King earlier. The rest of us are Hadi Mawagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Victoria Chamberlain, Devin Schwartz, Patrick Boyd, Carla Javier, Miles Bryan, and Travis Larchuk, who's leaving us today, but maybe he'll be back one day. What do you say, Travis?
--:-- Travis Larchuk: [no response]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Amina Alsadi is our supervising editor. Miranda Kennedy is our executive producer. We use music by Breakmaster Sildner. This week, we use some by Francesca Ramsey, too. If you don't know Francesca, you should. You can find her singing about leopards eating her face on the gram at Cheska Lee. That's L-E-I-G-H.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, Explain is distributed by WIC. See the show as part of Vox. Support our journalism by joining our membership program today, if you don't mind. Go to vox.com slash members to sign up, if you don't mind. And if you don't mind, we now have a Sunday show. Maybe you've noticed. It comes out on Sundays. The Today Explained feed, the one that you're in right now. It's called Explain It To Me. Listen. Thank you.
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