Huge week for the group chat

Summary

Today, Explained - Episode Summary: "Huge Week for the Group Chat"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Today, Explained
• Host/Author: Vox
• Description: Today, Explained is Vox's daily news explainer podcast. Hosts Sean Rameswaram and Noel King guide listeners through the most important stories of the day.
• Episode: Huge Week for the Group Chat
• Release Date: March 28, 2025

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1. Introduction: The Surge of Group Chats

The episode kicks off with Sean Ramis highlighting the unprecedented focus on group chats over the past week. Unlike personal group chats, this scrutiny centers on a high-profile group chat connected to the Houthi PC. Sean remarks, “[00:00] ... never talked to him before. So how's the number on your phone?” This sets the stage for a deep dive into how group chats have permeated various aspects of both personal and national spheres.

2. The Evolution of Group Chats: Insights with Max Reed

Hosted alongside Max Reed from the Reed Max Substack, the discussion delves into the evolution and rising prominence of group chats. Sean references Max's 2019 New York Magazine piece, “Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again,” and questions if the U.S. has reached a peak in group chat usage.

Max reflects on the transformation from public social platforms to private group chats, attributing this shift to the phenomenon of "context collapse." He explains, “[05:29] ... social interaction that had previously been happening on public platforms like Facebook or Instagram or Twitter and move it into private group chats.” This transition was partly a response to the 2016 election backlash and the ensuing "techlash," where users sought more controlled and intimate communication channels.

3. The Overwhelming Proliferation of Group Chats

Max and Sean discuss the overwhelming number of group chats individuals manage daily. Max shares his personal experience, stating, “[08:26] ... my wife ... constantly says she comes back to like 60, 70 unread messages and she's like, this is too overwhelming.” This sentiment resonates with many listeners who find the constant influx of notifications and messages daunting, especially when balancing personal and professional communications.

4. The National Security Group Chat Leak

A pivotal moment in the episode revolves around the leak of a national security group chat. Max contrasts this incident with previous security leaks, noting its relatability and the ease with which such a mistake can occur. “[10:20] ... 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.” This incident underscores the vulnerability of private communications and the potential repercussions of inadvertent inclusions.

5. Reflecting on Digital Communication Practices

The hosts reflect on how the overreliance on group chats and digital communication has led to a loss in personal interaction skills. Max muses, “[09:48] ... working from home. It's something that hasn't gone away even as the barriers to in-person interaction have gone away.” This enduring shift highlights the lasting impact of the pandemic on communication habits, emphasizing the need for balance between digital and face-to-face interactions.

6. Texting Etiquette: Do's and Don'ts with Tatum Hunter

In an insightful segment on texting etiquette, Tatum Hunter joins the conversation to outline essential guidelines for effective digital communication. She emphasizes the importance of clarity and respect in text interactions:

• Don’ts:

  • Misusing Group Chats: “[14:01] ... don't use group texts for something that they weren't created for.”
  • Being Overly Passive: “[17:29] ... using the Gen Z ... where you're, like, not sure if they're mad at you because they are putting ellipses into text messages where they don't belong.”
  • Sending Vague Messages: “[17:48] ... don't send someone you love something great. You saw online, an article, a meme, a joke, a photo, and they go, seen it.”

• Do’s:

  • Communicate Intentions: “[19:20] ... tell people what you want from them. Maybe one person wants to be in touch a lot and the other doesn't.”
  • Set Boundaries: “[20:37] ... establish at some point in the texting whether we want those or not. Maybe we should stick to phone calls.”

Tatum stresses the importance of mutual understanding and adapting communication styles to maintain healthy relationships in the digital age.

7. The Impermanence of Digital Privacy

Tatum Hunter also touches on the fragility of digital privacy, highlighting how once something is shared via text, it’s no longer entirely private. “[21:18] ... remember that 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.” This cautionary note serves as a reminder of the lasting nature of digital footprints and the need for mindful communication.

8. Conclusion: The Future of Group Chats and Digital Communication

As the episode wraps up, Sean and Tatum ponder the future implications of their discussion. Sean muses, “[22:19] ... we're finding we're looking at Venmo transactions from Matt Gaetz.” The conversation underscores a growing skepticism about digital privacy and the relentless spread of digital communication tools into every facet of life. Tatum concludes on a note of cautious optimism, hoping that the increased awareness of group chat dynamics will lead to more thoughtful and intentional communication practices.

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Notable Quotes:

• Sean Ramis [00:00]: “How's the number on your phone?”
• Max Reed [05:29]: “... move it into private group chats.”
• Max Reed [08:26]: “My wife... constantly says she comes back to like 60, 70 unread messages...”
• Max Reed [10:20]: “... something that can happen to anybody.”
• Tatum Hunter [14:01]: “Don't use group texts for something that they weren't created for.”
• Tatum Hunter [19:20]: “Tell people what you want from them.”
• Tatum Hunter [21:18]: “Remember that 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.”

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This episode of "Today, Explained" provides a comprehensive exploration of the multifaceted role group chats play in modern communication, examining both their benefits and the potential pitfalls associated with their pervasive use. Through insightful discussions and expert commentary, listeners are encouraged to reflect on their own digital communication habits and consider the broader societal implications.

Transcript

[Sean Ramis]

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 in any of this, but it's just curious. How's the number on your phone? Well, if you have somebody else's contact and then it. And then somehow, oh, someone sends you that, it gets sucked in. Nobody's texting war plans. As a matter of fact, they even changed the Title II attack plans. Now it turns out Judge Boasberg 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 gonna 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.

[Max Reed]

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[Sean Ramis]

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[Max Reed]

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[Tatum Hunter]

It's got that booty, that juicy boom.

[Max Reed]

Boom that don't got alive arm and hammer power sheets toss like this cause.

[Sean Ramis]

I toss like this A wash like this It's a no mess Laundry bliss.

[Tatum Hunter]

Arm and hammer power she more power to you.

[Sean Ramis]

This is TODAY Explained. And this is Sean Ramis for I'm 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 Ramis]

Are you in any of those kinds of group chats?

[Max Reed]

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.

[Sean Ramis]

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 3pm 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 play playground. I mean, 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.

[Sean Ramis]

Does it have a clever name?

[Max Reed]

It's called Ramius Boys, after Captain Marco Ramius, who is Sean Connery's character in Hunt for Red October.

[Sean Ramis]

A deep cut for the casual fan.

[Max Reed]

Of the Hunt for Red October. Yeah, exactly.

[Sean Ramis]

Your signal said nothing of a torpedo.

[Max Reed]

I'm also in a group chat dedicated to analyzing and reading Ross Douthat columns. The New York Times columnist.

[Sean Ramis]

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 1 of 2 Ross Douthat Group chats that I'm even aware of. There's another one called the Falcon's Children, which is named after Ross's fantasy series. It sounds like I have a really disordered relationship to Ross Douthat. I want to be clear, this is very common for millennials to have group chats about Ross Douthat.

[Sean Ramis]

Does he know about them?

[Max Reed]

I hope not.

[Sean Ramis]

I hope someone says this to him. Great.

[Max Reed]

I'm also in a group chat with three former coworkers called 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.

[Sean Ramis]

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.

[Max Reed]

I think every group chat has an equal number of group chats. That is, everybody in the group chat except for one person.

[Sean Ramis]

Oof. 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. How did we get here?

[Max Reed]

It's a good question. So 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 as a social graph. It was organized around 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. 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 coworkers 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. 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 and the general kind of populist backlash of the mid 2010s. So you have what was kind of termed at the time the tech lash. And there was a lot of writing and criticism. 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. 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 Ramis]

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, 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 HUD 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 w 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. And I think, I think that's probably true for a lot of people. I think if you made the mistake of marrying someone whose job is computer all the time, everything's computer, then probably you're, you're even worse at it.

[Sean Ramis]

And when did that happen? Was that like the pandemic when we just decided we'd be like typing away all day? I don't really know when it happened, but it happened and it felt like we weren't properly prepared for it?

[Max Reed]

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 and the amount of messages we send in group chats seem 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. You were sort of desperate for social 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 Ramis]

Yeah. 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. And none of the rest of us, very few of the rest of us at least have access to like 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. There's a much clearer narrative about exactly the screw up here that doesn't require 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 just somebody who wasn't related at all, who now can see all of it.

[Sean Ramis]

Maxread.substack.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. This episode is brought to you by Universal Pictures. Today's the day. From Universal Pictures and Blumhouse come a storm of terror. From the director of the Shallow the woman in the yard, don't let her in. Where does she come from? What does she want? When will she leave the woman in the yard in theaters now Pro Savings Days are back at Lowe's with limited time savings on the supplies pros need. Get up to 40% off select major appliances plus save an additional $100 on every $1,000 you spend on select major appliances. And don't miss your chance to activate and earn three times the points on select DeWalt and Klein tools Lowes. We help you save valid the 328 selection varies by location while supplies last. See associate or lowe's.com for more details on qualifying items.

[Max Reed]

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[Sean Ramis]

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[Max Reed]

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[Sean Ramis]

Check responses for accuracy today. Explain.

[Tatum Hunter]

I am Tatum Hunter and I am an Internet culture reporter at the Washington.

[Sean Ramis]

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. And this is contentious for people behave in a group chat on a text thread.

[Max Reed]

Welcome back ladies. Today I really wanted to talk to.

[Tatum Hunter]

You about the do's and don'ts of texting.

[Sean Ramis]

This is how to text the guy that you like.

[Tatum Hunter]

First thing you're gonna do is get.

[Sean Ramis]

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. If you send really long text messages, if you multi, multi, multi text, all of those tend to be low value needy behaviors.

[Max Reed]

If you're tired of having dry texting.

[Tatum Hunter]

Conversations, we all are. Let's fix that.

[Max Reed]

Ok.

[Sean Ramis]

Should we start with the do's or should we start with the don'ts?

[Tatum Hunter]

Let's start with the don'ts because I think that's spicier for people.

[Sean Ramis]

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.

[Sean Ramis]

Who was Texting me at 3am Random question, flies in the chat.

[Tatum Hunter]

Hey, man, if you run out of butter, what else can I put in a pan? What?

[Sean Ramis]

Why am I in this group chat.

[Tatum Hunter]

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. 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. 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.

[Sean Ramis]

No way.

[Max Reed]

A revolution against punctuation.

[Sean Ramis]

Yeah.

[Max Reed]

Apparently the younger generation, the Gen Z's.

[Sean Ramis]

And millennials don't trust the punctuation mark. Period. Like, 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, like, another exclamation point? Or, like, maybe I just leave it with no punctuation or no emoji, and.

[Tatum Hunter]

Then you can flip the script and you'll see younger folks getting frustrated and making fun of the way their bosses, their relatives text when they're spelling things out using ridiculous acronyms, using the Gen Z, or, sorry, the Gen X ellipsis, where you're, like, not sure if they're mad at you because they are putting ellipses into text messages where they don't belong. 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 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.

[Sean Ramis]

Number three. You said you had three big ones.

[Tatum Hunter]

Ooh, okay. 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 gonna be shorter, drier than sending a voice note than having a phone call. But you wanna be matching people's energy. Especially if you use texting to stay in touch, to share your life. If you're using it like a conversation, don't be that guy who's sending. Okay. Or thumbs up.

[Max Reed]

Lots of people see the thumbs up.

[Tatum Hunter]

Emoji as being passive aggressive. Really react to my messages like, you know what?

[Max Reed]

I saw your message, but you don't even. You're not even worth me typing out a word.

[Tatum Hunter]

It's like a stab in the abdomen to me.

[Max Reed]

What the hell was that?

[Sean Ramis]

Can I tell you about one of my pet peeves when it comes to this particular Don't.

[Tatum Hunter]

Yes.

[Sean Ramis]

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. Seen it is not useful to me. I don't care that you planted your flag on this meme before I did.

[Tatum Hunter]

Also, 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 like, no, I get that it's news. I wanna talk about it. I feel like memes are kind of the same.

[Sean Ramis]

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 wanna get off your chest?

[Tatum Hunter]

Oh, man. Oh, man. Okay, 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 like, oh, don't send a text like, can we talk?

[Sean Ramis]

Oh, I hate that too. My parents do that.

[Tatum Hunter]

Oh, don't send it to. My mom does. Call me.

[Sean Ramis]

Call me as soon as you can. Like, I call her. It's like, hey, so do you want to eat tacos?

[Tatum Hunter]

Or literally my. My same. Where the urgency is just not matched to the. To the content. Yeah, no scary mysteries allowed. You should say why you're reaching out.

[Sean Ramis]

Okay. We've done a lot of don't. Let's do a little do.

[Tatum Hunter]

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 text and the other person's 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. 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.

[Sean Ramis]

You know, what you're reminding me of is like the voice memos or as I call them sometimes when I get them from Noel King, my co host voice memoirs. 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'm going to vent for two minutes because I've been very positive lately and I feel like I have the right to complain to you for two minutes. In Noelle's case, I've never not loved one, but sometimes they're 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 technical, 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 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? It's not embarrassing, I think, to talk about your texting life as if it matters, because it does.

[Sean Ramis]

I like that. I like that. Be bold. Okay. Any more do's that you really want to share with the people out there?

[Tatum Hunter]

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, 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.

[Max Reed]

Vance questioned POTUS judgment about this Houthi bombing.

[Sean Ramis]

Vance said the plan was a mistake and was inconsistent with Trump's message.

[Tatum Hunter]

There was some analysis and chattering 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. Now he has to show up to work and be like, you know, hi.

[Sean Ramis]

Donald, it's that Trump is a really bad candidate and frankly, I think a really bad person.

[Tatum Hunter]

So it's important to remember that nothing is private, nothing is sacred once you have written it in a text.

[Sean Ramis]

And of course, we're gonna see where 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. 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?

[Tatum Hunter]

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. 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 find it and they analyze and it happens again and again and again to politicians, to celebrities, to CEOs. 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 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 Ramis]

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.

[Tatum Hunter]

I need to add another bullet point to this guide and say, don't add the editor in chief of the Atlantic to your group chats where you're gossiping because there was some gossip happening. They were gossip gossiping about Europe. They hate her.

[Sean Ramis]

Tatum Hunter, you can read more do's and don'ts from her for [e-mail], avishai artsy and Gabrielle Burbay made our show today from California. Jolie Myers edited, Laura Bullard fact checked. Andrea Christin's daughter mixed it. You heard from Noel King earlier. The rest of us are Hadima Wagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Peter Ballin on Rosen, Victoria Chamberlain, Devin Schwartz, Patrick Boyd, Carla Javier, Miles Bryant and Travis Larchuk, who's leaving us today. But maybe he'll be back one day. What do you say, Travis? Aminah Al Saadi is our supervising editor. Miranda Kennedy is our executive producer. We use music by Breakmaster Cylner 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 Today Explained. It's distributed by wnyc. The show is part of vox. Support our journalism by joining our membership program today. If you don't mind, go to vox.commembers 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.