Inside “Dialog”: Peter Thiel’s [secret] Society

A leaked member list shows that 222 hand-selected people will try to murder democracy

222 individuals are among the members of the invite-only “Dialog” society. The list of members is as deep as it is powerful, and as well-connected as they are influential. From US Senators to department secretaries, from the tech elite to Hollywood, and a world renowned chess-player, turned Substacker is on there, too.

The intent of “Dialog” is to get the right people in the same room, to then align the interests of the security state, surveillance‑tech, data‑brokerages, and high‑level policymakers inside an off‑the‑record “speak easy”, that cannot easily be reported on, scrutinized by investigative reporting, the public, or any democratic function that represents the people.

Unlike the World Economic Forum, where official registrations and schedules are published, Dialog has no transparent functions, no press presence, no recorded talks, and certainly no transcripts. That was, until a hacker (supposedly: maia arson crimew) found the member list and meeting agendas and sent them to Wired Magazine. Wired vetted both and found them worth publishing: panels on cult-building, sessions on preparing for World War III, and “How’s your sex life?” They are certainly discussing their own future, but more importantly, they are discussing yours.

Dialog

Dialog was founded in 2006 by Peter Thiel, who also co-founded Palantir, which builds the surveillance infrastructure the U.S. government uses to track, monitor, and remove people it does not want.

Thiel co-founded Dialog with Auren Hoffman, whose data-broker firms supply the commercial layer to the security and surveillance complex. Axios described Dialog as a secretive, invite-only network that had become one of the most elite and mysterious clubs for CEOs, officials, and influential thinkers. Gizmodo called it a tech-era Bilderberg. Both descriptions are accurate. Both miss the point.

The Bilderberg Group is at least visible and with a bit of digging, their agenda is easily discernible. Dialog isn’t in that category. They published nothing, and for 20 years it operated without any public footprint. The leak changed that, albeit likely only very briefly (Gizmodo).

What the leak uncovered was not a scandal in the tabloid sense, so there aren’t any juicy headlines, because it’s a difficult “sell” to be on the front page. The “secret society” story, that’s somewhere between a bad James Bond script and “Eyes Wide Shut”, is the stuff that makes you doubt your own perceptions, gaslighting your own conclusions:

“A group of well-connected and highly influential people gathering in private to decide on future directions and global impacts, in countries where their aim includes dismantling the democratic mechanisms that would otherwise constrain them or hold them to account.”

This cannot possibly be real. Can it? That’s the preferred outcome when you operate completely in the shadows. Doubting their existence is a strategy that buys them operational elbow room.

The People Inside Dialog

The leaked directory, which has not yet been fully published, but the little bit that’s known already reads like a who’s who of people with influence.

The NATO Supreme Allied Commander for Europe has been attending since 2021. The Army secretary is listed, as is the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, alongside the chairman of the committee with jurisdiction over the FTC and federal privacy law. The Treasury secretary, whose department writes the rules on financial data and runs financial surveillance through FinCEN and OFAC, is listed as well.

These people did not accidentally end up in the same room. For each participant, there’s a specific reason to be invited. Some more obvious than others. Suffice to say, Dialog’s design is purpose-built to create psychological safety. Through it being invitation-only, the intimacy of closed sessions is built to create a level of informality that formal meetings cannot produce.

Think of Dialog as a “speakeasy”, that went undetected for 20 years.

Palantir Is Not Merely a Guest

Thiel co-founded Dialog and Palantir. Both originated from the same roost, and for the last few years, both companies created pathways to influence government, legislation, and individual politicians. By which manner their coercion took place remains to be determined, but considering the frameworks of secrecy [multiplied by] surveillance, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the scarcity of membership, while being front and center of one of the most advanced and aggressive surveillance companies, can lead to all kinds of pressure points.

Think of it this way: Dialog gets the people who make decisions into one room. In that room, they’re exposed to high-level conversations. Whether favors change hands, or a person owes another a favor in the future, or if it’s money, or pressure tactics, in the end, Palantir’s software runs the backbone of many U.S. government departments and the US military.

From there, the speak-easy connections are that the Pentagon, which has easy access to nearly unlimited funding, pays (taxpayer dollars) for Palantir’s software, and then also, conveniently, relies on Elon Musk’s Starlink for much of its global communications infrastructure.

Now, take it one step farther. If you consider that Thiel and Musk are also part of the infamous “PayPal Mafia,” it doesn’t take a magic 8-ball to recognize the continued play for tech, infrastructure, surveillance, and murderous supremacy, under one umbrella. Then you add one of Dialog’s conversational topics, “Preparing for WW3,” and you know that they’re considering that the outcome of their ways may backfire. That’s a relevant conversation when you’re constantly operating on the edge of what should be possible.

This is merely a sketched-out scenario. The reality may be less intense or far worse. Chances are, we’re right on the money about this all works.

Dialog doesn’t rest its forward progress. Axios and Gizmodo both reported that Dialog is now negotiating to buy a permanent campus in Virginia, just outside Washington. Their intent is to expand influence in D.C. long after the current regime ends (Axios, Gizmodo).

In effect, the adage of “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer,” Dialog knows that the government, if elected by the people in a democratic way, is only one socially responsible election away from making their lives incredibly difficult. Thus, the closer they can set up shop to D.C, the faster they can react to adverse circumstances that could negatively affect their desire for global dominance, by way of murdering democracy.

The Data Brokers and Psychographics

SafeGraph, one of Auren Hoffman’s companies, became notorious for selling location data that tracked visits to abortion clinics, including Planned Parenthood facilities. Google banned it from the Android marketplace for policy violations, while The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented how SafeGraph’s claims about data safety were, well, manufactured bullshit. Data is harvested, then sold to the highest bidder, which demonstrably are well-funded organizations, from the Heritage Foundation to The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which is still working on getting Mifepristone and Misoprostol off the shelves by relying on the Comstock Act.

Then there’s LiveRamp, also Hoffman’s company, which operates as an identity-resolution and data-collaboration platform. It is now being acquired by Publicis Groupe in a multibillion-dollar deal. LiveRamp enables advertisers, insurers, and government clients to stitch together behavioral and transactional profiles across multiple sources, to adjust risk profiles by way of actuarial data and then change your monthly insurance rates, based on the established psychological docket. Inevitably, the monetary element is the immediate concern, but in the long run, your loss of agency and self-determination is the actual outcome. Once the data is compiled, you have very little opportunity to completely erase whatever data deck they have on you.

In 2026, the FTC sent warning letters to 13 firms regarding the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act, which restricts sales of sensitive data to entities tied to foreign governments. That enforcement environment directly implicates the kinds of firms Hoffman built, except, the U.S government isn’t a foreign government. Conveniently, Ted Cruz chairs the committee with jurisdiction over the FTC (Wired.com).

And, to no one’s surprise, Cruz is a member of Dialog.

Allegedly, Cruz and Hoffman met, off the record, of course. This is where “proving a negative” kicks in. Sure, they met. But the contents of the meeting are undisclosed; therefore, correlations between the FTC’s enforcement and LiveRamp are speculative, not rooted in fact. Convenient.

Your Money and the Treasury Department

Scott Bessent’s job at Treasury is, among other things, to combat economic threats and protecting American the financial system. To do that, the U.S government has FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control. The catch here is that, although both entities can be used to combat crime, both entities are, by design, also surveillance operations. They exist to watch money move, how it’s moving, and who’s moving it. The question is “how closely are they watching,” and are they focusing on crime or are they focusing on people who are inconvenient, too?

Bessent, without a doubt, isn’t in the corner of the people, and his handwriting has been moving the needle. The Cato Institute criticized his expansion of Bank Secrecy Act reporting to cover transactions as small as $200 and noted that when that expansion was challenged in court, Bessent responded by widening the surveillance further. Reuters reported that his team is overhauling the Financial Stability Oversight Council toward what it describes as innovation priorities. The Financial Times reported that he summoned major bank CEOs to discuss AI-related cyber risk.

Inside Dialog, Bessent is rubbing elbows with Hoffman, Thiel, Musk, and other power players, where specifically Musk and Thiel, with their understanding of the monetary system through PayPal and data aggregation, are in the position to cause massive inconvenience or worse yet, significant damages, to the American people. This is, potentially, at the root of the whole conversation of how much money you can transfer via Venmo, Zelle, etc., before you officially have to declare how much money you moved from one person to another.

The problem, once again, is that this is speculative, because when there’s no official record in existence, proving that something exists becomes virtually impossible.

This is how regulatory capture and control works nowadays. We’ve moved on from registered lobbyists who book meetings with movers-and-shakers, but the goalpost has been moved to the Treasury Secretary and a data-broker founder meeting at a dinner that no one knows about, and even if it made headlines, the contents of their conversation and organization were never documented. Unless someone snitches, it’s impossible to prove the correlation from dinner to reporting requirements.

Prepping for World War III

The leaked retreat agenda includes a session on preparing for World War III. For some inexplicable reason, this has received coverage more from a curiosity angle, perhaps a bit with “they’re lunatics,” when the full gravitas that they are the ones most likely to cause WW3 hasn’t been given the consideration it deserves.

The session discussing World War III contained NATO officials, the U.S. Army, Palantir, Starlink, investors, finance people, etc. In part, it’s the people who would profit from a large-scale conflict, and in another part, it’s the people who would decide how such a conflict is carried out, and the remaining part is to be “in the know” as to where to go to wait out whatever may come of such a conflict.

Naturally, all conversations were held in secret, no notes or transcripts available, so anyone who’s now correlating the 1% building bunkers in New Zealand, Hawaii, or moving to Argentina (Peter Thiel), is left to question their own sanity, quasi self-gaslighting into the la-la land of conspiracy theories.

Who Was in the Room: The Confirmed List

Below is a structured list of Dialog participants identified in WIRED’s reporting, a more exhaustive but unverified list, an invitation email, and the Substacker’s name. As for the names, where indicated, they were run through a research stack to determine their roles in “real life” and how they matter in the world of Dialog.

There are three separate lists. Wired has the list from the hacker, containing 222 names. Wired is not releasing all names at once.

Then, there are several Instagram posts, such as this one by“hereiseeheresy”, claiming to have an expanded list, albeit far from 222 names. Is the list plausible? Yes. Is it verified? No.

Updated: continued research showed this: https://github.com/nzaki-dev/dialog

https://web.archive.org/web/20260331003408/https://www.dialog.org/

Then there’s the list I want to offer, which is a bit more conservative and better substantiated (all links are below the article).

This is a small, 40-person drop of the 222 names of the leaked Rolodex. Over time, more names will be released, and as they become public, equal and inappropriate distractions will take your eyes off the ball.

Also, an email “invitation” was leaked, which remains unverified to date. The recipient…

The Truman Show Effect

For the most part, even with all our economic, political, social, and structural ills, we are living in a manufactured reality where “things are still barely possible.” It is a Truman Show kind of existence: one where we slowly recognize the rat race we’re running on behalf of the ruling class, while simultaneously robbing us of the capacity to organize, object, and, if necessary, overturn.

Thiel knows that. He also knows there is a breaking point, where the people will no longer accept the curated bubble that suffocates them. There is a reason he said, in 2009, that “freedom and democracy are incompatible.” His aim is to extinguish democracy under the premise that people will then be “free.” What he does not say, and what the evidence of Dialog demonstrates, is that when you murder democracy, every other form of governance is one of suppression, absent of freedom.

The problem with Dialog is not merely its existence. It’s that it shows us how a well-concealed speakeasy can shape the course of our daily lives, and we have no idea who’s pulling the strings behind the scenes. Dialog exists because it can, and because we are kept so busy and distracted that we don’t recognize it. Whether it’s called “Dialog” or has a different name is inconsequential. What matters is that it shows the systemic dysfunction that arises when an insignificant number of high-powered people assert their control over the vast majority.

The leak, and however many names will eventually be published, will change nothing about how we live day to day. They will, however, change how we live tomorrow. Until then, what the release of the names does is add one more data point on the scale. That scale is not going to tip from a single article or a single name, but it tips from accumulated weight, across time, and it will come crashing down.

History has shown us, more than once, what happens when the people have nowhere left to go but out of the corner swinging. That, without knowing the table of contents of the “how to navigate World War III” session, may very well be a subject of Dialog’s private consideration.

Rightfully so.

###
~ Z.

P.S.: Did you catch the prominent Substacker’s name on the list?

It’s Garry Kasparov.

But, there are also Johnathan Haidt, Joe Lonsdale, Steven Pinker, and Adam Grant - all have active Substacks.

Links

• WIRED main investigation (Dialog leak, 222‑name list, agenda):
  https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/

• Straight Arrow News feature on Dialog leak (113 names from site code, 2026 roster examples):
  https://san.com/cc/peter-thiels-dialog-network-was-super-secret-a-data-leak-changed-that/

• SAN main site: https://san.com

• Axios on D.C.‑area campus:
  https://www.axios.com/2025/08/07/dialog-secret-network-thiel-hoffman

• Semafor / follow‑up on land purchase near D.C.:
  https://www.semafor.com/article/08/08/2025/private-club-founded-by-peter-thiel-auren-hoffman-eyes-campus-near-dc

• Auren Hoffman LinkedIn (shows Dialog chair role, SafeGraph/LiveRamp history):
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/auren

• Auren Hoffman background (SafeGraph etc.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auren_Hoffman

• Joe Lonsdale biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Lonsdale

• Cato release criticizing Bessent’s remittance crackdown / low‑threshold surveillance:
  https://www.cato.org/news-releases/treasury-secretarys-remittance-crackdown-raises-financial-surveillance-concerns

• FT report on Bessent summoning bank CEOs about AI cyber risk:
  https://www.ft.com/content/397bf755-54cf-4018-a01d-8f714d8667c5

• SafeGraph’s abortion‑clinic location data controversy (EFF):
  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/safegraphs-disingenuous-claims-about-location-data-mask-dangerous-industry

• LiveRamp acquisition by Publicis (press + company release):
  https://www.publicisgroupe.com/en/news/press-releases/publicis-to-acquire-liveramp-to-accelerate-data-co-creation-for-smarter-agents
  https://liveramp.com/news/publicis-to-acquire-liveramp-to-accelerate-data-co-creation-for-smarter-agents

• FTC / PADFA warning letters to data brokers (2026):
  https://www.wiley.law/alert-FTC-Sends-Warning-Letters-to-Data-Brokers-on-PADFA-Compliance