Build-a-Cult: The Peter Thiel Retreat That Wasn't Supposed to Exist

There is a scheduled agenda session called “Build-a-Cult.”

It is moderated by the founder of Pray.com, a Christian social networking site. It is one item on a multi-day retreat organized by Peter Thiel, the billionaire who once published an essay arguing that women gaining the right to vote was bad for libertarianism, and who has written explicitly that “freedom and democracy are incompatible.”

The session is real. The retreat is real. We know this because a Swiss hacktivist named maia arson crimew found the entire attendee list and agenda sitting in plain text, embedded in the source code of the organization’s own website. Not hacked. Not stolen. Just… there.

The session name is funny. What it represents is not.

TL;DR:

• What Dialog Is – Thiel’s invite-only network, 20 years old, just exposed by a website misconfiguration
• The Agenda – “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” “Build-a-Cult,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?”
• Who Was in the Room – senators, the NATO supreme commander, regulators AND the companies they regulate
• The Ideology Behind It – Thiel’s stated beliefs about democracy, monopoly, and who should be making decisions
• The Infrastructure Problem – AI dossiers, Palantir, personal email addresses, and a new campus near Langley
• Bottom Line – this isn’t a conspiracy; conspiracies are secret

What Dialog Is

Dialog was co-founded in 2006 by Peter Thiel and entrepreneur Auren Hoffman. It has been running for twenty years. Forbes has described it as “Bilderberg meets Silicon Valley salon.”

That framing undersells it.

Over 1,000 paying members. More than 2,500 retreat attendees since inception. Annual gatherings at venues like the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain, the San Clemente Palace in Venice, and this August, the Powerscourt Hotel outside Dublin, Ireland. All discussions strictly off the record. Moderated small groups of 8-12 people covering artificial intelligence, geopolitics, military technology, relationships, mental health.

And an AI grading system. Because of course.

Leaked documents from the 2026 gathering reveal that Dialog uses AI tools to create dossiers on every member, then grades them A through C based on factors like assets under management, political leanings, and “interpersonal compatibility.” Lower grades pay more to attend: $10,000 or higher for a C rating. It is, in a very literal sense, a pay-to-play access structure where the price of the room is calibrated to how useful you are to the people already in it.

There is also a matchmaking service: dating.dialog.org, used by roughly 10% of members, excluding spouses, staff, and professional associates. Because the ultra-rich should also be able to find each other romantically, and Dialog would like to facilitate that.

The 2026 data leak, first surfaced by maia arson crimew and verified by WIRED, exposed two things: a 113-name member directory and a registration list for 222 people signed up for the August 12-16 Dublin retreat. The directory was not behind a password. It was not encrypted. It was embedded in the HTML source of the organization’s own public website, visible to anyone who pressed F12.

Twenty years of carefully managed secrecy. One browser refresh.

The Agenda

The Dublin retreat agenda is a map of what 222 very powerful people think is worth four days of their time.

“Navigating WWIII.” Not framed as a theoretical exercise. Not “if conflict escalates.” Just: navigating it. The implication being that the people in this room are the kind of people who need a navigation strategy, not just a news alert.

“Battlefield Technologies.” The NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Alexus Grynkewich, is on the attendee list. That session is not a TED talk.

“Bring Back Nuclear.” Defense contractors and surveillance executives in attendance; the argument for nuclear power (or weapons) gets made before it enters any public legislative debate.

“Build-a-Cult.” Moderated by the founder of Pray.com, which is a Christian networking platform. The session is described in agenda materials alongside community-building and social cohesion topics. The implied frame: in a world of AI disruption, civilizational instability, and collapsing institutions, elite cohesion requires intentional cultivation. You do not stumble into lasting loyalty structures. You build them.

“How’s Your Sex Life?” and “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness?” These are not tone-deaf additions. They are the product. Dialog’s value proposition to its members is not purely professional networking. It is intimacy. A rare space where the genuinely powerful can be, in some controlled sense, vulnerable with each other. That emotional bond is what keeps attendance rates high and discretion rates higher. It is also what makes the matchmaking service make sense.

The combination of those sessions tells you the complete worldview in the room: these people believe they are managing civilizational transition (WWIII, AI disruption, institutional collapse), and they are treating elite community-building (cult, matchmaking, emotional vulnerability) as a core survival strategy. Not metaphorically. Operationally.

Who Was in the Room

Here is the partial attendee list that matters, not for the names themselves but for what the categories tell you.

Government: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Senator Ted Cruz. Senator Cory Booker. A sitting US ambassador. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. Former Middle East intelligence officials.

Note that Cruz and Booker are both on that list. This is NOT a partisan gathering. The ideology in the room is not Republican or Democrat. It is something else.

Military: NATO Supreme Commander General Alexus Grynkewich. This is the person responsible for NATO’s military posture across Europe and Eurasia, discussing battlefield technologies, off the record, with tech executives and data brokers.

Tech and Finance: Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Six members of the PayPal Mafia. Multiple Google and Google DeepMind executives. Former Xbox president Sarah Bond. Bryan Johnson. Sam Harris. Josh Brolin. Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

The structural category that actually matters: Surveillance and data brokerage executives, in the same room as their government regulators, at an off-the-record retreat, discussing AI, data, and policy alignment.

Most of the attending senators used personal email addresses to register. Not government accounts. Personal accounts. This is not an accident. Government accounts are subject to records laws. Personal accounts are not. The participation, deliberately, generates no public paper trail.

The point is not that these people know each other. Of course they do. The point is that they are meeting regularly, in a structured setting, off the record, to align their assumptions before they go back to legislating, regulating, and deploying separately, in public. The coordination happens here. The public debate happens later, downstream, among people who were not in the room.

The Ideology Behind It

Peter Thiel is not shy about his views. He has put them in writing.

In 2009, he published an essay in a libertarian journal arguing that the extension of voting rights to women had been bad for libertarianism. His reasoning: women vote for more government programs, which undermines the libertarian project. The essay was not leaked. He wrote it and published it under his own name.

In the same period, he wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

His famous business maxim, “competition is for losers,” is usually interpreted as startup advice about seeking monopoly rather than competing in crowded markets. It is also a fairly complete statement of his political philosophy. Competition, in the marketplace of ideas and institutions, produces compromise, mediation, and accommodation of diverse interests. Monopoly produces clarity of direction. Thiel prefers clarity.

He is also not subtle about building political infrastructure. He mentored JD Vance, employed him, introduced him to Donald Trump, and then spent $15 million on Vance’s 2022 Ohio Senate race. Vance is now the Vice President of the United States. More than a dozen Thiel allies, former employees, and ideological aligned staffers are folded into the current executive branch.

Here is the contradiction at the center of all of it: Thiel professes to be a libertarian who opposes state power. His company, Palantir, has received more than $900 million in federal contracts in 2025 and 2026 alone. Palantir is building a “master database” for DOGE that aggregates tax records, immigration records, and other sensitive data. Palantir has a $30 million contract with ICE to provide near-real-time visibility into immigrant movements. Palantir has a $405 million contract with the Department of Health and Human Services.

The company that hates the state is the state’s most important data contractor.

The supposed libertarian keeps gravitating, as one analyst put it, toward “the hardest parts of the state: intelligence, defense, border enforcement.” This is not a contradiction he seems troubled by. The state is not the problem. DEMOCRATIC control of the state is the problem. Remove the democracy, keep the surveillance apparatus, redirect it toward the priorities of the people in the room.

Dialog is where those people decide what those priorities are.

The Infrastructure Problem

In 2025, Dialog purchased land in the Washington D.C. area for a permanent campus. The specific location: near Langley, Virginia. Near the Pentagon.

Think about the decision-making behind that for a moment. Dialog has operated for twenty years as a nomadic network of temporary retreats at luxury hotels. The choice to plant a permanent institutional structure, in that specific geography, is not a real estate decision. It is a statement of intent.

Meanwhile, the operational irony writes itself.

The executives who are designing surveillance infrastructure for the federal government met privately with their government clients and overseers, using personal email addresses to stay off public records, at a retreat organized by a network whose own member data was sitting unprotected in plain HTML because no one implemented basic access controls.

The AI dossier system that Dialog uses to grade its members collects political leanings, relationship status, assets under management, and interpersonal compatibility data on some of the most powerful people in the US government and military. That data was inadequately secured. The people building the architecture of American surveillance infrastructure cannot secure their own matchmaking database.

The normalization issue is arguably more important than any of this. Bipartisan senators showed up. A Nobel Prize-winning economist. A Cato Institute president. Entertainment figures with substantial cultural platforms. The presence of “respectable” participants does not make Dialog more trustworthy. It makes Dialog more durable. The institution protects itself by ensuring that enough mainstream figures have attended that exposure becomes personally inconvenient for people across the political spectrum.

That is not a conspiracy. That is a design feature.

Bottom Line

The Dialog leak is interesting for a specific reason that has nothing to do with the session called “Build-a-Cult” (though, again, that name is doing a lot of work).

It is interesting because the ARCHITECTURE of the organization maps exactly onto what you would build if you believed democracy was too slow, too compromised, and too accountable to actually make good decisions, and you wanted to replace it with something that wasn’t.

You would build invitation-only access. You would grade members by utility. You would charge more for access to people with less leverage. You would keep all discussions off the record. You would bring regulators and the regulated into the same room and let shared vocabulary and social trust do the work that bribery used to do. You would attract bipartisan participation to make exposure mutually costly. You would plant a permanent campus near the institutions you were slowly surrounding.

And when someone pointed all this out, the defense would be: “It’s just a networking event.”

Conspiracies are secret. This was in the page source. The only thing that was surprising about the leak was that it took twenty years.