Somewhere in the world, a spreadsheet exists that has graded Josh Brolin a VIP and cited his role as a purple alien to justify it. That spreadsheet belongs to Peter Thiel's secret elite networking club, and thanks to a Swiss hacktivist, the rest of us can now read it. Turns out the people who run the world operate with all the operational security of a college intramural sports league.
What Is Dialog, and Why Haven't You Been Invited
Dialog is a private social club co-founded by PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel and angel investor Auren Hoffman. According to The Guardian, the network has been running since 2006, gathering roughly 200 politicians, tech founders, foreign officials, academics, and Hollywood types for annual invitation-only retreats. This August, the group is scheduled to convene outside Dublin for a two-day event.
The existence of Dialog wasn't exactly secret before now. But what was secret, until Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew got hold of the data, was how the sausage gets made. Crimew is the same person who leaked the Justice Department's no-fly list in 2023, so this is not their first rodeo with accidentally embarrassing powerful institutions.
The leaked data is extensive. We're talking home addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, email addresses, food allergies, and the political leanings of some members. The kind of thing that, if it were your health insurance company losing it, you'd get a strongly worded letter and two years of free credit monitoring.
The Secret Report Card Nobody Asked For
Here is where things get genuinely strange. According to Wired's breakdown of the leak, Dialog grades its retreat attendees on a hidden scale based on wealth and fame. Every attendee receives a grade of A, B, or C, with C being the highest designation, reserved for the most famous and influential people in the room. The naming convention alone suggests someone really committed to being counterintuitive.
As Wired reports, Josh Brolin holds VIP status, and the internal notes justify this with the observation that his portrayal of Thanos in the Avengers series and his involvement in Avengers: Endgame, which grossed over $2.79 billion, contributes to his prominence. That sentence was written by a real human being, in a real document, about a real private club for global elites. Read it again slowly.
Beyond the letter grade, attendees also receive a "value-add" score from 1 to 4, handed out by Dialog staff. If someone is flagged as having a "Value Add Too Low" or being a "Poor Culture Fit," they can be disinvited from future events. The grades also determine pricing. Wired found that lower-grade attendees pay full price about 70% of the time, while only around a quarter of VIPs get the full bill. So yes, this elite secret society has a loyalty program. Welcome to the future.
The Agenda Reads Like a Silicon Valley Fever Dream
If you somehow secured an invitation to this year's Dialog retreat, here is a partial preview of what you'd be workshopping in Ireland. According to The Guardian's review of the leaked materials, planned sessions include "Bring Back Nuclear," "Disinformation and Deepfakes," "Contrarian AI Takes," "Democracy Under Surveillance," and a panel titled "Money (Does?) Buy Happiness" that sounds like it was workshopped by someone who already knows the answer.
There's also a session on cult-building, moderated by the founder of the Christian website Pray.com, which raises questions that are genuinely difficult to formulate into a single sentence. And if geopolitics is your thing, there is reportedly a session titled "Navigating WWIII" on the schedule. Not preventing. Not avoiding. Navigating. The framing there is doing a lot of work.
Then there's "How's Your Sex Life?" as a scheduled event, which at a retreat for foreign officials and Silicon Valley founders is either the most honest agenda item of the bunch or the most alarming, depending on what comes next.
Yes, There Is Also a Matchmaking System
Dialog doesn't just network its members, it pairs them off. According to Wired, the club runs a matchmaking system for both professional networking and dating, complete with photos and short bios presented to each person upon introduction. One internal note, cited by The Guardian, shows that two members were paired simply because they are "both in New York and work in government."
The club also maintains a list of "do-not-pair" combinations, flagging people who are already married to each other or are professional associates. Sometimes, according to the reporting, there's no stated reason why two people are on the do-not-pair list. That ambiguity is going to haunt someone.
So to recap: this is an invitation-only retreat where you are secretly graded on your cultural value, charged based on your grade, matched with potential romantic partners, and may or may not be on an unexplained blacklist. All of this is managed by a club co-founded by one of the most influential political donors in the United States. Totally normal operation.
The Hacker's Point Is the Whole Point
Crimew, who shared the leaked data, told Straight Arrow what is frankly the most cutting observation in this entire story. "It's just wild to me how this once again shows that the people who run the world are so confident in their safety that they don't really bother with any proper operational security," they said. "Not even for their 'off the record' secret conventions where they all network and discuss our collective future."
That's the thing. This wasn't a sophisticated breach of a hardened system. This was a group of people who apparently assumed that nothing bad would happen because nothing bad had happened yet. The home addresses and phone numbers of some of the world's most powerful people were sitting in a database managed with all the care of a gym membership portal.
For a club that reportedly hosts sessions on disinformation, deepfakes, and surveillance, Dialog seems to have skipped the part where they applied any of that concern to their own infrastructure.
The Dingo Take
Let's be clear about what this story actually is. It's not just a quirky item about a weird rich-person hobby. Dialog is a private network where tech billionaires, foreign officials, and politicians convene off the record, without press, without accountability, to discuss the shape of the world. The fact that they're also rating each other like Uber drivers and setting up dates is funny. The underlying reality of what the club is and who it connects is considerably less so.
Peter Thiel has spent years funding political candidates, backing nationalist movements across multiple continents, and positioning himself at the intersection of technology and state power. A private annual retreat where he and roughly 200 carefully selected global power brokers gather to talk about nuclear energy, AI, and, again, literally navigating a third world war is not a quirky networking event. It is a room where influence is brokered with no public record and apparently no serious security either.
Crimew handed us a window into something these people fully intended to keep hidden. The correct response is not to marvel at the Josh Brolin grading rubric and move on, though, to be fair, the Josh Brolin grading rubric is extraordinary. The correct response is to keep asking what exactly gets decided in Dublin every August, and why the people doing the deciding apparently never thought anyone would ask.
