Here’s a little touch of The Twilight Zone, coming from an amazing report in Wired. It’s about Dialog, a secret cabal of elites led by Peter Thiel, who has as many crazy ideas as he has dollar bills and who has enough rich and powerful people who share them to be a genuine concern.

A source separately provided Wired with the registration list for Dialog’s 2026 retreat, which names 222 people and records what the list describes as each registrant’s membership status and attendee type, including “active member” and “guest.” The retreat is scheduled for August 12–16 at a venue near Dublin, Ireland.

The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.

These people straaaaange, man.

Together, alongside the mundane fare of a typical thought leadership conference, the documents show an extraordinary convergence of power. The registration records list General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s supreme allied commander of Europe and the head of U.S. European Command, who took the post in July 2025 and is recorded on the leaked list as having attended Dialog gatherings since 2021. The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two U.S. senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.

Let’s guess who the two senators are.

What ties the roster together more than any title or office is a shared preoccupation with artificial intelligence, longevity, and the near future. Asked on a sign-up form to predict the future, registrants returned again and again to the same theme: that AI will reorder work, war, education, and belief within a few years. Several foresee mass labor displacement and a swing back toward unions and government programs; others predict an “AI winter,” domestic terrorism targeting data centers, criminal defendants choosing AI lawyers over public defenders, or religious revival provoked by the disruption. “Societal degeneration,” predicted one person, “will continue to accelerate.”

Boy, I’ll say.