Recent reporting has cast Dialog, an invitation-only network founded in 2006 by the Silicon Valley investors Auren Hoffman and Peter Thiel, as a secret society of global elites directed by Thiel. A Byline Times investigation finds something more consequential, if less sensational: a long-running influence network, run by Hoffman and built around light-touch social engineering, that trades on Thiel’s name while operating at arm’s length from him.

Thiel himself is barely there – no hand in running Dialog, rarely present – and the network sits at the loose end of a wider web he backs. Others in that web, working far more directly to place allies in positions of power, have drawn little of the scrutiny now falling on it.

Byline Times contacted multiple former participants and obtained copies of emails sent to invitees. Each contained long lists of names intended to encourage attendance at a range of events, including regular retreats, local dinners, one-off gatherings, and online discussions.

Importantly, while the conference itself is billed as off-the-record, none of those who spoke to Byline Times suggested that attendees were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Furthermore, marketing emails sent to prospective participants (which contained detailed information about participants and programming) carried no explicit expectation of secrecy. While invitations are clearly denoted as non-transferable, Dialog seems to rely on an aura of exclusivity and mutual respect to keep its gatherings on the down-low.

Rumors are swirling after a list of Dialog’s attendees and members leaked to the public. It includes journalists, politicians, tech figures, academics, and corporate leaders.

The revelation inspired a massive outcry because Dialog is an off-the-record conference of elites—a detail which led some to liken it to a Jeffrey Epstein-like conspiracy. That’s an understandable response when people hear that a creepy Epstein-connected billionaire is quietly convening influential figures on both the political left and right to discuss topics like how to prepare for World War III and how to “Build-a-Cult.”

Such a ridiculous format makes an easy target for conspiracy narratives and mockery. But what is Dialog, really?

My take: Participation in Dialog certainly raises some questions—especially for journalists who either paid $16,000 to attend an off-the-record conference or else received discounts, which is potentially more problematic (given journalism ethics rules). Now that the guest list has leaked, the promise of discretion that made Dialog attractive is exactly what’s working against everyone on it. The next time someone gets an invitation to a mysterious off-the-record retreat, they’ll likely do some research first.

Dialog provides a window into the process of how wealthy elites like Thiel and his cronies build quiet networks of influence at various levels. While viral Instagram memes comparing Dialog to an Epstein-style scandal went overboard, they show the degree to which Thiel has become a universal boogeyman who symbolizes elite conspiracies for global control. But the reality is more complex—and alarming—than one snotty private dork conference.

JD Vance said something bizarre the other day. During an appearance on The View, the vice president expressed concern about dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s close ties with wealthy elites.

“I think that it’s crazy that you had this guy who is clearly a sex predator who was hanging out with a lot of very wealthy and powerful people,” said Vance. “Like, that really bothered me. I don’t know what’s there, of course, nobody knows exactly what happened unless you were there, but that really bothered me, and I wanted to have full transparency.”

Vance wants to be seen as a crusader against Epstein and his friends, but there’s a problem with this narrative. The vice president serves two men with incredibly deep ties to Epstein: Donald Trump and Peter Thiel.

Trump was one of Epstein’s closest friends and described him as a “terrific guy.” “He’s a lot of fun to be with,” said Trump of Epstein in 2002. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Trump has since become a critic of Epstein, calling him a “creep,” but has continued to block the full release of the Epstein files—files in which, by one New York Times analysis, his name appears thousands of times.

Vance, who once described Trump as “America’s Hitler,” now serves under him. So, it is rich to watch him decry Epstein’s elite friends while playing the role of attack dog for Epstein’s former #1 bestie.

And it gets worse. Vance is largely the creation of one man, tech billionaire Peter Thiel. At every step of Vance’s career, Thiel funded him and promoted him. Thiel—Vance’s benefactor and creator—also had deep ties to Epstein.

A twenty-two-year-old man graduated from Stanford University last Sunday. While there, he wrote for Peter Thiel’s right-wing Stanford Review, worked at venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm.

Now he’s starting a new futures exchange with a $30 million venture capital investment that values his fledgling company at $300 million. His name is Theodore Gillibrand, and he’s the son of pro-crypto Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-New York.

From Fortune reporter Ben Weiss, who broke the story:

The 22-year-old son of a crypto-friendly senator plans to launch his own exchange for a type of derivative popularized by digital asset traders. Theodore Gillibrand, whose mother is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), has drummed up $30 million in a fundraise led by the venture firm Lux Capital, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The deal valued Theodore’s startup at $300 million, said the sources, who asked for anonymity to discuss private business dealings.

The story describes Gillibrand as “a key Democratic ally for the crypto industry” and “part of a group of lawmakers who first introduced the Genius Act, or legislation that regulates stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar.”

“My son is a grown adult starting his own independent business,” Gillibrand said in a statement to the New York Post. “I have no involvement in it whatsoever. That said, I’m enormously proud of him and wish him nothing but the best.”

Over the past 40 years, I’ve been privileged to play a leading role in three start-ups and be the first general partner hired by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. I saw how the internet democratized information, how the iPhone put a computer in everyone’s pocket, and how the cloud unleashed a tsunami of new software. Each wave showed that technology could be a powerful force for good, that the upstarts could win on the merits and that open competition and debate were values the tech industry welcomed and promoted.

Just as artificial intelligence is on the rise, that ethos is now under threat — and the threat is coming from inside Silicon Valley.

Some of the most powerful players in A.I. — led by some of my friends and former partners, to my great sadness — have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to forestall a more serious and meaningful debate about how A.I. should be governed. They have helped create political action committees to help defeat candidates who want strict regulations on A.I. and to promote those who can be counted on to stay out of their way. I believe this is a huge mistake.

https://archive.is/Bwumr

JD Vance climbed from obscurity to power thanks to one man: tech billionaire Peter Thiel.

This short video tells the real story of how Thiel funded and promoted Vance at every step of his career. Under Thiel’s tutelage, Vance became a venture capitalist, a Catholic, a Trump supporter, a political kingpin, a US Senator, and vice president of the United States.

You’ve heard of Hillbilly Elegy. But here’s the real story: Thielbilly Elegy.

Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, has shed light on billionaire Peter Thiel’s reason for suddenly planting roots in his country.

In a Financial Times op-ed, Milei announced plans to make Argentina the world’s top destination for tech billionaires seeking to escape regulation, legal liability, and taxes. Milei’s op-ed trumpeted new legislation that would do three things:

1. “Keep AI unregulated,” providing a haven for companies wishing to develop the technology without guardrails or government rules.

2. Create a new business category for what Milei called the “non-human corporation.” These would be companies supposedly “operated by AI agents or robots” that could “exercise independent judgment in unpredictable environments.” These non-human companies would receive major protections in the form of limited liability for whatever decisions they might allegedly make on their own, without human intervention.

3. Allow tech companies to duck taxes. Milei’s legislation would impose low corporate tax rates and also allow shareholders to “select the corporate governance law of their choosing.”

Milei made it clear that he intends his legislation as an “invitation” to attract tech moguls to his country, highlighting his nation’s “world-class energy and mining resources” and “geopolitical stability.” The president heralded his plans for Argentina as the dawn of a new Dutch East India Company, the joint-stock corporation founded in 1602 that was granted sweeping, quasi-governmental monopoly powers to carry out trade activities in Asia.

“The logic of 1602 still applies today,” wrote Milei. “Companies run by new technologies such as AI agents require the same legal framework that has underpinned capitalism for over four centuries, one suitable for development and experimentation.”

In essence, Milei plans to turn Argentina into a top destination for the Network State cult. His plan to create a new framework by which tech moguls (and their machines) can escape regulation, laws and taxes is an almost-perfect expression of the Network State idea promoted by Thiel protégé Balaji Srinivasan, who calls for Silicon Valley to secede from the United States. The only thing missing from Milei’s proposal is an option for tech billionaires to create their own private nations on Argentine soil.

In late April, I wrote about Peter Thiel’s decision to temporarily move to Argentina with his family. It seemed like an odd development, since Thiel’s allies and ideas form a core part of the Trump regime.

At the height of his power and influence, with his companies raking in multibillion-dollar contracts, why would the PayPal and Palantir billionaire “decamp” to South America?

Last week, the New York Times followed up on Thiel’s move:

Mr. Thiel, who has a history of collecting backup countries as he hedges his bets against the United States, is considering making Argentina another Plan B, according to two people familiar with his thinking. Born in Germany and raised in the United States, he received citizenship in New Zealand in 2011, and applied for a passport in Malta in 2022.

His new roots in Argentina are partly motivated by his concerns about the direction of the United States, the people familiar with his thinking say, particularly California, where an initiative on November’s ballot could lead to a significant tax on billionaires.

Argentina, a nation relatively insulated from potential conflicts in the Northern Hemisphere, also fits as a potential escape hatch from other risks that Mr. Thiel has publicly warned about — nuclear war and runaway artificial intelligence.

The NYT piece spurred a new round of interest in Thiel’s globetrotting from people who had apparently missed the New York Post’s exclusive story on April 24. As with the NYT story, the Post story pointed out that Thiel’s purchase of a $12 million mansion in Buenos Aires is part of a “meticulously constructed global hedge,” noting that “Thiel has spent years assembling a portfolio of residences, passports, and legal presences across multiple continents.”

Neither story mentioned Thiel’s decades-long fascination with The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. The 1997 book urges wealthy individuals—so-called “Sovereign Individuals”—to seek escape routes from democratic nation-states, obtain multiple passports, and acquire personal security services as the world devolves into chaos.

I recently joined writer Wajahat Ali for a live chat about how Jeff Bezos’ recent comments—praising Trump and disdaining taxes—are yet another manifestation of Billionaire Derangement Syndrome.

Bezos declared Trump “more mature” and “disciplined”... at a moment when the Trump family is raking in billions of dollars in corrupt profit and declaring itself above the law. Just like that, he put the Amazon and Whole Foods seal of approval on an openly criminal, fascist, and racist regime.

If you've seen clips or episodes of the glossy video podcast Diary of a CEO lately, you're not alone: over the last year it has skyrocketed in popularity to become the top business podcast in Britain and the number two podcast on Spotify, just behind the Joe Rogan Experience.

Not many people know the backstory behind the show's affable and telegenic 33-year-old host, Steven Bartlett, who presents himself as both a successful entrepreneur and curious learner who, following Rogan's lead, excels in the simple art of “just asking questions.” And like Rogan, the formula has helped him attract a roster of top-tier guests and a massive audience.

But many of the show's topics veer from business into territory familiar to America 2.0 readers as the subject of influence campaigns and information warfare. Shows have featured more outlandish fare, ranging from UFOs to World War III. A 2024 investigation by the BBC documented a pattern of questionable health-related claims promoted by the show, with little to no pushback from Bartlett.

Seeing that Bartlett and Diary of a CEO (DOAC) appeared to promote guests and claims consistent with a pattern of covert influence, we launched an investigation of our own.

Avoiding crypto isn't enough — it needs to be actively countered and regulated to avoid widespread societal and political harms. This is the message that emerged from my conversation with crypto experts Molly White and Tonantzin Carmona.

Cryptocurrency has stopped being a finance story. Heading into the 2026 midterms, it has become political-money infrastructure — woven into our elections, our regulations, the Trump family's balance sheet.

To open Season 4 of Dave Troy Presents, I sat down with two of the sharpest people on this beat. Independent researcher Molly White tracks the industry through her websites Citation Needed, Web3 Is Going Just Great, and her election-money tracker Follow the Crypto.

Brookings Institution fellow Tonantzin Carmona maps the structural harm: who gets targeted, who gets hurt, and the policies that need to change.

The conversation is a plain-English tour of where things actually stand. The SEC has reversed course and largely stopped enforcing against crypto. The industry's super PACs spent hundreds of millions in 2024 and are gearing up for more — and as the Illinois primary showed, often in races where the ads never mention crypto at all.

Earlier this year, I was invited to appear at Web Summit Vancouver, an annual conference that brings together CEOs, venture capitalists, journalists and other figures from the tech world.

There was a catch: they wanted me to appear onstage with Curtis Yarvin, the Peter Thiel guru who preaches the merits of dictatorship and monarchy.

That did not interest me. First of all, I have no interest in legitimizing Yarvin, who wears his racism like a badge of honor. Just as I would not share a stage with a KKK grand wizard or a neo-Nazi, I would not wish to appear with Peter Thiel’s anti-democracy guru who is so addicted to the N-word that he trained his AI chatbot to use it.

Second, Yarvin had refused to grant an interview for my book, so it did not make sense for me to participate with him in a public circus. (As the Book of Proverbs counsels: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you also be like him.”)

While he would not grant me an interview, he did go back and forth with me on email for a few days last year. He is as long-winded in that format as he is in every other. Yarvin did not say much of interest, but he did attempt to insult me in a way that—in my view—amounts to a compliment. Here’s what he said:

You have one of the kinds of mindsets that is rare in historical power structures: (relatively) open Machiavellianism. You know it is an evil world, everyone in it is evil, and when you're fighting for the good (La Lucha Continua! Venceremos!) you gotta not be out-eviled. This is a big, big big truth which you probably latched onto as a young person. While I would prefer not to see the world through the light of this truth, I do respect it, and indeed have often gotten fucked for not respecting it enough.

Climate Central examined historical trends in fire weather — a combination of hot, dry, windy conditions — across the U.S.

This analysis uses data from 476 weather stations to assess fire weather trends in 245 climate divisions spanning the contiguous U.S. from 1973 to 2025.

On average, climate divisions in the western U.S. experience 32 fire weather days annually. That’s four times more than in the eastern U.S.

Wildfire seasons are lengthening and intensifying, particularly in the western U.S. Parts of the eastern U.S. have seen smaller but impactful increases in fire weather days.

Much of the country has seen fire weather increase the most during spring. The Southwest is also seeing more fire weather during summer.

A new website being prepared by the White House has led to speculation about what information it may contain, as well as the motives behind the project. In mid-March 2026, the Executive Office of the President registered the domains aliens.gov and alien.gov, which currently go to a placeholder website. According to statements made by several administration officials, the site is intended to be a cross-government clearinghouse for all things “extraterrestrial.”

This, of course, means different things to different audiences. And the potential for ambiguity has many analysts concerned that the new website will bolster false claims that advance societal division while enriching the ecosystem of “disclosure entrepreneurs” that has sprung up around the topic.

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, former head of the Defense Department’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), responded to our request for comment, saying the “website, and the commentary of the Administration on aliens, is more theatrics to distract the American public from reality. It is more evidence that this Administration bases its actions and decisions on conspiracy and fiction rather than evidence and fact.”

Last year, I wrote a viral Bluesky thread about Paulina Borsook, who published a scathing and prescient takedown of Silicon Valley’s sociopathic politics back in 2000.

That thread led to a New York Times profile of Borsook and, within a few months, she landed a book deal to republish her masterpiece. Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech will hit bookshelves on September 15 with a new foreword by me.

My small role in reviving interest in Paulina’s work has been one of the most gratifying experiences of the past two years. I first ran across her name in David Golumbia’s Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology. I read her book and, as it turns out, we live a few miles apart. So, we met up.

Mainstream journalists are now grasping for ways to explain Silicon Valley’s far-right radicalization. Some pretend it’s a new development and try to blame it on taxes, regulations, or other trite political rationalizations. But Borsook’s work proves—definitively—that tech’s right-wing politics are nothing new. As she wrote in 2000, explaining the anti-government, anti-public attitudes percolating in tech:

It’s an inability to reconcile the demands of being an individual with the demands of participating in society, which coincides beautifully with a preference for, and glorification of, being the solo commander of one’s computer in lieu of any other economically viable behavior.

Computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fixable, and comprehensible than any human will ever be. As many political schools of thought do, these techno-libertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect.

Cyberselfish will be published in the USA, the UK & Commonwealth, France, Belgium, and Switzerland.

Storm Daniel, which struck central Greece in September 2023, devastated the town of Palamas, leaving behind a chaotic mix of mud, debris, dead cattle, and shattered lives.

Vaios Giatropoulos moved with his family to a village where their home is on higher ground. Returning is unthinkable. “I don’t want to feel that sense of dread with every drop of rain. For several months, we feared it would flood again. I even thought about seeing a psychologist,” he recalls.

Giotopoulos belongs to a steadily expanding group of Europeans: the continent’s first climate migrants. Displacement within national borders is no longer an academic issue, as more people are affected by storms, floods, wildfires and droughts.

The Geneva-based NGO Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) estimates that approximately 413,000 people were displaced in the EU between 2008 and 2023. So far, 2023 has been the worst year on record, with over 200,000 Europeans internally displaced, mostly due to wildfires and storms.

Just before noon on Saturday, Palantir, the defense-tech company that holds several multi-billion-dollar contracts with the United States military, published a 22-point manifesto on X detailing why Silicon Valley has a moral obligation to go to war for America.

“Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible,” the corporation wrote in a post from its official X account. “The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.”

California-based journalist Gil Durán called the manifesto a “worship of violence and speed that’s typical of fascism.”

Durán, a former Democratic strategist, has covered Silicon Valley’s hard turn to the right since 2024 in his blog The Nerd Reich. His X account was suspended after he reposted the manifesto with the caption, “TLDR: Fascism,” but he was far from the only one who called out Palantir’s disturbing rhetoric. The manifesto provoked a largely negative reaction on social media and alarmed political leaders abroad; the Guardian reported that one liberal member of the UK parliament compared it to “the ramblings of a supervillain.”

But Palantir has been circulating these ideas for more than a year. The post on X is a summary of several points made in The Technological Republic, the grandiose political book lamenting the “complacency” of the West and glorifying a return to “hard power,” co-written by Palantir CEO Alex Karp and his head of corporate affairs Nicholas Zamiska. The book was published in February 2025.

So, why would Palantir reprise it now?

https://archive.is/8yq5q

Getting banned from Elon Musk’s X for pointing out Palantir’s fascism has created more interest in my work.

Last week, I spoke with Emma Vigeland of the Majority Report about the Palantir manifesto and the company’s role in Trump’s fascist regime. You can watch the full interview below.

I also spoke with Cydney Hayes of the SF Gazetteer, one of the few journalists to write about my baseless suspension from X, for her piece on Palantir.

“Palantir is quickly becoming one of the most hated companies in the world, due to its open complicity with an authoritarian regime,” I told her. “They have a major public relations crisis.”

The word “fascism” gets tossed around a lot, often as a generic term for authoritarian or dictatorial. But it has a more specific meaning. I’m currently writing a piece that will explain why the Palantir manifesto is a clear expression of fascism. (Makena Kelly of Wired reports that “Palantir Employees Are Starting To Wonder If They’re The Bad Guys.” Spoiler Alert: Obviously.)

In the meantime, I explain some of my thinking in the Majority Report interview.

Last year, tech fascist guru Curtis Yarvin warned that Trump’s Silicon Valley supporters should prepare to flee the United States in case Democrats retake power. Now, one of Yarvin’s key followers—Palantir co-founder and Antichrist enthusiast Peter Thiel—appears to be heeding his advice.

Thiel has purchased a new mansion in an affluent section of Buenos Aires, according to the New York Post. The billionaire plans an extended stay in Argentina, according to the Buenos Aires Herald, and he met with Argentine President Javier Milei this week.

“Thiel, the 58-year-old founder of online payments processor PayPal and AI company Palantir, is reportedly planning to stay in the country for two months,” reported the Herald on April 23. “He is mostly in a US$12 million house he bought in Barrio Parque, an affluent suburb in Buenos Aires City, local media reported. Thiel and his husband, Matt Danzeisen, saw Milei in Casa Rosada at 2 p.m., together with the country’s Foreign Minister, Pablo Quirno.”

Thiel’s decision to establish a beachhead in Buenos Aires comes as Trump sinks to record-low popularity and the Republican Party heads toward a likely defeat in U.S. midterm elections. It’s the latest move for Silicon Valley's most prominent apocalypse enthusiast, who seems to be wandering the earth anxiously in search of refuge. Over the past few years, he has drifted from San Francisco to Los Angeles to Miami. His plans to create some kind of doomsday estate in New Zealand appear to have fizzled.

Thiel believes that the United States—and most nation-states—will experience a dramatic collapse in the 21st century as technological advances create widespread economic and political chaos. His beliefs were largely inspired by The Sovereign Individual: How To Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, a 1997 book which predicted that crypto and AI would collapse the existing world order. It advised savvy investors—a new class of so-called “cognitive elites”—to prepare for this reality by acquiring extra passports and exiting the USA for remote parts of the world.

Climate Central analyzed average annual temperature trends since 1970 in 49 states and 242 U.S. cities to understand how temperatures across the country have changed as heat-trapping pollution has continued to climb.

The fastest-warming U.S. states from 1970 to 2025 are:

• Alaska
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• Delaware
• Massachusetts
• Vermont

The fastest-warming U.S. cities are:

• Reno, NV
• Las Vegas, NV
• El Paso, TX
• Burlington, VT
• Tyler, TX

This Climate Matters analysis is based on open-access data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). See Methodology for details.