The First Interview With a Former Employee of Peter Thiel's Dialog
Plus: Cannes Lions backlash, the World Cup Fan Matrix, Nantucket's population mystery, a Hamptons real estate scandal, and an evening supporting the East End's invisible workforce.
Have you heard of Dialog yet? It’s the private, invitation-only network that was founded by Auren Hoffman, general partner of Flex Capital, and Peter Thiel. Since thousands of internal Dialog documents leaked earlier this month, Dialog has become the subject of endless speculation. Leaked membership databases, discussion prompts, internal rankings, and planning documents have painted the picture of a mysterious club where some of the world’s most influential founders, investors, politicians, academics, and public figures gathered behind closed doors.
But leaked documents can only tell you so much. Until now, no former Dialog employee has explained what it was really like to work inside the organization. RPS spoke with a former Dialog employee in what we believe is the first interview with someone who worked behind the scenes. They agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity, and we have removed identifying details to protect their privacy. What emerges is a version of Dialog that is, in some ways, stranger than the headlines.
Perhaps the interview’s biggest revelation, however, concerns Peter Thiel himself. Despite becoming the public face of Dialog after the leaks, the former employee says Thiel was largely absent during their tenure. He rarely attended programming, eventually allowed his membership to lapse, and, despite efforts to bring him back, remained far less involved than many people assumed.
The interview also offers an unusually candid look at how Dialog viewed its own members, how people were evaluated behind the scenes, why some attendees became anxious about being constantly judged by their peers, and why the former employee believes the internet has fundamentally misunderstood what Dialog actually was.
Their conclusion may be the most memorable line in the entire conversation: “Working there convinced me the Illuminati could never exist.” (For more background, I suggest reading the Wired story on the Dialog leak here. Dialog’s executive director, Raffi Grinberg, also has a rather active Substack How to Be A Grownup—another thing the press has not noted—but it seems unrelated to the network).
If you can’t commit to—or stomach—a whole interview about the wannabe Illuminati, don’t fret: we also have Amazon's OpenAI dilemma, why Cannes Lions felt different this year, the World Cup Fan Matrix, Nantucket's population mystery, a Hamptons real estate scandal, and an evening supporting the East End's invisible workforce.
