Peter “Nosferatu” Thiel

Above: Peter Thiel

I finally watched The Social Network recently. Near the end, the movie talks about Peter Thiel investing in Facebook, making it a real company. I laughed because of course Peter Thiel wasn’t so famous then but now has crossed the line into comic supervillain with his attack on journalism. But now, Thiel is taking this supervillain thing just a bit too far one thinks.

In an unpublished interview with Bercovici last year, Thiel admitted that he was interested in adding young-to-old blood transfusions to his personal health regimen:

After briefly discussing the pros and cons of caloric restriction, human growth hormone and the diabetes drug metformin, Thiel said this:

I’m looking into parabiosis stuff … where they [injected] the young blood into older mice and they found that had a massive rejuvenating effect. … I think there are a lot of these things that have been strangely underexplored.

I followed up to ask if he meant parabiosis was “really interesting” as a business opportunity or a personal-health treatment. He made it clear he was talking about the latter. “That would be one where it’s more just, do we think the science works? Some of these it’s not clear there’s actually a great company to start around it. …”

Last month, Gawker noted that the logical endpoint of Thiel’s dystopian world vision could feature an economy in which the wealthy, who wished to live forever, subsist on the blood of the poor, who would die at a normal age.

The dudebros of Silicon Valley truly are our greatest citizens. And given his Randian beliefs, in his ideal world there should be millions of impoverished Americans he can harvest for his feast of blood!