As a member of a prominent Transylvanian family, I am appalled, and profoundly offended, by the idea of someone even as much as suspecting Peter Thiel could be a vampire. He might be an evil bloodsucking parasite, but he lacks the sophistication mortals have come to associate with vampires over the centuries. It's shocking, really, that some people might confuse him with one.
It's OK, we understand that they're the difficult ones that never really cared for the family rules.
Peter Thiel may not be but Peter Steele was
Vampires are parasites. They're only as polite as they need to be to extract resources from potential hosts. The facade of sophistication only lasts as long as it needs to
Hisss...I mean, amen! I bet that scumbag has never eaten a bowl of Count Chocula either.
He’s an imposter, using blood infusions from young victims of his digital entrapments.
Oh, it applies to sama perfectly, except for the sophisticated bit, or empathy.
Are all vampires sociopaths or just some of them?
Most unless they dated a vampire slayer...
> Are all vampires sociopaths or just some of them?
That’s anti-vampire propaganda. Sociopaths have well above average representation among billionaires, not vampires.
> Stoker, a theatre manager with no medical background, somehow described the basic mechanism of heterochronic parabiosis
Just to pick a nit...
Stoker's story was inspired by "The Vampyre" by physician John Polidori, who doubtless knew whatever his contemporary medics knew about blood.
Polidori, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley told scary stories to each other by Lake Geneva in 1816, the "year without a summer". It couldn't get more gothic.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-poet-the-physician-...
It is worthy of note that John Polidori's model for a vampire was, in fact, Lord Byron.
Lord Byron's death was a result of what the medical profession then thought that they knew about blood. Namely that blood-letting was a worthwhile medical treatment.
Bloodletting is still a worthwhile treatment for certain conditions
https://www.southtees.nhs.uk/resources/having-a-therapeutic-...
I think we're witnessing a schism within the vampire community. By the end of the article, the author is less than subtle about being Dracula, and is trying to use the respect his name no doubt commands among vampires to get the unruly youth(relatively speaking) to get their shit together. This article is a warning to Thiel and Johnson. Dracula sees you, and he does not approve of what he sees.
The only question I have is "how far are you willing to go, Machiel?"
The novels Blindsight & Echopraxis by Peter Watts have a nice vampire sub-plot... basically his world has vampires which have been revived from the fossil record. They are posited to have gone extinct in recent times, but before then were human's key predator, keeping our populations strongly in check and then having to hibernate for decades to allow the breeding to provide new meat!
He's super interested in brain disorders and spins a good story about the trade offs of a terrible reaction to right angles in exchange for savant like powers of perception.
He even did a full academic-style presentation about the vampires that's on YouTube.
I can't believe I haven't seen this yet: https://blindsight.space/memories/
It never occurred to me to see if there was a film!
Mind you even more amazing I was on youtube yesterday and a short film showing the first chapter of the brand new book (published really recently) that I was reading popped up.
Now I see that there is not only that film (in the DUST series) but also a miniseries someone has made...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=antimemetics+di...
I have not read Echopraxis yet, but I thoroughly enjoyed Blindsight. Some very thought-provoking concepts in that book.
The idea that vampires needed to take “anti-Euclideans” and the way the ship was constructed to avoid generating right angles were some great details.
Just a heads up, don't go in to Echopraxia expecting it to feel like Blindsight. When I first read it, I was actually pretty disappointed overall, and a few of my friends had similar reactions.
Over a couple of years a few re-reads, though, I've come to enjoy it perhaps even more that Blindsight, but in a completely different way. It fills out a lot of the posits opened in the first novel, without coming to specific conclusions, but it gives you a lot to think about.
Echopraxia is great. I never understood those who thought it was disappointing. Blindsight is wonderful, but Echopraxia is possibly the more inventive one. It certainly pulls the narrative in a different direction.
I also really, really recommend The Freeze-Frame Revolution. It's about the crew on an starship trying to stop the rogue (sort of) AI that runs everything, the twist being that the crew is constantly under surveillance and must periodically hibernate in shifts for months or years at a time. It's a novella plus a handful of short stories set before and after the novel (all available for free on Peter Watts' website). Be warned, it's one bleak, dark universe.
Also, don't miss out on "The Colonel" (also on his website), a standalone short story that also happens to be a direct sequel to Blindsight.
> Here’s what’s genuinely interesting.
That's my current AI detector smell.
> He discontinued the blood exchange after data showed “no benefits.” A suspicious person might note that a vampire would say exactly this after the media got too interested.
I don't think it's the media (clearly the younger generations are media friendly), it's probably pressure from the older vamps.
I felt the same way and came to the comments to see if anyone else smelled it. It's either AI-assisted writing or people are genuinely starting to write like how ChatGPT sounds.
First, the structure of this satirical post is headings and bullet points. Fine, whatever, a lot of people write this way.
Then there's the exhausting litany of super short sentence fragments.
> He published this. Openly. In a book. As a priest.
This is how airport novels and LinkedIn "thought leadership" clickbait is written, so ok, fine, I'll let it pass.
Then I started to notice a lot of: "It's not X. It's Y" or "this isn't just A. It's B."
> Feeding isn’t nutrition. It’s dialysis.
Before LLMs, people weren't writing this way. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon: it's insulting to read, like the reader is a 5-year-old.
When several of these smells pile up, I close the tab immediately and try to forget about it. This one was so egregious that I had to read the whole thing and then come to the comments to rant a bit.
> it's insulting to read, like the reader is a 5-year-old.
It's not ELI5. It's ELY5.
The author has a bunch of AI stuff in their bio, so I assume this is partially or fully generated unless otherwise disclaimed.
But hey, maybe someone can get an AI to read it.
It had me at "The Twist".
Yeah, that does sound pretty AI-ish / marketing-bloggy. It’s not wrong, but it has a few classic “AI vibes”. If you want, I can........oh no!!!!!!
NO CARRIER
> You know what else is far-seeing? A creature that has been alive for centuries.
Well, hello there!
> The Suspects Peter Thiel
Has anyone tried garlic on him?
> Vampires don’t drink blood because young blood contains an elixir. They drink blood because their own blood accumulates factors that accelerate aging, and they need to periodically dilute it.
I don't think this makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever.
This is actually one of the mechanisms behind "blood swaps" done by the rich and weird. Donating blood frequently also reduces various accumulated "factors" that reduce kidney stress, encourage healthy new blood, and is overall beneficial to health.
Various other mechanisms can improve how effective your body is at recycling cells, encouraging autophagy and filtering things in the blood. There are a whole suite of various supplements and medicines that work in this system.
As undead, though, vampires no longer produce new living blood, so require fresh blood of the living to restore lost function. Or something.
I guess that'd make Bryan Johnson the ultimate thrall?
20161027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12809722#12810990 Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing
20170113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13395478 Questionable “Young Blood” Transfusions Offered in U.S. As Anti-Aging Remedy
20170421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14163395#14164470 Mice treated with a protein from umbilical cord plasma showed improved memory
20170521 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBA0AH-LSbo Silicon Valley S04E05 The Blood Boy
20170602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14470314 An anti-ageing startup is offering transfusions of blood from young people
20170825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15102304 Some wealthy people are injecting blood from teenagers to gain ‘immortality’
20180120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16194413 Clinical trial finds blood-plasma infusions for Alzheimer’s safe, promising
20180907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17929462 Startups Flock to Turn Young Blood into an Elixir of Youth
20190117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18929943 Blood transfusion startup Ambrosia is now up and running
20190221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19213938 FDA warning brings young-blood transfusion company to a halt
20191108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484203 Ambrosia, the Young Blood Transfusion Startup, Is Quietly Back in Business (0 comments)
20230817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37163684#37164170 Older mouse brains rejuvenated by protein found in young blood
The replication process makes worse and worse copies over time. Plus the cleanup crew gets confused and weak. Each bit of aging makes the process of keeping you young work less well, and hence you age more + faster.
> Has anyone tried garlic on him?
Or indeed daylight
I was going to suggest some other vampire remedies, but I was worried Palantir will scan this and tell ICE.
Who knew we could coexist with vampires if we give each some kind of dialysis machine? Imagine the kind of cultural works someone with centuries of experience could create. Imagine a vampire historian!
If they haven't recorded it in some way then it doesn't matter. And if they have, then it's what a human historian could do too.
Can you recall well what you did ten years ago to the day? How much is a vampire is going to accurately recall from a hundred years ago?
At best, the vampire has bragging rights like "I hung out with Gandhi."
We'd need some evidence the vampire has super-recall AND is somehow trustworthy enough to not change the story depending on motivations of the day.
Not the same blood, but dead cell matter does accumulate in plasma over time. The body has active mechanisms that perform cleaning: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7392086/
> I don't think this [ed:periodical dilution] makes sense. Our bodies do not use the same blood forever.
You might want to read up on chaperone-mediated autophagy, and how that declines over time. There's a point to be made that yes, in old age we collect things in our blood that don't belong.
It might not be solvable through dilution, but it's not like we get a full blood change every 5K miles either.
as someone that donates plasma twice weekly I wonder what health effects of removing and filtering the blood regularly has if accumulation of byproducts is a major issue
I believe research has shown that blood and plasma donors have mild positive benefits.
Maybe garlic alludes to the working class.
Imagine showing up to a meeting with Thiel wearing a huge garlic and onion necklace.
"What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"
"Garlic"
Love this concrete interpretation. The symbolic one is maybe more interesting:
Vampires:
- Consume the life force of the living to sustain themselves
- Are totally isolated and perverted from any kind of human community
- Have no family, no community ties
- Unable to feel love, warmth, connection with any human
- Must avoid spending time in the virtuous natural world (daylight, sunlight) and must instead be cordoned off indoors or in darkness, they do not live as most natural things do.
- Are kind of fallen/perverted; at one point, they were human, but they failed at being human (for instance: unbaptized, excommunicated, murderous, etc) and so were forced into exile often due to their own choice to live sinfully
Billionaires:
- cannot become a billionaire without thousands/millions of regular non-billionaires siphoning money (== time, == life force) upwards
- when they become a billionaire they are forced to be distanced from their community/family of normal people; middle class people are never "regular friends" with billionaires
- either their normal family/friends are 'bitten/infected' (wealth inheritance) or cut-off
- often are profoundly isolated on a personal level (are they talking to me for my money or for me?)
- often the direct cause of or at least complicit in the destruction of the natural world (i.e. cut off from sunlight; unnatural)
- often must make unethical or immoral choices to catapult themselves to wealth/powers (fallen, sinful)
Yeah. Vampires were conceived as analogies to nobility, and the billionaire class is our new nobility.
>They drink blood because their own blood accumulates factors that accelerate aging, and they need to periodically dilute it. Feeding isn’t nutrition. It’s dialysis.
This seems to be the emerging consensus. When you get older your metabolism creates all kinds of crap that circulates in the blood.
You would like to have boosted kidneys parallel to real ones that can detect and remove all the slightly wrong proteins.
To reframe the argument, it's more likely that mechanisms for clearing cellular debris become less effective with age.
Are there any reasons for this to work on non-vampires? :D
That was my thought as well. At least naively, it seems to follow that regularly donating blood might have health benefits. A typical donation is half a liter, and a person has about 5 liters of blood, so donating should in theory remove about 10% of the crap you've got circulating, right?
Edit: You can donate every 2 months, so donating as often as possible would roughly halve the crud every year (0.9^6 ~= 0.53, ignoring the natural increase over time).
I don't think it's very effective.
It's your metabolism that produces that junk with increasing ratio of stuff that you need. If you just remove blood, the ratio of good stuff to bad stuff does not change. Same with kidney filtering if they can't recognize the difference.
Blood transfusion from younger person gives you blood with better ratio.
The article includes a citation that explicitly states the opposite. Specifically citation 20 from the section "The Twist" (which is itself all about this idea):
> [20] Mehdipour, M. et al. “Rejuvenation of three germ layers tissues by exchanging old blood plasma with saline-albumin.” Aging 12(10), 8790–8819, 2020. The UC Berkeley team found that diluting old blood plasma with saline and albumin produced rejuvenating effects comparable to young blood — suggesting the mechanism is removing pro-aging factors rather than adding youth factors. This was, at the time of publication, the strongest evidence that old blood is the problem, not that young blood is the solution.
Maybe regularly donating blood would have more negative effects from losing good stuff than positive effects from losing bad stuff, or maybe not. There is evidence that it could be a net positive though.
And even aside from the buildup of crud due to normal aging, environmental crud (nano/microplastics, PFAS, etc) is not produced by the body. It's still not totally settled science whether all of those things have negative effects, but regular blood donation would help clear it out, at least a little.
The article confirms what I just wrote. Albumins are proteins. If you add more albumins, the ratio changes.
dilution = change of ratio. Just giving blood is not dilution.
I was waiting for someone to consider the idea of synthetic dilutants.
But a further horror is: you’re dumping your crud on the person getting your transfusion? I guess it’s better than dying in ER.
Yeah, unless your blood is significantly more cruddy than average, the recipient shouldn't really care that you had ulterior motives behind donating.
> it seems to follow that regularly donating blood might have health benefits
It's pretty effective if you have excess iron (hemochromatosis) and your local vampires accept your donation; some don't because a donation where you get a significant benefit isn't a donation for the sole reason of helping others (and a free cookie). In that case, traditional bloodletting may be required.
In New Zealand, you are stopped at 75 (or 81 if given an exemption) assuming you started donating before 71.
You can't start donating blood after 71.
From age section: https://www.nzblood.co.nz/become-a-donor/am-i-eligible/detai...
2 months for whole blood IIRC. You can do every 2 weeks for platelets, but I am not sure if that removes the crud or not. There's other donations with varying frequency (red, plasma, etc.).
I'm assuming this is in the US? I'm curious why it's 2 months there but 3 or 4 (men/women) in the UK.
Yeah, that is donating, now I wonder donating AND receiving (from a healthy individual). :D
Why do you think Gavin Belson had a blood bag? This has been a trope for a while. They even had blood bags in the Fury Road movie, but that was more of a continuous supply than just trying to refresh like Gavin. I don't think using movie tropes in a discussion on vampires is out of line here
Hope the author has some garlic silverware lying around after such a revealing article
I realize now that I might be in trouble. Thanks everyone
Cute. But I saw through your thin veil Mr Tepes. The irony of bragging about your opsec and revealing your true identity for leverage in the same sentence is considerable.
Anyway, I hope your son, Adrian, is doing ok. I fondly remember hunting your horrors of the night with him
-T.B.
I am deeply offended by someone associating Thiel with vampires. That idea is completely absurd. Vampires are famous for being handsome, interesting, elegant, well educated, and having impeccable taste for fashion. Thiel has none of these traits.
This is a fun story from the early 18th century if you haven't read about it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_of_St._Germain
And I don't want to add fuel to a strange fire, but in 1764 when Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a letter to Beaumont regarding the absurdity of belief despite evidence, he used this as an example:
"If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete."
“Don’t be silly, Bob,” said Mo. “Everybody knows vampires don’t exist.”
-- first line of The Rhesus Chart, by cstross
Wasn't this the guy going around building animate porcelain dolls in suspiciously modern gothic-lolita dresses?
Completely OT: In the link “what the longevity experts don’t tell you”[1] I found this:
“As a devout Baptist, he couldn’t use playing cards…”
And I’m wondering if I missed something in my Baptist upbringing. I have long since removed myself from any semblance of the Church and manage my own relationship with faith and any related higher beings, so it’s more a curiosity than pertinent.
1 - https://machielreyneke.com/blog/longevity-lessons/
As a devout Baptist minister, this is likely about one of two things, avoiding the appearance of evil (gambling, 1 Thess 5:22 - Abstain from every form of evil), and giving up something for the sake of others (gambling addictions within the church, Rom 4:21 - or do anything that causes your brother to stumble).
The reality is that most churches recognize that they were too legalistic in the past, and so now address things like gambling more directly, and are perfectly ok with playing cards. FWIW YMMV :-)
I was under the impression that the injunction against playing cards was because of their proximity to tarot/occult practices. Mormons had the same injunction against playing cards until the 80s, when the teaching was no longer promulgated. Speaking as a former Mormon...
Here in Sweden, where we also have free churches such as Baptists, Laestadians etc., the concern was definitely about gambling.
I think that's not wrong. Same principle, different sin... it looks like gambling, or the occult, or...
I knew plenty of Midwestern Baptists that didn't participate in the triple crown of no-nos: dancing, drinking, and gambling. And cards aren't necessarily gambling, but cards are the bricks that pave the road to such evil. It's guilt-by-association (and some will tell you, wrongly, that playing cards are an outgrowth of tarot cards and the like), but there ya go. Oddly, I knew plenty of Baptists that played Yahtzee, which involves dice, and that seemed acceptable. Never minding that the Roman soldiers cast lots ("dice") for Jesus' clothing. :-)
This is actually how the popular Texas dominoes game of "42" was invented. It's similar to Spades and other trick-taking games with bids and trumps, but it's played with dominoes, not cards, and therefore it's okay :) Two boys from a Baptist family who got in trouble for playing cards came up with it.
Consider some writing contemporary to Rockefeller (there is a section on cards): https://baptisthistoryhomepage.com/social.amusements.willis....
Consider that Titan was written maybe 100 years removed from the events and you're reading a secondhand telling of it from a blog. Maybe there is more context in the book if you're really curious, or maybe the context was lost from Rockefeller's time to the book, or from the book to the blogpost.
Consider a few more things: If you ask 10 Baptists about something secondary to scripture like this, you may get different answers from different people, especially if they are from different eras, as religion changes over time. As another example, some Catholics grew up hearing the mass in Latin.
It's funny though, Rockefeller appeared devout enough to understand that gambling was a sin. Rockefeller appeared to believe in an omniscient God. Did he really think his square counters would fool said omniscient God? People trying to find such loopholes in Religion is always fascinating to me. Of course, it could have all been a show.
> Did he really think his square counters would fool said omniscient God?
My favorite example of this is the string of fishing line around Manhattan.
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-enci...
The difference is that it is an explicit belief of most jewish groups that God put these "clever" gimmicks into the rules on purpose, God wants you to look for them and be rewarded for looking for them, and God thinks the way jewish people debate about rules is awesome, and that "clever" workarounds are just the best.
Contrast this with my Catholic tradition which insists that if I get cheeky with God I should expect to be slapped back down. Jesus seems nifty though, so it's a tradeoff.
Also, I'm lying. Catholics had no problems playing dumb games with "The rules" to eat beavers when they weren't supposed to eat "meat" and also fish aren't "meat" to this day. We're fun like that.
I was hoping he would provide some insight about why they avoid the sun. From observation, thiel looks like he is getting too much sun, or at least his skin has been reengineered like Alucard. While Johnson is just cake [0].
Side note: for once, I'm enjoying a heavily AI assisted article.
[0]: you'll have to find that reference on your own.
This predates 2005. A 1991 Simpsons episode depicts the rejuvenation powers of young blood.
I'm not really sure if the author (i.e. generative language model) is being serious or being sarcastic...
Oh there are vampires. They are very old. But they are mostly illusions of light. Once the veil is removed the disappointment of hell sets in. Smoke, mirrors, DNA, sound.
The French people didn't invest the most elaborate head chopping off machine for just spectacle…
Honestly, the surest sign of the existence of vampires to me would be a class of investors with extremely anomalous discount rates, suggesting that they are operating on inhumanly long time horizons, combined with a particular interest in real estate, as first documented in the field's seminal publication (Stoker, 1897).
Reasonable hypothesis. Supported by data. Seems legit
>The public begins to associate blood transfusion with eccentric billionaires rather than with undead predators. This is a critical narrative shift.
Not much of a shift...
You misunderstand. Coming out as vampires is meant to improve their reputation.
Early chatgpt really did not like it when I asked if Peter Thiel was a vampire.
It got very "mad" at me. It was funniest thing all day.
Thanks for the recommended chuckle.
Interesting that the author didn't mention anything about stem cell injections. Those have been in vogue among the elite for decades (millennia?).
Yeah… and anytime the narrative switches from transfusion to blood-sucking, I object “but what about stomach acid?” Bodies break stuff down first.
How could it be millenia? Have we been able to isolate stem cells that long, or are you suggesting feasting on placenta as suitable?