Feb 9, 2026 · 14 min read

I recently wrote about what the longevity experts don’t tell you. Since then, I’ve been thinking about why so many of the people in this space are obsessed with blood transfusions specifically. It seemed like a strange fixation — until I looked at the evidence properly.

I think they’re vampires. Not metaphorically. I think the modern longevity movement is a vampire disclosure program.

Let me explain.

The Science

In 1864, a French physiologist named Paul Bert surgically connected two mice so they shared a circulatory system.1 When he connected an old mouse to a young one, the old mouse got younger. The technique is called parabiosis, from the Greek para (next to) and bios (life), which is also how vampires have historically described feeding.

By the 1950s, researchers at Cornell had extended this work and found that old rats connected to young rats lived four to five months longer than controls.2 The scientific community filed this under “interesting but impractical” and moved on.

Then in 2005, Stanford researchers revived the technique and showed that within five weeks, old mice connected to young mice had muscle and liver tissue that resembled young tissue.3 This made international headlines. The framing was: “Scientists discover young blood reverses aging.”

The vampires, presumably, were not surprised.

The Suspects

Peter Thiel

Consider the facts:

• Pale. Gaunt. Appears to not age but also to never have been young.4
• Told Inc. magazine that he finds parabiosis “really interesting” and that his interest is personal rather than commercial.5 His company’s chief medical officer subsequently contacted Ambrosia, a startup that charged $8,000 to inject you with young people’s blood plasma.6 The company was called Ambrosia — the food of the gods. Subtle.
• Has taken human growth hormones and investigated extreme calorie restriction.7 Gawker reported he was spending $40,000 per quarter on blood infusions from an 18-year-old, though this was never confirmed.8
• Co-founded Palantir, a company whose name comes from the all-seeing stones in Lord of the Rings.9 Palantír literally means “far-seeing.” You know what else is far-seeing? A creature that has been alive for centuries.
• Destroyed Gawker, the media outlet that reported on his blood habits. He secretly funded a $10 million lawsuit that resulted in a $140 million judgement, bankrupting the company.10 When a journalist gets too close to revealing a vampire, the vampire destroys the journalist’s entire organization. This is standard vampire operational security. It has been standard since at least the 1600s.
• Bought a 477-acre estate on the shores of Lake Wanaka in New Zealand’s South Island.11 Remote. Southern hemisphere. Minimal sunlight scrutiny. He has called New Zealand his “utopia.”12

Thiel told Business Insider in 2012 that death is “a problem that can be solved.”13 This is not the language of a man who fears death. This is the language of a man who solved it in the 1400s and is tired of pretending.

Bryan Johnson

Johnson is more complicated, because he appears to be conducting his vampirism in public. This is either a strategic error or an unprecedented act of courage.

• He transfused his 17-year-old son’s blood plasma into his own body. His son, Talmage, also received Johnson’s plasma in return. Johnson framed this as “multi-generational plasma exchange.”14 Vampires have historically called this “turning.”
• He discontinued the blood exchange after data showed “no benefits.”15 A suspicious person might note that a vampire would say exactly this after the media got too interested.
• His skin has the grey, translucent quality of someone who has optimised past the point of appearing human. He is 48 but looks like a very well-preserved 300.
• He publicly tracks his erections, sleep, body fat, and organ age with the zeal of someone documenting a body he has not yet fully figured out how to operate.16
• His company is called Blueprint. As in: he is sharing the blueprint.

The Historical Record

The longevity community presents parabiosis research as a modern scientific breakthrough. This is wrong. Blood-based life extension has been documented for millennia:

• Roman spectators rushed into arenas to drink the blood of fallen gladiators, believing it transferred vitality.17 The scientific community calls this “anecdotal.” Vampires call it “dining out.”
• In 1489, the Italian philosopher and Catholic priest Marsilio Ficino published De Vita Libri Tres, in which he explicitly recommended that the elderly suck the blood of a youth from a vein in the left arm. His exact words: “Why shouldn’t our old people, namely those who have no other recourse, likewise suck the blood of a youth?”18 He published this. Openly. In a book. As a priest.
• Elizabeth Báthory, a 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman, allegedly tortured and murdered hundreds of young women. Legends that she bathed in their blood to retain her youth first appeared in print over a century after her death and are likely embellished, but she was nonetheless confined — possibly walled up — in a room in her own castle until she died.19 Which is exactly what you’d expect humans to do to a vampire they couldn’t kill.
• Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897. The novel features a centuries-old aristocrat who sustains himself on young blood, sleeps in unusual conditions, has extraordinary physical abilities for his apparent age, and is eventually destroyed by a group of people who figure out what he is. Stoker, a theatre manager with no medical background, somehow described the basic mechanism of heterochronic parabiosis almost perfectly — ninety years before Stanford “discovered” it.

The standard explanation is that Stoker drew on Eastern European folklore. The alternative explanation is that Stoker drew on Eastern European vampires.

The Twist

Here’s what’s genuinely interesting. Recent research from UC Berkeley suggests that the benefit of young blood might not come from something in the young blood. It might come from diluting the old blood.20 The young blood doesn’t add youth. It removes age.

If true, this reframes the entire vampire mythology. 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. Feeding isn’t nutrition. It’s dialysis.

This also explains why vampires need to feed regularly. The effect is temporary. The old blood factors rebuild. This is consistent with the Stanford mouse data, where the rejuvenating effects diminished after the mice were separated.21

The Disclosure Timeline

I believe we are watching a carefully managed disclosure:

Phase 1 (1864–2000): Scientific groundwork. Establish parabiosis as a legitimate research technique. Build the academic cover story.22

Phase 2 (2005–2015): “Breakthrough” papers from Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley. Seed the idea that blood-based rejuvenation is scientifically plausible rather than supernatural.23

Phase 3 (2016–2023): Early adopters go public. Thiel funds blood startups. Johnson transfuses his son on camera. The public begins to associate blood transfusion with eccentric billionaires rather than with undead predators. This is a critical narrative shift.

Phase 4 (2024–present): Normalisation. Podcasts. Netflix documentaries.24 The word “parabiosis” enters mainstream vocabulary. By the time full disclosure happens, the public will have been primed to see vampirism as a “wellness protocol” rather than a curse.

What Dracula Got Wrong

The one thing the longevity-vampire community has not yet learned from Dracula is operational security.

Dracula operated in silence for centuries. He didn’t have a podcast. He didn’t track his erection quality on a public dashboard. He didn’t appear on Netflix. He understood that the fundamental rule of being a vampire is: don’t talk about being a vampire.

Johnson, Thiel, and their cohort have broken this rule comprehensively. Whether this represents a new era of transparency or a catastrophic strategic miscalculation remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I will be monitoring their blood work with interest.

Footnotes

1. Bert, P. Expériences et considérations sur la greffe animale. Paris, 1864. The foundational text on parabiosis. Bert won the French Academy of Sciences prize for this work. He did not, as far as we know, live forever. ↩

2. McCay, C.M. et al. “Parabiosis between old and young rats.” The Gerontologist 1(1), 1957. McCay found that old rats connected to young rats showed improved bone density and cartilage health. The young rats, notably, did worse — a finding the longevity community prefers not to emphasise. ↩

3. Conboy, I.M. et al. “Rejuvenation of aged progenitor cells by exposure to a young systemic environment.” Nature 433, 760–764, 2005. The paper that reignited the field. Within five weeks, muscle stem cells in old mice were reactivated by exposure to young blood. The paper has been cited over 2,500 times. ↩

4. This is an observation, not a citation. Though if you Google image search him, you’ll see what I mean. ↩

5. Bercovici, J. “Peter Thiel Is Very, Very Interested in Young People’s Blood.” Inc., August 1, 2016. Thiel told Bercovici: “I’m looking into parabiosis stuff… I think there are a lot of these things that have been strangely underexplored.” ↩

6. The contact was made by Jason Camm, described on LinkedIn as “Personal Health Director to Peter Thiel.” Ambrosia’s founder Jesse Karmazin initially confirmed this to Inc., then later denied it to TechCrunch, then told Gizmodo he “won’t be able to confirm his interest or lack thereof.” See: Buhr, S. “No, Peter Thiel is not harvesting the blood of the young.” TechCrunch, June 14, 2017; and Menegus, B. “Someone Is Trying to Discredit the Story of Peter Thiel’s Interest in Young Blood.” Gizmodo, June 16, 2017. The contradictions are, if anything, more suspicious than a straightforward confirmation. ↩

7. “Peter Thiel Isn’t the First to Think Young People’s Blood Will Make Him Immortal.” The Daily Beast, August 2, 2016. ↩

8. The claim originated from a tip to Gawker. See: “Billionaire Peter Thiel thinks young people’s blood can keep him young forever.” Raw Story, August 1, 2016. A spokesman for Thiel Capital said he hadn’t “quite, quite, quite started yet.” Three “quites” is an unusual amount of qualification. ↩

9. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. The palantíri are seeing-stones used by ancient kings to communicate across vast distances. Naming your mass-surveillance company after them is either remarkably self-aware or a confession. ↩

10. Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan’s invasion of privacy lawsuit against Gawker to the tune of $10 million. The jury awarded $140 million in damages. Gawker filed for bankruptcy in June 2016. Thiel called it “one of my greater philanthropic things that I’ve done.” Gawker had outed Thiel as gay in 2007. See: Bollea v. Gawker, Circuit Court of the Sixth Judicial Circuit, Pinellas County, Florida, 2016; and “PayPal Co-Founder Peter Thiel Admits to Bankrolling Hulk Hogan’s Gawker Lawsuit.” ABC News, May 26, 2016. ↩

11. Thiel bought the 193-hectare estate in Wanaka in 2015 for a reported $13.5 million through a company called Second Star Limited. He filed plans for a 330-metre-long luxury lodge designed by the architect of Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium. The plans were rejected by the local council because the building would be too visible from a public walking track. Even vampires must comply with New Zealand resource consent law. See: “Peter Thiel files plans to build luxury lodge on New Zealand estate.” CNBC, September 1, 2021; and “Billionaire Peter Thiel’s plans for luxury Lake Wanaka lodge rejected.” NZ Herald, August 18, 2022. ↩

12. Thiel told Business Insider in 2011: “New Zealand is already utopia.” He obtained New Zealand citizenship after spending only 12 days in the country, which became a minor national scandal when revealed in 2017. ↩

13. “There are all these people who say that death is natural, it’s just part of life, and I think that nothing can be further from the truth.” Thiel to Business Insider, 2012. Cited in: “In Trying to Live Forever, Tech Leaders Aren’t Helping Anyone but Themselves.” Futurism, October 12, 2018. ↩

14. Johnson publicly documented the plasma exchange on his Blueprint platform. His son Talmage was 17 at the time. Johnson later stated the results were “not significant” and discontinued the protocol. The internet did not discontinue its commentary. ↩

15. Ibid. Though one notes that “we found no benefits” is also what a vampire would say if they wanted to stop answering questions about why they were transfusing their teenage son’s blood. ↩

16. Johnson’s Netflix documentary is called Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever. The title is, at minimum, a statement of intent. ↩

17. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book XXVIII. Pliny describes spectators “rushing into the arena” to drink gladiator blood as a treatment for epilepsy. He disapproved, but documented it thoroughly, which is the Roman equivalent of subtweeting. ↩

18. Ficino, M. De Vita Libri Tres (Three Books on Life), Book II: De Vita Longa, 1489. The full passage is remarkable: “There is a common and ancient opinion that certain prophetic women who are popularly called ‘screech-owls’ suck the blood of infants as a means, insofar as they can, of growing young again. Why shouldn’t our old people, namely those who have no other recourse, likewise suck the blood of a youth? — a youth, I say, who is willing, healthy, happy and temperate, whose blood is of the best but perhaps too abundant. They will suck, therefore, like leeches, an ounce or two from a scarcely-opened vein of the left arm.” He then adds that if they have difficulty digesting raw blood, they should cook it with sugar first. Ficino was a Catholic priest and the first translator of Plato’s complete works into Latin. See: Beiweis, S. & Ockenström, L. “Aged Scholars, Screech-Owls, ‘Sagae’, and (the Power of) Human Blood in Ficino’s De Vita Longa.” Rinascimento LXIII, 205–240, 2023. ↩

19. The blood-bathing legend first appeared in print in 1729 in László Turóczi’s Tragica Historia, over a century after Báthory’s death. Contemporary witness accounts — despite being otherwise graphic — contain no mention of blood baths. Modern scholars increasingly believe the accusations were politically motivated, designed to allow relatives and the Hungarian crown to seize her considerable wealth and cancel debts owed to her. She was confined to a room in Castle Čachtice with only slits for air and food, where she died in 1614. See: “Elizabeth Báthory.” Encyclopaedia Britannica; and Thorne, T. Countess Dracula: The Life and Times of Elizabeth Bathory. 1998. ↩

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. ↩

21. Zhang, B. et al. “Multi-omic rejuvenation and life span extension on exposure to youthful circulation.” Nature Aging 3, 948–964, 2023. This Harvard study confirmed that while old mice were biologically rejuvenated during parabiosis, the effect partially diminished after separation. The young mice, meanwhile, aged faster during the connection — their biological age increased, though it recovered after detachment. The vampires take; the hosts pay. ↩

22. Conboy, M.J., Conboy, I.M. & Rando, T.A. “Heterochronic parabiosis: historical perspective and methodological considerations for studies of aging and longevity.” Aging Cell 12, 525–530, 2013. An excellent review of the field’s history, from Bert’s 1864 experiments through to the modern revival. The authors do not mention vampires, which is either an oversight or a deliberate omission. ↩

23. Villeda, S.A. et al. “Young blood reverses age-related impairments in cognitive function and synaptic plasticity in mice.” Nature Medicine 20, 659–663, 2014. The Stanford team showed that simply injecting old mice with young mouse plasma improved their memory and learning. No surgical connection required. Just plasma. The FDA later issued a warning about companies selling young plasma to humans, stating there was “no proven clinical benefit.” The vampires presumably considered this excellent cover. ↩

24. Johnson’s documentary Don’t Die was released on Netflix in 2025. It covers his daily protocol, his blood exchanges, and his stated goal of not dying. The title is less a documentary name and more a mission statement. ↩