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Thanks to a chilling season finale and the departure of T.J. Miller, HBO’s smartest and most tech-savvy comedy has been making headlines lately. However, there’s one recurring theme throughout this past season that hasn’t gained much attention but has likely confused some viewers. What’s a blood boy, and do Silicon Valley billionaires actually think that the blood of young people can make them immortal?
The topic came up on the streaming scene again this past weekend with the release of Netflix’s latest documentary, Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press. Most of the documentary is devoted to the bizarre court case between Hulk Hogan and Gawker Media that ultimately led to Gawker shutting down while pitting privacy rights against freedom of the press. But even in this intelligent and serious documentary, the topic of young people’s blood pops up.
Blood and billionaires are linked for the same reason that Gawker no longer exists — Peter Thiel. Thiel is one of those figures who is an unapproachable celebrity in the valley but, until recently, was relatively unknown everywhere else. The venture capitalist and entrepreneur was first known for co-founding PayPal. However his prominence in the Valley grew in 2004 when Thiel’s venture capital firm became Facebook’s first outside investor. It was also revealed last year that Thiel was responsible for bankrolling the Hogan case that led to Gawker’s demise. Currently, he’s known for having a lot of money, even more connections, and for being an outspoken and financially generous Trump supporter. But more pressing to our interests, Thiel is also obsessed with warding off death and plans to live 120 years.
In her article for Vanity Fair, Maya Kosoff explained the billionaire’s philosophy on life, the many ways he has tried to combat death, and Thiel’s more extreme death-defying interest — parabiosis. The practice involves receiving blood transfusions from a younger person in order to improve health and reversing aging. It was a procedure that was explored in the 1950s but was abandoned for whatever reason, and it’s gaining more popularity than you would think in 2017. In an unpublished interview from Inc. magazine, Thiel expressed interest in picking it back up in his quest to become as close to immortal as possible. It’s unknown whether Thiel has actually injected himself with young people’s blood, though Gawker’s J.K. Trotter mentioned there were rumors the billionaire had tried the process for himself. The unsourced tip claimed that Thiel “spends $40,000 per quarter to get an infusion of blood from an 18-year-old based on research conducted at Stanford on extending the lives of mice.”
Enter Silicon Valley Season 4. This season HBO let us into fictional tech billionaire Gavin Belson’s (Matt Ross) inner life a little more, and the results were horrifying. Not only does Gavin have an alarming amount of framed photographs of himself, he also has a 20-something guy whose whole job is to give him blood, a character we explore in-depth in “The Blood Boy.” Thiel has always had a presence on Silicon Valley, though his doppelgänger has changed from season to season. Initially, Peter Gregory (Christopher Evan Welch) was the billionaire’s fictional copycat. However, following the death of Welch, Gavin Belson has become sort of the catch-all for the weird habits of the tech-obsessed and super rich.
Basically, the many blood boy jokes from this season were all mocking Thiel. So continues Silicon Valley‘s history of long-winded, surprisingly well-researched, insider jokes that feel like silly nonsense.
