Niko Argento believes it’s what’s on the inside that counts. He believes this because he is in the business of curating bespoke immortality for the chronically rich and famous. His conviction has made him a quiet legend among the beautiful and the damned. It’s not so much that he wants your blood, but that his very particular skills permit him to avoid the black market and get you anything you need whenever you need it—exotic peptides, a private nurse to inject them, salmon DNA, and a regenerative substance banned across all mainstream professional sports—and among the novelties and oddities available via his concierge services is his treatment to perfect and enhance what flows within your veins. Death may be inevitable, but decay is optional.

For approximately $250,000 a year, Argento, the founder of Members Only Health, will customize your blood. Many experts call the treatments risky. The challenge appeals to Argento, who says he’s not advocating for anything bad. “We find the yes behind the no,” he says, “and we hardly say ‘That can’t happen.’ ” He comes recommended by everyone who’s anyone not just in Hollywood, but in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and on the private jets, royal courts, and yachts off Monaco where masters of the universe drift.

His name is like a password for a secret club that understands appearances are everything only up to the point at which you have everything you want. Beyond material desires is the desire to transcend our mortality. This is reflected through pedestrian habits and procedures from biohacking to Botox. It’s the anxiety that hums behind antiaging and pro-longevity protocols. What seems just superficial or narcissistic is a primal scream of the profound human fear that accompanies our uncertainty about our circumstances. That Argento has mastered the unseen realm of our blood affords him special status in the world of concierge wellness advisers and elite fixers.

When I call Argento, he’s in Paris. One of his clients is there on tour and in urgent need of stem cells as a pick-me-up. For stem cells, exosomes, peptides, IV infusions, and even certain facials, his team handles everything in-house. If a client requests something exotic or unavailable, Argento will make the introduction to the right expert. What he can’t do himself, he will make happen.

“A majority of high-net-worth celebrity entertainment-industry clientele are doing these treatments to stay healthy and in front of the game,” Argento says. He speaks ­slowly and chooses his words carefully. This is his first time agreeing to an interview.

Even though his company is described as a regenerative-medicine concierge, he prefers to describe himself as a “fixer,” because he’s the guy people usually call when there’s a problem with their blood, their treatments, or their health plan. That’s why he and his team insist on comprehensive screenings and biomarker tracking, as well as reviewing each client’s blood panel line by line.

Whether it’s purely for vanity or to repair an old injury, celebrities are reengineering their blood with testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone swirling alongside human growth hormone and GLP-1. Peptides like BPC-157 are injected as casually as espresso shots, while NAD fills IV bags with the promise of a youthful glow. Add to that the micronized stem cells, exosomes, vitamin infusions, platelet-rich plasma, nootropics, and adaptogens—a custom-made recipe of biology and branding, equal parts science experiment and status symbol. What could go wrong?

“The approach has shifted because people have realized that you can make someone really sick, really quickly if you don’t guide them,” Argento admits. “I’ve had clients who never did precancer diagnostics before they started [treatment], and within two months, the cancer grew from like stage 1 or stage 0 to like stage 3,” Argento explains. “They went on these peptides and had no idea that it could do this because, unfortunately, whoever sold it to them or gave it to them never disclosed any of that.”

His team isn’t the only one dealing with uninformed decisions made by impatient people getting treatments from an entire ecosystem of luxury performance clinics and longevity spas whose upselling is flooding red-carpet bloodstreams with overpriced cocktails that may be counterproductive.

In Venice Beach, Bryan Johnson famously hosts “Don’t Die” dinners for high-profile friends. He discusses mortality and human advancement. He also offers to help guests with their blood work. Johnson is arguably the most measured man in human history and has tried and documented every popular and experimental longevity treatment while sharing his results publicly. He has said he spends $2 million annually on slow aging and recently started his own religion. Many celebrities look to him as a sort of consultant for their own routines, and surprisingly, he’s completely against the whole lifestyle.

“Most people do these therapies for the psychological benefit,” Johnson tells me after I ask him if anything actually works. The stance is almost shocking, considering the money and time he has spent making headlines for stunts like infusing his teenage son’s blood into his own. “They want to feel like they’re offsetting the bad things they do for their health,” he says with the scientific tone of someone who’s tried and calculated it all. Then he pivots: “The reality is that a lot of these therapies have inconclusive evidence, and some may actually be dangerous.” He sounds less like a biohacker mogul and more like a dad warning kids about marijuana. “You pair that with the fact that they’re not measuring the effects of these therapies, so you don’t even know if it’s doing good or bad in your body.”

According to Johnson, there should be no guesswork when anyone can test blood for various biomarkers to figure out if treatments are actually working. Then there’s (probably) the biggest bummer no one in the wellness world wants to talk about, which is that the most popular peptide on the market—NAD, or nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide—has been linked to accelerated cancer growth. NAD is a naturally occurring coenzyme found in every cell of the body, essential for turning nutrients into energy and supporting cellular repair. And boosting NAD levels with treatment may help aging cells produce energy more efficiently.

“There’s one type of cell that loves NAD,” warns Atria Health Institute’s chief science and medical officer, David W. Dodick, MD, “and that’s a cancer cell. Before people start dripping NAD into their system, they really ought to undergo a pretty thorough evaluation to make sure that they’re cancer-free and metabolically otherwise healthy.”

Atria Health Institute is a prevention-focused, membership-based medical practice with locations in New York and Palm Beach co-founded by Alan Tisch. Unlike Argento’s team, Atria won’t send a nurse to your villa with a cooler of stem cells, but it is set to open a chic Los Angeles location in 2026. The institute charges a one-time $80,000 initiation fee plus $60,000 per year. That’s essentially the price of a few Hermès bags for 24/7 access to a medical team led by Dodick, who spent more than three decades at the Mayo Clinic, where he founded and led several major programs related to neurology.

While Atria doesn’t offer Hollywood a menu of experimental blood therapies (yet), it’s nonjudgmental and wants to be part of the decision-making process. You want that experimental new longevity treatment your friend told you about? Think again. Dodick tells me about a 60-year-old biohacker who, before becoming a patient, got a plasma exchange treatment, “you know, to remove toxins, et cetera, et cetera” and had 10 strokes during the procedure.

It’s exactly the kind of disaster Dodick aims to prevent by providing a highly educated and experienced team of medical professionals from 16 specialties who will do research for members even if they don’t offer the treatment. They’ll even send doctors to other health care facilities around the world to determine where the best treatment options are available.

“I dispatched one of our medical directors to fly today to look at two different stem cell companies,” Dodick muses. “One that’s spun under the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, and one that’s spun under the University of Miami. So these are both bone marrow–derived mesenchymal stem cells.”

Meanwhile, it seems like every wellness spa in LA offers NAD peptide injections as a casual add-on to an infrared sauna appointment. Do they ever ask about the last time you were screened for cancer? Probably not. And do they offer before-and-after blood panels to track any changes? Not likely. Apparently, we’re all expected to go by vibes.

Because excess is the point, the injection routines recommended to celebrities are regimented and daily, especially in the weeks leading up to a red carpet. But how many of these stars are also regularly drawing blood, tracking biomarkers, and checking whether any of it is doing anything at all?

All of this may explain the rising popularity of Prenuvo, a premier body scan referred to simply as “getting scanned” every six months, made famous in the last couple of years by Hollywood staples like Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Hudson, and Cindy Crawford. Prenuvo is a private medical imaging company marketed as an early-detection tool for cancer and other serious health conditions. For $3,999, you get a comprehensive whole-body scan, lab testing for critical blood biomarkers, advanced brain health assessment, and an FDA-cleared body composition analysis.

Celebrities are as likely today to partner with wellness start-ups as they were a few years ago to develop their own tequila. Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, Kevin Hart, and Zac Efron are all investors in Function Health, a personal health service created by functional medicine proponent Mark Hyman, MD. For $499 (or about $42 a month), members get access to one yearly comprehensive assessment with 100-plus lab tests and a midyear check-in with 60 tests for biomarkers covering heart, hormones, thyroid, immunity, nutrients, cancer signals, autoimmunity, and aging. Almost all are blood biomarkers, with a small subset coming from urine testing. Function Health claims to run five times more lab tests than is typical through primary care and has a 500,000-person wait list with 100,000 active members since its mid-2023 beta launch. In May, Function Health acquired Ezra, a company offering AI-powered full-body MRIs. Furthermore, Whoop, a favorite among the White Lotus cast, launched a blood-testing service in September, claiming to have a 350,000-person wait list. Whoop, Prenuvo, and Function Health all use Quest Diagnostics for lab work.

Prenuvo’s senior medical director of preventative medicine, Vikash C. Modi, MD, says he sees a lot of substances come up in Hollywood blood, the most common being hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which he attributes to goals around hair, skin, muscle, and energy. His biggest concern is that people are doing HRT but getting it from doctors who do no safety checks. Again, more issues with responsible tracking.

Next, he sees a lot of NAD, glutathione, BPC-157, and GLP-1. The problem is that if people see low inflammatory markers in their test results, they’ll think they have to keep doing it because the blood work looks good. But testing before treatment would be key. Many patients don’t disclose any of their treatments due to stigma from lack of evidence-based research, but there’s a whole library of therapies Prenuvo patients are shy about disclosing, even if some of them show up with their specialty nurses, who sometimes even speak for them.

“What I’m saying is we are a suicidal species wrapped in pretty stories,” Johnson tells me, condemning the sleep-deprived pursuit of money, status, and power. He feels everyone rationalizes that it’s better to push through, make the money, and only then enjoy life on the back end. It surprised me that Johnson was the most strongly opposed to any kind of blood-related treatments, despite everyone seeking his advice on the premise that he’s done it all. Then it dawned on me that he has finished the game everyone else in wellness is still playing. And in the end, nothing significantly changed any biomarkers related to aging, though he did mention every IV drip deposits 44,000 microplastics into the blood from the plastic tube. So is it even worth whatever’s in the IV?

What he really wants is for people to build lifestyles and social systems around quality sleep, because according to him, it’s the most powerful therapy available to anyone on any given day, proven by his biomarkers. He says people will do anything to avoid going to bed on time and compensate for lack of sleep hygiene, even when he tells them his findings. We get it, Bryan, we’re toxic.

“You could take my experiment and apply it to planet Earth,” he tells me. “Earth is our home; we need the biosphere to support us. Replace my body with planet Earth, then measure it with a billion data points. Are its arteries healthy or clogged? Is it full of toxins?... We treat Earth the way we treat our own bodies—as if the relationship weren’t identical. That’s why I keep saying don’t just cope. Deal with it head-on. Otherwise, we’re ignoring the most important problem we have.”

I asked Johnson if he’s ever tried psychedelics. He did 30 days of ketamine therapy earlier this year, he says. (Ketamine is not a psychedelic, though it can have hallucinogenic effects.) “It had substantial change on my brain patterns.” None of this is what I would expect from someone who has immortalized himself with something called Bryan AI. He might still be playing the game, but I decide to ask him one last thing.

Is all of this just about however much money equals your placebo for feeling good? “That’s exactly right,” he tells me. “It’s a psychological soothing mechanism. But the way you wrestle control of your life is high-quality sleep, which gives you willpower and better decision-making.”

So if people tracked everything they’re putting in their blood, they’d find out maybe nothing’s changing, or maybe they have cancer now, which would make all of their effort counterproductive.

“They either come to us because of anxiety or they’re going to leave from us with some level of anxiety,” says Modi in regard to Prenuvo scan results. Some patients don’t want to know about the things they can’t fix; they’d rather not know if something was going to kill them.

While yes, we do all deserve preventative health care, and we do all deserve to have more information about our bodies, there’s still something missing in our most elitist approach to wellness. Courage and maturity, says psychologist Sheldon Solomon, who is best known for helping develop terror-management theory. He says it’s misguided to manage existential anxieties by trying to extend life indefinitely.

“That’s why the ancient Greeks had immortal gods who always wished to be human,” he tells me. “They were sitting up there forever, just bored. Just like you would be if you were reading a book that never ends or eating a meal where the courses never stop. Without an ending, the experience loses meaning.”

While all humans have apprehensions about dying, only the elite have had the means and time to be so anxious about it. And like all good fantasies, it’s catching. The thirst spreads quietly, disguised as aspiration—through the screens, the serums, the gym mirrors, the blood bags. What began as a luxury treatment for the fatally rich has become the democratization of death denial. Every injection, every supplement, every filter whispers the same seductive refrain—you don’t have to decay. The vampire is no longer a monster; it’s an algorithm.

Because this isn’t just a trend, it’s a cultural outbreak. A collective hallucination dressed up as self-care. A nation, radiant and terrified, sipping from the same silver chalice, certain that if we just keep drinking, we’ll never die.