2 generations, 1 hotel room, 100+ longevity minds: our year around the world

He brought the camera. I brought the questions.

In August 2023, my son Alek, 17 and just out of high school, and I set off on a year around the world to find out how to live longer. 39 countries and states. More than 100 scientists, doctors and healers. And most nights, one hotel room.

Same journey. Same interviews. But we never saw longevity the same way.

I want to live at least 500 years, and I hope for more. If I’m healthy at 500, I’ll have even more dreams than I have now. Alek doesn’t want to name a number. When Peter Diamandis asked him in Los Angeles, he said:

“I’m sure I will be able to give you a better estimate of how many years I would like to live further in the future, but at this time, I can just say as many healthy years as possible.”

My question was how to live longer. His, what kind of world we’ll live in.

This is the story of two generations on one quest, and what each of us brought home.

It started on a napkin

It started in a café in Warsaw. A few years earlier I had invited Alek to travel the world with me, and he wasn’t ready. That day he told me he was ready for a gap year. I said yes. And then I said: let’s connect it with longevity.

I took a napkin and drew a map of the world. Two kinds of places went on it: the epicenters of longevity I knew, like Dublin, Boston, San Francisco and Singapore, and the places Alek dreamed of: wild nature and great waves. He wanted to surf his way around the world. I loved it: surfing and longevity, together.

We dreamed of traveling with our own boards. Then reality hit: more than half of our luggage turned out to be film equipment. We never bought the boards. Traveling with them would have been too hard, and you can always rent one.

And the equipment kept growing. At the start, Alek joked that we had more equipment than talent. A few months later, he was the one asking for more gear. Now we had more talent than equipment. To make it all fit, we kept ditching clothes along the way, and in Bali we left a whole bag behind.

That napkin became a year of our lives.

He took the camera on day one

The quest started at Longevity Summit Dublin, and in those first days in Ireland, Alek picked up the camera. Every child spends years trying to be as good as their parents. Then comes the day you can do something better than your dad. He knew the gear better than I did, and I became his helper.

By Hong Kong, three months in, he was seriously good with it. And in Shanghai, in December 2023, at the TimePie longevity conference, he went on stage for the first time in his life. Just a couple of minutes. But afterwards, people from the audience came up to him with their questions. A star was born, I thought, and with him, a new confidence.

What he taught me

The hardest part of the year wasn’t the luggage or the jet lag. It was us. Two people together every hour of every day, in cars, airports, hotel rooms and other people’s homes. The first months were often hard, and the peak came in Australia.

Looking back, I can see what was happening. From the start, Alek kept trying to prove that he was different from me. And I kept trying to prove how similar we were.

When we had a fight, I was devastated. I wanted it solved immediately: sit down that evening, talk it through, fix it. And as long as it wasn’t fixed, I tormented myself. He’s my mirror, I thought. He must have learned this from me. It’s my fault.

Then I noticed something I couldn’t understand at first. Fifteen minutes after a fight, Alek was talking to me as if nothing had happened. He wasn’t pretending. For him, it really was fine. We had disagreed, and life went on.

At first it irritated me. Then it confused me. And one day I decided to try it his way. The next time there was tension between us, we let it go, and soon we were talking and laughing again as if nothing had happened. It felt like a small miracle.

Somewhere in Australia, both of us let go of what we were trying to prove. He saw how similar we are. I saw how different we are. And from then on, we started to flow.

The most important thing I learned on the whole quest, I didn’t learn from the scientists. I learned it from my son.

Resilience in a relationship. It means this: if two people love each other and want the best for each other, that is more than enough. We are all different. We see the world differently, and disagreements will happen. That’s natural. It doesn’t mean anything is broken.

But it doesn’t mean we have to analyze and solve every single one of them. Maybe 20% deserve that: sit down, talk, learn something. The other 80% we can simply let go, and get back to enjoying the relationship and the life we actually have.

The scientists we met use the same word for our cells: resilience, the ability to take a hit and bounce back. I learned the human version from a 17-year-old. And for someone who wants to live 500 years, it may be the most useful skill of all. A long life with the people you love depends less on winning every argument than on how quickly you find your way back to each other.

I first wrote about this in the opening article of this series, The most important thing I learned on the Quest, I didn’t learn from the scientists. I keep coming back to it because I use it every day.

Two views on a long life

We both live in the now. We both love the life we have today: the sea, sport, friends, the people we meet on the way. The difference is where our eyes go when we look ahead. Mine go far, to 500 years and more, and to how science can get us there. His go around us, to the world we’re living in.

He worries about AI, and about whether our planet will stay livable. In Boston he put to the bioethicist Raiany Romanni a question his friends ask him:

“People like my friends worry about overpopulation in the long run when we start living longer. Do you think it’s a real threat?”

And at the end of our walk with Peter Diamandis in Los Angeles, Alek summed up our year on the road:

“I want myself, my family, and my friends, people around me to live as many healthy years as they can and be optimistic about the future. … Maybe I’m not as optimistic as you yet, but that’s what I want.”

Not as optimistic as Peter, yet. I love that word. Peter told him that his potential, and how long he can live, is truly unbounded. Alek laughed:

“I wanna believe that.”

We still play that game, of course. In Seattle, after a week of frisbee golf and long walks, I told him we’re like twins from different times. He laughed and said we couldn’t be more different: he had beaten me at frisbee golf, and on our DNA walk down the road, I was the slow one.

A father and a daughter in the sky

If I had to choose one place that showed what this journey was, it would be New Zealand. The most beautiful place of the whole year. We lived in our car for a week, and every morning the view through the windshield was better than the night before.

On the South Island we flew over the glaciers with Matt and Lily Newton, a father-and-daughter team of helicopter pilots. Four generations of pilots. Matt’s father flew in the war and stayed on for the Berlin Airlift. Lily grew up in the back seat of a helicopter, flying farm to farm while her parents spread fertilizer, the family sleeping in the shearers’ quarters.

That afternoon they did something they almost never do. They shut the helicopter down and swam in the ice-cold lake below the glacier. A father and his child, doing what they love, together. I looked at them and saw us.

And it was Matt, who has nothing to do with science, who asked the question we had been asking all year. The tour buses bring him people in their eighties. Some are sprightly and fit. Others, the same age, have no get-up-and-go. And he finds himself wanting to ask them what the trick is.

In Rotorua, Tama tattooed my arm with koru symbols: rebirth, growth, and a father-son journey that never ends.

The one thing we agree on

For all our differences, we always came back to the same place. I said it to Peter Diamandis, the founder of XPRIZE, that day in Los Angeles, with Alek sitting next to me:

“For me, I always say that in the basics, the most important is the mindset. Actually, the mindset and heartset.”

And when Alek asked Peter Diamandis how people his age should prepare for a world where life may last 120 or 150 years, Peter didn’t talk about pills or clinics:

“I think it’s mindset. … I think mindset is the single most important tool that you have.”

For Alek’s generation, Peter said, it’s a curiosity mindset and a gratitude mindset. I think he’s right. And I think that’s a story for another article.

Father and son in the scanner

In California we did something most fathers and sons never do together: full-body MRIs, brain scans and blood tests at Human Longevity. Alek was 18 and perfectly healthy. That was the point. Why I think 18 is the right age, I wrote in Raising a Longevity Generation.

Then came the moment of truth: the results, side by side. Dr David Karow went through mine first, then turned to Alek:

“So, Alek, again, same story with you. There are no major findings, so that’s all good. Start with the brain. So I think you’ve got a lot of your dad’s genetics, because everything looks pretty good.”

I couldn’t resist: “But also similar or just as good.” And Dr Julie Chen, then Chief Medical Officer at Human Longevity, laughed:

“He wants to be better.”

We all burst out laughing. Because that’s exactly it. Every son wants to be better than his dad. And a few minutes later, scrolling through Alek’s brain, Dr Karow came back to it:

“I have to say, I can’t say it looks any better than your dad’s, but it looks pretty, pretty good.”

Same genes. Same results. And a son who still wants to beat his father. I hope he does, in everything.

The price he paid, and the end of the road

I’ll be honest: Alek missed his friends. For months we met almost nobody his age. In Singapore he told a doctor:

“I met maybe 10 people my age tops during six months.”

Looking back, I would tailor the trip more to him, and make sure we met many more young people along the way. But we also had a beautiful time as father and son, and I wouldn’t trade it.

In June 2024, after almost ten months together, Alek flew home to Poland, to his mom and his friends, and I went on to finish the quest. Before he left, sitting in a garden near Seattle, he told me he was excited and worried at the same time. Excited to see everyone. Sad that the thing we had worked on so hard was coming to an end, and that the routine we had built together would stop.

“The feeling I have is some kind of phobia of stopping traveling. I just can’t imagine life without traveling now.”

I told him the end wasn’t the end. We would meet again at the close of the quest in Copenhagen, and whenever he had time off from his studies, I would call him and say: let’s fly somewhere for a week. In Copenhagen, at ARDD, we stood on stage together.

10 p.m., one evening in Poland

When Alek first came home to Warsaw, he wanted to share everything he had learned about living longer and healthier. Nobody wanted to hear it. Not his friends, not his family. He told them how to live longer and healthier, and they shrugged it off. I wrote about it in My son came home and nobody believed him.

Then, one late evening when we were visiting Poland, my phone rang at 10 p.m. It was Alek. Could he come home with his friend Marcel? Marcel had questions, lots of them, and he wanted to ask the longevity advocate himself.

They came, and Marcel asked me question after question about longevity and our quest. He had been inspired by our journey. From what I hear, he is now heading in that direction himself.

That’s when I knew the film would reach young people. Not because of the science in it. Because of a friend who saw what his friend had lived.

What I hope he learned from me

I learned resilience from him. And from me? I hope it’s this: if you have the will, a mission and a purpose, you can do almost anything. And you never give up on your dreams.

Today Alek studies at a university in Amsterdam. He’s learning adult life, with its ups and downs, and he’s doing amazingly.

Two journalists, ten days

A year ago, at the end of November, a journalist named Stella Salomon wrote to me. She and her colleague Sina Metz had read my article about our journey, and they loved one thing about it: two generations on one quest.

After a two-hour call with both of us, they came. A week with me in Lisbon. A week with Alek in Amsterdam. Then Berlin, a longevity clinic and Life Summit. Two journalists from Die Zeit, the largest quality newspaper in Germany, read by almost 2 million people every week, spent ten days with a father and a son. We did sport together, ate together, and talked for hours about life, longevity and balance.

It took some time before Alek felt ready to open his life to them, and that mattered to me. This story was never just mine. It’s ours.

At Life Summit I introduced them to Aubrey de Grey, Brian Kennedy, Olivia Lesslar and Steve Horvath. They didn’t only ask about the science. They asked about us: how they had met us, and what they thought of our journey.

What they seemed to love most was the balance. We don’t optimize every step of every day. Longevity, for both of us, is about actually living.

On Thursday, 29 October, Alek and I are on the cover of ZEITmagazin, which comes with every copy of Die Zeit.

The next journey

In Dublin, at the very beginning, Liz Parrish wished us that this would be the first journey of many. It was the best wish we could have been given. We both dream of doing the same journey again. Just the two of us, maybe with a few friends. And this time, without cameras.

And a question for you. Would you spend a year traveling with your parent, or with your child? Yes or no is enough.

The film. Our year on the road became “Live Beyond. Father and Son on a Quest for Longevity”. Our friend, the filmmaker Kamil Rydzewski, supported us all the way and joined us for about 20% of the journey. The rest of the time, Alek was the main person behind the camera. I helped him, filmed now and then, and did the interviews. And it’s Alek’s voice that narrates the film.

Marek Piotrowski, Longevity Advocate ↗

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Marek and Alek talking in a garden in Seattle, June 2024. · Live Beyond
Where each quotation comes from. Alek Piotrowski, Los Angeles, December 2025. Alek Piotrowski, Boston, November 2024. Marek Piotrowski, Los Angeles, December 2025. Peter Diamandis, Los Angeles, December 2025. Dr David Karow, Human Longevity, California, May 2024. Dr Julie Chen, Human Longevity, California, May 2024. Alek Piotrowski, Singapore, March 2024. Alek Piotrowski, Seattle, June 2024.