Live Beyond · Warsaw, November 2026
Three years ago, one clinic. This November, a whole week.
When my son and I set out on our quest in 2023, Poland had one longevity clinic. This November, Warsaw holds two longevity events in one week, one of them in the National Stadium. Here is who is coming, and why it matters.
When my son Alek and I set out in August 2023 to find out how to live longer and better, Poland had one place that called itself a longevity clinic: Joanna Bensz’s Longevity Center in Warsaw. It was just starting. Beyond it, there was almost nothing.
Three years later, doctors across Poland want to be part of the longevity movement. And in the last week of November, Warsaw hosts not one longevity event, but two.
One week, two big events
On 28 and 29 November, the ELEVATE Health & Longevity Summit fills PGE Narodowy, the National Stadium, as Poland’s largest longevity event. It was founded by Michał Wieczorek. In May he came to Life Summit Berlin to see Olivia Lesslar and me on stage, and invited us both to Warsaw. I will speak at ELEVATE with Olivia. Joanna Bensz, whose clinic was the first, speaks there too.
A few days earlier, on 24 and 25 November, the Warsaw Longevity Forum meets at the DoubleTree by Hilton. Its program board is chaired by Prof. Marek Postuła, and it brings medicine, economics and technology into one room, under the patronage of the Ministry of Health and two other ministries. Andrea Maier is one of its keynote speakers, and Brian Kennedy and Liv Kraemer speak there too.
Poland is going global
Joanna has not stayed in Warsaw either. Every year she and the International Institute of Longevity bring longevity clinics and doctors from all over the world together at the Roundtable of Longevity Clinics, held at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in California. The fourth edition is this October. A Polish initiative now brings the whole field to one table, and that is a great thing to see.
Poland is in good company
What is happening in Warsaw is happening in other places too. Singapore opened a longevity clinic inside a public hospital in 2023, the first of its kind in public healthcare, with Andrea Maier’s research behind it. When Andrea’s team asked more than 3,000 Singaporeans, 82% knew what lifespan means, but only 43% had heard of healthspan, the years we live in good health. And more than half would go to a healthy longevity clinic. Abu Dhabi licensed a healthy-longevity medicine center in November 2024. In Saudi Arabia, the Hevolution Foundation has granted over $400 million to research on ageing and brought 3,000 people to Riyadh for its summit.
Every country does it its own way. In Japan, the government has worked with employers for years to keep people healthy for longer: annual health checks for every employee, and help to lose weight as soon as it starts to creep up. In Okinawa, Tina Woods told us why:
“About 10 years ago, they instituted a whole policy to engage employers in really looking after their employees, for example, to keep them healthy for as long as possible, just because they knew they needed to keep people healthy for longer because otherwise they have no people to work.”
Longevity is no longer a Silicon Valley story. It is becoming part of how countries look after their people. I hope Poland’s health system starts moving the same way, toward longevity medicine, and that it reaches everyone, not only the wealthy and those who already take care of their health. Andrea said it better than I can, when we first met her in Dublin:
Andrea Maier, Dublin, August 2023“I am really advocating, not fighting, but advocating for a framework that can be implemented in the end into normal hospital systems or into the healthcare systems, because I think that’s what we need to democratize health in the end.”
The people coming to Warsaw
Dr Olivia Lesslar is what I call a mind, heart and body doctor. Her field is psychoneuroimmunology, how the mind, the nervous system and the immune system talk to each other, and she works with Hollywood names such as Chris Hemsworth. We met on the first day of a conference in Singapore in February 2024 and ended up talking for hours by the hotel pool. Now she is becoming the medical director of Live Beyond, and we are very proud of that. We were on stage together at Life Summit Berlin, and in November we will be together again at ELEVATE, to share the science, the breakthroughs and the most important answers with Poland and the world. In Singapore she told us about the work that fascinates her:
“The fact that we can modulate, manipulate our physiology with how we think, who we surround ourselves with, how we feel, that is fascinating work, work that can make a difference to patients today, right now.”
Joanna Bensz founded the Longevity Center in Warsaw, the first longevity clinic in Central and Eastern Europe, and started the Roundtable of Longevity Clinics at the Buck Institute, which brings the world’s clinics together to define what a longevity clinic actually is. She speaks at ELEVATE.
Prof. Andrea Maier is one of the leading professors bringing science and the clinic together, at the National University of Singapore and at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and a speaker at the field’s top conferences all over the world. We first met her at the Longevity Summit in Dublin in 2023, then in Singapore, where she invited us to speak. In Warsaw she opens the Forum as a keynote speaker.
Prof. Brian Kennedy is one of the founding fathers of the longevity field: a biologist of ageing, a Distinguished Professor at the National University of Singapore and the director of its Centre for Healthy Longevity. We met him in Dublin in August 2023, at the very first conference of our quest. Those were the first interviews of my life, and of Alek’s, and from the first minute Brian felt like family: precise in every answer, ready for any question. It was he who said: come and see the lab in Singapore. He also wrote the foreword to my book. In Warsaw he speaks at the Forum. In Dublin he told us how much the field had already changed:
“Ten years ago, this field was all the same 200 scientists traveling. It was like a traveling circus. We all went to different stops out in the world and gave the same talks. I could give everybody else’s talk at that point. And it felt like progress wasn’t that fast. And now we have so many different kinds of people that have entered this sphere: investors, clinicians, regulatory people, and many others, just interested public, hackers.”
Liv Kraemer is a skin-longevity doctor in Zurich. We met her there near the end of our quest, and she makes the case that the skin, the organ everyone sees and most researchers ignore, belongs in the longevity conversation. She speaks at the Forum.
What I will talk about
My talk at ELEVATE grows out of the one in Berlin: the Longevity Map and our quest, how longevity is growing, and how it can grow faster if we all support it. What you can already do today, and what is coming. And why longevity always has to be tied to joy: not only lifespan and healthspan, but joyspan. Olivia and I will share what the quest taught us, from more than 100 scientists, doctors and experts on five continents, and how, together, we can take longevity to millions of people through Live Beyond: the film, the series and everything that follows.
Come and meet us
ELEVATE Health & Longevity Summit · 28–29 November 2026 · PGE Narodowy, Warsaw · elevatesummit.pl
If you are in Warsaw on 28 or 29 November, come and say hello. If you can’t come, the Longevity Map is yours.
Where each quotation comes from. Olivia Lesslar, Singapore, February 2024. Brian Kennedy, Dublin, August 2023. Tina Woods, Okinawa, October 2023. Andrea Maier, Dublin, August 2023.