The board
Five levels, one map
Three progressive levels, the Bridge of Prevention running across all of them, and a final move. It is the same shape as the map in the book. Open any level to see what is inside it.
Prevention runs across all three levels, and Creating the Movement carries the lot — the same shape as the map in the book and in the film.
Build the base the rest of the map stands on
Every player starts here, and this is the level nobody gets to skip. How you eat, how you move, how you sleep, what you tell yourself and how much joy you let in — these do most of the work, they cost almost nothing, and they are open to anybody, anywhere. Genes turn out to be a far smaller part of the story than most people expect; the rest is what you do with your days. Get this level running and everything higher on the map works better.
Open any part of this level to see what is in it.
01Mindset & heartset
9 things
The master switch. Decide that a longer, better life is actually available to you, and every other habit on this level gets easier to keep.
- Fall in love with yourself
- Mindfulness
- Meditation
- Breathwork
- Personal growth
- Retreats
- Gratefulness
- Follow your purpose
- A longevity mindset — reprogram yourself for it
Stress, cortisol and the alarm that never switches off
An alarm built to ring for a minute, ringing all night. The sound is not the problem. Not being able to switch it off is.
If your blood is not singing at the thought of being who you are and doing what you do, then your life is wasted.
I met Srikumar years before the quest, and one sentence of his changed how I look at everything. This is why mindset sits underneath the map rather than beside it: if you are not glad to be alive, no supplement and no scan is going to fix that. Extra years are only worth having if you want them.
Show another quote — Ketut Arsana
That is how you make your life balance in the world. That is why you will be a good player in the world.
Ketut said this to me in Bali long before I had thought of calling any of this a game — and there it was, a player. A healer in Ubud and a scientist at Harvard were describing the same thing in different words. That was the moment I stopped treating the basics as the boring part.
02Nutrition
11 things
The raw material your body rebuilds itself from. Less sugar, less processing, more plants — and enough hours between meals for the body to get its own housekeeping done.
- No sugar
- Quality unprocessed food
- Low carb
- Stop at eighty per cent full
- Vegetables
- Olive oil
- Nuts
- Berries
- Care for your microbiome — variety is the whole trick
- Intermittent fasting — a twelve-hour gap
- Fasting-mimicking
Autophagy
Your body’s clean-up crew. It takes old, broken cell parts, breaks them down, and uses the pieces to build new ones. When it slows, the debris accumulates, and that accumulation is a big part of what ageing looks like from the inside.
Also one of the twelve hallmarks of ageing — 05 · Disabled macroautophagyCaloric restriction and fasting
Eating less, but not eating badly. The body shifts from processing a constant surplus to maintaining itself.
The gut microbiome
A garden you did not plant and cannot see, which feeds you back. While it is varied it looks after the wall between your gut and your blood. When it thins, that wall leaks a little, and the immune system spends its life mildly annoyed.
Also one of the twelve hallmarks of ageing — 12 · Dysbiosis03Movement
9 things
Not an extra: maintenance. Strength, stamina and flexibility every week, some of it outdoors — and recovery counted as part of the training rather than as time off.
- Move in nature, thirty minutes a day
- Strength, every week
- Endurance, every week
- Flexibility, every week
- Recovery — it counts as training
- Yoga
- Pilates
- HIIT
- Freediving for VO2 max — with a trained buddy, never alone
Sarcopenia
Muscle quietly leaving. It starts in your thirties, and almost nobody notices until it costs them something — a fall, a stair, an independence.
Mitochondria
Your power plants. More of them, working better, is most of what people mean when they say they feel energetic. It is one of the most trainable things about you.
Also one of the twelve hallmarks of ageing — 07 · Mitochondrial dysfunctionHormesis
Give the body a small challenge and it over-repairs. That is why training, heat, cold and fasting all work by the same logic — you are not avoiding stress, you are choosing the right size of it.
So really, the trick for me is treating muscle as an organ. Finding out what my functional weight is, carrying a bit more muscle than the average person — and that becomes a place where you store sugar, so obviously your insulin sensitivity goes up.
Gary changed how I think about training. Muscle is not a look and it is not vanity — it is a working organ, the largest place your body has to put sugar, and the thing that decides whether you are still carrying your own shopping at ninety. Nobody had ever put it to me that way, and I have trained differently since.
04Sleep
11 things
The night shift, when the repair actually happens. Seven to nine hours, dark, cool and quiet — protected as carefully as anything you do in daylight, because without it the rest starts to unravel.
- Seven to nine hours
- A dark room
- A cool room
- A quiet room
- Legs elevated
- No overhead light
- No alcohol three hours before
- No THC three hours before
- No exercise three hours before
- Fewer screens in the evening
- Yoga Nidra helps
DNA repair
A maintenance crew working constantly on damage you never notice. Ageing is partly the crew getting slower than the damage.
Also one of the twelve hallmarks of ageing — 01 · Genomic instabilityChronic inflammation
A fire that never quite goes out. You do not feel it day to day, which is exactly why it does so much damage over decades.
Also one of the twelve hallmarks of ageing — 11 · Chronic inflammation05Flow, nature & joy
8 things
The part of the map most often read as decoration. It is the reason to want the extra years in the first place — and flow is a state you can learn to reach, not a mood that happens to visit.
- Live in flow
- Live in awe
- More nature
- Less noise
- Boost your social relationships
- Live a life you enjoy
- Live a life that matters to you
- Stay curious. Live Beyond!
The one word we refuse to use loosely
Flow is the state where performing at your best and feeling your best turn out to be the same state. Not a mood, and not a reward for the work — the condition in which the work goes best.
It is not one activity. It is music, making, writing, cooking; a long conversation that runs away with you; and sport — most of all the kind where you are surprised every second and have no choice but to let the subconscious take over. That is why the chapter is called Flow, nature & joy: nature and play are the cheapest ways in, and joy is what it leaves behind.
It belongs in Level 01 because it costs nothing, it is open to anybody, and because a life with more of it in it is a life somebody actually wants to keep living — which is the whole point of adding years to it.
- The self goes quietYou stop monitoring yourself.
- Time distortsAn hour goes in ten minutes — or ten minutes stretch.
- The effort drops awayThe doing gets easier, not harder.
- It feels richerMore information, more meaning, more of everything.
The clearest modern account of it is Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal of the Flow Genome Project, whose programme Marek trained on. The four marks above are theirs.
I encourage people to misbehave, to go out, to stay out late, to party, to have fun, to indulge, to enjoy.
A longevity doctor telling people to misbehave is the most honest thing on this level. A life you have to endure is not a life anybody protects for fifty years. Joy is not the prize at the end of the map — it is one of the reasons the rest of it works.
06The don’ts
5 things
The cheapest moves on the whole map, because they cost nothing to make. What you leave out counts for as much as anything you add.
- No alcohol
- No cigarettes
- No harmful drugs
- No overdoing things — not even the good ones
- Basic hygiene is a must
Oxidative stress
Rust, on the inside. Every cell burns fuel with oxygen, and that burning throws off unstable molecules called free radicals, which steal electrons from whatever is nearest — your DNA, the fat your cell membranes are made of, and the mitochondria that make your energy. Your body has its own clean-up crew for them and normally keeps up. Oxidative stress is the state where it cannot keep up: more damage arriving every day than gets repaired. Over years that is a large part of what ageing looks like from the inside — stiffer arteries, tireder cells, more mistakes in the code.
It sits in The don’ts because everything in this group makes more of it. Alcohol, cigarettes and harmful drugs all flood the body with free radicals faster than the clean-up crew can work, and so does overdoing anything — even the good things. That is the mechanism these five lines share, and the reason they are on the map together rather than being five separate scoldings. Leaving them out is the cheapest move on the whole map, because it costs nothing to make.
07Modern medical care
5 things
Use the medicine that already exists — body, mind, gut, teeth — and ask more of it than a visit once something already hurts.
- Look after your physical health
- Look after your mental health
- Look after your microbiome
- Look after your teeth
- Challenge your doctors to get an upgrade
Go further than lifestyle — with curiosity and precision
Biohacking is not a trend to copy or somebody else’s morning routine. It is taking your own biology seriously: watch it, change one thing at a time, keep what works for you and drop what does not. This is where lifestyle meets technology — supplements chosen for a reason, medicines used deliberately, heat and cold and light, and enough data to tell you whether any of it is landing. You do not have to finish Level 01 to come in here; for plenty of players, an upgrade is what finally makes the basics interesting.
Open any part of this level to see what is in it.
01Supplements
12 things
Not a shelf of jars. A short list chosen for what your own body is actually short of, and reviewed as often as your bloods are — and several of the things below interact with prescription medicines, so the list starts with whoever looks after yours.
- Creatine
- Omega-3
- Magnesium
- Vitamin C
- Vitamin D3 with K2
- Senolytics
- gliSODin
- Probiotics
- Methylene blue
- Nattokinase
- Berberine
- Spermidine
Sirtuins
A repair crew that only clocks in if there is enough of a particular fuel around. Much of the last decade of longevity supplements has been an attempt to top up that fuel.
AMPK
A fuel gauge that, when it reads low, tells the cell to tidy up and burn what it has rather than store more.
Autophagy
Your body’s clean-up crew. It takes old, broken cell parts, breaks them down, and uses the pieces to build new ones. When it slows, the debris accumulates, and that accumulation is a big part of what ageing looks like from the inside.
Also one of the twelve hallmarks of ageing — 05 · Disabled macroautophagy
So I tell people: pick one or two supplements, don’t go and take ten — because we just don’t know what that is doing.
Brian is one of the most cited people in this field, and this is what he actually tells people. It is also the discipline of this whole level in one line: change one thing, watch what happens, keep it or drop it. A cupboard with twenty bottles in it is not an upgrade, it is noise.
02Medications
5 things
Medicines built for one job that turn out to help with ageing. Powerful, prescription territory, and never a solo experiment.
- Metformin
- Rapamycin
- GLP-1 receptor agonists — and the dual GIP/GLP-1 receptor agonists
- Exercise-mimicking drugs
- Hormone replacement
mTOR and its suppression
A manager that decides whether the cell builds or cleans. Left on permanently you get growth without maintenance. The goal is not to switch it off — you need it to build muscle — but to stop it running all day.
Also one of the twelve hallmarks of ageing — 06 · Deregulated nutrient-sensingInsulin sensitivity
How well your body handles what you eat. When it slips, blood sugar stays high for longer after every meal, and the damage is cumulative.
03Basic treatments
10 things
Heat, cold, light, pressure, touch — and closeness. Cheap, widely available, and they work on recovery, inflammation and the nervous system rather than on anything exotic.
- Sauna
- Cold plunges
- Red light
- Floating
- Neurofeedback
- Massage
- EMS
- Somatic therapy
- Vagus nerve stimulation
- Sexual activity
Hormesis
Give the body a small challenge and it over-repairs. That is why training, heat, cold and fasting all work by the same logic — you are not avoiding stress, you are choosing the right size of it.
The people who were sexually active, who had sex at least once a week, had a 50% lower all-cause mortality rate compared to the people who were not sexually active — and that is from cancer, from cardiovascular disease. It is a correlation. It is not causation.
Amy adds the caveat herself, in the same breath, and I have never let that number travel without it. I keep it here because it is the part of longevity nobody puts on a conference slide — intimacy, closeness, being wanted. This level is not only what you swallow or step into.
04Advanced treatments
9 things
The clinic end of the level — oxygen under pressure, stem cells, peptides, infusions. Real promise and uneven evidence: most of it is not approved for ageing anywhere, so ask what is actually known before you pay for any of it, and ask who is responsible if it goes wrong.
- HBOT — hyperbaric oxygen
- Cryotherapy
- IV infusions
- Stem-cell therapies
- Exosomes
- Peptides
- Beauty span
- Sexual span
- Always search for more
Stem cell exhaustion
A workshop keeps a rack of good blank timber for repairs. Every year the rack holds a little less, and what is left is harder to work. Nothing looks wrong until something needs mending.
Also one of the twelve hallmarks of ageing — 09 · Stem cell exhaustion05Psychedelics & emotional healing
5 things
Trauma carried for decades shows up in the body, and these therapies are opening doors that talking alone has not. Where they belong is a room with trained people in it — a clinical setting, or a tradition that has done this for generations. Never alone, and never casually.
- MDMA-assisted therapy for trauma
- Psilocybin for depression
- Ketamine for depression and stress
- Local tribe therapies
- Ceremonial therapies
Stress, cortisol and the alarm that never switches off
An alarm built to ring for a minute, ringing all night. The sound is not the problem. Not being able to switch it off is.
Psychedelics are known to be anti-inflammatory. And the stress, that inflammation, in the brain and the body — as you well know, it accelerates aging. So I am certainly not suggesting just be on psychedelics all the time, but rather the combination — and the healing work that’s done.
This is the sentence that put this group on the map. Heal the trauma and you take the stress off the body; take the stress off and the inflammation comes down; bring the inflammation down and your cells wear out more slowly and you get fewer diseases. It is not a mood improvement, it is a longevity intervention — and Nick is the first to say the medicine is the smallest part of it. The preparation and the integration are the work.
06Cosmetology & skin
8 things
Skin is the shield your organs live behind, so looking after it is not vanity. And feeling younger has a habit of following looking it.
- Skin is the shield of your organs — heal it and protect it
- Lasers
- Micro-needling
- Peptides
- Creams
- Organic sunscreen
- Healthy teeth
- If you look younger, you feel younger
Cellular senescence
Cells that retired but stayed in the building, complaining loudly enough to make everyone else worse at their jobs.
Also one of the twelve hallmarks of ageing — 08 · Cellular senescence
Aging is a malleable process, so you can change that. And that is something we can see — how you can reverse aging.
Alessandra and Carolina Reis Oliveira built a company on this one idea, and they went at it through the skin — the organ you can see, reach and measure without opening anybody up. That is why this group is not vanity. If ageing is malleable anywhere, the easiest place to prove it is the surface, and what works there tells you something about everything underneath.
07Tech & tracking
10 things
Rings, watches, patches and apps turn your body into something you can read. Worth it when a number changes what you do, and clutter when it does not.
- Watches
- Bands
- Rings
- Continuous glucose monitors
- Apps that analyse your data
- Neuro-biofeedback
- EMS
- Sleep tracking
- Training tracking
- Nutrition tracking
Where ageing itself becomes the target
Everything up to here is about playing your own biology well. This level asks a different question: what if the ageing itself can be reset? Gene therapies change the instructions; partial epigenetic reprogramming changes how those instructions are read. Organs are being printed, grown and engineered, and at the far edge some people are buying time in the cold on a bet that medicine catches up. Most of it is still being tested — and none of it is science fiction any more, with biotech, medicine and AI now compounding on each other.
Open any part of this level to see what is in it.
01Gene & cell therapies
4 things
Changing the instructions themselves — correcting what is broken, adding what protects, and growing replacements for what has worn out.
- Gene therapies
- CRISPR-Cas9
- Advanced stem-cell therapies
- Organs from genetically modified animals
Telomeres
The plastic tips on a shoelace. When they fray past a point, the cell retires.
Also one of the twelve hallmarks of ageing — 02 · Telomere attritionKlotho
A thread being spun. How much of it there is seems to set how long, and how evenly, the spinning goes on.
Also one of the twelve hallmarks of ageing — 10 · Altered intercellular communication
The one thing nobody would give me was a date. Not whether — when. George Church is the person you ask, and the answer is never really a fact about biology: it is a fact about how much money, attention and permission the field is given. So I put it to him straight — within fifteen years, will we be rejuvenating our organs, the whole body and not one piece of it?
It depends on who we are. The people that will be starting clinical trials next year might start rejuvenating their organs next year. Right. But I don’t expect the average person to be seeing this for at least 15 years.
02Partial epigenetic reprogramming
3 things
Not rewriting the code but resetting how it is read, so a cell behaves like a younger version of itself without forgetting what it is.
- Partial epigenetic reprogramming
- Resetting cellular age
- Rejuvenating drugs
Epigenetics
Switches on top of your genes. The sequence is fixed; which parts are switched on is not, and that is where lifestyle actually reaches your biology.
Also one of the twelve hallmarks of ageing — 03 · Epigenetic alterationsPartial epigenetic reprogramming
A conservator cleaning an old photograph. Go carefully and the picture comes back. Go too far and the picture comes off with the dirt.
Biological age and the epigenetic clocks
Two watches on a table. One counts birthdays and cannot be argued with. The other counts wear, and it can be running fast or slow.
The blood comes from the bone marrow. And if you make the bone marrow young again, it will produce young blood. And young blood is known to rejuvenate tissues.
That is the logic of this whole level in three sentences: do not chase the symptom, go back up the chain to the thing that produces it. Make the factory young and it starts turning out young parts again. Dave has been funding work like this for twenty years, long before anybody called it an industry.
03Engineering resilience
6 things
Building the spare parts: printed tissue, engineered organs, and machines small enough to work one cell at a time.
- 3D bioprinting
- Nanotechnology
- Growing new bodies
- Growing new organs
- Implants that monitor
- Implants that support
Stem cell exhaustion
A workshop keeps a rack of good blank timber for repairs. Every year the rack holds a little less, and what is left is harder to work. Nothing looks wrong until something needs mending.
Also one of the twelve hallmarks of ageing — 09 · Stem cell exhaustion04Frozen time
2 things
The far edge of the map. Buying time on the chance that medicine arrives later — and held honestly as a bet, never as a promise.
- Cryopreservation
- Biostasis — the far edge, twenty or thirty years out
Catch it early, and everything else has time to work
Don’t die of something stupid — from something preventable, or from years of choices you already knew about. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes and dementia rarely arrive loudly; by the time you can feel them, the easy years are behind you. Prevention needs no prescription, only attention and the nerve to look before anything hurts. It is the one level that works for everybody today, and it is what keeps you in the game long enough for everything else on this map to reach you.
Open any part of this level to see what is in it.
01Measure
10 things
You cannot act on something you have never looked at. Bloods, imaging, fitness and the eye — a picture of where your body actually is, rather than how it feels.
- Biomarkers of ageing
- Deep blood panels
- MRI
- CT
- DEXA
- VO2 max
- Strength testing
- Retina scan
- AI diagnostics
- Early detection
Biological age and the epigenetic clocks
Two watches on a table. One counts birthdays and cannot be argued with. The other counts wear, and it can be running fast or slow.
You have a 53% chance of having something significant.
He said that to my face, in San Diego, with my own results in front of him. It is the figure from their own clinic — of the people who come in for a full workup feeling perfectly well, more than half turn out to be carrying something they know nothing about. Screening everybody is a real argument among doctors, and I am not settling it here. It is why I go and get scanned.
Show another quote — Joanna Bensz
This was my first question when I started the Longevity Clinic. What is a healthy human, and what are the parameters we should take for a healthy person?
That question is harder than it sounds, and it is the reason this level exists. Ordinary medicine has a very precise definition of disease and almost none of health, so it can tell you what is wrong and not how you are doing. Joanna had to start a clinic to go looking for the answer.
02Genomics & microbiome
4 things
What you inherited, and what lives in you. Both move your odds, both are readable now, and neither is a verdict — they tell you where to aim.
- Whole-genome sequencing
- Genetic risk analysis
- Microbiome testing
- Risk, not just disease
The gut microbiome
A garden you did not plant and cannot see, which feeds you back. While it is varied it looks after the wall between your gut and your blood. When it thins, that wall leaks a little, and the immune system spends its life mildly annoyed.
Also one of the twelve hallmarks of ageing — 12 · Dysbiosis03Mind & body checks
5 things
Memory, mood, hormones, skin, heart. The checks people put off precisely because nothing hurts yet.
- Cognitive tests
- Psychological tests
- Hormonal panels
- Skin checks
- Heart checks
Chronic inflammation
A fire that never quite goes out. You do not feel it day to day, which is exactly why it does so much damage over decades.
Also one of the twelve hallmarks of ageing — 11 · Chronic inflammation04Act early
4 things
A test you do nothing with is a receipt. A steady cadence, a team who know your history, and treating a risk while it is still only a risk.
- Regular checkups on a set cadence
- An experienced team at a longevity clinic
- Act on the recommendations you are given
- Treat the risk before it becomes the disease
Nobody wins this one alone
This is the only level that does not happen inside your body. Longevity is still written off as a wellness fashion or a rich man’s hobby, and that is exactly what keeps the money, the laws and the best minds away from it. The more of us who live this way in the open, the harder it becomes to ignore — and that pressure is what moves research from decades to years, and prices from millions to something ordinary people can pay. Start with the people you already have. Then the field. Then the culture.
Open any part of this level to see what is in it.
01Longevity Community
5 things
It starts with the people you already have around you. One person you bring in is worth more than anything you post.
- Bring friends into the game
- Bring your family into the game
- Turn NPCs into players
- Local circles
- Retreats
Aubrey started the whole craziness around longevity, and almost everybody in this field will tell you he is the one who inspired them. He also carried our quest a long way — when we needed to reach somebody, he wrote the introduction, and Dave Gobel came to us that way. So I asked him the question I had been carrying since the first week: if the science is there, why is almost nobody acting on it? He named it denial. I said we were also programming ourselves in the bad direction, and he gave me the word that matters back — “Yeah. Self-programming.” Which is the good news, because anything you programmed can be reprogrammed.
We’re now in a position where we do know how to develop technologies that will bring aging under comprehensive medical control, and we’re not trying hard enough — because we’ve had thousands of years of psychological denial.
What an NPC actually is, and why it is not an insult
An NPC — a non-playing character — is somebody living the script they were handed. Not a stupid person. A person who was never told there was a choice.
We have all had that script handed to us: thousands of years of programming which says that ageing is natural and therefore good, that death is natural and therefore good, and that there is nothing to be done about either. It is denial, taught carefully, generation after generation, until it stops sounding like an opinion and starts sounding like the truth. Ask most people whether they would like twenty more good years and watch how quickly they change the subject.
A player is somebody who noticed the script and put it down. Turning an NPC into a player is therefore not an argument you win — it is reprogramming, the same reprogramming you had to do on yourself, and it almost never starts with information. It starts with somebody near them living differently and being visibly happier for it.
“The biggest risk today? Living like an NPC — a non-playing character in your own story.” — Marek Piotrowski, TEDxSGH, Warsaw, December 2025.
02Advocacy
8 things
Ask more of science, governments and business — funding, laws and attention — so that what is coming arrives inside our lifetimes rather than after them.
- Demand more from science
- Demand more from institutions
- Reach governments
- Reach businesses
- Funding for the field
- Laws that let it move
- Executives who put their weight behind it
- So the therapies arrive within our lifetimes
I’m not saying everyone needs to want to live indefinitely… I just care about freedom of choice… I think we should liberate people to reclaim this number one human right, which is the right to live.
I am not asking anybody to want to live for ever. I am asking that it be a choice, rather than something decided for us by how slowly the research gets funded. Allison put that better than I have ever managed to.
03Culture
2 things
The end of the game: a world where health, longevity and joy are simply how people live, and not a privilege for the few who can afford it.
- A new culture with longevity, health and joy built in
- Longevity for everyone — not only for the few
Let us co-create a new culture with longevity, health and joy built into it. Inspire the masses, make them fall in love with longevity, and then everything changes — the money, the attention, the support all go to the longevity field. And we can start doing it now, together.
This is the end of the game as I understand it. Not a treatment and not a clinic — a culture, in which living long and living well is simply what people do, and nobody has to be brave or rich to choose it. Everything else on this map is a move. This is what the moves are for.
Show another quote — Nathan Cheng
Billionaires say they’d trade all their wealth to be young again — and yet most don’t invest in aging science. That’s the billionaire paradox.
We heard a version of this everywhere we went, and it is exactly the gap this level exists to close. Money and laws follow attention, and attention is something ordinary people make. That is why the last level of the map is not about your body at all.
Three minutes · the conference reel
Marek explains the game, on stage
Marek Piotrowski at TEDx Warsaw, Life Summit Berlin, ARDD Copenhagen, Quadrivio London, Healthy Longevity Singapore and TimePie Shanghai — telling audiences what the Longevity Game is, what the Longevity Map is, and how the whole thing fits together. Cut from the talks into three minutes.
