“IT ALWAYS fucking hurts, no matter how many times you do it,” says Steve Aoki. “Oh yeah, baby. I’m telling my brain to relax through the pain, but it’s telling me to run. Breathe, breathe, breathe.” It’s 102 degrees midafternoon on a blue-sky day in early September in Henderson, Nevada, and Aoki, the superstar DJ known for popularizing electronic dance music (EDM) in America and a budding biohacker, is hard at it, optimizing his mind and body with a workout/ice plunge/sauna trifecta. He’s about 90 seconds into a five-minute ice-bath challenge.
Aoki flew into Las Vegas after back-to-back gigs in Waterloo, Ontario, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, arriving at 2:00 P.M. They were something like gigs number 197 and 198 he played this year, out of a projected 250. He has a career side quest to play in every state and is currently at 48, with just West Virginia and Mississippi to go. Aoki went straight from the airport to exercise at home with his training partner Glen Cordoza, a fitness-book author. His 16,779-square-foot, four-bedroom, 11-bathroom multilevel glass-and-concrete home—@aokisplayhouse on Instagram—is perched on a ridge, with the Vegas Strip in the distance. There are several playrooms—one with arcade games, another with tables set up for chess and backgammon—as well as a library, a tea bar, a gym, and two music studios. Outside, there are three pools, a sauna, and three ice-plunge tubs.
Prior to submerging, Aoki and Cordoza got Huberman Lab–level granular and discussed the differences between a 39 degree plunge and a 42 degree one, and a three-minute duration versus five minutes versus nine. Ice plunges are hot in the longevity-verse because of their benefits, which include a feel-good dopamine glow in the short term and a steelier grit and brighter outlook in the longer term. They may also strengthen your immune system and improve your circulation. In conversation, Aoki is self-deprecating, mostly filterless, thoughtful, and quick to drop profanity. You’d expect him to be shattered from the travel and workout, but he’s psyched to do the five-minute challenge. He decided to Instagram Live it to his 11.6 million followers. By adding a virtual audience, he’s amping up the pressure to perform, which puts him in his happy place.
The thermometer read 39 degrees—ten bags of ice will do that—as Aoki slipped in and started breathing more deeply, inhaling through his nose, out through his mouth. He gives a running commentary. He closes his eyes and is motionless as the seconds tick by. Around four minutes in, he starts shivering. But he’s past the pain, past questioning why, and is calmly accepting the moment. He dips underwater at six minutes and emerges screaming. “Ahhh, it feels like ice went up my nose and into my brain.” Whatever fatigue and jet lag Aoki was feeling are gone, and his eyes sparkle and dance. “It feels so much better than a workout, so fucking good!” he says. “That’s why I do this shit. I feel so fucking alive.”
He’s the ultimate road warrior with a fierce schedule, grinding out 250 shows per year, headlining the top festivals globally, and locking down a residency in Las Vegas, earning $40 million per year. He has been at the peak of a high-energy, youth-driven industry for almost 20 years, winning a spot on DJ Mag’s coveted “Top 10 DJ” list for the past decade—he is number eight this year. His eighth studio album, Hiroquest: Double Helix, dropped November 17, and earlier this year, he played the closing set of Tomorrowland, the Super Bowl of EDM. “It sounds cringe,” he says, “but I was bawling my eyes out after and oozing love from every pore in my body. I felt emotionally saturated.”
On the surface, the 45-year-old Aoki doesn’t seem like the person to hang out with for insights into the promise and perils of longevity science—he has I’LL SLEEP WHEN I’M DEAD tattooed on the back of his neck. But earlier this year, Aoki took an epigenetic test popular with longevity bros to calculate his biological age, and it revealed that his pace of aging was among the best on the planet. Unlike chronological age, which progresses at the same pace for everyone, biological age, which is how fast our cells deteriorate, is individualized and somewhat malleable. Aoki ranked 22nd on the Rejuvenation Olympics scoreboard, which tracks everyone who has taken the test, alongside antiaging innovators like Ben Greenfield and tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who created the contest and is known for his extreme longevity Blueprint protocol—think vegan diet, 111-pill supplement regimen, and strict 8:30 P.M. bedtime.
Johnson tweeted out congratulations to Aoki, and an unlikely bromance blossomed. They spent time together talking longevity protocols and tactics. Johnson admitted he was surprised to see Aoki on the leaderboard, because of his nocturnal lifestyle, but that’s the point of the Rejuvenation Olympics, to show that longevity is not one-size-fits-all. “We’re really in the earliest of days trying to figure out how to measure aging, how to slow it, and how to reverse it,” Johnson says in a Zoom interview. “There are lots of emerging patterns, and Aoki is another pattern. Of course, he’s n of 1—but that’s exciting. We don’t know yet with certitude what things work, and that’s what’s fun about this game.” Aoki, of course, offers a more fun version of the game—a game that we all have a vested interest in. “Heck, on the biohacker spectrum, if Bryan is a 10, I’m more of a 2 to 4,” says Aoki. “Sometimes I spike to a 6 or 7.” A hard-partying, sleep-deprived son of excess seems to be aging slower than most of us and upending what we think about healthy lifestyles and longevity science.
Aoki is fighting two seemingly contradictory battles, keeping his career at its peak while also optimizing his longevity—which might require slowing down. “I know I’m very lucky,” he says. “There are not many DJs doing what I do for as long as I’ve done it. The fans might want a newer face, a younger person. Many of the biggest DJs that I looked up to are gone. The culture is unforgiving. Time is unforgiving. That’s why I’m still hustling, touring, in the studio making new music. It’s like you’re swimming upstream, but you have to swim a little faster to stay ahead and push the culture.” He is dealing with a dilemma we all face: how to emphasize our good habits to compensate for the not-so-good. More existentially, can Steve Aoki live fast and die old?
ONE OF THE books in Aoki’s library is the bestseller Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity, by Peter Attia, M.D., a physician specializing in health span. In it, Dr. Attia posits that there’s something more powerful than exercise and diet: “The most important ingredient in the whole longevity equation is the why. Why do we want to live longer? For what?” He continues by saying that a rule of thumb (he gleaned from a friend) for determining someone’s true age is to listen to them talk: If they talk about the past, about all the things that happened and that they did, they’ve gotten old. If they talk about their dreams, their aspirations, what they’re still looking forward to—they’re young.
Aoki talks incessantly about the future, his next gig, his next song, his next challenge. Dim Mak, the indie music label he founded after college at UC Santa Barbara, is going strong and has evolved into a lifestyle company with comics, television, metaverse, and clothing collaborations. Also a successful producer, he’s collaborated with everyone from Sting to Linkin Park to Snoop Dogg to BTS to Maluma. Aoki has an optimistic approach toward aging, too, which by itself can help lengthen your life by seven and a half years, according to research by Becca Levy, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and epidemiology at Yale.
His outlook is partly informed by his Japanese heritage and culture, in which older people are revered for their wisdom. “It’s a beautiful thing to respect where you are, no matter your age, and to share what you’ve endured,” he says. There are older iconic DJs he looks up to as well. He name-checks Tiësto, 54; David Guetta, 55; and Carl Cox, 61. “They’re still headlining, rocking stages, and people just love the music. It’s beyond generational, and that really inspires me. I’m grateful to the DJs that are still doing it and are years and years ahead of me.”
Aoki wears his heart on his sleeve—okay, his biceps. He even has a song called “Music Means Love Forever” that has almost 10 million streams on Spotify, and there’s no questioning his passion, his why. It’s 2:15 A.M., roughly ten hours after the ice plunge, and Aoki is shirtless again. He’s an hour into his set, bopping around, jumping, and waving his arms in the air onstage at Hakkasan at the MGM Grand. He told me he burns about 1,200 calories per two-hour gig, according to his Whoop fitness tracker, and it’s easy to see how. He’s a blur of constant movement, often climbing on a ledge to rev up the crowd with shouts of “Put your hands up!” and “Everybody fucking scream!” The 3,900-person club is jammed with a Las-Vegas-on-a-Saturday-night grab bag of bachelorette parties, birthday groups, guy-trip squads, and some EDM fans. The dance floor is a seething mass of bobbing heads and waving arms, while the big spenders dance on the sofas at the $6,000 bottle-service tables.
For the EDM uninitiated, Aoki specializes in what he calls “bouncy music,” or more formally, progressive house. The musical flow rises and falls in high-intensity intervals; Aoki plays the choruses of songs the audience will sing along to, then drops some foot-stomping, arm-pumping bass and everyone jams out. The mix of songs veers multicultural and multigenre, from K-pop to country to rock to grunge to pop to rap to reggaeton—what Aoki jokingly refers to as entertainment dance music. During one sequence, he mixes a version of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” into his own remix of BTS’s “Mic Drop” and then into his own remix of Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina.”
A few days later over Zoom, Aoki, nesting in his infrared-light bed, explains that he relishes his residency sets because there’s more art to the “free-form” DJing. He can adapt his playlist based on how a song resonates with the crowd. At huge festivals, there are often guest vocalists, so he has to stick to a “structured” playlist. “Yeah, 90 percent of the time, I’ll change the song to follow the crowd’s emotional journey. If I need to get them engaged, I’ll play what I planned for the 40th song 15th or play a familiar song or a surprising song. I make decisions seconds before I’m gonna mix into the next song. I have like two songs queued up, and I’m like, ‘No, this is the journey I wanna take them on.’ Then I can go on a whole choose-your-own adventure. Part of a good DJ is being able to adapt—and obviously that translates over into your life.”
At Hakkasan, he elevated the crowd’s emotions by shouting out a tribute to the late Avicii, whose birthday it was that night and who died by suicide in 2018, playing the artist’s hit “Levels.” Later, sensing that he needed more feels, he played a dance version of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” turning down the volume so you could hear the crowd singing, before a banging bass drop. “I want to get people out of their skins, to rip their shirts off and have fun,” says Aoki. He explains how he connects intimately with the crowd by scanning the dance floor and giving love via eye contact to the EDM diehards who know all the words—“an affair of the eyes”—and by throwing heart signs with his hands.
But the bigger challenges are the nondancers—“the seventh guy in the bachelor party who got dragged to see Aoki and is just standing there.” He says he often “zones in on someone who looks bored” and sees if he can get that person dancing. “If I can infiltrate his mind with beats, with bars, with melodies, if I can get him to put his hands in the air, it’s a moment when you connect and someone falls in love with the music. That gives me a lift.”
AFTER THE WHY, meaning your passion and purpose, Dr. Attia ranks daily exercise, both cardio and strength training, as the next most powerful factor in enhancing health span. The same relentless energy Aoki brings to the stage, he brings to the weight room, with a little less shimmying and arm-waving. Prior to the ice plunge, he did a strength workout with Cordoza, his training partner for the past three years. Aoki’s interest in fitness was his gateway into longevity, and it tracks back to high school—where he played football and badminton—and to his dad, who was a competitive wrestler.
Rocky Aoki, who in 1964 founded Benihana of Tokyo, a wildly popular hibachi chain that was the first of its kind in America, died from liver cancer in 2008 at age 69. Aoki idolizes his dad, who was born in Japan, was an incredibly hard worker and partier, and was both cerebral (a world champion in backgammon) and an adrenaline fiend (a powerboat racer). A year later, Aoki’s friend and mentor Adam Goldstein, the turntable wizard better known as DJ AM, died from an accidental drug overdose. The loss of his dad and then his mentor spurred Aoki to become more interested in his own wellness. He started training and recovering like a competitive athlete.
Then in 2020, his manager and very close friend Michael Theanne died from a heart attack at age 45—the age Aoki is now—making him even more health conscious. With more time at home because of the pandemic, Aoki leaned harder into longevity, gorging on content by researchers and biohackers like Dr. Attia, Gary Brecka, and David A. Sinclair, Ph.D., and interviewing futurists like Peter Diamandis, M.D., and Ray Kurzweil.
Aoki recently went to the tech-forward health start-up Fountain Life, whose motto is “We Make 100 Years Old the New 60,” to get a “total body data upload” that costs about $20,000. It included a full-body and brain MRI as well as other brain, heart, blood, genetic, and microbiome imaging and diagnostics, most of which are enhanced with AI to predict any potential problems. The team of doctors and other experts also recommended exercise, diet, and lifestyle goals. He “uploads” data from the tests annually to track changes and hopefully diagnose any issues with chronic diseases or cancer early.
He also added a hyperbaric chamber (so he can breathe pure oxygen and potentially improve his cognition, memory, and brain processing speed, as well as his sleep) and the previously mentioned infrared-light bed (believed to aid cellular repair, speed recovery from workouts, revitalize mitochondria, and maybe improve memory) to the Playhouse. Because he does all that dance cardio at night, Aoki’s home workouts emphasize strength training.
His gym is in the mid-level of the Playhouse through two soundproof doors. There are a couple weight racks, Rogue dumbbells from 15 to 100 pounds, and lots of medicine balls. Posters of Bruce Lee movies and photos of Lee line the walls. Linkin Park blasts through the speakers. Cordoza is a fitness nerd and coauthored the seminal fitness books Becoming a Supple Leopard and Glute Lab: The Art and Science of Strength and Physique Training. Their workout starts with an elaborate 15-minute warmup that is both gentle and intense. It involves foam-rolling, a mobility flow, some manual shoulder openers, a one-minute dead-hang, ultraslow pushups, goblet squats during which Aoki takes five seconds on the down (or eccentric) part of the exercise, and then rapid-fire jumping jacks and medicine-ball squat slams.
The meat of their workouts, which they do several times a week when Aoki is home, is usually six to eight exercises, prioritizing full-body moves (on this day chinups, Bulgarian split squats, and Romanian deadlifts) with “targeted accessory work” (biceps curls, bench presses, glute abduction). Usually they go for a PR on the first set of the first exercise, for a higher rep count with a lower load until perfect-form failure.
“I record all his PR loads and reps for the main lifts, and we try to beat some of them every training session,” says Cordoza. “It doesn’t always happen, but it gives us a goal. We’re working for progressive overload to build strength, but there’s also a competitive element.” During this workout, Aoki grinds out 15 chinups, which is a new PR, celebrated with a fist bump. But the DJ’s lower back is stiff, so Cordoza modifies the session to include more mobility moves, which means more time to talk, and the conversation turns to motivation.
Aoki says he’s not trying to get jacked but wants to look good, feel strong, and function at his best for as long as possible. Cordoza says Aoki “enjoys pushing himself and never backs down from a challenge.” He’s not kidding. Aoki launches into a story about how his two-month summer tours often include some kind of health challenge for the crew. One summer, he roped his squad into a 100-rep daily challenge (pushups, squats, or situps). If you didn’t do the 100 reps by a set time, you had to pay each person $1,000—roughly $14,000 a pop. Sometimes he had to stop the tour bus and do pushups at the side of the road or do reps in a restaurant to beat the deadline.
On another tour, it was a no-bread and no-fried-food challenge for two months. In 2020, during the pandemic, he did a $30,000 body-fat-percentage challenge with a friend, with the goal to get to single-digit body fat in two months. He dropped from 14.3 percent to 9.3 percent. Aoki seeks challenges that take him out of his comfort zone, things that are truly hard. It’s not about the money—the bets often go to charity, and one summer he doled out $40,000 in missed reps. Instead, he thrives on being held accountable and connecting with friends around a positive activity.
Cordoza says Aoki genuinely cares about other people’s health. “Steve interviews and befriends the smartest minds in the field and is always sharing his strategies and results,” he says. “Health is not a destination but a process—and he’s always working to refine and improve that process.” He has a series of YouTube video interviews with brain experts, started the Aoki Foundation in 2012, and has given $500,000 to help fund research on regenerative brain medicine and brain preservation. He did an ice-plunge workshop with Wim Hof’s team, studied breath practice with Laird Hamilton, and recruited Blake Aldridge, a professional diver, to give him tips on cliff jumping (because he has a recurring side quest to do ten cliff jumps into the ocean). Yeah, it’s a wild mix of different wellness modalities that Aoki mashes up into his own lifestyle. He doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but he’s science curious and into experimenting, figuring out what works for him, and especially collaborating.
Aoki admits that his Avengers-style health-advice group doesn’t have a consensus on the best diet. Currently he’s mostly vegetarian but eats poultry and fish, although he notes that he’s anxious about mercury and microplastics. He tried Johnson’s vegan diet for a day—and says it was surprisingly filling—but found it too restrictive because he has to eat after 11:00 A.M. (You need energy to dance after midnight.) One takeaway from his playdate with Johnson was the idea of rewarding yourself in ways that are more in tune with your body and not self-destructive. “When you finish a challenge, why celebrate by eating bad food or getting drunk, doing violent things to your brain and liver? I’m trying to think about that more.” What does a healthy celebration look like? “I love my taste buds,” he says. “A perfectly seasoned piece of fish and some quality cheese.”
The workout culminates in a 100-pushups-for-time finisher. It seems like a failure, since after a fast start banging out 40 pushups, Aoki slows way down. He grunts through single reps from 80 to 100 and completes the challenge in four minutes and 35 seconds. He misses his personal best by ten seconds, resulting in him shouting lots of fucks. Later, though, Cordoza tells me Aoki actually set a PR for continuous pushups, so there was a small win.
AOKI GOES STRAIGHT from the workout to the ice plunge—he cajoles Cordoza and me into sharing in the wellness fun, too. Cordoza lasts five minutes, but it’s my first ice plunge and I tap out at four. Then it’s into his sauna. It’s at 230 degrees Fahrenheit—past the red zone on the thermometer. Aoki has dripped some juniper oil onto the rocks and keeps spooning on water, giving the air a foresty scent, but it’s face-meltingly hot. Sauna bathing provides protection against dementia and may even reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
The talk turns to Aoki’s bugaboo: sleep. One thing almost all longevity experts do agree on is the power of sleep—especially deep sleep, which acts as a power cleanse for your brain, sweeping away metabolic waste, ensuring superior function, and potentially delaying the onset of memory loss and dementia. He says he’s always been someone who doesn’t need a lot of it, and he struggles to stay asleep. Early in his career, he often got by on four hours or less. Sometimes much less. He shares sleep war stories, not in a humblebrag way but with regret, because he knows how important sleep is to brain health. If he DJs three nights in a row—say, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—he might only get a total of six hours.
All his health advisors and biohacker friends kept telling him that he needed more sleep. So Aoki being Aoki, he sought out an expert and connected with Matthew Walker, Ph.D., a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and author of Why We Sleep. Walker works with select patients as a “sleep concierge.” When Aoki shared his sleep data from his Whoop, Apple Watch, and Oura ring, Walker was concerned, saying he’d seen such low REM duration only in people with alcohol use disorder. To optimize Aoki’s sleep schedule when he’s at home, Walker focused on the boring stuff: going to bed and waking up at the same time each day; setting an alarm for bedtime; making sure the bedroom is dark, gadget-free, and 68 degrees or lower; eliminating screen time an hour prior to bedtime; not having caffeine past the afternoon; and, in concert with Aoki’s physician, suggesting Trazadone, an antidepressant that’s often prescribed to battle insomnia because it regulates the neurotransmitter serotonin and can help people stay asleep longer.
It’s helping. Aoki says he’s logging eight to ten hours when he’s at home and recently slept the longest he has in a while, from his usual bedtime of 1:00 A.M. until 11:00 A.M., but his REM numbers are still low. Walker says that stabilizing the duration of sleep is a key first step and that it shows Aoki’s brain is recovering, which is a good sign. “It’s important to point out to patients that you’re not broken,” says Walker. “Your system is perfectly capable of generating sleep, and it can do it in voluminous amounts.” He says that while working with Aoki, he uses the analogy of a producing deck in a music studio: “I’ve got all of these dials, and the first one I want to use is the one on the far left, which is the one that moves all of the other needles. That’s sleep duration. Then once I’ve got you at a healthy amount, I go to the individual dials in the middle and I start playing with them to get a symphony of non-REM and REM.” He investigates Aoki’s sleep data—doing pre-and postmortems—seeking patterns regarding better sleep on days Aoki exercises or goes in the hyperbaric chamber or the sauna, and then he adjusts his tactics.
But there’s still the problem of Aoki’s touring schedule, when he often goes to bed at 5:00 A.M. and may cross several time zones, making establishing a sleep schedule difficult. Ultimately, Aoki needs to keep sleep top of mind when he’s planning his frequency of gigs and travel. “Steve takes sleep seriously now and understands sleep’s integral importance to his health span,” Walker says. “In our culture, there’s still a lot of sleep machismo, and Steve is helping break that down and destigmatize sleep.”
Aoki is adapting: “Now it’s more about the pre-party than the after-party.” There are other tactics, too, like doing more residencies so there’s less travel and more day parties so he can get to bed on time. His goals remain to optimize his sleep schedule while staying productive, “whether it’s 100 or 250 shows a year.”
Back in the sauna, my face burns red and rivers of sweat pour into my eyes. Aoki, ever the empath, notices and says, “Hey, this is a no-hero zone. No shame if you need to get out.” We finish the interview with the door open. We’re still talking sleep, and he mentions a surprising benefit. Aoki is riffing about his creative process and how deep sleep is itself instrumental. “Often I’ll be dreaming and hear a new melody or a beat or a lyric,” he says. “When I wake up, I immediately hum it or dictate a snippet or idea into my phone. Sometimes it’s nothing, but sometimes it’s gold.”
Steve Aoki's new album HiROQUEST 2: Double Helix dropped November 17. Listen to it here.
