It might seem completely adverse to the lifestyle of a globe-trotting DJ, but Steve Aoki has been stone-cold sober for almost a decade.
The insanely hard-working DJ – he averages about 250 gigs a year – told PEDESTRIAN.TV that he swore off alcohol and unhealthy habits years ago to better focus on his performances.
“When I first started, when you get thrown into DJing and you’re playing parties, and you have alcohol around you and women around you, and stuff is happening so fast, it’s easy to forget that ‘hey, you’re not just partying with everyone’,” he told P.TV. “You have to remember you’re the one navigating people through the night, and you have to in control of what you do.”
“In a nutshell, sobriety was a big deal for me.”
His lifestyle these days is extremely health-conscious: we’re talking daily meditation, organic food (where possible), and Aoki bootcamp, which basically involves him and his crew committing to daily workouts and getting fined $1 if they skip it. (The money goes towards the Aoki Foundation, which supports brain science and research.)
But hands-down the most extreme thing Aoki has done in the pursuit of health is literally bank some of his stem cells for future use.
“I went to this wellness centre in Denver [last year], and they did a two day, full body check-up, which is like 40 vials of blood, hair samples, saliva samples… every single test you could possibly do on your body.”
That included storing some of his 36-year-old stem cells, in what essentially comes down to an insurance policy against future health problems.
“The way I see technology, our progress and advancement… it’s not linear. It’s exponential. Stem cells are the building blocks of our body. So say in 20 years I need a new kidney, I have 36-year-old stem cells to regrow a kidney when I’m 56.”
So what’s the end goal here? Is it to live forever?
Turns out, it’s a little more altruistic than that.
“Say you’re in the hospital, and someone that you love is dying, and you can get a heart transplant, or a liver transplant, or you can get any sort of transplant, you would want that, wouldn’t you?” he says.
“If it was your husband or your brother or your dad, or your sister is dying, you’re going to do whatever you can to save their life, and if you grow a liver, without having to be on some waiting list, and it might not come, and they die in your arms.
“[With stem cells], you can save them. Regrowing from your own stem cells. That‘s the future. That’s how incredible the future will be. It’s not going to take that long to get there, it’s going to be in our lifetime.”
Aoki is heavily influenced by the death of his dad – the legendary Hiroaki “Rocky” Aoki who founded the Benihana chain of steakhouse – in 2008 from pneumonia,when Aoki was 29 years old.
“My father passed away in front of me almost ten years ago, and it was really difficult,” says Aoki. “It was really, really hard. If you put yourself in a situation with people that you love and care about… it’s not about living a long life, or living a happy long life. It’s about a life where you’re not in pain. Watching someone get destroyed by cancer, it’s absolutely horrific, it’s a painful death.
“That’s also why I created [the Aoki Foundation], to raise awareness towards brain research and understanding the brain. If we can understand the brain – not just to help people that are dealing with Alzheimer’s, and dementia, and other degenerative brain diseases, but to unlock the doors in the brain that we don’t understand – we can enhance our creativity and our intelligence, so that we can defeat cancer. We can defeat everything else, you know. And it doesn’t get talked about that much.”
You can catch this deadset legend (and possibly a cake in your face) when Steve Aoki plays MTV’s Beats & Eats this Saturday 26th November at Stuart Park in Wollongong, NSW. Tix are still available for $30 here, or you can get them on the door for $45.
