Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - EP #15 The Importance of Sleep for Creatives w/ Steve Aoki

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

In this episode, Steve and Peter discuss Aoki’s crazy touring schedule, the importance of preventive medicine, and the power of sleep. You will learn about: 05:43 | Steve Aoki’s in-depth analysis of his brain 12:32 | Why sleep is so important 24:35 | Can a cold plunge truly benefit your overall health? Steve Aoki is a world-renowned artist, DJ, producer, and futurist. He is a grammy-nominated label executive known for his high-impact, experiential performances, NFT collections, and love for technology. _____________ Resources Learn about Steve’s Foundation Take a look at Steve’s Metaverse Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter  Consider a journey to optimize your body with LifeForce. Learn more about Abundance360. Read the Tech Blog. Learn more about Moonshots & Mindsets.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. That's the thing that I've learned through all this is my journey and my like learning into, you know, how to live a healthier, longer, optimal life is like the main the main principles that I've that I've learned are, you know, extreme cold exposure, extreme heat exposure and and fasting.

And I'm just trying to do those in a regular way whenever I can. And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am, this is what I'm gonna do, this is the dent I'm gonna make in the universe. Steve Aoki, hey buddy, good to see ya. Hey, what's up, Peter? Where are you this morning or afternoon, as the case may be?

Las Vegas, back home. Nice. It's like I always look at my house. Most people look at their home as their home. This is like my vacation because my home is the road. I hear you. For a man, how many days on the road do you typically spend i mean you set i think you set a guinness book world record for the most number of shows in a year yeah most traveled musician on the planet

amazing in one calendar year but um it's i i'm i'm definitely making efforts to slow down. I don't need to hold this title. It's not a title that's exciting to hold. I do find myself proud of this when I hear about, oh, Yoyoki's the hardest working artist out there. But then I have the issues of sleep, my low REM numbers, which astonish me, stuff like that. And we're going to get to that. Everybody, I'm here on Moonshots and Mindsets with my friend Steve Aoki. Grammy-nominated billboard-topping artist, renowned DJ, philanthropist, fashion designer, author, futurist, surfer, and founder.

And like you said, Guinness book world record for the most traveled musician in a single year uh yeah man that's cool uh so welcome home i hope you get to stay there for a couple of days i do yeah i'm excited about this week yeah and it's funny right um i mean covid was a relief for a lot of people. I mean, I'm a road warrior, not at your level, but it was addicting to be home for it during COVID for a little bit. Oh my God, I totally agree. I mean, like the first part of COVID was tough,

the adjustment, but once I settled in, once you tell your brain like, yo, this is how it's going to be, instead of like, you know, but when you're like, there's no more FOMO because there's no one's out. When you like take away the FOMO element, you're like, oh, this is, this is life. Settle in, like, you know, figure out what you're going to do. That that's when, that's when it became like a lot of fun.

I love being home. Yeah. I mean, you know, my heart goes out to people who, you know, lost family and got sick and lost jobs and all of that. But yes. Yeah. But, but, you know, those two years, I think a lot of folks are going to look back with this nostalgia of like, it was great not to get on an airplane or, or go to meetings and

just hang out with family and friends. That's, that's the main thing is hanging out with family and friends that's that's the main thing is hanging out with family and friends like it's uh i i i remember i said that's on mic on uh to a crowd right when kovat broke and i was playing shows again i'm like you know kovu is all about spending times with people that you really know really well like that's your tight circle you see them you grow like even a tighter bond you know which is something i'll never forget like swimming with my mom and my sister like 12 at night and we're like well we probably will never do this again like we we might but like these are moments

we have to embrace this stuff and like we're kind of like holding each other like crying in our like in this moment of just amazing time with, you know, spending with your family. And then I remember I was talking about this on the mic, just like all heartfelt and like, I miss that. But it's interesting because like when I'm on stage, I miss this. And it, the whole point of me being obsessed with being on stage is because I want to be around people that I don't know. Pumped and full of energy, right? Yeah, yeah.

And like, I think it's like, I'm like, we go out here, we go to these shows. And I never make speeches at shows, but I'm like, we go out here, we go to these shows to be around people we don't know. We're like, this is like part of who we are as humans is that we, we like want to be around people we don't know in large gatherings like that's what's exciting and we've been missing this for for you know over a year and um this is why you can never take away festivals and shows like because just part of like our brain makeup is like we need that.

Oh, absolutely. There's, there's a, a need to be in community and a need to be in your crowd. And, you know, um, for those who don't know, you and I met, uh, through your foundation, uh, which is focused on, on brain related matters. And I, you very kindly invited me to be a keynoter at your foundation event, along with David Sinclair and some other amazing people. And it was great. And, you know, we're kindred spirits, different in many ways, and 100% kindred in others. And so we've connected on longevity and on health and on brain science. uh i guess you just did some uh some brain related imaging and reports what what's up yeah yeah no it's uh i i uh went to orange county and i met up

with dr amen oh great awesome dr amen's awesome and yeah and like i you know i've done a brain mri before because i was i just wanted to make sure the brain was looking good. This is like 10 years ago. But I did a different, it wasn't an MRI. I laid back and you inject some isotopes. I guess they are radioactive, but they're not, you know, they're not bad, you know, or like it's a small, minute amount. So you inject some isotopes into your bloodstream that cling on to your brain somehow. I'm probably messing this whole thing up. And then you lay back

like you're going in an MRI and there's these little cameras around this machine. So it's not like an MRI. It's not like you're going in this crazy thing with the crazy da-da-da-da sounds. And you just lay back and you they they took pictures and i think they're looking at like blood flow in your brain right right okay yeah and it's like your brain when you go and get an mri and i've done this through fountain life and through uh hli a number of times um i think we connected your mom to one of those centers right yes yeah yeah when you go you you go and you typically get an imaging of your brain HLI a number of times. And I think we connected your mom to one of those centers, right? Yes.

Is she going now? Yeah. When you go, you go and you typically get an imaging of your brain. It's a static image, meaning it's like, it's just looking at the structure. Like what's the volume of each part? And is there any, you know, anything too big or too small in there? But what's really interesting is your brain uses a ridiculous amount of oxygen and and glucose and energy and so the real interesting is like your blood brain flow and and your brain regulates where the blood goes depending upon its function so i think dr amin was looking at

at that so how did how did it go did you get a good report card I yeah so I got a report card that I've never seen before which is that that's what's so exciting you know I you know I think one of the cool things that you see like a healthy brain and I mean I did I did the scan and I went like you know 30 minutes later I sat with uh Dr. Amen and or about an hour later, and we showed my brain and a healthy brain. And what was cool is like that, like the top layer was, was, you know, look, look pretty good. There was a little valley dent in my prefrontal, like right here. So that like he attributed to that to potential like concussions, like hitting on the back

of my head, which've i've done from major spill snowboarding and like extreme sports still as a kid yeah which is actually quite interesting because like a lot of these like injuries i i did or had were from 10 20 30 years ago and there's and you can still see that there is like the brain's like sloshed forward and created this this dent right here um and he's like, okay, that's something to focus on. And then he, he flipped, flipped the brain upside down. They got to see the underlying part of the brain, which is, that was really cool. Yeah. And, and, and you, when you flip it up,

you have these lobes that, that they kind of, they kind of pop up like almost like a helmet with like around your ears. Sure. And, and, and he was saying, those are the temporal lobes that that they kind of they kind of pop up like almost like a helmet with like around your ears sure and and uh and he was saying those are the temporal lobes and they looked mangled they were just deformed and they're just like wow and they show that healthy brain and my brain my temporal lobes were just like kind of like all just destroyed and and and and then he he was saying that he's attributed to some sort of like emotional traumas and things like that and and then I also did neurofeedback at the same time of doing of seeing dr. Amen mm-hmm and the neurofeedback reports when when I do the brain map scan, shows that I have issues in memory and in my tinnitus, like my loud hearing. I think it's attributed into the temporal lobe area.

So that does have an alignment there. I mean, obviously, you abuse yourself from an auditory standpoint. I mean, in terms of the amount of energy that's going into your, your eardrums every, every night that you perform. And since you're the highest performing artists out there, I mean, it's probably not as bad as being, you know, on stage in the midst of a of a rock concert but maybe it is i don't know yeah i like right now in in our conversation i hear ringing yeah it's just constant ringing permanent ringing that i have to deal with the rest of my life because there's no cure for tinnitus yet and i just i just live with it you know i'm i've been living with it since 2007 so it's um it just gets louder and

louder as I destroy more and more of my hearing but so I you know I wear earplugs uh pretty consistently now but um um I mean it's interesting right a lot of us are naive about what's going on inside our bodies we really don't know I mean and what's amazing and i talk about this a lot is that our bodies are really great at compensating for problems and when you finally feel a problem like if you have cancer god forbid you don't you know uh you don't find out about it at stage zero or stage one or stage two it's like stage three or four that you finally have some issues or problems. You go to the doctor at that point. So, I mean, that's a lot of why, you know, the kind of imaging

that's becoming possible now, MRI and CT and a whole bunch of other imaging modalities that allow you to look every year at your body, allow you to track what's going on in a preventative fashion instead of a reactive fashion. Hey, thanks for listening to Moonshots and Mindsets. I want to take a second to tell you about a company that I love. It's called Levels and it helps me be responsible for the food that I eat, what I bring into my body. See, we were never designed as humans to eat as much sugar as we do and sugar is not good for your brain or your heart or your body in general. Levels helps me monitor the impact of the foods that I eat by monitoring my blood sugar.

For example, I learned that if I dip my bread in olive oil, it blunts my glycemic response, which is good for my health. If you're interested, learn more by going to levels.link backslash Peter. Levels will give you an extra two months of membership. It's something that is critical for the future of your longevity. All right, let's get back to the conversation in the episode. I mean, one of the things I know you and I've talked about a bunch is the whole issue of sleep. Yes. And how would you describe your sleep, my friend? I mean, you're on an unusual sleep cycle, to say the least. Absolutely irregular.

Absolutely irregular. And I know that's part of the main points of longevity is finding a really good regular schedule on all the things that you do to maintain health right and i and i get that you know but um and i try to do that with everything else in my life but it's it's nearly impossible if i was to unless i quit touring you know and i'm not going to do that so it's like the one as much as i i am into anti-aging and biohacking and trying to figure out all the different things to you know optimize my life and live you know live a healthy long long long life uh the touring is is probably the worst part of all of it because you know when

i'm at home i'll you know i'll go to bed at a very regular time. What time would you go to bed if you were, like this week or next two weeks when you're home, what is your ideal pattern fall into? I'll probably go to bed at 1 or 2. That's a.m., just to be clear. Yeah, that's 1 or 2 a.m. But when I'm playing shows shows i'm going to bed four or five wow and and um and i'm not a napper only when i'm on a plane only when i'm in modes of transportation do i nap yeah the vibration and the lower oxygen level can can knock you out

and so the other side of the question is when do do you wake up? Well, see, the problem is when I'm touring, I have to get up for these early flights. And that's what I'm like for this weekend, to give you an example, you know, from Mexico City to Vegas, Vegas to Edmonton, Canada, Canada back to Vegas on Sunday. I got a total amount of maybe six hours, you know, of sleep for those for that run of yeah of uh three days so six hours for the total of three days or per day no no total for for all three days oh my god that's insane yeah i mean like i'm not accounting the naps because they do count but i don't want to count them so i could be real with my numbers as, as conservative as possible. But, um,

I, you know, it's interesting because if you don't really do the diagnostic checks on, and on, on your performance level, because I, I used to just run like that. I used to do my shows consistently.

Like, you know, if I've one point I was doing 300 shows a year and i was doing those runs where i'm doing like two to four hours a night asleep for you know weeks on end weeks and weeks and weeks on end and i never diagnostic checked my shows but i was i really diagnostic check as much as i can nowadays right and i got my third show in Edmonton I was like I I was like forgetting some of the lyrics that songs that are very very like I'm like why like clearly it's because I'm not sleeping or I was like like I was like wait make some noise you know like I'm like

wow not like so fluid and you know with it's interesting how like the brain does like you think you're good but you're not ladies and gentlemen this is not what you want to do at home um so Abundance Platinum events. He is the god of sleep. He wrote an amazing book, Why We Sleep. What did he tell you? You're like the antichrist to sleep. That's why it's a perfect pairing.

Peter, as a god said, no joke, and I'm so grateful for the introduction. Thank you for that. And I'm always, especially with things that I'm really deficient in, I'm always looking for the experts of those areas. Sure. Matt, he is the God of sleep. He really is. He's been really extremely helpful and attentive to my aura data.

So we get on the call like, you know, like once a week. We text quite frequently now. And he's always checking my data. And the things he's told me is like, it's funny to to say but it's really alarming like i've never seen so low REM sleep ever that's what he said he's like if i was to tell this to a close family a friend of mine i would tell them they need to make an extreme change their life oh my god i'm like god if you're telling me this um and i've been living this way for decades you know i mean i'm i'm like, God, if you're telling me this, and I've been living this way for decades, you know, I mean, I'm like in a bad, I mean, I'm laughing because it's so, so like messed

up, but now I'm making changes. So that's why I'm laughing. Okay, let's talk about that. What changes are you making? Because, you know, I mean, when Matt Walker talks about reduced sleep, he's like, if you're sleeping six and a half hours a day, that's not enough. Not six and a half hours over three days. Oh, I got, I got to like, I just, I just got to read you like one of the lines.

Please, you know, I'm sure this is meant to be, this is meant to incentivize everybody listening that sleep is, sleep is your superpower i mean yes i when i was in medical school i used to like you know five and a half hours sleep was what i would optimize for and of course that's that's not healthy and i do i shoot for eight hours now and i'm really pissed if i get if i get seven so well he did tell me like and i love this analogy i think it's it's brilliant because it makes me look at sleep differently. But he's like in the movie Limitless, that limitless drug.

Yes. Where you're just like, you could do everything. Yes. Your brain's just like firing. I love that movie. Love it. Yeah. He's like, the limitless drug that we can all take is more sleep.

I'm like, oh my God. Because I want to take this drug it's like just get more sleep just get more rem you know and i'm like oh my like i love thinking of it like that then i i actually would start doing it but uh anyways he's what he said what do you say let's see just on the rep because like this is what my main main focus. I have good deep sleep for my aura ring, but my REM is just piss poor. This is some of the lowest amount of REM sleep I've seen in an individual consistently over time. We usually only see this in people who are heavy alcoholics since alcohol blocks REM, though I know this is not you, of course, because I don't drink. So the reason you don't get REM is that you are only sleeping four and a half hours a night

and therefore never give your brain a chance of getting REM sleep. So that's like my focus since he told me this a few weeks ago. And he put me on or he told me to take this med, Trazodone. So I've been doing that nightly about 50 milligrams of trazodone and um it it's not consistent i'll be honest um first time i took it i got an hour of rem which is astonishingly high for me which is not high enough um as you know peter, I usually get like 20 or 30 minutes of REM, even at an eight hour horizontal sleep. Yeah.

So it was good just to get, just to break the 60 minute. But I still need to figure out why my brain wakes up out of REM to not allow me to get two hours or whatever, what the usual dosage is so i'm figuring that out i'm still not there yet but i had a healthy amount of sleep last night took 100 milligrams of last night and i and um went to bed like at two and and i you know after like those two two to three hour windows of sleep over the weekend and And I woke up at literally 1230. In the afternoon? Yes.

Awesome. So I slept like incredibly long. But still 30 minutes of REM sleep with all that sleep. Huh. 30 minutes. Well, for Christmas, I want to buy you some REM sleep. Oh my God. I would, this would be the best.

Oh my God. I desperately need more REM. Oh my God. This would be the best. Oh my God. I desperately need more REM. Oh my God. Hey everybody. I hope you're enjoying this episode. I'll tell you about something I've been doing for years. Every quarter or so, having a phlebotomist come to my home to draw bloods, to understand what's going on inside my body. And it was a challenge to get all the right blood draws and all the right tests done. So I ended up co-founding a company that sends a phlebotomist to my home to measure 40 different biomarkers every quarter put them up on a dashboard so I can see what's in range what's out of range and then get the right supplements medicines peptides hormones to optimize my health it's something that I want for all my friends and

family and i'd love it for you if you're interested go to mylifeforce.com backslash peter to learn more let's get back to the episode so i mean the other thing that you have to deal with uh and i just dealt with this guy was back and forth to europe twice and to the Middle East is the whole area of jet lag, right? I mean, that must screw with you as well. So how do you deal with jet lag? I deal with it like it's never, it's never, I never hacked it. I've never hacked it. I mean, is your brain just so screwed up in terms of not sleeping that it doesn't really

matter? I think my REM has probably been like it's at this really in a really bad position maybe my brain doesn't allow myself i never checked my aura data before i used to travel i never had aura back then so yeah yeah it's interesting though when i travel to like let's say i travel to japan like if i go if i go i guess east right or east west west yes i'm in nevada uh when i go to japan i three days i'm good three days i'm good when i come back it's like actually no when i go to japan it's like six days i'm bad but i come back it's like three days i'm good three days i'm normal so

it's interesting when you go when i go back to my time zone it's a lot easier when i go there it's like twice as long i i don't understand usually usually people do better when they go west in fact when you're when you're looking at uh like i was on this ship called the world ship that would travel around the world. And it would always be moving east to west because you're gaining time in that regard versus losing it. But anyway, pal, I mean, the single most important thing for all of us in the world of sleep is prioritizing it. And I think for me, the biggest lesson, and there's a whole bunch of hacks and I put out, you know, uh, sort of summaries, but Matt Walker's book is still why we sleep is the best, but, um, it's prioritizing sleep.

And when you go to sleep, which is really hard for you. I mean, it's like I'm in bed at, if I can, if I have any control, I'm in bed at 9 30 and i hope to be asleep by 10 because my brain wakes up in the morning at at 5 30 or 6 so i'm waiting for me to get eight hours is that way that's great yeah you do cold plunges does that help you at all yeah i mean i think that like i don't know if it's really helped me on my REM, but on overall performance and excitement for life, just on that principle alone, I do it. I leave a cold plunge. I always say whenever I onboard new members of the cold plunge, extreme cold exposure membership club that I have here at my house. cold exposure uh membership club that i have here at my house uh um and i love introducing this to like you know very very scared friends of mine uh i'm like you literally leave the water a brand

new you like it's a different you if you're prepared for that join me into this new exclusive membership club the extreme cold so describe for people what how long do you do a cold plunge for is it like an isolated bath what talk to me about cold plunges one second so i'm obsessed with with the cold bunch i i i got really into it um through wim hof method and i started working with some of his students or whatever in different parts of the world. We would just fill up baths in the hotel room and do breath work and all that good stuff. So I got my own here and I went with Laird Hamilton. I did his house with him and Gabby and was inspired. Got his same unit.

So I have, I got one here. It's a solo tub. You just sit in it and you fill it with ice. I got two of those because I had so many friends coming over. And then I got a third one because I was the guy onboarding so many people to the ice exposure. And then I was like, you know what? I need to do one better. So I turned my water feature in my house, which holds probably at least 15 people.

It's like a jacuzzi. It's so big and i just put a chiller on there and i and i just turn into another extreme a group cold punch that's right six i mean normally it's 36 degrees maybe normally it's the jacuzzi that everybody's jumping into here yeah yeah so i get like the jacuzzi is actually not even warm i don't even heat up the jacuzzi because i don't even use it so So I have my water feature that now we bring in like six people or whoever I'm like, whoever I can onboard. And we sit in there for four to five minutes. I don't know at what stage is a diminishing returns effect.

But what's the longest you've ever been in a cold plunge? You know, interestingly enough, as much as I do it and i you know i was doing it like daily during covid and i do like three times a week you know when i'm home um i only i've never broke 10 minutes i always do like nine minutes and i'm out you know i know i don't like turn it into like this this like marathon like how long can I go? I just, you know, I mean, my niece, I remember her, she's when she was 19 during COVID, we would do as a family, right? So we get my whole family together and do it. And the first,

the first time she did it, she couldn't last 30 seconds. And then by the 10th time she wanted to beat my security, who was staying with me that he's a Navy SEALs. You know, he just, he was in the Navy seals. He did 45 minutes for whatever reason. Why? I don't know why. And she was so angry. She's like, I'm going to beat him. Like Natalie, please do not do anything to endanger your health. I don't want to see you like have hypothermia. Just don't do it. And the next day she's like, Just don't do it.

And the next day she's like, I beat him 45 minutes and 30 seconds in the cold plunge. I'm like, this is, I can't believe it. I've been, the longest I've done it probably is like three minutes. But when I remember doing it was going underwater and holding my breath, you know, just to complete clean immersion for 60 seconds of that. And it is, I hate cold. i hate cold i hate cold it's like i hate it but you're absolutely right man it is you come out of that feeling so energized so revitalized that it's uh it's awesome it's it's a it's like woohoo i can just like do anything it's extraordinary yeah it's all it, it's always the worst before.

Like the like, there's no greater fear and feeling than before you even touch the water. And then the second biggest fear is in the first minute, because your, your brain is just going haywire, like, Oh, my God, what's going on? Like, you gotta get out like, blah, blah, blah, heart rate goes up, everything goes crazy. And then you think you think you're gonna die and and you just have to tell yourself to calm down through that minute of pain and torture and then boom that thermal layer of heat goes over your chest you're like whoa i i'm not cold in the areas that that are protected your fingers start getting cold and you just have to deal with that. And then you're like, wow, four minutes goes by pretty quick

and then you're just a brand new you and ready to take on the world. You are. And as David Sinclair and many others will tell you, that cold plunge just activates so many genes that are revitalizing for you because when the body's in extremis, it shuts down a lot of the lazy protocols and just gets you focused on performance. You know, there's heat shock proteins that get activated in a, uh, in a, um, in a sauna. And one of the things I love doing at my, my friend's home, I don't have the situation here is we'll go, you know, in the sauna for like 30

minutes and then cold plunge and then in the sauna and cold plunge, just going back and forth. I feel like I'm going to crack on that. I love that. That's the thing that I've learned through all this is like, as my, my journey and my like learning into, you know, how to live a healthier, longer optimal life is like the main, the main principles that I've, that I've learned are, you know, extreme cold exposure, extreme heat exposure and and fasting and i and i'm just trying to do those in a regular way whenever i can and um and i i definitely feel more often and sleep which i'm i need to put that in the fourth yes i need to put that in the fourth i always see those three and i'm like, God, sleep is so important.

And I'm not, I am getting it, but I'm not getting enough of REM. And I'm going to figure that out. Steve, listen, thank you, my friend, for your unbridled enthusiasm and purpose and passion. And excited to be doing things with you. Excited to have you join us at A360 in March. Excited for helping spread the gospel of brain science and health through your foundation. And excited for the REM sleep I'm going to gift you. Please.

Thank you, Peter. I'd love to talk with you. All right, brother. Be well. Have a beautiful day.