Shortly after my father died, I set off on a journey to learn everything I could about the human body. I was in the middle of that downward spiral I wrote about earlier, drinking heavily, trying to find a fucking toehold. In the fog I was in, it made no sense to me that a man so full of life, a man so driven and fiercely determined to live, work, and play at the very highest level, could be cut down when there was so much life left to live.
It killed me that my father wouldn’t get to see how all the stories of his life would play out … wouldn’t get to see how his children turned out.
What killed me most of all was the thought that I could have saved him. It was a stupid thought, a baseless thought … but there it was. He’d had the best doctors, of course. And what the hell did I know, anyway? But still, I was desperate to learn if there was anything I could have done for him—and, out of that desperation, maybe, to learn the things I should be doing to take better care of myself and the people I loved.
I went off on a kind of information walkabout. I read everything I could find about health and wellness—mainstream stuff, out there stuff, everything in between. Books, blog posts, journals … I even started watching a bunch of documentaries on mind and body issues—a total-immersion deal. Somewhere in there, a friend recommended a book called Anticancer, by David Servan-Schreiber, a cofounder of Doctors Without Borders and a fifteen-year brain cancer survivor. His story was incredible. He’d been given this grave diagnosis, but then he went off in search of all these ways the body itself can fight off cancer. He started eating the right foods, eliminating stress, living a more spiritual, purposeful life, embracing all these transcendental Eastern principles.
I tore right through that book, and the great takeaway for me was that we’re wired in such a way that cancer and heart disease and dementia and all these other illnesses can’t help but find us in the Western world. Basically, we’re screwed. We put all these toxins into our bodies, breathe in so much shit, run ourselves into the ground … we give ourselves no chance. But Dr. Servan-Schreiber did such a complete 180 with the way he changed up his lifestyle he was able to beat his cancer. Twice.
Dr. Servan-Schreiber’s account left me doubling down on my quest to learn everything I could about the human body. I wasn’t thinking globally, just locally. I wanted to share what I was learning with my mother, with my siblings … maybe do what I could to keep us in each other’s lives for as long as possible. My family at first thought I was a little nutty. I was super-evangelical about it—same way I’d been when I had that come-to-Jesus moment following my one and only acid trip back in high school. (With me, when I get passionate about something, I can sometimes go overboard when I look to share that passion with the people I care about.) But after a while I started thinking outside myself on this, outside my family. The more I learned, the more I realized there were fundamental changes we should all be making, on a societal level, that could maybe set right the planet, you know.
One thing I want to make clear: I didn’t know shit about nutrition, going into all of this. I’d always been active, but I didn’t know shit about fitness. I’d been a vegetarian for a stretch, because of the folks in the co-ops I used to live in back in college, but that was just me fitting myself into the community. That was just me going along. When I left Santa Barbara, I went back to eating like crap—lots of carbs, lots of greasy, starchy processed foods. Maybe I’d pick up on some new diet or trend and try that out for a while, but I had no idea what I was doing, and I never stayed with any of these new diets or trends for very long.
Another thing I want to make clear: this wasn’t about community. This was me, looking out for me and mine. This was self-preservation—but, hey, when you’re out to save your ass and you keep an open mind, you start to see that what applies to you and yours applies to the many.
Eventually, my reading took me to the books of Ray Kurzweil, the great futurist and inventor. Probably the first book of his I read was The Singularity Is Near, which talks about the ways the human body can overcome the destiny of biology. Oh, man … the guy is so outrageously brilliant, and even if you spend just a little bit of time with his books he finds a way to distill all of these complex ideas into a simple, fundamental truth: technology can radically extend and enrich our lives.
That one basic thought set me off on my walkabout in a whole new direction.
I reached out to Ray and we struck up a friendship, and in a lot of ways that friendship was the inspiration for my first Neon Future album, with an introduction from Ray Kurzweil himself, in which he welcomed listeners to our shared neon future and promised that we would soon see “radical life expansion, not just radical life extension.” That album was a breakthrough for me. It featured collaborations with artists like Fall Out Boy, Afrojack, Machine Gun Kelly, and will.i.am. It also gave me one of my first mega-mega-hits—“Delirious (Boneless),” featuring Chris Lake, Tujamo, and Kid Ink, with over 100 million streams … and counting!
Can’t nobody stop us
We’re gone delirious …
But mostly Neon Future marked the first time I was able to use my platform as an artist to bring about change—meaningful change. That’s something I’d been passionate about since the early days of Dim Mak. You could see it in a small way with those Hearts and Minds motivational quotes I included in the liner notes, putting out all these healing, hopeful messages. But I’d never made any kind of major push on the back of my own work, and here I got to thinking that this DJ thing wasn’t just about making a name for myself, or making noise with my music … now it was also about making some kind of difference. End of the day, that’s why we’re here—to make the world a better place.
Like a lot of artists, I’d set up a charitable foundation to help fund a bunch of projects and initiatives, but we were a little all over the place. When we started out, our mission statement was to crowdsource a portion of the proceeds from each of my shows, letting the fans decide where the money would go. The idea was to promote a kind of “party with a purpose” concept, and to get people talking about the issues of the day, and feeling like they were helping to make an impact—only the crowdsourcing piece didn’t really work. Nothing against my fans, but they tended to respond to whatever was going on in the news in that moment. That’s just human nature, right? And it’s an instinct that came from the right place. If there had been some natural disaster in the news, they’d vote to send the money to relief efforts there, so that’s what we did.
Don’t get me wrong, I was pleased and proud to be a kind of conduit in this—pleased and proud of my fans for thinking things through in a thoughtful way. And I was thrilled and grateful that there was enough money coming in that I could send a good chunk of it right back out and put it to good use. We’d vet the organizations and send the money along, and it would make a little bit of a dent in whatever it was that was going on … until the next disaster or crisis came along and turned our attention to another corner of the world. But as my interests away from music became more and more centered on health, I decided to ditch the crowdsourcing element and channel all these resources into the science and study of the human brain. That became my primary goal—an obsession, really. I was out to support organizations in the brain science and research areas with a focus on regenerative medicine and brain preservation, but money alone didn’t cut it. A lot of these organizations were already well funded. Where they were lacking was in being well understood. People just didn’t get the seismic advances that were happening in the field, didn’t see that we were on the cusp of fundamental change, so I also started talking about it, posting videos and interviews and links to important new research, hoping to get my fans thinking of a world where degenerative brain diseases do not exist and we’re able to tap all these new ways to extend and enrich our lives.
One of the first organizations we donated to was the SENS Research Foundation, a group of scientists and innovators based in Mountain View, California, that believes a world free of age-related disease is possible. It’s a beautiful dream, don’t you think? But to the forward-thinking folks at SENS, it’s not just a dream, it’s a reality. SENS stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. “Negligible Senescence” is a term coined by Dr. Caleb Finch, of the University of Southern California, who found that in some animals, the progressive decline into sickness and frailty as it relates to age is negligible. In creatures like lobsters and hydra, it’s pretty much nonexistent. You can study them in the seabed, and they don’t seem to age. Whatever physical abilities they have once they reach maturity, they pretty much keep, with no deterioration over time, which led Dr. Finch and others to conclude that there must be some way to tap into that for us human animals, some way to thwart any and all age-related pathologies.
The SENS Research Foundation is run by a guy named Aubrey de Grey, who wrote a book called Ending Aging, in which he really breaks it down. He talks about what it means to age, how cells degenerate, all the different ways they can wreak havoc on the body. You should read his book or tune in to one of his TED Talks. What I love about Dr. de Grey is that he doesn’t just know his stuff. He knows how to sell his stuff—meaning, he can talk about it to just about anyone, in clear, simple terms. I’ve had him out to the house a couple times, and we sat in my studio and talked about the transformative power of music, the healing powers of meditation, the remarkable resilience of the human brain … real next-level stuff. Obviously, he did most of the talking, and I did most of the listening, but the thing that got me most excited about Dr. de Grey’s work and the work of his colleagues was the way they were able to share their discoveries and put them out into the world in an accessible way.
You listen to him and you start to think, Oh, man … anything is possible! Everything is possible!
It’s exciting as hell.
One of the other things Dr. de Grey turned me on to was the way the brain responds to color—that’s been one of the main themes of these pages, so we might as well end on this note. It’s like I said on the very first page: Sometimes I think my whole life can be seen through shades of blue. That’s not just a line or a literary device or a way in to my story. No, it’s the color of my life—the fucking base coat. My name, my moods, my music … there’s a blue to match ’em all. But it cuts deeper than that. We’ve known for centuries that certain colors attach to certain personality traits, deep down, but there’s a science to what we’ve known. Colors trigger our neurotransmitters in such a way that they create or enhance mood, based on different amplitudes and wavelengths of light. The color blue has been shown to activate our parasympathetic nervous system—meaning it sends a signal to our brain that there is no danger present. That’s where we get our fight-or-flight impulses, and when we’re bathed in blue we can shut down that part of our brain, because there’s not a whole lot of call for either.
When we’re in a blue state, we’re good to sit and chill and let our minds roam.
Think about it: when things are calm and peaceful, when there’s an overwhelming presence of blue in your environment, it stimulates deeper abstract thinking. When our defenses are down, there’s no need to feel agitated or up against it, or to put ourselves on high alert. It allows us to turn our thoughts and our energies inward, in a purely positive way. Shit, maybe that’s why artists and poets and visionaries have always been drawn to the sea, where the blue that reflects off the ocean helps to free our minds and ignite our creativity. Don’t know about you, but I always feel most alive when I’m on the water, most at one with the world, and I have to think it ties back in some way to the feeling of calm that finds us in a blue state. When we don’t have to think about surviving in the moment, we’re free to come up with ideas that move us, that move others, that move humanity forward.
We were sitting in my recording studio—the Neon Future Cave!—when Dr. de Grey pointed this out to me, probably because I’d had the room decorated with the sweet electric blue of that first-generation BMW i8 interior I wrote about earlier. That was the car of my dreams when I was a kid, and I was still drawn to it. The color was striking—and I guess it struck something in Dr. de Grey. He explained to me how without really realizing it I’d laid in a foundation to be my best creative self. In that kind of blue-soaked space, he said, I can relax, feel safe, and free my mind to explore. Against that kind of blue backdrop, we can take care of our basic needs: eating, sleeping, breathing, fucking …
That’s the power of blue, hardwired into our system.
That’s the power of blue, woven into the carpet, painted on the walls, dyed into the fabric of the upholstery.
And so I finish these pages the way I started out, talking a blue streak about ways my life has been colored in blue tones. I can’t tell you why this is so, only that it is so. I can’t fully explain the science behind it, only that there is a science behind it. I can’t even grasp the poetry of it, as I live my life in the hottest part of the flame, in the shade of the blue tree of my family’s history. And I can’t tell you what it is that draws me to these various shades of blue, to the blue markers that stamp my soul, only that they keep me whole, and calm, and present, and productive as hell.
I am so fucking thankful that music has taken me to this place—the music I write, the music I remix, the music I listen to. When I started out in this thing, the music was all about finding myself, creating community, seeding our little subcultures with a feeling of belonging, a feeling of purpose. And now it’s just worked out that my community has grown. My sense of self has grown. The little subcultures where I lived and breathed, like straight-edge hardcore, they’ve been put on blast, to where they now fill up the vast spaces of the EDM movement and seep past the edges of hip-hop and punk and good old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll. It’s viral … it’s international … it’s around every damn corner, and I stand proudly in the DJ booth, counting my blessings that I’ve been gifted this chance to contribute to the soundtrack, you know.
Together, we’re making some serious noise, and we’ll keep making serious noise—I’ll sleep when I’m dead!—but underneath the movement we’ve built and the music we’re making there’s still this pulsing hardcore mandate to make the world a better place. To put in more than you take out. To lift each other up, triumphantly. To set each other down, compassionately. To make repairs. It’s embedded in the culture, so that’s what I’m trying to do as I look to our shared neon future, and to the pioneering research of organizations like the SENS Research Foundation that seek to understand what it means to be human, after all.
I do not have all the answers, when it comes to the workings of the human brain, or how we might tap technology to help us live longer, more productive lives. Truth is, I don’t have any answers, but I’m learning what questions to ask. I’m learning that it takes money and a platform to bring about these pioneering breakthroughs—and that these breakthroughs, in a vacuum, will be locked in a kind of theoretical limbo. We need to talk about this shit, understand this shit, embrace this shit … so we do what we can to keep the conversation going.
And while we’re doing that and figuring it all out, we might as well paint the walls blue.