WHOOP Podcast - On Tour With Zedd: How the World-Renowned DJ Stays in the Green

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

On this week’s episode, WHOOP Founder and CEO Will Ahmed is joined by DJ, record producer, and songwriter Zedd. The Grammy award-winning and platinum artist has had multiple records hit number one on the Billboard Top 100 and has made music with superstars like Justin Bieber, Maren Morris, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, and more. Not only is he a musical sensation, he is incredibly obsessed with his health and wellness and has been a WHOOP member for a number of years. Will and Zedd discuss why he decided to commit to a health and wellness journey (2:14), becoming an artist and producer (7:01), working with Lady Gaga (10:20), making music for himself vs. his fans (14:45), creating a song (19:20), collaborating with the biggest artists in the world (23:24), making his health and fitness a priority (27:34), his WHOOP data (29:51), diet and recovery habits (32:41), paying attention to his heart rate and nerves (39:17), and how AI is impacting the music and technology industries (42:04).Resources:Zedd's Website Zedd’s InstagramSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the Whoop Podcast, where we sit down with the best of the best. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. On this week's episode, I am joined by DJ, record producer, and songwriter Zed. He is a Grammy award-winning artist with songs like Clarity and Beautiful Now, hitting number one on the Billboard Top 100. The Platinum recording artist has made music with superstars like Justin Bieber,

Marin Morris, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Haley Williams, and more. Not only is he a musical sensation, turns out he's incredibly obsessed with his health and fitness, and he's been on Whoop for quite some time. So we chat about how he uses Whoop to optimize performance. Zed and I get into how he started with music, collaborating and making music with superstars like Lady Gaga. His creative process, there's a lot of improvisation

until he ultimately finds a way to achieve his vision for a song, how he has really prioritized his health and recovery. We get into diet, how important sleep is, grueling travel. We talk about his Woop data and what he has coming next. He's got a great album coming out. If you have a question, you want to see answered on the podcast, email us podcast at Woop.com. us 508-443-4-9-5-2. A reminder, we've got a great offer where you can sign up for WOOP

for free. That's right, free 30 days on WOOP, full WOOP experience to trial, decide if you want to become a member. And now, without further ado, here is my conversation with the world-renowned DJ and great dude, Zed. Zed, welcome to the WOOP podcast. Thank you for having you. Excited to do this with you. I've been a huge fan for over a decade now. and I loved seeing just on social media that you were on whoop so that's how we got connected that's right big fan likewise thank you for having me again so you strike me as someone who cares about as much their health and lifestyle as anyone

else is that right I think so I mean for me the older I get the more I realize that I can't get away with behaving like I did when I was in my early 20s where you can eat whatever you want you can drink whatever you want you cannot sleep wake up feeling totally fine that was me frankly from 21 to 26 and then there was some sort of switch that somebody pulled and it was like oh wait okay so now things are changing and I got to adjust my life a little bit so I've been trying to be really healthy as much as possible and improve my fitness and well-being especially considering my travel is pretty rough so you're 33 now 34 actually 30 you just turn 34 and I'm 33

So we're rough with the same age. And it seems like when you first burst onto the scene, you probably had a lifestyle similar to a lot of other DJs and musicians, which was Go, Go, Go. Well, I did like a full on U-turned term because when I started DJing, I was traveling by myself. I didn't have a team. I didn't really drink alcohol every once in a while,

and I would kind of go play my show, go back and sleep. And as I started getting a little bit more popular, I started having a team, you have people that are around and you want to have a drink, I started doing this curve of living a substantially less healthy lifestyle and not caring as much about important things that I value today, such as sleep and being well rested. And then when those days of drinking and partying started lasting longer than just the day you drink, I started doing the U-turn and, you know, like, okay, I got to figure out how to be more healthy and more active.

And, yeah, so now I'm back to trying to be as fit as I human as can. And during that phase, did you ever feel like you had, like, a problem with substances? Or it's more just that you were like, this is a lot. And if I stay at this pace, I don't know where I'm going to end up. I don't think so. I don't think I ever had a problem with substances. I always told my team from the get-go if I ever drink too much. If I need to stop, I need you guys to tell me because I will probably be the last person to admit to myself that I need help, right?

But for me, it was more so that it became a habit for me to have a Jack and Coke before I go on stage, have a Jack and Coke on stage. And then if we party afterwards, which doesn't happen as often as you would think, I would have drinks afterwards. So it wasn't an excessive amount, but it became a habit. And at some point I thought that being on stage and having this feeling that's kind of hard to put into words, comes from, you know, having the drinks and connecting with people who probably had drinks as well. And then when I really started getting into my fitness and I decided I'm just going to start playing show sober, my first sober show, I remember being in Vegas and jumping and thinking I was drunk. But I was completely sober and then I realized, wait, that feeling that you might think comes from alcohol isn't actually the alcohol.

It is more so, you know, being excited, being probably a bunch of adrenaline, and that was the feeling I was after. It wasn't so much the being buzzed or whatever. And that was a really important lesson for me to learn because it made it so much easier to say, oh, then I don't really need to drink to have that amount of joy in that sensation. For that show, did you find that you were more nervous going into it than usual? I don't think I was more nervous because I was in a band for like eight years before I became a DJ and I never drank anything. and the whole alcohol thing just became a thing with DJing and it was fun but it wasn't so much that I was nervous because I'm very well capable DJing without having any drinks but I was a little

I would say I was concerned that I wouldn't get the same satisfaction from DJing the way I used to for the last let's just call it 10 years of being buzzed and having a little bit of that that feeling and I just realized partially I have more fun maybe because you notice more things. It's definitely helped me not be nervous for some shows and having a drink before it calms you down a little bit. I will say that. But the downside is, which I'm sure you're well aware, are all the other things that come with having had a few drinks. And I think I've been starting to realize that lately, you know, the price you pay for having the bus and then you've got to make the decision whether that's worth it to you or not. Well, we're going to come back to travel as well

because it looks like in your whoop data, that can be just as challenging as alcohol in your body. So both your parents are musicians. You get into music really young, right? Talk a little bit about just that journey of becoming an artist. Yeah, I think some of my first memories were just playing piano at the age of three. And I started writing music since I was about four years old. And my parents would leave for work. We had a little keyboard with a floppy disc that you can write.

record. At first it was like three and then it turned into 16 tracks. I would make some sort of song. My parents would come home. They would review it and be like, oh, see how this note doesn't match with the chord. See how that drum sound doesn't fit? And I was like, ah, okay, makes sense. Better job tomorrow. So that was my whole first life chapter. And then when I turned 12 and wanted to do the opposite of what my parents wanted me to do, my brother and I started the band where he was the lead singer, guitarist, I was a drummer, so did the polar opposite of classical piano. And I did that until I was 18, 19, 20 years old, and then I started my career as Zed, which really started as a mix of joke and experiment. I didn't mean to become a DJ ever, but I wanted to know

how to be good at producing electronic music. Then I juggled that a little bit, tried to do both the band and the DJ project, and at some point there was so much. much interest for me as Zed that I had to drop the band in full-time. So you're 18 years old. Where are you living at that point? In my parents' basement in a small town in Germany. Okay. And by the age of 22, you're a global phenomenon. Something like that. Things happened pretty quickly.

I think for me at that time, even my parents didn't really know what I was doing. I kept that secret, but I think in Germany where I was from, nobody really cared about me as an artist. And then I got a visa to come to the United States, and I would leave. And I was like, I have some shows. My parents knew me from playing shows in front of 50 people with my band. But these were like 2,000, 4,000 people. And then I would come home. And I didn't even bother trying to explain what I was doing because it seemed so far apart from the world that I lived in in Germany.

And it became longer. At some point I was gone for one week. Then I was touring for two weeks. And then I was like, hey, I'm gone for two months. And in my head, I was like, I've never left home for more than two weeks at a time. And that was for a vacation. Right. You know, and then slowly but truly think everybody in my family and Friends Circle realized that my career has been taking off in the States.

And then when I was, I think this was in 2011 or beginning of 2012, I got, asked to help Lady Gaga work on her record, which is when I left for three or four months at a time. So I would leave for four months, work on her record, and in the meantime also worked on my own record, because I had a bunch of time. Since she was so busy traveling, she wasn't always around, and I was sitting there. I was like, well, I guess I might as well make my own album. That's how my career really started. When I made that album, it really cemented me as an artist, And from that moment on, I got an apartment. And when I woke up in Germany, and it was raining every day,

and then I woke up in L.A., and it's beautiful in a blue sky sunshine, it made me feel like I never want to go back. So you're 21 years old, and you get a call from Lady Gaga. Yep. Was that a fairly surreal moment? Did you not stop really to think about it? And you're just kind of like, okay, I'm going to do it. It was a surreal moment for two reasons.

One was that I've always looked up to her. She was the superstar that I thought would just be so far out of reach to ever even be in the same universe with. And just to place it, right? So this is 2011. 10 or 11, something like that, yeah. But I feel like she was arguably maybe the largest artist in the world at that point. It felt like that. Like she was in the top few.

Absolutely. Like I was in college then, and I remember a lot of the songs when we went out were Lady Gaga. The same year. I mean, she was definitely on top of the world. And the other reason why it was surreal is because I was actually playing a little show in Germany at that exact moment and I didn't pick up because I was on stage. And I had a missed call and it was from Lady Gaga and I was like, oh. So she just called you directly? She called me directly.

And how did she even get your number? Through my manager, there was some sort of tie. But I just had a missed call and then I talked to my manager. I was like, well, Lady Gaga called you. And I was like, oh my God, I just played a show in front of, I don't know, 200. people and his to call from Lady Gaga. But eventually it turned around and we finally met and ended up working together. And was it something she heard in your music that had gotten to her and she's like,

that's what I'm looking for? Yeah, I think there was a tiny little snippet of a song I made. It was like a two-minute snippet of a song that wasn't even finished that I wanted her to hear. And this was like my wild imagination because I thought of her as an artist that can think beyond you know what's currently popular right I always thought of her somebody who was the one step ahead of what everybody else is doing and setting the trends and setting the standards and I felt that way about this little song I made and in my head I was playing out this you know version of reality where she would hear that and be like I got to work with this guy you know sitting in my

parents basement and ironically this is sort of what happened she finally got to hear this and back in the day she called Jimmy Iveen who was he was running Interscope Records which is the label I still am with and told him that he has to sign me and that's how the whole thing happened. Wow. I mean that's like a crazy sort of like manifesting reality moment. It is. You're like I'm going to make this song Lady Guy's going to hear it and it's going to go great from there. It's not like I made it for her but you know I just

made it and I was like wow it's weird. When she wanted to hear something I've done And I was like, well, this is a perfect example and somehow happened to be that way. When you first started working with her and you're at that stage, like, where you feel like your career is about to have this inflection, did you find yourself at all getting caught up in the moment or nervous around these people? Or had you just gotten so used to being an artist that you didn't think twice about it? No, it was really difficult for me at first to be in a room with somebody that I have so much respect for and working on something that is so fundamental. mentally subjective. There is no right or wrong with music ever. You know, you can work on trying to achieve a certain goal of being popular with a song, making it radio-friendly. Sure, you can kind of objectify certain elements of a song. But generally speaking, there's no right or wrong. The only

thing there is with music is your genuine honest opinion. And when we got in the studio, for the first time, she's like, no, I think it should be this way. It was this strange moment of being like, okay, well, anybody else sitting in that chair, I would say, I don't think so. I really think it should be this way. But sitting in front of somebody that you're respecting so much, it's really challenging to be honest at all times. And be like, ah, I think. And be like sharp, right? Yeah. So I had to just tell myself for a second, you're going to have to be honest. There's no way around it. You're going to have to disagree sometimes. And I kind of told myself that before really pursuing that entire project. And I think we found that delicate balance between being

able to challenge each other's ideas and finding the middle ground that everybody's happy with. How much do you think about when you're creating music? How much do you think about this is what it feels to me versus this is what the audience will like? I think you can compare it a little bit to draw a comparison to your health data. You can have a couple drinks, go to bed and be like, nah, well, it wasn't that bad, but you're going to wake up and you're going to know your body is going to know that you had some drinks. You can tell yourself that you're not going to be caring about what people think, but the reality is that it's incredibly hard to subconsciously not make certain decisions based on what you think people will like. I do my best to not think about that, but the reality

is it's impossible to completely forget when you at some point had a major success and that feeling of happiness you get from being happy that people like something, that becomes a drug. And it's very hard to completely forget about that. I'm doing my very best with this current album I'm working on to really be as honest as humanly possible. And people I've played some of the music for, they have noticed how vastly different it is from what people would consider popular music today. That can obviously go completely sideways and people will not like it. But as long as you as the artists are happy with it, I think that is mission accomplished. I read Rick Rubin's book recently, which I liked.

Have you read this book? I haven't read it, but I love him. Yeah. And, you know, he talks a lot about how, as the artist, you are the first and only audience. And in, like, it's purest form, what you put out into the world, as long as it's true to you, you can't do wrong. And then whatever it happens after that, so be it. But it's like a very idealistic energy. and it's interesting for me thinking about it

from the standpoint of an entrepreneur who's running a commercial business because I think artists are on one end of the spectrum, right? And people who are only thinking in commercial terms maybe you're on the other end of the spectrum where it's all about like did it sell that it make money. But often innovation within a technology company happens somewhere in the middle, right?

Where you're trying to have a sense for what the market needs but you're still speaking to yourself. You're still trying to pull. something out that feels true within. Right. I think with technology, it's probably similar, but I have a bunch of ideas when it comes to companies that usually start with, I wish this existed, or I wish there was a solution for this problem. Right. Music can be quite similar. You might have this idea of there should be a song that makes you feel like this, right? There's a hard, it's hard to say a song that has all these notes and all these sounds and all this makes it. I think

the feeling that you're craving is the song that you're trying to achieve and bring together. The tricky thing is that you have this vision in your head that you want to create a song that's going to make you feel this, this, or this way, or you want to implement all these different chord structures or sounds that you think will make you feel a certain way. But the reality is, when you make the song, you start building each block. You start building that house with a foundation, then you build the walls, and you build the roof, and then you hand it off to the universe and people hear it for the first time

and if I had to put a number behind it build their 51% of their opinion because you hear it for the first time you don't like it, it's hard to change your mind. Some people can. Most people will just stick to their mind because they don't want to admit to themselves that they were wrong the first time they did

or didn't like a song. And it's incredibly hard to get that first time feeling because you've never heard it for the first time. make the song, you hear it every step of the way, but you never get what I'm imagining. I've never worked with Rick Rubin, but I'm imagining what he's really good at is hearing something for the first time and making a judgment call on what may need to change, at least 80% of the way there, but you as the artist here, 1%, 2%, 3% of the way there, and by the time you hear the final product or close to it, you're already so accustomed to it, so used

that you might start thinking certain things are catchy that aren't actually catchy to people here for the first time, they're catchy to you because you've heard them two million times. When you're creating a song, do you feel like you kind of see it, see what it's supposed to be from the beginning, and then you know that you're working towards a specific vision? Or do you feel like you're starting to play notes and certain things are catching your ear and then you're iterating on it from there? And you're like, oh, well, what if I pulled this in? What if I pulled that? I have pretty much two ways to approach music when I make music.

One is where I just play on a piano and I just randomly play and maybe I'll switch the sound just to get, you know, some inspiration going. Sometimes a certain sound can inspire to play differently and I just improvise. And at some point I'm going to play something and I'll be like, ooh, this could be cool. And then I start exploring what could I make with this core progression or melody I just played? Could that be something that people haven't heard yet or something that gets me excited? That's one way, which is sort of trial and error of just randomly throwing things at the wall. And eventually you're going to play something that will stick whether you accidentally played a mistake. You're like, oh, that mistake sounds cool or because it just naturally came out.

The other approach is sometimes people will send me vocals and I will just skim through vocals and I would like a vocal. And then I'm just going to loop that vocal and play chords to fit the vocal. And then I make a track around that. So two approaches. One is I make a track and then I look for a vocal. And one is I have a vocal that doesn't have a track and I make a track for it. It's interesting listening to you talk about the creative process because I think in the world that I operate in, which is technology and creating companies, they kind of take

two forms. And the first is a little bit like the first you described in building a song, which is like test, iterate, fail. It's like you've got some idea of a problem that you're trying to solve, but you don't know how you're going to solve it. And so you're sort of pivoting your way to the finish line. This was a very popular startup philosophy, it was called like the Lean Startup, which was this whole phenomenon about testing and iterating. There's another type of starting a company which I think WOOP actually falls more under the umbrella of, which is you have just a strong opinion of what the world looks like when it works, when the technology is fulfilled, when the problem is solved.

The testing and iterating are on details, but the big vision. is very core to everything that you do. So in building whoop, I wrote a business plan 10 years ago when I was a student. And the technology that we've built today looks very similar to like what I plotted out then. Wow. So it was sort of like a straight line in terms of what the vision for the company was. But it took so many, it took a lot of iteration to actually successfully build it. I see, so you're sort of describing the Steve Jobs version where you know exactly what you want things to be.

You just need to figure out how to get there. Yeah. And so I love thinking about analogies to other industries and especially music because I have so much respect for what you all do. Yeah, there's a very similar way to approach music essentially that you know exactly what you want. You just don't know exactly which sound or mix or vocal or lyric is going to get you to feel that, right? I think the trickier part about tech is that you're so much more dependent on many other people. Totally. Right?

Whether it's the developers or people who actually figure out the right components or the right structure of a product where you can have the best idea ever and you can be a little bit unlucky and hire potentially not the best people or the right people for the job and it's going to fail even though everything in your plan was correct. Where with music there's a little bit less of the depending on other people because you're you can pretty much, there's people who produce and sing, in which case they can do the whole thing. For me, my voice is awful,

so all I can do is get everything ready, but then I still have that stage where I need to find the perfect singer to deliver the message. Or to change the message, which most singers want to do. They want it to be their own, and they will want to change the words. But I still have that part of depending on other people, which makes me really nervous, to be honest. You've collaborated with some amazing artists.

Talk a little bit about that experience. Yeah, for me, at first, when I started my career, I think I was so excited to be by myself because I came from being in a band where every decision has to be democratically decided upon whether the Hyatt's open or close, whether you play the crash or the ride, everybody had to agree at least that's how a band worked.

And then I started making music by myself and I didn't have to answer to anybody. Even my label, Interscope, were incredibly supportive of me just, doing whatever i think is right even if it's not what people want i think that was this feeling of freedom that i really enjoyed i can do whatever i want i don't have to answer to anybody and then once i started getting more into working with vocalists and collaborating more because i realized you can burn yourself out very quickly trying to do everything by yourself

it kind of got a little bit more into the realm of well now there's more people that are going to be like well i don't want this to be this way i wanted to be that way and i really had to learn to let go and just be a good collaborator and I think I've learned so much working with all these artists because every artist is like a work of art by themselves and working with them you learn so much about just humans you know sometimes I tend to think that my job when I produce a vocal is more so being like a therapist and getting the best out of a singer in that moment in that day making sure that they're happy comfortable feeling safe because they're being vulnerable when they speak about things that or want to sing about things that happen to them,

I don't want a singer to necessarily say something that somebody else wrote. People want it to be personal. So I also just learned a lot about being good with human beings by collaborating. So I think collaborating is an essential part to developing yourself as a human. And in any career, I think collaborating sooner or later is going to be a skill that you're going to need to learn. It's an amazing thing, right, with an artist where they can, sing almost the same exact thing and it can sound almost exactly the same way but if they didn't feel it yeah somehow you can feel it I think it's so easy to feel whether somebody is

believable or not at least for me maybe I have the yeah I mean you're there I've never set this out loud but sometimes you'll meet an artist in the studio you'll play the music they hear something they're so excited about and then they're like I want to record this Like, I want to record this. And this happened to me two months ago for a song on my new album. And while you're sitting there, you basically check off the box that all the things you do today are going to be pretty much useless because an artist can't feel the words the moment they hear the song.

They can love the feeling of it. But in order to really sing a song well and mean it, you're going to need to sing it so many times until you don't have to look at your phone to see the words. you know so the very vast majority of times this happens we record the song the artist then hears it a bunch of times they get really fall in love with the song and then we go back and just redo everything again because then they really feel it and i just went through this and um you can tell right away when somebody's looking at their phone reading the lyrics singing the notes or when somebody's just singing into the microphone and pouring their their emotions into it so it's something

you've got to really be careful of when recording vocals is that you want to make sure that somebody is vulnerable, honest, and believable when they sing those words. That's an amazing process, and it makes perfect sense that, like, it needs to get to a place where they're not even thinking about, you know, is the note right, is the word right? Exactly. But they're just feeling it comes through. Because notes you can fix with technology easily. Yeah.

Timing you can fix, but what you can't fix yet as opposed to is that feeling when just us as human beings, when somebody comes to you and tells you something, you're going to be like, I don't believe you. Or you're going to be like, oh, yeah, I'm so sorry, right? That feeling that we have developed as humans to basically differentiate a lie from the truth, the same thing applies to music. When somebody sings, you're going to be like,

I don't believe that, and you're not going to like it. Let's talk a little bit about health and fitness. At what point, it sounds like it was around 26, 27, that you're like, OK, I'm going to dial it up with my something like that 26 27 is when I started gaining weight basically and like I got a little bit more puffy I was like this is strange because I used to have to force myself to eat I couldn't eat enough and I was super skinny and I started trying to eat more and trying to eat more and then I started gaining weight and I was like I'm not sure if I like that and then the reason it's so hard

for me to be fit or if I look back in my last 10 years or so is the travel is my schedule is the day show at 2 p.m. and then the night show at 3 a.m. You know, it's so, and then you fly to, I don't know, Brazil where you can sometimes play at 6 a.m. and you will wake up at 5, you know, and sometimes you have to stay up and play late. It's so unpredictable that it's really hard to have a good schedule. As my health, you know, naturally declines with age, I just realized that there's something I'm going to have to actively do about it to combat all the side effects of aging essentially the pandemic was the first time that I didn't have to travel I was suddenly home that's when I got my whoop pretty sure around then first lesson I learned is

oh I need to sleep more I didn't realize that eight hours of sleep isn't eight hours of sleep it's really like seven and a little yeah I was like oh okay I always thought of sleep eight hours so I need one extra hour in bed so what one thing I learned and the first thing I learned from whoop was I'm just going to go to bed one hour earlier than normal and I love it. I mean, I've been doing it ever since. The other thing I learned is that I burned substantially less calories than I thought, which is the reason why I was gaining weight. Yeah.

And I got really fit during the pandemic because it was the first time I just had time to wake up at the same time, go to bed at the same time, eat healthy. Because when you're traveling, sometimes you only have one little time window to eat and you're at the airport and that's just what you're going to eat. It's not always great and healthy. So yeah, I've been trying to dial in my fitness, I would say, since the pandemic. You shared some of your whoop data with us, which is pretty interesting. So this is, like, the biggest difference in data that I'm seeing here is when you report air travel versus no air travel.

Right. So, you know, for folks listening to this, let's just appreciate how much travel affects your body, right? So sleep performance with air travel, 70%, without 89%, right? So when you're staying in the same city, you're getting way more sleep. Your sleep consistency is 26% higher, and you're getting 7.5 hours versus 6. That's a big difference. That's a huge difference. Resting heart rate, it's in the same district.

So you've got a resting heart rate of 56 versus 52. okay so 56 when you're traveling 52 when you're not and then your recovery scores are interesting so when you're not traveling you're at 70% so you're like in the green that's good yeah and when you do travel 56% so it's not like you're redlining all the time yeah I combat it with a bunch of little tricks but it's still not on the same level well you're on the perfect podcast to talk about all your tricks so tell us tell us what are your tricks so what I've is for me consistent sleep, meaning going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time, is going to be the best thing I can do for my body. The second best thing you can do if you can't

get your consistent sleep is going to be to at least try to get that amount of sleep spread out throughout the day, which is just going to require some discipline and a little bit of practice, but it's going to be, I mean, today is a good example, right? I flew in here red So I didn't have a night's sleep. So it was a matter of getting a nap in the plane for, I think I slept for about two hours. And then I got here and I slept here for about three or four hours or something along those lines. Change the nap to sleep. You know, do a couple of things. You got a recovery reset. Get my green back. But it's going to be that. And sometimes it's hard to go to bed at 5 p.m. and sleep for 90 minutes, but you're just going to have to do it if you want

to feel better. At least I can only speak for myself, of course. There's weeks when we have awful schedules where I sleep three or four times a day. That's just the only way to do it because we have very early flights. Sometimes we have to leave right after a show to go to the airport. So there's just no night's sleep. And that's the second best option is to just be disciplined, try to sleep. I know some people can't sleep on planes and I feel awful for people for that because it's a lot of my life. So I would say, do your best to just sleep as many times and get your eight or whatever hours of sleep throughout the day as you can.

And do you take any supplements or, you know, what are you doing from a diet standpoint? From a diet standpoint, when I'm at home, I eat very healthy. You have an amazing chef. I eat everything, essentially just in moderation. I try to stay low on fats and oils. I eat tons of protein. I try to keep my protein intake at just about a gram per pound of body weight. Supplement-wise, I take magnesium, zinc, vitamin D.

I take Fidoja, Grestis, Ashwaganda, Tonka Ali, creatine every day. I started taking creatine in the last year, and I've noticed it's been really helpful for muscle recovery. I think it actually does something too cognitively. I'd seen some research on that. I didn't necessarily believe it, but I've actually felt it. It's always hard for me to, if I can be completely transparent. I could stop taking supplements altogether, and I would likely feel very similar. I don't feel like I notice much, but I've been doing a lot of blood work and trying to optimize my health or my blood test, essentially.

And I've been seeing a pretty significant difference when I take and don't take it. them. And even the certain areas that were in the red in my blood work, I started taking more of that certain type of supplement and all of a sudden I was in much better range. So I do believe the science in that. I think the blood test probably doesn't lie. So that's why I'm pretty consistent with my supplements. If I leave, I take little pouches and I write the date on it and make sure I take them always. Whether creatine does something cognitively or not, I'm not sure. there's people who are much smarter who devote their lives to that Dr. Kyle Gillette was on this podcast. He is who put together my regimen. So I trust people who are much smarter than I am

and I blindly follow their lead in that regard. But something that actually does that I do feel a difference is stuff like cold plunge. And we talked about this briefly. Yeah. It's a habit I got into daily when I'm at home. And I do feel like that is my version of a coffee in the morning. So you'll do the cold plunge first thing in the morning. Yes, I do a cold plunge after waking up. Will you take a shower before or you just go straight in? Go straight in. It's great.

I have it outside. I do it with my trainer every day. We do six minutes a day. I know this is a little bit on the higher end, but it's more so of a mental challenge. I do that for, I do that just to start the day with a check mark of I just did something I really didn't want to do. And everything else is probably not going to be as bad as a six-minute cold punch. And then I just stay out in the sun for about 10 or 15 minutes. to warm up and then I play table tennis for probably 20 minutes just to get my heart rate going

and then I do my workout and then after I do my cardio and then I essentially start my day. That must be a pretty good table tennis session. Oh, I love it. Oh, yeah. I might log it. You know everything about me. I can't hide anything from you. But yeah, we go pretty hard.

So I love that point though. You know, you do something super hard in the morning, cold plunge, first thing. days downhill from there. Yep. You know, I think it's an important theme for people who are putting themselves under stress or have to perform at a high level. Like you obviously, you're performing tens of thousands of people. But it's like if you bring, you know, if you bring stress to yourself and you tame it,

the way you probably feel all of a sudden in front of a crowd is even easier. Yeah, I think it helps on so many levels. And I should probably mention that I really hate cold water. I was the same way, by the way. I totally hated cold water, got into cold showers, got into cold plunges, love it. You do both? Yeah. I mean, in Boston, cold showers are very cold.

So I start most of my days with freezing cold showers. Wow. And that, I think, is a similar phenomenon to what you described. I'm pretty bad with cold showers. Yeah. It's obviously not quite as cold as a cold plunge, but it's somehow worse to be. Yeah. And I know as far as I understand, the data shows that cold showers are great, but a full immersion up to the neck is technically better.

It does more for you. And I mind it less in a sense. So I would rather just go all the way and do the cold plunge and then, like you said, start the day with a success. Do you ever do sauna or, you know, steam shower or anything like that? I just got a sauna actually. Okay. So this is just a very new thing for me. but I'm planning on doing it weekly, making Wednesday my sort of recovery day and day off

and spending quite a bit of time in the sauna. I've heard about this study from Finland that said if you spend two hours in one single day in the sauna spread across four sessions, that that's supposed to be really good for you and help your metabolism in your testosterone. So you'll do two hours in a single day? Yes, once a week. but not all at once well it will be four sessions of 30 minutes yeah roughly and i'm sure you can probably build your tolerance up because i'm not very good at you know being able to do

that i've tried it twice so far and i was only able to do like 20 22 minutes each time but my goal is to work my way up to doing two hours one day a week spread across four sessions that day and just do wednesday as a full recovery day massage sauna i do cool plunges in between i actually quite like that feeling. By the way, it's hard to be down about anything after you do that. Yeah, yeah. It's a rough one. But you come out of it like euphoric, I feel like. The times I've gone back and forth, there's just like a natural high. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I get a little bit dizzy, which I'm not sure how well, we're on the scale of okay and not okay that is, but I do like that feeling. And I do feel like I honestly, it is like a workout. At that point, it's definitely

not oh it's nice and warm and it's nice and cold it's it's a workout have you noticed it on the the stress monitor on whoop like i actually haven't so you should you should add it when you do it like add it as an activity okay and what's cool is you can see your stress over the course of the period and you probably start at a fairly low stress level and i bet by the end you're at three it's like really intense yeah i actually haven't tried that yet especially because the sauna is such a new addition for me but um it's something i'm planning to do regularly, ideally once a week. You said downstairs that you're really good at paying attention to your heart rate

because it's what you do for a living. Yeah. What exactly does that mean? It just means that when I measure my pulse, when I get that whatever beat that is, I can almost instantly connect it to a song that I know. And I know the BPMs of all songs that I play because as a DJ, you kind of need to know what you're mixing. I will hear a metronome and it will remind me of a song and then I'll know, oh, this is going to be

107, this is going to be 112, this is going to be 128. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, so it's a quick connection to that. That's a cool trick. Which probably doesn't always work because with adrenaline, you feel like everything is slow on stage. Like sometimes when I'm incredibly nervous like a Coachella or something like that, you have this feeling of genuinely feeling that the music is playing in slow motion.

And I will look at everything like something is wrong. but it's just you feel like everything's slow down, I think, because you're so alert or your heart is high, I'm assuming. So it can probably be deceiving, but I can roughly measure it. So you mentioned being nervous at Coachella. I mean, you don't strike me as someone who gets particularly nervous. What is it that makes you nervous? I think what makes me nervous is less so my fear of messing up

and more so the fear that something is going to go wrong. Because the, you know, technical aspect of DJing is very simple. You do all the transitions in between each songs, and there's between 20 and 40, 50 songs in a set. So there's not that many moments you can mess up compared to, let's just say, being a drummer, and every single hit your stick could break, and then there's a question of where the closest stick, right? So it's not that it's the hardest thing in the world,

but there's so many things linked to it. Every single show we play, the question is that we have certain lasers on one song, do we have fireworks on one song? If I decide to skip a song, am I messing up the cue list of all the fireworks? Am I going to forget something? So I'm more so concerned that something like that's going to happen or that somebody's going to accidentally bump the cable

and something unplugs. All of that has happened in the past. And all of a sudden, the music stops, but my monitors work and I think everything's fine and I just look at everybody and everybody's looking weird at me and I'm not understanding why. That's probably a horrible feeling. Yeah, and then you turn down your booth

and you realize there's nothing out there. How long have I been making a plot of myself out here? But yeah, those are the things that I'm mostly nervous about. What's your take, right? I mean, you seem like someone who's very, like, tapped into culture and tech and all these things. What's your take on AI right now and this idea of artists being able to be replicated

and AI as a music source? Personally, without speaking on what kind of effect it will have on everybody, I am excited about it. I think it will enable me to spend less time on the things that I don't want to waste time on. And it's going to enable me to do things that I wasn't able to do before. For example, I mean, this is just, I've never done it, but this is something I'm planning on doing. Let's just say I have a song and I want to have an artist on it. The way I've done it my entire life is I would get it ready, have somebody sing a demo,

send it to the artist and be like, hey, would you be interested in singing this song? Okay. Sometimes they hear different voice and they're like, yeah, I don't like this. But what if I sent that song and it was already their voice? Because AI was able to convert the demo vocal to their voice and as I don't, I'm sure you're aware, it's so unbelievably close that it's hard to tell that it's not the real singer. They might hear the song and be like, ooh, I sound really good on this. My voice feels good on this track.

So this is a great application for me to be able to pitch a song to a singer that may have said no because he didn't like the performance of a demo and wasn't able to tell that the performance was the issue, not the actual song. There's a bunch of sounds that, you know, takes so long to create or find, it would be so nice to be able to say, hey, make me a sound of a baseball bad hitting a screen or whatever, because that's what you want, and you just get that sound. So I'm excited about it. I'm not too worried about being replaced by AI.

I really think that's a, at least in the foreseeable future and unrealistic fear. I think the AI is always trained on things that humans have done. in the past and my goal with music is always to do something that hadn't been done before. Right. So I'm essentially writing material for the AI to be trained on for the future. So I'm not really concerned about it too much. That seems like a good attitude. Would you say that most artists agree with you or disagree with you? I've never asked other artists but I would be afraid that they would disagree with me. Yeah. I think maybe it's a lack of confidence in yourself if you think that you're going to be replaced.

I've always had full confidence in myself. I'm my biggest fan. I'm my biggest supporter. And I think you have to be because you want to know that what you're doing is amazing. Otherwise, other people likely won't think that either if you don't. So yeah, I'm not concerned about AI replacing me. I'm more so concerned about AI replacing other parts of our world faster than we can keep up with, you know, changing the economy to make it work for the whole. whole planet. I'm also concerned about that, but in specifically music, I think music is

so, so complicated. I mean, the image side of AI is pretty damn good. If you look at Mid Journey or any of those open AI. I think it's amazing. It's beautiful. I mean, I've used it myself since the very beginning to get inspired for certain art. You just type in what you're imagining and you get an idea and you're like, oh, let's work on something like that. So image I think is amazing. I'm sure the video side of it will follow since it's technically just 23 images in a row in a second. Tech speaking, asking, as you guys just implemented, works pretty well. Music doesn't really work that well. There's just so many things that have to align for it to feel good for you. Eventually, of course, it will happen, but I feel like we're still so far away

from it really being able to be as good or better than humans do it. I think you're spot on. Or at least you definitely have the right attitude, right? Like that's the right way to approach it. Right. Which is, hey, I'm going to bring something new to the world that the world hasn't seen. Yeah. You know, we partnered with Open AI this year, and we obviously just announced the Whoop Coach, which came out this week. But our point of view from the early days of Whoop is that we want to make this a 24-7 coach.

Yep. And so one thing I kept coming back to in my mind was how do we make the coaching better? because the data is amazing, wearing it's great, like there's a whole ecosystem that we've built around this product, but how do we quickly cut to this notion of like, what do you need now? Right. And build that connection with our members. And so that's where large language models became so exciting. Oh, yeah, it's amazing.

Yeah. Have you played with the Woop Co-Jet? I just did it once. And it suggested me to look up my sleep performance compared to other people in my age group. Yeah. My sleep performance was shockingly good. Yeah. I don't remember the exact number, but it was something in the neighborhood of like 80 something percent on average. And that must include all the nights where I don't get any sleep at all. Right. So I was kind of surprised. So you're feeling good about yourself. I feel pretty good. I mean, to get 84% on average, I mean, what yours must be? Mine's not quite that high. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. I would say I'm closer to 75. Okay, which is probably still pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty good. I mean, I work a lot. travel I think I'm probably still optimizing my life more to be a great CEO than a great human you know what I mean so I'll you know like I'll still do red eyes and

things like that yeah I still simply working but but yeah it's something I'm always working on too right always room to improve but yeah I actually haven't figured out how to use the AI in WOOP to my advantage yet just because I feel like it's only a few days old. Yeah, I mean, start asking questions that occur to you, like around cold plunge or around sauna or around filling the blank. There's no limits, right? No, you can ask it anything. I mean, for me, the jet like part will be interesting to figure out what the best time is. I mean, there's probably math, right? There's certain apps you can use, but it would be nice to not have an extra app on the road. Well, we do want to ultimately be this home of your health and fitness, right? So you import a lot of

your data and then you can ask whoop anything about your life and then it'll be able to source through all this data and give you that's really awesome yeah yeah i really like that yeah does it do you know if it recalls because you i think we talked about this at some point but obviously it records how many minutes you've spent in each zone internally even though it's like not particularly showing it but could i ask it how many minutes i've spent in zone two today this week this yeah okay well see that's that's a really good question to like always ask because at least for people who want us have spent enough time in zone two per week to like know should I go in another walk or that's right like you can ask it an unstructured question like that that you otherwise might

not find in a graph right right that's cool that's awesome and then I imagine pretty soon you'll be able to ask you a question like that and say please graph it for me oh right oh that'd be amazing yeah so what if you wanted to graph like zone two minutes right per week over the last four weeks. I don't know. I'm making this up. I really like this. But that's the kind of, that's where it'll go quickly, where it's like at your fingertips you have access to all this information. I just did a EKG like two weeks ago and my resting heart rate was below 50, which flags it as abnormal. Right. And the lady asked me, what's your, what's your resting heart rate? And honestly, it's not a number I have been focusing on as much because I've been

kind of looking at getting my HRV up. It would have been a perfect moment to ask what my, because I didn't know, my average. Yeah, it looks like it's around 52. I think it's pretty decent. That's very good. Yeah. Resting heart rate is one of my better statistics. I'm like around 45, 46. Wow. So that's good. Abnormal, according to the EKG. Well, you know, it's not necessarily abnormal if you're in your 30s and your exercise and this and that. I feel like some of medicine is like a little behind? Yeah. Yeah. That's what I thought to. Yeah. So what's next for It sounds like you've got a big album coming out. Yes, so the album is definitely my big, big project.

My last album came out in 2015, which is a shockingly long time ago. Wow. Obviously, I've done a bunch of singles in between because the world has changed and people wanted to have faster access to new music. So the model of an album was just not the one. But the one thing I have been missing is to be able to tell a longer, bigger story and include songs that if I released as a single song, people would judge before. but in context of a larger body of work, make a lot more sense.

So I've been working on this album for quite some time. I pretty much restarted the entire album process once after the pandemic because I was so uninspired and sitting at home, not playing shows, not even knowing when I could play another show. It was like, who am I making this music for and what purpose does it serve? But that's my big project.

I'm not sure if I'm going to release a song before the album is done. So I'm focusing on obviously playing my shows, getting healthy, getting fit, and finishing this album, and then next year, tons of touring that will come with the new album. Pretty exciting. I'm very excited. Well, look, this has been a real pleasure getting to sit down with you, man. I'm grateful to have you on Google.

Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you. Big thanks to Zed for joining me on the show today to discuss life on the road, his creative process, his views on high performance, and how he optimizes his. health. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Please subscribe to the WOOP podcast. You can check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast to Woop.com. Call us 508

443-4952. We'll answer your questions on a future episode. If you're thinking about joining Woot, this is the best time ever because you can now sign up for free for 30 days. That's right, a free trial. It's the full membership experience and you can decide at the end of 30 days whether you want to become a member. New members can also use the code will to get a $60 credit on WOOP accessories. That's just WI-L at checkout. All right, folks, that's a wrap. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.