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Scroll through Steve Aoki’s Instagram feed, where the disc jockey has 3.9 million followers, and you will find photos of him performing shirtless, his audience obscured by fireworks or flames, or of him wake surfing or leaping off yachts, cliffs, stairs — off anything, really. The words “adrenaline junkie” come to mind.

So it was surprising to see flashes of tension on Mr. Aoki’s face as he navigated through Chinatown on a Citi Bike on Wednesday morning. Cars accelerated and slowed, sometimes drawing too close for comfort.

“If you make one wrong move, they’ll bump you,” he said as he rode over a rough patch of concrete on Grand Street. “Whenever I do something that appears crazy to you, it’s controlled. Here, I don’t know the terrain. I’m too old in my life for that kind of carelessness.”

The 38-year-old superstar of electronic dance music was in town to promote “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” a Netflix documentary about his life. For those wondering, Mr. Aoki does sleep, but not for long stretches. “My body has been trained to be able to repair itself in these little naps I do,” he said.

His iPhone in hand, Mr. Aoki was searching for a PokéStop, which fans of the augmented-reality app Pokémon Go are familiar with. In the game, users try to catch the creatures of the Pokémon universe, which pop up in different locations based on the player’s GPS coordinates, by swiping a ball across the screen. To refill balls, players have to stop at real-world landmarks.

Mr. Aoki, who performs upward of 200 shows a year, had flown in from Ibiza, Spain, on Monday night and was leaving for Tel Aviv in several hours. Keeping track of all the places he has played isn’t easy. “I rely on other people’s memories a lot,” he said. “I’ll think, ‘I’m pretty sure I played here before.’ And then I have to Google it.” The constant travel from his home in Las Vegas, and the mundane shuttling between airports and hotels that comes with it, is what led Mr. Aoki to take up Pokémon Go in the first place.

As he biked through a section of Chinatown that intersects with Little Italy, he braked to collect Poké Balls and looked around. “Little Italy reminds me of my dad,” he said, referring to Rocky Aoki, the founder of the Benihana chain, a speedboat racer and a hot-air balloon pilot who died in 2008. “We always used to eat here with him late at night.”

For a long time, Steve, who lived with his mother, Chizuru Kobayashi, while growing up in Newport Beach, Calif., strove to show his disapproving father that pursuing his passion, music, had been the right choice. Though Rocky paid for his son’s college education, he refused to invest in Dim Mak, the record label Steve founded while pursuing bachelor degrees in sociology and women’s studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “I think he thought: ‘How long is he going to mess around? What kind of future is this?’” Steve said.

The son was determined to prove to his father that he could pull it off, so he performed three times a week and kept his personal expenses low, eventually paying off credit card debt and saving. His label grew, adding well-known names to its roster, such as Bloc Party and the Kills.

It paid off. Steve Aoki is now the fifth-highest-paid D.J. in the world, according to Forbes, making an estimated $23.5 million a year. A hard worker who abstains from alcohol, save for a taste of an I.P.A. here and there or a toast to his friends, and who takes just five vacation days (at Christmastime), he performs for nearly two-thirds of the year, sometimes jetting between three or four cities in one day.

Mr. Aoki reflected on Rocky’s parenting methods over brunch on the Lower East Side at Dudley’s, an Australian restaurant in which he is an investor. Without his father’s “tough love,” he said, “I wouldn’t have been successful, and I wouldn’t be able to learn how to deal with situations.”

Feeling as if he never fit in while growing up, he joined a straightedge group of teens who didn’t smoke, drink or do drugs, but who listened to hard-core punk, when he was around 14 years old. It was during that time that Mr. Aoki fostered an affinity for the raw and genuine aspect of a live performance, something he works hard to maintain at his shows now.

“I see massive crowds, and it’s incredible,” he said. “But if you see that over and over again, it does become homogeneous. The details are really what keep me going. That fan in the crowd that’s singing every single song. All I want to do is give her a big hug and a sloppy kiss on the cheek.”