Episode 3: Questlove

Somehow I just saw the future and I, I don't know, something told me like plant based is going to be the future.

You know, if you're honest with yourself as you learn something, you're a little bit confused. You know, confusion is admitting that you don't know everything you should and trying to get that broad overview. And I call that getting unconf. Welcome to unconfused me. I'm bill gates. My guest today is Amir Questlove Thompson. Most of you probably know him as the drum of the Roots. He's got six Grammys, one Oscar, done a lot of books and also works on food systems, including a meatless cheesesteak. Today we're going to talk about how he's bringing plant based foods to reluctant consumers and also his deep love for music and storytelling. So welcome.

Thank you for having me.

I think both of us like the word games.

You're a wordle guy.

Yeah.

Every day do you have a wordle group chat or do you just play by yourself?

Me and four other people every morning it's like, oh, you know, somebody got a three.

Damn, I'm in three different world chats.

So today's word. Have you done it yet?

I didn't, I didn't play it. But my group chat is angry. It's hard. Usually I let them go first. They do it first thing in the morning. I do it at the end of the day. Usually like at 11:00pm oh, nice.

Just in time.

So based on their reactions, I can tell if something is a double letter. I can tell if it's super angry and it's like their fifth or sixth attempt. Then I know like, okay, well, must be a K or a Z or an X. So I have an advantage to it.

I'd say today is one of those days.

It's good to know you're a wordle addict. That's good.

What got you into the plant based food area?

So, you know, for me, food has always been the greatest social adhesive. Once I started doing Fallon, you know, I've become friends with Anthony Bourdain and you know, he was sort of mentoring me in terms of like, you know, food being art and that sort of thing. So I threw these things called food salons. We decided to go rogue one night and like, hey, let's, let's shock everybody and just have like a shake shack as, you know, as the meal for tonight. And it just so happens that my partner Alexis Rosenzweig had read this article about a guy named, you know, Patrick Brown who apparently had this new technology Impossible, where this hamburger cooks well and all this stuff. And you know, my thoughts back then with like anything vegetarian or vegan or, you know, I was like £430. Like I was a junk food. I'm from Philadelphia, you know, I breathe cheese sticks. So it just so happens that Patrick happened to be in town.

Amazing.

And so it was like, hey, let's do a thing. Like we do a blind taste test and you know, Shake Shack versus this plant based thing. Like supposed to be a hamburger that tastes like hamburger but plant based. And I was like, yeah, that should be fun. Like I just wanted a party trick. And I did three of the tests and every time I chose Impossible Burger, somehow I just saw the future. And I, I don't know, something told me like plant based is going to be the future. And I'm a guy that was like always rolled my eyes at anyone who like, oh, you shouldn't eat, you know, animal flesh. That was back in like 2011, 2012. I mean, you know, 10 plus years later, I've been in a lot of first round investments for, you know, impossible, not co eat just right rice, Magic spoon cereal appeal, there's a lot of them. But I just feel as though that's the future and I want to be the person that plants the seed.

Yeah, yeah. One thing that's cool is that it gets rid of the animal cruelty thing, but it's also a big climate thing.

Yes, absolutely.

I came to it more from that climate angle and I got to meet Patrick Brown, who's very great scientists and they're doing well, but you know, a lot of people want them to do make it even slightly better. They have a good roadmap. So I'm optimistic.

Yeah. The thing is, kind of the cool thing about especially with Impossible is, you know, that was back in 2012, 2013, I think, and you know, I was impressed then. But since then, you know, they've improved and improved. And the thing is that I always felt as though, you know, there's a lot of social issues, especially with black people in the inner city that we have yet to get to. And I'm a person that always wanted to know why are the worst foods, the high sugar foods, the fatty foods, why is that so accessible? Why is that so cheap? And one day Magic Johnson was a guest on the Tonight show. And you know, I happened to be looking at the production notes because I have to play a walk on song and I usually craft the walk on song about whatever they're there to promote. And I Looked and it was like Magic Johnson's TGIF Fridays. And I went down to his room. I'm like, wait, you're here to promote your Friday's restaurant? And I was kind of ripping him about it. And he's like, no, this is the most important of all my ventures. This is the most important one. And when he explained it to me, that was my Doc Brown flex capacitor, like, eureka moment. He told me that where he strategically placed these Fridays are neighborhoods in which you can't even get a salad within 20 or 30 blocks. Now, I'm from West Philadelphia, so we would have to go all the way out to Upper Darby, Pennsylvania to buy food instead of going to the local neighborhood supermarket. And that's because there was a variety of fruits and vegetables and fresh things there. And once he said that, I realized like, oh, okay, this also explains my weight and all this. Like, the fattiest foods in the world were accessible to me. I kind of want to change the narrative because I think people have this impression. First of all, there's just no education on how it's made. There's a lot of misinformation. And then on top of that, I just think that the reason why I invested in the Impossible cheesesteak was I wanted to show Philadelphians locally that just because it's plant based doesn't mean that it's boring or bland. Just starting there, People are opening their ideas.

I haven't tried your cheesesteak yet, Gold belly. People like it.

Yeah. My biggest fan's Obama, so.

All right.

I love all types of food. I know that people just generally don't like a know it all, even if it's to the detriment of their own life and health. But I think there's a way to just plant seeds. Like the way that I introduced the cheesesteak, I struck a deal with my local team. I'm from Philadelphia. So at Phillies games we had plant based cheesesteak and whatnot. And you know, it was a hit. Cause most of them gave us feedback like, wow, this really does taste good. Like it doesn't taste like cardboard. So, yeah, I definitely foresee a future in which alternative foods can sustain us and help us.

Well, we need that. You know, of all the climate areas, the one that people are probably least aware of is all the fertilizer and, yeah, cows. And that's a challenge. But you know, when you meet people like Patrick Brown, you go, wow, that's intense. He's intense. Yeah.

And right now, I'll say that the hardest, you know, it needs a perfect cheese to it. So right now it's vegetarian based because we're using real cheese. But the second that there's a plant based cheese that tastes good and we have high standards with how it tastes. So as soon as that happens, then we're really going to change the game.

Yeah, I have a few companies that are working on that. I know we have a number of mutual friends, including Nathan Myhrvold.

Yeah.

Man, that guy is amazing.

Nathan is. To me, that was the closest experience I had to like a Willy Wonka, you know, where you're seeing like robots that you're not supposed to know about. And we had a, I guess a 20 course meal. And so like the world doesn't know that food science can really be fun and creative and that it's art. And so I love Nathan to death.

Yeah, Nathan's the one who taught me that animal fats melt at different temperature than these plant fats. So one of the keys to getting the cheese that's gonna meet your high stand is to somehow chemically make fats that are really the same as what you're used to. The tongue feel, you know, that ingredient makes a huge difference anyway, so that now there's some people who think they can do that, make it even less expensive. So it's incredible the number of companies.

And also just love the interest of it. There's a school in New York City called the. I don't know if you ever heard the Food and Finance School. The Food and Finance School is a school that's sort of the equivalent of a performing arts high school, like the Fame School.

Cool.

Where you, you know, have music, drama, dance, creative writing, learning, production. This school is the culinary equivalent to that. And these kids are way more advanced in their thinking. Like when you're younger, you just don't. There's no limit, there's no cynicism. Like you're just constantly at play. So this school pretty much teaches you everything about the food world. So yes, there's like baking and cooking and pastries, but there's also like cutlery, how to photograph food on their rooftop. They have an irrigation system, they're raising fish up there. And so I started a program in which for the summer it's like the Food Entrepreneurialship program in which like 20 or 25 of the students for four weeks they go out to Silicon Valley where like a lot of these future food companies are located. And you know, a lot of these kids might not have had access to plant based Food technology or any of those things. So they're so advanced in knowing and creating what is needed for sustainability. And I have absolutely no doubt that in five to 10 years, we'll even be further down the road with it.

So, yeah, it's great to see science and art and culture kind of coming together. Yeah. So what's your guilty pleasure? Snack food.

Okay. My guilty pleasure snack food. So as a Philadelphian, there's a company called Tasty Cake, and it's. It's Tri State. Tasty Cake is kind of like our localized version of like what Hostess is, a Twinkie, a Yankee Doodle, like kind of that sort of part cupcake, part whatever. So there's something called the Butterscotch Crimpet, which in its heyday, what's your guilty pleasure? Snack food.

The one I can't avoid, so I just make sure it's not around is See's Candy has a peanut brittle that is both, you know, salty and sweet. And the mouthfeel is pretty amazing.

Is it bad for your teeth or.

No, it's just a lot of sugar, a lot of calories, and it. You don't fill up much, you know, so if you have a whole box there, next thing you know, you're just chomping away.

Right. Okay.

Another thing that's kind of almost. And it says you, you have a gigantic record collection.

Yeah, I do. In terms of volume, I have about 200,000 records.

Amazing.

But I don't want people to think that, like, I just went out and individually, like, got 200,000 records. I'll say that in the last six years, what's happened is, okay, so the way that the record industry was, say in the 50s, 60s, and the 70s, there would be something called One Stop Shops. And One Stop shops are the people that order in bulk every type of record, and then they'll service those records to restaurants that have jukeboxes, bars, diners that have jukeboxes, local mom and pop record stores. And so what's happening is that a lot of those One Stop Shop owners are, you know, they're passing away and oftentimes, you know, it'll be a family. They had a one stop shop and they're like, well, we have like 30,000 pieces and we don't know what to do with it.

Yeah, I thought I'd gone past vinyl, but then my friend Bono gave me a turntable and he was very thoughtful. He gave me about 12 records that he thought I'd like, and next thing I knew, I was using it.

I Heard this. I heard this.

Speaking of vinyl, we've got a turntable here and I asked you if you might bring a record. So what do you got?

Thad Jones and Mel Lewis. This is, you know, some of the greatest jazz orchestral work that there is. There's a really awesome cover of Get Out My Life Woman, which was a common song back then. So I guess I want to play the COVID of Get Out My Life Woman. Yeah. And it's a double album, so jazz. Jazz great Jill Williams is singing on this version. So this is this album. And this is for my personal collection. I lived in England for a time, and this is one of the first records I purchased. I believe this is 70. Yes. Get up my life woman. You Don't Love Me no More. No. Like one of the records from my childhood. Cool. Yeah. You Don't Love Me no More. No, no. So that's Thad Jones and Mel Lewis. Yes.

But that's Thad Jones.

Yes.

And that's Mel Louis.

Yes. And Jill Williams, A gentleman that's been singing, like, with Duke Ellington since, you know, the 40s, is singing on this.

Okay, cool. So I also have a record for you. This is Sly and the Family Stone's Greatest Hits. I'll bet you have a lot of copies of this. But this is actually signed by the artist.

Jesus H. Christ. Wait. Yo, this is what you call prime stunting. Like, this is. Jesus Christ. I. Well, right now, actually, you know, I'm coming here straight from the set. I'm working on. My follow up to Summer of Soul is the slide in the Family Stone documentary. Whoa.

Now that's great. I watched last night Summer of Soul, which was a blast.

Thank you. There's no way I can have a real conversation with you right now because I'm like, wow, this is amazing.

Thank you.

Yeah, I appreciate it.

Yeah. We'll have to ask them how many they signed like that. Maybe not that many. It's pretty cool.

Yeah. Wow. That's rare. That's so rare.

In your movie Summer of Soul. It was great when you got those artists to see them now that they're a lot older.

Yeah. To see them watch themselves.

They were.

My producer, Joseph says that that's the best part of the movie. Like the Harry Met Sally interstitial of them watching themselves. And you gotta understand that just randomly, these two strangers came to me with 40 hours worth of footage and they were like, we know you love music, Questlove. Here, take this and direct it. And the way that human nature is, I think, you know, we're so cynical and we're so distrusting. It was almost like, why you guys come to me? Like, did Spike lee or Ava DuVernay say no? Like, am I the last on your list? Like, is the audio bad? Like, there has to be a reason why you can't find a director to director to do this. It took me, like, maybe six or seven months to finally come to grips that, okay, this is your new mission. But for me, the one thing I was worried about was I knew that people of age of the Harlem Cultural festival, anyone over 45 and up, would instantly gravitate to it. But how was I going to attract someone younger? And, you know, it would have been easy for me to, like, call up Drake. Like, Drake's uncle is Larry Graham.

No. You're kidding. The I didn't know that.

Inventor funk, right? Drake's name is Aubrey Graham. And if people follow Drake on social media, then you know that Drake's father is just as famous as Drake is. And Drake's father's brother is Funkmaster Larry Graham. So, you know, I mean, that's the. That's the type of grasping for, you know, straws that I was trying to do. Like, maybe I can get Drake to talk about his uncle or something like that. But what I discovered was that the commonality between millennials and Gen Z with what was happening in the Harlem Cultural festival, like this 50 year gap, was we were starting to see a parallel movement of, like, the political uproar and the social uproar and the tension of the time that started the Harlem Cultural Festival, which was, you know, the killing of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, and, you know, we lost our leaders and what's happening in the Nixon administration coming in, and a lot of programs getting cut. And we were going, you know, through the same thing with unarmed killings and protests and, you know, not knowing if there's going to be if we're going to live or if we're safe. And so kind of that was what bonded the time periods together. And that's. I think it's a way better story than what I thought it was gonna be.

No, it ended up being phenomenal.

Thank you.

It's amazing how much of the music I knew because that's, you know, the music of when I grew up.

You know, it's weird. That was probably the main battle between me and some of the producers, the exec producers. Because the thing is, is that in my mind, I wanted goosebump performances. I'll give you an example. Stevie Wonder, during Stevie Wonder's 40 minute performance. He's doing his mega hits. I mean, he had still had like yester me Yesteru Yesterday I was made to love her Masha Rh Amour. He had the hits. But it was like the one song in which I got goosebumps watching him perform was also the one song that showed you what Stevie Wonder was about to do in the future. Like we got a glimpse of what 70s-90s Stevie Wonder was about to do. And you know, they were like, well, no one knows the song Shoobie Do Die Day. So you want to make this a seven minute performance and start with a drum solo at the beginning. But for me it was like the. But it's an amazing performance and that's what we have to go with, not the hits. Let's go with the amazing performance. And so I'm glad that we won that battle.

Yeah, a lot of gospel. Yes, it's great stuff.

Yes.

There's this song which I always thought was When Jesus Walks. It turns out it's When Jesus Washes. And of course now it makes more sense because it's really from the Bible. I never knew what were they talking about. It's baptizing people there. Well, it's amazing the number of things you get up to. You got books, you got this new movie, you're on TV almost every night. That's a heck of a schedule.

Well, okay, so my father was an oldies doo wop legend back in the 50s. And what makes my situation unique is that I'm also the last generation raised by parents that didn't trust or believe in babysitters. So you had to go to work, you had to work with your parents by seven, you know, they're teaching me how to iron and steam and clean the outfits and go to the cleaners and that sort of thing. By the time I was 9, it was very normal for a 9 or 10 year old to go to a nightclub and, you know, ask for a ladder, give me a razor blade so I can cut these light gels and switch out light gels and everything. And When I was 10, I was operating the system inside nightclubs like it was just normal for a 10 year old to operate, you know, smoke machine and the lights and the spotlight. And then one day my dad's drummer got in a motorcycle accident and my dad was just like, well, okay, you know, the show. So you're the new leader. And my first gig, that gig was at Radio City Music Hall.

Wow.

Weird enough, right?

Nice place to start, you know.

And my dad Felt like it was a jackpot moment because, you know, he doesn't have to pay his guy, you know, $700 a week. For me, it's like I was the richest 11 year old in existence. So, you know, give him like 200 bucks, he'll buy a bike, he'll be happy. And I became his band leader. That was the modus operandi and whatever job was available, you did. And I think that that's what I inherited from my family. By the time I got to Fallon, I was teaching at nyu. I was starting the Quest Loves Food thing. I was writing books, I had my podcast, I was DJing at all odd hours of the night. There were still the Roots, literally on the Tonight Show. I invested in a hoodie store. And so I thought, like, the more jobs you had, like, that defines your value. And then once everything was taken away in the pandemic and we had nothing in silence, I kind of realized that for health reasons, like resting, silence, meditation, that's just as important. I'm trying to get to a place where I'm enjoying boring stuff like naps and nothing. You know, the guy that used to always work. So. But, you know, I'm still writing books and seven jobs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's nice. The pandemic did get us to step back a little bit.

I figured the path to sanity for me was I somehow just went back to being an 8 year old, like, started drawing and sketching, started watching cartoons, started things that I wouldn't dare do in my busy, too busy to have fun times. So, like, what? What did you do?

Well, it was a very unusual time for me because the Gates foundation has a lot of experts on vaccines and infectious disease. In fact, most infectious diseases in Africa and poor countries and, you know, rich countries are very lucky. There isn't that much. I mean, there's some tb, there's some hiv, but not a lot. And one of our concerns was that in the rich world, you have all this oxygen. And, you know, even though those systems are overloaded, in poor countries, you have way, way less. And so, you know, we were trying to say, okay, how quick can we get a vaccine? How quick can we get an antibody? Now the fact that we were involved in writing checks, we wrote 2 billion of checks. It kind of, in a way, you suspend your emotional reaction because you're at least, okay, I'm a fireman, let's go in here and do all of that. And it was only like a year in, when we finally got the vaccine, to step back and Say, wow, that was crazy. I mean, so you immediately felt the.

Pressure and the weight of the world on your shoulders. Like, I have to use my resources.

To save the world and we can help with this. Yeah. Because it's our area. You know, in 2015, I actually gave a speech where I said, hey, this is. Everybody ought to be concerned about this. And, you know, sadly, we didn't get ready. Athletes versus athletes, you know, and then there was all this insanity about misinformation that, you know, maybe I was benefiting from it or maybe Fauci was. Was making money off of vaccines, things that were so the opposite that even today I kind of think, is that a joke? But then when you run into people who actually believe these things, so that, you know, that was a crazy time. And even now, as we realize, okay, the kids who didn't get their schooling or some level of depression that is still higher resonated.

Yeah.

For me personally, and maybe a little bit like you, it was such. So jarring that it did get me to think about my life and what I value, you know, friendships and things. So I can't say that it was an, you know, all negative. It was scary.

But just to. Just to keep you sane, like, would you go to video games or, like, just for a moment of sanity, like, how did you.

I got to do a lot of reading. And one nice thing was because I had no meetings I had to go to, I started exercising, particularly playing tennis a lot more. So it really knocked me out of my normal pattern, and there are some very positive aspects of it. And now we're going back to normal. I'm sure you're like this. It's like, okay, everybody wants you to resume all the things you were doing before, and you have to kind of force yourself to say, wait a minute, there's some of these things that. They weren't bad, but now I'm living a somewhat different set of priorities. You know, I have to add it all up. You can't do all the stuff that you learned to, like, during the pandemic and then all that stuff you did beforehand.

Yeah, I too, thought, like, okay, well, let me go back. But then, no, I still, like, I actually morphed into the person I used to laugh at. So, you know, I don't think I was big on, like, meditation or gratitude or yoga or stretching or morning walks or my health or any of those things. And that was the paradigm shift I needed. It's almost like I needed the pandemic to sort of morph into who I am now, so. Wow. Thanks for sharing that with me.

So what name does your family call you?

I've always been Amir. There was a period where they would call me by my middle name, Khalib. Like, playfully.

Ah.

But no, I've always been Amir, especially, you know, when I forget to take the garbage out or do the dishes, whatever. So it's more like a mirror with 12 exclamation points at the end. So what name does your family call you?

Well, my dad was also Bill, and he was quite tall, so people call him Bill or Big Bill. So I'm the third. And so in my family, the nickname is Trey. Everybody calls me Trey, which then when people from outside the family around, people are calling me.

Your name is Trey?

Yeah, that's my name, dog.

That's a hood name. Is it? I wasn't expecting that one. All right. Yeah, I got a cousin named Trey.

Did they give you a hard time about the name Questlove?

No, but it's weird now because, like, you know, there's this dual life thing. You know, everybody in hip hop, you know, does the government name thing and then their moniker. I didn't want to be Questlove. I didn't want a title.

Okay.

Back in high school, when Tariq was naming us, I decided that I wanted to be a question mark.

Ah.

And the thing was, when we started doing the press rounds, a lot of the European press just thought my name was Mark. So Mark, da, da, da. I'm sorry, why you call me Mark? And they're like, question mark? And I was like, oh, no, no.

That'S not going to work.

And so by our third album, Half Life, I decided that I'm going to go with an old school rendition of that name. So if you're old school, you're either going to be Rock, Ski, or Love.

Yeah, sure.

I mean, you're a power broker, so you used to be like, trey Rock. That's your name. I'll be Questloving. You're Trey Rock. You know, I'm gonna call you that till the day he died. All right.

Yeah. Well, thank you. It was great talking to you today and a lot of fun.

I enjoyed it. Thank you. And thank you for this. Yeah, I gotta frame this.

This is amazing. Unconfused Me is a production of the Gates Notes. Special thanks to my guest today, Amir Questlove Thompson.

Just, like crates and crates and crates and crates of records. I'm up to 200,000, but it's also, like, I have 300 copies of, like, Culture Club's. Do youo really Want to hurt me on 45?

That I don't.

That I don't need.