Episode 3: Questlove
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- Somehow I just saw the future and I don't know, something told me like plant-based is gonna 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 unconfused.

Welcome to Unconfuse Me. I'm Bill Gates.

My guest today is Amir Questlove Thompson. Most of you probably know him as the drummer 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. Okay. Every morning, it's like, oh, you know, somebody got a three. Damn. I'm in three different Wordle group chats. Today's Word, have you done it yet? I didn't play it, but my group chat is angry. It's hard. Usually, I let them go first, and then I let them go second.

They do it first thing in the morning. I do it at the end of the day, usually like at 11 p.m. 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, it must be a K or a Z or an X. So I have an advantage. I'd say today is one of those days. It's good to know you're a Wordo 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 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, you

have 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 pounds. Like I was a junk food. I'm from Philadelphia. You know, I breathe cheesesteaks. 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 Shake Shack versus this plant-based thing. It's supposed to be a hamburger that tastes like hamburger but plant-based. And I was like, yeah, that should be fun. 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 don't know. Something told me like...

plant-based is going to be the future and I'm the 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 ten plus years later I've been in a lot of first-round investments for you know impossible not co eat just ripe rice magic spoon cereal

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, you know, great scientist 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 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 ribbing 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 in neighborhoods in which you can't even get a salad anywhere.

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 is Obama. 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 because 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. Of all the climate areas, the one that people are probably least aware of is all the fertilizer and cows. That's a challenge. But 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, 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 going to meet your high standards 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 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 I also just love the interest of it. There's a school in...

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 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 entrepreneurship program in which students

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 and they're

knowing and creating what is needed for sustainability. And I have absolutely no doubts that in five to 10 years, we'll even be further down the road with it. 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 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 Crimpit, which in its heyday, mwah. What's your guilty pleasure snack food? The one I can't avoid, so I make sure it's on the round, is See's Candy has a peanut brittle snack.

that is both salty and sweet, and the mouthfeel is pretty amazing. Is it bad for your teeth? No, it's just a lot of sugar, a lot of calories, and you don't fill up much. 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 unusual is 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 would be a family, and 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 vinyls, but then my friend Bono said,

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 cover of Get Out My Life Woman. Fantastic. Yeah. And it's a double album. So jazz great Joe Williams is singing on this version.

So 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. This is like one of the records from my childhood. Cool. Yeah.

So that's? Thad Jones and Mel Lewis. That's Thad Jones. Yes. And that's Mel Lewis. Yes. Cool. And Joe Williams, a gentleman that's been singing with Duke Ellington since the 40s, is singing on this. Okay, cool. So I also have a record for you.

This is Sly and the Family Stones' greatest hits. I'll bet you have a lot of confidence, but this is actually signed by the artist. Jesus H. Christ, wait. This is what you call prime stunting. Like, this is... Jesus Christ. 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 Sly and the Family Stone documentary. Whoa. Well, that's great. I watched last night Summer of Soul, which was a blast. Wow.

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 Souls, it's great when you've 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. Yeah.

The Harry Met Sally interstitial of them watching themselves. And you got to 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 are you guys coming to me? Like, does 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 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 personally,

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 a...

Larry Graham. No, you're kidding. I didn't know that. The inventor of funk. Right. Drake's name is Arby 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 funk master Larry Graham. So, you know, I mean, 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, 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 protest 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 going to be. No, it ended up being phenomenal. Thank you. It's amazing how much of the music I knew, because that's 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 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 still had like, "Yester Me, Yester You, Yesterday," "I Was Made to Love Her," "My Sharia Moore." 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 to 90s Stevie Wonder was about to do. And, you know, they were like, well, no one knows the song Shoo-Bee-Doo-Dah-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 that. 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 Gospels. Yes. It's great stuff. There's this song, which I always thought was, "When Jesus Walks." It turns out it's when Jesus washes that—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. But 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...

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 teach 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 nine, it was very normal for a nine or ten year old to go to a nightclub and

and asked 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 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. Nice place to start. And my dad felt like it was a jackpot moment because-

He doesn't have to pay his guy $700 a week. For me, it's like I was the richest 11-year-old in existence. So give him here 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

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 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 and 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. Nothing, you know, the guy that used to always work. So, but, you know, I'm still, 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 eight-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 time. So like, 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 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 even though those systems are overloaded, in poor countries, you have way, way less. And so we were trying to say, OK, 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. 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 for it. Mathletes versus athletes. Mathletes versus athletes. You know, and then there was all this insanity about misinformation that

Maybe I was benefiting from it, or maybe Fauci 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...

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 so jarring that it did get me to think about my life and what I value, friendships and things. So I can't say that it was all negative. It was...

scary. But just to keep you sane, would you go to video games or just for a moment of sanity? 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, you know, 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 disappears.

you did beforehand. Yeah, I too thought like, okay, well, let me go back. But then, no, I'd still, like I'd 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 that 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. 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 Amir 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 called 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 that. Your name is Trey? Yeah, that's my name. Dog, that's a hood name. Is it? Yeah.

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 there's this dual life thing. Everybody in hip hop 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. 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-da. I was like, wait, why are you calling me Mark? And they're like, is it question mark? And I was like, oh, no, no. It's not going to work. And so by our third album, Illidolf 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 should be like Trey Rock. That's your name. I'll be Questlove and you're Trey Rock. You know, I'm going to call you that till the day you die. 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 got to 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 You Really Want to Hurt Me on 45 that I don't need. So, yeah.