“My friends don’t like me when I get in journalist mode,” Ahmir Khalib Thompson, the multi-hyphenate professionally known as Questlove, admits with a sigh. It’s a little after nine p.m. at the Wythe Hotel, and he’s just screened the second season of his YouTube series with The Balvenie, Quest for Craft, which is apparently the best excuse yet that Questlove has found for getting curious about his talented friends and their creative processes. Last year’s interviewees included Patti Smith and Malcolm Gladwell; this fall, the six-time Grammy winner is talking shop with Mark Ronson, Misty Copeland, Fran Lebowitz, and Kenan Thompson.
It’s just one of the many, many plates that Questlove, 51, is spinning amid a career that keeps redefining what it means to be a Renaissance man: drumming with The Roots on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, celebrating the Oscar he won for Best Documentary earlier this spring for his film Summer of Soul, and managing ventures across directing, podcasting, writing, record producing, DJ’ing, public speaking, culinary entrepreneurship, TV development, and music scholarship. Questlove’s own creative process, I wager to guess, is endlessly complicated. He lets me in on his secret to managing it (and his seven managers) as a self-professed Captain of Yes: “Three words, and it sounds so hoity toity, but I had to invest in a chief of staff.” Anyone juggling that much definitely has some interesting tabs open—roughly hundreds, it turns out.
For Vanity Fair’s new Q&A series “Internet Diet,” Questlove scoots back into the interviewee’s spot to get deliciously specific about his digital habits, his favorite go-to website, and what sounds like a pretty foolproof method for warding off unnecessary distractions. The resulting conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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Vanity Fair: Okay, so your “Quest with Craft” YouTube series goes live today, which begs the question: what do you watch on YouTube?
Questlove: The most used search phrase that I type in every day is “rare concert.” When we’re taping The Tonight Show, it’s somewhere in between an hour and a 90-minute affair. So if I see some…not lethargic activity, but you know, on the bandstand, I’ll put on a rare song or a rare concert. Something that will wake ‘em up, like “What the hell is that?”
Where on the internet do you go for inspiration or entertainment?
There’s this new website called Gaia. Since 2020, I’ve been really obsessed with this guy named Dr. Joe Dispenza. He is probably the best at explaining how to get out of your head. People like me tend to overthink and chase our tails in a circle, and he’s just the king of explaining the power of breathwork.
If I’m not looking at him, then there’s a woman named Barbara Hand Clow. I’ve been really interested in interstellar; I know we’re not alone in this atmosphere. She’s really big on like, alien activity and those sorts of interplanetary things. I’m really big in the afrofuturist kind of studies of the stars and whatnot. Between Joe Dispenza and Barbara Hand Clow on the Gaia website, that’s my milk and honey right now.
Ah, I was going to ask if you use any meditation apps.
I started with Calm, but I just cut to the chase now. And Gaia is probably the mother lode of all those things.
Are you a TikTok guy?
You know what? I have an account. The woman who, maybe like 25 years ago, gave me my first commercial, she’s one of the high-up execs there and wants me to DJ on TikTok now. I have yet to do my first post. But one of my managers, she’s obsessed with animal TikTok. So she’s always sending me cat and dog videos.
When you find a long-ish video or article online but don’t have the time to get into it right away, how do you remind yourself about it for later?
One of the ways that Dr. Joe Dispenza explains how important meditation is, is that our bodies are like MacBook Pros. When you go on Safari or Google Chrome, you have a gazillion windows open, and the whole point of meditation is to close those windows, shut down, restart and come back new.
If you want to know how much of a sentimental hoarder I am—well, I didn’t know there was a limit to how many windows you can open on Safari. The answer is 500. Mainly because I’m obsessed with keeping a track record of all my failed Wordle attempts. I’m in a very competitive Wordle thread group right now.
You’re still going strong with Wordle?
Oh, God. After I do my morning routine, the first normal thing I do is look at the Wordle thread. The level of their complaints will tell me if it’s a double word or if there’s an X or a K. It’s like two actresses, one lead news reporter for MSNBC, one drummer, and two managers, but we’re not our professions. We are just Wordle nerds.