- Hey, what's up?
This is Questlove and I don't believe in time.
And this is everything I do in a day.
[upbeat music]
I automatically wake up at 6:23AM.
I don't know why it's 6:23, but literally
when I open my eye, it's like Groundhog's Day,
I know it's 6:23AM.
Absolutely no alarm.
I spend the first 45 minutes writing down what my dream was.
I can only retain that information for maybe 15 minutes,
so I do a very weird, just non sequitur, random,
every detail of that dream,
which always involves a train.
I don't know why, but trains are always in my dream.
[train horn blowing]
I'll spend the next 60 to 90 minutes meditating.
After that meditation, ill spend the other hour writing
the 50 things that I wanna accomplish in a day,
in a year, in my lifetime.
I feel like writing down, it processes it
to your mind that it happened.
So by the time I'm done making my,
my wishlist, ill say that my feet hit the floor
around 11AM.
I don't even touch my social media
or my answering text message or emails until
at least 11 in the mornings.
At the time, I was quarantining on a friend's farm,
or ranch, or orchard.
I don't even, take your pick.
My next step would have been getting my 10,000 steps in.
So, I'll listen to comedy records, podcasts as well.
There's a really cool podcast by a guy named Open Mike Eagle
named, it's called "What Had Happened Was".
And that's where he takes an artist
and he goes through their entire career.
It's his first season is super-producer, Prince Paul.
And that's usually from like 11 to 12,
so I guess you could say that the Questlove Industry
starts around like 12 or 12:30.
I'll usually do like my first three glasses of water
in the morning and I take my vitamins.
That's super important.
The first thing I have in the morning is a Mark Hyman
Pegan Shake.
That's, that's kind of my first meal of the day.
I shower. I get dressed.
Because my hair is in braids,
I don't have to spend hours on my afro anymore
and I'm kind of fine with that.
I know that people used to like,
oh, your iconic afro.
But, you know, my hair's still there and I'm still me.
So usually, by 12:30 I'm in the car headed to 30 Rock
because I have to get tested every day
at a certain time when I go to that building.
There's another therapeutic process I do called pruning.
The ride from my house to 30 Rock,
I challenge myself everyday to discover 100 songs
I haven't heard before.
Ill just pick one song and then you'll scroll
to the bottom, and it'll say "listeners also listen to,"
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then you pick that song and then you scroll
to the bottom.
You just get lost in a rabbit hole.
I call it pruning because I will compartmentalize
all those 100 songs to where they should go.
Okay, this should go in my DJ set.
But this should go in my driving mix in the daytime,
but this is my driving mix for the nighttime,
but this is my Sunday afternoon driving mix.
This is my Thursday night driving mix.
Music is also like a day to night thing to me,
so I, I get very CSI with it
as far as like forensics,
and figuring out which key a song is in, and all that stuff.
So, I make sure that no day goes by
in which I don't discover 100 new songs.
By the time I get to testing at 30 Rock,
a rare time of quasi-normalcy,
that's where I'll see
the Seth Meyer writers and crew people,
and that's where I'll see the cast of "SNL"
and the rest of the "Tonight Show" people.
We'll small talk
and then you get tested.
You pray it's negative.
So, there's always a moment where, you know,
they don't come back in ten minutes with your result,
you're like, you're in panic and like,
am I getting sent home today?
So, when that's gone, ill go to my office.
My
production team, ill talk to them about,
you know, whatever adjustments we have to make for that day.
And usually, I'm disturbed by the knock of,
[door knocking]
3:10.
So exactly at 3:10,
I have to go on set.
We'll shoot all the commercial breaks at 3:10PM,
like four music cues.
That'll be done by 3:30.
So, ill spend that time eating my lunch.
And usually, I will get tuna salad
with no bread, or egg salad,
or sometimes I'll have a cheeseburger
with lettuce as the bread.
And then by 4PM, it's grooming time.
So I will have my beard shaped up by 4:00
and then it takes about 45 minutes to an hour
to get my hair ready, so I have to sit in the hair chair.
That's where I just sit and watch TV on my computer
while my hair is getting done.
I'm now watching, binging "Schitt's Creek".
I'm also binging "Fargo"
because my good friend Chris Rock is in that show, so.
I fell down a "Selling Sunset" rabbit hole.
I'm not even a reality-show-watcher,
but for some reason, there's just something
about the show that keeps you watching for no reason.
Back to Fallon,
Jimmy likes to wait as late as possible
for developing news to see if he can incorporate that
into his monologue.
Previously, we could get 300 people in the studio.
It's excitement.
There's energy in the air.
It's like a show.
Now, it's more like a public access show
and it's like just us.
Oftentimes, we'll just riff with each other.
It's sillier that way.
Like, I love it when the joke doesn't land.
Jimmy will edit that out.
But for me, the funniest parts of the show is
when he tells a joke and there's no laughter
and then we wound up laughing at that laughter,
and we'd wind up in a,
kind of an endless loop.
I'll say that 6:10, it's done with with.
And then I have to sit in the grooming chair
to rebraid my hair
or take the powder, the anti-shine off.
So usually, around 6:30PM,
either I'm gonna sit with my engineer
and work for the next seven hours on a Roots project
or something that I have to score.
My dressing room is a fully blown out studio
that I made like five albums in.
So, I will either work on music or record my podcast,
"Questlove Supreme".
Normally, I know about the person that's gonna be
on the show, but ill of the deep, rabbit-hole dive
on the internet for anything that I miss.
You know, some shows we'll end in an hour,
like Joy Reid was like an hour.
But then again, like Jimmy Jam was six hours and a half.
If I'm not doing that,
I'll say that I'm probably headed back home.
I'll do more pruning and when I get home,
I try to make sure that the meal that I ordered
from Postmates arrives in time.
My favorite thing to eat during quarantining is,
there's a spot in China Town
called New York Great Noodle Town.
To me, they have the world's best duck
and the world's best soft shell crabs.
Sometimes, I will also come home to DJ.
And I do that mostly to raise money
for the New York Food and Finance,
it's a high school of students that are
in the culinary arts.
I'm done at, let's say 11:30, midnight.
If my girlfriend is asleep already,
I will probably sneak and just get an hour
or two hours to myself,
just to sit and be by myself and relax.
I'll sit and watch old "Soul Train" reruns.
I'll make a peanut butter snack
and I'll go over whatever has to ready
for the next day.
And then I do a quickie,
like 15-minute meditation where I put the same music
on that I sleep to and look over my list of the day
of what I want to achieve.
And then I sleep to tone noises.
All right, full disclosure,
I might be the world's worst snorer.
In order to keep the anger level down of my girlfriend,
I discovered that if I put on these tones
if she falls asleep to
[Questlove humming]
you can't hear the
[Questlove imitating snoring]
below it, you know.
My bedroom kind of has those like Japanese shutters
that completely turn the room black.
It has to be completely dark in the room that I'm in.
I used to be the person that would fall asleep
to MSNBC,
and that became an obsession.
But what I didn't realize,
in falling asleep
and having that constant negative news loop
inside your head,
that can affect a lot in your life.
I made a deal with myself to not check the news,
to not check my social media,
to not even check messages.
So, that was the hardest,
that's the hardest drug to get off of.
That's pretty much my routine.
Guys, thank you very much for listening
to that whole shpeel.
And that's pretty much everything that I do in a day.