Padma Lakshmi
The Questlove Show
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2026
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Join Questlove as he sits down with friend Padma Lakshmi for a funny, sharp, and intimate conversation on food, culture, and reinvention. Padma revisits her New York City childhood, makes the case for Queens as the city’s true food capital, and shares her ultimate snack kryptonites. She also opens up about stepping away from a show she helped build into a powerhouse to launch America’s Culinary Cup from the ground up—and why she’s fully in her “zero effs” era.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.9 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:05.2 | The Questleff show is a production of I-Heart Radio. |
| 0:26.6 | Thank you. Good people, good people. |
| 0:28.9 | Welcome to the Questlove show. |
| 0:30.7 | I'm Questlove, your host. |
| 0:40.7 | So for 19 seasons, Strong on the Emmy nominated Top Chef and the excellent taste of nation. Our guest today has basically changed the culture and the conversation around food. She is a host, a producer, an author, an |
| 0:48.2 | activist. She is time 100s most influential people. And she reframed the American food as an immigrant story, |
| 0:57.8 | as the creator and hosts of a brandy show, an excellent show called America's Culinary Cup. |
| 1:04.0 | She raises culinary competition to new heights. I'm very jealous of that kitchen set, |
| 1:08.3 | by the way. Beyond the screen, she's a New York Times best-selling author, |
| 1:12.7 | cultural bridge builder, and a person who understands that food encompasses memory, migration, and politics. |
| 1:20.3 | Welcome to the Questlove show, Pam Laxmi, my good friend. |
| 1:23.7 | I'm acting like, weird that we don't know each other. |
| 1:26.1 | It's weird. |
| 1:27.1 | Well, it's weird to hear you say all that stuff. But thank you. And yes, we are friends. We are dear old friends. Sometimes your friends also have to ring your bell to remind you that, you know, you're the shit. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm going to do a mixture of rapid fire questions because I feel like we know of you but we don't know you per se. |
| 1:46.4 | So my first question to you is what is the first thing that you did this morning? |
| 1:51.6 | The first thing I did this morning was try on some leather pants because I needed them for later |
| 1:58.3 | tonight for a party and I haven't had time to figure out what I'm wearing. Okay. Yeah, and I got up earlier than I wanted to, but not early enough to go to the gym before Pilates. So I just decided I would have a little fitting with myself. What time do you normally wake up in the morning? About 7.30. Okay. And so this morning I woke up at, I want to say, 6.30. I was going to ask, what time do you go to sleep? |
| 2:20.7 | Sometimes I'd like to go to sleep earlier, but often I am only going to sleep about 12, 30, or 1 a.m. |
| 2:27.9 | And you still get up at 7? 7.30. |
| 2:31.3 | Okay, so I'm probably not going to ask a lot of beauty routine questions, but I'm certain |
... |
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