that Dice is his "writing partner" and that Dice, along with Greg P.O.R.N., are essentially the "recording nucleus of The Roots." Take that as you will. But the influence is especially obvious on their past three albums (which I found incredibly lacking, personally)

"My manager, Richard Nichols, who also executive produces a lot of The Roots stuff, he works with Greg P.O.R.N., who’s an MC who’s always featured on Roots albums, and Dice Raw, Karl Dice Jenkins, who is just pretty much my writing partner, the three of them collaborate often on music that will become The Roots music before it’s officially Roots music. They’ll collaborate, as far as what their ideas are, for beats that may or may not work, and Dice will start coming up with choruses, and he’ll try and come up with a verse of his own, and P.O.R.N. usually comes up with one of the first verses out of our crew that I hear on any of our records. For all intensive purposes, they’re kind of like the – they’re the recording nucleus of The Roots . . . But, these – Rich Nichols, Dice Raw, Greg P.O.R.N., they’ve been actually working on this album for 3 years. It’s just weird. It’s a weird, dysfunctional – we’re like dysfunction junction. …but it works out in the end, kind of thing."

https://rapverbiage.com/2014/03/08/black-thought/