Roy Choi
speaker
872 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 24 Mar
Roy Choi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I've never had attachments to like material items.
No, that's pretty weird. Yeah. I mean, I've had addictions and I've gone down really deep holes and I've stayed attached to many, many things like just where I won't let it go. And I've written like horrible love letters on the back of pizza boxes, like the Jon Favreau scene, the swingers like on the first date. So I've gone down dark holes.
Not that I'm perfect in that way, but I've never been attached to material items before. So interesting. I don't know why. But I think it might have been a foreshadowing or a precursor to who I ultimately became, which is creating businesses that make no money. That pretty much was my destiny from childhood.
No, no.
Or they may not have ascended to a level where they're...
There's not a lot of like recreational... And I feel like I moved to the front of the classroom with crack because it was one week. It was just a burner of seven days, just complete roller coaster all the way through. The lips are burnt to fucking oblivion. To oblivion, walking through the fucking Hell's Kitchen. That's where all the crack was being sold in New York.
I went so far through that I came out the other end and I was like, this shit sucks. I'm done.
You want to be around other zombies. And New York was really like that at that time. I'm from here. Speaking of pizza boxes and love letters, I went to go visit a girl that I met in Korea. And without warning her, I showed up at her doorstep in Providence, Rhode Island.
It doesn't feel dangerous at all. This was before texting. This was just a knock.
You had an address, a hard address.
Show up. And then I knock on the door and then obviously it didn't go well. So then I ended up in New York at the YMCA. It was $7 a night in Times Square. And that whole street that I stayed on was like Crack Avenue, man. It was zombies. Like, it was crazy.
Yeah. So they both came here for college, graduate school. So my mom was from a well-to-do family. My grandfather was a gangster. He was Tony Montana. Oh, really? My maternal grandfather. Can you just tell me the timeline? The Korean War is 50s? 50 to 53. Right. Up until 50, they're living in North Korea. Right. And the war happens. They all flee. But my grandpa's a geek. He figures things out.
He gets to Seoul. I mean, Seoul at that time was basically dirt roads and buildings all blown up. It was just crazy. Yeah.
that time the war was coming off of the japanese occupation because it's the peninsula in the pacific ocean we were at the brunt of the whole cold war between you know communism and the u.s right and korea was the pawn in between it all because that was the foothold into asia yeah and so most north koreans came down across the border it closed he's in seoul and it's like tony montana in the detention center washing dishes you know in miami tony montana's a scarface reference just so you know my
Yeah. And so he figured things out. He was hustling the whole time and he eventually took over kind of like what you would call Midtown Manhattan. Like he took over and owned pretty much all the real estate. So my mom's family was very well to do. But that's a whole nother story because they lost everything. They had nine sisters, two brothers.
Both brothers got addicted to gambling and lost the whole fortune. So you come by this addiction stuff, honestly. It's crazy, yeah. And so they sent her here to art school. Dad came from the total opposite. He came from the country in the South, ended up in the city. His father was just, you know, a normal everyday banker. But he figured it out and became like the head of his class.
So he came on a scholarship to America. They met and then they decided to go back. I always make fun of them. I'm like, why the fuck'd you go?
back so they went back and they realized because for a lot of immigrant families once you taste america it's hard to go back to where you're from yeah but i also understand the desire and i don't know that this was theirs but to like make it where you're from i think part of it's korea comes from a very confucius model very like male dominated very respect your elders respect your parents always pay tribute to your family so i think they were going back to do things right but once you taste america
They were here in the 60s. They were driving like beautiful cobalt blue Impalas, wearing Ray-Bans, smoking cigarettes, drinking scotch. And they go back. And I think they realized as soon as they step back in Korea, they're like, we got to get back. Well, also, they have a new thought, which is you. I forgot about this. This is probably the reason why they came back. I was born with a deformity.
What was the deformity? I was born with a cleft palate. Oh, okay. Yeah, a pretty bad one. So cleft palate is when your whole top part of your lip is ripped open when you're born. So you're born with a hole in your face. But back then in Korea, they were stitching people together with duct tape. So I don't think they saw me come out and they didn't know what to do.
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