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
But he somehow, he's developed this language and this style and they're just trying to get you out of there. Now things can not only be tailored, but they're also meeting you where you're at versus you having to put on a nice suit and go to a fancy place.
They don't have to wear all the same uniform. They can come to work with what they're wearing and have their own style. And there's just been an evolution of what service and style is in America and what is considered to be excellence and not just in food.
I think across the board and every, you see it with fashion, you see it with everything, but I think there's been an evolution of again, what excellence is before excellence was defined by that. What you said, the rich blue chip, third general, all that, but now excellence can be defined in any way. And you're seeing that in food.
Yeah, exactly. Yes. What you're touching on is the exclusiveness is cool because it's like nerdy exclusiveness.
And there's real scarcity because there's only so much that can be produced, you know? Yeah, yeah. And so it's a beautiful thing right now.
Yeah, you're Midwest. Grew up in an era where you were being infiltrated by the fast food advertising frozen food system. That was all deliberate. You are a product of that experiment. I just spoke with Alice Waters, who is the godmother of this movement of organics, of eating sustainably to the ground.
What happened in the 70s is that this was a deliberate act by the advertising and food corporations to feed us this idea that things need to be fast. Fast. disposable. Our time is money. We need to keep it moving. There's no time for food because all the time should be focused on what you need to do to push your upward mobility.
To get rich. And so food was the casualty and there was millions and billions of dollars behind that that fueled that advertising to get us to that point where we were completely desensitized and numbed to even caring about food.
And it took until probably like the early 2000s for us to break out of that cocoon. I'm just so glad because we could have never evolved beyond that. I see the picture in my mind of everything that was from the 70s until the year 2000. And it's so bizarre.
It is so bizarre for a country to completely devalue food to the lowest level to where it actually you are being told that you don't even have to eat. Ideally, yeah, you'd eat a capsule at the beginning of the month that would nourish you.
for the next 30 days because there's no time for it there's no time for it and none of it matters and flavor doesn't matter nutrition doesn't matter nothing matters within this realm of food growing it wasting it eating it cooking it nothing oh my god this is so fascinating so will you please tell us about how you started watching Emeril Lagasse yeah on the food network
It wasn't really an obsession more than it was a last cry for help. So I was here in Los Angeles. This was 1995. I had just come off of a four year deep addiction dive into gambling. What was your game of choice? It went from this game called Pan 9, which is kind of a card interpretation of Paigao. And it's similar to Baccarat, but you use four cards.
You use three in the hole and you can pull one. Are you getting chills right now explaining that? Yeah. Getting nine, pictures are zero, it's the whole thing. And then eventually led to poker and then high limit poker. Texas Hold'em? Texas Hold'em. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then playing like- At Commerce every day? At Commerce every day, yeah. Bicycle club, Commerce.
Back then it was before the whole World Series of Poker Day, so it was like- Just Doyle Brunson was popular. Yeah. It was me against Doyle Brunson. And Stu Unger. Yeah, Stu Unger and Telly Savalas. That was basically it. There was no like real no limit games. It was all structured. And it was a big game. I eventually made it to like 2040, which is a pretty big game.
And in your 20s, you know, losing $10,000, $20,000 is a lot of money. And a lot of that money sometimes is borrowed. So I burned a lot of bridges over those four years. And I was basically couch surfing. And I didn't have many other options left. The only other options were pretty much being a rail bird at the casino. That was all I had left.
And a rail bird is they toss you a $5 chip to get a water or coffee or something like that.
Because it actually not only destroys you, but it's a forest fire. It will destroy everything around you.
Yeah. Did you have that? I have it every day still. You don't even think about the money. There is no value in the currency at all. And all you do every single day when you look in the mirror is just promise yourself when you get even that you'll quit.
It's so crazy, yeah. What happens is because it's all dealt in chips, the amount of money that you go through, $10,000 feels like $10. So that's where the adrenaline from losing comes into play because you're desensitized.
I agree with that. But also just the magnitude of what you're spending on it will never equal gambling. Right. I can't do 10 grand of coke in a day. In a day.
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