Remarkable People: David Chang is 'Steve Jobs with a knife"

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/bd6ab0c1b9020cd1

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Food at its very best is like nothing else. It's
Something you can
Express
It's a story.
It can be delicious and
The absurd part of it is it's gonna be in the toilet eight to ten hours later.

Yeah.
Listen, for those that don't know anything about a Tibetan sand mandala, nobody would build a business
But where like everything would disintegrate.
If it wasn't refrigerated. It's a terrible business idea, yet we do it all the time.
Hey there.
It's Kai Kawasaki.
This is the remarkable people podcast.
We have a special edition today.
In October twenty twenty five
I interviewed
This guest.
At the мастерс о скел конференці санфрасиско, Калафорнія.
And the folks at Wait What

paired me up with David Chang of all people to interview. Now, if you're a foodie, you already know who David Chang is, but just in case you might not
David Chang is the creator of the Momo Fuku restaurant.
He's this great, great character on this video. Well that's not a character, he's just being him. Called Ugly Delicious. He has written a really fun book called Eat a Peach, which is his memoir.
At the end of that memoir, there's 33 tips for chefs that I recommend you read because it's really 33 tips for life. So anyway, this is David Chang and I Oh my god, we let it all hang out on stage and I came up with a new name for David Chang. He is
Steve Jobs
With a knife.
Because he has that kind of fanatical perfectionist attitude that none other than Steve Jobs had. So.
Now before the interview with David Chang, I made a tribute to Jane Goodall.
Jane Goodall was a friend of mine and she had just passed away and
I just wanted to recognize her contribution. She is the most remarkable person that I have ever met. So that's what this is. This is
A recording
Up an episode
Of a conference.
With me
And David Chang.
Aka.
Steve Jobs.
With a knife.
I'm so pleased to bring out onto the stage my friend and the host of remarkable people.
Guy Kawasaki.
Yeah.
Oh

Hello everybody.
Thank you for staying to the last few sessions of the conference. I didn't know they put me in the second to the last slot, or
So about
Eight days ago.
The world.
Lost one of its most remarkable people.
And uh I wanna
Put her picture up there.
So

The last time I saw Jane it was like a couple miles from here.
At the Salesforce Building.
And it was her nineth birthday tour.
And
Just so you know Jane Goals.
She was ninety at that time at that birthday.

Peak it are tired.
So I went up to her at the birthday party. I said, Jane, you should chillax a little bit. Take it easy.
Come to our house. We have a extra
Guest styles. You can stay in our guest house. We won't ask you for autographs. We won't ask you for pictures.
Just relax, Jane. You travel three hundred days a year.
She traveled three hundred days a year. Now
When speakers travel we get off the airplane.
The Lemo picture uh
You go to the hotel, you relax, you wake up, you give a one hour speech, you get back in the limo, you get back to the hotel, you go home.
But when Jane Goodall travels from morning to midnight, she's meeting with schools and kids and not profits and all these things. So her travel is
A hundred times more difficult than most speakers.
And so I went up to her and I told her this, and this is what she told me. She said, Guy
I cannot rest because
There is
Too much to do.
And that was Jane Goodall.
So listen, the day after she died.
I was
On my tr
property and I have this UTV on this property and I'm driving around in our yard
And I looked down
And there's a frog on my leg.
And my interpretation was that was Jane saying hello to me.
So listen, you know, I know when someone passes like that, it's customary to give them a moment of silence.
But I don't think that's appropriate for Jane. I think we should give her a moment
Of applause for all she does.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Standing ovation of that.

Mm.
Ha ha
Yeah.
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Um
Right.
I got
I think I'm gonna begin every speech by standing ovation at the start.
So now
I wanna bring out
Another
Truly remarkable person.
And his name is David Chang, so please join me welcome. David Chang.


Thanks for having me.
Hi guys.
Oh.
Phew.
All right, we're doing this.
Yeah, finally.
So David, first question for you is
Have you
been able to get some good figs while you're in San Francisco.
I'm not sure if everyone knows it's been some years, but I haven't had any figs in San Francisco.
And guys alluding to about f fifteen or years ago, I got in a lot of trouble. I didn't blame the late great Tony Bourdain because he got me drunk.
Uh uh talk much like this and
He said the topic was I call bullshit. And I call bullshit about at the time the Bay Area only cooking things like figs on a plate.
You got poll quota as first of my life, right?
But I was basically saying that
San Francisco, the Bay Area has the been at the forefront of sexuality, politics, technology, art, music.
And
I love Alice Waters. I love Shade Panese, but it can't be the only thing that the Bay Area celebrates at the time. I could have used better words at the time, but I was trying to express that. But till this day, sometimes I might just get a fig on the plate at a restaurant here.

David, I read your memoir.
And I have come to the conclusion, and I say this.
With the highest degree of respect.
Because I believe you are in the sort of tradition of Steve Jobs.
You are a mission driven asshole. You truly are a mission driven asshole.
And
I was reading your memoir, so I'm not sure.
Nah.
That sounds like Steve Jobs with a knife.
And
I think one of the things that
Separated Steve from everybody.
Із терм да I learned from Brené Brown yesterday, which is stів was a plumber.
And the poet.
And not many people can be a plumber and a poet, and I would say you are a plumber and a poet.
Well, most people would say I'm a poor plump plumber at best, but uh I'm I've never heard that comparison. I don't want to put myself in anything like that, but an asshole for sure, I believe.
I think you should go to your LinkedIn profile and say.
Steve Jobs with a knife.
So you know, I'm alluding to when I read your book.
Well for one thing, I will never

So talk about the plumbing of a restaurant and then the poetry of what you're trying to do.
Literally owning a restaurant, you better know the plumbing because more often than not you are going to be cleaning up shit. That is not a joke. That happens quite often and
It sort of uh punctures any sort of beautiful idea, this romantic idea of opening a restaurant that might be romanticized on TV or the movies. And yes, the bear is very accurate, but not exactly perfect. But it's great. It's a great show. But uh when you're running a restaurant as a chef
Sometimes you forget that you have to be a chef as well because you have the bureaucracy, the politics and m Lord knows managing people. That is not the easiest thing for anybody, let alone someone that
started to cook so they didn't have to talk to people.
And what is the hardest part there?
Everything's hard. Everything's hard. So everything that will go wrong can go wrong. It just every day is like the worst
Day possible.
And I try opening a restaurant and running a restaurant is like the Catherine great Catherine Bigelow movie The Hurt Locker, except that
You are not only diffusing the bomb, you are also creating the bombs as well. And that's what I want it's like. Every day you're diffusing problem after problem at the problem.
And you know it
At the end of the day, when you look at the business, it's such an absurd thing that it truly is a passion project for most people.
Okay, that's the plumbing part. What about the poetry part?
At the very best. Cooking is not like any other
Discipline.

Has to integrate
Food science. So you need to know microbiology, bio chemistry, you need to understand proportions, you need to know history, you need to have a way to express yourself. And if you asked me when I was twenty two cooking, I would have said no, this is a craft. We're just plumbers.
But more and more and actually talking about
And
Figs on a plate. Like,
I've learned that I actually was like so punk rock.
That was
an ultimate form of expression and
Food at its very best is like nothing else. It's
Something you can
Express
It's a story.
It can be delicious and
The absurd part of it is it's gonna be in the toilet eight to ten hours later.

Yeah.
Listen, for those that don't know anything about a Tibetan sand mandala, nobody would build a business
Where like everything would disintegrate.
If it wasn't refrigerated. It's a terrible business idea. Yeah, we do it all the time. This is the Masters of Scale summit. So I feel a moral obligation to ask one question about scaling so that they invite me back next year.
So as I'm reading your memoir
I'm looking at all the whales you tried to scale, so
You try to scale by getting more butts in seats, then you wanna get butts in different cities in seats, then you wanna get butts eating different kinds of foods in seats, and then you wanna get butts watching your TV shows.
And then you want to start delivering food to bots.
And then you wanna sell
Па консумер пакет гуд.
So let's talk about what you learn about scaling trying all those things.
Well
This is an interesting topic because I think it is the hot button subject in food, at least, is the idea scalability.
And food, unlike any other form of culture.
That you consume.
It is
Like not scalable.
It really is not scalable. And I was just thinking about in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, I was friends with the former manager of U two.
Paul McGinnis.
And he was
having conversation was like this and he he's like your business is dumb, David and I was like no question about that, that it's a dumb business. But one reason is you can't scale it. You can't scale it like
like music or downloads or s what is now like streaming in general
And I didn't know it at the time, but he was showing me what later was that U2 uh download that every iPhone got. I think it was like iPhone 6 or something like that.
And I was like, yeah, that's definitely scaling. We can never do anything like that.
And
That is a bottleneck with people that are looking to invest
Because you take this great idea.
And there's tewar, there's story, there's perpass in.
a specific restaurant in a specific city and there are cultural banks. Like a great restaurant is a cultural bank to its neighborhood.
Yes, you can scale that. Yes, you have fast food.
I have tried to do that. After that conversation, I tried to do our first what is now like the first ghost kitchen. We did it with Thrive and we did another one called Ondo, so Maple and Ondo, and I knew that we had to scale. Like we had to integrate technology at some point.
But
You know, like
Food and tech just don't go hand in hand. It doesn't because at the end of the day everybody wants to eat at seven o'clock.
Right.
You cannot manufacture food fast enough, and it's still no matter what you say.
I you need people cooking. It is a workman's like job and it's slow and it's plotting.
And until somebody creates
Ways to make the throughput of food faster, but I don't know if that's gonna be delicious.
It's not gonna ever really scale. So knowing that.
And knowing that food is not scalable, the irony here is
The fact that food is not scalable is why it is becoming infinitely scalable.
Because what is being broadcast on social media now are
Really high en restaurants or experiential dining that you cannot consume.
But you can now broadcast and that becomes cultural currency. So high end dining restaurants.
Let's just say the French laundry here, it's harder to get in than ever before.
Because there's a limited amount
Of these reservations. And the demand is growing and growing, growing. So you have this barbell thing, you have super high end and experiential dining.
And weirdly that's becoming scalable.
And I don't know how to explain that, but
They're able to expand, but they're also more importantly being able to charge higher prices, which they should be doing. And then you have things that are gonna be cheaper and faster, not necessarily cheaper these days, but faster.
food that you're gonna be able to order on your app and it'll be at your door pretty instantly. I do believe that.
My concern is everything in between.
But that is not scalable.
And I'm mostly concerned about the things that are not scalable. But Dave, I want to point out to you that these people are alternating how to scale, not that something cannot scale. Listen, I've talked to so many people that are
advanced in technology and they all say you can do this, you can do that, but
Well, you have to design an oven that's faster, and all of these things it will take time. It will happen.
All of this is gonna happen. It just can't happen at once.
So
I think this idea of
Broadcasting this fear of missing out on food is good and bad, but
I think what we need to figure out honestly everyone in this room is like the restaurants that can't scale.
My focus is like how do you save those restaurants?
That are your neighborhood mom and pop, the diners.
And I feel like we're losing the ability to actually judge the quality
Of
What's good?
Now because
Everything's going to what is the best. This hyperbole in the media. This is the best thirty eight restaurants. This is the steakhouse you have to eat at.
And I'm just telling you like
I think everyone should go to these lists and go to these restaurants and eat at the restaurant next door to these restaurants.
Um
And honestly, choose five restaurants that you want to support, and it may not be the best restaurant you've ever had.
I think we need to be comfortable with just eating good.
You know, like that's pretty goddamn amazing.
So I don't know if that answers your question and I know I'm gonna talk to someone later like no I can definitely scale it.

And I've talked to a lot of very smart people, much smarter than myself, and I no doubt that'll happen.
But
You know.
We should be worried about everyone else that are just sort of
making a restaurant their livelihood right now.
So one of the stories that I found most endearing in your book
Was the story of Marge.
So tell us the story of Marge, who started as an intern.
And eight years later was CEO of Momo Fuku.
Marguerite Mariscal, she is our CEO. She started as an intern and then she had almost every position. And I remember telling our board when she was twenty five, I was like she's gonna be
the CEO and they all laughed at my face. Oh she's too young. You're crazy. I was like, Yes, I'm definitely crazy, but I think that she's going to be the right person and I'm not betting on her now to be this fully formed sort of executive. I'm betting on w who she's going to be. And there's a saying in hospitality that
We can teach anybody how to cook. We can tell them techniques and
so on and so forth, but we can't teach people like to give a shit. And she cared more than anybody else and
Over the first few years, no matter where I was.
She didn't have to be there, but she was there adding value at all times.
And that was an easy ask for me to be like okay.
I I know that she's gonna be the best custodian of this brand.
And where we're going.
And did she go to the Culinary Institute of America and all that?
I mean.
You say someplace it's better to get a college education than a culinary education, right?
Yeah, I mean it uh cookie schools don't love me so much. It's not
Perfect for everybody. Some people certainly benefit from it, but
You're talking about
a twelve month program, so twenty four month program that might be like two hundred fifty thousand dollars in tuition.
They're not gonna make that back any time soon in the workforce.
Like when I started cook, everyone called me college boy because it was not like a cool thing to be as a cook at the time.
And they're like, do our numbers, do our other counter. I was like, I was a religion major guy. I was like, you do not.
You do not want me to do anything number oriented.
But what I learned was I learned how to critically think. I learned how to



And I thought that learning how to think, learning how to communicate gave me a leg up in cooking.
And
Like everyone else in college for the most part, you work a job and
I think you should go to a really great state school.
And work at a restaurant before you want to become a cook, and before you work in a restaurant, you should wash dishes for six months.
And if you love it, then just maybe
The professions for you.
In my podcast, I once interview Mark Maron and he wrote the book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving Uh, you know
And he told me that you will truly know that you discovered what you love when it involves a shit sandwich, and you love the shit sandwich.
And it seems to me the restaurant business and what you described, there's a lot of shit sandwiches that you love.
It's nonstop. It's honestly what people cook the best.
Okay.
This question, David, trust me, I'm trying to be deeper than it might seem, but
Yeah.
I wanna know what is the ideal number of Michelin stars to get as a restaurant. Obviously you everybody wants three, right? No no no no.
We have the longest reign for two stars in New York City history.
And for a while I wanted really three stars.
Well just
And I'm a highly competitive person and I wanted it. And then at some point, like halfway along the way, like fifteen years, I was like
I'm good with two.
Because
When you get three
He can only go down, they can only take it away.
Right.
And two, I know what we can, and you know what? I that's when I knew like I was getting older, and the things I cared about when I was younger, I don't care about at all anymore. And listen.
I love when my peer group gets awarded with the highest praise and the highest honors.
But I
truly don't care at all about Michelin stars for myself anymore, but I want it for my team.
It just doesn't mean anything to me anymore.
So if you get one star, you're so thrilled you got your star. You get two stars, it keeps you hungry.
You get three stars.
You always gotta be worried about
It can only go downhill.
Truly.
And two stars just for those in the business.
Вен самоз аводи тві стар.
That's the restaurant you want to eat at.
Because you need to make the decision, is this person gonna try to go get three?
And historically speaking, the restaurants that went when two to three, those are the moments they're just like
amazing albums in like rock and roll. You want to go there. So you got a lot of great restaurants, a lot of two star, three star restaurants here, but if there's a new two star restaurant in in San Francisco or one that goes to two or Oakland area.
You should definitely check those out.
Who gives a shit about the mission guy? You can go to any restaurant and it'll be very good.
So the
The cover of your book shoals odd job.

Pushing the peach up the hill, right?
And you're forty eight years old now, right?
I wanna know has the Sisyphus boulder changed for you? What's the boulder now?
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know. I think about that all the time. For those that don't know the Greek myth of Sisyphus, right? He's
Eternally punished to roll this boulder up the hill only to have it roll back down on him when he reaches the top of the hill and
I actually view it as a inspirational story. You're Asian. I do, because you have a choice. You can have a choice to be like, oh I I've been presented this really crappy situation which we're all presented all the time and you can bitch and moan about it.
Or you can actually say this is not going to affect how I'm going to think about this. I'm going to roll this
Boulder up the hill better than anyone's ever rolled it.
And that's mindset that I have and
I gotta be honest.
Now that I'm a father of two, I'm forty eight, it's like maybe I don't want to roll this boulder that much more anymore. That's just where I'm at. Yeah. I'm not as angry as I used to be.
And I would much rather be a dad.
When
Be me. So having Hugo your first child was the turning point.
For sure.
Yeah.
I mean
She was born twenty nineteen, his first birthday, which is a big deal in Korean culture. You celebrate March first and
twenty twenty and then the world ended.
And that was tough for so many people, particularly restaurant business and
I think it was a
Spending time with my son because I was on the road probably a hundred seventy five days a year.
We had restaurants in Canada, Australia, a bunch of places. We'd open up like nine restaurants in twenty four months.
That talk about s not scalable. That was not a scalable pace.
And then I just was like, you know what, I don't want to do this anymore like this.
So thankfully we started to grow our CPG business and I spend less time on the restaurant and scaling.
And all of a sudden we're scaling. And the funny thing is no offense to s certain parts of America, but I don't want to f go there. I don't want to open up a restaurant there.
Um
One of my investors told me you are the worst businessman I've ever met in my life, David. Because I cannot
Tinker. If a restaurant's supposed to be the same, I will definitely screw it and it will be different, right? And
I just have to. I can't do the same thing. It drives me crazy. Now we can
Have control. I'm a control freak, so we can work on a product.
The only problem with consumer product goods and retailing grocery stores, it moves at a snail's pace. And I I'm an addict to a lot of things, but I'm an addict to action.
And that's been hard for me is while we're scaling this.
Consumer product, it's business, it moves so goddamn slow.
So if there's anybody in the world who can answer this, it is you.
У води з іпак в
The shall I say war on immigrants that's going on right now. What's uh impact is that gonna have on the restaurant business?
I always think about what like Singapore I I don't know what th they're doing right now, but they put a ban on immigrants and I remember my friends had a restaurant in Singapore like we don't have any employees. No one's working.
And I remember twenty sixteen.
couldn't find a lot of laborers or cooks or dishwashers and
Here's the problem. I I think a lot of restaurant chefs want to speak out, but they don't want to become a target for the people that work there.
That sucks.
Right. And
It's difficult. It's difficult right now. It's not fair that a lot of people and they don't have to be
restaurant workers that there's just too many people that live in a state of fear and that's just completely unacceptable.
So have you
Have you done anything for Momo Fuku to help the situation, or can you do anything?
We we can help as much as we can and I don't want to speak more than that.
But we're helping.
Yeah.
I don't wanna get morbid, but I wanna ask you, so at the end of your life

I'm closer than you.
At the end of your life.
What do you want your eulogy to be? Is it chef or father or entrepreneur?
Steve Jobs or the same thing.
No, I
I think it's people might think about it a lot and honestly
I was telling you before we come up here, I genuinely am shocked with myself that I don't care about the things I used to care about.
I'm sure you guys know plenty of very wealthy, successful people. Let me tell you, no one's gonna care about them.

Ultimately, to me, it doesn't matter. It's all ephemeral, and it I don't care about it. I used to.
But now it's I would much rather just be like a good dad and a good
Sort of
executive and partner to the people I work with.
But
I'm not trying to think about those things.
All I want to do before is win every goddamn award possible.
And I just don't care. I also understand when I talk to somebody that's younger and they're like, Oh, I'm a semi-finalist for the James Beard Awards. And let me tell I was like, dude, it doesn't f matter.
And they're like, shut up, Dave. You want a bunch, you can say that. I was like, I totally understand you.
But I guarantee you if you stop caring about it, you'll probably win a ton of them.
Okay, so we know what you don't wanna do. What's your eulogy say?
Well let's put it this way.
Dave Chang was an asshole, and he learn not to be an asshole.
Ha ha ha.
Okay.
That's a higher bar. This is going down a real deep hole, but I'm very curious.
The cover of his book I should have brought the book out with me. It shows this tiny little guy pushing this
Peach up a hill.
And the guy you say is odd job. It's odd job. An odd job
If you're old enough he was the guy. Yeah, with the metal hat that threw the hat.
No, but they're all too young. And you all looking at us like we're nuts, right? So believe it or not, that guy's name is Harold Sakata.
I know.
My father and he served together in the army.
He and my father were gonna have a tag team wrestling.
Professional wrestling team. Yeah.
And
He was a family friend, so I got a ride with him driving around a Mercedes two eighty Sl.
And he was driving me around in that car and I said, Guy, this is why you gotta work hard
So w what is your connection with Harold Sakaba?
Well
It's not just him.
I hate talking about like representation and stuff.
For the sake of it. But for me
My only heroes were people like Odd John and Bruce Lee and
Anybody that was a villain in movies, they happened to be like a computer expert or a demolition expert or something like that. And I was like, okay, growing up.
These were the people I would saw. So I was like a huge fan of Odd Job. I'd watch James Bond. Everyone's like, I wanna be like James Bond. I was like, I wanna be like Odd Job. You know what I mean? Again, it's a very different thing in twenty twenty five, but you know.
In the eighties.
Growing up as a kid, you just didn't see anything like that. So when you see someone on TV that happened to be Asian,
I was like, yeah, okay, let's go. There was nobody on sports. I can tell you everything, it was Jumbo Ozaki, Japanese golfer.
June ring in in Taekwondo and that's about it. So yeah, in Hollywood, that was my guy.
We're out of time, but my logic here is what are they gonna do? Not invite us back.
So
Since we talked about Alga, I gotta tell you a funny story about me.
So

So one day.

So this is about fifteen years ago, I had a nine eleven, okay?
I'm driving in Menlo Park, I'm in'em on nine eleven, so
Nine eleven is a Porsche.
So you know, all Porsche drivers are assholes. With that caveat, I'm driving my Porsche, I pull up to a stop sign, I look to my left, there's a car full of four teenage girls. They're giggling, they're laughing, they're making eye contact.
And the one in the front seat says, Rode on your window. So I wrote on my window. She sticks her head out and she says
Are you Jackie Chen?
So that's
We gotta have our heroes, right?
Yeah.
So ever since that day, my goal in life is that some girl in Hong Kong asked Jackie Chan
If he's meaningful

I mean I
I'm gonna let you close with a message to this audience about changing the world and being a father and
Not being an asshole, what's your final message here, David Chang?
I wasn't anticipating this. My God. It's like a commencement speech. My goodness.
Wow, this is now a lot of pressure. David Cheng is speechless. I'm speechless.
I'll tell you, like when we started Maple in twenty
fifteen it was one of the reasons why again from that Paul McGinnis conversation I want to do something
I had never worked with
people that were venture capitalists. Like we work with Thrive and it was Josh and Will Gabrick who's at Stripe now and
I was blown away.
at the kind of big picture of thinking that was possible.
I didn't even understand.
the numbers that was being thrown around and the logistics and
А лер сома.
That
There is
innovation that can be had in industries that you didn't think were possible and that are completely uncool and food I think needs a lot of help. We need a lot of help and I just would say if you're gonna scale food don't make shitty food. Don't make shitty food
Oh.
Don't make a ball.
Try to make something beautiful with great ingredients and everyone's happy to work there. Alright, so let's give it up for Steve Jobs with a knife.
Okay.

Mm.
Um
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