Creator of Bizarre Foods franchise, What’s Eating America, and The Zimmern List; TV personality, chef, writer, and author

If you can do certain skills in the restaurant business, you can have a job for life

There was nowhere else I wanted to be other than restaurants. There was no other people I wanted to spend time with more than food people.

It is an incredibly unique group of people that represent our industry, both public-facing on the floor and behind the scenes, making your food, washing your dishes, putting things away in refrigerators, doing the prep work and all the rest of that. So it's a very, very unique population that, number one, I felt at home with, but number two, has to be looked after with great care.

If you love this industry as much as I love this industry, if you love the world of hospitality, if this is your thing, then fight harder than you've ever fought for anything. Stay in it, be in it, be the agent of change, be additive, not subtractive

To me, we do life not for the things, but for the ways that we can affect change and be a good global citizen and be remembered as someone who made a difference for other people. When I started focusing on everyone else other than me, incredible things started to happen.

My interest in hospitality started with two things. My parents entertained a lot. I think being at their table and seeing the reaction that other people had to food being served to them was probably first. Second was probably traveling around the world with my father as much as I did.