Chef José Andrés reflects on his Las Vegas restaurant Loves Bazaar—praised by Joe Rogan—moving to the Venetian while keeping its whimsical, grill-driven fusion of global flavors. He shares childhood struggles, Bourdain’s legacy, and food’s role as a unifying "superpower," critiquing U.S. policies like fragmented agriculture and fast-food scapegoating while advocating for school kitchens and urban food access. His World Central Kitchen fed 500,000 meals daily in Ukraine, used helicopters in the Bahamas, and now fights Gaza’s shortages, condemning war as a weapon against civilians. A lifelong immigrant, he ties America’s promise to collective dignity, urging leaders to embrace unity over division—like his "longer tables" vision—while cooking for humanity’s survival. [Automatically generated summary]
And when you're young, you think you know everything.
And as you get older, there's a quote by, I think it's Dennis McKenna said this, that as the bonfire of enlightenment grows, the surface area of ignorance is exposed.
So the more you learn, the more you realize there's so much you don't know.
Whereas as you're young, you think, ah, fucking, I figured it all out.
And then as you get older, you're like, there's so much I don't know.
Not only that, there's no way I can know everything.
It's not possible.
That's why fools argue about things that they don't know.
Instead of just going, what is that?
How does that work?
Instead of actually being genuinely curious, fools like to try to pretend that they know more than they know.
It's not possible to breathe underwater.
Don't pretend you can.
It's not possible to know everything.
You just can't.
There's going to be people that know things that you don't know.
Celebrate that.
Enjoy it.
I think that's one of the best things that's ever happened to me through this podcast is I get to talk to so many different people that have lived so many different lives and have so many different passions and so many different interests and so many different things that they've studied.
I don't need to know how you made all those numbers work.
I just, like, I know it's real.
Okay, that's great.
I'm interested in other things.
But the thing is...
School was designed to make good factory workers.
That's what school was designed for.
The American school system, at least, was designed by the Rockefellers.
And what they're essentially doing is preparing people to be cogs in a wheel.
They're preparing people to just show up and do what you're told and live this life of quiet desperation and just sit there and absorb whatever they tell you to because you're going to have to go and work and do something you don't want to do all day long and show up and do it again until your body stops working and you die.
The type of learning and the type of teaching and the method of Montessori.
I was fascinated by it.
I was so fascinated that I almost felt like as a dad, I had to go to school to learn the Montessori system myself because I thought it was great.
I thought it was giving my daughters a great framework to understand how to...
How to be themselves, how to grow, how to organize themselves, giving them the freedom to become the young woman they are becoming.
So for me, just watching them going through when they were four or five, going to Montessori, I thought that was amazing because I saw little human beings that they were far away smarter, I think, than when I was at their same age.
There was no system of education that was used.
Guiding them like cows or like horses when they put...
I just think that there's a lot of different roles in life.
And the problem with traditional school is that they're preparing you for a job.
And I think there's a lot of very creative people that would be served better if they had a more open-ended education and they were allowed to just pursue their interests and be excited about certain things and just get a rudimentary education in other things.
That's just my opinion.
Because I think there's certain people that just don't fit in.
With a regular nine-to-five life, it's just not for them.
Like I said, you can call it ADHD, whatever you want to call it.
All my friends, everyone I hang out with, I don't know anybody that's built for regular life.
As long as you're really doing something and really challenging yourself and really applying yourself to something.
That's, yeah, I agree with you.
And, you know, you have to have a lot of...
I think the more interest you have, the more things you're fascinated by, the broader your understanding of human beings will be and the better your life will be.
Yeah, I got to the top and they had 10 guys carrying their belongings, the Sherpas and their oxygen bottles.
It's like, actually...
Actually, if I was any of the countries that controls the access to all those amazing mountains, all the top, the 8K, the Aconcagua, and the Everest, and all the big peaks, I would make it mandatory that you have to go on your own.
You could argue that, okay, but then scuba diving, you are using air.
That's different.
Okay, but I want to be fair.
It will be an argument.
Jose, you like scuba dive.
You can go down into the ocean and you can bring air, but I'm going to the Everest and I cannot bring air.
But I take my bottle with me.
I don't litter the bottom of the ocean as I scuba dive.
I mean, that is one of the most underappreciated, grueling jobs is to be a cook in a kitchen with 15 other guys and women and everyone's running around.
Everyone's got a job.
You've got a hundred people out there waiting to be served.
You're running around making this and that, this and that, and orders are coming in, and this is medium rare, and this is that, and that is this.
Listen, I just had this documentary on the last season of Chef Table on Netflix where I am one of the four chefs that on this season they've done a documentary and they've done a documentary of my team's and myself culinary life.
You're going to see Minibar, my top restaurant, Two Star Michelin, Bazaar, everything else.
But you're going to see me telling stories about me cooking with my mom and my dad.
Sorry.
My God, I haven't had a cigar yet.
But my profession, slowly but surely, because everybody cooks, right?
I always talk about longer tables.
But this goes almost to the beginning.
A moment that was very important in my life, talking about cooks and chefs and restaurants and food people and living, is that the first time I became a dad, my daughter,
who is 26 years old now, Carlota, an amazing young human being, In the moment she came out into the world as a father, that I began having tears, that's another moment you realize that there's always so much pressure on everybody.
I feel as a young man, I always had a lot of pressure to be the man everybody was expecting you to be.
And sometimes you felt like nothing ever came with instructions.
And I think because it's not like music that you can listen to over and over again, or comedy, or a movie, or literature, we don't think of it as an art form.
I didn't realize it was an art form until I started watching Anthony Bourdain's show, No Reservations, the original one on the Travel Channel.
And then from being, like, really a big fan of that show, I realized, like, oh, this is art.
And because of his narration, his narration was so brilliant.
Because he wrote all the descriptions of the cultures that he would visit and the people and the descriptions of the show.
You could tell it was all in his language.
It was in his mind.
Wrote it all out.
He didn't have writers and script writers.
He wrote all the narratives.
And I think then I realized through his passion for food and his passion for cooking and his deep appreciation for other chefs.
It wasn't about him.
And he was always very self-deprecating to his own abilities to cook.
It was about other people and how amazing these people were and how he loved to go and visit them.
And sometimes it was someone's mother that would be just cooking sundae sauce.
You know, some Italian mother.
And he would have someone translate what she was saying.
He would ask questions.
Then I realized, oh, this is an art form.
And I never considered it was an art form until I was a grown man.
And I was a little embarrassed by that.
It was like, oh, that's a blind spot.
Food is not just delicious.
It's a form of art.
There's something to it.
It's just an unheralded art form.
Because everybody needs it, and it's not always art.
Like, Twinkies aren't art.
But it's food.
It's calories.
You need to consume it to stay alive.
You need food.
So you don't think of it, but when it's done with passion and when it's done in this creative way...
It's like you talk about it forever.
It's amazing.
It's like going to see an incredible concert, or it's like going to see a movie that just rocks your world.
It's the same thing.
It's just someone expressing themselves through a medium, and that medium is food.
And it's the medium, the one medium, that we all consume.
Everyone consumes that medium.
When I talk to people and they say, "I don't really care about food.
It's just fuel for me."
I'm like, "Well, you're an idiot."
You're missing out on life.
You're missing out on a giant chunk of life, which is delicious food and delicious food that you enjoy with others, which is also a part of food.
Enjoying delicious food by yourself is not nearly as fun as enjoying delicious food with other people.
There's something communal about it, which goes back to our tribal ancestors sitting around the campfire enjoying something that we cooked.
I've got another one I'll show you that I have that's in another part of the studio.
I've got a lot of art in the studio, luckily.
It's nice.
I love...
Art.
I just love being around people's expressions, you know, different things that people have created.
I just love things that people make.
If there's anything that I couldn't live without in this world, I need to be around people's creations.
It's very important to me.
I like seeing it.
I like it to be all over the walls.
I like it to be everywhere.
I like to touch it.
I want to see it.
I found out he was gone because my friend Maynard, he's the lead singer of Tool, and Tony had really gotten into jiu-jitsu.
And that's how, one of the ways, I was friends with him before that, but that's one of the ways that Tony and I got closer, is that he knew I was a black belt, and I've been doing jiu-jitsu for decades.
And so...
He would ask me questions.
And when we were doing the show together, it was really funny.
When I did one episode of No Reservation, we went pheasant hunting in Montana.
And part of the day, he's asking me how to finish Darce Chokes.
So he and I are on the ground, on the dirt.
And I'm saying, now, when you're in this position, I'm showing him how to strangle people in the dirt.
So we're wearing hunting clothes and boots and everything like that.
And I'm like, no, no, no.
This way, and then trap the head here and turn it like this.
So we're like, now do it to me.
Do it to me.
Like, we're working with each other, like, on the ground.
And he's, like, fascinated by this martial art.
And I thought it was wonderful.
Because, like, he's this sensitive, creative, poetic guy.
But he found the beauty in jiu-jitsu.
Which is, like, to the outside person who's the uninformed, it looks like this brutal caveman activity.
But it's not.
It's a very complicated, intelligent...
Creative martial art and he was obsessed with it and he didn't start doing it until he was 58 years old which is kind of crazy but he really got obsessed with it entered into tournaments age-appropriate tournaments and did really well and so it was training every day sometimes twice a day like we got just taking private lessons and like really good I can tell you that because when we were shooting in Asturias and few other places Cayman Islands one of the things he always did is finding out Where was the local
So Maynard got his black belt recently, and Maynard was also very into jiu-jitsu, and he was joking around like maybe one day he and Tony would have a celebrity jiu-jitsu match.
So I'm in Chicago.
I'm doing shows in Chicago, and I get a text message from Maynard and says, so much for that celebrity jiu-jitsu match.
And I'm like, what does that mean?
And so I'm like, I don't even know what that means.
Another lesson that I've taken with me is that any conflict that I've ever had with a person, even if I was correct, even if I was right in being angry, even if I was right in the mean things that I said.
I never felt good afterwards.
But every good interaction that I've ever had where maybe me and a person disagreed but we came out of it smiling and hugging and we found common ground, then I feel great.
Always.
Always feel great.
You know, I just...
There's going to be people that you run into in life that are stubborn and they don't want to avoid conflict.
They want that conflict.
They feed off of it.
They're stupid.
Not even stupid.
They're on a bad path.
They have a bad programming.
They have bad whatever the patterns of behavior that are ingrained in their consciousness.
They're unforgiving and they have this.
This way of living their life, and it's not a good way.
And, you know, you can't fix everybody.
So you just got to, when you encounter those people, you have to be able to filter people out of your life.
You have to know, like, some people you can't interact with.
Especially when you are in, obviously in cities you can see how beautiful life is, even.
But when you're in a tour, and you're seeing the sunrise, or you're seeing the sunset, or you're seeing the moon, and you see how little you are, how insignificant you are, but at the same time, how God gave us this power to be part of this amazing universe we are part of.
And then you are thankful there, because you are like, oh my God, I am part of something so beautiful.
And we all occupy a space in that universe.
And the space we occupy should be to don't make it worse.
If anything, leave it as it is.
And if you can, do whatever you can use to make it a little bit better.
Me, when I am in those places, like I go to the south of Spain.
And my wife is from there, Cadiz, is where I did my military service in the Spanish Navy.
And it's one moment, not too far away from Gibraltar, the little possession that England has there in the south of Spain, that maybe one day England gives it back to Spain.
There is a place that almost you can touch Africa.
You feel like you can, with your finger, touch Africa in the Strait of Gibraltar.
And it's just like, even a movie cannot recreate the amazing place you are with birds and the oceans, the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean, and two continents that want to love each other, but they are separate,
but that body of water.
There, I look, and I began circling my head in 360 degrees, and I'm like, oh my...
Like, you are in a convertible spaceship and you're hurling through the galaxy and the only thing that's protecting you from everything else is a layer of gas.
A layer of gas that surrounds this beautiful planet.
He's a physicist that's been working with the government with this stuff forever.
He said they have 10 retrieved crafts that are of non-human intelligence.
10 that the United States is in possession of.
And he said during the Bush administration, during George Bush's administration, they were contemplating disclosure to the American people.
And they wanted to get all these physicists and scientists and psychologists to
a list of things that would be negatively impacted by disclosure and things that would be positively impacted by disclosure and give them a numerical value, like a zero to ten value.
So during the Bush administration, during George Bush's administration, during 9 /11, during that time, that time period, they were contemplating, this is 2004, they were contemplating having disclosure and releasing to people the fact that we are in possession of non-human intelligent crafts.
They have recovered biological entities, meaning beings from another planet that are preserved, that we have.
And that non-human crafts are visiting this planet or might not even be visiting.
They might actually be here.
They might have bases in the ocean.
They might have bases somewhere in the mountains.
But that this is a real thing.
So he started working on this in 2004.
And he's...
He's, you know, 100% convinced that we're not alone.
Sound 51. Area 51. Area 51. Listen, nothing will give me more joy.
As a young boy, I always thought, man, could I be the guy that finds E.T.?
It wouldn't be cool.
Yeah.
And especially it seems it's a good...
Alien space that is an alien space of goodness.
Hopefully.
Imagine it's a science fiction movie and planets like us is part of...
Yeah, let's say they're here.
And let's say that all the junk food and extra calories and the obesity pandemic is actually something like this alien civilization has orchestrated.
And so as we become fatter, they're going to be able to recollect more protein to take back to their planets.
Okay, that can be a great next big movie, and then we'll eat seeds, and they'll take it with us, and they'll put us in the planet, and at our stomachs, we'll have potatoes in their fields.
I don't know.
But I only will say that if that already happened, and the government, the U.S. government, number one.
Seems everything only happens in America.
All the great movies of the world, everything happens in America.
All the science fiction movies.
And me, as a young boy, like, that's why I wanted to come to America.
Because, man, the aliens never visit Spain.
It's always America.
Everything cool always happens in America.
And that's, I guess, where I wanted to come.
But I will say that if already something like that happened, and we've not invaded again, means that...
That they're good aliens, let's hope.
But I will say that at this moment, our government will be already sharing with all of us something that will forever change the present and the future of humanity.
I mean, we can go to Peru with the Incas and we can go with the Mayas to Guatemala.
And it's a lot of people that always have been trying to make connections of things they found that they say already we made contact in previous civilizations on planet Earth.
But I have a hard time believing that this has already happened.
And I respect the opinion of obviously who looks, seems he's an expert and has spent a lot of time.
And I see that you believe in it.
The sight of me that is the boy that will want to believe that there are other planets with people and we are not alone, I will be full of joy.
I hope that if there are good people and that happens, that you and I and everybody else around the world, maybe that's the moment that the world becomes one.
And all of a sudden, we are all fighting.
You remember what was the movie?
Independence Day.
If they are the bad guys, you and I, you will be doing Jiu-Jitsu against an alien species, and me, I will be with two pants.
Well, I would imagine if you look at the trajectory of human life on this planet, the world is safer than it's ever been.
People are smarter than they've ever been.
People are more aware.
We have more access to information.
And generally, generally, people are kinder and less tolerant of evil than they have ever been before.
There's still problems with just the tribal nature of human beings where...
We're territorial apes.
I mean, that's what we are.
But I would imagine that if they are so sophisticated that they're capable of traversing solar systems, traversing galaxies and reaching us, they're beyond that stuff.
If they weren't and they have reached us...
They could have destroyed us a thousand times over by now.
We could destroy ourselves a thousand times over.
We, with our inability to go to other galaxies, we could destroy ourselves.
So for sure, they could destroy us.
I don't think that's what they're interested in.
I think we are an emerging civilization in the galactic sense.
And I think that if you look at...
Primitive man and you look at primitive primates and you look at current human beings and our technological achievements and all of our medical achievements and our ability to feed enormous groups of people and our concern about the environment and all the things that make us so special as human beings.
I would imagine that that would be even more advanced with these species.
Sending our conscience in other ways without our physical body.
This could be happening one day.
Me, what I know, the thing I'm interested in is I wish I will be alive when we put the first restaurant in the moon or the first restaurant in Mars.
And I will be there just cooking for the first people arriving.
I've done my little part.
Many chefs, many chefs, many, you know, they've done, thanks to NASA, their work, and they put their mark on food that has been sent to the space station.
I did it in 2016, 2017.
My dream was to send paella, the Spanish rice dish.
I was able to partner with a company called Axiom, A-X-I-O-M, which is one of the companies helping provide services to NASA to bring astronauts, and they will do it also with civilians to the space station,
and was a Spanish astronaut, a Spanish-American astronaut called López Alegria, and he is like, José, in Axiom we will be interested if you want to do a dish.
Because we're going to be feeding all the astronauts in one of our first trips.
And if you are up to it, say, yeah, what do I have to sign?
And we send Iberico ham.
We send paella valenciana.
We send a pork dish with pisto, which is like a ratatouille, a Spanish ratatouille.
So it's this guy called Jim Sears, an amazing engineer, a guy that is crazy for space, like you, like me, like so many.
And like everything, there is a competition, and the competition is about...
Right now, astronauts receive the food already cooked.
Come in those pouches, semi-puretes, liquids that they pour into their mouth.
And certain things are okay.
The rice we did, I thought, was very good, even we had a little issue.
We tried to make the paella too by the book, and the paella at the end was a little bit too dry, as a traditional paella is, meaning the grains of rice are fairly loose and separated, one from each other, which on earth is a sign of a good paella.
But in the space, if you open the pouch, all of a sudden, you start having all those little rice flooring in the station, and there is the moment you want chopsticks.
Oh, my God.
I was on the edge of collapsing the space station, but what I've been working on with this guy I mentioned, Jim Sears, is that he came up with a kitchen that will be...
The kitchen, and he won a competition, the kitchen that astronauts could use one day, hopefully soon enough, save it, and that Jim, amazing guy, Jim Sears, and it's two prototypes of this machine.
He gave us the prototypes, my team.
Has been working on them.
Wow.
They can cook that in space?
Macaroni and cheese.
Look, that's a cornbread.
That's a cornbread.
And I want you to take a look, because this is how food will look in space.
If one day we have a kitchen in the surface of the moon, or in Mars, that's a brownie, and if you are, Elon Musk, if you're listening to this conversation, Space food will look like this kind of circle,
this circumference, because that machine, what it does is centrifuge, like G-forces can go up to G-14th.
That's a lot of Gs.
And the reason is that we will send ingredients, but the ingredients will float.
If you don't achieve the centrifuge that will move the ingredients to the sides of this kind of kitchen where you don't cook in the bottom but you cook on the sides, you will not be able to cook.
And it's not, as I said, that they are waiting for planet Earth to be 10, 20 billion people.
All of us obese.
That's why the best way, people of America, the best way to fight against an alien invasion of planet Earth is that we all stay fit, we don't get overweight,
and we are lean, a lot of muscle, not a lot of fat.
Because that day, that alien civilization, we learn that we are not, we are not a harvest worth having.
Because we're too lean, and they cannot feed their own planets.
I think our real hope is that they've moved beyond commerce.
That's the real hope.
I mean, everybody's all...
Look, I'm not saying communism is good because it's terrible.
Communism doesn't work with human beings because we're not prepared for communism.
But I do think that if we evolve past these primate instincts that we have and we genuinely develop some sort of a sense of real intimacy and community with everybody on earth, we would share resources.
Totally.
Yes.
And our real fascination would be in contributing.
To whether it's contributing to knowledge, contributing to art, contributing to whatever it is.
Instead of constant competition, our competition would be with ourselves to make better things and to do better and to achieve better.
But that's going to have to come with...
We're going to have to evolve past the way we interact with each other.
And I think we're slowly doing that.
I think human beings are slowly but surely doing that.
And when you have like well-minded people who want to embrace Marxism and socialism, I think that's really the heart of it.
It's like, well, it's a good idea at a bad time.
We're not prepared for that as human beings.
But I think if we get to a point where we could all read each other's minds, which I think is on the horizon.
We get to a point where information is instantaneous.
We get to a point where how do you have money?
If money is ones and zeros and then there's no such thing as encryption anymore because you have quantum computing.
And so you can't just keep money.
You can't just get...
We're going to have to develop a way as we advance as a society, as a species.
To share resources, to share resources in a genuinely equitable way.
It's beyond our comprehension now as territorial apes, but I think that's the future of the human species, is that one day we reach this peak where we realize that our true competition is within ourselves, within our own minds, and to do the best that we can for the overall greater good of the species,
and then hopefully the greater good of the universe itself.
I mean that's a great idea, but have you ever had a woman boss?
They turn into tyrants too.
It's human beings.
Human beings should not have power over large groups of human beings because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It almost always does.
That's why there's so many checks and balances in our system of government, you know, to try to...
Try to mitigate the impact of human psychology when they achieve great power over everyone else.
Because people just become tyrants.
And I think that is the hurdle.
That's the hurdle to becoming a part of the galactic civilization.
The hurdle is we have to get past that.
We have to evolve as a species.
And my suspicion is that somehow technology plays a part in that.
And the interconnectivity that we're achieving through technology is going to advance our ability to understand each other, and it's going to advance our ability to communicate, and it's going to force us to come up with some sort of a new way.
That's the one thing you absolutely need for survival.
You need fossil fuels because of the way society is engineered.
That's why you need fossil fuels because we've gone in that way.
You know, this is the real suspicion about ancient civilizations is that they figured out a way, a different way to achieve great results.
They did like the civilization, like ancient Egypt.
To this day, we have no idea how they did that.
How did they make those pyramids?
How did they do it?
How did they do it at the very least 4,500 years ago?
Many people suspect that it's far older than that.
I'm one of them.
I think civilizations have been around a long, long time and I think there's been catastrophes and there's a lot of physical evidence that point to those catastrophes.
But the idea is that at one point in time...
So our technology has evolved in a very specific path.
Our technology has been the industrial revolution, the invention of the internal combustion engine, electronics, and all these things have led us to this incredible level of sophistication that we enjoy now that's so much different than people that lived just 200, 300 years ago.
My suspicion is that the people of Egypt, the people of Turkey, there's a lot of other places in the world, they achieved very similar levels of sophistication with completely different methods that are lost, that are lost in history.
And we know for a fact that there was an immense...
Catastrophe.
This is the catastrophe that's written in the Bible.
This is the Epic of Gilgamesh.
This is Noah's Ark.
This is so many cultures share these stories of a great civilization that was wiped out by a great catastrophe.
And science now believes that that is the Younger Dryas period.
The Younger Dryas impact theory is this theory that we were hit by comets somewhere around 11,800 years ago.
And it essentially wiped civilization out, brought us back to baseline.
We were tribal hunter-gatherer people again, and then we reinvented civilization 6,000 years, 7,000 years later.
Because as we mentioned at the beginning, the lovely mother-feeding moment that unites you, food is the best way to tell somebody, I love you, I'm here with you.
I'm going to respect you and I'm not going to let you alone.
And this is why, for me, going to emergencies through my lifetime, in the last 15 years especially, is the moment I've been seeing this moment of light, of hope, of saying, in these worst moments of humanity, it's so much love.
Where there is no religion, no color, no political party, it's only people helping people.
That tells me that food is this thing that...
People in a table can have a conversation about more meaningful things.
And then it gets deeper than that.
It gets deeper on food I said before I think is the biggest power anybody can have.
I would like to know the number because I think that's very important for national security.
But I've seen in the first year, in the same year I've seen back-to-back Category 5 hurricanes hitting Central America, big food producers, parts of the United States with big food production,
the Caribbean.
I've seen typhoons in Asia at the same time hitting very big food.
At the same time, droughts in South America, the same time that we had hurricanes with a lot of water in Central America, droughts in Asia, wiping out rice production.
At the same time, pests.
Three, four countries in Africa with a couple of insects wiping out the entire harvest of that year.
Wars like Ukraine.
The grain they export feeds close to 500 million people a year.
And a few other things I'm forgetting.
Put everything together in the shaker.
And if it happens, we go from we have enough food to feed humanity.
But the problem is that we are not good enough in making sure that the voiceless and the very poor get their share of food to one day.
The newspapers of the world will say, today we don't have enough food to feed humanity.
This could be happening.
Obviously, I want to think about the happy moments, about my restaurants and all the restaurants of the world full, the supermarkets full, and everybody eating, and every mother and father being able to bring a plate of food to their children in America and in every country overseas.
When everybody has food on the table, the place is a most...
A more peaceful place.
And a happy place.
And a hopeful place.
But I'm worried that day that may be happening and that's not science fiction.
And, ah, we could read it on the press, but this was real.
Families with money, no problem.
We could get it.
Somebody would bring it from overseas.
But poor families, they were having a hard time finding that baby formula.
That only tells me that we take food for granted.
And that's why I've been always asking that we need to have a national food security advisor near the ear of the president of the United States, near the president of every country, to make sure that food is not an afterthought.
Well, I think we have a real hard time imagining things going badly when things aren't going badly.
When things aren't going badly, like right now, we concentrate on getting more.
I want more stuff.
I want more this.
I want more that.
I want to get better.
I want to make more money.
I want to be more famous.
I want to be more popular.
Whatever it is.
All it takes is one super volcano.
All these things that you're saying, these are all possible.
War, famine, disease, pestilence, all that stuff's possible.
But you know what else?
One super volcano.
Yellowstone.
Yellowstone blows every six to eight hundred thousand years and it's a continent killer if it goes the whole the whole world's fucked we have nuclear winter for decades like who knows how long it lasts with the dust in the sky there's gonna be no crops and people are just gonna starve to death there's no if ands or buts about it if it blows most of us here are dead most of us and most of us like there's a there was a super volcano the Toba volcano in I believe it was 70,000
years ago they think Brought humanity down to a few thousand people.
And that could happen again.
But it's very difficult for us to think that way.
It's very difficult for us to imagine how things could be bad.
That mean, people, that if you have a good bottle of wine that is very expensive and you are waiting for it to that moment in your life, remember what your Rogan said here, drink it tonight.
Again, as I said, we have only food for so many weeks produced around the world.
Japan right now has, like in the same way in the United States, obviously, we have the reserves of fuel, right?
We have gas reserves in case something happens.
And then the governments and the presidents use that reserve.
In Japan, they have rice reserves.
And those rice reserves, they are not barely ever touched.
They're there because in case something happens, the government wants to have the possibility to.
Japan has been releasing those rice reserves for different reasons because it's been the harvest of rice.
They've not been as good as they were supposed to.
It's a shortage of rice.
The prices are going up.
So it's a whole bunch of things.
So they released those.
Rice reserves and they're able to control the price.
But here is more than controlling the price because inflation and other issues.
This is because the rice has not been flowing through the market in the ways the Japanese society is used to.
So it's only food for thought.
China has 7% of the farm land but has 15%.
Of the world population.
We need to make sure that 7% of the farm land, but they have to feed 15% of the world population.
When you see that China is very interested in buying land in Africa, in America, that they help ports in many countries in Africa.
Well, if you are the leader of China and you want to feed your people, what will you do to make sure that...
You don't only produce at home, but if you cannot produce enough at home, even every country should do more to be a better food producer on the land we have.
I remember when I was young and I went to the gas station, the gas station had a little restaurant that was not even a restaurant.
It was like a diner.
But for me, it was like a high-end restaurant.
And once every two months or three months, my father would take us there.
The restaurant in the gas station.
And I thought it was great.
Like, are we going to a restaurant?
This is the days that we always cook home.
We never went to restaurants.
But I'm only saying this because when we went to the gas station, to go to the restaurant happens was next to the gas station.
But when my father went in to pay for the gas, he paid for the gas and that's it.
There was nothing else there.
This was the place to pay for the gas.
And it happens the restaurant was there.
That was the only food.
Go now to the gas station.
Oh, my God.
You live with 25,000 calories.
So you are feeding your car, and in the process you are the Cheerios and the M&Ms and the sneakers.
Oh, my God.
It's like...
The gas station now is, I'm telling you, those gas stations are owned by those aliens that are to make sure we are really, really overweight so one day they harvest us and they take us to their planets.
I do believe the gas stations of the world are, they belong to the alien species.
It's trying to make us all fat.
But put that.
So yeah, why are we so overweight?
Because I used to walk to go to school.
Walk.
Walk for an hour.
One hour to go, one hour to come back.
My father worked in the morning.
My mom worked at night.
We had one car.
But for me, I could do it in 20 minutes.
It took me an hour because my life was walking through cherry trees and the forest and the farms.
But I will go walking.
It's not like I'm going in Uber.
I will be walking and come back walking.
And life has changed.
I'm going to the train, walking, and then from the train to the subway, I had to take a train and a subway, and then from the subway I had to walk.
It's other times.
Now life is very easy.
You have calories everywhere, calories everywhere.
You wake up in the morning and you open your eyes and you are ready.
Calories.
And that's one of the problems, and that's why we are all fighting.
Against those calories that are not making us any healthier.
I could argue with you that it's a big conversation.
And I'm not going to come here.
Actually, I'm going to disagree with myself.
Because I can agree with myself.
Because we can have the same conversation and use the conversation from two different points of view.
It's been, obviously, the very easy attack to the fast food industry, to the junk food industry, to call it whatever, on the pandemic and the obesity, to the soda industry.
And again, I'm not going to be the one here now becoming the Robin Hood defending them.
But at the same time, they are not the only ones part of the problem either.
Look at me.
I'm overweight.
I promise you by the end of this year, 2025, I'm going to get close to 210 pounds, and I'm never going to move from there.
I've been fighting.
I used to be 280.
I was able to bring it down already to 215.
I went up.
Right now I'm in 245.
But I'm going to bring it down to 2010, and I'm never, never going back.
Because I own it to myself, to my wife, to my children.
I own it because, in a way, a chef, we are also an example.
We have people that are poor right now that use not to happen.
And if you were poor, you were skinny, and maybe you were hungry.
And now we are in this situation that you have people that are poor, and it's difficult to explain.
And it seems that they're overweight.
Because the food they are able to buy is very cheap because it's all this junk food, you say, and that's part of the problem.
And they are not only overweight but unhealthy because they're bad calorie, bad quality food because they cannot afford anything else and sometimes it's not only about affording, it's because they don't have access to anything else.
And there goes again about one of the big conversations.
Food is a superpower.
And it's a superpower the governments need to use for the betterment of the lives of their citizens.
And it goes beyond putting food on the plate.
It goes beyond making sure that...
When I tell every American, when I speak in every state, red or blue, urban areas or rural areas, every time I say every American children deserves to be fed and no American family...
Should be poor and hungry ever again.
Everybody claps.
This is the truth that brings everybody together.
And you could argue why we have people who are poor or hungry, and then we talk, okay, and what is the role of government making sure that we don't have poor and hungry?
If we have a government, I would say, in part, is to make sure that we take care of the less privileged, and the poor, and the hungry, and the ones that lose their jobs, and the veterans that come back home, and they are...
I think we need to have government for that.
And government should do a better job in making sure that every children in America is fed.
And making sure that it's not throwing money at the problem, but invested in solutions.
You need to invite him to this show if I can recommend you.
People that will give you amazing conversation about these issues.
And he saw that food waste was wrong.
But everybody was...
He was talking about food waste before anybody was talking about food waste.
On President Bush's inauguration day, he got a truck.
And he went to every hotel that they had these huge quantities of food on the parties after the inauguration that nobody touched.
And he got them in the truck, brought them to a central kitchen.
Repackaged everything and began feeding the homeless in D.C. 30-plus years later, that organization is doing 15,000, 20,000 meals a day.
But it's not about feeding.
It's an organization that began bringing homeless into their kitchen.
Ex-convicts into their kitchen.
People couldn't find a job because they were in jail.
Those convicts, those homeless, all of a sudden, they were receiving dignity.
The dignity that society, for some reason, was not giving them.
American-born citizens that were not receiving the same opportunity to belong as this young immigrant called Jose Andres that came from overseas.
And very often, I got many doors open.
People that, for whatever reason in life, fall behind.
The kitchen gave them a place to belong.
And in the process, they began learning how to cook.
The organization, this is Sandra Kitchen, was teaching them how to cook.
In the process, they were making the meals with that leftover unused food that they will produce, and then the organization will feed the local homeless.
In the process, CEOs and volunteers from around America will come to join forces, volunteering next to those ex-combits and those homeless, that they were no convicts or homeless anymore.
And in the process, food was becoming a place of building longer tables.
So the $1 to feed one homeless was also the $1 to give hope, was the $1 to give training, was the $1 to rescue food, was the $1 that those men and women, when they graduated,
restaurants like me will hire them.
So $1 for human resources.
All of a sudden was no $1 thrown at the problem.
We feed the poor and forever we'll have to spend the dollar to feed the poor.
But no, it was one dollar to build up the entire economy of a city in the process of taking care of the most vulnerable.
Robert Edgar told me that philanthropy seems it's always about the redemption of the giver, when actually that's the wrong approach.
Philanthropy always must be about the liberation of the receiver.
When you tell me what the role of our government should be, our government should be here to make sure that they invest in their citizens.
And food is a good place for our government to be investing in our citizens.
For families that fall behind, that the government give you that food dollar, that dollar assistance for food.
And it's been very controversial.
And it's politics around it.
That's the way Democrats won, that's the way Republicans won.
But everybody forgets really about the right talk, which is, what is the right policy?
How do we, if somebody complains, oh, food stamps has not fulfilled its promise.
It's like, okay, but let's not fight about cutting it down.
Let's fight about how to make it better.
And let's make sure how those dollars, in the process of feeding American families, in blue and red estates equally, that helps those families that fall behind to be able to put food in the table, are able to do it with the dignity they deserve.
What happened?
That because I said before, the government doesn't see food as a whole, and usually everything is handled through the Department of Agriculture, which it's okay, but it's not the right way.
What happens?
That when a family in a poor suburban area in any city in America receives the food stamps money, in the place they live is so poor that they don't even have a market.
Their neighborhood is so poor that nobody wants to open the market.
So even those poor families, they have to go to another neighborhood to spend those dollars, even when they have no transportation sometimes because they don't own a car or they don't have public transportation.
So they don't have easy access even to that food.
So imagine if all of a sudden the government, yes, they help the people through the food stamps, but also in the process.
Urban housing development is able to help building a market that is run by the city, is run by the state, where the local farmers can come.
In a way, you are subsidizing that business because no other private business wants to do it.
But somebody has to be taking care of that shortfall.
And all of a sudden, we build there a market.
All of a sudden, that family has the dignity to be able to shop in their neighborhood, where that shop actually hired local people, that all of a sudden they are employed in the neighborhood, and that neighborhood stops being poor no longer.
And all of a sudden, that one dollar, as the example I gave you of DC Central Kitchen, is not only the dollar that the government...
It throws money at the problem, I'm going to feed you today.
But that dollar of the government, if the government is smart and works as a whole, creates local employment in the same poor neighborhood, gives dignity to that neighborhood because all of a sudden it's a little bodega, a little market.
In Spain, the country no more, we have our own share of problems too.
It's never the perfect city, the perfect state of the perfect country.
Because if one place is perfect, please call us right now.
Call us to JoeRogan.com and tell us the place and Joe Rogan and I will move there.
Tomorrow, right?
But in Spain, I grew up in public markets.
Public markets that were available everywhere.
Public markets that were public markets.
With the smallest stalls that local business owners could have their little chicken place or the local farmer could have a place he could afford and be not only a farmer but a local businessman by selling his product.
But it's very difficult to see them in the forgotten, sometimes voiceless places in America.
In a lot of suburban areas, in a lot of rural areas, that sometimes they are totally forgotten.
And food could be a great way to make sure.
That they are not forgotten.
Every school in America should have a kitchen with good cooks.
That they are well trained.
That they are well paid.
Investing money in infrastructure to build those kitchens.
Buying from the local farmers who run in those rural schools.
In the process, one dollar to feed the children, but one dollar to invest in infrastructure.
One dollar to buy food from the local farmers.
One dollar to pay for the local cooks that work in that little rural community.
all of a sudden, in the process of feeding better quality food to our children, food that is fresh and made from scratch, and that when you can is local, that one dollar
Yeah, absolutely.
France invests a lot of money feeding their children.
Spain invests money in feeding the children.
But America, I know we can do much better, especially because what you mentioned before.
We have issues with obesity.
We have issues with hunger at the same time.
And the government has to play a bigger role in how to be solving those issues that, to me, they are no problems but opportunities.
I think one thing that this administration is doing well under Bobby Kedney is that he's trying to educate people on what is healthy food and what are the problems.
And one of the ways you start is by eliminating harmful ingredients that are banned in other countries and that we use everywhere in this country.
And to slowly but surely make people aware of these problems.
And make people aware of what these foods are doing to the overall metabolic health of these people and why we have these crises.
Why we have these crises of obesity and diabetes, type 2 diabetes, which is food caused and environmental issues that people have because of pesticides and herbicides and to slowly clean that up.
So it's a good step in the right direction.
I think one of the things that you do that's really beautiful is when there's crises in the world, you go there and you cook.
I know that you were doing that during the Ukraine war, and I know you did a lot of that in Gaza.
And about why politics is bad, but policy is good.
Because good policy is good politics.
I don't agree with everything Secretary Kennedy...
He's doing vaccines.
I mean, my mom was a nurse, my father, my family, doctor.
But I'm not going to get into that.
Everybody is entitled to their opinions, and obviously, truth hopefully will always prevail, and the best decisions will be made.
But I 100% support what Secretary Kennedy is trying to do.
100%, 110%.
Secretary Kennedy, and one more.
Person joining your willingness to make America healthy.
But then this is a conversation I want to be having.
It's not like the first time we heard before from Republicans saying, why the government has to decide why we eat.
And in a way, Secretary Kennedy is doing that too.
So I 100% I agree that sometimes government has to intervene.
Okay?
And that's where policy that is bipartisan in these issues is what I believe food can be bringing both parties together.
Because I'm going to say everybody in America needs to be supporting whatever initiative Secretary Kennedy has in the next four years to feed America better.
To have America fitted.
To make sure every children is fed.
With more fresh fruits and vegetables.
With less young food.
And et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But I'm only going to go back then to President Obama.
And I'm going to be talking about Michelle Obama.
She created a movement called Let's Move.
And very much is aligned with a lot of the things Secretary Kennedy was doing.
And the conversation back then was...
Why is the First Lady having to tell me if I need to eat spinach or hot dogs?
Who is she?
And the only thing she was trying to do is exactly what Secretary Kennedy is doing now.
So what I'm only saying is, let's put politics aside on those issues that is about every single America.
And let's agree once and for all in the things that actually...
Both parties always should be supporting each other.
I just wish that Secretary Kennedy back then would be one voice next to Michelle Obama in trying to do fresh fruits and vegetables in the schools and children and American families.
And so the same people that supported Michelle Obama initiatives back in the day, I want them to be supporting now Secretary.
But also, Secretary Kennedy needs to promise me that if one day he's not in power and another party come, another president come, that should be always the same.
That's a mother who is in power.
America should be eating better.
America should be healthier.
America has children.
Should be producing the best qualities of food because we are the richest country in the history of mankind.
America exports more food than any country in the world.
America should be feeding every children, every family with the best possible food we have on planet Earth.
Therefore, everybody should be joining that movement.
But again, let's put the politics on the side.
And let's make sure that we come up with smarter policies that will allow not only Secretary Kennedy and this administration, but every administration in the years to come with bipartisan support in the right way to feed America with the right food that makes us healthier and that makes us stronger and where food is part of the solution.
I think the issue was with Michelle Obama was back in 2008, I don't think people were as aware of the consequences of...
I don't think they realized how many metabolic health issues.
I think some people did.
But I think because of podcasts and because of documentaries and because of a lot of discussions and articles that have been written on the issues that people have with food and the additives in food and preservatives and the real problems that people have and not exercising,
I think people just weren't as aware.
I think one of the good things about the internet is that it has exposed people to a lot more voices of people that are living lives that are more interesting to follow in terms of their health
choices and whether or not they're – what do you got there?
So, I know now we're talking about feeding the poor and feeding the hungry, and now we're going to be having caviar, but that only shows you the complexities of life itself.
But me cooking with fire, with vines, orange tree, making the fire.
In the countryside, with the terracotta that you put the water and you put the meats and you put the pork and you put the vegetables and you put the chickpeas and you boil it and you are doing what you do when you are in the forest or in the countryside.
The juiciness of that piece of meat in contact with your tongue.
Before it is in your tongue, obviously, you cannot eat barbecue with fork and knife.
Fork and knife people, they were created for you to protect your food from others.
The fork and knife was not created for you to use it.
You cannot eat barbecue with fork and knife.
You cannot.
But it has many reasons why.
You get a fork and you're getting no information.
You're seeing the color, the usiness, maybe the smell in the distance.
But when you start using your fingers, the moment your fingers get in touch...
With that piece of meat, already the meat is talking to you directly.
Like if it's an alien form telling you, hey baby, here I am.
And you know the temperature and you know the juiciness and you know the fattiness.
And as you are grabbing it with your two fingers already, it's so many things happening in the process of you bringing your two fingers with a piece of barbecue into your mouth.
Already your mouth is salivating.
Already your tongue is activated.
Already your stomach is flowing with juices.
Already your brain, your eyes, everything is just pure joy.
Use the very simple thing of using your two fingers to grab the piece of barbecue.
That moment itself, even if you don't eat it, you can make a movie out of that simple, humble moment of grabbing the piece of barbecue with your two fingers.
Technically, Magellan was the guy that began the circumnavigation on the world, but he died, and the guy that finished the circumnavigation was Juan Sebastián del Cano.
The boat was called in his name.
Beautiful boat.
Four mast, white.
If you could find a photo, it would be amazing if people could see it.
300.
Now, it's women that go, in the old days, 300 men.
Now, actually, the princess, future queen of Spain, is on this boat right now, on the train trip.
First time I leave Europe.
First time I visit Canary Islands.
First time I visit Africa, Ivory Coast, Abidjan.
First time I visit Brazil, Rio de Janeiro.
My first caipirinha, my first papaya.
First time I visit Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo.
First time I arrived to Florida, United States, Pensacola.
The city of the five flags.
Hello, one of the five flags.
The Spanish-Castilian flag.
Hello, offshore I belong here.
Yeah!
I already was in love with America since I was a little boy.
The NBA, the Westerns, the history of America, the Civil War, I was fascinated with America.
There is first time I had soft-shell crops in my life.
Those are the moments that every time you...
I remember when my father brought the first Kiwi home.
I was a little boy and my mom was so upset because he paid like...
Four percent of his monthly salary to buy five kiwis.
But my father was like, I guess that's why I became so crazy.
For me, finding a new product is like the happiest moment of my life.
Swap shell crab for me was like, holy cow!
Swap shell crabs are amazing!
A whole crab that you can eat like a seal that is soft.
Oh my God, those moments I remember like it was yesterday.
But one of the most beautiful things is...
I moved to New York in the next segment of the trip, and I remember coming under the Burress on a bridge, Lady Liberty, Ellis Island.
I'm an immigrant.
Even I'm not an immigrant.
I'm just a soldier, a Navy guy visiting America.
I became an immigrant later.
And that night, I'm watching the American flag.
Before we go to shore.
I'm looking at the stars, same stars we were talking before.
I'm looking at American flag.
I'm looking at the stars, the dark blue color, the white stars.
And me, I'm like, holy cow, America is amazing.
Look, they put in their flag the same blue sky at night where you imagine that you can be free.
That everything is possible, that you are welcome, that if you were hard, you can belong.
I looked like a fool when I realized a few weeks later, whatever, that the American flag stars actually were the States.
Okay?
Yeah, I had no clue that the stars were the States.
To this day, I think my story is much more beautiful.
Much more beautiful than the States.
But anyway, I wanted to share that story with you because when we dock around 30th Street on Manhattan, 30 years later, so I finished the military service,
I came back to America, I moved to New York, then I came to Washington.
But 30 years later, I opened Mercado Little Spain, which was bringing a little...
A bigger piece of Spain to New York, to Manhattan, 200 meters away from the same place I arrived in New York for the first time 30 years before.
And when they tell me about the American dream, I want to share the message that if anything, the American dream is more alive than ever before.
That doesn't mean that we live in a perfect place in a cocoon where everything is perfect.
Actually, no.
The American dream is...
It's realizing that actually we need to work harder for the things we want.
For ourselves and from everybody else around us.
That the American Dream is recognized that we are a beautiful place created through centuries by so many different people that contributed so much.
That people like me, I'm right now so proud and so happy and so thankful overall.
I've been given the opportunity to come to this country to belong as an immigrant, first with an E2 visa, then with a green card, and then becoming an American citizen with three beautiful American daughters.
Much of what I am, I live 70% and 90% of my adult life in this country.
I know where I come from.
I love Spain.
Everybody knows it.
But also I know where I belong.
And everybody knows how much I love this country.
And now go back into my first arrival as a sailor, my comeback as an immigrant.
And the last 30-plus years, I want to remember that moment with the American flag and the beautiful night sky full of stars.
Because it's still the American dream, I want to repeat myself, is here.
But we all need to do better to work towards that dream where we do it.
Sharing longer tables, where we do it with dignity to others, especially to the voiceless, especially to the poor, and that together we solve the problems that we face.
The problems are opportunities for us to work together.
And that's what our politicians need to do more of.
I think I talk about it too much, so people are moving here too much.
I try to hedge my enthusiasm a little bit, but I think cities can get too big, and when cities get too big, people become a burden rather than your neighbors and your community.
People become, you know, you have this diffusion of responsibility.
And then everybody complains that you overcharge, but then we need to take care of the people and the employees need to make a living.
But we forget that the vast majority of the restaurants in America are owned by small business owners, who many of them are working as hard as they can to make the restaurant successful.
And we forget sometimes that, right?
That the business owner, in a way, is the employee, too.
Listen, sometimes it feels, and we saw it during the pandemic, that the people that feed America, the people that feed the world, sometimes it seems, and it's real very often, that they cannot feed themselves.
You know, between restaurants, life, books, trips, TV.
The new TV show I have on NBC with Martha Stewart.
Monday nights at 10 o 'clock after The Voice.
My work, my humanitarian work with World Central Kitchen.
You know, policy work, which I will not say I work on policy.
It's only like when I feel...
I can become one more voice to push smart policy on behalf of all Americans.
I just try to be a voice that brings politicians of both parties closer together to move forward, something like I believe makes every single American better.
And that's how I try to divide my time, like all of us, right?
For me, coming here was, like, the highlight, because, number one, you know, it's like, shit, will he buy me if I ask?
At the same time, it looks pretentious that you ask.
But again, for me, just coming here and getting to be with you one-on-one, yeah, it was kind of in my bucket list of, I don't know, listening to you, I don't know if it's your voice, your looks, the easy conversation with no...
No script.
I mean, you keep asking questions and you have nothing in front of you.
I, you know, in the last 15 years, especially in the last seven, eight after Maria, you know, I've been very much in every single hurricane and every single big earthquake, big tornado.
That all the money we had from donations from people in America that they cannot be more given than people in Europe.
And we channeled that money through supporting the local restaurants.
If they are available...
I'm not going to open my own kitchen.
The same dollar that is going to help feed the refugees or the displaced people is the same dollar that can help maintain the local economy.
Nobody's getting rich.
But the restaurants want to help.
The people want to help.
That's what people don't understand in emergencies.
That everybody wants to be part of the solution.
What Worcester Kitchen does is that it allows everybody to be part of the solution.
In Asheville.
Was no Wilson Dragichem helping feed, even most other organizations feed the people of Asheville and the different parts in North Carolina and the couple of other states that were hit by the post-effects of the hurricane?
Was the people of Asheville that helped feed the people of Asheville?
And we then got a helicopter because we wanted to be cool.
Or another helicopter.
Or another one.
If we had to.
It's because there was no roads.
And the only way to arrive to the people was by helicopter.
Like we did in Bahamas.
We had six helicopters.
Two seaplanes.
One boat with two helipads.
Why we did it?
Because there was no airports.
Because there was no control towers in the north.
It was 16 islands.
Everything was destroyed.
And we had to feed 80,000 people.
The only way to do it was that way.
Asheville, North Carolina was exactly the same.
The fires in California were exactly the same.
How we did it, for example, in California, in Los Angeles.
We were there trying to make sure the firefighters eat.
Not like the system doesn't take care of the firefighters.
It's in place.
Somebody, some organization, some catering.
On paper, getting paid to do it.
But that's a business.
In an emergency, you have to adapt because they're not going to let you go to the firefighters sometimes because it's one guy on the road that is trying to protect you from...
But we have to go to them because those firefighters probably, they're going to be fighting for 48 hours.
Non-stop, no break.
You can see their eyes, how tired they are, and still they keep going.
And if they have a break, you have to be near them to make sure that in that moment they're able to be fed food they need, food they want.
And that's what World Central Kitchen does.
But at the same time, the people escaping the fires.
And the people arriving to the shelters.
That sometimes, in the middle of the night, you get...
3,000 people are riding to a shelter.
Because Altadena was destroyed.
And you have to be there with them.
So we got a lot of restaurants, but we got a lot of food trucks too.
And the food trucks was great because the same way an ambulance is there on a call to bring somebody very quickly after a heart attack and the hospital have an option to save their lives.
We use food trucks like an ambulance.
Or we use food trucks like a fire truck.
We have them there.
We have them park.
We have many already feeding firefighters and shelters and people in their neighborhoods.
But we have 10 or 20 trucks on weight.
Why?
Because every truck is full of 1,000 or 2,000 meals.
That means at any moment, today, tomorrow, at 3 a.m. in the morning, if something happens, we can activate those food trucks within a minute.
In less than one hour, they can be feeding anybody, anywhere.
Amazing moments were when I had Israeli friends that also some of them even lost friends or family members in the October 7th attack.
That because some of them even had two passports that they said, I would love to go to help the people of Gaza to feed themselves.
Like, there's no way we're going to be bringing you in there.
And I had a Palestinian woman that said, you know...
We feel for those people.
I wish I was given the permission to go there to show them that we don't hate them.
But sometimes what you read is only that it's hate.
People that hate each other.
Maybe those are the few.
The vast majority of the people are not hateful.
The vast majority of the people want peace.
The vast majority of the people don't want you to be shooting.
That's what I see in emergencies.
Even in the worst moments, like war songs.
I remember in Ukraine, this older woman in the north, in Kharkiv and in Chernihiv, a woman that didn't speak Ukrainian, speak Russian, and she was like, they are our brothers.
Why are they killing us?
They are our brothers.
Why are our Russian brothers bombing us?
When an older person tells you that with that simple sincerity, You know, speaking from the heart.
They've been under attack and necessary, and this war is lasting too long.
I wish that peace will be reached in the right terms for Ukraine.
And that hopefully also it will be a ceasefire in Gaza.
The hostages will be released immediately.
And hopefully there can be a certain beginning the rebuild of Gaza and giving the people of Palestine the future they deserve in peace and prosperity, equally as what the people of Israel deserve, living in peace and prosperity without being afraid of a terrorist attack every other day of their lives.
What is good for Israel must be good for Palestine too, and vice versa.
And that's something like I believe everybody agrees on.