There's a great book by my friend Nate Garvis called Naked Civics that was very important in my development as someone with a social conscious and that has become, I guess, something of an activist.

Don't eat till you're full, eat till you're tired.

The single greatest pleasure that I have in doing ('Bizarre Foods') is when I meet families with 6, 7, 8-year-olds, or teenagers, who say, 'It's something the whole family can watch, and it lets us show our younger children that one man's 'weird' is another man's 'wonderful,' and we all kind of live in the same place.' It's just the best part of my day.

You never know when the next person to shake your hand at an autograph session, or the next guy you bump into on line at the pizza parlor, that could be your best friend for the rest of your life. Or it could be the person that two years later pushes you out of the way of a speeding bus. I mean, you just don't know.

The food to me is just a hook, it's a button, it happens to be the social construct and the cultural totem that I'm most familiar with. So of course I built the show around food because it's where I'm familiar.

I don't want people to judge books by their cover, I want people to be open minded to the rest of the world.

Please be a traveler, not a tourist. Try new things, meet new people, and look beyond what's right in front of you. Those are the keys to understanding this amazing world we live in.