From warzones to boardrooms: José Andrés on leadership learned in the kitchen

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

JOSÉ ANDRÉS: Humans, we’ve been building, post-World War II, a good world, a good world that, in America, is full of imperfections, and that we need to work together to fix them, of course, but you don’t fix them by burning everything down. You fix them by coming together to the table, realizing that problems never will be solved by finger-pointing. Problems will always be solved sitting down in the table and coming together. And how we find common ground, that’s the way we build good intent, good empathy, good policy that then becomes good politics because it’s on behalf of all Americans. That’s the way we should be doing it. So that’s why, in a way, I’m hopeful.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s José Andrés, chef, restaurateur, author, and founder of World Central Kitchen. José has a new book out, Change the Recipe, filled with lessons from José’s life in the kitchen that can be applied to leadership and everyday life. We used the book as a jumping off point to discuss everything from what rules are worth breaking, to the benefits of unplugging, to why everyone has the potential, in José’s words, to be superhuman. We also cover the ongoing hurdles that World Central Kitchen faces in multiple war zones around the world, the messy state of Trump’s tariffs, and more.

Above it all, José’s enduring optimism shines through. I don’t know about you, but I need to hear some of that right now, so let’s dive in. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with José Andrés, renowned chef and restaurateur, TV host, author, father, husband, and founder of World Central Kitchen. José, it’s great to see you again. Thanks for being here.

ANDRÉS: Happy to be back, Bob.

Copy LinkLessons from the kitchen

SAFIAN: Yeah. So you have a new book out called Change the Recipe, but it is not a cookbook. It’s a book about building a better world, or as the subtitle puts it, “You can’t build a better world without breaking some eggs.” The book’s filled with personal stories and advice. Why this book? Why now?

ANDRÉS: Well, I don’t even think it’s a book. It’s few thoughts, few ideas of my life since I was a little boy all the way until now, and things I learned, things I learned from the right decision, things we learned maybe from the wrong decision but that they help you to become better — random stories that I wanted to share with my daughters. I wanted to share with anybody maybe interested in finding answers to problems they face themselves.

SAFIAN: There’s this theme in it that lessons from the kitchen are kind of applicable everywhere from the boardroom to everyday life. That’s been your experience?

ANDRÉS: Cooking for me has never been a job. It’s been something I enjoy since I was a young boy going to work early in the morning to the kitchens. I remember I would get there early because for me, arriving to the kitchen early before anybody else got there was, I don’t know, it was so special. I used to see a kitchen come to life every single morning. From the moment you go there looking like a cave, dark, from the moment you turn on the first lights, you turn the ovens on, and everything began getting warmer and then everybody began arriving slowly—

SAFIAN: It’s like every day is spring, things coming up.

ANDRÉS: Very slowly. So I spent a lot of time obviously in kitchens and not only in professional kitchens but also in the kitchen in my house, and I realized that there’s a lot of moments and lessons that, even at the time, were not maybe meaningful to me because I was young or they are stories that stayed with me in my memory line of the past.

And all of a sudden, as I was growing up, I began making sense of the moment, even reimagining what my father wanted to tell me, what he told me, “You need to control the fire.” Sometimes I kind of romanticize the moment maybe. Maybe his words in his brain were not so deep. He only was telling me, “Control the fire, or you cannot cook,” literally. But then I began trying to imagine that maybe behind the words of wisdom were deeper and deeper and deeper stories.

SAFIAN: And what does the phrase mind the fire mean to you now?

ANDRÉS: Well, this came out of a story of me helping my dad. I would help my mama in the kitchen, everybody in my house would help in the kitchen. My three brothers, myself, my father, but my mom was Monday through Friday. My father was more the weekend cook when more people probably will arrive. Gatherings we would do in a near forest or in a park, and my father would cook very often the big pot, the big paella, and I will be always in charge of the fire.

And one day, I got upset because I wanted to do the cooking. I wanted to cook with him. I don’t even remember the exact age, but it happened anywhere between 11, 12, 13 years old. And my father didn’t let me do the cooking because it was a very big one. The fire required a lot of support and, “No, I need you to concentrate on the fire.” I got upset. He sent me away, and then my father told me, “You must control the fire. If you don’t learn how to control the fire, there’s no cooking you can do.”

For a cook, a young cook in the making, controlling the fire is everything. I think we all need to find our fire, we need to control it, we need to master it. And then in a way, you can do anything you want with your life. You can do any cooking you want with your life.

So I think we are all in this search obviously that: What is our fire? What keeps us going, and are we able to master that so we can achieve anything we want? In a way, this is a story of controlling the fire.

Copy LinkBalancing food & business endeavors

SAFIAN: I was curious, as a cook, you think about individual dishes and you think about the meal, how it all comes together, and I’m wondering in your other businesses at World Central Kitchen, all your ventures, how do you balance the focus between dishes and meals, between projects and mission, or are they not separate for you?

ANDRÉS: Well, I’m 55, and I’m still a little bit confused of what my role in life is.

SAFIAN: Like the rest of us.

ANDRÉS: And I think it’s okay because if you recognize you are confused sometimes, you keep searching. Maybe it’s one of the reasons I turn everybody crazy around me because I try to do so many things, but it’s not the number of things I do. It’s how diversified the world is and the amount of things you want to be part of because I think it’s good that you’re involved. By being involved, it doesn’t make you an expert, but at the very least, you are learning in real time with boots on the ground what happens.

When I was a younger cook and I began being the chef of my restaurant and then partner and owner of my own restaurant company, I wish I knew more about business back then. I didn’t go business school, but that applies to everything else. I am a cook that feeds the field. I always had the interest to be part of feeding the many. We all have a talent within us that goes beyond what we think of ourselves.

In a way, I think everybody is a superhuman. They need to believe it, and they need to see the talents they have. And even talents they have and they don’t pride themselves for it can be a very powerful tool for them to make people around them even better.

So it’s okay to move away from my business domain and become volunteering in a local soup kitchen, which is also food, and it’s also business in a way, the business of giving opportunity to people that had none. In the process, they become cooks. Like when I began joining this Central Kitchen, which is my favorite NGO in America, that they do something as simple as giving people the chance to belong, training them to be cooks, feeding the homeless population, fighting food waste. Oh my God. It’s like we need more of this type of NGO that they have the mentality of for-profit.

In the process of all of that, uniting the dots, I become better at understanding what are the solutions to the problems we face versus blaming and finger-pointing to everybody for everything that is wrong. It’s involving yourself in everyday life that surrounds you to make obviously your business or your work place better, to make your street better, to make your neighborhood better. Obviously, your family, your friends. In the process, everybody’s contributing.

In order to do that, we don’t have to do it, but I see that everybody has that feeling of doing something. Being the coach on your children’s game, that’s an amazing way to create. It’s a lot of ways everybody contributes, only we need to make sure that all of that is multiplied in such a ways that then is stopping problems and amazing opportunities keep moving forward.

SAFIAN: Your fire is as a cook, but as you talk about all this, I mean, you’ve got fire as a business person, as someone who’s trying to sort of use levers to amplify, even though you may not define yourself that way.

ANDRÉS: Well, my company is in a good moment. Still we are not out of the water completely after COVID. Many, many companies in America, especially in the area I know a little bit more, which is the restaurant company, we went through a lot of hardships and you keep looking at the future to make sure that the decisions you keep making today, you make them learning from decisions maybe you made in the past and that you regret you made them before COVID came, for example.

So it’s all always learning and that’s what I keep doing every day, every day of my life.

Copy LinkJosé Andrés on his new show, “Yes, Chef!”

SAFIAN: Along with the book, you also have a new TV show premiering shortly called “Yes, Chef!” Right? Co-host is Martha Stewart. It sounds like you two had fun together.

ANDRÉS: Well, Martha is an amazing human being. My God. She’s so full of energy, so full of wisdom.

SAFIAN: And was it fun?

ANDRÉS: Oh, it was very fun, and I put my phone away and dedicated myself just to do the show and have time to meet the people. Sometimes I’m realizing that I’m not even having the time to do it right now, even with my restaurants, because it becomes a very big mountain of more people you have to meet, more people, which is necessary. But this one moment, you are only one person. And I realized, and especially this last year, everything is very overwhelmed.

So for me, doing the show was a way just to say, “I’m going to do the show, and I’m going to have fun.” And I tried to meet every one of the cameramen. We shot in Toronto. Amazing people, and I met everybody I could, and we played darts, and I went two, three times to amazing restaurants in Toronto. I cook a lot at home because it was cold and snowy every day and was raccoons all over the house and I love that, all of that.

But this long story was to tell you that I really enjoyed the moment, but the message, what I realized is that sometimes, in the last few years, I’ve been on the grumpy side more times than I like, and I realize that has a lot to do with being overwhelmed sometimes, pressure on your shoulders of a lot of things you are leading, that it’s not the fault of anyone. They’re all mine because I’m the one that gets into so many things, that maybe I don’t have to head into so many things. Even I have great people that manage them, I’m only just very lucky that when I open my mouth, things happen or they start happening.

But I realized that sometimes just to breathe in, breathe out, do one thing and put everything you got into the one thing allows you to fulfill and enjoy the moment so much more than when you keep always trying to do a hundred things at once, and this is the big learning from this show.

So yeah, I hope the show will do great. I got to know Martha even more. I think we are now even, you need to ask her, but I think even more friends. We keep texting each other now. It was very, very, very special, very emotional because it’s real people, real 12 chefs that they’re going through their own life issues and restaurant issues and they go into this competition that is a competition, but there’s a quarter million on the line, and in the process they need to fulfill who they are as a chef, as a person, as a mother, as a father, as a boyfriend. Wow. All these things are going to be part of the show.

So yeah, NBC, 28th of April, 10:00 PM after The Voice, 10 episodes. “Yes, Chef!”

Copy LinkInside World Central Kitchen’s global aid

SAFIAN: When we last talked, it was probably two-plus years ago for this show, and you were focused on Ukraine. It was six months after Russia invaded Ukraine. World Central Kitchen was feeding millions of people. You’d just come back from talking to Zelenskyy. You were struggling to maintain balance in your life. You felt this weight of others’ troubles on you. Do you feel any lighter today?

ANDRÉS: No.

SAFIAN: No?

ANDRÉS: No. The last two years and a half, if anything, they’ve been more brutal, right? It’s been more than a year I didn’t go back to Ukraine now, but again, one thing is World Central Kitchen, another thing is José Andrés, and it’s a good thing, obviously I’m very involved with World Central Kitchen.

In the last days, we’ve been able to be delivering 60 — I don’t know, up to 100, we are trying to do — big generators because many of the rural farmers, and especially cow milk producers, were in lack of electricity. All the electricity and grid has been damaged enormously. There’s many parts that they have zero electricity, and probably it’ll be years before they’re repaired. We’ve been able to deliver those massive generators that will simplify the lives of meal-producers.

We’re doing other things of that sort. We built a kitchen in the north in Chernihiv, and so we help build one kitchen that is feeding, I don’t know, up to 10 schools out of that central kitchen. Not close to the front lines, but close enough. I’ve been supporting an organization that is trying to bring the thousands and thousands of Ukrainian children that they’ve been taken by Russia.

And obviously the efforts of World Central Kitchen, we are not doing the numbers we used to do, but we’ve done over 300 million meals. Without a doubt, we were the biggest humanitarian organization in Ukraine, especially the first year and a half. We took over in the first year in ways nobody else was able to do. But it’s not good or bad. It is the space we occupy. We are the quick, faster, and we can become very massive if we get the support of the people.

Myself personally, as one more volunteer, I’ve been in Ukraine, I was in Turkey, in Syria on the huge earthquake. Everybody told me, “You shouldn’t go to Syria,” and probably I was supposed to listen, but it was important for me that I saw with boots on the ground what was going on in Syria. We were able to put a lot of hundreds of thousands of meals every single day to help the people in northern Syria that between a war, they’re forgotten. Imagine. Wars of the wars, when you already were in a hole, even deeper. So for me, it was important we were there, and there we were.

I’ve been in other scenarios. I was in Asheville in North Carolina in the mountains every day in a helicopter joining World Central Kitchen team and delivering food. I was the same in Valencia where more than 230 people also die in a big flooding that nobody saw coming where thousands and thousands of homes disappeared. Tens of thousands, thousands of business were underwater. And I went there too because obviously it’s the country I come from, and I had to be there.

Even moments, I say, “I don’t want do it anymore,” I don’t have to. I’ve been doing this 15 years now, and it’s a volunteer job. Done some other, but I have a hard time staying away. I went Gaza, I went to Lebanon, I went to Egypt, I went to Israel this last year. It’s been hard the last almost two years.

So you mentioned, is it any more weight? Well, I mean, we began feeding in Israel when Israel was attacked by Hamas. At the same time, we were in Gaza because we had to be in Gaza. Obviously Gaza became much more massive for us. We reached close to half a million meals a day. We help support almost 196 kitchens, which was the right thing to do. Putting aside the wars, putting aside the invasions, putting it aside, and that’s what I’ve been doing, making sure that at least food gives opportunity and hope to people.

This all comes with weight. Obviously, this last year we lost seven members of World Central Kitchen in a strike by the IDF, and obviously we’re trying to still search for answers, and we got some answers, but still, you want more answers on behalf of everybody, and with a very simple idea that the future of anybody that is fighting with each other is just to live in peace. It can be Russians with Ukrainians, Israelis and Palestinians. It’s the same questions from a lot of people, “Why you here?” People from Israel that wanted to go to help feed in Palestine, people in Palestine that want to go help feed in Israel.

I believe it’s the silent majority that usually wants goodness, that wants to live in peace. And that’s what I obviously try to do personally. Building longer tables, seating more people than maybe they were not meant to know each other or that they seem they are at odds with each other. To see that it’s much more humanity within every one of them and that the vast majority of the people, I put my hand on the fire that that’s what they want. What is good for me must be good for you too.

SAFIAN: José’s openness to varied communities runs counter to the “what’s in it for me?” vibe these days. So how can turning to others help us thrive as individuals, businesses, and countries, especially in a time of increasing volatility? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, chef and World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés previewed his new book Change the Recipe and talked about why longer tables, not higher walls, are critical to solving the world’s biggest problems. Now, he shares lessons about what rules are worth breaking, where he finds hope in the face of crisis, and more. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkAdapting in volatile times

One of the book’s key themes is adaptability, right?

ANDRÉS: Yeah.

SAFIAN: And for many people, especially today, very volatile, there can be panic, there could be paralysis. How do you center yourself in those moments, and how much do you think adaptability is about temperament versus something we can learn?

ANDRÉS: I think the human DNA of who we are, we are a species that we are highly adaptable. We are not adaptable with our bodies, meaning evolution happens over hundreds of thousands, millions of years, but our brain can and our heart can. Our heart in ways of things that you didn’t care about forever, that didn’t make you a bad person, but once you find out what something is, your heart adapts and we change.

Copy LinkWhen rules should be broken

SAFIAN: You talk in the book about breaking rules and that you need to break rules to make progress.

ANDRÉS: Yeah. Obviously, that one can be used in many ways because you could argue that rules are being broken right now in our government.

SAFIAN: I want to ask you because you’re in favor of rule-breaking sometimes to get certain things done, right?

ANDRÉS: Let me tell you what rule-breaking means. It’s like when you show up somewhere and somebody comes and tells you that you are not needed here and you’re looking around and you are only seeing hunger, destruction. I’m sorry, but I want to be respectful, but if I see that there’s need, we’re going to stay here because our mission is not going to be following your guidance. It’s going to be following what the people are telling us.

And so this is a way of breaking rules. We were told sometimes in some hurricanes in America that some schools, we couldn’t use the kitchens, and the school kitchen was the best kitchen in many kilometers around and was complicated to navigate through roads and destruction, and even we were told we couldn’t use that kitchen. We used that kitchen. We got in trouble. We got in trouble until, “Oh, you are feeding 2,000 people every day?” I think that’s a rule that I will even not mind to pay a penalty or even be sent to jail.

SAFIAN: Right. You’re okay if you pay a penalty for breaking those rules because the goal is important enough.

ANDRÉS: That’s what these breaking the rules means. Sometimes the rules are in your own brain. It’s breaking the chains of the own rules that you set on your own that don’t allow you to do the extra step to make something happen.

Copy LinkThe difference in thinking like hardware vs software

SAFIAN: Sometimes they’re rules then, they’re not really rules. You’ve just taken them as rules. I want to ask you, there’s something else you write about in the book, the difference between thinking like software and thinking like hardware. Can you explain what that is?

ANDRÉS: Yeah. Well, obviously, this is a one that in emergencies I learned a long time ago. Very often in emergencies, you can hear presidents, “We are positioning military or helicopters or boats or food or armories or water or ambulances.” Okay. All of that is hardware. The hardware are tools, things that will allow you to have a good response. Everybody’s going to be working on bringing the hardware to ground zero.

A week later, two weeks later, you are still in the business of being a transportation company that you are trying to move hardware from point A to ground zero. All of a sudden, you forgot who you were: a feeding organization.

Software will allow you to respond to your main mission, which is feeding people on day one. What software is, what do you have around to feed people? What is at your finger points today? Ain’t going to be perfect. Ain’t going to be pretty. You’re not going to have logos. It’s not going to be the perfect, clean, basket container to go. Maybe tamales in a banana leaf because it’s the only thing we have. We don’t even have forks and knives, but that allows you to give to somebody a piece of food that actually you can be holding in your hands and you are feeding day one in the heart of Puerto Rico with nothing.

So that’s the hardware versus software. Never forget your mission, never forget what you’re there for. For any organization, every organization has to be having very clearly what your mission is to the most simplistic, as smaller phrase possible, and never let anybody forget that. If not, your mission becomes something else. Concentrating on the software will always allow you to be faster and quicker.

Copy LinkCan AI solve our food problems?

SAFIAN: As you’re talking about technology, I recently did an episode with Marc Lore, the founder of Wonder.

ANDRÉS: Marc, yeah.

SAFIAN: Yes, you know the food delivery app. I know you’ve collaborated with Wonder. And Marc talked about how he uses AI to pick all of his meals, like every meal, and he thinks one day everybody’s going to do that and you’re even going to use it at a restaurant to pick your meals for you.

Has he talked to you about this? Have you tried it? Do you think this is a good thing?

ANDRÉS: Anything Marc says, I will support because Marc is one of those amazing brains. Obviously, he’s working on taxis that will lift up in the middle of the cities, planes that will fly us away. I think he just bought the Timberwolves, and so many other things. And obviously, Wonder I know very well. I’m on their board.

The big thing for me and AI is when I tell AI, “What are the food problems and food solutions that America and planet Earth?” And AI right now at the best can do is giving you a very good glimpse of all the different situations food is a problem and can be a solution, and these things people don’t even imagine. But food is everything. Food is national security, food is defense, food is immigration, food is a science, food is health, food is the economy.

Food is very much in everything, and we don’t even realize. We only have food in planet Earth for around six, seven weeks, no more. I think the number is, at the moment, it’s 90 days is the total food that we have in stored to feed the 8 billion people on planet Earth. If a major thing will happen at once, and it’s been glimpses in the past that we had back-to-back hurricanes in high productive food areas of America, Central America, tornadoes, droughts, pests wiping out food production, wiping out cattle, wiping out eggs, wiping out chickens.

Imagine if the perfect storm happens. We have enough food to eat in planet Earth. Why we are not finding the way to make sure that those people that are really poor, we distribute that excess of food through better distribution, et cetera? That’s the problem now. We have enough, but not everybody is receiving the food, and we should be solving this problem. I believe it’s highly solvable.

But we have another problem that is brewing in the back, and I don’t think anybody’s giving enough attention. That’s why I’m asking for a national food security advisor to the president. What happen if one day we wake up and we say, “Today is not the enough food to feed America”? These are the problems that I hope AI will come up with.

So obviously, if Marc is saying, “This is the way,” I will listen to Marc because we need more brains like Marc solving problems, and it doesn’t seem we have the people or the experts concentrated in what can become potentially a very big problem not too far away from today.

Copy LinkReasons to be optimistic about the U.S

SAFIAN: So I want to ask you one last question. Are you optimistic today about America?

ANDRÉS: I am optimistic in the way that in life, humans, we learn how to adapt, and we seem sometimes we learn the lessons, even it seems we only learn them short term and we have a short memory, and then we need to go back to the mistakes of the past to remind ourselves that this other is always a better way.

The last issues with tariffs happened what, almost over a hundred years ago? And I guess nobody is alive that went through the great pains that those tariffs created. Therefore, sometimes you have to go through problems to remind every human how good our life is, how much we have to work to keep improving what doesn’t work.

But my God, I am asking everybody, go out right now. Walk in your cities, walk in the countryside, take a look at the trees with the flowers and the butterflies and the children playing in the campgrounds in poor neighborhoods and in rich neighborhoods. Just people walking alongside, 50 years married, hand by hand, and just smiling that they spend their lives together. The hospitals, the nurses, the doctors doing the best. Take a look around airports, that they function in a very amazing way that they don’t know how. Things actually work.

Humans, we’ve been building since post-World War II, a good world, a good world that, in America, is full of imperfections and that we need to work together to fix them, of course, but you don’t fix them burning everything down. You fix them by coming together to the table, realizing that problems never will be solved by finger-pointing. Problems will always be solved sitting down in the table and coming together and how we find common ground.

That’s the way we build good intent, good empathy, good policy that then becomes good politics because it’s on behalf of all Americans.

SAFIAN: Of everyone.

ANDRÉS: That’s the way we should be doing it. So that’s why, in a way, I’m hopeful.

SAFIAN: Well, thank you so much for doing this.

ANDRÉS: Thank you.

SAFIAN: Your spirit may be hard, but your energy is great. Change the Recipe, the book’s out now.

It’s hard not to get caught up in the rhythm and whimsy of José’s mind. I never know quite where he’s going to go next, but I’m never disappointed. At a time where finger-pointing and tribalism is on the rise, it’s refreshing to hear how José still sees the best in people. He’s upbeat about what humanity has the power to achieve if we work together to solve problems, yet his optimism isn’t naive. He’s pragmatic, leaning into boots-on-the-ground action.

As we all try to navigate today’s volatile climate, let’s see if we can’t inject at least a little bit of José’s romance for life along the way. It couldn’t hurt and it might just help.

I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.