Whenever something went wrong when I was young - if I had a pimple or if my hair broke - my mom would say, 'Sister mine, I'm going to make you some soup.' And I really thought the soup would make my pimple go away or my hair stronger.
My mom always says, "Pack your smile," but [the sound guy] articulated it beautifully, because he saw me go from Joe Schmo who had been on food stamps to Adam Richman from Man V. Food. He said, "For you, it may be your 50th or 100th selfie, autograph, or whatever of the day. But for that person, it may be the first or the only time in their life that they've seen someone they enjoy on television. Never lose sight of that."
My mom's a psychologist, and I think that has influenced me on a personal level. Plus, I'm just generally interested in visualization and humanity, social activity and technology, and what happens in aggregate.
I was raised in a spirit of the importance of service to your fellow man. My mom is a senator back home in South Africa. My father is a very caring and generous individual.
No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children; for upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour of the day but often every hour of the night.
The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.
My dad didn't graduate from high school, ended up being a printing salesman, probably never made more than $8,000 a year. My mom sold real estate and did it part time.
My mom was on welfare and the occasional food stamp, but I have never participated in any of those governmental programs, even the ones that kind of work like education, scholarships and whatever, and I managed to do just fine.
"Baby, you know?" my mother once said to me. "I think you're the greatest woman I've ever met - and I'm not including my mother or Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt in that." She said, "You are very intelligent and you're very kind, and those two qualities do not often go together." Then she went across the street and got in her car, and I went the other way down to the streetcar. I thought, "Suppose she's right. She's intelligent - and she's too mean to lie." You see, a parent has the chance - and maybe the responsibility - to liberate her child. And my mom had liberated me when I was 17.
I have had viewers that come up to me, and they're, like, "You know, we used to watch ('Breaking Bad') as a family, and once the melted body came falling through the ceiling, my mom was just, like, 'I can't watch this show anymore. This is just way too disturbing for me.' So it's not for everybody.
I think I was afraid of being a mother for many reasons. I wanted to be a good mom and I was fearful at one point of even working at the national level because I was afraid that I would disappoint a child or I wouldn't be as ready for a big position as maybe I should have been when I came to Fox.
When you're walking down the street or in the car just listening to the radio, and you're, like , 'Oh, that's my song.' You want to say, 'Hey Mom!' That never changes.
What I remember thinking at that point, having gone through both the ups and downs of my first four years, and seeing the sea of people was, "What a remarkable country this is and how lucky am I that we live in a place where the son of a single mom, not born into any kind of fame or fortune, in a pretty remote state somehow can end up be in a position to - to make a difference."