YouSaid · the spoken record

Amanda Hesser

lines on the record: 114
first: 2023-03-20
most recent: 2023-03-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So I just want to back up a minute because between my junior and senior years, my dad died. That was a big Obviously, it was a devastating moment. And Know put me in a place where I felt, you know, quite lost. But I also, looking back, I realized that it was this moment of liberation from like I felt so lost that I felt like I didn't, I really didn't have to conform to anybody's expectation about what I should or shouldn't do after college.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She didn't go in saying, like, we're gonna have steak. She would go in and look at what she deemed. Know good quality and then decide on what we were going to have from there. And so I think there was a lot of influence that was built in to my upbringing. And, you know, and it was even something that I think was a little weird back then. Like I remember, you know, one of my best friends coming over and her crying at our dinner table because my mom was serving asparagus. And that's not an unusual vegetable now, but certainly in, you know, in Pennsylvania in the 70s, it was nobody was really eating asparagus.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Food was always a really important part of our family life. And kind of everyone cooked or contributed in some way. You know, I think about like, you know, when we would go to my grandparents in Maryland, we would go crabbing and then we would cook the crabs and we would eat them with tomatoes that they grew in their garden. And we never had a store-bought cake. It was always made from scratch. My mom, you know, she would even bake her own bread and, you know, she always made jam in the summer. And like my mother would go to the grocery store, I very, you know, list oriented. Like I want to get things done. So I would always be like, okay, mom, what's the list? Let's split it up. And she said, well, you know, I have a couple things on the list, but I just want to see what looks good.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know it's always been there. I think it took me a while to realize that. It took me leaving home to realize that even though I come from a family with very kind of like I would say like a very kind of like working class like values, the”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I was a good student, and I was a very involved in a lot of school activities. I played basketball, I ran track, I played tennis, I was very active. But I think that a couple of things heavily influenced certainly my teenage years. When I was 11, you know, my dad, he had a massive heart attack. And from he survived this heart attack, but it severely diminished his health. And it was a pretty intense period of my life. And I think that, you know, at that age, I just had a very different feeling about my parents than most teenagers. You know, I think, you know, I had a real appreciation for the fact that they were alive. And it was very clear that to me that life was precious. And this was. We were lucky”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A building filled with cars that are filled with gasoline catches fire. It's just a pretty big disaster. So they lost most of everything. They had some cars and a lot across the street that hadn't been damaged. And, you know, it was a very sort of defining moment for, I think, me as a child in that, you know, my I think a lot of people could really feel quite defeated. You know, my memory is that, you know, my dad didn't pause for a moment. He, you know, immediately rented a trailer so that he could have a temporary office and, you know, continued selling the cars that weren't burnt.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getting attention. And there was definitely a sense in the household of I felt like we felt as a family kind of like the pressures of what it was like to build a business. And it wasn't easy. There was the oil crisis, so gas prices were up and people weren't buying cars, but there was also a few years after my parents bought this dealership, it went up in flames. And the whole building burnt to the ground in the middle of the night. And it was just a giant fire because, you know, when...”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of my memories around that is he created something called the Jello Jump and it involved filling a garbage dumpster, a clean garbage dumpster with orange jello and putting a bunch of numbered keys in the bottom of the dumpster. And so every number correlated with a prize and one of the prizes was a car. And so in order to get your key, you had to jump into the jell-dumpster. And, you know, he just instinctively knew that this was funny and also would energize people. And the local news media covered it and lots of people came and it was like, you know, a hot summer day and the perfect day for jumping in a dumpster of jello. But yeah, he was really good at”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Provisional instincts of an entrepreneur. Instincts she actually learned from her dad. In the 1970s when Amanda was a kid, her dad owned a Chevy dealership in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her parents took out a massive loan to buy that dealership, and Amanda remembers her dad as a smart and scrappy businessman.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amanda had one of the most coveted jobs in journalism. She was a food critic and writer at the New York Times, testing recipes, writing reviews, and compiling cookbooks. It's the kind of job a lot of people would have stayed at forever. But around 2009, Amanda decided to take a big risk and start her own venture, a food blog called Food fifty two, with a limited amount of money and using her own apartment as a test kitchen, Amanda and her co-founder, Meryl Stubbs, gradually and sometimes painfully built Food 52 into a digital media company, which today reaches about twenty five million users a month. And along the way, Amanda sort of combined the best of two careers, the relentless drive and intensity of a New York Times reporter and the”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are deeply skeptical people. They have to be. They're trained to doubt and debate everything they're told. Unlike many of the founders I've met, the very best reporters are generally not fake it till you make it type of people. They're meticulous about getting the facts straight and making sure they're not getting spun by a source. And years and years of doing that? Well, it can make you kind of cynical, suspicious, even a bit jaded, none of which is helpful if suddenly you decide you want to start a business. So when a story of a former journalist turned entrepreneur crosses my desk, I get excited because it's a reminder that it takes a lot of courage to leave a prestigious job in a newsroom. But that is essentially what Amanda Hesser did. For a little over ten years”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of my favorite people to hang out with are reporters. They generally tend to be fun and interesting and a little snarky but usually with the best intentions. And because I used to be one myself, I understand where they're coming from. Reporters actually have a lot of the same skills and qualities required to become a great entrepreneur. They're curious, they know how to become experts pretty fast. They know how to ask questions, how to get around insurmountable obstacles, how to spot an opportunity. And some of them are pretty big risk takers. They stand in was deep water in the middle of hurricanes and jump into the middle of war zones. But for all the entrepreneurial zeal embedded in the profession, there is one thing that many journalists share that is not conducive to starting a business.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we cried over pizza, but really good pizza. And we needed to have a conversation of like, where is our breaking point? Because it felt like we just, it wasn't that we had no traction. We definitely had people interested, but we just couldn't get that lead. And then I actually like often with things that are bad memories, I sort of shove them into a drawer somewhere in my brain. And I don't know, maybe it was a good pizza that we were just like, yes, we're going to keep going.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of my favorite parts of traveling is getting a feel for a neighborhood, the way locals do. A few summers ago, I was in Rome and stayed in an apartment I booked on Airbnb. It was tucked in a quiet neighborhood just outside the Roman forum. Every morning I'd walk to the corner cafe, grab an espresso, and just watch the world go by outside. I even managed to chat with the owner about the neighborhood he lived in for nearly forty years. And he got me thinking about my own neighborhood. There are incredible hiking trails and great restaurants and, of course, the beach. And when I'm traveling this summer, listing my own place on Airbnb could be a really smart way to let someone else experience the area the way I do, like a local. Listing your home on Airbnb while you're traveling is a great way to make some extra money. You could put the money toward your next trip. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT