How I Built This with Guy Raz - HIBT Lab! Osmo Salt: Nick DiGiovanni

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

Do you know who holds the record for making the world’s largest chicken nugget? How about the world’s largest sushi roll?If you know Nick DiGiovanni, then you know the answer to those questions. Each week, more than 15 million followers across YouTube and TikTok gawk and drool over Nick’s masterful and over-the-top culinary creations. Nick is at the helm of some analog business ventures too, including a DTC salt and seasoning company and his debut cookbook, Knife Drop, which publishes later this year. This week on How I Built This Lab, Nick talks with Guy about overcoming shyness to become an on-camera personality, and his recent decision to forego Harvard Business School to continue on his path as a creator. Nick also opens up about his struggles to set strong work-life boundaries and speculates about his professional future. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. So I cook dinner for my family every night. It's my me time. Anyway, a few months ago, I noticed that my kids were hanging out in the kitchen with me a lot more. more while I was cooking. They were asking questions, even wanting to help out. And it turns out that my kids, like apparently hundreds of thousands of other kids, were watching videos from a

YouTuber named Nick D. Giovanni. His videos have been viewed over three billion times since he started posting them on TikTok and YouTube in 2019. Some of his videos are how-toes, how to make ramen, how to make beef Wellington, how to grill a wagyu steak. He's even made the world's biggest chicken nugget. And Nick comes to his craft from a place of real expertise. Years before he became a YouTuber, he took courses at the Culinary Institute of America, he worked in Michelin-starred restaurants, he did his college thesis about food and climate change, and he even competed on the TV show Master Chef. Today, Nick's got about 15 million followers across his social media channels, and he's also started a food company called Osmo that sells

salts and seasonings. And when it comes to his passion for cooking, it started when he was just eight or nine years old, making pancakes. I think every kid at some point helps their parents make pancakes. But for some reason, and I couldn't really tell you why, I started to play with the pancakes. So I'd put lemon zest in there, and I'd put orange zest and, you know, orange and chocolate chips. And so I remember experimenting a lot with simple stuff at first, like pancakes. And then I was doing this in part, I'm sure, because I was watching my grandmother and my great-grandmother and all of them cook. So, you know, I was very impressionable, I guess, when it came to food and cooking, and I just soaked it all in and wanted to do it myself. But from what I gather,

you were actually an athlete, which takes a lot of time and commitment, right? Well, yeah, but I will also say growing up with three younger brothers, you have to play every sport. So I think the only sport that I didn't get into is football, but I played lacrosse. I played hockey, ice hockey. I, I mean, I literally, I can do any sport in the ocean. But you still were into cooking. Like, you went to a cooking camp, I think, a freshman year of high school, right? Like a summer camp at the Culinary Institute of America. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was the only sort of younger kid there, and the rest of the people were, I don't know, I want to say, in their 50s. Wow.

So, yeah, I wanted to go there and learn more formal training. Because the routes that you can take when it comes to the food world are, you know, you can either go to culinary school and take out a huge loan and do that or you can go to restaurants and get paid right away and hope that it kind of pays off even more from the learning experience in restaurants. So I did that in part as a test, you know, do I want to go to culinary school or do I want to jump straight into restaurants and learn that way? Yeah. Clearly you were taking this seriously already in high school. What was it about cooking or like the idea of cooking that appealed to you? Because you're an athlete, a student athlete. A lot of times, you know, there's like a path, right? Like kids who are really good at sports or really into sports. Like that's what they do. Focus on that. And you were on that path as an athlete. But what was it about cooking that kept drawing you back? I think my parents were great in the sense that, you know, they especially encouraged us to be well-rounded, try to be a student. student athlete or whether it was an instrument or whatever. But like you sort of hinted at, cooking was always there no matter what was happening around me. Yeah. And in trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I think especially when that crossroads came in college, when you have to start deciding, what do you want to be when you grow up? The question becomes real. And then

that's when I looked to food and she said, food's the thing that I love the most. Yeah. And I want to do something in the food world. All right. So you take this summer program at the CIA, the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park and in that time at that camp. I mean, obviously, you can't learn, you know, what it takes to become a professional chef, but you can learn some knife skills or you can learn how to make a holidays or, you know, brown butter sauce or presumably basic techniques like that. Yeah, I mean, it was a lot of the more sort of basic stuff there. But as I like to say in food, I mean, you have to learn the foundations and the techniques before you can break the rules, which is what I think leads to good food.

All right. I think already in high school, you got a job in the kitchen at an Italian restaurant in Providence. What were you doing? Like were you doing prep work in the kitchen? Yeah. So it's called, you know, when you stage, that's sort of the culinary world equivalent of an internship. And so, you know, I went in and I would spend the whole day, you know, every day throughout this whole summer I spent there doing prep work. I was sort of taken under this one cook's wing. And he, you know, he. helped me. You know, they let me do more and more as time went on. It was fun. It was fast-paced. And I learned how the ins and outs of a restaurant worked. It was amazing. Yeah. Nick, you obviously did not go to culinary school because you had a different offer, which was to go to Harvard. And I know you created a major for yourself called Food and Climate. So while you were in college before your senior year, did you have a sense of what you were going to do? Like, did you think, oh, maybe I'll I'll become a restaurateur or, you know, or maybe I'll, like, become a food consultant or maybe, like, did you start to think about what you might do? Totally.

So my master plan was to go to college, get a degree there, and then finish school and go get an MBA to know the business side. And then also work in more restaurants and perhaps go to culinary school after. And so my thought there was I'd worked in restaurants. And, I mean, anytime I'd been in a restaurant, I noticed this one interesting thing, which was, that oftentimes there was a kind of a sharp divide between the people actually running the restaurant day to day and then the people on the business side of it who just were investors and they had no idea. You could probably ask any of them to go in and fry an egg and I'm sure some of them wouldn't know. And to me, that seemed crazy. So my thought was, I will learn the side

of business and then learn how to be a good cook and then be able to come in from this totally different angle on it and know the inner and outer workings of a restaurant. But, obviously that didn't happen. That didn't happen because you, I guess your senior year, you had an opportunity to compete on Master Chef, which you did, and you took a semester off. Tell me how that came about. Yeah, so I just remember senior year was the time that I really started digging deep with food. I was working in this seafood restaurant.

I was working multiple nights a week. I'd show up at 2 o'clock, get all my prep work done. I remember chopping lots and lots of chives. That was always one of the big. They loved using chives at this place. And then I was a teaching fellow in this big food course at Harvard that a lot of kids took. I did everything I could with food senior year. And then Master Chef, I just saw a flyer.

I saw a little flyer and I was already doing everything else with food. So I figured, let's go to the audition. It doesn't hurt to try. Yeah. And what did you prepare for the audition? I wanted to show something, you know, that highlighted my background. So I'm Persian and I'm Italian, among other things. And so I took those two things and I made lamb and mint raviolo.

And I thought it was a nice representation of the family that I learned from and just me as a person. All right. So you're there. And, you know, obviously now with your YouTube videos, you are charismatic and funny. But that takes time to learn how to be that persona on camera. And I'm imagining, you know, you were a college student and probably maybe a little nervous. And maybe there were people there who were more charismatic than you. Obviously, you knew it to cook. But were you nervous in that audition? Yeah, I'm sure I was. I'm very shy. And this was very far outside my comfort zone.

Yeah. So you get there and had to go? I mean, what do you? I mean, obviously they picked you, but was it based on your food? Was it based on an interview, on questions they asked you? Well, funnily enough, I went to the audition expecting to be gone from school for maybe an hour and then I'd get back for my midday afternoon class. Yeah. And I never made it back for the class. I was there until it got dark because I kept moving on to another room and then another smaller room. And then, you know, with fewer and fewer people until you met the executives there who sort of hinted at the fact that you would be going further with the process. And it was the same mindset there that I had for the actual show where I thought, you know, okay, I got onto the show, I probably last a couple episodes and then come home. And then I ended up being gone for three and a half months.

So same sort of deal there. Three and a half months. That's how long the commitment was to be on MasterShift. Yeah, it's a long time. No technology, no contacting your family or friends other than every Sunday. Get a couple phone calls. And you hear it at first and you think that's terrible, but it's actually amazing. You sleep better than you've ever slept before.

I mean, you wake up at 4 or 5 a.m. with the sun and you feel fresh and new every morning. It's amazing. It was amazing, actually. How did you overcome that sense of shyness? You know, because you had to answer questions and was it hard for you at the beginning? Yeah. I think MasterChef was a time in my life that helped me become a little bit more confident and perhaps a little bit less shy, even though I'm still extremely shy. Yeah.

But the other thing that I think I had to my advantage that I was very lucky to have was that I had a fallback plan of going back to college, which, again, I was lucky to have. but I could take all the risk I really wanted to. So when I walked in the room with everybody, I think I had perhaps less nerves than anyone else did because I was just going to go back to school and finish up school. Right. And some people were taking a much bigger risk being there. I mean, people lose their jobs for going to these shows.

Yeah. So, all right, so you're there. You do this, and it's fun. And spoiler alert, I think people probably know this who know you end up third place, which is pretty awesome. Young man, you plate food with such maverickness. Tonight, the dish looked incredible. But young man, let me tell you, your dream does not end tonight.

I don't think I knew what I was getting myself into when I went to that audition. But I can't thank everyone enough. It's been amazing. And you go back to college and you finish your degree at Harvard. And obviously I'm sure on campus, people are like, dude, I saw you on Master Chef and, you know, but you're back in school. And at that point, when you're now wrapping up your time at college, were you starting to think, you know, maybe I should just get on YouTube and make videos? Or were you still thinking, no, I'm going to go to business school and follow this path of learning the business of restaurants? So my senior year of college, I applied to a couple business school programs where I could defer.

So take a couple years to work and then go. Yeah. And I applied to just a small handful. And I actually got rejected from all of them except for Harvard Business School. Wow, you got rejected from all of them except Harvard Business School, okay? Yeah, I did, I did. And, you know, that was the one side of my plan is maybe two years from now I'll go to Harvard Business School. And then on the other side of it, I was preparing to accept a job at McDonald's.

And it was actually, you know, it was a really cool job that I had gotten lined up with them. So it was a corporate job. And if you boil it down, frankly, I was just going to be an undercover food inspector for McDonald's. Hmm. But that didn't happen. obviously. What happened? What derailed that plan? I mean, I figured I'd gotten this tiny little spark, this little jumpstart for Master Chef. And despite being such a shy person, all the cameras, all that kind of stuff didn't seem to bother me. And I'd always love cooking. And it just seemed like this

really unique path that I might be able to take. So I started making some videos on TikTok when COVID hit, which is, you know, about the time I finished school. And then a couple of them took off and I looked back. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll have more from chef Nick Di Giovanni on how he built internet fame after competing on Master Chef. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest today is Nick D. Giovanni, chef, internet personality, and founder of Osmos Alt. One of the videos on TikTok is how to make chocolate from a cacao pod, for example.

Yeah. Super cool. Did you have like a massive following on TikTok or are you just kind of a, you know, a normal following, but then you'd post something and then it just somehow went viral? Yeah, TikTok is fascinating in the sense that I always explain it to, let's just say, parents or my grandmother as, you know, they ask how does it work? And I say, it's really cool. It essentially finds the very best videos. And no matter how many followers you have, you know, you could make an account right now and post a video that's a really funny, silly video. and you have zero followers. And it can have 10 million views in 20 minutes.

And that's just a fact and a reality of a platform like TikTok that's totally kind of transformed the way that videos are shared and found, I guess is a good word. And so I didn't have very many followers at the time, but just posting this very unique and interesting thing, I guess there was never a video out there that was, you know, widespread about chocolate, but there was a giant audience of people out there that eat chocolate all the time that we're curious to see how it's made. So it worked out. I want to ask you, I'm going to put you on spot here, but you did grill an A5 waggon butter, and I think that's controversial. Now, this might sound crazy, but turn your heat to medium and add an entire stick of butter.

Adding an entire stick, it sounds insane. But what this butter is going to do is really toss a ton of flavor into this steak. And it's basically going to allow us to use this like, yeah, you know, I know, it's hard. That's a fat bomb right there. That is a self-basting piece of meat. I know. I know. I know.

And you're a whole stick of butter. I know it's a lot of butter, but trust me, it's worth it. And now we're going to keep this down at around mediums. Man. That was your first video. That was your first YouTube video, I think. I think it was one of them, right? Oh, I don't, I don't doubt it for a second.

It was an A5 filet, and you cooked it with a stick of butter. And baste and butter, and I think that's controversial. You know, Guy, you got me on the spot here. What I'll say, though, if there's any, defense for this is this has all been a learning experience for me too, right? I mean, at the time, I might not have known how to cook a piece of wag you. I don't know, but I have learned so much over the last couple of years just by cooking every single day. And I would go so far as to say that I spend a lot more time cooking now than even I was back when I was working in those

restaurants for full-time jobs. Because I'm here in my kitchen every single day, even on weekends a lot of them, just cooking and experimenting. So, I mean, I can't come back from what you just said, but I learned so much. No judgment. I'm sure it was delicious. It just added more deliciousness, maybe. But I'm looking at that A5 wagon. I'm looking at that $100 steak, and I'm thinking, a lot of butter.

It's the age-old question and issue of when you try to make videos that are supposed to go viral online, how far do you take it? and how far can you skew from the true techniques before being ridiculous. Right. All right. So you start making videos. And presumably the first earliest videos you're making is just you, right? I mean, how are you, or did you have a friend that filmed you or what?

So to this day, because I'm very shy, I film all my TikToks by myself. The TikToks. Just you, you're holding, or you set it up on a tripod or something? No, yeah. No one's allowed in the room. I got a camera on a tripod. Yeah. My camera guy, Manny, taught me how to use it all and run it.

So I can use a camera really well now to the extent of, again, I'm certainly not a camera professional, but I can use a camera. I know how to turn it on. I know the settings. I know how to work it. And I think that's important anyways. But I'm too shy to have people in the room for TikTok. All right. So you start making these videos.

And tell me, I mean, this obviously, this is a show. How I built is a show about business, about building a business. And one of the things we do here on how I built this lab is we're talking to creators about how they built a business around being creators. Most of the time, there's an intentionality. A person's like, yeah, I wanted to become a YouTube creator. And so I had this strategy or like I just started making videos and people liked them. And with you, it doesn't sound like you went into the saying, you know, business school, all that stuff. Like, I want to be a YouTube creator.

I want to be a content creator. But, I mean, that essentially is what happened very quickly. I like to say to people that you can't really one day wake up and say, you know, I want to be a TV star. I want to be a, you know, but there's a lot of people I know now that just said from day one, I want to be a YouTuber and they work so hard at it and they make it work. Yeah. But at the same time, honestly, I've just taken this journey day after day and week after week. And I've been taken on this wild ride.

And I work really, really hard, you know, with every opportunity that comes my way. but I never know what's going to happen a week from now or a month from now. And I kind of like it that way. So, all right, so let's talk about the business side for a moment because you wanted to learn the business side of restaurants, but turns out that you've been having a crash course in the business side of content creation.

At what point, and maybe you haven't done it yet, did you at a certain point say, all right, let me form a production company and a team around me, or have you not done that yet? So I have a nice, you know, really well-thought-out team around me now. Initially, it was just sort of, and I'm still figuring it out as I go, truthfully. But initially it was just, you know, we'll work with whatever people we need to when, you know, when the time comes and just deal with things on a case-by-case basis. Right.

And now it has to be much more sort of planned and figured out. So now I've got, you know, I've got three editors. I've got still the same camera guy, Manny, that I work with. But also we're always getting extra contractors now to kind of come help on videos. So it's just sort of, it's changed a lot over time. But, you know, we've got a nice, large team now. How many people are working around you now? I would say when you account for like my agent and people like the lawyer and the CPA,

people that we talk to a lot. Sure. I would say 12 to 15 people is constantly. And then there are, you know, there are now video shoots where we have, we've had up to 35, 40 people working with us for some of them. So how many videos do you make a week? Well, I film pretty much every day, but I would say on a day of filming, if I'm just doing TikToks, I probably do five.

But I made a rule for us that we will never spend, we will never do more than one YouTube video in a day because I don't want the quality to suffer. Yeah. And some of the videos are straight up cooking videos like how-toes, but some of them are more like, let's break a world record or let's make the biggest this or let's like do something kind of crazy, right? So it's a combination of the two. Yeah, it started out with more tutorial cooking type stuff where I might be a little bit goofy in them and make a few jokes and try to keep it lighthearted and fun.

And through COVID to now, it's shifted more to these sort of challenges and honestly just whatever comes to mind. There is no set formula to the idea. that we pursue. Yeah. How do you, I mean, let's talk about the economics of YouTube for a moment. I mean, you know, and we've talked about this with other creators that, you know, to just make money off the ads, you know, and the rev share that YouTube provides is, you know, there's some people who can make hugely significant amount of money from that because there are tens or hundreds of millions of views. But can you walk me through the economics of it? I mean, could you run your business sustainably with just the revenue share from YouTube alone?

I don't think so anymore. Doing what I'm doing now, I think, has forced me in a good way to put on a lot of different hats and kind of learn to be in the managerial role and then in the actual creator role. Yeah. And I try to pay everyone on my team really, really well and really generously. Yeah. Because also at one point, I had this person that I put a lot of time into and then they ended up getting some job that was paying waiting. more somewhere else. And that was the first time that it happened to me. And I didn't really know what to do about it. I couldn't pay them what this place was paying them. And I'd spent so much time. And so

there's been so many crazy things like that. But I've built this to not rely on getting extra advertisements outside of the YouTube ad revenue. But I do think that I need to take them on once in a while to be able to keep everything moving and sustain everything. Yeah. Okay. So now you've got, I think today you've got about 20 million followers across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Yeah. And so that's a huge audience. And then you have this content that you create. And there's advertising that comes in.

What are other ways that you can bring in revenue? So the way I look at it is I have this kind of one bucket of YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. And those all make their ad revenue and also brand partnerships through those. So there's that one area. Yeah. Right. And then I have Osmo, the salt seasoning company. This is a company that you founded, co-founded.

It's a sells salt and seasonings, and it's direct-to-consumer company, right? Yeah, it's direct-to-consumer. And, I mean, it's doing quite well. And we have wholesale, you know, we're selling wholesale now. It's getting crazy, crazy eyeballs just online because there's so many different creators that love it and use it. So that's another area, which, again, we're trying to let it run itself. I haven't ever taken a dime from it. And have you raised money for it?

or did you self-funded? Yeah, we raised some money pretty early on to just, you know, go crazy on the advertisements and that kind of thing. And so that's, I mean, again, that's another area where for me it's amazing because I've learned a ton. It's what I like to do. I get to taste this food, this salt, make these really creative, unique flavors. I mean, I was working on a pizza flavored salt today, just fun stuff like that.

Yeah. And then I get to see all the numbers and the business side of it. So we've got Osmo, the salt company. and then on the other side of it as well, I mean, I'm now launching my first ever cookbook. And what's the name of the book? It's called Knife Drop, because I do that little knife throw in some of the videos. That makes sense. Yeah, it'll be great. I'm excited.

And so that's a whole new area where it'll be really interesting to see how that all works out and just a totally new area of getting my name out there, getting my food out there, which I'm excited for. Yeah. I'm just curious from a business standpoint, right? Because this is, what you're doing, right, creating your own media business. This is something that a lot of particularly younger people are looking at. Like, could this be a model? Could I build my own media company around what I do around content?

So at this point, you know, you're still early days. You've got the salt business and brand partnerships and advertising revenue. And so there's lots more that presumably you could do. But in terms of just like overall revenue, can you give us a sense of like how much revenue roughly all this generates a year? I mean, to be honest with you, I'd have to even just kind of look more carefully to get a really great sense of it. But what I will say is that our revenue is higher than I perhaps could have ever imagined going into a space like this. And especially higher than I thought something could be for for a career where I didn't set out to make money. I just was doing what I enjoy doing.

Yeah. But at the same time, I don't even think about the money. I just don't because as long as I have enough to do these crazy projects, then I'm happy. Right. Well, we hear about YouTubers who are making like $50 million a year, and I think that's very rare and unusual. But I imagine probably somewhere between $1 and $10 million of revenue a year, something like that. Yeah. I'm certainly not at $50 million, but yes, I'm in that range.

and it gives me more than enough money to do whatever I want to do, which is great. Yeah. So let's talk about building out the business, right? Presumably the biggest expense is the business is Osmo Salt, right? Or is the biggest expense actually making the content, making the YouTube videos? Osmo funds itself. It's amazing. Got it.

It's the content. I mean, we spend a lot of money on some of these videos. I mean, you know, we made the Guinness World Record, largest sushi roll. Just take a look at how truly massive this sushi. Yeah, I saw that. With all that salmon. Today, you guys have just completed an official Guinness World Records attempt for the largest sushi roll by width. I was very impressed with your salmon butchering skills.

Oh, thank you. Thank you. Amazing. Sushi-grade salmon, too. All expensive sushi-grade salmon. And that's, again, that's all me and kind of my company buying that stuff. And we donated everything to a food pantry. And people should check this out.

Giant Roll. huge fillets of sushi-grade salmon just piled into this giant sushi roll. Yeah. Seven feet one inch. Congratulations. You're officially amazing.

How much at all the salmon, cucumbers aren't expensive, but how much of the salmon, for example, cost than that? All in, I can say this is about a 30 grand video. Wow. The whole video is 30 grand. And that includes all the food

and all the editing and all the people. evolve to make it. Yes. And if you sit down and you look at the numbers, then I won't make my money back on that, nor did I expect to. But I would also argue to you that I absolutely will in the bigger picture of just, you know, we got so many eyeballs on it. It did some amazing things. And we got a lot of press out of it. And so I look at it as a win. But if you actually look at all the numbers and you go granular, then technically we're not going to make that money back. All right. In that video, you're with another YouTuber named Linja,

and that people who know your videos know who Linja is. And you've collaborated with Linja on several videos, the biggest cake pop, the biggest chicken nugget. You both went to almost 70 fast food restaurants and 24 hours. You broke a world record there. How did you come across Linja? She's, I think, in her late 60s, she's a small, petite woman, lovely cancer survivor.

How did you guys connect? She's amazing. So I DMed her on Instagram, and it's funny, I thought I was DMing Linja. I thought I was DMing that, you know, 60-something-year-old woman. Yeah. And it was really her son that I was talking to who runs all of her, all of her content. She's had cancer four plus times now, and she's run eight marathons. She puts me to shame, honestly.

And she's got kind of a potty mouth, too. So she actually doesn't. She won't swear. We just bleep it. But before we get started, we have a little bit of measuring and weighing to do. Guinness World Records doesn't f*** around. So she won't even swear, but it's hilarious because she's just... Oh, you put the fake bleeps in there, I go.

So she's not really saying those words? No, no, no, no, she won't. It's so funny. She refuses to. And so, and we bleep it anyway. And she's totally good with it. And would you, you connect with them and you were like, hey, I want to do something with her? Yeah, it was actually really early on where I sort of figured,

let me reach out to a bunch of people and collaborate on videos and just keep things fresh and make it fun. And now you guys are breaking world records. Yeah, I mean, we just got our seventh the other day, I think. And it's just been a roller coaster. We're going to take a short break, but when we come back more from Nick about how he's creating food videos with millions of views and turning that into a successful business. Stay with us.

I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. And my guest today is Nick D. Giovanni, chef, YouTuber, and founder of Osmosalt. So, I mean, how do you kind of manage your time? Because you're still young and you're learning how to do this as the face of this thing. And also, I guess, the CEO of the company? Yeah. It's something that I have a difficult time doing still. There's plenty of areas with all of this where I just really. realize that I need help and I also need to figure out how to do it better. So I would say

time management is still something that I need to work on because I work pretty much from, let's say, 9 a.m. to 9 or 10 p.m. every single night consistently. And then I don't take the weekends off ever anymore, which is just, and I'm not saying that to brag. I'm actually saying it is a bad thing and something that I want to work on and change. You know, you might look at that from the outside and sort of say that doesn't even sound possible. But if it's something that you really enjoy, doing and you love it. It doesn't feel as painful as it might sound, but it's a problem. It's definitely not sustainable. And it's what I've been doing for well over a year now into all this, and it's not good. So how do you unwind? If you're working from nine to nine,

how are you able to stay mentally healthy and physically healthy? Well, so the reason I say I'm work from about nine to nine is because I'm super serious about my sleep. So I will get eight hours every night. I can't run on no sleep, and I learned that a long time ago. So that is, one giant chunk were right away. That's it. And I mean, outside of that, I don't know. I mean, to be honest, I don't really unwind that often anymore because it's just hard to get my brain thinking about anything, you know, other than YouTube and, you know, what's the next big idea? It's really, really hard once you get stuck in that ecosystem to think outside of that. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I get that you're super grateful for this audience you have

and the fans, my kids told me about you. That's I found out about you. I'm not a big YouTuber just because I'm kind of aged out of it a little bit. But a lot of kids, like 9, 10, 11-year-old kids are watching your videos. And it must be incredibly gratifying. But at the same time, like, I hear you. It's a lot. It's a lot to, and probably more and more you get recognized on the streets and you've got to be on all the time.

And, you know, you've got to 24-7 be the best version. of yourself. Yeah, it's tough. It's tough. There's a lot of, there's a lot of things to get adjusted to. And I also want to set a good example and be a good role model for all those kids. Yeah. Because it is true that our audience, it has a nice sort of range between, you know, young kids and then 18 to 24 and 25 to 36, that kind of whole area. I've traveled around the world and had kids come up from all over the place and, and ask for a picture because they enjoy the videos. And I'm still to this day almost sort of, unsure of why or how so many kids think that food and cooking is interesting. But I love it. And yeah,

it's stressful, like you said. It's stressful. And there's a lot of things to get used to. And for somebody so shy, it makes it even more difficult. This is an interesting point here that you raised. You know, Hank and John Green, our guests on how I built this. They talk a lot about burnout, especially that they've seen among younger YouTubers. And I mean, you are making so much content. And you are incentivized to make more to grow your audience so then you can expand your reach and maybe build new products and extensions. And I'm sure there are a lot of people coming through the door who want to work with you. You know, brand consultants and business consultants and all kinds of people who have ideas for what you could do. And, you know, probably some of those meetings are

certainly worth taking. But it's like a ping pong match. You're just like looking all around. Like, what do I do? What direction do I go in? Meantime, you're making all this content working all the time. And burnout is a real thing, right? It's a real thing that certainly could happen. Yeah, definitely. There's days now where I come in, and this didn't used to happen, where I just don't feel like filming a bunch of TikToks, just getting the kitchen disaster and getting all, like, oily, and I just don't feel like it some days anymore. Yeah. And what I try to do now is just say, you know what, that's fine. Just turn around, take your computer and go do computer work, or go do something else, go think of ideas instead.

Right. But it's hard. You're being pulled in a lot of directions. I guess my question for you is, you know, there are different things you could do, right? You know that. Like Mr. Beast just open a burger joint. And, you know, I don't know him, but I would venture to say you're a better cook than he is. You could maybe open a restaurant, right?

There are lots of things you could do or a takeout place or whatever. Like, you can just decide, you know what? I don't want to do this TikTok stuff and YouTube stuff anymore. I'm going to go to business school and pursue the path and actually be a restaurant group owner or whatever. Like, do you think that there's a world where you might decide to do that? You might say, you know what, this was fun, I'm done. Or do you think that now this, what you do now as a content creator is what you should continue to do because you have an audience that wants more content from you? You know, one large area of my audience is kids.

And for me, the mere fact that I could inspire even a single kid or just to talk. want to cook, especially in a time where it's easier than ever to just go get, you know, food delivery or go to a quick, fast, casual place like Chipotle and get a quick lunch. Yeah. For me, that's one of the biggest drivers that just keeps me going on it and makes me think that, no, I don't think a time will ever come where I want to, where I want to stop. I do think I need to sort of shift the direction of everything anyways and just sort of keep, you know, keep it sustainable, however that might look.

But no, I know that I want to do. do this. In fact, I just recently, literally a couple days ago, finally told Harvard Business School that I'm not going to go. And that was a door that I never thought I would close. Yeah. It was weird sending that email, to be honest with you. Yeah, I'm sure. It just, it's my dream forever to go there. I mean, that's a dream come true. You know, I sent off that email and I said, all right, I'm in it now. I mean, there's no, there's no fallback anymore. Yeah. But it sounds to me like what you're trying to figure out now is, as you say, how to make it sustainable, right? Because you cannot make all that content yourself and, you know, and not burn out for the next 10 years. And

at some point, you're going to want to figure out how to maybe if other people make videos under your, you know, your umbrella or, you know, maybe you just make one video a week and there are other people who are making different kinds of content around you, stuff like that. Yeah, I don't know what it's going to look like to tell you the truth. It's funny. In a way, all it would really take is me just taking a couple days to slow down and think bigger picture for a second. Yeah. And to an extent, it almost feels like right now that's, even that is not even possible because I have this to do and I have this to do.

And I've never gotten the time to actually go and do that. But it's been this thing that I just keep pushing away because I have this brand deal to get done or I have this video to make and I have this new idea. And so at some point, I know the time's going to come where it just hits me and I have to slow down and stop and say, okay, enough is enough. You know, where are we taking all of this? So I need to slow down. It's just a matter of when. Do you actually, like when you're done at nine to night, are you actually going home and eating takeout?

Oh, yeah, every single night. Yeah. Do you get to cook for people like ever for fun, like friends? Or are you just so busy that there isn't any time for that? Yeah, I used to. But at this point, I'd so much rather go and meet friends out at a restaurant. Yeah. It's sort of sad in a way, if you think about it, because it used to be this thing that I, And I'm not saying all that I've done has made cooking not fun because that's definitely not the case. Yeah. It's more leisurely cooking.

It's just not a thing in my life anymore. No. Because why would I, you know, it just doesn't make any sense for me to do. I just need to take a break from it sometimes. Yeah. Do you think that you'll ever one day pursue the idea of opening or owning restaurants? We certainly had conversations about it already. I just, I don't know enough about it still.

but what I do know is that you need to find the right people for it. And I also think that you need to dedicate a lot of time. And just working on this cookbook took way more time than I ever could have imagined because any time I take on a project, I want to be a part of it and I want to make sure that I do it right. If I'm going to put my weight behind something out, I want to make sure that it's done right. Yeah.

I mean, it is amazing how, you know, 20 years ago, a lot of the kids who you graduate college with would have gone into finance, probably still a lot of them do. And there's a well-worn, you know, path down that road. But you ask most kids say what they want to be, and most of them say, are significant chunks that they want to be YouTubers. Kids, you know that. Kids now say they want to be YouTubers. There are millions and millions of YouTube channels and YouTubers in the world, and just a small, tiny number of them can build a sustainable business. And you are, you know, you have a massive following and even you struggle to kind of stay on top of it because it's a heart. It's a lot of

moving parts. Yeah. I have this feeling now. Everyone's looking to me and sort of saying that I've got a lot of a lot of it figured out, right, or all of it figured out. Right. And I think when you look closely at a lot of different people and businesses, and that's probably not the case. And for me, I mean, I'm totally transparent in the sense that I still need a lot of help. I mean, I think I am not alone in saying that a lot of YouTubers probably work way too much because it's just a space where it's so uber competitive now. Yeah. And it's easier than ever every single day to post a video online.

And it is a stressful, stressful, stressful job. Yeah. Tell me what, you know, what's on a horizon for you? What, what's 2023 going to be for the Nick D. Giovanni Empire? I'll be honest. I've thought about a lot of stuff. I've thought about a restaurant. And if I could find the right people to do it, I would love to have a restaurant by the end of

2023, although I know that's ambitious. I think I could also see myself looking into some sort of TV show. I've looked into that with a bunch of different people now, and that could be something. But I think 2023 should be, you know, the year for me to slow down and look bigger picture instead of just taking things so day by day and say, okay, what could this whole business of what we're doing right now look like in five, 10 years and try to really build something that's more sustainable and that's much, much bigger than just me. And so I would be very happy if I had an answer for that in 2023. Nick Di Giovanni, founder of Osmo Salt and YouTuber, thanks so much for

joining me. Thank you so much, Guy. I will think of you next time I'm about to base a whole piece of wag you of butter. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This and mine is at Guy Raz, and on Instagram, I'm at guy. ros. If you want to contact the team, our email address is H-I-B-T, at ID.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Carla Estevez and Susanna Brown, with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Rompeteen-Arablui.

Our audio engineer was Neil Rauch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Chris Messini, Elaine Coates, Jay Caward, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, and Kerry Thompson. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to how I built this. So like in the last, I don't know, five or six months, my kids, they started to be more interested in when I was cooking. And then I discovered that they were watching your videos.

And they kept asking me to buy Wagyu Beef. They're like, Daddy, can you get A5 Wagyu Beef? Anyway. Sorry. Go ahead. Um, how did you get all that chicken from the World's Ler's Chicken Hockey with Linja video? Oh, that's a good question. We bought it. We just bought it. Was there like a specific manufacturer or something?

For all that chicken? Mm-hmm. Oh, man, that's a good question. I don't know, actually. I have to look back and see, I don't even know where we got it. But it was in these really big industrial bags, so... Wow. It was fun. But even harder was getting all the sushi for the world's largest sushi roll. That was hard. All the sushi rice? All the sushi rice. Yeah, we had probably five...

five or six restaurants making rice nonstop all day for a whole day to get us enough rice for that. Isn't that crazy?