Nick DiGiovanni - The Story Of How I Became A YouTuber

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

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You're richer than you think. Recognize this guy? That's me. This is also me. Turns out, I've loved. I loved food and cooking ever since I was a kid. And it got me wondering, how did I get from here to here? This is the most personal video I've ever made.

The photos in here, my mom almost wouldn't let me borrow them just to make this video. So because of that, I'm doing this whole video by myself. And we're going to start way back from the beginning. My love for food all started with my grandmother. She's the one right in the middle there with the green tree. shirt on and the apron. Every single photo I seem to find of her, she has an apron on. And we actually still have her recipe box. And someday, I'd love to go through the entire thing, cook every single recipe in there, and taste it all again. I really wish I remembered eating

some of her food. But another person I remember learning a lot from was my great grandmother. Here is a photo of me giving her this cookie that I made for her for her 90th birthday. And fun fact about her is that she actually lived until 1001. The third person that I think about, when I think about where did I get my love for food, is my grandfather right here. He was Persian, and I looked everywhere with my family. We couldn't find any photos of him actually cooking, because he didn't really cook that often. But what he did know how to do was make rice. Every time he'd make rice, we'd all go into the kitchen and we'd huddle around him. It was like he was this magnet that brought everybody right into the kitchen around this one pot.

And all he was making was rice, but he was good at it. This is my mom. And as you can see, she is very pretty. She's the best mom ever. But when it comes to cooking, my mom still to this day jokes that we would know dinner was ready when the fire alarm went off. And this right here is my dad. He actually didn't really cook that often, but as you can see, he got me Duncan. I don't think I've ever seen a happier kid than this right here.

The one thing is, even with all these photos, and between talking to my family and doing research on my own, we can't exactly seem to figure out the very first day that I actually cooked something. But what's obvious in looking at all these is that most of my childhood photos, like right here, this is me eating a block of cheese. They're pretty much all me either with food eating or trying to cook or me in the kitchen. This is me in the kitchen exploring the pantry with two of my brothers. food that I would cook or the experimentation that I did during this time looked very good. Like I have absolutely no idea what this is supposed to be. I think I made a lobster using bread, a sandwich, and carrots.

Here's me bringing this birthday cake to my brother, okay? And I'm very young, clearly, to be making a birthday cake for anybody. And as you can see, when I bring it over to him, right, we're all excited, we're all happy, but we don't have to pretend that this looks good, right? And here's another time when me and my brother Pete apparently decided to to make some cupcakes. I don't know what you guys think, but to me it looks like a dog

just went to the bathroom on all of these cupcakes. Like just went right down the line. Look at this. This is the aftermath of the cupcakes. I don't know if we did something, but my brother Pete there looks extremely guilty. We at least had what looks to be a pretty successful lemonade stand here,

but this one right here. This one is my favorite photo that I think I found. You could try to look at it for a moment and figure out exactly why it's my favorite, But the simple reason is because we were having artichokes for dinner. And look how excited my face is. What kind of normal kid gets that excited by an artichoke? I guess the reason I showed you all these photos here is to say that clearly from a young age, right,

I had this passion, this crazy passion for food. We've gotten through the photo album, okay? But it gets better. So during the holidays, my family, like many families do, would often get together to celebrate. And at some point in time, at a very young age, I started making menus. These are copies. My mom was too nervous to give me these. And I think she's probably right.

I probably would have spilled something on them. I would have lost them. It was a good call by my mom. And I've got a couple of these. So this just looks like a dessert menu, a simple dessert menu. We were having brownies. I spelled that wrong. These things always throw me off.

Remember this right here, okay? Now the next menu gets a little bit more advanced. On the top there, that's my mom's handwriting. I think she put a note to remember. what it was. The rest is all me. Apparently in my mind, by me helping to cook some of this stuff, and I'm sure I wasn't helping much at this age, I thought that I could charge them and make money off of my family, which is kind of messed up. This menu here, you can see, starts to get even more advanced. And it looks like I started breaking these into courses. So we've got this curry cauliflower

soup, which I know I didn't give my mom too much credit earlier, but she made an amazing cauliflower soup with toasted pine nuts. I have a few problems with this menu here. First of all, Why is there a lightning bolt on there? I don't even know what this is. It looks like a logo for a car or something like that. I have no idea what this is. And remember, I'm not making all of this food. I'm writing down a lot of the things that the different family members are bringing,

and then I'm usually contributing one or two dishes to the overall menu. Going into the final menu now, this is where things have really gotten advanced. The Santa actually makes sense, given that it's Christmas. So I've gotten better there, and I'm not trying to do anything fancy anymore, right? I've got the main courses, and I've got the desserts, all in one menu, people. And look at this, the best part. I had it now so it could be folded to be put at everyone's placemap.

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i love the progression of those menus over time and let's remember what this video is all about there is still no social media in my life whatsoever right i'm seven eight nine ten years old at this time just messing around in the kitchen i haven't asked any of my friends on youtube whether or not they had these same kind of passions when they were kids of the things that they're now doing on YouTube, but I wouldn't be surprised if these guys loved playing sports and doing trick shots when they were kids, or if he always loved finding the latest and greatest technology, or if his favorite subject in school growing up was always science class. I mean, it would all make sense. But we're gonna fast forward now to

when I was in middle school. In 2009, Facebook had just become popular and a year later, in 2010, is when Instagram was created. All in this same time period, I got my first cell phone, which thanks to my mom, I still have. But as you can tell, from this thing, it didn't have any social media. So, even though things like Instagram and Facebook were now available, I still had no way to get on them. And because of that, was nowhere closer to getting on a place like YouTube. During high school, I got my first job working in a restaurant. This was an Italian restaurant in my home state of Rhode Island. At one point, it actually won the award for Best Fast Casual Restaurant in the entire world. It was famous for inventing

grilled pizza, which is still my favorite type of pizza anywhere in the world. It's this beautiful, chewy, flavorful pizza that's made over a charcoal grill, and the recipe that they use when they open the restaurant is still the exact same today. I have to admit most of my time at the restaurant was spent sweeping the floors, but I got really good at it, and I was proud of that. But in 2015, I started college, and one year later is when I first created my YouTube channel, the same one that you're actually watching right now. But I hadn't created it to post videos. I just created it so I could watch videos, and it would save my preferences. It would know what I wanted to watch. I remember watching Gordon Ramsey a lot, especially his video on how to master

the basic cooking skills or how to make a nice classic Beef Wellington, and I loved seeing all of his best steak recipes too. To learn more and more about food, I remember also getting really into different food or cooking related movies. Obviously by that time I'd already watched over and over my favorite movie ever, Rattatooey. But I also loved the movie chef, which has now become one of my all-time favorites. And I also loved the movie burnt. It was a little bit more intense, but it showed the behind the scenes of what it's like for some people who live the life of a chef. My mom also had me watch this other movie called Julie and Julia, which is about this woman who attempts to cook all 524 recipes in just one year

from this cookbook done by this famous celebrity chef named Julia Child. One summer during college, I got this job at a three Michelin-star restaurant in California called Benu. The dishes at this restaurant were incredible. So much time and care went into every single dish and every single ingredient, and every single ingredient there, even down to things as basic as the butter that they served with their bread for the first course. At this restaurant, I was still young, and it was so intense that I was mostly doing prep. But one night, this one chef unfortunately cut his finger and had to go off to the hospital, so I got to step in to his station for the evening, and I remember burning off all of my fingerprints

while making this fake shark fin soup dish that they had there. And I remember still going home and being so happy. And that was one of the moments where I knew how much I loved food. At this point in my life, I had still never posted a single YouTube video, but that was about to change. When I was in my third year of college, I was walking to class, just like any other day, and I passed this poster for Master Chef. I remember the exact spot where it happened, and I can't remember exactly what the poster looked like, but it was probably something like this. And whatever it was, it had me convinced. A few weeks later, I went to the audition, and a little bit after that, I was doing all sorts of things.

of interviews and a few months later I found myself in LA shooting for Master Chef. I didn't know it at the time, but this was my first huge leap towards making food on TV and on the internet. I don't regret any of this, but to finish Master Chef, I had to sort of drop out of college. I did go back and finish. I promised my parents that I would do it and I did it, but suddenly I found myself going from cooking in my dorm room at school and at home to cooking with a hundred people around me and all sorts of cameras in my face.

The competition itself went well. I made it all the way to the finale before losing in the final round and missing out on the Master Chef trophy and the $250,000 prize, which would have been nice. But I'm a firm believer that everything happens for a reason. It's hard to believe sometimes in the moment, but I really do believe it. And because I wasn't able to make my dessert in the Master Chef finale, I went back home and I posted my first YouTube video. I don't know what caused me to do it exactly, but with this video, I just wanted to show people

what I would have made if I got to compete in that final, final round. So this was a huge moment, right? I'd made this video, I'd put it on YouTube, it was doing well, I got to make more, and they didn't do so well. They did so poorly, in fact, that they are no longer there. And I wish I left them so I could go back and see what they were, but I deleted every single one. It turned out that those people that watched my video,

they were just fans of Master Chef, and they wanted to see what I would have made in the finale. They didn't really care for anything past that. And listen, guys, making a YouTube video takes so much time. And if you spend all that time and then the video doesn't perform like you wanted to perform, you don't really want to make any more. And that's exactly what happened. So I stopped.

But then, COVID hit. Probably just like you, I was stuck at home. And I cooked a lot. I did this really fun thing, actually, where I would pick a location from anywhere in the world. And I would cook food from there for a week or a month. I did a month of Japanese food. I did a month of Thai, some Indian. some Peruvian, and at this point in time, I'm sure you all remember, but this is when TikTok suddenly became really popular.

There were tons and tons and tons of these viral trends that were happening, but none of it really made sense to me, and I wasn't that interested. So as quickly as I had downloaded the app, I deleted it. Then one day, no idea why, I decided to buy a hamster. We went to the pet store, and we looked at all the different hamsters that they had, and we picked the quiet one that was sort of sitting in the back of the crate. We named him Pesto. But most chefs, they care a lot about the food that they eat and that the people around them eat. And because of that, I decided right off the bat that I wasn't going to feed Pesto any of that disgusting hamster kibble. I started cooking him these cute little tiny hamster meals.

And for whatever reason, we redownloaded TikTok and filmed it one time and we posted a video. That first ever video we made got a million views and I couldn't believe it. Even when we brought Pesto to the veterinarian, they all knew who he was. He passed away about two and a half years later, but if you scroll all the way to the bottom of my TikTok page, you'll see that a few of those videos with Pesto are still there. I'd had so much fun making those videos on TikTok that I decided to keep going. In 2020, I made this video making chocolate from a cacao pot, and it went crazy. TikTok listed it as one of the top 100 videos posted that entire year, and after that, I never looked back.

Every day, I'd wake up, go to the grocery store or fish market, and pick up some random ingredients, and then I'd go back home, and I'd film. Once I was done, I'd sit down on my computer and I'd edit. We're not quite at the stage yet where I'm making anything on YouTube, but I learned how to edit by watching videos on YouTube, and I loved it. I posted hundreds and hundreds of TikTok videos, but like anything, doing the same thing every day gets tiring. One day, I called up one of my friends named Mani.

He'd actually helped me film something a year before, and I asked him if he'd be interested in trying to make a few YouTube videos together. And the next morning, Mani showed up in my apartment, and we filmed our first YouTube video together. Little did I know, this was the start of a new chapter in my life. It was the start of my journey on YouTube. Fast forward to now, and here I am in my studio. Nowadays, about 95% of my life revolves around making YouTube videos.

And listen carefully, because I'm going to let you in on a few more secrets. If you're going to be a YouTuber, and I'm not saying that you have to be or should be or anything, I'm just saying how it is. You must first accept that you're going to completely give away your privacy. Once you open up your life like that, there's no turning back. people are going to try to find out where you live, they're going to try to get your phone number, they're going to stop you on the street. It's also very difficult to have a work-life balance. The reason I'm sitting in a studio right now and not in my old apartment is because waking up and

working in the same place that you live, it gets really difficult. But if you're going to be on social media, then your work and your life are going to be largely the same, totally blended together. One more thing you have to accept, and I'm probably forgetting a few things, is the uncertainty. There's going to be really big highs and really, really. big lows. One very easy example is the money. I feel like people always think that creators are making crazy amounts of money all the time, but that's not the case. One month you might do really well and it definitely happens, but then another month, you might not talk to any brands and you might make nothing. And another example, and my

favorite one is even simpler. See, YouTube does this thing. I'm gonna take you behind the scenes of the channel a little bit here. Basically, anytime you post a new video, it'll tell you how that video is performing compared to the last 10 videos that you posted. Of course, if you spend all this time on a video and you post it and it's ranked 10 out of 10, that means that of your last 10 videos, this one is doing the worst of all of them. It feels terrible. It's really sad.

It used to ruin my day all the time, and sometimes it actually still does. But on the other end of things, if you post a video and it ranks 1 of 10, you get these fireworks and it's the best feeling in the world. You've put all this time into a video and it's crushing it. It may seem like something so simple and maybe almost kind of dumb, but I can tell you personally, from a lot of other friends in the YouTube space that this one of ten ranking, it means a lot to us. And it's almost like seeking approval from somebody. You really want to get that one of ten.

If you watching right now are in Gen Z or a millennial, most of your peers' top career aspiration now is being an influencer. And after telling you the entire story, the very personal story of how I got right here, right now, I am telling you that being a YouTuber is really fun. And I love it. But just like any other job, it comes with highs, it comes with lows, it comes with everything in between. When I was a kid, I remember so many people telling me, do what you love, and the money will follow. And I always thought it was just such a total joke. I never actually realized that it's totally true.

It wasn't until I actually sat back and realized how much I truly love food. Even though it seems like it was right in front of my face the whole time. Guess what I'm saying is just follow your passion. Because you have no idea where it might leave you. Car shopping this civic holiday weekend, most car dealerships are closed and all you'll find are crickets. Not Performance Auto Group. They're open this Saturday and Holiday Monday for their annual Civic Holiday Sales event.

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