The Shameless Impropriety of Joshua Weissman

By Joe Rosenthal
July 29, 2025

On Joshua Weissman’s website, in a first-person narrative, he referred to himself as “‘one of the most renowned chefs in the world.’” More apt would be to describe Weissman as the head of a food media production company and the face of his company’s YouTube channels. Weissman’s brand was built through cooking videos. With over 10-million YouTube subscribers, the 29-year-old has been one of the 50 largest food-based accounts on the platform, and he has been big enough to support a full-time staff for cooking research and development, production, and video editing.

In Weissman’s early days with a full-time staff, video concepts were brainstormed by Weissman and his team, and once an idea was decided, Weissman would give a recipe to his defacto culinary director. The culinary director, along with an assistant, did prep work, and executed and tested the recipe. I was told that when doing a shoot, Weissman would “‘go to the kitchen, make a video, and leave’” and that there “‘wasn’t much cooking’” from Weissman outside of what was filmed for videos.

Weissman’s recipe development process was described to me as a secret endeavor. A former employee told me, “‘I would see him on his computer all the time,’” and a different employee said that “‘he will pull up a recipe out of nowhere.’” Both quotes aligned with accounts from other staffers. I was told that Weissman instructed staff to change the ingredient quantities on recipes, but one employee assumed at the time that Weissman was interested in tweaking his own numbers.

Weissman, labeled a “‘control freak’” by one of his former staff, eventually became so detached from recipe development that he had to be “‘walked through the cooking process’” by his employees, who he came to trust with finding recipes. I was told that Weissman gave sourcing instruction to his staff when they were first charged with coming up with a recipe: “‘just look up whatever recipe, and change a few ingredients, so people aren’t saying we’re copying it.’”

I spoke with nine sources who engaged with Weissman professionally, and six of those sources were his former employees. My sources described a hostile work environment in which he exploited his staff, engaged in abusive behavior, and regularly made sex noises, sexual comments, and sexually harassed his executive assistant. I reached out to Weissman’s team, and I did not receive any response prior to the publication of this article.

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A satirical magazine cover celebrating plagiarists, featuring Joshua Weissman.

Joe Rosenthal

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Nowhere

On September 29, 2021, Weissman released a cheesesteak video, “The Perfect Philly Cheesesteak At Home (2 Ways),” and the accompanying write-up on his website. Several of my Instagram followers told me that it seemed like Weissman’s hoagie roll recipe for the cheesesteak video was a copy of my How to Hoagie Roll recipe, and one person wrote that “‘it seems tweaked just enough to plausibly deny plagiarism.’” Many pointed out similarities in the high fat percentage and other ingredient concentrations like the yeast, water, and sugar amounts.

Weissman listed less salt than my recipe, but there is a thread on PizzaMaking.com about my hoagie roll recipe, and one poster talked about trying the recipe with less salt, and another offered their own variation on the recipe with less salt with a similar concentration to what Weissman published. Weissman’s salt concentration is 2.1% relative to the total flour amount, and the PizzaMaking.com is 2%. It does not surprise me to see the salt lowered in Weissman’s recipe, and Weissman may have found that PizzaMaking.com recipe.

Weissman’s methodology for making the hoagie rolls was extremely similar to that of my own recipe, including the suggestion to flip a bowl over a stubborn dough and walk away for 15 minutes or to put shaped rolls onto a towel or couche dusted with rice flour. Weissman’s recipe also featured the same method for spraying water including the same spray time interval: spray at the start, spray at 2.5 minutes, spray at 5 minutes. Weissman even had his subscribers divide their hoagie dough into 400g dough balls, the same weight as with my recipe. It is exceedingly unusual to see another recipe with all of these similarities without any citation and without a path that establishes supporting expertise.

The cascading similarities of my hoagie roll recipe with Weissman’s pushed me to look into other cases of possible plagiarism by Weissman. I came across Weissman’s “‘Perfect Homemade Pastrami Completely From Scratch’” video and write-up published on May 19, 2021. One of my Instagram followers pointed out Weissman had copied Meathead Goldwyn’s cure recipe at Amazing Ribs: Weissman’s recipe uses the same water, salt, and cure amounts but for a different weight of brisket. The cure amounts make no sense for Weissman’s meat amount, and it is clear that this recipe was stolen.

For safety and quality reasons, cure amounts should be specifically calculated for a given brisket weight, and Amazing Ribs has published Prof. Blonder’s Wet Curing Calculator, an incredible resource for calculating safe cure amounts, and I consider that calculator to be critical for anyone wet curing meats.

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Left: Amazing Ribs, “Home Made Corned Beef Recipe,” published prior to May 22, 2020. Right: Weissman, “Perfect Homemade Pastrami,” published in conjunction with the YouTube video “Perfect Homemade Pastrami Completely From Scratch,” released on May 19, 2021.

YouTube

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On March 3, 2021, Weissman published a pad Thai video, “Easy Authentic Pad Thai At Home,” along with the accompanying write-up. In an Appropriation 7 Instagram story highlight, Cooking with Cas pointed out that Weissman’s recipe features many similarities to The Woks of Life’s pad Thai recipe by Kaitlin Leung, published on September 28, 2020. The similarities included perturbed recipe amounts and a suggestion to substitute zha cai for Thai preserved salted radish. I spoke with Thai food experts who all established that zha cai is not a typical substitution for pad Thai.

A user commented in response to the pad Thai recipe from The Woks of Life, and they noted the similarities between it and the Weissman recipe. They asked Leung, “‘was yours first?’” The author replied, “check the posting dates of his video to this recipe, and I think you'll get your answer.”

In his video, Weissman falsely claimed that using a fork to eat pad Thai is “‘illegal,’” but pad Thai is commonly eaten using a fork and spoon. If you watch a bit earlier in the video, Weissman claimed his stolen pad Thai recipe to have bore “‘one of the greatest pad Thais you’ll ever have.’” Weissman’s video currently has over four million views on YouTube.

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A comment left in response to The Woks of Life’ pad Thai recipe, questioning if their recipe came before Weissman’s “similar” recipe.

The Woks of Life

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Weissman’s theft of creative work was not limited to recipes: his channel published stolen photos from Brian Watson, Thee Burger Dude, a vegan recipe writer and video creator, and in one instance, Weissman misrepresented Watson’s vegan food as if it were his own food made with meat.

On March 27, 2022, Weissman published the video “‘Making The Taco Bell Cheesy Gordita Crunch At Home’” on YouTube, stating at 1:59, he showed Watson's vegan gordita photo on the screen as he said that Watson’s photo is what the Taco Bell offering is “‘supposed to look like,’” and then he contrasted that with what he positioned as a disappointing cheesy gordita crunch obtained at a Taco Bell location.

Nearly two years later, on January 3, 2024, Weissman released “‘47 Food Hacks To Make Your Food Healthier’” on YouTube. The video thumbnail featured Watson’s photo, which misrepresented Watson’s burger as his own. Watson confirmed that both his gordita and burger photos were stolen without permission.

For my hoagie roll recipe, I would be happy if a YouTuber used my hoagie roll in a video, noted any tweaks, cited my recipe explicitly, and linked to my article in the video description. I would benefit from traffic to my website; they would strengthen their work by clearly citing a tested recipe from a subject-matter expert, and they save time on perturbing the recipe and pretending that it’s not stolen. It would be a win-win.

Similarly, Weissman’s pastrami recipe used a stolen cure from Amazing Ribs, but the recipe could have cited Amazing Rib’s cure instructions, alongside his published pastrami recipe. As it was written, Weissman suggested a smaller proportion of cure than Amazing Rib’s corned beef recipe, and a different meat volume and surface area. If Weissman cited Amazing Ribs’s work, it would have made his pastrami recipe safer for his subscribers.

With Weissman’s pad Thai recipe, there’s no culinary contribution from Weissman. His video is entirely stolen without any credit. In other cases Weissman’s own staff told me that he used personal recipes from his employees without credit. In these cases, it was beyond a substantive portion of a recipe that was stolen, it was the entire recipe.

Across each instance of stolen content, every recipe and his stolen photos, Weissman misrepresented the work of others as his own. Weissman did not have subject-matter expertise for Thai food. He did not have subject-matter expertise for Jewish cured meats. And he did not have subject-matter expertise for hoagie rolls or yeasted doughs in general.

If an influencer like Weissman has broadly covered food with frequent recipe releases, and they do not cite sources, without any demonstration of related subject-matter expertise, it is likely that they’re taking recipes from others without credit. It’s unclear to me what he created himself.

“‘…threats of violence soon followed.’”

Those who worked with Weissman described him as quick to anger and prone to abusive behavior. I was told that he would “‘throw shit all the time,’” and that he often had “‘fits like a child.’” Weissman threw food and other items so often, asking employees about specific instances of something thrown sometimes felt like asking people to describe a specific sound during rush-hour traffic: they all might remember different things, but everyone heard a lot of noise.

A former employee talked about Weissman’s violent behavior and said that “‘he would throw pots, pans, equipment, the food he made’”, and added that “‘he’d throw it anywhere.’” They told me that Weissman threw a hot dog at a dishwasher for buying the wrong meat. Someone else described Weissman berating them for not buying the precise ingredient Weissman requested and that “‘getting the “‘wrong thing’” was the quickest way to get him mad, and threats of violence soon followed.’” On the other hand, another former staff member told me that Weissman would become angry if employees spent too long looking for a specific item and didn’t just buy a generic alternative. There was no winning for Weissman’s staff.

Another former employee told me that Weissman once got annoyed with them for making noise, and he threatened to stick a gun in their mouth and pull the trigger, a threat made more disturbing in the context of the regular violent outbursts that Weissman’s employees described. A former staffer felt that “‘if you were his employee, you were beneath him,’” a sentiment that was broadly echoed by his employees.

Weissman’s studio is in Round Rock, Texas, just outside of Austin, but prior to moving to the Austin area, his videos were filmed at his home in Houston. Weissman bought a home in Los Angeles as an additional shooting location, and it was purchased in part for making videos with collaborators.

While on a 2022 trip to Weissman’s LA home, former employees told me that Weissman became enraged when he made a pizza too big for his pizza oven. He allegedly threw a pizza at the culinary assistant who had purchased the oven, and then they said Weissman threw knives into the sink. Weissman was said to have stormed out, and he did not return for hours. The culinary assistant was left to cleanup Weissman’s mess.

I was told that the next morning, Weissman decided that he wanted a large table moved upstairs, three flights, and that his employees would be the ones to move it. It was heavy enough that the employees believed it would take several of them to move it. The staff did not want to move the table; they noted that the table was heavy and unsafe to move and that there was no workers’ compensation or health insurance. They wondered what would happen they dropped it or if someone got hurt. When staff told Weissman they couldn’t move the table, they say he “‘flipped.’” They told me he threw a “‘tantrum,’” and he threw things on the floor.

That table incident was the breaking point for Weissman’s staff, and soon after, on October 8, 2022, they wrote a letter to Weissman and his second-in-command Vicram Chatterjee, known to Weissman’s audience as Vicram, outlining their issues with production planning, scope of work, lack of overtime pay, and Weissman’s anger and abuse toward employees. Sources told me that with exception to Vicram, all of Weissman’s staff who worked entirely on-site signed the letter.

Employees told me that remote workers were insulated from Weissman’s toxic behavior as he did not manage them directly. The experience between the two groups of workers was so different that when in-studio staff interacted with remote members of the team, they said that they often joked about how they “‘worked in two different companies.’”

The letter held back from discussion of Weissman’s sexual misconduct. There was a belief that his tendency to sexualize the workplace was immutable and that bringing it up would only anger him, and it risked him taking the rest of the letter seriously. One employee told me that “‘we figured if we put that in writing, the response would be beyond bad.’”

A former employee told me that they were working 60-to-70 hours a week without overtime pay, despite being contracted to work for 40-hour weeks with eight-hour days, and someone else described working 80-hour weeks for Weissman despite their claim of being contracted for 40-hour weeks. They claim that they never received additional pay for that work. In addition to those examples, a separate employee with whom I spoke described working 80-hour weeks long after the letter was delivered. None of those employees were paid more than $55,000 annually.

A former employee gave some additional context as to why the staff wrote the letter:

The editing department was frustrated about Josh’s consistently shifting demands and expectations that was burning us out. And the on set crew was being treated like garbage. And the behind the scenes people were dealing with the same stuff the editing team was while also having more personally targeted malice thrown at them. It was just a storm with Josh at the center so we knew we needed to come together and try to do something.

Staff had described Weissman as sometimes erratic, and he would abruptly change plans for videos. I was told a couple of completely finished videos were scrapped entirely. Weissman’s last-minute changes wasted weeks of effort and disrupted the shooting schedules. One employee said that from start to finish, the entire process of making a video could take two-to-three weeks.

Weissman’s former staff have told me that after they delivered the letter, Weissman had meetings with individual signatories, but things became different rather than better. Weissman cut the signatories out of the collaborative staff brainstorming process that typically bore video concepts, and he shifted to leaning on Lawrence Weibman, who was a primarily-remote producer who was flown in for the filming of larger-scale videos.

The shift toward leaning on Lawrence took staff by surprise: “‘Josh would talk about how shitty of a guy he was to us… how overpaid [he was], [how he] doesn’t do his job etc. But Josh would then turn around and call him to implement and oversee every process that “‘wasn’t working.’”’”

Weissman often complained to his staff about how much Lawrence was paid, and he often used both the expenses Lawrence incurred as a producer and his salary as excuse for not having money in the budget for various employee requests.

Another employee during that time described the shift in the workplace power dynamic:

The addition of Lawrence for us really just added another mouth into the mix. When the rest of the crew got taken out of development Lawrence took our place. Josh used him to communicate with us when Josh didn’t want to. We’d be getting orders from Josh through Lawrence or [he would] talk to us on Josh’s behalf.

Lawrence accumulated more power within the organization, but a former employee described his relationship with Weissman as “‘volatile,’” and another employee claimed Lawrence faced “‘the brunt of Josh’s childish meltdowns.’” Weissman continued to complain about Lawrence to his in-studio staff even after leaning heavily on him, and I was told that “‘he never stopped complaining about Lawrence.’” They added that “anything and everything he felt Lawrence was doing wrong… anytime he had a complaint about Lawrence everyone knew about it.”

I did not notice much difference between the descriptions of the culture from before the letter and after. One employee described the work environment as recently as 2024: “‘The culture was terrible. He throws fits like a child anytime the slightest thing is off and would bark orders to his staff like we were his servants.’” The source told me that Weissman “‘was a big fan’” of using an ableist slur to belittle staff, and according to multiple employees, that use of the slur went on for at least several years.

One employee said Weissman’s erratic behavior worsened after the letter. They thought that without the team’s creative input, Weissman was both less confident in ideas and there was less support to ensure smooth operations.

Weissman’s obsession with “‘constantly evolving’” added to employee stress and pushed him to want to change plans if video metrics did not improve. Another employee described the situation similarly, and said that plans changed “‘constantly.’” They told me that it “‘seemed like he was always afraid to fail.’”

Weissman’s continued to have violent episodes after the letter, and I was told that he became enraged during a shoot for his March 19, 2023 YouTube video, “‘I Cooked Without a Kitchen.’” While filming the ice cream making portion of the video, a source explained that “‘he got so upset and started punching the ice in a bowl until his hands were bloody.’” In the video, starting at about 9:47, cuts consistent with a punching injury appeared.

“‘I want to fuck you in the asshole.’”

Every one of Weissman’s former employees with whom I spoke told me that he regularly sexualized the workplace. Weissman frequently made sexual jokes, talked about performing sexual acts, made sex noises, and he would do things like pretend that a ladle was his penis. One of his former employees characterized Weissman’s behavior as “‘extremely overtly sexual humor’” that he attempted “‘all the time.’”

Some staff noted that Weissman specifically avoided making sexual comments directed at women, and some of Weissman’s former staff believed that Weissman feared that such behavior perceived as sexual harassment. Weissman made an exception to that apparent policy for women with whom he worked in the kitchen. I was also told that Weissman avoided addressing sexual comments toward a bisexual employee.

One of Weissman’s former employee remarked on the differences in employee treatment: “‘if you’re not doing it in front of women, you probably shouldn’t be doing in front of anybody,’” and they added, that the discrepancy betrayed that Weissman had “‘some awareness’” that his behavior was inappropriate.

I spoke with sources outside of Weissman’s staff who encountered him in a professional setting, and someone who was on set during a collaborative shoot with Weissman described his behavior: “‘he's a huge creep and he spent a lot of the day forcing unnecessary sexual jokes.’” They noted that Weissman specifically made sexual comments in front of women during the shoot. Those women did not work for him, and he sexualized the environment without compunction.

Weissman’s sexualization of the workplace was so intense that by the summer of 2023, he instituted a safe word for staff to use when he was saying something “‘horrible’” while cameras were rolling so his behavior wouldn’t be filmed. That he could be caught doing something obscene with cameras rolling seemed to be a specific concern for him.

Weissman had a predilection for making sexual comments going back to his time in restaurants, and I spoke to several of his former coworkers at Austin’s Uchiko, where Weissman worked primarily as a prep cook. I was told that Weissman worked on the line at Uchiko for “‘maybe a month or so just to say he did it.’” Weissman also worked as a prep cook at Odd Duck in Austin.

While some amount of sex talk was normalized in the kitchen, I was told that the extent of Weissman’s speech was aberrant. One of his former coworkers described him as often talking about “‘dildos or vibrators’” at the time. His behavior at Uchiko was bad enough that at least one former coworker made a complaint to a more senior figure in the organization.

Weissman’s former executive assistant Ulises Flores, known by fans as Ulises, faced a substantive amount of sexual harassment from Weissman. When Weissman’s employees greeted each other in the office, Ulises received compliments of his clothing. Instead of a polite compliment, Weissman regularly told his assistant, “‘you look real cute today,’” or “‘you look real sexy today.’” I was told these comments came along with a “‘creepy smile.’”

One employee recalled Weissman telling Ulises, “‘I want to fuck you in the asshole.’” Another employee quoted Weissman as he asked Ulises, “you want to get your ass ate?” Many told me that Weissman regularly sexually harassed Ulises in this manner, and he talked explicitly about wanting to have sexual intercourse with Ulises.

Ulises specifically asked Weissman to stop making sexual comments. I was told that Weissman avoided that conversation and changed the subject. But no more than a week later, Weissman was said to have returned to sexually harassing Ulises.

Weissman’s But Faster YouTube series featured Ulises racing to pickup takeout food while Weissman attempted to make the food himself (but faster). Fans knew him as Ulises and regularly cheered him on in the video comments by writing, “ULISES NATION.” In the comments to the video “Making Sushi Faster than a Restaurant,” fans expressed that they specifically enjoyed watching Ulises, and one fan wrote that Ulises was his “favorite part of the entire video.

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A series of comments in response to Weissman’s August 31, 2022 YouTube video, Making Sushi Faster than a Restaurant, in which viewers praised Weissman’s assistant, Ulises.

YouTube

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That type of positive reaction to Ulises was typical, and one of Weissman’s employee noted that “‘everyone adored him.’” Some perceived Weissman as threatened by the attention Ulises received, and I was told that “‘if anyone ever had any more credit than him, Josh would find a way to cut them down at the knees.’”. A source said that during a collaboration, people asked where Weissman found “‘such a good’” executive assistant. They said Weissman replied that Ulises was “‘overpaid’” and that he was looking for a new assistant.

Weissman’s sexual harassment of Ulises served to exert power over his executive assistant and mock the positive response that Ulises so often garnered. His behavior as an employer firmly constitutes sexual misconduct, and this misconduct occurred in the face of firm boundary setting from Ulises.

Sad Potato

Despite the several known instances of stolen recipes and photograph published by Weissman, Weissman’s employees said that he often accused other food YouTubers of copying his recipes, thumbnails, and methods. But Weissman was fixated on Nick DiGiovanni more than any other YouTuber. His staff told me that he regularly complained that DiGiovanni stole his work, and he claimed DiGiovanni’s success was because of him. Weissman made it known to his employees, that he hated DiGiovanni. One former employee said that “Nick DiGiovanni was the main source of his contempt.”

On October 30, 2024, Ulises made a Reddit thread, “‘I used to be Joshua Weissman’s assistant. Ask Me Anything.’” Among many other Weissman-related issues, Ulises discussed Weissman’s relationship with DiGiovanni:

Once he had me stalk his channel and take screen shots of any thumbnail that looked like a JW one. He did a small tik tok collab with Nick and when trying to tag Nick he was like I couldn’t find you. Nick grabbed his phone and was like oh it’s cuz you blocked me. JW quickly shifts the convo. That was truly embarrassing.

I was told about that Weissman/DiGiovanni interaction by another former employee. In 2022, during the same trip as both the pizza-throwing and table-moving incidents, Weissman went to a YouTube event in LA while his staff worked at his LA home. Weissman told his staff that he was seated near DiGiovanni at the event, and he decided that “‘it would be good for the brand to do a collaboration with Nick.’” It was characterized to me as a “‘a complete 180 on his stance’” after regularly accusing him of plagiarism among staff for over a year.

DiGiovanni came to Weissman’s LA home to film what would become a negligible short-form video, “‘Easy Tater Tots’”—the video was published on October 7, 2022, just a day before employees delivered their letter of grievances to Weissman. One of Weissman’s employees had recently flirted with a woman they met at a party. A rumor spread that the employee had been talking to a trans woman. Weissman heard the rumor, and while he was with DiGiovanni, he harassed the employee and repeatedly called on him to tell DiGiovanni about how he flirted with a trans woman.

Weissman thought it was funny that his employee would want to date a trans woman, and he sought to belittle the employee for what he perceived as foolish behavior. The employee was disturbed by the idea that Weissman would engage in this transphobic line of harassment in an effort to impress someone he previously framed as his “‘mortal enemy.’” Weissman harassed the employee twice, both times the employee appeared near him and DiGiovanni.

The employee eventually confronted Weissman about his transphobia, and they told me that Weissman yelled at them for describing his behavior as transphobic. Weissman defended himself by claiming he knew more about social issues than the employee. Whether or not the woman with whom the employee flirted was actually a trans woman, the behavior described is plainly transphobic, and the behavior further contributed to the hostile work environment that Weissman created.

When the shoot wrapped, DiGiovanni and Weissman wanted to promote their upcoming collaborative video on social media. But when Weissman went to tag DiGiovanni, he found himself unable to do so. DiGiovanni looked at Weissman’s phone, and he found that Weissman had him blocked.

A former employee gave their take on the situation:

It was an insane moment… all of us knew how much shit he had talked about Nick. When Nick showed up, Josh put on a face and acted like he had never said anything bad about him in his life. It felt like he almost got away with it until the end.

Weissman went on to accuse DiGiovanni of plagiarism for years after this incident. On December 18, 2023, DiGiovanni announced his Happy Potato brand, a clothing line with a stated goal to “‘donate as many meals as possible’” to combat food insecurity.

Weissman told his staff that he believed the smiley face within the Happy Potato logo graphic was stolen from him, and he claimed that he would send a cease and desist letter to DiGiovanni. Weissman had drawn smiley faces on objects for years prior. I can’t comment on the similarities between the two designs, but I do have concerns about my dentist getting sued.

By the time of the Weissman/DiGiovanni collaboration and the staff grievances letter in early October 2022, DiGiovanni surpassed Weissman in subscriber count, and as of July 2025, DiGiovanni is close to tripling Weissman’s following (27.5 million versus 10.3 million). Maybe it would have been “‘good for the brand’” for Weissman to have done the collaboration without bungling it up by blocking DiGiovanni and being transphobic.

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A comparison of the YouTube subscriber counts for Joshua Weissman (blue squares) and Nick DiGiovanni (red triangles) from mid 2022 to mid 2025 using data sourced from Social Blade. The date of the letter also indicates the approximate time of the collaboration between the two YouTubers.

Joe Rosenthal

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Weissman’s former employees described him as “‘terrified’” of confrontation, but there’s the aforementioned instances of Weissman’s violent temper, abuse of staff, and other confrontational behaviors. One employee told me that Weissman chewed them out for a half hour over something as trivial as a basic typo—how does that align with being terrified of confrontation?

One employee summarized Weissman’s approach to confrontation: “‘He’ll scold you if he thinks he has power over you but if he genuinely respects you and thinks you’re equal or even better than him he becomes incredibly defensive.’” They added, “‘…where that line is for him can shift in the middle of a conversation and he can go from attacking you to trying to deflect and back out… you demonstrate you aren’t afraid of him in that moment and/or he doesn’t have the power over you that he thought he did.’”

By his staff’s accounts, Weissman perceived DiGiovanni as his equal or better. Rather than confront his alleged plagiarist at the YouTube event, he took the likely path of least resistance: he invited him to collaborate—silently stewing in his seat would be its own sort of confrontation. One employee did note that Weissman “‘would do anything for views.’”

Weissman hyped up moving from Houston to the Austin area for years prior to its realization, and some staff were led to believe the move would happen within a few months after he first started talking about Austin. Weissman’s staff told me he would often say that they would be paid handsomely should they stick around and move with him, and employees told me he specifically claimed that “‘by the time we move to Austin, everyone will be driving nice sports cars.’” Weissman’s own collection of cars at times included a Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S, a Land Rover Defender, and a Lamborghini Huracán Tecnica. The Lamborghini had “‘YSCHEF’” license plates.

Former employee concerned about that move told Weissman they needed a path toward being compensated more. The employee told me that Weissman acted as if he were amenable to that. But privately, Weissman mocked the employee to their coworkers and laughed at how much they wanted to be paid.

The employee believed that Weissman lied rather than turn abusive because he had no leverage: the employee could have quit and disrupted operations if Weissman responded negatively. The employee further explained that “‘he only attacked people’s worth behind their backs.’”

I previously described such attacks: Weissman regularly complained to staff about the worth of his high-priced remote producer Lawrence, and he claimed that his executive assistant Ulises was “‘overpaid’” in response to people impressed by the job performance of his executive assistant. I never heard of Weissman making such claims in front of those staffers.

One former staffer told me, “‘he never considered that everyone was already struggling to get by in Houston and that Austin was a higher cost of living”’”. The staff I interviewed were making no more than $55,000 annually, and Vicram, Weissman’s second-in-command, and Lawrence stood as the only two exceptions to that ceiling. Both the employee who worked 60-to-70-hour weeks and the employees who said they worked 80-hour weeks told me they made that same meager wage. I spoke to multiple employees who told me Weissman promised them salaries of $70,000–80,000 after a period, but I never heard any such raises occurred.

One employee described Weissman’s failure to confront employees on the reality of their future working for him:

He’d constantly play up how great things would be, how much money we’d be rolling in, all the cool stuff we’d be able to buy…But he never paid us in a way that would make any of that possible. But it definitely gave us all this idealized dream of what the future of working with [Weissman] would be which only made the way things ended up going that much worse I feel.

A source familiar with Weissman’s brand deals told me that in 2021 and 2022, Weissman was receiving brand deals for between $50,000 and $200,000 for 30 seconds to a minute of video, and they gave a few specific examples: a $100,000 deal for 45 seconds of video; $200,000 and for one minute of video and a website rebrand, and the client, Wix, handled the website rebrand work. The source said $200,000 was a common number they saw for brand deals.

One employee brought a Crocs deal to Weissman that they fascilitated through a personal connection. Weissman would get a custom-designed pair of Crocs, and he would receive a percentage of the shoe sales. The employee wanted a percentage of the deal. Weissman “‘reluctantly agreed,’” they said, but told them that that Vicram is the only employee who receives percentage of any brand deals, and he wanted no other staff to know about anyone else being cut in.

The employee said that the deal fell through after Weissman refused to put a percentage in their contract. After repeatedly following up with Weissman, the employee told me he exploded. Weissman was described as swearing at them. They said that he told them to “‘fuck off,’” that he could “‘hire anyone else,’” and that he could do these deals without them. When pushed to a decision, Weissman seemed to fear cutting a staff member into a deal more than he feared cutting down an employee’s worth in front of them—Weissman’s false dichotomy.

In summer 2023, Weissman finally moved his operation from Houston to Austin. One employee who made the move contrasted Weissman’s extraordinary wealth from his YouTube presence with their struggle to make a basic living:

He was constantly flexing all of the new things he has… but crying poor to his underpaid employees. I was living in a tiny 200sq ft apartment, sleeping on a futon because I couldn’t afford a bed and barely making ends meet, and he while wearing a watch that could’ve covered my salary for 5 years told me he couldn’t pay me anymore.

Employees talked about Weissman’s Lamborghini and other cars, his watches, and he previously had a second home in LA. His home in Austin was featured in an episode of Architectural Digest’s Open Door. In the video, Weissman talked about the home being custom built by Matt Fajkus Architecture, and he showed off his nearly $20,000 Wolf range, a range for those who want to impress lay people more than they want to cook, and a Carrara marble kitchen countertop to match. The retail price of the range was roughly four months of salary for most of his staff.

In addition to his employees, some fans have even taken issue with his shows of wealth. In a Reddit thread for the Open Door episode, RubberBannedMan10 wrote, “‘Oh cool, look what scamming an audience with error-filled cookbooks buys you. No wonder he keeps slinging his audience lazy bullshit.’” It’s always been that way: he had a two-and-a-half-year-old recipe that, as of the time of writing, still suggested cooking sous-vide short rib at room temperature for two days.

The employee who moved with Weissman and couldn’t afford a bed told me that there was no work for nearly two months because Weissman’s studio wasn’t ready. They said that Weissman repeatedly misled them on the readiness of the studio ahead of the move. Wages weren’t paid until 30 days after the end of the pay period, and that led them to getting kicked out of their first apartment that they were subletting.

They told me Weissman promised a contract before the move occurred, but they received nothing until a week before the studio was ready, and nothing was signed until the first day back to work. They described being “‘put into a corner’”: “‘I had to accept any offer that was enough to cover rent.’”

They said they were told by Lawrence that they should expect an offer for between $60,000 and $65,000. Instead they got a six-month contract for $55,000 with the promise that if they did well, they would get another contract for $75,000. They say Weissman avoided any conversation of new contracts, and they believed that Weissman wanted them to continue working for $55,000 without an additional contract. That was the end.

I can’t say whether Weissman’s continual broken promises to staff are a result of his aversion to confrontation or if his aversion to confrontation is a product of his interest in continuing to exploit his employees, but it’s clear that Weissman regularly misled his workers and harmed them, and “‘misled’” is a generous descriptor.

Weissman published plagiarized recipes and stolen photography. He abused his employees and created a hostile work environment that he regularly made sexual. And throughout it all, he exploited the staff that helped build his fortune.

The story of Joshua Weissman is a story of failure. He failed to be a leader to his staff. He failed to curb his ego, his rage, and his most obscene impulses. He failed to do anything more than build the myth of the man. I hope that a failure of accountability will not be next. And I hope that he will stop. ////