Josh Richards: Too Handsome

0:00I don't even know if we have to - we can just stare at each other now for the next 45 minutes.

0:16Hey, everybody. Welcome to Literally. Today, we have a masterclass in the content creator economy. TikTok, Twitch, live streaming, influencer, brand deals, endorsements. If you have any interest whatsoever in the new online economy, this episode is for you. We've got my guy, Josh Richards, who I met through my sons. He's too handsome for his own good, and he's too smart for his own good, and he's so ambitious and just a, as my kids would say, dad, he's a baller. And he's murdered it in the content creating field. Josh has over 25 million followers on TikTok. He's got 6 million on Instagram and on and on and on.

1:14And he has currently a very cool podcast with Dave Portnoy's Barstool Sports called BFFs and was a part of the original Sway House, which you probably won't know, but your kids will. Let's find out what the youngins are doing these days and what influencers are doing right now with one of the biggest stars there is, Josh Richards.

1:43Joshua, does anybody ever call you Joshua? Only my mother and my girlfriend. Ah, so basically the two most important women in your life. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Not much of a just, I would, yeah, preface that with saying the most important people. When you're in trouble or? I think when there's ever any elevated emotion, I think Joshua comes out, right? I don't know if it's just, you know, when it's, yeah, I'm in trouble and maybe I did something wrong. I think, you know, sometimes if I have a moment where I'm really funny, a Joshua could slip out. sometimes if I have a moment where, you know, maybe I'm not letting my mom have the ability to talk in a conversation, she'll hit me with a Joshua and be like, hey, it's my turn.

2:27It's my turn now. So yeah, I think I'm up every once in a while. Okay, good. So if I feel like the conversation's getting away from us, I'll hit you with Joshua again. Yeah, you'll see my eyes go a little bit wide. Like I know it's getting serious. So we met, it's been years ago now, hasn't it? Yeah, yeah. I would say it's been at least... three, three years, maybe two and a half years now. It's been a while. Were you still living at the Sway house at this point? I think you might've been. Yes. Yes. Yes. Or one of the Sway house variants. Uh, I guess at that point we, we had gone through, I think kind of the initial like splitting where we had half of the boys in one house and half in the other house.

3:06Uh, when, when we started talking, but yeah. So for those of you who do listening, who might not understand what a Sway house was, you got it. Like I'm, I'm deeply immersed in the TikTok world. And we'll get to that much more so than when I first met you. But for the uninitiated listening, walk me through what your life was like at that point and living in the Sway house, which is my favorite thing. Yeah, yeah. I always like to say that was my college fraternity experience in life. I didn't go to college after high school. I moved out to LA and joined the Sway house. And essentially, it was a group of seven best friends that all decided we were going to go live in a mansion in bel-air is really where it was we we had sponsors come in and sponsor this house uh and it was all of us creating content on social so all of us would be posting you know our our five videos a day creating youtube doing podcasting whatever it was we were all making content together and and really the idea was you know you can only show up so many times through your own socials but you can really kind of take over the whole platform if you have six or seven people posting you five times a day.

4:14Now you got 35, 30 videos up of yourself instead of just five. So that was really kind of the idea. But the lifestyle there was very chaotic and why it didn't last much longer than two years because we were young kids that had been given a lot of attention and money and we were partying just every time. Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? A bunch of college, freshman age guys single, good-looking, famous guys living in a mansion. What could possibly go wrong? Right. Of course, that seems like it's the recipe for something great. But it was definitely wild. There were a lot of neighbors that weren't too fond of the Sway House.

4:57And a lot of people in the government in LA that weren't too happy with us either during the COVID times, just because we decided, you know, we were going to keep doing parties. And that was something that was, you know, definitely young and dumb in us that we were doing. Like we were deciding like, hey, we're going to stay social. And we were hanging out with everyone our age. We kind of, you know, looked at it like, ah, we're just having fun. What could be an issue here? But eventually the issue became that they decided to shut off our power and water at one point. So we had to go, you know, we had to then go to a different one of the houses to throw the parties.

5:32It ended up becoming a very wild time and uh eventually all the boys were like okay i think we need to actually start focusing on our futures a little bit let's uh maybe strap in so uh we did and uh now now you know we still like to have fun but um everyone's off doing doing their own thing and trying to navigate this this world of entertainment yeah and and we'll get to that you've got your your bff with barstool and dave portnoy always a big fan of dave's um but i i still am because i think we're gonna look back on that time as the beginning of, well, we already look back at that time as the beginning of sort of the new media and the new ecosystem for, I mean, you're in an interesting point.

6:19Like, you didn't go to college, you clearly could have. And instead, you were like, you know what, I'm going to go, I'm going to start now. I'm not going to go into debt to go to college. I'm not going to wait four years. I'm going to go and do it. Um, I did the same thing, you know, years, years and years ago. Uh, what, what were the economics like? Like, how did you got, how did you get to a point where somebody said, Hey, I know, uh, we're going to, we're, we're, we're a brand, whatever brand, and we're going to fund your mansion. How does that, how does that even happen? Yeah, yeah. So I actually was the one that founded the management company that repped all of us guys that got the brand to come in and fund the house.

7:08So you found or knew all these other young influencers, content creators, you knew them anyway. Yeah, yeah. So we had actually just wrapped doing a tour. So this was kind of a big thing at that moment in social media, where you'd have groups that would kind of go on these meet and greet tours, much like, you know, you show up, you do like, like kind of like we see with a live podcasting tour right now. It's a lot of, you know, conversations with the audience. You're getting the audience engaged in ways you do the meet and greet line. And that was a way to kind of create that deep connection with the audience, be able to see them at this point.

7:45All that it was, was, you know, you were seeing numbers or you were seeing comments. You never really got to know the audience. So me and a lot of my friends went on this tour. And when we wrapped that up, we had come off the tour and the tour had grossed around$3 million. Wow. So we were, you know, 17, 16. This was crazy to us. We'd never seen anything like this before. And I ended up getting my paycheck for the tour and it was$700. So I'm starting to do some math. You know, my dad's a calculus teacher, a math teacher. I didn't need to use the calculus though to figure out, okay,$700,$3 million.

8:18Somebody's taking some money that isn't supposed to be getting a lot of this. And that's very quickly when I found out like social media was the wild west. There was no UTA, CAA, WME. No agencies were coming in and repping. There was no union. There was nobody protecting the creators. The creators were pretty much on their own. And there were a lot of these people claiming to be either managers or reps, but there was no barrier to entry. They didn't have to go to school. They didn't have to do anything to call themselves a rep. And they weren't certified. Like an agent is certified by a board.

8:48Exactly. There's no agency they're working for. There's no clients that they have had existing that you can go and talk to or get a check on. And so it was a lot of handshake deals. And people take advantage of young kids when they're in entertainment. That's the story as a whole time. It doesn't matter what scene in entertainment you're in. And so right then I was like, all right, I got to do something about this. So that's when I went and I founded a management company. And we got investors into that. And then some brands were able to come in as well. And that's what funded the house. But that was really like, I'm going to create a management company by the creator for the creator.

9:25I don't want to rip myself off. I don't want to rip my friends off. So why not do something that I know can be in favor of all of them. And we went and signed. I signed 115 kids, 115 of the top TikTokers in the span of 10 days. And then that's when all the agencies decided to start paying attention. That's when WME and UTA and ICM, they all started knocking on the door, calling us. And I took one of those calls with ICM. And I used them because I needed to get an agency license for my company and I didn't have one. So we used ICM to rep us to be able to use their agency license. And then that's how we built that company.

10:01And I've sold my shares in that since then. But that was really the start in how Sway was able to kind of be founded. And all these guys, we'd all hung out together. We were doing content together all the time. And we were going to do this either way, where we were going to build this group. All of us were like, why would we stop this momentum that we've created off of tour and being in LA for the summer after? Let's keep this going. And so it was kind of this perfect storm where I was wanting to create this company. The boys and I had already decided, let's together They're going to create Sway.

10:29So it was able to work really well. Yeah. And you're how old when you do this? I was 18. I was 18 at the time. Amazing. You know, that's the thing. I love stories of young, really young. I mean, that's young, young, young entrepreneurs. And you're kind of, is it fair to say a lot of it you're making up as you go along, right? Yeah. I mean, a lot of it has been, I would say like the biggest thing at the beginning was, not being afraid to make mistakes. Like that was always just kind of what I held on to. It was like, I'm at a time right now where I can make so many mistakes. I'm young, I can do that.

11:07I can learn from that. And the more mistakes I can make at a young age, the less I'm going to make at an older age. So let's like, let's just get those all out of the way while we can. And yeah, it was just kind of, how can we also, you know, hold on to this kind of lightning in a bottle in the sense that we had achieved with social and not let it slip away. What was the moment where it went from, and I'm assuming it started as you're just, you know, fucking around on TikTok, you and your bros, and you're just, and then all of a sudden it gets with no real eye on the future, but then something, it sort of catches fire and you go, oh, there's some there there.

11:43Like, do you remember what that moment was? Yeah, yeah. You know, I think there were a couple of those aha moments like throughout or things that like kind of just re-encouraged me to keep going. But I remember the first one, and this is the story that I love to tell, was my sister was the first person to get me onto social media. She's a year younger than me, and she asked me to do a video. And we did this video together. This was my first time being on social, like showing my face. I'd always like run accounts. I'd always loved social media. I ran like family guy clip accounts, or I'd run like an Adventure Time fan page, like cartoon fan page.

12:20I loved social and growing pages. I just never had done it myself. So this was my first time getting a video. I was 13. She was 12. Video gets like 100 likes. We think we're viral. We're running around the house. We're going crazy. We're like, holy cow, we're famous. Like, and after that, I remember, you know, seeing the comments and there were a couple of girls commenting on it. And I was like, yeah, all right. Okay, I'll make myself an account, I guess. So I go and I create an account and me and my sister started doing together for a little bit. And I went on live. There was this live streaming like feature on the platform.

12:52So I tried it out and I went live. It was fun, fun time. Me and my sister were having a blast. I end the live, I post another video and I get a comment. And it was like, hey, those gifts people were sending in, that's money. And I kind of was like, wait, you can make money off of this? And so I go and I look into my account and there was$100 in my account. And I'm 13,$100. I'm freaking out. I'm like, okay, I'm rich now and famous. This is wild. 100 views,$100. Let's go. Wait, somebody gave, wait, wait, why did somebody send you$100? So it was through a bunch of people watching, much like, I don't know if you've at all seen kind of this new meta of social media right now, but Twitch, if you've heard of that, it's like a massive thing, right?

13:38And you see these people that are getting, Kai Sinech broke the record with a million subscribers, right? Yes, yes. Those are like people donating. So subscribers are actually, that's$5. That's$5 a month, just like if you're subscribing to, you know, a streaming service. Understood, understood. So the people watching this live with your sister have to subscribe to do it. And it's a hundred bucks. I see. A hundred viewers, a hundred bucks. Got it.

14:15So like back then it was a little different. They weren't using subscribers. They were using a gifting method, which like people would send these gifts. their username pops up on the screen. It's like, you know, the moment where the creator kind of gives extra attention. And like, it's like this moment that I guess people feel like they're getting to be involved in the stream more than just commenting, right? And usually it'd be like, oh, we're going to follow them. Oh, let's send a bunch of people to their account, whatever it is. So that's kind of what that first like moment of being like, oh, you can make money on social.

14:45This is something like I could actually take seriously. And I was always a very entrepreneurial driven kid when I was younger. if that was having a hockey shirt company and going and selling those when I would have hockey tournaments or going and creating a lacrosse company where I string sticks and dyeing mesh and all that stuff. So I saw this and was like, okay, how do we start? How do we start making? How do we start making more money? How do we start using this as a job? And I cut my sister in on a 15 % commission-based salary. And she would sit beside me on my dad's high school assigned iPad.

15:14And she would go through the list of the top 200 gifters. There's actually a list of the top 200 spending people every single 24 hours. She'd go through that list, log into my account. She'd follow all of them and then like 15 of their videos. And that would send them a bunch of notifications. They'd come over into my live stream. We'd know because we followed them. So they're highlighted in red. We'd give them attention and then we'd get donations. And that was like just this little thing we were kind of doing in our room that ended up eventually starting to be like a$600 a week kind of like business we were doing at 13 and 14 until my dad eventually saw the PayPal notifications going through from his PayPal to my bank account and thought I was selling drugs.

15:52So then we had to have a serious conversation. Um, cause he, he, he had to sit me down and go, yo, where's all this money coming from? I'm no idiot. I was in high school once, you know, and he, he's starting to have this very deep conversation with me and I'm sitting there like, what, what do you think it is that I'm doing? And he goes, well, Josh, you know, I was your age. I'm no, no, no, I'm not oblivious to drugs. Yeah. And I'm still like, Whoa, whoa, man, no, it's social media. And so I had to explain to him what live streaming is. How was that conversation? He must've been like, I'm, I'm fairly, uh, educated in, in all of it.

16:27I mean, it's media. So I'm, I'm, I know what, what's what, but I can imagine your dad, just, just a regular dad in that era, you know, that so many years ago going, what the living hell is going on. Yeah, yeah. Because I mean, that's 10 years ago now, right? So social media was like 100 ,000 years ago. Yeah, yeah. It wasn't even close. Yeah, I think it actually would have been an easier conversation for my dad if I was selling drugs than if it were to be teaching him about social media. I think he could have, he was more prepared for a conversation going in that direction. For sure. But no, they were, they were, they were extremely supportive.

17:03I always say like, I do have to credit a lot of who I am today and my career and everything about my parents. I mean, they were the type of parents that would drop everything and just want to learn and support whatever their kids are doing. If that was, you know, when I did social media, that would be my dad, you know, taking an unpaid day and helping me be able to fly to DC or wherever it was that was having a social media event, like he was doing that. Or if it was when I wanted to do the lacrosse company and I was dying mesh, I mean, I destroyed my parents' basement, the carpeted basement with dye.

17:38And they set me up a whole little office area. And like, they were okay with doing those things because to them, that's, you know, just like installing creativity and something that's going to go for it and all those good things and a kid. So yeah, I wouldn't be here today without them. That's, it's, first of all, you're blessed to have parents like that for sure. It's definitely, it puts you in the red zone of life to score. Yeah, and yeah, it's a very lucky place to come from because there's not a lot of it anymore. You know, even like all my friends in the Sway House. And, you know, like that was kind of, I'm from such a small town.

18:17I'm from a town of 15 ,000 people that even if there are, you know, families that might have disputes or whatever in a small town, it tends, they'll hide that home life a little bit better, I find. Or maybe you don't know as much of the home life. And so to me, everyone kind of had that family. And then when I came to LA and I met the guys in the house, I kind of started to see like, all right, there's a lot of people that, you know, they're starting on the one yard line compared to the red zone. And that's, it's, you got to be grateful for it. You got to count your blessings for it. Yeah, 100%.

18:48Okay, so you move out of the Sway House. Yes. And so let me ask you this. In the Sway House, is everybody doing the sort of similar stuff or do you have your, like, one guy is the funny guy. one guy is the prank guy one guy or is it just sort of a free-for-all yeah no i think uh at the beginning it was a little bit of a free-for-all but um very quickly everyone kind of started figuring out their roles or i think people's personalities just kind of started to shine through like we had uh bryce hall in the house he was very much the wild card like if you if if anybody in the house could have uh you know taken one night and changed its direction on a complete 180 in a split second, that's Bryce Hall.

19:34You never know what's going to happen. I mean, we might have the best night of our lives. We might end up behind bars. We really don't know what's going on with that guy. Love him to death, but he's a wild man. And we had Jaden. Jaden, he was the artist. He was the musician. He was the one that went and signed a record deal. He was doing music. He was coming out with that. Quentin was kind of the young guy in the group. When he joined in, he was like our freshman. He was like the guy that was kind of in our frat. he was the pledge. He was the guy that was having to rush us. And he very quickly kind of started finding his own lane in the music scene as well.

20:09And then, so everyone, you know, kind of had their like little, like we had like Anthony, who was more of like a fashion guy. We had Griffin, who was more of like the outdoorsy. He's like a Florida guy. He's fishing all the time, hunting all the time. Now he races his horse. Like everyone ended up kind of having their own lane. So yeah, it definitely got built out where now everyone kind of had a path to go to once Sway disbanded. And so Sway disbands and how do you get hooked up with Barstool and with that whole crap with Dave Portnoy and everything? You're like, I love the pizza ratings. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

20:46No, so I started the podcast with Dave, was still in, Sway was still going on at the time when the podcast came to be. I had actually made a diss track online against another person in the influencer scene. And it went really viral and started trending and was on Twitter and everywhere. And that was kind of one of the times when social media had started to seep into other areas of entertainment or other areas on like the platform where TikTok itself or the creators and drama and news coming out of TikTok was circulating now on Twitter and everywhere else. Like this was one of those first kind of storms.

21:25and Dave started seeing it in his timeline and he tweets out and his exact words were, why the fuck are these wiggle dickers showing up on my timeline? That was the quote that he put out. So me being that wiggle dicker, I went, I need to get on a call or a stream. I got to do something with Dave explaining to him exactly why we're showing up on his timeline. So get in contact with him. We do an Instagram live together. This Instagram live ends up having like like 100 ,000 concurrence on it or something crazy. And we go and do this conversation for about 15 minutes of me just kind of explaining.

22:03Let me stop you there. Let me stop you there, Joshua. So 100 ,000 concurrence literally means that at that moment, any given moment, there were 100 ,000 people listening, watching live on their phones. To put it in proper perspective, there are cable news shows now that barely get those numbers. Yeah, it was literally like very famous people who I don't want to name because it'll sound like I'm, you know, taking the piss out of them. There are very, very famous talking head people on cable news who shows barely get that. Just perspective for people listening. So you've got 100 ,000 people watching.

22:46Okay, continue on. Yeah, this was an impromptu live that just came out of nowhere, right? This wasn't a scheduled event or anything. So it definitely kind of took a little bit of the social media world by storm. People were all going, you know, throwing their hands in the air being like, what is going on? What is this combo? Like, why is Dave Poirot talking to Josh Richards? And what world would this ever happen? And, you know, clips from the stream started to get posted and it just kept getting kind of this talk around it. And seeing how well it did, I went, okay, this could become a full-time show.

23:16like this could be a really cool co-viewing opportunity for people where you know all their parents watch dave and all their kids are watching on tiktok so they all the kids know the drama and the kids are trying to talk to their parents about things that go on and the parents never get it well this is perfect that dave is representing the parents i'll represent the kids let's go do this podcast where we talk about all this stuff that's circulating social media i'll give the opinion and then you give your opinion on it as well being you know the older generation right and And so it created this really funny kind of duo between the two of us, but there was still kind of a piece missing.

23:51And that's why we went on and brought Brianna Chicken Fry into the podcast as well, who she's our other co-host. Or now it's just me and Bri. But Bri was able to give that female perspective because it became a little bit of like a bro down. Oh, a little bit of a bro down. A little bit of a bro down. Yeah, come on. Yeah, for sure. It was like, all right, we need to bring in somebody that's going to be able to keep us in check. And that was Brianna Chicken Fry. And she did an incredible job with it. One of the great names of all time. Great name. Great. I mean, it's as good. It's like, I don't know about like, sometimes when you check into a hotel and you want to go under an assumed name, right?

24:32I always have fun with like, what's a great name to go under it. I think I might have to steal Mr. Chicken Fry. It's awesome. It's really, it is such a good one. I mean, like Johnny Drama is a good one too, though. Johnny Drama is one of the great names. There are some great names in the new Leo movie, One Battle After Another. They've got some, all those characters have. I haven't got to go see that yet, but I'm very excited to. Really insane names, but nothing tops Chicken Fry. So Dave, Dave sort of, you and Dave launched it. And what was the schedule, like once a week? Yeah, it was once a week.