- The Sway House, also known as
Sway LA , is Los Angeles TikTok collab house that has a reputation for controversial personalities. Sway LA pools some of TikTok's biggest stars: Bryce Hall, 20, Jaden Hossler, 19,Josh Richards , 18, Quinton Griggs, 17, Anthony Reeves, 18, Kio Cyr, 19, and Griffin Johnson, 21.- With nearly 19 million TikTok followers, Richards, one of Sway's founding members, was an unspoken ringleader.
- Amid a string of house controversies, including drug arrests and a New York Times article about their partying, Richards announced a hiatus from the group this month. Fans were roundly shocked and confused.
- In an Insider interview, Richards explained the thought process behind his decision to hit pause and discussed what's next, including his new clothing line, Buddy's Hard.
Josh Richards was on top of the world. With nearly 19 million followers on TikTok and a coveted spot in Sway, one of Los Angeles' buzziest collab houses, Richards had seemingly reached the apex of his career.
Now he wants to apologize — so much, in fact, that he skipped the influencer favorite "Notes app apology" and went straight to an 800-word confession on Medium. It's a rich text for anyone who's been following his latest controversy: deciding to take an indefinite hiatus from Sway to rein in his "recklessness."
"I let the fame get to me," Richards wrote, clarifying the primary reason for his unexpected departure. "I allowed the LA partying
Sway LA is one of the most prominent (and polarizing) groups on TikTok
2020 has been a pivotal year for Richards. It's clear he's been doing some soul-searching as he struggles to reconcile the earnest 14-year-old who rose to social-media fame with the person he's become: an untouchable veteran creator, a Gen Z pop-culture soothsayer, and something of a TikTok troublemaker.
The members of Sway — Richards, 18, Bryce Hall, 20, Jaden Hossler, 19, Quinton Griggs, 17, Anthony Reeves, 18, Kio Cyr, 19, and Griffin Johnson, 21 — have managed to earn a party-animal reputation in a short time; Sway was created in January.
"I love those guys, and they've always had my back," Richards told Insider. "They're loyal friends. They are people you always want in your corner. They're great guys. But we had lost ourselves.
"I don't want to speak on their behalf too much, but I feel like we've lost our way in a sense. We got a little bit blinded by all the flashy lights and money in LA. And I think that happens to everyone that comes out here and starts becoming successful, to a certain degree. And then eventually they either take a step back and go, 'Well, OK, I need to find myself and be true to myself again,' or they don't."
—Josh (@JoshRichards) May 31, 2020
For the uninitiated, the "Sway boys" are shade-room regulars, known for engaging in Twitter spats, sparking minor feuds, dropping diss tracks, and, occasionally, flashing fans on Instagram Live. But most of those controversies have been blips on the radar for fans, whose religiosity can mirror that of the followers of '90s boy bands.
—Josh (@JoshRichards) May 4, 2020
Richards wanted Sway to be a haven for emerging creators
At the beginning of his career, Richards worked with managers who policed his public image so closely that going live on social media was the only way he could be himself, he said. From 14 to 17, he felt like he was playing a character or reading a script. The managers controlled what he posted and used shared access to his personal account to leave comments on his behalf.
"I remember it was, like, a whole big thing, because I wanted to go on the [Light's Out] tour so badly, and he wouldn't let me," Richards recalled. "It was even to that degree where the things I wanted to do I wasn't allowed to do.
"So I got away from that. I got to go on this tour, and I was like, I'm going to slowly but surely turn my content into what I want it to be."
That summer tour is how Richards met most of the boys who'd go on to form Sway. Richards cofounded Sway's parent company,
—Josh (@JoshRichards) April 18, 2020
Sway has recently been plagued by mishaps that point to bigger issues at the house
In May, while vacationing in Texas, two of Sway's most recognizable faces, Hall and Hossler, were arrested on drug-related charges.
Sway LA doesn't have an official hierarchy, but if it did, Hall, Hossler, and Richards would be the Trinity. And in early June, The New York Times' Taylor Lorenz confirmed that there had been a lot of "frat-like behavior" at
Neighbors told Lorenz that the boys were loud and messy and relied on delivery and Amazon to meet most of their needs. One said young women kept showing up on her doorstep in the middle of the night, having mistaken her house for theirs.
On Twitter, Reeves has repeatedly asked fans to stop pulling up to the house, knocking on the door, peering through the windows, and trying to record videos of the group at home. This week, he tweeted about recording the license-plate number of someone lingering outside the house.
"It kind of feels like you're just like a zoo animal in a cage, and they're coming by and poking at the cage," Richards said. "It's hard to say that, because we love our fans so much and they do everything for us. But there's also — I feel like there always has to be that respect. And there are a lot of supporters that do know that address, but they wouldn't show up, just because they know that would bother us."
—anthony:) (@imanthonyreeves) May 28, 2020
—anthony:) (@imanthonyreeves) May 15, 2020
Richards has dabbled in 'bad boy' aesthetics before
Frankly, it would have been easy for Richards to lean in and spin controversy into a branding opportunity. Memorably, when the YouTuber Tana Mongeau was arrested at Coachella in 2017, she sold T-shirts emblazoned with her mugshot for $28 each. After receiving blowback on social media earlier this year, the Hype House cofounder Thomas Petrou dropped a collection of cancel-culture-themed merchandise. Another YouTuber, Jake Paul, has built a very successful career around agitation.
"I mean, I've been there, I've done that," Richards said. "And just, with that I found I was just digging myself a deeper grave. Like, I was sending myself down a path that I had never truly wanted to be in in the first place."
Taking a step back from the group wasn't a decision Richards reached quickly, and he said he was considering some kind of break before the group's encounter with the police in Texas. The hiatus wasn't tied to a single event, but a result of a growing sense of disillusionment with his own content.
"I have those millions and millions and millions and millions of people that are following me," he said. "And I wasn't showing any of the good side of me.
"It's not that I wasn't doing anything great or I wasn't being a good person. It's just, I was trying to break the stigma of TikTokers being these kids that didn't fit in or were lame, didn't have fun. And I was so concerned about what other people were saying about me and what these other YouTubers would say about TikTokers and what TikTokers said about themselves — I was trying to break that. I was going to do whatever I could do to show people that we were these regular teenage kids."
Coming across an old clip on Instagram solidified his decision 'to make a change'
While searching through his tagged photos one night, Richards spotted a snippet of himself, at 14, going live on Instagram.
"And in that video, I was talking about how I wasn't going to care what people thought about me, ever," he said. "I wasn't going to be someone that fell into the mentality in LA of getting money and spending a lot of money, buying this fashion-designer item and these $2,000 shoes and, like, spending this much money to get a brand-new car. And I was going down that path.
"It was just another one of those wake-up calls," he said of the moment. "I need to make a change. And I need to let every single one of my fans or supporters know that I'm going to do that."
Richards is escaping the trappings of Sway life in a luxury apartment. The biggest perk is privacy.
The apartment is a major downsize from 7,800 square feet, but as Richards and Hossler joked in one of their latest vlogs, it has a lot of things the Sway House didn't: privacy, food in the fridge, flatware, a microwave, a dog, and clean bathrooms.
"At least for me, personally, after a little bit it was just, like, I'd realized for the last maybe eight months it felt like I never had a moment of privacy," Richards said of his time living at Sway. "I remember there was one day, like, I was in my room, and there was no one else in my room, because Jaden went home. And it felt so weird to be alone. It was just really different."
Apparently, the apartment smells significantly better than Sway House too.
"Smells like f---in' body odor in that b----," Richards said of the mansion during a video tour of his new place.
Hossler, Richards' new roommate, agreed. "Smells like death," he said.
Richards and Hossler want to focus on new projects
Music and entrepreneurship are two of Richards' passions, and since childhood, he's almost always had a side hustle of some sort, be it yard work, making lacrosse mesh, or, in this case, starting a sociology podcast to explore "why people think the way they think" and how we can have better, more productive IRL conversations about our "opinions and differences."
Hossler will cohost the show, and Richards promised that the guests would be "mostly unorthodox" and "some of the most formidable experts in their respective fields."
"We want to be able to show people that you can still have a conversation," Richards said. "Because our society today is so focused just on the phone and in the now — like, instant, instant. And their attention span goes away in, like, 30 seconds.
"And that's why something like TikTok has become so big, because the videos are so short, right? But with that, like, kids are losing the ability to hold a conversation."
Richards said he also hopes to use his new clothing line, Buddy's Hard, to affect change. As Black Lives Matter protests broke out across the country, Richards created an exclusive "Buddies Stronger Together" hoodie and said he'd donate 100% of the proceeds to the NAACP.
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