- Garrett Watts is a YouTuber with over 3 million subscribers.
- He’s beloved by his subscribers for his wonderfully chaotic editing style and nonconformist ideas such as baking a cake for a rat that he found and dressing up like “IT” for a day.
- He’s a self-defined oddball and free-spirit, whom fans love for his authenticity and lack of materialism that characterizes traditional celebrities and influencers.
- Watts spoke to Insider about his YouTube career so far, what he loves and finds challenging as a creator, and what 2020 has in store.
- Along the way, he also championed the message to take the time to find what you love to do, and never to look at yourself with anybody’s eyes but your own.
- Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.
When Garrett Watts joined our Zoom call to have a chat about his life and career, he’d forgotten to change his background back from a blue and pink psychedelic pattern he’d been experimenting with earlier.
“I can’t even take myself seriously,” he laughed as he tried to get rid of it. “Hang on, hang on. Everything’s going to be cool. It’s all good.”
The image disappeared to reveal a poppy painting on the yellowish wall of the Washington Airbnb Watts was staying with his friend Andrew Siwicki.
“We’re up here in this honeybee themed cottage in nature,” he said. “We’re just, like, hanging out with the trees … We’ve just been making stuff up here and goofing around a lot. We did a fire pit last night. I love it. I love camping and nature and all those sorts of things.”
Some fans know Garrett from his famous friendship group
Watts normally lives alone in LA in a tiny house with his terrifying but iconic doll Benjamin and a garden where he leaves out cakes for various wildlife. He started building a following on YouTube about four years ago when he was given a gentle nudge by his friend, and YouTube royalty, Shane Dawson, who also hired Siwicki as his cameraman.
Watts can't remember exactly when he and Dawson first met, but it was on the dating app Tinder. They quickly realized they'd be better off as friends as there wasn't much of a romantic spark.
Watts, Siwicki, Ryland, and Morgan Adams formed a group that became hugely popular among fans for their adventures and experiences Dawson has been uploading to his channel since 2016. While Siwicki remained mostly behind the camera, Watts built a career with his wonderfully chaotic energy in front of it.
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But before I could question Watts about any of that, he asked me how I was coping during the lockdown in London. He said he'd only visited once, a couple of years ago, when he'd stayed in a massive abandoned retirement home in the outskirts of the city.
"I do a lot of couch surfing," he said. "So I was staying with this hippie guy in there and his girlfriend. It was very interesting. It had been shut down a couple of years previous, but there were still some tenants who they said didn't have to leave. So there were still some elderly people living in there that were capable enough to live on their own."
Watts also wanted to show me one of the possessions that had made the trip to Washington before we got going - a cuddly baby Yoda.
"My friend Sean from Florida, he sent me this," he said. "His girlfriend crocheted this baby Yoda and he just sent it in the mail 'cause he's a nice guy. It's so thoughtful. I'm not even a huge Star Wars fan."
He doesn't care about fame
It's easy to see how Watts has a loyal following of over 3 million subscribers. You can't help but be taken in by his whimsical excitement for life, and how he seems like one of those people who picks up friends wherever he goes. Even with our interview, it was his idea to talk over video, simply because "it's nice to see another face."
He is captivating, but not in a way that feels performative. He has held onto a wonderment for things that most of us lose as we grow up, which makes him someone you want to have in your life. His channel description says, "I don't care about fame, numbers or ego. I just wanna have a great time with you," and he leaves us with no doubt it's true.
Inside the effervescent exterior, there's also a lot of wisdom. It might be something to do with his absolute lack of envy for anyone else on the planet.
"It's like I'm just missing some part of my brain that is able to compare myself to other people," he said."It's like that's the silliest thing in the world. I'm a different human with different parents and upbringings and interests and all this stuff, and no one's going to do what I do, and everyone has different strengths."
His thoughtful nature maybe also partly be thanks to the long, haphazard journey he took to being an internet celebrity, which began when he was just 17.
He originally moved to LA to pursue being a director, but as is the case with many showbiz stories, he ended up doing a lot of other things. He was a wedding DJ for a long time, worked on at least 100 production sets, waited tables in at least 15 different restaurants and cafés, and even managed a pizzeria-slash-art gallery at one point.
"I've done everything possible before YouTube, which I really appreciate about myself," he said. "Because I see some of these kids who are super young on YouTube - on social media, not just YouTube - they're 15, 16, 17. I always want to shake them and just be like, 'Go live your life, do something else before all this stuff happens.'"
He doesn't mean it in a condescending way, he's just grateful he had world experience before delving into the world of being an online influencer.
"It just makes you respect so many different facets of every industry before starting something like this."
Shane Dawson helped kickstart his YouTube career
Watts created his YouTube channel back in 2012 to make content for a drag queen called Miss Coco Peru. He'd been a fan of hers since watching "Girls Will Be Girls" - a parody movie about what it's like to be an actor in Hollywood - so he was more than happy to help. Being the actual YouTube star was never part of the plan.
"It was an option for sure," Watts said. "Like everyone in high school watched YouTube and knew all these YouTubers and stuff, but I didn't. I was a sucker for like old movies and all these different things, so YouTube wasn't part of my ambition."
He only really considered it a viable career path after he was laid off by Will Ferrell's production company Funny or Die about three years ago, and Dawson, who was already a YouTube veteran, gave him some career advice.
"He just gave me a really good push to be like, dude, what do you want to do?" Watts said.
"I was a Viner at the time too, and I already had the channel, so it just was a really healthy catalyst to get it moving. He kind of gave me a swift kick in the butt to help me with that."
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Dawson told him YouTube was a creative space where he could do anything he wanted, which was really interesting to someone who was "tired of doing literally every job on the planet," Watts said.
"I just ended up having a really good time with it," he said. "And that's still this ever-ongoing process of just figuring out how that evolves and what that turns into."
Sometimes it turns into documenting his attempts to wake up at 5 a.m. every day for a week, enlisting his friends to help clear out his house, or making a hit song about being a baby in 24 hours. Fans love his frenzied jumble of quick-fire thoughts and hilarious moments of self-awareness, but amazingly, Watts doesn't actually consider himself funny.
"I've never felt funny," he said.
"It's just this weird thing where I feel like in my videos all I do is work with - at risk of sounding pretentious - like a flow of energy. I feel like it's just like inviting people into my headspace.
"It feels a little bit intimate in that respect, just being like, 'Hey, come in here for a second, or for 30 minutes or 20 minutes or something, and just see like what goes on in here."
It's pretty difficult to put Watts into a box - not that you'd want to - as his videos are not quite comedy and not quite vlogs. As he puts it, he's "just having a good time with a theme."
"I guess what I'm saying is I'm very lucky that people find me funny in any respect and I hope it lasts," he said.
'YouTube is one thing about me'
Watts doesn't struggle with letting the audience in because he's drawn barriers he's comfortable with. He's not one of the influencers, of which there are many on YouTube, who lays out everything in their lives for their followers to see - their homes, their emotions, their relationships, and so on. He's even traveled to different countries in the past without even posting about it anywhere.
This is partly because it's just not in his nature to immediately want to show off his life to the online world, but it's also a conscious choice because he doesn't want to be part of the toxic culture on social media where everyone tries to make their lives seem perfect.
"Everyone just highlights the '10' moments in their life and it creates this horrible illusion that their life is a 10 all the time," Watts said.
"And it's not. For every story that you see, think of the influencer or the friend or the family member who's just chilling. They're not in France, and they're not at a music festival, because most of them are probably sleeping in and trying not to be sad that day."
He said he's also seen it too many times where the internet consumes someone completely and they lose part of their identity, and he'd rather keep a certain side of his life to himself.
"YouTube is something about me that I love and I appreciate deeply that people watch, but it is one thing about me," Watts said.
"It's so much more important for me to maintain my relationships with my family and my friends and work on myself and do things way more so than it is to be some rockstar YouTuber."
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'Am I so cagey and distant or is everyone else just hyper-visible?'
Fans of Watts sometimes worry about him because there are sometimes months-long gaps between his videos. They don't understand why he's not uploading as often as other creators do, because he could post a video of something as mundane as ordering lunch and millions would love it anyway. This leads to them often coming to their own conclusions about his absence.
"When you give someone something, like an Instagram post, they're going to comment 18 seconds later under that, 'Are you dead?'" he said. "It's just like never enough. And I didn't set those expectations."
He was once asked in an interview why he was so "cagey and distant" on the internet.
"I was like, am I so cagey and distant, or is everyone else just like hyper-visible?" he said, "Like, who defined that?"
Watts is super aware of how long his breaks are - he uploaded just three videos in 2019 - and uses a self-deprecating "wine lady" character in his videos who judges him and voices concerns about where he's been.
"I understand my failures so intimately, and no one has to remind me of those more than I do myself every day," he said.
"When you fail, sometimes you just have to laugh it off, and make the most of it basically. So yeah, she's my little way to know that I am in reality."
Watts also doesn't really see the value of ambition when it costs every waking moment, and has never subscribed to the "hustle culture" narrative that's popular among creators right now. That's why he doesn't see his upload schedule as a major flaw - although he admits he could probably split the difference better.
He sometimes wonders what it would be like to stick to a regular upload schedule and give viewers more and more of himself, but he doesn't want to be someone who's defining his worth and career from what other people think.
"It's just like, I'll just do me, and if that works for you, rock on. If it doesn't, also rock on," he said. "I'm just content with my little slice of the internet and I'm really grateful for the people that watch me."
A bit of a YouTube oddball
Watts also thinks bending to other people's expectations might destroy the reason some people watch him in the first place - he's a "bit of an oddball" who isn't like other YouTubers.
"The only reason that I'm at all alluring on YouTube to anyone is because I have that mentality of being like this guy who doesn't care for a G-wagon or being in party vans in Vegas and stuff," he said. "I'm not shading any mentality on YouTube or anyone's content or anything, because people love that, and I get that."
He has no interest in the materialism that characterizes traditional celebrities and influencers. He prefers his possessions to be unique with a story behind them.
"I can't stand going into a clothing store where there's 60 pairs of jeans stacked on top of each other and you grab them and go, 'Oh, this is my personality!'" he said. "I like everything to have a little bit of soul power."
Even the poppy picture behind him?
"The poppy picture!" he said. "It's this silly cottage. I don't know ... I think you asked about my upload schedule and somehow I turned it into talking about the soul power of store clothes."
Watts' mind darts around a lot, which probably explains his never-ending list of ideas. He has an "ungodly" note of his phone full of them which he has to scroll for nearly a minute on to reach the bottom. He just doesn't seem to have the time to materialize them into existence.
This may be because he hasn't found the best place to discuss all his passions. He said he'll be working on that over the coming year, delving into other online content like game streaming and podcasts. He wants to be able to dedicate time to slower, more meaningful conversations about things like his deep obsession with music and love of miniature building.
"People will see different sides of me because there's a lot of different sides of me," he said. "That is my own version of being like, OK, how do I kind of rekindle this thing that I love about myself and refresh it a little bit."
'Other people's expectations will get you nowhere'
Watts still has a lot of love for YouTube and sees it as part of his future, but he's probably not going to be making promises about his uploads anymore. He's learned now that you really can do exactly what you want if you're willing to try, and it comes from a place inside rather than any external pressures.
"Other people's expectations will get you nowhere," he said. "In fact, they'll lead you down a pretty dark road."
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He sees younger people in the spotlight and within his own family looking at themselves through the digital gaze, and just wants to hug them and urge them to stop.
"Take what's in your core and output it to the world in a way that has like fervor and passion and do that well, and then people will like it," he said. "I just want to always remind people that their stuff comes from them."
Everything is a relationship, he said, from romantic partners, to careers, to creative endeavors, and each and every one of them requires care.
"It can't be like an abusive thing in your head," he said. "Those forces require a lot of other energies. And you've got to figure out what those are ... I'm starting to speak like some sort of witch now."
We've gone a bit off-topic again. Watts takes you down some twisty-turny detours when you talk to him, but he has such a zeal for it all you're more than happy to go along for the ride.
At several points during the call, he forgets the initial question I asked him because his curiosity for everyone and everything leads to infinite distractions. Talking to him is a bit like being led through a box of unopened ideas by an imaginary friend, which inspires you to absorb even a hint of his irrepressible enthusiasm.
"Trust me, it would have been great," he said of one lost train of thought. And even though I'm not sure how we got to the end of our conversation, or where it was going, I know great is exactly what it was.
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