Tgyyg

The Strange Ubiquity of Crypto.com Everything You Need to Know About NFTs Our Writer Joined the FaZe Clan The Next Act for the Bored Apes

THE WORLD’S NEWEST SUPERHERO

Bad Bunny

CONTENTS

GQ World

Behind the Scenes With the People Who Make GQ

26 Ways to Turn Up the Brightness on Your Summer Wardrobe.. . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . ... . . .. .. .. 19

Contributor

The New Class of Extreme Dive Watches. .. .. . . .. . 24 Getting Dressed in the Digital World. . .. . .. .. .. . . .. . 26 What the Hell Is Crypto.com?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 MAT THEW HENSON Stylist

Features Cover Story: BAD BU N NY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

Matthew Henson has styled plenty of stars—Jonah Hill, Kid Cudi, A$AP Rocky— but for GQ’s profile of Dominic Fike, he had a new challenge: Imagining what the Euphoria star would wear while visiting the metaverse. The result: a distinctly Web3 interpretation of cool. “Styling can make the most audacious items from the runway seem realistic,” he says. “I think it’s where meta and IRL collide.”

The Lucrative World of NFTs, Explained............ 56 Is Metamodern. . . .. . . . . .. .. . ... .. . . . . . 64

Bored Ape Goes Hollywood............................ 74 F a Z e CL A N’ S

Grand Plans.............................. 80

→ NORIAKI MORIGUCHI

director, GQ Japan

Levi’s denim

A New Frontier: Jobs in the Metaverse.............. 86 AUS TI N BU TL E R:

Hunk of Burning Love. . . ... . . .. .. 90 ← Associate commerce director, GQ U.S.

for work.”

On the Cover Photograph by Roe Ethridge. Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu. Hoodie, $2,250,

by Prada. Earrings, nose ring, and necklace (bottom), his own. Necklace (top), $950,

by Swarovski. Grooming by Gianluca with Creative Management. Tailoring by S. Mullins.

Set design by Tom Criswell for MHS Artists.

Produced by Select Services Production.

6

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

ZAK MAOUI

“When Harry Styles drops tees, making sure one is in your wardrobe is the done thing.”

MAT THEW HENSON: ANDREW MOR ALES. OFFICE GR AILS: COURTESY OF SUBJECTS.

D OMIN I C FI KE

For our cover story on Bad Bunny, see page 44.

Jacket, price upon request, by Loewe. Goggles, $25, by Speedo. Earring, nose ring, diamond heart necklace, and heart pendant necklace, his own. Diamond chain necklace, $50,000, by Jacob & Co.

8

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

P H O T O G R A P H

B Y

R O E

E T H R I D G E

ST YLIST, MOBOL A JI DAWODU.

CONTENTS

Enter the Irresistible Scope Zone for breath so fresh, people want in.

Kills Millions of Bad Breath Germs

ST YLIST, MAT THEW HENSON.

CONTENTS

For our story on Dominic Fike, see page 64.

Tank top, $42 for pack of three, by Calvin Klein Underwear. Earring, his own. Headset, $299, by Meta.

1 0

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

P H O T O G R A P H

B Y

S E B A S T I A N

M A D E R

These are no ordinary clouds They’re gathered by equatorial trade winds over a remote Fijian island, 1,600 miles from the nearest continent. Their rain filters through volcanic rock, gathering more than double the electrolytes* for a soft, smooth taste.

What these clouds make isn’t just water.

It’s FIJI Water.

FIJIWater.com *Compared to the other two top premium bottled water brands. © 2022 FIJI Water Company LLC. All Rights Reserved. FIJI, EARTH’S FINEST, EARTH’S FINEST WATER, the Trade Dress, and accompanying logos are trademarks of FIJI Water Company LLC or its affiliates. FW220311-12

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

We’re Going Crazy in the Metaverse!

to launch GQ’s first Metaverse issue started back in December. I was in Miami, hosting a GQ party during Art Basel, and whether you were walking on the beach, browsing the fair, sitting in a meeting, or art-partying under the winter moon, all anybody seemed to be talking about was cryptocurrency, NFTs, and Web3.

THE MOTIVATION

1 2

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

A CONDENSED TIMELINE OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB Web 1.0 (1991–2004) Users consume online content in the form of static web pages.

Web 2.0 (2004–Present) Users generate content and share it on platforms often owned by tech companies.

Web3 (Present–Future) Users generate and share content in a decentralized digital ecosystem that utilizes a blockchain.

Will Welch

GLOBAL EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

SIGMUND OWHO OSIMINI.

One afternoon at the fair, I overheard a gallerist implore friends who had stopped by her booth to ask her about anything on earth except goddamn NFTs. (She was selling paintings.) I sat in on a meeting where an executive at one of the big emergent metaverse platforms pitched his vision to a world-famous musician. Meanwhile, I ran into another guy who works in the music business—but was expanding. “Will,” he said, with bitcoins blazing in his eyes, “I’m going crazy in the metaverse!”

Since then, it feels like we’re all going crazy in the metaverse—just not all in the same way.

If politics polarizes people, the metaverse, so far, is splintering us.

There are the true believers who think blockchains hold the God Code. (Note: They are also looking to drive up the value of their own Coinbase and MetaMask wallets by proselytizing to doubters, secondguessers, and wannabes.) There are leaned-in types who buy into the promise of this new economy and have peppered their financial holdings with a mix of crypto and NFTs as a way to explore this new landscape while also diversifying their portfolios. And there is the FOMO-driven crowd, who are buying mostly because they’re panicked that everyone is getting crypto rich but them.

And then, of course, each of these participants has its inverse nonparticipant.

Like the abject hater who believes the dawn of the metaverse is the unfolding of the technological apocalypse—or at least some giant scam. Then there’s the casual skeptic. And the Luddite who refuses to succumb to peer pressure.

And, finally, there are the people who have no clue what any of this is about.

They are hoping that if they ignore this whole metaverse thing, it will go away.

Well, it won’t. And that’s why we created this issue.

It is our belief that though Web3 and the metaverse are currently in their infancy (and rife with all sorts of silliness, schemes, and desperation), the ideas and technological innovation at their core— starting with decentralization and the blockchain—will fundamentally alter our world in ways we are only just beginning to understand and imagine.

So we’ve devoted these pages to pushing that understanding-and-imagining process a few steps forward.

Taken together, the wide-ranging stories in this issue serve as an exploration of the high, lows, and WTFs of the metaverse and Web3, engineered specifically to deliver something for everyone—no matter which splinter corresponds to you.

Luckily, the early research and data we gathered in our reporting indicate that no matter how virtual our reality might get in the years to come, the golden rule of GQ still applies: Always be yourself.

THE REAL ACTION IS OFF THE FIELD. WAT C H AT

youtube.com/gqsports

Organic Sleep from $699 America’s best rated, certified organic mattresses are now affordable for everyone. Our mission is to be the most respected source for organic mattresses, pillows and bedding — while maintaining environmentally conscious, ethical, and sustainable business practices — to help safeguard the health of people and the planet. Experience Avocado at your local experience center or online at AvocadoGreenMattress.com.

CU 861640

CU 861640

26 Ways

to Turn

Up the

Brightness

MEET OMAR APOLLO

With rare endorsements from Pharrell and Tyler, the Creator, the 25-year-old singersongwriter’s debut album, Ivory, has only cemented his destined stardom.

“Songs are like fantasies,” Apollo says.

“I write about everything.

Nothing’s off-limits.”

on Your OMAR APOLLO: GROOMING, MELISSA DEZ AR ATE USING L A PR AIRIE.

Summer

Wardrobe By YA N G -Y I GOH

PIC-PRINT SHIRT As a celebration of post-lockdown public life, Dries Van Noten and his design team printed their exuberant spring-summer 2022 collection, including this drapey cotton buttondown, with a smattering of smartphone photos— a vibey club shot here, a moody architectural still life there—taken throughout the label’s native Antwerp ($595).

P H O T O G R A P H S S T Y L E D

B Y

B Y

M A R T I N

S E B A S T I A N

B R O W N

J E A N

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

G Q . C O M

1 9

GQ World Drops

BLINDING BUTTON-UP A nod to the label’s raucous early-aughts era, this ritzy Dolce & Gabbana silk shirt is cut loose and flowy to let the hypnotic print really swing ($1,745).

WILD-STYLE WINDBREAKER Swapping out the standard techy nylon for washed taffeta silk, Valentino’s lush upgrade on the everyday anorak reads more palatial than practical ($2,350).

PINK COW SHOES It takes a particular kind of guy to pull off Camperlab’s fuchsia calfhair square-toe loafers—and trust us, you want to be that kind of guy ($410).

TRIPPY TRUNKS Australian surf aesthetes Double Rainbouu specialize in delirious, print-happy beachwear, like these roomy neon-drenched swim shorts ($99).

SKATER SHADES The timeless squareframe shape of these Etnia Barcelona sunglasses helps to make the boisterous blueand-white checkerboard feel versatile enough to wear every day ($345).

BLING RINGS In case the 18-karat gold and sizable white diamonds on these Melissa Kaye rings don’t have quite enough shine for you, the blazing enamel accents cement ’em as verified showstoppers ($9,950 each).

WRIST CANDY The icy Zenith Defy 21 Chroma chronograph appears as clean and classic as it gets. Up close, the subtle rainbowgradient detailing on the open-dial movement, hour markers, and strap stitching gives the whole thing some serious extra oomph ($14,500).

RALLY TOP Looking to turn up the heat on the tennis court (or, frankly, anywhere else)? This pulsating zip polo from Canali is your ticket to championshiplevel style ($330).

SOLAR SLACKS The wild streaks across these fiery canvas cargo trousers by MSGM are meant to mimic the effects of fading from sun exposure ($430).

GAUZY GUAYABERA No one understands the showy and sensual clothes you need to survive a sizzling New York summer—like, say, a sheer electric blue camp shirt—better than Willy Chavarria (price upon request).

VERDANT VEST Bottega Veneta’s radiant signature green has become a genuine thing over the past couple of years, and it’s deployed to perfection in this textured vest (price upon request).

COBRA KICKS From the incandescent colorway to the chunky serpentine soles, there is absolutely nothing understated about Giuseppe Zanotti’s latest sneakers ($1,250).

P R O P ST Y L I ST, J O H N N Y M A C H A D O AT J U DY C A S E Y, I N C.

COLLARLESS CLOAK Somewhere between a mandarin-collar shirt and a golf jacket, this sleek Emporio Armani top is the ideal ’tweener layer for those unexpectedly cool summer nights ($745).

© HDIP, Inc.

Luxury is where you are.

HOT STEPPERS Minimally constructed from smooth calf leather, Salvatore Ferragamo’s sandals will leave an outsized impression for when you’re strolling down the beach or into a bar ($895).

POOLSIDE POLO The fine knit, the jumbo florals, the full-length placket—this Hermès polo is begging to be left unbuttoned by the pool on an unreasonably hot day ($1,700).

JACKED-UP JACKET A classic workwear silhouette with a not-soclassic oversized waffle texture, this freaky Off-White zip jacket is a prime example of the late Virgil Abloh’s sublimely off-kilter vision ($2,737).

SHOW-OFF SHORTS They’re equipped with marathon-ready curved hems and a comfortable mesh lining. But these JW Anderson running shorts will frame your legs perfectly, whether you’re clocking miles or just kicking back on the deck ($345).

CERULEAN CHAIN Remember the playful rainbow-hued necklaces guys like Pharrell and Nigo used to rock back in the 2000s?

Consider New York jeweler Fry Powers’s signature ombré chains their present-day successor ($2,250).

PARTY PANTS There are jeans and then there are going out jeans.

Etro’s glistening emerald dungarees are definitely the latter ($980).

SUNNY SLIDES Prada leveled up the humble pool slide with beefy tread soles, a tonal embossed logo, and that infectiously bright and popping hue ($480).

CLIMBING SHORTS The built-in webbing belt and cinched drawcord hems lend these Dior Men shorts some crunchy ruggedness. But the raveready sheen and breezy tailored cut are pure Kim Jones luxury ($1,700).

CURVY JERSEY With its wavy placket and enormous pointed collar, the dream of the ’70s is alive and well in this Casablanca tennis shirt ($590).

BUDDING BOTTOMS Inspired by Jonathan Anderson’s boyhood trips to Ibiza, these cacticovered Loewe shorts are every bit as oversized and trance-inducing as you’d want from your vacation garb ($690).

A SQUEEZE OF LIME The G-Shock, everybody’s favorite knockabout digital watch, gets a citrusy seethrough facelift just in time for summer ($140).

TUNED-UP TOWELS Your beach-day fit is only as good as the towel you’re lying on. These geometric Dusen Dusen joints will help you ace that test with flying colors (from top, $50, $54, $54, at Coming Soon New York).

SMARTEN UP TO SHRINK YOUR GUT

By Chris Hansen Being a trainer, bodybuilder, and nutrition expert means that companies frequently send me their products and ask for my stamp of approval. Most of the time I dive into research, test the product out, and send the company honest feedback. Sometimes, however, I refuse to give the product a try, because frankly, the ingredients inside aren’t real food. And I’d rather drink diesel fuel than torture my body with a chemical concoction.

Like my father always said, “What you put inside your body always shows up on the outside.”

One protein shake that I received, that will remain nameless, was touted as ‘the next big shake’ but really had a list of gut destroying ingredients. Everywhere I read I saw harmful artificial ingredients, added sugars, synthetic dyes, preservatives and cheap proteins; the kind of proteins that keep you fat no matter how hard you hit the gym, sap your energy and do nothing for your muscles.

Disappointed after reviewing this “new” shake, I hit the gym and bumped into my favorite bodybuilding coach. This guy is pushing 50, has the energy of a college kid, and is ripped. So are his clients.

While I firmly believe that the gym is a notalk focus zone, I had to ask, “Hey Zee, what protein shake are you recommending to your clients these days?”

Zee looked at me, and shook his head. “Protein shakes are old news and loaded with junk.

I don’t recommend protein shakes, I tell my clients to drink INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake because it’s the only all natural meal replacement that works and has a taste so good that it’s addicting.”

Being skeptical of what Zee told me, I decided to investigate this superfood shake called INVIGOR8.

Turns out INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake has a near 5-star rating on Amazon. The creators are actual scientists and personal trainers who set out to create a complete meal replacement shake chocked full of superfoods that—get this—actually accelerate how quickly and easily you lose belly fat and builds even more lean, calorie burning muscle.

We all know that the more muscle you build, the more calories you burn. The more fat you melt away the more definition you get in your arms, pecs and abs.

The makers of INVIGOR8 were determined to make the first complete, natural, non-GMO superfood shake that helps you lose fat and build lean muscle. The result is a shake that contains 100% grass-fed whey that has a superior nutrient profile to the grain-fed whey found in most shakes, metabolism boosting raw coconut oil, hormone free colostrum to promote a healthy

immune system, Omega 3, 6, 9-rich chia and flaxseeds, superfood greens like kale, spinach, broccoli, alfalfa, and chlorella, and clinically tested cognitive enhancers for improved mood and brain function. The company even went a step further by including a balance of pre and probiotics for regularity in optimal digestive health, and digestive enzymes so your body absorbs the high-caliber nutrition you get from INVIGOR8.

While there are over 2000 testimonials on Amazon about how INVIGOR8 “gave me more energy and stamina” and “melts away abdominal fat like butter on a hot sidewalk”, what really impressed me was how many customers raved about the taste. So I had to give it a try.

When it arrived I gave it the sniff test. Unlike most meal replacement shakes it smelled like whole food, not a chemical factory. So far so good. Still INVIGOR8 had to pass the most important test, the taste test.

And INVIGOR8 was good. Better than good.

I could see what Zee meant when he said his clients found the taste addicting.

I also wanted to see if Invigor8 would help me burn that body fat I’d tried to shave off for years to achieve total definition.

Just a few weeks later I’m pleased to say, shaving that last abdominal fat from my midsection wasn’t just easy. It was delicious.

Considering all the shakes I’ve tried I can honestly say that the results I’ve experienced from INVIGOR8 are nothing short of astonishing.

A company spokesperson confirmed an exclusive offer for GQ readers: if you order INVIGOR8 this month, you’ll receive $10 off your first order by using promo code “GQ10” at checkout.

If you’re in a rush to burn fat, restore lean muscle and boost your stamina and energy you can order INVIGOR8 today at drinkInvigor8.com or by calling 1-800-958-3392.

Watches

Going Deep on Watches.

Extremely Deep

You may not need a watch capable of functioning 6,000 meters below sea level, but that’s what makes the new class of extreme dive watches so damn cool, says GQ watch columnist Nick Foulkes. releases at Watches and Won­ ders, the international watch trade show in Geneva that took place earlier this year, it was the hard­ est one to miss. The name alone was huge: TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional 1000 Superdiver.

A big name for a big 45­mm­diameter watch, it boasts a dodecagonal black­ and­orange bezel, a chunky bracelet, a garage­door­size helium escape valve, and a brilliant arrowhead hour hand loaded with enough lume to read Proust in the dark—even at 1,000 meters underwater. With a large brutalist crown guard and a relatively slim—by deep­dive watch standards—15.75­mm thickness, the message is clear: TAG Heuer is back in the extreme dive watch market.

The Superdiver is a project close to TAG CEO Frédéric Arnault’s heart, albeit one born out of frustration.

F ALL THE NEW

O

The new Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean Ultra Deep; TAG Heuer’s Aquaracer Professional 1000 Superdiver; a 1967 version of Rolex’s Sea-Dweller.

2 4

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

A keen skier, golfer, chess master, and tennis player, Arnault is also an expe­ rienced diver. “When I joined [TAG], I was approached to sponsor some­ one wanting to go deep diving,” he says. “I thought, Okay, that’s cool and it’s in line with our Don’t Crack Under Pressure slogan. But if we do some­ thing like that, we need a watch that goes deep. And we didn’t have that.”

Now TAG Heuer does. The Super­ diver is just the latest in the compa­ ny’s long history of pushing the limits of ultra­deep­dive watches. And this iteration merely returns the Swiss watchmaker to where it was in 1982 when the 1,000­meter Diver debuted.

Back then, one kilometer underwater was extraordinary, putting it within reach but still 220 meters short of the most emblematic of extreme dive watches: the Rolex Sea­Dweller.

By the time the Sea­Dweller launched in 1967, Rolex had already been deep diving for a decade and

COURTESY OF BRANDS.

GQ World

a half. In 1953, off the southwestern coast of Italy, an experimental Rolex plunged to a depth of more than three kilometers fixed to the outside of a bathyscaphe. The achievement was eclipsed in 1960 when the same vessel descended 10,916 meters to the bottom of the Challenger Deep (the deepest known point of the earth’s seabed) in the Mariana Trench with another experimental Rolex attached to its hull. Even though the watch was equipped with a crystal resembling a transparent Ping­Pong ball that made it impractical for everyday wear, the feat captured the world’s imagina­ tion. When offshore oil exploration hit its stride in the 1960s, the Sea­ Dweller became the default timepiece of the underwater elite.

In 2008, the appropriately named Rolex Deepsea sparked a new era for the deep­dive watch by functioning at depths of 3,900 meters. Three years later, Hublot launched a 4,000­ meter watch (the King Power Diver), only for Rolex to up—or, more accu­ rately, lower—the ante in 2012 with a specially engineered Rolex Deepsea Challenge attached to a submers­ ible with Titanic director James Cameron aboard.

Then, in 2019, Omega claimed a record depth of 10,935 meters when three prototypes of its Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean Ultra Deep watch were attached to Limiting Factor, the submersible owned by Texas businessman Victor Vescovo.

Those extra 19 meters gave Omega a chance to challenge Rolex for brag­ ging rights and provided a backstory for its biggest launch so far this year (MoonSwatch aside), the Seamaster Planet Ocean Ultra Deep, a watch with a dive depth of 6,000 meters.

Of course, 6,000 meters is over­ kill. The Professional Association of Diving Instructors defines deep dives as beyond 18 meters—and even adventurous recreational div­ ers limit themselves to 40 meters.

The record for the deepest dive (701 meters), achieved by Rolex adver­ tising star Théo Mavrostomos, has stood for 30 years, yet the deep­dive watch has never been more popular.

Breitling—primarily associated with aviation—has a 2,000­meter watch, while Zelos (an obscure but accessi­ bly priced brand) successfully crowd­ funded the Abyss, the third iteration of which has a depth of 3,000 meters and a retail price that starts at $699. It raises the question: What is a watchmaker to do, now that it’s getting increasingly tricky to stand out in this field? The only answer, it seems, is to go deeper.

ADVOCACY HAS ONE DIRECTION, FORWARD. Visit NAACP.ORG/FORWARD

GQ World Fashion

The metaverse is coming, and to embrace your style in the virtual realms, you might first have to completely change the way you think about fashion.

Dolce & Gabbana’s Glass Suit, above, is part of a nine-piece NFT collection that used pieces picked from the brand’s extreme-luxury lines to open doors between the physical fashion world and the metaverse.

2 6

G Q . C O M

COURTESY OF DOLCE & GABBANA.

B y YA N G -Y I GOH

GQ World Fashion

WAKE

UP,

YAWN,

stretch, ignore the texts from your uncle, and open your closet. It’s time to decide who you want to be today. Your Gucci sweater and Burberry trench hang neatly above a row of pristine Nike sneakers. But today you’re feeling somewhat less…human…and more like a highly intelligent mollusk. You spot the eight-armed hoodie you copped for this exact occasion. Today, you’re going to be an octopus.

Welcome to getting dressed in the metaverse, where your daily ritual of self-expression will be taken to its logical—and, probably more often than not, wildly illogical—extreme.

The internet has already irrevocably altered the way we buy our clothes, and social media has changed the way we wear our clothes, but the advent of Web3 is about to radically shift how we think about fashion, period. In the near future, dressing yourself won’t merely be about throwing on a shirt and pants and heading out the door.

It’ll be about choosing the very form— human, animal, object, or other—you want to represent you at any given moment, and then adorning that avatar in gear dreamed up by designers freed from the limitations of the corporeal world.

A new wave of upstart tech compa-

Y

and experiences for the metaverse, an effort that CEO Cédric Charbit predicts will take the house “to the next level.” Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Adidas, and Ralph Lauren have all dropped metaverse projects of their own in recent months. And, arguably most notable of all, Nike announced its acquisition of RTFKT in December by placing the NFT sneaker company’s logo alongside those of its iconic main brands: Nike, Jordan, Converse.

“I got chills when I saw that [Nike] press release,” says Brian Trunzo, the metaverse lead for the blockchaintechnology company Polygon Studios, which recently announced a partnership with the Council of Fashion Designers of America to help usher fashion labels into the Web3 landscape. “You forget that not even LeBron is treated as a full subsidiary brand within Nike, so in a subtle way they were saying RTFKT is bigger than LeBron. It validated the space.”

-

From left: The Gucci x Superplastic NFTs are porcelain sculptures decked out in motifs by creative director Alessandro Michele; digital fashion

by RSTLSS as customized for the metaverse.

2 8

G Q . C O M

-

the first-ever Metaverse Fashion Week on the Decentraland virtual world platform in March. In December, Balenciaga rolled out a new division dedicated to developing products

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

roadblocks need to be navigated. The first and biggest hurdle is making the public at large understand what digital fashion even is, and why it even needs to care.

The bottom line is that many of us are already living most of our lives in the metaverse. “These days, I could argue that our lives in the physical world are our secondary lives,” says Bobby Kim, the cofounder of L.A. streetwear stalwart The Hundreds.

In 2021, Kim launched an extremely popular NFT offshoot, Adam Bomb Squad, which clocked $8 million of sales in its first week and lets owners shop exclusive physical and digital clothing drops. “Our primary lives largely exist online.” If that’s the case, Kim contends, then the way we portray ourselves online should matter just as much—if not more—than the clothes we choose to wear on our physical bodies. “At its core, fashion is a means of self-expression and identity,” Kim says. “I think we’re at an inflection point in history where we’re going to redefine what fashion means. Now, there is no body.”

In the metaverse, you can theoretically take on any shape or form you

wish. You can be shapeless, translucent, invisible. To get a little kooky and metaphysical, it means that fashion will soon evolve past a mere outward expression of our inner selves and instead become a truer manifestation of, as Kim puts it, “what your soul is.”

“Some people might identify as a blue square,” Kim says. “Some people might identify as a telephone pole. And that sounds really crazy and silly, and it might offend a lot of people, but just think about what that means. It’s not that these people actually think that they’re a telephone pole in the physical world. But for whatever reason, as art, that’s how they would like to express themselves, because it says something about

GUCCI, RSTLSS: COURTESY OF BRANDS.

OU

LOOK GOOD. FEEL GOOD. GET THE BOX. GQ.COM/FRAGRANCEBOX

THE LIMITED-EDITION FRAGRANCE BOX $267 VALUE

GQ BOX MEMBER-EXCLUSIVE PRICE: $59 NON-MEMBER PRICE: $119 Introducing the Fragrance Box: a limited-edition GQ Box dedicated exclusively to fragrance, packed with four essential scents we can’t get enough of.

This box includes: Prada Luna Rossa Ocean Eau De Toilette (100 ml) Maison Margiela 'Replica' Jazz Club Eau De Toilette (30 ml) Escentric Molecules Escentric 05 Eau De Toilette (30 ml) Arquiste for J.Crew No. 57 Roller Ball (10 ml)

Buy or subscribe now at: GQ.COM/FRAGRANCEBOX

Available starting May 16, 2022. While supplies last.

Fashion

From left: Balenciaga’s fall 2021 collection came in the form of a video game called Afterworld: the Age of Tomorrow, a precursor to the house’s launch of a collection of character skins on the Fortnite platform that same season; Burberry’s NFT Sharky B is a vinyl toy that lives on the blockchain as part of Mythical Games’ Blankos Block Party world. The English heritage brand also sells jet packs, armbands, and pool shoes as NFTs on the gaming site.

3 2

G Q . C O M

stuck with blocky graphics that look straight out of an ’80s sci-fi movie in order to help them run smoothly across wide audiences. And at present, for all the hype and investment, the metaverse remains a difficult thing for most people to engage with. It’s currently a loose assembly of arenas— centralized gaming platforms, decentralized open worlds, the blockchain, social media—all competing for your money and attention, like a dizzying Moroccan bazaar.

That’s where innovators like Charli Cohen come into play. Cohen, a 32-year-old British fashion designer, has been at the forefront of the digital fashion revolution for close to a decade. She began experimenting with augmented reality alongside her physical fashion line as a means of engaging with a wider global audience, before eventually collaborating with games like Assassin’s Creed and helping to usher traditional fashion companies like Selfridges into Web3.

Now, she’s looking to streamline the digital fashion experience through RSTLSS, her brand-new Paris Hilton– backed platform that aims to bust

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

-

-

-

rience for the customers.” RSTLSS aims to eliminate all of that clunkiness, allowing users to customize wearables (i.e., digital clothing for their avatars), mint them as NFTs, and then take them into a whole range of metaverse locations—video games, open worlds, social media avatars—as well as buy a physical version to wear IRL. If you want, hypothetically, a new Billie Eilish hoodie, you can make a single purchase on RSTLSS and then wear that hoodie on Fortnite, in Decentraland, on Twitter, and to school.

As far as Cohen is concerned, all this will seem second nature to the vast majority of us before we even realize it. “Think about it this way: We’re having this conversation on Zoom,” she points out. “Nobody was having conversations on Zoom until 2020. Or with Web 2.0 social media, you had your early adopters and then suddenly it just became normal for everyone without their even really thinking about it. And in the same way social media is heavily tied to identity—you’re choosing a profile picture, you’re curating your

holds the key for finally pushing fashion forward into its next evolution.

No one knows for sure exactly what that next phase looks like, but it doesn’t seem like the idea of brands is in danger of going anywhere: They remain an important element of identity and expression, and names like Gucci and Nike continue to hold plenty of cultural cachet in the physical and digital realms alike. If anything, the metaverse will simply give you new avenues to engage with the brands you already love—and the new ones that’ll emerge as the tides continue to change.

To that end, while some experts believe you’ll someday be spending more on digital fashion, it’ll likely never fully replace your real-life clothing. Instead, we’ll eventually reach a weirder, more fascinating space altogether, where rather than our metaverse garments taking cues from their physical counterparts— owning a digital copy of Balenciaga trousers that premiered on the runway, say—the opposite begins to happen. What will it look like when the clothes you put on your web-footed, wing-armed, seven-eyed avatar start to influence the clothes you wear to the office? How will designers translate the freedom of identity and expression we’ve all been granted online for the times we choose to unplug and interact in person?

Fashion—for all of its perceived frivolities—is only going to grow more essential, more bizarre, more expressive, more artful, more powerful as we step deeper and deeper into our crypto-fueled future. yang - yi goh

is gq ’s style editor.

BALENCIAGA, BURBERRY: COURTESY OF BRANDS.

GQ World

them.” In other words: The form you choose to take in the metaverse serves the same purpose as the clothes you wear in the real world—the avatar itself is fashion.

The main thing standing in the way of that abstract vision of infinite possibilities? The technology hasn’t quite caught up with our boundless imaginations just yet. The processing capabilities on the average laptop or smartphone just aren’t up to snuff if we’re going to experience the seamless, high-definition visual expression most futurists are envisioning—some of the biggest platforms, like The Sandbox and Decentraland, remain

GQ World Money

CRYPTO.COM IS COMING

(With a Little Help From Matt Damon and LeBron James)

All of a sudden, they’re everywhere.

Matt Damon’s pitching us their services.

LeBron James, too. They’re plastered all over the NBA, the NHL, Serie A, Formula 1…. But what exactly does Crypto.com do?

And what exactly do they want from us?

By STEPHEN WIT T

I L L U S T R A T I O N S P A T R I C I A

B Y

D O R I A

LOOK GOOD. FEEL GOOD. GET THE BOX. GQ.COM/GQBOX

Handpicked by GQ editors. Delivered right to your door.

The GQ Box is filled with the lifestyle upgrades, grooming essentials, and must-have apparel and accessories that our experts can’t live without. Delivered four times a year and always valued at over $200, each box is yours for only $50.

Our latest box includes: Diff Eyewear Cody Sunglasses, Misc. Goods Co. Playing Cards, Jack Black SPF 20 Double-Duty Face Moisturizer, and more!

New members will receive instructions on how to redeem a free pair of Freedom Moses slides ($45 value).

Products may vary, available while supplies last. Offer valid May 1st through July 31st, 2022.Products may vary.

Subscribe today at: GQ.COM/GQBOX

GQ World Money

like most people , I first heard of Crypto.com when

Matt Damon popped up on my TV screen and suggested I was a coward. I’ve followed cryptocurrencies for over a decade, but I’ve never invested in them—beyond money laundering, I’d never been able to understand what they were good for. Seeing Damon, though, I understood that the public perception of the technology had reached a new phase. And, yes, I felt in danger of being left behind. ¶ Damon’s commercial is part of a larger, sports-focused marketing push by Crypto.com: The cryptocurrency exchange’s lion-head logo appears on the ice of the NHL, in the octagon of the UFC, and on the jerseys of the Philadelphia 76ers. Last November, the company announced it had purchased the naming rights to the downtown arena of the Los Angeles Lakers, at the cost of $700 million; during this year’s Super Bowl, Crypto.com aired an advertisement featuring LeBron James. In March, it announced it will be sponsoring the World Cup.

Crypto.com, as it currently exists, earns most of its money executing trades for clients via its smartphone app. (The company courts the small investor, and several people I talked to compared Crypto.com to the investing app Robinhood.) But charging fees to trade cryptocurrencies is a lucrative business, and rival exchanges like FTX and Coinbase are fighting for the same customers.

FTX owns the stadium-naming rights for the Miami Heat, and Coinbase— which went public last year, reporting higher profit margins than Google—is the NBA’s exclusive cryptocurrencyplatform partner. If the 76ers travel to Miami for a nationally televised game, you will see all three brands advertising on the same broadcast.

With each successive sighting, I assumed that Crypto.com was just throwing money around. And it was— but, to my surprise, when it comes to sponsorship deals, Crypto.com is often not the highest bidder. The company’s remarkable influence is not due to its largesse but to the uncanny strategizing of its CEO, Kris Marszalek, a 42-year-old Polish-born serial entrepreneur who lives in Hong Kong.

“The ability to write a check is a good starting point to many a conversation,” he told me over Zoom recently, “but for those really important things, the things that have real impact, it’s never enough.” Marszalek speaks in a monotone, and he favors a neutral corporate wardrobe, alternating between suit jackets and branded zip-up hoodies. His distinguishing

3 8

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

feature is his large forehead, framed above by a receding hairline and below by a pair of small rimless glasses. He qualifies, in the crypto space, which is often populated by single young men, as a regular guy, with a wife, a child, and a somewhat relatable background. Given the breadth of Marszalek’s advertising campaign, and the sudden emergence of Crypto.com as a player among the exchanges, I was expecting a snake charmer. What I got instead was the guy they send to fix your printer.

But Marszalek’s lack of sizzle masks a keen understanding of human motivation. Using the advertising campaign he commissioned, Crypto .com has captured market share from competitors and now has more than 50 million users. Eighteen months ago, no one had heard of Crypto.com, which began its life under a different name, with a different business strategy. Today, it looks like the dark horse can win.

Whoever becomes the world’s go-to crypto exchange will enjoy immense wealth and unprecedented control over our emerging currencies.

Consequently, the exchanges are sticking their necks out to lure customers to their platforms. Many are offering high-yield accounts, with earnings paid out in crypto. For well-capitalized accounts, Crypto.com rewards customers with interest rates as high as 14.5 percent per year, and up to 10 percent per year in “stablecoin” currencies pegged to the U.S. dollar. This crushes a savings account, which pays

basically nothing, but it also prompts questions about what kinds of risks the company might be assuming.

I thought of a quote from the financial writer Raymond DeVoe Jr.: “More money has been lost reaching for yield than at the point of a gun.”

And then there is the scenario where Bitcoin goes down in value, causing people to lose interest in trading it at all. Marszalek told me he was prepared for a bear market.

“We went through the crypto winter of 2018 and 2019,” he said. “We kept our heads down, and we continued building a strong product. That’s one of the reasons why we grew so quickly in 2021.” Marszalek wants Crypto .com to be more than an exchange—he wants it to be an “ecosystem.” Crypto .com got its start marketing prepaid crypto-linked debit cards, which it still distributes, and it also runs its own cryptocurrency called Cronos, which it invites users to “stake” (i.e., lock money into) in exchange for various rewards. Marszalek likes to keep things flexible and, last March, introduced a marketplace for NFTs. “Right now, 90 percent of the revenue in this industry is coming from trading, right?” he said. “If three years down the road that’s still the case, then this is a complete industry failure.”

Here is where I should confess that I am a person, unlike some who have written about crypto, who is downright enthusiastic about technology.

Especially technology that comes from big, evil corporations. I lined up at the Apple Store to buy the original iPhone the day it came out. I’ve been an Amazon Prime member for 17 years. I like Instagram. I like Uber.

At the end of my life, I would like Elon Musk to upload my brain to the cloud.

In short, when an obnoxious entrepreneur makes a trillion dollars marketing a ridiculous technology, I think that that is good. I think this because I am lazy, and I think this because I believe, as an American, that it is my birthright to have large corporations catering to my every whim.

My problem with cryptocurrency was that it didn’t do this. Crypto was hard to understand, and even harder to use. When I started writing this article, I remembered that I had a little ether left over from an account at Decentraland, a janky attempt at a “distributed metaverse” that makes Second Life look like the Matrix.

Accessing my wallet meant digging through a box in my closet for the notebook where I’d written down my 12-word passphrase—the only way to recover my account. After I found it, and successfully typed it in after

CRYPTO.COM COMMERCIAL: COURTESY OF BR AND. PHIL ADELPHIA 76ERS’ UNIFORM: MITCHELL /GE T T Y IMAGES. LOS ANGELES ARENA: RICH FURY/GE T T Y IMAGES.

three failed attempts, I transferred $40 worth of ether to Crypto.com.

The transaction took an hour to complete, and cost me eight dollars.

I didn’t like this. I resented having to remember a passphrase, and I resented paying the Ethereum network a 20 percent transaction fee. But once the money made it to Marszalek’s app, the friction disappeared. Trading crypto on my phone was dumb and fun in a way I’d been conditioned to understand. I knew the fees were corroding my capital, and I figured any business offering double-digit interest rates might be taking on some kind of exploding risk. But I also knew, the instant I saw Matt Damon’s face on my TV, that from now on it was going to be more work to be a crypto skeptic than a crypto enthusiast. So I surrendered. Kris Marszalek had made crypto stupid, and in exchange I was going to make him rich.

money into the Crypto.com app, you can begin trading instantly. In my first four minutes, taking advantage of discounted transaction fees for new users, I bought a small portfolio of blue chips: Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, Cardano, and Near.

Only later did I bother to do the math.

Matt Damon wasn’t selling me technology—he was selling the possibility that my portfolio might go up in value a thousand times. The total market value of Bitcoin was nearly $800 billion, so for Bitcoin to go up a thousand times again, it would have to be worth $800 trillion. I dumped the blue chips and started buying altcoins, specifically selecting for ones I’d never heard of, picking them at random based on name alone: Venus, Chromia, Orchid, and SuperFarm; Ontology, Golem, Gnosis, and ThorChain; ApeCoin, SushiSwap, Chia, and Moonbeam.

But the coin I ended up owning the most of was Cronos—Crypto.com’s own. Marszalek’s app subtly but insistently guided me toward offers to stake Cronos. To access Crypto .com’s higher Visa card reward tiers, I had to buy at least $400 worth of Cronos, then hold it for a minimum of six months. This was a risky proposition: Cronos had traded between $0.09 and $0.90 in the 12 months before my purchase, and was down more than 50 percent from the peak it hit following the debut of Damon’s commercial. But in return I got a branded prepaid debit card.

For a $400 stake, Crypto.com will send you a “Ruby Steel”–tier card, pay for your Spotify subscription each month, and reward you with 2 percent cash back on all purchases. (The ONCE YOU TRANSFER

cash back is denominated in Cronos, of course.) For a $4,000 stake, Crypto .com will send you a “Jade Green” card, cover your Netflix subscription, pay interest on your stake, and pay 3 percent cash back. For a $40,000 stake, Crypto.com will send you an “Icy White” card, and for a $400,000 stake the company will send you an “Obsidian” card, each with increasing benefits. Stake enough money and at some point you might even meet Kris.

In addition to the cards, the Crypto.com app has a gamification element, in which users complete “missions” to earn “diamonds,” which can be exchanged for “mystery boxes,” which contain Cronos.

Crypto.com also offers to exchange small lots of other cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, into Cronos for free. It felt like the longer I used the app, the more likely I was to end up owning Cronos, perhaps even inadvertently.

Cronos is one of the 20 most valuable cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, with a present total value of around $10 billion. Granted, there is more money stored in Dogecoin than Cronos, but given that over 18,000 cryptocurrencies have been launched since 2009, ranking in the top 20 is a commendable achievement. And even if Cronos is not the most widely used blockchain, Crypto.com does appear to have the most widely used crypto-linked prepaid card. Visa recently

announced it had processed over $2.5 billion in crypto-linked card transactions in the first quarter of 2022. “I would say about $1.7 billion of that was our card,” Crypto.com spokesman Matt David told me.

One of the nice things about cryptocurrencies is that most of them use public ledgers, permitting snoopy users like me to monitor the fattest wallets. On Etherscan, I saw a couple of single-signature wallets, each with over a billion U.S. dollars of Cronos stashed inside. I wondered if, perhaps, one wasn’t Marszalek’s wallet, but when I asked him, he wouldn’t tell me. When I asked him again, he still wouldn’t tell me. When I asked him, directly, how much Cronos he personally owned, he told me, “Just a bit.”

Cronos has a controversial history, and has gone through two rebrandings. It started life as the Monaco token and attracted a small base of early users. After Marszalek acquired the Crypto.com domain name, the company introduced a new token, called the Crypto.org coin, which traded under the ticker symbol CRO. For a time, Crypto.com sponsored both currencies, but, after stating he would keep the two tokens separate, Marszalek ultimately decommissioned Monaco, effectively forcing outraged Monaco holders to swap their holdings for CRO. More recently, the Crypto.org coin was renamed

GQ World Money

Lately, we can’t turn on our TVs or head to a sporting event without encountering Crypto .com. Here, in a muchdiscussed commercial; on the uniforms of the Philadelphia 76ers; and as the title sponsor of the Los Angeles arena formerly known as Staples Center.

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

G Q . C O M

3 9

GQ World Money

4 0

G Q . C O M

Cronos, after Marszalek removed it from the Ethereum network and ported it to its own blockchain.

So Cronos, like most cryptocurrencies, was advertised as “decentralized,” but for a time Marszalek acted as its central banker. Lacking expertise, I turned for help to Rich Sanders, the cofounder of CipherBlade, a blockchain-analytics firm. “There is a common phrase in the industry: ‘Token not needed,’ ” Sanders said in an email.

“I can tell you that CRO doesn’t need to exist.” (Crypto.com contended that there are over 700,000 blockchain addresses connected to CRO and over $4 billion in value locked in to CRO.) Sanders also reiterated a common criticism of crypto exchanges in general—that they were exploiting unsophisticated suckers like me.

“Companies of this nature specifically target new investors,” he said. “They just know that a lot of people got rich quick with cryptocurrency, and they want to do the same.” (“Our mission is cryptocurrency in every wallet,” David said in response. “To achieve this goal, we must build a trusted, secure platform for everyone.”) Sanders’s biggest concern with Crypto.com, though, was the aggressive interest rates it offered on customer accounts: “The only way these companies can offer these high rates is because they’re performing higher-reward (albeit much higher-risk) activity.”

Normally, to earn interest one has to make a loan, but in our conversation Marszalek repeatedly told me that his company was “not doing aggressive lending.” David reiterated that the company had earmarked money to pay these high interest rates to users out of its customer-retention budget. This struck me as unsustainable, given that a single Obsidian cardholder would cost Crypto.com $48,000 a year to retain, and that even if the company wasn’t lending, it would have to stay competitive with other exchanges, which were. “We’ve been reducing those rates lately,” Marszalek said. “This is a business with very robust revenues.”

Still, the combined deposits of Joe and Jane Crypto, each uploading a few hundred bucks on their phones, together form a growing blob of capital, and that attracts financial entrepreneurs in the same manner that chum attracts sharks. In particular, those deposits can be used as pooled liquidity to fund speculative, leveraged trading in the murky realm of crypto termed “decentralized finance.” DeFi is a burgeoning marketplace for exotic new financial instruments, executed via computer code,

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

that are largely unregulated and very difficult to understand. That hasn’t prevented some exchanges from offering to boost their customers’ interest payouts if the customers permit their deposits to be lent to a DeFi protocol.

If this sounds familiar it’s because you have, in fact, seen this movie before: In the lead-up to the mortgage crisis of the late 2000s, average people’s bank accounts were similarly used to fund the leveraged trading of complex new financial instruments, and one exchange, BlockFi, recently reached a $100 million settlement with the SEC, after the agency charged it with offering an unregistered lending product.

(BlockFi did not admit wrongdoing.)

A representative from Crypto.com told me that the company had examined this line of business but rejected it as being too risky.

There is also the industry’s ongoing problem with hackers. In January, Crypto.com admitted that hackers had bypassed its two-factor authentication codes to gain access to the accounts of 483 customers, and proceeded to steal over $30 million. “In the majority of cases we prevented the unauthorized withdrawal, and in all other cases customers were fully reimbursed,” a company press release said. Sanders observed that, more recently, Crypto .com has added sending authentication codes via SMS text messaging, a practice he called “insane,” due to potential insecurities.

Finally, there is the industry’s issues with money laundering, particularly in light of the sanctions levied against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. Marszalek dismissed this concern. “This is, in fact, the worst way to try to avoid sanctions, because everything is in a public ledger, and fully traceable, and monitored in real time,” he said. Marszalek added that his early partnership with Visa had put him ahead of the industry on compliance with anti-money-laundering (AML) statutes, and on this point, Sanders agreed: “From an AML perspective, I think they’re doing a good job. That’s a rare compliment from me.”

Marszalek is not blind to the flaws of cryptocurrencies. “I don’t think there’s any chain out there today that is technically capable of doing what is required for mass adoption to happen,” he said. First-generation blockchains, like the one that powers Bitcoin, are slow and remarkably inefficient. The Bitcoin network, as a whole, can process from three to seven transactions per second. The Visa network can process 76,000 transactions

per second. Programmers can use second-generation blockchains like Ethereum to build “decentralized” applications that operate across multiple computer systems, but the platform’s slow transaction speed (about 15 per second) and resulting fees can prevent those apps from scaling.

“Where we are today with the tech, comparing it to the old internet days, we are still not even broadband, we are at the modem days,” Marszalek told me. Investors have been waiting for a “killer app” for cryptocurrency, but Marszalek warned that this would resemble an extinction-level event for more-established tokens if it ever arrived.“Today, a killer app would probably take down each and every chain that is out there in production,” he said. Marszalek also told me he was using the Cronos blockchain to build something amazing but wouldn’t tell me what it was. I asked him if he was excited about it. “Like a five-year-old,” he said, without a trace of emotion in his voice.

M A R S Z A L E K W A S B O R N in Poland in 1979. He was raised in a small rural village with a population of about 100 people. His childhood was happy, and he spent a lot of time playing in the forest, only dimly aware that he lived under a communist regime. “I’d go to the store, and there would be nothing,” he said. “It would be unimaginable today. Just empty shelves.”

By the time Marszalek was a teenager, Poland had emerged from the shadow of the Soviet Union. At 15, Marszalek embarked on his career as an entrepreneur, selling wholesale computer hardware and software.

He attended university but dropped out before completion. In 2003, one of his business associates offered him the chance to move to Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, “there were successes, and then some failures,” Marszalek said. The successes included Beecrazy, a discount-deal aggregator similar to Groupon. Beecrazy marketed coupons for partnering businesses like restaurants and travel agencies. It was acquired for about $20 million in 2013 by iBuy Group, and the rolled-up companies would later be rebranded as the Australia-based Ensogo.

In 2014, Marszalek became Ensogo’s CEO. Ensogo, like Groupon, soon ran into trouble. Marszalek described the situation there as a “turnaround”—except it did not turn around. In 2016, nearly two years after Marszalek took over, Ensogo’s board announced it would cease its operations in Southeast Asia. Marszalek says he opposed the decision and

resigned as CEO in response. Some merchants who had participated in the coupon program said they were stiffed; the Hong Kong police reportedly received more than 300 complaints from merchant partners. One merchant, in an interview with the Hong Kong Standard, said that she had lost HK$20,000, and noted that Beecrazy had launched a marketing push just weeks before the closure: “It seems to us that they wanted to make huge business from us one last time before they closed down.” (Crypto.com says there was no finding of wrongdoing during Marszalek’s tenure, and that he has not been involved with Ensogo in any way since his resignation.)

While Ensogo was shuttering its Southeast Asia operations, Marszalek was founding the company that became Crypto.com. Its original name was Monaco, and the original business plan was to market prepaid debit cards. These cards were linked to Monaco’s own cryptocurrency, known as the “Monaco token,” with payment

processing handled by Visa. But in 2018, the value of Bitcoin dropped by 78 percent, taking the Monaco token’s value down with it. It was then that Marszalek executed an extraordinary series of marketing coups that would eventually turn his prepaid-debit-card start-up into a household name.

Marszalek first approached Matt Blaze, a law and computer science professor who had owned the crypto.com web domain for more than two decades. Blaze was a outspoken critic of cryptocurrencies: “Cryptocurrency somehow combines everything we love about religious fanatics with everything we love about Ponzi schemes,” he wrote in a tweet from 2017, and had stated that his domain was “not for sale.” Eventually, it was.

The terms of the deal remain private, but in 2018 Blaze sold the domain, and Monaco was rebranded as Crypto.com. (Blaze did not respond to requests for comment, and Marszalek declined to discuss the details of the deal—but he did tell me he believed Blaze received hundreds of offers.)

Marszalek, along with Steven Kalifowitz, Crypto.com’s chief marketing officer, began looking for a way to leverage the brand. In March of last year, the company announced it was sponsoring Aston Martin’s F1 team. Later that month, Crypto.com announced its logo would appear near the center ice of the Montreal Canadiens. In June, it announced a second F1 deal, worth $100 million, to become Formula 1’s global partner for five years. In July, it announced a $175 million 10-year deal to sponsor the gear of UFC fighters. In September, the company became the “official cryptocurrency platform partner” of Paris Saint-Germain, then scored the jersey deal with the 76ers later in the month. (Marszalek and Kalifowitz maintained straight faces when they told me that young men were not their target demographic.)

Then came the Damon commercial.

Marszalek and Kalifowitz modeled the advertisement after Apple’s legendary Think Different campaign, looking for a script that didn’t refer to crypto trading directly but reached directly into the achievement-hungry part of the human brain. They hired Pereira O’Dell, an upstart advertising agency, which came back with the firm’s tagline: “Fortune favors the brave.”

After kicking ideas around, the two decided the spot would end with the colonization of Mars. “Going to Mars is a very strong crypto concept, right?”

Kalifowitz told me. “We’re gonna have programmable money, and that’s what we’re gonna use in outer space. It just makes so much sense if you’re a futurist.” When I talked to Kalifowitz, via Zoom, he was using a space station as a backdrop, but he told me he found early versions of the spot, which featured an anonymous narrator, lackluster. He soon realized what was missing—celebrity. “We knocked our heads together on this one,” Kalifowitz said, before it finally came to them.

“Matt Damon! Matt Damon ticks so many boxes, right? He exhibits bravery as a person, right? He’s globally known, right? We can put him around the world and everybody will know his voice.… Oh, and he won the Oscar for The Martian.” (Damon was nominated for Best Actor but did not win.)

At this point, the story becomes astonishing. Damon had done a small amount of commercial work but had never appeared as the face of a brand. Kalifowitz and Marszalek were able to talk him into it. Part of the attraction was the creative team.

The Crypto.com spot was directed

by Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan’s former cinematographer, and Damon

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

GQ World Money

G Q . C O M

4 1

GQ World Money

is playing Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, in Nolan’s forthcoming movie Oppenheimer.

Damon also donated his appearance fee to Water.org, a clean water charity he cofounded, and Crypto.com made an accompanying donation. (“I appreciate the partnership with Crypto .com and am grateful for their support of Water.org,” Damon said in an email.) When I asked Marszalek how a former coupon merchant running a rebooted prepaid debit card company out of quarantine in Hong Kong had managed to secure Damon, one of the most respectable and popular faces on the planet, to be the public face of crypto, he said, “I think it was the material. If you read the copy of this piece of work, I’m very proud of it.”

The next play was the naming rights to the home of the Lakers.

Staples Center was so closely associated with the legacy of Kobe Bryant and his five championships that fans often forgot its name derived from Staples, Inc., the derelict office-supply chain that is currently being gutted in a private-equity bust-out. For several years, the stadium’s owners, AEG,

without just looking for the big splash in the first year,” he said. I pointed out that Crypto.com was not yet six years old, and that for two of those years the company had had a different name. “They were really smart and astute. It was the most natural and organic conversation that we had,” Goldstein said. “I can tell you right now, though, we wouldn’t have done the deal as Monaco. We wouldn’t be in the Monaco Arena right now.”

How was Marszalek doing it? Not through stage presence, certainly.

During our calls, he spoke in a quiet voice, and sometimes when I asked him a question, he would look at the floor for a long time before answering. At one point in our conversation, he looked at the floor for so long I thought his Zoom had crashed. (“I apologize for not warning you about the long pauses,” Matt David told me later. “I’m normally really good about warning people about that.”) But when Marszalek finally responded, the answer was always diplomatic, even bulletproof, as if he’d simply been polishing it in the rock tumbler of his mind.

“You know, what he’s doing is smart,” he said of Marszalek. “You’ve got blockchain companies that have been around since 2013, and they don’t even have a marketing officer. Other companies are building technology, but they’re investing in glamour.” had been looking for a new partner.

“Staples was a domestic company that was shrinking their footprint,” Todd Goldstein, AEG’s chief revenue officer told me. “We wanted someone who had global ambitions.”

Much of Goldstein’s professional life revolves around naming deals.

(I met him at the Lexus Club, at Crypto .com Arena, adjacent to Xbox Plaza.)

The deal he helped negotiate with Crypto.com paid AEG $700 million over 20 years, but Goldstein told me the company was far from the highest bidder. “We had other companies offer us more money,” he said. “Interestingly enough, I’ve had companies offer us more money since we announced the deal, including a buyout.”

Goldstein turned that buyout down. “You want a partner who’s going to be really thoughtful over the course of the next two decades,

4 2

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

“There’s been a lot of grit, tenacity, and creativity,” Marszalek said of his epic string of marketing deals, “but the ability to listen has also been very important.” Marszalek told me he likes to put himself in the other person’s shoes and understand their likely points of mental resistance, then work, point by point, to address them.

“Listen intently: What is the concern on the other side of the table?”

“Empathy,” I said. “You’re talking about empathy.”

“Empathy is very important,” Marszalek said.

Wanting to see things from the cetacean perspective, I wrote to Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and noted crypto whale. Cuban made his fortune selling the overvalued Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999, then famously traded options on his Yahoo stock as a hedge against his

windfall. It was the trade of a lifetime, especially after the bubble burst, but he doesn’t see a parallel with crypto. “Most of the apps like Crypto .com are centralized exchanges that are actually very profitable,” Cuban said in an email. He contended that sports-stadium operators will accept below-market rates for sponsorship “because they see these companies can grow significantly, which means there are future opportunities.” The possibility of a crash was always present, as Cuban knew better than anyone, but for now, he sees a bull market. Last October, the Mavericks signed a sponsorship deal with the crypto trading platform Voyager, and in January, Cuban told Jon Stewart that 80 percent of his new investments outside of Shark Tank are in the crypto space. of writing this article, my altcoin portfolio appreciated a little. I also accumulated a fair amount of interest, scored some Cronos kickbacks, and was comped a month of Spotify. I still didn’t really understand why people wanted to own cryptocurrency, or why it was so expensive, or complicated, but it felt good to be a joiner. Matt Damon was right.

Looking to commune with the tribe, I visited the long-running CryptoMondays meetup in Venice Beach. We met under patio lights in the parking lot of an upscale Mexican restaurant, which had been converted, during the pandemic, into an outdoor bar. I’d been to a similar event, years earlier—a total sword fight, where feverish dweebs lectured one another about distributed ledgers. Since then, crypto had enjoyed a social upgrade: In Venice, the attendees were diverse, funny, smart, beautiful, and cool. I felt like I was in a vodka commercial.

No one I spoke to could remember who first organized the event—one attendee told me it was spontaneous, or “decentralized.” Some of the participants had been coasting for years on the proceeds of their swollen Bitcoin wallets; others, like me, were just getting started. I talked with a recent college grad and former javelin thrower.

Jacked and bro-adjacent, he belonged to the demographic that Crypto.com refuses to admit it targets, but when I asked him about the company, he scoffed. “No one I know uses it.”

Similarly dismissive was Jackie Peters, a stylish entrepreneur who is building a blockchain-enabled dating app called “Trust!” (The app will use “Web3 technology” to restore authenticity to online dating.) Peters was still in (continued on page 98) OVER THE COURSE

TRY IT

Want to look and smell your very best? Be the first to try new grooming products for your hair, skin, and beard by signing up for GQ’s new Try It Program. We’ll send you samples that match up with your own grooming routine.

Just fill out a grooming profile to qualify.*

Sign up now > GQ.com/tryit *Spaces and samples are limited. Products are targeted to skin and hair types and preferences where applicable.

In the six years since he quit his job bagging groceries,

BENITO ANTONIO MARTÍNEZ OCASIO

has become one of the most streamed artists alive, a professional wrestling champion, and a whole new kind of cliché-shattering sex symbol.

Now, the Puerto Rican superstar is poised to make his next big jump: to Marvel leading man.

BY CARINA CHOCANO

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROE ETHRIDGE

STYLED BY MOBOLAJI DAWODU

←← PREVIOUS PAGE

shirt $990 Loewe

shorts $625 Dolce & Gabbana

in a good place. Fresh off a long-delayed 25-city tour for his third solo album, the most streamed artist of 2021 on Spotify is comfortably ensconced in a waterfront house in North Miami, just across Biscayne Bay from flashier Miami Beach, finishing his latest record. Built out of shipping containers arranged around a patio that looks onto a pool and a dock, this temporary residence is teeming with friends who are also collaborators—his creative director, his photographer, his producer, his jack-of-all-trades.

The sliding glass doors are open, but the breeze barely cuts through the humidity and the heat. A chef is at work in the open kitchen, filling the room with the aroma of pork and onions, and a spring break vibe hangs in the air. Someone has set a beautiful table for a crowd.

The mood is so mellow that you could almost forget that the person who shows up a few minutes after everyone else, fresh from the gym, is a global phenomenon whose genre-bending songs, convention-flouting lyrics, and gender-fluid looks have, over the past six years, changed the face of pop music. An urbano Latin trap singer who has defied every expectation about what a rapper and trap artist should look like, and what a reggaeton singer should sing about—upsetting some people but inspiring many more.

“I think he’s the biggest star in the whole world right now,” Diplo, who appeared on Bad Bunny’s 2018 debut album and will join him on his stadium tour this summer, tells me over the phone. “Bigger than any Englishspeaking star, bigger than, of course, the biggest Latin star. He’s the most massive, most progressive, most important pop star in the world.” Bad Bunny’s frequent collaborator J Balvin concurs. “He’s a creative genius,” he says, someone who “takes us out of the stereotypes and shows the real, new way that we see the world as Latinos.”

Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is here with his girlfriend, 28-year-old jewelry designer Gabriela Berlingeri, and their three-month-old Beagle puppy, Sansa. Dressed in a pair of royal blue Bravest Studios L.A. shorts, neon green slides, a black Balenciaga T-shirt with bébé bedazzled across the chest in rhinestones, and a tan bucket hat with the string hanging loose around his chin, Benito, also 28, is carrying a stack of coffee table books on interior design, which he neatly arranges on a side table next to the sofa. There’s a gold ring in his septum, a necklace of small diamond hearts around his neck, small gold hoops with diamond charms in both of his ears. His nails, a modest length, are painted ballerina pink.

As Benito talks, his demeanor shifts from shy and introverted to playful and goofy to voluble and defiant.

Sometimes, he gets sentimental. He turns to Berlingeri at one point and murmurs, “You look so pretty right now.”

And she laughs and says, “Oh, yeah, I look really pretty.”

BAD BUNNY IS

4 6

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

Berlingeri, who has come from the gym too, is wearing an oversized “Puerto Rico” T-shirt and denim shorts, boots $1,320 her hair wet and no makeup. She sits close to him on Marsèll the couch, keeping a watchful eye on the puppy, who is sunglasses $246 being showered with gifts, including a stuffed bunny.

Oakley Meeting Sansa was a highlight of the tour, Benito tells watch $305,000 me. Berlingeri brought her to meet him during his show Vanguart at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. He was about to earrings, go back onstage after a five-minute break when he found nose ring, diamond heart out they had arrived, and he made a dash for the dressnecklaces, ing rooms. “I ran because of her,” he tells me in Spanish, pearl necklace, pointing to Sansa. “It wasn’t because of Gabriela.” Then he bracelets, laughs. “That’s a lie, it was for both,” he says with a grin. and rings “I gave Gabriela a kiss, and a kiss to Sansa.” (throughout), his own The chef brings over some sushi for Benito to sample.

His boldly colored outfit feels tropical and refreshing, → transmitting a summer energy—but he explains that his shirt $896 approach to style is always shifting. “It depends on my pants $919 state of mind,” he says. “Everybody has to feel comfortable Tokyo James with what they are, and how they feel. Like, what defines his own boxer briefs a man, what defines being masculine, what defines being Calvin Klein feminine? I really can’t give clothes gender. To me, a dress Underwear is a dress. If I wear a dress, would it stop being a woman’s sandals $495 dress? Or vice versa? Like, no. It’s a dress, and that’s it. It’s Hermès not a man’s, it’s not a woman’s. It’s a dress.” sunglasses $465 I ask what he’s going to wear to the upcoming Met Gala.

Gucci “If I knew, I would tell you,” he says with a smile. Then he watch $13,500 remembers something: “Cabrón, I saw a post that they Cartier announced the theme.” diamond chain “It’s not ‘American’?” Janthony Olivares, his creative necklace (throughout) director, asks. $50,000 Benito explains that the dress code is “gilded glamour, Jacob & Co white-tie,” and that the theme, In America: An Anthology of Fashion, is inspired by an exhibit from the Met’s Costume Institute. He says that when he heard the theme, he thought he’d wear something inspired by Latin America. “Because it’s America too.”

The idea that America is about more than just the United States is something he’s been thinking a lot about—something, in fact, that governs his entire approach to global stardom. Specifically, it reminds him of “This Is Not America,” a recent song by his friend René Pérez Joglar, the Puerto Rican rapper better known as Residente, who helped awaken Benito’s political consciousness when in January 2019 they paid an early morning visit to then governor of Puerto Rico Ricardo Rosselló to discuss the island’s violent crime, and later joined protests that ultimately resulted in his resignation. Inspired by Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” Residente offers a searing critique of U.S. imperialism and violence in Latin America. “Ever since I heard that song, I’ve loved it,” Benito says. “It gave me the chills. We were drinking, and suddenly René played that song. Cabrón, my eyes welled up. My hair stood on end. I don’t know if it was because I was a little drunk, or what. But the song is very good.”

Released on May 6, Benito’s latest record, Un Verano Sin Ti (A Summer Without You), is less political, but his sensibility remains as proudly Latin as ever; a large portion of the album was recorded at a house in the Dominican Republic. “I go to a specific place with my people, and we stay, we have a good time, and we work,” he says. “I rent a house like this one, put the equipment in, and record the songs there.”

He avoids recording studios whenever he can. “From the moment I get in the car, I lose the desire to go,” he adds. At the house, though, everything flows. “Here, you get up, you eat something, and we get on it.”

In January, Benito deleted all of his social media posts and put up a reel of himself and Berlingeri eating dinner under a palm tree, in which he announced his upcoming World’s Hottest Tour. The shows sold out in minutes, crashing the system. “It was madness,” he says.

Today, in mid-April, it’s been only a week since his last show and he hasn’t fully come down. Usually, he goes to bed at 1 or 2 a.m. and wakes up around 10, but lately he’s been having trouble sleeping. “I don’t know if it’s just me or everyone, but the higher I go, the more pressure I feel,” he says. (text continued on page 50)

4 8

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

shirt $825 pants $825 Emporio Armani necklace $800 Swarovski

And he’s certainly continuing to soar ever higher.

Later in April he was tapped to star as El Muerto, the Spider-Man antagonist and superpowered wrestler who is the first Latin Marvel character to get a standalone live-action film—the latest chapter in a burgeoning acting career. “Maybe, for some people, it’s different in that the higher they go, the less pressure they feel, because maybe they’re confident that everything they do will be a success,” he continues. “But I’m the opposite—the more I acquire an audience, the more I go up, the more pressure I feel to keep going. Sometimes, I can’t sleep thinking about that. I go days without sleeping.”

Everyone jumps in to speculate as to why. Maybe it’s because he’s coming off the tour—he’s overstimulated, pumped up on adrenaline. There has to be a certain amount of vertigo involved in an ascent as dizzying as his. People screaming and dancing at his shows—“You never get used to that,” he says.“It never becomes normal.

It will always cause emotions to see people get so excited and receive you that way. It changes you.”

B E N I T O H A S N ’ T C H A N G E D , though—not according to the

people who know him. “He was the same when I met him

→ shirt and shorts (prices upon request) Etro shoes $230 Dr. Martens sunglasses $640 Gucci watch $305,000 Vanguart ↓ shirt $1,250 pants $1,150 Bottega Veneta top $285 Issey Miyake sunglasses $380 Loewe necklace $200 Éliou

as he is today,” his manager, Noah Assad, says. “He’s definitely an introvert in many ways. Most people would think he’s the other way around—but very humble to this day.”

Olivares says, “He’s sort of shy. He’s a person who likes to demonstrate love.” Benito says he’s made a conscious effort to remain the same. “Some things change because it’s impossible for them not to when you get a lot of success and a bunch of money you didn’t have before,” he says.

“But my inner self, my person is intact.” His Boricua pride, for one, remains as strong as ever. So does his commitment to singing in Spanish. Back in the day, for a Spanishspeaking recording artist to break into the mainstream American market, they had to sing in English—Enrique Iglesias, Shakira, Ricky Martin. That idea has crumbled thanks in part to people like Benito. “It’s like that curtain fell,” he says. “Everyone is in the same league, on the same court. I’ve said that from the beginning.”

Social media has allowed him to present himself on his own terms—defiantly Puerto Rican, playfully genderneutral, and politically outspoken. “I was never on a mission to be like, Oh, this is what I’m going to do,” he says about conquering the global pop market. “It happened organically. Like, I’ve never made a song saying, ‘This is going to go worldwide.’ I never made a song thinking, Man, this is for the world. This is to capture the gringo audience. Never. On the contrary, I make songs as if only Puerto Ricans were going to listen to them. I still think I’m there making music, and it’s for Puerto Ricans. I forget the entire world listens to me.”

Now that we’re living in the era of the reggaetonero, he wants to celebrate the genre’s dominance. “The Latino audience would always undervalue their artist,” he says.

“Sometimes, Latinos would want to record with an American, and because they’re American, they’d think, I have to do it. No, man. He’s not at the level I am, you know? Just because they’re American. But that perspective has changed. You can see it now. People have become aware. They suddenly see, Wow, Bad Bunny has been the most listened to on Spotify for 70 days. It wasn’t the American. It’s this guy, who’s Latino.”

As if on cue, the chef punctuates the pause that follows by presenting a plate with more sushi. Everyone goes quiet, simultaneously chewing on the fish and Benito’s words. After a while, Benito continues. “I remember one time—I don’t know who the hell that was, if it was Billboard, or if it was Rolling Stone—came out with a list of the best singers in history. Like, cabrón, specify that it’s of the history of the United States. Because, on that list, I didn’t see Juan Gabriel, I didn’t see Vicente Fernández, I didn’t see Tito Rodríguez.” Gone is the shy introvert. He’s been replaced by a guy on a tear. “Don’t refer to those artists like the greatest when we have legends in our Latin American music. And that’s the pure truth. Why are they called a legend and I can’t compare them to this one?

Because they’re American? Because they sing in English?”

The more famous he’s become, the more Benito has come to appreciate his language, his country, his culture, his family, and his friends. “Many artists become famous, and they suddenly start to change their circle of people, and then people start to filter through,” he says.

“Like, ‘Now, I’m closer friends with so-and-so. Now, I’m better friends with this one because he also has money.’ I continue to surround myself with the same people. I keep my same circle. I’m always in contact with my family, even when I can’t see them.”

“Benito is the most family-oriented person I know,” Olivares tells me. “He brought his middle brother along on tour as soon as he could, and when the younger one finished school he brought him along too. He loves it. It creates a family bubble for him.”

Wanting this bubble of protection makes sense for Benito. His ascent was disorienting, and there was a time when he felt lost. “It’s like I was in a coma,” he says. “As if, suddenly, two years of my life went by in a week, because of this sudden boom.” He was doing things he’d never done before and hustling all the time. “I still work every day now, but during that time it was really weird. It was as if they had taken an animal from the jungle to the zoo.

I was in the zoo for two years doing the same thing I did in the jungle, only I wasn’t in the jungle.”

Privacy is crucial now that his life is on constant display. “I mean, I’ll post a photo with Gabriela,” he says, “but I’m not making a love story. I post photos because it’s the fucking thing you do during these times—posting pictures.

Sometimes, as much as you’re anti–social media, it’s impossible. As much as you say, ‘I’m going to stay out of this,’ you’ll suddenly say, ‘I’m going to post a photo,’ you know?”

Still, he says, you won’t see him out there creating controversies, or doling out details about his relationship to strangers. “People don’t know shit about my relationship,” he says. “They don’t know if I’m married, you know?

Maybe we’re already married and people don’t know.” He smiles. “I’m just saying that. I’m not married.” the Almirante Sur barrio of Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, the eldest son of a truck driver father and a schoolteacher mother, Benito was a shy but funny kid with a rich imagination. “I liked being a clown,” he says.

“But I was also, like, shy. I was always loving with my parents. I liked drawing. I liked playing a lot with my imagination. I wasn’t ever, like, an athlete.” He spent a lot of time in his room but also outside—not riding a bike or playing ball, but pretending he was a Norwegian Viking.

“I have an image in my mind of a little rock that I would stand on, and damn, I’d feel like I was in a kingdom, and lightning would come down,” he says. “I remember there was a neighbor who would always tell my parents that I was talking to myself. And it was just me playing, making voices of the other characters because I was alone. She would say to my dad, ‘That boy is always talking to himself. You should have him checked out.’ And my dad was like, ‘The boy is playing.’ ” “There’s always a neighbor,” Berlingeri deadpans.

As a kid, Benito sang in the church choir, rapped in his middle-school talent show, and listened to anything his parents would play. “A lot of salsa,” he says. “And my mom would listen to ballads, merengue, and Top 40 radio.” He listened to reggaeton in secret. “The only thing they’d allow me to listen to was Vico C,” he says, referring to the stage name of Luis Armando Lozada Cruz, the rapper widely regarded as one of the founders of reggaeton. “At that time, Vico C was street, but they allowed me to listen to him when he started to make cleaner music. But the first O.G. street artist they’d let me listen to was Tego Calderón. And that was the first one I was really hooked on.”

We’re sitting around the big table, now eating ceviche and pork, drinking red wine, and Benito smiles at the memory of first encountering Calderón, the legendary Puerto Rican hip-hop MC and reggaetonero. “I always tell the story of when I was in school: If I was feeling lazy and I didn’t want to get up, they’d threaten me with not being allowed to listen to Tego Calderón. Man, I’d get up so fast and get dressed. I’d be ready. ‘You’re not going to listen to Tego’s song!’ And I’d say, ‘Okay, Mami, fine. I’m ready!’ ” GROWING UP IN

5 2

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

Benito attended the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, intending to major in visual communications. In his first semester, he failed all his classes except the ones in his major. “And I passed math,” he says. He was writing songs but not recording them. “I always made rhythms, tracks, beats. I was clear that I wanted to be an artist, but I wanted it to be serious. Like, I’m working seriously. It’s not like I’m here trying to do crazy things. That’s why I didn’t upload songs until I felt as prepared as possible, at the flow level, at the rhythm level, at the lyric level.”

Around 2014, before he dropped out of school, Benito took a job bagging groceries at a supermarket chain.

That’s when his friend Ormani Pérez, now his official DJ,

pushed him to upload some tracks to SoundCloud. “There was a page on Facebook that still exists, and my friends would always tell me to upload it there. I was never very confident. I’d say, ‘No, I won’t do it on there. I want to be a musician and post them when they’re finished.’ But there was a scene of young guys making music, and they uploaded it on SoundCloud. And I said, well, that’s what I’m going to do then.”

People started sharing the songs, then more people.

“It was 500,000, then it was a million,” Benito says.

“It’s exciting to throw out a song and hit Refresh, and see how many people have played it.” In 2016, Benito came to the attention of Noah Assad, a founder of Rimas

↑ shirt $795 GCDS shorts $385 JW Anderson his own sunglasses Chrome Hearts watch and flower necklace, his own

Entertainment, which had swiftly become one of the biggest music labels in the Latin world. Cofounded with José “Junior” Carabaño in 2014, it began as a small YouTube network that distributed and marketed music videos.

Even as Benito was in the process of deciding whether to sign with the label, he was still handing out résumés to retail establishments and thinking about his studies. He knew he would always make music but didn’t know how long it would take to launch his career. He was trying to be prepared for anything. To not be crazy.

Assad’s approach was unique, leveraging strategic collaborations. Rather than focus on albums, his plan was to release singles in rapid succession. By the time the major

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

G Q . C O M

5 3

labels took notice, Bad Bunny’s YouTube views were in the hundreds of millions. Since his 2016 breakthrough, “Soy Peor,” and his collaborations with Cardi B and J Balvin on “I Like It” and with Drake on “Mia,” Benito has continued to beat records and defy expectations. He’s released three studio albums, a collaborative album, and a compilation album, and has racked up two Grammy Awards, four Latin Grammy Awards, eight Billboard Music Awards, an MTV Video Music Award, and two American Music Awards, among others.

In late 2020, El Último Tour del Mundo became the first all-Spanish album ever to reach the top of the Billboard 200. Benito has been the most streamed artist on Spotify for two years running. His tour earlier this year sold 500,000 tickets in the first week and grossed almost $117 million. And after a recurring role on the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico, he filmed the movie Bullet Train with Brad Pitt.

“Brad Pitt was super fire,” Benito says. Sometimes, during filming, they’d yell ‘Cut!’ and I would think, What the fuck. I’m here with Brad Pitt!”

Even the Lamborghini Urus he bought has another side to it. “Benito isn’t a guy who loves having lots of cars, customizing them, having the latest or the fastest,” Olivares says. “Benito is not that guy.” Yes, he has a $200,000 SUV with over 600 horsepower (along with a Bugatti), “but that was a kind of trophy he bought for himself because in 2012 they came out with a prototype, and even though Benito doesn’t really care about cars, he fell in love with it, but he wasn’t even close to being able to have it. He was in high school. And seven or eight years later, he was able to buy it. He didn’t buy it to have a Lamborghini. He bought it because it had been his dream car when he was a kid.”

“I went through all the processes of an artist,” Benito says over bites of an unlikely main course of beef Wellington, served in a foie gras sauce. “It was superfast.

I had my free parties. I had my $100 parties, still independently. I had my mistakes like any rookie. Then I was a new, hot artist. Then, the following month, I was a new level of an artist. And so on. And it kept on happening like that. It keeps happening.” of 2021, when he would have been on tour were it not for the pandemic, Benito began a curious side hustle, making guest appearances on the WWE circuit and winning its 24/7 Championship, a unique title that can be challenged at any time. Weeks after taking home a Grammy, he competed in a tag team match with his Puerto Rican compatriot Damian Priest at WrestleMania 37. That experience in the ring prepared him for his upcoming role as El Muerto. “I grew up watching wrestling,” he says. “This role is perfect, and I know El Muerto is going to be epic. I’m a Marvel fan and the fact that I’m now part of this family still feels like a dream.”

Olivares wasn’t surprised that Benito wanted to dive headlong into the ring. “I know it’s always been his dream,” he says. But he was surprised at how focused he became.

“He stopped doing everything else. He’s always making music, but he stopped. He stopped doing everything to dedicate himself to this 100 percent.” Benito trained twice a day, working on his technique, his body. “It was like—since he blew up and started touring—it was the biggest change I’d seen,” Olivares says.

Then again, the contradictions are expected. He made headlines in February 2020 for going on The Tonight Show BETWEEN JANUARY AND APRIL

5 4

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

Starring Jimmy Fallon wearing a skirt and a shirt that raised awareness about a trans Puerto Rican woman who had recently been killed. And that commitment to seepants $1,150 ing the world through a feminist point of view extends Valentino to his music, perhaps best evidenced on his anthem “Yo watch, his own Perreo Sola” (“I Dance Alone”), a rallying cry against sexual harassment and violence against women.

“Latino culture is very machista,” Benito says. “So, that’s why I think everything that I’ve done has been even more shocking.… Urban Latin music, reggaeton, is a genre where you have to be the manliest, the baddest. That’s why it’s the most shocking too.” Sometimes, he says, people think that if you’re a reggaeton artist, you have to act or dress a certain way. “But why? If I dress this way, I can’t sing this way? Or if I dress like this, I can’t listen to this type of music?”

But he’s not trying to be an example. “It’s not like I’m making a sermon. I’m going to a club, or being with friends. It’s natural. So, when somebody listens to it and says, ‘Cabrón, it’s true,’ and it changes their mind a bit, it’s not like they’re going to be a new person, but they acquire something. They might start accepting things that they hadn’t, or they might suddenly say, ‘Damn, it’s true, I’m being a little unfair with this person.’ ” “Obviously, there are a lot of things that people won’t know about me because I have my private life,” he says at another point. “I might not speak about some things in public. But when I go out there, I’m not acting, you know? I’m not making up a character, or becoming more of an artist, or changing the way I speak or anything. I’m the way I am, and I’m proud of how I am, and I feel fine with who I am.”

“I think that he’s relatable,” Diplo says. “He’s just a normal-ass guy. He has a sick voice. He knows how to dress and be outrageous, which is what you really need too—you need to have that level of balls to pull it off. He seems to be in a league of his own. Nobody is doing these wild mash-ups—a record that has trap and grunge rock together. He’s the one taking the time to make these ballsy records of what he loved growing up, and he’s doing it himself. He’s just taking chances and winning.”

Lunch was late, or dinner was early. Either way, the sun is starting to mellow, casting a golden hue on the pool and the dock. Benito’s engineer and producer Beto Rosado sets up equipment for a listening session, and Benito asks if I want to hear a few songs from the new album. Jomar Dávila, his photographer, and Jesus Pino, his assistant, drink beer at the kitchen island while the chef cleans up. Berlingeri sits on the couch, playing with the dog.

Benito, sitting on a stool in front of the speakers, puts on the first song, a tropical upbeat reggae track about drinking beer on vacation. He stands, a glass of red wine in hand, and bobs his head to the beat. Then he shuffles over to Berlingeri and Sansa and sits on the couch. The music is loud. It riles up the puppy. She wags her tail and jumps up, trying to catch the toy bunny he’s waving above her head.

Benito has never recorded so many songs for an album before, he tells me. He’s still not sure which ones he’ll include.

The next song features a Colombian band called Bomba Estéreo, which has described its music as electro tropical. It sounds like a party. Benito turns it up and starts to dance. Everyone perks up, swaying in their seats and singing along.

“This song makes me want a beer!” Berlingeri says. The third track, which features Berlingeri singing, has a mambo beat. Benito starts to dance what might be a mambo—little sideways steps at an angle, step-touch-step. Dávila and Pino line up behind him, step-touching in a synchronized mini conga line.

“What’s this step called?” Benito asks. He’s still smiling and wearing his bucket hat. He seems relaxed and content.

“Esta es mi playa,” the song goes. (“This is my beach.”)

“Este es mi sol, esta es mi tierra,” it continues. (“This is my sun, this is my land.”)

“Esta soy yo.” (“This is me.”)

“Is it bachata?” Benito asks about their dance. “Merengue?” They don’t know what it’s called, but they know how to do it. It’s second nature. Shared history.

“It’s Caribbean,” says Dávila.

“It’s Cruise Ship,” offers Pino.

“Electric slide!” replies Dávila.

Benito shuffles across the floor in syncopated little steps. “It’s American!” he exclaims. Everyone laughs and keeps dancing. → shirt $1,550 Dior Men

carina chocano

is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.

22 questions about the insanely lucrative, uniquely confusing, distressingly scammy, and quite possibly revolutionary world of non-fungible tokens.

5 6

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

OKAY, SO WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?

3

SO WHAT ARE NFTS, ANYWAY?

SOME BASIC TERMS AND ACRONYMS YOU SHOULD KNOW As if the tech underlying NFTs weren’t impenetrable enough, fans and collectors seem to speak a language all their own. Here are a few terms to get you started.

—J.K.

GOT IT. BUT WHY DO THEY MATTER, AGAIN?

2

GM: Good Morning, a standard greeting NFT enthusiasts have turned into insider code.

WAGMI: We’re All Gonna

Make It, shorthand for the optimism—sometimes merited, sometimes delusional—around NFT projects.

NGMI: Not Gonna Make It.

Someone who bails out and sells early.

PFP: Picture for Profile,

used to refer to a collection of NFT-linked images designed to work as Twitter avatars. (See CryptoPunks, Bored Ape.) DYOR: Do Your Own

Research. Because Web3’s self-sovereignty ethos means there’s no safety net if you make a mistake, collectors are on their own when it comes to avoiding scams and finding the most promising projects.

MINT: The act of

transforming a digital asset—a JPEG of a penguin wearing a hat, a trance song, etc.— into an NFT.

DIAMOND HANDS: The ability

DAO: Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

Basically, a club but with no central leadership.

Members typically pool their crypto and make decisions on what to do with their funds, together.

PAPER HANDS: The opposite

CC0: A type of license that waives copyright and puts an NFT’s art in the public domain.

An insult reserved for inept investors, rip-off projects, and NFT haters generally. to hold onto NFTs for the long haul. If you can wait out early losses in hopes of a big payday, you’ve got diamond hands. of diamond hands:

WHAT ARE BLUE-CHIP NFTS?

5

WHO ARE SOME OF THOSE POTENTIAL CHALLENGERS— THOSE DAVIDS— TO YUGA’S GOLIATH?

WHAT MAKES AN NFT VALUABLE?

6

CAN YOU SPLIT THE COST OF AN NFT WITH SOMEONE ELSE?

7

HOW PERMANENT ARE NFTS, REALLY?

9

A BRIEF TAXONOMY OF NFT COLLECTORS QUICK FLIPPER: You’re someone who’s extremely online and always early, surfing the waves of other people’s FOMO, minting anything that’s hard to get, then selling it to stragglers who pay extra to join in.

ART RESPECTER: A patron of the digital

arts, you’ll sell for millions someday, or you won’t. If it all goes to zero, you can still admire the art in your wallet, proof it was all real once.

INVESTOR: With a V.C. mindset, you leverage industry connections to make big bets on the most professionalseeming NFTs, hoping one or two become household names.

NORMAL: You eat healthy, go outside,

and at some point might spend $200 on an NFT your cousin made, never to think about it again. But your cousin will love you forever.

SO HOW DO I ACTUALLY BUY ONE?

10

JUST OUT OF CURIOSITY, CAN I MAKE MY OWN NFT?

IN THE KNOW?

11 HOW DO I PROTECT MY NFTS FROM GETTING STOLEN?

12 ANYTHING ELSE I CAN DO ON A PERSONAL LEVEL TO AVOID GETTING SCAMMED?

THAT SOUNDS WILD. JUST HOW WEIRD CAN NFTS GET?

SECTION 3

SO I BOUGHT MY FIRST NFT. HOW DO I DISPLAY THIS THING?

ARE NFTS REALLY ART?

SO HOW DO ARTISTS FEEL ABOUT THIS?

16

WHAT’S UP WITH FASHION NFTS?

18

WHAT ABOUT MUSIC NFTS?

19

20

MOST IMPORTANTLY, CAN NFTS REALLY HELP SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT?

SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS, PAGE 99.

OR MAYBE EVEN THE WORLD?

OKAY, BUT KNOWING ALL OF THIS NOW, WHAT IF I HATE IT? IS THAT OKAY? WILL I DIE OF FOMO?

22

With an armful of breezy songs and a breakout role on Euphoria, singersongwriter

DOMINIC FIKE

has become the multihyphenate face of the Web3 era (complete with Apple tattoo). So we enlisted him to help us figure out what, exactly, we’ll wear in the real world when life moves into the metaverse.

BY SAMUEL HINE PHOTOGRAPHS BY SEBASTIAN MADER STYLED BY MATTHEW HENSON

←← OPENING PAGES

HEN SINGER-SONGWRITER

Dominic Fike tried out for a role in the debut season of Euphoria, it wasn’t just his first time auditioning for a big part on a show. It was his first time acting, period. Fike had been approached by the show’s casting director and made it through several rounds of callbacks easily. Then Euphoria creator Sam Levinson invited him to do a final chemistry read with series regular Barbie Ferreira. Fike decided to prepare like all the greats do: with a little bit of method acting. Since Euphoria is centered on a high school full of more drugs than a CVS, Fike took a bunch of shrooms and headed to the audition. You can kind of see where this is going. “I started peaking right when me and Barbie were reading,” he says with a laugh.

It could have been brilliant—when Fike trusts his instincts, things have a way of working out. But then he looked at the script and saw the letters dancing around. And then he looked at Levinson and—in Fike’s psychedelic mind’s eye, anyway—the show creator was standing there in a dress. Fike broke out laughing, as he recalls: “I looked at him and I was like, Are you wearing a dress right now?

It was crazy. I started making fun of everybody in the room.” It was

tank top $42 for pack of three Calvin Klein Underwear boxers $455 Hermès

tie $165 Paul Stuart shoes $1,555 John Lobb watch $8,500 Rolex earring, his own → OPPOSITE PAGE

jacket $3,750 pants $2,080 Louis Vuitton Men’s sneakers $110 Nike socks $29 for four pairs Calvin Klein Underwear hat, stylist’s own earring (price, per pair, upon request) Jacob & Co chair $2,000 Tom Sachs Furniture

a disaster. When he got home, his agents called him with feedback: “They were like, What. The. Fuck.” He didn’t get the part.

Fike can laugh about the experience now because he made it onto Euphoria’s second season, playing the new kid in town: a guitar-playing stoner named Elliot who talks his way into a love triangle with Rue (played by Zendaya) and Jules (Hunter Schafer). Elliot’s actions on the show aren’t particularly laudable, but he’s hard not to like—mostly because Fike himself is hard not to like. At 26, he’s thoughtful and funny, with a relaxed, confident demeanor. Clothes look very good on him, and you can imagine his face tattoos, mustache, and grown-out bleached hair setting a dirty new beauty standard. The moment Elliot appears in the first episode of Euphoria’s second season, to do drugs with Rue in a laundry room at a party, you get the sense that a major star has walked onscreen.

I have yet to meet a person—any gender, any sexuality—who doesn’t think he’s hot.

W E M E E T O N E warm spring afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Fike lives in L.A., but for the past couple of weeks he’s been holed up at a recording studio in upstate New York working on his second album. He got the Euphoria audition back when he was best known for his music. Like many singer-songwriters his age, his sound defies easy categorization. It’s beachy bedroom rock, broadly, that frequently dips into hip-hop and Spotify-friendly pop. Unlike many singer-songwriters his age, Fike has collaborated with artists as large as Justin Bieber and Paul McCartney—and, in Fike’s case, both happened around the same time.

His range is legitimate. He’s in town on his way to Paris, where he’ll meet up with Schafer, his girlfriend of several months.

Making the boppy songs Fike does is a great way to get famous with the social-media generation. But it’s nothing compared to being on an insanely popular TV show. (Euphoria is now the second most watched show on HBO since 2004, after Game of Thrones.) On the day we meet at the museum, the show’s season finale is airing in a few days’ time, and America is in the throes of Euphoria mania. It’s a weekday, and the museum is mostly filled with retirees.

But at one point, as Fike gazes at a column of Richard Serra ironwork, it seems like every girl under the age of 20 in the place is hovering nearby, giggling and not-very-surreptitiously taking pictures. Fike is warm and charming when they ask for selfies, which causes one teenager dressed like a Euphoria extra to borderline hyperventilate. It’s not hard to guess who’s gonna come up to him, he tells me later.

At the entrance to the galleries, I ask Fike if he wants to hit the pre-1970s or post-1970s art first. “Let’s check out some new shit,” he says. (text continued on page 70)

HEADSE T AND CONTROLLERS ( THROUGHOUT ), $299, BY ME TA.

suit $2,895 shirt $495 Ralph Lauren Purple Label

6 8

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

blazer $2,115 Han Kjøbenhavn pants $805 Bryan Jimenèz boots (price upon request) Givenchy balaclava $235 Chrishabana

so rapid and unexpected that The New York Times, FX, and Hulu collaborated on a 2020 documentary short about it. So rapid and unexpected, in fact, that he hasn’t had much time to develop a celebrity side of himself—the safe, frictionless persona that many stars show the public. At one point, he wonders aloud where the jellyfish are. “Don’t they have an aquatic section here? Am I tripping? Am I thinking of an aquarium?” He has become famous by being himself, entirely: an all-American kid, in a deeply Gen Z sense.

Fike’s story goes something like this: He’s of Filipino and African American heritage, and was raised in Naples, Florida. Growing up, his mom was in and out of jail, but she introduced him to Lil’ Kim and Biggie, and bought him his first guitar. His dad was out of the picture till Fike was 9 or 10, when he showed up unannounced at their house.

He crashed there for about a week, Fike says, before riding off into the sunset on Fike’s tiny electric Razor scooter. He’d taught his son a few chords on the guitar first; Fike learned the rest on YouTube.

In high school, Fike fell in with a local hip-hop crew and started uploading music to SoundCloud. He started booking gigs, stealing bikes and selling them on Craigslist for gas money as he drove from city to city. “It was crazy, how I was living,” Fike says. But even then, he was betting on himself. “I was like, ‘This is it. Imma blow up off this rap shit.’ Which I did not, at all.” Fike’s nascent rap career was derailed in 2016 when he was charged with battery of a police officer following an altercation that has been described as an attempt to defuse a situation between the police and his younger brother.

FIKE’S RISE WAS

→ shirt and pants (prices upon request) Valentino Haute Couture boots $975 Jimmy Choo earring (price, for pair, upon request) Jacob & Co bracelet and ring (prices upon request) Cartier High Jewelry ↓ cardigan $1,150 sweater $990 jeans $1,150 belt $375 wallet chain $895 Balenciaga bracelets (linked as necklace) $1,800 and (with diamonds) $20,000 Tiffany & Co. bracelet $395 Martine Ali

After pleading guilty, he was sentenced to six months of house arrest.

But Fike has a way of turning his hardest moments into breakthroughs. He moved into a friend’s apartment with his guitar, and with nothing but time, started trying to find a new sound. One day, in the shower, a breezy, reggae-inflected melody came to him.

He jumped out and started laying down what would become the almost absurdly catchy hand-clapper “3 Nights,” his first breakout hit.

“I remember the day I made it, I called people and I was like, ‘Yo, I just made a smash!’ I actually used that word,” he remembers.

The only problem? When the song blew up on SoundCloud, in early 2018, attracting major-label attention in the process, Fike was in jail for violating probation. If anything, that only seemed to increase the labels’ interest, and Fike found himself meeting with record executives through several inches of jailhouse plexiglass. Columbia Records won a fierce bidding war, and when Fike was released from custody he had a major-label deal and $4 million to his name.

All of a sudden, Fike had to record a proper album that proved he was worthy of the next-big-thing hype generated by his deal, and go on a 32-date worldwide tour, all while adjusting to the spotlight and taking care of his family and friends.

Over the course of our conversation, there’s not a single difficult topic—not his family nor incarceration nor addiction— that Fike can’t spin into a positive. (He describes jail, for example, like a sabbatical: “It really was just a year off to focus on myself.”) But he acknowledges that things got dark during that period, especially while he was trying to put together his debut, 2020’s What Could Possibly Go Wrong. “I was going through so much then, and I was heavily addicted to so many drugs,” he says.

“Trying to make a fucking album in the midst of that much pressure, the drugs, my family being insane, and me being insane, was impossible.” He admits that he “could have been more proud” of his first LP. It doesn’t take long for Fike’s sanguine side to shine through again, though: “Whatever happened was cool,” he says.

And with his long-awaited second album, he’s got good reason to feel optimistic. “This one,” he says, “sounds really good.”

so we decide to make our way to the museum café. As we duck into a gallery to avoid another group of teenage girls—“Now this is tight,” he says of a spooky Magritte canvas—Fike explains that he decided to record his album upstate so that for the first time in years he could focus on making music. “I don’t want to go back to L.A. right now. There’s too much trouble for me to get into, to be real with FIKE IS STARVING,

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

G Q . C O M

7 1

you,” he says. “I know so many goddamn people in L.A., and I can’t get away from them sometimes. There’s always something to do and every studio is accessible, people are just walking in and out all day. Whereas upstate, you might see a fox or a rabbit.”

The first album, and his failed audition, were both factors that motivated Fike to “take a sec,” as he puts it. He realized the only person who could slow down his rocket ship of a career was himself. “Back when [Euphoria] first hit me up, I was crazy,” he says. “I was like, I would be perfect for this show! I’m like one of these fucking kids right here!” Meaning: He drank a lot and did a lot of drugs, going on big-time benders. “I was reallly turning it up,” he says. He managed to avoid becoming a tabloid headline, but his hedonism caused more immediate issues: “I was fucking up my relationships, and then also things with financials—like, I was just spending so much money on yachts and shit.” Renting yachts, to be clear. “My business manager was calling me, like, ‘Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?’ ” Following a stint at an Eric Clapton– funded rehab center in Antigua in spring 2020, Fike is not, he says, “always drugged the fuck out” anymore. It paid off almost immediately: The Euphoria casting directors reached back out after they heard he was making steps in the right direction, which resulted in Fike landing the Elliot role. And so far, he says, his second LP has been much easier to record than the first. He also has a more seasoned approach to making music. “Last time, I was like, let’s see what I do when I go in there and get wiggly with it,” he says. “But now I know exactly what kind of sound I want and what kind of music I want to make.” According to Fike, the new record will feature more rapping and a “more rounded version” of his rock-pop mix. “Shit sounds good!” he says.

His friend and producer Kenny Beats puts it this way: “How effortless music making and creativity is for Dominic Fike is something that people are not used to understanding.”

Until Fike’s Euphoria episodes aired, he didn’t intend to keep acting. Creator Sam Levinson didn’t want him to feel trapped, Fike explains. “Sam was always giving me the option to leave. He was like, ‘Whenever you want to go be a musician, dude, you let me know, I’ll kill you,’ ” meaning Elliot.

As we sit down at the museum café and approximately the 6,000th person of the day tells Fike they love him in Euphoria, he explains why he ultimately decided to sign on for a second season. To start: His first outing paid off in the form of bigger acting projects. “There’s some crazy shit that I’m about to be doing, and that I’m about to be committed to for a long time, potentially,” he says, declining to discuss specifics. But returning also gives him the chance to spend even more time with his girlfriend.

7 2

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

“I’m trying to go crazy. I’m trying to get, like, annoying famous.”

Fike and Schafer met on set in L.A., and Fike is very much in love. He tells me he’s gone to the Prada store in SoHo eight times in the past four days—to buy clothes, of course, but also to see Schafer’s face on the ads displayed in the windows of the store. “That’s the best part,” Fike says. Right now Schafer is in Milan, and he misses her.

Fike and Schafer found an easy chemistry early on, but it took Fike a second to warm up to the other people on set. The whole experience of being the new kid at Euphoria High, he says, “was very intimidating” at first. “Zendaya, it’s just crazy seeing her in real life. You see her in fucking movies and shit, and I’m like, ‘Oh, shit, that’s Spider-Man’s girl, dog!’ And then Tom Holland would show up to set and kiss her on the mouth, and I’m just here like, ‘This is wild!’ ” Whatever guards Fike had up when he arrived on set were soon lowered by the show’s emotional intensity. In the first few days, Schafer filmed a crying scene. Fike was floored by her execution. As he tells it, the set went quiet as she got into character. “I wanted to hug her. The tears started going, she said, ‘Okay, I’m ready.’ And then they did the scene.” Afterward, Fike asked Schafer to teach him how to cry on command, which she did.

The process is simple, in theory: “You just compile all these terrible experiences, and bring them to the front, and then just watch them,” says Fike. When Schafer explained it to him, “I was like, ‘That’s fucked up. You do that all the time? It’s horrible!’ ” Fike says the experience of learning how to cry in front of the camera, not to mention the girl he had a huge crush on, was weird. But the emotional implications were profound. “In those moments, your relationship is accelerated,” Fike says, “because you’re so vulnerable with someone, immediately.

Which usually takes a long time. Some people fall in love, like, fucking months after they meet, or years after. We developed an attraction—it sped it up so fast. We just really got to know each other so quickly.”

→ shirt $1,150 pants $1,100 Gucci watch $3,100 TAG Heuer necklace, stylist’s own grooming by melissa dezarate for jillian dempsey skincare. tailoring by alberto rivera for lars nord studio. set design by lauren nikrooz.

P A R T O F H I M is bugged out by his new reality. “I have better friends in Paris than I do in Naples right now,” he says. “It’s very surprising, and it’s heartbreaking as well, honestly.” But another part of him is ready to ignore all the annoyances and inconveniences and lean as far into celebrity as possible, and see what happens. Do you ever worry about getting overexposed? I ask as Fike picks at a BLT. “No,” he replies. “I’m trying to go crazy. I’m trying to be like Lindsay Lohan.

I’m trying to be annoyed at paparazzi and shit.” Actually? “I’m not even kidding. I’m trying to get, like, annoying famous.” Why? “I just think it’d be dope…. I want those iconic pictures from back in the day. The cool stories. The fucked-up knees from all the Ecstasy. You know? I want all of it.”

Fike knows there’s a chance that this pursuit of celebrity might spin him out of control again. In fact, he basically thinks it’s inevitable.

“Even Paul McCartney has had his speed bumps. I mean, it’s part of the game,” he says.

But recently he’s been thinking that there might be another future in store for him. He’s been talking to a friend about writing a movie where the main character “just keeps winning,” he says. “Like, his life just gets better and better. As soon as you think it’s going to be bad? He gets promoted.” The sequel, because of course there will be a sequel, will be called Still Winning. If the plot were tweaked slightly to include a few scenes in which the protagonist somehow fights his way through a few surefire L’s—failing a court-ordered drug test, doing shrooms before the most important audition of his life—only to escape with huge W’s, it could be about Fike. Do you see yourself being that guy? I ask Fike. “Honestly, kind of,” he replies. “I’m kind of killing it right now.”

samuel hine

is gq ’s fashion writer.

It’s already the world’s most coveted NFT collection, but the

BORED APE YACHT CLUB

is becoming something else: highly lucrative I.P. With buyers racing to make their apes the stars of movies and books and albums and shows, GQ goes inside the quest to cash in on a decentralized version of Disney.

BY WILL STEPHENSON ILLUSTRATIONS BY SEÑOR SALME

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

G Q . C O M

7 5

Sonny Q, who would prefer I not use his last name, was telling me about the exorcism he had received as a younger man in Boston, in which he lay in a bathtub while a priest covered him with eggs.

“I had a weird spirit on me,” he said. “I was struggling, doing bad things and having constant failures. Bad things happening in my life over and over and over again.” Stoutly built and bearded, he shook his head somberly as he recalled the demon possession that had nearly ruined him.

It was early spring, we were on the crowded deck of a private club in Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard, and he was sharing this story by way of illustrating why he particularly valued a passage from the Gospel of Mark—the one in which Jesus casts the demons out of a man into a herd of pigs, which proceeds to rush off a cliff and drown.

Sonny lit a joint; the DJ started spinning B.T. Express’s “Do It (’Til You’re Satisfied).” “I like to think that happened to me,” Sonny said.

Now, his demons are long gone, and with them his propensity for failure. He is born again, in a manner of speaking. “I have a personal brand,” he said. “I want to, like, fuck bitches and live a player life.”

A timeless story of redemption, sure, but the mechanism by which he planned to make it was new: Like everyone else at the party (except, I suppose, myself ), Sonny was the proud owner of a ludicrously expensive cartoon portrait of a monkey. It wasn’t the first time I’d been the brokest person in a room, but it had to be the most ridiculous—any given three attendees, one owner pointed out to me, were collectively worth at least a million dollars, most of them much more than that. This was an invite-only gathering of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, namely those savvy enough to have gotten in early and held onto an avatar from arguably the most well-known NFT collection to date, which bills itself as part social club, part streetwear brand, and part collaborative art project. Besides

7 6

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

receiving a headshot of one’s ape, this was the thing owners really got: access to membersonly meetups, merch drops, and Discord rooms. The value of that membership—the initial price of an ape was around $200, but the price floor was by now over $300,000—is a function of the collection’s exclusivity (there are just 10,000). The Yacht Club, though, was in the process of transforming into something else, and I had come to better understand why and how. What were they plotting, and why was the collection so interesting to so many people? To me, the apes looked unremarkable, like pure assembly-line kitsch—but the owners were desperate to show them off.

“Put my ape in GQ,” Sonny demanded, before a bartender came over to confiscate his joint.

He looked down at the primate on his phone and smiled like a doting father.

Nearby, Jeremiah Allen Welch stood out for his rainbow-colored hair, thick gold chain, and sequined black cardigan, which shimmered when he moved his arms. He had been raised in California’s Central Valley by a family of evangelical Christian ministers who were also professional clowns. He’d long since relocated to San Francisco, where he made a living as an artist—he’d toured as a DJ and his art had been laser-engraved on at least one satellite currently orbiting the Earth. One of the most respected of the O.G.s in attendance, Welch had jumped on the bandwagon the first week the apes became available in spring 2021. “Everyone knows

my ape,” he told me. “People say I sound like my ape,” he added, confusingly.

He was eager to insist that he didn’t care about his apes for their price point alone— it was about the culture, the ecosystem that had organically sprouted up around them.

“The new people are the rich people,” he said, meaning Paris Hilton, Justin Bieber, Eminem, and the many other celebrities who had perplexed their fans in recent months by announcing their purchase of a Bored Ape. “They’re not active in the community. They bought it as an asset. They had somebody help them buy it, or maybe a company bought it for them.” Still, Welch was content to see celebrities buy in if only because it meant someone poorer had likely flipped them an ape for a life-changing sum. “In January a bunch of people around me sold,” he said.

“Now they have a lot more money than me, so it’s like, Why am I holding my apes still?

Everyone says I should sell, but I’ve gotten so used to seeing the price go up.”

I stood off to the side for a while with Zi Wang, one of the party’s hosts and formerly a global creative director at Google, who told me the Bored Ape team “was extremely generous to the point of naivete, to give away all that I.P.” I asked what he meant. “Would you have given away 99 percent of your value?”

This was, he explained, the Yacht Club’s true innovation: Unlike comparable previous projects, which maintained some degree of control over an NFT even after it was purchased, the Yacht Club permitted buyers to fully own their apes and do whatever they wanted with them, ranging from the obvious (using them as profile pictures online) to the unprecedented (licensing them for any number of commercial ventures). Owners could put them on skateboard decks or weed strains or coffee brands, animate them in TV shows or video games or for musical projects—such as Kingship, a band of Bored Apes recently assembled and signed to Universal Music Group.

It was fitting that we were in Hollywood, because the entertainment industry had clearly smelled a lucrative opportunity in these humble JPEGs of monkeys and were beginning to circle the community, vulturelike. Certain apes were already represented by agents from top-tier talent agencies CAA and WME, and the Yacht Club’s parent company, Yuga Labs, was being managed by Guy Oseary, whose other clients include U2, Madonna, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Yuga had also recently helped set up a cryptocurrency, ApeCoin, which was to be the primary medium of exchange in its largest project to date, a metaverse launched in April that it calls Otherside—a mysterious three-dimensional expansion of the BAYC world that could soon be selling virtual real estate (and which would be, in the words of the company, “a metaverse that makes all other metaverses obsolete”).

It was a gold rush, or anyway an increasingly monolithic, at least notionally legal I.P. laboratory that would either demonstrate the radical possibilities of Web3 or the reverse, marking a retrenchment into the very institutions and intermediaries (Hollywood, talent agents) that NFTs were designed to supplant.

For now, though, all of that remained to be seen, and the ape owners could still circle their party unconcerned and triumphant, drinking free negronis and imagining that they represented the cutting edge of something or other.

“What an ugly beast the ape,” wrote Cicero, “and how like us.”

H A V I N G B E C O M E increasingly preposterous and unbearable, it was only a matter of time before we sought to escape it entirely. It was only recently, however, that we began hearing rumors of the augmentedreality metaverse as a more comprehensive retreat. What if we’d gotten it all wrong, the metaverse thesis seemed to suggest, and movies like The Matrix weren’t dystopian but actually, more or less, in a way, sort of utopian? Haven’t we had enough of the existing outside world, with its fluctuating temperatures and endless social entanglements and, you know, wars—don’t we deserve a new world, in the form of a prelapsarian virtual REALITY

fantasy free of pain or boredom? Like Second Life or Fortnite before it—or the online gaming platform Roblox, which has shockingly claimed a user base of two-thirds of American children between 9 and 12—Otherside and other corners of the metaverse hold out the promise of self-abnegation as self-expression.

To paraphrase Wittgenstein: “Let the unutterable be conveyed unutterably.”

I was reminded of that last quote when I encountered it in an interview with the founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, two creative-writing MFA veterans who had met in a Florida dive bar and were now going by the pseudonyms Gordon Goner and Gargamel.

“We’re not technical guys,” they conceded to a journalist from the website CoinDesk, going on to cite horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and famed literary editor Gordon Lish in their attempts to explain how and why they had come to start the project—they weren’t engineers, they stressed, they were storytellers.

The idea in the early days was straightforward: a swamp bar in the Everglades populated by listless monkeys with different combinations of algorithmically generated traits—a sailor hat, 3D glasses, cheetah-print fur, a halo. This was, apparently, what amounts these days to a multibillion-dollar idea, and one Yuga Labs now hopes will entice us into the digital realm for good.

In the future, sorting through the wreckage of society hoping to understand how things went wrong, historians might happen upon a clip of Paris Hilton’s January 24 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The interview went viral on account of its sheer strangeness; Newsweek called it “awkward,” The Atlantic, a “match made in hell,” and Gothamist, a “nightmare.” Fallon and Hilton, presumably to the confusion of their audience, discussed their recent Bored Ape purchases, as the host held up portraits for our admiration—here was the host of one of the most mainstream shows in America pitching the audience on the merits of his investment. It was a cultural inflection point, a bizarre but significant mainstreaming of the NFT. Curious about his involvement, I asked Fallon what interested him about the apes, and he replied, “Probably the adventure.

Like—where is this thing gonna go? Where is it gonna take me?” He added, “It’s attracting interesting people, and who wouldn’t want to be around interesting people?” Asked his thoughts on the metaverse, Fallon said, “I think it’s definitely a thing. If I had a nickel for everyone who says, ‘It’s the Wild Wild West,’ I’d have another ape.”

I had hoped to speak to the Yacht Club founders about their vision, but they’ve been press averse since a Buzzfeed News

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

G Q . C O M

7 7

investigation in February revealed their real names—an apparently unpardonable breach of decorum in the world of crypto. (Yuga Labs wouldn’t even speak to the extent of their involvement with the company, though the founders continue to promote the brand on Twitter.) Yuga now has a CEO, Nicole Muniz, who formerly worked in brand development for Google, and who told me, “We think of Otherside as a digital Disney World.” The difference being, of course, “the platform is designed to allow anyone to build their own ‘rides’ or ‘attractions’ in this metaverse and own the value of those for the community.” A virtual amusement park in which users bring their own amusements, and pay for the privilege in ApeCoin.

This preoccupation with ownership—with users building their own experience, owning their own data and I.P.—is the defining feature of the discourse surrounding NFTs and Web3.

Not long ago, I asked Finn Brunton, a technology historian and scholar of all things crypto, to explain why anyone would care about this stuff, what the phenomenon represented. “It is actually rather rare and special to feel that you own something digital these days,” he replied.

“You may own your computer or phone, but it is rare to own anything on it: Your music and movies are streamed, and come and go; your digital life and social life and much of the content we consume and produce is all on other people’s platforms and making money for someone else.” Everything we do online is already financialized, in other words, but the benefits accrue to other people—large tech companies, generally. Proponents envision a transition from this renter’s economy to an ownership economy, in which our data belongs to us, a primary resource that we’re finally free to control. “There is something weird and melancholy,” Brunton said, “about how little there is to NFTs beyond the act of ownership itself.”

The Yacht Club and its owners hoped to take the idea one step further, bringing their data to life and putting it to work.

metaverse of their own making,” Neil Strauss told me excitedly one afternoon over lunch on the plaza of the Los Angeles Convention Center. The author of The Game, which popularized pickup artistry for the masses, and celebrity ghostwriter to the stars (or, at least, to Marilyn Manson and Jenna Jameson), Strauss had been tapped by the team behind a Bored Ape named Jenkins the Valet to “ghostwrite” the ape’s life story, complete with stories of other apes he’d encountered at the Yacht Club. Rail thin and prone to laughing easily in a mischievous sort of way, Strauss had left pickup artistry behind years ago and seemed genuinely excited by crypto’s possibilities. (One wonders about the Venn diagram between the two communities.)

It reminded him, he said, of pitching stories “EVERYONE’S IN A

7 8

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

on hip-hop to skeptical editors decades ago.

“People were literally saying this is just a trend that’s not going to last. Whenever people say something is a trend that’s not going to last, that means it’s a trend that’s going to last.”

I asked him how he described Bored Ape to his friends who knew nothing about NFTs and must be puzzled by his decision to cowrite a book with a cartoon monkey.

“How would you describe Spider-Man to somebody?” he responded. “Right? He’s just an illustrated character with, like, a red-andblue outfit. What makes Spider-Man live in people’s imagination is the storytelling around it. So the Bored Apes are just characters, but because people have the I.P. and take such pride in the community, those characters can start to breathe and come to life.”

The team behind Jenkins the Valet had sold a set of “writers room” NFTs allowing other ape owners to cast their own avatars in the book.

Most owners wrote their own backstories, and they held improv sessions in character on Discord. Strauss also planned to make an appearance, in character, as the ghostwriter, and to combine all of this material into a collaborative work that CoinDesk speculated might be “the first true novel of Web3.”

“It’s a great solution for lazy writers, because in a sense you outsource the decisionmaking process,” Strauss told me. He doesn’t own an ape himself—“I’m really risk averse,” he said—and would be taking his paycheck in U.S. dollars rather than, say, Ethereum.

He added that “the biggest danger of this world is there’s so much money being fucking thrown around. And so much opportunity and opportunism.” He hoped to finish the novel by the end of April but seemed unsure about even the most basic aspects of its structure, or about its potential appeal to those outside the community itself. And anyway, book writing was a form fundamentally alien to the high-velocity, highly distractible world of crypto; short of exquisite corpse– style avant-gardism, the fiction-writing process can only be made so decentralized.

“It takes a while to write an amazing book,” Strauss admitted. “And the space moves so fast. You spend a lot of time trying to make the perfect project, and sometimes the space can move on without you, and now you’re a dinosaur.”

Finishing his lunch, Strauss hurried into the convention center—the home, that week, of the conference NFT/LA—where he’d shortly be cohosting a panel with Steve Aoki, the DJ, record producer, and Benihana heir, who himself owns a handful of apes. The day before, I’d dipped into a talk by another ape owner, Mark Cuban, who brought out Charlie Sheen and the creator of Entourage as special guests. (Sheen seemed confused by his own presence, admitting he knew “practically nothing” about NFTs.) That night I’d followed

a person wearing a white goat’s head mask into the arena and found Quavo from Migos rapping to a depressingly sparse room save for the small but crowded VIP zone near the stage, a cordoned-off sector filled mostly with sullen men in hoodies, vaping and nodding while women on stilts wandered around them ribbon dancing. The message seemed clear: Why bother coming to a place like this at all, unless you come as a VIP? I F I W A S still vaguely puzzled by the idea of a novel cowritten by apes, I had no point of reference at all for the Yacht Club’s musicindustry endeavors. Snoop Dogg, one of the most active and prominent of the celebrity ape owners, had purchased his alma mater, Death Row Records, and claimed that all new releases on the label would be minted on the blockchain—telling Billboard it was to become “the first major label to be an NFT label.” (One assumes Suge Knight would respect this dedication to the ownership economy.) Futurist rap producer and occasional bodybuilder Timbaland had started his own company called Ape-In Productions, which would host a roster of Bored Ape musical projects. (Its first was a hip-hop group called TheZoo, whose debut single, “ApeSh!t,” Timbaland produced himself.) And then there was Universal Music Group, which had launched a Web3 label that promised to populate the metaverse with a whole slew of NFT bands and artists, starting with Kingship, which are something like Gorillaz, perhaps, but starting from the cartoon avatars rather than any demonstrable musical value or audience. As a fan of musicians who are not cartoons, the appeal to me seemed elusive.

I spoke with Celine Joshua, the Universal exec in charge of the blockchain-based label and the mind behind Kingship, over Zoom one afternoon, where she was appearing from her office in Santa Monica. Behind her was a TV screen featuring the members of the Bored Ape band, who had been licensed from the prominent NFT collector Jimmy McNelis.

Unlike most of her peers in the industry, Joshua had started out in the I.T. department of another label, which made her quicker to discern the possibilities that the blockchain and Web3 might hold for music. “When I saw what Yuga created and that they provided the I.P.,” she said, “I looked at it as a decentralized Disney,” curiously echoing the framing that Yuga’s CEO had offered me. The Yacht Club impressed her immediately: “It’s a project that launched 10,000 units, that created billions in valuation, and a fandom that will rival some of the biggest recording artists in the world.” Like the best NFT projects, she said, she thought the team behind Bored Ape was “no different from an artist that goes inside the recording booth and gives it all they’ve got through their passion and their pen.”

Not wanting to argue the point, I asked her about her own project, Kingship. How does one—or why would one—put a band together from digital apes? What would they sound like? “Kingship is an access token,” she said. “It’s going to provide value and utility—to have the best of every part of the supply chain, physical and digital.” I must have looked puzzled, because she continued trying to explain. What it came down to, she went on, was “delivering experiences, utility, value, and access to our holders.” But what about the music itself, I asked. “The emotion that music will bring into the entire project will be the heart,” she said. “But there has to be an infrastructure, an architecture, that is truly blockchain native. There has to be a token.”

Why? “I think the important thing here,” she went on, “is that if you’re a holder of a Kingship NFT, I hope that you fall in love with the music too, but there’s also going to be value built in, in case you don’t.” For

apes in Kingship. Fallon had been enthusiastic about Oseary’s involvement as well, telling me, “We’ve been friends for a while,” and that Yuga “were smart to ask him for help.”

Strauss, too, was connected to Oseary, who as an A&R man had helped secure a deal for Marilyn Manson (the coauthor and subject of Strauss’s first ghostwritten book). In an article on his Substack titled “Mapping the Celebrity NFT Complex,” journalist Max Read had asked, “Where does a person like Paris Hilton or Eminem even hear about ‘bored apes’? Who is recommending that they buy one?”—and had drawn a convoluted web connecting many of the major figures, including Oseary (who did not respond to my emails).

Donning the tinfoil hat, I began to wonder just what sort of possible psy-op I was dealing with here, exactly. What would happen when the O.G.s like Jeremiah and Sonny were forced to sell, and the new owners were the already rich—and the only ones in the metaverse with access to the limited number of ape avatars. Would there be a sort of

so-called blockchain and Web3 accelerator, which had recently announced an open “Ape casting call” for a forthcoming animated TV series. “I think the number one movie in the world should be about crypto and the number one TV show in the world should be about crypto,” Patrick McLain, one of the founders, told me. “Here’s a bunch of these still images, they don’t have a backstory—and if you look at the profile of the people who own them, they’re a bunch of people who got lucky, they’re not media savvy. They have zero idea how to license I.P. or make some kind of media deal.”

“I know I’m living in a bubble, in an echo chamber,” he went on. “Are these going to be hit characters, are they going to be Mickey Mouse? We don’t know yet. But the new Rolex is an Apple Watch with a Bored Ape on it, if you want to impress a girl at a bar.”

“You’re more likely to impress a guy,” his coworker, Travis Scalice, interjected.

Their casting call had so far netted them nearly 500 applications. As with the book,

“Are these going to be hit characters, are they going to be Mickey Mouse?

We don’t know yet. But the new Rolex is an Apple Watch with a Bored Ape on it.”

—PATRICK M cLAIN whatever reason, I persisted in asking her what the band would actually sound like.

“It sounds great,” she replied. “Hmm. What do they sound like? The hard part of that question is that I’d really just like to put the music out and let the audience decide.

It’s incredibly difficult to—I wouldn’t dare to even start to think anything other than what the fans want to think, as it relates to the music itself.”

It seemed we had reached an impasse, so I asked her about Guy Oseary, the elite music-industry veteran who manages Yuga Labs and seemed to be a point of connection between many of the celebrities who had all decided at around the same time that what they really needed was a Bored Ape. “Guy is an incredible example of someone who has been in the entertainment industry for a long time and understands the potential of this space right now,” she said. “What a great person to usher in other musicians, other entertainers. You’re seeing him do it.

He’s great, I love him.” It was Oseary, she said, who had introduced her to McNelis and the

virtual caste system, with cartoon monkeys at the top of the pile? I thought of the apocalyptic ending of Planet of the Apes: What sort of future were we signing up for here?

For her part, Joshua was clear-sighted and optimistic. “In the near future,” she concluded, “when an artist launches an album, it will look and feel like a video game.” As to what it will sound like, that’s apparently a question for another day.

Coinbase, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, announced its plan to produce “an interactive three-part film” starring members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. As with Strauss’s book, owners could audition their apes for a kind of casting process and agree to have their avatars appear in the work. In doing so, whether it realized it or not, Coinbase was relatively late to the race to contribute to an extended Bored Ape cinematic universe.

Early in the NFT/LA conference, I met up for pizza with the team behind Meta Ape Studios, a project launched by MouseBelt, a IN MID-APRIL,

the ape owners were then asked to submit biographies. They’ve since whittled down the cast to 10 main characters, whose owners live all over the world, and the aim is a show loosely inspired by the format of 30 Rock.

The apes—in a plot that embodies the plight of the NFT fans who purchased them—orbit around a talent agency hoping to find work.

“Most of these owners, this is their most valuable asset,” McLain said. “They don’t make much money; their wife is probably begging them to sell. I’m sure people have gotten divorced over this. If they aren’t selling, they’ll want passive income, so they’re going to want to put their apes to work.”

I asked McLain if he thought people outside of the NFT bubble would be remotely interested in a show about Bored Apes. “Even the most talented people in Hollywood make shows that flop,” he said after some consideration. “But that is still the question: Will anyone give a shit?”

is a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine.

will stephenson

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

G Q . C O M

7 9

How a ragtag collective of infamous gamers, esports stars, and YouTube creators—plus the people who are transforming their exploits into a billion-dollar valuation— is aiming to change the entertainment industry as we know it.

BY SAM SCHUBE PHOTOGRAPHS BY XAVIER LUGGAGE

8 0

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

long ago, I walked into a hulking warehouse— technically, three warehouses conjoined into a gleaming, concrete-floored corporate campus, complete with a 20-foot Astroturf staircase—in Los Angeles. Though now the headquarters of the gaming-and-esports conglomerate FaZe Clan, the building was once home to a Hollywood prop warehouse, and traces of its former tenant were still visible: 30-foot bow-trussed ceilings, immense doorways, an open-air elevator equipped with an enormous metal hook. But to FaZe Clan cofounder Richard Bengtson, the compound reminded him of something else: “It looks like a Call of Duty map, bro!”

This was fitting: Bengtson, under the gamer tag FaZe Banks, made a name for himself in the early 2010s producing videos of his exploits inside the first-person shooter Call of Duty. When he started, the idea of playing video games for work seemed far-fetched. “It was like me telling you that I can make a living professionally chugging water,” Bengtson said. “That doesn’t make sense. How the fuck are you going to do that?”

We sank into an enormous couch in the company’s luxurious new office. Two employees idly skateboarded in circles across the polished floor; a few weeks later, a 20-foot mini ramp in FaZe colors would be built in one corner. Bengtson, along with his friend and FaZe cofounder Thomas Oliveira (better known as FaZe Temperrr), explained to me how a group of video game streamers, YouTube creators, and social media personalities had grown, seemingly overnight, into a multimedia enterprise with 130 or so employees, many of them recruited from CAA and the NFL and the music industry, heading for a billion-dollar debut on the stock market.

Bengtson and Oliveira started at the beginning. After meeting online, they joined a nascent collective of Call of Duty gamers called FaZe Clan. FaZe had gained traction producing a video series called Illcams— “KillCams without the K,” Oliveira explained, attitude-heavy montages of violent deaths captured by the game’s “KillCam.” This wasn’t competitive gaming, exactly; it was a sort of punk-inspired way of operating within the Call of Duty universe. Oliveira likened it to

8 2

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

different sports entirely. “It’s got the skateboarding dynamic of the tricks and the complication,” he said, along with “the humiliation aspect of dunking on someone,” all tidily wrapped up into skate-inspired videos.

By 2012, the group had a million subscribers on YouTube.

For FaZe members, success was less about technical excellence inside Call of Duty than entertainment value on YouTube: They had to be exceptional at their chosen games but also charming and compelling in the videos they produced, some of which didn’t even include gameplay. The group had come of age online and grew up on social media. Showing their faces outside gaming videos came naturally.

Viewers couldn’t get enough of it.

In 2017, by which point the FaZe collective of gamers and content creators had grown to include professional esports teams, the group moved into a series of mansions in Los Angeles that they repurposed as “content houses.” They fit right in in Hollywood: These days, Bengtson is more likely to post an Instagram video from a nightclub than from his gaming setup. He attributed FaZe’s initial popularity and staggering growth in part to the fact that they didn’t look like stereotypical gamers. “It’s that hunched-over, superantisocial, overweight kid—the nerd, right?” he said. “Obviously, me and Tommy are both six-five, tattooed, fuck girls and party, all that shit. The kids we lived with were way less cool than us—but they were still cool, though.”

Over the past few years, FaZe Clan has matured into a category-busting business more or less unprecedented in the history of entertainment. “They are definitely among those groups of emerging media companies that you have to pay attention to, because they are a sign of a trend,” explained Matthew Belloni, a founding partner at Puck who writes a newsletter about the entertainment business. “And the trend is towards esports, and the creator-driven digital economy of content.” Most of the company’s output exists online, in a web of loosely interconnected content nodes. There’s FaZe’s own YouTube channel, which keeps its more than 8 million subscribers up to date with clips of the group’s exploits. Some members still make

gaming videos for their own YouTube channels. Others, like FaZe Rug and FaZe Adapt, have moved into producing viral videos, like prank clips. Then there are the individual Twitch streams of popular gamers like FaZe Nickmercs and FaZe Swagg. The company’s 11 esports teams (groups of gamers who excel at Fortnite or Counter-Strike or Rocket League) compete in tournaments broadcast on digital platforms (and sometimes on cable). And then there are the Instagram accounts of members, like Oliveira and Bengtson, who have parlayed their years of grinding out Call of Duty clips into audiences large enough to turn them into relatively traditional social media influencers.

When we met, Oliveira was deep in training for a boxing match in London against another YouTuber (following the blueprint established by Jake and Logan Paul), while Bengtson had thrown himself headlong into Web3. Their inordinate success has afforded them a rare privilege: After years of gaming and streaming and gaming some more, they no longer have to play video games for a living. Chugging water, Bengtson explained, had somehow become a very lucrative career.

“Obviously, we’re rich now; we got bread.

I’ve been living in mansions since I lived in L.A. Crazy, disgusting houses. Fucking 20-bedroom houses with lakes in the backyard. Everybody’s driving sports cars and wearing Richard Milles and shit.”

But as I waded deeper into FaZe waters, I struggled more, not less, to understand what sort of company FaZe Clan was. It was tangly, complicated, simultaneously frivolous and disarmingly prescient. Some days it resembled an old-school talent-driven content play; others, a paradigm-shifting future-builder. The answer seemed to change depending on who I was talking to, and when and where we had the conversation. For most businesses, this sort of existential uncertainty—or rather, the inability of most people on the outside to say what it is exactly you do here—would be a very bad thing. But FaZe Clan is betting that this indeterminacy, along with its reach and ambition, will allow it to be nothing less than a prime shaper of the future of entertainment.

I’m not much of a gamer. I own a PlayStation but pull it out of the closet only for emergencies. I prefer a game of FIFA against a friend to Fortnite against a stranger. I know plenty of people who play video games, but I know fewer people who proudly identify as gamers—or, more pressingly, seem likely to spend money on goods meant for gamers. I hadn’t heard of FaZe Clan until a couple of years ago, when I read about its plans to put the YouTuber FaZe Rug into a full-length feature film.

Kai Henry, who joined the company as chief strategy officer at the end of 2020, explained CARDS ON THE TABLE:

that the group’s sometimes confounding appeal actually had more in common with traditional stardom narratives than I’d realized. “It started with the most aspirational thing that could happen,” he said. “A bunch of regular kids meet on the internet, playing games, and then they become fucking rock stars. That’s a 2,000-year-old fucking story.”

More than that, he continued, the way they came to prominence ensured their stickiness.

Whereas an older generation of movie fans had managed to form a relationship with Tom Cruise despite his only showing up in their lives at specific intervals (once or twice a year, for two hours at a time, and in magazines and on late-night shows) and under very specific conditions (inside a dark, cold, sticky-floored and popcorn-smelling room, or in print or on TV), FaZe fans saw their favorite creators multiple times a week, and saw them doing the same things they did themselves: playing video games and joking with their friends. “A whole generation of people got to watch that happen,” Henry said, keying in on FaZe Clan’s initial advantage in the marketplace. “That’s cemented in a certain way, and it’s different than raising $200 million from some V.C. firm and starting an esports group.”

There’s a reason that venture capitalists are eager to get into gaming. FaZe’s investor deck cites a report that pegs the number of gamers worldwide at 3 billion people, while in a 2021 Deloitte survey, Gen Z participants ranked video games as their preferred form of entertainment. (Watching TV and movies came in at fifth.) Earlier this year, Microsoft announced plans to acquire the game developer and publisher Activision Blizzard for more than $68 billion. And the number of Americans playing video games, along with the amount of time they spent playing them, boomed during the pandemic (though those numbers seemed to slow down as restrictions eased). While FaZe hasn’t always been the biggest or most successful gaming organization (in 2020, Forbes ranked it the fourth most valuable in the esports space), it is perhaps the most popular among the cool kids.

Musicians like Snoop Dogg and Lil Yachty are members, as are athletes like Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray. “If I’m not on the field, and I’m not working out, I’m probably playing video games,” Murray told me. “So being able to join FaZe, which is to me the Nike of gaming organizations, fits my personality, my brand.”

Lee Trink was deep into a long career in the music business when he read a story about the near–Super Bowl–size audience garnered by an esports event. He thought he might start taking on gaming clients, starting with FaZe. What he found was what you’d get if a bunch of 20-somethings had started making an enormous amount of money basically by accident. “There was some merch going

on, and then we had a few esports teams,” he explained one night in the living room of his home in the Hollywood Hills. “But it was hard to call it a business.” In 2018, Trink joined as CEO. The goal was clear: to build a business on top of the unprecedented connection FaZe members had forged with their audience.

That meant growing, and quickly. Trink estimates that some 60 percent of the company’s employees have joined in the past two years; many of them, like Trink and Henry, come from the music business. FaZe has erected a unique vertically integrated entertainment business around its talent: Talent managers help its members build their own brands, secure deals and partnerships, and then spin those partnerships into further content. The design team maintains a thriving merch business in the corporeal realm and is working on building the same inside the digital world, one of a number of Web3-related dreams.

The company is not yet profitable—it reported a net loss of nearly $37 million in 2021 on about $53 million in revenue, the “lion’s share” of it coming from sponsorship, Trink tells me—but it plans to go public, at

what FaZe has done differently is built out a holistic media entertainment company, which is in the early innings but is a true business nonetheless.”

But FaZe fans, while legion, have specific ideas about what FaZe should do and be.

Scaling the company—by doing deals with megabrands like McDonald’s, say, or tiptoeing out of gaming and into traditional entertainment—requires a certain amount of finesse. As Henry explained it to me, businesses across the corporate spectrum are now learning that “you should have underrepresented people at the tippy top of your organization, sniff-testing things. You need that cultural lens so that you are doing the right thing.” A company like FaZe, which operates in the uniquely hard-to-parse realm of “youth culture,” requires that too—but also, he said, something else: “An engine in your company that’s comprised of people that have innate knowledge of the culture.” Which is to say, very young employees who must be empowered to propose the right Instagram-sourced artist to design a fire collab, or to suggest that a prospective deal is wack.

“We’re first-generation internet kids, pioneers. And it’s our job, again, to write the fucking script. Life is a video game.

Everybody’s life is gamified.

We just build a business off the back of that.”

— RICHARD BENGTSON, FAZE CLAN COFOUNDER

an implied valuation of $1 billion, by merging with a publicly traded special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC), in the first half of 2022. Daniel Shribman, who runs the SPAC FaZe is set to merge with, put it this way: “I view FaZe as almost like a holding company. It’s an I.P. company. And then the verticals underneath that, you’ve got merchandise, you’ve got esports, you’ve got sponsorships, you’ve got wholly owned I.P. and content creation.” To his mind, that FaZe can be difficult to define is what makes it powerfully appealing. “When we think about it from a financial perspective, esports are insignificant here,” he explained. “Now, from a brand perspective and a company perspective, it is extremely important—but

I mean that literally. One day I met with a few of what FaZe calls its “ideators,” 20-something creatives who are tasked with making sure the company’s financial interests don’t get out too far ahead of its audience. One ideator had pink hair; another, green. All wore lots of Vetements, the post-irony luxury fashion label that catapulted Balenciaga designer Demna Gvasalia onto the scene. Brandon Dalton, very tall and very skinny and wearing raver boots, described his role as “an internal consultant, pretty much, for executives.” The pitch, he explained, goes like this: “ ‘You worked at Capitol [Records] for 20 years, but I’ve been in gaming for 10 years. I can help.’ In this industry, you need to have a two-headed

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

G Q . C O M

8 3

monster, pretty much. I have business acumen to an extent—I got a bachelor’s degree in business—but it’s nice to have a CEO of a company do the business stuff and then me do the creative stuff.”

Dalton’s fellow ideator Kani Ashford felt the same way. “I’ve worked at cool companies,” he said. “It’s the same as any other company, where they’ve got these people who have been there for 10 years; they can do no wrong. They have the final say on everything. Yeah, maybe they’ll entertain you for a second, but really, it’s what they want to do. And we were actually given a platform at FaZe to make a change and to have our expertise and our viewpoints really heard by executives. Really heard by people who understand, Hey, this is about culture and always has been about culture.”

Perhaps the most tangible way FaZe has of exporting that culture is merchandise.

It sells a constantly updating selection of T-shirts and hats, as well as limited collections like lace-up hoodies released in collaboration with the Los Angeles Kings and mouse pads adorned with the designs of Pop artist Takashi Murakami. The traditional rules of fashion don’t quite apply here. As Derek Chestnut, the company’s vice president of consumer products, explained, “A kid cares as much about having a cool brand on his mouse pad as his T-shirt now, because that’s where he spends time with his friends and that’s part of his outfit. They don’t even see the shoes he’s wearing, right? And they don’t even see the pants he’s wearing either.” Not incidentally, he noted, FaZe doesn’t do a great business in bottoms.

Still, I wondered why—for all its supposed success and penetration of hard-to-reach markets—I hadn’t seen the company’s goods anywhere outside its offices. An esports championship might occasionally outdraw a World Series game, but Yankees caps, at least in my corner of the corporeal realm, still outnumbered FaZe ones.

Chestnut gently suggested that I might be thinking about this the wrong way. FaZe Clan doesn’t want to sell hats. Or, more accurately: It does, but not as badly as it wants to sell keyboard accessories, mouse pads, and all the other peripherals likely to appear in the background of a FaZe fan’s stream. The FaZe hat, he explained, isn’t actually a hat. Gear like a mouse pad is “the hat you wear inside,” Chestnut said. “Bro, these kids don’t go outside. You need pants to go outside.” that building the future of entertainment requires occasionally putting on a pair of pants and going outside. And so, on an unseasonably hot Sunday earlier this year, the air veined with high-performance octane fuel, 10 or so members of the FaZe roster clustered on a small red carpet just inside the gates of the Los Angeles Memorial IT TURNS OUT

8 4

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

Coliseum. They had gathered to attend, of all things, the Busch Light Clash at the Coliseum, NASCAR’s preseason exhibition race inside the 100-year-old stadium.

The group seemed practiced in the moves and poses of fame. FaZe Santana kept his shearling jacket on for the photos before removing it in the heat. FaZe Swagg’s diamond chain glinted in the sunlight. The petite Montoya Twinz—Mya and Myka, who share a YouTube account with more than half a million followers and currently belong to the preparatory FaZe Academy—arranged their thumb, index, and middle fingers into an F, for FaZe. Event photographers, picture takers employed by FaZe Clan, and a few videographers kept on retainer by individual FaZe members all jockeyed for photos, which would promptly be blasted out to many of the more than half a billion followers the organization and its members claim across platforms. One preteen attendee took in the scene, slack-jawed, and tried to help his confused father understand what we were seeing: “It’s FaZe! It’s FaZe! It’s FaZe!” If it seemed incongruous that approximately 40 members, publicists, talent managers, executives, and assorted functionaries of a video game concern had gathered in L.A. to hype a NASCAR race, this was precisely the point: The group’s attendance was part of a wide-reaching, years-in-the-making collaboration between FaZe and the racing organization. From NASCAR’s perspective, the appeal was obvious. The Clash at the Coliseum— from its high-intensity main event held on a shrunken track to the Pitbull concert that opened the proceedings—was engineered, yes, to energize longtime fans, but also to grow new ones.

Tim Clark, NASCAR’s senior vice president and chief digital officer, told me on race day that FaZe Clan was “on our radar because of the way that they were representing the brand, the audience that they were reaching, the content they were creating, the uniqueness of what they were doing.” Initially, he wasn’t sure what, exactly, the two companies would do together. But he knew this: “They’re engaged with an audience that we really want,” meaning the under-25 crowd who’ve demonstrated they’re plenty willing to sit in one place and watch their favorite FaZe member stream Fortnite for hours, just as they hopefully one day would their favorite NASCAR driver. Clark shared a story that he’d heard, about a family that had driven six hours to the Coliseum the previous day—not for the race itself but for the prerace meetand-greet with FaZe members. “There’s a part of us, in our history, where we would’ve been uncomfortable with that,” Clark said.

“Like, we want you to drive six hours to see the NASCAR race. But I think we’re much more comfortable now having this broader

halo set of relationships, that if you drive here six hours to see the FaZe guys, and then, oh, by the way, you stick around for a NASCAR race, great. We have to go where the fans are, and we can’t dictate that it’s going to be on our terms.”

As the race got under way, the FaZe contingent took their seats. Someone passed out FaZe-red foam earplugs, which, in addition to the extraordinary din of the race, made conversation difficult. A few FaZe members posed for selfies. Staffers headed to the concourse and returned with armfuls of warm beers.

Everybody looked at their phones. The race broke for a brief Ice Cube concert and, with all promotional duties done for the day, members were free to come and go as they pleased. One gamer headed for the exit, citing a need to get home and stream for his fans.

For FaZe, partnerships like these are useful in different ways. “NASCAR is a perfect example of an audience that probably underindexes on their understanding of FaZe Clan,” Trink, the CEO, told me. “When NASCAR does something with FaZe Clan, it says to all of the NASCAR fans, plus the business world at large, how important FaZe Clan is. That’s a big part of how we have built our reputation and our place in the world: by sitting alongside.”

He’d put it to me this way previously: “How do we build a bridge from gaming, which has been bastardized in this corner? How do we build a bridge to the real world? Because that’s where all the money is.” The deal with NASCAR was a bridge-building exercise.

And though I’d long understood gaming to be an incomprehensible universe—an island, off on its own, with an audience Fortune 500 CEOs were desperate to access—it was becoming clear that the industry was less a walled-off garden than a sort of substrate of lots of other industries. Gaming, FaZe’s strategy head Kai Henry told me, is less a culture in and of itself than “the glue between 1,000 cultures.” This was what FaZe employees meant when they told me their company was rooted in “gaming culture,” even as I struggled to understand what they meant by that, or how that statement was still true, given all the non-gaming layers to their business. The closest analogue, Henry suggested, was the culture surrounding cannabis. It made a certain sort of hyperstoned sense: The guy who smokes a joint after work and the one who does so at Bonnaroo while wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt both, technically, participate in the same culture, just with different degrees of intensity. Companies interested in building bridges between those two communities had turned cannabis into a multibillion-dollar industry.

Similar riches seemed all but guaranteed for the figures able to pull off the same trick with video games. But how to connect them under one banner? How does the casual

OPENING PAGES AND THIS PAGE: ST YLIST, TORENO WINN; GROOMING, MARL A VA ZQUEZ. PRODUCED BY SEDUKO PRODUCTIONS.

Some members of the FaZe Clan roster, clockwise from top left: FaZe K1 (a.k.a. NFL star Kyler Murray); CEO Lee Trink; content creators FaZe Kalei, FaZe Swagg, and FaZe Adapt; digital wunderkind Tarek Mustapha, with his avatar Mynt; chief strategy officer Kai Henry; and cofounder FaZe Temperrr.

gamer and the hard-core fan of FaZe videos amount to not just a viable business but an unfathomable untapped market? Inevitably, one answer seemed to lie around the corporeal corner, in the metaverse.

are busy plotting ways to launch an NFT, or break into crypto, or embrace Web3. FaZe is bullish on what Web3 will mean for its business. At one point, Trink told me it would be “totally unsurprising” if, 10 years from now, 80-plus percent of FaZe’s revenue was “Web3-derived.” (Broadly speaking, Web3 refers to a “new” version of the internet that will operate according to the decentralized, ledger-based principles of the blockchain.)

Skeptics will tell you that Web3 tech doesn’t yet deliver on its utopian promises—and question whether it ever will. I will only say that I felt deeply, powerfully lost while listening to Trink, Henry, and many other FaZe members speak passionately of their hopes for Web3.

And then, sitting in on a meeting of FaZe’s creative and consumer-products teams to discuss a few Web3 initiatives, I met Mynt.

Unlike the rest of his colleagues on the video call, his skin was seafoam green, and when he smiled, his brow wrinkled and flushed to a shade of blue-purple. He posed, stoic and LOTS OF COMPANIES

unmoving, in three-quarter profile inside his Zoom window, and took up enough of it to suggest that, if he had a body, it would measure in at seven or eight feet tall.

Mynt turned out to be a digital avatar operated by Tarek Mustapha, FaZe’s head of creative tech Web3. Mustapha’s story, as he recounted it to me a few days later, is in many ways emblematic of the promise of FaZe—and of some of the stranger paths the company might yet take. He went to school for architecture and ran his own creative agency for close to a decade but eventually felt stymied by the way his work had come to feel standardized. On a lark, he put in an application for FaZe5, a recruitment challenge designed to enlist five new members— and while he fell out of the running when the field was culled to 20, he wound up with a slightly stranger prize: a job offer.

And so, last spring, Mustapha and Mynt established a beachhead within FaZe from which they imagine the future. That future looks like a very weird place to the uninitiated, but it’s plain as day to FaZe fans. “Our audience, the people who are natively ingrained in the FaZe ecosystem, see digital as priority,” he explained. “It’s more important than their physical life. Some of these kids, the skins that they have in Fortnite are more important to

them than how many shirts they have in their closet. That is an inevitable fact.” His task is getting everyone else on board.

Mynt is one way of doing that. “A lot of the conversations that we schedule are about the digital frontier,” Mustapha said. “I would say Mynt has a really good ability to just absolutely demolish the door. As soon as there’s any hesitation, the door is just kicked wide open.” (Both parties were quick to clarify that the underlying I.P. for Mynt is owned by Mustapha, not FaZe; the company’s default stance toward employees’ side hustles can be characterized as very enthusiastic.)

If you struggle to imagine why you might need your own green-skinned avatar, consider this scenario: You used to work in an office, and you will again soon. But in the meantime, you’ve been meeting with your colleagues via videoconferencing software, which is laggy, and unflattering, and all around miserable to use, at least when you’ve been glued to it for the past 24 months. You’re not pulling on your V.R. goggles yet, Mustapha conceded.

But shouldn’t there be a better option than showing your coworkers your tired, unshaven face? “Look, I’m staying up till three o’clock in the morning and then jumping on a Zoom meeting at eight o’clock a.m.,” he said. “You don’t want to see (continued on page 98)

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

G Q . C O M

8 5

Savvy entrepreneurs are flocking to the metaverse to set up shop, building the next generation of imaginative businesses.

Here are some of the wild things they’re pitching us, from virtual apartments to coffin NFTs to maybe even finding the love of your life.

BY GABRIELLA PAIELLA ILLUSTRATIONS BY NICK LITTLE

As real estate becomes increasingly less affordable in the physical world, it’s also booming in the metaverse. And Metaverse Group is at the forefront of digital property acquisition. Last year, it purchased a massive amount in Decentraland and The Sandbox, which it rents out to interested parties—for instance, a $2.5 million plot in Decentraland where Metaverse Fashion Week was held.

Andrew Kiguel, a former real estate investment banker and the CEO of Tokens.com (of which Metaverse Group is a subsidiary), estimates that Metaverse Group’s portfolio is currently worth somewhere between $25 million and $30 million.

Who are your tenants and how are you collecting rent?

The general rule that we’re trying to apply is: About 2 percent of what we believe the asset value of the land to be is the rent per month. We’re collecting money in fiat, so we’re not doing it in crypto. It’s just a lot easier if you’re dealing with large corporations—our two highest-profile tenants would be Skechers and Forever 21. What are the rent prices like, say, compared to New York’s? It’s a lot cheaper than New York’s.

Depending on the location, it could be anywhere from $1,500 a month to $5,000 a month. And each [plot] is 52 feet by 52 feet.

Leases in the real world come with rules, naturally: You can’t smoke, you can’t mess up the apartment, etc. What are the clauses in the metaverse? We want to protect our brand, so we want to avoid things that have any hate or pornography or anything that would be controversial. There’s some liability insurance coverage there—if somebody in our land gets sued, we don’t want that coming back to us. So there’s protections like GQ:

ANDREW KIGUEL:

8 6

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

that, but certainly if your avatar wants to smoke or drink on our property, that’s okay. What about the flip side: What are issues your tenants have to rely on a landlord to fix? We don’t have those issues. Nobody’s roof is going to leak, nobody’s fridge is going to break. I believe that the types of things that we will have to deal with are more improvements and enhancements. When I was building Tokens.com Tower, I told them I wanted great whites jumping out of the pond in front of the building. This seems to be mostly commercial—do you see a future where people will want to rent apartments in the metaverse? Some of that’s happening, but it’s more trophy assets. I’m sure you’ve heard Snoop Dogg is replicating his mansion in The Sandbox. He could host parties there. I’ve heard there are other people who are building miniature dream houses in the metaverse and they hang their NFT art there. Are we going to see a metaverse real estate bubble? What I’m hoping is actually that the trends from traditional real estate progress to here. Decentraland has a finite amount of plots available for development. There’s only 45,000 plots available. You can make the analogy, maybe, to the early days of building Manhattan. As more people congregate, your access to those people is going to have to go through us. And I think that’s going to be very valuable.

In late 2021, Grungo Colarulo opened the first personal injury law firm in the metaverse. It’s since launched LawCity.com, a district within Decentraland where several other law offices can have a virtual presence. (It’s still TBD what jurisdiction perceived metaverse crimes will fall under.) Partners Richard Grungo and William Colarulo—two self-described Jersey boys— explain where they see the future of law heading.

We relied on my 11-year-old to build the office. She legitimately designed that building in about 30 minutes by just moving things around and having fun. The other day, I was working and I heard somebody talking at the property and it was an ape that showed up, just looking around.

Now, that particular ape was not looking for legal advice. It was somebody just exploring.

WIL L IAM C OL ARULO: We don’t represent big corporations.

Everybody we represent is an individual who needs help. Recently, there was that big story about a woman who felt that she was assaulted in the metaverse. As the metaverse evolves, I’m sure there are going to be legal situations that occur in this new world.

GRUNGO: We see this as another avenue for people to come in an avatar and maybe click on a link to learn about sexual discrimination in the workplace or what constitutes a punitive damage award in a construction collapse case that involves RICHARD GRUNGO:

CAN GET SWOLE IN SPACE? So I’m standing on the surface of the moon one Monday morning and it looks like, well, the moon. Gray and cratered. The vast and unknowable expanse of outer space surrounding all sides.

Suddenly a black sphere hurtles at me, followed by a white one.

They keep coming in rapid succession, as I shuffle around to punch them away, sending the orbs flying into oblivion. After working up a sweat, I take off my V.R. headset and find myself back in my living room.

A few hours later, I video chat with the person who, until that point, had existed as a peppy and encouraging virtual coach.

Leanne Pedante works as the head of fitness at Supernatural, an app that allows you to grind out workouts in ancient Egyptian temples, on the surface of the ocean, and, yes, even in outer space.

She still teaches one in-person class a week, and says many people come to her IRL sessions after first finding her on Supernatural. Supernatural launched in April 2020, right around the time the pandemic closed down gyms. Suddenly, the future of fitness was a more pressing question than usual.

While being strapped in a V.R. headset can feel like the opposite of being present and engaged in your life, Pedante would argue the opposite. “You have controllers in your hands. You’re not scrolling.

You’re not reading your email on your phone in between reps,” she says. “I mean, I have literally seen people at the gym trying to check their email while on a treadmill and go flying off.”

PHARAOH WHEN YOU DIE. Since the dawn of human history, we have memorialized our dead: in pyramids and graveyards and everything in between. Now, the team at Remember is dreaming up how we’ll mourn each other in the digital future with the first commemorative metaverse.

Interested parties can purchase one of its NFT memorial stones, which take the form of smooth, abstract sculptures randomly generated from one of 30 base shapes. Each stone will set you back 0.125 ether (ETH), or around $350. “We wanted to be happy and memorable, so we tried to focus the design not to be a traditional tombstone, but something brand new,” Jake Ma, the company’s blockchain and full stack developer, tells me on a Zoom call from Seoul, where Remember is based.

CAT FOR METAVERSE FLING. Dating these days tends to follow a familiar script: Boy sees girl on an app and thinks she’s hot, boy and girl mutually swipe on each other, boy and girl meet up in real life. Nevermet, the metaverse’s first dating app, wants to eliminate that final step and get people to form relationships in virtual reality instead. Metaverse matchmakers Solaris Nite and Cam Mullen launched their 18-and-older app globally on iOS on Valentine’s Day, with Android launching a month later. Instead of uploading a photo of yourself, you use your metaverse avatar: a chill guy with spiky hair and a tie-dye sweatshirt, a busty woman in red latex fetish gear, a dog. If two people like each other’s avatars, they get an alert and can start chatting on the app.

From there, they can make plans to meet up in a metaverse of their choosing. “We wanted to enable limitless relationships,” Nite says. “We envision a future where people have more meaningful relationships in the metaverse than in the real world.”

Dating in V.R., they explain, can facilitate experiences that are for reasons of location, finances, and the laws of space and time, impossible in the real world. Mullen tells me about “sitting on a U.S. spaceship and looking at the blue Earth with white clouds and the black stars behind it, talking to this one girl from rural Mississippi for about an hour and hearing all about her life.” The Nevermet founders emphasize that their app is less superficial than the competition and has the potential to enable people who feel shut out of traditional dating, due to anything from cultural circumstances or social anxiety, to form connections. “The people that are most engaged in these metaverse dating communities feel most comfortable as their best self in this form,” Mullen says.

I can’t help but feel as if dating while strapped into a V.R. headset is a touch dystopian, especially in the midst of a real-world loneliness epidemic and declining birth rates, so I raise the idea that this will make it worse. “It has the opportunity to have the opposite effect,” Nite says, “which is they build confidence through lowerstakes dating, maybe less pressure, in the metaverse.” But—you’re thinking it too—can you have sex in V.R.? Sort of. “There’s something called ERP, which stands for erotic role play,” Mullen explains. “What people experience is something called phantom touch.”

8 8

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

Stephen Han, the head of product and business development, was first struck with the idea for Remember when his grandmother died from COVID-19 and he was unable to attend her funeral.

“There was nothing much left for me to remember her, other than a few photos that I kept,” he says. Soon, the company hopes to even create 3D hologram renderings of the deceased, based on photos, that can live on in virtual memorial halls. “In the past, there were Egyptian pyramids—all these huge figures have built memory space before, but for people like me there’s not enough real estate,” Han says. “But nowadays, it is possible.” Remember even has a terra firma casket partner, Titan Casket, and now they’re kicking around ideas of how they can work together. “Maybe if someone

FOR REAL MONEY AND RIDICULOUSLY PRICEY IN-GAME FASHION. launched in 2019, is already responsible for building an active daily community of metaverse poker players. Here he explains why they’ve been so successful:

s.

Brady Keehn, a.k.a. Panther Modern, a.k.a. the dancing king of the metaverse, looks more indie musician than tech bro: a choppy blond haircut, black tank top, delicate silver earring dangling from one ear. That’s probably because he is one, as the frontman of the post-punk electronic band Sextile. “I’ve always been a DIY artist my entire life, just hacking it together,” he says. Now, he’s applying that same ethos to Heat, a DAO—or decentralized autonomous organization—that Keehn describes as “Bandcamp for dancers.”

Users will be able to upload their specific dances to the platform and sell them as NFTs, which other users can then purchase and use to get their avatars moving in various metaverses. “We are building a platform for dancers and movers,” he explains.

“Traditionally, it’s been hard to monetize movement. All this tech is being built for music, all this tech is being built for visual art, all this tech is being built for everything else, but where is movement in all of this?”

When the pandemic meant his band could no longer tour, Keehn started using volumetric cameras to project himself in 3D environments and put on virtual performances. That led him to experiment with motion capture suits. Around the same time, he started noticing how difficult it was for dancers to retain ownership over their moves as they proliferated online. “We see Black creators going on strike on TikTok when we see influencers taking their dances and monetizing off them,” he says. Now that concerts are happening in the metaverse, he also sees potential in having dance NFTs—currently being sold at 0.15 ETH, or about $450—essentially be featured as merch. “Say you’re at a Doja Cat concert in the metaverse,” he says, “and all of a sudden she airdrops everybody these NFTs so everybody is able to do a special Doja Cat dance.”

“We started with regular, casino-style games, but didn’t really find the product market fit until we launched Ice Poker. We pivoted away from gambling because we wanted to appeal to anyone in any jurisdiction. Basically, we sell wearable NFTs for your avatar.

By owning one, you can have access to Ice Poker, which gives you a daily allocation of chips. With those chips, you can play poker with other players and get a daily payout of Ice Token. If you’re at the very bottom of the leaderboard, you’re still earning a very small amount of Ice Tokens—50 cents or something. If you’re at the very top, then you earn 30, 40, 50 dollars per day.

“People like to show off their wearables as they level up within our game, like it’s some sort of fashion statement…. There’s a really strong community around the diamond hand cigars. For some reason, people just love them. The cheapest is 3.9 ETH, so, like, $11,000.

“The dealer is a bot, and all the players can communicate with each other. There’s voice chat, text chat, and it’s very social. We solved one of the main problems with the metaverse: Because it’s so early, it’s pretty empty. But we have roughly around 1,500 to 2,000 players just constantly in the venues, and then around 12,000 daily active players total. This doesn’t sound like a lot in traditional web standards, but for Web 3 and metaverse, it’s pretty considerable. We’re pretty much 60 percent of Decentraland’s overall users. There are even little celebrities kind of popping up within our community. There’s a guy called Ice Poker God. I don’t know who he is!”

T H E R E A R E A N estimated 400,000 Elvis Presley impersonators worldwide, who devote themselves to shimmying into rhinestone jumpsuits and slicking their hair back and swiveling their hips. Who, night after night, croon “Hound Dog” and “Love Me Tender,” and pronounce you man and wife and put on their best Southern drawl to thank you, thank you very much. There is perhaps no other person in human history

who has been imitated and idolized as much as Elvis. In the face of the King’s omnipresence, how can a performer who is met with the task of portraying Elvis make it feel… real? After all, even footage of the actual man can feel uncanny, as if he, too, is yet another impersonator playing up the tropes.

Now, Austin Butler is taking on the challenge of trying to resurrect him for the Baz Luhrmann biopic Elvis. If Elvis was a polite, handsome, and talented young interloper in the world of music, then Butler is a polite, handsome, and talented young interloper in the world of Elvis interpreters. For starters, the 30-year-old actor looks as if he’s been transported to our interview—at a convivial Los Angeles restaurant where the owners treat him like family—on a ray of California sunshine. He’s tall, with a face meant to be ripped out of a magazine and taped up in a locker: blue-green eyes, a lock of sandy

blond hair that falls over his forehead, lips so pillowy they might as well be memory foam. When he smiles, it is the most earnest smile you’ve ever seen in your life. And if you are within Austin Butler’s vicinity, there is, statistically speaking, a 98 percent chance he is smiling right at you. Even when he’s saying things like: “You can lose touch with who you actually are. And I definitely had that when I finished Elvis—not knowing who I was.”

His friends say he really is that unflaggingly upbeat. Take it from director Cary Fukunaga, who first sublet his New York City apartment to Butler almost a decade ago and, more recently, directed him in the upcoming Apple TV+ World War II drama, Masters of the Air. Fukunaga told me about a guy on that set who used to love to imitate Butler. “It was this overly polite, overly warm kind of impersonation,” said Fukunaga. “Everything is just: Beautiful! Excellent!”

To be fair, everything is beautiful and excellent for Butler. He went from a shy kid growing up in Orange County, California, to an optimistic teenage journeyman, grinding out Disney and Nickelodeon projects while hoping to make the leap into something more serious. Little by little, it started to happen. Maybe you first caught him as a pouty denim-clad swain alongside Selena Gomez and Luka Sabbat in Jim Jarmusch’s zombie flick The Dead Don’t Die. (He ends up mauled by zombies.) Or as crazed Manson follower Tex Watson in Quentin Tarantino’s epic Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. (He ends up mauled by Brad Pitt.)

Butler is now poised to have his big breakthrough, all while trying to get back to himself after living as Elvis for the better part of three years. As he waits for the movie’s release in June (as of now, he still hasn’t seen it), he’s spending his time boxing and being out in nature and reading Raymond Carver short stories. He’s rediscovering his love for Los Angeles. “L.A. can be a coal mining town. You know, where everybody works in the coal mine. Everybody talks about the coal mine,” he says with a laugh. His easy mannerisms and teen idol good looks can obscure something else too: an extreme intensity and steely, in-the-weeds dedication when it comes to his work.

His journey embodying Elvis began with an emotional video he sent Luhrmann of himself performing “Unchained Melody” while wearing a bathrobe. The video stopped Luhrmann in his tracks, rendering him equal parts confused and intrigued. “Was it an audition? Or was he having a breakdown?” Luhrmann told me. Either way, the director brought Butler in and put him through his paces. Butler reciprocated with a commitment so intense that Luhrmann sometimes didn’t realize when he was (text continued on page 96)

←←← OPENING PAGES, LEF T

jacket $2,690 pants $1,390 Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello shirt $180 Budd Shirtmakers tie $185 Ralph Lauren Purple Label boots $310 Rich Cast of Characters sunglasses $745 Jacques Marie Mage watch (throughout) $4,400 bracelet $37,200 ring $2,400 Cartier vintage cuff, his own OPENING PAGES, RIGHT

jacket $3,970 shirt $1,345 pants $1,170 Tom Ford

vintage necklace, his own ←← OPPOSITE PAGE

jacket $2,990 Alexander McQueen shirt $245 Fursac ← THIS PAGE

jacket $3,200 shirt $850 pants $980 Gucci belt $595 Artemas Quibble his own boots Lucchese necklace $7,950 Cartier

9 4

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

← jacket $1,100 Ami Paris shirt $240 Husbands Paris vintage necklace, vintage cuff, and vintage ring (on middle finger), his own bracelet $37,200 ring (on pinkie) $3,550 Cartier → jacket $5,175 Versace shirt $300 Our Legacy pants $2,095 Dunhill boots $855 Second Layer bracelet $3,550 ring $2,400 Cartier

E LV I S. ” in character. “I asked one of my assistants [about Butler’s accent], and the guy said, ‘Well, he’s not Southern. He’s from Anaheim,’ ” Luhrmann said. “I don’t think, until recently, I actually came to understand how Austin actually sounded.” His native speaking voice may still be a mystery: Butler greets me in a husky Elvis tone that gradually fades and reemerges throughout the course of our conversation. When he orders an oat latte, the pronunciation is pure Presley—a long, drawn-out o to start, punctuated by a laconic taaay—as if the King himself had returned and requested an alt milk to wash down a peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwich. is a tricky thing to master—for every Walk the Line, you get three others that veer into Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story territory. Luhrmann’s film covers the momentous scope of Elvis’s entire life, told through the lens of his relationship with his manager, the mysterious and controlling Colonel Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks.

Butler sought to match Elvis as precisely as possible. He read and watched and listened to everything he could. (“An American Trilogy” is probably his favorite song.) He learned to talk like Elvis and sing like Elvis and, with the help of a movement coach named Polly Bennett, how to move like Elvis did too.

Sometimes that involved unconventional methods, such as studying animals that resemble the King. Especially the way certain animals use their eyes. “He has catlike things, sort of like when a lion looks out at the prairie,” Butler explains, surveying the savanna of the restaurant. “There’s this quality of an alligator, when it comes up from underneath the water,” he adds, pretending to be an alligator coming up from underneath the water.

The young actor made a pilgrimage to Graceland and met Elvis’s ex-wife, Priscilla Presley, who embraced him and told him he had a lot of support. “She looked like an angel,” Butler says. “I walked down the hall with Baz afterwards with tears in my eyes.”

Beyond all the technical preparation, he sought out other things that would allow him to access this larger-than-life figure on a personal level. “His mother passed away when he A MUSIC BIOPIC

9 6

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

was 23, and my mom passed away when I was 23,” Butler says. “So when I learned that, it was one of those things where I got chills, and I just thought, Okay, I can connect to that.”

Luhrmann told me he saw connections between the actor and character in other ways. “Elvis was an intensely spiritual person,” the director said. “And I think Austin has a really spiritual quality to him. He has a very sensitive and big inner life. He’s very lovely on the outside, but you know there’s deep thinking going on, on the inside.”

Filming was slated to begin in March 2020 in Australia, Luhrmann’s home and where he shoots most of his movies. But just a few days prior, Tom Hanks was infamously diagnosed and hospitalized with COVID-19. Production was shut down indefinitely. The producers were ready to whisk Butler home to Los Angeles, but he decided to stay put and hole up and use the break to dig even deeper into his character.

He basically turned his apartment into a detective scene, à la Charlie in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia unearthing a vast mail-room conspiracy. “Just images of Elvis everywhere, from every time period,” says Butler. “I think the film would have been very different if we had started shooting at that point, and I’m grateful I had the time to let myself marinate.”

Six months later, they were finally ready to go. The first performance scene that Butler had to film was Elvis’s big 1968 comeback special, which, appropriately enough, had a ton of pressure riding on it. Despite his nerves, Butler maintained that unrelenting positivity. “Look, I’ve worked with every kind of actor and every kind of performer. And I accept that they have freak-outs, that’s okay,” Luhrmann told me. “But Austin, he doesn’t freak out. He has the most polite panic of anyone I’ve ever met.”

Butler settled in and managed to suppress his panic, but he was mystified about how someone could operate at that acute intensity for so many days and weeks in a row, let alone so many years of a career. He asked Hanks, ever the elder statesman, for advice on how he’s managed to keep his sanity over the decades. Hanks had a simple tip, Butler

recalls: “ ‘Every day I try to read something that has nothing to do with the job that I’m doing.’ ” This advice was a relief. “That gave me permission, because up till that point, I was only reading everything to do with Elvis.

I was only listening to Elvis. It was Elvis’s influences and Elvis himself and nothing else,” he says.

Elvis will premiere at Cannes. Though the man was an all-American artist who managed to entrance the world, the only international performing Elvis ever managed to do was in Canada. “The sad bit about it is that Elvis never got to tour the world,” Butler says. “That is a thing that I think a lot of people don’t quite realize. And that was a big thing that he really wanted to do.” (The rumored reason why he never went overseas was because Colonel Tom Parker was an undocumented immigrant who feared not being able to get back into the U.S.) By the time the project wrapped in March 2021, Butler had given himself over to the role so much that his body revolted. “The next day I woke up at four in the morning with excruciating pain, and I was rushed to the hospital,” Butler says. He was diagnosed with a virus that simulates appendicitis and spent a week bedridden.

“My body just started shutting down the day after I finished Elvis.”

navigated the Disney and Nickelodeon pipelines on their way to long, meaningful careers. It starts with getting scouted—in Butler’s case, his stepbrother got noticed at the Orange County Fair and Austin tagged along with him to an audition, nabbing a background spot.

“I didn’t really have a passion for anything that included other people at that time,” he says. “I wouldn’t go play sports. I wouldn’t do things with other kids.” When he realized acting was something he could actually enjoy, he got a coach and gradually started booking more and more roles.

Soon, with the support of his parents, he left school to pursue acting full-time. “I never had a real prom,” he says. “But I had prom in a TV show. I tested out of high school when I was 15 and a half, but I kept writing essays because I was always afraid that I wouldn’t be able to communicate.” He applied similarly studious rigor to the industry. “I printed out the Pulp Fiction script when I was 12, and I’d read it to my mom in the car,” he says.

“That was my dream from 12 years old. I said, ‘Quentin is the director I want to work with.’ ” First, he had to appear in a revolving door of kid and young adult series (Hannah Montana, Wizards of Waverly Place, The Carrie Diaries) in which he was mostly introduced walking through doorways while girls turned their heads and swooned. These parts still get him (continued on page 99) COUNTLESS

STARS

HAVE

suit $2,895 Ralph Lauren Purple Label shirt $235 Fursac tie $170 Anderson & Sheppard boots $675 Alessandro Vasini bracelet $3,550 Cartier grooming by jamie taylor at the wall group for leonor greyl and augustinus bader. tailoring by susie’s custom designs, inc. prop styling by audrey taylor. produced by seduko productions.

F A Z E C L AN

C RY P TO.C O M

C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 4 2

C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 8 5

the process of selecting which blockchain she would use, but Cronos was not a contender.

“There’s nothing on there, technically, that would attract me,” she said. “I’m thinking of using a blockchain called Avalanche.”

Of the dozen or so attendees I spoke with, only Apu Gomes, a Brazilian photographer, had any direct experience investing with Crypto.com. Gomes, who was looking to market NFTs of his photographs, was also a smalltime speculator. In the weeks after Damon’s commercial first aired, Cronos had quintupled in value. The company’s next commercial, which featured LeBron James, ran during the Super Bowl. “It went down,” Gomes said.

“I sold it to buy Solana.”

Many of the attendees seemed to be nursing hangovers. That was thanks, in part, to Audrey Pichy, an organizer of NFT/LA, which had concluded earlier that week, and which billed itself as “an epic IRL conference fused with immersive metaverse integrations and L.A.’s robust nightlife scene.” Pichy, who was born on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, wore a leather jacket, and bounced from side to side in excitement as she spoke. “Up until a month ago, we weren’t even sure how many people were going to show. But 4,000 people came!”

NFT/LA had been held in the convention center adjacent to Crypto.com Arena. Hearing this, the javelin thrower reconsidered his dismissive stance. “You know, what he’s doing is smart,” he said of Marszalek. “You’ve got blockchain companies that have been around since 2013, and they don’t even have a marketing officer. This space is forbidding to outsiders.

Other companies are building technology, but they’re investing in glamour.” I looked around the parking lot, with its warm glow and dazzling people. “That’s smart. It’s undervalued.

They’re building an on-ramp,” he said.

I went inside, ordered a drink, handed the bartender my Crypto.com card, and awaited his reaction. Nothing. “That’s a crypto card,” I said.

He nodded.

“I’m paying with cryptocurrency,” I said.

“With Bitcoin. Well, actually not Bitcoin, but Cronos, which is like Bitcoin.”

“We don’t take Bitcoin,” he said.

“Well, let’s just run it, and see if it works,” I said.

I’m unsure what I expected—fanfare, banners, a handshake from Satoshi Nakamoto— but the transaction was processed, and the bartender left to serve another customer.

Crypto was here, and not only was it stupid, it was boring. Marszalek had won.

these bags under my eyes. Here’s a digital version of me.” The way he put it, using an avatar is somewhere between a more polite version of keeping your camera off and a savvy investment in the future. “If we’re going to interact in these metaverses, I would like to be pulling up in the Ferrari of avatars rather than some pixel art,” he said. “Why not have full hair dynamics and stuff simulated and figured out right now so that they’re ready later?” Later being, obviously, the point at which we’re all interacting in the metaverse.

This stance, like so many held by FaZe employees, requires a bone-deep certainty that the world will change, and in one very specific way: that we will begin to live ever-larger portions of our lives in the digital realm, and that doing so will be pleasurable enough that we won’t put up a fight. Or, rather: We might put up a fight. But FaZe fans, who’ve developed deep parasocial relationships with their favorite creators rooted entirely in the digital realm, won’t. The company is betting on it.

I’ll admit to having felt a slight thrill as I listened to Mustapha pontificate about his post-human future between sips of his vape. (“As soon as I can upload my consciousness, I’m gone. You’ll never see this body ever again.

It’s a waste of time. I have to maintain it. Not eat gluten or whatever. What? It doesn’t make any sense.”) Beyond that, spending a little bit of time in FaZe’s world made it hard to shake the feeling that we’re on the verge of seismic technological and cultural change. And while it seems more likely than not that this change will be affected largely by and for the benefit of very wealthy stakeholders, we’re still going… somewhere. And the people I met at FaZe seemed to have, if not a clearer sense of where that somewhere was, at least a confidence that they’ll be the people to get us there.

“We’re first-generation internet kids, pioneers,” Bengtson told me. “And it’s our job, again, to write the fucking script. We’ll do it first and it’ll be in the fabric of everyone’s life.

You play video games, whether you know it or not. Everything’s a fucking video game. Life is a video game. Your whole life is gamified.

Everybody’s life is gamified. We just built a business off the back of that.” All of the spoils— the massive audience, the cavernous office, the watches and sports cars and mansions, the whole content operation—were by-products, basically, of a life lived on the bleeding edge of digital culture.

Everyone I spoke with was enthusiastic about where FaZe is pointed. But I don’t know that I could call any of them optimistic, exactly.

They seemed to understand, deeply, that change is inevitable. But they also seemed to

is an investigative journalist and writer based in Los Angeles.

stephen witt

9 8

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

intuit that, though opportunity for wealth and fame seems closer than ever, change doesn’t necessarily mean progress. (Mustapha, in making his case for the metaverse, outlined a scenario in which augmented reality might allow a family living in, say, a smog-choked metropolis to fill its windows with a view of the Maldives.)

The way you feel about the future FaZe is imagining, I began to realize, depends an awful lot on how you see the present.

“Ready Player One, that shit’s happening and I think it’s super exciting,” Bengtson told me in the FaZe warehouse. Talk had turned to the metaverse. Bengtson suggested that Steven Spielberg’s 2018 film provided a helpful vision for our lives inside. If you haven’t seen Ready Player One, it’s about a young man living in a dystopian near-future Ohio where residents, seeking to escape grinding poverty, take refuge (and make money) in a virtual reality universe.

This, as Bengtson saw it, was a good thing. “It’ll give people freedom, man,” he said.

I blanched. I’d seen the film; I didn’t understand it to be an endorsement of the metaverse so much as a half-baked critique of it. I said as much. Taav Cooperman, Bengtson and Oliveira’s manager and FaZe’s V.P. of marketing, assured me that I’d misunderstood the movie’s message. “If you think about it, the actual plot of the whole movie is, you can come from the gutter and play in that video game.”

Chelsey Northern, the company’s head of communications, finished his thought: “And still influence the world for the better, because at the end he decides to shut it down for a couple of days so people aren’t that fucked up. The goal is to make it better.”

I’ve thought about this moment maybe once a day, every day, since it happened: three people roughly my age, by any accounting vastly better equipped for the economy of the future than I am, insisting that the evidently horrific world of a bottom-tier Spielberg movie was in fact a utopia.

With time, I began to see what I’d initially clocked as the cynicism of various FaZe figures as, instead, a kind of measured pragmatism. If you grew up playing video games, it was no great sacrifice to substitute in-person interaction for in-game socializing. If you’d spent hours collecting power-ups and skins while playing those games, then buying NFTs wouldn’t seem like much of a scam at all. If employment seemed increasingly hard to come by in the real world, life in the virtual creator economy beckoned. And if you’d been born into a world of rising seas and increasing temperatures, taking up residence in the metaverse might even begin to seem appealing. I don’t know if FaZe Clan will revolutionize entertainment, or if it’ll indeed merrily lead us all into our brave new future. But I think I know what I’m supposed to take away from Ready Player One. I’m not particularly excited to enter the metaverse, but I also know that it might not matter in the long run. The goal is to make it better.

I made my way down the large Astroturf staircase and headed out into the sleepy Los Angeles afternoon. I lingered on the sidewalk for a moment, the sun warming my skin, and then I went home. sam schube

is gq ’s deputy site editor.

AUS T I N BU T L ER

C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 97

recognized on the street occasionally, but it wasn’t exactly where his heart was at. “I wanted to do a part like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape or The Basketball Diaries,” he says.

“I was watching Raging Bull, and those types of films, and going, ‘I don’t want to be just a guy who walks in slo-mo through a door.’ ” So how did he finally extricate himself from teen-crush territory? Butler pauses to think about it. “Do you ever listen to Ira Glass?” he asks, referencing the popular public-radio personality. “There’s that one quote, where he talks about how there’s this gap between where your skill is and where your taste is.”

You may want to make work that corresponds with your taste, but your capabilities aren’t quite there yet. Butler says he related to that, being firmly in the middle of that gap and mostly taking jobs to pay the bills.

His dream at that time was to do a play in New York, which came true when he landed a part in a 2018 Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. One of his costars was Denzel Washington. “There’s that thing where you meet your heroes, and you want to be their best friend,” Butler says.

“I was like, ‘That’s not going to happen.’ So, I went into the quickest mentality of ‘I’m not going to try to be his friend, I’m just going to try to do work as well as I possibly can.’ ” Butler showed up at the table read for the play, having memorized the entire mammoth script.

Then he would try to arrive at the theater earlier than Washington every single performance. Eventually, the legendary actor caught on to what was happening.

One day, Washington waved him over and said, “Hey, I got an idea for you,” Butler shares.

“Then I sat down; it’s just Denzel and me in this empty theater. He started giving me acting advice and he really took me under his wing. He’d start telling me thoughts about the scene, and suddenly I’ve got Denzel almost as an acting coach.” And maybe even a life coach. “Denzel always goes back to gratitude,” Butler adds. “I look at that for longevity in any career. Having those moments where, at the best of times or the worst of times, you’re being grateful for what you actually have and having humility.”

Critics started to notice Butler too. Hilton Als, reviewing the play in The New Yorker, both opened and closed his review praising Butler and highlighting him as the standout among his more seasoned castmates. “Most performers want to be seen at any cost,” Als wrote, “but actors—at least, those as good as Butler—are both determined and relaxed in their ambition to do justice to the playwright’s text while contributing to the life of the story.”

The play put him on the map and vaulted him to the company of his other heroes—Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio on the set of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, directed by, yes, Quentin Tarantino. Butler remembers one night shoot, in which Tarantino ordered a crepe truck to the set at 3 a.m. “We were sitting there eating Nutella crepes, and Quentin goes, ‘How great is this?’ ” Butler recalls. “I think back to my 12-year-old self, being there with Quentin and eating a crepe at three in the morning on his set. And he goes, ‘You know what my goal is? My goal is to give everybody on this set such a good time that their next job sucks.’ ” By the time that next job rolled around, Butler had someone huge in his corner. As Luhrmann tells it: “I get a phone call out of the blue from Denzel Washington, who I did not know. Denzel Washington just said, in the most incredibly emotional and direct way, ‘Look, I’ve just been onstage with this young actor. I’m telling you, his work ethic is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen anyone who devotes every single second of their lives to perfecting a role.’ ” “I was so grateful for that,” Butler tells me.

“He didn’t call me beforehand, he didn’t call me after. It was this generous thing that he just did.”

I didn’t sound like me anymore,” Butler says. He emerged from Elvis changed in a myriad of ways. His voice, for starters. Over the course of filming, his relationship of nine years with fellow former teen star Vanessa Hudgens also ended. “Life is full of changes, and you’ve got to find a way to constantly be evolving and growing,” he nonanswers, politely, when I bring it up.

After Butler recovered from his post-Elvis medical emergency, he immediately flew to London to begin working on Masters of the Air. Following a mandatory quarantine, he and his castmates were put through a mock boot camp run by Dale Dye, a military veteran who has offered this service on projects such as Platoon and Band of Brothers. And yet, Butler still couldn’t shake Elvis off. Even as a brand-new character, he felt as if he were channeling the King. “I was like, ‘This is what Elvis felt when he was put into the Army,’ ” Butler says. “You know, performing, and the glamour of it and hearing screaming fans, and then suddenly you’re just dressed like everybody else in those fatigues.” Fukunaga noticed too: “I was aware when he showed up, he was still very much Elvis.”

During his 10 months in London for Masters of the Air, Butler fell in love with the city, so much that he’s considering moving there. He would spend his free time riding his bike and visiting museums and the Reference Point library, poring over rare art and poetry books. Sunday nights were devoted to cooking dinner and playing cards with a group of friends at famed River Cafe chef Ruthie Rogers’s home. “I just feel like everybody made me feel very welcome,” Butler says. “There was a lot of kindness there.”

Since returning to Los Angeles, he’s been enjoying a rare spell of downtime between projects. Of course, this is only the beginning for him. He is rumored to have been cast in “ M Y FA M I LY S A I D

Dune: Part Two as the villainous Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (played by a codpiece-wearing Sting in the 1984 original). When it comes to the future of his career, he wants to go deeper and darker. Paul Thomas Anderson is one director he’s dying to work with. Alejandro Iñárritu is another. “The way that Leo has done it has been really, really impactful on me,” Butler says. Luhrmann, who cast a young Leonardo DiCaprio in 1996’s Romeo + Juliet, actually drew a comparison between the two actors. Just recently, Butler and Luhrmann met up with Leo after a Lakers game. “I think Leonardo was recognizing what Austin’s about to go through,” Luhrmann told me. “The difference for Austin, and this is fortunate, is that Austin is very young looking, but he’s 30.”

Butler mostly stays off the internet. He’s been photographed recently with the model Kaia Gerber, and their relationship is already an object of intense speculation. “I go, ‘If I don’t see the picture, then it doesn’t really exist to me.’ I don’t want to be really negative, but there’s hardly any job I despise more than paparazzi,” he says, in the same sunny tone of voice that most people would use to compliment someone’s shirt. He is similarly positive when I try to get him to open up about his relationship with Gerber. “I don’t think there’s anything I want to share about that,” he says.

“But thank you for providing the space.”

Butler is still recording music for the film, so he’s not quite done with Elvis yet. He’s happy to have a bit more time with him.

“It’s comforting to me now, when I get in the car. I’ll just go, ‘What do I want to listen to?’

Usually I just end up popping on Elvis,” he says. “I’ve never loved somebody I’ve never met more than Elvis.” gabriella paiella

is a gq staff writer.

A DDI TI ON AL C REDI TS Pages 56-63. Gary Vaynerchuk: Brian Gove. Grimes (first use): Taylor Hill/WireImage. Beeple: Jason Bollenbacher. Mona Lisa: Kenzo Tribouillard. Grimes (second use): Frazer Harrison. Snoop Dogg: JC Olivera. Nadya Tolokonnikova: Chris Saucedo. All: Getty Images. Tom Sachs: Rocket Factory x Tiffany & Co.; courtesy of Tiffany & Co. (3). Bored Ape Yacht Club: courtesy of Yuga Labs (3). Rare Pepe: courtesy of MrHansel (3). DJ Pepe: courtesy of Rare Scrilla.

CryptoKitties (4), Azuki, Jacob & Co Watch NFT: courtesy of brands. Mfers (2), Blitmap (3), Tubby Cats, Howlerz (2), Grifters, shields (2), raccoons: CC0.

All other collage elements: Getty Images.

GQ IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT © 2022 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. VOLUME 92, NO. 5. GQ (ISSN 0016-6979) is published monthly (except for combined issues in December/January and June/July) by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Roger Lynch, Chief Executive Officer; Pamela Drucker Mann, Global Chief Revenue Officer & President, U.S. Revenue; Jackie Marks, Chief Financial Officer.

Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices.

Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40644503. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001. POSTMASTER: SEND ALL UAA TO CFS (SEE DMM 507.1.5.2); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address corrections to GQ, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK ISSUE INQUIRIES: Please write to GQ, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717, call 800-289-9330, or e-mail subscriptions@gq.com. Please give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent label. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks after receipt of order.

Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to GQ Magazine, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For reprints, please e-mail reprints@condenast.com or call Wright’s Media, 877-652-5295. For re-use permissions, please e-mail contentlicensing@condenast.com or call 800-897-8666. Visit us online at www.gq.com. To subscribe to other Condé Nast magazines on the World Wide Web, visit www.condenastdigital.com.

Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services that we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these offers and/or information, please advise us at P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717 or call 800-289-9330.

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

G Q . C O M

9 9

FINAL SHOT

For our cover story on Bad Bunny, see page 44.

ST YLIST, MOBOL A JI DAWODU.

Jacket and pants (prices upon request)

by Loewe. Goggles, $25, by Speedo.

Earrings, nose ring, diamond heart necklace, heart pendant necklace, and rings, his own.

Diamond chain necklace, $50,000,

by Jacob & Co.

1 0 0

G Q . C O M

J U N E / J U L Y

2 0 2 2

P H O T O G R A P H

B Y

R O E

E T H R I D G E

THE HIGHEST

PROTEIN SNACK NUT

*

We’re flexing our protein power. Whnderful Pistachios is a complete protein snack with all nine essential amino acids. Every 1oz serving has 12% of your daily value of protein. If you had these stats, you’d show off, too.

*Based on percent daily value of protein: pistachios (12%) vs almonds (6%), cashews (6%), and peanuts (8%). © 2022 Wonderful Pistachios & Almonds LLC. All Rights Reserved. WONDERFUL, PLANT PROTEIN, the accompanying logos, and trade dress are trademarks of Wonderful Pistachios & Almonds LLC or its affiliates. WP220202-13