Pod Insights Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso GQ’s Will Welch on the Future of Magazines (and Men) About this episode Is it possible the rumors of the death of print magazines (and masculinity) have been greatly exaggerated?
We sit this week with GQ's Global Editorial Director Will Welch to discuss the magazine’s 2025 Special Issue on American Masculinity https://www.gq.com/story/introducing-gqs-special-issue-on-american-masculinity-starring-glen-powell (3:53), its revealing survey of nearly two thousand men across the US (5:00), the absence of “low-stakes mischief” in today’s surveillance age (9:40), the widespread obsession with Gen Z (12:00), and the “125 Rules for Modern Gentlemen” https://www.gq.com/story/gq-125-rules-for-modern-gentlemen-manners-etiquette-guide featured in the issue (17:30).
In Act II, we turn to Welch’s own story: his Atlanta upbringing (21:00), the music of OutKast and D’Angelo that shaped him (24:00), and his early years as an editor at The Fader (28:00). He also shares the call that brought him to GQ (33:00), his road to recovery (42:00), and how spiritual leader Ram Dass reshaped his life (48:00).
In Act III, Welch reflects on the “when the going was good” era of GQ (55:00), the magazine’s unparalleled access to its subjects (1:00:00), and how magazines (and men) can fit into the ever-changing cultural landscape (1:15:26).
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Transcript 13,469 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:21 Sam Fragoso? This is Talk Easy. I'm Stan Fragoso. Welcome to the show.
0:38 Sam Fragoso? Since its founding in 1957, GQ has been both an architect and mirror to masculinity in America. That's perhaps never more true than in its latest issue, The State of the American Male, which poses a familiar, yet widely debated question: What does masculinity look like in the year 2025? To get to the bottom of it, the magazine surveyed nearly 2,000 men across the country. The respondents reveal a culture in flux, with some signs of progress, yes, but also some regression since GQ published its previous issue on masculinity in 2019. We talk about how the pendulum has swung in those six years, along with
1:20 Sam Fragoso? the mix of new anxieties and aspirations young men seem to be having in this moment. Presiding over this issue is GQ's global editorial director, Will Welch. He's been at the helm since 2018, when he first took over as editor-in-chief for the beloved Jim Nelson. As editor, Welch is typically the one asking the questions, not answering them. And so today, we wanted to turn the tables a bit. In Act One, we talk about the masculinity issue, some rules to live by in this brave new world, and why so many young men have turned to the manosphere for answers. In Act Two, we get into some of Will's story, growing up in Atlanta, in a city defined by music, and how those late
2:05 Sam Fragoso? nights at Tower Records, immersed in the sounds of OutKast and the late- D'Angelo propelled him to New York, where he quickly began working at music magazines. Then, finally, in Act Three, The Personal and Professional Converge, we talk about Will's road to recovery, why the work of Ram Dass led to a spiritual awakening, and how each of these chapters, in their own way, has informed his vision for GQ, both in the present and in the years ahead.
2:36 Sam Fragoso? This is Will Welch.
2:54 Sam Fragoso? Will Welch, welcome to the show.
2:56 Speaker 01 Hi, Sam.
2:57 Sam Fragoso? We're taping this episode in New York City at the Conde Nast offices, where you currently serve as the Global Editorial Director of GQ. Now, on Mondays and Tuesdays, it's my understanding that you typically have calls with your GQ affiliates around the globe. Is that right?
3:14 Speaker 01 That is correct.
3:14 Sam Fragoso? So that means you have to wake up at, what, 4:00 AM?
3:20 Speaker 01 Our global calls on Mondays and Tuesdays are at 9:00 AM.
3:23 Sam Fragoso? 9:00 AM.
3:23 Speaker 01 Which is definitely a New York-centric time to do the calls, because that means Japan, India, it's 9:00 PM.
3:30 Sam Fragoso? So it orbits around New York and Will.
3:34 Speaker 01 I would like to deny that, but I guess the answer is a little bit yes.
3:38 Sam Fragoso? Hey, your title is Global Editorial Director. I think you can have that one.
3:42 Speaker 01 As you can imagine, I have done my fair share of 9:00 PM, 10:00 PM calls with Japan, China, et cetera. But the standing calls are oriented around New York.
3:53 Sam Fragoso? The latest issue of the magazine for October is all about the state of the American Mail. Now, I know the magazine is ready, printed, about to go to newsstands. Having said that, are you sure you don't want to pivot to any other subject right now?
4:12 Speaker 01 I do not want to pivot. I really feel it is our calling as GQ to look this subject around masculinity directly in the eye. And it has been an ongoing theme of my time as editor of GQ, and I feel it's a responsibility. So I do not want to pivot.
4:30 Sam Fragoso? Okay, I'm just giving you a chance.
4:31 Speaker 01 It's entirely too late, but thank you for the opportunity.
4:35 Sam Fragoso? This would be the chance, you know, we could go to the cafeteria right now. We could just abandon The American Man and talk about anything else.
4:41 Speaker 01 What about me or this topic makes you think that this is a bad idea?
4:46 Sam Fragoso? Nothing about you makes me think it's a bad idea, but it's been a pretty tumultuous five to six years for The American Man. In November of 2019, you put out the new masculinity issue. I think Pharrell was on the cover. So tell me, in between then and now, where are we at? What is the distance between the idea of masculinity you were putting forth in 2019?
5:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:10 Sam Fragoso? And the one in this new issue?
5:13 Speaker 01 Well, part of the reason that I wanted to make this second statement, so you had new masculinity in 2019, the state of the American male in 2025, was I kept seeing op-eds and other headlines saying masculinity has regressed, like, men just want to be men again. We've gone back.
5:33 Sam Fragoso? And you take that to mean what?
5:35 Speaker 01 I think in some cases that was, oh, no, men have gone back, as though me too never happened, as though there was no reckoning, as though there was no evolution, and as though men were just waiting to revert to like, I don't know, like, shotgunning beer cans and then smashing them against their foreheads and like yelling about boobs or whatever. And I just feel like we're very obviously in this new space that is not back. It has elements of back, it has elements of forward. We are in a complex, extremely uncomfortable, but extremely interesting new place. It is not like the masculinity of the 50s or the 80s or 2000s.
6:21 Speaker 01 2018, just before we published the new masculinity issue. And so I really wanted to use the entire breadth of an issue of GQ and everything we do online and on social and video, et cetera, to revisit this idea because I think it's important that we not be stuck in this. And in my letter from the editor, I say that masculinity is not just a pendulum that swings between toxic and woke and back again. Like, that is a boring and untrue assessment. And I feel like we're a little bit stuck culturally in that dichotomy.
6:56 Sam Fragoso? In the issue from 2019,
6:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:57 Sam Fragoso? it was on the heels of the Me Too movement.
7:00 Speaker 01 We were right in it, yeah.
7:01 Sam Fragoso? Yeah. And the prevailing sentiment was, this is a time for men to shut up and listen. In 2025, how would you describe the pendulum swing?
7:11 Speaker 01 Well, I first want to articulate something about 2019 and shut up and listen.
7:15 Sam Fragoso? Okay.
7:16 Speaker 01 What we found is that the shut up and listen was a paralyzing concept for men. There was just so much criticism of men and none of it was constructive. And I felt like, oh, it's GQ's role as this longstanding authority on masculinity since 1957. We are actually an outlet that can deal head on with the reckoning of Me Too and the change that men are being asked to make. But we can work through that, but also chart a course forward. Because at the time, not much of the dialogue was constructive.
7:52 Sam Fragoso? Mm hmm. You write in your letter from the editor, "So with all the old rules out the window and many men unsure of what norms to adopt, the so-called crisis of masculinity era is upon us and has collided with the chaos of our modern political and media environment, where truth is just a conspiracy, the body, mind, and soul can be biohacked, and the almighty algorithm is God." You called it a so-called crisis.
8:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:23 Sam Fragoso? Which to me suggests that you don't actually think it is a crisis. Where are you at on that?
8:28 Speaker 01 I went back and forth on the so-called. I think phrases like crisis of masculinity, they are in many ways designed to whip up fear. Young men are in crisis. You know, a million mothers and fathers, millions of mothers and fathers around America. Like, you know, their hair stands up on end and they like read the op ed and tear it apart. And I'm just trying to keep the thoughtfulness turned on through this discussion. Cause otherwise I think you go back to the pendulum that swings between toxic and woke.
9:00 Sam Fragoso? Why did you reckon with putting that in or leaving it out?
9:03 Speaker 01 Well, I do think that there are like strong signifiers of crisis.
9:08 Sam Fragoso? Okay.
9:08 Speaker 01 Loneliness, social insecurity, insecurity around sex and sexuality. I think so many of our problems go back to the godlike algorithm that I mentioned in that quote. The young college students and Emily Sundberg's piece talk about the way that they surveil each other. If you go up and try to talk to a girl or a guy that you're interested in, it could be recorded or it could just be talked about on social media and people's DMs. And there's just this feeling of like, you can't be young and make mistakes in private.
9:40 Sam Fragoso? You know, you mentioned that Emily Sundberg piece.
9:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:43 Sam Fragoso? And she talked extensively with 21 college boys about being a young man in 2025. And one of the big revelations is how little room there is for low stakes mischief.
9:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:54 Sam Fragoso? Kid after kid talks about how everyone has these receipts now. And it struck me as a really troubling thing because I was remembering just my childhood and I'm a decade removed.
10:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:08 Sam Fragoso? And I remember my mom, when I was about 20 or 21, she said this line, and I've remembered this since she said it, no mother should have a ringside seat to their child's twenties.
10:20 Sam Fragoso? And I want to say, thank you, Mom.
10:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
10:22 Sam Fragoso? And I think that is a thousand percent true.
10:26 Speaker 01 As your child gets 15, 16, 17, 18, maybe you're like moving back in the auditorium.
10:31 Sam Fragoso? Mm hmm.
10:32 Speaker 01 You know, and by 18, like, let's be in the rafters. And by 22, you should just.
10:36 Sam Fragoso? Get a postcard.
10:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, go be at home, hear about it afterwards. Let me ask you this, when you were reading Emily Sundberg's interviews with the college kids, or, you know, reading the survey of 2,000 American men in our issue, did you come away thinking that masculinity is in crisis?
10:53 Sam Fragoso? I came away thinking that we're all in crisis a little bit. And part of that is the phone addiction. But I think that low stakes mischief comment, I think it extends to people in their 30s, 40s. I think we know too much and in turn do too little in our own lives. Out of fear of retribution or looking dumb on the internet. A few different things that stood out to me as like thinking about young men. One was of the 1929 men surveyed, 38% felt the Me Too movement was beneficial to society. What did you make when you got that back?
11:32 Speaker 01 Well, I think the movements, including Me Too, Black Lives Matter, have been grouped into this concept of wokeness. And wokeness has just been pilloried across the culture, starting with the political culture. Certainly, the Trump administration ran on anti-wokeness. And a lot of that stuff got grouped together. And it's not like intellectually cool right now. To be down with like wokeness that led to cancel culture. And, and I think Me Too got grouped into that. So I read that data through that lens.
12:10 Sam Fragoso? And that rightward shift, it was talked about throughout the election cycle in regards to young people. 47% of the 1929 respondents said that men have more privileges and advantages than women. That means 53% go, actually, women have it easier right now.
12:28 Speaker 01 Right.
12:29 Sam Fragoso? A decade ago in college, I don't remember anyone thinking that women had it easier.
12:34 Speaker 01 No, but a decade ago, this word privilege wasn't loaded in the same way.
12:38 Sam Fragoso? I mean, it was experienced and felt.
12:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
12:40 Sam Fragoso? And known.
12:41 Speaker 01 It was known, but it wasn't a political term, as it has become now.
12:46 Sam Fragoso? In the magazine, you also get into the fact that this generation, this Gen Z, they have been op-edified and written about so much. And I have three younger siblings, they're all Gen Z.
12:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:00 Sam Fragoso? And even I have thought, man, the New York Times, they seem really interested in whether Gen Z is fucking or not.
13:07 Speaker 01 Totally.
13:09 Sam Fragoso? Like, I don't remember anyone.
13:10 Speaker 01 And drinking.
13:11 Sam Fragoso? Yeah, and drinking and doing drugs. And like, that was like the thing you do quietly and scamper off and hide from your parents.
13:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's like one of my favorite songs is like Drink, Smoke and Fuck.
13:21 Sam Fragoso? A hundred percent.
13:21 Speaker 01 It wasn't a social dictate.
13:24 Sam Fragoso? And it wasn't an anthem from your own parents. I'm fascinated by how these young people are metabolizing and internalizing the fact that adults are very interested in what they are doing and what they are not doing.
13:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:38 Sam Fragoso? What do you make of that?
13:39 Speaker 01 And the piece where Emily Sundberg interviewed them, it came through very clear that they're like, we don't want to be told what our generation is good at and bad at and all the ways that we're lacking, which I understand, I'm like the eldest possible millennial. And I'm like, man, we gotta quit weighing in on Gen Z. And that's what inspired the piece, right? It was like, let's give them a place to speak for themselves rather than us opining about what they are and are not doing and should and should not be doing.
14:06 Sam Fragoso? Why do you think there seems to be this ongoing obsession with Gen Z?
14:11 Speaker 01 Sam, it's because of the so-called crisis.
14:16 Sam Fragoso? If you just left out so-called, you'd wrap this thing up in a meatball.
14:19 Speaker 01 We could just all go home. Yeah, it would be so much easier.
14:22 Sam Fragoso? I offered the cafeteria upstairs. It's a nice cafeteria. We could have left. We could have hung out.
14:27 Speaker 01 I think, you know, rightly, we are all concerned about the effects of the COVID era on all of us and on young people in particular. I think people, you know, whatever, I'm 44 and I'm worried about the impact of modern life on my brain. And then you think about somebody whose brain is still forming and it's really scary. So I think that's why.
14:49 Sam Fragoso? The last point I want to hit before we move on. Embedded in this issue is a lot of conversation about role models.
14:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:57 Sam Fragoso? And who, especially through the COVID era, these young men began turning to. And a lot of them were, you know, straight men hosting podcasts, streamers, YouTubers, et cetera. Why do you think young men have begun to drift toward them?
15:12 Speaker 01 I think it's related to the gap that we were trying to fill with the new masculinity issue in 2019, which is like, in a world full of criticism, and you're young and you're impressionable and you're looking for answers.
15:24 Sam Fragoso? Where do I go?
15:25 Speaker 01 For somebody who's charting a path forward. And I really feel like in the algorithm era, you have to throw out the far edges. So we could sit here and worry each other for an hour about Andrew Tate, who is this like comic book villain character.
15:41 Sam Fragoso? In your letter from the editor, you pretend as if you don't really know who he is.
15:45 Speaker 01 I don't really. I mean, I know enough to reference him. I know enough to say, right, Sam, Andrew Tate, the comic book villain. I have never like watched one of his YouTube videos.
15:54 Sam Fragoso? You never considered him for a cover of Man of the Year?
15:58 Speaker 01 Not this year. We'll see how 2026 goes. Anyway, yeah, you throw out these like extreme outliers, but across the board, they're just like some of those guys, Andrew Huberin, for example. He is using science, you know, to tell people like, here is a way forward.
16:16 Sam Fragoso? Yeah.
16:16 Speaker 01 You know?
16:17 Sam Fragoso? So when you throw out the edges of it.
16:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:19 Sam Fragoso? What do you think we're left with? What is the takeaway you have after having made this issue?
16:24 Speaker 01 I wanted there to be some takeaway other than just raising more questions. So one of the solutions for us was this big manners and etiquette package. One very funny of the moment element of making that was there was a really healthy debate among me and the staff of like, whether or not to call it a gentleman's guide. So the modern gentleman's guide to manners and etiquette. It's like, do people aspire to be gentlemen anymore in 2025?
16:52 Sam Fragoso? I will say for the two of us to begin answering that question, sitting in a podcast studio, wearing suits. I'm not sure if we're overly qualified or if we're the target audience for wanting to be gentlemen.
17:03 Speaker 01 One of us being the editor of Gentleman's Quarterly Magazine. Yeah. So anyway, we brought back the word gentleman. If it was dead, I don't know, but, um, and just tried to like walk readers through with 125 rules. Like, how do you greet somebody when you see them? How do you manage your technology? A really important one was like, let's give a little top line advice on consent, which became a huge topic. And the basic advice is over communicate. Over communication can never hurt, you know? The reason it's a so-called crisis, and my words is because let's not freak out. Let's not panic. Let's stay with this and work our way through it.
17:44 Sam Fragoso? So let's talk through some of the 125 rules to live by.
17:49 Speaker 01 Okay.
17:49 Sam Fragoso? In 2025. Ava DuVernay contributed, Chris Black of How Long Gone. I take some advice from him. What are some of your favorite rules to live by?
18:00 Speaker 01 Ava had actually two really good related ones. The man walks between the road and the woman.
18:08 Sam Fragoso? The sidewalk rule.
18:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, the sidewalk rule, which I don't think that a lot of young men know.
18:13 Sam Fragoso? I didn't learn it till about 22 or 23.
18:16 Speaker 01 And can you tell me the context in which you learned it?
18:19 Sam Fragoso? It was a woman I was dating.
18:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:21 Sam Fragoso? We were walking, I believe in New York City. And she said, just so you know, when you're walking, the man should be on the outside by the cars. To which I asked like, wait, so I'm the one who has to get hit? And she said, if it's gonna be one of us,
18:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:37 Sam Fragoso? it's gonna be you.
18:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:38 Sam Fragoso? And I thought, yeah, well, that's the price of admission.
18:41 Speaker 01 And then the related one is that you, man, in the restaurant, your back is to the wall so that you can see the door.
18:49 Sam Fragoso? Yes.
18:49 Speaker 01 Because if danger enters the door, we need you to be aware of it and to take action.
18:56 Sam Fragoso? See, that one I knew because of watching Goodfellas and monster movies.
19:01 Speaker 01 Exactly. Which- Corner booth, baby.
19:02 Sam Fragoso? The corner booth.
19:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:04 Sam Fragoso? Back to the wall.
19:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:06 Sam Fragoso? This is a controversial one. Rule number 99. If you're riding shotgun, be an entertaining and engaged companion and navigator. Don't just sit silently there scrolling on your phone.
19:17 Speaker 01 That is so real.
19:18 Sam Fragoso? Does that rule extend to or exclude the passenger princess?
19:22 Speaker 01 I just think there are plenty of us who always drive out of a need for control. So we're not actually doing a service to the other people in the car. Where it's, we just need to be behind the steering wheel.
19:33 Sam Fragoso? Is that you?
19:34 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:34 Sam Fragoso? Yeah, it's me too.
19:35 Speaker 01 So when you're in that position, you can't really be like, oh, well, I'm doing this as a favor to all of you. But I do think it's just like impolite to just be like surfing the algorithm, like flashing through TikTok or whatever, when somebody is driving and keeping everybody safe and should be like engaged.
19:55 Sam Fragoso? I agree.
19:56 Speaker 01 But if you're on a really long road trip, a little spell of, you know, being on your phone as the passenger is-
20:01 Sam Fragoso? That's fine.
20:02 Speaker 01 is understandable and fine. And if you're carrying on a text conversation, that's fine. But if you're just like doom scrolling, that's rude.
20:12 Sam Fragoso? After the break, more from Will Welch.
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23:39 Sam Fragoso? Coming back. Before you began working in fashion, you were primarily in the music space. And I was thinking about you growing up in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta. Did you have any male role models that were instructive for a young Will Welch?
23:55 Speaker 01 I did. I had a very present father.
23:59 Sam Fragoso? He was a lawyer?
24:00 Speaker 01 Yep. My dad would sit on an overturned bucket. When I was in Little League, I was a pitcher and he would catch my pitches in the driveway for like a long time on end. I also, I'm very tall. I'm six foot six. In puberty, I was having some pretty severe growing pains and he would karate chop the back of my knees at night, which would alleviate some of the severe growing pains and allow me to fall asleep. And that, that stuff is like unforgettable and extremely generous. So dad is number one for sure. I also had an older sister who had some really cool boyfriends and male friends that were around the house a lot, hanging out. One of them taught me how to throw a spiral, a football. I was in seventh grade.
24:45 Speaker 01 He was the ninth grade quarterback. It was very cool.
24:48 Sam Fragoso? Yeah.
24:48 Speaker 01 And then there was another friend of my sister's who like taught me about the Allman Brothers and there wasn't a lot of like cool music being listened to in my high school, but learning about the Allman Brothers at a young age. And then a couple of teachers, English teachers particularly, one, his name is Frank Finzway. And I really credit him with the like early stages of teaching me how to think.
25:12 Sam Fragoso? How do you mean?
25:13 Speaker 01 Well, he would show us footage of Adolf Hitler giving speeches in Nazi Germany. And he would challenge us on the idea that if we were our age in Germany at that time, are we sure that we wouldn't have been caught up in the sweep of Nazism? And if we're sure, how could we be sure? Things like that, that just went far beyond like, just like teaching the canon. Let's read Huck Finn.
25:41 Sam Fragoso? And do you think you've carried that open mindedness in presenting conservative voices in this new issue of GQ?
25:48 Speaker 01 I don't know if I can like directly draw a line, but I absolutely think they're correlated. His class was just, it really like, felt like my brain became my own. I don't, it was almost like growing into a way of thinking that you already had. And I've had a few experiences like that in my life, and that, that was one of them. Where you're like, oh, somebody older and smarter gave me a framework to understand the way that I already think.
26:12 Sam Fragoso? So where did the music of OutKast begin to contribute to how you were thinking?
26:18 Speaker 01 OutKast really made me feel less lonely, which is very important to a young man. I felt isolated. You mentioned that I grew up in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta, and it was just a bubble, you know? Very classic bubble inside of like, a wild, heaving city.
26:36 Sam Fragoso? What did the bubble look like?
26:38 Speaker 01 Upper, middle-class, white, conservative, South.
26:41 Sam Fragoso? And you were going to a Christian school?
26:42 Speaker 01 Yep, I went to a school called Westminster, which was a Christian junior high and high school I was there for. And all of that felt like a bubble. And I knew it was a bubble. I knew that there was an outside the bubble.
26:52 Sam Fragoso? And did your fellow classmates not think of it like that?
26:56 Speaker 01 I would say being like 14-year-old boys in the 90s, we didn't necessarily have those conversations, but I think I had an instinct to go beyond that wasn't necessarily shared by my classmates. And, and was occasionally, come to think of it, like ridiculed.
27:11 Sam Fragoso? What do you mean?
27:12 Speaker 01 When I started getting into jazz music, I decided to try out for a play. And I got a part, which I later kind of put two and two together and realized that I was a set mover in costume.
27:25 Speaker 01 But the play was Mozart and I became friends with a guy by the name of Brian Parks, who was a fantastic piano player. And he was gigging around Atlanta as like a jazz musician, playing concerts, playing cocktail parties, you know, I would go with him to these parties.
27:44 Sam Fragoso? But how were you ridiculed?
27:46 Speaker 01 Just breaking rank with a group of friends invites ridicule, you know? One thing about the way like social groups worked at the time, at least where I was, if sometimes you like hung out with your new jazz pianist friend and then the next night you wanted to like go back and hang out with the crew that you had always hung out with, you didn't necessarily get called back. It was like, well, where were you last night?
28:10 Sam Fragoso? Right.
28:10 Speaker 01 Like if you break rank, you broke rank.
28:12 Sam Fragoso? They wanted consistency.
28:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, there was loneliness in that for sure. Cause there was like, there was a trade off to doing something different and to being different. It doesn't all just get a pass. You have to like sacrifice for that.
28:24 Sam Fragoso? So having broken rank.
28:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:26 Sam Fragoso? Take me to the night of September 29th, 1998. You're 17, at Lennox Tower Records.
28:33 Speaker 01 Ah, yes.
28:34 Sam Fragoso? What are you in line for that evening?
28:39 Speaker 01 I think it was probably a Monday night in Atlanta because albums used to come out on Tuesdays instead of Fridays. So Monday at midnight, 1998 Outkast Equimini is coming out. And they were doing a signing of the album on release night at the Tower Records in Atlanta, my hometown, of course, their hometown. So I drive up there by myself. I probably got there around 11:30. The line was out Tower Records into the parking lot. And I don't know how long I was in line, 45 minutes or something like that. And the whole time, what am I thinking about?
29:15 Sam Fragoso? I suspect you're rehearsing what you want to say to them.
29:17 Speaker 01 Exactly. I'm about to meet my heroes. They're sitting right there at that table and I have 45 minutes to figure out what to say.
29:25 Sam Fragoso? What do your drafts sound like?
29:27 Speaker 01 I was probably recognizing that everything I had to say sounded really stupid.
29:31 Sam Fragoso? Okay, so give me some dumb lines.
29:33 Speaker 01 Um, you know, I grew up two miles from here. Your music means so much to me. You know, when I first heard, Andre, when I first heard you say. Rap about the eighty six Lithonia headed to Decatur. I've been on that bus before and that made me feel something like, what's he gonna say? Cool.
29:50 Sam Fragoso? I'm so glad you felt less alone.
29:52 Speaker 01 You two have been on a bus, my friend. You know what I mean? There's like, none of them left anything interesting for them to say. But anyway, I was gonna do it my best. I didn't have resolution. And then I get up and it's my turn and I step up and Andre and Big Boy are deep in conversation with each other. And one of them, Sharpie signs the interior of my album booklet, passes it to the other one who keeps talking to themselves. He signs it. They look at me, hand it back, kind of give me a head nod. And I look at both of them and I give them a head nod and I walk out.
30:32 Speaker 01 Now, I think I had a fiery ball of conflicted feelings upon getting in my car. But I put the album in and I drove around and I listened to it and I dealt with that. But it has been quite joyous many years later to tell that story to each of them and to have them laugh.
30:52 Sam Fragoso? So from the fiery ball of conflicted feelings.
30:55 Speaker 01 Yes.
30:55 Sam Fragoso? Will goes to New York, attends Columbia, graduates and quickly gets a job at the Fader.
31:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:02 Sam Fragoso? Now, you've described your time at the Fader as, quote, "a mix of hard work and alcoholism."
31:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's true.
31:12 Sam Fragoso? What did that look like?
31:13 Speaker 01 I was at the Fader from two thousand and three until April of two thousand and seven. It was about four years.
31:19 Sam Fragoso? So New York's going through a whole bunch of interesting musical moments at the time.
31:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, and artistic.
31:25 Sam Fragoso? The Meet Me in the Bathroom era, Rap is Changing.
31:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, for me, I wrote about this in a recent editor's letter. It was like, wow, I'm at the same bar as Ryan McGinley. Cause at the time, what like Dashno and Ryan McGinley were doing was like extremely exciting. And I just felt like an overgrown idiot kid who didn't skate and didn't write graffiti and wasn't cool like any of that. Like that was just, I'm from Atlanta. I grew up, you know, playing AAU basketball.
31:58 Sam Fragoso? Mm hmm.
31:58 Speaker 01 But anyway, at the time, it was burgeoning alcoholism. It wasn't the real deal yet, I guess.
32:04 Sam Fragoso? What does that mean exactly?
32:06 Speaker 01 It was just work hard, play hard. Like, The Fader was a magazine office on 23rd Street, but felt very downtown. And we just were this small group of like five, six people, a changing cast of characters over the four and a half years I was there. But five or six people who were doing this thing soup to nuts. The first time I went out on a writing assignment, the photographer was with me. And so I was learning about photography. I was learning about graphic design. I was fact checking and copy editing the writing of everybody else. We were all editing everything together. You really learned how to put a magazine together holistically. And I was very young and very excited. But then partying really hard, going
32:48 Speaker 01 out to four concerts a night. We knew everybody at like Mercury Lounge and Bowery Ballroom and pianos and you could just walk in. You didn't like have to have a ticket to the show. You'd just walk in, see two songs. If you liked it, you'd stay for more. If you didn't like it, you'd go back to Max Fish and go out to somewhere else. So.
33:04 Sam Fragoso? When you, when you look at that period, do you look back on it with fondness?
33:08 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, absolutely. I don't think like any kind of crazy, you know, sepia tone nostalgia or anything like that, but definitely fondness, although I remember the insecurity.
33:18 Sam Fragoso? I've seen some old photos of you from that era. You look great. I mean, the outfits are kind of fantastic.
33:27 Speaker 01 Thank you. Big hair.
33:28 Sam Fragoso? White guys in New York, you might as well be Wilt Chamberlain down there. I mean, what were you insecure about? What was nacking at you?
33:35 Speaker 01 I think that I realized in college that I wanted to figure out how to be a writer for a living. I wanted a creative life. And I didn't know how to get that necessarily, although once I started at The Fader, I had a first step. And I didn't know if, for lack of a better way to put it, I was like allowed to have it. Everybody that I grew up around, their parents were like doctors, lawyers, cable company executives, you know, that's the milieu that I grew up in.
34:05 Sam Fragoso? Writing for The Fader probably doesn't fit into that.
34:08 Speaker 01 Yes.
34:08 Sam Fragoso? Were they supportive?
34:09 Speaker 01 They were super supportive. There was a very funny moment where my mom's father, my grandfather, who was Extremely confused by the fader, which I would send to him. And he just found there to be a lot of cussing in it for no reason. But then I sent him an issue and inside the front cover was a Mercedes Benz ad. And he was like, wow, if Mercedes Benz is going to pay these idiots to align with what they're doing, maybe it is somewhat legitimate. But otherwise, yeah, this is really total support. So I, I just didn't know how to have a creative life, especially as a young person. You feel like nobody else is having a like insecurity meltdown inside their head.
34:53 Speaker 01 It turns out everybody else is. You know, one of my best friends, Jason Nocido, who at the time was like one of those people, I still look up to him, but I really looked up to him. He was a really amazing photographer who shot for the fader and other places. And he tells the story of, he thought I was kind of a dick because I like wasn't socially ingratiating. I was standoffish. I have since told him that's because I was having my own internal meltdown. It was just like, I'm so happy I'm here. This is exactly where I want to be, but I'm not sure if I belong. So let me have this Budweiser in one hand and this shot of Jameson in the other hand, and I'm just going to hold up the wall.
35:33 Sam Fragoso? So the burgeoning alcoholism was then.
35:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:36 Sam Fragoso? When did it become something else?
35:38 Speaker 01 Well, it's all just a continuation, but it's really like workaholism, alcoholism. You can't really split the difference between the two.
35:46 Sam Fragoso? So you go to GQ.
35:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
35:48 Sam Fragoso? After the fader, this is around 2008?
35:51 Speaker 01 Uh, 2007.
35:53 Sam Fragoso? Okay, working at the offices in Times Square?
35:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, for Times Square.
35:57 Sam Fragoso? And your life looked like what?
35:59 Speaker 01 I would work most nights until somewhere between 10:00 PM and 1:00 AM. And then I would go out from there.
36:07 Sam Fragoso? On weekdays?
36:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, on weekdays.
36:09 Sam Fragoso? And then you'd go to bed at what time?
36:11 Speaker 01 Somewhere between two and 6:30. Then you got to get up and report for duty. And then you rinse and repeat and things start to get a little hairy.
36:19 Sam Fragoso? It's far from the Will Welch we started from at the beginning of this episode, the global editorial director who has to have like Zooms with different continents.
36:29 Speaker 01 Yes, I was not getting up to go to the boxing gym at 5:45 a.m.
36:33 Sam Fragoso? Is that what you're doing now?
36:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:34 Sam Fragoso? So tell me about those early years at GQ. There's been a lot of books written about this era.
36:41 Speaker 01 Everybody's getting their books off right now.
36:43 Sam Fragoso? Graydon Carter has a brand new book. I think the title is When the Going Was Good.
36:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:48 Sam Fragoso? Carter was, of course, the longstanding editor of Vanity Fair.
36:52 Speaker 01 Yep.
36:52 Sam Fragoso? When he says the going was good.
36:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
36:55 Sam Fragoso? What did good look like at GQ?
37:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, high times for sure. When I first got a call to come work at GQ, I was like, what do I know about GQ? I'm like downtown rock and roll guy. And what I found was a really like humming and creative place that was very well staffed with a bunch of very experienced adults. Jim Nelson is the editor in chief, is a fantastic long form story editor. Andy Ward, I think his title was probably executive editor then. Joel Lovell, who has had a lot of hit podcasts in your space. All these great editors, writers, just a big cast of characters. And we had some of the best magazine writers in the world working on stories.
37:41 Sam Fragoso? And just a shortlist for people to remember.
37:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:44 Sam Fragoso? There's George Saunders, writing about tent city and homelessness in Fresno. There's Elizabeth Gilbert, two weeks drinking through Provence. Taffy Brodesser-Ackner on Searching for Sugar Daddies, an amazing article. Amy Wallace on everything and everyone.
38:00 Speaker 01 Amy Wallace's D'Angelo story was like a high point for me.
38:04 Sam Fragoso? An all-timer.
38:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:05 Sam Fragoso? This was an era where the magazine felt especially literary.
38:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
38:09 Sam Fragoso? Did you think in that moment that you were living through this sort of renaissance for the magazine?
38:15 Speaker 01 No, I thought I had come to a place where greatness was like expected and was just the bar every day. And that was incredibly exciting. And I remember I did some sidebar to a Chris Heath piece. And Chris thought the sidebar was good and went out of his way to come up to me in the office and say, Are you Will? Did you do that sidebar? And I was like, yeah. He was like, that was really good. That was really additive. It's like, oh, my God.
38:43 Sam Fragoso? What did you want for yourself in those early years at GQ?
38:47 Speaker 01 I was really just thinking about how to be a really meaningful contributor in as many ways as possible. And that meant writing and editing small front of book stories. That meant coming up with big ideas and small ideas and fearlessly pitching them in all the meetings. That meant leveraging the connections that I had developed at the Fader in the music space to not only like get the right music into the magazine, but then to also go get very hard to get musicians to say yes to being in GQ. I just wanted to be like as involved in as many places as I could. Like I spent a couple of years getting D'Angelo to say yes to be in GQ. And then ultimately Amy Wallace delivered that incredible piece.
39:31 Sam Fragoso? But this has been a recurring trend of yours. I mean, Andre 3000, you wrote a profile of him. He never agrees to interviews. He does a little more now, but at the time he certainly didn't. D'Angelo famously perseveres. Your first cover as editor in chief of GQ, Frank Ocean.
39:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, he just doesn't do stuff.
39:49 Sam Fragoso? Yeah. So how do you go about doing that?
39:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, that is what we did at the Fader. And the modus operandi at the Fader became when Phil Bicker became the creative director was we need to go to their house and photograph them with their friends in their own environment. If the talent won't let us in their house, then we need to like go to their favorite bar or to their recording studio or to their friend's house or wherever they actually hang out. And we're going to do this kind of like stylized reportage photography that has like a really specific vibe. Yeah, I learned the process of reaching out to artists, dealing with their representatives if they have them.
40:25 Sam Fragoso? And are you often the one making the impassioned pitches?
40:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, you're doing the whole thing.
40:30 Sam Fragoso? For D'Angelo, what do you say?
40:32 Speaker 01 Well, D'Angelo, it was about getting to know Dom Trinier, who was his manager, one of the greatest voices you'll ever imagine. And I got to know Dom and like, we chopped it up and he thought that D'Angelo being in GQ would be great. But he had as little ideas I did about how to make that happen. But we set an intention and just started chipping away at it. And there were a lot of false starts and ups and downs to the process. But to me, it was like all worth it because Voodoo is one of the greatest pieces of recorded music ever. And I also think that if you're just getting people to do the magazine who like doing magazines, your magazine sucks. Very simple.
41:11 Speaker 01 And I think probably to the audience, maybe, or to somebody who, you know, works at a different magazine, like, well, yeah, of course, GQ can get D'Angelo. That makes sense. But GQ is only GQ because of a history of figuring out how to get D'Angelo.
41:26 Sam Fragoso? It always takes more work than people think.
41:28 Speaker 01 Yeah. And there's only a magic there if you are really diligent about cultivating the magic.
41:34 Sam Fragoso? So give me the flip side to the when the going was good era. You know, the kind of behavior that was permitted in the office. The outrageous amounts of money spent. And I remember when I started, you know, in journalism at like 18, you know, as an intern, you were the lackey.
41:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
41:52 Sam Fragoso? And that was, that was just part of it.
41:54 Speaker 01 At GQ, there was a incredible creative environment. So I remember it was my first week at GQ, maybe my first day, I don't remember exactly. And we were all walking into a story ideas meeting. So it was my first staff wide story ideas meeting. And I walk into Mark Healy's office because he was the editor with an office that I was closest to. And I said, when we go into this meeting, I'm not like the music editor. I'm just like the new guy, but if I have a music idea, can I pitch it? And he was like, yeah, you can pitch whatever you want. So I was on like my first or second day, I was in my mid twenties. Nobody knew who I was. I was totally clueless about big magazine. And it was like, yes, if you have ideas, you can share them.
42:37 Speaker 01 So that to me is the most important part. There were times when I was like, huh, I don't think that spending all that money is making this better.
42:47 Sam Fragoso? Like the photo shoots.
42:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, but it was actually less about a big grand cover shoot and more just like using absolutely like some of the best still life photographers in the world to shoot little thumbnails for the front of the book. You know what I mean? Like, oh, it's like, oh, you you actually showed the wrong side of the sneaker. This is about stripes and the stripes on the other side. So we need you to reshoot it. So we're sending the sneakers back to you. Some of that stuff, you're just like, is this making it better? Like,
43:15 Sam Fragoso? Have you read Fleishman is in Trouble?
43:17 Speaker 01 I have, yeah.
43:17 Sam Fragoso? Yes. I want to play a clip from that show.
43:21 Speaker 02 I worked at a men's magazine, the only place I ever wanted to work.
43:26 Speaker 03 Killed it.
43:27 Speaker 02 I loved it there. I was an editorial assistant, then a news assistant.
43:33 Speaker 03 Hey, you're taking notes, right?
43:35 Speaker 02 Yeah.
43:37 Speaker 02 All I wanted was to be a writer with my stories up there. To write those stories seemed to me to be the closest approximation of actually living.
43:48 Speaker 02 Hey, Archer.
43:49 Speaker 04 Hey.
43:49 Speaker 02 I work, I work at the magazine.
43:52 Speaker 04 I've never seen you there.
43:54 Speaker 02 Oh, well, I'm I'm such a huge fan of yours. I had to just come and hear you see, see you speak. That piece that you wrote about the fountain of youth in the Andes, that story completely changed my life when I read it. It was,
44:10 Speaker 04 What's your name?
44:12 Speaker 02 Libby Slater.
44:16 Speaker 04 There you go.
44:16 Speaker 02 Thank you.
44:19 Sam Fragoso? Do you think it was gendered in that way? If you were a man, it was a little easier for you at the magazine?
44:25 Speaker 01 Of course. Yes, I do.
44:27 Sam Fragoso? When do you think the culture changed from that time?
44:29 Speaker 01 I think the culture changed over time, but I think there was a opportunity when I became editor to rethink the structures and certainly not a knock on Jim Nelson or the other leadership from before me. But when you get a new era, you're able to examine things. And I thought there were all sorts of ways of working from, Creative to more like office culture that I had the opportunity to shift. And frankly, to do it like more the way my generation does things. So a big example of this is just like in fashion. There's this feeling of like, when I was an assistant, all this stuff was asked of me. And then that is why I became great at what I do.
45:14 Speaker 01 Because such demands were put on me as an assistant. So now I need to do that, not only so that I get what I need, but so that these young people become great the way that I did, you know? And again, this isn't, I'm not like talking about anyone specific here. It's just like, a lot of it has to do with the, the nature of freelancers, you know? Photo shoots, fashion, et cetera. I just think we've been able to really update the software.
45:41 Sam Fragoso? So I want to talk about your road to getting the job as editor in chief.
45:45 Speaker 01 Sure.
45:45 Sam Fragoso? Before we get there, you talked about the beer and the Jameson being your drink. And I heard you talk about this with your friend, Jason Isbell.
45:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
45:54 Sam Fragoso? On Des Sex and Money. And you talk about how somewhere between 2012 and 2014, I don't know when, you walk out of the office in Times Square.
46:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:03 Sam Fragoso? And you call Jason and you say something to the extent of, this is not working anymore.
46:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
46:10 Sam Fragoso? What is that phone call?
46:11 Speaker 01 That phone call was like, you seem to be on a raft. Like, throw your boy a lifeline. I'm about to drown.
46:19 Sam Fragoso? What did you need saving from?
46:22 Speaker 01 I needed somebody to give me encouragement and a little bucking up, a little confidence that I could overcome my dependence on getting fucked up, on drugs and alcohol. Yeah, that's what, that's what the call was about. It was like, okay, like you tackled this, um, what's the first step?
46:41 Sam Fragoso? And what did he say?
46:42 Speaker 01 Um, well, first of all, he just said, like, you're gonna be okay. If I'm being honest, I think there was an element of. I was so put together. I was a really successful young editor at GQ. It was all working, you know, I didn't like to people who knew me really well, which Jason does, but I guess it's just a matter of degrees. He was a little bit like, maybe it's not as bad as you feel right now. And I was kind of like, no, it is. And he was like, okay, cool. And so what I did at his suggestion is I went and I found, uh, I think I went to an NA meeting. So Narcotics
47:24 Speaker 01 Anonymous on St. Mark's Place. Um, I just thought, if you need to go to a meeting, St. Mark seems like the place to do it. It was awesome. It was grisly and great.
47:36 Sam Fragoso? Had you had moments before that call to Jason where you thought, okay, I may need to change something here?
47:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was working with a therapist and I was, um, he was very old, which I do think had something to do with this perspective. He was a little bit like, you're probably fine. You just need to get this thing under control. And so we had tried this system of counting drinks, which was like, you can have one, two, three drinks max on a night.
48:06 Sam Fragoso? Okay.
48:06 Speaker 01 Turns out when you have your third drink, you don't care about counting drinks anymore at all. So it's like three becomes 11, like really fast.
48:15 Sam Fragoso? Okay. And it would become three to 11 pretty quick.
48:17 Speaker 01 Yeah. By your third drink, you're like, yeah, whatever. He said, it's not that big of a problem. Anyway, that's fine. And so that night, there were just a lot of conversations with my wife. And then there's an older couple that are like spiritual parents to us. They're like our spiritual godparents. So they were very involved as well and giving guidance to both Heidi and I. Um, and it was a, you know, it's a whole process from there.
48:45 Sam Fragoso? It was in like May of 2014?
48:48 Speaker 01 It was fall of 2013.
48:50 Sam Fragoso? Fall of 2013?
48:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
48:51 Sam Fragoso? How do you go about embarking on that, brick by brick? How do you, how do you start recreating your life?
48:56 Speaker 01 Yeah. Um, well, I guess it brought to the foreground, something that I've always had in various forms, which is a spiritual practice. It required that I like examine my values and develop.
49:14 Speaker 01 A connection to the spiritual side of me that had always been there and to like nurture that instead of just like being out every night, like trying not to feel anything.
49:22 Sam Fragoso? So, so the drugs and alcohol were muting that?
49:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I think I liked to overwork and then I liked to overdrink. And I have to be careful now about ways that I like get high off adrenaline, you know?
49:34 Sam Fragoso? What do you mean?
49:36 Speaker 01 Well, the body is a pharmacy. Like, we are full of all of our own chemicals. And it is a great first step to stop getting high off external chemicals that you apply to the body, but it's also very easy to get high off just your own pharmacology. And so I have to be careful about using work or travel or an overpacked schedule or all these things. I'm gonna wake up, I'm gonna go to the boxing gym and then I'm gonna go to this and then I've got this event that night and then I'm gonna run to the airport and I'm gonna get on the plane and I'm gonna get to LA. I'm gonna shoot that night and then I'm gonna get on the red eye and come back because I have to be like, that is a way to like live high on adrenaline.
50:19 Speaker 01 And so, yeah, I mean, it's, it, it continues to be this long process of like unpeeling this, finding different things, you know, the, the, the phone is another one. Like, how can I just numb out by paying attention to this instead of whatever's going on inside of me?
50:38 Sam Fragoso? And how does, how does this journey intertwine with you working more and more at GQ and, and, and being promoted higher and higher up the ranks?
50:45 Speaker 01 Well, the way that I was doing it before, which was being exemplary in the fact that I was like completely would do anything to deliver excellence to GQ and was like overworking and then going out anyway and being on that spin cycle that we mentioned earlier, that can't last forever. So getting the drugs and alcohol out of my life was step one.
51:09 Sam Fragoso? Was that easy?
51:11 Speaker 01 You know, it would be crazy to answer yes to that, but I very quickly, and I thank God for this, I very quickly realized that I preferred feeling good to feeling really bad.
51:24 Sam Fragoso? The next day?
51:25 Speaker 01 Yes, but in general, yeah, the next day is the obvious one. And I do think when you're in that cycle, you think you deserve the bad feelings that come with the next day, but then. It starts to get to be nighttime and you're like, I gotta get out of it. I've been feeling this way all day. I gotta get out and that that starts it all over again. But it's bigger than that, you know, and I came to really value clarity, a newfound confidence that I felt. I was able to reintroduce myself to social situations in which other people were doing God knows what without jeopardizing my own cleanness. And I don't know what to say other than I'm just lucky.
52:05 Sam Fragoso? I was thinking about that because the times I have met you
52:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
52:08 Sam Fragoso? are at parties.
52:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, there are people who know me from coming to GQ parties who have no idea that, you know, I haven't had a drink in 13 years or whatever it is.
52:18 Sam Fragoso? I didn't, I did not. So tell me about the spiritual practice that kind of emerges and takes the place of the addiction you had.
52:25 Speaker 01 Well, as I kind of hinted, it was like, it was always in me.
52:30 Sam Fragoso? It was dormant.
52:30 Speaker 01 Not even dormant. It was overshadowed. And that had looked like, you know, I grew up going to Catholic church. I was an altar boy. I had a fairly brief flirtation with one of those like Georgia style mega youth groups where I was like the backup drummer in the Christian rock band and stuff. Kind of figured out fairly quickly that that wasn't the path for me. And then honestly discovered like through literature, through reading the myth of Sisyphus, a spirituality that wasn't attached to a traditional religion or a traditional understanding of God. And I discovered that in 11th grade and exploring that carried me through college and my early twenties.
53:10 Speaker 01 And then when I met my wife, who's a very spiritual person, this started developing further and saying any of it out loud almost sounds silly, but I just became like better understanding of Buddhism and Hinduism. I don't know.
53:23 Sam Fragoso? What about the tattoo?
53:25 Speaker 01 Want nothing?
53:26 Sam Fragoso? Yeah. When did you get that tattoo?
53:28 Speaker 01 I don't remember exactly. I was in my late 30s. I was old to be getting my, this was my second tattoo.
53:34 Sam Fragoso? What was your first one?
53:35 Speaker 01 The Stick and Poke, I'll Get Up and Fly Away, which is from the Grateful Dead song Warfrat, which is a bit of a sobriety anthem. Grateful Dead land, the Warfrats were sober deadheads, and they would do meetings during set breaks. To cut a long story short, I found the work of Ram Dass through my friend Wes and through my wife Heidi. And I had like a profound spiritual awakening as a result of addictively listening to old Ram Dass lectures, which they have organized into a podcast.
54:09 Sam Fragoso? And then you go profile him for GQ, I think in 2018, right?
54:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
54:12 Sam Fragoso? What was that process?
54:14 Speaker 01 I reached out to Raghu Marcus. He runs Ram Dass's estate. And I said, I'm the editor of this spinoff magazine of GQ called GQ Style, and I would love to come to Hawaii and profile Ram Dass. And he was like, what? Like, what does GQ want with Ram Dass? So this is obviously before COVID and before Zoom was an everyday part of our life. And he wanted to get on Skype, I think just so he could look into my eyes and try to figure out like what the connection was between GQ's style and Ram Dass. And yeah, they invited me and the photographer Pari Dukovich and the painter Wes Lang came as well
54:52 Speaker 01 to Maui to spend time interviewing Ram Dass, which was like one of the richest experiences of my life and career, both.
55:00 Sam Fragoso? Is there a moment from that trip, when you think back on it now, is there a moment that you hold on to?
55:05 Speaker 01 Yeah. Ram Dass had suffered a pretty debilitating stroke. And it affected the part of his brain that summons words. So he would speak with these incredibly dramatic pauses. And he was talking about his day and he, we were sitting up in this kind of perch above the living room in his house that looked out over all these tropical trees that were full of birds and the sea breeze was coming in. And he was talking about how he comes up there after like being bathed and having breakfast. And he just begins to like sink into the moment. And he was describing that process and it really sounded like he was leading us on a meditation, which especially with these long.
55:49 Speaker 01 Epic pauses between each word and the like sound of the birds and the sea breeze and you know, he, he coined the term be here now and he like really brought me down into presence in a profound way that I wasn't capable of doing myself at that time. And he was able to almost create this like vortex of nounness and share it, which was incredible.
56:16 Sam Fragoso? What's amazing is with that presence and the presence of mind, come 2018, 2019, you get the job as editor in chief of GQ. And Jim Nelson, who has been talked about lovingly on this podcast is is a hero to many who love magazine journalism. You take his spot and not at an easy time. I mean, the New York Times reported as you got the job. Mr. Nelson's departure comes amid financial woes at Conde Nast, which lost more than 20% of its ad pages last year. Entering Conde Nast in what was a tumultuous period. How did you think about the magazine you wanted to make?
56:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:57 Sam Fragoso? In contrast to the magazine Nelson had made.
57:00 Speaker 01 Well, I always feel like I can say this honestly because I was like bleeding, sweating and crying for Jim's version of the magazine. But I think GQ at that time was still striving to be this mega general interest men's magazine. Like there was a time, you know, nineties and aughts where GQ's salespeople could walk into a meeting and say, GQ speaks to American men. And that was true because there was just like network television, newspapers like the Times, the Post and the Journal, magazines like GQ and Esquire. And like in terms of speaking to American men, yeah, GQ was one of very few options.
57:40 Speaker 01 But now it's 2018 and the internet has changed everything, obviously. And my conception was that we were now in an extremely niche driven culture and that being broad open barn door for all men was impossible and was no longer working. And what you had to do was be super niche, like the internet runs on niche. Like if you, Sam, launch a great idea called Talk Easy and you do one thing really, really well, you can build a platform that is more powerful than some media company platform that's like trying to do a bunch of stuff.
58:19 Speaker 01 So I felt that it was time to refocus GQ as the preeminent global men's fashion magazine.
58:27 Sam Fragoso? And but but what and what is lost in that refocusing?
58:31 Speaker 01 Well, for one thing, the way that we would cast the magazine would be very specific, you know, versus like, oh, well, this person is broadly popular. It's like, we don't care about that. We want to go for very specific people. This is like a big one in terms of change, and I think something that my version of the magazine has been critiqued for, doing long-form journalism about literally anything. There was a time where GQ was really flexing its muscle and its breadth by being able to cover anything. You know, it was like a full-on fashion magazine and a full-on politics magazine and a full-on entertainment magazine, like E Weekly or something, you know, it was all those things crashed into one.
59:15 Speaker 01 And I thought, we need to focus this.
59:17 Sam Fragoso? So you're leaving that long-form stuff to The New Yorker?
59:20 Speaker 01 We are leaving elements of it. I mean, we still do a lot of it and we do it very seriously and very proudly, but not with the breadth. And frankly, you know, over time, our ability to prioritize everything budgetarily also changed.
59:34 Sam Fragoso? Do you read the critiques?
59:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, of course.
59:37 Sam Fragoso? I mean, the one, the one that, and the research, the one that kept coming back.
59:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:40 Sam Fragoso? Lauren Sherman in Puck wrote, "When Welch took over GQ in 2018, he unemotionally narrowed its focus, catering to a generation of fashion enthusiasts, the kind that obsessed over Virgil Abloh designs at Louis Vuitton and the advertisers desperate to reach them. The investigations and intrepid reporting that defined the Jim Nelson era all but disappeared."
1:00:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, that doesn't read to me like a critique.
1:00:07 Sam Fragoso? Unemotionally?
1:00:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think I lead with my emotions, but when I believe something is right, I'm very decisive about it. And so it wasn't with a lot of like hemming and hawing. That's probably different from emotions. It was like, this is the path forward for this incredible, beautiful legacy brand.
1:00:26 Sam Fragoso? The path forward to make it financially solvent.
1:00:29 Speaker 01 Yes, and my job is number one, make it as culturally relevant as humanly possible. And two, make sure that the financial solvency is following.
1:00:38 Sam Fragoso? Yeah, and it has had a remarkable turn in that way. Last year on the podcast, Print is Dead, you said, "The modern GQ reader reads like a lady."
1:00:51 Sam Fragoso? I'm serving her.
1:00:54 Speaker 01 Okay, that...
1:00:56 Speaker 01 Do you have the broader context for that?
1:00:59 Sam Fragoso? It's not gonna help you, but...
1:01:01 Speaker 01 I think it is gonna help me.
1:01:02 Sam Fragoso? It was in the context of GQ operating like a women's magazine. One of the hosts said, quote, "It feels like now it's operating in a more traditional women's magazine economics." Like, the length of the stories and the depth of the stories and the focus on fashion, that's the world I think the women have come from.
1:01:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I think I have thick skin and a good sense of humor about this stuff. And so I'd know exactly what she meant, and I'm fine with that reading of what we're doing. I also think this issue, the state of the American male, like complicates that narrative a little bit. But the joke that I was making there, "The GQ man reads like a lady," is like, yeah, we're just like into shallow fashion stuff. And that, to me, has large elements of truth and is really funny. I often say that, dude, it's just a magazine about pants. Like, I don't know what to... But what I'm saying is, I am not embarrassed at the idea of a men's fashion magazine.
1:01:57 Sam Fragoso? Say more about that.
1:01:57 Speaker 01 If we can be the definitive global men's fashion magazine and to bring in culture and to still bring in beautiful, reported, long-form journalism when it makes sense and when topically they're part of our niche and to do... I think some of the best men's fashion photography, some of the best celebrity journalism that's out there, if we can do all those things and appeal to everybody around the world who's interested in that, that to me is a viable 2018 and beyond, 2025 and beyond iteration of GQ. And I'm not sure that being all things to all people is going to work
1:02:38 Speaker 01 for us going forward. In fact, I know that we have to be more decisive than that. And if losing some of the incredible tradition of award-winning journalism means setting GQ up for success in the long term, for me, it makes sense.
1:02:57 Sam Fragoso? Tell me what success for GQ in the long term looks like to you, to bring us back to the present.
1:03:03 Speaker 01 I think a great magazine is able to profoundly impact the culture of the audience that it serves, or the world that it covers. That's what it's all about to me. That's the only thing I care about. That's the only thing I strive for. I have other priorities that need to line up behind that. But to me, that's the difference between a good magazine, iffy magazine. The balance sheet matters, but the profit only matters if you're having a cultural impact. The loss has to be looked at through the same rubric.
1:03:32 Sam Fragoso? The last inside baseball question for us.
1:03:33 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:03:34 Sam Fragoso? You know, as someone who has done interviews since I was 16.
1:03:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:38 Sam Fragoso? Have been doing the show for nine years, 10 next year.
1:03:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:42 Sam Fragoso? How do you think about access to the people you're profiling in 2025? Because all of these people, for the most part, whether it's actors, musicians.
1:03:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:52 Sam Fragoso? They do have their own social media.
1:03:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:03:55 Sam Fragoso? Accounts, and it's made their desire and willingness to agree to the Amy Wallace three-week profile, I think, much harder.
1:04:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:04:04 Sam Fragoso? Last year, you got a bunch of grief about the Beyonce cover and she was selling whiskey or something or another, and there was an email correspondence for an interview. How are you thinking about that dynamic in 2025?
1:04:16 Speaker 01 We get better access than just about any other outlet out there. And I'm willing to take flak. If there are a few people in the media, which I think is a fair assessment of the flak that I caught for allowing Beyonce to do an email interview, there were a few people in the media who thought that that was embarrassing.
1:04:40 Speaker 01 I thought the trade off was clear and worth it. So I made the decision that I made.
1:04:45 Sam Fragoso? And the trade off to you look like what?
1:04:47 Speaker 01 Well, Beyonce famously doesn't do interviews at all. She has mostly written pieces that were then published by the magazines that she did. And we were able to have a real back and forth with her. And I think get substantive material from her and personal material that she doesn't often share as a result of what we negotiated. And I just think she's an exciting and powerful force. And because we were able to get like real material from her that I stand behind, I think it was worthwhile. And I also think that if you look at the access that we get across the board, it is rivaled by few, I guess would be the way to put it.
1:05:30 Speaker 01 And we do that by having a really dynamic, but very demanding bar of excellence that we need. And I think the majority of our celebrity profiles required two, two hour interview sessions. And I don't think there are many out there that are getting that anymore.
1:05:47 Sam Fragoso? And is that negotiation more difficult in 2025 than it was in the past?
1:05:51 Speaker 01 It is, but by standing our ground on it. And I also, I think, hopefully proving issue by issue that like,
1:05:59 Sam Fragoso? Yeah.
1:06:00 Speaker 01 GQ asks a lot, but it's worth it. You get back more than you give.
1:06:03 Sam Fragoso? High reward.
1:06:04 Speaker 01 From the perspective of like the subject and the people advising the subject.
1:06:07 Sam Fragoso? And the impact it makes.
1:06:08 Speaker 01 Yeah. If we were asking that and we weren't delivering much that was interesting to an audience, then we wouldn't be getting it.
1:06:20 Sam Fragoso? All right, after one last break, the end of my conversation with Will Welch.
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1:07:53 Sam Fragoso? As we go, I want to wrap our way back around to the issue. I was thinking about the tattoo on your hand.
1:07:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:07:58 Sam Fragoso? Want nothing.
1:07:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:08:00 Sam Fragoso? Which, like, as someone who's the editor-in-chief of GQ.
1:08:04 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:08:05 Sam Fragoso? A magazine that instills a desire to want plenty of things.
1:08:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:08:10 Sam Fragoso? How do you hold this juxtaposition?
1:08:12 Speaker 01 I think you're, yeah, you're putting your finger on something that is hilarious.
1:08:19 Speaker 01 For lack of a better way to put it. There are many lessons that anyone could glean from any number of places, but that, for me, one of the ones that came from Ram Dass was just about attachment. And the basic idea is that life is just grist for the mill of awakening. What we're all here to do is to wake up, wake up. I certainly was asleep and needed to wake up on all these different levels. And what nothing is just one way of making a declaration about attachment. And I think it's fine to like, want to have the nice suit that you're wearing now. But are you really attached to having it? Or what are you really attached to in life and why?
1:09:01 Speaker 01 And how can you renegotiate, loosen those attachments? And this is just one way of putting it. And it happens to be screaming from my hand. And I happen to be the editor of a fashion magazine that is full of desirable things.
1:09:17 Sam Fragoso? Is GQ undergoing a spiritual awakening?
1:09:21 Speaker 01 You know, I think it's always had that as part of it. It certainly did under Jim. It had a moral compass, a conscience, a desire to like, play with ideas about fashion and the good life, but to also be looking at just the deeper elements of what it means to be a human in these eras, you know?
1:09:40 Sam Fragoso? The theme of this year's Met Gala was dandyism. And it was the first exhibition devoted to menswear in more than 20 years, I think.
1:09:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:09:48 Sam Fragoso? Big picture. What does this celebration of menswear say about this moment in men's fashion? What does it portend?
1:09:56 Speaker 01 I think that for many years, very clearly, men were just the sideshow at best. And, you know, the great fashion Olympics. And that has been changing. And I think part of what the exhibition about dandyism that the gala was in celebration of was that there has always been this really interesting dance happening with men and, and the way that we array ourselves and what we're claiming about ourselves and what we're putting forth into the world through our clothes. And I guess your question's about like, GQ and its evolution and am I doing things emotionally or unemotionally and all that? Of course, it's like, of course, it's all emotionally driven, you know?
1:10:41 Speaker 01 And I've wanted both the fashion life of men and the emotional life of men to fully live in the pages and tried to connect. Basically, the the conversation that we started in 2019 with the new masculinity issue and then have hit hard again in 2025 with the state of the American male. We've been trying to keep that conversation going the whole time. And that's every interview we do, like your interviews. We're not just talking about like, tell us about your project. It was like Brad Pitt, how did you grow up in the Ozarks? What was your relationship with your dad like? All of these things.
1:11:16 Sam Fragoso? I'm glad you mentioned that because my last question for you.
1:11:19 Speaker 01 Tell me it's about the Ozarks.
1:11:20 Sam Fragoso? Will Welch, 17 years old, in a line at Tower Records, picking up a copy of Equimini by himself, had lines rehearsed to say to Andre 3000, did not get to say them. And I wonder, in terms of an emotional moment, I noticed that your outfit at the Met Gala was made by someone I was not totally familiar with. And I thought, tell me about the convergence of 17 year old Will and the one before me right now, that night.
1:11:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, when the Met announced that dandyism was the was the theme. And when Anna invited me to go this year, which I always appreciate, I thought, okay, the theme of the Met Gala is black dandyism. How is my six foot six white self going to be appropriately arrayed for this event? And I thought, well, I know arguably the greatest living black dandy in terms of dresser, and he also happens to be a hell of a designer, which was Andre 3000. And so I just texted him and said, I don't know where you're at with making clothes right now, but is there any chance that you would make me something to wear to the Met Gala?
1:12:32 Speaker 01 And he was like in Amsterdam, working on the return of his fashion label. And he just said, yes. And so we embarked on this collaboration. And I do think when I like tap in with 17 year old me, like, how do you feel about this? I'm like freaking out and can't believe it.
1:12:52 Speaker 01 And really like felt that and appreciated that. And we were in the van in the long line to arrive at the Met. And Andre had heard it before, but I was telling the other people in the van about like the Tower Records story and essentially saying like the long road to tonight. But at the same time, I was like, a different relationship to what it means to stand next to or know a hero now than I did at 17, you know? At 17, it was just like peeing my pants, trying to think of something cool to say. I guess it's not that different now, but.
1:13:27 Sam Fragoso? Yeah, what is it now?
1:13:28 Speaker 01 Well, it's more about like, understanding the humanity of people and how complicated it is to have just another person be capable of these incredible feats of greatness, which I would deem OutKast music as incredible feats of greatness, you know? But you don't want to confuse somebody who's capable of incredible feats of greatness for being like an immortal god, because it's just not so.
1:13:54 Sam Fragoso? To close, this editor letter, I think it speaks a lot to this conversation. Maybe you want to read just the end here.
1:14:02 Speaker 01 Oh, boy. Okay.
1:14:05 Speaker 01 All right. Yes, men are awkward. Yes, we are too slow to change. Yes, we are easily and often misguided, but still through our ups and downs, our heroic breakthroughs and our inconceivable missteps, we stumble forever and only forward. Because masculinity, like America itself, can never become what it was before. It is always changing. It is forever new.
1:14:29 Sam Fragoso? It's funny, that line about masculinity also feels like it could be a mission statement for the magazine itself.
1:14:35 Speaker 01 I think so, yeah. Trundling forward, trying to evolve and trying to reach out to our readers and help them do the same. That is the mission.
1:14:45 Sam Fragoso? I so look forward to seeing how you continue doing that in the years ahead. And thank you for all the time today.
1:14:52 Speaker 01 Thank you for having such thoughtful questions for a guy who's usually asking them. I appreciate it.
1:14:57 Sam Fragoso? Will Welch. See you soon.
1:14:58 Speaker 01 Thanks, Sam.
1:15:00 Sam Fragoso? Is that right?
1:15:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:15:02 Sam Fragoso? Okay.
1:15:03 Speaker 01 Great. Really, really good.
1:15:28 Sam Fragoso? And that's our show.
1:15:31 Sam Fragoso? If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to leave us five stars on Spotify. You can leave a review on Apple. If you want to go above and beyond, you can share the program on social media. Tag us at Talk Easy Pod. All of it really does help us continue making the program each and every Sunday. I want to give a special thanks this week to Caroline Brooks, Peyton Hayes, Vince Fairchild, Conde Nast, and of course, our guest, Will Welch. For GQ's special issue of American Masculinity, featuring cover star Glenn Powell, visit our show notes at TalkEasyPod.com. For more episodes, I'd recommend Seth Rogen, Gabriela Hearst, and David Remnick. To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you
1:16:16 Sam Fragoso? like to listen. You can also subscribe to Lemonada Premium for exclusive bonus content and ad-free listening. Just hit the subscribe button on Apple or head to LemonadaPremium.com. If you want to purchase one of our mugs, they come in cream or navy. Visit TalkEasyPod.com/shop. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer, Janix Abraha. Today's talk was edited by Finn Nolan and Corey Attad. It was mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Illustrations by Chris Shannon. Photographs today come from Sarah Schneider with research assistance from Kiki Giorgio. This episode was made in partnership with the good people at Lemonada Media, and I'm Sam Fragoso.
1:17:00 Sam Fragoso? Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next Sunday with Salman Rushdie. Until then, stay safe and so long.
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1:19:03 Speaker 06 Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.
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