It’s a beautiful, blue-sky day in Los Angeles and Instagram star Brock O’Hurn is spending his afternoon just the way you might expect: shirtless. It first went missing where this photo shoot began, high up top of Runyon Canyon, in his trailer where—in what was either a heavy-handed metaphor or a cosmic practical joke—Drake’s “Started from the Bottom” played loudly. And it continues to be missing now, a few hundred yards downhill, where O’Hurn jogs back and forth on a ridge above the city, skyline stretching out below, his liberated pectorals bouncing freely in the twilight of another day in the life of our generation’s Fabio.

Ask O’Hurn how, exactly, you go from being just a guy with an Instagram to a guy who’s super famous because of Instagram and he’ll make it sound like the most normal thing in the world. He had about 10,000 followers on Instagram, and 300 on Facebook, and then he made a video where he put his long hair in a bun, and uploaded it to Facebook. (There’s music playing and it’s all very sexual, and it lit the Internet on fire. You can see it here.) By the end of that month, he had 300,000 Instagram followers—today, he has 1.7 million. That’s it. End of story. And that’s sort of disappointing, because it leaves unanswered that nagging question hovering in the back of your head when you see someone who isn’t a celebrated actor, musician, or artist—really, anyone who isn’t already famous before they get on Instagram—with millions of followers: But, like, how?

But maybe it’s a flawed thing to ask of him—to try and figure out the step-by-step process that accounts for the distance between where he was then and what his life is like now—because O’Hurn isn’t “just a guy”. He’s a 6’7” hulking mass of man with a beard and flowing golden-brown hair that’s regal enough to make random strangers stop him and ask to touch it. O’Hurn —who does have a “normal” job as an actor, model, and jewelry line owner—is also not normal in that he is warmer, nice, more humble and grounded than any average person. (However easy it is to scoff at O’Hurn before you meet him, it’s that much more difficult to not like the guy when you meet him.) But mostly, he’s not normal in that he’s here, on this ridge, mostly naked, fake jogging for the camera, while strangers hiking nearby stop to gawk or take their own photos of a man they aren’t sure they even know. Here are just a few of the comments overheard:

Guy: “What’s that dude’s name?”Girl: [inaudible]Other guy: “She would know.”

Guy: “Wait, is that Fabio?!”Girl: “Oh my god. Yes!”[It’s not Fabio, but O’Hurn is friends with him.]

Girl: “I want to see him run.”[She pauses. O’Hurn runs.]“Yaaaaaasssss.”

This isn’t unusual. O’Hurn gets recognized wherever he goes—and he goes all over. In Berlin, a dad approached him and said, “I don’t know who you are, but my daughter really likes you. Can you get a photo with her?” She was too shy to say hi. At Stagecoach, a country music festival in California, a girl asked him to pick her up for a photo. Another girl saw that and then she asked too. “I had to do like 30 in a row,” O’Hurn says. “I was like, Is this a joke? Do I just have to keep lifting people? This is my life?”

It is indeed his life, and while most of these people (according to O’Hurn) know him because of the worldwide footprint his Instagram following has created, it’s hard to know how many people approach him—or just stop and stare, as they’re doing now—because he looks the way he does. It’s like the chicken-and-the-egg question recast for the Social Media Age: Do you get a reaction like this because you’re a famous Instagram star—or are you a famous Instagram star because you’re 6’7” and handsome enough that it literally stops people in their tracks trying to figure out who you are or whether or not they can touch your hair?

“What did I do? I made an Instagram,” O’Hurn says with genuine modesty, his shirt still missing. “Same as everybody else.”

We’re not so sure.

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Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQInstagramCelebrities