Celebrity Watches · Hip-Hop · Streetwear · Casio Collaboration

Action Bronson's Baklava x G-Shock “Desert King”: The Watch He Made, Worn on the World’s Biggest Podcast

On the Joe Rogan Experience, Action Bronson didn’t reach for a Rolex or an AP. He wore a $200 watch he helped design — the Baklava x Casio G-Shock GA2100AB25-5A “Desert King” — and that choice says more about him than any status piece ever could.

Action Bronson on the Joe Rogan Experience — the G-Shock “Desert King” visible on his wrist. Source: JRE / Spotify

Baklava x Casio G-Shock GA2100AB25-5A “Desert King” — designed by Action Bronson. Source: G-Shock / Casio

Action Bronson — born Ariyan Arslani on December 2, 1983, in Flushing, Queens — is one of hip-hop’s more genuinely unlikely stories. Of Albanian and Jewish descent, he trained as a gourmet chef and worked the line at his family’s Mediterranean restaurant before a serious kitchen injury redirected his energy toward music. What emerged was a rapper with a deep, smoke-cured baritone, an encyclopaedic appetite for food and culture, and a gift for dense, cinematic wordplay that drew inevitable comparisons to Ghostface Killah — a rapper he has since collaborated with extensively.

His early releases — the 2011 mixtape Bon Appétit… Bitch!!!!! and his debut album Dr. Lecter — established him as a cult figure before major label deals and television work broadened his reach. He hosted culinary travel programmes, built a media presence anchored as much in food as in music, and eventually formalised his creative identity into Baklava: a clothing and lifestyle brand named after one of his longtime aliases, Mr. Baklava. The brand has partnered with New Balance on footwear and, in 2025, with Casio on the collaboration sitting on his wrist during his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience.

Wearing that watch on one of the most-watched programmes on the planet was, whether intentional or not, the highest-profile wrist shot the “Desert King” could have received.

“BAKLAVA WORLDWIDE” — Engraved on the caseback of the GA2100AB25-5A “Desert King”

The Chef, the Rapper, and the Watch He Built

Most celebrity watch sightings involve someone wearing a piece they were gifted, loaned, or seduced into by a brand ambassador deal. Action Bronson wearing the “Desert King” on the Joe Rogan Experience is categorically different: this is a creator wearing his own work. The design choices are his — the ocher palette, the globe graticule, the bull bars, the red LCD, the caseback engraving that reads BAKLAVA WORLDWIDE. Every element traces back to an identity he has been building for over a decade: Mediterranean roots, global appetite, and a refusal to be contained by a single lane.

The GA-2100 platform was a smart foundation for that identity. It’s a watch that punches above its price point visually — the CasiOak comparisons to far more expensive Swiss octagonals are not accidental — but it carries no pretension. It’s a tool watch dressed elegantly, which is precisely the register Bronson operates in: technically skilled, culturally literate, and entirely unbothered by the hierarchies others impose on food, music, or horology.

Why This Watch on This Wrist

There is a version of Action Bronson who could have turned up to the most-listened-to podcast on earth wearing something that announced financial arrival — a Daytona, a Royal Oak, a Richard Mille. He wore a $200 G-Shock instead. Not because he had to. Because it was his. The “Desert King” is a limited edition that sold out, a collaboration that required Casio to say yes, and a design that carries Bronson’s fingerprints from the translucent bezel to the world-map caseback. Wearing your own collaboration on the world’s biggest stage is a statement about value that no luxury brand can manufacture for you. The watch tells you what the man thinks is worth wearing — and he thinks it’s the thing he built.

And at Spot.Watch — that’s always worth noticing.