Photos: See Jaden Smith Wear Fall’s Trippiest Clothes

Jaden Smith has a game he likes to play whenever he's in public, or whenever he's stating something that will eventually become public—such as right now—and the game goes like this. It starts with him saying something Jaden-like. For example:

“Me and my sister started this initiative called Mystery School. It dates back to like ancient Egypt, ancient Greece—like Plato, Pythagoras, all these students had mystery schools. And what they learned in there was sacred. They would learn the math and sciences of that generation, and then they would build the cities and give that energy and that knowledge to the other people. And a lot of stuff they would keep really, really to themselves. Like, you couldn't say the word dodecahedron, which is just a shape, outside of one of the mystery schools or they would, like, kill you or whatever. Because it was such a sacred shape.”

The next part of the game is: He waits. He watches you react. He's 17 and has already been famous so long that there are red-carpet photos of him he doesn't remember posing for. There are paparazzi photos of him and his sister, Willow, in strollers. There are photos of him right here at the Calabasas Commons, the strip mall near his house that he favors because of the Pain Quotidien and the Barnes & Noble and the movie theater and the juice spot. Every day, basically: a flip-book of Jaden Smith slowly aging, as told by strangers' cameras. With his long California-drought-colored T-shirt and red-and-black leggings and his fine Smith-family features, he looks like a mischievous sorcerer's apprentice, which he sort of is. He's got the ease of a kid to whom the world has belonged for as long as he's known the world.

“Me and Willow are scientists,” he explains, “so everything for us is a scientific test upon humanity. And luckily we're put in a position where we can affect large groups of human beings at one time.” Fame is their lab, is what he's saying, and we are the subjects. He'll get on Twitter and tweet something like “The Biggest Flex Anyone Will Ever Have Is Dying.” Or the T Magazine interview they did last year, the one that left everyone convinced they were drunk on prana energy: “That experiment—it went really, really well,” he tells me. “We got to see how people reacted. And they actually ended up reacting exactly as we predicted beforehand that they would react.”

He gives a sly smile. “It's fun, bro. That's what a lot of people don't realize. It's fun. It's so much fun. It's the best thing. People think you're crazy—I feel like it's an honor, actually, for people to think I'm crazy. Because they thought Galileo was crazy, too, you know what I'm saying? I don't think I'm as revolutionary as Galileo, but I don't think I'm not as revolutionary as Galileo.”

It's the middle of a heat wave in Los Angeles, and we're sitting outside Le Pain Quotidien. He orders oatmeal. I guess this is another way of emphasizing that he's still only 17. The oatmeal arrives and he spoons it into his mouth and then he starts pointing at his mouth and frantically waving his arms. “Extremely hot,” he says eventually.

It's 95 degrees outside and you're eating oatmeal.

“Definitely. Definitely. Yeah. That wasn't the best idea.”

He puts the spoon aside. “Let's walk,” he says. We walk past a Sephora and a Starbucks and a cell-phone store, past the usual dazed couples and harried moms that come to strip malls at noon on a weekday. “One day this will be the Calabasas Walk of Fame,” Jaden says. “Everybody that lives around here, which is pretty much everybody that's in the news, they all come here.” The Kardashian-Jenners live around here. Kanye and Kim. Drake. You might count his parents, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, too, if you're talking about people in the news. We walk past the Barnes & Noble and the Citibank and the sushi joint and a bunch of potted trees. The bland anonymous psychic terrain of a teenage space wizard.