Previously published January 13, 2026
Antonio Gary Jr. shared something that stuck with us: a viral Tweet about an incoming wave of smart-to-hot pivots.
“The change to me was less about smart versus hot and more about when information is commoditized,” Antonio explained. “You have to be appealing in other regards because being smart no longer holds the same status. What’s interesting about it too is everyone’s getting the same surgeries…It’s tied to what I’m seeing as far as the peptide trend and this normalization of injecting yourself with suspicious things to achieve a certain look.”
To Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick, it signals something we’ve already witnessed: the tech bro glow up, which is obviously continuing but He thinks this is going to evolve to destroy certain cultural (a la: fashion) hallmarks. “People are going to get even deeper and deeper into the ‘I got this is at the Rose Bowl’ feeling,” he told Antonio. “We’re five seconds away from Mark Zuckerberg doing it and Jeff Bezos doing it. Once that happens, where it’s not the leisure class of people who care about [fashion] and who are doing that work but someone outsourcing that work to get it, that’s going to collapse a lot of [vintage mindsets] too. That’s really a final frontier, the ‘I went to JetRag on La Brea and spent two hours looking for gems. You didn’t, Jeff Bezos.’”
What will follow this? We can expect a rise in not just pivots to “hot” but a general pivot to eccentricity. “The premium is on setting yourself apart in some kind of meaningful way,” Ben Dietz observed. “Where I guess I go more so rather than being hot or being cool is you have to get a little weird. You have to be different. It’s going to be interesting to see in 2026 how different people get.”
Something to watch this year! Listen into more of this conversation above.
