Every big idea moves down society through what I call “The Culture Stack.”
Let me take ChatGPT as an example.
Table of Contents
The Futurists
At the top, you have the futurists.
They see things years before anyone else and make bets that look insane at the time, for example, AI researchers in 2017 who saw transformer models and thought, “This has potential.”
Statistical Probabilists
Below them are the statistical probabilists:
OpenAI teams who ran the numbers, testing whether this specific interface plus model could work reliably at scale.
These are the people who have a vision into something measurable.
Iterators and Curators
Then come the iterators and curators:
Prompt engineers, wrapper apps, and “Top 10 ChatGPT Hacks” channels.
They made the tech usable for people who will not read research papers.
The Operators
Next are the operators, also known as the appliers.
They are the ones who figure out how to make it work in the real world, at scale, with actual constraints.
These are the companies that built GPT into Slack, marketing teams that used it for content calendars, and devs who integrated it into their workflow.
The Consumers
Then there’s the category that most people land in: the consumers.
They adopt the thing once it has been packaged, explained, and de-risked by everyone above them.
People who use GPT to write emails, do homework, and plan vacations.
They have no idea how it works and do not care.
To them, it is just a tool.
Products of Environment
Below that are the individuals who are just products of their environment.
They feel the effects of new ideas without even knowing those ideas exist.
Job seekers who go up against AI-written applications.
Teachers who are forced to grade AI essays.
Boomers who consume online content without realizing it is synthetic.
Non-Participants
And then there are people who do not participate at all (the people who still do not know ChatGPT exists).
The Reality
Everyone wants to think they are an early adopter.
But if you learned about something from a tweet or a YouTube video, you are not at the top.
You are in the middle.
Maybe lower.
And that is fine.
That is how it is supposed to work.
Information Hierarchy
There is no moral hierarchy here.
But there is an information hierarchy.
If you are trying to build, invest, or understand where markets are moving, you need to know where you actually sit on the stack for any given idea.
The people at the top are not smarter.
They are just willing to operate with less proof.
They have taste and judgment and are comfortable being wrong in public.
Most humans optimize for being right by default, but the top of the culture stack optimizes for being early.
The distinction between those two things is not minor.
Because by the time an idea feels safe and proven, you are not early anymore.
You are a consumer of someone else’s conviction.
Finding Alpha
To me, the alpha in investing does not lie in being early to every idea.
But in knowing which ideas you should be early to and which ones you should let other people figure out first.
That is the ultimate skill.
Knowing where you belong on the stack for each idea.
Not pretending you are higher than you are, but not waiting so long you miss it entirely.
Conclusion
Understanding The Culture Stack helps you see where you actually sit in the adoption cycle of any idea.
The goal is not to always be at the top, but to know when to be early and when to let others take the risk first.
That awareness is where real advantage comes from.