Everett Rogers

Before I get into the good about AI, I want to give you a very short crash course in the history of AI because I think it'll help us see where we're at and also how recent and rapid all of these changes have been.

So there's a sociologist called Everett Rogers who came up with a very famous bell curve showing how different people adopt any new technology.

And there are five categories of people on that curve.

So I want you to listen for which one sounds most like you.

Technology gets adopted in waves, and the waves are so predictable that a sociologist mapped the whole thing out back in 1962.

His name was Everett Rogers.

His book was The Fusion of Innovations.

And if you've ever seen that bell curve, you know the one with the little categories of people underneath it.

That's his.

That's where this comes from.

What Rogers found is that any new technology moves through five groups of people and they always, always show up in the same order.

First, the innovators, a tiny group, about 2.5%.

The audience matters more than the speaker, or as the pollster Frank Luntz puts it, it's not what you say, it's what people hear.

So what does work? One more idea from a sociologist named Everett Rogers.

In 1962, Rogers published Diffusion of Innovations, studying how new ideas spread from hybrid seed corn among farmers to new drugs amongst doctors.

He found the same curve repeats over and over again.

About 2.5% of people are innovators who will try anything.

About 13.5% are early adopters.

then the early majority and the late majority, about a third each.

And at the back, about 16% Rogers calls laggards.

So, why did sliced bread spread so fast when so many good ideas don't? Well, for an answer to that question, let's stay in Iowa, where Otto Rohwedder came from, and meet a farmer's son.

Everett Rogers was born in 1931 on a farm near Carroll, Iowa.

His father loved mechanical gadgets, new tractors, new machines, but he was deeply suspicious of anything biological or chemical.

And in particular, he refused to plant the new hybrid seed corn, even though it yielded around a quarter more and stood up much better to drought.

In this case, yes, neighbors started talking, sales quickly rose 2,000%.

So five out of five, no wonder sliced bread took off.

But notice what happens in the case of Everett Rogers' father and the hybrid seed corn.

It wasn't an advert or an expert that convinced him to change.

But I'll say this much.

I put a survey out yesterday asking, have you read either of these books before? And the first one was diffusion of innovations by Everett Rogers first published in 1962, 60 62.

Um, so up until that point, um, the people who rolled out new technologies were kind of banging their heads against the wall, right.

And they were saying this technology is amazing.

Why don't these people use it or buy it or adopt it? What's the problem? Um, So Everett Rogers came along and his attempt was to, he kind of looked at the merger of technology, marketing, consumerism, and psychology.

And he proposed that the reason that technologists feel so frustrated when technologies don't penetrate to the mainstream is that the populace can be democratized into five main subsets.

regarding how they perceive new technology or emerging technology.

I'm going to assume that book's not mentioned very often in the context of Bitcoin adoption.

So then what was this thing called the Willow Creek Association? So I run into a book called Diffusion of Innovations.

A guy by the name of Everett Rogers wrote the book.

Yes.

And it is the textbook executive summary of 4,000 innovation diffusions, if you will, of how new ideas, new things became normal in society and in culture.

There were some big ones.

Mm.

The strengths of that was we accelerated the time that it took for a new idea that was effective to reach more churches, and that's what Everett Rogers also said.

In a movement, um, it, there's a natural progression for how that happens, innovators, early adopters, early majority, et cetera.

And for our final top story, Abel Kerr from 1962 explains most of how podcast advertising works.

Adopter Media SVP Adam McNeil argues in a LinkedIn post where a brand sits on Everett Rogers adoption curve should decide how it buys podcasts.

I have linked to the Wikipedia on said adoption curve if you want to brush up.

He says early adopters buy because someone they trust told them to.