Mini Ep. 101: Open Knowledge

Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I just want to let you know, we released a new mindset course featuring Rob Bernaki from Island Top Team and BJJ Concepts. It's called Mindset for Betas. It's an amazing resource that breaks down a new way to build a resilient jiu-jitsu mindset. It's part of BJJ Mental Models Premium. I will spare you the full sales pitch because you can try it for free. Just go to bjjmentalmodels.com/beta. I will give you a free month, you can check out the course and if you decide that it's not worth your money, you can cancel, you won't have to pay a cent. I've already been told by subscribers that this is the most valuable piece of jiu-jitsu content they've ever received, so I hope you like it too. Hey everybody, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. And this is actually mini episode number 101. Impressive, huh? Now, what would be an appropriate topic to cover for a 101 level mini episode? Well, let's talk about the learning process. I want to talk about a concept that we call open knowledge here at BJJ Mental Models. This is the concept that rapid leaps in knowledge come from the free sharing of information. This is a challenging topic in jiu-jitsu because there's this constant push and pull over whether information should be freely shared or whether it should be kept secret. The idea of secret techniques has long been around in martial arts. If you have been training martial arts for a long time, especially Brazilian jiu-jitsu, you may remember a time when old school instructors would keep their best knowledge secret and the idea would be that either this would only be disclosed to their paying customers or maybe not even to their paying customers. Maybe they would keep the secret so they always had a trick that they could use to beat up their students or to dominate in competition. And this idea of keeping information secret was prevalent for a long time, but in the 2000s there was this explosion of knowledge, probably led by instructional sites like Grapple Arts and BJJ Fanatics and of course YouTube. Suddenly people started sharing information much more freely in jiu-jitsu and that was really what led to the just explosion of talent and skill that we have seen over the last few decades in the sport. I think we could probably trace that explosion back to the point where people started sharing their information more freely. Now, there's a flip side here though, because if you give everything away for free, what is left for you? There is a time and a place to keep information to yourself. But when you make that decision to share something or to give something away for free or to charge for it, that proves to be not as simple as we would think. Let's talk about the history of this idea. This goes way back to the early 20th century where the sociologist Robert K. Merton talked about an idea that at the time he called idea communism. Nothing to do with the political system. So this is just the idea that information should be shared freely. And that sounds great in an academic environment, but once you start getting competitive economic pressures on top of something, now you've got these counter forces. People want to preserve their information or charge for it or maybe keep it to themselves because it's a competitive advantage. Now, this whole battle really took shape in the late 20th century when information technology started to explode. There is a saying in the IT world that information wants to be free. It's a quote that was originally attributed to Stewart Brand who first shared that with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak back in 1984. And basically what he talked about is that information wants to be free, it wants to be shared, but on the other hand, information is valuable and therefore it also kind of wants to be expensive. So exactly what Stewart Brand said was, and here's the quote, on the one hand you have, the point you're making was, is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other. So again, a quote from Stewart Brand back in 1984, talking about this push and pull, this polarity between whether information should be free or whether it should be kept secret. And of course, there's also this middle ground where maybe it's neither free nor secret, but it's paid. Maybe you make your living off of selling information. That's a very common experience for instructors today who will willingly share their information, but ultimately feed themselves and their family by sharing that information. And so at some point, there is this expectation that there should be charging, there should be a fee associated with that. So you've got three paths when it comes to how you choose to share your information or not. You can keep it secret and just never share it with anybody. You can make it a paid service where you will share it for a fee or you can make it completely free. And these are just decisions on a spectrum. None of these are definitively right or wrong. However, there is a time and a place for each. My feeling has always been that in the short term, you might be able to get away with making things secret and you might be able to get away with charging for things, but over the long term, if the product that you're selling or the competitive advantage that you have is information, eventually it probably will become free. Simply because information can be copied freely. So even if you don't share that information for free, someone else might. And then what are you going to do about that? If you're still trying to hold on to it like it's a secret or if you're still trying to charge for something that other people are giving away for free, what is your competitive advantage now? So my feeling has always been, over the short term, maybe there's a benefit to keeping something secret, such as a game plan or a new technique that you're deploying in an upcoming competition. Maybe you want to hold that one close to your vest until you get a chance to use that in competition and then you can share it after. Maybe you want to charge for your information, a completely reasonable decision. But at some point, as the knowledge base expands and there's more and more open knowledge out there, at some point that information will probably become free. And so, you could argue that there is an evolution to information where maybe at the beginning it's secret or it's something that comes with a cost, but eventually information wants to be free. So this is a concept that is really helpful when it comes to how you price your products or share your knowledge in jiu-jitsu. You can keep things secret at first, but my feeling has been that the more openly and easily information is shared, the less value there remains in trying to keep it secret or trying to charge for it. And you have to be willing to accept where that information is in the life cycle. If you are still trying to keep something secret or charge for it when everyone else is giving it away for free, that's maybe an indication that it's time to let go of that competitive advantage and find something else. This is a fascinating concept when it comes to how we communicate information. If you want to hear more like this, check out bjjmentalmodels.com. There are full length episodes plus mini episodes like this, all available for free. I also suggest you sign up for the BJJ Mental Models newsletter, which is also free. And if you would like to commit with us to advancing your knowledge of the sport of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, check out BJJ Mental Models Premium. It is the world's largest audio library of jiu-jitsu master classes. You'll really like it and the first week is free. All of that is at bjjmentalmodels.com. I'll put a link in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening and I'll talk to you soon.