The instability of prestige is being tested by fighters
How an entertaining drama in the martial arts world illustrates what universities are not taking seriously enough
Imagine if Michael Phelps decided today to create a competitor to the Olympics. With just four weeks before the Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony, Phelps rents the largest event space still available in Paris and calls it the Michael Phelps Invitational. Wearing his 23 gold medals around his neck, he goes to NBC and pours out five million dollars of cash onto the announcers’ table to say “it’s criminal that my fellow Olympians work so hard for zero pay and the hollow promise of glory. I will pay $50k to every Olympian who quits their event to instead walk across the street and compete at my event. At the Michael Phelps Invitational, winners get a million dollars.” What would you feel?
My first reaction is to protect the sacredness of the Olympics. I love the Olympics and everything it stands for. It’s not about they money, I’d say, it’s about the honor of representing your country on the biggest stage in the world! It’s the Olympics because … well, it’s the OLYMPICS!
This is more than a thought experiment: This drama is happening right now in the world of professional jiu jitsu. One of the most famous grappling athletes in the world, Craig Jones, used his star power to set up the new Craig Jones Invitational (CJI) right across the street from the most prestigious event in Jiu Jitsu, the Abu Dhabi Combat Club (ADCC) on the same weekend.
On the surface, this story is hilarious. Craig is a unique blend of technical brilliance and comical irreverence. He says “time for nose beers” in post-fight interviews, posts interviews with prostitutes on a hotel bed1, rips off the Chicago Bulls logo for his teams’ (“The B-Team”) competitive matches and his repeated joke that “Jiu jitsu is powered by autism and steroids” led to a line of sold-out waterbottles. He’s like a half-sober Luke Skywalker taking on the Death Star: ADCC fills arenas with tightly polished shows, enjoys brand hegemony, is led by a strong public figure who is respected by the community. Huge names in the sport are publicly thinking through their personal dilemmas with noticeable holes being blown into the ADCC roster. And what fuels this tense narrative is that Jones was once a golden boy of the ADCC arena.
Deeper down, CJI vs ADCC is a fascinating drama about the difficulty of staying on top. It illustrates why dominance based on prestige can collapse if taken for granted due to the magic of positive feedback cycles2. If I were a leader of a Top Ten university watching the biggest brand in a sport shaken suddenly into a defensive scramble, I’d be wringing my hands: can a defected insider burst the bubble of prestige, and if so, can the displaced leading organization recover?
If you know me and/or you’ve read this blog, you know I love jiu jitsu. Its exponential growth since I’ve been engaged in 2010 is (in my opinion) one of the better trends in western society. Jiu jitsu has changed how I think about education and productive communities (see my writing on the importance of “enforceable honesty”). In its purest form, jiu jitsu athletes fit somewhere between entrepreneurs and science professors.
This essay is not about the details of the martial art but about the social dynamics at play when there is a finite amount of top talent and room for one leader. A maximal position, like the title of Most Prestigious Competition in the World, is either stable or unstable. Consider two examples3:
San Francisco’s position of best tech hub in the world is an unstable equilibrium. The feedback loop is that the best in the world go there because the best in the world are already there. But what if the best in the world go somewhere else? Every time the city leadership does something awful (example 1, example 2, map of closures, etc.), I cringe at the fear of seeing the doom spiral start. Chicago’s $150M incentive package to repopulate downtown (WSJ, NYPost) seem like a desperate stab for a city already in the doom spiral.
A stable equilibrium would be something like the oligopoly of the Big Four Agriculture Companies. If you want to sell a genetically edited crop as a startup, you have very little choice aside from partnering with them. The practical advantages of scale (eg, government relations and the cash reserves to navigate ~$1B deregulation processes) means that any upstart threat to one of the giants threatens all of the oligopoly, and that any misstep of one of the oligopoly will be filled in by another. Every perturbation to the system seems to return to the same point.
A Gold Medal from ADCC is the biggest accolade in the sport of jiu jitsu. While many productions have sprung up to capitalize on the growth of the sport, most of them either steer clear of ADCC or bow knee to ADCC’s primacy. One such stage is the professional series of WNO professional league, put on by FloGrappling (the biggest media company in the space), and WNO directly builds up to the importance of the ADCC stage. The post-fight interviewers will ask things like: “How do you think your win tonight prepares you for the big stage in ADCC?” ADCC’s brand and history felt untouchable until only weeks ago.
Craig Jones is one of the few with the power, clout and gumption to break the virtuous cycle of ADCC’s prestige. Jones has been beating a drum for years now that it’s a crime that ADCC only pays $10k if you win (video). That means you fight the hardest fights of your life, amplified with the energy of tens of thousands screaming fans, for a paycheck that would barely cover medical bills. One of the Hall of Famers, Xande Ribeiro, said that he’ll stick with ADCC but shared that he invested $2M over his professional career to prepare for ADCC. For Xande, this was likely a profitable investment because of his revenue from selling instructional videos and seminars, but competitors just one rank beneath him are in likely in debt. It illustrates that as the game of jiu jitsu developed around its flagship entity, the flagship entity didn’t developed fast enough in turn. As conditions got harder on the athletes, it made room for Craig Jones to stick his foot in.
Imagine that I open up an institute right across from Harvard. I tell the best science professors that they could quit Harvard and work at the Dan Goodwin Invitational.
I’ll double your pay overnight and you’ll never be required to teach an intro undergrad course again.
We’ll drop the 80% overhead costs and save you burning 40% of your career grant writing through a mixture of expert technical staff and AI.
The leadership will only be other highly credible scientists and people with deployment experience either through companies or scaling successful government projects. The core mission will be creating scientific excellence.
How long would Harvard be Harvard? As soon as it’s no longer the Best Place In The World to be a professor, the new Best Place will suck in the talent. The Harvard strategy of prestige simply doesn’t work if the best don’t want to go to Harvard. Soon, the best students won’t want to go to Harvard and this might already be happening according to the 5% decrease applicants4.
It’s a great season to pile on the trash talk on the Ivy League. Nate Silver publicly giving up on the fancy schools in his essay Just Go To A State School hit me hard. But every recent public statement by Harvard seems to make the Crimson H look worse: the latest fiasco is an essay by the Dean of Social Studies attempting to weigh in on free speech is both appallingly low quality in substance and insultingly chiding in tone. In the short term, leadership for the status quo can rely on the TINA mantra of Wall Street —There Is No Alternative— but I think the ecosystem will be rocked once the first viable alternative arrives.
Top professors are leaving academia: Aviv Regev at Harvard, Hans Clevers at Stanford, Sebastian Seung at Princeton, Daphne Koller at Stanford, and many more, all left for industry where they had higher salaries and higher leverage. Seemay Chou left to create Arcadia. Sam Rodriques left to create FutureHouse. One could argue this is a healthy and normal churn, but my perspective is the conditions of academic professor life are on such a negative trend that it’s unlikely to select for star talent moving forward. Jonathan Wosen at STAT has written great articles on this brain drain, including a snippet from this article.
The [NIH] working group, which launched last year, had been tasked with reenvisioning a system that is under increasing strain. Life science Ph.D. graduates, who have for years complained about low wages and long hours in labs, are skipping postdocs, a temporary period of research and professional development, and going into lucrative industry jobs at historic levels.
Back on the mats, ADCC is on the defensive and has stepped up to match many of Craig Jones’ critiques. Women are paid more, purses for all winners have increased. So the Invisible Hand people who read this could extoll the importance of free market competition making all players better. Maybe this is a scenario in which everybody does win5.
US Universities are on bad trends and are due to have their own “CJI moment” when a viable competitor emerges. That competitor will have a model that is scalable and demonstrably better at one (or both) of universities’ core functions of training and deploying intellectual talent. When that happens, I hope the universities will rise to the challenge to make the necessary leadership/bureaucratic overhauls, as ADCC seems to be doing6. I think it’s inevitable that Universities in ten years will look very different than what they are today, the question is whether it will still be MIT/Harvard/Stanford still leading the way.
And the 2024 ADCC this year will be awesome, I will watch it, but I’ll frankly be watching the CJI feed first.
This is the video: Craig is actually super respectful to her and brings out her stories.
A positive feedback cycle could be “all the cool kids are at your party because all the cool kids are at your party.”
And if you like this flavor of thinking, you must read Donella Meadows’ classic Thinking in Systems
A 5% decrease in applications from Harvard is a which is net 15% devitation from peer institutions like Yale which saw their applications increase by 10% this year.
One thing that I wasn’t able to quite fit in easily, but want to add into the thoughtpile here, is the empathy for the defenders of a prestigious monolith. In this story, Craig Jones says everything imaginable to provoke ADCC, but once an ADCC employee took it personally and responded with a threat of violence, that employee was immediately fired. Despite the hyperbole, a good analogue is guerilla tactics versus a more powerful conventional force. Everytime ADCC responds to Craig Jones, they just add more attention and oxygen into his fire. Worse, responding to Jones’ PR moves draws the whole ADCC organization out of their fort to play on Jones’ territory of online bickering, for which Jones wins every exchange handedly.
I see similar things in my world. I’ve seen countless pitch decks which hinge on the “[Science/Education/etc] is Broken!” flavor of argument, which always feels like a cheap trick to staple oneself to a bigger entity while trying to tear off just one small piece. Universities are going to deal with the same disadvantages in the defensive position as viable competitors emerge for education and research.
Andrew Wiltse is a jiu jitsu champion and all around fascinating person, who penned his own essay last week. His perspective on the sport is of course incomprably better than mine, so it’s cool to see him discuss the same points of prestige and feedback loops.
Mirages are to academia what staph infections are to jiu jitsu, part of the trade
Love this! As you were promising to double salaries at the Goodwin Institute, this Onion Talk popped into my head. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q. 2 mins 15ish second in.
When are you migrating to a sub stack competitor ?