Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Savannah Bananas: Inside The Banana Ball Phenomenon | Jesse Cole

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

What if instead of chasing a seat at the table, you built an entirely new game — and the world fell in love with it?On today’s episode, we sit down with Jesse Cole, founder and owner of the Savannah Bananas and creator of Banana Ball. Jesse has built one of the most extraordinary, fast-growing sports movements by breaking every rule in the book. In an era where attention is the hardest currency, he’s turned baseball into a full-blown entertainment experience — part sport, part show, and all heart.From selling out ballparks across America to giving foster families standing ovations mid-game, Jesse’s vision is driven by one principle: Fans First. He shares the habits and systems behind that mindset — from his “Learn, Change, Plus” culture of constant improvement to the leadership lessons that came from adopting two daughters during COVID. It’s a conversation about leading with joy, embracing risk, and using creativity as a form of love.In this episode, you’ll learn:How to design sold-out experiences by removing friction — and why iteration beats perfectionWhy culture must evolve from “team” to “teammates”The simple system that keeps the Savannah Bananas innovating nightlyWhy “winning” is redefined as a remarkable show and shared joy–not just the scoreHow Jesse and his wife Emily turned their foster journey into Bananas FosterWhat it means to “play your own game” — in business and in lifeThis is a masterclass in building something meaningful — not by following the rules, but by following your heart.--------------------------Links & ResourcesSubscribe to our YouTube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine: findingmastery.com/morningmindset!Follow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and XBanana Foster: https://bananasfoster.org/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. If you follow us for a while, you know how highly I think of Momentus and what they're trying to do in the supplement industry. They talk about something they call performance for life. I want to say that again, performance for life. I love that because it puts words to something we hear at Finding Mastery care deeply about. We do not believe in high performance for high performances sake alone. We want to help others unlock their potential that is.

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liveMomentis.com, and then use the code Finding Mastery for those who are in it for the long game. Bare-handed backflips. A whole lot of singing. A whole lot of dancing. Batting on stilts. Taking the world by storm. Selling out ballparks and football stadiums with 80,000 seats. It is a party here.

Massing nearly 11 million followers on TikTok. You're going to be entertained like never before. If somebody hasn't been paying attention, can you just explain, in your own words, what banana ball is? We're combining the game of baseball with brand new rules. What are all the boring parts stepping out of the box? Walks, mound visits, three to four hours. game. And then I said, all right, well, what would be those perfect scenarios? What would be really

cool? A two-hour time limit. If you win the inning, you get a point. No walks, no mound visits, no bunting. What if a kid caught a foul ball to win the game and the players rush out? They bring them on the field. They lift them over their shoulders and they're celebrating the media's interviewing him after the game. That's the banana ball. What if instead of chasing a seat at the table, you built an entirely new game and then the world fell in the way. Started with Savannah bananas, first playing traditional baseball. And then And we created the party animals that now have a huge following. Then the firefighters, then the Texas tailgators.

And the key is each team has their own identity, their own point of view. This is the greatest pregame in sport that never ends. Welcome back. Welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Treveh, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. The idea behind these conversations is simple. To sit with the extraordinarily and to learn. To really learn about how they work from the inside out.

And today's guest is someone who has completely reimagined. What's possible in sport. Jesse Cole grew up dreaming of playing Major League Baseball. But when his playing career abruptly ended, he didn't walk away from the game. He reinvented it. When I was in college, I was a very competitive baseball player. I had this goal of playing at Fenway Park of being drafted,

and it was everything. It was that top scholarship guy. Scouts watching, I'd put pressure myself. And I never performed with my belly. In fact, I ended up tearing my shoulder because I was doing so much. I wished I played with the fun that I played when I was 12 years old, the way my dad taught me.

Because I put that expectation of this big scholarship and this demand on me that I played different. And that affected everything. Building a scrappy team from nothing, sleeping on an air mattress, and then pitching local rotary clubs for ticket sales. On January 15th, 2015, we got the phone call that we were out of money. We sold our house, emptied our savings account, put our money in, and I sleep on an airbed. I mean, everyone was like, your embarrassment to our city, you're never going to sell a ticket. But we saw nonstop entertainment game. So we had to have characters. We saw the banana nana, so senior said it's a dance team. We saw the idea of a man anas, a dad bought cheerleading

squad. Just like some of the greatest innovators, there's a point where you have to disrupt yourself. for someone else will. Jesse went on to create banana ball, a high-energy fan-first version of baseball that has become a cultural phenomenon, selling out the biggest stadiums in the country and drawing millions of fans worldwide. Through his fearless experimentation,

his infectious energy, and then a deep belief in joy, Jesse has built more than a team. He's built a movement. And in the process, he's shown what can happen when you dare to break the rules. I think a lot of people now, they see all the social media,

they see all the highlights, they see all these things, and they say, look at them. It's been 20-plus years of learning and building and growing to be able to create something that really makes a difference. And the crazy thing is I believe we're still in the first inning. So with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with the showman, the disruptor, the visionary man behind the Savannah Bananas, Jesse Cole.

Okay, Jesse, so you come in, you come in with some energy, right? You got a suit, you got a smile, you got a body of work behind you, and you've got an amazing community that is standing up for you and with you. And so well done on creating a community. Well, thank you. It has been an extremely long journey. I think a lot of people now, they see all the social media. They see all the highlights.

They see all these things. And they say, look at them. And, you know, it's been 20 plus years of learning and building and growing to be able to create something that really makes a difference. And, you know, the crazy thing is I believe we're still in the first inning. You know, we're not even close to what I believe we can, the impact that we can make in this world. And so that's what fires me up every day. That's why I have energy and that's why I'm in a full yellow tuxedo

trying to bring the fun every day. If somebody hasn't been paying attention and they're not sure what banana ball is, can you just explain, in your own words, what banana ball is? It's been described as baseball meets Broadway or what ESPN called the greatest show in sports. So we're combining the game of baseball

with brand new rules, fans catching foul balls for outs, a two-hour time limit. If you win the inning, you get a point. No walks, no mound visits, no bunting. Because we say bunting sucks. Like we literally eliminated that rule and mixed with nonstop entertainment, speed, trick plays, celebrations.

And we're just trying to create an experience that people have never seen before in the fastest and most entertaining sport. And so we started with the Savannah Bananas, first playing traditional baseball and then Banana Ball. And we created the party animals that now have a huge falling. They're selling out their tour. Then the firefighters. And then the Texas Tailgators. And then we have two more teams for 2026 and the Banana Ball Championship League starts. And the key is each team has their own identity, their own point of view.

So they're doing things differently, their own live music, their own characters. And so you can go see a Texas Tailgator show and you're going to see country theme, line dancing. The players are on their own country rock band. It's a different theme, the different point of view. The party animals are the greatest party in sports. The firefighters are the hottest team in sports. The Texas Tailgators is the greatest pregame in sports that never ends. And so you build these points of view so people can experience each one in a different way.

So obviously I'm been watching what you're doing. and it's awesome. We'll get into that in a bit. But then I did not realize that you also had three books. So you've put your ideas down as well. So there was really a wonderful gift for me to better understand you and where you came from. Thank you for not just doing the thing you're doing, but also archiving along the way. It's a meaningful lesson.

Well, I think that is something I think back. And Walt Disney, you know, is probably my biggest inspiration about someone that has just continued to break the rules and go against criticism and create and have a vision that's, you know, bigger than anything. And I was fortunate that there were a lot of quotes, a lot of things he shared. There were some interviews, you know, and then obviously his biographies later, but I just like, man, if he was sharing the journey, when people are saying, you know, you can't do a full-length animated short film, no one wants that. You know, no one wants that. At a theme park, are you kidding me? No, those won't work. And to see what his mind was saying, I would have loved that. So when we started, yeah, my first book, I was 31 years old and we just barely started the bananas. We were one

year in. But I was like, I wanted to just share it as something that also helped me learn. You know, I believe the greatest leaders are the greatest teachers. And when you teach, you learn. And so I try to share those because it helps me communicate, helps me learn. And, you know, I learned a little bit of that from Walt Disney during his time. You are a student. And you also express really well. So you share your ideas, your emotions. There's an honesty about you that I want to understand. I was forced to. Go there. Because when we first started, you know, I was 23-year-old general manager of a team in Gastonia in North Carolina, a team that no one wanted there. They weren't successful. They

had 200 fans coming to the games. They were the worst team in the league, maybe the worst in the country, $268 in the bank account failing. And that's the reason I got the job because no one wanted it was. I was very fortunate. I was an intern and I sold some sponsorships. I did pretty good at selling. So the owner gave me the opportunity to the GM. And we had to get people to come to the games. I couldn't pay myself the first few months. there was no money. And so I had to get out there. I had to communicate. And I had to, I mean, I remember just every rotary meeting, every Kwanis meeting, every J.C.'s meeting, everything I could go to. I was just say, hey, let me share about our team. And I had no idea

to do it. I mean, I remember even some talks. I like forgot what I was talking about. I never did it. But I was forced to. And I forced that so I could learn how to communicate. And to do that, then you also had to force yourself to learn. So that's when I started studying Walt Disney, P.T. Barnum, Steve Jobs, Amazon. Because it's like, how do you do something that, you know, everyone's telling you you can't do. And for us, it was trying to make baseball fun. So I think that that forced function, it was the only way to be successful was I had to start communicating and sharing and then getting the reps in. You know, people I realized I did over a thousand podcasts when I was like 27, 28, 29 years old. I said yes to every single one. And it was just to communicate,

to share and to grow. And for me, you mentioned this earlier, like you have a lot of, you have a lot of energy. Well, I used to have not a lot of energy. I only had energy when I did things that gave me energy. And so that's why I created my energy list. And it's creating, sharing, and growing. And so if I'm creating, sharing or growing, I can do it all day long and be the best dad to my kids and the best husband to my wife. But if I'm not, I'm done. And so I learned that speaking, sharing on a podcast, sharing on stage, that gave me so much energy and fired me up that I just kept saying yes. Let's go back to how you got the GM job. Yeah. And then I want to come back to your philosophy. This is a core philosophy. Those three words are the makings of your

philosophy. They're actually the values that are guiding your thoughts, words, and actions. Do you mean the creating, sharing, and growing? Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Those are three values that are informative for you. They're almost like guardrails or wayfinders to make sure that you're lined up in the right direction is if you're doing those three, you are able to line up your thoughts, words, and actions. Yes. And then when you have like that type of wood behind the arrow, that arrow becomes more true. It becomes more reliable. It becomes more potent. I've never thought of it. I've always thought of it personally, but now when I think about it with everything that we're doing with the business, creating, sharing, and growing, and I can all go together in that order.

Creating, sharing and growing. Yeah. And for you, though. Yeah. Well, personally for me, but also, it goes to everything that we do with our teams as well. Yes. I wish I'm learning. There is kind of the stitch, and I do want to go back to this GM thing. So I'm saying it, no, that's good. I'm saying it out loud for myself. There's the hook there is that When somebody is very clear about the first principles or the values that matter most and then can figure out how to organize their life around those, whether that becomes a team setting, whether it becomes a family unit, whether it becomes a full organization or Savannah, Bananas, like, whatever sphere that you're in, if you're very clear about your thoughts, words, and actions, you influence that space. Yes. And you're resting on three values. So we'll come back to that.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that is really good. So you got a GM job that is not very attractive. No, it's an old Legion field in a little small town, you know, south of Charlotte and a college summer baseball league, one of the lowest levels of baseball. But you said I did something I sold well. What allowed you to sell well? So when I was in college, I was a very competitive baseball player. I was very fortunate. I got a scholarship. I turned down some other big schools because I got a really big scholarship. We got a Wofford College Division I school. Immediately it was the biggest scholarship they offered.

So immediately I put a lot of pressure on myself because I knew I was this big scholarship guy. Now, fortunate, you know, they let me pitch and hit, and I started off amazingly. I was the Southern Conference Player of the Month for the whole conference. And then that expectation. You and Shoah. Yeah, yeah. But I'm saying this because I learned so much from this, and this affect everything. I put so much expectations on myself then.

First month, I was the top player of the whole conference as a freshman, 18 years old, playing against some of the top players down south. And I felt I had to continue to stay at that level. And so baseball then became very serious for me. very serious, didn't perform the way. It would go into the summers. And I was MVP one year in the summer. I was an all-star of the next year

because the summers, I just had fun. And I went back. It was that top scholarship guy. Scouts watching. I had to put pressure myself. And I didn't have to. I did. And I never performed with my bill.

And in fact, I ended up tearing my shoulder because I was doing so much. So what am I hearing in your voice right now? What is this emotion? Well, this is the, now I'm so grateful I did that. Yeah, but that's not what I'm hearing. Now, but looking back, I realized that if I did what I preached now to all our players to have fun and to just enjoy and understand what you're a part of, I would be still playing the game.

But in looking retrospect, I'm so glad, like, looking back, because now you can have both. Yes, I have both because I regret the way that I played the game. I wish Banana Ball existed. I wished I played with the fun that I played when I was 12 years old, the way my dad taught me. because I put that expectation of this big scholarship and this demand on me that I played different. And that affected everything. But in a good way, if I didn't tear my shoulder, I would have never gone to Gastonia. I would have never gone to Savannah.

So in retrospect, now, it's the best thing that ever happened to me. But I wish I knew then what I know now about the way you should play the game with fun. And I did during the summers, but not when I was at school. Finding Master is brought to you by Fatty 15. One of the core questions I often return to is, what does it mean to A. well, not just live longer, but with clarity, energy, and the zest to keep doing what I love. That's why I've been invested in consistently taking fatty 15 for a few years now. It is a daily supplement. It's powered by C-15, the first essential fatty acid discovered in over 90 years.

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I want to encourage you to go check out Square. Head to square.com slash go slash finding mastery. That's Square, S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash go, G-O-Slas finding mastery. Yeah, so it's still alive in you. I could hear it and feel it. I don't think it was like a regret. I think there's a sadness to the 19-year-old way of living. Yes.

It was everything. It was everything for me. Like getting drafted. It was too much. It was, yes, I had this goal of playing at Fenway Park, of being drafted, and it was everything. That's all I thought about. What did that mean to you? Fenway or just everything.

The dream coming true. It was, you know, I was an only child is my dad and I, the one big bond that we had was baseball. Every day, coming home from school, we would go play. It was my identity was built on baseball. And fortunately, I was one of the top players in mass. And I had the opportunity to Boston College, Northeastern, and went to Woffer to play down South. And then immediately, Southern Carnes Player of the Month, I have scouts. I'm hearing from scouts.

I'm throwing 90 miles an hour, which back then was something. Now everyone throws 95. And, you know, that was, that was it. That's what I worked for every day. Every day I'd be working out and playing for that. So that was my path to where I was going. Why do you think it was so important for you? Identity.

If you go deep into who feeling loved. So it was something my dad and I have the most, right? Right now, I mean, we say, I love you almost every call. There's a different level of, but he never said it to me when I was a kid. And so I didn't hear that necessarily. And his appreciation, his love meant the world to me. And so when I played well, I mean, it was a different level of excitement from him because he saw what I was doing. And so he would say now, you know, you love me for me and all that.

But that's what I felt back then. So the idea of, you know, we watched baseball games together. We watched the Red Sox together constantly. The idea of getting our opportunity to play for the Red Sox, for me, and for him, that's something I thought about constantly. So you're carrying a couple things in there, the dream of the togetherness, the bond, the love. And oftentimes when we come from experiences in families

where there's a trauma that we're sorting out, when we're a 14-year-old kid or whatever, like we don't have the sophistication that we do now. So we adopt these personas. You could be the Joker, you could be the high performer, you could be the angel, like there's a handful of personas. So you adopted the high performer. Yes.

Right. Oh, everything. In school and everything. I had to get good grades because if I got good grades, I would feel more love and all that. Yeah. So it's look, but what ends up happening is there's a corruption. You don't get seen for yourself. You get seen for your performances.

And then what was the trauma, if you're comfortable talking about it, that you had as a child that led to that? My parents got divorced. I was only a child. My mother had some challenges. So my mother had some challenges. so she wasn't in the picture and my birth mother. And luckily, I had a stepmother who joined our family and helped. But yeah, I just didn't have a connection with my mother.

And so at all, like really at all. And it was my dad. If you look back, I had a great childhood. My dad was amazing. And we had the best time. I just didn't know what that other side was. You know, I guarantee they're going to ask, we have three kids now under seven. And they're going to be like, you know, your life must have been crazy.

How was it? Well, it was our life. It was, this was it. You know, they don't have the other, like, stay at home. They travel around the country with us. They're homeschooled. It's a crazy lifestyle. But, you know, I think for me, it was wonderful.

I was grateful. We got to go on trips. We played baseball all the time. It was a great childhood, but that was the childhood I knew. So I don't necessarily call it a trauma. I felt like I was very fortunate. My dad took care of me an unbelievable way. My stepmother came in, and they were great.

Just my birth mother, I didn't have the great connection with. And so you can still have, it's like the two things. You can still have two things. You can have the childhood that you knew, but you can also have a sadness and a longing for your biological mom in this case. There was a divorce. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And so there was a divorce and some substance abuse that was taking place.

Yeah. And so in that mess, if you will, there's still a longing that a child can have. Yeah. Yeah. And that longing that you're saying was to be seen, to be loved. Yeah. Yeah. To feel.

And now you zoom out and look at where we are. And there's so many things that happen in our game. So everyone feels like they're a part of something. Look how you did that. Yeah. And it's even to the end of the night. And there's certain moments that I just look around and I see how. happy joy, happy tears, emotion.

And I feel so grateful to be able to provide that. And yes, there's definitely, it's rooted in that feeling. You had an insight in one of your books, which was do for one, what you can do for all, something along those lines. And so I just hear that, that idea in how you just answer that question, is that, and the one is probably you in this case. If you want to go deep into it, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, that's why we take so much

pride. And when we go to these big stadiums, these NFL stadiums, that we often meet the whole staff in the upper deck. And I say, you know, guys, people think that we can't create an experience like we can in our small little ballpark up here. And I said, no, we're going to do the same way we done from day one. And that's one fan at a time. And even our coach now, he writes handwritten letters and signs them and puts them in different seats in the upper deck. And we meet up there and I get up in the upper deck every single night for two innings and do pictures with fans and interact and stuff. And so, you know, whether you're got the seat behind home plate or if you're really far away, I want everyone to feel like they are truly a person.

something and we care about them. And so I think it's one of our special parts of our experience, but it's something we'll never, ever stop doing. The attention to detail is remarkable. So going from a couple, no, a couple hundred folks to 80,000 to 90,000 folks in an NFL stadium. Do you staff those stadiums yourself? Or are you training the existing vendor staff? Yeah. Because when you were small, it was you and your 12. Yes. So this actually kind of goes into one of the big lessons that impacted our business from a podcast that you had with John Nordstrom. That dramatically changed the way we looked at how we grew. With John Northstrom.

Yes. The interview you had back in 2021, maybe. It was many years ago. That's right. And it was as we were debating this idea to go and take the show on the road. And now, again, for people who don't know the journey, like we went from Gastonia, 10 years, 200 fans a game, to getting 1,000 to 2,000. We started having success.

I mean, we were trying everything. Every experiment, every promotion, you name it. And from grandma beauty pageants to flatulence, fun night. to salute to underwear nights. We tried it all. We were experimenting and learning. But then we went to Savannah and it was an old ballpark and literally minor league baseball there for 90 years and they were failing. And they left and we came in there and we proceeded to fail.

So the context, again, we came in there, myself, our wife, our 24-year-old team president and three 22-year-olds. That was our entire team. And we sold a handful of tickets our first few months on January 15th, 2015. We got the phone call that we were out of money and we were overdraft our account. We were missing payroll. And so it was that moment that we had just started a team that we had nothing left. So Emily turned to me, we sold our house, emptied our savings account, put our money in, and we're sleeping on an airbed.

And so like, a twin airbed. You know the story very well. So that's where we were. And we were just trying to be a regular baseball team or make it fun, you know, have different entertainment, dancing players, et cetera. So we did that for a while. Before we got to this moment that I was about to share, when you ask about how much do we travel with. So we just a regular baseball team for five years. but I realized that fans were leaving games early.

We were literally taking videotape and pictures every 30 minutes, and we realized when they were leaving, even with all the entertainment, the banana nanas, the band, everything. And so then I knew, hey, if we put ourselves in our fans' shoes, we have to do something different. And so when we were like, how are we going to go on the road? And I listened to your podcast, and I just kept saying,

we just got to be so good that Steve Martin quotes, so good they can't ignore you. We've got to be so good they're kidding. Because he kept talking about, you know, we just kept getting better in Seattle. And everyone kept coming to us, say, hey, we want a Nordstrom here, the malls of America, he's like, nope, not interested on it. And he's like, we're going to keep doing it. And then they said, well, what would it take?

And when he said, well, and he didn't want to say it, but you were like, well, how did you do it? He's like, well, they offered me a signing bonus. You're like, what kind of signing bonus? And it was 30 to 40 million. And I'm in my mind. I'm like, what? And he's like, well, then you're like, well, then you had to pay rent. He's like, no, we just had a $1.00 rent. And it was like, for guaranteed 10 to 15 years. And then he's like, but because it made the malls so much more valuable by bringing in a Nordstrom, everyone else came that it was a big win for the developers. It was a big win for everyone. And so I thought about that. It's like, why do we have to go on the road like everyone else? Why don't we be so good that we can make it a big win for

everyone that we don't have to pay the rent. We don't have to do everything else that makes it hard for us. And so starting in Mobile, Alabama, our first ever one city world tour, the city contributed for us to come. We found one city, only one that would do it because he actually, the mayor read my book. And he's like, oh, I love what you guys are doing. You're really trying to make the experience every. We had never played a game on the road. But he said, he said, he said, He said, what would it take to get you guys? I go, what would it take in my mind? Like, what do you have in mind?

And so he made a nice offer and the tourism came involved. And we went there. And again, a lot of things didn't go right. But we sold out both nights. It was huge. The hotels were sold. People came into town. And it's like, this is our model.

So now every single city we go to, every venue we go to, we bring hundreds of people. We don't pay rent anywhere we go. And because of that lesson from Nordstrom, I realized, that create a product that is so good that everyone else wins, that there's a value to you coming in. And you, that podcast, John Nordstrom, gave us the opportunity to probably reinvest millions of dollars into our people, into our fans because of that lesson that we learned.

I'm so thrilled to hear that. That is one of my notes to talk to you about, and you just nailed it, which is you do something that I think is one of your crown jewels, which is you feel something, you think something. You line those two things up. up together and then you take action, even so much towards like that vision that you're seeing and feeling that it costs you maybe, I don't know, selling your home.

Oh, yeah. Living in a, on an air mattress. It's like that idea takes incredible courage, but it takes vision of something that is compelling you to take action. Yeah. So can you open up, I gave you a lot of kind of room in there. You got to see something other people don't see. So what people often are, they're focused and they're seeing what.

currently is. They don't see, like, I reverse engineer and I say, what would be the perfect, the most amazing epic experience and work backwards from that? So here's an example. When it came up with the rules for banana ball, I looked at all the friction points in baseball. It's too long. It's too slow. It's too boring. This would be a good point to actually describe banana ball. So the handful of folks that don't know it. No, no. There's a lot that don't know. Believe me, there's a lot. We're still learning. But the reality is when I looked at the game of baseball, now when we did the bananas, we chose to make that team called the bananas, even though no one wanted it. We chose that because we saw what it could be. And here's that exact example you're

kind of talking about. We saw a nonstop entertainment game. So we had to have characters. I saw, we saw the banana nanas, a senior said it's a dance team. We saw the idea of a man anas, a dad bought cheerleading squad. We saw the idea of a banana baby that we put a baby in a banana costume and lifted up before the game to start the game, which makes no sense in the scheme of things. But if fans watch a little baby coming up to start the game, this weird ritual, awesome. And so we saw all these things of what it could be because we're like, the bananas could be fun. Go bananas. You know, can't stop the peeling music video. Like, we thought of all these ideas. And it was criticized locally, like, ridiculously. I mean,

everyone was like, your embarrassment to our city. You know, you're never going to sell a ticket. But what we saw is like, if we're going to be like everyone else, we're going to get results like everyone else. And in Savannah, everyone else failed. The team had to leave because they couldn't sell enough tickets. They never had success from attendance. And so I was like, we can't be. And I learned in Gastonia for 10 years to go from 100 fans to a couple thousand in selling out games that you had to do things people have never seen before. You had to get them to feel things. There's competition in sporting events and baseball. There's thousands of baseball games all over the world, constantly. We've all seen a baseball game. They had to see something different. This is exactly

what I learned from Walt Disney. He's like, they've seen what the typical three-minute shorts are. I want to get him a full-length animated with unbelievable storytelling. He was the first one to do color and flower and trees and then snow white. Almost went broke for it. He has 100%. Then the same thing with music and that sound. He almost went broke for that. All of that. But he saw, what if we had the music. What if we had the sound? What if we had full length and the storytelling and the emotions that you feel? And so we saw it. And so I was just like, what would Walt think on this? How could you see a better experience? And so that was how we thought of the bananas. And then the same thing. So we started selling out every game. Now at first we were failing, but they came

out and they saw that first night. And they saw players go into the crowd and deliver roses to little girls in the middle of the game. We broke down the barrier. I said, you can't be a spectator. I want to break down the barriers. I want fans in the crowd. I want more fans on the I want after the game, all the fans interacting with the players because that's more of a perfect scenario. If you're a kid, you know, hoping for an autograph, you know, that's what all kids. They go to a game, they hope to get a ball,

they hope to get an autograph. Well, what if we find a way to give them something even more? And so you look at that, you reverse engineer that. And so with Banana Ball, for five years, we were playing, selling out every game. We're a great business, very healthy. It was college summer baseball, so we weren't even allowed legally to pay the players at that point.

It couldn't even legally do it. It wasn't allowed. So on paper, it's a great business model, all right? Great business model. We're healthy. But then I'd realize, just like some of the greatest innovators, there's a point where you have to disrupt yourself or someone else will. And I wanted to do it ourselves. So I said, we're playing traditional baseball. We're doing the same game. And we're watching. We're taking videotape and seeing our fans are leaving at 9 o'clock. Even with all the entertainment, they're still leaving early. And then at 930, they're really leaving. So I went down for Bannibal.

I said, all the friction points. What are all the slow points? What are all the boring parts of a baseball game? wrote them all down, stepping out of the box, all right, walks, mound visits, a three to four hour game, all right? And then I said, all right, well, what would be those perfect scenarios in a game? What would be really cool? What if a fan caught a foul ball and it wasn't out? And then I actually envisioned, I said, what if a kid caught a foul ball to win the game and the players rush out, they bring him on the field, they lift him over their shoulders, and they're celebrating the media's interviewing him after the game. I'll never forget in 2023. We're playing in Canapolis, Carolina still building our way up a small tour. Blind drive. 15-year-old kid catches it. Players

rush out to him, lift him up on their shoulders. He's in the paper the next day. I never told anybody, it's exactly what happened. And so with the game of banana ball, that's what we tried to create. And we've had to add rules and enhances. We see how the games work. And I mean, the greatest innovation happens from iteration. You just keep trying things and experimenting and then you do new things. You know, we were playing in Tulsa and it was a showdown, which again, think about this, the end of a game, three-hour game. It's like, all right, extra innings. We're back to just more baseball. I was like, that's not making big, it's just more. So how do you, you're borrowing from hockey. You borrow for everything. Yeah. So I heard a podcast of Rube Waddell, this crazy

pitcher in the 1900s that he would literally, if there was a fire truck in the game, like outside, he would get off the mountain and chase a fire truck to go, like he was crazy. He would also drink beers, take people's food in the state. He was a lunatic, but an amazing lunatic. And so what he would do when he pitch? Sometimes he'd be like, I got this guy, everyone off the field. and I was like, that is awesome. That is the epitome of showmanship. I mean, you can't not watch that because he said, I don't need anybody else.

It's me. So I said, what if our end of our games? We have pitcher versus hitter and no on the field. So what if it's a showdown? And so again, envision that perfect scenario. So we created that. That's how we started doing that. So we were in a showdown in Tulsa.

And the umpire missed the call at the end of the game. And it almost turned bad because our players care. This isn't the Harlem Globetrotters. It's a competitive game. It was ugly. The fans were upset. the players were upset. Game was over. The bananas lost. And the players for the first time, they didn't come out the first 10 minutes to go autographs. Like, I was like, this is bad.

So by the next week, the next game, we had the fan challenge in play where fans could literally, if there was a bad call, they could hold up a fan challenge and do it. And so that's the way we look at all of this. If something doesn't feel great for the fans, how quickly can you test something new and then learn from it? Because the greatest entrepreneurs, business leaders, I believe they learn from doing as much as anything. You've got to start doing it. Finding Mastery is brought to you by David Protein. One of the lessons I've learned working with some of the best in the world is that consistency matters.

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that I think frees you up so there's a that's a two-part question really which is about the process yeah and then your model for risk taking what I'm fascinated about is trying to look at who has been able to sustain creativity for a long period of time and so for us you know we realize that what we ask ourselves every single night we're doing 10 to 15 things that never happened before in a baseball field every single night I heard Steve Jobs talk about you have a force the function so like we force I mean in our game promos we have to do a completely brand new promo in between innings then we have all the celebrations all the walkups everything before and no matter what it's like we have to and we have to do one in pregame and so when we have multiple games there's multiple new things

that never happened before so that's a forced function but how do we do it we studied Saturday Live specifically I look at there's very few you know there was Pixar well they were in their heyday WWE have a lot of respect for them. They were everything in the 80s, and they're still very relevant. You know, not many people can do 40 plus years, Taylor Swift, but she's constantly reinventing herself. There's a small group, Mr. Beast, I mean, there's a small group that's very at that highest level, highest standard.

And so one that I was like, well, the biggest similarity for us right now is Saturday Night Live because every Saturday, it's a brand new show with a brand new host. So we're at a brand new venue, a brand new place, and we have to be able to figure out how to do a brand new show. So with Saturday Night Live, I found a documentary. It was by James Franco, and he followed a whole week on the set of Saturday Night Live. And he basically showed a whole week. And I was like, I'm going to watch this. And so I was like, this is good. So it was like Monday, you know, they come in and it was a John Malkovich, he was the guest host. So Monday, he comes in and all the writers, they meet him. And they just start pitching ideas. All right. He's just

listening. They're talking. Then the next day, they start writing all the ideas. Then on Wednesday, they have a table read. They start going through it. Then they start picking some. They start doing rehearsals. They start doing props. Then on Saturday, they actually do a full run-through in front of a crowd before the 1130. And more than Michaels, he's watching the crowd reaction. He's trying to get the feel for it. Then they actually cut things. So with our team, I was like, guys, this is the blueprint. We have games every week. So we got to write new ideas, create new ideas, have a table read, do rehearsals. Ideally do some rehearsals in front of fans so we can see their reaction. And so yeah, in 2023, we said, let's start doing it. And what we realized was for us, the gold standard

is what's great for the live crowd and great for the digital crowd. We don't do any marketing on how to get people to our games. We want to create an experience that's so epic that it becomes remarkable. And so to do that, what we have to do is we have to have ideas of things that people have never seen before in a baseball field that's over the top, that's big, that's unique, that's different. One idea can change everything. The 3-2-2, which was we saw there was a popular dance, the drop challenge.

This was, geez, three, four years ago. It was basically just a song by Beyonce and everyone just drops. and we just said, what if the pitcher does the drop like that with the music and just throws a pitch? And we're like, no, why not? And it was crazy is the ESPN Banana Land the first season. They actually capturing us coming up with us and documenting like the first one. And we put it out there. The pitcher dropped and we had the two other infillers behind him and dropped in the middle of the game.

And the fans were like live like, what is happening? And then digital got like 40 million views because people had never seen it before. And we said, whoa, this opens up a whole other bucket. We can do any type of dance during that. We can do any type of thing. We'd have different things in the background. We could have split there. We could have fans there.

There's so many opportunities. So that became one bucket. I was like, oh, all right. So every night we come up with different unique dances. But then you push yourself. So now we have a new team in Texas, the Texas tailgators. They sold out their whole headlining tour. It's crazy.

We said, we can't just do a three to two two. We said, what's something different? And the idea came around from person in our team. He said, well, what if we do a standoff? And so like, do-do-do-do-do-to-so. So you have the pitcher walk out, the hitter, walk out and they go back to back and they just go all the way because they're there at Texas country-based team till they get to the mound till they get then you're hitting and so it's

new iteration of something people have never seen before and so it just what they're very familiar with because the westerns yes westerns yes or the the 3-2-2 drop yeah they're familiar with something you add it into our you banana-fi it is what we always say so one idea leads to another and so yeah we have now our players have their own OTT session our broadcast is a part of it our creative our marketing team, over the top ideas. So that's what it's called on. Every Tuesday we have our over the top meeting. So like we have, you know, four shows this weekend, two in Texas and two at Yankee Stadium and we'll have multiple all day Tuesdays, our creative day until we get to a table read at the end of a Tuesday. And then we start preparing rehearsals, getting the props, getting everything

we need, teaching the players of the dances, teaching the players the songs. Okay. So each game is net new because you're introducing, did you say 12 to 15 ideas? You still play your main hits. So Kay Baby's a big ritual. We do at all our stadiums. We still honor a future foster family because of Bananas Foster, our nonprofit. Like, we have some of our main moments, but then there's big new elements that we do every single night. And you just had Derek Huff on. Yes. We had him on the show, but you had him dancing with his partner.

It was amazing. Yeah. Was that to open the show? No, that's, no. Everything's a surprise. So I learned this from Bill Vec, one of the greatest owners of all time. You had the white socks and the Browns. He actually talked about a fans first owner.

He had the grandstand manager's night. In an actual major league game, he let the fans make the decisions what the. players were going to do, bunt, steal, hit and run, pinch run. He put the managers in rocking chairs in the seats. This guy was unbelievable. Every night, he said, if you're going to do fireworks, don't tell people, make it a surprise because you never know what's going to happen when you come to the game. And so that inspired me. So we have guests, a lot of our nights at major league stadiums and we don't tell anybody. Go back to the Beyonce 322 for just a moment, is that that's when I learned about what you guys were doing. I was one of the 40 million that saw it on YouTube,

which YouTube is free for everybody, right? You pay for the stadium. YouTube is free. Again, that's our whole ethos. We haven't really discussed it, but the whole ethos is putting ourselves in our fan's shoes. So the name of the company is fans first entertainment.

So yes, there's no ticket fees, no convenient fees, no service fees. We pay your taxes. There's no shipping fees on merchandise in Savannah because we control everything. All the food and Bev. It's all included. And so, yeah, we said,

what's a big, another friction point for fans? You got to go to paywall now. Where's the game? Is it on this channel? Is it on this channel? Is it on this channel? Oh, I don't have that subscription anymore. I can't watch the game.

So what's the opposite? Because it's behind a paywall. single game free for YouTube. We've thrown away millions of dollars the last few years doing that because of the opportunity working. But now, just like John Nordstrom, you keep creating a great product and making the product better. So now you show up at Yankee Stadium. But we have deals from ESPN. We have deals from other groups, T&T, CW, Roku, and they're still lending us for the first time ever. It's a non-exclusive deal. So how does it work? It's non-exclusive. So we can keep it on YouTube and on ESPN. Yeah, there you go. So you get a free for your fans and you get to. I know we're

diving around a little bit. No, no, no, no. I'll come back to the three, two, two, two, a minute. Go to the business model here. How do you show up at a stadium that takes billions of dollars to build and you show up rent-free? Because of the value you provide. So again, what I realized, we saw this because in Mobile, Alabama. You know, again, you see as a Yankee Stadium, the football stadiums, but, you know, a 3,500-seat stadium. But you had to pay $20,000 for your first license at one of these stadiums. This was like way back 25 years ago.

For Savannah to be a year-round tenant. Yes, we pay $20,000 to be a year-round tenant. Year-round tenant. year-round. Okay. Right. Yes. So that's the year-round. But then when we went to these other places, we said, well, what's the value? So if we come there to a stadium that has nothing going that day, and they get 100% of the food and Bev. They get the food and be. 100% the food and Bev. Got it. And who gets parking?

They get parking. Okay. So it's a win. Oh, it's a huge win. And then it's a win for tourism. So when we went to Charlotte, we played two games at the Panther Stadium, NFL Stadium, 148,000 fans. They said it was near record. Wait, no, no.

They don't sit 148,000. Two nights. Two nights. Okay. Two nights, 148,000 fans. Charlotte reported it was near record hotel occupancy. 38.6 million dollar economic impact. So when you think about that, now we have this data.

So what's the value for a. city, tourism, and the stadium, yeah, are they not going to make as much money as a concert where a huge act pays a half million dollar rent and there's splits on tickets? Yeah, they might not make three, four, five million dollars on us, but the team might make a million, a million and a half profit, plus they get all the tourism. So the city gets a big impact. And so we have to just make our product better and better. So we continue to draw people from all over the country wherever we go.

That's what I focus on. Yeah, people are driving and flying. Yeah, we average 38 to 40 states almost everywhere we play, which is just crazy. So you get gate and merch. Yes. Right? And so they get parking and food and bath. And then depending on the deal, the venue, sometimes they get some of the premium, but they have like set premium clubs or sweets.

You know, there's a breakdown of there. You know, those partnerships are a little different and you eat at the stadium. Yeah. So, but it's a win. You know, everybody wins. Flat out. Everybody wins and they might not win as big as some others. And we've had a lot of stadium say no.

But you find ones that say yes. And then you deliver and you create a great experience for everyone. You're kind and you're nice and you treat people well and you do it. So they actually enjoy having you. You know, it's just you have to deliver on what you say. How is this sustainable for you and your team? There's a few different levels of sustainability. There's sustainability on the travel.

That's right. Yeah. So I've been fortunate to work a little bit with Chick-fil-A and they've been out to us and I've spoke there and we've worked together. And, you know, again, they were very non-negotiable on their Sundays. They're closed every Sunday. They do more revenue than every other place. And so their team gets rest on Sundays.

We don't play games on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I've committed to that. I learned the hard way in 2020, 22, 23. We were playing in between and it was just tough. You know, you're in a new stadium, starting up, loading up, starting up. And so, you know, we only have, you know, 60, 70 games each team or whatever that's going to be when we go into the league. Major League Baseball played 162 games. They're playing six days a week. Talk about sustained. That's hard for a family. So there's that. And then there's the creative sustainability. That's right. So for me and Emily, Emily, my wife, who cares so much about our people, she got a hard, like we're thinking, how do we do that? So we actually are even

willing in the middle of this tour to have complete weekends off for the entire organization which is crazy in the sports imagine Major League Baseball having multiple weekends off just don't do it because it's lost revenue I'm not worried about the revenue

I'm worried about our people actually feeling energy excitement for what they do And who are the people? Is it the athletes or is it the staff? It's everybody. So yes, are our players playing maybe 190 less games

than they play Major League Baseball but every night they're signing, they're doing pictures they're coming up new dances Wait there how many games less? So Major League Baseball is 162. Yeah. And so we'll play.

Our season will be 60 to 65, maybe 70 with playoffs. However, you're not the full MLB machine, you know. Yeah. So that actually seems reasonable to me. Yeah. But it's for our staff as well. And I mean, I think about it, every night, every weekend we're going to a new stadium. We travel with 200 plus at the Major League stadiums, the minor league stadiums for other tours.

Like the party animals, they have more followers than every Major League Baseball team on TikTok. So, like, they're selling out their tour in minutes. This is one of your four teams, the party. And we're going to have two more coming in October. So they sold out on their tours, but they have about 150 that we travel in. And then we hire Major League Stadium out of the 3 to 400 to merchandise stands. The Nanner scanners, we put them in full banana costumes and they scan your tickets in. Operations, the load, and we bring in three, five semi-trailers, which, again, we had no idea how to do it when we started.

You're traveling with more than an NFL team travels, and you're traveling about half of what a Formula One team travels. yeah so you're you're you're in a pretty heavy lift a hundred percent and and so we often stay an extra day to let people read like we do different things to try to work on the rest but yeah it's a lot and so that's what we're we're looking at on how do we continue to give an opportunity for them to be a family time so we actually let them travel with family at certain weekends and do other things because the greatest creators they want to create something they would love that's great for them like you look at steve jobs the first phone he's like they're clunky i want to create something different the i he's the mp3 players the walkman like Pixar's same thing. I want to create a movie they would love. And what are you creating? So I want to create something that is unbelievable for fans, but also great for families internally. We have three kids under seven. We adopted our two young girls, our biological son. How can you make it where? I didn't know you adopted. Yes, we had two girls of foster. So that's how we got into our nonprofit bananas foster. Oh, very cool. So yeah. So, yeah, one when she was six days old, right out of the NICU and another one, which is two and a half. And so we adopted an officially

last year. Can we pause about the bananas and talk about that decision? That is a significant life decision. That's what I said. If we could figure it out and create it so it can be great for us, we believe that we can create a model. It can be great for all our people as well. But if you want to dive in, that was Emily's dream. She supported me in this big dream of what we want to create with the bananas. And she knows that this dream is much bigger than where it is right now. And that can be tough for her or anybody to know that it's here. And in 2020, when we were obviously COVID and we were trying to figure out the business, and all that. She just had in her heart. She goes, there's 400,000 kids in the U.S.

who don't have a permanent home. She's like, we got to do something. She read the book, everything is figureoutable by Marie Forleo. And she said, you know, it's just a simple concept. Everything's figured. No matter what the situation that you could figure it out. And so he said, well, if it's COVID, it's hard. Why don't we try to become foster parents? And so we actually got licensed in the middle of COVID. And months later, we got the first call and a two-half-year-old girl joined us. She had gashes on her body. She was scared of the dark. She was nonverbal, two and a half, just saying yuck and no. She had a challenging, challenging background. That first night, she was so scared of the dark that she actually slept on my shoulder

whole night. And there's a picture that makes me emotional thinking about it. What does it mean to you? It means so much. We were able to give love to this girl that, you know, again, I'm not talking about a past. We don't know. But what we understand, there's probably neglect. That's why a dark room, closed door, scared. There was probably just that yeah so she joined us and then we were going on to date nine we got another call and it was a six-day-year-old and the NICU who was battling a lot of everything was in her system and so she joined us and again the goal in foster care is to always help reunite uh reunification and bring them back so we didn't expect we were just hey we're helping a week turns in a month turns into two months

turns a new year turns in a year and a half and then we knew it just it wasn't the best situation for the families and actually our youngest addison her mother and I shared in the book her mother we were flying at the end of our tour. I'll never forget this. Our 2022 tour, it was only seven cities. So this was the first, like, Mobile was like, okay, we can do this in one city? But seven cities, can we do a real tour?

And so I was already full of emotions. We did it. It was unbelievable. And it's Mother's Day. And we're flying back home after the last tour game. And Emily turns to me, and she's bawling her eyes out. So she's up with Kenna and I'm with Maverick. And she hands me the phone.

And Addies, Addison's biological mother wrote a whole note. She said on Mother's Day, I couldn't imagine a better gift than to allow you to be the mother of my daughter. And it was that moment that she said, she was so mature her birth mother to know that she wasn't in a spot to take care of her. And so Emily cried and we knew that was the moment. And so, geez, that was two years later, went through the process. We were actually finally able to adopt him. Again, an idea with emotion and then action taken.

And so you're good at finding the thinking there, yes. Yeah, I think it's as benevolent. And that's the time we started the nonprofit because then we realized we let's take it to the next level right after that. It was just one step we're like, we can only do so much. Banana Fosters. Yeah, bananas Foster. Yeah, so again, you look at a problem. So you look at a problem.

How are most nonprofits run? You know, it's always talking about all the bad things asking for money. But what if we don't ask for money at all? And what if we just honor future foster families? So when we go to any stadium, a family that's maybe taken in 30 kids, 40 kids, adopted three. They become the heroes in front of a sold-out crowd and get a standing ovation every night. How do they do that? You bring them down.

We stop the game. Emily walks out there. Please welcome the field. You know, Savannah Manna's owner, Emily Cole. You know, she tells the story of them and what they did. Stadium rises, standing ovation. The kids run out. The whole players, both teams run out, put their arms around them, and then they come

off the field. We don't ask for donations, you know, we just share that and we make them heroes. And every stadium we do that. And so now what we've been seeing is we got people reaching out left and right saying, I want to learn more. I want to become a foster family. I want to know it. And so that I'm so.

probably like that is that is emily's baby and we've now hired three four five people as we do it all over the country but yeah i think you're right we see a problem and we realize that no one knows exactly how to do anything until they do it you just start doing it and that's a first that's a first principle for yours no one really knows how to do it so you got to start you just start and you learn for him i do i went to greenfield village in detroit henry ford another person i look up to the plaque it said henry believed in learning by doing and i think that's true of almost anything you know how to play banana ball games at football stadiums. We don't know how to do a cruise ship.

We literally took all our fans. We sold out a cruise ship with no banana ball. The one thing that we do, we said, well, what if we can learn how to entertain our fans for three to four days without playing the main thing that we do? And we just did it. And now there's another one that sold out. So it's like, that's my mindset.

I just want to learn more. I want to be the fastest learning organization in sports. If we can learn faster than anyone else, talk about sustainability from a business standpoint, we can be sustainable. It's the creativity that I believe to be at the highest level creativity, there's not many blueprints out there on how to continually do it. And so that's where we're going to have to learn new things constantly to be able to do that in 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years.

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off when you use the code finding mastery at checkout that's lisa l-e-e-esa dot com the promo code is finding mastery for 20% off plus an extra $50 off on us because great sleep it's just too important to leave to chance i think your mechanism sounds sustainable but the rhythm is the one to be careful because you're you're talking about human energy yes in this case right but the mechanism sounds sustainable yes and we're going to have to continue to think on how we push ourselves out our way of thinking so i'm saying it's like we know now so many things that do work well in front of a live crowd and need to try something different so the best example of this is Taylor swift could have been a great country singer for many years she knew the types of songs that she knew would work

even though everyone said no a female country singer it doesn't work that much anymore it's not going to do But she's like, no, I'm going to now go into pop. You know, I'm now going to go into, you know, she's constantly reinventing herself and testing. So how does it work for you? Like, do you have a thought and a feeling or is it primarily a feeling? Or are you using your imagination to see around corners to create a compelling idea of what could be? So help me understand how you link.

It's imagination. So for you, it's. Yeah. And then how, okay, so hold on. This is, sorry to interrupt you. Okay. How, what do you do to create the space to use your imagination? I always want our fans every night to say, you wouldn't believe what they did.

You wouldn't believe how they made me feel. So again, you working backwards. Working backwards. So you go to you wouldn't believe where they played. You wouldn't believe what they created. You wouldn't believe how they showed that game on TV. You wouldn't believe what happened in the stands during a game. So like, for instance, right now, you wouldn't believe where they played.

I've got a lot of ideas on places that people have never imagined. And now I know we start going through the process. Well, then you ask the question, what's it going to take? What's it going to take? And you got to get creative because, you know, to do games at certain places that have never had games before, you got to put seating, you got to build a field. You got to do all that. But what I'm realizing is we're learning how to do that.

When we go to a football stadium, we bring in all the netting and padding. We had a great partner, netting professionals. They helped us out. And we built a deal, which was a great trade partnership. And we learned that. So now we know we can put padding and netting anywhere. We had to go to football stames that you had to put grass in and we had to do ones that you had just turf.

We learned how to do that last year. Now the next step is how do you learn to put seating in a place that doesn't have seating? Now, anybody, there's companies that do it, but how do you do it where you don't pay millions of dollars? So how do you do it where it's a win, win, win, win, for everybody without doing that. So that's another test that will happen in the next couple of years. And so you do that. And then it's like, okay, now that you know this competency,

now I can put a game anywhere. Where else could we play? Very cool. So that mindset, it's one step ahead of the other. Like, we went to football stadiums because we didn't know if we, the relationship with MLB, we didn't know how it was going to work. We wanted to have another opportunity. We didn't know how football stadium was going to work with 190 feet down the left field line,

you know, in Clemson. It's crazy. But for an 81,000s, we played a game in an hour and 43 minutes with 20 plus trick plays, 11 home runs, and it was great for fans. So now we will do more football stadiums. And so you just, you do and then learn. You have to imagine what would be cool from a fan point of view, what would be fun, If this were to work, would it be epic that you could do again and do any bigger and do it different?

So that's kind of the mindset. So let me stay on this question one more time before I go to thinking around corners. Is this an internal private experience or is this an extroverted, you know, kind of talk it out experience? I share probably way too. I would just have lawyers or other people who say, Jesse, stop sharing so much. But I also share because I learn when I share, I get a reaction. Yes, but your process to use your imagination is an extroverted process. 100%.

Yeah. So you're not. I write it down. No, I write. So every morning I write. Oh, you do. Oh, I write. I've started that. I read the book Miracle Morning by Hal Al Rudd, and that changed everything. Jeez, 10 plus years ago. See, there you go again. You do, you observe, like John Nordstrom. Yeah. You didn't passively listen and go, man, that's amazing for John. Like, what a great job he did. That's really smart. You absorbed it. You put it through a filter and then you put it in action. You tested. We We experiment with everything. Talk to me about curiosity. How does, how does curiosity and experiment It's one of our fans' first principles, constantly curious. It's the only way that we believe we can grow.

And so I guess it's also an obsession on continuous improvement. So to give an example, this is something that I don't think many people know. After every game, we have an LCP, which means learn change plus. So it started with us in entertainment because our live show and entertainment is our main, that was our main differentiator. If you come to one of our games, the broadcasts are fine, the social media, they're good, but they can be a lot better. Our live show is how we start this.

We want to make a live show, you feel something you never felt before. So it started with that. So we have our whole script, pre-game, during, game, post-game. I mean, our shows, people are realized at a major league stadium or football stadium. They started at 2 o'clock. We do a rope drop with the whole opening performance, and the players are there to greet you when you walk in at 2 o'clock. For a 7 o'clock game, and then we have a 3 o'clock show on the stage our front.

That goes to 4.30 when we have the big march. And then we have... So 430 is when I see the pictures of like... The packs, the thousands out in the streets. That's still two and a half, three hours before the game. But because we built the... the show into there. So like we are obsessed with that. And so that's part of the script. Then we have the game with all the new things we've never done before, the celebrations, the dances,

the walkups, all that. And then we have a postgame plaza party. And that's where we'll do a whole other performance. And that's where I have, it was really special moments, stand by me, thanking the fan signing autographs. My point is that's the whole show. Our director of entertainment, our show callers, we all put notes into an LCP, learn change plus. So we look at everything in the show. What do we learn? What are things that we would change? What are things that we're going to plus? And so we put those in the notes. And then at the end of the night, we have an idea of how are we going to get better for tomorrow? What things can we take with us and get better for next week?

What things are we not going to do? All of that. So now that's become a part of our culture. And the P for Plus is like what you're going to push further. It's the best lesson I've learned from Walt Disney. And it's, he said, Disneyland is a living, breathing thing. It'll never be complete. We will continue to plus the show.

He called it a show. And, you know, he said, whenever I go on a ride, I'm always asking what's wrong with this thing and how can it be improved. So he used to time going on the jungle cruise. And he went on at once and it was only two minutes. It was supposed to be four and a half. Boy, his team heard about it. And by the time he came on that afternoon, it was fixed because he knew at the perfect time.

You had to feel the whole experience. And so plus is something that we, that's our final fans first principle. We will always plus the experience. How do you work with your staff, your team? Yeah. When something isn't to your standard or isn't to the standard of the fans? That's a fault I have.

I try to coach 95. percent of the time. Sometimes my emotions come out. And it happened this past week in Texas and Emily actually was in the dugout and she had to come over to me. How I work with our staff is it's constantly trying to coach and share, you know, hey, the sound wasn't right here. Hey, we're doing this. Like the moment that really got me was that we have these new Texas tailgators aprons instead of T-shirts throwing out aprons, you know, trying to mix it up. And it was the first time. And so it was like, oh, want some Texas tailgators aprons. And I always, the first thing I do is I look to every seat in the stadium and I want to make sure there's a player there or staff member there

and right on our main dugout all the fans stood up pumped and there was no one there and my little part of my core just died right there because I watched disappointment in hundreds of fans faces and I reacted I went in the dugout and I reacted almost probably like someone if they struck out in a big moment it wasn't the reaction I should have and this happened recently I haven't done a long time and because I care so much and so I you know I went And after I capo, I said, I go into our guys, I said, we can never let down the fans like that again. We need to find it. And I found out what, I go, what happened?

And they share the story. I go, what will we do in the next situation? So that never happens again. And then we talked about it again at night. And to me, what I realize is that if these are young, 23-year-old, 24-year-old young people, sometimes if they see how much something matters to me, it will get into their system that it also matters to them. That was not my best moment. But we, after the game, we meet as a group and debrief on everything that happened and talk about things that went right, things were wrong, how are we going to prove it, how are we going to plus it?

It's just part of our culture. But now our banana ball, our coaches do the same thing. After every game, they look at it, not who struck out, who got out, but how do you make the experience better for fans? How do you make the show better? How do you make the games faster? How do we have more trick plays? All the differentiators in our game that we're trying to focus on, those areas they meet with their coaching staff and talk about that. They share that on paper.

How much does winning matter and how much is high performance matter? Winning is subjective. For us, if the bananas lose or the main headliner team loses, if it's a great show, we all won. And our players know that. And I share that with our players. Winning will matter more next year. And I'm very conscientious of how that can affect things because we go into the league.

We're going to have the banana ball championship. Everything comes together. This is with six teams now. With six teams, yeah. But what I always tell the guys is so much bigger than a game and what we're trying to do and how we make people feel. And I've been to too many, I remember I went to a great football game

many years ago, and it was a great game at the end. It was Patriots. I would never forget. It was Patriots versus the Panthers. It was in Charlotte. I grew up in Boston. So I'm watching, you know,

kind of a Patriots fan, but being neutral. And there was a touchdown at the end and Gras caught it from Brady and at the last minute, the Patriots won. And where everyone's leaving, and the amount of people cussing,

just swearing out of their minds, furious. And I watch, I was like, I never want that to happen. 74,000 sold out crowd for the Patriots and 95% people leaving Panthers fans are screaming and angry because of that game. And I was like, you go back to Walt Disney

control the controllables. He wants to control how people, when they walk in, you want in one entrance, where all the other amusement parks had multiple. He wants to control what you see, what you feel, what you hear. I go, if we make everything based on solely winning and losing, fans might not have a great experience. And so we even change our language.

It's not welcome to the game. Did you enjoy the game? It's welcome to the show. Did you enjoy the show? So even when the bananas lose a bad game and there are big bananas fans, do you enjoy the show? And if we can always answer with hopefully yes, then to me, that's winning as an organization.

That's winning for banana ball. And that's what our group is collectively focusing on. Your outfielder, though, can't drop a ball. I mean, they do drop. It goes for a trick play and he drops it sometimes. Like, what's the athlete's name that, do you call them athletes? performers.

I just call them with their names, to be honest with you. But yeah, I mean, yeah. Dancers, yeah. Well, no, they're ball players. So if it's a tie game and he goes up and does a backflip, you know the gentleman. Well, we have a few of them now, but D.R. Meadows was the first one ever did it. Yeah. And it's awesome to watch. It's remarkable. And he drops it.

Yeah. And kind of, let's say somebody kind of comes home on third to score and game over. Yeah. So what happens there? Like, are you, you're good with that? Yes. Let me give you the best example. We're playing in Cooperstown. So one of the oldest ballparks of the country. It's, it's, it's, uh, 20, 23.

So it was just the bananas and party animals. There were no other teams. This is the first time we went all around the country, playing in 33 cities. The bananas were- Just the two teams traveling around. Yes. We're still learning everything. It's the first time doing a national tour. We're figuring it all out.

Just minor league parks. And so the day before they put us in the hall fan, which was a really cool moment. I'll never forget. They were playing this final game. But this game mattered more than any other one. And here's why. 10 games prior, the bananas were up, nine games. to none. The year was over. Like the bananas already won the tour. We thought the party animals won

the next nine straight. So they both were 33 and 33 going into this final game. And not scripted. Not scripted. You can't script the party animals winning nine straight games. I'm sure you could WWE does it all the time. In baseball, it's much hard. I mean, you could make, it would look too fake because hitting balls, throwing balls. You would have to have so many fake plays. You're 100% hand-on Bible that you are. We have never, ever, ever in a game scripted any part of the actual impacting the baseball game ever i mean i'm proud of that and that's why it's i hope you never change that oh 100 so like you can as far as like the entertainment like when they score we have this is the run and scoring sally if they score this is what they do this is how it's going to walk up this is

who's going to come into the game now but what actually happens on the field and if we were to ever do something like that like an umpire miss a call there's a fan challenge and there's player challenges if we ever keep the whole thing on us correct even if we ever and i'm kind of giving a tease of something that could in the future. If we were to do that, it can be corrected immediately because of that. So 33-33. Fifth inning, this game comes down at all. Fly ball to DR Meadows. It's a sun because they have no lights there. So the sun, Blair, he goes for a backflip, hits him right off the face, run scores. Next ball. Deep fly ball, deep to center, all the way back. He goes for the backflip again and nails it. The bananas ended up losing the game, but that run didn't actually impact.

But I tell that story to everyone who tries out with us. I tell a story to everyone who joins us. The ability to take one off the head in a situation, a championship game, and then go and do it again, that's what we want to create. Those moments matter so much to the sense of like, we're not afraid to fail. I want people that are not afraid to fail. Now, it's going to be challenging when you get into a point when fans really maybe start caring a little bit more. They become really big party animals fans or tailgators or firefighters fans.

how can you make those trick plays matter? And so those are things we're looking at affecting the rules. So a fan goes, oh, he went for this because it was important in how it can impact. It's like a three point shot in basketball versus two points. Or you have whoever has the most trick plays and, you know, a certain amount of the game, it could affect maybe add a point in that. So you're going to add that element as part of the scoring mechanism. Potentially.

Potentially. So then it gives an opportunity to go for things and fans can understand as well, not just put on a show. That's right. So you have to, you're dabbling with things. WB, everything's scripted. Yeah. It's entertainment and athlete. But other than that, like, I don't know anyone that's all entertainment and not scripted.

Like, I can't think of anyone. So we're trying to do something that really hasn't been done before. And so it's going to be messy for us when we try to figure this out. Next year, we'll be messy. But we'll make a quick adjustments when we need to. I think it was Walt Disney that said, I'd rather entertain people. And if they're, I'm going to butcher the quote. It's the hinge between education and entertainment.

I'd rather entertain people. And if they get some education, great. It's the right. That's what you're doing. Yes. Right. Okay. In my world of finding master, I want more of that.

Yeah. But my default as an applied scientist is to like kind of be boring on education. And boy, do I and we need more of what you have. You have this aperture that you've opened up. And it's, there's a freedom about you. And I'm going to kind of draw this bridge, if I can, from early experiences in your life with your parents, divorce issues, da-da-da. you adopting of the performer identity and now you are almost devoid of the shackles that that has created and you are an extraordinary performer.

Your identity, if I'm making it. Well, no, I think of our team as the performer. I think it's just someone kind of helps orchestrate it. You're in a yellow suit. I guess it's your definition of performer. I see performance. I mean, I just had Derek Huff perform. I see that's a performance.

You know, for myself, you're right. I guess because I speak, I share, I'm on the field in front of it. It is a performance. Yeah. I see that. Yeah. And you're creating an ecosystem of performance for others. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. It is a showman. It is, I do have the showman mindset because I'm constantly, even when I introduce a player, I'm thinking about how do I have the inflection here? How do I do this? Where are they coming from? What's the light?

Every time when I finish the night, and this is the moment that at the end of the night, we thank the fans and we do a stand-by-me moment that this happened in Mobile organically. The band was playing for an hour after the game, and fans weren't leaving. So this is right at the end of COVID, just giving it a part perspective. And people are finally getting back together a little bit. And fans didn't want to leave. And the band was playing for an hour and they were exhausted. I mean, we were two nights, it was exhausted.

But the tuba players, look at the drum, they're all like, tuba's like, one more, one more. So he just starts playing the opening beats of Stand By Me. And I watched as our staff, our players, cast, our fans organically put their arms around each other. And they started singing. And I was in it. But I actually, I captured the moment because. I knew it was a moment that was going to be so impactful and significant for our future because I was like, this happened and this is going to be how we finish every single night

from now on. And so now, wherever we go, at the end of the night, they band does a whole performance. We do a big, hey baby, which is our big dance. And I say now for final tradition. And I always tell the story. I say, this is how it started. And you guys have been standing by us since that moment. So everyone with your friends, your family and your new bananas ball family, or you put your arms around each other. And everyone puts their arms around each other. You're in the middle and we start singing stand by me and then everyone at the end they bring it in and i thank them i tell them this is why we're here we're here because of you and we're never going to stop because of you and we raise our hands and we say fans first and i say good night that's how i finish every night

and then i lost sign for another hour so but that's how we finish every night there it's those moments of bringing people together and you mentioned performer yes i think about how do i deliver this to really make make people know how much this means to me to us to them being most of them got there at 2 o'clock It's now 10 o'clock. They've been there eight hours. Maybe their first time they've been on the bucket. They've been on the wait list for three years. This is a bucketless trip for them.

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It's what you train. As a psychologist, the way I view sport is that it's a way to learn more about who you are, who you want to become. How to open up the aperture of what's already inside. So it's a mechanism. Sport is a mechanism. And it's awesome for a lot of reasons. It's got tons of problems.

how do you see sport i've never been asked that question because i'm always being open i'm so in our world of trying to create something better each night but what i love about sport is that every night it's something new it's some way of of expressing yourself being out and competing like for me i have this big fear of just boredom irrelevance settling down and so the fact that why you look at what's happening now and the disruption of tv and social what's what's the one thing all all the stations, the platforms want, sports, because it's a new live experience. Now, where I think in traditional sports, to an extent, there hasn't been enough innovation. It's still very similar, but it's still, you never know who's going to win.

You never know what's going to happen. There's a moment. It's pitcher versus hitter. The player with the basketball shooting, those moments are, you don't get to feel those often. And many people don't get to feel them at all. And so I think there's a tremendous level of that. But when I think overall about sport, I think about, and the sports that I enjoy, It's not individual.

It's teams coming together. It's the camaraderie. Yeah. That's what I get excited about. I think for you, sport is community and sport is innovation. I think it's your petri dish to work out how elements can come together to create something that new. It's everything. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you get to build a world. Like, so what I get to do is I get to build a world where whether you're two or you're 82, you're dancing, you're singing, you're seeing new things. You're getting touched and impacted by players. Like, it's this new world that is fascinating. I can see you dropping into Walt Disney framing and P.T. Barnum framing and Steve Jobs framing. I can see that you've really studied. How do you study them? Thousands of books and podcasts. So, I mean, that's why I got into your podcast. I studied your, I mean,

I religiously listen to founders now. I try to, you know, you always say you're average of the five people you surround yourself with. Well, I try to surround myself with Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Ed Catmell, some of the most creative people. And if I'm surrounding myself with I can think the way and, you know, I don't want to be around negative people. I want to be around dreamers. Emily always says, Jesse, you're always so optimistic about the future. I'm like, we're going to figure it out. We're just got to keep doing.

We're going to keep showing up. Most people, they don't show up. And those, some of those people I listen to, they just kept showing up, even with criticism. I mean, we get more criticism now. And it's crazy. We're getting criticism regularly. And that's the thing I'm trying to learn because it hurts. It still hurts.

I'm not numb to it. But then I realize that Jobs, Bezos, Walt, they got tons of criticism. but they didn't let that drown it out. They kept moving forward. When somebody is not optimistic, what do you hope that they would understand? The best example would be for my dad, he battled two forms of cancer back about 10, 12 years ago. And I was now as 12 years ago. I wasn't even Savannah yet.

I was in Gastonia. It was a GM running the team there. And he had one the size of a tumor the size of a pair outside of his liver. And it was bad. And so he had to be in the hospital regularly. regularly. And he kept saying, Jesse, you know, you stay in North Carolina, you do what you need to do. But he's like, I'm going to get through this. And we're good. So I call my dad every single day, still talked to my dad almost every day. And every day, say, dad, how are you doing?

He goes, Jess, I'm great. Tell me about your day. What ideas you're working on? Next day, how are you doing? Great, Jess, great. Every single day, he said great. And then one day, I said, dad, how you do it? He goes, good, Jess. What's going on with you? And there was the good word. The good changed everything in my mind. So I talked to Diane, I said, I said, what happens. She goes, he had one of the worst nights I could ever imagine. The chemo, the thrown out of the sick, he wasn't even sure. Like, I've never seen anything like that. He woke up that morning and said he was good. And when I talked to my dad later, he said, oh, Jess, it's just a season, man. I want to get to the next season. Just a season. Hey, wait till the next season. And look at

this. Hey, the Red Sox are on a, on a run right now. I get to watch the Red Sox. He reframed everything as a season. Think about that. And a season, that's a long period of time. But if you reframe everything as this tiny little blip, you know, what I realize, we've had now some challenging moments, some challenging criticism, some bad decisions, some things that have heard us. And all of a sudden, it's gone in a little period of time. And so for me, there's someone that I would say, it's to realize, you know, again, you're the psychologist, so you'd look at it a much better way than I would, but I just constantly look at, well, what can we do now? I believe constraints foster creativity. What are the challenges that? All right, this is,

now what can we do because of this? And if you have everything easy, you're not going to learn. You're not going to. So you got to get out of your mind. I try to get out of my head and say, what are the action steps? And the Bezos said this as well. He said, when I'm really stressed, it's because I'm not doing anything about it. I'm thinking and I'm worrying.

And so take action. And so I try to take action. Gratitude, I write, I do thank you videos every day. So every day, I used to thank you much for six years. And now I do videos. And I just immediately, because they can see my tone, how I feel. can see genuine and I'll send it to someone and immediately after that I get something back from them and it's just everything seems wow like what really matters you send it to someone always yeah

so if optimism is a fundamental belief that something's going to work out well but that tomorrow's going to be a little bit better you know that it just might break open whatever the dream is that yeah that's optimism the quote unquote pessimists believe that oh you optimist you're not dealing in reality yeah you know like it's a little naive don't you think yeah I get that a lot. Yeah. I'll get that a lot. Yeah. By the way, I haven't met a world's best that is not fundamentally optimistic. That's interesting. So that's just a one underlying theme. And I have not found compelling enough research to say that there's value in pessimism. So all of the research around optimism that I'm familiar with is rich and compelling. Yes. However, not everyone is

optimistic. Because pessimism is a protection mechanism from trauma, survival, from re-traumatized, being re-traumatized. So you pull yourself back from the edge if you believe that going for it might hurt too much. So basically you're saying, anyone has experienced some trauma, maybe as a child, they revert to pessimism.

No, so no, pessimism is a mechanism in place to save yourself. Okay. To not have your hopes crushed. So optimism, there's a bunch of hope in optimism. Yes, 100%. Like, I believe it's going to work out. But for it to work out,

I have to actually put myself into the mix and apply myself and then if it doesn't work out, is it me? Is it the, so, ah, you know what? Let me find all the faults and all the things that could go wrong, all the things that might not work out. Let me protect myself. So folks that are pessimistic have earned it usually from past experiences where they've been burned and hurt and let down and their dreams been stepped on. So there's a play, there's a reason why they have to pessimists. Because I know we are 100%. It's not an go to moments. Yeah, 100%. Like there's a sliding scale. 100%. Because I know there's moments where it's like, you feel like everything's coming down.

That's right. Yeah. For you personally. Oh, 100%. Oh, yes. But then, yeah, that's what's like, it's not eternal optimism. It's not always. There's moments. But then I have to force myself to get out of that moment. Yeah. I have to take action. If I just sit there and I have to do something. Yeah. So optimism, you need to figure out how to control the things that are in your control and maybe even commit to mastering those things. Yes. And then that gives you the best chance. to this idea of what could be amazing to put yourself in the playing field, if you will, to make something happen. So it is one of the things. So gratitude and you sharing kindness and love and appreciation for other people

would be something that you're working on mastering. It sounds like, okay, let's take third base here, kind of rounding. Halfway to home here is 3-2-2, right? So back to... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So when that idea came forward,

and you've got a seriousness about your respect for the game of baseball and in irreverence for the rules that don't make any sense. Yes. Okay. And somebody says, we're going to do this thing

and they're going to dance. And like that, I mean, there's a bombastic kind of thing. I could see myself going, oh, my, that's a great idea. But wait,

hold on a minute. We can't do that? Can you just open up that moment for me? A lot of companies, a lot of people, they're so focused on either their current customers and their current people

that they're serving. And they don't think about necessarily their future fans. And so I've talked to so many teams that like, oh, our season ticket holders won't like if we get this crazy. Well,

only focused on your scenes and ticket holders and on a base of more people that you can bring joy to, you're going to be stuck doing the same things you've always done. And so for us, like, I mean, we even had, we had a big consultant group, a very well-known group come in and we were thinking about our stadium and the future of banana ball. Like we just, we hadn't really played banana ball. We just were thinking about it. And so we had them come in and they interviewed a lot of people in the city and fans. And they came back to us, whatever you do, don't go all in on banana ball. Don't do it. You can't go all in on banana ball. You got to say this because everyone, They want you, they love what you're doing right now.

Stay with what you're doing. Do not go there. And we immediately ended that relationship and, you know, and we paid the money. And we said, no, we're going all in. You know, the famous thing, if people ask what they want, they would say they want faster horses. Steve Jobs never did surveys. You have to see that vision of where we're going. And I saw a regular baseball game.

And I saw that if I'm a fan and I watch a pitcher do a dance and then throw a wicked strike with a nasty slider. that's awesome. That's awesome to watch. If you do it and the hitter hits a bomb, that's crazy too because that's unbelievable showmanship. What is, what's the worst than it happened? They do a great dance and they throw a wild pitch, which has happened, but the fans still got to watch them do a dance in the middle of the game. So again, I didn't see a risk there. I saw the opportunity like that fan catching a foul ball to win a game. If the opportunity is so much better for the fans at the end, even if there's going to be messy moments, you go for it. And so what I remember when we were talking about it, we all started laughing.

If we're laughing, if we're all laughing, you create something you would love. I was like, that's hilarious. When I tell an idea, you know, crazy, the living pinata promotion or crab my pants in Baltimore or any of these ideas and I get a reaction of laughter, go for it. So I often, I'll do ideas, you know, today and it's like, I'll call my dad. I'll say, dad, or M, what do you think about this one? And immediately based on their reaction, if they start laughing a little bit, why not? And so like that, we all felt it in that room.

we're like, that's kind of funny. Let's try it. And then we got the results. I think about what happens for people in your position is that sometimes the team stops being honest and becomes lonely. So they laugh at the jokes that are not funny. They laugh at the ideas that are actually terrible, but it came from you. So I become yes, man.

Yeah, you have to, yes. Yeah. So I think you're going to figure that out. I'm not concerned for you. But I also, like, I would like to have a part two of this conversation on how you figure out from 200 to 2,000 employees and how the jokes stay funny and the things stay honest. That's the big thing. Yeah. And how the culture, like, I will want to, like, you're going to, you know, bruise your knees and scrape your elbows here with some culture stuff probably, which is the, it's the right challenge.

It's happening. And we understand that. And if we can help in any way. No, I appreciate it. Yeah, please. You know, it's fascinating. You probably get diagnosed this as well, but I do save the comments that people say it'll be gone in a year. It's a fad. They've jumped the shark. Their 15 minutes are up. And so I will never share those or publicly say anything. But it's, you know, I don't know, Kobe Bryant's had similar motivation. And it's not probably the best motivation. But for me, it's like, if everyone sees this because Ann won, it happened, you know, the basketball group and all these groups that's happened, everyone sees it's a fan. It fires me up to think, well, what will it take? to be a fat. How do you have that consistent creativity, that consistent culture of creativity? The Pixar, how they built it. WW, how they built it. So, like, I get real, a tremendous amount

of motivation of knowing that everyone thinks this will be gone soon. And it pushes me to figure out, well, we can't keep doing the same things. What's our next big risk? That's our next big challenge. Yeah, I can't wait to see what you do. Like, congrats on what you've built on the community, on the innovation. I do think that what you're doing is a, community-building innovation-based company that is producing new, new type of baseball. And joy, hopefully, joy is that feeling of joy. And the world's hungry for fun and not taking themselves too seriously. You are perfectly situated.

We need joy. When the world is so digitally dopamine-focused and you are experientially human-focused. Like, what a well-timed, well-designed accident that you're creating on purpose. You've got to get lucky. What's what? JFCC said, the harder I work, the luckier I get. Well, you've seen something for a long time. Yes. So that's not by accident. Yeah, you got to see it and then you just got to do it. And I get to see, you got to see a show

because I think once everyone they see it on the outside, it's really, we've been built on that live experience. The digital, we're still learning like completely. I mean, we're learning everywhere, but that's our, that's our MO. All right. Well, Jesse, thank you for what you're bringing to the world. And thank you for the time we spent together. It was a lot of fun. Thank you. selling author and body language expert to reveal how the smallest shifts in your behavior can completely change how others see you. From hand gestures to tone of voice, Vanessa and Dr. Javey unpack the science of first impressions and how to appear more confident, be heard, and even help our children build stronger social skills. Join us on Wednesday, October 22nd

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