Living in a garage to building the $1B+ 'Savannah Bananas'

- December 5, 2025 (3 months ago) • 01:09:34

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Jesse Cole	You gotta create attention first. If people don't know who you are, good luck trying to create something.
00:04	Shaan Puri	"You guys have a multi‑million‑person waitlist for tickets on TikTok. You have ten times more followers than the New York Yankees."
00:11	Jesse Cole	Ideas are more valuable than anything. Whatever's normal—do the exact opposite. No one comes home and says, "Oh, did you hear this thing? It's so normal." You get excited about the remarkable—unforgettable.
00:20	Shaan Puri	You're one of our Mount Rushmore-type guys, because you're playing the game on extreme hard mode, and I respect you for it.</FormattedResponse>
00:26	Sam Parr	It's way harder than I thought.
00:28	Jesse Cole	So we completely ran out of money. We had nothing left. Then Emily turned to me and said, "We have to sell our house." So we sold our house.
00:33	Sam Parr	"Did you have conversations about wanting to quit?"
00:34	Jesse Cole	I mean, it was brutal. What's up, guys?
00:46	Shaan Puri	"Oh my God, it's Jesse Cole. What's up?"
00:51	Jesse Cole	You guys doing?
00:52	Shaan Puri	We almost wore the same thing today.
00:54	Jesse Cole	You should've, you should've. There's a lot more going around these days. I'm keeping them in business.
00:59	Shaan Puri	When did you start the yellow suit, yellow hat? What was the day?
01:02	Jesse Cole	What was the... that's the crazy thing: people didn't even realize that it was before the bananas. That's the wild thing. Oh yeah, man. We—we had a team in "Talk About First Million." We had a team in Gastonia. So I was, I was wearing this before because of P.T. Barnum. I'm inspired by him—not just to be the same, you know, regular host like everyone else.
01:19	Sam Parr	"So, do you know what you're getting into at all with this?"
01:22	Jesse Cole	Well, no — I've listened to your show, and I'm ready. I'm ready to rock. I loved the one with the two — yeah, the owner of the Jazz. That was interesting. That was more of a sit-down.
01:32	Shaan Puri	When I was hanging out with him, I was telling him a bunch of Savannah Bananas anecdotes. I was like, "You gotta — you gotta do this. You gotta get the grandmas on the courts."
01:40	Jesse Cole	"Well, he loves hearing all the other things he should do — yeah, yeah."
01:43	Sam Parr	Yeah, that's probably what he liked, Sean. He probably liked that, yeah.
01:46	Jesse Cole	No, it was very well done and very well produced as well. You guys did a great job with that. </FormattedResponse>
01:49	Shaan Puri	Oh, thanks, man. Well, we're excited to have you here because you're one of our entrepreneurial "Mount Rushmore" type guys. You took... you know, it's about the gap — about going from nothing to something. The way you went from nothing to something incredible is pretty remarkable. Just to give people a sense: I don't know a soul in my life who wanted to go watch exhibition or minor-league baseball. That was not even a thing. Yet you guys have a multi-million-person waitlist for tickets. I just looked this morning on TikTok — you have ten times more followers than the New York Yankees. Accomplishing that kind of thing blows my mind. I want you to come on here and tell your story. I want you to teach us how you think, because I think the way you think and how that's been applied to baseball could be applied to many other types of businesses. I think that's the real gift you're going to give the entrepreneurial world.
02:47	Jesse Cole	"Yeah, we're fired up. Let's jam."
02:50	Shaan Puri	Alright, so, Sam—where should we start? "Start at the start."
02:52	Sam Parr	Yeah... let's spend—but we'll keep it a little bit abbreviated because you've done a lot of amazing podcasts. We've talked about it. But yeah, do set the context a little bit: ten, fifteen years ago, where were you?
03:02	Jesse Cole	Yeah. I started as a 23-year-old general manager with the team in Gastonia, North Carolina. It was college summer baseball, which is a low level of baseball, so that's where I started. That team only had about 200 fans coming to the games and $268 in the bank. I could have paid myself for literally three months. It was December; I think I was able to take my first paycheck, which was $27,500. So I wasn't making a lot of money regardless, but that's where I started. I was learning how to make college summer baseball exciting and entertaining, and I did that for years. No one knew anything—we were just experimenting and trying new things. That's really kind of where I learned the ideas of making baseball more fun and adding new elements to the show.
03:45	Shaan Puri	"Why even be there?" Like, why weren't you an intern at JPMorgan? Or, you know, why is your first job a GM of a summer-league baseball team? What was the plan?
03:57	Jesse Cole	I never could have gotten a job at JPMorgan or any of those, for the record. No — I played ball. My whole life was baseball. My dad owned a baseball facility. I was very fortunate to get a huge scholarship to Wofford College, a Division I school in South Carolina. My goal was to play professional baseball. I was getting letters from the Mets, the Padres, the Pirates, and the Braves, and I was like, "This is gonna happen." Then I tore my shoulder — just like that. Everyone was like, "Oh, you're gonna go into coaching, Jesse; your dad was a coach — you're just..." I coached for one summer in the Cape Cod League, and I wanted to pull my hair out every day. It was the best players — the highest level — these guys were all going to be first-round picks, and I was in the dugout with the best seat, and I was just bored out of my mind.
04:37	Sam Parr	I used to go to the Cape Cod League games. The hot dogs were great. </FormattedResponse>
04:42	Jesse Cole	It was just baseball. It was... high; it was all these guys. If you look at the major league rosters, All-Stars — a lot of them played in the Cape Cod League. But I was bored. There's a difference between playing and watching. It was the first time I really — you know, as Walt Disney says, "put yourself in the customer's shoes." I put myself in the spectator's shoes, and I was like, I'm bored. It was then I realized that I don't want to coach anymore. I said, "Well, what if I got in the front office and tried to make the show, the entertainment, and the experience better for fans?" That's really where it started. That's when I went to take this job as a 23-year-old general manager of one of the worst teams in the country.
05:16	Shaan Puri	Isn't there a story of Disney going to—don't know if it was a park or an amusement park—with his daughter? He's sitting on a bench, kind of just looking at things. He's like, "Why isn't this fun for me and her and not just her?" For example, isn't there some famous story like that? That's where the origins of Disneyland came about.
05:32	Jesse Cole	A hundred percent. I've studied Walt [Disney] religiously. So yes—it was at Griffith Park. It was his two daughters' day. Saturdays were his day with his daughters, and he always took them. He had, you know, "daddy day" with the daughters. He took them to Griffith Park, they were on the carousel, and he's sitting there and he goes, "I wish there was a place that adults and kids could have fun together." That's where the literal mindset said, "Well, what if we created a place like that?" In a weird way I was sitting in the dugout—the best seat in the house with some of the best players—thinking, I'm bored out of my mind; why can't this be fun for more people? That's where it kind of started. As a 23‑year‑old general manager with no money in the bank account and not getting paid, I asked, "How do you make this more fun?" That's really where I fell in love with Walt Disney and P.T. Barnum, and started studying WWE, Cirque du Soleil, and Saturday Night Live. I became obsessed with learning about entertainment, not necessarily the baseball business. I wanted to learn about the entertainment business.
06:22	Sam Parr	Can you tell us about the transition from employee to owner? And then... well, first thought: it's like—when was that era?
06:29	Jesse Cole	I was a general manager for two or three years. Then I became the managing partner, which the owner gave me — I think — a 5% equity stake for being a part of it. Then it was 2014. So that was, jeez, about six to eight years later that I bought it from him. The team was worth very little; I made it worth a lot more. We went into owner-financed debt with him, and I bought it from him in 2014. He gave me every opportunity. I was so fortunate that the owner, Ken Silver, just let this kid kind of run with the team, try things, and experiment. We ended up having success after that first year, and that made the team a lot more valuable — a good win for all of us.
07:09	Sam Parr	And it was still like a real, normal baseball team for the first two years, right?
07:15	Jesse Cole	Oh no. Well, it was normal base. I mean, we had grandma beauty pageants our first year. I mean, we had—we came up with the garbage-can nachos: four orders of nachos, three cheeseburgers, three hot dogs, nacho cheese, jalapeños, donuts. We called it "heart-stoppingly delicious." I tried to get a cardiologist to sponsor it, but no one was interested. We did a "Dig to China" night where literally hundreds of people went on the field and dug in the infield dirt to win a trip to China. But when the woman won, she realized it was just a one-way flight to China—no flight back and no accommodations. So we had a lot of fun. We fired our mascot for "bit bear growth hormone" because "H G H" was big, so we did "B G H." We offered George Bush—because he had just finished his term as president—an internship with us with a $1,000 stipend. We said, "We're gonna get him a host family; we're gonna figure it out." He turned it down. We just came up with all these crazy ideas. We were trying to get attention—I was using the P.T. Barnum book on how to create attention—so we tried everything. The players—we got the players to dance that first year. They weren't great dancers, and every player turned me down except for four. Those four did the "Jump On It" dance and they became the most popular players. We were dabbling and experimenting in no-man's-land where literally no one knew who we were outside of Charlotte. </FormattedResponse>
08:35	Shaan Puri	"You're not even the Savannah Bananas yet."
08:37	Jesse Cole	"You're still the Gastonia, yeah?"
08:39	Shaan Puri	Yeah — the ones nobody heard about. I think that's really important: the sort of toiling in obscurity, trying things, iterating. Now let me ask you: those ideas that you just said — every one of those ideas, I'm like, "Oh my God, what a genius idea. That's fantastic." I could totally — it makes me laugh. I can totally see them. I can see the press release, I can see the news clip, I can see the TikTok clip. To have ten great ideas, you probably had, what, ten thousand bad ideas or something like that. Tell me about your practice of generating ideas. What was your kind of system of creativity?
09:10	Jesse Cole	Well, when we first started, I learned from Bill Veeck. He was the famous owner of the St. Louis Browns and the White Sox. He was brilliant in what he did. I mean, obviously—so many things: Grandstand Managers' Night, where he literally let his fans in a major league game dictate whether they were going to bunt, steal, or hit-and-run. He put his coach in the grandstand. It was unbelievable. He came up with Eddie Gaedel, the midget hitter, and he did so many things. He gave away live lobsters to fans during games. I mean, he was brilliant. His book, Veeck as in Wreck, made a huge impact on me. I went to his son's conference—Mike Veeck, another unbelievable pioneer [of the Saint Paul Saints and other minor league teams like the Charleston RiverDogs]. I went to his conference when I was 23. He said, "My dad always said, if there's a fire, you gotta get the most important thing in the house—and it's our idea box." The idea box: he said ideas are more valuable than anything. He actually gave us a wooden box. I still have it today. We started coming up with ideas, and as a 23-year-old I started coming up with all kinds of things. A lot of them were ridiculous—some worked, some didn't. Salute to Underwear Night—failed. Flatulence Fun Night—failed. The Hairiest Man in Gaston County—that was gross. We did a lot of things that just didn't work, but I started learning about ideas. The big premise I came up with was: whatever's normal, do the exact opposite. No one gets excited about normal. No one comes home and says, "Oh, did you hear this? It's just so normal." You get excited about the remarkable, the unforgettable. It was literally eight years of doing that. I think about the title of the show, My First Million—we never made a million dollars in Gastonia. We started at $100,000 in total revenue the year I took over the team; expenses were $250,000. We were doubling pretty consistently and getting like $200,000, then $300,000, then $400,000, then $500,000, then $600,000, then $700,000, then $800,000—but we never got to a million. I ran that for eight years. </FormattedResponse>
11:00	Sam Parr	Wait, wait, wait... Let's recap. That's pretty remarkable — this is remarkable. So it took you eight years to get to a million in revenue?
11:07	Jesse Cole	No, we didn't even get to a million in revenue.
11:08	Sam Parr	Okay. After.
11:09	Jesse Cole	In Gastonia, we never got to a million. It wasn't until Savannah that we actually reached $1 million in one year.
11:15	Sam Parr	And how old were you on the eighth year? You were like, "what, like 32?"
11:18	Jesse Cole	So I was 23. When we finally expanded, we had Gastonia and then Savannah in 2015. We had both teams at once, so I went to Savannah in 2015. 2016 was the first year we reached $1,000,000 in revenue.
11:31	Shaan Puri	How many times did kind-of-smart, well-intentioned friends and family sit you down and be like, "Jesse..."?
11:37	Sam Parr	"What are you doing?"
11:37	Jesse Cole	"What are you doing out? What's going on?" "I was having the time of my life."
11:41	Shaan Puri	Do you need some help? Do you need a job at the car wash? Like, what are you doing out there?
11:45	Jesse Cole	Oh—everyone I've come across, especially family, knows I need help in many, many different ways. But they knew— they saw I was having fun. Guys, think about this: we took over a team that had most nights 50 to 100 fans. In my first year we had nights where we were over a thousand fans, or 1,500 fans, or 2,000 fans. By our second year we were selling out games. Again, it was only a 2,000–3,000 seat stadium, but it was unbelievable. I was having the time of my life.
12:08	Sam Parr	"Were you making a profit?" "Yeah."
12:10	Jesse Cole	Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, we got, you know, probably $800,000–$850,000 in revenue, probably costing $600,000, so, like, okay—expenses.
12:18	Sam Parr	You could live.
12:19	Jesse Cole	You know... oh, it was a healthy profit. It was for college summer baseball—we were killing it. Are you kidding me? It was like, "Heck yeah, look at what we're doing." In my late twenties, in Gastonia, in a little, tiny town, I was happy. Every day I got to create new things. That's what people don't realize: I got to create things, I got to have fun, and every day I got to test those ideas in real time. Will people show up or will they not? Will they like this promotion or will they not? Will it sell tickets or not? Will they buy this merch or not? I got to test every day. I'll never forget when I visited Henry Ford at Greenfield Village. He said Henry believed in "learning by doing." I'm obsessed. I want to be the fastest-learning sports organization in the world, and so the more we do, the more we learn. So that started many years in Gastonia before we went to Savannah. Alright.
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13:33	Shaan Puri	"Mentioned P.T. Barnum and Disney and how you obsessively studied them. What were some of the early stories that inspired you, or things that they did that maybe someone who hasn't read about P.T. Barnum wouldn't know about, that blew your mind?" "Well, you know, with P.T. Barnum it was so much about how do you create attention — showmanship."
13:54	Jesse Cole	He says, "Without promotion, something terrible happens: nothing." When you look at P. T. Barnum's work, he was a master promoter. He hired terribly performing musicians and violinists—so bad that he put them outside his museum. He'd say the only way you could get away from it was to come inside the museum. He would come up with ideas and bring people together. He was also a tremendous writer and was always writing and speaking. I kind of took his spot as the front person. You need someone who truly believes in what you do, and P. T. Barnum believed in his museum. He said, "Hey, some of it's true, some of it's not, but you're going to come in and you're going to be entertained," and he shouted that from every mountaintop. I took that from him. It was about showmanship. For example, the first tuxedo I bought was black with tails, and it was 95 degrees on a North Carolina summer night—I almost melted. So I said, "We're not doing that." I found a yellow one that was brighter, fit the color of the Grizzlies, and that's how that started. Bill Veeck was the most fans-first owner ever. He would sit with the fans in the stands. He was an owner who would literally set up and talk to fans every single night. After every game, he would go to the bars with the fans just to connect with them—what I call "Veecking" [I made up the term]. When he took over the St. Louis Browns, people would say, "What time does the game start?" He'd reply, "What time do you want it to start?" His mindset was always, "What would be best for the fans?" and he acted on it. He did constant giveaways, was the first to put names on the back of jerseys, and had an exploding scoreboard with fireworks. He was so far ahead of his time that every other owner hated him because he did so much more for fans. Combine that with Walt Disney's vision—it's fun to try to do the impossible and to put yourself in the guests' shoes—and those three influences set the tone for me: let's combine these worlds and create something pretty special in baseball.
15:58	Sam Parr	So all of that — you dressing the way you dress and doing the thing you do now — it's inspiring because the company is... I don't know if it's real, but the headline says that it's worth a billion dollars, and you're incredibly successful and well loved. But for the first handful of years, did you feel like... I mean, did you feel embarrassed? Like, "I don't know if this is going to pay off. I don't know if this is going to be worth it. I'm risking my reputation. I look silly right now." Did that fear come into play? Because when I hear what you're doing, I'm like, "That makes sense — I should do that," and also, I'd be embarrassed.
16:30	Jesse Cole	A thousand percent. We've been criticized every step of the way. I've been embarrassed at many points along the way. You know, our first eight, nine years in Gastonia, we did everything. It was me, my wife, and one or two other team members. We put out "Show Tonight" signs around town just to try to convince people: "Hey, they have a game—please go." We took out the trash before the game, did the hiring, ran the concessions, handled operations, put up signs—we did everything. It was exhausting. People criticized us, saying, "It's like you're a college summer team." On a Wednesday night there might be 500 people there. When we went to Savannah, that's when the criticism and the skepticism reached an all-time high.
17:06	Sam Parr	Why, then?
17:07	Jesse Cole	We had professional baseball for ninety years. Then, all of a sudden, a college summer baseball team came in. They had the New York Mets' affiliate the year before us, and now they wanted a brand-new stadium. The city said no — they weren't going to invest because no one was coming to the games. All the professional Savannah teams were the lowest in league attendance. Literally, some nights there were only 300 people in the ballpark for professional baseball. We came in saying, "We're going to make baseball fun. We're going to do this, we're going to do that." People were like, "Sure you are — we've heard that before, kid." And yeah, we sold two tickets in our first three months. I mean, people hung up on us every day. We held a free launch event with free food and free drinks. My wife would walk into little shops, stores, and restaurants and be told, "Get out" — literally told to leave. We weren't selling anything; we were offering free stuff and saying, "Hey, we just want you to come. We're the new team. We're here in town. We want to meet the community." It was brutal.
18:10	Sam Parr	"But did you have conversations of wanting to quit?"
18:13	Jesse Cole	You couldn't, because we were now in seven-figure debt. We had to buy the team — we bought it through the Coastal Plain League because it was an expansion team — and then we also had to put money into the team. We had to do the startup: we hired people; we had nothing. So we were in debt. We had all these young people right out of college, including a 24-year-old team president, that we were responsible for. There were no options for quitting. It was just, how do we convince these people to believe in us? What I realized is the only way to do that is we had to show them. As Steve Jobs says, "No one knows what they want until you show it to them." We were talking, talking, talking — that's not good marketing. Marketing is creating experience and showing people. So we had to get to that.
18:53	Shaan Puri	You seem like an incredibly optimistic guy, and I love that — I love your energy. Obviously, there's a lot to be optimistic about, but in the era we're talking about, things were not going well. You sold two tickets in three months. You were in seven-figure debt. I'm curious: nobody's optimistic 100% of the time. There are moments of doubt, pain, or struggle. So when I say "rock bottom" and they're making the movie about you, what's the movie scene where the director says, "Okay, this is the rock bottom scene"? Is it you and your wife? Is it you at the ATM machine, looking at the balance? What's rock bottom when I say that?
19:33	Jesse Cole	Well, so we got the phone calls at 4:45 PM on January 15, 2016, and that was when we were out of money. We completely ran out of money. We couldn't cover payroll. We had nothing left. I moved, I think, about $3,000 from my personal account to cover the rest of payroll. Then we emptied our savings account and put that in to cover us for another couple of weeks. Emily turned to me and said, "We have to sell our house." So we sold our house. People don't know the timing of this: Emily and I had just gotten married on October 10, 2015. We got the keys for Savannah that same week. Within three or four months—three months—we were completely out of money. In our first year of marriage, we had nothing left and we had to sell our house. We found an old garage. I'd like to say it was turned into a studio, but it really wasn't. It was the grossest thing I've ever imagined living in, but it was the only thing we could afford. She got a twin air bed. We realized we could only grocery shop with $30 a week, and we couldn't use credit cards anymore because they were already maxed out. So we'd go into Walmart with a $20 bill and a $10 bill for 42 meals. That was pretty rough. It was a tough time. </FormattedResponse>
20:47	Sam Parr	"Didn't Emily's sleep the one?"
20:49	Jesse Cole	She kept me — I don't know how — because I can get into, you know, I think all entrepreneurs, we're high performers and we think differently. But you can spiral a little bit. I started—I'm optimistic—I was like, "What are we gonna do? This is bad; everybody's saying no to us." But she's like, "Jesse, we did this. We gotta get to that first game, get to the first game, get to the first game." So she lifted me up and we knew we just had to get to that next at-bat. The first thing was really naming the team, because at that point we didn't have a name. We had to get people to understand who we were, and that was the big thing. That's when things changed — positively and negatively — because when we did a name-the-team contest everyone said be the Spirits, be the Ports, be the Anchors, you know, be the Braves. I was like, "There's a team in Georgia called the Braves — we're not gonna be the Braves, guys." But one person suggested Bananas. I remember we looked at each other and said, "Yeah, go bananas." We thought of the Banana Nana senior-citizen dance team, the Mananas male cheerleading team, a banana baby that we lift up before the game, a banana band, and the slogan "can't stop the peeling." We just thought about all those things and were like, "We have to go — it is perfect." Then we announced it and we got crucified. We were ripped apart locally. I mean, it was so bad. I'll never forget the Saint Patrick's Day parade two weeks after we announced: we were wearing green banana shirts and getting booed walking through town. Literally, people were booing. </FormattedResponse>
22:15	Sam Parr	Were they like baseball purists, or did they think that you were insulting the town—or what?
22:19	Jesse Cole	And yes — embarrassment to the city. We were insulting the town: "How dare you name the team after the silly bananas team?" I mean, it was bad locally. But nationally, we were on SportsCenter — "Logo of the Year" — and nationally people were like, "Yes!" Because they didn't take pride in Savannah; they thought, "This is fun, this is gimmicky, this is cool." Locally it was rough, but at least people knew who we were. I believe attention beats marketing 1000% of the time. You have to create attention first. If people don't know who you are, good luck trying to create something. Once people knew us, we announced, "Every ticket's all-inclusive." They were like, "What?" I said, "Yeah — every ticket: all your burgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, soda, water, popcorn, dessert — all night long. No ticket fees. No convenience fees. $15." People were like, "What?" Then they started paying attention. We were going to try to make everything fans-first. Here's what our players are going to do. We have a banana band. Here's our senior citizen dance team, the Banana Nanas. People were like, "Alright, this is a little different." I think people were expecting us to fail, so we sold out opening night. They all came out because they wanted to see it. We didn't know what we were doing with concessions. People had to wait three hours for food because we didn't know we'd go through 10,000 pieces of meat in an hour. We had no idea how to do that, for the record. But they watched the show — they watched the fun, the Banana Baby, the band, and the players dance. That's when they started telling everybody. That's really when it changed: after that first night.
23:36	Sam Parr	I've watched maybe 10 or 20 interviews of you now, and we've talked about you on a bunch of podcasts. I've noticed you do a few things consistently. One of them—you've already done it here—is that you name-drop historical figures: Henry Ford, Bill Vet, Walt Disney. You talk about Steve Jobs all the time. You name P.T. Barnum; you name-drop a lot. Am I reading into that? Where do you go to find inspiration? Do you find a couple of lines in books and think, "That's it — that's what we have to do"? I've learned that—I don't think you've ever explicitly talked about your creative process—other than, I think you said, "I make a list of 10 new ideas every single day." I've also noticed you have frameworks where you say, "Walt Disney said this," and it's as if you read a biography, saw one line, and now you live by it. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that's kind of fascinating.
24:27	Jesse Cole	Walt Disney said, "Curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." We'll keep trying things and experimenting. It's my curiosity, so I go very deep on subjects. I don't think there's a strict track—yes, I do 10 ideas a day, and yes, I journal every day—but it's the reading that fascinates me. When I start learning about Walt Disney, I read one book and it guides me to another, then another, and so on. Right now I have an entire bookshelf of every book on Walt Disney and Disney World—about 100 books, maybe. I also have a whole section on P.T. Barnum, an entire shelf on Amazon, another on Steve Jobs, and shelves on ESPN. I have every book on Taylor Swift—she's fascinating in what she's doing. Marvel, the Grateful Dead... all these different worlds, because there's a blueprint on how to create something truly special: a world of entertainment that's different from anyone else. In sports, you see similar thinking in WWE, UFC, and F1. But in most traditional sports it's the same: you're competing to win. Our game is different—we compete to create fans. We ask, how do we entertain? I want to learn from the greatest entertainers in the world. My framework is to go very, very deep. I earmark every single page and I know exactly what I'm looking for when I earmark it. I've done book reports—numerous book reports—like "Built to Last."
25:50	Sam Parr	Tell me about a book report. Like, what's so... </FormattedResponse>
25:52	Jesse Cole	Book report. Yeah — we did this as a team. For many years, in the beginning, we actually paid our people to read; we paid them to do book reports. We're obsessed with learning as part of our organization, so we did that for many years. Now we do team books that we read as a group. A book report: I'll go through the biggest takeaways — the biggest things that lead to fans-first ideas and parallels. David Novak, the former CEO of Yum! Brands, gave me a compliment I didn't understand at first. He said, "You're one of the greatest parallel thinkers I've ever seen." I said, "Thank you, David. What does that mean?" He explained, "You can see something and then make it your own on a parallel path." For example, when I see what the Grateful Dead did — they brought sound in-house, tried to bring tickets in-house, and let their fans record shows — then Dave Matthews followed suit. I can see that, and then others followed our way. There's no real method — it's just you. I want to look at examples of the best in the world. For example, Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast) — he was with us. I've read everything on him, and we spent a lot of time talking because he's the best in the world at YouTube. I try to ask all those questions. I think that's just you following your curiosity.
27:03	Shaan Puri	"What did you steal from Jimmy?"
27:04	Jesse Cole	Well, the biggest thing I was fascinated with was his YouTube growth: 70% of his views come from outside the U.S. So, you better believe that we immediately started hiring Spanish-speaking broadcasters. We're going to hire Japanese-speaking broadcasters. We're going to start having our games and social channels go all over the world as we continue to grow there. That was the one thing: what in YouTube can we do right now to grow an audience and create fans? He shared what he's doing with his audience and dubbing, and that was fascinating.
27:35	Shaan Puri	We did an episode with Jimmy, and he talked about the same “10 ideas a day” thing. He said he started when he was 11 or 12, and it was kind of the same story. > "At 12 years old, nobody watched. 13 years old, nobody watched. 14 years old, nobody watched. 15 years old, nobody watched. 16 years old, 'Is anybody ever gonna watch?' Nope. 17 years old, nobody's still watching. Finally, when I was 19 I started to get some viewers." Even then it was small. He had six or seven years of toiling in obscurity—years where it just wasn't working, but he was getting better. He talked about how he used to do the 10 to 20 ideas a day routine. "The most important thing in a YouTube video is the idea—the premise of the video," he said. "So I came up with 10 to 20 ideas a day. I would flip open a dictionary [on the spot]." So we had him do it live on the podcast—we put a random word generator.
28:23	Jesse Cole	Love it.
28:23	Shaan Puri	And he came up with ideas live on the thing, and you could tell he had built that muscle. So I'm curious: you say this thing about "10 ideas a day" — is that something you used to do early on? Are you still doing that? Is there a sticky note on your desk right now with, like, 10 ideas you wrote this morning?
28:37	Jesse Cole	I did two groups of ideas... No—have it? Please get it? No. So, here is the idea book. I have one every single year.
28:45	Sam Parr	"What's that say on the cover?"
28:47	Jesse Cole	Well, it just says "twenty twenty-five ideas: banana ball." I have these books all the time, and today I was obsessed. I'm working on two of our newer teams. I'm working on the Indianapolis Clowns — we brought back one of the most famous Negro League teams. It's all the clowns' characters: dynamic contortionist, bat boy, the juggling hawkers, juggling ball boy, an umpire that's a mime, trampoline coaches, strong man, balloon artist, ringmaster/barker, human cannibal, a character artist. So it just starts listing, and I start thinking about ideas on... so how we wanna
29:20	Shaan Puri	I want to zoom in. Do you do this first thing, or do you take meetings first? What's your kind of process? Do you have a routine you use?
29:26	Jesse Cole	Sure. Hal Elrod helped me tremendously. His book Miracle Morning was a game changer for me. In 2015 I read it and realized that most people don't start their day on purpose; they start their day with other people's news, social media, and other things going on. So "win the morning, win the day" became a huge thing for me. In 2015 I actually ran into him at a speaking appearance. I showed him my first notebook from 2015, where I started writing and journaling. I have to win the morning. I have three kids under seven, so I get up very early and I start by reading, because your input affects your output. I want to read something, so I'm rereading Amazon Unbound right now—it's the story of how Bezos continued to grow Amazon. Then I start writing and journaling. Often I have an idea bucket from the day before, so I can already start thinking about ideas a little before I go to sleep, and then I work on that idea bucket the next day.
30:14	Sam Parr	Dude, you're an animal. You're an animal.
30:16	Jesse Cole	Yeah, I love it. It doesn't feel like work — it's never felt like work. There are certain things you really love, like ideas. If I come up with good ideas, or ideas that are exciting to me, I'm fired up for the rest of the day. I have great energy. So, you gotta create before you consume. Often we consume — we read all these things: "I'm getting criticized," we see all these different things. But if I can create first... I mean, literally as we record this, we just launched our first-ever Fans First ticket marketplace — a secondary market. Right now we're getting killed. People are spending huge amounts for tickets and often they're getting scammed. [Original numeric examples in the audio were unclear.] We built our own: face value, no markups, no fees. We just announced that thirty minutes ago. That fires me up because I'm gonna learn, we're gonna get it out there, and we're gonna start experimenting. You get to do new things — that's what Walt Disney did: you get to try new things constantly — and I love that.
31:04	Shaan Puri	I feel like now you've sort of hit escape velocity — people recognize, "Oh wait, this is something special," and you have a lot of momentum going. I'm sure, whether it's speaking fees or speaking gigs, or just meeting interesting people while doing what you're doing, you've now gotten into some pretty interesting rooms. You mentioned reading about Jeff Bezos — you'll meet Jeff Bezos if you haven't already — and these things will happen because I think everybody can take inspiration from a brand builder and a fan-first, customer-first mindset that's not just words but actually put into action in all these really interesting ways. Who have you met in this that kind of was a wow moment for you? And I'm curious: what do they want to learn from you? What do they pull from you? Because I think, no matter how successful you are in one industry, there's a lot people can learn from you.
31:52	Jesse Cole	Oh, I appreciate that. You know, whenever I get a call with one of these people, I'm picking their brain like crazy and asking questions... But yeah.
31:58	Shaan Puri	Just a question: "Tug of war?"
31:59	Jesse Cole	Yeah, it usually is. You know, it's funny—the FaceTimes and the videos and the calls that I get now. One that stood out for me was Bob Iger a couple months ago. I have so much respect for what he did and for continuing to make creative the heartbeat of Disney. I think it loses it sometimes; it ebbs and flows with the creative. After Walt was gone for twenty, thirty years, they were figuring it out. Then Michael Eisner and Frank Wells came in and went crazy, and then Iger kept it going to a whole another level. Now he's again trying to bring back that. That was a 30-minute conversation—I walked out fired up. There's a wide array of people reaching out, from the heads of WWE and some WWE wrestlers, to actors and actresses, to a lot of musicians. Now I'm hearing from big-time football players and other athletes as well. I think my biggest thing is I always just want to host them—come out to our show. You learn by seeing. Watch how we literally start entertaining seven hours before the game. Watch how we stay two hours after the game and continue entertaining. That's what Taylor Swift—she's like, "I'm gonna do a three-hour and forty-five-minute set," which is crazy. I want to over-deliver, and so we look to over-deliver with everything. I enjoy hosting people at our shows, getting to meet them, and sharing the behind-the-scenes. That's where I get a lot of joy.
33:16	Sam Parr	"When I hear you talk, I think I would never want to compete against this person. We've — we've had a bunch of people like that. I think Jimmy was one of them, where you're like, 'Oh, the guy is just... he's gonna die or win.' I mean, there's, you know, you're going against a crazy person. You don't seem motivated by money. You don't seem particularly competitive with the outside world. You must have a chip on your shoulder. What caused it, and what's kind of forcing you to keep on moving forward?"
33:41	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, name that chip."
33:43	Jesse Cole	I certainly have a chip on my shoulder, I think. But that's not what I'm chasing. As an only child, I always wanted to make my dad proud. That was a big thing for me. He worked really hard and spent a lot of hours working, and I always wanted to do well for him. Then I didn't get drafted and tore my shoulder. I think often I've been, you know, misunderstood—probably the way Bezos would explain it: misunderstood. We've gotten criticism every step of the way. In Gastonia: "What are we doing here?" In Savannah: "How dare you bring college summer baseball? How dare you name the team the Bananas? How dare you leave traditional baseball to create this silly sport called Banana Ball?" It happens all the time. The one that really fires me up now that I have a folder saved is: "It's a fad; it'll be gone; their fifteen minutes are up." I have every one of those saved and I will never say anything back to them except, when some people get really going, just write, "Thanks for the inspiration," because I mean that sincerely. Those ones—and all the groups that have kind of come along and disappeared—get me fired up because we are completely misunderstood. People think we are the Harlem Globetrotters. We're building a sport. There will be a world where the kids' first ball they pick up is a yellow banana ball. There will be a world where Banana Ball is played all over the world because of the entertainment level. It's not just about people who love the sport; they love the fun, they love the show, and they love the crazy talent—backflip catches, trick plays, the celebrations. They love how, if they sit in the upper deck, we're going to come up there and give them flowers, throw giveaways, and put on a show no matter where they're sitting—even if they're the furthest seat away. I get excited for that. Ten years ago we had nothing, and now, yes, we're very fortunate with the businesses, but nah—I chase moments. There are certain moments: our first game at Fenway Park. I was a kid who grew up south of Boston with a goal to play at Fenway Park. We had the largest crowd of the year there and we're all singing "Yellow"—a powerful moment. You've probably seen the videos: everyone's got their flashlight, the whole stadium is singing "Yellow," and I'm on the field saying, "Look at what we get to do together." Or our first football stadium with 81,000 fans, where we're putting on a halftime show with 250 people in the middle of a game, which should never happen, and I'm jumping up and down because I'm feeling it. When we're going to do a 100,000-seat stadium, when we're going to do a cruise where we're playing, aircraft carriers, games at beaches—those moments fire me up because you get to feel part of something and you get to feel alive. I think I want to feel alive, and I'm sure you guys get that feeling too with certain things. It's not the money—it's these moments that really light me up.
36:24	Shaan Puri	You're sort of like this joyful version of Dana White or Vince McMahon. You know, I— I think Dana literally said the same thing in a press conference. He goes, "I'm in the—we're in the business of moments," and he says, "We sell good moments and then sometimes we sell 'holy shit' moments.'" Tonight was a "holy shit"** moment. He was talking about a big knockout that happened.
36:41	Jesse Cole	We're a similar mindset. You know... I've got to work a little bit with those guys; I haven't connected directly with him yet. But I mean, yeah — he creates these moments that you never imagined.</FormattedResponse>
36:48	Shaan Puri	I love that he's just sort of... rage-fueled, more so than, "I want to create this amazing family fun," you know? But I think that's part of the nature of fighting—you know, baseball. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book but then tearing out four-fifths of the pages. You miss a lot. Unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts— all that unstructured data—make all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. So if you want to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it, visit hubspot.com. When you sit—when you step back, how do you sort of figure out the good ideas versus the bad? It's easy to come up with ten ideas a day. It's easy to think of these things in hindsight. But, you know, when you say the ticket price is $25 and "there's no ticket fees," we sort of round off the change. That's cute. When you're selling 200 tickets... now you're selling... I think I did the math—this is like tens of millions of dollars you're eating in cost by absorbing the ticket fees, or revenue left on the table depending on how you want to...
37:54	Sam Parr	Look at it. A bit of it.
37:55	Shaan Puri	Yep... I'm sure there's someone over there with a spreadsheet who's like, "Jesse, this is not—can we not do that anymore? Like, can we charge for hot dogs? Because, you know, this is..."
38:07	Jesse Cole	They know better in our organization about this. But yes.</FormattedResponse>
38:09	Shaan Puri	Well, I guess—what are your principles? One thing you've talked about is, like, "fan first." I think if you asked—if I went to 100 businesses around here and asked, "Are you a customer-first business?" they would all say, "Of course. Of course customer matters." But then you look at their actions and they're totally out of line with customer first. So what are the different principles you have? What are the things you find yourself repeating over and over again that shape how you operate? When a new person comes in, they almost have to break their brain and rebuild it just to work the way you guys want to work and to come up with the ideas you want to come up with.
38:39	Jesse Cole	We started simply by naming our company _Fans First Entertainment_. That was the start. By naming the team Fans First Entertainment, it made very clear who we are and who we work for. It set our beginning—our mission: Fans First Entertainment. That's always what we do. As we've grown, we've developed a bit more of our core beliefs—our Fans First principles, which we talk about all the time. Those principles guide how we hire and who we are. I try to keep things very simple with an "Always Be" ethos. It goes like this: Always be caring, different, enthusiastic, fun, growing, and hungry. That is who we are. When we hire, we assess how candidates fit those core beliefs. We say, "Show us your future resume," because we're not really interested in what you've done in the past. We want to know what you want to do in the future and how you fit. If you say you want to stay in the same position for the next five years, you're probably not growing and hungry, and we can find that out. A few years ago we developed our Fans First principles, inspired a little bit by Bezos and his 14 leadership principles. We developed 11 principles. Eleven is a very big number in "banana land." The eleventh letter of the alphabet is K, and the symbol for potassium is K, so we use 11 a lot. I know it sounds kind of silly, but the reality is we realized this all started because of a banana. If you think about Walt Disney, they were bankrupt at one point and he said it all started because of a mouse. They had a lucky Oswald rabbit stolen from them; he had nothing and then he came up with Mortimer Mouse. His wife corrected him and said, "Let's do Mickey," and that kind of changed everything. For us, it started with a banana. We have 11 Fans First principles. We have 11 rules of Banana Ball. We do our countdown from 11. Eleven is a very big part of us. Some of our guiding lines are: - We're fanatical about the fan. - We entertain. - Always play the long game. - Whatever's normal, do the exact opposite. Again, I don't want anyone to ever get excited about "normal." Ideas are everything. That is kind of how it started.
40:25	Jesse Cole	Everything. Constantly curious. We're always going to learn from the best outside our industry, not inside it. Everything speaks. That's a Walt Disney line: "If you lose the detail, you lose it all." So we're obsessed with the details. Fewer things done better. We eliminated all of our sponsorships in 2020, we eliminated all of our events, and we focused solely on Banana Ball because we asked, "What can you be the best in the world at?" We believe we can create the greatest show in sports, and so we became obsessed with that. Relentlessly resourceful. When we moved into our new office — a lot of people know this — I made a trade: I got all of the furniture for free. I sold my soul a little bit; I think I gave two or three speeches, but we got all of it for free. That was very important. It was hundreds of thousands of dollars and so, little mindset. Uphold the highest standards. That's "at the highest," not just "high," because everyone has a different version of their "high standards." And finally, always + the experience. These guide us. We talk about them every Tuesday on Snapchat. We have people give examples of how we're doing that, and then when we have really big moments we share a big example again so everyone knows how we do that.
41:31	Sam Parr	So, I'm psychoanalyzing you a little bit because I just—I admire you so much and I want to steal little pieces of the way you operate. You're doing something that we talked about, Sean, when we talked about MTV and how they sort of said, "This is the world that we are building." So basically what you're doing is saying, "I'm creating a world—I'm world-building." You're not necessarily empire-building, but you're creating this world with its own rules. I think where a lot of entrepreneurs, myself included, fall short is that when you ask them about their values, they'll say, "Well, I'm just kind of going through the motions of getting it done." If I asked you what your values were, sometimes you wouldn't even remember what they are, or you would just do it because you have to. You do a really good job of creating these rules and processes that you actually abide by, and some of them sound incredibly silly. You have all these phrases—you had the one-city world tour. I think your first "world tour" was just in Georgia, or "making Georgia"—anything.
42:26	Jesse Cole	There's meaning behind that — in the whole thing. There's meaning behind that, which I get into later.</FormattedResponse>
42:30	Sam Parr	Well... is that—there's meaning. There's intention and meaning to it. I think a lot of entrepreneurs don't have the courage to say, "This is the world that I'm building, and here's the rules and laws of the world that I'm building," and, "I'm going to stick to them." Some of those rules might sound silly—like wearing a yellow tuxedo all the time—but there's a reason for them. If I live according to the rules, it's going to actually become a thing. Did you always have that in you, or is this something you learned? Like, if you say it enough times you'll start to believe it and it'll start to become real? Walk us through that.
43:01	Jesse Cole	No. I guess if you’re the average of the five people you surround yourself with... my five people have been, you know, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and so on. I mean that not arrogantly—I have read and learned more of what they think, and that’s around me. Walt Disney was a world builder. And yeah, you better believe we will build a Banana Land, the first-ever sports and entertainment theme land. You better believe every single team that we build, we build with that point of view in mind. I mean, you don't think we just built the local Beach Coconuts and we’re not going to build the local beach? You're crazy. And if you don't think we built the Indianapolis Clowns with a homage to the history of the 1940s and '50s—built that land up—like, all of this has a bigger picture. So I’ve surrounded myself with that, and I think it fires me up. There are certain principles. Like I want to go back to the "one city world tour"—start small, dream big. One city world tour: we still call it a world tour. We've got numerous opportunities to play internationally; we've turned them all down. But we call it a "world tour" because that is where we are going. That is our vision. That is what we believe. So we’re going to continue to call it that, and then we will pretty soon start doing international. Everything we do—the cruise for the first time, a football stadium for the first time—is a one-city, dream-big test. We did a few football stadiums; now we’re doing ten. We’re doing multiple nights at the Superdome and Patriot Stadium, and literally we’re doing Kyle Field and Neyland Stadium with over 100,000 fans. That was a one-city test, and now we’re expanding it. Yeah, I never thought of the "world builder" label, but I love it when you can create everything and control everything. What people don't realize is control is such a big part of this. Most people give up control, and when you give up control you lose more fans than you realize. We do our own—we built our own ticket system. Now we built our own secondary ticket system. We do all the merchandise in-house. Everything from ours: we do our logistics in-house, we do the entertainment in-house, we do our broadcast in-house, which leaves millions of dollars on the table because we’re doing it all on YouTube. So when you do it all in-house, you afford yourself the opportunity to learn and to fail, but also to connect closer with your fans because you can see directly how they're responding and not outsourcing your core competency. That’s part of this world-thinking: Walt Disney wanted to control everything when people came into his theme park. You know, he couldn’t control a movie theater. When you go into a movie theater it could be dirty; it could be gross—who’s serving you sticky food, all that, the lighting, all of that. But he could control Disneyland. I think about that often.
45:28	Shaan Puri	Did you raise money for this, or do you control 100% of the business? What's the business side look like? </FormattedResponse>
45:34	Jesse Cole	Yeah, well, we went into a lot of debt. We took on the opening debt, and it was just my wife and me. We paid it off very quickly. Fortunately, after our first two years we were selling out games, which is good for the business model. The more fans you sell out, the more it helps. The merchandise has been bigger than anybody ever imagined. So yeah, we get offers daily, probably in emails, but we've turned them all away because they're interested in return and in some controlling aspects. I have no interest in that. If a shareholder would say, "Start charging taxes, start doing shipping fees, start having more sponsorships, take the huge TV partnerships," there'd be, easily, probably $50 to $100 million just like that. That'd be a no-brainer for an investor, but that doesn't interest me. So yeah, my wife and I own it 100%, and we don't plan to change that ever.
46:26	Sam Parr	Do you, in your weekly leadership meetings—or whatever you guys have—pay attention to the finances at all? Or do you just say, "Revenue is a scorecard; if we're doing things right, that's all I care about. Make sure I have enough money in the bank to go do what I want"?
46:39	Jesse Cole	You focus on the metrics that matter most to your customers. That's what I pay most attention to. So you better believe that I pay attention to the speed of every game. I pay attention to how long the merchandise lines are at every game. I pay attention to how many trick plays there are and how many ball force sprints.
46:51	Shaan Puri	Do you really—do you have a metric for wait times?</FormattedResponse>
46:54	Sam Parr	"On merch, what's the wait time right now?" </FormattedResponse>
46:56	Jesse Cole	Depends on the stadium. That's the biggest challenge. Right now, if we go to Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, or a football stadium, it depends on the size and the setup. We invested this past year in another experiment. Jared Ordon, our president, was brilliant in this. He said, "We're gonna set up an outdoor mall." So we bought a monster tent, and that was a test at Yankee Stadium. That changed everything. Our per-capita went up, so we had to find the space to do that. We did the same thing in Seattle — we're playing there. If you're indoors or in a stadium, we can only have a small tent. That's really bad. My goal is to get everyone served within ten minutes. We're not close to it right now, but the same thing with serving all-you-can-eat food in Savannah: everyone can get fed within five minutes now. The first few nights it took an hour. We'll get there, but those are the metrics I focus on. To answer your question about money: I have one meeting a year — it's coming up, and it's about an hour or two. Our finance director and Jared will share with us what we're looking at, and Emily and I just say, "Alright, great — where are we reinvesting?" And so this
47:54	Sam Parr	"That's what Dana White said, too. I think Dana White — I heard him say, 'I meet with the CFO occasionally, but I just... I don't really care.'"
48:03	Jesse Cole	It is what it is. And again, we're very healthy, and all the estimates that people have are dramatically low on where we are. Like, we are very, very healthy, and I know that—I pay attention. Right now we're going—no, obviously you're going to the Christmas holidays. So how many fans are we serving merchandise to? How quickly are we serving them? Are we getting it out quickly? We have a huge 100,000+ square‑foot warehouse now, and our team is like, "Get out, get out, get out." How quickly can we serve them? Those are the things. I'll know exactly how many people we serve when we do a twenty‑four‑hour shirt. You know, we go through 30,000 orders in 24 hours. I know the metric this year versus last year, and how do we continue to grow that? Because that means we're creating a better product and a better experience and have more fans. Social media—I pay attention to all that as well. Have you ever
48:44	Shaan Puri	I heard the founder of Airbnb talk about the 12-star experience.
48:47	Sam Parr	Do you know?
48:47	Jesse Cole	"Yes — love Brian Chesky. He's one I would love to meet." "Me too. I've taken a lot of inspiration from him." "Yeah, I like the helicopter, the firefight, the fireworks going off, the red carpet." "Yeah... you?"
48:56	Shaan Puri	We'll connect you with him. But one of the things you reminded me of was an anecdote about you pointing the cameras at the fans in the stadium instead of at the game. You said, "I want to watch from the security camera when people get bored and when they leave." Is this true? You wanted to study the fan experience and try to understand where the lulls and dips are. It's almost like how Jimmy would look at his YouTube retention chart and say, "Oh, at seven minutes there's a dip. What do we do at seven minutes? Oh, that's when we did our ad reads — we need to make those more entertaining because we can't lose people during that time."
49:34	Jesse Cole	Yeah—obsessed with that. Yeah. What people don't know is that when I'm on the field—and again, I'm on the field in front of the dugout with our players—we're always out there. I'm constantly turning around, watching the fans and their reactions. Our director of entertainment, who we've worked with now for five years, is unbelievable. We can look at each other and all of a sudden say, "Alright: energy, music—energy, music now," because we know when the energy is down. We can look at each other; it's just a feel, and it's really special. But yeah, geez—many years ago, when we were looking at the debate to go to banana ball, I realized that fans were leaving games early and I said, "We need to document this." So one of our staff members—one of our ushers—had them take pictures and video every thirty minutes, starting 05:36, 06:37, 07:38, 08:39. We realized at 09:00 the first influx of people left; at 09:15 a lot more; at 09:30 even more. So I was like, "Gotta do a two-hour time limit." No one said they wanted a two-hour time limit—the games at that.
50:29	Jesse Cole	In Major League Baseball, we're three hours and twelve minutes. So even when I shared internally, our team was like, "Jesse, two and a half's probably fair." I mean, that's still dramatic. I go, "No — you want people to want more. There's a difference." Yeah.
50:40	Shaan Puri	You know.
50:40	Jesse Cole	A great comedian—you want more at the end. A great concert—you want the encore. In baseball, everyone's like, "I've had enough." I was like, "We gotta create a product that people always want more of."
50:51	Sam Parr	HQ staff, do you... do you have now?</FormattedResponse>
50:55	Jesse Cole	I wish I had the answer for you. I'll give you an idea of what it looks like on the road. If we go to a major league stadium or football stadium, we travel with 200+ people. If we have a minor league stadium, it's 150 people. We have three tours and six teams, so we're traveling with 500+ people. Then we hire between 100 to 300 people at each stadium as part-time staff to help with merch, tickets, logistics, etc. We also have our team in Savannah. And then we have our "cas" [unclear term]. I mean, it's hundreds, you know. Some are full-time. But yeah, we're hiring every week — there are new people joining our team.
51:30	Sam Parr	And I read that you had the business and you were like, "We're gonna get into social media." And I think it was like, "I don't really know what I'm doing, but, okay — you know, my coworker, just start, go and figure this out." Is that true? Were you successful in just getting young and inexperienced people and inspiring them, and did that work out? Has that worked out better than hiring more — the more experienced...?
51:54	Jesse Cole	I have very few from the outside. I would say 80% were started as interns. You know, I was an intern for a little bit; my wife was an intern. We believe in that — you learn from seeing how people do in this kind of culture. So yeah, social media. Again, first insight: "Can't Stop the Feeling" — in 2016 we created a music video to it and Justin Timberlake. We made "Can't Stop the Feeling." It was a very rudimentary video, but I remember watching it put on Facebook and seeing 10,000 views, 20,000 views, 30,000 views… you got like 100,000 views. I was like, whoa, people like this. I was like, let's do more of this. And again, once TikTok came around in 2020, when we started paying attention, one of our interns I said, "Just post every single day." She goes, "What do I post?" I go, "I don't know, but make baseball fun. If it fits that overall brand, do it." We learned, and then nothing happened the first few weeks. Then we had one that hit — it was like, alright, it's our players. What are our players doing? Okay, now let's do this with our players. How about a music video with our players? How about this? We just kept iterating. We posted every single day from 2020, and that's literally how we learned. If you think about our second team, the Party Animals, they have more followers than every major league baseball team on TikTok because we started with them in 2022 or so. So yeah, everything is just — you can't be afraid of failing. I mean, every night we do 10 to 15 promotions we've never done in front of a live crowd: games, skits, ideas. Every single night we have our scripts, and we use different colors to show the new things we haven't done before. That's where you learn. We're not afraid of failing because we're just going to keep trying new things, and our fans will give us the benefit of the doubt because they know we're going to try something new next and we're going to keep trying.
53:36	Shaan Puri	"Somebody told me you guys treat this almost like Saturnet Live. Like you have the pitch meeting the way Saturnet Live has: a kind of weekly schedule where they pitch, then they script, then they rehearse, and then they sort of edit from there. Is that what you guys do?"
53:49	Jesse Cole	So you solve your problems with the fans first. The starting point of everything is: what are the friction points from your fans' point of view? Then you can look at it from your organization's point of view. From the fans: it's too long, too slow, too boring; you get nickel-and-dimed — all that stuff. We just went from there and created that. Then, from the internals: creativity is hard. It's hard to come up with creative ideas all the time. I mean, those idea books — it's hard. So we said, "Alright, who's been sustaining creativity at a very high level for a very long time and doing new shows constantly?" Saturday Night Live. So you better believe I bought every book on Saturday Night Live. Then I realized, "Guys, there's a documentary — a week behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live by, I think, James Franco." I was like, "Guys, we have to watch this." Our creative team was small back then and was like, "We watch..."
54:35	Shaan Puri	It, we're.
54:35	Jesse Cole	Alright. They come in on Monday, and then they pitched the idea — John Malkovich was the host that way. They pitched to John, then they pitched to Lauren. Then they start writing, have an idea session, then a table read. They start getting the props, then they do it, and then they do a show at 8:00 in front of a live audience. They watch what hits with the live audience and what doesn't. Then they put the new ones in at 11:30 and cut everything else out. It's like, "Guys, we're the same thing — let's just do that." So we started; we built it. It's Tuesdays because Monday is our travel day. Tuesday is our OTT session — over-the-top ideas. Everyone comes with ideas, so we actually have a form that you have to fill.
55:05	Shaan Puri	Up, even just in naming.
55:06	Jesse Cole	It's over the top — yeah, 100%. So, we have a form we gotta fill out by midnight with all the ideas: whether it's a walk-up, a celebration, something in the crowd, whatever that is. Include any video or a full description. Our meeting starts at 10:00, when we review all of those. Then we have a smaller group meeting at 11:00. The players share some of their ideas — broadcast shares some of their ideas. By 4:00 on Tuesday, we have a table read where we go over what's going to be in the script. Then we start getting the props and the creative. After that, we do rehearsals: when we're in the sit-in in Savannah, then rehearsals in the city, and then rehearsals in front of our VIP — our "Very Important Bananas," which is our special VIP group. We get to watch them: how do they react? Are they taking video? Are they into it or not? Then we put it into the show, and that's repeated with...
55:48	Sam Parr	Everything about this one of our businesses sounds so hard to run. I mean, first you have the production of SNL. You also have personal issues, personality clashes, paying people and keeping everyone in line, and then getting the funny stuff out the door. Then you have merch. I think merch makes up half—or about 40%—of your revenue, which is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. You have supply-chain issues. You're traveling with hundreds of people. Then you're doing social media. I mean, this is an incredibly complicated business.
56:15	Shaan Puri	You're playing the game on extreme hard mode, and I respect you.
56:18	Jesse Cole	For it.
56:19	Sam Parr	It's way harder than I thought. When you gave it all, I was like, "Oh my gosh — there's so much." And then you still have normal company operations.
56:24	Shaan Puri	"And the principle is: don't do the same show ever again." </FormattedResponse>
56:27	Jesse Cole	Every show has to be brand new, and yes—the logistics are impossible. We hired someone from the military to help us because we've got trucks all over the country. When we're going to a football stadium with 100,000 people, we need 12 to 14 trucks. Then we also have two other games in another part of the country that require separate merchandise. The teams are playing each other at different times, so we're bringing all the merchandise, the show, and all the props to go there. Then we're flying everyone around the country and getting them in. It's crazy.
56:52	Sam Parr	"But then, check this out. Look — if you move your head, so move your head like this, it looks like you have two books behind you. I think you wrote two books, right? Just Jesse — 3." </FormattedResponse>
56:59	Jesse Cole	Yes. Yeah.
57:00	Sam Parr	Yes, yes. Okay. So Jesse Cole has three books, and I also read online that you have the Hulu documentary, and I think you have another one somewhere else. Yeah. I think I read somewhere online that— I think you said you don't take a salary, or you're one of the lowest-paid people, and that you live off your speaking fees. Yes. Okay, so Jesse has books—three books—documentaries, speaking fees. I did this monster of a business that is incredibly complicated. What price are you paying to do all this?
57:29	Jesse Cole	I think it's a good question. I think it's the right question. I believe in doing what gives you energy. I'm very fortunate that what I do gives me energy. When I first started in Gastonia and I was doing everything—operations, hiring, you name it—I was worn out. Now, speaking or being with you guys right now fires me up. I love creating. I love sharing. I love growing. So when I can go speak, you know, that's an energy giver. Our family—we homeschool now. We have three kids; we homeschool and we travel. I do daddy-daughter dates and burger boys with my son, and I focus on that, but I can always be better in that area. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed with it. I love it; it brings me so much joy, and I stay really focused. Even though it sounds like there's lots of things, I'm focused on trying to create the greatest fan experience in sports and the greatest show in sports every day. If I'm speaking, I'm sharing about it. If I'm on a podcast, I'm sharing about it. In the morning I'm working with my team—I'm creating it. So it really sounds widespread, but it's all focused on doing something very, very narrow.
58:32	Shaan Puri	What's your talent strategy? Are you like, "Oh, we use recruiters and then they come in for interviews," or is it that you look in the TikTok comments and find people? Like, what is Jesse doing to source some of these diamonds that end up being there?
58:44	Jesse Cole	This is the crazy one, guys. So, yes — I'm very grateful that we have 4.2 million people on our waitlist to get tickets or whatever. There's also 12,700 people on our waitlist to work with us, so we have a waitlist. I believe it's attracting over recruiting: if you're very vocal about who you are and what you stand for, you often attract people. I attract people. I never imagined we'd attract that. I mean, even you guys — I was listening to you before we even knew each other. Again, I'm so grateful for that. And yes, we do. I'm working with Cirque du Soleil right now on bringing on some cast at a higher level, because you better believe the Indianapolis Clowns is going to be the greatest show people have ever seen. We're going to take that to a whole other level. I'm also working with, you know, WWE and UFC on some stuff — people that are great. But a lot of it is just attracting young, hungry talent that believe in us and believe in what we're doing, and they'll give their hearts to it. Very special.
59:40	Sam Parr	I think that—if I had to make a prediction, I'd be curious to hear your take. We probably don't have enough time, but we brainstorm ideas here on this podcast a lot, so I would be curious. Ari Emanuel, who runs Endeavor (they own WWE, UFC, DVR, whatever—yeah, a ton of stuff), did this great podcast with Patrick O'Shaughnessy. He was basically like, "I'm making an anti‑AI bet." He said hotel bookings for Thursdays are now up through the roof, busy drive times are at 11 a.m., and basically people are working less and they want to go out and have experiences. My prediction for you guys is that there's going to be a second wind. I mean, you're already— I don't want to say you're at a peak, but you're killing it right now. I think there's going to be another macro trend that pushes you even further up this mountain of glory. Are you feeling that? Also—have you seen any other events businesses that are shockingly large or well run that inspire you? A lot of people don't realize that Cirque du Soleil is a multi‑billion‑dollar company. Have you seen any cool events businesses like that?
01:00:43	Jesse Cole	You know, I mean, I think I named the main ones. There's probably other ones out internationally that I'm not aware of at this point. But yeah—no, I'm fascinated by the cruise industry as well, because they're combining the entertainment, the shows... everything. They're creating their own worlds. I've gotten a lot closer because we're doing our own to learn: can we put on a show for five days for all of our fans without playing Banana Ball? So that's a good test we're looking at. I'm fascinated by the youth game of Banana Ball and developing that. We did a one-city "world tour" test with a youth tournament that sold out in Cleveland, with kids from 48 states coming in. We're going to build the sport that way and then continue to expand. I mean, we're going to do a tour movie. I'm really inspired by what Taylor Swift has done and how she built that ecosystem—created a great tour that generated all these little things from the flywheel that jumped off it. We're going to do some of that. We're creating original music. I haven't announced it yet, but we have an unbelievable music partnership with a very well-known group that's going to help create original music for us. All those steps, I think, are going to take the show to another level. If we keep making our show better, I believe everything will take care of itself. We can never settle for, "Last year's show was great—let's do the same thing." That's what scares me.
01:01:57	Shaan Puri	If we saw you when you were a kid — like a teenager, maybe 12 years old — what would we have seen? Were you selling CDs and hustling entrepreneurially? Were you "Mr. Popular" at school, or were you on the fringes? Who were you when you were young, and would there have been any clues that this is who comes out of that?
01:02:14	Jesse Cole	Yeah, no—I was a shy kid to start, and I was by myself a lot. I remember literally during the summer my dad would go to work and, you know, I was like 12 or whatever. Thirty days: "Jesse, what'd you do?" I was like, "rode my bike to Alex's house, rode my bike to John's house." I didn't have a lot of friends, and my friends were through baseball. So anytime I was around my baseball team, I would try to create attention. I would try to do anything, because it was my time around people my age. I think that love of being around people—I didn't have that as much growing up. Now, being around 50,000 to 100,000 people and staying till the last fan leaves to sign their autographs—that is something I think, because of what I had and what I wanted, now I can have at a higher level, and I keep pushing for that. But yeah, I was creating attention. Instead of public speaking—which is ironic, because I now speak—we created movies. We used iMovie, and we were the first ones to create movies, so I learned how to create movies and videos that people were interested in. That guided us with what we were doing on social media—or, like, not social media back then, but how to make videos that people were interested in. So yeah, I was creative, but I was alone. I just played baseball, and I think it was more the world I surrounded myself with after school—the Walt Disney, the P.T. Barnum, the Bill Veeck world—that really...
01:03:31	Sam Parr	"You were interested in those guys when you were younger."
01:03:34	Jesse Cole	No. None of them. No — it was after. So, like, yes: did I go to Walt Disney? I was the "big kahuna" at Typhoon Lagoon, which they let me in early, and I got to have this whole experience. It was magical. Did I have some really cool experiences at [AAU national tournaments] or going to Disney? Yes. I didn't know anything about them other than what most people knew. It was that world I surrounded myself with afterward, like — you guys. I mean, think about this: ten, fifteen, twenty years ago — it's what you've learned now in the last ten, fifteen years — that world has impacted you. You know, maybe there were some influences, obviously back in school, but it's more now. You find this new world of entrepreneurs and creative thinking, and creators and inventors, and that fires me up.
01:04:11	Sam Parr	Sean, have you ever seen the talks? Jesse does these things on his Instagram where he gives the players a talk before the game. I don't know if it's for new players or if it's before every game, but you have the guys in the stands.
01:04:23	Shaan Puri	No, I haven't seen these.
01:04:24	Sam Parr	Okay, so he gets everyone. I'm going to tell the story for you, Jesse, as an outsider — you can correct me if I'm getting it wrong. I think it's the team, or maybe some of the staff. You have them, I think, in the outfield stands or somewhere not in the front row. You're sitting there because you need to be in some of the worst seats so you understand that we have to make this great for everyone. Then you tell this amazing story. I imagine you repeat some of the stories, but every time I've watched it it's been unique and it inspires them so much. I'm like, "This guy has made playing silly baseball seem like I'm saving the world." I'm so invested. I'm like, "You guys are doing God's work" — the guy on stilts is doing God's work. I'm so bought in. I agree with you — you've judo'd me; I've totally bought in. Did you have to learn how to tell stories like this? You're doing such a good job of getting me invested. I see the players. Typically, baseball players — by the way, when I grew up or hung out with college baseball players, they weren't the coolest guys. They were kinda too cool for school; they didn't want to do silly stuff. These guys are so wholesome and awesome. Did you learn how to tell stories like this? It's incredibly effective.
01:05:36	Jesse Cole	Thank you — 100%. And yeah, still to this day.
01:05:39	Sam Parr	Did I tell that right, those talks?
01:05:40	Jesse Cole	Yes. Whenever we come to a city, the first thing we do is have our Fans First talk. That includes the entire staff, the cast, and the players, so we can have upwards of 200 people in those. Both teams and the players are there. Every week we have a new talk, and it is one of the most stressful things for me. I could speak in front of a Fortune 50 company or 10,000 people, but I'm more nervous speaking to our 150 people because I know my words—our words—mean so much to them. It's weighed differently, and I truly care how it impacts them. So every week it's like: "What's our message? How does it fit Fans First? How does it fit a principle? How do we... win the upper deck?" We talk about that all the time. I have a lens now—one of the lenses I use is being a friction fighter. Wherever I go, I see friction. > [Walt Disney] "Whenever I go on a ride, I'm always asking what's wrong with this thing and how it could be improved." If I go to a restaurant, if I'm driving down the road, if I'm going to a store, I notice: what are the friction points from a customer?
01:06:41	Jesse Cole	Of course, that's just my lens. Now, the other lens I see is that I always see stories in everything—anything that happens. What's the story that can be told? When I think about speaking, it's like: what's your story? What's your message? How can people get one main thing out of it and then leave? So that's what those short, short speeches are. To give you an example I haven't shared in forever: Russell Wilson—you guys know the quarterback in the NFL—he played for me in Gastonia. Literally the first night, I had all the players come down from the roof and high-five the fans coming out to the field. I said, "Hey, high-five the fans, get on the field—we're gonna be the starting lineup." I was up on the roof, like, "Batting first for the Gastonia Grizzlies, from NC State, number one, Russell Wilson." He goes down batting second from Clemson, and each one goes down. I'm up on the roof and I see all the players on the field except for Russell Wilson. Finally, I see everyone on the field except Russell, so I go down into the grandstand. I see he's way out in left field grandstand—he was high-fiving every single kid in the stadium. He was 22 years old, and he knew what mattered: it was high-fiving every fan more than getting out on the field. I just think about moments like that. Guys, we're doing something so much bigger than just putting on a show—it's how we make people feel. Put yourself in the shoes of that five-year-old or seven-year-old who went to their first game: all you wanted was an autograph, you wanted a ball, you wanted a high five from your favorite player. How many times did you not get that? We can provide that every single day. Now you guys are even bigger—looked upon even bigger than some of those major leaguers. We owe it to that kid to do that. So we just share these messages and examples.
01:08:20	Sam Parr	"I'm in."
01:08:21	Shaan Puri	"Every... this morning. Yeah, you gave us the speech. I'm ready."
01:08:24	Jesse Cole	"Well, that wasn't the speech."
01:08:25	Shaan Puri	When I go work on my dance.
01:08:26	Sam Parr	I don't think I shared.
01:08:27	Jesse Cole	That one with you guys — I don't think I've shared it, because it was back in Gastonia days. You brought me back to that one.
01:08:32	Sam Parr	I'm in, man. I'm in.
01:08:33	Shaan Puri	Jesse, there's a quote that you remind me of — we can leave it on this, which is a John Wesley quote. He says: > "Light yourself on fire with passion, and people will come from miles to watch you burn." I feel like that's what you've—like, you have lit yourself on fire with passion. You've done that with this thing that none of us even realized we wanted, and now millions of people want to come watch you guys burn. I think that's amazing.
01:08:56	Jesse Cole	I got—well, yeah. Hopefully you got the other burn [unclear phrase]. Because some people probably do the baseball/traditional [unclear phrase]. But I want you guys to see a show. I'm so impressed with how much you know and how much you're able to talk about this. For you to see it from the beginning to the end and watch what goes into it, just get mentally prepared... Get some good rest before that.
01:09:15	Sam Parr	Well, God bless you. Thank you so much — we appreciate you coming on. This has—this has been an all-timer.
01:09:19	Jesse Cole	A lot of fun. Thank you, guys — seriously, I really appreciate y'all.
01:09:22	Sam Parr	Alright, that's it. That's a pod.</FormattedResponse>

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Living in a garage to building the $1B+ 'Savannah Bananas'

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