Cirque du Soleil & The Savannah Bananas: Why the Smartest Move is to Quit the Game

David Carson: 00:00:00

So let me tell you about the most pathetic networking event of my life, and how escaping to a fire escape accidentally led to my most successful business partnership. But more importantly, I'm gonna show you why the smartest business move you could make is something you probably heard from your mom a thousand times when you were a kid. Remember going over to some kid's house and he was like, "You can't play with any of my toys. My stuff is my stuff." And you're like, "This kid sucks. I'm gonna tell my mom what's going on here." And she just goes, "If that kid won't play nice, go find somewhere else to play." Turns out my mom was really onto something. Life advice, Buddha-level stuff, but I didn't realize it until much later in life. So let me take you way back to when I was first starting out. I'm in this stereotypical New York City Soho loftis office kind of space. Exposed brick, beer on tap, with like 200 desperate entrepreneurs crammed into a room meant for 50. Everyone is wearing that slightly too casual blazer they bought specifically for shitty events like this. I walk in and it's a feeding frenzy. There are like three actual investors with a horde of like 200 people just hunting these three guys down. Grown adults are literally sprinting, just rushing toward anyone who had a speaker badge, like they're running for the last helicopter out of Saigon. It was wild. So here I am clutching my craft beer, clutching my business cards, doing that weird hover dance near conversations. You know the one, where you're close enough to seem involved but far enough away that you're clearly not invited. After 20 minutes of professional humiliation, I gave up, so I wander outside to the fire escape. And that's where I meet Sarah-

SFX SARAH: 00:02:04

Hello

David Carson: 00:02:05

... who'd also escaped the chaos.

SFX DAVID: 00:02:06

Hi.

David Carson: 00:02:07

Turns out she's working on this brilliant app for dog walkers. It was pretty fun. And we talked for like two hours about everything from behavioral psychology to why hot dogs come in packs of 10 but buns come in packs of eight. That conversation led to a followup meeting that turned into a great opportunity. It's one of my most successful investments to date, all because we both decided the crowded room was insane, and found an empty fire escape instead. Walking home that night something clicked. What if the secret isn't fighting harder for attention in the packed room? What if it's walking out and finding your own empty space?

Welcome to Dumbify. I'm David Carson, and today we're gonna explore why throwing your own party beats fighting for scraps at someone else's. But first, let me tell you about this 24-year-old street performer who was about to destroy an industry that had existed for over a century.

THEME SONG: 00:03:10

Dumbify, let your neurons dance. Put your brain in backwards pants. Genus hides and daft disguise. Brilliance wears those googly eyes. So honk your nose and chase that spark. Dumb is just smart in the dark. Dumbify. Yelling like a goose. It's thinking wrong on purpose with Juice.

David Carson: 00:03:38

Quebec, 1984.

ame shrinking scraps. See, in: 1984

SFX VO: 00:05:20

No, no, no.

David Carson: 00:05:21

Insurance costs are skyrocketing. Every city council meeting becomes a battleground between circus bookers and activists with hidden cameras documenting every bruise on every animal. Even venues are getting nervous. Why risk the bad publicity when you can book a monster truck rally instead? Monster trucks don't need veterinarians. They don't generate protest footage. They don't make soccer moms feel guilty about buying tickets. Meanwhile, ticket sales are plummeting because the whole landscape of entertainment is shifting. Shopping malls are becoming entertainment destinations with food courts and arcade games.Blockbuster movies are getting bigger and more spectacular every year. Kids who grew up on Star Wars and Indiana Jones aren't exactly thrilled by a guy in face paint riding a bicycle. And every circus operator is responding to this crisis the exact same way, fighting harder and harder for whatever scraps are left, slashing ticket prices until profit margins disappear, adding more rings, more chaos, more of everything that used to work, all of them clawing at each other for the same exhausted families who barely seem interested anymore. The whole industry has become a death spiral of desperate competition for a shrinking pie, but here's what they don't know about this 24-year-old. He figured out years ago that fighting for scraps is a sucker's game. He's been performing on the streets since he was 14, not because he dreamed of joining the Circus Wars, because he discovered something powerful about creating your own audience from scratch. See, he grew up watching those traveling shows roll through small-town Quebec, and what he saw wasn't magic. It was desperation. A bunch of performers competing for the attention of distracted kids hopped up on cotton candy, everyone doing slightly different versions of the same tired tricks, hoping to grab a few more seconds of scattered focus. So, he taught himself to eat fire, to walk on stilts, to play accordion while breathing flames. But here's the thing, he never set up where other street performers were working. [gasps] He never tried to outdo the guy next to him with a louder act or bigger flames. Instead, he'd find an empty corner, start with nothing, and build something so captivating that people would abandon whatever they were doing and crowd around him. He learned that when you create something genuinely new, you don't have to fight for attention, you generate it. For years, he developed this strange hybrid performance style on those cobblestones. Folk music meets physical theater, meets pure spectacle. While other performers were competing for coins from the same tourists, he was discovering that the hunger for real wonder was everywhere, you just had to create the right experience to unlock it. And that's when the bigger realization hit him, everyone in the circus business was playing the wrong game entirely. They were all asking, "How do we grab a bigger piece of the existing market? What if we created a completely new market that nobody else knows even exists?" What if, instead of fighting with Ringling Brothers over families who wanted cheap entertainment, you created something for adults who didn't even know they were hungry for sophisticated wonder? What if, instead of competing in the race to the bottom, you threw your own party in a completely different space? He'd seen it work on the streets. When you stop trying to be a slightly better version of what already exists and start creating something the world has never seen, people don't just notice, they become evangelists. But when he tried to explain this vision to industry veterans, they looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language.

OPERA SONG: 00:09:24

You're abandoning the circus market. Without elephants, without clowns,

you won't have any audience at all.

The whole appeal of circus is tradition. Families want elephants and tigers and clowns and things they recognize. You idiot!

David Carson: 00:09:59

They saw his idea as commercial suicide, walking away from the only customers circus had ever served. They wanted to compete harder for the existing audience. He wanted to create audiences that didn't even know they existed yet. The experts told him he was throwing away everything profitable about circus. "You're not creating a circus," they said. "You're creating some weird theatrical experiment that will put people to sleep."

d with a single production in: 1984

David Carson: 00:12:55

So let's fast-forward to a more recent time, to the year [chimes ringing] 2015, where we're hovering over a guy named Jesse Cole, who's standing in an empty baseball stadium in Savannah, Georgia. He's looking at 2,000 empty seats as he listens to the echo of his own footsteps on the concrete of the stadium floor. He's hopeful, but also incredibly nervous, because everyone thinks he's about to flush his entire life savings down the drain, because what he's about to do will make every baseball executive in America question his sanity. To fully understand why, you have to look at the market for Minor League Baseball. Like the circus back in 1984, Minor League Baseball is dying. Attendance is plummeting. Teams are folding. Fan interest is evaporating, and the few people who still show up are mostly there for cheap beer and nostalgia. Every team is fighting for local attention with the same tired minor league formula, baseball with hot dogs and beer, maybe some in-between-inning kiss cam on the mini-Jumbotron. It's kind of a stale, worn-out experience, and in some local markets, the competition for entertainment is super stiff, let alone the options for anyone to just opt to stay home with Netflix and just chill. Minor League Baseball's margins are razor-thin. Even the teams with decades of rich history are barely surviving. So what does this 33-year-old former college baseball coach do?

opened their first season in: 2016

The response was immediate and brutal. Local headlines screamed, "Owner should be thrown out of town." "Whoever came up with this name should be fired." "You're an embarrassment to the city." "You'll never sell a ticket." At Savannah's massive Saint Patrick's Day parade, Jesse and his tiny staff wore banana T-shirts. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets, and they got booed everywhere they walked. But something unexpected was happening. The national media picked up the story, CBS, NBC, Sports Illustrated.... 2006. The Bananas even became the number one trending topic on Twitter. Merchandise orders flooded in from across the country. Opening night finally sold out, and over 4,000 people packed Grayson Stadium. Not because they believed in what Cole was doing, but because they wanted to see the train wreck for themselves. And it was a disaster on the field. The Bananas made six errors. They were letting up runs left and right. Cole later admitted, "The baseball was terrible." But here's what nobody expected. When the game ended, all 4,000 people were still there, waiting. Not for quality baseball, but for whatever came next. The dancing players, the break-dancing first base coach, the senior citizen dance team called the Banana Nanas. All those elaborate scripts that Cole had written for between innings were infectious and fun. The audience had never seen anything like it. And for that reason alone, the Bananas sold out 17 of their 25 games that first season. They even ended up winning the championship. They broke the Coastal Plain League attendance record. They averaged over 3,600 fans per game when the second-highest team in the league averaged 1,900. By season three, every single game sold out. Over 70,000 people were on the waiting list. The Savannah Bananas social media was exploding. Even ESPN started covering their games, like it was some kind of cultural phenomena. The ticket prices went from desperate to fill seats to some kind of premium entertainment experience. Audiences were going wild. They were no longer confused baseball fans. They were energized families who'd never even cared about sports. Coverage went from local mockery to national fascination. Even Major League players started showing up just to experience what Jesse Cole had created. Not to scout talent or mock the team. They were there just to feel what it was like to play in front of a crowd that was genuinely, wildly, joyfully engaged. By walking away from the dwindling audience for traditional baseball, Jesse Cole had found a new one, a bigger one, a more excited and energized one. While traditional teams were still arguing about the infield fly rule and batting averages, the Bananas were selling out massive stadiums with people who never cared about baseball in their lives. But why does this work? Why does stepping completely outside the game everyone else is playing give you such a massive advantage?

David Carson: 00:21:04

Let's take a second to understand the science behind why your brain throws better parties when nobody else is invited.

TIME FOR SCIENCE THEME SONG: 00:21:11

Time

for science.

Time to get unnecessarily nerdy with it. 'Cause nerding out is what we do. And we're not going to apologize for it. Get ready for

science.

David Carson: 00:21:35

Okay. What's actually happening when someone like Laliberté or Jesse Cole walks away from the crowded party? Well, it turns out there's some real research backing up this seemingly backwards approach. Business professors W. Shine Kim and Renée Mauborgne analyzed over 150 strategic moves across 30 different industries over a span of 100 years.

SFX VO: 00:22:01

Wow.

David Carson: 00:22:02

And what they found completely overturned conventional business wisdom. The companies that tried to outperform competitors in existing markets consistently under-performed. And the companies that created new market spaces, where competition was non-existent or at least irrelevant, generated 38% higher revenues and 61% higher profits. But here's what's really wild. 86% of these new market moves were made by companies that didn't have superior resources, brilliant strategies, or unique insights. They were just willing to question assumptions that everyone else took for granted. Dr. Kim explained it this way. "Most companies focus on beating their rivals, but the most successful companies focus on making their rivals irrelevant." This lines up with research from behavioral economist Dr. Sheena Leongharr at Columbia University. When consumers face too many similar options, they either delay decisions or make worse choices. But when a truly different option appears, something that doesn't fit existing categories, it captures disproportionate attention and preference. Your brain literally perks up when it encounters something that breaks the pattern. Something that says, "I'm not like the others." Neuroscientist Dr. Arne Detrich has studied what happens in the brain when people try to create something genuinely new. Breakthrough thinking requires stepping away from conventional rule-following patterns. When we're competing within existing frameworks, our brains optimize for following established rules. But creating new categories requires a different kind of thinking entirely. The research consistently shows the companies and individuals who create the most value aren't the ones who fight hardest in crowded spaces. They're the ones brave enough to walk away and create their own space where they set the rules.

MB WORD OF THE DAY THEME SONG: 00:24:04

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb word of the day. Dumb word of the day. It's a word. It's dumb. Use responsibly.

David Carson: 00:24:14

All right. It's time for my favorite part of the show. It's time for Dumb Word of the Day, where we excavate linguistic treasures that sound like they escaped from a philosophy textbook written by someone who'd eaten too many mushrooms. And today's deliciously dumb word is “liminal”, spelled L-I-M-I-N-A-L. Liminal. It means occupying a position at or on both sides of a boundary or threshold, sort of that in-between space where you're not quite one thing and not quite another. Like being awake but not fully conscious. Or being in an airport terminal, which somehow exists outside normal geography and time. Here's why this word is perfect for today. When La Liberté created Cirque du Soleil, he wasn't building a circus or a theater show. He was creating something liminal, a space that existed in the threshold between acrobatics and theater. When Jesse Cole invented the Savannah Bananas, he wasn't making a new sport. Not exactly. He was creating something new that occupied the boundary between baseball and spectacle. Liminal spaces are where the most interesting things happen because the normal rules don't apply. You're free to experiment, to create new combinations, to be weird in ways that would be unacceptable in more defined spaces.

Let's try using it in a sentence.

I wasn't trying to reinvent family dining when I mashed pizza with arcade games. I just knew there was magic in that weird liminal zone where mozzarella meets mortal combat.

Liminal thinking makes experts uncomfortable because they've spent their careers mastering the rules of defined categories. But liminal is where the magic happens, where you can throw your own party instead of fighting for scraps at someone else's overcrowded event.

David Carson: 00:26:19

So here's my dumb challenge for you this week. Find your empty room. That's it. I want you to question at least one assumption that everyone in your space treats as gospel and start sketching out what your own weird party might look like. Because the most interesting people aren't fighting for attention in the crowded room. They're the ones everyone else eventually follows to see what all the noise is about.

David Carson: 00:26:50

Thank you for getting dumb with me today. If this episode made you want to abandon your current competitive strategy and go find an empty room to throw your own weird party, share it with someone who's exhausted from fighting for scraps. If you want more counterintuitive business wisdom that makes industry experts question their fundamental assumptions, subscribe to the Dumbify Newsletter at david-carson.com. Until next time, stay curious, stay liminal, and remember, sometimes the smartest thing you can do is stop trying to win the game everyone else is playing and start playing a game where you get to make the rules. This is David Carson signing off from the beautifully uncrowded space of strategic rule-breaking, where competition is irrelevant, and the only party that matters is the one you throw yourself.