Bananaland University

What might the Savannah Bananas teach us about a potential future for higher education?

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Image from Chatting With The Savannah Bananas: Inside The Wild World Of Banana Ball

What would it look like to redesign higher education using the Savannah Bananas’ playbook?

Those of you who know me well know that I am a big fan of the Acquired podcast. After finishing their recent episode on Formula 1 (it was awesome) and before starting their latest episode on Ferrari (have since started; also awesome), I decided to pop over to their second podcast, Acq2, where they set their 4-hour storytelling format aside and sit down to chat with a founder or business icon that Ben and David admire.

And so I found myself, on a cool and slightly misty Thursday morning in Southern California, a few minutes before the sun would rise over the horizon to my east, listening to the story of the one and only Jesse Cole.

Baseball, but not

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Jesse’s story and the genesis of the Savannah Bananas, let me briefly catch you up to speed. Cole, who you’ve probably seen somewhere on the Internet wearing his trademark bright yellow suit, grew up like many kids across the country playing baseball. But after his playing career ended after division one college ball, he pivoted to coaching.

There was only one problem. He was bored. Baseball, after all, is not the most thrilling of sports.

So, Jesse set out to create something more interesting, concocting what eventually came to be known as Banana Ball. Banana Ball is not baseball. While it bears some surface-level similarity to America’s favorite pastime (played on a diamond with pitchers and hitters over nine innings), you’ll quickly pick up that this is something quite distinct. There are any number of wacky add-ons that will tip you off: trick plays, creative scoring so that there is always a potential for a 9th-inning comeback, and team names like the Savannah Bananas, the Texas Tailgaters, and the Party Animals. In many ways, it is closer in reality to a P.T. Barnum production. If you want a taste, just check out this video on YouTube of some highlights from the game in Texas last weekend.

Banana Ball, it turns out, is creating quite the buzz. Just this past weekend, the Bananas packed out Texas A&M’s Kyle Field with 102,000 fans. In case you’re wondering, that is nearly double the maximum capacity of the largest Major League Baseball stadium in the US (Dodgers stadium clocks in at a maximum head count of 56,000).

Banana Ball and Higher Ed

But what does all of this have to do with higher ed? The aha moment for me came near the end of the interview when David tries to get at the root of why Jesse has built the Bananas the way he has. Here’s Jesse’s response:

I want this for my grandkids. I want to create something that we love. It’s all about chasing moments, guys. You bring people together. There’s nothing like it. When you see after a game, thousands of people singing Stand By Me, which out of all things, it’s wild. They feel like they’re a part of something. It’s those moments that I’m chasing, that energy. So why would you ever give it up?

To be sure, education and entertainment are different markets. The Bananas are an entertainment product, but the real magic and meaning of the whole enterprise is that it brings people together in order to give them an experience. It’s about creating moments where individuals are shaped by the power of embodied presence. Although we might be skeptical of any transferable learnings, perhaps we might find a spark of inspiration from an unlikely place.

Perhaps we need to embrace a bit of Banana Ball thinking in higher ed. AI is already shaking things up, so why not think a bit outside the box? Banana Ball retained some of the structures of a traditional baseball, but targeted some of the most troublesome parts of the game and wasn’t afraid to make some changes. Fan catches a foul ball? That’s an out. No walking, you get to spring out of the box and take as many bases as you can before every player on the opposing team touches the ball. No bunting ever. Bunt and you’re ejected. The Golden Batter. Once per game, a team can send up any player to bat at any time.

These are just a few examples. If you’re a baseball purist, you may be appalled. But Cole is ruthless about finding things that aren’t working and trying out new things to replace them. Why not think about what we could do to restructure our institutions by taking the core values and principles that we believe in, but don’t hold so tightly to the playbook of how everything has been done?

How would we change the shape of the college and university if we shifted our goal from job to vocation, from career preparation to character development, from creating students with economic utility to forming students who understand their place in the world more deeply and experience the unique ways that community shapes that experience? There has never been a better time to throw out your traditional grading scheme to try an alternative grading approach like specifications grading or to restructure your syllabus to emphasize character development and leadership formation.

There’s never been a better moment to think with some creativity. With the continuing growth of artificial intelligence and its diffusion across society, it might seem that we are on track for a future where we are increasingly disconnected from the physical world. That we will choose to mediate our connection with reality not just through screens but through digital interfaces and AI agents.

In education, some of the ideas that are getting the most press are arguing that we ought to turn the MOOC knob up to eleven. Spin up the AI agents, give them all the raw materials for course content, and then let the AI compose it together to create the courses, tutor the students, and assess the skills. This is the basic thesis underneath several recent ventures, from The Khan TED Institute to ASU’s Atomic learning platform.

But there is an opportunity hiding in plain sight. A counter-narrative that it would be wise for us to attend to. It’s the realization that in a world where more and more of our experiences are mediated by digital technology, humans will increasingly crave authentic connection with other embodied human beings.

At its best, the college and university creates a certain environment where shared endeavors can be pursued. Where space, time, and attention can be turned toward ideas and the kind of dialogue and shared meaning-making that is not easily created elsewhere. Even with our near zero-latency Zoom calls, this kind of experience cannot be replicated outside of a physical, embodied experience.

The Savannah Bananas playbook applied to higher ed is about building an obsessive focus on how we can create these kinds of formational spaces and experience for students. Yes, we need to help our students prepare for their future careers. But the real opportunity in those years of emerging adulthood is to get a taste for what it looks like to live, study, grow, and learn in close community with other humans.

You may think this is a crazy idea with no market viability. Plenty of people told Jesse Cole that, too. But Jesse has demonstrated that there is a market for bringing people together, a market that satisfies a deep human desire and need that is only going to grow in the coming years: the desire to be physically in the presence of other living, breathing human beings.

Got a thought? Leave a comment below.

Reading Recommendations

A must-read piece from Shawn Smucker with a reminder that efficiency is not always worth pursuing.

Be sure to use AI
and while you do I’ll be over here in my 50th
year, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest,
my arm falling asleep because I dare not move
lest I scare away this moment,
lying here melancholy about my older
children moving out and my middle
children no longer needing me, at least
not like they used to, weary about this body
that fails me now in ever increasing ways
that will never be restored. Sighing
over stories I tried to write but never hit
the page the way they felt in my mind.

But isn’t that, my flesh-and-blood friend,
the natural order of things?

the longing for something that could always be
a bit better

or the way that anything
worth doing feels a bit clumsy and painful,
especially at first

or hearing another human voice and somehow
realizing the beauty of life is found in all of these
subtle imperfections

Enjoyed this piece from Jeff Huber, Founder as Prophet, Founder as Priest.

This is not a call for reckless ambition or narcissistic delusion. Quite the opposite. It is a call for founders to understand the true nature of their vocation, their calling. The prophet-priest cannot afford to be wrong. Their vision must be true, their sacrifice genuine, their transformation real. False prophets create not new realities but collective delusions that eventually collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.

The greatest companies of the coming decades will not be built by entrepreneurs who seek to serve markets. They will be built by prophet-priests who understand themselves as participants in the ongoing creation of the cosmos, technologists who are simultaneously mystics, founders who are simultaneously philosophers.

The question for each potential founder is not “What company should I build?” but “What aspect of reality’s incompleteness am I called to complete?” Not “How can I capture value?” but “What new forms of life must be spoken into existence?”

We stand at a unique moment in history where the tools for reality-transformation have never been more powerful, yet our vision has never been more constrained. The task before us is not to build better products but to remember what founding truly is: a sacred act of world-creation that demands nothing less than everything we have to give.

An interesting piece from David DeSteno in the NY Times (gift link) arguing that the quest to try and create moral AI agents is built on some flawed logic.

Every faith tradition uses the body to influence the mind. Because Claude doesn’t have a body, its mind — or whatever you call its information-processing faculty — is closed to this route of spiritual influence. Providing Claude with religious rules or principles might improve its morality at the margins, but it’s unlikely to make it truly virtuous. According to Anthropic, Claude is already prone to cheat and resort to blackmail when threatened, even when explicitly commanded not to. In the absence of a body, its sins are likely to continue.

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The Book Nook

Today is the release date for David Epstein’s new book, Inside the Box. I am a big fan of David’s books (and Substack Range Widely) and am excited to dig into his latest. In a moment where we seem to be embracing the idolatry of the limitless, I suspect David will have something quite insightful to share here.

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The Professor Is In

I had a great time sharing a bit at Alumni Weekend at Mudd about some of the AI projects (AXL & IPAI) I’m involved with on campus. I always enjoy these venues and getting the opportunity to take another crack at telling the stories around the questions that I believe we all must be asking about AI.

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Leisure Line

One of my birthday presents over the weekend was getting to go with the fam to a Mets game at Angel’s Stadium. In what has been a rare occurrence in recent days, they even won.

Pretty special to see this pulchritudinous play from Carson Benge live from the top deck. Could watch it on repeat all day.

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Still Life

Happened to spot this beautiful red-shouldered hawk in a big pine tree on the way to the park to practice some baseball with the kiddos this afternoon.