SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

?? Episode Summary: “Bananas”
Theme: Taking bold risks in business and creativity.
Overview:
Tom Antion uses the story of “Banana Ball” — a wild, entertaining reimagining of baseball — to illustrate how breaking conventions and adding fun can lead to massive success.
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?? Main Points
• Traditional Business Advice:
Tom usually teaches low-risk entrepreneurship — entering established markets (like pizza shops) and serving them better to secure steady profits.
• Banana Ball Example:
o Created as an exciting alternative to slow, traditional baseball.
o Fans are part of the game — if they catch a foul ball, it counts as an out.
o Games include trick plays, dancing umpires, confetti, costumes, and fast-paced innings (one lasted only 57 seconds).
o Features skilled athletes who didn’t make the major leagues.
o Tickets cost about $40, and events sell out — showing the concept’s success.
• Entrepreneurial Lesson:
o Bold innovation—taking something familiar and making it wildly different—can create huge opportunities.
o Compare with Dana White’s bold move creating UFC, now a billion-dollar industry.
o Not every risky idea wins, but big innovation can bring big rewards.
o Entrepreneurs should ask: Am I the type to take bold chances for big results?
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?? Key Takeaway
Don’t always play it safe. Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come from transforming something ordinary into something extraordinary and fun — like turning baseball into Banana Ball.
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?? Promotion & Resources
• Automation Book: screwthecommute.com/automatefree
• Mentor Program: GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com
• Tom’s School: IMTCVA.org – licensed internet & digital marketing education that leads to practical, high-income skills without student debt.

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Episode 1051 – Bananas Final
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1051 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today I'm going to talk about fruit. Not exactly, although the title of this episode is bananas, and you'll see why in a minute. Hope you didn't miss episode 1050. That was the pros and cons of bankruptcy. It's a you know, I don't like to talk about negatives that much, but the thing is, that could be something that saves you, but it could be something that hurts you for a long time. If you're in that situation, you want to listen to that. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then episode number. Bankruptcy was 1050 and today is 1051. All right. Pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Make sure you get version 3.0. And check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org.

[00:01:23] All right. Bananas. What am I talking about? Fruit. Bananas. What? Well, normally, I tell you, and I teach my students. The easiest way to make money is to get a market or get into a market that already has a high demand and then do a good job creating for that market, and then you will get your fair share of the business. I actually call it my pizza shop theory. There's a big demand for pizza in the world, and if you do a great job making pizza and run your business good, you'll get your fair share of the business.

[00:02:02] That's just kind of the way it works. Starting up something totally unheard of Nerve is the most difficult and the most costly and the most risky of all ways to start businesses. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. Somebody that did this, and I don't know all the history of the person that started this or the partnership that started this, but I'm going to talk about something called Banana Ball. I recently heard about it and the fans just love this. It's an it's an alternative professional sport. And it's crazy what what the guy did is he looked at baseball and he looked at people in the stands being kind of bored. You probably do this with golf. That would be another thing. Banana golf. And they're they're going up to get beer and hot dogs and not really paying attention because baseball is so slow. So this guy said, you know what? That's terrible. What can I do to make a wild professional level baseball alternative. And he came up with banana ball. I don't know how he got the name. There's probably a lot of history on this you could look up, but I just noted I watched one trailer of or, you know, brief video on all the different things that they do in Banana Ball.

[00:03:33] And it's just it's just outrageous. The point of this whole episode is, yeah, if you're bold enough to take something that exists, but take it to a completely different, more fun and entertaining level, and this kind of goes back to what I've been preaching forever with the social media engagement. The fans are engaged in banana ball. All right, so here's some of my list 123456789 ten 1112. There's 15 or 20 things just in my list here. And they all have their own variations. So here's an engagement one If the batter hits a ball and it's a foul ball but a fan catches it, it's an out. All right. So the fans are all have baseball gloves and they're standing there. They're all over the place getting ready to, uh, to catch a foul ball. And then they have trick plays. And I think they keep track of the players that do trick plays, and then they get awards or something. But this one guy I saw, he's got a, uh, a a fly ball coming at him. He does a flat, a back flip and catches it during the back flip. All right. You see the guy's catching behind the back. You see him catching him between their legs. There's one guy that he bats and pitches on stilts. They do put a pinch runner in for him because he's not very fast.

[00:05:16] There's confetti all over the place. Uh, the The players have these impromptu dances where they all get in and it's terrible, but it's fun. They walk through the stands, they wear weird helmets like, you know, alien helmets and sombreros and all kinds of funny hats while they're playing. They had a race to do the fastest possible inning, and it was 57 seconds for the whole inning. Four pitches. The guy finished the inning. Even the umpire dances and and he does the Karate Kid like pose while he's calling balls and strikes is just crazy. The players are up in the crowd playing tubas, and they have a magician on the field. That's one of the players. They wear funny outfits. One of them, they lit the ball on fire before the guy pitched it. And then this other guy, he played all nine positions in one inning. So? So this is just crazy. But it's going it is going crazy. They're filling stadiums. The the the cost to get for a ticket is $40. I mean these people did it. And the other really good thing is they were able to hire a lot of really great athletes that just weren't good enough or just didn't have the luck to get into the major leagues. But these people are awesome. I mean, these are really killer athletes and baseball players on this.

[00:06:56] So. So the whole purpose of this was to introduce you to Banana Ball. You can go online and watch it. Or if it comes to your town it's a blast. But to get you thinking all right am I the type of person. Am I the type of entrepreneur that's willing to risk something really big for some really big returns? You know, another one is that Dana White that started the the WWE or whatever it's called, the not not the fake wrestling, the you know, the the super kind of kickboxing stuff and that's $1 billion industry now. And he couldn't even pay his bills in the beginning. So he took a bold move and got bold returns. I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that took bold moves that lost their shirt too. So so you say, well, do I am I the right type of person to do this? Can I put together investors? Is the idea crazy enough to really hit big? So that's what this episode is about is is not my standard of doing really low risk things that make great money, but potentially making super big money by taking a chance and putting something into the marketplace that's never been seen before. All right. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it for this episode.

[00:08:13] And make sure you check out my school IMTCVA.org. It's the only licensed, dedicated internet and digital marketing school in the country, probably the world, and it's licensed to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality, distance learning, and you can get a highly in-demand skill in as little as six months and not be paying off student loans for the rest of your life. In fact, I heard this 90 year old guy, one of his jokes. He was a stand up comedian. Hey, I just paid off my student loans. Well, yeah, there's a cost to our school, but it's like minuscule compared to any other kind of education that that just teaches you how to protest and you have no usable skills, and companies don't want to hire you. They do. They came out on the news in the past couple months saying, we don't want to hire any of these people. They suck. They don't have any skills. They're all entitled. Well, you go to my school, you'll have a usable skill. And you know what? You can go ahead and be entitled because you can write your own ticket when you have these internet and digital marketing skills. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.