Seth Godin: prediction

Transcript context

…If you were called in as a consultant to professional baseball, what would you tell them to do to keep the game alive? [laughs] I am so glad I never was a consultant. What is baseball? In most of the world, no one wants to watch one minute of baseball. Why do we want to watch baseball? Why do the songs and the Cracker Jack and the sounds matter to some people and not to others? The answer is that professional sports in any country that are beloved, are beloved because they remind us of our parents. They remind us of a different time in our lives. They are comfortable but also challenging. They let us exchange status roles in a safe way without extraordinary division. Baseball was that for a very long time, but then things changed. One of the things that changed is that football was built for television and baseball is not. By leaning into television, which completely terraformed American society for 40 years, football advanced in a lot of ways. Baseball is in a jam because, on one hand, like Coke and New Coke, you need to remind people of the old days. On the other hand, people have too many choices now. There’s a baseball team called the Bananas. It’s like the Harlem Globetrotters for baseball, and they sell out every single game. People wait in line to get in, and they create this extraordinary family experience built on top of baseball. It reminds us of baseball, but it isn’t baseball. I’m not sure all of Major League Baseball can do that, but I think the useful lesson is not how do we fix baseball? It’s how do we think about which story do we want to tell next? How do you think about the future of the NBA?…

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