Looking stupid, NASA on aliens, and getting divorced on Saturday Night Live

Good morning!

Last week we won tickets to see Jason Sudeikis (create of Ted Lasso) host SNL in NYC.

SNL is so overrated these days it might have come back around to being underrated but it was still fun to see Jason live & in person. To be honest watching him feels like I’m watching Ted, and this seems to be confirmed by the show’s cocreator in a fantastic piece about Jason @ GQ.

One highlight from the pice from Jason, on what it was like doing SNL while going through a divorce:

“You're going through something emotionally and personally, or even professionally if that's affecting you personally, and then you're dressed up like George Bush and you're live on television for eight minutes. You feel like a crazy person. You feel absolutely crazy. You're looking at yourself in the mirror and you're just like, ‘Who am I? What is this? Holy hell.”

One of the more earnest things I’ve seen printed in GQ. Not surprising given it’s coming coming from the guy who created Ted Lasso.

I wasn’t sure how much of the show was from Jason. Was he merely the actor? No. The GQ piece convinced me that he’s the whole thing.

Have a great week.

Trevor

PS: I’m at Money2020 this week, if you’re around ping me!

Be willing to look stupid (article)

One of the fastest way to learn something is to ask what seem like really dumb questions. Or to do things that seem very wrong.

First off: if someone else knows the answer, their human instinct will be to correct you, so you’ll get the answer back very quickly!

But secondly, and more common, is that usually no one actually knows the answer. People generally do no know how things work but because of the fear of “looking stupid” never ask the questions in order to find out.

Using this strategy @ work you’ll regularly find out, after asking a “dumb question”, that most or all the people in the room didn’t know the answer either.

NASA chief Bill Nelson talks UFOs and ET life (twitter video)

“They don’t know what it is. And we don’t know what it is. We hope it’s not an adversary here on earth that has that kind of technology.”

Basically the head of NASA saying about the sightings “we don’t know WTF it is”.

The real thinker behind Chinese ideology (article)

“Most analysis has focused on one man: Xi and his seemingly endless personal obsession with political control. The overlooked answer, however, is that this is indeed the culmination of decades of thinking and planning by a very powerful man—but that man is not Xi Jinping.”

Nearly 400 Americans still stranded in Afghanistan (article)

I couldn’t have guessed that number to save my life before seeing the article.

New Patrick McKenzie financial services newsletter

His first post is about Community Banking and Fintech, which also led me to read this book about a guy starting a bank in the state of Georgia in 2007.

This is slightly embarrassing to admit but while I knew creating new banks became basically illegal after the Great Recessions, I didn’t realize how many new banks were regularly created every single year before. I assumed a handful or so at most but nope: in 2006 179 new American chartered banks were created. Incredible.

Compare that to, say, 2012 - 2016: a combined 3 new banks created, total.

And Finally…

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See you next week!

Trevor