What’s going on with The Ones Who Knock podcast

For several years, Joanna Robinson and I hosted a podcast about Breaking Bad called “The Ones Who Knock.” This was one of our first popular recap podcasts together and led to many memorable moments like future-Star Wars director Rian Johnson doing a commentary with us on “Ozymandias“, one of the best episodes of TV ever produced.

Awhile after the Breaking Bad series finale, we converted this podcast into a Better Call Saul recap podcast. However, listenership fell off a cliff and pretty much never recovered.

Simultaneously, we’ve been putting a lot of time and energy into Gen Pop, a new podcast that is funded by listeners through Patreon and which features interesting conversations with awesome people about pop culture.

We’ve been getting a lot of requests to re-start The Ones Who Knock but ultimately the numbers are not there to justify us to bring it back as a full-fledged show. Instead, we are going to be doing a sort of “The Ones Who Knock” lite by posting podcast recaps every two weeks as bonus audio episodes on the Gen Pop Patreon feed. We’ll also likely do a full season recap that’s released publicly on the Gen Pop feed. So, to recap:

  • All Patrons at the rate of $2/month will have access to the bonus episodes. 
  • All subscribers to the Gen Pop podcast [iTunes link] will have access to the season recap we will do after season 3 has aired.

I know this is not what a lot of “The Ones Who Knock” fans wanted, but it lets us put time and resources into a show that is a longer term investment for us, while making sure our hardcore fans are served. Thanks for your understanding and listenership.

Stephen Tobolowsky’s New York Times interview

John Williams, interviewing Stephen Tobolowsky, for The New York Times, about his new book, My Adventures with God:

When did you first get the idea to write this book?

The real genesis of the book, so to speak, was probably 2008. I had a terrible accident, and I broke my neck in five places riding a horse on the side of an active volcano in Iceland. What could possibly have gone wrong? So I got back to America, and the doctor told me I had a fatal injury. Which is disturbing on many levels, including a terrible misuse of the word fatal. There’s not a lot you can do with a broken neck. So I’m at home waiting to recover, and I know it’s going to be a few months. And I thought: What if what the doctor told me was true? What if I had died on that mountain in Iceland? What would I have wanted my sons to know about their father?

Those stories became the podcast “The Tobolowsky Files,” and some of those found their way onto national radio. And then Simon & Schuster said, “Can we do a book of some of these stories?” That became “The Dangerous Animals Club.” After that, my editor, Ben Loehnen, called me up and said: “Several of the stories have a kind of spiritual resonance that we’re getting feedback on from people. Is it possible you could write another book of stories that are held together by the idea of spirit or belief or faith or something?” And I said, “Sure, not a problem.” […]

Persuade someone to read it in less than 50 words.

These are true stories from my life. Most are funny. Some are not. They’re often unbelievable, occasionally creepy. Together they tell a bigger story of how we are shaped by the invisible. Something I call divine. Something I hope becomes wisdom.

I have a copy of My Adventures with God [Amazon link] and from what I’ve read so far, it exemplifies the best qualities of Stephen’s storytelling. It is moving, funny, and provocative. I’m so pleased to have been a tiny part of Stephen’s journey towards bringing his stories into the world.

Watch Hans Zimmer’s spectacular Coachella performance

Hans Zimmer performed a set at Coachella that blew the roof of the place yesterday(it’s already on Reddit’s front page this morning). Those of us who weren’t there live could watch on Coachella’s live stream.

Unfortunately, Coachella only uploaded a small portion of the 60+ minute performance (seen above). That being said, here’s a list of the full set:

  • Inception – Half Remembered Dream
  • Inception – The Dream is Collapsing
  • Inception – Mombasa
  • Pirates of the Caribbean – One Day
  • Pirates of the Caribbean – Up Is Down
  • Pirates of the Caribbean – He’s a Pirate
  • The Lion King – Circle of Life
  • The Lion King – Under the Stars
  • The Lion King – This Land
  • Gladiator – The Wheat
  • Gladiator – The Battle
  • Gladiator – Elysium
  • Gladiator – Now We Are Free
  • Freedom
  • The Dark Knight – Why So Serious
  • The Dark Knight – Fear Will Find You
  • Aurora
  • Inception – Time

If you want to see Hans Zimmer live, there’s still a chance! Check out the tour dates on his website.

Recommendation for the new Mac Pro: Make it as versatile as possible

Marco Arment, writing for his blog, on how Apple should design the new Mac Pro:

The requirements are all over the map, but most pro users seem to agree on the core principles of an ideal Mac Pro, none of which include size or minimalism:

  • More internal capacity is better.
  • Each component should have a reasonably priced base option, but offer the ability to configure up to the best technology on the market.
  • It needs to accommodate a wide variety of needs, some of which Apple won’t offer, and some of which may require future upgrades.

Or, to distill the requirements down to a single word:

  • Versatility

I agree with all of Arment’s recommendations. The pro market needs versatility to accommodate a huge variety of use cases.

I’m skeptical that Apple, which seems to prize thinness above all other design principles these days, will follow this path. That being said, their recent mea culpa seems to indicate they are open to a hard pivot on a product for this product.

How the model minority myth is deployed

Andrew Sullivan had a piece for New York magazine yesterday that set my Twitter timeline on fire. In discussing United’s recent dragging of an innocent Asian man off a flight, Sullivan wrote this:

Do you know the real reason Dr. Dao was so brutally tackled and thrown off that United flight? It was all about white supremacy. I mean, what isn’t these days? That idea is from the New Republic. Yes, the cops “seemed” to be African-American, as the author concedes, so the white-versus-minority paradigm is a little off. Yes, this has happened before to many people with no discernible racial or gender pattern. Yes, there is an obvious alternative explanation: The seats from which passengers were forcibly removed were randomly assigned. New York published a similar piece, which argued that the incident was just another example of Trump’s border-and-immigration-enforcement policies toward suspected illegal immigrants of color. That no federal cops were involved and there is no actual evidence at all of police harassment of Asian-Americans is irrelevant — it’s all racism, all the time, everywhere in everything.

It’s easy to mock this reductionism, I know, but it reflects something a little deeper. Asian-Americans, like Jews, are indeed a problem for the “social-justice” brigade. I mean, how on earth have both ethnic groups done so well in such a profoundly racist society? How have bigoted white people allowed these minorities to do so well — even to the point of earning more, on average, than whites? Asian-Americans, for example, have been subject to some of the most brutal oppression, racial hatred, and open discrimination over the years. In the late 19th century, as most worked in hard labor, they were subject to lynchings and violence across the American West and laws that prohibited their employment. They were banned from immigrating to the U.S. in 1924. Japanese-American citizens were forced into internment camps during the Second World War, and subjected to hideous, racist propaganda after Pearl Harbor. Yet, today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America. What gives? It couldn’t possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn’t be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?

Sullivan has often made controversial statements about race, like when he repudiated Black Lives Matter, but now he’s bringing the status of Asians into this argument and my brothers and sisters just were not having it.

In response, journalist Jeff Guo issued the following tweetstorm:

It’s important to recognize when and how the myth of the model minority is deployed. It’s almost always used to disparage one minority group, and occasionally to turn minority groups against each other. We should be vigilant against it.

A toxic worker’s damage can outweigh the benefits of a superstar employee

Nicole Torres, writing for HBR in 2015, about a paper by Dylan Minor and Michael Housman:

They compared the cost of a toxic worker with the value of a superstar, which they define as a worker who is so productive that a firm would have to hire additional people or pay current employees more just to achieve the same output. They calculated that avoiding a toxic employee can save a company more than twice as much as bringing on a star performer – specifically, avoiding a toxic worker was worth about $12,500 in turnover costs, but even the top 1% of superstar employees only added about $5,300 to the bottom line.

The real difference could be even bigger, if you factor in other potential costs, such as litigation fees, regulatory fines, lower employee morale, and upset customers. One 2012 CareerBuilder survey found that 41% of the nearly 2,700 employers surveyed estimated that a bad hire could cost $25,000, while a quarter believed it was much higher—$50,000 or more.

As we’ve seen over and over again in recent days, companies often value the skills of high performers at the expense of all other beneficial characteristics. This comes to cost them dearly when their superstar employees turn out to be toxic workers.

Ian Abramson’s insane stand-up set on ‘Conan’

I hadn’t really heard of comedian Ian Abramson before, but he’s definitely on my radar now. On a recent episode of Conan, Abramson dramatically upped the stakes of his set by giving an audience member the trigger to a dog shock collar that he wore around his neck. Good jokes got a pass; bad jokes resulted in a body-jolting shock.

The result is a set of jokes that needed to be funny to avoid bodily harm. I felt more invested than I ever have in a comedian’s set being hilarious. For the most part, Abramson succeeded. Bravo for taking a chance and creating a really memorable late-night moment in the process.

(via Vulture)

Visualizing the ‘Fast and Furious’ movies

Bloomberg has an incredible data visualization of every Fast and Furious movie (excluding the eighth):

The Fast & Furious blockbuster franchise unfolds over nearly 14 hours so far—and that’s before an eighth movie in the $4 billion series, The Fate of the Furious, arrives in theaters on Friday. The newest film will speak in a lucrative language that audiences have learned to crave: gear shifts, engine revs, car chases, angry banter about cars, and sips of Corona. Exactly how fast and how furious is the Fast & Furious cinematic universe? The family at Bloomberg decided to meticulously analyze all seven movies to track their evolution. We counted just about everything that could be turned into a meaningful metric, even screen time for men’s biceps.

Here are some of the biggest findings in my opinion:
  • The movies have grossed over $4 billion but it’s really Fast Five ($626MM), Fast and Furious 6 ($789MM), and Furious 7 ($1.5B) that sent the series’ box office receipts into the stratosphere.
  • As time has gone on, the movies have focused on cars and racing less and less, with less than one minute occupied with racing in Furious 7, compared to a luxurious 15:10 of racing screentime in Tokyo Drift. This makes sense, as the movies have shifted towards more of a heist model, compared with the undercover police intrigue from the first three films.
  • In contrast, the number of action scenes have significantly increased over time. Number of car action scenes, hand-to-hand-combat scenes, and explosions have all gone up dramatically from Furious movies 3-7.
  • Remarkably, despite how schlocky and unrealistic the series has gotten, reviews of the films have trended upwards over time, with Furious 7 receiving the highest RottenTomatoes score of all of them, 79%.

Check out the full rundown at Bloomberg’s site.