The Mothership

Introduction

I would like to do a lot more with this, but currently time is scarce.
However, I want to fulfill Jason’s request, since I would love to be worthy of the title of record keeper.

Since its first episode on August 22, 2010, The Incomparable has accumulated 1052 hours of content (roughly 44 days) across 767 episodes.

The latest episode in the current dataset:

mothership_wide |>
  head(1) |>
  select(number, date, title, host, guest) |>
  mutate(
    date = as.Date(date),
    title = glue::glue("<a href=\"https://www.theincomparable.com/theincomparable/{number}\">{title}</a>"),
    guest = and::and(stringr::str_split(guest, ";", simplify = TRUE))
  ) |>
  knitr::kable(
    col.names = c("#", "Date", "Title", "Host", "Guests"),
    escape = FALSE
  ) |>
  kableExtra::kable_styling()

#	Date	Title	Host	Guests
742	2024-11-15	Hi, Anxiety	Lex Friedman	Brian Hamilton, David J. Loehr, and Kelly Guimont

Panelists

2024 Panelists

There were 45 episodes published in 2024. Here’s a breakdown by host and guest counts.

mothership_long |>
  # Filter out special episodes containing letters
  filter(!str_detect(number, "[a-z]$"), year == current_year) |>
  count(person, role) |>
  pivot_wider(names_from = role, values_from = n, values_fill = 0) |>
  mutate(
    person = factor(person),
    total = guest + host,
    total_perc = scales::label_percent(.accuracy = .1)(total / nrow(mothership_wide)),
    rank = rank(-total, ties.method = "min")
  ) |>
  arrange(desc(total)) |>
  select(rank, person, host, guest, total, total_perc) |>
  reactable(
    columns = list(
      rank = colDef(name = "Rank", sortable = TRUE),
      person = colDef(name = "Person", filterable = TRUE, sortable = TRUE),
      host = colDef(name = "Host", sortable = TRUE),
      guest = colDef(name = "Guest", sortable = TRUE),
      total = colDef(name = "Total", sortable = TRUE),
      total_perc = colDef(name = "Total (%)", sortable = TRUE)
    )
  )

Looking at it as a bar chart is not really helping I guess but sure why not.

panelist_breakdown <- mothership_long |>
  filter(year == current_year) |>
  group_by(person, role) |>
  tally() |>
  spread(role, n) |>
  replace_na(list(guest = 0, host = 0)) |>
  mutate(total = guest + host)

panelist_breakdown_long <- panelist_breakdown |>
  gather(role, n, guest, host) 


ggplot(data = panelist_breakdown_long, aes(x = reorder(person, total), y = n, fill = role)) +
  geom_col(color = "black", alpha = .6) +
  coord_flip() +
  scale_y_continuous(breaks = seq(0, 100, 5), minor_breaks = seq(0, 100, 1)) +
  scale_fill_brewer(palette = "Dark2", label = c("Guest", "Host")) +
  labs(
    title = glue::glue("The Incomparable — {current_year}"),
    subtitle = "Panelists by # of Appearances",
    x = "Panelist", y = "# of Appearances", fill = "Role"
  )

All Time Stats

Here are some rankings of panelists (including hosts) across different metrics / subsets.
Special bonus episodes are not included (507b, 506b, 337b, 173z).

By Number of Appearances

Nothing special, just “appears in episode” counts.

mothership_long |>
  # Filter out special episodes containing letters
  filter(!str_detect(number, "[a-z]$")) |>
  count(person, role) |>
  pivot_wider(names_from = role, values_from = n, values_fill = 0) |>
  mutate(
    person = factor(person),
    total = guest + host,
    total_perc = scales::label_percent(.accuracy = .1)(total / nrow(mothership_wide)),
    rank = rank(-total, ties.method = "min")
  ) |>
  arrange(desc(total)) |>
  select(rank, person, host, guest, total, total_perc) |>
  reactable(
    columns = list(
      rank = colDef(name = "Rank", sortable = TRUE),
      person = colDef(name = "Person", filterable = TRUE, sortable = TRUE),
      host = colDef(name = "Host", sortable = TRUE),
      guest = colDef(name = "Guest", sortable = TRUE),
      total = colDef(name = "Total", sortable = TRUE),
      total_perc = colDef(name = "Total (%)", sortable = TRUE)
    )
  )