Canadian Jon Dore was the first comedian ever to perform stand-up on Conan’s new show on TBS last night. Part of me feels as if he could land his own series from this set alone. Pretty great.

Pretty great insight from Bill Carter’s upcoming book, The War For Late Night, an excerpt of which was published in Vanity Fair, into how the whole Leno-Conan-Tonight Show controversy played out behind the scenes:

Jay, already in his denims, greeted them in the private digs in his new studio. To close observers, Leno remained as he had always been: work-obsessed, single-minded, outwardly affable but emotionally opaque, driven by the unrelenting daily routine of joke creation, collection, and delivery. He saw the nightly monologue as his self-definition, the unifying principle of his life.

Debbie Vickers, Jay’s producer, drifted in, saying hello a bit tensely to Gaspin and Marks. Gaspin suspected she might know what was coming.

Gaspin initiated a bit of small talk about that night’s show; the conversation was forced, and it was pretty obvious that it was forced. Finally, Rebecca Marks bit the bullet, saying simply, “We have an issue.”

“We have a problem,” Gaspin seconded, stepping up to the task. “Our affiliates are incredibly unhappy with 10 o’clock. They want us to make a change. If we don’t, they’re threatening to pre-empt. We’ve got a real problem here.” Gaspin spoke directly to Leno, and he could read the impact of his words on Jay’s face.

“What do you want to do?” the host asked.

Gaspin, though feeling terrible, didn’t hold back. “We’re going to pull the show,” he said.

Very quietly Leno said, “O.K.”

Debbie Vickers grasped the bottom line: We’ve just been fired.

The room fell silent. At last, Jay spoke up again. “What do you want to do?” he said. “How do you want to handle it?”

“I want you to go back to 11:30,” Gaspin said.

Jay’s relief, Gaspin noticed, was instantaneous. His face lifted and brightened. “Yeah, let’s do it!” he said, the pitch of his voice almost as high as his performance level.

Vickers, in her quiet but forceful way, got herself in between Gaspin’s and Jay’s enthusiasm. She suggested that they hear more.

“It’s not that simple,” Gaspin told Jay. “I only want you to do a half-hour.”

Now Vickers jumped all the way in, clearly thrown by the proposal. What did he mean, a half-hour? What kind of show is it?

Gaspin emphasized that Jay would get to do his long monologue every night—just as always. That was the prime selling point, as Gaspin saw it.

Starting to put it together, Jay brought up the other obvious lingering issue. “What happens with Conan?” he said.

“He goes at 12,” Gaspin said. “Everything just moves back.”

“So I wouldn’t get The Tonight Show?” Jay asked.

“No, Conan would keep Tonight,” Gaspin said. Jay stared at him during an extended silence. “Look, we have a tough situation here,” Gaspin finally said. “NBC is in trouble. If you leave or Conan leaves, it gets worse. We really want both of you. We think both of you are big talents.”

Leno told Gaspin he didn’t want Conan to be hurt, but he was still trying to get his head around what this half-hour-11:35-not-The-Tonight-Show really meant.

“I don’t need an answer tonight,” Gaspin said. “Think about it, and let’s talk more tomorrow.”

Vickers had one final question, something she had to know before she committed even to thinking about switching to a half-hour format: What would happen if they said no? “Would you release us from our contracts?” she asked.

“No,” Gaspin said. “We’re not going to release you.”

The next evening, back in Jay’s post-show enclave, Gaspin presented his rationale again to a suddenly waffling Jay, talking it through, this time adding a little high emotion. Speaking of how difficult it had been to find a solution that would not leave either Jay or Conan behind, Gaspin said, “I’m not trying to make Sophie’s choice. I’m really trying to be fair to both of you.”

Jay and Debbie pressed him on the Conan issue: did Gaspin really think Conan was going to take this?

Gaspin said NBC was about 75 percent sure he would.

“What happens to the staff?” Jay asked. “Do I stay on this lot?”

“Nothing has to change,” Gaspin said.

“Nobody loses a paycheck?” Jay asked. Gaspin guaranteed that would not happen.

“O.K.,” Jay said. “I’m in.”

They stood up and shook hands on it.

Gaspin wasted no time. Feeling a surge of confidence, he called Zucker, who had just arrived in L.A. for a get-acquainted-with-Hollywood tour with a team from NBC Universal’s prospective new owners, Comcast. (The current owner, G.E., was selling a controlling interest.) Gaspin told Zucker he thought this was really going to work.

Jeff Zucker was thrilled.

The excerpt published in Vanity Fair really changes the way I look at Leno and his involvement in the controversy, while also making me feel even worse for Conan.

Leno doesn’t appear to have been the bad guy. He had an option presented to him that allowed him to keep his job and to continue supporting the livelihood of his employees, and he took it. The initial proposal wasn’t ideal, but it was better than getting outright fired and telling his staff that they were all out of work.

Conan, on the other hand, didn’t view any of this as “just business.” Landing The Tonight Show appears to have been an extremely personal goal for him. He felt a sincere responsibility to the franchise and its legacy to continue on with tradition. And he certainly didn’t understand how, after having led The Tonight Show for 17 years, Leno could at all be painted as a victim in any of this. He had The Tonight Show, he agreed to leave, he was given the lead-in to The Tonight Show at the last minute, and now he was being given the opportunity to return to The Tonight Show’s time slot. In Conan’s eyes, Leno failed at 10pm because he was producing a bad show, while Conan, on the other hand, was floundering at 11:35pm not because he was producing a bad show, but because he was getting an awful lead-in from Leno. No one could accurately compare his numbers to Leno’s iteration of The Tonight Show because the quality of the lead-ins had changed so dramatically.

And when you consider all of that, Conan’s right, but it doesn’t necessarily make Leno wrong.

Read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

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The music video for N.E.R.D.’s Daft Punk-produced Hypnotize U, directed by Paul Hunter:

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This is pretty great. I didn’t understand why everyone loved the original Nike ad that this is responding to, but I’m happy that someone was able to effectively communicate why it was that people like me didn’t love it.

Here’s Cleveland’s response to the “LeBron Rise” spot for Nike:

And here’s the original advertisement:

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The New York Times has a great profile piece on Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, the new owner of the New Jersey Nets, an NBA team that he purchased a controlling stake in and plans to move to Brooklyn in 2012 after a new arena is completed construction.

What really stood out for me was how fickle Prokhorov’s ascension to billionaire status was. If he hadn’t been wrongfully arrested in France, it’s entirely possible that the Nets would never have become the Nyets:

For many years Prokhorov spent the Russian Orthodox Christmas skiing at Courchevel, booking rooms in the luxury hotels for guests, among them, in 2007, a number of young Russian women whom the French authorities suspected of being prostitutes. Prokhorov says the seven young women were his guests.

Prokhorov was arrested at the Hotel Byblos and was detained in a cell in Lyon for 88 hours. “I spent five or six hours a day shadowboxing and standing on my hands,” he said. “And I did a lot of stretching. I said to the police, ‘I’m not in a hurry.’ It sounds strange, but to a certain extent it was fun. I was reminded of my two years in the Soviet Army.”

The incident did not amuse his partner, Potanin. They had been drifting apart on questions of business strategy for some time, and the scandal brought their differences to a head. They agreed to dissolve their partnership and began negotiating a division of their common assets. In April 2008, Prokhorov sold his 25 percent stake in Norilsk Nickel not to Potanin but to another billionaire, Oleg Deripaska. In exchange for $13 billion of Norilsk Nickel stock, he received 14 percent of the Rusal, the world’s largest aluminum producer, and $4.5 billion in cash, with $2.7 billion more to follow. It turned out to be the perfect time to cash out. By the fall of 2008, markets all over the world were cratering, and Prokhorov, flush with cash, pounced on depressed real estate, media properties and half of an investment bank.

It’s tough to argue that everything in life happens for a reason. But every once in a while, the cosmos do tend to give you some pretty amazing assists. So the next time you get arrested for operating a traveling brothel, maybe don’t look so glum. It could be the best thing that ever happened to you.

That said, it’s not as if Prokhorov’s rise was all a fluke. The man and his partner were calculating businessmen who saw opportunity in the collapse of the Soviet Union and benefited greatly from first mover advantage:

It was as a banker during the tumultuous privatizations of Soviet state industries in the 1990s that Prokhorov began building his fortune. And it was as a metals-and-mining magnate in one of the most hellish places on earth that he made his name a decade later as one of Russia’s richest men.

From the Moscow Finance Institute, Prokhorov went to work at the International Bank for Economic Cooperation, or IBEC, based in Moscow and set up to handle the foreign trade accounts of 10 Communist states. He was in charge of international finance at the bank when, in March 1991, his friend Khloponin introduced him to Vladimir Potanin, a former bureaucrat from the Ministry of Foreign Trade who the year before started a private foreign trade company called Interros with about $10,000 raised from Soviet trade organizations eager to make deals. Potanin was four years older than Prokhorov. He had lived abroad, was fluent in English and French and had political connections that would prove invaluable.

As the Soviet Union unraveled in the summer of 1991, state-owned enterprises exporting goods to the West lacked a banking system for credit and currency exchange. With Prokhorov as an equal partner, Potanin created MFK bank in 1992, one of the first private banks in post-Soviet Russia. As the journalist David Hoffman recounts in his book, “The Oligarchs,” a number of Eastern-bloc countries were unable to repay loans, and IBEC was in trouble. Letters went out from IBEC’s management to clients in Russia suggesting that they shift their deposits to the safe harbor of MFK. “Potanin appears to have effectively taken the deposits and assets away from the troubled state bank, while leaving behind the debts,” Hoffman wrote. “Potanin inherited a $300 million windfall over a six-month period.”

A year later Potanin and Prokhorov opened the United Export Import Bank, or Uneximbank, with Potanin as the president and the public face, and Prokhorov as the chairman of the management board. With inflation running high, it wasn’t hard to make money converting rubles to dollars and dollars back to rubles. The bank amassed more than $2 billion in assets by the end of 1994. In 1995 Potanin devised the notorious scheme known as “loans for shares” that made him and his partner billionaires. Boris Yeltsin’s government was desperate for cash. There was no money for salaries, pensions, health care, military expenditures. Inflation was running at more than 200 percent, elections were looming and the resurgent Communist Party was poised to retake the country. The whole experiment with free markets and democracy seemed to be hanging in the balance. It was Potanin’s idea that Russia’s major banks make loans to the government (which no one expected it to be able to repay), to be secured with shares in the country’s state-run giant oil, metal and telephone companies. And so, the legacy assets of the defunct Soviet state were auctioned off for a fraction of their intrinsic value and transferred to a handful of banks controlled by men who came to be known as “the oligarchs.”

Uneximbank ran the auction for a 38 percent stake of Norilsk Nickel, the giant mining-and-metallurgical complex in northern Siberia that at the time was booking a profit of around $400 million a year and had $2 billion of debt. The mining company was already a client of the bank. On a technicality Uneximbank rejected a bid for twice as much from a rival bank and awarded the shares to one of its own subsidiaries with an offer barely above the preset reserve of $170 million. The bank’s subsidiaries also “won” loans-for-shares auctions for a controlling stake in Russia’s fifth-largest oil company, Sidanko, shipping companies and other concerns. After two years of nominal control, Uneximbank in August 1997 took the shares it had been holding as collateral for the unrepaid loans and sold them for $270 million to a subsidiary, Swift, thus gaining outright ownership of Russia’s largest producer of nonferrous metals.

“It was bad,” Potanin acknowledged to The New York Times three years later. “The prices were cheap. . . . But it did solve the problem of having more efficient owners.” Potanin was the public face of the scheme, with the political connections to make it happen, and he always appears on the now-canonical list of the era’s oligarchs, whereas Prokhorov, who worked behind the scenes and professed little interest in politics but benefited just as much, does not. I asked Prokhorov last month how, with 15 years of hindsight, he viewed the program that a 1999 article in this magazine said was “almost universally [regarded] as an act of colossal criminality.”

“Was it fair or not fair?” he asked. “Should you keep the profits or not? I can’t really be neutral, of course, but when we bought Norilsk Nickel, and also Sidanko, we met with more than 20 investors public and private. No one wanted to take the risk. People hadn’t received their salaries for a half a year. We bid $170 million for the right to manage Norilsk and then we invested $300 million in the company and another $100 million to buy the shares outright.”

Uneximbank’s stake in Norilsk Nickel was Prokhorov and Potanin’s most valuable asset, and the one they were most determined to protect, when, in August 1998, the entire Russian financial system collapsed. It was the beginning of the end of Prokhorov’s banking career. The Russian government decided to default on its sovereign debt, devalue the ruble and suspend payments to foreign creditors by commercial banks. Prokhorov had been looking forward to a week on the Côte d’Azur when he got the news. He went for a 12-mile run hoping to clear his head.

“I spent the whole night trying to create some model of how to save Uneximbank, and the next day I called in all my colleagues and I said, ‘There is no way.’ Thirty percent of our balance sheet was Russian Federation bonds. Can you imagine what would happen to American banks if the U.S. government stopped paying its treasury obligations? It was a great surprise to me that one of the strongest banks in Russia could crash in one day. In the first month nobody believed that this could happen to Uneximbank. A month later our Russian and Western partners were saying, ‘Give us our money back!’ For the next three months nobody wanted to speak to us. We set up a restructuring committee and moved all of our business to a bridge bank.”

That in itself was controversial — what critics call “asset stripping,” in which the valuable parts of a company are transferred to a new institution (in this case, Rosbank) and sheltered from creditors. And yet in the long run the shell game enabled Uneximbank to fulfill some of its obligations. Two years later, Uneximbank merged with Rosbank and a settlement was reached that gave the majority of the creditors about 34 cents on the dollar.

By now Prokhorov was looking for a new line of work. His and Potanin’s giant stake in Norilsk Nickel still rankled many Russians. A Moscow prosecutor went so far as to file suit to overturn the privatization of the mining combine in 2000. Where Yeltsin had rushed to put the assets of the state in private hands, Vladimir Putin reasserted the primacy of the Kremlin, making it plain the oligarchs would keep their holdings only if they stayed out of politics and aligned their businesses with the interests of the government. One way for Prokhorov to secure his franchise was to enhance the fortunes of the company where the bulk of his wealth was concentrated; in 2001, he took over the day-to-day management of Norilsk Nickel as its new general director.

It’s hard to know whether what Prokhorov accomplished in his six years running Norilsk Nickel illustrates the sort of strategy he believes will help propel the Nets to the top of the league, or the not-so-soft authoritarianism that will end in Plan E.

“When he took over Norilsk Nickel, the hemorrhaging had stopped and the company was back on its feet,” recalled Christophe Charlier, who worked under Prokhorov as head of mergers and acquisitions at the company from 2002 to 2004 and is now deputy C.E.O. of Prokhorov’s investment firm, Onexim Group, and the chairman of the Nets. “But there was no volume on the stock, no liquidity, analysts didn’t cover the company. There were no independent members on the board. We couldn’t even answer the question how much nickel we had.”

Prokhorov worked out of the Moscow headquarters but made many trips to the city of Norilsk, and the factories and mines of the combine built under Stalin with gulag labor. Norilsk is a world unto itself. For decades a secret city that did not appear on Soviet maps, it is an island in the wilderness of the Taimyr Peninsula, 175 miles above the Arctic Circle, with no link to the outside world, no power lines, no railroads, no highways. Darkness and 20-below-zero temperatures grip the land for months during the winter. The ships that bring in food and trucks and clothes, and carry out thousands of tons of nickel and palladium and other ores, required icebreakers to clear lanes in the pack ice of the Kara Sea and the frozen Yenisey River. Norilsk is among the most polluted places on earth.

“When you are the C.E.O. of Norilsk Nickel, you are president of a country,” Prokhorov told me. Assuming the top post, he made a point of working in the mines a couple of weeks, hoping, he said, to show his mettle and establish solidarity with the miners. He never sat down when talking about making Norilsk more efficient. “It was important to create trust,” he said. “My slogan was, We need to be the global leader. We need to streamline the cost of production and increase the market cap. We need to simplify the workers’ jobs. Better salaries. Better clothes. Better equipment. Cleaner factories. Better quality of job experience.”

And fewer workers. With shareholders now as much a consideration as employees, he spun off noncore businesses, like the harlequin’s quilt of subsidiaries, which did everything from making furniture to bottling soft drinks to operating the Norilsk phone system. A labor force that numbered 129,000 in 1996 was more than halved by 2004. Prokhorov improved cafeterias, restaurants and lavatories, and brought in artists, theater companies and lecturers — measures that enriched the culture but also soft-soaped the lost jobs and the cost-cutting. The company invested millions in pollution controls, but Norilsk remained among the most toxic places on earth, with elevated rates of lung cancer and an environment devastated for miles around by sulfur dioxide. Nickel dust from smelters fell so thickly that the soil around the city could be mined; acid rain has killed more than 1.2 million acres of trees. The chairman of the federation of trade unions in Norilsk once called Prokhorov a prime example of “ice-cold managers who act without restraint.” Some things Prokhorov did suggest a creepy usurpation of dissent — a replacement of the control of the old Soviet state with the control of a for-profit corporation.

“We established a network of psychologists to take up some of the counseling that was previously done by trade unions,” he said. “I secretly supported an opposition press, the Norilchanin paper, which had always been very tough on the company. I said to the editor, ‘I need a bit of criticism all the time.’ The only goal was criticism. The editor pushed my staff to another level so much that from time to time my security people, who didn’t know about the arrangement, tried to block the distribution of the paper.”

Prokhorov was resolved to make the revenues of Norilsk Nickel less vulnerable to fluctuations in the price of nickel and of palladium, one of the world’s most valuable metals. He used the company’s cash flow to buy a gold-mining firm, Polyus and then methodically added gold reserves from other parts of Russia. He acquired a 20 percent stake in a South African gold mine, which he later flipped for a profit that covered the cost of cobbling Polyus together. Then in 2006 he spun Polyus off to Norilsk Nickel shareholders, who essentially got what is now a $10 billion company free. During his tenure Norilsk Nickel stock went from less than $7 a share in 2001 to $189 in the first quarter of 2007. The market cap of the company, around $2.5 billion when he started, was more than $60 billion when he headed off for a ski holiday at the French resort in Courchevel in January 2007.

If you can take your stock price from $7 to $189 in six years, then your success can’t simply be chalked up to luck. Especially if part of that success resulted from your insistence on working on the front line with your employees so you better understood their working conditions. Prokhorov’s wealth is absolutely a product of his hard work, intelligence, and skill. But whether you look at his ability to take advantage of the Soviet government’s need for cash in the early 90s or his serendipitous split with his partner after his arrest in France, there’s no arguing that some cosmic assists played a small part in his rise, as well. And Brooklyn basketball fans will be the ones who reap the rewards.

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Best thing ever? Almost. The first and second acts are incredible at times, but the third act falls a bit flat for me.

Pretty sure this has a chance to be the best album of the year, though.

And the film definitely makes you wonder if Kanye can/will/wants to try his hand at directing a feature. I know I’d be there opening night if he did.

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I’m a regular reader of Signal vs. Noise, a “weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more.” It’s a great blog, and although I don’t fully understand why 37signals, the software company behind it, is as profitable as it is, I really respect and appreciate their approach to running a business, which they discuss in depth in Rework, a business book they’ve published (that I haven’t read) that “shows you how to build, run, and grow (or not grow) a business.”

The company has just finished work on their new office space, and it’s just been profiled on Fast Company’s design blog, Co.Design.

37signals had previously blogged about their new office space on Signal vs. Noise, but I didn’t find the design particularly interesting. In fact, I remember being a little underwhelmed. It wasn’t until I read Co.Design’s post that I came to appreciate what 37signals had accomplished:

“My feeling is that being cramped is a form of stress,” he says, when talking about the clutter of cubicles one normally encounters at an office. So Fried worked hard to keep hallways extremely wide (up to 12 feet), and pushed for the maximum square-footage for open areas.

…

One handcrafted detail that also serves a practical purpose is the walls made from stacked pieces of heavy-duty felt. The team at Stay-Straight Manufacturing, who fabricated all 37signals’s custom finishes, enthusiastically took on the challenge of working with a new material in an unusual role, which not only gives a literal warm fuzzy feeling to the room, it helps to absorb sound. In the team rooms, which are made for small meetings and other brainstorming events, a similar technique is used that employs stacked pieces of cork, which of course can also double as a bulletin board.

Utilitarianism FTW.

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Smell Like a Monster, a Sesame Street parody of the Old Spice The Man Your Man Could Smell Like ads starring Isaiah Mustafa, featuring one very talented Mr. Grover:

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I’m not sure if David Malki, the creator of the Wondermark comic strip, intended for people to see parallels between this comic and the experience most people have with their power/cable/phone companies, but it’s tough to believe otherwise. Only because it’s just so accurate.

Enjoy:

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Oh, right. So this isn’t the real explanation for the science behind flight. Good to know I’m not crazy.

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