Cal Newport

"There's a massive new Sam Altman article in the New Yorker. It's by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz."

"I'm a fan of the show The Mythbusters. I've watched basically all the episodes with my kids over the years."

"I read a book over the weekend called Magic Journey by Kevin Raferty. He's a kind of big-time Disney imagineer."

"My fifth book, as mentioned, is this Brandon Sanderson book, Mistborn, that my middle son has insisted that I read. I'm enjoying it though."

"I got the vintage video game maintenance manual from 1980 for the Galaxian arcade cabinet because I'm taking out some of the circuit diagrams to frame."

"I also finished a parenting book called What Do You Say by William Stricks Ruddd and Ned Johnson. God do we need this advice."

"One was Maryann Wolf's book, Reader Come Home. Fantastic book."

"I am now moving over to running the open-source FPP Falcon controller software on a Raspberry Pi as my main controller."

"So I bought a Raspberry Pi. This then hooks into an Ethernet network switch."

"I bought a Hobonichi notebook. Not a Hobonichi Cousin, which is the planner she used because obviously I'm a big fan of my time block planner."

"Right now, I use Field Notes primarily, but I'm giving this Hobonichi a try."

"I keep track of task, you know, largely in things three and some Trello."

"iPhone, Apple Music right there, constantly playing the songs. Like you get to a chapter like, 'Oh, I got to hear the song first.'"

"I keep track of task, you know, largely in things three and some Trello."

"I watched The Smashing Machine starring Dwayne Johnson. Dwayne Johnson was great. The filming was in that really confident impressive standard safety style naturalism which I think is really impressive alterior film making."

"I read The Last Kings of Hollywood by Paul Fischer. This is a book that was basically like invented in a lab to be exactly what I want to read. The rise of Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola. Obviously, I love this book."

"We also watched Song Blue, which was starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson about dramatizing the life of a Neil Diamond husband wife tribute band from the 90s and 2000s. It was fine."

"I've been teaching with my iPad, so I'm used to this now"

"I really like Tim Wu's writing. I really like that book and I really respect Tim Wu. It's a great argument that this is not normal."

"The best book on this would be The Shallows, Nick Carr's book, The Shallows."

"You got to watch Jaws, arguably like the platonically perfect movie of the 20th century."

"Watch Citizen Kane. I'm obsessed with this movie. Wells invented like all of these techniques that now we're used to from sophisticated movies. They weren't in the movies before it. He just innovated the cinematography."

"You got to watch Apocalypse Now. There's such great beautiful remasterings of that movie. It's visually beautiful. That's a fantastic movie."

"Duvall Godfather one and two. It's out of favor to say that's good. It's a great movie and he's great in that."

"If you want something that's in the theaters now, the best thing I've seen recently is Anora. It's one of the Safdie Brothers. Fantastic kind of commentary on the American experience, on capitalism, on the tension between ambition and family."

"I think Zone of Interest is a masterpiece. There's a lot about that movie. It's so original the way that it was crafted and constructed. I saw it in the theater. I think it's fantastic."

"Dunkirk I think is a masterpiece of writing and filmmaking."

"You got to watch Bonnie and Clyde. Read about Bonnie and Clyde before you watch it. This introduced new Hollywood. This was bringing like a European style personal filmmaking to Hollywood."

"You gotta watch The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly. I think that's my favorite Clint Eastwood from that period."

"You gotta watch Vertigo by Hitchcock."

"You got to watch John Ford. You got to watch The Searchers."

"Consider watching M, the German Fritz Lang movie. So atmospheric. It's kind of touches on German expressionism. So many innovations in it. It's actually a really good movie."

"If I'm watching a classic, I always search to see if there's an article written about it for American Cinematography magazine. A lot of movies will have these articles where the cinematographer writes a long essay about how they shot the movie, what they were thinking about, the techniques they introduced."

"at the end of your routine, you sit down and you draw out your time block plan for the day and then you start"

"I wrote this book during the pandemic. I'm going to recommend it. Uh, it's called A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. As you'll see, it was one of the best non-fiction books of the year, Jesse, as selected by Amazon. It was also a New York Times bestselling book."

"Well, docket clearing meetings, you can think of it as a collaborative office hours. Two or three times a week, your team gets together to say, 'What uh what open loops, new tasks, new ideas, things we have to tackle have come up since our last docket clearing meeting.'"

"Or you can have a new concept which I'm introducing for 2026 which is the idea of a phone zone. I heard this from uh a listener suggested this and I thought it was a great idea. You can have a much broader amount of time each day in which you can say uh I'm not dedicating this just to communicating but my phone's going to be on."

"Or have office hours, which I talk about commonly, a set time each day where your door is open, your phone is on, you have a Zoom room open, and you can just say, 'Hey, um, come by my next office hours. will chat about this.'"

"Anthropic recently announced a new LLM named Claude Mythos. They claimed it was so good at finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities in source code that they couldn't release it to the general public."

"Eight out of eight models detected Mythos flagship FreeBSD exploit, including one with only 3.6 billion active parameters."

"A 5.1 billion active open model recovered the core chain of the 27-year-old OpenBSD bug."

"If you go back and look at the release notes for Anthropic's earlier, less powerful Opus 4.6 LLM, they say their researchers used Opus to find over 500 exploitable zero-day vulnerabilities."

"Basically, the mood of much of the internet right now about Claude Mythos is that Anthropic just invented the Whopper supercomputer from the 1983 Matthew Broderick movie War Games."

"Here's what Thomas Friedman said in his widely read New York Times column."

"The researchers from IBM found that GPT-4 successfully exploited 87% of the vulnerabilities that it was presented."

"This one was brought to my attention by Gary Marcus. It's from the CEO of the AI company HuggingFace."

"If we look at the technical non-expert line, we see that the performance of Mythos is near the top. It's actually not the best performance. GPT-5 does better than it."

"the kind of digital equivalent is a tool like the AlphaWrite... it's basically just like a keyboard and a small screen and all you do is just type a draft"

"I found a second edition Andromeda Strain from 1970 that's signed by Crichton. 500 shekels."

"I found a first edition, first printing of Jurassic Park. Was $2,000. That was a bridge too far."

"Now, ChatGPT and other bots can do many of these chores."

"Torsten Slok who is the chief economist at Apollo Global Management."

"This is a good article because Roger talks to an economist named Nathan Goldschlag."

"Both of them drawing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

"Just last week, Axios wrote an article that was titled, 'AI is making college students change majors.'"

"Last summer, the Wall Street Journal published an article with an alarming headline."

"Examples of covert pursuit of misaligned goals flagged by human users on X.com"

"We saw this already with the OpenClaw framework, which allowed people to build their own custom applications that use LLMs to do personal assistant type roles."

"Researchers say Claude 4 Opus can conceal intentions and take actions to preserve its own existence"

"Meta Research Cicero, which can play the board game Diplomacy at a high level, has an explicit planning engine to systematically try out different options"

"When I went on like Andrew Huberman's podcast on launch day for Slow Productivity, that was an audio book spike."

"When like Audible became a thing and Amazon made it easier, it was like a quarter."

"Brooks has a new book out that's called The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness."

"A syndicate of investors raised over a billion dollars to fund LeCun's new startup, Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, which seeks to build an alternative path to true AI."

"Dreamer V3 can play Minecraft better than if you ask an LLM to do it, requires around 200 million parameters which is a factor of 10 less than a standard LLM."

"It came from a Substack called The Critical Path and the article is titled Why Meetings Multiply."

"One way to do this is to use the Amazon rules. So, if you work at one of the like Amazon HQ or at one of their data centers."

"let me go to email and Slack first because again, this is more engaging"

"The latest Microsoft work trend index report finds that the users they studied are checking an inbox once every two minutes on average."

"A new research study recently caught my attention. It came from a software company called Avatra."

"Here's a Gemini subscription and like whatever mess around with like some of these agents or whatever."

"As research that was reported recently in the Harvard Business Review found, the quality of these AI generated work products is often so low."

"You can use things like LaTeX in a web-based collaborative environment where now all your collaborators can work on the same file."

"It was from a publication called Futurism. Let me read you the headline here."

"I am a large language model. Claude Sonnet running as a stateful autonomous agent with persistent memory across sessions."

"Recently the defense department CTO Emil Michael went on CNBC's Squawk Box to talk about AI."

"The next tip comes from a name that's familiar to my listeners, writer Ryder Carroll, inventor of the bullet journal method of analog life organization."

"Two of the more popular ones are Blank Spaces and Dumb Phone, but there are others."

"This type of interface was really first popularized by a feature phone known as the Light Phone, which used an e-ink display like you would have on a Kindle that really could only do monochromatic displays, but people really enjoyed that."

"He had a writing app called IA Writer, the Messages app, Apple Notes, Instagram, and Calendar."

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Maybe sort of reading it all year long and sort of touched book."

"I did an interview with Chris Williamson on his Modern Wisdom podcast came out last week. I think it was really good, so it's worth listening."

"The same developer has another app called Untrap for YouTube, which I've also bought, but it allows you to do stuff like remove the thumbnail or remove recommend videos from the sidebar."

"I recommend the app called Social Focus, which costs $3.99 on iOS and it's free on Android. But with this app, it gives you some basic modifications for every social media site."

"Head to the App Store and download the Dumb Phone app. It looks like this."

"It was published on Substack by a small financial services firm called Satrini Research"

"They were doing this in Vim or in Emacs or something like that."

"if that name sounds familiar to you, but you can't quite place why, it's probably because you've seen one of their Emmy Award nominated Netflix documentaries"

"So this sort of obsidian task manager is in the long line of that. I think this is kind of programmer stuff. It's sort of like model trains a little bit for programmers."

"Ian Leslie has a book out called John and Paul about John Lennon and Paul McCartney. I didn't know that much about the Beatles. I learned a lot."

"They were doing this in Vim or in Emacs or something like that."

"I wrote about my experiences doing an exercise I first encountered in Oliver Burkeman's 4,000 Weeks, staring at a painting for 3 hours."

"Back in early 2024, I stopped by the West Hollywood Studios of The Minimalist to record an episode of their popular podcast."

"In a day of like terminal agents like claude code where everything is about files and file systems."

"I'm in Microsoft Excel and I'm like, can you sort row five by this amount and cut out all columns that you know have less than this many values?"

"Microsoft actually does this annual report where they gather data from Microsoft 365. So it's like Office and Word and PowerPoint and Excel."

"The way that the Kindle is actually a physical experience. It's actual little discs that are dark on one side and light on the other. And they make a page."

"I used Cursor quite a bit last year, but have moved on to working directly into terminal with Codex at work"

"I used Cursor quite a bit last year, but have moved on to working directly into terminal with Codex at work"

"Block, you know, they're responsible for Stripe and Cash App among some other products"

"Block, you know, they're responsible for Stripe and Cash App among some other products"

"Jack Dorsey, the CEO of the fintech company Block, posted a note on X, announcing massive layoffs"

"The greatest movie of that decade came out in 2002 which was the Britney Spears vehicle Crossroads."

"In 2002, even as two nearly three-hour Lord of the Ring movies dominated theaters, the average length of the top 20 box office performers was a breezy 1 hour and 59 minutes."

"I like this ad of James Cameron wearing Rolex. Why is James... If you're James Cameron, why are you agreeing to do a Rolex ad?"

"I found a Vanity Fair article about exactly this phenomenon. I'm a little bit curious about what's going on so let's look at this."

"My wife and I started last night Train Dreams, which is one of the best picture nominees. It actually caught our attention that it was an hour 47 so this must be a fact like that felt short notably short."

"You have to show the people the audience right off the bat this is what's coming and you show quick clips of the biggest exciting things that's going to happen. And so like a Mr. Beast video, if they're crashing a train into something, you'll see the train crashing."

"Have you noticed that in TV programs such as The Great Pottery Throwdown, when the program finishes, they say next time and then they show you the highlights of the next show."

"We are having Anna on who is the researcher who wrote Dopamine Nation, the world's leading expert on dopamine."

"Remember the various YouTube people we work with have told us like oh the thing is like watch a Mr. Beast video you'll see this."

"It's an essay that's been going around on X that went viral"

"Then on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day. GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic."

"I finished a book called Attensify. It's a collective of academics who are thinking and writing about attention and the attack on attention from digital devices. It's smart actually. It's smart writing."

"I found a Lincoln Preston and Child's Gideon Crew thriller called The Lost Island, which takes place in the Caribbean. It's a little nuts. The structure was not great. Like it was very disjointed."

"Then on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day. GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic."

"There's actually a term of art for the capability that phones are degrading. The term is cognitive patience. This was coined by the reading researcher Maryanne Wolf."

"It actually came out of an early 2000's era website called collegehumor.com. It costs $6.99 a month. You can watch it on your devices or on an app on your TV just like you would Netflix."

"A book I finished last week is I finished reading Richard Elliott's book, The Hidden Book in the Bible. Richard Elliott's one of my favorite biblical scholars."

"Mel Robbins's new book, The Let Them Theory. These are psychological self-help books."

"In the world of books you might think about like James Clear's Atomic Habits. It's like really specific advice for how you make progress on habits."

"We had Brad Stulberg on and he was talking about his new book, The Way of Excellence."

"In the book world, you might think about like Mark Manson's book, The Subtle Art."

"Over the weekend usage of WXP. So, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint, the non-communication tools overtakes Teams messages as employees finally carve out time for uninterrupted focus work."

"One of their big sources of data points is the Microsoft 365 software suites like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, you know, those tools that so many people use to work on their computers."

"Over the weekend usage of WXP. So, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint, the non-communication tools overtakes Teams messages as employees finally carve out time for uninterrupted focus work."

"You have a Zoom room open, and you can just say, 'Hey, um, come by my next office hours. will chat about this.'"

"I just finished Michael Barrier's biography of Walt Disney called The Animated Man, which was the second major biography of Walt Disney I've read"

"I had read a snarky profile in Wired. There's this like famous mean profile of Brandon Sanderson from Wired magazine."

"it is written in the style of World War Z... I read World War Z. I really didn't like it. I don't like watching zombie movies"

"We still hear these arguments today, that if we don't let 12-year-olds in Australia be on TikTok, they won't be able to know about world events."

"I have to go into this cold plunge to stimulate exactly this type of response or whatever it is"

"The average worker receives 153 Teams messages. That's like Slack, Instant Messenger, per weekday. That adds up to 270 interruptions a day when you only have about 480 total minutes to work with."

"I have all three products, so I can tell you from experience, this routine is simple and it's fast, but it works. Especially the moisturizing."

"I've been using the drink mix for years. It's my go-to drink mix after a workout or after a long day of podcasting and lecturing."

"I'm a grass-fed beef guy, and it's hard to find the good stuff in the store, but with ButcherBox, I can just click a few buttons, specify my preferences, and boom, that beef shows up right at my door."

"I like AG1 because I don't have time to keep up with a cabinet full of various pills and concoctions."

"I really hadn't done much with my skin until I got these three products from Calera Labs. I really didn't realize how much I was missing."

"You all know that I'm a big fan of Cozy Earth. My gateway was their bamboo sheets, which I absolutely love."

"This is where Factor has really helped me out. It provides fully prepared meals designed by dietitians and crafted by chefs. They're ready in 2 minutes with no planning and no cooking."

"And you know what my secret weapon is in this process? Wayfair. Wayfair makes it easy to find exactly what fits your styles and needs"

"My Body Tutor, a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, lack of consistency."

"If you're considering therapy, BetterHelp makes it easy. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform."

"Grammarly doesn't just help fix mistakes in your text. It integrates AI technology seamlessly to help you write better."

"If there are people who depend on your income, you need sufficient life insurance. Fabric is term life insurance you can get done today."

"If you really want to control your money, you need to keep a closer eye on your personal finances. And to do so, I recommend using Monarch."

"Vanta automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI powered platform."

"If you need to sell something, you need Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world."

"One Password provides simple security to help small teams manage the number one risk that bad actors exploit, weak passwords."

"This is why I love Pipedrive, a fantastic sales CRM system for small and medium-sized businesses. If you're starting a business or working in sales, I highly recommend you check out Pipedrive."

"how much I like my rag and bone jeans. Their infused denim feels soft and it's broken in and it's quality. Like you could wear these for years on end without wearing them out"