Cal Newport

"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."

"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."

"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'm not right now. There are certain things I do where Trello is the right tool. In particular, if it's a complicated project with multiple people involved, Trello is the right tool."

"Earlier this year, I switched to a new task management app. It's called Things 3. I spent $10 to buy a copy for my phone and then I spent $50 to buy a copy for my Mac."

"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."

"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."

"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 Jaws, arguably like the platonically perfect movie of the 20th century."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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 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."

"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.'"

"We go way back we go to Cursor these sort of pre-ChatGPT products."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"But if you have one click away from those horizontal carousels on Netflix like my god there could be something better."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

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

"These sort of AI tools for programming have been big since before ChatGPT came out."

"Claude Code switching from Opus to Sonnet. There's like these little things got just good."

"The jump from two to three and three to four were these impressive leaps"

"Chat GPT was made on from the very beginning the last half decade"

"GPT53 Codex from OpenAI and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 a lot of morning routine content on YouTube right now and the audience of YouTube heavily skews towards young people"

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

"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."

"We have become trained as consumers that when we see video content at the level of quality of something like MasterClass or Netflix, we say, 'Okay, that's something I'll pay for.'"

"But if you move down just a little bit to the level below, like these really good video podcasts where people have nice DSLR cameras and some diffused light and it looks pretty good, people say, 'No, no, no. That is for free platforms like YouTube.'"

"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."

"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."

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

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

"I keep on thinking about this with your episode earlier a couple weeks ago about Substack too."

"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."

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

"They gather trillions of observations from people using that software. They anonymize them and analyze them and you get this snapshot of how are actual knowledge workers using their computer."

"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."

"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."

"something like 170 million times on X alone"

"we had Brad Stolberg on and he was talking about his new book, The Way of Excellence"

"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"

"Distraction in the workplace is driven by workplace communication tools like email and Slack."

"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."

"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."

"Is anything really all that terrible going to happen if I look at TikTok for a little bit during my bus commute home?"

"I wrote an article back in January for the New Yorker about this"

"if you read my newsletter today and get at calNewport.com"

"Here is my technique that I use. I'm going to give it to you now for the first time. Never talked about it before. I call it the 30-minute rule. You never go more than 30 minutes without stopping to read something about the movie."

"in my second book, which was almost as popular as the Da Vinci Code, how to become a straight A student. Actually, here's a connection to the Da Vinci Code."

"Hey, so I recently filmed a course for MasterClass. Now, this was a really interesting experience and I think the final product was great and you can check it out at masterclass.com/calnewport."

"That's almost as many copies as I've sold of How to Become a High School Superstar."

"This is something I really came to understand when working on my last book, Slow Productivity. The connection between workload and messages."

"By the way, notice how all these people have they don't want to use my term deep work. So, everyone uses the phrase focus work, which is I guess good or bad."

"That's like almost as many copies as I've sold of How to Become a High School Superstar"