Cal Newport

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"GPT53 Codex from OpenAI and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic"

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

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

"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"

"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.'"

"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.'"

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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"

"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."

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

"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?"