Cal Newport

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

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

"You gotta watch Vertigo by Hitchcock."

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

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

"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."

"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.'"

"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."

"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.'"