All right, speaking of deep, let's do some questions about the deep life. Sandy asks, "What were your thoughts on the Get Back documentary?" She elaborates, "I've been watching the Beatles Get Back documentary, and one thing that strikes me is the novelty of watching people just hanging out, playing with creative ideas and without distracting technology.

I wondered if you have any thoughts on it. They spend a lot of time just hanging out, apparently not doing much. Is this important if you want to be as creative as the Beatles were? Do you think the lack of technology contributed to their brilliance?" Yes. I think the answer is yes and yes.

Creative work requires a lot of deep work. So there's a lot of moments of just being able to be very comfortable, being very focused, but also a lot of what we can think of as cognitive wandering. It's the Beatles just hanging out, talking, messing around on their instruments, noticing things, "Wait a second, let me try about that.

What if we did this?" None of that can happen at a high level if you're constantly context switching. Look at a text message thread, look at a WhatsApp thread, look at social media to see what's going on. I can give you a very specific case study from exactly this world.

A couple years ago, I was communicating with a very high-level songwriter. So she's well-known and she works on songs for some pretty famous pop stars. Not to spoil this for the kids out there, but unlike the Beatles, pop stars today don't write their own music. Some do, but a lot of them don't.

Anyways, she wrote me because she was having a real problem. She was constantly on social media and she had told herself this story about people need to know who I am and promotion and it's going to help me get work. But guess what was not happening? Songwriting. She wasn't writing songs.

She was obsessed with posting, but did people like what I posted? What were people thinking about me? What are other people doing? What's happening in the world of the related pop star celebrity? And I talked to her and gave her some advice and said, "Don't worry about people finding you, man.

What people worry about is are you writing killer hooks?" And she did pull back and it made all the difference. She's like, "Man, I'm back into it again. Like I just don't do this thing on my phone anymore." That's a direct example from this world. You also see this all the time with novelists.

Novel writing is difficult, cognitively demanding work. It is very difficult. They don't mess around. I mean, some do, but there are so many novelists that say, "I don't want to have anything to do with this stuff." You know, I go, I disappear. I'm Dave Eggers where I have a writing house with no Wi-Fi on an old laptop with no internet connection and eight hours at a time, you can't get to me.

It's John Grisham who like the groundhog comes out of his Warren in the ground, you know, once a year to promote his book for two weeks and then disappears. It's like, I don't want to have anything to do with that, right? This is like Aziz Ansari has a new comedy special out that I was watching the other day on the rowing machine and he uses a flip phone.

He's like, "This just was killing me. And I'm supposed to create creative, interesting things and I can't if all I'm thinking about is what's happening on this little glowing piece of glass flip phone." You know, I'm sure he could be on Instagram and Twitter and trying to get an audience back and now he's like, "Forget it.

I want to do this and I don't care if I'm less successful at it. I can't do creative work with this." So I think it's a good point, Sandy. It's not compatible. You know, Jesse, I hear this with sports too. I've talked quite a bit of people within professional sports.

I've talked with general managers of NBA teams. I've talked with people at national rugby teams. I've talked with people within football. I've talked with golfers and this is like a real issue. Is especially coaches and managers are very worried of the impact of the cognitive drain of looking at these things all the time on their athletes.

And so it's another world. So forget creative stuff. What about physical, high concentration physical stuff? Phones kill you. A lot of the coaches, general managers, they're on their phones all the time too. Agents. Yeah. Well, the agents are part of the problem. Because the agents are talking in one ear, especially the NBA is a real problem because these are the youngest athletes of any sport, right?

It's the only sport where you can come out of high school into it, really, right? I mean, you're not, to play whatever, professional football, you got to grow, you know, and so typically you're going to come out of college for that. Baseball, you have a, you're going to have this 10-year path of the minors before like anyone cares.

Basketball players, you could be 19 and on the national stage. And the agents are in their ears. People got to know, people got to know your brand, you know, you got to be on there. You got to be and they get on the court and it, they can't, it's not that they can't play, but it is a, I've had, I had this conversation with a really high level person in the NBA.

At that level. It is a game of Epsilons. If you are 3% off of your peak, you're on the bench because everyone is fantastic and everyone is playing at their, their, their fullest extent. There's really no room unless you're really, you know, Giannis or someone who has like a little bit of wiggle room here.

It makes a huge difference. These agents are in their ear. You got to be on your phone. You got to be on their phone. It, it destroys their concentration. And then they're 5% worse and then they're out of the league in two years. A lot of them start clothing lines too.

You know, Aziz Ansari talked about this in that special. He's like, yeah, a lot of comedians I know, like have these other products and do these other things. He's like, it kind of makes me feel like a slacker, but like, I just want to write. I just want to write comedy.

Basically, I saw a David Goggins video. And he was talking about being in the gym at a hotel and like an NBA player came in with his coach and I forgot exactly. It was a Goggins video. So, you know, it was like really intense, but, but basically like the, the long and the short of it was like the NBA player was just going through the motions and the coach, the, and by coach, I mean trainer, not coach.

The trainer was like, let's do 15 reps, not 12. And the players like, nah man, I'm just doing my 12. And Goggins went off on like, you know, not pushing yourself, whatever, but that it's like an example of what happens when you have this pull from you coming from the phone is like you're doing the 12 reps instead of the 15.

It makes a difference when you're at a very high level. So, yeah, I'm a big believer in that. I think it's a huge, it's a huge competitive advantage. Be the guy or the woman not on this stuff. It's a big advantage. Yeah, you're gonna produce better work. Nothing matters more than producing better work, social media, and I don't mean to rant too much, but social media is great for spreading the word about you, but it's best when other people are doing it for you.

So yeah, you should be happy that social media exists. If you're doing something awesome, because it makes it easy for people to talk about it, but they don't need you on there saying look at me. That only helps a little bit. So there we go. All right.