The Power Of Writing - David Perell - #072

Perell arrives with no agenda and one thing on his mind: ten days in Morocco, which he calls the first time in recent memory he has gone that long having "barely consumed any information" — observation only, and a different experience of time passing. From there he builds a case about the country's near future. Morocco sits on the northwestern tip of Africa, "nine miles across the straight of Gibraltar" from Spain, its visitors mostly French, German and Spanish, and the state owns its national airline outright — the same lever Singapore, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Iceland have pulled. That is why Perell, who calls himself "an airline buff", expects tourism there "to explode". A "vision 2020 initiative" aims to make tourism the largest industry in the country, displacing agriculture, which he saw on a hike: women carrying bundles of leaves through the mountains, donkeys and mules working the fields.

Then the argument turns. Perell resists the phrase that the world is "becoming more visual", since reading was always a visual medium. His claim is that it is "becoming more imagistic and the world is being run by images", with Instagram as the place where that happens and Morocco as "the most Instagramable country in the world": palaces built two centuries ago that photograph better on a phone than in person, because "all the blemishes kind of go away". The joke about kings commissioning architecture for the sake of likes is only half a joke — the appetite for a place that photographs well is now part of what a place is for.

Chris Williamson offers the familiar experience of the grass being greener on whichever side he stands on — missing routine while away, missing immersion once home — and sets the "pedestrian pace" of walking through the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel or Pompeii against the "dopamine hangovers" that follow a long flight spent on a phone. Perell declines the framing. He has no pause button: "I just go ham every day", and he thinks of a lot of life "like a rubber band", tension and release, which is also the structure of the electronic music he listens to — layers added until the tension is discharged and replaced by another form of it.

Travel, observation and conversation are therefore not a pause but an intake: "you can't breathe out all the time, but you also can't inhale all the time". Routine is straight production mode, where accumulated tension gets spent; travel is where it is added, along with the conversations and experiences he books into the trip. He insists this is a rhythm rather than a rest — a cadence, in his words, not an interruption — and the distinction matters to him because it removes the guilt from either half of the cycle.

The conversation then reaches Perell's working thesis. He looks for arbitrage, and concedes that the efficient markets picture — crowds pricing assets fairly — mostly holds, which is the point of the economist who refuses to pick up a $20 bill because if it were real somebody would have taken it already. Except that "sometimes there actually is a free lunch", and the mispriced asset he names is writing on the internet. Demand for high-level ideas has inflected — he points to the intellectual dark web, to parts of Twitter and YouTube, material he rates above any college class he took — while "the supply of really high quality information is growing way slower than the demand for it".