The Power Of Writing - David Perell - #072

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. Welcome back to the Modern Wisdom Podcast. Today's guest is fellow podcaster, blogger, writing coach, and incredibly interesting individual, David Perell. We had no agenda going into today, and ended up coming out with some fantastic insights into what David's been working on at the moment. Chiefly, why the ability to write effectively is his single biggest opportunity, which individuals can capitalize on in the 21st century. Also, how an improved grasp of language can actually improve the quality of your thoughts, and why you should focus on content which is more than 24 hours old. David talks about some really interesting articles and resources, all of which are linked in the show notes below. And of course, if you do have time to give us a five star rating on iTunes or share the episode with a friend, I would be very grateful. For now, please welcome David Perell.
I am joined by host of the North Star Podcast and all-round interesting internet person, David Perell. David, welcome to the show.

**David Perell** (1:28)
Thank you, I'm really excited to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (1:30)
We've had some technical problems, but we've managed to girdle them around, and we've fixed it, and we're fully working now, right?

**David Perell** (1:36)
We're resilient, my friend. No matter where we are, no matter what's in our way, we're resilient.

**Chris Williamson** (1:42)
We certainly are. So we haven't got an agenda for today. We're just gonna talk about whatever's been going on. So what have you had on your mind recently, David?

**David Perell** (1:50)
Yeah, so, well, I've spent the last 10 days in Morocco. So that has absolutely been the thing most on my mind. And I mean, that was wonderful. It's probably the first time in recent memory that I've spent 10 days, I've barely consumed any information, just pure observation and pure just living.
And really enjoyable, had actually forgotten what it was like to just be in a state of pure observation and the ways in which your whole brain chemistry changes, the ways in which you experience the world differently, the ways in which time begins to dilute and kind of expand. But then also now that I'm back, thinking through the benefits and the virtues of routine and just something I've been thinking a lot about. But Morocco is an amazing country in terms of my takeaways from the trip. I think that tourism there is about to explode. There's three main reasons why. I think Africa is fascinating in terms of what it means for the future of the world. And geographically, Morocco is in a really interesting place. It's on the northwestern tip of Africa. And it's nine miles across the Strait of Gibraltar to get to Spain. So, Morocco, the countries that have the most tourism visits to the country are France, Germany and Spain. And so, in the northern part of the country, you'll hear a lot of French and a bit of Spanish. And then there's Arabic spoken everywhere. And so, because it's so close, what the Moroccan government is doing, and they own 100% of the airline, which is called Royal Air Maroc, they're gonna position Morocco as a kind of gateway to Africa, meaning that'll be the first place you go, and then you can sort of spread into it. And if you look at, I'm an airline buff, so if you look at Singapore, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Iceland, all those countries, they own 100% of their national airline, and they've used that national airline to increase business in the country, increase tourism, and Morocco's about to do exactly that. Then the government has what's called the Vision 2020 Initiative, and they want to make tourism the biggest industry in the entire country. So right now, it's agriculture, and man, I'll tell you, we're walking through the northern part of the country. So we're about an hour and a half south of the Mediterranean Sea, and we were going on a hike, so we were in just a very, very, very rural area, super poor, and there were these women. We saw five women, and it was like a Frida Kahlo painting. These women had probably 20, 30 pounds, probably more of leaves on their back just walking through the mountains. We saw donkeys and mules helping these farmers tend their fields, and it went to show that right now agriculture is the number one biggest industry in the country, and that's sort of the problem. Agriculture, in the ways in which they do it, doesn't scale like a lot of more industrial first-world country, you know, Morocco is pretty developed, but it's very different from an American agriculture. I grew up in California, it's very different from what you see in many parts of the Central Valley, and so what they want to do is they want to really have tourism explode, which gets to my third point, that Morocco is like the most Instagrammable country in the world, and this will be a great segue into some of the ways in which I think about the world, but like, the world is, look, it's not becoming more visual. I think people use that, but it's a bit lazy, because if reading is, was the dominant way in which knowledge was transferred from after the Gutenberg Revolution until basically now, reading is inherently visual. What I like to say is that it's becoming more imagistic, and the world is being run by images, and the dominant place where a lot of that is happening right now is Instagram. And when you go to Marrakesh, which is the number one tourism city in Morocco, the patterns, we were laughing, actually look better on your phone than they do in person, because all the blemishes kind of go away. And we were joking that there were these 19th, early 20th century kings who were having all their workers design these beautiful palaces, just exquisite, classic Morocco. And we were joking that they knew that Instagram was going to happen, like 200 years before we did.