i always laugh when i convince myself i’ve got nothing left to say. it happens every few months. i’ll go quiet for a week or two, disappear into airports, stare at the pacific from venice beach, wander around pretending i’m empty. then george gammon appears with a camera and asks the first question. ten minutes later i’m interrupting myself, chasing ideas down blind alleys, doubling back because i’ve remembered something from twenty years ago that suddenly matters again. ninety minutes disappear. george titles the interview yen will collapse while silver goes to $250!! which, if you know george, is exactly how it should be written. i suspect he experiences the world through exclamation marks. maybe that’s what happens when you’re fizzing with curiosity.
it made me realise that i’ve been thinking about creativity the wrong way. i keep treating it like fuel, as though one day i’ll wake up and discover the tank’s empty. bollocks. ideas don’t disappear. they compress. leave them alone for long enough and they build pressure like a champagne bottle you’ve been shaking without noticing. all george really did was pull the cork. the conversation wasn’t about the yen, or silver, or whether some central banker has finally lost the plot. those are just props. what interested me, as always, was the machinery underneath. why crowds believe what they believe. why price starts moving long before respectable opinion gives itself permission to notice. why the really dangerous question is usually the one that sounds faintly ridiculous when it’s first asked.
that’s why i’m obsessed with summer camp. not because we’ve assembled an all-star cast of macro investors, although george will be there alongside david levenson, brent johnson, mike green, izzy kaminska, ben grey, tom roderick and a collection of minds i’d happily get stranded with on a desert island. they’ll disagree. they’ll change their minds. they’ll probably annoy each other from time to time. good. that’s where the energy comes from. nobody’s arriving to deliver tablets of stone from the mountain. they’re arriving because curiosity behaves like a current. put enough genuinely inquisitive people in the same place and the voltage starts jumping between them. i’ve watched it happen often enough now that i trust the process more than i trust any individual speaker.
if you’re wondering whether you’re qualified to come, you’re asking the wrong bloody question. i’m not interested in your cv. i don’t care whether you’ve managed billions, founded a company, written a bestseller or simply spent the last five years trying to make sense of a world that’s started behaving strangely. the only thing that matters is whether you’re still curious. curiosity is the one asset that compounds without asking anyone’s permission. everything else is just a résumé.
hugh.
all this and more at the camp 2nd aug- 5th aug,
