This was my sixth year attending Camp Kotok, an informal gathering of about 50 financiers, economists, entrepreneurs, and otherwise interesting people in eastern Maine. Toward the end of the five-day event, I recorded a short video with David Kotok, who got the retreat rolling after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 rattled the financial industry. David retired from day-to-day investing in 2024 but remains the animating spirit of Camp Kotok.
If you don’t know David, the video will give you a sense of the passion and humor that make him a people magnet. If you do know David, you’ve probably heard all this before, but you’ll enjoy hearing it again, anyway. 😊
Hummingbird alert: Just before I started recording, Scott Weeks, proprietor of Leen’s Lodge, where the event takes place every year, cleaned and refilled two hummingbird feeders at the railing of the deck at the back of the lodge. Several hummingbirds showed up right away. You’ll see them flitting in the background starting around the 2:20 mark. As I was filming, I wasn’t sure the hummingbirds would appear in the video, so I cut away for a moment to see if I could capture them more clearly. But they show up just fine, buzzing and darting right behind David as he talks. Maine is pretty cool.
Here’s the video, which I conducted on August 9. A few bullet points follow.
Washington stinks. There seems to be near-consensus on that among Camp Kotok attendees. “These are money people, they’re in the investment class,” David says. “They are harsh on the budgetary, fiscal policy to the point where three-quarters of the people now are talking about how the creditworthiness of the United States is deteriorating because of policy. And the finger-pointing at the lousy, stinking politicians is repeated and repeated by Democrats, Republicans, Independents.”
Hegseth is awful. I already wrote about the disdain for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. David piled on. “Hegseth is like the plague,” he says.
The biggest AI concern. At the financial level, the unanswered question is where the return on a gigantic amount of investment will come from. “Nobody can answer the financial question,” David says. “Where do you get the revenue for a long stream to amortize trillions of capital investment? That stumped the group on AI.”
[Notes from Camp Kotok: 10 ways to exploit AI]
Trump’s deportations are business-negative. “We have the shock of losing a million originally legal working people who now are not here,” David says. “What happens to those jobs? This has an impact on both business and finance. That’s a subject we may discuss next year.”
I had never heard of David Kotok until your columns from the last few days. The interview shows how this upright gentleman has got his head screwed on straight and, despite being fiscally (and perhaps otherwise) conservative, he's not afraid to call out government excess and crazy policies insofar as they badly impact our society, our economy, public health, etc.
Loved your Camp Kotok series!
Good report from Mr. Kotok. I enjoyed the conversation you had with him. The will to spend our country into debt is high on my list of failure's. Hegseth is a mistake already happening. The Trump lies go on and on. Our country is the worst for it.