Riding a Greyhound bus to the New Orleans Investment Conference, I had time to pause and think about everything I heard at Jekyll Island this weekend at the Hard Asset Investing Conference with Palisade Global Investments. There was a lot.

I am someone who would rather hang around the conference hallways and chat with random people than sit through innumerable speeches. The good news for me was that this Palisade conference was light on speeches and heavy on socializing.

A virtue of all this socializing is that much of the information I was exposed to was tailored to fit me by the people who were providing it to me. I don’t mean the speeches from the sponsoring companies, which were good, but the small-group interactions. The conference was limited to a small number of people who were sophisticated. We all tried hard to communicate with each other and I think there was a bunch of learning going on.

For example, G.E. Griffin made a rather profound comment to a small group that really jumped out at me. He said that society has always been led by the 1%, it just depends on which 1%. What a great message for a group of liberty-minded speculators.

I’m afraid I don’t have a selfie with Mr. Griffin, but I do have a recording of his keynote speech about the Creature from Jekyll Island recorded in the Federal Reserve room. You can find the MP3 here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwzguBvmPvuYQ2xKcnBPb3BVN1k

The weekend was full of surprising coincidences. My favorite part was the number of times I heard someone say something that matched something I had been written about in the past. We were clearly a like-minded group in many ways. It was encouraging to know that I was in the ballpark and inspiring to see people actually doing the things I was just talking about.

The centerpiece of the weekend was arguably Mr. Griffin’s speech, which I recorded and shared with permission. Over 100 years later, we still look back at the significance of that small gathering of high-powered people working to a common goal. It led me to wonder if we will look back years from now and see that this gathering organized by Palisade played some role in a bull market in hard asset investing. As the song goes, "You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."