About Cameron

Cameron Lawrence splits his time between Missoula and Big Sky, Montana, where he is happily pursuing the life of a semi-retired mountain bum. Winters are spent largely on skis at Big Sky Resort, where he can usually be found wandering the mountain with friends and logging well over one hundred days on snow each season. When the snow finally recedes, he turns his attention to Montana’s rivers, long summer evenings and the quiet luxury of time to read and think.

Before embracing this slightly disreputable lifestyle, Cameron had a reasonably respectable career. He worked as an entrepreneur in both the self-storage and technology sectors, which was coupled with a career in academia where he spent more than two decades as a tenured Full Professor and Department Chair at the University of Montana’s College of Business. Upon his retirement, the Montana University System Board of Regents awarded him Emeritus status in recognition of his contributions to the university, his field, and the state of Montana. Along the way he served on boards of directors of business and nonprofit organizations.

He has also held a number of less conventional jobs. Over the years he worked as a professional ski patroller, ski instructor, and ranch hand. During what can only be described as a wildly misspent youth, he spent six years jumping out of perfectly good airplanes into forest fires as part of the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management smokejumper programs. It was during these years that he met some of the wildest and most interesting characters on the planet, many of whom remain close friends today.

Looking back, life has worked out remarkably well. No one is more surprised by this outcome than Cameron himself.

These days his intellectual interests revolve around the study of long-term social and economic cycles. He finds the work of Ray Dalio, Neil Howe, Russell Napier, and Christopher Lasch particularly compelling. He is also closely engaged with the rapid rise of agentic AI systems, a subject he both studies and actively experiments with.

Yet an understanding of markets, institutions, and technological change ultimately offers limited guidance on the deeper question that occupies him most: how one ought to live. For that inquiry he returns to the work of Joseph Campbell, Charlie Munger, Matthew Crawford, James Hollis, Ryan Holiday, and Shane Parrish—thinkers who, in different ways, explore the timeless question of the well-lived life.

And while this is a remarkable moment to be alive for all that artificial intelligence promises, a larger part of his life is devoted to the pursuit of mastery in the physical world: on skis, with a fly rod, and with a shotgun as a competitive sporting clays shooter. It is a mastery that can never truly be reached, which is rather the point. The craft itself, and the lifelong discipline of chasing it, is what it’s all about.