Teaser: Investing in America: The Rise Of A 250-Year Bull Market

**Meb Faber** (0:06)
Welcome to a special series of The Meb Faber Show on the past, present and future of America. I'm sitting down with some of the most notable historians, thinkers, investors in US financial history, all tied to my new coffee table book, Investing in America, The Rise of a 250-Year Bull Market, out July 4th.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:26)
Meb Faber is the co-founder and chief investment officer at Cambria Investment Management. Due to industry regulations, he will not discuss any of Cambria's funds on this podcast. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Cambria Investment Management or its affiliates. For more information, visit cambriainvestments.com.

**Meb Faber** (0:41)
What is up, everybody? Happy summertime. Man, it's flown by. Got some monster news. My new book, Investing in America, The Rise of a 250-Year Bull Market is now out.
It was published on July 4th. So we thought we'd give you all a little preview. Now, to be clear, this book is meant to be a coffee table book. We spared no expense in the cover, the pages, the printing, the graphics. There's like 70 tables and charts. It's meant to be something you sit down on your couch, flip through. You don't necessarily have to read it cover to cover.
Audio won't really do it justice. But to give you guys a flavor of what's inside the book, we're going to read the introduction, a couple of sidebars, and hopefully get you all excited about it. Some of y'all may balk at the $76 price tag in honor of 1776, by the way. But be rest assured, all the proceeds from the book will go to the Invest America charities. We love the idea and think it's a great start for every American born in this country, particularly as we celebrate this patriotic anniversary. I'm going to start with a quote by Warren Buffett. This is in 2016 Berkshire Letter, where he says, From a standing start 240 years ago, a span of time less than triple my days on earth, Americans have combined human ingenuity, a market system, a tide of talented and ambitious immigrants, and the rule of law to deliver abundance beyond any dreams of our forefathers.
There's a fun foreword by Dr. Brian Taylor, Chief Economist at Finian. But I'm going to skip on to the preface where we start with the Charlie Munger quote.
Old Charlie had a way with words and he said, the first rule of compounding is never interrupted unnecessarily. So I'm going to read this preface in my first person, and then the rest of the book is normal, but let's get started.
I rode in my first Waymo the other day. For those unfamiliar, Waymo is the self-driving taxi service taking over the streets of Los Angeles and soon every other city around the world. It was incredible. A cheery voice greeted me as I slid into the clean car. There was no awkward small talk, no shame when I requested my favorite tunes, and I felt none of the usual anxiety about a human driver speeding through intersections while checking their phone, texting friends. It felt like the future, and that's saying something. After all, I'm old enough to have watched the flying cars on the Jetsons cartoons as kids. Now imagine trying to describe the wonder of self-driving cars to an American 200 years ago. Their response would likely be remarkable. Pray tell, young sir, what is a car?
A great deal has changed over the past 250 years. Our republic, which was founded by a bunch of immigrants in search of a better life, looked very different than what it does today. If you were to ask Americans today what inspired all that migration, most would likely say they were fleeing religious persecution, or perhaps they were seeking freedom and opportunity. While both of those are true, the founding of America can be understood less as a purely ideological crusade, and more as one of history's boldest investment projects. Long before the United States existed as a nation, its earliest settlements were financed, organized, and governed by joint stock companies, which are like modern-day venture capital funds, which were designed to pool capital, spread risk, and pursue outsized returns. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, overseas exploration was extraordinarily risky. Ships sank, settlers died, crops failed, and hostile environments routinely wiped out entire expeditions. No individual could bear this risk alone. The solution was financial innovation. Joint stock companies that raised money from many investors sought asymmetric upside and accepted that many individual quests might fail.
The Virginia Company, chartered in 1606, was among the earliest examples. Its investors backed the Jamestown Colony, not out of idealism, but with the expectation of profit in the form of gold, trade routes, land appreciation, and monopoly rights. Jamestown itself struggled mightily, yet the model endured because the payoff, when successful, was enormous.