 Over the next two days, you will be the very first to experience life-changing interactive sessions across 10 incredible tracks, all designed to help you transform yourself so that you can change the world. If you're thinking about starting a business or looking to break into a new career, check out our panels on entrepreneurship and business success, economic essentials, and professional and personal development. Learn about innovation and how you can contribute to building our future by attending panels on digital solutions, science and technology, and urbanism. Use your creative skills to build a meaningful career with advice from successful artists, writers and filmmakers through our creativity and commerce track. You can even learn how to better help people in need with our powerful sessions on poverty, alleviation, well-being and prosperity, political philosophy and policies for economic and social progress. Then, when it's time to take a break, head upstairs to the atrium where you can relax and power up in our Chargent Lounge. While you're there, check out our swag store or just grab a snack and watch a movie at the Fee Screening Room. And share your experiences with your friends through the FeeCon app and on social media. Everything you need to have an incredible experience is all right here. So get ready, welcome to FeeCon. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Glenn Jacobs. FeeCon started off with a bang. That was pretty doggone awesome, right? Tremendous. This is a spectacular honor for me to speak here. Of course, Fee is the original organization devoted to the promotion of Austrian economics and a free society. And when I think about the just great individuals that have been affiliated with this organization, it is extremely humbling to be in any way to be participating in something like this. I don't know if I can come back next year though, unfortunately. I'm running for political office. I'm running for mayor of Knox County, Tennessee. So I know, but I, you know, in general, I dislike politicians and I'm already starting to loathe myself for that. I was recently speaking at a fifth grade elementary school graduation and in the program it listed everybody, right? And it's Glenn Jacobs, professional wrestler. I'm like, yeah, I was really good at that. That's cool. Business man. I'm proud of that. Politician. Mom would be so disappointed in me. But I'd like to talk a little bit today about my life journey and really how I think that it is a microcosm like all of our lives are of what happens in the free market. And much like the theme of this conference is transformation, in all of our lives the market gives us the ability to transform and to better our lives and to achieve our goals. I'm one of those people that believes that every individual is born with a gift. And the key to finding happiness and success in life, and by success I'm not necessarily talking about monetary success. I'm talking about what makes you content, what makes you happy. The key is discovering what your gift is and then going out and doing it. The only place that you have the ability to do that is in a free market. And my life is a great example of that. When I was a kid growing up, it was back in the 1970s in rural Missouri, my father had just retired out of the military. And that was a very hard time economically in our country. So I always had something to eat, always had a roof over my head. My parents worked very hard, but we weren't exactly wealthy or well off. So I saw my path to a better life, materially at least, through sports. And ever since I was a little kid, I dreamed of being a professional athlete. When I was a little bitty, I wasn't very good at anything. I could have been a great baseball player except I couldn't pitch, I couldn't feel, and I couldn't really hit too well. Besides, I was tremendous. But I was always taller than all the other kids. So by the time I got to high school, I started to develop and grow into my body, and I became a pretty good basketball player. I wanted to play Division I basketball because I thought, hey, if I do okay, maybe I can actually play in the NBA or they have some really good leagues over in Europe. And that was my goal. About halfway through my senior year in high school, I tore ligaments in my ankle and wasn't unable to finish the season. So I wasn't able to attend a Division I school on a scholarship. I went to a smaller school. When I got to college, I still tried hard at basketball, but at that point, I started lifting weights. And I discovered that I liked lifting weights and I really liked to eat. So between those two things, yeah, between those two things, I ended up putting on like 60 or 70 pounds and I'm trying to run up and down a basketball court at 290 pounds. So the football coach comes to me and he's like, what do you do and come play football? So I'm like, okay, I'll get this football thing a shot. I found that because of my years of basketball, I was a very good athlete with very good footwork. And then my size and my strength and just my physical gifts made me an outstanding football player. And I thought I had a shot to play in the National Football League. Well, unfortunately, and I say unfortunately now, but looking back, it was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. But unfortunately, I suffered a severe knee injury that, for all intents and purposes, ended my football career. I did go to the Chicago Bears camp, but I was only able to stay for one day because you go through a very rigorous physical, including orthopedic testing. And my knee precluded me from playing professional football. I was devastated because I had a dream and my fingertips were on it, but I couldn't grasp it. It was devastated. For me, it was just horrible. But I started looking at my situation. I started looking at my assets, what I brought to the table. And I'm, as you can see, a very large guy, pretty athletic. I have a degree in English literature, so I was into drama and theater, and that's where I think, yeah, let's give it up for the English majors. I haven't read any Shakespeare in years. It's been replaced by economics and history, but what the heck? Most of all, though, and I'd always been a casual fan of professional wrestling. Most of all, I didn't want to get a real job, and I was like, well, yeah, that looks like fun. I couldn't do that. Well, I found out that I could do that, and I went, and my first lessons were in a promoter's hayloft, off to a very inauspicious start. I found a local group that's willing to train me, and my career was essentially born in a barn. Okay? Well, I spent the next year or so traveling around, often making no money, not even making enough money to pay for gas to drive a couple hundred miles to get beat up. Remember one time, this is a true story, I opened my pay envelope, and I discovered two buy one double cheeseburger, get one free from Burger King. That was my pay for the evening, okay? But I loved it, and I loved what I was doing, and I knew that I had a future in the professional wrestling industry. So I was able to convince my parents to lend me some money. I went down to a real wrestling school, which was the Great Malinko's Academy of Professional Wrestling in Tampa, Florida. In 1994, I got my first big break. I was asked to go to Puerto Rico to work full time. I was trepidatious because a Midwestern boy going to a Caribbean island didn't know how that was going to work, and also, in our business, the promoters, there's a saying, promoters come in two flavors, bad and worse. And the promoters in Puerto Rico were, their reputation were that they were the worst, but it turned out to be a great move for me. I got a lot of experience. They treated me fairly and always paid me on time. I lived close to the beach with a couple other guys, and I even got used to the occasional gunshot in the middle of the San Juan night. So all in all, it was a great experience. My next stop was in East Tennessee for Smoky Mountain Wrestling. Again, it was a small, we call them territories, it was a small company in many of the venues that we worked at were tiny. I called them witness protection program towns because if I was in the FBI's witness protection program, I don't want to go there because no one is ever going to find you, even though these places exist. 1995, I was signed with WWE. The thing was, though, again, it wasn't like my career took off like a rocket ship or anything like that. When I had an initial meeting with Vince McMahon, who is the CEO and president of WWE, I was so thrilled because they called me. They wanted me to come up to Stanford, Connecticut to have a meeting with Vince. So fly from Tyson McGee Airport in Knoxville to LaGuardia. They picked me up in a limousine. I've never been in a limousine before in my life. I'm like, this is the greatest thing ever. I'm a WWE superstar. It doesn't get any better than this. Be aware of one of those days where everything's going really great and your rocket ship has taken off and you're going straight to the moon and that blows an engine and you're plummeting downward very quickly. That happened. Vince comes in, we have some small talk, and then he says, Glenn, are you afraid to go to the dentist? I'm like, well, no, not really. Well, I've always had this idea for a wrestling dentist. What? Yeah, Isaac Yankham. I, Yankham. And then, yeah, right, but what's worse, it gets worse. Because Vince thought it'd be ironic if his wrestling dentist had rotten teeth. So I had to put makeup on my teeth to make them look decayed. And then if you've ever watched our show or been to a show, the guys always get to come out to really cool music and rock music. And I got a dental drill, okay? That was my music. So I'm sitting there, I'm like, and Vince is a billionaire, by the way. But I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, dude, you gotta be kidding me, right? You flew me all the way up here from Knoxville to tell me that you want me to be a wrestling dentist? Now, who's gonna take that seriously? Well, no one took it seriously. I didn't take it seriously, actually. I just couldn't get into the character and it was a monumental flop. And I thought that was the end of my WWE career. I spent the next couple years just sort of hovering around before I got my big break in 1995 when the character Kane was developed for me. And from there, things have gone really well. I've traveled all around the world. I've wrestled in front of millions of people, both live and on TV. I've had the pleasure of working with some of the greatest performers in the world. Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Stone Cold Steve Austin, baseball legend Pete Rose, Drew Carey, fellow libertarian, by the way. The Muppets, Kermit and I are pretty tight. I was even in a Scooby-Doo movie. Let me tell you something, folks, you know you've made it in pop culture when you're in a Scooby-Doo movie, okay? But when people look at me, I think they often just see that. They see sort of the finished product. They don't see the process that I went through to be able to get to that. Again, the reason I've been able to do the things that I've been able to do is not necessarily because I'm special. I do have a unique skill set. Not a lot of people are cut out to be professional wrestlers. But I found something that I was good at. And I had the opportunity to go out and do it. But if you look, I failed time and time again throughout my life at things that I tried. The free market means nothing if it means nothing other than the ability to fail and try again until you achieve greatness, until you achieve what you want to achieve. I had a friend last night, we were talking about this, and he said a lot of you guys may not remember this system, but how many of you remember the Atari 2600, the original sort of, okay? It's like a reset button on the Atari 2600, the market is. You can mess up your game. You can fail time and time again, but you can always reach up and hit the reset button and start over again. Often when people are talking about the free market, they'll talk about results or they'll talk about market failures. The market is a process. Often when they're talking about market failures, the reason that they're talking about a failure is because the market just hasn't got around to solving it yet. Or in some cases, of course, because the government has gotten involved and messed things up and now, instead of addressing the initial intervention in the market, we address the secondary intervention or the tertiary intervention or whatever order of intervention that there is. For example, you're here with the housing market, the housing crash. The market failed. Well, the market didn't fail at all. What happened was the Federal Reserve printed tons and tons and tons of money, shot it out in the economy, and then the fiscal policy of the federal government directed it into the housing market causing a huge bubble. And then along the way, the federal government created a secondary mortgage market, which took the responsibility away from the primary lenders, chopped all these toxic assets up and threw them out into the market, which would have never existed in the market itself. But somehow that becomes a market failure. It was a government failure. And at this point, thankfully, that's pretty clear. Then also when we talk about market failures, often our innovations are things that become so commonplace and we rely on them so much that when they don't work, they become failures, right? So our cell phone, if it doesn't work like we want it to work, people fuss about it. But we didn't even have these things 15 years ago. If you think about it, I'm standing here in the middle of Atlanta, Georgia, where it'd be 95 degrees today. I'm one of those people that I just perspire a lot. I'm a big guy. I can't, these lights are actually killing me, okay? But I'm serious, I'm out of my campaign knocking on doors. I'm just like, gosh, I'm out in the sun trying to look cool. That just doesn't work for me. But it's going to be 90 degrees today or whatever it's going to be. But I'm standing here in relative comfort because of this thing that we have called air conditioning. Andrew Carnegie was the richest man in the world, one of the richest men in the world. I think he is misaccurately described as a robber baron. He was a great entrepreneur. He was worth at the peak of his wealth about $480 million, which is $310 billion in today's money. He died in 1919. Residential air conditioning was not introduced until 1920. So we are all enjoying something that at one point, the richest man in the world never even got to experience. And it wasn't because the government decided that it would be great if we all had air conditioning. It was because entrepreneurs were trying to solve a problem. And what happened was they were actually working on one problem and then realized that their solution was applicable to something else. And we see that all through the market. That might have been a failure. In fact, we see inventions that are considered failures because they don't solve the problem or they don't do what the inventor envisions. But what ends up happening is someone else comes along and says, this would be great for that. And because of that, our lives are better, all of our lives. The market gives us the ability to fail and then to succeed. And that's important on a number of levels, not only as an entire society, but as individuals. The left, and I have some friends who are on the left, but the left consider themselves compassionate. They're trying to protect people from failure. That doesn't work because what they're really doing is putting people in a box where they can't fail, where they're comfortable enough to be happy with mediocrity instead of striving for greatness. Thomas Jefferson said that timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous seas of liberty. On the seas of liberty in the free market, sometimes you're going to get thrown on the rocks. I have in my life. I've got thrown on the rocks. But if you have an ability, and we all have that, if you have the desire, if you have the perseverance, you get back up and you're able to do something great with your life and you learn from your mistakes and you find out what your life really is. And that's the transformation that I'm talking about. I've seen that throughout my entire life. I've gone from a little kid who just could barely walk and chew gum at the same time to a high school athlete who is pretty good, to a college athlete who is pretty good, to an elite college athlete, and then to a professional athlete. Maybe not in the way that I saw when I was a little bitty kid, but nevertheless, I was able to achieve that dream. And the only place that I could do that was here in America because we have a free market and we have the ability to fail and then we have the ability to grow and to succeed. That's what transformation is all about, not only on a social level, but also as individuals. That's why the free market is so important. That's why liberty is so important. That's why organizations such as FEE are so important. Thank you guys so much for being here today and I really appreciate it. Have a great time. Thank you.