 Hey, wow. Welcome to FECON! Woo! Hey, it is so awesome to see everybody here today. How was last night? Do you guys enjoy that? Dad's garage was hilarious. Lou Perez was awesome. I'm glad you're all here in Atlanta. You know, it is an awesome, awesome thing today on Adam Smith, the father of economics, his 294th birthday. I know we can nerd out a little bit here, right? That we are all here, and we have here at FECON this year over 700 people, which is awesome and so far beyond any of our expectations. We have people from Australia, Georgia, India, Nigeria, Sri Lanka. In fact, we have somebody here from Australia who traveled almost 10,000 miles to be here, which is awesome. So, thank you everyone for being here. So, we're so excited about the program that we're going to run for you this weekend. We're so excited that you're here. Just like Glenn was saying, we're going to run through everything that you can use to individually change the world for the better. We're going to run through urbanism, entrepreneurship, economics, technology. There's a hack day going on where people are learning how to do different things and create value for others. We're going to cover the gamut, really, of human knowledge and how you can use it to improve the world. So, we're really excited about all the sessions that we have ready for you here today. The real point of FECON is for you to circumvent the system, to overcome the obstacles, to go around the rules that are put intentionally in some ways to thwart progress. We want you to be able to hack the system in a way that, again, allows you to realize your dreams. I love this graphic because sometimes when we're thinking about how we're going to work our lives and advance our own careers, we see a maze in front of us. But all you have to do is go around. You have to create a new way of doing things. And that's what we hope that you're going to get out of FECON this weekend. So, before I go any further and kind of continue with the program, I want to tell you a little bit about what brought me to this way of thinking. When I was a kid, we would have a lot of conversations around the dinner table. About where my family came from and why we were so happy to be in the United States. And this is a picture of me and some of my family at one of those dinner table conversations. I'm probably a little young to recognize exactly what's going on here in this picture, but at least I knew that it was being taken. You see, my dad was from Poland. He's actually right here in the front row if we could give a hand to dad. And from a very early age, I was able to learn what made the United States different from other places. Because here we had a roof over our heads. We had food for every meal. We had two cars, which is kind of exceptional even in the 20th century. We had even enough computer equipment to keep me tinkering. This is a picture of me as I was preparing for my fifth grade portrait. The other kids didn't seem to think it was as cool a thing that I had a computer keyboard for my fourth grade portrait. But I loved it. So we had a lot of stuff. We weren't wealthy by any means, but we had enough and we felt wealthy ourselves. Here's a picture of my dad's family in Poland. And so when my dad was eight years old, he moved from a communist dictatorial state to the United States and was able to create a new life for himself and become a successful entrepreneur. And it was through those initial formative conversations that I first appreciated that a billion minds acting individually for their own self-interest are superior to a single mastermind trying to control everything from the top down. And so from that point, I began to understand, as Glenn was saying, the amazing power of the market to find ways to serve people well. So that's, again, what we're doing here at FICON. I'd love to talk with each of you if possible about my own story, to talk about why you're here and to hear how all the sessions go this week. We're really, really excited that you're here. So before we do anything else, I want to do a couple housekeeping notes. How many folks have downloaded the FICON app? Just give me a round of applause. All right. So the FICON app is especially important because through it you're able to figure out your sessions, you're able to plan your schedule, exchange contact information, get announcements as we have them. Please go to the iTunes Store or to the Google Play Store and download the app. It's free of charge and it'll enhance your experience greatly. The other thing I need to mention is for everything that you post on social media, we would love for you to hashtag FICON so that we can see everything that everyone's up to. Now, I have to acknowledge the fact that we have so many generous sponsors at this event. The premier sponsor of which is the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation. Let's give them a round of applause. They support both FICON and a bunch of other groups in our world that strive for ideas to improve the world and to improve people's lives. The other sponsor I would love to mention is Freedom Factor. Let's give them a round of applause. Freedom Factor, they have a mission to distribute 100 million constitutions of the United States all around the country so that they can help to unify people underneath that document. Thank you Freedom Factor. Well, I'm going to continue with the program and I'm going to introduce our next speaker. I was actually driving home from work the other day and I turn on NPR. I love NPR and there's a show called On Being which talks about religion, talks about spirituality, talks about ideas and I heard a familiar voice which I wasn't expecting and that voice was Matt Kibbey and Matt was on a show talking with somebody who many people would actually assume to be ideological opponents for what we're talking about here today and in fact Matt's ideological opponent. He was talking with this person, he was conversing with this person to build bridges, to build bridges between the right and the left and the center to bring us all together because we have so much more in common than sometimes people want to admit. So I was listening to Matt, he was talking with this woman who considers herself progressive, building bridges, that's what Matt's career is all about and Matt Kibbey, he was the founder of Freedom Works in 2004 serving as its president until a few years ago. He's now the president and the chief community organizer of Free the People which is an awesome organization, I hope he talks about. He is the author most recently of the New York Times, number two best seller, don't hurt people and don't take their stuff which I think is an awesome way to describe what we believe at fee. Everyone let's welcome to the stage Matt Kibbey. How's everybody doing? Okay, be honest how many of you have not gone to bed yet from last night? The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only way to defend true liberty. James Madison said that and I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to teach at Madison's ancestral home Montpelier and I was talking to a bunch of congressional staffers most of whom aspire to power, they aspire to take their superior knowledge of how the world works and redesign things from the top down. And I had a chance to sort of dig into American history and to figure out what Madison was talking about when he said that. And I had a chance to check out Madison's home and when you walk through Madison's home there is pictures all over the place. He had pictures of his intellectual mentors, he had pictures of intellectual enemies, but he also had a picture of his teacher, a guy named John Witherspoon. John Witherspoon was an immigrant and he was a member of this radical sect called Scottish Common Sense Realism. He was reading guys like Adam Smith who at the time was writing the theory of moral sentiments about how it is that we come together with the respect for liberty and property without anyone telling us to do that because it's the right thing to do. But he was also reading this guy Adam Ferguson and Adam Ferguson at the time was writing about the wisdom of crowds. He was writing about this process, this mysterious process by which people do whatever they want, pretty much regardless of the designs of government. They somehow come together and they somehow develop a culture and institutions and solutions to problems in a way that even the smartest politician could not have imagined. This is 1750s. Think about how radical that concept is. We all love to quote the founding fathers now and it's called conservative, but James Madison's teacher, he wasn't a conservative at all. At the time the idea that people are smarter than government was not only radical, it was almost unacceptable. And yet James Madison, because an immigrant smuggled really cheap goods across the border into our country, this idea of liberty and the power of people figuring stuff out, the wisdom of crowds, this was a basis by which the founding fathers decided that they were going to do something different and put the power with the people and allow for liberty to govern and to strictly limit the power of the government itself. It's a radical idea. Many, many years later Frederick Hayek, one of my intellectual mentors, was trying to figure out how to explain to his colleagues in the economics profession how it is that socialism fails. And he's talking to market socialists, Mises, Ludwig von Mises had already crushed the idea that real socialism could work because you couldn't possibly allocate resources without prices and without that structure of production. But Hayek was still struggling because they said, okay, we're going to have markets, but we're going to plan markets from the top down. He's talking to Keynesians, he's talking to market socialists, he's talking to every single freaking technocrat that aspires through quadratic equations to redesign how you guys live your lives. And he's banging his head against the wall. Hayek's like, look guys, there's something about this market process. There's something about the way that you and I and everybody else in civil society comes together to do things that no one's ever been able to do before because they respect the fact that each of us is different. Each of us knows something that nobody else knows. Each of us has aspirations. Each of us goes through the process that Keynes is describing by which you get to that ultimate, penultimate position in your career where you're hanging out with Scooby-Doo. That's freedom. But Hayek was failing. Most people think that Hayek lost the calculation debate that he was having with Keynesians and socialists because he was trying to describe this process. And back then, it was hard to see. Adam Ferguson saw it, James Madison saw it, but most people couldn't imagine this idea that you could somehow do all this beautiful stuff without a plan. I always wonder what Madison and Jefferson and Mises would think about the world we live in today where technology and social media and all of these ways that there is radical disintermediation and democratization of information and knowledge and human relationships and the way that we put food on the table. All of this stuff looks a lot like what Ferguson was talking about. These magical things happen when you just get out of the way. So would Madison tweet that? Would he post a meme on Facebook? Would Molly take away his Snapchat account because he had gone way too far? Maybe. When I was a kid, finding liberty was a hard thing to do. I stumbled across a rock album when I was 13 years old. A band called Rush published an album called 2112. This is back in the days when albums were actually albums and these are sacred vinyl discs that you would take out of the liner notes and you would sit down and before you rocked out, you would read the liner notes. This particular album was dedicated to the genius of this dude, Ayn Rand. I'm 13 years old, I don't know who this guy is, but man, this album is awesome. This album is about this overbearing society where everything is planned from the top down and somebody knows better than you are and I thought this is so cool. I stumbled across a book, an old earmarked copy of Anthem by Ayn Rand and I immediately devoured it and I followed the breadcrumbs and I tried to find every book that she had written eventually, even though it wasn't in the library. We had these things back in the day called bookstores. You actually drove to them and we had these paper things called books. She eventually says, you got to read this guy, Ludwig von Mises, if you want to understand economics. Do you know how hard it was to find a copy of Human Action when I was 16 years old? I don't know how I found it but I read it, I didn't understand it but I was trying to figure it out and by accident my dad was transferred to a place called Grove City, Pennsylvania. I didn't want to go to college, my dad wanted me to go to college. I discovered Austrian economics, I discovered the foundation for economic education and today if I had gone through that whole process it would have taken me about two seconds because I would have just Googled it. That's what people do today. This is the radical transformation that those of us who believe in liberty face today. There's an opportunity to do things that we've never done before and it's all based on the philosophy that you and I believe in. It's the belief that you and I can change the world and fundamentally transform the conversation from the bottom up regardless of what Marxist professors are telling us, regardless of mainstream media, regardless of any single politician that has designs on your life because the power has all shifted back to the end user. This is our opportunity. This is our opportunity to talk to people that don't think they agree with anything that we believe in. We talk to young democratic socialists, we talk to progressives, we can talk to people all the way down at the long tail of the internet who don't even know that they care about liberty because they're too busy living it. They're too busy taking care of their families and pursuing their dreams and working really hard to get ahead and to achieve careers the way that Cain described. Now there's a little bit of time for them to understand why defending liberty, why defending these ideas from any potentate that would steal them from us is worthy to do. But we've got to do things different. It's not about reading a book anymore, it's not about human action, it's not about a professor standing behind a podium lecturing to us. We've got to get into the popular culture and I joked about Scooby-Doo but we will know we succeeded when Scooby-Doo is quoting human action instead of the guy up on the stage. That's where we go, we go upstream of politics, we get into the popular culture and we do things that have never been done before. We can change the world, you guys can change the world, I'm too old to do it and we can do this, we can do whatever we want as long as we don't hurt people or take their stuff. Thank you guys so much.