 Welcome, my name is Jeff Deist. I am president of the Mises Institute. I'd like to thank you very much for coming today. And we'd especially like to thank the donor who made this possible today. His or her name is Anonymous. So we shall leave it at that. And as far as the actual high school students who are here today, I would like to say congratulations. Now why congratulations, you might ask? Well, congratulations are in order simply because you managed to be here today, either with us or watching online. Just being here today means that you managed to find out about the Mises Institute. It means you managed to find out about this seminar that's taking place today. And it also means that you managed to have an interest in today's topic of inflation, or at least sort of a broader interest in the topic of economics itself. It also means you managed to sift through all the white noise that's out there that bombards you every day, whether websites, games, texts, apps, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest, YouTube, et cetera. Now notice I didn't mention Facebook. I'm not going to insult any of you. Your parents are busy on that. And I'm going to admit I know what Pinterest is. I don't know what Vine is. But you managed to sift through all these vast amounts of information that are available to you and find the information that led you to attend our seminar today. You also chose to come here today and consume the information that our speakers are going to provide as opposed to consuming information from millions of other sources out there. So this is really one of the most important challenges you'll face as younger people in today's world. And that's to sift through the noise and discover what's important to you. So kudos on being good sifters. I think just being here today sets you above your peers. But it's interesting, sifting wasn't always the most important part of education. Just getting information used to be the hardest part. Having access to information used to be the hardest part. You can ask your parents about this. This is actually a very dark, dark time in human history. And a lengthy time too, it's called the pre-internet age. And believe it or not, humans went many tens of thousands of years until about the early 90s in the pre-internet age. Now speaking of sifting through information, I'd like to ask, if I could get a show of hands, how many of you are familiar with or have seen the Drudge Report online? OK, so a lot of you have seen the Drudge Report. Well, the Drudge Report is a news aggregation website, which means its proprietor, Matt Drudge, spends his days going through a vast universe of information and to bring together the news stories that he thinks will be important to his readers. Or that his readers will find interesting. So I thought I'd give you a few interesting facts about Matt Drudge that might interest you or even inspire you since you're in high school. First, he graduated 341st out of 355 kids, young people, in his high school class, and he never attended college. So after high school and this dominating academic performance, he worked at McDonald's, he worked as a telemarketer, and he worked at 7-Eleven in the years following. And by his own account, these are the only jobs for which he was remotely qualified. He started the Drudge Report in the early 1990s with a very simple computer that his father bought him. His father insisted on buying him. And he began the Drudge Report in a one-bedroom apartment. The Drudge Report started out really small. It was just an email to, I guess today we call it a listserv, but it was a blast email he sent out to just a few friends and he covered topics like political gossip and entertainment and media. And eventually, it grew into an email that went out to about 1,000 people, and at that point, he started the actual website we know today as the Drudge Report. So in 1996, before most of you were probably born, he seized on an opportunity to report what was at the time a big story that Jack Kemp was going to be the vice presidential running mate of Bob Dole for the Republican Party nomination. So this was a big story. And then in 1998, he absolutely scooped the major media of the time by reporting the Monica Lewinsky scandal that plagued the second Clinton administration. So these stories, among others, catapulted the Drudge Report into becoming a very popular website. It actually made it one of the most highly visited news sources on the internet. So here we've got one guy in an apartment with a computer and he's rivaling the biggest news organizations in the world. Now he's never changed the basic design of the Drudge Report. If you look at it, it looks exactly the same as it did in the 1990s, very simple architecture. But what's not so simple is those little banner ads that are in them because Mr. Drudge makes more than a million dollars annually. So those pop-up ads pay Mr. Drudge some money. And the final thing I'll leave you with about Matt Drudge is that the concept of a news aggregator didn't even exist when he started out. So in that sense, he's almost like Steve Jobs. He created an entirely new product and went out and found a market for it. So Matt Drudge is a very successful guy today. But not in the traditional sense. He's not a doctor or a lawyer. He's not a Wall Street big shot. He is a sifter of sorts, which is what all of you will need to be if you hope to find success in the modern world. You'll have to sift through a lot of irrelevant information to get to what's important to you. Of course, that's why we are so happy and so gratified that you've managed to find or have already found at this young point in your lives, the Mises Institute. And that's why we hope very much that you will use the Mises Institute as part of your education going forward and as part of your life going forward. So now I realize this is starting to sound Mark a little bit like a commencement speech. And it's just supposed to be an introduction. So I'm gonna let you in on Matt Drudge's secret, which is simple. His secret to success is simple, but it's not easy. And this is a tweet he issued forth. He tweeted in November of last year. He said, secret, I do not multitask. I give what I'm doing full attention with integrity and focus. Reason I've had success in cluttered manic world. So that, ladies and gentlemen, is a task before all of us. I think adults and high school students will like today and good advice for all of us. Easier said than done. But it is the key, apparently, to Mr. Drudge's success. So I know none of you text while you drive, right? For example, okay, we'll stick with Mr. Drudge here and get away from multitasking and use our brains to their full stability by focusing.