entrepreneurial community? william dunkelberg is the chief economist for the nfib. brian hamilton is the co-founder and ceo of save work a company that developed software for financial professionals and small businesses. brian hecht is a serial new media entrepreneur and phil town is an investment adviser and best-selling author. great to see all of you. all right, phil, you have been here every year, i think, doing this with us at the end of the year, so i want to start with you, also, because we cited your survey. optimism up three months in a row. in your crystal ball, do you expect this to continue next year? >> well, i think it will continue. as we look at the basics in the economy, we see that, you know, either we're just getting used to bad news and so we're going to try to ignore it and move forward, or some good things are happening. and i think the latter is the case. so we did see an improvement in the optimism index. and in particular, inside of the index, the ten components, seven of them went up, put some nice numbers in place. and as you cited, what was