Have you?

Yeah.

Picked her up and started twirling around and she went, put me

it's a little handbag that was given to me by mr valentino himself it's by valentino i've given it to you to auction

until You have had the unfortunate necessity to understand what the hospice movement does.

You can't imagine how important the role is.

These places are the lifeline.

... what does it do to my 401[k]?

Yeah, look, equity financing is actually coming up into conversation again because this is a lot of balance sheet constraints on the banks who helped, not only help the paper come to market through IPOs, but then actually lend to the, you know, not only buy side, but other areas of the market to borrow and basically buy stocks, and that is coming under more pressure.

Are we asleep about any instabilities to come up here? I mean, in, in personal finance, retirement, wealth management, are we all asleep right now?

So right now as the macro picture stands with growth and inflation where it is, I think we can expect maybe a reverse of the Powell cuts and maybe a, a subsequent maybe 75 basis points of hikes just to reset the le- levels and basically get, um, markets, you know, even.

You're fearless

...

I'm f- absolutely fearless.

The fear came later.

And then from there, Cameron Mackintosh saw me, uh, and th- they were casting Les Mis.

Les Mis was about to happen at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Trevor Nunn directing.

I was obsessed with him as a director.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And when I was doing my radio show, I heard this, and I went, "We've got to play this, and I want to play it all the time." So we kind of championed it, and, um, it started getting traction, became a hit.

And, uh, so I said, "Let's get her in, and she can play live, and we can chat." Everyone had said to me, "You should meet her.

She's amazing." She came in.

It was the last show we did before lockdown, so it was the last live guest we ever had.

She came in.

I'd have been at the O2 the night before performing.

So how, how does someone like Amy identify what is a Michael Ball song?

Mm.

"What advice?" And they're sort of looking for technical advice and, uh, how to go about auditions and stuff like that.

I said, "No, no, no, no, no.

You either c- can do that or you can't.

The best advice I can give you is it's not about landing that job.

It's about landing the second job.

It's about being a company member that people enjoy working with.

Mm

What did you listen to?

I listened to...

So there was a period in, in, uh, uh, my family's life.

We, where my dad, 1970, and so I'm eight, uh, we moved to South Africa for three years.

And in those days, full apartheid, sanctions, there was no television.

There was huge censorship.

So we had to make our own entertainment, and my dad and mum rented a house there.

Yeah

Can you give us a service sector component yet or goods component, or you're not there?

No, I mean, I've taken a look.

It looks nice compared to what we were expecting.

Obviously, we all know January can often be a shock from prices resetting just normally, and then there's obviously the seasonality factors.

And taking that aside, we're not seeing a whole lot of one tariff pass-through, which there was this concern that, you know, after we'd sort of seen the dust settle, you know, businesses would use January or the new year to basically reset higher.

I'm looking at apparel.

I'm looking at home furniture.

Okay, yeah.

f-... focusing more on things like the weekly jobless claims, which, um, didn't really get as affected by the government shutdown because these are state-compiled numbers.

Yeah, I think the continuing claim's interesting.

You did see some of that picked up in other survey data, uh, and also what I'm looking at a lot is now the Beige Book.

The trending there has been much weaker.

You have obviously three points: growth, inflation, and the labor market there where you can kind of extract a trend.

And all of it's been sort of negative, including the inflation, which has seemed to be stabilized, moved sort of from the forefront in the summer now to something secondary.

And instead now guys are talking about lower sales, lower activity, lower investment.

(laughs)