Leighton Roberts

So we've got markets up.

one minute down the next and we're just interested, you speak to businesses all the time, like what are you hearing out of the businesses and the people who are following you?

Yeah, it just seems to move so fast.

I was lucky enough to be in San Francisco two or three weeks ago.

A company called Stripe, which does a huge amount of payments around the world, some maybe 1.7% or something of...

of global GDP goes through it.

And one of their founders, John Collison, gave a session on the economy, which is really worth watching, but one of the things he called out is the difference between these other bubbles and the relationship between profit.

and valuation.

And if you go back to previous bubbles, in fact, the worst, sort of the dot-com bubble, which was where, for a weird time, the least profitable businesses were the most valuable.

And right now, despite it sort of having these feelings of bubbleness and overhype and stuff, we've got a time where the most profitable businesses are outperforming on valuation materially, which almost sort of is quite...

rational for the markets so those things are interesting but this AI stuff, how's it going to flow through and is there anything that you're seeing on the ground in smaller businesses and everyday Kiwi lives that you're seeing with AI?

When you're advising these businesses, like you say one in four believe that it might improve the business in some way, do you think these are businesses that end up performing better?

You can see there's an age where you may be less motivated and you're more happy with the status quo and stuff like that.

Part of that's quite exciting as we have this massive...

Movement happening at the moment of businesses moving into new hands, younger hands, generational changes and material differences in the way the businesses are run, particularly marketed, operated, and as a result, the numbers that are coming out of it.

So I wonder how we're forecasting that into the government books and stuff.

Another thing that people have a lot more exposure to today is just the amount of noise around everything, like it's pretty easy to get sucked into whatever vortex you want to really on social media, and that can go either way.

But from what you're seeing, do you think it's helping or is it just amplifying anxiety?

So with the overwhelmed side and just broadly with the people wanting all this information,

I mean you touched on it a little bit then but what is like the single piece of advice that you try to give them just to walk away with?