Now I can broadcast to an audience of several million people on the 'Today' programme. I can talk about the day's news. But on radio, believe it or not, we have notes and scripts. And while we might ad lib the odd wryly amusing asides, they come at the frequency of a suburban bus. About one every 90 minutes.
Now undoubtedly, we face some very British challenges when it comes to infrastructure. We rightly cherish our back yards and green spaces, and we'll defend them passionately when projects are announced. We live in a democracy, and we like to debate these things, often for many years.
Phyllis is one of the tunnel boring machines for Crossrail and one of the most extraordinary characters I met, visiting some of the most exciting infrastructure in Britain. Crossrail is the new railway which will run from West to East right across London. It is the biggest engineering project in Europe - and Phyllis herself is not exactly dainty.
The fact that radio is so hopeless at delivering data makes it an uncluttered medium, offering the basic story without the detailed trappings. But it does mean that if data is important, radio is probably not your place.
The Germans are clear about what they do - cars and machine tools; the Japanese are clear about what they do - electronics; the Chinese are clear about what they do - they're the workshop of the world.
The new industries are brainy industries and so-called knowledge workers tend to like to be near other people who are the same. Think of the City of Hollywood. People cluster. This means you have winning regions, such as London and Cambridge, and losing regions. The people who want to be top lawyers in Sunderland are hoovered up by London.
I actually profoundly think the world's a better place when economics is fairly boring... The more boring the better.
What comes with a job as a staff member of the BBC is a certain self-censoring that you get utterly used to. You don't say everything you think. You hold back on some things.
When a population saves a lot, the funds are invested outside the country as well as inside. If the Japanese invest in the United States, it pushes their exchange rate down and makes their manufacturing more competitive.
Black Friday is not another bad hair day in Wall Street. It's the term used by American retailers to describe the day after the Thanksgiving Holiday, seen as the semi-official start of Christmas shopping season.
Even though disciplined sleeping habits and the adrenalin of live radio ensures that we are very awake while on duty, there is evidence of a phenomenon called circadian desynchronosis which causes one's brain to function slowly at those times of day when it thinks it should be asleep, regardless how wide awake the body is.
We escaped the last big bursting of a bubble - the dotcom bubble - with a relatively light U.S. recession. On that occasion, the world economy found its way back on track fairly quickly.
We Brits print banknotes out in Debden in Essex, and have contracted it out to the private sector. Here in the U.S. it is a government operation right in the heart of Washington next door to the Holocaust Museum.
