Ferrol had a vague oh-shite moment when instead of pursuing the sports talk, Brian pursued the numbers talk. Ferrol had known Brian was a businessman; that he worked with numbers, which he now suspected, he hadn't known. Not that he did know now, but yeah.
"It's just a small thing, a few colleagues," he said negligently. As if it wasn't as important to him as it was--for Ferrol loved his work, even if he pretended he never worked. He was proud, very much so, that he was doing so well in his field, even if he published under another name and wore a faint glamour. "Some papers being presented and discussed, much yelling that people are wrong and eviscerating their characters along with their work. You know, the usual." He smiled a sharp, anticipatory smile.
"I predict the future," Ferrol declared dramatically, then laughed, winked, and laughed again. "I compile and jumble statistics and the like, crunch them all, create formulae to process them and analyze the patterns in order to see what the most likely probabilities for the future is." It was, essentially, a laymen Muggle's definition of Arithmancy, and one it had taken him quite awhile to create once he'd been introduced to the Muggle world.