Cloud Technology Down Under: Navigating Global Trade, AI in Education, and Remote Work in New Zealand and Australia

Mark Smith: 0:00
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. Welcome everybody to the Ecosystem Podcast. We're your hosts, collaborators. What else do we do together? We probably can't cover everything, can we on?

Chris Huntingford: 0:27
this show? No, probably not.

Mark Smith: 0:29
It's not long now till we're going to all be in Slovenia, of course, having the time of our life at Dynamics Mines. I heard the event's almost fully sold out. It's going to be epic. If you haven't booked your ticket, there's no excuse like it's too far to travel, because I'm coming from the bottom of the bloody world and it's a long way for me to travel, and I'm going to be leaving my two kids one being three, one being one and a half with my wife for 10 days to do this epic journey. So please come along to Dynamics Minds and hang out with us. Will is offered to record a podcast at the event or something about a dinner and a show. I don't know what that's all about, but that could be entertaining. We have our panel that we're doing.

Mark Smith: 1:13
We have our panel at Dynamics Minds. Anyhow, this has been the longest introduction, Andrew. What are we talking about today?

Andrew Welch: 1:20
Yeah, so we had a. I had a message from one of our listeners and he was talking to me about I'm looking, I'm going to kind of paraphrase this, this message but he was talking with me about how the lot one of the recent episodes got him thinking beyond the day to day life in his work with Power Platform In his case he's a Power Platform consultant and he was talking about how, basically, he spends a lot of time arguing with customers about how much data versus storage capacity they need. And the conversation developed a little bit and I asked are your customers not thinking particularly deeply about this? And he said you know, some of the larger ones are, but to give you an idea of scale, our largest customers and he's in New Zealand, our largest customers in New Zealand would be SMB or small medium business by US or EU standards.

Andrew Welch: 2:18
And as we went on, I thought that this was really really interesting and brought up some interesting questions about scale when comes to how the technology, how cloud technology and Microsoft technology specifically is used, particularly in different economies where you have different population dynamics around scale. So I pointed out you raised this really interesting topic. I'm an American living in a country about the fifth the population of the United States. He's an American living in a country much smaller than the United States, you know. So I thought we could talk a little bit about how geographic variation and population variation and the different dynamics in business culture are impacting cloud ecosystems around the world.

Mark Smith: 3:09
Interesting. Interesting Because it's been something that in the last three years has became abundantly clear to me in the understanding, particularly of people out of North America and or Europe and their understanding of the geography of the world and the smallness of things below the equator. And I'm not referring just to myself here when I talk about smallness. What I'm referring to is let me just show you quickly here on screen an example, just so, for those of you that are visual, you can see this. If you're listening to the audio podcast, go watch it on YouTube if you want to see the Bandages can now be applied on wet skin, thanks to new technology.

Andrew Welch: 3:55
Forget the most popular section.

Mark Smith: 3:56
Look at this here's the northern hemisphere. Here's why it's home to 90% of the world's population. This is at 2022. This number is still only 10 percent of the world live below this line here. Look at little new zealand it's tiny af. What you have here is a very low number. Lesson it's about 10 of the world's population live down here. Now you play that forward into business. That means 10 of the deals in the world that are very large are down here. Like it's a very and that's all these countries right.

Mark Smith: 4:30
So, because I used to work for a very large global company they would always talk about well, you need to add more zeros to the deals that you're doing. You need to make you know sell larger. Like we're not interested in million-dollar deals. I only bring $10 million deals to the table when we're talking about the power platform and I'm like so I called this guy particularly on this. I said how many Fortune 500 companies do you believe are in Australia? Oh well, at least three. I said well, the concept of Fortune 500 is actually a US-only measurement and so there's none. None are headquartered or fully owned or operated. Yes, we have provincial offices from those large corporations in these countries, but they're not the decision-making arm of the business right when it comes to $10 million IT spends in building solutions. So I just wanted to ground that for everybody around this question. That's coming from Nathan about the discussion on sizing Andrew back to you.

Andrew Welch: 5:33
I think, to just drive this home, one of the things that I think is very difficult for those who live in, maybe, an incredibly densely populated place. So Europe is incredibly densely populated, I believe. Actually, the EU has a higher population, has a larger population than the United States, though maybe without the UK it drops below. But if you come from Europe or if you come, like me, from the Northeastern United States, I don't think it's hard to have a real concept of density, right? So Australia, for example, is an absolutely enormous place. This is something, by the way, that Canadians certainly will understand, right?

Andrew Welch: 6:20
But Australia is an incredibly large, vast place that only has 24 million people living in it, so that's basically the population of Romania or the population of New York State living on an entire continent. You see this in I'm just going to carry on with Australia, right? You see this in some of the non-technology business dynamics, right? So Australia is dominated by two airlines, right Qantas and Virgin Australia. I believe that Australia has a higher concentration, kind of market share concentration in a few grocery companies, right? Because, if you think about it, 24 million people just doesn't give you the population to spawn multiple large, competitive airlines, and that's not to say anything for New Zealand, which is five and a half million people in terms of population. If New Zealand were a US state I looked this up it would be the 24th largest state. There would be 23 states larger in population than New.

Mark Smith: 7:36
Zealand like in New Zealand, we have one national airline and they go after this whole thing of support local, you know, support your local. The problem is they're the most expensive airline to fly in and out of New Zealand. Just a case in point. Right, I just booked my tickets yesterday Now when I say I did, my wife did to the Power Platform Conference in Vegasgas, right?

Mark Smith: 8:07
later is no, no, I'm I'm coming meg's not coming unfortunately, someone has to look after the children, and so leave the small one with the three-year-old, but you got it.

Mark Smith: 8:17
You got that robot that cuts your grass right yeah, yeah, it's man, I can, man, don't get on my mower. It's just the most epic thing ever. Anyhow, we went through. So you know, I have airpoints, I have status with that airline, I log in and I go to book the flights and, for whatever reason, we got distracted. Time out, we went back and, of course, the flights had gone up. Surprisingly, the identical same flights, which was a co-chair flight with United Airlines. Right? So United Airlines fly in and out of New Zealand and it was a co-chair flight. And I was like when I was living in the UK, I'd set up account with United Airlines because I was flying, you know, across the Atlantic. It made sense I hate British Airways with a vengeance, I hate British Airways with a vengeance. And so I was like let's just try the same flights on United. They were $300 cheaper than booking through my local statist count.

Andrew Welch: 9:16
Like New Zealand dollars or real dollars.

Mark Smith: 9:18
We're talking real dollars, cheaper Real dollars Than booking through our local airlines. And this is the thing when countries have monopolies on things, even like airlines. Honestly, it doesn't matter that you're you know, it's about looking after your citizens or your fellow countrymen or anything like that. They screw you over Anyhow.

Andrew Welch: 9:37
My little side rant no, I think that that's actually very. I think that that's very interesting. And I wonder, and I don't know right, does that dynamic in the market for anything right? New Zealand's got one national airline. I don't know how many grocery store chains New Zealand has, but Australia has this, like I said, this hype too, right? So does that dynamic depress innovation in some way? Or does it change the calculus around technology-based modernization? Right? We don't need to do A, b and C to modernize. We don't need to make this kind of investment because, well, why we don't have a competitive pressure to do so? I don't know if it does or doesn't. I'm curious what do you guys see?

Mark Smith: 10:32
Yeah, well, there's two things. There's a mindset as well that goes with it. So I chose some years ago not to work for New Zealand companies, and the reason is is that it's like extracting teeth Every little price point, every like it's. They want everything for free, right? They want the best technology, they want to pay for it, they want and this is where, oh, they're perfect for Power Platform. Then Exactly right, it's this whole.

Mark Smith: 10:59
It's a mindset of being a miser, right, and I, for me, I've been indoctrinated enough with American mindsets in a way that you know about being optimistic about the opportunities out there are just yours to behold, right, it's the American dream, and I suppose from my years of being indoctrinated with Amway back in the day that I bought into this concept, and so now I find it very hard to work with New Zealand businesses. I find it very hard to make New Zealand dollars. I'd much rather earn USD, euro or pounds, because it seems like for the amount of work and the return on investment is so much better working in the Northern Hemisphere than it is in the Southern Hemisphere, than it is in the Southern Hemisphere.

Andrew Welch: 11:47
I will say, though, if we were going to go down this road, we probably should not have chosen airlines as our point of departure, because if anyone has ever flown on a US-based airline or gotten a glimpse of the nightmare that are their computer systems, then airlines are not where technical innovation thrives.

Chris Huntingford: 12:10
It's an interesting point he was making about monopolies though, because let's face it, as soon as you have a monopoly on anything, it absolutely restricts competition, it increases prices and it lowers quality. You know, even we wind back to the invisible hand of the free market of Adam Smith. He even stated back then in the Wealth of Nations book that monopolies do not equal success, and they harm not just the overall economy but all the advancements you can make, as well as then the consumer wealth from behind it. So I mean it was an interesting point to bring up, although what I'm trying to get to is how we relate that back to nathan's question.

Mark Smith: 12:48
Yeah, yeah and let's wait till andrew comes back on and and to get some clarity around what the core of that question is and and how do you address it. But it's an interesting thing you bring up there, is that? Because every time I see either the government divesting its assets and going, oh, let the free market decide, it never, ever, ever plays out to support the person on the street, right? I mean, look at UK water, the story behind UK water. Now I think it's owned predominantly by investment companies and it's gone through the roof, right, right, the price of water in the uk, andrew, we were trying to get back to the question from nathan. What is the core question that we're trying to discuss or unpack?

Andrew Welch: 14:02
Yeah, so, as I read on here, we talked a little bit about the dynamics around population, but so now what's interesting to me is how one might turn the entire thing around, because we can focus on taking this amazing tech and doing something of quality without the headache of having to scale the thing to 100,000 employees right yeah, to 100,000 people. I think that this was harder back in the day when technology was less accessible, right when the engineering, when you basically had to hire an army of engineers to build a lot of this from scratch. But I just think it could potentially be such a cool opportunity. Pick the largest New Zealand company in any major industry and say, listen, nobody else is doing this. You have an opportunity to use Azure plus Power Platform plus Fabric to run away with the prize. Azure plus Power Platform plus Fabric to run away with the prize, and I don't know, like maybe. I just think that would be such a wildly cool thing to do as a CIO.

Mark Smith: 15:15
So there's been cases of that. There was a company called Green Button in New Zealand some years ago and they adopted Azure straight away for compiling video footage and I'm talking about movie footage, right and Microsoft acquired that company and built it directly into the platform, into the Azure platform, because it was an amazing piece of tech and definitely there's the ability for innovation and I don't want to just shit all over my country, but one. We don't have a government system that really I love New Zealand, oh, I love it. I live here because the vista, the landscape, the fact that I can go to a beach in the morning with my kids and the beach is a kilometer long and I'm the only person on it right, it's just epic. It's just that nature piece is amazing.

Mark Smith: 16:04
But if you want to earn serious coin, you've got to be working on projects outside of New Zealand. Like I don't know, we're being contaminated by working internationally enough that I have expectations that are higher than what I believe the New Zealand market can do for me and businesses in New Zealand. We have a thing called New Zealand Trade and Enterprise that take New Zealand businesses offshore. Like we have a thing called New Zealand Trade and Enterprise that take New Zealand businesses offshore. Like, we've got Rocket Labs, right, they're sending rockets into the atmosphere in New Zealand, right, random in that whole aerospace area and they've done extremely well. And then you know, of course VCs come in and then they're all owned by BlackRock at the end of the day.

Chris Huntingford: 16:46
So these companies it depends how globalized these business are, right. So we're saying their actual market is domestic. It's different than saying actually they've spawned this multinational conglomerate and that means actually it's not just New Zealand, it's all the countries they're in and that's the difference. And this goes back to when we were saying you know the monopoly conversation I built on that a bit andrew oils away. Uh, you know saying that actually having monopolies can be, can be absolutely detrimental, but at the same time if you are growing your business out, you become incredibly good because of the innovation. Then monopoly also naturally occurs. So that's why this argument of capitalism, free market, that is always up in there and it always will be well this is.

Andrew Welch: 17:27
This is a challenge that I think, and I love these episodes that we do, where we branch out from being, you know, from strictly talking about, about the tech. I these are some of my favorite episodes, by the way, um, but if you look at this phenomenon, um, it manifests in some interesting ways, right, and it's all about what I think economists would call the internal market. Right, so the United States is is, I think, the quintessential example of a big internal market and, I think, historically right, as the, as the American in is the one American on the podcast right, I will say that there's an alternate history where things could have turned out very differently, where, essentially, the United States would have been a collection of independent nation states similar to to Europe. Right, but that's not how history turned out, as we know.

Andrew Welch: 18:23
And today the United States part of the reason for America's economic vitality is that it has an internal market with 400 million people and almost no trade barriers between the states, right, and you see, in Europe, where the EU has tried to emulate this and has had some success, it's certainly easier.

Andrew Welch: 18:50
You know, european companies certainly have a bigger addressable internal market today than they did a generation ago, or certainly two generations ago. But you do have friction some friction in trade between those countries, and you have friction in language as well, right. If you're going to make a product that is not obvious in how to use it or is in any way dependent on communication, you have a language barrier in some cases. And then you have countries like China, right, which is so export oriented and there's been a lot of talk in in amongst economists and in the press about this over the last year or so as China has faced a bit of an economic downturn and they've tried to double down on exports without actually stimulating the vast consumer internal market of over a billion people that they have. So I think this is a really interesting dynamic for sure.

Chris Huntingford: 19:48
I think these set up of trading zones in general has. I mean, if you look at the history of them, it's absolutely fascinating. The history of Europe, the history. Actually the US was tightly involved in that for a long time as well. We look at the Dalit-Batts-Bretons-Wood agreement, where everything was traded back to New York and the fact that we had a load of gold sitting there and all of a sudden Germany's economy took off, the automobile trade took off and they ended up imbalancing that system. They weren't the only reason, but they were a huge contributor.

Chris Huntingford: 20:19
If you look at actually half the reasons behind Europe and how that evolved from us meant to be able to trade cotton and agricultural goods and now all of a sudden it's become this huge thing, which it was never meant to be. But I cannot think of one system that has happened in the era of capitalism that has actually worked out well, that has worked out truly well, because there's always imbalances in systems and I think there always will be. Sorry, you triggered a thought in my head as soon as you started talking about Europe and America and I thought I went straight to Bratton's words, so I dialed the history way too far back.

Andrew Welch: 20:55
Yeah, I should say the reason that this conversation on LinkedIn between Nathan and I got struck up is he listened to our last, our most recent, episode, where we actually kind of stayed mostly away from the tech and we talked about the big societal implications for AI, and his original message was hey, I just got the latest two episodes of Ecosystems in the AI chat. You sound a lot like a guy who is two years away from announcing his campaign for the US presidency. So these are wide ranging conversations, which is why I love him.

Chris Huntingford: 21:31
Andrew. It's funny he says that because there is something you want to announce around that isn't there.

Andrew Welch: 21:38
This is not like the time I started Cloud Lighthouse, though you know, Mark recently left his role. Are we ready to talk about what Mark is doing with himself now?

Chris Huntingford: 21:51
Nah, next episode. We should never talk about what Mark is doing. We should never talk about it.

Mark Smith: 21:57
I think we're an episode away or so before we talk about what I'm doing now, we ripped the curtain off.

Andrew Welch: 22:04
I don't know. What is it? What are we doing?

Mark Smith: 22:06
Drop the sheet. Yeah, we doing. Drop the sheet.

Mark Smith: 22:08
Uh, yeah, whatever drop the sheet yeah, it's um, yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe one more, but but yeah, it's interesting because, even jumping into this back, you know you mentioned ai then and of course it's just, it's my massive focus area, um, at the moment and I've heard a soundbite recently around education, right, because education is going to be transformed by ai and how we educate particularly and when I talk about educator I want to go out adult education I'm talking about our children, right, so I'm particularly looking at it from having a three-year-old and a one-and-a-half year old and of course, you know that they go to daycare at the moment. They're learning so much, but they're going to be going to school and we know that the ratio classroom ratio sizes generally 25 students to one teacher in New Zealand is the ratio sizing and the data shows that the more one-to-one you can tutor an individual, their EQ goes through the roof, their skill levels, all that kind of stuff accelerates in that scenario and, of course, what AI is going to give us in the future is this very one to one. Now it's going to probably get messy for a while as everyone goes no, we shouldn't use AI in education. Everyone goes no, we shouldn't. There's going to be ups and downs and stuff, but the soundbite that really hit me was that, if you took the entire and for whatever country I don't know if this is different per country the quote was coming out of the US, so it was based on the Konegi schooling system.

Mark Smith: 23:42
Right, he was one of the big proponents of education so that he could get workers for his plants and factories educated workers. And is this whole thing that the schooling term from five years old to, in our case, is about 18 years of old before you go to university? Is that all that could be done in 20% of the actual time, that education process, if you had a much more one-to-one type case of training? And so in that world of AI, you know. So, like the way this in my mind goes whoa, hang on a second. I would never, ever considered homeschooling my kids as in, because I just think that's for crazy people.

Andrew Welch: 24:29
A line has been drawn.

Mark Smith: 24:31
So what I mean it's for people that are kind of very like oh, we don't trust the education system, they're going to talk about sex in a way that I don't like sex to be talked about. This is the type of stuff that I've seen. Or they're very religious and therefore they want to make sure they're going to indoctrinate their kids correctly. So what I'm saying is that all of a sudden, like I'm going hang on a second you know, meg, and I still want to travel, heaps.

Andrew Welch: 24:59
You know we've got a whole continent that we haven't explored yet. How much traveling do you want to do, heaps?

Mark Smith: 25:01
Heaps man, heaps, heaps, sweet, sweet as bro, sweet as. So I'm like, hang on, what about if we took that model, that we decided to take our children's education into our own hands? And she was like, oh yeah, but what about their social interaction? I mean, my gosh, let's say we're in vietnam. They're going to learn to play with vietnamese kids. Right, they're going to have massive and like.

Mark Smith: 25:25
It's not like we're going to stay in a resort or anything, we're going to stay in the general populace in any of these type of travels. Uh, you know that we do. I think you could bring up a generation that are one massively critical thinkers, brilliant at math, because you could have the best math tutor training them at any time english, french, any type of language. I think that when we move into a world where the richness around education, I think, is going to explode and go through the roof and therefore that changes. That changes the whole dynamics. And this is one of the things I'm challenging myself with is the concept of the nine to five job or the work week, which come from the industrial revolution and I think, will it goes into an area of work-life balance which we want to bring up on another show and really it's about life how do you you live life, how do you make good money so you can support your lifestyle, but also how do you really enjoy life and and and.

Andrew Welch: 26:25
What is life for?

Chris Huntingford: 26:27
yeah, but the other thing that I think actually is one of the reasons why I love you all on this podcast is because I think we're all very good at that, which is looking at traditional paradigms and almost ignoring them and going well, how else can we do this? You?

Mark Smith: 26:43
know exactly, yeah, you know you want me to you, I'm, I'm.

Chris Huntingford: 26:46
I'm born. I've got to be the family person. I've got to go to school. I've got to go and get a job. I've got to get a university. Actually, why do I have to? And what's a better way of doing that? What's a better way of doing school? It's a better way. What's you know? That's why I love digital nomads. I love that that's become a thing which everyone's like. I can work from wherever I need to.

Andrew Welch: 27:03
I've got my laptop, my bag, I'm touring, I'm going everywhere I will say and anna and I talk about this, so we talk about this all the time. So I'm I am an a us citizen living in the United Kingdom. Anna is a Romanian citizen, also a British citizen living in the United Kingdom. And I say all the time the world was not built for us. The world is incredibly administratively cumbersome to navigate for those living in a country that is not their own.

Mark Smith: 27:35
Oh, yes, so true.

Andrew Welch: 27:37
But, mark, let me ask you and I'll share my answer in a moment, but think about you cannot say your beautiful island home, right? I cannot say my beautiful home on Cape Cod, but where is someplace in the world that you've been that? If the paradigm that you're talking about were different, where would you live? Where would that be?

Chris Huntingford: 28:01
italy italy yeah, if the question was addressed to me, then I, I would have, I, I, I would have said absolutely similar mark, and it's funny that you've gone to that. So, so why?

Mark Smith: 28:12
so I think we've traveled to 40 odd countries now meg and I and um, and before italy it was portugal, it was 100. I'd go to portugal and specifically porto in portugal is where I would live I didn't like porto I love porto. I I'm just amazing, amazing. I gotta hold myself back from saying stuff that would get me in trouble about Portugal.

Chris Huntingford: 28:37
I'm like you.

Mark Smith: 28:38
Yeah, yeah, yeah, All right all right. But anyhow. So definitely Portugal was my first, but the thing is, I'm saying this with only 40 countries. Isn't there around 200 countries in the world? I've not even scratched the surface yet.

Chris Huntingford: 28:52
But you can only base it on your view of what you understand.

Mark Smith: 28:54
Yeah, yeah, and that's definitely Italy. And now, keeping in mind, I've never been to Greece, but yeah, italy Will. What about you?

Chris Huntingford: 29:03
So I've been to Greece, and that's I haven't done 40 countries, but I have been to Greece, so I'm going to take that one off the mark and take that as a point. I've been to some very interesting countries, so I've been you to, from from war zones where to all the way through to, to to europe, which I love. And one thing that you, I know you two, know about, is I hate flying. I have an irrational hatred for flying and it's, it's a fear and, uh, it's. It's only come to me since I've been doing sort of more holiday travel, which I think is just bizarre you need to get some ayahuasca in you and get them to deal with that yeah, yeah, I mean I'm uh, I'm dealing with.

Chris Huntingford: 29:37
I've got three different flights coming up over the next six weeks and I'm pumped for once tomorrow. Actually, I was on the way to color cloud, you know, will I?

Andrew Welch: 29:44
I thought about sorry. I thought about you when thank you baby. This was last month I flew across the atlantic ocean four times in 10 days, like in a 10-day period. Four of those days were spent flying across the ocean and every time I thought it was like, oh, I wish will were here and I love europe and I and I and I like europe because it's almost familiar but but more perfect.

Chris Huntingford: 30:15
So you know there's, there's, there's that you know that the people kind of understand your humor, that you know, culturally it's the same but so different and it's just beautiful. But I went to italy and I think who I went with helped. So I went with my, my girlfriend and actually my foster mother. It's the first time I've ever taken her away and that was quite a special thing.

Chris Huntingford: 30:33
But I went to a place in italy, in in tuscany, which not many people visit, called san gimignano, and it's this old, medieval town and you know, high, high up and on a hilltop, and everybody they knew their place in that system and they all had their routine and they all got up and the food was amazing, the people amazing. People were friendly, they were happy to talk, they were happy to to give you the best food, the best drink, and I just loved it. I just thought this is a place where I could absolutely live and I'll probably live for longer than if I lived in the uk. I'll probably survive longer. There'd be less stress, there'd be less epigenetic factors tearing down, you know, my, my nucleotides. Yeah, that's how I feel about spain so yeah, spain's for you.

Andrew Welch: 31:15
Spain is for me, um, but in order to add some variation here, I'm going to go, uh, I'm going to go South and say that, uh, anna, anna and Alexandra and I spent 35 days in South America last year. Anna was on maternity leave. I could work anywhere, um, and we brought Alexandra when she was eight months old, and one thing that I found is that Buenos Aires is, and that that whole time zone is actually an amazing time zone because you're in between New York and London, right?

Andrew Welch: 31:48
So my favorite time zone to work from is definitely. I don't know what the time zone is called, but it's the one that contains Buenos Aires, argentina, and I would move down there and I would move there in a heartbeat. I think what holds and Mark is going to laugh at this what holds me back from doing something like that is that, oh my God, every time I got to go see someone in person, it's a 14 hour flight, yeah, anywhere.

Mark Smith: 32:21
You're just every time I don't know if I could, if I could do that, that is valid. But like, what you do is go, okay, let's say I'm going to do that time zone only once a quarter, right, and you and you pack it out. What you do in that once a quarter, you know, because I mean, honestly, I just find that. So what covid did for us is make this ubiquitous right that people don't expect to, you know, be in a meeting room with you, in a boardroom with you, all the time anymore, or they don't even want it. Don't want it, yeah.

Chris Huntingford: 32:50
Yeah, I mean, that's a podcast in itself, isn't it? Which is hybrid working? Yeah, doesn't work.

Mark Smith: 32:58
Man, let's, let, let's. I'd love to pull that apart as in um, that that's.

Chris Huntingford: 33:01
Yeah, that's such an interesting topic that impacts your work-life balance as well.

Mark Smith: 33:06
Yeah, massively removing the commutes, removing the interact yeah, I think there's a lot of ground to cover there I've spent more time with my kids in their young life than I reckon my father ever spent with me.

Andrew Welch: 33:20
Really. So there's some really interesting research on this topic now that Anna and I have been looking at as we navigate parenthood ourselves, and I don't know the exact percentages right, but it's something like this the typical and the numbers are different for men and women, particularly because two generations ago the disparity in parenting duties was so vast, right, so you have to look at at moms and dads separately here. But if you look at if you the typical mother today who has a full time job spends more time with her kids than the typical stay at home mother two generations ago, and it's it's, it's astonishing, and I think that you know, and the same is true for fathers. But if you look at the data, it doesn't take much to spend more time with your kids than fathers two generations ago so.

Andrew Welch: 34:25
I don't think that's particularly valid, but it's fascinating data well.

Chris Huntingford: 34:37
So we must remember that, that actually, you know and and and I'm going to say how it is because I don't, I think it's the appropriate way to say it which is the role of the female within our world, is being corrected to where it should have been a long time ago, yeah, and that is having a huge impact, a correct impact. You know, I sat through a um, a lecture on the gender pay gap the other day and you know that it's it's insane that we have to have these sort of meetings, but they are the right meetings, the right lectures to attend and the best things to understand. So that will have a play in the dynamic. On top of all the work-life balance, on top of the people having kids first the people, not on top of the values, belief systems that have changed significantly due to the increase in education. There's so much there to unpack and education.

Andrew Welch: 35:18
There's so much there to unpack. It's an interesting thing and this is a really hot topic right now because many countries, across cultures and across geographies, many countries are really wrestling right now with what they you know, what demographers would call the total fertility rate, and that is, on average, how many children are born to the average mother, and replacement rate is about 2.2, right. So in order for a society to not to grow, but to replace itself, every mother needs to have 2.2 children. I don't know how the 0.2 child, how that works out, but it's very messy. It's very messy.

Mark Smith: 35:54
A lot of arms and legs. It's very messy.

Andrew Welch: 35:56
It's very messy In any case one of the ideas that I find very interesting is that if you look at countries that really invest in supporting parents and, in particular, supporting mothers in the workplace, right Will to your point, you can do it. You can make these sorts of national investments and dictate your public policy by a desire to increase the total fertility rate, basically to encourage the having of children, but historically that has not actually been very effective. And if you look at countries like Sweden, the whole orientation of the policy is not to increase the number of babies but to actually make it more possible for mothers specifically to have fulfilling careers and participate fully in society and in the workplace. And I think that's a somewhat lost distinction on a lot of people, but it's it's what is our purpose. Is our purpose to have more children, or is our purpose through a policy or through an investment?

Chris Huntingford: 37:03
It depends if you're asking Richard Dawkins or not. Right the selfish gene. Go read it guys. Well, this one has been wide ranging.

Mark Smith: 37:11
Yeah, it's been interesting and I and I think we've got some good topics for other discussions like that the work-life balance, the hybrid work. I think we could do an individual episode on each.

Chris Huntingford: 37:24
The evolution of society in general. I think between us would be quite. We'll have to bring out a different sort of branch of podcast here. Old men ramble.

Andrew Welch: 37:37
Can I give a shout before we sign off? I just want to say that I chose this wine glass. This is our second episode that we're recording today and it's 10 o'clock at night. I chose this wine glass specifically because this was a wedding gift from the famous Janet Robb.

Chris Huntingford: 37:54
They are lovely.

Andrew Welch: 37:56
They are lovely and we love them them and we use them all the time. So, Janet, if you're listening, thank you so much.

Mark Smith: 38:00
Well done, Janet. You mentioned her name and it just takes me back to Belfast Anyhow. Ciao, ciao, ciao, bye, guys, cheers all. Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP, mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash. Nz365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.