Transcript of AE 1259 - The Goss: Are Australia's Youngest Tradies Too Lazy to Work?

G'day, you mob! Pete here. And this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news weather locally Down Under here in Australia, or Non-locally overseas in other parts of the world. Okay. And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right?

If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in The Goss. So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English. So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills.

In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at Aussie English. Com.au where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time. Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time. Keep practising. And that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode guys. Smack the bird and let's get into it.

All right. Dad, what's going on?

Hey. Not much. What's the goss? What's the goss? What are we gossiping about?

Ahh, fed up tradies! So.

Tradies.

News.com.au. They don't put in the hard yakka. Fed up tradies turn on their own or- a lot of our expressions..

A bit of Australian isms in that isn't there?

Yeah. So hard yakka. What's that dad?

Um hard work.

And if you are..

Yakka in work.

'If you're a fed up tradie'?

Um, well, 'fed up' means you're sick of something and a 'tradie' is a tradesperson. Traditionally a tradesman. But of course many are women now, so.

And if you 'turn on your own'?

Turn on your own means you turn against the, those that you are colleagues with.

Yeah. So the article, "Tradies in Australia have become synonymous with getting their hands dirty and working hard. But a whole new generation-"

You certainly turned in, with your ocker accent.

I've got to chuck it in, man. "But a whole new generation of workers are changing that very image. Generation Z have turned.."

Z?!

Yeah.

.. don't have generation Z! Zed!

.. zed, whatever, "Have turned up with their workplace boundaries and are changing the industry, leaving their millennial bosses fed up and exasperated." So yeah, effectively this story was about a Sydney plumber Tommo..

Not Tommo, Tommo!

"Who's 38, has become so exhausted with the lack of effort from young tradies that he doesn't even bother with apprentices anymore." So I guess the practice here in Australia, do you want to explain that, about apprenticeships?

Yeah. Well apprenticeships are a, it literally is a training on the job. So for trades like plumbing, electrician, mechanics, builders and so on, the traditional way of training is you get an apprenticeship, which means you go and work with a professional part time, and do work on the job. But you also go to school, at TAFE, technical college, to learn the sort of more academic side of it. So.

Well, yeah.

Like, in combination.

If you're an electrician or something you'd be doing, you'd be learning all those sort of science around..

Science, and the legislation around it,

How to run a business.

Yeah, all that sort of stuff.

So it's pretty common in Australia, right, to be a tradie and to have one or more apprentices working under you because they're cheap labour. But the trade off is that you're training them up.

You're training the future.

Yeah, yeah.

Whether or not they end up working for you. Although I think the assumption is that they're usually going to get a job with you.

Yeah.

But yeah. So the article was effectively talking about how millennials- so I guess that's my generation, are having trouble with the next generation of kids coming through, generation zed or Z, coming through and just having completely different expectations with hard work. Hours worked, pay, everything like that. And so this guy Tommo, I think he was saying effectively that he, he had, apprentices that he would have to go to their houses and wake them up in the morning.

Yeah.

With the mum or whatever. Get them out of bed, drag them out of bed,

.. out of bed to actually turn up on the job.

And they wouldn't want to do the hard work or they would do a dodgy job, you know, they would do a poor, a poor job, whatever they're actually having to do. And that he was saying that it's now so common amongst Gen Z's that he's not even going to take on apprentices anymore. And it's funny because my, my son's best friend's dad. Right. So Caden's dad works as a, I believe he's a brickie or a, um, what are they called again? Concrete layer.

Concreter?

They're just concrete. We don't have a slang term for that?

No. Conky?

Conky? Crete-y.

No, we don't.

He works there, but he has apprenticeship, apprentices, and he's just like, man, they're so lazy, you know, they're stoned all the time, you know, doing weed, or they're just go out and do- have big nights before coming to work, and then they're just too tired to do these jobs. And he's like, part of the problem, too, is that I can't find anyone who's not apprenticeship age willing to do those jobs of just shovelling stuff..

.. find someone who's 25 to do it.

Yeah, he's like, there's just zero chance. And so he's saying the industry is really struggling at the moment. But do you, I guess there's two questions. What was it like- two questions. What was it like for you when you were younger? And tradies, you know, the whole culture and how it was respected as a job, everything like that. And then also what's your take on sort of Gen Z? Do you notice a change in work ethic, and hard yakka? And maybe it's changed in my generation as well because you're what, Gen X or you know, no, you're a boom- are you a boomer?

I'm a boomer.

Just on the edge. Boomer.

Well no no, I fall well into the boomer. About three years. Yeah.

Okay.

Well, what's 'boomer'? 45 to 60, I think.

Possibly. I don't know.

1945 to 1960. They're..

Ah, not 18?

Not 18. No. No. It was a little bit before my time. Although, I'll take those in reverse. I think the, I actually don't know what kids are like these days because the last 20 years of my work life, were working in universities and with a private company. Selling and supporting sales of software to universities and schools and businesses. So I really had to deal with anybody under the age of 25. You know, in the workplace. So I can't really tell you what I think of that.

There's the sort of cliches that you see in everybody says. And so everybody says the only thing, the only stories you get are the, you know, the lazy kids that won't get out of bed or they can't be bothered digging the hole or, you know, 'I don't want to do that' or, you know, 'Is it knock off time yet?' You know, instead of finishing the job, you know? 'At 3:45 I'm out of here.' You hear that? But then it's always reinforced by news stories. You never hear the one of about the..

Hard working kid!

The kid who stays longer at work to, you know, to do a good job, because nobody cares about those stories.

It's funny, isn't it? Because that would just not be news.

No.

With a tradie ringing up and being like..

Guy does job!

Here. Yeah, until it gets to the point where no one is doing that at all, that it would be astonishing.

Yeah.

Oh my god. Young Gen Z shows up to work on time.

Yeah.

Call the press.

Yeah. And so if you go back to- back in my day, when I was, you know, school age and thinking about, you know, what I wanted to do afterwards, I was always intending to go to university, but when I left school in 1975, about 5% of school leavers went to university. So now it's over 50%.

Oh it's huge. Yeah.

So it's a very different expectation. So I think the, and if you didn't finish school, and or finish school but didn't want to go on to university, then there wasn't an expectation to have a degree to go and work in retail or the service industry or something like that.

It's funny, to interrupt you there, sorry. It's funny because I remember being at high school, especially at the private school that I went to, and it was almost a taboo to not actually be wanting to go to university. You would just be like, 'What are you, a moron?' Like, what do you mean you're not going to uni? There's no other option. Like, that's what idiots do, right? Like, I mean, again, I'm being extreme here, but yeah, but that was the basic idea..

You're in a very, you're in a sort of a very exclusive and biased.

Yeah.

Cohort.

But it was just such a weird, looking back on it, it was such a weird kind of environment to think that that was the assumption and that was how we looked at it, like, what do you mean there's no other you know, this is this is what what we do!

That's what you do. Exactly. But even now, there is an expectation that, you know, a university degree is basically the minimum you need for any professional work. Other than trades. When I was a kid, you know, lots of people left school before the end of year 12, or after year 12, and didn't go on to further education. And didn't need to go into a trade. People who wanted to do trades did it as a positive choice. It wasn't the last thing left. They did it particularly because either they enjoyed that sort of work or they knew they'd make a lot of money.

Yeah.

And make it quickly. So if you're 16 years old and you leave school to go and become a plumber's apprentice, by the time you're 19, you're a fully qualified plumber, and you've been working for three years.

Well, that's that's the thing..

So when I was 19, I was halfway through my first year at university, and I had worked on school holidays. You know..

I still remember that having, there was a guy called Rick Thomas who was at primary school with me and then went to Bellarine High School, but he lived in Ocean Grove, where I grew up. And I remember he all of a sudden was driving around in a V8 Commodore at like 19. Yeah. And he had his own house and just being like, what the fuck? How? And you know, he, I think he'd come from a relatively wealthy family because he'd done go karting and was like trying to go down that road.

But he'd become an electrician. Yeah. And he'd left at year ten. He just bailed on school. And yeah, it was one of those things where I remember being at school and at the start of uni and thinking, there's this kind of social bias, right, against people who leave school early. It's kind of seen as like, you don't do that. That's, you know, you're an idiot. You're a no hoper, you're a bogan, you're a moron. If you do that, you're just going to end up with some dumb job that doesn't pay you very well, and you're going to be stuck there for the rest of your life. But then going through university, I remember thinking like, I'm so smart, I'm going through my master's degree, I'm going through my PhD and then thinking, but I have nothing to really show for it. I don't have a house. I don't have a real, I don't have a good wage at all. And I have friends who are probably now, you know, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even $1 million, because they've been working as traders for the last decade or even 15 years and have like a family on the way and all that, and you sort of like, yeah, who gets the last laugh? But it was one of those things where you're like some of them, I guess the ones who do get into it and work really hard, at least here in Australia, do end up on really good wages. And just end up crushing it from a very young age because, yeah, they just I guess they knew what they wanted and they get into it.

Yeah. And look, I think one of the best examples I have of that is when I was a high school teacher back in the 80s and the 90s, I can remember one girl, at the age of 16, decided the end of year ten. She decided, I've had enough of school. I'm going to go and be a hairdresser.

Yeah.

This was one of the smartest kids I've ever taught. Yeah, and sort of heads were turning in the staff room.

"What a waste."

What? Yeah, 'what a waste'. What are you doing? and I saw her probably 4 or 5 years later, so she would have been 21, 20, 21 and. And just talking to her, I said, what are you doing? Oh, I've got two hairdressing businesses now. Yeah. One in the suburb that she grew up in, one in another suburb. And I said, 'Oh, that's really good. Two shops.' She said, 'No, I own the building for one of them.' She bought the building bit and she rented out the shop next to it. She ran the hairdresser and so she was clearly what she wanted to be in was the beauty industry.

Yeah.

But she didn't want to be a hairdresser. She wanted to be a business person. And that was the industry she wanted to get into.

I think that's the thing that I envied. I think for my entire life, I just don't know what I want to do. Even now, you know, like, I mean, I Aussie English is probably one of the only things that I've been able to maintain for as long as I've done it, besides science at university. But it's still I feel like I am so I, I'm so similar to these Gen Z people from the article, or I feel like I totally get it. I don't like getting up early. I don't like working long hours doing shit that I don't like that's laborious where I have to use my body. I would much rather just be playing video games or guitar or hanging out with my family. And so for me, it's been that my entire life. I've sort of felt really lazy, but I've always been able to either come up with something clever enough to be able to cover my ass, you know, job wise, or just do the bare minimum to get by.

Yeah, just go and do the heck work.

And so I guess my point is, I really envy people like the woman you were talking about, where it's like they knew from such a young age exactly what they wanted to do, and they've gone and done it and got it like they've had that. All I've ever wanted is to be good at this one thing, and it's got 100% of my focus and motivation and discipline, and I'm just going to keep going. And I've done it for 30 years now, and you're just like, from my side. I'm like, I don't know if I have ADHD or I just don't have that kind of concentration or ability to maintain that kind of passion. But I totally, I totally envy people like that. Sons of bitches. Yeah.

Yeah, but so I. I don't know whether it is a generic generational thing. I think there has been a, yeah. And people have, you know, talked about it all the time that every generation has got it easier..

Doesn't this date back to the Romans, where it's been written down in some Roman literature where people are like, well, the kids these days and you're like, this is 2000 years ago.

I know, I know.. Like there is always that. And part of it, I suspect, is not necessarily the reality, but the people who are recording it publicly, recording it over, you know, whether it be Roman times or whether it be now, are people who are in a position to ensure that their children are going to be in a better position, like you are in a way better position than I was.

Well, to some degree.

Yeah. Just generically, in terms of, yes, the pathway that you had through what you were doing,

I can definitely get way more toys from Kmart these days for my kids than you ever got me.

We didn't have money!

We're living the life!

Exactly!

The amount of Lego that we buy.

Well, yeah, exactly. So I think there is that element. But so the people who are recording that and commentating on it are in a position to make it happen.

Yeah.

I think your average, and I'm not putting down factory workers, but your average factory worker who does 40 hours a week of hard physical work in a factory and often mind numbingly boring work.

Yeah.

All I want in life is for their kids to have a better life. They don't want their kids doing the same thing. And I think that's always been the case.

Yeah.

But if you're a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, an engineer or whatever, you're going to go. I'd be happy if my kid was a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher, an engineer,

But not if he was a tradie, yeah.

But not if he's a tradie. So you have that different expectation.

When this is something that's interesting with migrants, right? We have that kind of, is it the first generation, like, that are born here in Australia? Yeah. They often have the most pressure on them compared to their parents, because their parents have come from a country where they didn't have the opportunities and they had to work their asses off to get anywhere, to scrape by, you know? And so once they get to somewhere like Australia and they live here, they push their kids immensely hard.

Like I remember, there's there's an Asian woman that takes her kids to Kel's work to get music lessons, and they get like three different instruments in a row. And between lessons, because they'll take breaks, they'll be playing chess. Or playing with a Rubik's Cube. And you're just like..

On the way home, they'll have swimming lessons.

Jesus Christ, man, just give them a break. Like..

But that's I think that's that's a migrant thing. But I think it's also a cultural thing. If you go to Hong Kong or Singapore or, I've never been to mainland China, but I'm talking about particularly, the Chinese culture has always been about 'education is big'. And it's not just school education. It's education in everything.

Yeah.

And you push your kids to do those things. I remember when I used to work with a guy in Singapore and he was saying that, because high schools are selective.

Yeah.

There are better high schools in Singapore than other schools.

Kids at the end of primary school. So 11 and 12 year old kids..

Were taking a three hour exam..

Are doing a series of three hour exams in order to get the scores to get into. And so what do you do with that. You pay for tutors to do that. But at the same time the kids are also playing soccer. They're having tennis lessons, they're having swimming lessons, they're having music lessons because all of those experiences are going to make them better people and better able to. Yeah..

It's funny though, because it seems like..

.. 12 year old kids! Let them just go and be kids!

.. so subjective. Yeah, for me, that's almost child abuse. At that point.

Yeah, I know.

If you're like, when do they have time to be children?

But you live in a society where if you just said, uh, hang it, my kids don't need to have any extracurricular activities. They can go to the local high school and they'll be fine.

Yeah,

They're not going to be able to compete!

But I think also..

To do the things they want to do.

A big thing about culture is from a lot of these countries, that face is so important. And your reputation and how well your kids perform so that you can 'keep up with the Joneses', right. You can go out and say, 'My son's a doctor. He's not one of those filthy so and so's.' He actually he's actually smart. Whereas for me, I think most migrants would probably be shocked at the average Australian's kind of attitude towards that. Where yeah, of course, if your kids end up doctors or whatever, you're going to be proud of them, but I'm not going to hang myself if Noah ends up being a tradie.

Just as proud if the kid's a plumber or..

Even if he ends up working at a day-care place or, yeah, exactly. The- it's funny that for me, one of the most important things, if not the most important thing, is how happy he is as a person.

Of course, that was always the case with us, with you and your sister.

And you wonder how much that is just a, not first world problem, but like, something we take for granted that we live in a society where the thing..

Happy is the most important thing.

The most important thing for us is actually just the happiness of the kid, because all these other things we can take for granted, that he has clean water, he has enough food. He may not have a house because they're getting more and more expensive. But yeah, so those things are always really interesting to think about.

But back to the sort of, you know, can't get a good tradie, or apprentice. I think the challenge may well be that there is a general societal shift towards- and 'I don't give a shit about a career'. And I think that's, you know when my father, and he was probably a bad example because he had several careers. But in my father's generation, your grandparents generation typically a man because a woman would stop working unless she was in a profession, she would stop working when she got a, you know, when she got married, certainly when she got pregnant. But a man would have one career. He would have one job, potentially work for the same employer and yes, maybe get promoted through through the things, through the, you know, the company or the industry that they were working in, but they'd have one job. In my case, that is certainly not the case for people my age, most people my age. And when I retired a few years ago, most people in their mid to late 60s will have probably had five or more jobs, and many of them in different industries.

Yeah, Noah's watch is always going off. You set the alarm, I don't know.

Ohh, right. Triggers you?

.. when I was in primary school.

Yeah. And I think now we've got two generations, or a generation and a half after, that I don't think your average kid leaving school says, 'Whatever I do in the next five years is going to be critical to the rest of my life.' Yeah, okay.

Nah! It'll work out. Yeah. So. I don't know that it's they don't want to work hard. I just think they don't think they have to work hard. And but there's also an element of, and it's certainly a change that I've probably noticed since I stopped teaching. Because, you know, when I was teaching kids who were older than you, not older than you at school, but, you know, you were born while I was teaching high school.

Yeah. So, those kids behaved a lot like I did. Realistically, they were ten years younger than me, so it's hardly a surprise. But I think now a lot of kids are, you know, school age kids are looking at their life and just going, I don't have to do this. Yeah. We instilled in you and your sister this thing of, you know, 'Can I have this?' 'No. Save your money and buy it.' Oh, but you can afford it. Doesn't matter whether I can or not. Usually we couldn't. You had this sort of perverse idea of what we could afford.

It's so funny how the tables have turned. And I am now in that position where Noah will be like, data, can you just. Or he'll be like, mama, can you just go to work and make some money so we can buy monster trucks?

Yeah.

And Kel's like, 'No?!'.

Yeah.

Or worse. Yes.

Yes, exactly. And that's my point, is that that's my point is that kids these days, I think, have not just been given everything on a silver platter, but they've never had to. No, never. Never say never..

'Back in my day..'.

Yeah. 'Back in my day, we had to work for a living. We walked 15 miles through the snow with bare feet just to get to the shops to buy food.'.

Have you seen those memes where it's like the guys walking through a snowstorm or something, and underneath it's like 'My dad walking to school.'.

Yeah.

How my dad describes walking to school.

Exactly. But yeah, walking to school. There's a classic one. Now, yes, you walk to school because we lived within 100m or so of school, but, yeah, I walked a kilometre and a half to school each way. I almost guarantee you no kids do that these days. They'll either ride bikes, which we didn't have, but they weren't allowed to ride to school, or parents will drop them with it.

Yeah, but that's because we're worried about predator, predators, right?

I don't think so.

Well, like them getting hit by a car, I would imagine that would be..

I'm not talking about..

I mean, I'm concerned.

I'm talking about high school aged kids. I'm not talking about, you know, your average..

'We used to get on the bus at like eight' and be able to go to the supermarket by yourself..

Well, not supermarket..

There's no chance that's happening!

I know. And that was I used to go to the library, which was two suburbs away, on a bus when I was eight, 8 or 9.

Noah's not going to be allowed to go outside by himself until he's 20.

So I think there is that element that that kids have just had. It's always that, you know, you don't want to be saying 'they've had it too easy'. It's not too easy, but because too easy is just a subjective term. They've never had to work for something.

Yeah. And why in the world has changed.

Yeah. And so and you know, you flippantly talked about, you know, we didn't have Kmart where I could go buy cheap toys for you when you were kids, which was true. A, we didn't have the money and B, it didn't exist.

Well, yeah, 19- late 1980s, early 90s China wasn't pumping out stuff.

No. Exactly.

Like they are..

And so you know what we would have spent $20 on 30 years ago for you as a kid, you now spent $10 on.

Well, it depends. Right? There's certain items. It's weird. There are some where you look at it and you're like, 'how on earth..' Like I remember, yeah, one of those crucial ones that's along that line was seeing a 1990s magazine with a microwave in it for like 140 bucks. And I did the inflation thing, and it was like $1,500.

Yeah.

For a fucking microwave.

You can buy a microwave for $19 now.

Yeah. From Kmart, for under 100 bucks. You know, there are heaps of toaster can be like ten bucks. Yeah. So there's. Yeah.

So it's got both sides. But I just think there is that attitude of whether it's a good thing, a bad thing or whatever. But..

It is what it is.

It is what it is. But the challenge is going to be for industries like that that require hard physical work. Of, you know, you want to be in this industry, you're going to have to dig holes, you're going to have to scramble under houses to, you know, check out the wiring you're going to. That's the job.

Well, you wonder what happens if you get to a point where fewer and fewer tradies are willing to do the hard work. So you just have fewer of them, surely that's inflationary. Well, that's just going to be..

There'll be a balance. So all of a sudden you'll have, you know, plumbers and electricians earning $300 an hour, in which case more kids are going to want to do it, in which case they'll go in three years time. If I can earn $300 an hour, I'll go and dig a few trenches. Now. Yeah. Whereas I look at it now and go, 'Eh, 50 bucks an hour. Why would I bother?' Because that's probably what they're getting paid, whereas the plumber is earning a lot more than that. But you know, they don't see that.

It's funny. There was I think it was South Park had this episode recently that I watched that was about handymen becoming millionaires. Because I think it's like Randy Marsh, right? The dad, Stan's dad, works out that he doesn't know how to repair anything.

Yeah.

And he rings up his friends and they're like, oh, you don't fucking know. Like he's like, the oven breaks and he's like, I don't know what to do. And so they ring the local tradie, the local handyman, and he comes over and fixes it. And then he's like, Oh, you know, I've also got to fix this light. What do I do? And he's like, I'm sorry, I've got to go to another job. And it gets to this point where everyone starts freaking out and hiring the same guy, and he starts making loads of money and just pushing everyone back to like, Oh, I can't, I'm not free for another year and a half. And he's like, I need the light bulb changed now. And so it was funny just thinking about that idea, I guess, of there being fewer and fewer people who now are good at who just never learn those sorts of technical skills from their parents or their grandparents to fix things. One, because things have gotten so complicated. Two..

And they're solid state now.

Yeah. Two, they get thrown out as soon as they break, which is one of those things that's sort of heartbreaking. But at the same time, you're like, it's going to cost me ten times the amount of a frickin' microwave to have it repaired.

And I use, the story I use about that. And you've heard this story before, is the toaster that we used when I was a kid. It was a steel toaster with two sides, doors. The little handle on you flipped it open. You put your piece of bread in, flipped it closed, open it up, turned it over. And this was..

It was always only warm on one side!

Exactly. And that toaster was inherited by my mother as a second hand one from her parents. So by the time I was ten years old, it was probably already 30 or 40 years old.

Yeah.

And when the element blew, I would go to the hardware store, buy an element for a dollar.

Yeah.

And take the old one out. Install it myself. You learn how to do it by trial and error.

Ironically, nowadays you just wouldn't be able to find an element.

You can't! No, you're going by. You can buy- and if I wanted to replace that toaster, to buy that toaster, it probably would have cost me $10, which in the 1960s that would be the equivalent of a couple of hundred dollars now.

Yeah.

And so- well, maybe 100, but now I can go to the supermarket and buy a toaster for $19.

I was going to say, in Noah's life, I've probably been through at least three toasters because they just break.

When it stops working, you throw it away. Because it's solid state. There's nothing to open up.

Yeah.

The only thing you can open up is the crumb tray at the bottom. There's nothing in there that says, oh, pull this because it's got this little computer chip in it that drives everything. And that's the thing that breaks. It's not the mechanics that break. And so we've got this society now where everything is throw away. So people just haven't got that. Yeah. I'm not sure I was ever going to become an electrical engineer because I learned how to change a element in a toaster, but it meant that when I was 12 years old, I could change the element in the toaster. It's meant that the first response I have to something is, can I fix this myself?

Yeah.

Not 'I need somebody else to fix it.'.

Well, a big problem too, is that companies don't want you to be able to fix things.

Of course they don't.

Like look at the iPhone, right? Or the I, the iMacs that I've got here.

You can't replace a battery in an iPhone.

It's all connected together so that you have to replace- and if you do want to replace anything, you've got to replace the entire thing. Like the motherboard is attached to, the keyboard is attached to, the screen is attached to the and you're just like, I just want the one key changed on the key. Are you going to have to, you're gonna have to completely change the computer, mate. Like, it's going to be too grand.

And if it's a laptop..

It's like, oh my God.

You can't pull the keyboard out of a laptop. It makes it simpler for them, but it also maximises profit.

It's built in redundancy.

So yeah, I don't know. It'll be interesting. I guess that's the good side of it though, with tradies. And if you're a tradie, I would be thinking, it's almost like the, when drugs are caught, right. So people find, say $100 million worth of cocaine. All the cocaine dealers who are sitting on cocaine are thinking, wow, the price is just doubled. So I would be thinking, if you're a tradie and you're a good tradie, hope you're like, well, I'm not worried. I'm good. I'll still always have a job and I'll just increase my prices as demand goes up.

Yes.

So be as crap as you want, Gen Z. I'll keep crushing it.

It'll be Gen Z two that makes the money out of it.

I think they're called..

I don't know what they're called.

Alpha.

Alpha?

Yeah.

What, we've gone back to the other end of the alphabet and turned it Greek.

Yeah. That's it. I'm pretty sure I saw that today and was like..

So were these..

2018 onwards.

Right. So these are ten year olds.

Yeah. Or your grandkids. Yeah. These are all 'alphas'. And the next ones I guess are going to be 'betas'.

'Bakers'.

Anyway. I don't know, it's something interesting to think about. The other thing to end here is. Kel always finds it so interesting compared to Brazil, where again, there's that societal kind of, not a taboo, but the way in which they look at tradies in Brazil is like, 'Oh, you're uneducated, you're poor, you're not..' I mean, again, this is from my experience of talking to her. I haven't been there. I don't know. But she says it's not looked at anywhere near the same way that we look at tradies. Like, I'll meet a tradie and you'll be like, Oh, okay, you're pretty well off then, right? Like, you know, Oh, you're a bricklayer. Shit. You're probably on 150 K a year, you know. You know, you're probably rich. You're probably got a big house, all that sort of stuff. And I think that was one of those things that blew her mind when she came here. She was just like, how? But I think housing prices is probably a big part of that, right? The fact that houses cost so much to build. And so all of the tradies have just increased their prices with the housing prices and not necessarily naturally with wage growth. So you wonder if that's going to maintain itself. Who knows? Any parting gifts?

Learn how to dig holes. People will always need holes dug. Even if it's with a machine.

See ya!

Bye!