Birth-Rate Crisis: The Hidden Catastrophe in the Global Decline, and What To Do about It

So with Dr. Jim Penman today in the very first long form interview he's done about his research, in particular in regards to the baby bustle population decline. Jim, so before we get into the questions, do you want to tell us about your background and how did you come across this topic?

Well, I did a PhD basically in history back in the 70s, early 80s, and I was looking at demography, amongst other things, looking at why populations grow and why they decline, looking at ancient societies where this is a major feature. And so that was my original concept, my original idea of the research. I spent 10 years researching this, came up with the conclusion what was behind it, that it's basically a biological pattern and since then built a business and I've launched a research institute. We actually have something over $3 million a year on directly researching this and.

Related topics before we go into the questions as well. You're currently working heavily on a book in this field, aren't you?

Yes, Baby bust book. It's actually the conclusions from basically decades of research as to what's really going on and looking at from a scientific perspective. Cool.

So let's get into the questions. The first one I've got to. We'll get straight to the point. Are we heading for a global baby bust?

Yes, we are. Birth rates are declining all over the world. Basically all the wealthy countries in the world, apart from Israel got fertility well below replacement. Replacement level is 2.1 children per woman. That's equal population. Most countries, including Australia, are about about 1.5, 1.6 others. You're thinking about Japan's like about 1.1 or 1.2. China's going the same way. South Korea is down to 0.7. It's the third one necessary. So we're seeing a dramatic decline in fertility to the extent that most countries are now well below replacement level.

So why is the birth rate plummeting?

It comes down to a change in attitude. People's values are different to what they were in the past. It's really a matter of what's important to you. See, there's a common feeling that it's all about money. You can't afford to have children really though, it's a matter of what your priorities are. For example, if you want a, you know, success in career that's more important than children, you put off the children and the family. If having a nice house or even having a house of your own that you would own, having a nice car, having holidays, having leisure, what is the most important? And you can actually see this in Changing the survey done of changing attitudes over the decades. In the past, if you ask Bill what was important to them, and this was just going back a few decades, family would come fairly high. These days, if you ask the same question, less than half people would put that as a top priority. They would talk about success, wealth, leisure, lifestyle, all kinds of other things. So we are changing our values. And people don't have children because they have plenty of money. They have it because it's more important than things they could spend money on.

Is being less religious or becoming less religious in societies a cause as well?

Yes, it's part of the same trend. You have a different kind of attitude. The attitude that relates to high fertility is one in which other things are more important. Family, children, your spouse, your community, your church, even your nation. Anything at all. It's looking at other directed values. What we've got now is something that's very individualistic, is my personal, my status, my wealth, my security, my leisure, my enjoyment. So it's individualism. It's kind of like a toxic individualism that we're focusing so much on ourselves that we're less and less focusing on other people.

So basically, is modern society then doomed by declining facilities? That's just the. The symptom of us advancing.

Well, it is going to get a lot worse. And the reason we know that is because if you look at the attitudes of the youngest generation, particularly those born in the last 30 years, their attitudes are much more extreme even than the one before. So each generation goes by, you see more and more of this attitude, less and less interest in group, in religion, in other people, in family, in anything else, and more and more, what's in it for me, it's individualism. It's growing and it's getting worse and worse. So the fertility rate is going to keep on going down under current trends. Eventually. There's also a change in character, on the ways, like the work ethic and so forth. Eventually it will be the end of our societies.

Well, is it too late then to fix the crisis?

No, it isn't. Because basically these are changes in character that are based in what we call epigenetics. Epigenetics is the way in which environment affects the functioning of genes. It turns genes on or off as a basis of experience. Now we are understanding what's going on. We're using animal models to understand the changes that are taking place. Once we understand them, it's actually not very difficult to develop a treatment that can reverse this process. And we're already well Launched into doing this kind of thing, we just need more research funding to be able to do it consistently. And the great thing about that is not only would it be good for fertility, but it would actually make people happier. Because part of the changes that are taking place in the world right now, it's not just the fact that people are having less children, they're actually becoming more miserable. By every measure, we are becoming less happy. You see rising rates of death and despair, there's rising rates of suicide, rising rates of anxiety, mental illness, depression. They're all going the wrong direction. It's all part of the same process. When we become selfish, when we become focused on ourselves, we lose community. And any scientific research shows you that one of the biggest, the single biggest factor in determining the happiness of people is connection, community, friendship, family, church, whatever. Being part of something larger is what makes us happy. We're losing that. So what we want to do is develop a treatment, a system which will be purely up to individuals, whether they want to take it or not, which will actually make them happier with life, make them more effective in life, more connected, more community minded, but will also have the side effect of improving the birth rate.

How do you then develop that treatment? Like what research goes into it? How do you then come across the research for it and develop this actual treatment? So how is that process for people?

There's different ways to do it, but one of the things we're trying right now is we are looking at, we have an understanding of the epigenetics of this. We understand the epigenetic signature of these changes. We're actually doing it through looking at rats in particular, looking at changes in their brain, in their epigenetics, when they're exposed to mild food restriction, which had the same effect. One of the things we're doing, for example, is we're getting brain cells and we're putting them in little dishes and you have an automated process where you can introduce thousands of different drugs, just chose them at random. There's millions of drugs that are available. We don't know what they do. They're just samples you can get, and you put them into different ones of these little things and you automatically look at the epigenetic change. And because we know what epigenetic signature to look for, we can then find something. And then we've got something that looks promising, we take that out and we test it in animals and we thoroughly look at it from the point of view of health, point of view, of changes in character and stuff. And eventually you find Treatments can be used for people. That's one way of doing it.

And in your research at the moment, or projecting out, do you see there's a point of no return for the fertility decline? Like if it's not resolved in 100 years, is the point of no return? Does it go off a cliff or where do you see it?

It's going to get worse. And one of the effects is going to be it's not just a matter of fertility. It's a matter of people's ability to think creatively and effectively and to work hard. And you're already seeing problems with the. Even though we're getting advances in technology, I mean, you're seeing computer systems, AI is improving all the time and our advances, but productivity isn't rising. So we're hitting the stage where it's going to be very difficult to keep on advancing. If we don't actually attack this system now in the next few decades, it's going to be much more difficult to do it because scientific researchers, advances are going to start going backwards.

What can then governments do about it? Or what are they doing in this?

To address the issue, what governments are doing now is they're trying to bribe people to have children. This is all over the world, they're saying, okay, if you have kids, let's give you a baby bonus. Let's subsidise childcare, let's. All kinds of things. Housing, all kinds. They're doing all sorts of things all over the world, they're doing it. And there's one universal thing, all that these attempts have in common, none of them work. You know, you've got a country like Hungary which is desperate. They're spending like 5% of their entire GDP on measures to increase the birth rate. And it's not happening. There's still about 1.4, 1.5. They're way below. Japanese are doing it, the Koreans are doing it, Taiwanese are doing it, lots of countries, the Greeks and the Italians, people in Europe are doing it. They're all trying to use these systems to try and profit the birth rate with money. And it doesn't work. And the problem is it's not money. People don't have children because they can afford it because they have more money. They have children because they want to have children. Comes down to psychology, comes down to our very nature as human beings. What is important to us. And to use the perfect example of this, I was back in the early 80s. I was completely broke. I had no savings. I was deeply in debt. I was married to A wife who wasn't working. I was working as a law mowing contractor. That's when I started having children. No savings, no nothing. I just wanted kids and that was important to me. And as time went on I managed to get myself together, bought a house, okay, got ahead, but I wanted to have children as soon as I had because children is more important to me than anything. We lived a very simple life, Very simple life. You never ate out the most basic old cars. Lived a very simple life. Holidays were maybe in a caravan if you were lucky. But children were important to me. And the same thing applies to my parents. You know, I grew up in the 50s and in the 60s my parents standard living and my father was well off. He was the university lecturer, so he was well off by comparison. But you know, we had like soft drink, was Christmas, chicken was Christmas, only you had. Holidays were in a tent, we had no air conditioning. We had one rather old family car. That was it. That was our family lifestyle. And yet my parents never hesitated to have four children. And that was so typical. People have children because they want to have children. We have the wrong attitude. We think it's all about money. And in fact the focus on money is so much the problem. We think money is the example. If I have more money, I'm going to be happier. Well, rubbish you aren't. If you have more friends, you're going to be happier. If you have more purpose in life, you'll be happier. If you have more sense of community, you'll be happy. If you get more exercise, you'll be happy. If you spend more time outside, you'll be happier. There are a lot of things to create happiness. Having more and more money to buy more and more stuff doesn't help.

So I was going to say then, well then who are these governments then advising to form these policies? Is it economists or who should they be actually listening to? Because they're obviously listening to the wrong people. Because as you said, these government interventions or these attempts to change the working hours or Tokyo did the four day week for the government workers, where are they actually basing these policies from?

Well, in a sense they listen to people. They're asking people, why don't you have more children? And they say, well, because we need more money, okay? That's what they're doing. They're listening to what people actually say. And if you ask, well, why they're not going to get married and have children now, because I want to get established, I want to get in my career, I want to this, that's the reason that they give, but it's just people don't know the reason. The real reason is not because of money. So yes, governments listen to people, but people give them the wrong answers so they have the wrong policies.

Okay, so then who should the governments, if there's any people come across this clip, who should they be actually listening to for this?

Well, they should listen to me. Just a short answer, but they should listen to me.

You've got the answer.

They should understand. It's so clear that the result is it's a psychological thing. Look, if governments ever wanted to do anything at all that was not purely scientific, what they should do is support religious practice, for example. That's the kind of thing, if you put this way, if you have government policies which actually bear down on religion and try and shut down religion in the public space, that is the kind of thing that's likely to have a bad effect. So in a sense, what Vladimir Putin is doing in Russia trying to support the Greek, the Orthodox Church isn't the right idea. Now it's pretty futile because it's not working particularly there either. But when you see government policies like saying, I'll give you an example, when you have a religious school, like a Christian school, for example, and the government says no, you can't discriminate against non religious teachers. So somebody who wants to come to the school and preach atheism and free love and stuff, you have to employ them because that's otherwise you're discriminated against people. Now that kind of attitude is bad because you're actually trying to destroy religious belief and faith and practice, which is really what's necessary. It's still a very small effect though. To the extent that governments are at least not negative about religion, that's a positive step. It's certainly more positive than anything to do with subsidizing birth because that is completely futile.

Now, is there any examples you can refer to, Like I remember reading about Georgia, for example. Georgia had some success with that. Maybe you want to tell people a little bit about that.

Well, they had the patriarch, I think, of Georgia offering to personally baptize to christen any babies that were born. And that did seem to have produced a bit of a surge in the birth rate. But it's the kind of idea that's right. But fundamentally, look, governments have far less power. We have this vision of government as being all powerful. You can do whatever you like. You're in government, you're the prime minister, you can make things happen. Well, let, let me Tell you, governments have very little power. Now you take China, China is a government that has much, much more powerful government than any Western country. I mean, you get on the side of Xi Jinping, you are going to do well, you're going to come rich, you're going to become powerful, your business is going to go. Very powerful government. The most powerful government around, the most effective government around. Let's have a look at Chinese policy on birth rate and how it's affected. Chinese had a one child policy. Okay, so you only had the one child and you get forced abortion and everything else if you try and have more. That was really strict. And they said, we suddenly worried about this. Let's take away the one child policy. Okay, now what happened to the birth rate? They expected it to go up. The birth rate went down when they did it. So the government's panicking again and saying, oh, this isn't good enough. Let's actually encourage you to have two and more children. So they make this change. You know what happens? Birth rate goes down. So every time the government, this powerful government, said, we're going to do things to really ramp up the birth rate, the actual birth rate declines. Governments are so futile, they're so feeble. This idea the governments are all powerful is just complete myth. They are not. You can, yes, you can get people to obey the speed limit. You can get them to stop criticizing the government in China or Russia, getting them to have more children. No, you can't.

Are you surprised? That's changed the conversation because a few years ago people were saying, oh, we're gonna have too many people and overpopulation concerns. Now it's quickly shifted the other way, hasn't it?

Well, there are some people who think.

It'S great for the environment.

Oh yeah. Some people think, hey, hey, having less and less children and more and more the area is rewilding and going back to nature and less and less people. Fantastic. So you've got your crowd around them like that. I think lately more people are starting to see the problems with it. There are major problems with declining populations. One of them is your, is your age ratio. See, at the moment you've got something like, I don't know what the figure is. You've got a certain proportion of the population which is too old to work. So you've got your working age population. One of the things when the birth rate drops initially you have a bonus because you get more working age people relative to fewer children and more women in the workforce. So you get this economic boom. Now the Trouble is, when the birth rate goes down, you get more and more elderly people. Now you get to the stage where say 40% of the population are retired, you've got the other, there's a few children there. So maybe 40% of the population is trying to support this massive number of retired people, support them economically because some of them are going to need pensions. You support them in terms of, you know, they need to have their nappies changed in nursing homes. You've got all these things needing to take place. It becomes very difficult to look after people when there's too many elderly people and there's too few working age people. And that is not good for quality of life.

Well then how about will the economic meltdown be, you think, over the next decades if this is not addressed?

I think it's going to become bad. I think you're already seeing signs of it. We're seeing rising inequality and you're seeing productivity stagnating or even going backwards. It's going to become significantly worse. We are in for major trouble. We've had a golden time since the Second World War. We've had a massive increase in wealth, we've had improvements in lifespan all over the world. Actual fact, particularly in wealthy countries. It's been a fantastic time. We're coming to the end of that now. We're starting to see things are going to become worse if we don't do something about it. The really great news is that for the first time in the history of humanity, we can do something about it. Now you look at something like the Emperor Augustus in ancient Rome. This was a man who was really concerned about the declining birth rate at the time, especially amongst the Roman elite. And he would actually give lectures to people. You've got to get married, you've got to have kids, this kind of stuff. And they used to do laws and stuff. And he was pretty powerful understanding at the time, but he couldn't do anything about it. And when you've got governments up until now have tried to do something, when we've got massive resources, we've got billions and billions and billions of dollars that governments have to throw at these things and it doesn't work. But now, for the first time in human history, we've actually got an understanding of the problem and what's behind it and we have the potential to do something about it. Augustus couldn't do it. The powerful governments of the past couldn't do it, The Chinese couldn't do it. But now with modern advances in technology, particularly to do with genetics, and epigenetics, we can actually have a solution for the first time ever.

Now, are there any ethical concerns about trying to engineer higher birth rates, especially if it involves direct biological or epigenetic interventions?

No, because very simply, it's simply a treatment that people would take because they want to, because they see the benefit. Now, you can do all kinds of things to affect your health. You can have antidepressants, which are a really, really bad idea overall, as a short term aid to getting person, they can have some value. But more people are on antidepressants and we've found not only are they less and less effective, most people aren't getting any from it, but actual fact, they're causing some really bad side effects in all kinds of ways, even associated with increased in suicide areas. There's so many. And then you have people who are taking things like Ritalin, like these stimulants that they use for things like adhd. So we've got a lot of people taking medicine to try and cope with various problems. If you can develop a medication, which all indications are, would actually be incredibly positive, it would actually help people to have a better mood, better relationships, happier life. If people choose to take this because they see the benefit and as a side benefit of that they have more children, I can't see any ethical problems at all. Because one thing I would say is that governments shouldn't and can't tell people to take these things. It should be all a matter of the individual choice.

There's a lot of doom and gloom in what you're saying here. So what can personally like if someone hears this and goes, what can I do to play my part? What can they actually do?

Yeah, people can hack their brain, epigenome, in a sense. There are certain ways to do it. The thing is, what causes the problem is an excess of certain kinds of excess of dopamine. And the way that works is that when you, when you take. I'll give an example, okay, you've got an addictive drug like cocaine, all right? What that does is it actually puts a surge of dopamine into your brain, which feels good. That's why these drugs feel good. Now what happens is the brain then rewires itself. It says, we don't want a big surplus of dopamine coming because that's not good for it. We have to balance it out. So when you get this big surge of dopamine artificially from cocaine, what happens is your dopamine receptors actually they wind down, they become less dense, less sensitive. So the grain goes in the balance. So you put the dopamine in dopamine receptors, then drop it off, so the effect goes away. So you need more cocaine. And the more you do this, the more your receptors are actually desensitized, the more cocaine you need, or heroin or whatever it is to feel normal. That's the process of drug addiction. That's why drug addiction doesn't work, because it upsets the balance of your brain. It gets down the dopamine receptors. What you need to do is to do the opposite. Cocaine. Now, I suppose, put another way, what happens is that cocaine does it in extreme way, but other things can do it too. Another example is junk food. Junk food or food with very high levels of sugar and salt and fat that actually does the same thing. It surge of dopamine winds down the dopamine receptors. A lot of things do the same way too. If you focus a lot on personal competition, if you like gambling, for example, that's the same thing. It gets you a surge of dopamine or dampens the dopamine receptors. Even video games, if you're endlessly involved in video games, has the same kind of effect. You've actually seen this in scientific experiments. You can actually see the effect of these games. They dampen down the dopamine receptors. What all these things do is when you dampen the receptors down, it means you need more and more stimulation, more and more dopamine to feel good, because your brain's out of balance. Competition in general, social media, going for likes on social media, even things like using dating apps where you're trying to get lots of swipes and stuff. It's all a competition thing. Putting yourself on Snapchat, showing how good you are, getting approval. All these things are the same effect. They boost the dopamine temporarily, they dampen down the dopamine receptors. This is the science behind it. Okay, now there's a solution to this. What you've got to do is the opposite. You've got to do things that actually take down your dopamine, depress it down to increase the dopamine receptors. So for example, one practice is fasting. Now, one of the things I do is I practice 16:8 fasting, which means I don't eat the 16 hours a day. Now, there's good health reasons for that. It's to do with autophagy and the way your cells work, but also feeling a bit hungry and is actually good for you has this kind of effect. Sexual, okay, having very active sex life, especially using things like porn and very partners, tends to depress your dopamine receptors. So having a more limited sex life and only with one person, for example, that's a way of depressing it down. Being part of a community, doing things for other people, being part of a church or a voluntary group of some kind, where you're helping other people, that has some effect. Actually it boosts the positive side. Strange, exercise actually boosts dopamine, but it also boosts dopamine receptors. So a lot of things you can do if you act in a more positive fashion, if you act in a way that's associated with more altruistic, more giving, less personally sort of indulgent activities, even things like work, like gardening, I love gardening. So doing routine work, spending time outside all this has the opposite effect. So what you can do is you can in a sense hack your own biology by doing the opposite to the competitive, individualistic, selfish, self indulgent lifestyle. If you do that, you actually rewire your brain and what that then does is make these more positive things like community, like family, like children, more attractive.

So then do you think we have a discipline problem then? A lot of the stuff you're saying requires a lot of discipline.

What all of this requires is to be disciplined, to look to long term values, long term interests rather than short term ones. So just being, getting up and going for a run, you know, being active, helping if you're home, helping with housework. It's a big thing in our house. You know, women, my wife, predictive cooks, we all help to wash up. The men always wash up, me and the kids for example. You do things that are actively involved. One of the things in our houses, we're pretty well off but we, apart from having a cleaner come in, we do domestic. So I do the laundry, for example. You tidy things up, you wash the dishes, you cook, you do all kinds of things that actually involved in work. So living a more simple, more direct lifestyle, being disciplined. Books like the Atomic Habits or Tiny Habits are fantastic that way help you to live a more disciplined lifestyle. Anything you can do to advance your long term goals, your more altruistic goals in particular, over your selfish, individualistic, Your laziness is going to help in this regard.

I was going to say then as well. So what communities then where this is not a problem. So obviously some people have probably been to put a graph up where you look at the map of the world with the fertility rates and there's a couple of countries where it's not a problem at all. This is continents like Africa and, and other places as well. So where is it not an issue for those countries? And what's the sort of common thing for those countries?

Look, relatively poor countries, like much of Africa, it's less of a problem simply because they don't have the wealth that we have. But you do have pockets within Western wealthy countries that are much better at this. There are certain groups which are highly religious, conservative groups like the Amish or Orthodox Jews, for example, which are very good at this sort of thing, at resisting this. And they had these kinds of very communal oriented things, very disciplined. They're very strong controls of things like sexual activity, very strong ideas about marriage and marriage early, strong things about having large families, disciplined lifestyle in so many different ways, like the Jewish Sabbath, those kind of things. Or Amish have all kinds of things against pride and display and wealth and ease and leisure. So these communities are actually very successful at disciplining people. And the way they do it actually though is they separate themselves out from society. So both the Amish and the Orthodox say in places like America, they use different languages, for example, which separate them. They have habits of eating and so forth to separate them out. So you have to resist the siren call of the world because the things about the modern world are very, very appealing. The freedom, the sensuality, the sexual adventure, the drugs, the alcohol. These things feel good in the short term, but they make you worse in the long term. These communities have worked out a way of a technology. Certain churches, the Church of Jesus Christ from Latter Day Saints, the Mormons, they're very good at this too. They have very strict disciplined lifestyle, quite rigorous, but they are noticeably happier and better off and more successful than most people. And actually there's one country in the world too that's actually made to happen fairly well, and that's Israel. Israel is the only wealthy, the only OECD country that actually has a positive fertility. It's about 2.1. And that's a large part because they've got strong religious minorities, even the Orthodox particularly so. But also a lot of Jews are actually quite religious, and that's also very beneficial. And then you've got the Muslim population too. So they're also, they're more religious, they're more communal, they have much more stronger community sense. They're very strong sense of patriotism. Young people are very eager to serve in the army, for example. You have strong associations. It's an extraordinary country, actually. I mean, reading books about it as well. I've just finished called the Genius of Israel, which talks about all this and interestingly enough, Israelis, you know what most of us consider a pretty tough situation. You know, they've got, they're surrounded by enemies, you're threatened with destruction. You've got missiles, rainbows, you've got exploding buses, you've got all kinds of things going wrong. You've got that dreadful thing that happened, you know, with that, you know, coming out of Gaza, that attack, an ongoing war with all this, you'd expect the Israelis to be unhappy. They're actually amongst the happiest people in the world. They're right up there with the Scandinavians, despite all this, because they've got this, this pro social, this community, this family, this fertility lifestyle. And in Israel it's actually fairly normal to have three or four children.

I think the Scandinavian country is a good example as well because they, they really help people, encourage them have kids, you know, Finland in particular to give you a box. And they have 250 days leave for both parents. Like they just a good example of showing that these sort of interventions do not work, aren't they?

They don't work though.

I know they don't work, but I'm just showing they're trying these, they've been driving time.

But I think Scandinavia is, countries are happier because they are more communal, more egalitarian. Inequality feels good when you're in the top dog, but it really doesn't help people's happiness very much. Even the people who are on top of it. This endless competition for status isn't particularly good. So I think the Scandinavian countries have done it well in respect of having a more egalitarian, more pro social kind of societies. But even then it doesn't work. Their birth rate is not that much better than somewhere like Greece.

There's another pe, there's another group of people, Irish Catholics. Back in the day, my, my mum was one of 11 and I grew up on a dairy farm and a lot of people in southwest Victoria, which is in Australia and there's a lot of farms back in the day they had, was quite common to have six, 10 kids and a lot of them would work on the farm as well. So lack of farms I think and different things as well.

Yeah, traditional country lifestyle, especially when children could help in the farm, was certainly a positive.

Well, you needed him to work, you need, you need your labor. So you had Pete. They won't say that, but that's what they did. The Irish Catholics, they'd have a lot of kids for that little reason, I think.

Yeah. Look, solitudism was a tremendous, they were Known as having very big families until a generation or two back and then they've fallen apart, they get pulled down with the rest of society. The trouble with this change is this. It always seems good in the short term. It's like it's the same thing, you know, getting out of bed in the morning, it feels good to actually lie down there and just have another snooze or turnover and stuff, to get up and go for a run. That's hard. And yet if you do the things that's most difficult, you are in the end better off, healthier and happier. Same thing for society. It's easy to do these things. It's easy to have the junk food, it's easy to have the marijuana and the alcohol and the leisure and the individualism and the likes on Facebook and the video games and all this stuff. It's very attractive. But it makes us miserable. It's making us miserable. We have to fight against that.

So with countries, obviously they might be using migration and thinking this is going to stop the problem, but as you said, it's just going to. Would migration. Is migration just going to delay it that we know you can't use migration to get your way out of this.

Yeah, well, look, countries like Australia, Canada and the US with very high levels of migration are actually a lot less affected. The worst affected problems countries, places like Japan and South Korea don't particularly want lots and lots of immigrants. So yes, we to a certain extent are insulin. And I think you find there's less concern about the falling birth rate in countries with high immigrant levels because we do get young, vigorous people from other countries and we've done very well in Australia. We've got people from places like India and China and so forth. And my wife's Chinese, so I'm very appreciative of immigration from such countries. And they bring a lot. The trouble is the countries that those countries are running out of people too. And that's the same problem, their birth rates collapsing as well. And you can always get more people from countries like Sudan, for example, if we want to bring Sudanese or Somalians in. The trouble with that is when you get people with a very different culture, it changes our culture and you get an issue like in Sweden, Sweden was always very open hearted about let's bring people in, let's bring everybody in because we're so generous. You're now getting, you know, gang warfare in the streets of Stockholm and people are starting to say Malmo and stuff.

Yeah, mass amount of gun violence in there now.

Yeah, it isn't necessarily having mass immigration from very poor, war torn countries. It isn't necessarily all good. And I don't say we shouldn't. I mean I love immigrants. We've got a lot of great people that I know, not least my wife of course. But it's not a great solution in the long term because the people that the countries that are going to have the population tend to be countries with very different standards of living.

I was going to say as well. So advice for young people because the problem might be that young people now might be growing up in a household where they're the only child or they may be only other kids. So that's the example. They're sort of going to go off. So what would your advice then be to young people, even maybe to parents?

You're talking about being a parent. That's a very different issue. What parents should be doing is several things. Learning from the communities that have got more fertile, more fertile communities. Children need limits, they need discipline. That's one thing that's very clear. If you don't, if you indulge a child, if you just keep on telling them you're special, you're wonderful, whatever you do, you don't put any restraints on them. That has a very, very bad effect on character. This breeds this individual, this selfishness, this laziness, these things that are going wrong. So you need to put strict limits, stern limit and show by example and by what you say that you need to behave in a better way. My wife's very good at it actually comes from that old tradition. She's always, she lectures a lot to the children, she's a lecturer. They sort of roll their eyes but she does and she talks about the need to look after other people. And you know, our children are wonderful. They turned out exceptionally well. They're really decent people, hard working, but they're also very caring. They look after each other, look after other people. So you've got to, you've got to train people in that sort of pro social, if you can. Being part of a religious community is the best possible way because that's where you learn these kind of. You go to church and you don't get taught, hey, you know, this is how to become more, more an influencer or something selfish. You get taught, you know, be a better person, look after other people, you know, care for other people. That, that's that lesson that you get and then you're part of it. If you're involved, you're part of a very intensive community. I have to say religious belief itself has no benefit. Believing in God or not, it really doesn't matter of stuff. What matters is what you do about it. If you're part of a faith community. But any, look, any community is good. Being a mason or being some sort of helping with your local CFA or any of those things, any pro social activity is good. But religious communities, whether they're mosques or temples or synagogues or churches, they're the best form because that is the most powerful form of helping you to achieve this kind of positive, unselfish, meaningful life.

Do you think a change in parenting style could then help? You just mentioned it then. Do you think actually changing the actual parenting style could help to push the child away from being. Yes, well, could actually, actually actively help in this.

It's beneficial. But to a certain extent parenting comes out of your own personality and if you live a very self indulgent lifestyle, very undisciplined, you're not likely to be a very disciplined sort of parent. So it's very difficult for people to. You can't raise your children different to the kind of person you are. If you're very lazy, if you're very indisciplined, you can't teach your children because you might tell them, but they'll look at you and say, well, you know, but what are you doing? Children are very quick to notice the difference. It's this thing, do what I say, not what I do. That doesn't work, does it? So to actually be a good parent, you've got to actually model it. You've got to be the kind of person that will be a good parent. Now the problem with all this is that as the society moves in a very negative direction, it takes the parenting style with it and it's very hard to fight against it. It's kind of like the idea, but it's a bit like you had a, you've got a, you've got a, you've got a big spate of water coming down the river like a flood tide and you're just throwing a few rocks in the water to try and slow it down. Well, I mean it's kind of like idea, but it's not enough. You've got to put a huge amount of rocks in to stop the water, to actually slow it down. Same thing with parenting, what we do as individuals. It's very difficult bound out with a temperament and our lifestyle, there's not much we can really do to change that course. All you can do is slightly slow what's going on if you were in.

Charge of a country, if you're the prime minister or president, what could you do? Or what would you suggest they actually do?

I'd fund scientific research. There's no other way of doing it. We're not talking about a lot of money. I mean, you're talking about all the hundreds of billions of dollars, even trillions worldwide, to try and cope with this completely futile. My research head actually estimates to do this thing properly would probably cost between 100 and $200 million, which is a fair amount of money, but really it's pocket change to most governments. And that would solve the problem. It wouldn't just put a bandaid over it futile, it would actually solve it. All you've got to do is to develop the technology. And some of these technologies are quite new, actually. One of the most promising ones is crispr, which is a way of going in individually, changing the actual, directly going in and changing the site. If you know the sites, which we pretty much know what the sites are, we know what these things do, you can go directly change them now. That technology has not been good enough in the past. Within the next year or two. One of the problems with CRISPR is it's the targeting. You want to go in and change a particular gene, you want to put a methyl group on that there, bang, turn it off, but then you put it over there or over there. So the targeting isn't fine, but they're getting much better at targeting. So within a year or two, probably going to get the stage where you can individually make exactly the changes you want and you can change it. And then you've got to make them in the right place in the body because it's often in the brain that you need to do it, where the expression is and so forth. But it's getting very close. So scientific research can solve this thing.

Yeah. So I'll say so. I just want to outline for people specifically, and hopefully it gets translated to Japanese or South Korean, it gets picked up. But 100 to 2 million dollars is your estimate. And then that would be. And that would then give you enough research and be able to develop the technology. And would that look like a pill that someone would take or what would the actual treatment look like for people itself? And how would you actually get them to do it, to take it?

Well, you probably like a vaccine. Vaccine, you could do it pure, but most likely there's a lot of vaccines that actually work. The new ones from COVID which is a remarkable improvement of what happened in the past, where you go in, you actually get the body to produce the cells itself. You use something like a harmless virus that go and gets the cells to pump out what you need. There are problems with it. One of the problems with it is, unlike a COVID vaccine, is you need to get past the blood brain barrier. The body has very strict systems to stop things getting into the brain. So you've got to somehow get past that barrier by bringing it in directly or using navel sprays or using certain ways to get that. There's complications in how it's to be done, but mostly some sort of a. A drug of some kind would be the most likely way to do it. As to how you get people to.

Want to take it would be to.

Want to take it. That's not going to be your problem. Your problem is going to be like these weight loss drugs. You're going to have to try. And the demand for it would be hysterical, over the top. Once it's proved that it can work. And by the way, it would actually act to weight to help you to lose weight because they help you burn more discipline. Somebody who took this kind of stuff would actually be fairly easily be able to take take weight off and leave it off and they can become fit and they become much happier. So once you develop systems that work, the desire for it would be an absolute stampede. And the problem would be for the drug companies to try and struggle to keep up, which is what's happened with the weight loss drugs.

And I've seen on a few podcasts they've actually been spent male fertility decline, actual sperm counts, like microplastics and all these sorts of things. So what would you. Is that really minuscule community contributing factor.

Or what would you sort of say it's microplastics? I think it's part of the general infertility that happens when you get this process of society collapse. It was the same thing in. I'll give you another example. In the past, most populations were too poor, had this problem. But there were certain groups that did become very wealthy and urbanized. And one example of that is the Chinese scholar gentry. These are Chinese families who would be hard working, say peasants and merchants. And then they would get their children to become part of. They'd study and become part of the imperial elite. They became very wealthy and moved to the towns. Now what actually happened was after a time these families became very infertile. Not only did they seem to want to have children, but their actually fertility rate dropped dramatically. They really found it impossible. So we see the same sort of happening whenever you get wealth and urbanization. People have less desire for children and eventually less ability to have children. So infertility rises. So I don't think it's microplastic. It's the same process. So if you actually fixed up the epigenetics, you'd actually fix the fertility problems too.

Yeah, it's great. It's interesting here in that example because the people presume thousands and thousands of years ago people would just be having kids everywhere. But as you said with that example there, that's not always been the case. I think that might be pretty illuminating to a lot of people there as well. All right, I was going to say then, Jim. Well, personally, why are you interested in this topic? Why should you allocate all your time? I'm sure people might be going, well, he's this wealthy, successful entrepreneur, like he could be doing anything he wants. Why is he focusing on this? Why do you personally focus on it?

It's the single most important thing in my life. Look, when I was a student, I developed this as a PhD student and I thought it was important and I thought I'd have an academic career to pursue it. And I completely failed in that because I couldn't get the. I couldn't get people to believe what I was saying. It was too outrageously different to anybody else was saying. So I said, okay, what I got to do is to become wealthy enough to fund my own research institute. And that was the whole function, my whole purpose. Besides gyms, I never had any personal desire to become wealthy. Even today, my wife and I live in a lifestyle which is very similar to that of most people in the population. You know who I'm like. I don't have expensive tastes. I don't see pleasure in that. This is my life's mission, my life's work. That and my kids too. Being a father is very important to me and it's what matters to me. But also another thing too is I think even if you look at it in terms of happiness, having a life with meaning and with purpose is part of what makes you happy. If your whole purpose in life is that I'm going to be richer than you and I'm going to have a better Facebook account and I'm going to be more prestigious, I'm going to be more wealthy and I'm going to have, you know, yeah, you've got gold plated taps in your yacht, but I've got solid gold caps in my yacht. That kind of garbage competitive things doesn't make you happy comparing to other people. What makes people happy is doing something that has meaning and purpose in your life. And they've actually discovered that with money. They discovered that the worst way to spend money is competition. If you spend it on being more rich than somebody else, it doesn't work because somebody's always richer. If you spend money on doing things with other people in the community, it works better. But you know the thing they've found out most important in life, the best thing you can do with money is to give it away to a cause that you're involved with. So that's what I do. I actually spend something like 90% over. More than 90% of my direct net income is given away. And I tell you what, I reckon I'm as happy as any man on the face of the earth. So even from a purely selfish point of view, living a life with purpose is good. But even more than that, though, it's just what's important to me, what matters. We've got to have a reason to live in life and just living for personal indulgence. Selfishness is not good enough. It makes you miserable. It's not good for you, not good for the world.

Now you've got a couple of. You got some really devout followers online who followed you right from your bio history release and obviously Epigenetics and Character is the updated version. What have been the changes until now? Like what are some updates or what are some improvements or changes to what you're doing at the moment?

We have a vastly more better idea of what's going on. Look, this thing about dopamine is revolutionary. And quite frankly, this is only in the last few months that we've actually worked this out. Trying to work out what's going on, trying to explain it. I was doing it in terms of testosterone, all kinds of things too. And it's so clearly dopamine. And that's based on the sort of reading that I do all the time. It's unrecognizably different. In actual fact, I'm going to have to, when I release this book, I'm going to have to go back and rewrite by history completely and radically. It's totally different to what I had when I first did it. And I'd apologize to anybody who's read it, you'll recognize it, but it's really different. And what I'm going to do actually, when I introduce, when this new book comes out, I'm going to have another version of biohistory called something like biohistory 2025, which I'll make free through electronic versions and stuff so people don't have to pay for something they've already paid for. But yeah, it's changed a lot. I continue to develop the ideas and we're doing research all the time too. We're spending millions of dollars a year on research and as we come across more findings, we're updating what's going on.

I'll say to people then, Jim, is there anything else I should ask you? I haven't asked you or you've been. You've given us a lot of content, which is great now. So what I'll say to people as well, click on the link to sign up to the mailing list and you actually get advised when Jim's what's the title of actually getting the book going to be called? Have you said on the title?

That's called the Baby Bus.

The Baby Bus. The Baby Bus will be out hopefully sometimes this year. So make sure you get on the mailing list to be first notified as well. We'll also release a free chapter as well later on to get you hopefully to buy it too. So the baby bust as well. Now if there's anyone who likes to learn more about this sort ofstuff, buy history.org, also jimpeman.com where you can actually contact Jim as well. We afford on all contact requests to Jim, so if you've got something there, follow Jim on social media as well. We're going to put a lot more content like this out on Jim's social channels. Sojimpeman on everything, YouTube, TikTok. You ask him a question on TikTok, we'll answer about this, which we're going to be doing a lot now. So just follow him online, ask him questions, reach out if you're interested and hopefully learn more. And if you're a government listening to this or a government official, get it to him. If you're in Japan, South Korea, just get it to him, translate whatever you need to do. Jim's more than happy to help out anyway. So thank you very much for your time today, Jim.