How I would solve the birth-rate crisis and it has nothing to do with money!

Cool. So welcome back to another Conversations with Jim. So if you've been following Jim on X especially and other platforms, you've been seeing Jim post a lot about birthright with birth rate with his. With his research in different countries and stuff like that. So I just want to share with a bit of an update. Jim. So where's the book at and what's been happening with it?

Well, the moment the book is largely finished, except we're just waiting for the results of a whole series of experiments that are currently being done. We are looking at. The nature of the idea is that.

What causes people to have children has to do with mild food restriction. There's a kind of mentality associated with it and the reason that birth rate is dropping is because of prosperity. What we're doing is looking at the effects of mild food restriction in rats in particular and trying to understand what happens and trying to work out a way of reproducing that. Now, we tested 1,000 drugs in nerve cells, basically in little capsules to see those that had a similar effect. We found 61 that had some kind of effect that was very interesting. We've narrowed that down. We're just about to start testing nine in animals and we're looking for things like improved maternal behavior, but also better, more hard working in rat terms, which means more active and exploratory and so forth.

That's pretty exciting. So how long is that process sort of going to take before you think you'll have some sort of treatment or something available?

Well, we could have a treatment within a year of some kind, basically. Testing animals is one thing, but then you've got to go to human trials, which is hugely expensive and it might mean getting a drug industry involved. But it's also possible that some of the weight loss treatments like WeGovy and so forth could have. They have very similar effects. For example, weight loss drugs do help people to get off things like drugs and smoking and so forth. So we think that they may operate in a similar way. So we're testing some of those for the right kinds of psychological changes and how you're.

This is part of Epigenes, your research project? Yeah, yes. So how big is the team at Epigenes?

I think We've got about 15 researchers right now through La Trobe University. Yeah, it's quite good. They've got the nice labs there with.

You've had a look at them?

Yes, yeah, we went right through and did videos. It's quite impressive that there's a wing of the Trobe which Is actually.

Does joint ventures with companies like ourselves which have scientific ideas that also got commercial potential as well. I'm not mainly interested in making money out of this thing of course but the fact of the matter is if we could produce a substance that was extremely helpful in treating things like drug addiction and depression and so forth, it would have financial potential which would be great because then we can plow the money back into further research.

Yeah. So the birth rate crisis is pretty much done but as you said, you're waiting for results of these new studies before it will start.

Yeah, we're particularly looking at the dopamine reaction system.

Right.

Because lots is to do with the way that food restriction or food plentiful actually affects the way that our bodies respond to dopamine.

Yeah, it's quite, it's quite interesting. And yeah when you anticipate the book is going to be coming out probably early next year. Early next year Based on that now in the media a lot there's been recently as you would see yourself, there's been more and more, I'd say mainstream sort of awareness and take up. There's a lot of more videos and stuff coming about this subject so none of it mentions your stuff or what you're saying about. So just how little effect is these sorts of benefits and I guess schemes governments are coming up going to have?

Well they're not having any effect at all. See that's the interesting thing is when you talk to anybody about why the birth rate's dropping and say ah, don't worry, nobody talk about it. I know the reason, absolutely know the reason. People can't afford to have children. That's it. Beginning, middle, end, problem solved. Give them more money and they'll have more children. Only problem is doesn't work anywhere in the world. There are countries from Japan to South Korea to Eastern Europe to all kind of baby bonuses galore, help with childcare, parent the Scandinavian model of more support for parents, none of it works. There's no intervention ever been seen that has any effect at all on the birth rate. None at all. And what I've got, what we've got is a solution that we believe can absolutely solve this thing but it just requires scientific research, scientific knowledge because for.

Me like we do a lot of TikTok Q and A stuff and I reckon every day I'll go through the comments, it's exactly the same comment saying Jim's out of touch. It was far cheaper back in his day to have kids even though he was struggling things were lay less than cost. Now I can't afford housing. There's housing crisis, et cetera. I'd love to have kids, but it's too expensive to have kids. And that's pretty much every single comment we get on a video you do is literally those two things.

Exactly. And that's why government respond to that. They say, look, we've tried this in the past, it's completely failed. So I know, let's try it again. And that fails. Oh, okay, solution, try it again. They keep on trying the same thing. It keeps on failing. Look at every level. It doesn't work. Money is not the factor. You look at who's having the fewest children. It's not the people who are poor. It's the people who are wealthier. The wealthier you are, the more you live in a big city with high income, the less likely to have children. If you look at the past, look at when I was, when I started having children, for example, I was a lawnmower contractor and I didn't have any property. I was renting a house. I was actually in debt when I started having a family and my wife wasn't working. It just lived simply. That's a priority. When I was growing up in the 50s, we lived in a small house. We had no air conditioning. If you had a holiday, it was in a tent. I mean, we lived very simply. We never used to go out. We just never went out. There just wasn't. And food was very basic. That was where we lived. And it wasn't poor. But my parents had four children and that was common in those days. As the standard living has increased, as people have got more and more, bigger houses, better cars, better holidays, better everything else, they have less and less children. It's completely the opposite.

Because the argument you'll get back from people, let's say online, because I see all the time, they'll actually say that's all well and good, but the cost in comparison to income and what things are now is completely different. So that's the argument we'll get. And obviously people get pretty, I guess, worked up about it as well because they're, they might be using that as an excuse, I guess, not to do it. Or they might think that's the real reason why. Yeah, so. So do you think if they were aware of the actual real reason, they might change their attitude or.

I don't think many people will ever change their attitude. I think, look, I, I like, I think Albert Einstein had one of the best words on this. He said to keep on Doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. People are so convinced that it's money, money, money that they ignore all the evidence of the opposite. It's not money. If anything, it's completely the opposite. The more money we have, the less children we have. The wealthier you are, the less children. Even within societies like you look in somewhere like India, okay, where's the wealthiest part of India? Relatively speaking, it's in the south. Where's the birth rate highest in? It's in the north. In any country, in any society you look at, it's the people who've got the most money, who have the fewest children. As people become wealthier, the birth rate drops. Not just a pattern of the modern world, it happened in ancient times, too. It happened in ancient Greece, for example, in the fourth century, when you get the population becoming quite wealthy and prosperous in the 4th century and the birth rate drops. It happened in the Roman Empire. It happens all the time. It's a psychological thing. Even though common sense is more money, more kids. Human biology says more money, less kids.

Just to be clear, because we're going to get a lot of comments on this online, it's always going to be the same thing. It's literally what I just told you before. We're going to get more and more of it. So, like, it might be hard for people to hear, but you're saying. But basically, you know, people listening to this, they've got to really look at themselves and their lives in terms of what they're doing and adjust things. Or maybe if they really do prioritize kids, that will make. They'll make the effort, or they'll maybe readjust things to then accommodate their life, to do that if they're not earning enough money or whatever it is. But you're basically saying people just need to have a look at themselves. That's where. That's where the issue stems for their bone. Yeah.

It comes down to psychology. It comes down to priorities. If you're the kind of person that gives a high priority to career success, to having a nice house, to having a bigger car, to having holidays, to having eating out, if those are your priorities, you'll tend to have less children. If your priority is children are more important than anything else, as long as there's food on the table, then you'll have more children. It's as simple as that. And the people who have bigger families are not the rich. It's actually typically people who have more conservative, particularly religious kinds of points of view.

It's quite interesting because we do a lot of this stuff. We take a lot of your words and we repurpose them for different platforms and there's a difference between the different platforms. A lot of people get really worked up about some of this stuff, but there's a lot of people who agree with you as well. You know, about the rise of individualism over community and obviously the lack of religion is a big factor as well and certainly in some things. So I do think there's some people who do agree with you, but I do think there's a lot of people who don't get it or they think it's. They just money, money, money, money.

I'm not sure the majority of people in Western countries will ever agree right frankly. But.

We don't have to have everybody agree. What you have to have is enough people understand say yes, there's something in this. Let's, let's not keep on, let's keep on spending billions and billions of dollars on subsidies. We lot. But let's just take a little bit tiny fraction of that, like a 1% fraction of that and put it into basic scientific research and produce treatments that can actually solve the problem. And you can keep on spending your billions if you want to. And you have no effect at all as long as you do something to actually that's going to actually work. And it will. And it's actually not so difficult. We don't have to have a substance that will suddenly want. People want to have children. You have a substance that helps people to be happier, to be more entrenched with their community, to have a more positive attitude towards work. If we can help that kind of change take place and as a side product that'll help people to have more children, then you'll solve the problem.

So we're going to watch some videos soon and get you to react to some of this stuff because a lot of content around like 60 minutes is doing stuff on South Korea and Japan, like disappearing appearing villages and things like that. But for me, all these obviously these initiatives they're trying, they have to be based on experts, I guess opinion or some sort of thing for governments to throw money at it. So how are the experts so wrong in that? Because they're obviously trying these initiatives based on they're getting advice from somewhere or from some people around it. So how are they getting it so wrong on that?

I don't think the experts are that expert in what they're talking about because one thing people have is very little understanding of history. You Might have somebody who understands economic, but they don't understand neuroscience, for example. And that's exactly the problem people look at in a very narrow focus. And they simply go and ask people, why don't you have more children? That's what the researchers do. And they say, because we need more money. Oh, there's your result. But it doesn't fit empirically, it doesn't fit the evidence. And that's the problem. People think in terms of ideology, they don't think in terms of science, of evidence.

Were you surprised that countries like South Korea and Japan are basically not getting towards the same conclusion that you are? Because they're countries where they're very technologically advanced. They're very down the book. They will look at a whole bunch of different things. How are they missing it?

There's a big. In academia, there's a very big divide these days between different disciplines. If you understand sort of like economics, you don't understand history very well. Even if you do, you don't understand neuroscience, you don't understand epigenetics. There's a whole lot of different areas. These people talk amongst themselves, These people talk amongst themselves. These people talk. What I've done, and I'm not a huge expert in everything, is bring them together and say, okay, let's try and understand it. We understand how the dopamine system works. Okay, let's apply this to the collapsing birth rate. Let's apply this to the declining work ethic, to the rising deaths of despair. Look at it all together, bringing these disparate ideas together. Because when you contingent look in silos, you'll never make the connection that really can change anything.

Yeah. So you're saying it's sort of. You need to bring these different disciplines together under one sort of concrete.

In the book, in birth rate crisis, I start by talking about the actual demographics, the changes that are taking place, pointing out that extra money isn't helping. And then I talk about the ancient world, talk about the same thing happening in the past. It's not just a matter of the 20th, 21st centuries. It's happened many times in the past in different civilizations. And then you start talking about biology, talking about the way that apes and gibbons and so forth, how they react to different environments and how that changes and how their maternal and their parenting behavior changes and their social behavior changes. And then you start looking at the physiology part to do with the dopamine system and the way the dopamine reacts to it and the way that drugs work and so forth, drugs of addiction so you put all these things together in a picture that does actually give a fairly clear idea of what's going wrong and what we need to do about it.

Yeah, I just think that hopefully we can get this out there enough for people in the governments to maybe look at it. Because the amount of money they're spending on what they're doing, that's worth having a goal with what you're doing to put some investment into it.

Because it's interesting. You only need one or two people.

Yes.

You need one prime minister or one senior person in some government to look at and say, yes, okay, we've tried all these things.

Our country is dying. Maybe, maybe just take, as I said, fraction of 1% of what we're plowing into these useless, and put it into research and let's have a solution. You don't need a lot of people because once one country tries it and they start to see, they start to move ahead and their fertility rises and their sense of morale rises and their rates of suicide drop and their mental health increases, once one country people can look at it and say, wow, you know, Japan's done this and they're actually working now, maybe we should stop doing all the useless stuff we're doing and let's look at what works.

A lot of people are saying in Japan that it's gone too far. Like it's literally, it's gone to a tipping point where it can't get arrested.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they are too. And that's because they don't understand the reason behind it. But in fact, it's actually something that's, that's solvable. It's, it's one problem that's solvable. One of the great things, too is that science has advanced so fast in recent years. Our understanding of things like epigenetics is dramatically more than it was even a decade ago. In fact, a decade ago would have been very difficult to do what I'm proposing. Even though I've been working on this stuff for, you know, 50 years, only recently have we developed the technology that allows us to actually make these kinds of changes. And it's amazing what's happened. So, yes, we can actually do solutions. And Japan isn't a basket case, nor is any other country. Any country can survive. It could happen fairly quickly. And it'll be cheap, too. Instead of spending hundreds of billions on subsidies, it's going to cost something in the nature of a.

Like a prescription, it's like a weight loss drug, something like that. It's that kind of level of intervention. And that's all we need. We just need to know what the process is. We need to know the substances, the treatment that'll turn it around and make that widely available and the problem can be solved.

What I'm going to do, we've got some videos here because I want to just play you some stuff to see your reaction, because we're going to put these clips in here as well. So this is one that was quite. So this is about. Japan's birth rates have been full, so it goes through some graphs here. And the ninth year of decline in a row. It's also the lowest since modern record keeping began in 1899. Looking at the queues of couples lining up to have their picture taken in front of Tokyo Station as the sun goes down, and you'd think that marriage must be booming here. But look closer, and about half of the couples are visiting from elsewhere in Asia. Also, in 2024, only 500,000 couples got married.

For Japan, that's critical.

All but 3% of Japanese babies are born to parents who are married.

So for all the talk about dual income, no kids, relationships, what we actually see across all sorts of countries, Japan just being one, is not a rise in the number of people who are happily married or cohabiting choosing not to have kids. It's a reduction in the number of people coupling up at all. But the simple number of couples out there who even could have kids if they want, has fallen a lot.

So what are your thoughts about that, about those sort of graphs and what they're saying there?

It's actually, psychologically, it's the same mentality, it's the same reaction. Psychological reaction causes people not to want children and not to want to have marriage. Psychologically, they're very similar. If you're the kind of person that wants to be bonded with the single partner for life, then you're also the kind of person who want you to want to have children. And that's why you find religious groups, for example, like the Amish, particular Orthodox Jews, tend to have very, very high marriage rates and also very high birth rates. They go together. If you're the kind of person that wants to live a sort of a carefree, single, you know, consumerist lifestyle, you're not going to want to get married, you're not going to want to have children.

Absolutely. I'll show you a few other things because there's a few other videos about it, where they go through some of these initiatives. And I just want to run through it because I think It'd be good to just show people. Even Sky News is doing on it. All right, here we go.

Last Wednesday, Japan's Internal Affairs Ministry published new data showing that the number of Japanese nationals fell by over 900,000 people in 2024, the biggest annual drop on record, marking the 16th consecutive year that the Japanese population has fallen. This was due to a record low number of births, around 690,000, and a record high number of deaths, nearly 1.6 million. This year also heralds Japan's 2025 problem, marking the year when all of Japan's roughly 8 million baby boomers will be 75 or older, pushing up health and pension costs, while the working age population only shrinks. This crisis has become so urgent that Japan's former Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida told parliament in 2023, Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.

So I've got you to comment on that. That quote back in 2023, that the functioning of society. Because people. Do you think people don't even understand what this actual impact is like? They show graphs and stuff like that. They might go, that looks a bit.

They don't understand. We're so used to having our elderly people supported by the general population that the very idea that there won't be enough working people to actually support them is alien. But it's going to happen. It's going to go on. And one thing people don't understand, too, is they think the birth rate's going to a certain level and it's going to sort of level off now and we'll always have the same. Actually, no, it's not. It's going to keep on going down. The reason, you know that is because when you ask the opinions of young people who are just about to start any age, like they're, you know, late teens, early 20s, start having children, they're actually less positive about children and family than 20 years ago. So in actual fact, the birth rate will continue to decline. If Japan's now what, 1.1 utility, it's going to go down to South Korean levels, it'd be 0.7 and South Korea will go down to 0.5 unless we do something about it.

We'll continue with the video because they talk about the initiatives up here.

Explain the data on Japan's declining population, how successive governments have tried to fix it and how it interacts with Japan's population had declined for a 16th consecutive year, falling by 0.44% to about 124.3 million people at the start of 2025. This was due to a 17th consecutive annual drop in births with just 688,000 babies born in Japan in 2024, plus a record high number of deaths at 1.6 million. This high death rate is due to the size of Japan's elderly population, age 65, which has increased every year between 1994 and 2022 and now accounts for nearly 30% of the total population. Conversely, the working age population, age 15 64, has decreased every year since 1995, making up 60% of the population in 2024. This demographic shift has contributed to the so called 2025 problem. In 2018, Japan's government projected that due to its rapidly growing elderly population, overall Social Security costs, including pension payments, would increase by nearly 60% between 2025 and 2040.

Let's talk about that point real quickly. The cost to the economy, which is this mentioned there about Social Security, obviously Australia's got a, got a bunch of South Korea and stuff. How worrying would that be? Or should that be for governments? Because that's a big, big jump.

Yeah, well look, what's crazy is at the moment most western governments in general, including Australia and most age, are actually borrowing money. So in a time of peace and prosperity, we're actually borrowing money to be repaid by our children and our grandchildren, but there's so few of them, so we're just loading more and more. I cannot see it as it's not sustainable. There's no way in the world that we can support more and more elderly people with less and less working age people. And I think you're going to find situations like happening in Canada now where elderly people are being offered the option of euthanasia.

Really?

Yeah. This is a growing trend. It's become very, very widespread and a lot of the time people just think, I don't want to be a burden, I can't afford to look after myself. I don't want to be a burden on my children if I have any. And they just take an easy way out. I can see that becoming something that's encouraged because how on earth do you cope with it when you've got people? We cannot possibly afford to look after growing numbers of elderly people when there's less and less working age people.

While Japan's elderly population is among the healthiest in the world, with more than half of 65 to 69 year olds and more than a third of 70 to 74 year olds employed in 2023, they're also among Those living the longest requiring more years of state support. Finally, the data also shows that the foreign population in Japan has increased to nearly 3.68 million people, the highest since records began in 2012. This is because until 2022, Japan's foreign population was less than 3 million people, but has since risen due to the government's expansion of overseas work visas, which we'll explain later. Anyway, to address this population decline, successive Japanese governments have tried and failed to reverse it through various childcare based initiatives to encourage more people to have children. This began under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who introduced policies to subsidize nurseries, loosen regulations on childcare providers and keep women in the workforce. But Abe's reforms did little to change things. So in 2023, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's government increased annual childcare spending to around 3.5 trillion yen, or US$25 billion from 3 trillion and in 2024.

So let's stop on that point about childcare subsidies. And we've spoken about subsidies before, but obviously that's a lot of money, 25 billion US on that, and obviously there hasn't been much effect. So it sounds like it's good in theory, but obviously it doesn't have the.

And they do it because that's what people say when you ask them why they don't have children money, why don't you have kids money. It's always the same answer. That's what people say, that's what people think. Most people do think that. The fact of the matter is when you actually put it to the test, when you give them more money, you don't get more children. I've seen an estimate that you probably could bribe people to have another child, but it would cost something like a million dollars per child, which is way, way beyond the capacity of any, any country to support that kind of spending. Even the richest.

Yeah, it's amazing.

Japan's parliament passed a law to set up a new 600 billion yen, or $4 billion childcare support funding scheme, which will run from 2026, with that scheme set to increase to 1 trillion yen, or $6.8 billion by 2028. Overall. The scheme is designed to offer increased benefits to parents. Specifically, it extends coverage for children from 15 to 18, doubles the monthly allowance for a third or subsequent child, expands parental leave and daycare facilities, and scraps the household income cap for the allowance.

So there's the one about the. Doubles the monthly allowance for the third child. So they're basically, you know, they're Trying to get people to have children at a certain point to get a discount or to get a tax concessions. Now Hungary have been doing that. So how's it been sort of tracking for Hungary from what you can tell, or is it too early?

Hungary is about the most extreme in the world. List something like 5% of their GDP on subsidies. No effect at all. Anybody can tell it just doesn't work. Everybody thinks it's about money and you get them more money, they don't have more children. We've got to start thinking differently. You keep on trying the same thing again and again. It keeps on failing. And the only answer is let's try it again. It's failed 10 times in the past. 11 times. Lucky. Somehow many will magically create more births. People don't have children because the company gives you more money. It just doesn't work that way. You have children because you want to have children and for that you need to change your character.

So that children are eligible regardless of their parents employment status. But while these reforms clearly increase the economic incentives, there are also social factors preventing Japanese women from having children, such as a demanding work culture, falling marriage rate and paternalistic traditions which discourage single parent families. With just 2.4% of Japanese babies born outside of marriage, there's a few things there.

So about the demanding work culture and let's say paternalistic traditions, what do you sort of think about that as being.

I think that probably does have an effect. I definitely do. The East Asian countries with these kinds of cultures, including Japan and South Korea, do have relatively lower birth rates than western countries like Australia and the United States and in Europe, for example. The only thing I'd say is that even in the most liberal, egalitarian, workforce, friendly mother pro mother environments in the world, the birth rate is still way, way, way below replacement level. It's like most countries, about 1.5, 1.6, but you need 2.1 just to break even. So yes, it probably is a culture difference and it does account for some of the very low levels in these countries. But even if you completely 100% solved all these problems overnight, completely changed the work culture, changed everything, which is unreasonable anyway, even if you did that, you'd still have a declining population.

Probably. The money, the money we've been hearing there. Jim. Sorry, the money we've been hearing there is billions, billions of us. Like we're talking tens of billions of dollars.

Yes.

So just for the government or for any of these countries interested, how much would you sort of say financially you would want to put into your research, we could probably get it to a.

Point where it could be my research head who's got many decades of experience in these kinds of areas, think between 1 and $200 million Australian. That's it would solve the problem. Because what you're looking for is not to subsidize. You're looking for a basic science understanding of how this process, this psychological change has taken place and then working out a way to reverse it. And it's quite solvable.

There you go. So to learn more, guys, jimpeman.com you sign up to Jim's mailing list and if you are from those governments or anyone know anywhere, flick him this stuff and email jims.net and he'll be more than happy to talk to him.