Jacinta Allan gone! The threat of China? Plus a lot more!

Absolute disaster. He's no better than Chairman Dan, I tell you what. The Labor Party in Victoria is such a horror. I'd say it was a joke, but there's nothing funny about it. They are dragging this state down. They are damaging business. They are piling up debt. They are putting on— the only growth industry in Victoria is overpaid civil servants. Trump is a purely appalling man. He is, he is, he is just— character, he's a dreadful, corrupt, short-sighted— he's done terrible damage to America and to the world. I really have no respect for him at all. Bah! Vance is the real article. China is not a threat to Australia at all. There's no conceivable way that Chinese would ever want to invade Australia. What they want to do is to take our raw materials and sell their stuff.

So this is Jim Penman's newsletter for July 2026. This is newsletter which you can get on his Substack. And obviously, if you follow Jim on X, you'll see bits of this as well, so make sure you subscribe. So Jim, let's go for the first item here, which is titled Accepting Feedback, based on a book that you've read by Reed Hastings.

Yeah, well, I— it's the second time I've read this book actually, and it's just very interesting because there's a number of things about— it's called No Rules Rules. It's a, it's a great business book. Um, one of the things it talks about is, is the need for high quality workers. You choose good people, people do you really, really want, and pay them really well. But if they're not particularly good, get rid of them. That's one thing, which is tough. But other thing I thought was really interesting, just to reinforce, is that they have a very open culture where they request feedback at every level. So somebody who's quite junior can actually say to Reed Hastings, the CEO, founder of the company, I think you handled this wrong, and he will take it in a certain way and thank them for their input. So they have a whole system of how you present the feedback. It's— there's a way of doing it and it's a way of receiving and accepting it. It's a very powerful thing. And I certainly find that in gyms, one of the greatest things we've got as a benefit is the fact that I give my phone number and email address to all my franchisees. Yes. Which people think is very strange, but in actual fact, it's a way of me finding out what's going wrong at every level. And I get this Multiple times a week, somebody will come to me with, "I've got an issue here." And sometimes it's them, but sometimes it's us. Even if it's the fact that we're not selecting carefully enough, people who are having problems who shouldn't have problems, or should we train better, or is there something wrong with the contract? So I just thought that's a great book for that purpose, and it's something that we really, really use a lot in gyms.

And you mentioned, to those who don't know, an advisory committee as well, which you would've had today.

We just had one today. It was about an hour. We have some of the really top people in the country. It's all done remotely. They can be anywhere at all. And it's fantastic because we come up with an idea. Somebody comes up with an idea. And then you've got these very capable people with different viewpoints. So I think this, I think this. And we almost do very good by consensus. There's not really very little voting going on. No, no. But you just talk about it and you get the feedback. And if we do this, well, what do people think? 'How will that work?' So it was great. We had about 10 things on the agenda this morning. We meet every couple of months.

Yeah, every couple of months. For those that don't know, franchisees can give an item, or the franchisor can give an item to their advisory member, and the advisory member will put it on the agenda, and they all get raised, and there's the decision to make with it at the end.

Yeah, we never refuse to talk about anything. No. We made some significant changes this morning, just things they suggested. You know, we can, you know, let's change it.

Awesome. Next one here is the threat from China. That'll be an interesting one when that goes online, and I can imagine what comes back with that one. So do you want to just talk about the threat from China and what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I get very upset about the way people think about China as a threat. China is not a threat to Australia at all. There's no conceivable way that Chinese would ever want to invade Australia. What they want to do is to take our raw materials and sell their stuff. China has never been an aggressive power.

They've never invaded a country, and that's the thing.

Yeah, well, they like to take the surrounding areas. When the Chinese dynasties become strong— and I'm just working on my book, my latest book, 'Lemon Cycles,' which is going back 3,000 years— but there's a tradition, there's a pattern in Chinese history when they get to be strong, like in the— they take over the surrounding areas, the ones that threaten them, like Mongolia, Tibet, those kinds of areas where they get invaders because they want to protect themselves. But they've never tried to attack Japan, for example. I mean, Japan's just off the coast, for heaven's sake.

Japan done a lot to them, and that's— yeah, people, if you know history—

that's right, the Japanese invaded China, but the Chinese have never invaded Japan. The only people who invaded them was the Mongols, but they weren't Chinese, they were Mongols, and they were totally different. So China's actually really beneficial to us. They buy our stuff, they sell us good stuff. Taiwan's a difficult point, but Taiwan's been part of China for centuries. For hundreds of years it's been part of China. Now I don't at all mind if the Chinese want to be independent and they want to fight them off, just as the Ukraine is fighting off Russia. But the idea that we Australians should go to war with China is ludicrous. And I just think people should be aware how silly that would be, how destructive. And we really can't do much anyway.

Well, I do think it's hurt our prosperity a bit if we were more neutral, right? If we were neutral, I reckon we would've been a lot more prosperous than what we were because—

America's not that reliable an ally anymore.

Look what they're doing to their allies.

I don't think the Chinese are a threat. They're actually good. And we've got a lot of Chinese, people of Chinese descent, including my wife in Australia and some people who work for me and franchisees and they're great people. We should align ourselves with China to a large extent.

I'm going to go back there for a holiday in a couple of years actually because I went there, I've been there before. It's an interesting place when you go there. I think a lot of people have a fear about it. Just go there. It's a brilliant, like Shanghai and Beijing and these places are quite amazing. They're very advanced. I think people don't understand how advanced.

They are so good at so many things these days. We've got my research project which is actually still run to a certain extent in Australia. There's certain areas like CRISPR that Australians do quite well, but most of the actual labs are going to be set up in China. They've got labs set up in Nanjing and in Chongqing, and with people who are brilliantly good at what they do, and they're good at getting things done in a fast way and it's cost-effective, and they've got tremendous resources there. They put enormous effort into biotechnology, which is our area, so—

They're winning the AI race, and people don't realise it, but they're actually winning the AI race at the moment with their models that are coming out. They're far cheaper and used by actually more people than what the big models in America are.

That's right, yeah. China's doing very well.

I will say about what are some of the posturing, like in the South China Sea, the Philippines, there's always a lot of disputes going on there. They circumnavigated Australia with a boat with one of their, I think it was their warships or something like that as well. They do do some things sometimes.

Hang on a bit. They make a big stinking fuss about that. But you think about it, we are supporting the Americans sending fleets through the South China Sea, which is just a few kilometers off their coast, for heaven's sake. This has been Chinese territorial waters in effect forever, and they're a great power. Why is it any different to have one ship going around Australia? It's, it's, it's— we don't see it in perspective. To them, that is a very threatening, aggressive posture. And I think sending a single ship around Australia is very tiny by comparison with what—

well, do you think there's just a lot of fearmongering then from the media? Like, obviously the Huawei contract, right, which got knocked back because they were going to spy on us, or that was the fear, right? There was a few different things that have been—

what To find out what?

Well, all countries spy on each other. That's what people should know.

Yeah.

All countries do it.

Well, spying is good anyway. Spying actually is one way— No, it is. Seriously, spying is one way to make sure that it doesn't surprise you. That's what you don't want. You want to understand what the other person's doing.

Well, we did that with the, um, in Timor, right? When we put the bug in the room and all these sorts of things. So all countries spy on each other, which is— people need to remember that.

Yeah. Yeah.

But I do think you're right. We obviously have a lot of Chinese-based franchisees, a lot of Chinese customers as well who love using gyms.

So we buy a lot of stuff from China. Um, it's, it's, yeah, I'm very— I mean, I wouldn't particularly like them under their political system. I couldn't be as noisy as I am.

No, you're definitely not. You go disappear.

If I can't say the same things about Xi Jinping in charge as I could, as I could say about, um, Chairman Dan. So I appreciate being in a democracy, but it doesn't mean to say that we should be one-eyed about it. And Chinese government's actually pretty pretty sensible in the way they do things. If I have a look at the Chinese compared with the way that say someone like Donald Trump carries on, I'd say the Chinese are a lot more sane these days.

Well, they are. And I think the way they, you know, you're ruling 1.4, 1.5 billion people, right? That's the method that they use to manage that.

And then obviously India, for example, is a bit different, but look at the difference between countries. And democracy doesn't work for every country. It just doesn't. You know, when Tiananmen was taking place, people were talking about potential civil war. You gotta be joking. You had the Taiping Rebellion. You know, you've got what, 50 million people getting killed. Yeah, that they don't like eternal— they don't like disorder. They're very allergic to it, and they've got very good reasons for being allergic to it. So they do tend to control society a lot more. But China is basically a very safe, well-run country right now.

Yeah, it's a good place to visit. I think everyone should just— if you want to go to a different place, different country to visit, China is a great place to go. Great food as well. We all— yeah, awesome food. The next one here, we've got no government can satisfy modern electorates, which is quite an interesting and relevantly, uh, time— well-timed, uh, point there.

We can look at what we do as peculiar in Australia, but there's actually various great similarities. Like back in the '80s, you had a whole lot of governments which were very reformist and very sensible and rational. Like you got the Hawke, Keating, Howard Costello years in Australia, then you got Thatcher in America, and then you got people like, um, Tony Blair, and then you get Cameron after him. Well, not so much Cameron. I go back a bit before that. But you had some very reformist governments who were able to take decisions. We paid off our national debt, which was a tremendous thing they did. But that was started by the Labor Party, but the Liberals continued it. So we had good governments. Right now what you've got is an attitude of mind that says that they're suspicious of government. It doesn't support taking hard decisions, the hard decisions that might say we have to cut back here, cut back expenses because we're going into debt. We can't keep on doing more and more and more bureaucracy and more and more debt and more and more big government because it's sapping our prosperity. But there isn't the public demand for it, there isn't the public support, so we get tired of our leaders very, very quickly. This is right going on throughout the Western world. The thing people think they They think it's because the governments and the political parties are bad. It's not the government, it's the electorate.

Yeah.

And we don't have an electorate anymore that can put up with making good long-term decisions the way we did a few decades back. And that is a real issue. And that's where what I'm doing with Birthrate Crisis comes in, because what we're looking at is saying it's not the government decisions, it's the people themselves. And if you have a certain change in temperament which becomes cynical and suspicious of government and won't support hard choices, then you have a problem with the country.

But also, you're right, people love the, you know, we get free Myki for half a year or free transport and what can you give me and what can I take. Yes. And that's who they vote on, which I think is crazy. And I think you're right, people as a voter need to be way more responsible now with who they're voting and not get sucked in.

Well, One Nation, for example, what they're doing is making promises. The same with Farage in the UK and National Front in France. They make these wild promises that, oh, we're going to We're gonna— you're gonna pay less taxes and we're gonna give you more free stuff and stuff. They're just making all these promises.

It's populist stuff.

Yeah, it's populist. Nobody's costing anything. I mean, you know they can't achieve it, but, but they just make promise. People, people would rather believe the, the absurd promise than go for the sensible policy.

That's, that's on people, you know. That's— you need to get more educated as a voter, right? I think that's—

no, no, it's not going to work.

I know it's not going to work, but I'm just saying it's not going to work because the problem is a decay of character.

It's a change of character, and you can't educate people because the education system is part of the problem, because the education system is so stuffed up and so bolshie and woke and everything else that it's not going to teach anybody anything.

Yeah, well, the universities are a big concern, especially in Australia.

They are too. They're not good. The educated, the tertiary educated classes are the worst of anybody.

I think, like, in America, like, 98% of professors are like all Democrats or something like that. It's nuts.

It's very, very biased. So you look at the ABC, for example, which is basically the spokesman for the woke left. This is paid for by everybody, which is ridiculous. So you have this, but even right-wing, I'm talking about this later, but this book Communion by J.D. Vance, you should really read it, it's a fantastic book, and he just talks about the problems. Now he's not as much of a right-wing ideologue as you might think in some ways. He's, for example, he talks a lot about the way that the elites so focused on the economy on money, on GDP, that they're neglecting family. He talks about the way that these policies affect the working people who, because they bring all these goods and stuff, and they lose their jobs and so forth, and that you have unstable work hours which change all the time and destroys family life. He's got a lot of these kinds of ideas which are not at all standard conservative points of view. I should talk about that in its own section, but the fact of the matter is Character matters, and it's the character of the population that matters. And that's why we're going to solve these problems. We can, we can keep on electing governments and throwing out leaders, but that's not going to work. We have to actually have a change of character in the population.

Makes sense. And it's only going to get worse. I can see just more people getting voted out after changing leaders after 6 months, or one year.

That is a complete pattern. You bring somebody in, they come in, they wave a populist deed, and they lose it and lose it. Yes. Nobody be satisfied. And if Pauline Hanson ever becomes Prime Minister, you'll see exactly the same thing happening there, exactly precisely the same thing. She'll make all these wild promises, she'll come in and she can't do it because everybody says, yeah, we know what government to do, give me more and more and more stuff and charge me less tax. Yeah, yeah, but I don't want debt. I mean, come on, it's impossible.

That's going to be interesting. The next one you've got here is then Angus Taylor as well, so maybe you want to talk about that one.

Well, he's making some good noises. At least the Liberals are now trying to differentiate themselves a little bit from Labor. They're not saying, oh well, I'm just as good as Labor, you know, I'll pay as much money as Labor, I'll borrow as much as Labor, I'll do everything Labor does, but we'll be a little bit less extreme. That's not going to work. He is actually presenting an alternative voice, and you need, you need to make a decision. You need to stand up for something, otherwise why would you vote for them?

Exactly right. And they've gone as low as they can probably go.

Right.

And they're obviously going to lose a lot of seats at the federal election. But I think they're not going to get the seats back.

No, not going to fight the Greens. You can't fight the Greens because the Greens are the populist party. They'll promise everything.

Where do you think this decline happened? Because I think you can link it back to probably Malcolm Turnbull, because obviously Malcolm Turnbull was big on, you know, environmentalism and all these types of things as well. Where do you think the decline happened?

I think it started in 1997.

1997, right.

Sorry, sorry. In 2007. 2007. When Howard got got lost. Then you get Rudd come in and Gillard. That was the beginning of it. And the Liberals came in and they were no better, honestly. Maybe not quite as bad, but still, it's just got worse since then.

Well, they've got Abbott back as the president of the Liberal Party, so maybe that's what they're going to do. They're going to pick a lane and stay with it, right? True to their values.

I think they should. And this whole, you know, net zero rubbish— people are paying double their power. And that actually understates it because it's not just the fact that you pay twice as much for power. You pay more for every good that's produced using power. So in actual fact, it's putting a huge burden on the population. And net zero is crazy because they say it's a matter of helping people who are poor. You look at Copenhagen Consensus and they, and they, and they list the ways that you can spend money to give the most benefit to the most people. And, and, and maybe solving global warming comes about the 20th. It's one of the least efficient ways to spend money to reduce human suffering. There are far, far better ways. And yet we are seeing our economy go stagnant and under control because of this insane thing. And it's not that I don't believe in, in global warming. Of course carbon dioxide has an effect, but the question is, is impoverishing Australia and making it— turning us into a banana— is that solving the climate crisis? Well, it's not.

It's just crazy. Like, you know, logically look at it. Like, we get out— let's say we get our carbon emissions to zero. Like, what's India going to do, decline? Or they basically go, because Australia is going to be zero, we can put ethical pressure on these others.

I can just imagine, oh, Australia's zero, so we'll cut out No, they won't. Yeah. The Chinese are building more coal-powered stations than anybody.

Yeah. And, you know, the arguments obviously swing because people are feeling the hip pocket now, right? So it obviously sounds good and feels good. Once it starts hitting your hip pocket, like, you sort of forget all that.

I would hope so. I hope there'll be enough sense go through. And I think this is something the Liberals can actually do something about because it was a very touchy issue.

Like, if you said this sort of stuff maybe 5, 6 years ago, right, everyone would be shouting you down and boycotting and all these sorts of things.

So I got to say, if you asked me if I was 6 years ago, I probably would have said something pretty similar, that it's good to do it. But I don't think I understood the economic problems they're causing. I didn't understand the fact that it's not a very cost-effective way of relieving human suffering. They do talk about things like, you know, we're going to get more wild weather, but for heaven's sake, we've had cyclones forever.

Yeah.

They say people are going to die of heat. What people don't recognize is a lot more people in the world die of cold than heat. But you don't put that down. You just say, oh, there's people dying of heat. Oh, get rid of global warming. What about people who are not dying from cold? Forget about them. They don't matter because they're not dying.

It's interesting. And also, it's funny, Albanese announced a $4 million exploration package to do a new oil refinery in WA. So they're just going to do another oil refinery. They're going to do an oil refinery again to obviously shore up our supplies. So they've gone— interesting how he's approved that, but $4 million just to do the exploration work or the scope of the project as well.

Actually, where I am a green warrior in a sense is that I think we should do everything possible ourselves to not rely on Middle Eastern oil. And I said this years and years ago, it's in one of my letters, that it's really, really dangerous to have so much of our economy dependent on the Straits of Hormuz. I actually mentioned the place because I said it's in one of the most politically unstable parts of the world, which is why, what is it, 4 years ago now, one reason I bought an electric car and why I have electric panels and everything is not to save the environment so much, though if it helps, that's good. It's because I don't trust And I drop off at the petrol station. I had to— I drove my wife's car once about in the first year, and we stopped off to get petrol. And I said, what is this? Yeah, this was before the current crisis. I said, you're paying a bloody fortune for petrol. I had no idea. I just plug it into my solar panels.

It's been a great thing. I'll do it here as well, and it's been a, been a very good change.

It's good too because we get surplus power during the day, so it's, it's a way of Helping the environment and helping my staff.

And great, you know, more in hip pocket as well. And you've got The Lemming Cycles here, so you're going to talk about this new book as well. I don't know about your time to do all these multiple books, but Lemming Cycles.

When I was, I was on, I was on my computer till 11 o'clock last night and much of the weekend too. Um, Lemming Cycles is a part of biohistory. It's, it's, it's, um, Chinese dynasties and a lot of things like the Black Death and so forth. You get these 300 to 500 year cycles of population growth and decline which have very specific patterns of behavior. You tend to get aggressive wars taking place just past these peaks and so forth. So there's a lot of patterns. It was in Biohistory. I've taken it out, making it a separate book. And it's really very neat. It's actually the same cycle quite clearly as lemmings and other small animals do that have these population explosions every 3 to 4 years. And you say, well, that's 3 to 4 years, not 300 to 500 years. And they say, yes, but the thing is, if you know the generation length, they're actually very similar.

Right.

A typical human cycle is anything from about 10, 11 generations, and that's similar to what muskrats and lemmings and so forth do too. So it's the same cycle. You get population growth and you get the decline. It's a lot less steep in humans, but it's the same thing. So I've been writing this book, expanding on the stuff and showing how this explains enormous amounts of world history.

It sounds very interesting. So is that because— are you doing the new book is just because there's been more research that's available to you, or what's the—

I can find out a lot more too. I must say, having ChatGPT, see, this research assistant does help a great deal. I can find a lot of stuff that I couldn't find in the past. But there's just so much good stuff. Learning cycles I love because they're mathematically precise. They give you reasons why this particular change took place at this particular time. Why, for example, the Black Death took place where it did, when it did. Or why the plague of Marcus Aurelius' reign, or the Justinian plague. These come at very precise times, and you can actually spot them, and you can look at political changes and changes in thought and ideas, like changing from more open to more closed attitudes towards the outside world.

Now, you've probably already— it probably is in the book, and you've probably mentioned this before, but how did you then— how did you figure that out, that link? Was it just an idea you had, or how did you work that out?

I was very interested in— well, the big difference with me is that I'm a bit lazy. I hate just doing the same thing over and over again. So history gets boring. So basically I look at history and I say, okay, I'm interested in European history, but I'm also interested in East Asian history, so let's have a look at that. Let's have a look at this. Oh, there's something curiously in common between these two things. And then, because I don't want to read history, I looked at things like cross-cultural anthropology and biology, and I was reading up about lemmings. And I thought— and these kinds of animals, muskrats more than lemmings actually— looked at them, I said, there's, there's some very strange similarities between what's going on here. So what I'm doing is putting together information from very different areas and seeing a common pattern, which most people don't do because scholarship is very specialized. You know, you're a historian, you're not interested in, in, in Arctic animals. It's just not your area. That's, I mean, But they are astonishingly similar in terms of their— the way they behave. Like humans in these particular— in these boom periods, they have higher birth rates, lower death rates. In the trough periods, they have higher death rates, lower birth rates. And exactly the same as muskrats and lemmings, they all have the same kind of pattern, similar kinds of generations, similar kinds of behavior, more aggressive behavior during the peaks and so forth. So It's when you look at it, you have to look at it. To me, you look at it and say, well, how could anybody not see these as being connected? They're so obviously the same thing.

It just shows you look outside what you're currently doing, right? That's amazing how I think it's, you know, looking completely something different. You've discovered that pattern that's sort of formed all your, your research and what you're doing. It's amazing just by looking outside of what you're currently doing.

And then you're including things like, like, um, dopamine systems and so forth, and reacting to dopamine and understanding how that works, and looking at cross-cultural anthropology and why different societies with different child-rearing methods. Like, for example, you have very different, big differences between, say, peasant style like in Egypt, where you have a very peculiar kind of child-rearing pattern which is, which is very indulgent to infants and very harsh towards children in later stages of childhood. Now you see that, and it's very similar in traditional societies like India and China and so forth too, but very, very different from what you see in Europe, where you have tight controls traditionally from infancy onwards. And then you look at that and you can see there's correlations between those child-rearing systems and the way that societies function, the way they look at authority, the way they're loyal or not loyal to the nation-state, the way they consider hereditary rank. So you're kind of, you're putting a whole lot of things together into a pattern and it's a very, to me it's a very powerful pattern. I'm very optimistic, Birthrate Crisis coming out in October, And it's a book that's going to be easy to understand. Anybody should be able to pick it up and look at it and understand what I'm saying. It's got a fairly radical kick in the end about the need for medical potential to help these things, but it'll also refer it to my other books, which will be in draft form. I'll make them freely available, and then people can read the full research if they want to. I'm very hopeful people will start to listen.

Absolutely. Well, it's a big topic at the moment. You know, as we said before, American podcasts now, the big ones, they're all talking about this sort of stuff. But everyone keeps saying the same thing as the problem. There's no real solutions or guides provided.

This book by JD Vance I've just finished is the same thing. He's very concerned about it and he says the same things. It's people are changing their attitudes. They're not interested in children and family. They're too focused on success and consumption and wealth.

And we'll see South Korea's birth rate's gone back up for the first time.

Has it?

0.9. Yeah, I'll show you. I'll send you a video. But they've actually started doing government dating camps for people. So they'll send 12 women and 12 guys to a a camp and sort of matchmake them. I'll send you the video on it, but they've actually got their birth rates gone up to 0.9 for the first time. Something to do with COVID but I'll send it to you.

Let me make you a very powerful prediction. This is not going to work, right? They are not going to be able to release it. It's not a matter of government policy. The whole problem people have is they think the solution is government. If you just place the right laws, everything— we had this, we have this, this belief system The government controls everything. Well, actual fact is just not correct. What governments can do, governments can stop you being prosperous. You can turn South Korea into North Korea if you just have the government that actually cracks down on free speech and enterprise and everything else. You can, you can, as Mao's theory in China too, same thing. But basically, fundamentally, people, ordinary people, their attitudes, their abilities, Their behavior is what changes society. Gotta understand the people, not the government.

Yeah, I'll send it to you because it's interesting because there's a lot of stuff that the women in it, when they interview them, say, you know, they're getting lonely and they want to be more connected, or they want to— they're more inclined to have a family now based on things. And I'll send you the video, it's quite interesting to have a look because it's a lot of the stuff you're talking about with community, family, all these sorts of things. And you hear it from there.

2.9.

What?

We're not even halfway there. 2.1 is breaking.

Yeah, it's an improvement. Our point 7 or whatever they were. So a little bit of an improvement.

I didn't know. It's a bit— that's a bit like— it's a bit like, um, you go to a doctor and he says, okay, you've got 6 months to live. And then you go back, I've got good news for you, you might live for 9 months.

It's better than nothing, but I'll still—

it's still death. True.

I'll send it to you for a look, but you have a look at it. It's quite interesting anyway to see. And then, um, your next one here, you've got Jimbo. So for those that know, Jimbo's our franchisee software that they can use to manage their business. So you can talk about that one.

Yeah, well, we're putting a lot of effort, we're putting millions of dollars a year into this. We're actually embarking on a program to speed it up. We just got incredibly exciting things happening. The ability for franchisees to be able to sell and buy clients, particularly the sell, so the new people come in with some clients and they can get some money and they can pack their businesses. Ability to be able to book in direct jobs, appointments to the diary, because more and more clients do not answer their phones these days. It's coming more and more common. I thought I'd find everybody It's less and less likely to answer their phone than they used to. So those kinds of things, other things like inbuilt financial packages, there's just so many things, improvements to customer service. We get customer service improved, the leads will soar because every time you let a customer down. So there's all kinds of systems going to be built in to do this. It's going to be very, very big. It's the one thing we can do, I think, more than anything else to actually improve our franchisees' lives.

Absolutely. It's obviously integrated in our training program, so obviously we spend a lot of time if you're new franchisee coming here Mike will show you that as well.

And you can see a lot of good response. Yeah, but there's still issues, things we can improve on, and we're going to keep on working on them. Absolutely. Yes, I'm going to slow down. We do the whole things we've got in mind, which will be hopefully completed in the next 2 or 3 months. We're going to have another raft of things that'll make it even better. We want to— we want a system that's better than anything in the world, that can actually really help you to run a better, more efficient business. Just looking at constantly improve, improve, improve, constant feedback. Let's get better.

Absolutely. The next one here, you've got Google My Business.

Yes, that's a— that's one of the biggest lost opportunities. Yeah, one of the most effective things you can, you can do to get your business to work is to get Google My Business listing, and then you've got to start getting reviews, reviews on it. Yeah, and if you have a whole stack of good reviews, you jump to the bottom. Anybody looks up your service They see whatever it is, car detailing, Brunswick, you're up there.

Number one.

Number one, or even if it's just visible, number of the top three, and you can see all these great reviews and stuff. And mostly our franchisees might get very good service, but people don't know. And you might have a whole stack, but they're hidden because they haven't got enough. So one of the things we've really got to focus on is to work out ways to get our franchisees more Google reviews. Because they generally speaking give very good service, but we've got to show that to the public. And if we can do that, and this costs nothing, it's just a bit of effort. Yeah. And then, and then, and they can see their leads boost, and good local leads too.

Well, I show the example today because I spent around 10 minutes on it in the training. I'm real passionate about— I show an example, guy called Tony in Jim's Cleaning. He was off leads after 6 months, and the reason was is because he had 113 5-star Google reviews after 6 months as a franchisee. So everyone, if you typed in cleaning South Yarra his business would come up all the time, number 1 on there as well.

And then cost doesn't become such an issue because you want it because you've got great reviews.

Correct, because he's got so many good reviews from customers, you will pay more for one. And people actually already— it's been proven people will pay more for a well-reviewed business over someone else. But the other thing is as well, if he ever goes to sell his business with 120 clients and he has 155-star reviews, it's not worth $0. That's worth a substantial bit of extra money to your business. So the frustrating for me is you might have a mowing franchisee might have 400 Jim surveys which are 5 stars and you have one review on his Google Business Profile. And for me, that's just leaving money on the table. So it's a very valuable business asset. But yes, we should be getting more— franchisees need to do it more. And the second two items here, which I think are ones which are really cool to discuss, the world's first trillionaire that in brackets you've got briefly with Elon Musk, obviously with SpaceX.

Yeah, well, the share price went down. Yeah, he's no longer a trillionaire.

He wrote that himself on X as a tweet. Yeah, I think he put that in his bio, first trillionaire, then briefly, or something like that as well.

Yeah.

Um, what do you think about that then? If someone got on there, I thought we'd never see a day where someone can get to the wealth of a trillion dollars. Pretty nuts.

Yeah, used to be a billionaire was a billionaire, was a big one, right? A thousand times more. Yeah. Um, yeah, look, he's done some pretty flaky things. I think this thing with Doge was disappointing in the extreme. They tried to reform the American government bureaucracy and it just completely failed.

I want to shut off the, um, air controllers and stuff like that. I've listened to a book on it and they've got a section on that. And yeah, some of the stuff he was doing, it was terrible.

And, and some of the stuff he does, like buying, buying Twitter, turning to X and stuff, wasn't a very good financial decision just so you could have a bit of a louder mouthpiece. I'm not— the point of me is he's done some, he's done some questionable things, but this is the guy that's reduced the cost of getting into space by around about 90%, pretty on the estimate, 85 to 95%. That's amazing. He's actually gone from the stage where we were using, you know, Russian rockets to get into space. Now the Americans can do it at a fraction of the cost. I believe in— I have the same vision. I think we should be going into space. I've read science fiction since I was—

well, he mentions, um, Asimov. Yeah, all the time. And what's that series of books, the science fiction ones?

Foundation.

Foundation, right? He always mentioned that's his favorite one.

Yeah, Foundation. Foundation is great. I must have read it multiple times. The series, the television series, Terrible, terrible. I can't believe they did it so badly. But the idea of going into space, I think, is amazing, and he's the one guy that can get there. I think that's important. I think the multi-planetary species idea is really, really valuable. And the other thing I like about him is he understands the problem with the birth rate. He's a passionate speaker on that particular subject.

So he's doing his bit, definitely. Yes, he's got a few kids himself.

Yes, but he's not necessarily doing it the right way.

He's definitely not.

The way you, the way you increase the birth rate is you have two couple, a couple get married reasonably young, preferably early 20s, start having children and stay together and raise those children. The way that he's doing with multiple different partners is not really practical from the point of view of society, because we can't all have had, would have multiple girlfriends having our children.

Yes, he's got a lot, he's got, he's got a lot.

But the fact of the matter is he does see the problem, and I, I, I, I take my hat off to him. So I think he's a brilliant technologist I love what he's doing in space. I'm quite happy that he uses his financial resources to push the space race. He believes in solving the birthright, probably even if he doesn't yet know how. I have to explain that to him down the track a bit. But at the same time, so I can excuse him. I would rather look for somebody who had flaws but who had great strengths rather than trying to find somebody who's got no weaknesses at all, because I think that kind of person is pretty anodyne.

Yeah, and also the Starlink that he does as well. I think Starlink's Starlink's quite amazing how he, how he's got that. I think it's really one of his best sort of—

becoming cost effective. But we use Starlink actually at my farm.

Yep.

So we get connections. That's not quite as good as, as the, the ground stuff, but you've still got connections.

Yeah, a lot of our franchisees will install that. But, um, and obviously Tesla as well, like he revolutionized electric cars really. Now China's obviously copied him and caught up.

And I think China's killing him.

He is, but they copied a lot of what, uh, Tesla was doing.

Oh, I think he did some good stuff, but to me SpaceX is the big thing. I think as a science fiction fanatic from way back when I, you know, was— when I was 16, I wanted to be a science fiction writer. That was my great ambition. So, and I read Asimov and all those kinds of ones too, and I loved them all. Um, I, I believe in what he's doing, and, and to me SpaceX is exciting. You see that, that video where they actually— they actually caught the rocket?

Yeah, yeah, that, that SpaceX is great. They have on X, they live stream everything, right? So whenever there's a launch, like every 2 or 3 days, they live stream it. And, um, you know, he'll watch it as long— and obviously when it gets caught and all these sorts of things as well. It's quite amazing. And, um, the story of SpaceX in the, um, the Walter Isaacson book as well, like it was not an easy— very, very hard. There's lots of photos of him online with things blowing up and all that sort of stuff.

It's amazing what he's done too. It's a technologist too. You've got to admire the guy. He goes into the assembly line and says, why is this this length? And so that's just because it is. Yes, we'll try it. Try it, try it, try it. Okay, failed. Okay, that's it. It's sort of the same thing that John D. Rockefeller did when he went into this production facility where they were soldering barrels. And he said, how many solders? They said 50. He said, why 50? They said, that's what we've always done. So he says, try 48. So it leaked. He said, try 49. Okay, 49 works. So now on 49 solders. Just that tiny little thing. Or he says, this particular whatever it is unit, okay, this is a— what does that cost that much? That's because that's an aircraft. What about using an automobile one? How would that work? Well, we don't know. Well, I could try it, see what happens. So you actually produce a part that's a fraction of the cost. He does that kind of— and then he finds people. He's got a knack of finding people who can actually be driven to do the same kinds of—

well, he calls it hardcore. He wants people who are hardcore, right? That's the term he always uses. And that's, um, he's built a brand around himself where if you go work for him, you know exactly what you're going to get. Get into, right? You're going to be working 20 hours, 18 hours a day.

And which is another thing, it's not particularly good for families.

It's not, no.

So that's an irony, because if you want to have a family, you've got to spend time with your family and you've got to have time with children. If you're working, you know, 100 hours a week, you're not going to be able to do that. So, somewhat. But I admire the guy, I do.

I do think, well, I do think he's a modern genius, we're saying. I think obviously he's going to— history will look probably back— obviously there's flaws with him, but I think overall pretty fondly with what he's done. It's like an Edison-type character or a Tesla. We're listening, you know, we're watching.

I think we have a problem with trying to tear people down.

I do.

I'd rather look at the positive. I'd rather look at the good thing people do.

I don't appreciate everything that, um, but what you forget, Jim, is when he did Tesla the first time, he was the Democrat's darling, right? Yeah, he's saving the planet with electric vehicles and stuff. And then he slowly started swinging Republican and they're burning Teslas and all that sort of stuff. So it's, um, it's quite interesting.

But, um, I think, but I admired him on both sides. I don't think politics should be the definition of whether you like somebody or not. No, you can disagree with somebody's political— you can disagree with some of the things they say and do, but if they achieve wonderful things, I can recognize that in anybody, left, right, I don't care. What are you achieving? What are you doing?

Well, I do think we'll get to see someone go. I reckon that Mars trip will definitely happen whilst in our lifetime, which would be quite, quite amazing. I would never have thought that would have been possible. So I definitely think it's going to happen, the Mars trip. There's obviously people signing up for it already, and I think there's doing a lot of psychological testing.

I think you have no problem getting people to go to Mars.

If they don't come back, that's what they're working out.

Setting up a self-sustaining society on Mars would be phenomenally difficult. It will be if you could actually have to produce everything from scratch there. That would be very, very, very hard. Not impossible, but very difficult.

What's amazing, we've been talking about is a possibility, so it's going to be interesting to see.

You know, it's so disappointing. You know, I remember, I remember watching the moon landing in 1969, which is before you were born. We watched it in our school, in our big auditorium. We could see these pictures of it. And I had a feeling about it at the time. I said, "This isn't going to last. This isn't going to last." The trouble was it was all based on incredibly big spending. It wasn't supportable. You took some giant chunk of the American GDP. But now they've got to the stage where it's become affordable, where it's become financially reasonable. The costs are a tiny fraction of what they used to be. That's getting there.

It's just saying, obviously you've got Bezos with his Blue Origin project in there, and you've now got the other companies as well basically contracting out to SpaceX. So there's all these new startups now starting in this—

I would much rather these multi-squillionaires actually competed by, by getting into space. They are rather, you know, who's got the biggest yacht.

Yeah, well, that is true, but it's amazing. I just find it funny that you see— always say comparison is the thief of joy, right? So Bezos at the moment, you can tell he's always second to Musk, and you can tell it it annoys him. But Musk is— SpaceX is obviously a lot more advanced than Blue Origin, right? So it's quite funny you're talking about no matter how rich you are, sometimes it can— you're competing for status all the time or trying to compete with someone else.

It can— well, that's an attitude I really would try very hard not to have in my own life. I do not like to compare myself with anybody else. Yeah, I just simply say this is the, this is the abilities, this situation God's put me in, what can I do with it? How can I do better? I don't need to say I'm never going to be as rich as as Bezos or Bill Gates or anyone.

Of course I won't.

I might even be as rich as a lot of Australians, like, like the Hancocks and this kind of thing. I don't care. I care what I achieve with where I am.

And also what you do with it as well is probably important too.

Yeah.

And the other one here, the last one we've got, is Jacinta Allan on the ropes, which should be Jacinta Allan gone, because she obviously resigned today. So they had a meeting and obviously, uh, you know, she thought it was going to go a certain way, but, um, she sort of read the writing on the wall and resigned. So what would you say about her tenure?

Absolute disaster. She's no better than Chairman Dan, I tell you what. The Labor Party in Victoria is such a horror. I'd say it was a joke, he said there's nothing funny about it. They are dragging this state down, they're damaging business, they are piling up debt. They're putting on— the only growth industry in Victoria is overpaid civil servants, honestly speaking, and they're very good at growing that one. You know, all these green bureaucrats and the rest, it's just terrible. And you see everywhere you look, it's so difficult. Because I know that, because we're in— between me and my family, we're in multiple areas of business. We're in the area of franchising, though that's more federal. We're in the area of building and zoning and so forth. We're in the business of hospitality. Everywhere you look, this mounting tide of red tape and controls and stuff without any, any, any concern about costs. It's like you can— the more public servants you can buy, you somehow buy yourself prosperity. You've got to have people make the wealth. It's very sad. Even within Australian terms, I mean, Labor governments in Australia, there are— there wasn't— there was not even any other Labor government in Australia anything close to as bad as the Victorian Labor government. And it's It's not getting any better.

Well, I heard her speech and she was— it was very defiant, I guess, in a way. She was just talking about her achievements and she kept bragging about crimes down first time since COVID And I thought, does anyone in Melbourne think Melbourne's a safer place than what it was, you know, let's say 5 to 6 years ago? I think it's probably every day. You see on TV there's a home invasion or a firebombing. I'm surprised when there's not a firebombing on the Today Show, which seems to be every single day.

Machete murders.

Machete. We had 4 attacks on the weekend in the city.

4.

And she's got the audacity to say crime is down since then.

And then rising levels of homelessness too, which is in large part directly based on government policy, which says let's make housing unaffordable, let's make rents unaffordable. Oh my goodness, what a disaster she really is. But let me tell you, whatever the replacement is will not be any better.

No, he's definitely not. His name is Ben Carroll. He's the Education Minister. And they've obviously had a big pay dispute with all the teachers who were striking last week. So he's not a very popular person amongst the teachers, but they're just doing it to obviously maybe save some seats come election time.

Yeah, they just ditch leaders and it won't work. It will not work.

Well, the brand. Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see. And I think Liberals are obviously in a really good position as well. And who knows if yourself, Jim, with your run in Northcote. I know we don't want you to get in because we need you here, but who knows with what's going on with the Labor Party.

I don't expect to win. If I did win Northcote, I would do my best to be a responsible MP, even if it costs me a lot of money in my business. But at the same time, I don't think I will. All I want to do is to make a bit of a fuss about it, because what— because zoning is one thing I think we could possibly achieve some changes. Even the Labor government of Victoria, which is the worst in the whole history of the Commonwealth, had made some effort to, to ease some of these strangling regulations on zoning. I mean, I've got to give them credit. They're terrible in every other way, but in that area they've done something. It's not necessarily left versus right. If anything, Liberal Party is worse. I was asked to stand by somebody from One Nation, and I simply looked at their policies and I said, "Your zoning regulations are no good. All you want to do is to cut taxes, but that won't solve the problem. You've got to get rid of zoning, or you've got to restrict zoning." So I think there's a movement going on that may have the effect, because if you ask people out there, that's one of the interesting things about it. I speak on a lot of subjects, a lot of which is controversial. But when you talk about zoning reform to have cheaper rents and cheaper housing, it's about 96% in favour. Is that right?

Yeah, you don't get much— most people will say if it's negative, they think it's purely immigration. They don't even want to acknowledge it's zoning, right? So that's probably the main thing.

Yeah, that's very common. But people don't object to the idea of having lower rents and lower housing. No, definitely not. No, no. Because the people who benefit are just the very few, relatively tiny fraction of people who own multiple houses. Because if you own your own house, you don't care what it's worth because you live there. Yeah. And if you ever have to sell, well then, if price has gone down, you'll buy a— sell a cheaper place, buy a cheaper place. So you don't care. The only people who are going to hurt from it are people who own multiple properties, like big companies and big investors and stuff. And quite frankly, I don't think we should be running our whole country on the basis of their welfare.

But also NIMBYs as well. NIMBYs are NIMBYs have been the really worst. You wanted to do a development in your backyard, put a granny flat there or something, you put the yellow sign at the front saying it, someone from down the street opposes it and then next thing you can't build. So I think the NIMBYs have been a massive problem. That's a local council thing as well. So the state government needs to come in and really get rid of that stuff and make that more efficient from a planning point of view. 'Cause you know yourself with the building and stuff.

It can take months.

It's a joke.

Even years to get through the most basic stuff.

Should be all automated. Like what's the, you know, someone can review it quickly, like—

Outsource it. Let local companies like architects or whatever, those kinds of people handle the whole thing. You set up some very clear minimal regulations, you take it to some person who's a free enterprise person interested in doing a good job. Yeah, yeah, tick, tick, tick, I'll change that. Okay, tick, alright, 24 hours later, here's your permit. That's the kind of thing they should do. That would save money because you could let a whole lot of civil servants go, but you could also dramatically cut the cost of housing and improve the economy at the same time. There's simple things that you could do having so much benefit. It'll never happen with Labor government, I don't— but we might see improvement. The New Zealanders did it back about 9 years ago. They released, they changed the zoning in Auckland, which then spread through the country, and they're actual—

they're going right down, yeah.

Their houses and their house prices and their rents are significantly less than they would have been. They reckon they're about 40% below what they would have been in the past.

I think Australia's auction clearance rate is the worst it's been in 40 years or something like that.

Yeah, it's funny, I read The Australian and they were moaning about how it's not good for the— you've got to be joking. House prices are going down, who cares? That upsets you? Who are you writing for? The wealthy investors? I don't care about them. It's much better actually, if you want to actually help the economy, rather than putting your money into overpriced housing, you're much better off putting it into the stock market, which actually helps to create jobs.

And that's what the intention was originally with the CGT, all that sort of stuff back in the day. And at the time you had that big market crash which made people scared, so they put their money into property. And that's where the problem really started back in the day. But I think a good one is Alan Collar. I don't know if you know Alan Collar, but I really rate him as an economist. And he's been really pushing the zoning argument. So he'll come out and basically saying what you're saying. It's easy to say immigration, but it's actually the zoning and the local council and all the NIMBYs and stuff like that. And you compare that over 30 years or 35 years.

If you have any sense of understanding what goes on in the world, you know it's not immigration. And the very simple case is Houston versus San Francisco. Same country, same country, same immigration laws. If you look at the number of immigrants coming in, there's a lot more coming into Houston because it's affordable than San Francisco. House prices in Houston are a quarter of what they are in San Francisco. Why? Heavy zoning in San Francisco, almost no zoning in Houston. That's the difference. So house prices are less, rents, and people are leaving Coastal California and moving to Texas because they can afford to live there.

Absolutely, yes. It'd be a nightmare to live in California, plus with all the—

not immigration—

with all the taxes.

Yeah, I think we've got to be careful who we let in. I think letting in machete-wielding people from impoverished countries without education is foolish. I don't care how compassionate you want to be, we've got to look after Australian citizens. But I tell you what, there are so many great people in gyms from overseas, from all countries, everyone from every country pretty much.

There's 190-something countries, I'd probably be pretty close.

I reckon we could You could point to just about everything at all, and some of those are just amazing men and women. They're just so good for the economy. You just need to build enough houses to put them in.

There's a good book on that topic called Suicidal Empathy by Gad Saad, which has come out. And basically, you know, you're so empathetic as a society, you're just letting everyone and anyone in. It just wrecks the fabric of your—

What's happening in Europe very much so. In Sweden, it was, oh, let them all in, we're so benevolent, we are so virtuous. Yeah, you come in, you got war-torn refugees, Yeah, come to Sweden. No, they've got, they've got gangs fighting in the streets of Stockholm. Malmö.

Malmö. And so Malmö is a city of Stockholm, and that's going to be one of the most dangerous gun capitals in the world.

Yes.

In like 10, 15 years.

And the Swedes are waking up and they're saying, this is not a good idea.

Denmark's already done it. Denmark's gone really, really hard with, with their immigration and things like that. So they've done that where they had full open slather, you know, come in and put you up in housing and full, you know, all benefits and stuff like that. And it just made ghettos and things like that. And they've gone completely back the opposite now where they're deporting people and things like that. So it's a very interesting, very interesting time.

Yeah, it's about time. I think I love immigrants. I think it's great. I'm actually born in a different country myself. I came here at 3. You are? Yes. My wife is an immigrant. So many of my top people, my franchisees, immigrants. I think Australia has benefited. We need the right immigrants. Yeah, we need to be careful who we choose. The people who shouldn't be here can get out. I don't care what the bloody anybody says. If you haven't any right to be in this country, you shouldn't be here. But then we should build enough houses to put them in, and if you do that, we can have a great country.

What's interesting, we deport— we actually do deport a lot of, um, Kiwis. So we deport a lot of Kiwis, and that's quite regular, but you rarely find it with any other country. I think because, you know, they'd be scared of being called racist or be a big kerfuffle, but for some reason it's done a lot with Kiwis. So if you get—

oh, I tell you what, I just find any country in the world, if you— if Sudan or or whatever will accept them, go there. If you don't want to go there, you go back to where you came from. Absolutely. You've got no— the world population has no absolute right to live in this country. We want to choose the people that are going to help this country, and we have fantastic immigrants. Let's choose them.

But that system's been scammed for too long, right? You do your cooking class, there's a certificate or whatever, and all of a sudden you're in. Like, we haven't been taking people from what we actually needed for the visas or for the category of jobs, and that's been a big problem. And the last thing I'll mention is the audiobook then. Audiobook you've been listening to is Communion. So you've mentioned it real briefly.

Well, I have been talking about that.

Yeah, but I just want to just follow on. Why does that resonate with you so much? Well, I'll push back with you a little bit with JD Vance.

Of course, no, be my guest. Look, as I said before, I can look at people and I can look at the weaknesses they do and look at the positives. Now, to my mind, I don't judge a person having no weaknesses. I judge them by whether their positives are strong enough. Trump is a purely appalling man. He is, he is, he is just character. He's a dreadful, corrupt, short-sighted— he's done terrible damage to America and to the world. I really have no respect for him at all, but Vance is the real article. I read Hillbilly Elegy when he was completely unknown, way back before he was even considered to— I think before he was even in the Senate, when it first came out. Loved it, read it again since then. He's a genuine Christian. He really believes, and he talks about the— how he came back to faith. He's, um, he's very aware of the problems in society. He talks a lot about the emptiness of the the left, but also the impotence of the right. He's actually more scathing about the right than he is— he talks about GDP. He says that when a woman actually gives up a job to stay home and look after the children, the birth rate goes down. And he quotes, "This is a really bad thing. What she should be doing is hiring somebody else to look after her kids, and then she goes and works really long hours propping up the economy, so that's better for GDP." He says that is such a twisted way of looking at things. They're about to have a fourth child actually because he—

They've already had him, yeah.

Yeah, has he?

Yeah.

All right. He believes in the family and he talks about all those sorts of things like that. He understands the threat to civilization. He's a real fellow traveler. I just read this guy. He's a genuine, sincere Christian values, genuine understanding of what's going on with society. And he's also got a really good feeling, understanding for the the people who are hurting in America, which neither the elites of the left or right have. He's openly critical of the other elites, of the American elites, the way they are so obsessed with success that family and other kinds of values don't matter anymore. It's amazing. So he does some— you know, when he did that speech to have a go at the Europeans for being a decadent society and so forth, he's jolly well right, they are. His values are good.

My problem with him is the Peter Thiel connection. Peter Thiel has been heavily invested in JD Vance for a number of years, long time. He got him started in his venture capital firm and a few other things. And Peter Thiel, do you know much about Peter Thiel at all? Yeah, I'm not a fan of him at all. I think he's a very interesting character. I don't think— I think his values do not align at all with JD Vance. I find it very interesting, but he's had a big money connection with Peter Thiel right from his early days. So I understand you do need money with politics, and obviously it's, you know, if they're going to invest in your venture capital firm and stuff like that. But I don't, I don't personally like his links with Peter Thiel and with the tech.

No, I'm sure you don't, but I like his links with Donald Trump even, even worse, because Donald Trump's a—

well, I hear the thing with JD Vance, that the problem with him, a lot of I hear from people, is he's a chameleon. Right? He's calling Trump this and that, and then all of a sudden, because he can't get that route into power, he has to be a good guy.

You can't be vice president to a guy like Donald Trump.

Well, Peter Thiel called that in, so it wasn't Trump picking JD.

You cannot be. And one of the things he talks about in the book, which I think is very— is about the kind of compromises that you need to make. You can look at it from the outside and you say you should be pure and so driven, so on and so forth. But in fact, when you're in politics, you just can't act that way to do what you need to do. Sometimes you need to make messy compromises. That is what politics is about. And that's, I'm quite sure, what he thinks about Trump. He cannot possibly, being the kind of man he clearly is, who adores his wife and his children and his faith, he cannot possibly like Trump and what he is doing and the kind of man he is. But he works with him, okay? Now that may be enough, many people, and it is for many people, enough to say that guy is a complete write-off. I don't believe so. I think he's a fundamentally really good man. Who has to do certain things to be in a position of power and influence. He could be the US president and I would be very, very supportive. In fact, I have to say this, if I had been able to vote in the last presidential election, which I can't not being an American, I probably would have voted for Trump simply because of Vance as being the vice president. Now, if I had done that, I would dearly regret it because Trump has been worse than I could have imagined. But I do think he's a good man and I do recognize his weaknesses.

Well, does it concern you, the Peter Thiel link?

It concerns me, the Trump link.

Right.

The whole thing concerns me.

Right.

The kinds of compromise you need to make. But the fact of the matter is he wouldn't be vice president. He wouldn't be in a position of power if he wasn't prepared to make compromises. And in America, money speaks even louder than here and it speaks far too loud here. You don't get to be in that position in America without financial resources. If Peter Keill is offering resources, then grab them. That's my view.

That's fair enough. I had to push back and ask that because that's the criticism I hear a lot with J.D. Vance from online. It's generally the links with Peter Keill.

What about the link with Trump? Trump's worse.

I know, but Trump's a weird case, Jim Penman. He seems to just get a pass. If anyone else did 1/20th of what he's done from a corruption point of view, they'd be gone.

He's made billions of dollars out of office.

And his kids.

They give him a, what, a $500 billion plane, and he's just his—

what about the Defense Department giving Don Jr. a loan for, um, $520-something million for his company or something like that? That was the biggest loan in history.

And he's using, he's using the justice system to actually chase his political enemies. Yeah, he said— and he, and he, he defies the, the fact that he lost the 2020 election, which anybody sensible knows that he, he lost. He supports the people who invaded Congress. I mean, he's a terrible man. I don't even think how you can put Peter Thiel in the same basket as being as bad as Trump. He's a terrible man. And J.D. Vance is his vice president. If you want to blacken the guy, there's your ammunition. I don't need anything else but Trump. But this guy makes compromises, and I still think he's somebody who has the right values at heart. And he clearly does. He was against this Iran war.

He did speak out.

Rubio was in favor. He was against it. He had the sense to know that it would not play well, and he actually spoke out about it. I give him full credit for that. He's consistent in his values. He says the same things. He does compromise, no doubt about it. But look, it's like, it's the same thing as like, um, like Elon Musk. There are things that Elon Musk does which makes my toes curl, really, really, some of the stuff that he's done. I don't like it at all. I would never run a business the way he runs it. But at the same time, he does great things. I'd rather look at what a person's positives are, and I'll look past a whole lot of negatives if their positives are strong enough.

There's a great new book on Trump from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, and it's about his second term, or I think about his first term as well. They go right into the conversations and stuff with all the leaks, and it's interesting to hear JD Vance and Trump and some of the dynamic and how he's running things. But, um, Yeah, Trump's story is an interesting one. He's a product of his environment with his dad and his mum, and he's still just trying to impress his dad at the end of the day. That's the sort of way I get with Trump. Everything he does to impress a dad who never loved him, Fred Trump. So that's what happens. But Jim, we'll leave it there. Thank you for great information and content. Check out Jim on Substack, jimpenman.com.au, and also any podcasts and videos online. And send some questions to us on TikTok and we'll get Jim to answer them as well. Thank you for your time.