Jim Penman: this budget is pathetic and Victoria is now a basket case

So welcome to the Jim's Newsletter podcast as well. So thank you for being a subscriber. But there's a whole bunch of stuff in the newsletter, Jim, which is a broad range of topics which I'm going to ask you about. But the first one, which seems to get the most traction online— I personally, as a marketer, love it because I know it's going to get a lot of views— is talking about politics and then the budget. So what were your thoughts about the budget?

The budget's pathetic. This is a high-tax, high-spend government, but it spends even more than it taxes. We just get ever, ever rising expenditure. And we're in a time of, you know, peace and relative prosperity, and we can't even balance the budget. We're going further and further into debt. What makes this really ironic, this wretched budget, is 40 years from Paul Keating's banana republic comment. Australia was going to become a banana republic if we continued. And from that time, they started a process of reform, real controls on government spending, brought marginal tax down, and then started paying off the debt, which was completed by Howard Costello. That was a great period of government, 25 years of good government, peace, and, you know, and prosperity and low debt. What we see now, Chalmers reckons he's, what, echoing Keating?

I mean, gimme a break.

He couldn't even shine his boots, for heaven's sake, this guy. He's so incompetent. It's just appalling what's happened. The ever-rising expenditure, the spending on massive boondoggling projects, things like the Snowy scheme. It's actually off the books. It's like a trillion-dollar potential liability, and it's all done by, by, um, contracts which are going to burden Australians with higher energy prices for decades to come. There's not even— that's not even part of the legitimate cost of government.

And what about the caliber of things? I think this is something we've spoken about before. I think the caliber of politicians is, yeah, is definitely—

there are complaints about government, about politicians being overpaid and, you know, having rorts and so forth. I don't think that's the biggest problem. I wouldn't mind paying politicians more if they did a better job. The fact is they're wasting hundreds of billions of dollars. That is the real problem, these overpriced Building projects like the Snowy, like the Melbourne Rail Loop.

Oh, the SRL, yes.

I mean, look, you just drive past and you see roadworks, for example. Our roads are always being blocked off, but you look at them and hardly anybody is working. And when anything is done, you see multiple people holding up signs on the road as if you couldn't do that with electronic signs. It's just like, oh, 'Look, how can we use this needs of the public to repair roads or anything? How can we do it the most expensive way possible that'll give really, really high-paid jobs to our union mates? Let's not worry about the taxpayer. People are going to use them.' About the excessive cost and the fact that the roads are blocked off for days or weeks or months on end by these inefficient processes. That's the appalling thing. We need good government.

Now people will think politicians are paid too much, so you are saying that they should be paid more?

Well, when you consider the value of what they do, they're spending hundreds of billions of dollars. You want the best quality people in those jobs, and the fact is a lot of very capable people wouldn't go into politics because it doesn't pay enough. So I wouldn't mind them getting paid a whole lot more if they did the job better. I mean, they're mixing with people like, like heads of industry and stuff who are paid multiples of what they are, and yet they call this power.

Well, that's why. But the problem I see is that they go and make favorable policy to those heads of industry, because when they go post-politics, they go and work for BHP or they work for these mobs as well. So their decision-making during their time, how is that neutral?

It's a revolving door. Yeah, they start off in politics to make very little money And then after they leave politics, they make really big money. Well, that's a future bribe in a sense.

Correct, a future bribe, and that's exactly right. So how do we— so you're saying basically let's put in some policy to get rid of this future bribe potential, which is what's happening, let's quite frankly face it, and pay them a lot more for actually going in the term.

I wouldn't mind if you could do that. If you could actually have a requirement that they can't go and work for private enterprise later in any job that's anything to do with their decision-making in government, for example. That would be a sensible way to do things.

Absolutely.

But there's too much, there's too much money in politics. There's too much money funding political parties. The Liberal Party is funded by wealthy people. Naturally, it's going to steer that way. You look at the policies of the government, they're very skewed towards those who have the money and the power. Labour Party, of course, is completely controlled by the unions, and what the unions want is a whole lot of really, really expensive— inefficient construction jobs. Now we're talking hundreds of billions of dollars based on that because they fund the Labor Party. So their little tiny bit of funding they actually give them gets huge benefits in terms of these pattern contracts.

Well, do you think— because I think back when Paul Keating made that comment, Lee Kuan Yew, the, um, you know, the Singapore absolute legend, what he's done with Singapore, that was sort of— he made a lot of comments around about Australia at that time saying we risk becoming, you know, basically the white trash backwater of Asia. Do you sort of think we're heading on that path?

Oh, we are. Australian governments are becoming worse and worse. I despair of this country. I was a proud Australian in the past. These days I just look at what we're doing. This inefficiency.

Well, how's it gotten to this point? Because I remember growing up in the '90s. I'm 38, but I remember growing up, I always had Keating, Howard, you had Kim Beazley, these sort of you had these people and you had really respectable, I guess, people who spoke a lot of common sense. And, you know, they didn't get along, but they could work together for the best of the country. They did have a forward-thinking approach to what they did.

A lot of the time, what the Labor Party did too, the Liberals supported them as well. They tried to modify and change it, but basically they recognized this is good for the country. Let's put party politics— so there was that period between, um, when was it, 1982, when the Hawke government came into power in 2007 when the Howard government got kicked out. So you had a quarter century of competent government and it laid the basis for a really strong prosperity. We were an admired, respected country in those days. What we've got now is just terrible. And the situation too, the things we need to spend money on like defence, for example, I mean, we are pathetically underinvesting in defence in a very increasingly dangerous world. And the only thing we've got is nuclear submarines, which may or may not come about 20 years in the future.

For $400 billion, apparently.

Whereas the Ukrainians have shown that you can actually achieve so much with smart missiles and drones and so forth. That's what we should be investing in, those kinds of things. And we've got it because we've got a motor about us. We've got a sea. We're in a very good situation to be able to use that kind of stuff. That's good protection.

So when do you think this decline started to happen? And why do you think that happened? Do you think it was because too many lobbyists got involved in Canberra? Do you think big corporations capture Canberra with these future bribes, or what? How do you— where do you think the change happened?

Well, the big change was 2007, right, when Labor government come in and said, no, no, no more, we're going to start spending and spending, we're going to spend and spend.

And that would have been Rudd, and then Rudd back then, right?

And everybody else. I don't think the Liberals are much better, right? I mean, marginally better in some ways, but no better in others.

So they came in, we're in a good budget position, we're going to spend. And that's where—

that's right, they said, oh, we've got plenty of money now, we can spend, we can just borrow and borrow and borrow, it doesn't matter. We just make more and more promises. I mean, to a large extent it's because the public is wanting more and more stuff. And the fact of the matter is sometimes you've got to make hard decisions and say, "No, we can't afford it. We've got to put priorities in place." And there are ways that we should spend more. I mean, some of the health is grossly underfunded. There's too many bureaucrats and there's too much undirected social welfare. It doesn't really focus. It's incredibly easy to get on NDIS. I know my, my, um, one of my kids, I won't say who, was actually had some sort of an issue at one time. And, um, they— what she said was that is that you can stay on this forever. Once you get on it, there's nothing to stop you staying on it forever. Now she got off it, she's now doing incredibly well, making good income and stuff, and everything's going fantastically. But it wasn't because of the social welfare system that actually kept her there.

I think when everyone— the NDS come out, like the serious issues like people in wheelchairs and quadriplegics and people with serious conditions. Like everyone's like, yep, that's, that's what it's there for. And then as you said, it's just been extended, extended, extended, extended. And now you've got criminals involved with this thing as well. And it seems to be that anything the government's sort of running as a scheme or involved in— tobacco, NDIS— it now seems to be criminal enterprises get involved.

And mental health is sort of an endlessly, endlessly open area. I mean, if somebody is in a wheelchair or they're blind, it's pretty obvious they're going to have some issues with living. 'But I've got mental health problems, I've got anxiety, I've got—' How do you define that?

Yeah, it's a slippery slope, and that's the thing.

You just say, 'Oh well, I've got this anxiety.' 'Oh well, here we are, government funding for the rest of your life.' I mean, come on. Well, you've got—

you've had— there's been cases of, um, carers, um, buying a car, like a nice car, to actually drive the person to like the movies or whatever, and all these things which it wasn't designed for originally, right? And that's the thing, it's just been abused.

Constant bloat and extension.

All right, before we get into the next topic, I was actually in a bit of a bad Victoria, because there's firebombings every day. I reckon they need to change the number plate to be the Firebombing State, because every single day there seems to be a firebombing. It started off with tobacco wars, now it's gone into the pubs and clubs who aren't taking the illegal alcohol. It seems to be that the criminals are just running this joint, and you've got NDIS involvement as well with criminals involved with that. Victoria is pretty much, I think, very lawless, and the government doesn't want to call a spade a spade, but How, how, what should they be doing, or how could you sort it out? Because the police are in dire straits as well. They can't recruit enough people. There's people leaving. They need an extra 1,800 police, which they can't get.

Look, you've got a choice. You can either employ hordes and hordes of green diversity bureaucrats to pull more and more controls and bureaucratic things and tie down the state very tightly. That's what you can spend on. Or you can spend it on frontline workers like police and medical care and so forth. And the government says, nah, bureaucrats are more important, more and more stifling regulations. We're gonna, we're gonna invest in that. Let's really, really, really tie down the economy with that kind of garbage. And we— so we don't have enough money to spend the things, the unimportant things like security and health and stuff. No, no, that's not so important. Bureaucracy matters.

It's got to a stage where I wake up and I think, where's the firebombing now? Like, you think every single day. It's embarrassing, I think, for Victoria as our brand in Australia, in the world, that Every single day a shop is getting set on fire and there's nothing that can be done.

Victoria has a traditionally a very, very good police force. It's one of our great strengths, it always has been. Even in Australian terms, comparatively speaking, Victoria Police has a reputation of being good. And every relationship I've ever had with them, in every way, they're respectful, they're competent professionals.

We need to give them more support and more help, and they could do a lot more. And they're not getting in there, and that's the problem. No. And it just thinks wrong priorities, wrong priorities.

Police, health, there's important thing we really need to look after. We don't need to look after those who are genuinely in need, but there's an awful lot of money being wasted at every stage.

And the politicians aren't listening because I tell you what, Labor government, every single video that Jacinta Allan does with her politicians in Labor, every— if you look at the comments, reactions, they're getting smashed on social, yet they keep persisting with this. Oh no, everything's fine and we're driving crime down and and all that sort of stuff. And I don't think people have fallen for it at the moment. So, but I think people are sort of numb to the fact as well that, wake up, where's the firebombing? Like, it's just an expectation.

I tell you what, as somebody who's in business, if I had— if I wasn't in any state and I wanted to launch a business, Victoria would be the absolute bottom. New South Wales, yeah. West Australia, yes. South Australia, yes. Northern Territory, AC, anywhere but Victoria. Absolute worst basket case. It didn't used to be the case. I can remember when, when Geoff Kennett came in and he made real positive changes. It's possible to do great things in this state. We've got a government that's determined to do the absolute opposite.

We do. But what concerns me is the people who vote for them. It's just like a cult. Yeah, these, these sycophants who cannot objectively look at outside of everything Labor has done as being fantastic, or everything they do is good. And I just find it crazy how they've been able to brainwash a large percentage of the population, mainly inner city, in Melbourne.

And that's the cultural elite that rules us, the people who are so good, they're the best of us. It's just awful what's happened. And once again, Australian— the Australian film industry is a perfect example too. Back in the '70s, we had the Australian film renaissance, and, and it was brilliant. You had Picnic at Hanging Rock, you had a lot of great films coming out, hearing your own voices. I loved that. We just— it was so exciting. And then the government said, okay, let's not have tax subsidies, let's just give it control to these woke lefties. Yeah. And now you go on Netflix and you say Australia, oh shame, no. Yeah, American, yeah, okay. British, good. Mexican, yeah. Chilean, Australian, absolutely not. Left-wing garbage, all about, it's all woke, it's all Aboriginals, it's all gays, it's all evil white racists. Oh my goodness.

We're the white man, we're the worst people in the world now.

This tiny, this tiny self-satisfied, self-righteous obsolete. They're just controlling everything. And, and I don't even understand the ABC. ABC is pathetic.

I'd love to see the ABC go to a subscription model. Yeah, that would be funny.

Look, ABC, okay, there's nothing in principle wrong with your woke lefties, that 5-10%, having their own media outlet. I don't object to it. I just object to asking us to pay for it.

Well, the ABC ratings is reflective of people have had enough. They're losing in all ratings. They're Everything, breakfast radio, everything's on a big decline. Oh my goodness. And people are going to YouTube and they're going to other sources for their stuff.

I go into a dentist's office or something and I see the ABC and I go, "Get that stuff off." I want to go back to the budget real quick before moving to the rest.

There was another thing, the term that the Labor government has pulled up the ladder behind them. So they allowed the benefit of negative gearing, all the capital gains stuff for 40 years, which they have, and all the young people like me and other people behind me now we've got to play by these new rules which they benefited from. Look, what do you think about that?

The problem with this is this: when you have policies, the government went out to say basically, okay, we're going to have a policy that's going to restrict zoning, we're going to make it really difficult and expensive to build anything, we're going to put all kinds of burden on, so what we're going to do is to essentially double the price of housing and massively increase rents. Oh, okay. That's causing some problems. So let's have negative gearing. Let's bring it in so that rents can be at least partially affordable. Doesn't make housing affordable. It makes rent a little bit affordable. So in a sense, when you've got policies that go out of their way to deliberately force up the price of housing, you almost have to have negative gearing. Now the problem is, what they should do is take away the zoning problems and bring the price of rents and housing down naturally, and you wouldn't need negative gearing because somebody could buy a property and they could get a fair rent without any tax advantages. The problem is when you have the policy of making housing incredibly expensive and you take away the negative gearing, what you're going to do is to force up the price of rents dramatically, and that's going to really hurt a lot of vulnerable people. So I, I'd like to get rid of negative gearing completely. I don't really think any reason why. It's basically a huge tax lurker and it's putting money into non-productive assets. Well, that's the—

that's the— yeah, that's what they're arguing.

I would rather have the properties be cheaper and going into the— into the hands so that rather than having a cheaper rent, you can actually buy your own home.

That'll be my preference. But what about on ETFs and stuff? Now, now you've got this 30%, like, if you want to invest in ETFs, a lot of people invest in ETFs so they can put their money away to actually buy a deposit for a home now. Now they're going to get whacked again. So a lot of young people have done that strategy. They might invest in ETFs from the age of 18, get to 30 or 35, that's compounded over time, they can then take it out. Now they're getting whacked on top of that.

Yeah, a lot of problems would be better if we had a simpler tax system. There's too many holes. You know, tax avoidance is a multi-billion dollar lurk. I mean, the amount of money we spend on smart accountants to get around tax laws is just appalling. And it's because the system is so complicated. Actually, a better tax system would be one that was on taxing property, land value as such. If we did that and had lower marginal rates, and then get rid of a lot of deductions. You know, it's crazy that a person— I don't mind a person getting a tax deduction because they want to contribute to the Salvation Army stuff, but why should you get a tax deduction for donating to the opera or to elite private schools or all kinds of things that actually is to the benefit of the ultra-rich? Why is that tax deduction?

Yeah, right, next one here. Um, we can do more, we can do 2 hours on this sort of stuff. We'll do it later on. You have in here Making Friends, and I think it was The Laws of Connection by David Robertson. So what's— Robertson, sorry. What's that?

I just said that's my best book of the year, right? It's a book about how to connect with people genuinely, how to actually build relationships. That's something we need more than else in the modern world. And I just found it was a wonderful, very practical book. In fact, I listened to it completely through. I'm probably going to listen to it again just to get the benefits. And I'm actually trying to use these sort of principles.

What's some of the examples? What's an example of a principle?

Well, how do you have a conversation with somebody that actually creates a real bond? Which means not just sticking to trivial topics like the weather and so forth, but you get into topics that means something, and then you ask the kind of questions, follow-up questions that do that, and then you share in a reasonable way. And it shows you, like, when's it good to interrupt and when's it not good to interrupt. It's just a very practical— yeah, I was blown away by it. I actually went down after I'd been reading this, and I went down to talk to some of the people in franchisee training, which I connect with, and just try to use some of these things to get to know somebody a bit.

That's good, it's good. It's a very good thing to get better at. I think people don't put a lot of effort in it sometimes and they suffer for it.

One of the most important things to life, to happiness, is social connection. And having lots and lots of casual friends on Facebook doesn't cut it. There has to be friends that you— people that you see ideally in person, or on the phone can be to some extent, but also connecting about things that matter. Talking about things that— finding common ground with people, not being shut off by, you know, superficial political differences and stuff, but understanding where a person is, what they're like, what's important to them, and sharing yourself too. And there's connections too, and helping other people too, doing favors for people, why that makes you feel better. It's funny, people think that the more you hold to yourself, the happier you'll be. It's actually not Not so at all. If you actually go out of your way to help other people, you'll actually get a lot more satisfaction. They've done a test where they, for example, they show that if you have a certain amount of money and you say either spend it on yourself or give it to somebody else, the people who give it to somebody else actually end up a lot happier than those who spend it on themselves.

There you go. That's very— that's very— sounds like a great book, Laws of Connection by David Robson. Next one here is re-reading. So really good practice to read back books in the past, going over things and re-reading. And I think that's a good This is a good one because a lot of people go, "You need to read 100 books in a year," or whatever, but I think going over the ones that you've actually liked to try and absorb them more again.

Yeah, because you forget most of them. I mean, just recently I went through 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. That's terrific. That really is a wonderful, wonderful book. And it's a very— it's not only a book about succeeding, it's about being a good person, having a good character, not just being a good impression. Expectation effect. It's wonderful talking about diet and health and how you can improve your state of mind to have a better life.

And the brain that changes itself.

Brain changes itself too. That's just stunning stories about how plastic our brains are and how they can be changed. And if it's just exciting technology, like there's something you can put on your tongue if you're blind that actually gives you a sense of sight by using cameras. Oh, right. Amazing things. And there's a follow-up book of his too, which I, I meant— that's called The How—

but How Minds Change.

Yeah, How Minds Change. Yeah, same kind of thing. It's just very exciting. Some of the technology is amazing.

Absolutely. And the one here, which is obviously your topic of passion at the moment, really is the birth rate crisis. So where's that at and what's happening with that?

Well, it's going well. I'm working with Andrea, my editor. She's become a co-writer, actually. She's actually It gives a different— I mean, I've had 10 children, I'm very blessed that way, but she's wanted a large family but couldn't have it for various reasons. So she talks about her own struggle and about what that means on a personal level. So Andrea is a great communicator. So we've been working intensively on Birthrate Crisis. It's very exciting. We're just within a couple of weeks having a draft, final draft that can go out to editors, and we've got a release date planned. Planned for October. And actually, we're both pretty confident this book will do well. Andrew says it could do a half million sales because it's—

I think the key to this is it's not just the crisis, but you've got a solution. Yes. I think that's the key. Even though it's a big birthright crisis, it's not just saying, oh, it's doom and gloom. There's actually a solution, which I think is—

There is a solution, actually. It's not something anybody's thinking about, but when you actually understand the science, and this is not— the The science I talk is nothing radical, it's just basic to do with the way dopamine works and so forth. You can look it up, it's widespread. It's just applying it to the birth rate crisis the way we've done it is the difference. But yes, there's a real solution and it's not even out of the question. In fact, I think we'll solve it. I think we will solve it. Once we understand what to do, it's not gonna be as difficult as all that.

I'm looking forward to it. I think it's gonna be quite topical. Hopefully we can get you on some of the big American podcasts which are talking about it at the moment. I think the difference is though, all of them talk about how doom and gloom it is. No one really proposes a solution. They all have these sort of— they always say economics and these sorts of things, which your solution is different. So I think it's going to be a really good one. Money doesn't work. I can see you on today's show with this one, actually. So I'm looking forward to that. Hoping to get some Australian media too. Yeah, I actually, I hate, I hate travel like anything, but anything remote, no problem.

Yeah, but if it's necessary, I'll even travel overseas to promote this.

Well, the one thing you— I'll tell you what, if you ever got the biggest podcast in the world is the Joe Rogan Experience. Now that's the one, if we ever got that, I don't know how— if like, that would be the biggest thing we could ever do in the marketing for that. So that'd be great. Next one up is Jimbo. The Jimbo was obviously— we put a video out about releasing Jimbo. And look, you know, you've been saying it for a while and asked you about what's going to happen and what the plans are, but we did put it out there and an email went to every franchisee with the video. I think based on the views, around half the franchisee group watched it. Based on the number of videos. And there's obviously a heap of comments. And what we did the other day, for those who don't know, Jim went through every single bit of comment and responded to them with Safi, who's the head of the product. And I think for transparency, it's great. Like, obviously there's a lot of comments there which—

there was, there was some objections.

There was a few, to put it mildly.

There were some objections. People said it was making it compulsory. We're actually not. Yeah, what's happening is that the only people that it's going to be compulsory for, those who've got severe problems with customer service, right? So that's, that's the key.

So if you're good with customer service, you don't have to, you don't have to use it, right?

But Jimbo's got things in it. For example, if a franchisee doesn't return a phone call or at least a text within 2 hours a client calls, that sends an alarm. It's not a complaint, but the franchisor gets to know and they can follow up and remind them. We're going to be setting up systems so they, if they set a job to be there in a certain time interval and they don't turn up, a warning comes back and that gives an opportunity to coach them and to really help them and all these things to do with the way that surveys are done. We can make them more accurate so they can define what franchisee's done. So basically, I believe it's got the potential to halve our level of complaints overall.

And that's why you really— and that's ultimately why you're so passionate about it, is that reason alone?

Because there's a small minority of franchisees who are badly letting the clients down, and I see that every day when I go through the complaints and I see, 'I'll never use Jim's again,' 'I'll never use Jim's again.' I see that again and again, and it's heartbreaking. It's because somebody let them down. And Jimbo is really useful. So, if a franchisee, one of that small minority, we're only talking about probably 5% of franchisees, they need to use it. If they want to take leads, you've got to use it because we cannot have you blackening our name because that hurts everybody else. Yeah, yeah. Because if one person goes out who does a bad job of say, pest control, okay, that means the client's not going to use them for mowing or cleaning or dog wash or antennas or anything else, 50 other divisions. Now that's a real, that's a real shame because all those franchisees are being hurt.

Well, it's embarrassing because I remember I got some times and they find out where I work and they instantly probably use the gyms or that, and they might say, I used Jim's guy and he was no good. Yeah, I want to hear that, it really annoys me.

And I think, and most of the complaints aren't quality of work, they're to do with communication. That's what Jimbo's going to be good at. Yeah, we're going to really be able to crack down If we can halve the level of complaints, which is my sort of aim, then I think we'll see our income, our leads soar.

Yeah, and that's why he's so passionate about it. That's what franchisees got to remember. It's not about, we're not looking at trying to look at your figures or no one cares. We don't honestly care about that. We care about the service level and the getting that complaint ratio down to as much as we close to can to zero. Because I think since 2025, we've had 1.1 million new leads.

We don't actually Yeah, we don't want it. We don't care whether they actually use the accounting package. Now surely there will be a package that will mean instead of paying $75 a month to zero—

yeah, it's $70.

Yeah, it'll cost you nothing. Yeah, so $1,000 a year, nothing. But if you want to spend $1,000 a year, be my guest. We're not concerned about that. It's the scheduling thing that's important.

Yeah, so because I think since Tony started 2025, there's been 1.1 million new leads to gyms. Out of that, how many What's the complaint ratio? Is it less than 1% or is it around 1%? Less than 1%. Less than 1%, yeah. And you reckon you could get this to probably half a percent, even lower? Lower, yeah. Right.

I think we can get rid of at least half of their complaints with the right sort of systems in place.

And now, what complaint level would you consider someone having to get on Jimbo? Like, what is it, like a 4.6, or is it a certain amount of complaints in the period?

Or basically, there's a warning letter sent out if they get 4 4 complaints, at least 4% of total leads within a 6-month period.

And that would be the trigger?

That's the trigger. Now franchisors can object to that, the reasons they say, oh well, there's causes for this and this condition, and we can delete complaints if they're shown to be completely unfair or if they satisfy the client in the end. So we do delete quite a few, but basically you get that sort of level of poor customer service. Now what that means in a practice, and I know this sounds a very That means you can look after 90% of your clients well and 10% badly, you're in trouble. You really have to look after all your clients properly. Now you can make an occasional mistake, okay, but generally speaking, we don't want any excuse to say, no, I just didn't feel like bringing that client back, or I forgot about it. No, don't do that. Get to the habit of doing it properly.

And I was gonna say, basically, just to be clear for Francis, is if you've got a big setup with whatever you're using as a software, you give 5-star service, you know and you want to stay with what you're doing, we hope you go to Jimbo. But if you want to stay with what you're doing, you can.

The only difference it will be for those on more recent contracts, the technology fee.

Yeah, the more recent ones. But if you're an older existing contract, no.

The technology fee will rise a bit, but the fact of the matter, technology fee doesn't even cover F&S, the basic support of the system. We're rewriting our entire system, which we have to because of changing— to improve it, but also because of changing technology. It's costing us millions of dollars. Technology fee doesn't even cover that as it is. So Jimbo's just an additional extra, but I reckon it's going to make a difference.

Um, Marketplace is going to be big. Marketplace is good. I've seen that. I think that'll be good.

I know some franchises are really looking forward to that. You've got, you've got it. You start building a big run and you're making good money, but now you start to get busy knocking back work. Okay, rather than knocking back work, sell off some of your most outlying clients and take more in town. And that, you know, wipe off a couple of months fees and then do it again. And as you go, you pay less and less fees and you travel less and less, and your income just goes up and up just from one thing, from the marketplace.

Yeah, because a lot of— that's exciting. A lot of franchisors will do like a text around or email. It's a bit— a lot of handling, right? Whereas a franchisee can log in and go, right, I want to list these 8 clients or whatever on the marketplace, and the franchisor can select.

And the person who sells will actually be rated by the buyer.

So you can't do junk Junk.

So if you give junk across, your future might be worth nothing. So what you want to do is to hand over really good clients, well-priced clients, well-looked-after, steady clients, and get a good rating. And that way, next time you want to sell some clients, you've got a good rating, you get a good price for them. Yeah, that's the idea. And of course, the other thing too, you can sell off your outlying clients. You say, well, hang on a bit, I've got 20 clients over there that I really— they're too far to travel now, but there's 10 clients in my territory which are just around the corner or in the same street. Now I want to buy those. It's the same principle. You look at them, you say, okay, it's got a good rating, pay for that bank. So you actually, you actually kind of swap.

Yeah, you're swapping clients a lot easier than probably what gets done with Facebook groups and WhatsApp.

And we handle the money, so it's, it's easy. So you, you don't pay for a job, you actually have 45— so check out— so there's a 45-day period still, just like when you, when you buy a business, is a 45-day checkout period if the jobs don't come through. Then you say, right, this is the reason. If it wasn't your fault, you don't pay for it.

All right, and then the money gets released. That's a really good reason to use Jimbo's because you get access to that. You won't have access to that if you don't use Jimbo, right? Yeah.

And the other really good thing about it is the, is the ability very shortly to be able to book, to have jobs booked straight into your diary. Right. One of the biggest problems we have more and more is that clients don't answer phones. So you get a message, you're going to bring it back in 2 hours, they They ring and they ring and they text and they can't get through. That happens again and again, more and more. Okay, now we're going to have an option very shortly where you can simply have the option of saying, okay, book him in. I've got half an hour spare today, I'm going to be in this kind of area. The system looks it up and says, okay, there's spare time, you're not too far away. Bang, tells the client, afternoon between 2 and 4 would be fine. So instead of having a a message to ring a client, you've actually got an appointment. And a certain extent, in some situations, you could even book in a job. Yeah, like for a driving school, for example, somebody rings up and says, I'd like a lesson done, and they look it up and say, okay, well, we've got a slot tomorrow morning between, you know, between 8 and 10, would that suit you? So that's— you've got a job booked, not just a lead, a job.

Yeah, so what would happen? Yeah, so for those who are wondering, like, you go online, you book, and then it will allocate it to the franchisee, put pull it up, their schedule from Jimbo, then present it to the customer and say, you know, Bill's got between 7 and 9 and 1 and 2 where he can come and do an on-site quote or whatever, and you can go book it in.

Yeah, or even when the job's actually priced, which is in some divisions like Cartier telling you, can actually book in the job.

Yeah, so that's a good one. Yeah, so set pricing, literally that'll be the job booking, and then for other divisions who need to do on-site quote, be on-site quote booking.

So we can, if we can, for example, improve our conversion rate by, say, 20%, yeah, that means franchisees get a whole lot more.

It locks them into business.

Yeah, more money for the same number of leads. Absolutely.

That's exciting. The other one here you had was AI, about your concern for potential harm of security systems, development of germ warfare, and the potential extinction of humanity. Yeah, nice.

Well, you know, it's It's exciting. I love AI. I'm using it a lot in my, in my research, in my books. It's fantastic. I just, I just started using it and it's exciting, but it's also very, very worrying. These new systems that can crack any security.

Now, well, Anthropic pulled their model Mythos from the market because it went and did a— it could hack a few things.

Now we have a, we have a wonderful guy Eugene who's in charge of our security, and this guy is insanely paranoid about this. He's best person you could find to run IT, and he's really obsessive about security. We're getting the best systems, upgrading it. We have, we have phishing attacks, fake ones given out to staff.

It's gone beyond phishing now, this stuff. This stuff's a lot more advanced than phishing.

I, I even clicked on the wrong one the other day, which was, which is a fake one put out by IT. So they really keep you on your toes. We have a very good system internally, but the ability of these systems to crack security is very, very worrying.

Should be a good market for the Jim's IT division if they could have a— the cybersecurity is booming and this is the reason why.

I think so. And IT is going great. We've got over 50 franchisees now and it's growing fast. I think it's a—

that could be a massive market, like that could be a massive division based on cybersecurity alone. Yeah, good option. Yeah, for small business. Look, it is a worry though.

I mean, I mean, the ability of, of AI to teach people how to make biological warfare, which I think is a very significant threat. If you had tailored diseases, you imagine something like COVID, easily transmissible, having a latency rate so you can actually be infectious before you know you're sick. Imagine 20% or 30% mortality. What would that do to our society? I mean, COVID was like 1%, and the people that, the average person who died was above the average age of the life expectancy population. It was a very small minority of vulnerable people who were affected. Imagine it at 20%. That would be shocking. It would be like Spanish flu all over again.

If you were a betting man, do you think it's going to wipe us out or be the— get us on the improve our— improve the earth or improve humanity?

I have to be optimistic and say we'll survive it. Yeah. But I do think— I think also that And the research that I'm doing with Birthrate Crisis is actually— it's got more to do— it's not just about having more babies and more children and maintain population, it's also got economic implications too. If you could use these sort of treatments, which basically what they're doing is mimicking the effect of mild food restriction, it would not only make people more fertile and more community-minded but also make them more hardworking and more dedicated. So I think we can actually improve— Improve productivity. —the calibre. Of the human race overall, of all groups in society, and decrease economic inequality. For example, people like Aboriginals, for example, who are disadvantaged. I believe it's an epigenetic change, and if they could be given access to treatments, that would actually help them to become far more successful.

And yeah, so we'll say that you're going to think it's going to be not going to wipe us out, but hopefully— I hope it won't.

Hope it won't.

It's interesting, I listen to a lot of AI podcasts with people and guys who are involved in DeepMind, and It's still a split camp. You've still got people who think it's going to wipe us out, then you have other ones who are really involved in it who think it's going to do the opposite. So it's still a very— I think it's a 50-50 argument. I don't think it's 10% and 90%. I think it's a 50-50 argument.

I think if I had the choice, I would say let's stop it completely, but you can't.

You can't, and that's right, because other nations can do it.

Because the danger is so extreme. There's massive benefits, but there's such great danger too.

Absolutely. So we'll leave that there. Thank you very much for your time today, Jim. If you like that, make sure you subscribe to the channel and obviously Jim's Substack where you're getting this. Leave us some comments or questions for Jim and we can answer them.