Jim’s Journey with Jim Penman

Hello and welcome to The New Orchard. Imagine this: a young man in his 20s owning not much beyond a beat-up mower, a small trailer, and about $20 in his pocket. It's early 1980s in Australia, and he has just finished his history PhD. But instead of committing fully to academia, he decides to take a leap of faith instead and dive headfirst into the world of lawns and hedges. What started as a simple and easily accessible side hustle, knocking on doors and clipping grass for pocket change, quickly turned into something much bigger. He notices a serious gap in the market and spots the potential in franchising, empowering everyday regular people to build their own business under a shared identity. Through sheer grit, With a singular focus on quality service and an unwavering commitment to his team, this one-man operation transforms into a nationwide empire spanning landscape gardening, cleaning, pest control, and dozens of other services, serving tens of thousands of customers daily and generating over $1 billion in annual turnover. It's a wonderful tale of turning humble beginnings into a franchise phenomenon. That prioritizes people over profit. Who's the man I'm trying to introduce here? I think most of you will know the answer already, especially those of you who live in Australia. The man I'm talking about here is Jim Penman, the founder of Jim's Group. There are a couple of reasons why I wanted to interview Jim Penman, one of them being his incredibly strong commitment to basic business principles: people over profit. It sounds simple, but it's extremely rare in our modern world. Secondly, Beyond Business, Penman is a prolific writer who authored numerous books over the last few decades. One of his books is titled Biohistory: Decline and Fall of the West. In this book, published in 2015, the author constructs an interesting theory, a theory positing that environmental stresses induce epigenetic modifications, alterations in gene expressions without DNA changes, that shift population-level temperaments, driving historical patterns of societal vigor, expansion, and eventual decline, as evidenced in the analyses of ancient civilizations like Rome, as well as modern Western trends. After reading Oswald Spengler's "The Decline of the West," Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," and more recently "After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory" by Alasdair MacIntyre, I just felt the need to quiz Penman about biohistory. And his intellectual angle of attack with regards to this topic. Most Australians associate Penman with his franchising business, which by 2025 supported more than 5,500 franchises across Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and apparently generated combined annual turnover exceeding $1 billion, as I've mentioned earlier. This is very, very impressive, but the man is a lot more than business and the wealth he created and continues to create. In 2017, he established the Institute for Social Neuroscience. It's a private entity dedicated to funding and conducting research on the intersection of epigenetics, neuroscience, and human behavior, set up as an independent institute because founder wanted to avoid reliance on public grants or university oversight, which in modern context can be a massive plus as it filters potential sources of ideological contamination. Or even censorship. Penman also founded Epigenes Australia, which is a private organization focused on epigenetics, where he serves as a head of research alongside a team of scientists studying gene-environment interactions, including calorie restrictions' effects on behavior. Being a modern-day Renaissance man, Jim Penman, on top of everything else, is also politically active, supporting the Australian Libertarian Party, One of the very few courageous individuals with a lot of skin in the game, Penman has publicly criticised Australian government's policies when doing so was extremely unpopular, even risky, particularly those policies implemented during COVID-19 lockdowns in Victoria. Winning hearts and minds when he described then infamous State Premier Daniel Andrews as the worst political leader since Federation for policies that essentially halted small business operations by prohibiting franchisers from performing essential outdoor services like lawn mowing. Critic of big government and out-of-control bureaucracy, Penman called on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to establish an Australian equivalent of the US Department of Government Efficiency aimed at slashing waste as well as addressing bloated layers of compliance with ever-growing mountain of regulations. Albanese predictably did not respond. Penman is a fascinating human, and I feel quite privileged that he has agreed to do this interview with me. Let's dive in and hear from the man himself. How about we start with this? Can you take us back to your birth in Stourbridge in England and describe how your family's immigration to Australia in 1955, when you're only 3 years old, influenced your sense of identity and adaptability in a new country?

Well, first of all, I am a fair dinkum Aussie. My mother's family has lived in Australia since the 1830s. So, and she went across after the war to England and she met my father at a youth hostel in Wales. And my dad decided the Australian climate looked better than the English one. So we came out when I was 3. So I really don't remember the UK. I used to have apparently a very posh, pommie accent, which got knocked out of me very fast when I arrived here.

How about you tell us about growing up in Australia? What were the biggest challenges you faced in your early childhood, and how did these challenges instill in you the values of perseverance and hard work that would obviously later define your career?

Well, I guess it can obviously come from my parents as much as anything. I have strong-willed, capable parents. My father is an engineer. I didn't get on with him very well for a lot of my childhood. He was a pretty fierce character, but very good man man, but quite authoritarian and quite bad-tempered at times. Not physically violent, just, just my mother was loving but anxious, moody, you might say. So I don't know. I mean, I had good parents and I guess they instilled something in me. Where else? I don't know.

And do you have any siblings at all?

Yep, got 3. One older sister and 2 younger. One younger one, one brother, one sister.

And did the older one influence you in any way, shape, or form?

No, Lynn was different. If anything, I had more of a bond with my brother. He and I were pretty good mates. We used to play around a lot. We'd go out in the backyard and make bows and arrows, which was strictly forbidden in our house, but we used to like doing things like that and then play games, a bit rough. I broke his collarbone once playing Hoppo Boppo, but we decided not to hop, just to bang into each other. So, and we had, and I was keen on dinosaurs. So we had the dinosaur empires that we created up. Mine was called Tricerolumpia because I liked triceratops a lot. And his was Bluebearia because he had a blue bear at one stage.

Well, that sounds like a lot of fun. Obviously you've attended very prestigious schools like Prince Alfred College, Sydney Church of England Grammar, Melbourne Grammar. How did these experiences shape your worldview and prepare you for the rigors of higher education later in life?

Well, obviously I had good quality education. My parents sacrificed an extraordinary amount to send us to expensive schools, which wasn't that easy because my father was a— was okay, but he was a you know, he wasn't a millionaire or anything like that. My mother was a schoolteacher only later on. So it was quite a sacrifice to do it. Having said that, I don't know that private school education matters as much as your parents, because I come from a family which is very bookish. You know, all of ours is lined with books and the conversation was about books. It was always about reading. And I was an obsessive reader from when I was very little. I probably learned more from my own reading than I did from school. Like, we did history at school, but the history I remember most was the stuff I did as a matter of interest, mostly ancient history, Greek and Roman and so forth. I was just obsessively, very antisocial. I was notorious at school for not knowing the names of my school, my classmates. I would walk around, even walking down the street, I'd be reading a book. I was an obsessive reader. A lot of history, but a lot of science fiction. Just that sort of stuff. Very antisocial, very poor people skills, always getting crushes on girls which were unrequited. Just, just a quite a tormented adolescence, you might say.

Does that mean introverted or just not interested in other people?

Oh, highly introverted, very strong-willed. I'm what's called a loud introvert. In other words, very strong-minded but very unsocial. Just not, not good with people. Don't know what to say to people. You just— even things like, you know, you come and you say, hey, how are you? I, I just didn't do that kind of stuff. I learned it since then, but I was just hopeless at it. Yeah, I was notoriously— I always— I said a lot of very stupid things. I was always making really, really dumb comments that offended people without really knowing what I was doing because that's just socially, um, My wife says I've got mild form of Asperger's, and I'm going to tell you, I'm a lot better now than I used to be.

That's a nice compliment from your wife, Jim. This next question I have for you does not necessarily follow because it's been decades since you've graduated. Now I'm guessing you don't have a clear frame of reference. Oh, maybe you do because you have so many children. How do you think the mainstream education today compares to the education you have received as a young lad?

Look, education's got a lot more unfocused, um, a lot more woke. They try and teach everything in school. I mean, we were pretty heavily drilled in reading, writing, with particular, you know, basic knowledge. The amount of extracurricular stuff they get into now is quite appalling. But you've also got problems like the use of social media. Now, the kid my son goes to, my youngest son who's still at school doing year 10, they allow social media, they allow phones in the classroom. And it's just constant, constant phones all the time, even when they're supposed to be listening to the teacher. I know my son-in-law, he's a teacher too, and he says kids have got their laptop up and while he's speaking, they're watching something on the laptop. This whole thing is incredibly damaging. Really, really damaging the way we teach. I believe smartphones should be barred from schools completely. In fact, kids would be better off if they didn't have them at all. They're menacing and dangerous to children and adolescents. They should have to put them away and have nothing like that in the classroom. If you have to have a phone, then get a dumb phone. You can just receive phone calls. Very bad what's going on. But it's not a problem, Patrick. It's the education system has got worse. It's got less rigorous. It's got these distractions. But also the caliber of students has gone down too. And this is something that people don't realize. People think that the only thing that affects society is government actions like rules and regulations and systems. But in actual fact, there's been a dramatic change in the caliber of people. In recent years. People are a lot less hardworking than they used to be. And you can see this in the answers to questions like, if you asked a few decades ago, you asked young people what they wanted out of life, what were their main priorities, and you get marriage, family, meaningful work way up there. If you ask young kids today the same age, they say leisure, easy life, wealth, you know, work way down in meaningful work, not interested. Family, not interested. Marriage, not interested. Children, not interested. Way, way less than they used to be. People's character is changing in a way that's really damaging. And it's poisonous. And we see this most logically, evidently, in the collapsing birth rate as people become more selfish and individualistic. But it's also visible in the levels of literacy and numeracy. It's not just the government, it's the people themselves.

Jim, do you think the government has failed its citizens by not creating the right conditions and incentives for, particularly for young people who probably feel like it's impossible for them to have skin in the game, to have that seat at the table? You see a lot of students not being hopeful about their own future and turning into all kinds of activism, sometimes a violent kind, as that at least gives them a sense of belonging to something bigger. That said, I do agree with your previous statement that being active in your smaller local community and personal responsibility are absolutely critical.

Yes. Look, government policies are very bad in many ways. Like, for example, why is the cost of housing so dramatically higher in rents than it used to be? It's because government restrictions, zoning restrictions force up the price of housing. And you see the same situation in America, which is one country, one immigration policy. Median house price in Texas is $330,000. In San Francisco, $1.4 million. That's about— sorry, Houston would be about half a million Australian standards. San Francisco, about $2 million. Now, if we relaxed and had proper, decent, fair, reasonable zoning limits, which allow people to rebuild to a large extent what they wanted, our house prices would be half what they are. You know, you could be able to buy— you should be able to buy a house with 3 years average income. So you should be able to buy a house in Melbourne or Sydney for, you know, $400,000 instead of having to spend, you know, best part of a million, close to a million. And that's government policy that does it. And government policy is very damaging. It damages the economy, the bureaucratic red tape and stuff. It's impoverishing us. But there's another worse problem, is that the character of the population is changing. It's going down, and it's a response to wealth, excessive wealth and commercialization, which is caused by and partly driving a decline in community, in faith, in just being part of other people, living your life for something more than your own selfish desires. And that's changing very dramatically, very fast. It's going downhill in a big hurry. People just don't even— the only thing that people are starting to recognize is a problem with the birth rate. People stop having children. But it's far, far worse than that in every way. The rising— the rise of what's called deaths of despair, the increase in mental illness, in depression, in anxiety, in suicide, in drug overdose and alcohol problems, these kind of things— this is a sign of a fundamental change in the population. The government doesn't help, but it's not the basic cause. People have this illusion. They think this government's all-powerful. Government orders, we do it. Absolutely, we do it. Governments are actually just froth and bubble floating on the surface of popular opinion. Give you an example in China, okay? You get the Chinese one-child policy, where the government does everything possible to stop people having children. And my wife comes from that environment, so she knows all about it. You can't have children, abortion, infanticide, no matter what, you just cannot have children. All right? Makes it really impossible. And then some while ago, 10, 15 years ago, they said, this is causing some problems. 'Let's allow people to have more children. Let's allow them to have children.' And they sat back and waited for the birth rate to explode. You know what happened? The birth rate went down. The government went from forbidding it to allowing it, and it went down. And they said, 'Oh, this is really serious. We're going to be losing people. So let's now encourage people to have more children. Let's actually give bonuses. Let's give praise. Let's give benefits.' You know what did that? The birth rate went down again. The Chinese government is the most powerful in the world, incredibly great, incredibly effective at getting people to obey and do what they're told. And there's surveillance and there's communities and there's the Communist Party in every part. And, and they try and do something so basic as reversing the declining birth rate, and they completely and utterly fail. We have this illusion that governments are so powerful. They are not. Individual people is what counts. Individual character. That's what we've got to understand. That's what we've got to come to grips with. No government regulations can change this. We must change people.

All right, let's get back on track with our questions. Pursuing an honors degree in history at La Trobe University, I'm wondering what sparked your passion for historical studies And how did it lay the foundation for your later academic explorations?

Well, my experience of history comes from when I was quite little. My father was very keen on history, and when we went to England, we spent a year in England when I was 10, 11 years old, and we toured around every weekend looking at castles and cathedrals and churches and Stonehenge and all kinds of things. Britain is stuff full of history. So I got some sort of background from that. And I would read, even as a very young teenager, I would read historical books. The real serious interest started when I was 14. And a friend gave me a copy of the Peloponnesian Wars by Thucydides, which absolutely enthralled me. I've read it about 3 times. And that amazing story about the decline of a great city, and Athens was an extraordinary city, it just mesmerized me. And I thought, why? Why does civilization decline? And then I got into the Roman Empire. I was interested in the collapse of the Roman Empire. Why did it happen? What changed? So that was something that fascinated me very young. I'm talking about middle teens, 14, 15 years old. I was interested in that. And I also had an interest in biology. I remember picking up a book called The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, which is talking about human beings as if they're animals. And that fascinated me too. So I The basis of my ideas, my way of thinking, actually came very, very early, really intensive reading and thinking when I was young. One of the things that interested me most, which is really the subject of my latest book, is one thing that we're human beings seem to be completely contrary to biological animals. In animal populations, if you get a increase in food, population explodes, it just goes through the stratosphere, just grows and grows and grows. In human societies, and I knew this from studies of the ancient world, when you have wealth, the population tends to go down. That completely stumped me, it just mesmerized me, this fundamental problem. What happens? How on earth could people respond, even though it's so clear that we are biological animals. We're like 95% or 98% of the same genes as chimpanzees. We are very, very similar. How do we react to prosperity so differently? What's happened? So I had these questions in my mind. And I was fascinated. And I was a reader. And I was reading and thinking about these things. I went to university in 1971. And I wanted to understand society. And I thought these people must have the answers. So I'll study Sociology. Sociology is the study of society. I looked at what they said and I thought, this is complete and utter garbage. It's hogswallow. It's just meaningless. These people haven't got a clue. There's nothing. It was vague, waffling theories without any empirical foundations, without almost any reference to the real world. Just things like Marxism and stuff, which is about as stupidly unempirical as you can possibly get. I'm not talking about the ideological, you know, dictatorship of the proletariat. I'm talking about his ideas as a so-called scientist. It's garbage. And I remember going to one of my tutors and saying, but, you know, Marxism suggests this should happen. Empirically speaking, it doesn't. And then he said to me, he said, well, Jim, Marxism isn't empirical, it's dialectic. Nothing to do with the real world, it's nothing to do with, it's all to do with the argument. What kind of response is that? You're trying to understand the real world, you don't even want to relate to the real world, none of these theories have anything to do with it, they're not testable, they're not empirical. So I thought, this is complete garbage, so I switched to history, and history seemed to be at least a way of discovering the real world, what was really going on, and I actually wasn't the most congenial person. I remember I went to see one of my lecturers to complain about, or tutors, to complain about one of my results. And I went and just told him flat out why he was so completely wrong. And one of my classmates went in afterwards and he said the guy looked shell-shocked. Like this young Turk who was just completely telling him off. I wasn't rude. I wasn't yelling at him or swearing or anything. I just told him empirically speaking exactly why he was so wrong and all his comments were wrong. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you were not wrong for calling him out that way.

And in my third year at university when I was studying history, I just went to all my lecturers and said, listen, I don't want to study the course. I'll just submit essays on the topics and you can knock those out. All right. La Trobe's a fairly easygoing institution. I was lucky in a way. I could have gotten to somewhere like Melbourne. I only went to La Trobe because it was specializing in sociology, which I deludingly thought was the way to go. I really should have gone to Melbourne or somewhere like that, or Monash. But in actual fact, La Trobe humoured me in a way that more up-end universities probably wouldn't have.

Your PhD journey was marked by initial rejection in 1981, before acceptance 3 years later. Are you able to reflect on that setback and explain to us how it tested and ultimately strengthened your resolve as a scholar?

What happened What happened was I did 3 years. In my 3rd year, I just basically followed my own course. I used to write essays and stuff, follow my own ideas, my own way of thinking. I had ideas I was developing. Came to my honors year, and I was told, Jim, you cannot do what you've been doing in 3rd year. You've got to follow the course. You've got to actually come and do the things you're supposed to do. So I said, all right, well, I have to, so I suppose I will. And that was my honors year. And then I wanted to do— and I came up with a thesis, which was basically the beginning of the way I was looking at things. It was very, very different. And it went wildly over time. It was supposed to be, I don't know, 10,000 words, and it was about double that. I was just trying to cram everything in. And then I wanted to do a PhD, and they actually warned me. They said, you better stay with here because other people wouldn't be so tolerant of your wild eccentricities. They possibly didn't put it in those terms, but, you know, we will It will give you a bit more freedom to do what you want. So I started working on this thesis and developing ideas that I'd started working even pre— before I was at school, but I was working at them in my honors and my— and everything else. So then I started developing those ideas. Now, I was in the history department where you're supposed to be trained to be a historian. But I, when I started looking at things, first of all, I wasn't interested in any particular field of history. I was interested in the broad space of history. What is the commonalities? What are the things that are in common in different areas? And when I tried to understand them, I started looking at different things. I started reading up on cross-cultural anthropology and psychology and economics and a whole lot of other different— and biology too. So I was looking at a whole lot of different things to try and understand the patterns that I was seeing in history. And this was really not the way you're supposed to do a history degree. And then in the end, I came up with this really wildly different sort of thesis, which is just not even pure history anymore. It includes all these cross-cultural anthropology. I did cross-cultural comparisons and statistics and stuff and trying to show the patterns that were in common. And then I had a wonderful supervisor called June Phillip. She was very bewildered by the whole thing. Nobody wanted to actually look after me. I was such a maverick. This lovely lady, she put up with so much pain on my behalf. But anyway, she just humored me and tried to understand what I was saying and tried to support me. She was wonderful, really great lady. And then I got to there. Now, I just kept on working on this, kept on working and working, and I went way over what I was supposed to do. I was studying, I launched my PhD in 1975, and I was still going in 1982. So this is like 7 years later. And so I had this thesis, which basically completely demolished the entire body of history in terms of the reasons why things happen. Okay, pick an example. All right. Why did the First World War take place? All right, now you've got historians, they'll give you all kinds of reasons. It's the great powers, it's economics, it's this, it's the leaders, it's what I said. No, no, it isn't. The Great War took place because of a thing called the lemming cycle. It's the same thing that causes lemmings to migrate when their population grows. And it's a biological pattern designed to get animals to colonize marginal areas. Now, this is just ludicrous. This is not history. This is the ravings of a lunatic. And I submitted this thesis with all these wildly convergent different ideas, which are all based back on biology and neuroscience and stuff like this, quite primitive in those days, and put it to 3 examiners. Now, examiners would normally come back with a several-page statement about what you know, what, talking about it. Two of the examiners came back with a statement which was a paragraph. It was like about 6 lines long. That was it. And my supervisor said, this is not, this should not happen. What are you, what is going on? This is just not a proper response to a PhD thesis, which was quite big in those days. And then the third person came up with some more comments like that. And in the end, they knocked it back. One of the comments that he made was very interesting, the third, whoever it was, he or she, said, look, if this was a magnum opus at the end of a distinguished career, then, you know, we'd possibly consider it. But who is this guy? He's taking issue with everything we believe in, in a sense. And they failed me. They failed me. They said, no, failed. Can't have it. I went and did a verbal presentation. I apparently didn't do too well on that one either. So they still knocked me back. So I failed in my PhD. So at that stage, I, I decided to— I had to make a living. Now, I was expecting to be an academic. I really thought that was my future. But it was obvious at this stage there was no way anybody would hire me in any way. Not possible. I'm getting knocked back for the PhD. Even without that, I wouldn't have got hired. So what I did then was turn my part-time lawn mowing business, which had funded my studies, into a full-time business. That was in December 1982, I started that. And I started doing that, and it was tough in the beginning, and then I started to pull ahead of it. And then my thesis supervisor, June Phillip, contacted me. She said, listen, if you rewrite this section of your thesis, which is about methodology, then, you know, you should be able to get it. And she guided me on how to do it. So I actually was difficult because I was very busy. But what I did was I sold a lawnmower, and then I got more customers, and I sold that one, and I sold a third one. I sold 3 lawnmower brands in a row, and that gave me some leisure so I could go back and, um, actually resubmit. And I got granted my, my, uh, about 2 years later. So I actually got granted a PhD and went up on a stage with a big red cloak and a funny hat, and it's very colorful. Actually, my wife was pregnant with our first son at the time, and I looked like a medieval baron, so we decided to call him Richard Baron Penman. Nobody agreed with me. Nobody thought I was right. Not one person. I thought my ideas were obviously good, but nobody agreed. They said, this is just outrageous. This is so different. This is a different way of thinking about the world. It's like when you talk about education before, okay? You ask about government policies. It's not government policies. People. It's character that counts, individual character. And everything, the economy, the politics, is all froth and bubble. It's like foam on the surface of a sea. The waves go up and down. It's not the froth changing it, it's the waves, it's the motion of the ocean. All we see is the superficialities. So that was my view, and it was really wildly unorthodox. But see, what I— even though nobody agreed with me, not one person thought I was right, Not one, but not my supervisor, no academics, no reviewers, nobody thought I was right in this. The first person ever to think I might be right was one of my sons, my second son, and that was a couple of decades later. Okay, so, but I, but I, but I was sure I was right. And I, as I said to people too, I don't care if a room full of professors tell me I'm wrong if they can't give me a reason why I'm wrong. Tell me the one, the evidence doesn't fit. Now, if a 12-year-old kid comes up and says, Jim, here's a reason, here's evidence that you are wrong, I'll listen. But to me, history has to be a science, it has to be empirical, it has to relate, it has to be a coherent theory that fits scientific understanding. It must be the simplest theory that explains the available data. Entia non sunt multiplica in praeter necessitatem. That's Occam's razor. You prefer the simplest theory that explains the observable facts, and whatever you decide must be testable. It must be testable. Now, to me, that is the essence of any theory of history and society. And in neither way did any of the theories that I read even come remotely close to that direction. As I said, you explain the First World War, but what explains why different countries launch wars at different times? Why did the French become aggressive at the dawn of the 18th century, and the British around later, and the Germans later still, and the Italians and Japanese? And why in each case you see a surge of population as you— the generation born at the peak of population comes of military age, you get these aggressive wars. Now I could see that pattern. That was to me an empirical pattern. And there's also ways of testing that in laboratory, which we're doing. But that is not the way that historians think about it. So I had this wildly different theory. I also knew too that this theory had to be tested in the laboratory, had to be developed in the laboratory, because all the implications were to do with physiology, to do with things like food restriction. There were certain things you could do to test it. Not only that, but the very powerful suggestion that there were things that you could do, there were treatments that you could produce that would enormously increase human welfare and prevent civilization decline. So I had this, this mission, this sense of belief in what I did, even though nobody shared it. And I said, the only way I'm ever going to get anywhere with this is to become filthy rich so I can afford to fund my own research institute. and I'm currently spending something over $3 million a year doing just that, and I intend to increase that dramatically. That's what the whole aim of my gyms was. Until that time, I had no desire, interest, never even thought of becoming wealthy, but I had to fund my research.

That's very interesting. I didn't know that this was your primary motivation. Also, considering that this was a while ago, it's interesting to hear from you that even then, that academia lacked curiosity and open-mindedness to somewhat abstract and maybe obviously untested and perhaps not particularly well-articulated ideas. I thought this sort of posture was relatively new, but it isn't really. And now we only have science as ideology as a downstream consequence of academia behaving in this way, and not so much science as a testing method. Us created by its founders.

You've got to be very arrogant to take the view that I do. But I can have all the professors and doctors and academics telling me I'm wrong, and I don't have any hesitation in saying, no, you're wrong, I'm right. These people often ask whether my academic career influenced my business career, and I say it didn't really, except it's got one thing in common. When I came to launch a business, I had the same attitude. I'm going to do things in the way that I think best, and I don't mind what anybody else has ever done. So I set out to develop a franchising system on principles that I thought were correct, and I didn't listen to anybody else. I took advice, I read a lot, I always obsessively read things, but I have the same attitude that says no, even though people— like when I was setting my franchise system up I wanted a system that would be very favorable to franchisees who want to join. That was the, that was the foundation idea. And the lawyers that I investigated tell me you were wrong. They said, no, you can't do this, nobody does this, you've got to give yourself more power. They called it flexibility, but they need more power. You've got to be able to tell franchisees what to do and you better control things. And I said, I wouldn't, but I wouldn't want to sign that if I was a franchisee. So I decided to develop a system that was very, very friendly to franchisees and gave them enormous power and security, even against myself. And that was a very strange idea. And the lawyers actually said to me, you're going to want to come back on this and give yourself more power. You know, I did the opposite. I actually gave myself steadily more power to franchisees as it progressed. I gave franchisees the power to change to a different franchisor, to vote out their franchisor, to veto changes to their own manual. So I became more and more extreme in my thinking. And again, the same attitude in common. I don't care what anybody else says. If I believe in something, I will simply do it. Now, often I'm wrong. I make terrible mistakes. But fundamentally, I'm the kind of person that just doesn't care what everybody else thinks unless they can give me evidence that I'm wrong.

Considering where you landed in life, all your achievements and all your setbacks, it's clear that you're more right than wrong?

Well, I think I am. Most people still think I'm wrong. That's the view of society. Look, you look at it, you look at The Economist. Now, I subscribe to a number of different magazines and so forth, and The Economist, I think, is the best. I would read probably 80% of it, which is very high. The Economist is incredibly intelligent. It's beautifully written. Its view of science, technology, its understanding of the world as a whole is wonderful. It really is. I enormously admire the way it's done. And yet they have this absolute blind, total blindness. They think everything's about government regulations. It's so obvious they're wrong. It's not about government. It's about people, people's character. That's why you can't change the government of a certain kind of country, like, say, Iraq, and turn into a liberal democracy. It doesn't work because the character is different. Same with Afghanistan. You can't change Afghanistan into a Western liberal democracy, because no matter what you do, no matter how many billions of dollars— they spent about a trillion dollars trying to turn Iraq into Sweden. It didn't work, because the people are different. And it's not just their belief, it's their fundamental character is different. And that's the whole point. And now people can't accept that. One of the reasons they can't is because they think it's racist. And I say it's not racist, it's not eugenic, because it's not a genetic difference. It's an epigenetic difference. It's environment. It's what your parents did. It's your grandparents' environment. It goes all the way back, changes the way your genes function. It changes your character. That's what you got to understand. And that's totally, totally different to anything you read anywhere.

Looking to the government for all answers Isn't this a form of a primitive neo-religion of some kind? Some oddity that has replaced Christianity all over the West? Would you agree with that?

Yeah, you're quite right too. They think the government's so powerful. You know, government does this, government does that. This is absolutely illusion. You know, rates of literacy and numeracy are falling. Oh, it's the government. We need to put more money into it. Oh, garbage. Come on. People were more literate before we had compulsory schooling than they are today. Yeah, it's just, they're just pathetic. People are different. There's a wonderful book called Farewell to Arms, A-L-M-S, by an economic historian who looks at English behavior over the centuries leading up to the 19th century. And what he shows very clearly is there's a change in character. The actual things like people became more hardworking and more willing to get skills, for example, The gap between skilled and unskilled labor costs differed dramatically. There's a whole lot of changes taking place, clear change in character leading up to the Industrial Revolution. Now, he didn't know why. He actually guessed it could be genetic, which is ridiculous. It's far too quick to be that. It's also because it's collapsed so quickly since then too. But he understood that there's a change in character. That insight is lost. You go back in history, you look at a time when, like, the Merovingian monarchs in, like, the 6th and 7th century in France, what's now France, and then people talk about the weak kings. Well, they weren't weak, they were just in a situation where people weren't listening to them. There was a change in character. And then when the Carolingians come along and Charlemagne, people started to listen. And then after Charlemagne died, the thing fell apart again. There's a change in character every time. People want to blame leaders. They're far, far less capable to change things than you could possibly imagine. Character changes.

That's a very counterintuitive point of view, Jim. You wrote a thesis on why civilizations collapse. What key historical patterns did you uncover as a part of that work? And how have those insights evolved in your thinking over the last decades.

When you see— go back to, say, the late Roman Republic is a good example— when you see there's a number of changes happening in terms of the way people behave, one of the things you found happening is that people were flooding— the peasant farmers who'd been the background of Roman army were fleeing to the cities, and the land was being taken over by these vast slave estates run by wealthy senators. And the problem with that is, is it's Again, people look at it in terms of government policy, but then you get Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, who was a couple of reformers at the end of the 2nd century BC, who tried to reverse this. They actually gave land to the homeless workers from the city, and they went out there and they got it. But you know what happened? They basically sold up and drifted back to the city. They didn't want to do it anymore. So we had a change of character. Then you find changes in character of the population. Is that with time, the Romans of the Republic had been very wedded to their constitution, to their laws, their principles. With time, by the end of the 2nd century and into the 1st century, you start to find loyalty to personal leaders coming over. And that's why people like Marius and Sulla, and then later Pompey and Caesar, were able to gain power, because people were gradually becoming more oriented towards people. It's the same thing you see with Donald Trump in America. Where people are actually loyal to him over things like the election. They can actually say the election was lost, he won the election, even though he obviously didn't, because my loyalty to him, the personal, is the same kind of thing happening today. So then you get in that society in the late Roman Republic, you get a decline in the work ethic, you get a decline in impersonal loyalties to personal ones, you get an increasing focus on commercialization and wealth and status and a loss of the old Roman virtues. And people became less interested in family and children and so forth. There was a whole lot of changes that took place in character. And they were quite aware of this. First Emperor Augustus actually gave a really strong speech to his equites, like the aristocrats, the knights, and said, you've got to start having children. And he started putting— tried to tax them and bully them into having kids and getting married, which they didn't want to do anymore. But so what is happening was this change of character going on, all these things together, and the decline of the old Roman religion. And everything else. It's exactly the same pattern in the world today. The decline in the work ethic, so obvious. The rising gap between rich and poor, the focus on wealth and status, the decline of traditional religion, which is in our case Christianity. All these things are the same psychological pattern, this rise of this toxic selfish individualism, the decline of community and of faith, same pattern. And the same thing happened in Han China, for example. It's a very frequent pattern throughout history. When you get a wealthy commercial civilization, you get this change of character. And then what you get is a decline of republican forms of government into autocracy, and eventually the whole thing collapses.

Indeed, that pattern is clearly recognizable today. And as a scholar of history yourself, I'm sure you would appreciate that trends like this one are not really reversible in any meaningful way.

It is reversible.

Is it?

It's completely reversible. Because what we're talking about here, it's not something mysterious. It's not, it's not any great abstract forces. It's a change in character. And the character is largely driven by wealth, by prosperity, by commercialism. And what this actually does is cause a way It's similar to drug addiction in terms of the way that the mind works. If you have like a cocaine addiction, okay, so like you take cocaine, first time you have cocaine, tremendous high. You keep on taking it and it becomes weaker. The effect is weaker and you have to have more and more to have some effect. And eventually you get so depressed, you have to have cocaine just to feel normal. Now, what's actually happening in your brain is that the brain loves dopamine. Cocaine gives you a burst of dopamine, hyper-strong burst of dopamine. The brain looks at this and says, we don't want too much of this stuff. So what they do, what the brain does, is it dampens down the receptors to dopamine. It makes the brain less sensitive to dopamine. That's why it requires more and more cocaine to have some effect. That, that's well known. It's a well-known science behind how these things work. Now, what's actually happening in the modern world is the same thing. We have this wealth, this unparalleled wealth, and commercialism and so forth, that's giving our brains dopamine fixes because we've got junk food, we've got social media, commercial competition, all these things, the same kind of— they all give you a burst of dopamine every time you go onto a Facebook and you get a like, that's a dopamine surge. Gambling, same thing. Leisure, all these things give you— sex, especially with varied partners— all these things give you a burst of dopamine, and the brain reacts by becoming less sensitive to dopamine. And this causes a major, major problem, because as this happens, you become less sensitive. Things like children, like family, like work become too boring. They're not interesting. I want stimulation. I want competition, I want sex with multiple partners, I want drugs, I want alcohol, I want anything that will give me more and more of this dopamine, because my brain is so starved for it, because it's not sensitive. But there is a solution, and it's not a difficult one. What you've got to do is to work out ways of resetting the way the brain reacts to dopamine. You've got to actually mimic the effect of food restriction. That's exactly what we're doing. In my research program. We're actually examining a whole lot of drugs to try and find drugs that mimic the effects of food restriction. And the way you do that, for example, is by you put human brain cells into a whole lot of tiny little vials, and you put different drugs in them. We tested 100,000 different drugs, and we looked at the epigenetic changes, the changes that caused in the brain cells, picked up 61, done some more analysis, we're now testing 9 in animals, that process. Another way to do it is to go straight into the, use a system called CRISPR, where you go straight into the genome itself and you make specific required changes. And this wasn't possible until very recently, but you can. People think about CRISPR as making genetic changes, we're looking to make epigenetic changes, not changing the genes themselves, but changing the way they work. And we've hired one of the top CRISPR people in Australia to help us with this. So we're going to have some experiments. Hopefully by the end of next year, we'll have some results. So it is actually possible to reverse this entire thing, completely change, completely halt the decline of civilization by producing a treatment. And the thing about this is too, you don't, you're not going to make a treatment to halt the decline of civilization. What you're going to do is to have a treatment that's going to treat anxiety. It's going to treat depression. It's going to treat drug addiction. It's going to treat deaths of despair. It's going to be because there'll be, there'll be really big psychological benefits from taking this treatment. That's the aim. And it's actually quite possible. And the interesting thing is people, countries across the world are spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to reverse the birth rate crisis. In Hungary, they're spending 5% of GDP. On just on this alone, and it has virtually no effect at all. To actually develop a treatment would probably cost no more than $100 or $200 million, a tiny rounding error fraction of what they're trying to spend right now to reverse this crisis. We can change it completely, change the entire course of human history. This may sound wild, but I have some very skilled neuroscientists working on this, and they think it's quite feasible.

I would have to agree with that last statement of yours, Jim. That is a wild-sounding idea and not the answer I expected to get from you. It's very, very interesting how you would like to tackle this big issue. Quick follow-up question: you said that you can use CRISPR to create an epigenetic effect. Did I get that right? You mind expanding a little bit?

Okay, just for the benefit of your listeners who don't know what epigenetics is, genes are like little, lots of little taps, they're spitting out proteins, that's how they work. Okay, what epigenetics does is the effect of the environment, and it can be from your current life, it can be from your early childhood, it can be from your ancestors, it turns these little taps on or off. That's how it works. Now, what CRISPR does is goes and finds a particular gene and says, turn— instead of cutting the genome here, it says, turn this one off, put that one on. Those precisely targeted epigenetic changes. Not only that, but they can make targeted genes very recent. This is just the last couple of months, they've worked out ways to not only actually turn the genes on or off, specified genes, but also to do it in targeted sections of the brain. Because you only want the brain affected in the limbic system, you don't need it in the liver or anywhere else, you just need it in one particular place. And they've developed technologies that can do this. The field is advancing with extraordinary speed. The problem with CRISPR has always been targeting, but you can actually target a particular area. What you don't want to do is to, is to hit it somewhere else. That you don't want. So you've got to precisely target it. The epigenetics is new. It's mostly been genetic, which is actually deleting, cutting, changing the genes. What we want to do is something quite different, just changing the activity. Mostly what excess food does is it turns, it inhibits, it puts methyl groups on certain genes. We need to take those off.

Wow, silly me, I assumed we'll be talking about lawn mowing all day.

We can too, if you like. I did wonder— I did warn you I rambled, Patrick.

Nah, this is fantastic. I'm learning things about you I did not know at all. I do want to dive into your books next. You are a prolific writer, I think it's fair to say that, starting with Biohistory Decline and Fall of the West. What motivated you to write it, and what core lessons about societal rise and fall do you hope readers will take away? And I appreciate you might have addressed parts of this question already.

The idea behind Biohistory was to put it into a form that could actually be hopefully persuasive to certain people. That was what I intended to do. I wrote an initial academic version and then with the help of my son, we narrowed it down to this one. I've been actually developing my theory all along. When I started off doing my PhD thesis, it got to a certain level. During the time I was mowing lawns, I was actually looking at other things like behavior of apes and monkeys and apes like gibbons and chimpanzees and so forth. So I was developing it further. And I was also beginning to get some, I did some studies too. I was at Trobe University, I got some academics working on some aspects of it and doing experiments and things which, which helped to support some aspects of my theory. So BioHistory was an attempt to, to make that happen. It wasn't very successful. It actually did get certain people interested. I had people, you know, actually in several university courses were teaching aspects of the idea. So I did have a certain amount of followers, you know, I've kept in vague contact with. So there was some impact. But that was an attempt. I think my next book, which is The Birthrate Crisis, is in its 10th sentence similar. It's an attempt to do the same thing, but I think doing it better. First of all, I've advanced the theory quite a lot. In Biohistory, I wasn't even talking about dopamine. I didn't understand it. I hadn't even come across that literature. So when I saw this, it made sense of a lot of things too. A lot of things advanced. Also to do with the research project. So it's a far more advanced version. It's written in a simpler fashion, an attempt to get a wider audience. And it's focusing on the one thing that people can see that's going wrong. That's unarguable. Because I was talking about the decline of the West and people look at it and say, no, the decline of the West, doing fine. Nothing wrong with the West. We're hunky dory.

Wait, who is saying that to you?

Basically, well, I think global warming is the problem. They think greedy capitalists are the problem. They think, you know, racism is the problem. But they don't accept that we're in a stage of civilization decline comparable to that that destroyed the Roman Empire. Put it that way. So that message wasn't taken up very well. So what the idea with this next book is, first of all, it's got a lot more science in it. It's a lot more studied. It's a lot more advanced. There's a lot more stuff put into it. I'm also getting a lot of help in writing it. I'm getting editors and so forth, so having a lot of effort to make sure it's understandable. And then we're going to run a really, really major campaign to promote it across the world, including language translations into lots of different languages, because people in Australia and the US and so forth aren't particularly worried about collapsing birth rate, but people in places like China and Japan and South South Korea are panicking, not to speak of Eastern Europe. They're really, really worried about it. Basically, the populations are starting to shrink dramatically in these countries, and the fear is rising. So I think with the right promotion, we can get enough interest. And seriously, all the— look, the people in the world— I only need one prime minister, one really senior person, one super wealthy individual, one person to say, hey, this is worth considering and looking at. We've tried this other stuff, we've tried the bait bonuses, they don't work. Maybe, maybe we'll give this, this, this crazy guy a try and launch some serious experiments on developing these things, particularly if we can help to develop them too. If we can actually get— because we're actually developing a lot of stuff ourselves. We've got potential treatments we're actually trialing. If we can show any kind of effect, this is going to be a standout medical advance. Because depression is a big problem, it's a rising one. If we can show ways to make people less depressed, less dependent on drugs, it's going to be powerful. So that's what I'm trying to do, get enough of an interest to get people to say, "Okay, let's just, even if this guy's 99% crazy lunatic, why don't we just give it a chance? Why don't we try developing drugs that mimic the effect of food restriction? Why don't we just see maybe if there's something to this?" I only need to have one person do it. And put some serious funds into it, you could change the world.

Are you pitching this to universities in Japan or South Korea or any places like that?

I don't think I'd go to the academics anywhere because the academics are fairly blind. They're very, very fixed in their way of thinking. But if you talk about food restriction, the beneficial effect, that's not particularly controversial. The people who run my research projects at La Trobe, they're not biohistorians. If you talk to someone like Terry, he's a fantastic researcher, but he, as far as he's concerned, the First World War took place because of, you know, the great powers and the leaders and the Kaiser and all the rest of it. He's convinced of the normal pattern of history, but he is very skilled at understanding the science. So to say, to develop something that mimics the effect of food restriction, hey, that's interesting. Let's do it.

All right, let's press on because we still have quite a lot of ground to cover. In The Hungry Ape, you explore biological factors in human behavior. What personal experiences or observations led you to this topic, and what has it taught you about human nature?

Well, Hungry Apes basically is an intermediate stage. It was between my thesis, and I was continuing— when I was mowing lawns, I, I was fairly busy, but I would, I would grab time, anytime that I could, going down to Monash, my biomedical library, and read up on— that's when I started reading about primates, monkeys and apes and so forth. So when I had that sort of information, I decided to put it in a form of a book, hopefully to get some interest at that stage. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't done it. It was so crude and simplistic that it really didn't do me any good. Even gave people the idiotic idea I believe in eugenics, which I don't. I'm the opposite of eugenicist because I believe that the changes that matter are epigenetic. People think epigenetics is eugenics. People are so ignorant. So that was, that was the attempt to do that. That was my first. So it was first, it was my honors thesis, then my PhD thesis, then Hungry Ape. And after that, there was Biohistory. And now there's the new book coming out. So these are all attempts, hopefully better attempts to get attention for this way of thinking about things. I'm pretty optimistic about the new book. I think that with the evidence that we've got and with the way it's presented— look, most people are still going to say, 'No, no, Jim, you're wrong. Governments are in charge. Governments are in control. Change the laws. Everything else is garbage.' Most people will say that, particularly the lefty liberal ones. But I think enough people are going to say, 'Well, you know, we're not particularly convinced that government is the answer because they're so hideously failing to achieve anything. No matter how much money you plow into baby bonuses and everything else, it doesn't work. And if you keep on trying the same thing that doesn't work, and you try more of the same, and you try more, and it's— you have to look and say, well, maybe, just maybe, our presuppositions are wrong, and maybe this is worth looking at. Maybe we can actually try a different pathway. Just let's take a fraction of a percent of the money that's wasted on these daily bonuses and stuff and put it into basic scientific research. And then maybe it's worth having a go at. You only have to get one major research institution, one government body, one wealthy individual, one, one person to actually seriously take this up, and you will develop treatments. We actually have treatments already. Some of the weight loss stuff, like Wegovy and so forth, seems to have what I call effromoting effects. They seem to have similar kinds of effects. Like, for example, weight loss drugs get people less interested in smoking. That's an interesting sign. That's a sign that it's the same kind of effect you expect to have.

Going back to what you've said about collapsing birth rate, I'm sure in your research you came across policies of current Hungarian government. I think they are trialing things like income tax exemptions for life. For mothers with 3 or more children, which on paper sounds like an amazing deal. Are you saying these policy experiments are not doing what they are designed to do?

Oh no, I wouldn't say no impact. Um, with a kind of— just, just to put the fertility in perspective, you need 2.1 children per woman to have equal population. 2.1. Okay. And there's no OECD country apart from Israel that's even close to that level. Israel's about 3, 3.0, very high Orthodox Muslim population, this kind of thing. OECD countries, generally Australia is about 1.5, 1.6. Okay, now what seems to happen in Hungary is they probably increased the birth rate from about 1.4 to 1.6. In other words, there has been an effect, but to get it from 1.6 to 2.1, It doesn't work. And it seems to me if you took the entire GDP of the country and tried to boost birth, you probably still wouldn't do it. You just— there's not enough money to persuade people to have more children. If you give every mother with every baby a million bucks, you'd probably have an effect. We just can't afford to.

I don't know. I don't know. The money printer is pretty good these days. Let's get back to your books. With No Other Success, you share insights on achievement and fulfillment. My question to you is, what inspired this book, and what do you want your audience to learn about balancing ambition with deeper purpose?

Look, it's, it's, it's a strange irony. The reason people want to talk to me is because I'm perceived as being successful. I mean, seriously, if I was an impoverished mining contractor, you'd be talking to me now, would you? Because who am I, you know, what I've got to say? But because I've actually achieved some sort of success in business, people want to talk to me and want to ask me, and they want to know why I did it and how I did this kind of stuff too. But I have a very ambiguous attitude towards success and wealth as such. I read a lot about happiness, what makes people happy. Now, people think what makes them happy is to have more stuff. If I can get a better car, a better house, better clothes, designer handbags, better holidays, I'll be happy. Well, in actual fact, it's just not true. Past a certain level of income, which is about the median Australian income, wealth makes very little difference at all. What they also find too is that when you spend wealth in a way that's competitive to try and get more people admiring you, it actually has no— not even— it has a negative effect because there's always somebody richer. There's a book I just finished called From Barista to Billionaire. It talks about this guy who got to know all these wealthy people, and somebody have a luxury yacht and be so proud of it, and then be moored next to a bigger yacht, and he'd look at that and he is gall and wormwood. And, and everybody, you know, like in church this morning, they were talking about John D. Rockefeller, and, and he was the richest man in the world. He was like the first billionaire in history, and he had about 1% of the whole GDP of America was in his pocket. That was how wealthy he was. And people asked him, what do you need to be contented? And he said, 10% more. Nothing is enough. Now, what they've discovered is that what makes people happy is not having more and more money to buy more and more stuff. What makes them happy is community, friendship, family, faith, especially faith community, giving to other people, helping. You know, the best thing you can do with money to create happiness? Give it away to a cause that you're involved with. Helping other people makes you happy. Selfish individualism does not. And this whole attitude is so terribly wrong. And in this book, what I wanted to do was to talk about my career and my business, but also to say that what really matters is not money, it's not becoming wealthy, it's what you do with it. And the book title is short for the saying, no other success can compensate for failure in the home. And that's what I absolutely believe. It doesn't matter how much money you have. What matters is what sort of wife or husband you are, what sort of parent you are. And then it matters what sort of community member you are, what you're doing for other people. That's what matters. These are called, what do you call it, the virtues you talk about at the end of a life. What really matters. And amassing money is that. So I talk about the first episode in the book, the first anecdote. It's about a guy I rang. He was a 10-year veteran. I make a practice of ringing my franchisees when they hit 10 years and just ask them, chat to them, ask how they're going. This one particular guy told me about how he started. He said he was a manager at a supermarket and he worked very, very long hours. Could make good money, but very long hours. And one morning, just very first thing, he was leaving for church and his 4-year-old son said to him, Daddy, I wish you could have breakfast with us. 'Yes.' That was all. And he drove to church and he said, tears streaming down his face, quit his business, quit his job, bought a Jim's franchise, happened to be a mowing franchise. And ever since then, he's seen his son grow up. And I said, 'Doesn't make any more money.' Actually, it's about the same, but his family life has been transformed. And I said, 'Did you ever thank your son for his comment?' He said, 'Jim, every day.' Because nothing, no amount of money could have, could have compensated for the fact that he wasn't seeing that little boy turning into a young man. And that's the lesson too. It's not just about money. And I want people to get over this idea that you amass wealth and you become better than other people and you become more admired. It's the whole point of it. It's not. You have to live a good life. It requires Letting go of yourself, thinking about other people, thinking about family, thinking about community, thinking about faith, thinking about things beyond yourself, having a sense of purpose, a mission in life. And the purpose of becoming happy by doing whatever feels good is the worst way. It's the recipe for misery. It's the recipe for drug addiction and alcoholism and greed and infidelity in marriage and all this garbage. Happiness is not achieved by that, and people don't understand that. And that's the message I want to talk about. So this talks about myself, talks about franchisees successful. And I know a lot of wonderful people. I don't know many people outside of gyms, I must say. My world is very insular. And I know a lot of— we've created probably more millionaires than any company in the history of this country. I know at least 20 guys who are turning over a million dollars a year. Um, these are franchisees. So it's— we're good at producing this, but to me, the real value of a system like ours is not that. I mean, it's great that they do, but it's people who are able to make a decent living. And a typical Jim's franchisee doesn't make a lot. They make about, based on recent surveys, a bit under $3,000 a week. So it's equivalent to $100 grand a year or so net profit. Okay, so they're not— most of them aren't rich, but it's enough that you can live a decent life with time for your family because it's flexible. It's not, not working ridiculous hours. It's not having to work weekends, late at night. It's having time for your family. And what else matters?

Yeah, it's a really simple message, but I think people do need a reminder quite frequently, actually.

We are so deluded, Patrick. We are so deluded. People think, if I only had more money, if I won the lottery— no, it's rubbish. You know, people who win the lottery, within 12 months they're back to the same level of happiness. Than they were before they won.

I think it's pretty well understood that lottery winners are not really happy for long, and most of them end up in pretty dire financial situation anyway. It's just not a good recipe for life that's full of meaning and happiness. Finally, I want to ask you about, um, this one last book titled Every Customer Is a Fan. That book focuses on business service. What lessons from your career did you instill into this book, and how do you want it to guide business owners towards a more sustainable success?

Well, it's the same as in basically, um, the latest book, um, No Other Success, is an update of that one too. But it's, look, it's the same. The lesson of my business career is the same principles. First of all, you look to the interest of people you're dealing with. You've got to make a phenomenal deal. Now, my book, as you've seen from the, my email, when I emailed you, there's a little down the bottom, there's little 3-line slogans. Our first priority is the welfare of franchisees. We're also passionate about customer service. We sign only franchisees and franchisors we are convinced will succeed. Now, the unique thing about Jim's is I focus really, really heavily on the first of those. Even customer service is considered to be in service of franchisees. Because if you give great customer service, you get more leads coming in because reputation. And we know that franchisees who give great customer service tend to be more successful. They tend to be more likely to put good income, like to stay long term. So we focus really hard on that. So I would say to anybody who's going into business, you focus intensively on your key people. And your key person is not yourself making money. You have to make money, That's clear, otherwise you'll go bust, you're out of business. But you should be focusing on how can I give an outstanding service? How can I turn my customers, or in franchising, how can I turn my franchisees into raving fans? That's one key principle. And the other one is this: people think that success is about having some brilliant idea, one idea. Hey, I'm mowing lawns one day, and what if I franchise? Suddenly I'm a multi-millionaire. It doesn't work that way in the slightest. It's thousands of thousands of little tiny experiments and trials. Every day of my life for the last half century, I've asked myself the question, how can I do it better? How can I improve? How can I— when I'm mowing lawns, how do I, how do I, how do I manage to save myself one step by emptying my grass bag? What do I put it into? How do I, how do I cut an edge in the cleanest, neatest way possible? How do I turn my mower? How do I navigate between streets? How can I do jobs in different ways that will actually increase the quality of the job but also increase my efficiency? How can I market more effectively? How can I employ people more effectively? Every day, every day of my life in business is the question, how can I improve? Looking very self-critically at where I've gone wrong, the mistakes that I've made. Try this, fails. Try this, fails. Try this, fails. Try this, okay, that works, let's do more of it. It's that kind of attitude. And I've not only from my own experience, but looking at other people— I talk to franchisees all the time. I— every single one of my 5,500 franchises has my phone number and email address, and by jeepers, they use it, and they're encouraged to. And I talk to them and I see what's happening. And what I see is the one most crucial thing, apart from a passion for customers, is very important, is somebody who is prepared to listen and learn. And if something goes wrong and they say, okay, what mistake did I make? How can I do it better? And the ones that are doing badly are the ones that are saying, like, for example, you get a franchisee who's getting too many complaints. Now, his attitude can be, oh, look, the reason your whole system's unfair, you know, you're too harsh and unreasonable, the customers are bad, you know, the system's bad. My franchisor's giving me no support. They'll blame anybody else, and they're the ones that tend to keep on making mistakes and doing the wrong thing. Whereas somebody says, hey, look, okay, I understand that sometimes it's not fair, but yes, I've learned from this. I really have to make sure I phone more quickly and text. I have to change my system of operation, my, my diary, whatever, to make sure I don't forget customers. I need to check carefully. I need to look at why the complaints come through and then figure out Why the customer wasn't happy the first time, make sure I don't do that again. So you, you, somebody who learns— I have made more mistakes in my business career than any normal 10 persons within the whole of their entire lives. So, so many. But I've always wanted to learn from them, and that's the, that's the key secret. It's not being brilliant, not even being a workaholic. It's being endlessly self-critical and saying, how can I do better?

You know, this self-reflection, this self-examination that you talk about is actually a very rare commodity in a modern world. Not a lot of professionals, especially managers, do it or have it. What's impressive in your case is your consistency over decades in business. You seem to have stuck to your clear principles quite well, not just for a few years but for decades, and that is truly amazing.

I think one of the greatest virtues people look at is humility. In anything that you do, you've got to be prepared to look at yourself and accept that you're imperfect and recognize that and make changes. Always look inwardly first. As they say, you're pointing at somebody, you've got one finger pointing out and you've got three pointing backwards. What did I do wrong? Okay, this person is acting unreasonably. What could I have done could I have done different? How could I have managed that better? What mistake did I make? And I'm very aware of it. If you actually have a look through the book, you would find that there's an awful lot of stuff where I talk about my mistakes, things I've missed, errors that I've made, errors of judgment, errors of strategy, lots of bad things. I'm very open about it. I'm very— I still got very poor people skills, as I mentioned before. So trying to learn how to adjust with that one too and live with it and improve on it. Always, always trying to learn. I'm 73 years old and I'm learning faster and more than I ever have in my whole life before. Certainly no slower. You always got to learn, look at yourself, be so critical. I find the Christian attitude helps a lot, actually. And one of my favorite passages is, if we have— we say, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins to God, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. It's that attitude that says I am imperfect. I don't have to rest on being never wrong. I just have to recognize myself. I love the Bible. People sometimes ask me who my mentor is, who my— it's Jesus more than anybody else. Jesus, because there's so much, like Jesus washing his disciples' feet. That is a wonderful story. And it's an amazingly radical story for the time because in those days, washing feet was a very degraded job. It was filthy. The feet were really, really dirty and smelly and disgusting because they had sandals on dirt roads and stuff. Now, occasionally a revered rabbi, his disciples might wash his feet as a sign of respect, but Jesus washed his disciples' feet. That was extraordinary. That level of humility, of service, is the whole idea behind what we do as a mission. And the whole meaning of money. You know, Jesus said it's harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. That's a very meaningful statement. Wealth is corrupting, really, really corrupting. And there's a proverb, Proverbs chapter 7, verse 7-8, and it says, God help me not to become too wealthy or prosperous or too poor, because if I'm prosperous, then I can forget you. If I'm too poor, I may steal and cause, you know. So that's a wonderful saying, that the wealth is corrupting. And you always have to have this view that it's a thing, it's entrusted you by God. And I make no bones of it, I would give away 90% of my net income. I really live on— I live quite well, very well. I buy all the fruits and the books I need and stuff, but I live on a tiny fraction of what my business makes. The rest goes into my research. That's the way it should be. Not my money, it's his money.

Oh, it's very good that you are so open about your faith and how it guides you in personal life and business. We'll get to Christianity a bit later, but before we do, I want to ask you this: as a father of 10 children across 4 marriages, how has your family life intertwined with your entrepreneurial journey, and what values of grit and love have you strived to pass on to them? You've talked about the necessity to make time for the family, for the children, good friends, and also you briefly presented this little story of a father whose child told him that he needs to be there for him. So I'm just curious how you're going to respond to this question.

I've never neglected my, my kids, never, at any stage in my life. I've never, never dreamt of it. I never I just couldn't. Like, I am obviously CEO of a major company. I drive my son to school and pick him up. That's like the best part of an hour each way by the time I've driven there because school's a fair way away. That's— I wouldn't even consider not doing it. It's time I spend time with him, and it's important. And I never— I mean, one of my problems was, in a way, and of course the social bias doesn't help, I I got divorced, which was unfortunate, but basically my wife came to believe in open marriage, in effect, and I can't tolerate that morally or personally. But then I had these 5 children that I was very devoted to. And to a large extent, what wrecked my next 2 marriages was the fact that when I saw them, which was only very part-time, I was so focused on them that I neglected my wife. My third wife actually said to me, if you let your children go, I'd stay with you. I even offered to get a separate house so I could be with them and not have to impose on her, but it was very hard. And I don't blame either of them for not being able to cope with that. And even my current— I've been married 24 years to Lee now, and she found that very difficult in the beginning, really challenging. And she's a wonderful, giving lady. She's amazing, far better person than me, but she found it very hard. But I've never neglected my kids because I just can't. I love my kids to distraction. I just, I can't not see them. Nothing is more important. I never ever, ever would put kids and money into the balance and say that the money is more important. I just can't do it.

The reason why this is so impressive to me is that in our modern culture, parents get overwhelmed with one or two children. They will say that things are so hectic that they simply can't cope. And I'm not passing judgment here on such parents specifically. Modern world is terribly configured for quality family time, and that's just evident. But you, on the other hand, had 10 children, and on top of that, you've managed to be very successful in business. That's incredible.

The worst pain is I didn't see enough of them because, because I, I missed them so much. It was very, very hard. One time with my dispute with my first wife, she cut me off for 2 years. And that was the worst, most traumatic time of my life. I still, what is it, 30 years later, I still have nightmares about it. It's just horrifying. I just, I never had enough of them. I wish we had more. 4 children in my current marriage and they just stopped coming. That was all there was to it. But I would cheerfully have one every couple years forever. Now I'm a father, so I don't do so much the hard stuff, but I just love kids. See, people don't understand about, about the declining birth rate. They think it's you don't have enough money. It's not, it's a priority. I started having kids when I was, I was a lawn mowing contractor, you know, working pretty long hours pushing lawn mower around, making money as a gardener. My wife was a student and then she was a homemaker, so she wasn't working. But I just wanted kids. I was actually in debt when I started having kids. I didn't have a house. I was actually still in debt. I paid it off, the last of the debt. But I was in no situation you'd normally think of it. We had no money. We just lived very simply. Eating out was a rare treasure, maybe fish and chips if we could afford it. I mean, that was— I just wanted kids. It's what's important to you. It's really what's important. And if you love children as much as I do, then it's no sacrifice to to have a lot of children. I would have a lot more if I could.

Let's talk about religion. Your conversion to Christianity in 1979 seems like a pivotal moment. How has your faith influenced your business ethics, your family priorities, and overall approach to life's challenges?

Christianity is the core of what Jim's is about. Now, to a certain extent, these may mean my values anyway, but they certainly were enormously strengthened by the ideals of Christianity. The whole idea of service, the fact that wealth is entrusted by God, the sense of needing to be completely honest, the need to pay tithing even when it was very difficult, which it sometimes was— those kinds of things just became very fundamental to the way I thought about it. And look, I made many decisions against what I thought was my own self-interest. I really did. There was a situation where, um, like looking at the franchise, um, I, I was in this business where normal— my major competitor that has 250 franchises when I launched my first one, and they, they did not select— they had no selection process at all. And I said, I will not do that. I said, I'm not going to sell a franchise to anybody that I think unless I'm pretty confident they're going to succeed, I'll just say no. Um, when I used to sell lawn mowers, I knew that if I sent somebody out on the road to be trolled and they didn't have good customer service, they tended to fail. And I said, I'm not going to let that happen. Now, my thought about that was this was going to really make it difficult to succeed. And I, I thought, I will never ever be as big as VIP. I mean, 250, that'd be crazy. Um, and somebody asked me how many I'd have franchise one day, and I said, maybe if it goes well, maybe 100, because I'm never going to compromise. I was never going to put people on that I didn't think would succeed. That was an ethical stance. It wasn't business, it was ethics. Now, as it turned out, it was an extremely good business decision. It was a brilliant business decision, and I try and teach new franchisors why that's the case, and there are various reasons for it. One of them is that one thing we used to do to sell franchises is to give people a list of current franchises with their phone numbers. Just give them out and say, ring them. And that was decades before the code of practice came in, the code, the Franchising Code came out. I should give it to them and they'd say, why would I buy from you? You're running it from your basement. VIP's got this international interstate thing, they've got fancy offers, why would I buy from you? And I say, look, there's some differences 'But ring my franchisees and ask them, and then get a list from them and ask them.' Now, I knew they wouldn't provide them with that list because if they ring my people, they'd say, 'Yeah, Jim is good, he looks after me, I'm going well.' That was the overwhelming impression. And as we give great customer service, it got easier to find leads, and that made franchisees more happy and successful. It means that when you've got good franchisees who are thinking for themselves and doing the right thing, they, they're not so draining on you, not taking up your time. Failing franchises are very, very demanding emotionally and in terms of time. So you don't want that. You don't want it for you, don't want it for them. But as I say, it's always— when you take this attitude, it's got to be for the sake of the franchisees. That's the core idea behind what we do. And it proved to be an incredibly successful way of doing things. It's enormously successful. But it wasn't made— the decision wasn't made for business reasons. It was made for ethical reasons. I'll give you another example. When I was having problems years earlier selling lawn mowing rounds, I'm not very personable. I'm not a great salesperson. I was doing it very badly. And then I went to see a person in my church who was in the advertising business to get some advice about advertising. And he sat me in his office. He's a very successful guy, much more successful than me at that stage. And for half an hour he told me about advertising, about how to work and where to advertise and how to— the method, everything else. I said— came out of his office and I thought, I don't know anything about this guy Peter, his business. I don't know how he operates. I don't know what he charges. But if I ever need an advertising agent, I will go straight back to him. And as I was walking back to my car, I thought, this guy hasn't told me anything about his business, yet he's completely sold me on it. And what I realized was that he had no other concern but my welfare and the welfare of my business. Now, I was really struggling to sell lawnmower rounds at that stage. I was so bad at it that I used to, one day, employ a professional salesperson to sell for me. So what I tried to do was a new approach completely. I had a— and this is a really little business, it was crazy— a little tiny shed in the backyard from my office. There was nothing. So what I decided to do was to try what this guy Peter had done. And the next time somebody approached me about a lawnmower's advertisement in the paper, I, I said to him, tell me, do you know what the cut of a lawnmower means? Now I knew what it meant, and it was always how that was expressed, but most people who would cry didn't know, and I'd explain and then I'd talk about the business and I'd explain how it worked and come to see me and I'd talk more about the business and then I just give them a list of, you know, some of the customers, this business in your area, you know, have a look. So there was no sales pitch, just an information session. One of these guys rang me back and approached me and said, listen, I've been offered a business in my area, what's the better offer, yours or that one? So I thought, okay, I've got to do this honestly. I've got to be honest about this. So I asked him, because I thought hopefully mine's the better business. That was the idea. So I said, okay, how many customers? What's the cut value? How far apart are they? How long has he been doing it for? What's he doing? When's he going to— after the sale? These are just obvious questions. You, you could value a business if you understood the industry. At the end of the day, it was obvious it was a better business. And I said, I'll go and buy that one. I said, I did the same thing 3 times in a row. So I gave away 3 sales. I gave them advice. The third guy actually said it's a better business, but it's too expensive offering that price. So I gave away 3 sales purely for ethical reasons. You know what happened? They all came back and bought from me, every single one of them. And by the time I did that, I had no trouble selling lawn mowers, even though I'm extremely socially goosh. It was an ethical— it was an ethical decision which turned out to have incredibly great practical business influence. And I can give you many stories like this. A story like when I was started off mowing lawns full-time, I was really, really in a bad way, deeply in debt, deeply in debt, really impoverished. And my mower and my brush cutter broke down just the week before after Christmas. It was just after I started, so I had no equipment. So I had to go to a place which is a long way away, buy some replacement equipment. Gun Taster was open, so I went in there. Mower, brush cutter, wrote down the price, add them up, went to the cashier, paid the price. And I, and I, and I, when I walked out of there, I looked at the list he'd given me and he'd added them up wrong. He charged $100 too little. He made a mistake in his arithmetic. And that's a lot of money in those days because they were a lot cheaper. It was a big difference. And I thought, okay, I'm so desperate for money. I need this money. I've got to have it. I just, it's just good fortune. Okay. So I drove all the way back to my first job, which was quite some way away, got the mower out, put it on the nature strip. And I thought, God does not want me to do this. Does not want this to happen. And so I packed the stuff up. Back in the car, drove back to the shop, found the guy who did it, said, look, you made a mistake in the adding up. You charged me wrong. You know, here's the money. I didn't honestly know how I was going to find it, but I just gave it back. He said, thank you. That would have come out of my paycheck. Later that afternoon, I was doing work for somebody who had a, like, a machine, like, he sold things like printers and so forth. Now, I did not mention anything about my financial situation or my needs or anything, but out of the blue, this guy actually offered to do some leaflets for me. He not only offered to do leaflets without me asking him, but he actually suggested a specific number of leaflets, and the value of that number of leaflets was $100. And this was like about 4 hours later. Now, the really striking thing about that experience was not, not the $100, really. It was the fact that I did what God wanted me to do, and I got some clear message so soon after: I am with you, I am behind you, you follow me and you will be right. Even though at that time it looked incredibly desperate, I was really in a bad state, but just that sense of certainty, that sense that God was there and that somehow if I was faithful to him, he'd be faithful to me, even though I couldn't comprehend how it could happen. And I had no dreams of what would go on. But again and again, and I can give many examples when I did something because it was right, because it was ethical, it's turned out to be a great business decision, even though it doesn't seem so at the time.

Talking to you today and doing a bit of research for this interview, it's clear to me that you love people and you love Australia. You seem to have deep love for this land. So let me ask you this. What aspects of Australian culture, from its emphasis on hard work to community spirit, have deepened your love for the country and inspired you to build and expand your business primarily here. You didn't move to US to access a bigger and much more dynamic market, which I'm guessing you could have easily done.

Never, never, never a possibility because, because my family's here. No one's success is more important than, than home. I wouldn't lose my children. I wouldn't lose my family. My wife would go with me, but no, never, never even crossed my mind to leave with majority of my children. As it is, I've got one son in the Philippines and one in Taiwan who we tried very hard to get back. No, but I wouldn't move. Um, what do I like about Australia? I think the number one thing— I don't think Australians are particularly hardworking, anything but. If you look at the difference between them and, say, Chinese or Americans or almost anybody else, but definitely not. The thing I love about Australia much is that we're relatively egalitarian people. We don't have as strong sense of social hierarchy as other countries do. I think, I think one of our greatest prime ministers was Bob Hawke, somebody I greatly admire. I just finished reading his biography for a second time, and Demons and Destinies, it's a good one. But he's an ordinary man. I mean, he's extraordinary in some ways, but he's the kind of guy that have a beer with somebody in a pub. He just speaks to people. He's not above them. I like that about Australians. The best Australians are very ordinary in a sense. They don't hold themselves as superior and above somebody else. That's what I really admire. We also have a more, I think, a more relaxed attitude towards manual work. Like in some countries, if you were to leave a white-collar job and go out and become a gardener, people would say, oh, you know, that's pretty ordinary, isn't it? You know, you're going to work with your hands. You're like some duds, dirt-soiled peasant. But seriously, but in Australia, if somebody does that sort of thing, probably say, oh, wow, you're in your own business. That's good. What's that like? Being your own boss. It's kind of a— we have a more— we laugh at ourselves too. I think that's one of the great things about Australians. You know, my favorite joke, I'll tell you this one because Australians love this one. It's about the creation of the world. You can take this from the Koori if you like. It's about the creation of the world. When God and Satan get together, they have a bargain on how they're going to design the countries of the world. And the bargain is that God can go first, say whatever he likes, and Satan then can't disagree with him but can add anything he wants to. So God says, okay, let's start with Japan. Now I'm going to make Japan a wonderful country, beautiful country, lots and lots of scenic majestic mountains and beautiful sea coasts, and the people are going to be very, very hardworking and disciplined and responsible. And Satan said, right, all of that, but but there's going to be so many mountains and coasts and stuff, there's going to be hardly any flat land, and the people are going to be so disciplined and well-organized, they're not going to be able to enjoy life. God said, all right, Africa, we'll not make the same mistake twice. Africa, beautiful country, mountains, sea coast, all the rest, but lots and lots of flat land, and the people will be absolutely— they'll be fun-loving, they'll love life, they'll be digging, they'll be dancing, they'll be just making whoopee all day long. And Satan said, right, all of that, but half the land's going to be jungle and the rest is going to be desert, and the people will be so busy singing and dancing and making whoopee that you're going to have pretty big problems with the economy and fame and famine and plague. And all right, God said, right, New Zealand, I am definitely going to get this one right. New Zealand's going to be a beautiful country, mountain, sea coast, beautifully scenic, 'But lots and lots of flat land, no jungle, no desert, and the people will be— they'll be hardworking, disciplined, and responsible. At the same time, they'll have this ability to relax and get laid back and enjoy life.' He said, 'Satan, see if you can beat that.' And Satan said, 'Easy, wait till you see their neighbors.' I tell that joke to Americans about Canada, and they do not find it funny at all. Australians laugh their heads off. And that's got to be the thing about us. We love, we love, I know a lot of Australian jokes too, they're all the same format, but we love, we love making fun of ourselves. I think that's a great national characteristic.

It is a very good national characteristic indeed. I want to ask you about housing affordability, as I know you have been quite vocal about this issue. Reflecting on Australia's current state, how do you view the housing affordability crisis? And what changes in government regulations do you believe are needed to make homes accessible for young families again?

It's easy. It's easy to do. All you've got to do to government is get out of the way. The whole problem with housing is government regulations and zoning. All you have to do is to make one simple change to say, build what you like, where you like, with certain very minimal changes. Like, for example, we don't put— if you're going to build a factory, put it next to other factories, not in the middle of a housing zone, something like that. I mean, very, very simple. Build more houses. Now, that would— what actually means in practice, if you look at it, was done in Auckland 10 years ago. They did this sort of experiment where they actually released the zoning, and they reckon the housing rents and prices about 40% below what they would have been if they hadn't done it. What actually has happened is not so much you get these these high-rise towers. You get a lot more multi-story, just 2 and 3-story buildings, and, you know, little terrace houses like that. Just, just moderate stuff, what people want. So you just allow— that's just what used to happen in the old days before they brought these stupid things in. It used to be the case that you could buy a house, average house in Melbourne, with 3 years' earnings from an average worker. Now it's about 7. It's ludicrous, and it's completely about zoning. I live on 5 acres. We are like 7 minutes from the station, shops, employment, everything. 5-acre covenant, how insane is that? It's completely stupid. There should be 30 families living on this property, not just one. That's purely government regulations. What we need is the state government to come in and simply wipe it out. No more housing, no more zoning regulations, nothing at all. Now, I'm not saying we'll ever get that stage, but that's effectively what you need. The more you can get rid of it— no local changes, you can't object if your neighbors do something, you can't object in the community, nothing— and you have a simple system that's basically object— no permits needed. Like in Texas, for example, what they do— and Texas is a good example of how this is done properly— they actually, if you don't get an answer from the local council, you can actually go to a approved like a town planner or an architect and get put through like that. I don't even think we need— we shouldn't need any government bodies at all to do this. We simply have very simple, objective, clear guidelines, and people go in and build what they want to build. If you did that, the housing regulation would suit itself, would fix itself in no time at all. House prices would start to fall, rents would go down, people wouldn't lose out with properties because they'd be able to subdivide them and put terrace houses in the inner suburbs, all kinds of things. You would get tremendous advantage, you would get a massive effect on the environment. At the moment, people are forced to use cars because they're so spread, and you have to have a car even if you live next to a station. Any unit's got to have space for a car. Why? I don't want to build a car, why should I pay for a car parking space? So if the government took that away, people could avoid having cars. Cars. They could, they could, you have livable cities, people can walk to shops, you better walk to any place in 15 minutes, you have shops, you have public transport, people don't need cars so much, you cut down on carbon dioxide poisoning. You look at America, which is a classic example of the extremes in San Francisco, it's full of greenies, people love the environment. You know what happens? Or most ordinary people who live in the city can't afford to live there, $2 million houses. Australian, they travel, they drive 2 hours to get to work, 2 hours to get home. We're talking about police officers, teachers, people like that who can't afford the millionaire lifestyle. You know how many billion tons of carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere every day by these greenies with their insane regulations? It is so bad for the environment what we do. It is dreadful. It is one of the worst sources of pollution, our insane zoning. It widens the gap between rich and poor. What you're doing is you're impoverishing ordinary people, people who can't afford to rent, people who can't afford to buy a house, and when they do, they're stuck with this massive mortgage. Who benefits? Money property speculators with multiple properties, seeing them go up and up and up and up and up without any action of their own. The property I live in, I bought 23 years ago, it's now worth 3 times what I paid for it. How is that fair or even? What did I do? I didn't do anything to it. I barely maintained my house, for heaven's sake. Okay, I've done nothing, and suddenly I've got all this massive extra. Why should I, because I'm a wealthy man, have that opportunity? And I've got to say, my wife owns property too, so if this ever takes place, she's going to be in big trouble. You better sell them pretty quick fast because they're not going to maintain their value. That is what should happen. It's social mobility. People can afford to live near where they work instead of having to go out way out into the countryside where there's no employment. They can actually live in dense, properly livable cities and they can have a better income, a better life for their family. You allow people to rise through the ranks, live better, access to educational institutions. There's so many different values of doing this. The housing, the property thing is is widening the gap between rich and poor. That's one of the most toxic things about our environment, about our current economy. The rich are getting richer and the poor are staying pretty poor. They're even going backwards. That's a terrible thing. And the government says the only way to do it is to have more and more taxes and more and more taxes, and it will shovel money at the poor. Well, how about stop making them poor in the first place? And then you've got things like, um, this, this whole thing about global warming too. Global warming is is such a furphy. I believe in net zero, and I think it'll happen as the technology improves, which is doing all the time. And I personally have solar panels on every house I can do, every surface, and electric car. I think it's great. But you know what? Our electricity prices are double in real terms what they were 10 years ago. They are double what they are in the United States. This is a massive, massive cost borne by ordinary citizens, many of whom cannot afford it. Paying expensive power, and it shouldn't happen. There's a wonderful thing called the Copenhagen Consensus, and I'm going right off zoning now, but I'm talking about it. It's one— look it up, Copenhagen Consensus. This is a group of economists got together and said, how can you spend money in the way that will best meet human welfare, that will save, improve the most lives, particularly save the most lives? And there's things like bed nets and impregnated with DDT, all kinds of things. Global warming, solving global warming doesn't even come in the top 10. According to one, it's 20th. So it's another way in which the government policies impoverish ordinary people and the billionaires at the top, the ultra-wealthy people at the top just keep on raking in more money. The government drives this. Our government is like Robin Hood in reverse. How can we screw the poor and give more money to the rich. That's government policy for you all the way along the line.

What's interesting is that people who promote these policies, your net zero, the transition to weather-dependent electricity generation, more often than not they seem to be quite illiterate, unable to articulate how things in this category work, how electricity is generated, and how much of it is needed to power a village, a town, or a city, they seem to be totally unable to deep dive into the detail. It's so frustrating to observe them engage in these ideological battles in the parliament and senate.

People in New Zealand, they don't understand economics. That's the biggest problem. They don't understand business. It's blind ideology without any sense of reality. Like government regulations. People have no sense. Like, for example, okay. Let's say it takes 6 months to get approval to do a building, and people say, oh, fantastic, that's great, that's wonderful, that's wonderful, these greedy, greedy capitalists with their developers, they actually have to dig into their pockets. That's not what happens. What you do is you force up the price of the property, and then some poor mug comes in and has to borrow an extra $50,000, which they end up paying off for the next 25 years to pay for the fact that somebody denied them a permit for 6 months. That's the kind of thing that goes on. There are so many areas of the economy where government regulations simply force up the costs and impoverish everybody. It's almost impossible to build anything these days because it's so difficult to actually get the permits through. It's just the insane regulation, ultra things about safety without any sense of, of, of, at every level, it's so frustrating. When you talk about animal studies, okay, I'll give you an example. This is the sort of thing I know, the areas I know into things like franchising, building, and science. These are areas I understand, and you can see, and all these areas, you see government regulations taken with no sense of cost. And one of the things, I'll give you a little example. When you use rats in experiments, you've got to kill them, all right? Now, there are painless ways to do this. One is guillotining. Okay, which is known as being a very instantaneous, fast way of doing it. But you know what the ethics people say? You've got to choke them to death with carbon dioxide. Now, anybody who's actually experienced that is concerned, that's a really nasty form of death, really nasty, cruel form. People who've been choked say it's stressful. And when you see the actual level of stress hormones in the rats goes up through the roof when they're choked to death, but you can't kill them humanely. You've got to kill them because to the ethicists, so-called, they think, oh, it seems more humane. These stupid, stupid regulations that go without any sense of economy about any of these things. And what makes it really idiotic is you get rats. We kill rats with rat poison, which is one of the most brutal things you can do. They are horrible things. They have ground glass to get into their stomachs and they slowly bleed to death. It's absolutely torturous. And yet, and yet, In scientific experiments, when you're trying to save people's lives and extend lives, you have these insane regulations which don't even protect them anyway. There are just so many stupid things. The franchising code itself is just insanely unfair. You've got this massive, massive disclosure document that nobody reads. I have yet to meet any franchisee in gyms who's ever read the disclosure document, but it's Page after page after page of drivel, absolute drivel. Has absolutely no help at all to anybody. What I've said again and again to the government in every inquiry, what you should do is really help people make a decision. You have an independent body anonymously, confidentially survey every franchisee in every, every system once a year and publish the results on an open website. You ask them simple questions like, has it been able to develop the promise? You know, just simple, simple, simple questions. Now, that little session, which would cost nothing to potential franchisees, would do more through franchising than 1,000 disclosure documents, which does nothing at all. The only great thing about disclosure is if you are a greedy, ruthless rip-off merchant All you've got to do is to hide that stuff deep into a disclosure document which nobody will ever read, and then you say, I've shown it to you, knowing perfectly well they'll never read it. That's just an example of the way the government regulations are so poisonous. They really hurt the economy. They hurt ordinary people. We could get rid of two-thirds of our government bureaucrats, and you could actually give a massive— you can just about pay half of people's rent from the savings, both the— and that's just from the fact that the whole system is so inefficient, so bloated. Besides, it's doing nothing, very little of value. There are certain things of value, like basic health regulations and clean water and stuff, of course. But so much of what they do is actually destructive and negative. Like Australian standards, for example, that's a monstrous thing. You have actually— you are forbidden to use systems that are widely used in the EEC. Now, the EEC is about the most safety-prone, highly regulated economy in the world. If they think it's good enough for them, why isn't it good enough for Australia? It's just, it's just ludicrous. Why do we not just accept them? Or qualifications— you've got people who've got qualifications from other countries which are just as rigorous. You can't use them in Australia. So you want to force up the price of medicine, for example, I mean, it's just stupid. Government regulations are so destructive of the lives of ordinary people. It's become too big. It's out of control. They do these regulations, which, like zoning, which impoverish people, and they try and make it up by throwing things at them like the NDIS, which is the biggest reward system of all. And I should know because we do heaps of NDIS jobs. The amount of administration and bureaucracy and the complete unfairness You know, you get somebody who goes overseas on a holiday with their caretaker to a luxury resort. That's all paid for by NDIS. Where's the sense of that? How does that possibly consider to be anything to do with helping the less fortunate? You can help the less fortunate. Give them some money for heaven's sake. Universal basic income, something like that. There's lots of different ways to do it that are so much better and fairer and cleaner and less costly.

In terms of the economy, You've critiqued over-subsidized education and promoted trades. How do you think shifting priorities towards practical skills could boost productivity and individual success in Australia?

The one thing that employers are not crying out for more art historians and sociologists. They're just not. These jobs are— these degrees are meaningless. They're useless. I should know. I did a history degree. How much did that help me to make a living from? Now, I don't regret it, but I had some quite different reasons for doing it. But the fact of the matter is we don't need more people overeducated. The only— there's a wonderful book called The Case Against Education by a guy called Bryan Caplan, fantastic author. He also wrote a wonderful one about the zoning problems. But he points out that the actual benefit of education isn't actually that it benefits the economy at all. It's the fact that it gives certain people an advantage over other people. So if you're going for a job, If you've got 50 applicants for a job, nice white-collar entry job, well, you say, well, 25 have got degrees, 25 haven't. Chuck the ones out who haven't got degrees because basically at least they've sat for 3 years in this boring classroom learning this useless stuff, and it shows they've got some ability to do as they're told. But they've learned nothing of value. Most university students who come out of university are pretty much illiterate anyway because the courses are so weak. What we need is more tradies. We need more people with their hands. We need carpenters and electricians and plumbers and construction workers and people who can do practical, real things. Especially if we unlock the zoning straitjacket at the top of your building houses, we could do with people. They could make very good money doing those things and have a chance of their own business too. So it's— we do need to put a lot less money into useless tertiary education and a lot more into helping people to trades, because the subsidies that they have on trades are just not enough. Basically, if it was, if it was a, a, an apprentice, so little money doing a trade course that they're tempted to go and get an unskilled job but basically get money straight away. Well, that shouldn't happen. They should be able to earn the same money training as they would in any other job. We need more skilled people, we absolutely do. We don't need more sociologists. We need more plumbers. My youngest son is very interested in doing something like a carpenter and the rest are all white-collar total. I'm really encouraging him.

Yeah, very good. You should continue to encourage him. Regarding government overreach, from lockdowns to bureaucracy, what lessons from your experiences suggest that Australia needs a department of government an efficiency like the one you've advocated for via your social media channels?

Yes, we do. How that's possible politically, I don't know, unless a totally new party sweeps to power. Because I can't think— one of the problems is this. Look, as a business owner, one of the things I know is that if you don't completely watch really carefully, you can get a massive drop in efficiency. People just slacking off, they take extra work because I'm too busy. Get it? If you don't know exactly what somebody is doing, your costs can basically double quite quickly, really, without any improvement in service at all. It's so easy to happen. I've seen it happen. It's an easy process. Now, this is in a private company where the owner's eye is at least theoretically on what's going on. It's so— and it can happen very fast. Now, you can imagine You talk about government bureaucracy where there's no private owner ever. There's no private ownership ever. And not only that, but the people are practically unsackable. My view is that with even just trying to do what we're doing right now, you could reduce costs by at least two-thirds if you had an efficient— now, how you get that happening, I don't know. You'd have to have somebody come in, but you'd have to have the power to hire and fire. That's absolutely basic. The unions have got a stranglehold on the whole thing. You have to be able to say, if you're not useful, you go. Here's 2 weeks severance. That's it. Or whatever you're entitled to by normal commercial law. If you did that and you had oversight— look, I worked for the Commonwealth Government many years ago. I left school, I worked for 6 months for the Department of Civil Aviation, and I had a job that was basically half-time. I had 3 different jobs. One of them was, um, that was half my time. I went to my superiors and said, I haven't got enough to do, can you give me more to do? I'm not happy with being paid full-time for doing so little. They of course said, no, let's go back and think you're so fortunate. And, uh, oh, but when, when the bigwigs come around, pretend to look busy no matter whether you are or not. That's what they told me. They actually told me that. Now One of the jobs I had was helping the guy who did the publications for the department. And they came to me and said, okay, this guy's going to be getting a promotion to a higher grade in pay. That justifies a full-time assistant. That person is you. And I said, you've got to be joking. I've only got enough work to do one half-time. You're going to get rid of all my other jobs and give me a job that now takes me one day a week. Now, I made a bit of a stink about it, and I didn't do it at that stage anyway. But I left that job, and I got to talking with the person who'd actually had the same job before me, and he had the same 3 tasks to do, and he would manage to be so inefficient they took 2 of the jobs off him. You know, the job he had left was a job that took me 15 minutes a week, literally 15 minutes a week. That was all I spent on it. That's all he did. He did it for 18 months and then he got tired and decided to go and do something else. Okay, that is how inefficient running government department is from my own personal viewpoint. So yes, if you can get a department efficiency come in and really— I would have really hoped Elon Musk could have done that. He was absolutely— that was such a disappointing fiasco, really was. If you did it properly and you went into the civil service, you could cut down civil servants by at least two-thirds, and that's at every level. Just swathers them. All the local planning departments, just gone. Bang. You don't need them. Let that be licensed by independent people like the town planners or whatever. Let them do it. They'll do a vastly better job, and it's competitive, so they'll do it quickly. You go in, 24 hours, 4 hours later, here's your permits to do it because it meets the current government guidelines, which we understand very well. You simplify things, you could dramatically, dramatically And you'd not only have this massive amount of money that would be available to pay off the national debt or to give back to people, but you'd also have the economy starting to boom and grow.

It's a shame that Elon has not ultimately succeeded with Doge. Americans who voted this administration in had massive expectations, and now they are mostly bitterly disappointed. Milena Argentina, on the other hand, has apparently been quite successful reducing government waste and bureaucracy.

Under, under great pressure now, the, the Peronists are sort of coming back and so forth, but you know, he has been good. Interesting thing is the level of poverty has dropped dramatically in, in Argentina. Economy is up, inflation's down. He's actually done a phenomenal job. I just hope he can maintain that. I admire him.

Jim, as you continue funding research and eyeing potential political and your involvement, what vision do you have for Australia's future, and how do you hope your legacy contributes to a more prosperous and resilient nation?

First of all, we're in terrible trouble if we don't do something about this changing character. There's just no way around it. We are going the same way as ancient Rome, but we're going much, much, much faster. And you can tell that because of the birth rate. I mean, the Romans, if the Romans had the same birth rate that we did, their population would have shrunk dramatically during the empire. And it didn't, apart from plagues and so forth. So we know it's much worse. You know, if you had, like, if you had the Romans in, say, time of Augustus Caesar had the same fertility rate as South Koreans, by the end of 400 years, the survivors would fit into my living room. That's how serious it was. So the Romans didn't go through anything like as extreme as what we've had in terms of collapsing fertility, and yet it still destroyed them. We're going to go down much faster. And you will see in your lifetime, you will see some really serious going backwards. Productivity is already starting to fade. Poor people are getting poorer. Gap between rich and poor is growing. We see some really, really bad signs. So if you're looking about the history of this country, the future of this country, the only way is to understand the effort you need to behind what's happening and reverse it, which is quite feasible. And I believe, I hope it will happen. Okay. Now, apart from that, obviously, I'm in favor of things like reducing, getting rid of a lot of zoning problems and all the restrictions that impoverish people. Yes, I'd like to see that happen. But the main thing is we've got to, we've got to do something about the decaying character. We've got to understand the problem. We can't think that government regulations are going to fix anything. They're not. The more the more money you spend pouring into the thing, more taxpayers' money, the worse it becomes.

Can I ask you about how are you planning to get politically involved? Are you joining a party or starting one? What's the plan?

Libertarians. Libertarians are a serious political party. They've already got one MP in Victoria, David Lindbrick, and their values are pretty much in line with mine. I wouldn't describe myself as libertarian as such. I don't believe in minimal government. I just think the government should be efficient in what they do. And in fact, I like the Scandinavian model where you actually have pretty good distribution and less inequality. But they're in favor of things like very reduced zoning, or none at all, less government bureaucracy, just things of that nature.

Yeah, Lemberg is a good guy. I like what he stands for and what he's trying to defend. Aside of politics, what else is in store for you? You've mentioned earlier that you're going to write more books. What are you planning to write about?

I'm writing this book called Birthrate Crisis, which will be released early, middle of next year. That's actually waiting. We've got quite a few experiments running, particularly on things like the, the way that the dopamine system works. We're doing experiments with joint ventures in, in the US. And we're a lot more experienced ourselves. So we're putting a lot of resources into that. We're testing, developing different drugs and treatments. We're testing some of the things like Wegovy, some of these substances to see if they have similar effects, but they seem to. So we are looking at all of those kinds of things. Book will come out early next year. I will promote it as much as I possibly can. I'll even do lectures if I have to, but really try and get some interest. Thinking that with enough, um, enough panic going on, people are going to start to think about alternatives. You can show a credible alternative which is very, very cost-effective. We will start to get interest. That is the biggest thing. Honestly speaking, if we don't solve this crisis, Patrick, you know, we are really stuffed. People have no idea how bad it's going to become. They just don't know. They're still scratching and thinking, oh, this, this government directive and this government law will change it. It won't. Governments don't control things, we do.

Well, our politicians act as if they have solved this issue already, pulling the mass migration lever. This seems to be the dominant model the West seem to have fallen in love with.

That's becoming more and more toxic too. People are against mass immigration.

For sure.

It's not a good solution, it really isn't. And even if it was just short-term, you know, you've got to run out of company. I mean, Chinese aren't having many babies now. How are they going to keep on getting more people from there? India is doing better, but even they're just reaching the replacement level. I think they're slightly below it. So you can't keep on solving it with immigrants. The immigrants you're going to be able to get in places like sub-Saharan Africa, Sudan and Somalia and Afghanistan. But trouble with such people, they don't fit very well into our kind of society. I mean, there's some wonderfully decent people in those kind of countries, but when you come from a a war-torn land with, with, they have different attitudes. You've had people using machetes to kill each other in suburban Melbourne these days, all kinds of things, problems like that. That's going to happen more and more and more. And the more you have, like the Swedes, the most benevolent, open-hearted people in the world, said, come in, come in, come in to all these from the Middle East. Now they've got, they've got gangs fighting in the streets of Stockholm. And even the Swedes are starting to think maybe this isn't quite so easy. Just have massive, massive immigrants so we don't have to have so many children. It's not going to work.

Sweden is a very interesting case. They seem to be going through some kind of adjustment or course correction with this newly elected right-of-centre government. That government over the last two years, I believe, has been experimenting with remigration, a policy of offering serious financial incentives to migrants who voluntarily wish to return to their home countries.

Well, we're actually well off in Australia because we've got this big moat around and we take people to Christmas Island and never let them in. So that's kind of— we've done it better than most countries and other countries admire us for that. So we do have some control, but even so, our borders are too porous. We rarely badly need— if you've got educated Chinese and Indians, people like that, that's fantastic. They are so good for this country. My wife is a Chinese immigrant. She employs about 20 people. She's a housing developer. She's put dozens of houses up. I mean, she's a great asset to the economy. She runs our conference center. Fantastic citizen. You need more people like that. You don't need impoverished refugees from war-torn countries. You need the right kind of citizens who are going to not only help the economy but help themselves. Because you bring a person into the country who can't possibly integrate, and they become very resentful because they're part of the underclass. They're a criminal. They're not respected. So naturally they hate us.

Why?

Because why would you bring people in who've got no reasonable prospect to succeed? It's not fair. Not fair to them, and it's certainly not fair to our own citizens either.

No, you're right about that. It's not fair at all. Jim, it doesn't feel like it but we've done 2 hours today. You're a fascinating man and a great Australian. To be honest with you, despite researching extensively for this interview, there's few things you said today that truly caught me off guard, and part of me feels we should deep dive into those themes again at some point in the near future. But for now, I'd like to thank you very much for your time today. It was an absolute pleasure hosting you on the New Orchard Show.

Well, thanks, Patrick. Good to talk to you.

Well, I hope you've enjoyed listening to this interview as much as I have enjoyed conducting it. This show, The New Orchard, is in its second year, and I would say it's still very much in its embryonic state. I have recorded almost 30 interviews in that time with what I think are fascinating people who have a lot to give in terms of life insights, lessons, and just general inspiration. I have now published over 25 of these interviews interviews. When I first started, I was adamant that the interview format is the right way to go for me, simply because I wanted my guests to respond to very specific things I was interested in, instead of me gradually guiding them to the response in a free-flowing conversation and likely sounding like an absolute plonker. Halfway through the interview though with Jim Penman today, I've realized that the interview format for him specifically might not be the best way forward. There were certain things I didn't quite anticipate, certain things I did not press him for elaboration, which in hindsight was a missed opportunity. I'm especially talking about his views on the birth rate crisis and how technology application can solve it. It's an incredibly important problem we should be solving as a society, perhaps the most important problem of all, and I should have pushed my guest to tell us more about his proposed solutions. Hopefully, if he does feel charitable with his time in the future, we can record an episode dedicated to the declining birth rate crisis. As per usual, you will find all the relevant links in the show notes. Make sure you check out Jim's books, and no, this is not some mobile book delivery service he created, but the books he has written over the last few decades. Some of these include The Hungry Ape: Biology and Fall of Civilization, published in 1992, Biohistory: Decline and Fall of the West, published in 2015, Epigenetics and Character: The Biology Behind History, published in 2021, and something closer to his franchise business, No Other Success: How Lawn Mowing Business Transformed Thousands of Lives, published in 2025. For a full list along with the links to where you can procure these books, please check out the show notes. Thank you for your time and attention today, and I hope to see you next time.