Jim's Mowing CEO Jim Penman on birthrates, upgrading humanity & Christian politics

Good morning and welcome back to another episode of Backbench Drivers. I'm your host, John Lawson. And joining me for the first time I have the man, the myth, the legend, Jim Penman. He's a household name for founding the gyms franchise, which includes mowing, lawn care, well, everything involved in that, cleaning and various various other things. It's a constantly expanding empire. But that's not necessarily why I wanted to have you on the podcast this week, Jim. I wanted to have you on to talk about your other love, which is history and sort of how that, how societies evolve and how empires decay. I think would be very interesting to get your opinion on. Originally, I asked you, on following your, your recent video, about birth rates and particularly about how birth rates are collapsing and some of the impacts of that. If you would like, would you like to maybe just introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your concerns regarding the topics of birth rates?

Yeah. Well, what people don't know this, but the reason I started gyms was, was not so much to become wealthy, but to fund a research institute. I did, I did a PhD back in the 70s, early 80s, trying to understand the reason for the rise and fall of civilizations and came to the conclusion that it's basically to do with biology rather than principles. Do the economics and stuff, that there is certain character, type of personality that is responsible for civilization, including things like large states and also having a, you know, a decent fertility rate and these. This character type is basically driven by food restriction or by other cultural practices such as chastity, which have a similar effect. And what happens when you have wealth and urbanization? These break down and that's essentially why civilizations collapse when they become wealthy and urban. It destroys this food limited character and the solution then lapses, which can take some time, as in the Roman Empire, it can take a few centuries, but that's because they bring in more and more people from, you know, who are less, less civilized or less corrupted in a sense. Now the interesting thing about this is that this has always, until very recently, been completely inevitable. But if we understand the biology behind it, then we actually theoretically at least could completely reverse it. In other words, by a fairly simple medical treatment, which people could opt to have, which would then make them better parents, more hardworking, better marital partners, more responsible, those kind of things.

And that's a big focus of your research, which you've invested a lot of your earnings into, which is doing rat tests specifically and seeing what can be altered by changing food and also chastity levels within the rat population. Have you had a lot of success with that? Are you seeing ways that we could potentially replicate these results on humans?

Well, rats and humans are very similar in this regard. We're different in other areas, like in the neocortex, for example. But in the basic, the limbic system, the amygdala, the hippocampus, the nucleus accumbens, this area of the brain, we're almost the same. The hormones are very, very, very similar. So what we've been doing is doing experiments mainly with 25% food restriction and looking at the differences it makes. And one of the things it does as an example is that if you restrict female rats, if you restrict their food, they become better mothers. It's quite startlingly so. Rats have certain behavior. They create nests and they retrieve their young back into the nests. Now, domesticated rats are not very good at this. We had one lady who'd been working in the research Lab for about 20 years, and she knew what rats were like, so she could see them, normal domesticated rats, and they were just very inefficient. They weren't building the nest well, they weren't retrieving the pups back in. And then we showed her some of the rats that were on this food restriction system, and she was astonished. She'd never seen anything like it. They were much better mothers. And we've done experiments which suggest too, that in the wild, that kind of behavior actually leads to higher survival amongst the offspring. So what we. What we need to do with humans is to. Is to duplicate the process. Now, we have a fairly good idea of the hormones involved. More particularly, we're studying the epigenetics. I don't know if you people understand what epigenetics is, but if you think of the genes, they're basically like a whole lot of taps spitting out a protein. That's kind of how they operate. And that protein then goes and does things. It could be messenger R and it could be all kinds of things. Epigenetics is experience from the environment, which can be from your experience or that of your parents or even grandparents that actually change the settings and change the way that genes function, it sort of turns these little taps on or opens up a bit more, and that changes character. So, for example, if you calorie restrict male rats and then you mate them with females, and the fathers never have any connection with their offspring. The young act as if they're calorie restricted too, with a whole number of things like reducing testosterone and so forth. So we, we're learning a lot about how to do this. And one of the things we're doing, all kinds of things. One of the things we're doing is looking at pheromones. We're trying to see if. So we know, for example, if you. If you give rats the bedding of car rats, they act as if they're carotri something. In the pheromones, in the smells, which we're investigating, we've got a cellular process where we're investigating like 100,000 different drugs. We will be where you use in cellular culture and you have a look for the epigenetic pattern. So you try and find a drug that has some effect. Some of these ones, like WeGovy, the weight loss drugs, could potentially have this kind of effect too. We don't know. We're testing them.

Yeah, that's very interesting. And I think you've got a similar. Well, I am not as experienced as you. Of course, you've got a doctorate in the subject, but I've got a similar interest in history and rising and falling civilizations. You, of course, don't just look on the micro level. You're looking at the macro level of how these characteristics impact a whole society. If you have a whole society of people that have abundant resources, are well fed, have lots of leisure time, etc. As you're talking about with the rats, you can expect certain behavior. And likewise, if you have a society that has less of those things and people struggling, they're not getting their fill of food, et cetera, you can expect those same results.

Now, it's more than food, though. It's actually religious systems, philosophical systems, they're kind of cultural technologies. Like Christianity, for example. Traditional Christianity has a whole stack of things. Obviously it's very strong on chastity and that kind of thing, but also things like Sabbath keeping, like periodic fasting, like the Lent and the fast. Also monogamy itself, which is very unusual in world terms, is something that's very strictly enforced in traditional Christianity, which actually has a similar kind. All these things have a similar effect. They're like a supercharged food restriction. And one of the problems is when you get wealth and urbanization, not only does it pressure this character, but it also tends to weaken Christianity and other philosophical systems that have some effect.

Yeah, and I've experienced the same thing in my own life. I'm an orthodox Christian, like you said, that's more of a traditional denomination. So we do still practice Lenten fasts, where we restrain ourselves from eating meat and dairy during certain parts of the year. As well as on Wednesdays and Fridays, etc. But what you're saying is absolutely correct. You've even within Christianity, that has changed over time. As societies become more comfortable, people relax more, they don't observe things as strictly. And this is true in times of crisis. People become more close to God really. They start looking for answers and that sort of leads them to these behaviors which get them out of the situation, which is they turn to Christianity, they turn to looking for the higher ideal and they bond over that. And like you've commented in your book Bio History, this can lead to a civilizational cycle where the next generation can sort of break out of the previous inclination towards violence, war, destruction, etc. But to bring it back a little bit to the original topic of birth rates, how does everything that you've researched and looking at the genetic impacts and epigenetic impacts of, you know, humanity on the civilizations created, how does birth rates and falling birth rates tie into that? What would be causing that out of all of the circumstances that we see?

Okay, in a sense it's an evolutionary conundrum. If you have a situation where food is very plentiful. Now, example would be baboons living on the tropical savannah, which are, generally speaking, they might have tons of starvation, generally well fed. Now it's quite dangerous. So what their environment says is there's generally plenty of food. So breed fast, breed often. So you, you have a lot of sex, you give birth, you wean the offspring as soon as possible, let it frame for itself as soon as possible because there's plenty of food. And then you have, you get, you get pregnant and have a baby. That's how you maximum food. That's how you get maximum population in that particular population growth in that particular environment. Now at the other extreme, you have an animal like gibbons, for example, which live in the forests of Southeast Asia where food is very, very limited. It doesn't vary much from season to season, from year to year. It's very limited. And what happens is these animals, the population grows to the absolute limit of the environment and they have all kinds of systems to stop it going beyond that. So for example, if you're a gibbon, you can't track a mate unless you defend an exclusive territory. So you delay your mating, delay your breeding till you've got a territory. And then when you have offspring, you're not going to have a lot of them. You spend a lot of time making sure they're okay. You spend a lot of time working, like patrolling your territory, making sure others stay out of it, making sure you find where the fruiting bushes are and those kinds of things too. So it's a different psychology from one that says have a lot of sex, breed fast, get rid of your offspring really quickly. The one that says delay sex, delay mating, delay breeding, make sure you go to good territory and spend a lot of effort looking after your offspring. Because this is a very competitive environment that only the really fittest can survive. So in a sense, the food restriction thing is designed to control population. The food plentiful is designed to let it go berserk. The one thing that gets in the way of this in humans is that we control our births. So you see, we can have sex, but then we use contraception or we have abortion or A lot of societies in the past, they just basically abandoned their babies. So it's the human rationality. So what happens is when you get a, an attitude that says, hey, sex is really fun, they're not that interested in the offspring. In baboons, that caused the population explosion in humans, it caused the population collapse.

And that's what we're undergoing at the moment, especially in western countries. But I think it is observable. What you said in Africa, for example, definitely the earlier mating strategy seems to be more prevalent throughout history, where you have lots of kids, some might not survive because of the harsh environment. And then. And that's the strategy that they've pursued over there. Whereas in Western countries and in Asia it's definitely been more so. The latter, where you want to secure territory, make sure that you're having fewer children, who can then be raised in optimal circumstances. And that's the reproductive strategy over here. But it's changed in recent times.

You've said there are cultural systems that actually do promote high birth rates. One of them is the Sidic Orthodox Jews, where they have an environment which is very, very strictly limited, controlled. They have enormous number of restrictions on behavior and Sabbath keeping and what you can do, what you can carry, what you can eat enormously, that has a. It acts a bit like food restriction on steroids. So those, those communities have a very, very high birth rate. Another example would be the Amish, the old Order Amish in America. They also have very high birth rate and a similar thing, very controlled, very restrictive environment that tries not to get engaged with the outside world. Another example of societies that do this is Muslims in general. They have systems of patriarchy, of things like Ramadan, which is a very particular kind of extreme fast that create a kind of character, a different kind of character, which is Also suitable to having larger families. And that's why whenever you get Christians and Muslims or Muslims and Hindus in any population together, the Muslim populations grow faster.

Yeah, and this is something that's true of Mormons. And really it's religiosity and birth rates are very tightly correlated. This is something I think observed by paper. Patrick Buchanan, presidential candidate and conservative in America, he mentioned about how religiosity is tightly linked with, you know, people's willingness, even in the harshest conditions, to have large families and to care for them. For example, you can look at some parts of the world, like we said earlier, that are much worse off materially than in the west. And people still don't stop having kids and raising them in accordance with their traditions, etc, going on from blinded by money.

When any government says the birth rate's dropping, the first thing they say is, well, it's all about money. If you had more money, you'd have more kids. Well, actually, it's not true at all. It's got to do with psychology. Like, I have 10 children. Why? Because I love kids, really, really love kids. And I'd love to have more if I could. I started having a family when I was broke, didn't have a house, was in debt, okay, Supporting my wife, who was a student and I was a lawmaker, contractor, struggling to start a new business. You couldn't have imagined a worse financial situation just starting a family. But I wanted a family. And to me it almost doesn't matter. You just work out ways to do it. And so all these subsidies, government trying to pour in subsidies, it doesn't work. No country has managed to get even anywhere near replacement paper, which is 2.1 babies per woman, by money. Not even close. The best you can do is some places in Northern Europe at 1.7 and obviously in so much of the world, it's gone way below. What's really fascinating is China. China is a country that until quite recently, you were actually got into big trouble of having more than one kid. You have forced abortion and everything. And the birth rate was quite low. And the government said, okay, let's change this. Let's get rid of this one child policy that happened about 12 years ago, something like that. It wasn't long back. So let's get rid of this one child policy and let's see the birth rate rises. Well, it didn't. It actually dropped. And then the government says, okay, now we really want you to have more than two children. And you know what happens? The birth rate drops again. See, it's not economics, it's not the law, it's psychology. People have kids because they want to have kids, not monetary based at all.

So you would be skeptical of a program like Peter Costello's Baby Bonus, which I think it momentarily raised the birth rate, I think 1.7 to 1.9. However, it obviously wasn't lasting. Are you skeptical of any sort of program like that being implemented here?

Absolutely. It's complete waste of money, really. It has. I don't even think that probably has an effect at all. Honestly. People have children because they want to have children, not because somebody's going to give you a bit of money.

I, I think I agree. In fact, one of the examples of a recent reversal in birth rates was in Georgia, which is a highly religious, highly nationalistic, patriotic country. And what actually changed things wasn't the government offering subsidies necessarily. It was actually the patriarch, the orthodox Christian patriarch said, anyone who has a child, a fourth or third child, I will personally baptize them as and make them my godson. Right. So the country's small enough, it's Casey enough. They've got enough of a Christian and nationalist identity that they, that some, a program like that was able to work. And in fact that actually did raise the birth rate and it skyrocketed after that. And he's got lots of godsons now as a, as a result of this.

What's the fertility he made in Georgia Now?

I would not be able to tell. Let me look it up now. But I think it is above replacement.

That would be an unusual achievement. I mean, look, in a sense, people like Putin and those people in Eastern Europe have the right idea. They want to, they want to focus on, on traditional religious systems.

Sorry, I've got the birth rate here if you wanted. It's 2.024 births per woman now at this point, which is, that was in 2022, and it was even higher than that even a couple years before when that announcement was made by the patriarch.

It's an immensely destructive thing. See, one of the things the Chinese have done, particularly in, in mainland China, is they, they went out of their way under, in the communist era to destroy traditional Chinese values and Chinese culture. And that has had a terribly terrible effect because there's nothing to replace it. All they've got now is materialism and, you know, search for money. And that is no basis for society. People are too focused on money. It's, it's the wrong attitude. We don't have kids because of money. We have kids because we want kids.

Yeah. And even now they're trying to bring back traditional Confucian values I've heard in certain parts. And. And I don't know if they're gonna have much success with that. I. I suppose they might. That brings me on to the next sort of topic, which, you know, among many of your solutions, it basically sounds like we need to re. Sacralize our society. Basically, we need to reintroduce religion. That's whether by artificial means and trying to get the effects of that or by a more heartfelt sort of, you know, religious sense that seems to be what a lot of your conclusions come to. Is that true?

Okay, let me give you an example. All right? There's an avalanche coming down a hill. And you're on the hill and you're picking up snowballs and throwing them at the avalanche to try and stop it, okay? Now, theoretically speaking, you're right. If you threw enough snowballs hard enough fast enough, you would actually slow it down by building a sort of wall. The trouble is, the avalanche is so powerful and so strong that your effort to strike a few snowballs is completely futile. And it's. The same thing applies. It doesn't matter what the government says. In government. In Russia, you have a leader. I mean, he's a militaristic swine. I mean, really. But his idea of bringing back traditional Russian Christian morality is in the right direction, but he can't control it. He can't get people to have kids. So how do you get people to be more religious? Because this immense force, this wealth, this urbanization, this materialism is so destructive that you can't change it by moral force or by argument or by speeches or by books. You know, only thing that contains it is medical systems. You've got to work out a way of reversing this biochemically. You've got to work out an epigenetic way of solving it. That's what we're working on now. If you did that, you would have a rebirth of Christian, of fervor. Whether it's Confucian or Christian or Hindu, it doesn't matter. It would actually have the effect of increasing spirituality. But you can't. It's just not possible. It's not strong enough. There's no. There's no persuasive person. There's no person passionate enough to be able to cause this reversal without biochemical help.

Perhaps you yourself, you might be the man. You just need to tell everyone. One for mom, one for the dad, one for Jim's mowing. And who knows it might happen.

Well, actually, when Peter Costello came to, I was hosting a dinner for him and, and I said, peter, you know, you say one for dad, one for the one, one for the country. Well, I've got one for mum, one for dad, and eight for the country.

You're doing your patriotic duty and we salute you for it.

Yeah, well, not for that reason, though. It's sort of just your disposition, my children, so much. That's the point. People have got to realize that you don't have it because of money. Okay, I'm pretty rich now and I'd love to have kid buying kids, but the fact is I wanted them when I was poor. It doesn't matter. I just love kids. And there's nothing to me, more enjoyable than kids. There's no housing, there's no car, there's no luxury holidays. Anything remotely matches the pleasure I have from my children and now my grandchildren, too, which is good. I've got three grandchildren and two more on the way, which is very, very delightful.

Congratulations.

I love my king. I had. I had a couple of my. Living in Taiwan, actually, to my son and his two sons, and they were here recently. And I had my little Noah, who's about six months old, and I was carrying for hours just. Just in a sling. I just love that. And then he's my little. My grandson Ian is so cute. He's just. He's just adorable.

I mean, well, it's an intangible sort of thing. It's. It's not. It doesn't come down to dollars and cents like you're saying. And it's sort of an ugly sort of way to think about things in that you would pay someone to have kids. Although I do think, you know, lifting economic conditions probably will. If people feel more comfortable, it might help. But ultimately you're correct. It's not. It speaks of a deeper reason. At the end of the day, look.

At snowballs and avalanche, John. Honestly, it's not strong enough. See, the interesting thing about this is you can spend a trillion dollars and you. And you really won't budge the birth rate to actually solve this problem. To do the, the biochemical, the epigenetic research would probably cost maybe a few tens of millions. We may achieve it ourselves. If we had one national government, one billionaire who got involved in the project and said, let's take this seriously, let's look for whatever this is, can do it. You probably got the problem solved. Science is far enough advanced. One of the most promising ways to do it is through crispr, which is a system where you actually can go in, you can precisely target certain genes. Now, CRISPR is usually applied to genetic changes as such, like they slice the genome, but they've also developed ways of using it to have an epigenetic change. Now, at the moment, it's not possible to be accurate because you've got to have a guideline that says, go in there and make this change. And the trouble with that is if it's not precise, you can go somewhere else to make another change and you have unexpected changes. So that's a bit dangerous. But my research head, I was just talking to him on Wednesday, says that within a year it should be possible to target CRISPR changes precisely. And once you've done that, once you've got one treatment, the problem is solved. Because people will want this. Because the people who take it will not only be better parents, but they'll be better at working, they'll be more likely to get educated, they're going to be more successful in the competitive environment that we live in, they're going to be less likely to become criminals. For young people, you have kids, instead of going on the streets and getting into gangs, they'll go to university and become doctors. Because in actual fact, character has much more to do with success than intelligence. So if we can develop a treatment, it would be fantastically helpful. It would also, it would be the absolute magic bullet against problems like drug addiction. Because one of the effects of this would make people think long term instead of short term. That's an effect of what we call this food, limited character. So a person who's drug addicted is very short term thinking. They're thinking, what can I make me feel good now? But if you say that is you, what's going to make me feel good in a month's time? Well, it's not taking drugs or it's going to be worse. So I'll think long term and I won't take them. Once we develop it, it'll take off like mad. We just have to be able to do it and we may well have a solution within the next year or two. And if it's not that, it wouldn't cost much, a few tens of millions of research to actually produce something that would solve this whole problem. What the actual actually look like, though?

What? Yeah, what would the application look like? So is it you have your genes edited and suddenly you have your interest in having kids? Like your mentality changes or what's the. How does it actually apply?

Yeah, what happens? It'd be something like probably an injection of some kind, like a, like in WeGovy, something like that similar kind of thing. So you just take injection, like, like a vaccination. And you would just simply see a change in character which would be quite subtle. You wouldn't be like a different person, but you just suddenly say, oh, okay, all right. Actually, I don't need to have a Big Mac. I think I might have some vegetables for dinner or I might settle down and do some studying rather than going out and partying, for example. I mean, I mean, it just, it just changed you or. You know, I really like being at home with my kids these days. I don't feel the need to go out and have an affair, for example. I mean, just, just. It would change your motivation just like if you'd read some really inspiring book and had somebody mentoring you to, you know, I, I have, I have regular dinners every couple of weeks with some friends and, and two of them in particular. Others come and they both are losing weight. Okay. They're both overweight. They're both losing weight partly because they're talking to someone like myself who's a fanatic about, about diet and health. So being around me actually causes them to be more long term thinking. So for example, one of them who's always had pizza on Monday night, he had, he had salmon and vegetables. And, and they're shifting their diet and their attitudes. So it's, it's kind of like that. It'd be like as if you had a really powerful mentor helping you to do better or a counselor who was super effective. But, but on a mass scale, like millions of people potentially.

And this would be.

Some people wouldn't want it because for one fix would be you'll probably drop your libido a bit. Okay. Which some people wouldn't like. So it could have some negative effects. But the people who took this would basically would take over because they'd be so much more successful. They'd be so much better every way. They'd be better parents that have more kids, they'd be more successful occupationally. And it doesn't really matter what the rest happens.

And it's a permanent change taking the, whatever the method is. But this CRISPR technology, once it's done, once your personality changes forever, Is that correct?

Yeah, if, if, if we're using crispr, yes. It would change it permanently. You could actually make a permanent change or you might have to do it. You might have to have regular treatments like with something like the WeGovy, those kind of things. It depends what you're doing.

And what would you make of concern? Some might have, for example, that changing the human race so fundamentally, it might have unforeseen side effects. For example, it might reduce the natural scarcity of different talents, etc. And, and make everyone sort of. I wouldn't say, like even in a negative sense, but that it would. It destroys some of the. The beauty. Beauty in humanity in that some people better at some things and better at others.

Well, what this thing would do is bring an explosion of genius because you actually change the things that are actually going to cause it. You look like a. It looked like a city of ancient Athens, like in the late 5th 30th, 4th century A.D. sorry, B.C. of course, you have this explosion of genius which is completely without precedent in human history. You have developments in writing of history, people like Thucydides. You have architecture, brilliant architecture. You have plays, you have development, democracy. You have magnificent artwork. You have so much philosophy, the birth of modern philosophy. Socrates, Plato and so forth. This explosion of creativity, this is based on character. So potentially, if you make the right epigenetic changes, you'll get an explosion of creativity like the world has never seen, or at least not since. Since ancient Athens. And don't forget, that's a few tens of thousands of free men. That was all that had access to it. And yet what did they produce? What if you could do that again? Now, there are dangers to this. This is, this is clear. Okay. One of the dangers is that if you took this, you would start to have problems potentially with overpopulation again, because if people want to have children, you eventually are going to come up against natural resources. So there's got to be some way that you control births. And you know, for example, you might have a system whereby everybody has the right to have two children, but if you want to have more, you've got to pay something. You've got to buy the right. Either from somebody doesn't want them. For example, I could envisage a situation, rather than having a problem with collapsing population, that you actually have a concern that populations could rise too high. And the other issue, which is even more serious is this. There is two aspects to this decline in fertility and simulation. One of them is what I call C, which is the food shortage thing, which is to do with hard work and loving children and so forth. Another which is to do with V, I call V, which is to do with energy, to do with confidence, to do with aggression. And what you see, for example, the Muslim practice of Ramadan is very well calculated to raise vocabulary. Now, certain amount of V, this energy, this figure, this confidence, this aggression is very helpful. If you haven't not enough of it, you're too weak and anxious. But if you have a certain amount, it's very, very positive and you drop levels of anxiety and probably low levels of mental illness. But if you have too much of it, you could have terrible outbreaks of war and violence. It could destroy the human race. So that's the biggest danger. The danger is that if you were too successful at this, you could actually not only have a population, runaway population explosion, but you could potentially, if a country like Russia got this handed and said, we want the next generation to be super, super aggressive, they'd be very, very good soldiers. But that would be dangerous. And if you have a look at something like the world First World War, there are periods when this level of V peaks and it peaks in the generation born at a peak of population growth. And it's a very. It's called a Lemon cycle pattern and it's very characteristic. And for example, the. France was the first country in Europe to have this peak and it reached at about the end of 18th century, and then you had an apollygon, it was. And England reached it 1875, in 1870s, and then you had the Bowl War, like 20 years later. And then in the 1890s, two countries reached this peak. One was Russia and. And one was Germany. And when that population came of age in 1914, you got the First World War, this explosion of militaristic fervor. They just wanted to fight and they were so desperate to fight. Massive cheering crowd, so much enthusiasm. That's. That's V. That's what happens. You get a very big surge of V. And by the way, the Japanese reached it later. They reached their peak, 1926. And after that you got the Pacific War. So it's. It's a very. So excess V, which you could reduce with these treatments would be very, very dangerous, possibly threatening the future survival of humanity.

And what would the limit. How would you limit such an outcome happening with this sort of two.

You have to have international controls. It'd be like nuclear. You'd have to have. You'd have to actually have some sort of body looking at different countries and saying, you've got to stop this, you've got to keep your level below that level. I don't know how else you could do it, because any country that could have a combination of incredibly great industrial might and wealth, which this could produce with really, really aggressive young Men, they'd be unstoppable because they want to fight. And there'd be lots of them too because the birth rate's going up. So very look at could preserve our civilization. That could destroy the human race. And believe me, I've thought about this too. I just think that civilization decline is such a horrifying thing to happen. So much misery will be associated with it. The end of plenty. I just think we have to try.

Yeah, yeah. I do see the perspective you're coming from and it is sort of a utopian vision in some ways. Imagine a world without war and without scarcity, et cetera. I do also, I think to like Brave New World. I think of that sort of a thing where you have very centrally planned society where even births and everything like that, artistic output, etc. Is predetermined before and you have certain castes of people in this way. I think of that as a possibly negative outcome of this.

But I don't think you would reach that though. I don't think you broke. Any word is possible. Not with human psychology. You wouldn't get it. There's no way to produce that kind of society that I could imagine. The things, these character aspects that I talk about, which is what's called C and V. C is the food restriction, V is the aggression and so forth. You'd never get that kind of society. It just wouldn't happen. If you reinforced V and you reinforce C, you get to something like say Victorian England as an example, which was both very productive in terms of industry and so forth, but also very fertile, had a high birth rate, also very aggressive. They basically, you know, they control half the world eventually. So I don't think you'll get Brave New World. I don't see how you can do it. You have to.

I'm not familiar with the technology. You are much more knowledgeable in this area than me. But that is something that I think myself, many others might have a concern with. You think of, you know, wealthy elites rubbing their hands together and planning out the world. That's the sort of image that comes to mind. And I know you've talked about super villains before in the past and the sort of allure that conscious up and I.

You got to understand though that if you. If you raise the level of C and V significantly, the last thing you're going to get is control, especially of C because C is associated with republican ideas, impersonal looties, democracy and so forth. That's what makes it. That's why what's happening in In America right now with the, with the, the Trump phenomenon is so dangerous. Now whether or not you agree with his policies or not, the very idea that some 40% American population believe the last election was stolen is very, very alarming. This is the first steps in the decline of democracy in America and that's, that's the result of this whole decay process. And it's exactly what happened in the Roman Empire where you got a change from republican Rome which was not democracy in any way but, but certainly both we free. Then you get towards the thing like the first century B.C. you get the rise of these strong leaders like Marius and Sulla and then Pompey and Caesar and then you get changed to the empire. That's the, that's this, that's the kind of process you're going to get. Now what we'd be doing is reversing that you would strengthen republican democratic institutions if you did this. It's, it's not the same thing at all. Don't, don't think 1984. If you want a autocratic state, there is a way to get it. But you can never combine it with the peak level of economic efficiency. They don't go together. That's why Russia is relatively poor. It's good at fighting. They've got a relatively high level of V for the present world but they're not very strong on this sea thing. So they're not very good at business, commerce and technology. You're concerned about, you're talking about dictators controlling people and end of democracy and stuff. But I see it doesn't get you dictatorship. It actually is very anti dictator because people tend to be very, they're strong impersonal loyalties. See, your loyalties are personal versus impersonal. High C is very impersonal. That means you're loyal to the law, to parliament, to institutions, to that kind of thing. Personal loyalty is a loyalty to an individual. So when people say that, that Trump is still propagated president, you're ignoring all the institutions and legal systems and just saying I'm loyal to Trump, whatever he says goes. And that's same thing with, with Caesar. Same thing with any of those people who take over. When you get, when you get this process take place, you get this drop of impersonal loyalties, rise of personal loyalties. And actually if you look at the climb the Roman Empire, it's, you can see it as, it wasn't just a once off thing that happened when the Republic ended. It was a gradual process that went on. And by the End of the empire, at least in the western empire, which was really subject to this decay, the central authority largely broke down. The only people that could actually command authority were the individual emperors. And that's why it was. So you had to have multiple emperors like the Gus's and the Caesars, personally contacting the army, leading the armies, because people were only loyal to the people. And then in the end you had these large estates where people were loyal to the estate owners and not to any larger authority. And then the empire basically collapsed. And you also had a collapse of the economy at the same time. Kind of went downhill dramatically from after the first century A.D. to the time by, by the time it ended, it was, it was totally. You can see this in the, in the, the green and light Greenland ice caps. The levels of metal like lead in the ice caps drop dramatically after the first century ad. And that's because this whole process of decline, it's economic decline and then leaders become far more autocratic in the later empire, you get the remaining republican institutions like elected officials just fading away and more and more personal loyalties. And that's autocracy. Extreme autocracy.

Yeah. I have to say I'm not, it's not my primary concern about loyalty to our current institutions, etc. More so my concern is to. Well, I'll say it, I don't want to sound pretentious or anything, but loyalty to God in that I have to wonder whether what you're describing is in line with God's intention for the human race. Not to say it sound too parochial or anything like that. But I do think that there was clearly a design. I think obviously Genesis isn't literal. You, I think that's the point, the position you agree with. But there's definitely a message in there that God created us, we are gods. And so therefore I don't know that tampering with the human genome to solve what might be a temporary problem is the best way to go down. But what do you think? You're a Christian yourself. How do you tackle with that idea?

Well, look, if you look at what Christianity does, look at the teachings of Christianity, it's actually, it's a series of. It's a series of cultural directions, of practices of things that affect behavior in such a way that it has this effect of being what I call C promoter, V promoter. So if, if the Bible tells you, for example, you shouldn't commit adultery, for example, okay, that is a supermoder that's reducing sexual activity, which is the same effect as mild Food restriction, if it tells you only have one wife, which is by New Testament times was a standard, you only have one wife, that is, that is a C promoter. That is actually. So in a sense you could look upon the Bible and also the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita and Confucian analects. All these things are cultural traditions which have the effect of creating and strengthening these aspects of character. So in a sense, if you want to look at God's intentions, as far as we can judge from the Bible, anything else, that's exactly what he wants. All we're doing is saying, okay, let's give the Bible, the analytics, the Quran, a little bit of a help to push them in the direction they want us to move in. Because basically a religious system is successful to the extent that it creates this, these characters. If it makes you more hard working, more fertile, better neighbors, more likely to obey the law, your society becomes stronger, you have more children yourself and you take over from others. So why was Christianity adopted in the Empire? Because it actually worked. People who had it were better off than those who didn't. And in the modern world, people who are practicing Christians, doesn't matter what you believe in, it's what you do that matters. If you're practicing Christian, you're more likely to be happily married, you're less likely to be a drug addict or a criminal and, and you're more likely to have children and, and settle down with one partner and so, well then be a good parent. Why? Because the whole religious tradition is pushing you in that direction. It creates this character. So I'd say this is definitely what God wants from us. I just want to achieve it in a different. I want to help. So yes, but also let's give you some extra help to achieve the same goal.

And yeah, there has always sort of been that contention between should we sort of throw off the world and reject everything that we've been given? And that sort of gnostic, sort of a spin off from Christianity. But certainly the path that we went down was to embrace the fact that we are in this world and we can improve it through our instruments. So it's, you put forward a very interesting case that this is just an extreme version of that where you're changing the building blocks of the human person themselves. In some ways it's, I'd be very interested to see how your research goes and at least how it goes on animals in terms of how it goes on humans. I won't be the first test subject, I'll say, but No, I would think.

The first test subjects would be people who've got real problems with drug addiction, for example.

Okay, well, there you go.

And if you see somebody who's, who's a drug addict, who cannot control it, and then you give them a course of treatment and they come out of it and, and they, and they get a job and they get educated and they marry and they have kids and they have a wonderful, productive, happy life, you got to look at it and say, well, maybe this is something worth considering.

Well, it's something you want to see, right? You don't like to see people suffering. So if it is something that genuinely self motivates them to improve their life, it's hard to argue against. It's hard to argue against something like that.

What you would see is people around you being successful. You'll see somebody who was sort of in business and suddenly they're far more successful in business. They're better at business and, and they. What are you, what are you doing? Well, it's this treatment I've got. I mean, it's not that difficult. Or people who, who have problems in their marriage and they take this treatment and suddenly they're really romantically close to each other and they have a wonderful, happy marriage and their kids are turning out so well, you'd look at that and say, wow, okay, all right, this is a bit strange, but it works. Look, you could look at a lot of things too. You know, in a sense it's pretty natural that, you know, happy children die before they grow up. That's normal. Through most of history now we, we do artificial, scientific, weird things like vaccinations and, you know, sanitation and sewers and stuff. That's all very unnatural. That's very unlike the way our ancestors lived. But is it necessarily a bad thing for that reason?

No. Well, it's hard to argue against and certainly the church has never said that it is. So I mean, yeah, it's something to investigate. Have you ever heard of Gary Johns, former alp, I think Minister?

No.

He, he sort of has a similar idea to you. He had, he wrote a book called, what was it? Contraception or the dole or something like that. And the idea was that to receive the dole in Australia, we should make people who are receiving it for that reason take contraception as a condition. And it would be via. In a small injection in their arm or something like that in a woman's arm. And this way you're not giving birth to extra children while you're still in a poor Financial state, unable to give them all the things that they deserve in their, in their growing up. It's, it's a similar idea to what you're saying, although you're proposing a more futuristic and I guess to the source solution to, or alternative to his solution.

Well, having children, who wants them is a very contentious issue.

Well, he suffered as a result of that. Yeah.

If you've got drug addicted mother who is having child after child who's got birth defects and you know, and it's taken into adoption and fostering, whether as some sort of condition for help, she actually to be asked to take contraception until she's, you know, able to look after children properly, that might be reasonable as a public health measure.

And that was his point exactly. Yeah, yeah.

So is she better off having a lot of children? She can't look after her? Well, probably not, but certain people, it goes back to a bit like the Nazis started, you know how they started with their, their eugenics so called. It was basically dealing with people who were, you know, mentally defective or had had mental illness of some kind. And, and there's. That's a slippery slope.

Yeah, he never got it passed. Of course it was never really adopted by the Labor Party. It's pretty controversial. But what you're proposing is sort of, I suppose you're cutting things off at the source before it would get to that point where you're, you're removing the damaging behaviors before they had say my preference.

Rather than saying to somebody, you know, you can't have kids because you're in a mess. I'd say let's see if we can get you out of the mess and live a productive life and then you'd be a great parent.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's. We want to see things improve. Is this your idea of Christian, of Christians engagement in politics is that it should be solely focused on, you know, improving in this way. Do you see any point to the social aspects of Christianity where some people call it identity politics, et cetera, like that? Or do you think Christian's involvement should be purely on improving people, material. People's material conditions?

Oh, I think Christianity has always played a very powerful role in society. Look at William Wilberforce, the ending of the slave trade, which if you think about it, was a very remarkable thing to do because it was so much against Britain's self interest. They made a fortune out of the slave trade. It was so productive. You take manufactured goods from Britain, you export the site from Bristol, go to West Africa, you sell that stuff, you Buy slaves, you go across the Atlantic to Barbados or wherever you sell them. You get the sugar cane, the sugar, take it back to England, you make a massive profit. It was a huge, huge industry. And the Christians people led by William Wilberforce, just simply said, this is wrong. I don't care how profitable it is, but it's wrong. And they stopped it. Now, that is a magnificent example of Christian action. And I totally, totally approve of that. And I think Christians have responsibility to do to help those in need. But I also think people should be helped to live a better life and not just treated as passive victims. In other words, I don't think that. Just as an example, I don't think that giving a person the doll and saying, you don't have to do anything, just sit back and accept the doll, some people would say that's a really humane thing to do. I'd say, no, that's a very brutal thing to do. Because if you give a person money for doing nothing, you are not helping them with their character. I think if you said to them, yes, we'll give you a doll, but now you come out and you plant trees in the desert, for example, or you pick up garbage on the highways, or you go and work with elderly people in need, or whatever we're going to do for you, do something useful for society, develop proper skills of work, develop discipline, and then go on to have a proper job. I think you'll be helping them a lot better.

Yeah, I 100% agree with that. It was part of the problem with COVID I suppose. So many people went on to Covid payments and it was much easier than going to work. It was a little bit of trouble getting everyone to go back. I know something that you talked a little bit about. We're approaching the end of the time, so we won't dive into that topic too much. But just to wrap up maybe last question, it's going back a little bit to the previous topic of, you know, human improvement. Do you see a nexus between your epigenetic or genetic research and Elon Musk's Neuralink project, which is of course trying to improve people's mental faculties via digital electronic means. Do you see a combination between those two that could create the superhuman 1000 million IQ, or is that unrealistic?

I don't know what the technology is capable of, but I do believe it's character that counts more than anything. I really do. People have too much of a faith in intelligence and everything else. If you've got the right kind of mind you can achieve so much. You just got to have the direction, the energy, the creativity. I think character is everything. Change in society isn't mainly a matter of institutions. It's a matter of people. If you have people who are hardworking and productive, then you're going to have a wealthy society. If you have people who respect the rule of law and reverence democracy, you're going to have a stable state. If there are people who love to help other people, then you're going to have a compassionate society. It's not institutions, it's not vast personal forces. It's individual human beings and their character that counts. And if you look at history, people focus on the great leaders. Don't worry about the leaders. Look at the followers. Look at the people that obeyed them. Don't just look at Napoleon. Look at why millions of Frenchmen went out and prepared to fight so savagely. Understand the ordinary people. Like when you go into Iraq, for example, you've got a leader like Saddam Hussein with a fairly nasty character. Now, if you take the view that the problem with Iraq is a nasty leader, it's very simple. You go in, get rid of it, sad Hussein, and you're going to have a peaceful democratic country. Well, no, you don't. You get anything but that. The reason is because Saddam Hussein reflected the people in the society. And they're people who just don't take to peaceful democratic government. They don't like it. It doesn't suit them. So we've got to change the character. You just can't change people at the top. You can't change the ideas. And that's what I'm working on. Christianity changes character. What I'm talking about, this process that we're working on will change character. People who want to have it change. That's what we're going. That's what we're after. Same thing, but different ways of achieving it.

Yep, definitely something that I'm very interested in seeing your results from. That pretty much brings us to the end of the episode. Thank you so much for coming on, Jim. It's really an honor to have you on and for you to come share your knowledge with us. Where can people find more about what you're talking about if they're interested?

If you go to the website www.jims.net about Jim, you'll see some links in there that shows you all kinds of things. There's, there's the. The history website is www.byhistory.org. there are some links to books and there's also some videos in there, which explains how these things work.

All right, yeah, everyone go check that out. And if you want to find more of my podcasts, go to thenationalobserver.co and that's where you can find all of our content. Also, check out the National observer on YouTube. And that's it. Thank you very much for joining us, Jim and everyone. Have a great rest of your week. Sam.