Jim PenmanCEO, Jim's Group · CEO and Founder of Australia's largest franchise, Jim's Group

What cocaine explains about the birth rate crisis?

15 Sept 2026 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

2:00

In this YouTube monologue, businessman and research institute funder Jim Penman explains his theory that the global decline in birth rates is rooted in a neurochemical phenomenon similar to cocaine addiction. He describes how cocaine delivers powerful, short‑term dopamine surges that, with repeated use, desensitise the brain’s dopamine receptors, forcing users to seek ever‑greater stimulation. Penman argues that modern society—through social media, abundant high‑calorie food, gambling, travel, competition and other highly stimulating activities—delivers comparable dopamine spikes on a continual basis, effectively creating a societal “mini‑cocaine” habit. This widespread desensitisation makes low‑stimulation activities such as family life, child‑rearing, and long‑term relationships feel boring, contributing to falling birth rates. He proposes that the remedy is to “resensitise” the brain to dopamine, a strategy he claims would also help with drug addiction, depression, and other mental‑health issues, thereby addressing the birth‑rate crisis.

Chapters

Hi, I'm Jim Penman. I'm a businessman who's funded a research institute into, amongst other things, the birth rate crisis. Why are birth rates dropping? I've written previous books including Epigenetics and Character and Biohistory, about to release Birth Rate Crisis. Now let's talk about cocaine, because understanding the way that cocaine works is a good way to comprehend the reasons for the birth rate crisis. Now, what cocaine or other addictive drugs do is they give very, very powerful bolts of surges of dopamine to the brain, which feels in the short term very good. But the reason they don't work long term is because when you continually besiege the brain, you charge it with these surges of dopamine, the became— brain becomes less and less sensitive, and therefore to cocaine, and therefore you need more and more of the drug just to feel okay. And activities like family and children and stuff, they're just too boring. They need the excitement, they need the stimulation of these vast dopamine surges. Now, in a sense, that's what's happening to our entire society because what we're doing is the influence of society, including things like social media, including things like plentiful food, including things like competition, like gambling, like travel, like all the exciting different stuff. They are acting like a mini sort of cocaine habit. They're, they're hitting our brains with lots and lots of dopamine surges, and our brains are becoming less sensitive. And the result of that, things like children and family become less interesting. So the solution is actually quite simple. What we need to do is to resensitize our brains to dopamine, which incidentally should be a very, very good way of dealing with problems of drug addiction, but also with problems of— Addiction. Of depression, of mental illness, and the birth rate crisis itself.