Why did Jim Penman decide to enter politics and join the Libertarians??

Yeah, I went on Ask Jim and I asked myself, you know, I said, I'm a husband who's cheated on his wife and I feel real giddy, what should I do? They gave pretty good advice. They are absolutely clueless and that's one of the major problems, especially with people like the Greens and Labour Party, is they don't know anything about business. They've never run a business, they've never worked in a business, they've never had to make money, they've got no idea what the world, the real world, is actually like and they're trying to make decisions. What it actually does, all this stuff, is it cripples the economy. It saps productivity.

Welcome back to Conversations with Jim's podcast, and we've got a pretty good episode today because I think there's a lot happening since we've probably done this on your standalone one. There's been heaps of stuff. You seem to be getting in the media every week now. There's something going on. You're at Parliament House, or you're online with a whole bunch of different things. The Daily Mail is running a story on you every week, which is good, and you've obviously got your shirt there, which we're going to lead off with now. For those who don't know, Jim, why are you wearing that shirt?

Well, I have a passion about zoning. Zoning regulations are killing housing. They're forcing the price of housing up, at least doubling the cost of housing, increasing rents. I looked around for any political party that would actually tackle this, and the only one I could find was the Libertarians. So that's why I'm supporting them. That's why I'm standing for the seat of Northcote.

Now, people will say that Libertarians— you might not agree with everything the Libertarians, all of their policies, So sort of, was that the closest that just aligned with what you were doing?

They're the closest. Look, there's the differences. For example, one difference is the Libertarians have pledged never to raise taxes. Now, if I was elected a Libertarian, I would follow that pledge. I would. But if you ask me personally what I think, I think one tax that should go up is land tax, right? Because land tax with relaxed zoning would push development into people who want to build affordable housing. So it'd be good. Then we should be able to reduce other taxes which are far more aggressive. Things like stamp duty, for example, or GST maybe, or those kind of taxes that really bear on ordinary people. Or, what do you call it, payroll tax.

Payroll tax is a shocker.

There's some really, really bad taxes that hurt ordinary people. I think if we actually took money from land tax which is impossible to evade, and put it in and take it off some other areas. People would be better off.

Do you think the government's though just too addicted to it? Because that's obviously a massive revenue source for the state government, which is stamp duty. Do you think they could actually even do that?

If you replaced it with land tax, you could, right? I mean, land tax could be anything. If you make land tax high enough, you could just about replace every other tax that we've got. And it's a very efficient form of tax, and it's very fair. And the great thing about land tax too is that you can make it incredibly progressive by giving everybody an individual allowance to the extent that half the population pays nothing. So you get a certain credit towards it. So, you know, somebody who's buying a house worth, say, you know, $400,000-$500,000 would pay no land tax. But if you're a millionaire who's got a house worth $10 million, they pay a fortune in land tax.

Right. Okay, that sounds good to a lot of people as well, but obviously Hopefully getting that information.

Not only that, but actually if you're a tenant, your landlord gets it.

Right.

Because that makes it being a landlord and giving you low-cost secure housing becomes very, very attractive because they get the tax benefits. Because if they let them to wealthy people, like you build luxury apartments, then, you know, there's no benefit to you. But if you've got people who've got this thing, you get the benefit because they're your tenants. So therefore you say, "Oh well, I'm going to give you a really good deal and I'm going to give you a low rent and I want long, stable, secure tenants," and that helps tenants.

What about negative gearing? Obviously that's, I guess, another type of thing, but obviously there's capital gains and these sorts of things as well. What are your thoughts about that?

Well, I think you'd be better off having a simpler system where you bring the rate of tax down overall, right? So I have lower tax Margins, but less deductions. I mean, capital gains tax, yeah, I'd be happy. You lower the overall tax, get rid of capital gains. There's a lot of other things that people do that lurks, like for example, okay, charitable deductions. Now, I don't particularly have a problem with a person getting a charitable deduction for, for example, the Salvation Army, but I have a severe problem when they get it for funding a museum or an opera or private school building funds and stuff which benefit the elite. So So I think we could do a lot to reduce a lot of the lurks, deductions. And if you didn't have negative gearing at the moment, because property prices are so high, then rents have become unaffordable. But if property prices were brought down to a reasonable level, you wouldn't need negative gearing, and that's basically a lurk for the better off. Also things like superannuation, for example. Superannuation should not be deductible beyond a couple of million dollars. 'Cause most of the superannuation deductions are rich people like myself who actually use it as a tax look. I don't need superannuation, I've got superannuation. Why? 'Cause it's tax effective.

Well, they're having, yeah, SMF, that's self-managed super funds, and they're putting properties into that and commercial properties as well.

Yeah, so most of the actual deductions are not to help people stay secure in their retirement, it's just a tax look for the wealthy, and that's the big problem with it. I know there's a big fuss about this and they want to reduce the limit to $3 million and, oh, it's going to be so bad. I said, come on, how much money do you really need for a comfortable retirement? You don't need $3 million.

Well, they basically say you've got to own your house and then you need like $700,000 or something as a couple. That's what they— that's what the new data was showing.

So something like that. And that is about where it should be. It should be at the level where you can comfortably live. And that's what we need to keep people off the pension, give them a comfortable, secure old age. We don't need to give a whole lot of extra tax deductions to multimillionaires. People like multimillionaires like myself, we do well enough. We don't need the government Putting the scales on our favour.

Well, what— yeah, and also the people in the higher tax bracket obviously do properties to reduce their taxable income to get it below the threshold as well. So tax— you're taxing them 47% above whatever, you know, and it's—

but if your company tax rate was to say down, if you took— got rid of all the deductions and all this garbage and you took the company tax rate down to say, you know, 20% or something like that, then you wouldn't have the same temptations to fiddle it. You wouldn't be sending property overseas, you wouldn't be having in Ireland and the Cayman Islands and so forth. All this garbage that goes on because the tax rates are too high. Make them lower, make them simpler, cut out the great majority of the deductions. That's the way I would do it.

Yeah, and I think that's, you know, I always admire— I reckon we need to look at more countries overseas who do that sort of stuff. I think there's some models over there which have worked. I've always loved Singapore as a country.

Singapore, beautifully.

No resources, no nothing, and look how they're probably the best economy in Asia with that little place, like with what Lee Kuan Yew done, right? I think it's amazing how you've got a model there which actually all this stuff sort of works and we don't do it.

It's one of the best-run countries in the world. Yeah.

And what about the politics? Well, actually, I'll ask you about that because I think entering into politics now, there's obviously a lot of— I think what Singapore does is great. They pay their politicians a lot of money so they don't do all the— they have to do all the dinners and all that sort of stuff as well. What about— do you think people understand just the true amount of shadiness that goes on in the background with like the fundraisers? And obviously, you know, they leave their career and they go work at a big corporate who they've been making policy on for 5 years as a favor. Do you think that sort of stuff?

Yeah, I would agree with that. I would actually pay— and this is, this is costing more— but I would pay politicians better. They really, for the power they have, they get paid very little, and it's not the way to attract good people, and it encourages corruption. Um, and also we should take the money out of politics as far as possible. You shouldn't allow more than individual donations, small individual donations, and basically they should run themselves within that. It's really bad that the Labour Party is funded by the unions. That gives the unions ridiculous amounts of power. So we see a lot of overpriced building. It costs the community billions and billions and billions of dollars because of these sort of things. And also wealthy people who fund the Liberal Party, they want their own stuff. They don't want residential zoning changes. They're NIMBYs, okay? So they destroy, they mess up the whole housing environment too. So if you had public funding of political parties, modest public funding, and you prohibit anything but individual funding up to a certain level, and people shouldn't be able to fund their own buddy campaigns too.

And the problem is that the parties, though, they won't change those rules because I remember Labor brought in those rules a while ago to sort of, you know, about to protect those trade union donations, right? And you've got the Liberal Party, the McCormick Foundation as well, and basically the little guys like the Libertarians You know, like what hope do you have in terms of that where your rules are different to what the big parties are?

Sometimes insurgents can have a go. You know, you see minor parties, lots of countries now sort of coming up and having a bit of a go at power. I just think money is very corrupting of politics, even if it's not direct corruption. Look, you go to a fundraiser for these parties and you pay a huge amount of money to sit in a seat next to some government minister. I mean, you're not doing that out of the goodness of your heart. You're not doing it because you believe altruistically. You believe because if you step there, this, then he's going to, you know, push things in your favor. I mean, governments try and do too much, and that's the problem. And they're so bound by special parties, special interests, and it's not a healthy environment for a democracy.

I think we have the most amount of politicians per capita in the world, was the report the other day. It was quite, quite amazing. Obviously you're a big fan of smaller government. So if you— let's say, for example, right, Jim's in there for the week.

What are you—

where are you looking to just sort of downsize, or where do you think we need less of?

Okay, we'd have only two levels of government. We'd have the federal government and we'd have basically local government, which for someone like Melbourne would be the whole city, right? You have the city of Melbourne. It's senseless to have local—

these little councils everywhere.

You don't really— it doesn't make any sense to have a political organisation that doesn't have a vibrant local media. That's the basic point about anything. So when you've got, say, Melbourne as an area, then you've got local papers, you've got The Age, and you've got the— those kinds of papers that can actually express some sort of a local thing, and you've got local talkback radio. That's sensible for a democracy. Having something like Yarra Ranges where nobody even knows where they are most of the time, and there's no way that you can put pressure on the individuals because there's no political party, you don't know who to vote for. I wanted to know who to vote in local election. I rang up an MP I know and said, "Who do you think?" because I really didn't have any comprehension of what I was voting for. So local democracy is senseless. We need city-based. So you have somewhere like Albury-Wodonga, should be, should be, because that's a regional area, it's a regional area, let them have their thing. Let Melbourne have it, let Sydney have it, and then we have the federal government and everything else. Get rid of it. State governments, obviously, the ones you get rid of.

And then what else in terms of the actual— because we've obviously got a lot of politicians per person here, like the most in the world— what sort of departments or what areas do you think could be downsizing? Or do you just think they need to have a big sweep of efficiency through there?

I think one of the best ways to do it— first of all, if you ask any management consultant to have a look at the way that a bureaucracy has worked, first thing you'll say is that it's approximately at least double, at least double cost. And I know that because when you run a business like mine, I know how easy it is to get costs out of control. When you've got the owner peering over your shoulders, even then costs will tend to blow out. So government's far worse. Civil servants are unsackable. There's no KPI, there's no performance, there's nothing really, basically. So you cut that in half. And then you have a look at every regulation that we have. I would just do a clean sweep. I'd almost start from nothing. I'd say start from nothing, not immediately get back to things, but look at everything that we do and say, is it cost-effective? I mean, let me talk about some of the things I know, like the Franchising Code, which is a massive, massive bureaucratic nightmare, okay? You have this disclosure document, which is page after page. I don't even know, I've never read one, I must say, so I don't even know what it's like. What I do know is that we take on more franchisees than any other franchisor in the country by far. We're the biggest in the country by far. I have asked franchisees again and again, who has read the disclosure document? You know how many have answered me? One. One person ever has read this disclosure document. So we have disclosure, it's massively complicated and bureaucratic to write and to keep up to date with and put everything in place. One franchisee reads it. Now maybe if you're buying a McDonald's franchise, you might read it more carefully. But for heaven's sake, it's so useless. Now there's a real, real simple way of doing this, which I actually, when they started this inquiry, I said for years, do what we do in gyms. Every year we send out a questionnaire to all of our franchisees. It's anonymous, it's confidential. We don't tell the franchisor, and we ask them questions like, you know, support they're getting, how often they're rung, whether they responded to. And we get that results and we publish it, and we, we can then assess every franchisor, what their franchisees honestly think about them. Now, we do that since we've been doing that. That has been massively successful in raising the level of performance because people don't want to be getting a bad rating. If they get a bad rating, they can get breached in our system. If they're a good one, then they become diamond and they get the award. They pick your own award. So it's a really powerful, effective way to do it. Now, why not do the same thing for franchising? So basically, every year, at the expense of the franchisor, an independent company does a survey of all the franchisees in the country based on the list, and they publish it on a website, and everybody who wants to buy a franchise of any company has to be directed towards that. What you then see is an incredibly powerful force saying, "If you want to look after your franchisees, make them happy." Now what they do instead, they also get lawyers to have a look at the contract. This is stupid. Lawyers mostly don't know anything about contracts. They're not experts. They basically hardly even read them. What can they reasonably say? If you want to do something practical, you'd say every franchisor puts their contract to a party, somebody who's qualified to do it, who makes a comparative statement about that contract, and that is then placed on a public website that anybody can read. At the expense— not employing tens of thousands of lawyers to actually get opinions, but getting the franchisor to pay for one lawyer who's carefully chosen to give a fair, balanced opinion and say, "This is a relatively good contract, this is a relatively tough." I mean, that's just a very simple idea. Now, it would cost a fraction You wouldn't employ as many lawyers, you wouldn't employ as many—

There's so many lawyers in franchising.

There's so many lawyers. But what you would do is you'd give good information that people could actually look at. Somebody who's a good franchisee will tend to do their research. What you want to do is to make it really available. That would do an enormous amount to help. There's no bureaucracy, there's no civil servants, there's a really simple process. Once a year, survey goes out, independent thing, franchisors pay, government stays out of it except they say you must put this on your website.

Yeah, I get you. Yeah, yeah, that's— yeah, you've said this a few times, and I think hopefully the Small Business Minister, when the FCA does it, you jump on them and tell them, which I think would be really good.

I said this every year they come up with it. I did the same thing. I said do something practical. I know they said more and more bureaucracy, more— yeah, you know, look, they make us, they make us audit the advertising funds. Now, the biggest problem with that is that it's a really complicated process. You have to pay for the audit. The audit comes out of the advertising fund, so it doesn't actually help the franchisees. And anyway, all they can say is that we've spent the money. Have we spent it well? No idea. Was it effective? No idea. Did it help anybody get more work? No idea. You can just spend money on something like— you can sponsor your kid's softball team, and that's advertising. It's legal, but it's useless to the franchisee. What counts is other franchisees happy. Now what we're actually doing in some divisions, we're taking out the advertising fund. We just charge a bit more on the base fee because the cost of auditing it is so extreme. Yeah. So it's— they do stupid things that have no benefit, that are really costly in government, they're costly on the company, but they don't benefit the franchisees. I just use that as an example because I know about that.

Yeah, yeah. People making decisions which got no idea about what they're doing it on. Now changing a bit of tactic from franchising, I want to talk about, um, a new Labor. Labor seems to be bringing in a few things based on polls, and you know, obviously there's a decline in popularity with Alan. The 4-day work week was something that got announced the other day, and they've obviously been promoting it really, really hard. It's going to go live in, I think, September, which is convenient timing as well. But the 4-day work week, what do you think about that?

Well, we're talking about 4 days of 10 hours?

I think it might— no, I don't know if it is actually, to be honest. I don't know, I have to look into it. I think, but it's a 4-day work week and obviously there's a 2-day work from home rule as well they're bringing in. Sorry, yeah, sorry, not the 4-day work, the 2-day. I misspoke, the 2-day working from home.

Okay, 2-day working from home, that, that's a, that's a perfect example. Okay, we have different policies about working from home at gyms. Now, for example, if you're in the call center, you're doing a decent job, you can work from home because that's the kind of job which works well. If you're another kind of business which requires face-to-face, like reception, you need to work from the office. It depends on the individual job. A lot of people work sort of 3 days from the office, 2 days from home. But we make the decision with them. Now, what actually happens is some person in government says, I believe every company should have 2 days working from home. Why? How do you know? Oh well, because that's obviously fair. Have you ever run a business? No. Have you ever employed anybody? No. They are absolutely clueless. So somebody who's never run a business, never had to operate in the real world, is going out and telling businesses how you can run your business better. They are absolutely clueless. And that's one of the major problems, especially with people like the Greens and Labour Party, is they don't know anything about business. They've never run a business. They've never worked in a business. They've never had to make money. They've got no idea what the world, the real world, is actually like. And they're trying to make decisions. What it actually does, all this stuff, is it cripples the economy. It saps productivity. And there's so many regulations which just make it harder and harder and harder to employ anybody. And basically, we have policies in gyms now where we actually employ as few people as possible. We outsource, we automate, because the whole employment system becomes so labyrinthine and complicated. And it just drags on businesses. People who make regulations that have no concept of the cost of what they're doing.

Exactly right. And you've got payroll taxes and stuff we mentioned earlier as well, which is a massive, big problem. But I was going to say, How does that apply to Jim's franchisees? Because it's small business, right? So I think it's a bit of— we had a lot of people ringing up radio stations and stuff about it. I don't know how it's going to apply to them. They haven't had things explained to them properly. A lot of people are saying as well, you've got cafes, all these sorts of small businesses now which this applies to from the looks of it.

Working from home?

Yeah, yeah. This rule's not the right— Play out the joke.

How can you mow lawns working from home?

Well, that's what I'm saying. I've got a cousin who's got an arborist business and I messaged him. I said, how does this work for you? And he's like, all my guys are working Yes, but like, if someone wants to request it, what's the thing?

Well, I don't know. I don't think the people who do these things are complete drooling idiots. They understand that if you run an arborist business, you've got to be in the field chopping down trees.

Or you could be in an office doing administration, that sort of stuff. But I was going to say, it's the wrong people to make the decisions.

They make decisions on behalf— they don't understand. And that's very, very dangerous thinking. It's the arrogance of power that thinks you know better than the powers that be. It's the same kind of mentality as drove the Great Leap forward in China back in the 1950s when Chairman Mao says we're going to make China into a vast industrial country within a decade. So let's everybody make steel. So let's set up quotas. Well, actual fact, the quotas they set for steel production was such that they used to melt down their cooking pots and everything else into completely unusable ingots. And the actual result was that tens of millions died from famine. And that's because the powers that be think they're more smart than anyone else, and therefore they make rules without any understanding how that applies. Or when they want to kill, I think it was starlings, okay, which were supposedly going for crops. So they had a tremendous campaign to kill starlings, and they had people going out there shaking trees and just killing them in scales. And it was very successful. They killed all the starlings. But what happened then? All the locusts and the pests came into the fields and ate the crops. They just didn't understand what they were doing. So it's the same thing on a lesser scale that governments do today. They make laws that they don't understand, and they apply to the people who understand best. The people who can make the best decisions are those at the coal front who are actually doing things. Some politician, some bureaucrat, or some power-hungry dictator a long way away makes very, very bad decisions.

I was going to say, do you think then people, you know, Like, real-world experience needs to happen in politics because you look at the last two leaders, they had— they basically came through university to their, to their Labor sort of party, and they've worked up for a staffer and they've gone that way. Like, they literally haven't worked a real job. And then you had the other one, Wilson, who was— who rolled Brad Batten, who actually had a franchise. He was actually— I think he had a franchise and was a policeman. And she's done the same thing from uni, you know, you worked at a policy center and now all of a sudden a career politician. We've got all these career politicians who haven't actually done anything with real-world experience. And I remember John Howard was saying you should have to do 10 years in the real world in the private sector or something else before you even enter this sort of thing. You think that's been a big problem?

I'd like it to happen, but I'd also like Santa Claus to be real too. Let's talk about what's possible.

But do you think people should expect— maybe that's something they should actually start considering when it comes to voting for people? Does this person actually have real-world experience or business experience? Because a lot of the comments with you has been either 'Oh, here we go, rich millionaire getting into politics.' But other people are going, 'At least he's run a business, he's run a business.' And, you know, and this is the thing, he's been—

I'll tell you that, but I'm actually in touch on a daily basis with thousands of people who run businesses themselves, so I'd have a pretty good understanding. That's one of the reasons I, I make my phone number and email address available to franchisees, and I respond very, very fast because I want to know what they're going through. Because you've got to go to the cold face, you've got to go to the people who make the decisions. They're the people you've got to understand, not the powers that be. They just don't understand. And elites, powers that be, make stupid decisions again and again and again. Look, I'd love it if people had worldwide experience, but I can't honestly think what on earth would a Labor Party politician— if they were in business, they wouldn't be Labor, would they? Because they don't understand how stupid the policies are. So to get people to actually be Labor politicians, you have to have somebody who's ignorant of the real-world economy almost by definition, or they wouldn't vote Labor.

I'd love to see a plumber or bricklayer or something having a go, but I know it'll never happen. But I think people, when they look at it, actually vote. They should actually start considering it.

What I used to like is actually in the beginnings of Labor Party movement, it was actually workers. Yeah, it was, it was people who've been bricklayers and plumbers and so forth and worked in factories and actually had real jobs. Actually, Labor Party meant a lot in those days. Yeah, but now it's, it's, it's all the educated elites. They've gone through university, the most they've gone through the trade union movement. I mean, you have someone like, say, like Bob Hawke, who was, to my mind, a pretty decent sort of leader, and he came up through the trade union movement. But all the same, in general, they just don't know the real world. It's a big problem, but you can't change it, really.

Yeah, I just hope people actually start wanting real-world experience in politicians, and it might get them to change things. But I don't know if that will happen. Now I'm going to go into another complete other tactic as well— birth rate. Birth rate seems to be every week now. It's either on Nine News or Seven. ABC are running it. Seems to be going more and more. Jim Chalmers came out and said the government is rolling out policies to ease pressure on families and make it easier for people to have children if they want. That was Jim Chalmers back in the Centre of Population report, was back in October 2024. And I don't think anyone's thinking that now. So what are your thoughts on this? Because obviously this is a big passion. Well, this is your main research going into this, and I think you're the only person in Australia with your views on this.

So Yeah, look, when you ask people why they don't have children, they tend to give the same answers. They tend to say, can't afford it, interruption of career, not— kids are expensive to raise. They always give reasons in terms of money. That is overwhelming. This is— doesn't matter, just not just Australia, this is America, this is Europe, this is Japan, this is South Korea, this is everywhere, the same fundamental answers. Money. So every government has the same fundamental response. Okay, we'll give you more money. We do it in Hungary. They spend 5% of their GDP on this. They do it in Europe. They do it in Greece. They do it in Italy. They do it in Russia. They do it in China. They actually give them political advice. They do all kinds of things. So everybody get asked, what's your reason? They say money. Every government has the same response: give you more money. And every population has the same response: nothing. It doesn't work. It never works. In fact, as they've been given more bonuses in China and more reasons, the birth rates dropped because money isn't the issue. People think it's the issue. It's the issue. The real issue is priorities. People today have a lower priority to family. They have a lower priority to children. They have a high priority to wealth, career, those kinds of other areas of life that are important to them, travel, whatever. That's what they want. Now, the real question is why? Why is that happening? And what there is happening is a fundamental change in the character of the population. And what happens is it's to do with the way that our brains work. And you've got to think of it in terms of cocaine, all right? Cocaine is something that makes you feel good. I've been told that. I've never used it.

It'll make for a good social clip when you say that.

I've never tried it, but I'm informed that it does. The reason that cocaine works is because it floods your brain with this chemical called dopamine. Dopamine feels really good, so the first time they use it, they have a real high. And then they try it again, not so much. Try it again, less and less and less. Now what's happening? As the brain is flooded with dopamine, the brain becomes desensitized to it. So eventually it gets so desensitized, the only way it can feel even normal is to have more and more cocaine. And if they don't have it, their brain is so starved of dopamine, life is boring and pointless and senseless. That's what actually happens when you have a drug addiction. And that's why even though drugs make people feel good in the short term, in the long term they become miserable. And they often die because they become so miserable. It's because their brain is desensitized. Now what people don't understand is this: what we're doing in the modern world is very much like a mild version of cocaine because dopamine is not the— cocaine is not the only way to get a surge of dopamine. You can get it from junk food. You can get it from porn. You can get it from sex, especially with a variety of people because dopamine likes novelty. You can get it from gambling. You can get it from likes on Facebook, you can get it from social comparison, anything that boosts your ego above somebody else gives you a burst of dopamine which feels good, but it makes the brain less sensitive to dopamine so you feel worse. And the effect of that is that the ordinary things of life which produce a little trickle of dopamine, things like family, children, work, relationships, friendships, faith, churchgoing, those kind of things, they become boring and senseless. That's because your brain is desensitized to the dopamine. So the little trickle, the little ripples of dopamine that come through, which would satisfy a sensitive brain— boring, senseless. And people lose a sense of purpose, they become depressed, and you get rising suicide rates and the rest of it. So what we've got to try and do to solve the birth rate crisis is not give people money but make people— help people to have brains that are more sensitive to dopamine, then they won't want it. They will want children, they will want family, they will want meaningful, useful, productive work that'll be attractive. They'll want exercise, they want time in nature. All these things that actually produce this little trickle, this little tiny amounts of dopamine, are satisfying at that level. The problem with it is The world is addictive. All these things—sex, porn, gambling, social media, junk food—they're all really attractive. We want this stuff. We crave it because we feel good. So one way to do rid of it is to stop doing that. And there are certain groups that do this quite successfully. Amish is an example. They have an environment whereby they don't have junk food. They have enough food, but it's not junk food. They don't have drugs, they don't drink to excess, they don't get involved in social envy, they're very cooperative, they're not trying to one-up each other, they actually dress the same so there's no sense of apartness. So they have very strict rules of behavior which subject the individuals to the rule of the community and to the rule of God. So psychologically speaking, what they've done is a whole stack of different things which shut out all these these surges of dopamine and they make their brains very sensitive to dopamine. So they have big families because they love family, they love kids and they love cooperation. They're happy people on the whole. They have much lower levels of mental distress than most other people. So that's how it's done by an ideological system. Orthodox Jews are the same. They have the same kind of system and it's the same way of basically making their brain sensitive to this dopamine thing. The trouble with that is it won't work for the wider community because the attractions of these dopamine surges are so great. So what we're working in our project is to work out a way, a treatment that will actually resensitise the brain. Now this can be injection, it can be a pill, it can be anything. It could work very much like some of these weight loss drugs and some of them seem to have some of these kinds of effects. You've got to find something that actually has this effect. You give it to somebody like, say, a drug addict, and their brain suddenly becomes very sensitive to dopamine, and they don't need the drug anymore because they're satisfied with the ordinary life. You give it to somebody who's depressed, and suddenly their ordinary life becomes more meaningful, more sensible. So you give it to a kid who's got ADHD who can't concentrate, and suddenly work becomes more enjoyable than just the ordinary things of life. So it's actually a medical treatment that will help with a lot of social ills, the alcoholism, all kinds of things.

It makes sense because, um, the top— if you look at the top companies of the stock market, for example, I remember Scott Galloway, who I really like, you've listened to his book, he's basically saying that the top companies in America, they're all in the business of dopamine extraction. Yes. And I think that's— and when you think about it logically, it makes sense. Dopamine extraction, that's what the top companies are doing. They're obviously— the shareholder returns is basically based on dopamine extraction from people.

They, they know this too. The top executives won't let their kids use social media themselves, but they actually understand that every like that you get is a dopamine boost and it's really, really negative. It feels good, but it makes you feel worse. So it's the same thing as when you— it's food, okay? Why are people overweight? They know quite well if they eat less, they will be better off over life, they'll be happier, they'll look better, they'll feel better about themselves. But that, whatever it is, the Big Mac, the fries, the Coke, whatever it is that makes them feel good in the short term. So they sacrifice their long-term satisfaction for a short-term boost, which is a very difficult thing to do, to be able to forego the short-term satisfaction for the sake of feeling good overall. Now, I do this at the moment, for example, I'm fasting for Lent, which means there's no There's no sweet drinks, there's no sweet food, there's no desserts, there's no deep-fried food, chips, all that kind of stuff. So I just don't do it for Lent. This is a bit over, about 5 weeks. Okay, now it's hard to forego it, but I feel better. I actually have a little bit of hunger at times because I practice 16/8 fasting, but I actually feel more clear in my mind. I feel more focused. I feel, I just feel good. And I think, why can't I do this all the time? Well, it's because the The chocolate ice cream is so attractive in the short term, and that's the struggle we always have. It's like exercise, the same thing. You know quite well if you got up and you exercised and went for a walk every day, you'd feel better, but in the short term you feel better to lie in bed or to watch TV or to be on social media and stuff. And that's the exact problem that we've got. People think short-term delight. If we can't get them to think long-term, we want to get them medical help to make that so much easier to happen, and then some of these things will become really attractive.

Yeah, which I think the GLPs obviously, um, have sort of— they're showing other benefits besides just weight loss as well, which is a good sign for what you're doing, I guess, with what you're—

yeah, with some people it helps with smoking, with drug addiction. They just don't feel the need for these things so much. That's a classic case. Now, these by themselves probably wouldn't work because they, they cause weight loss, which past a certain level wouldn't be something like good for me to have because I tend to be underweight. I'd be in a bit of trouble, and you can lose So it's not a— but if you can tweak them, the point about it is too, is look, it's not difficult to do it. It would probably cost $100 or $200 million. That's what my research institute is to actually develop some sort of basic treatment. They need to be tested, need to be trialed and so forth. But it would be worth an absolute fortune because it'd be so useful. And if you had these people taking this on a big scale, then your birth weight problem is going to be solved. So it's basically got to be in— the answer's in neuroscience. And the really great thing about this is that, look, I've been looking at this thing for more than half a century since I started developing these ideas, and I had a fairly good idea, you know, what was causing it, but only now do we have the technology that can make it work. One of the greatest advances you have is in the field of epigenetics, which is really booming. And even in the last year, they've worked out ways about epigenetic targeting that actually hits certain sections of the brain. So it's actually possible to go in and make a really targeted change because all these effects are epigenetic effects. Everything you do, what happens in your childhood is epigenetic effect. Epigenetics is where you switch on or off genes and it's the effect of the environment. It's particularly powerful in early life. Now if you can go and fix out, work out what went wrong in your early life that caused you to have your brain that was desensitized to dopamine, which is things like lack of discipline and direction in childhood would do that, or being spoiled, too much junk food, whatever, okay? If you can go back in and you reverse that and you turn off, you turn back on the genes that are causing this problem, suddenly you've got somebody with a different personality. And they're also going to be much better at work and focused and might be successful and so forth. So what we're going to try and do basically with this book is to put it out there and say, okay, there's probably 10,000 people in the world who could make a decision to launch this kind of research project, who've got the resources. It could be people with high net wealth, it could be people high in government, drug companies, all kinds of people could do this. Head of research institute. You find one person out of maybe 10,000 that says, I believe in this stuff, let's work on it, and suddenly your problem is solved.

And it wouldn't even be difficult. Governments listen up because they're throwing money at things which aren't going to work. Yeah, and they, and they keep throwing money at the same things, and it's all around the world where they're doing similar.

I would say you take a fraction of a percent, 1% of 1% of the money that's been pumped into trying pumping up birth rates, and you look for a real solution, and you would find it, and the problem will be solved. Absolutely.

So we'll talk about more of this later in more episodes as we go on further, but I want to switch up to something as well. Your AI bot again went in the media. They said it went rogue, but it didn't really go rogue. It was saying things like wham and giving life advice and all these things. And people were quite shocked because I was trying to compare it to Woolworths. And it's like, it's not, we're not here as a Woolworths and it's a prim and proper thing. It's literally, we call it your digital mind. So all the stuff we do now, for example, goes in this and people can access it. So we're surprised about it. Again, it's gone, it's gone, got national attention about Albanese as well. That did, Jim's bot.

I can't even mention Jim Chalmers in, but it was spot on. All the others, I tried it myself actually. I just tried it just lately. I actually, I acted— it even gives marriage guidance counseling, which you've sort of—

on Ask Jim, you get asked that sort of stuff. That's why it's given that advice.

Yeah, I went, I went on, I went on Ask Jim and I asked myself, you know, I said, I'm a husband who's cheated on his wife and I feel real guilty, what should I do? Okay, pretty good advice. It said, be honest with your wife and then work on your relationship. And I said, you, you may lose it, but you've got to start with honesty. I mean, it's a perfect answer. I could not have said it better myself. I had a young guy actually contact me the other day. He said he wanted to have a half-hour talk with me, and I said, listen, you go in here, you can talk for as long as you like, and you'll get the best answers, the same answers I give you in person. That's right.

Yeah, it's gone pretty viral, this sort of thing. And we had some big Instagram accounts as well. I couldn't believe they were mentioning WAM, like your breakfast routine and your morning routine. It's like, that's exactly from Jim.

It's not going rogue or anything. And every time I do an interview, like here, it goes on the system, and the answers become better.

Yeah, because it gave it the $70 grand waste example too, which I thought was cool because we only did that a couple of weeks ago. So it actually brought that in there as well. And I used it to attack Albanese in the Daily Mail.

I tell you what, I reckon Digital Gym is pretty smart. It is pretty smart.

It's a very good thing. And I know that I've had a few people contact me about it to do it for themselves, but I'm hoping they do it as well. Now, I was going to say, with obviously coming up into the election, we've obviously been going pretty hard on X with a lot of your posts. So we take a lot of your stuff and we obviously repurpose of that platform. So I'm going to read you out some people to respond to it as well. So let's just read you a few out of these comments as well, because every time you post about housing, you're literally going to get things like this, right? Mass immigration is the cause. Halting mass immigration is the solution. Housing costs are the primary cause. A baby bonus of $17,000 doesn't offset a multi-million dollar price tag. Your profiteering grift is changing you from one of the most admired to the most despised. So this guy called Bad Alex, he actually Whenever we post about housing or anything online, he comments every day, so he's a bit obsessed with this guy. But what would you say about that mass immigration? Because that's all these guys will say a lot of the time to you.

I'd say look at America, okay? Look at two cities. Look at Houston in Texas, low zoning. Look at San Francisco, high zoning. Same country, same immigration policy. Now the actual differences between them is that in Texas people are going into Houston. They're actually arriving there, so it's a high immigration environment. They're leaving San Francisco because they can't afford to live there. So by all the logic of what these people are saying, San Francisco prices are obviously going to be lower than they are in Houston because San Francisco's got less immigrants, Houston's got more. In fact, Houston house prices are a quarter what they are in San Francisco. It's not immigration, it's zoning. If you have tight zoning, prices go up. It doesn't matter. We have a bad policy. I agree with that. We're letting half a million people into the country every year and then we're saying, okay, but we forbid you to build enough houses to put them in. We forbid it. We're going to use all the power of government to make it really difficult to build more houses. Naturally, you've got problems. But the problem isn't immigration. The problem is The government. If you allowed people to build what they want to build, in other words, more dense housing in inner suburban areas near the cities where there's lots of work and employment and everything else, then you wouldn't have a zoning problem. You wouldn't have a housing problem at all. And it's clearly shown by the comparison. It's purely zoning. It's not immigration. I think immigration is good for this country. I do think we should be really careful to pick immigrants that are good for this country. Now I know people are going to say I'm harsh on this one, but you get somebody like a, let's say, a business owner or an IT specialist from business, business, a very business entrepreneur person from China or advanced IT specialist from India, people like that. These are great for the country. They come in, they strengthen the economy, they pay high taxes, they're wonderful for the country. Now at the other extreme, I have enormous sympathy for people in places like Sudan and Somalia in refugee camps. But bringing them into the country brings all sorts of problems because they tend to have very high rates of unemployment, high rates of crime, they upset people and they get people against immigration. But it's not immigration as such. My dentist is an immigrant. She's a wonderful lady. She's Chinese. She's a wonderful lady. Nobody can object to her. But when you have people wielding machetes in public parks and having fights Okay, that causes problems with immigration. So let's, maybe we have a bit too many. One of the things I'd love to see is as a policy, rather than having all these temporary visas where people go out and they ride Ubers and stuff like that, I'd say come into the country on a trial basis, come here for 5 years or whatever, find a job where you're paying this level of tax, like equivalent to a median household. So you can be a plumber, you could be a computer programmer, you could buy a gym franchise. Okay, no, but it's the same thing because most of my franchisees make above average income and they pay a lot of tax. They do. So prove it, prove that you're a useful citizen, prove that you can contribute to the country, and we'll give you permanent residence. If you can't do that, well, go home.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of problem with these scam colleges and these scam, you know, let's say cooking course or something like this, right?

And then But if you're going to come here and be on the dole, then honestly, go back to where you came from. Because I don't think people who come here and live a life of crime or stay on the dole and stuff, I don't think it's good for them because they're in a society where they're looked down upon and they resent us. They don't appreciate it. Somebody comes here from another country and stays on the dole or goes to prison, they don't think Australia is a wonderful place. They think, oh no, there's prejudice against us. So they're resentful, they're angry. Those people we don't need. We need quality immigrants, people like my wife. I mean, she runs multiple businesses. She's a property developer. She does amazing things for this country. Amazing things for me too. But the fact of the matter, she's an immigrant, okay? She came here 25 years ago. That's the kind of person that you really, really want.

Yeah, my dad was an immigrant too, and he worked very, very hard, and he was a highly skilled immigrant. So yeah, I exactly agree with you, highly skilled.

Well, actually, I was born in the UK, so I'm an immigrant too.

You technically are, because someone said, I think he goes here, this Bad Alex guy, I think he knows you from England. He goes, 'You should be deported as well, Jim.' So I think he just thinks anyone who's not born in Australia should be deported.

Well, my mother's family lived in Australia since the 1830s, so I don't think I'm at that risk.

Yeah, yeah. But I think it's an interesting one. There's a bit more nuance to it rather than just saying mass migration and that will solve it all as well. And also those people maybe should have a bit more kids so we don't have to bring in so many immigrants. Have a bit of a family here would be the other good thing. I was going to say as well, another one about rental listings. Obviously there's 21,000 fewer rentals as investors are pulling out of the market. With homes disappearing. And I think Purple Pingers, so Purple Pingers is a big, he's a big, I don't know what to call him, I don't want to offend him too much because he might do a big video, but he's a very big left socialist, leftist activist. You know, he's actually running as a socialist candidate in, I think, the city of Melbourne. So he's not up against you directly, but he's got a pretty big following. He does some really good videos actually holding out real estate agents accountable with stuff. But he says, I thought it was just babies that haven't developed object permanence yet. But turns out it's libertarians too. Homes don't just vanish, you fool. So with rentals, listings pulling out of the market, what happens when, let's say, there's less rentals? What happens with those homes?

Well, a lot of them, because one of the problems with the situation now is that the solution to difficult tenants, to a difficult rental market, is to make life really, really hard for landlords. They say, look, the more we can crush landlords with more and more regulation and stop them from getting rid of bad tenants, the more just give them more and more privilege to the tenants and make it harder for the landlords, then we're going to have more and more properties on the market. But that's not how it actually works. If you're a potential landlord and you know that you're going to be crucified by the government, you don't want to have permanent tenants because you can't get rid of them if they don't pay, for example. So what you do is you put it on Airbnb, as an example, or you just leave it vacant. A lot of people are doing that. Houses that are left vacant. Because the rental laws are so onerous. They're becoming worse. I personally would not be a landlord in a domestic market because it's just so bad. So what you need to do, you need a system of regulation which is fairer to landlords and makes it more attractive to be a landlord. That is very, very important because if it's relying on a free market. And the other thing, of course, you need to do is you need to have zoning reform which brings down the price of housing. And that's just not— that's partly zoning reform is part of that too. So if you take away some of the artificial restrictions on zoning, but you also take away things like the cumbersome process, like it could take you 6 months to get something approved. Now that's money that's sitting there. What they do is they put the price up. You've also got Australian standards. You've got systems of like there's building systems you have in, say, in the EEC. Which are really advanced and they're very good insulation and they're good for the environment. You can't use them in Australia because they're not Australian standards. They're good enough for Sweden, they're good enough for Germany, they're good enough for Denmark, they're good enough, but not good enough for Australia. So let's have more expensive, lower quality housing. So there's a whole lot of government regulation that goes making houses more expensive. Look, I live on a 5-acre property. It's 5 minutes from the station. It's 5 minutes from employment, from shops. It's a great location, okay? I like it, okay? It's good, it's convenient, next door to the office too, all right? You can't— it's a 5-year covenant, you can't subdivide it. If you took away the zoning regulation, you could have 40 little houses on that that are affordable. Why not do that? Why not make them available? Now, if you did that, if you made it possible to have low-cost houses, then Rent is going to, rent's going to be exposed. And instead of people being desperate— now, I understand problems with rental availability. My daughter and her partner were looking to rent a property, to rent a flat. They turned out to one place, there was 40 people there. Because I wanted to help them, I actually wrote to the agent and said, listen, they're so desperate for a place, I will personally pay their entire year's rent in advance And they said, "No, not good enough." Okay. It's so— there's such a desperate supply. But why? Because the government is doing everything it can, first of all, discourage people from renting properties by making it so difficult to be a landlord. And secondly, by stopping people building low-cost properties. Like they could do. Let my property be subdivided, put up into units, low-cost units, for example, then you'll have lots and lots of tenants.

I want to do one more before we finish. This comment comes up a little bit now. So there's a lot of people who are pretty, I'd say they're Labor, not Labor bots, but they're Labor through and through. Like they've got #IStandWithAlbo in their hashtags and their handles and stuff. And this is another guy. He goes, Eddie Jackovich goes, stick to lawn mowing, mate. At least you know what you're doing there. Economics and government expenditures is not your field. So that's a typical comment from people when they, when you, but this is interesting. What do you, what did you say about that? Because obviously the Victorian government or the Labor government doesn't understand it as well, but That's another story.

Well, I would say that your Labor Party politicians sitting in Spring Street haven't got a clue of what's going on in the real world. I have contact. I have every one of my franchisees, nearly 6,000 now, have my direct phone number and email address. These are ordinary people. They're making decent money, that's what franchising is about, but they're the battlers, they're the ordinary citizens. I know them very, very well and what their interests are. I understand it. I understand business. I understand the decisions business. I understand what property— because my wife's a property developer. I understand their motivations, understand the motivations of tenants, understand the motives of people buying businesses. I'm in touch with people like that. So I understand it very, very well. I wish people, some of these senior politicians, would actually step out of their cocooned offices with all the protection and go and talk to ordinary people and find out what they're thinking. And they don't do that. They don't know. They don't have a clue what it's like to run a business. They don't understand how it makes— they don't have a clue what it's like to be a the landlord or most likely a tenant either because they're not in that kind of environment. They're so insulated. I wish people would get out into the real world and learn what's going on. Not just about— yes, it's about lo mein and it's about cleaning and it's about retail and it's about clerical jobs and it's about walking, it's about livable cities. All these things are part of real life. They need to get out of their cocoon and go and find out what's going on. One of the biggest problems is that politicians have so little idea. So few of them actually had jobs. They've never had to struggle the way ordinary people struggle. That's something I understand. They don't.

I'd love to see all Labor politicians go one year as a laborer or something, one year as a brickie's laborer, or work for a plumber.

It was great in the old days, in the beginning of Labor movement. Labor Party politicians were not professionals. They were bricklayers, they were carpenters, they were people who worked on the shop floor in a factory. They were the kind of people that founded the Labor Party. And I think Labor Party was a greater party then than it is now, when you've got basically bureaucrats and professional politicians and civil servants and the elites, people who've never— like, I've never known what it's like to have calloused hands. I got calloused hands because I do a lot of gardening. They're people with soft hands living in a privileged environment, so cut off from the rest of us. And there's a big divide between the elites, the Labor Party and the Greens, and the ordinary working people of this country. And I really wish the Labor Party would represent the interests of ordinary people, in which case I will be tempted to vote for them.

Well, let's end on that note. That's a controversial note to end on. Let's end on that. So if you enjoyed listening today, make sure you follow as well. If you want to learn more about Jim, just head to jimpenman.com.au. We're on all the social channels as well. As you see, we do respond to your comments and tweets and questions on TikTok all the time, so make sure you leave questions and comments there. We do put them to Jim all the time and he do have responses as well. But thank you very much for your time today, Jim. Thanks for listening to the podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please make sure you leave a rating, a review, comment, share it with friends and family. If you are interested in becoming a Jim's franchisee, just call 131 546 or head to jims.net and put in an enquiry and we'll be in touch soon.