Why is Jim Penman entering politics and how he would fix the declining birth-rate and housing

Welcome back to the Conversations with Jim podcast, and every couple of weeks we're doing an update with Jim about what's been going on, especially with politics. And obviously there's an election in November, but a couple of your clips went viral. It was the stuff where you said Labor politicians wouldn't be Labor if they'd ever run a small business, and then you said stuff about, you know, people in government, you know, needing to get their hands dirty, and government are clueless about— because they've never owned a business, right? That resonated really well with a lot of people, so Why do you think it did?

I think people see the value of politicians understanding real life. I honestly do. Look, when you're trying to run a business, the thing about it is they bring these policies in and they say, "Oh, we want people to be safe, want to regulate this stuff." But they just don't understand actually how they work. They don't understand how having legions of bureaucrats breathing over your shoulder, getting you this and this and this and this. And when you're doing this, you're not actually running your business. You're not serving your clients. You're not looking after your staff. You're just doing all this bureaucratic stuff. And what you gotta do is to balance it. Say, "Okay, we've got this much improvement in, you know, safety or whatever, but it's this much cost." Now, could this cost be spent better somewhere else? Look, it's the same thing as global warming, all right? And this is an important issue. People say if you can reduce global warming, then That's great, there's a benefit to people. So if you spend, say, $100 billion to reduce global warming by half a fraction of a percent, that's worthwhile. But then you've got to look at if you spent that same money on doing other things, how much benefit would it have? And if the things that you could spend it on have vastly more benefit than reducing carbon emissions, that's what they should be used for. This is part of the Copenhagen Consensus. So the same idea, Whenever you do something, you've got to count the costs. And that's the problem with politicians, particularly those who've never run a business, never been involved in real life, have no conception of what people are going through. That's the problem. They're unrealistic. They just see, let's regulate, regulate, regulate, regulate, and they never count the cost.

Let's talk about Victoria then, because it's obviously the worst. Yeah, but this is what I want to talk about because there's been a few things they've been doing. Obviously free public transport was one. You know, I think Jacinda Ardern was crying at a press conference about the cost of living, which obviously doesn't affect her. And then obviously you have all the scandals with the CFMEU, with the $15 billion estimated gone in corruption. You think it's just like, it's just out of control. So $2 billion and there's no— I don't really see a plan where they say, we're going to have this, how we're going to tackle it. There's actually been no plan at all.

Yeah, these people are completely divorced from reality. They've got no idea what it's like. To live as normal citizens in the country. This is an insulated elite with no conception of what happens. It's like during COVID lockdown, it's like the Premier getting up and saying, "Oh, well, you know, you can't have your lawnmower and your houses cleaned." But really what you're talking about is throwing 120,000 Victorians out of work for no reason at all. But he didn't even think about them because to him, Those people might as well live on Mars. They're just alien. Doesn't matter. They don't talk to me, I don't listen to them, I don't hear from them. And one of the differences in my situation is that I'm in touch with my franchisees every day. So far at this point, I've actually had contact with about 6 franchisees about different kinds of issues. So I know what they're thinking. I know what they're going through. Things like petrol problems, things like issues with the system, with the way leads are working, with what clients are doing. I know what's going on. These people don't know, they just don't know.

These are small business owners, as people will know, obviously, with Jim Penman. Some might be a sole trader, some might have 8 staff, but you've got a good range of that because you know, especially people with staff, for example, payroll tax and these sorts of things as well, they've got to incur the cost of.

Yeah, yeah. And these things make a difference. People make decisions based on so much, and a lot of the regulations to do with fair work and so forth, they just don't understand how much work there is and how much discourages. So every time a person applies for a job they don't get or sitting at home because they can't find a decent job. They've got to actually think, okay, all these regulations, this pile of red tape is stopping people, employers from employing people.

Well, there's a new big one which is going to affect young people is they're getting rid of the industrial, new industrial relation laws coming out about the junior rates. So junior rates, they're getting rid of pretty much. So you know how people would hire a junior because they're incentivized because they can pay them less?

Yeah.

You know, between a 17-year-old and a 20-year-old, they're going to get paid the same now. So these younger people aren't going to get as much of a fair go with small businesses or being employed because of these new regulations coming in.

Unemployment is a big problem. And the trouble too with being unemployed when you're young, you've just finished your education, whether it's secondary or whether it's tertiary, if you don't find a job, one of the problems that has, because the regulations make it really difficult and unprofitable to employ you, it actually takes them out of the workforce. First of all, they're not learning skills because 'Cause you learn a lot more from work than you do from education, bluntly. That's why lawyers who come out of law school are worth nothing. Most of them can't find a job. But you got even 1 or 2 years' experience and your career's laid out. So experience is really, really important. The other thing too is when employers look at somebody who's been unemployed for 6 months or a year, they say, "Well, you know, that makes them harder to employ ongoing." It's actually a bad sign. So when you discourage employers, when you say, "Don't employ the young," Do not give jobs to the unemployed. If you keep on saying that, the real victim is not actually the business, though they suffer, but it's the people who are denied it. And as in all of these things, the worst problem, the worst damage is done to the least fortunate, the most vulnerable. It's like when you force rents up by policies. You say, let's have higher and higher and higher and higher and higher rents. Okay, you've got to consider the people who suffer the most are not the people who are affluent, you know, the doctors and lawyers and civil servants who are comfortable with their own houses or they can afford the pay the rent. It's the people who are struggling, the people who might be on the street if they can't. So, so many government policies do not take account of the damage they do to people, especially the most vulnerable. And we want to be a society of people. Parties like the Labor Party was founded to look after working people. Why have they lost interest in them?

And that's not just here, that's overseas as well. When you look at it overseas with Labor parties in government, it's a sort of similar sort of thing. But I think the junior rates is a big problem because A lot of people get their start at a Maccas or a franchisee might give a young person a go because it's more affordable and they can get experience that way. But now, like a franchisee, for example, I've got a 16-year-old versus a 21-year-old and they're going to be paid the same. And this guy's got 5 years' experience and he's got nothing. Who am I going to give a go to? So they won't get a shot now.

No, it's sad that they've done that. It really is. My son, 16-year-old son, without strong encouragement, he's been doing some shifts at McDonald's and we're looking at getting him experience because we know experience is so great. It'd be so tragic if he's denied the potential. Now we can provide it through the business, so he's very privileged in that sense. We can provide him some work ourselves, but so many young people are being denied the opportunity to get that valuable experience.

Well, those Maccas franchisees now have to look at their business now because obviously they hire a lot of juniors, they hire a lot of young people now, and that's going to affect what they do as a franchisee.

We got wonderful examples within Jim's group. Dan Cahill.

Yeah.

Um, this is a, this is a kid who drops out of school, So society wipes him off, you're hopeless, you're useless, you'll never amount to anything, you're human, subhuman garbage, we don't consider you as even human, all right? But he gets out there, he gets a job at McDonald's, and he works at McDonald's and he works himself up and he builds good contacts. And then in his early 20s, he buys the Jim's Mowing franchise, very scary. This guy now in his early 30s is running Jim's Mowing all throughout Australia and now New Zealand. And he's a multi-millionaire, but he's also providing really great training and support for young people who've never had the same opportunity. I mean, what a great thing is this? But what was the start? McDonald's. So we ought to be encouraging young people. And I actually think that it's really, it's a bad trend lately. People are not encouraging young people to get into jobs. Parents are saying, "Oh, just focus on your studies." No, no, get out there and work. Working actually doesn't matter if McDonald's, doesn't matter if it's mowing lawns, doesn't matter what you're doing. Working is a really great form of education. So in many ways it's more useful than school.

And there's another thing which is the Payday Super. Now some, obviously that's more favorable to employee, but like for small businesses, like there's a lot of companies now who are giving, they have to get loans because this Payday Super thing coming out because they risk big fines, right? So with our franchisees that obviously who employ people, that's going to discourage them as well about employing people now because they've got this Payday Super thing.

Again, and they don't count the cost. I never see in any of these instances of changes, they never say, "Okay, here's the benefit, here's the cost. How much will it cost people to do this? How much extra time? How much extra effort is it going to take? How much extra capital is it going to take?" They never make the comparison. They just simply say, "Well, we think it's good." It's all cost-free because after all, we personally don't have to pay it. I'm a privileged lawyer or civil servant, doesn't cost me anything. So there's no cost as far as I'm concerned. But they don't think of the cost on people. They don't consider incentives too. Let me give you a little tiny example. This is the opposite end of the labor market, okay? You know, actually employers are heavily penalized for employing older people. The government goes to them and says, "We don't want you to employ the old. Those people who are approaching retirement, we don't want you to employ them." You know what they do? They say if you employ an older person, you've got to give them more notice. Now, that might seem, "Oh, wonderful, the old people get more notice." What it really means is that it says to employers, it's a signal that says, "Two people similar, okay, otherwise older person gets treated differently, therefore let's choose the younger person." So you actually, by doing something which seems very benevolent, let's help the older workers, you're actually doing the opposite. You're hurting potential workers. And what you find is this, and this is something I've seen often, when somebody approaches in their late 50s, that kind of age group, they find it much harder to get a job. The government should not be in a position of saying— discouraging people from employing older workers. They shouldn't be discouraging people, business, from employing younger workers. They should look at those who are most vulnerable and needy and say, instead of, they're badly off now, let's make them worse off, let's take away their jobs. Why don't we say, let's look at the most vulnerable people in society and see how we can do to help them and lift them up, give them work, give them a future, give them work towards retirement.

I'll give you a question then. Why do you think the Victorian Labor government is so unfriendly to small business? Because I think Victoria is, based on all reports and measurements, is the worst state, place to do business, and especially for small business. Why do you think they're so anti-small business?

I'm going to be maybe unreasonably benevolent at this. I think most politicians actually have reasonably good motives for what they do. They think that what they're doing is helping. I'm going to help the young by making them higher wages. So he's— they envisage a young person who's going into the workforce who's now getting paid several dollars per hour more. They see that as a benefit. So they're not being brutal, they're not being callous, but they are being ignorant. They just don't understand incentives. They don't understand what it's like to be a struggling small business and knowing that you've got to make a decision based on a few dollars an hour, which to these people is nothing because they're just not used to it. They've got staff, they've got all kinds of limousines, they've got all kinds of perks, okay? It's a comfortable enough life at that level. They don't understand a small business struggling. They don't understand the motivation. So they have the best motivations. They think, "Oh, I'm gonna help young people." But they don't understand, no, you're actually hurting young people. 'Cause frankly, whether an underage kid gets an extra few dollars an hour doesn't make that much difference. 'Cause in the end, they'll make more if they get experienced. But the actual cost to them of not getting a job is far, far, far greater. We as a society need to do a lot more to help the less fortunate, and I think that's something the Labor Party politicians should understand. And I wish they would get out and speak to people and work in the community and find out. And it would be even better if they had a proper job in the first place, especially if they run a business. I would love to see, I would love to see a prominent Labor politician who's run a small business. And they, you know, they ridiculed Pauline Hanson. They said, this is a fish and chip shop owner. Yep. This is a fish— she is scum. She is not a big corporate executive. She hasn't— she's not a lawyer. She hasn't worked. So therefore she is beneath contempt. And you could see that sneer in their voice when they talked about it. Now, I don't particularly like the policies of One Nation, and I'm not a supporter. I don't think that's the solution to the country. But it's that kind of attitude. Because a person's run a fish and chip shop, they're somehow incapable or unworthy of having a role in national life. And I think the fact that she ran a fish and chip shop, it's a jolly good thing. And the fact that I was a gardener too makes me a different sort of person than if I'd always been an ivory school epidemic. Understand these things. You've got to have some background. There ought to be a principle: you cannot be in politics unless you had a proper job.

Or they should ban arts degrees and law degrees from entering politics because it seems to be everyone's got an arts degree or some political science and they go through the ranks in university.

Well, to be fair, I've got an arts degree too. Yeah, yeah, but you've run a business. But I I have actually run a small business. I mowed lawns for 15 years, part-time, full-time, so I know.

I wouldn't bar them, but I would say, "How about having some time out in the workforce?" Well, you know the irony is we've done a few of these videos which went viral and we've had some Labor sycophants just go, "Well, what would Jim know running the state?" It's like, well, what does someone with an arts degree or doing a law degree who works for a staffer who then just runs into being the member? What do they know about running anything? You know what I mean? Like, that's the point.

I think actually a background in everyday life is the best possible way, because when you're running a state, what are you trying to do? You're trying to make policies that help ordinary people. At least I hope you are. If you're there just to make policies that help the rich and the powerful, that make even more wealth, if that's what you're after, well then you don't need any particular experience. But if you're actually interested in helping ordinary people, and especially the battlers, then you really have to have some comprehension of what it's like to be a battler. And being a lawyer or an ivory tower academic is not going to teach you that. So I think actually people who've got real-world experience can run the state more effectively, because the purpose of the state— let's face it— it's not to make the rich richer. It's not to increase GDP as such. It's actually to help people to live better lives. Particularly, I have to say, we have to look after the less fortunate, the more vulnerable. And that's where governments so badly fall down because they just don't know.

Well, it's amazing because they spend millions on consultants every year, so the Big Four consultants, to do all this research and stuff. And how they're not, you know, how these consulting firms are not including small business in any consideration, it seems to me, is quite mind-blowing. So I think small business is getting a real rough end off the stick and it has for a very, very long time in Victoria.

Consultants can do very good work in controlling costs and so forth. They do understand things.

Well, they also do dodgy stuff. You know, they put, they use AI for their reports and charge millions of dollars for that. They do a lot of other dodgy stuff as well.

But they can be pretty useless. We actually had an issue at one stage with a problem and something in IT or something like that. We got some consultants and we paid them quite a lot of money and they came up with this really impressive impressive. After paying tens of thousands of dollars, they're really, really impressive with the PowerPoints and everything. And it starts, oh, Jim's has been a company around since 1989, there's employees, so many people, all this stuff. What do you mean? I know this stuff. What are you telling me?

I remember.

And then at the end of it, after paying them tens of thousands of dollars, they came up and said, but Jim's has a problem. So they tell me all the things I already know that I could have told them before they started. I just said, go away. I'm not as rude as that, but honestly speaking, it was just rubbish.

But I just think, yeah, small business in Victoria, like we want people to be starting businesses. We want people, it's like we're just making it so hard. And that's the thing which I find frustrating is that people who vote don't take that into consideration. Small business owners know and they're obviously going to vote the way they're going to vote. But the other people, the under 40s or 30s who have gone to uni and maybe work for a company, they don't really consider that. I think small business is the lifeblood of Victoria. and we need to be helping them.

Yeah, we do, we do. And, and the, the burden— the smaller you are, the greater the burden.

Yeah, yeah.

That's one thing we noticed too. See, a lot of regulations to do with, with franchising, for example. Now, they're infuriating.

I mean, we've got the worst in the world for— in Australia for franchising.

Yeah, it's, it's really bad, and it's getting worse all the time. Now, let me give you an example of how this works. We, in our dog wash division, for example, we have this thing called marketing funds we've been using for for years. We've always had marketing funds. You know what we're doing? But you have to audit them every year. Now quite often we overspend anyway, but the fact is you have to audit them, you have to do this. If you don't audit them, you've got to get a vote of franchisees. The administration is such, the cost of all doing this is such, that what we're doing is we're just taking the advertising funds out, we're just increasing the base fee. So we don't have to report it anymore. I mean, and in a sense that takes away a layer of protection for franchisors. We will look after them, we obviously have to keep them busy. But the point of it is, these things have unexpected consequences. Okay, you make us do this really expensive audit, take a giant chunk of the money that we spend, that could be advertising, just to follow your government regulations. So what do we do? We just don't do it anymore. And that is the kind of thing that you tend to do. You have unexpected consequences. As I said, the thing we've got at Jim's is because we've got close to 6,000 franchisees, we are very, very efficient. We have it automated. Actually, in fact, in a sense it helps us against the competition because people who've got smaller franchise systems are going to find it very difficult. It costs them far more to do a contract because of all the things, whereas we sort of just press a button and it's all done electronically. We spend minimal deal on software, but it's easy for us. So from that point of view, what these regulations do is they help the established operators and they hurt the new ones. But that's not a good principle of business and I don't think it's fair. I don't think it's right. I don't think the government should be saying, "Let's help the people who are already successful against those who are struggling and starting." Even when I'm talking about competitors to myself, I don't think it's reasonable for the government to make it so difficult that it stops people from growing businesses.

Now, question about the debt. Are you surprised that there's no kick-up or more pressure about how the state's going to pay off this debt? There's some people raising a little bit of noise, but Are you surprised by how, see, people just seem to be very apathetic to it? Like they don't even care about it.

Yeah, the big problem in society right now is people are very, very short-term thinking. And that is the big issue. If somebody gets up in public and says, "If you elect us, you're going to have more spend, you're going to have more welfare, more giveaways, more subsidies, more of this, more of that, more of that." And the other party gets up and says, "No, look, we can't afford quite as much. Let's actually keep the debt under control." They're going to vote for the first party. Why? Because it's in their short-term interest to do so. They don't really understand that after 4 or 5 years, as the debt rises and rises— and we're now spending more on debt now, interest, than we are on Medicare. It's ridiculous. I mean, it's getting worse. Every day it's getting worse. And the more debt that you have, the more it costs you down the track. It's very short-term thinking. It's the same kind of thinking as somebody says, well, look, you know, I'll I'll just spend more and more and more and I'll run it up on the credit card. And then that worsens the problem because they've got so much credit card debt, they're paying this giant interest rate, so they've got less and less, so they borrow more and more. People getting into debt is the same thing as governments getting into debt. You take the easy short-term solution that seems, yes, I can afford to buy this now, or I can afford to buy the more expensive version instead of waiting. But that means that down the track a bit, you're even more financially constrained. Governments think the same way. Unfortunately, look, in 2007, I have to give credit to Peter Costello, John Howard paid off the national debt. That was a really amazing achievement. But since then, nobody— we've had 3 terms of a Liberal government and they couldn't control it either. It doesn't matter who's in power. Labor runs up the debt, Liberal runs up the debt, the Greens would treble the debt overnight with their promises and stuff. I don't know how anybody could afford that. One nation will run up the debt. It doesn't matter who they are. Everybody's going to run up the debt. We just can't do it. And we're in a time of peace, prosperity, with record money coming in from all over. If we can't afford to get our debt down now, what can we afford? What do you have to do? When do we have to start thinking about debt reduction? When we've got, you know, Australian defences falling apart and people moving into Northern Australia?

Yeah, let's talk about Victoria because people will then go, well, how would you fix it, Jim Penman? That'll be the comment. So what would you look at? You know, $200 billion debt, you had to tackle it, how would you do it?

Look, the first thing you've got to do is you've got to look at government spending in every department. You've got to look at first two things. First of all, what is government doing? Is it necessary? Is it useful? Is it cost effective? A lot of the things you spend money on are actually things that have a dramatic cost to the community, particularly business owners. So you got to look at that. Is it useful? So, for example, okay, my wife's a builder, all right? And the amount of problems she has with government bureaucrats for the most insanely petty little thing, like building systems that you could use quite freely in the EU, which is a very highly safety conscious— can't use in Australia, not Australian standard. So we as government bureaucrats will spend our time stopping you from using world's best practice. Now, is that really what taxpayers' money is supposed to be about? So the first thing, we look at what governments do. Look at planning regulations. If you're going to have them, why do you have bureaucrats doing it? Why can't it be outsourced to companies like they do in Texas? And say, okay, you just go to a licensed, whoever it is, town planner, whatever, and they've got an interest in doing it efficiently and quickly. So instead of 6 months struggling with bureaucracies, you spend 2 weeks with a consultant, which you pay. So the government then— so that's just an example. There are so many things the government does where they're spending money on doing things they don't need to. And the second thing is this: governments are incredibly inefficient at running it. Now, I used to work in the public service for about 6 months back in 1970, Department of Civil Aviation. I had a job that I wasn't particularly efficient or particularly, in those days, even hardworking in those days, but I had only enough work that filled up half my day. Now I look back now and I think about 3/4 of what I did could have been so easily automated, even with the most simple systems, okay? But what's even crazier about that, I asked the powers that be, I said, "Have you got anything extra?" "Oh no, they just—" 'You know, just stay where you are. And if the bigger people come through, everybody—' They actually instructed us to look busy. Now, I had one job which took me one day a week. And they came to me. I was assisting the guy who did the publications. And they came to me and said, 'He's been promoted. He needs now— he merits a full-time assistant. That's you.' And I said to them, 'I only work half my time right now. You want to take away most of my leads, most of my jobs to give me— I actually protested quite strongly. It was just insane. Not only that, but I had a job that take me half an hour per week. Half an hour per week. It was actually going around to the senior managers, getting to say no STD on their phone bills. That was simple. Half an hour a week. Okay. Now, I actually met Mater, a guy who had the job before me, and he managed it so that he actually did nothing but that job the whole time. He did it for 18 months and then he retired to go and get an actual job. Now that's my experience of the public service. Yeah, I can tell you from running a business, if you don't watch costs really, really carefully, it's— they blow out like anything. People come on, they come on. Now in the civil service, there's two things. First of all, you don't have anybody with any concern about profitability. So even in a private company where the owner's interested, and I'm walking that every day and seeing it, we've seen really bad blowouts which we've had to reduce. It's been quite a painful process. But in the public service, nobody's— there's no owner there. Nobody's there, nobody cares about it. In fact, the more money they spend, the more benefits for the higher-ups. So they haven't— They've got a situation where there is no incentives whatsoever to control cost. Not only that, but the whole system is actually there making it virtually impossible to ever fire anybody for any reason at all. Now, I think at the absolute minimum, even if you did everything the bureaucrats do now, if you couldn't reduce that cost by at least 50% just by having efficient work practices, Doing things like saying, "Okay, let's reward powers that be not for growing their division, but by achieving jobs cost-effectively." Or contracting out certain aspects of things, like town planning is a perfect example. Because I'm familiar with that because of my wife's company. Why can't you contract things out and go to the lowest bidder and say, "Okay, we want you to actually do this particular job. How much can you charge? It's now costing us, you know, $100 million a year." And somebody says, "No, I'll do it for—" 'For 60.' 'No, no, I'll do it for 50.' 'No, I'll do it for 45.' Okay, but you have to meet the standard. Why not do something like that? And if you did that one thing alone, just made public servants responsible and make them conscious of costs and kept an eye on them and kept— even not the same pressure as private enterprise because you'll never get that, but just really worked on systems to get the cost down and to be more efficient You cut the cost by 50%, we don't have to worry about debt anymore. You could actually start paying off the debt and you could start bringing back some of these onerous taxes which keep going up all the time, just by being more efficient. And how on earth is anybody going to lose from that? The only people who will lose, obviously, you're going to have public servants who have a very cushy job doing very little. But let's face it, you know, people aren't Public service is not meant to be a sort of retirement ground for people who don't want to work hard. Let them go out and get proper jobs. Let them build up the economy. Let them buy a Jim's franchise. Let them do something useful with their lives.

But I also think the politicians themselves, with their own costs, need to be controlled about how many staff they have, all the benefits. You know, Annika Wells has come under a lot of fire for flying her family left, right, and center across the country to join her under some rule. And then all these rules they're making for themselves to all these other personal expenses that they're going through. And the fuel crisis doesn't affect any politician because they've all got a fuel card, right? They've all got personal drivers. They've all got personal staff. They can fly their family to them anywhere in the country. We don't get that sort of benefit.

I'm going to be slightly contrary here. In fact, if you look at the kinds of power and influence politicians have compared with people in industry and so forth, they're not paid very much. And I think in a way it would be somewhat better maybe to pay them more to make the political career more attractive because one of the things you might do then is to attract people who've got higher levels of skills. So instead of a person saying, "Well, I'll go into finance because it's lucrative," which is on the whole largely a pretty useless job, doesn't actually add much to the economy. If someone says, "Well, I'll go into public service because it pays better." So I think I'm not saying— I don't necessarily think politicians should be paid less. I think we should watch their allowances more carefully.

But what they do is they monetize on their networks and their connections. Yeah, they do posts like Joe Hockey, defense, US defense contracting small business, he calls it. You've got Dominic Perrottet, BHP, international relations. Now you have multiple politicians who go into politics so that can actually become You've got Bill Shorten, he's the Chancellor at the ANU on $990,000 a year. What does he know about running a university? So you've got people who go into politics and they're sometimes—

They don't actually run the university, there's a Vice-Chancellor rather than anyone.

Sorry, whatever he is there, but he's on $900,000 at the ANU, right? So you've got then people who go into politics will then actually use their networks and leverage their relationships to actually then make themselves a lot of money post-career.

And they do, because when you consider the importance of what they do, and the people they mix with, they, in a sense—

Dan Andrews in China. This is a guy, the former Premier, is in a picture with Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-un.

In a sense, there's nothing wrong with the idea that people who do important jobs in society should be well paid for it. I don't know if that's the best way to do it.

I think— The Singapore model might be one too.

I think another very noxious problem is the the way that the money controls the political parties. I think that's a really, really major issue. See, in some ways we could probably spend more. Maybe if we look after politicians better in terms of their actual salary, you might attract a better class of operator. That's fair. But also, if you pay more for some things, like for example, public funding of political parties might have some point. Because one of the things I find very disturbing is the way that wealthy people, for example, tend to control the Liberal Party. And that's one reason the Liberal Party has gone off the rails, because the Liberal Party can't get into things like rezoning very much because they've got so many wealthy backers who actually have multiple properties. And they're the privileged elite that's helped by the current system. And look, in a lot of ways I agree with the Liberal Party, but in that particular area I'm completely opposite. I think Labor's better, or at least less bad. And then of course you have a problem with the Labor Party being so tied up with the unions. Well, let's look at the infrastructure costs.

Everything, you know, you've got guys on $300,000 and $350,000 just working on the rail project, right?

So because the unions support financially the Labor Party, the Labor Party then does things like put through massively overpriced structures, which ends up costing the country billions upon billions upon billions of dollars unnecessarily. Whereas if you had public funding of political parties, which can be based on your share of votes in the last election, that kind of thing, or small contributors, which is okay, individual contributors. If you did that, you might get parties which are a lot more aligned with the public interest.

Ireland did this. Ireland did this and they've removed all the political donations and they've had it in there for a while. So there are some countries around the world doing it and it's been quite good. But I agree with you, buying a table or buying a chair at a thing where a Labor politician's sitting on or a Liberal politician and lobbyist in Canberra, for example.

Yeah, why would you do that? Why would you make a $10,000 donation to a political party. Now sometimes it's idealism, mostly it's just buying influence. Absolutely. So actually, it actually biases the whole political system in favor of those with resources, whether they're wealthy businessmen or whether they're unions.

Yeah, and I want to talk about your area because you're going to be running in Northcote. A lot of young people in Northcote, right? And the housing stuff that you've been going on about really affects them. But they seem a bit brainwashed in regards to their party allegiances and that. What would you say to the younger people in those sorts of areas, especially in the inner city where they seem to vote a certain way, more, it might be Greens or more Labor, for example, because I think they're voting for people who are basically working against them and never going to get a home.

I think a lot of young people are very idealistic. They really are. They think, I want the best, like my daughter who's who's living in Northcote actually, she's there. In any case, she won't vote for me, but she's not gonna, but you know, she's a psychiatrist actually. She's working in public hospitals and she says there should be money for, there should be more money for people who are in need because she sees it all the time. She sees people being unable to be, deciding I can't care for them. They get thrown in a hospital because there's no beds for them and then they suffer in the community. So she sees all these kinds of issues going on. So she's pretty idealistic about it. So yes, she likes the Greens, or I think—

what's she after? There's Victorian Socialists as well, is another one in there.

She's after some other company like Animal Justice or something. Some company, some party she's supporting. So she's got great motivation. She's a lovely young lady. She's a young mother. She's got a beautiful little daughter, and who's just the most gorgeous kid. Point of it, she's a good person with good principles But she really doesn't understand the effects of what she says, that if you have lots and lots and lots of spending and lots and lots and lots of regulation, which is what these parties tend to do, then you have less money to go around, less money to look after those in need. So it's— they've often got the right principles, they just got them— they don't understand. They don't understand. It's like people who say, "Let's put more and more regulations on business so we can be safer." and safer and safer and safer. And the costs go up and up and up. And the employment goes down and down and down. They just don't understand reality. It's a bit like rent controls. I mean, who wouldn't want rent controls? You know, you've got young people who can't afford to buy, to pay their rent. So let's make it cheaper for them. Hey, cheers, cheers! Everybody's happy, fantastic. Rent control is great. But what happens when you do that? Is you dramatically reduce the supply of rental, particularly for the lower rental. Because if a person has the opportunity of only renting below a certain level with very little margin and they've got all kinds of obligations, they can't— they do the— they take it off the market. So you don't have rent. So what actually happens with rent control is that rents actually tend to go up and people are more often homeless. So You do things because you're idealistic and you want to help people, but when you don't understand what— you don't understand the effects of what you're doing, you actually do really big damage to those you should help the most. Now, I would like to see Australia do a lot more to help those in need, and I think we could if we had a proper rational system. There are too many people fall through the cracks. But we can afford to do this. I'm not a real libertarian. I'm not in favor of minimal government like Ayn Rand or something. She's a complete nutter. Everybody knows what she stands for. And it would not work. But if we make government more efficient and we take away stupid regulations and we slim down administration, everybody will have more money and the benefits can flow to those who need them most.

I was surprised, I went to Melbourne on the weekend, by how many homeless people there are in Melbourne. Having a walk around the street, I thought it was quite disturbing actually. It's the most I've ever seen in a long time, the amount of homeless there. And you'll hear just sitting around in my press comments, you know, try and talk about all these things and I've even referenced it. But I think if you walk around the city, you can just see how bad homelessness is. It's quite sad in a place like Melbourne and Victoria.

Yeah, look, I have some friends who wanted to set up a place for homeless people to get them off the street, give them safe housing, and they had it all ready to go, you know, hundreds of people being off the street, safely housed and stuff. State government gets in and says, no, if you stay there more than 3 more than 3 days overnight, you've got to give them a lease, which made the whole thing completely and utterly impossible. Shut it down. So there's hundreds of people who could have been off the streets with decent homes. The government regulation says no. Now, okay, what the government is doing is saying, we want to give more security to them. But the fact of the matter is, they've got nothing right now. They're living in the street. So you've got to consider the effects of the regulations. It sounds good, Yeah, give them leases and so forth. But if that's not possible for all kinds of reasons to do so, you shouldn't be throwing them into the street. It's just not fair and it's not right. And I think as citizens of a democratic country, and I say personally as a Christian, we have a responsibility to look after the less fortunate in our society. And I think governments do a very poor job of just that.

And they do. And a lot of it's mental health related as well. There's not enough beds in psych wards or acute units too. And I think this government has sort of really dropped the ball on mental health, I think as well. I think it was a big thing a while ago, obviously during COVID but obviously reducing the sessions, but there's a lack of investment in that as well.

There's a lot of, there's a big gap between hospitals, which are incredibly expensive and living in the street. And in a sense, if you have somebody who's in hospital, you can't afford the kid in the bed cuz it costs how many thousands of dollars a day. It's enormously, but you don't have anything that's that's lesser, that's something that's actually affordable for the community. You've actually stopped that happening. That's, that's a really damaging, bad way to spend money. And what you sometimes do then is you keep people in hospital longer than they should because they know perfectly well there's nowhere for them to go. There's no support system. It'd be far better if you could provide better non-hospital care, like my friends were wanting to do, ways of getting people off the street into safe clean, hygienic environments with proper food and proper help and everything else. It would be so much better to do something at that level rather than plow more money into hospitals.

And, and yeah, but also mental health. Mental health is the big issue. A lot of those people on the street have mental health issues that are unresolved. They do. And they get kicked out of the, uh, acute wards and all that sort of stuff.

And some, and sometimes they, they look— some people are kind of chronically homeless because of They just can't.

Some people just, there is a thing where some people just, they'll just— No matter what you do, they'll do it.

No matter what you do. But there's a lot of people in those sort of situations actually could be helped if we allocated resources more efficiently. And that's why when you talk about charging an extra $50 billion to run the public service more than you need to, that money could be so well used.

Well, $15 billion on corruption. That could have went to all this sort of stuff and gone a long way to helping it. So right there, like, it's just astounding. And the other thing as well I want to talk about is because it's always going to come up, you know, zoning and Labor government seems to be doing a few, trying to do a few things. Like, in your opinion, is it enough or is it a good start or what would you say about that, to be fair to them?

Okay, I am no fan of the state Labor government. I think in many ways it's one of the most appalling governments, but I have to say It's actually done the best job of anybody has in recent decades in Victoria of trying to make housing more affordable with opening up things like backyards and so forth. So it's good in near railway stations. They're doing some good stuff. What I can say to you, it doesn't go nearly, nearly, nearly far enough. In Houston, as an example, and I always use Houston, they really just don't have a zoning system. This is a livable, city. You know, people say it's so bad you don't have zoning. Well, people walk with their streets. San Francisco, ideal city, great green city, okay, fantastic, everything done right. Houston, no regulations, no government control, minimal cost for— because they don't have to pay for all that sort of stuff. So obviously, here's the two cities. You know what people are doing? They go from San Francisco to Houston, or from the California coast to Texas. People vote with their feet. So people say it's so great to have zoning, but it doesn't make the place more livable. It just means it makes it unaffordable. And people are shifting towards— in America, they go towards places that have got less zoning because they're better places. Just talk about livability, walkability. The idea about to walk to anybody in 15 minutes, that's a very important thing. Local communities, local shops, friendly to young families and so forth. Regulations stop that. They say, basically speaking, "No, you've got to have acres and acres of housing all on quarter-acre lots and you have to drive to the supermarket, which is some tailway." That's not a great system to run a city. If you had a city which allowed people to build what they want to, to a much greater extent, then you would have livable communities. You'd be denser in the inner city. You'd have terrace houses. You'd have 2 and 3 stories. You wouldn't have massive apartment blocks because that's obviously not what people want, generally speaking. They want more livable. Then you have local shops which are able to run. People could live in these places and they could walk to the station. They might not even need a car. Now how much better for the environment would it be? Zoning stops that. Zoning says no, you could live in a walkable, sociable, friendly, eco-friendly environment, but we're going to stop you. We're going to insist you use the car. We're going to insist that you, you, you price out the people from renting. You're going to insist that you leave the home. That's what zoning does. It's a terrible, evil system, and it benefits a few people who want to live in wealthy enclaves with, with big lawns and so forth, which they don't need. And even though I'm in a mowing business, I tell you what, I'd be quite happy to have a lot of them actually cut down. Anyway, you can Terrorist houses need a lawn mower, you just go and mow it. They can't keep their own lawnmowers. That's good for us.

You can do the gutters, all that sort of stuff. But the frustrating thing as well is you can sort this out. Japan sorted it out in Tokyo. And I've been to Japan a few times and you go to Tokyo and you just come back to Australia frustrated, just how everything there works. They sorted it out back in, I think it was the late '80s or '90s. They got together and they've got their 13 areas or whatever now and you can do whatever you want if you're in those areas. And everyone who goes to Tokyo or Japan, will say the same thing. It's the most efficient walkable place.

That is the basic experience, that when you get rid of zoning, you've actually got better cities. I mean, it's not as though you're going to have somebody who's— your next-door neighbor's going to build a 10-story tower next to you and overshadow you and stuff. That's not actually what happens because they don't want to do that. What they want to do, maybe add a second story to their house or terrace down the street a bit. You just want to change it.

A little business, all that sort of stuff.

They fit people's needs.

And that's the frustrating thing. I was going to ask you now about, because there's another thing which they did was the 5% deposit. Now obviously interest rates going up now, a lot of people who got on the 5% deposit scheme, they'd be struggling big time. And here's another thing with good intentions, but it's obviously having the opposite effect.

The trouble is housing is unaffordable, but instead of looking at the basic cause, which is zoning, they try and fiddle with it. And so they say, okay, 'Let's give you extra money.' Now that actually doesn't solve the housing crisis. It actually pushes the price of properties up and the interest rates go up. It's causing terrible problems. Look, just think this way. The average house price in Melbourne, Sydney is about a million dollars a year. I mean, that's just very roughly speaking, okay? If it was, by comparison with Texas, should be about half a million dollars a year. You take that half a million dollars, over, say, 30 years, that's $30,000 a year of extra payments. You can imagine $30,000 a year extra cash coming out of your pocket. What difference does that do to your lifestyle? It's just—

You can invest it, better retirement, you wouldn't need a pension, all that sort of thing.

Yeah, that's right. There's so much more you could do. And all you're doing is helping the ultra-rich become even richer. Why is that the purpose of government? Do we elect a government that says, "You elect me and I'll make sure that the battlers are really going to struggle really hard, but your multi-millionaires are going to become really rich, so vote for me"? If they honestly spoke, if they honestly put down the effects of what they were doing, you'd get a very different election campaign. Like, it's like, there's a wonderful film with Ricky Gervais called The Invention of Lying. I've seen it, yeah. Where everybody has to tell the truth in this society and they tell the most comical things. It's a great film. Yeah, it is a great film. Even though it's anti-religious. But the point of it is if you made politicians have truth in advertising, then you'd get some very, very interesting campaigns. Vote for me and I'll make the rich even richer and the poorest and the homeless will swarm through the streets.

But a good example is this, obviously captured by the big corporations, is the gambling advertising thing. Where they're still skirting around it. They bring in all these new gambling things which were handed down in the Peter Murphy report ages ago. And it's pretty obvious to all Australians what to do. We're the biggest losers. By a person in the world. I think on average $1,600 per Australian. I think it's like $30+ billion is lost to gambling. And they still can't do the right thing, which is obviously total ban, you know, get rid of it from this and that. They have to go around the edges because they don't want to annoy the gambling companies, or the gambling companies say, we're going to stop, we're going to— free-to-air TV won't be free-to-air because we're going to pull out our money running these scare campaigns. So I think the government's just so captured by these lobby groups.

Again, yeah, that's big money. And when you are a a political party that needs to rake in millions of dollars a year to fund your advertising, then you are very much trapped. That's why policies, government policies overwhelmingly in a democratic country overwhelmingly are skewed to favor the wealthy. It's not because of the voting, it's because of the lobbying. It's because of the influence they have and the money they've got.

Now, last thing I want to ask you, because I know this is going to come up in this section when we do housing clips, you're going to have a lot of comments saying, "No, Jim Penman, you're silly. It's migration." It's migration, it's migration. That's all you're going to get in these comments, right? What would you say to people who just think of it as a singular issue? And this is big people like Matt Barry, he's a big guy online. He's always, when you post this stuff, he'll put migration graphs and he'll say it's all migration. So what would you sort of say to people like that?

Okay, first of all, I think migration is very good for this country when you've got the right kinds of people, educated, entrepreneurial, skilled, People are an enormous asset. So I've seen this. I see it in myself. I see it in many of my franchisees who are wonderful people who are immigrants, and I see it in staff members in Elquest. However, when you've got a system that says, "Let's bring 500,000 new people into Australia every year, and then let's use the iron hand of government to forbid anybody from making enough houses to house them," you really are creating a problem. But it's not— the basic problem isn't the immigration. It's the forbidding. If you let people come in, good people come in, hardworking, enterprising, decent people come into this country and you gave them affordable housing and they helped to build the stock of affordable housing, then actually it'd be a wonderful thing for the society. It's again, the example I always give is America. America's the same country, okay? Same immigration policy. But housing prices are 4 times in San Francisco what they are in Houston. So basically San Francisco roughly double the house price from what they do in Melbourne, say, and Houston roughly half, okay? Same country. And the only difference in immigration is that a lot more immigrants go to Texas than they do go to San Francisco. So that's the fact. If you looked at immigration as a policy, you'd say by that nature, Houston ought to have been a worse situation, but it's infinitely better. So you can have any number of immigrants coming in if they're the right kind of immigrants. I think we need to be a bit more careful sometimes on who we select. It's fine to do that as long as you actually allow us to build enough houses. If you just take away the iron hand of government and say, build what people want to live in.

Yeah, and the regulations haven't made it better building quality, it's worse building quality because obviously our building inspection franchises are flat out. And I'd say building has gotten worse over the last 10 years. And in Victoria you've got the VBMI or whatever, and they're obviously— a lot of people say they're useless and the building standards have gone down with more regulation.

We are actually forbidden from using a lot of the best and most systems. The systems that are used overseas, like in Europe, they've got some very advanced systems, not allowed in Australia. So we actually enforce it. There's some wonderful developments going with transportable modular homes and so forth, the debate in factories and so forth.

People 3D printing houses with concreting now, all these sorts of things.

There's some amazing technological innovations. You can get actually better quality housing, better insulation, better for the environment, cheaper, more affordable. You can do these things. The government says, "No, stop it." We are very much in favor of shoddy, overpriced houses. That is our remit. Again, truth in advertising.

And the last one I'll ask you about with our political sort of segment is the fuel crisis. Obviously that's affected a lot of franchisees, that's really affecting a lot of small business owners and just people everywhere. What do you think about the government response and has this sort of exposed their lack of maybe planning or foresight or what would you say about that?

Oh, it's abysmal. The Chinese have got what, 4 months worth of 200 days?

And some— Japan's got it.

That's right. We've got nothing. Not only that, not only have we got no reserves, but we've gone out of our way to shut down the Australian industry. We could have all sorts of— we, we could do things like fracking. Yep. We could, we could have more oil wells, and Victoria is the worst state for that. We could have more supplies of fuel. We could have more refineries. The government stops it. The government prevents it. So the government has actually created this policy. The Americans aren't too worried about the whole thing because they produce so much of their own oil and gas and stuff. There's no reason why we can't do that as well. But this insane—

Good luck trying to be able to do that anywhere in Australia, fracking.

Green thinking where we say, okay, let's do all this stuff and stop producing oil and gas ourselves and we get it from the Middle East. How does that make the climate better?

And we're not even getting proper tax on the stuff we export anyway. You know, we're getting a raw deal on that.

So it's stupid policies. It's policies that make it difficult to produce it ourselves. I mean, which the Americans have done. Well, you know, their power price is about half ours, okay? They don't need to be. Power doesn't need to be so expensive. Petrol doesn't need to be so expensive. It's government regulations that are forcing it up. And if you want to make it expensive, then, heaven's sake, charge a carbon tax, which is a sensible form of ways of raising regulation. Don't just use all these regulations to actually force up the prices without anybody getting any sort of benefit from it.

And what about— what do you think about then? No, actually, this last one of this segment is the, um, the resources that we're exporting. I think David Pocock's been pretty good actually in, um, Canberra talking about this. I think we get a real raw deal on what gets exported from the ground which belongs to Australians in terms of gas, minerals, etc. Look at the Sovereign Wealth Fund in Norway, which is nearly a trillion dollars. More than $1 trillion, and that's all from their resources pretty much. It done a job. Ours is the Future Fund, which is like $100 billion, whereas we theoretically, we should probably $2 trillion, trillion and a half.

Yeah, we've had this massive surge of income from the minerals boom and so forth, and we've done very well with that coal and iron and everything else. We've got tremendous opportunities to do that. We've got a very big continent with very few people in it. My wife comes from Chongqing in China. There's more people in Chongqing city than there is in the whole of Australia. Yes, 30 million plus, yeah. Yeah, that's right. So we've got this vast continent with vast riches, but instead of actually taking the money and using it to build future security, we actually get more and more debt and makes it more and more vulnerable and impoverishes society.

Once again, that's the lobbyists and that's the corporate interest involved with politicians. As I said, Dominic Perrottet goes from being a premier to BHP International Relations. This is the thing, right?

It's very much in their interest to do so. And that's again, the the power of money, the problem with money. Too many people are representing the powerful, the already powerful and the already wealthy, and not enough people representing what is beneficial to ordinary Australians. Absolutely.

Now I wanna talk about birth rates. So obviously, Birth Rate book, you've gone right into it. You're working really hard on the birth rate crisis, which is the new book in the background there. Obviously, a lot of the incentives that have been thrown around the world are not helping at all. Now obviously there's cash incentives, people will say housing affordability. Every time you do a birth rate thing on your profiles, you get, "I want to have kids, but I can't afford it." "I want to have kids, but I can't afford housing." "I can't afford this, so how do you expect to have kids?" So basically, what would you sort of say to that sort of stuff?

First, the most obvious thing is people do say that. That's the majority response, is money. It depends on different areas too, actually. Places like Eastern Europe, for example, they really say that and they've got some reason. Because the economy is so bad. But the really interesting thing is no matter how much money you give people, they don't tend to have more children. Birth rates— bonuses, baby bonuses just don't have an effect. You would think they did. If you listen to people and said, "More money." Okay, give them money. Where's the babies? They just don't come. They tried that in Australia, Peter Costello.

They did a while ago, yeah, I remember, yeah.

And it just fractionally rose the birth rate just a little bit, bumped, and then went down to much, much lower than it was at the at the time. So it just doesn't work. But also, if you have a look at the polls, you ask people why they're not having children, they do actually put that element up there, but they also do other things too, which are very interesting. That's usually the main one, usually finance. Then they talk about things like, um, they want to travel. Okay, that's another thing. They want to spend on money. They want more leisure time. They're not interested in children. They don't like children. You get these responses coming up, and they're, and they are very, very strong and even growing all the time. What's really happening is not to do with money, it's to do with priorities. And you can see this very clearly, people just don't prioritize children and family as they used to. They're not as interested, they find them boring, and that's all got to do with the dopamine system. If you have a, if you have a brain which is constantly flooded with dopamine, and that can be from all kinds of things, it can be from luxury food, it can be from the excitement of society, it can be from social media, it can be from all kinds of things cause it, alcohol, lots of things. They flood the brain with dopamine, the brain becomes non-reactive to dopamine, which is what happens to a drug addict basically, it becomes less reactive. What that means is that there is a flow of dopamine from things like looking after children, but it's only a little one. And if your brain is demanding the big surges, that's boring. Children are boring. Family is boring. You know, sex with one partner is boring, so I want different people. That's it. So what we've got to do is to resensitize our brains to dopamine. That is the solution. We've got to have a solution that actually helps people to have a better attitude, which is inherently a happier form of life. Because drug addicts are not on the whole happy people. You don't get somebody to say, "Look, I'm on heroin and I'm having the best time of my life." It's not a common reaction, is it? They don't, they don't, they don't, because it makes them miserable. And our current lifestyle with this dopamine surges is making us miserable too. So we need to work out a way of cutting back on that, cutting down on all these surge activities. So we will find the everyday family, work, children more interesting, more engaging. I've actually been on a fast. I did a Lenten fast during, leading up to Easter, and I was eating less desserts, particularly sweet drinks and stuff. And I find my weight's dropped a little bit, but it's still within reasonable bounds. But I also find my mind is sharper. I find I'm more focused. I'm actually working on my book really more intensively and more, and I've got better ideas and so forth. And it feels good. It's a great feeling. I don't want to go back on— I'm going to try and stay away from the desserts for now and keep my weight down as well. 64 kilos because it's actually psychologically better. So what you've got to do with this kind of stuff is you've got to do things that feel less comfortable in the short term to feel much better overall. So you take— instead of getting a burst of happiness like that in one time and then you go down like that, you have— you avoid that, but then you lift your overall level of happiness and well-being. That's kind of the principle of how it works.

Well, it's interesting because the most of the top companies in the US are their basically main business is addiction. You've got Meta, who obviously lost that court case recently about the lady sued Meta about saying that she got too addicted to Instagram, for example, and had to pay her $8 million. And that's sort of like their smoking moment. You've got Apple, for example, device addiction. You've got all the top companies are actually, they're basically monetizing all their profits are from addicting society.

It's unbelievable how much damage it's done. I couldn't have predicted it.

Smartphones to kids as well.

My son's school has actually banned Good. Tablets. Phones during the day. And that's something that I actually spoke to them about. I spoke to the headmaster last year about it and they've now implemented it. I wasn't obviously the only person, but I didn't actually know because we gave Aaron a smartphone quite young. It's only recently I've started to realize how damaging that was. Yeah, we refused to do it.

So my wife, we give her phone sometimes to play with, but I've said no more. So no more screens, no nothing like that. And even just noticing the change, she's only not even 2 years old, like crying sometimes because she doesn't have the phone to play with, but we just made her go cold turkey and we've done that. And you're seeing Jonathan Haidt, a lot of these guys, the book you like, just the research is quite scary around kids with iPads and then parenting, just sitting and giving a kid an iPad at 6 years old or 5 years old, how it changes the brain.

Well, a product I got from my son's school actually, Since the phones were banned this year, kids are talking a lot more. They're actually quite clearly, there's more communication, more community going on in that school since they've done that. He says you can see the difference. Well, it's a digital pacifier, right?

You feel sorry for parents because they think the kid's crying at 3 or 4 and, "Oh, we need entertainment dinner," for example, then you give them an iPad. You can see it all the time, but the research on the actual brain development and what's happening to the brain is quite damaging. I think it's a lot more damaging than people think. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Keep your kids away. If I, I was ignorant, I really didn't, I wasn't aware. I would not have let my kids have screens at a young age if I had any understanding of how bad they were. And I was backward in that too. But the stuff I've been reading over the past couple of years really shows how terrible it is. Yeah, it's awful. It's, it's, it's social media, it's porn, it's, it's comparing yourself to people who are more— that, that actually has a bad effect. If you compare yourself on Instagram, you're looking at the pictures of people who better and happier than you, that has a really, really bad effect on you. Even the lifestyles, following these influencers with their, you know, wealth and looks and everything else, that has a really bad psychological effect. All these things are really damaging.

They are so bad. Absolutely. And maybe that court case which happened, which is a bit of a watershed moment for, for this sort of thing, because they actually, they are designed to literally addict you to the device, right? Instagram wants you to stay on Instagram.

I would like to think that this would have an impact. I am not optimistic about it because these companies are so rich. Oh, the tech lobby.

Yeah, the tech lobby in America is massive.

They have got so many trillions of dollars worth of assets and they're protecting— they will do everything they can to fight it. It doesn't matter what regulations you make, the power of money is such in our society that they'll get around it.

Absolutely. Now, where is your book at then? So like when you say you've got new ideas for it, are you coming up with new ideas to the actual— what you're proposing in solutions or where are you at with it?

No, the ideas are always the same. Basically, the idea is that the birth rate crisis shows what the problem is. They say it's not economy, basically, it's attitude. And then we talk about why that change has taken place. Why we now have, you know, like we're all quasi-drug addicts because our brains are so saturated by this dopamine surges, we've become less sensitive and so family and children and work become less interesting. So I'm showing that. Showing what people can do about it, which is how you can change your own lifestyle to treat, and also talking about different kinds of medications which are now being developed. Some of the weight loss drugs, for example, seem to have these effects. We're testing them. We've got labs going in China now. We've got some new experiments just starting up. We start the testing on a major scale. We've got dozens of potential drug candidates we're looking at. And we're also studying CRISPR, which is a way of going into the genome and changing, taking off some of these metal groups which are causing all these problems, right?

So let's say you develop a treatment. I want to know how you'd package this thing, right? So you go, here's a treatment, it's a tablet or whatever it is, all right? What would you, what would you actually say? Like, what would you say, take this and the benefits are going to be what, for example? I—

what you do is you, you'd have it, you'd have it approved for a specific condition. It could be something to do with depression because it should be effective. It could be helping weight loss. It could be for ADHD, anything, okay? Just find one use, and then what's going to happen? It'll go off-label, right? Like, for example, um, my daughter was telling me that one of her friends has taken one of these weight loss drugs and, um, she stopped smoking.

The GLP? Yeah, yeah, that's right.

So, so, um, now she's got a problem because she can't take more of the weight loss drugs because she's lost enough weight. Yeah. But she says just because she's done it and the weight's gone off, she's now able to keep off cigarettes. That's the kind of thing that's going to happen. And it's the same thing what happened with the weight loss drugs. They were all originally intended for diabetes and they're effective for diabetes. And then people noticed they were losing weight, so they started to say, okay, now they start to expand it to lose weight. And then people are starting to see other benefits like for addiction and so forth and smoking and alcohol and these kind of things. So people are using them off-label and eventually, of course, the regulators will catch up and they'll be able to prescribe it. And as time goes on and they get more effective treatments, that's the kind of model I see.

Would the model be like, so for example, all right, I'm an alcoholic, right? So I want to get off alcohol, right? Yeah. I've tried the program, for example. Would your treatment be something that's custom designed or how would How would that person be affected?

Well, it wouldn't need to be custom designed because it always has the same effect. If you have anything that has this kind of effect, produces this change, it's like the effect of fasting or restraint from sexual activity or coming off drugs or anything else. What you're doing is reducing the— making your brain more sensitive to dopamine so that you don't need the powerful surges but you're happy with the trickle, the ebb and flow that comes from everyday life, you know, family and so forth, family, friends, that kind of thing, work. So basically, that's kind of what you do. All you've got to do is to establish something that works for some area, and it'll go off-label very fast. That's the nature of modern society. Right.

Now, in regards to the birth rates then, so how would you then— obviously this would have an effect with people wanting maybe a family with kids, how would it then be packaged up in relation to that? How do you see it helping the birth rate issue?

You wouldn't need to because what's going to happen is that people are going to start taking it and eventually you're going to find kids are going on it because they find that if they're on this stuff, they grow up to be smarter, more hardworking, more disciplined, they get better jobs. I mean, what parent's not going to want that for their kids? Once it's been shown that this really, really works, like Ritalin for example, they give it to kids and it causes terrible effects. And there really are some very dangerous things. And they reckon when they've grown up, they're actually worse off. But if you can produce something that actually showed that it was good for kids, and you gave some kids, for ADHD, for example, which it should be effective because it makes them more focused and more hardworking. And it works for that. And then suddenly these kids which were struggling now become achievers. And they're some of the best kids in the class. The other parents are going to look at that and say, "Wow, I'm going to get my kid onto that." because they see the effects. Now, interesting thing about if you do that at any sort of scale, when these kids grow up, they're gonna say, not only are they gonna be good at working and so forth, but they're gonna say, "Hey, I wanna get married and I wanna have kids 'cause I really want to do that." You wouldn't need to do anything specific.

[Speaker:JOSH] Right, okay, so that's gonna be the effect of it as well from that. So for example, Japan and obviously South Korea at crisis points, 2.7 births per woman, they're pretty much disappearing, right? So for example, you know, the government, for example, could trial this or they could implement it and then obviously trial it over a certain amount of years and then obviously that would—

You wouldn't need to use heavy-handed government methods to do it. All you need to do is to actually do the research, which is not that expensive actually. I mean, they're spending so much on these drug things, but they're very lucrative too. So this kind of thing would pay for itself. Though it'd be nice if governments could could subsidise it to make it affordable because it has so many benefits for society in terms of improved mental health and, you know, reduced death from addiction and all the kind of— So yeah, that's kind of— all the government has to do is to get out of the way and give a little bit of subtle support and people will do it because fundamentally this kind of attitude where you have a more active dopamine system, it's happier, it's a happier life. I've got a great life because I have a very strong sense of this type of personality. First of all, I've been successful, far more than anybody else in my family. I've also got a wonderfully happy marriage. I've got wonderful kids that I get on well with. And I'm a very happy, fit person. I'm very healthy in old age, very vigorous. This is all benefits from this stuff. This way of living is very is very beneficial, it's good for you. And once people start doing this and learning it, you don't have to do anything. You just have to get out of the way and let the people rush in and take it. And society will mend itself very quickly.

Yeah, because you're ultra-disciplined as well, so that would make obviously people really ultra-disciplined, you know, to resist this, resist that, and that's the thing.

I can, I can. I don't have a tendency. I've always managed to control my weight. I just can. I can exercise regularly.

You don't miss. You don't miss.

You do Weightlifting. I do half an hour on the treadmill. I lift weights for about 10 minutes and stuff. I just do that kind of stuff every day. I have a cold shower to follow, which is good too, because you need to toughen your body. And I feel really, really good. I feel great. And I still feel great. And with the fasting and stuff, which has emphasized this a little bit— I was getting a bit slack beforehand, but with this fasting thing, I've actually found I'm even better. I did a fantastic day of work yesterday. I was working on my book and I've just got so much done. I've got so many So much progress, so many new ideas and better references. And I'm using ChatGPT, which is fantastic, which is really good. So it's kind of, it's exciting, it's wonderful. And my life is very full of meaning, a sense of purpose that I have.

Because the way I see this, it's good. Well, I see this is like, you know, everyone wants to be more disciplined, right? Yeah. But when it gets, times get tough, it's easy to revert back to your old ways and you can get that thing. So I think for me, I'll go to like the the discipline pill. What you're sort of developing in a way, the discipline pill, not only will it make you disciplined in this area, it will make you disciplined in this area, this area, this area, and ultimately lead you on to have married, have kids, and that's obviously going to help reverse the birth rates.

That'll be a byproduct. I mean, look, the problem you could easily get to once this thing becomes widespread enough is that you might have real problems with overpopulation again. And it's not out of the question. If you solved these issues, if you did something to people that was equivalent to, say, the effect of the Great Depression— because what the Great Depression did by the kids who went through it in late childhood, actually the parents, the baby boom, and they were having 3 or 4 children per family. Now, if you actually made this work, you'd have the opposite problem. Instead of having too few children, you're going to have too many. It'd be very easy to get overpopulation happening.

So where's your development of this actually? At? Obviously you're trialling a heap of different things. Like, where's it at? Like, how far is it off, or where's it sort of at?

The actual treatment? Look, what we're doing is we've got a lab in China at the moment. We've got two labs in China doing experiments for us. One of them is to do with food restriction, different ages and stuff. And the other is to do with— they're testing one of the drugs, which is actually one of the weight loss ones. Right. So to look for effects on maternal behaviour and so forth. If it works well, We can test it. We've tested about 1,000 drugs and we've got a shortlist of, you know, 20 or so that look very promising that we know they're not going to form— they're not toxic. So there's potential, a list of drugs that we can try. Then we start testing on animals, knowing already that they're not going to harm them, but see whether we have the effects that we want. So we're going to try that And we can go and get another 1,000 drugs and we can test those. It's actually not that expensive to actually test a drug. Probably it's gonna cost us about $50,000 per drug. Right. Something of that nature. And with mass, we could probably do a lot more. And then what about human trials?

Well, that's what you do.

You test them on animals very thoroughly. Yeah. And basically we test them on rats and mice, those kinds of animals, which have very similar to humans actually. People think they're different, but they're not. The genes are extraordinarily conserved. All these things we're talking about, this is all to do with the limbic system. It's very much the same process. So we test them on animals, and then we get some good results, and then we start testing them on drug addiction, probably one of the best.

Right, okay. And then, you know, and this sounds promising. Is this the most promising it's ever been in your research? Because you've been on for many many years. Oh yes, most exciting time. Uh, Terry, Terry McCann, Professor McCann, who's running my research at Trobe.

Yeah, Trobe. He's, he's a, he's brilliant. He's actually great. He's run large research projects in the past. He's, he's a very skilled manager. He's good at keeping costs under control. Um, he's made his contacts in China and so forth. He's just a great guy. Uh, we— this is the best progress so far. We've actually got this system that he's developed, that he's using of actually trialling different kinds of drugs with human brain cells in these little capsules about that size is amazing. And that's— you can take 1,000 drugs and you can test it quite quickly and simply, look for the promising ones, do further tests on those, try them on animals. It's a very good process. The other thing too that's really exciting is we've started the CRISPR study. So we've got some very top people, and this is in Australia. We're not taking that overseas. This is staying in Australia. This is really advanced told you, you've got one of the best people in the country working on this. And that's about a 2-year project. You've been going a few months now. So we're looking at going— right, basically what we're doing is we're trying to make an epigenetic change to the epigenome. Basically, what happens is when you have these malign influences, certain genes become methylated, which means that they stop functioning properly. The proteins that are supposed to, like the messenger RNA stops coming out. So what you've got to do, a drug will actually go in and they'll take off some of these methylation. That's kind of like the way it would work. But if you could actually use CRISPR, you could actually go to the gene directly and say, strip them all off. So you get the effect, for example, of early childhood experience, which is, you know, much more powerful. That's the real exciting part. So you could actually have a treatment that you could go to somebody who's a, completely undisciplined drug addicts, basically heading for an early grave, and you give them a treatment and they come out of it and they become different. They're hardworking, they're good employees, they find a partner, they settle down, they get married, they're great parents, start going to church maybe, whatever, or whatever their religious denomination is. Their life turns around. This could happen, this could happen like overnight almost. A total change of character, undoing a lot of the bad things of the past, even the things that came from their parents and grandparents, because these effects go down generations.

Yeah, that's what I want to break down for people, because so basically someone could have a traumatic childhood or whatever, and then obviously that does something to the genes and switches something on. You could go in with CRISPR and you could reverse that as though it never ever happened. Yes.

Right, you could. You could change—

That would solve a lot of problems. That would solve a lot of problems for people.

It would change the world in an unimaginably great way.

Now, are you the only person who's come up with this sort of study, or is there other people doing this? Because it sounds quite— for me, it sounds quite logical, right? You know, a lot of people— trauma is a big problem. A lot of people you see in the street, you know, you probably could trace it back to some sort of— they've had a really bad childhood or something like that, and if they didn't have that, they would have gone this way instead of that way, right? Is there other people doing this sort of thing? Not really. Does that surprise you? Because I think it's quite logical for me looking at my perspective.

It's very obvious when you understand it, but the thing about it is too, it brings together some very different kinds of fields. For example, you're talking about history and the effect of history, you're talking about economics, you're talking about you're talking about psychology. There's a whole lot of different disparate fields that actually come together and people don't put them together. There's all these pieces. And neuroscientists understand dopamine reaction quite well. They know a lot about it, but they've never thought of applying it to the birth rate, which is basically a social issue. It just doesn't— people just don't think in cross-discipline categories. That's the problem. It's not even complicated. It's quite obviously simple. I think when this book comes out, people are going to read it and say, well, yeah. I mean, they might object to it. They will. In various ways. They're not going to be happy with it. They say, "Oh no, it's all about economics. I don't believe you," this kind of stuff.

That's what will probably happen, yeah.

But it doesn't require most people to accept it. It just requires a minority to look at it and say, "Why?" But people are starting to understand it. There's this thing of dopamine fasting, okay? Yes, yes. Where people deliberately do things like reduce their diet and they find focus and so forth. And it does work. It really does work. If you want to focus more, then avoid dopamine. The only thing, they do stupid things. First of all, they can— they can do too much on the diet, which means you cause malnutrition, especially muscle loss. So you've got to be very careful about that. But the other thing too is they do things that I think are very negative, like they avoid social interaction. Now, social interaction, close social interaction with close friends, unlike the rave parties, but close is good. That's good stuff. So they make mistakes in the way they apply it. But the principle of dopamine fasting is basically quite correct and it will have beneficial effects, and it does. What I did with my fast last month, that's basically what I was doing. I was actually reducing the dopamine, so I wasn't having desserts, which gives you a spike like that.

There is a bit of a trend in America where you've got some podcasters in the health space who are talking a little bit about this, not to the extent you are, but they are actually talking about dopamine fasting and all that sort of stuff. And Brian Johnson, for example, the guy who wants to Lifter 140, right? He was saying, you know, the 7— done like a 7-day detox from social media and all that sort of stuff, reporting on the benefits. So they are— they are—

look, it's coming about. People are understanding it. They haven't connected it to the birth rate crisis at the present time. That's, that's still to come. But it doesn't take much. You don't even have to directly attack the birth rate crisis. You just have to look at things like addiction. You have to look at things like ADHD. You have to look at things like depression. And if you've got a treatment that actually handles any of those really effectively and properly and well, it'll spread and the birth rate crisis will solve itself.

What's CRISPR being used at the moment? So obviously CRISPR's technology you've mentioned for a while now and it's been around for a while. What are they using it for at the moment? Are they using it for cancer treatments or what is it being used for?

Yes, they use it for that kind of thing too. What they do with CRISPR now is they use it genetically. They make a genetic change. They actually go into the genome and they snip at a particular place and they cut it. Or they insert something in because they can target. And they can be very good at that. What they haven't been using it for, to my knowledge, though it's very much not very much talked about, is epigenetics, where you go and instead of changing the gene itself, you change the way it's expressed. You take off the methylation, the methyl groups that actually— they're like plugs. If you can think of a gene as having a sort of like a lot of different taps, with a little spitting out of protein. And these male effects, they plug them up. You've got to unplug them. It's like you've got a plumber to fix your drains. That's what you're doing, but on a cellular level. So it hasn't been thought of. I don't know why it hasn't been thought of. But like I said, it's because these things are— everybody knows about this. There's nothing mysterious really. I mean, they're still finding out more about how dopamine works and dopamine reaction works. But they're very advanced. It's just, here's all these bits of information over there. They're all very specialized in what they're doing. Put them together and have a picture of the whole thing and then understand what's going on.

Yeah, it's interesting that people wouldn't, 'cause issues aren't simple, they're complex, right? And you've got multidisciplinary fields, so it just makes sense that they would have some cross-pollination across them.

There is a problem with, ideology in this. Now, give you an example. In the past, way back a few centuries ago, everybody thought that the Earth was the center of the universe and the sun went around the Earth, okay? And then Copernicus gets up and says, no, no, this is not a very good system. I reckon it's better if you put the sun at the center because it's more simple. You don't have these Ptolemaic circles to try and explain the planets. And then Galileo says, I agree with that. And the Inquisition said to him, no, you cannot say say that, shut up or we'll burn you at the stake. So he's, oh, all right, all right, shut up, I'll shut up, okay. He's supposed to have muttered after he came out of recanting, but it still moves. It's probably apocryphal. The point of it is, and then after it got around a bit and they started really observing these things and seeing all kinds of stuff going on, well, maybe these guys were right in the first place. But the trouble was there was an ideology that says that the Earth is the center of the universe. And it took people a while to get out of that mindset, to change their minds. Well, we've got a, a current ideology right now which is very fixed, and it basically says people are the same. So if there's a change, it's because governments change, economy, these vast institutional forces, they're the ones that change. And that is very ingrained. That's why, with very few exceptions, people deal with the birth rate crisis, they look at things like monetary incentives, The only person who has much value, people like Vladimir Putin, he says you need more traditional thinking, religion, which he's been quite ineffectual at doing, but at least he understands the kind of problem. It's a character problem. So people have this fixed view, we are the same, people don't change, but so you've got to fiddle with the laws and the regulations. Now, the trouble is that's just not true. People do change, and early life experience has a big, big impact on not just on your thinking, but basically very deep into the biochemistry of your body and how it operates and how it reacts to dope and these kind of things. So it's difficult because even though people don't say it, they have this concept, you just have the right laws and society will work perfectly. It's just wrong. It's completely wrong. And that's the fundamental ideological blinder that people have in their minds. Until they understand that character changes and that character can change and there's ways of changing it, we're not going to have a solution.

The amazing thing is that there's so many case studies around the world where they've been observing this effect of money and all these incentives and it just doesn't work. And it's amazing that governments just keep all doing the same thing. And they look at all these signs.

You'd think there's enough signs. For example, you see things like levels of testosterone testosterone falling. Yeah. Okay. Levels of male fertility, sperm counts falling. You can see these things happening. There's a lot of things going on that are deeply theological. But there's still this fixed ideology. We do not change. We're all the same. We're exactly the same as we were 200 years ago. We're exactly the same as we were 10,000 years ago. We do not change. Society changes. When you understand that people do change, that character changes, and it changes at the level of the epigenome, very deep, right in the limbic system. This is a part of the brain that we share with rats and mice and even fish, for heaven's sake, okay? It's very highly conserved. That's what matters, not the neocortex, not the stuff about language and beliefs and stuff. It's the emotional inner brain. It's called the mammalian cortex. It's deep inside the brain, the amygdala, the hippocampus, all those kinds of areas. They're right in the middle of it. That's what we're gonna look at. And that has an enormous effect on what we do and what we believe and how we act and how we treat and how many children we want, all this kind of stuff too. The point about all this is too, I don't have to convince people on the whole that this is the case. What I have to do is to convince enough people to look at it and say, wow, okay, Maybe this, this, this, this, this raving Penman guy's worth taking at his word and trying some of this stuff. And just putting a little bit of, you know, a fraction of a percent of what we're spending on trying to pump up birth rates into basic scientific research in these kinds of areas. That's all it takes. And as soon as you get something that works, I don't care what people believe now, they might say character doesn't change, but if you show them a treatment that will make them happier and more hardworking and better parents and better members of the community and having fun in life and meaningful life, people will want it. They will want it. You don't have to convince them in the beginning that character can change as long as you can show them how we can do that process for them. And people will take this stuff.

Yeah, it's going to be interesting because obviously the book will come out hopefully this year. And I think it's going to be—

it's planned for October, by the way. October.

Yeah, there's going to be a big push around it. And I think, you know, hopefully we can get you on some big podcasts and things to talk about this. Because I think I've seen a lot of the American podcasts which are really big in this, they have this stuff, they talk about it occasionally, right? But I think there's no one talking about it in the way that you are. I think that's the thing. Everyone's economic or— I know some people do say loss of religion and things like that, which you do hear occasionally, but you don't hear the dopamine, you don't hear anything of that.

Basically, but they see the loss of religion as a causal factor. Correct. But in fact, it's also an effect. But it's all based on the— one of the things that I've found is since I've been having this fast, and it's only a minor change to my life, but I actually am more spiritual, more disciplined. It's just a feeling. I recognize the feeling, actually. I'm looking forward to trying some of this weight loss stuff to see if I can, without— don't want to lose too much weight, obviously.

You're pretty light as it is, 63 kilos or what are you telling me? 64.

So I don't want to lose weight, but I'd like to see if it has the same kind of effect psychologically, because I know what it feels like when you're fasting or this kind of thing. So, look, I'm optimistic, I really am. I think people are ready to listen. I think this could— it's amazing to say it, but it could change the world. It could change the whole course of human history once we understand this. We've got the technology, all the pieces are in place. it's like you've got a jigsaw puzzle and all the pieces are scattered around all over the place. All you've got to do is to put them together and to form a picture.

I think the number you quoted to me when we've done this before was 200 million or something like that would be what you'd be looking at to really just get this thing—

Well, to do the basic research and get enough drugs together, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look, drug trials, human drug trials, taste, taste, to get them— Years, yeah. They take a lot of time, they take a lot of money to actually get these things done. But the point of it is, once you've got really promising treatments out there, private money is going to pour into this thing. Because I mean, you know, like these, this, what, Merck or whatever it is, become one of the most valuable companies in Europe just because of—

Monjaro and all those sorts of things, yeah.

Weight loss drugs. So once— the only thing I fear actually is that by letting private companies take the lead in it, you're going to make it unaffordable, which a lot of the weight loss drugs are right now. A lot of people can't afford them.

Yeah, and people are going to getting stuff done dodgily made up by other chemists and all that sort of stuff.

I have an issue with that. I would— I would—

look, do you think they'd be for it? Because wouldn't— wouldn't Big Pharma be against this? Because a lot of the stuff— they probably have drugs for all these other things. Wouldn't it put a lot of those out of business?

Well, hang on a bit. What do you think of the value of a substance whose potential market— well, I could charge what they want— is every man, woman, and child on the planet? True. That's right. I mean, it would dwarf weight loss drugs. It would be bigger than anything. Who wouldn't want— now, not everybody would want it because there will be some side effects. It might reduce libido, for example. Right. It might make you a bit less outgoing, social. It does seem to have these kinds of areas. But in general, if you've got something that makes you more successful, more disciplined, better family member, happier— I mean, who wouldn't want it?

Sounds like a Jim's Mining franchise. But yes, we could definitely, I could definitely see a lot of people wanting that as well. And I think, yeah, you're right, there would be a big company very interested in because you're right, the market for this would be pretty much everyone, as you're saying, right? There wouldn't be no one who could use this sort of stuff.

And the point of it is too, once you develop it, you can always improve it too. Yeah, there's different levels too. There's levels to do with the There's different effects. There's all kinds of other things too. It's not just the dopamine thing. There's other things to do with intermittent stresses and the effect they have on the body. There's a sort of resilience factor. If you're subjected to too much stress, it's very harmful. If you're subjected to too little stress, it's very harmful. If you have moderate levels of stress repeated, it actually has a very beneficial effect on character. That's another thing, it's a different kind of level of effect, but that also people would be interested in because that has an effect on mood and character. Can make people very aggressive if you do it wrong, but still. So there's an almost infinite capacity for developing treatments in these things. And you look at everything, look at what goes wrong, look at the— okay, let me give you another example. You've got kids like in Romania, who I brought up in these orphanages. Because the government had this stupid policy where they actually shut down abortion and stuff, and you had all these huge numbers of unwanted kids were put in institutions with very little affection. And they are really, really damaged. They're so damaged that most of them cannot live and function in a normal society. They are just so bad. Now this is an epigenetic effect. If you could understand what the effect was, You simply develop, you work out which genes are being turned on and which genes are being turned off that shouldn't be. You develop pre-specified epigenetic changes and you go in and you give so many injections, suddenly one of these kids who are completely incapable of living in modern society becomes a happy, hardworking, disciplined, good relationship human being. There's no reason at all, 'cause these are epigenetic effects. If you can change one epigenetic effect, you can change anything.

Absolutely. It's very exciting. I think it'd be used by a lot of people. I think just the trauma thing alone, um, yeah, with what you're saying would be quite beneficial. But Jim, thank you very much for your time today as well. If you've listened to this, make sure you leave a comment, subscribe, you know, check out Jim's Substack as well. And you can also chat with Jim AI. This will be in there, so you can get all this content in there and have a, have a chat with Jim as well. So thank you very much for your time today.