Why Jim Penman thinks politicians need real life experience, his dopamine fast plus more!

So welcome back to Jim's personal newsletter for 2026, which is April. It's a video newsletter as well. So make sure you check out Jim on Substack as well and you get this every single month. So the first item there you had, Jim, was about fasting. So do you want to tell us about fasting and then why do you do it?

Yeah, I did Lenten fast, which is basically traditional fast of Christianity, Western Christianity. And I didn't have any— for just over a month, I didn't have any sweet foods, sweet drinks, or fried food like chips and stuff like that. It was great. It was really good. I lost a few kilos.

Like you needed to.

Well, no, I'm now at about 21.5 BMI, which is good, and I feel a bit, you know, slimmer and healthier and trimmer. But I think the main thing is psychological. Since I've done that, I've just had a lot more energy and self-discipline. I've been working very long hours on my book, you know, sometimes until late at night. First thing in the morning, get up at 6 o'clock and just getting incredible progress, great ideas. I just seem to be able to do things better. So it's that focusing of mind that's the main advantage.

Is it because you're sort of training yourself, like you want that temptation of that sweet thing or whatever it is, but you're telling yourself no and it builds that muscle in your head? Or what's the— why is that the case?

Well, maybe it's a matter of practice, but I think actually the way I look at it is to do with dopamine sensitivity. If you avoid things that put surges of dopamine into your brain, like nice food and stuff and other things like sex and stuff, which I don't do a lot of these days, and then focus on family, work, those kinds of things, it actually makes your brain more sensitive to dopamine, which means it's easier to do routine stuff because they're more interesting. The little trickle you get from doing that kind of stuff is very satisfying. So it's the whole principle of dopamine fasting, which isn't a sect, what I do. I try to keep the dopamine surges to an absolute minimum and just the work, relationships, family, those kind of things, keep them coming through. And it's amazing, it's wonderful. I'm actually basically doing it full-time. I mean, since I've stopped the fast, I've only had about a hot cross bun and one chocolate egg and I really haven't had anything else. I'm just keeping it.

I think you've started a bit of a trend there, dopamine fasting. I can see all the American health YouTubers and stuff start— so dopamine fasting.

Well, dopamine fasting is a big thing. It really is. A lot of people are doing that these days, but I think they make mistakes. First of all, you can't take it too far. Dopamine fasting is okay to the extent that you're a healthy weight, but they take it too far. The other thing sometimes what people do is they stop relationships, and that's the worst thing to do. Relationships are very good for you. They're really good for you every possible way, and they don't produce surges. I mean, things like wild parties and stuff, yes, absolutely. But close talking with friendships, family, that kind of thing, that's the best thing to keep your brain healthy.

Dopamine fasting, that's something I think we're going to see a lot more of. Yeah, but I think it's a mainstream— I think it's something where you're ahead of the curve a bit because I think a lot of American big health influencers, they talk a lot about this stuff and they're sort of saying it, but I've never heard it said as dopamine fasting, so I can see that sort of catching on.

Well, dopamine, it is a term that's used. If you look it up, people talk about dopamine fasting. There's a lot of negative about it. But as I said, part of the problem is that they take it too far. You can't stop, take your food below the level which is healthy, which I don't. That's why I watch my BMI. I weigh 64 kilos in the morning, that's what I do. But also you've really got to focus on the good stuff, the relationships, and that's where people make a mistake.

Right. The next one here you've got on happiness. So obviously happiness is a big passion of yours as well. So you've got a topic here on that. Do you want to talk about that?

Yeah, well, that's basically what I have been doing. It's got to do with avoiding the surge activities, the things that surge dopamine, and do the things that produce that little trickle that satisfies you. Work is one, family, relationships, exercise is another good one. I do a lot of things like gardening. I spend several hours a week gardening, which I find very satisfying. It's very simple routine work, but it's in nature, outside, contact with the green stuff and everything. Anything else. Happiness is really— people don't understand the technology of it. They think it's all to do with if I have more money, if I have a bigger car, better car, big, bigger house, more expensive holidays, if I look good to my friends, if I can post things to show how good I am. All this sort of stuff actually is pushing dopamine. It's the dopamine surges. You've got to avoid that. As far as possible, we try and keep ourselves from getting too egotistical, which is not easy because we will proud.

But I think a great example of this is Jeff Bezos. You know, you look at this guy and how he's trying reinventing himself. He's got the trophy wife now, and he's always seems— he was always trying to buy the biggest superyacht, and he's obviously behind Musk all the time with Blue Origin. You can tell that really annoys him. Yeah, so you can see this man is a multi-billionaire, but you can definitely tell he's not— he's, he's, he's, um, buying these things and thinking he's trying to—

the worst thing is to try and compare yourself with others in any way. I do not compare myself with others. People who are richer than me, I don't care. That's not the point at all. Am I using my own talents in the best way I can to serve, you know, God's purpose in my life? That's fundamentally the idea. You do not compare yourself. Everything where you put yourself online to say how good you are in a social media post, that's bad. If you're looking at somebody else's post and saying, oh wow, they look so happy, they look so good-looking, they're so whatever, so successful, I want to be like them, that's That's a negative thing. It's good to have your own internal standards. Of course you want to improve yourself, but you should not compare yourself with others. Social comparison is the thief of joy. It's what Teddy Roosevelt said.

Yeah, yeah. Now that's a big one, because I just think with Bezos, with what he's doing, you can tell he's doing all these different things, and you think, geez, a man with that much wealth and stuff, he's trying to still impress others and show off and do all these things.

It doesn't help. And these people are not happy. You know, I know I was fairly close to somebody who's a billionaire and not a happy person at all. Lonely, isolated. You look at someone like Warren Buffett. He's a guy who's been phenomenally successful, but he's also very down-to-earth, ordinary sort of man. He lives in the same house he's lived in for decades. He's got very intense, close friendships. He's very interconnected. He's just a really decent, ethical guy. Now he's insanely rich as well, but then he's giving his money away. I admire people like him and Charlie Munger and others like that. You can be rich and you can do very well, and you can be rich and you can be a real scumbag. Absolutely.

Next one here you had is Birthrate Crisis. Birthrate Crisis is obviously what you're working on. Do you want to talk about that?

Well, it's going well. We expect to have the book out in October. In fact, Andrea and I are working on the draft back and forth right now. She's sort of becoming a co-author because I've got the ideas, but Andrea is fantastic at explaining the way people think. So she's actually helping me to say, "If I say it this way, people will take that kind of attitude," or, "This will come across as arrogant," or, "This will come across as insensitive." Now she's a woman who's actually experienced. She comes from a big family and she knows how good it is to be in a big family. She's also a mother. She's got 3 children, would like to have a 4th. Got a good relationship, steady churchgoer and so forth. So she's got a very good voice and she's just a fantastic communicator. So I'm actually putting her on as a co-author.

Great. Yes, that's going to be good because there's a lot of push with that. There's a lot of content we're doing already with that. If you follow Jim online, you'll see a lot of that sort of stuff. So looking forward to that one as well. I think it's going to be quite a unique angle for you to promote— not for promotion, but like with Jim, you know, Jim's got the solution for the birth rate crisis, right? So I can see it on the Today Show and Tonight Show because It's something where a lot of people listen to podcasts, American podcasts, they're slowly bringing this topic up a lot and I think the timing will be very much right in October because no one else has a solution for it. Everyone's saying money, money, money, money and everyone's just saying, oh, you know, it just keeps going down. Obviously Musk is really involved in this as well.

We have got a solution. It's going well too. We've got 2 labs set up in China doing research for us. So we're doing work in Australia with CRISPR and with nerve cells and so forth and screening drugs and then we've got these Chinese labs that are helping us with that. It's very good at these kind of things.

Next one here you've got is using AI. So you started using ChatGPT, even though I've been telling for 2 years, I teach it in training for 2 years here at AI. So you started finally using it?

I just started using it just in the past few weeks and it's absolutely phenomenal. And what I use it for, I'm using it in my book. I'm actually in this, I've got Birthrate Crisis, which is the popular book, but there's this other book that's more academic.

Biohistory, yeah.

Biohistory, and I'm rewriting that very thoroughly, going through, right through, putting good references in. Andrea's gonna help me with that too. It's gonna take part of a year to get all that done. It's very, very complicated. And it's amazing, I'm actually getting lots of advancement. I'm actually working things out as I go, and I'm putting things in. It's a very big advance over the previous book. Even just in the last few days, I figured out things about the causes of war which I didn't really understand. Right. So it's great. And ChatGPT is fantastic because what I do is I'm going through, I'm looking at the references and I can find very good reference most of the time. But sometimes when I look up references in detail, it actually shows me that what I was saying was wrong. So I'm changing certain things too at the same time as a result of finding out more stuff. And I can progress so fast. I'm doing about, it's about 33 chapters. I'm doing about a chapter a day.

Wow. It's great. Yeah. It's a good tool. It's a very good tool. Yeah. For those who don't know, we actually teach it in training here. So we have ChatGPT and Claude, we talk about for new franchisees. The actual practicality for franchisees using it's really good too. Obviously emails, quotes, taking photos, uploading it, getting a pot plant out into the corner for Mrs. Jones. So it's been a really good tool for us as well.

I'm a total fan. It's just amazing what it can do.

Absolutely. It's only gonna get better. So the worst it's ever gonna be is right now. And that's the thing.

One of the things I've just discovered from, I've got a, there's in biohistory, this thing called Lemming Cycles, which is like Chinese dynastic cycles or, you know, responsible for things like the First World War, the Black Death. It does a lot of different things. Now what I've actually been able to work out from the, it's like having a really fantastic research assistant. And one thing I really didn't figure out before is generation length. So I've worked out the average generation length in human Lemming cycles, and it's around about sort of 11, 12 generations.

Right.

ChatGPT told me that. Well, that's very similar to muskrats actually. They're on a very crude estimate, they're about 8 generations. So this is just something that's come up in the past week. I've been able to really see this. Here's a comparison. Yeah. Muskrats and humans cycle at about the same frequency. I didn't know that until this last week, but ChatGPT has been—

Well, you could even ask it and say, you know, build me an interactive webpage showing that concept and it'll build it for you and you can mess around with graphs and stuff. There's a whole, there's so many things you can do with it. So I'm glad to hear you're using it as well. Jimbo. Now, Jimbo is the custom— is our app for our franchisees to obviously help them manage clients, etc. Gets rave reviews from a lot of the guys I interview and girls who use it. So, what's going on with Jimbo?

Jimbo is getting close to the stage where it's general release. About 1,000 franchises are using it and as you say, we're getting great response. But the real, real great thing about Jimbo, it's going to make an absolute breakthrough. First of all, there's a whole lot of features that actually improve customer service. For example, if you're using Jimbo and you don't make a call within half an hour, I yell at you.

We've got a video where we went to a franchisee on a job and this wasn't planned and she had that happen. I heard your voice and I go, "Where's Jim?" And the actual alarm come up. We've got this on camera, which we'll put online.

So there's that to remind franchisees they're not doing it. Down the track a bit, we'll have other things to remind a franchisee if they haven't turned up. It'll give us some feedback, not as a formal complaint, just let us know, hey, coach the franchisees, so we can help them. I think that alone will halve the number of complaints because most complaints are time-related or communication-related. Simple things like when you can't get through, you press a button, it sends a message to the client. But even just as exciting as that, and that alone is probably going to be worth, you know, an extra 10-20% worth of leads coming through the system for the same advertising. But even more than that, What we're going to be able to do is to book jobs straight into the diary. And what we have more and more problem with these days is we can't reach clients. You're ringing them back. I hear that again and again and again. Okay, very shortly a franchisee will be able to opt if they wish to have a quote booked into their diary. This is to tell you how much time you've got, where you're going to be approximately, and it'll give the client a time. So when a client rings up, instead of being sold, somebody will ring you back 'Would you be home between 2 and 4 this afternoon?' Now, if we can get that working, we might even be able to book a job in it, something like driving school where you can just book it straight away. What you'll do is dramatically improve conversion rate. You'll have better quality leads, better service to clients, less work to franchisees turning more leads into jobs. And another thing too is what's called marketplace. And we have a problem with franchisees who They build their business over a wide-ish area and then they get busy with regular clients and they stop actually taking work, which is really sad because they're not improving what they do. So what Marketplace will allow us franchisees to do, if they wish, is to put the outlying jobs on the market and then somebody comes in, it could be a new franchisee just coming on, the franchisor buys it, could be somebody's territory, right? They come in, They buy those jobs, the franchisee gets an infusion of cash, pays off a couple of months fees maybe, then they start taking work close to home and they do it again. So instead of working there, they work less and less and less travel, and as they work less travel, their costs go down and their income goes up, and then they end up eventually with the business which is just in their territory. They do several jobs in one street, several in the next. That process could be fantastic. It'll It'll increase franchisees' income. And I think it'll also reduce attrition because people can see the point. Hey, let's stay long-term with Jim's because every month that goes by, my business becomes more and more lucrative. And the longer I stay, the more lucrative it is. And if in the end I want to get out, I've got this really tight business that's so, so lucrative to run that I can put workers on, I can make even more money per hour. And if I do want to sell it, Well, I've got a fantastically valuable product. That's huge in terms of something that I want. So these changes, which is technology-based, which really won't cost franchisees a cent, will actually dramatically, should dramatically improve their income.

Yeah, and that's not too far away. I was speaking to Safi actually the other day. I think he's gonna show it at the next meeting, but yeah, 'cause you went over the screen with him and the great thing as well for franchisors, there's lots of running around, you know, texting guys, you've got clients to sell, there's a lot of, inefficient stuff going on for this to make happen. So, a franchisor, rather than doing that, can just go in and basically select what they need to do and away they go.

And everybody who sells a client, they—

Rating.

They get a rating on the sale. So, what I was talking about last night, talked about the other night and asked Jim Penman, is that I can sell my poor clients. And he said, "No, you don't do that." If you got clients that are too low in price, you put the prices up and you take more jobs and price them out. If you want to sell your clients, you have good, steady, regular, well-priced jobs. Get yourself a high rating, and that way the next time you come to sell some clients, you can get the best possible price for it.

That's, that's it.

We're going to hold the money for 45 days, so there's, there's a defense against somebody putting dodgy jobs out. Yeah, but that would be—

but if you get a poor rating, you know, no one's going to buy your clients moving forward.

So you've got to make sure you start off by making a fairly cheap offer. The other thing too is, and this is something that quite distresses me, you get a franchisee who wants to leave or, you know, just can't keep working for it. Then they have to go overseas for 6 months, like sometimes Indians have to go back home, okay. They lose their client base. Now in this situation, what they can do is they could put their clients on the market and sell them and get the cash, and we don't take any percentage from this. And then when they come back or if they want to rejoin us, they just go and buy some more clients.

Just to be clear, we don't take a percentage from that at all?

At the moment, we're not planning to take any percentage. It's just surely a service for franchisees.

Wow. So that's, that's pretty attractive then, obviously, for franchisees for sure.

Now, if we do it for non-gym people, we will probably charge for it. Yeah. And that's, that's an option.

Yeah. But franchisees, there's no commission at all, which is quite appealing. And that'd be appealing to franchisors, I guess, as well. If they have a vacant territory, for example, they could buy 20 clients and then they could pair it to that.

Well, we'll do that straight away because I run the Dongguan division. The one thing I'd love to do is if I can give every new franchisee $1,000 a week worth of clients, which is not a lot, most make a lot more than that. But that's a good basis to get going. And our experience is that if you start with a decent roster of regular clients, it's a much, much easier start. It really changes the stress. People who do this say, "This is fantastic, I'm really enjoying this, this is great." It doesn't have to be the full income, it doesn't have to be the $3,000 a week, but even $1,000 a week to get started with and then you can start picking up referrals and upsells and all the rest of it.

Yeah, no, it's very exciting. It's not too far away. The other one was the built-in accounting program. So a lot of franchisees obviously use Xero. I know franchisees at the moment, there's a test going out with 40 of them using Xero and Jimbo integration, which is a big thing because I think once that Xero integration is ready to go, we got 1,000 people hoping.

That's the last thing that we're waiting for. But the real good thing about this is that down the track, within a very few months, Jimbo will have its own internal accounting system.

So they won't need Xero.

They won't need Xero, they won't need QuickBooks, and it'll cost them absolutely nothing.

Right, that's exciting. And then the other thing as well is the next one here. A lot of stuff with Jimbo, and we did a lot of podcasts with Safi, and there's a lot of videos online. If you're not using it, please jump on board it because I think what you said about it as well, which you said at the start, is the complaints. So if you're doing everything via Jimbo, everything's timestamped, there's visibility. Like, it makes a lot easier if there's a complaint or a dispute with you, right?

Yeah. If a client says you never rang, it's there, it's on record. Here's the record of the call, here's the record of the text, which is automatically— it's easy to do.

Complaint gone.

Hey, complaint gone. Yeah. So we wipe complaints. That's the job I do every day, wiping complaints. So many complaints are unfair. Jimbo make it very easy to prove you did the right thing.

Yeah. And I'll say this to Francis, if you're skeptical, I've done multiple down the roads with franchisees, and I've been in the vehicle with franchisees who use it and they have it on the thingo and they all love it. The mowing guys I went with to do it, it's basically come in after every job, tap, button, dub, swipe, bang, it's gone.

People used to go home and spend half an hour doing their administration. You go home now and you start playing with your kids or talking with your wife or—

Can be all done on the job via the app.

It's all done by the time you get home.

Yeah.

And everything up to your best can be done with this free program.

But I do know Xero is the last thing for a lot of people. So Xero, believe me, once that's ready to go, we'll be announcing it left, right and center and make sure you jump on board as well. And now another one, changing a bit of topic here. You had a headline with the insanity of red tape and this was about ChatGPT coming up with the cancer treatment for his dog.

A guy who developed this amazing cancer system treatment for his dog. He actually got us— he learned how to do it. He got the cancer analyzed and he developed a treatment that cured cancer on his dog. I mean, that's astonishing that an individual can do that. Just a dog, could be a kid, but it was a dog, right?

Yeah.

What's really incredibly insane about it, that getting permission to save his dying dog was a lot harder than actually doing the program. It was like 3 months' worth of administration and bureaucracy. His dog is dying. The absolute stupidity. And we see it all the time. My wife's a builder and the kind of stuff that she goes through, the immense picking and the tiny little things and the delays. It takes you months to get anything done and stupid regulations that make no sense. You know, we are forbidden from using systems that are widely used in the EU, which is a very safety-conscious Can't use it, not Australian standard. The insanity of it everywhere. The franchising code is just ridiculous. Absolute dog's breakfast of useless things. It does nothing to protect anybody. There's simple ways of doing things that are so cheap and simple, and yet we keep on having this more and more bureaucracy. It's grinding us into the dirt, it really is. It makes business worse and harder all the time.

Well, the evidence shows it's not effective. Like, we're the most overly regulated franchising industry in the world, yet there's bad franchisors and there's horror stories all the time, which they do, not working. And then with building, anyone— people would laugh at Australian standards. All you need to do is go on YouTube and look up building inspections videos and you'll see how horrible these Australian standards are and they're not even enforced. So it's quite ridiculous. Yeah. It's ridiculous. And I think you mentioned in here as well about the ethics committee with your RATS. So you have a research lab, for example, you've got to go through, I guess, an ethical standards and all that sort of stuff, which delays a lot of things as well, adds a lot of cost as well.

Oh, it does. It takes months and months and tens of thousands of dollars just to get permission to do it. And the things they do is absolutely insane. One of the things that really upsets me most is sometimes in experiments you've got to kill animals, okay? Now what you want to do is to kill them as humanely as possible. And there's ways to do that. I know it sounds a bit bloodthirsty, but decapitation, for example. It's instantaneous. It's the most humane way you can kill an animal. No, ethics says you can't do that. What you've got to do is to choke them to death with carbon dioxide. Now, that sounds clean, but the problem is it's a really horrible way to die.

Yeah, yeah.

And they've actually tried it on people and they get enormously distressed by it. And you can see in the rats the level of cortisol, the stress hormone, goes through the roof. So we say to you, hey, here's a clean, simple, quick, Painless way to kill? No, we want you to torture the rat to death. How insane is that? It's getting to the stage where it's just not worth running science in Australia. That's one of the reasons we're going to China. Costs are less, but they're just not so insanely stupid about the things like ethics, which add costs and they add time and they really, really hurt animals, what they do.

The ethics is a lot of things though, like there's AI ethics and all this sort of stuff now, which is going to get in the way of a lot of things and people just going to, as you do, just go somewhere else.

We are so backward. I admire so many things about what the Chinese do these. I wouldn't want to live in China. The way I'm outspoken, I wouldn't last very long.

No, you wouldn't.

You'd be off. Having a go at government. But I tell you what, in so many ways they do things much more sensibly. They look at what they want to achieve in terms of technology and they say, okay, how can we make it happen? Rather than, yeah, let's look at what we want to achieve and then see if we can go through thousands of pages and $10 billion on regulations and everything else. And maybe in the end we'll get nothing to even start in the first place. Look, simple example, we wanted to start a holiday resort in Gippsland. Found a property, looked good, no problems. They were already doing it in a very small way, wanted to expand it. Okay, put, you know, this is holiday, low-cost holidays, for, you know, people and so forth, bring tourists into the area, bring employment, bring— okay. We had a look at the actual— no possible way. The amount of regulations, the amount of— you'd have to go through months and months and months of checking for Aboriginal artifacts and all this thing, and there's no certainty you'll get anything. There's no sign of anything there.

Yeah.

They just think there possibly could be. Now, what's the result of that? We didn't do it. But that's happening all over. People don't even realize.

Happens to farmers, happens everywhere. You get these consultants in, it costs tens of thousands of dollars. It's ridiculous.

And the costs go up and the delays go down and we are crippling our economy. We are crippling our livelihood.

Well, look, we'll go into one before going to the last one. That probably goes into the petrol crisis.

Yeah.

Because we can't do anything here because there's so many environmental laws and various other groups you've got to consider.

That's right.

We can't do nothing here, yet we probably If we had that in place, it wouldn't have been this issue.

Yeah, that's right. There are massive reserves of gas and oil available for Australians. There's a huge find just out off the West Australian coast that they could do. Why not? Because the government puts so many— it's just not worth anybody going into. They make it so difficult, so cumbersome, so long. Now, this is supposedly green thinking. Okay, so it's— for us to actually have oil ourselves, have our own oil supply, make ourselves sort of, "Oh no, that's black and bad." What you gotta do is to go and buy it from the Middle East. Now how on earth is that getting better? 'Cause not only do you have to mine to burn it, but you have to get it here in these vast things. So you're using transport and costs all the way. And stuffing up the environment. It's insane what they're doing. It really is. And I can't see any way out of it. Now, I'm hoping the Libertarian Party can have a bit of an impact to the next election, enough people to say, even if we don't win, even if we don't win a lot of seats, to say, well, you know, maybe, just maybe, there's an interest out there in people wanting to reduce government costs, have better services, less debt, more money in the pockets of ordinary people, maybe, just maybe, that might be an election winner instead of what they're doing now, which is basically forcing up the cost all the time. What's really insane about it is they do everything possible to make business difficult, to force up costs and force up costs and force up costs. And then they say, okay, now let's put a subsidy on petrol. So we'll actually get money from taxpayers, or we'll borrow it, which is even worse, because our loans are costing us more than Medicare is right now, and it's getting worse every day. So rather than reducing costs for householders, what we do is we increase the cost for householders and then get taxes to subsidise and bring them down just a little bit. It's like driving a car. If you had a luxury car and you said to me, "OK, I'm going to drive it, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to put one foot on the accelerator I'm on the brake and I'm going to drive like that all the time. And that's what the Australian government is doing to our economy.

And what I find frustrating is we used to have 11 refineries in Australia, 11, and they've obviously been all shut down. There's only 2 left now, right? Obviously, Albanese's had to go to the Sultan of Brunei and basically cap in hand to beg because they've obviously got a lot of oil over there. Obviously, Singapore, we had to go to recently.

It's just embarrassing. The Chinese have got months and months and months of this.

Japan's got 200+ days. Yeah, it's just—

Other people are doing it. We've got nothing. We are spending so much so badly in this country. We are stuffing ourselves up. We can't defend ourselves properly. We can't spend money on defense. We can't properly— we can't develop our own resources properly. It's more and more— it's like, you know, Australia used to be pretty good at, you know, sporting facilities. Not so good these days. But it's like if we said, okay, we want to have our Olympic team go out there and try and win the 100-yard dash, but we're going to insist that every Olympic athlete carries a leg iron with a ball and chain on it. And how many races are you going to win then? Now, it's great to win the Olympics. Yes, I know. But how much more important is it to win at the business of actually having economies that give decent lives and employment to Australians?

Well, I think it's embarrassing. I think, you know, other countries are looking at Australia and going, how can this resource rich country be so inadequate in what they're doing? I think it's embarrassing. An Albanese having to go to Singapore and basically beg, and he has to go to Sultan of Brunei, who's an autocrat.

Singapore's got nothing.

I know.

Singapore's got nothing. They've got no oil, they've got no gas, they've got no coal, they've got no iron ore. They're a little island.

Well, Lee Kuan Yew was very harsh on Australia. He always used to say we're a— all we do is dig holes out of the ground and do nothing else. We've got no inventiveness in our economy. I think towards the end of his life, he changed the opinion on Australia a bit. He said we're at the risk of becoming a really bad backwater in the world unless we do certain things to the economy. So I think—

And we could, and we could. It's so simple. It's so simple. We could halve our government bureaucracy. We could make it efficient. We could get it to do only the things that are going to help people, and you could give that money back. You could stop, you could pay down that debt, and you'd actually be able to give better services to people who need it. It's just a matter of running the country properly.

But our economy needs a shift as well, because it seems all we do is dig things out of the ground and ship them overseas, right? Whereas the future is going to be in data centres, it's going to be in energy production, absolutely, because of the— with AI, it has to do— we're actually, we should be in a really good position.

And all the government needs to do to make this happen is just to lift their foot off the brake. In other words, you've got a car, you're driving the car, accelerator full on, brake full on. Why isn't it— why is it getting such lousy— why is it wearing out? All you've got to do is take your foot off the brake, get rid of these, so many of these stupid regulations that are slowing down and increasing the cost and suddenly the car is going to start moving.

I'll give you an example. There's a big data centre close to where I live in West Footscray being built. It's been going on for years but there's been that much dramas with the councils and local residents and stuff. And these data centres, that's what the future needs, right? And the amount of dramas there's been with building this thing and the cost and stuff like that, like those people who are doing it are just going, "Why would we even bother doing any more of this or investing our money in Australia?" It doesn't just delay it, it actually stops it happening.

Like with our project in Gippsland, people don't understand how much, they don't understand 'cause they don't see the jobs that are being lost. They don't see the diminution, the rising cost of everyday things. Like we're paying double for power what they do in America.

Yeah, which is ridiculous.

Double in real terms what it was, you know, a couple of decades in the past. Why? Government regulations. Government has this policy that say more and more and more, Crazy.

I was going to say, I'm not on here, but the budget's obviously coming up. So the budget's obviously pretty important and it should be really, it's going to be really well watched by people. Obviously there's been a lot of news out this morning about the IMF's prediction about global recession if the oil prices stay high. And Jim Chalmers has come out, always sounds good, Jim Chalmers. But if you look at the actual outcomes of where we are, he doesn't know what he's doing in my opinion, because I look at where we are currently. So what are your thoughts about the budget and about that sort of warning from the IMF?

You know what they do is they project for the most optimistic possible expenditure and income and they base it on that. Oh, we've balanced the budget. Yes, you have, theoretically. And then of course, oh well, you know, costs are going up because of NDIS faster than we expected. And you know, the royalties aren't quite as high as you want. You get this thing overseas, not our fault, we just have to borrow a few more trillion dollars. And that's basically what they're doing. They keep on running it up. And I have to say, Labor, Liberal's not much better. They actually borrowed.

If you look at the fuel stuff, they actually can be traced back to the Liberal government when they got rid of a lot of the reserves for whatever reason. I can't remember what it was, but it was actually a Liberal government decision, which people will point out, but Labor did nothing about it as well.

Last time we paid off the national debt was what, 2007? That's like 20 years ago. And now we are so borrowed so much that, as I said, it's costing more than Medicare and just keeps on going and it's getting worse all the time.

What do you think the outlook is for Australia for this year? Because there's obviously a lot of fear, you'd obviously hear yourself from franchisees with petrol prices, like diesel is $3.20 now. I think, they had a trucker on the ABC this morning, his fuel bill used to be $140,000 a month, now it's $300,000 in diesel, right? So there's an extra $160,000 cash flow every month this guy's got to come up with, right? And he's just like, what can we do? Like, it's just, it's just impossible.

It's so obvious and so predictable. I'm a great believer in electrification. I've got solar panels on everything, solar panels on the office, and any staff members with electric cars can charge for free because we've got surplus power during the day. Yeah, it's quite cheap. Got it at home. Got it on my farm.

Trucks don't run on that though. This is the thing. Trucks run on diesel. A lot of the economy, agriculture runs on diesel. This is the thing.

What can you do? All I'm saying is from the point of view of the individual, I'm saying everybody should go electric. I mean, 3 and a half years ago I bought my electric car.

Yeah.

And that was part of the reason. One of the things I said at the time is, is the Straits of Hormuz, the Middle East is dangerous, dangerous, dangerous here. And this is, this is years before you say that back then.

Okay.

I was talking about the— that's one of the things I said to people at the time.

Yeah.

Yeah. Look at the instability. You're getting so much of oil from one of the most politically unstable places in the world. It's so predictable it's going to happen. So we should have— we should go electric wherever we can. You don't need vast subsidies, you just need the government to get out of the way. And we should be looking at homegrown resources in every way we possibly can.

Yeah, absolutely. And the last one here, Jim: politicians need real-life experience. Yes, you did a few of those, sort of.

Apparently that really hit the hit.

It did. It did. You say you had over a million With probably 3 or 4 clips combined, 1 million views, yeah, multiple platforms.

1 million views, it's amazing.

Yeah.

Just, and all we're doing is saying people should have some real life experience, and there's so much problem with politicians.

But you believe some people who know nothing, they know nothing about life.

They've never had a job apart from working in politics, never had a job. How would they know what it's like? And they make these rules that seem good. Oh, we're gonna be more safe, we're gonna be more protected, we're gonna be, But you don't add up the cost of what you're doing because they don't understand it. Because all they can think of is more regulations the better. And they just don't understand that when you're running a small business and your regulations go through and up and up and up and up and up and up all the time, you have to put your prices up or you simply don't do things.

Yeah. I was gonna say, well, I reckon it was 95% positive and you had 5%, I presume, just labor sycophants jumping on there saying, you know, Well, what would you do any better? Or they won by a massive majority, which seems to be the comment they sort of go, well, the Australian people voted him in with a massive majority, which was what, 33%? Obviously, we've got preferential voting in Australia, so it's not that big of a one as well.

That's true. It doesn't say much for the Australian people, does it?

No, it doesn't. You'd love to write that sort of stuff, but you can't. But I agree with you. That's a bit of a concern. And last one I'll leave you, obviously coming into November, obviously the election with the Libertarians coming up. What would you sort of say to people about that election coming up in November?

It's an opportunity. One of the great things about preferential voting is that you can vote twice. You might say, "Hey, I really like this particular party. I don't care what it is. It could be Animal Justice. It could be Libertarians. It could be anybody." I say, "So I'll give them my first vote, and then my second-order vote will go to Labor or Liberal or Greens or anybody else. What that does is convey a message because people look at the first vote and they said, this particular party with these particular policies are getting, you know, 20% of the people saying they agree with them as the first thing. Hey, why don't we listen? So maybe we'll do some things different. Maybe we'll look at the ever-growing bureaucracy. Maybe we'll look at these absurd zoning laws that that shovel money from the battlers to the already wealthy. Maybe we'll just do something.

I think the corruption's sort of a big thing as well. It seems to be getting just pushed away from the side, but I think people, the corruption's really getting at people.

I'm very unhappy with the Liberals as an opposition. They're just weak and they're worse on zoning than Labor. But I tell you what, One Nation isn't good. They're really, and their policies are stupid. I mean, we know quite well, they talk about immigration as if it's the whole source of problems.

Correct, yeah.

Immigration isn't the source of our problems. Zoning is what forces house pricing up. It's not immigration. And we have some fantastic people in Jim's group, a lot of them are just new immigrants. They're just wonderful people from all over the world. They're just great Australians. They work hard, they're enterprising, they're smart. I think we've got to be careful who we choose, but I think just trying to reduce blanket immigration is just Well, it's not gonna be good for the economy at all.

So those people who keep saying it's immigration, they don't have a holistic view of the system. They think it's one issue and that's it, which is not the case.

There are so many great people, and I know a lot of them personally because of the franchising network, that they're really an asset to this country. So I think we need good immigrants. And also, we're not having enough babies, at least we are until I get the birth rate crisis to proper attention, people start doing something about it. We're not having enough babies, so we need immigrants.

That's the irony, isn't it? These people who say, you know, no immigration, I'd love to know how many kids they have or how big their family is. I guarantee they don't have any a lot of the time. So I think that's one thing people consider. But Jim, thank you very much for your time as well. We appreciate it as well. And make sure you leave a comment, like, and if you've got any questions or topics for Jim for his next one, please make sure you leave them in the comments below.