You Know Jim's Mowing But Do You Know Jim Penman?

Jim, thank you so much for coming back on. How you been? Pretty good.

Exciting year?

Yeah, it's been good. I want to do a bit of a different episode to the one we did last time, which was business focused. A lot of people don't know You've got a PhD in history and something that I've listened to, an episode you and Joel did about your favorite time in history. So could you.

Yeah.

Tell me a little bit about that.

The golden age of Athens. Yes. In the. In the 5th, early 4th centuries was just astonishing in terms of what was achieved in that period of time, in terms of the birth of modern theatre comes from that time there. History. Modern history comes out of Athens, Thucydides particularly, which is who got me really hooked on history in the first place. And then you get architecture and then you get philosophy with Socrates and stuff. There's this incredible. And then you talk about the actual things like the vases they used to make, the black sticker vases and so forth. It was just so astonishingly beautiful. They were exported all over the world. And you had this small city, by modern standards, like a country town, really. It's a few tens of thousands of people producing this extraordinary surge of creativity that's never been seen in the world ever since. And it's kind of left enormous influence. And the Romans were absolutely enraptured by it. Still Today, more than 2,000 years later, we're still in the shadow of this incredible period. And the point that strikes me is, what happened? What was it about these people that caused them to be so insanely creative? And that's, in a sense, the whole thing behind biohistory is that I believe there was a type of character there. In many ways, it was a bad character. They were very violent, they were warlike. They did this ridiculous expedition against Syracuse, which was disastrous, and they treated people like mammalians in a dreadful way. But if we understood how they did it, who they were, what they were like, and we could reproduce that level of creativity, what could we achieve? What could be achieved?

And there was a book you read in your early teens that really spurred this fort on the war of.

It was the Peloponnesian Wars. Somebody gave it to me at the age of 14, and I read it, and I was just enthralled by the book and just by the way it portrayed it. Thucydides had a very. He wasn't a great fan of Athenian democracy, in a sense, but he loved his home city. And it comes through in a way. It's just. It's an amazing book. I must have read it about three or four times. So it's just one of the things. Also I've read lectures about it. It's based on Thucydides and so forth. So it's. And books of fiction. So I know that period pretty well. Yeah.

And there's almost like this hundred year period where there was linear growth of what the Greeks did. And I've heard you say they are basically still off the coattails of that. The Greeks. What was it about that period in particular that one, inspires you and two, we're seeing the benefits of that still?

Well, the benefits are there in terms it's almost the origin of Western culture, which is, you know, most of the world in essence now, including the ideas of democracy and so forth too, which were extraordinarily unusual. There was a very new innovation that had never been seen before and it wasn't to be again for a long period of time. But as I said, the main point to me is what caused it and how could we reproduce it? Look, I'll just give you a little example in a different level. You look at something like Elon Musk and what he's achieved, especially with SpaceX. And what he's done is gone and produced these reusable rockets at a fraction of the cost of what anybody else is doing. He's transformed the industry. Now how has he done it? There's a wonderful biography by Ashley Vance about Elon Musk. And what he does is he actually pulls together extremely dedicated, talented engineers, people who have the right character, and he puts them into a team where they work together. And looking at other developments of the, of the last century, like the way the development of the transistor at Bell Nubs and so forth, you see these people, they're individuals who have this extraordinary ability to be creative, either in terms of, as in ancient Greece, in terms of philosophy and theater and those kind of things, or in terms of engineering or science. And the most productive people are like thousands of times more productive than the average. But what if we could produce that? What if we could reproduce that? And I think it's possible. I think if we understand how the epigenetic, the epigenome works and we could turn on or off certain genes, which is quite practical with modern technology. We could reproduce people who had that level of ability. So the average person could be the level of a transcendent genius of the past.

Well, I've been very open on my podcast. I've even been on Joel's podcast Talking about my bipolar in terms of mainly the depression side of things and then the mania. And I know a lot of your research is around the mental health space, but I often tell people, if somebody can control the mania, take out the bad parts of it, but take the positives of motivation, energy, creativity, drive. If someone harnesses that, they'll be incredibly powerful. So is that almost similar to what you.

Well, yes, if you have that. If in your manic phase, you have this ability, this drive, this creativity vision, if there was some way of getting that all the time, as a matter of course. Because basically people are two things. They're our genes and they're our environment. And a lot of our environment is actually epigenetic. So your issue is a combination of genes and epigenes. To a large extent, we are getting to the stage we're very close to understanding all this. We know what it's about and what it fundamentally is, and we also know we can change these things. Particularly over the last two or three years, there's been developments in understanding of the genome, for example, and our ability to change things, which is really dramatic. This is why the development of COVID vaccines is so extraordinary. I mean, in the past, it used to take five years. We had vaccines in a couple of months. The time was actually testing them and then gearing up and making them, but they actually produced them incredibly quickly. This is brand new, amazing technology. Now. It's not too much to go beyond that to say, okay, well, what is causing your issues? Why are you doing this? And then you develop something like an adenovirus, which actually targets certain things, and then just goes in and makes those epidemic changes like a bang like that. And suddenly there's no more down, it's all up. It's quite feasible, it's quite possible. And this is not some pipe dream of the future. This is something that could be done in the next two or three years.

Because that's amazing. The period at which I'm in right now, I'm healthy, I'm doing all the right things, I'm exercising. I know you're a fan of cold showers and going for a run. I'm doing all of that. And that is a beneficial thing that I'm seeing. And I'm on the up, and it's fantastic. But I also learn from the bad places. I learn from what's going on. But if there's only upside, that's incredible. And is that where your research is? It's like finding out. So it's got a base in Greek History in terms of how and why they were so creative. And that got you thinking about it. But then you've now gone into research and really studied it. Am I correct in.

Yeah, that's right. Well, look, it started off with my passion for Greece, but also look at the Industrial Revolution too. You know, what happened in Britain in the end of the 18th century and 9th century. Why did machines develop? Now people look at, in terms of institutions and stuff, and it all has a symbol. I don't think it's mainly that. I think it's mainly character. People at that time were simply more capable of doing things. And if you look at the inventors, they are just passionate kinds of people. They just have this incredible interest in machines and they love them and they think in that way and they just get things done. So the whole wealth of the modern world, to me is an outcome of a change in character. And if we could change the character. See, it's mind blowing to think about it. But, you know, genius is two things. Genius is genetic ability, and genius is the character behind which is to a large extent epigenetic. There's also influences of education and so. But I think they're relatively minor because if you get the right. If you get the basic character right, these things will come out very readily. Now, think about the future too, in genetic terms. We are very close to understanding what intelligence is. It only gets done in the next few years. We'll actually be able to probably put a map down. So imagine if you could work out a system to abuse a thousand zygotes for every parent, and you pick the ones that have got incredible intellectual ability and then use the epigenetics so that they have the creativity and the drive and the passion. Like I said, the average citizen could be extraordinary. We could be colonizing Mars and building spaceships to go to other planets and we could be the end of poverty and the end of mental illness and these things. And this is not pipe tune. This is something we could achieve within decades.

I mean, that would definitely help Elon, because I know Elon wants to go to Mars. He's got programs.

But why not? Why can't we do it? I mean, talk about things like global warming and stuff. If we had the right people with the right technological skills, it'd be a snap. You just get rid of coal and oil and the rest of it, and we'd all work on renewal. Because the technology being advanced technology is produced by brilliant people, by dedicated brilliant people.

Yeah, I want to go back on character because character Very much comes to the environment that you're in, but also the genetics of the person too. You're either born with good character or it's developed. I did an interview with a guy, 26 years as a Navy SEAL. In that 26 years he would have formed character that he now has today. But he's also born with the ability to go, I want to be a Navy seal. And in order to that. So how can someone develop character which would then put them in good stead for life in terms of achievement, relationships and everything that we've covered?

Well, there's two parts to that. First of all, epigenetically, if you could actually change the settings of genes. And this is, as I said, this is not far out stuff. This is something that they're already doing. We could turn off genes, turn on certain genes. You could program a person to have the kind of character they want to have. Get rid of the downside, get of rid, keep the upside, make you far more creative, make you far more hard working, make you not interested in taking drugs or alcohol. All those things could be done that way. So that's the science side. In terms of character, obviously behavior matters a very dull different from what we were talking about before. Just as an example, my wife, she's an amazing lady. She's actually far more capable than me in so many ways. But she has problems with mood. Where she goes down now, something like six weeks ago, after years of nagging, she actually agreed to start exercising regularly. It's really quite staggering even to her how much difference that's made. And we're not talking about a long period of time, maybe 20 minutes a day. And her mood, he just doesn't get those black moods anymore. So things like exercise. Exercise is by far the best mood. It's it hands down better than any antidepressant there is. Exercise is phenomenal. I'm also, as you know, as we mentioned before, I'm a believer in cold, cold exposure. Not just cold showers, but cold exposure in general. I think it's very good for you. Diet is very, very important too. Like controlling your diet, controlling your weight, eating lots of vegetables and fruits. That also affects your mood because it affects your microbiome and that affects your in all kinds of ways. So there's an awful lot we can do. I mean happiness in general. We're not talking about product, but happiness. How do we achieve that? And things like diet, exercise, those kind of things. Also social relations, sense of meaning and purpose in your life too. Doing something that you believe in. Having the right social context, being part of a group, being part of a community, we know what does it. This is all scientific findings. So we can actually re engineer our own character in quite significant ways simply by what we do. One of the things I love to do is to start something like Jim's Life coaching. Not necessarily as a business, but we've been discussing this, how you can just encourage people by a sense of community, by sense of group, to actually live in a way that brings out their full potential and brings joy to life. Because I mean, the thing of it is, I am extraordinarily happy person and I really find it very hard to almost comprehend how it works. I just have an amazing mood most of the time. I'm very, very positive. I don't get discouraged. I've got this enormous energy. I'm just turning 69, but I really just. I drive all the time. I get people annoyed until I push them too much. But I have this mood. So what causes that? And I think it's to a large extent, look, I'm very fortunate. I've got a wonderful, wonderful wife and I've got a great business. But in a sense, so much of it's just a decision to act in a certain way. I love chocolate, but I just can't eat all the chocolate I want.

I think he banned chocolates from the office. Joel wanted to ban chocolates from the office, didn't he?

I try. We get fruit things in and then try and discourage people bringing that stuff. We're getting our health club done. Hopefully within six months we'll be able to have, you know, and I want to encourage my staff to be healthy too, because it's every point of view as a boss, I want them to be productive and as a human being, I want them to be happy. And they're really the same thing, isn't it?

It is, it is, because it goes hand in hand. Last year I spent nine months in an unhealthy state. You know, just put Covid on top of everything. But that wasn't. That was just the straw that broke the camel's back. I look at my diet at that stage. It was terrible exercise. I wasn't doing any exercise. I play cricket religiously. I know you're not a sports guy, but like I'm fast bowler, so I run in and I wasn't doing that. I wasn't walking. I put on so much weight that I couldn't walk. Like in terms of walk a far distance, I could walk, obviously, but I couldn't walk A far distance. But now all the things that you're saying, I go for a walk every day, every morning. If I don't do that walk, I notice the negative impacts. I'm eating a hell of a lot better fruit and things. I still indulge here and there.

We all do that, including me. I'm not completely disciplined. Actually, you mentioned about a walk, too. It's the other thing too. You walk, walking outside. Outside. They found, and this is a lot of studies done, being outside, being exposed to sunlight is really, really good for you. It's also green things. So going to walk in a forest or in a park or something like that, where there's trees around, seems to have a dramatic effect. And they've done all these studies on this. Just for example, they put people in hospitals. They find people who have an outside view, they can see outside, actually spend less time in hospital than those that don't. So you can actually test all this stuff. It's quite remarkable, the smell somehow. There's all kinds of things we're discovering.

Yeah, well, you've done a lot of research in pheromones, haven't you? And smells and things. Is that tied to that as well, in a sense or completely?

Yes, well, it's a different level. What we found is that, look, there's some tentative experiments. We found that when you mildly restrict food for rats, they behave in a better way. They become more exploratory. They become better mothers, for example, quite dramatically so they spend more time with their offspring and they get them back into the nest. You know, the rats do. Actually, we had one lady who was a research assistant who actually saw this taking place, and she was astonished. She had never seen a rat behaving in this manner because they were just good mothers. You'd never seen it. What we have discovered is that to at least a certain extent, if you get the urine for rats that are food restricted and given to other rats, they tend to behave more as if they're food restricted. It's not strong, not consistent across the thing. But we're actually analyzing the pheromones that are different in those two. And we're trying to. We're doing some experiments right now to just expose them to these pheromones to see if we can reproduce the same behavior.

Yeah, and I mean, obviously you're doing it right now, but what's the hypothesis to that? And then what's, you know, all research and insights is good for research, but you do it to get an insight, to create action. So. So what's the back end of that that you see will be okay?

Well the back end will be simple. If you work out, if you work out what the pheromins are that do this thing. What you do is you have somebody, for example, who has got drug addiction problems and they go to a drug retreat, you give them normal sort of whatever the support and stuff like that. But you also expose them to these pheromones. And then when they go home, you say, okay, take this bottle, put it on the nightstand and run it like that. And if I'm right, what you would find is a dramatic improvement in the success rate because they would find that they just wouldn't need the drugs anymore because their character has changed. Because the interesting thing about this is where it comes from, it looks like human societies, they tend to move together. There's these things called lemming cycles, which are like a 300 year cycle responsible for things like the great world, the first world war, those kind of things too. And the population in an area seems to move together. Now it's the same with humans, it's the same, same with muskrats, the same with lemmings. Now I believe that pheromones is what holds us together. So we're influenced by other people. So if you're in an environment where people have a certain kind of character, the pheromones will actually shift you in that direction. So that's what we're going to use. We're going to actually hopefully create this level of this change of smell and having the same effect as if you were with people who are very disciplined and organized and happy and motivated and monogamous and faithful to their spouses. All this kind of good stuff that you can get from the food restriction idea. If we can produce that by pheromones and just help people to move in.

That direction and that then lifts up society. There's the phrase you're only as strong as your weakest link. And if we essentially can help drug addicts, mental health, alcoholism, homelessness, it lifts up the holds whole society. Not only then can, can can the bottom 5 or 10% be increased, but the top 5 or 10% can, can tap into the higher levels of their thinking.

Character is the key to everything. You look at people talk about, I know they talk about the economics and they say, well there's these two, there's these elite people with the knowledge workers and so forth and they're going to get richer and richer and richer. And then there's people who don't have particular, you know, university trained skills. And there's going to be always garbage. Bottom of society. It's not necessary at all. And the perfect example is my own company. In gyms. We actually take people who don't have any particular education and within days or weeks we train them to do a job. And if they're successful at it, then they can make huge amounts of money. They can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, some of them millions of dollars a year. But what's the difference? It's not the education that requires. You don't have to open up a special. They're doing normal things like cleaning houses and building fences and mowing lawns and pest control. The rest of it. They're doing something that's quite basic, but they're still making great money. What makes it possible? Character. They just got their people with a great character. They've got very good attitude towards customer service. They don't get discouraged. They've just got good work ethics. They're very organized and stuff. This is all character. So what it means is that if you can create people with the right character, then everybody can have a fantastic job. Everybody can be successful and prosperous. You don't have to have an underclass. Everybody can be above average, which is obviously like Wobegon, isn't it? We're all above average. But in a sense, in terms, in modern terms, there's no reason why every person in the whole society can't have the equivalent of a quarter million dollars a year income because they're so productive. If we could change character.

Yeah, I met, I was lucky enough after the interview we did last year to meet Dan Cahill, who's Jim's, one of Jim's, one of his top franchises. And he has that. He has character, he has drive. He has, you know, came from. And then also the education. He came from McDonald's management and like as managing systems processes and then went for your training because he wanted to do something else and he's crushing it. So shout out to Dan. But do you think, you know, that's why he's been so successful and maybe, maybe for people who don't know Dan and haven't listened to him. Tell, tell me about what you know about him and his story.

This is the guy. I think he's like 25 years old.

20, 27, 28.

That's right. He's making several hundred thousand dollars per annum, has a great business, great lifestyle. He's just doesn't have any particular education. He's just a Great guy, and he did well in McDonald's. McDonald's is also very good training. Terrible food, but it's a great place to learn to work and be organized. They do amazing things there. So he's had some very good influences. And of course, in all due modesty, gyms is a great influence too, because we're a learning environment. You come into gyms, you get trained up front, you get franchisor mentor, you go to meetings. Franchisees who are successful will tell you what to do. They'll all want to help you. So you have both McDonald's and Jim's are great environments for developing it. But the thing about Danny is he's got the character to actually take advantage of to learn. One of the biggest things that I find between people who are successful, We've talked about this before, is this attitude that says, I'm going to do better. What can I do today to do better? A poor operator will say, it's somebody else's fault. A good one will say, okay, what could I have done? How could I have change that? Well, how could I have treated that differently? Why did mistake happen? Why that customer get unhappy? Why wasn't this a good day, financially speaking? Why is it taking me too long to do this job? And they figure out how to do it and they get better and better and better and better. And there is no upper limit to this.

Yeah, well, let's dissect a live example of that. So last time we did a podcast, I obviously quite nervous and I set up.

You were nervous. Why would you be nervous?

You know, good question. Good question. But I set up. We did it in your office. Took me a while to set up because I tried to clamp everything and it wasn't working. And then I didn't realize. So the camera I used, I borrowed it off a friend because I wanted really good quality, but I didn't actually know how to use the camera properly, which meant that the footage that I got flickered because of the lights. I didn't put that into account. What else happened? Yeah, all of that. And it was just rushed versus now. You then told me during the interview the same thing. How can you get better? So over the year, I've now purchased two cameras. I usually have backup sources of audio, but I'm trusting Jake and Ben today. Thank you to them. But since that interview, I have now gone to podcast setups where I've set them up in 10 minutes because I just use lapel mics sometimes. The quality has dramatically increased because I had to learn how to use these angles. And that's because of you, because of that advice.

That's good.

So someone else, like, if you go into your job today or you're going to do it, how can you do it better?

I think look at mistakes you make. And I have made so many stupid mistakes. I reckon I've made more mistakes, 10 times more mistakes in my lifetime than the average person has. But then you learn from them. There's a wonderful book I'm actually listening to now. It's called no Rules.

Get it if you want to. Yeah, give me a chance to answer it.

It's about Netflix.

About Netflix.

Netflix. It's a really extraordinary book. It's actually by Reed Hastings, who's the CEO. He's done it with a lady who's a journalist. So they work together on this and it's really mind blowing. I've just ordered three copies. I'm going to give three of my.

Top managers good today.

I should arrive today. But there's just certain ideas that they talk about. And one of the ideas they have is this thing called they get constant feedback. They get feedback, so they have a thing called a360review. So everybody's behavior and including Reid, the guy who's in charge, the ultimate owner, CEO of the company, big shareholder, the CEO gets this feedback from all kinds of people. They have these sessions where they actually talk and there's certain rules about the way it's done, but basically it's very critical feedback. Everybody, including the guy in charge, and then they use this. It's development feedback. And it can't be any more than 25% positive. It has to be 75% what they call developmental. And it's how to improve. And they just use examples of how this kind of feedback helps people so much to improve what they do. And it's not destructive. It's there to help people to be better. And it's sometimes quite uncomfortable and it's quite scary and challenging. But that kind of idea, they've institutionalized this whole system. It's an amazing company, actually, I must say. It's really just the way they do things. They talk a lot about payment structures and how much they pay people and like having very, very tough standards and having. Having a culture of excellent choosing, really good people paying at the upper level of their. Of their band, but then also people who don't measure up, giving them a generous severance package. It's really been quite inspiring and enlightening. And this is just something I've been listening to. The past few days. It's fantastic.

Yeah. Well, it's just as important how people think about your company coming into it as they think about it coming out of it. Right. Because someone going out of it who's angry and bitter and all that kind of thing, going to take it upon themselves to spread bad, bad, bad feedback. But if they go out of the company, like, yeah, this was. This was amicable. This was good.

Well, yes, we don't like to lose good people.

No, of course.

And that, That's. That would be one of my worst nightmares. To have somebody who's actually good at what they do and lose them when we didn't need to. I find that very upsetting. We lost one staff member because of a conflict with somebody else who shortly after was let go. But, yes, it's very great fun, but you've got to take it on yourself. I think one of the most underrated virtues in business is humility. Passion and leadership and stuff is all very well, but if you can't recognize that you're making mistakes, you don't learn.

Yeah. And then if you don't have the humility to accept the feedback of, hang on, maybe this is bad or this is. You're not going to get anywhere, are you?

It's not as very hard as the boss to get people to tell you the truth, too. And that's one of the things they do in Netflix regularly. They have this whole modeling thing where everybody. They model this whole system of getting this 360 feedback. It's really quite wonderful, quite amazing.

And can you pick up on that when someone's maybe not excluding the full truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth?

I don't know, actually. My wife certainly tells me that lots, all the time. She's very willing to tell me all my faults in great detail. So that keeps me down to earth. Hopefully doesn't hang back in terms of actual stuff. I don't know. No, actually, this is one of the challenges, listening to this book is how I can. Actually, one of my key managers. Yesterday, I actually sat down in a room and I said, look, what can I do better? How could I improve? How could I help? Is there anything I'm doing? He couldn't think of anything too. So that wasn't very helpful from that point of view. But I want to try and model that behavior. But then again, Cynthia in finance will actually tell me off very readily. She's always having a go at me for spending money badly.

Well, all good accountants and finance people will tell you that won't they?

Cynthia is wonderful. He actually cares more about my money than I do. She really does. I want to give some more money. He says, no, you can't do that. I have to argue with her to be able to spend my own money.

And that's the difference between. You might have a. Because I know you come up with ideas all the time and you might have a great marketing idea and then the finance person goes, hang on, where's the return?

It's a good corrective, actually. It really is. I have, amazingly, I have great staff. I really do. I think I'm very grateful and maybe it's in some extent a credit myself, but I do have people who tend to be unusually dedicated. They care about what they do, they care about franchisees, which is always our set for mission in gyms. Of course they care about the company. They care about each other. We're very privileged, actually.

Yeah, well, we have good staff. They'll treat your customers good, which will give you good feedback, which will give you a good reputation, which brings more business and makes people a raving fan. I'll just point it out that way because I know the books are everywhere.

I do try and be a good employer. We had things like Thursday staff lunches, which go down very well, and sporting complex, to a large extent for my staff as much as anybody from the conference centre. Also try and be a good boss. I'm not saying I am the best. I. I get very impatient sometimes. I'm. I push people too hard. I can get. I can get very irritated. So I've got to really try and control these kinds of behaviors. Sometimes I have a conversation with a franchisee and I get annoyed enough. Oh, you stupid idiot. Why did you say that? Why didn't you cut it short? You should have. Should have cut short the conversation. Look, so this isn't helping. Write an email, calm it down. Yeah, I do dumb things still. Even in the past week, I've done dumb things. It's just. You just got to try, that's all.

Well, that's your humility at show right there, obviously. So humility, leadership is a big one too. And you can learn a lot from leadership, from Julius Caesar and the past. And I think, correct me if I get the name wrong, but there was another Roman leader, I've heard you talk about it. So where only two of his generals followed him into battle, and then Julius Caesar was different, where all of them followed into a battle. So what's.

Oh, no. Sulla.

You're talking Sulla. Yeah. No, no, Actually, I apologize. Yeah, that wasn't.

That's okay. Everybody knows Roman republican history. No, actually, well, the lesson was not quite that amount of leadership. What actually happened was that when Sulla marched on Rome, which was the first time it ever happened, that a military leader had marched on the capital, the magistrates came out with the badge of authority and said, stop. Now, none of that would be enough to stop anybody. But it had broken down far enough that Sulla continued, but most of his legates, officers from the aristocratic class, refused to go with him. When Julius Caesar did the same thing somewhat less than a century later, all of his legates were with him. Now, actually, what. That's a sign, not so much that Caesar was a better leader, but that in that time the Republic institutions had broken down and the belief in the Republic had broken down so that people were more willing to go against the traditions of the Republic, which is caused why the Republic collapsed because people stopped believing it, they stopped following it.

But what made Caesar so great? Why does everyone know him still? Why is he taught in schools and universities? What made him so great?

Well, he succeeded. I mean, Sulla basically became the dictator, but then he stepped down and Caesar actually ended the republican effect. He became an effective dictator. So he was a more consequential figure because after him, the Republic was dead. He killed him. That's not the way he spoke about it, but that's actually what happened. But Caesar was an extraordinary man in other ways too. For example, he's. He still read his writings, the classic. If you look at the Gallic wars, for example, it's still used as a Latin text. It's actually. It's very simple Latin. It's not like Cicero, but it's widely used today as an example of good writing. So he was quite an accomplished writer, actually. What Caesar did in Gaul was horrifying. I mean, he was a mass murderer on a big scale. Probably killed a million people in those campaigns and caused incredible misery and, you know, slavery and all this sort of stuff on a huge scale and did it for his own wealth and power and glory. I mean, I don't particularly admire him, but he was a great author. And also he was a. He was an innovator. For example, the calendar we use today is basically the Julian calendar. It's his calendar. And the months of the. So much of what we still use comes from him because he was a very capable man, but not a nice man. It's a bit like Napoleon in a way too. I mean, I don't think Napoleon was anything Great. He was a mass murderer, in a sense, in his campaign. So how many people died in the Russian campaign was horrifying. But at the same time, you know, to the Roman, to the French Republic, we have the decimal system, for example. And a lot of good ideas sort of came out of that. I don't really admire Congress very much.

No, because of the.

My great heroes would be the. Would the innovators, the scientists, people like James Watt, the steam engine, or Isaac Newton or Galileo, or people of that nature, or Nikola Tesla, for example, Edison.

Do you have a favorite invention that someone has done? I mean, even something as simplistic as the light bulb might be someone's favorite, but.

Oh, I think that the steam machine, that was the beginning of everything.

Why?

Because it's the first time you get away from. You get a proper use of artificial power. Everything in our civilization is based on engines. And that was the first really effective. It wasn't the first steam engine, but it was the first really effective one. Newcomen did one some decades earlier, but it wasn't very powerful. The only reason steam engines got going in England was because in the mines, they originally used to pump coal mines which used to go into the ground and they'd get flooded, and it was an incredibly difficult process. So they developed this steam engine which actually used to pump out of their mines. And the reason that it worked was because even though it was incredibly inefficient, it was in a coal mine. It was burning coal, so you could burn any amount of coal because it was already around you. So the first steam engines were really, really, really primitive and really inefficient, but at least got them started. And then Watt came along amongst many people, too, and developed one that was really efficient and you could use it to drive things like trains, which were extraordinary innovation, and then factories and all the rest of it that's come out of that. So I think the steam engine is the greatest invention in history.

Yeah, very cool. I wanna have this section of the podcast called Pitch My Product. I think if you've been listening to Jim and you know Jim, there's a lot that you have. Is there anything you're working on at the moment or anything that you want a message out there that's five or ten minutes, just talk through that. Anything, even if it's one of your books.

The big thing we're working on now is a program called Jim's Jobs, or Bizza, which is a program for French.