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I Started Mowing Lawns at Eight Years Old

I was in Cub Scouts, doing Bob-a-Job week. I knocked on the door of the man who lived across the back fence and offered to rake his driveway. He paid me two shillings.

Jim’s Group now has close to 6,000 franchisees across more than 50 divisions. Every one of them has my phone number and my email address, and I encourage them to use it. Office hours, after hours, weekends, Christmas Day. About a dozen contact me every day.

I did not build it to get rich. I built it to fund research.

Why a Lawn Mowing Business Funds a Laboratory

My PhD was in history. I failed it the first time through.

The question I went to university to answer was why civilisations rise and fall. I started in sociology, decided it was garbage, and switched to history. By the end I knew the answer was in biology rather than in history, and that no university was going to pay me to look for it, because of the way I think.

So I made the money myself.

That research is still running. We have screened around a thousand drugs on human neuron cells, found 61 candidates, and are testing nine of them. We are using CRISPR for epigenetic changes rather than genetic ones. Findings within a year or two.

Almost nobody agrees with me. That has been true for forty years.

What You Get

One letter a month. No fixed formula.

What it usually covers.

Why the birth rate is collapsing across the developed world, and why no government subsidy anywhere has moved it.

Housing and zoning, and the reason your children cannot buy a house.

Where government money actually goes, converted into what it costs a household.

What I have learned running a franchise network for close to forty years, including the parts that went badly. There is a long list of those.

Books worth your time. I get through a couple a week, mostly while driving or exercising or gardening.

Some of it you will disagree with. That is fine. I would rather be argued with than ignored.

Why This Is Different From Everything Else You Read on These Subjects

Most people writing about these problems are commentators.

I run a research institute and a laboratory, and I have spent decades and a great deal of my own money testing whether I am right. When the evidence goes against me I will say so.

I also run a business, which means I live inside the rules that other people only write about.

What I Am Doing Now

Birth-Rate Crisis comes out in October.

Governments everywhere can see the problem and are spending enormous sums on it. Hungary is spending about 5 per cent of its GDP.

None of it works, because none of them have the cause right, and until you have the cause you cannot have the solution. We do.

I am also standing at the Victorian state election in November, on housing and the cost of government.

The best result is not that I win. It is that enough people vote on zoning that the major parties look at the numbers, decide there are votes in it, and fix it themselves. If that happened I would leave politics the same afternoon.

I am not here for a career. I am here to make a fuss about one thing.

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