Chapter Eighteen: 21st Century

He built his own machine between 2003 and 2008, and he built it well, and this is where honesty requires an admission that nobody who has been robbed ever wants to hear:

Jamie McIntyre was extremely good at this.

Not at property. He was, as a Federal Court judge would eventually put it in language that has followed him across three countries, completely financially incompetent. He could not read a development feasibility. He could not, in any meaningful sense, run a company. Dennis did the numbers and Dennis was worse.

But at the room. At the room he was, at his peak, among the two or three best in the country, and that is not a compliment, it is a diagnosis.

The book came out and it sold. What I Didn't Learn at School But Wish I Had. It is a genuinely readable book — warm, funny, with a farm boy's cadence, and containing perhaps fifteen pages of entirely unobjectionable advice about compound interest and spending less than you earn, wrapped around two hundred pages of an engine for moving a reader into a room.

And there was the funnel, refined from St Kilda Road to a manufacturing tolerance:

The free two-hour evening. Cost: nothing. Purpose: emotional destabilisation, and the sale of the cheap event.

The three-thousand-dollar three-day intensive. Purpose: identity conversion. By the end of day two the attendee no longer describes themselves as a schoolteacher. They describe themselves as an investor who currently teaches.

The fifteen-to-thirty-thousand-dollar platinum tier. Purpose: the product.

The product. Whatever was on the shelf that year. Land banking options at up to forty thousand dollars. Trading room memberships at up to thirty. Later, tokens. Later still, villas.

And at the top of it all, from about 2006, the thing that made the entire apparatus hum.