Australian Penthouse

Is that what Laid Bare is about?
That’s essentially what Laid Bare is about. It’s not about sex; it’s a book about trying to figure out what love is and where to find it, and how to make it last. It started out as an article I wrote for marie claire magazine about how it feels when your wife leaves. I got a lot of letters from women around Australia thanking me for writing a candid story from the male perspective on how difficult divorce is.

How tough was it for you to actually write the book?
I took the approach that if you’re going to write a memoir, you have to write it as authentically as possible. My dark personal moments were very much a part of that story. It’s important that people understand that men—though outwardly we may appear to have no emotions at all—are actually deeply emotional, as much as any woman. We just very rarely show it.

How common is your experience among other men?
I found that my situation wasn’t that uncommon and there were a lot of guys suffering in silence and not really having anyone to talk to about what they were going through internally. I felt that it was important for me to show that it’s okay to be vulnerable and to break down and have emotions. I think it’s really important that men also be more open about the times when they are struggling, particularly with mental illness.

Mental illness?
A lot of guys I know are going through similar sorts of things to what I went through, particularly with anxiety and depression and even OCD [Obsessive Compulsive Disorder].

You mention OCD in Laid Bare. What was your particular subset?
My subset of OCD is called ‘Pure-O’, which is short for ‘Pure Obsessional Obsessive Compulsive Disorder’. Essentially, what was happening is I would be getting intrusive and disturbing thoughts at the most inappropriate times. It’s not something you can really understand. It’s brought about by anxiety. I think OCD is an incredibly misunderstood disorder.

How so?
In the media, the impression we get of it is crazy people washing their hands 50 times a day, but it’s much more than that. The thing that most don’t understand is that people are driven to these sorts of compulsive behaviours because they’re trying to shut out thoughts and images coming into their head that they don’t want. People are killing themselves because of OCD because they don’t know who to talk to about it.

On the topic of sex, what kind of dating websites were you signed up to?
I never went on an adult personals site that was strictly geared for sex. I put a profile on one of the adult sites here in Australia, just to see what the deal was, but it didn’t strike me as something that was for me. I met most of the women I dated through more traditional online dating sites, such as RSVP.com.au.

In your experience, was RSVP more geared towards relationships or sex?
People are saying they want relationships, but it’s a meat market. If you’re in good shape, have decent looks and a bit of money, it’s very easy to fall into the player lifestyle by putting yourself online. And it’s not just men, it’s women as well. I found myself getting hundreds of emails from very desirable women. All of a sudden, it’s like being in an American supermarket where you’re overburdened with choice.

So these women were chasing you?
Oh, much more so than I was approaching them. I was frankly surprised because the woman I was deeply in love with—my ex-wife—didn’t want a bar of me. But I put myself online and hundreds of women were sending me emails and they all looked bloody fantastic. It’s great for your ego, but it’s not necessarily good for settling on one person because I think men go on there and become rock stars. We get a bit carried away with the attention. That’s certainly what happened to me.

What is the perfect middle ground for online dating?
To be honest, I have met a lot of women through online dating who have become very good friends of mine. I think online dating is fantastic for making friends, for networking, for building your social circle; I just don’t necessarily think it’s fantastic for relationships.

How does power come into it?
One critical aspect of our relationships with other people is dominance. That’s where power comes into play—the power we have over other people or that other people have over us, whether that be political, economic, workplace, or down to the relationships we have within our families where there are incredible power plays.

Which is more impactful: societal or interpersonal relationships?
Well, they’re both pretty important. Bertrand Russell, the great philosopher, said, “Power is the fundamental substance of human relationships, just as energy is the fundamental substance of physics.” Basically, human beings are a group species; we evolved to live and hunt and survive in groups and therefore most species that have groups have dominant hierarchies within them.

How exactly does power affect people’s interpersonal relationships?
On the small scale, most husband/wife or partner relationships involve a certain degree of power. The definition of power is having control over resources that the other person or other people fear or want. If one person is more in love with the other person, there’s an imbalance. The fact that one person is more emotionally needy will give the other person more power. There are a number of psychological mechanisms that can lead to distortion and a negative cycle of behaviour of the powerful person, so the powerful person starts to see the less-powerful person in progressively more negative terms because of the power imbalance.

How does power actually affect the brain?
Power makes people feel good because it increases testosterone, in both men and women. And that testosterone, in turn, increases the level of dopamine activity in the middle of the brain in an area called the ‘reward network’. That’s the area of the brain that activities like sex and taking drugs act on: it’s the feel-good centre. When that up-regulates, it gives us that ‘glow’ we get when we have sex or when we achieve or when we get that promotion. That glow is the up-regulation of dopamine in the reward network. And being given power operates through the same system.

What are the mental benefits of power?
Being given tiny amounts of power temporarily makes you smarter, it makes you more focused on goals and makes you more confident that you can achieve them, it makes you more action-oriented, it makes you less depressed, and it makes you less anxious. It makes you think more abstractly and strategically.

What are the effects of an absence of power?
A powerless position down-regulates dopamine and increases the activity of noradrenaline, which is a kind of threat transmitter, and that activates more of the right-front part of the brain, which is the cautious ‘accountant’ part of the brain.

How does the brain maintain balance?
In a way, the human brain is two people, metaphorically speaking. One is the kind of gung-ho, confident chief executive and the other is the cautious chief financial officer, always worrying about the downsides and the plausible threats. They make a good team, but the problem with unfettered power is that it basically bullies and inhibits the cautious accountant side of the brain and you get the kind of recklessness and bizarre distorted judgement that led to the Global Financial Crisis.

What are you working on at the moment?
I’m actually running a course on policing the organised crime aspects of the Australian bikie club for the Federal Police Executive College. A few police station masters from each state come along, and I try to teach them how to mediate between the police and the bikies because the traditional ‘hammer’ approach is just not working.

How do you remain objective? It must be difficult, considering that you have friends on both sides…
If I’m hanging out with a bikie club for a while, each night I call Julie van den Eynde, my field-note archivist, and debrief her thoroughly as to what happened, so the notes are as clean as they can be. I then get Julie to work me back through it all and take out any bias. It’s a scientific process—an insider/outsider technique.

Are there differences between US and Australian bikie clubs?
There is no [crime] problem here, compared with America. In a lot of ways, we have a pretty laidback, peaceful society, and our bikies tend to be that way, too. There is a lot more violence in the US gangs, and the customs are different. When the first Australian Banditos went over in around 1983 to meet up with the Banditos in America, they were shocked. They’d walk around a Bandito home and be offered the host’s wife or partner, and this shocked them because that custom did not take off here.

Is there an official mediator between bikie clubs in Australia?
The Motorcycle Council of Queensland tries to keep the Queensland clubs in line, and is by far the best tribunal in Australia. They allow two members from each club to come in and air their grievances, in an attempt to stop turf wars.
What is the major difference between a gang and a club?
Club is the preferred term. Bikies usually see ‘gang’ as a derogatory police term. You are only seen as a legitimate club when you have formed a group with absolutely no criminals in it, and you are operating at a level that is respectable within society.

How does one go about starting a bikie chapter in Australia?
There’s a hierarchy and a protocol that must be followed to get a club officially accepted in Australia. You need at least six members, three in smaller rural areas, and you have to get approval from the mother club, usually in the United States.
Why do you think that bikie clubs are seen in such a negative light?
Because some of the members in the clubs are criminals. However, what needs to be known is that bikie clubs are not criminal entities—some just have a few bad eggs in them. This is why other clubs are getting angry. There has been a drop in the core values of outlaw motorcycle clubs, and this is what we are attempting to wipe out for good.

What sort of blokes were the sailors?
A lot of them were depression-era kids—some grew up in the slums of Sydney, and they’d have been lucky to get a bit of bread and dripping for dinner at night. Others were country kids.

But to suddenly grow up and see the world like that, and to come out of the depression and plunge into WW2, it was a huge thing. They were an amazing generation—they dealt with it all. They grew up strong and they stayed that way.

And their first big stop was New York City!
Oh, New York was an absolute eye-opener for them. They were stunned and amazed—skyscrapers and Coca Cola and women. I like the story of the two sailors who were at Madison Square Garden, at the old ballpark.

The locals invited one to have a hit out on the field. Someone pitched a baseball at him and he missed it and fell over. But the second pitch he knocked out of the park!

And so they just rolled out the red carpet for them and took them to nightclubs where they met movie stars and all of that stuff.

The Aussie boys done good!
Yeah, but the story I really like was when they were on their way back across the Pacific and they called in at Tahiti. It was more or less a four-day orgy! Half of the ship’s company was dancing or swimming naked in the water with these Tahitian girls and it was just an amazing scene. Of course, it got a bit rougher after that.

You need some fond memories when you’re floating in oily and fiery waters…
…When you’ve just been torpedoed, yes. There was a terribly sad story of one former crewman who was dying on the Burma-Siam railway and he said to his mate, “I’m gonna die tonight. Just come and sit with me and talk with me about the old times and about Tahiti and everything.”

It was terribly poignant. They saw life in a way I don’t think any other Australians have: from those incredible highs to the atrocities of the railway. They went from the A to the Z of human experience.

The ship survived several battles before it was finally sunk. Did its first hostile contact in the Mediterranean, with a dozen casualties, come as a shock?
They knew it was coming, but nothing can really prepare you for the first time you’re under attack. Particularly from the dive bombers of the Luftwaffe, which must have been terrifying. They were under attack day after day until, finally, a bomb hit them.

HMAS Perth was one of just three cruisers to survive the almighty Battle of the Java Sea… only to then stumble into the main Japanese invasion force in the Sunda Strait.

That was an absolute tragedy. But in hindsight, the Japanese were everywhere. The Perth blundered into that and was outnumbered, outgunned, out-everythinged.

They fought as best they could with what they had and ended up firing practice ammunition and star shells, which were utterly useless. But I guess it gave them something to do and a sense they were fighting back. It was a tragic battle. There was no other end to it than that the ship was going to be sunk.

So they knew they were doomed?
Well, it’s hard to say. If you were on the bridge or you were working one of the guns, then you could see the battle. But if you’re below decks, you don’t have a clue—you just hear the noise and the feel vibration of the ship.

Until the torpedo hits, that is, and then you know you’re stuffed. And when the second torpedo hits, you know you’re gone for all money. Some of them could see it straightaway, that they were doomed.

Others didn’t know for a while. There were blokes who would have been killed outright when the first torpedo hit, and others who were trapped inside the ship with no way of escaping—which would have been an appalling way to go.

In your estimation, what was the Perth’s finest hour?
That final battle. It was magnificent and she fought to the very last. The captain, Hector Waller, should have won the Victoria Cross.

But for some reason—which puzzles a lot of people—no-one in the Australian Navy has ever been awarded the VC. Until fairly recently, they had to be okayed by the British Admiralty in London.And they never once okayed the Victoria Cross for an Australian sailor.

Was Waller’s contribution to that final battle known to his men?
Oh, yeah. He was an inspirational leader, and they knew he’d done his best to get them out of it, to try to save them and the ship. To this day, they still hold him in enormous regard. They knew how the battle was fought—and how it ended.

In our 2008 interview for Dexter in the Dark, you said you had problems getting the character to where you wanted him, and even considered killing him off. Two books later, has this changed?
Well, I had a couple of good books in between that made it relatively easy. It’s funny you should bring that up, though, because I find myself in the exact same spot again. Apparently, every three books I get this block. Maybe this time I’ll use a large hammer, and then Cody will take over the family business.

In Delicious, the birth of Dexter’s first child reveals glimpses of real emotion within the character. Was your decision to provide this evolvement a conscious one to humanise Dexter or just a personality facet of sociopaths?
Maybe both those things, but neither was conscious. I don’t sit down and plan things that ruthlessly. It was just what I was feeling when I started. I did plan to begin with him looking down at the birth of his child. I had plot points, but I had no idea about the tone until it started happening.

Do you have regular sources who advise you on the science in the books or do you go to different people according to plot direction?
I have a lot of sources in Miami, and others who do forensics for a living. I don’t really go into a lot of detail in the books because it’s just not interesting to me. Some people like it, I don’t. It’s background for me. I recently learned we’re using a different thing to test for trace blood and fingerprints; it’s a new chemical. That’s good to know. I need to know that, as Dexter uses it. But I don’t go into long lyrical sentences using the electro-spectro-diccolo-pack test machine. I don’t know and I don’t care.

The hit TV show Dexter has developed a different plot to your novels. Have the scriptwriters introduced any specific stories or twists that you like or dislike?
Rita’s a great example. I wasn’t happy they killed her off. I think [Julie Benz] is a terrific actress, a really nice person, and I hate to see anybody lose their job. On top of that, people are angry at me for killing Rita. I say to them, she’s still alive in the books! Occasionally they do stuff I never would. Sometimes it’s just because it’s TV, other times it’s a bunch of other writers wanting to put their own imprint on it. It doesn’t yank my chain in any way. It’s a different medium with different demands.

We understand you used to be a karate champion. What can you tell us about that?
I was at the black-belt level and I took a silver medal in the World Championships. The guy I was fighting for the gold was about six-foot-eight and very, very serious, a really hard person. I was a point-and-a-half ahead and was thinking it was easy; he was slower than anyone I’d ever faced.I went in for a side snap-kick and landed it perfectly. I heard a loud pop and crunch. I thought I’d got him, but when I landed on my foot I realised I’d got me.

I broke my foot in four places kicking this guy in the ribs. As I was standing there in shock, he did a sweep move that lifted me up and sent me flying out of the ring and into the bleachers. People think this is a punch line, but as I went back in, all I could hear in my head was, “New strategy, let the Wookie win”, and that made complete sense. I tried to give him small targets to get points so I could finish with the silver medal instead of being disqualified.

Have you ever thought about combining your passions into a stage musical about a sociopathic, serial-killing martial artist?
Actually, I believe I’m about 65 pages into something quite similar to that! I mean, why not?

After taking so much personal responsibility for the losses incurred by your publications, how do you feel about the heads of other organisations getting off scot-free post-GFC?
That’s the problem with the financial system in the western world right now—there are too many people playing with other people’s money, and that’s where all of the risk-taking came from. I talk about the history of hedge funds in the book. In the old days, the managers co-invested.

So when a fund blew up, you knew whoever was managing it was doing his darndest to make it work; taking prudent risks and not reckless ones. He was right there, shoulder to shoulder. Those are people you can only admire—and if it does work out, you’re happy for them. But these bank chieftains are making giant bonuses and have very little ‘skin in the game’—or if they do have skin, it’s because they were granted stock options, they didn’t buy them. So they’re playing with house money. Of course it’s infuriating, and it’s also dangerous. And as it continues, I worry we haven’t learnt our lesson.

Could a magazine like Trader Monthly launch now?
No. We knew we were in trouble with the last issue of Trader Monthly, which had the cover line “What’s next?” and a dour-looking trader on a black background. The magazine had been go, go, go, then when things started to get choppy in the Autumn of 2008, we were a little bit restrained. Then absolutely everything that Trader Monthly was about, which was celebrating these guys as rock stars, fell apart. ‘Wall Street’ became two dirty words. Trader Monthly was sustained on advertising and suddenly the advertisers didn’t want to work with us because they couldn’t be seen advertising to that crowd. And that hasn’t gone away. So until Wall Street types are seen as the good guys again, a magazine like Trader Monthly doesn’t really work, and I don’t see that happening in the foreseeable future.

You give the example of BMW, who said they knew that ads in Trader Monthly sold cars but they just didn’t want to be associated with traders.
That was the day we knew we were in real trouble.

Do you think the magazine would still be around if you and your partners hadn’t tried to expand the stable with Dealmaker, Private Air, The Cigar Report, etc.?
Yes, it could have survived as an electronic newsletter and we could have kept some of the events going. There were aspects of it that, if we weren’t so leveraged, we could have still had a small business. But that was never the goal. We were of the time. Especially when Jim [Dunning] came on board and we started to feel the success, the idea was to do something monumental. And in the end, we paid the price for that. But I don’t think Trader Monthly as a magazine works anymore. It’s amazing how fast something can go from a vibrant product to a museum piece. They should put those magazines in a time capsule. In 50 years, people will pick them up and their mouths will be agape.

It was interesting reading how keen traders were to be on your cover—kinda like the glamour models who dream of being on ours. Did any big businessman try to buy his way into that coveted spot?
We were never offered bribes. It was more that we were lobbied—as I’m sure you guys are. Although I’d rather be in your position. Having some 40-year-old millionaire kissing your arse probably isn’t as good as being courted by an Australian beauty!

It’s amazing how many bullshitters and backstabbers you’re forced to deal with throughout the book. What about the good guys/gals—who do you still respect?
My partners, Magnus [Greaves] and Jim. I still talk to them and I still respect them. They put their money where their mouths were and they lost a lot.

They paid their debts.
Absolutely, and you can only respect that. There were a lot of stand-up people… It’s almost uncanny the correlation—the people who were willing to take risks with their own money were generally the ones who came out okay or at least with their integrity. The ones who were playing around with other people’s money… Either they made money and you kinda winced, or else they blew something up and you winced about that, too.

It happened to Lehman Brothers, where one day they’ve got a market cap in the billions and the next day they’re worthless. It happened at BusinessWeek, one of the biggest magazines. It was worth probably a billion dollars in 2007—literally—and it was given away to Bloomberg for a dollar. There were two perfect storms. The magazine industry was in free fall in 2008 because everyone had started pulling back the ads. And our core industry, Wall Street, was ‘cratering’ at the same time. So we’ve got these two awful vortexes converging and we were right in the middle of both. That was very scary.

We don’t want to focus solely on the bad times… so what’s your happiest memory from working on Trader Monthly and the other titles?
Launching new magazines is like giving birth. So the pride of doing that—launching things into the community and seeing the reaction. Especially when we were doing something nobody had done before. We were taking trade magazine audiences, B2B audiences, and giving them Conde Nast-level products. You’d see a look on people’s faces like, “What is this thing?” We blew them away on quality—that was always a big kick.
And by the end, when we had half a million people who we were reaching, we were able to do a lot of things for charity. We could send an email and raise thousands of dollars for charity. It was heady. Just the influence you had on such an audience. We tried to do good things with it… although there was that awful team from Extell. That still makes me insane.

They hijacked your charity boxing tournament, scored free publicity, made sales and never paid the charities what they’d promised.
They still haven’t paid. It’s disgusting.

With the benefit of hindsight, what would you change?
We could have done a lot of things differently. We shouldn’t have expanded so quickly. It seems obvious in retrospect, but those are the lessons you draw. That’s the core lesson: we should have been more cynical about ourselves.

What about the foreign versions of Trader Monthly—were they a mistake?
Dubai wasn’t a mistake because that was licensing, but we lost way over a million dollars on the UK operation, all told, because we wanted to own it. As you know, usually with outside markets, you do a licensing deal and the local company runs it and gives you some money, so it’s good for everybody. But in the UK, we actually paid Conde Nast to produce the magazine for us, and so we lost a lot of money as a result of being over-aggressive.

Is there a lesson to be learned by other publishers from the demise of your group of titles?
Yeah, don’t go into magazines! Unless you’re already there and in a strong position, it’s a very tough business right now. Web sites have their problems, too, but digital doesn’t have all of the paper and printing costs and the distribution. I mean, in 2008 we did US$12 million in revenue and we were still losing money! It’s very daunting economics and that’s the lesson for the magazine world.

And with web sites, your pages can’t be hijacked by an ex-baseball star…
People ask about that, and the thing about Lenny [Dykstra, who won the World Series in 1986 with the New York Mets] is that he was paying us. I always thought that was a crazy idea in terms of a business, but he had a model that he didn’t want to make money from the magazine—it was a marketing piece for him [and his financial advice].

So I got that. It was actually quite a good deal, because he was paying us to do what we were good at and we got a lot of residual benefit. In the end, after he didn’t pay us, he wound up jumping ship to American Express Publishing, and they were happy to take his money and steal him from us. He didn’t pay them, either, but I still think that, in theory, it was a good deal.

Because nobody knew he was going to turn against you.
What are you gonna do? It’s the classic confidence game. We ask him for 100 grand and he writes a cheque for 150. Then, later on down the line, he’s asking us to lend him money. It’s tough, though, when you’re dealing with a guy who’s a public figure, owns a giant house, flies around in private jets and is writing you cheques whenever you need, not to go down that path. It’s easy to regret it, but it was hard to resist. It would have been hard for most people to resist.

You now write for The Daily Beast (www.thedailybeast.com). Have you left print journals behind for good?
Never say for good, but right now I’m enjoying the immediacy of the web. The Daily Beast is fun because [editor in chief] Tina Brown has a magazine sensibility and we’re translating that into kind of a daily digital magazine. It’s fun to do something where we’re breaking new ground. I miss magazines, but I don’t miss
the magazine business.

In your opinion, is the behaviour of Wall Street any less insane these days?
It’s like an iceberg right now—it’s under the surface. That’s the scary part, and I end the book that way. A lot of the crazy bonuses are still happening. A lot of the behaviour hasn’t changed. A lot of the incentives to take risk have not been removed. You don’t see Wall Street spending as conspicuously or acting as arrogantly, but the institutional problems are still there. So that’s cause for all of us to be a little worried.

You mention Goldman Sachs telling its employees not to be ostentatious.
That’s right. And that was a real memo. That’s not fixing the problem. That’s putting a coat of paint on it. That’s worrisome. They’ve changed their public perception, but I’m not sure they’ve changed the drivers that caused the problem in the first place.

Have you got any more books planned?
Nothing in the pipeline, but this one was very cathartic. I enjoyed getting back to my roots—I’d forgotten how much fun it can be to write. Like most things, if you’re looking to do it, it’s not going to be very good. I was never looking to write this book. In fact, until everything imploded, the thought didn’t even cross my mind—then my mother told me I should write this stuff down. I’d started telling these stories and we were all realising, “My God, it’s an unbelievable cross-section of what went wrong during the decade.” Luckily, I had it all in email.

Was there anything you didn’t put into The Zeroes because you thought, “No-one will believe this”?
I’ve gotta say, for good or bad, I didn’t leave very much out. That’s why I had the book fact-checked. I actually hired a fact-checker out of my own pocket, who spent the better part of a month going over every email and every line in the book to verify its accuracy. Because even I, as I was re-reading it, couldn’t believe it all happened. But it did.

It’s like a dream.
It is. And it’s one of those dreams where, for most of it, you’re having a happy dream, and then you wake up in a sweat.