Someone I don't know at all just wrote me with the worst selling technique of all time. He wrote, "I really need to talk to you. Can I have 20-30 minutes of your time?"

The answer is, "no." Not that I think I'm so great. Or my time is so...

Claudia and I spent the entire Thanksgiving on an airplane, going from San Francisco to New York. We avoided the entire holiday.

Cooking, cleaning, getting together with relatives, all the small talk, all the hateful talk, all the gossipy talk, all the expenses. I hate that shit. Claudia slept almost...

Sometimes in the middle of the day, totally by reflex or accident, I blurt out, "No" really loud. The word escapes my throat before I can stop it. I'm daydreaming about some mistake I made over the past 40 years and how embarrassing it was. How ashamed I feel. I...

In the Twitter Q&A that I give every Thursday @GiraffesCanSwim asked, "what did you learn from playing poker?" I gave a 140 character answer. Something like, "you learn quickly that all your friends lie to you all the time in order to steal your money."

But I've been thinking a...

I got an email this morning that said, "I disagree with you on Immigration. Unsubscribe."

So I guess after 280 posts where I've written about transvestite prostitutes, and every other topic under the sun, I finally said something that offended this guy so much he could NEVER EVER...

I'm scammed almost every day. Or, if not scammed, at the very least someone tries to scam me. Usually more than once a day. The first time was at the age of 12 playing Three-card Monte in NYC where I lost my watch. Another time when I sent in $80...

I was about three years old and my dad scared the hell out of me. It was the first day of Yellow Duck nursery school. I had never been to school before. I vaguely remember being upset about it. Perhaps crying.

My dad said, "first you'll have two years of...

I had to run to the second level basement at the New York Public Libary on 42nd Street. Every day. I worked across the street at HBO and I would usually hold it in until I really had to go the bathroom. But there was no way I was...

I'm in even worse trouble now. A few weeks ago I had to speak at Barry Ritholz's conference but that turned out to be "only" a panel. It was a great panel but I knew I would only have ten minutes of time so not need to prepare much...

I cheated. When I was in college I took six courses a semester and then worked another 20-30 hours a week to pay for my bills (on top of the debt I was incurring). Often I had to miss classes because I had a job that I had to go...

I was going to go out of business or get sued.

I had just started my fund of hedge funds and on our fourth month in business our main investor said, "I'm going out of business and I need my money back." Apparently he had never told HIS investors that...

The man was crying in my office. He was interviewing to be head of sales at my company. We made websites for entertainment companies.

It started out differently. He had come in confident. He wasn't tragic yet and the mythology of all of our success still permeated the room. "How...

"Why am I totally dead broke again?" That's what I thought the last time I had started a business that failed. I had no income. I had just lost a bunch of money investing in my own business. I was in danger of losing my home. I was in danger...

Charles Bukowski was disgusting, his actual real fiction is awful, he's been called a misogynist, overly simplistic, the worst narcissist, (and probably all of the above are true to an extent) and whenever there's a collection of "Greatest American Writers" he's never included.

And yet... he's probably the...

The single most popular way people have arrived at my blog who have no idea who I am (so this eliminates all social media) is by typing in the words "I Want to Die" into a search engine.

4,722 people did that this last month.

Specifically that phrase: "I Want...

I just published a brand new book and I'm really pleased with it.

The book has original material (not just blog posts), had a professional designer work on it, solves a problem we all face in life, and I think I do it with a good amount of storytelling. In...

I distinctly remembered we all threw our bodies on top of each other. We were making a mountain of bodies. We were all laughing and wrestling to see who would get to the top of the bodies. I was on top. I was three or four years old. We were...

I regret losing all of my money and then losing my house. I regret not spending more time with my kids when they were little and I regret not saving the life of my dad when I could've.

In 2000 I was buying every IPO I could. It was...

Back in college, Sanket and I would hang out in bars and try to talk to women but I was horrible at it. Nobody would talk to me for more than thirty seconds and every woman would laugh at all his jokes for what seemed like hours. Even decades later...

When I was first living on my own after ten years of marriage and my kids were visiting me every two weeks I didn't know what to do with them. If you think about it superficially, what does a 40-year-old man have in common with a 12-year-old girl and a...