I lied to him to get a job. The hedge fund manager asked me how much money I had in the bank. I had ZERO but I said, "a million dollars". This was in 2002. In the prior two years I had lost all the money I ever made and...

I limped out of the meeting and said, "excuse me", and took the elevator down 67 stories, went to Grand Central, limped home, and never went back to work at that job.

I never returned the constant phone calls and emails over the next month. "James, where did you go?"

This was going to end badly. I would play chess all day in my office with the door locked. My boss would knock on the door and I would put my headphones on and ignore him. People would complain that the software I wrote didn't work. My boss would say,...

An anonymous commenter named "Frank" wrote on an article I wrote yesterday, "Every time Altucher opens his mouth or posts commentary, he subtracts from the sum total of all human knowledge."

Frank is absolutely right and I congratulate him for recognizing that. I do subtract from the sum total of...

Are you a Republican? Are you gay? Or straight? Are you pro-choice? Are you anti-environmentalist? Are you a Buddhist? Or a Jew? And, if Jewish -- are you Reform or Conservative? Or Reconstructionist? Are you a vegetarian for moral reasons? Do you smoke?

Are you a writer? Or a lawyer?...

I'm pretty mediocre. I'm ashamed to admit it.  I'm not even being sarcastic or self-deprecating. I've never done anything that stands out as, "whoah! This guy made it into outerspace! Or...this guy has a best selling novel! Or...if only Google had thought of this!" I've had some successes and some...

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...