You write that the reason that your hedge fund succeeded is that you recognized that Wall Street was this fashion show, and it was all psychological. After the bubble, do you think that small investors have learned this lesson?

No. I think people need the help of pros, frankly. I think that you really need someone who understands the process to help you through it. It has to be someone who has been around and has a cynical view of the capital-formation process.

It's just way too hard. I feel so many people are out there still trying to understand the way it works, and they just don't get it.

But wait. Wasn't part of your success as a media commentator in promoting the idea that individual investors could make their own decisions?

Yes. I made the mistake of thinking that people could do a fairly modicum amount of homework.

Let's take the case of WorldCom, OK?

I would have thought, in the democratization days, that you could go look at WorldCom, and when you saw that the debt got out of control, that they had borrowed too much money, that you would sell WorldCom. Because you would go, "Well, holy cow! It's like they've taken down four mortgages."

What I didn't count on was a lot of people don't even know what debt is. They don't even know that you have to look at the balance sheet. They kind of melded this bizarre belief in stocks with a philosophy called "buy and hold," so they could buy and hold really bad stocks, and ride them to zero.

I mistakenly thought that you could teach anybody, or that people knew. I just did not know how little people understood about a balance sheet. I used to say if you can do your checkbook, you can understand a balance sheet. But maybe you can't.

Do you think that when the next wave of Wall Street hype comes around we won't have learned this lesson?

No. We won't have learned jack, because it's the nature of manias. It just happened. I think that there will be more people who will be skeptical, and they will therefore lose even more money because they're skeptical initially.

You write that in 2000, you realized it was clear that the Web wasn't going to be a commercial endeavor except for eBay and America Online. Do you still think that today?

I think that it's a very unimportant piece of commerce.

I was hoping that it was going take off like TV. For instance, TV is not as good as print news, but TV news kind of took over. It meant the end of the afternoon papers, and the papers never really had a chance versus the profitability of the networks.

I was hoping that the same convergence would occur again with the Web, but ... it just turned out to be a very inefficient medium. I don't think it will be that way 10 years from now.

So, the hang-up is that we don't have broadband now?

It's not just that we don't have broadband. We also have to carry these heavy computers around everywhere. We haven't figured out how to do a docking mechanism, and people like to have the tactile feeling of paper.

[But] from the point of view of TheStreet.com now, it works well. Before, people wouldn't pay for an Adobe version of a research report. Now, they'll pay for it, and they're happy to. But that was something that they weren't willing to do five years ago, and now they are.

But again that's not a big use. That's a niche use. And it turned out to be a series of niche products that weren't as important to the economy as we thought, and a couple of huge wins like Amazon and eBay, although they were valued too high at certain points.

There's been a great deal of controversy swirling around your book and Nicholas Maier's book about you.

I've been incredibly controversial my whole career on Wall Street.

And there are a lot of people who would like to make a name for attacking me. All I can say is: Look, I had a great record on Wall Street. I retired. I got out of it because I couldn't stand how I became as a person. Not that I became an unethical person. I became a sick drone that just worked really hard, and that's not a life.

I stand by my record, and I think that a guy like Nick [Maier], he has to go sell his books. And let him go sell his books.

You've been quoted saying that Roger Ailes, the mastermind of Fox TV, is trying to torpedo your book since Murdoch also owns HarperCollins, which published Maier's book. What's the evidence?

Well, Roger has made a very forceful case in the Washington Post that it was a coincidence the New York Post attacked me every day just after [Maier's book] was published by the Murdoch empire, so I'll take him at his word.

If he says it, he seems like a man of his word. I'm glad he explained it to me.

People have been raising eyebrows about this idea that you were having early morning conversations with Maria Bartiromo, and making investments based on what you thought she'd be talking about on TV.

The way it works now is that Maria Bartiromo can call the research department of Goldman Sachs and say, "What did you recommend today?"

And they'll tell her. But when that process was started in the mid-'90s, those firms wouldn't take Maria's call. So, what would happen is that she would have to call accounts like mine and say, "What was the research?"

That was the extent of my role. I read her the upgrades and downgrades. She never commented to me what she was going to do with it, and I never knew.

But I gotta tell you: Did I own stocks that got upgraded and downgraded? Absolutely.

But did I try to figure out the so-called Maria effect? Give me a break. I'm trying to make hundreds of millions of dollars. And you don't make hundreds of millions of dollars trying to guess what Maria is going to talk about on TV.

This has been postulated as being a method of making money, and I just laugh. It's not a legitimate way, it's not a good thing, it's not what I did. What I tried to do, and I was very clear about this in the book, I tried to anticipate upgrades and downgrades. That's what I tried to do. And I was very good at that. And you could argue, "Jim, that's a scummy game."

But that's what I tried to do. The fact that I spoke to Maria or did not speak to Maria would not have meant a dime to my P and L [profit and loss].

So have you slowed down? Are you still waking up at 4 a.m.?

No. I don't have an alarm. I get up whenever I want. This morning, I got up at 6:15. I made the kids breakfast, I made them lunch, put them off to school. Left the house at 8:30 after having a cup of coffee with my wife.

Got stuck in bad traffic, but then went to a voice coach for my TV show. I've written a couple of articles. I'll do my radio show at 3. I'll have the TV show taped at 5:30, and I'll be home at 7. I'm working from 8:30 to 7 p.m. Before I was working from 4 o'clock in the morning to 11 with a break for dinner, so I'm working about six hours less.

I wish I could still do even a little less. I'm glad to take six hours out, but I'd like to take three more hours out, and I'd like to take a couple of months' vacation, and I can't do that.

So now that you're picking stocks for the long term as an investor, not a money manager, how often do you trade?

I have to get everything cleared by the general counsel of CNBC. I have a four-month holding period. In an emergency, I can ask for it after a month, but I haven't used that. I own the same stocks that I've owned for the last year for the most part, except for United Technologies, which went up a lot, and I sold that.

Do you miss the constant rush of trading all the time?

No. I can't go back. I don't go back to my old office. Well, I shouldn't say that I don't miss it. I just feel like I'm still close enough to remember what comes with it: the miserable nature, the unhappiness, the belief that I didn't do a good enough job, the belief that I let people down, the belief that my partners are more important than my family.

All that stuff comes with it, and it's undeniable, and I can't go back. I can't do it.

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