INVESTING - 'Money' man explains method to his madness - Jim Cramer talks about his personal brand, his young audience's billionaire complex and I-5 truck stops.

The 52-year-old Cramer, a Harvard Law School graduate, former hedge fund manager and co-founder of financial news company TheStreet.com Inc., launched "Mad Money" in 2005. He has become infamous for the wild on-screen antics that accompany his advice on stocks to buy or dump. Despite the clowning, he shows an encyclopedic knowledge of individual companies and market history.

Although he has plenty of critics, Cramer -- who in the late 1970s was homeless for about nine months and lived out of his car in California -- has acquired an avid following among younger people. He met Thursday with a group of Times editors.

How'd you get invited to USC?

This is one where the trustees and the alum played a major role. Typically it has been the [student] stock club that has gotten it started. This was much more from a level that told us we had buy-in, so to speak.

You've found that you aren't welcome at every campus you'd like to take the show?

We are a disruptive influence. But USC is a school where they've had so much experience with filming.

We were supposed to go to Notre Dame during football season. At the last minute they pulled it. Stanford said no. We got a direct turn-down from them a year and a half ago.

In a column you wrote for New York magazine in June, you tried to explain why you thought so many people hated you and also why college students, in particular, identified with the "Mad Money" show. You said you were riding two waves: young people who were discovering the stock market and their disdain for the way traditional media deliver information.

We're in a situation now where we're all up against Google/YouTube. When radio was king and then TV came, I think radio was very reluctant to recognize that TV was bigger.

Now I think TV still thinks it's really big -- and the revenues are bigger -- but Google/YouTube I think could make TV small.

This is something that everybody in the media has to recognize. Newspapers are always going to have a core contingent, radio's going to have a core contingent, TV will, but this next generation just doesn't view TV the way my generation does.

But the wilder your antics get on the show, is there a risk that the audience just expects more and more outrageousness? You know what the Romans did to keep the crowds satisfied -- giraffe versus bear in the Colosseum!