DJ Scruggs

Paul Gilmartin is host of the Mental Illness Happy Hour, a terrific podcast about mental health that you should go listen to right now.

Follow him on Twitter @MentalPod.

The show opens with Slow Magic’s Corvette Cassette and closes with Charles Mingus’ Folk Forms. Check out his hilarious memoir Beneath the Underdog.

Download mp3 or get it on iTunes

PS: Rather than commenting here, please give Semi-Random Walks a review on iTunes.

You can also give me more detailed feedback by completing this short listener survey.

I discovered Kristin Wong while googling something or other, and I ended up on this story she did about breaking out of a career rut. I had just finished What Should I Do With My Life, so I was curious to hear more stories about midlife career changes.

In addition to doing stories like the above, Kristin also runs BrokePedia, which offers tips on frugal living.

Follow Kristin on Twitter @TheWildWong

The show opened with a loop from Digable Planets’ Black Ego and closed with Video Killed the Radio Star as covered by The Presidents of the United States.

Rather than commenting here, please give Semi-Random Walks a review on iTunes.

You can also give me more detailed feedback by completing this short listener survey.

This was a fascinating interview. Darren Pillsbury struggled as a writer for many years, and even gave up on it for a period, but in the past few years he’s been crushing it through self-publishing. Here’s his Amazon page.

That’s only part of the story, however. What you don’t see there is the bread and butter stuff that makes him a lot of money. That’s because Darren also writes women’s erotica under a (female) pseudonym, and it’s important that he maintain his secret identity. So unfortunately I can’t link you to any of those works, but he was kind enough to tell us how he discovered the market and has created a living from it.

Note: In the show I incorrectly mentioned Patricia Highsmith as being featured in the New Yorker. I misremembered the name. The article is actually about Nora Roberts.

The show opens with Sacred Love by the Bad Brains and closes with Lucius’ Turn it Around. (I love this song!)

Download mp3

PS: Rather than commenting here, please give Semi-Random Walks a review on iTunes.

You can also give me more detailed feedback by completing this short listener survey.

Lawrence Lanoff is, as he describes it, “a sex positive, streetwise, business savvy life coach,” also known as Catholic rehab. Follow him on Twitter @soullight

Links to more info about some of the things we covered:

• Christoper Hitchens’ takedown of the Dalai Lama
• Lawrence’s early interest in Pyramid Power
• Transcendental Meditation, which Lawrence calls a “full-on complete waste of money.” (I looked into it a couple years ago but was turned off by the price, then I found an alternative called Natural Stress Relief. I tried it out but I’ve found that I get the same benefits from yoga. I still would like to try a Vipassana retreat, however.)
• At about 36:50 we talk about ayahuasca, which I did in a ceremony shortly after this interview. (You can hear the results at the end of the episode starting at 48:00.)
• Lawrence says there are four major belief systems that you can trace all spiritual systems back to:
  • “It’s all good, even the bad” e.g. Buddhism
  • “Life is a struggle between good and evil” – Christianity, Islam etc
  • “My way or the highway” – many cults follow this line of thought
  • Objectivity – a scientific-ish attempt to find objective reality (many atheists follow this)

The show opens with James Brown’s Sex Machine we wrap it up with Steve Reich’s Six Marimbas.

Download mp3

PS: Rather than commenting here, please give Semi-Random Walks a review on iTunes.

You can also give me more detailed feedback by completing this short listener survey.

Thomas Frey is a the founder of the DaVinci Institute, and his job is to think about the future. How cool is that? Here are just a few of the many things we touched on in the interview:

• The Oculus Rift virtual reality platform. (I have one but have barely had time to use it. However, based on my limited experience I think it’s going to be HUGE! We’re talking Xbox.)
• Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab
• Thomas predicts that by 2030 half of all colleges will fail.
• Do you have a bold new theory, or are you just a crackpot? Take the Crackpot Index test and find out.

The show opened with Kraftwerk’s It’s More Fun to Compute. Check out this great New Yorker article about their influence.

PS: Rather than commenting here, please give Semi-Random Walks a review on iTunes.

You can also give me more detailed feedback by completing this short listener survey.

Warning: this is the depression episode. Not only do we talk about depression, but I was literally in the midst of a pretty bad clinical depression myself when I produced it.

Rand Fishkin is co-founder (with his mom!) of Moz. Which is really cool, but the real reason I reached out to Rand is because of this epic post he wrote about depression. It’s amazingly transparent, but nothing new for Rand. He touched on the subject previously in late 2013. As he describes in the interview, he’d rather the skeletons in his closet just be out in the open than feeling like he has something to hide. And not just with his personal life. Check out this exhaustive post about how Moz raised $18 million. Follow him on Twitter @RandFish.

Other stuff we talked about:

• Adventure Time, a brilliant cartoon series which Rand watched obsessively when he was in the dark
• His unintentional use of the George Costanza sales technique
• The Hyperbole and Half depression comic (I would love to have her on the show someday)
• Adrenal fatigue, which is very common in entrepreneurs
• Michael Kinsley’s article Have You Lost Your Mind?
• Ben Huh’s When Death Feels Like a Good Option
• Rand’s post on the Individual Contributor as a career path (in contrast to the Peter principle)

The show opens with the Zoloft by Ween and closed with Be So Happy by the Heartless Bastards.

PS: Rather than commenting here, please give Semi-Random Walks a review on iTunes.

You can also give me more detailed feedback by completing this short listener survey.

John Corcoran is an attorney and the founder of Smart Business Revolution. He’s also the consummate networker. Listen to the episode to here how you can grow your network and in turn use it to grow your business.

Some of the things we discussed:

• The book Give and Take by Adam Grant, and why you should always give first
• The TechStars Mentor Manifesto
• The original networking book, Andrew Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People
• A great quote from Zig Ziglar: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
• Why you should “Keep it personal, stupid”
• John’s guest post about connecting with influencers on OkDork. (I did essentially the same thing in asking John to run my post about how to start a podcast or interview site.)
• An app to help you learn to embrace rejection: The Failure Games

I also open the show with a discussion of the difference between vulnerability and pathos.

PS: Rather than commenting here, please give Semi-Random Walks a review on iTunes. Whether you love it or hate it, I value your feedback.

This episode is a little different. Michael Amon is the national practice manager of a major consulting firm, the name of which will remain secret. (Trust me, you’ve heard of them.) He self-published an e-book called Kill the Interview that has been circulating among some successful people that I know, but which has never been released to the general public.

Until now. You can download the e-book here.

I invited Michael on the show to walk us through the key points of the e-book. If you’re looking for a job, this stuff is gold. Especially if you’re just getting out of school and trying to differentiate yourself from the thousands of other grads.

PS: Rather than commenting here, please give Semi-Random Walks a review on iTunes. Whether you love it or hate it, I value your feedback.