Deviate with Rolf Potts

Jan 31 2025 250 ep. 59 mins 1.4k
Deviate with Rolf Potts Podcast artwork

Travel Writer, Essayist, Adventurer, Teacher

  Society & Culture
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A travel writers’ Super Bowl special: Pico Iyer and Rolf discuss NFL football from the global perspective

Jan 31 2025 38 mins  
“My life has often forced me to follow the Super Bowl in unusual circumstances. The first Super Bowl found me in boarding school in England, huddled under my bedclothes with an illegal transistor radio.” –Pico Iyer In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Pico talk about the novelty of two travel writers talking about the Super Bowl, and Pico’s NFL fandom (4:00); how sp

Pico Iyer on how solitude, stillness, and silence play an essential counterbalance to the traveling life

Jan 13 2025 55 mins  
“In solitude, I often feel closer to the people I care for than when they’re in the same room.” –Pico Iyer In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Pico talk about how the best travels are often counterbalanced with a kind of stillness, in which one can find one’s “best self” (3:00); Pico’s decades-long experiences with monks in a California monaster

Life changing travel experiences: Memories of traveling to Syria, 25 years on (with Ari Shaffir)

Dec 30 2024 83 mins  
“Syria is a mix of everything. There are multiple Christian cultures, multiple Muslim cultures, and multiple languages. It’s the crossroads of the world. It made for some of my best travel memories from that time of my life.” —Rolf Potts In this episode of Deviate (which was remixed from an episode of Ari Shaffir’s You Be Trippin’ podcast), Rolf and Ari talk

Travel memoir lab: How to fast-track your travel book by working with a hybrid publisher

Dec 09 2024 61 mins  
“In El Salvador, I dropped $5 out of my pocket at the border, and some guy came running up to me. At the beginning of the trip I would have been surprised by that. But by that point I would have been surprised if it didn’t happen.” —Matt Savino In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Matt talk about how the first version of his travel book was way too long, and what he end

HoneyTrek: A case study in making a full-time living as travel influencers and content creators

Nov 25 2024 43 mins  
“When we got into this, we didn’t know how to make videos. That’s a skill we’ve had to learn, because the industry has changed so much, from photos to videos. We are still learning all the time.” —Anne Howard In this episode of Deviate, Rolf, Mike, Anne and Kiki talk about they got started traveling as a couple, how they made it affordable, and how t

Live from Bali: How tourists, influencers, and nomads transform destinations (for good and for bad)

Nov 11 2024 38 mins  
“Influencers are forever reinforcing the same images. They’re spending no time in the actual place, other than the requisite time to take the photo. From the local community’s point of view, these kinds of tourists bring very little value.” –Stuart McDonald In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Stuart talk about why Stuart chose to make his office in We

Vagabonding audio companion: Obnoxious travelers (and how to avoid being one)

Oct 21 2024 45 mins  
“We’re having less enjoyable travel experiences, even as our photos show us having this amazing time, because we’re performing a version of travel for people who aren’t even there.” In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and David talk about the time-honored practice of Americans pretending to be Canadian on the road, and why Americans at times have had a bad reputa

What you discover when you walk down every single street in New York City (encore)

Sep 16 2024 90 mins  
“Traveling, for me, is all about destroying stereotypes and narratives about people and places.” – Matt Green In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Matt discuss Matt’s mission to walk every street in New York City (3:00); walking across the entire United States and breaking stereotypes (12:00); bucket lists as a catalyst for action (28:00); and Matt’s experiences walking i

A history and future of digital and biological technology, with Jane Metcalfe

Aug 07 2024 59 mins  
“We need positive visions of how all this technology gets deployed, because what we visualize is what we build.” –Jane Metcalfe In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Jane talk about the pioneering work she did with Wired during the dawn of the “digital revolution” (3:00); how and why Jane’s professional focus shifted away from digital issues and into food and

Bicycling across the USA (with no money or food) looking for human connection

Jul 15 2024 50 mins  
“My parents passed away and it created this sense of recklessness in me, but in a positive way: I wanted to create a travel experience and push myself and learn about myself. Because you never know how long you’re gonna be around for.” –Daniel Troia In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Daniel talk about why Daniel chose to bicycle across America with no money or food, t