Using your travel skills to make quarantine life better: An open chat

“Give yourself the luxury of unplugging from the news cycle. Like travel, this will allow you to reconnect with an older way of being human.”  –Rolf Potts

To celebrate the launch of Deviate Season 3, Rolf gets the tables turned on him as he is interviewed by Konrad Waliszewski as part of TripScout’s #TravelFromHome initiative. Discussion topics include how travel skills apply to quarantine life at home, and how to engage in creative new habits a familiar environment (3:00); how to find serendipity and spontaneity at home when you can’t travel (12:00); hopes and advice for “getting travel right” once we’re able to travel again (17:30); how to engage in the spirit of long-term travel when you have a more traditional life, such as kids or a place-based job (26:00); which travel books Rolf recommends right now, why he started the Deviate podcast, and which projects he plans to tackle in the near-future (31:00); and how Rolf plans his journeys, what inspired his early travels, and how he seeks to go vagabonding in places close to home (43:00).

Konrad Waliszewski (@goKonrad) is the CEO and co-founder of TripScout, a travel entertainment platform and app that provides a portal for visual discovery by featuring the best articles and videos from top publishers and local influencers for each destination. Prior to TripScout, he was the COO of Speek as well as a consultant for private equity firms and Fortune 500 companies.

Notable Links:

• Bocce (ball game)
• An African in Greenland, by Tété-Michel Kpomassie (book)
• Song of the Open Road, by Walt Whitman (poem)
• Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman (poetry collection)
• Annie Dillard (author)
• Video Night in Kathmandu, by Pico Iyer (book)
• Barbarian Days, by William Finnegan (book)
• On Photography, by Susan Sontag (essay collection)
• Still Processing (podcast)
• The Ringer (website)
• Go Viral Festival & Network (festival)
• How being travel-influential differs from being an travel “influencer”
• Van Life before #VanLife (Deviate episode)
• Walking every single street in New York City (Deviate episode)
• Punk icon Ian MacKaye (Deviate episode)
• Deviate Super Bowl special (podcast episode)
• Narrative therapy can make life feel more coherent (Deviate episode)
• Luke Van Tassel’s TikTok (Rolf’s nephew’s social-media stories)

The Deviate theme music comes from the title track of Cedar Van Tassel’s 2017 album Lumber. 

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