The “deviate” aspect of my Deviate podcast gives me the pretext to veer away from travel themes and explore most any topic that interests me — and often I end up exploring affecting and meaningful episodes from my own life. I have, for example, produced episodes about my childhood fascination with the 1976 Sears Christmas Wish book, the weirdly earnest dinosaur book I wrote at age seven, and my fannish fixation with professional indoor soccer in the 1980s. I even convened a group of Wichita childhood friends (amid 2020’s Covid-19 pandemic) to discuss The Great Gatsby in the manner of a high school English class.
Sometimes these personal episodes are connected to important episodes from my youth — but just as often they explore more recent experiences that have affected my life. Below are my five favorites so far.
Pandemic love, cheating death, & cassette tapes: A personal history of nostalgia
This episode uses a selection of found-audio outtakes from childhood cassette tapes to frame a more recent story about the 2019 Asia motorcycle wreck that almost took my life, how I met the woman who became my wife during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, and the prospect of turning fifty years old. By far the most personal and life-spanning episode I’ve ever produced, this installment of Deviate is at heart a philosophical examination of nostalgia, and how it interweaves with both memory and the ongoing accumulation of new life experiences.
Talking with my parents about how to handle it when your parents die
Recorded at the height of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, this conversation with my parents, George and Alice Potts, was an attempt to make sense of the inevitability of their own mortality by asking them how they dealt with it when they lost their own parents. Honest, philosophical, and at times deeply emotional, this episode explores not just the reality that life ends, but how to embrace fleeting moments of connection and communion while we are still alive.
Ari Shaffir unpacks Rolf’s experience of doing psychedelics for the first time
It’s rare to have utterly new life-experiences at the advanced age of 48, but this is what happened for me when I sampled psilocybin mushrooms for the first time in the fall of 2018. Though I had previously taken a dim view of psychotropic drugs in general, I was talked into my formative psilocybin experience through a series of conversations with Ari Shaffir — who joins me here to make sense of my mushroom experience. We cover a lot of entertaining, insightful, and surprising ground in this two-and-a-half hour conversation.
Growing up racially diverse: A not-so-politically-correct roundtable
I am especially fond of this unique conversation about the experience of race in America — in large part because, at a moment in history when race is so frequently discussed in terms of political abstractions, this conversation simply entails four childhood friends of different races and economic backgrounds thinking out loud about what it was like to grow up together. At once honest, insightful and affectionate, this is the kind of race-themed conversation one doesn’t often hear on mainstream American media.
Memories you didn’t know you remembered: A deeper dive into nostalgia
This episode, which debuted the week I married Kiki Bush, is a sequel of sorts to the nostalgia episode above. Unlike my first nostalgia episode, this discussion is less formal and essayistic, instead revolving around Kiki and I talking about the kinds of nostalgia-themed topics — things such as generational music, sports, and technology– that we didn’t have time to address in the first episode.
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