All Episodes

Sense of place in cinema: Las Vegas Never Plays Itself, with Tod Goldberg

Travel memoir lab: How your journeys can inspire fictional adventure stories

Best of Travel: Paul Theroux on the necessary obstacles of meaningful journeys

The geography of sports movies (with Chuck Klosterman and Michael Weinreb)

Designing a creative life on your own terms (with Cedar Van Tassel)

What movies (do and don’t) show us about places before we travel there

Talking about sense of place and “Kansas Never Plays Itself” on Yonder Radio

Exploring the idiosyncrasies of male friendship, with Andrew McCarthy

Debunking the mythology of BEFORE SUNRISE, with co-writer Kim Krizan (in Paris)

Super Bowl special: Why football kind of matters, with Chuck Klosterman (kind of)

Time is your truest form of wealth (and travel helps you embrace your riches)

Kansas Never Plays Itself: How movies lie when they take us places

Traveling as a writer, and awkward book-tour experiences, with Anthony Doerr (from 2012)

Talking with my parents about how to handle it when your parents die (in memory of Alice Potts, 1943-2025)

An audiobook about how (not) to write a travel book: 9 lessons from my failed van-life memoir

Vagabonding pioneer Ed Buryn on what indie travel was like in the 1960s and 1970s (encore)

Why We Travel: Happiness, curiosity, wonder, sex, healing, and other motivations for hitting the road

Before Sunrise (redo): Screenwriter Kim Krizan on what led up to the classic travel-romance movie

Before Sunrise: Screenwriter Kim Krizan on what led up to the classic 1995 travel-romance movie

Mars on Earth: The world’s driest desert, and what travelers might find when they go there

Why a chapter about “slum tourism” was edited out of The Vagabond’s Way (with Chloe Cooper Jones)

Long-term travel 101: Matt Kepnes on how to slow down and save money on an extended global journey

Travel memoir lab: On blending travel narrative with a broader memoiristic life-narrative

How a journey on the Hippie Trail changed Rick Steves’ life (and influenced Rolf’s travels too)

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new film, shot in Kansas, aims to show what is possible for women’s artistic voices in rural America

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

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

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

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

Wonder Year: The Art of Long-Term Family Travel and Worldschooling

How Rolf Ruined the 1990s: A personal history of my grunge-bandwagon band

Walk and Talk: Notes from a peripatetic salon across northern Thailand

Essential tips and strategies for telling travel stories, with Andrew McCarthy

What it’s like to spend a full year traveling within a day’s radius of your home

Sports, superstitions, and sacraments: A Deviate Super Bowl Special (2024 remix)

Tim Ferriss and Rolf discuss travel, time wealth, and “success management”

The best journeys explore mindscapes as well as landscapes (book club remix)

Going abroad for love, and travel writing that says something new about a place

Seek places where your very presence makes you interesting (book club redo)

Travel memoir lab: Truth, luck, & multi-genre storytelling (with Tom Bissell)

Seek places where your very presence makes you interesting (book club remix)

Vagabonding audio companion: A life in (and philosophy of) long-term travel

KCUR “Central Standard” radio interview with Rolf

Raising My Parents in Mongolia

Super Bowl Exile

Anthem Soul

The baksheesh diaries