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Your host (and his erstwhile nonexistent roommate Chad) sit down with entrepreneur and wandering investor Maurice to talk about his travels, his financial advice for expats, and his recent jaunt to San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua to avoid quarantine. Your host gets a little overzealous with the website promotion. That domain name, by the way (should you manage to forget it before the end of the show) is www.thewanderinginvestor.com.

In which your host extends an open invitation for you to join or to willfully ignore The Trout Society: a deliberately ill-defined band of brooders, thinkers, and blatherers united in their opposition to the breed of nihilism espoused and embodied by Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States. All requisite information is included in this mini-podcast, and all requisite links are provided on the show page.

Rev. Jerry Stiles makes his record-setting third appearance on the show in this wide-ranging interview that covers everything from the pronunciation of the word "Nebraska" ("like a fart on a plastic chair") to Daoism to the coronavirus to 1980s baseball and everything in between. One might think of Jerry as an involuntary expat: months ago, he, his wife, and his son went to visit Jerry's Chinese in-laws and, a week later, were placed on lockdown in Shanghai. Now Mr. Stiles has a job, a visa, and no intention of leaving the People's Republic anytime soon.

In which your host interviews Nathan Pauls, his second contestant in the show's accidental Nicest Guy from New Jersey Competition. Highlights include Nathan's account of his first and only winter in Mongolia's coldest province, zen and the art of woodchopping, the Naadam festival of "three manly sports," and his short-lived Mongolian wrestling career. Nathan and his girlfriend are currently enjoying some quality quarantine time in Santiago, Chile.

Proud New Jerseyite Ethan White has been quarantined in his apartment in Valencia, Spain for the past three weeks. In this episode, a Yankees fan and a Red Sox fan agree to a truce upon discovering their shared love for The Wire.

In which your host sits down with his long-estranged half sister for a conversation that has absolutely nothing to do with travel, but quite a lot to do with the art of burlesque, child furries, assless chaps, prosthetic arms ejaculating high fructose corn syrup, and post-marital dog theft. This podcast was recorded over a month ago, at a time when the Mookie Betts trade mattered more than COVID-19.

A few days ago, Jeanine Fitzgerald narrowly escaped quarantine in Cairo and multiple Egyptian plagues, only to return to her native Washington and proud Western epicenter of COVID-19. In this episode, she and your host discuss Cairo's ongoing great flood, the ensuing eruption of raw sewage, killer hailstorms, a locust infestation, and a power outage imposed by the Egyptian government in order to prevent mass electrocutions. Other matters of note include: giant minesweeping African rats, The Mummy (starring Brendan Fraser), the horrifying Step Pyramid of Djoser, helpful tips re: bribing one's airline stewards and stewardesses in exchange for infinite vodka, and an orange tabby cat named Jimmy who ran away with an entire croissant. Jeanine is working on founding a nonprofit tentatively titled "The Forgotten Cats of Egypt." And this covers about 13% of the conversation.

In which your self-quarantined host relates his improbable three-year path to continued survival, bitches about the duplicity of the word "biweekly," and gushes shamelessly about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

In which your host, who has been self-quarantining and social distancing for years, predicts the sweatpants-and-small-talk revolution, fails to invent a new sport, and describes (briefly) a peculiar layer of Hell that not even COVIDiots deserve to visit.

In which your host riffs on a very stupid anecdote to a ladyfriend to remain nameless.

In which your host, unsure of whether he is the type of dude who goes voluntarily tumbling down rabbit holes, proceeds to go tumbling down a rabbit hole on his own volition and (for the moment) suspects that he knows darn well what he has encountered down there (though, as you will see in Vols. 3 and 4, plenty of entirely possible (if not more probable) explanations yet remain, many of them still more puzzling than those presented in this edition).

In which your host attempts to comprehend the universe and ultimately falls on his face.

Almost certainly the funniest interview your host has ever had the privilege of hosting.

In which your elderly and considerably more chilled host parts ways with (some of) the institutional angst that he felt during his two years of service in the People's Republic of China.

Emphasis on the word “deduce.” We know nothing of yet, and perhaps never will.

In which your host totally breaks his own heart via the tale of his guest, who lost both of her sisters (one to suicide; one to a car wreck) before she was even born. A few drops of CBD were necessary for this'un.

In which your profoundly sober host engages with his former boss in an effort to arrive at the truth.

In which your sleep-deprived host and his profoundly wise guest talk life, love, Ukraine, and Peace Corps.

You’d think we’ve have learned our lesson by now. Our differences, our in-fighting, our refusal to vote because we didn’t get to pick our dream candidate — these are the mistakes we made in 2016, and we are repeating them blunder by blunder in 2020. And things will intensify. They will get uglier. Four more years of Trump seems like an inevitability at this point. What, if anything, can we do to keep the fascists from getting exactly what they want out of is? Also, your host (as the butt of the inside joke that has become his life) has been peer pressured into asking AOC out for a cup of coffee. We’ll see how that goes. Early precinct results from the State of Iowa (six days late) suggest a likelihood of 99% ignore, ..3% of total (and justifiable) ignore, and .1% of actual acceptance of the offer: in which case your host’s life ceases to make sense, as though it ever did in the first place.

In which your host and return guest Kelly Branyik take altogether too long to establish the day of the fucking week, then move onto broader topics: The Chonx (the largest city on earth), the potential extermination of humanity by the Chinese coronavirus (endemic to Kelly's Xi'an), and the extermination of Peace Corps China by forces external to the Peace Corps itself -- whatever the Wall Street Journal or NPR or Axios or Marco Rubio (@rubella)would have you believe. The convo ends on a heartwarming note, and Ms. Branyik invites y'all RPCV China volunteers to contribute your video snippets to her ongoing multimedia project to celebrate this bad-ass thing we were all in some semi-coherent way a part of.