Travel as a Political Act with Rick Steves
TOPICS DISCUSSED
Travel as a Political Act with Rick Steves
Thank you for being a part of our community! We couldn't do it without you. To become a financial supporter of the show, please visit our Patreon page, subscribe to our Premium content on Apple Podcasts Subscriptions, purchase a copy of our books, Now What? How to Move Forward When We’re Divided (About Basically Everything) and I Think You're Wrong (But I'm Listening), or share the word about our work in your own circles.
Sign up for our newsletter to keep up with all our news. Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook for our real time reactions to breaking news, GIF news threads, and personal content. To purchase Pantsuit Politics merchandise, check out our store or visit our merchandise partners: TeePublic, Stealth Steel Designs, and Desert Studio Jewelry. Gift a personalized message from Sarah and Beth through Cameo. You can find information and links for all our sponsors on our website.
EPISODE RESOURCES
Travel as a Political Act by Rick Steves
TRANSCRIPT
Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.
Beth [00:00:08] And this is Beth Silvers.
Sarah [00:00:10] Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics. Hello everyone, and welcome to a very special episode of Pantsuit Politics. We're going to do something a little different today. We have a very special interview with the one and only Rick Steves, beloved figure in my life since 1999. We're going to share our interview with Rick Steves and our conversation with him about his book, Travel as a Political Act, in its entirety today on our show, because we think it's so wonderful and we think it's well timed as we all head into a heavy travel weekend.
Beth [00:00:56] As you probably know, Rick Steves is a popular public television host, a best selling guidebook author and an outspoken activist who encourages Americans to broaden their perspectives through travel. He is the founder and owner of Rick Steves Europe, a travel business with a tour program that brings more than 30,000 people to Europe annually. Rick lives and works in his hometown of Edmonds, Washington, where his office window overlooks his old junior high school. And that care and attention that he takes in writing his bio in such a lovely way comes through in this conversation and his book, which desperately made me want to book a trip to Germany just to go to a particular spot. So if you listen to this conversation without immediately starting to do some Google searches for a new trip, you have a stronger will than I do. Without further ado, here is our conversation with the wonderful Rick Steves.
Sarah [00:01:55] Can you tell us about your dad? You mentioned him several times in the book, and I was really interested because he took you on your first trip to Europe and you talk about this sparking your lifetime passion. But then later in life, you talk about him telling you not to get duped on a political trip and how you took him to Turkey to really expand his views on the Muslim population. And so I was kind of fascinated by this role reversal and how that played out in your relationship.
Rick Steves [00:02:21] Yeah, well, my dad was just a dear man. I'm a dad, and you don't appreciate the challenges and the opportunities of parenting sometimes until you got your own kid. And then I keep thinking back on how great and loving my mom and my dad were. As far as my teaching and my travels go, my dad was sort of like my-- what do you call it, test market or something like that. And he was the classic guy that was afraid of Islam. And he was the classic guy that when you said Paris, he'd go, "Ooh la la gay Paree." And he loved to travel, but he came out of the fifties and sixties. You know, I was born in "55 and travel was going camping. He was an avid boater. But he was also the best piano tuner in Seattle and he started importing pianos from Germany, which was quite a bold thing for a piano tuner to do back then. And he took me to Europe and boy, what a way to open up your perspectives. We learned together and we went over there. And I'll never forget some friends gave us white asparagus and we thought, what are these albino asparaguses? And the Germans are so crazy about them. And little things like that. I mean, I ate my first mushroom in Germany. I had my first yogurt in Yugoslavia. And I had my first escargot, of course, in France. And I became pretty enthusiastic about what I called stinky cheese. And all of that we were a step on the learning curve together. And then my travels kind of politicized me. My dad was a little slower to broaden his perspective politically, and I enjoyed challenging him. So I remember we'd be gathering together with grandma and grandpa for dinner, I taught my son to kind of go, "Allah, Allah, Allah" at the end just to ruffle my dad's feathers and remind him that this world is filled with billions of people and we're all children of the same God. So that's the fun thing about traveling is you get out of your comfort zone and if you're a teacher like me, you want to bring people there with you. But you got to realize that you can't force people into it. You've got to artfully introduce people to challenging situations where afterwards they realize, yeah, that was a good experience. Thank you for taking me there.
Beth [00:05:01] You talk in the book about how feather ruffling is kind of your thing and how you were maybe more aggressive about it in your younger years than you are now. And I wonder, were you like that before you started really being interested in traveling? Is that inherent in your personality or did that come from the travel?
Rick Steves [00:05:18] I'm a teacher, that's kind of what I've always done. My two favorite things I think are music and travel. And I was a piano teacher before, and I remember the mothers would bring their kids to my piano studio and they'd have to stay [inaudible]. You're going learn the piano. And they'd take me in there and and I would start them with the, the pop stuff and the boogies, and we'd get to Bach and Beethoven in due time. But I was artfully broadening their world in music, and I guess that's the same thing I like to do as a travel teacher. And I think you used the word aggressive. I used to be more aggressive. I'm fine with that, but I think I just became more artful and better at it because for 20 years I had the bully pulpit. I had the microphone in my hand, and I had 25 people on my bus and I lived on the bus. I was a creature of the bus. And I was the teacher. I was the coach. I was designing people's-- how were they going to come home with the most beautiful souvenir? And that's that broader global perspective. And I used to do it aggressively. I used to put people in bad hotels just so they could gain an appreciation of having a good roof over their head. Or I even had a group once where we didn't have reservations for hotels, and I realized Americans can't relax after about 3:00 if they don't know where they're going to sleep tonight. They can ignore homelessness across the street, but if it's their possibility of not having a hotel, life's got to grind to a halt right now until we figure out where the heck am I going to sleep? I found that to be quite interesting. And as the teacher in a kind of a tough love parenting figure in their path to growing into a broader perspective, I would realize that it's fun to let them realize that for a lot of people homelessness is is a way of life, not just the fear of not having a hotel reservation come through one night. But I had to do that carefully. I'll never forget once in my early days of tour guiding, I would put people in bad hotels and just so they'd appreciate good hotels. A hot shower is good after you've had a few cold showers. I remember people not wanting to disappoint me, but not being able to handle it.
Sarah [00:07:35] Another woman crying, when she came to you and crying, I was like, Oh, my gosh.
Rick Steves [00:07:39] We were in a circus tent in Munich. And there was 400 roommates cross between Woodstock and the slumber party. You could hear Australians retching in the corner in the dark over there. And I remember we corralled our mattresses with my little group and I woke up in the middle of the night and I kind of silhouetted this girl on my tour and she was kind of sobbing and kind of bouncing up and down as she sat cross-legged and she didn't want to disappoint me. And I remember her words, she said, "Rick, I'm not taking this deal very well."
Sarah [00:08:14] Poor thing.
Rick Steves [00:08:14] I know. And I kind of realized right there, I'm not doing this right. I've got to give people a refuge. I've got to be realistic about about people need a comfortable zone so they can venture out without the fear and have the same rich experience. So now we take 30,000 people in tours every year and we pride ourselves in giving people this same experience, but in a more artful way. And they come home probably more thankful than ever that they live in the United States, but at the same time much more comfortable with the other 96% of humanity, which I just think is a beautiful thing. That's the most rewarding thing about my work, is helping Americans really develop that broader perspective and that empathy for people who live far away and also to be a little more humble that there's different right ways to do things. It's not exclusively this way. I love this idea that you learn a lot about your own home by leaving it and looking at it from afar. So these are all just beautiful dimensions of travel. And you know what, every time somebody asks me how many countries have I been to or "What's on your bucket list?" It stokes the fire in my teaching soul to help people get out there and not count how many countries they've been through, but count how many ethnocentric hangups that they've overcome and how they broaden their perspective and how they're more friendly with things that are different. I talk a lot about fear in my writing, and there's so much fear these days. In the old days people said bon voyage, they didn't say have a safe trip.
Sarah [00:10:01] I love that. I loved it when you wrote that. Yeah. So you said you're a dad and I know that you say in your books-- I rejected this advice-- not to take kids to Europe. I took mine to Europe this summer. We had a great time. But you also raise kids with this curious, empathy-driven-- and so how did you do that when you're raising little kids or middle school kids? How did you get them out there in a way that-- was that gentle sort of persuasive approach with your own kids?
Rick Steves [00:10:30] One thing I've learned from a parenting point of view, kids absorb more than you realize. Kids joke 20 years later that they were just real pills and that they just "Where's my McDonald's" and all this kind of stuff. And this is part of their job description, is to be a pain in the butt for travel to their parents when they drag them all the way to Europe. Just last week I was in Switzerland meeting a family and they had two teenage boys and those boys were classic pouters, but they were having a fine time. They just didn't want their parents to know it. Both of my kids I'm so proud. We dragged them to Europe and for years we took them out of school every April for 10 years. And their teachers knew these students that their mom and dad were committed to education and tour was an investment in the education of those kids. And there's no doubt that with that good kind of parenting, kids get more stimulation and experience and education spending a few two three weeks abroad than they do going to the classroom for those three weeks. It's a privilege thing to do to be able to afford to take your kids on a vacation. And from a very practical point of view, if the kids are really young-- because they wish you didn't take your kids-- and I say that grandma and grandpa are on the way to the airport. But if you're realistic about the fact that your personal travel experience is going to take a big hit, you'll accomplish less and you'll spend more by taking your kids. Having said that, it's more fun to change diapers in Paris than at home. [Crosstalk].
Sarah [00:12:09] I'm way past diapers, I will say that.
Beth [00:12:11] My first trip abroad was to Switzerland with my great, great aunt. Maybe that's the secret. You can take a 13-year-old to Europe and not have all that in planning as long as it's not the parents.
Rick Steves [00:12:20] Well, Beth, you're right about that. There's a certain age where it becomes much more practical. But a lot of parents I remember they take their kids to these little kiddy concerts and the kids are just crying and sleeping and the parents are thinking they're doing a good job. And they just spent a lot of time and money for nothing but misery. And there's that dimension of travel with little kids. But when the kids get older, question what age is best. That depends on a lot of things. But my parents took me to Europe when I was 14, and it was a crossroads in my life. And it opened me up to the world and it changed the whole trajectory of where I was going because I was fortunate to go to Europe. Regardless of your age, we're all beginners. We're all wide eyed children when we explore the world. I love that in my touring, either as a tour guide or a guidebook writer or a TV producer. I remember my earlier tours taught me-- they had two phrases they liked. Age only matters if you're a cheese. And it's never too late to have a happy childhood.
Sarah [00:13:26] I like that.
Rick Steves [00:13:27] And I like both of those phrases. And I employ those. I pack them with me. It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
Sarah [00:13:34] For me as a parent, I really think travel teaches kids-- which is a theme throughout your travel writing in this book-- travel is a political act. Which is discomfort is important. Discomfort teaches you you can still learn. You can still have a valuable experience. You don't have to be comfortable. Comfortable stunts curiosity, comfortable stunts learning, stops learning to me. But I think that comfort with discomfort, we've lost so much of that. And I love how you're centering that. I even love when you say I'm not going to take the edge off my opinions, I'll share them assuming that good people can disagree. Like, there should be discomfort. That's definitely the center of our piece. There should be discomfort in conversation. That's how we grow. That's how we rub each other's rough edges off. So when I take my kids, discomfort is kind of part of it. I expect them to be uncomfortable. I want them to learn that you can be comfortable and still have a good time.
Rick Steves [00:14:32] Nowadays, when I go to the dentist, they spend more time making sure I'm not in pain than the whole rest of my life before that put together. You're so afraid of discomfort these days, and I guess I don't want pain in the dentist chair, but I do like culture shock. And it just occurred to me recently that people go to great lengths to avoid culture shock when in actuality culture shock is a constructive thing. It's the growing pains of a broadening perspective. And what we want to do is have culture shock that gives us, again, that most beautiful souvenir. And that's a global perspective and an empathy for other people. The cool thing is when you travel, you get out of your comfort zone intentionally. I mean, you want to get out of your comfort zone. You don't need to change. You don't need to like it. But you should, I think, expose yourself to it so you can pick and choose what you do want to weave into who you are after you go home. You may realize that, oh, there are countries that actually pay more taxes with us and they don't complain about it because they know collectively they're in this together and they have a different social contract than we do and it works for them. You don't need to go home and be an advocate for higher taxes, but you realize that there are countries where people don't play the cheap political stunt of just promising tax cuts all the time because the electorate is more sophisticated and they realize that all tax cuts are are not the same. And there are good investments as a community.
[00:16:08] And I just love being humbled in my travels by going to a country that may have a have a smaller per capita income than my country, but the people are living better. And for me, that's just really like, how is this happening? I thought you measure well-being by material consumption. Like, for me, I grew up with well-being and material hyphenated. You know, it's material well-being. That's what you meet, right? No, not always. There's an alternative to material well-being. And that's almost subversive here in the United States for anybody to challenge that. In my early days, I stumbled into a Norwegian philosopher named Eric Darman, and he started a political organization called The Future in Our Hands. And it was based on being satisfied with how much material wealth you have and moving higher up on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And that was his political mission, his agenda. And they actually had people in Parliament in all the Scandinavian countries from The Future in Your Hand Party. And it really is to me indicative of a more sophisticated electorate and society that doesn't have barbed wire halfway up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and people mindlessly consuming at lower levels when they could just step over that fake boundary and slide higher up on that pyramid and live more fulfilling lives.
Beth [00:17:38] When you talk about the benefits of culture shock and the richness of observing other countries and other societies priorities and values, I've been thinking a lot about how to be an ethical traveler and to make sure that when I'm being so enriched by an experience, I'm participating in it and in first a respectful way and second in a way that gives back to it. And I wonder how you encourage people to do that. You mentioned in the book how important it is to have a sense of the history of a place before you visit it. Are there other things that you think about when you consider what the exchanges for that benefit of culture shock?
Rick Steves [00:18:16] There's a lot of ethical issues that you can consider in your travels. I've always been concerned about the gap of between wealthy countries and poor countries. And when I was even a kid, I realized this back when it cost you $0.50 every time you took a photograph. I remember that for every photograph I clicked, that was half a day's wages for the people whose photograph I was taking, and they were out there trying to feed their kids. And I was spending two years wages to play there and back and just having a jolly time. Is that ethical if you really care about hungry people? Mother Theresa might say don't spend that money on that. Give it to some organization that'll help feed these people. And that's a reasonable approach if you want to be that ethical in your travels. But I decided early on that living in a powerful country like ours where we are relatively free and where we are able to be thought leaders, and to set an example and help steer our country if you believe in participatory democracy and so on, the most beautiful thing about travel that makes all of the expense ethical is if you do it with a sort of a stewardship approach that I'm spending this much money to go there and I'm a wealthy, privileged person and I'm going to have a nice vacation in Costa Rica and I'm going to stop by Guatemala and Mexico City on the way home. And then when I get back north of the border, my responsibility, if I want to be ethical, is to incorporate the lessons I learned down there into my outlook and then live my life here not oblivious to the struggles south of the border. And in a democracy, as a citizen of a democracy, especially a powerful and rich democracy like ours, I have an ethical responsibility to step into the voting booth and not vote for what's best for me, but what's best for the community.
[00:20:21] And what is the community? Is the community me and people who look like me and worship like me and live like me? Or is the community everybody who lives here where I live in Puget Sound? Or is the community all Americans? Or is the community everybody in this hemisphere? Or is the community the environment and humankind? And the more you travel, the more you have a broader definition of community. And when I step into the voting booth in the privacy of the voting booth, it seems kind of almost quarky or strange, but I honestly vote for what's best for everybody, what's best for the future, what's best for people who can't vote, what's best for the environment and so on. That's just an ethic. That's a way of thinking politically. And it's nothing. I don't brag about it. It's just a beautiful byproduct of travel. I'm saddened by the reality that in the privacy of the voting booth, most Americans would vote for themselves if they had a question where you can get $100 savings on your taxes or you can generate $1,000 for people south of the border who don't have a school, the normal American approach in the privacy of the voting booth, I believe, would be a $100 tax break for them. That's the normal, less sophisticated approach. But Thomas Jefferson said travel makes a person wiser, if less happy. I just love that. My whole life is not designed to go to my grave with a scrapbook of fun, Budweiser beer type images of me having a great time with all my buddies who are just like me. I'm curious. I'm outward reaching. I want to make a difference. I want to contribute. That's just an ethic that I've been blessed with because in part, I've traveled a lot and I realized the world is filled with love. It's filled with good people. It's filled with opportunity. And it's filled with challenges.
Sarah [00:22:45] I'm interested because I think there's two really good questions here, which is how do we all think about being an ethical traveler? But I'm also interested in a very specific question I would imagine you ask yourself, because you're not just an average traveler, you are what we call these days, but not when you started in 1975, a travel influencer. You're no longer taking Europe through the back door, you're this name. I mean, you have fans. When I tell people we were going to talk to Rick Steves, they lost it. So I wonder how you think about how as this career that started as this sort of back door, I'm not a travel agency. You survived the Internet, which in theory really probably should have killed your business because people could get the information lots of places. And here you are as successful as you've ever been. And how do you think about, well, if I put this in a book, I'm not giving people a back door influence. I'm directing thousands and thousands of people to this location. How do you think through that as you're working?
Rick Steves [00:23:42] That's the ongoing responsibility as a travel writer. If I go someplace, I got to be careful I don't find a place that can't handle crowds and send a lot of crowds there. That would be a selfish thing to do because it would be a successful article or something like that, but it would end up messing something up. So I have to do my best in that regard. I have to be just honest about who's my market. That's one thing I think people like is candor. We don't have a lot of candor these days. I don't do what do frequent flier miles. I don't enter contests. I just don't want to waste time with that. It's the emotion, the complexity or the non productivity or a lot of gimmicks and stunts that we go through. I just want to be an example of how if you are curious if you are well prepared, if you're well-organized. If you equip yourself with good information and expect yourself to travel smart, you can travel. And you can travel in a way where you can have the greatest time you can imagine. So that's why I'm here, is to go over there and make mistakes, take careful notes. When I get ripped off, I celebrate. They don't know who they just ripped off. I'm running this game and I'll pack it into my next book so people can read about the problem instead of being victimized by it. I love the thought that people can learn from my mistakes, rather than them.
[00:25:10] And I love that I can get ripped off and and and write it off as a business expense. I mean, literally, because I'm out there making mistakes and taking note, that's what I do. And I've been doing the same thing now for 40 years, and I've got a hundred wonderful colleagues that I work with here at Rick Steves Europe in Seattle. And we're all on the same sort of team with the same mission. And if you went to one of my lectures back when I was a university student and you went to one of my lectures that I'm giving next week, it's essentially the same lecture. And I've got experience beyond my wildest dreams and I've got technology beyond my wildest dreams to amplify my teaching. So when somebody ask me what's my occupation, I'm really a teacher, I teach people how to travel, got a wonderful classroom. And for me, for my business philosophy, it's let my information kind of be a publicity stunt. I don't give people a little bit and charge them for the rest. My TV shows I've been producing for 30 years, they're free to public television. My radio show, I've got 15 years of my radio show. It airs every week on public radio for, I don't know, an hour in 500 stations around the country. It's absolutely free. Of course, I make money taking people around Europe on my tours. For me, the best thing I can do is help somebody have a great trip because then all of a sudden I'm their buddy, I'm their travel partner.
Sarah [00:26:44] The trust you have with your audience. My favorite game was how many people DM'd me with like the codenames they have for you because they don't want everyone hear them talk about Rick Steves because they'll be like, oh, tourists. So you have all number of aliases should you ever need them. Uncle Rick. Uncle Steve. Yeah.
Rick Steves [00:27:01] Oh, that's funny. Yeah, well, last week I was standing in Campbell, my favorite little village in the Swiss Alps.
Sarah [00:27:09] That's where I went on your recommendation. I sat on your bench. It was incredible.
Rick Steves [00:27:13] The bench. You found the bench.
Sarah [00:27:15] And the [Inaudible] behind me on a bicycle as we were sitting on that bench. When I tell you it was a moment...
Rick Steves [00:27:21] Oh, Sarah, anybody can sit on that bench and have a moment. I mean, but not anybody takes the time to do it. It's like poetry, you got to read it. And that bench is there and it's a special place. It's there. Oh, that is really cool. Yeah. So through COVID I've kind of come up with a slogan that I've just added to my business ethics. It's just good business is good business. And in America there's less and less good business. Everything is slick. Everything to me is kind of deceptive and everything is aggressive. And I'm in this for the long haul and I've got enough business success. And I want to continue to be successful. I want to be more successful, but I'm going to earn it with the sort of mantra that good business, meaning ethical business, is good business. So there are these issues. I mean, Airbnb it's a great value as a entrepreneur and a capitalist. It turns me on Airbnb. What a cool thing. You know, hotels are charging too much. Airbnb gives you double the comfort for half the price. Uber similar thing when you consider the whole industry in taxis and so on. But what is the ethic of Airbnb? And do you want to burden yourself with being a thoughtful consumer when it comes to accommodations? Airbnb is ruining neighborhoods all over the world and my bit is Europe. And I see it. The OnePlus in Barcelona, the Grand Boulevard of Barcelona. It was just a cultural festival. Today, it's a touristic gantlet. It's fundamentally changed. In my last edition of my Barcelona book, I put Ramblas it's not what it was. It's still worth strolling down. But what made the Ramblas magical in the old days was it was a neighborhood. People lived. Grandmothers took their granddaughters out to the bird market and bought whatever animals they wanted to take home. The market was filled with local people buying local food for local kitchens. And today there's almost no local people in the neighborhood anymore because landlords can make more money renting out to tourists short term rentals. And it drives the human foundation of that neighborhood into the suburbs where it's more affordable and less characteristic for tourists.
[00:29:51] The tourists get the characteristic zone and they're just tripping over each other, buying stuff designed for them. And there's none of that culture that made the place attractive in the first place surviving. And that's where part of it when we go to Airbnb. Is it a battle I'm going to fight? Well, it's up to me. In this case, I don't make a big deal about it because I've got other other axes to grind. But that's an ethical issue. Of course, climate change is an ethical issue. I take 30,000 people on my tours every year. That's a lot of carbon I'm causing, and that contributes to climate change. Am I going to be flight shamed out of that or am I going to find a way to mitigate the carbon I create? Well, I believe it's important to travel from a philosophical point of view. For peace and justice in this world to survive, we need to connect. Rather than have walls, we need bridges. That's just important. That's fundamental for our future, for our children. But do we want to ruin the environment in the meantime? Well, there is an alternative, and I believe mitigation is for real. If you create X amount of bad for smartly invested amount of money, you can create X amount of good and it zeros it out. So I've studied this enough to know that the consensus is if you smartly invest $30 in climate change or climate carbon mitigation projects, you mitigate, you zero out the amount of carbon or single person flights from the United States to Europe and back. 30 bucks. I wish airlines charge you for it and then you were taxed for it and it was done that way. But that doesn't work in our country. It would work in other countries, but it's not the way we do it in United States. So I have to be ethical as a businessman and I have a self-imposed carbon tax of $30 per traveler I take to Europe on our tours and then I invest that money. I could invest it in carbon offsets here in United States, but that's too first world for me and it's just not quite creative enough. I like creative philanthropy and what I've decided to do is invest the money we raised either in advocacy to raise awareness of the climate issue in in our government or in supporting third world farmers, developing world farmers, poor world farmers.
[00:32:05] Half of humanity is smallholder farmers trying to live on $5 or less a day. And they scramble and struggle to feed their kids and have a little extra money to take a little extra produce to take to the market. And in doing so, they contribute mightily to climate change themselves, and we can help them with what's called climate smart agriculture. So what I've done is on a good year, I take 30,000 people to Europe, we invest $30 per person, and that means 30,000 times $30 is $900,000. Round that up to $1,000,000. So we invest $1,000,000 a year in a portfolio of 10 organizations that either raise awareness about climate change in the halls of Congress or fund creative and effective organizations in the poor world, south of the border, the global south, to help farmers farm in a way that contributes less to climate change. There's a fine definition on my parameters here. I don't support organizations that help farmers in the poor world suffer through the consequences of climate change. That's a legitimate thing. But I want to invest in climate smart agriculture, which to me is more fundamental mental and more contributing to sustainability and so on. So we've got 10 organizations that we give an average of $100,000 to each each year. We're doing it this year. We did it even through COVID when we didn't have any income at all to make that multiplier necessary. But the organizations we had helped in the years before were doing so well, we still gave half a million dollars to them, even though we had no income. But now we're back on track. We've got our income and we're investing $1,000,000 in these kind of climate smart, nonprofit organizations. And all of our travelers, when they join a Rick Steves tour and fly to Europe and back, their flight is paid for from a carbon point of view. It's nothing to brag about. I bring it up just because I'm trying to set a model and encourage and inspire other tour operators to realize that if they're not taxing themselves for the carbon they create in making the profit by taking groups to Europe, they're stealing from the future and the environment.
Sarah [00:34:15] Well, let me tell you, when you take a 13-year-old to Europe repeatedly, he asks repeatedly if you have purchased your carbon offsets. And so I basically finally sent in the receipt and was like, here we go, we purchased all our carbon offsets for our flight. So that's the upside of taking the next generation to Europe, is they keep you real accountable on your carbon offsets for the travel. Believe.
Rick Steves [00:34:34] That is one impressive 13-year-old. Congratulations.
Sarah [00:34:39] He's great. Okay. So you talked about COVID and so COVID to me-- I know you updated this book with some thoughts past post COVID. But we're not really post-COVID yet. It's still changing everything. It feels very much like a 9/11 moment in travel where everything will be different moving forward, I don't think we're going back to the before time. And I'm wondering how you're thinking through that. How are you thinking about the ways that travel has changed, even to your point about culture shock and being uncomfortable. It feels to me like everybody's so burned out and they really just want a relaxing vacation. So it's like I did see about approximately half of America in Paris this summer. I heard more American accents than Parisians. But so people are getting out there. But I'm wondering how you're thinking through this sort of post-COVID landscape as far as travel.
Rick Steves [00:35:25] For me, the fundamental joy of travel is meeting people and connecting with people, enjoying life and enjoying with them. And my fear was after COVID that you wouldn't have that energy in the streets anymore. And they certainly didn't have it during the depth of the pandemic. But now we're coming out of COVID. I've been to Europe four or five times in the last year, and thank God I've never had COVID and I've got a pretty good personal sort of way of, I think, staying pretty safe. And what I was worried about, all my guidebooks are based on all of these wonderful little mom and pops. Little creative adventures. Little labors of love. People's dream to have a little bed and breakfast or a guesthouse or a cafe or whatever. And I really was worried after two years of COVID that when I updated my guidebooks, I'd be raking away the corpses of all the little bit of businesses that make a Rick Steve's guidebook and they'll just be the Subway sandwiches and the Amazons and the Starbucks left, you know. But thankfully, I've traveled enough now. We've had with my staff. It's all hands on deck to update all of our guidebooks in this post-COVID time. It's still there. The vitality is still there. If you want to go to Spain and join in the Paseo, it's still there. If you want to lick your gelato on a square on a piazza in Rome, you can still do it. If you want to go to that pub in Ireland where they say strange are just friends who've yet to meet and clink glasses, you can still do it. If you want to get your cheeks kissed in Paris, you can still do it.
Sarah [00:37:00] If you want to see geese in [Inaudible], believe me, they're still there.
Rick Steves [00:37:03] You got it. Yeah. So that's to me, really good news. Now, what's going to come out of COVID? There are certain technological advances that just, I think, make sense. They're realizing that everybody wants to go to the same places. That's our Instagram age, I think. And we always talk about herd immunity. We've already got herd mentality. So we could [Inaudible] places that are forever overcrowded. Ann Franks House. The Uffizi Gallery. The Gaudi architecture in Barcelona. Now you have to have a reservation to see those things and you just have to embrace that. A lot of people are predisposed not to want to make a reservation. But now when I updated my guidebooks, what I found myself doing was at the beginning of each chapter saying, okay, if you go to Amsterdam and you want to see Van Gogh and Rembrandt and then Frank, you got to make reservations for those three museums well in advance. Everything else, you can just walk up to the door. But when you go to Amsterdam, reserve one fancy dinner in these three sites and you should be okay. That's kind of the new checklist before you go somewhere. What must you have a reservation for? If you want to go to Salvador Dali's house, it's one of the greatest estates in Europe, I think north of Barcelona. They let in 15 people every 20 minutes and it fills up weeks in advance. Just you got to book a ticket. And there's two kinds of people, those who make reservations and those who don't.
Sarah [00:38:26] The ultimate personality test.
Rick Steves [00:38:28] And there's two kinds of travelers. I like to joke there's two IQs of travelers these days. Those who wait in lines and those who don't wait in line. If you want to get around the lines, you can. But that's something that's coming out of COVID. But the fundamental beauty of travel is great. I would just say more than ever, Americans just go to the same spot and take the same selfie and you could take away the top 30 Instagram stops in Europe and a good traveler would hardly notice it. There's so much else. So I was just cruising and on a canal in Burgundy for a week, barely saw a tourist. I was just hiking in the Alps for a week really saw very, very, few tourists. I was staying in hotels that were filled with Swiss people. So if you're complaining about crowds, you're going to the crowded places. I mean, that's fine. Go to Amsterdam, go to Salzburg, go to Barcelona, go to Venice. They're great. But don't complain about the crowds because you put yourself in the middle of it. And all over Europe there are alternatives that are also good, that have no crowds at all.
Sarah [00:39:27] And that's advice for the burnout too. Like, if you're feeling tired and overwhelmed then don't go to those places. Like, there's still places to go that don't have to feed that place you're in.
Rick Steves [00:39:36] It's so much more relaxing to find that bench you and I keep talking about.
Sarah [00:39:40] It was a really great bench, rick.
Rick Steves [00:39:42] I know.
Sarah [00:39:44] When he came by-- Nicholas my husband-- he's like, he is herding those geese on a bike. Like, it was just a very wild thing. It was very exciting but also peaceful in a weird way.
Rick Steves [00:39:57] And then a little family comes by and you see three kids on a little little--not a not a bicycle, but a little toy tractor because they're living in a farm community. And these are kids that they don't play house. They play barn.
Sarah [00:40:12] Yeah. I tell people Switzerland was the sleeper hit man. It was the sleeper hit of the trip. We went to Italy, Switzerland and France. It was just fantastic.
Rick Steves [00:40:21] That's great to have a sleeper hit because you don't really know what-- it's not definitively the sleeper read for Sarah Holland. It is a sleeper hit. For some other people, it might have been Riviera or it might have been Paris.
Sarah [00:40:34] Well, and it's like you said, when you think about travel, it's easy to start thinking about places. And listen you will pry my national park scratch off poster for my cold dead hands. I love a checkoff. But you're right. It's about the people. And part of what was so great about [Inaudible] was the owner of the pension, and she was so lovely. We were friends by with the time it was over. It is visiting people. I think you make that point over and over again. Like, it's not just about taking a picture in front of a place. It's about connecting with the people who live there.
Rick Steves [00:41:04] Was that Sabrina at the [Inaudible]?
Sarah [00:41:07] Yes, we're friends now.
Rick Steves [00:41:08] Really? Oh, that's good. I was just there and I was and I had a beer with her husband David. But that's wonderful. They've been there 14 years now.
Sarah [00:41:15] She's incredible.
Rick Steves [00:41:17] Great couple. And those are the kind of people-- For instance, if I'm updating my guidebook and checking my restaurants in Paris, it occurs to me my favorite 10 or 15 restaurants all have the same formula. It's mom and dad, mom and pop or husband and wife. And they've got a little restaurant, 10 tables, one cooks, one serves. And they're not leapfrogging or whatever you call it from one business to a bigger business to a bigger business. They have found their niche and they are put on this planet to serve beautiful food to their neighborhood.
Sarah [00:41:48] And we're all so hungry for that. Everybody's just trying to get big to sell, like, just get big as you can to sell it to somebody else. Like, we're so hungry for something that's sustainable instead of just-- We always say on this podcast growth after growth after a growth after growth is just cancer. That's not sustainable.
Rick Steves [00:42:06] Boy, that's a good phrase, because how could continuous growth be sustainable? And in my memory, every time we're in a economic 'crisis' it's because we're not growing fast enough. We're still growing, but we're just not growing fast enough. And we've all been conned into thinking it's got to be pedal to the metal all the time. Don't be duped, as my dad told me.
Sarah [00:42:25] That's right.
Rick Steves [00:42:26] Don't come home with some goofy idea.
Beth [00:42:29] My time in Europe each time I've been made me more and more aware of how relatively young America is. And so I always hope well these lessons that the mom and pop restaurant is the gold standard, not the chain. Maybe we're getting there. Maybe we're just behind a little bit.
Rick Steves [00:42:49] I'm not even sure if I'm on solid ground by having these feelings. But if I go to community and all there is is strip malls with chain outlets, it just seems soulless compared to a little community where there's a butcher shop, where the young man that's there is doing the same thing his grandfather did with the same cutting block. Is that just romanticism or is that quality of life? But when you feel the roots of these communities in Europe and you feel that the joy that people get of finding their niche, it's one thing I'm trying to better put my finger on it, but I'm trying to think of what is the difference between Europeans and Americans. And part of it is, I believe in Europe people find their niche and then they just do it with gusto rather than calculate how can I get ahead and don't do anything they believe in. Maybe that's related to defining your own success. If you let somebody else define your success, you are not a success. You are their success.
Sarah [00:43:56] Well, and that timeline can define your success. How long is your timeline? If you're talking about a culture that's been around for generations and generations, then your timeline for what success-- I mean, I even think about as I was traveling through France, so many Roman ruins. So I'm like, okay, well, is it the fact that they built these arenas people are still using for like bull races? Is that a sign of success or is it a cautionary tale that they got this big but they're not around anymore? I guess it just depends, right?
Beth [00:44:25] I think proximity to violence too. I was really struck by your description of the European Union as being fundamentally about peace. And how much would it impact my life today if the war in Ukraine were happening in Texas? Quite a lot. I think it would influence my outlook quite a lot.
Rick Steves [00:44:41] Yeah. I'm so glad that you guys have-- really it sounds like taken to heart the book I wrote Travel as a Political Act because it's not a guidebook in a standard sense. But in a way it's a guidebook to, I think, inspire or show people how travel can be a life changing experience. The catch word these days to sell travel is experience and I just love the thought that you can have life changing experiences and you don't get them when you go to the predictable places and and you don't strive to get out of your comfort zone. If you look at the places I've featured in Travel as a Political Act, it's places on the fringe it's Cuba and Nicaragua and El Salvador and Morocco and Egypt and Iraq and Russia and India and Sri Lanka.
Sarah [00:45:34] It depends on how you define the fringe, because there's not a global hot spot in the news that you don't hit on, from poverty in Africa to violence in Western Asia. I mean, like the places you talk about in this book are like-- you even bring up Tigray, like all these places that are in the news right now.
Rick Steves [00:45:48] And I was just in Tigray during a show on Hunger and Hope. And then a year later, the president and Prime Minister, who's supposed to be everybody's salvation and the key to peace, he suddenly got his country in another war. And the charming corner of Ethiopia that we were focusing on, Tigray, is suddenly in a hellish experience. Same thing when you go to the Holy Land and you go to Israel and then you go to Palestine. And you go to Ireland and you go to the north, then you go to the Republic. I just am really passionate about this idea. Any time there's a wall, there's two narratives. It's never just as simple as they're right and they're wrong. You need to get on both sides of that wall and talk to people and you need to strive to get an honest, dual narrative approach. And this is my goal as a traveler when I get into these more complicated areas, and it's hugely rewarding. And what you realize is that a lot of those walls are built for the excuse of keeping one side safe from the other side. But the real consequence, the unintended consequence, is the younger generations are saddled with their parents baggage.
Sarah [00:47:02] Maybe that's an intended consequence.
Rick Steves [00:47:04] Maybe. And they cannot talk to each other. If the kids from either side of the wall of those two communities could talk to each other, the parents would find that there might be a solution to some of these intractable problems.
Sarah [00:47:16] And I thought you are focussed on these places, these groups that don't have a nation or that don't have a state but are a type of nation. That comes up in a lot of different places you visit and it's almost like I think your argument is a good foreign policy one, which is just let off some of the steam. And trying to contain these places you make it worse. If you let them have space, which is definitely the approach of the European Union-- I thought the way you wrote about that was so interesting in Travel as a Political Act-- you watched the change across Spain and in these different places where they said, okay, we're going to give you some space for this, a space to be who you want to be.
Rick Steves [00:47:53] Nations without states, that's a huge thing. And so many times as kids and we have a globe and this country is orange and this country's green and this country's blue, but no borders are that cut and dry. And things bleed over. And borders were shaped by people who won the last war. And countries plant settlers to dilute this or that ethnic group. And there's so much complexity. And when you go there, you get to talk to people and it really carbonates the experience. And it saddens me that so many people spend so much time and money to go to Europe or go wherever they travel. You know, my beat is Europe, so I'm always talking about Europe, but it could be anywhere. And they forget some of these fundamental ideas about how you can have a meaningful experience. But those opportunities are there. You don't need to go to Afghanistan to have an adventure. I mean, there are plenty of ways you can have an adventure. You can have an adventure in Paris, actually, but you can choose Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, wonderful places. Where for half the cost of Germany, you can arguably have double the experience if you're looking for political Eurekas.
Sarah [00:49:05] We use the word grace here are a lot at Pantsuit Politics. And it just the way you talk about travel makes me think of grace. It's just the flow of grace. And to remember that those porters are just-- it makes me teary. Those are just created. We just made those up and there are people everywhere. It's this beautiful sort of macro. It's like you learn about your differences, but also that constant reminder, which is that the foundation of grace, which is we are all the same.
Rick Steves [00:49:30] Amen. That is so important. And when we travel, we need to remember that. And we need to grab those opportunities when they present themselves because they're there. I wrote a book. During COVID. I found my journal that I wrote when I was 23-years-old, I traveled from Istanbul to Kathmandu. A 60,000 word journal. And this was before I ever wrote a travel book. I was just this crazy kid that wrote every night. And it's so vivid. It was like an anthropological dig into my own past. Who is this 23-year-old Rick Steves. I thought that it was a coming of age trip. And I was out of my comfort zone and I was learning and I was meeting people. I was overcoming my fears. And I was realizing, again, just like you said, the world is filled with grace. And, of course, bad things make it into the news. But I really think if we just get out and get to know our neighbors, travel is a vital force for peace. And I'm so committed to the idea that if everybody had to travel before they'd vote, we'd have a very much stronger democracy. Of course we can't enforce that, but we can advocate for the importance of travel. Europe believes in that to the degree that even in tough economic times, they have a well-funded program called Erasmus that funds students and teachers to work in other countries and study in other countries. When I was filming in Portugal I went to a fraternity house in Queenborough, the university town of Portugal, and I thought I'd find a bunch of Portuguese kids, you know. I got there and it was filled with kids from all over the European Union. And at first I was disappointed. And they're like no this is a celebration. This is what Europe is all about. And these students were living with each other in a dorm, and for the rest of their lives, they would have a connection when they went back home and they'd realized we've got to work together. We've got differences. You've got one kind of culture, we've got another kind of culture, but we can celebrate the differences and we can still work and play together. And when we think of the divisions that our country is grappling with, if we had something like Europe's Erasmus program, I just think it'd be money. It'd be a very good investment, because there's nothing like overcoming your fears by getting to know who you're afraid of.
Sarah [00:51:51] I love it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And thank you for this conversation. And thank you for guiding me through Europe on very, very, many trips. Just thank you so much.
Rick Steves [00:52:02] Well, Beth and Sarah, anytime I have an opportunity to share how I value travel, it's for me just a beautiful opportunity. So thank you for having me. And to all of your audience, happy travels.
Beth [00:52:22] Thank you so much to Rick Steves and his team for making this interview happen. We were just really honored to have him with us today.
Sarah [00:52:30] We will be back in your ears on Wednesday of next week because of the holiday on Monday. So look for that new episode on Wednesday not Tuesday. We're going talk about quiet quitting everybody get excited. If our Instagram feed is any indication, lots of you are thinking about this new phrase viral trend-- I don't know exactly. We're gonna get into that on Wednesday. Until then, keep it nuanced y'all.
Beth [00:53:01] Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our managing director.
Sarah [00:53:07] Maggie Penton is our community engagement manager. Dante Lima is the composer and performer of our theme music.
Beth [00:53:12] Our show is listener-supported special thanks to our executive producers.
Executive Producers (Read their own names) [00:53:18] Martha Bronitsky. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliot. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Helen Handley. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Katina Zugenalis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Molly Kohrs.
[00:53:34] The Kriebs. Lauri LaDow. Lilly McClure. Emily Neesly. The Pentons. Tawni Peterson. Tracy Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katy Stigers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Valleli. Katherine Vollmer. Amy Whited.
Beth [00:53:52] Jeff Davis. Melinda Johnston. Ashley Thompson. Michelle Wood. Joshua Allen. Morgan McHugh. Nichole Berklas. Paula Brimmer and Tim Miller.