(gentle music) - [Narrator 1] I am a mother of five.

I really didn't see myself being able to go back to school.

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Once I found Amazon and all their free education programs, I was hooked.

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I feel like the sky's the limit.

(gentle music continues) (upbeat music) - [Narrator 4] At BECU, we know that it's people who make all the difference, because we're not for profit.

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(gentle music) - [Narrator 5] And now, the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival featuring journalists, newsmakers, and innovators from around the country in conversation about the issues making headlines.

Thank you for joining us for "The Journal," with Rick Steves, moderated by Ryan Knutson.

Before we begin, a special thank you to our session sponsor, Socius Law Group.

We'd also like to thank our stage sponsor, BECU, and our founding sponsor, the Killinger Foundation.

Also, thank you to our host sponsor, Amazon.

(audience clapping) (gentle music continues) - Hi, everyone.

I'm Ryan Knutson, host of "The Journal," podcast, "The Wall Street Journal's" flagship daily podcast about money, business, and power.

I'm here today to the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival for a live conversation with one of America's most well-known tour guides, Rick Steves.

Rick, welcome to the show.

- Nice to be here.

(audience cheering and clapping) Thank you.

- So for those of you in the room, Rick Steves is a man who needs no introduction.

But for those of you listening at home, you might be thinking, "Who is Rick Steves?"

So just a quick bit of background.

Rick Steve's first trip to Europe was in 1969 when he was 14 years old, and he is been addicted to traveling ever since.

He parlayed that addiction into one of the most well-known travel businesses in the US.

He's got a line of popular travel guides.

He's taken tens of thousands of people on tours around Europe, and he is had a travel show on PBS since the 1990s.

Rick Steves has built a philosophy around travel as a political act, an act that fosters understanding, challenges stereotypes, and in his words, fights xenophobia.

At the same time, something strange is happening.

Travel has never been easier, but while record numbers of Americans are now traveling abroad, the US is also becoming more nativist and more isolationist.

So, what does Rick Steves make of this contradiction?

Are people just traveling the wrong way and do people even need a Rick Steves in the age of smartphones and artificial intelligence?

So I'm, as we've been talking about, and everybody in the Green Room knows, I'm on parental leave right now and my nine month old son is here, hopefully sleeping with a babysitter right now.

But when they reached out to have a conversation with you, I was like, "I have to do this."

And because I'm on parental leave, I felt like the first question that I have to ask you is about my own upcoming trip, which is my wife and I are taking our nine month old and his older brother, who's two and a half, to Europe this summer.

It's a very controversial thing to do to travel with small children.

So, what's your take?

- Well, I had 20 years of experience with traveling with our kids.

- [Ryan Knutson] Yes.

- And they were the same ages as yours, two and a half years apart or something like that.

And my big advice if you've got kids your age and you ask, "Where should we go," I would say to grandma and grandpa's on the way to the airport.

(audience laughing) You know?

I mean.

- [Ryan Knutson] Yeah, they're right there, grandma and grandpa.

- There you go.

Honestly, I would say if you've got two-week vacation, have a week with the kids that have run forest here, and then have a week of adult travel in Europe.

Having said that, we never did that.

We took our kids to Europe.

Every spring, we took our kids outta school throughout the grade school years in April, and they had a better education in Europe.

And I am so committed to the idea that if you can afford it, and if you're willing to compromise from an adult travel point of view to make it a family occasion, it is beautiful parenting and you will never regret it.

I really believe that everybody traveled before they could vote, this world would be a much more stable, and just, and beautiful place.

(audience clapping) - One of the things that you recently published a book "On the Hippie Trail," which is just your notebook basically from 1978, when you were 23 years old, going from Istanbul to Kathmandu, which you discovered during the pandemic.

We're all looking for things to spend our time with.

I was binge watching Rick Steve's shows, so I can have some escapism.

You were looking through your notebooks and reminiscing on old times.

But one of the things that really struck me in your book was how you said that you packed enough film to take nine photos a day.

- [Rick Steves] Right.

- And I thought to myself, "Wow, I take nine photos a minute when I'm traveling."

- I'm old enough to know that I just have that memory that you would never go click, click, and I'll do another one, click.

Because you had nine a day, because you had 36 in a canister, and you're on the road for 70 days and you already have 20% of your packing light bag filled with film canisters.

You have divided out, you know, 20 rolls times 36 divided by how many days.

And that must have, if I did my arithmetic correct, it must have been nine a day.

- Yeah, I don't know if any, I don't know if you fact checked yourself there at the end, but let's also just like you can't, a trip, like that's just not even possible in today's world, where you, you know, you were going around.

You were writing about how you're on the bus and you don't really know much about where you're going.

You're asking people that are sitting next to you, "Do you know anything about where we're headed and what we can do and get there?"

And it was just, you're flying by the seat of your pants.

But now, I mean that that era is gone, or do you think there's still ways you can find that kind of magic?

- Yeah, Ryan, you're talking about an age when there was not a glut of information.

There was not enough good travel information in 1978 when I did this.

And when you leave Istanbul and head east, for me, it was like going behind the dark side of the moon.

It occurred to me even as a 23-year-old, there's not another soul that knows me between here and Seattle and I don't know anybody between here and Seattle.

And I'm heading that way with no internet, with just a few travelers checks in my money belt and no guidebook, and a bunch of hippies and ad-libbing it all the way to the end of the hippie rainbow Kathmandu.

And then, I was hoping to find a one-way flight back to Europe.

It was an adventure.

You can't do that adventure today.

But the takeaway from my "Hippie Trail," book is that, okay, I'm 23 years old, 1978, having the, doing the ultimate road trip on the last year, by the way, that you could do it before the Shah fell and Khomeini came in Iran and before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan the next year.

So, that was the end of the hippie trail.

It was the perfect time in my life, the perfect time to do the hippie trail.

And I journaled it with a 60,000 word intimate journal, and I documented with all these photographs.

I mean, it was just like 50, 45 years later, it's just dying to be a book.

And I didn't even know I had it until COVID.

And then, I remembered I have this journal.

But about can you do that, now the takeaway is you can't do the physical trip, but you can have the hippie trail experience even in our comfortable age, if you get outta your comfort zone, recognize we can learn more about our home by leaving it and looking at it from a distance, and when serendipity knocks, you say yes.

And I am inspired by people who are in their 20s now that are having a hippie trail experience by doing that real travel.

And that's the fundamental decision travelers have to make is am I just gonna do the bucket list thing or am I gonna do, let's explore the world and lose ourselves in it.

And I just love, that's our mission where I work, is to equip and inspire Americans to venture beyond Orlando.

(audience laughing and clapping) That's it.

- When was the last time you were in Orlando?

- I stay away from Orlando.

I don't think they like me there.

I was doing some- - Their slogan just must be, "Rick Steves is wrong."

- No, no, no, here's the deal.

Go to Disney World four or five times, but then try Portugal.

You see a lot of people, they travel all their life.

They do Cancun.

They do Orlando.

They do Disneyland.

They do Vegas.

They do a Caribbean cruise.

They go back to Orlando a couple of times.

That's their whole world.

And they're surrounded by other privileged Americans that can do that kind of stuff.

And they come home and they think they've traveled.

Well, no, you had a vacation and there's nothing wrong with it, but it's a lost opportunity.

And for me, there's, I've been thinking about this a lot lately 'cause I've been giving talks about the "Hippie Trail," and my own teaching has evolved over the years to think that there's three kinds of ways you can be a traveler.

You can be a tourist or a traveler or a pilgrim.

And I don't think you wanna do all of any of them, one with none of the others, but you can mix it up.

And the default for Americans is all tourist, fun on the sun and the beach.

And that's vacation, but you're not learning about the world, and we need to learn about the world.

- What's a quick definition for traveler versus pilgrim.

- Traveler versus pilgrim, I think the traveler is learning about the world and the pilgrim is learning about him or herself within the world.

And I love that.

To me, as a tour guide for 25 years, I was leading people around to Europe on Rick Steve's Europe tours.

Now, I take those tours because I really have so much respect for the guides that we have and I would love that experience.

But for me, the challenge is to help Americans get outta their comfort zone.

To see culture shock as not something you avoid, but something that's constructive.

It's the growing pains of a broadening perspective.

And culture shock just needs to be curated.

And that's what a good guide does.

A good guide does not protect you from culture shock.

A good guide turns it into a broadening experience.

And Americans tend to be, well, you remember when people called ugly Americans?

That's not a, that doesn't mean they're bad or evil.

It just means they're ethnocentric.

And the challenge for us is because we're a big country, we can think we're the norm.

You don't have ethnocentric Norwegians and Greeks.

You know, you have ethnocentric Russians, and Chinese, and Americans, and Germans.

Big societies can be ethnocentric.

So, we're the biggest and our challenge is to get away from that.

So, I love having that be one of our missions when we're traveling.

- Well, so as we were, I was mentioning earlier, more Americans are traveling abroad now than they ever had before.

There's a pew study out not too long ago that said that 76% of Americans have left the country once, half of Americans have traveled to between one in four countries.

And yet we're seeing in the US over the last several years, this America first political shift, isolationism.

People are becoming, you know, the more nationalistic.

Are people traveling wrong?

- Well, I think the people that are traveling are the people that probably don't need to travel as much as the people who are not traveling.

(audience laughing) Half of America does not travel.

Half of America is afraid of the world.

Half of America dreams of building walls.

The takeaway when you travel is you realize how it is folly to think that you'll be safer if you build walls.

If you build walls, you're planting the seeds of instability and danger for your society.

And what we need to do is build bridges to the other 96% of humanity outside of our country.

And that's just a beautiful thing.

It's a beautiful thing from ethical point of view and a love your neighbor point of view.

And it's also a beautiful thing from a, just a pragmatic security point of view.

It is so tragic to think that we can be safer by withdrawing from the world, by letting voice of America become voice of China, you know?

And that's what we're doing right now with this mania for pumping people's fears, frankly.

We are the most fearful.

I'm just so tired of hear hearing people say, "Have a safe trip."

(audience laughing) When somebody tells me have a safe trip, I'm inclined to say, "Well, you have a safe stay at home."

(audience laughing) Because where I am traveling statistically, and I know statistics are optional these days, but where I'm traveling statistically is safer than where you're staying.

Americans live in a very dangerous place, you see.

So, I lament the loss of bon voyage.

Remember, if you're old enough to, when people used to say "Bon voyage, have a great trip."

When I went on the most dangerous trip of my life, hippie trail, it was bon voyage.

And I came home with a broader perspective on track to have a very fulfilling life.

That was a beautiful, beautiful experience.

Fear is for people who don't get out very much.

The flip side of fear is understanding, and we gain understanding when we travel.

Who are the most fearful people in our society?

People with no passports.

That let commercial news shape our perspective.

And that is if it bleeds, it leads, you know, and that makes us fearful.

And then, powerful people can manipulate us through our fears, and that threatens the fabric of our democracy.

We need to travel and not be so darn afraid of the rest of the world.

It's a beautiful place.

- You've gotten more attention or become more outspoken in recent years about your political views, which you've been talking about a little bit so far.

You endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

You're pretty outspoken as an advocate for the legalization of marijuana.

How has that affected your business to be more outspoken about politics?

- I guess, I've gotten to the point where my business is strong enough that I don't make my personal political decisions based on what's good for my business.

I remember when we were getting into the Gulf War, and I just didn't believe that this was the right thing for our country to do.

And I put up a peace sign outside of my office in Edmonds.

And I was across the street just walking down the street from my office and a man say, "Hey, Rick.

I bet you if you realized how much that peace sign was costing your business, you would've thought twice about putting it up."

And it occurred to me, "Really, you would support a war you don't believe in for what's good for your business?"

That honestly did not even register to me that that was an option for a person with any ethics at all to support a war by calculating how it would impact its business.

And now, I've, you know, been, I've been a outspoken advocate about how racist, and non-productive, and wrong minded, and against civil liberties.

Our prohibition against marijuana is, for example.

And I'm bringing home a European sensibility to that, because in Europe, joints is about as exciting as a can of beer, you know.

And they, it's a laughable thing in Europe that they would lock anybody up for smoking marijuana.

Well, every once in a while, I'll meet somebody when we're out giving a talk and they say, "Rick, we know what you think about marijuana, and we're not gonna take your tours and we're not gonna use your guidebooks."

And all I can think is Europe's gonna be more fun without you.

(audience cheering and clapping) - But so do you feel like you're, that you are alienated part of a potential customer base?

- No.

Well, okay, does the openness that I don't believe President Trump is good for America, does that alienate people from going on my tours?

That would be the immediate question, I suppose.

I don't think, I think people, when they wanna go to Europe, they want good information, and my information is so good that they will just hold their nose and consume it.

You know, because we get a lot of people all across the political spectrum, taking our tours.

We take 30,000 Americans on our tours every year that there's a, we have a hundred busloads of Americans in Europe today at the same time all over Europe.

And for me, I love the fact, not that we've got a bunch of progressive people that love their escargot, having a good time, but we've got a lot of people that are dealing with some pretty exciting culture shock who are having their fears challenged and their sensibilities challenged by other societies that have the same challenges, that are addressing those challenges differently, and in some cases better.

So for me, the most profitable person on my tour bus would be the more conservative person that's gonna have a more broadening experience.

So, I rally my guides.

I've got a hundred Europeans who are guides for me.

And you know, they say it's complicated when we have mega people on our bus.

Hey, this is what it's all about is to everybody wants to better, I think everybody wants to understand the world better, and here's our opportunity.

It's a golden opportunity to help people with a narrow perspective come home with a little broader perspective.

And long story short, if my political outspokenness has had an impact on my business, if it's scared away a few people, that has more than been mitigated by how much of a publicity stunt it's been.

- Because you get more headlines.

- And more, I get far more headlines.

- But then you sort of- - And legalize marijuana and all of a sudden, twice as many people are buying your books, you know?

- Well, it's funny, you know, I was asking people, I was like "I'm interviewing Rick Steve's like what should I ask him about?"

Everyone's like, "Ask him about marijuana."

- Yeah.

- Have you thought about getting into the marijuana business in some fashion?

- I've had so many marijuana entrepreneurs want to name a strain of cannabis after me.

(audience laughing) And I've- - Like what?

- As a matter of principle, I want nothing to do with the green rush, you know?

And actually, that's been a good decision from a business point of view because the cannabis industry's in terrible straits right now.

It's easy to joke about marijuana, but for me it is a very serious issue dealing with racism, mass incarceration, stoking, a black market that enriches and empowers gangs and organized crime rather than provides a highly regulated industry that employs people.

And fundamentally, it's against our civil liberties.

So I give talks all over the country about marijuana, but it's a principled civil liberty stance.

And it's one of those things that I can, I just love taking home sensibilities from my travels.

And there's a lot of easy causes you could get into.

But when I got into legalizing marijuana, ending the prohibition against marijuana by our government, that was a hard one to go because it was scary back then to talk about that if you are a respected business person or whatever.

But I brought home that European sensibility, and that's what for me is really fun, is to travel and to realize we've got the same challenges.

How are you guys doing it?

And then, come home.

It's kind of like, I think of a travel writer kinda like a medieval jester.

You know, in the middle ages, the king gave the jester room and board in order to be annoying.

He was told to get outta the castle, hang out and tell dirty jokes with the kids in the ravine, find out what's going on in the barrio, and then come back behind the walls of that castle and tell the king what's going on out there, you know?

And as travelers, we can, in a sense, do that.

And as somebody who orchestrates travels, we can help travel, provide that function.

Go out, find out how they're doing it over there, and come home and respectfully challenge your neighbors to open up and think more creatively about how to deal with these exciting challenges.

- So what are people saying about America now when you're out being the jester?

- Well, that is a very common concern when people are traveling in this, in 2025.

And a lot of people are afraid to go to Europe because Europeans might not like President Trump.

It's kinda like do you really want to go to Canada considering what we've just done to Canada?

Well, as far as Europe goes, I've been over there a lot.

I've got all sorts of colleagues leading groups around today.

We know what the sentiment is.

Europeans are saddened by our president.

They are confused by how our government, our society can elect him two times.

They are discouraged.

They are abandoned.

And they are sad because they need America in the arena with the forces for good.

And for Americans to go over there, they wonder, "Is this a good time to go over there?"

I'll tell you, I love the fact that Americans are interesting to Europeans, and we're twice as interesting now than we were a year ago.

(all laughing) And they wanna talk, but nobody that I've ever met is gonna take it out on you for who your president is, unless you decide to wear a red hat that says what it's gonna say, you know?

- So, you haven't felt any hostility when you travel?

- No hostility at all.

If you do, it's some drunk guy in a beer hall in Munich.

And that's just what he does for a living is he gets drunk and he spouts off stupidly, you know?

- Yeah.

- But any, any decent, thoughtful person is gonna wanna talk to you because they've got an angry, fearful potential base of an autocrat in their own country going on.

That's what's striking to me is every country, no matter how hip that country may seem, has its base.

It's right wing base, and this is a real threat.

And it boils down a lot to the fear of refugees, you know.

And it also boils down a lot to how wannabe autocrats, there's a playbook for them to read.

Nobody's ever turned it into a actual huge plan like Project 2025, but it's essentially the same thing.

Mussolini had it.

Franco had it.

Hitler had it.

Orban has it.

Erdogan has it.

And it's just, you can read that playbook and you go tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

Right now, the only way our democracy is gonna survive, I believe, is if we can employ the power of solidarity right here in our own country.

This is wild times that we're living in, and it's exciting to be clued in, and we're gonna do it, but we've got to get our act together.

And that's called solidarity.

- Why do you think this is happening, though?

'Cause I mean... (audience clapping) The US spent, you know, 70 years post World War II building bridges.

- [Rick Steves] Yep.

- And now there's a lot of effort to try to tear some of those bridges down so.

- Yeah.

- What's driving that, do you think?

- Fear.

Fear.

People that have felt neglected.

I mean, there's good, this is a, beyond the, you know, the realm of it, travel writers talk, but I would just think there's really good reasons for angry people on the right to support the promises of Trump.

I don't think they're very sophisticated to believe his promises, but if I was in some of those situations, I could probably see me and my friends having that as our point of departure.

When you travel, when you are an educated elite, you might look at things with a little more savvy.

For me, my secret juice, I think, is the fact that I'm a historian.

I got my degree in European history, and I'm a traveler.

So being a traveler, I'm less ethnocentric.

And being a historian, I'm less chronocentric.

I really believe in the value of history, and I really believe in the value of getting to know people you're afraid of.

I mean, when, when you're threatened by somebody, they're, you're probably more afraid than you need to be.

You just don't know them very well.

So when we travel, we get to know our enemies.

It's a beautiful thing if you travel well.

And then when you come home, it's harder for their propaganda to dehumanize us.

And when we get home, it's harder for our propaganda to dehumanize them.

You've made the world a better place.

That's just one of the beautiful values of travel.

- Have you thought about traveling more within the United States?

- Yeah.

- Because you know, one of the things that people, there's a lot of, there's a big divide in speaking of bridges that need to be built between the left and the right.

And people, I think you'd self describe yourself as a coastal elite, well-traveled, but you know, a lot of people on the right feel very talked down to and, you know, it's very paternalistic.

And so- - No, it's absolutely true.

And that's something I need to work on.

Lately, Ryan, I've been thinking a lot about walls.

I'm fascinated by walls.

You know, the Berlin wall, the wall in Belfast between Protestants and Catholics, the wall in the Holy Land.

There are physical walls and there are metaphorical walls.

We have a huge wall in our country between red and blue, and it's a metaphorical wall.

My takeaway from the Holy Land is 'cause I've heard so many people talk about the wall in Israel as if they know what it is.

Typically, these people only talk to people on one side of the wall.

In the Holy Land, any good tour operator or tour guide will embrace the idea of dual narrative travel.

You can't learn about the wall unless you talk, give a voice to people on both sides of the wall.

It's the same thing in Belfast.

You don't know that wall unless you've gone on a Protestant-based tour and a Catholic-based tour, then you can make the decision.

But you've gotta honestly hear both sides of the wall or you have no business opining on that wall.

And my challenge is to better understand the people on the other side of our metaphorical wall.

When I give a, I've been talking at rallies lately, and I don't wear blue.

I specifically wear purple, which is blue and red put together, if I understand that correctly.

And I'm all, I'm excited about a partisan debate and I long for a good principled debate between the pragmatic, responsible Republican point of view and the idealistic, loving liberal point of view or Democratic point of view.

It's not blue against red.

It is America against autocracy.

That's fundamental.

That's why I wear purple.

We're all in this together.

(audience cheering and clapping) - All right, thanks everybody so much.

It's been great.

- Thank you.

(audience cheering and clapping) Thank you.

(gentle upbeat music) (gentle upbeat music continues)