And the F.F-M.

I'm Moil Othe-McCain and this is Navarro FM.

Like many people, a lot of my so-called disposable income goes on traveling around the world. But in an age of climate crisis, carbon guilt, and mass tourism, I find myself increasingly

pondering why I feel so driven to take myself off to far-flung places.

And when I saw tourists flocking into disaster zones this summer,

like the burned-out landscapes of Hawaii and roads,

I knew there had to be something more animating the desire to travel than simply relaxation.

You need to read this book, a friend said, pressing a copy of the Tourists by Dean McConnell into my digital hands.

Originally published in 1976, the Tourist is a sociological analysis of leisure travellers

in the first half of the 20th century.

The book has become a Bible for sociologists and people in the tourism industry

alike. I took the book with me on a little meta quest as I travelled around this summer and I thought of all the questions I wanted to ask Dean about his thesis and how it maps onto the tourist landscape of today, dominated as it is by corporations and the rise of

Instagramable hotspots.

Luckily, I work for a media organisation that has a podcast dedicated to exploring big ideas that wield power in our lives.

So, we called Dean up from his retirement in Northern California to discuss the tourist, modern travel, and searching for self in a

fragmented world. My name is Dean McCannell. Started out as a student of sociology and anthropology.

Early on, even before I completed my PhD,

I decided that I wanted to study tourism.

I was reading the classics in the social sciences

and I found that almost all of them were based upon the results of the Industrial Revolution and the growth of capitalism.

I looked around and said, what's going on today it might be the equivalent of that.

And my answer to that question was tourism.

...