Today's episode comes to you from the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival in Seattle.

Recently, my co-host Ryan Knutson sat down with travel business mogul Rick Steves in front of a live audience.

Steve's talks about his business and his progressive politics and how they intersect.

You can watch the interview as a video on Spotify.

Thank you. You can watch the interview as a video on Spotify. Rick Steve's first trip to Europe was in 1969 when he was 14 years old,

and he's been addicted to traveling ever since.

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

He's got a line of popular travel guides.

He's taken tens of thousands of people on tours around Europe,

and he's 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 U.S. 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?

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Ryan Knudsen.

Coming up on the show, a conversation with Rick Steves.

Rated T for Teen.

Each year, thousands of adults lose their shred.

It's an epidemic simply known as shred loss, but it doesn't have to be this way,

...