Hi, I'm Rick Steves. In what just might be the most fascinating and surprising land I've ever visited. We're in Iran, here to learn, to understand, and to make some friends.

In 2008, the guy who's probably America's most famous travel writer, went to Iran. The resulting one-hour TV special covered history,

religion, and lots of interactions with Iranian citizens. We found that the easiest way to get a

smile was to tell people where we're from. I'm from the United States. Okay. America?

It's true.

It's actually true.

Rick Steves is best known for his dozens of European travel guides

and the long-running PBS show called Rick Steves Europe.

But more broadly, he's an evangelist for Americans traveling anywhere outside the U.S.

And he makes this call in the most inviting down-to-earth way.

As Sam Anderson wrote in New York Times Magazine profile in 2019,

Steve's is so completely American that when you stop to look at his name,

you realize it's just the name Rick,

followed by the plural of Steve, that he's a one-man crowd of absolutely regular everyday American guys,

one Rick, many steves. Underneath that broad appeal is a radical commitment to principles that have driven Rick Steve's activism for things like marijuana legalization and the end of mass incarceration and his decision back in 2008 when then-president George W. Bush had already declared Iran to be part of an axis of evil to travel there with a film crew and invite us to, quote, make some friends.

So after America bombed Iran and started a new war, I wanted to talk to Rick about his life's mission to make the unfamiliar more familiar.

We talk about his experiences in Iran, a country he first visited as a young man in

1978, and we talk about how travel has shaped his personal and political opinions,

particularly when he went to Central America in the 80s, which made him question the Reagan administration's framing of the Civil Wars there,

and how experiencing hunger and hardship on the road has led him to donate millions of dollars to help homeless families in the Seattle area,

where he was raised and still lives when he's not traveling abroad.

The most frightened people in our society are the people buried deep in the middle of it with no passports,

...