 As you know Rousseau is quite negative on travel as a way of acquiring useful knowledge He thinks it leads to a sort of false vanity and a belief that you know things that actually you don't and you like myself You're quite positive on travel Make the case for travel as a fundamental form of learning Yeah, I a fish can't explain to you what water is like because he's never been out of water And I don't think you can really understand where you're from Until you go somewhere else and see a different form of social organization And so what this book is built the first third is sort of straight stage setting About this new thing called perpetual adolescence and the last two thirds is five Habits that I think we should want our kids to acquire as they come of age And one is learning how to have the eyes to see which come from travel It's very akin to why you learn a foreign language I mean you may be learning a foreign language because you're gonna need to use it But even if you never use your Spanish or your French or your Latin It was still really good to go through the process of having to learn a new language and think about its grammatical Structure and other vocabulary from yours because now for the first time you can see your own language It wasn't until I started to learn Spanish that I understood English at all and I think that's what travel is This is not the grand European tour for rich kids This is about going ten miles from your own home and spending time with people in another neighborhood Or this is about going from the built environment where our kids are almost exclusively being raised and going and living in nature for a while And I think you acquire eyes to see where you're from the first time and this is this is something that I First came to see as a little kid. I live in the same farm-dependent town in Nebraska one of these twenty five thousand person towns that I grew up in and when I was a little kid we would go fishing in Minnesota, and we didn't have any money my dad was a High school teacher and a football and wrestling coach And we would go stay at this rustic cabin that my uncle had in Minnesota And we'd go fishing and I thought I was in the middle of nowhere Like I thought this was the greatest thing in the world to go fishing with my dad and my uncle and my cousins And my dad and my uncle always sort of put the kibosh on how Wild and and sort of remote and primitive we thought we were because when they were kids they used to go up into the northern woods of Canada fishing and it was just a bunch of high school and college boys from Nebraska who would load in a car and drive up into Canada and literally they had canoes sleeping bags They had fishing tackle They had fishing poles and they had a few cans of beans and a can opener as their emergency plan for if they didn't catch enough food How they would live and they would just go and to remote Canada And they would talk without any analytical categories to explain it But they would talk about how they first understood social relationships And they first understood the little farm town that they were from and I'm from Because they could contrast it with being at a place where there was nothing built And I don't think we're helping our kids right now Understand the need to get to another place more often so that you have the fresh perspective on where they're from Now in 1992 or so you lived in Europe for about a year. Where were you mainly? so I was in Prague for the summer of 1992 and then I did a junior year abroad at Oxford in the fall of 92 and then December January early February probably two-ish months. I bought a url pass back then you could buy I think was 600 bucks for 60 days Limitless train ticket to anywhere in Europe and a buddy mine and I went and did that for 60 days Living on the trains in Europe in the middle of winter and we had no money like our $660 was all we had and we budgeted six doll I think it was six dollars a day To live for those two months which basically meant, you know, we had a backpack where you'd have peanut butter Jelly and mustard and then you would buy baguettes whatever town you got to we'd buy water and we'd buy bread And we didn't have any money that we're gonna be able to pay for lodging So we quickly realized that whenever you wanted to be in a town for two or more days or some European city You'd pick a town that was a 12-hour train ride away as the way that you would be able to sleep And so you would batch towns you would be in a city if you want to be in city a for a few days in city B you go a b a b so that every night you can take a 10 to 12 hour overnight train as a way to sleep indoors And we did that for months. It was great. What was the biggest surprise for you in and near Prague living there? Well Prague is incredible because it wasn't bombed out and we were there You know, this is two and a half years after the the fall of the wall in Berlin And I'm from a part of Nebraska where when I was a kid were parts of Nebraska I live again about an hour outside Omaha and parts of our state are Hispanic sizing rapidly We have a lot of first-generation immigration but when I was a kid the town that I'm from was basically a hundred percent German the big cultural divide in town is German Catholic versus German Lutheran and I never I never I never thought of myself as potentially looking German because Everybody where I lived sort of looked like I looked and when I was in Prague for the summer of 1992 Prague Czech and Slovak Republics were gonna split right in November. So it was four months later. And so they had some old currency that was sort of pre fall of communism and then they had a transitional currency and then they had the current Czechoslovakian currency And then they were about to split the country in two So if you were a tourist it was really easy to get taken because there's a whole bunch of bad money in circulation that wasn't worth anything and But you couldn't lose more than six dollars a day, right? In the summer again, this was I was in Prague the beginning summer and the winner was the train travel So maybe I didn't budget well. So the beginning summer I might have lived kind of high on the hog and then at the end I had no logic for a couple of months but in a daughter in no jelly in Prague. We ate really really well because that was the beginning of the trip and all of these Shucksters who were trying to you know, take your money Would think that I was a German tourist in Prague for the weekend because the Germans would use Prague as their playground at this point And so people would come up to me constantly like just, you know, very Saraptiously showing you currency in their hand. It was illegal that to be a private money changer But all these people would just come up to me all the time and in German ask me if I wanted to change money And I hadn't expected to feel in a place like Prague That there were folks that had this constant Immediate East-West line having created Eastern Europe as kind of a playground for Western Europeans But I was mistaken as a German all the time