TravelTube Podcast Transcript - Travel Warnings and Media Bias

Host: Mark Murphy, TravelTube.com

Hi, it's Mark Murphy from TravelTube.com. I'm on the job today letting you know that I've got bad news for some travelers who were planning to visit some exotic locations.

You can't go to certain countries right now because they've been deemed too dangerous by the State Department, and I'm here with this news. Well, it's not really breaking news—it was a few days ago. But even if it was breaking news, it's not really breaking news because you've got to cancel that trip you were planning.

You were thinking about going to the Caribbean, and I'm sure Haiti was on the top of your list. Don't go to Haiti, folks. I don't think any of you are planning on going, but if you were, it's a Level 4 warning—that's "Do Not Travel" on the State Department warning system.

Thank God for People Magazine, because without People Magazine, I don't know how you would be able to manage this. Let's face it, if you didn't know that it was a bad idea to go to Haiti, I don't know what to tell you. It can get pretty crazy in Haiti, and I know a lot of you had those plans booked and probably had your tickets in hand and your bags packed. But People Magazine says don't go because they're running some news from the State Department.

I just want you to know they're not the only country you should avoid in your travels. They've come down with this great story that says to avoid Syria, Iraq, and—I almost forgot—Libya. You cannot go to Libya, folks. Well, you can if you want, but the State Department is telling you to avoid travel to Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Haiti. Like you needed to be told that, right?

The Problem with State Department Warnings

These State Department warnings—that's one example. The other example is when they have a Level 4 warning for places like Mexico, or they have a country-wide travel warning for Mexico. They do that because there are going to be areas in Mexico that are cartel-controlled that you want nothing to do with—you want to stay away from them. But the area of interest for you might be Cancún, and you might be 1,400 miles away by land from where the issue is happening. Yet if you just go by the State Department travel warnings, you would never leave your house, let alone get on a plane and go to a foreign country.

I use the Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Haiti example as "Captain Obvious"—I also call that "Master of the Obvious." There are certain places in the world that you don't want to go. I probably wouldn't recommend going to Eastern Ukraine anytime soon, just off the top of my head. There are definitely places you don't want to travel to.

Media Bias and Travel Reporting

That leads me to news reporting when it comes to travel to places like the United States. If you are overseas and listening to this podcast—either on TravelTube.com, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, or Spotify (and by the way, if you haven't signed up yet, please do)—if you're listening to the news or getting your news in different places that have a bit of a bias, and it's not pro-travel...

When travel has a problem—meaning something bad happens with the travel experience—you hear about it and they beat it into the ground. I get those calls to go on TV and talk about those things. At the same time, when things go well 99.9% of the time, you never hear anything. That's just the nature of news.

What I think is really interesting—I don't know if any of you have talked to folks in Canada, the UK, or other Western countries—I talked a couple of weeks ago, maybe it was even last week, about a family member who came with his girlfriend from France. They were warning her before she left—her family members, one in particular, was warning her not to travel to the US because she may just get arrested at Customs, put on a plane, and sent to prison in El Salvador. Because that's what they're being fed.

The irony is a lot of these outlets have been funded for years by your tax dollars. Just go look up USAID and the media funnel that was spewing money out to these outfits, and you won't be surprised. Unfortunately, it's been used to actually hurt traveling towards the United States in some cases.

Censorship and Information Control

I came across this video of a person—a Canadian citizen talking about going on social media. When you post content on social media and it's not criminal content, it's just content that the folks in charge in Canada don't like—maybe it's an outlet that can be critical of their foreign policy, whatever it is—blocked, blocked, blocked, blocked, blocked.

If you're a business in the United States that relies, in some part, on Canadian travelers coming to the destination and experiencing the destination, good luck, because they're not getting any real news. They're getting a filtered version of what the government wants them to see.

This woman asks, "Why aren't people doing anything about it?" You know why people aren't doing anything about it? Because they get canceled. We went through that in the US, and thank God we are beyond that at this point in time. It looks like that is not an issue for us in the US. The censorship is pretty much over. There's still shadow banning and things like that, but we're not blocking news outlets from pushing content on Facebook and other places, or individuals for that matter, sharing a story from an outlet and then being told that content is blocked.

Just imagine being in that environment and then you get this filtered little version of what's going on, and you're trying to make heads or tails. Most folks are choosing the wrong side of that coin when it comes to travel to the US because they don't have the information.

International Censorship Examples

These are Western so-called democracies. You have the social media police basically in the UK. You've got that stuff going on in France. If you haven't seen the 60 Minutes segment on the censorship taking place in Germany, it is unbelievable—literally knocking on your door and arresting you because they don't like a post that you put up because it could be considered hate speech.

Other than that 60 Minutes exposé, we've heard nothing about that, right? Even in our media, our media is so biased in the US, and I think people have finally figured it out.

Travel Boycotts and Economic Reality

I love the Canadians who decided they were going to boycott travel to the US because they don't like our president. Think about that larger picture. You've got 340 million people in the US. We got one guy who gets elected countrywide every four years. One guy. And that guy has Congress, so he's got checks and balances. And he's got the judiciary. It's a republic. In this republic, that one guy will be gone in less than four years. But there are another 330-340 million people in this country. It doesn't change the landscape. It doesn't change the attractions. It doesn't change anything.

I will say there are certain states in this country where they have some really backwards policies and had them during COVID and even to this day—some ridiculous policies. But on a national level, that's what they're pushing back against.

Economic Comparison: Canada vs. US

When everybody went through COVID, the standard of living just dropped, right? Check out this graph—this is the real GDP per capita, Canada versus the United States. When you look at what happened in 2020, everybody took a dip. Canada took a much bigger dip. You can attribute that to the fact that a lot of those policies were pushed out all across the various provinces.

In the United States, there were states—of our 50 states—that did some very onerous things. I got to experience a bunch of them because during COVID in May 2020, I was in an RV in Fort Lauderdale and I traveled all the way across the country, all the way out to California, up to Washington State, back through Idaho, back through Arizona, and down and around. I hit a lot of states, and you could tell state by state where the incompetent leaders were in charge and where the people with sense were in charge.

Things bounced back faster for the US and they've been climbing ever since. What happened in Canada? They started to recover, then the engine died. Canada was doing pretty well before 2020. They were inching up when you baseline things—we both started at 100 on an index from 2016. They were keeping track, but the gap was widening before COVID, then the gap got really wide after COVID, and now it's monstrous.

When people tell me they're not traveling to the United States because of Donald Trump and blah, blah, blah—two factors: the rate of exchange. What do you get for your money? Canada, look at your government. Where is the Canadian dollar versus the US dollar, and how has it trended over the last 20-30 years? Just take a look at that chart.

If you're getting 72-74 cents on the dollar for the US dollar, but a few years back you were getting parity—dollar for dollar—your Canadian dollar went a lot further and you could enjoy many more vacations in the United States. But now when it's going to cost you 30-40% more to have that same experience in an environment where travel's booming and rates have boomed globally for travel, that's a double hit.

I feel bad for Canadians because they do tend to travel heavily. They're just travelers—they love to travel. Unfortunately, a lot of them aren't going to have that opportunity anytime soon because of how things are and how things have been managed there.

Airport Incidents and Common Sense

There's some other stuff going on in the world of travel. What happens when you're heading into the airport and you want to enjoy a great vacation, and then you find out your flight's canceled or delayed? Or you're near the gate, but the gate across the way—they've closed the door and some lunatic comes up trying to get on board, but the door's closed. They're not getting on board.

Instead of being like, "Man, they'll rebook you on the next flight," they lose it. These people lose it, and I go, "What is wrong with you? Why are you so insane? Why can't you just say, 'All right, I get it. I'm late. I messed up'?" But they're not going to open that door. That plane door is closed down at the end of the jetway. They're not bringing you on or opening that door back up. They're done. They're moving on. You'll be on the next flight or the flight the next day.

Just so you know, it doesn't matter how much you paid for the ticket. The airline doesn't owe you anything if they close the door and you miss the flight. They don't owe you a free hotel room. They don't owe you anything. You're on your own. You'll probably be sleeping in the airport that night if it was the last flight of the day.

Don't be an idiot. Don't cause a disruption. Don't go nuts like you see these videos on TikTok where people are losing it and screaming and yelling. Instead of basically waiting 24 hours to go home on the next flight, what ends up happening? They get arrested.

The Delta Flight Incident

I don't know what it is with People Magazine—People Magazine is now, I guess, a travel news outlet. Who knew they were so all over travel? I saw this story the other day. A Delta flight from Minneapolis was flying into San Francisco, and it landed. Before they deplaned, law enforcement came on, took the co-pilot, took him off the plane in handcuffs—he was arrested.

But the best part of the story—and let me tell you, he should have been arrested. This guy's name is Rustam Bagwagar. He's been arrested for child pornography and sexual assault on somebody under 10 years of age. Co-pilot on this flight.

The craziest part about this is not that you have this predator flying planes—thank God they caught this guy. That's not the craziest thing. The passengers, one in particular... Bear in mind, this plane was going from Minneapolis to San Francisco. Obviously, there were some people that developed PTSD as a result of this.

Here's the quote: roughly 10 officers come on, arrest the co-pilot, take him off the plane in handcuffs, and away he goes. A passenger on the plane reportedly told a site called "View from the Wing" that the officers "stormed the cockpit, leaving everybody on board confused."

I'm sorry, ma'am—were they supposed to give you a heads-up? "I'm coming on for a work trip. I'm going to be in San Francisco. I can't believe these people didn't tell me that these officers were going to storm the cockpit. We were very confused."

FYI, they don't need to tell you. They're doing their job. They're taking a predator off the street.

But then this person continues—and this is where, if you don't have a clue, maybe you should just shut up. This person said, "I don't know if this person was disappearing before our eyes, if there had been a crime committed, or what exactly was happening," a woman on the plane told ABC7.

What? You're conflating the co-pilot of a jet who gets arrested for having relations with somebody less than 10 years old—a 30-plus-year-old man—you're conflating that with ICE coming on and "disappearing people." This is how stupid people are. They didn't know. They couldn't understand what was going on.

How about you wait like a couple of hours? How about you wait and find out? No, you're going to go and spread your fear.

Conclusion

That's my podcast for the week. I hope you have a great one and try not to be a complete idiot when it comes to travel. Try not to be a complete idiot when you look at the news and you don't understand you're being lied to. Get out and enjoy the world. There's a lot to see.

My travel warning is: don't forget to have your passport updated so it doesn't expire within six months of your trip overseas, and don't go to war-torn countries or places where they've had civil unrest and massive poverty for decades, terrorism, and ongoing shooting wars. You'll probably be pretty safe—probably as safe as you would be going out to your local grocery store or doing something in your neck of the woods.

Till next time, I'm Mark Murphy. This is TravelTube. Thanks for joining me and have a great rest of your week.

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