S4E47: Waking Up in the Unknown with Jim Benning

Colin Marshall sits down in Santa Monica with Jim Benning, travel writer and co-founder of World Hum, home of "The Best Travel Stories on the Internet." They discuss why Mexican food on other continents sucks so bad; the nature of a "weather lifestyle" site he previously edited; the old question of travel versus tourism; his relationship to the label of "travel writing"; whether hatred or love for a place can produce anything but uninteresting writing; our need for "hidden gems"; how Los Angeles offers the world within it, yet rewards travel outside of it; that feeling you get upon first waking up in a completely unknown city; the American traveler's anxiety about entering a foreign McDonalds; his multimedia production "Starbucks Versus the Traveler"; the English and American traditions of the travel writing of ignorance; the rant for a single-language world he found in his old diaries; the lost world of the Pan Am vacationer and the United States' "new humility"; LAX and the many other ways that Los Angeles seemingly hasn't internalized its own status; the obsessions, like surfing, that take you places you wouldn't have known to go otherwise; having a relationship with a place as you would a person; his mid-1990s Orange County "Drive-Thru Life"; his search for the stories that make him feel like he feels when he's traveling; and where in town he currently goes for his tacos.