Travel in a World on Fire: Are We the Problem? with Yulia Denisyuk

Rethinking Travel: A Conversation on Responsibility, Consumerism, and What We Owe the Places We Visit

What does it mean to travel responsibly in 2025? It's a question that keeps me up at night—and one I knew I needed to tackle on this podcast with someone who thinks as deeply about it as I do.

Enter Yulia Denisyuk: award-winning travel journalist, photographer, filmmaker, and founder of Going Places, an independent journalism platform. We met in Okinawa during a press trip, and I was immediately struck by her authenticity and the depth of her work. When I saw her speak at the Women in Travel Summit in New York, she brought the room to tears with her raw honesty about the state of our industry and our world.

In this episode, Yulia and I have the kind of conversation you don't often hear in travel media. We talk about the uncomfortable truths: how tourism can harm the very places we claim to love, why "glamping in the desert" might be destroying local ecosystems, and what happens when Instagram-worthy moments replace genuine human connection.

We discuss tourism leakage—the phenomenon where money spent by travelers leaves local communities instead of supporting them—and why choosing where you stay, eat, and spend matters more than you think. Yulia shares her perspective as an immigrant who has lived between Kazakhstan, Estonia, and the United States, and how those experiences shaped her approach to storytelling and travel.

This conversation also gets political. We talk about media bias, the genocide in Gaza, the erosion of American values, and why staying silent is no longer an option. Yulia explains why she's building an independent media platform and why legacy travel publications aren't telling the full story.

If you've ever felt conflicted about your impact as a traveler, wondered whether your trip is helping or hurting, or questioned what "sustainable tourism" really means—this episode is for you.

It's not easy listening. But it's necessary. And I'm grateful Yulia was willing to go there with me.