Episode 41: Charlie Glass, Journalist, Broadcaster, Author

Charlie Glass is an American journalist who has covered some of the most fascinating and horrific stories of our time. 

While you might not think a journalist has any connection to Paleo, these story tellers are vital to one of what we believe are the 7 Pillars of Paleo, and that's Community.  Without someone to tell our stories we remain individuals only aware of those we know personally; people like Charlie allow us to know and come to understand other communities living in wildly different worlds.

He is one of very few Western journalists to have been kidnapped AND escaped from terrorist hands, and while he doesn't tell the story in this podcast (it's been extensively covered elsewhere), you understand while listening to him the immense power that his practical and analytical mind brings to bear on any problem, from escaping confinement to tracking down the essence of a story.

Charlie has that most basic requirement of journalism, "a curiosity to find things out", and as you listen to this podcast you begin to understand what it takes to delve deep into a story, suss out and untangle the various threads, and then package it in a form that most of the rest of us can understand.

His journalist odyssey began under the tutelage of Peter Jennings, and he covered the Arab-Israeli war while working out of Beirut throughout the 1970s.  Charlie's experiences portray a man with a finger on the pulse of Arab unrest.

He interviewed the hostage crew of TWA 847 in Beirut Airport in 1986, exposed Saddam Hussein's secret biological weapons program in '88, covered the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq in '91, the '03 invasion of Iraq, and has worked for over 30 years to find and deliver the stories that follow all the tangled and connected threads of complex situations.

Charlie credits some of his fascination with journalism to his time working at The Observer (the world's oldest Sunday paper), where he says "to walk into that newsroom was to walk in to the University of Life." 

If you'd like to know more about Charlie, check out his website here or follow him on Twitter.

Tune in and absorb the lessons of a well read, brave, and deeply thoughtful journalist.  Enjoy the show!

Cheers,

Nik