BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast.
Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
For rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My castaway this week is the broadcaster and writer Simon Reeve.
You might know him as the intrepid on screen adventurer who's dodged bullets on front lines, walked through minefields, tracked lions on foot and been detained for spying by the kgb.
But his media career began much earlier, after he wrote one of the first books about Al Qaeda back in 1998.
It was ignored when it came out, but three years later, in the wake of 9 11, he found himself on television screens across America.
He circumnavigated the world three times and visited 120 countries.
Though perhaps the most dangerous journey he's taken was one he revealed only recently, his troubled path to adulthood.
As a teenager he suffered poor mental health and by 17 he left school with one GCSE, no job and facing an uncertain future.
Getting hired as a postboy at the helped him turn things around.
Along with the advice from a kindly benefits clerk to quite literally keep putting one foot in front of the other.
He says, I'm not traveling to film a holiday brochure.
What I'm trying to do is get people to take an interest in our world.
Simon Reeve, welcome to Desert Island Discs.
Thank you so much.
It's an enormous honour.
Well, we're thrilled to have you.
Your feet, Simon, must be incredibly itchy by now.