Of course, I then ate the staples too.

In Kindergarten, I was obsessed with parachutes and planes. During my first trip to Nigeria at six, my father’s country, the pilots made me an honorary member of the team and I sat proudly in the cockpit with my wings marveling at the impossibility of flying high in the air. For weeks, I tried to figure out how the sands in Senegal got so white and decided the beach was drowning in bleach.

As long as I can remember I wondered how anyone could argue dogs had no souls. When I looked into their eyes as I child without exception I saw something there. In third grade it was nuclear power plants, since my dad was building them. I tried to imagine the power of fusion. By seventh grade it was the worlds introduced to me in The Great Gatsby and Blubber I wondered about.

And in high school it was the Blarney Stone in Cork, Ireland, where my grandparents lived. The lore of the gift of gab was thick in my mother’s Irish family. Could it really give you the gift of gab? I kissed it several times just in case. I think it worked.

I won’t bore you with the twists and turns of my rampant curiosity, suffice to say I was always the kids asking, “Why, why, why?” Understanding the world around me has been an ongoing and frantic effort towards comfort.

It’s no wonder, despite the detour to law school at UCLA (yes, I graduated, much to the delight of my parents, and I even worked briefly for the brilliant Hon. Consuelo B. Marshall), I wound up in journalism. I’ve spent the past dozen years covering hundreds if not thousands of stories all over the America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. That’s meant presidential elections, environmental marvels and disasters, murder trials like that of O.J. Simpson, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the British royal family, Tiger Woods on the hunt for a Grand Slam in St. Andrews, Scotland, and Hurricane Katrina.

What had the takeaway been? I’ve learned there is no one way to live life, that man can never kill the human spirit, that understanding what divides us leads to great and wonderful surprises, that humanity is ever changing while at times staying the same, and that sometimes there are just no answers.

It’s a thrilling ride me and my co-host John Hockenberry hope to take you on in understanding our lives, our world. Along the way you’ll meet the extraordinary staff we have backing us up. They too have lived all over the world and have been driven most of their lives by the idea of getting to the bottom of things.

That’s what we hope to do.