When I first got into journalism as a student at American University, my goal was to change people's minds about others by helping them understand different perspectives. I didn't necessarily aim to make them feel one way or another, but rather to foster a sense of connection with people they might not know or might even disagree with.

We are in the midst of a pandemic of eating too much (the overweight and obesity pandemic) and a pandemic of not having enough to eat (the under nutrition and hunger pandemic). Roughly 1.6 billion people in the world are affected by the first pandemic and roughly 1 billion people in the world today are affected by the second pandemic.

Speaking about the demand side… we have skills and techniques in drug prevention and thousands of advisors have been trained by our programmes around the world to work in the community at school level, especially with children. Children are the most vulnerable group, and we must do our utmost to protect them.

We all have obstacles we think can't be overcome, but if our dream is great enough, and we work hard enough, the world is ours for the taking. Keep an open mind: look for learnings everywhere and don't be afraid to fail.

It is essential to think about it systematically and to include demographics as it's the study of people – who we are, where we are- people are the foundation of every society. There is a lot of misunderstanding about demography and one of the biggest misunderstandings is that it's destiny. If it's, destiny, it is not that interesting to study, but it's not destiny.

The reality is – you can't accomplish anything unless you're all in emotionally, physically… you have to put it all on the table. You can't just put a little part of you out there in case you get hurt… guess what… everything about competition will hurt.

LGBT+ identity came into existence as a defence mechanism against those who were attacking us. We were being targeted because of our sexual behavior and our love. We had to defend ourselves – that is why we claimed, and asserted our LGBT+ identity.

Don't base your identity on your opinions. This can be a perilous path because it makes it challenging to change your mind. Instead, it's preferable to root your identity in your values and character.

There's no way electrical signals alone can produce the sensation of taste. That's the hard problem of consciousness: qualia—the sensations and feelings through which we know the world and ourselves—bear no resemblance to electrical impulses, and physics offers no explanation for how one could give rise to the other.

It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world... it's going to be a game changer.

We have to live in the world as it is, not the world as we wish it would be, is something that we misunderstand. If we are realistic those ideals are usually out of reach, and in fact thinking about them and dreaming about them is a way to punish ourselves for the fact our lives are never going to match up to those ideals.

There's a moment when you look at good art when time changes… It's as if time no longer exists, becomes longer, or is suspended. There's a moment of reverie when you're fully immersed in something apart from yourself. One experiences this sometimes in meditation. These inexplicable, wonderful and mysterious experiences we have never leave us.