I started as a standup comic and an actor.

Catholic and Jew - it's very closely related, a lot of holidays, a lot of guilt, a lot of the same things going on.

When I was born there were still different drinking fountains you had to drink out of.

My basic political philosophy is, I ain't mad at that. Which basically means I don't have to have a strong opinion about everything. I'm too tired most of the time. Why do I have to take a stand on everything? Sometimes I'm just not mad at it. Like, What do you think about gay marriage? I ain't mad at you, you're gay and you're married: I ain't mad at you, go do it.

I've always felt like I had a guardian angel in some of those ways.

It seems that there's a constant humbling - I don't know if that's the right word - because things are disproved all the time with new discoveries, at least that's the way it feels sometimes in the layman's world. Like, people will make proclamations of something to be true, and then 50 years later that's proven wrong because there's something else.

I grew up in California. I was outside of the city, not directly in it. So I did have an experience of the sky, but for me, it was the idea of space exploration that fueled my interest. I grew up in that age of the astronauts, and I was fascinated that we could leave the Earth.