We should stop wasting taxpayer funds on ridiculously expensive government missions to nowhere that return little value and blaze no useful trail for others to follow. Of course we should spend much more on science - and yes, use robots to do that science when it makes sense.

It was Apollo 8 that first showed us the tiny blue marble of Earth floating in the void of space, one of the great psychological shifts in human history. From out there, we can both appreciate and begin to solve the problems of our world in ways unavailable to us otherwise.

From the moment those images of Buzz and Neil arrived on the world's television sets, our human space program has been lost - for a blatantly simple and obvious reason - after the first giant leap to take that first small step, there was no plan for the next one, because there was no second question to be answered.

Life is an affirmation, not a defamation. Life means living. Life means taking that one tiny or giant leap beyond what you know you can do, or simply beyond what you know. It is in these moments that we live.

Your birthday happens each year on exactly the same day. It is a solid thing, a dependable thing, a measure of your life broken down into 365 subunits. For a Leaper, it is a bit different. For us, the basic assumption is shattered from the beginning.

We go as humans into space to expand the domain of humanity and life - not robots. And as we do, we will get more science because when you are living somewhere, you obviously learn more about it. NASA and the government must first get out of the way and then support us as we open the frontier.

Government should support - and benefits from - economic development and settlement. The oft-used analogy of building highways and supporting infrastructure - not driving the vehicles or the industry - fits.

We are as old as we feel. And while I never feel my calendar age, I often feel my Leaper age. And I'll go with that. Because life is not something to be run down like a counter nor counted as it runs you down. It is an experience, and we can choose to live it as we will.

Go out tonight and look at the stars. And allow yourself to dream.

To establish human settlements on the Moon, Mars, or in the free-space between, humans will have to again rapidly adapt. Like early pioneers, there will be no nearby friendly merchants or supportive governments to replace that broken tool.

Trust in our economic system and the genius and hard work of our citizens beyond the mandate and control of government.

I am a Leaper: a person who - thanks to some mathematical errors tied to the cosmic interactions of Earth and Sun and bad math on the part of some old timers long ago - is lost in time, born on a day that simply doesn't exist three out of four years.

We face fear many times a day, in many ways, and usually we turn away from it. It often hides itself behind laziness and complacency, which are its shadows and aliases. We accept the things-as-they-are world in which we are comfortable.

When good people do bad things, it is sad, but when they reach the point where one can predict that they will do nothing but bad things, a deeper kind of sadness sets in, almost at the level of resignation.

The people who pawn stuff never want to be on the show. And the reason behind that, I find out, is when people are pawning something, it's - they're getting a loan. They have to admit they're broke. For some reason or the other, something has happened, or they're financially irresponsible.

It's like a golden rule in the pawn business: never cash a government check.

I got the Pawnbroker of the Year award. They said I did more for the pawn business in one year than their media team, in 30 years, has been able to do.

Pawn shops have been around for thousands of years - they were the number one form of consumer credit up until the 1950s, but we were vilified by Hollywood. We were easy people to vilify.

I can't work 12 hours a day, every day for too long before it burns out.

That's the beautiful thing about my show... It's truly different every week. We get to pick and choose. Every morning, the girl from production comes to me with 100 different items, and I go, 'Fake, fake, fake, fake... that's cool.'

People come from all over the world to be on the show, and it still works because of all the interesting items coming in.

When you come across something, and its quality is just outrageous, that's probably something of value. It's been that way for hundreds and hundreds of years - the really, really expensive stuff is also really, really high quality.

I was a businessman for a long time before I was a celebrity.

Being a middle-class family back in the 1970s meant we only had one TV... and it wasn't in your room... so when I was 8 years old, I began developing a passion for reading history, and it's never stopped.