-My next guest is an Emmy Award-winning
actor, author, performer, and, as of yesterday,
he is now also officially an astronaut.
[ Drumroll ]
Back from his trip to outer space with Blue Origin,
please welcome the one-and-only William Shatner!
[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪
That's what I'm talking about!
Hey!
Oh, my gosh.
I'm -- -Oh, my God. An astronaut.
We're not really.
You know, astronauts really -- they go up and they do things.
We're half astronauts.
-No, no, no. Half astronauts.
Astronauts. Thank you. Yeah.
William, I'm so happy to see you.
And I really wanted to talk to you.
This is so exciting for me, because I loved it so much.
And I'll tell you why I loved it.
One is because, obviously, you spent a majority of
your life talking about space and, you know, "Star Trek,"
and you're Captain Kirk.
Here's why I really loved it. You come down.
You land in this desert thing.
You come out of the capsule.
Jeff Bezos comes over.
Then he comes in with champagne, and he's like, "Whoo-hoo!"
And you go, "No.
Hey. No.
Abs-- No, not now, buddy. Absolutely not.
I don't want the champagne.
I've got to think about what just happened."
-Well, you know, the whole effect of going into space
and seeing what very few people have seen,
and there is no frame of reference.
How do you describe weightlessness?
How do you describe seeing palpable darkness,
blackness of space, where there is no filter of
dust or dirt or reflections of light?
It's there. It's like hanging there.
It's evil. It seems like the monster.
And then you look down and you see this precious thing,
this warm, nurturing Earth.
And you see death and life.
And you descend and then you're overwhelmed by
the possibility of the Earth ending in a short while.
And your life is in front of you.
But the message is interesting.
The message is, we all need a wake-up call
every so often in our lives where your life
is threatened by something.
You may have a near accident or somebody you love has died.
And, all of a sudden, you look at your life and you say,
"Wait a minute.
What's important here?"
And you have that wake-up call and you need it every so often,
because then, you know, coming and telling jokes
is very important, and you lose sight of the fact that,
yes, that's important, but what is
equally and perhaps more important is caring, loving.
The planet is going to be inundated
unless we do something about it.
I mean, really bad, and we got to do something about it.
And what are we going to do about it?
And what am I going to do with my life?
And so all the deep things that we should be thinking about,
every so often, we need to be reminded.
And that moon shot, that thing -- that did it to me.
And I was overwhelmed by all the things
we need to do and the loves and the losses.
It was an enormous moment for me that I never expected.
I, too, have an album called "Bill" that out's there,
and there is a song on there, "So Far From the Moon,"
a time in my life when they walked on the moon,
and I was so far from it.
And here I was, 50 years later, so close to the moon.
And it was very meaningful to me.
-The album, by the way, which I just listened to --
it's getting great reviews, and I love it.
I go, "Wow, William Shatner has a new record."
It is getting great reviews. I loved it.
I know you that were saying,
in interviews before you did this trip,
that you going to write a song about this.
Are you still going to write a song?
And has the song changed?
-Thank you, Jimmy.
The other part of that, the other astonishing part,
was that Dan Miller and "Rob the Poet" and I
have worked on this album, and it's a beautiful album.
It's a work of love.
And, as you said, it is getting astonishing reviews.
We met in New York a few days ago and said, "You know,
we've got to write a song about Bill
going up into space.
And what's the song about?"
And we started talking about
what it's going to be like, you know,
the blue orb and the thing you see.
I called Rob the Poet when I came down
and I said, "Toss out everything we talked about.
Going up there and having that experience
is nothing like what you hear about."
-I just want to say also, on behalf --
I just -- I thought it was great that you did it.
I think it was also -- maybe also a wake-up call
for all of us to just, when you get a chance,
just tell someone you love them.
So -- Yeah. -And that's the --
-We love you, buddy. William Shatner, everybody!
[ Cheers and applause ] -Thank you.
-He went to space!
He's an astronaut. He's returned.
It's William Shatner!