President Obama visited The Tonight Show with Jay Leno last night, just a few days after his 52nd birthday, and it wasn’t long before recent domestic security, surveillance, and terrorism news was on the conversation table. On the NSA, Obama says the programs were already in place before he came into office, that he was skeptical of them himself, and so they were all reviewed before he kept them in place.

He reassures that while the government has never abused the powers, they are significant — and he uses the April Boston bombings as an example of why such surveillance mechanisms are useful and necessary:

Nobody is listening to your phone call, but we do want to make sure that after a Boston bombing for example, we’ve got the phone numbers of those two brothers, we want to be able to make sure, did they call anybody else? Are there networks in New York, are there networks elsewhere, that we have to roll up, and if we can make sure that there’s confidence on the part of the American people that there’s oversight, then I think we can make sure that we’re properly balancing our liberty and our security.

These more casual appearances are a way to bring the President’s thoughts and opinions out from behind a podium and into a more conversational realm — during the show, he recounted his recent lunch with Hillary Clinton, and joked about getting older, as well as opined on the Trayvon Martin verdict and his thoughts on the racial dialogue that the country needs to have.

Watch the full interview below, via NBC.