Grew up in Flatbush section of Brooklyn, NY, where his mother taught high school biology and his father was a "storefront" lawyer. Attended the competitive Hunter College High School in Manhattan.
Is a Harvard graduate who later entered, but never completed a Ph.D program in analytic philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
When he submitted a sample sitcom script to the producer/creators of The Big Bang Theory (2007) it included two stories: one was about game theory and the other was about masturbation. It helped win him a writing job.