My father wouldn't get us a TV, he wouldn't allow a TV in the house.

My parents were very strict. They thought boarding school would do me good. So, when I was about seven, I was put in one in India for a while.

That background helped me a lot, because it taught me to fend for myself from a very early age, and to be responsible. It was an upheaval of an upbringing, which seems to have worked, I guess.

I never had, like, a nanny that took care of me. My mom always fed me breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I belong to a family of boys who were raised in meager circumstances in central Kansas, and every one of us earned our way as we went along, and it never occurred to us that we were poor, but we were.

I just sort of kept having ideas. We had a lot of magazines lying around our house. It was kind of messy. So you kind of read stuff all the time, and I would read Popular Science and things like that. I just got interested in stuff, I guess, technology and how devices work.