I've never gone to acting school and I never will, so I'm learning about the business from the people who are in the business. It doesn't seem like I work at all. And the unknown is always exciting.
What happened was, my parents after 'Circus Boy' decided to take me out of show business for two years to go back to normal school. It was the smartest thing they ever did.
My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups - development, testing, marketing, user education.
It's obviously unfair to paint with a broad brush here, but the germ of an idea for a breakthrough in technology doesn't come out of a business school curriculum. It comes out of a laboratory or a math lecture or a physics tutorial.
My first business was a retro-gaming site where you'd go and play all these cool old-school games. It was a good idea but ahead of its time.
Month after month, Wizard Academy equips people who want to make a difference. This is why journalists and scientists and artists and educators and business owners and advertising professionals and ministers are attracted to our little school.
I worked with practically everybody in the business in all of the years in NBC, but I worked personally many years with people like Crosby and Sinatra, so of course that was a great ground school for me.
Whether it's in an inner-city school or a rural community, I want those students to have a chance to take A.P. biology and A.P. physics and marine biology.
From kindergarten to graduation, I went to public schools, and I know that they are a key to being sure that every child has a chance to succeed and to rise in the world.
In America today, a young person needs more education after high school just to have a chance to make it in the middle class. Not a guarantee, just a chance to make it.
I could have easily gone down the wrong path and dropped out of school, but I was given a second chance.
I love contrast in music. Being inspired by classical, actually - in high school especially - classical and metal both, I remember having this cool realization that they are really similar. It's just different instrumentation.
I've never been one of the cool people at school, but then again, I don't get the people who are cool. It's not that I don't like them, it's just that they don't interest me.
I was feeling like a real misfit in middle school, but when I saw 'Wicked,' it made me feel really cool for being different... and you can carve that in stone!
Music's been with me from the get-go. It was always around me as a kid. Dad got me my first guitar when I was 11 and, at school, if you wanted to be cool you had to be in a band.
I started off dancing and playing sports, and I joined the drama stuff, the theatre stuff in middle school because my friends were involved, and it was kind of the cool thing to do.
In high school, I threw a party to get a guy's attention. I wanted him to think I was cool, so I let him and his friends DJ and basically take over the house.
See, at a certain point it becomes cool to be boy crazy. That happens in sixth grade, and it gives you so much social status, particularly in an all-girls school, if you can go up and talk to boys.
I remember girls watching it in high school, and I thought the basketball part of the show was cool. And lo and behold, a few years later, I found myself in 'Tree Hill' land.
I'm just not a big fan of the too-cool-for-school indie world. Metal bands have never been invited or been able to be part of the cool kids, and I like it that way.
I have a cousin called Flirta D who was big in the grime world, which made me really cool at school. 'Flirta D's your cousin?' 'Yeah, buddy.' 'He must be a millionaire!'
