What do you remember about growing up in Vegas?
"When I was a boy, my dad used to work from 4:00 in the afternoon until like 2:00 in the morning, and my mom worked from 8:00 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon. So we were with my dad all day and my mom all night. A lot of times when I was with my mom, whether we were going to go get dinner or go shopping, we needed some money from Dad, who was working. So we would pull into the old MGM Grand Hotel, and at like eight years old, I would go running through the casino to the Jubilee showroom, where they had all the naked dancing ladies, the follies kind of chorus line type stuff. I knew all the captains and maitre d's and used to just wait for my dad to come through his little turn there in the office. He would give us some money and I'd go running back out, go to the grocery store, and go home. As a little boy, it felt strangely normal."

Could you ever live in a normal town?
"The thing is, excluding the slot machines at grocery stores, there's nothing about living here that would seem any more or less odd than living anywhere else. We have an industry here: the gaming and tourism industry. We have a few casinos that have popped up in different areas of town, but we also have more churches per capita than most of the cities in America. That's not wedding chapels; that's real churches. We have 27 high schools here. It's a very narrow perspective to think that a person who was born and raised here had an abnormal upbringing. It's like thinking if you live in New Orleans, that you've gotta get drunk every night."

So, how did growing up in Vegas affect you?