That's Richard Browning, inventor of the jet-suit and founder of Gravity Industries, and from the book. Caught on the horns of a dilemma, for age fifteen he lost his father to suicide; his father having run out of road developing an invention of his own, for which he'd given up his day-job as an aeronautical engineer. I can identify with each, success with any idea being a roll of the dice.
Browning said he'd most often been asked "What for?" by people after revealing he'd made an 'Iron Man' flying machine. But in truth, it's the question that's asked of every advance that humanity ever makes. As a stand-up comic in London once said, you can be sure when we started cooking meat that people would have said, "What... cold food not good enough for you?".
