Tell the people a little about
yourself.
I’m Ben. I
was born in Detroit but have lived all over. I was a bad kid and was sent to
military school when I was 14. I thrived in certain areas but I was all about
mischief. I only wanted to do the things that people said I couldn’t do. There
was a course on booby traps and immediately after that course, I went and set a
bunch of booby traps all over the school.
My dad is a
neurophysiologist, which led to us moving around a lot. I was in the army for a
while and served in the DMZ in Korea. I was injured out there and left the
service shortly after. I can’t really talk about that for another 12 years.
What is this project that you’re
working on?
Which one?
The TV project.
Oh, that? It
falls into the reality genre. Not so much a “Get-Me-Off-This-Island!” deal.
It’s not really like anything that’s been done before. I guess it’s going to be
a little scripted to pump up the drama with scenarios and tasks and then
they’ll edit it to make it appear interesting. I get the feeling some of it
might be kind of dangerous. I was part of some groups when I started building
the drones that I’ve been working on and I think the qualifications that sold
them on me are that I’m not morbidly obese, I can speak in complete sentences
and I’m not a total political radical. I have strong opinions but I’m also
aware of reality. But I can’t really go into [the details of the show]. There’s
a contract. I’m not looking to get sued. Can we talk about my mucous instead?
Nope.
I’m a very
curious person and that often gets me into trouble but it also apparently opens
doors.
Trouble is good.
Yeah,
sometimes.
How long have you been getting in
trouble/engineering?
I don’t know
if this story is true or not - I can only take my mother’s word for it – but,
when I was a baby, she had a fence set up so, when I was crawling around, I
wouldn’t fall down the stairs. And my mother showed up at the top of the stairs
after leaving me alone for a couple of minutes and found that I was sitting
there with a screwdriver and had taken the whole thing apart. I can only take
that with a grain of salt but that seems to be her impression of me anyway. I
was a constant concern. I suppose it’s really difficult trying to raise a kid
who tries to circumvent everything you do to protect them.
So, it doesn’t sound like you’ve had
a great deal of formal training in… whatever it is that you do…
Oh, no, not
at all. Well, when I start off with a project, I usually know nothing about it.
Like with the drones that I’m working on. I’d never even flown a remote control
airplane before. And not only did I need to design something beyond radio
control - something that could fly on its own - I also had to make it do things
that had never been done before and employ stealth technology and all these
other things and so there was a lot of learning to do. And I just jumped right
in. Someone once told me that I go through life ass-backwards and at full
speed. And that seems to be the general approach I take for everything.
Are there other drone enthusiasts?
Yeah, but
our group has since dissolved. The closest we came to a "name" was
calling our lab, "The Dick Cheney Center for Humanitarian Studies.”
What other projects have you worked
on recently?
I fought
robots. My robot was evil and won a pretty big competition. It had thread
mines, a hammer drill, fork-lift skewers and Kevlar/welded steel/fiberglass
armor coated with aluminum powder and suspended in beeswax. I wrote a symphony.
A bad one. I was in a band but we broke up before our first gig. The
combination of ego, Adderall and Jameson made me impossible for the others to
be around.
My biggest problem when I’m writing
is figuring out when to stop. It sounds like sometimes you don’t even know when
you’ve started a project so how do you know that you’re done?
I can
definitely understand that. I hate finishing a project because it says, “this
is all I can do.” Also, it’s the process that I enjoy more than the result, so
I have to set myself deadlines, I collaborate with others, try to manage my own
expectations, because I always want more than I can do. I have a drone in my
apartment right now. All it needs is a battery but I just can’t bring myself to
do it. Because then it’s done. And then I’ll have to do something else. I’m a big fan of [Serbian-American polymath]
Nikola Tesla and he has this great quote: “We build but to tear down. Most of
our work and resource is squandered. Our onward march is marked by devastation.
Everywhere there is an appalling loss of time, effort and life.”
So what’s next?
There’s some
stuff that I’ve got signed off for this TV show. Basically, anything that you
see in a Bond movie or Batman movie is something that I’m interested in. Mostly
toys for my nephew, to be very honest. Maybe the FBI.
If you could describe yourself in a
word, what would it be?
Lost.
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