Pixel and Particle Meeting of the Minds w/ Ben Johnson | Ep. 86

In this podcast episode, David and Gary speak with the Founder of Particle41, Ben Johnson. The gang speaks about taking yourself out of the daily grind, not trying to compete with the hustle culture and above all else- have patience, start small and be consistent.

Links:

Ben@particle41.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminrjohnson/

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David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel

The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

David: 0:06

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the biz dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host and I am joined today, as usual by Gary Voigt, who little known fact you know all those garden gnomes that sit out in front of your house. Gary, mix those out of his trailer. He's got a little little manufacturing plant right there next to his trailer in between the flamingos. How's that business going for you there, Gary?

Gary: 0:29

Well, I'm selling the manufacturing plant in Craigslist. Now in the market for a 3d printer. I'm hoping to

David: 0:36

kind of cheaper, cheaper than and more resonate with

Gary: 0:41

my nomen.

David: 0:42

I call them nomen. That's nice. nomenclature for

Gary: 0:46

gnomes is nomen.

David: 0:49

Did you just say nomenclature? I can't help. That was painful. More importantly, we are joined by Benjamin Johnson, who is the founder of particle 41. And we're going to talk to him about all sorts of goodies. I wanted to start because I think Now correct me if I'm wrong, Benjamin, but when I've read a little bit about you, you particle 41 is a development shop. Is that

Ben: 1:15

accurate? Right? Yeah, I'm doing product consultancy. Yep.

David: 1:18

So you do what we do. That's what big pixel is. So that's very interesting. And I'm now now I'm extra intrigued. So I wanted to because of that I wanted to, but you're based in Dallas, right? I am. What part of Dallas I grew up in Dallas. So we're part of Dallas.

Ben: 1:35

I'm in Frisco. The whole utility part of Dallas.

David: 1:39

I grew up I grew up in Plano. So I totally understand the hoity toity, yeah, doubt. And for those who don't know, Dallas is one of those places where you have to get fully dressed up and put on your best to go to the grocery store. It's just how it works.

Ben: 1:52

And you get to use the valet. Yeah, yeah, there's a

David: 1:54

piano. This is not a grocery store. I'm not kidding. There is a grocery store when I was growing up. I think it was a Kroger signature, which was their fancy brand, right? That actually had a piano in the middle of it. And there was someone playing it in the grocery store.

Ben: 2:11

So now the new hotness is HEB. We got a couple of ATBS here that everyone's you know, lining up around the block for so.

David: 2:18

So heb is a Houston brand, which was the discount mid tier Houston. Grocery Store. What's funny about that is in North Carolina where I am, Bluebell is the fancy ice cream. Because they don't have that here. And so to me growing up Bluebell is out of Texas, and it's the cheapo ice cream. And their number one ingredient is skim milk as opposed to cream so it's it's everywhere like oh bluebells the best ever. Okay, man do it. Anyway, I'm sorry, I went off into a rabbit hole there. But little little extra for you Dallasites or people who are thinking about moving to Dallas. So let me think here so particle 41. You guys are development shop. So I thought a really good intro topic would be hiring. Because I am guessing that your hiring is similar to our hiring, which means it's a hot mess. Are you guys US based you offshore? How do you guys get your people?

Ben: 3:14

Yeah, so we're 100 people all across the globe, about 60 of which are based in India, one of my partners in the businesses in India National he's the CTO of the company. And so he runs the boots on the ground operation in India, probably wouldn't do it any other way. And, and then we have people in South America, and then project managers designers in the US.

David: 3:39

Okay, so your PMS, and your designers are US based. But all of your development is done offshore in some capacity.

Ben: 3:47

It's about 6040 is about the split between nearshore and offshore.

David: 3:54

Okay. So, but just correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't have any US based developers. Right? They're all in either South America or India? Or did I miss him?

Ben: 4:04

I have some US based DevOps people. We have a big DevOps practice here. So yeah, we have a couple and I have a red card for all markets. So if that's what folks want, we would totally add that it depends on the situation but predominantly offshore, just for the cost savings, mostly. Sure.

David: 4:25

So we are US based. That's a thing of ours. All of our people are US based and which creates all sorts of weirdness. But they're all over the place. They're all remote. None of them are in North Carolina, except for one project manager. Gary's in Florida, for instance. So I am curious what it's like, I mean, because I don't know anything about offshoring, specifically, because I've never managed one. What is the hiring like, like when you I mean, there's a bazillion devs over there in India specifically is what I'm thinking of. I mean, there's just a lot they have, they crank him out and out of the call. We'll just there's just a lot of them there, which is awesome. And that's where they've got so much out. I remember looking years ago, Guy was his, he had a doctorate in development. And he his bill rate, and again, this a long time ago was like 20 bucks that was like, Dude, that's crazy. Now I know they're a little more pricey now. But how do you find someone? Are you involved in that? Or is that your CTO? Or is it now even farther away?

Ben: 5:23

Well, sure. So we have our, we have a some HR in house, I mean, we have to take care of our people. And we're now we're north of 60 people. So we have to have both an internal and our recruiting. There's been some cycles here. So when we were in COVID, obviously, kind of hiring froze. And then when we came out, we came out into the great resignation. And so, one, one thing I'll mention just about the type of businesses boast this boutique consultancy, I've seen lower attrition rates in the boutique consultancies than I did in my clients companies. And I think this distinction is really interesting. So we really focus on the craft of DevOps or the craft of software development. And this connects directly to the developers career, right? I, as a, as a developer, I want to get better at development, I want to be presented with new and interesting problems. I don't want to get stale in my learning. And so we embrace that as a cultural internally. So while you might be focused on Acme inks, new mobile apps that they're doing, you're also seeing, we had 31 engagements in the last 12 months. So each one of our individual developers are able to kind of understand different technology choices and different things that are going on in these other businesses. And then we're able to take that back to the hive mind of what it means to be good developers good, and deliver good products. So I think that has met the need of the individual a lot better than what you'd see in at Acme, Inc. at Acme, Inc, they're worried about their share price, or they're worried about the revenue. So they have a trickle down of goals. Hopefully, they're well run company, and they have this trickle down of goals. And by the time you get down to the developer, it's okay, I need to do my project by x date. That's how I apply to this goal. This is kind of like, you know, there's time pressure to deliver this thing by the certain date. And so there's this disconnect it the, the stock price relates to me so indirectly, that that the with them is is lost, sometimes for the developer. And then especially if we have market condition like we do today and start prices declining, then that's why you see a great resignation cycle in the clients Company, but you didn't see it inside of article 41. Because we can really focus on that long term skill of what it means to be a developer. So first off, we go into recruiting with that in mind that we are craftsmen, and that we are that we have core values around building good products. And so I think that is those core values and those things that we're putting into the recruitment processes. Good. Now, we have had experiences with the emergence of Chad GPT. And I guess everybody's kind of wanting to talk about that lately. And we've seen people try to do interviews, or we at least have a strong gut feeling that they have tried to pass interviews, using chat GP to assist them so. So when somebody's reading things, you can kind of get a sense that they're reading things. So the pre COVID are going up into COVID, the revenue, the sorry, the interview process looked like this, it looked like, Okay, well meet with one person for a kind of pseudo technical screening, you know, the recruiter found you or some interest in working together. So we'll have you meet with one person for a technical screening another person to, to maybe do a live coding exercise. Another part. So we just saw that there was three or four steps to the interview process. And we were not getting really what we needed. So the standard that we set internally was a one hour technical screen that had to involve some type of screenshare working on code and making sure that that and look, the x the actual exercise was super simple, like, loop over a list of dates, pick the odd ones. You know, we did not pick a super challenging thing. But what we wanted to see is that they had an environment for development. They could set it up, they could talk to us about it. We could connect on things like do you use VS code, or do you use something else? What extensions do you use? We could connect on this and really get a quick sense if this this individual was one of us or not. And if we could make that connection in that one hour, then they were moved forward. If they struggled, and we just couldn't, couldn't make that connection, then they were rejected. But it's not going to work going forward to ask a bunch of technical questions, because you will have no idea what's going on on their desktop. And we need to do all of this remotely, and we need to do it fast. So our, you know, kind of our secret sauce here, that's not so secret anymore now is, is that it's a one hour technical screen. And it has to be some kind of shoulder to shoulder working session over some simple coding exercise. And we found that that really works. And, you know, somebody with experience is not going to bother them one bit. Somebody who's struggling to, to get to that novice level in their career, obviously, is not going to want to do that. We find that, you know, the real high, high expertise guy like the doctor you recommended, he probably is like, could you give me something a little harder to work on. But it's really about making that connection about what it means to be a developer. And once that connection is made, we're pretty happy. And we know, you know, we know we can work work through the rest.

David: 11:15

It's so interesting, your process is a lot like our process where we because we hire remotely, of course, and we we have been hosed in so many creative ways that we have had to come up with a very similar process that you're talking about. Because we would have in generally, we find a lot of our people starting out as contractors, and we bring them on after we've proven them out. Not always but that's that's one way we've hired people. When we hire contractors initially, man, I can't tell you the credit that my favorite one and Gary saw me if I've told this story before on the podcast. My favorite one recently was a guy says, the picture of the guy looked like me bald dude, white guy, you know, beard. melon head is strangely similar looking to me. And he gets on and at first he says he doesn't have a camera, which is to me is a no goes like, Okay, well let me know when you do have a camera. And he's like, Okay, let me go find one. So, a minute later, he comes back. Finally, his camera comes on. And he's in a tank top undershirt, which is always a good, good sign. And then his face is that picture? Avatar onto his face. So when it moved, it was super creepy because it couldn't keep the mouth couldn't keep up with the with the speaking. And his voice didn't match either. He had much more light voice than the guys my size would have. And it was just the strangest interview. He went to the whole thing. Like dead serious, that this was really him. And this is how I should hire him. That's my favorite one of these. But we've had all over the we've had people who said, Oh, yeah, I'm the coder. And then we find out that they're actually a front for another team. Yeah, somewhere else.

Ben: 13:06

So say you're saying he was not a cat. Have you seen that? The? Yeah, yeah, I'm not a cat. I'm not a cat. I promise you. I'm not a cat.

David: 13:15

That was like a political guy. Right? Where he had is a courtroom.

Ben: 13:19

Yeah, it was a courtroom. And the one of the attorneys or the the judge or somebody was was logging in, as a cat. Yeah,

David: 13:27

I, but that would the cat was even better than this. But what was really scaring them, when I talked to Gary about afterwards, is in probably two or three years, that avatar will be so good, I won't be able to tell you that's really

Gary: 13:39

meta avatars, and you won't know for sure.

David: 13:43

Well, but then I'll just ask them to show me their feet. And then it's over, right because they have no feet in meta. So that'll be one of our new requirements is to show me your feet. But we've gotten to the point where we have to do side by side coding and all of that to prove they are who they say they are. So it's interesting that you have gone through a similar thing. I do want to back up because I want to talk about particle 41. I want to you have again, you have a very similar your company is almost as old as mine. So you started six months after I did according to your LinkedIn, I started 10 years ago March and you started like six months after that. So our trajectory is very timelines. My company is much smaller than yours. But it is really interesting to me how did what did you start alone? Or did you start immediately with a partner?

Ben: 14:31

So I've actually in the past, I've been kind of a two headed monster so I, at the same time I was building particle I was also the CTO of a company called legal Inc. And then in three years, I sold it to legal soon. So I'd like working on a product now since April of last year, I've been slowly working on particle and really growing our service capabilities. We mostly grow through referral And that's the way we've grown since the beginning. So people in my network that I've well served, were ran by four CTOs. So my partner offshore CTO, I've been a CTO in the past. And so I've met two of my other partners in the business. And so we have kind of a body of knowledge and different backgrounds. And our networks, you know, we did good work for folks in the past, they go somewhere else. And we set up those teams as well. We're really indexed on, you know, technical partnership, where we're kind of the engineering team in a box or product dev team for for businesses. So we can do CTO advisory, product ownership design. And then of course, the table stakes software Dev, project management, QA. DevOps is a big thing that I'm into. And I've been into for a long time, just the idea of really getting the most out of your cloud. And then we also have a data engineering practice as well. So very technically diverse and kind of wide on different skill sets. But what we're really focuses on it honest that that that team environment, and whether that's a team that we're augmenting, or, or we're kind of providing a turnkey team for the client.

David: 16:23

So when you started nine and a half years ago, or something like that, was it just you? Or is it you and the four other CTOs that you happen to know?

Ben: 16:31

Their original founding team was myself and my offshore partner?

David: 16:35

Okay, so you guys had an idea? Because you guys knew each other in some capacity outside of that, you're like, hey, we can make an amazing dev company together. And so you, were you ever a dev yourself? Or you were just DevOps guy? What was your career path? How did what were you bringing to the table? Yeah.

Ben: 16:54

Back in 2001, outside after college, I feel like I've been programming since I was in junior high, kind of. So I could go way back with some of my early programming stuff. But yeah, I built an online travel company, so before Orbitz, before 911, and grew that to about 70 million, so interacting with mainframe GDS systems to deliver discounted travel rates to the internet before anybody was doing that. And that early experience in online travel was a lot of coding, but also a lot of racking and stacking hardware and doing it all, very grassroots. So learned a ton through that process, and picked up Ruby on Rails shortly thereafter really loved that did a couple of media companies using Ruby. So yeah, I definitely, definitely like to get my hands on some code once in a while.

David: 17:51

So you were doing, you're a serial entrepreneur, which I know that and you build up, sell, build up, sell build up. So So you've been building product companies, what made you decide instead to do a consulting firm kind of setup.

Ben: 18:08

The service company is really the call out to that expertise and that craftsmanship. And I really love the exposure to multiple products at the same time, multiple challenges. At the same time. I think the advantage to not only myself, but also my team is we just get to see a lot more than what you would see if you were working within the constraints of a single company. So I like working in the entrepreneurial side, because you get to do all these things like learn how to hire people, learn how to sell your services, learn how to report your finances, and do all the fun back office stuff. That business acumen, as I as I grow is is also super interesting, the best way to do leadership and the best way to do all of those business acumen type things. But being able to see what's working technologically and tactically for folks is also super intriguing. And then as I work with clients, I get really involved in their product, their who is their ICP, how are they listening to their ICP, and you know, working towards that feedback rather than working off of their own assumptions. So I just simply cannot separate the product side from the service side of my brain. I'm always kind of operating in both because the worst thing is to write a beautiful piece of code and nobody use it.

David: 19:42

For sure, yeah. Yeah, we talked about when we work with startups a lot. That's a big drumbeat that we do a lot is simply, you know, you're going to turn this on and no one's going to care. We call that the slog. When you turn this on your job is now to make people care and that's that can be months or years. But this is probably the hardest part of your startup right there. Because it is soul crushing when you've worked so hard on something and no one cares. That's fine. That's normal. Don't freak out. They will care if you keep at this is kind of our mantra. Yes. It's, it is sad, you build it, it's awesome. And no one in they should fold shop because they ran out of steam. That's, that's heartbreaking for us.

Ben: 20:26

Yeah, if you build it, they will come. This is a fallacy of the startup, you have to generate interest. And we kind of lost track of that as the VC bubble was created. I call it a bubble. And because I think we just see it sought burst. VC money was so plentiful for so long, that if we rewind back to just before that happened, there was this great body of work around bootstrapping. And bootstrapping was this idea of maybe I have this, I'm seeing this need in the marketplace. Maybe I want to create a product for it. How can I validate this idea. And so people were putting out like a little ebook or a little white paper and putting that out on on the net, see if they could get some interest in that. And then understanding like an early set of ICP and starting to draw feedback, and I think those folks, were, we need to kind of go back to what those folks documented and pull that back up and go, Okay, well, now, in 2023, with capital being so expensive, this is what we got to get back to validating ideas, and seeing what kind of traction we can we can get. The also great thing about a services company is you can make money right away, whereas a product company genuinely has that build tale, or some kind of risky investment. And so we need to reduce the risk of that initial investment and get back into, you know, a more minimalistic self funding approach, and reduce that risk for not only ourselves, but our investors. And then I think as we come out of the slump, those two things we'll connect,

David: 22:09

we push really hard on the concept of bootstrapping. And because once you go investment, you can never go back to bootstrapping. But you can always go to investment as what we tell our clients all the time, you see, and it also changes your outlook, you if you're paying the bills, out of either your own funds, or you know, family friends kind of thing. You're going to be thinking about revenue way, way sooner than if you have a two year runway that some investor hand you, right, we want you to think about revenue early, early, early on, because it's going to change how you run your company. From day one. We've seen so many startups that we've worked with and others that say, I'm going to go on the user acquisition route, which it always makes me shake my head a little bit, because that rarely works. I mean, even Twitter, perfect example, they weren't profitable for 12 years. And I'm not sure they're ever going to be profitable again. They, it that user acquisition route is really hard. Now, the the gold at the end of the rainbow is that if you nail it, it's almost infinite money, Facebook, Google, I mean, all of these live on the fact that they have tapped into the ultimate spigot of infinite money, because you can always sell data. And you can always advertise if you figure that out. It's really hard. People don't give those companies enough credit that they have solved something that has never been solvable for it is every other company in the history of the planet that I can think of correct me if I'm wrong. They sell a product. And now we have companies that literally don't have a product, they sell their users. Very different world. And this is totally backwards.

Ben: 23:53

Yeah, totally agree. I mean, since when navvies third of a SaaS company being a lifestyle, a lifestyle company for the founders, right? The idea is that you drive up the value and you raise as much as much money as you can, and then you go public. By the time you go public, you know, you're your original founder probably owns a single digit of equity. And so to me, maybe being a touch more modest about the growth trajectory being okay with growing to, you know, those that I'll just use 100 million as a as a goal reference point, you know, getting to 100 million and in ARR being this kind of like fantastic goal. What if that takes a little bit longer, but you can actually have margin and actually have profit throughout that journey. I just I think that is something that founders need to kind of think about, rather than being so impatient rate, and selling equity, to the hilt, you know, to try to hit that goal. In just some kind of record unicorn pace, I think if we do that we'll, the differences between a product company and a services company are going to kind of reduce. And I'm also super interested in this idea of a tech enabled service where you've done a service so well, and you start to add technology around that. And, and then that becomes a tech enabled service, I guess you could argue, Uber, as an example, as the favorite example of almost everyone is a tech enabled service. It's a two sided marketplace. But just for a moment, let's just say that all Uber drivers were kind of not this independent contractor anomaly, but they were all part of, you know, a single company brand, you could literally do something like that, making money off of every transaction off of every ride, and just make it better and better by optimizing it through technology, probably a bad example. But the tech enabled services are really cool, too, because you may have something that that is a service cost. And I think we're seeing that with kind of like data entry things that then you can start to automate those, those services and make them more and more affordable to produce. But that doesn't necessarily mean the customer is willing to pay less. So those can be really great opportunities to

David: 26:31

you bring up something interesting that I've never really thought about before I miss the idea of a regional company. I'm old, and that used to be a thing, where you know, you started a brand, you're an entrepreneur, and you create a hardware store or whatever, you know, 20 years ago, whatever you were building. And if you did really well, you'd open up a few more, and you'd open a few more. And then suddenly, you might have 610 12 of your gizmos around the state. But someone in California 1000 miles away from you have no idea you exist. And they have the same thing. And they build up their own 1215 stores. And both of these people are wildly successful, and they're doing very well, the concept of Uber, you could do that on a regional basis. And in fact, it used to be there used to be dozens of ride sharing, and scooter companies and this, that and the other. But now everything is national. And so they get so big, that there's no way that you can have a regional version of that, like a regional scooter company, right? That doesn't exist, it can't, because you can never get that scale. And I kind of missed that. If I'm being honest. I wish we could get back to that a to a point. I mean, I'm not saying we need a regional Facebook, but some companies I think, would you get better service, your profits would make more sense. People would know your drivers, that kind of thing. I don't know. I'm often the weeds there. But it's just I kind of missed that I'm old enough to remember that. That was a thing. Can you

Gary: 27:54

can combine your grocery store valets and Uber and make regional grocery store valet companies?

David: 28:01

That man, Dude, Where's My notebook

Gary: 28:05

down and mail it to ourselves for copyright.

David: 28:10

Just wear it everywhere. I've been having this stuck to me for years. It's my idea anyway.

Gary: 28:15

Well, Ben, we do have one question we ask every guest and you kind of started to touch on it a little bit in your last answer. So just to expand on that, what are three pieces of advice that you would give an entrepreneur, entrepreneur or a new business or a startup when entering them?

Ben: 28:30

Yeah, I think, to echo the, what we already talked about is, is start small, you know, and have have a little bit of patience about validating your idea. And trying to learn from your user, you know, connect with your user and figure out their their need. I really suggest for folks to think about the service that they actually want to provide first before they think about the product and lean least with the way the market is right now. Lean towards say you have this ICP. You know, one of the one of the big problems in trucking right now is if you break down as a truck driver, there's no mobile mechanic for so let's say we're going to we're going to grow this business, my recommendation to that kind of entrepreneur would be don't try to create a two sided marketplace product from day one. Try to figure out who's that truck driver broken on the side of the road and what their problem is. And if you have to hire somebody to answer that phone call and fix that problem for them completely analog or manually do that first, you know, feel feel the solve the problem for your ICP. As as much before the technology because the moment that you start paying companies like me to build companies like mine to build that product for you. You are you're investing you've become I'm an investor in your own idea. But if you can actually start solving the problem, pick up the phone, call the mobile mechanics for them, get somebody out there, and then figure out a way to make money in that transaction, then you're headed down a road of a tech enabled service. And I think right now, that's the way people need to be thinking, two sided marketplaces is what most of the ideas, I hear some form of two sided marketplace. And they're very difficult, you have to build towards not only the person receiving the service, but you also have to build towards the vendor. And so from day one, you're like, all your resources and all your capital is split two ways. And you have to make these decisions, do I want to work on the supply or address the demand, and you can't separate those two in your mind. So you immediately take on this huge responsibility, and I don't know, if you truly understand the problem that you're trying to solve. So that's all in that vein of start small, serve the customer care about your ICP. And, and I think that's, that's a really good way right now, especially with capital being expensive, to reduce your risk and actually maybe even make $1 from the first day, rather than waiting till you put a bunch of money into a bucket, created a product. And then you have also then like we discussed have to then figure out how to market that product and in two directions towards the, towards the supply vendors and towards the demand. The other thing I would say it's kind of stepping out of the grind is don't forget to take care of yourself, exercise, take care of your family, these are marathon deals, like growing a business is a marathon, it is not a sprint, and the people you want at the finish line are are super important to kind of pull along the way. So you know, there's, there's a certain amount of discipline that I feel is really important to us as humans, you know, don't sacrifice sleep for your ID, there's so much of this kind of grind culture. And believe me, it's super important to be driven and work hard. And, and I'll be right there with folks, you know, I have been definitely accused of some workaholic tendencies by my wife and my family. But the the idea of this being a marathon is super important. And just making sure that your body keeps up with you as is, should should not be ignored. No matter how good you think your ideas are, no matter how much an hour is worth to you. You got to kind of maintain some, some good personal habits.

Gary: 32:49

Yeah, like that, we've actually talked about the validation of the idea in past episodes, and David had a story about connecting a, like a tourist to a photographer in that city, and then doing the legwork on your own kind of connecting them to make that just to see if that's a viable service. So that was great. And then the, the anti hustle culture is also something we kind of talked about, I would say, two or three times at least about not overworking yourself to death just because of the hustle culture tells you to you know, so

Ben: 33:22

yeah, I think the flip side of that, too is also like this, as much as the hustle culture is something I would love to worry warn people about. Because like, you know, your kids are only young once and all the that but the the opposite is also true. Like we have these procrastination aids in our in our in our pockets here. And we can go flip reels for 30 minutes and just screen suck our lives away. And so the time management is just super important. Like, you know, Instagrams, not on my phone right now, just because I think, you know, for me, I needed to do some real reprogramming some detoxing there. And so just watch the screen sucking because you don't get that time back either. And, and so like, just kind of evaluating the value of every moment, I think is super critical for an entrepreneur. And, and I think the discussion we have internally is, are we resting or recreating, because recreation might not be rest, what you might be wanting is rest. But what you're doing instead is recreating, and that's not the same thing. So I'm all for a little reduction in recreation, increase of rest, and then and then that way you can maximize your productivity time.

David: 34:47

Man, I couldn't echo that more. I have removed myself from almost all social media for exactly that reason. You could just fall down a hole and wake up it's an hour gone. And all you saw was 3000 videos of up I'll be doing something funny, which is always great. Don't get me wrong. But yeah, that's the man in what's it's easy to recognize that when you're 40 plus years old, but to tell my kids that, yeah, they think I'm crazy that this is life.

Gary: 35:18

Yeah, my kids are mad at me. Because I won't install that game pigeon app or whatever and play games with them throughout the day or whatever. I'm like, No, I have things to do. The last thing I want to do is play battleship on my text messages with you like,

Ben: 35:31

the the dad talk that I have inside my house is You we need to create instead of consume. And I just kind of say that a million times now now they even probably are shadow mining me while I'm not looking, you got to create so consumed, you know, like, it just

Gary: 35:48

got a whole tick tock, making fun of it.

Ben: 35:51

Exactly. I would much much rather see my nine year old draw, or do something that's creating something than having spent an hour watching YouTube reels. So um, you know, hopefully that will get through at some point. They hopefully I say it enough, they'll never forget that. But the the idea of creating, you know, even if you're just recording your video game footage, and throwing it up on YouTube to see, to see if that's interesting to someone that's at least creating something you're showing something for your time. And so I think even an exchange like that is going to be valuable because you're even thinking of your video game time as a means to create content. And so trying to get them to think of of the the creation aspect of it, what they're doing. And the value of it is, I think, super important.

Gary: 36:53

Like that, instead of consuming. Now, Ben, if anybody wanted to reach out to get to know you more or get to know more about particle 41, how could they get in touch,

Ben: 37:02

they can reach out to me directly. I'm Ben at particle 40 one.com. And they can also get me on LinkedIn on Benjamin R. Johnson on LinkedIn.

Gary: 37:13

We'll include those links in our show notes, they'll be under the video here on YouTube and also throughout whatever podcast distribution you use, they'll be in the show notes for this. Awesome, and if anybody wants to reach out and get in touch with us or leave any comments or questions, you could do that again under this video on YouTube. Or you can email us at Hello at the big pixel dotnet. You can get all our links for social media, we are on all channels, including Tiktok, where we're gonna watch funny rules of bending and made fun of his kids.

David: 37:46

Hey, and don't forget to review us on Apple podcasts. That's important. Review us on Apple podcasts. It's funny how that's little site everyone listens to on all sorts of different gizmos. But Apple podcasts still wins for I guess it's just because of the default. But that helps a lot for people to discover the show. So review us.

Gary: 38:07

Alright, and with that, thanks again and we'll see you guys next week.

David: 38:12

Have a good one, everybody. Thank you