Transcript — S2E3 — Get Over Your Own Bad Self

Rhyd: In today’s episode, I’m talking to Jim Benson. Jim’s the CEO of Modus Cooperandi, founder at the Modus Institute and he’s based in Seattle. Jim, thanks for joining me today.

Jim: It is a pleasure to be here.

Rhyd: Thanks very much. Jim, what are you rethinking about at the moment?

Jim: We were just talking about that when we came in, but I’m rethinking about the place that I live. My per my current place of live, life and work (if we’re rethinking those things) has become incredibly violent in, in the United States. So I’m thinking about moving somewhere that is significantly less so.

Rhyd: Yeah. I think the news of the moment seems to be awash with stories that are obviously very upsetting to read about, so I can understand that. So has that been something that’s been on your mind recently or has it been a number of years you’ve been thinking about this?

Jim: It’s not surprisingly, it’s mostly been since 2016.

Rhyd: Yeah.

Jim: When we had a huge, non-collaborative activity in our election. And one of the big things about that is my wife is originally from Hong Kong. And she never felt unsafe in the United States until the Trump administration and all of a sudden the racism aspect of the country kind of jacked up. And you know talking about just like life and work, it’s been interesting to watch that, watch the impacts of the things that have happened over the last 6 or 7 years globally impact people’s work/life. Like what companies kind of follow those anti-collaborative or violent trends and what companies become more and kind of try to protect each other from those trends.

Rhyd: Yeah, I think the last, I just say last 7 or 8 years so much has happened. It’s happened so quickly. It’s difficult to almost realize what’s happened with the Trump administration in the US, Brexit here in the UK and Europe. It’s, there’s been a lot of news. I think certainly from my point of view, trying to not read the news is actually quite a good thing there. I think it’s something that helps me a lot.

Jim: I concur. Unfortunately I live with a news junkie and so she I soak a lot of it up. Sometimes I’m just like, I have to leave the room. We have a four, four story town home, so sometimes I have to leave like the floor.

Rhyd: You mentioned non-collaborative events there and that, that leads nicely onto the next question you released your latest book, the Collaboration Equation late last year. I’ve read it. I really enjoyed it. One of the things I took from that is like, what’s the hardest thing you think about helping companies and teams do better when it comes to collaboration?

Jim: For all of us, it’s very hard to collaborate when you don’t have empathy and when people are overloaded or people are worried about specific things or even general things, it’s very hard for them to work together. Because you’re thinking about you, you’re kind of in constant fight or flight mode. And so because of the recent changes in the economy and layoffs and shifts in the workforce and people working from home, we feel a lot more isolated. And when we were more isolated, we tend to collaborate less and we also tend to feel more stressed and overloaded. So that’s been the hardest thing for me: is getting teams to slow down for five to seven days and just say, okay, we’re gonna focus on what’s the work that we need to do? How do we want to treat each other? How do we wanna be treated? What information do we need to exchange with each other? And how do we build a system to do that in a coherent and humane way that lets us get awesome work done without going crazy in the process.

Rhyd: Yeah, and I think there’s a couple of things I took from the book that have helped me recently and one of them was the realization that sometimes especially in the line of work I do, sometimes you just wanna get your head down and try and focus on trying to get something finished. And often you end up not procrastinating, but you kind of end up spinning wheels trying to think, how do I get this to the point where I’m ready to share it? Something I took from your book actually is actually share it much sooner than you expect. Get some initial feedback, get collaborative with your colleagues, your co-workers, whatever. And actually you’re fine that just the act of talking about it unlock something that. You’ve, that’s been blocking you for quite some time. And that’s what I’ve been doing more recently is trying to think about how I can share more often and certainly in a way, share before I’m comfortable with sharing because that is helping me reevaluate the way I do to do my work. So that’s something that I took from the book, found that really interesting.

Jim: Wonderful. The, one of the things that I’ve noticed in myself and everybody else, this seems to be a human constant, is that when we create work alone, we create it so that it is, that done for us is to the best job that we think we could do which may greatly exceed the amount of work that the other person needed you to do. So it’s not necessarily a perfection loop, but at least it’s an over solving of the problem loop. And the other danger is that your perfection loop is taking you off into your definition of perfect and not theirs. And that, that often is a very different hope dream in reality.

Rhyd: Definitely. I think one other thing I took from the book was the fact that it had nothing to do with work anyway. It was actually something I do, you know, in my spare time, which is Composing and music. And one of the things I actually do this year as partly as we’re reading the book, was actually get something released in a way that I was happy with it. I was, so, whilst I was working out on my own, I shared it and it’s available and it’s something that felt like, okay, I can collaborate. And I got some feedback from a few people. And so again that, that was something that really helped as well. So it’s funny how some things that you read or take in end up inspiring you in ways you don’t expect. And again, that’s something I think that your book seems to suggest as well.

Jim: Yeah, it was at the beginning of Covid. In January or March of 2020 when I came home from my last trip and we went into lockdown, and so I was like, wow, we’re probably gonna be locked down for six months. So I went out and I bought, I you can’t see them all because we’re audio, but there’s a bunch of guitars behind me and a keyboard next to me. I went out and bought all this gear, set up this huge recording studio, found all my friends that I used to record with, and then. Started talking to each other about music every day. And so I went from 15 years of no music to just releasing my first album since 1990. No, since 2000. Just on the 1st of May. So, so kind of, kind of a similar thing. Yep.

Rhyd: What what event or events made you pause and rethink your approach to work and life?

Jim: So, people often ask me like, how did you get to do what you do now because you were a punk rocker, you were a civil engineer, you were an urban planner, you owned a software company. And I’m like, that should partly tell you it’s that. I’m kind of like that Homer Simpson loop where like the ambulance goes up the hill, runs into the tree, he falls out the back and runs down the falls off the cliff and then they take him back up and it just goes around and around. That’s kind of been my life. But the things that make me pause are sometimes me and sometimes others. And so when I saw that you were gonna ask this question I didn’t want to give the answers that everyone else gives, but I’m gonna give this answer. The biggest thing that ever happened to me was so I grew up in the middle of Nebraska, in the us, which is about the most conservative thought, hostile bigoted place you’ll ever find. So as a not entirely straight human being, I grew up there not talking about myself ever. So I had to become a punk rocker so that I could yell about something, even if it wasn’t what I actually wanted to yell about. When I went through university, came out to Seattle, and went to work for Parsons Brinckerhoff, which is the third largest engineering firm on Earth, and we were building subways and light rail systems for people. The first day I went into work, I was really worried about how I was going to be accepted. At this stodgy firm, at a ponytail down to my butt and whatever. And and which yeah, if you can see me now, I don’t have, I don’t have one now. I’m far more 58 years old than I was then. I go into the, to the place. And there’s this big thing on the wall, like a big wall hanging on the wall, and it looks really interesting, but somebody comes and gets me right away and I go off to my office, which is literally 12 floors above. Where that where I went into the, to the lobby of the firm. So I go up and I’m sitting at my desk and this is way before there were computers. So I, there’s the only thing you do in that time, the only thing that you did when you signed up for a company was you went in and you rearranged your stapler like 500 times cuz there was like literally nothing to do. And at one point I was like, you know, I think that thing on the wall was an AIDS quilt panel. So I go get in the elevator, I go down and it was. And it was for a guy named Ed Elliot - used to be a vice president at at Parsons Brinckerhoff and ended up becoming kind of a posthumous mentor for me. But I ended up through that joining up with the names, project AIDS Memorial Quilt, and I ran the quilt in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States for about 10 years. And during that time, sorry, this is such a long answer, but during that time, I experienced scale cause the quilt went from when I first joined up to being able to fit on basically a basketball court to being 50 square miles of fabric. The largest public art and memorial in history. we had to ship it by train because there was so much of it. But then also thousands of volunteers. There are also thousands of people who were making the panels for loved ones, so then there was a lot of grief counselling and stuff, but it was something that was so much bigger than me. And helping end the AIDS crisis was so much bigger than me and it was so collaborative and it was so impossible and… that more than anything else in my life had the biggest impact on me for what is possible when human beings get over themselves and actually buckle down on something that we could get done of value. And so that is my answer. I have a thousand answers to that question

Rhyd: That’s a brilliant answer. So it taught you a lot that you use in your career since then. Then you talk about scale and collaboration and all the stuff that you talk about.

Jim: And getting people who are very upset to become not so upset. Getting people to focus on the thing that you need to do when you need to do it. How to deal with baggage when you run a non-profit that is largely made up of young, gay guys: you get a lot of drama. So you have to figure, like, how do you diffuse the drama? So drama in companies’ got nothing.

Rhyd: And so everything that you learned in that time, this is like, when was this? 80s, 90s?

Jim: Yeah. Yeah. That would’ve been 1990 through 1999 was my time there

Rhyd: So a lot of those learnings you put into the work you did…

Jim: Even then. Yeah. So like even while, you know, so obviously I was still a civil engineer during most of that time, so, Just, we’ll put this in the most unlikely of situations. The in Maricopa County, in in Arizona, in the us there are several city jurisdictions and they all hate each other.

Rhyd: Right. Right. Why? Why? Why do they hate each other?

Jim: Why do they hate each other? Because people like to form teams and call the other team a jerk.

Rhyd: Okay.

Jim: It’s just it’s literally just tribal behaviour and income. So the city of Phoenix, far lower income than the city of Scottsdale. And between those two cities, there was a road, Indian school road that ran between the two cities. And if you went and talked to the people at Scottsdale, They would say, “oh, I hate those people in Phoenix because they keep retiming their signals just to screw us up!”. And then they went to the, to Phoenix. They say, “oh, those people in Scottsdale, they keep setting up their signals just to screw us up!”. And I’m like, this is interesting. So do you set up your signals to screw them up? Of course I don’t. So it got them together and the reason was because they both re-timed their signals on the same day. And then they would optimize them to the signal timing that was coming to them from the other thing. But they never thought, “Hey, let’s get together and collaborate and do our signal timing together”. Thankfully, at the time I was working with them the Clinton administration at that time had an intelligent transportation systems architecture program. And that’s why I was there. And so I was like, as your architect, I want you both to collaborate. But there was no difference between them fighting with the other ones and anybody that I may have worked with on the quilt or any of those other things, it was human beings. Wanting an outcome and solutioning around that outcome and then identifying with the solution as opposed to getting together and coming up with a solution as a group.

Rhyd: One of the things I wanted to understand from the fact that you had such a varied career is that, is it, because you’re talking about base human nature in terms of wanting to collaborate or struggling to, to work together, it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in actually, it’s the same basic rule. So you’re talk in your book about how you needed to help a group of academics write a paper within a very short space of time compared to helping construction workers solve specific problems in terms of deadlines in, in New York City. And I wonder like, do people when you come in and they’re like hang on. What do you know about our industry? Or do you have that kind of barrier? You gotta get over first.

Jim: Absolutely. So especially like in software development everybody’s like, nothing’s like software development. Everything’s like software development. Get over your own bad self. And Martin Gore solved this problem for us 40 years ago by saying people are people, you know, so, we have, everyone has this belief that their problems are the most complicated problems in the world, and the problem with that belief isn’t that they’re right or wrong about that. It’s that it makes them discount the problems of others. And so if we don’t respect that other people have complexities in their lives too, then we say I wish that people would treat me better because I’m too busy to treat them better.

Rhyd: It goes back to empathy, the thing you mentioned right at the start, I think. I think that’s, something that certainly over this several years I’ve been doing, the job I’m doing, it’s just trying to be empathetic towards other people. You never know what kind of day someone else has had when they walk into the office or whatever. They’re in a shitty mood doesn’t mean that they are a bad person. Who knows? So I think it’s about cutting slack and all that kind of stuff.

Jim: There’s also the thing like have you set up the environment in your work group or your office so that people feel comfortable saying something like, today I’m off. Like, not I’m taking time off, but just, I am not on my game today, so I may be snippy I may only get half of the things done I was supposed to do today. But one of the worst things that can happen is somebody comes, like, I’ve seen people who have. You know, lost parents and then go into work the next day and they expect the next day to just be perfectly fine and and you’re like, you know, you’re human. Go do the human thing.

Rhyd: And in your previous books, did you realize before you wrote the book, the collaboration equation, did you realize that, ah, this is the topic I’ve really, I’ve worked towards over the last sort of 20, 30 years. Has it always been in the back of your mind when you wrote Personal KanBan? Why Limit WIP, all those books did you realize that there was culminating towards this this book? Or was it a realization that they’re suddenly dawned in the last few years.

Jim: It definitely wasn’t in the last few years. So my software company Gray Hill Solutions, which we started in 1999, was designed specifically to create software for government, to make government better stewards of their data and more collaborative. So that idea has always been there when I was an urban planner. We helped pioneer the use of something called a design charette which is basically that what used to happen was cities or counties or whatever would plan something out and then they would go show it to the population and the population would tell them everything they hate about it, and then they would be dejected. The design charette is basically you get everybody together in a neighbourhood and you say, we’re gonna build this park. How do we wanna build it together? With, you know, the thing that I talked about between Phoenix and Scottsdale, getting them together and saying, “how do we wanna work out this problem that’s funny from a distance, but probably not funny for you” together. And when I was growing up, the only way I survived growing up in the middle of Nebraska was that I had, wow - sometimes it’s hard not to get emotional about things - I had like the greatest group of friends. And we did everything. We made movies, we made music, we wrote screenplays, we wrote novels. We like, built all sorts of things. And none of those things ever could have been just Jim Benson. They couldn’t have been just Dave Fisher or Corey Smith, or John Von Sager or anybody else. They were always, it was always the group. And we had a lot of conversations. I remember in high school when like the Police would break up and then Sting and Andy and other people would release all these other albums and they were so drastically different from the sound of the Police, right? So that there was an intangible third quality to working with others that you know you know, “I Advanced Mask” is a great album. “The Dream of the Blue Turtles”, great album, but they, neither of them were even remotely close to a Police album.

Rhyd: I’ve never thought of it that way before why solo albums are radically different. That’s a great point. And I like your point about collaborating in your youth as well, especially around things like music and other creative or even sporting activities. I’ll definitely say that some of my fondest memories as kid is being in someone’s garage making an absolute rackets and not in tune, not in but it was, you know, incredible fun.

Jim: Yep. It sounded good at the time, but that’s just fine cause no one else is ever gonna hear it.

Rhyd: No, exactly. Exactly.

Rhyd: So given that you’ve written a number of books is it something that you find particularly difficult? Is it something that, oh, I can just, I’ll just knock up a blog post here, or I’ll do a book in the next couple of months? Or is it something that you really struggle with in terms of spinning wheels, trying to get things sorted?

Jim: Oh, you should have asked me this question before this last one. Sure. So I’ll say this the first three books were effortless. Writing, Personal Kanban with Tonianne—I mean, we’d have artistic squabbles certainly—but we would look back on it, you know, with the same. Fondness as you know, it, it looks better in the rear mirror maybe. But one of the things I appreciated about the recent films and articles written about Queen was like, the absolute pain in the ass it was to get Bohemian Rhapsody recorded, and then after it was done, how they felt about the work as a completed work. So, The Collaboration Equation was a Sisyphus syndrome situation for me. It took 6 years to write the book for a variety of reasons. The biggest reason was because I had it finished before I ever went to Turner Construction. And Turner Construction is actually, if when you all go and read the book. Sorry, Turner Construction is kind of the primary story that surrounds all the other stories in the book. And when I got to Turner, I was just so moved by what an amazingly well run company they were. I got there. I’ll never forget it. I left it after the first day and I was like, “oh my God, I can’t finish my book”. I have to sit here for years and work with these people and watch these people because they had you know, a je ne sais quoi about how they work. That was just ridiculously unexpected. So what I will say is that the writing of the book was easy. The editing of that book was a nightmare because the other books were just stuff that I thought about. This was stuff that actually mattered to other people, and I wanted to get it absolutely right. And in the book, I actually tell this little story. So there’s another author, David Brin, who writes science fiction novels. And he, once I was, I talk, I was talking to him once about his book the Transparent Society, which is one of his few non-fiction books. And I said, you know, “I really appreciated these things about the book. Are you gonna come out with another book like it?” And he said, “I’m never doing that again”. He’s like “fiction. I can say whatever I want. Non-fiction, I have to get it right”. And he said it was so hard to write about the human condition and that’s kind of what I did. He’s like, “never write a book about the human condition”. I did it. So that’s a long answer to probably what you thought was a short question.

Rhyd: No, but but it definitely an interesting answer as well because it’s I’m just looking down at the book now. Yeah. So fascinating that cause I remember Turner construction obviously comes up very early in the book and it, as you say, it’s a sort of a, almost like steel thread throughout the work.

Jim: Yeah, they’re just amazing people and they’re 120 year old construction company. Who would think that type of a company would ever be anything you would call amazing.

Rhyd: Given that they’re so, inspiring to you, I mean, what did you do to help them? What were the what difficulties were they in where they needed your help and others?

Jim: So like everybody so the construction industry as a whole, I guess I’ll start there, is rather combative. Turner’s internal ethic is solve the problem. Early, so you had people in a combative industry who wanted to solve problems, and so there were a lot of opportunities there to take long-standing, acrimonious relationships between the trades and the general contractor or between the general contractor and designers or between owners and all of these people, and build the most collaborative system possible. And kind of my apex for that experience—I’m going back next week for the first time in three years—but the apex of that experience was building what is now the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hospital in Brooklyn which could have been a nightmare of a project, but we built a very beautiful collaborative system. And my measure of success for that system is that when Covid hit that group was so good at solving problems (and so respectful of each other) that they all just immediately filed into the conference room, got out a bunch of whiteboard pens and post-it notes, and said, “how are we going to manage remote work on a construction site?”. And their solution became the template for the rest of Turner Construction worldwide. That’s my KPI for that particular project.

Rhyd: One of the things I took from the book I, I know you primarily because of the work that I do in software development and product management. It was the fact that I was expecting a lot more stories about software and IT and actually there are some, but a lot of them are not and that took me by surprise. Cause I was expecting it to be, “oh, this will be something that will be very relevant” and actually it is relevant. It’s just that you can kind of ignore the industry. It doesn’t really matter the stories that, that you talk about. Other things help you view your own thinking.

Jim: So Tonianne and I have been absolutely blessed with the clients that we have interacted with over the last 15 years. So we’ve worked with the UN, we’ve worked with the World Bank, we’ve worked with gaming companies, we’ve worked with insurance companies and banks, and you know, you name it whatever human endeavour is out there and whatever continent we’ve worked on, all of the continents except for the one entirely covered by penguins. And universally everyone had the same problems. So lean, agile. Prince2, all of the things that are out there are just different flavours of ways for people to try and figure out how are we going to interact with each other. And our biggest problem from place to place was always just not, wasn’t just like, how do you get the team to work? But how do you get teams to work with other teams? How do you get people to say, I can’t work with them, they’re from tech. And and so just, you know, negotiating people out of those divisions and into actual true cross team, cross-functional, cross silo collaboration.

Rhyd: I think it took me a long time to realize that it’s not about the amount of work individuals or teams can get through on their own. It’s the interdependencies between them that are the thing that will determine whether you’ll be successful or not.

Jim: Yep. And interdependencies are a thing. Dependencies are not. So when Agile teams will say, my biggest problem is dependencies, it’s like, no, your biggest problem is that you’re a silo. And they’re like, what?

Rhyd: That’s that’s a great way to think about it because I’ve just been writing about, you know, trying to manage dependencies between teams. So maybe I’m thinking about it the wrong way.

Jim: All a dependency is work that requires a different structure than you’ve arbitrarily set up in your company.

Rhyd: A couple other things that stuck out for me in the book. One was the, I think you mentioned it quite early on, it’s that the fact that individuals and teams create value, not teams. Which I really like. And another thing was the creating the right environment, you mentioned at Turner, had that, that had that sorted from, almost from day one. And then your idea that back, the third thing that sort of stuck with me was the idea that you. Recommend that teams come up with a roadmap for improvements. And I first read that, I thought, oh, he just means a roadmap for their work. But it’s, and I was like, okay, yeah, that’s a good idea. But the, it hit me, that’s not what Jim’s talking about. He’s talking about making very visible about the improvements you all need to make in a team. Otherwise losing sigh of that becomes a problem and you don’t see the benefit from those improvements.

Jim: It is it was exciting to me. It has been exciting to me that we’ve been brought in to do these right environment exercises for all sorts of different verticals now, and that the realization that both the Kaizen Event in Lean and the retrospective in Agile are highly are intrinsically flawed. Not cause they’re evil and not because you should never do them but because they end up being the only way that change happens. And so when change doesn’t happen kind of on a daily basis, when improvement doesn’t happen on a daily basis, you stop paying attention to it. And so the systems that we set up visualize not only the work, but have triggers in them for this should be improved or we should do this or we should do that. And oddly enough, when people go in and at the earlier part of that right environment exercise and say, this is what we want as professionals to get our work done, what people might call culture that when they define that and then they look at the way that they work, they’re like, wow. we really undermine our own success, don’t we?

Rhyd: That’s something yeah, if I had to pick one thing, it was the constant or the visualizing, your roadmap for improvements is something that, that I’m certainly gonna take away and see how I can use that in my work and personal life. Jim, we’ve mentioned a number of industries that you’ve worked in. So you talked about joining the engineering company as a punk with hair down to your Lower back, let’s say, but how did you know, how did you get started? How did you end up working for an engineering company as a punk?

Jim: So, I went to study I went to school at Michigan State University in the middle of Michigan, which is kind of a little section of Nebraska right in the middle of Michigan. I got there and I was like, oh man. But I went for a time and studied in Japan, and while I was in Japan every couple of days I would call back to Michigan and talk to my girlfriend. And at one point she said, “Hey, you know, the bus company is going to stop running buses to our apartment at five o’clock at night, so we’re never gonna be able to go to work or come home”. And I was like, “okay. I’ll do something about that”. So I got an aerogram cause there was no email then. It was just 1988 I think. And I wrote this on this aerogram, which for people who’ve never seen them, was like super light paper, almost like tissue paper that you could write a letter on, folded up and then send it for almost no money. And so as a student, I had almost no money. So I sent this aerogram back to. To CATA the Capital Area Transportation Authority and said, “Hey. Rather than cancel this at night, why don’t you…” And then I gave them like all these different maps and timetables and ways that they could reconfigure the bus system to to still serve the population that was bus dependent, but also cut their costs. So then I finish in Japan a couple months later, come back to the states and I go to a CATA public meeting. I say, “Hey, I don’t know if you guys got this aerogram or not…”. And Mark Fedora, the head of planning at CATA says, “did you write that Aerogram?” And I said, “yeah”. He’s like, “I’m not gonna answer your question. Just talk to me afterwards”. And so I got done afterwards and he’s like, “you want a job?”

Rhyd: Brilliant.

Jim: And so I started working at the transit agency. And while I was there, there was this dude who was a consultant to us who lived in Seattle. And he said, I said, you know, “hey, I really wanna get out of this place. Is there anything going on in Seattle?” He says, “yeah, talk to this woman named Kathy Stombon” and he made this handshake and I called her and my interview with her was literally 4 hours long. We just talked and talked on the phone and I got that job. And so that is how punk rock Jim made it out of the middle of Michigan where my colleagues were literally being hired out of college for $6 an hour and showed up in Seattle, Washington with a high-paid job with a high-power company. That ended up loving me a lot more than I thought they would.

Rhyd: And have you been in Seattle ever since?

Jim: With a brief stint I moved down to Portland, Oregon for a little while to work with them on a specific and wonderful planning project. I talk about it in the book, it was called Region 2040, but Portland, Oregon has a very collaborative, Government style. And so I went down to kind of experience that for two years. But Portland sits in this bowl, it’s surrounded by hills, so you never see a sunrise or a sunset. And I was like, I really need to see a sunset. So I came back to Seattle.

Rhyd: Nice. Jim, it’s been brilliant to talk to you today. What’s coming up next?

Jim: So, the next stuff for us is we’re really kind of doubling down, I guess, is the current term for these things. But we have a school called Modus Institute, Modus (M O D U S). And if you go to .com or.net, you will find the school and it talks about our classes, but also our community. And so we have a worldwide community of people who think about these things every day and talk about them on the site every day. And then we have classes both, you know, ones you can take on your own or sign up for with instructors or whatever, but you don’t have to pay to join. It’s free to join. And that’s what I spend most of my time doing now is creating with students, creating with the community. And then from time to time people call up and say, give us a right environment exercise. And I could go do that.

Rhyd: So modus institute.com.

Jim: Right? Oh, and I’m also OurFounder on Twitter. Which no one uses anymore, including our founder. But if you go to Spotify or to Tribal or anything else out there you will find that if you type in ourfounder you’ll come up with my album.

Rhyd: Brilliant.

Jim: And so you’ll get to hear me making noises during covid.

Rhyd: Is it punk rock?

Jim: it sounds nothing like any of my bands.

Rhyd: Oh, I was gonna say, is it not punk? It’s not. I was looking forward to punk rock after 30 years, but

Jim: no. So I tell people that like most punk rockers now, I do ambient, but it’s some of it’s dark wave. Some of it’s just silly. So you can hear a little bit of my punk rock aesthetic with the song on there that’s called “Eating Edward Monk in Scotland”.

Rhyd: I’m looking forward to that one. I’m gonna check that one out.

Jim: yeah, one of the two in there with vocals from me, and then there’s a bunch with. Actually, if you’re into AI, the rest of the songs that have vocals in them are all AI vocals,

Rhyd: AI written or AI sung.

Jim: AI sung.

Rhyd: Oh, I’m definitely gonna check that out.

Jim: So yeah, Suzanne Synapse is my AI vocalist.

Rhyd: Jim, thanks. Thanks so much for your time today. And that was Jim Benson, CEO and author. Thanks Jim.

Jim: Yeah, no, this was fun. I mean, cause it didn’t, number one, I didn’t have to talk about Scrum or Kanban.

Rhyd: Oh. I was desperate. Do not talk about that. I do not even talk, don’t talk about the Toyota production system. Don’t do it. Even though I’m fascinated by all that stuff. Yeah.

Jim: Yeah. I was so glad to, I was so glad to miss that. And yeah, so this really felt like we were actually just talking about the content and so thank you for that.

Rhyd: Take care Jim, have a great day,

Jim: All right, man. Okay. Talk to you a little bit.

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