The Louis Carter Show: Lou talks with Harrison Owen, legend in the field of Organization Development

Well, everybody, welcome to the Louis Carter Show. I have an awesome guest with me today, Harrison Owen. I consider him to be a friend and mentor. He's taught me so much. I've called him after times I've failed. I've called him after times I thought I've succeeded and succeeded. He's given me wisdom that is beyond measure. Harrison is the founder and creator of the Open Space Technology movement. Back in the 1960s. He has done enormous things for the field of organizational development that is beyond measure. Done things for NASA Goddard Space Center all the way through to local communities. And started out really in ministry, right Harrison? You were in the— and using— and how to use myth, really myth and open space and the power of the group to enable real change inside of corporations and social systems. Lengema Harrison Owen, Harrison, great to have you on. Thank you for joining me today.

Well, my pleasure. I try and keep centered. That's a hard, hard thing in my life to be better.

Um, it is.

You didn't say where we wanted to go, so I decided where I want to go. And if that turns out to be a bad place and you want to go some other place, your job is to hold me back. Okay, right on.

We're in an open space now. It's law of two feet.

All right.

We could get—

I want to correct a couple of things. I didn't invent open space. I didn't create it. Open space, as near as I can figure out, it's been around for 13.7 billion years. It's nothing more than the application of self-organizing systems to self-organizing systems, which is what we are. And for whatever it's worth, and we can talk about it down the road, I find in most cases organizations get screwed up when people try and manage them, and they actually can straighten themselves out pretty good if you just allow that to happen. So, you know, I know that's counterintuitive, outright rank heresy and all the rest, but that's my experience. So everybody knows I'm a storyteller, and if they don't, they should. And I make that a starting point to be able to say, look, we all know about storytellers, they have a light regard for the truth, which means that you are advised to take anything you hear me say with a certainly a large grain of salt. If it accords with your experience, use it. If it doesn't, I can't help you. And just as a matter of principle, I, I don't do theory, uh, I do my experience. So my experience may be wacko, but there it is. So I want to start this story at a place that some of you may have been to, the Tarrytown Conference Center in Tarrytown, New York. And the date was roughly 1981.. And a gentleman who became a good friend of mine, David Bellile, who at that point was head of OD for Morton Marietta, and I were sitting on the lawn having a couple of beers and kind of talking about the world. Anybody been to that conference center, you know, it's gorgeous. It's an old family estate, actually friends of my family's owned it. So I went back and I knew the place, but I'd only been there when I was 3. In any event, David and I were discussing the state of the world, and I don't know who said it first, but we both agreed that whatever it was that our clients were supposed to be doing and thought they were doing and might want to do, they weren't doing it, and it was going somewhere different., and we all read and knew the literature of what then was and is now organization development, and we both agreed that it looked great on paper, nice linear projections, straight plans that you could follow, etc. The only problem was none of our clients did that. What would happen is they'd wake up some morning and their total environment had changed and they thought— used to think they were, and suddenly there was something different. If you want an example, think of AT&T. They used to be the phone company, then they were nothing, and now who knows what they are. They've been sold and bought so many times. So anyhow, we were just sort of musing on it and got to the second beer and said, well, can we give it a name? Now, if we'd been physicists or psychiatrists, that would have been simple. It's called transformation. But since we were organizational consultants, that really sounded weird. So we tried it out to see if it worked. Organization Transformation. Well, as far as we know, nobody had ever put those two words together before in the same sentence and capitalized it.. And we tried it out in a couple places and it immediately created pretty close to a riot. I can't remember all the details, but I do remember in 1983 we decided it'd be kind of fun to get a bunch of folks from around the world together to see what, if anything, it meant. And so I think it was about 250 folks. From all over the globe showed up at the Tarrytown Conference Center, uh, no, showed up in Dover, uh, New Hampshire, uh, for 3 days. And the issue was, what on earth is organizational transformation and what do you do with it? And it was massively exciting. The next thing I knew, the ODN was having its added, uh, whatever, flight deck or whatever to their conference in Los Angeles. And I wasn't even a member of ODN at that point, um, but I went and I was just amazed. People who I eventually came to know and liked a great deal, Bob Tannenbaum for one, uh, was just apoplectic. I mean, how can anybody talk about transformation in organization? I mean, whatever, whatever. All I could say was, I just call the shots as I see them, and if you think of a better word, let's try it, but that's what I'm seeing. And I don't think we do it to an organization, I think it does it to itself, and the best we can do is maybe help it along so it comes out in one piece instead of several. Well, that didn't help many, but several years later we got to be very, very good friends. And the funny thing happened in 1982, if you said organization transformation in the wrong company, you could be tarred and feathered. Uh, 5 years later, you couldn't pick up a copy of the World Wall Street Journal without noticing that every organization mentioned there was transforming. What on earth was going on? Well, Louis mentioned that I have a strange background. My field is Semitic languages and literature, and what I used to know the most about and think about was chaos and order in the creative process. Particularly as that appeared in ancient Near Eastern mythology. I mean, grab yourself a Ugaritic text and get to work. Um, I didn't last in that, but it informed my life ever since. And the process that we as a species go through seems to me pretty well mapped out by those who have understood. Not that there is chaos and there is order, it's always a dance. It's between one and the other. It's the, you know, the Indians got it down between Shiva the destroyer and Shiva the creator, and the Chinese do the same thing with the yin and the yang. And we could go on and on, and that was 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, so this isn't new. So anyhow, things went along and people thought this was a great idea, and I've written God knows how many books about it. I will mention that along the way a funny thing happened called open space, and I'll end with that. I didn't invent that either, that was a 2-martini idea. Organizational transformation was a 2-beer idea. —So jump a bit. About 10 years ago, I was at lunch with two friends on separate, two different lunches, but one happened to have been an ex-four-star general and one happened to be a senior State Department person, and both of them said, you know, the world is really getting to be a funny place. We find ourselves, and the State Department person said, engaged in asymmetric diplomacy. I said, okay, but what is that? They said, well, they are not playing by the rules. I said, oh. Two days later, I was with my four-star general friend, and he said, you know what, we are engaged in this funny thing, we call it asymmetric warfare. I said, oh, excuse me, what's that? They said, well, they ain't playing by the rules. I said, oh. About 3 or 4 weeks later, or maybe it was a month or two, I don't really remember, I forget a lot these days, um, I found myself in Belgrade in Serbia meeting with a bunch of friends and colleagues, and I don't remember why or how, but we were there. And the Ukraine had just popped off and the Middle East was doing its number. And I had a friend from Milano and he said, "Harrison, I think this is World War III." I said, "Well, no, I don't think so. I think it's probably worse." He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, as I've been watching what's been going on, I think it's fair to say that every single social system that we have depended upon is busted. Uh, it's kind of hanging on by the edges. Uh, we go through the motions, we sort of hope that this will work or that'll work, but they're busted. And I said, okay, um And where does that leave us? Well, I remember exactly what I said. It leaves us at the most terrifying and most exciting point in our life. Most terrifying because all of that stuff that we— I mean, I was born in 1935. I'll be 85 come December. So I've seen a reasonable amount of this. That's a short time for the cosmos, but kind of a long time for Homo sapiens. And, uh, last time we went through something like this was World War II, and we walked into that and there was the British Empire and the French Empire and the German Empire and the Italian Empire and a few other odd ones, the Belgians, and we walked out of it And that was all gone. And, you know, we used to know what a country was. We don't. We used to know what a business was. We don't. We used to know what military tactics was. We don't. So today, that being the whatever it is, 30th of October, 19— or 2020. As near as I can figure out, it's much more of the same. And I think that's my wife, and I'm gonna have to answer it. So she's in New York. Hello?

This is part of the cosmos for Harrison. Anything happens in the open space—

Okay, that's good. I'm on the air, so I'll call you later.

Tribute. Hi! And Harrison, in the cosmos, that would be considered whatever happens is the right thing in the circle, and we learned something. Perhaps she could come into the circle, right?

Well, no, she's in the middle of Jersey Turnpike. I think it's not just her health and everybody else's. In any event, yeah, just to sort of round the horn, I can't remember any time in my 85 years of presence on this planet where all at once we had a plague, climactic dissolution, economic furor, emerging dictatorship, uh, what did I leave out, etc., etc. It's ecological disaster. Um, it's enough to get your attention, and, and the question becomes, what are we going to do? I mean, on the one hand, there's absolutely nothing to do. Go vote or do whatever it is you want to. Take a deep breath and hold it and see what happens. The other side is sooner or later that's going to come out on the other side. It's interesting, Louis runs this thing called Best Practices, and a best practice is only a best practice in a given context. And change the context, and that practice doesn't mean anything. I mean, best accounting practice is great if you're fussing with numbers, but it doesn't work all that well in astrophysics. I mean, you still got to add and subtract, but it's different context. Especially metaphysics. And especially metaphysics, or almost anything else. So Putting a bottom line under the moment, our context has just been blown. And, you know, we sort of maintain it, like we still have pay systems in the federal government. You used to be a GS, whatever it was, and everybody knows it's absolutely immoral, unfair, not useful, but they're afraid to change it. The same thing happens in a corporate structure and NGOs and everywhere else. Uh, so what we're left with are just the shreds of things that used to work. Now, the way this story, when it was run 60 years ago, 70 years ago, ended was they brought a bunch of folks to San Francisco and they all sort of sat down and said, right, what do we do? And out came the United Nations. Was it perfect? No, but it worked. I mean, part of it was you had two superpowers and they sort of created a yin and a yang, and we managed to do actually quite well for 60 or 70 years. Well, that's not there anymore, and what is there? We don't know. And furthermore, what we do know is instantaneous. It used to be that the news would happen and a week or two later you'd hear about it. That changed. My favorite story, that one, I was in a bush village in Liberia sitting around the fire with the chief and the elders on the night that whoever it was walked on the moon. And we had a battery-operated radio out there, and we caught the BBC, and you could hear, "One small step for a man, a giant step for mankind." And I said to Blaymer, that was the chief, Lema, there's a man up there, he's walking on the moon. Lema said yes. It wasn't a new or different idea, but it was a very different context. So anyhow, what do we do now? What we used to be able to do is have this great huge conference and we'd all get together and imagine a new structure. Well, I think we got a rather different plateful in front of us. There are now 8 billion people, plus or minus a few, that need to be involved in that conversation. I mean, it used to be you could forget all those people down in Yemen or South Africa or Botswana or You name the place. China. Yeah, whoever heard of China? It's interesting, 500 years ago China accounted for basically two-thirds, I think, of the economy of the world. They're just getting back to where they were. Um, how do we deal with that? Well, The only answer I've got at the moment is we need a conversation for about 8 billion, and that would be an absolutely mind-boggling impossibility, except for the fact we actually have the technology to do that. Um, I mean, in a way, that's where this massive internet connection is. It's an ongoing conversation for 8 billion people. Uh, it's pretty disorderly, but most good conversations are. Um, it's filled with a lot of disinformation, and most conversations are too. It takes people a long time to figure out what they want to talk about.

It is a mess, right? We call it a beautiful mess that we all are, and we can introduce ideas and our perspectives or even our vision of what we want the world to look like, and it gets skewed, right? In politics and organizations, especially today.

And— Totally skewed. I mean, my skew— excuse me, my straight line is your skew. I mean— By definition, language does that. Words matter, right?

Words do matter.

Well, words do matter, but it's also true, and I've actually spent most of my life thinking and writing about language, um, you know, it's just a simple fact of the matter that you can say things in French you can't even begin to think about in English. It's a fact that the other way, or the Native Americans in Alaska and Canada, have something like 60 words for snow. We have snow. Well, we have words other than that, but none of them are nice. Words do mean, yeah, it's very important. It's the way we structure our environment. But the thought that a word captured reality, I think, is whistling in the dark.

And that's what I think the disconnect, the dissonance is happening, is that, you know, one can create a sound or a tone, and if you can't hear your own tone, understand your own purpose, your own vision of what you're doing, even understand yourself you end up being in this soup of other people, right? And you can't make your own way. You just can't make your own way. And so I always say to people, why are we being what everybody else is being? Why can't we really follow who we truly are and what we care about, what means to us, right?

We could, except that very often we don't have a clue. I can speak just personally, but I have never known from one minute to the next what I was going to do. I've never gotten a job that I ever went after. I never went after any job that I got, and I never had any idea how any job was ever going to happen or work. Now, frankly, I have always had a wonderful time, sometimes a little more exciting than others, but there it was.

I mentioned that the wonderful times you've had, I want to talk about that. Because one of the things that I— that inspired me about what you do, and in my own work, is that I shouldn't do anything that I don't have fun with, number one. Number two, don't set myself up for disaster. At this time when I, I literally was in a situation where I was going to get mobbed. And I had to have the police bring me out. And I called you up after it, a little shaken up, because I literally, I said, Harrison, I almost got, I was, you know, mobbed. I, I think I was set up by the, the mayor of the system. And Harrison said very simply, he stopped for a moment and he said, you didn't get set up, you set yourself up.

Yeah, we do that. We do that.

What he was telling me was—

let me just put in one more thing and I'll be quiet for a second. For this conversation of 8 billion to happen, we don't have a stadium large enough for that, and we don't need it. And who knows, Homo sapiens may terminate the experiment before we ever get around to it. We all, I think, have to be aware of the fact that species do come and go. We all have our examples. But on the off chance that we might just continue on in some reasonable form, how do you do this? And this to me has been the excruciatingly wonderful part of open space, which has nothing to do with my invention. It was quite literally a two-martini thing. The first martini got me loose enough to have a blinding flash of the obvious. This had been here forever since. But the question was, how do you effectively intuit and go with the flow? I mean, using words we all use. We have some good analogues, I think sailing is one. I sail a fair amount, and any sailor who says I know exactly how to get from point A to point B is lying through his teeth. You got winds and tides and currents and who knows nasty things called rocks and I had whales and turtles and God knows what all. And it's wonderful.

And there's small adjustments in sailing, right? Because winds come and they go. You take small adjustments, you bring in the sheet. Same way with flying hot air balloons. You don't know where you're going to land, right? So you have this one following you to find you and be your handler to get there, right? And that's what life is about. Who supports? How do we bring together? With you, Harrison, I wanted to know something very important. Energy is big for you, um, and big for how, uh, you've been able to bring massive amounts of people together. And I've seen this work. Uh, you mentioned the billions. How do we bring the billions together now that they're not physical? We bring them through technology. How do you see the new energy forming, the new way to bring people in, in a mass way, in technology? What What will— what's the major chord that will transcend conflict and violence and extreme extremities, that will go beyond into how you began in the '60s, uh, more of a movement really, and you with others, Pat Tannenbaum, etc.? How do we get back to that reality where energy and positivity drives collectivity, the collection of the whole. How do we get back to that? We can't force it, right? We can't force sailing, we can't force praying. So help me, help me with that. Help us all.

Well, we also have funny things called hurricanes, and if you've ever sailed in one, it's not a matter of small increments. Sometimes you just lose your mast and all your rigging. The question you ask, I think, is, is quite pertinent, and my answer is you can't. You don't. And if you were to try, you would be doing what you did with the mayor— set yourself up. Uh, I mean, let me put it this way: the energy is out there, and the presumption is that What is destroying things at the moment is massive amounts of chaos, confusion, and conflict. I suppose you could throw in some other things, but they'll do for the moment. And I think there's a presumption that if somehow or another you can eliminate those three, we would have peace. Well, my experience is 180 degrees opposite that. It turns out, and I think any biologist will tell you this, or astrophysicist, or mystic, that chaos is the opening of space to allow new forms to occur. And the moment you eliminated chaos, you would eliminate energy and livingness. It would stop. And then you get to confusion. I know everybody's— we gotta have the answer. Well, my, my experience honestly has been confusion is the intellectual equivalent of chaos. What it does is muddle made-up minds so they think something new. And if you put it that way, it becomes, I think, reasonably clear that confusion is the first step for wisdom. You could never possibly have a profound thought if you didn't begin in confusion. I mean, we see this in little ways, like, oh, what's his name in Penicillin He looks at this crazy petri dish and he's confused. Why? Well, because these funny white things are blotting out these massive green things.

Starting with the question, right? It's starting with a question.

Well, now there— yes, now that is something that we can actively work on, I think. Um, we're an answer society. Everybody has to have the answer. So much so that I find we typically forget the question. More to the point, we forget the importance of question. Now, I don't want to put this personally, but you, you do best practices, and I think another word or translation of that might be best answers.

I like that. Sounds like a rebrand.

Okay, and then the problem is if you change the context, you don't have an answer. Um, the Quakers have this wonderful phrase they call sitting the question, and it's not about being mystical. I suppose they are in a way, And they're not the only people who do this, but what they've discovered is that one begins to fully appreciate the reality that you're in when you suddenly find yourself in the midst of the question, something that was so deep and so profound that you couldn't have an answer, and to be easy with that. And to know that as whatever species works along with the kinds of challenges that those questions, or that question, provides, you know, they're going to find partial answers but never the answer. And so chaos, confusion, and then conflict. Can you imagine a good basketball game without conflict? I mean, it would be boring and dull.

It defines a basketball game. Exactly.

Can you imagine a corporation where there was no corporate conflict? I mean, I think you can. We see a lot of them. They're dead. So the issue is not getting rid of chaos, confusion, and conflict. The issue is allowing the energy flow to flow. And typically what happens, I think, is that we tend to bottle it up and then are surprised when it breaks out and does nasty things. Um, We see that concretely with our water thing. You know, you build levees, well, that's fine, and then all of a sudden it turns out that there was a reason for floodplains, and that sooner or later Mother Nature is just going to drop a big one, and those levees are going to go, and you're going to be in worse shape than you would have been if you'd done nothing. Furthermore, you're going to impoverish the land because every time those plains flooded, what happened was new topsoil. So, you know, let me go back to open space.

Yeah, it's good because I— you're talking about the days when you brought the Chevy to the levee and the levee was dry. They're not dry anymore, right? We got the conflict, we have chaos. When we have questions.

And in that, we've always had that. Talking about— yeah, right. And somewhere along the line, we, we, we created this— I won't say mythical world because I have a great deal of respect for myth— so I, I would say this fantasia world where we just sort of had, I don't know, a life in a hammock. I mean, Somehow or another, you say, think about going back. Well, I happen to be a great fan of the early 1900s, and I had a great uncle, Joseph Harrison. He built a boiler and he built the Trans-Siberian Railway. And, you know, he was one of these engineers, did all this kind of stuff. And he was a Philadelphian, as am I. And I think everybody thought he lived in a very peaceful life. Well, yeah, but funny things were happening along the way. This patent lawyer in Switzerland starts thinking about gravity and all of a sudden comes out with this funny little story, E equals mc squared, and all of a sudden reality changes. And that had barely gotten done, I think That was in 1907. And in 1923, these weirdos got together in Copenhagen, and they were quantum mechanics, and they started talking about a reality that absolutely blew your mind. And I remember, if you want to, if you want to catch the flavor of this time, listen to the Rites of Spring. When Stravinsky did the Rites of Spring as a Russian composer, obviously it blew the walls of Paris. The crowd was in the street screaming and yelling. I mean, all of a sudden, this specific supposedly peaceful early 1900s was awash in ideas that we didn't know where we were going, and we've lived in that ever since, but we keep trying to pretend it isn't true. Oh, it's a funny thing. One of my favorite books is called The Four Percent Universe, and I, I'm not enough of an astrophysicist nor a mathematician to take you all the way through it, but Along about the time that people discovered, um, dark energy and dark matter, some bright person figured out that 96% of everything is dark energy and dark matter, which leaves 4% left. Now, dark energy and dark matter by definition are unknown and unknowable, which means what we're left with is 4%, and we hardly know anything about that. There's a dose of humility that gets in, and that's where sitting the question, I think, makes some sense.

And that's what I believe— that I know that the sense comes in is with quantum mechanics we had a large amount of uncertainty that, that was presented with energy waves, motion, and it brought that kind of understanding of, like you said, dark matter. There are things that we don't know that exist and we can't know that exist. And it's, it's a, uh, you know, if we look at to your background, uh, whether it be religion or it be openness through social systems, there are things we can't control. So there's a semblance of surrender to learn.

Well, there is that, but there are two things that I find that give me joy. One is just watching a group of people encounter the chaos, confusion, and conflict called the energy of their lives. And come out. That's called open space. And what the facilitator does is nothing. Nothing. So that's just exhilarating. The other thing that's really exhilarating to me is being in a moment when all we have is the question. And one of the ways of working with that, at least for me, has been how do you communicate in that kind of a situation? Words are, you know, we use them. Well, it's words in a certain context. It's storytelling. Storytelling doesn't give you the facts. What storytelling does is create an energy environment in which the hearer experiences the reality you're talking about or not. Think about the last time you sat around the circle and somebody told ghost stories. You know, it wasn't all the facts and figures about the ghost. It was that sense that that rock moved, didn't it? So we have our ways I'm hopeful that Homo sapiens is not going to join the dinosaurs, but we should be aware of the fact that maybe this experiment is over. But in the meantime, it looks a little like 10:38. It's interesting that, right, you only know what you know.

And the— what I want— I don't know if it is— I don't believe it is over. Harrison. I, and, um, I don't, I don't think any of us do. Um, the concept, especially in OD, um, and we know it's not because we've seen it, it's the control that's getting in the way of it manifesting in, in, in more of the, more of the quantum physics aspect. Yes, relativity, relativity as it's relative to the emotion itself Needs motion. When you were in the group with open space, you're in your group and you would set things up and you go in the middle, you open up the circle. Tell me what that's like for you. Bring me back to a moment when you just felt like, man, this is the opening of a circle. You're jiving, you're feeling good, you're at that helm. You bring in the sheets. Tell me what that looked like when you opened it up and, and the energy, how you pulled out of the circle and facilitated. I've heard funny stories about what you've done and how you hung out afterward. I wanna hear what it's like. Bring me to a moment when that happened inside the circle, started the circle.

Well, you know, you gotta have the context of the circle to get the flavor of the story. So let's take it. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. Let's pick a nice one. One of my favorite examples of this was 50 Palestinians and Israelis. They were the security people. As one said to the other as we started out, "You know, it's really funny being together because we're in business to kill each other," which was true. And the government of Rome had made space available for a 3-day open space for these people who came from— I mean, Rome is sort of the first neutral territory they could get to. And so I walked into the middle of that circle, and I, I mean, they didn't know who I was, right? I'm some weird white man. I don't speak Hebrew, and I can't speak Arabic. And I walk in the middle of that circle, and it's in a gazebo, big gazebo sort of thing, open. Sides. And it felt like, you know, we're here. And I just simply said, you know the facts better than I do. You also are the people who can begin to help with that. So what are the issues and opportunities for bringing peace in your land? I don't mean peace in the sense of just lying in a hammock somewhere. I mean reconciling some of these murderous forces that kill people. And I stopped and I said, now a few minutes, I'm going to ask each and every one of you who cares to, to grab a piece of paper in the center of the circle and write down the issue that you have personal feeling about and take responsibility for, post it on the wall. We keep going until we're out. That's what they did. And then I said, well, uh, this is not a life commitment, but I'd like to invite you all to go to that wall, take a pencil and sign up for the issues you'd like to be a part of. As I say, it's not a life commitment. Change, but gives everybody an idea of how many people might be coming. And they all go to the wall and I walk out. That's it. That was an interesting occasion. These, as I say, these were the security people. We had two-star IDF general, we had I don't know, the folks. And the first day, it was amazing. I think the thing they recognized was for all of the yelling and screaming, they had much more in common than they did in difference. Now, they could convince themselves, and they did. I mean, by the time we got to the evening meal, I won't say it was love and kissing time, but it was a markedly different place. So anyhow, we had the evening meal, and we of course had instant communications back to Israel and Palestine. And that night, I don't know who, but somebody killed somebody. So all of a sudden, this nice day was a deep, dark thing. And I went to bed that night. They all went off, whatever. I went to bed that night, and I, I was in a guest house that was overlooking the gazebo that they were in. And because of the people and the security concerns, they left the lights on all night. So I had 50 chairs sitting in a circle right outside my window. And I confess I didn't sleep a great deal. And I was looking out the window about 3 o'clock in the morning, and the line from Rumi came through my head. Rumi, of course, is the Islamic poet. And the line goes, "There is a place beyond right thinking and wrong thinking. I'll meet you there." And that line went through my head, and I went to sleep. Well, the next morning I got up and I wasn't sure what to expect. I mean, I knew the feelings were pretty raw. So we're sitting in this circle and the 50 are there, and that was supposed to be a day of action planning. Well, I'm just very clear that that wasn't going to happen. So what I said to him was this: I understand that last night was probably a rough one for all of you, and I don't have a clue where to go, so I'm putting this gathering on pause for an hour. You can go or do anything you want to— talk to somebody, don't talk to somebody, do whatever you like. The buses are right over there, pointed the place out. I said, if You want to go back home, just get on a bus. You want to come back here, come back here. I'll see you at 10 o'clock or not. And I went off and walked. It's funny, I never saw anybody. It's the biggest estate. I mean, there was about 20 acres. And so I was wandering around, and on the way back, they happen to have an olive grove. So being me, I just sort of inadvertently clipped an colored branch and stuck it in my pocket. And we came back and everybody was there. And I said, well, I think probably rather than doing what we didn't want to do, Why don't we do something that I've seen work very well, we call it a talking stick, and we just sort of— I'll start to my right, that's just the way I always do it— and with a stick, and you go around, everybody could say anything they want to. It's not an argument, just say it. And The rules are very simple. If you have the stick, you can talk, and if you don't, you'll listen. And in either case, you'll do it with respect. So I took the olive stick out of my pocket, gave it to him. For the next— I mean, you might not know what an olive branch looks like, but they sure did. And for the next 2 or 3 hours, that olive branch went around this body. Now, at that They weren't sitting Palestinians on the right and Israelis on the left. They were all mixed up. And as they went along, it went from, you know, sheer anger to laughing to crying to whatever. And we got to the end of it. And as it happened, the a senior Islamic cleric, the chief guy from Rome, had joined us, and somebody said, well, could he say something? I said, sure. So anyhow, after we got done with the olive branch, I introduced him, and he stood up, and he looked around at this whole group, and he said, um, 'You know, the Quran teaches us that to kill somebody is to kill the world. To save somebody is to save the world. We have a lot of work to do.' And he said that. And the next thing that happened was that whole group stood up. I mean, as if on cue. And the next thing I knew, they were hugging and kissing and tears running down down their face. Now, did we bring peace in the Middle East that day? No. But I do know of a number of things that were really nasty that didn't happen because somebody called somebody. Virtually everybody in that meeting could not admit that they'd been there for obvious reasons, but I never forget it either. So yeah. You know, all of a sudden you're standing in the middle of people and they're living life, and you have a privilege of being there. And I think we do. Wow. Whatever it's worth, I, I agree. I, I have no idea whether it's over or not, but I do know that every single thing— person, being, whatever— has a beginning, middle, and end. And that includes us. Now, maybe tomorrow, it may be at some other time, but time itself is not necessarily eternal, right? By definition, it's finite. I don't know, it gets very confusing, but just tell good stories and you can have a beer or martini too.

A beer and martini creates a lot, uh, I, I, I, when I, um, remember you first telling me that story about the creation and how creation happens in different ways, and saying the beginning, middle, and end for life and for stories and for knowing how we save the world, right? In the Quran, that one moment that he stood up created complete peace release of emotion for groups of people who would otherwise kill each other.

Yeah, well, that's simple. So, and there's why they went back to doing it, right?

Why can't we keep doing it, right? Can we? Can you keep doing it?

Life is not a destination, life is a journey. This has been— I don't know, but you know, we have the capacity to let good things happen, and we have the capacity to destroy it all. That's our choice. Well, I, I gotta go soon. I was just to say that I—

we must end on that. That is a great place to end because it just says it all. Uh, you know, there's a place between good and evil, and I'll meet you there, right?

I'll meet you there. There's the place between right thinking, right thinking, and wrong. The Arabic gets a little hard to translate, but it's, you know, a right idea and a wrong idea or point of opposition. And I'll meet you there. We can do that.

Harrison, thank you so much for joining us. You've been phenomenal. It's really an honor always to learn from you, be with you, and to share that with the world. We just changed and shifted just now. I did personally, and I know it will— I'll bring that to so many people, uh, just this conversation and everything I'll do now. And I know people out there today who are listening will see this on recording. Um, just thank you so much for joining us, Harrison.

My pleasure. Thank you. Curtis, and call my wife.

I wish you're good. Bye-bye, Harrison.