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Jody Williams is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a globally recognized human rights activist, and one of the world’s most influential voices in disarmament and peacebuilding. She is best known for her leadership of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), a global civil society movement that grew to over 1,000 organizations across 60 countries, where she served as chief strategist and spokesperson, helping lead an unprecedented coalition of NGOs, governments, and international bodies that resulted in the landmark 1997 Mine Ban Treaty—earning her and ICBL—the Nobel Peace Prize for transforming grassroots activism into international law. In 2006, Jody co-founded the Nobel Women's Initiative, which she chairs to this day, where she works together with other women Nobel Peace Prize laureates to elevate the voices and support the work of women peace activists around the world. In 2013, Jody published her memoir on life as a grassroots activist, My Name is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl’s Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize.
How does one individual from a small town in America grow a movement from a staff of one into 1,000+ organizations across 60 countries—and ultimately change international law? Can the feeling of “righteous indignation” be enough to address the injustices in the world? What separates those who change the world from those who don’t? And is “extraordinary” simply a choice we make everyday?
Find out from Jody Williams, exclusively in conversation with Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa on Intersections Podcast.
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Greetings and a warm welcome back to Intersections, where our mission is to dissolve boundaries in order to explore and expand to our fullest capacities. Today, we're going to aim to dissolve those boundaries between you and me and the rest of humanity, but also between the ordinary and the extraordinary. We will do that in partnership with Jody Williams.
Jody is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a globally recognized human rights activist, and she is one of the world's most influential voices in disarmament and peace building, something so critical at a time like today. Jody is best known for her leadership of the "International Campaign to Ban Landmines," also called as ICBL, which is a global civil society movement that grew to over 1,000 organizations across 60 countries, where she has served as the chief strategist and spokesperson and has helped to lead an unprecedented coalition of NGOs and governments and international bodies that ultimately resulted in the landmark 1997 "Mine Ban Treaty," earning her and the ICBL the Nobel Peace Prize for transforming grassroots activism into international law. In 2006, Jody also co-founded the "Nobel Women's Initiative." So this is the 20th year anniversary of that where she chairs to this day. The work with her and other women Nobel Peace laureates to elevate the voices and support the work of women peace activists around the world. In 2013, Jody published her memoir on life as a grassroots activist, and this is called "My Name Is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl's Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize." It is such an honor and joy to have with us. Jody, welcome.
Hello. Nice to be here.
So grateful to have you, Jody. We have so much to talk about. What is such a storied life, very active and dynamic even today. I want to start by just asking you how someone with very humble roots from a small town in Vermont, ends up ultimately, changing international law and winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Not by any form of what we might call saintliness, but through almost stubbornness. You call yourself a time, you used to be a mousy girl, right? Yeah. Who could barely get through college.
In the words of the Nobel Committee. At some point, you became the strongest single driving force behind a treaty signed by 164 nations at this point. So that's the journey that we want to unpack. What is it teaching us about life, about the inner life, about the outer life.
When you were born in this, I understand a town of 1200 or so people? Yes. You've said that you used to be very quiet in high school. Take us back to that girl, who was she? What was stirring inside you that perhaps nobody had seen at that time?
Yeah. My family was five children. We still are five children. My mother just died at 95. She was a widow for 20 years, but my oldest brother was born deaf. As he reached adolescence, he developed a violent schizophrenia. Watching how people treated him because he was different had an impact on me as I was growing up. Our next door neighbors, Billy and Bobby, on our little street in Poultney, Vermont, they used to harass my brother because they liked the sound that his fear made. He couldn't talk, but of course he could make noise. Billy and Bobby liked to chase him down and try to be mean to him. I ended up trying to protect my brother. I remember one time we were riding our bicycles around the block, and Billy and Bobby were up on a hill and they started throwing tin cans at us.
They had been cut open, and one of them slashed my brother's head, and he freaked out and rode his bike home. I went after Billy and Bobby, convinced that I was going to catch them and beat them up, to protect my brother. Of course, I couldn't do that. I didn't catch them, they were gone over the hill. But it's the little bitty things that you don't think about that contribute to, at least for me, how I became not fearless, but fierce in defending issues and people who should be defended.
From my experience with my brother in fourth grade. We had a new boy in school who came to the grade, a couple of weeks after the class started. That's always difficult because everybody else knows each other. Michael, the new kid, was geeky. Not in today's sense of geeky, he was awkward, he didn't do sports well, etc. The cutest and smartest boy in fourth grade was David Cheever. We were having a recess, of course, go out and get exercise. There was a game called kickball, and David Cheever was directing, who was on which team, and in the process he told Michael that he could not play. That he might have lost. As you pointed out, and it's true, I was afraid of sort of authority type people. But as I stood there, I don't know, we were 20 kids maybe in the circle and David's directing, it just suddenly struck me, "Wait a minute, we're 20 people, nobody is saying anything to include Michael, to protect him, to help him." So I stepped into the circle and challenged David Cheever, and he backed down, and he invited Michael in. Just little things demonstrate that if you act on what you believe for the better of everybody.
It's a good thing. And when you have a little bit of success, I don't mean in a self-aggrandizing way, but when it helps somebody else, you begin to feel the necessity to be a voice. If you needed to use your voice for the betterment of people. It just grew in me.
Wow. Yeah. How is your brother? How has he done over the course of his life?
How old is he now? He's 78. He is now living in a home. A place for care.
He doesn't like it very much, as you can imagine. He's always lived at home until he was like 74 or 75, but my mother got too old, and it was very difficult to take care of him all the time. So, he moved into this home and he's okay. In my view, my brother has had a life unlived in many ways. He's never had a relationship with a woman. It's so strange sometimes when I think about it as a life not lived and life is complicated.
My mother was an amazing woman, very strong and defended her son. I think I'm strong because my mother was. And my dad.
Well, thank you for sharing that and being so open about it. He's going to be in my thoughts.
Thank you.
I hope and I imagine that as humanity keeps taking strides forward, that, to the extent there will be more, of him, born with special needs that we become better at understanding, them for their unique talents and needs and are able to adapt, to support them in the right way. That we perhaps have technology or other ways through which more capacities can be opened and expressed from them. I mean, they used to be the blind. Then there was Braille, so what could that be for the, for the deaf and beyond. Anyway, so one prays and hopes because I know he is by himself just a microcosm of a whole community like that in the world. But thank you for sharing that story and about how it works so much.
There were a few things you said that really sort of, I wanted to put a little bit of a pause and a spotlight on, you talked about not being fearless, but being fierce. In those moments. Was there fear in that ferocity? Was there fear as well?
When I went after Billy and Bobby, for example, I don't recall fear. I recall righteous indignation at injustice. I call it that because one time we had a women's conference at West somewhere, but so long ago, I can't quite remember. There were several of us Nobels, it was me and Betty Williams and Mairead Maguire from Northern Ireland, just talking about these kinds of things and fear. A woman in the audience asked why I was so angry. It took me a second to respond in the way that I still believe. I said, "I'm not angry, I want to fight injustice. It's righteous indignation. Not that I'm pure and all that, but I feel indignation at injustice. It's righteous indignation because one wants to make the world better for everybody. This is critical to me, even people you don't like. There's certainly people in the world I do not like, I will not pretend that I'm Mother Teresa and I love everybody, I don't."
Yeah. Righteous indignation. It's a little bit of a milder term than anger, but it depicts a certain positive direction to take the anger into, as I see. Maybe there's a learning there for us broadly in society that it's not that, the emotion of anger is to be suppressed or conquered or, etc. it is to be channeled.
Right? I think that's perfectly said, actually. That's why it's righteous indignation. It's not just random anger. Certainly I feel random anger. I'm not pure.
Yeah. But again, what's unique about you is what you did with it. So I want to talk about that a little bit, in a few minutes. But, let's take a moment here to get back into the flow of your life journey.
We hear about these moments in school. We hear about that moment with your brother and what it activated in you. I want to kind of fast forward now to your time in college. As you're coming into formation, for yourself. So you mentioned that you were kind of drifting, at the University of Vermont. You changed your major several times.
Five times.
Five times. You skipped your commencement. So, describe that chapter in your life. What was it like to be this young, emerging woman in the making?
I was at university during the Vietnam War, during the reemergence of the women's movement. I consider, when I think about it, that I learned more from what was going on around me than from classes. Not that I hate classes, but so much was happening in the world. My first protest was at the University of Vermont against the war in Vietnam.
Then a bunch of us went down. It seems so small and ridiculous now, but it wasn't. We went down to the state Capitol and went in and up in the galleries and demanded that the state take a position against the war in Vietnam. As I was saying before, it's like the accumulation of little acts that one does. It helps channel where your life goes, how you decide to face the world. Because to me, you have to. It's a decision. You decide how you want to be in the world. I don't want to be famous. I don't care about being famous or any. I want to be a person who cares enough to do things for the betterment of everybody. Even those I don't like, that's the most important part. There are a couple I would probably not put in that group, but not many.
For example, right now, a bunch of us organizations are coming together for a conference in Rome with the Vatican on artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons and nuclear weapons.
That in this volatile time is to me, an important movement. I'm proud to be part of it. It's like you were saying earlier. You can't give up. You can't give in to depression. Although, of course, one can feel that. But you have to channel your energy into efforts to try to make the world better.
My husband and I—we worked together on the landmine campaign. He was the chair of the arms division of "Human Rights Watch" for 30 years.
So it's important to join efforts to try to bring rational thought and concern for the world as a whole.
So it's important to have people understand and understand, what's an ordinary person? What's the difference between ordinary and then wonderful? To me, anybody who cares enough to join efforts to make the world better for everybody is extraordinary. It's extraordinary to make that choice.
Yeah. Well, that's a wonderful way of defining the extraordinary. So you're saying the difference between ordinary and that amazing, wonderful, extraordinary person is someone who cares enough to join efforts in making the world better. What a beautiful definition. I'm a mathematician at heart, so I love, like, precision of thought, definition. Like, "Okay, what do we mean by this term and that term." You define extraordinary in a way that makes it an invitation to every human being to take that on.
I remember the early days of the landmine campaign. As it grew, I had so many campaigners come and say, "We're like a family." Family of campaigners and that was beautiful to me. It's not that we all loved each other all the time and all that, but everybody worked together. In a joyous fashion to tackle the serious issue of landmines.
Wow. Look at that. I love the fact that we've also moved the conversation from purely anger to joy. There is joy in this kind of work. I mean, it is effortful and there are setbacks. There's at times a sense of despondency that comes up, I'm sure. But it is joyful work. Again, being the mathematician, as I am, in my study of Abraham Lincoln, what I found is that here was a young mind shaped by the most minimal education because he was more or less like a farmhand, growing up in Hanoi. But he ended up having this view of an ideal point, an ideal point of what America could be, what democracy could be, what humanity could be. This would be a society where everybody was equal, not necessarily equal in physical capacity or intellectual capacity or personality or what have you, but equal in the right to rise to the full potential.
Then for him, it was, "Okay, what's my duty? What's our duty in our generation to do our part to move society a little bit closer to that ideal point, we may not get there in this life. Then we'll have to pass the torch on to the next generation and then to the next generation." But in a sense, that was the unifying purpose of everybody. At any point in human history is to be very clear about that ideal point. Whatever it is for you, that moral imagination you have about what a good, caring society is about, and then do your part and take joy in the inches that you're able to move. It helps me see how we can gain fulfillment and comfort even when we don't see ideal outcomes arise around us in two years, five years or ten years.
I see a little bit of that, in your life journey, Jody. You keep getting to be a fighter for things that you don't see going right. You put a lot of energy and time into it. From what I hear now, you build these coalitions. They feel like a family. It's joyful work, hard work. But then, you're feeling that sense of fulfillment that is coming right from our time or not.
That doesn't mean that you don't have times, like there were times that I would think, I just want to go back to Vermont and make maple syrup or something, pick apples. But of course they happen. You have moments of, "Oh my God, what are we doing? Who are these people? Why are they so?"
But then you go, "Okay, I'm going to join this campaign, to try to stop nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons that can go out on their own and target and kill," which is horrifying. Who in their right mind thinks it's okay to cede the power of decision making like that to a machine?
Yeah. I want to come back to that. It's an important concern of our present times and, and let's go back and put our audience in the shoes of that young woman in the making. In college, you're being exposed to the Vietnam War. I want to help them see and build the connective tissue from there to this work that you were doing in landmines and then beyond and now, your concern about autonomous weapons.
So, I'm remembering back to that era. and actually very close by to where I live is Riverside Church. I remember Martin Luther King gave a very historic speech there, where he broke out, from just his focus on civil rights in the United States to actually taking on that cause as well against the Vietnam War. He was, I think, an early voice against it. Perhaps you might remember some of those moments as well. I remember him saying something like "an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere". What a beautiful idea.
It is.
Yeah. Now I'm visualizing you being on fire about these causes there and yet your ultimate calling lay elsewhere and then, there's this moment that I understand in your life where, it's the leaflet moment. You're on a DC subway, finishing a masters at Johns Hopkins and something happens, can you talk about that?
Sure. I was going to the subway to get home in the Virginia suburbs. This scruffy looking dude, kind of stuffs a pamphlet at me as I'm going down the stairs. My intention was to get to the bottom, find a wastebasket and throw it away. Then I looked at the cover and it said, El Salvador—another Vietnam with a question mark. Had it not said Vietnam. If it had just said Salvador, it would have gone in the trash. But making the connection, made me read it. By then, I had lived in Mexico, I knew something about the region and to be educated in a little pamphlet about the intention of, it was Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig. "We have to stop communism in Central America. Or the next thing we know, the communists will be at the border." Then they were trashing, of course, the Sandinistas, but they were involved in trying to keep the right wing in power in Salvador. When I led delegations to Nicaragua and Honduras, it was insane because Nicaragua had one functioning elevator, in the capital that was in the Intercontinental Hotel. We're afraid they're going to take over Harlingen, Texas and then the US. Those were the thoughts of Reagan and HaIg.
When I learned that and thought, "Oh my God, they're doing it again, another country, another region that they feel they have the right to mess with." So I became very involved in the work. I think I did ten years in and out of Central America working to stop the US doing what it always does, as we see with the Middle East and Iran. I learned a lot.
It's another one of those things where little steps in thinking and action come together. It changes how you view the world. It changes how you view yourself. It changes how you believe you should act to make the world better for everybody. When I talk publicly with an audience and stuff, I always say that doesn't mean I love everybody. I don't, I'm a normal human being. There are people I don't like. But I don't wish them harm. I wish that we could change the system. So everybody felt part of a system that cared about them. We certainly don't have that, especially now.
I'm remembering a thought from Rumi. Are you familiar with him? He just has a way of putting things in words. It's just beautiful. So he talks about, "Let yourself be silently drawn by, the stronger pull of what you really love." Just imagine for how many of us, life just passes us by. Every now and then we get a certain stirring, a certain experience, a certain pull. Then it just gets lost in the noise of the allure of, material something or the other or popular something or the other that, the world is kind of pulling us towards. In your case what's distinctive, both about those early years when you were feeling a great sense of righteous indignation, about how the world was treating your brother, to then this moment where El Salvador and Vietnam and then you got sparked by that. You were open to making a lot of material sacrifice and to doing things off the beaten path. Not what most people might do with degrees like what you had because you were feeling that stronger pull of something you really, really love. Perhaps it has to do with remedying injustice anywhere in the world.
Yep. As you've mentioned, certainly how my brother was treated was an injustice. He didn't ask me to help him out, for God's sake. That certainly was a big pull. Then to be with Vietnam, I knew people that were drafted, for God's sake. Of course one of the things one never forgets is Kent State when four students were shot by National Guardsmen. It reminds me of right now with Trump's ICE movement, militarizing the cities and states of this country under the terms of immigration via violations, they don't have a right to be here. And then the National Guard people that he has sent to places have killed people.
Sometimes it seems like rerunning tape. First Vietnam, Kent State, now we're back in the cities and it makes me have righteous indignation.
It builds it up again. There's no way I can imagine not continuing to try to make the world better.
Yeah. It seems so deeply wired in you, this instinct, can imagine a time like today, it must just have you constantly lit up with that. I want to have us learn from that next level channeling that was happening of that energy for you in Central America. You worked, on what was, life threatening human rights work. Part of it was about supporting children who had lost limbs to landmines, offering them prosthetics, and you've even written in your memoir about being assaulted by somebody you call Mr. Death Squad.
Well, the US trained death squads, in the South, "The School of the Americas" was the name. They brought soldiers from countries in Latin America primarily, and trained them in the US thinking and US methods of warfare and leaders of the death squads, which were very famous in Salvador, were trained there. The death squads were made up of soldiers who dressed like normal people and then went out and killed enemies.
It's just mind boggling to me how evil people can be and how they believe it's okay for them to decide the life and death of people. If we really want the world to be a different place. Violence is not a solution. Violence contributes to more violence.
I did some work recently on Öcalan. He is a Kurd who has been imprisoned by Turkey on this island for 25 years. And he was a leader in trying to find resolution between the Turks and the Kurds. And last year, still being imprisoned. This reminds me of Mandela. He issued a statement to the PKK, which was the armed group that was trying to find a solution for Kurdish people, to lay down their arms to disband, and that the only way to find resolution was through negotiation and discussion, not through violence. That is what we need. If people like him and people like Mandela, who also was a fighter.
People want to forget that he started out as a fighter, for God's sake. They come to recognize that violence only breeds violence. It will not resolve the problem.
So Öcalan's call was very dramatic, and the response of the Turkish government has been slow, to put it mildly. But last year, I was able to help get 88 Nobel Peace, Nobels of all fields, sign an open letter to the government, etc. and governing bodies of the EU to listen to what he is saying, to let him be free so he can be the leader that the Kurds believe he is. It has helped him in prison. It's not the solution, but it's helping make his life less horrible. We just are doing a year later, a letter pointing out that what we called for in the first letter is not happening as quickly as it should. But it's people like him, too, and people like Mandela. Who in prison, my God, can think that the only way to resolve the problems of the world is to work together.
I don't have to invite you to dinner, but we can work together, conceiving a different way of interacting with each other. I don't need to be better than you. I don't need to be bigger than you. I don't need to be more important than you. I need to recognize each other's humanity. That we work together to try to make the world positive for everybody.
It does take working together. That doesn't happen if I think I'm better than you. Or if I think I can kill you because you bug me.
Jody, these ideas. You articulate them very clearly, emphatically, clearly you live them. Many of us go through life without having the space or the reflection to do around, what are those values that animate me.
Beyond just what I see around me and being conformist, what's cool, in my group and what have you in your case, what has been that practice for you? Is it something that just involves you going to your core and feeling connected, with what feelings and pulls arise from there, and that's it. And then maybe one day you reflect back and say, "Oh, I did this because, and then you're able to rationalize it to this value or that value." Or is it that you've actually spent some time, reading certain books or reflecting on certain things and talking to certain people and then writing things down and then saying, "That is a value I really respect, and like, I love what Mandela was doing there, and I love what so-and-so was doing there, and I want to be that kind of person. And I struggle because I can't because I still get caught in the pull of this or that. But I'm going to try more the next day and the next day, and then one day you become that." I don't know. It sounds like, if I had to place my bet, I think it's more the former. It's just something that naturally arises in you. You just follow that instinct and maybe at some point you put words behind it. But tell me, which.
I think you're actually pretty spot on about that. It's not that I, especially in the beginning, it's not that I thought, I'm going to dedicate my life to trying to help. It just evolved from the things I did, the people I met, trying to overcome my fear of speaking in public and all those things. Some of the people I've met are just amazing.
One of our sisters, not Nobel, but an activist sister from Iraq, was just assassinated there. We've worked with her for years and years and years in the Nobel Women's Initiative. She went back home to try to make life better for women in Iraq, and two guys on a motorcycle drove by and shot her dead.
Of course, the question is, "Why did you have to kill her?" Because she was helping women, and that was upsetting your male view that they should be suppressed. I mean. If you do the work I do. It makes you know that you can't go back home to Vermont to pick apples and make maple syrup. You have to continue. Not that you have to, I want to continue to try to make a contribution that helps make the world different.
Yeah. Yeah. So there's one piece of our puzzle here with you, Jody, that I'd love to continue to unpack for our audience. That has to do with how you ended up being sparked by something, and that spark turned into this raging fire around the world to solve this landmine issue, which today over 140 countries have signed up to be committed to. I realize you're saying, some headwinds and some setbacks about the state of war in the world, but broadly speaking still, that is an incredible achievement. It is a glimpse, to all of us, about the latent capacities that I and others have, and everyone has to come together and work against a current state of affairs, a system, what have you, to get good things done. So, let's unpack that a little bit for our listeners, if that's okay with you for a few minutes.
Sure.
I'm taking us back to where you were, in Central America. I think it was in El Salvador at that time. Is that right?
I worked in Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador. Different projects.
Yeah. Okay. Then in one of those moments, this paralyzed Vietnam veteran. Bobby Mueller comes over to you, and asks you something, and then you talk about how in 37 seconds, you made up your mind, which actually completely changed the arc of your life. So could you talk about that?
Sure. I was working then in Salvador with the children. I ran the children's project, which brought wounded children to hospitals in the US that donated medical services to help them survive. And we also had a prosthetics project run by a Vietnam vet providing prosthetics to people who had lost limbs and to landmines, etc. I was tricked into going to Bobby Mueller's office by a German fellow who was part of the prosthetics program. He asked if I'd pick him up at the airport, take him to a meeting with Mueller, and then take him back to the airport so he could go home. I did that, and they're talking about landmines. I'm sitting outside the office reading, ignoring them because I wasn't part of the conversation, but they drew me in. Then Mueller said, I think we should get rid of landmines, and we'd like you to be in charge. Something to that effect.
I was sick of Central America by that point. I think I'd done 10 or 11 years in and out of Central America. But I said to him, "Why are you not dealing with nukes? It was a time when Russia was changing and, wouldn't there be an amazing opening here to deal with nukes?" He started to explain the issue of landmines. Once you plant them in the ground, or put them in trees or wherever, they're always there, ready to take a victim. He talked about the tens of thousands of mines in the world, etc. Wouldn't it be great to get rid of them? I started visualizing it and got caught up in the thought of trying to create a global movement that could do that. The whole timing was right too. I still have friends in Central America, but I was sick to death of that issue and how the US was, etc.
So I decided to agree to try to create a campaign to ban landmines. We went from those two organizations, the one in Germany, "Medical International" and Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation," a staff of one, me and grew to thousands of NGOs in 90 countries. It was amazing. It just felt organic. You meet with people who are trying to have an impact on wars and talk with them about, adding the issue of landmines to what they work on. You just grow a movement and it grew. As I said, it was almost like a family, even though it grew huge. We were successful in that effort to create a treaty to ban landmines. I still have friends from that movement that feel like family.
In fact, one of them, a guy from India, just died. I'm still connected with a woman in Hungary who was fighting against the Russian leaning government. It's just amazing to me. It does feel like family. A family that fights for a better world for everybody. It sounds so cliched. But it's true. The networks of people that I know that work together on different aspects of the problems of the world. They're like family. It's great.
I love to think sometimes of this from the vantage point of energy or consciousness.
Yes.
Because that can take us out of our bodies into more of a collective flow and all of that. So when I see you talk about family, which, by the way, Phil Jackson, who's very zen-like in the way he has been a coach to these professional basketball teams in the NBA like Chicago Bulls and L.A. Lakers and done so well. He talks about that too. He says the word that people use to describe a good team that 's working well together is family. So, I love this notion of family being more of a fluid thing, rather than a fixed blood thing. It's as though a collection of people can come together for a period of time and just feel this expansion of consciousness and feel like the collective and as if, like, it's a super entity that gets formed.
One version of that that I got very inspired by was when we were traveling around in Botswana, on a classic African dream safari. We were chasing the beautiful wildlife, wanting to watch the giraffes and the zebras and the lions and everything. Then there were these big mounds. At some point I stopped our guide and asked them and said, "Can you stop the Jeep? Because I'd love to ask you, what are these mounds? We keep seeing that we try to avoid it." He was like, "Oh, I was wondering if you'd ever want to hear about those." I said, "Okay, tell me about those." He said, "Well, these are termite mounds." I was like, "Okay, well, tell me a little about these." It was mind blowing. I later studied a little bit more about them from National Geographic. Anyway, I mean, like, a few things, like how they're the tallest non manmade, animal construction ever. The irony of that is not made by elephants, giraffes, but by termites. They each have a life expectancy of around 8 to 12 months. It takes about 60 years. So it's like what, 60 generations, so the early termites, are building something which they're going to die in. The next generation is going to die. The next generation is going to die, and it's going to keep happening, and it's going to take 60 generations to achieve their goal. Some of them are soldier termites and some of them are construction termites. They have these very intricate tunnels, for air conditioning and for breathing and all that within these mounds. I mean, it's just incredible, what an act of genius it is. I wonder, like, do they have universities like Johns Hopkins? Do they get master's degrees and PhDs? I mean, how do they know what to do, each of them playing their role? Or who are the managers and who are the C-suite executives? So anyway, I think about that and I feel like, wow, there has to be in the universe, not just individual consciousness, but collective consciousness.
Absolutely.
Have you felt that, I mean, because that's what I sense happened in that moment for you, for you, in that movement?
Yeah. People come together who believe what you're saying. That we are connected. We have to use those connections whether or not we're still alive. If others benefit from work I have done when I'm dead. That's great. It's part of the fabric of life.
Beautiful. I want to probe that a little bit more. I see an opportunity here to kind of explore something with you to make the invisible more visible. That's about like the deeply felt things in us that make us sense, that make us at times, feel somebody else's pain. Or feel a collective sense of power because there are so many of us, arising at the same moment towards a certain cause. Can you talk a little bit about that in your own journey? Is that again, just more instinctual, intuitive to you or, have you at times felt it very clearly and visibly that there is a force being cultivated that is not material initially. It starts from some deeper place, but then it embodies and expresses itself and in the words and actions of a large number of people.
Well, the landmine campaign is probably, for me, the most real palpable. Experience of that because we grew from such a little nothing to so many people who would have annual meetings, different places. When we would get together, you could just feel the energy and the connection and the anger, righteous indignation at the use of landmines. But the joy that we were working together to do something. That we were committed together and we, in the campaign, treated everybody with respect there.
For example, if we would do a six month plan. If the people in Thailand didn't fit into what their individual plan was, it's great. Do what you're doing and send us the information and it'll be sent out to everybody in the campaign. And people can.
Try different things. And I feel very proud of that part of the campaign. As often as you know, if you have a group of people and somebody is the coordinator, whatever the title is. You can choose to try to make yourself more powerful by keeping important information to yourself.
Right.
If you want the entire body to function and change things, you have to share that information.
It's not about you. It's about sharing information. Then how do we, as a global group and individual country groups, take that information and work to bring about change? It's a lot about power.
I think it's important to have leadership, but that doesn't mean that you're better than other people. It means you have some skills that are functional in helping the group move along.
Wow. There are so many incredible lessons in that. You brought up this earlier about this aggrandizement aspect of when you have success, well, are you trying to hold things for yourself versus, honor and respect and welcome others into that fold? I see that what you're saying is so central to what ultimately made this movement successful in what you were trying to accomplish.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get a sense that in what you observed there and what you accomplished there. I've noticed that there are certain moments in human history where something is just kind of destined to emerge, and it's kind of like those people who are in tune. They start to stumble into it a little bit, and then they start to get connected across borders, and then it starts to come together. At some point it leads to that big breakthrough in physics or that big new movement in art, or a big form of next level peaceful revolution or something or the other, and so is that something that you would feel happen, like you were all just meeting the moment? It was as if humanity was ready to rise, at least to that level of saying like, no landmines.
Yeah, that's a brilliant way of putting it. We started out so small and we would have a conference every year. But I think it was the third year, the conference was in Phnom Penh. Of course, Cambodia was one of the most mined countries. Suddenly we just had dozens of new organizations and campaigners that came to that conference and grew the campaign. It was a wonderful moment. You could feel it. You could feel that people were there because they understood the issue. They understood they could make a difference. They understood we could change this if we work together. We had the grace to let each campaign do it the way they do it in their own country. For example, if the campaign had agreed, we did a letter writing campaign or a signature campaign calling for a ban. Well, the way they do it in Cambodia is not the way we would do it in the US.
So they should do it the way they did. Everybody, because they were respected and not told what to do, asked to be part of whatever elements of the campaign work we decided on for the next six months or year.
I mean, imagine how that makes people feel. It makes them feel special. It makes them feel part of a movement. It makes them recognize that they can learn from us and we can learn from them.
It was a glorious campaign, I have to say. I don't usually sit around and think about it, but it's a damn good campaign.
Oh, beautiful. I like the notion of beauty as a core motivator for humanity. That there's all kinds of beauty, nature and human beings and paintings, but also in movements, and that's, so that's the word that was coming to my mind as you were just talking about all of this. It's as if, there were all these, individual termites out there doing their piece, and somehow you were able to bring them together, make them feel part of a building, a big hill together, sharing and interacting. Probably also expanding their sense of identity, if I hear you correct. You are like a world changing force of good. Building relationships and all that. Of course. Sharing best practices, knowledge, information.
So many of them have gone on to do other campaigning, for issues that they cared about. Because we as a family had learned to do it really well. You take that experience and use it on other issues.
Yeah. Incredible. You know who you're reminding me of a little bit of, although it's a very different story. Are you acquainted with Candace Lightner at all?
Nope.
Okay. Very dear soul. I think you both would actually really enjoy connecting. I hope I can make that happen for her and for you. She'll enjoy meeting you, too. First her little child, her son got hit by a drunk driver and fractured his skull, and he's had a struggle, over the course of his life with things and, so that was a lasting impact. Then a few years later, her daughter got hit by a drunk driver and got killed, and then she starts to discover she was in California. She starts to discover how messed up we are as a country with regard to the apathy people have, to this issue.
She said she discovered that the attorneys were driving drunk, the judges were driving drunk, the legislators were driving drunk. So people just didn't care. She was knocking on the door of Governor Pete Wilson at that time in California, not getting any love, attention. He wasn't even giving an audience until some breakthrough happened a couple of years ago. She would take balloons and chocolates for the secretaries and all that just to get attention on this. Anyway, she finally gets through to him and from there, she galvanizes other mothers who've lost children. So she's the founder of MADD, "Mothers Against Drunk Driving."
They've been credited over the years to have, ultimately, improved. Of course, highway safety and perhaps saved over 500,000 lives. She's so much like you. A lot of anger, a lot of righteous indignation, very fierce. Speaking her mind on the issues of today and constantly evolving. From MADD. Now she is about, distracted driving like people texting and driving, or drugged driving, people having, marijuana or sometimes even, prescription drugs, but who may therefore lose their sense of attentiveness and awareness and put themselves and others at risk. And so she's very vigilant about these things. She's, I think in her late, late 70s probably I'm guessing, at this point. But anyway, it's just been beautiful.
Anyway, so I was just thinking of her, and what a force you are and how she's lived a similar trajectory in life, so powerful. In her case, it was all these mothers who had felt so much pain about losing a child that it kind of converted into this massive capacity in them to sacrifice everything to make sure other mothers don't lose their children. I remember in your campaign also, you use that as a way to open people up to more empathy and care about this issue. Examples of people who have suffered losses as a result of these landmines.
But also, I think a big positive element was in the campaign, were landmine survivors. They were not poster children. They were activists who did not want other people to suffer what they had suffered, like the MADD woman. I don't want other people to lose their children to drunk drivers. I don't want other people to lose their livelihoods or their life or their limbs because of landmines. They were a very powerful component of the campaign.
At one meeting conference in Geneva of the governments. They had done the petition campaign about the treaty and getting rid of landmines.
It was a group of survivors from different countries who presented the president of the conference, at that time, with a million signatures, calling for the treaty. That's powerful. The campaign just gave so much to everybody. Because of that, the campaign was powerful.
Yeah. Incredible. We are starting to come to our final minutes, and I don't want to lose the opportunity for us to get a little bit of a glimpse into your pursuits since that brilliant campaign. Now, it leads to you winning the Nobel Prize. The world suddenly starts to see you differently because you're a Nobel Prize winner. For you, was there any big shift? Did you feel the heaviness and burden of that mantle on you?
I don't really know if I felt a burden. I mean, because I am so committed to this life. Type of life. Having the Nobel certainly has open doors that would not have been opened.
I appreciate that. There are a lot of Nobels across disciplines that I really like. I love Archbishop Tutu. What's not to love? South Africa, he's just wonderful. And the Dalai Lama.
And now, Maria Ressa, from the Philippines, who's a Filipina but also an American citizen, and she fought the horrible dictatorship there. She does brilliant work on artificial intelligence. So I feel privileged to know these people and I recognize the utility of the prize. But I don't think I'm better than anybody else because of it. I appreciate the work is being recognized through an individual. I do see, though, that sometimes when they have given a prize to a group with no figure to. It's harder to deal with it. Who do you talk to? So I recognize that naming a person helped in our case.
Right.
It made my parents happy. Neither of them finished high school. It was so much fun going to Norway to get the prize. My family came and my aunt and uncle, and it was a blast.
Yeah. So well-deserved. So beautiful. It is lovely when these moments come in human history to see people rise from humble roots and, do I would say God's work, and get recognized for it during their own lifetime. Yeah. Not years later, like Susan B Anthony.
One time they gave the prize posthumously.
Yeah, I see.
I can't remember who it was. I have to look. They realized that it was stupid because they could have given it to somebody that could buy their work in character, etc., to carry the message forward. So they've never done that again. But now I'm going to have to look up who they gave it to.
I see. Interesting. That makes sense. Let's just honor the person, but actually use it as a force for the next stage of good, that can be unfolded. You're doing that now with these women Nobel laureates that you're working with. Can you talk a little bit about what you're all, coming together to advance in the world?
Well, the idea in the beginning was to offer moral support to women's organizations working in conflict zones. To try to bring attention to them, to what they do to help them by being better known. Find resources and things to increase their work, the value of their work. It's been amazing. For example, maybe six months ago, we did a delegation to Palestine and of course, met with Palestinian women. We went to East Jerusalem, which was more Palestinian, of course. So they're trying to eliminate the Palestinians, but it's just the resilience of those women. All the things that they put up with are amazing.
Then recently, there was a 20th anniversary meeting in Kenya. I couldn't go because I had sciatica so bad I couldn't move. It made me so upset. I cried a lot. Oh, of course. The people who. Anyway, it was apparently a brilliant meeting. There were lots of members of the organizations there. We have a program that's called "Sister to Sister," and we bring, I don't know, about 20 young women from different countries in the world that are working on issues for the greater good.
It's been going on for years. They brought 75 young women of the sisters there. I regret deeply that I could not meet them and see it.
It's just amazing what people can do when they care. Just as simple as that.
Well, that's a really very simple and powerful idea you've just shared. It's amazing, literally amazing what people can do when they care. It reminds me of a tool I use in my class. I like to try to open people up to how they can be more than just their personality. Many of us think, I'm this kind of a personality or that kind of personality, whatever. So I was like, okay, let's assume, some of us are introverts. anybody introvert anywhere. Okay. Then I say, okay, imagine you're walking in the streets of Manhattan and you're holding, your child or your nephew or niece or somebody, and they break away from your grip, this little child. Then they run across the street on Broadway, and there's traffic. At that moment, as an introvert, would you feel more natural and comfortable just being quiet and shy because you don't want to attract attention and just whisper? "Joey Joey." Or would you just shout at the top of your voice, "Joey, stop! Somebody help!" And wouldn't you feel more true and natural just doing that? And of course, everybody nodded their heads and I said, "Who cares if you're an introvert or you're extrovert? What mattered is that you deeply cared about the child and their life, and then the force and strength came to you to do what you needed to."
I mean, I say that in a very casual, everyday setting, but it's so incredible to hear it from you. In your case, it is what has actually allowed somebody to become a world changer, because you really deeply care about your brother and what he was going through. Then, Vietnam and what was happening there, and then Central America, and then over time with these landmine victims and others as well. How beautiful. I think it's a lovely cause you've taken on, women peace activists in the world and supporting them. Again, this coalition kind of way of thinking about things to create synergies and community and sharing and, world as one family. I see that as a running thread in your work.
I want to end on that note of peace. You've said something quite important for our audience to hear about what peace is and what it isn't. How it needs to be taken from a place of great stewardship, ownership, responsibility. It's not just something that you just casually and happily just experience on a peaceful mountain one day. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Peace. I think to me the basis of it is recognizing the inner person of everybody. Each person recognizing that I have an obligation in many ways to respect another individual because I want them to respect me. Really believing that you can make a change by being that way. I don't have to love you. I always say that. I always say, don't confuse me with Mother Teresa. I don't love everybody, but I respect their rights as an individual.
Beyond this planet to make it better for everybody else. And if I have to fight with some of them to get them to recognize that I have no problem doing that.
Incredible. So beautiful. Well, I know everyone who's listening is going to be rooting for you and having you in our thoughts and prayers as you work through this, and come to the other side of it and heal and do more of this beautiful work in the world, for which you are uniquely gifted and born.
Yet it is so rewarding to see that in addition to doing the good work, you have taken a step back from it and examined what it reveals about human potential. For every human being to do their part individually and then also coming together in coalitions and doing it collectively because, I know when you took on that cause for the landmine reform in the world that you were acutely aware of so many other injustices and opportunities of, causes you could have taken on, you rightfully chose one and dedicated yourself to it for a number of years. Have continued to evolve since then. There's so much more of that good work still to be done. So God knows we need so many people lit up with that same energy.
I remember at Columbia after that terrorist attack in India, several years ago in Mumbai, in the hotel that was taken over and all that. There was lots of this Jewish community there that got affected by it, the Jews. So there was a rabbi who came and in a candlelight vigil, he said, "Look, there were about 6 or 7 of these terrorists. And they were in some ways courageous to be able to take this boat, come down to Mumbai and in a very demented, evil way, do whatever they had to do and allow their lives to be just all burnt in flames." He said, "what if we had the same courage? What if we had the same commitment? There were just seven of them, and there are 70 of us here at Columbia. And who knows how many in the rest of the world? Let's have that." So, that's what I see you doing. It's like, come on. Any or all of us have so much capacity in us, and that is so beautiful.
It is especially when you respect how each person does it. They don't have to be you. Everybody has their own talents and ways of contributing, and it's beautiful.
Let that be then, the last insight from our conversation today, this notion of sort of they don't have to be you. Because I see that in your story, and it didn't come out earlier in my acknowledgment of all the lessons you were sharing about that coalition work that you did, but you were really honoring what they needed to do in Vietnam, what they needed to do in that country based on their local conditions, isn't it? So, yeah, thank you for sharing that as well. Thank you for sharing that with us.
Thank you.
What a joy to have you with us. Thank you for joining us. So grateful.
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