Wavemaker Conversations

Former NFL offensive lineman John Urschel fell in love with math before he fell in love with football. He pursued both fields with equal intensity. How he has succeeded in both (his mother played an important role) is an inspiring story - and as good a reason as any to bring back this 2015 conversation from the Wavemaker archives.

But I’m revisiting it now because of a major new study out this week that concluded at least one ...

Sebastian Junger and I discuss his search for purpose as a young man; his 1997 best-seller, The Perfect Storm, that put him on the map; his high risk years as a war reporter; the aneurism that nearly killed him; becoming a father&...

Find part 1 of this conversation HERE

Spencer Glendon's work on climate change is driven by this question: How can we, together, "increase our chances that the future is good?"

Glendon is answering that question through his nonprofit organization Probable Futures, which has created a suite of tools, including vivid interactive maps, that help us visualize climate change's evolving impacts - locally, regionally, and globally. Much of ...

Spencer Glendon, one of the most brilliant guys I've ever heard speak, is the creator of Probable Futures, an ambitious project focused on what he calls climate literacy. I've brought back this conversation of ours from 2022 in light of&nbs...

Joining Michael for this conversation about America’s past, present, and future, on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, are:

David Blight - Yale History Professor. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Frederick Doug...

Michael delves into how the body, mind and spirit impact wellness with three featured guests at this summer’s Nantucket Wellness Festival.

We can’t beat the guest introductions delivered by the Festival’s co-founder, Joann Burnham: 

Dr. Shieva Ghofrany, MD: 

“We knew we had to have a gorgeous goddess represented on the panel... goddess is a big word. So finding a science-based goddess was our mission....

Timothy Snyder is one of the world’s leading historians of fascism. His bestseller, On Tyranny, is a palm-sized North Star for democracy — featuring twenty lessons from the 20th century for how each of us can resist authoritarianism and protect our republic — all of which feel doable. He and I had this conversation in 2021. I am sharing it here now as we mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of independenc...

When it comes to the global economy — and its impact on politics and society — Liaquat Ahamed has an eagle eye for pattern recognition.   Ahamed won a Pulitzer Prize for Lords of Finance:  The Bankers Who Broke The&nbs...

In this conversation with legendary music executive Clive Davis, Michael tries to figure out how one man, with no musical background, managed to identify, shape and guide so many stars in so many different genres over half a century. Davis died this week at the age of 94. What did he experience that drove him? What did he hear that moved him? Michael and Clive share a lot of laughs and insights exploring those questions together in...

Robert Malley is a veteran U.S. Middle East peace negotiator, and, as I’ve come to learn, an inspired and devoted teacher. He has participated in multiple U.S.-brokered Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. He was on the team that negotiated the Iran nuclear inspection deal in 2015, and more recently served as U.S. Special Envoy to Iran. Under President Obama, he also served as the White House point person in the campaign against ...

I’m always on the lookout for an inspiring graduation speech. Last weekend, at Yale College, I heard one that I can’t stop thinking about. Min Jin Lee, the Korean-American author of Pachinko, a Yale graduate who, as a student, had far more B’s than A’s, channeled the ancient Greeks, and her own struggles, including a terrifying battle with liver disease, to help us figure out how to “choose the importa...

AI is shifting the ground beneath us in many fields. When the ground shifts in the world of cyber security, Laura Galante is a great person to have on your side. Galante served as the U.S. government’s Director of the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center from 2022 to 2025. She has represented the cyber intelligence community in dozens of White House Situation Room meetings. I reached out to her soon after Anthropic an...

Sometimes my favorite conversations are the ones I never expected to have – encounters made possible by serendipity.

I didn’t expect to meet my featured guest, Nurse Betty Long – at least not on this day. But when she appeared, and we started talking, I suspected that because of the difficult work she does – doing street medicine in a mobile van – and because of the humor she brings to it, we would arri...

Azar Nafisi, author of the internationally acclaimed memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, addresses the question: Where do Iranians who have stood up to their ruthless government get their courage?

I reached out to Nafisi following Iran’s traditional 40-day mourning period for the thousands of people killed by the ruling clerics’ enforcers during nationwide demonstrations aga...

When American figure skating phenom and gold medal favorite Ilia Malinin imploded on the ice at this Winter Olympics, I wanted to discover what we could all learn — and possibly apply to our own lives — from that heartbreaking failure. So I called Noa Kageyama — a veteran performance psychologist on the faculty of the Juilliard School and Cleveland Institute of Music. Why reach out to someone who works with musici...

35 years ago, Julia Ioffe and her family arrived in the U.S. as refugees from the former Soviet Union, having fled their homeland upon rumors of a planned pogrom against the Jews of Moscow. Julia was only seven. Today, Julia Ioffe — a happy American accident, as she has called her life — has become a go-to journalist for her singular insights on Vladimir Putin and Russia and her reporting on the war in Ukraine and U.S. ...