Wavemaker Conversations

The Formula 1 U.S. Grand Prix takes place this Sunday in Austin TX. The motor sport has a growing global fan base among young people. My guest, Alara Altun, is one of them. But she’s much more than a fan. Alara Altun is a senior strategist with VaynerMedia, and is a key player in that company’s Formula 1 work. But there’s no strategy guiding her in this conversation. Just insight and enthusiasm - ...

In light of Tennessee’s failed execution of Christa Pike, who tortured and murdered a classmate when she was 18 years old, there will be a court battle over whether the state should be permitted to try again. Which makes this Wavemaker Conversation. It was conducted in 2015, during the penalty phase of the trial of the Boston Marathon bomber. My guest, Mark Osler, is a law professor and former pro...

As AI reshapes power, two leading cybersecurity minds join me to map the terrain of national security, business and daily life. Laura Galante is the former Director of the U.S. government’s Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center. Tal Feldman is an AI and National Security scholar with a keen focus on China. Galante and Feldman are two of the clearest communicators you will hear on this subje...

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 wee...

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 late in life; and what he calls the “escape from the tyranny of self-interest.” A riveting and thought-provoking introduction to a journalist you’ll be seeing more of in ...

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 evolvi...

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 the extreme wildfires and heat waves in Europe and the broader, continual flow of evidence that our climate has been dangerously destabilized. There are ...

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 Douglass Peter Baker - Chief White House Correspondent for the New York Times Susan Glasser - Staff Writer at The New Yorker Recorded live at Nantucket’s ...

Michael’s conversation with The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos Live at Nantucket’s Dreamland Theatre from July 2025. The New Yorker’s   Evan Osnos  has spent years diving deep into the world of the ultra-rich. His jaw-dropping reporting, in  The Haves and Have Yachts , sheds light on why so much wealth in America is concentrated in the hands of so few.

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 mis...

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 Declarati...

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 World  — his history of the Great Depression, and its aftermath.   This past weekend, at the Nantucket Book Festival, he and I spoke about his newly released prequel,  1873 , about the...

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 ex...

Liaquat Ahamed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his history of the Great Depression is out with a prequel called 1873, the story of the breathtaking, first, truly global economic boom, and the bust that followed. I'll be in conversation with Ahamed at The Nantucket Book Festival on June 14th . I reached out to him now for a brief chat, because a lot of educated readers are wondering - is 1873...

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 pe...

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 im...

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 t...

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 woul...

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 against the regime. It seem...

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...

Actionable intelligence for spouses, parents, teachers, and students - on Valentine's Day and every day - with Nantucket's inspiring middle school librarian Becky Hickman.

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 w...

At the end of Michael’s first Wavemaker Conversation with psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, in 2015, Michael extracted a promise: that Dr. Yalom would join him for another conversation after Yalom completed his memoir. Two years later, Dr. Yalom released his memoir, and kept his promise. Irvin Yalom is a highly esteemed psychoanalyst, with a large, devoted following; a Professor Emeritus at Stanford Unive...

Oh, what some people would give to have just one therapy session with Dr. Irvin Yalom. Dr. Yalom is a legendary figure in modern psychotherapy and a best-selling author.  Over half a century, he has spent roughly 50,000 hours working with patients, and many more researching, writing, and teaching at Stanford University. During this conversation, he shared with me what he has taught his patients, a...

Lois Jenson’s courage and tenacity have made her a historic figure in the battle against sexual harassment. She was the lead plaintiff in the first class-action sexual harassment lawsuit -- a case that inspired the 2005 movie North Country. I spoke with her in 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, for an in-depth Wavemaker Conversation . I’ve decided to repost the conversation now, for histo...