Wavemaker Conversations

This is the story, and backstory, of a workshop on feminism, led by men, for men, in an all-male prison. The Feminist on Cellblock Y is an immersive and memorable CNN documentary shot inside a California state prison. In this episode, we speak with the two inspired journalists behind the doc – CNN’s Emma Lacey-Bordeaux and Cocomotion Pictures founder Contessa Gayles. With a cameo from President Ob...

What is your superpower? Is it writing, speaking, communicating with power? It could be if you listen to this conversation with Joseph Romm, author of How To Go Viral and Reach Millions: Top Persuasion Secrets from Social Media Superstars, Jesus, Shakespeare, Oprah, and Even Donald Trump. This episode is like a short master class. If you want to get the most out of it, I advise you start by listen...

@YahooSports Senior NFL Writer and Hall of Fame Voter Terez Paylor joins me in Atlanta for a Super Bowl seminar and Football 101 combined – making it the perfect prep for those across the football spectrum: from super-novices to those who follow the NFL all year – all in under 25 minutes. Paylor’s show on Kansas City’s 610 Sports Radio & Radio.com has been a destination for Chiefs fans.  Even thou...

Yoka Verdoner was separated from her parents when she was only 8 years old. Now 84, her life story is a window into the trauma that has been inflicted on so many migrant children separated from their parents at the southern border of the U.S. I spoke with Yoka over the summer, at the height of those separations, after she'd published a piece in The Guardian that was widely shared. Her story has ur...

A Charlottesville, VA jury today convicted a white supremacist of first-degree murder for killing Heather Heyer. He intentionally drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors at the “Unite the Right” rally for neo-Nazis and white nationalists. A week after that rally, in August 2017, I visited Charlottesville to speak with Henry Abraham. Abraham, now 97, spent his Jewish boyhood in Nazi German...

America is hungry for the voice of an honorable leader. So Wavemaker brings you the voice of Retired Admiral William McRaven, former Navy SEAL and Commander of all U.S. Special Operations Forces. He was the architect of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. This episode features McRaven’s viral University of Texas commencement address: 10 memorable lessons from Navy SEAL training for those “who wa...

Environmentalists don’t vote. At least not nearly as much as the general population. They have a turnout problem. By Nathaniel Stinnett’s estimate, 10.1 million registered voters who consider climate change or the environment as one of their top two priorities, sat out the 2016 presidential election. An even larger number stayed home for the 2014 midterms. But for Stinnett, those big numbers mean...

Jane Alexander’s illustrious acting career was launched in 1968 by her breakthrough performance in the Pulitzer Prize winning play (and later movie) The Great White Hope. She then took the political stage as Chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts, when the NEA was on the political right’s hit list. She and her husband had virtually all their money stolen by an accountant who did a conv...

Standup comic Pete Dominick joins me to dissect Michelle Wolf’s routine at the recent White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Why now? Because this Sunday, May 27th, Wolf’s new series, The Break, debuts on Netflix. That’s just as good an excuse as any. Dominick, with Wolf as a launching point, helps make us all more astute observers of the art of comedy. Among the issues we discuss: using the P word,...

Here is Michelle Wolf’s entire performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.  Most people have only heard clips.  Here is all of it – 19 minutes and roughly 50 jokes – unedited.  This is the beginning of a broader mission on Wavemaker: exploring the deeper significance of comedy – from ancient Greece to the 2018 mid-term elections and beyond.  What’s funny?  Why?  Can comedy enable Americ...

There’s a new surge of military veterans running for Congress.  And they’re split about evenly between Democrats and Republicans.  Do veterans have a competitive edge over those who have not served in the military?  Are they better equipped for the job?  Can they help bridge the hyper-partisan divide?  This Wavemaker episode begins looking for answers with Jeremy Teigen, veteran, professor, and au...

Some people recognize potential threats to our democracy before others.  My guest, Barbara Simons, is one of those people.  15 years ago, not long after the infamous “hanging chads” threw the Bush v Gore vote count into turmoil and computerized voting became the new rage, Simons, a computer scientist, and some of her colleagues, concluded that in order to protect the integrity of the vote count, w...

Introducing former Army Sergeant Matt Martin, author of “I’ve Been Shot In Combat.  And As A Veteran, I’m Telling You: Allowing Teachers To Be Armed Is An Asinine Idea.”   Since writing it two weeks ago for his new hometown’s website, CharlotteFive.com, Martin’s story has been viewed more than 2-million times on Facebook. “When I saw the news flash of another school shooting,” he said of the Parkl...

Introducing Saru Jayaraman.  Millions of Americans caught a glimpse of her at this year’s Golden Globes, where she was Amy Poehler’s guest – recognized for her role in the battle against sexual harassment in the restaurant industry.  Jayaraman, who was accepted to Harvard at the age of 16 and said no thanks, is the co-founder and President of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United.  Her organ...

Lois Jenson is a historic figure in the battle against sexual harassment – the lead plaintiff in the field’s first class action lawsuit.  As one of the first four women miners in a northern Minnesota mine, Jenson shares what one judge called the “record of human indecency” that she and the other female miners endured for many years – extreme harassment, including one miner grabbing her crotch whil...

Astrophysicist Sara Seager joins me for a conversation about her leading role in the search for earth-like planets outside our solar system.  When she began her search as a graduate student – not just for any “exoplanets” as they’re called, but planets that may have just the right atmosphere to support life – she was greeted with plenty of “no’s.”  Not anymore.  Our conversation about her search l...

Mary Koss has been on a 40-year quest for justice – “to understand why women are hurt and how we can stop it.” As a young professor, with a PhD in clinical psychology, Koss was asked by a more senior male colleague to join him on a study that proposed “to have women that he employed sit and wear different sizes of padded bras, while they interacted with male college students.”  What that colleague...

Professor Louise Fitzgerald is a pioneer in sexual harassment research. At this moment, when women who have broken their silence have led to the downfall of so many prominent men, I speak with Fitzgerald about how to assess the continuum of acts – ranging from bad to horrific – that have made the headlines. She also shares stories of harassment happening under the radar, including the extreme vuln...

This conversation will help make your children (and you, too) better writers. Last time Jack Gantos was on Wavemaker Conversations, he shared his unforgettable journey to a terrifying prison sentence in a federal penitentiary and then to a prolific writing career. Now, with his new book, Writing Radar: Using Your Journal to Snoop Out and Craft Great Stories, his goal is to help young writers who f...

Author Will Schwalbe is one of the funniest serious readers you’ll ever hear.  In our conversation, before a packed house at The Nantucket Book Festival, Will and I talk about his latest work, Books for Living, in which he treats us to a tour of books we might love to read – but may have missed – and shares his perspective-changing takeaways for how to live a more meaningful life.  Imagine: the he...

When Ruth Reichl became the restaurant critic for The New York Times, she learned there was a bounty on her – $1,000 for any worker who recognized this make-or-break critic when she sat down to eat.  Reichl shares the backstory of her elaborate, yet necessary, disguise; her courageous first review of how New York’s most heralded restaurant treated her when they didn’t have a clue who she was; and...

New York Times bestselling author Julie Lythcott-Haims says she is “so American it hurts.”  Why so much pain in this American success story? How did this daughter of a prominent black physician and white teacher come to loathe herself despite her academic success as an undergraduate at Stanford and a law student at Harvard, followed by her professional accomplishments as Stanford’s Dean of Freshme...

Michael visits one of the most influential and beloved figures in the field of psychotherapy on the eve of the release of his memoir:  Becoming Myself.  At 86, after a recent health scare, The Atlantic magazine wrote:  "As a psychotherapist, Irvin Yalom has helped others grapple with their mortality. Now he is preparing for his own end."  Not quite.  Yalom's legions of fans will be gratified to he...

6’2” Carey Kauffman, a March Madness veteran of the Duke University Blue Devils, couples her insights from a life in basketball with her experience as the mother of two children born with rare diseases.  Kauffman, the daughter of an NBA all-star. will help make you one of the most insightful people in the room during the Final Four – and help give your kids an edge if they play the game.  But it’s...

You may be tempted to scream -- “don’t do it, Jack!” -- at the outset of this podcast.  My conversation with author Jack Gantos, at the Nantucket Book Festival, begins with a choice he made in 1971 that led him to a horrifying year-and-a-half as an inmate in a federal penitentiary.  He describes the crime and the time in unforgettable detail.  Where did he find the resilience to survive prison, ca...