Wavemaker Conversations

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...