Interviews

…Jimmy Carter, James Carville, Glenn Close, Michael Chabon, Roz Chast, Noam Chomsky, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Cesar Chavez, Bill Cosby, Sandra Cisneros, Billy Collins, Pat Conroy, Francis Ford Coppola, Jacques Cousteau, Michael Crichton, Francis Crick, Mario Cuomo, Tony Curtis, Marc Danner, Ted Danson, Don DeLillo, Gerard Depardieu, Junot Diaz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joan Didion, Maureen Dowd. Jennifer Egan, Daniel Ellsberg, Rahm Emanuel, Nora Ephron, James Fallows, Susan Faludi, Diane Feinstein, Jane Fonda, Barney Frank, Al Franken, Jonathan Franzen, Lady Antonia Fraser, Thomas Friedman, Carlos Fuentes, John Kenneth Galbraith, Andy Garcia, Jerry Garcia, Robert Gates, Newt Gingrich, Allen Ginsberg, Malcolm Gladwell, Danny Glover, Jane Goodall, Stephen Greenblatt, Matt Groening, Sammy Hagar, Woody Harrelson, Robert Hass, Werner Herzog, Christopher Hitchens, Nick Hornby, Khaled Hosseini, Patricia Ireland, Kazuo Ishiguro, Molly Ivins, Jesse Jackson, PD James, Bill T. Jones, James Earl Jones, Ashley Judd, Pauline Kael, John Kerry, Tracy Kidder, Barbara Kingsolver, Alonzo King, Galway Kinnell, Ertha Kitt, Paul Krugman, Ray Kurzweil, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ang Lee, Spike Lee, Annie Leibovitz, Doris Lessing, Michael Lewis, Maya Lin, Laura Linney, John Lithgow, Amory Lovins, Sidney Lumet, YoYo Ma, Norman Mailer, David Mamet, Mickey Mantle, Wynton Marsalis, Jackie Mason, Mary Matalin, John McCain, George McGovern, Catherine McKinnon, John McWhorter, Russell Means, Lyn Manuel-Miranda, Lorrie Moore, Rita Moreno, Ralph Nader, VS Naipaul, Janet Napolitano, Graham Nash, BeBe Neuwirth, Grover Norquist, Barack Obama, Edna O’Brien, Tim O’Brien, Frank Oz, Cynthia Ozick, Orhan Pamuk, Leon Panetta, Camille Paglia, Ann Patchett, Nancy Pelosi, Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn, Michael Pollan, Rosa Parks, Francine Prose, Anna Quindlen, Robert Reich, Ruth Reichl, David Remnick, Janet Reno, Joan Rivers, Richard Rodriguez, Linda Ronstadt, Isabella Rossellini, Phillip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Kay Ryan, Paul Ryan, William Safire, Carl Sagan, Bernie Sanders, Carlos Santana, George Saunders, Eric Schmidt, Charles Schultz, Gary Shteyngart, Russell Simmons, Tavis Smiley, Patti Smith, Stephen Sondheim, Susan Sontag, Aaron Sorkin, Sonia Sotomayor, Jackie Spier, Eliot Spitzer, Gloria Steinem, Sting, Joseph Stiglitz, Tom Stoppard, Oliver Stone, Amy Tan, Deborah Tannen, Jake Tapper, Studs Terkel, Twyla Tharp, Charlize Theron, Paul Theroux, Wayne Thiebaud, Amor Towles, Calvin Trillin, Archbishop Desmond TuTu, Mike Tyson, John Updike, Abraham Verghese, Derek Walcott, Alice Walker, David Foster Wallace, Elizabeth Warren, James Watson, Cornel West, Gene Wilder, George Will, Billy Dee Williams, EO Wilson, Gary Wills, Debra Winger, Naomi Wolfe, Judy Woodruff and Bob Woodward. Listen at KQED’s Forum

…Brian Greene, Dennis Hopper, John Irving, Glenda Jackson, Vinod Khosla, Alan King, Tony Kushner, Ursula LeGuin, Barry Levinson, Robert MacNeill, Bobby McFerrin, Leonard Mlodinow, Errol Morris, Greg Mortenson, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Sandra Day O’Connor, Amos Oz, Michael Pollan, Richard Price, Robert Redford, Condaleeza Rice, Cokie Roberts, Ambassador Dennis Ross, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, George Schultz, Charles Schwab, Stephen Shepard, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jane Smiley, Amor Towles, Scott Turow, Craig Venter, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Jon Voight, Peter Weir, Colson Whitehead, Terry Tempest Williams, Fred Wiseman and Tobias Wolff (who interviewed him on stage). In 2011 he interviewed authors Jennifer Egan and Vendela Vida at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. In 2012 at the Herbst he conducted an on-stage interview with Physics Nobel Laureates George Smoot and Saul Pearlmutter on cosmology. In 2015 he interviewed psychiatrist Nora Volkow at the Norse Theater in San Francisco. He also interviewed film producer David Brown for Stanford University’s annual professional publishing course (2002) and James Watson and EO Wilson for Conservation International at the estate of Gordon and Betty Moore (2003) as well as John Carroll, the editor of The Los Angeles Times (2003) and Investigative Journalist Seymour Hirsch 2004) for the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

In 2019, Michael interviewed Fareed Zakaria of CNN at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City for a conference on connecting local and international news and attended by seventy-five journalists from the U.S. and Canada. He moderated the CFR National Symposium lead panel on the topic, ‘Has The Post-American World Arrived?’, which included (former Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice and (Council of Foreign Relations Director) Richard Haas. Michael conducted a live broadcast of a panel set up in San Francisco for the first edition of The Night of Ideas on “Facing Our Time: The City of the Future.” He was also a presenter, along with Maxine Hong Kingston, Armistead Maupin, Andrew Sean Greer and Joyce Carol Oates, at a celebration for the release of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s novel, Little Boy, and his 100th birthday. Michael served as moderator of the 50-year anniversary of the Biochemistry and Biophysics Departments at the University of California San Francisco featuring Bill Rutter, Bruce Alberts and Reg Kelly, as well as panels at the Stanford Alumni Association (Palo Alto) and the International Conference on Jewish Genealogy (Cleveland).

In 2021, Michael emceed the awards ceremony celebrating fifty years of San Francisco Bay Area Philanthropy on National Philanthropy Day, 11.18.21 for the Association of Fundraising Professionals and led an on-line virtual panel discussion on Bay Area Philanthropy featuring leaders of the Black, Latino, Native American and Chinese American communities. Michael interviewed painter Wayne Thiebaud for the California College of the Arts. Watch the video here. He gave a keynote talk on Jewish humor with comedian Lewis Black at Chautauqua Institute Lecture Series.

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