Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew interviews Alexander Sammen, author of “Forbidden Fruit: The Anti-Avocado Militias of Michoacan” about the sordid history of the avocado, the thirstiest fruit on the planet.

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Alexander Sammon is a writer based in New York. His latest piece in Harpers is “Forbidden Fruit.”

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Richard Rhodes, author of Scientist, about E.O. Wilson and the great biologist’s life in nature.

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Richard Rhodes is the author or editor of 22 books, including The Twilight of the Bomb, the last volume in a quartet about nuclear history. The first, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, won the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received numerous fellowships for research and writing, including grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT and a host and correspondent for documentaries on public television’s Frontline and American Experience series. An affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, he lectures frequently to audiences in the United States and abroad.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Trond Undheim, author of Eco Tech, about how to avert the end of the world before 2075.

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Trond Undheim is a futurist, scholar, podcaster, venture partner, nonresident Fellow at the Atlantic Council, co-founder of Yegii, and Lead Ecosystem evangelist at Tulip. He formerly worked with MIT, WPP, Oracle, and the EU. He’s a co-author (with Natan Linder) of Augmented Lean (Wiley 2022), an author of Health Tech (Routledge 2021), Future Tech (Kogan Page 2021), Pandemic Aftermath (Atmosphere Press 2020), Disruption Games (Atmosphere Press 2020), and Leadership From Below (Lulu Press 2008). In addition, he hosts two podcasts, Augmented and Futurized, and is a Forbes columnist. He holds a Ph.D. on the future of work and artificial intelligence.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Angela C. Sutton, author of Pirates of the Slave Trade, about the battle of Cape Lopez in 1722 and the birth of chattel slavery as an American institution.

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Angela Sutton is a social and digital historian of the Atlantic World interested in the tools and methods that preserve and widen access to the sources that help refine and redefine popular understandings of American slavery and its modern consequences. She is the director of the Fort Negley Descendants Project, an oral history archive of the descendants of the enslaved who built and defended Fort Negley, a local Civil War fortification on the UNESCO Slave Route. She has also managed projects and data with the Slave Societies Digital Archive at Vanderbilt. Her work on the intersections between slavery, memory, and the digital has appeared in The Historical Journal, the Afro-Hispanic Review, archipelagos, and Slavery & Abolition. Her most recent project involves the development of a database of the over 16,000 enslaved and free Black builders and defenders of Nashville’s Civil War Fortifications through the use of community-driven linked data, is being funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Park Service.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, co-authors of American Gun, about the history of the AR-15, an assault weapon that captures America’s contemporary love affair with technology, freedom and guns.

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Cameron McWhirter is a national reporter for The Wall Street Journal, based in Atlanta. He has covered mass shootings, violent protests and natural disasters across the South. He is also the author of Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. Previously, he reported for other publications in the U.S., as well as Bosnia, Iraq, and Ethiopia.

Zusha Elinson is a national reporter for The Wall Street Journal, based in California, who writes about guns and violence. He grew up on a dirt road in upstate New York, graduated from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and worked as a chimney sweep. Elinson has also written for the Center for Investigative Reporting and The New York Times Bay Area section. He received a MacDowell Fellowship to complete this book.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Abby Smith Rumsey, author of Memory, Edited, about what we should remember and what we should forget about history.

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Abby Smith Rumsey is an intellectual and cultural historian. She focuses on the impact of information technologies on perceptions of history, time, and identity, the nature of evidence, and the changing roles of libraries and archives. Her most recent book is When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping our Future (2016).
Rumsey served as director of the Scholarly Communication Institute at the University of Virginia; Director of Programs at the Council on Library and Information Resources; and manager of programs relating to preservation of and access to cultural heritage collections at the Library of Congress. She served on the National Science Foundation’s Blue Ribbon Task Force on the Economics of Digital Preservation and Access; the American Council of Learned Societies’ Commission on the Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences; and the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure Program. Board service includes: Chair, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences; the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library Advisory Council; the Stanford University Library Advisory Committee; the Society of Architectural Historians; the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia; and the Harvard Board of Overseers Committee to Visit the Harvard University Library. Rumsey received a BA from Harvard College and MA and PhD in Russian and intellectual history from Harvard University.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Craig R. Smith M.D., author of Nobility in Small Things, about his life as one of America’s most celebrated heart surgeons.

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As a surgeon at Columbia University and the New York Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Craig R. Smith has been no stranger to pressure—from performing President Bill Clinton’s quadruple bypass, to openly massaging patients’ hearts. But when the COVID pandemic shut down non-emergency operations at New York City hospitals, Dr. Smith was presented with a different purpose. He began writing daily email updates from the front lines of the pandemic battle. The updates—designed to inform and reassure—became a balm to his colleagues, and when theWall Street Journal published them in April 2020, they were immediately recognized as essential dispatches from “the pandemic’s most powerful writer.” Dr. Smith has now written a deeply thoughtful new memoir, NOBILITY IN SMALL THINGS: A Surgeon’s Path (St. Martin’s Press; on-sale October 10, 2023), sharing what goes into the impossible decisions he must make on behalf of his patients. President Bill Clinton has already praised it as “much more than a medical memoir; it’s an elegant work of literature.” Diane Sawyer has called it “a book of staggering reach” from a “fearless explorer of what it is to be human when the choices are hard, the stakes high, and courage is the only choice,” while Senator Cory Booker says “[Smith’s] story, his journey, is a compelling narrative of a servant leader who in times of trial emerged as a humble hero.”

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Vincent Bevins, author of If We Burn, about the global mass protests between 2010 and 2020 that mostly failed to bring about radical change and how they could survive with better care going forward.

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Vincent Bevins is an award-winning journalist and correspondent. He covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post, reporting from across the entire region and paying special attention to the legacy of the 1965 massacre in Indonesia. He previously served as the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, also covering nearby parts of South America, and before that he worked for the Financial Times in London. Among the other publications he has written for are the New York Times,The Atlantic, The Economist, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and more. Vincent was born and raised in California and spent the last few years living in Jakarta.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Will Harris, author of A Bold Return to Giving a Damn, about the repellent nature of industrial farming and why the future of food should be local.

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Will Harris is the owner of White Oak Pastures, a holistically managed, regenerative ranch and farm in Georgia’s semi-tropical Coastal Plain. Described by his daughters as an “organic icon” of the Real Food movement, he is one of the very first people to bring grass-fed and humanely raised meat to the mainstream. Harris is one of the most outspoken critics of industrialized, centralized, and commoditized agriculture and is one of the most recognized leaders in the regenerative and resilient agriculture space.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew talks to Joanna Robinson and Gavin Edwards, co-authors of McU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, Iron Man, Ant-Man and our thirst for parasocial super heroes.

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Joanna Robinson is a writer and podcaster at the Ringer. Previously, she worked at Vanity Fair. She lives in Oakland, California.
Gavin Edwards is the best-selling author of The Tao of Bill Murray and twelve other books. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.