Saving Bill Clinton's life and other tales from the operating theater: Craig R. Smith on his life as one of America's most celebrated heart surgeons

EPISODE 1778: In this KEEN ON show, 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

As a surgeon at Columbia University and the New York Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Craig R. Smith has been no stranger to pressure—fromperforming 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.”

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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