40+ Authors, 9 Specialties, and a Book Written by the Next Generation of Doctors: Emily Leventhal and Rishma Jivan on The Physician's Guide to AI From Offcall and MD+

Key Podcast Moments

• Why virtually every medical student in the country is already using AI daily
• What one author did after an attending accepted her AI-sourced recommendation without question, and why she went and checked the source anyway
• The "hidden curriculum" that quietly separates students from medical families from everyone else, and how AI is starting to close that gap
• The blackout delivery lesson from an OBGYN rotation that reframed how one author thinks about relying on technology at all

Emily Leventhal is a third-year MD-PhD student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, working at the intersection of AI, genetics, and women's health. Rishma Jivan is a fourth-year at Rush Medical College who spent years inside San Francisco health tech startups, helping health systems actually implement the tools physicians are now being asked to use, before going back to medical school. That combination, one still mid-PhD, one who worked the technology side before returning to clinical training, shaped the book they built together: The Physician's Guide to AI, a nine-specialty e-book written with more than 40 physician authors and published in partnership with MD+.

Emily and Rishma join Graham this week to talk about what medical training actually looks like from inside the AI shift, not the polished version that shows up at conferences, but what's really happening on rotations, in the hallways, and in the conversations students are having with attendings who don't always know what to make of it.

The conversation opens with a role reversal that neither guest treats as remarkable: attendings and residents, curious about tools they haven't adopted themselves, are increasingly turning to students for guidance. From there, Rishma introduces the idea of the hidden curriculum, the unwritten norms of clinical training that students from medical families tend to absorb passively and everyone else has to work to learn, and argues AI is doing real work to close that gap. Both guests are careful, though, not to frame AI use as a shortcut. They describe it instead as a discipline still being built in real time: verifying an output against its original source, disclosing when a tool was used, and deliberately working without it on some rotations to protect the underlying skill. Graham pushes on this directly, asking whether faster answers erode the kind of forced, broad learning that comes from digging through an entire textbook chapter, and neither Emily nor Rishma dismiss the concern. The conversation closes on where they think this is headed: AI reshaping not just how physicians practice but which specialties students choose to enter, and a shared position that if a technology touches a patient, physicians don't get to sit out the conversation about how it's built.

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Top Takeaways

Two med students spent a year pulling more than 40 physicians into a conversation the rest of medicine has barely started having. Here's what they walked away knowing that most practicing physicians don't yet.