#84 From OR to AI with Dr. Ivan Capobianco

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What happens when the skills that make you a great surgeon begin pulling you toward a different kind of impact?

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Ivan Capobianco, who trained as a hepatobiliary and transplant surgeon and whose career journey spans Italy, Germany, global health work in Angola, academic research, AI, entrepreneurship, and medical publishing.

Ivan shares a deeply honest account of how he moved from the operating room into startup life and research, not because he couldn’t handle surgery, but because he began asking a bigger question:

How else can I serve?

We talk about:

1. Growing up in Italy in a creative family, and why medicine wasn’t always the obvious path
2. Training at the University of Padua, one of the oldest medical faculties in the world
3. Key differences between European and U.S. surgical training systems
4. How a year “off” before residency led him to Angola and permanently changed how he saw medicine
5. Why pediatric surgery culture felt different, and what that revealed about surgical identity
6. Burnout that didn’t announce itself until it did
7. A pivotal moment during parental leave that forced a reckoning between career, family, and self
8. Attrition in surgery, particularly for women
9. The unfortunate truth that productivity and profit override patient-centered values in modern surgical systems
10. The realization that helping healthcare workers may help more patients than operating alone

Ivan also shares how his love of research, data, and prevention led him to:

1. Learn coding and machine learning
2. Found the healthcare documentation startup Briefly
3. Create STITCHES, a daily newsletter that curates and summarizes the most relevant surgical literature from hundreds of papers published each day

We explore:

1. Why most “AI in surgery” papers miss the mark
2. The value of small case reports and practical technique papers
3. Why knowing open surgery still matters in a robotic era
4. The loss of discussion and collaboration in modern academic medicine
5. The myth of “I don’t have time”
6. How essentialism can reduce cognitive and bureaucratic...