Justin C. Key is a psychiatrist and author of The Hospital at the End of the World, a sci-fi medical thriller about artificial intelligence, healthcare, and the fight to keep medicine human.

In this episode, Justin C. Key joins Ryan Poole to talk about the strange and complicated future of AI in medicine.

The conversation explores where artificial intelligence could genuinely help doctors, where large language models can go wrong, and why human judgment, empathy, and patient care still matter.

Justin also shares the story behind The Hospital at the End of the World, including why he set the novel in New Orleans, how he imagined an AI-dominated medical future before ChatGPT became mainstream, and how his background in psychiatry shaped the book’s ideas about medicine, technology, spirituality, and healing.

The conversation also gets into what psychiatrists actually do, the difference between psychiatry and therapy, schizophrenia, mental illness stigma, medication, family members trying to help loved ones from the outside, and why people with serious mental health conditions are more often victims of violence than perpetrators.

Along the way, Ryan and Justin also discuss microplastics, LaCroix, Spindrift, alternative medicine, the “woo woo” side of health culture, Harry Potter, Michael Crichton, medical school, sci-fi storytelling, and why school stories are such a powerful way to explore big ideas.

This episode is for fans of science fiction, medical thrillers, AI ethics, psychiatry, mental health conversations, speculative fiction, horror, and stories about the future of healthcare.

Featuring Justin C. Key, author of The Hospital at the End of the World.