Midjourney Goes Medical, Noam Shazeer & Dean Ball Join OpenAI | Diet TBPN

Summary

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TBPN "Diet TBPN" Episode Summary

Episode: Midjourney Goes Medical, Noam Shazeer & Dean Ball Join OpenAI
Date: June 19, 2026
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Theme:
This episode takes listeners through the groundbreaking expansion of Midjourney into the medical hardware field, delves into some of the biggest AI talent shifts of the year, and covers quirky moments from the wider tech scene. The injects of wit and candid insights are typical TBPN style, making for a vibrant, tech-obsessed conversation.

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1. Main Theme Overview

The hosts center the discussion on Midjourney's surprising leap from AI image generation into developing cutting-edge medical scanning hardware. Interspersed throughout are breakdowns of AI industry moves, especially high-profile talent jumps to OpenAI, and lighter moments from the tech world.

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2. Key Discussion Points & Insights

A. The Midjourney Medical Expansion

• Not a Pivot: An Expansion

  • Midjourney announces a new division, "Midjourney Medical"—a hardware and health-focused second act under founder David Holz.

    "It's not a pivot, it's an expansion. It's a second act, a third act for David Holes. Fantastic entrepreneur, extremely inspiring entrepreneur." — Host 1 [00:00]

• David Holz’s Backstory

  • Holz’s journey: son of a dentist, video game hacker, PhD-track mathematician, NASA stint, Leap Motion founder.

    "Born on third base with teeth wise. It's crazy over there...turns down the PhD to go work at NASA, I think...Eventually branches into entrepreneurship. Starts Leap Motion." — Host 1 [01:52]

• Leap Motion and the Path to Hardware Innovation

  • Leap Motion brought early hand-tracking to VR and experimented with deep neural nets surprisingly early (circa 2010s).

    "Early 20 teens and he's using like these deep neural nets. He said it was a mixture of Expert's model...incredibly far ahead of the curve..." — Guest 2 [02:59]

  • Apple attempted to acquire Leap Motion twice, printing onboarding packets before the deal fell through at the last minute.

    "Apple had printed welcome packets to all of the Leap Motion employees...and then the deal fell through, which is crazy." — Host 1 [03:23]

• Midjourney’s Unorthodox Approach

  • No venture funding, no website, fully Discord-native for years—scaled community to millions before launching an app.

    "...no venture funding, no front end, no website, no no app. Like really, they, they, I mean now they have a front end and stuff. But years went by, just a Discord." — Host 1 [04:01]

  • Social, multiplayer prompt sharing inspired creativity and a rapid flywheel of user-driven improvement.

    "It was multiplayer on day one." — Host 1 [05:48]

  • Unique image generation process (four candidate images per prompt) produced valuable data and fueled further innovation.

    "...generating four candidate images for each prompt midjourney got a bunch of really valuable data on what a correct image looked like for a specific prompt." — Host 1 [07:11]

• Midjourney Medical Launch Event

  • The hosts and guest discuss the launch’s aesthetics and hands-on demos; the "Midjourney scanner" combines powerful, elegant hardware with a welcoming spa-like experience.

    "They had similar, like, warm lighting everywhere...they had a smaller version you could put your hand in. I did it in my hand." — Guest 2 [09:38]

  • Demo could diagnose minor wrist issues, showing early detection capabilities.

    "Someone else said that they figured out that they had some, like, wrist because of box...They found some issue." — Guest 2 [09:57]

  • The user experience: designed for delight and ease, not traditional clinical coldness.

    "The spa is like, mostly because...going to the clinic or whatever, it's like not a good experience. Yeah, this should be...much more like going to, you know, sauna or steam room or whatever than going to the doctor." — Guest 2 [16:46]

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B. Deep Dive: The Scanner’s Technology

• Ultrasonic Marvel

  • 358,000 sensors in a ring, using transducers acting as speakers and microphones firing in precise patterns.

    "Transducers act as speakers and microphones...a choir of 9,000 singers and an audience of 9,000 people...firing at a rate of up to 1000 times per second." — Host 1 [13:01]

  • Sensor precision measured in picometers—smaller than atoms—and overall throughput of 17 gigabytes/sec.

    "Each sensor resolves motions smaller than the width of an atom...can even push into the subatomic femtometer range." — Host 1 [13:53]

  • A 60-second scan generates up to 806 terabytes of raw data and creates detailed 3D maps of tissue structure at half-millimeter resolution.

    "Over a period of 60 seconds, the goal is to obtain several hundred slices of your body...21 servers...806 terabytes of raw data..." — Host 1 [15:48]

  • Goal: deploy up to 50,000 scanners globally, enabling "a billion scans a month—basically everyone on Earth."

    "Their goal is a fleet of five of 50,000 of these scanners, capable of a billion scans a month. It's basically everyone on Earth." — Host 1 [16:19]

• Beyond Diagnosis: Read & Write

  • Potential for noninvasive surgery, such as ultrasonic tumor ablation or even UV intervention.

    "You can like do non invasive surgeries, whatever by like beaming light." — Guest 2 [17:30] "We have folks who have done that where it's like it pulverizes the cancer, the tumor with ultrasonic waves." — Host 1 [17:45]

• Bootstrapped Boldness

  • Midjourney’s ability to self-fund enables audacious moves most VC startups would never attempt.

    "...such bold bets require ownership and a kind of devil may care attitude." — Host 1 [18:32]

  • Yet, hosts note exceptions like Elon Musk or Sam Altman who use traditional funding but still take big swings.

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C. Major AI Talent Moves: Noam Shazeer & Dean Ball Join OpenAI

• Noam Shazeer’s Big Career Shift

  • Former DeepMind/Google Gemini co-lead and one of the minds behind transformers, Shazeer joins OpenAI.

    "Co Author of Transformer T5 Switch Transformer Papers, one of the pioneers of sparse moe models. He's leaving his VP of Engineering, Gemini Co lead role at Google DeepMind to join OpenAI." — Host 1 [20:48]

  • The hosts call it “the most significant AI talent move of the year.”

    “This is likely the most significant AI talent move of the year.” — Lisan Al Gaib, cited by Host 1 [20:48]

• Dean Ball Crosses Over

  • Dean Ball, policy expert and previous guest, also joins OpenAI, adding government and regulatory firepower.

  • The hosts emphasize Ball’s reputation for criticism paired with a genuine desire to "get this right as a country."

    “He’s not an AI researcher. He’s policy...really cares about getting this right as a country.” — Host 2 [21:31]

  • The moves fuel speculation about broader shifts at Google and OpenAI’s ongoing hiring “talent war.”

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D. Lighter Tech & Culture Moments

• Riley Walls Sells a Street to Notion

  • In a quirky bit of San Francisco lore, entrepreneur Riley Walls buys a city street and auctions its naming rights, won by Notion ("Notion Way").

    "...Notion won this. It could have been some crypto thing. It could have gone so odd." — Host 1 [22:44]

  • Hosts discuss their own support and relief the name went to an innocuous, recognizable brand.

    "We told him that we would backstop it basically, like if no one bid on it..." — Host 2 [23:12]

• Personalities and AI Lore

  • Aiden Gomez, a key author on the transformer paper, gets playful attention ("Aiden Goatmez"), and the hosts joke about having more Death Grips fans on.
  • A light jab at Donald Trump asking Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, for help adjusting a chair instead of using GPT, illustrating slow AI diffusion.

    “You take a picture of the chair, tells you how exactly to operate it. It's chair super intelligence, Mr. President. And Mr. President is just not interested.” — Host 1 [24:32]

• Jake Paul on Haters

  • Jake Paul talks about dealing with haters, noting their effect on visibility and algorithmic success.

    “The haters actually will talk about you more and say bad things...it just adds to clicks, views, talk, trending. So that's the way I've always looked at it. And the biggest and best people in the world all are also the...most hated.” — Guest 1 [25:39]

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3. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Midjourney as a David Holes art experience. And I feel like you, as the prompter, are merely the museum goer in the Museum of David.” — Host 1 [10:08]
• “No one making this kind of device has ever been as cool as David Holt. Straight up.” — Host 2 [11:15]
• “Never black pill on startups. Like he could be so successful and he doesn't have any venture money and he's never going to sell his business.” — Host 1 [11:59]
• “Each sensor resolves motions smaller than the width of an atom...Working together, hundreds of sensors can even push into the subatomic femtometer range.” — Host 1 [13:53]
• “Their goal is a fleet of five of 50,000 of these scanners, capable of a billion scans a month. It's basically everyone on Earth.” — Host 1 [16:19]
• “Such bold bets require ownership and a kind of devil may care attitude.” — Host 1 [18:32]
• “This is likely the most significant AI talent move of the year. It makes you wonder what's going on at Google. Only matched by the next day. Dean Ball joins OpenAI.” — Host 1 [20:48]

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4. Important Segment Timestamps

• David Holz & Leap Motion History: [00:52–04:01]
• Midjourney Discord/Social Model: [04:01–07:11]
• Midjourney Medical Launch & Aesthetics: [09:30–11:12]
• Scanner Technical Deep Dive: [13:01–16:12]
• Deployment Model & Spa Experience: [16:19–17:17]
• Read/Write Potential: [17:30–17:59]
• AI Talent Moves (Noam Shazeer, Dean Ball): [20:32–21:55]
• Notion Way & Tech Culture: [22:00–23:32]
• Jake Paul on Haters: [25:02–26:49]

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5. Signature TBPN Tone

The episode embodies TBPN’s blend of insider knowledge, irreverent humor, and admiration for bold entrepreneurs. The hosts’ language is informal, energetic, and peppered with running jokes ("Nepo teeth," "Aiden Goatmez," "museum of David") that reinforce the conversational, community-driven flavor of the show.

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TL;DR

Midjourney—a company famed for AI art—has stunned the tech world by unveiling a massively ambitious medical hardware project: an ultrasound scanner poised to democratize deep body imaging. The episode explores founder David Holz’s career of rogue innovation, the scanner’s sci-fi specs, and the potential to disrupt both diagnostics and treatments. The conversation then covers seismic AI hires (Noam Shazeer, Dean Ball) bolstering OpenAI’s dominance, and ends with playful reflections on SF startup culture and the role of haters in building a personal brand.

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Transcript

[Host 1]

Midjourney. Why Midjourney pivoted to medical machines? It's not a pivot, it's an expansion. It's a second act, a third act for David Holes. Fantastic entrepreneur, extremely inspiring entrepreneur. Maybe we should give some background on David Holz.

[Host 2]

Should we talk about the show today first?

[Host 1]

Yeah, please.

[Host 2]

Because this is the first time that Derek Thompson and Jake Paul have been on the same podcast. And I want to just take, I want to take a moment to just appreciate that because a lot of people said it would never happen. They said it was impossible, that they

[Host 1]

were just going all over the place today.

[Host 2]

Two different worlds, but we're bringing them together. Derek Thompson's kicking off our guest Lineup today at 11:30. Yeah, you don't, you don't need an introduction there. We have Rene Haas from arm, CEO, also on the board of Softbank. And then we'll be closing it out with David Senra and Jake Paul at

[Host 1]

the end of the show in live in the TV pin. I'll show you. Anyway, yesterday Midjourney announced a new division of the company, an expansion, not a pivot, called Midjourney Medical. We'll watch the video, we'll go through the Mid Journey scanner. Tyler was actually at the launch event, has some news to break it down. But first let's kick it off with the history of David Hulls because it's fascinating. Grew up in Florida. Son of a dentist. He's not the dog walker, he's on team Dentist over there. Son of a dentist.

[Host 2]

We have a son of a dentist.

[Host 1]

We have a son of a dentist on our team and played video games.

[Host 2]

Dentist camp.

[Host 1]

Dentist son, dentist son Cam.

[Host 2]

Look at those teeth.

[Host 1]

Oh, wow.

[Host 2]

Wow.

[Host 1]

Nepo teeth.

[Host 2]

Nepo teeth.

[Host 1]

He's got Nepo teeth.

[Host 2]

Go back, go back. Cut back.

[Guest 1]

Look at that.

[Host 2]

Big smile, big smile. There we go.

[Host 1]

The Nepo teeth. That's crazy. Crazy. That's crazy.

[Host 2]

That's crazy. Wow, your father really saved his back.

[Host 1]

Born on third base with teeth wise. It's crazy over there. Played video games as a kid obviously, but starts hacking them, learns a little bit about computers. Super intelligent PhD in math track. I don't think he graduated, finished the PhD, but I mean, you know, at that level of engineering. He turned down the PhD to go work at NASA, I think. So he's at NASA. Eventually branches into entrepreneurship. Starts Leap Motion. Pretty traditional venture backed startup. Raised money. I think founders fund was in at least one of the rounds, but it was a grind by all accounts. And so the first product brought hand tracking to VR. We should pull up a video of the original Leap Motion because there's some cool demos and you can see how it worked. And it's not actually that crazy to think about what we're going to talk about today with the midjourney medical scanner. If you know the history of Leap Motion and some of the, some of the technology that was employed there. Yes, this is a different, different use case, different product, very much bigger. But in terms of sensing, detecting, mapping, using algorithms.

[Guest 2]

Yeah, yeah. And so when David was talking about like the backstory, he was kind of going through like some of the technicalities of how the Leap Motion worked. It was incredible because he was like, I mean this is early 20 teens and he's using like these deep neural nets. He said it was a mixture of Expert's model is like incredibly far ahead of the curve just on like deep learning and it's just like, on this of like weird, like side project. It's like doing hand motion. Yeah.

[Host 1]

Everyone thought VR was going to take off. There was so much energy around Oculus and the dev community. But it was a tough, it was, it was a very tough business. A lot of hardware challenges, much less mature supply chain. Everything's expensive and there's all these complex market dynamics with other big companies. Meta bought Oculus. Apple was investing heavily. Eventually Apple actually tried to buy David's first company, Leap Motion, but the deal fell through at the 11th hour. I think it actually happened twice. There was a reporting that like Apple had printed welcome packets to all of the Leap Motion employees. Being like, you're getting onboarded today. And then the deal fell through, which is crazy. You don't see that normally.

[Host 2]

David turned it down.

[Host 1]

He turned it down. There are, there is some crazy reporting about like getting in and basically being like, this is too corporate or like, this is not the vibe. We're not going to be successful here. It was really rough for the company. They had to do layoffs, but they kept building and they sold devices to hackers. Yeah, look at this. The Leap Motion, this is Play Fruit Ninja. Now a lot of this stuff can be done with cameras and hand tracking and the hand tracking on the modern VR device is pretty good just from the headset. Hand tracking in Apple Vision Pro, my favorite device is fantastic. But at the time you needed a third party device, so you had. Can you scroll the video down to show the actual device a little bit? Yeah. This little like it looks like a stick of gum. Very small, very neat, very cool. But ultimately very much a dev kit. Never, never got to you Know, mass consumer adoption, like an oura ring or a whoop band or anything like that. It was not must have for, you know, the average gamer, the average consumer, the average technologist. After about a decade, David was able to take a step back and start hacking on the next thing. AI image generation, you know, mid journey, obviously, huge viral success, broke a lot of the traditional rules. So no venture funding, no front end, no website, no no app. Like really, they, they, I mean now they have a front end and stuff. But years went by, just a discord. Everything was in a discord. And they scaled that discord to millions of members so huge that the company Discord, I think it was the biggest mid journey Discord was the biggest discord for a while. They had to scale their systems at that company. But you're doing all this like off balance sheet R and D basically. And on day one, you just get a fantastic mobile app for every device.

[Host 2]

Social experience.

[Host 1]

Social experience. That was the second thing.

[Host 2]

So yeah, because there was so much. This was the air like prompt engineering era. Right. Where exactly their favorite prompts.

[Host 1]

Yep.

[Host 2]

It really helped kind of cultivate.

[Host 1]

It was multiplayer on day one.

[Host 2]

Yeah.

[Host 1]

And so David has this quote, I think it's from him saying, like if you show someone a blank box and you tell them, hey, this is a magical AI machine that can generate you a picture of anything, people will just type in dog and they'll get a picture of a dog. And they would get the same picture if they just went to Google images. That's not what AI is actually interesting at. It's the astronaut riding a horse on the moon. The thing that, that picture doesn't exist already. So it's you flying an F16 in your hometown and like personalizing and doing something that would typically take a very large CGI budget or some sort of, you know, Photoshop master to actually whip up or collage together. You could do that with just one prompt. And so the multiplayer nature of midjourney, when I jump into the midjourney discord, the first thing I see is your crazy prompt, your 12 levels deep prompt, injecting, thinking of different keywords, doing different srefs for style references, doing all these different tweaks. And then I can just see, oh, he used this model and he specified these dimensions and he's getting really good results. So I'll take that. But I don't want to make it about. I want to make my images about a dog. You're a mosquito guy, so you're going to make them about mosquitoes.

[Guest 1]

Right.

[Host 1]

And you can take my prompt and just sort of remix it.

[Host 2]

And so some of the mosquito propaganda prompts I had back in those days were crazy actually. I never ended up sharing them. They were simply too good.

[Host 1]

Yeah, well you lost the war and the mosquito's going away whether you like it or not. Google is focused entirely on killing mosquitoes. Apparently by generating four candidate images for each prompt midjourney got a bunch of really valuable data on what a correct image looked like for a specific prompt. This was another sort of midjourney innovation. I don't know if they were the first ones to do this, but it was really key to the mid journey flow. It would genuine instead of generating you an HD image, it would generate you four low res images and you'd be like ah, that has the right vibe, that has the right style, that has the right layout and then it would get that feedback and be able to iterate at the same time. Stable diffusion had some really good results but it ran locally, it was open source and so they weren't having the data flywheel like midjourney was. And so there were a lot of really positive things there. Now every company has a data flywheel and can can iterate on that. But it was an important innovation. The company still that we know of hasn't take venture funding. So I think David Holes owns most if not all of the company and after the big metadeal to vour vibes there's clearly enough cash flow to fund other projects. David's actually been talking about this for years. This idea of a medical.

[Host 2]

Yeah, the meta deal. I don't think any specifics were ever released but I think it's safe to assume it was in the hundreds of millions.

[Host 1]

Hundreds of billions. Trillions potentially.

[Host 2]

Potentially, but, but enough to be able to take some really, really, really big swings and be able to have a balance sheet like a heavily funded private company.

[Host 1]

Yeah, so it's really cool. I was hoping for a VR headset. Honestly I really wanted a VR headset.

[Guest 2]

I mean this is just one of the hardware projects, right. He says like I think there were like eight little, you know, images, teaser things so, so there's, there's a bunch

[Host 1]

more hardware because after the Apple Vision Pro launch I think he put out some sort of review being like ah, we're going to have to do it ourselves, which I love. Anyway, let's play the mid Journey launch video for Mid Journey Medical and see what's going on here in this two minute video. The goat is still on screen. The goat is in our stream, not in the mid dream. Did the aesthetics of this video carry through to the actual event experience? I only saw a few photos, but did the event have a nice vibe to it?

[Guest 2]

Yeah, it was very cool. They had similar, like, warm lighting everywhere. They had, like, kind of fake versions of the real machine. It's like, way too big, obviously, to move around.

[Host 1]

Yeah.

[Guest 2]

But they had these kind of big tubes that, like, resembled it. Then they had a smaller version you could put your hand in. I did it in my hand.

[Host 1]

Interesting. Are you healthy? Is your hand healthy? We need you coding at all times. Prompting.

[Guest 2]

I think it's. It's hard because that was like a small, like, demo version. So the resolution was lower.

[Host 1]

Sure.

[Guest 2]

But someone else said that they figured out that they had some, like, wrist because of box.

[Host 2]

Yeah.

[Guest 2]

They found some issue.

[Host 1]

You just use an if statement in real time.

[Guest 2]

Yeah.

[Host 1]

If San Franciscan, then yes. Carpal tunnel. Very cool vibes. I've always said this about midjourney, that I think when you, like, people debate, is AI art art or whatever. I always think of Midjourney as a David Holes art experience. And I feel like you, as the prompter, are merely the museum goer in the Museum of David. And he is the one who is creating. And the Midjourney team is the curator. They're the artists, and you are experiencing the art through the prompts. But the decisions and the taste comes from David. And so our midjourney image is tasteful. I think they have taste. I think they have David's taste. And then there's the opportunity for a user to put a little bit more on top. But by default, I think the reason midjourney has been successful is because it's so opinionated and it's not trying to just be a stock photo generator.

[Host 2]

Yeah.

[Guest 2]

Even this video was fully filmed by David. Like, really? He was, like, the one holding the camera.

[Host 1]

That's cool.

[Guest 2]

Yeah.

[Host 1]

Love this guy. It's amazing.

[Host 2]

It makes me a little bit emotional. It's so cool. Yeah. It makes me feel like we're finally living in the future. No one making this kind of device has ever been as cool as David Holt. Straight up.

[Host 1]

Let's.

[Host 2]

I'm willing to state that as a fact. It's just true. Like, this is not the first medical device product that we're going to show.

[Host 1]

The medical device industry does not have aura.

[Host 2]

Yeah.

[Host 1]

They have no motion.

[Host 2]

He's bringing motion and aura to the

[Host 1]

medical device field category.

[Host 2]

Yes.

[Host 1]

He's inventing. He's inventing medical devices.

[Host 2]

I think a Lot of people are going to want to get these scans because it is a beautiful representation, futuristic representation of the human form. It's personalized also.

[Host 1]

Just never black pill on startups. Like he could be so successful and he doesn't have any venture money and he's never going to sell his business. And so you have like 12 biomedical device companies that are like we have to, we cannot get steamrolled by David Holes. We got to work with this company. We have buy from that the YC company. Like the competitive dynamics of the market are always more complicated than just a single winner comes in. Steamrolls all the startups and all the incumbents. That's not how things ever play out. Life is more complicated, the economy is more complicated. So never black belt. Let's play the deep technical dive. The technical deep dive. Did he make this music too, I wonder?

[Guest 2]

Yeah, and he also made this in I think blue Blender. He said whoa all day. Animations are all made by him by hand though.

[Host 1]

He's the one.

[Host 2]

No AI.

[Host 1]

I guess he's doing Blender. I mean for this. It's a great use case for blender because you're cloning.

[Guest 2]

I don't know if it was actually blender. It was some, I mean CGI stack.

[Host 2]

Incredible music selection.

[Host 1]

Oh yeah, there's words we should be reading. There's no voiceover, but we can kind of give you the summary here, the overviews. We'll start with something called transducer. We're going through. Transducers act as speakers and microphones. Imagine a choir of 9,000 singers and an audience of 9,000 people, all listening carefully. The transducers are controllable at a rate of 100 million times per second. Together they fire in a pattern that sends out structured waves. Those are the structured waves you're seeing. The waves travel out at a speed of 1,481 meters per second. We construct a ring of 40 of these systems. 70 centimeters in diameter. The ring consists of 358,000 ultrasonic sensors. The chips take turns sending out waves. As the waves have a chance to dissipate, we fire the next one. One by one. They fire at a rate of up to 1000 times per second. You're vibing out. The waves travel across the tank in 480 microseconds, about 1 2,000th of a second. Hundreds of thousands of transducers. Listen. Each sensor resolves motions smaller than the width of an atom. Not micrometers or nanometers, but picometers. Working together, hundreds of sensors can even push into the subatomic femtometer range. Finer than the scale of atoms. A scale where we don't even have anything you've heard of. The system captures data at a leisurely 17 gigabytes a second. Gigabytes of sonic reverberations flow around your body, and from vibrations, they form images. With this device, each probe sees different angles of your body. We combined hundreds of waves and thousands of sub images to get the final product over. Over 40 gigabytes of data moves through the system to just see one slice of your body. We analyze the images, making out organs, structures and tissues. Of course, all good uses of AI. There you go. Not going to read all that here. We show a slice of what we can see with 25 different biological structures. Look at this. We do this again and again and again as you move through the ring. So are you moving through the ring or is the ring moving around you?

[Guest 2]

No, no, you're moving down. The ring stays. Oh, that's why you saw in the video, it's a little platform you stand on.

[Host 1]

Interesting. Over a period of 60 seconds, the goal is to obtain several hundred slices of your body, reconstructing across 21 servers. With two petaflops of compute power and up to 806 terabytes of raw data, the slices form a 3D map with the ability to resolve internal tissue details as small as half a millimeter. Wow.

[Host 2]

Limina Leap says. Still can't believe they missed the med journey opportunity here.

[Host 1]

Less than a dozen of these systems operating at full speed can do a full body scan of every. Their goal is a fleet of five of 50,000 of these scanners, capable of a billion scans a month. It's basically everyone on Earth.

[Host 2]

Tyler, what's the logic of putting these, integrating these into spas? They want to make standalone spas or they want to make a first one in San Francisco that's like a flagship. And then.

[Guest 2]

Yep.

[Host 2]

I can't imagine all 50,000 scanners would come with full spa.

[Guest 2]

But yeah, I think he said the plan was you start with the big one. I think there's going to be like 10 or so in the first SF location. And then in some places there'll be like hundreds of these. Some places there's like one or two. But yeah, I think that the spa is like, mostly because at least he rationalized it because, like, oh, you know, going to the clinic or whatever, it's like not a good experience. Yeah, this should be like, very quick and it should feel much more like going to, you know, sauna or steam room or whatever than going to the doctor. Because you can imagine you don't really need a doctor present during it. Right, yeah, it's like autonomous.

[Host 2]

They should create a bunch of needles in the ring that come in and just kind of connect with you. Deliver whatever peptides, hormones, peds that it deems necessary potentially.

[Guest 2]

Well, I mean, he also talked about this system is pretty overpowered, he said, so you could like theoretically, instead of just like basically reading like what's going on in your body, you can like write stuff too, right? So you can like do non invasive surgeries, whatever by like beaming light.

[Host 1]

Yeah, yeah, we have folks who have done that where it's like it pulverizes the cancer, the tumor with ultrasonic waves.

[Guest 2]

Yeah, like think about like UV lithography or something. If you like, you know, position the light in various ways, you can like actually make a change too.

[Host 1]

Not just like you're saying potentially. We could pivot this into more chip fabrication capacity.

[Guest 2]

That would be the goal.

[Host 1]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. We can make way more money just making more chips.

[Host 2]

Yeah, one of my.

[Host 1]

We're gonna go to the data center.

[Host 2]

Bren's over on X antibology. Great account says the obvious next step, once you have a full body ultrasound scanner, is to use the ultrasound to do useful things to the body. Delete tissues, make cells, divide, reprogram cells, read plus write. If you're an engineer interested in solving the right side of sci fi medical devices, we're building this and hiring.

[Host 1]

Well, let's go through some more of the reactions midjourney. Launching an ultrasound scanner is such a clear example of freedom enjoyed by bootstrap companies that VC backed companies would never have. Only time will tell if it's the right bet. But such bold bets require ownership and a kind of devil may care attitude. That's somewhat true, but the counter to all that is like the Elon Musk projects and a variety of founders and specs. But also Sam Allman has done this too, where it's like, okay, there's a new idea, get a new team, fund it, and it's on the side. There are a variety of entrepreneurs that are playing the VC game, marshaling capital, and then have the permission to work on crazy stuff like a mass driver on the moon, et cetera. But in general, I agree with this point that a lot of founders get locked in a VC loop of you got to raise money every 18 months, you got to hit the core KPI, you don't have the time or cash flow, because you're win, win, win, fight, fight, fight. And it's very, very interesting. And such a narrative violation that midjourney has become such a machine financially in, you know, people would say it's a commodity market, people would say it's a highly competitive market. You're going up against Google, you're with Nanobanana, you're going up against OpenAI. And yet Midjourney has carved out a fantastic community, a fantastic user base, fantastic business model, and it's really, it's a testament to something. It's just awesome. I don't know what else to say. What did Noam Shazir see? What did he see? Because Noam Shazir, the legendary AI researcher formerly of DeepMind, has joined OpenAI. Very exciting news for Gnome and OpenAI, he says. I'm excited to share that I'll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there. It was a difficult decision to move on. I'm incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we've built together. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with all of you. Everyone is very, very excited about this. And Yaxin shares some interesting details. He says, noam Shazir, sixth War.

[Host 2]

I don't know, just getting right to the important stuff.

[Host 1]

But I like that we're apocryphally building up our heroes.

[Guest 2]

Yeah.

[Host 2]

Number one, the Metis list.

[Host 1]

Number one on the Metis list.

[Host 2]

Do you remember the Metis list which we released summer of last year during the height of the talent wars.

[Host 1]

Co Author of Transformer T5 Switch Transformer Papers, one of the pioneers of sparse moe models. He's leaving his VP of Engineering, Gemini Co lead role at Google DeepMind to join OpenAI. Lisan Al Gaib says this is likely the most significant AI talent move of the year. It makes you wonder what's going on at Google. Only matched by the next day. Dean Ball joins OpenAI. Tyler, you've been at Ball Nower for a long time. We've had him on the show multiple times. We love Dean and he's been in the complete opposite camp. He's not an AI researcher. He's policy a lot of experience there and had a really even keel I think on a lot of the analyses of should something be.

[Guest 2]

I think the main thing is he

[Host 2]

really cares about getting this right as a country. Totally right. And he's been critical of almost every company in space, but only again because he cares. What does Jim Cramer think about these moves? Yeah, he posted at 3am this morning. Noam Shazir, top AI thinker goes to AI from Google. Big win for AI.

[Host 1]

And drop the O. Drop the Open. Just AI.

[Host 2]

It's cleaner.

[Host 1]

It's cleaner. There's closed source models. Anyway, just call it the AI Company, I guess. In other news, Riley Walls did it. He did the unthinkable. He bought a street in San Francisco and auctioned it off. And Notion bought it. And now the Notion way is officially born. I'm sorry. I'm so happy that Notion won this. It could have been some crypto thing. It could have gone so odd. It's like high risk. Whenever you turn something loose like this on the Internet, it can go a bunch of different ways. Notion way is not something that I think would be annoyed. I personally wouldn't be annoyed if a street corner in my neighborhood was Notion way. It is an ad, but it's a.

[Host 2]

Well, you certainly wouldn't be annoyed, but

[Host 1]

it's just a term that feels like. It could just be a street name. Not something that just feels totally like an ad, like with a dot com in there or something. So fantastic.

[Host 2]

Yeah. I remember when. Perfect execution from Riley Walls. I remember talking with him about this idea for the first time. Absolutely loved it. We told him like they painted the street too. We told him that we would backstop it basically, like if no one bid on it then. Then we.

[Host 1]

Yeah, we were like, we're good for like a thousand bucks or something like that.

[Host 2]

Yeah, I think it was like, I

[Host 1]

think maybe 10k or whatever the cost was.

[Host 2]

I remember it was like 20 something.

[Host 1]

But we were like, well, we'll backstop it. We'll be like the buyer of last resort if you need that. And winning bid was 40k. Very, very interesting.

[Guest 2]

They get the blessing of the mayor.

[Host 1]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Guest 2]

Daniel Lurie.

[Host 1]

That's very exciting. Very exciting.

[Host 2]

Aiden Gomez accidentally became important at work.

[Host 1]

I love Aiden Gomez. Can we get him on the show?

[Host 2]

Ruining his life.

[Host 1]

We haven't had enough Death Grips fans on the show.

[Host 2]

Scrol.

[Host 1]

We gotta have Aiden Gomez on.

[Host 2]

Really funny thing to post from.

[Host 1]

Also on the transformer paper, by the way. Aiden Gomez. They call him Aiden Goatmez for a reason. He's coded. No, I love him. He's fantastic. And he did a podcast episode with 20 BC wearing a death Grips T shirt. And that was incredible. Anyway, a bunch of other funny things happening at the G7. Apparently Donald Trump had to ask Sam Altman how to adjust his chair up and down, how to use the chair. And that's gotta hurt because you're Sam Altman, you've spent billions, tens of billions of dollars, years of your life, a decade of your life, building a machine that can answer this exact question, almost any question. You take a picture of the chair, tells you how exactly to operate it.

[Host 2]

So to do that right in his face.

[Host 1]

Right in his face.

[Host 2]

Just completely reject the premise.

[Host 1]

Yeah, yeah. And you know, on the tip of the tongue, he's like, actually like, this is a great opportunity to use ChatGPT. You can use images, upload a photo of that chair, it can go, and agentically pull the actual diagrams, the manual from that chair to the website. It's chair super intelligence, Mr. President. And Mr. President is just not interested. He's just like, I'm going with a human on this one. And that's why diffusion takes so long. That's why we're in the slow takeoff.

[Guest 1]

Anyway, you know, I don't think anyone who does good things in this world or big things in this world doesn't have haters. I mean, it's the. It's the day one story. And I honestly, you know, since day one, when I first went viral, the video I was talking about, like, I. Yeah. Instantly people in my school started hating. So, like, I don't even. I don't even remember life without haters.

[Host 2]

Yeah, your mom, you know, took that video when you were born. I'm sure some of the nurses were like, yeah, this kid, they're like, oh, fuck this guy. Yeah, yeah.

[Guest 1]

No, you have to have it. And, you know, good news travels fast, bad news travels faster, and the. The haters actually will talk about you more and say bad things. But at the end of the day, people don't really remember what was said. They just remember your name and your face and so you could do with that what you want. And you know, it's really. They're adding to the algorithm at the end of the day, so it's really just math. And if you just have fans that are saying things, you know, let's say that's 10,000 people, but add 10,000 haters in there, and now 20,000 people are talking about you. And it just adds to clicks, views, talk, trending. So that's the way I've always looked at it. And the biggest and best people in the world all are also the. The most hated.

[Host 1]

Ferrari. Luche has a lot of haters. Will you be getting one?

[Guest 1]

Say it again.

[Host 1]

The Ferrari Lucha. Oh, New electric vehicle. Ferrari.

[Host 2]

Gotta be careful, because if you want any of those Halo cars, you know this is gonna be permanent. I know you might want an F80 at some point. You gotta be really care. I just want you to be really careful with this.

[Guest 1]

This is a political answer. No comment.

[Host 1]

Okay.

[Guest 1]

That shit's ass. No comment.

[Guest 2]

No comment.

[Guest 1]

No comment.

[Host 1]

That's a lot of fun. Well, thank you so much for coming on down.

[Host 2]

Yeah, congrats on the new fun. Have fun down in El Segundo. Hopefully give our best to everyone. The South Bay. I'm sure you guys are going to be spending a lot of time there post SpaceX IPO. It's just going to be more and more action.

[Host 1]

Flashbang out leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter tvpn.com, and thank you for tuning in today. Goodbye.