[0:00] Last week, David Holz, the founder of
[0:02] Midjourney, the company best known for
[0:04] generating six-fingered anime waifus and
[0:06] getting sued by Disney, sat on stage and
[0:08] announced their next big initiative to
[0:10] get inside of you. Midjourney Medical is
[0:13] a new division of Midjourney with the
[0:14] goal to reimagine the foundations of
[0:17] healthcare and our relationships to our
[0:18] bodies. The last time a San Francisco
[0:20] company wanted to reimagine the
[0:22] relationship with my body, I ended up
[0:24] getting Narcan behind the Ben & Jerry's
[0:26] at Fisherman's Wharf, but they said you
[0:27] can't OD on the same thing twice, so I'm
[0:30] feeling optimistic. David went on to
[0:32] basically say that because Midjourney is
[0:34] bootstrapped and profitable, they can
[0:36] afford to focus on something no other
[0:37] frontier AI lab would touch with a 10-ft
[0:39] pole, and that is actually improving the
[0:41] human experience. In today's video,
[0:43] we'll look at how they plan on doing
[0:45] that, what it may mean for the future of
[0:47] healthcare, and why I now know that I
[0:48] have the bone density of a Civil War
[0:50] widow. It is June 23rd, 2026, and you're
[0:53] watching The Code Report. In today's
[0:55] [music] world, if you want to look
[0:56] inside yourself, you have a few options
[0:58] that were all invented before the
[0:59] personal computer. You've got an MRI
[1:01] machine, which feels like sitting inside
[1:03] a Titan submersible as it screams at you
[1:05] for an hour, or you can do a CT scan,
[1:07] which is much faster, but with that
[1:09] speed comes a microdose of radiation.
[1:11] There's also a Dexa scan, which is more
[1:13] convenient, but causes depression when
[1:15] you get the results and realize that
[1:16] veggie straws don't actually contain any
[1:18] vegetables in them. All three are
[1:20] expensive at best and locked behind the
[1:22] bureaucracy of the healthcare system at
[1:23] worst. Not to mention, the whole
[1:25] industry is gated behind referrals,
[1:27] insurance fights, and wait times that
[1:29] give that pesky lump in your pants time
[1:31] to grow. That's why Midjourney got my
[1:33] attention last week when they announced
[1:34] their goal is to make a medical imaging
[1:37] device called ultrasonic CT that's
[1:39] cheap, fast, and accessible. It works by
[1:42] having you step into a platform and
[1:44] slowly lowers you into a shallow pool of
[1:46] warm water. As you sink, you pass
[1:48] through a ring of half a million tiny
[1:50] sensors that are each about the size of
[1:52] a grain of sand equipped with a
[1:53] microscopic speaker and microphone that
[1:56] fires ultrasonic waves through your body
[1:58] at a million times per second. When the
[2:00] waves come back, depending on what they
[2:02] pass through, they come back in
[2:03] different shapes. This creates terabytes
[2:05] of data per second about your insides,
[2:07] but reconstructing a coherent image from
[2:10] ambiguous noisy input is ironically the
[2:12] one thing Midjourney has spent years
[2:14] perfecting. The end result looks a lot
[2:16] like what you get with today's MRIs, but
[2:18] at nearly 100 times the speed and
[2:20] without having to marinate in the
[2:22] screaming tube. Because this whole
[2:23] process is just sound waves, some water,
[2:26] and eventually a minute of your time,
[2:28] Midjourney believes getting scanned
[2:29] should be much more common than it is
[2:31] today. But to do that, it needs to be
[2:33] available in a place you actually want
[2:34] to visit. And as Robert Kraft once told
[2:36] me, there's no better place than a spa.
[2:38] So they're also launching Midjourney
[2:40] Spa, a 25,000 square foot space in San
[2:43] Francisco at the end of 2027, complete
[2:46] with hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, and
[2:49] in their words, cozy rooms of pools of
[2:51] golden light which softly scan your
[2:53] body. The pitch is that you show up for
[2:55] a relaxing day, dip into some water,
[2:57] maybe turn down some LSD from an early
[2:59] FTX employee, and the full body scan
[3:01] just sort of happens as a side effect.
[3:03] But before you get too excited about
[3:05] cold plunging with Linux kernel
[3:06] maintainers, there are some people who
[3:08] have doubts, and they happen to be
[3:09] doctors. The biggest critique is that
[3:11] ultrasound is great at soft squishy
[3:13] stuff near the surface, like your
[3:15] thyroid, kidneys, or abdomen, but the
[3:17] laws of physics prevent sound waves from
[3:19] traveling through air or bone, which
[3:21] means your air-filled lungs and your
[3:23] skull-wrapped brain are basically
[3:25] invisible to it. And clever vibe-coded
[3:27] software is never going to fix that.
[3:29] It's also extremely early. That
[3:31] 60-second scan is a goalpost, but today
[3:33] the prototype takes about 20 minutes to
[3:35] finish and has no FDA clearance. So for
[3:38] now, the only thing it's legally allowed
[3:40] to tell you is your body composition,
[3:42] which if you're watching this, I could
[3:43] probably tell you as well. So the
[3:45] current plan is that over the next year,
[3:47] they'll be refining the hardware,
[3:49] running research trials, and building
[3:50] out the first research spa before it
[3:53] opens at the end of 2027. In the
[3:55] meantime, they'll keep submitting test
[3:56] results to the FDA to slowly unlock the
[3:59] actual disease detecting stuff, build
[4:01] out Gen 3 of their scanner, which they
[4:03] hope to have done in 2028, and scale a
[4:05] fleet of over 50,000 machines by 2031,
[4:08] which is enough to give monthly scans to
[4:10] a billion people. So no, the Midjourney
[4:12] spa probably isn't deleting 30% of all
[4:14] deaths next year, and the haters
[4:16] roasting the physics have legit reasons
[4:18] to be hating. But after years of
[4:19] watching the smartest people alive use
[4:21] their powers to create God, there's
[4:23] something refreshing about a profitable
[4:25] AI lab bringing accessible health
[4:26] optimizations to the masses. But another
[4:29] thing that's refreshing is Retool, the
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[5:21] Code Report. Thanks for watching, and I
[5:23] will see you in the next one.