---
title: 'Midjourney has a new side quest... death'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=a2i9h2ip-nY'
video_id: 'a2i9h2ip-nY'
date: 2026-06-28
duration_sec: 0
---

# Midjourney has a new side quest... death

> Source: [Midjourney has a new side quest... death](https://youtube.com/watch?v=a2i9h2ip-nY)

## Summary

Midjourney, the company known for AI image generation, has announced a new division, Midjourney Medical, aimed at revolutionizing healthcare. Their first initiative is an ultrasonic CT scanner, a cheap, fast, and accessible medical imaging device, along with a Midjourney Spa where scans can be performed as part of a relaxing experience. The video explores the ambitious plan, its potential, and the significant skepticism it faces from the medical community.

### Key Points

- **Midjourney Medical Announced** [0:00] — David Holz announces Midjourney Medical, a new division aiming to reinvent healthcare and our relationship with our bodies.
- **Bootstrapped and Profitable Focus** [0:32] — Because Midjourney is bootstrapped and profitable, they can focus on improving the human experience, unlike other AI labs.
- **Existing Imaging Challenges** [0:55] — Current medical imaging (MRI, CT, Dexa) is expensive, uncomfortable, and locked behind healthcare bureaucracy, referrals, and wait times.
- **The Ultrasonic CT Scanner** [1:34] — Midjourney's device is a platform that lowers a person into a pool of warm water, passing through a ring of half a million tiny ultrasonic sensors that fire waves a million times per second.
- **AI Image Reconstruction** [2:00] — The sensors generate terabytes of data per second. Midjourney's expertise in reconstructing coherent images from noisy input is key to creating the final scan.
- **Speed and Comfort** [2:18] — The end result is similar to an MRI but at nearly 100 times the speed, without the discomfort of being inside a loud machine.
- **Midjourney Spa Concept** [2:34] — To make scans accessible, Midjourney is launching a 25,000 sq ft spa in San Francisco by end of 2027, with hot tubs, saunas, and 'cozy rooms of pools of golden light' for scanning.
- **Medical Skepticism and Physics Limits** [3:03] — Doctors critique that ultrasound cannot penetrate air (lungs) or bone (skull), making those areas invisible. The laws of physics prevent software from fixing this.
- **Early Stage and Regulatory Hurdles** [3:31] — The prototype takes 20 minutes (goal is 60 seconds) and has no FDA clearance. Currently, it can only measure body composition.
- **Future Plans and Scaling** [3:55] — Over the next year: refine hardware, run trials, build the research spa. Goal for 2028: Gen 3 scanner. By 2031: 50,000 machines to offer monthly scans to a billion people.

### Conclusion

While Midjourney's medical initiative faces real physical and regulatory limitations, the company's profitable, bootstrapped approach to accessible health screening is a refreshing deviation from other AI labs. The project is ambitious but early, and its success hinges on overcoming physics and achieving FDA approval.

## Transcript

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