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

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.com/Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Mid-Journey, why mid-journey pivoted to medical machines? It's not a pivot, it's an expansion. It's a second act, a third act for David Holes, a fantastic entrepreneur, extremely inspiring entrepreneur. Maybe we should give some background on David Holt. Wait, should we talk about the show today first? Yeah, please. Because this is the first time that Derek Thompson and Jake Paul have been on the same podcast.

And I want to just take a moment to just appreciate. that because a lot of people said it would never happen. They said it was impossible that they were just in two different worlds, but we're bringing them together. Derek Thompson's kicking off our guest lineup today at 1130. You don't need an introduction there. We have Renee Haas from Arm, CEO, also on the board of SoftBank. And then we'll be closing it out with David Senra and Jake Paul. Be it the end of the show. TV can ultrasound. Anyway, yesterday, Mid Journey announced a new division of the company, an expansion, not a pivot, called Mid Journey 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 Holes because it's fascinating. We 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. We have a son of a dentist on our team. and played video games growing up. Dentist's camp, dentist son cam.

Look at those teeth. Oh, wow. Wow. Neppo teeth. Neppo teeth. He's got nepot teeth. Go back. Go back. Cut back. Look at that. Big smile. Big smile. There are. I mean. That's crazy. That's crazy. That's crazy. Wow. Your father really saved his back. We're on third base with teeth wise. It's crazy over there. Played video games as a kid obviously, but starts hacking them, a little bit about computers, super intelligent, PhD and 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. He's at NASA. Eventually branches into entrepreneurship, starts to 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 Mid Journey Medical Scanner. If you know the history of Leap Motion and some of the technology that was employed there, yes, this is a different use case, different product, very much bigger. But in terms of sensing, detecting, mapping, using algorithms, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, So when David was talking about like the backstory, he was kind of going through like some of the technicalities of how the lead motion worked. It was incredible because he was like, I mean, this is early 20 teens. And he's using like these deep nil nuts.

He said it was a mixture of X Hertz model. It was like incredibly far ahead of the curve just on like deep learning. Yeah. And it's just like on this kind of like weird like side project. It's like doing hand motion. Yeah. 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 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 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 normal. David turned it down. He turned it down. There is some crazy reporting about, like, getting in and basically being like, ah, 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 did do layoffs, but they kept building and they sold devices to hackers. Yeah, look at this. The leap motion. This is, yeah, Playfruit 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.

that 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 got to, you know,

mass consumer adoption like an aura ring or a whoop band or anything like that. It was not must have for, you know, the average game or the average consumer, the average technology. 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-jurney, obviously. Huge viral success.

Broke a lot of the traditional rules. So no venture funding, no front-end, no website, no app. Like, really, I mean, now they have a front-end and stuff. But years went by where it was 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-Jurney Discord was the biggest disord. scored for a while. They had to scale their systems at that company, but you're doing all this

like off-balance sheet R&D, basically. And on day one, you just get a fantastic mobile app for every device. Social experience. That was the second thing. Yeah, because there was so much, this was the air like prompt engineering era, right? Where people had their favorite prompts. Yep. It really helped kind of cultivate. It was multiplayer on day one. Yeah. And so David has the 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 a F-16 in your hometown and like personalizing and doing something that would typically take a very large CGI budget or some sort of of Photoshop Master to actually whip up or collage together. You could do that with just one prompt. And so the multiplayer nature of Mid Journey,

when I jump into the Mid Journey Discord, the first thing I see is your crazy prompt, your 12 levels deep, prompt injecting, thinking of different keywords, doing different S-Refs 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 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, right? And you can take my prompt and just sort of remix it. And so some of the mosquito propaganda prompts I had back in those days were crazy. Yeah, actually I never ended up sharing them. They were simply too good. Yeah, well, you lost the war and the mosquitoes going away. Whether you like it or not, Google is focused entirely on killing mosquitoes apparently. By generating four candidate

images for each prompt, Mid Journey got a bunch of really valuable data on what a correct image look like for a specific prompt. This was another sort of mid-jurney innovation. I don't know if they were the first ones to do this, but it was really key to the mid-jury flow. It would genu- 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 is 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 mid-jurney was. And so there were a lot of really positive things there.

Now every company has a data flywheel and can iterate on that. But it was an important innovation. The company still that we know of hasn't taken venture funding, so I think David Holes owns most, if not all, of the company. And after the big meta deal to Vauer 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 device.

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. Hundreds of billions. Trillions, potentially. Potentially, potentially. 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. Yeah.

So it's really cool. I was hoping for a VR headset, honestly. I really wanted a VR headset. I mean, this is just one of the hardware projects, right? He says, like, I think there were like eight little, you know, images. is a teaser thing. So there's a bunch more hardware. Because after the Apple Vision Pro launch,

I think he put out some sort of review being like, 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 Journey. 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?

Yeah, it was very cool. They had similar, like, warm lighting everywhere. Yeah. They had, like, kind of fake versions of the real machine. It's, like, way too big, obviously, to move around. Yeah. But they had these kind of big tubes that, like, resembled it. Then they had a smaller version.

You could put your hand in. Yeah. I did it. And my hand. Interesting. Are you healthy? Is your hand healthy? We need you coding at all times prompting.

I think it's hard because that was, like, a, a small, like, demo version, so the resolution was lower. Sure. But someone else said that they figured out that they had some, like, wrist thing because of boxing. Yeah, they found some issue with their... You can just use an if statement for that. In real time? Yeah.

If San Franciscan, then yes, carpal tunnel. Very cool vibes. I've always said this about Mid-Journey that I think when you, like, people debate is AI art, art or whatever. I always think of Mid-Journey as a David holds... art experience. And I feel like you as the prompter are merely the, the museum goer in the museum of David, and he is the one who is creating. And the Mid-Journey 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 are Mid-Journey images taste? Well, 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 Mid Journey has been successful is because it's so opinionated and it's not trying to just be a stock photo generator. Yeah, even this video was fully filmed by David. Like he was like the one holding the camera. That's cool. Yeah.

Love this guy. It's amazing. It makes me a little bit emotional. It's so cool. 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. True.

Straight up. I'm willing to state that as a fact. It's just true. Like, this is not the first medical device product that we talked about on the show. But the medical device industry does not have aura. Yeah. They have no motion. He's bringing motion and aura.

To the medical device field. Category. Yes. He's inventing medical devices. I think a lot of people are going to want to get these scans. Yeah. Because it is a beautiful, representation, futuristic representation of the human form. It's personalized. Also, just never

black pill on startups. He could be so successful and he doesn't have any venture money and he's never going to sell this 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 want to buy from that 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 blackmail. Let's play the deep dive, the technical deep dive. Did he make

this music too, I wonder? Yeah, and he also made this in, I think, Blender, he said. Whoa. All day animations are all made by him. By hand, though? He's the one per-I-I. I guess he's doing Blender. I mean, for this, it's a great use case for Blender because you're cloning, I don't know if it was actually Blender. It was some I mean, CGI stack. Incredible music selection.

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 the transducer. We're going through transducers, active 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 1,000 times per second. The waves travel across the tank in 480 microseconds, about 1,000th 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 picom. meters 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 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. I'm not going to read all that. Here we show a slice of what we can see with 25 different biological structures. 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? No, no, you're moving down. That's why you saw in the video.

Yeah, a little platform you stand on. 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. all the internal tissue details as small as half a millimeter. Wow.

Limina Leap says still can't believe they missed the med journey opportunity here. 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 50,000 of these scanners capable of a billion scans a month. It's basically everyone on Earth. 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 I can't imagine all 50,000 scanners would come with a full spa but yeah I think he said the plan was you start with the big one I think there's

gonna 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 I 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 yeah it should feel much more like going to sauna or steam room or whatever, then going to the doctor. Because you can imagine, you don't really need a doctor present during it, right?

It's like autonomous. They should create a bunch of needles in the ring that come in and just kind of connect with you, deliver whatever peptides, hormones, BEDs that it deems necessary. Potentially. Well, I mean, he also talked about this. This system is pretty overpowered, he said.

So you could, like, theoretically, instead of just like basically reading like what's going on your body you can like write stuff too right so you can like do non-invasive surgeries whatever by like beaming light yeah yeah we talked to some folks who have done that where it's like it pulverizes the cancer the tumor with ultrasonic waves yeah like think about like uv lithography or something you if you like you know position the light in very certain ways you can like actually make a change too not just like you're saying potentially we could pivot this into more chip fabrication capacity that would be the goal yeah yeah yeah sorry uh we can make way more money just making more chips.

Yeah, one of my... We're going to go to the data center. Friends, over on X, Anabology, 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. Well, let's go through some more of the reactions. Mid Journey launching an ultrasound scanner is such a clear example of freedom enjoyed by bootstrap companies that VC back 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, you know, like Sam Alman has done this too, where it's like, okay, there's a new idea, get a new team funded, and it's on the side. like there are a variety of entrepreneurs that are playing the VC game, Marshall and Capital and then have the permission to work on crazy stuff,

like a mass driver on the moon, etc. But in general, I agree with this point, that a lot of founders get locked in a VC loop of you've got to raise money every 18 months. You've got to hit the core KPI. You don't have a time or cash flow because you're win, win, win, fight, fight, fight. And it's very, very interesting in such a narrative violation that Mid Journey 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 open AI. And yet Mid Journey 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 Deep Mind, has joined O'Meathear, has joined Open AI. Very exciting news for Nome and Open AI. He says, I'm excited to share that I'll be joining Open AI 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 Yaxine shares some interesting details here. He says, Nome Shazir is 6-4. I don't know. Just getting right to the important stuff. But I like that we were apocryfully building up our heroes. Yeah, remember the METIS list. Number one on the METIS list. You remember the METIS list, which we released summer of last year during the height of the talent wars. Co-author of the Transformer T5 Switch Transformer Papers, one of the pioneers of sparse MEOE models. It's leaving his VP of Engineering Gemini co-lead role at Google DeepMind to join Open AI.

L. Gaiib 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 Open AI. Tyler, you've been at Ball Naur 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. Should something be? I think the main thing is he 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 Kramer think about these moves?

Yeah. He posted at 3 a.m. this morning, Noam Shazir, top AI thinker, goes to AI from Google. Big win for AI. Drop the O. Drop the open. Just AI. It's cleaner.

It's cleaner. There's close-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. Now the Notion Way is officially born. I'm so, I'm so happy that Notion won this. It could have been a, you know, some crypto thing. It could have gone so odd, you know, 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 like a street corner in my neighborhood was Notion Way. It is an ad, but it's a, it's a term. You certainly wouldn't be annoyed. I would love it. But 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. 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 We told them like...

They painted the street, too. We told them that we would backstop it. Yeah. Basically, like, if no one bid on it, then we would cover it. Yeah, we were like, we're good for like a thousand bucks or something like that. No, I think it was, I think... Maybe 10K or whatever the cost was. I remember it was like 20 something.

But we were like, we'll backstop it. We'll be like the buyer of last resort if you need that. And the winning bid was 140K. Very, very interesting. They get the blessing of the mayor. Yeah, yeah. Daniel Lurie. That's very exciting.

Very. Aidan Gomez accidentally became important at work. I love Aiden Gomez. Can we get him on the show? Ruining his life. We haven't had enough Death Grips fans on the show. We got to have Aidan Gomez on. We got to see what he's quoting.

Really funny thing to post from. Also on the Transformer paper, by the way, Aidan Gomez, they call him Aidan Goatmes for a reason. He's coated. No, I love him. He's fantastic. And he did a podcast episode with 20VC 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 got to hurt because you're Sam Alman, 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, it tells you how exactly to operate it. So to do that right in his face. Right in his face. Just completely reject the premise.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you know on the tip of the time, he's like, actually, like, this is a great opportunity to use chat GPT. You can use images, upload a photo of that chair. It can go and agentically pull the actual diagrams, the manual from that chair. It's chair super intelligence. 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. 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 instantly. Yeah, instantly people in my school started hating.

So like, I don't even, I don't even remember life without haters. Yeah, your, 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. No, you have to have it. And, you know, good news travels fast, bad news travels faster. And 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 most hated. Ferrari, Luce, has a lot of haters. Will you begin? getting one? Say it again? The Ferrari luchin. Oh, new electric vehicle from Ferrari?

Are you in the market? You got to be careful, because if you want any of those halo cars, you know, this is going to be permanent. I know you might want to say, I know you might want an F80 at some point. You got to be really careful.

This is a political answer. No comment. Okay. That shit's ass. No comment. No comment. Oh, well. That's a lot of fun.

Well, thank you so much. 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. Flashbang out. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts.

Spotify, sign up for a newsletter at TBPN.com. And thank you for tuning in today. Goodbye.