Body Scanners, Banned Models, and DeepMind's Space Game Obsession - EP 78 Ashlee Vance And Kylie Robison

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
All right, Kylie, here we go. What did we do last night?

**Kylie Robison** (0:03)
Last night, we uploaded our arms into The Matrix in downtown San Francisco.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:09)
We're gonna tell you all about it on this episode of Core Memory. This is Ashlee Vance.

**Kylie Robison** (0:14)
And I'm Kylie Robison.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:16)
This is Core Memory. And here we go.
Kylie, here we are, we just saw each other hours ago.

**Kylie Robison** (0:38)
It does feel like hours ago, yes.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:40)
We were at a soiree in downtown San Francisco in the dodgy part of San Francisco.

**Kylie Robison** (0:48)
Very dodgy.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:49)
Yes, things were hurdled and avoided on our way into the door. But David Holtz, the founder and CEO of Mid Journey, was holding an event. We got a semi-exclusive invite. How many people were there?

**Kylie Robison** (1:03)
250

**Ashlee Vance** (1:04)
250 I think we were not the only group, but there were a few reporters.

**Kylie Robison** (1:09)
There was very few. Very, very few.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:13)
Wow. Okay. Most people listening to this probably know what Mid Journey is. But if you don't, it was the place that kicked off all the image generation stuff when AI started getting extra weird. You could just tell your computer to manufacture whatever you wanted.
Credit to them. They were ahead of the game, really. A lot of the stuff. David self-funded this company and took no venture capital, and has been printing money ever since.
Last night at this event, we got quite unexpected glimpse of what he plans to do with his money.

**Kylie Robison** (1:52)
Yeah. An MRI machine, which is nuts for an AI startup. You just wrote about a rich guy doing fancy things with his money.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:01)
Yeah. He's created what, okay, so we're at this event, there's hors d'oeuvres, it's in some new club. They told me the person at the front desk told me it opened in February. It's like a members-only thing. We weren't supposed to take any pictures or photos. I of course had my glasses on even though they made us turn our phone off.
For a while, we're schmoozing, we're having cocktails, then David sits down to, yes, we're going to unveil this thing. It's this full body scan to check on your health. It does crazy 3D scan of your body. Then he said this is one of eight products that Mid Journey is going to do that all seem, at least a little field of what the company has been doing. He said there will be four hardware products, four software. The first two were unveiled which was the scanner plus a spa, which we're going to tell you all about. So these were the first two. Then he said the others are coming. It sounded like over the course of this year.

**Kylie Robison** (3:00)
Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:01)
He didn't give too many hints, although we'll scoop it early. We heard from the chatter at the party that one of them is probably some kind of brain computer interface.

**Kylie Robison** (3:09)
Yeah. Which I can't imagine Mid Journey making a BCI. It requires so much attention and really amazing scientists and engineers to pull off.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:20)
We have quite a lot of BCIs now.
I just don't know where you take this because we've got Neuralink doing the most extreme end of full-on surgery, putting electrodes right against your neurons. We've got other people sitting right on top of the brain. We have other people doing ultrasound already. So there's quite a variety of BCIs than Merge Labs we wrote about. They're trying and I just don't know how many takes. There's only so much you can do.

**Kylie Robison** (3:46)
One of the founders of Merge was there.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:48)
Sumner, a Core Memory subscriber.
Yeah, so I just don't know how many takes there are. So anyway, I don't think we... We didn't learn much beyond... We just heard they're working on a BCI.

**Kylie Robison** (3:59)
Yeah, I was not familiar with Butterfly.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:03)
Yes.

**Kylie Robison** (4:04)
So it has a lot of those.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:06)
Oh, for the full body scan.

**Kylie Robison** (4:08)
Yeah, for the full body scan.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:09)
Yeah, so there's Butterfly Networks, I think it's called. It's Jonathan Rothberg, who I run across a little bit. So they make a portable ultrasound machine. You people might have seen it, just like a handheld ultrasound. And so it has this chip and mid-journey, well, quite clearly, the CEO of Butterfly was there.
They've taken these, just a ton of these chips and arranged them to create the scanner.