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

**John Coogan** (0:00)
Mid-Journey, why Mid-Journey pivoted to Mediocom Machines? It's not a pivot, it's an expansion.
It's a second act, a third act for David Hull's fantastic entrepreneur, extremely inspiring entrepreneur. Maybe we should give some background on David Hull.

**Jordi Hays** (0:15)
Wait, should we talk about the show today first?

**John Coogan** (0:17)
Yeah, please.

**Jordi Hays** (0:18)
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 line up today at 1130

**John Coogan** (0:42)
Yeah.

**Jordi Hays** (0:45)
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 at the end of the show.

**John Coogan** (0:59)
Live in the TBPN Altron. 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. Grew up in Florida, son of a dentist. He's not the dog walker. He's on Team Dentist over there.

**Jordi Hays** (1:27)
Son of a dentist.

**John Coogan** (1:28)
We have a son of a dentist on our team. And played video games growing up.

**Tyler** (1:33)
Dentist son Cam. Look at those teeth. Oh, wow.
Wow.

**John Coogan** (1:38)
Nepo teeth?

**Jordi Hays** (1:40)
Nepo teeth.

**John Coogan** (1:40)
He's got Nepo teeth.

**Jordi Hays** (1:41)
Go back, go back, cut back.

**John Coogan** (1:42)
Look at that.

**Jordi Hays** (1:43)
Big smile, big smile. There we go.

**John Coogan** (1:45)
He's got the Nepo teeth. That's crazy. That's crazy.

**Jordi Hays** (1:48)
That's crazy.

**John Coogan** (1:49)
Wow.

**Jordi Hays** (1:51)
Your father really saved his best for you.

**John Coogan** (1:52)
Born on third base, 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, 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 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.

**Tyler** (2:59)
Yeah, and so when David was talking about the back story, he was kind of going through some of the technicalities of how the Leap Motion worked. It was incredible, because he was like, I mean, this is early 20 teens, he's using these deep neural nets, he said. It was a mixture of Xhertz model. It was like incredibly far ahead of the curve, just on deep learning.
It's just on this kind of weird side project, it's doing hand motion.

**John Coogan** (3:23)
Yeah, everyone thought VR was gonna 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.
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 on boarded today, and then the deal fell through, which is crazy. You don't see that normally.

**Jordi Hays** (4:01)
David turned it down.

**John Coogan** (4:02)
He turned it down. There is some crazy reporting about getting in and basically being like, this is too corporate, or 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?