Midjourney Builds a Full-Body Ultrasonic CT Scanner. No Radiation. No Investors. No Precedent.

Start with the sourcing context. Nick St. Pierre posted the thread explaining this project, and his own bio identifies him as an "unofficial Midjourney shill." He is not a Midjourney employee. This is not an official press release from the company. It is a well-informed and enthusiastic fan laying out what Midjourney appears to have built, and it deserves to be read with that framing. The details are extraordinary enough to cover in full, but do not mistake a fan explainer for a corporate announcement.

What was described: a full-body ultrasonic CT scanner. 358,000 ultrasonic transducers across 40 rings, firing 100 million times per second. The patient lowers into a water bath for roughly 60 seconds. No radiation, no magnetic field, no sedation required. The scanner generates 17 gigabytes per second of raw data, with each full scan reconstruction requiring 806 terabytes of compute running across 21 on-site servers delivering two petaflops of processing. The output is sub-millimeter 3D tissue maps. On day one of testing, it was already outperforming MRI on some tissue boundary and muscle fiber detail measurements, at roughly 10 times lower cost and 60 times faster scan time. This would be the first new whole-body medical imaging modality in approximately 50 years.

There are people quietly building tools that could save millions of lives, and they are doing it without venture capital, without government grants, without asking anyone for permission. Today's lead story is one of the most encouraging developments in technology we have covered in this newsletter.

For every AI doomer insisting that nothing real is happening at the tip of the AI revolution, that the valuations are fantasy, that the productivity gains are illusory: this is undeniable. Midjourney reached $200 million in revenue in its first year selling image generation subscriptions. Fully bootstrapped, zero institutional investors. David Holz started with approximately $200,000, called Google cold when he needed 10,000 GPUs, and built the whole operation on trust and product quality. His mentor told him early that he could bootstrap the entire thing. He did. That self-funded model then quietly redirected its resources toward building a medical scanner using an entirely different modality from anything the imaging industry has attempted in five decades. The technology is legitimate. The investment is worth it. Midjourney arguably built the coolest AI application yet, and they did it without a single check from a VC fund.

We have talked on this show with guests like Dr. Ahmad Ammous about the ways hospitals fail human beings before the medicine even starts. The environment is clinical to the point of being punishing. Fluorescent lighting, cold institutional surfaces, rooms optimized for sterility in every sense, including the emotional one. Patients arrive already afraid and spend their time in a physical space designed to reinforce that fear. What Midjourney is building instead is a spa. Not metaphorically. The first location in Union Square, San Francisco is a 25,000 square foot, four-floor space combining hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, and a gym alongside 9 to 10 scanners. They are reimagining what preventive healthcare looks and feels like from the foundation up. That choice is not incidental. It reflects a coherent philosophy about human dignity and what the experience of caring for your body should feel like.

The gravity of what gets disrupted here is worth appreciating slowly. Medical imaging technology that has defined the diagnostic landscape for decades. MRI machines that cost millions of dollars, scan times measured in hours, access bottlenecked by credentialed facilities, insurance authorization, and scheduling queues that stretch weeks out. What Midjourney is describing is 10 times cheaper and 60 times faster, available in a location you could walk into. Tumor detection caught years earlier. Disease screening for people who currently skip it because it is too expensive or too slow. Blood clot identification. Pregnancy imaging. The FDA regulatory path extends from body composition to physician data sharing, blood flow analysis, and eventually incisionless surgery via focused ultrasound. Total capex to reach full scale is modeled at $20 billion, with Holz planning to self-fund the first Union Square location and projecting a six-month payback per site. The target is 50,000 scanners across roughly 5,000 locations globally, generating a billion scans per month. The downstream impact on population health outcomes is genuinely massive for humanity.

We use Midjourney every single day at TFTC to generate thumbnail images for this newsletter. We have watched this company operate with genuine craft and bootstrapped integrity for years, building slowly, staying independent, putting product quality above growth metrics at every turn. Here is the irony worth sitting with: an AI company that had solved a hard technical problem, was printing money from it, and could have deployed that capital on literally any problem in the world chose medical scanning. They did not take venture money. They did not sell to a strategic acquirer. The most impactful AI application may have come from a company that never took a dollar of VC funding. That is the story of Midjourney in a sentence, and it is a very good one.

MONETARY POLICY

The Dot Plot Just Flipped. Nine of 18 Fed Officials Now Project at Least One Rate Hike by Year-End.

Why it matters: In March the Fed was projecting a cut. The first Warsh-era dot plot shows a committee that has pivoted fully to hiking, while Warsh simultaneously launches a structural overhaul of how the institution operates.

The updated dot plot reversed the March projections completely. Nine of 18 FOMC officials now see at least one rate hike by year-end. Eight see rates on hold. One sees a cut. The median rate projection for 2026 moved from 3.4 percent to 3.8 percent. Warsh did not submit his own dot, consistent with his longstanding criticism that the mechanism creates false precision and misleads market expectations.

The structural story runs alongside the rate story. Warsh announced five task forces to overhaul Fed operations: communications, balance sheet management, data sources, productivity and AI, and inflation frameworks. Policy statements are getting shorter. The communications architecture that gave markets a roadmap every six weeks is being redesigned. This is a new Fed. As Luke Gromen warned on the show, the bond market has been saying tick-tock in both rate posture and institutional design.

POLICY

The Bank Secrecy Act Was Barely Constitutional in the 1970s. It's a Surveillance Dragnet Now.

The $10,000 reporting threshold that justified the BSA would be roughly $130,000 today.

Kyle Olney helped the government resolve more than 140 failing banks during the 2008 financial crisis for the FDIC. He knows how Washington wields financial power. In our conversation with Kyle about the second front in the policy fight, he made the case that the Bank Secrecy Act is probably unconstitutional. When the BSA passed in the 1970s, the $10,000 reporting threshold was the inflation-adjusted equivalent of roughly $130,000 today. Supreme Court justices at the time barely found the law passable, and only because they believed a $10,000 transaction was uncommon enough that few ordinary Americans would ever trigger a suspicious activity report.

The statute was never indexed for inflation. Fifty years of currency debasement later, $10,000 is a routine transaction for millions of Americans: a security deposit, a used car, a modest home repair. The BSA has become exactly what those original justices feared, a financial surveillance dragnet that sweeps up ordinary people conducting ordinary commerce. Kyle points out that even on its own terms, the system is theater: Jeffrey Epstein triggered over a thousand suspicious activity reports moving more than a billion dollars through the banking system over a decade, and nothing was done.

Meanwhile, the CLARITY Act is moving through the Senate. If the BRCA carve-out that protects non-custodial developers gets diluted, writing open-source wallet software could become a federal crime. Two separate battles, one shared principle: the right to transact without asking the government for permission.

REGULATION

Illinois Just Signed the Most Aggressive Bitcoin Tax in the United States

Why it matters: This is not a capital gains tax. It is a tax on movement. Illinois is charging on every transfer, exchange, and custody arrangement involving digital assets, with no comparable treatment of any other financial instrument in existence.

Starting January 2027, Illinois will impose a 0.20 percent tax on the gross value of digital assets exchanged, transferred, or stored for customers. Buy bitcoin in Illinois: taxed. Transfer it: taxed. Hold it with a custodian: taxed. No profit required. No capital gain required. Move $1 million through a bank wire and Illinois takes nothing. Move that same $1 million as a digital asset and the state takes $2,000. No comparable tax on stocks, bonds, derivatives, or bank deposits exists anywhere in the country. The message to every Bitcoin company operating in Illinois is unambiguous: leave.

TECHNOLOGY

Block Ships Builderbot: Fifteen Percent of Production Code Now AI-Generated

Why it matters: This is what AI-native engineering looks like at scale, inside a company that also enables Bitcoin purchases for millions of merchants worldwide.

Block rolled out Builderbot, an AI orchestration layer deployed across their entire codebase. 200,000 operations per day. 1,500 pull requests merged per week, roughly 15 percent of all production code changes. Engineers use Slack to tag @builderbot with a task description. It picks up tickets from Linear or Jira, creates branches, writes code, opens PRs, and monitors CI automatically. What previously took months now takes days. Builderbot is built on goose, Block's open source agent framework, contributed to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation. Block also co-developed MCP with Anthropic. One hundred percent of Block's engineers now regularly use AI tools. This is not a pilot. It is production at scale. And Block enables Bitcoin purchases for millions of merchants through Square and Cash App.

Set Up Silent Payments in Sparrow Wallet

One address you can share publicly. Every payment lands at a unique address on-chain. Nobody watching can tell those payments share a recipient.

Sparrow Wallet now supports Silent Payments (BIP-352). You publish a single sp1 address, share it as widely as you want, and every sender automatically generates a unique on-chain address. No address reuse, no XPUB to manage, no interaction with the sender required. Paired with the new Frigate server software, scanning for incoming payments is practical for daily use. Follow this hands-on guide to set up your own sp1 address this week.