Matthew Finkelstein

Cofounder: member of Raoul Wallenberg Jewish Dem club SF.
Podcast host on Davka Smola

[Roz Rothstein @RozRothstein]

We remember the important words and legacy of the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks as we combat the ever-growing virus of antisemitism.

May Rabbi Sacks' memory forever be a blessing, and may his wisdom serve as an inspiration for all.

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. Something just happened today that I genuinely did not see coming — and it could change the future of preventive medicine more than anything I've written about on this platform.
Midjourney — the AI company that became famous for generating images from text prompts — just announced a medical hardware division and unveiled a working prototype of a full-body scanner unlike anything that's ever existed.
It's called the Midjourney Scanner. And it works like this.
You step into a shallow pool of water. You stand on a platform that slowly descends — about two inches per second — through a ring containing roughly half a million tiny ultrasonic transducers, each the size of a grain of sand. Every one of them acts as both a speaker and a microphone, sending ultrasonic waves through your body from every angle and recording what comes back.
60 seconds later, you step out. The scan is done.
No radiation. No magnets. No claustrophobia. No IV contrast. Just sound, water, and an almost incomprehensible amount of computing power — roughly 2 petaflops processing 17 gigabytes per second of raw acoustic data — reconstructing a 3D map of your entire internal anatomy down to half a millimeter resolution.
Organs. Tissues. Blood vessels. Bones. Muscle. Fat distribution. All segmented by AI in real time.
As a cardiologist who has spent months writing about how the standard screening playbook misses the majority of future heart attacks — this is the technology I've been waiting for without knowing it existed.
Here's why this matters for the future of your heart.
Right now, getting a detailed look inside your cardiovascular system requires either a CT scan (radiation), an MRI (magnets, claustrophobia, 45-60 minutes, $1,000+), or a coronary CT angiogram (radiation, IV contrast, limited availability). These are powerful tools. I order them regularly and they save lives.
But they're reactive. You get them when something is already suspected. They're expensive. They're uncomfortable. And for most people, they happen once — maybe twice — in a lifetime.
Imagine instead: a 60-second scan with no radiation that you could repeat monthly or quarterly. Tracking cardiac structure over time. Watching body composition shift. Detecting changes in organ size, fluid distribution, or vascular architecture before symptoms ever develop. Building a longitudinal dataset of YOUR body that AI can analyze for patterns no single snapshot would reveal.
That's what Midjourney is building toward.
The company plans 50,000 scanners worldwide over six years, with capacity for a billion scans per month. The first location — the "Midjourney Spa" in San Francisco — opens at the end of 2027 with 10 scanners alongside saunas, cold plunges, and a gym. The scan costs a few dollars. The experience is designed to feel like wellness, not medicine.
The technology is built on Butterfly Network's ultrasound-on-chip platform — 40 modules per scanner — combined with Midjourney's own AI segmentation and reconstruction stack. David Holz, the founder, claims the system aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many aspects but at nearly 100x the speed with zero radiation.
Now the caveats — because I'm a physician and the caveats matter enormously.
This is a Gen 1 prototype. About a dozen people have been scanned so far. Current scan time is actually closer to 20 minutes, not 60 seconds — the system is bottlenecked by bandwidth and reconstruction algorithms. The 60-second target is aspirational for future hardware generations.
It is not FDA-cleared for diagnostic use. Midjourney is starting with body composition maps — a category below diagnostic imaging in the regulatory hierarchy. The path from "beautiful 3D body scans" to "clinically validated diagnostic tool that your cardiologist can act on" runs through years of clinical trials, comparative studies against MRI and CT gold standards, and FDA review.
No independent clinical validation has been published. The imaging claims come from Midjourney's own demonstrations. Comparative data against established modalities does not yet exist.
And the privacy implications of full-body internal scans at planetary scale — a billion scans per month — is a conversation that hasn't even started yet.
So I want to be precise. This is not ready for clinical medicine today. It may not be ready for years. Many ambitious medical hardware projects have failed in the gap between prototype and product.
But.
The fact that a working prototype exists — producing real segmented 3D anatomy from sound waves and compute alone — means the physics works. The engineering works. The question is no longer "is this possible" but "how fast can it be validated and scaled."
And if it is validated — if the resolution holds up against MRI, if the AI segmentation proves reliable, if the regulatory path clears — then what we're looking at is the most significant new imaging modality in 50 years.
For my entire career, preventive cardiology has been limited by the fact that seeing inside the body is expensive, slow, uncomfortable, and infrequent. We catch disease late because we image rarely. We image rarely because imaging is hard.
A 60-second, no-radiation, spa-based full-body scan that costs a few dollars would demolish every one of those barriers.
I've written about AI detecting inflamed arteries. About gene editing curing cholesterol. About GLP-1 drugs rewriting metabolic medicine. About cellular reprogramming reversing aging.
This is the missing piece: the ability to see inside every human body, routinely, safely, and affordably — so all of those interventions can be deployed before the disease arrives instead of after.
The company that taught AI to generate images from imagination just built a machine that generates images from the human body.
The future of medicine showed up today from the last place anyone expected.

[Rabbi Poupko @RabbiPoupko]

Was it Joseph Goebbels who said in 1939: "those monsters move millions of dollars in dark money to preserve their single goal: to divide us so they can hold on to power"

No, it was Zohran Mamdani in 2026.

Any historian or academic pretending not to know what is going on here is either lying to themselves or to the public.

[Matthew Finkelstein @ProgressivZion]

@DumisaniTemsgen @Osint613 "Blah blah blah is right"

[Matthew Finkelstein @ProgressivZion]

@TheChiefNerd Iran tried to assassinate Trump and failed. Trump responded by blowing up their entire country. I guess by that logic he should have let them keep taking shots. At this point I wouldn't even object.

[Matthew Finkelstein @ProgressivZion]

Calling Michelle Obama a man is peak racist trash. I wish Jewish space lasers existed. Imagine the expression on Joe Rogan's face as that bigot gets instantly vaporized on national television.

[Matthew Finkelstein @ProgressivZion]

@marindatanow Nothing to do with the fact that Hamas has ZERO technocratic capacity because their a bunch of butchering warlords who won't spare a dime for taking out the fucking trash so rats don't run around everywhere. When you're run by rats, rats is what you get.

[Matthew Finkelstein @ProgressivZion]

The Western conceit to Palestinians victimhood is offering up Jewish scapegoats as mea culpa for colonialism. Having pushed the Jew out of Europe, and into their midst they think they can mollify the Arab mob by dislocating blame for their condition upon him. 2 birds one stone.

[Matthew Finkelstein @ProgressivZion]

@arash_tehran Yeah because the multilateralist UN plan for Somalia has been working out great. If only we'd given the warlords more welfare money to pilfer. Thats enough outdated thirdworldist delusions for one day. I can't read any more Arash.

[Matthew Finkelstein @ProgressivZion]

@sgcarney First time seeing your videos on Youtube today. Zoomed in on your background and saw you impressive 2nd ed and Warhammer old school and thought 'now here's an analyst whose view point I could use.'

[Matthew Finkelstein @ProgressivZion]

@havivrettiggur There's a dearth of options for deescalating with Hezbollah. The aid framework is politically off the table as a rearmement guarantor. What MOD exists for Israeli security?

[Matthew Finkelstein @ProgressivZion]

https://t.co/xabUlRK2Yp
@IANempowers

[Matthew Finkelstein @ProgressivZion]

Why do people do this when their team wins?

[Intelligent Advocacy Network @IANempowers]

📣IAN's latest! CAIR-CA was awarded $40 million in federal @HHSGov funds through the State of California. As Hussam Ayloush touts his organization's "compliance", the audits tell a very different story. 👇
@SecKennedy @SecRubio @StateDept @DOJ_EOIR
Read IAN's report: https://t.co/z0GuMB5dSQ

[Matthew Finkelstein @ProgressivZion]

The federal govt is closing in on the CAIR's corruption very quickly now. We're happy to have played a feature role in providing the core findings.

[Intelligent Advocacy Network @IANempowers]

🚨 Great news! IAN first broke the story in March 2025 and now HHS is probing CAIR-CA over tens of millions in Afghan refugee funds and alleged ties to Hamas revealed through our ongoing research. @nypost @isareport @HHSGov @SecRubio @DOJ_EOIR @StateDept
https://t.co/HwSVSvPlxk

[Matthew Finkelstein @ProgressivZion]

@IANempowers @nypost @isareport @HHSGov @SecRubio @DOJ_EOIR @StateDept None of these proceedings would even be happening if it wasn't for @IANempowers's research. This work constitutes the core of the complaint.

[Matthew Finkelstein @ProgressivZion]

@coldxman @tylercowen @JohnHMcWhorter recently stated he thought Israel was committing a genocide. I wish you'd have had a conversation with him about that on the merits while he was on.

[Matthew Finkelstein @ProgressivZion]

Beautiful.

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

Tajikistan, a 97% Muslim-majority country which had already banned burqas and hijabs, is now turning mosques into dance halls to fight radicalization.

Do you like this idea?