Derek Bennion

Principal Industrial Designer @webergrills | Founder of THOP™ and GT11

[Derek Bennion @derekbennion]

Building THOP — The Human Optimization Protocol.
A performance and health optimization system focused on clarity, consistency, and measurable progress.
Early stages, more to come. https://t.co/D39o3o4n1O

[Derek Bennion @derekbennion]

@TechCrunch 👀

[Derek Bennion @derekbennion]

@appleinsider

[Bart Mol @Bart_Mol]

Me explaining AI to friends

[Derek Bennion @derekbennion]

@cybrtrkguy Pretty nice design though, hopefully one day it becomes more feasible

[Derek Bennion @derekbennion]

@Polymarket

[Derek Bennion @derekbennion]

@ninjamattic @wholemars 3d print a lid

[Derek Bennion @derekbennion]

@ScottPresler @JamesOKeefeIII Yikes

[Derek Bennion @derekbennion]

@TFTC21 Yikes

[Derek Bennion @derekbennion]

@sama 👀

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Data centers barely use any water, barely use any land, and they lower electric bills.

[Derek Bennion @derekbennion]

@steipete @badlogicgames

[Peter Steinberger 🦞 @steipete]

Are we still talking loops or did we shift to graphs yet?

[Palmer Luckey @PalmerLuckey]

Everyone who thinks AI slop will ruin code efficiency/performance is going to be so surprised when everything is absurdly well-optimized John Carmack style machine code.

[Derek Bennion @derekbennion]

@michellezfr So weird, I’d rather just type

[Derek Bennion @derekbennion]

@asha_shar 14 layers of management lol

[Jacob Coffman @JakeC0ffman]

I don't think people realize how revolutionary home robotics will be for modern life.

My wife and I talk about this constantly. We want to go on a walk with our daughter after work but one of us needs to cook dinner so we rotate.

We put the baby down for the evening but have a house to clean so one of us showers while the other cleans the house and the kitchen.

Someday this work will be done by a robot - the hours that we have lost over the years will come back to us because of companies like @weaverobotics

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

What is going on.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

I wouldn't worry about this. Wearables are valuable for their relative tracking.

They help you compare yesterday to today and learn things like how your sleep changes when you drink alcohol before bed.

A device that is consistent is reliable. It reproduces its own reading from the same conditions. The most commonly worn wearables are sufficiently reliable to make relative measurement useful.

There are many engineering, data analysis, and algorithm reasons why two brands generate different numbers but that doesn't really change the value much. It's helping people develop intuitions about what helps or hurts their health.

[Derek Bennion @derekbennion]

@theStarWarsHQ Hope this works with VR too

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

The Midjourney scanner is revolutionary. There’s a bullish case that exceeds the most optimistic takes.

I was at the unveiling and used the scanner myself. I personally want to experiment with a weekly whole body Midjourney scan to add to my 1.5 billion data points and let my AI and doctors start connecting the dots.

Most of the early commentary has focused on the wrong questions: “is it as good as MRI?” and “what about false positives?” These are legitimate concerns, but they miss the bigger shift.

The more important question is: what does fast, low cost, safe whole body imaging unlock?

Let’s start with measurement.

A speedometer tells you how fast you are going. A fuel/battery gauge tells you when to stop. A thermostat tells you what to wear. The stock price tells you how much money you’ve made or lost. We measure what we care about.

Except, oddly, for our bodies, which are among the least measured things in our lives. Most people have more data on their favorite sports team, bank account, and social media performance than their body. The future will think we were crazy for this.

The first law of medicine is to do no harm. Our current system has harm baked into it.

+ an undiagnosed condition progressing silently is harm
+ a doctor who can’t easily get a patient screened preventively is harm
+ having no baseline to compare against when something shows up is harm

Our preventive net is narrow and inconsistent. Late stage diagnoses that could have been caught earlier remain common. Midjourney’s technology won’t eliminate that overnight, but it points toward a future where routine wholebody baselines become normal rather than exceptional.

Midjourney can help flip harm-by-default into a new expectation for our health infrastructure: almost no one will ever again be blindsided by a late-stage, life-threatening diagnosis that could have been caught earlier reasonably and cost-effectively.

Some examples of what earlier structural visibility enables:

+ breast cancer caught while localized has a ~99% five year survival rate. Once it has spread distantly, that drops to around 32%.

+ an abdominal aortic aneurysm kills more than 8 in 10 people when it ruptures. A single ultrasound finds the aorta in 99 percent of people, and screening cuts aneurysm deaths by a third to a half.

Midjourney’s technology will not do it all on its own. Its full angle, water immersion approach works around bone rather than seeing through it, and routes bowel gas to image the full abdominal cross section. Yet two real limits remain: air filled lungs stay a blind spot even here, and the brain is out of reach behind the skull, beyond the torso and legs this scanner covers.

That is fine, and they may improve these areas over time. Midjourney doesn’t need to do it all in order for it to be one of the biggest things to hit medicine in a long time.

Let’s look at where specifically Midjourney may be useful to each of us. We’ll start with where we get data today:

1) Blood draws tell us what is happening chemically.
2) Wearables tell us how the body is functioning.
3) Imaging tells us what is happening structurally.

The third layer, soft tissue, is the one we have never been able to access easily. MRI is great, but it is expensive, intimidating, and slow.

Midjourney's technology excels with soft tissue. Here are three places it could be game changing. There are many more.

1. Metabolic health - fatty liver is one of the earliest structural signs of metabolic dysfunction. It’s strongly linked to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular risk. Being able to track visceral fat, muscle fat infiltration, and liver fat over time could give a much clearer picture than blood markers alone. Over 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy.

2. Endocrine tissue - the same metabolic patterns often cluster with thyroid issues, PCOS, and hypogonadism. Ultrasound can directly image the thyroid and ovarian structures. Fat tissue itself is an endocrine organ, so tracking it structurally adds another useful data layer.

3. Soft tissue + multiomics - new proteomic aging clocks can already predict risk for many chronic diseases from blood proteins. These molecular models could become significantly more powerful when combined with actual structural imaging data. The two are complementary, not competitive.

The real advantage: baseline + longitudinal tracking

The biggest unlock isn’t a single scan. It’s having a baseline followed by regular follow-ups. A one off scan in a moment of concern turns every finding into a potential crisis. Without context, you have no idea whether something is new, stable, or changing. With baseline + repeated measurement, the question changes from “what is this?” to “is this changing?” Most incidental findings stay stable. The dangerous ones tend to grow or evolve. Trajectory is often more informative than any single image or timepoint.This is why false positives become more manageable with frequent, low-friction imaging.

Midjourney has a difficult road ahead. Building robust, clinically validated medical hardware and software is extremely hard. Regulatory, technical, and adoption challenges shouldn’t be understated. Also, David is doing this for the right reasons and he’s well positioned financially to push through the difficulty.

On the horizon

We are moving quickly into a future where we will have continuous biological measurement. It will be all around us, a lot of it invisible and autonomous. Measurement will be in our gyms, beds, homes, clothing, offices, cars, glasses, and wearables. It will also be inside of us, in tissue and circulating in our blood vessels. This moves us from managing crises to preventing them. But this future will not just show up. We need bold builders like David and his team, willing to do the hard work.