Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
00:14:14 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
[00:14:14] S1: I think it really depends what motivates you. Some people are excited by seeing those solar bursts and that's all they care about. They would do it even if no one read the papers or they wouldn't even get to write the papers. They just wanna think about solar bursts all day. But I'm personally someone that's also motivated by the recognition and therefore wanna do something where I see the impact either directly or indirectly on the way that we live our lives. [00:14:39] S3: I wanted to ask you about that. You mentioned when you were working in space medicine, which also is super intriguing, like, holy shit. By the way, just like a quick question, how different is the physiology and the needs of the human body in space versus on earth? Like, is it Yeah. Is it drastically different? Or is it Yes. Kind of similar? [00:14:58] S1: I mean, it's still a human body, and you still have to eat and and digest. The impact of gravity on the human body, though, is so much more profound than you will think. We're so used to, like, standing up from a chair and, like, when we're in a headstand, it just feels different. And in in space, that is taken away, and there are many things that happen as a consequence that you wouldn't think of right away. The impact that I spent most time thinking about was on the cardiovascular system where it also has... [00:15:30] S3: That's what I was just starting I was just starting to think that. Yeah.
00:15:30 · Cameron Herold, Victoria Weller
[00:15:30] S3: That's what I was just starting I was just starting to think that. Yeah. [00:15:32] S1: Yeah. Probably the hardest impact apart from muscle dystrophy. So astronauts have to work out for several hours per day to keep up their muscle, but also their bone mass as a result so that they're not completely weakened and stable when returning to Earth. But other than that, the cardiovascular system takes a huge hit as a result of the of gravity not pulling down all liquids to your lower extremities, but rather everything kind of moves up a little bit like you're in a handstand, but maybe somewhere in between. [00:16:05] S3: Yeah. [00:16:05] S1: And the human body has baroreceptors, so ways of measuring the pressure in the upper part, like, of of your body around your chest area. Sure. And if all the liquid is pushed up, the baroreceptors are like, oh, pressure's higher, it must mean that there's too much liquid. And then astronauts that just arrive in space, their their body is like, signal too much liquid. Let's start reducing our blood volume. [00:16:32] S3: Yeah.
00:16:32 · Cameron Herold, Victoria Weller
[00:16:32] S3: Yeah. [00:16:32] S1: They pee a lot, reduce the blood volume, everything's back to normal. They have a great time while they're up there and everything's like transferred... The blood is transferred up. But then when they go back to earth and everything's pulled to their feet, they often, like, they can't walk or they would faint when they walk. Wow. And there are many things that you can do to prevent that in a couple chapters in that book where it's about, like, what you can do to one, like, study it on Earth without having to go to space to see what happens, but also what can you do, be it like drink a bunch of salt water before returning to earth to make sure that once you arrive, you are actually more okay than you would be if you didn't have any anti precautionary measures. [00:17:17] S3: Okay. So like that science seems to be extraordinarily fascinating and also extraordinarily useful considering that we're working towards this being an interplanetary species where we are, you know, doing more in space. We are looking at potentially colonizing Mars. Like these are answers that are not only intriguing, but also we need to understand this soon. [00:17:39] S1: Yeah. Soon. Soonish. Soonish. Okay. Alright. Think I think relevant for Mars One, but I think AI is more relevant to the average. [00:17:51] S3: Alright. So so better left for a dinner party conversation than still. So then [00:17:55] S1: For another Burning Man conversation.
00:17:55 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
[00:17:55] S1: For another Burning Man conversation. [00:17:56] S3: Yeah. Another Burning Man conversation. So then you then you get to work in AI. I mean, clearly it is the hottest industry and business areas being talked about today. And you're in the in the kind of text to speech side of things which is also super intriguing because, so so talk to us a little bit about what ElevenLabs is working on.
00:18:17 · Victoria Weller
[00:18:17] S1: Yeah. ElevenLabs, as you mentioned, is a text to speech company. And our mission is to make content universally accessible in any language and voice. So you could dub a podcast that is still spoken in your voice into another language. That's like the the goal. The more immediate use cases are inputting text and outputting audio. For example, if you want to create an audiobook, you can upload the EPUB file, that is the format in which audiobooks come, and then you can immediately instantly create the spoken version of that. You can even go as far as instead of having one voice read the entire audiobook, you can give each character their own voice and then have the dialogues with different characters, which I think is in... Is such a fun improvement to what... How we know audiobooks at the moment. So those are two examples of how text to speech can be used. And ElevenLabs is one of the the leading AI companies in that space with the best models that are really great at creating emotionality in the voices and having contextual awareness as well. And this contextual awareness is where AI really really feeds in and where AI has allowed a breakthrough for text to speech compared to how, you know, Alexa speaks or Siri speaks, where the model understands what it is saying and therefore can say it in exactly the right way. So you could say a sentence and it's like, hi, my name is Victoria. I'm really sad. And that will come out sounding a lot sadder than if you'd say, hi, I'm Victoria. I'm so happy. That would come out like more excited because of the context of that sentence. And you could also clone voices, so you could have that sentence spoken in by me without me having to sit and record it in the first place in the happy and the sad version potentially.
00:20:20 · Cameron Herold, S0
[00:20:20] S3: Yeah. What I what I love about 11, and I've heard about 11 now over the last few months almost weekly. Someone has mentioned it [00:20:27] S0: for for a few for