Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
00:09:15 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
And then found out about Palantir and applied there as a reliability engineer and joined Palantir in 2019, which was actually my most recent position before ElevenLabs. So I was at Palantir in New York for the first couple of months until the pandemic hit, relocated with them to London, stayed for another couple of years. And now in May switched to a startup called ElevenLabs, which does text to speech AI. And I'm working there as chief of staff and own all the internal operations as well as compliance and hiring and HR and a big hodgepodge of things that are super fast moving and really exciting and exactly what I want to do at the time being. I think you can tell that there's like so many different things that [00:10:06] S1: I did. [00:10:08] S2: But now in one role, I get to do so many different things, which I really enjoy.
00:10:08 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
[00:10:08] S2: But now in one role, I get to do so many different things, which I really enjoy. [00:10:13] S1: I'm I'm kind of dumbfounded. I mean, anyone who's watching this on our YouTube channel, we have a Second in Command podcast YouTube channel, will see why I'm dumbfounded. You don't look old enough to have done all this stuff. But and but even when you said, you know, you got your masters in your early twenties or you started your masters in your early twenties, you've really done a lot at quite a young age. Know, clearly, I mean, anyone to clearly to work in astrophysics is clearly smart. And I'm glad you gave us a bit of a glimpse as to what astrophysics is. I've heard of it. Physics was really one of the only courses in high school that I loved and I was never, like, fantastic at, but it made sense to me. I think it appealed to the logic side of of my world. So I'm curious how you go from all of this real science, real kind of esoteric, real kind of, you know, mathematical and then into the business world? Like, do you how do you make that leap? It doesn't seem like a very logical leap, but I know that you've done it and and many engineers are running, you know, tech companies. So Yeah. How do you learn business and how have you made that leap?
00:11:13 · Victoria Weller
[00:11:13] S2: Yeah, for me, it was in the end. Mostly it came down to logic for that leap. And the more time I spent with astrophysics or with physics and research, I realized the timeframes over which huge changes and impact happens. Before going to Edinburgh during my studies, I also did an internship at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. And for my entire summer, I was analyzing the gamma ray bursts and the spectral catalog of these explosions that had been seen over the last two years. And I spent six weeks just selecting the background in the foreground. And this was a tiny part of a huge spectral catalog, which in turn was a tiny part of a bigger piece of research, which might take someone a lifetime to find something that is truly life changing or in their world life changing, and then ends up being not really life changing to the rest of the civilization. So I realized that you are very much in a niche that not many others care about, but you also operate on terrestrial or extraterrestrial time frames where it's taken the light millions of years to reach you. And it might take you many years as well to have an moment from it. And so that I realized that wasn't the speed that I want to operate at, as well as the locations usually where these things happen, especially astrophysics research happens. We spoke briefly about the light interference of satellite observatories. But for observatories on Earth, that's an even bigger consideration. You can't be close to city because the city lights and the pollution and the scattering of light makes all of your extraterrestrial observations worse. And so you end up being in the Atacama Desert or anywhere by design that is dark and is far away from civilization, but is also like in need of a lot of space and therefore cheap. And I'm I like Berlin and New York and London. And so there was a contradiction there as well. And then there's a financial aspect. Then there's the... For me, it's really important to get along with colleagues and love who I work with. And at some point, I also realized that those people are more in the business world rather than in Okay. The research
00:13:55 · Cameron Herold, Victoria Weller
[00:13:55] S1: So I got to ask you one final question around physics, and then we'll kind of dive into 11 in the business world. So are there extraterrestrials, and are we living in a simulation? [00:14:06] S2: Both amazing questions. I don't know how you expect me to answer them really quickly before talking about ElevenLabs. I don't know. It would be really fun if either of these were true. For the first one, I would say like, what gives us the right to think that we're the only civilization out there? The universe is so vast, surely. I don't have better insight there to other people. But I think for that one, I had to choose, would like to believe that yes. And for the latter, I think not. I think this is real. Who knows? [00:14:45] S1: I think for the latter, it's a fun Burning Man conversation, but it's not necessarily it's not necessarily one that really makes sense. But, you know, for for the exes, it just doesn't make any sense how we can be the only species in the entire solar universe. It it it just makes no sense. And and that will probably be the one regret that I would have before I die that we don't find something. Like, it would just... That's kind of the one unanswered thing that would be kinda cool other than, like, why are we here, which [00:15:10] S2: Yeah. [00:15:10] S1: We'll never figure that one out.
00:15:10 · Cameron Herold, Victoria Weller
[00:15:10] S1: We'll never figure that one out. [00:15:12] S2: That's another really frustrating thing about physics is you spend so much time trying to find the answer to these unsolved problems and you might die before the answer is found. And it's just so frustrating to think that you might never know. Like, we we will never know. We won't be there for the answer of these things. And that's maybe another thing that deterred me from from from physics. [00:15:34] S1: It makes sense that it would deter you because I think all of a sudden your intelligence and logic would kick in and say, like, what's the fucking point of doing all this work if it just isn't gonna be used or pay off or if no one's really gonna care? Like, I see that one solar burst and great. Three people care. Like, really? I just spent a year doing something, know what? I get it. So it makes sense. [00:15:53] S2: 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 want to do something where I see the impact either directly or indirectly on the way that we live our lives.
00:15:53 · Victoria Weller, Cameron Herold
[00:15:53] S2: 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 want to do something where I see the impact either directly or indirectly on the way that we live our lives. [00:16:19] S1: So I want... 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 a quick question. How different is the physiology and and the the needs of the human body in space versus on Earth? Like, is it drastically different or is it similar? [00:16:39] S2: I mean, it's still a human body and you still have to eat 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 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 [00:17:11] S1: has That's what I just starting to think that.