Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
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.
00:17:11 · Cameron Herold, Victoria Weller
[00:17:11] S1: has That's what I just starting to think that. [00:17:13] S2: Yeah, 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 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. [00:17:46] S1: And
00:17:46 · Cameron Herold, Victoria Weller
[00:17:46] S1: And [00:17:47] S2: the human body has baroreceptors, so ways of measuring the pressure in the upper part of your body around your chest area. And if all the liquid is pushed up, the baroreceptors are like, oh, pressure is higher. It must mean that there's too much liquid. And then astronauts that just arrive in space, the body is like, Okay, signal too much liquid. Let's start reducing our blood volume. 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. There are many things that you can do to prevent that in a couple of 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. [00:19:00] S1: Okay. So like that science seems to be extraordinarily fascinating and 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 that are not only intriguing, but also we need to understand this soon.