Second in Command: The Chief Behind the Chief with Cameron Herold
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.
00:19:00 · Cameron Herold, Victoria Weller
[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. [00:19:23] S2: Yeah. Soon. Soonish. Soonish. Okay. Alright. Think I think relevant for Mars One, but I think AI is more relevant to the average. [00:19:35] S1: Alright. So better left for a dinner party conversation than still. So then [00:19:38] S2: For another Burning Man conversation. [00:19:40] S1: Yeah. Another Burning Man conversation. So 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 kind of text to speech side of things, which is also super intriguing because... So talk to us a little bit about what ElevenLabs is working on.
00:20:01 · Victoria Weller
[00:20:01] S2: 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 goal. The more immediate use cases are inputting text and outputting audio. For example, if you want to create an audio book, you can upload the EPUB file that is the format in which audio books 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 such a fun improvement to 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 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 would say, Hi, I'm Victoria. I'm so happy. They will 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 and record it in the first place in the happy and the sad version potentially.