Alex Wiltschko

Corey Grant, it's awesome to be here.

I'm excited to chat.

So, I mean, let's talk in analogies.

What does it mean to digitize sound, which is what we're all experiencing right now?

There's three steps.

Take the physical world, which is vibrating airwaves, and turn that into a digital signal.

So that's what a microphone does.

That had to get invented at one point, right?

Initially, that was literally changing those pressure waves into grooves of a needle carving into a piece of physical material.

Step number two, encode and reason about and then decode that signal, right?

So now we have MP3.

It's a way of compressing and understanding audio.

We've got audio editors.

So first, you got to read the physical world, then you have to map it.

And then you have to write it back out again, right?

So that's what a speaker does, which is it takes those originally just grooves, but now digital signals, and then it moves a surface to recreate those airwaves.

The important thing about all that is those three steps are wildly different.

They're actually three different, totally different steps.

Those are three different technology stacks that each operate under different physical principles, but you have to have them all.

And so we're looking at digitizing the sense of smell, and we have to do all those three steps.