here at ut southwestern, where discoveries change lives. and this spark is just the beginning. follow your spark at ut southwestern. the future of medicine today. if you've been hurt in an accident, who you choose to represent you matters. being part of your community matters. their winning record and level of care matters. the trial attorneys at sweet james are some of the best in the country, consistently delivering some of the top settlements in the state. not only do we win, we win big. so if you're injured in an accident and results matter, call a hometown firm that delivers. call sweet james. we're all about getting you ready for today, especially here in the bay. this week. asml on the rise now. the second most valuable company in europe a murder mystery at an online encyclopedia. novelist stephen harrison and a 26 year old entrepreneur takes on airbnb.

plus, a team creates a digital human to play games alongside you. that's this week on press here. good morning everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. a company called asml just became the second most valuable company in europe. now, you've heard of the most valuable novo nordisk, because you may take one of its products, including ozempic, and you've almost certainly heard of the third biggest, lvmh. although if that doesn't sound familiar, it's brands will sephora, moet and chandon, louis vuitton, among others. which leaves us with asml. it makes things that make chips, specifically lithography. the etching of patterns on silicon wafers. and though the company has a thousand employees in silicon valley, it happens worldwide, worldwide, rather, ralph howell is a vice president of research and development for the company. so this is the second most valuable company in

europe. i believe it's a dutch company, right. but i don't think most people, rafe, have ever heard of it. right so we like to think of ourselves as the most important technology company that you have never heard of. but indeed, we are a multinational company. we're headquartered in the netherlands. but sites worldwide, including here in the states, and we are a leading supplier in the semiconductor industry. this is the industry that manufactures the chips that are in our servers, in our ai forms, in in our laptops, our phones, our cars, and even our refrigerators. right. these, you know, i, you know, i think of an american analogy might be nvidia. i mean here in the valley, everybody knows who nvidia is because it paid for so many of their houses. but you know, outside of the silicon valley, nobody's really ever heard of nvidia either. yeah. that's right. so actually the industry, the semiconductor industry itself is quite large. it's projected to be $1 trillion industry by the end of the decade, yeah. it's an exciting

industry to be part of. and a lot of that industry is coming back to the united states. intel recently started construction in arizona, you have facilities in san diego and connecticut. is there more plans to ramp up us production? you've got a lot going on in the us as it is. we do well. we're just we're growing worldwide everywhere. indeed, we have those three r&d and manufacturing sites that you mentioned. we also have 26, customer service sites all across 20 states in the us. but but indeed, asml is growing now. you're a hardware company mostly, but but software is becoming more and more important. explain to me why. right. so primarily asml makes these large hardware machines called lithography machines that really form the image of a circuit in the chip down on silicon. and it does it many times over. so mass producing chips now we're getting we're getting so small that we're talking down. it's sort of the atomic level. right. so i mean

the, the width of a light wave doesn't that become relevant at this point? it does. i mean, it's interesting to imagine what it takes to manufacture a single transistor, but imagine doing hundreds of billions of transistors, all in a chip that you can hold in your hand, and that is very hard from a lithography point of view. the interaction of the light with the materials and the features. if you were to bring that circuit design into our lithography machine today and just hit go, it simply would not image the circuit down on the chip. and that's where the software part comes in. so we will simulate the physics and the chemistry and all of the processes that happen in that machine in such a way that then we can go back and optimize the machine, optimize the shapes of the patterns in the circuits so that ultimately they do image perfectly down in the silicon. and like you said, indeed, when we help our customers to design the chips that are coming in the

next five years, we are we are talking about distances between transistors and using length scales of angstroms and angstroms are typically used to measure the distances between atoms or the sizes of molecules. so yeah, nature doesn't really allow things to get much smaller than that. it's pretty amazing. now, you know, you're one of the people in charge of research and development. can you keep going? can you keep getting smaller? if we're down that small? well, we can go in three dimensions for sure, and we do. we try to get smaller, so it's really all about the physics. it's about the chemistry. it's about modeling. all of it, it turns out that our best models today are machine learning models that we train with those measurement tools that we also build here in silicon valley, a massive training exercise. and those machine learning models are able to out predict, or at least from an accuracy point of view, the physical models, the chemical models that we have, all of them are important, of course, in

this entire process, you can imagine the team that i that i have, it's, physicists and chemists and data scientists. it's computer scientists because these are running on tens of thousands of cpus. these optimization problems that i discuss in compute centers across multiple cities. so we have a large variety of disciplines here in silicon valley. yeah. and my last question for you is, is, you know, we've seen technology boost chip production in the sense that i mentioned nvidia earlier. nobody, you know, everybody wants their hands on nvidia chips in order to do i are there things like quantum computing that could blow up your business model? because that's an entirely different way of making a computer. yeah, that's interesting to think about. i think from a manufacturing point of view, we will definitely contribute to quantum computing when it's ready. yeah, but fair enough. and probably your average calculator or car probably doesn't need a quantum computer inside of it. not yet, but i'm excited for quantum computing

just as much as anybody else. yeah. all right. fair enough. well, ralph howell, i appreciate you being with us this morning. ralph howell is a vice president of research and development at asml. thanks again, pressure back in the min. explore the new olympic sport of breaking tonight at 8 p.m. on nbc. bay area. chasing gold is sponsored locally on nbc bay area by toyota. proud partner of team usa. get ready for the all new archuleta presents gold over america tour. join simone biles and america's best gymnasts for a night of action packed gymnastics saturday, september 21st at sap center. fun for the whole family. you and your kids will love this high energy spectacle. music, lights, breathtaking flips, and gold squad dancers. let's go! saturday, september 21st at sap center. tickets on sale now at gold over america tour com. this is the most exciting moment in painting when the frog tape

comes off, when all the swatches samples, prep, and pride depend upon frog tape's best in class paint block technology to keep paint out and keep lines sharp from long stretches of baseboards to complicated corners around windows to crown molding that will have you asking, what room should we paint next? frog tape when it matters most, i choose to work where everyone can see how busy i am. i choose pedal power. i choose the freshest beats. i choose to never burrito and drive. whatever you choose, choose transit and do your part to spare the air. good morning everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. one of the most famous fictional mysteries took place on a train. baker street. perhaps that's another good one. the conservatory with a candlestick is a good location, but to my knowledge, no one has ever set a mystery at wikipedia. to which

stephen harrison said challenge accepted. he has set his new mystery, the editors, at a fictionalized version of wikipedia called info pendulum. stephen, good morning to you. i'm not sure an online encyclopedia has the same pizzazz as the orient express, good morning, scott. well, yeah, some some people, and my publisher at one point thought i was a little crazy for writing a thriller inspired by wikipedia, but i just thought it was the perfect setting for a novel because people use wikipedia every day and they don't really think about who are the people behind the information. and you know, what kind of threats it might be under. and so i just thought it was a perfect place to set a mystery and a thriller now. and you're quite the expert on wikipedia in real life. so and they say, write what you know. that's right. yeah. no i got, interested in covering wikipedia back in 2018. and, you know, there are a lot of journalists who would really focused on facebook and google, and i just thought that wikipedia was a website that everyone uses that hadn't been

covered very much. and, and, and so i'm really excited that the novel is coming out august 6th, and that people can kind of get an insight into this, this world that is wikipedia or info point dume as it is in the novel. right? i'll get to info in a minute. but tell me something about wikipedia. what? i mean, people are aware of it. you know, maybe when they google search, they, they they read an article that's on wikipedia. what what is amazing about wikipedia? what fascinates you about it? yeah. well, i think what's really fascinating to me is that there are, you know, it's a website that everyone uses and everyone accesses. and even if you don't go to wikipedia directly, you're getting it in your google search results. you're getting it in your chatgpt lately. but even though so many people are using it, it's really a small, relatively small group of contributors that are volunteering their time and energy to make that site. it's, and so it's really this dedicated contributor base, that of super contributors, that's building this resource, collecting facts from different journalistic sources to build

the site. and one of the examples i like to give is when i was first starting to describe the topic, a report on the topic. i was on new york. i was in new york for business trip, and i saw and i grew up in texas, not much public transportation in texas, and i was interested in the subway, and i was reading the wikipedia articles about the subway. these were extremely detailed pages, and i was like, who writes these? and so i it's of course, it's collaboratively written. you know, lots and lots of editors and, but i looked and saw two main user names, and i reached out to those people and scheduled interviews with them. and it turns out that it was a high school senior and a college student, and they're writing these wikipedia pages at millions of people have read and yeah, it ended up being kind of an interesting story of figuring out who the people are behind the information and writing about them. factually. you're talking about ryan eng, epic genius, right? yeah. yeah, yeah. i mean, he he he does not run the subway system, but he sure knows a heck of a lot about it.

that's right. it's not the transportation experts, or at least not someone who you would think has a formal credential. and yet they are the ones who are writing the information that all of us read about the subway on the site. and so now your characters in at the info pentium, they are editors and you've set that murder mystery there. i've seen the, the cover, the cover is fantastic, do you get to choose the cover? i don't know anything about the publishing world. how does that work? yeah. so? so in this case, you know, my publisher, inkshares, allowed me to have a lot of influence over the cover, a lot of, discussion over the cover. and one of the things that we wanted to build in there is this concept that, you know, wikipedia or antependium is kind of an institution, but it's under threat, there's, there's the cover back there, actually. and, so it's sort of, encapsulates this idea of an internet institution that is being challenged or being threatened to be dissolved by all these different forces. you know, you mentioned foreign languages. one of the things as i was reading some of your

previous writing, that i thought, oh, i'd never thought about that, is that wikipedia is available in many the real wikipedia, not your not info. pentium is available in many languages, but if your language isn't one of them, it almost feels like your culture's not represented. yeah, that's right, i think that, an example of that is welsh wikipedia, which is realized very early on that if they didn't have a robust wikipedia in their language, then tools like siri and alexa wouldn't be able to speak their language. and so they actually kind of smartly reverse engineered it, built up a really big welsh wikipedia, and that's a knowledge base that alexa and siri are using in order to speak the welsh language and kind of reinvigorate that smaller language. well, stephen harrison, i very much enjoy your book, stephen harrison's new book, the editors, is available for preorder now. it'll be in bookstores in early august, and we will make sure to remind you in early august to check it out as we get closer. stephen again, thank you and press here. we'll be back in just a minute.

they are ready to get to it just about. oh my goodness, smartness and power on full display. history made a performance for the ages. there's the exclamation point. the paris olympics coming july 26th. brought to you locally on nbc by stanford medicine children's health access to excellence. if your dog suffers from fear of thunder, fireworks, separation or any other anxieties, thundershirt can help. thundershirt applies gentle, constant pressure to a dog's torso like swaddling an infant. this calming pressure may help your dog stay happy during stressful situations. thundershirt. the number one vet recommended brand is drug free, has a 60 day satisfaction guarantee and has helped over 85% of users. thundershirt find

at retailers like petsmart and petco. buy now before july 4th, fireworks s and g carpet has offered affordable quality since 1948, growing into one of the largest and best family owned flooring companies in america, with showrooms featuring northern california's largest selection of flooring, all backed by s and g's no surprise guarantee and promise to beat any written estimate by 10, go to s.g. carpet comm for the showroom nearest you, or to schedule a free in-home consultation. s and g more than carpet. we're quality is affordable. welcome back to press here. my next guest says he can take the concept that airbnb created and make it better. here's an example of a home on wonder. now from our living room, we can step right on into our state of the art kitchen that that is simply stunning. you have viking stainless steel appliances, wooden cabinetry, and very sleek

white marble countertops. and then on the back side of the kitchen here, you're going to find a little nook area where you have your own separate coffee bar, cocktail bar. and seriously, every single appliance you're going to need during your stay. all that for $1,100 a night. john andrew entwistle is wonder's founder. he's a teal fellow. a student paid $100,000 to drop out of school, and a forbes 30 under 30 and john andrew, among your contemporaries on forbes 30 under 30 list? elizabeth holmes and sam bankman-fried, which i believe they've all found permanent housing. i don't know that you can sell them a vacation home. yes, obviously there are quite a few people on that list alongside some other other great entrepreneurs as well, like dylan field from figma and many others. but yes, those those two are particularly notable for their their misgivings. indeed. indeed they are. i you know, i invited you

on this morning because i want to know you know who who takes on airbnb and also who trusts of what 26 year old with their house, where did all of this start, and how are you so successful with this? absolutely. so yeah, i've i've been an internet entrepreneur since a very young age. i started my first company at 13, 14, which did low six figures in revenue and as you would imagine, meant that i was not focused on my homework much after that. from there, i started my second venture backed company right out of high school, and that that company did fairly well. we raised over $45 million, powered millions of software engineers at companies like vanguard, netflix, robinhood and more. but in terms of, you know, taking on airbnb and starting to think about the vacation rental space, you know, we've all had a bad vacation rental experience, a place that didn't look like the photos. the beds were uncomfortable, the internet was bad. and the big idea behind wander was, what if we could provide sort of this hotel like consistency and cleanliness in the vacation rental space and really give a great, great experience to our travelers? and so that's exactly

what we've done. and now here we are, three years later, close to 100 employees, tons of locations all across the us, and a lot of happy customers and something like, what, $12 million in listings, well, far, far, far more than that, we're probably cresting close to half a half $1 billion worth of real estate on the platform, which is super exciting. outstanding. so, you know, the thing that really appeals to me, and yes, i've had, you know, those those poor experiences with other, you know, sharing rental things is that i can get a hold of somebody. i mean, that's the key, right? is that at two in the morning when the dishwasher is flooding, there's somebody to call? yeah. i mean, it's the same experience that wander. if anything, it's actually elevated to a completely different level. think being able to book a masseuse at the property or a private chef. so whether it's an emergency where you can't find the tv remote and the big game is about to turn on, or you want to have that private chef for that beautiful family outing,

you know, all those things were able to take care of. so it's a really fully integrated experience. now, airbnb owners and, and, you know, and owners on your platform as well tend to move prices around depending on whether it's a weekend or maybe there's some event you think you're pretty good at this, this dynamic pricing. yeah. dynamic pricing is a really tricky problem. as you would imagine. there are thousands of different variables that we look at from occupancy of different homes to seasonality to conversion data. really, our goal is to find what we call the market clearing price. so in the stock market, you obviously have a bid and an ask. and somewhere in between is when that stock actually transacts. and then that's how you find sort of that market price for, for the stock. we kind of deal with it in the same way for really dates. so we look at the conversion data, how many people are initiating a checkout, what that conversion rate is, and then we'll dynamically adjust the price to ensure that obviously we're pricing it where consumers are really exciting. now that being said, we also try and make it something that when someone goes

and experiences the property, they feel like they got a great deal. so we will set a maximum that the homes can be priced at really, just to ensure that everyone has a great time and of course tells all their friends about this great value experience that they had. and finally, john, andrew, i want to ask, which one of is your favorite? that's that's a wonderful question. there are obviously so many incredible properties, but i remember when first starting the company being up in bandon, oregon, which is a small little town on the coast, if you're a golfer, you may be familiar with bandon dunes. and i was looking out and we have this beautiful property, modern glass windows, looking at the ocean. and i remember thinking to myself, if i can duplicate this experience, if we can make it so that we have thousands of properties like this all across the globe, that people can now access, imagine staying at like an architecturally unique home, that this could be a really impactful and important company that delivered a lot of happiness for folks. and so that's probably my favorite just because as a young founder, you know, having those moments is

really important on on a very long journey. well, i appreciate you being with us this morning, john andrew entwistle created wander taking on airbnb at a at age 26. thanks for being with us. and press here. we'll be back next year. the olympic games are coming, but first, the best american athletes have to make team usa the us olympic team trials on nbc and peacock. season 19. the talent is insane. i've never seen anything like this. thank you. i never have done this before. i'm a little scared. we have a medic on standby. what's happening? tuesday on nbc and peacock. exciting. and. we're expecting

you. the noho. so we'll be making another run. it's like. 45 if you're an asbestos victim, pay close attention. billions of dollars are being paid out to people like you. we should know we're whites in luxembourg, the law firm that already won over $9 billion for men and women. just like you. that's right. over $9 billion for mesothelioma sufferers and their families. we know you're short of money and we know you're short of time. so we fight hard. call whites in luxembourg at 917 lawyers. that's 917 lawyers for whites in luxembourg winning big for the little guy. welcome back to press here. i have some little boys in my life who really like minecraft videos on youtube. and the more i watch with them, the less i understand about what's

going on. so i want to tell you, we're going to be talking to some degree about minecraft right now, but you don't need to understand minecraft either. just know this simple concept. you can play video games with others online, and my next guest has invented a way for you to play with a computerized friend. nico christie is founder of altara, an ai company developing what it calls digital humans. nico and his co-founder shut down their lab at mit so they could build altera. nico. good morning. i got all kinds of questions, but first let's explain digital humans. you are not building robots, right? this is a disembodied human. that is right. we're altera, and our mission is to build digital human beings that live, care and grow alongside us. and we're starting first with, like you said, friends that could play any game with you and are always online, starting with minecraft. so you know when you think about human beings in your life, the ones that you don't see, the ones that you know you correspond with on text message,

or you give a phone call to a live across the country in a way, they're sort of digital human beings, too. this would be the same sort of thing eventually. it's incredibly similar. we are more and more interacting with our friends digitally, and this is probably the next step we're going to take now. you've got you've got a great name with digital humans, but how how is this different than the chatgpt demos that i've seen? you know, at the highest level, our agents are more and more human, and they require less and less compute. what we mean by that is we're building on a lot of our work, specifically, my co-founders work from mit that takes a lot of the systems of the human brain and puts them together to make something that looks and feels a lot more human. it's more coherent. it has better social emotional intelligence, and it's frankly more fun to interact with. so let me ask you this. there is a little bit of a risk that what you're doing. i get why you started with games because games are an introduction to human behavior. but there might be some confusion as to what you're doing. maybe somebody watching

this right now. oh wait, they're building something on minecraft. that doesn't sound like a very serious company, but what you're doing is using games as an entry point for your ai. yeah, that's exactly right. if you look at the history of games recently, it's been improving, you know, improving stomping ground for new technologies from mobile apps to gpus. and now ai mustafa from microsoft, i just demoed gpt four's capabilities using minecraft because it's so obviously familiar to people. there's a great research playground, and it's where billions of people are familiar with. so yeah, we're an ai research lab building in games. we're certainly not a games company. i want to bring in, jason yee. he's from a venture firm called, patron, not to be confused by the way, with, the crowd funding patreon, jason, you wrote niko's startup a pretty healthy check, so you're an investor? what? convinced you? what interested you in this? i think at the end of the day, really believe that agents shouldn't just be something that people can turn to for collaboration and for utility. we really believe in this future where digital humans can actually be friend, build deep

relationships and coexist with humans. and we were really impressed by kind of the large vision that robert, niko and team had as they were kind of pitching altera and building the initial demo. and jason, you heard my question about minecraft that, that, you know, on outwardly it looks like, wait , why? with all the problems in the world, you guys built a virtual friend in minecraft, but it makes sense. i'd like to get your take on starting with games. you have a deep history by the way, in games, as you well know, but my viewers may not. why games? why is that a good proof of concept? sure. so my co-founder brian and i and our third partner, amber, are our backgrounds. were that we helped to scale riot games, which made league of legends and valorant and then discord to hundreds of millions of people around the world. so they built two of the largest consumer companies over the last decade, and we're really excited about how altera are using games as a wedge, because if you look at this new generation of

consumers, you have hundreds of millions of people around the world growing up on products like roblox, minecraft, discord, league of legends and how they use the internet is just they expect it to be much more interactive, immersive and community driven, and we feel like this is really going to shape how other parts of how we use the internet is going to evolve. and so we feel like altera has a very exciting wedge to get their technology in the hands of this emerging consumer population. and then lastly, niko, what's next? i mean, once you've got the games figured out, what do you do with this thing next, we're working on a pretty ambitious project that is going to demonstrate agent complexity and scale. in a way that was a little bit previously unimaginable. and what we want to debut it in a couple of months. and from there, we want to expand into the other largest games in the world. and then finally, beyond games into things like productivity, market research, simulations and finally embodiment of digital intelligence. and jason, does that track with what you were expecting when you made that investment? we're really excited about the broad vision that the altera team have, and we really

believe that 5 to 10 years from now, like it will become normal for humans to coexist and have deep relationships with with digital humans. and so we feel like all of these kind of parallel threads are exciting areas for altera team to push forward on. well, it's interesting work. i enjoyed talking to both of you. thank you. both of you. jason. yay! from patron and nico cristi from altera. that's our show for this week. a reminder we have a sister podcast called sand hill road. it's all about venture capital. it's audio only so you can take it with you in the car. you can find it wherever you find good quality podcasts. my thanks to my guests and thank you for making us part of your sunday. the new school year is here, but for foster kids, this day can be a hard one. that's why mancini, slip road and the ticket to dream foundation is hosting a school supply drive for foster kids. to participate, just bring in new backpacks and school supplies to any mancini sleeper. old for the world's greatest athletes. there is

nothing like competing on the world's biggest stage. the world record again. and when that stage is here, anything is possible. how about that? an olympics unlike any other. the paris olympics, the paris olympic games coming this summer, brought to you locally on nbc by asml. changing the world one nanometer at a time. it's time to say yes to san francisco. yes, sf is a movement towards urban transformation. the program supports sustainable startups with potential to revitalize san francisco. it's electric. is electric vehicle charging specifically built for cities. we are bringing free charging to cities so that buildings and cities can put chargers everywhere to meet that need to help us transition into this clean energy revolution. say yes to san francisco. visit yes asphaug for more info. most things in belfast, but man. get

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