this week on "press:here," we take you inside a virtual reality training system designed to help teacher and employers better handle conflict. meet a entrepreneur who built atms for bitcoin. how they work and is bitcoin ever going to work as a currency? plus, new science helps doctors find the recurrence of cancer, years before a ct scan spots it. that's this week on "press:here." good morning, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. silicon valley is famous for high tech. it is seeing its biggest advances in something different, biotech.

small companies you might not have heard of doing things you might not quite understand or at least that's true with me. i want to focus in on one area in particular called natera out of san carlos. the company has created a series of tests that can detect the recurrence of cancer. sometimes years faster than an oncologist will catch it on a ct scan and it is done with a vial of blood. steve chapman is the ceo of natera. good morning. while your company makes most of its money from something called panorama, this is a non-invasive prenatal test, i want to start with this issue of cancer. you are detecting cancer, the return of cancer to be specific, the dna of a tumor which you're finding essentially in a drop of blood. have i got that description pretty close? >> that's right, scott. thanks for having me. we developed a new test we call

signatera. we're sequencing the entire tumor and making a personalized test for every single patient to track their tumor in the blood. the test has shown so far amazing performance in five peer review publications, and tests across 25 different cancer types. we can detect cancer recurrence up to two years. it is a really exciting technology. we just cleared some major milestones receiving coverage for medicare for the first indication of colorectal testing. >> it may be nine months earlier for colorectal cancer, this is recurrence. this is life and death stuff. >> the clinical utility in colorectal cancer is very high. today, stage two and three patients are generally making a decision after surgery whether they need chemotherapy.

and most patients don't benefit and there are several side effects. we can help determine which patient actually needs to get the chemotherapy and which ones don't. if we tell you you're positive with signatera, there is a 98% chance you will recur. after that chemotherapy decision process, then the patient is treated and we do routine surveillance where we monitor a blood draw every three months, for example, with the hopes to detect a recurrence up to nine months in advance. that's really important in colorectal. because today 85% of colorectal cancer recurrence is caught too late to do surgery. so with our test, the hope is with routine surveillance you can detect that recurrence early and be ready to do surgery at an earlier stage when you can still remove the tumor. it is life or death. >> i want to be clear with the viewer what we're talking about is the recurrence of cancer.

you are looking for the dna of the original tumor that was presumably removed bay sur ed b or taken out by chemotherapy, et cetera. you cannot detect cancer from the beginning, correct? >> correct. we're not doing asymptomatic stringing. there are some groups working on that and that's an exciting field moving forward. what we're focused on is the detection of residual and recurrence. so usually when someone is diagnosed with cancer, the tumor is receptive by a surgeon. they do everything they can to get ritt of thd of that tumor. there are micrometastases that can't be seen on imaging. if we see there is a presence of small fragments of tumor dna in your blood, we know you're going to recur. even if you get rid of your tumor initially, with our routine surveillance, we can detect when the cancer is coming back by finding those fragments

of your particular tumor, personalized to you, much earlier than what could be seen on imaging alone. >> you're doing, like, 200,000 tests per quarter. but the market would be much, much, much bigger than that. i'm throwing in your non-invasive prenatal test as well. you have some busy labs. >> yes, just last quarter we did 262,000 tests in our lab. and we generated nearly 100 million in revenue. that was an all time record for us. quite a bit of growth since i first joined the company in 2010. but, you know, there is a lot of room to grow. in prenatal, we're very early stages of penetration. in colorectal, specifically, we estimated that about 1 million tests per year could be done, and a total market as they were scratching the surface of that. we're at the very early stages. >> revenue 40% year over year, up 40% profits, 34 million to 46

million, i believe. and as ceo managing that kind of growth, that kind of delta, has just got to be a 24-hour job. >> yeah, so we have been drinking from a fire hose basically with all the growth that we had. so when i joined the company in 20 10, that was one of the first employees, we had $3 million in revenue. over the past ten years we launched more than ten new products and this year we're talking about $385 million in revenue. so there has been just an extreme amount of growth. >> you had an ipo a number of years back at 18. what is it now? >> yeah, so yesterday i think we posted around $82, so $7 billion valuation. and we ipo'd around $18, which at the time was just over $1 billion valuation. so we have been one of the best performing diagnostic stocks over the last two years. >> let me ask my final question,

i don't mean the stock price, the company, where do you go from here? >> so we're sitting at the very beginning of three very large market opportunities and women's health and reproductive care, though that has been out for now seven years, it is still very underpin underp underp underpin penetrated. in organ health, we're now looking at whether or not a patient is experiencing organ rejection after a transplant. that's another market that is very large and there is a significant clinical utility to help patients at a very early stage of penetration. we have a lot of work to do. we want to stay focused on delivering the best care for patients and helping as many patients as we can. >> steve chapman is the ceo of

natera. i wish you best of luck. thank you for being with us this morning. and "press:here" will be right back.

welcome back to "press:here." i had a conversation with a venture capital founder tim draper about a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago, we discussed whether or not bitcoin would ever be used as an everyday currency. to buy a cup of coffee at

starbucks, for instance. he insisted it will. i said it won't. we ended up betting on the whole thing, setting a five-year timeline for it to be proven or disproven. now, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies kind of confuse me because many people position it as an investment, and indeed the price of bitcoin has risen significantly over the past few months. about $13,000 of bitcoin in october, $15,000 in november. my next guest makes an atm-like device for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. i suppose i shouldn't say atm-like, it is an automated teller machine, just for cryptocurrencies. daniel bilotski makes those machines. thanks for joining us this morning. >> please don't make me list all ten off the top of my head. it is getting harder and harder to do. i have to think more and more these days. we have the big ones, bitcoin,

life coin, ethereum, chain link, usdc. i won't keep going. >> that's fair enough. where do you put these atms? you know, it has to be in a place that would be likely that a person who is into cryptocurrency would find them. >> we're trying to make the most accessible locations possible. open 24 hours a day, places that have great parking, super accessible, super friendly, gas stations, convenience stores, liquor stores, restaurants. >> and there are going to be people who think, wait a minute, didn't scott say bitcoin is worth $15,000? you can buy a partial bitcoin as well, right? i'm not buying anything for $15,000 out of a machine at a gas station. >> that's crazy. had to have been a stock split at some point, right? .000001, it is like eight

decemb decimel places. >> the dollar is divisible into 100 or more than that. so you aren't just dealing with a dollar every time. you could be dealing with a portion of a dollar. so explain to me the process and more importantly the people who are not familiar with cryptocurrency. i slide my credit card or my atm card in your atm machine, and say i would like some fraction of a bitcoin. there is nothing that comes out of a slot. >> no, yeah. it is cash only at the atm. we have a credit card option online. i think if you want to view the credit card or debit card you wouldn't have to leave your house. just on our website. if you want to buy bitcoin with cash, you go to the atm and do the registration process. you insert cash, and nothing actually comes out. just you scan the qr code to the camera of the atm and you'll receive your bitcoin within

three minutes. m before you get back to your car. >> it is a number, it is a long string of numbers that is worth a value and then that is stored in these ledgers all over the world. and you can then spend that bitcoin or keep it as you wish. >> yes, you can do whatever you want with it. we don't hold customers for them. we're a big proponent of giving them their own bitcoin to use and that's cool because there are other sites, robinhood, paypal, you don't get bitcoin when you buy bitcoin you get a bit ccoi bitcoin-like contract. >> you buy basically the contract or the rights to the share, but you don't actually necessarily own it, and the company will pay off one way or the other. >> right. >> it turned out bitcoin to be a very good investment and you know the story, anyone who knows

cryptocurrency knows the story about pizza. the guy who early investor in bitcoin, not worth very much money, just been invented. he uses 10,000 bitcoin to buy two pizzas and we marvel at this idea, papa john's or something. and it was cool at the time. bitcoin is worth so much money, those -- let's say, $10 pizza, those are now $150 million pizzas. >> yes, they are. >> okay. so is bitcoin a currency? because no currency is useful if i'm afraid to spend it because i'm going to look like an idiot for buying $150 million pizza. >> yeah. you're 100% right when you say that. i'm going to break most bitcoin entrepreneurs and saying that currently bitcoin is not a currency. bitcoin is an asset, it is an investment.

i think for it to be a currency it has to stabilize -- needs to have through price discovery, once there say price discovery, people will be fine using the currency where the value increases. >> i was going to use gold as the absolute example. no denying that the american dollar is clearly a currency. but then again it loses 2% of its value in inflation every year, thereabouts. so people who have lots and lots and lots of dollars don't keep their money in dollars. they keep it in gold or in commodities or something. it has more price stability to it. >> yeah, for sure. i think that definitely once the price of bitcoin stabilizes, it is way easier to spend than gold. scan your qr code and send it off. not like ripping off a piece of gold and spending it. >> taking that sack of gold and putting it on the -- like a cowboy. >> exactly. >> what do you think we'll have

some sort of stability in bitcoin prices and let's -- i'll ask you where do you think that price point is going to be? >> if i knew that, i would be a very rich man. i think that -- i think probably at least five to ten years. and i've always thought that bitcoin had a very wide range of what it could do. could have a few trillion dollar market cap, which would mean $100 per coin. we always print u.s. dollars, so the value in terms of u.s. dollars will keep rising. i think in terms of today's dollars, probably 100,000 to $500,000 per coin at maturity, whatever that means. >> that's a -- i asked you for a price target, big price target, i appreciate you answering the question. people watch us from around the world, but on television they watch us in silicon valley. if they wanted to go out and try one, do you have locates, atm

locations in silicon valley? >> yes, we have locations in san francisco, for sure. i don't know how many, but we have some. you can go, buy any of our ten cryptocurrencies, you can get bitcoin before you get back to your car, which i think is different than most exchanges. and you'll be able to talk to one of us 24/7. come and join the flip game. >> all right, daniel polodsky, thank you for being with us this morning. and "press:here" will be right back.

welcome back to "press:here." with so many of us working from home, we're getting used to zoom conferences and other teleconferences. i saw something interesting that i really thought you we see. it is a video conference used for training, using avatars. created by a company called mersion, where a student teacher can try his or her hand at teach and a pretend rowdy student could challenge them or someone learning to work in human resources could learn the ins and outs of hr. what you're seeing here is a television friendly version. it is normally done in virtual reality, but that's hard to show on television. i tried it out myself in a scenario where i am the boss, trying to mend a rift between two employees. take a look. hi, lee. we were just talking about maybe there was some tension in the office and can you help me

understand what is happening? >> yeah, so, hey, linda, linda and i have been struggling lately and she gave me some -- she's calling it feedback, but i felt berated publicly at the end of the team meeting this morning. >> it is really interesting about this scenario is the same actor is playing both the man and the woman and even a third character all simultaneously. mark atkinson is the ceo of mursion. the people powering your avatars, we'll get to know how they do it in a second. first, who are they? >> they tend to be people that have had formal training in acting and particularly improv. because improv training has underneath it a level of empathy training and so much of what we're trying to do is help people practice challenging conversations, push them to the point where they make the kind of mistakes we all make when people push our buttons.

but in an empathetic way, give them a chance to do a do-over and get it right so they don't make the mistakes in real life. >> the technology that you created changes the actor's voice. one actor may be playing several characters at once. changes the voice and is there some sort of motion capture or something, they can control the bodies as well. >> there is an ai layer of our system that morphs the voices into the target profile of the character they're representing in real time. we over time machine learned a way of interpreting their tone of voice, their facial expressions and even some of the content they say in order to create body language that reflects the tone of the situation. >> yeah, i had noticed in my little experiment i did with yours that one of the characters crossed her arms and it is a very realistic nonverbal cue. i could tell she was upset. >> yes.

you might have said something to get on her nerves. we all do that. it is the nature -- so much of what we're trying to teach is the skill of tracking. am i reading the person i'm interacting with and adjusting my tone and style to match that? >> right, if you're training something to manage an hr department, for instance, you can give them a script of -- as to what to say or say in this situation, do this, but there are so many situations in the real world in which nobody wrote the script for that one. >> that's absolutely right. and then just so happened to be people whose style, sometimes not an aggressive style, can be a very passive style, that sort of pushes our buttons an we feel like we can't get through to them and we become intolerant of that style and we end up turning the ball and not accomplishing the goal of whatever the conversation was. >> i see the value of one person playing several characters. is there any kind of ethical issue here in the same character who played the female in my

scenario also played the male african-american character as well. i don't know the actual race or gender of the person who is behind all those avatars, but there is some discomfort in the world with people portraying characters or characteristics that they're not. >> we're trying to do the opposite of stereotyping. we're not trying to suggest that a human behaves the way a human does because they are a specific race or gender. we have a very diverse talent pool behind the scenes, role playing multiple characters who have a very specific back story associated with that. so, for example, linda, i believe you interacted with in your simulation has a very explicit story about who she is as a personality type and we are playing the personality type. just so happens in your scenario that she was an anglo woman, but had she been an african-american woman, who would have been

distinctive about her was her personality type. as actors we play personality types all the time. we go to the theater. because i'm a white man, it doesn't mean i can't -- >> i agree up to a point. i don't want to argue this point. but there are situations in which even in the theater it would be in 2020 make some people uncomfortable if a -- a character was played by a certain race or gender portraying a different race or gender. >> if they were attempting to tell you that what made that character distinctive was the race or gender, absolutely. the only thing we're trying to portray are personality types. >> and i'll admit i have no idea who the actor -- whether it was male or female. i had several characters i was interacting with and the voice changes. so i haven't the faintest idea. this would be particularly valuable for teachers because you can mimic children. >> very difficult to be children generally speaking because you

don't know what you don't know as a fourth grader. you forget you had a vocabulary as a fourth grader. the training is to get them to use age appropriate vocabulary. >> a lot of this is done in virtual reality as well. that makes it that much more realistic. >> and that much more intimate and emotionally charged and that much more likely to trigger and make mistakes you might make in real life. >> that's interesting. i agree with you. second time you've said that that the best training really does come through goading the person you are training into making the mistake. >> well, i think it is about re-creating the stress that you experience in real life that causes you to make mistakes. i like to sort of analogize those tough conversations we have with our teenagers. in the shower, in the morning,

they all sound great, we're alone thinking about what we're going to say and we get there in the moment and they say that one thing that sets us off and we forget what we thought of in the shower. our job is to re-create the real life stresses that causes us to make mistakes. we don't make them when we do it alone in isolation. >> companies like coca-cola are using your system. you have some big name companies using your system. without giving away internal business details, can you tell me, give me some idea what a coca-cola would use it for? >> a lot of fortune 1,000 companies are trying to create a much more evolved way of giving co-workers feedback in situations on the job. it was the sort of practice of last decade or two to at the end of the year call an employee and tell them what they did right and what they did wrong and people would forget what happened and it was never really useful for the person give the feedback or receiving it. and now in the moment identifying what they saw, what

they would like to see differently but doing it in a constructive way. that's what a lot of companies are focused on that. >> you say you use improv actors. have you had anything happen that you didn't expect? we talked earlier about, you know, that all of it is unexpected. but anything stand out as far as, oh, okay, that training session didn't go the way that i expected it to. >> i mean, we have people who think and say we tell them there say human behind it all the time, they say weird things to the avatars thinking nobody will know, there say point to which the human says i want to jump through the screen and says you can't talk to me that way. that happens more often than you think. we raised a round of capital for mursion and i had investors do things that shocked me. i said there is actually a human behind that. we have that all the time. >> you get to the point where you can get a computer to do it.

right now it is a human. that's fascinating. thank you so much. mark atkinson is a real life person, and ceo of mursion. thank you for being with us this morning.

that's our show for this week. my thanks to my guests and thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.

of little joe y la familia and his new book on your joe "comunidad del valle." [music] [singing in foreign language] damian: oh man, there he is, the legendary little joe, little joe y la familia. we miss those days at rodeo. miss those days at the saddlerack with little joe, even at the moose lodge when little joe would come on down and entertain all of us.