this week, president biden asks america to reject lies and manipulated facts. meanwhile, donald trump's banishment from twitter has reduced the number of falsehoods online. but is kicking somebody off social media the way to protect the truth. i'm speak with two of the world's experts on critical thinking. california ranks high on the list for start-ups run by woman but beat out by colorado and washington and oregon. we'll talk to julie, the person behind that list. and before there was that created the tools that made

life saving inoculations possible. dr. claus gustavson my guest this morning. that is all this week on "press: here." good morning, everyone, i'm scott mcgrew. president biden called for unity in his inaugural speech. that is difficult for some but it is doable. we literally fought a war between the state as and managed to patch things up. so it is achievable. biden also called for americans to reject falsehoods, particularly in the media, in social media. take a listen. >> and we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are and even manufactured. >> my fellow americans, we have to be different than this. america has to be better than that. and believe america is so much better than this. just look around. >> that sounds like a much more difficult task to be honest. let's bring in exerts.

helen is one of the country's top experts in critical thinking. timothy coughfield is one of the country's top experts in critical thinking and i know what you're thinking, how could both of them be the country's top expert. two different countries. helen is business expert in the united states, she is raised hundreds of millions of dollars in capital, renegotiated billions of dollars in debt but dozens of companies in the black. and timothy is in canada, a professor of biotechnology and a book called "relax damn it" and we'll ask him about that later. he's a hello at center for skeptical thinking or so he claims. helen, you're pushing hard to teach critical thinking in schools. defind what critical thinking is. what are schools not teaching now that you think they should be teaching. >> at the foundation, we

approach critical thinking just better thinking. making better judgments. hopefully through a process of cognition and tnking about your own tnkinhi the fact that we're not teaching critical thinking in schools which is when the foundation did a survey, a majority of people think they are doing critical thinking, they understand that a k through 12 level, less than 20% of the schools are providing a true critical thinking education. a lot of it comes from the fact that so much of the u.s. education is based on standardized testing. where teachers feel that they don't have the flexibility or the autonomy to try to incorporate critical thinking in confirmation bias and my viewers are sophisticated, they know what confirmation bias is but the problem is it is so inherent. when i watch something like oan,

i immediately turn it off because they're not sticking to the facts to the way that i know it but those viewer whether they watch me turn me off because they think i'm not sticking to the facts that they know. how are we able to communicate? >> it is a huge problem. they call the confirmation bias the mother of all confirmation bias. it is incredibly powerful and i think it is become more powerful because, no surprise, social media has allowed us to create these powerful echo chambers, the fragmentation of the media and i think this is going to be one of the challenges of our times. and one of the things that we need to do and there is some evidence to back it up, we need to tackle the information as soon as it emerges. no matter how absurd, 5g creates -- and we have to get on that quickly as possible before

it takes on a component and becomes a flag of ideology. but i love helen's suggestion, too. we need more critical thinking and part of that critical thinking is to on our own cognitive bias and there is evidence suggesting that this works in countries all over the world though suggest that the kind of strategies that helen is talking about does work. >> and republicans are brain washes, democrats chant while clad in identical white uniforms. stephen colbert said this might be true because it feels true. it is truth-y. >> it is difficult to monitor information. the ideal world is where we could tag and identify misinformation. but imagine the myths around covid-19. there were over a thousand new tweets per minute around covid

of which a large portion of it was mi so the actual ability where 90% of news information that we gather is by social media, it is actually very difficult to root out this misinformation. that is why fundamentally what we need to teach adults and children is a combination of critical thinking and media literacy where it is common practice for children who ask who is the author and youth tactics like not relying on a single source of information, that more and more people are doing when they're not on social media and have the echo chamber that timothy just alluded to. >> and that is a good long-term solution. a short-term solution that works and i guarantee you it worked because monitoring the media, in the media, i'm seeing evidence of it right away. just cutting president trump off twitter. the number of complaints i get on twitter, you're not talking about, you know, whatever it

happens to be that isn't true, has just dropped precipitously. and think there was study that showed the amount of fake news has dropped. that is a fast and quick way of doing it but it feels dangerous to do it that way. >> it does feel dangerous. and you're right, i think you've portrayed this accurately. on the one hand, these kind of strategies are pretty dramatic, banning stuff and taking stuff off of social media, off of youtube, et cetera. that does have an immediate impact in the aggregate right now to those kind of strategies probably work. the challenge is, are we creating a more eckee -- echo chambers and therefore in the long-term have problems. we're asking private actors to make decisions about what we're going to see. and by the way, i like all of the moves that they've made but hav to think about this long-term. as you've pointed out, how

sustainable is this kind of strategy. ly i will say this. debunking does work. because there is so much misinformation out there. but there is robust body of evidence that it does make a difference and i'm sure helen will agree it doing is well and quickly and doing it in a way that is where it is going to make a long-term -- have a long-term impact. >> let me ask you both about context. and that is i think as i work in mainstream media and television, i'm detecting the viewer knows the thing before i tell him or her about it. we find it in sports. they could find the score to the game on their phone, they don't need someone to tell the score. i think i could add value in context. and here in california we're constantly talking about the percentage of icu beds available.

it is very important and it is very low. and when we read the number, we might say, well, good news, the percentage of icu beds have gone up but i will add to the context, some of the beds that are empty because the person that was in them is dead. context to the data, right. but by creating that context, adding in that thing that myself has added, not opinion because it is fact, but i have chosen what context to put in there, and i think that is a battle that is very gray as to what is factual and what is contextually factual. >> i think context is so important. people read the headlines, if they're getting on the phone, they read the headline and maybe the first paragraph and then they kind of tails off a little bit. that has an impact. so providing meaningful context to have a impact on people's

perception. and be honest and open with what the science says, and we've seen that with the mask debate and the arrow sole debate and i think it creates long-term debate and that trust in you. there is a little bit of evidence to back this up. there is a study out of germany recently and you have to be careful, but they found that people want that kind of context, they wanted -- they want health care providers to be honest and the media to be honest and they even want public health officials to be honest even on a controversial topic where the evident might be conflicting. >> thank you ever so much for joining us this

good morning, everyone, i'm scott mcgrew. we created not one but many vaccines to fight covid-19, nothing short of a scientific miracle and it starts the moment vaccine experts got their hand on the model of the covid virus much like the plans to the death star, they were able to find the virus's weakness and exploit it.

they built the model even before coronavirus has hit ameri scientists needed to create the vaccine to fight it. dr. claus gustavson took the genetic code and rebuilt it into something that scientists could safely work with. thank you for joining us. if anyone still had cocktail parties but we don't, if you could build a safe version of the virus, could you build a dangerous version of it as well? >> a and c and n and g, you could build a script, absolutely. >> so that is fascinating and we'll get to how you're saving lives in a minute. but the power in a lab to build kind of whatever you want or model whatever you want is a

power that we couldn't have dreamt of a couple of decades ago. >> no, it is amazing. it is very cool. it allows us now, because at the end of the day it is just dna that runs all of the biology and all of the -- and the cell or in the virus and now we could go straight from chemistry and just build anything we could imagine. the problem of course is what are we going to imagine? that is a key thing, right. >> so i think we're all becoming slight biological experts during a vaccine. but let me tell what you i understand about finding a vaccine and you could expect me or steer me in the right direction. before now, somebody who wants to create a vaccine for a virus, would have to work with the live virus. when they found the vaccine for smallpox, they were working with smallpox, right? >> absolutely. and back in the day it is transporting the vials of the very, very lethal virus.

it is a very scary event and you had to use various and vast tools and technologies to make sure that you didn't kill yourself. today with that technology, we could now just pull out snippets and dna sequence any virus that you could think of. we could pull out all of the snippets and that we are interested in, not dealing with the whole virus but just take a little piece that corresponds to something that we may use to build a vaccine again or something like that and work with that little piece only and that makes things first of all much, much safer and much more efficient and then we get to the end point much faster. >> so when you're building these snippets, these little pieces or models, you're building it out of proteins. how do you know when you have it right? >> so dna sequences is a matter that allows to you look genome. so what we first do is sequence in this case the covid virus and

first in wuhan in china, and then we know the sequence for that particular virus and now build it and here in california and build the same acdp and then we verify that sequence and verify them side-by-side and the identity is the same. >> i was going to make sure, you have to make sure that is spot on because if you made a mistake, they're going to build a vaccine based on a mistake. >> that would be very bad. they would spank me. >> yes. that would be very bad. so there is a lot of questions about how transparent the chinese were about the coronavirus in the early days but you mentioned this. a credit to their scientists that they got the genetic sequence very, very quickly and then they made it public. that was critical and it is one of the real keystones so why we have a vaccine so early, right? >> absolutely. and it was really interesting.

so there is a public data base that is run by nih that is called jam bank where all of the sequences are -- anyone could have a popular sequence so they were deposited and within hours we have ten customers who wanted to build snippets to start making vaccines and making diagnostics and therapeutics within hours. >> is it more difficult to build one thing over another? or is it just putting the right combinations of proteins together? >> so, it is very different effort. so diagnostics you want to replicate what you have so you could see if the patient has that or not. and for the vaccine, when you build a vaccine, it has to illicit the immune system and you have to make sure that it

expressed well and all of those sort of things. so the synthesis part is one thing but then do you the research to figure out this is the right -- the thousand ways to make a vaccine which is right and which is wrong and same thing with therapeutics you don't go down paths of classic research. >> sure. now your company is part of a relatively new industry and i way trying to figure out what they call it and google came up with -- custom confident services market. i could open up any synthetic genetics that i want. it is like ordering from amazon. >> you type in i want agct and click submit and we'll send it to you. >> and this is somebody who doesn't know too much about this and seen too many movies but could i order something that i shouldn't have access to? >> soso what we do on our side, fill a catalogue of all of the

select agents, so these are sequences that the center for disease control has listed as viruses and we run all of the sec -- sequences through the list and we run your name to make sure you're not hiding in a cave in afghanistan or somewhere. >> or a secret lair in a volcano. >> absolutely. >> so i would imagine you've been approached by investors but i understand you're not taking venture capital. >> that is true. we made the decision we wanted to build the company the old way, the classic way to make sure we are profitable every quarter and then that allows us to plan things long-term. we could think five years, ten years out, 20 years out because we control our own destiny and that is something i enjoy doing very much. in the past i was in -- our

founders were in another company and it is a very different world because it is all about flipping the company and how fast could you get investors and dump this on the public market or whatever. but we wanted to focus on building long-term value. >> well we all appreciate your hard work on planning a coronavirus vaccine and whats that had a done for the world. so doctor, go founder at atom, thank you for being with us this morning.

parts of the bay area still stuck in an extreme drought. but kerry is tracking major changes in the seven-day forecast. >> plus i'll be busy examining biden's first week on the job on monday.

welcome back to "press: here." i was looking at some data put together the other day by an organization called mer chant maverick that look at states where women are most likely to succeed with their start-ups. and as you might expect, california ranked in the top ten. but barely. number nine, colorado, is number, followed by washington and virginia. if you were looking for a trend here, though, it would be that western states dominate. julie titterington assigned her data reporters to rate the states. you have got the same impression, that western on you >> yes. significantly. seven of the ten states that ranked on our list are west of the mississippi and that is not muchf a surprise to anybody. >> tell me why that is not a

surprise? >> well western states tend to be more liberal, and they tend to have more equitable policies toward women in general. and they tend to have a bigger start-up scene. >> and i'm going to throw out a theory having lived in the west for a great majority of my life, for people who are watching us would don't live in the united states, they're familiar with the western united states culture. which encouraging men and women historically to strike out on their own. i think even more than a century later this idea, maybe i'm extending the metaphor too much, of a man and a woman on a ranch by themselves, there was a quality built into the american west that kind of carries through to today. >> i agree with that 100%. there is definitely a self-sufficiency that we cultivate out here in the west and a lot more opportunity for women honestly. >> now it is not just states

like california or washington which we think of as being high-tech or start-up hubs. montana, speaking to our theory here about the american west. >> yeah. montana has actually pretty good venture capital opportunities. got a nice low income tax. so it was surprising that it ended up on the list but there is a lot of good reasons that it did. >> now california, as i said, is in the top ten but it is nine. why do you suppose or i suppose you don't suppose, you put together the list, why is california in ninth place? >> well that comes down pretty much to unemployment rates, which is pretty high. and then also income tax highest in the country. so that is just making it harder for my business to succeed. and unfortunately that is why california placed ninth. california did really well in terms of venturecapital, start-up survival rate, all of

threat place to do business if you're a that the are outweighing the down sides. >> absolutely. >> as far as colorado, that came in one nun. what is going on in colorado that we need to know about? >> well, colorado really significantly outranked the rest of the states with the possibility exception of washington which was number two. and colorado really, what it does well is low income tax rate, one of the lowest in the country. and then it has this budding start-up scene in boulder and denver, a lot of venture capitol going to women owned businesses there. and a lot of tech companies are kind of migrating out east, actually, they'll start in the san francisco bay area and get seated there and then it just becomes too expensive to live there any more. so when they want to grow and

they want to hire employees, they move out to boulder or denver. >> austin is another good example. i've seen a lot of young people who find they cannot afford to live in the bay area who are moving to places like boulder and austin which are very bay area similar. >> exactly. >> and then there is kind of another tier down, julie. austin and boulder are not very affordable. and we're seeing some kind of tool development, maybe montana is one of them, in which younger people are moving to places where you think, boise? boise? and they're turning it into these cool places that are fun to live in. >> exactly. well and part of this is due to coronavirus honestly. because we're all working from home, kind of doesn't matter where you live any more. so a lot of people are moving to thes places thatm.

central oregon is a big hub for people starting businesses too. it is a beautiful area. you could ski and hike and you could do all of that and still work from home. and in a top tech company and succeed that way. so i think we're going to see a lot more of that over the next few years. >> and speaking essentially, the state on the bottom list are mississippi, iowa, west virginia, any commonality that they ended up where they did. >> the biggest commonality with those is a lack of funding for women-owned start-ups. back funding is traditionally almost impossible to get if you're a female and the venture capital hubs just aren't into the midwest. so women who want to start businesses in those states are kind of out of luck when it comes to funding. i mean we're seeing a lot of alternative funding options arise that are a little bit more

to people of color like -- but if you want to get a bank loan or venture capitol funding, you're out of luck if you don't live in one of the western states. >> and maybe some opportunities for venture capital in those regions. >> absolutely. >> julie, isset editor in cheech of merchant maverick. "press: here" will be back in just a moment.

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

>> kenny: the blackhawks used to play here, chicago stadium now across the street, united center bobby ryan, four goals in his first four games as a detroit red wing three-time stanley cup champion patrick kane of the blackhawks openin