So it was just sort of almost like a conspiracy correlation matrix. It just said, you know, hey, you're interested. You follow these conspiracy groups. Maybe you'd like these other conspiracy groups.

We're never going to solve information pollution. We need to equip people with the skills to navigate it. You're listening to Epidemic, the podcast about the science, public health and social impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.

I'm your host, Dr. Saline Gounder. Back in 2007,

2007, the Cook was at a family party. He was having a good time until he got pulled into one of those uncomfortable moments.

He got into an argument with his father-in-law.

So he is a climate denier and at our family get-together he threw all these different climate

myths at me and I went away and researched them

just tried to find out what the truth was about these different arguments.

John wasn't really all that interested in climate change. He wasn't an

activist and didn't really follow it that closely, but that didn't matter. John

just didn't like the idea of losing. And like any competitive son-in-law that wants to make sure they win the next argument with their father-in-law,

I started building a list of the possible arguments that I might encounter at the next family get together.

But as he was trying to one up his father-in-law, John actually learned a lot about climate change.

He got familiar with the science and learned that the consensus was that people were impacting the climate.

He showed up to the next family gathering armed with the facts.

Eventually I realized that other people had family members like that that might find

this useful resource as well and so I published the website debunking climate

misinformation. The website was called skeptical science and it changed his life.

Publishing the debunkings and just beginning public engagement on the issue of climate change really set me down the road

of learning more about how to debunk misinformation, eventually leading me to do a PhD in

cognitive science and really study in depth the psychology of science denial. Today John is a professor at George Mason University studying misinformation and how to counter it.

Over the last 10 years John discovered a very effective way to fight science denial, something called

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