Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify Subscribe: episode updates the current state of misinformation. in the world of COVID-19, misinformation runs rampant. from international interference to at-home video productions, the internet hosts misinformation and spreads it similarly to a disease. guest clint watts discusses this misinformation: what is it? where is it coming from? how can we spot it, and know what to truly believe? tom and rp cover the top pandemic conspiracy theories, and get to the bottom of knowing if a news source is legitimate. clint watts is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Non-Resident Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. he is also a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. clint is the author of the book Messing with the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News.  tom scott is chairman & co-founder of the nantucket project. rp eddy was the architect of the Clinton administration’s pandemic response framework and the United Nations response to the global AIDS epidemic & is CEO of global intelligence firm Ergo.   rp is co-author of the best-selling award-winning book Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes with Richard A. Clarke, Former National Security Council counterterrorism adviser. listen to this episode on apple podcasts subscribe to our youtube channel follow us on facebook follow us on instagram transcript   Tom Scott [00:00:22] Clint's coming to us from Cold Spring, New York, so, so, listen, the last time we were here, we talked about. We talked about disinformation, you know, and. You know, clearly, there's just been a flurry of that kind of activity over the last period of time and, you know, and for for us, we keep saying we wanted to revisit this conversation for for many reasons. So if I were going to make observations and if you had asked me, OK, what places are going to grow and what places are going to shrink in the disease? I'll show you this and we'll make it clean and post. But I would have said West Virginia is going to rise. Arkansas is going to rise. Alabama is going to rise. And sadly, Louisiana is going to rise. And that's just based on observations in the way I just saw the culture reacting as I was traveling. And you look here, RP. And sure enough, West Virginia, by the way, was my first stop. And I checked into a Holiday Inn Express and it was like nothing had changed. Like the breakfast bar was open in the morning. No one who was working there was wearing a mask. And I was like, whoa, this is strange. And then you see the first one mentioned there is West Virginia, by the way, I just want to say before says I say this with great respect. I don't want any of these things. I'm I'm not rooting for this. That makes me sad to see that. But my very unscientific observation of humans would suggest that that's where it was gonna go. And that seems to be where it's going. And and RP, if you just wanted to comment on that?    RP Eddy [00:01:54] I think I think that it's also we still have to remember that while the trends are going up, the numbers are very small. Thank God. And let's hope they stay small, meaning the behaviors that you see in all these we talked about last time. But again, click bait media wants you to know. Oh, my God. Look at all these partiers in the Ozarks. Look at all these people without masks in wherever they want us to look at that. And we do. Those also may be places where there's just very, very little of the disease endemic, in which case. Let's just hope it won't turn into a problem. So, again, we had I had a conversation yesterday with someone who hopefully the South Korean response, interestingly enough. And Clint, you'll appreciate this. He's a U.S. Army colonel from the U.S. Army Medical Corps who now runs International Vaccine Institute in Seoul. He's a Korean by heritage and he works over there now.