What happened to the Truth - Gordon Pennycook

What happened to the truth? Lately, I find myself fixated on a troubling realization. It feels remarkably easy to win over an audience. A slogan, a promise, or a confident declaration can be wildly disconnected from people's lived reality yet quickly accepted, repeated, and amplified. I wanted to understand why. Not from a political or media lens, but from a human one. What is it about human nature that makes this possible?

That question led me to two conversations at the heart of this moment.

The first is with Gordon Pennycook, a highly regarded cognitive scientist whose journey from small-town Saskatchewan to a renowned thought leader at Cornell University gives him a rare lens on how ordinary people reason in extraordinary information environments. Gordon studies why we are so trusting, why misinformation spreads faster than truth, and why most of us are not irrational or malicious, just distracted. His research shows that people do not fail because they cannot think, but because the systems around them reward speed, emotion, and certainty over reflection and accuracy.

We discuss why falsehood often outperforms truth online, how social platforms exploit attention rather than intention, why news has become opinionated, and why there is still hope.

To ground that risk in the real world, I am also joined by Milos Stojadinovic, a cybersecurity leader at RBC who thinks like attackers so the rest of us do not have to. Milos explains how cybercrime has become organized, global, and industrialized, from ransomware-as-a-service to AI-powered scams and nation-state involvement. His insight makes one thing clear. Trust is still our greatest human strength, but it has also become the easiest point of entry for those who want to exploit it.

What ties these conversations together is a sobering conclusion. Our minds have not fundamentally changed, but the tools used to target them have. And unless we become more intentional about how we think, what we believe, and what we amplify, it will remain dangerously easy to sell comforting narratives that drift far from reality.