TDL 026 | The First Line of Defense Is Being Informed | Matthew Dufresne

In this episode of The Defender’s Log, host David Redekop sits down with Matthew Dufresne, a veteran tech director and early pioneer of London, Ontario’s first internet service provider. Looking back at over 30 years in technology, the duo traces the massive evolution of connectivity—from the blissfully simple, unsecured days of text-based Gopher interfaces to today’s hyper-connected, complex digital landscape. The core of the conversation spotlights Dufresne’s latest innovation: CanadaGPT (and its chat component, askgordie.ca). Frustrated by the polarization of social media and the hallucinations of standard AI, Dufresne built CanadaGPT to democratize public government data. By anchoring a natural language AI to a specialized knowledge graph of pure Canadian data, the tool provides citizens with factual, nuance-driven answers complete with direct source provenance. Key Highlights Combatting Misinformation: Moving past “meme culture” and marketing spin to let Canadians examine primary data for themselves. Civic & Economic Literacy: Empowering the next generation to understand complex systems like monetary policy, taxation, and immigration paths. The Value of Human Connection: Navigating brain drain to the U.S. and remembering that true progress requires human-to-human dialogue. Dufresne leaves listeners with a vital piece of advice: use technology to find the facts, but don’t let it replace real, cordial conversations with people who think differently than you. Full episode of The Defender’s Log here: The First Line of Defense Is Being Informed | Defenders Log TL;DR Tech Evolution: Host David Redekop and Matthew Dufresne discuss the 30-year shift from simple, unsecured text interfaces to complex, modern AI. Introducing CanadaGPT: Dufresne created CanadaGPT (and askgordie.ca) to fight misinformation by providing factual, verified insights into Canadian government data. Fact-Based Answers: The platform uses a specialized knowledge graph to answer civic questions using primary sources with direct links, avoiding AI hallucinations. Civic Literacy: The tool helps the next generation understand nuanced Canadian systems, including immigration, healthcare, and monetary policy. Human Connection: While technology aids research, Dufresne urges Canadians to move past polarized social media memes and prioritize real, human-to-human conversations. Links View it on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdBbSY3WPjQ Listen to the episode on your favourite podcast platform: Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-first-line-of-defense-is-being-informed/id1829031081?i=1000777674485 Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/33gPlj5zgKT97qMCgcqYeL Amazon Music https://music.amazon.ca/podcasts/d7aa9a19-d092-42a6-9fe9-9e8d81f68d30/episodes/03b16c10-bdeb-4068-8ee6-2fb6b05a8436/the-defender%E2%80%99s-log-podcast-the-first-line-of-defense-is-being-informed ADAMnetworks https://adamnet.works The Defender’s Log full transcript - Episode 026 Introduction Narrator: Deep in the digital shadows, where threats hide behind any random byte, a fearless crew of cybersecurity warriors guards the line between chaos and order. Their epic battles, rarely spoken of until today. Welcome to the Defender’s Log, where we crack open the secrets of top security chiefs, CISOs, and architects who’ve faced the abyss and won. Narrator: Here’s your host, David Redekop. David Redekop: Hello everybody, and thanks for tuning into another episode of “The Defender’s Log.” And today’s guest is someone I’ve actually really been looking forward to connecting with and chatting with for some time. Matthew Dufresne was involved with the very first internet service provider set up in London, Ontario, Canada. In fact, that’s how we met, my goodness, over 30 years ago at this point. But today he’s serving as a managing director, and if you look at Matt’s track record, he’s a true blue teamer at heart. He has spent his career solving the hard problems, from dissecting complex incidents to building out robust defense strategies that actually work in the real world, not just on paper. So today, we’re gonna pick your brain, Matthew, on CanadaGPT. Matt, thank you for joining us today. Matthew Dufresne: Oh, thanks, David. It’s really great to be here with you. The Early Days of the Internet David Redekop: It’s been a long time since we had the Simplicity. I just did an interview with the local London Free Press last week, and the journalist asked me, “What was the difference between an interface that you had 30 years ago versus today?” And so I’m actually gonna punt that question right back to you. What’s different today compared to when you first set up that ISP in London? Matthew Dufresne: Oh, I think, so much has changed, but a lot of it’s changed without people really realizing that it’s been changed. Certainly today, there’s a lot of movement towards voice and towards prompting and this type of interface, which is very much different. When we first got started, I don’t know if you remember, this was back before the World Wide Web even, and things were different. I don’t know if you even remember Gopher and some of those things that we used to use, the very earliest text interfaces that there were available. And then now, obviously, we’re talking about more natural language interface and more things that come, I think, easier to people and make things a lot more accessible to people for sure. David Redekop: It was long before AOL Instant Messenger. It was even before there was any kind of ICQ. That’s right. I remember when the bragging point was how few your digits are in your ICQ number, because that was an indicator how early on you were. And I remember back then the chat online was literally an email thread, right? Because as long as you could pop email and you could SMTP outbound, it was literally seconds for the other party to receive their message. And, to think of how insecure our systems were at the time and how blissfully ignorant we were about the insecurities that we were operating with no privacy. Like anybody on the path or anybody in your NOC was able to observe everything going through there. It’s crazy that we only had white light thinking back then, which is only about all the things that are possible, not at all about what things could go wrong. That didn’t even enter our thoughts at the time. Well, maybe for you it did, but for me it didn’t. Matthew Dufresne: No, I think, certainly there were, even back then, there were stories about people hacking and that kind of thing. But it wasn’t something that we necessarily put in the foreground. We were focusing more about getting people connected. We were focusing more about turning people onto the idea of connectivity itself. So certainly nothing like ransomware wasn’t a thing. If it was anything to do with hacking or anything like that, it was really to gain access to systems. So even the concept of spear phishing and that sort of thing wasn’t really a thing that was discussed regularly in terms of security. I remember certainly one of the first times that we actually got involved, and this is back in the internet days or in the ISP days in security, was when we were hooking up, I think, the city of London at the time. And that was primarily just access control level lists, that kind of thing. And I remember actually, I don’t know, did you ever meet David Wiseman? He was one of the people that was working at Western at the time, and I remember him telling me something that I’ve always, kinda kept with me in terms of security, and that is, “The only secure system is one without a power cord.” And so that was the kind of the insight that we were having back then, and it really was to say, you need to shut things off to really prevent any kind of access, and that really anything can be exploited if given enough time. David Redekop: And today, the equivalent is no ethernet cord and a tinfoil wrapper to prevent Wi-Fi, right? That’s the only thing that’s safe today. Matthew Dufresne: And it was really, I mean, it was the basis, I think, the thinking of which became zero trust, I think these days is where that was coming from. The Evolution of Connectivity David Redekop: Right. So that kinda gave you an early start into the aspect of connectivity and connecting people, connecting resources together. And even though I would argue that there are factions of connectivity that have not been a net gain, right? For example, I don’t make any hesitation about expressing my opinion that social media has been a net negative for society. But the connectivity has been a net positive because we’ve been able to accelerate commerce. We’ve been able to apply innovations that have health improvements that have helped us all create a higher density in learning, right? When I think about the amount of things that our sons can learn today in a short period of time, compressed to be hyper-focused on what needs to be learned and have retention, I am amazed at what connectivity has done for the world at large. So one of the things about the internet, broadly speaking, is that it’s been a net positive for me and for everybody that I know that has utilized it for good. That’s not to say that social media was a net positive, but a lot of aspects of technology have been, and I’m just wondering how you applied connectivity and technology in general as stepping stones to what became very meaningful work for you. Matthew Dufresne: Yeah, and I think it’s important to take a little step back. And we always wanna talk about, especially these days, social media being a negative thing. And you’re right, there certainly are negative aspects of social media and stuff that’s very mainstream today, where people talk about algorithms and they talk about engagement and forced engagement and reinforcing that. And that’s a lot of the things that, I think, we need to talk about in terms of how we continue forward with these things. But net-net, the connectivity part about it has been positive, I think. It really does in a lot of cases bring people together. And that’s, I think, your question about how have I built on that, it’s really been the thing that’s enabled a lot of the things that have been able to come after it. And so we started with the World Wide Web, as we mentioned. Then we started to move into social media and really, which is kind of, it is the World Wide Web if you really think about it. We’ve translated it onto our mobile phones and so forth. But the idea that you can connect with people and message them and send messages to them and get responses and engagement from that is something that’s really built to where we are today. And in fact, now that we’re moving into the age of AI and so forth, that’s going to even further multiply, I think, in how we are connected to each other. So it’s important, I think, to really look at connectivity itself and take a look at those different component pieces and then talk about what is working and what doesn’t work in terms of where we are as a society. There are some, like I said, there are some really good net positives that have come out of being hyper-connected to everyone, and there’s some net negatives too. So it’s important for us to realize the difference and make some decisions about how we want that to be going forward. A First Love for Tech David Redekop: Before we get into your CanadaGPT project, Matthew, let’s go take a further step back. What is it that even got you into the technology game to begin with? What was at the root of your first love for tech? Matthew Dufresne: My first love for tech, I think, maybe you know this story, David, but I first started getting involved in tech back when I was in high school, in fact, and I was lucky enough to get a co-op with the local university, Western University here. And it was, in fact, in microbiology and immunology is what my co-op was in. But when I arrived at my placement, there really wasn’t a lot of that science that was being offered as part of the co-op. It was being done by postgraduate students and so forth. But one thing that really was available was this whole idea of being able to learn with machines and being able to teach people in classrooms about how to do different things. So in my case, it was teaching immunology and microbiology students about how to diagnose problems with patients, how to run labs and so forth. And that was all done at the time with multimedia, with Adobe Flash back in the day. Maybe you remember there was a couple other applications that were around at the time, Course of Action. I don’t know if anybody recalls that from so long ago. But it really intrigued me that you could build content and make it available and useful for a particular purpose. So at that particular placement, I was working to build that exact software in order to help medical students at the time understand these premises, and that really pulled me into it. And being able to construct that courseware or construct that material in a way that was gonna assist with people learning things. So it got me hooked, I think, right from the start. David Redekop: Almost like being a glutton for the punishment of having to dig for meaning, dig for understanding, how can we make this work, right? There was this element of attractiveness to say, “How can I use a machine to solve something that hasn’t been solved by a machine yet?” Was that part of it? Matthew Dufresne: Yeah, no, it was part of it, but really I think it was the creativity aspect of it as well. And being able to have, for the first time, we, if you remember with some of the first machines that we used, like the Apple IIe or the IBM AT series or XT series if you’re old enough, they were really sorta text-based. But then it flipped over into really being more graphical, and that element really just attracted me. Being able to convey concepts with not just words, but with images and animations and so forth. At the time we even had a little laser disk that would pull up images of, if you programmed it correctly, you could, whether it was pulling up an image of a gram stain or something like that. So you could use that multimedia approach to really engage people with content, and like that was new, and that was very exciting, I think, too. David Redekop: Yeah. It was clearly a reason why a lot of people started getting into technology at the time. And I just had a flashback of the time when John and I were building PCs and selling high-end computers. And, for us it was always about making sure that the experience was the best it could possibly be. It was at the time when manufacturers would already preload Windows with a bunch of adware or free trials of antivirus and things like that. So we would get rid of all that and then put, I remember it being like a recipe of we put Macromedia or Shockwave, and Flash, and RealAudio player, and all of the things that were, like, bleeding edge to get the online experience. It came bundled with a 56K modem with all of the tweaks to make it the fastest possible. There was some tweaks that you could add to your TCP/IP stack, or it was some kind of a modification that basically optimized the MTU, if I remember correctly, that would make it just noticeably faster than the regular internet connection. And it was because we recognized that the professionals at the time that were buying the high-end computers with connectivity, this was how they were consuming content, getting DVDs. DVDs were new at that time, but there was a lot of CDs already in circulation, and then the CD burners became common. It’s interesting how we end up going through these phases, relatively quickly, each time iterating to a better, higher capacity, faster medium, that time never stood still. And I think those of us that took on the initial technology leap then felt like, “Okay, I can take the next leap as well,” and then we just always stayed current. Introducing CanadaGPT David Redekop: And so it’s no surprise that you, today, you are staying current in the AI world with CanadaGPT. Tell us all about CanadaGPT. Matthew Dufresne: So CanadaGPT actually came out of an idea of my own personal research and wanting to understand more about how our government worked and how issues that are affecting Canadians were really manifesting themselves and what was behind it. So, of course, we read things in the news and we get things from other sources and online being one of those sources. And we just came to realize that there’s a lot of information that is available, that the government makes available, in various sources, but that information is in all kinds of different formats. It could be in a spreadsheet format, a CSV format, it could be like just a plain HTML page somewhere. It could be any number of things like even JSON or XML formats in some cases where we get a little bit more machine-ready disclosures. But some of the challenges there is that because of the diversity of the things that are available, there really isn’t a good way of a regular person to really understand the data that was behind it. What is driving the decisions that people in government are making or beyond the spin, beyond the flavor of the week that gets laid on top of some of these things. And so in my own kind of journey to find this out, this is where I realized that unless you’re really good at manipulating data in a spreadsheet or if you’re good at seeking out and finding different sources for things or where they might be or where you might look to find something, that you’re really facing of an uphill battle. And this is at the same time that, of course, things are being made a lot easier to access through AI. And obviously I’m using ChatGPT or Claude in certain cases to research things and find things out and so on. And so that to me was obvious. It was to say, “Oh, okay, I can use AI now to find out some of this information.” But, of course, as just using AI isn’t always the best thing, that you can do. AI hallucinates. It doesn’t always have the most up-to-date information just depending on its training. There’s all kinds of issues of provenance, so even if it does tell you something, it doesn’t necessarily come with the background where you can go and trace to see, “Hey, oh, I understand where you’ve come to that conclusion or where you’ve drawn the inference to that particular solution.” And so that’s what was behind, I think going through that a few times and downloading the spreadsheet or doing whatever, was really made it obvious to me that there were still some challenges to using AI to do this type of thing. Navigating Misinformation and Finding Facts David Redekop: The first thing that comes to mind, Matt, is figures lie and liars figure. Matthew Dufresne: Yes. David Redekop: And it’s a good quote from a mentor of mine that every time we would look at a trend, that would be his first defensive critical statement comment which forces you to look at. So, keep going. Matthew Dufresne: No, I think that’s right. Figures lie and liars figure. It’s everyone wants to put a spin on it, and also if you don’t have access to that information that yourself or you don’t have a way of finding it, then you’re forced to accept that narrative, or maybe not. But the point is that you really don’t have the information that you can make a good decision on your own with the information that’s available. And so that was part of it. It was to say, okay, I’m a pretty decent person in terms of accessing the information. I can do a pivot table on a spreadsheet, for example, like just on the very basic of things. And so it’s easier for me to do, but then it got me thinking like, really, not everyone is in the same situation. And so what would it take to have a system that would be able to do that? And that’s what really got started me down the road of creating CanadaGPT. So the idea there being that we can take public information that’s available, we can compile that into a knowledge graph, which is a very specific type of database, very modern type of database, and then we can couple that with an AI. You can use ChatGPT, you can use Claude, you can use any of the other inference models that are out there. But we configured it in a way that the system is allowing you to, first of all, give a natural language question. So, if you wanna find out about what expenses has a particular politician incurred, and I wanna dig into that sort of area, then you can just simply ask that question, and then that gets posed against the database instead of just the AI’s training. So whatever that response comes back with is not just what the AI’s been trained with, but it’s the actual data, and then that actual data is used to formulate the answer. And because we do it in that kind of way, it means that the source for the answer that’s given is also included, so you get what’s called a provenance answer. So if you’re asking about, as I mentioned there, if you’re asking about an MP’s expenses as an example, then it will give you an answer, but it will also give you the link to go find out that information or check up on that information yourself if that’s what you wanted to do. And so it’s that concept of not just being able to ask questions simply and plainly and get answers for it, but also that it will provide the source for those answers when it’s providing an answer as well. David Redekop: Yeah. That’s so key because of our lack of confidence sometimes in AI-generated answers that if the substance is there for the response, then that gives the response additional credibility. One of the things about living in Canada is that a large amount of our population has been living and enjoying the freedom that was established because of those that went before us, that created the environment of our freedom, of our liberties. And so getting politically involved has been less necessary, so much so that there’s pockets of people that just don’t worry ever about what’s going on, right? Living literally in the result of the efforts of those that went before us to establish the right governance in many ways. I’m wondering, though, if it’s time for all Canadians to get more involved again, and if this is something that would help. Was that part of the thinking? Matthew Dufresne: Absolutely. Because I think that, as I mentioned, we’ve found ourselves in an environment today where people have various opinions on things. We’re not always able to depend on mainstream media, as an example, because they’ll have an opinion on something, and we’re not always able to depend on maybe what we would do in the past. We would talk to our parents or we would talk to, various people that were more politically active. But that’s becoming, I think, a little bit harder to keep track of just because of the environment that we find ourselves in. And a lot of this was being able to provide access to the basics of the information so that you could find out for yourself. I mentioned before, if you were to ask a question about imports and exports, you might not know that you have to go to Industry Canada or Export Canada to find out that information. And this is a way that kind of will sort through some of that for you, because we can use inference to figure out where to get the information from and present it to you. So it’s a way of pathfinding that information, but it’s also a way to get away from this polarization, I think, that we all experience, where we’re looking at and you mentioned social media earlier. We all know about memes, and we all know about how easy it is to take a message and boil it down into a picture with a few words and try and pass that off as, the solution or the answer to a problem. And life is just not that simple in a lot of cases. And what that’s caused, I think, in a lot of instances is that we really stop talking to each other about those things. It’s easier to share a picture and get your friends to agree to that, and then think somehow that the problem’s solved or that you know the answer, when in reality, it’s never that. It’s never that straightforward. It’s always levels of complexity that are behind that. And this was definitely a consideration. It was a way that we could potentially get people to get more engaged and have more fruitful discussion around some of these topics. The Power of Informed Discourse David Redekop: Yeah. I remember even just a couple of decades back that it was completely normal for a few people that were on polar opposites of the political spectrum in terms of their default positions to still have a very cordial and a fruitful discussion because it was safe to do so. It was completely normal to say, “Hey, this is how I perceive things. Why don’t you tell me what I’m missing?” And both sides would address each other in an aspect of humility. Today, it’s almost like there are way too many folks looking for that opportunity to express something that will get attention that is about being disagreeable instead of saying, “Where do we have common grounds?” Because disagreeableness gets attention more than agreeableness does, right? And, so that is the part of social media that seems to have made things less productive than they would’ve been. And so if we can encourage the next generation, I always think about our sons, what are our sons and daughters going to experience, and are they able to get to the real data as soon as possible? Now, if I can draw a very quick analogy, I am a sucker for pecan butter tarts. And, as I was at the local Farm Boy on the weekend, I actually took the package of freshly baked pecan butter tarts, but then I saw a high-fat, high-sugar warning, and then the calorie count there, and that is what made me put it back. And it was just having that information so readily available that reminded me, “No, this is not wise.” And if we can find a way to have real information, political in nature, what’s been going on, ready and available that’s factual, that’s not about expressing an opinion, but where we can then derive opinions based on the facts presented, to me that’s a good thing. And I don’t know, are you tracking any metrics, or is it too early to tell? Matthew Dufresne: I think it’s too early to tell, but I think one thing that I’ll put out there is that in this journey that I’ve gone through in digital, if you will, like from the very earliest part of the internet to now, one thing that does stand out to me more than ever is that marketing itself has become a real science. And there are ways that you can play off of that same mechanism that wants you to get that butter tart, the dopamine cycle that says “Here it is. I’m gonna put it in front of your face and you need to consume and get it and just eat it and never mind the consequences,” which is, of course, a very marketing sort of thing to do. But as you’ve noticed and made an observation on, it’s not always healthy to do it that way. And so I take a look at social media and I take a look at a lot of these things and that’s what comes across to me is that so many things are marketing to the point where even as society we’ve picked up on that. We mentioned memes. Memes are a really easy way. They’re that butter tart for you to consume. They want you to just take it and eat it and accept it and not worry about it. It’s solved for you and that’s a bias that we all have. All humans have that bias where we use stereotypes, we use preconditions, we use anything that allows our brain to shortcut our decision-making process to get something that’s potentially it’s good for us. But, as we know, it’s not always good for us. So this is, I think, really where I think we need to get back to the actual conversations. Liking a bunch of memes is not a conversation. Talking about what is on those memes is really I think the thing that we’re losing more and wanting to get back to that. You can’t get back to that until you can, I think, get people to realize that there is more to things than just some text that gets printed on a picture that you can click like on. It really has to get back to, I think, engagement with individuals about what the actual issues are that we see here. And I haven’t even touched on foreign interference. I haven’t even touched on things that people that don’t necessarily have the interest in Canadians in mind want to see happen in our country. So this is really, I think, CanadaGPT in particular, it’s all Canadian data. It’s all structured to answer those questions to the best way it can so that we can move beyond that way of engaging with people. David Redekop: Canada should absolutely be the wealthiest nation on the face of the earth in every regard, having the most fresh water, having an unbelievable reservoir of oil, having land and having the diversity of geography, having English and French. The amount of value that we should be able to produce if we didn’t get stuck on various aspects, it should be the cheapest place to live with the highest level of abundance on everything, right? And, so if we could find a way to show the next generation what the roadblocks are to that and how every decision is tied to who benefits from this decision this way, what group tends to have the largest financial stake in this? Did they influence this decision somehow? I think if I’m envisioning your graph to actually be a three-dimensional object, almost what’s that Tom Cruise movie, that is about pre-crime, where it’s a- Matthew Dufresne: Minority Report David Redekop: Minority Report. Thank you. So I can see that kind of an interface where the interconnectedness of various data points is readily accessible, where it isn’t making an interpretation, it isn’t creating a meme, but it’s giving you threads to connect so that as our 13-year-old son is able to connect some economics because he’s now saving money for a MacBook Neo, and now all of a sudden the idea of mowing a lawn for $10 is a whole lot more interesting. And so now there’s economic lessons that I can teach him in that when he’s looking at decisions behind the scenes that will now bring economics into it like it never did before. And it’s not just all about what’s in this for me, but what stake am I leaving in for others, right? Measuring things like consumption versus production. We actually use our internet connection policies now in the home as a distinction between is this consumption mode or production mode, right? And sometimes it’s gray. If you’re watching something educational, okay, that’s both at this moment. But, just creating that awareness and that I’m getting excited by the minute here as I’m talk processing what CanadaGPT is today and where it can go. I’m really excited about what you’re doing. Matthew Dufresne: It’s important in what you said there is that there is nuance in things. That’s the thing that I think is most important to realize in today’s society, is that everything from a marketing perspective wants to be simplified. But in reality, to make decisions for millions of people that we share our communities with, it’s not always straightforward. When we take a look at, you know, when I was doing a lot of these things, you get involved in the actual data that’s coming out of government, and you realize very quickly that it’s not simple. It doesn’t mean that it’s too complex for everyone to understand. It just means that it’s very rarely straightforward. There’s so many intersections, there’s so many nuances that you just have to take into consideration. And if you look at the actual mechanics of government, that’s what they’re doing. When they’re making laws, when they’re having debates at committee or on the floor, it’s seldom very simple. Even as though there’s certain politicians that wanna make it a little bit more simple, that there’s a lot to be considered and there’s a lot to be understood before you can do something. And it’s not a wrong thing. It’s just that like everything else in business and in everywhere, if you wanna make the best decision, then you gotta be informed and you have to really understand the factors that are involved in order to make that decision. So, is trying to get to that exposition, if we will, that, like I said, not everyone knows how to program a computer or write software or anything like that, but that should not be a barrier in today’s day and age. We do have assistance that can help us get to that level of detail. More and more, we’re able to rely on AI to at least tell us the foundational things that are involved and allow us to make decisions about that or what we think is right and what we think is wrong based on having more information. And so, yeah, my hope is that people will be more critical about their politics, especially now. Especially, in the Canada that we have today, which is under threat in certain cases by other foreign interests, whether you wanna think that’s China or Russia or even America these days. There are going to be, I think, like everything else, when you are such a great prosperous nation that has so many things going for it, then there’s gonna be people from the outside that want to take advantage of it, or they want it to be aligned with their own, objectives. And as Canadians, this is where we need to come together and really have this, the hard discussions because a lot of times these are not easy discussions to have. But being able to do that with information that we all know is factual and grounded in primary sources and is the real thing, I think, is that becomes the basis for all good discussion. Education and Generational Impact David Redekop: Yeah, it’s almost like the first line of defense is being informed, not uninformed or misinformed, which is sadly, altogether common. But if we start with the foundation of being aware, then that is a good solid rock foundation to start from. And, as an example, with one of the things about being a dad is that you get regular opportunities to articulate thoughts that you’ve never had to express in a certain way before, right? And, one of our sons recently asked me, “So how does a government generate money? They just have an unlimited supply, right?” And, so just being able to particularly articulate the three main sources, I just realized, wait a minute, I never had this growing up. I don’t know how it would’ve changed, informed me differently if I’d had that kind of information. Maybe I wasn’t interested, maybe I was told, but just the idea of where the sources of revenue come and what the impact is, both short-term, medium-term, long-term, what’s the generational impact or who’s gonna pay the price? What if it’s gonna be people that pay the price that come multiple generations after me? Somehow we tend to justify as a society today that we can keep on punting things down the road, right? And, anyway, where I’m going with this is just that being aware and informed is super important, and you’re really guiding us in that place. But there’s also a fundamental desire that I know that we have in our generation, which is to leave our children with a better future than was handed to us. And when you look at the stats today in terms of IQ, in terms of health, in terms of obesity, in terms of things like type 2 diabetes, I’m not sure we’ve done that. So we have a little bit of work to do. So giving kids today access to CanadaGPT, I’m excited about it, genuinely. Matthew Dufresne: Yeah, I think there’s something you’re hitting on there too that I’ll comment on is that I’m not so sure if I look back on my schooling and so forth, that there was a lot of time. You get a prerequisite time that’s spent on civics and so forth, but none of that ever prepared me for how things actually work. And I’m not sure we do a good job in schools today in really getting into that detail. And what you find is that when you do get into it, you realize that there’s a lot there that maybe I didn’t know before. So you talk about monetary policy. How many Canadians really know how the Bank of Canada sets rates, sets the overnight rate, finds out about, like, how inflation works and manages that in the economy? How many people understand the relationship between the Bank of Canada and the actual governing party that’s in place? If it’s glossed over, I think, in our school’s curriculums, and I think that’s true even today. You have to really get to a next level. Of course, in politics and so forth to like really get indoctrinated to how those certain things work. And, that’s not always compatible with the way that people learn, especially today. I have kids myself, and I think that one thing that strikes me is that this generation especially coming up now, they learn things from online as well. So not just what they’re learning in school, but they’re on YouTube, they’re watching videos, they’re consuming this information all the time. And a lot of it, just because of our geography and so forth ends up coming across the border from the United States. And we, in a lot of cases that I’ve seen, we take for granted that our systems operate the same way, and they don’t. In a lot of ways they don’t operate anything remotely the same. But that’s never really, I think, covered in the detail that it needs to be. And so CanadaGPT will tell you those things as well. It will get into, like, if you wanna understand how monetary policy works in Canada, you can ask that question. It will give you an answer that’s grounded in facts that you can go and chase down further if you wanna get into a little bit more detail of it. It will tell you about various parts of the government that you might not have had experience with in the past, and that’s perfectly okay. It’s being able to have access to that Canadian context, and that was a really important thing as well for me to build into this as well. Because if you look around, we are dependent on so many things, especially when you look at our data, on what comes from the United States. And that’s not some kind of treachery or anything like that. It’s just like it always has been. We watch American television. We consume social media primarily on all American applications, although there’s some really great Canadian social media companies that are rising like ASocial and Gander and so forth. So that’s in the process of being corrected. But like the history there is that we do get so much signal and that comes from outside of our borders that it was important to have something that was purely focused on the Canadian signal and what it means to interact with Canadian systems, I think, is another goal that I had. Retaining Talent and the Canadian Experience David Redekop: That’s very good. And hopefully in there, the net result also will be to expose why it is that the center of gravity is America. Why is it that we have an outsized number of comedians that end up going to the States? Why do we have an outsized number of entrepreneurs on a per capita basis that then move to the United States? And I think what we’ll find is that there are policy reasons why that happens. If there’s policy reasons why that happens, why can we not be smarter about policy to make sure that the attractions here are to keep them. And at the end of the day, it’s still a global market, right? It’s one thing for people to go there for better weather, you know? But usually that’s not the sole reason why Canadian entrepreneurs go south. Matthew Dufresne: I think, I’ve known a lot of them that have done it and to be blunt, a lot of them have to do with financial reasons and taxation reasons. I think that a lot of times that those decisions are made purely financially. I can take my own experience from that, having accepted a job in the States and moved to California for a number of years. That was a big motivator for me. You can get paid in US dollars. You can get paid more than what you would see in a Canadian marketplace. But living there also proved to me that there are other things that we don’t take into account, because at first blush, the money’s great, but then you get into things like the healthcare system, and you get into things like rule of law and how we have different ways of doing things here. I think, like a lot of Canadians that have lived abroad, you really cherish moving back. You really understand the differences having been away from Canada, what those are, and what on the surface might appear to be like a huge benefit isn’t always what you think it is. I find myself, I think, I found myself, after living in the States for some time, that moving back was very refreshing. It was a big realization of the things that we have and all of the great parts of this country that we have here that we can take advantage of and we should be proud of. But, they’re not always it’s the same thing. The marketing isn’t always aligned, right? If the only thing that’s important to you is the dollars, then that might be a reason, but you realize, especially I think as you get older too, that it’s not just always about money. David Redekop: Hopefully, that is not going to be lost in the coming years and decades, because there are a lot of changes coming and our natural resources are not being utilized in the way that they could. And we’re still having brain drain, leaving Canada at a record pace. It seems like to me if maybe some of the numbers I need to validate on CanadaGPT, but it seems the trend currently is not there to retain the talent. And so the higher concentration of talent moves to the US from Canada, the more difficult it will be to ever reverse it. All the stories like from the Avro to Alexander Graham Bell, just look at the country code plus one, right? We don’t even have our own country code. We have to share it. There’s just so many interesting dynamics. But one of the things I do wanna point out, whether it’s anywhere in the West, we are truly living in the best of times that there’s ever been. We have more comfort, we have more abundance than kings and queens did just a few hundred years ago. And, that’s not something I take lightly. I still wake up every single day with nothing but gratitude. I go to bed with nothing but gratitude in my heart because of how good we have it. So we have to keep that in context as well, not just the current numbers that look scary, not just the current condition that make it look like there’s trouble here and there’s trouble there. Matthew Dufresne: No, I think it’s an important time to have courage with these things. We talk about brain drain all the time. One of the things that I’m proud about is that, and I’m not sure we’ve mentioned this, but we have a site that’s exclusively the chatbot. So if you just wanna ask questions, you can go to askgordie.ca, which is just the AI portion of the site. It will still pull on the same data behind the scenes, but it’s more of a kind of a chat interface that you can go there. One of the things that I was mentioning I worked on with that is being able to have a persona for Gordie, that will allow healthcare workers in the US, if they are interested in immigrating to Canada, that they can ask questions, and it will go and pull the resources from the various provinces and from the federal government, from Health Canada, and assist people to do that. And, there’s been a lot of movement lately of healthcare professionals that are relocating to Canada because we have a more stable kind of environment in some cases politically that can be found in the States. And that there’s all the other benefits too, like the beautiful parts of our country that really are stunning. I’ve had the opportunity to visit all the provinces and not quite all the territories yet, but they’re on the list. But I am always taken aback by just how much our country has to offer in terms of its beauty of physically and the people that are here and the way that our society works, that I think that it’s not always gonna be that way. I think that we’re gonna see that people are gonna want to relocate here, and certainly we’re seeing that in kind of the healthcare professionals these days as well. David Redekop: Yeah, it’s a conversation that begs for a lot of nuance. I’m gonna push back for just a second because the American system creates for a opportunity for massive innovation in a way that the Canadian one doesn’t. And there are times when we get put on waiting lists, like when I was completely disabled and I would have never been able to get the help I needed in Canada in time. But I was fortunate enough that I was able to get what I needed just across the border in Michigan. And, so those that have the fortune or find ways to make it happen do that, and so medical tourism is a real thing. But not everybody can exercise that. So there are times when that system is far superior to the single-payer system that we have here. There is no perfect answer, but one almost tends to complement the other, and in some situation one is better than the other. But back to the territories you haven’t seen. There’s only three of them, you know that. Matthew Dufresne: Yeah, I do. With various, levels of accessibility. I think it’s pretty easy. Yukon, Northwest Territory. Nunavut’s a bit tricky. Gotta have a plane, I think. David Redekop: Yeah. It takes almost as long to cross each of them as it takes to cross Texas, right? I remember one time, the first time that I went by car all the way to West Texas, and when we got to Dallas, and get out of Dallas, I think it’s on Interstate 10, and it says El Paso 599. That’s in miles. Oh my goodness, that’s gonna take all day on one road. Matthew Dufresne: Yeah, but the funny part is that because you’re Canadian, you probably considered driving it, because we’re used to it here, right? “Oh, we’ll just go to Toronto. That’s only 200 kilometers.” Final Thoughts & Conclusion David Redekop: No, I wonder what the stats are about the miles we drive as Canadians. But, yeah, we don’t tend to shy away from that. Matt, it’s been such a joy chatting with you about moving forward in technology and how AI can equip the future generations. You and I both being dads, we obviously have built-in motivations and are aligned to leave the world a better place for our kids, and that’s why we’re in the role of a defender in everything that we do. Is there any one piece of wisdom that you would like to leave any listener or reader or watcher of this podcast? Matthew Dufresne: Yeah, I think so. I think that if I was to say anything in dealing with technology as I have in 30 years and where we find ourselves today is, especially for Canadians, just take the time to talk to other Canadians regardless of so many opportunities now to talk to a machine because it will listen to you and it actually tells me I’m funny and it tells me I’m sure it would tell me I’m good-looking if it could too. But, talk to people. It’s important to make these connections today more than ever, and it’s important to talk to people who don’t necessarily agree with you on things to just find out who they are, and, I think, we can really benefit from that, especially today. David Redekop: Well, because you said so, the next time I go to Tim Hortons, I’m gonna talk to a person to take my order instead of using the app, okay? That’ll be my commitment, because I agree. We rely on machines too much when machines can do the work, and we forget the importance of connecting humans to human. So on that note, thank you very much for your time today, Matthew, and I look forward to connecting with you again real soon. Matthew Dufresne: Thanks so much, David. Great to be here. Cheers. David Redekop: Bye for now. Narrator: The Defender’s Log requires more than a conversation. It takes action, research, and collective wisdom. If today’s episode resonated with you, we’d love to hear your insights. Join the conversation and help us shape the future together. We’ll be back with more stories, strategies, and real-world solutions that are making a difference for everyone. In the meantime, be sure to subscribe, rate, write a review, and share it with someone you think would benefit from it, too. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you on the next episode. 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

Nguồn: https://securityboulevard.com/2026/07/tdl-026-the-first-line-of-defense-is-being-informed-matthew-dufresne. 8sync News chỉ tóm tắt và dẫn link; bản quyền nội dung thuộc tác giả và nguồn gốc.

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