80: Grit with Andres Andreu

This episode has been automatically transcribed by AI, please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

Chris: Andres Andreu is a cybersecurity leader who has spent time in the DEA, and his background has instilled a mentality of toughness and grit, allowing him to become the determined and successful individual that he is today. Dre, it’s good to see you, man.

Dre: Yeah, likewise. Good to see you guys, and thanks for having me.

Chris: Absolutely, man. And I’m also here with cybersecurity sales veteran and BarCode cohost riding shotgun with me today, Doug Gotay. Thanks for joining us, man.

Doug: Always a pleasure. And to have a good friend Dre on board. You guys are going to love this story.

Chris: Yeah, man, I’m looking forward to it. So, Dre couldn’t do you justice by reading through a scripted bio of your journey. So if you don’t mind, walk us through your story in your own words.

Dre: Sure. So I am officially an immigrant to this country. So I’m from Cuba, born there and raised in New York. Queens, New York. So for anybody that’s familiar with Queens.

Doug: Oh, yeah, born and raised.

Dre: I did a lot of running around as a kid. The whole Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens thing. I can certainly say that the upbringing in those days, queens in the 80s especially, was really rough. Definitely prepared me for what was coming next in my journey. And I’m super thankful for everything I’ve been through, irrespective of how rough it was at the moment. It is what it is. It makes you who you are. I grew up predominantly in Jackson Heights.

Dre: Did my share of running around Queensbridge and different parts of Brooklyn. It was all good. Definitely Queens in those days made you tough, or you just stayed home and never went anywhere, which that wasn’t for me.

Chris: So talk me through that specific era in time. What was the environment like?

Dre: Particularly where I grew up was interesting because if you’re familiar with Queens, I grew up right where Northern boulevard is, and to the north side of northern boulevard, it was houses. Right? And there were a lot of Irish and Italian American families on that side of the avenue, of the boulevard. Then on our side was more of the minority related areas in pockets. We were buildings, right. We grew up in apartments, no houses, and there were a lot of gangs, a lot of crews in those days.

Dre: And it wasn’t so much based on ethnicity as it was your particular block or a particular building that you were from. And in those days, I will say there were a lot of fair fights in those days. So if someone was going to scrap, it was entirely okay, understandable and accepted to just create a crowd around them and let them work it out. Right. As things progressed, then people started getting jumped, and it was a lot of multiple attackers on one. And so even your hand to hand strategies I grew up boxing and doing judo. Even your hand to hand strategies had to change, because no longer was it a fair one on one type of situation.

Dre: All of a sudden, for instance, you don’t want to fight to go to the ground. Fighting three or four guys. You don’t want to go to the ground. You want to stay on your feet. Right? And so that type of stuff molds you. I was kind of one of those people who tried to get along with everybody irrespective of the ethnicity. I didn’t care you were either cooler, you weren’t, and if you were an asshole, you’re an asshole. Right. Like and that and that was that for me. But there were there were interesting cultural dynamics because it was kind of a true New York melting pot right, in that little cluster of a neighborhood.

Dre: But, yeah, in the 80s, it was rough. There were a couple of night fights too. Those were fun.

Doug: Chris, I’m not sure if you know this, but he mentioned judo, and correct me if I’m wrong, Dre, but you’re a black belt in judo, correct?

Dre: Yeah. So technically, I’m fourth degree yodan in judo, and I’ve trained all of my sons as well. They’re all black belts in judo and in a couple of cases, international medalists.

Doug: That’s fantastic.

Dre: Yeah, I started judo in 1982 and, you know, stopped for a little pocket here and there just because of life. Right. But, you know, judo makes you tough, man. There’s a famous saying in judo. It says, judo teaches you many things, but fear is not one of them. And it’s very true. There’s nothing more humbling than having another man throw you. It is a humbling experience and one that I am eternally thankful for.

Doug: And I recall a conversation that we had in regard to judo and how I told you I started training in Brazilian jiujitsu. And the one thing I always remember, you saying is that learn judo, right? And the reason why is you don’t want to end up on the floor if there’s multiple attackers. Regardless, if you’re going to control the guy, he’s got his boys on the other side ready to, you know, kick at you and so on and so forth.

Dre: Yeah, absolutely. Look, I have great respect for BJJ in terms of what it’s developed out to be. Technically, what the Brazilians learned was a style of judo called kosin judo. You can go look it up, and you’ll see where the Brazilian jujutu roots are. And kosin judo was exclusively focused on what’s called NawazA, or ground techniques in judo. And judo is a complete art. Right. Judo has traditional judo has striking throwing grappling. Right.

Dre: But to me, there’s no silver bullet. You have to be well rounded because whatever situation you’re in, what if you’re a phenomenal on the ground to this point, right. You have five people stomping on you. I don’t care who you are, you’re going to take a beating. Right? So you want to play the odds. The odds are better. Hell, I’d rather just have good boxing skills if I got to fight four or five people because you know how to evade, you know how to duck, move. Right?

Dre: And so to me, it’s about being well rounded. It’s about finding that balance of, okay, if it goes to the ground, I can hold my own, but if I got to stand here, it’s cool. If I got to pull my belt off and fight a guy with a knife, what good is ground fighting going to do for me, right?

Doug: Right.

Dre: So you need my you know, my perspective is you kind of need to have all that. And I’ve blended up in my professional life in certain situations, in certain environments where they were definitely hostile. And all of this definitely helped mold my frame of mind, my demeanor, as I carried myself in those environments.

Doug: Thank you. That’s great. And that’s why still to this day, I trained in boxing in Bui Thai. Right, because you got to have those hands.

Dre: Yeah. Look, even from the ground, you can hit, but how much power can you actually generate? It’s very difficult to generate a lot of power from the ground. So I don’t knock any art. Anybody that trains gets my respect because I know how hard it is. But to me, like I said, it’s about well rounded. It’s about being balanced and well rounded. Yeah.

Chris: So judo helped you with the physical aspect, but it also helped you with the mental aspect as well. As you navigated through tough situations well.

Dre: Even look even into your adult life. Right. One of the biggest I won’t say lessons one of the biggest aspects of judo is the following. You’re going to get thrown. You’re going to hit the ground, just like life will kick you in the balls, and you’re going to end up on the floor at some point, right? And so there’s two there are two elements that come into play at that point. And I’ve always told my students this one is that you get up.

Dre: But two, more importantly, how you get up, right? So when you get thrown and it hurts, right, you landed bad, whatever, it’s a jarring experience. You got to get up and you got to get up like you’re ready to get thrown again. Because that’s how life is, right? Life kicks you in the balls. What are you going to do? Curl up in a fetal position and not live your life? You can’t do that. You can’t live with fear. So that lesson of just getting up and all right, you got me, let’s go, right?

Dre: And you just keep going. And that’s part of the beauty of training in those type of arts, right? You can call it a sport, too, but my training has been more of the art part of it, even though sport has been a big component of that experience to me, that’s prices into personal life, having kids I have four kids into business, right. I had my own startup. We built it all the way to have an exit and all that.

Dre: It’s tough doing all that. That’s not for the fainted heart, right? And it’s funny because the psychological dynamics that start to come into play, doug, you touched upon some of these type of combat sports that we’re talking about. If you step back and you think about it, there’s an interesting dynamic because we like to rely on ourselves for success or failure. I don’t play a team sport because I don’t want to rely on somebody else.

Dre: Plus I don’t want to be a failure, a point of failure for them. If I mess up, if I fail, it’s on me. And I like those odds. I’d rather have those odds. I’d rather it be you and me. One of us is going to win. And if it’s you, good for you. If it’s me, good for me. But I like the odds. I don’t have to depend on anybody else. And if you ever run your own company, for instance, you need that mindset, right?

Dre: Yeah. You need people around you. I’m not denying that. But there’s a certain mindset that will bring you to success or failure. And I am so thankful that I got put into this stuff young because it molded my mind to be strong in that sense and to anybody listening.

Doug: As well, I’ll say one thing, I didn’t start young, whereas as Dre did, and he built this resiliency to deal with the stressors and the complexities of business, right. And how this sport psychology and a singular level of fighting really kind of paved the way of who you are today, amongst other things that we’ll get to. But for me, I did it late, I did it in my adulthood, and now I agree where I see how it has helped me mature and deal with the many different challenges that I have in business today and how I’m able to overcome them and make them a positive outcome, it just toughens your mind.

Doug: It creates that resiliency that we all need to keep pushing forward.

Dre: Let me give you a parallel that I think will hit home. Let’s say you’re playing in a judo match and you’re trying to throw someone who doesn’t want to get thrown. It’s difficult, right? They’re putting up a fight. They’re not just letting you walk in and do that. To me, that’s very much in parallel with trying to raise money for a company. Right. Go out there to find 20 million in funding, you’re going to get told no a lot, and either that discourages and deters you or you keep moving. Right. You keep going at that opponent until you get that throw it.

Dre: When I was in that environment, in that startup world, we raised $22 million, and I was part of that entire experience, and had I let all of the nose bother me, we could have never achieved that. Right. And so you’re not going to stop me from reaching my goal. That kind of mentality is absolutely essential.

Doug: And I have that mentality now. Right before, I think a lot of people could tend to just kind of go with the flow, get knocked down, and then just slowly pick themselves back up. I think as people like us, where we train and we try to better ourselves and put ourselves into, quite frankly, you think of like, cold showers, cold plunges, you stay as long as you can and you keep fighting through that. It’s the same thing, right?

Doug: How many knows? And I’ll just keep pushing through. Right. So with that, growing up in Queens, I know how that was, right. There’s a little age gap between us. But how did you transition as a kid going through high school? I’m not sure if you went to university. We didn’t talk about that yet, but how did you end up in the DEA? Did they find you? Did you find them? Let’s talk about that.

Dre: Yeah. It was an interesting mutual discovery exercise, let me put it that way. No, I did not go straight to college. I didn’t have the money to go to college. And honestly, in retrospect, I don’t even think it would have been a worthwhile experience given my state of mind coming out of high school. I’m just being honest with myself. Right. You have to make the best out of college. I was a kid coming off the streets in New York.

Dre: You don’t think in terms of what the hell is college is going to do for me? Technically, I started at the United States Customs Service in the Intelligence Division when it was in the World Trade Center, back when the towers were there, and I actually started there because a personal contact of mine really appreciated certain skills that I had, including language, right? Because I’m bilingual. And you have to remember, this is we’re talking 90, 91. There weren’t too many Spanish speakers in the federal government, and especially in federal law enforcement.

Dre: I think they appreciated the hand to hand skills that I brought to the table simply because you end up in certain situations. But it was interesting because from an intelligence perspective, I ended up having certain qualities, abilities, whatever you want to call them, that I didn’t even realize because I had never been put in a position where I could realize that I had them. Right? I’ll give you a perfect example.

Dre: One of the initial tests that they put me through. They would put you in a room. No windows, one room, one table. A bunch of photographs on the table, a timer. You had, like, two minutes or whatever. They didn’t tell you. There were no instructions. They just put you in the room. So you start looking at all these photographs, and then they pull you out of the room and they start asking you questions, detailed questions about all the photographs from left to right on the top row. That photograph, the belt buckle, what did the belt buckle say? Stuff like that. That if you did not really pay attention to detail, that wasn’t the type of work for you. Right? They were looking for that level of diligence and thorough analytical ability to look at that at all those data points and talking 91. Right.

Dre: Computers weren’t what they are today. Right? There was no Internet as we know it, none of that stuff. It was literally you, your eyes, and whatever you could come up with.

Chris: You’re going in blind to this, right? You didn’t know anyone there?

Dre: Nobody. I didn’t know any of this stuff. I was like, wait. But I didn’t even know what the hell united States Custom Service was. And what appealed to me was when they started telling me about all the types of investigations, because customs worked on a varied set of investigations, right? Everything from art theft to narcotics. Customs was involved, and I was like, wow, that’s pretty freaking cool.

Dre: So I started working there and then. I wasn’t a full timer yet. I hadn’t gone through the academy or any of that stuff. And they put a hiring freeze on, and during the hiring freeze, I meet a recruiter from the DEA. Fast forward again. The skill sets appealed to them, right? I knew my way around whatever, handling weapons and stuff. It was none of that was foreign to me. I end up in Quantico, and that’s when things got my trajectory changed. And even then, within that space, my trajectory ended up changing more.

Dre: And it was one of these things that I saw myself in this one capacity on the operational side, and life just had something different in store for me. And I kind of just had to go with it. But the experience of that journey from zero to quantico was very eye opening, was very enlightening, was definitely instrumental in learning about myself because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life is that you may think you’re going to react a certain way to a situation, but you never actually know till you’re there, right? And until the stressors of that situation are on you, you just don’t know.

Dre: Like you could think you’re the baddest motherfucker on the planet until somebody comes running at you with a knife and then you realize that you’re not. Or you could think you’re the biggest coward on the planet until somebody does something and you react a certain way and you go, wow, I thought I was going to be a coward and look at what came out of me. Right. You just never know until they put you in those stressful situations.

Dre: And DEA’s hiring process definitely tests your limits in terms of what you’re made of. For those that don’t know the process. Culminates in what’s called a panel interview. And the panel interview is, or at least used to be. I don’t know now. I don’t know if it’s changed, but used to be five agents and you in a room, they sit behind a table, you sit in a chair, and everything’s fair and I mean everything like personal matters, because they want to touch on those points that strike your nerves and see how you react. Right?

Chris: So there’s an investigation that goes deep before they even get you in that room.

Dre: Oh yeah, they have their ammo ready. Your background investigation may not even be complete, but I’m sure they have enough information that was part of the process later, but they have enough information to certainly push your buttons. On a personal level, is it the.

Doug: Same sort of deep dive investigations as if you would find in the intelligence community such as the CIA or the NSA, or is it different?

Dre: So those with operational capacities I would say are very similar. Okay? Right. You take a look at, for instance, the NSA. The NSA doesn’t have a very large operational arm, right? It’s more of a SIGINT type agency. But the CIA obviously does have field operational capacity. So they have to test these limits because you’re not going to be behind the desk no matter what you do. I mean think about I ended up in tech there and I was not behind the desk.

Dre: I was one of these fortunate technologists who got to do my thing in the field, right? My life has not been that and I’m going to call it like it is. It’s not a judgmental or negative term. But my life was not one of those nerds behind the desk writing code. I was writing code but my code was to go out into the field and do things like I actually got to go out there place taps on phones. We had to break into apartments to place microphones and recording devices.

Dre: So I ended up working in what’s called a Title Three operations center. And for those who don’t know, a Title Three intercept is the highest level of intercept within the United States, meaning they can, in those days, set up wiretaps on your phone, your fax machine, your beepers, you talk in the 90s, okay? There was nothing that we couldn’t go after in terms of you being part of an investigation, and it forced a lot of creative technical capacities to start surfacing, because everything this was all greenfield, right? This was all new.

Dre: Nobody had done extensive tapping of anything in those days. And so my journey went that way, right? My journey put me into this situation where and by the way, totally ended up there by accident, by opening my mouth and the response of one of my supervisors literally just changed the path of my life. I went into the Title Three operations center where the wiretaps were taking place. I didn’t know anything about them.

Dre: And my dad had become a programmer, a software engineer on his own when he came to this country. So I kind of knew the concepts, right? Because he used to talk to me about it, and I was like, that’s just boring. I don’t want nothing to do with that, right? But when I went to the Title Three operations center, I saw that they had all these monitors, these translators with the headphones on and everything was handwritten on index cards and, like, all this crazy stuff. And I was like, oh, my God. This is archaic. So I went to the supervisor never forget this. Never, ever, because this is what put me on the path.

Dre: And I said to him, I said, look, this is crazy. There’s stuff we can do now to maybe use technology that he was like he said, Listen, kid, don’t come in here whining and complaining unless you have a solution. So unless you have a solution, get the fuck out of my office and go find me one. And I was like, okay. So as I walk out, I’m kind of pissed off that he spoke to me like that. But then it was like, Wait a minute.

Dre: He’s right. He’s right, he’s right. I went in there to complain about something without offering a solution. Like, that was, you know that was.

Chris: The last time you did that?

Dre: Last time? Hell, yeah. Hell, yeah. But, you know, and again, in those days, there was no Internet. There wasn’t anything. There was the main Barnes and Noble bookstore on 18th and Fifth. I’ll never forget it. 18th street, fifth Avenue. And I ran over there to see what kind of books they had, and they had, like, five technology books, mostly on C programming. That was it. There wasn’t, like, no big tech section, nothing.

Dre: And I was like, oh, man, I got to learn this shit because it was like this opportunity just presented itself, and that was it. I never looked back. I did a lot there. I had a lot of fun. I grew a lot in a short amount of time. I am one of these people who can legitimately claim I’m self taught in technology.

Doug: Fantastic.

Dre: Because there was no college. There was no school. There was none of that. It was like, Listen, here’s a problem. Either solve it or disappear, right? And so I solved it. Yeah.

Chris: I’m the same way, dre. That’s the way I learned. And I don’t think I’d personally trade that for anything.

Dre: Yeah, well, let me tell you something, though. This is me and, you know, in my mid 50s telling you this. You value it that much more, okay? Because you didn’t pay for it. Nobody gave it to you. Nobody forced it on you. You said, Shit, it’s do or die here, right? Like, I either take this or I go back to whatever, a worse situation. Those are defining moments in your life. And let me tell you, I wouldn’t change it. Likewise for nothing.

Dre: For nothing. But the creative point that I made earlier I think is important, because as the challenges came up, so, like, a team would be out on an operation, and they realized they want to start listening to conversations from person X. They’d come and sit down with us and be like, Listen, this is all we know about this person. What can you do? And it was never much to go on. So you had to go out there in the field, do your recon, figure out how they’re communicating with people, right? And then put a plan end together and devise the technology to then go implement that and make sure more importantly and this is key, make sure that all of what you did held up in court, because if this thing goes to trial, you the scrutiny is on you, right?

Dre: Any good defense attorney would try to tear you up or discredit you or say that what you built wasn’t functioning properly. Whatever. They were notorious, and it was upsetting. But then you realize later, it’s not personal. That’s their job, right? In the beginning, you’re like, Dude, you know what? I’m going to wait for you outside of the courthouse. That kind of mentality. But it’s just business, right?

Dre: They’re getting paid to do a job, and their job is to make you look bad. And some of them are very good at it. But it’s funny, because in retrospect, I realized that we did a lot of we built a lot of technology raw in the 90s that’s now come out and is a big thing now. And, like, blockchain is the obvious one for me because when I actually took a look at what it takes to build a blockchain under the hood, I sat there and I was like, we did that shit in, like, 94 when I was there.

Dre: Because that’s how we would prove in court when they would bring in independent experts, right? That’s how we would prove the chain of events of phone calls, because it’s irrefutable at that point. So we used MD five, right? The message. Digest five algorithm. I think it came out in 92 or something. And we managed to get again, there was no email back there. We managed to get ourselves a print out of the math behind it, and we wrote the algorithm in a function that we used and we used. So we would take a call, the digitized version of a call, and generate a digest, a hash, right?

Dre: And then on the next call, we would have that hash embedded as proof of the fact that it came after the call that was previous, and so on and so forth. And in essence, that is what makes up a blockchain. So when I saw all the hype around it, I was like, what the hell is a big deal? We would have put that again, you’re in a bubble, right? The bubble of the government. And that technology doesn’t leave.

Dre: But that’s how we were able to get solid results. Just one of the ways I should say that we were able to get solid results in court when all of this stuff ended up as evidence for a case. So that’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about when I say when you were forced to be creative because none of that existed, right? The prosecuting attorneys would go, how do I prove that this stuff is really what happened? And you got to go back and come up with something interesting.

Dre: But just one personal note because I have to stick it in there. The greatest thing that came out of my government days was meeting my wife. My wife was a translator on the wiretaps with the headphones on that’s. Right? And now we’re married.

Chris: You better tell that story.

Dre: 26, 27 years, four kids. Nice.

Doug: Can you share the story of what happened the time that you said where I think it was your wife, where she eventually became your wife. You guys were listening to a wiretap where she told you about a wiretap and it was actually a you could tell the story better. You know what I’m talking about?

Dre: Yeah, I won’t get into details, but yeah. So we were on an operation and we were being set up basically by a group that was being worked on one case that had nothing to do with another case, from another group that were targeting the same people. And by the way, we ended up solving that problem with another piece of technology that I’ll talk about in a second. But we had two separate groups working the same targets from different angles.

Dre: And as it turns out, we had set up some meetings. I’ll just use that loosely with. These people and ended up hearing on the call that I was unofficially listening to, that they were setting up the people from the original, from my original operation that I was a part of. And it just kind of hit me like, oh my God, they’re talking about us. And had we not overheard that conversation, who knows what would have happened?

Dre: But it forced multiple disparate teams to start coming together and figuring out that they were working on the same targets. We ended up coming up with a system called Dex drug Enforcement Coordination System. Remember, this is in the 90s that the teams would put their case details in and it would figure out based on like deeper codes and stuff like that, if there were links to cases that had nothing to do with each other. And it would basically create that pattern of, hey, you guys need to talk to each other because you’re working the same target. Plus we’re wasting money, right? You got two separate groups working separate investigations on the same target.

Dre: And by the way, before that system existed, there was actually an incident where a DEA group and if I remember correctly, it was either a Customs Task force group or an NYPD group. I don’t remember they both actually went to do a takedown on the same target at the same time and nobody knew who guns were pointed all over the place. It was an ugly situation. That piece of tech that we ended up building actually had a tremendous impact on avoiding those type of situations.

Dre: I can’t say eliminate them entirely because nothing is 100%, but it definitely had a positive impact from my recollection in terms of coordinating investigations.

Doug: And it sounds like intelligence was just ever more important, especially intelligence sharing between the multiple teams that were working. Correct. And let me expand on that with that. You being in technology today in cybersecurity, as a leader, as somebody that is there to create strategy and protect an organization from cyber threats. What is your opinion on threat intelligence today and how it works in the DEA and how it works today in your role as a CSO?

Dre: I’ll use the term loosely the investigative process. Right. From the perspective of the investigative process, the sharing of intel is priceless. And unfortunately, we’ve seen the failures when intel is not shared. And I think unfortunately, it is in the inherent DNA of a lot of these agencies to not share or they will share up until a certain point, which then puts into question the effectiveness of what you’ve actually shared, even though you can make the claim that I shared.

Dre: Right. And so it’s one of those double edged swords that I think you’re talking about. Like I said, the DNA of these agencies and many years of history. I don’t see an easy solution. But honestly, without that intel, without the sharing of intel, we’re always going to have certain issues certain gaps in terms of what we can do and what we can look into on the non investigative side. If you think about it, the whole thread intel component for what we do now is to really enhance the proactivity of whatever protective solutions we put in place.

Dre: Because if you’re not running an investigation, what’s the point of looking at intel, right? You want to look at the intel to be able to say, hey, I think we’re covered from that type of a vector, as opposed to going, oh my God, we’re not covered. We better do something. Right? And so I see it really linked to that level of proactivity. Honestly. Security is very much like law enforcement. It’s a reactive space.

Dre: Anybody that tells you differently hasn’t lived in this space for 30 years. Pushing anything into the proactive is just an enormous step forward. And it is possible, right? Like, I can tell you stuff that we’ve done where I am now, that is definitely proactive, and we’ve seen the fruits of that work, but it’s difficult to be proactive because it’s almost like a guessing game, right? You’re taking that intel, you’re looking at it, you’re going, okay, I think they’re going to try to come in this way.

Dre: You put a protective mechanism in place, and then you kind of hope for the best. You can’t boil the ocean. You can’t cover all the angles. One of my flaws is that I always try to look at all the angles, and you just create so many different vectors within what you’re trying to protect that it becomes almost like, oh, my God, this is impossible. And then you got to backtrack and go, okay, let’s focus on what we can protect, and at least we’re aware of the fact that we have deficiencies over there.

Dre: But to me, threat intel is a component of that, of moving me into the proactive space.

Doug: Yeah, I’ve been in the threat intel space for a little while now. We’ve seen a lot of talk, and this may be in your circle as well, where there’s more reorganization and more investments per se in the CTI program as a whole. Even the most mature security teams need an extension of their intelligence program that are well decorated, ex military, ex law enforcement like yourself and CIA analysts that can do more than what their team’s capabilities have in place today. Right.

Doug: And I think it’s interesting, and I think it’s correlated back and please, I would love to hear your opinion on this correlated back to the changes in the global geopolitics. China, what’s going on? Russia and Ukraine, there just seems to be a lot more activities going on in respect to that. And at the same time, you could also ask somebody else, and it’s just business as usual, right? China wanting to steal IP, russian threat actors are trying to steal money and so on and so forth. Right. What’s your opinion on that and then we can move on to the next topic.

Dre: Look, the geopolitical landscape is what it is and honestly it hasn’t really changed in years and it’s not going to change. Let’s just be honest. Right? And so let’s say an adversary I’ll just use that term Lucy an adversary of ours has really good intel, right, threat intel. They’re going to see that as a differentiator as an advantage. What would be in it for them to share with anybody else? Right? That’s just the nature of the political landscape as we know it, right?

Dre: The same way we wouldn’t let’s just be honest as a country, if we had our fingers on the pulse of something that was going to happen. Chances are we’re not going to share, especially not shared globally. Maybe with a couple of allies or whatever. That’s to be expected. And if you expect anything different, I think you’re borderline delusional. You just don’t understand the way the world works. I just accept certain things.

Dre: Right? Then you get into some areas where the lines get blurred. Like I spent almost three years at an NGO doing some global work involving human and sex trafficking and counterterrorism work and all on the tech side. But in those places the lines of blurred because now it’s not a country protecting itself. Now it’s like you’re trying to do something that’s more cross functional or cross country where you’re trying to protect humanity per se if you want to label it that way.

Dre: In those, in some of those cases, countries are slightly more open to sharing in a more giving fashion. That’s the only expression I can come up with because I’m sure that if the context was different, that same country would say no if I asked them to share something because I’m not working within this capacity at a human level. Right? And so I’ve experienced that as well. And I think there’s some positivity there because I think generally speaking I’m just going to make this statement. I think most entities on this earth try to do right by people when they can right now, it’s not to say they always can, which is why we have some of the problems we have.

Dre: But if you have the ability to have a positive impact on human life, I’ve seen entities from certain countries step up and do the right thing. I’ve seen it. And so I know it’s possible. No, I’m not singing the rainbow unicorn story. I’m just sticking the facts because my feet are on the ground. I’m pretty pragmatic, but I can’t deny the facts of what I’ve seen.

Doug: Tying back to your experience in the DEA and your focus on narcotics, one of the big, and it’s unfortunate, the big revenue generators for cartels today, and quite frankly, even local gangs, is human trafficking, sex trafficking. And we see quite often these big operations that do great things, whether it’s for the sex trafficking locally or child predators globally. Will we ever gain control of that?

Doug: And if so, do you believe technology will help in the future to identify these threats sooner, such as trying to recruit these girls that are very easy to manipulate? If we’re able to kind of pick that kind of chatter up, can we stop it beforehand? Do you see that in the future? Or is that too invasive to what we need as citizens? Right. That privacy aspect of it for social media and the such. I know that was a long winded question, but I hope that came across.

Dre: Yeah, I don’t know if we’ll ever get ahead of any of this stuff. I wish I could give you a better answer, but I just know what I’ve seen over 30 years operating in this space and I don’t think we’ll ever on a large scale, get ahead of it. Let me put that out there first. But I do think that there are improvements taking place in terms of facilitating certain actions, certain discovery of actions, and then acting upon those discoveries.

Dre: You touched upon an interesting point, the invasion of privacy in terms of let’s just use law enforcement as a loose entity, as a loose term. If law enforcement can basically see all of your communications, then yes, there is an invasion of privacy. And if you’re not under investigation, then why should they be able to see that? Right? That’s kind of the age old question. Introduce certain technologies that you and I can use right now, right. We can download, signal and have point to point encryption and literally cripple the ability of like a title three investigation that will try to, you know, work with an ISP to grab packets off of their literally off their core network as part of an investigation. All of a sudden, those packets are useful, I mean, useless, right?

Dre: So what happens then? Are they totally blind? And my answer is no. And I’ll tell you why. If you’re really good, you know how to do analysis on metadata and you’re still able to glean patterns off of metadata, so you don’t need the actual content of certain communications, you can actually generate patterns and pretty successfully act on those patterns off of pure metadata. Now, I bet you out of all of the people I’ve encountered in this industry, maybe a handful understand what I just meant when I said that.

Dre: Because you have to be able to operate at a certain core level to understand what I just said. And most people in this industry, unfortunately, they’re not players or creators or anything. They’re users. They are implementers, right? They implement solutions. Somebody else built it’s. Like I always say, with the games, right, with the gaming industry, you know, you can there’s a game, there’s a million players of the game, right. And some players are really good. Right.

Dre: To me, doesn’t matter if you’re good or not, you’re still a player. You’re still one of the million. The real brilliant one is the one who created the game. And this industry is the same way. This industry has become an industry of product tours, nothing more. Right? It’s like, well, I’m a cybersecurity expert. What the hell does that mean? That you know how to implement the Palo Alto firewall? That doesn’t make you a cybersecurity expert, because if I rip open a PCAP and I go to you, show me what happened in this TCP stream so that you’re not an expert to me.

Dre: So anyway, back to the metadata. You have to be able to operate at those granular levels to be able to say, look, I intercepted N number of packets in these communication streams, and here’s the pattern that I’ve been able to come up with based on the metadata. And the reason I tell you that that’s possible and powerful is because, again, we were doing that in the 90s, okay? Dude, we were doing that before TCP dump was a thing.

Doug: That’s crazy.

Dre: And by the way, we weren’t the only agency that were operating at that level. As a matter of fact, we were starting to learn how to operate at that level from other agencies that were kind enough to share with us. And interestingly enough, I just saw that there’s a really good documentary on exactly what I’m talking about that just came out with a gentleman who just retired from the NSA. I guess whistleblower might be the right term for what he’s become, but he got very disgusted with what he saw on his way out, and he’s speaking up. And he was one of the first to actually implement technologies to operate at a metadata level and get tremendous results.

Dre: So I think there are possibilities that will facilitate investigations going forward. You just got to know what you’re doing.

Chris: So you mentioned signal as a way to stay secure within communications, and it leads me to ask you this. When it came to offenders using technology, was that something that you personally witnessed, whether it be for evasion techniques or staying anonymous? How often did you see that? And was it problematic for you within your investigations.

Dre: Contextually? Right, I was there during the so please bear that in mind when I give you my answer, because I’m sure things have changed in recent times. But in all of my years there, I knew of one case where one I don’t know if you would call it a cartel or one gang, group, whatever you want to call it, but they were smart enough to actually have a couple of computer science professors from a university in New York on payroll.

Dre: And the job of those professors was to make sure that all of their laptops were encrypted. Now, this is before encryption, disk level encryption and all that was a thing. And so all of a sudden, come investigation time and all asset seizure time, the agents would pop up on these laptops and couldn’t see anything because everything was encrypted and they didn’t have the keys. So there were groups smart enough and had enough cash, right, to pay these guys.

Dre: But it wasn’t like a rampant thing back in those days, if a Title Three went up, chances are you were going to have evidence. It was almost like fishing with dynamite. I think that’s changed dramatically because now that level of protection via encryption or other methodologies is just so easy to attain. And by the way, one little known fact, I always just kind of bring it up humorously, but this did happen on my way out. When I left, I was actually approached by some interesting entities. Offer me a shit ton of money to become an advisor to them on how not to get caught.

Dre: Yeah. Obviously I didn’t do it, but they had moles, so they knew who you were? They knew who I was. They knew what I used to do. Right? And it didn’t take much. I had to testify in court a couple of times and, you know, you could walk into a courtroom and go, oh, obviously that guy works on the on the tech side in there. He knows what’s going on, right? So I don’t know how they knew, and I don’t even speculate. I don’t even wonder, but I always found it kind of humorous and interesting that happened, and I was like, call me whatever you want, but I prefer to have my stuff clear.

Dre: I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life. And I obviously opted not to partake in that. But yeah.

Chris: So that raises another question then, for me. In cybersecurity, we often talk about how closely aligned it is with physical security and the physical security side. During your time at the DEA, did you get a new sense of personal security, and did you ever feel like your personal security was ever in danger?

Dre: Yeah. If nothing else, your situational awareness becomes very heightened when you’re in those environments. Like I said, I was on the tech side mainly, and it could be going out into the field to do some tech work, but your head’s got to be on a swivel no matter what, right? Yeah. So, for example, let’s say anybody who knows how buildings work in New York, right, the phone boxes were in the basement.

Dre: Well, in certain neighborhoods, where does everything bad take place? It was in the freaking basement. So here you come in to pop open this box, place some taps on a line, right? And it’s not like a two second process. And you’re standing there, no backup. You’re totally by yourself, right? Stuff is happening right next to you, and you’re kind of like trying to mind your own business, but you got to keep an eye on them because you just never know, right?

Dre: And there were a couple of funny instances where you’re working on the box because what’s in the basement also the laundry room, right? The laundry machines. So you’re placing the tap and you turn around and who’s coming out of the laundry room? The dude you tapping because he was doing his laundry. And you’re kind of like, Holy shit, right? Moments like those that you’re just kind of like, all right, is this really happening?

Dre: Let me just play it cool. That was just kind of course of business when you went out there. It was like, yeah, you could be part it’s like Mike Tyson’s famous saying, right? Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face. And you can plan all you want, but stuff happens, right? Let’s say the operation was me meeting up with you, and we’re going to have a conversation. And my job was to make sure that you’re in the line of sight of the entire backup team.

Dre: And all of a sudden you say, hey, let’s take a walk over here. What am I going to say? No, let’s just hang out right here. That’s not going to give something away, right? You got to be smarter than that, right? I think that’s where having grown up in those kind of areas kind of helped. It was just like, all right, we’ll go with the flow and we’ll just deal with it, right? And you just kind of go along and you keep you cool. You keep your demeanor, right? Because they want to put you through those stressors as well, right? They want to test you and see if you start acting nervous or start fidgeting or little things. Every little thing.

Dre: It’s one thing you start learning is you start learning how to read body language, how to read reactions to things, right? Like, for instance, if you ever sit down with somebody to have a meal and start talking, do something, like invade their space somehow and watch how they react, right? Just reach over and move their glass of water. Just move it. And they kind of sit there looking at you. That right there tells me that you don’t know how to deal with those type of situations, right? Little things like those that you just kind of learn how to test people’s thresholds. But you also know when you’re being tested, and this carries over to business.

Dre: You go present to a board. You walk into a room for the board members. You better know how to read that room because you better know how to speak to each one of them in a language and a demeanor that appeals to them, right, where you can connect with them and you can relay the message properly. Sometimes it’s not even what you’re saying, it’s how you’re saying it. The message comes through. If you come in and you speak one way to an entire room full of board members, how many did you actually hit? Right? So you got to kind of learn how to play that room. And all of that gets developed through all those years of trying to stay alive during these little operations.

Doug: Preach on, brother. Because I tell you, this is an area that I’ve learned over time growing up, and I’ve not educated. I think we all are kind of on the same background, right? And I had to figure it out on my own. And one of the things that I learned was you need to be able to read the room and you need to be able to adjust how you talk to someone based on their profile, their personality, their responsibility.

Doug: And this is something that I’ve tried to encourage and educate to the junior sellers, the people that are getting into the in face meetings. It’s just so important, right? I know this is a little different than the security aspect of it, but it’s the same thing. You need to be able to read that room to assess where you stand and how you need to present and so on and so forth.

Dre: You’re spot on. And in sales, this is an ability that can really dictate your success or failure. So, for example, I’m an advisor to a number of startups through like, Forge Point Capital, and I work with teammate as well. And I always bring this up because as an entity that’s being sold to constantly, right? I can talk to 200 sales people in a week. I may click with one of them, like, Doug, you and I did business when you were at Kaspersky.

Dre: We just clicked. And it had nothing to do with the sales experience. It just had to do with the fact that you knew how to appeal to me on a human level. And I was like, all right, this guy’s cool. We can talk, right? Rather than as soon as you come and you make one compliment to me and then you try to sell me something, it’s like, Dude, seriously, who the hell taught you how to sell? Go away. Right?

Dre: There’s a human aspect. There’s a human element that I think is kind of being lost.

Doug: I just had this conversation today in a team meeting that you can’t go in and call somebody and you get that one shot and you go right away and be a salesperson. It’s not going to work out for you. You have to be a person, get to know that person first. I think it was you. And many other leaders that I engage with over the last year, year and a half has said I get 200 plus calls a week, if not a month from sales guys. The people that I talk to are the ones that I know I can trust, the ones that are listening to what I’m saying, right?

Doug: Asking me questions about my initiatives and make it about me, right? And follow through and follow through with it. Because you know how many people drop off.

Dre: It’s incredible, because as soon as I pay the bill, then what happens? Right? That’s it. I don’t hear from you anymore. There’s that human element. Now, I’m not saying you got to cater to people and all that, but there’s just a reality to that, right? It is. There’s a reality to me knowing that if I have a problem with that product, I know I can call this guy and he’ll get it taken care of. That means a lot to someone in my position.

Doug: It really does.

Dre: Yeah.

Doug: So you talked about what you’ve learned over time in the DEA, how it transitions back to your corporate life being a leader. And we talked about security. How that personal security? Where I’m at today in my firm, we have seen a lot of requests for executive threat assessments, both physical and cyber. And I think a lot of it pertains to high profile executives. But we’re seeing it come from all angles in terms of industry.

Doug: Why do you think that’s happening? Why do you think more and more executives are concerned or the company is concerned about their leaders and the leaders families? Right. So I’d love your opinion on that.

Dre: To me, it comes down to one thing. You know what a key man insurance policy is? Tell us. So a key man insurance policy is a policy that a company can take out on anybody that they consider to be a key component of that company. They’re usually very lucrative policies because obviously, person X is important to the company. And if Person X was to disappear tomorrow, it would have a negative impact on the company, and they could make an insurance claim on that.

Dre: Well, bad guys know that too. So what does that mean? It means that kidnapping an executive anywhere, right? Overseas, domestically, whatever, can become a very lucrative exercise. If you do it overseas, it’s a lot easier to get your money and let this person go and move on with life. And it happens more often than people realize. Okay?

Doug: That’s right.

Dre: So executives have become far bigger targets to nefarious entities simply because there’s the potential of a positive payout without having a horrible ending. Right. You don’t have to kill this person. You just get your money and you move on. And so what happens? And I’m going to generalize a little bit, so I apologize to anybody that doesn’t fit into this mold. But there’s a reality to the generalization.

Dre: As people move up in the career ladder, they don’t exactly remain physical examples of whatever athleticism or whatever. Right. So the fact that you run on a treadmill 30 minutes a day, three times a week isn’t going to save your life in a horrible situation. Let’s just be real about it. Right. So you go on these business trips, and unless you’re so high profile that you got armed bodyguards with you, well, guess what?

Dre: You’re at risk right there’s. A reality to that. You tell people that. Some people look at you like, Come on, this ain’t the movies. No, it’s not. But you know what? I have about, I don’t know, eight fully stamped passports around here that tell me what I’ve seen is very real. And I’ve seen it in many countries, right? You get into a cab in some Southeast Asia country and not know where the hell you end up getting robbed somewhere simply because they could tell by the way you’re dressed, you got money, right? Or the fact that you came in on an American passport, that makes you an instant target.

Dre: And so these people can’t even protect themselves while they’re traveling. So these insurance policies become an avenue towards that whole model of you being easy money. And this is one of the reasons why I’m I make I’m such a stickler for balance. And by balance, I mean, for example, if you’re so successful in business or you’re so tech smart that you can’t do five push ups, that’s not good. But if you can do 1000 push ups and you can’t add two and two, well, that’s not good.

Dre: And somewhere in the middle is this fine balance of you being able to be successful in business, be tech savvy, be whatever, but still be able to take care of yourself in a situation, right? That middle ground, that balance, that’s lost. I can’t tell you that. I can look at the majority of my peers and I see that in them. I don’t see that in them. I see one or the other usually on the business side, right? Because these days, most Cecils didn’t even come up to tech tracks, right? They came up through the MBA track.

Dre: But my point is, for instance, on a Saturday morning, I’m busy choking people out on a mat because I think it’s fun and because it keeps me sharp. What are they doing? They’re probably playing golf. That’s not going to save your life. And so it’s just a different perspective, right? My perspective is about balance and being ready. Your perspective is about maybe whatever hedonism. You like hitting a little white ball into a hole. It’s like, all right, dude, that’s on you. Right?

Dre: You do you.

Doug: In summary, intelligence for executive protection seems to be important if you’re a high profile person. And more importantly, it’s an insurance policy. You understand what the risks are to this executive, his family. You eliminate whatever threats you can eliminate on the cyber side, and you prepare for the worst on the physical side. And I learned something new today, so thank you. Which was the key man insurance policy.

Doug: So I will definitely circulate that to my team and let them know, teach them about that because it’s a great talking point.

Dre: Thank you. Yeah, look, even something simple like situational awareness, right? Walk into a restaurant. Did you scan the room as you walked in? Do you. Know where all the exits are. Did anybody catch your eye as you walked in that room? Because if they did, then you adjust the way you sit. Right. You want to keep an eye on them. When you sit down, do you have stuff at your fingertips that you could use as weapons if needed? Right. A fork could be a weapon. A butter knife could be a weapon in the right hands.

Dre: Right. All those things. People don’t even think about this stuff. They just sit down and want to have a fun meal. It’s like, okay, dude, but my mind just doesn’t work that way.

Doug: Dre, I think you and I both carried to dinner with our wives at certain times.

Dre: Hell yeah, dude. When I’m here where I can legally carry, yeah, that’s a no brainer.

Doug: Oh, man, that’s a whole other subject.

Chris: So, Dre, man, what would be your advice to those transitioning into cybersecurity from another field, such as a federal organization? And I think you highlighted on many of the key aspects that would carry over. But as you transition into this field, what do you feel like you needed to learn personally or what areas were foreign to you that could maybe help others prepare for this line of work?

Dre: Yeah. So what I didn’t have were the softer skills. Right. You know, I came from a cut and dry kind of world, right. And I still am cut and dry to an extent. Right. You asked me a bullying question. I’m going to give you a boolean answer, because I think that’s appropriate. Some people, you ask them a bullying question, and they talk for 40 minutes, and then you go, did you even answer my question?

Dre: I didn’t have some of the softer skills, so I had to learn, for example, how to cater my messaging, my message delivery to specific audiences. Right. I had to learn how to do that. I had to you know, when I was in the government, I never had to speak publicly or anything. Fast forward a few years. When I’m out of the government, I end up on stage one day, and I had to learn how to carry myself on a stage. Right. There’s a reality to carrying yourself on a stage.

Dre: The inclination is to put up slides and read what’s on the slide. That’s a horrible way to present, but that’s how we all kind of start, right? We all make that classic mistake. And so I think if you came up to technical ranks, that’s really powerful, because you’ll at least be able to command the respect of the technical ranks. When you come into an environment, generally speaking, people that come from the business side that may have those softer skills, they have a hard time commanding that respect because they don’t have the tech chops. Right?

Dre: I can sit down. I wrote C code for many years. I can sit down with a programmer and talk shop and there’s a level of respect that just instantly takes place. A lot of my peers don’t have that, right? They know, for instance, how to put together a great deck for a presentation, and they can deliver that presentation flawlessly. But if they had to go sit down with the tech team and figure out a problem, it’s not going to happen.

Dre: So to me, again, that’s that balance that I always talk about. Right? And so my advice to people is figure yourself out so that you know the areas you have to work on. There’s no formula. Right? I had the tech background. I had to figure out these softer skills, and that’s what I worked on. I’m not saying I’m great at them, but I’ve improved over the years, and that’s where I put my focus. Right. I had to learn about business. I didn’t know about business. I didn’t know about Series A, series B seed funding, key manage policy.

Dre: I didn’t know any of that stuff. I had to learn all that as I was going, right?

Chris: Yeah, but you did have some key soft skills in terms of communication and social interaction.

Dre: I knew how to talk to people, yes. And I was savvy enough in the interpersonal that I knew how to get information out of somebody without them realizing that I was getting information out of them. Right. That’s a technique. Right. That’s something that you learn, you develop in that world, and you can’t be obvious about it. Right? Like, for instance, back in whatever, let’s say you were arresting a Caribbean person back in the 90s, what was the first thing you would do? Start talking about baseball.

Dre: Because they all play baseball. They all love baseball. The next thing you know, they’re spilling their brains out and you’re like, all right, baseball rocks. So these are just techniques that you can develop along the way. But I think people just need to figure themselves out and understand that there’s no formula. Everybody’s path to whatever to Point X is different, but don’t ever lose sight of that finding that balance. You got to have that balance. You have to be able to be able to present to a board right now, and when that’s over, go sit down with engineers and have a conversation and solve a problem. You have to be able to do both.

Dre: Now, there are people that will disagree with that because that doesn’t play into their narrative, that they just want to be a business person with Title X. I don’t care. That’s fine. Like I say, you do you I know what works for me. I like what I see in the mirror. Right? I know what I am capable of. I can sit down with the engineers. I can go speak to a board. I’m good. You’ll never hear me bullshit you. I won’t talk you in circles. And like I said, you ask me a boolean question, you’re going to get a boolean answer, but that’s just me, right.

Doug: I agree with you, Dre, in respect to that. What got me through to where I am today is because I knew how to talk to people. But you refine how you talk to different personalities, different teams, and work together, right. That transition is important. So I think the advice that I would give to anyone that’s transitioning from government or other fields for that matter, is understand where you’re not comfortable in your weak points, right. Those soft skills.

Doug: And just research, read, talk to others that are really good in those areas. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Ask for advice, so on and so forth, because it’s only going to help you. And it’s just so important, so important in growth for yourself and having that balance as you talk talk about, you.

Dre: Know, I’m going to tell you I’m going to tell you something that I feel is very relevant. And it was an important lesson for me when we were out trying to get funding to build Bay Show networks, when we had the first investors, I’ll never forget a conversation that I had because I had never reported to a board or any of that stuff. So I had to learn how to do all that fast and hard because I reported to the board.

Dre: Right. And I’ll never forget a conversation. It was with Alberto, and he said to me, listen, we did not invest in the company. We did not invest in the products. We invested in you. The success of failure here is going to be around what you’re capable of doing. And that was a no shit moment because it was like, okay, the success of failure is on me. I like those odds because I know myself. But then it hits you like, oh, my God, these people put all this money in and they’re dependent on you. Right.

Dre: And so there’s a reality to that. And so, to your point, Doug, that whole identification of gaps in yourself and being humble enough to just go seek out the help you need to improve that’s imperative, you have to be able to do that. If your ego doesn’t let you do that, you’re going to fail. So I learned that lesson, and for that, I’m very thankful to people like Alberto because they taught me a lot in that experience.

Doug: That’s great. And that goes to also, it’s always great to have if you can have a mentor, somebody that you can just bend their ear when you need advice. Right?

Dre: Yeah.

Doug: And they’re expert in that area. Thank you. That was great advice, great information.

Chris: So, Dre, are you still in the New York area?

Dre: I’m in North Carolina now.

Chris: Okay. And if I recall correctly, you don’t partake in the bar scene anymore. Is that right?

Dre: I’ll go hang out with people at a bar. I don’t drink.

Chris: Yeah, got you. Okay, so then where do you like to go hang out after a long day or do you just prefer to stay in?

Dre: I’ve become sort of a homebody after having my family right. Raising my kids. But believe it or not, before all of this, I’m an artist. I was a graffiti artist in New York for many years. I’m an Afro Cuban painter and artist. I have a gallery online of some of my work. I haven’t done stuff in years, but if you’re familiar with CBGB’s in New York, which was kind of a whatever, hardcore music.

Chris: What is that?

Dre: It was a bar where a lot of really underground bands would play. Right. Like a lot of thrash metal and some of the original hip hop groups. And I liked all that underground stuff. When I was in New York, I really dug that scene. I kind of lived it for some years, but then I had to grow up.

Doug: We have a very close parallel in our lives.

Dre: I think that’s why we get along.

Doug: Yeah, the whole graffiti. I was friends with some of the most well known New York City graffiti artists. I grew up in the New York punk rock scene where I used to hang out at CBGB’s and Coney Island High in St. Mark’s place. And it’s such a shame how CBGB’s is no longer and it became a John Varvatos cony. Allah became condos.

Dre: Yeah, there are still remnants. I always used to tell my daughter’s an artist, and I used to tell my daughter about trash and vaudeville, that shop, and it moved. It’s not a St. Mark’s place anymore. It moved, but it’s still there. And I actually got to take her on a trip to New York. I actually got to take her there. And we had a great time because they kind of know this, me and my daughter was kind of like, you used to come here and buy something like yeah, I did.

Chris: Nice. So, Dre, I just heard last call here. You got time for one more.

Dre: Let’s go.

Chris: If you opened a cybersecurity theme bar, what would the name be and what would your signature drink be called?

Dre: So when I had my consulting company, the company was called Neurofuzz because I did a lot of neural network work with fuzzy algorithms and I felt there was a strong applicability to the cybersecurity space. I was a one man shop, and that’s what I used to do. All my consulting business, I would reuse that name for the bar. Yeah. Because to me, there’s still a lot of value. And you’ll see as a is starting to take off now how applicable it is to cybersecurity. Right. Because cybersecurity has become sort of stagnant from the product perspective now that the intelligence is starting to play a factor. I think that’s really cool.

Chris: And it’s applicable to drinking too. I mean, that’s what happens when you keep drinking.

Dre: Yeah. You’ll get real fuzzy. Actually, you know what I’d love to do? We’ll just keep the name and put a whiteboard in. But you can’t write out an algorithm until you’ve had, like, five of them. Dead will see what comes out.

Chris: Yes, I love that.

Dre: Let me tell you something. I had dinner with some of the gentlemen that invented DNS years ago, right?

Doug: Okay.

Dre: And one of them told me with a dead straight face that he literally wrote the original implementation of it intoxicated. And he said his words. He said, do you actually think anybody sober could have come up with that? And I thought that was the most hysterical thing. I was like, that is great. That’s awesome.

Chris: Drag, you mentioned your art gallery. Where can our listeners find that online? And then also, where can our listeners connect with you directly?

Dre: Yeah, no, my gallery is at andresandreu.xyz, and my personal blog cybersecurity site is andresandreu.tech.

Chris: Okay. Are you on social media?

Dre: Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn, but that’s about it. I don’t do it much beyond that because people irritate me.

Chris: Dre, thanks for joining Doug and I, man, I truly appreciate it. Take care.

Dre: Alright, guys

Doug: Thank you again for coming on the show. It was a pleasure hearing your story, and it’s always a great time to chop it up with a fellow kid from Queens. Thanks again, and I’ll make sure to work on my judo throws next time I’m in the gym. All the best.