In this Lital-less episode of the DiDi and Lital Show, DiDi interviews Denis Knjazihhin, a cybersecurity veteran who founded D2 to help enterprises roll out AI agents about his new company, D2, after a brief sports and music discussion including World Cup reactions and concerts at Fenway. Denis explains that D2 helps organizations adopt AI by removing security as a blocker, since agents require deep access to systems and data and can make risky mistakes or be tricked into harmful actions. D2’s approach is intent-based policy: expressing what should happen and translating it into controls that constrain agent actions deterministically, evolving as agents find new ways around restrictions. A key use case is governing Claude CoWork access to sensitive email in a financial institution with policies like limiting access to recent emails, excluding attorney-client privilege content, restricting to specific folders, and allowing drafting but not sending. D2 deploys via a gateway between the agent and applications, supports local/hosted/enterprise installs, offers natural-language policy creation with testing, and provides an open-source policy catalog. Denis invites users to try D2 free at d2.ai, shares that the team is six people, and says they are seeking GTM leadership and critical product feedback.

Topics

01:35 World Cup Takes

03:53 US Team Rollercoaster

07:21 Red Sox and Fenway Concerts

09:39 What D2 Does

14:22 Claude Email Policy Use Case

17:00 Gateway Deployment and Policy Catalog

19:29 Hardening Policies and User Partnership

22:51 Try D2 and Core IP

25:01 PDP vs PEP Architecture

26:49 Small Team Big Speed

27:56 Startup Building Then vs Now

31:45 Wrap Up and Call to Action

Didi hosts without Lital and welcomes returning guest Denis Knjazihhin, a cybersecurity veteran who founded D2 to help enterprises roll out AI agents. Denis recounts being born in the Soviet Union (now Estonia), moving through Germany to Boston, and his startup path from BladeLogic to Aveksa (acquired by RSA), where he met DiDi and later partnered with him on Cisco’s internal startup CDO. They discuss how product success at Cisco depends heavily on integrating with Cisco’s go-to-market machine, highlighting an ASA upgrade feature that drove adoption and services. The conversation shifts to software process: their preference for one-week sprints for rapid feedback, and how AI is disrupting agile practices, moving work from code completion to agent-driven design and implementation guided by ADRs, with growing need for higher-level review and summaries. Denis cites a 153k-line agent-assisted PR done largely during vacation, while both caution against letting AI change core, high-risk systems.

Topics

00:52 Denis Returns

02:51 Denis Origin Story

03:55 Pets And Parenting

05:07 Startup Journey Together

07:50 Patents And AI

10:45 Cisco GTM Lessons

12:26 ASA Upgrade Breakthrough

15:24 Startup Strategy Analogies

18:10 One Week Sprint Rule

20:31 Fast Follower Examples

21:36 TiVo to Streaming

22:36 Blockbuster and Piracy

23:20 Netflix Pivot Lessons

24:13 Big Company Pivots

25:00 Apple Burns Ships

26:17 Microsoft Cloud Shift

27:20 Life Sciences vs Security

29:56 Agile Is Outdated

32:02 AI Coding Evolution

33:28 ADRs and Review Load

37:18 Code Rot Reality

40:01 Adopt AI or Fall Behind

43:11 Token Budgets and Local Models

44:12 153K Line PR Story

46:01 AI on the Periphery

47:17 Wrap and Cliffhanger

Didi & Lital are joined by their kids Ron and Leia, starting with reactions to the Jaylen Brown trade, which they argue reflects ownership-driven, analytics-obsessed decision-making that ignores entertainment value. The conversation shifts to how people measure the wrong outcomes, using a podcast on the stereotype “Asians are bad drivers,” where fatalities per mile show Asians have the lowest death rates, prompting debate over whether safety outcomes match everyday “bad driving” annoyances and traffic impacts. They then discuss Waymo and self-driving tech, noting Boston and New York resistance tied to unions and politics, while highlighting benefits for disabled and blind riders and claims that autonomous vehicles are significantly safer than humans. They compare tech disruption to containerization and self-checkout, discuss compromises like retraining and early retirement, and touch on public fear of rare autonomous crashes, liability, and lobbying.

Topics

01:01 Jaylen Brown Trade Shock

03:17 Analytics Versus Entertainment

06:38 Swift Kelce Wedding Rumor

09:26 Measuring the Wrong Things

10:02 Bad Drivers and Outcomes

15:53 Traffic Costs and Flow

19:00 Self Driving Cars Arrive

20:09 Boston Pushback on Waymo

22:08 Unions vs Waymo

23:33 Accessibility Case

24:43 Safety Data Debate

25:31 Teamsters Compromise

29:40 Automation Jobs Shift

33:24 Right to Drive

38:31 Control and Politics

40:33 Rare Crashes Liability

44:05 Lobbying and Wrap Up

45:38 Podcast Farewell

DiDi and Lital open with a summer sports update: the Red Sox are struggling, they discuss NBA and hockey player preferences for low- or no-income-tax states and argue Massachusetts’ millionaire tax affects teams’ ability to retain talent. Lital shares the atmosphere in downtown Boston during the Scotland soccer matches, with Scottish fans filling pubs and causing venues to run out of alcohol, plus light talk on global fandom and star players like Ronaldo, Messi, and Mbappé. The conversation shifts to business and product development: a request for dark theme triggers a broader point that it’s “not about the nail” or dark mode, but about organizational rate limits beyond coding, including uncertainty, fear, testing infrastructure, and release processes. They describe using AI to generate themes and emphasize automated testing, sandboxes, MVP scoping, and making faster business decisions while managing risk across a large customer base.

Topics

00:27 Red Sox Reality Check

01:08 Taxes and Team Trades

03:15 Hockey and No Tax States

05:20 Scottish Fans Take Boston

07:03 Modeling and Pub Planning

08:48 Globalization and Soccer Stars

12:18 From Sports to Business

12:42 Its Not About the Nail

14:13 Dark Theme Debate

18:28 AI Changes Product Delivery

20:53 Testing Infrastructure and MVP

29:46 Automation Over Manual QA

32:29 Shipping Faster in the Cloud

34:51 Wrap Up and Goodbye

Didi and Lital are joined by their kids Ron and Leia. The group jokes about family life and discusses Ron’s plan to attend RIT in Rochester to study computer engineering, partly as a smoother path for staying in the U.S. They run a round-robin of America-themed songs. The main discussion centers on self-agency versus powerlessness, contrasting internal vs. external locus of control, criticizing rule-following that discourages initiative, using examples like fire alarms, 9/11 messaging, and school shooter drills, and applying agency to work challenges such as AI, layoffs, and collaboration barriers by urging people to act, adapt, learn, or leave rather than complain.

The Day The Music Died: American Pie (documentary): https://www.paramountplus.com/movies/video/vrmcb4z5mbx3CwjVzC4L5x_76JIz1t8h/

Topics

00:43 Family Check In and Summer Plans

02:07 Ron Heads to RIT

04:27 Fourth Playlist Rules

05:27 Round One Song Picks

10:01 Round Two Curveballs

12:23 American Pie Deep Dive

14:25 Born in the USA Meaning

15:39 America the Beautiful Finale

16:49 New Topic Self Agency Debate

18:04 Defining Agency

19:55 Mud Ball Perspective

21:42 Culture Discourages Control

25:31 Rule Followers and Empire

26:59 Alarms and Shooter Drills

30:25 Haiti and Fatalism

33:40 Can Our Generation Succeed

35:32 Learning Disabilities Debate

39:20 Building Agency in Kids

41:09 Workplace Powerlessness

43:02 Ride the AI Wave

45:32 Freedom Needs Defending

46:43 Fourth of July Signoff

Didi and Lital discuss the brief restricted release and takedown of Anthropic’s Mythos/Fable, claims about a Glasswing participant issue, AWS researchers finding easy jailbreaks, and resulting U.S. government demands. They argue advanced AI can be treated like regulated technologies (encryption, bio materials) and propose licensing/KYC-style access for high-end models to enable research benefits (e.g., cancer immunotherapy advances) while limiting misuse.

Topics

00:20 Whistling Debate

01:32 Misophonia Confessions

02:34 Broadway Edition Begins

03:04 Cats and Memory

03:57 Phantom Deep Cut

05:37 West Side Story Picks

07:14 Fiddler and Broadway Roots

08:53 Porgy and Bess Choices

09:37 Grease Lightning Trivia

11:06 Over the Rainbow Origins

12:24 Rent and Chicago Finale

14:01 Broadway Song Tangent

14:28 Impossible Dream Memories

15:54 Mythos Release Fallout

17:11 How the Takedown Happened

22:21 AI as a Weapon History

30:33 Regulating Like Encryption

33:04 AI Boosting Cancer Therapy

39:08 Licensing Model Wrap Up

39:50 Closing and Next Episodes

DIdi, Lital and Leia open with a wide-ranging sports update (World Cup, the Patriots signing A.J. Brown and hopes for adding Stefon Diggs, Stanley Cup excitement, NBA comebacks, and critiques of Boston teams’ performance and decision-making). They then discuss Anthropic’s Mythos frontier model, which was delayed after consultation with the US government due to concerns it could rapidly uncover code vulnerabilities at scale; it was first released to select “Glasswing” organizations and later to the public with claimed restrictions. DD describes Mythos as highly autonomous, memory-enabled, and “token hungry,” able to perform extensive research and brute-force testing with minimal prompting. They warn of a “patching apocalypse” as vulnerability discovery rates surge, urging CISOs—especially in hospitals and infrastructure-heavy environments—to plan for continuous, cheap patching via redundancy, improved deployment architecture, and vendor coordination, and to consider cloud services like AWS to offload patching where possible.

Topics

00:34 Quick Sports Update

04:36 Boston Teams Reality Check

06:45 What Is Mythos

09:22 Mythos in Real Workflows

11:36 Memory Skills and Token Costs

13:54 Cyber Risk and Patch Apocalypse

15:28 How CISOs Should Prepare

20:45 Redundancy and Upgrade Architecture

22:33 Inevitable CVE Flood

25:26 Services and Jobs Shift

27:30 Plan Cloud and Re Architect

28:58 Wrap Up and Subscribe

DiDi and Lital welcome their daughter Leia back to the show to recap prom, graduation, and her upcoming move to Reichman University in Israel to study business administration and entrepreneurship, including details about her dorm choice and family help with tuition and a car. The hosts then run through a breakup-songs theme, naming picks such as U2’s “With or Without You,” Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the Greg Kihn Band’s “The Break-Up Song,” Scorpions’ “Still Loving You,” Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know,” Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats,” Hall & Oates, Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds,” Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone,” multiple Taylor Swift songs, The Eagles, and Air Supply, and suggest a future part two. They shift to reflections on graduation, praising Leia’s “Excellence Award” and academic progress while contrasting it with her twin brother’s straight As and high SAT score but fewer recognitions and college acceptances, arguing schools and society reward hard work, relationships, and “participation” over outcomes and excellence, connecting this to hiring, sports team structure, AI’s impact on work, and the film “Broadcast News.”

Topics

00:50 Leia Returns

01:47 Prom and Graduation Recap

03:09 College Plans Israel

04:09 Dorms and Family Deal

06:47 Breakup Songs Theme

08:19 Classic Breakup Picks

10:20 Gen Z Taylor Era

12:09 80s and 90s Rage

16:23 Power Anthems Finale

18:06 Avril Lavigne Vibes

18:47 Taylor Swift Picks

19:36 Kids and Politics Talk

20:13 Eagles and Singalong

21:40 More Breakup Music Tease

22:44 Leia Graduation Wins

26:22 Ron and Merit Debate

30:14 Outcome Over Effort

32:31 Israel vs US Admissions

34:44 Hockey and A Players

41:15 AI Raises the Bar

43:02 Excellence and Curves

44:49 Movie Recommendation

45:52 Podcast Wrap Up

Didi and Lital open with casual sports talk (NBA, NHL, World Cup traffic) before returning to a cliffhanger about soaring AI token costs. They cite Marc Benioff saying Salesforce will pay Anthropic $300M in tokens for coding, and discuss Microsoft pausing Anthropic use after exhausting its AI budget. They argue costs are driven by energy/physics and by developers running many parallel agents, making outcome measurement crucial so token spend aligns with valuable work rather than performative usage. They describe organizational resistance ("Luddites") and poor prompting/problem decomposition ("one-liners"), stressing the need for core computer science thinking. They predict new solutions: on-prem/local models, company-built data centers, and software “broker” layers to route tasks to the right models and enforce policy. They describe building such a layer for security SOC triage to reduce alerts to ~2% needing humans, and discuss tradeoffs between general models for innovation and cheaper specialized models for repetitive tasks. They close noting rapid startup exits in this space.

Topics

00:24 Sports Rants

02:43 World Cup Traffic

03:43 AI Token Shock

07:59 Measuring AI Productivity

08:45 Luddites And One Liners

13:17 Family Travel Chaos

15:02 Token Optimization Layers

19:14 Generalists Vs Specialists

23:45 Efficiency War Stories

26:57 Future AI Cost Tools

28:55 Startup Exits Teaser

29:43 Wrap Up And Outro

DiDi and Lital discuss Elon Musk’s prediction that apps will be replaced by AI agents in 3–5 years, reviewing phone UI history (T9, BlackBerry, iPhone/App Store) and questioning future pricing models (tokens, bandwidth, on-device GPUs). They debate which apps persist (visual content, dating), how aggregators like OpenTable/Airbnb/booking.com may remain, risks of paid recommendations and transparency, and predict Google could dominate consumer agents while Apple lags. Producer Dave adds an Apple user perspective.

Topics

01:10 Summer Theme Kickoff

01:46 Summertime Classics Round One

05:03 Boys of Summer and ABBA Remix

07:37 Summer of 69 and Will Smith

09:19 Grease Nights and Van Halen

11:41 AI Returns No Apps Just Agents

12:36 Phone UI Evolution T9 to BlackBerry

15:15 BlackBerry To iPhone Shift

15:56 App Store And Bandwidth Money

16:48 Agents Change Interfaces

18:12 Audio Versus Visual UX

20:39 Portals Replaced By Agents

22:18 Paid Recommendations And Truth

23:31 Tokens Edge Compute Pricing

26:20 Aggregators Still Matter

31:53 Agent Optimization Opportunity

33:40 Google Versus Apple Prediction

36:11 Producer Dave Apple Perspective

37:25 Wrap Up And Podcast Outro