Won't Fix

Juliet Shen is cofounder and Head of Product at ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools), a nonprofit building open-source trust-and-safety infrastructure for platforms of every size. She has done anti-abuse product work at Google and Grindr, and was the first trust-and-safety product manager at Snap, where she helped launch early cross-platform efforts to combat child exploitation. ROOST's website...

Dave Kleidermacher is a vice president of engineering at Google, leading engineering for Android security and privacy. His scope encompasses Android and the Made-by-Google world — Pixel, Nest, Fitbit, and the Play Store. We talked about Android's answer to scams: smarter defenses that use AI as a shield (on-device detection that catches scams as they unfold), and a deeper structural pivot to "Acto...

My guest today is Jeremy Galen, founder of Charlemagne Labs. Jeremy spent twelve years at Meta working in privacy, safety, and security — most recently five years as a product manager in trust and safety, focused on machine-learning content enforcement, account access, impersonation, and plagiarism. He left to start Charlemagne Labs, a New York startup building what he calls a "digital bodyguard"...

Tate Jarrow is the Founder and CEO of Rebound ( https://trustrebound.com ), a consumer anti-scam company. Before founding Rebound, Tate was an Army infantry officer and Airborne Ranger, and then a Special Agent at the U.S. Secret Service. At Google, he helped start a company called Beacon through the Area 120 incubator, which was then acquired into Google One. Key Highlights: What Rebound is build...

Jonathan spent thirty years inside the machine — product leadership at DoubleClick, executive roles at Google, and a founding role at Harvard's Applied Social Media Lab. A year ago, Jonathan started writing Platformocracy , a newsletter with a simple, uncomfortable thesis: tech companies didn't set out to govern us, but they do now. Billions of people are subject to rules they didn't vote for, enf...

Craig Silverman is an award-winning journalist who has spent more than 15 years researching and reporting on the manipulation of our information environment. He is currently the co-founder of Indicator , a media outlet dedicated to exposing digital deception and teaching digital investigative and OSINT (open-source intelligence) techniques. Prior to launching Indicator , Craig was a national repor...

Assaf Kipnis spent years hunting financially motivated bad actors on Meta's e-crime team and in Google's Ads Trust & Safety org . He now runs KTLYST Labs , where he's building the threat intelligence tooling he always wished existed inside big platforms. We get into the practical realities of scam fighting — what's actually changed in the AI era, what hasn't, and why so much of the industry's...

Investigative journalist Tom Wright (Project Brazen) joins Rob Leathern to discuss the staggering rise of Benjamin Mauerberger, a South African money launderer who utilized crypto exchanges and high-level political "state capture"; to fund a billionaire lifestyle of super yachts and private jets while evading an international dragnet. Tom shares more about the dark underbelly of a $200 billion glo...

In this first episode of Won't Fix, Rob Leathern talks to Jason Zoltak. Jason is the founder and CEO of tofu , which is using AI and machine learning to fight fraud and deception in hiring and recruiting. About Won't Fix: In software engineering, “won’t fix” describes a bug by acknowledging the issue but intentionally leaving it unsolved because addressing it is too costly, risky, or not worth the...