Won't Fix
From the founders of InfoHawk, this podcast explores AI-driven deception, abuse, and scams, and why they are so difficult to stop. The title references a software engineering term for a bug that is acknowledged but left unresolved because fixing it is too costly or risky. Listeners hear from practitioners who fight phishing, deepfakes, and bots, and learn about the broken systems and misaligned incentives that keep us vulnerable.
Episodes
Won't Fix Episode 18: With Jon Leibowitz Former Chairman, FTC
My guest Jon Leibowitz spent nearly a decade at the Federal Trade Commission, and four years running it — as Chairman from 2009 to 2013, right through the wreckage of the financial crisis.During Jon’s chairmanship (March 2009 to February 2013), the FTC's enforcement centered on "last dollar" frauds preying on Recession-battered consumers: coordinated national sweeps against mortgage-rescue and for
Won't Fix Episode 17: With Dave Willner, Co-Founder of Zentropi
My guest today is Dave Willner, cofounder of Zentropi and a fixture in the Trust and Safety world.In 2008, he was a young Facebook employee who sat down to replace a one-page list of banned content — it said, roughly, no Hitler and no naked people — with the first real set of community standards the internet had ever seen. The rules he wrote are still the foundation of how Meta governs content sha
Won't Fix Episode 16: With John Canfield, Founder & CEO of BlueArc
The question "is this business real, and should I believe what it's telling me" isn't new. It's about as old as American commerce. What's changed is that you can now spin up a company, a website, and a merchant account before lunch, and there's no correspondent in town to write you up.My guest has spent his career on the modern version of that problem. John Canfield built risk and verification sys
Won't Fix Episode 15: With Alexios Mantzarlis, Co-Founder of Indicator
Alexios Mantzarlis has spent his career on the unglamorous side of the internet. He founded the Italian fact-checking site Pagella Politica, then led the International Fact-Checking Network, then spent several years at Google building an adversarial red team focused on content risks from generative AI. In 2024 he became the founding director of Cornell Tech's Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative
Won't Fix Episode 14: With Ajit Varma, Head of Firefox at Mozilla
My guest, Ajit Varma, is Head of Firefox at Mozilla, where he leads Firefox strategy and product. He joined Mozilla in late 2024, from Meta, where he worked on monetization and business messaging for WhatsApp. He's also worked at Google and various startups in his 20 years of product leadership in Silicon Valley, and is based in the Bay Area.We talked about trust as a business strategy — Mozilla's
Won't Fix Episode 13: With Alan Chapell of The Monopoly Report
Rob Leathern speaks to privacy attorney and host of The Monopoly Report Podcast, Alan Chapell, about residential proxies, privacy and podcasting. Hear how free smart TV apps might be sharing your home IP address with strangers, and see just how broken online consent forms really are.Alan explains why current data broker laws miss these proxy networks entirely and how coming age verification rules
Won't Fix Episode 12: With Jeff Allen Co-founder & CRO of the Integrity Institute
Jeff Allen is the Co-founder and Chief Research Officer of the Integrity Institute, started in 2021. A physicist and astronomer by training, moved into data science in 2013, and has since worked all three sides of the platform-publisher relationship: for publishers chasing platform traffic, for the platforms themselves, and for political organizations navigating both.At Facebook he worked on syste
Won't Fix Episode 11: With Independent Researcher & Consultant Ben Edelman
Ben Edelman has spent two decades catching online fraud that hides in plain sight — combining software engineering, law, and economics to prove misconduct empirically rather than take companies at their word. In this conversation we get into the Phia shopping-plugin scandal, how it relates to Honey and Paypal that he covered after Megalag broke the issue on YouTube, the mechanics of affiliate frau
Won't Fix Episode 10: With Lindsay Kaye & Will Herbig of HUMAN Security
On July 7, 2026, HUMAN’s Satori team exposed NewsJunkie, a massive, coordinated connected television (CTV) device-spoofing operation that generated up to two billion invalid bid requests per day, per seller.In this episode of Won’t Fix, we go inside the investigation with Lindsay Kaye (VP of Threat Intelligence) and Will Herbig (Senior Director of Media Research) from HUMAN Security to break down
Won't Fix Episode 9: With Juliet Shen, Cofounder & HOP at ROOST
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
Won't Fix Episode 8: With Dave Kleidermacher of Google
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 "Actor
Won’t Fix Episode 7: With Jeremy Philip Galen of Charlemagne Labs
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" —
Won't Fix Episode 6: With Tate Jarrow, Founder & CEO of Rebound
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 building:
Won't Fix Episode 5: With Platformocracy's Jonathan Bellack
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, enfo
Won't Fix Episode 4: With Indicator's Craig Silverman
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 reporter
Won't Fix Episode 3: With KTLYST Labs' Assaf Kipnis
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 eff
Won't Fix Episode 2: With Project Brazen's Tom Wright
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 glob
Won't Fix Episode 1: With tofu's Jason Zoltak
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 tr
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