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Won't Fix

Rob Leathern 13 Episodes Aug 18, 2026

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 13: With Alan Chapell of The Monopoly Report Aug 18, 2026 46:39 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 Aug 7, 2026 48:29 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 Jul 24, 2026 48:05 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 Jul 17, 2026 47:32 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 Jul 7, 2026 46:01 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 Jun 30, 2026 54:22 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 Jun 19, 2026 39:35 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 Jun 5, 2026 47:42 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 May 22, 2026 53:47 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 May 1, 2026 50:25 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 Apr 24, 2026 42:34 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 Apr 16, 2026 42:17 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 Apr 7, 2026 42:24 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

Won't Fix

Episodes

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