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" — an on-device AI assistant, Agent Charley, that steps in before a worker clicks a dangerous link or pastes sensitive data into a chatbot.The company's research recently landed in Meta's safety report for its frontier model, Muse Spark, where Charlemagne's benchmark measured how capable leading AI models are at multi-turn social engineering. His core argument is that the old "think before you click" model of security is broken, and that risky digital behavior should be treated less like a moral failure and more like a public-health and system-design problem.Learn more about Jeremy and the company at https://charlemagnelabs.ai/Listeners who sign up for the Pro plan can get 6 months for free if they use the promo code ROB2026. Key Highlights:Selling consumer security software is a non-viable market because consumers buy what they want, while businesses buy what they need.The open internet operates as an active battlefield where users face direct threat vectors from sophisticated foreign adversaries.Falling for social engineering scams is entirely situational, rather than a reflection of an individual's intelligence.Real-time, automated AI interventions are far more effective at enforcing digital hygiene than relying on static digital literacy training.Over 90% of modern cybersecurity incidents originate from human risk vectors where an individual is directly targeted or manipulated.Chapter Timestamps:00:00 Introduction and Guest Background1:02 Career Transition and Startup Journey2:33 Consumer vs. Business Security Market Analysis3:56 Personal Motivation and Scam Prevalence5:09 Social Engineering Sophistication and Victim Blaming8:01 Big Tech vs. Startup Challenges13:59 Fundraising Reality and Survivor Bias18:05 Digital Hygiene and AI-Powered Protection22:06 Privacy-First Architecture and Local Models28:18 Democratizing Security and Luxury Concerns31:59 Meta Collaboration and Industry Standards35:16 Founder Advice and Problem Selection38:08 Company Information and Target MarketResources & Links:Rob Leathern (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leathern/)