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 Background

1:02 Career Transition and Startup Journey

2:33 Consumer vs. Business Security Market Analysis

3:56 Personal Motivation and Scam Prevalence

5:09 Social Engineering Sophistication and Victim Blaming

8:01 Big Tech vs. Startup Challenges

13:59 Fundraising Reality and Survivor Bias

18:05 Digital Hygiene and AI-Powered Protection

22:06 Privacy-First Architecture and Local Models

28:18 Democratizing Security and Luxury Concerns

31:59 Meta Collaboration and Industry Standards

35:16 Founder Advice and Problem Selection

38:08 Company Information and Target Market

Resources & Links:

Rob Leathern (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leathern/)