Stephen Winn is Chief Operating Officer of StockX, the online marketplace where every single product sold passes through a verification process before reaching the buyer. He was employee number six, wrote much of the original platform code, and now oversees an operation spanning 170 countries, 5,000 trade lanes, and 71 million lifetime sales. We recorded this episode inside the company's Detroit verification center, where specialists scrutinize everything from shoes to electronics day in and day out.

Stephen walks Jon through the full defense-in-depth verification stack: machine learning risk scoring that runs before a package even arrives, RFID checks against chips embedded by brands like Nike and Adidas, trained verification experts who inspect stitching and packaging and even the smell of products, and a Lumafield CT scanner used on ever ...