Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2: Previously on We don't know exactly what happened yet, but
Speaker 2: I think we suspect and I would bet dollars to
Speaker 2: dimes that the story is very similar to a case
Speaker 2: we had in La recently where a young woman was
Speaker 2: basically stabbed for no reason by a psychotic homeless person.
Speaker 3: San Francisco police arrested thirty eight year old Nima Monmeni.
Speaker 4: Suspect is another tech executive who knew lye.
Speaker 3: While we're not going to release any additional facts at
Speaker 3: this time, I must point out that reckless and irresponsible
Speaker 3: statements like those contained in mister Musk's tweet that assumed
Speaker 3: incorrect circumstances about mister Lee's death served to mislead the
Speaker 3: world in their perceptions of San Francisco and also negatively
Speaker 3: impact the pursuit of justice for victims of crime.
Speaker 2: A jury has just found Nimo Momenti guilty of second
Speaker 2: degree murder in killing a cash app founder Bob Lee.
Speaker 2: Didn't turn out to be a first degree murder guilty.
Speaker 4: It is second degree murder.
Speaker 1: When you spend a year reporting out a murder story,
Speaker 1: you accidentally learn a thing or two about how to
Speaker 1: commit crimes. For example, if.
Speaker 5: You commit a serious crime in San Francisco, do not
Speaker 5: cross a bridge. My god, there's bridge tolls, there's surveillance cameras,
Speaker 5: there's plate readers. If you commit a crime and you
Speaker 5: cross a bridge in any direction, you're getting picked up.
Speaker 1: This is my source from the police department. He has
Speaker 1: deep knowledge of the Bob Lee murder case, and he
Speaker 1: wants to remain anonymous. We're having a voice actor read
Speaker 1: what he told us, and he said something surprising that
Speaker 1: the police figured out that the main suspect was Nima
Speaker 1: mong Many almost immediately.
Speaker 5: I believe that his vehicle was picked up on a
Speaker 5: building surveillance camera first, and at that point, okay, we
Speaker 5: have a vehicle near a homicide scene.
Speaker 4: Let's see where a vehicle is traveling.
Speaker 1: Once police had a photo of the car, they pulled
Speaker 1: a DMV record, and then they had just about everything else.
Speaker 5: We have a suspect, we run their criminal histories, we
Speaker 5: run their driving history, we run their vehicles that are
Speaker 5: linked to them, and any firearms as well.
Speaker 1: The department had put together a full profile sheet on
Speaker 1: Nimo MOMENTI just over forty eight hours after Bobley was stabbed,
Speaker 1: complete with pictures of Nima smiling into the camera pulled
Speaker 1: from his social media profiles. The information was kept tightly
Speaker 1: under wraps. Only a few specialized units within San Francisco
Speaker 1: Police knew his identity. Even many cops themselves weren't sure
Speaker 1: what to believe.
Speaker 5: When there's a lack of information put out through official channels, Cops,
Speaker 5: like anybody else, liked to gossip and try to come
Speaker 5: up with their own answers.
Speaker 4: There was all kinds of speculation.
Speaker 5: There are plenty of cops here who jumped on the
Speaker 5: bandwagon of it was a homeless guy that stabbed him,
Speaker 5: because that's what was tweeted out by somebody I know.
Speaker 5: I heard somebody else bring up it was probably a
Speaker 5: B girl thing. That's from the California penal code six
Speaker 5: forty seven B, which is prostitution.
Speaker 4: We call them b girls. Rich guy, super late at night.
Speaker 5: It's not like it could have been a robbery. But
Speaker 5: why was he down there in the first place.
Speaker 1: During this time, misinformation was running wild, and city officials
Speaker 1: were getting it from all directions.
Speaker 4: It was a tough time.
Speaker 3: It was a tough time for all of us.
Speaker 1: That's Brooke Jenkins, the District Attorney of San Francisco.
Speaker 3: There was a lot of pressure on the police who
Speaker 3: not only saw that case, but to investigate it in
Speaker 3: a way that made it fool proof. Multiple of us
Speaker 3: were up for reelection very soon.
Speaker 1: The next year, the mayor d A. Jenkins, and many
Speaker 1: other city leaders would all be up for reelection. So
Speaker 1: they wanted to squash this narrative that San Francisco was
Speaker 1: a failed city led by buffoons who were so useless
Speaker 1: and the neft that they allowed this great tech guy
Speaker 1: to get killed. But also, this was not the kind
Speaker 1: of case you could lose. You needed a conviction, so
Speaker 1: they needed to be thorough.
Speaker 3: You're trying to collect evidence before it's disposed of, before
Speaker 3: somebody knows that you're on their heels.
Speaker 1: What she told me was that some city officials wanted
Speaker 1: to announce, hey, we know who the killer is much
Speaker 1: more quickly, and this became an argument.
Speaker 3: Those were tough conversations, right when you're getting calls from
Speaker 3: city hall that want to counter what we believe is
Speaker 3: the right thing to do for the case. It's hard
Speaker 3: because we all, you know, as public officials, have the
Speaker 3: same interest in wanting San Francisco's reputation to be what
Speaker 3: it should be right to correct this false narrative, and
Speaker 3: we all knew that during that timeframe, however long it took,
Speaker 3: which ended up being a few days, that this story
Speaker 3: and this narrative was going to continue and we were
Speaker 3: going to be under fire. And so that was a
Speaker 3: tough time.
Speaker 1: When I finally had some distance from Bob Lee's death
Speaker 1: and all the media and arguing surrounding it, it felt
Speaker 1: like I was waking up after a wild night out.
Speaker 1: I kept wondering, Wait, how did things get so out
Speaker 1: of control? Why did Bob's death receive so much scrutiny.
Speaker 1: He was beloved and respected among people who knew him, sure,
Speaker 1: but not exactly a household name. So why did this
Speaker 1: blow up the way it did. The two things I
Speaker 1: kept coming back to were time and place. The same
Speaker 1: way that people would say that Bob had been in
Speaker 1: the wrong place at the wrong time at the end
Speaker 1: of his life, it seemed possible this whole story took
Speaker 1: off at the worst possible time, in the most explosive
Speaker 1: place it could have happened. I'm talking twenty twenty three
Speaker 1: of the tail end of COVID in San Francisco, a
Speaker 1: place people like to think of as the most liberal
Speaker 1: city in America. It seemed tailor made to touch on
Speaker 1: America's most sensitive nerves. So that's what we're going to
Speaker 1: look at today. In the final episode of this series,
Speaker 1: We're going to take a step backwards, rub our eyes clear,
Speaker 1: and try to make sense of the time and place
Speaker 1: surrounding Bobley's murder, not thinking about it as an isolated event,
Speaker 1: but as part of a continuum, one moment in a
Speaker 1: long string of developments that led us to where we
Speaker 1: are today. I'm sean when this is foundering the killing
Speaker 1: of Bobley. When Bobley died, there was one name that
Speaker 1: kept coming up, a name I hadn't thought about much
Speaker 1: the previous year, Boudin.
Speaker 6: I started getting threats, including death threats, related to his death.
Speaker 1: Boudin was the San Franciscodier from January twenty twenty until
Speaker 1: July twenty twenty two. He was ousted nine months before
Speaker 1: Bob's murder in a contentious citywide recall vote. He had
Speaker 1: been elected on a very progressive platform of police reform, decarceration,
Speaker 1: and eliminating cash bail. He came into power during a
Speaker 1: moment when Black Lives Matter was gaining momentum. The phrase
Speaker 1: defund the police was a common rallying cry, and Boudin
Speaker 1: wasn't alone. He was part of a wave of progressive
Speaker 1: prosecutors elected across the country, but he did sort of
Speaker 1: become the representative of the movement. His parents were in
Speaker 1: the weather underground and incarcerated for decades for murder. He
Speaker 1: was raised by other notable leftists, and then he became
Speaker 1: a Yale law graduate, a Rhodes scholar, and a judicial clerk.
Speaker 1: His background was so intriguing and his credentials were so fancy.
Speaker 1: He was perfect for idolization or villainization.
Speaker 6: I was used to being blamed for everything during my
Speaker 6: time in office. Walgreens clothes, my fault, a coyote kill
Speaker 6: someone's dog in Golden Gate Park, my fault. Jokes on
Speaker 6: Twitter abounded. I mean, I think there were signs literally
Speaker 6: put up around San Francisco saying that I had Overdoe
Speaker 6: Library books. On Twitter, I think they suggested renaming the
Speaker 6: San Andreas Fault Line chase of Boudin's.
Speaker 1: Fault, something that hadn't occurred to me in the moment,
Speaker 1: but seems clearer now after time was how clearly Chase A.
Speaker 1: Boudin's eventual recall fed directly into the response to Bob
Speaker 1: Lee's murder. Let me explain. Boudin took office in January
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, which I think is fair to say was
Speaker 1: a strange time to take over law enforcement in the
Speaker 1: major American city.
Speaker 6: I was sworn in just too much before COVID hit,
Speaker 6: and people started to associate me and my administration with
Speaker 6: a lot of the changes that were driven by COVID.
Speaker 1: Like we mentioned earlier in the series, in the first
Speaker 1: couple years of the pandemic, crime in San Francisco was
Speaker 1: trending down overall according to SFPD data, but the exceptions
Speaker 1: that stand out included Carthuff's burglaries and homicides, all of
Speaker 1: which increased a little.
Speaker 7: SFPA protesters gathered in San Francisco's Chinatown hoping District Attorney
Speaker 7: Chase A.
Speaker 4: Boudin himself would show up to it.
Speaker 1: And while you can argue over the scope and amount
Speaker 1: of coverage and whether it was appropriate, the reality is
Speaker 1: that this small uptick in crime did get a lot
Speaker 1: of attention.
Speaker 8: I think that the most important one is his catch
Speaker 8: and release policies is soft on crime that allows the
Speaker 8: criminals to come out and coverment more and more crime.
Speaker 7: Around that time, Like a lot of people I knew
Speaker 7: in Silicon Valley were like buying gun.
Speaker 1: This is Max Chafkin, my colleague and a reporter here
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg. He covers the intersection of tech and politics.
Speaker 7: We're so worried about violent crime and so worried about
Speaker 7: their own safety, rightly or wrongly, that they were like
Speaker 7: arming themselves.
Speaker 1: The pandemic was a time when there was just a
Speaker 1: lot of fear, obviously fear of disease, but then there
Speaker 1: was also fear for personal safety and a broader fear
Speaker 1: among some tech leaders of a meddling left leaning government.
Speaker 7: A lot of the folks in the tech industry had
Speaker 7: come to the conclusion that like the government was out
Speaker 7: to get them, that the government was going to not
Speaker 7: on in the context of like violent crime, but the
Speaker 7: government was trying to like either put them in jail,
Speaker 7: or put them out of business or bankrupt them.
Speaker 1: Which in the case of San Francisco wasn't a totally
Speaker 1: wild conclusion. Chase A. Boudin and the d'ae's office did
Speaker 1: go after tech companies. Six months into office, he sued
Speaker 1: door Dash for misclassifying workers.
Speaker 6: When you prosecute tech companies for stealing wages from their employees,
Speaker 6: when you prosecute politicians for corruption, we prospect police or
Speaker 6: tested force, all of which we did. You make our lettomies.
Speaker 1: So a progressive da a city on lockdown with a
Speaker 1: small uptick in some forms of crime. There was almost
Speaker 1: this vinegar and baking soda effect. Things felt combustible on edge.
Speaker 1: And there's one more factor at this particular time that
Speaker 1: I do think contributed to how Boble's death would play
Speaker 1: out in the media. When the pandemic started, many tech
Speaker 1: workers were locked away at home on their computers all
Speaker 1: the time, and some of these people started new podcasts.
Speaker 7: All right, everybody, welcome to another edition of the All
Speaker 7: In Podcasts. We'll call this episode one.
Speaker 1: This is a clip from the first episode of the
Speaker 1: All Limb podcast, launched on March nineteenth, twenty twenty. It's
Speaker 1: hosted by four tech executives, the most prominent of which
Speaker 1: is David Sachs, a co founder of PayPal.
Speaker 2: So hold on, So, for example, okay, let's take the
Speaker 2: Let's take the drug addict who commits a petty theft.
Speaker 2: We all agree that person should go to treatment, not
Speaker 2: to jail or prison, right a nonviolent, of course offender. Okay,
Speaker 2: but how are you going to get that person to
Speaker 2: go to treatment?
Speaker 1: The podcast covers all sorts of things, AI, trade policy,
Speaker 1: tech news, and very quickly it became massively popular, particularly
Speaker 1: in wealthy tech circles. In its first few days, more
Speaker 1: than one hundred thousand people had downloaded it, which by
Speaker 1: podcast standards is genuinely pretty great. The politics on the
Speaker 1: show leaned right. There's constant frustration with the progressive policies
Speaker 1: in any number of spheres.
Speaker 7: Like these guys were really mad about stuff that had
Speaker 7: nothing to do with San Francisco, but San Francisco is
Speaker 7: just sitting there as this symbol of everything wrong with
Speaker 7: the United States. The forces of cultural progressivism, like black
Speaker 7: Lives Matter or views on diversity, equity and inclusion become
Speaker 7: kind of coded to them as very anti tech. And
Speaker 7: so when you talk about like Chasa or these other
Speaker 7: San Francisco liberals, they could be talking about something that
Speaker 7: sounds like it has absolutely nothing to do with tech,
Speaker 7: but like it's processed as part of this whole society
Speaker 7: is trying to slow us down. They're going to make rules,
Speaker 7: They're not gonna let us build, and it becomes part
Speaker 7: of this cultural battle.
Speaker 1: Within the first six months, the hosts had turned their
Speaker 1: attention to what would become an ongoing target for them,
Speaker 1: Chase a Boudin and crime in San Francisco.
Speaker 2: His agenda is decarceration. It's like a fire chief who
Speaker 2: doesn't believe in using water, yes, and.
Speaker 7: He is part of the burn it all down party.
Speaker 1: Within the year, they were challenging him to debates and
Speaker 1: raising money for his recall. One of the hosts, Jason Calacanis,
Speaker 1: even started to gofund me in twenty twenty one. It
Speaker 1: raised more than fifty thousand dollars to pay for an
Speaker 1: investigative journalist to write about victims of crime in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: Here's David Sachs speaking to conservative commentator Megan Kelly on
Speaker 1: her podcast, which also launched in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: During COVID, he released forty percent of the jail population.
Speaker 2: And the crazy thing is he wrote an op ed
Speaker 2: in the La Time saying I'm making San Francisco safer
Speaker 2: by emptying out the jails. That was literally the headline
Speaker 2: of the piece that he wrote in the La Times.
Speaker 4: So he has this warp view that somehow he's going
Speaker 4: to make all.
Speaker 2: Us safer by emptying out the jails and not prosecuting anybody.
Speaker 1: The campaign to recall Chase A. Boudin started in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, when he had only been in office for
Speaker 1: a year. Many of Boudin's sharp his critics were rich
Speaker 1: tech moguls, including venture capitalists David Sachs, Gary Tan and
Speaker 1: Ron Conway. The recall campaign raised more than double what
Speaker 1: Boudin's supporters were able to raise. Now, I want to
Speaker 1: take a moment to say that the people criticizing Boudin
Speaker 1: were not all venture capitalists and keyboard warriors. He also
Speaker 1: faced criticism from victims of crime, and in cases where
Speaker 1: the victims were dead, often their surviving family members cast
Speaker 1: blame on him. There are many examples, including cases where
Speaker 1: the perpetrators were repeat offenders, and so Boudin's detractors could say, see,
Speaker 1: he wanted to let these criminals out of jail, and
Speaker 1: now this happened. Also, San Francisco's large Chinese population rallied
Speaker 1: against Boudin. During this time, there was a string of
Speaker 1: attacks on Asian Americans all over the country actually, but
Speaker 1: also in San Francisco, and this is something I feel
Speaker 1: really sensitive about because I'm Asian American. The stories were
Speaker 1: really gruesome and especially upsetting because many of the victims
Speaker 1: were elderly. An eighty four year old man who was
Speaker 1: pushed to the ground and died, another eighty four year
Speaker 1: old man who was kicked out of his walker at
Speaker 1: a bus stop, two women sixty three and eighty five
Speaker 1: stabbed at a bus stop. There are many more examples.
Speaker 1: Victim data released by the San Francisco Police showed that
Speaker 1: crime against Asian Americans in the city increased five hundred
Speaker 1: percent in Boudin's first year in office. This was all
Speaker 1: a few years ago. I think that now that the
Speaker 1: fervor of the recall has passed, we can all acknowledge
Speaker 1: that Chase A. Boudin didn't shove and kill an eighty
Speaker 1: four year old man, no more than Brook Jenkins killed
Speaker 1: Bob Lee. But at the time, these were fierce arguments
Speaker 1: that people were having, including very rich, very powerful people.
Speaker 1: Boudin lost the recall, and he left office in July
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty two, nine months before Bobble was killed.
Speaker 7: I mean this was especially that recall was a really
Speaker 7: important example of these right wing tech guys setting a
Speaker 7: target and then achieving it, you know, like using their
Speaker 7: power for like a political purpose.
Speaker 1: From my colleague Max Chafkin, the Boudin recall opened up
Speaker 1: a new sphere of influence for tech leaders, one that
Speaker 1: would become key in how the story of Bobbley would
Speaker 1: play out.
Speaker 7: You could get really involved in San Francisco politics. You
Speaker 7: could decide that, you know, the San Francisco school board
Speaker 7: was the thing that had to be changed, or like
Speaker 7: San Francisco housing policy or San Francisco crime or whatever.
Speaker 7: I think that the recall and then and then the
Speaker 7: murder of Bobb Lee came a gateway for a lot
Speaker 7: of these guys who maybe had started to like express
Speaker 7: some of these feelings but hadn't considered the role that
Speaker 7: they could play and maybe even the power that they had.
Speaker 1: And the fervor around crime in San Francisco was still
Speaker 1: so strong. The anti Boudin sentiment was still recent enough
Speaker 1: that almost a year after he had been out of office,
Speaker 1: the former DA still had people tweeting at him things
Speaker 1: like Chase A Boudin and the criminal loving city council
Speaker 1: that enabled him and the lawless SF for years have
Speaker 1: Bob's literal blood on their hands. Do you see a
Speaker 1: connection between Sacks and Musk both targeting you and spreading
Speaker 1: misinformation about Bob Lee?
Speaker 6: Of course, it's obvious. I mean, I'm not sure what
Speaker 6: the question is.
Speaker 1: I wonder if you could draw a line between those
Speaker 1: two for a listener.
Speaker 6: Well, Sax and Musk both spread this information about public
Speaker 6: safety in San Francisco in general, about criminal justice performed
Speaker 6: in general, and pushed a far right narrative about more
Speaker 6: police and longer incarceration being an effective way to promote safety.
Speaker 6: They also share an unshakable belief that they're right even
Speaker 6: when they've been proved wrong, and an unwillingness to admit
Speaker 6: error or apologize when they spread misinformation. So all of
Speaker 6: that is entirely consistent, both with the way the recall
Speaker 6: targeted me and my policies and my supporters, and with
Speaker 6: the way that they handled the messaging around the Bobbly murder.
Speaker 6: This is quintessential cherry picking of facts or of anecdotes,
Speaker 6: not even facts, because in this case, all we knew
Speaker 6: was that he'd been killed, and seizing a situation or development,
Speaker 6: and out of whole cloth, inventing facts around it to
Speaker 6: fit a narrative, and once the whole cloth starts to
Speaker 6: unravel because it's not based in any reality, they just
Speaker 6: move on and find something else that fits their narrative
Speaker 6: and don't make any effort to apologize or to grapple
Speaker 6: with the reality of what happened. And in many ways,
Speaker 6: my recall was sort of a Canarian the coal mine
Speaker 6: for the direction that the tech elite were moving politically
Speaker 6: on a wide range of issues, not just criminal justice,
Speaker 6: but racial justice and gender equality, and party politics, taxes,
Speaker 6: foreign aid, I mean, higher education. The list goes on
Speaker 6: and on.
Speaker 1: Musk didn't respond to our interview request. After Bobley's death,
Speaker 1: and after the truth of what happened surfaced, very few
Speaker 1: of the folks who spread misinformation recanted publicly. In fact,
Speaker 1: all in host David Sachs became even more involved in
Speaker 1: conservative politics. He became a major supporter and fundraiser for
Speaker 1: Donald Trump and later became the White House AI At
Speaker 1: cryptos Are. He's still on the podcast. He continues to
Speaker 1: talk about crime in cities with Democratic leaders and calls
Speaker 1: for expanded police and military presence in those cities. He
Speaker 1: and the other all In hosts declined to speak to
Speaker 1: us for this podcast. After the break, we end where
Speaker 1: this all began in San Francisco. Why the city itself
Speaker 1: and its long history with the tech elite primed it
Speaker 1: for the powder kead moment of Bob Lee's murder. When
Speaker 1: Bob Lee moved to San Francisco in two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: both he and the city were in the midst of
Speaker 1: massive changes. On the one hand, you have Bob coming
Speaker 1: from Saint Louis, from being a small time programmer, he
Speaker 1: helps develop Google's ad platform, having a direct hand in
Speaker 1: turning it into one of the richest companies in the world.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, you have San Francisco itself. It
Speaker 1: was at the epicenter of the era's most pressing tech
Speaker 1: and cultural issues. That year, San Francisco issued the first
Speaker 1: marriage licenses to same sex couples. In the course of
Speaker 1: a month, more than four thousand couples were married. This
Speaker 1: was during the time when then President George W. Bush
Speaker 1: was calling for a federal amendment to define marriage as
Speaker 1: a union between a man and a woman. Then, in
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven, when Bob was a young dad
Speaker 1: and expecting his second child. The iPhone debuted that, along
Speaker 1: with the Android operating system which Bob was helping to build,
Speaker 1: ushered in an entire category of companies that would hire
Speaker 1: many thousands of workers in San Francis, young excited engineers
Speaker 1: working at the likes of Uber, Instagram, and Airbnb. I
Speaker 1: bring all of this up to say, in order to
Speaker 1: understand why the story of Bob Lee exploded the way
Speaker 1: it did, we need to reflect on the ways that
Speaker 1: Bob and the city itself were mirrors for each other.
Speaker 7: Keep in mind that Silicon Valley in San Francisco are
Speaker 7: not the same thing.
Speaker 1: Max Chafkin, again, my colleague at Bloomberg.
Speaker 7: Silicon Valley originally are these peninsula suburbs south of the
Speaker 7: Bay Area, basically halfway between San Francisco and San Jose.
Speaker 1: About an hour south of San Francisco by car. It
Speaker 1: really came into its own as a tech hub in
Speaker 1: the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 7: And the politics of Silicon Valley were kind of the
Speaker 7: politics of conservative, suburban, upper middle class you're kind of
Speaker 7: like typical, like Ronald Reagan voters and so on. San
Speaker 7: Francisco was not as big a part of the tech
Speaker 7: industry know un till more recently.
Speaker 1: Right around the time Bob Lee moved to San Francisco,
Speaker 1: America was living through a wave of urban revival. People
Speaker 1: wanted to live in cities again where there were more restaurants, clubs,
Speaker 1: and museums.
Speaker 7: Suddenly you had all these engineers who wanted to live
Speaker 7: in San Francisco, companies wanting to recruit there, and San
Speaker 7: Francisco itself wanting to accommodate these companies and giving them
Speaker 7: tax breaks, trying to find ways to lure them north.
Speaker 1: But San Francisco is not Sunny Vail. The politics are different.
Speaker 1: It's a storied, progressive city, home to New Age thinking,
Speaker 1: the Black Panthers and Harvey Milk. This influx of wealthy
Speaker 1: tech entrepreneurs made for strange bedfellows.
Speaker 7: San Francisco itself has kind of complicated feelings about growth
Speaker 7: and industry, and there always is local opposition to development
Speaker 7: as well as like local opposition to change of any kind.
Speaker 1: Rents went up, local businesses shut down. In twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: the same year that Bob Lee helped launch his legacy project,
Speaker 1: cash App, there were large protests stopping Google workers from
Speaker 1: commuting outside the city on company buses.
Speaker 7: I'm talking about like protests against tech companies or politicians
Speaker 7: making comments about tech workers or tech executives as they
Speaker 7: saw the villainization of what, in their minds was an
Speaker 7: industry that was like fundamentally valuable, like creating jobs, bringing
Speaker 7: in revenue, and also good.
Speaker 1: And for me. There's one incident that really seemed to
Speaker 1: sum up this tense dynamic. In twenty fourteen, a woman
Speaker 1: was at a bar wearing an early prototype of smart
Speaker 1: glasses called Google Glass.
Speaker 4: It's some video now.
Speaker 1: She was recording bar patrons, which they didn't like, and
Speaker 1: so they snatched them off her face, and people started
Speaker 1: using the phrase glass fire.
Speaker 7: Think about that from the from the point of view
Speaker 7: of the tech industry. We have this like quirky cool product,
Speaker 7: Google Glass, Like it's so great, right, and you know
Speaker 7: you're gonna be able to check your email.
Speaker 4: It's so awesome.
Speaker 7: People aren't even probably gonna use it, but maybe they will,
Speaker 7: and if they do, it'll be exciting. And like a person,
Speaker 7: a normal person in San Francisco is just like, why
Speaker 7: is there a camera pointed at me? And also why
Speaker 7: is my rent gone up by like forty or fifty
Speaker 7: percent or more, and so you can understand why there's
Speaker 7: a confrontation. But from the tech people, it's just this
Speaker 7: like completely unwarranted aggression, like they expected to be celebrated
Speaker 7: and instead, you know, they were greeted with the kind
Speaker 7: of usual skepticism or even hostility. And basically the tech
Speaker 7: industry didn't like that, and the tech industry found it offensive.
Speaker 1: I moved here in twenty fourteen during a moment when
Speaker 1: San Francisco was rocked by gentrification and the perception that
Speaker 1: the city's artists and weirdos were being pushed out by
Speaker 1: a wave of tech workers. At the time, I had
Speaker 1: never heard of uber or lyft. I caught up with
Speaker 1: an old friend and he told me to download these
Speaker 1: apps on my phone, and I remember how totally novel
Speaker 1: it felt, this idea that you could press a button
Speaker 1: on your phone and then the person shows up to
Speaker 1: do something for you at an absolute bargain price. It
Speaker 1: was a genuine clash of cultures. Newly wealthy tech entrepreneurs
Speaker 1: and their well compensated workers who believed they were building
Speaker 1: the future versus a city that did not like that
Speaker 1: vision for the future.
Speaker 9: Can you tell me about how that turns into this
Speaker 9: idea that the wealthy white tech guy becomes the most
Speaker 9: disenfranchised in San Francisco.
Speaker 7: I mean, there's so many things going on that leads
Speaker 7: to this kind of like victim narrative where tech guys
Speaker 7: feel like they are being persecuted by politicians.
Speaker 1: Black Lives Matter and Me Too were powerful movements that
Speaker 1: shook things up in San Francisco, even on the government level.
Speaker 1: The Mayor's office released a plan for police reforms, the
Speaker 1: city created a dedicated office to handle sexual harassment, and
Speaker 1: this is where you start to see a split between
Speaker 1: powerful tech companies and the people who work for them.
Speaker 1: Many tech workers engaged meaningfully with these social justice movements.
Speaker 1: In some cases, they organized against their own employers. At Google,
Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen, employees staged a walkout over sexual harassment.
Speaker 1: Facebook employees staged a virtual walkout in the wake of
Speaker 1: George Floyd's death. Coinbase employees pushed their management to make
Speaker 1: a statement supporting Black Lives Matter, and when management pushed back,
Speaker 1: many workers left to the company in protest. I think
Speaker 1: sometimes there's a tendency to conflate white collar tech employees
Speaker 1: with the companies that they work for. As if they're
Speaker 1: happy to cash their large paychecks and turn a blind
Speaker 1: eye to their employer's actions. But there are many examples
Speaker 1: of employees risking their livelihoods to push these companies to
Speaker 1: do better. To me, it feels like the city's radical
Speaker 1: history was having an effect on tech workers, even if
Speaker 1: it didn't reach the executives. This was also around the
Speaker 1: time of the so called TEXADUS, when the number of
Speaker 1: companies left San Francisco and shut down their offices in
Speaker 1: the city, including Coinbase, Stripe, PayPal, and Twitter, which had
Speaker 1: been rebranded as.
Speaker 7: X COVID lockdowns. A lot of these are, of course,
Speaker 7: white collar type workplaces, but there are some factories sworled
Speaker 7: in there, and you know, factory owners were no fan
Speaker 7: of government shutdowns. It's a whole bunch of things.
Speaker 1: I can't help but think of Bob Lee in this context,
Speaker 1: in this particular time and place. By the time he died,
Speaker 1: he no longer lived in San Francisco. He had moved
Speaker 1: to Miami. A lot of his friends were there. It
Speaker 1: had lacks or COVID restrictions, and it was also becoming
Speaker 1: a center for cryptocurrency startups, which he was involved in.
Speaker 1: That said, he was still flying back to San Francisco
Speaker 1: all the time for work, to see his kids, to party,
Speaker 1: and sure San Francisco was not the same place he
Speaker 1: had moved to in his twenties, defined by that explosion
Speaker 1: of new startups. But Bob, forever a curious person, was
Speaker 1: still attracted to the things that made the city strange
Speaker 1: Edgy a good place to have a good time. I
Speaker 1: asked my colleague Max about this, about why Bob's peers
Speaker 1: may have spread false rumors about the city that Bob,
Speaker 1: by all accounts, still loved. For his part, Max was
Speaker 1: willing to give the benefit of the doubt to some
Speaker 1: of the people who pushed false narratives about Bob's death,
Speaker 1: who connected it to crumbling liberal cities and progressive Das.
Speaker 7: I hear a political thing, I also hear an honest
Speaker 7: reaction to a very upsetting thing. This kind of thing
Speaker 7: repeats itself all across the country, where like something unspeakable happens,
Speaker 7: and in making sense of it, we end up swirling
Speaker 7: in our politics or whatever we think is wrong. I've
Speaker 7: had people in my own life react almost the exact
Speaker 7: same way to violent crime, like where I live in
Speaker 7: New York or whatever and like blame poor city governance
Speaker 7: or bad national policy, or some combination of those two things.
Speaker 1: It seems to me that people wanted to hold up
Speaker 1: Boble's murder as revealing something about the city and decline
Speaker 1: or the country and decline due to homelessness and crime.
Speaker 1: What do you think that this death ultimately exposed?
Speaker 7: You know, I'm just like really resistant to, like, especially
Speaker 7: after hearing these guys spout off and like turn this
Speaker 7: man's death into like a symbol of something. I'm like
Speaker 7: really resistant to the idea that it meant something except
Speaker 7: that it was horrible. It's just staggering to think about
Speaker 7: how strong that political narrative was and how wrong it
Speaker 7: was on a pure, like factual basis in this one case.
Speaker 1: And how quickly it evaporated as soon as there was
Speaker 1: a suspect arrested. Yeah, for Nina's part, as of this recording,
Speaker 1: he's incarcerated and awaiting sentencing. He's hired new attorneys who
Speaker 1: are going to make a motion for a new trial.
Speaker 1: He's also filed civil suits against several media outlets. Bob's
Speaker 1: family has filed a civil suit against multiple parties, including
Speaker 1: Nima's family, alleging they knew about Nima's actions before he
Speaker 1: was arrested and helped him hide and destroy evidence. If
Speaker 1: the story of Bob Lee is anything I think it's
Speaker 1: a cautionary tale about jumping to conclusions. Nima jumped to
Speaker 1: conclusions about what happened to his sister, people on Twitter
Speaker 1: jumped to conclusions about what happened to Bob Lee and
Speaker 1: what it said about San Francisco. The media jumped to
Speaker 1: conclusions about Bob's social life, and at every step it
Speaker 1: only led to bad outcomes. A couple months ago, I
Speaker 1: called up Bob's former wife, Krista, and I asked her
Speaker 1: if she harbored any resentment for those who used Bob's
Speaker 1: death to further a political narrative, and her answer was no,
Speaker 1: not really.
Speaker 8: Anger should be reserved for those that actually deserve it.
Speaker 8: And it sucks, especially when you get hurt by the
Speaker 8: people around you, But there's no reason to stay angry
Speaker 8: at them. Obviously, the people involved in the murder of
Speaker 8: Bob I will forever be angry with. But you know,
Speaker 8: there is a lot of people that in the beginning,
Speaker 8: it was a mystery, it was misguided, it was everyone
Speaker 8: was kind of throwing theories out there, and there's still people.
Speaker 8: There's still a lot of people throwing theories out there,
Speaker 8: So yeah, you can't get mad at that. They were
Speaker 8: just trying to help. They just wanted to talk, So
Speaker 8: it's okay.
Speaker 1: In death, Bob a symbol drifting further and further away
Speaker 1: from the actual person. First he was a symbol for
Speaker 1: the San Francisco doom loop. Then he became a symbol
Speaker 1: for the excesses of the tech elite. In the midst
Speaker 1: of all this, his friends kept telling me that they
Speaker 1: didn't recognize Bob in any of the coverage. I think
Speaker 1: this trend is bigger than Bob Lee. We have this
Speaker 1: impulse to turn individual tragedies into collective I told you
Speaker 1: sos to turn people into martyrs. Sometimes their death comes
Speaker 1: to represent something that they maybe would have wanted nothing
Speaker 1: to do with, and so I thought I would end
Speaker 1: on a few concrete memories of him. One thing that
Speaker 1: came up often was how much Bob loved facetiming people
Speaker 1: at twelve that night while they're in bed. At six
Speaker 1: in the morning, when they've just woken up, people would
Speaker 1: hear their phone ring, think who the hell is facetiming
Speaker 1: me right now and then see it was Bob. Another
Speaker 1: friend mentioned to me that Bob kept on his phone
Speaker 1: a list of people who were close to him so
Speaker 1: that he could be reminded to check in on them
Speaker 1: from time to time. One of Bob's friends from his
Speaker 1: college fraternity hosted on an online memorial thanking Bob for
Speaker 1: quote programming a website for me that was due the
Speaker 1: next day. It was an utter mess. Bob finished the
Speaker 1: website program in fifteen minutes, just so we could go
Speaker 1: out and get a beer. He always did things like that.
Speaker 1: In the last year of his life, Bob moved to
Speaker 1: Miami with his elderly father as his roommate. It was
Speaker 1: a long search for an apartment because Bob was bent
Speaker 1: on finding a place that had two master bedrooms, one
Speaker 1: for him and one for his dad. His dad didn't
Speaker 1: know about this until after Bob had died. The real
Speaker 1: estate agent mentioned it to him as he was moving out.
Speaker 1: Bob and his dad only got to live in that
Speaker 1: department for six months. Foundering is reported hosted and executive
Speaker 1: produced by me Sean Wen Eric Mesiti's mental produced our show.
Speaker 1: Bart Warshaw is our audio engineer Our story editors are
Speaker 1: Joshua Brustein, Tom Giles, Anne Vander May, and Nicole Beamster Bower.
Speaker 1: Voice acting by Mark Laydwarf. Be sure to subscribe and
Speaker 1: if you like our show, leave a review. Most important,
Speaker 1: tell your friends told to blend to fl