Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Rounding the News.
This is your weekly news roundup presented by Rounding the Earth and hosted by me, Liam
Sturgis, musician, handsome gentleman, short haired dude extraordinaire.
All of this and more coming at you live today.
Thank you for your patience as I start a few minutes late today.
I have been spending these last few minutes getting my presentation all up and ready to
go.
Today, we are live on Locals and Rumble as well as Rockfin and other places.
So let's get started.
Today we have a single story.
I was considering what to cover this week.
I was looking at the RFK Jr. sort of official announcement that he's running for president,
which we already kind of knew.
I was going to consider doing examining Effective Altruism Part 7 as we're really getting into
the heat of I think where that whole saga is going in terms of real life manifestations
of changes to the banking system in ways that actually affect us.
The rollout of central bank digital currencies officially the FedNow situation, which by
the way is something that RFK Jr. pointed out in a very excellent tweet that he put
out.
But no, today we're going to look at something very specific.
We're going to look at a very unfortunate murder that has taken place.
A gentleman named Bob Lee, who was a big tech entrepreneur to put it short, who was stabbed
and has died in San Francisco a couple days ago.
So we're going to get into that.
It's not a happy one and we're going to focus a little bit on the stuff we usually do.
We're going to look at who was this gentleman in terms of what did he do throughout his
career, what were his contributions to big tech, which of course these days anything
that goes into big tech also affects our lives.
So how did this man, how did Bob Lee change the way we live?
So before we get started, thank you to everybody and a shout out to everyone watching on Rumble,
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This week on Wednesday, we had Matthew deliver a mini presentation, an opening of the thoughts
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Okay, let's move into our topic for today.
So big tech entrepreneur, Bob Lee has died.
Now I want to be very clear right off the bat.
He's not just a big tech entrepreneur.
I will never be able to sum up who this gentleman was in full.
All I can do is find what open source information is out there about him and try to piece together
his network, his impact, and in a sense, just try to understand the context around who he
was in order to perhaps begin to understand if there was a motivation for him to no longer
be alive.
Maybe we can try to make that clear.
We're not going to solve a murder today though.
Okay.
No promises there.
But on Tuesday, April 4th, it was announced that tech entrepreneur Bob Lee had been stabbed
to death in San Francisco, California.
From the BBC article, I quote, the California San Francisco police department said officers
responded to reports of a stabbing on Tuesday at around 2.35 local time.
They found Mr. Lee unconscious on the ground with two stab wounds to his chest, according
to the San Francisco Chronicle and started to administer aid before rushing him to San
Francisco General Hospital.
Very sad.
Mr. Lee's father posted a message on Facebook on Wednesday confirming the circumstances
surrounding his son's death.
My deepest sympathies go out to Lee's friends and family and all who are mourning his death.
The news came to my attention after several of my peers sent around a thread discussing
the incident on a forum on the forum of Y Combinator, a technology startup accelerator
based in Mountain View, California.
We've talked about Y Combinator before in the context of the Effective Altruism series
because they are a, they're an incubator that is very friendly to Effective Altruist types.
And this is just a screenshot, a quick glance at the thread reveals that Lee's death has
sparked heated debate about whether he's victim of a larger increase in violent crime in San
Francisco with some accusing others of playing politics during a sensitive time.
Some in the latter camp have expressed desire to focus on understanding and celebrating
who Lee was as a person and marking his place in history as a highly successful contributor
to big tech innovation, changing the way people all around the world interact with their technology
and each other.
So let's dive in to that exact question.
Who was Bob Lee?
But first, just a quick shout out.
Ami came.
Oh, I didn't pronounce that right.
Well, hello indeed.
So getting into who was Bob Lee.
Lee's early years are a little hard to piece together.
They're not clear to me in my initial research, but his Wikipedia page is undergoing rapid
changes because of his death.
Wikipedia's write up on him cites various sources, including his own personal blog detailing
his early ventures into coding.
I quote, in high school, Lee wrote a 3D rendering engine in Turbo Pascal.
Lee attended St. Louis, St. Louis or St. Louis, St. Louis University, where he became known
as Crazy Bob from Water Polo and pledged Sigma Chi.
In July 2001, Lee wrote a program for Microsoft IIS to defend servers from code red, a rapidly
spreading computer worm around the time.
From 1997 to 2000, Lee worked as a web developer for several organizations, including Red Rock
Consulting, Southeast Missouri State University and Darcy.
He then took on senior consulting positions at Capgemini, Ajalon Consulting, where he
developed MasterCard's member bank website, and OCI, where he built a stock trading system
for AG Edwards, a defunct and reorganized financial services firm.
I think it may now be working under Wells Fargo.
Lee worked at AT&T from September of 2003 to October 2004, then jumped to a longer-term
position at Google as a staff software engineer.
There he led the core library development for Android, the company's mobile operating
system.
You see what I mean when I suggest that he's had a large impact in the lives of many, about,
I don't know, what is it, like 30% of smartphones use Android, maybe more?
Probably way more.
So then, in January 2010, Lee was headhunted by eCommerce startup Square, where he went
to work as chief technology officer.
As you can see, this article from the time, Bob Lee is Square's lead Android guy.
So he developed the Android platform, and then he jumped over to Square to develop their
Android app.
He then also developed the iOS app.
Now Square, okay, is a payment processing platform originally developed in 2009 by Twitter
founder Jack Dorsey and his friend Jim McKelvey.
Four months after Lee was recruited, the first version of the service went live for public
use.
Early investors in Square during Lee's tenure include Citi Ventures, GGV Capital, Gosla
Ventures, or sorry, KOSLA Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Rizvi Travers, Sequoia Capital, Starbucks
of all people, Tuesday Capital, Richard Branson's Virgin Group, Visa, and VMware.
So these are some fairly substantial institutional backers, which makes sense if you're revolutionizing
the credit card payment industry.
Lee led the development of Square's Cash app, launching in October 2013 under the name
Square Cash.
Now notably, Square secured a debt financing agreement in April 2014 with several major
banks, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Silicon Valley
Bank.
Aha, everyone's favorite.
Okay, Lee left Square in May 2014, taking a job the following month as a limited partner
at SV Angel, which was another investor in Square.
Now SV Angel's founder Ron Conway went on to serve as co-chair of the COVID-19 Technology
Task Force alongside other high-powered American tech executives.
For example, Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, and others.
So this is a serious guy.
Now news reports coming out this week note that during this period of time, Lee invested
in a number of notable startups, including Clubhouse, Figma, and SpaceX.
I just got a text from my landlord.
Please forgive me.
Now I want to point out that Clubhouse is where I first met Matthew Crawford and Steve
Kirsch and a number of others, a number of people who have gone on to do tremendous things
in our expanded internet community.
Now it's not clear to me at this point if these particular investments were made in
association with SV Angel or independently.
Some additional investments that he did make individually are Leo, a disappearing message
app purchased by Lyft, and Tile, a company that creates devices connected to a mobile
app, helping others to locate their personal items.
Now Tile is interesting and alarming for several reasons.
The tiles can be attached to items, connecting them by Bluetooth to a network that allows
them to be tracked and located by their rightful owners.
They can also, however, be used by stalkers to track individuals carrying the tags, a
very real problem that the company has had to address.
Furthermore, they're, for those paying attention, a rather obvious precursor to more widespread
connectivity as envisioned by proponents of Internet of Things systems.
Now it's not just an add-on product, however.
This is sort of the point.
This technology is already being built in and deployed into an array of widely used
devices from brands such as Bose, Dell, Fitbit, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Lenovo, Skullcandy,
and Smile Direct Club, which I thought was an Invisalign type brace company.
Bluetooth to your teeth, everyone.
As well as Apple's Siri, Google Home, and Amazon Alexa smart home devices.
As you can see on the right side of the screen, we have Tile plus Amazon Sidewalk.
Now you guys may recall, maybe last year there was this piece of news that went out that
said, hey, if you have an Amazon Echo in your home, Amazon's smart home device that runs
Alexa, unless you specifically opt out by this certain date, you're going to be signed
up for the Amazon Sidewalk program.
Meaning your Echo will become part of a network where anybody walking by your house will now
be connected to your Alexa for purposes.
For example, like this one.
If you lose something, you drop your keys or your wallet outside someone's nice looking
townhouse and there's, let's say three Amazon Echos nearby, well, they're going to ping
to your phone or to your keys and identify its location.
So you'll be able to go get it.
The point is people's private smart devices are all going to be connected or are connected
to this network, ostensibly for good reasons.
So the fellow investors, Lee's fellow investors in Tile include, once again, look at that
Silicon Valley bank, Nicholas Woodman, founder of GoPro and Tencent Holdings, parent company
of TikTok.
Man, it's funny how connected everything seems to be these days.
Just nuts.
So, Lee started working as an advisor at a real estate services company called Golden
Key in March 2015.
And in April 2015, he became CEO of Present Company, a social media company focused primarily
on women.
In May 2017, he became a limited partner at Signalfire, another venture capital firm based
in San Francisco.
Companies in Signalfire's portfolio include, once again, Clubhouse, along with a number
of startups in the sectors of virtual healthcare, driverless trucks, cybersecurity and financial
services.
Now, here's something real interesting, everyone.
Two days ago, when I started looking at this story, I was able to access Bob Lee's LinkedIn
profile.
It has since been scrubbed.
This is the page you get when you're not logged in.
When you are logged in, it gives you a this page doesn't exist message.
Funny enough, it's not just Bob Lee whose account has been scrubbed.
We'll get to that later.
And I can't help but wonder why this is.
You would think, you know, with Facebook, for example, you can immortalize an account.
I did that with my mom after she passed away, where the account can no longer be logged
into.
It's immortalized.
Now, I don't know if LinkedIn has a similar function, but it seems odd to me that there
would be just a complete wipe as if the thing never existed.
That being said, I did as a smart individual, particularly one who's been listening to
Mark Kulak, Huesutonic Live, I understand the value of immediately capturing information
that's going to be relevant likely down the line.
And that's what I did.
So this section of his LinkedIn lists his patents.
What I didn't do is open up the entire patent list and capture that.
My mistake.
But just the top three that are visible themselves are particularly interesting.
So according to the now defunct LinkedIn page, he sorry, Footsch on Rumble, how could Amazon
sidewalk possibly go wrong?
Very good question, Footsch.
So according to his yeah, Lee was an inventor of at least eight patents.
The first three are visible on the main page of his profile, which I had managed to capture.
The first is titled card reader emulation for cardless transactions.
The patent was filed.
Let's pull it up here on April 17th, 2017 by Square Inc, which is now named Block Inc.
That happened in 2021, I believe.
And the patent was issued on September 14th, 2017.
So as described in the abstract, I quote, disclosed are methods and apparatus that enable
a cardless payment transaction to be executed from a merchant point of sale system.
You know, like the one that Square uses.
A user is enabled to check in at a merchant by using a mobile device of the user and then
pay by simply appearing at the merchant and mentioning his name.
Very interesting.
It's the second patent, though, that really got my attention titled detecting proximity
using Wi-Fi hotspots.
The patent describes a method of includes sick receiving hotspot identification data
from the first device where the identification data identifies a plurality of Wi-Fi hotspots
that are in proximity to the first device, determining that the second device is associated
with the first device, sending the hotspot identification data to the second device where
the first device and second device are mobile devices, receiving an indication of proximity
from the second device and notifying the first device of the indication of proximity.
Square and Block are once again the holder of that patent.
Now, I'm going to show you a fun little graph here because, recall, leaves investment in
Tile, described earlier on, just moments ago.
Just as Tile uses Bluetooth technology to connect devices to the Internet of Things,
this Square slash Block held patent describes a method to accomplish the same outcome using
the much more familiar technology of Wi-Fi.
In both cases, the idea is to be able to use these wireless networks to tag and identify
the physical location of an object or person based on its interaction with other parts
of the network, also allowing for the sending and receiving of data to each device.
You see where I'm going here?
So this graphic comes from an article published by the Wi-Fi Alliance, which in a moment I'll
show you, outlines the importance of Wi-Fi to enable the Internet of Things.
Now look, on the bottom left here, we have location awareness as one of the key aspects
of this pie chart.
Now, for those listening just on the podcast, I'll read this out.
You have location awareness, reliable, sophisticated connectivity, extensive IoT, that's Internet
of Things, product portfolio, standards-based interoperable technology, pervasive connectivity
and backward compatibility, proven WPA3 security, cost-effective simple deployment and use,
and flexible network topology.
And that together makes up the Wi-Fi certified Internet of Things.
All right, so now we go to the article itself from the Wi-Fi Alliance.
I quote, Wi-Fi has played a foundational role in delivering IoT innovation, providing pervasive
connectivity to connect a wide variety of things to each other, to the Internet, and
to 18 billion Wi-Fi devices in use around the world.
The economic potential of the Internet of Things is boundless, and Wi-Fi delivers a
vast range of opportunities across a variety of sectors, including smart homes, smart cities,
automotive, healthcare, enterprise, government, and industrial IoT environments.
There you go.
The third patent, titled Hierarchical Data Security Measures for a Mobile Device, covers
a cybersecurity system for mobile devices.
It is also held by Square slash Block and was published in September 2019.
Unlike the other two patents, Lee is not the sole inventor on this one.
His co-inventors include Nathan McCauley, co-founder and CEO of Anchorage Digital,
the first digital asset bank to be granted a banking charter from the Office of the Comptroller
of the Currency, or OCC.
In a March 2022 article for Fortune, McCauley claims that Anchorage proactively volunteered
to be regulated at the highest level they could.
That sounds an awful lot like what Sam Bankman Fried was doing with FTX, going in there,
helping draft legislation to regulate the crypto market.
Interesting.
Why would you, unless you were collaborating and, strange.
He was formerly the security engineering manager at Square.
And that's what we'll find, is all of the inventors here used to work for Square.
That's why they're all inventors on this thing.
Next we have Sam Quigley, Square's first information security hire, as per his LinkedIn.
Quigley started Emerose Advisory Services in 2010 to work as an independent consultant
focusing on security management and scaling issues.
He volunteered for Joe Biden's presidential campaign in August to November 2020.
In March 2021, Quigley founded Kicho Inc., an organization dedicated to finding therapeutics
for people with DUP15Q syndrome, which I believe is a genetic…
I don't know what the appropriate word is.
Genetic disease?
Genetic condition?
I don't know.
I don't like how any of those sound.
Anyway, I think that's what it is.
A non-profit organization, okay, partnered with the…
Oh, sorry, sorry.
He also serves on the board of directors for the DUP15Q Alliance, a non-profit organization
partnered with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
That's yes indeed Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan.
Also the pharma-funded National Organization for Rare Diseases and the U.S. government's
major agency collaborative to advance research in epilepsy, or ICARE, research portfolio,
as you can see funded by the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, so on and so forth.
Now I mentioned that others are having their LinkedIn profile scrubbed.
This guy, at least at the link that I was looking at, no longer has a LinkedIn profile
as of this morning.
Very strange.
Then we have a guy named Eric Monte, a security engineer at Square.
He previously worked as lead security engineer for TrustWave's Spider Labs threat intelligence
gathering program.
Among TrustWave's partners are Amazon Web Services, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google Cloud,
and Microsoft, which if you recall last week's episode, we talked about not this company,
but another company who offered their opinion on Russia's cyber warfare, so on and so
forth.
Go watch that episode if you haven't yet.
But the same partners, and CrowdStrike, I can't help but feel like I've heard that name come
up in the context with some data breach, something to do perhaps with the 2016 election.
If someone can remind me in the chat or provide further info, that may be valuable.
I haven't looked into it yet, but they keep coming up.
And then finally we've got this guy, Mike Lewis, who appears to have a sense of humor,
head of engineering and human learning at Square in the security or the risk area, among
other former positions.
He formerly worked as a software engineer at Google and then Uber, focusing on financial
anti-fraud software, cloaking detection, and rewriting the service that tracks all of the
devices people have logged in with.
I think that was for Uber.
Hmm.
Okay.
Now we're coming up to the present day here.
We're getting there.
So while details on this are scarce, the World Health Organization confirmed that after COVID-19
broke out, Lee participated in the development of the official COVID-19 app for the World
Health Organization.
That's no small thing.
That's no small thing at all.
And this bears further digging.
I found it quite difficult to locate any information beyond just a mention that he had done this.
And yes, indeed, the World Health Organization came out and said, yeah, he was a big part
of this.
It was a big deal.
So let's find a way to circle back to this.
If anybody can come up with any further context through what mechanism, through what organization
or effort or funding mechanism did he participate in the development of the World Health Organization's
COVID-19 app?
And don't they have more than one?
Well, this is certainly interesting and bears further investigation.
But I find even more interesting or more pertinent is a job he took before the first year of the
declared COVID-19 pandemic was up.
This is a screenshot from his LinkedIn profile, which happily I still have up on my laptop.
I haven't refreshed yet.
You see, one of them is advisor and head of software at Prediction Bio.
I think it's meant to read Prediction Bio from November 2020 to present.
Now in November 2020, he joined Prediction Bio as advisor head of software.
Prediction Bio was founded in February 2016 by a trio of students at the University of
Michigan winning a $100,000 TIE Boston Angel Investment Prize.
How good for them.
From the University of Michigan's website, I quote, Prediction Bio is a precision medicine
diagnostics company with a product called MicroKine, a patent pending near bedside diagnostic
device that measures certain proteins or cytokines in the blood of critically ill patients.
Company delivers this information in less than 30 minutes, 10 times faster than that
of any existing technology on the market from a single drop of blood, allowing physicians
to prescribe drugs specifically tailored to an individual patient's unique immune response.
Does that sound familiar?
Does that sound a little bit like Theranos?
The company that turned out to be a complete fraud, supported by Joe Biden and James Mattis
and Henry Kissinger and a whole bunch of other very powerful people.
Around this exact same time, it's almost as if there were multiple companies each claiming
the same general origin story.
And when one of them didn't work, the other one continued.
I don't know.
It's quite a striking resemblance though.
Now in June 2016, the company received its first pair of grants from the University of
Michigan and MedTech Innovator described as the largest lifestyle, sorry, not lifestyle,
the largest life science accelerator in the world for medical device, digital health and
diagnostic companies.
Now on the screen, you're going to see a bunch of logos and if you can identify the most
pertinent one in the next five seconds, you get a no prize.
MedTech is funded by COVID-19 vaccine developer Johnson & Johnson.
It's funded by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority or BARDA and the
Pharmaceutical Lobbying Association, Advanced Medical Technology Association or ADVAMED along
with a whole bunch of others.
So we got BARDA funding.
Fantastic.
Then it gets even more direct.
In 2018, the company received $224,000 some dollars, just under $225,000 in funding from
the National Institutes of Health's Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business
Technology Transfer Small Business Grant Program.
Further grants and investments for the company came from Y Combinator, Hills Venn Capital,
Signal Fire where Lee worked and I think still did up to his passing and Paul Bouquete, inventor
of Google's Gmail, worked at Y Combinator, I believe.
So that's all very interesting.
But after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Prediction underwent a revision, at least what
looks like a revision to its history and then a reintroduction of a brand new flagship product
called Refractil.
Instead of their Theranos-like blood testing machine, which I imagine might invoke some
skepticism from investors and consumers at this point in time, this new product, Refractil,
was specifically focused on testing for COVID-19 alongside flu, strep and RSV at once with
a single sample.
And it was during this era of the company that Lee joined on as head of software and
as an advisor.
In short, Bob Lee was working at a company whose primary focus at the time that he worked
there was COVID-19 testing and testing for similar viruses.
Coming off of his work with the World Health Organization.
Okay, but now moving into the final stage here.
Lee began advising a cryptocurrency startup called Mobilecoin in February 2021, taking
on a full-time gig as chief product officer in November 2021.
Mobilecoin is described as a cryptocurrency platform that provides anti-fraud services
and payment services for merchants.
Its first round of seed funding came from 8D Capital and INB, the latter of which advertises
itself as, quote, the most influential investment group in the Chinese blockchain space, with
its partners being, quote, among the single largest holders of Bitcoin in the world.
That's significant.
Its website bears the slogan, in blockchain we trust.
Oh my, indeed.
Now, later rounds of funding brought in investments from Binance Labs, General Catalyst, which
we've looked at before because of Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook who went
on to work as a, I think a limited partner there as well.
As well as Future Ventures, which is bearing a nice Ukrainian flag there, you might notice.
Then in August 2021, Mobilecoin's $66 million Series B round of funding brought on board
a number of notable investors, including, of all the companies, Alameda Research, one
half of Sam Bankman Fried's FTX scheme, Coinbase Ventures, Time Ventures, which is the venture
capital firm of Salesforce founder Mark Benioff, and VY Capital, whose other recent investments
include several of Elon Musk's big ventures, including Neuralink, The Boring Company, and
Twitter.
Mobilecoin's development is led by the Mobilecoin Foundation, whose mission is, quote, to build
a trusted and innovative financial network that empowers people and business around the
world.
This is where we get into current events.
Things are moving at light speed.
In February 2023, Mobilecoin announced it was rolling out its own stablecoin, pegged
to the US dollar, called EUSD.
Remember that stablecoins are basic.
They're supposed to be, as described here, a cryptocurrency token, but that operates
exactly for the consumer, exactly like a US dollar.
So USDT, that's Tether.
You have USDC, which is USD coin.
And there's a number of others.
There was one called BUSD, which was Binance US dollar.
But we covered, remember, that that was told to stop minting new coins and Binance distance
themselves, maybe two months ago.
But let's quote from the Yahoo News press release here.
In the wake of the FTX implosion, the need for proof of reserves has never been greater.
Pegged to the US dollar, EUSD is backed one-to-one by a diversified basket of yield-bearing trusted
stablecoin derivatives utilizing Compound and AVE.
And they list AUSDC, CUSDC, AUSDT, and CUSDT.
EUSD is decentralized, community-governed, and censorship-resistant.
Interesting.
Nevin Freeman, co-founder of Reserve, shared, in light of New York State Department's order
for Paxos to stop minting BUSD, exchanges everywhere are scrambling to reshuffle all
BUSD trading pairs and functions, which highlights one of the advantages of stablecoins like
EUSD that aren't dependent on any one issuer.
If any underlying fiat-backed coin included in EUSD's backing has such an issue, it can
be rebalanced out via governance without interrupting service for EUSD users at all.
Alright.
In short, mobilecoin is very much involved in the ongoing transformation of the world's
banking system, tying together many pieces of the puzzle including the collapse of both
FTX, as they noted, and Silicon Valley Bank, and the subsequent crackdown on cryptocurrencies
and crypto-friendly banks like Silvergate.
Bob Lee's life and career are notable for many reasons, and his contributions to advancing
the cryptocurrency and mobile payments ecosystem are not to be understated.
His work on and investments in Internet of Things technology and close relationships
to the people and organizations behind Twitter, both Jack Dorsey, who founded Square, and
Elon Musk are notable as well.
As of this morning, Friday, April 7th, no arrests have been made.
Heck there's not even that much interest in finding out who it is as far as I can tell.
But an article in The Independent provided an update from San Francisco police, stating,
I quote,
San Francisco police say they are chasing down unspecified leads in the fatal stabbing
of Cash App founder Bob Lee as the search for his killer enters day four.
Gruesome details continue to emerge about the murder in an early morning mugging continued
to emerge.
Hmm, that's a weird typo.
But authorities do not appear to be anywhere closer to an arrest.
We have some leads to follow up on, San Francisco police chief Bill Scott said Thursday as scrutiny
mounts over the investigation.
I can't disclose what those are now.
It's early on in the investigation, but I'm hopeful and I'm very confident.
This article that I've put together, this video is not meant to capture the entirety
of who Bob Lee was.
I can't possibly do that.
Nor do I want anyone walking away thinking this is the most important or complete summary
of his life.
However, after identifying some of his most prominent accomplishments, the people, the
organizations, the financial flows, the influence flows, I feel we are now better informed,
at least a little bit as we process further news of what led to his murder.
Maybe we'll find out who did it.
I guess if anything, my point is to say this man was not just another statistic.
Frankly, nobody who's murdered in San Francisco or anywhere else is just a statistic.
I don't like that some people are treating him as just a statistic.
Some of the people doing that know who he was much better than the general public.
That makes me a little suspicious.
The point is the more informed we are, the better we understand who this person was,
their contributions and their impact, the better we will be in processing new information
as it comes out and understanding as Ms. Weasel points out, qui bono?
Who benefited from Bodley and his passing?
Maybe the answer is no one or maybe the answer is, yeah, there's some people, but there's
no reason to believe that they were connected to his, as the Independent now calls it, his
murder.
I'll say, I think it's weird that they don't have any actual leads to report on after four
days.
I smell something fishy here.
I have nothing specific to offer in terms of suggestion, but we'll see what happens.
But most importantly, rest in peace, Mr. Lee.
Now before we go to the end here, I'm just going to read one of the comments here from
AmiCame on Twitch.
It seems that they very much desire a near magical diagnostic slash testing tool.
What happened with all the swabs from COVID testing?
Surely they were all destroyed and no one tried to use them to improve some magical
diagnostic machine.
I like the way you think.
I think there's a, you know, I noticed that I read here, I'll pull it up one sec.
I read this book, Bad Blood, about Theranos.
And I'll just say on the back cover, you've got a quote from Bill Gates, so compelling
that I couldn't turn away.
This book has everything.
Which makes me think this book doesn't have everything.
But the way they talk about what Theranos was supposed to do sounds an awful lot like
what they describe PCR in general as a technology of being able to do.
But it seems weird that it's so clearly transparent, the limitations of what PCR can do, that it's
just so weird.
It's just so weird.
So then when I see something like this, indeed, I start to wonder if there is this almost
dishonest desire for the ability to test everything with the simple drop of blood or any other
fluid.
Or just a simple swab up the nose or just spit into this thing and we can tell you your
entire genetic history.
Very odd.
In any case, thank you all so much for watching.
Not a happy show.
I don't like talking about people.
I don't like it when people die too early.
Death is a part of life, murder I don't think should be.
But thank you all for watching anyway.
I hope we walk away more informed.
Don't forget, join us over on roundingtheearth.locals.com where we've had a number of wonderful people
watching and on rumble as well.
Some wonderful conversation.
And also don't forget, Rounding the Earth started as a substack series written by Matthew
Crawford and he continues to publish tremendously interesting and informative materials over
at roundingtheearth.substack.com where you can also sign up for free or become a paid
subscriber which also supports not just the substack but the Rounding the Earth enterprise
as a whole.
I have been Liam Sturgis.
You can find me at liamsturgis.com and last but not least, the show notes for this show
will be posted on roundingtheearth.locals.com within the next few hours as I finish up the
it'll probably be actually fairly quick because I just need to do some last minute formatting.
We will see you guys on Monday for a wonderful RTE discussion between Matthew and yet another
excellent guest and I hope you have a fantastic Easter weekend no matter what you celebrate.
I hope it's with friends, family and loved ones in general and just overall be well.