How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University reveals the “Stanford within Stanford”—the unofficial pipeline linking Silicon Valley investors to top students. It’s a pathway to power unlike any other, fueling the AI gold rush and remaking Stanford itself.

Theo joins Jon Bateman on The World Unpacked to debate the deeper meaning of Stanford’s tech ties. Is it a normal and necessary part of capitalism, or a devil’s bargain corrupting education? And what does Stanford’s story say about other civic institutions fighting for their souls as AI eats the world?

Transcript

Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors

Jon Bateman: Theo Baker, welcome to the World Unpacked!

Theo Baker: Thank you for having me.

Jon Bateman: You have written a spellbinding account of your time at Stanford, and it raises some big questions that we're gonna talk about today about the way the world works, the relationship between technology and power, the corruption of universities and other institutions, and your own coming of age in today's elite environment. Before we get into all of that, I just wanna know... How are you doing? You are a current student at Stanford. You've not just written a book about it. You're a graduating senior. You're on a book tour, but you're also in the middle of finals. Is that right? What is life like for you right now?

Theo Baker: Well, finals are coming up. Yeah, no, thank you for having me and for doing this is great. It's a little bit odd, but I would expect nothing else of my Stanford experience. Cool thing about Stanford is that there actually are a lot of people who do very extracurricular activities. There are kids who took off this winter to go compete in the Olympics. So not quite on that level. But it's interesting. Stanford is, I don't know, the focus is almost. Far more pronounced on everything you do outside of the classroom than than uh your time in actually studying um which speaks to sort of the broader transformation of of this university into like a more corporate organ i guess

Jon Bateman: A major narrative in your book is your investigation as a student journalist for the Stanford Daily of Stanford's then president, Mark Tessier Levine, an investigation that actually led to his downfall and departure from the university. Tell us about how you got started with that and your journey in this kind of detective story.

Theo Baker: So, yeah, I showed up at Stanford, not at all thinking I was going to be a journalist. You know, I was like a coder. I was a kid. I always loved technology. I showed thinking I would be part of this milia. And I joined the student paper on a lark and very quickly got sort of dragged into things. And so a lot of tips were sort of flooding in and people were reaching out to me with tidbits they thought would be interesting. I found these. I was directed to these posts on a pseudonyminous website called Pubpure. Where scientists dissect published research works. And these were seven-year-old comments at this time from 2015. Wondering whether some of the images that had been published in papers co-authored by the Stanford president appeared to be duplicated or have some other sort of anomalies. So I took those concerns. I took them to forensic image analysts. And that's what began the reporting process. By the end of the year, we had around a number of issues in papers. That were published across the president's career at different institutions. And he was forced to resign by unanimous vote of his own board of trustees.

Jon Bateman: So the Stanford president, I'm just going to call him MTL, because I'm not great at my French pronunciation. The book, I think, treats this as symptomatic of a broader phenomenon within Stanford about the incestuous relationship between the university and the tech industry and the institutions captured by a kind of tech power elite. Tell us about that connection. What is the? Broader significance of MTL's misconduct and the way the university handled it. How does it link to these deeper issues?

Theo Baker: Yeah, no, exactly in the sense that, you know, Mark Testy Levine, you know, is not only the figurehead of this institution, you know, it's president, but also represents something about how, you know, so much of the institution seems to function. And he, you know, what we discovered right in the difficulty in searching for accountability there in these papers you know that that should have faced scrutiny far earlier you know some of them had been published before I was born right and it took you know two decades before they were finally retracted you know what we discover there was a system in which you know cut corners got overlooked or were not properly addressed you know the guardrails were lacking there you know Mark I found no indication that he ever falsified data himself. The allegations are that he, you know, inculcated this sort of environment within his labs that enabled these cut corners and these manipulated figures to emerge at various points. And then when suspicions were raised to him about the research in question at various points, he declined to effectively purge a scientific record. And this definitely is of a piece with what I witnessed as a student coming in and seeing some of my peers in the tech world learn that you can get away with a lot without being called on it if there's not the incentive structure in place to necessarily find or combat misconduct. Do you think that-

Jon Bateman: A typical Stanford professor working in the sciences could act with the same degree of lack of care and impunity. Or do you think this is tied to his status as a leader of the institution, his connections to a lucrative biotech company? Is there kind of a deeper institutional failure here tied to tech?

Theo Baker: So Mark Tessie Levine is certainly a superstar in his field. But Stanford, you know, as a whole, right, this no boundaries relationship with Silicon Valley has been a very pronounced one. You know, it has sort of launched the university on this meteoric ascent into, you know fame and fortune, but has also allowed for the corruption of some of these basic sort of values that the university professes for itself. You know, and it's completely integrated. There's, you know, a professor who's known for the longest time as Professor Billionaire because he made more than 20 billion dollars by investing in his students' companies. The interchange between capital and ideas makes it clear that if you can get ahead, you can get very far. And couple that with a system that does not necessarily scrutinize or ask questions that need to be asked, that at times appears to brush things under the rug rather than confronting them. And you see how issues continue to manifest again and again.

Jon Bateman: The professor billionaire thing is fascinating. If we could just dwell on that for a second. So we are a society that produces billionaires, right? A lot of those billionaires come out of tech, finance, big business. Maybe some students going into Stanford hope to become one or something close to one. They might be excited to take a class with a billionaire. Maybe that person has something to teach students. I guess what you wouldn't want is a situation where the power that that person has from outside of the academic context somehow distorts the mission and nature of education. Maybe he isn't called to account for his own issues or he's imparting like a bad ethics on his student. Is that what you found?

Theo Baker: Well, it's interesting, right? So students at Stanford, especially those prized few who are identified as the next trillion dollar startup founders, they're sort of prized commodities, right, they are not just teenagers. There are people that you can make your career and your reputation off of if you're one of these hangers on, you know, who is constantly hunting for a meal ticket on Stanford's campus.

Jon Bateman: Could you explain the concept of a hanger on this is a fascinating part of your book?

Theo Baker: Yeah, so I mean there are these people who seem to spend more time with teenagers than their own families, right, who are hanging out often at the, you know, ubiquitous Koopa Cafe and constantly courting these children, effectively children, minors sometimes, you now, who come to Stanford and are plucked from the crowd, identified as the future masters of the universe. You know, it's this very integrated system kept purposefully sort of opaque from the rest of campus. You know, it's a term that some people I know have come to use is the Stanford Inside Stanford. That there is this group who all know each other and all show up to the same VC dinners and the yacht parties and are off of the same pre-idea funding and text the same billionaires for advice. For them, there's a completely different parallel reality because they're a marketable and monetizable force. Because you, teenager, you might start the next Google or Instagram or any of those of companies. And I, as an adult, if I'm a hanger on, you know, I want to make my money off of you.

Jon Bateman: So whereas Professor Billionaire has a formal status with Stanford, right, he's a professor as part of a department somewhere, these hangers-on, as I understand it, are not necessarily part of the formal Stanford structure they could be, but they kind of float in and around a nearby campus in an attempt to kind of penetrate this porous environment and get access to these talented young people. Is that right?

Theo Baker: Yeah, and look, some of them actually are professors. There are a number of investors who have, who teach classes at Stanford. You know, there are also VC firms that employ talent scouts who can often be upperclassmen at Stanford, who are trained to go find the freshmen as soon as they land on campus, who you can sink your hooks in as early as possible. So it is a sort of formalized system.

Jon Bateman: There's juniors and seniors at Stanford who have, they're almost performing a job, maybe like a paid function by a VC firm to scout.

Theo Baker: Yes, they're their formal talent scouts, you know, going after their younger classmates and applying them with money and access and whatnot. And again, there's some VC firms who will only fund freshmen and sophomores because by the time you're a junior, you're too old for them, which is astonishing to me because it's all about talent, right? If Silicon Valley is this great gold rush, it's by some metrics the greatest creation and concentration of wealth. Maybe in human history in the last 35 years here, the resource that people are trying to mine is talent. And so the earlier you get at it, the more you've made your own career. And that's why these teenagers who are the freshest, the rawest talent are considered so valuable to this slice of Silicon Valley.

Jon Bateman: VCs are, of course, venture capitalists. These are the people who provide early-stage funding for potential startups. Peter Thiel is a famous VC who made career-making investments in Facebook and other companies that made it big later. He has connection to Stanford, as do many others. You use this term Stanford within Stanford to describe the subset of the student body that is most plugged in to this tech power blob. In your experience, how many students are in this Stanford within Stanford, and how many students are on the outside?

Theo Baker: It's very limited, intentionally so. There's so many people now understand Stanford through this reputation of the inculcator and incubator of all of these great startups, of all the great technology. That there are a ton of people who come to campus thinking they're going to be, you know, the next Steve Jobs or whatever. And the thing is that, right, these hangers-on, you know as one of them put it to me, like, their job is to root out the wantapreneurs, as in the people who are just doing it because they want the status, they want the money, they think it's what they're supposed to do, and find the real builders, quote-unquote, you know the people, who have the real insight, the talent, the genuine, you know nature and desire to create something new. Unfortunately, the way that they do it is very, very frequently referral-based and often becomes quite divorced from talent or merit. It's not that the people in the Stanford Inside Stanford lack in talent. Many of them are extraordinarily brilliant and very gifted in so many different ways. And yet, there are also lots of people who are extraordinarily talented and gifted who are left on the outside, and it's just because they don't know the right people. To some people, joining the aces or bases, these are the big entrepreneurship clubs on campus, the public facing ones, is a quote unquote anti-signal. Because it means you don't the real path into success, and because it means that you're just doing it because you want the appearance. So once you learn how to say the right things, and you learn to meet the right people, you have almost guaranteed entree into this whole integrated system.

Jon Bateman: The book is called How to Rule the World. That title is drawn from one of these hangers-on, whom you call Justin, one of the most fascinating figures in the book and a real set piece. Explain to people what is how to rule the world.

Theo Baker: Well, I'm glad you brought this up. So How to Rule the World is a secret class at Stanford. It's taught by this Silicon Valley CEO who teaches the 12 students a year how to, quote unquote, extract value from people around them, how to get their way, how make the world reshape it in their own image. Only 12 students year, they meet once a week in the winter quarter for this seminar. And there's this whole cloak and dagger admissions process to get in. You have to be. Tapped on the shoulder by someone already in it before you can get grilled, interrogated by this professor who asks you about your deepest, darkest secrets, tries to get to know everything he can about you, to judge your character, your value, whether you are worthy of ruling the world. Now, it's not actually a real class in the sense of learning coursework, although there are lectures and discussions and guest speakers and whatnot. Really, it's more like a sort of skull and bones for the aspiring tech elite. Right? The idea is that this secrecy, this exclusivity, makes it desirable, makes it valuable. And Justin, as it turns out, according to several of the students who I spoke to in the class, in their view, is really just as much a grifter as so many other people on Stanford's campus. He is trying to network with the students, the teenagers, he thinks will be useful to him in the future, only he's figured out a way to get them to come to him because they really do want to rule the world.

Jon Bateman: How could it be that teenagers are such an enticing product to a very powerful, wealthy person? Could you help people understand the conditions by which someone, having just arrived at Stanford, and I'm sure they're very talented, they've done things in high school, no professional experience, maybe still learning about some of the technologies that they might apply in a career. What is it about the tech economy? That means that that person seemingly is of huge value to a VC or a potential investor such that they would take a lot of time to kind of immerse themselves in this campus environment, Koopa Cafe secret classes, in order to get access to this burgeoning elite.

Theo Baker: Yeah, well there are sort of two aspects to this right? The first is that, you know, look at the track record, right? There was once a frat bro at Stanford who wanted to send disappearing sex to a girl. And he created Snapchat and became the world's youngest billionaire, self-made. There were some kids who started out by getting food delivered to their dorm and created Door Dash, which obviously worth billions of dollars more. Instagram was created when a Stanford student decided to go looking through the alumni network to figure out who he should start a company with. So there are these examples of all of these companies that have emerged from Stanford. The two most valuable companies in the world right now, NVIDIA and Alphabet, were both started by Stanford alumni. And so all of the VCs and a lot of the kids who are coming here now know that this is the track record they're trying to live up to. They know what is possible, which makes it very interesting because they're trying to replicate the success of a system that was until very recently... Very very radically different. You know Stanford made its reputation as the sort of underdog where these renegade outsiders are building for the hell of it and it creates this extraordinary new technology as a result. Stanford is very far from an underdog right now right there's a budget an annual budget higher than 116 countries you know it's one of the top universities in the with the reputation to protect. And this goes to the second part of it, it's that universities, like Stanford, Stanford being the vanguard of a trend that has really swept across much of higher education, is a corporatized organ. People show up and immediately they start thinking about their careers. You know, the idea of classes is sort of secondary to what you're actually going to get out of college, which is a job or to get wealthy in some other fashion, right? Is this a place to have a liberal education or is it a place to get filthy rich? You know, that sort of conflict is one that really defines the university at the moment and so many kids come here thinking this is their ticket into success. It's not about the education you're getting, it's about the fact that you can segue this into positions of higher and higher acclaim.

Jon Bateman: What were you hoping to get out of your Stanford experience? I'm sure, like many promising young people, you looked at a variety of different colleges. What drew you to Stanford? What was the mental model that you had of the place before showing up? And what you would thought that you would encounter and get out of the experience.

Theo Baker: Well, I fell in love with Stanford when I was seven. You know, like I remember, I saw this image of these kids in their Stanford t-shirts and their shorts and their flip flops lounging, you know, in the shade of a palm tree and leaning up against a self-driving car they had just helped to build. And I was like, oh my God, this is the coolest place in the world. Like things are happening out there and I wanted to be a part of them. I was thrilled when I got into Stanford. I was thrilled when I arrived and so fortunate and lucky to have gone there. But I quickly discovered that the idea that I had of Stanford was a very different one than the reality of the institution today. I was just a few weeks into my time at Stanford when I ended up at a mansion party in the hills funded by a slush fund that funneled corporate cash into the pockets of teenagers. This is a very, very weird place. Um and the decisions that are made here and the mentality that is learned here uh goes on to have a huge amount of influence over the rest of society you know all technology you know runs through silicon valley technology controls all of our lives and the kids who are being trained to control technology in the future are being taught how to cut corners and how to get ahead at all costs

Jon Bateman: Could you give us some examples about those lessons, times when somebody at Stanford or one of these hangers-on were imputing ethical values on impressionable young people looking to get ahead that we would not want that to be the lesson of their liberal education?

Theo Baker: Yeah, well so much of it comes down to this quote-unquote high agency mindset that if you are one of these sort of tech uber mentions, you know, the regular rules don't apply to you. You can just go out and do things. Now, on its face, that's not necessarily a terrible thing. You know, Justin, the teacher of the how to rule the world class, tells his students repeatedly to exceed the limits of your conceivable ambition, right? And that's NOT a bad thing, to dream big. The problem is that dreaming big is not coupled with an apparatus to keep things responsible. So it's not just that you dream big, it's that if you sell a company off of a promise that you can't keep, you know. The easier thing to do is to just fake the demo and say you have the technology anyway, and no one's going to call you on it, right? And you just keep going and the lies tend to accrue and the deceit tends to grow more and more consequential. Right? If you want to understand like how Sam Bateman Fried or Elizabeth Holmes comes to be, you have to look at how it starts. And I saw this with my own two eyes, you know, with some of the freshmen that I arrived with, you now who came to Stanford idealistic and brilliant and genuinely committed to technology and learned. That if you say the right things, if you behave the right way, your own actual merit is sort of second to how you are perceived. You can get very, very far in this world very quickly, especially with the amount of money flowing in to anything with AI in the name.

Jon Bateman: I'll just put my own cards on the table here. I'm also the product of an elite education. I went to Harvard Law School. When I showed up as a 1L at Harvard, of course I was thrilled to be there. And the majority of people that I spoke to, my friends, classmates, they had pretty touchy-feely aspirations for how they were gonna use the power that they would accumulate there. They wanted to become environmental lawyers. They wanted it to protect the rights of children, public defenders, and so on and so forth. Those people, by and large, went on to what's called big law. The largest commercial transaction and litigation firms in the country, they're pretty ruthless. I had friends who even did the stereotypical defending a tobacco company against a wrongful death lawsuit, almost like the storybook version of kind of like legal villainy. To what extent do you think what you're describing is a unique phenomenon either to Stanford or to the moment that we're in right now with tech and AI and the power that it has in our society versus a universal story of coming of age and discovering that the world of adults is grubbier than we thought. Being an elite comes with... Ethical and spiritual sacrifices that all just kind of flow down from our broken world.

Theo Baker: Yeah. That was a great question. And the answer, of course, is partly both, right? On the one hand, you know, Stanford is unlike anywhere else, right. We know the privileges of Harvard and Yale and the Ivy League. You know, the pipeline that they serve, you know, toward D.C. And Wall Street. Stanford is significantly more integrated because Silicon Valley wouldn't exist without the school. It was really started at Stanford Research Park on Stanford land. If you just take the value of the companies that have offices on the grounds of the Stanford University, their cumulative value is somewhere north of $6 trillion. So it's a much more integrated system. And not only that, but they're seeking out talent much earlier. You're not putting in your time and doing your internships and getting a return offer from McKinsey. Know, you're dropping out at the end of freshman year. The guy who taught me how to shotgun a beer in freshman year dropped out six months after he started his AI company. It was valued at over a billion dollars. Right. So the velocity there is different. But as you say, exactly, this is sort of the vanguard, the bleeding edge of a story that does affect lots of other institutions, not just the elite institutions, but all modern universities that have become corporatized, increasingly treating their students as a form of product from which they can reap rewards. Stanford, one of the models for this book that I tried to keep in mind was 1L, the shot to row chronicle of pressure and privilege there. Um, you know, I do think that exactly at Harvard Law, um, I do think that that book, you know, uh, while being very focused on Harvard specifically and, you know, sort of told through to Rose perspective as a one L, um, speaks to how, you know, not just intentions can be warped, but also behaviors by a system that has its priorities in the wrong place. Certainly that is true of Stanford and certainly I hope that this book, uh you know will help show what universities are actually like at the moment. It's a place, you know, where going back to the war on fun, the very first story that I reported, you now it's a space where you now have to take a class and pass an exam to be able to apply to host a college event three weeks in advance to the so-called party review committee. And when you show up, you have to read the land acknowledgments and the idea of the consent, asking for and receiving consent, just to get into the fraternity party where you're going to scheme about becoming a billionaire. So it's appearance and safetyism, but as a function of corporate universities, certainly part of that is represented across the country.

Jon Bateman: Yeah, yeah, so this takes us back a little bit to the downfall of MTL and one of the things you chronicle in the book is that the Board of Trustees of Stanford was not, let's say, the most enthusiastic about uncovering and looking into this wrongdoing. And it seems as though Stanford's Board of trustees over time has been transformed into a body that is heavily, heavily comprised of wealthy people from tech, finance, and business. I will say... This is a story I think that we're seeing across the country to differing extents. I looked into the Harvard Corporation, which controls that university. They have some members on it that have experience from government, civil society, foundations, NGOs, and so forth. But I've talked to people who have worked at state public universities, not the most cutting edge, not the more elite, who tell a similar story about the kind of corporatization. Of education.

Theo Baker: Yeah, yeah. Well, in Stanford, and I might not get the numbers exactly right, but in freshman year, while this was happening, there were 33 members on the board, I believe. And many of them were billionaires, right? Not a single one of them was an academic, aside from Mark Tessier Levine. Not a singe one of the, as I recall, was a nonprofit chair, or worked in journalism. You know, so it shows exactly where the priorities of the institution lie. Stanford, you know, had this remarkable turnaround story. Right? It used to be the sort of regional institution, but with the rise of technology, you know, it became the first school in the early 2000s to raise more than a billion dollars in a year, became the top fundraising school in a nation. You know, today, its annual budget is nearly twice that of a school like Yale, which is sort of remarkable to think about, because they educate almost the exact same number of students. So wealth, you know has into this institution in a really remarkable fashion. And again, it's not all a bad thing, right? It's amazing walking around Stanford's campus, just seeing all of the exciting, amazing, incredible, phenomenal, you run out of superlative things to say about the activities and the research and whatnot. The problem is that the institution only ever wants to talk about the good stuff. And the good staff not only coexist with the bad stuff, but it is driven by the exact same conditions. Elizabeth Holmes is just as much a product of Stanford as Hewlett or Packard. And so if we're only ever talking about the success stories, we're missing, you know, a big part of the story, which is the fraud and the deceit and the issues that arise from the very same combination of factors.

Jon Bateman: You mentioned Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman Fried. These are two of the higher profile examples of tech CEOs who went to prison for fraud. In Sam Bankmen Fried's case, he is truly the product of Stanford. His parents are both Stanford professors. He grew up on campus. Lots of people have raised questions about how it could be that someone who committed his crimes had the kind of upbringing that he had. If your friend who taught you how to shotgun beer was here, the guy who now has the billion dollar company, what would he say about the Stanford experience? Would he have the same critiques as you? And would he, say, I wish I'd been incentivized to spend more time with a broader classical education, get better ethical advice, and then launch a little bit later in life and Maybe I wouldn't have launched in the same way. Or would he say, I'm glad I took the path I did. I'm happy for these hangers-on. I'm Happy about Professor Billionaire because that's exactly the kind of mark I wanted to make.

Theo Baker: Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, I ran into him, you know, somewhat recently in San Francisco. I think, you now, he is so underwater running his startup. I don't think he has a lot of time to reflect on much of anything. You know, but I do think that for people like him, it's something very mission driven. You now, it is a very, very accomplished and hard charging person. It was not surprising to me or anyone else that he has had this of meteoric success and rise to the heights of tech world. Again, it's not a bad thing, per se, that kids are dropping out and doing startups. The problem is when they're doing it without an actual idea, they're doing it because they're being put in this position by a system that rewards a certain kind of behavior, and they feel that they're just sort of going along with the flow. Um, and it's bad, of course, when it results in something, you know, uncouth when it results in, uh, the sort of behavior that has become far too common, uh is not the only, it should not be the default way to run a company, right? Doing a startup doesn't have to be a bad thing. Um, And yet in Silicon Valley, you now, really the, the major metric of, of, uh whether or not you are a valuable contributor is whether or not you've succeeded, right. The line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior is very, very hard to CERN. You know, even companies like, I think as journalists, we often think of like Reddit as one of the better social media companies, you know, or the less problematic ones as a company. You know the founders of Reddit admitted that they faked all of their user data for the first year or two while they were running the company. And it's like, fine, I guess, because it's become what it's became. But you know I think a friend of mine captured this pretty well while we were working on running the school hackathon, which I was on the team with her helping to put together. We were talking about all the sort of moderately shady things that had happened, you know, within the club that, you, know, sort of siphoned money without much oversight, really any oversight whatsoever. And she said, it's all just a little bit of fraud. And just a little bit fraud, I think really captures, you now, how this place works, what's embedded in it.

Jon Bateman: Just a little bit of fraud, huh, hmm. Yeah, so Silicon Valley runs in many respects on a kind of fake it till you make it mentality. You might look at a company like Reddit and say, maybe a little bit of fakery helped it make it in the end. I mean, it seems odd to say. And I know a lot of people out there are just going to be recoiling at any defenses that I offer of the kind of structure that produces the current technology companies in the tech elite. But there is a logic to it. I guess one's feeling about all of this is difficult to divorce from one's. Feeling about the tech industry itself, right? I mean, you named a bunch of companies earlier. DoorDash, Zillow, Google, if you like those companies, then you're probably willing to tolerate a system that produces them at the cost of cracking some eggs. If you don't like those company, this whole thing probably just seems like a corrupt mess. And we are in a moment in history where most people don't really like tech companies.

Theo Baker: I hope that people will come away with this with a better understanding of how it actually works and the texture of it, because I think that's very hard to impart without spending time in this place, which works in a very odd and unusual way, where a bunch of overgrown toddlers are controlling the world's technology. I think we're very quick to place things into the vector of malice or virtue. And there are very malicious people in Silicon Valley, like... True psychopaths of the highest highest order. What's almost more interesting to me though are the kids who get sort of thrown off the rails, you know, like they're not necessarily intending to do harm, and yet the way things are set up, you, know, this is the decision that seems the most obvious and the most reasonable. That's something that's more interesting to me than the idea of a few rotten apples. You know, I spoke to a number of, you know, sort of representatives of Stanford in various guises. While reporting the book, and one of them was Condoleezza Rice, you know, the former Secretary of State. She had been Stanford's provost before she went into the Bush administration. Now she runs the Hoover Institution, which is the influential think tank on campus. And she brought up an example from her time as a national security advisor, in which she said, sometimes, and I'm paraphrasing here, but this is, you can get the actual quotes from the book. She says that sometimes, you know, she had to make a decision where... You knew that civilians were going to die, but you had to bomb the terrorist nest because otherwise thousands more would die. And so she extended that metaphor to Stanford. She said, if you're going to have a big commercialization arm and you're going to encourage people to take risks, you know, there will be some bad actors. And I guess I have a somewhat less fatalistic view. It's that I do think that you can you know, inculcate innovation without enabling fraud in the same way that Stanford, you know at times appears to have done so. And part of the problem, I think the biggest, you know, source of the problems, although maybe this is my bias as a journalist, is the lack of transparency and the really the unwillingness to confront when things go wrong.

Jon Bateman: I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who... Are absolutely revolted at Condoleezza Rice's comparison to bombing a terrorist den and killing civilians. Of course, the war in Iraq was pretty much a disaster. And so if that's the model being held up for how we should run our university and our tech industry, a lot of people are not going to like the sound of that. But I think there's also a truth to it, that once someone comes of age, as you document beautifully in this book, you learn that the real world is brutal. And attempting to accomplish anything requires doing tough things.

Theo Baker: Yeah, and there's never gonna be this sort of like pure, you know, unsullied version of reality in which nothing ever goes wrong. But that's part of why it's so insidious to some degree, you know to try to promote a view like that as Stanford has historically done where things are only ever good. You know, and one of the stories I reported on in freshman year was this professor named Stan Cohen, this living legend of genetics, who was the first to transplant genes from one living organism to another. His patents gave the university hundreds of millions of dollars. In fact, by the last year that his recombinant DNA patent was active and accounted for 62% of the patent revenue that the school got. But I learned during freshman year, he had been found viable in a court of law in a fraud case. He had been forced to pay $29 million judgment because he told investors that he had this promising new drug target, uh, that he called HD 106, that would be a cure for Huntington's disease. He neglected to tell them it had been permanently banned in 1976 by the FDA because it could kill people. So he was forced to pay this $29 million judgment. I went to Stanford. I asked for their comment. They said, oh, we can't say anything about this. They refused to comment on whether he would face any repercussions. They said we had nothing to do with this court case or any of this, and so we can say anything. But Stanford owned the IP issue, which emerged from his lab. They had been subpoenaed in the court case, fought the subpoenas, then ultimately provided documents and witnesses. Not only had the professor admitted to some of his conduct with regard to the running of the company, at one point also giving false testimony on the witness bench in the witness Take care. He also admitted to potential violations of various university policies. He was cheating on his wife as she lay dying of cancer and appointed his paramour without disclosure to both his university lab and to the company. So to this day, Stanford cites this man's research as an example of why the research enterprise is so valuable, rightly so. It is incredibly valuable research that he did with recombinant DNA while refusing to acknowledge the fraud that emerged from the same lab. And you can't have it that you can have it both ways. You know, you can't just talk about the good and ignore the bad.

Jon Bateman: Yeah, it's one thing to accept the money, it's another thing to celebrate the man and his achievements. It makes me think of universities doing a kind of excavation now of their relationships with slavery. Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, many other universities have sought to go into the archives and develop. A kind of public transparency report about the ways in which they financially benefited from the institution of slavery. In cases like Georgetown or Harvard Law School, two institutions that I've been affiliated with, they virtually wouldn't exist without slavery. And so a modest step that they can take is to at least acknowledge some of these issues and kind of have some...

Theo Baker: But the difference here is that this is not history. This is happening right now. So as they glorify the model of the great tech dropout, the great billionaire who emerges from Stanford while ignoring the fraud that emerges from the same system, they continue to incentivize the same behaviors that we see repeated time and time again. At a moment when Silicon Valley is assuming far more power over the world than it ever has had before. So this isn't an academic project. This is a very central question to how the technologies of the future are being governed. And what I found in my reporting for this book is that the people who are being groomed to assume the reins of this technology are learning to put themselves above others in a way that you know, is clearly, I think, deleterious, has the deleterius effect on all of us.

Jon Bateman: Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most famous venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, has become notorious for this in the last couple of years. A lot of their funding rounds have been focused on companies and business strategies that strike many people as kind of unethical and skeezy, creating gambling-like experiences, provocative, kind of dark advertising campaigns. So there does seem to be something going on where. In the current moment in the tech industry, a kind of Machiavellian style is promoted and seen as good for business. Yeah. What can a university like Stanford do to insulate itself from the pernicious influence of the town industry, right? The industry that students show up wanting to get into, that professors hail from, trustees are a part of, what are the guardrails that a university like Stanford can put up to protect its integrity and mission in this kind of atmosphere?

Theo Baker: Stanford has this sort of Faustian bargain, you know, the very thing that enables it to accrue power is also the thing that allows it to be corrupted. And so, you know, it has to take a hard look at itself and understand that, you know, that the very attributes that enable it are also the ones that have to be, you know altered or beaten back if they want to restore, you know, a culture that is somewhat different than the one that exists today. You know, and part of that is about, you Part of it is about, you know, what the school actually values in terms of these corporate partnerships You know that that function is to sociologists wrote in their analysis of the subject by selling students by selling access to students You know part of it again goes back. I think primarily to this question of transparency right, that if you actually want to have students who are creating good things, you know, you have to show them that the way to do it is not just to, you, know, put your name on something and say I have succeeded, but to go and do the dirty and sort of, you now, unpleasant work that it takes to create something new. And again, it's not covering things up. Right, that actually is probably like the most important thing. You know, Stanford has a famous cover-up baked into its very historical origin story. Jane Stanford, the co-founder of the university, was murdered and its first president, David Starr Jordan, covered it up. In years since, there have been a hell of a lot of other cover-ups. And the problem is that when you are just always talking about the good stuff, you're just always promoting, you know, this particular vision of success, which revolves around money and revolves around technology. And you have no protections against faculty monetizing these students, against the degradation of liberal education, you're going to continue to have the same problem.

Jon Bateman: I'm just, I would love any advice that you have because to me, this problem of how one maintains institutional integrity in the face of overwhelming wealth and power from the tech industry is one that our whole society and world is facing more and more, right? I mean, basically, if you look at America today, tech is becoming a bigger and bigger part of all power structures. The stock market is increasingly dominated by a small number of large tech companies. President Trump, at his inauguration, made sure to showcase behind him the titans of Silicon Valley. He was saying to the world, these are the people who I view as the power elite and who can essentially validate me as having arrived. We see now tech companies are increasingly the biggest political donors. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, and so... A number of newspapers now have been bought by tech CEOs. And again, you could like this or you could dislike it. You could view it as a financial lifeline for struggling institutions like newspapers, or you can say it's disturbing. But the question remains, how does an institution with a mission that is different than Silicon Valley's mission, that isn't just about kind of money and the raw elements of success, protect itself?

Theo Baker: Well, certainly Stanford would have to articulate that as its mission, which I don't think it has sufficiently. I took my first class at Stanford in the Nvidia auditorium in the Jensen Huang Engineering Center. Jensen Wong, of course, the head of Nvidia. When I started freshman year, Intel had a higher server share than Nvidia did. By junior year, by the beginning of junior year Jensen Hwang was worth more than the entire company Intel, right? And so, that has been very interesting to witness, but also speaks again to what the university values, right? Just down the hall from that classroom was the so-called Hewlett Shed, which is this tiny replica shed of the place where Hewlet and Packard started their company with $538 in 1939.

Jon Bateman: Right, the iconic idea of a company started in a garage. Yes, the mythological Silicon Valley Orchards. Exactly, and now it's inside out.

Theo Baker: And now it's inside a 136,000 square foot, you know, Huang Engineering Center, named after, you know the founder of the most valuable company in the world, which is has a higher percentage of, you now the S&P 500 than any company in history, right? And so I think this also circles back to something that we talked about earlier with regard to all of higher education, right? They've lost a cohesive identity. You know, these schools are at the same time, giant hedge funds, controlling and investing billions of dollars. They are, you know, the hubs for teenage exploration, you know where people go and party and do you know all these things. They're institutional brands that sell a large amount of merchandise. They are professional sports leagues. They are repositories of historical knowledge and thought. They are giant scientific undertakings. All of these things are somewhat at tension with one another. And as universities have become so sprawling, it's become much harder to articulate what a cohesive identity for a university looks like. And Stanford, I think, has found itself lost in that muddle.

Jon Bateman: Terrific description of the problem. I have a young daughter. I'm starting to think about her life and education. What advice would you give to a 17-year-old today who has big dreams, wants to make a mark on the world, maybe sees themselves as a do-gooder, but maybe has like an unformed ethos or plan for precisely how it is that they will become influential and important, hopefully in a positive way. Should they go to a place like Stanford or Harvard or Yale or Princeton? Should they try to seek some sort of alternate path that might actually mean fewer tech opportunities, but maybe opportunities of a different type or a different kind of upbringing? Are there universities that you feel are providing a robust alternative for an ambitious young person who wants to hold on their integrity.

Theo Baker: Well, this is the thing. It's a very individual choice. The calculation is different for everyone. And it should be different for every one. If we just hold up a few institutions as the best, the paragons of everything, the only answer, that's where you see a lot of the problems come in. These universities have taken on this reputation as arbiters of elite status. Right to get in is to be told that you are worthy that you as a person are a great, you know that that you know If you get in you are the greatest thing since sliced bread You know that you now stanford has a three percent admissions rate, right? You beat the odds and it's so ridiculous, right because the average admissions reader has 14 minutes to read your file And no one, you, know, no 16 or 17 year old applying to college, uh, you know, uh Facing an admissions reader who has 14 to read Your file like you are not actually getting judged on your value as a person. And yet, because we assign that sort of value judgment to it, this moral weight, do you deserve to get in? We treat it as the end result, that this is somehow the reward for all of your good behavior, as opposed to just one step along the path, as opposed an opportunity to take advantage of. And so by building up these universities. You know, we have made it into a sort of value judgment, you know, assigned a sort of power to them that I think is deeply damaging both to students and to the institutions themselves.

Jon Bateman: Yeah It's hard to know how to unwind that. And I think there's a paradox there, too, where many people have encountered some version of this critique, right? Whether it's the arbitrariness of the vaunted U.S. News and World Report rankings, right, which are very gamified and, you know, not the best representation of what a college can offer a student, or issues with standardized tests, interviews, grades, every aspect of getting into an elite university is deeply flawed in some way. On the other hand. Populists out there, cover your ears, okay. Every society has had an elite and there is a purpose that elites serve and that elite institutions serve in matchmaking, signaling who has the talent, the drive, the motivation, the skills to perform in challenging roles that not everyone can perform and that will be immensely rewarded in some countries and times and places. Would you agree that we do need some institutions to serve that function? Right now, it's a place like Stanford mediated through all of this messed up stuff, like US News World Report, the SATs, the 14 Minutes. But do we not need something to serve that function, in other words, if Stanford went away, we'd have to invent it or something like it.

Theo Baker: That's an interesting question. I'm not sure that I'm fully qualified to render judgment on the value or lack of value in terms of credentialing, but I will say that, look, universities in this country are a really special place. The opportunity to go to a four-year school is a really incredible one, not just Stanford bit. So many schools here have a model that is unique in the world, private-public academic partnership that has spawned so much great research. But it's also just really fun to be a student, and it's really great to be around your fellow peers. I will say that, you know, at a certain point the process becomes so flawed that there's almost no point in evaluating, you know, the sort of theoretical version of it, because it's so divorced from the reality of what these institutions are, that it's almost a completely different conversation. It's, yeah, I don't know. You've also written about this.

Jon Bateman: Challenge of how to have fun still on a university campus in which legal liability reigns supreme, and we've got this bloated administrative bureaucracy that seeks to control all aspects of campus life in the process kind of quashing creativity. Could you just tell us briefly about shit? The Stanford highly incompetent team, did I have that right? Yes, absolutely. A little bit of rebellion against this no fun atmosphere.

Theo Baker: Yeah, so this was one of the most enjoyable things I got to do freshman year. The Stanford Highly Inconfident Team, great acronym, was a group of amateur students who created basically a race team on their own in the lowest level of the underground garage in the middle of the night because this wasn't exactly allowed and they didn't want the police to see them. And they created these two race cars out of old beater 1990s hatchbacks that were barely hanging on to life. Um, and it was amazing because this was a group with no profit incentive. You know, as one student joked to me, a balloon would be above our budget. Um and yet uh you know just for the sheer love of it right for the shear uh you know desire to build something cool um they were incredibly inventive and and thoughtful and and you know they would take breaks from wrenching on the car to go watch lectures on fluid dynamics and talk about Erdogan you know and and this was sort of the stanford that i had hoped to find right these genius kids who are you know having fun for the hell of it building cool things because they want to You know, building go-karts to take themselves to class or whatever it was that they did in their free time. You know that ethos still exists to some degree, but it has been swallowed for the most part within the university by the influx of power and wealth and status and all of the things associated with the tech boom. There is a version of Stanford, you know, that is more like that more resembles the Stanford highly incompetent team. I think that would be a better version of Standford, you know, at least from my own experience that if there were more of this sort of pure attitude toward creating things, I can't see how that would that I can see how that would a worse thing.

Jon Bateman: Yeah, yeah, it's a great story because it calls to mind the romance of this time in our lives, the exploration, the creativity, the friendship. We had something similar at my undergrad. There was a group called WPA, the Whimsy Progress Administration.

Theo Baker: Not the worst progress, the whimsy progress.

Jon Bateman: Exactly. So they would just try to bring a little mirth to campus. One day they got like 1,000 inflatable pink flamingos and just put them on the main quad. It seems like there is a spark of life left, despite this kind of austere, punishing Machiavellian environment. There are still people, and this is also an important part of who young people are, even at a place like Stanford, that is yearning for the romance. Of youth and the exploration that this time in life can offer.

Theo Baker: Yes. And look, you know, I'm not saying that we should burn all of this down, right? Like I'm going to graduate from Stanford next month and I will be, you know, just as happy and pleased as everyone else. You know, I think my main thing is that when you have so much power, right, which is this, this dramatic accelerant for everything that was already brimming beneath the surface and you're exercising it in such an irresponsible way, as many people seem to be doing frequently and all too frequently in Silicon Valley. We need to understand how the system is actually working. And I believe by looking inside, you know, and seeing how the next generation of these tech oligarchs are being trained, we can glean some insights as to how, you know how this power is being wielded and developed, you know throughout Silicon Valley.

Jon Bateman: Your book absolutely offers that inside perspective. I commend it to people. It's got great stories. It's a memoir, a journalistic account of misuse of power. It's breezy. It's propulsive. So congratulations on the book, Theo. I'm sure a lot of people are gonna wonder you're about to graduate. What's next for you?

Theo Baker: I honestly don't know, but I gotta cut there first. It's honestly entirely true. I don't now. I imagine that I will continue to do something related to storytelling and investigating. I fell in love with journalism over the course of my freshman year in a way that I hadn't really expected. Um, but...

Jon Bateman: We'll see. You came to Stanford looking for a career, perhaps in computers and tech. Instead, you discovered something that you did love outside of that space. So maybe that is a kind of hopeful way to wrap up this conversation. Theo Baker, thanks so much for your time today.

Theo Baker: Thank you so much for having me.