00:00Our next guest will graduate from college in just four weeks, but Theo Baker is not suffering from senioritis.
00:05That condition of pre-commencement carefreeness that I can only imagine is easier to contract among the palm trees on
00:11the California campus, where Theo is still a student.
00:13His first book, How to Rule the World, an Education in Power at Stanford University, hits store shelves on Tuesday.
00:19All right, it chronicles the prize-winning reporting Theo did for Stanford's student newspaper, reporting that led to the resignation
00:25of the university's president.
00:26And the book is a gimlet-eyed look, yes, that expression comes from David Gurra, at the academic institution that
00:33continues to be a training ground for the tech elite who play an outsized role in our lives.
00:37Well, Stanford has made a Faustian bargain with Silicon Valley, Theo writes, one that has enabled its meteoric ascent and
00:43allowed for its corruption.
00:44Theo joins us now here in New York. Great to see you. Congratulations.
00:47We have the book. We have the book.
00:48Hoisted, if you'd like.
00:49Amazing. Yeah, thank you for having me.
00:51You grew up in a milieu of powerful people.
00:53I'm going to allow that when I lived in D.C., I remember seeing you as a kid with your
00:56parents, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, at a Center for a New American Security event.
01:00You were there in a blazer, you know, at probably the age of like seven or eight.
01:03But you tagged along and met a lot of folks who were powerful people in the world of Washington.
01:07How is power different?
01:09How does it manifest itself differently on the campus of Stanford or in Silicon Valley generally?
01:13Yeah, no, it's a great question.
01:15You know, I came out to Silicon Valley thinking I was going to do the exact opposite thing from D
01:20.C.
01:20I was going to go 3,000 miles away and be a coder and kind of fell into the family
01:25profession by accident.
01:26But, you know, I very quickly arrived and discovered that there was a sort of secret inside world afforded only
01:33to those identified as the next trillion dollar startup founders.
01:35And so these teenagers are plied with yacht parties and slush funds and the sort of excess that, you know,
01:42feels like it's something out of a satire.
01:44And yet in reality is exactly the product of a system in which teenagers are a valuable commodity to monetize.
01:51That's so interesting.
01:52You said when you got to Stanford, everything looked perfect.
01:55Why does that matter as well?
01:56And does that extend to the student body?
01:59Are they trying to look perfect or is it more about existing in the perfect place and having the perfect
02:03resume and getting that perfect job?
02:04Yeah, no, I mean, this is exactly the thing that Stanford, which really is sort of Silicon Valley's feeder school,
02:10its training ground.
02:12This relentless focus on perfection, on appearance is sort of, I think, the best way to explain the entire institution.
02:18Are you all looks maxing, academic maxing?
02:21I don't know what else.
02:22Well, look, if you learn how to say the right words, you can raise pre-idea funding, you know, where
02:26someone will give you a million dollars and say, hey, if you make a company with it, call me.
02:30And so the reward to looking really good is accruing the sort of power that teenagers very rarely get to
02:37wield.
02:37You write about the coziness the school has had to Silicon Valley, the importance of intellectual property.
02:44The professors there realize the worth of that.
02:46Many professors and administrators have availed themselves of that.
02:50They were very rich members of the faculty at Stanford.
02:53Talk a bit about that coziness, if you would, the way that this institution, perhaps more so than many other
02:57academic institutions in the United States, is really part and parcel of a larger kind of industrial theme.
03:04Absolutely.
03:05I mean, Silicon Valley wouldn't exist without Stanford.
03:07Much of it was created on the university grounds.
03:10In fact, if you just took the value of the companies that have offices on Stanford land, it's something north
03:15of $6 trillion in terms of total value.
03:18There's a professor who's known by the moniker of Professor Billionaire because he's made over $20 billion by investing in
03:24his students' companies, right?
03:26And so understanding this no-boundaries relationship goes a long way to explaining how both the money and the power,
03:31you know, that have seeped into Silicon Valley make their way onto campus,
03:34but also the sort of cutting corners mentality that has, you know, in so many ways infected a number of
03:40the students that I arrived with, you know, seeing them take on this tech ecosystem for themselves.
03:45All right, we're talking about Stanford, we're talking about everything, but we also do want to talk about the reporting
03:50that you did that scrutinized the work of Stanford's now former president.
03:54First of all, when you sat down, because we both know your parents, I said, didn't you learn anything from
03:58your parents?
03:58Why did you want to go into journalism?
03:59And you said you actually didn't, and then this started with a tip, so talk us through that.
04:03Yeah, no, I'm a completely accidental journalist.
04:06I joined the student paper.
04:07Happens to the best of us, buddy.
04:08I was a ballet dancer.
04:08It's, you know, it's a terrible thing, and yet, you know, I fell in love, of course, over the course
04:13of freshman year with, you know, the ability to actually find a story
04:17and do reporting that I thought mattered to my community.
04:20This reporting on Mark Tessay-Levine revealed allegations of research misconduct in several papers that he had co-authored over
04:28a significant period of time
04:29before becoming the president of Stanford.
04:32Ultimately, by the end of the year, as I report for the first time in this book, he was ousted
04:36by a unanimous vote of his own board of trustees,
04:38and several major neuroscience studies were retracted as a result.
04:42You know, it's interesting, as you're reporting all of this out, the kind of pushback that you get from folks
04:46who knew him, knew of him,
04:48suggested that he had a sterling reputation.
04:50In effect, you should watch yourself as you're doing this, and that kind of manifests itself most significantly, I guess,
04:54in letters that you got from legal counsel saying these allegations are untrue, you shouldn't publish this, it's scurrilous.
05:00Here you are, like, not even 20.
05:01Yeah, that's always fun.
05:02Having to navigate this world, how did you find your way to that?
05:05I think a lot of us think of the quaintness of a college paper, but you had a lot of
05:08might at your disposal.
05:09There were lawyers that you and the paper had as you went through this.
05:12Yeah, thank God.
05:13You know, the Stanford Daily has been independent.
05:14It was as of 50 years before I arrived, so we had editorial control, and there were pro bono counsel,
05:21as you say,
05:21who volunteered their time to, you know, review our work and to keep us safe as we published,
05:27which obviously was essential to this work.
05:29Mark Tessie Levine hired Steve Neal, who was the chair emeritus of Cooley, sort of the dominant Silicon Valley firm.
05:36He had formerly represented Charles Keating Jr. and Elizabeth Holmes,
05:39and he began sending me letters soon after my 18th birthday about trying to stop my future reporting from coming
05:46out.
05:46But, you know, I'm grateful for the team, and, you know, I'm grateful that these stories have emerged into the
05:52public record.
05:53All right, so you're graduating in how many weeks?
05:56Gosh, I think it's a little over three weeks now.
05:58Okay, have you done all your homework? I know you're here on a Sunday.
06:00I do have an assignment for Sleep and Dreams I have to turn in after this.
06:03I'm not digging into that. We were talking about the break.
06:05For another time.
06:07Look, it's a very hard time, it seems to me, to be a young person right now.
06:11And I just want to ask you broadly, are the kids all right?
06:14How are you guys doing? Do you feel like you're going to find your place?
06:18Well, some kids are, some kids aren't.
06:20You know, but this has also been interesting, right?
06:22I came on campus right at the beginning of the AI rush.
06:25And at Stanford in particular, this has been a crazy time.
06:29ChatGPT came out two months after we arrived, and now as we graduate, you know, some people have learned how
06:35to make a meteoric fortune off of this.
06:37They have, you know, the guy who taught me how to shotgun a beer freshman year dropped out six months
06:41after he started his company.
06:42It was valued at over a billion dollars.
06:44But for a lot of people, the latter has been sort of drawn up, taking away these starter positions.
06:49Got about a minute left.
06:50It's a book about Stanford and your experience there, both doing all of this reporting and just digging into the
06:55academic life there on that campus.
06:57Are there or is there a broader lesson to be drawn about an institution like Stanford in American life today?
07:03Absolutely.
07:04I mean, Stanford is the vanguard of so many trends that influence the rest of higher education.
07:09You know, many of the things that begin out there, including the sort of corporatized university, have filtered out to
07:15various degrees.
07:16So I think understanding what's happening, you know, in the middle of Silicon Valley's training ground, where so many of
07:22the great technologies that affect all of our lives are being shaped,
07:25is essential to understanding how the next Elizabeth Holmes or the next Sam Binkman-Fried comes to be.
07:30Theo Baker, clearly overachieving just like the rest of his Stanford class.
07:33Very impressive.
07:34Very impressive.
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