August 28, 2026 • 41 mins
Did your college have a secret society? Well, Stanford has a secret off-campus class training the next generation of Silicon Valley billionaires. And it's literally called "How to Rule the World."
Theo Baker arrived at Stanford as an aspiring coder with dreams of building the future. Instead, he stumbled into the "Stanford-within-Stanford" — a hidden pipeline connecting a select few students directly to Silicon Valley CEOs, yacht parties, and venture capitalists offering millions before you even have an idea. Then he decided to write a book about it.
In How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, Theo traces his freshman year transformation from tech idealist to award-winning investigative journalist — including the reporting that brought down Stanford's own president. He joins us to talk power, secrecy, and what Silicon Valley is really teaching the next generation.
Additional Reading:
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Hey, it's Oz here.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Tech Stuff is taking a week off, but we'll be
back on September 3rd with new episodes. In the meantime,
I wanted to share an episode from earlier this year
to celebrate the start of the school year.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Hope you enjoy. Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Oz Foloshin.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Listeners have probably noticed that on this show, we have
a deep fascination with the upcoming generation, striving to build,
and in many cases, own the future. What inspires this
under-25 cohort to drop out of school, plug into the
mainframe of AI, and attempt to be the next Zuck
or Sam Altman? Today, we have someone who can take
(00:52):
us deep into the world of young founders and the
people who fund them, Theo Baker. As of this recording,
Theo is still an undergrad at Stanford University. He spent
much of his freshman year reporting on research fraud committed
by the school's president, which led to him becoming the
youngest ever recipient of the George Polk Award for Investigative Journalism.
(01:12):
And now, just ahead of graduation, Theo is publishing a book,
How to Rule the World, An Education in Power at
Stanford University. The New York Times says, quote, in every age,
there is some place that epitomizes how power works. Baker's
Stanford is a strong candidate. Theo, welcome to Tech Stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
So congratulations on being about to graduate for surviving college,
just about. I know there were some hairy moments, but
why did you choose Stanford?
Speaker 4 (01:43):
Well, I've now, I guess, been in love with Stanford
for the greater part of my life. I was seven
years old when I first had my heart set on Stanford.
And I remember, you know, just this image becoming embedded
in my mind of these teenagers and and their Stanford
T-shirts and their flip-flops lounging in the shade of a
palm tree and leaning up against the self-driving car they
(02:03):
had just helped to build. And I thought, this is
the coolest place in the world, you know, that all
of the most brilliant people are doing, you know, are
making the future out here.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
And that part of Stanford, you know, it exists. That
is true.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
There's just another side that the school is less than
willing to talk about.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
So when you were seven, this was like, what, 2010
or so?
Speaker 3 (02:24):
This would have been 2012. 2012.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
And I mean, that was already when huge fortunes were
being made in Silicon Valley, obviously.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Huge companies had already gone public.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Were you attracted to becoming a tech billionaire or more
of an idealist?
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Or what was the motivation for you?
Speaker 4 (02:41):
I was never really into being a tech billionaire, but
I definitely wanted to do something in tech. By the
time I got to high school, I was the kid
who was coding machine learning in my models at night
in my bedroom. And I thought that was a fun
Friday night. which is very obviously nerdy. But there was
just something so cool about the future is being remade
(03:02):
at this institution, in this place where people are empowered
to dream big and work on big problems. And that
was definitely the ethos that I anticipated Stanford having.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
And when did the scales fall from your eyes? I mean,
talk about, or did they fully fall from your eyes?
Where are you on the aspiration you had versus the
reality of what you encountered at Stanford?
Speaker 4 (03:25):
Well, it didn't take very long at Stanford to realize
that things didn't work the way that I thought that
they might. You know, there's this sort of Stanford inside Stanford,
I learned. You know, this sort of parallel reality for
those who have been tapped on the shoulder and identified
as the next trillion dollar startup founders. And for them,
there are yacht parties and slush funds and something called
(03:46):
pre-idea funding, which still boggles my mind.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Pre-idea funding.
Speaker 4 (03:50):
So before you even have the glimmer of an idea
of what you're going to do for a company, you know,
venture capitals will reach out if you are one of
these special few and offer you hundreds of thousands of dollars,
more than a million dollars sometimes, just because they're trying
to network with the next generation of talent and they
will go to some extraordinary lengths to do so.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Now, I remember in the Bush-Kerry election, you know, there
was the the revelation that both men were former members
of the Skull and Bones Secret Society at Yale, right?
And this was like the big, big national news. So
I guess these elite institutions have always had like clubs
and insider groups and insider groups who continue to exert
(04:28):
influence and help each other, old boys network, whatever you
want to call it, long after graduating college. But is
there something different, A, at Stanford and B, in your
generation because of the moment in technology?
Speaker 4 (04:42):
You know, people are well aware of the privileges and
the excesses of the Ivy League and the pipeline that
has historically existed between those, you know, prestigious institutions and
Wall Street and Washington.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Stanford and Silicon Valley are just so much more entangled.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
If you just take the cumulative value.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
Of the companies that have offices on the Stanford campus,
it's somewhere north of six trillion dollars. You know, that
this is a place that that literally its own venture
capital fund. The school has its own VC fund to
seed students as new companies.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Right.
Speaker 4 (05:14):
And so it's just, you know, Silicon Valley couldn't exist
without Stanford. It was created at the Stanford Research Park.
They grew out of this university. You know, the early
tech giant Sun Microsystems was literally named for Stanford University Network.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Right.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
And so, you know, the book is subtitled An Education
in Power, right? That power operates in similar ways, you know,
wherever it.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Exists, I guess.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
But this is the hub of power at the moment
that Silicon Valley, you know, controls the technology that controls
our lives. And these kids are being groomed, you know,
to inherit their rightful place among the ruling elite. And
so you mentioned Skull and Bones, the equivalent to Skull
and Bones, I guess, what I think of as sort
of a Skull and Bones for the aspiring tech elite
is where this book gets its title. the secret class
(05:58):
at Stanford called How to Rule the World.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
It's literally called How to Rule the World.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
It's literally called How to Rule the World.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
The Silicon Valley CEO teaches 12 Stanford students a year
the secrets to becoming the billionaires they aspire to be.
There's this whole cloak and dagger admissions process. And the
end result is that people are taught how to, quote,
extract value from others. That is the central lesson here.
And that seems to be what Silicon Valley is teaching
a lot of people at the moment, extracting value.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
That's very different from the images.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Of Stanford of people in flip-flops building motorized couches and
all the kind of things I imagine captured your imagination
as a seven-year-old. And what was, when you arrived on campus,
your first days, your first weeks, what was the split
in the student base between those who were there to
learn how to rule the world and those who were
there to express their creative dreams through technology?
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
Well, the sort of Stanford inside Stanford for those chosen
few is necessarily different small and cloistered and kept, you know,
obscured from, from everyone else, even at this institution. Like
most people who go to Stanford go to a very good,
but you know, normal quote unquote, normal college where there
are lots of opportunities and you study for your exams
(07:10):
and you go to coffee shops and you fall in
love and you, you know, try to get an internship.
And then the Stanford inside Stanford is sort of like
the supercharged manifestation of the attitude that Stanford has been
inculcating for the last several decades. This is an institution
with a guy who's known by the moniker Professor Billionaire
because he made $ 20 billion by investing in his students' companies.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
The smartest kids in the world, they're not so creative
with the names, Professor Billionaire and How to Rule the World.
I guess it's good to have the clue and the name,
but these seem a little on the nose.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
It is a little on the nose, but there's a
lot of stuff that's on the nose here.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
I mean, this place has a very funny relationship to irony.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
I remember.
There's just one interaction that has stuck with me.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
I'm meeting this woman for the first time at this
like secret society, you know, and it's this totally bizarre scene.
And she's telling me, she spends her very first interaction
complaining about living on a private island. She says, living
on a private island is so difficult. And here's the
reason she gets. She says, well, this is a direct quote.
(08:17):
We were rolling around in bed making love one day
and I realized I wanted French toast. And she couldn't
get French toast on the private island. And why did
they stay, she said? Well, it's a tax dodge. I mean,
this place has a very, there's something of an irony
freeze that is quite remarkable. That once you're in, you know,
(08:37):
the sort of inner circle, people feel completely empowered to
say whatever it is they want to say. And also
to admit to a large amount of very casually expressed wrongdoings.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
I want to ask you about that.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
And I want to ask about going to Stanford at
a time when Sam Bankman Freed was in the midst
of his house arrest and also when Chachi Putee was
being released. I mean, a lot of interesting stuff happening
at the same time. Before we get there, though, I
actually spent a year doing study abroad at Yale when
I was 20, I think, and wrote for the Yale
Daily News. I didn't win a Polk Award, unfortunately, or
(09:13):
get the university president dismissed. But nonetheless, it was a
satisfying experience. One of the things I was very struck
by was the secret societies at Yale, because they were
almost the opposite of secret. They were called tombs, like
Skull and Bones had a tomb, and there were these
enormous buildings that were totally impossible to miss dotted throughout
the campus. There were probably 12 or 14 of them,
(09:35):
which had no windows. It was this strange, almost perverse
psychological phenomenon, which was like, look at me.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
But don't look within me. But it's like, if it
was truly secret, it wouldn't be fun.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
The fun, the thrill was the fact it was like
ostentatiously hiding in plain sight. So I'm curious, like where
does the, how to rule the world club fit into
the sort of, is it like a true desire to
be secret or a desire to be known for secrecy?
Speaker 4 (10:03):
No, I mean, this was genuinely secret, that when I
arrived on campus, even knowing that it existed was something
of a status signifier among the most insider of the
insider group. You were in the sort of delicious phrase
of someone there, quote unquote, rule adjacent, just to know
that it existed. I mean, I guess you can understand why.
(10:24):
It is a sort of amazing thing that this exists, right?
That you know, these students, you know, in their own words,
they think it's something of a scam, right? That this
guy doesn't actually know how to rule the world. What
he's doing is networking with teenagers that he thinks will
be useful to him in the future. Only by creating
this class, he has this sort of brilliant way of
(10:46):
making them come to him because he's positioning himself as
this sort of, you know, like mysterious figure who possesses secrets.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Like a guru. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
And some of these kids, look, the kids who are
in the class are genuinely very smart and high achieving. And,
you know, some of them are already well known. One
of them is Phoebe Gates, who is the daughter of
Bill and Melinda Gates, which I thought was an interesting detail,
you know, who has gone on to create her own startup.
And it's, you know, I think it's sort of the
ultimate manifestation of this no boundaries relationship that Stanford has
(11:19):
very intentionally cultivated. you know, that Stanford has made this
sort of Faustian bargain with Silicon Valley that has enabled
its meteoric.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Ascent, right?
Speaker 4 (11:29):
Like no other institution of higher education in the last
few decades and has also allowed for something that's corruption.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
So the institution knows that this character who's called Justin
in the book is coming to campus, creating his own
parallel class and connecting with all these students. I mean,
are they turning a blind eye? Are they actively aware
of it? I would think if I was a college administrator...
I might be a little concerned if somebody was trying
to sort of create some cult-like sort of proxy organization
(11:59):
in recruiting my students.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
No, I mean, it's fascinating, right, just how much selling
access to students has become the business model. You know,
there are venture capitalists who teach classes at Stanford just
so they can have access to students, right? That's actually
fairly frequently a thing that happens. you know, there's this whole,
this thing that some students call the Coupa circuit, right?
These investors who literally spend all day, seemingly every day
(12:24):
at the small little Coupa cafe, this outdoor cafe on campus,
where they are literally from dawn till dusk, you know,
networking with teenagers and seeming to spend more time with
them than their own families.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
These venture capital.
Speaker 4 (12:37):
Firms employ talent scouts, many of whom are literally Stanford
upperclassmen to identify freshmen the second they step on campus.
And once you're in the Stanford inside Stanford, everyone is
texting the same handful of billionaires for advice or.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Going to meet them on the weekends. It's profoundly odd.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
But not only is it this sort of weird ecosystem,
that's one part of it, but it's that the incentive structures,
the way that they are set up, encourage and enable
deceit that the logical end result too many times is
the sort of cut corners mentality that breeds the larger
(13:15):
frauds like Sam Bateman Freed or Elizabeth Holmes.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
You mentioned this phrase, the Cooper Circuit. You have a
kind of glossary in the front of your book of terms.
That's one of them. You've also got builders, entrepreneurs, and NGMI's.
Can you talk about those three cohorts?
Speaker 4 (13:34):
Yeah, well, in the words of one of the investors
I was talking to in the book, his job, he says,
is to separate out the quote-unquote.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Entrepreneurs from the quote-unquote builders.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
That people come to Stanford now understanding this idealized, mythologized
version of it, believing that they can be the next
billion-dollar dropouts. And the job of the investors is to
figure out, are you doing it just because you want
to be rich and you want all the associated perks,
or are you one of those pure and sort of
fetishized builders who are doing it just for the sake
(14:05):
of it. The NGMI's, on the other hand, are the
not going to make it, those who don't have the hustle.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
They're even worse than entrepreneurs.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Somehow.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Not going to make it. I mean, that's a pretty
dehumanizing term, by the way.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
Oh, completely. And this is another one, right? Technical, right?
Speaker 4 (14:21):
Technical or non-technical, that is a judgment on your value
as a person. Are you technical or are you non-technical?
Your entire worth can be summarized you know, very, very succinctly.
And one of the reasons I did the glossary of terms, one,
I just find it fun. It's sort of like, you know,
cultural anthropology embedded here in this fun ecosystem. But the
(14:42):
whole book, right, is about self-presentation. That if you learn
how to say the right words and you learn how
to exist in this closed off ecosystem, the rewards are fabulous.
And so I wanted to sort of expose people to
some of the lingo and see that they've created this
very sort of closed off world in which everyone says
the same things to each other back and forth.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
I mean, the New York Times book review said, in
coming of age as a young man, he, i.e. you, Theo,
travels to the heart of a dehumanizing age, which I
thought was a good quote. But there's also, I mean,
there's something interesting here, which is like, there is a
Bildungsroman quality to your book, like a Pilgrim's Progress, right?
Like you go there with one set of ideals, you
(15:24):
experience all of these things, you almost die, you expose corruption,
and then you get to the end But the end
is kind of the beginning because you haven't even graduated yet.
But you're a sort of observer participant and you can't
help presumably be swept up by this culture that you're
part of at the same time as you're critiquing it.
Talk about what has been the challenge personally to both
(15:46):
be part of this world and exposing it.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
This book takes place over the course of freshman year.
And freshman year in college, I think, is a formative
time for anyone, right? One thing I really wanted to
embrace with this book is the coexistence of very normal,
banal things with utterly absurd context. The guy who, 30
minutes after I met him, is offering to get me
(16:11):
drugs because he's like, oh, well, you should try these drugs.
And I look him up later and he's already raised
$ 20 million for a software company. It's like normal college
things with very abnormal context. And so, yeah, I mean,
I have over the course of freshman year, I come
in thinking I'm a techie and.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
I still love technology, but.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
I very much got swept up into journalism and discovered
that that was something that I, I is so powerful
and special to me as to like my own positioning.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
You're right. That, that like I'm here in the mix
and I'm seeing this too.
Speaker 4 (16:43):
And, and, and I'm trying to show what the seduction
looks like because I want people to understand that this,
this doesn't work unless people are drawn into it. You know, I,
I never got like much further than kid with potential, right?
Like I was just close enough to see, uh, but
I obviously like I never took venture capital money or, or, um,
I never made any money off of this.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
Like I was just close enough to see it exist.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Not yet.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
I mean, I think I've sort of made my choice
with journalism at this point. But what I hope that
this book is able to show is what this looks
like at every stage, right? In the fight for accountability
with the president and these papers that had not been
scrutinized for years and the sort of extraordinary apparatus of
(17:24):
power protecting itself that I come up against, as well
as these bright-eyed freshman wannabes that I arrived with who
are shown that the way to play the game in
their own words, the way to get ahead is appearance
at all costs, is cutting corners because winning is the
only thing that matters. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
I mean, let's talk about your journey to being a journalist.
Both of your parents are famous journalists. I used to
have quite a lot of contact with your father, Peter Baker,
back in the day when I was a television news producer.
But like most children of journalists, you had the very
wise reaction perhaps of not wanting to be a journalist.
Speaker 4 (18:07):
Uh, no, so yeah, I mean, I, I really never
wanted to be a journalist, uh, which is part of
why all of this has been so strange. I was like,
I'm going to go 3000 miles away from home. I'm
going to study computer science, do the exact opposite. But
you know, my, my maternal grandfather, my Gramps, um, he
and I were very close and he passed away, um,
(18:30):
just a few weeks before I started at Stanford. And
he wasn't a journalist by profession, but dispositionally, I think
he was. And I've never in my entire life heard
someone talk more about a college newspaper than he did.
He used to sit me down on his knee and
tell me tales of his own campus newsroom. So I
showed up and I thought this would be something I
(18:51):
did to feel connected to my grandfather. And things spiraled
pretty quickly, I guess.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Emotional talk about your grandfather.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's the other thing, that this
year was, this was, like all freshman years, many things,
you know. Both of my grandfathers passed away that year,
as did a very close family friend. You know, the
ordinary rhythms of freshman life, you know, losing a long-distance relationship,
(19:21):
going through the travails of Weider courses, you know, that
all of these things were coexisting with the investigation that
would see the president of Stanford, you know, sending his
high-powered attorneys after us and whatnot.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
It's destabilizing and stressful enough to go to college and
be in your first year as an undergrad, a freshman.
Doing that, doing student journalism that brings down the president
of the college, winning a Polk Award, and essentially calling
(19:54):
out the culture that all of your peers are striving towards.
I mean, that's tremendous psychological pressure.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
Look, it was at many times an uncomfortable year, and
I'm not, interested in stories where the edges are sanded off.
And so you will definitely see in the book that
there are places where, you know, I'm clearly making very imperfect.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Decisions about my personal life. And, you know, I.
Speaker 4 (20:23):
Am this blundering 17 and 18 year old kid, you know,
at the same time as I'm also doing this reporting
and everything else is happening.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
I think, correct me if I'm wrong, the first two
pieces you wrote for the Stanford paper were Inside Stanford's
War on Fun, and Stanford knew about the campus imposter
for a year, he kept coming back. I mean, these
two stories, particularly inside Stanford's war on fun, I mean,
they're stories of alienation.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
In one way or another, right?
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Reading the no fun on campus story, just the idea
that you can't gather without permission from the administration, and
people are ending up drunk out of their minds in bushes.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
I mean, you were overdosed on oxycodone.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
I mean, it's a sort of the dark underbelly of
this On the one hand, a very rigorously controlled culture,
and on the other hand, this cowboy gold rush Wild
West financial environment.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
It's a strange portrait.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
Well, the War on Funds story was both my introduction
to student journalism, but also my introduction to the defining
theme of the book, which is appearance versus reality. So
students came up with this name for the War on Fun,
basically to describe the sort of increasing bureaucratization of all
facets of the student experience.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Everything.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
Every action you can take as a student is governed
by some web page. You officially can't make more than
55 decibels of noise after 10 p.m. And the conversation
that you and I are having right now is probably
around 70 decibels. And so it's all of these things.
Alcohol is part of it. The way that they've cracked
down on drinking alcohol has made things less safe in
(21:57):
the words of safety advocates because, you know, there's no
alcohol at any parties and, you know, you can't drink
in front of your RAs. So kids are taking like
six shots in a row in their room and they're
ending up, you know, drunk in bushes. And there's an
increasing rate of so-called transports, which is the euphemism for
hospitalization due to alcohol poisoning. You literally have to take
a class and pass an exam to be able to
(22:20):
apply to host a social event now, three weeks in
advance to the so-called party review committee. And that includes,
by the way, an off-campus event. You can't host an
off-campus event without applying to the party review committee and
providing the quote-unquote harm reduction plan. And that's the thing, right?
If you have to get six different university departments to
sign off on putting up 10 balloons in your dorm,
(22:42):
there are so few parties approved that the sole party
that's happening in the weekend will have 600 people trying
to slam through the doors and the fire safety risk
will actually be far higher.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Right.
Speaker 4 (22:52):
So it's this interesting mix of appearance versus reality. And
it was also an early lesson in how the school
would react to my reporting. When the school learned that
I'd spoken with office employees of the Office of Alcohol
Policy who criticized the school's own policies as hopelessly out
of touch with reality.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
They sent an email to a.
Speaker 4 (23:13):
Group of employees they suspected of having leaked to me
and said that someone had violated the policies that their
employment was contingent upon.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
And I went through their policies.
Speaker 4 (23:23):
I was provided the training materials and the contracts by
people who worked for the office. That policy didn't exist, right?
But they threatened someone for daring to speak with me
and criticizing how the school was operating. And that was,
I think, very early lesson in what I would come
to expect from reporting at Stanford.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
You went on to write, obviously, a story about the
president of Stanford, which was another story about power, which
was a story that put you on the map globally.
You won the Polk Award, which made you a powerful person, right?
It was about power. It was about the abuse of power,
but it also positioned you on campus undeniably as one
of the stars, even if you were not going to
(24:02):
be a tech founder. You were broken through as somebody
with clout, which is a highly valuable commodity.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
I don't know how much clout I have.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
Ask the average student. But no, I mean, look, student
journalism is an amazing thing, right? That you can be
a 17 and 18 year old and ask questions about
things that should have been asked years earlier. Mark Tessie
Levine is this superstar neuroscientist and fabulously wealthy from his
time as a biotech executive. He begins the year with
(24:34):
his greatest triumph, in the words of many, by opening
Stanford's first new school since 1948, the Doar School of Sustainability,
with a billion-dollar donation from John Doar, the venture capitalist.
He ends the year, as is reported for the first
time in this book, ousted unanimously by his own board
of trustees because of new allegations that have been raised.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Over the course of this reporting.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
And what are the allegations?
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Basically, what I found over the course of eight months
of investigating was that at various labs that Mark Tessier-Levine
had overseen at different institutions, researchers under his supervision had
falsified results, had falsified the data leading to papers that
he co-authored. And that at various points when Mark Tessier-Levine
was made aware of issues in his studies, he did
(25:20):
not correct or retract those papers.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Do you think it's a coincidence that he was president
of Stanford or is there some sort of echo between
what you identify as the culture of appearances being everything
and the president of the school?
Speaker 4 (25:33):
Well, look, Mark Tessier Levine was held up as a
perfect avatar of Stanford. He was its figurehead. And so
I think it's fair to say that some of his
conduct reflects on, you know, the values of the institution,
that this is a legitimately impressive person, right? He's the
first in his family to go to college. He earns
a Rhodes Scholarship, creates an entirely new field of research
in the 1990s by discovering something called the Net Trend.
(25:56):
And then, this is when colleagues say that as he
begins to segue into positions of higher and higher acclaim,
in the words of one, he becomes sort of royal, hands-off,
distant from the day-to-day, that his lab culture begins to change.
And this is when the problems begin to seep in.
Of course, these papers, some of which were published before
I was even born, questions about some of these had
(26:18):
existed on an anonymous forum called Pubpeer going back to 2015,
so seven years before I showed up on the story.
And Marc Tessier-Levin had never publicly responded. And the journals
had not corrected or retracted these papers. And the institution, Stanford,
made him president in 2016. So he went through the
vetting process. And these questions clearly were not fully addressed
(26:39):
at that time.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
I want to come back to this idea of Stanford
within Stanford. I mean, how did you find out about
it and how did you gain access to it? And
as you were trying to gain access to it, presumably
people were aware that you were also this kind of
star journalist on campus.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
Well, I, you know, I came here as a coder.
This was something I did a hell of a lot of.
Speaker 4 (27:15):
So I ended up, I was one of half a
dozen kids who skipped through the intro sequence of computer
science classes.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
I jumped straight to the so-called Weider class, CS107. And
in tandem with.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
That, I applied for and was very lucky to be
accepted to join the organizing team of TreeHacks, which is
the school's annual hackathon. And TreeHacks has a sort of modest,
ostensible mission, right? That this is a hackathon that takes
place once a year in February, where students from around
the country, actually around the world, come to build projects
(27:49):
in a 48-hour stretch, and there are prizes and whatnot.
What it actually is, to some degree, is this sort of,
one of these sort of disguised entry points to the
Stanford inside Stanford. Because, you know, what builders who are
doing it, because they're actually the geniuses who are going
to reshape the world in their image, are so valuable
in this place, right? The Treehacks team is considered one
(28:11):
of those so-called high signal clusters, where those builders congregate.
High signal cluster. Yeah, going back to the lingo of
this place. And so venture capitalists would take us all
out for dinner and offer to fund any of our ideas.
And there was, you know, a yacht party and, you know,
there was mansion retreats and all of this sort of
insane stuff, which, you know, TreeHacks does not advertise, right?
(28:33):
The perks are not advertised as part of the job.
But it turns out that, you know, this was sort
of my entry point to beginning to see how some
of this place worked.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
How do you go from TreeHacks to How to Rule
the World?
Speaker 4 (28:46):
You know, you have to be tapped on the shoulder
by someone in the class. to be worthy of an
interview with Justin, the Silicon Valley CEO who has styled
himself as a professor. And he sits there and his
eyes are like burrowing into you, or at least that
was my experience. And he's asking you, you know, these
deeply personal questions, like right after meeting you.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
What was the highest emotional point of your life and
this type of thing, right?
Speaker 4 (29:08):
Yeah, and what was the lowest emotional point of your
life and what ties them together? And he says that
he can learn everything he needs to know about you
in 20 minutes.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
And It's amazing.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
Right.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
He's sitting there.
Speaker 4 (29:21):
We are our interview because it was raining.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
We had to go inside.
Speaker 4 (29:25):
So we did our interview inside instead of outside as
as he usually does it. We were sitting in the
most public building at Stanford.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Right.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
The Tressiter Memorial Union, which is like the food court
for visitors, having this interview for this secret, secret class,
which was just so, I don't know, that said a
lot to me about this place that there are so
many things, I guess, that are hidden in plain sight.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
So were you trying to get into the class or
were you trying to expose the class at that point?
Speaker 4 (29:53):
I mean, I think as soon as I heard about it,
I knew that I would be writing about it in
some way, that this was just, you know, a great story.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
That, you know, there's just there's a lot that happens.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
Here that is known to the quote unquote insider and
yet never gets written about, you know, in part because
the Silicon Valley press corps is sort of undergunned and
there's just a lot of stories to go around, in
part because this aura of secrecy is sort of strictly maintained.
You know, in freshman year, like I had someone asked
me to sign a nondisclosure agreement to go to a
party like like a.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
20 year old.
Speaker 4 (30:27):
Which is a really, really weird thing to ask someone
to do. It also was a really boring party. It's
not like there was anything happening there. And so all
of these things, this place is distinctly odd.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
And the flavor of its oddness is driven by its
status as the controlling mechanism for the technology that governs
all of our lives.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Justin looked into your soul and decided, He didn't want
you in his heaven, though.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Yes, I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy of ruling the world.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
But as I discovered over the course of that freshman year, right,
like ruling the world was actually a lot less attractive
to me than figuring out how others did it. That
actually reporting is the thing that I find much more interesting. And,
you know, what I'm asking of Stanford, right, is not
to tear it all down. I'm not saying we have
to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I'm going
(31:24):
to graduate here in less than two weeks. But I
do think Stanford, you know, needs to have a more
honest conversation about what's.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
Going on here.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Let's talk about what's next for you and your cohort.
You had an interesting conversation, I thought, in the book
with John Hennessy, who was the Stanford president about 20 years.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Ago, right?
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Between 2000 and 2015.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
And he's now the chairman of the board of Alphabet.
And he said to you, quote, there are hundreds of
students on our campus who think they're going to build
the next great AI company.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Maybe one of them will, but not hundreds.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
If you look at the most successful startups that have
spun out from Stanford, they were graduate students, not undergrads.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
There's a very palpable sense of a gold rush.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Right now, and people are getting billion-dollar valuations on zero-revenue companies.
I mean, what does that do to the minds of
the people experiencing real-time, and what might happen if these
things don't work out? What are the lessons being learned
about Suffering and perseverance and, you know, all those things, rewards.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
Yeah. Well, it's so interesting, right?
Speaker 4 (32:32):
Because John Hennessy is incredibly responsible for cultivating this no
boundaries relationship. He is responsible for making Stanford into, you know,
the top fundraising school in the country. He builds more
than 70 new buildings in his tenure, driven by the
sort of coziness of Silicon Valley.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
And even he is like, this mythology is wrong.
Speaker 4 (32:53):
You know, that like, you know, some of the image
that has been created here is actually harmful to a
certain degree.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
And, you know, certainly I've seen that with students, right?
Speaker 4 (33:02):
That kids here have been raised on the idea that,
you know, they can be like the frat guy who
wanted to send disappearing nudes to a girl and by
doing so became the world's youngest self-made billionaire. He created Snapchat.
You know, they hear about the two students who got
food delivered to their dorms And became billionaires by creating DoorDash, right?
(33:23):
So there's this mythology created. And now, you know, this
place is trying to replicate the success of a system
that was, until very recently, an incredibly different place. That
hacking sessions now, you know, have corporate sponsors. That the
thing that you work on in your dorm room is
not just for fun. You're going to put it on
(33:44):
your resume. Right? that actually building and inventing things, that's
not nonconformity anymore. It's people trying to replicate the playbook
that they've seen yield tremendous riches in the future. And
I think that has changed the character of things, that
students here now are taught how to make very, very
(34:05):
big promises. And then they know and they are shown
time and again that if they don't live up to
those promises, They can just say that they have and
that nobody seems to call them on it and that
little deceptions lead to bigger ones. And that, you know,
kids I arrived with as freshmen, you know, I watched
(34:26):
them learn how to misrepresent themselves to VCs and raise,
you know, venture capital funding. I watched, you know, one
of them I knew who. literally faked a launch demo
for her company and was feted by all of Silicon
Valley and put up in a mansion and celebrated as
the very, very best of the best for technology she
didn't have and hadn't made. You know, if you want
(34:49):
to understand, right, how the next Elizabeth Holmes or Sam
Bankman Freed comes to be, you have to look at
how the next generation of tech leaders are being trained.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
There's also this irony, which is what you've written.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Quote, the same Stanford dropouts who seem to be making
the most money right now are often working on the
very technology that is worsening life for their former college classmates.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 4 (35:12):
Yeah, well, this is, I think, in a piece I
wrote about AI, which is so fascinating, right? AI is
this great accelerant. It takes all of these trends that
have been brimming beneath the surface and makes them far
more intense. So one of those trends is stratification, right?
The most valuable researchers are more valuable now than they
ever have been before. while the entry-level positions are getting
(35:33):
drawn up in front of people. And so there's this
sort of common refrain now among the Stanford inside Stanford
that it's easier to raise money for a startup than
it is to get an internship. That Stanford's computer science
enrollment actually went down for the first time last year
in over two decades because people don't feel that they
can get a job with a computer science degree from
(35:53):
Stanford anymore. But on the flip side, this certain cohort
of people at Stanford You know, like the guy who
taught me how to shotgun a beer freshman year drops
out six months after he starts his company.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
It's valued at over a billion dollars, right?
Speaker 4 (36:07):
It's been so fascinating to watch that play out here
at Stanford because it's sort of a supercharged version of
a story that's playing out, you know, across the rest
of the country.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
There's a tremendous irony in your book as well, which
is that Montessier Levine, after leaving the university based, you know,
in large part on your reporting, raised a billion dollar fund.
And then somebody from his office reached out to you
to offer you a job.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Is that true?
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (36:30):
So Mark Tessier-Levine, six months after he's ousted by his
own board because of his oversight of research and his
highly aggressive public posture when faced with these questions, six
months later raises the largest seed round in the history
of biotech, a billion dollars for his new company, which
is riding the tidal wave of funding for anything AI.
(36:51):
They're going to use AI for drug discovery. And two
of the VCs who are leading the round, who have
invested into Mark Tessi's companies, turned out to be ones
that I got to know over freshman year in the
Stanford inside Stanford. And both of their firms continue to
be friendly with me. And one of them invites me
to an event two months later with an investor texting me.
(37:12):
And this is a verbatim quote. It's etched into my brain.
So this is verbatim. The text message read, Hey, Theo,
when you aren't too busy knocking university presidents off their
perches into the hands of VCs willing to fund them
for a B, you should join.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
Winky face.
Speaker 4 (37:28):
And then a partner from the other firm reaches out
to offer me money, too, if I wanted to start
a company.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
Because that's how Silicon Valley works.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Are you never tempted?
Speaker 3 (37:39):
I mean, I think at this point, I've committed to journalism.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
I've been faced with tough challenges when it comes to
journalism and made the decision to keep going with it.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Final question to you. Graduation is coming up shortly. As
you know, commencement speakers around the country have been booed
for mentioning AI, including former CEO of Google.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
Eric Schmidt.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Current CEO of Alphabet, Sundar, is scheduled to give your
commencement address.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Do you think he'll get booed?
Speaker 4 (38:13):
You know, I'm really interested to see. So Sundar Pichai
is a Stanford success story, got his master's here. And
I just, I sort of chuckled myself imagining how many
like lawyers and PR people have reviewed that speech before
we're going.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
To hear it. It was interesting, right?
Speaker 4 (38:28):
Stanford, in the four years that I've been here, the
commencement speakers have been two billionaires and two athletes, right?
Which I guess says something about, you know, who they're picking.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
They choose people who are going to stick to the
company line. But we'll see. We'll see. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
No prediction.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (38:46):
I mean, I think if Sundar were to talk about AI,
he would probably have a friendlier reception here. But that said, right,
Stanford is so many things to so many different people.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
That's the thing, right?
Speaker 4 (38:56):
All universities right now, I think, are struggling with this
identity question. And Stanford, you know, perhaps more so than most,
Because on the one hand, it is this hedge fund
controlling billions of dollars in assets. It is a giant
real estate firm effectively controlling huge amounts of land. It
is a sports league, a professional sports league. It's a
hospital system. It's a repository of historical thought. It's the
(39:19):
place where teenagers are going about their coming of age.
It's a supercharged science lab. It's all of these things,
and yet it says it.
Speaker 3 (39:27):
Is one thing. And that sort of cultural challenge... what
actually is Stanford?
Speaker 4 (39:31):
What does the English lit major have in common with
the startup CEO to be? That's a really hard question
to answer. And what it means to actually come to Stanford,
are you coming here for an education or are you
coming here to get rich?
Speaker 3 (39:43):
I think that's one of the biggest challenges that the
school faces.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
The book is How to Rule the World, An Education
in Power at Stanford University.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Theo Baker, thank you.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
This is awesome. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Now, a quick break, switching topics to one of our
favorite sponsors, Vital Proteins. As a fan of science and technology,
I like knowing.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
What I'm putting into my body and why.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
We've talked on Tech Stuff about AI-enhanced blueberries, superhuman athletes,
and health trackers, and while I might not be joining
the enhanced games anytime soon, I still want to make
sure I'm doing what's best for my body.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
That's why I love Vital Proteins.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
I always know exactly what I'm getting in their products,
like protein and collagen, and what they're leaving out, like
sugar and artificial sweeteners. I especially love the convenience of
their new collagen and protein shake, With Vital Proteins Collagen
and Protein Shake, I can grab and go without too
much stress. And they have both vanilla and chocolate, so
(40:53):
I even get a bit of variety. Not only that,
with 30 grams of protein, including 10 grams of collagen
peptides in every shake, I'm confident that I'm supporting my hair, skin, nails, bones,
and joints for years to come. But don't take my
word for it. Try the new Vital Proteins Collagen and
Protein Shake for yourself. Thank you again to our sponsor.
(41:14):
vital proteins. For Tech Stuff, I'm Osvald Oschin. This episode
was produced by Liza Dennis and Tyler Hill. It was
executive produced by me and Julian Nutter for Kaleidoscope and
Katrina Norvell for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Inslee mixed this episode
(41:35):
and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. A special thank
you to all our listeners. Please rate, review and reach
out to us at techstuffpodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
We love hearing from you.
Hey, it's Oz here.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Tech Stuff is taking a week off, but we'll be
back on September 3rd with new episodes. In the meantime,
I wanted to share an episode from earlier this year
to celebrate the start of the school year.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Hope you enjoy. Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Oz Foloshin.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Listeners have probably noticed that on this show, we have
a deep fascination with the upcoming generation, striving to build,
and in many cases, own the future. What inspires this
under-25 cohort to drop out of school, plug into the
mainframe of AI, and attempt to be the next Zuck
or Sam Altman? Today, we have someone who can take
(00:52):
us deep into the world of young founders and the
people who fund them, Theo Baker. As of this recording,
Theo is still an undergrad at Stanford University. He spent
much of his freshman year reporting on research fraud committed
by the school's president, which led to him becoming the
youngest ever recipient of the George Polk Award for Investigative Journalism.
(01:12):
And now, just ahead of graduation, Theo is publishing a book,
How to Rule the World, An Education in Power at
Stanford University. The New York Times says, quote, in every age,
there is some place that epitomizes how power works. Baker's
Stanford is a strong candidate. Theo, welcome to Tech Stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
So congratulations on being about to graduate for surviving college,
just about. I know there were some hairy moments, but
why did you choose Stanford?
Speaker 4 (01:43):
Well, I've now, I guess, been in love with Stanford
for the greater part of my life. I was seven
years old when I first had my heart set on Stanford.
And I remember, you know, just this image becoming embedded
in my mind of these teenagers and and their Stanford
T-shirts and their flip-flops lounging in the shade of a
palm tree and leaning up against the self-driving car they
(02:03):
had just helped to build. And I thought, this is
the coolest place in the world, you know, that all
of the most brilliant people are doing, you know, are
making the future out here.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
And that part of Stanford, you know, it exists. That
is true.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
There's just another side that the school is less than
willing to talk about.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
So when you were seven, this was like, what, 2010
or so?
Speaker 3 (02:24):
This would have been 2012. 2012.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
And I mean, that was already when huge fortunes were
being made in Silicon Valley, obviously.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
Huge companies had already gone public.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Were you attracted to becoming a tech billionaire or more
of an idealist?
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Or what was the motivation for you?
Speaker 4 (02:41):
I was never really into being a tech billionaire, but
I definitely wanted to do something in tech. By the
time I got to high school, I was the kid
who was coding machine learning in my models at night
in my bedroom. And I thought that was a fun
Friday night. which is very obviously nerdy. But there was
just something so cool about the future is being remade
(03:02):
at this institution, in this place where people are empowered
to dream big and work on big problems. And that
was definitely the ethos that I anticipated Stanford having.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
And when did the scales fall from your eyes? I mean,
talk about, or did they fully fall from your eyes?
Where are you on the aspiration you had versus the
reality of what you encountered at Stanford?
Speaker 4 (03:25):
Well, it didn't take very long at Stanford to realize
that things didn't work the way that I thought that
they might. You know, there's this sort of Stanford inside Stanford,
I learned. You know, this sort of parallel reality for
those who have been tapped on the shoulder and identified
as the next trillion dollar startup founders. And for them,
there are yacht parties and slush funds and something called
(03:46):
pre-idea funding, which still boggles my mind.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Pre-idea funding.
Speaker 4 (03:50):
So before you even have the glimmer of an idea
of what you're going to do for a company, you know,
venture capitals will reach out if you are one of
these special few and offer you hundreds of thousands of dollars,
more than a million dollars sometimes, just because they're trying
to network with the next generation of talent and they
will go to some extraordinary lengths to do so.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Now, I remember in the Bush-Kerry election, you know, there
was the the revelation that both men were former members
of the Skull and Bones Secret Society at Yale, right?
And this was like the big, big national news. So
I guess these elite institutions have always had like clubs
and insider groups and insider groups who continue to exert
(04:28):
influence and help each other, old boys network, whatever you
want to call it, long after graduating college. But is
there something different, A, at Stanford and B, in your
generation because of the moment in technology?
Speaker 4 (04:42):
You know, people are well aware of the privileges and
the excesses of the Ivy League and the pipeline that
has historically existed between those, you know, prestigious institutions and
Wall Street and Washington.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Stanford and Silicon Valley are just so much more entangled.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
If you just take the cumulative value.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
Of the companies that have offices on the Stanford campus,
it's somewhere north of six trillion dollars. You know, that
this is a place that that literally its own venture
capital fund. The school has its own VC fund to
seed students as new companies.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Right.
Speaker 4 (05:14):
And so it's just, you know, Silicon Valley couldn't exist
without Stanford. It was created at the Stanford Research Park.
They grew out of this university. You know, the early
tech giant Sun Microsystems was literally named for Stanford University Network.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
Right.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
And so, you know, the book is subtitled An Education
in Power, right? That power operates in similar ways, you know,
wherever it.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
Exists, I guess.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
But this is the hub of power at the moment
that Silicon Valley, you know, controls the technology that controls
our lives. And these kids are being groomed, you know,
to inherit their rightful place among the ruling elite. And
so you mentioned Skull and Bones, the equivalent to Skull
and Bones, I guess, what I think of as sort
of a Skull and Bones for the aspiring tech elite
is where this book gets its title. the secret class
(05:58):
at Stanford called How to Rule the World.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
It's literally called How to Rule the World.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
It's literally called How to Rule the World.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
The Silicon Valley CEO teaches 12 Stanford students a year
the secrets to becoming the billionaires they aspire to be.
There's this whole cloak and dagger admissions process. And the
end result is that people are taught how to, quote,
extract value from others. That is the central lesson here.
And that seems to be what Silicon Valley is teaching
a lot of people at the moment, extracting value.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
That's very different from the images.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Of Stanford of people in flip-flops building motorized couches and
all the kind of things I imagine captured your imagination
as a seven-year-old. And what was, when you arrived on campus,
your first days, your first weeks, what was the split
in the student base between those who were there to
learn how to rule the world and those who were
there to express their creative dreams through technology?
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
Well, the sort of Stanford inside Stanford for those chosen
few is necessarily different small and cloistered and kept, you know,
obscured from, from everyone else, even at this institution. Like
most people who go to Stanford go to a very good,
but you know, normal quote unquote, normal college where there
are lots of opportunities and you study for your exams
(07:10):
and you go to coffee shops and you fall in
love and you, you know, try to get an internship.
And then the Stanford inside Stanford is sort of like
the supercharged manifestation of the attitude that Stanford has been
inculcating for the last several decades. This is an institution
with a guy who's known by the moniker Professor Billionaire
because he made $ 20 billion by investing in his students' companies.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
The smartest kids in the world, they're not so creative
with the names, Professor Billionaire and How to Rule the World.
I guess it's good to have the clue and the name,
but these seem a little on the nose.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
It is a little on the nose, but there's a
lot of stuff that's on the nose here.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
I mean, this place has a very funny relationship to irony.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
I remember.
There's just one interaction that has stuck with me.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
I'm meeting this woman for the first time at this
like secret society, you know, and it's this totally bizarre scene.
And she's telling me, she spends her very first interaction
complaining about living on a private island. She says, living
on a private island is so difficult. And here's the
reason she gets. She says, well, this is a direct quote.
(08:17):
We were rolling around in bed making love one day
and I realized I wanted French toast. And she couldn't
get French toast on the private island. And why did
they stay, she said? Well, it's a tax dodge. I mean,
this place has a very, there's something of an irony
freeze that is quite remarkable. That once you're in, you know,
(08:37):
the sort of inner circle, people feel completely empowered to
say whatever it is they want to say. And also
to admit to a large amount of very casually expressed wrongdoings.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
I want to ask you about that.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
And I want to ask about going to Stanford at
a time when Sam Bankman Freed was in the midst
of his house arrest and also when Chachi Putee was
being released. I mean, a lot of interesting stuff happening
at the same time. Before we get there, though, I
actually spent a year doing study abroad at Yale when
I was 20, I think, and wrote for the Yale
Daily News. I didn't win a Polk Award, unfortunately, or
(09:13):
get the university president dismissed. But nonetheless, it was a
satisfying experience. One of the things I was very struck
by was the secret societies at Yale, because they were
almost the opposite of secret. They were called tombs, like
Skull and Bones had a tomb, and there were these
enormous buildings that were totally impossible to miss dotted throughout
the campus. There were probably 12 or 14 of them,
(09:35):
which had no windows. It was this strange, almost perverse
psychological phenomenon, which was like, look at me.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
But don't look within me. But it's like, if it
was truly secret, it wouldn't be fun.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
The fun, the thrill was the fact it was like
ostentatiously hiding in plain sight. So I'm curious, like where
does the, how to rule the world club fit into
the sort of, is it like a true desire to
be secret or a desire to be known for secrecy?
Speaker 4 (10:03):
No, I mean, this was genuinely secret, that when I
arrived on campus, even knowing that it existed was something
of a status signifier among the most insider of the
insider group. You were in the sort of delicious phrase
of someone there, quote unquote, rule adjacent, just to know
that it existed. I mean, I guess you can understand why.
(10:24):
It is a sort of amazing thing that this exists, right?
That you know, these students, you know, in their own words,
they think it's something of a scam, right? That this
guy doesn't actually know how to rule the world. What
he's doing is networking with teenagers that he thinks will
be useful to him in the future. Only by creating
this class, he has this sort of brilliant way of
(10:46):
making them come to him because he's positioning himself as
this sort of, you know, like mysterious figure who possesses secrets.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Like a guru. Yes, exactly.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
And some of these kids, look, the kids who are
in the class are genuinely very smart and high achieving. And,
you know, some of them are already well known. One
of them is Phoebe Gates, who is the daughter of
Bill and Melinda Gates, which I thought was an interesting detail,
you know, who has gone on to create her own startup.
And it's, you know, I think it's sort of the
ultimate manifestation of this no boundaries relationship that Stanford has
(11:19):
very intentionally cultivated. you know, that Stanford has made this
sort of Faustian bargain with Silicon Valley that has enabled
its meteoric.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Ascent, right?
Speaker 4 (11:29):
Like no other institution of higher education in the last
few decades and has also allowed for something that's corruption.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
So the institution knows that this character who's called Justin
in the book is coming to campus, creating his own
parallel class and connecting with all these students. I mean,
are they turning a blind eye? Are they actively aware
of it? I would think if I was a college administrator...
I might be a little concerned if somebody was trying
to sort of create some cult-like sort of proxy organization
(11:59):
in recruiting my students.
Speaker 4 (12:02):
No, I mean, it's fascinating, right, just how much selling
access to students has become the business model. You know,
there are venture capitalists who teach classes at Stanford just
so they can have access to students, right? That's actually
fairly frequently a thing that happens. you know, there's this whole,
this thing that some students call the Coupa circuit, right?
These investors who literally spend all day, seemingly every day
(12:24):
at the small little Coupa cafe, this outdoor cafe on campus,
where they are literally from dawn till dusk, you know,
networking with teenagers and seeming to spend more time with
them than their own families.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
These venture capital.
Speaker 4 (12:37):
Firms employ talent scouts, many of whom are literally Stanford
upperclassmen to identify freshmen the second they step on campus.
And once you're in the Stanford inside Stanford, everyone is
texting the same handful of billionaires for advice or.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Going to meet them on the weekends. It's profoundly odd.
Speaker 4 (12:54):
But not only is it this sort of weird ecosystem,
that's one part of it, but it's that the incentive structures,
the way that they are set up, encourage and enable
deceit that the logical end result too many times is
the sort of cut corners mentality that breeds the larger
(13:15):
frauds like Sam Bateman Freed or Elizabeth Holmes.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
You mentioned this phrase, the Cooper Circuit. You have a
kind of glossary in the front of your book of terms.
That's one of them. You've also got builders, entrepreneurs, and NGMI's.
Can you talk about those three cohorts?
Speaker 4 (13:34):
Yeah, well, in the words of one of the investors
I was talking to in the book, his job, he says,
is to separate out the quote-unquote.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Entrepreneurs from the quote-unquote builders.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
That people come to Stanford now understanding this idealized, mythologized
version of it, believing that they can be the next
billion-dollar dropouts. And the job of the investors is to
figure out, are you doing it just because you want
to be rich and you want all the associated perks,
or are you one of those pure and sort of
fetishized builders who are doing it just for the sake
(14:05):
of it. The NGMI's, on the other hand, are the
not going to make it, those who don't have the hustle.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
They're even worse than entrepreneurs.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Somehow.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Not going to make it. I mean, that's a pretty
dehumanizing term, by the way.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
Oh, completely. And this is another one, right? Technical, right?
Speaker 4 (14:21):
Technical or non-technical, that is a judgment on your value
as a person. Are you technical or are you non-technical?
Your entire worth can be summarized you know, very, very succinctly.
And one of the reasons I did the glossary of terms, one,
I just find it fun. It's sort of like, you know,
cultural anthropology embedded here in this fun ecosystem. But the
(14:42):
whole book, right, is about self-presentation. That if you learn
how to say the right words and you learn how
to exist in this closed off ecosystem, the rewards are fabulous.
And so I wanted to sort of expose people to
some of the lingo and see that they've created this
very sort of closed off world in which everyone says
the same things to each other back and forth.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
I mean, the New York Times book review said, in
coming of age as a young man, he, i.e. you, Theo,
travels to the heart of a dehumanizing age, which I
thought was a good quote. But there's also, I mean,
there's something interesting here, which is like, there is a
Bildungsroman quality to your book, like a Pilgrim's Progress, right?
Like you go there with one set of ideals, you
(15:24):
experience all of these things, you almost die, you expose corruption,
and then you get to the end But the end
is kind of the beginning because you haven't even graduated yet.
But you're a sort of observer participant and you can't
help presumably be swept up by this culture that you're
part of at the same time as you're critiquing it.
Talk about what has been the challenge personally to both
(15:46):
be part of this world and exposing it.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
This book takes place over the course of freshman year.
And freshman year in college, I think, is a formative
time for anyone, right? One thing I really wanted to
embrace with this book is the coexistence of very normal,
banal things with utterly absurd context. The guy who, 30
minutes after I met him, is offering to get me
(16:11):
drugs because he's like, oh, well, you should try these drugs.
And I look him up later and he's already raised
$ 20 million for a software company. It's like normal college
things with very abnormal context. And so, yeah, I mean,
I have over the course of freshman year, I come
in thinking I'm a techie and.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
I still love technology, but.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
I very much got swept up into journalism and discovered
that that was something that I, I is so powerful
and special to me as to like my own positioning.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
You're right. That, that like I'm here in the mix
and I'm seeing this too.
Speaker 4 (16:43):
And, and, and I'm trying to show what the seduction
looks like because I want people to understand that this,
this doesn't work unless people are drawn into it. You know, I,
I never got like much further than kid with potential, right?
Like I was just close enough to see, uh, but
I obviously like I never took venture capital money or, or, um,
I never made any money off of this.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
Like I was just close enough to see it exist.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Not yet.
Speaker 4 (17:04):
I mean, I think I've sort of made my choice
with journalism at this point. But what I hope that
this book is able to show is what this looks
like at every stage, right? In the fight for accountability
with the president and these papers that had not been
scrutinized for years and the sort of extraordinary apparatus of
(17:24):
power protecting itself that I come up against, as well
as these bright-eyed freshman wannabes that I arrived with who
are shown that the way to play the game in
their own words, the way to get ahead is appearance
at all costs, is cutting corners because winning is the
only thing that matters. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
I mean, let's talk about your journey to being a journalist.
Both of your parents are famous journalists. I used to
have quite a lot of contact with your father, Peter Baker,
back in the day when I was a television news producer.
But like most children of journalists, you had the very
wise reaction perhaps of not wanting to be a journalist.
Speaker 4 (18:07):
Uh, no, so yeah, I mean, I, I really never
wanted to be a journalist, uh, which is part of
why all of this has been so strange. I was like,
I'm going to go 3000 miles away from home. I'm
going to study computer science, do the exact opposite. But
you know, my, my maternal grandfather, my Gramps, um, he
and I were very close and he passed away, um,
(18:30):
just a few weeks before I started at Stanford. And
he wasn't a journalist by profession, but dispositionally, I think
he was. And I've never in my entire life heard
someone talk more about a college newspaper than he did.
He used to sit me down on his knee and
tell me tales of his own campus newsroom. So I
showed up and I thought this would be something I
(18:51):
did to feel connected to my grandfather. And things spiraled
pretty quickly, I guess.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Emotional talk about your grandfather.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's the other thing, that this
year was, this was, like all freshman years, many things,
you know. Both of my grandfathers passed away that year,
as did a very close family friend. You know, the
ordinary rhythms of freshman life, you know, losing a long-distance relationship,
(19:21):
going through the travails of Weider courses, you know, that
all of these things were coexisting with the investigation that
would see the president of Stanford, you know, sending his
high-powered attorneys after us and whatnot.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
It's destabilizing and stressful enough to go to college and
be in your first year as an undergrad, a freshman.
Doing that, doing student journalism that brings down the president
of the college, winning a Polk Award, and essentially calling
(19:54):
out the culture that all of your peers are striving towards.
I mean, that's tremendous psychological pressure.
Speaker 4 (20:02):
Look, it was at many times an uncomfortable year, and
I'm not, interested in stories where the edges are sanded off.
And so you will definitely see in the book that
there are places where, you know, I'm clearly making very imperfect.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
Decisions about my personal life. And, you know, I.
Speaker 4 (20:23):
Am this blundering 17 and 18 year old kid, you know,
at the same time as I'm also doing this reporting
and everything else is happening.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
I think, correct me if I'm wrong, the first two
pieces you wrote for the Stanford paper were Inside Stanford's
War on Fun, and Stanford knew about the campus imposter
for a year, he kept coming back. I mean, these
two stories, particularly inside Stanford's war on fun, I mean,
they're stories of alienation.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
In one way or another, right?
Speaker 2 (20:49):
Reading the no fun on campus story, just the idea
that you can't gather without permission from the administration, and
people are ending up drunk out of their minds in bushes.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
I mean, you were overdosed on oxycodone.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
I mean, it's a sort of the dark underbelly of
this On the one hand, a very rigorously controlled culture,
and on the other hand, this cowboy gold rush Wild
West financial environment.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
It's a strange portrait.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
Well, the War on Funds story was both my introduction
to student journalism, but also my introduction to the defining
theme of the book, which is appearance versus reality. So
students came up with this name for the War on Fun,
basically to describe the sort of increasing bureaucratization of all
facets of the student experience.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Everything.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
Every action you can take as a student is governed
by some web page. You officially can't make more than
55 decibels of noise after 10 p.m. And the conversation
that you and I are having right now is probably
around 70 decibels. And so it's all of these things.
Alcohol is part of it. The way that they've cracked
down on drinking alcohol has made things less safe in
(21:57):
the words of safety advocates because, you know, there's no
alcohol at any parties and, you know, you can't drink
in front of your RAs. So kids are taking like
six shots in a row in their room and they're
ending up, you know, drunk in bushes. And there's an
increasing rate of so-called transports, which is the euphemism for
hospitalization due to alcohol poisoning. You literally have to take
a class and pass an exam to be able to
(22:20):
apply to host a social event now, three weeks in
advance to the so-called party review committee. And that includes,
by the way, an off-campus event. You can't host an
off-campus event without applying to the party review committee and
providing the quote-unquote harm reduction plan. And that's the thing, right?
If you have to get six different university departments to
sign off on putting up 10 balloons in your dorm,
(22:42):
there are so few parties approved that the sole party
that's happening in the weekend will have 600 people trying
to slam through the doors and the fire safety risk
will actually be far higher.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Right.
Speaker 4 (22:52):
So it's this interesting mix of appearance versus reality. And
it was also an early lesson in how the school
would react to my reporting. When the school learned that
I'd spoken with office employees of the Office of Alcohol
Policy who criticized the school's own policies as hopelessly out
of touch with reality.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
They sent an email to a.
Speaker 4 (23:13):
Group of employees they suspected of having leaked to me
and said that someone had violated the policies that their
employment was contingent upon.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
And I went through their policies.
Speaker 4 (23:23):
I was provided the training materials and the contracts by
people who worked for the office. That policy didn't exist, right?
But they threatened someone for daring to speak with me
and criticizing how the school was operating. And that was,
I think, very early lesson in what I would come
to expect from reporting at Stanford.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
You went on to write, obviously, a story about the
president of Stanford, which was another story about power, which
was a story that put you on the map globally.
You won the Polk Award, which made you a powerful person, right?
It was about power. It was about the abuse of power,
but it also positioned you on campus undeniably as one
of the stars, even if you were not going to
(24:02):
be a tech founder. You were broken through as somebody
with clout, which is a highly valuable commodity.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
I don't know how much clout I have.
Speaker 4 (24:11):
Ask the average student. But no, I mean, look, student
journalism is an amazing thing, right? That you can be
a 17 and 18 year old and ask questions about
things that should have been asked years earlier. Mark Tessie
Levine is this superstar neuroscientist and fabulously wealthy from his
time as a biotech executive. He begins the year with
(24:34):
his greatest triumph, in the words of many, by opening
Stanford's first new school since 1948, the Doar School of Sustainability,
with a billion-dollar donation from John Doar, the venture capitalist.
He ends the year, as is reported for the first
time in this book, ousted unanimously by his own board
of trustees because of new allegations that have been raised.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Over the course of this reporting.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
And what are the allegations?
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Basically, what I found over the course of eight months
of investigating was that at various labs that Mark Tessier-Levine
had overseen at different institutions, researchers under his supervision had
falsified results, had falsified the data leading to papers that
he co-authored. And that at various points when Mark Tessier-Levine
was made aware of issues in his studies, he did
(25:20):
not correct or retract those papers.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Do you think it's a coincidence that he was president
of Stanford or is there some sort of echo between
what you identify as the culture of appearances being everything
and the president of the school?
Speaker 4 (25:33):
Well, look, Mark Tessier Levine was held up as a
perfect avatar of Stanford. He was its figurehead. And so
I think it's fair to say that some of his
conduct reflects on, you know, the values of the institution,
that this is a legitimately impressive person, right? He's the
first in his family to go to college. He earns
a Rhodes Scholarship, creates an entirely new field of research
in the 1990s by discovering something called the Net Trend.
(25:56):
And then, this is when colleagues say that as he
begins to segue into positions of higher and higher acclaim,
in the words of one, he becomes sort of royal, hands-off,
distant from the day-to-day, that his lab culture begins to change.
And this is when the problems begin to seep in.
Of course, these papers, some of which were published before
I was even born, questions about some of these had
(26:18):
existed on an anonymous forum called Pubpeer going back to 2015,
so seven years before I showed up on the story.
And Marc Tessier-Levin had never publicly responded. And the journals
had not corrected or retracted these papers. And the institution, Stanford,
made him president in 2016. So he went through the
vetting process. And these questions clearly were not fully addressed
(26:39):
at that time.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
I want to come back to this idea of Stanford
within Stanford. I mean, how did you find out about
it and how did you gain access to it? And
as you were trying to gain access to it, presumably
people were aware that you were also this kind of
star journalist on campus.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
Well, I, you know, I came here as a coder.
This was something I did a hell of a lot of.
Speaker 4 (27:15):
So I ended up, I was one of half a
dozen kids who skipped through the intro sequence of computer
science classes.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
I jumped straight to the so-called Weider class, CS107. And
in tandem with.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
That, I applied for and was very lucky to be
accepted to join the organizing team of TreeHacks, which is
the school's annual hackathon. And TreeHacks has a sort of modest,
ostensible mission, right? That this is a hackathon that takes
place once a year in February, where students from around
the country, actually around the world, come to build projects
(27:49):
in a 48-hour stretch, and there are prizes and whatnot.
What it actually is, to some degree, is this sort of,
one of these sort of disguised entry points to the
Stanford inside Stanford. Because, you know, what builders who are
doing it, because they're actually the geniuses who are going
to reshape the world in their image, are so valuable
in this place, right? The Treehacks team is considered one
(28:11):
of those so-called high signal clusters, where those builders congregate.
High signal cluster. Yeah, going back to the lingo of
this place. And so venture capitalists would take us all
out for dinner and offer to fund any of our ideas.
And there was, you know, a yacht party and, you know,
there was mansion retreats and all of this sort of
insane stuff, which, you know, TreeHacks does not advertise, right?
(28:33):
The perks are not advertised as part of the job.
But it turns out that, you know, this was sort
of my entry point to beginning to see how some
of this place worked.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
How do you go from TreeHacks to How to Rule
the World?
Speaker 4 (28:46):
You know, you have to be tapped on the shoulder
by someone in the class. to be worthy of an
interview with Justin, the Silicon Valley CEO who has styled
himself as a professor. And he sits there and his
eyes are like burrowing into you, or at least that
was my experience. And he's asking you, you know, these
deeply personal questions, like right after meeting you.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
What was the highest emotional point of your life and
this type of thing, right?
Speaker 4 (29:08):
Yeah, and what was the lowest emotional point of your
life and what ties them together? And he says that
he can learn everything he needs to know about you
in 20 minutes.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
And It's amazing.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
Right.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
He's sitting there.
Speaker 4 (29:21):
We are our interview because it was raining.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
We had to go inside.
Speaker 4 (29:25):
So we did our interview inside instead of outside as
as he usually does it. We were sitting in the
most public building at Stanford.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Right.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
The Tressiter Memorial Union, which is like the food court
for visitors, having this interview for this secret, secret class,
which was just so, I don't know, that said a
lot to me about this place that there are so
many things, I guess, that are hidden in plain sight.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
So were you trying to get into the class or
were you trying to expose the class at that point?
Speaker 4 (29:53):
I mean, I think as soon as I heard about it,
I knew that I would be writing about it in
some way, that this was just, you know, a great story.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
That, you know, there's just there's a lot that happens.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
Here that is known to the quote unquote insider and
yet never gets written about, you know, in part because
the Silicon Valley press corps is sort of undergunned and
there's just a lot of stories to go around, in
part because this aura of secrecy is sort of strictly maintained.
You know, in freshman year, like I had someone asked
me to sign a nondisclosure agreement to go to a
party like like a.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
20 year old.
Speaker 4 (30:27):
Which is a really, really weird thing to ask someone
to do. It also was a really boring party. It's
not like there was anything happening there. And so all
of these things, this place is distinctly odd.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
And the flavor of its oddness is driven by its
status as the controlling mechanism for the technology that governs
all of our lives.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Justin looked into your soul and decided, He didn't want
you in his heaven, though.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Yes, I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy of ruling the world.
Speaker 4 (31:03):
But as I discovered over the course of that freshman year, right,
like ruling the world was actually a lot less attractive
to me than figuring out how others did it. That
actually reporting is the thing that I find much more interesting. And,
you know, what I'm asking of Stanford, right, is not
to tear it all down. I'm not saying we have
to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I'm going
(31:24):
to graduate here in less than two weeks. But I
do think Stanford, you know, needs to have a more
honest conversation about what's.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
Going on here.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
Let's talk about what's next for you and your cohort.
You had an interesting conversation, I thought, in the book
with John Hennessy, who was the Stanford president about 20 years.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Ago, right?
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Between 2000 and 2015.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
And he's now the chairman of the board of Alphabet.
And he said to you, quote, there are hundreds of
students on our campus who think they're going to build
the next great AI company.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Maybe one of them will, but not hundreds.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
If you look at the most successful startups that have
spun out from Stanford, they were graduate students, not undergrads.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
There's a very palpable sense of a gold rush.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Right now, and people are getting billion-dollar valuations on zero-revenue companies.
I mean, what does that do to the minds of
the people experiencing real-time, and what might happen if these
things don't work out? What are the lessons being learned
about Suffering and perseverance and, you know, all those things, rewards.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
Yeah. Well, it's so interesting, right?
Speaker 4 (32:32):
Because John Hennessy is incredibly responsible for cultivating this no
boundaries relationship. He is responsible for making Stanford into, you know,
the top fundraising school in the country. He builds more
than 70 new buildings in his tenure, driven by the
sort of coziness of Silicon Valley.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
And even he is like, this mythology is wrong.
Speaker 4 (32:53):
You know, that like, you know, some of the image
that has been created here is actually harmful to a
certain degree.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
And, you know, certainly I've seen that with students, right?
Speaker 4 (33:02):
That kids here have been raised on the idea that,
you know, they can be like the frat guy who
wanted to send disappearing nudes to a girl and by
doing so became the world's youngest self-made billionaire. He created Snapchat.
You know, they hear about the two students who got
food delivered to their dorms And became billionaires by creating DoorDash, right?
(33:23):
So there's this mythology created. And now, you know, this
place is trying to replicate the success of a system
that was, until very recently, an incredibly different place. That
hacking sessions now, you know, have corporate sponsors. That the
thing that you work on in your dorm room is
not just for fun. You're going to put it on
(33:44):
your resume. Right? that actually building and inventing things, that's
not nonconformity anymore. It's people trying to replicate the playbook
that they've seen yield tremendous riches in the future. And
I think that has changed the character of things, that
students here now are taught how to make very, very
(34:05):
big promises. And then they know and they are shown
time and again that if they don't live up to
those promises, They can just say that they have and
that nobody seems to call them on it and that
little deceptions lead to bigger ones. And that, you know,
kids I arrived with as freshmen, you know, I watched
(34:26):
them learn how to misrepresent themselves to VCs and raise,
you know, venture capital funding. I watched, you know, one
of them I knew who. literally faked a launch demo
for her company and was feted by all of Silicon
Valley and put up in a mansion and celebrated as
the very, very best of the best for technology she
didn't have and hadn't made. You know, if you want
(34:49):
to understand, right, how the next Elizabeth Holmes or Sam
Bankman Freed comes to be, you have to look at
how the next generation of tech leaders are being trained.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
There's also this irony, which is what you've written.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Quote, the same Stanford dropouts who seem to be making
the most money right now are often working on the
very technology that is worsening life for their former college classmates.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 4 (35:12):
Yeah, well, this is, I think, in a piece I
wrote about AI, which is so fascinating, right? AI is
this great accelerant. It takes all of these trends that
have been brimming beneath the surface and makes them far
more intense. So one of those trends is stratification, right?
The most valuable researchers are more valuable now than they
ever have been before. while the entry-level positions are getting
(35:33):
drawn up in front of people. And so there's this
sort of common refrain now among the Stanford inside Stanford
that it's easier to raise money for a startup than
it is to get an internship. That Stanford's computer science
enrollment actually went down for the first time last year
in over two decades because people don't feel that they
can get a job with a computer science degree from
(35:53):
Stanford anymore. But on the flip side, this certain cohort
of people at Stanford You know, like the guy who
taught me how to shotgun a beer freshman year drops
out six months after he starts his company.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
It's valued at over a billion dollars, right?
Speaker 4 (36:07):
It's been so fascinating to watch that play out here
at Stanford because it's sort of a supercharged version of
a story that's playing out, you know, across the rest
of the country.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
There's a tremendous irony in your book as well, which
is that Montessier Levine, after leaving the university based, you know,
in large part on your reporting, raised a billion dollar fund.
And then somebody from his office reached out to you
to offer you a job.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Is that true?
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (36:30):
So Mark Tessier-Levine, six months after he's ousted by his
own board because of his oversight of research and his
highly aggressive public posture when faced with these questions, six
months later raises the largest seed round in the history
of biotech, a billion dollars for his new company, which
is riding the tidal wave of funding for anything AI.
(36:51):
They're going to use AI for drug discovery. And two
of the VCs who are leading the round, who have
invested into Mark Tessi's companies, turned out to be ones
that I got to know over freshman year in the
Stanford inside Stanford. And both of their firms continue to
be friendly with me. And one of them invites me
to an event two months later with an investor texting me.
(37:12):
And this is a verbatim quote. It's etched into my brain.
So this is verbatim. The text message read, Hey, Theo,
when you aren't too busy knocking university presidents off their
perches into the hands of VCs willing to fund them
for a B, you should join.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
Winky face.
Speaker 4 (37:28):
And then a partner from the other firm reaches out
to offer me money, too, if I wanted to start
a company.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
Because that's how Silicon Valley works.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Are you never tempted?
Speaker 3 (37:39):
I mean, I think at this point, I've committed to journalism.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
I've been faced with tough challenges when it comes to
journalism and made the decision to keep going with it.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
Final question to you. Graduation is coming up shortly. As
you know, commencement speakers around the country have been booed
for mentioning AI, including former CEO of Google.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
Eric Schmidt.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Current CEO of Alphabet, Sundar, is scheduled to give your
commencement address.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Do you think he'll get booed?
Speaker 4 (38:13):
You know, I'm really interested to see. So Sundar Pichai
is a Stanford success story, got his master's here. And
I just, I sort of chuckled myself imagining how many
like lawyers and PR people have reviewed that speech before
we're going.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
To hear it. It was interesting, right?
Speaker 4 (38:28):
Stanford, in the four years that I've been here, the
commencement speakers have been two billionaires and two athletes, right?
Which I guess says something about, you know, who they're picking.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
They choose people who are going to stick to the
company line. But we'll see. We'll see. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
No prediction.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (38:46):
I mean, I think if Sundar were to talk about AI,
he would probably have a friendlier reception here. But that said, right,
Stanford is so many things to so many different people.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
That's the thing, right?
Speaker 4 (38:56):
All universities right now, I think, are struggling with this
identity question. And Stanford, you know, perhaps more so than most,
Because on the one hand, it is this hedge fund
controlling billions of dollars in assets. It is a giant
real estate firm effectively controlling huge amounts of land. It
is a sports league, a professional sports league. It's a
hospital system. It's a repository of historical thought. It's the
(39:19):
place where teenagers are going about their coming of age.
It's a supercharged science lab. It's all of these things,
and yet it says it.
Speaker 3 (39:27):
Is one thing. And that sort of cultural challenge... what
actually is Stanford?
Speaker 4 (39:31):
What does the English lit major have in common with
the startup CEO to be? That's a really hard question
to answer. And what it means to actually come to Stanford,
are you coming here for an education or are you
coming here to get rich?
Speaker 3 (39:43):
I think that's one of the biggest challenges that the
school faces.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
The book is How to Rule the World, An Education
in Power at Stanford University.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Theo Baker, thank you.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
This is awesome. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Now, a quick break, switching topics to one of our
favorite sponsors, Vital Proteins. As a fan of science and technology,
I like knowing.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
What I'm putting into my body and why.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
We've talked on Tech Stuff about AI-enhanced blueberries, superhuman athletes,
and health trackers, and while I might not be joining
the enhanced games anytime soon, I still want to make
sure I'm doing what's best for my body.
Speaker 1 (40:29):
That's why I love Vital Proteins.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
I always know exactly what I'm getting in their products,
like protein and collagen, and what they're leaving out, like
sugar and artificial sweeteners. I especially love the convenience of
their new collagen and protein shake, With Vital Proteins Collagen
and Protein Shake, I can grab and go without too
much stress. And they have both vanilla and chocolate, so
(40:53):
I even get a bit of variety. Not only that,
with 30 grams of protein, including 10 grams of collagen
peptides in every shake, I'm confident that I'm supporting my hair, skin, nails, bones,
and joints for years to come. But don't take my
word for it. Try the new Vital Proteins Collagen and
Protein Shake for yourself. Thank you again to our sponsor.
(41:14):
vital proteins. For Tech Stuff, I'm Osvald Oschin. This episode
was produced by Liza Dennis and Tyler Hill. It was
executive produced by me and Julian Nutter for Kaleidoscope and
Katrina Norvell for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Inslee mixed this episode
(41:35):
and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. A special thank
you to all our listeners. Please rate, review and reach
out to us at techstuffpodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
We love hearing from you.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.