June 10, 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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Os Valoschen. 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 twenty five cohort
to drop out of school, plug into the mainframe of AI,
and attempt to be the next Zuck or Sam Altman.
(00:36):
Today we have someone who can take 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's went 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, and now just
(00:59):
head of graduation, THEO is publishing a book, How to
Rule the World and 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 2 (01:18):
Thanks for having me. It's great to be.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Here, so congratulations on being about to graduate for surviving
college just about I noticed that there were some hairy moments.
But why did you choose Stanford?
Speaker 3 (01:30):
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 their Stanford T
shirts and their flip flops, lounging in the shade of
a palm tree and leaning up against the self driving
(01:50):
car they had just helped to build. And I thought,
this is the coolest place in the world. You know
that all the most brilliant people are doing, you know,
are making the future out here, and that part of Stanford,
you know, it exists.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
That is true.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
There's just another side that the school is less less
than willing to talk about.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
So when you were seven, this was like what twenty
ten or so.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
This would have been twenty twelve, twos.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Twelve, And I mean that was already when you know,
huge fortunes were being made in Silicon Valley. Obviously huge
compani has already gone public. Like were you were, were
you attracted to becoming a tech billionaire or more of
an idealist or what was the motivation for you.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
I was not really into like being a tech billionaire,
but I definitely wanted to do something in tech, you know,
by the time I got to high school, Like I
was the kid who was like coding machine learning in
my models at you know night in my bedroom, and
I thought that was like a fun Friday night, which
is you know, very obviously nerdy, but there was just
something so cool about the future is being remade, you
(02:49):
know 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 that I I, you know,
anticipated did Stanford having.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
And when did the scales fall from your eyes? I
mean talk about or did they fully fall from your eyes?
Like where are you on the aspiration you had versus
the REACTI of what you encountered at Stamford.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
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 and
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
(03:32):
something called pre idea funding, which still boggles my mind.
Pre idea funding. So before you even have the glimmer
of an idea of what you're going to do for
a company, you know, venture capitalists 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 are trying to network with the
next generation of talent, and they will go to some
(03:54):
extraordinary lengths to do so.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Now, I remember in the Bush Kerry election, you know,
there was the revelation that both men were former members
of the Skull and Bones secret society. Get Yale right,
and this was like a big, big national news. So,
I mean, I guess these elite institutions have always had
like clubs and insided groups and inside of groups who
continue to exert influence and help each other, old boys
(04:18):
network whatever you want to call it, long after graduating college.
But it is something different A at Stanford and B
in your generation. Because of the moment in technology.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
You know, people are well aware of the privileges and
the accesses of the Ivy League, and the pipeline that
has historically existed between those you know, prestigious institutions and
Wall Street and Washington, Stanford and Silicon Valley are just
so much more entangled.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
If you just take the cumulative value of the companies
they have offices on the Stanford campus, it's somewhere north
of six trillion dollars. You know that this is a
place that literates its own venture capital fund. The school
has its own VC fund to seed students' new co companies. Right,
And so it's just you know, Silicon Valley couldn't exist
without Stanford. It was created at the Stanford Research Park.
(05:07):
They grew out of this university. You know, the early
Techchi Sun Microsystems was literally named for Stanford University network.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Right.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
And so you know, the book is subtitled in Education
and Power. Right, that power operates in similar ways, you know,
wherever it.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Exists, I guess.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
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
(05:45):
at Stanford called how to Rule the World.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
It's literally called how to rule the world.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
It's literally called how to rule the world. The Silicon
Valley CEO teaches twelve Stanford students a year the secrets
to becoming the billionaires they aspire to be. There's this
whole cloak and dagger admission process and result is that
people are taught how to quote extract value from others.
That that is the central lesson here, and that seems
to be what Silicon Value is teaching a lot of
(06:10):
people at the moment, extracting value.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
That's very different from the images of Stamford 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 day is 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
are there to express their creative dreams through technology.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Yeah, Well, this sort of Stanford inside Stanford, for you know,
those chosen few, is necessarily small and cloistered and kept,
you know, obscured 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
(06:57):
your exams, 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. Right, this
is an institution with a guy, you know who's known
by the moniker Professor Billionaire because he made twenty billion
(07:17):
dollars by investing in the student's companies.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Some of the smartest kids in the world. They're not
so creative with the names Professor Billionaire and how to
rule the world. I guess, I guess he could have
a clue in the name, but he seemed a little
on the nose.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
It is a little on the nose, but there's a
lot of stuff that's on the nose here that I mean,
this place is this has This place is a very
funny relationship to irony, you know, Like I remember, there's
this one interaction that has stuck with me. I'm meeting
this woman for the first time at this like secret society,
you know, and it's this this totally bizarre scene, and
(07:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
And here's the.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Reason that she gets. She says, well, this is a
direct quote. 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.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
And why did they stay? She said, well, it's a
tax dodge.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
I mean, this place has a very there's something of
an irony freeze that is that is quite remarkable that
once you're in, you know, 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 wrongdoing.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
I want to ask you about that, and I want
to ask about going to Stanford at a time when
Sam Bagmann freed was cine mids of his house arrests,
and also when Chatchi Petit was being released. I'm a
lot of interesting stuff happening at the same time before
we get there, though. I actually spent a year doing
a study abroad at Yale when I was twenty, I think,
and wrote for the Yale Daily News. I didn't win
(08:57):
a polk Award, unfortunately, or or get the university president dismissed,
but nonetheless it was a satisfying experience. And one of
them I was very struck by was the secret societies
at Yale because they were almost the opposite of secret,
Like they were called tombs like Skullmban's hard Tomb, and
there were these enormous buildings that were totally impossible to miss,
(09:19):
dotted throughout the campus. There were probably twelve or fourteen
of them which had no windows. And it was this strange, strange,
almost perverse psychological phenomen It was like look at me,
but don't look like don't look, don't look within me.
But it's like if it was truly secret, it wouldn't
be fun. The fun. The thrill was the fact it
was like ostentatiously hiding in plain sights. So I'm curious, like,
(09:40):
where does the how to How to Rule the World
club fit into the earth to sort of is it
like a true desire to be secret or a desire
to be known for secrecy?
Speaker 4 (09:50):
No?
Speaker 3 (09:50):
I mean this, this was really genuinely secret that when
I arrived on campus, even knowing that it existed, with
something of statistica fire 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.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
You know, and I mean.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
I guess you can understand why 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 is networking with teenagers that he thinks will be
useful to him in the future. Only by creating this class,
(10:31):
he is the sort of brilliant way of making them
come to him because he's positioning himself as this sort
of you know, like mysterious figure who possesses secrets. Yes, exactly,
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
(10:53):
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 very intentionally cultivated. You know that Stanford
has made this sort of faustian bargain with Silicon Valley
that has enabled its meteoric ascent right like no other
(11:17):
institution of higher education in the last few decades, and
has also allowed for something its corruption.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
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,
how 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
(11:45):
of proxy organization with or in recruiting my students.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Now, I mean, it's fascinating, right, just how much selling
access to students has become the business model. You know,
they're a venture capitalists who teach classes at Stanford just
so they can have access to students. R s fairly
frequently a thing that happens. You know, there's this whole,
this thing that some students call the Koopa circuit. Right,
these investors who literally spend all day, seemingly every day
(12:11):
at the small little Koopa 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. These venture capital firms employ
talent scouts, many of whom are literally Stanford upperclassmen, to
identify freshmen the second they step on campus. And you know,
(12:32):
once you're in the Stanford and side Stanford, everyone is
texting the same handful of billionaires for advice or going
to meet them on the weekends.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
It's profoundly odd.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
But not only right, is it this sort of weird
ecosystem Like that's that's one part of it. But is
that the incentive structures right the way that they are
set up, encourage and enable deceit that the logical end
result too many times is the sort of cut corner
mentality that breeds the larger frauds. Like like Sam Bateman
(13:03):
Fried or Elizabeth Holmes.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
You mentioned this phrase, the Coopers 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 ngmis.
Can you talk about those three cohorts.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Yeah, well, you know, in the words of one of
the investors I was talking to in the book, right,
his job, he says, is to separate out the quote
unquote entrepreneurs from the quote unquote builders that you know,
people come to Stanford now understanding this idealized, mythologized version
of it, you know, believing that they can be the
next billion dollar dropouts. And you know, the job of
(13:42):
the investors 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 fetish eyed builders who are doing it
just for the sake of it. The NGMIS on the
other hand, are the not going to make it? So
those who don't have the hustle, they're.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Even worse than entrepreneurs somehow make it. I mean, that's
a pretty dehumanizing term.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
By the way, Oh completely this and you know this
is another one, right technical, right 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 gloss or your terms, well,
I just find it fun. It's sort of like, you know,
(14:24):
cultural anthropology invented here in this this fun ecosystem. But
the 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 through
wards are fabulous. And so I wanted to sort of
expose people to some of some of the lingo and
see that they've created this very sort of closed off
(14:45):
world in which everyone says the same things to each
other back and forth.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
I mean, the Neil Times book review said, in Coming
of Age as a young Man, he I a youth.
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
Buildings Roman quality to your book, like a pilgrim's progress, right,
Like you go there with some one side of ideals,
(15:10):
you 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 beginnings. You haven't even
graduated yet, but your sort of observer participant, and you're
I mean, 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, Like talk about what has been
the challenge personally to both be part of this world
(15:34):
and exposing it.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Yeah, this book takes place over the course of freshman
year and freshman year in college. I think is a
formative time for anyone.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
One thing I really wanted to embrace it this book
is the coexistence of very normal, banal things with utterly
absurd context. You know, like the guy who you know
thirty minutes after I met him, is like offering to
get me.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Drugs because he's like, oh, well, you should try these.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Drugs and you know, I look him up later and
he's already raised twenty million dollars for a software company.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
You know, it's like.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
Normal college things with very abnormal context. And so yeah,
I mean I have over the course of freshman year.
I you know, think I come in thinking I'm a
techie and I still love technology, but I very much
got swept up into journalism and discovered that that was
something that I is so powerful and special to me.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
As to like my own positioning.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
You're right that that like, I'm here in the mix
and I'm seeing this too, 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.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Are drawn into it.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
Yeah, you know, I never got like much further than
kid with potential, right, Like I was just close enough
to see. But I obviously, like I never took venture
capital money or I never made any money off of this,
Like I was just close.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Enough to know yet it exists.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Yet well, I think, you know, 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 had not
been scrutinized for years, and the sort of extraordinary apparatus
(17:11):
of 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.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Yeah, 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. So but you know, like most children
of journalists, you had the very wise reaction, perhaps of
(17:53):
not wanting to be a journalist.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Now.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
So yeah, I mean, I really never wanted to be
a journalist, which is part of why this has been
so strange. I was like, I'm gonna go three thousand
miles away from home, I'm going to study computer science.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
To the exact opposite.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
But you know, my maternal grandfather, my Grams, he and
I were very close and he passed away 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 have never in my entire life heard some
(18:27):
would 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
did to feel connected to my grandfather, and thinks spiraled
pretty quickly, I guess, and emotional to me your grandfather. Yeah,
(18:48):
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,
going through the travails of weeder courses. You know that
(19:11):
all of these things were coexisting with the investigation that
would see the president of Stanford, you know, sending his
high powered attorneys after.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Us, and whatnot.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
It's destabilizing as stressful enough to go to college and
be your first year as an undergrad of freshman doing
that wom doing student journalism, that brings down the president
of the college, win you a Polk Award, and essentially
(19:41):
calling out the culture that all of your peers are
striving towards. I mean that's tremendous psychological pressure.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Look, it was at many times an uncomfortable year, and
I'm not interested in stories where the edges are standed off,
and so you will definitely see in the book that
there are places where, you know, I'm clearly making very
imperfect decisions about my personal life, and you know I
am this blundering seventeen and eighteen year old kid, you know,
(20:13):
at the same time as I'm also doing this reporting
and everything else is happening.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
I think correctly, how wrong the first two pieces you
wrote for the Stanford Paper were inside Stanford's War on fun,
and Stanford knew about the campus impostor for a year
he kept coming back. I mean these two stories, particularly
inside Stanford's War on fun, I mean their stories of alienation.
And while we're another right reading the no Fun on
campus story, I'm just the idea that you can't gather
(20:41):
without permission from the administration, and people are ending up
drunk out of their minds in bushes. I mean, you
were overdosed on oxy codon. I mean, it's a sort
of the dark underbelly of this very on the one hand,
very rigorously controlled culture and on the other hand, this
cowboy gold rush wild West financial environment. Is it's a
(21:02):
strange portrait.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Well, the War On Fun Story was both my introduction
to student journalism but also my introduction to the defining
theme of the book, which is, you know, appearance versus reality. Right,
So students came up with this name for the War
On Fund basically to describe the sort of increasing bureaucratization
of all facets of the student experience. Right, Everything, every
(21:23):
action you can take as a student is governed by
some web page. You know, like you officially can't make
more than fifty five decibels of noise after ten pm,
and like the conversation that you and I are having
right now is probably around seventy decibels, right, And so
it's all of these things, you know, it's it's alcohol
is part of it. You know, the way that they've
cracked down on drinking has made things less safe in
(21:44):
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, drunken bushes. And there's an increasing
rate of so called transports, which is the u femism
for hospitalization due to alcohol poisoning. You literally have to
take a class and pass an exam to be able
(22:07):
to 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
(22:27):
ten balloons in your dorm. You know, there are so
few parties approved that the sole party that's happening in
a weekend will have six hundred people you know, trying
to slam through the doors, and the fire safety risk
will actually be far higher. 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.
(22:48):
When the school learned that I'd spoken with employees of
the Office of Alcohol Policy, who criticized the school's own
policies as hopelessly out of touch with reality. They sent
an email well to a 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 2 (23:08):
And I went through their policies.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
I was provided the training materials and the contracts by
people who worked for the office that policy didn't exist, right,
But they'd 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 from reporting at Stanford.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
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.
He won the Polk Awards, which made you a powerful person,
right like it was about powers, about the abuse of power,
but it positioned you on campus undeniably as one of
the stars. Even if you're not going to be a
(23:50):
tech founder, you'd have broken through as somebody with clout,
which is highly valuablecomotive.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
I don't know how much cloud I have like asked
the average student, but no, I mean, look, student journalism
is an amazing thing, right that you can be as
seventeen and eighteen year old and ask questions about things
that should have been asked years earlier. Mark tesse Levine, right,
is this superstar neuroscientist and fabulously wealthy from his time
(24:18):
as a biotech executive. He begins the year with his
greatest triumph in the words of many, by opening Stanford's
first new school since nineteen forty eight, the Door School Sustainability,
with a billion dollar donation from John dor 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
(24:41):
over the course of this reporting.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
And what are the allegations?
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Basically, what I found over the course of eight months
of investigating was that at various labs that Mark tesse
Levin had overseen at different institutions, researchers under his supervision
had falsified results, had falsified the data leading to pay
papers that he co authored, and that at various points
when Mark teste Levine was made aware of issues in
(25:05):
his studies. He did not correct or retract those papers.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
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 3 (25:20):
Well, look, Mark test say, 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 nineteen nineties by discovering something called the netron.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
And then this is.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
When colleagues say that, you know, as he begins to
segue into positions of hire 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, you know the these papers,
some of which were published before I was even born, right,
Questions about some of these had existed on an anonymous
(26:07):
forum called pub Pier going back to twenty fifteen, so
seven years before I showed up on the story, and
Mark Tesselavine had never publicly responded, and the journals had
not corrected or retracted these papers, and the Institution Stanford
made him president in twenty sixteen, so he went through
the vetting process, and these questions clearly were not fully
addressed at that time.
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podcast episode description box. I want to come back to
said your Stamford 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 are aware that you were also
the kind of star journalist on campus.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Well, I you know, I came here as a coder.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
This was something I did a hell of a lot
of so I ended up I was one of half
a dozen kids who skipped through the intro sequence of
computer science classes. I jumped straight to the so called
weader class CS one oh seven, and in tandem with that,
I applied for and was you know, very lucky to
be accepted to join the organizing team of tree Hacks,
(28:29):
which is the school's annual hackathon, and tree Hacks has
a sort of modest ostensible mission, right that this is
a hackathon that takes place once a year in February,
where you know, students from around the country actually around
the world come to build projects in a forty eight
hour stretch and there are prizes and whatnot.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
What it actually is, to some degree.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
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 the geniuses who
are going to reshape the world in their image, are
so valuable in this place. Right, the tree Hacks team
is considered one of those so called high signal clusters
where congregates high signal cluster. Yeah, going back to the
(29:13):
lingo of this place, and so venture capitalists would take
us all out for dinner and offered to fund aney
of r 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 tree X
does not advertise, right, the perks are not advertised as
part of the job. But it turns out that. You know,
(29:33):
this was sort of my entry point to beginning to
see how how some of this place worked.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
How do you go from tree hacks to how to
rule the world?
Speaker 3 (29:42):
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 and deal or at least that
was my experience, and he's asking you, you know, these
these deeply personal questions like right after meeting you, like what.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
The highest emotional point of your life and the type
of thing right yeah?
Speaker 3 (30:04):
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
twenty minutes. And it's amazing. Right, he's sitting there, we
are our interview. Because it was raining, we had to
go inside, so we did our interview inside instead of
outside as he usually does it. We were sitting in
(30:26):
the most public building at Stanford, right, the Trusted or
Memorial Union, which is like the food court for visitors,
having this interview for this secret secret class, which is
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 that are hidden in plain sight.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
So were you trying to get into the classes? Are
you trying to expose the class at that point?
Speaker 3 (30:49):
I mean, I think as soon as I heard about it,
I knew that I would be writing about it in
some way.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
That this was just, you know, a great story that.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
You know, there's just there's a lot that happens 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.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
You know.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
In freshman year, like I had someone ask me to
sign a non disclosure agreement to go to a party
like like a twenty year old, which is like a
really really weird thing to ask someone to do. It's
like it also was a really boring party, Like it's
not like there was anything happening there, and so all
of these things.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
It is just this place is.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
Distinctly odd you know, and in the flavor of its
oddness is driven by its status, as you know, the
controlling mechanism for the technology that governs all of our lives.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Justin looked into your soul and decided he didn't want
you in his heaven.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Though yes, I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy of ruling
the world.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
But you know, as I discuss 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
(32:19):
with the bathwater. I'm going 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 going
on here.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Let's talk about what's next for you and your cohort.
You had interesting conversation I thought in the book with
John Hennessy, who was the Stamford president about twenty years ago, right.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Between twenty two down fifteen.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
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. Maybe one of them will,
but not hundreds. If you look at the most successful
startups that have spun out from Stanford, they were graduate students,
not undergrads. Yeah, there's a very palpable sense of a
(33:02):
gold rush right now. And people are getting billion doll
evaluations on you know, no on zero revenue companies. I mean,
what does that do? What does that do to the
to the minds of the people experiencing in real time?
And and well, what might happen if these things don't
work out? Like what are the lessons being learned about
suffering and perseverance and you know all those things rewards?
Speaker 3 (33:26):
Yeah, well, it's so interesting, right 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 seventy new
buildings in his tenure, driven by the sort of coziness
of Silicon Valley, and even he is like this mythology
(33:48):
is wrong. You know that that like, you know, some
of the image that has been created here is actually
harmful to a certain degree. And you know, certainly I've
seen that with students, right 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
(34:10):
youngest self made billionaire. He created Snapchat. You know, they
hear about the two students who got food delivered to
their dorm and became billionaires by creating door dash. Right,
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
(34:31):
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 gonna put it on your resume. Right,
That actually building, you know, and inventing things. That's not
nonconformity anymore. It's people trying to replicate, you know, the
playbook that they've seen yield tremendous riches in the future.
(34:52):
And I think that has changed the character of things
right that students here now are taught how to make
very very 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,
(35:15):
and that little deceptions lead to bigger ones, and that
you know, kids I arrived with as freshmen, you know,
I watched 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 celebrate
(35:38):
it as the very very best of the best for
technology she didn't have and hadn't made. You know, if
you want to understand right how the next Elizabeth Holmes
or Sam Bateman free comes to be, you have to
look at how the next generation of tech leaders are
being trained.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Because also this irony, which is which you've written quote
the same Stanford dropouts has seem to be making them
most money right now are often working on the very
technology that is worsening life for their former college classmates.
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Yeah, well, this is I think in a piece I
wrote about AI, which is so fascinating. Right, AI is
this great accelerate. 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
(36:29):
getting 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
(36:49):
from Stanford anymore. But on the flip side, this certain
cohort of people at Stanford, you know, like the guy
who taught me had a shotgun a beer freshman year,
drops out six months after he starts company.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
It's valued over a billion dollars. Right.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
It's been so fascinated 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 1 (37:11):
And there's a tremendous irony in your book as well,
which is that Martetiller Levine, after after leaving a university
based you know, in large parton of your reporting, raised
a billion dollar fund and then somebody from his office
reached out to you to offer you a job. Is
that true?
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (37:26):
So Mark Mark tesse Levine, six months after he's ousted
by his own board because of his oversight of research
and his his highly aggressive public posture when 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 title wave of
funding for Anything AI. They're going to use AI for
(37:48):
drug discovery. And two of the vcs who are leading
the round, who have invested into Martessee Levin's companies, turned
out to be ones that I got to know over
freshman year in the Stanford and side 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 and this is a
(38:08):
verbatim quote.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
It's etched into my brain.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
So this is verbatim the text message read, Hey, THEO,
when you aren't too busy knocking university presidents off their
purchase into the hands of vcs willing to fund them
for a bee, you should join winky face. And then
a partner from the other firm reaches out to offer
me money too if I wanted to start a company, right,
(38:31):
because that's how Silicon Valley works.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
You never tempted.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
I mean, I think at this point like I've committed
to journalism. You know that I've been I've been faced
with tough challenges when it comes to journalism and made
the decision to keep going with it.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
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 Eric Schmidt,
current CEO of Alphabet Sunda is scheduled to give your
commencement address. Do you think he'll get boot.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
You know, I'm really interested to see. So Sundar Prachai
is a Stanford success story. He got his master's here,
and I just I sort of chuckle to myself, imagining
how many like lawyers and pr people have reviewed that
speech before we're going to hear it. It was interesting, right, Stanford,
In the four years that I have been here, the
commencement speakers have been two billionaires and two athletes, right,
(39:32):
which I guess says something about you know, who they're picking.
They choose people who are going to stick to the
company line.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
But we'll see, we'll see. I don't know, no prediction,
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
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 2 (39:51):
That's the thing.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Right, All universities right now, I think are struggling with
this identity question. And Stanford, you know, perhaps more so
than most right because, on the one hand, it is
this hedge fund controlling billions of dollars in assets. It
is a giant real estate firm effectively, you know, controlling
huge amounts of land. It is a sports league, a
professional sports league. It's a hospital system. It's a repository
(40:13):
of historical thought. It's the place where teenagers are going
about their coming of age. It's you know, a supercharged
science lab, like it's all of these things, and yet
it says it is one thing, and that sort of
cultural challenge. What actually is Stanford? You know, what does
the English lip major have in common with the you know,
like startup CEO to be That's a really hard question
(40:34):
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? I think that's one of
the biggest challenges that the school faces.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
The book is How to Rule the World, An Education
in Power at Stanford University.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
THEE. A.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Baker, Thank you, This is awesome.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
For tech stuff. I'm as Valoscian. This episode was produced
by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter. Executive produced by me
Julian Nutter and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell
for iHeart podcasts. Our engineer today was Bahid Fraser. Jack
Insley mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Os Valoschen. 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 twenty five cohort
to drop out of school, plug into the mainframe of AI,
and attempt to be the next Zuck or Sam Altman.
(00:36):
Today we have someone who can take 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's went 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, and now just
(00:59):
head of graduation, THEO is publishing a book, How to
Rule the World and 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 2 (01:18):
Thanks for having me. It's great to be.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Here, so congratulations on being about to graduate for surviving
college just about I noticed that there were some hairy moments.
But why did you choose Stanford?
Speaker 3 (01:30):
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 their Stanford T
shirts and their flip flops, lounging in the shade of
a palm tree and leaning up against the self driving
(01:50):
car they had just helped to build. And I thought,
this is the coolest place in the world. You know
that all the most brilliant people are doing, you know,
are making the future out here, and that part of Stanford,
you know, it exists.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
That is true.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
There's just another side that the school is less less
than willing to talk about.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
So when you were seven, this was like what twenty
ten or so.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
This would have been twenty twelve, twos.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Twelve, And I mean that was already when you know,
huge fortunes were being made in Silicon Valley. Obviously huge
compani has already gone public. Like were you were, were
you attracted to becoming a tech billionaire or more of
an idealist or what was the motivation for you.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
I was not really into like being a tech billionaire,
but I definitely wanted to do something in tech, you know,
by the time I got to high school, Like I
was the kid who was like coding machine learning in
my models at you know night in my bedroom, and
I thought that was like a fun Friday night, which
is you know, very obviously nerdy, but there was just
something so cool about the future is being remade, you
(02:49):
know 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 that I I, you know,
anticipated did Stanford having.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
And when did the scales fall from your eyes? I
mean talk about or did they fully fall from your eyes?
Like where are you on the aspiration you had versus
the REACTI of what you encountered at Stamford.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
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 and
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
(03:32):
something called pre idea funding, which still boggles my mind.
Pre idea funding. So before you even have the glimmer
of an idea of what you're going to do for
a company, you know, venture capitalists 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 are trying to network with the
next generation of talent, and they will go to some
(03:54):
extraordinary lengths to do so.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Now, I remember in the Bush Kerry election, you know,
there was the revelation that both men were former members
of the Skull and Bones secret society. Get Yale right,
and this was like a big, big national news. So,
I mean, I guess these elite institutions have always had
like clubs and insided groups and inside of groups who
continue to exert influence and help each other, old boys
(04:18):
network whatever you want to call it, long after graduating college.
But it is something different A at Stanford and B
in your generation. Because of the moment in technology.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
You know, people are well aware of the privileges and
the accesses of the Ivy League, and the pipeline that
has historically existed between those you know, prestigious institutions and
Wall Street and Washington, Stanford and Silicon Valley are just
so much more entangled.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Right.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
If you just take the cumulative value of the companies
they have offices on the Stanford campus, it's somewhere north
of six trillion dollars. You know that this is a
place that literates its own venture capital fund. The school
has its own VC fund to seed students' new co companies. Right,
And so it's just you know, Silicon Valley couldn't exist
without Stanford. It was created at the Stanford Research Park.
(05:07):
They grew out of this university. You know, the early
Techchi Sun Microsystems was literally named for Stanford University network.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Right.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
I didn't know that.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
And so you know, the book is subtitled in Education
and Power. Right, that power operates in similar ways, you know,
wherever it.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Exists, I guess.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
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
(05:45):
at Stanford called how to Rule the World.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
It's literally called how to rule the world.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
It's literally called how to rule the world. The Silicon
Valley CEO teaches twelve Stanford students a year the secrets
to becoming the billionaires they aspire to be. There's this
whole cloak and dagger admission process and result is that
people are taught how to quote extract value from others.
That that is the central lesson here, and that seems
to be what Silicon Value is teaching a lot of
(06:10):
people at the moment, extracting value.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
That's very different from the images of Stamford 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 day is 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
are there to express their creative dreams through technology.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Yeah, Well, this sort of Stanford inside Stanford, for you know,
those chosen few, is necessarily small and cloistered and kept,
you know, obscured 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
(06:57):
your exams, 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. Right, this
is an institution with a guy, you know who's known
by the moniker Professor Billionaire because he made twenty billion
(07:17):
dollars by investing in the student's companies.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Some of the smartest kids in the world. They're not
so creative with the names Professor Billionaire and how to
rule the world. I guess, I guess he could have
a clue in the name, but he seemed a little
on the nose.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
It is a little on the nose, but there's a
lot of stuff that's on the nose here that I mean,
this place is this has This place is a very
funny relationship to irony, you know, Like I remember, there's
this one interaction that has stuck with me. I'm meeting
this woman for the first time at this like secret society,
you know, and it's this this totally bizarre scene, and
(07:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
And here's the.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Reason that she gets. She says, well, this is a
direct quote. 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.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
And why did they stay? She said, well, it's a
tax dodge.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
I mean, this place has a very there's something of
an irony freeze that is that is quite remarkable that
once you're in, you know, 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 wrongdoing.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
I want to ask you about that, and I want
to ask about going to Stanford at a time when
Sam Bagmann freed was cine mids of his house arrests,
and also when Chatchi Petit was being released. I'm a
lot of interesting stuff happening at the same time before
we get there, though. I actually spent a year doing
a study abroad at Yale when I was twenty, I think,
and wrote for the Yale Daily News. I didn't win
(08:57):
a polk Award, unfortunately, or or get the university president dismissed,
but nonetheless it was a satisfying experience. And one of
them I was very struck by was the secret societies
at Yale because they were almost the opposite of secret,
Like they were called tombs like Skullmban's hard Tomb, and
there were these enormous buildings that were totally impossible to miss,
(09:19):
dotted throughout the campus. There were probably twelve or fourteen
of them which had no windows. And it was this strange, strange,
almost perverse psychological phenomen It was like look at me,
but don't look like don't look, don't look within me.
But it's like if it was truly secret, it wouldn't
be fun. The fun. The thrill was the fact it
was like ostentatiously hiding in plain sights. So I'm curious, like,
(09:40):
where does the how to How to Rule the World
club fit into the earth to sort of is it
like a true desire to be secret or a desire
to be known for secrecy?
Speaker 4 (09:50):
No?
Speaker 3 (09:50):
I mean this, this was really genuinely secret that when
I arrived on campus, even knowing that it existed, with
something of statistica fire 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.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
You know, and I mean.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
I guess you can understand why 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 is networking with teenagers that he thinks will be
useful to him in the future. Only by creating this class,
(10:31):
he is the sort of brilliant way of making them
come to him because he's positioning himself as this sort
of you know, like mysterious figure who possesses secrets. Yes, exactly,
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
(10:53):
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 very intentionally cultivated. You know that Stanford
has made this sort of faustian bargain with Silicon Valley
that has enabled its meteoric ascent right like no other
(11:17):
institution of higher education in the last few decades, and
has also allowed for something its corruption.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
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,
how 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
(11:45):
of proxy organization with or in recruiting my students.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Now, I mean, it's fascinating, right, just how much selling
access to students has become the business model. You know,
they're a venture capitalists who teach classes at Stanford just
so they can have access to students. R s fairly
frequently a thing that happens. You know, there's this whole,
this thing that some students call the Koopa circuit. Right,
these investors who literally spend all day, seemingly every day
(12:11):
at the small little Koopa 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. These venture capital firms employ
talent scouts, many of whom are literally Stanford upperclassmen, to
identify freshmen the second they step on campus. And you know,
(12:32):
once you're in the Stanford and side Stanford, everyone is
texting the same handful of billionaires for advice or going
to meet them on the weekends.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
It's profoundly odd.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
But not only right, is it this sort of weird
ecosystem Like that's that's one part of it. But is
that the incentive structures right the way that they are
set up, encourage and enable deceit that the logical end
result too many times is the sort of cut corner
mentality that breeds the larger frauds. Like like Sam Bateman
(13:03):
Fried or Elizabeth Holmes.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
You mentioned this phrase, the Coopers 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 ngmis.
Can you talk about those three cohorts.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Yeah, well, you know, in the words of one of
the investors I was talking to in the book, right,
his job, he says, is to separate out the quote
unquote entrepreneurs from the quote unquote builders that you know,
people come to Stanford now understanding this idealized, mythologized version
of it, you know, believing that they can be the
next billion dollar dropouts. And you know, the job of
(13:42):
the investors 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 fetish eyed builders who are doing it
just for the sake of it. The NGMIS on the
other hand, are the not going to make it? So
those who don't have the hustle, they're.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Even worse than entrepreneurs somehow make it. I mean, that's
a pretty dehumanizing term.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
By the way, Oh completely this and you know this
is another one, right technical, right 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 gloss or your terms, well,
I just find it fun. It's sort of like, you know,
(14:24):
cultural anthropology invented here in this this fun ecosystem. But
the 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 through
wards are fabulous. And so I wanted to sort of
expose people to some of some of the lingo and
see that they've created this very sort of closed off
(14:45):
world in which everyone says the same things to each
other back and forth.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
I mean, the Neil Times book review said, in Coming
of Age as a young Man, he I a youth.
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
Buildings Roman quality to your book, like a pilgrim's progress, right,
Like you go there with some one side of ideals,
(15:10):
you 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 beginnings. You haven't even
graduated yet, but your sort of observer participant, and you're
I mean, 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, Like talk about what has been
the challenge personally to both be part of this world
(15:34):
and exposing it.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
Yeah, this book takes place over the course of freshman
year and freshman year in college. I think is a
formative time for anyone.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
One thing I really wanted to embrace it this book
is the coexistence of very normal, banal things with utterly
absurd context. You know, like the guy who you know
thirty minutes after I met him, is like offering to
get me.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Drugs because he's like, oh, well, you should try these.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
Drugs and you know, I look him up later and
he's already raised twenty million dollars for a software company.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
You know, it's like.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
Normal college things with very abnormal context. And so yeah,
I mean I have over the course of freshman year.
I you know, think I come in thinking I'm a
techie and I still love technology, but I very much
got swept up into journalism and discovered that that was
something that I is so powerful and special to me.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
As to like my own positioning.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
You're right that that like, I'm here in the mix
and I'm seeing this too, 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.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Are drawn into it.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
Yeah, you know, I never got like much further than
kid with potential, right, Like I was just close enough
to see. But I obviously, like I never took venture
capital money or I never made any money off of this,
Like I was just close.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Enough to know yet it exists.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Yet well, I think, you know, 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 had not
been scrutinized for years, and the sort of extraordinary apparatus
(17:11):
of 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.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Yeah, 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. So but you know, like most children
of journalists, you had the very wise reaction, perhaps of
(17:53):
not wanting to be a journalist.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Now.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
So yeah, I mean, I really never wanted to be
a journalist, which is part of why this has been
so strange. I was like, I'm gonna go three thousand
miles away from home, I'm going to study computer science.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
To the exact opposite.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
But you know, my maternal grandfather, my Grams, he and
I were very close and he passed away 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 have never in my entire life heard some
(18:27):
would 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
did to feel connected to my grandfather, and thinks spiraled
pretty quickly, I guess, and emotional to me your grandfather. Yeah,
(18:48):
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,
going through the travails of weeder courses. You know that
(19:11):
all of these things were coexisting with the investigation that
would see the president of Stanford, you know, sending his
high powered attorneys after.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Us, and whatnot.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
It's destabilizing as stressful enough to go to college and
be your first year as an undergrad of freshman doing
that wom doing student journalism, that brings down the president
of the college, win you a Polk Award, and essentially
(19:41):
calling out the culture that all of your peers are
striving towards. I mean that's tremendous psychological pressure.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Look, it was at many times an uncomfortable year, and
I'm not interested in stories where the edges are standed off,
and so you will definitely see in the book that
there are places where, you know, I'm clearly making very
imperfect decisions about my personal life, and you know I
am this blundering seventeen and eighteen year old kid, you know,
(20:13):
at the same time as I'm also doing this reporting
and everything else is happening.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
I think correctly, how wrong the first two pieces you
wrote for the Stanford Paper were inside Stanford's War on fun,
and Stanford knew about the campus impostor for a year
he kept coming back. I mean these two stories, particularly
inside Stanford's War on fun, I mean their stories of alienation.
And while we're another right reading the no Fun on
campus story, I'm just the idea that you can't gather
(20:41):
without permission from the administration, and people are ending up
drunk out of their minds in bushes. I mean, you
were overdosed on oxy codon. I mean, it's a sort
of the dark underbelly of this very on the one hand,
very rigorously controlled culture and on the other hand, this
cowboy gold rush wild West financial environment. Is it's a
(21:02):
strange portrait.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Well, the War On Fun Story was both my introduction
to student journalism but also my introduction to the defining
theme of the book, which is, you know, appearance versus reality. Right,
So students came up with this name for the War
On Fund basically to describe the sort of increasing bureaucratization
of all facets of the student experience. Right, Everything, every
(21:23):
action you can take as a student is governed by
some web page. You know, like you officially can't make
more than fifty five decibels of noise after ten pm,
and like the conversation that you and I are having
right now is probably around seventy decibels, right, And so
it's all of these things, you know, it's it's alcohol
is part of it. You know, the way that they've
cracked down on drinking has made things less safe in
(21:44):
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, drunken bushes. And there's an increasing
rate of so called transports, which is the u femism
for hospitalization due to alcohol poisoning. You literally have to
take a class and pass an exam to be able
(22:07):
to 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
(22:27):
ten balloons in your dorm. You know, there are so
few parties approved that the sole party that's happening in
a weekend will have six hundred people you know, trying
to slam through the doors, and the fire safety risk
will actually be far higher. 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.
(22:48):
When the school learned that I'd spoken with employees of
the Office of Alcohol Policy, who criticized the school's own
policies as hopelessly out of touch with reality. They sent
an email well to a 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 2 (23:08):
And I went through their policies.
Speaker 3 (23:10):
I was provided the training materials and the contracts by
people who worked for the office that policy didn't exist, right,
But they'd 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 from reporting at Stanford.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
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.
He won the Polk Awards, which made you a powerful person,
right like it was about powers, about the abuse of power,
but it positioned you on campus undeniably as one of
the stars. Even if you're not going to be a
(23:50):
tech founder, you'd have broken through as somebody with clout,
which is highly valuablecomotive.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
I don't know how much cloud I have like asked
the average student, but no, I mean, look, student journalism
is an amazing thing, right that you can be as
seventeen and eighteen year old and ask questions about things
that should have been asked years earlier. Mark tesse Levine, right,
is this superstar neuroscientist and fabulously wealthy from his time
(24:18):
as a biotech executive. He begins the year with his
greatest triumph in the words of many, by opening Stanford's
first new school since nineteen forty eight, the Door School Sustainability,
with a billion dollar donation from John dor 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
(24:41):
over the course of this reporting.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
And what are the allegations?
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Basically, what I found over the course of eight months
of investigating was that at various labs that Mark tesse
Levin had overseen at different institutions, researchers under his supervision
had falsified results, had falsified the data leading to pay
papers that he co authored, and that at various points
when Mark teste Levine was made aware of issues in
(25:05):
his studies. He did not correct or retract those papers.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
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 3 (25:20):
Well, look, Mark test say, 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 nineteen nineties by discovering something called the netron.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
And then this is.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
When colleagues say that, you know, as he begins to
segue into positions of hire 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, you know the these papers,
some of which were published before I was even born, right,
Questions about some of these had existed on an anonymous
(26:07):
forum called pub Pier going back to twenty fifteen, so
seven years before I showed up on the story, and
Mark Tesselavine had never publicly responded, and the journals had
not corrected or retracted these papers, and the Institution Stanford
made him president in twenty sixteen, so he went through
the vetting process, and these questions clearly were not fully
addressed at that time.
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podcast episode description box. I want to come back to
said your Stamford 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 are aware that you were also
the kind of star journalist on campus.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Well, I you know, I came here as a coder.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
This was something I did a hell of a lot
of so I ended up I was one of half
a dozen kids who skipped through the intro sequence of
computer science classes. I jumped straight to the so called
weader class CS one oh seven, and in tandem with that,
I applied for and was you know, very lucky to
be accepted to join the organizing team of tree Hacks,
(28:29):
which is the school's annual hackathon, and tree Hacks has
a sort of modest ostensible mission, right that this is
a hackathon that takes place once a year in February,
where you know, students from around the country actually around
the world come to build projects in a forty eight
hour stretch and there are prizes and whatnot.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
What it actually is, to some degree.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
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 the geniuses who
are going to reshape the world in their image, are
so valuable in this place. Right, the tree Hacks team
is considered one of those so called high signal clusters
where congregates high signal cluster. Yeah, going back to the
(29:13):
lingo of this place, and so venture capitalists would take
us all out for dinner and offered to fund aney
of r 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 tree X
does not advertise, right, the perks are not advertised as
part of the job. But it turns out that. You know,
(29:33):
this was sort of my entry point to beginning to
see how how some of this place worked.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
How do you go from tree hacks to how to
rule the world?
Speaker 3 (29:42):
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 and deal or at least that
was my experience, and he's asking you, you know, these
these deeply personal questions like right after meeting you, like what.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
The highest emotional point of your life and the type
of thing right yeah?
Speaker 3 (30:04):
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
twenty minutes. And it's amazing. Right, he's sitting there, we
are our interview. Because it was raining, we had to
go inside, so we did our interview inside instead of
outside as he usually does it. We were sitting in
(30:26):
the most public building at Stanford, right, the Trusted or
Memorial Union, which is like the food court for visitors,
having this interview for this secret secret class, which is
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 that are hidden in plain sight.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
So were you trying to get into the classes? Are
you trying to expose the class at that point?
Speaker 3 (30:49):
I mean, I think as soon as I heard about it,
I knew that I would be writing about it in
some way.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
That this was just, you know, a great story that.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
You know, there's just there's a lot that happens 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.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
You know.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
In freshman year, like I had someone ask me to
sign a non disclosure agreement to go to a party
like like a twenty year old, which is like a
really really weird thing to ask someone to do. It's
like it also was a really boring party, Like it's
not like there was anything happening there, and so all
of these things.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
It is just this place is.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
Distinctly odd you know, and in the flavor of its
oddness is driven by its status, as you know, the
controlling mechanism for the technology that governs all of our lives.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Justin looked into your soul and decided he didn't want
you in his heaven.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Though yes, I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy of ruling
the world.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
But you know, as I discuss 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
(32:19):
with the bathwater. I'm going 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 going
on here.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Let's talk about what's next for you and your cohort.
You had interesting conversation I thought in the book with
John Hennessy, who was the Stamford president about twenty years ago, right.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Between twenty two down fifteen.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
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. Maybe one of them will,
but not hundreds. If you look at the most successful
startups that have spun out from Stanford, they were graduate students,
not undergrads. Yeah, there's a very palpable sense of a
(33:02):
gold rush right now. And people are getting billion doll
evaluations on you know, no on zero revenue companies. I mean,
what does that do? What does that do to the
to the minds of the people experiencing in real time?
And and well, what might happen if these things don't
work out? Like what are the lessons being learned about
suffering and perseverance and you know all those things rewards?
Speaker 3 (33:26):
Yeah, well, it's so interesting, right 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 seventy new
buildings in his tenure, driven by the sort of coziness
of Silicon Valley, and even he is like this mythology
(33:48):
is wrong. You know that that like, you know, some
of the image that has been created here is actually
harmful to a certain degree. And you know, certainly I've
seen that with students, right 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
(34:10):
youngest self made billionaire. He created Snapchat. You know, they
hear about the two students who got food delivered to
their dorm and became billionaires by creating door dash. Right,
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
(34:31):
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 gonna put it on your resume. Right,
That actually building, you know, and inventing things. That's not
nonconformity anymore. It's people trying to replicate, you know, the
playbook that they've seen yield tremendous riches in the future.
(34:52):
And I think that has changed the character of things
right that students here now are taught how to make
very very 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,
(35:15):
and that little deceptions lead to bigger ones, and that
you know, kids I arrived with as freshmen, you know,
I watched 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 celebrate
(35:38):
it as the very very best of the best for
technology she didn't have and hadn't made. You know, if
you want to understand right how the next Elizabeth Holmes
or Sam Bateman free comes to be, you have to
look at how the next generation of tech leaders are
being trained.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Because also this irony, which is which you've written quote
the same Stanford dropouts has seem to be making them
most money right now are often working on the very
technology that is worsening life for their former college classmates.
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Yeah, well, this is I think in a piece I
wrote about AI, which is so fascinating. Right, AI is
this great accelerate. 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
(36:29):
getting 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
(36:49):
from Stanford anymore. But on the flip side, this certain
cohort of people at Stanford, you know, like the guy
who taught me had a shotgun a beer freshman year,
drops out six months after he starts company.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
It's valued over a billion dollars. Right.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
It's been so fascinated 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 1 (37:11):
And there's a tremendous irony in your book as well,
which is that Martetiller Levine, after after leaving a university
based you know, in large parton of your reporting, raised
a billion dollar fund and then somebody from his office
reached out to you to offer you a job. Is
that true?
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (37:26):
So Mark Mark tesse Levine, six months after he's ousted
by his own board because of his oversight of research
and his his highly aggressive public posture when 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 title wave of
funding for Anything AI. They're going to use AI for
(37:48):
drug discovery. And two of the vcs who are leading
the round, who have invested into Martessee Levin's companies, turned
out to be ones that I got to know over
freshman year in the Stanford and side 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 and this is a
(38:08):
verbatim quote.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
It's etched into my brain.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
So this is verbatim the text message read, Hey, THEO,
when you aren't too busy knocking university presidents off their
purchase into the hands of vcs willing to fund them
for a bee, you should join winky face. And then
a partner from the other firm reaches out to offer
me money too if I wanted to start a company, right,
(38:31):
because that's how Silicon Valley works.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
You never tempted.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
I mean, I think at this point like I've committed
to journalism. You know that I've been I've been faced
with tough challenges when it comes to journalism and made
the decision to keep going with it.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
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 Eric Schmidt,
current CEO of Alphabet Sunda is scheduled to give your
commencement address. Do you think he'll get boot.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
You know, I'm really interested to see. So Sundar Prachai
is a Stanford success story. He got his master's here,
and I just I sort of chuckle to myself, imagining
how many like lawyers and pr people have reviewed that
speech before we're going to hear it. It was interesting, right, Stanford,
In the four years that I have been here, the
commencement speakers have been two billionaires and two athletes, right,
(39:32):
which I guess says something about you know, who they're picking.
They choose people who are going to stick to the
company line.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
But we'll see, we'll see. I don't know, no prediction,
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (39:42):
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 2 (39:51):
That's the thing.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Right, All universities right now, I think are struggling with
this identity question. And Stanford, you know, perhaps more so
than most right because, on the one hand, it is
this hedge fund controlling billions of dollars in assets. It
is a giant real estate firm effectively, you know, controlling
huge amounts of land. It is a sports league, a
professional sports league. It's a hospital system. It's a repository
(40:13):
of historical thought. It's the place where teenagers are going
about their coming of age. It's you know, a supercharged
science lab, like it's all of these things, and yet
it says it is one thing, and that sort of
cultural challenge. What actually is Stanford? You know, what does
the English lip major have in common with the you know,
like startup CEO to be That's a really hard question
(40:34):
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? I think that's one of
the biggest challenges that the school faces.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
The book is How to Rule the World, An Education
in Power at Stanford University.
Speaker 3 (40:51):
THEE. A.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Baker, Thank you, This is awesome.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
For tech stuff. I'm as Valoscian. This episode was produced
by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter. Executive produced by me
Julian Nutter and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell
for iHeart podcasts. Our engineer today was Bahid Fraser. Jack
Insley mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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