The Freshman Who Took Down Stanford's President And Its Perfect Image - EP 72 Theo Baker

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
All right, imagine you're a freshman at Stanford University. You're working for the school paper. When you receive a tip that Stanford's president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, may have had some deception in his past work as a very, very prominent scientist, you start digging into the story, you find out that it's true. And as a result of your reporting, the president of Stanford is forced to resign a few months later.
This young man's name was Theo Baker. This actually happened. He's written a book about this incident. I've read it. It's very good. How to Rule the World. This was an extraordinary, extraordinary thing. Young reporter just starting out, ends up taking down the president of Stanford. This book is partly about that. It's partly about Theo's wild freshman year in which Stanford turns him into something of a pariah and cracks down on him. And it's really about Stanford itself and whether or not this university is as perfect as it seems. Theo would tell you it is not. It's turned into something of a meat market for youngsters and venture capitalists descending upon them. This book is quite damaging in a lot of ways to Stanford and its sterling reputation. Theo is a phenom. He's done things that professional reporters would cherish in a 30-year career, and he did them all as a 17 and 18-year-old. He's now written a book that might well become a best seller. People will be jealous, but he's an astonishing young reporter and a very, very good writer and he's put in the hard work to make this happen. It's an amazing story. We're going to get into all of it on the podcast. As always, please leave us a review or give us some stars. Wherever you listen to the show, it makes a huge difference in people being able to find our work. Thank you so much for listening. I am Ashlee Vance. This is Core Memory. Here we go.
Theo, it is so good to see you.
I see you're like still in the process of graduating.

**Theo Baker** (2:28)
Yeah, next month.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:28)
From Stanford?

**Theo Baker** (2:29)
Yeah, yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:29)
Okay, you're graduating right now, over the next couple of weeks.

**Theo Baker** (2:33)
Yeah, I think a month from when we're recording this now.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:35)
Okay, and they're letting you graduate.

**Theo Baker** (2:38)
That's the hope, that's the idea, yeah. Hopefully, make it across the finish line.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:43)
That's amazing, and then you kind of like took a couple semesters off to write the book.

**Theo Baker** (2:47)
I did, yeah, yeah, so I reported it sophomore year and then took off most of junior year.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:51)
Okay, okay, well, we're going to get into everything. The book's a little different than I thought in that it's, for me at least, it was kind of three things. I thought maybe the whole bulk of the book would be the journey of reporting on the president, and what are we going to do for his name? You use an acronym in the book, which is much easier, because his name is a problem.

**Theo Baker** (3:12)
It's Marc Tessier-Lavigne, but people say MTL. So you can use MTL, that works.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:16)
Let's MTL, let's MTL.
And so I thought that would really be the heart of it. And there is a ton in there about that. There's way more detail than people would have seen from the reporting and obviously your side of living through it. But then I felt like the book was three things. It's that, I felt like it was your lived experience. And there was, you're quite open about, you know, like to your credit, because you're doing hard reporting on other people. And then you were, you're, you're very transparent about, there's moments in here where you're passing out, you're overdosing on things. I mean, you, you let it all out there. And then I thought, you know, the third chunk of the book is really this exploration of Stanford and what it, what it has come to be. And, and I found all of that fascinating. I was actually very disappointed myself because we are recording this a couple of miles from Stanford and I was like, man, I've been missing a lot of stories that we're, that we're sitting there. But yeah, so, so do you feel like that's a relatively fair framing?

**Theo Baker** (4:23)
No, I think that's completely right. It's this, you know, I tried to write like a sort of portrait of this very particular moment, at this very particular place and it's all sort of knitted together through, you know, the perspective of my freshman year. But yeah, no, it's, it was tough to, tough to weave everything together, but hopefully it's sort of one cohesive narrative.