Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley

**Kara Swisher** (0:00)
I call it The Mistakes Were Made. Oh well, Kara.
I had a similar thing where someone, I took down some idiot entrepreneur, and then when I was looking for money, I didn't take any venture money. But one of them took me to lunch and offered me money, and I said, I'd rather poke my eye out with a dry stick than take money from you. But no.
It's on!
Hi everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Theo Baker, a journalist who's graduating from Stanford University next week and the youngest ever recipient of the George Polk Award, which he won for his investigative reporting at the student newspaper, The Stanford Daily. Over the course of his freshman year, Theo wrote a series of articles investigating the university's former president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a wealthy and influential neuroscientist and biotech executive. By the summer, Tessier-Lavigne resigned over allegations of research misconduct in his labs. Now, Theo's written a book about his work and his college experience called, How to Rule the World, An Education in Power at Stanford University. It probes the veneer of perfection at one of the most elite universities and uncovers the world of excess and absurd wealth that's intertwined with the powerful tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley. What bad could happen with that? A lot, I've been privy to watching that over the many years. And Theo really does encapsulate the real problems that started sort of at the dawn of the internet age. Silicon Valley has always been affiliated with Stanford, but it really got going in the 1990s, the early 2000s. I'm really interested in this topic and how these people got this way and if you wonder why our current tech leadership is a little mutated in a way that's pretty ugly, you'll get a sense of what happened here. Our expert question today comes from Ryan Mack, a tech reporter for the New York Times and a Stanford University alum. So stick around.
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**Kara Swisher** (4:01)
Theo, thank you for coming on On.

**Theo Baker** (4:03)
Thank you for having me.

**Kara Swisher** (4:04)
You need to tell the story beginning of when we met, how we met. I do know your parents, not well, but I know of them and I've gone to parties and stuff in Washington with them there too. They're both well-known Washington reporters, but tell me how you and I met.

**Theo Baker** (4:18)
Well, I asked you for advice. I reached out to you for help in thinking through this reporting challenge I was working on, which turned into the book that we're now here talking about, so thank you to you.

**Kara Swisher** (4:30)
No, no, no. What stupid thing did I tell you? Did I tell you anything dumb or not?

**Theo Baker** (4:34)
I don't remember you saying anything stupid, to be clear. Look, I think you and I have a somewhat similar perspective in that, I come at this from the idea that tech is good, and tech is awesome and fraud is bad, right? That you don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater to understand that something has gone deeply off the rails here.

**Kara Swisher** (4:52)
Off the rails in terms of people and not just fraud, just in general, the behaviors and everything else, which I think we're going to start talking a little bit about Stanford, but I love a little bit of your background so people understand that. You are a techie from when I went to your book party, several of your teachers from school were there, they were all computer technology professors. Talk about that really briefly.