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Susan B. Glasser (New Yorker) and her husband Peter Baker (NY Times) have long been two of my favorite people. I knew nothing of their personal lives. After seeing Amna's PBS interview, I hit 1-click. I've subsequently spent all day reading their son's book. Deep into it.
Just wow. One scary 22 yr old.
Ahhh... Stanford.
UPDATE
Finished the book overnight. Yeah, just wow. Current issue of Science Magazine has reviewed it already.
Shortly after joining the staff of Stanford University’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, in 2022, freshman Theo Baker received a tip that there were potential problems with research published by the university’s president, neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Baker followed up, and his subsequent reporting prompted a formal inquiry that eventually led to Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation in 2023 and to the retraction of several high-profile research papers, including two published in Science. In his new book—How to Rule the World—Baker shares the experience of working on this story and reflects, more broadly, on Stanford itself, where powerful stakeholders—from tech industry leaders to academic entrepreneurs—train promising students to join the next generation of Silicon Valley elites…
What makes Stanford so different from other universities?
I showed up here as a coder. I was one of a handful of freshmen to jump through the first intro sequence of coding classes, and as a consequence, I saw inside this secret world that exists for the most promising students who are identified as the next trillion dollar startup founders. As a freshman, I was just close enough to peer into this world and to know that there were these slush funds and yacht parties and all of these extraordinary perks lavished on a very select few.
Stanford has really become this bleeding edge for a trend that you see across higher education right now, which is this sort of corporatization and monetization of students. So adults [interested in capitalizing on students’ ideas] are hunting relentlessly for a meal ticket. And the school, in turn, benefits from it because the more you have kids dropping out to start billion dollar companies—whether or not they’re actually going to be successful in the long run—the more that they’ll kick back their proceeds to the university and reflect that this place is the cradle of innovation that it claims to be.
Early on, you learned about an unofficial class called “How to Rule the World.” What was it about and how did it fit in with other ideas and attitudes you were encountering on campus?
There’s a secret class that takes place every week on the Stanford campus with 12 students who are selected through this cloak-and-dagger admissions process. It’s not an actual class. It is more like a secret club for the aspiring tech elite. This guy [the instructor] is playing the same game that everyone else around here is, which is, how do you get in with the next generation of future oligarchs early? And he has done this brilliant maneuver and effectively made them come to him.
The way that they’re learning to behave is exactly the reason why you see these cut corners pop up again and again in Silicon Valley. They are being taught that you have to get ahead at any cost. You have to move as quickly as you can. And it doesn’t matter if there are consequences, because if you win out in the long run, all bad behavior can be excused.
What was the initial allegation made about the president’s research that made you think, I have to pursue this story?
There had been these comments that began springing up on PubPeer around 2015 on a handful of papers that Tessier-Lavigne had been involved in. These commenters were pointing out places where there appeared to be anomalies, or irregularities, in some of the figures, particularly some of the Western blots. And there had not been any response from Tessier-Lavigne or the journals. This had all been happening right around the time when Tessier- Lavigne was first being considered for the Stanford presidency. And so I really didn’t think that there was going to be all that much to it. It seemed impossible to imagine that he would’ve gone through the whole vetting process and this wouldn’t have come up.
But that’s where I started. I began looking into these allegations that had been made on PubPeer. I worked with forensic image analysts, including the incredible Elisabeth Bik, to begin [investigating] that initial suite of concerns and then work from there progressively...
Did you learn anything that surprised you about the scientific process?
I learned a ton from this, some of which reflected very well on the scientific community. I think there are a lot of people who take issues of misconduct very seriously and see the integrity of data as paramount to the integrity of the scientific process. But I also learned things that reflect very poorly on the scientific community, which has been really reticent to confront some of these issues that have been allowed to fester for a number of years. And I think there’s some wider recognition of that problem now and of the complicity that journals and institutions have had historically in allowing flawed studies to remain in the scientific record and to allow credible allegations of misconduct to go without inquiry or a serious investigation.
In a few weeks, you’ll be a Stanford graduate. What’s next?
My focus right now is just trying to get this book out and hopefully starting some productive conversations. If you want to understand how Elizabeth Holmes happens, or how Sam Bankman-Fried happens, or how this whole “move fast and break things” philosophy works, you have to understand how the next generation of tech oligarchs are being trained.
This isn’t normal. None of this is normal. We’re investing huge amounts of power and authority in a system that does not have the guardrails to catch or ward off bad behavior. You see teenagers learning this philosophy from the beginning. And you also see how hard the fight for accountability is when reporting on this leader whose behavior was not fully confronted until it became public years later.
One riveting book.
California was once the site of the great gold rush that transformed America. “It was that population,” wrote Mark Twain, “that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day.”
He termed his own era of American excess the Gilded Age.
Yet the fortune generated by Silicon Valley in the past few decades has exceeded the value of all gold discovered during the first California boom two hundred times over, even adjusted for inflation, and concentrated the lucre in still fewer hands. Even the richest men of Twain’s time would find Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar pay package remarkable.
Once a bucolic region dominated by farmland and horse trails, this little stretch of Northern California now sets the agenda for the planet. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Every aspect of modern life is dependent on technology, and technology flows through here. The value of public companies based in the area is $14.3 trillion—greater than the GDPs of the United Kingdom, Germany, and India combined, with enough left over to cover the assets of every major bank in Africa. Private companies add at least another trillion.
Silicon Valley gave birth to the chips and computers and internet that we all rely on in the twenty-first century. Technology became king. As Bob Martin, an influential software pioneer, put it a decade ago, “We rule the world. The world doesn’t know this yet.” Martin explained that “other people believe that they rule the world,” yet “we write the rules that go into the machines that execute everything that happens on this planet nowadays. No law can be enacted without software. No law can be enforced without software. No government can act without software. We rule the world.”
Ten years later, the world may have taken notice. After all, the top tech CEOs in the world were the ones standing directly behind President Donald Trump at his inauguration while political leaders were shunted to the overflow room.
Today’s tech tycoons are not dissimilar to the robber barons of Twain’s time. Wealth inequality is by some metrics greater in Silicon Valley than in any other region in the world; just eight households in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties hold more wealth than the entire bottom 50 percent of the population of these counties combined, more than half a million people. Together, the top 1 percent in Silicon Valley control forty-eight times more wealth than the bottom 50 percent.
Palantir, the data defense tech company cofounded by Stanford stars like Peter Thiel, is a Silicon Valley darling hoovering up many bright young engineers. Currently, its CEO, Alex Karp, makes more in a year than the entire company earns in gross revenue. This is possible because the company trades at well over five hundred times its earnings, thanks to Silicon Valley’s unshakable belief in exponential future growth.
When the talented artificial intelligence researcher Ilya Sutskever started Safe Superintelligence, he launched with nine employees, a two-hundred-word placeholder statement, and zero articulation of a product, much less any revenue. The company was valued at $32 billion. Higher than the National Bank of Canada, the cosmetics giant Estée Lauder, and even the third-largest auto manufacturer in the world, Hyundai, which produces more than four million cars a year. SSI, meanwhile, has produced nothing.
Thinking Machines, another AI company, raised $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation in 2025, although the pitch to investors “offered no information about a product or financial plans,” according to the Financial Times. Five months later, the startup was seeking more funding at a valuation of $50 billion or even $60 billion, Bloomberg reported.
Silicon Valley runs on the assumption of potential. It runs on the notion that heights are limitless and hurdles along the way will inevitably be smoothed by the exercise of brute will. It runs on the idea that the people in these startups will eventually produce untold riches.
So if this is a modern-day gold rush, the resource to mine is talent. And nowhere can you find more of it than Stanford University.
Baker, Theo. How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University (pp. 3-5). (Function). Kindle Edition.
As I was finishing the book...
Theo is a hot media property this week. Deservedly so.
I have long had great love for the SF Bay Area (and California broadly). I first arrived in SF at the age of 21 in 1967. Lived in North Beach for a couple of years prior to moving to Seattle in the wake of the birth of my daughter Sissy. Subsequently lived in Birmingham AL, Tuscaloosa, Knoxville TN, Las Vegas, and then back to the SF Bay Area (Walnut Creek, Antioch). Moved to Baltimore in 2019.
During my last day gig (NV/UT Medicare QIO), I did a side hustle covering the digital health IT startup space as a "photojournalist." (I applied for a press pass to the HIMSS Conference on a lark, and, to my surprise, they approved it. I ran with it from there.) Spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley covering a wide variety of Health Tech conferences. So, I totally resonate with Theo's book.
