On with Kara Swisher - Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

Kara talks to Theo Baker, a Stanford University student journalist and the youngest-ever George Polk Award winner, about his new book, "How to Rule the World." In it, Baker unpacks his investigation into former Stanford president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne over research misconduct in labs he oversaw. He breaks down how the university reacted and what it says about power at Stanford and in the Valley Theo reveals the “Stanford inside Stanford” and the university’s lucrative, no-boundaries relationship with Silicon Valley’s tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. He and Kara discuss secret power networks, “builders” versus “wantapreneurs” and whether Stanford is a university or, as one professor put it, an “incubator with dorms.” Plus: Theo weighs in on the backlash against AI among young people. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I called 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 offer me money. And I said I'd rather poke my hat with a dry stick than take money from you. But no. 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, Mark Tessier Levine, a wealthy and influential neuroscient.

neuroscientist and biotech executive. By the summer, Tessier Levine 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 oligards of Silicon Valley. What bad could happen with that? a lot. I've been privy at 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's 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 report. reporter for the New York Times and a Stanford University alum. So stick around. Thanks again to Odoo for supporting this show. Odu wants to be your ultimate all-in-one fully integrated platform to handle everything. Seriously, everything. Inventory, CRM, accounting, HR, and much more. No more shopping around or settling for expensive services that can only handle a fraction of your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odu for free at

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Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Regist for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac Definition of Luxury. What's up y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and Mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Theo, thank you for coming on on.

Thank you for having me. 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. They're both well-known Washington reporters, but tell me how you and I met. Well, I asked you for advice. I reached out to you, you know, for help and 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.

No, no, no. What stupid thing did I tell you? Did I tell you anything dumb or not? 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. Off the rails in terms of people and not just fraud, just in general, the behaviors and everything else, which I think, but 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 were a techie from when I went to your book party, several of your teachers from school

were there, and they were all computer technology professors. Talk about that really briefly. Well, so I was, you know, one of those 17-year-old kids who shows up at Stanford and thinks that computer science is the world. You know, I was like the kind of kid who would like code a machine learning model, you know, from scratch in my bedroom in high school and call it a fun Friday night. and I showed up at Stanford. That isn't, is not a fun Friday night, but go ahead. It can be a fun Friday night. All right, okay, I'm teasing.

I fully embraced my, you know, unfortunately nerdy side. No, I have a techie son, and he used to build things and saw it all the time. He's a mechanical engineer, but go ahead. It's such an amazing thing to learn that, you know, as a teenager, right, that the things you do can, you know, directly translate from words, on a screen into something new, something that actually does something. I found that so fun and enjoyable, and I showed up at Stanford, and I think this is like... Can I ask you, what was fun about it for you? Explain to people, because I think people are quite passionate about it. A lot of the original technologies start off that way, either coding or... And it doesn't necessarily have to do with social

issues. It has to do what they love it. They happen to love it. Yeah. No, I mean, I think there's just something really engaging, you know, when you're like a teenager or kid or something. And you learn that if you become skilled enough at programming, right, that you can translate the ideas you have into something working, that, you know, I'm never been great with paint. You know, I'm not a great artist. But here was the way to create something that maybe then could solve a problem in my life, you know, if I was trying to do something that or do some research that I found interesting. That was, you know, something I really enjoyed doing, working on natural language processing stuff, was really interesting to me. And so when I showed up at Stanford, this was what I thought, you know, my life was going to

look like. And very quickly, I realized that things didn't work out here exactly as I thought they might. Right, exactly. When you fly to California from Washington, you grew up in Washington, D.C. Stanford, for people who don't know, everybody knows, is an elite institution, extremely low admissions rate of 3.6%. They're proud of it for some reason. But the school exerts an outsized influence on Silicon Valley as a result of the rest of the world. The Google guys were there. A lot and lot of people were there at Stanford. It has a connection every which way to everyone in Silicon Valley. So I want you to talk about how it's developed into what you call a no boundaries relationship. Well, Stanford has done this really intentionally, right,

that Silicon Valley wouldn't exist without this university. You know, it grows out of the Stanford Research Park and efforts made by then-Provost Fred Torman to encourage. this no boundaries relationship with industry. You know, between 2000 and 2015, Stanford, you know, under the leadership of then-president John Hennessy, goes on this extraordinary run. They build over 70 new buildings on campus. They become the first school in the nation to raise more than a billion dollars in a year. Yeah, I believe Tennessee was on the board of Google. Is the chair of the board of Alphabet? Yeah, exactly. And it's so fascinating, right, that Stanford was once this regional institution. It is literally called the farm, because this used to be.

a horse farm where Leland Stanford Senior had his horses. You know, he was the robber baron who started this university in the name of his son. It's a very quaint name. And then it becomes this institutional juggernaut. Right. Well, no, and that's exactly right. It still thinks of itself as this underdog, right, where the outsider, renegades are building for the sake of it. And this is not an underdog. This is a place with a budget higher than 116 countries. Right. But you fell in love with Stanford. You wanted to go there. Not every East Coast kid goes there. My brother went to Stanford, and he also went to Stanford med school. I did not get in. Just, I'm 3.7%. So why did you fall in love with Stanford? Was it because of that? Well, I fell in love with Stanford when I was seven. And so I have loved

this place for the greater part of my life. For what? What happened? Did you see a pine tree? What? I remember seeing this image of these teenagers, you know, in their Stanford t-shirts and their flip-flops, lounging in the shade of a palm tree, right up against the self-driving car they just helped to build. And I just thought this is the coolest place on earth where all of the new things are happening and the most brilliant teenagers are going about their lives. And it's so cool and it's Northern California and it's all of that. Stanford still has parts of that, right? That image isn't false.

It's just that this school works so hard to maintain its sterling reputation that a lot of other stories get swept under the rug that might belie such an idyllic and paradisal view. So as I said, your parents are Peter Baker, the New York Times chief. I'm going to only mention the monster, just so you know, Chief White House correspondent and New Yorker staff writer, Susan Glasser, because you're your own person. But the reason I'm asking is,

you said that journalism is the only career you ever ruled out. Why is that? And you mentioned that at the book party. Why was that? Well, I mean, exactly that, right? My parents have already done it. You know, they're political journalists,

which is obviously not the same thing, but, you know, they are really good at what they do. And I always wanted to stake my own identity. And I did love technology very genuinely and passionately. And it also seemed like a good idea to go 3,000 miles from home and make my own reputation. I joined the student paper, you know, mostly on a lark, but also especially to feel when I was a freshman, I showed up. I joined the student paper right away, even though I didn't expect this to be an all-consuming part of my life.

But my grandfather had just passed away a few weeks before I arrived at Stanford. And he wasn't a journalist, but he talked more about his time on his own college paper than anyone I've ever met in my entire life. And so he used to sit me down on his knee. Where did he go? Let me guess. Where did he go? You went to Colgate. Oh, okay.

I was thinking crimson and then I'd have to hit you. No, no, no, no, not an Ivy League man. And so I joined the paper. I thought I would feel connected to him. And things spiraled pretty quickly. Now, there's what you call the Stanford inside Stanford that's exemplified by an unofficial secret class called How to Rule the World. Justin, the so-called professor, tells the students a success,

in the Valley is all about, quote, extracting value from people, which seems, sounds familiar. You interviewed for a seat and didn't get it. So why did you interview for the seat and talk a little bit about why you wanted to do the class? What are some of the lessons that students are supposed to take away from it? Well, so this book, right, is titled How to Rule the World, and that's not a metaphor. There's this secret class, there are 12 students a year, and you have to be tapped on the shoulder by someone already in it before you can go through the cloak and dagger admissions process with the Silicon Valley CEO who has styled himself as a professor. Because it's not like you're getting course credit for it.

It's more like a skull and bones for the aspiring tech lead. It's like a secret society where the most insider kids congregate. And when I arrive here, even knowing that this existed was like a status signifier among the most inside of the inside crowd, right? That you had to be, in the word, this was sort of a delicious phrase that was used by someone there, that you were quote unquote rule adjacent just to know that it existed. because that signified that you were part of this Stanford inside Stanford, where the kids who have been identified as future trillion-dollar startup founders

congregate to learn the secrets of... How are you rule adjacent? So my entry point into this world was through helping to run the campus hackathon tree hacks, right? And tree hacks is modest in its ostensible mission, right? This is a place for hackers to come and spend, you know, 36 hours working on their projects. in reality, it's sort of like a feeder into this sort of Silicon Valley pipeline because the idea is, you know, so many people come to Stanford thinking they can be the next Snapchat founder or DoorDash founder that investors have to, quote unquote, rule out the want entrepreneurs, as one of them put it to me, the want entrepreneurs as opposed to the quote unquote builders. And the idea was that the tree hacks team, you know, was an example of those builders. And so VCs would take us out and wine and dine us. In the book, you paint a picture of Vee. see scouting for talent on campus, meeting with students at Kupa Cafe and inviting them to

lavish dinners and yacht parties. What are they looking for among these so-called plucked and high-agency teenagers? All these phrases, entrepreneur, builders, plucked. Talk about why they're so willing to offer Stanford student this pre- Idea funding. It's a little like recruiting basketball stars in seventh grade or something like that. Yeah, except the earnings potentials, you know, come with a B, not an M, right? That these kids could potentially be starting billion-dollar or trillion-dollar startups in their dorm room, which is not unheard of at Stanford. I took my first class at Stanford in the Jensen Huang Auditoria, named after the founder of the most valuable company in the world, edging out the second most valuable company in the world,

also started by Stanford students. And this place, right, has such a fascinating relationship with the valley that makes sense when you understand, I guess, really the context of the last few decades, It's that Silicon Valley has been the greatest concentration and creation of wealth, potentially in human history. And so if this is a gold rush, right? By that same token, the talent is the thing to mine. Like, that is the resource that people are trying to find. And the earlier you find it, you have made your own career by identifying it at 18.

Right. And why not? Why not troll to campus, essentially? So give me an example of, you know, coffee is one thing. And that makes sense to me. But these dinners, yacht parties, etc. What's the goal? I mean, they're trying to make you starry-eyed and, like, oh, no money or what?

Well, it's amazing because, you know, so much of it seems so nebulous. You know, I remember this one CEO of a unicorn company reaches out to me freshman year, and I have no idea who this guy is or why he's cold emailing me. And he takes me out for brunch at the Rosewood Hotel, which markets itself as the modern clubhouse for Silicon Valley, which is, I think, a great, great tagline. And he's sitting there, and he's spooned. feeding his eight-month-old caviar as he confesses that his first ever contract was for the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. And in that moment, I'm just sitting there and I'm thinking,

what the hell is happening? You know, I'm just this barely legal teenager. You know, why am I here? But he explains it to me this way. He says, I like barely legal there, but I like how you asserted that, but go ahead. You know, I always got to emphasize that, you know. It's a hotel. It has a reputation called the Hosewood. There's supposed to be prostitutes. anyway, go ahead. Move along. Yeah, they have the Cougar Knights with some regularity. And so this guy explains it like this. He says, okay, my job is running a company,

but my secret job is working with interesting people. And the truth is, anything can be monetized in Silicon Valley if you know how to scout it. If you are this rule breaker who has accrued a vast amount of capital and you have decided that you have dominion over all things, therefore, you can figure out how to shepherd these teenagers into something that will benefit your bottom line. Right. So you found out you were dinner. You just suddenly realized there you were the prey essentially, correct? Well, it's, you know, I don't want to give this guy too hard of time because,

like, you know, as far as the exploitative scale goes, like, he has never asked anything of me, whereas there are people in Silicon Valley who have much, much shoddier reputations for how they treat students, including when it comes to, like, you know, sexual misconduct and, like, incredibly predatory behavior. And that's the thing, right, is that as much as this is, like, paradise for a talented teenager, where you can walk in the door of any venture capitalist and raise millions of dollars for your startup, it's also deeply exploitative in a way that incentivizes and encourages bad behavior. We'll be back in a minute. How can working at your local Tims take you further? Sure, you can level up your teamwork skills. You also get a chance to receive a Tim Horan's

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You move very quickly, and your investigation into the university's president at the time, Mark Tessier-Lavine. He's a prominentist, neuroscientist researcher and biotech executive, very well-known. You joined the school newspaper, as you said, as a hobby, but you found yourself sucked into it. You were thinking of going this tech route, whining and dining with caviar feeding baby entrepreneurs. But you publish your first story on him in November of 2022. Talk about how the investigation begins. and for people don't know this story, maybe don't remember it anymore than the broad outlands. Give us a summary of what you found. So what my reporting eventually uncovered over months of investigating was several instances at different labs that had been overseen at different institutions by Mark Tessie Levine, who was the superstar neuroscientist, really at the very top of his field. One, won the Gruber Prize for neuroscience, which is probably the most prestigious or second most prestigious award for neuroscientists. He had made a fortune hundreds of millions of dollars

and his time as a biotech executive. And what I discovered were these instances where researchers that he oversaw had falsified data in papers that he co-authored. And that at various points, when presented with opportunities to correct the scientific record, he did not avail himself of those. when it came to various different papers and studies, and ultimately one of the most important stories that I think I reported, was about a paper, a famous study that came out in 2009

that had claimed to identify the cause of Alzheimer's disease. Right. It was very exciting in Silicon Valley at the time because several, there were several issues. There was a lot of investments by Silicon Valley people in the area, including hiring big researchers and putting them in place in lots of hospitals at the time, I recall it very, very much. But what puts you on to it? And how did you, like, come to this?

Well, here's, you know, something I find really interesting, right? That anyone could have started where I started in 2022 back in 2015. Right. So I started, I began, I saw these anonymous comments on a forum called Pub Pier, where usually scientists scrutinize published research papers. And these had been there for seven years without follow-up. The papers hadn't been corrected, or attracted by the journals, you know, that this hadn't been reported by any newspaper. And Mark Tessie Levine in the interceding time in 2016. So the year after some of these concerns were first broached, that's when he becomes the Stanford president.

So he'd gone through the vetting process for the presidency, all while this had gone unreported. So your reporting resulted in nearly a dozen studies receiving post-publication notices. Now, Tessier Levine was forced to retract for influential papal from which he was the senior author. and he pledged to correct a fifth, and by the summer of 23, he resigned. But independent investigation conducted by an outside panel of scientists refuted the most serious claims in your reporting. Talk about the panel review. How do you respond to that? Did he not know it or sometimes well-known people put their names on things? Explain that for people how that works. Yeah, well, that's called gift authorship when a senior author puts their name on a paper, often because it'll help it get published when they had very little to do with the results. and that can allow them to take responsibility for something if it's successful and

disclaim responsibility should something else arise. But no. So the Stanford investigation was a fascinating story too, right, because it was announced in a statement that praised Mark Tessia Levine's quote integrity and honor. And that's when they said they would be investigating his scientific integrity. I discovered within days that one of the first people appointed to the five-person board, the five-person committee to investigate him, had an $18 million dollar investment in his company, right, Denali Therapeutics, that he had co-founded. Ultimately, what the panel found was that Mark Tessavine oversaw labs with a, quote, unusual frequency of manipulation of research data and or substandard scientific practices, end quote, and that he had,

quote, failed to decisively and forthrightly correct the scientific record on multiple occasions when presented with the opportunity. And so certainly, you know, many of the things that I reported, and most of the things that I reported were confirmed by this investigation. However, this Stanford investigation wasn't offering anonymity to people who were saying that they had potential disclosures to share with them. And that was a non-starter for people at Genentec who'd signed non-disclosure agreements to talk about the things that had happened in Marta Tussie Levin's labs. So there were some notable gaps there in the investigation too. So was he just not paying attention from your perspective? I've had a lot of people come up and they're like, well, he just wasn't paying attention.

I said, that's just as bad. I just, I don't know why you're trying to let him off in that regard. I've had arguments with people about it. I'm like, he had his name on them and therefore should have run them, even if he himself didn't change, they seem to be fixated on, well, he didn't change the, he didn't do the shoddy science essentially. And I was like, to be clear, yeah, no, no reporting is. Right.

Go ahead. No reporting has ever indicated that Mark Tess de Levine himself falsified data or ordered anyone to do so. And so that's important to note. The oversight thing is the main thing, right? and that's what the trustees end up faulting him for, mostly. But this Alzheimer's paper, right, is a good example, some degree, right? So in 2009, this study comes out to massive fanfare.

Every single publication is covering it, because finally, you know, it seems like we have a new theory for how Alzheimer's works after decades of failing to convert this amyloid hypothesis, is the reigning hypothesis, failing to convert that into a real treatment. What I discovered in my reporting was that even before the paper was published in 2009, Genentech had conducted internal experiments that showed that its central finding was at best unreliable, and that two years after this paper comes out, there's an internal review at the company, an internal review that results in Marc Tessi Levine being encouraged to attract the paper, which he declines to do so.

Now, seven people who had knowledge of that review at the time told me that the paper was based on fabricated data. Mark Tessi Levine denies that allegation, but he was encouraged to retract the paper at that point after its central data could not be reproduced, both internally and externally. And when I went to Mark Tessi Levine about this story, by the way, in 2023, his reaction was to send the lawyers after us to try to stop it coming out. Talk about that. How has he responded publicly? Mark Tessie Levine, while he was president, never once responded directly to a single one of my

comment requests. He has never sat for an interview about this and has declined to answer the vast majority of the more than 150 questions he's received in the course of this reporting. Instead, he hired a law firm and a PR firm and then another PR firm and another PR firm and another law firm to try to stop this reporting from coming out. And issuing at various points, by the way, statements which have later been shown to be false with evidence that has emerged into the public record. So you're a young student.

And, you know, obviously the investigator required sophisticated reporting, you developed a lot of sources, some of them off the record and work with experts to interpret highly technical research. So there was this law firm, which happened to John Kerry You around. Theranos, obviously. But one of the things they claimed was that your reporting was breathtakingly outrageous and replete with flagrant, seemingly deliberate distortions. That's a lot for an experience reporter to deal with, let alone a freshman on a school newspaper. How did you deal with this? Talk about the resources required to do this level of investigation because he did resign, right? He did resign, which to me was like, well, if he were so outrageous, why I resign?

Well, and actually, as I report for the first time in this book, he was ousted unanimously by his own board, right? This is not a voluntary resignation. And one of the things that the trustees faulted him for was his highly aggressive public posture and the stance that his lawyers took in regard to my reporting. You know, they hired Steve Neal, was the chair emeritus of Cooley. And so this is one of the most influential lawyers in the country. He's served as the chair of the META oversight board, served as the chair of the Hewlett Foundation, is on the board of NVIDIA. And this guy mentioned Elizabeth Holmes. Yeah, he had previously represented Elizabeth Holmes. He had previously represented Charles Keating Jr. That's how he made his fame in the 1990s. And this guy, shortly after my 18th birthday, began sending us letters, accusing us of all of these things and denying even aspects of the story that seemed fairly cut and dried, you know, that he would say this paper has been fully validated when no one has been able

to replicate it. And so it was this, you know, incredibly stressful. moment. I was very lucky that at the Stanford Daily, you know, we had been independent from the school at that point for exactly 50 years when I arrived. And so there was a volunteer team of advisors and lawyers who helped the daily on occasion and really stepped up, you know, to help me and my editor, Sam, as we were going through all of this. Less than a year after he resigned, he co-founded, though, an AI drug discovery startup and raised a billion dollars. It's one of the largest seed rounds in biotech history. What does that tell you about how power works in Stanford and Silicon Valley?

Yeah, the largest. Yeah, the largest. The largest he'd round in biotech history six months after he's ousted by his own board. You know, I think it's a fascinating kicker to the story. But I think the most... I mean, they all get refunded. They all get refunded. Travis Caledick got all of them, all of them. Well, and by the way, you know, two of the VCs who invested in Mark Mark Tessaly's new company were ones I had gotten to know over the course of freshman year in my other life as, you know, is teenager glimpsing the view of Silicon Valley from the world of coding. And both of them continued to be friendly even after funding Mark Tessie Levine and one of them offered to fund a company from me, too, if I wanted to start one. So they've just funded Mark Tessi Levine and they say, oh, we'll fund you too.

And that to me, you know, says a lot about Silicon Valley, right? where talent is everything, if you can figure out how to monetize it, it doesn't matter who it is or what it is. But it also is about how, right, Mark Tessaly Levine is not an isolated story. As the figurehead of the institution, he is necessarily a representative of some of its values. And the story that we saw there and the fight for accountability with papers, by the way, that should have been scrutinized years earlier and weren't, a lot of that same behavior that I was writing about, I began seeing with, peers, you know, that I arrived with as a freshman undergoing their training. Yes, exactly. Yeah, the mistakes were made thing. I called 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 offer me money. And I said, I'd rather poke my hat with a dry stick than take money from you. But no, but it was sort of like, why not? And I'm like, because you're terrible. Like, you know, it was really interesting, which made me laugh. I'm like, okay, well, I see. It was very, um, ethics were very shifty, as they say, if ethics were there at all. So let's take a step back and talk to some of the bigger themes you wrote, including the obsession with perfection, or at least the appearance of perfection. In the book, you highlight some of the recent fraudsters associated

with Stanford, including Theranos founder. We just mentioned Elizabeth Holmes and crypto entrepreneur, Doe Kwan. Talk about how the university does or doesn't take accountability for its failures and frauds in its orbit, because I think that's really the heart of it. They would call it mistakes were made. Eggs are broken. I've heard every excuse for just terrible behavior. You write that Stanford quote has made a fostian bargain with Silicon Valley, one that is enabled its meteoric assent and allowed for its corruption. And then they commercialize and corporatize differently from other elite universities like Yale, MIT, and Harvard. So talk a little bit about these two things, this accountability, and then they're making some bank off of it,

obviously. Well, look, it's not an accident that the Stanford inside Stanford exists at Stanford, right? This is a place that made its fortune because of Silicon Valley. This is a place, the guy on the faculty who was known by the moniker professor billionaire because he made $20 billion by investing in the students' companies. This is a place that has its own VC fund run by the university to cede students' new companies. And if you literally just take the cumulative value of the companies that have offices on campus,

somewhere north of $6 trillion. Right. So much ink has been spilled about the privileges of the Ivy League and the pipeline to Washington and Wall Street. Stanford is completely entangled in an even more pronounced way. That was an intentional strategy, right? that was intentional because that no boundaries relationship is what allows Stanford to profit. And as to how they address it, Stan Cohen actually is a good way to talk about this, right?

Stan Cohen, living legend in genetics, he was the first geneticist to transplant genes from one living organism to another. So he's on the Stanford faculty, and his patents on recominant DNA technology is what instigates the university to come up with its new patent licensing strategy, allowing them to profit off of basic discoveries made by the faculty. So by the last year that's active, it is 62% of the school's total patent revenue, right? So he has made them hundreds of millions of dollars. I write about during my freshman year the other side of the story, which is this court case in which he was levied with a $29 million judgment because he told investors he had this promising new drug target for Huntington's disease

that the company said internally that it would be a cure, not just a treatment. And he neglected to inform the investors that this drug had been permanently banned by the FDA in 1976 because it could kill people. So he loses this court case. Mistakes were made. Mistakes were made. Mistakes. Mistakes. Mistakes. Mistakes. Which he admits eventually after giving false testimony on the stand, by the way. And so I report this story freshman year and I go to the university and I say, hey, here's an active faculty member. Here's this court case. You know, like, is he going to face any repercussions? Is there any investigation at the school? You know, like, what is your reaction to this? And they say, we had nothing to do with this, we've never heard of this, we can't say anything, right?

And that was untrue. Stanford owned the IP at issue. They were subpoenaed in the court case. They fought the subpoena, and they ultimately provided documents and witnesses. Not only had he eventually admitted to potential ethics violations and how he ran the company, but he also admitted to potential violations of Stanford policies. He was cheating on his wife as she lay dying of cancer, and he appointed his paramour to both lucrative positions in his Stanford lab and at the company without disclosure. Right? And so to this day, Stanford cites Stan Cohen's research as an example of why the university's research apparatus is so valuable and important, and you can't have it both ways. No, you can't. Their interests are aligned, and that's the problem, is that there's no

accountability within when there are problems, or they gloss them over, as you noted. Now, interestingly, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Director of Stanford's Hoover Institution, told you that dealing with risk and so-called bad actors are essentially tradeoffs that come with having university with research enterprise and a big commercialization arm. Sounds like Condoleezza, I have to say. Well, she brought up, actually, the metaphor she brought up was from her own time as national security advisors. She said, sometimes you have to drone strike a village knowing that civilians will die because you have to kill a terrorist cell or people are going to die. And then she says she applies that to Stanford. That's patented Condoleezza. I've heard her say coming out of her

mouth herself and I'm like, oh, like, okay. And I get it in staycraft a little bit, just vaguely, sort of, not really. But those are the choices different people decide to make. But when it comes to a university, it's interesting that she extends that particular tragic metaphor, really. But is it possible for a university be ethical while still being quote an incubator with dorms, as serial entrepreneur and Stanford professor Stephen Blank described to you? And is Stanford's response really need different than other powerful institutions protecting their own interests? Make a comparison. Well, Steve Blank is a great character, right? So he, you know, is a creator and teacher of Lean Launchpad, the most famous entrepreneurship class at Stanford, probably the most famous

entrepreneurship class in the world. And what he tells me is that we've lost the moral compass for what we invest into, is what he says, that Stanford has become an incubator with dorms. And I think there's some interesting contrast between Justin, who teaches how to rule the world, which is known by the students in it, by the way, is rule. So to be in it, you call it rule. And what Justin teaches, right, is to extract value from people. And what Steve Blank teaches is to provide value to people. And so these are sort of two sides of the same coin. Both are theoretically offering a path to Silicon Valley success. And yet there's sort of an inverted message there. I find that fascinating, especially when I come to think about, you know, much of what Justin says isn't bad per se.

Right, learning to exceed the limits of your conceivable ambition, that's not a bad thing. Big ideas and big, big challenges are what have driven, you know, great things in Silicon Valley. And yet, when it is coupled to a culture that lacks accountability, that's how the problems emerge, right? That I watched these kids I arrived with, many of whom were my friends, you know, who were brilliant and idealistic, and I do believe genuinely committed to technology. I watched them learn, in their words, to play the game. You know, as one tells me to misrepresent herself to VCs, to raise money. You know, as one of my friends ends up doing, is faking a launch demo and gets fetid by all of Silicon Valley and put up in a mansion and being celebrated for technology she doesn't

have and didn't create, right? And so if you want to understand how the next Elizabeth Holmes is there, Sam Baitman-Frieds come to be, like, the egregious fraud starts with how people are being trained to act. And these are young people. These are not unsophisticated people, but they're young. Curious, what made it repugnant to you? I think the thing is that Stanford has gone beyond a few bad apples, right? The problem is this institutionalized and cultural insistence on perfection, right,

it leads to the sort of inevitable and repeated fudging of the boundaries. That, as one professor put it to me in the book, at Stanford, we have a culture of overclaiming the big results. We blow them up bigger than they would be elsewhere. And we take the bad stuff and we sweep it beneath the rug. And so that's what I'm asking Stanford to reckon with, right? I'm not saying that the good stuff is wrong. I'm saying that it's also another side of it, that the same incentives that reward this innovation

have also been set up to reward, you know, self-presentation, bordering on and frequently becoming fraud. Which is why they're like this as adults, which is really, you know, it does have, it's a through line. It's an absolute feeling. How has Stanford responded to your book? So far silence. But I should say, and I'm grateful that both President Levin and Provost Martinez took the time to be interviewed and face some tough questions over the course of the book.

You know, what John Levin would say is that, you know, he is the first, by the way, president of Stanford in over a century to have been an undergrad here before becoming president. And he says that, you know, the amount of pressure being placed on students to think about career from the second they step on campus is a problem. The question, of course, is what you do with that. And at one point in response to a question, he says, well, should we have a rule barring all VCs from campus? No, of course not. And you understand the position that he's in. And yet, and yet, these problems continue to persist. We'll be back in a minute.

So every episode we get a question from an outside expert, here's yours. Hey, Kara. Hey, Theo. This is Ryan Mack, a technology reporter at the New York Times. Theo, congratulations to finish your book. how to rule the world. I've been getting through it. And it's reminded me a lot about my own time at Stanford,

which I attended a few years before you did. And I want to stress a few. And so I have a question for you, which is, looking back at my time there, I attribute it with making me who I am today. I wouldn't be a journalist necessarily. I got my starting journalism at the Sanford Daily, like yourself. I met a lot of my friends there. I made a lot of connections as well that helped me to this day professionally.

And I've also grappled with, at the time when I was going there, I grappled with the amount of power that was at the university, the amount of wealth. I saw friends that chase iPhone apps and startups and all the things that you described in your book, probably which have accelerated more so to this day. And so knowing what you know about the university and how it treats students and the amount of power that's amassed there, my question is, if someone were to come to this day and ask you, hey, you know, should I go to Stanford University? Should I commit four years there? What would you tell them? Thanks. Great question. Yeah. Well, it's great to get a question from Ryan. He knows this ecosystem very well. He actually was the, I mentioned Professor billionaire earlier in passing. Ryan was the first person to report on Professor billionaire way back in the day. Not that longer. I shouldn't, you know, maybe 2011. Ryan, you're really old, but I'm older. So go ahead. It's a really interesting and tricky but important question, right? I have a very complicated relationship with Stanford. And yet, you know, I'm going to graduate two weeks from today that we're recording this. And I'm going to rock across that stage and be just as happy and grateful as anyone else, right? In many ways, this is a still a fabulous institution. You know, it's doing world-class research. It has amazing professors. A lot of students here really will change the world for the better. It's just that it's a lot more

fraught than it likes to let on, that if you're not careful, you quickly fall into what students call the tech whirlpool, that if you learn how to play the game in the way that it's been set up, frequently that leads to sort of deceptive business practices and to getting ahead at any cost. And what Ryan mentions, right, that you see everyone else doing it and it's sort of hard to resist. Like, that's a huge thing. You know, the guy who taught me how to shock out a beer freshman year dropped out. And six months after he started his AI company, it was valued over a billion dollars, right? And that's $80 million per head because there are so few employees.

And it's weird to be surrounded by all of that and also, you know, make your own decisions and figure out why you're getting into it. Yeah, and resist it. So fakery is encouraged in many ways. Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. So what would you tell? What would you say? I think it depends on the student. But for many people, I still do think that Stanford is a great institution. I also think that it's important to have some tough conversations, right? And frequently asked like why I do this, you know, that like, aren't you biting the hand that feeds

you or tearing down? And I really don't see it that way. That I think, because you love it. That's why. If you love an institution, you want it to be better. Right. Right. And, and, you know, I think it's important for our community to understand how it's really operating. And that the Stanford inside Stanford is sort of the ultimate manifestation of what has come home to Roost at the university in recent years. Right. And why we have what we have today in a lot of ways. The same attitude, you know, you can initially put it as a devil may care, but it's not caring at all. And one of the things that I think is very misjudging about this book or stuff I write was I love it. And I hate what you're doing to it. I hate what you're doing it. And I recall writing a column for the New York Times about how they should have an ethics course at Stanford and other places just for tech people, just to have ethics in history and stuff like that. And it is as if I told them, you know, I would like you to drink a bottle of Ebola or something like that. I was like, it's just an ethics course to be aware, like on some small level. It was interesting. Well, and then there's how students take it, right? I remember in my freshman year, a guy telling me that he was taking a business ethics course.

And he said, quote, well, we were all there to learn how they got caught. Right. Well, you can't raise kids. Let me say. That starts with the parents in many ways. But it also starts with the mythology, right, that Stanford is cultivated. Why are kids coming here? They're coming here because they can become billionaires, right, in many senses.

Or at least that's sort of the chosen image that the university has put forward. That's a fair point. Although I do think it goes back to parents. I think the way you are is because a little bit of your parents, the same thing with my kids, wouldn't do this, because it just wouldn't do this. There's a, there's a, there's something that they were raised with. It was, we'd like it to be fantastic, but not like this. So let's end talking about tech, AI and its impact on education. Chad GPT arrived on campus at the start of your freshman year in November of 2022 in your recent New York Times op-pad, which I like very much.

You wrote that cheating has become omnipresent and at the same time, many students view AIA as a job threat. This is in line, obviously, with more widespread concerns over how AIA will affect job market and potentially drive down wages. You have, of course, since you're graduating. Anyone who says, yay AI from Eric Schmidt to that lady gets booed down and Ronnie Chang gets cheered at Harvard. It's kind of weird to watch. But what do you make of the anti-tech sediment among young people broadly? Yeah. Well, AI is this great accelerant, right? It takes all these trends that have already been brimming beneath the surface and it supercharges them. And so at universities, one of the ways to understand why everyone is cheating now isn't just that the technology

has enabled it, but it's that students have now been made to feel as if the education part of their education is actually secondary to the outcome, whether or not you're going to come out of this with a high-paying job or a stable career or, you know, at Stanford, potentially significantly more riches than that. AI has also significantly increased this sort of stratification that we see, that the most valuable researchers are more valuable than ever before. right, but the entry-level positions are being drawn up ahead of people that Stanford last year for the first time in over two decades saw as computer science enrollment go down, go down, which is so fascinating, right? Because for some people, astronomical wealth is just around the

corner and all you have to do is put a wrapper on chat GPT and tell a VC you want some money. You know, if you have been tapped on the shoulder and you have this reputation as one of the people in the Stanford inside Stanford worth funding. And yet for most people, AI, as been destructive to their education. We're in this really fascinating interregnum where the technology has just suddenly leapfrogged from where it was, and yet higher education really has not, you know, gotten the memo yet to some degree that I keep hearing professors saying a variation of the same thing, which I just find so fascinating, where they say, oh, AI in classrooms is really bad. I'm so lucky that none of my students use it. And their students are using it. You know, that, that, that,

Yes, absolutely. And you'll see some of them say that publicly, too, by the way. Stanford professors who think that students are not cheating in their classrooms. And I'm here to say that, unfortunately, they are. So Google's CEO, interestingly, Sundar Pichai, is your commencement speaker. If you were interviewing for the Stanford Daily, what would you ask him? And what shouldn't he say? Well, I mean, if I were interviewing him for the Daily, I would ask him about politics, right?

All of these Silicon Valley billionaires have tried to. to make a new home for themselves in, you know, the current administration. I'd love to know a lot more about that in their approach there. But look, it's going to be interesting to hear what he says. Sundar Pichai is a classic Silicon Valley, you know, like Stanford's success story, who made it big. You know, he is operating in the vein of, you know, Larry and Sergey and his predecessor, Eric Schmidt, who just got booed down for talking about AI. We'll see if he makes the same choice in his own commencement speech. I'm sure has been reviewed by many dozens of lawyers and PR professionals. But this also, I think, says a little bit of something about the school, right? That 10 years ago today, Ken Burns gave the

commencement speech, or not today, 10 years ago next week, Ken Burns gave the commencement speech. And he gave, you know, a call to action about Donald Trump. And he was booed by some of the parents and then they were drowned out by cheers from the audience. In my four years at Stanford, the commencement speakers have been John McEnroe, Katie Ladeke, Melinda Gates, and now Sunderbuchar. That the school used to have a rule against athletes and used to try to avoid doing the billionaire CEO thing, you know, too frequently, and now seems to have chosen explicitly people who will stick to the company line. Right, right, right. Sooner at least appears cheapish sometimes, not in cheapish enough in my estimation.

I'll be interested to see how he manages this, because I wouldn't say he's the most stellar of speakers. But we'll see. You said that amid the many crisis is impacting higher education the past few years, universities have lost a sense of identity. That's what you're talking about here. Are you Ken Burns or where's the money, right, essentially? As you mentioned earlier, you interviewed a few of Stanford's past presidents. It's current one, Jonathan Levin. How do you view Stanford's identity? And if you were running it, what would you do to change it? Yeah. So it's been such a funny four years to be on college campuses, right? The first year was chat GPT, that came out, that changed everything. The second year was post-Oxober 7th. Those protests are the most, you know, divisive in decades on college campuses.

That our third year was an unprecedented federal assault on universities and research funding. And now our last year were graduating into a very uncertain job market. Right. And high school was COVID. Yay! Yeah. Well, exactly. Exactly. It's been an interesting four years. And so all of these might seem like sort of unconnected things that are all striking at the same time, and it's all sort of coincidental. Right. But all of these issues strike at the same central problem, which is that what do universities actually value? And can they articulate that? Right? Because the modern university has become a hedge fund controlling billions of dollars, you know, many times a giant hospital system, a research apparatus that is spinning out companies constantly and producing vaccines, a repository. A repository

of historical thought and knowledge, you know, a giant experiment for teenagers going about their coming of age. It's a professional sports league. It's a huge merchandising opportunity. It is all of those things. And even at the best of times, right, those coexist somewhat uneasily. Now, right, that we're seeing these pressures facing universities, I think that tension has come to a head. How do universities really define themselves? Is this Stanford a place to get an education are a place to get rich. Right? And answer to that conflict.

President Baker, what would you do? Well, I don't know, but I do think that the answer starts with transparency, right? It starts with honestly reckoning with these issues. You can't have a conversation about these things where it's only just about how great things are. Up into the right. Yeah. Up into the right. And I think this is something about Silicon Valley that I find frustrating that people are very quick

to cast every issue in terms of vice or virtue, as if, you know, Stanford and Silicon Valley are either all perfect and all great in these innovative, transformative places that nothing like has existed in the history of the universe or everything that produces, you know, anything technology-related is completely rotten

and should be thrown out. I mean, their heroes are like that. Mark Andreessen, you're either with us or against us. Peter Thiel, you're the Antichrist. If you don't, what? How do we get to Antichrist when you have normal criticisms about AI.

They are the most delicate of flowers. Including the Pope, by the way, has said concerns. But this is the thing, right? In his thing, because he's an adult, he said there's some great things, right? Exactly. He did not binary the thing,

which I thought was lost on them. Well, and this is the thing, right? We see a lot of issues emerging from Silicon Valley right now. And in different fields, in different sectors, but a lot of that comes from malice. sure, there are real psychopassant in Silicon Valley, and you have chronicled many of them, and there is an absurd texture to that there, and part of that is in the book. But there's also

this extraordinary silliness, right? That what happens when you give teenagers too much money to burn? You know, that actually it can be people who are, quote-unquote, well-intentioned, who end up doing, you know, the worst things. And so I want people to understand that texture, and I hope this view of Silicon Valley's training ground affords something of view of that. Yeah, yeah, they're broken people. There's a lot of broken people with a lot of money, and that's always a prescription for something.

Not good. You've won the POCA award, written the book, sold the film rights to producer Amy Pascali. You're doing pretty good for just graduating college. Kudos to your parents and yourself. When you look at the journalism industry, also in a lot of pain, but at the same time,

a lot of innovations happening in journalism, by the way. If you had the choice between working, I'm not going to say the New York Times, the New Yorker, but ProPublica or the Wall Street Journal, run by two great people, or let's just say Anthropic, working for Anthropic or slash, one that's a relatively acceptable tech company, perhaps. What would you do? What do you want to do? I know this is not like the most fashionable sentiment at the moment, but I really fell in love with journalism over the course of that freshman year. And I hope this book, in part, serves as sort of a love letter to it, that, you know, you can be the 17- and 18-year-old kid. And just by pursuing questions you want an answer to and pulling on the loose thread that's dangling there, you know, hopefully provide some value to your community and report things that should be known.

I never expected to be a journalist. And I don't know exactly what the future holds. I'm trying to get to graduation first. But I have to imagine that I'll continue to, in some way, work in journalism. If you were looking at journalism today, what do you think the greatest thing about it and the most problematic besides the business plan? Yeah. Well, the greatest thing is still a reporting, right? Actually, like, for all the noise, like, the reporting is the thing that matters most. And there's amazing reporting being done every single day by the press corps. You know, the American, like, accountability journalism

tradition, we take for granted, but it's a unique thing, you know, that it grows from the post-Sullivan tradition out of the Pentagon papers, you know, in the post-Watergate era. Like, that tradition of investigative accountability journalism is amazing to me. I'd say that one of the biggest challenges that I think newsroom leaders have been slow to adapt to is really people like me, people my age, that our news intake is incredibly decentralized and scattered, that we're not taking in text media in the same way. And it's this sort of ticking time bomb that our distribution methods are not reaching young people effectively with high quality nonpartisan news. I think that's a huge problem that needs to be worked on. And it's a distribution

problem. Yep, you're 100. You sound just like my son. I just had a discussion with him about it. But he's a heavy news. He loves substantive news, both of them, which is really, that's, I think, the lie that people have to make it stupid and short. I was like, no, you know, you just have to make it where they are. And in a way, it's not that different if you create compelling content. Anyway, whatever you do, I think you're going to do a great job. Theo, I love this book. I think it's great. I think my piece of advice was just focus on the reporting. I believe that's probably what I said, because that never goes away. That absolutely 100% cannot be displaced, cannot be disrupted, and asking questions is the only way forward. Anyway, terrific job, How to Rule the World by Theo Baker. I think perhaps maybe you will at some point, I hope. And thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me and for everything you do. Today's show was produced by Christian Castro-Roussel, Michelle Aloite, Catherine Millsop, Madeline LaPlante, Dube, and Kalin Lynch. Nishot Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Ruella Roof and Rosemary Ho. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan and our theme music is by Tracademics.

If you're already following the show, you're a high agency person who deserves pre-idea funding. If not, you're less of a builder and more of a wantrepreneur. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On With Caras Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday, with more.