'How to Rule the World' exposes Stanford's complex relationship with Silicon Valley power

Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Amna Nawaz: While most college freshmen spend their year shopping around courses and picking their majors, Theo Baker had a bit more on his plate.

As a reporter for The Stanford Daily, Theo’s investigation into research misconduct brought about the resignation of Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Baker chronicles that investigation and a secretive culture of access, money and big tech influence on campus in his new book, “How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University.”

I spoke with him about that book recently.

Theo Baker, welcome to the “News Hour.” Thanks for being here.

Theo Baker, Author, “How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University”: Thank you for having me.

Amna Nawaz: So you arrive at Stanford in 2022 as an incoming freshman after dreaming of attending the school from a very young age, right? You write in the book, college is about reinvention. What did that mean to you? What did you imagine your college life would be when you got there?

Theo Baker: Well, you’re right that Stanford was a dream of mine. I fell in love with that place when I was 7.

I remember seeing this image of these kids who were wearing their Stanford T-shirts and their flip-flops and lounging in the shade of a palm tree leaning up against the self-driving car they just helped to build. I just thought this was the coolest place in the world. The future is being made by these amazing teenagers who are off in Northern California.

Amna Nawaz: Yes.

Theo Baker: I arrived and very quickly I learned that things were not exactly as I thought.

Amna Nawaz: You write about the Stanford within Stanford, one where students who have ambition and a potentially really good start-up idea get plucked, as you put it, right? V.C.s are flooding the campus, trying to pour money and time and resources into some of these students.

You wrote this that struck me. You said: “A study once determined that V.C.s,” venture capital funds, “fund only one company for every 100 they review. Not so for Stanford’s undergraduate elite. V.C.s seek out this network aggressively, even employing older students as talent spotters.”

Tell me about that. What does that do to the culture at a place like Stanford?

Theo Baker: Yes.

Silicon Valley has been, by some metrics, the greatest concentration and creation of wealth in human history. And so if this is a modern-day gold rush, the resource to mine is talent. And the earlier you can find it, the more you make your own career by getting in on the ground floor of the next Google or Instagram.

So these teenagers, the second they step on campus, are being assessed for whether or not they are the — quote — “wantepreneurs,” who just want to do it because they want to make their billions, or if they’re going to be the so-called builders, those who actually have it in them.

Amna Nawaz: How is this different, though, from, say, like financial firms or consulting firms reaching deep into business schools or into the Ivies in the Northeast…

Theo Baker: Yes.

Amna Nawaz: … mining for talent for people that they want to hire eventually?

Theo Baker: Yes.

Amna Nawaz: What’s different about it?

Theo Baker: So I think people are well aware of the privileges of the Ivy League and the pipeline to Washington and Wall Street.

Stanford is so much more entangled with Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley wouldn’t exist without Stanford. It was created at the Stanford Research Park. If you just take the value of the companies that have offices on Stanford land, it’s somewhere north of $6 trillion.

So it’s completely integrated. Stanford even has its own V.C. fund to seed students’ new companies. That said, what we’re seeing at Stanford really is the vanguard of a trend that sweeps higher education, right? It’s the sort of extreme and concentrated version.

Just as Silicon Valley trends tend to filter out into the rest of society, so too do the things at Stanford.

Amna Nawaz: And so you arrive there, you see this culture, you see what’s going on, and even though you’re turned off by it, it seems, you really do try to jump into it, embrace it, right? You want to be a part of it. You want to navigate it. Tell me why.

Theo Baker: Look, it’s an intoxicating system. And I hope that I capture that seduction in the book, because how can you as a teenager say no to this?

It’s ridiculous, right? It’s — imagine being the teenager, being offered the yacht parties and the slush funds. And it’s all just so absurd. I remember this Silicon Valley CEO who started a billion-dollar company reaching out to me cold in freshman year.

So he takes me out for brunch at the Rosewood, and he’s wining and dining me I guess. And he’s spoon-feeding his eight-month-old caviar as he confesses that his first ever contract was for Moammar Gadhafi. And it was just a ridiculous scene, but it also speaks to the sort of casualness of misdeed in this system, right, where actually it isn’t just that this is absurd.

It isn’t just that teenagers are being handed this excess and access that is ridiculous by any objective metric. It’s that it also inculcates a series of deceptive and fraudulent business practices that we see emerging all too frequently from this insider system.

Amna Nawaz: Well, you end up making a name for yourself down another path at Stanford, which is the fact that, despite both your parents being renowned journalists, you make very clear you don’t want to pursue journalism, and you kind of do it as a hobby at Stanford, it seems like.

But before the end of your freshman year, you report out a story uncovering research misconduct in scientific papers that were co-authored by the powerful Stanford president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, and that reporting ultimately leads to him being ousted from his post.

What was it about that story that made you want to chase it so hard?

Theo Baker: Well, it was definitely not at the end of the day the story that I expected to be reporting on in freshman year.

I arrived. I thought that the student paper would be something I did as a tribute to my grandfather, who passed away just before I arrived and really loved his time as a college reporter. And I discovered these image alterations in papers that had been co-authored by the Stanford president by looking at these forums that these comments had popped up on in 2015, so seven years earlier, that had never been followed up on.

So I began my reporting process there and spent the next 10 or 11 months really digging into Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s labs, ultimately establishing that there was a pattern of papers that emerged at different institutions in labs that he oversaw in which papers had emerged with falsified data and that, when issues were brought to his attention, in the judgment of the eventual Stanford investigation, he failed to decisively and forthrightly correct errors in his research.

Amna Nawaz: But, Theo, I want to be clear about. This wasn’t like you got a tip and you wrote a report. You chased this story. You got waved off this story by powerful people who knew him well, said, don’t do it. You were threatened with lawsuits.

That would scare off a lot of seasoned journalists. Why didn’t it scare you?

Theo Baker: Well, it’s not that I wasn’t scared. I mean — and this book I think makes very clear that I certainly was rattled at many points, that I didn’t always handle the pressure all that well personally.

But at the end of the day, it was very clear that, as a student journalist, you have no higher calling than reporting on your own administration. And I knew that research misconduct is an issue that goes overlooked far too frequently. No one else was doing this reporting.

And so it was up to us at the student paper to figure out whether or not there was a story here and what actually we needed to know about our president.

Amna Nawaz: You write, obviously, about the very high highs that you experience and then, like all college freshmen, anyone navigating the real world, the very low lows. And you write very honestly about a harrowing experience in which you essentially overdose on opiates that were prescribed to your grandfather.

Tell us about why you wanted to be so honest about that moment and what it’s like to reflect on that now.

Theo Baker: Yes. Yes, I mean, this is not an easy thing to write about, certainly my lowest life moment.

But I wanted to tell a three-dimensional story, right? I want to look at Stanford as an institution that has produced so much innovation and also fraud. I want to look at the students that I’m arriving with who have so much promise, and yet also learn how to cut corners.

And I didn’t feel that this would be an honest book if I didn’t apply that same standard to myself and show the true reality of what this story looks like, right, which is not always an easy, simple triumphalist narrative, right? Life is never quite so simple.

The whole book revolves around the appearance of perfection. That is the central theme of Stanford, that this school needs to appear perfect. And I certainly didn’t want to model that behavior myself.

Amna Nawaz: I should point out you are weeks away from graduating.

Theo Baker: I am.

Amna Nawaz: What’s next?

Theo Baker: I don’t know what’s next, but I will say that I’m going to walk across that stage and be just as happy and grateful as anyone. And Stanford is a place with deep issues. It has made this Faustian bargain with Silicon Valley that has allowed for its ascent, has made it into this incredible powerhouse of university and allowed for its corruption.

But at the same time, I view this reporting as, to me, an act of love, that I’m not doing this because I want to tear down the institution. I’m doing it because I think, if you love something, you want it to be better. And I think it’s time for us to honestly reckon with both the good stuff that Stanford is really good at promoting and the part that too often gets swept under the rug.

Amna Nawaz: The book is “How to Rule the World.” The author is Theo Baker.

Theo, thank you so much. Such a pleasure.

Theo Baker: Thank you.