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Before Theo Baker graduates from Stanford University next month, he will have already published his first book.
“How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University,” which was released on May 19, is based on Baker’s investigative reporting for student newspaper The Stanford Daily during his freshman year uncovering alleged misconduct in research that led to Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne stepping down. For that work, Baker became the youngest recipient of the prestigious George Polk Award for journalism. He has published work in The Atlantic, New York magazine and The New York Times, including a recent essay on fraud and student use of AI.
That’s a lot of rare early-career milestones, but as Baker’s book describes, Stanford is a place where extraordinary things happen, for good and for ill.
So much about a “typical” college experience gets upended just in the book’s first chapter, capturing Baker’s first days on campus as a freshman in 2022.
Baker introduces us to a subset of insider students with unfettered access to money and power, backed by adult “hangers-on” looking to snap up the most talented, most ambitious and youngest students who may become the next Sam Altman, or Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
But Baker wasn’t investigating these insiders; he was invited to join them. As the child of veteran journalists Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, initially he wasn’t tempted to take up his parents’ work — he writes that he joined The Stanford Daily “as a hobby” — and instead aimed to carve his own path by studying computer science.
It was that track that led him into the “Stanford Inside Stanford,” where venture capitalists wine and dine Stanford’s newest arrivals who show promise in tech skills — and lots of ambition. Throughout his freshman year, Baker took part in Tree Hacks, a hackathon and entrepreneurial group with serious insider clout and money.
The free-flowing booze and party atmosphere in such groups was otherwise deemed forbidden at the time by stringent campus rules that came to be known as Stanford’s “War on Fun.”
The repercussions of the War on Fun became Baker’s first story for The Stanford Daily.
As his articles got noticed, Baker began to receive tips, including a suggestion to look closely at some images in research papers on which then-Stanford president Tessier-Lavigne was listed as an author, including some, it would turn out, tied to what had once been touted as groundbreaking Alzheimer’s research with the biotech firm Genentech. It was a line of inquiry that eventually led to Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation.
Throughout “How to Rule the World,” Baker identifies how a longtime symbiotic relationship between the university and Silicon Valley has mutated into a secretive, competitive environment driven by profit — one where it becomes increasingly obvious how fraud scandals involving Stanford alums like Elizabeth Holmes or those in Stanford’s orbit, such as Sam Bankman-Fried, were inevitable.
Baker will discuss “How to Rule the World” at Kepler’s Books on May 29. We spoke with him ahead of the book’s publication.
It was announced at the time of Baker’s book deal in 2023 that Warner Bros. bought the film rights to “How to Rule the World.” Baker said he wasn’t sure about any progress on a film adaptation, and casting-wise, he demurred on who might play a 17-year-old version of himself. But he did say, perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, that he pictures Ralph Fiennes as a good fit to play Tessier-Lavigne.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Embarcadero Media: You’ve been working on “How to Rule the World” for most of your time at Stanford. What was it like to revisit your reporting, to look back on it without the high-stress situations in which you originally had to work?
Baker: I think every reporter is grateful to have time to go more deeply into stories.
Certainly, I had a great time reporting this book. I did over 250 interviews over the course of reporting the book, with lots of people at every stage, from freshmen up to the accomplished billionaire CEOs. I think I had a sense of by the end of freshman year of how this place worked, and certainly over the course of reporting I think I learned a lot more, so I really enjoyed that process.
I’m also grateful, by the way, that three Stanford presidents and three Stanford provosts agreed to be interviewed for this book and provided their perspective, which was certainly interesting for me to try to get a better understanding of how all of this came to be.
Embarcadero Media: What did you learn about yourself in writing the book?
Baker: A lot. The book gets very personal at times, and it’s not always comfortable, obviously, to have a 17- and 18-year-old version of yourself frozen on the page for all time, but I think it was really a special thing to be able to dedicate the amount of time that I did to this book, that I was able to really dig in, and to try to ask big questions and figure things out, and realize, in fact, that I wasn’t just working on a single story about a single phenomenon — that what I was writing about was this whole place and this system, and that all of it ends up coming back and influencing every other aspect. That part was really, really cool for me to be able to see how all these pieces fit together to create the sort of broader ecosystem.
Embarcadero Media: You were able to keep one foot in the “Stanford Inside Stanford” world for a while, even as your reporting was really starting to rock the boat. How did you navigate interactions, like with your fellow saplings (first-year students) at Tree Hacks, for example?
Baker: I still have a deep well of affection for Tree Hacks, while I think also recognizing that there are issues with this construction, and I think that’s actually an attitude shared by a lot of people who are in the system. It’s just that usually you’re not writing about it.
I would say that what I hope this book does is provide a portrait of a very particular and peculiar moment in time at an institution that has come to wield so much influence.
I still love technology. I just started using the line that “tech is awesome, fraud is bad.” If you want to summarize your philosophy that’s a pretty succinct way to do it, but, of course I think it’s really important to recognize the second-order effects, and the reason that the sort of irresponsible construction of the system so frequently manifests itself in fraud, in deceitful practices, in ways that end up harming everyone involved, both those who are in Silicon Valley and people thousands of miles away with no idea that kids at Stanford are the ones who have an influence over how their technology is constructed.
Embarcadero Media: You write that you stayed at Stanford because you love it. Why do you love Stanford?
Baker: I fell in love with Stanford when I was 7 years old, so really the greater part of my life I have been in love with the school. I remember just seeing this image of teenagers lounging in their Stanford T-shirts and their shorts and their flip-flops in the shade of a palm tree, like resting up against a self-driving car. I was like, “Oh my god, this place is so cool, and the future is being made out here, and not only that, people seem to be having fun, and it looks like this amazing, incredible environment.” That part of Stanford still does exist.
I’m not here to write a polemical saying “Tear everything down.” My goal is to show that for the glossy portrait that Stanford works very, very hard to curate for itself, for all of the cultural insistence on perfection and appearance, there’s a darker side of this, too. The greatest things about Stanford have come with a cost, and one that is all too frequently ignored or covered up.
Embarcadero Media: What will you miss most about Stanford?
Baker: Well, college is a weird place right now and I think people are very aware of that, but it’s still an awesome thing to get to spend four years surrounded by people your age, many of whom are pursuing very different kinds of interesting careers. There’s a stimulation to it that is really phenomenal, and I’ve had such incredible experiences with my friends and professors, who have stood up for me and supported me as things have been at times challenging.
Embarcadero Media: You grew up as the son of two journalists. How did that experience shape your own reporting?
Baker: You obviously read about this in the book that I wanted to do something completely different, but I think I realized very quickly that journalism is almost more than anything else a temperament, right? When you see a thread, you want to pull on it and figure out what’s at the end. You’re not going to sit around and wait for someone else to answer the question for you; you’re going to get off your ass and dig for it.
I just found the ability to report and write stories that I found interesting, and that I thought had value in my community, irresistible. I realized it’s just an extraordinary thing to be able to do for your community, especially at a place like Stanford, where there are so many stories just waiting to be reported that need someone to go out and find and bring to the public.
Embarcadero Media: What are your plans post-graduation?
Baker: Honestly, I haven’t gotten that far yet. It’s been such a mad dash to try to get the book out and still graduate in four years, and to do everything else that I gotta get to graduation first, and then I’ll figure it out.
Embarcadero Media: Journalism is often under attack in the U.S. and abroad, and you knew before you started with The Daily that it can be a very grueling job. What’s your advice to young people who are interested in becoming journalists?
Baker: I would say just try it, no matter who you are. If you’re going to college, being on a student paper is a really fun experience, for the most part. Most importantly, it exposes you to different perspectives, it forces you to see and interact with things you might not otherwise see.
I think that everyone can benefit from a little bit of time understanding how journalism works, especially as journalism, as you say, has come under such furious assaults in recent years. So much of that is driven by the fact that people don’t know how journalists work or who they are.
Everyone would benefit from touching journalism a little bit more. There’s a reason that people fall in love with it.
Theo Baker discusses “How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University” with Angie Coiro May 29, 6 p.m., at Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park. Tickets are $48.24 general admission with book; $21.99 general admission without book; $11.49 student/low-income without book. keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/theo-baker
