Theo Baker spent four years investigating Stanford. Before he left, here’s what he found:

Most members of Stanford’s Class of 2026 are smart, ambitious, and poised for remarkable careers. Theo Baker already has one. In her first semester of college, Baker broke the story that forced Stanford President Mark Tessier-Lavigne to resign – work that earned her one of journalism’s highest honours, the George Polk Award. Warner Bros. and producer Amy Pascal have optioned the rights to that story. And on Tuesday, less than a month away from graduation, Baker publishes how to rule the World. A comprehensive account of his time at Stanford and the school’s often insidious relationship with the venture capital industry. Given the initial interest, is likely to becomeing a bestseller.

We were expecting it (we shared some related thoughts about it a few weeks ago). We spoke to Baker last Friday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You got into Stanford as a coder. How did you break one of the biggest stories in university history before your first year was over?

I came here thinking that technology and entrepreneurship were the path for me. I joined student hackathons, Tree Hacks; helped run it; and headed to the CS Weeder class. But my grandfather, with whom I was very close, passed away a few weeks before I arrived, and he talked about working on the student paper more than anyone I ever knew. So I joined the student paper to feel connected to them – it was supposed to be a hobby, a way to meet people and explore the campus.

Things progressed rapidly from there. My first few stories got more reception than we imagined; suggestions flooded in, and one of them led me to a pseudonymous website called PubPeer, where scientists analyse published research. There were comments dating back seven years at the time, suspecting that the papers co-written by Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, contained images that were duplicated, spliced ​​or otherwise irregular. I had been at Stanford for a month when that investigation began, and by the time I came back for my sophomore year, the president had resigned.

Were you alerted to the story?

This has happened several times even before you published your first article. People warned me that Tessier-Lavigne was a person of very high integrity and prestige – that I didn’t want to do it and that it would put me in a very uncomfortable position within the institution. Which was undoubtedly not wrong. Over the next 10 months, as the story expanded, the pushback intensified. Within 24 hours of my first story, the board of trustees announced its investigation. I immediately learned that one of the board members who oversee it had invested $18 million in Denali Therapeutics, the biotech company Tessier-Lavigne co-founded. And the statement announcing the investigation praised his “honesty and honour” – in an investigation that was theoretically examining his scientific integrity. Therefore, the investigation itself became the subject of reporting. During my first year, Tessier-Lavigne never responded directly to a request for comment. Eventually he started sending messages to the entire faculty – including all of my professors – calling my reporting “breathtakingly offensive and full of lies”. And then I started hearing more from his lawyers.

However, the book is really about something broader – what you might call Stanford inside Stanford. What does it mean?

Soon after I arrived, I realised there was this parallel reality – an inner world – where kids were identified as the next trillion-dollar startup founders, plucked from the crowd and placed in a world of access and resources. Yacht parties, dirty funds, and everyone messaging the same billionaires for advice on the weekend. According to some at the university, as Stanford has become more famous as the home of great startups, it has become harder to spot real talent. So many people come in thinking they might be the next billion-dollar dropout; there’s a whole system of hangers-on whose job it is to separate what they call “aspiring entrepreneurs” – people who are doing it because it feels good – from the so-called builders who actually have potential. This is a system designed to quickly locate teens with whom you can make money.

The book’s title, it turns out, isn’t just a metaphor.

No, that’s actually the name of a so-called secret class at Stanford, taught by Silicon Valley CEOs. It’s not really a class. It’s like Skull and Bones for the aspiring tech elite. People aren’t getting course credit, but there are lectures, discussions, and guest speakers held once a week in the winter quarter on campus. When I arrived, it was a status symbol, even knowing it existed; it made you “rule-adjacent,” as one person told me.

What this guy Justin was trying to do – as the students in the class told me – was the same thing everyone is trying to do: Connect and network with teens who might be useful to you, the youth. Only he figured out how to hide himself in this secret and bring these talented, promising children to himself, because he was promising them how to rule the world. He promised that Stanford’s brightest students would gather in this 12-person seminar, and the only way to learn these secrets is to go through them. This case is a very poignant example of how this system of talent extraction has manifested in strange ways.

What does that talent-scouting system actually look like on the ground?

There are VCs who hire old Stanford upperclassmen to identify new people as soon as they arrive on campus. This has been deliberately kept vague. People have told me that it’s seen as an anti-sign to join one of the big entrepreneurship clubs, because it makes it seem like you’re doing it for the title – as opposed to being in one of the secret feeder groups where true builders gather. But as much real talent as there is among kids in this world, the primary qualification is who you know – whether you’re being shouldered. There was a CEO who cold-emailed me in the New Year and asked to get to know me. The first time we went out to dinner, we went to the Rosewood Hotel, and he was sitting there spoon-feeding his eight-month-old caviar as he casually mentioned that his first contract was for Muammar Gaddafi. That casualness is something I find attractive. And this whole system helps a lot to explain how big frauds develop. It starts with placing enormous amounts of authority, money, and power in the hands of teenagers without adequate safeguards in case something goes wrong.

You arrived right when FTX was collapsing and ChatGPT launched. What was it like when seen up close?

The timing was almost absurd. We arrived at the tail end of crypto mania – when we showed up, the perception was that crypto is how you’re going to make your fortune. The SBF begins its descent on 2 November. ChatGPT will arrive on November 30th. And immediately everything changes. I remember being at a dinner shortly after ChatGPT was released, sitting with one of the biggest crypto boosters on campus, and he was telling me that SBF was “directly correct” – that was the phrase – but everyone was trying to figure out how to avoid validity. And soon, many of them realised that AI was a new trend that they could get on board with. He told me that they could reach the same heights as SBF by taking advantage of the latest new thing, preferably without the downside. Silicon Valley operates in cycles, but it’s especially fascinating to see it up close because its scale is immeasurable.

Do you think your peers are leaning toward entrepreneurship partly out of concern about the job market?

Absolutely. The race to AI has turned talent into a resource in this modern-day gold rush – the most valuable researchers and founders are more valuable than ever, but entry-level positions are beginning to disappear. There is a common belief among people in this world that it is easier to raise money for a startup right now than it is to get an internship. Which is remarkable, isn’t it? Entrepreneurship is now an expected path, no longer the non-conformist outlier it once was. This changes its nature completely.

What advice would you give a 17-year-old going to Stanford or any elite university today?

You must be aware that you act because you believe it is right, not just because it is easy. It’s effortless to get carried away by trends and technological whirlwinds and find yourself doomed to a job you don’t really want because you followed the expected path. Following the expected path is much less interesting than going out and doing something for yourself. I admire the best founders who emerge from this space because they feel empowered to truly make a difference. You just have to be careful that you’re doing it for the right reasons – and not just because you want to get rich.