How to Rule the World

I read Theo Baker’s How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University in the last 24 hours. I was entranced, horrified, and amused, often on the same page. Baker arrived at Stanford as a seventeen-year-old freshman in 2022. By the end of his first year, his reporting in the Stanford Daily had forced the resignation of the university’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, over research misconduct. He became the youngest person ever to win the George Polk Award. He kept reporting. It’s a memoir of a freshman year spent inside Stanford’s VC pipeline. The “Stanford-within-Stanford” Baker describes - a private club of students being courted by VCs from the first week of school - is something I’ve watched evolve from the outside for years. “Stanford is an incubator with dorms,” one of the VCs tells him. Reading it from the inside is fascinating. It’s a study in how powerful people respond to inconvenient reporting. The instinct is to dismiss, to delay, to discredit, and to…