STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Many people in Washington, D.C., know the journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Susan writes for The New Yorker. Her husband, Peter, is a White House correspondent for The New York Times. They sent their son, Theo Baker, to Stanford University a few years ago. He joined the school paper and broke a story that forced the university president to resign.
THEO BAKER: Marc Tessier-Lavigne, I uncovered over the course of my reporting, had overseen several labs at different institutions in which researchers under his purview falsified results.
INSKEEP: Theo Baker was suddenly famous, with all the upsides and downsides for a teenager. Baker had gone to Stanford to study tech, not journalism. Stanford is in Silicon Valley, intimately connected with tech firms and billionaires, and Theo Baker began to sense another story.
BAKER: I was only a few weeks in when I ended up at a mansion party in the hills, and it was funded by a slush fund that funneled cash into the pockets of teenagers.
INSKEEP: Tech executives and venture capitalists were competing to be the first to invest in talented teenagers. Baker is now 22 and expects to graduate in two weeks and has written a book about what he learned in college. It's called "How To Rule The World."
BAKER: There was a sort of Stanford inside Stanford, where the most elite students who are going to found the trillion-dollar companies are dragged into this alternate reality and foisted with excess and access and learn how to cut corners.
INSKEEP: Why would wealthy people be giving money to teenagers? What's going on?
BAKER: So this is a gold rush. You know, people are trying to mine talent. That's the resource. And so these kids who are coming into Stanford - you know, the very freshest, the very newest ones - are the pure, unadulterated talent to mine.
INSKEEP: And it's not the students reaching out for the opportunity, although they would like to. It's people from the outside reaching into them?
BAKER: Well, certainly, there are a lot of student strivers, but there's an entirely integrated system to try to exploit and extract talent as early as it arrives. There are students who are upperclassmen who are employed as talent scouts by venture capital firms to try to seek out the freshmen the second they arrive.
INSKEEP: The title of the book is "How To Rule The World." Where does that come from?
BAKER: There's a secret class at Stanford. Twelve students a year, in the winter quarter, meets once a week on Stanford's campus and it's called How to Rule the World. You have to be tapped on the shoulder by someone in the class to be worthy of an interview from the Silicon Valley CEO, who is its self-styled professor.
INSKEEP: Theo Baker was invited for an interview with the teacher, Justin. Baker's book uses only first names, but the professor is identified in other sources as Justin Lewis-Weber, a Silicon Valley CEO.
You quote him as saying, the only people who really understand the world are the literal children of billionaires.
BAKER: Yes.
INSKEEP: What does that even mean?
BAKER: It's a great question. But that's the thing - there's a lot of hocus-pocus involved here. Justin doesn't really know how to rule the world. I mean, he can teach you something. He can teach you, as he frequently tells his students, to exceed the limits of your conceivable ambition. But what it really is is that he wants to network with kids who he expects to be very successful.
INSKEEP: Is this a little bit like sports recruiting? They're coaches, they're grown-ups, they're going out to find talented teenagers who might be worth millions to them. This is very similar.
BAKER: Absolutely. Except these kids could be worth billions.
INSKEEP: Somebody might ask, what's wrong with that? - if young people get an opportunity and get rich very quickly for not doing very much, possibly.
BAKER: You know, I think I generally try to say - right? - tech is awesome and fraud is bad. And it's one thing to have a system that is designed to inculcate innovation. It's another to have one that enables cut corners to get ahead. There is not a system of accountability that has been set up to check bad behavior. And because the money is being spent so irresponsibly and because the system is designed for these teenagers to make very, very big promises, to be foisted with something called pre-idea funding was the newest new thing when I arrived.
INSKEEP: Pre-idea funding?
BAKER: Pre-idea funding.
INSKEEP: Describe, please.
BAKER: Before you even have the glimmer of a concept of a company, if you are one of these most promising teenagers, a VC might hand you hundreds of thousands of dollars, even more than a million dollars, and say, hey, when you make a company with this, call me.
INSKEEP: I want people to know, if they don't, your parents are very well-known journalists, both of them. What happens when you are the son of well-known journalists...
BAKER: (Laughter).
INSKEEP: ...And you go into journalism at the student paper...
BAKER: (Laughter).
INSKEEP: ...And you break what turns out to be a national story? What's it like after that?
BAKER: Well, yeah, I never wanted to be a journalist because I knew I could never do it like they do. But I showed up a few weeks after my grandfather had died was when I started Stanford, and I've never, ever heard anyone talk about student journalism more. He wasn't a journalist, but he loved his time on the college paper. And so I showed up and I thought I would do it as a way to feel close to him. And within a few months, everything had sort of spiraled from there.
INSKEEP: You tell a story in the book that begins with a butt-dial.
BAKER: (Laughter) Yeah. There was this guy who pretended that he was my friend, and he butt-dialed me one night from the bar, I think it was, where he and someone else were talking about how noxious I was and how, quote-unquote, "nauseating" they found me. And that was a really eye-opening moment that, you know, I had to be careful in every interaction because people weren't being honest with me about how they felt.
INSKEEP: What did you do after that?
BAKER: I didn't necessarily react in the best way in freshman year, facing all the pressure that I did. I certainly crumbled at various points.
INSKEEP: You describe yourself taking opioids after this butt-dial incident.
BAKER: Yes, I made the incredibly poor decision. This was soon after my second grandfather - my pappoosie (ph) - had passed away, and I was overdosing on the floor of my dorm room with my friends just on the other side of the door, having no idea what was happening. But, thankfully, I made it out. And at Stanford, you know, there's this thing that people call duck syndrome, where, you know, like a duck, you appear to be gliding above the surface, presenting effortless achievement, but beneath the surface, your legs are paddling desperately just to keep afloat. And it was very important for me in this book not to do that, to sort of puncture this myth of effortless perfection because really the appearance of perfection is the central theme of this book. That is Stanford. This is a place that is culturally insistent on appearance.
INSKEEP: Now you're close to graduation. You planning to be a journalist?
BAKER: I love the ability to look for a story and, you know, that my efforts will directly determine whether or not something is known. So I'm sure that in some way or another, that's in my future.
INSKEEP: Theo Baker, it's a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much.
BAKER: Thank you so much for having me.
INSKEEP: The book is called "How To Rule The World."
(SOUNDBITE OF TEARS FOR FEARS' "EVERYBODY WANTS TO RULE THE WORLD")
INSKEEP: We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
(SOUNDBITE OF TEARS FOR FEARS' "EVERYBODY WANTS TO RULE THE WORLD") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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