While most college freshmen spend their years 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 Mark Tessier Levine.

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 and power at Stanford University. I spoke with him about that book recently.

Theo Baker, welcome to The News Hour. Thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me. 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? Well, you know, you're right that Stanford was a dream of mine. I fell in love with that place when I was seven. You know, 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. I arrived,

and very quickly I learned that things were not exactly as I thought. You write about this Stanford

within Stanford, one where students who have ambition and a potentially really good startup idea

get plucked, as you put it, right? VCs 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 VCs, venture capital funds, fund only one company for every hundred they review, not so for Stanford's undergraduate elite.

BC'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 at Stanford?

Well, Silicon Valley has been, you know, 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-unquote, want-depreneurs who just want to do it because they want to make their billions, their billions, or if they're going to be the so-called builders, those who actually have it in them. How is this different though from, say, like financial firms or consulting firms reaching deep into business schools or into the Ibees in the Northeast, mining for talent for people that they want to hire eventually? What's different about it? 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 VC fund

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