Stanford freshmen want to rule the world. . . you will probably read this book and try even more

Theo Baker is graduating from Stanford this spring with something many adults don’t have: a book deal, a George Polk Award he received for his investigative reporting as a student reporter, and a leading account of one of the world’s most beloved institutions.

His future How to Rule the World: Powerful Education at Stanford University released on Friday at Atlantic and based on that alone, I can’t wait to see the rest. The only question to ask is the one that Baker himself is probably closest to answering, namely: Can a book like this make a difference? Or does the spotlight, as it often seems, send many readers running around the place?

The synonym that always comes to me is “Social Networking.” Aaron Sorkin wrote a film that was in many ways a case of the certain sociopathy that Silicon Valley tends to reward. What it seemed to do was make a generation of young people want to be Mark Zuckerberg. The cautionary tale became a recruitment video. The story of the boy who – in the movie, at least – burned his best friend on the way to the millions did not discourage ambition; it continued to admire it.

Judging by the citations, Baker’s picture of Stanford is very granular. He talks to hundreds of people to fully describe the “Stanford within Stanford,” an invitation-only world where capitalists wine and dine 18-year-olds, where hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of “pre-idea funding” is awarded to students before they have a single original thought, and where the line between counseling and rape is almost impossible. Steve Blank, who teaches the school’s popular startup course, tells Baker that “Stanford is an incubator with dormitories,” which is not intended as a compliment.

What is new is not that this pressure exists but that it has been fully internalized. There was a time, maybe 10, maybe 15 years ago, when Stanford students felt the weight of Silicon Valley expectations pressing them out. Now, many of them come to campus already expecting to, in fact, start, raise money, get rich.

I think of a friend — I’ll call him D — who left Stanford a few years ago, during his first two years, to launch a startup. He was not yet twelve. The words “I’m thinking of taking a break” were barely out of his mouth before the university, according to its own account, gave him its happy blessing to dive fully into commencement. Stanford is no longer fighting this, if ever. A move like his is an expected result.

DD is now in her 20s. His company raised what would register in any normal situation as a staggering sum of money. He probably knows more about cap charts, investor psychology, and stock market equity than most people learn in a decade of casual work. By all the metrics the Valley uses, it is a success story. But he also doesn’t see his family (no time), he’s never dated (no time), and the company, as it continues to grow, doesn’t seem willing to give him that kind of balance anytime soon. He is already behind, in a meaningful sense, in his own life.

This part is the part Baker shows without being fully occupied, perhaps because he is still in it himself. The costs of this system are not simply distributed through fraud – although Baker is specific about this, describing it as pervasive and ineffective. The cost is also very personal: the relationship did not exist, they themselves are not developed, the normal texture of adults sold for a billion-dollar vision, which, according to statistics, is almost impossible. “100% of entrepreneurs think they’re opinion makers,” Blank tells Baker. “The data says 99% don’t exist.”

What happens to the 99% in 30 years? In 40 years? These are not the questions Silicon Valley is set out to answer, and certainly not the questions Stanford will begin to ask.

Baker also brings up something that Sam Altman said so well. Altman – the CEO of OpenAI, former head of Y Combinator, the kind of person these students aspire to be – tells Baker that the VC dinner circuit has become an “anti-signal” for people who really know what talent looks like. Students doing rounds, doing the founder-ness of rooms full of investors, tend not to be real builders. The real builders, most likely, are somewhere else, building things. The workings of ambition and the object itself are increasingly difficult to separate, and a system that was clearly designed to find intelligence has become very good at finding people who are good at appearing to be intellectuals.

How to Rule the World sounds like a perfect book for this time. But there is some irony in the strong possibility that this well-thought-out book about Stanford’s relationship with power and money will be celebrated by the same class of people who criticize it, and – if it does well (it’s already been optioned for a film) – be used as further evidence that Stanford produces not just inventors and fraudsters but important writers and journalists, too.