Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley

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19:46Kara Swisher:You moved into journalism. Like, you moved very quickly, and your investigation into the university's president at the time, Mark Tessier Levine. He's a prominent neuroscientist, researcher, and biotech executive, very well known. You joined the school newspaper, as you said, as a hobby, but you found yourself sucked into it. You were thinking of going this tech route, wining and dining with caviar feeding baby entrepreneurs, but you published your first story on him in November of 2022. Talk about how the investigation began. And for people who don't know the story, maybe don't remember it any more than the broad outlines.

20:23Kara Swisher:Give us a summary of what you found. So what my reporting eventually, you know, uncovered over months of investigating was several instances at different labs that had been overseen at different institutions by Mark Tessier-Levine, who was the superstar neuroscientist, really at the very top of his field. Won the Gruber Prize for Neuroscience, which is probably the most prestigious or second most prestigious award for neuroscientists. He had made a fortune, hundreds of millions of dollars in his time as a biotech executive. And what I discovered were these instances where researchers that he oversaw had falsified data in papers that he co-authored, and that at various points when presented with opportunities to correct the scientific record, he did not avail himself of those.

21:10You know, when it came to various different papers and studies, and ultimately one of the most important stories that I think I reported, was about a paper, a famous study that came out in 2009 that had claimed to identify the cause of Alzheimer's disease.

21:25Kara Swisher:Right. It was very exciting in Silicon Valley at the time because there were several issues. There was a lot of investments by Silicon Valley people in the area, including hiring big researchers and putting them in place in lots of hospitals at the time. I recall it very much. But what put you onto it? And how did you like, come to this? Well, here's, you know, something I find really interesting, right? That anyone could have started where I started in 2022, back in 2015. Right? So I started, I began, I saw these anonymous comments on a forum called PubPeer, where usually scientists scrutinize published research papers.

22:03And these had been there for seven years without follow up. The papers hadn't been corrected, or attracted by the journals, you know, that this hadn't been reported by any newspaper, and Mark Tessier-Levine in the interceding time in 2016. So the year after some of these concerns were first broached, that's when he becomes the Stanford president. So he'd gone through the vetting process for the presidency, all while this had gone unreported.

22:28Kara Swisher:So your reporting resulted in nearly a dozen studies receiving post-publication notices. Now, Tessier-Levine was forced to retract four influential papers from which he was the senior author, and he pledged to correct a fifth, and by the summer of 2023, he resigned. But independent investigation conducted by an outside panel of scientists refuted the most serious claims in your reporting. Talk about the panel review. How do you respond to that? Did he not know it? Or sometimes well-known people put their names on things. Explain that for people how that works. Yeah. Well, that's called gift authorship.

23:00When a senior author puts their name on a paper, often because it'll help it get published, when they have very little to do with the results And that can allow them to take responsibility for something if it's successful and disclaim responsibility should something else arise. But no. So the Stanford investigation was a fascinating story too, right? Because it was announced in a statement that praised Mark Tessier-Levigne's, quote, integrity and honor. And that's when they said they would be investigating his scientific integrity. I discovered within days that one of the first people appointed to the five-person board, the five-person committee to investigate him, had an$18 million investment in his company, right, Denali Therapeutics, that he had co-founded.

23:39Ultimately, what the panel found was that Mark Tessele-Levine oversaw labs with a, quote, unusual frequency of manipulation of research data and or substandard scientific practices, end quote, and that he had, quote, failed to decisively and forthrightly correct the scientific record on multiple occasions when presented with the opportunity. And so certainly, you know, many of the things that I reported and most of the things that I reported were confirmed by this investigation. However, this Stanford investigation wasn't offering anonymity to people who were saying that they had potential disclosures to share with them.

24:15And that was a non-starter for people at Genentech who'd signed non-disclosure agreements to talk about the things that had happened in Mark Tessie Levine's labs. So there were some notable gaps there in the investigation too.

24:25Kara Swisher:So was he just not paying attention from your perspective? I've had a lot of people come at me and they're like, well, he just wasn't paying attention. I said, that's just as bad. I just, I don't know why you're trying to let him off in that regard. I've had arguments with people about it. I'm like, he had his name on them and therefore should have run them. Even if he himself didn't change, they seem to be fixated on, well, he didn't change the, he didn't do the shoddy science essentially. And I was like, I don't care. Right. Go ahead. No reporting has ever indicated that Mark Tessie Levine himself falsified data or ordered anyone to do so.

24:58And so that's important to note. The oversight thing is the main thing, right? And that's what the trustees end up faulting him for, mostly. But this Alzheimer's paper, right, is a good example to some degree, right? So in 2009, this study comes out to massive fanfare. Every single publication is covering it because finally, you know, it seems like we have a new theory for how Alzheimer's works after decades of failing to convert this amyloid hypothesis, is the reigning hypothesis, failing to convert that into a real treatment. What I discovered in my reporting was that even before the paper was published in 2009, Genentech had conducted internal experiments that showed that its central finding was at best unreliable.

25:39And that two years after this paper comes out, there's an internal review at the company. An internal review that results in Mark Tessay-Levine being encouraged to retract the paper, which he declines to do so. Now, seven people who had knowledge of that review at the time told me that the paper was based on fabricated data. Mark Tessie Levine denies that allegation, but he was encouraged to retract the paper at that point after its central data could not be reproduced, both internally and externally. And when I went to Mark Tessie Levine about this story, by the way, in 2023, his reaction was to send the lawyers after us to try to stop it coming out.

26:14Kara Swisher:Talk about that. How has he responded publicly? Mark Tessie Levine, while he was president, never once responded directly to a single one of my comment requests. He has never sat for an interview about this and has declined to answer the vast majority of the more than 150 questions he's received in the course of this reporting. Instead, he hired a law firm and a PR firm and then another PR firm and another PR firm and another law firm to try to stop this reporting from coming out. And issuing at various points, by the way, statements which have later been shown to be false with evidence as has emerged into the public record.

26:46Kara Swisher:So you're a young student, and, you know, obviously, the investigator required sophisticated reporting. You developed a lot of sources, some of them off the record, and work with experts to interpret highly technical research. So there was this law firm, which happened to John Carrey Yu around Theranos, obviously. But one of the things they claimed was that your reporting was breathtakingly outrageous and replete with flagrant, seemingly deliberate distortions. That's a lot for an experienced reporter to deal with, let alone a freshman on a school newspaper. How did you deal with this? Talk about the resources required to do this level of investigation.

27:19Kara Swisher:Because he did resign, right? He did resign, which to me was like, well, if you were so outrageous, why resign? Well, and actually, as I report for the first time in this book, he was ousted unanimously by his own board, right? This is not a voluntary resignation. And one of the things that the trustees faulted him for was his highly aggressive public posture, and the stance that his lawyers took in regard to my reporting. You know, they hired Steve Neal, who was the chair emeritus of Cooley. And so this is one of the most influential lawyers in the country. He's served as the chair of the Meta Oversight Board, served as the chair of the Hewlett Foundation, is on the board of NVIDIA.

27:57You know, and this guy mentioned Elizabeth Holmes. Yeah, he had previously represented Elizabeth Holmes. He had previously represented Charles Keating Jr. That's how he made his fame in the 1990s. And this guy, shortly after my 18th birthday, began sending us letters, accusing us of all these things and denying even aspects of the story that seemed fairly cut and dried, you know, that he would say this paper has been fully validated when no one has been able to replicate it. And so it was this, you know, incredibly stressful moment. I was very lucky that at the Stanford Daily, you know, we had been independent from the school at that point for exactly 50 years when I arrived.

28:35And so there was a volunteer team of advisors and lawyers who helped the Daily on occasion and really stepped up, you know, to help me and my editor, Sam, as we were going through all of this.

28:47Kara Swisher:Less than a year after he resigned, he co-founded, though, an AI drug discovery startup and raised a billion dollars. It's one of the largest seed rounds in biotech history. What does that tell you about how power works in Stanford? Yeah, the largest. Yeah, the largest. The largest seed round in biotech history, six months after he's ousted by his own board. You You know, I think it's a fascinating kicker to the story. But I think they all get refunded. They all get refunded. Travis Callen, it got all of them, all of them. Well, and by the way, you know, two of the VCs who invested in Mark Tessie Levine's new company were ones I had gotten to know over the course of freshman year in my other life as, you know, this teenager glimpsing the view of Silicon Valley from the world of coding.

29:32and both of them continue to be friendly even after funding Mark Tessay Levine. And one of them offered to fund a company from me too, if I wanted to start one. So they've just funded Mark Tessay Levine and they say, oh, we'll fund you too. And that to me, you know, says a lot about Silicon Valley, right? Talent is everything. If you can figure out how to monetize, it doesn't matter who it is or what it is. But it also is about how, right, Mark Tessay Levine is not an isolated story. As the figurehead of the institution, he is necessarily a representative of some of its values. And the story that we saw there and the fight for accountability with papers, by the way, that should have been scrutinized years earlier and weren't, a lot of that same behavior that I was writing about, I began seeing with peers that I arrived with as a freshman undergoing their training.

30:24Yes, exactly.

30:25Kara Swisher:The mistakes were made thing. I call it the mistakes were made. Oh, well, Kara. I had a similar thing where someone, I took down some idiot entrepreneur. And then when I was looking for money, I didn't take any venture money. But one of them took me to lunch and offered me money. And I said, I'd rather poke my eye out with a dry stick than take money from you. But no, but it was sort of like, why not? And I'm like, you're terrible. Like, you know, it was really interesting, which made me laugh. I'm like, okay, well, I see. It was very, ethics were very shifty, as they say, if ethics were there at all.

31:00Kara Swisher:So let's take a step back and talk to some of the bigger themes you wrote, including the obsession with perfection, or at least the appearance of perfection. In the book, you highlight some of the recent fraudsters associated with Stanford, including Theranos founder, we just mentioned, Elizabeth Holmes, and crypto entrepreneur Do Kwan. And talk about how the university does or doesn't take accountability for its failures and frauds in its orbit, because I think that's really the heart of it. They would call it mistakes were made. Eggs are broken. You know, I've heard every excuse for just terrible behavior.

31:32Kara Swisher:You write that Stanford quote has made a Faustian bargain with Silicon Valley, one that has enabled its meteoric ascent and allowed for its corruption. and then they commercialize and corporatize differently from other elite universities like Yale, MIT, and Harvard. So talk a little bit about these two things, this accountability, and then they're making some bank off of it, obviously. Well, look, it's not an accident that the Stanford inside Stanford exists at Stanford, right? This is a place that made its fortune because of Silicon Valley. This is a place the guy on the faculty was known by the moniker Professor Billionaire because he made$20 billion by investing in his students' companies.

32:11This is a place that has its own VC fund run by the university to seed students' new companies. And if you literally just take the cumulative value of the companies that have offices on campus, it's somewhere north of$6 trillion. So much ink has been spilled about the privileges of the Ivy League and the pipeline to Washington and Wall Street. Stanford is completely entangled in an even more pronounced way. That was an intentional strategy. That was intentional because that no boundaries relationship is what allows Stanford to profit. And as to how they address it, Stan Cohen actually is a good way to talk about this.

32:48Stan Cohen, living legend in genetics, he was the first geneticist to transplant genes from one living organism to another. So he's on the Stanford faculty and his patents on recombinant DNA technology is what instigates the university to come up with its new patent licensing strategy, allowing them to profit off of basic discoveries made by the faculty. So by the last year that's active, it is 62 % of the school's total patent revenue, right? So he has made them hundreds of millions of dollars. I write about during my freshman year, the other side of the story, which is this court case in which he was levied with$29 million judgment because he told investors he had this promising new drug target for Huntington's disease that the company said internally that it would be a cure, not just a treatment.

33:35And he neglected to inform the investors that this drug had been permanently banned by the FDA in 1976 because it could kill people. So he loses this court case.

33:45Kara Swisher:Mistakes were made. Yeah, mistakes were made, which he admits eventually after giving false testimony on the stand, by the way. And so I report the story freshman year and I go to the university and I say, hey, here's an active faculty member. Here's this court case. You know, like, is he going to face any repercussions? Is there any investigation at the school? What is your reaction to this? And they say, we had nothing to do with this. We've never heard of this. We can't say anything, right? And that was untrue. Stanford owned the IPA issue. They were subpoenaed in the court case. They fought the subpoena, and they ultimately provided documents and witnesses.

34:19Not only had he eventually admitted to potential ethics violations and how he ran the company, but he also admitted to potential violations of Stanford policies. He was cheating on his wife as she lay dying of cancer, and he appointed his paramour to both lucrative positions in his Stanford lab and at the company without disclosure. And so to this day, Stanford cites Stan Cohen's research as an example of why the university's research apparatus is so valuable and important. And you can't have it both ways.

34:48Kara Swisher:No, you can't. Their interests are aligned, and that's the problem, is that there's no accountability when there are problems, or they gloss them over, as you noted. Now, interestingly, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, director of Stanford's Hoover institution, told you that dealing with risk and so-called bad actors are essentially trade-offs that come with having university with research enterprise and a big commercialization arm. Sounds like Condoleezza, I have to say. Well, she brought up, actually, the metaphor she brought up was from her own time as a national security advisor.

35:17Sure, I get it with dictators. She said, sometimes you have to drone strike a village knowing that civilians will die because you have to kill the terrorist cell or people are going to die. And then she says she applies that to Stanford.

35:29Kara Swisher:That's patented, Condoleezza. I've heard her say coming out of her mouth herself and I'm like, oh, like, okay. And I get it in statecraft a little bit, just vaguely, sort of, not really. But those are the choices different people decide to make. But when it comes to a university, it's interesting that she extends that particular tragic metaphor, really. But is it possible for a university to be ethical while still being, quote, an incubator with dorms, as serial entrepreneur and Stanford professor Stephen Blank described to you? And is Stanford's response really any different than other powerful institutions protecting their own interests?

36:04Kara Swisher:Make a comparison. Well, Steve Blank is a great character, right? So he, you know, is a creator and teacher of Lean Launchpad, the most famous entrepreneurship class at Stanford, probably the most famous entrepreneurship class in the world. And what he tells me is that we've lost the moral compass for what we invest into, is what he says, that Stanford has become an incubator with dorms. And I think there's some interesting contrast between Justin, who teaches how to rule the world, which is known by the students in it, by the way, as rule. So to be in it, you call it rule. And what Justin teaches, right, is to extract value from people.

36:38And what Steve Blank teaches is to provide value to people, right? And so these are sort of two sides of the same coin. Both are theoretically offering a path to Silicon Valley success. And yet there's sort of an inverted message there. I find that fascinating, especially when I come to think about, you know, much of what Justin says isn't bad per se, right? Learning to exceed the limits of your conceivable ambition, that's not a bad thing. Big, big ideas and big, big challenges are what have driven, you know, great things in Silicon Valley. And yet, when it is coupled to a culture that lacks accountability, that's how the problems emerge, right?

37:17I watched these kids I arrived with, many of whom were my friends, you know, who were brilliant and idealistic and I do believe genuinely committed to technology. I watched them learn, in their words, to play the game. You know, as one tells me to misrepresent herself to VCs to raise money. You know, as one of my friends ends up doing is faking a launch demo and gets feted by all of Silicon Valley and put up in a mansion and being celebrated for technology she doesn't have and didn't create. Right. And so if you want to understand how the next Elizabeth Holmes or Sam Bateman Freed's come to be, like the egregious fraud starts with how people are being trained to act.

37:56And these are young people.

37:57Kara Swisher:These are not unsophisticated people, but they're young. Curious, what made it repugnant to you? I think the thing is that Stanford has gone beyond a few bad apples. Right. The problem is this institutionalized and cultural insistence on perfection, it leads to the sort of inevitable and repeated fudging of the boundaries. That, as one professor put it to me in the book, at Stanford, we have a culture of overclaiming the big results. We blow them up bigger than they would be elsewhere. And we take the bad stuff and we sweep it beneath the rug. And so that's what I'm asking Stanford to reckon with.

38:31I'm not saying that the good stuff is wrong. I'm saying that this, and there's also another side of it, that the same incentives that reward this innovation have also been set up to reward, you know, self-presentation bordering on and frequently becoming fraud.

38:47Kara Swisher:Which is why they're like this as adults, which is really, you know, it's a through line. It's an absolute through line. How has Stanford responded to your book? So far, silence. But I should say, and I'm grateful that both President Levin and Provost Martinez took the time to be interviewed and face some tough questions over the course of the book. You know, what John Levin would say is that, you know, he is the first, by the way, president of Stanford in over a century to have been an undergrad here before becoming president. And he says that, you know, the amount of pressure being placed on students to think about career from the second they step on campus is a problem.

39:19The question, of course, is what you do with that. And at one point in response to a question, he says, well, should we have a rule barring all VCs from campus? No, of course not. And you understand the position that he's in. And yet, and yet, these problems continue to persist.

39:37Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

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41:41Kara Swisher:Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. So every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours. Hey, Kara. Hey, Theo. This is Ryan Mack, a technology reporter at The New York Times. Theo, congratulations on finishing your book, How to Rule the World. I've been getting through it. And it's reminded me a lot about my own time at Stanford, which I attended a few years before you did. And I want to stress a few. And so I have a question for you. which is looking back at my time there, I attribute it with making me who I am today.

42:24I wouldn't be a journalist necessarily. I got my start in journalism at the Sanford Daily, like yourself. I met a lot of my friends there. I made a lot of connections as well that helped me to this day professionally. And I've also grappled with, at the time when I was there, I grappled with the amount of power that was at the university, the amount of wealth. I saw friends that chase, you know, iPhone apps and startups and all the things that you describe in your book, probably which have accelerated more so to this day. And so knowing what you know about the university and how it treats students and the amount of power that's amassed there, my question is, if someone were to come to you to this day and ask you, hey, you know, of should I go to Stanford University?

43:15Kara Swisher:Should I commit four years there? What would you tell them? Thanks. Great question. Yeah. Well, it's great to get a question from Ryan. He knows this ecosystem very well. He actually was the, I mentioned Professor Billionaire earlier in passing. Ryan was the first person to report on Professor Billionaire way back in the day, not that long ago. I shouldn't, you know, maybe 2011. Ryan, you're really old, but I'm older, so go ahead. It's a really interesting and tricky but important question, right? I have a very complicated relationship with Stanford. And yet, you know, I'm going to graduate two weeks from today that we're recording this.

43:53And I'm going to rock across that stage and be just as happy and grateful as anyone else, right? In many ways, this is still a fabulous institution. You know, it's doing world-class research. It has amazing professors. A lot of students here really will change the world for the better. It's just that it's a lot more fraught than it likes to let on. That if you're not careful, you quickly fall into what students call the tech whirlpool. That if you learn how to play the game in the way that it's been set up, frequently that leads to sort of deceptive business practices and to getting ahead at any cost.

44:27And what Ryan mentions, right, that you see everyone else doing it and it's sort of hard to resist. Like that's a huge thing. You know, the guy who taught me how to shotgun a beer freshman year dropped out. And six months after he started his AI company, it was valued at over a billion dollars. Right. And that's$80 million per head because there are so few employees. And it's weird to be surrounded by all of that and also, you know, make your own decisions and figure out why you're getting into it.

44:54Kara Swisher:Yeah. And resist it. So fakery is encouraged in many ways. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true. So what would you tell? What would you say? I think it depends on the student. But for many people, I still do think that Stanford is a great institution. I also think that it's important to have some tough conversations, right? And frequently asked, like, why I do this, you know, that like, aren't you biting the hand that feeds you or tearing down? And I really don't see it that way. That I think - It's because you love it. That's why. If you love an institution, you want it to be better. Right. Right?

45:25And, you know, I think it's important for our community to understand how it's really operating and that the Stanford inside Stanford is sort of the ultimate manifestation of what has come home to roost at the university in recent years.

45:39Kara Swisher:Right. And why we have what we have today in a lot of ways, the same attitude. You could initially put it as the devil may care, but it's not caring at all. And one of the things that I think is very misjudging about this book or stuff I write was I love it and I hate what you're doing to it. I hate what you're doing it. And I recall writing a column for the New York Times about how they should have an ethics course at Stanford and other places just for tech people, just to have ethics in history and stuff like that. And it's as if I told them, you know, I would like you to drink a bottle of Ebola or something.

46:12Kara Swisher:I was like, it's just an ethics course to be aware, like on some small level. It was interesting. Then there's how students take it, right? I remember in my freshman year, a guy telling me that he was taking a business ethics course and he said, quote, well, we were all there to learn how they got caught. Right. Well, you can't raise kids. Let me say that starts with the parents in many ways. But it also starts with the mythology, right? That Stanford has cultivated. Why are kids coming here? They're coming here because they can become billionaires, right? In many senses. Or at least that's sort of the chosen image that the university has put forward.

46:48Kara Swisher:That's a fair point. Although I do think it goes back to parents. I think the way you are is because a little bit of your parents, the same thing with my kids, wouldn't do this. They just wouldn't do this. There's something that they were raised with. We'd like it to be fantastic, but not like this. So let's end talking about tech, AI, and its impact on education. ChatGPT arrived on campus at the start of your freshman year in November of 2022. In your recent New York Times op-ed, which I like very much, you wrote that cheating has become omnipresent, and at the same time, many students view AI as a job threat.

47:18Kara Swisher:This is in line, obviously, with more widespread concerns over how AI will affect job market and potentially drive down wages. You have, of course, since you're graduating. Anyone who says yay AI from Eric Schmidt to that lady gets booed down and Ronnie Chang gets cheered at Harvard. It's kind of weird to watch. But what do you make of the anti-tech sentiment among young people broadly? Yeah. Well, AI is this great accelerant, right? It takes all these trends that have already been brimming beneath the surface and it supercharges them. And so at universities, one of the ways to understand why everyone is cheating now isn't just that the technology has enabled it, but it's that students have now been made to feel as if the education part of their education is actually secondary to the outcome, whether or not you're going to come out of this with a high paying job or a stable career or, you know, at Stanford, potentially significantly more riches than that.

48:10AI has also significantly increased the sort of stratification that we see that the most valuable researchers are more valuable than ever before, right but the entry level positions are being drawn up ahead of people that that stanford last year for the first time in over two decades saw its computer science enrollment go down go down which is so fascinating right because for some people astronomical wealth is just around the corner and all you have to do is put a wrapper on chat gpt and tell a vc you want some money you know if you have been tapped on the shoulder and you have this reputation as one of the people in the Stanford inside Stanford worth funding.

48:47And yet for most people, AI has been destructive to their education, right? We're in this really fascinating interregnum where the technology has just suddenly leapfrogged from where it was. And yet higher education really has not, you know, gotten the memo yet to some degree that I keep hearing professors saying a variation of the same thing, which I just find so fascinating, where they say, oh, AI in classrooms is really bad. I'm so lucky that none of my students use it. and their students are using it. What? No. Yes, absolutely. And you'll see some of them say that publicly, too, by the way.

49:23Stanford professors who think that students are not cheating in their classrooms, and I'm here to say that, unfortunately, they are.

49:30Kara Swisher:So Google's CEO, interestingly, Sundar Pichai, is your commencement speaker. If you were interviewing for the Stanford Daily, what would you ask him, and what shouldn't he say? Well, I mean, if I were interviewing him for the Daily, I would ask him about politics, right? all of these Silicon Valley billionaires have tried to make a new home for themselves in, you know, the current administration. I'd love to know a lot more about that and their approach there. But look, it's going to be interesting to hear what he says. Sundar Pichai is a classic Silicon Valley, you know, like Stanford success story, who made it big.

50:04You know, he is operating in the vein of, you know, Larry and Sergey and his predecessor, Eric Schmidt, who just got booed down for talking about AI. We'll see if he makes the same choice in his own commencement speech. I'm sure has been reviewed by many dozens of lawyers and PR professionals. But this also, I think, says a little bit of something about the school, right? That 10 years ago today, Ken Burns gave the commencement speech, or not today, 10 years ago next week, Ken Burns gave the commencement speech. And he gave, you know, a call to action about Donald Trump. And he was booed by some of the parents, and then they were drowned out by cheers from the audience.

50:42In my four years at Stanford, the commencement speakers have been John McEnroe, Katie Ledecky, Melinda Gates, and now Sundar Pichai, that the school used to have a rule against athletes and used to try to avoid doing the billionaire CEO thing, you know, too frequently, and now seems to have chosen explicitly people who will stick to the company line.

51:02Kara Swisher:Right, right, right. Right. Sooner at least appears sheepish sometimes. Not in sheepish enough, in my estimation. I'll be interested to see how he manages this, because I wouldn't say he's the most stellar of speakers. But we'll see. You said that amid the many crises impacting higher education the past few years, universities have lost a sense of identity. That's what you're talking about here. Are you Ken Burns or are you where's the money? Right. Essentially, as you mentioned earlier, you interviewed a few of Stanford's past presidents, its current one, Jonathan Levin. How do you view Stanford's identity?

51:33Kara Swisher:And if you were running it, what would you do to change it? Yeah. So it's been such a funny four years to be on college or campuses, right? The first year was ChatGPT. That came out. That changed everything. The second year was post-October 7th. Those protests are the most divisive in decades on college campuses. Our third year was an unprecedented federal assault on universities and research funding. And now our last year, we're graduating into a very uncertain job market. And high school was COVID. Yay! Yeah, well, exactly. Exactly. It's been an interesting four years. And so all of these might seem like sort of unconnected things that are all striking at the same time.

52:14And it's all sort of coincidental, right? But all of these issues strike at the same central problem, which is that what do universities actually value? And can they articulate that? Because the modern university has become a hedge fund controlling billions of dollars, many times a giant hospital system, a research apparatus that is spinning out companies constantly and producing vaccines, a repository of historical thought and knowledge, a giant experiment for teenagers going about their coming of age. It's a professional sports league. It's a huge merchandising opportunity. It is all of those things.

52:53And even at the best of times, right, those coexist somewhat uneasily. Now, right, that we're seeing these pressures facing universities, I think that tension has come to a head. How do universities really define themselves? Is this Stanford a place to get an education or a place to get rich? Right? And answer that conflict.

53:14Kara Swisher:President Baker, what would you do? Well, I don't know. But I do think that the answer starts with transparency, right? It starts with honestly reckoning with these issues. You can't have a conversation about these things where it's only just about how great things are. Up and to the right. Yeah, up and to the right. And I think this is something about Silicon Valley that I find frustrating, that people are very quick to cast every issue in terms of vice or virtue. As if, you know, Stanford and Silicon Valley are either all perfect and all great and these innovative, transformative places that nothing like it has existed in the history of the universe.

53:52Or everything that produces, you know, anything technology related is completely rotten and should be thrown out.

53:59Kara Swisher:I mean, their heroes are like that. Mark Andreessen, you're either with us or against us. Peter Thiel, you're the Antichrist if you don't, what? How do we get to Antichrist when you have normal criticisms about AI? I just, it's, they are the most delicate of flowers. Including the Pope, by the way, has said concerns. But this is the thing, right? But he was, in his thing, because he's an adult, he said there's some great things, right? Exactly. He did not binary the thing, which I thought was lost on them. Well, and this is the thing, right? We see a lot of issues emerging from Silicon Valley right now and in different fields in different sectors.

54:33But a lot of that comes from malice. Sure, there are real psychopaths in Silicon Valley and you have chronicled many of them and there is an absurd texture to that there. And part of that is in the book. But there's also this extraordinary silliness, right? That what happens when you give teenagers too much money to burn, you know, that actually it can be people who are quote unquote well-intentioned who end up doing, you know, the worst things. And so I want people to understand that texture. And I hope this view of Silicon Valley's training ground affords something of view of that.

55:09Kara Swisher:Yeah. Yeah. They're broken people. There's a lot of broken people with a lot of money. And that's, that's always a prescription for something not good. You've won the Polk Award, written the book, sold the film rights to producer Amy Pascali. You're doing pretty good for just graduating in college, kudos to your parents and yourself. When you look at the journalism industry, also in a lot of pain, but at the same time, a lot of innovations happening in journalism, by the way. If you had the choice between working, I'm not going to say the New York Times, the New Yorker, but ProPublica or the Wall Street Journal, run by two great people, or let's just say Anthropic, working for Anthropic, or Slash, one that's a relatively acceptable tech company, perhaps, What would you do?

55:52Kara Swisher:What do you want to do? I know this is not like the most fashionable sentiment at the moment, but I really fell in love with journalism over the course of that freshman year. And I hope this book in part serves as sort of a love letter to it that, you know, you could be the 17 and 18 year old kid and just by like pursuing questions you want an answer to and pulling on the loose thread that's dangling there, you know, hopefully provide some value to your community and report things that should be known. I never expected to be a journalist. And I don't know exactly what the future holds. I'm trying to get to graduation first.

56:27But I have to imagine that I'll continue to, in some way, work in journalism.

56:32Kara Swisher:If you were looking at journalism today, what do you think the greatest thing about it and the most problematic, besides the business plan? Yeah. Well, the greatest thing is still the reporting, right? Actually, for all the noise, The reporting is the thing that matters most. And there's amazing reporting being done every single day by the press corps. The American accountability journalism tradition, we take for granted, but it's a unique thing that it grows from the post-Sullivan tradition out of the Pentagon Papers in the post-Watergate era. That tradition of investigative accountability journalism is amazing to me.

57:05Um, I'd say that one of the biggest challenges that I think newsroom leaders have been slow to adapt to is really people like me, people my age, that our news intake is incredibly decentralized and scattered, that we're not taking in text media in the same way. And it's this sort of ticking time bomb that our distribution methods are not reaching young people effectively with high quality nonpartisan news. I think that's a huge problem that needs to be worked on. And it's a distribution problem.

57:37Kara Swisher:Yep, you sound just like my son. I just had a discussion with him about it. But he's a heavy news. He loves substantive news, both of them. Which is really, that's I think the lie that people have to make stupid and short. I was like, no, you don't. You just have to make it where they are. And in a way, it's not that different if you create compelling content. Anyway, whatever you do, I think you're going to do a great job. Theo, I love this book. I think it's great. I think my piece of advice was just focus on the reporting. I believe that's probably what I said, because that never goes away.

58:07Kara Swisher:That absolutely, 100 % cannot be displaced. It cannot be disrupted. And asking questions is the only way forward. Anyway, terrific job, How to Rule the World by Theo Baker. I think perhaps maybe you will at some point, I hope. And thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me and for everything you do.

58:52Kara Swisher:agency person who deserves pre-idea funding. If not, you're less of a builder and more of a wantrepreneur. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

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