YouSaid · the spoken record

Theo Baker

lines on the record: 60
first: 2026-06-04
most recent: 2026-06-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, the greatest thing is still the reporting, right? Actually, like for all of the noise, like the reporting is the thing that matters most. And there's amazing reporting being done every single day by the press corps. You know, the American accountability journalism tradition, we take for granted, but it's a unique thing, you know, that it grows from the post-Sullivan tradition out of the Pentagon papers.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you want? I know this isn't 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 can be the 17 and 18 year old kid. And just by 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. But I have to imagine that I'll continue to.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is the thing, right? We see a lot of issues emerging from Silicon Valley right now in different fields and different sectors. 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 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 a view of that.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Stanford and Silicon Valley are either all perfect and all great in these innovative, transformative places that nothing like it has existed in the history of the universe or everything that produces anything technology related is completely rotten and should be thrown at me.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, you know, many times 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. And 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?”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And it's all sort of coincidental, right?”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. That 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. Who knows what's happening?”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About Donald Trump. And he was booed by some of the parents, and then they were drowned out by cheers from the audience. In my four years at Stanford, the commencement speakers have been John McEnroe, Katie Ladecki, Melinda Gates, and now Sandar Pachai, 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.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 Pachai is a classic Silicon Valley, you know, like Stanford success story who made it big. You know, he is operating in the vein of, you know, Larry and Sergei 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 a call to action.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, absolutely. And you see some of them say that publicly, too, by the way. Stanford professors who think that students are not cheating in their classrooms. And I'm here to say that unfortunately.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And all you have to do is put a wraparound 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. And 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 gotten the memo yet to some degree that I keep hearing professors saying a very 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 You know,”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 high-paying job or a stable career or at Stanford potentially significantly more riches than that. AI has also significantly increased this 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 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.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It also starts with the mythology, right? That Stanford is cultivated. Why are kids coming here? They're coming here because they can become billionaires in many senses. Or at least that's sort of the chosen image that the university has put forward.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And 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.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you love an institution, you want it to be better. And 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”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 make your own decisions and figure out why you're getting into it.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm older, so go ahead. It's 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. And 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. 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. And 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.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, really.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. The 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.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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, right? I'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 self-presentation, bordering on, and frequently becoming fraud, which”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See the limits of your conceivable ambition. That's not a bad thing. Big ideas and big, big challenges are what have driven great things in Silicon Valley. And yet, when it is coupled to a culture that lacks accountability, that's how the problems emerge, right? That I 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 fetid 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 is or Sam Bateman Freeds come to be, like the egregious fraud starts with how people are being transferred.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Steve is a great character, right? So he, you know, as 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. What Justin teaches, right, is to extract value from people. And what Steve Blank teaches is to provide value to people. 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”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mistakes were made, which he admits eventually after giving false testimony on the stand, by the way. And so I report this 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? You know, like, 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. Not 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,”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would be cure, not just a treatment. And 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.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was intentional because no boundaries relationship is what allows Stanford to profit. You know, and as to how they address it, Stan Cohen actually is a good way to talk about this, right? Stan 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 patent 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. The company said internally that”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's 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 who was known by the moniker Professor Billionaire because he made $20 billion by investing in the students' companies. This is a place that has its own VC fund run by the university to seed students as new companies. And if you literally just take the cumulative value of the companies that have offices on campus somewhere north of $6 trillion, right? So much ink has been spilled about the privileges of the Ivy League and the pipeline to Washington and Wall Street. Stanford is completely”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, you know, that I arrived with as a freshman undergoing their training. Yes, exactly.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and by the way, you know, two of the VCs who invested in Mark Tesse 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. And 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 Tessevid and they say, oh, we'll fund you too. And that, to me, you know, says a lot about Silicon Valley, right? Where 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 Tesaline 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.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The largest, yeah, the largest. The largest you'd around in biotech history. Six months after he's ousted by his own board, you know, I think it's a fascinating kicker to the story. But I think the most...”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How 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. And so there was a volunteer team of advisors and lawyers who helped the daily on occasion and really stepped up to help me and my editor Sam as we were going through all of this.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. They hired Steve Neal, who's the chair emeritus of Cooley. And so this was 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. And this guy, mentioning 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, he began sending us letters accusing us of all of 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”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mark Tasuvine, 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 that has emerged into the public record.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, and that two years after this paper comes out, there's an internal review at the company. An internal review that results in Marc Tess ⁇ Levine being encouraged or tracked 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 Tesigline 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.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go ahead. No reporting has ever indicated that Mark Tessay Levine himself falsified data or ordered anyone to do so. And so that's important to note. The oversight thing is the main thing, right? And that's.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And that was a non-starter for people at Genentech who'd sign non-disclosure agreements to talk about the things that had happened in Mark Tessio Levine's labs. So there were some notable gaps there in the investigation too.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, that's called gift authorship when a senior author puts their name on a paper, often because it'll help it get published, when they had very little to do with 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 Levine'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? Denale Therapeutics that he had co-founded. Ultimately, what the panel found was that Mark Tessa 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”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and here's 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 Pub Peer, where usually scientists scrutinize published research papers. And these had been there for seven years without follow-up. The papers hadn't been corrected or attracted by the journals, that this hadn't been reported by any newspaper. And Mark Tessa 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.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what my reporting eventually uncovered over months of investigating was several instances at different labs that had been overseen at different institutions by Mark Teste 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. You 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”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't want to give this guy too hard a time because, like, you know, as far as the exploitative scale goes, he has never asked anything of me. Whereas there are people in Silicon Valley who have much, much shoddier reputations for how they treat students, including when it comes to like, you know, sexual misconduct and incredibly predatory behavior. And that's the thing, right? Is that as much as this is paradise for a talented teenager where you can walk in the door of any venture capitalist and raise millions of dollars for your startup, it's also deeply exploitative in a way that incentivizes and encourages bad behavior.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so this guy explains it like this. He says, okay, my job is running a company, but my secret job is working with interesting people. And the truth is, anything can be monetized in Silicon Valley if you know how to scout it. If you or this rule breaker who has accrued a vast amount of capital and you have decided.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's amazing because, you know, so much of it seems so nebulous. You know, I remember this one CEO of a unicorn company reaches out to me freshman year, and I have no idea who this guy is or why he's cold emailing me. And he takes me out for brunch at the Rosewood Hotel, which markets itself as the modern clubhouse for Silicon Valley, which is, I think, a great, great tagline. And he's sitting there and he's spoon feeding his eight-month-old caviar as he confesses that his first ever contract was for the Libyan dictator Muamar Gaddafi. And in that moment, I'm just sitting there and I'm thinking, what the hell is happening? You know, I'm just this barely legal teenager. You know, why am I here? But he explains it to me this way. He says.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, except the earnings potentials come with a B, not an M, right? That these kids could potentially be starting billion dollar or trillion dollar startups in their dorm room, which is not unheard of at Stanford. I took my first class at Stanford in the Gensen Huang Auditoria, named after the founder of the most valuable company in the world, edging out the second most valuable company in the world, also started by Stanford students. And this place has such a fascinating relationship with the Valley that makes sense when you understand, I guess, really the context of the last few decades that Silicon Valley has been the greatest concentration and creation of wealth, potentially in human history. And so if this is a gold rush, right, you know, by that same token, the talent is the thing to mine. Like that is the resource that people are trying to find. And the earlier you find it, you've made your own career by identifying it at 18.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my entry point into this world was through helping to run the campus hackathon tree hacks, right? And TreeHacks is modest in its ostensible mission, right? This is a place for hackers to come and spend 36 hours working on their projects. In reality, it's sort of like a feeder into this sort of Silicon Valley pipeline because the idea is, you know, so many people come to Stanford thinking they can be the next Snapchat founder or DoorDash founder that investors have to quote unquote rule out the want of news as one of them put it to me the want of prepreneurs as opposed to the quote unquote builders and the idea was that the Treehacks team was an example of those builders and so VCs would take us out and wine and dine us and”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so this book is titled How to Rule the World, and that's not a metaphor. There's this secret class. There are 12 students a year. You have to be tapped on the shoulder by someone already in it before you can go through the cloak and dagger admissions process with the Silicon Valley CEO who has styled himself as a professor. Because it's not like you're getting course credit for it. It's more like, you know, a skull and bones for the aspiring techalite. It's like a secret society where most insider kids congregate. And when I arrive here, even knowing that this existed was like a status signifier among the most inside of the inside crowd, right? That you had to be, in the words, this was sort of a delicious phrase that was used by someone there, that you were quote unquote rule adjacent just to know that it existed because that signified that you were part of the Stanford inside Stanford, where the kids who have been identified as future trillion dollar startup founders congregate to learn the secrets of”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no, no, not an Ivy League man. And so I joined the paper. I thought I would feel connected to him and things spiraled pretty quickly.”
2026-06-04 · On with Kara Swisher · Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT