HOW TO RULE THE WORLD

Theo Baker was a 17-year-old Stanford freshman when he reported on research misconduct tied to university president Marc Tessier-Lavigne and helped force his 2023 resignation. In this debut memoir-investigation, Baker documents a 'Stanford within Stanford' — a VC-funded pipeline that courts promising students — and argues the university struck a Faustian bargain with Silicon Valley that normalizes corner-cutting and fraud. The book works twice over: a procedural account of rigorous investigative journalism, and a study of how power protects itself.

Navigate power

1. Corroborate any important claim across independent sources before you trust it. Baker refused to feed one source's details to the next until four senior figures had each, unprompted, described the internal review the same way. (source)
2. Vet a source before relying on them. Actively dig for conflicts of interest or anything that could compromise what they tell you, rather than taking their word at face value. (source)
3. Test a source's reliability by asking leading questions you already know are false and watching whether they agree. Baker used this on senior Genentech executives, who didn't bite, which strengthened his confidence in them. (source, source)
4. Treat a tip as a lead to verify, not a conclusion. A years-old blog post pointing to PubPeer comments led Baker to forensic image analysts, because he didn't assume someone in authority had already checked. (source, source)
5. Give the subject of your investigation a genuine chance to respond and state their side, and keep interviews free of bias. Your account stays evenhanded and harder to dismiss as a hit job. (source)
6. Run drafts through experienced editors and legal advisers before publishing. Institutional review catches the errors that would otherwise cost a reporter their credibility under attack. (source)
7. Expect a predictable playbook when you challenge power: dismissal, delay, attacks on the messenger, legal threats. Recognizing the pattern as routine is what lets you keep reporting through it. (source, source)
8. Learn the underlying technical subject yourself before writing about it, and check a reputation against primary evidence instead of trusting it. Power shields itself and hides secrets in plain sight; authority is not proof. (source, source)