The Freshman Who Took Down Stanford's President And Its Perfect Image - EP 72 Theo Baker

All right. Imagine you're a freshman at Stanford University. You're working for the school paper when you receive a tip that Stanford's president, Marc Tessier-Levine, may have had some deception in his past work as a very, very prominent scientist. You start digging into the story. You find out that it's true. And as a result of your reporting, the president of Stanford is forced to resign a few months later. This young man's name is Theo Baker. This actually happened. He's written a book about this incident. I've read it. It's very good. How to Rule the World. This was an extraordinary, extraordinary thing. Young reporter just starting out ends up taking down the president of Stanford. This book is partly about that. It's partly about Theo's wild freshman year in which Stanford turns him into something of a pariah and cracks down on him. And it's really about Stanford itself and whether or not this university is as perfect as it seems. Theo would tell you it is not. It's turned into something of a meat market for youngsters and venture capitalists descending upon them. This book is quite damaging in a lot of ways to Stanford and its sterling reputation. Theo's a phenom. He's done things that professional reporters would, would cherish in a 30-year career, and he did them all as a 17 and 18-year-old. He's now written a book that might well become a bestseller. People will be jealous, but he's, he's an astonishing young reporter and a very, very good writer, and he's put in the hard work to make this happen. It's an amazing story. We're going to get into all of it on the podcast. As always, please leave us a review or give us some stars wherever you listen to the show. It makes a huge difference in people being able to find our work. Thank you so much for listening. I am Ashlee Vance. This is Core Memory. Here we go. Theo, it is so good to see you. I assume you're like still in the process of graduating.

Yeah, next month. From Stanford? Yeah, yeah.

Okay, you're graduating right now over the next couple weeks.

Yeah, I think a month from when we're recording this now.

Okay, and they're letting you graduate.

That's the hope, that's the idea, yeah. Hopefully make it across the finish line.

That's amazing. And then you kind of like took a couple semesters off to write the book.

I did, yeah, yeah. So I reported it. Sophomore year and then took off most of junior year.

Okay. Okay. Well, we're going to get into everything. The book's a little different than I thought in that it's— for me at least, it was kind of 3 things. I thought maybe the whole bulk of the book would be the, the journey of reporting on, on the president. And, and what are we going to do for his name? You use an acronym in the book, which is much easier because his name. Yeah, it's a problem.

It's Marc Tessier-Lévine. Yeah, but people say MTL. So you can use MTL, that works.

What's MTL? What's MTL? And so I thought that would really be the heart of it. And there is a ton in there about that. There's way more detail than people would've seen from the reporting and obviously your side of living through it. But then I felt like the book was 3 things. It's that, I felt like it was your lived experience and you're quite open. I've actually, no, to your credit, 'cause you're, You're doing hard reporting on other people and then you're very transparent about— there's moments in here where you're passing out, you're overdosing on things. I mean, you let it all out there. And then I thought the third chunk of the book is really this exploration of Stanford and what it has come to be. And I found all of that fascinating. I was actually very disappointed in myself because we we're recording this a couple of miles from Stanford. And I was like, man, I've been missing a lot of stories that were, that were sitting there. But yeah, so, so do you feel like that's a relatively fair framing?

No, I think that's completely right. It's this, you know, I tried to write like a sort of portrait of this very particular moment at this very particular place. And it's all sort of knitted together through, you know, the perspective of my freshman year. But Yeah, no, it was tough to weave everything together, but hopefully it's sort of one cohesive narrative.

No, no, it is, it is. And I say 3 books, but I mean, it's great, because you have a central character, which is you, you know, taking it.

Well, I actually, I think the central character is Stanford. I mean, it's right, you see, the thing that I find so interesting about this place is that it's not any one thing, right? It's both its administration, you know, and the institutional bureaucracy that surrounds it, but it's also the people, it's the idea of it, you know? And the idea of Stanford is very different, you know, today than it was 20 or 30 years ago. And so it's been really fun to sort of capture that at every level, you know, the freshmen I'm coming in with all the way up to sort of the figurehead of it all.

No, no, that's very fair. And I don't wanna like give away, I mean, I want people to read the book. It's, I said it in the intro, but it's fantastic. I mean, you should, people should buy this book.

Thank you.

It's like selling books is very difficult. This one is worth your time and money. And so, so please, Please do get it. And so, you know, I don't, I don't wanna give like everything away in the book. We, we won't do that. But I was gonna march through. Yeah. Just a little bit. 'Cause I, it was just sort of how I consumed it and was leaving these notes as I went. You, you like, you come to Stanford really like people might expect. I mean, you're a, you're a tech, you're, you're coming to be like a coder. You're coming to be like a, a startup. I mean, not for sure a startup founder, but you're in that, that, that group.

Yeah, yeah, no, I've always been a huge tech kid, which is part of, by the way, why it's so cool to be here with you because I've seen, you know, you chronicle the tech ecosystem for, you know, like my whole life and amazingly well. But yeah, no, I came here as one of the, you know, like I was a true believer and, you know, to some extent I still am in terms of technology itself. But I very quickly found myself sort of dragged in the opposite direction. But yeah, no, I showed up and immediately I realized that, you know, nothing around here worked exactly as I might have thought it would.

Yeah. So there's like this thing going on where really early on you're in these, these— you're getting recruited by this guy, his name is Justin. Do we ever give his last name in the book?

I, I use his first name.

All right, I think I found out who it is. But the— he's, he's, he's kind of setting up this elite club, and you have to pass these interviews and, and to become part of this inner circle of tech superstars. There's other, like, fraternities and other clubs. How It's, it seemed like this was happening from the first moment you step on campus. Is this just like anyone who's in computer science is part of this? It just struck me that they were identifying who they thought were elites. So, and I could not wrap my head around how this process happened.

Yeah. Well, you've picked up on something that like I think is really important about this is, is just, you know, how formalized the system has become that, you know, the earlier, you know, you want to find the next Google, right? Or Instagram as early as you can, uh, because you're going to make your billions of dollars off of that. And so the earlier you get your hooks into a freshman, you know, the more that you've made your career. And so these adults are literally from the second, you know, someone steps on campus and they're identified, they're sort of tapped on the shoulder and as one person described it to me, plucked, you know, from the crowd. You belong to this sort of parallel reality in which nothing works the same way. You know, for most people, Stanford is a normal elite school. You know, it's you go to classes, you study for tests, you try to get an internship and you fall in love and, and, and, you know, all the normal college things, you know, albeit in Silicon Valley. But for a select few, right, those who are going to be the next trillion-dollar startup founders in the judgment of these associated, you know, hangers-on, the VCs and the investors and everyone else, reality is completely different.

And how does— so how in the book you talk about there's VCs paying a friend of mine, Amber Yang.

Yeah.

$20,000, I think it was her, to to be introduced to some of these people. There's— how did— how do— from that first moment you're walking on campus, though, are they separating the wheat from the chaff? How are they saying, like, like, these are the 20 kids that we want to really court?

Well, so much of it is groupthink, right? And, you know, it's something I guess that VCs have become somewhat known for, but it's less about, you know, the actual talent that you have and more about who you know and being tapped on the shoulder. And by the way, about finding one of these disguised entry points, right now that Stanford has this reputation as the place where all great companies come from. So many people come to Stanford that, that many of them are identified now as the quote unquote wantapreneurs. Right. Because just being an entrepreneur doesn't mean that you're going to be good at it. And so, you know, they've tried to disguise effectively the entry points to this so-called Stanford inside Stanford. You know, there are places for me, my first taste of it was through Treehacks, the school hackathon. And that was a really fascinating experience. I was just a few weeks into freshman year when I found myself at a mansion party in the hills funded by a slush fund that funneled corporate cash into the pockets of teenagers. And that was where I first learned how to play beer pong. So it was, you know, just a weird set of experiences.

And you think— I mean, I assume things like this sort of happen at MIT or Harvard, but clearly Stanford has made— has engineered this to perfection and has everything else set up to help facilitate this whole process.

Yeah, look, Stanford and Silicon Valley have always been entangled. You know, Silicon Valley wouldn't exist without Stanford, at least not in this form. It started, you know, in the post-World War II era with Frederick Terman. You know this, you know, I'm sure better than I do. And certainly many of the moves that have been made in the last 25 or 30 years that have allowed Stanford to go from what was once sort of a regional university into this global powerhouse have all been about reducing the friction and reducing the boundaries between tech world and Stanford. You know, there's a professor who was known as Professor Billionaire because he invested in his students' companies and he made $20 billion off of it.

David Cheriton.

Exactly. Yeah. And he cut the first check to Google and also co-founded, you know, companies of his own while serving as a full-time professor, which is exactly the kind of arrangement that Stanford wants. And so it's this sort of no-boundaries relationship that has both allowed for Stanford to become, you know, a global powerhouse to raise, you know, became the first university to raise more than $1 billion in a year. Now it has a budget higher than 116 countries in annual budget. And it has also allowed for some of its corruption. Yeah.

Yeah. So you mentioned Frederick Turman in the history here. Yes. Like, all this was designed to, to occur. It just seems to have gotten to a very far place. For people who don't know Frederick Turman, he used to court the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Philo Farnsworth, who helped invent the television. The Litton brothers, the Varians, they were all part of this. Frederick Terman was this electrical engineering professor. He'd bring everyone together and get them on campus interacting, take the students to these labs. And then he's the one who set up this real estate empire that surrounds Stanford, where even today you still have companies like Tesla and used to be VMware and others just nestled right up against the campus. You fast forward, there's tons of money going to the Defense Department. Stanford has these, these deep military ties. Then you get to like the more modern era. I kept thinking of Sun Microsystems, which I think stood for Stanford University Network.

Yeah, exactly. Amazing.

It was maybe founded in 1982, if I remember right. And just in the name, it's like symbolic. It was these, you know, kids, they weren't all Stanford, but I think Bill Joy went to Berkeley and coming out—

a traitor, an enemy of the No, but it's exactly right. And so, you know, this integration on the one hand, like it does allow for all of this innovation. You know, it is this sort of amazing thing to be told as a 17-year-old, like, go out and build whatever you want to build and you can do it and people here will enable you to do it. The problem is that the way that it's been set up, you know, sort of encourages this sort of cut corners mentality, right? There haven't been proper guardrails put in place to sort of detect and root out deceitful behavior. And so, you know, if you want to understand how like the Elizabeth Holmes or the Sam Bankman-Frieds or whatnot of the world come to be, you know, it's not that they're one-off bad apples. It's that, you know, they're just as much a product of this place as Hewlett-Packard. Right. These two things are tied to one another.

Okay. And so what are we to make of this? Is this— I put a tweet out about you coming on the show. Somebody jumped in. I think one of their arguments was like, oh, Yes, you find this stuff, but it's very niche-y. And the glory of this, you know, very prestigious, phenomenal institution is still there. And that really is the lifeblood of it. And, and okay, if you, if you go looking for this on the edges, there's— yes, there's— just to be super clear for people what we're talking about, it's, it's kind of like venture capitalists surrounding these very young kids, trying to court them, trying to, you know, fill their heads with all these hopes and dreams of creating these massive businesses, and, and students bringing in all the— there's all these networks. It's like, uh, you got some like Thiel Fellows, and so they're tapped into Peter Thiel's network, and now everybody's having dinner together, and all these impressive people are coming to campus. And so this person is just arguing this is a tiny slice of what's going on at Stanford. You're— you seem to argue in the book really that so many of these students are computer science students now, and so much of this university's lifeblood is tied to this mechanism that, like, it felt heavier than some niche thing. It felt like the identity of the school in a lot of ways.

Yeah, well, there are sort of two aspects to this. You know, the actual number of students who are the ones getting, you know, courted by the VCs, like, that is an intentionally small slice. Absolutely. And it's completely fair to say that, you know, most students don't have the experience of, getting wined and dined every night, you know, the CEO taking you out for brunch at the Rosewood, you know, spoonfeeding his 8-month-old caviar while he—

One of the best parts of the book.

Yeah. And confesses that his first contract was for Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator. Right. So, yes, that is necessarily an exclusive experience. And the cult of exclusivity is a big part of this book. But there's also a much broader cultural issue which has really embedded itself in the institution. And this is the the unrelenting quest for appearance and perfection for its own sake. And this is where part of the story of the president really is instrumental to understanding this. Marc Tessier-Levine, this world-renowned neuroscientist, these papers, some of them published before I was even born, had escaped the adequate scrutiny. How does that happen? How does that come to pass? Well, it's because there aren't proper safeguards, as I said earlier, to root out misconduct, to call cut corners when they occur. It just allows people to accrue positions of higher and higher acclaim without ever being called on their misbehavior.

Right. Okay. You're reminding me of this great line. We're fast forwarding and, and I'm cheating here through some of this story, but because we're going to get into it all, I've already told people that he has to resign and he goes out. But like, to your point on this perfection aspect of things, I mean, you— he, he's forced to resign and then you're watching somebody give a tour. You've won all these awards. You're watching somebody give a tour of people around campus, and the tour guides at Stanford were now telling their groups that the Stanford Daily had just won the first-ever Polk Award for a college newspaper.

Shocker.

They didn't mention the content of the reporting, just the prize. Somehow Stanford always comes out on top. I mean, I thought that was amazing. It's like, it's like, and we're winning all these awards and we have this incredible Reporting to you and not, not mentioning what the awards were for.

Right. And this is the thing, right? So I'm, I'm not coming at this from the perspective of someone who says burn it all down, right? I'm going to graduate next month and I will be just as proud and happy as everyone else. I am coming at this from the perspective of someone who has seen how transparency is, is routinely neglected. You know, in one of the stories I reported freshman year was about this Professor Stan Cohen, this living legend geneticist whose patents made the university hundreds of millions of dollars. Over the time that they were active and also led to the creation of the first artificial insulin at Genentech, the first biotech company. And this guy, Stan Cohen, living legend, had told investors that he had this promising new drug target that he said would be a cure for Huntington's disease or could be a cure for Huntington's disease. He solicited investment, didn't tell them that the drug had been banned in 1976 by the FDA permanently because it could kill people. Right. And so he finally loses a court battle, is found liable for species of actual fraud and deceit in the court of California law. He is forced to pay $29 million judgment. I go to Stanford about this story. I say, hey, you know, we've got this active professor here. You know, what do you think about this? You know, do you have any reaction? Like, you know, is he going to face any repercussions from the university? They say, we've never heard about this. We had nothing to do with it. We can't tell you anything. We can't react. I look into the record, I look into the court papers. Well, lo and behold, Stanford owns the IP at issue. You know, they were subpoenaed. They fought the subpoena. They provided documents and witnesses. Not only was he talking about during the court battle his behavior at the head of the company, but he admitted to potential violations of various university policies. He was— while his wife lay dying of cancer, he was cheating on her and appointed his paramour to a lucrative position, both at the company and in his Stanford lab, without disclosing it. Potential violation of various university policies. And the university's reaction had just been to say, oh, we've never heard of this. So now fast forward to where we are in 2026, or I guess this would have been in 2025 when I was writing the end of the book. Stanford still cites Stan Cohen's research as an example of how great the research apparatus of this place is, while refusing to reckon with the fraud that emerged from the very same lab. Right. And so that's kind of what I'm talking about. Yeah. You cannot just talk about the highs. And ignore the lows because they're coming from the same place. Yeah. All right.

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Yeah.

Yeah. So you're, there's this other element. I mean, there's the stuff we've been talking about, and then there's this like overarching Stanford bureaucracy that, um, seems to be part of the seems to be like some politically correct but also like just legal overreach of just, just wanting to make sure nothing's happening. And clearly, you know, they'd had rape cases, they'd had suicides, things, things, very serious things. And so, so what, you come as a freshman and what, like the campus is just, there's no parties. What's— I didn't know what's going on.

Yeah. I'm so glad you brought this up because this is a favorite story of mine to talk about. This was my very first story for the student paper. Again, I arrived not thinking I was going to be a journalist, right? So I showed up and I thought I would do the student paper as a hobby and to feel connected to my late grandfather who had just passed. And so this war on fun, you show up and you realize that Stanford, you know, is not the college that you expect it to be, right? It's a corporate organ, you know, and students are a commodity to be sold, you know, to be profited off of and to be protected and preserved. And so nowadays at Stanford, in what the students call the so-called war on fun, you know, you have to take a class and pass an exam to be able to apply 3 weeks in advance to the party review committee, which meets once a week on Tuesdays. I really love that detail for some reason to approve any sort of social event. You know, you have to have all of decorations, including like a few balloons approved well in advance by the fire department. You know, and all of this, of course, is theoretically safety, you know, adjacent, but makes things far less safe. You know, in the words of the community advocates I spoke with while reporting, you know, for both the piece originally and for the book, you know, there are so few parties approved that when you try to host one, there are 600 people trying to slam down your doors. And, you know, the fire safety risk, obviously a lot bigger. You know, alcohol is so strictly prohibited that students are taking like 6 shots in their room in quick succession and then going out because they know that there isn't, you know, going to be a sort of moderated supply for them. And, you know, people are telling me these stories about women passed out in bushes and an increased rate of what they call transports, because, you know, that's the sort of euphemism for taking people to the hospital with alcohol poisoning. And so it ends up being a story that isn't just about parties, right? It's not just about, you know, whether kids are having fun or what college looks like, although it is, you know, an example of how college is weird right now. I showed up to my first frat party and we had to read not only a pledge to ask for and receive consent, but a land acknowledgment to get in the doors of the frat. But it's also a story about institutional management.— it was my first sort of view into how Stanford would protect its image through not only this legalism, but also when I was going to the university for Comet and they realized that one of their own employees of the Office of Alcohol Policy had told me about how their policies were, quote, hopelessly out of touch with reality, end quote. They threatened their jobs. They said they had violated their policies. Policies, by the way, which did not appear to exist in any of the materials I reviewed, barring them from speaking to the media. And so that was sort of an early taste of what I would come to expect from the institution.

And has that changed or like, was that a reaction to something and now it's coming back or this is still—

Right. Well, so, you know, Marc Tessier-Levine resigned in the summer of 2023. Here we are, you know, in 2026. And Jonathan Levin is the president. I will say, you know, Marc Tessier-Levine rejected over a dozen interview requests, you know, did not answer, you know, the majority, the vast majority of the 150 questions he was asked. We're going to get it, you know, to their credit and, you know, whether or not this is their attempt to manage or whatnot, but to their genuine credit, the current administration has been much more willing to engage with tough questions.

Well, but I mean, even this culture, this— yes, this no fun culture is—

oh, it's— it's definitely still a lot of the stuff happening. I was just— I was with a friend last night and we were talking about this and she, you know, we're seniors. She lives in a row house. She was talking about how they wanted to have, you know, a group of like 30 of their friends over. And, you know, to be able to serve alcohol, they— the school requires them to either have a licensed bartender or to get a liquor license from the Santa Clara County. Yeah. Which, like, seems a little bit excessive for, for, you know, hosting people in a dorm. Certainly not the Stanford, you know, with its motto, let the, let the winds of freedom blow. That's its actual motto. Not the Stanford that people maybe experienced in the past. Yeah.

I mean, Berkeley clearly has the more counterculture ties to the '60s reputation, but Stanford had all that too. And yeah, Ken Kesey used to live in those, those houses. And so do you think this is— I'm old now. I mean, do you think this is common across all big higher education institutions, or is this a Stanford-specific thing?

So one thing I've come to believe, you know, in the course of reporting this book is that Stanford is really sort of a proving ground for trends that are sweeping higher education. You know, like AI, right, is something that all of us talk about all the time. That is, you know, sorry, I hit the mic there a little bit. You know, AI is obviously something that, you know, with regard to higher education, people are talking about all the time. Stanford is like the extreme version, you know, and in so many ways, actually, you see this pattern repeating itself. Not only did Stanford pioneer the public-private academic partnership, you know, in the wake of World War II that every major research university uses today, but so many other things. The patent licensing strategy that started with Stan Cohen, Now, that's the gold standard across universities. It allows them to profit off of the basic research that their scientists do. The, the Stanford was the first university in 2003 to establish a so-called corporate partnership program, which two sociologists wrote in their analysis of the subject, was worked by selling students. And now, of course, that has popped up across, you know, a number of elite institutions. So Stanford, you know, like how you see in Silicon Valley, a lot of trends here proliferate out into the rest of the world. I think there's a similarity there with how Stanford functions in higher ed.

Okay. Okay. So this is, this is like the cultural backdrop of what's going on. And you arrive and you're— it seems like you're poised to be heading towards a computer science degree and maybe doing a startup and being in the midst of all this. You stumble into reporting almost like as a hobby, something to do, and then you just go on this this immediate tear of, of insightful stories, of scoops. I, as I was reading this, I could just feel it. I mean, I remember, like, I remember getting my first scoops and ever— I can tell what energy, the frenzy you're getting, like the adrenaline, a little bit of the addiction. And it's like it's calling to you. You have reporting in your blood. Just looking at you, I hate to say this, it's embarrassing.

I—

your dad, Well, both your parents are very well-known reporters. Your dad, Peter, he started, I think, at the New York Times the same year I did. And I think we were— he had already been at the Washington Post, I think.

Yeah, like 20 years.

Yeah, a long time. But he, he— I could see his face when we're talking.

I take that as a compliment. He has like anti-aging genes. I hope they pass down.

So it's in your blood going back a couple generations. You happen to be on campus also. With an editor named Glenn Craymon who worked at the New York Times. He was my editor off and on when I was there. And I guess he's teaching a class and—

Yeah, yeah. That's how I met him.

Yeah. And then there's another woman, Felicity Beringer, who I used to work with. Just as I was reading the book, I'm like, man, like you could not— the New York Times is a pretty exceptional place in many ways and people are very talented, but Glenn and Felicity were—

I was, I'm the luckiest kid in the world.

Yeah.

I discovered, you know, at the Stanford Daily, I sort of had this incredible team of alumni who volunteered and stepped up to bat for me, especially when things started getting tough. We had great pro bono legal counsel too, which made a really, really big difference. But yes, no, as you say, I come from journalism. I always thought I was going to escape it. I came out here 3,000 miles away, you know, I was like obsessed with natural language processing, thinking I was going to do, you know, something different. You know, I fell in love with it. It's—

it's—

you know this better than I do. It's a total rush.

I don't know. I think, you know, pretty well, you're doing— you're doing big things. So it was either— was it like your fifth story when you start to get the tip about the president?

So I got— I got my first— I got the first tip about the president after my story about the campus imposter who had been— yeah, yeah. Living on— living in dorms for a year with Stanford's knowledge, but nobody ever was told.

So you start because you get some scoops and so you're developing a reputation and now people are sending you stuff. And so you get this note, it's like, hey, okay, so Marc Tessier-Lévine, I mean, he worked at Genentech, he was an academic, he was just incredibly famous. I mean, he was seen as this, this flawless, powering intellect. And you get a tip that, hey, some of his papers, it looks like the data has been kind of like fudged and these things don't look right. And you just start digging in.

Yeah. Yeah. So I got it. I got a tip from a friend that led to a Medium post which had a sentence which referred me to Pubpeer, this sort of pseudonymous online forum where scientists dissect published work. And there were these comments going back to 2015, so 7 years before I started on the case, where, where anonymous commenters noticed that some of these panels, some of these images in papers that were co-authored by the president appeared more similar than they should have been. And so I started from there. I started with sort of open-source investigation. I took it to forensic image analysts who were able to start the story off and confirm some of the concerns. And then things really spiraled from there over the course of the next 10 months or so.

They sure did. I mean, I was so impressed with the level of reporting. I mean, You did all the things right that you're supposed to do, which is, is like not assume that, you know, this is as shady as it might look and I'm gonna go check everything out. How did you, because like you mentioned from the very get-go, you're going to these like forensic analysts. Um, some of this like might seem obvious to an outsider. I found it quite precocious for a 17-year-old to have these instincts and even to know about going around, how to report the story and go to the links you did, the number of people. Were you— it was that— was that in your blood or did you have people angling you?

No, I had— I had so much I had to learn. You know, I'd always been interested in the brain, but I'd never worked in a wet lab, obviously. And so I had a ton of catching up to do there. But this is not like I didn't have any context for how to do this. You know, my parents are political journalists. And so, you know, I understood like the philosophy, you know, you just— you ask the questions, you keep going. But there's not a lot of overlap with neuroscience there. And so, you know, it was a slog. It started working with these experts, and eventually, you know, a lot of it was shoe leather journalism, was talking to people who worked with him. You know, Marc Tessier-Lévine had this extraordinary career, right? Really, you know, almost at the very upper, upper, upper echelons of all of science. He was the first in his family to go to college, earned a Rhodes Scholarship, incredibly impressive person. He created an entirely new field of research as a Cub PI in the early 1990s by discovering something he called the Netrin, which, which helps with neurodevelopment effectively. And then he goes on to segue this into positions of higher and higher acclaim. He becomes eventually the chief scientific officer of Genentech, overseeing more than 1,000 scientists. And then he segues that into the presidencies of Rockefeller and then Stanford. So by the time I came on the case, you know, he'd been president for 6 years. Right? And he began the year by announcing his signature accomplishment, right? The creation of the first new school at Stanford since 1948, the Doerr School of Sustainability, from a billion-dollar donation by John Doerr. And, you know, he had this sort of spotless reputation. There was the profile of him that I found, you know, where the stories that I can think of, Mark, are all about him being essentially perfect, says one of his coworkers. Yeah. You know, he could lead the country, gushes a Nobel laureate. And what I discovered was a pattern of papers that emerged at labs he oversaw at various different institutions where, you know, falsified images or other research misconduct had been perpetrated by members of his lab that he oversaw, and that these issues had not been confronted when, when they were first brought to light.

Right. And, and there's this mix of issues. It's like, you know, we're were these images altered? Is it a big deal? Did he know about it, or was this just people in the lab, you know, trying to get away with— like, how much did he know? Did he not know? Um, it's very hard, like you mentioned, if you're not, um, a biologist yourself. I thought you made a really important point, which is, is because I think people could see these images and sort of be like, eh, you know, whatever, there's tons of data, like, what does it matter? But these images are important. It's a huge part of the paper.

Proof. It's the biology. In biology, the figures are themselves the evidence.

And it seemed like people were kind of Photoshopping stuff and shifting things around and all this. So you start digging in, you're getting some people who are corroborating what you're saying. There's others. Well, yeah, okay. I mean, maybe walk us— tell me, you know, from the first minute you start doing this.

Yeah.

Somebody tells you, fuck off, don't do this. This is a bad idea for you. This is not going to end well. And you're clearly— you're going after the president of Stanford. It doesn't get too much bigger than that. And so— but you're like undeterred.

Did in those initial moments where you just kind of like, maybe there's a better way to spend my time, you know, I do sometimes think that like naivete is like a superpower because like I'd only been on campus for like a month, so I didn't maybe know enough to know like what I was getting myself into. I remember I came back home for Thanksgiving and I showed my parents for the first time these figures that I was looking at and told them a little bit about the evidence I'd collected. And my dad said, well, okay, but, you know, maybe investigate a professor first before the president. But as soon as I realized that there was a story here, you know, and there clearly were these issues, you know, I knew that this was something that had to be reported. And, you know, I certainly wasn't content with leaving it with the initial story which first reported some of these allegations. You know, if there was something that was going to cleave for Martin Levine, you know, that was very important to find. You know, he's the figurehead of our institution. You know, we need to know this. If he behaved properly at all times, we need to know that rather than, you know, leaving him sort of under a cloud of suspicion. And certainly if there were, you know, moments in which he was more directly tied to misconduct, you know, that felt, you know, very salient for our community to understand since, you know, this is one of the largest research institutions in the world. And so, you know, once I started on the story, there was no chance that I was I'm going to stop.

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Well, again, it goes to the whole image management thing, right? So if you think about your priorities, you know, if your priority is, as one professor, you know, put it to me, to always make the good things look better and to, you know, hide all the bad things under the carpet. Right. It's understandable that the incentives are not aligned toward open inquiry. Now, it was astonishing. Within 24 hours, the board of trustees opened an investigation into Mark Tessier-Levine based on my reporting. What was also astonishing was that within a few days, you know, I learned that this investigation, which was announced, by the way, in a statement that praised Marc Tessier-Levine's, quote, honor and integrity while announcing an investigation into his scientific integrity. I learned within days that one of the few— the 5 board members appointed to the special committee maintained an $18 million investment in Marc Tessier-Levine's biotech company, Denali Therapeutics. And so at that point, I just realized that like there was so much more to the story. There was always going to be something more for me to report. And certainly the tech life that I thought was going to be everything to me freshman year, I began to feel a little differently.

Yeah. I mean, the investigation just looks like a sham from the beginning, at least to me. And so, so there's rumbles and he can, like, feel a little bit of this, this pressure. And then you've got some people who, because he is so prominent, empowerful. They don't want anything to do with this. They definitely— others don't want to go on the record. But you start getting in and you get, you get some people who are, who are extremely knowledgeable in this, this area, and a couple who are willing to go on the record. And the, the plot thickens as time goes on. There's more and more inconsistencies. Things are going back decades. Yeah, it's looking like some of the scientific journals who publish this stuff, like, kind of, sort of, maybe knew that there were some inconsistencies, and it was unclear who was really— who was going out of their way not to correct the record. And throughout all of this, I mean, God, it's hard because it's a big story just to continue.

A lot happened in one year.

A lot happened. But I mean, I want people to read the book. So the thrust of things is the picture gets worse and worse and worse for Mark Tessier-Levine over time. He gets more and more defensive. Lawyers are brought in. The shocking thing to me, I mean, you're doing all this diligent reporting. He's, he's like flat out denying stuff in these statements that are not terribly consistent, but he's, he's flat out denying. As time goes on, you're getting quite serious legal threats.

Yeah.

He never does an interview with the student reporter. He doesn't even talk to you ever.

No. And you know, to this day, this is crazy. To this day, he hasn't answered many questions about this, but it is remarkable. I learned, you know, I did an event for this book yesterday, and the PR people, his PR people found out about it somehow and reached out to the moderator ahead of time to try to spin the moderator and offered and said, hey, Mark Tasei Levine will talk to you on background about all the misinformation that has been spread about him. You know, so this is a guy who refused to engage, you know, with, with, with my reporting process, who didn't answer, you know, the 80% of the questions sent over by my independent fact-checker this fall. You know, who has only since, since November 2022, only done one public interview after, you know, all of these allegations began to come out with a friendly industry newsletter in which the matter of his, at that point, already been ousted from president, from the presidency. That matter was left until the last 50 words of a 1,500-word piece. You know, this is someone who is used to having You know, I think the record clearly shows that he is used to receiving, you know, extraordinarily glowing portraits. He is not used to having sort of negative portrayals. And so he begins to plead his case, you know, in the court of public opinion. He sends these missives to the faculty, which of course includes all of my professors, sort of lambasting the reporting as breathtakingly outrageous and replete with falsehoods was one of my favorite quotes that he used. And, you know, he publishes more than 11,000 words of rebuttals on his website. But, you know, at the same time, he doesn't respond to me. He never responds to a single question that I send him over email, you know, over that 10-month period until, you know, after he's already been forced by unanimous vote of his own board of trustees to resign.

And I can understand he's afraid he's going to lose this position. His reputation is going to be tarnished. And so he picks the— I'm not going to— everything's going to be controlled. I'm not going to say anything. I found it incredibly cowardly. You know, you've got this for a whole bunch of reasons. I think it would have been cowardly if somebody at the New York Times was chasing this story who'd been a journalist for 20 years, for him never to do an interview. I found it extraordinarily cowardly to have this student reporter who's clearly, like, putting in the effort to try and get things right, um, who's sitting outside of his office as this goes on, to like never engage with you and have a conversation, uh, especially even when it—

at the—

when you get to the point where he knows he's going to resign, doesn't seem like there's all that much to lose at this point. It's like, you know, let's, let's like actually set the record straight, or at least give his side, you know, in a conversation. I mean, it was— yeah, I, I found it appalling, if I'm honest.

Well, and look, you know, I, I never want to feel entitled to an interview, right? So it's, you know, Martin Seligman has no obligation to sit down with me. That said, there are questions that I would love an answer to, or I would love to hear his perspective on. And some of his statements that he makes in writing over the course of this 10-month period, later evidence shows to be clearly inaccurate. His very first defense delivered by proxy is that these issues have no bearing on the findings or interpretations of the papers. That's a direct quote. And obviously, since a half dozen of them have been retracted now, that wasn't true. You know, he says about this Alzheimer's paper, you know, that all of the central findings had been reproduced. But Genentech itself later says that that was not the case, that in fact, even before it was published in 2009, this paper that effectively claimed to identify the cause of Alzheimer's disease, experiments had been done within the company to show that its central finding was at best unreliable. And so there are all these remaining questions that that, you know, I really would love to get an answer from him or his team on.

But, you know, what we have here, I have done as much as I can to represent his perspective because there is one, like, overhanging thing, which was like, did he know about this stuff or did he kind of create a culture where the people in his labs and his teams were so incentivized to try to impress him, to try to get good results, either for prestige or for kind of financial reward, that they were fudging stuff and I mean, I do want to make clear that my reporting has never suggested, and I've never seen any convincing evidence to suggest that Marc Tessier-Lévine ordered about or knew about fraud in any paper that he published.

And so, you know, that is an important clarification. You know, the allegations are that once he was made aware of fraud, you know, as the Stanford investigation ultimately concluded, he, you know, this is their quote, he failed to decisively and forthrightly correct the scientific record. On a number of occasions. And again, you know, the report concluded that he fostered an unhealthy lab environment that led to this unusual frequency of manipulated research.

And there's the unusual frequency. There is this pattern over a very, very, very long period of time. Have you— have you been to his Wikipedia page recently?

I noticed that it was edited this fall.

I mean, I went to it a couple of days ago and it is quite sanitized on how it recaps.

Yeah, there's this—

these events—

an anonymous New York IP address in the fall took out, uh, some of the mentions to, uh, what the report had actually concluded about his responsibility for the research.

I mean, I was shocked because I was just trying to— I was like, oh, I wonder, uh, you know, what the— I wonder how the world is now characterizing all this turn of events. If you go read his Wikipedia page, it does not look like the description of events that would lead a president to have to resign from Stanford Well, and this is—

look, Marc Testai Levine has now hired 3 PR firms and 2 law firms, including, you know, the chair emeritus of Cooley, one of the big firms out here who had represented Steve— this guy's name is Steve Neal. He had represented Charles Keating Jr. and Elizabeth Holmes. You know, more recently, he's hired Clare Locke, the very aggressive defamation firm. You know, we received, you know, just 2 weeks ago their latest letter threatening a defamation lawsuit against me and my publisher. And so, you know, like, did they try to stop the book? Oh, yes. Repeatedly. They've sent hundreds of pages. You know, before I even wrote a word of the book, a 64-page letter, I believe, showed up on the doorstep of the CEO of Penguin Random House. You know, this is, you know, at the beginning of sophomore year. But again, that's also because, you know, the capper of the story, right, is that he is forced to resign, as is reported for the first time in detail in this book. And 6 months later, he raises the largest seed, the largest initial fundraise in biotech history, more than $1 billion for his AI biotech startup, which I think is just a perfect sort of conclusion to the whole story because it shows, you know, how this whole system works.

I think. Okay, so they tried to stop the book, but the book is here. It's in my hands. It's coming to the shelves. So, so what? They just haven't sued you yet. I mean, they have— they know that they have it.

I'm not—

come on, I've been through this. It's going to be okay. It's going to be okay.

You know, I think the main, the main thing that's important to me, important to all of us, is making sure we get it right. And so, you know, this is a book that a lot of work went into it. You know, I think we're confident in what we report.

I've had subjects contemplate buying every copy of things that I have written about. Yeah.

But this is also, right, so Marc Tessier-Lévine is not some sort of anomaly. He's a figurehead of Stanford, not just because he's serving as the president, but because so much of his career reflects the life that many Stanford students adopt. He is this shining star, this brilliant figure who has this sort of, every single one of his both allies and enemies agree that he has this unbelievable ambition for himself. He's always on the move to the next thing. Unconstrained ambition is not in and of itself a bad thing. Not at all. In fact, it's often a very good thing. Often how Silicon Valley has made the changes it has made. But when you have a system that isn't asking the tough questions, that allows small things to compound into larger and larger issues, this is the same fight for accountability with the president is what I witnessed in many ways with the freshmen that I arrived with, you know, who were taught that this, you know, that this was the way to get ahead.

Okay. You hit right to the thing I wanted to read. That trait that both allies and opponents agreed on unanimously as I did more reporting was Tessier-Levine's ambition, singular ambition. From the start, he'd been a man in a hurry. An early collaborator of his told me he was, quote, always looking for the next thing. I have to tell you, as I was reading that, it reminded me of someone, and it was you.

Well, that's an interesting comparison. Again, you know, like, I'm not here to write about Marc Tessier-Levine as a villain, right? I'm here to understand him as a character. I'm here to understand Stanford as a character.

No, no, no, I get that.

I know. But this is the point, is that, right, like, these are complicated institutions. Marc Tessier-Levine is not a fraud in the sense that he was an excellent scientist. You know, he did produce excellent science.

Yeah.

And also, you know, there were these issues lurking in his career which had not gone addressed. And so that's what I want to understand, right, is how does this system, you know, that is responsible for lots of great things also continue to produce bad behavior? And the answer to that, I think, is, is that when you have a very thin line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior when it comes to Silicon Valley and the tech world,, and you throw so much money, you know, at it as an accelerant. Money and power, of course, are an accelerant to all things good and bad. You get this system where, you know, again and again, I would see people who would cut corners, who, you know, this one kid who admitted that he had stolen a Chinese AI model and passed it off as his own original research goes to work the next month at an AI startup, you know, now worth $20 billion, where he's the head of evals, right? It's like there is not, it's not just that there isn't punishment, there's no transparency about what happens when bad things occur.

Fair. But as I was reading the book, I mean, you, okay, there's one week where you're like trying to plan this big party, you're like taking exams, you're breaking the story at the same time. I don't think you're sleeping at all. And you basically, you're not eating, you, and you end up, you have like a couple hours off You have a couple drinks and you just, just totally black out from exhaustion. Later, I'll say this sort of comically, but delicately. I mean, uh, you know, you've been under stress for months and months and months. The story's kind of culmin— starting to head towards the culmination of, of the president of Stanford being forced to resign. You go away for a family vacation to, to relax for a little bit. You find some of your, I think it was the grandparents Oxy and have a couple, then you have a couple more another day. You're overdosing. I mean, in this like ambition front, I mean, doesn't your ambition in a similar way lead you to a quite difficult crossroads?

So yeah, this is obviously the book's nadir. I, I was overdosing alone on floor of my dorm room while my friends were right outside the door. I had no idea what was going on. It wasn't— both of my grandfathers died freshman year.

And I don't mean to make light of it.

No, no, no.

There is something like— there's something slightly comical.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Because I am— look, I want people to understand that I am this, this bumbling 17 and 18-year-old kid going through this, right? If I'm going to present this institution and Martha Silvina and my friends and, you know, do this sort of warts-and-all portrayal, I'm I'm not comfortable giving the sort of sanded, you know, edges sanded off, heroic triumphalist version of my own narrative, right? I am making deeply imperfect decisions, of course, you know, when it comes to my personal life. I would say that ambition maybe isn't the frame of reference that I use because, you know, if I were out there like trying to get ahead for myself, this is certainly not what I would have chosen. I would have just stayed in tech world. You know, I had every ambition, I had every reason to not continue doing this when the president of my own university was, you know, coming going after me very aggressively, and it was very unclear what would happen or whether I would ever have a career or whether I would be, you know, dealing with a lawsuit for years of my life, you know. And, you know, even if, you know, we would very likely win just because, you know, the facts are the facts, like, that's not a pleasant thing to go through. So, you know, I ended up at a place where I felt obviously very deeply alone. And thankfully I got through it and thankfully, you know, I came out the other end. But it's also part of it is, you know, ties back to something I read about in the school, the sort of duck syndrome thing, which I don't know if that's interesting to talk about, but it's the idea that students at the university, you know, are like a duck, sort of appear to be floating effortlessly above the surface, you know, gliding above it all and winning every acclaim. And beneath the surface, their legs are paddling, like, desperately to keep afloat. And again, it does all tie back into the sort of appearance thing.

So I always battle with this in my own career, though, you know, it comes this moment of is what this person is doing. You know, it falls on the journalist at some point of like, how much are you going to pursue this? The only reason I bring it up is 'cause it's the same thing. It's like, okay, yes, you could have done something that was like the easier path.

Yeah.

I do think there is an element of ambition in this 'cause I think it probably is in your DNA and you could—

I might use the word like drive or determination.

Drive. Okay.

Okay. And it's maybe ambition is right, but I wouldn't say it's like personal ambition.

Drive. That is, that's totally fine. But you know, we all, we get confused, right? Yeah.

No, look, I gotta understand, you know, I'm like, I like, I am of course a kid who's like, I want to do something, you know, I'm like, I'm, you know, I— and you see in the book, like, I come into this place, I'm totally insecure, you know, I'm one of those 17-year-olds who's like, do I belong here? Do I fit in? Am I good enough? You know, because how could you not be at a place where it's like, you know, either like you get in and either you have this sort of God complex because you're better than everyone else on Earth and you're, you know, there's 3% admissions rate and oh my God, you're going to change the world. Or, you know, you have this total inferiority complex because like, like, you know, how can you possibly stack up to everyone else? Or, you know, most people I think just don't know how to evaluate themselves.

Yeah.

And that, you know, this is also a chronicle of freshman year.

No, that, that all makes sense. But I mean, the, you know, there, there's always this question of like, you're gonna have this impact on somebody else's life. Like maybe he was driven and had some bumps along the way. And then, I mean, look, Mark Tessier-Levine's doing just fine in the world now. But you know, to have to like battle with those heavy questions when you're 17, 18, 19, years old in your first, like, major assignments, did that stuff run through your head of, of like, is it worth the cost to this guy? Hmm.

Well, look, I think that it was always extremely important to me and to my editor, Sam, who is a running character in the book, obviously. You know, it was really important for us to get this right. Right. Like, this is important, you know, not just to Marcus, I say, to be in our community, too. We go to this school, you know, we want it to— we want it to succeed. And, you know, we don't want it to be saddled with bad things. And I don't think any of us was particularly happy about, you know, having to report this story. You know, I think part of it, though, is that, like, at least as I see it as a journalist, you have to do as much as you can to divest yourself from being outcome-driven. You know, like, my job is to report the facts. It's not to pass judgment on Marc Casse Levine. It's not to say what should happen, or at least that's not how I perceived it. You know, it's to say, here is the information and other people who are not the 17 and 18-year-old are going to make the decision based on that. But it is clear to me that this is important for the community to understand.

Yeah. And I will say, I mean, the amount of work you put into this is extraordinary. I know people hate journalists, but I think if you read this book and see what you did, this is how it's supposed to be done. And, and it's awesome that you had such good mentors with you. What's less awesome is, again, the Stanford PR department and the people that they hired near the end of the story as his resignation is nearing. You're working on another piece. They essentially talk you out of publishing it in exchange for offering you an embargo on— on— they're going to put out a letter finally answering some of these, these questions. And if you put out your story. They're not going to give you the letter at the same time as they give it to all the other reporters. And you have the right instincts, which is like, you've owned the story and you don't want to see some major moment in this get reported somewhere else first. So you agree to this embargo. For people who don't know what an embargo is, it's kind of like you get all the reporters together, give them some information ahead of time, but everyone has to release their story at the same time. And so sometimes the PR people use this as this like coordinated thing. And then sometimes it's, it's a reasonably fair way to do things when you have lots of reporters chasing a story. So you're in Berlin, it's the summer. Summer or— yeah, you're, you're, you're, you're working and you're still chasing the story even on your summer vacation. You've made this deal. Then as things start to come out, It turns out that there's a— there were two— there's this— there's like a separate batch of information which includes the fact that he is actually going to resign. And they've given this to every other reporter except for you. So even at the very end, Stanford's still trying to fuck you over.

Well, it was— no, it was— it was— yeah, it was the PR. It was kind of an amazing moment because, you know, I had prepared. I'd been working for a time on this story. I talked to a dozen witnesses. Who told me that the Stanford investigation that was being held, you know, conducted into MTL, was not offering witnesses anonymity. And, you know, wasn't saying that they would protect their identities, which is a nonstarter to some of these people who had nondisclosure agreements, you know, for example. And I was ready to report this and I went to them and they said, don't report this, you know, hold it for a few days and we'll give you this embargo. We'll give you the embargo of the final report. And it's like, it'll be 150 pages or whatever. And so you want the time, you know, you'll have a full day to go through it. So, you know, 24 hours before it's supposed to come out, no email in my inbox. Finally, you know, I have a few hours later at 3:00 AM my time, they send over the report and I look at it. And as you say, they have withheld the actual news. They assume that I'm not going to find out about it as if other people aren't going to immediately call me and ask me what I think. And it was this, you know, it just felt very petty. And I learned later through reporting for this book that it was directly, you know, a directive issued by the board chair, Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo who was, you know, taking issue with the 18-year-old.

Seriously? Yeah. So it's pathetic.

You know what? It's, it's, uh, um, it's pathetic. I found out anyway, so it's no harm, no foul, I guess.

But, uh, no, I mean, that's— it's like, it's, uh, incredibly messed up because these people are making these deals and, you know, it's all meant to be fair play and So you really, I mean, you really upset this administrator. I mean, you were, you were a, just an enormous thorn in your side, I guess in part because like the national, you write about this in the book.

Yeah.

It's 100% right. These kinds of stories fall in this weird gray zone where it's like the national media isn't really there. They don't really have a lot of education reporters anymore. So even though you're doing this amazing reporting, nobody else is like, following up on it. So you're just— you're this, like, gnat who just won't let go.

And well, it is, you know, they're hoping, like, the Alzheimer's paper, right? This paper, every major news organization covered it when it came out. You know, this, this brand new theory on Alzheimer's, maybe we finally cracked it, you know. And, and, and every single one of them puffed it up. When it was retracted, you know, uh, 13 years later, 14 years later, facing credible accusations of research misconduct, albeit ones that are denied to this day by Marc Tessier-Levine. Not a single one of those publications wrote about it, right? And so, you know, look, the media is to some degree complicit in this. There is not a robust accountability ecosystem, and that requires a lot of different stakeholders. It requires a change in the institutions. It requires— in terms of the science part, it requires a change in the journals, you know, who are publishing this and also seem to have an incentive to keep keep the bad things from coming out. Um, and it also requires this sort of transparency that journalists often push for, uh, but seem to be sort of outgunned, I guess. Um, and that routinely, you know, allows these companies, uh, that are doing bad things to sort of fester, you know, that allows, uh, you know, the same thing for scientific research.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, there's another paragraph I want to read. Um, college is about reinvention. Like others, I'd hoped to leave behind the baggage of high school and begin anew with people who didn't know me, except only 4 months in, that was over. Nearly every person I would meet now would already have an opinion of me. I cannot describe how this— cannot describe how depressing that felt, that at 17 I'd already lost the chance to be seen as a blank slate. I went to a dinner a couple of months ago with some Stanford graduate students, and your name came up. They had opinions of you, I'm sure. And they would say things like, oh yeah, I saw that guy in the class, everyone was looking at him. And then I thought, man, what a, what a weird way to go through school. So did students hate— do they like, are you, are you hated or are you— I mean, I'm not, I'm sure it's not universal, but you must be a thing.

Well, it sounds kind of melodramatic when you read it out loud, right? It's, you know, it's, it's, it's not, you know, there are actually famous people at Stanford, right? You know, like Eileen Gu is my classmate. She is way more famous than I will ever be and way more accomplished and all that. I was more like a zoo animal, I think is a better descriptor. I remember, like, I think right before that paragraph, like, people had just shown up outside my door and were like gossiping and they were like, oh my God, it's that kid. You know, it's like, I'm right here. I can hear you. The door is very flimsy. You know, I can hear you through the dorm walls. Look, it's weird to be a sort of polarizing figure, especially because, like, the journalism thing I was doing this because I, I don't know, because it was a hobby, because it was fun. Like, I wasn't trying to be in the middle of all this and it kind of happened. But, you know, look, it's— I feel very, very fortunate that I'm able to do work that, you know, I think has an impact on the community, hopefully start some conversations. So it's a mixed bag.

Is it like less bad as a couple of years, like while you're working on the book and it sort of dies down a little and he's gone and It definitely got a lot worse sophomore year in the middle of, you know, when everything became just much more rancorous.

All of higher education became much more rancorous in the sort of post-October 7th landscape. But, you know, again, like, I'm grateful. I've had a lot of great support at Stanford, so I'm not, you know, I— it's just weird, right? It's like I remember like there were like 7 different shows within like a year that like put a parody version of me on stage. It's like I don't really know how to process seeing like a version of myself on screen at the Law School Musical, you know, dancing to a version of In the Navy called In the Daily with hunky backup dancers. Like, you know, no, you know, there's like another one where like it was like 1,500 people were there. It's like this show that they've written called Gayities and, you know, a version of my character and a version of my editor are like onstage kissing.

Yeah.

It's like, you know, like Sam and I are not—

not—

no. Yeah, I'm not super comfortable with that. So, you know, look, it's a mixed bag. But it's just an interesting thing. I mean, it's— I don't know. For me, it was an interesting phenomenon. I hope that it's sort of like an interesting journey to follow along with.

No, it is. It is. So when he— like, when it gets to the point where he's— they're essentially— the lawyers are saying, you can't print this, we're going to sue you. Like, was there ever any time where other parts of the administration were like, we're going to throw you out of state? I mean, it didn't seem like it, but I mean, did Did anything like that ever happen?

Certainly, I always worried about what forms of pressure they would try to exert, you know, and certainly I was warned to expect things. There were a lot of moments where there were, like, faculty whose classes I was taking, and I'd be like, oh, you know, can I talk to you about, like, you know, I was like, oh my God, here's this thing about philosophy, like, can I talk to you about, you know, Descartes or whatever? It's like, I totally support what you're doing, I love your work, but I cannot be seen with you in public. It's like, what kind of a tenured professor do you have to be to tell that to a 17-year-old, right? It's like, you know, like what's also— what is the point of tenure if you can't speak your mind? But it also goes to the sort of omerta that is very, very present at Stanford. You don't talk about the bad things. You don't talk about the powerful people who, you know, may or may not control your lives. And that's a big part of why none of this stuff had come out, you know, properly in public before. And why a lot of stuff at Stanford and Silicon Valley, like, you know, there's most of the stuff in this book should have been reported a long time ago. And, and, you know, through a variety of circumstances and for various reasons, you know, it wasn't. But a big part of that is because of this culture of silence.

So you already talked about what happened before this recent event, but I mean, so Stanford must be shitting their pants about this book coming out.

You know, I was at a graduation the other day. I was at an event the other day and a senior, very senior administrator I know, was very nice guy, good guy. He sees me, he walks over, he says, May 19th, you got a lot of people around here scared. What's in it? I'm just like, you know, like, but I don't know. Look, I'm grateful to the administration. They by now they definitely have, you know, I'm grateful that John Levin sat down for I think it was 3 interviews His president predecessor, the interim president, Saller, Richard Saller, sat down for 3 interviews. The provost sat down for an interview. The former provost and former President John Hennessy and Condoleezza Rice both sat for interviews. You know, I'm grateful that they've been willing to engage with this stuff because it's thorny. Yeah. And, you know, there isn't— I'm not so presumptuous as to think that I alone have the one answer. You know, these are tough questions, but You know, I think there are parts. Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, tells me, you know, while we're talking about all of these issues, you know, she was the provost at Stanford. She's obviously a very impressive figure, still very engaged with the community. She directs the Hoover Institution. We're talking about the fraud. And she brings up a comparison from her time in the Bush administration. And she says, you know, and I'm paraphrasing here, but she says that, you know, sometimes You know, you have to— you know that you'll kill civilians because you have to bomb a terrorist cell, and you know that people are going to die, innocent people are going to die. But if you don't do it, thousands more people are going to die. And so she extends that to Stanford. She says, if you're going to have a big commercialization arm, if you're going to encourage people to take risks, you know, there are going to be some bad apples. And I guess that's sort of the perspective that I disagree with. You know, I think with respect to Secretary Rice, that I have a slightly less fatalistic view. You know, I do think that you can inculcate innovation without enabling fraud at the same time, that that is not necessary to only ever talk about the good stuff. And so I guess that's, that's part of the conversation I hope that we're going to have with this book is that, you know, we'll be able to see this institution, this place that has so much influence on the rest of the world, you know, that is training the future generation of, you know, Silicon Valley rulers of the universe and see it for what it actually is.

What do you like? The fraud. Okay, so that line where you go from drive and genius and curiosity and all that into fraud, like, what is it about the Stanford culture then that you think is fostering? Yeah, this turn to fraud.

Yeah. Well, there are a lot of examples over the course of the book and, you know, I won't, you know, go into all of them in detail. But I guess the thing is that when you're an 18-year-old right, and someone says, here is $1 million of pre-idea funding, right? You don't have a company yet, but take it and build something with it. You overpromise, you know, because how could you possibly say no to that? You put yourself in a situation where you have a huge incentive to make yourself look good. And, and then there aren't people who are going to call you when you start to do the little deceptions. You know, if you fake a launch demo, you know, as one of the kids I arrived and became friends with over over the course of my time at Stanford did. You know, I watched, you know, she put out this, this, this glitzy launch video and had, you know, was feted by all of Silicon Valley in these, you know, mansion parties and whatnot. And her tech couldn't do any of it. Right. And that starts, you know, with the sort of extractive, like, talent situation. Again, it's not a bad thing to want to find the 17 and 18-year-olds who are going to change the world. But when you are not not, you know, you're showing them that, um, this is the way to get ahead and that they're not going to be stopped, uh, or not going to be called on it if things go wrong. That's why you see the same behavior occurring again and again.

So there you do an interview with, or you met Sam Altman at some point. Um, did you interview him for the book? I just met him. And I mean, Sam went to Stanford. He says in here, It was 20 years ago when I was there, and it's very— it was a very different time in the world. None of that stuff happened. No VCs were showing up, taking people to dinner. There was nothing even close to the idea that clearly exists now of the VC circuit where the same people go to every event. He continued, I heard there's crazy luxurious trips now and all of this stuff, and it sounds very awesome, but that didn't exist at all when I was there. I mean, there's other parts in the book where VCs are inviting either you or somebody else to like a sex party.

Yeah, I was a minor, by the way. That was not a good decision.

I was good. I— yeah, I mean, like, there's not like a lot of stuff in the— there's a couple of things of sort of like sexual things. A lot of this is kind of like just money for ideas, but like, it seemed like it could kind of go that way.

And certainly there are, there are many stories that sort of percolate about that behavior.

And then my big question, I mean, I think I have a largely different opinion of Sam than the world seems to have at the moment, but he went to Stanford and a lot of what you describe is kind of like following along with his reputation at the moment, sort of exactly what you described of promising the world and, and then just being on this endless cycle of, um, you know, trying to prove things that may or may not exist yet. Yeah.

Well, yes, you know, I think the point that, that Sam makes in the book that I think is, is, is completely the right point is that, you know, this is a system that is trying to replicate the success of a place that was until very recently a very different place. Right. Stanford built its reputation as an underdog, you know, that, that these crazy builders were out here making things for the hell of it. And it's leading to all of this amazing new technology. It's not an underdog anymore. You know, it is on top of the world. It has a reputation to protect. You know, the kids who are hacking together things in their dorm rooms, uh, aren't just doing it for fun. It's— they're putting it on their resumes, you know, and the, the hacking sessions, you know, have corporate sponsors, you know, and when you want to start a company, you text a billionaire for advice, right? And so I think the jury is still very much out in terms of whether or not that will actually help, uh, lead to future successful companies. You know, whether this new version of Silicon Valley and Stanford where the money is everywhere, where it's not the renegade outside hackers, but it's the kids who know that they can make their billions by doing this. It's unclear to me whether that's going to result in the same sort of success. And I think, you know, Steve Blank, who teaches Lean LaunchPad, the famous startup incubator class at Stanford, you know, I talked to him for this book and I thought he had a really sort of sharp perspective on that, that that, you know, that it's, it's getting harder to find the actual geniuses, uh, cuz it's so suffused with entrepreneurial ambition.

Yeah. Slightly tangential, but you should watch Steve Blank's The Secret History of Silicon Valley video. It's very good. Um, to your point, you're making me think, I mean, that first generation of Hewlett-Packard, the Littens, the Varians, um, Philo Farnsworth, a huge thing they were doing was, uh, reaction, even coming a generation or two later with, uh, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, the founders of Silicon Valley. This was a reaction to the East Coast and the traditional way of doing things. And Stanford, in large thanks to Fred Terman, and then just some weird happenstance, um, John Hennessy.

Now, I mean, really, yeah, the more like sort of higher-end institutional version.

But I'm just kind of going back to this, this like, yeah, it was, it was electronics, but it was the Wild West of electronics. And it was, it was like RCA is going to do things this real slow, stodgy way. IBM is going to do that. We're going to figure out the different way to do things. So I could see how what you're talking about. I'm covering like these hard tech founders all over the world. I mean, maybe somewhere else pops up, you know, like India or something.

But it's just, it's just amazing though, is the mythology has taken over everything. And sort of replaced what actually existed there in the first place. You know, it's like, you know, there's, there's something on Stanford that's called the Hewlett Shed, right? It's a replica of the garage where Hewlett-Packard started their company with $538 in 1939 at the urging of Fred Terman. And it sits inside the 136,000-square-foot all-glass, you know, Huang Engineering Center. And, and by the way, you know, Treehacks, when I was there running the— helping to run the school hackathon my freshman year, I locked up $200,000 worth of prizes in the Hewlett shed, standing next to the solar car, the solar-powered car that was hanging from the ceiling that had been built from students. So it's just, it's a very different place right now. Yeah. While it continues to insist that it's the same institution and it has the same character.

Okay. What did you end up getting your degree in?

Uh, I, uh, I'm getting a history degree. I'm one credit short of a CS minor, but I had to skip time so I could get that.

So history.

Yeah.

So, Please tell me you're not going to make the mistake of becoming a journalist. I fear you are. What is next?

I, you know, I honestly have no idea. I feel like I got to get through graduation first.

Okay. Okay. You seem like you're the kind of person that might have already lined something up.

I'm not really like, I don't know, I'm not like a planner in the sense that like I have, I've always had like my 5-year plan, but I came to look, I fell in love with Stanford when I was 7.

Yeah.

And I remember, I remember very specifically actually the moment I did. I saw this image of these kids in their Stanford t-shirts and shorts and sandals, and they were, you know, lounging beneath the shade of a palm tree, leaning up against a self-driving car they just helped build with Sebastian Thrun. And I was like, holy cow, you know, like the coolest kids in the world are there, the most brilliant people. Things are happening there. And so, you know, I've had a weirder time at Stanford than maybe I expected, but I'm still, you know, I find that sort of ambition, that philosophy remarkable.

You look like you didn't want to tell me something. Do you know what you're doing next?

I genuinely don't.

Yeah. Are you going to be a journalist? Probably. Yeah.

I don't know. I think I will probably. Like, storytelling is something I've found that I really love. Yeah. And I hope that, like, in the book, I think it's sort of clear that, like, I don't know, journalism was almost like something I discovered inside of myself. It was like, you know, it's like this temperament that, like, you know, if you want to know the answer to something, you're not just going to sit on your ass and wait for someone to tell you, like, you're going to go out and get it.

So do you think you would do like tech stuff, politics? Like, I mean, what are your interests? History? I mean, what are you—

yeah, I mean, all of the above. This is the other thing is that like, you know, research misconduct is the reporting that, that obviously, you know, resulted in what it resulted in. But I've reported on student parties, I've reported on, you know, Formula One, I've reported on, you know, this imposter kid. So I'm just interested in stories, you know?

But you, like, come in looking for all the world like you're going to be a startup founder. You don't think you're going to do like a tech startup?

I don't think it would be like— I'm never going to be like a SWE kid, you know, a software engineer. I think that, that, that route is behind me. I don't think it's impossible that I would work with tech in some way. But again, this, like, I don't know, I have not been like— I just turned in my thesis last week.

I'm not trying to pressure you. I was just curious.

You're making me feel anxious. You know, I don't have it all squared away yet.

That works for me. I was just— I was— no, no, I was just super curious.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll keep you posted.

Okay.

I don't know.

There is a hilarious part of this book at the end. You've like, you've forced the Stanford president to resign. All these VC sycophants are still around you. I mean, and they're offering you jobs. They're like, I mean, it's like It's like they hate the press, they hate people who do stuff that you do. They probably hate this particular story in a lot of ways, and yet they still see in you what they look for, which is that exceptional, exceptional kid, somebody doing something out of the norm, and they're still offering you jobs.

We'll see if they continue to do so. But yes, no, it's the very kicker to the book. Two of the VCs I get to know over the course of freshman year who, you know, go over and beyond, you know, to— I think I know who that is. I'm sure you do. Are the ones, two of the ones who end up leading Marc Tessier-Lévine's fundraising.

Yeah.

After having said that they admired my reporting and then they continue to be in touch. And a few months later, one invites me to a party and someone from the firm texts me, hey, Theo, this is a direct quote. I remember it verbatim because I remember getting this text. Hey, Theo, when you aren't too busy knocking university presidents off their perches into the hands of VCs willing to fund them for a B, you should join. Winky face.

Okay, so this— I did have one question about this. I mean, you, you don't name many of these VC characters. This entire book of you holding power to account. They say some of the most disgusting stuff in the book and you kind of let them off with a pass.

Well, I'm not going out of my way to hide, you know, everyone's identity. I will say that one of the things that inspired me to write this book was One L, which is Scott Turow's, like, enduring account of his first year at Harvard Law School. And, you know, one of the things that Turow did, which made sense to me, was that he changed a lot of the names that he used. And, and to me, you know, because I was writing about a lot of young people, you know, that I encountered, like, you know, thinking that I was a coder like them, you know, who were there with me, you know, and are still figuring things out for themselves. I think it made sense for me to change some of the names here, particularly because it's not— it's not about any individual, right? Like, it's not about me. It's not about Mark, you know, Tessie Levine. It's not about any of these individual students. I'm trying to capture this sort of chronicle of this portrait of a place and time. And so, you know, it's not that I don't name people, like there are definitely people who are named in the book, but a lot of the, a lot of the like sort of more memoir-ish elements or the things that, you know, you are experiencing with me, you know, as a character, I have, you know, chosen not to do that.

So even though, because there is, Yeah, I'm pretty sure I know this one guy, and like, why give him a pass? He's like talking about women he likes, and, um, you know, someone— it's like not even the worst stuff, it's a bit unsavory, but, but why, why, why, why give him a pass? I still don't know that. I can understand. No, no, prudence or something like that.

I think, I think that's a fair point to make, and Look, most of it is that, like, he's not that interesting to me, you know, like this place is.

Yeah.

So, like, I don't want the focus to be on, you know, like, oh, this guy said that thing or this sort of like, you know, like salacious side of things. Like what I want this to be is the sort of telling us a broader story. And I think that's fair. You know, maybe there are places in the book that, you know, one could make different decisions reasonably, but This is where we ended up.

Okay. Okay. I just had to ask.

No, no, I think that's totally fair.

You say the professors in the humanities are still excellent, producing remarkable scholarship and teaching great classes, but demand has fallen off a cliff. This is about like comp sci versus the other subjects and cultural conflict over the mission of the university. Oh wait, I messed something up. But demand has fallen off a cliff. And cultural conflict over the mission of the university— is this a place to learn or a place to get rich— has been profound. So which one is it?

Well, I think the problem is that people have very different opinions, right? And that this is an institution that has become so sprawling that what do you as a chem major really have in common with an English lit major, you know? And what do either of you really have in common with the CS kid who's getting fettered every night by a different VC? Right. And so it's really hard to have a cohesive, you know, cultural character when everything is so fragmented. This is not just a Stanford thing. The modern university has become a giant hedge fund, you know, controlling for these most elite institutions billions and billions of dollars, a professional sports league. You know, Stanford has, you know, some of the largest athletics programs in the country. It is a place where teenagers are growing about their normal, ordinary, you know, teenage exploration.. It is a place where the highest standards of scientific research are being conducted and where the repositories of historical knowledge are being kept. You know, it is a series of hospitals, you know, operated under the aegis of the same institution. It is, you know, all of these things at once. And how do you make that one institution? You know, these, these, they have sort of strayed, you know, from, from having a single character as they have become larger and larger and larger. And certainly that is a huge problem for Stanford. Stanford right now. I think everyone, you know, at Stanford would tell you that.

Okay. Um, all right, I'm gonna set you free in a second. Um, the last time I read a book like this by somebody so young that really— I mean, it was just like extraordinary. Um, was No Good Men Among the Living, if I remember right. That's like an MIT kid who goes to Afghanistan and hops on a motorcycle and, and goes across the country trying to figure out the truth of what happened. Um, after the US turned up and it was just like, I'm so envious, man. I wish it's like, uh, it's awesome what you guys do. This is very hard. I don't— people hate journalists. I hope they know how hard this is. Um, I hope they know how much work I can see went into this and the fact that you did this while you're going to school. I'm getting a little teary-eyed because it's It's extraordinary. I— no, it's really hard. And like, you should be so proud.

And beyond that, thank you.

The writing is just really, really good, you know? And so it's gonna be tough, dude. You gotta like— I mean, it's like so cool that you've done this. Then like, what's next? Oh my God. What a— is it probably a good problem to have, but a daunting one. But I'm sure I'm sure you got it in you. So cool. All right. Well, anything else you want that we didn't cover? You want people to know? You want to pitch it?

Well, the one thing I didn't talk about that maybe is a good place to end is what Stanford can be. One of the last things that I did freshman year that I really enjoyed was the so-called Stanford Highly Incompetent Team. And, you know, the acronym, I think people could figure out for themselves. There was this amateur car racing team. And as one team member joked, you know, a balloon would be above our budget. And these kids in the lowest level of the underground garage created two race cars from scratch out of these beater 1990s hatchbacks and with no profit incentive, you know, no motivation other than really just doing it for the hell of it. Yeah, these kids, and they are brilliant and they are fun and they are fantastic. Are the exact example of what Stanford really can be and the parts of the university that still exist. So there is hope. There is a reason to, to, to be positive about Stanford. That is the kind of thing I would like to see more of and a little bit less of the fraud part.

Yeah, fair. There's so much cool stuff still happening. I find sometimes the pendulum just got to swing a little the other way when it's gone too far and probably VCs paying tens of thousands of dollars to then like offer trips to their mansion and sex parties to, to 17, 18, 19-year-olds is probably too far.

I think, you know, I think reasonable, I think most reasonable people are probably on board.

Yeah. Yeah. It reminded me of what we do with professional athletes. I just didn't realize it had gone this extreme. I just got kind of like new bits and, you know, like a flavor of this, but I didn't really, I was like, wow.

Yeah.

God. I'm in the thick of it and I'm not just the whole tech scene, but I, you know, I'm right in Palo Alto and, and, um, yeah, it was, it was a surprise.

Wow.

Uh, well, congratulations and I can't wait to see what you do next. I wish you all the luck. This is, um, when you go on these book tour things, it's like extremely energy demanding and, and fun and stressful and all that at the same time. And you're doing this as you graduate.

Wow.

You know, good luck to you.

Thank you. And it's, you know, an honor and a privilege.

It really is. Well, that's silly. You've already outdone me. So good for you.

Oh my God, get out of here. Not again. Thank you.

Thank you. I hope we stay in touch for a long time. Thank you so much for coming by.

This is amazing. Really appreciate it.

The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance, and/or Kylee Robison. Both of us together. It is produced by me and David Nicholson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited always by the John Sortland. Thank you so much to Brex and Send Cut Send for all your support, and thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching. We love you. Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things. Thank you, and we'll see you again.