Author Talk: Theo Baker — How to Rule the World - with Mary Louise Kelly

Watch author Theo Baker discuss "How to Rule the World" at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

Winner of the George Polk Award for his investigation that brought down Stanford’s president, Theo Baker offers a revelatory and gripping account of Silicon Valley hubris

Slush funds. Shell companies. Yacht parties. This is life for Silicon Valley’s favored teenagers.

Seventeen-year-old Theo Baker showed up for freshman year at Stanford University as a tech-obsessed coder. It seemed like paradise. There were Rodin sculptures next to nuclear laboratories and inventors lounging with Olympians. But Baker soon discovered a culture that embraced corner-cutting, that vested infinite excess and access in the hands of kids with few safeguards to catch bad behavior.

Stanford, he realized, was less a school than a business. Its annual budget was nearly twice that of Harvard or Yale and higher than those of 116 countries. The product? Students. Especially those special few identified as the next trillion-dollar startup founders. For them, there were secret societies, “pre-idea” funding offers, and social calls from billionaires, all with the expectation that these geniuses would soon join the ruling elite.

Theo Baker is an undergraduate at Stanford University. His reporting led to former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation and made Baker the youngest-ever recipient of the prestigious George Polk Award. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, New York magazine, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He will graduate from Stanford in June 2026.

Baker is in conversation with award-winning broadcaster and author Mary Louise Kelly, one of the most prominent voices in American journalism today. As host of NPR’s All Things Considered, her assignments have included North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Israel, Iran and beyond. Kelly’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. She serves on Harvard’s Board of Overseers and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and author of two novels, Anonymous Sources and The Bullet. Her 2023 memoir, It.Goes.So.Fast, was an instant New York Times bestseller.

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Politics and Prose is a beloved and award-winning staple for book lovers around the nation's capital and the world. In addition to our incredible selection of titles, Politics and Prose offers public book talks with today's leading authors and journalists.

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