Theo Baker

You know, people are well aware of the privileges and the excesses of the Ivy League and the pipeline that has historically existed between those, you know, prestigious institutions and Wall Street and Washington.

Stanford and Silicon Valley are just so much more entangled.

Right.

If you just take the cumulative value of the companies that have offices on the Stanford campus, it's somewhere north of six trillion dollars.

You know, that this is a place that that literates its own venture capital fund.

The school has its own VC fund to seed students as new companies.

Right.

And so it's just, you know, Silicon Valley couldn't exist without Stanford.

It was created at the Stanford Research Park.

They grew out of this university.

You know, the early tech giant Sun Microsystems was literally named for Stanford University Network.

Right.

I didn't know that.

And so, you know, the book is subtitled An Education in Power, right?

That power operates in similar ways, you know, wherever it exists, I guess.

But this is the hub of power at the moment that Silicon Valley, you know, controls the technology that controls our lives.

And these kids are being groomed, you know, to inherit their rightful place among the ruling elite.

And so you mentioned Skull and Bones, the equivalent to Skull and Bones, I guess, what I think of as sort of a Skull and Bones for the aspiring tech elite is where this book gets its title.

the secret class at Stanford called How to Rule the World.

It's literally called How to Rule the World.