Theo Baker

It's literally called How to Rule the World.

The Silicon Valley CEO teaches 12 Stanford students a year the secrets to becoming the billionaires they aspire to be.

There's this whole cloak and dagger admissions process.

And the end result is that people are taught how to, quote, extract value from others.

That is the central lesson here.

And that seems to be what Silicon Valley is teaching a lot of people at the moment, extracting value.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, the sort of Stanford inside Stanford for, you know, those chosen few is necessarily different.

small and cloistered and kept obscured from everyone else, even at this institution.

Like most people who go to Stanford go to a very good, but normal, quote unquote, normal college where there are lots of opportunities and you study for your exams and you go to coffee shops and you fall in love and you try to get an internship.

And then the Stanford inside Stanford is sort of like the supercharged manifestation of the attitude that Stanford has been inculcating for the last several decades.

This is an institution with a guy who's known by the moniker Professor Billionaire because he made $20 billion by investing in his students' companies.

It is a little on the nose, but there's a lot of stuff that's on the nose here.

I mean, this place has a very funny relationship to irony.

I remember there's this one interaction that has stuck with me.

I'm meeting this woman for the first time at this secret society, and it's this totally bizarre scene, and she's telling me,

She spends her very first interaction complaining about living on a private island.

She says, living on a private island is so difficult.

And here's the reason she gets.

She says, well, this is a direct quote.