Theo Baker

You know, like the guy who, you know, 30 minutes after I met him is like offering to get me drugs because he's like, oh, well, you should try these drugs.

And, you know, I look him up later and he's already raised $20 million for a software company.

You

It's like normal college things with very abnormal context.

And so, yeah, I mean, I have over the course of freshman year, I come in thinking I'm a techie and I still love technology, but I very much got swept up into journalism and discovered that that was something that

I, I is so powerful and special to me as to like my own positioning.

You're right that, that like I'm here in the mix and I'm seeing this too.

And, and, and I'm trying to show what the seduction looks like because I want people to understand that this, this doesn't work unless people are drawn into it.

Yeah.

You know, I never got, like, much further than kid with potential, right?

Like, I was just close enough to see.

But obviously, like, I never took venture capital money or I never made any money off of this.

Like, I was just close enough to see it exist.

Well, not yet.

Not yet.

I think I've sort of made my choice with journalism at this point.

But what I hope that this book is able to show is what this looks like at every stage, right?

In the fight for accountability with the president and these papers that had not been scrutinized for years and the sort of extraordinary apparatus of power protecting itself that I come up against, as well as these bright-eyed freshman wannabes that I arrived with who are shown that the way to play the game in their own words is

The way to get ahead is appearance at all costs, is cutting corners because winning is the only thing that matters.

No.