Theo Baker

I don't know.

That said a lot to me about this place.

There are so many things, I guess, that are hidden in plain sight.

I mean, I think as soon as I heard about it, I knew that I would be writing about it in some way.

That this was just, you know, a great story.

That...

You know, there's just there's a lot that happens here that is known to the quote unquote insider and yet never gets written about, you know, in part because the Silicon Valley press corps is sort of undergunned.

And there's just a lot of stories to go around, in part because this aura of secrecy is sort of strictly maintained.

You know, in freshman year, like I had someone asked me to sign a nondisclosure agreement to go to a party.

Like a 20-year-old, which is like a really, really weird thing to ask someone to do.

It also was a really boring party.

It's not like there was anything happening there.

And so all of these things, this place is distinctly odd.

And the flavor of its oddness is driven by its status as the controlling mechanism for the technology that governs all of our lives.

Yes, I'm not worthy.

I'm not worthy of ruling the world.

But as I discovered over the course of that freshman year, right, like ruling the world was actually a lot less attractive to me than figuring out how others did it.

That actually reporting is the thing that I find much more interesting.

And, you know.

What I'm asking of Stanford, right, is not to tear it all down.