Theo Baker

That actually building, you know, and inventing things, that's not nonconformity anymore.

It's people trying to replicate, you know, the playbook that they've seen yield tremendous riches in the future.

And I think that has changed the character of things, right?

That students here...

now are taught how to make very very big promises and then they know and they are shown time and again that if they don't live up to those promises they can just say that they have

And that nobody seems to call them on it.

And that little deceptions lead to bigger ones.

And that kids I arrived with as freshmen, I watched them learn how to misrepresent themselves to VCs and raise venture capital funding.

I watched one of them I knew who...

literally faked a launch demo for her company and was feted by all of Silicon Valley and put up in a mansion and celebrated as the very, very best of the best for technology she didn't have and hadn't made.

You know, if you want to understand, right, how the next Elizabeth Holmes or Sam Bankman free comes to be, you have to look at how the next generation of tech leaders are being trained.

Yeah, well, this is, I think, in a piece I wrote about AI, which is so fascinating, right?

AI is this great accelerant.

It takes all of these trends that have been brimming beneath the surface and makes them far more intense.

So one of those trends is stratification, right?

The most valuable researchers are more valuable now than they ever have been before, while the entry level positions are getting drawn up in front of people.

And so there's this sort of common refrain now among the Stanford inside Stanford that it's easier to raise money for a startup than it is to get an internship.

That Stanford's computer science enrollment actually went down for the first time last year in over two decades.

Because people don't feel that

that they can get a job with a computer science degree from Stanford anymore.