“The Stanford Freshmen Who Want to Rule the World”. . . You will probably read this book and try even harder.

Theo Baker will graduate from Stanford this spring with something most seniors don’t have: a book deal, a George Polk Award he received for your investigative report as a journalism student and front-row story of one of the most romantic institutions in the world.

Your next How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was extracted Friday on The Atlantic and based on that alone, I can’t wait to see the rest. The only question worth asking is the same one that Baker himself might come too close to answering: Can a book like this really change anything? Or does the attention, as it always seems, send more students running to the scene?

The parallel that comes to mind is “The Social Network.” Aaron Sorkin wrote a film that was in many ways an indictment of the particular sociopathy that Silicon Valley tends to reward. What it apparently did was make a generation of young people want to be Mark Zuckerberg. The warning was turned into a recruiting video. The story of the guy who, at least in the movie, ran over his best friend on his way to billions didn’t discourage ambition; embellished it even more.

Judging by the excerpt, Baker’s portrait of Stanford is much more granular. He speaks to hundreds of people to bluntly describe the “Stanford within Stanford.” “You either join the first year or you don’t,” one student tells Baker. It is an invitation-only world, where venture capitalists wine and dine 18-year-olds, where students are given hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of “pre-idea funding” before they have even come up with an original idea, and where the line between mentorship and predation is nearly impossible to discern. (The shame of chasing teenage founders, if it ever existed, is gone; not chasing them is no longer an option for most VCs.) Steve Blank, who teaches the school’s legendary startup course, tells Baker that “Stanford is an incubator with dormitories,” which is not intended as a compliment.

What is new is not that this pressure exists but that it has been fully internalized. There was a time, maybe 10, maybe 15 years ago, when Stanford students felt the weight of Silicon Valley expectations pressing down on them from the outside. Now, many of them come to campus expecting, as a matter of course, to launch a startup, raise money, and get rich.

I think about a friend (I’ll call him D) who dropped out of Stanford a few years ago, halfway through his first two years, to launch a startup. He was barely past adolescence. The words “I’m thinking about taking a leave of absence” had just escaped his mouth before the university, by his own account, gave him its joyful blessing to fully immerse himself in the startup. Stanford no longer fights this, if it ever did. Outputs like his are an expected result.

D is now in his twenties. His company has raised what in any normal context would register as a staggering amount of money. You almost certainly know more about cap tables, risk dynamics, and product-market fit than most people learn in a decade of conventional careers. By every measure the Valley uses, he is a success story. But he also doesn’t see his family (no time), he’s barely dated (no time), and the company, which continues to grow, doesn’t seem willing to provide him with that kind of balance anytime soon. You are already, in some significant sense, behind in your own life.

This is the part that Baker’s excerpt hints at without quite landing, perhaps because he himself is still in it. The costs of this system are not simply distributed in the form of fraud, although Baker is forthright about this, describing it as pervasive and largely consequence-free. The costs are more personal, too: the relationships unformed, the ordinary milestones of early adulthood traded in exchange for a billion-dollar vision that, statistically, almost certainly will not materialize. “100% of entrepreneurs believe they are visionaries,” Blank tells Baker. “The data says that 99% are not.”

What happens to the 99% at 30 years old? At 40 years old? These are not questions that Silicon Valley is prepared to answer, and they are certainly not questions that Stanford is about to start asking itself.

Baker also brings to light something that Sam Altman expresses best. Altman, CEO of OpenAI, former head of Y Combinator, precisely the kind of person these students aspire to become, tells Baker that the VC dinner circuit has become an “anti-signal” for people who really know what talent looks like. The students who do the rounds, acting as founders to rooms full of investors, tend not to be the real builders. The real builders, presumably, are somewhere else, building things. The performance of ambition and the thing itself are increasingly difficult to distinguish, and the system that was ostensibly designed to find geniuses has become very good at finding people who are good at looking like geniuses.

How to rule the world It seems like exactly the right book for this moment. But there’s a certain irony in the high likelihood that this critically minded book about Stanford’s relationship with power and money will be celebrated by the same kind of people it criticizes and, if it does well (it’s already been optioned for a movie), used as further proof that Stanford produces not just founders and hustlers, but important ones as well. writers and journalistsalso.