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How to Rule the World
- Author
- Theo Baker
- Narrator
- Theo Baker
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Publish Date
- 19 May 2026
- Run Time
- 11 hours 31 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
A searing critique of the crony-capitalist, talent-scraping culture of the Stanford elites, by a brilliant young journalist
When seventeen-year old Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University one brisk September morning, its manicured lawns, palm trees and sparkling fountains, all under azure Californian skies, provoked in him both wonderment and a sense of anticipation. After all, this legendary campus, where Rodin sculptures rub shoulders with nuclear laboratories, is where Silicon Valley was birthed. Its research park housed the headquarters of Facebook and Hewlett Packard, with venture capitalists a stone's throw away, ready to fund the next promising teenager's startup. With an annual budget eclipsing the budgets of 153 countries, yet a reputation for being laid-back and innovative, Stanford seemed like tech heaven. Instead, Baker discovered a cultural rot.
In this astonishing debut Baker recounts his freshman year mission to uncover the secrets behind Silicon Valley's training ground. He describes the Stanford inside Stanford, a strange, money-soaked subculture of infinite excess and access, afforded only to those special few students plucked from the crowd and expected to create billion dollar companies. And he documents a culture of getting ahead at any cost, of cut corners enabled and embraced. A culture that went to the very top. Baker's investigations for the student newspaper would soon place him in the impossibly difficult position of investigating his own university's president, a famous neuroscientist with a squeaky-clean reputation. By the end of his freshman year, after Baker's reporting revealed two decades of unreported research misconduct allegations, including in a study that claimed to have found the cause of degeneration in Alzheimer's patients, Stanford's president was forced to resign.
Both coming-of-age story and clear-eyed exposé, Baker takes us inside this elite American world like no other, revealing the ambitious, amoral, and at-times laughably absurd truth behind the institution training kids to rule the world.
© Theo Baker 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026
Critics Review
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I am a sucker for books that illuminate cultures born of hubris, stories that make you say, ‘I had no idea this world existed.’ Theo Baker achieves this for several such worlds at the same time: Silicon Valley, ‘Nerd Nation’ (as Stanford calls itself), oligarchy, and precocious youth generally. Poignant, maddening, and genuinely hilarious, How to Rule the World is to be devoured—and fast, before Stanford buys up and sets fire to every copy. (Talk about a burn book!)
Mark Leibovich, #1 New York Times bestselling author of This Town
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How to Rule the World is the story of a young reporter unafraid to challenge Silicon Valley’s billionaires and the powerful institutions that enable them—including his own university. Dogged, fearless, unflinching—Baker proves journalism’s future is alive and fighting. Both a gripping personal journey and a searing indictment of our entanglement with tech wealth and influence, this book shows how real reporting can still unsettle, expose, and hold the powerful to account
Emily Chang, national bestselling author and Emmy Award–winning journalist at Bloomberg Originals
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I first loved How to Rule The World because it manages to tell you everything you need to know about America in this particular moment by focusing so closely on the cloistered yet unimaginably powerful world of Stanford. And then I met Theo, a young man so brilliant and erudite that I walked away from our first meeting with a full reading list. His vulnerability and brilliance leap off the page in equal measure
Amy Pascal, former chairwoman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, founder of Pascal Pictures, and producer of the Spider-Man films, James Bond, The Post, Little Women, and The Social Network
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Theo Baker has written a page-turning drama about what happens when the search for scientific truth has to compete with personal and institutional power. His remarkable reporting has permanently changed the way we discuss research misconduct. Yet How to Rule the World is so much more. It’s a vital story about how higher education has lost sight of the students and ideals it was created to serve
Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of Science and former chancellor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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In How to Rule the World, the wunderkind Theo Baker combines the remarkable story of his astounding reporting as a Stanford freshman that led to the downfall of the university’s president with his wry, insightful observations about Stanford’s unique form of Silicon Valley arrogance. Both strands are rendered in spare and propulsive prose, making it a nearly unfathomable accomplishment from someone so young
William Cohan, bestselling author of House of Cards
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How to Rule the World is a fascinating safari through modern academia, based on meticulous, damning reporting. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the culture of money and ambition that has taken hold at one of America’s most storied institutions
Jake Tapper, #1 New York Times bestselling author and Emmy Award–winning anchor at CNN
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Stanford is one of America’s most influential and fascinating institutions, and the gulf between those qualities and the attention it receives is vast. The world badly needs an inside account of this mysterious corner of the country from which so much wealth has oozed, and Theo Baker is the perfect author to deliver it
Jonathan Chait, staff writer at The Atlantic
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A rigorous, self-assured, propulsive, at times terrifying portrait of a dweebocracy that ‘sets the agenda for the planet.’ In every age, there is some place that epitomizes how power works. Baker’s Stanford is a strong candidate, and his book follows in the tradition of Michael Lewis’s Wall Street chronicle Liar’s Poker
The New York Times
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Baker’s book is a thrilling story of journalistic investigation: effectively, it’s All the President’s Men as a campus novel. . . Every one of us now lives in the domain of Stanford’s self-styled Übermenschen. Baker’s undeniable talent might make me sick with envy, but the truly nauseating thing here is the moral void he sketches at the heart of the tech world
The Times
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The true significance of Baker’s book lies not in the story of a brave student journalist nor in the size of the scalp he eventually claimed, but in what it reveals about the ethos of the institution now routinely referred to as ‘America’s top university
New Statesman
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Details
- Author
- Theo Baker
- Narrator
- Theo Baker
- Duration
- 11 hours 31 minutes
- Release Date
- 19 May 2026
- ISBN
- 9781837314195
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Genre
- Corruption in politics, government and society, Higher education, tertiary education, Reportage, journalism or collected columns, True stories / true accounts of events, Student life
Synopsis
Brought to you by Penguin.A searing critique of the crony-capitalist, talent-scraping culture of the Stanford elites, by a brilliant young journalistWhen seventeen-year old Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University one brisk September morning, its manicured lawns, palm trees and sparkling fountains, all under azure Californian skies, provoked in him both wonderment and a sense of anticipation. After all, this legendary campus, where Rodin sculptures rub shoulders with nuclear laboratories, is where Silicon Valley was birthed. Its research park housed the headquarters of Facebook and Hewlett Packard, with venture capitalists a stone's throw away, ready to fund the next promising teenager's startup. With an annual budget eclipsing the budgets of 153 countries, yet a reputation for being laid-back and innovative, Stanford seemed like tech heaven. Instead, Baker discovered a cultural rot.In this astonishing debut Baker recounts his freshman year mission to uncover the secrets behind Silicon Valley's training ground. He describes the Stanford inside Stanford, a strange, money-soaked subculture of infinite excess and access, afforded only to those special few students plucked from the crowd and expected to create billion dollar companies. And he documents a culture of getting ahead at any cost, of cut corners enabled and embraced. A culture that went to the very top. Baker's investigations for the student newspaper would soon place him in the impossibly difficult position of investigating his own university's president, a famous neuroscientist with a squeaky-clean reputation. By the end of his freshman year, after Baker's reporting revealed two decades of unreported research misconduct allegations, including in a study that claimed to have found the cause of degeneration in Alzheimer's patients, Stanford's president was forced to resign.Both coming-of-age story and clear-eyed exposé, Baker takes us inside this elite American world like no other, revealing the ambitious, amoral, and at-times laughably absurd truth behind the institution training kids to rule the world.© Theo Baker 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026
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