Theo Baker Cracks Open Stanford’s Faustian Bargain With Silicon Valley

But, uh, no.

But it was sort of like, "Why not?" And I'm like, " 'Cause you're terrible." Like, what...

I, you know, it was really interesting, um, which made me laugh.

I'm like, "Okay.

Well, I see." They, it was very, um, ethics were very f- um, shifty, as they say.

If ethics were there at all.

So let's take a step back and talk to some of the bigger themes in your book, including the obsession with perfection or at least the appearance of perfection.

In the book, you highlight some of the recent fraudsters associated with Stanford, including Theranos founder, we just mentioned Elizabeth Holmes, and crypto entrepreneur Do Kwon.

Talk about how the university does or doesn't take accountability for its failures and frauds in its orbit, because I think that's really at the heart of it.

They would call it, "Mistakes were made.

Eggs are broken.

Blah, blah, blah." You know, I've heard every excuse for, for just terrible behavior.

You write that Stanford, quote, "Has made a Faustian bargain with Silicon Valley, one that has enabled its meteoric ascent and allowed for its corruption." A- and then they commercialize and corporatize a lo- differently from other elite universities like Yale, MIT, and Harvard.

So talk a little bit about these two things, this accountability and then they making some bank off of it, obviously.

Well, it's, look, it's not an accident that the Stanford Inside Stanford exists at Stanford, right? This is a place that made its fortune because of Silicon Valley.

This is a place, the guy on the faculty who was known by the moniker Professor Billionaire 'cause he made $20 billion by investing in his students' companies.

This is a place that has its own VC fund run by the university to seed students' new companies.

And if you literally just take the cumulative value of the companies that have offices on campus, that's somewhere north of $6 trillion.

Right, so much ink has been spilled about the privileges of the Ivy League and the pipeline to Washington and Wall Street, um, Stanford is completely entangled in an even more pronounced way.

That was an intentional strategy, right? That was intentional because that no boundaries relationship is what allows Stanford to profit.

You know, and as to how they address it, um, Stan Cohen actually is a good way to talk about this, right? Stan Cohen, living legend in genetics.

He was the first geneticist to transplant genes from one living organism to another.

So he's on the Stanford faculty, and his patent on recombinant DNA technology is what instigates the university to come up with its new patent licensing strategy, allowing them to profit off of basic discoveries made by the faculty.

So by the last year that's active, it is 62% of the school's total patent revenue, right? So he has made them hundreds of millions of dollars.

I write about during my freshman year the other side of the story, which is this court case in which he was levied with a $29 million judgment because he told investors he had this promising new drug target for Huntington's disease, that the company said internally that it would be a cure, not just a treatment, and he neglected to inform the investors that this drug had been permanently banned by the FDA in 1976 because it could kill people.