Theo Baker — How to Rule the World
Journalist Theo Baker and NPR's Mary Louise Kelly examine Silicon Valley's quiet accumulation of political power — and what happens when tech billionaires decide democracy is a constraint.
Why we picked this
Baker is a Stanford-trained investigative journalist who spent years inside the institutions he's now holding accountable — the resulting book is reported from the inside, not lobbed from the outside.
Theo Baker’s How to Rule the World is an investigative account of how a small number of technology executives have translated enormous wealth into outsized political influence — reshaping government agencies, media ecosystems, and democratic norms in ways that are only now becoming legible. In conversation with Mary Louise Kelly, host of NPR’s All Things Considered, Baker discusses the reporting behind the book and what accountability might actually look like.
Baker is a journalist who graduated from Stanford and spent time embedded in the institutions his book examines. That access shows: the book is full of specific scenes and named sources rather than the structural critique that can sometimes substitute for actual reporting. Kelly brings a foreign policy correspondent’s fluency with power to a conversation about how domestic influence actually works.
The event arrives at a moment when questions about tech-political entanglement are front-page news. Baker’s contribution is to ground those questions in evidence rather than speculation — making this conversation useful whether you already have strong views or are still trying to understand what’s happening.