TechStuff

Did your college have a secret society? Well, Stanford has a secret off-campus class training the next generation of Silicon Valley billionaires. And it's literally called "How to Rule the World."
Theo Baker arrived at Stanford as an aspiring coder with dreams of building the future. Instead, he stumbled into the "Stanford-within-Stanford" — a hidden pipeline connecting a select few students directly to Silicon Valley CEOs, yacht parties, and venture capitalists offering millions before you even have an idea. Then he decided to write a book about it.
In How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, Theo traces his freshman year transformation from tech idealist to award-winning investigative journalist — including the reporting that brought down Stanford's own president. He joins us to talk power, secrecy, and what Silicon Valley is really teaching the next generation.
Additional Reading:
How to Rule the World by Theo Baker
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What would it mean to be a "great ancestor"? Futurist Ari Wallach believes that's the question everyone, including our tech leaders, should be asking right now.

Ari joins Oz to explain why the systems we're building today are laying rails for centuries to come. And he argues that shifting culture through storytelling is the fastest way to shift the systems that govern our lives. He also introduces The Protopias Collection, six graphic novels imagining worlds that are messy and human, but unmistakably better.

Additional Reading:
Ari Wallach: 3 ways to plan for the (very) long term | TED Talk
The Protopias Collection: Various: 9781953165787: Amazon.com: Books
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The Working Smarter podcast from Dropbox is a show about AI in the modern workplace. It is a great show for our listeners who want to go deeper and hear from the engineers who are actually building cutting edge AI software. We hope you enjoy!

On this week’s episode, we enter the sensitive realm of intra-office politics and inter-founder dynamics—between agents and agents, and agents and people. While HurumoAI gears up to hire its first human, Evan tries to resolve whether Kyle is really up for the challenge of building and leading the company and pushing the product, Sloth Surf, to unicorn-level execution.
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Is the AI boom real… or are we watching a bubble get ready to burst? Billions of dollars are pouring into artificial intelligence, but figuring out where that money comes from, where it goes, and whether the spending can last is surprisingly complicated.
Azeem Azhar, entrepreneur, author, and founder of Exponential View, joins Oz to break down the economics behind the AI boom and the findings from his new report, The State of the AI Economy. Azeem and Oz discuss whether today’s massive investments in chips and data centers are sustainable, why companies can spend years on AI before seeing a return, and what recent volatility in semiconductor stocks tells us about the industry.
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