Michael Steinberger
speaker
509 appearances
6 recordings
6 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 3 Jul
Michael Steinberger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
The Daily · Inside the Tech Company Powering Trump’s Most Controversial Policies · 16 Dec 2025
podcast
He finds the intellectual climate very dissatisfying.
The only thing that makes law school tolerable for Karp is the friendship he strikes up with another first-year law student at Stanford, Peter Thiel.
Exactly.
They bonded over their shared dislike of law school, and they also bonded over their love of political argument.
As Thiel said to me, he was more the capitalist and Karp was the socialist.
We've been having these feral discourses now for 25, 26 years.
Karp says that they argued like feral animals.
These dorm room bull sessions were apparently epic.
That's right.
So, you know, Carpenteel graduated from Stanford Law in 1992.
Carp had no intention of pursuing a career in the law.
Instead, he went to Germany to pursue a doctorate in philosophy.
But I became myself in my adolescence in Germany.
His father's family had come from Germany, and he wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the Holocaust and why Germany, which had been the
pinnacle of European civilization, descended into such barbarism and turned on its Jewish population so savagely.
And he ends up writing his dissertation on the rhetoric of fascism.
Meanwhile, Peter Thiel is back in the United States.
He works for a time for a New York law firm, then ends up working at an investment bank.
Unsatisfied with that, he heads back out to Silicon Valley, where the dot-com boom is underway, and co-founds an online payments company, PayPal, in 1998.
Three years later, the world changes.
Showing 301–320 of 509 · page 16 of 26
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