What does it mean for information to be live?   ///   Is entertainment a substitute for understanding?   ///   Who profits from uncertainty?   ///   Does speed make information more or less true?   ///   Can a platform be neutral?   ///   Is virality a proxy for truth?   ///   What is the price of being informed?   ///   Is attention a resource or a right?   ///   What do we actually want from media?   ///   Who benefits from ambiguity?   ///   What gets remembered when everything is recorded?   ///   Does more information mean better decisions?   ///   Is objectivity a business model or a principle?   ///   What separates a free press from a profitable one?   ///  

Charlie Steinbaum

San Francisco  --:-- --  |  New York  --:-- --

Background

Studied economics and government at Harvard ('24). Prod Cohort 3.0. Ex-McKinsey.

News and entertainment media fascinate me: the economics of attention, the architecture of trust, how information moves (and who shapes it).

Get in Touch

Happy to connect about media, research, and interesting problems.

Recent Projects

  • Polymarket World Map

    I hate the Polymarket interaction layer, so I built a new one; A world map with spatially-defined prediction markets better visualizes geographic exposure and market coverage.

  • Talmudic Epistemology Applied to the U.S. Constitution

    Five traditions of American judicial philosophy, arranged around the verbatim constitutional text, Talmud-style.

  • X Handshake Bot

    Creates records of mutual agreements and wagers via X, no intermediate platform required. Puts conviction behind natural language predictions.

  • The Lightcone

    If you're a startup, this is the only thing that matters...

  • National Museum of Artificial Intelligence (NMAI)

    A proposal for a congressionally-recognized national museum dedicated to artificial intelligence, sited in the American heartland (St. Louis, MO) and built to be a defining national institution.

  • Political Satire — nom de plume & nom de guerre

    Scathing critiques of those around me, published in the Harvard Independent.

  • IFX Research

    Created a market system and research community to align research outputs with private incentives, compensating academics for the economic value of their work. Acquired for core IP and network.

  • US Treasury

    Developed and built novel tools and methodologies for tracking and monitoring $1.9T American Rescue Plan (ARP) disbursements (establishing baselines for eventual DOGE work).