Written portraits — the closest you can get without listening to everything.
Alex KarpAugust2026
Augustus DorickoJuly2026
Dario AmodeiJune2026
Palmer LuckeyJune2026Keep Reading
People, from their own words.
Almost everything you can read about a person isn't actually from them — writers paraphrasing interviews, articles citing other articles, takes built on takes. Meanwhile the person's actual words are out there, hundreds of hours of them, mostly unheard because no one can listen to everything.
Every article on steelman.press is a written portrait, built from a person's public record of conversation — every interview, lecture, and appearance we can find. We locate the relevant moments and write the connecting thread between them. The quotes are entirely theirs. The reading of them is ours — and you can always tell which is which.
When a person contradicts themselves across conversations, summaries smooth it over. We treat it as the most interesting moment and dig in: did they change their mind? Does context change the answer? Or do they see something we don't? We follow their complete thread.
We don't supply counterarguments, evaluate whether the person is right, or end with a verdict. We present someone's position in its strongest form and let it stand. It takes restraint to let a person speak for themselves. If we've done our job, a reader who disagrees with the subject should still feel they finally understand what they're disagreeing with. We've made what has been missing.
The point someone was building toward before the interviewer changed the subject. The argument that only becomes clear after hearing someone talk about the same subject in five different rooms. The answer that deserved ten minutes and got sixty seconds before the next question. Reconstructing the whole argument out of the record is the point.
Don't take our word for it — click any linked line and you'll hear the person say it, in their own voice, at that exact moment in the original conversation. You can always check our work.
If you want to understand what someone actually thinks — and remember it — this is the closest you can get without listening to everything.
We read everything that comes in. Whether you've spotted something we got wrong, have a suggestion for who we should cover next, or just want to say hello — we'd like to hear from you.