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Tim Urban

Co-Founder & Writer, Wait But Why · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

authorfounderentertainer@waitbutwhy ↗LinkedIn ↗waitbutwhy.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗

Tim Urban is the creator of the explainer blog Wait But Why and authored the 2023 book What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. He also delivered the widely viewed TED talk, "Inside the mind of a master procrastinator."

19statements → 11claims → 2claims resolved → 3.47/5average certainty → 2.11/5average debate potential → 4.2/5argument clarity · the sources → 6said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 8 not checkable as stated how the 11 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

8 predictions · 3 assertions · 5 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 11 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 8 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Tim argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up
Urban: Wait But Why will remain a two-person team
“Six years ago, we hired Alicia who's the manager of lots of things which is just like the second in command at Wait But Why and does a little of everything. And that's about it. I was just like, I don't want a big team.”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 11:01 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Their most notable contradicted claim

Prediction Didn’t hold up
Tim Urban plans to launch a new podcast in 2023
“I am starting a podcast later you know, this year probably”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 12:13 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
0% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.2 / 5 directness 4.7 · coherence 4.2 · precision 3.9 · compression 3.4

answered every one of 42 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

291 words/min while actually speaking · 26.3 um and uh per 1k words · 21.9 false starts per 1k · 31.3% of pauses land inside a clause

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 13,590 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 3/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 2/10
setup questions received 35%

Everything Tim Urban said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated
Urban: Elon Musk will make Twitter successful within five years
“If, again, you put me in a time machine five years from now, my gut is I come out and it, yes, the answer is yes. Just because this guy does things well and sometimes it takes a while, right? And there's going to be a lot of experimentation. It's going to be a…”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 1:12:04 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Urban: AI could automate his writing job within two years
“12 months ago I had any inkling that AI might steal my job within, like two years. Didn't, I would have guessed, like, 20. So that's, I mean, and that's one of a hundred different things that I've been shocked about with AI in the last few months like everyone…”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 1:11:09 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Urban ignored crypto because it lacked proven future significance
“People wanted me to write about crypto, and I was kind of just like, ah, I don't know. This is, it's like this hasn't proven yet to be a huge part of the future, and if not, then it just seems so boring to write about.”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 20:10 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Urban: A large email list reduces the need for posting consistency
“A big email list makes it less important to have consistency. I still think it's better than not. I think that you know, it's not ideal the way I do things, but I'm very inconsistent now. I'll disappear for a while, and then I'll come out with something big, a…”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 42:38 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Urban: New creators should master one core medium before expanding
“I don't think that, that, that a new creator needs to be worrying about, oh, I only doing like writing and drawing right now. I need to also be doing TikTok. So we need to start doing video to make sure we have stuff on TikTok. I don't think I think they shoul…”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 44:35 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Urban: AI will solve climate and lifespan challenges by the 2050s
“I think that AI, if things go well, I think we're going to have so many answers. In the near future. I think we're going to solve so many problems that seem really hard to us right now. I think 20, you know, these problems won't be a match for 20 fifties human…”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 1:06:38 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Urban: The world in 2080 will be amazing, not a dystopia
“So deep down, I still kind of feel like if I went into a time machine and got out in 2080, I'd be entering an amazing world, not a horrible dystopia. But I don't know, I couldn't really defend that argument.”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 1:08:31 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Urban: AI will accelerate the fracture of shared societal reality
“We already see, of course, the fracture of the shared reality because of tribal narrow cast media, you know, each telling their own story and social media, creating bubbles of reality. And I think AI can just accelerate these trends.”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 0:10 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Urban: Lack of external structure lets instant gratification dictate decisions
“And then if you don't have any of those external structured things, then you end up in a you can end up with the monkey kind of running your whole life suddenly. So now it's like, you're actually like the monkey is making the decisions, which is actually worse…”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 4:32 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Urban: Long-form writing monetizes downstream through paid speaking engagements
“It's like it's like taking content that if I write this AI post, it actually doesn't make much money because it's just on a blog. If I now go do a bunch of talks on AI, to me, that's like, that's the way that, that the, all the work I did for that AI post actu…”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 10:31 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Held up
Urban: Wait But Why will remain a two-person team
“Six years ago, we hired Alicia who's the manager of lots of things which is just like the second in command at Wait But Why and does a little of everything. And that's about it. I was just like, I don't want a big team.”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 11:01 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Urban: Deep research beyond intermediate understanding yields diminishing returns
“There's a diminishing return on like excitement as you keep putting those years in. So for me, it's like, I want to get from like a two or three, you know, to a six. Five or six, something like that, where it's like, oh, okay, I understand this way more deeply…”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 21:58 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Urban: 'Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy' reached 14M readers
“Fourteen million people read that in a week.”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 33:50 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Urban: AI danger stems from super-potency, not malicious intent
“AI is probably gonna be dangerous not because It's going to be evil Terminator robots, but because it's going to be super powerful with unintended consequences”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 58:46 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Urban: Wait But Why speaking revenue can exceed Patreon and merch
“Patreon, trying to, it's hard to remember the exact percentages, but like, Patreon, you know, is bigger than merch, partially because we just haven't made that much new merch recently but there's always, you know, there's always patrons, new patrons and speaki…”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 9:08 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Tim Urban plans to launch a new podcast in 2023
“I am starting a podcast later you know, this year probably”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 12:13 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Urban: Wait But Why's SpaceX post inspired readers to join the company
“That post, like, inspired some young people to go work at SpaceX and work in that industry, so I'm very happy about that”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 56:52 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Urban sold his Tesla stock at $700 before the split
“I sold Tesla at like when it was at 700 before split. So it was like one, I don't know, eighth or 10th of what it is now. I made a couple of good ones along the way, but it's like just soul crushing.”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 1:10:42 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Urban: Self-imposed deadlines drive output of 2,000 to 3,000 words daily
“If I have a deadline I've imposed on myself, and I say, this post is going to be up Friday, then I can, like, probably write two or 3000 words a day, Thursday and Friday, and get it up, you know.”
Tim Urban Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 37:16 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

The other half of the tape: Tim Urban's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 5 episodes on 20VC. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Tobi Lütke 1Tim Chang 1Rishi Garg 1Dennis Mortensen 1

Statements about Tim Urban, by other people (1)

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Stebbings passed off Tim Urban's AI writing as his own
“I just mentioned that I actually tried to Passed some of it off as my own intellect on AI about seven years ago, and it worked”
Harry Stebbings Aug 14, 2023 ▶ 0:28 Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E1048 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
00112220162017201820192020202120222023episodesmentions
01220162017201820192020202120222023episodes it came up in
000.511220162017201820192020202120222023episodesmentions per episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2016 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Tim Urban: How "Wait But Why" Grew to 600k Readers; AI's Revolutionary Impact on Media | E Aug 14, 2023 57m
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