Tim Urban
Co-Founder & Writer, Wait But Why. On 5 shows, 5 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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."
5shows
5appearances
60statements
6resolved
2supported
1contradicted
33%fully supported
32said about them ↓ Everything Tim Urban said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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: Berkeley and UCLA require diversity statements for chemistry professorships
“Berkeley, right now, and UCLA, and about 20 other schools. If you want to apply to be a chemistry professor, The first thing that you do is you have to fill out a diversity statement, and it's called, that sounds nice, a diversity statement, but it's actually,…”
Urban: AI could surpass human intelligence within the next decade
“That could be changing, like, Next decade. Like in our lifetimes.”
Urban: AI will not stop at human intelligence but race past it
“That if AI can start moving up in intelligence, it's not going to stop at the human intelligence station. It's going to just race right by us because all of these limitations that our intelligence has”
Urban: Chip export limits may fail to keep US ahead of China
“China has shown that maybe it's going to be harder to stay ahead of them than we thought.
Maybe the, this limit on chips is not going to.”
Urban: AI-enabled bioweapons pose a severe risk in the near future
“I think that in the near future, of course, you're going to have a higher risk of
Bad guys with using AI, you know, to do things like manufacturing scary bioweapons things like that, that you really, you know, things that could really kill a billion people.”
Urban: The New York Times explicitly became a political movement's arm
“That's a moment of truth where the New York Times basically says, you know, the paper of record, they cross that out, and they say, we now are an arm of this political movement.”
Urban: Robot nannies and housekeepers will arrive in the 2020s
“Housekeepers, robot nannies and housekeepers will be in the twenties.”
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…”
Urban: Wokeness is a far-left, postmodern, Marxist ideology
“I think wokeness is two things. It's a far left ideology, and it is far left. It's, you know, postmodern, and it's Marxist, and that's fine.”
Urban: James Bennet was fired for publishing Tom Cotton's op-ed
“We see James Bennett, the editor of the New York Times op-ed section, getting fired because he published an op-ed by Tom Cotton that 62% of the country agreed with, But it didn't jive with woke orthodoxy.”
Urban: Apple fired diversity head Denise Young Smith over comments
“You see Denise Young at Apple, a black woman who's the head of diversity, who says, to me, diversity is not, you know, it's more complicated than just about something like race. When I look at 12 blue-eyed, blond-haired guys, I see diversity. I see different p…”
Urban: Outrage mobs hijack reputable institutions and spend down their trust
“A mob like this, they don't build anything, you know, they don't create. What they do is they appropriate, they hijack something, they take its existing good reputation, which is real, which is a lot of power, And they spend it down.”
Urban: Humanity Faces Impending Extinction or a Radical Utopian Paradigm Shift
“It's either going to be the coolest story for humans or it's the end. This is the, That is a, it is a 501 page book. And that's it. Or this is the beginning of like the new paradigm. We have a new BC AD situation. We have a BC, which is like before something t…”
Urban: Multi-planetary colonization in our solar system will not protect humanity from rogue AI
“No, if it's something like really bad AI, it doesn't seem like AI would have, and they wanted to wipe us out. It doesn't seem like being on multiple planets in the solar system would really help.”
Urban: Liberal conservatives share more common ground with liberals than extremists
“If you can expand this a little bit and have more of this vertical axis and just think about this liberal house, you can start to say, actually the liberal, the lowercase, lowercase L liberal conservatives are more on my side than the People on the left with t…”
Urban: 62% of Americans supported Tom Cotton's military deployment op-ed
“During the George Floyd riots, Tom Cotton writes, they'll send in the troops, which 62% of Americans agreed with it. In that moment.”
Urban: Ideological mob power is brittle and erodes once dissent starts
“That, they can hold that for a while, but their power is brittle, and when certain people start saying something, gives permission for other people to say it, before you know it, more people are saying it, and they can't pitchfork anyone, and now people are st…”
Tim Urban predicts humans will land on Mars around 2035
“I would, if I had to guess now, I'd say, you know, 20, 35, something around there.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
The other half of the tape: Tim Urban's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 31 times in 19 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Sahil Bloom 7Jason Calacanis 5Greg Isenberg 4Coleman Hughes 3Zach Pogrob 1Tobi Lütke 1Tim Chang 1Rishi Garg 1
Statements about Tim Urban, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Startup Ideas Podcast 16
All-In 8
20VC 5
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 1
American Optimist 1
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- E147: TED goes woke, Canada's Nazi blunder, AI adds vision, plus: who owns OpenAI?
- Ep 57: Balaji Srinivasan on the Severity of the Bank Crisis and the Future of Bitcoin · Joe Lonsdale
- Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke: Remote Work vs In-Person; The Benefit of Setting Constraints | E997 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
2022 20 mentions in 10 episodes 2 per episode
- Betting Big on Web3 with Li Jin
- Building From Scratch with Ryan Hoover
- The Metaverse & How It Will Change the World with Matthew Ball
- Why You Need A Digital Detox with Andrew Wilkinson
- E76.5: Food shortage, China's grand plan, inflation, French election plus an All-In Summit preview
- Investor Psychology & Trading on the Future With Raoul Pal
- #AIS: Bestie AMA with Valor's Antonio Gracias
- How to Invent and Invest In the Future with Josh Wolfe
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: How To Test The Strength Of Co-Founder Relations, The Dangers Of Raising A Large Series A & Why The Biggest Challenge For Consumer Companies Is Finding The Second Big Hit with Rishi Garg, Partner @ Mayfield Fund
- 20VC: Why We Will See A Big Series B Crunch? Why Proprietary Data Pools & AI Talent Will Be The New Limited Natural Resources? Why Now Is The Closest Thing To A New Normal with Tim Chang, Managing Director @ Mayfield Fund
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Who Will Own The Data? Is There An Incumbency Advantage in AI? When Will Artificial Super Intelligence Come To The Forefront with Rudina Seseri, Founder and Managing Director @ Glasswing Ventures
- 20VC: X.ai's Dennis Mortensen on Why There Is No Incumbency Advantage in Artificial Intelligence
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Tim's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & Writer, Wait But Why | 1 | 19 | 50% 1/2 | full record on 20VC → |
| AMERICAN OPTIMISTLEDGER | Co-Founder & Writer, Wait But Why | 1 | 16 | 0% 0/1 | full record on American Optimist → |
| ALL-INLEDGER | Co-Founder & Writer, Wait But Why | 1 | 12 | 33% 1/3 | full record on All-In → |
| STARTUP IDEASLEDGER | Co-Founder & Writer, Wait But Why | 1 | 8 | — | full record on the Startup Ideas Podcast → |
| Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Co-Founder & Writer, Wait But Why | 1 | 5 | — | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |