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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."

12statements → 4claims → 3claims resolved → 33%fully supported → 3.83/5average certainty → 2.92/5average debate potential → 8said about them ↓

1 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 assertions · 3 opinions · 5 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 1 names 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

Assertion Supported
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,…”
Tim Urban May 26, 2022 ▶ 42:39 #AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022

How they sound: speaking style how? →

290 words/min while actually speaking · 19.4 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Tim Urban: only 1 usable question→answer exchange on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 7,129 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 →

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

Assertion Supported
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,…”
Tim Urban May 26, 2022 ▶ 42:39 #AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022
Opinion
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.”
Tim Urban May 26, 2022 ▶ 22:53 #AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022
Assertion Partly supported
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.”
Tim Urban May 26, 2022 ▶ 23:38 #AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022
Assertion Partly supported
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…”
Tim Urban May 26, 2022 ▶ 23:51 #AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022
Insight
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.”
Tim Urban May 26, 2022 ▶ 50:31 #AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022
Opinion
Tim Urban: The far left and far right aren't inherently bad
“The far left and far right aren't inherently bad.”
Tim Urban May 26, 2022 ▶ 2:21 #AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022
Insight
Tim Urban: Low-rung thinkers adopt rigid, predictable political checklists across all issues
“In high-rung politics, if someone tells me their position on guns, I have no idea what their position is on climate change or on abortion or on immigration. In low-rung politics, You hear one position from someone, boom. I, you can just look at their demeanor,…”
Tim Urban May 26, 2022 ▶ 8:55 #AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tim Urban: Republican concern over national debt vanished under Donald Trump's tax package
“The classic example, the debt was the worst thing in the world during Obama's presidency, and then Trump comes in office, starts doing up these tax packages that are adding to it, and suddenly it's no problem.”
Tim Urban May 26, 2022 ▶ 11:51 #AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022
Insight
Tim Urban: High-rung thinkers share more with ideological opponents than partisans
“If you're in that, one of those upper giants, the other upper giant is a lot more on your ultimate team, if you take a big step back, than the lower giant that wears the same color.”
Tim Urban May 26, 2022 ▶ 13:59 #AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022
Opinion
Tim Urban thinks political discourse is overly constrained to a one-dimensional axis
“I think that we are very constrained to this one-dimensional axis.”
Tim Urban May 26, 2022 ▶ 2:04 #AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022
Insight
Tim Urban: 1960s politics had distributed tribalism rather than less tribalism
“It's not that people were less tribal. It's that tribalism was distributed.”
Tim Urban May 26, 2022 ▶ 16:45 #AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022
Insight
Tim Urban: Virality dumbs down information because nuance lacks emotional impact
“Virality dumbs down information because nuanced information doesn't hit as hard.”
Tim Urban May 26, 2022 ▶ 33:43 #AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022

The other half of the tape: Tim Urban's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 5 episodes on All-In. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Jason Calacanis 5Coleman Hughes 3

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
00325420222023episodesmentions
02420222023episodes it came up in
001.523420222023episodesmentions per episode
2023 3 mentions in 1 episode
2022 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
#AIS: Tim Urban on political discourse + Keith Rabois on early-stage investing in 2022 May 26, 2022 30m
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