Tim Urban

Urban is a HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry graduate and a film-score composer; in his twenties he moved to Los Angeles and started a tutoring business to fund his creative passions, but increasingly felt lost and uninspired.⁠[1]

His partner Andrew Finn’s full-time job is running the company the two started in 2007; at Wait But Why, Finn handles the business side.⁠[2]

In 2013 he co-founded the blog Wait But Why with Andrew Finn. He said he had spent nine years after college doing something objectively cool that was not what he wanted to be doing, while the blog let him keep learning, have great conversations and create.⁠[3]

He began writing Wait But Why full time at 30; an early article, Why Gen Y Yuppies are Unhappy, brought the site more than 30,000 email subscribers.⁠[1]

He said the site was a bet that high-quality long-form writing could find a place amid the image-heavy, short-text style then dominant online; by June 2016 it had about 31 million unique visitors in total and about 80 posts.⁠[4]

On October 30, 2013, he published the long post “Why Procrastinators Procrastinate,” a self-mocking analysis of why “real procrastinators” cannot change their habits through advice such as “avoid procrastination”.⁠[5]

On May 21, 2014, he published “The Fermi Paradox,” which starts from the roughly 2,500 stars visible in the night sky to explore whether other intelligent life exists in the universe.⁠[6]

On January 22, 2015, he published Part 1 of “The Artificial Intelligence Revolution.” In a note he wrote that while researching AI he realized it was “by far THETimes Higher EducationTimes Higher Education (THE) is a London-based higher education news and data company. It grew out of the Times Higher Education Supplement, launched in 1971, and is best known for its World University Rankings, founded in 2004; it has been owned by the private equity firm Inflexion since 2019.Open the full entry most important topic for our future,” which is why the post took three weeks to finish.⁠[7]

Elon Musk shared the series twice on Twitter, calling it an excellent intro to artificial superintelligence, and Urban later turned the material into a talk.⁠[8]

On May 7, 2015, he published the first post in his Elon Musk series. He wrote that after an unexpected phone call he spoke with Musk about Tesla, SpaceXSpaceXSpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 whose businesses include space transportation, Starlink satellite communications and artificial intelligence. It went public in 2026 under the ticker SPCX.Open the full entry and their industries, and was invited to California to tour the Tesla and SpaceX factories, meet engineers and sit down with Musk.⁠[9]

He later recalled that this 2015 work with Musk and his companies produced an in-depth four-part series, whose SpaceX installment took three months and about 40,000 words.⁠[10]

In August 2015 he was invited to speak at the main TED conference in Vancouver.⁠[11]

On February 16, 2016, he gave the talk “Inside the mind of a master procrastinator” at TED2016; as of October 2026 it had about 79.28 million views on the TED website.⁠[12]

The talk has been described as the third most viewed TED Talk of all time.⁠[13]

In mid-2016 he turned to a new topic: as technology soared ahead, society seemed to be going backward in wisdom, with tribalism flaring and public discourse reduced to one-dimensional narratives. He decided to write about it, which led to six years of work.⁠[14]

In September 2016, after Musk unveiled details of SpaceX’s giant rocket at the International Astronautical Congress, Urban published a long post about it; he had reached out to SpaceX in advance and discussed the rocket, the timeline and the larger plan with Musk on a call.⁠[10]

In March 2017, after news of Musk’s Neuralink broke, Musk tweeted that a long Neuralink piece would appear on Wait But Why in about a week, and Urban wrote that he had been given the lowdown on the company earlier that month.⁠[15]

On April 20, 2017, he published “Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future,” arguing that Neuralink’s mission eclipses Tesla’s and SpaceX’s in boldness because it aims to redefine what future humans will be.⁠[16]

As of November 2017, Wait But Why received more than 1.5 million unique visitors a month and had over 550,000 email subscribers.⁠[17]

In August 2019 he began publishing his society project as the serialized series The Story of Us; after his Chapter 11 draft passed 100,000 words in 2020, he decided to turn it into a book.⁠[18]

On February 13, 2022, he appeared as the guest of episode #264 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast; topics included aliens, extinction of human civilization, the future politics of Mars, SpaceX, Elon Musk, nuclear power, Neuralink, AI, free speech, how to read more, spaced repetition and procrastination.⁠[19]

On February 20, 2023, he returned as the guest of episode #360, which introduced his new book; topics included human history, social media, conspiracy theories, arguing on the internet, political division, social justice, censorship, free speech and thinking at universities, with Liv BoereeLiv BoereeLiv Boeree is a British former professional poker player and science communicator who won a European Poker Tour main event and a World Series of Poker team title, co-founded Raising for Effective Giving in 2014 and later turned to research and communication on game theory and AI risk, hosting the Win-Win conversation series.Open the full entry joining partway.⁠[20]

On February 21, 2023, his book What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies was released as an ebook, on the website and as an audiobook he narrated; he said it took 2,440 days, with about 25% drawn from a rewritten Story of Us.⁠[18]

The book is published by Wait But Why and runs 676 pages; instead of the usual left-center-right horizontal axis, it introduces a vertical axis about how people think, as individuals and as groups.⁠[21]

He argues that, amid political divisiveness, cancel culture and conspiracy theories, society is behaving more and more childishly, and that people need to focus more on how they think, not just what they think.⁠[22]

He is married. His first child was born the day after the book launch, forcing the cancellation of 12 book-promotion podcasts.⁠[23]

In 2024 What’s Our Problem? appeared in a print edition, and Wait But Why published the endnotes corresponding to it.⁠[24]

In November 2025 he published a post about a trip to Bhutan. He wrote that he and his wife had pledged to visit two new countries every year but fell off the wagon after Covid and the arrival of two babies, resuming that year.⁠[25]

X: Public account: https://x.com/waitbutwhy (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

Wait But Why: Official website: https://waitbutwhy.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[19]