#55 - Tim Urban of Wait But Why

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, happy new year, everyone. This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Our first episode of 2018 is with Tim Urban. Tim co-founded the blog Wait But Why with Andrew Finn in 2013 He's become well known for his long form explainer post about things like AI, Elon Musk, and the Fermi Paradox.
So I met up with Tim in New York to talk about his research strategy, the purpose of Wait But Why, and his thoughts on technologies including cryptocurrency, AI, and VR. All right, here we go.
Is the purpose of Wait But Why to start kind of informing people to get them to care before it's too late? Or what is your intent with the whole, like all the content you're making?

**Tim Urban** (0:45)
The purpose in general is for me to do something I'm having fun at doing. I spent nine years after college doing something that was kind of objectively a cool thing, but I was not doing what I wanted to be doing.
So, honestly, I was like, I want to be excited to wake up, I want to be excited to do my work, I want to feel like I'm playing when I'm doing my work. And this fits a lot of things for me. I'm very curious, so I get to be a constant learner. I like having great conversations with interesting people in Wait But Why is connecting me to all kinds of great conversations.
I love creating, like just artistically creating, so a post is a piece of art in a way.
And it allows me to kind of just, yeah, continually stay in excitable mode, because I can switch topics again and again and again. And I'm just always very, I feel like I'm in the honeymoon phase with the job all the time, because I switch topics, and it's a whole new planet for me. So I love that. And if I didn't like it, I don't think I'm a good enough person to do it out of obligation for, you know, I think this is gonna help. I think I would, but I think I'm more the kind of person that might throw money at something good. I'm not sure I would dedicate my life to something where I felt like it wasn't my calling, it wasn't something I really was passionate about, it wasn't something I had fun doing. So that said, as Wait But Why has gotten more popular, as I've kind of begun to dive into a lot more kind of intense, deep topics, I've started to appreciate the impact that a viral blog post can have. I appreciate it when times like when I go to, and I've spoken at a bunch of colleges, and I was at a place like MIT, and afterwards a couple of students came up, and they said they're going to work in, one of them is working in SpaceX, and one of them is going to work in AI next year, both because of my post. And I was like, right there, these two are probably smarter than me, both of them, they're 18, and if they both go work, that's like 120 years of human effort going towards like really good, important things, and maybe they instead would have gone into finance or something else. So to me, I was like, that's really awesome. And if that's two of, I don't know, however many, that to me is a massive impact. If I can convince really smart people to turn their attention or their money or their time towards important things, I think that that's about as big an impact as I could have as a human. Because me going into it myself, that's one person. Plus, honestly, these MIT dudes are probably more capable than I am. So I think, you know, yeah. And just kind of, since it is a battle for kind of awareness right now, awareness of the story that we're a part of, this human colossus story is crazy. We woke up inside of a thriller movie.
And, you know, I use this analogy.
So if human history is a thousand centuries, about 100,000 years, okay? Picture every page of a, there's a 500-page book telling the story. And every page is two centuries, okay?
If you're an alien, again, and you pick up this book, and you're trying to understand what the human history is like, so the first 450 pages, the first 90,000 years, gets us to, it's just hunter-gatherers. That's it. Migrations and hunter-gatherers, and very slight biological changes. You are bored as an alien reading that book.
Page 450 of the Agriculture Revolution, and you have cities, and you have the first kind of wide-scale cooperation. And this colossus takes a huge leap forward, right? Things start to get a little interesting.