Ep. 112: Tim Urban on Startup Cities, AI Safety, Longevity, and Building Better Societies

**Infinita City** (0:01)
Welcome to the Stranded Technologies Podcast, where we explore how to accelerate the future. Imagine a world of abundance, longer lives, clean energy, transparent markets, robots and AI doing the toiling labor. Why don't we have those things yet? Join us as we explore the biggest problem that holds back Frontier Tech, overregulation. Now we have real solutions, startup cities, network stays, and on-chains finance. Please find ways to support us in the show notes. Now enjoy this episode.
Great, Fnastic, today is March 27th and 2026, and my guest is Tim Urban. Tim is the guy behind Wait But Why, where you can get an 80-page deep dive on Neuralink, illustrated entirely by stick figures, among other things.
Also, one of the most read blogs on the internet, also had the most watched TED Talk of all time, at least sometime, or still?

**Tim Urban** (0:54)
I think it's second most, unfortunately. It annoys me.

**Infinita City** (0:58)
Okay, so we've got to get another one out.

**Tim Urban** (1:00)
Come on.

**Infinita City** (1:02)
So these days, he's obsessed with the big picture, especially how we can use first principles thinking to fix society and eventually solve death. So two things that we care about a lot on the show. So welcome, Tim.

**Tim Urban** (1:14)
Thank you. Thanks for having me on the show, but also here.

**Infinita City** (1:17)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're going to talk about that and about where we're at and what we're doing. But for regular listeners of the show, you know where we're at.
But Tim, first of all, what can you reveal so far about the new book that you're writing? And what are the things or the chapters that you think most about right now when writing it?

**Tim Urban** (1:36)
Yeah, so it's a book about everything. It goes from the Big Bang to the end of the universe.
And I go chronologically. So I try to cover everything.
And I hit the present about two-thirds of the way through, and then the rest of it is about the future. And for the past, you can research, read historians, read paleontologists. You can use historians, paleontologists, archaeologists, astronomers, biologists, evolutionary. There's a big crew of scientists that will tell you what happened, or at least the best picture of what we think happened. And it's still a lot to go through. You may actually be surprised how much disagreement there is, and how quickly the past, our picture of the past changes too. You know, just from the time I started writing to now, it's new theories have come out, other things have been debunked. But the future is even harder, because there's no one to help you. The best you can do is, there are no experts on the future. I don't think anyone knows. People can take guesses. But there are experts on the present. You know, if you look at conventional wisdom, you're going to see a lot of... What you're really going to see is a reflection of the values and lessons of the past, because it's slow, conventional wisdom. It's always lagging behind, especially when things are changing really quickly, like they are now.
So, actually seeing the present is hard to do. And the people that are going to, I think, be best at seeing the present, are going to be the people building it. The scientists, the technologists, the tech CEOs, the engineers that are working on the cutting-edge things that will define the future. So, I basically just interviewed a ton of them, including you. You were one of my people I interviewed. Just, you know, because I both interviewed, you know, real experts. And then I also tried to interview people like you, who see a broad swath of what's going on. So, you have an elevated view, even though maybe you're not a specific expert in one of this, you know, the sciences. And so, it was a nice mix, and it was really fun. And by looking at the present and getting the predictions of the people who you talked to, you can start to at least paint a picture of the future. Much of it will be wrong, but you can try to do it, you know, you can try and at least give people an idea of one vision of the future. And I tried to do both a positive and a negative version, so we could see both what we could have and then also how bad things could get.
And as far as what I'm thinking about most, whatever I'm working on last, so I did the whole thing from the Big Bang to the end, I wrote the first draft and I had to go back and do a big fact check and revision and cut a bunch, so I went back to begin and now I'm doing all the illustrations. Like you said, I do a lot of stick figures and other diagrams and maps.