Tim Urban

Tim Urban is the creator and chief writer of Wait But Why.

## History

Tim Urban was born in 1981 of Jewish descent. As a child he was a fan of multiple toys such as the sticky hand and the slinky. His favorite toy to this day are magnets. In high school Tim's procrastination was kept under check due to constant pacing from teachers and deadlines. He also entered chat rooms during the early days of the internet. At age 3 Tim began dating astronomy.

After graduating high school and going to Harvard, studying a government major, Tim had a major procrastination problem. One time he wrote a 90 page essay in 72 hours and failed badly. Eventually Tim graduated college, being led around by the Instant Gratification Monkey to being a composer.

During his composing career he set up a tutoring business on the side with his best friend Andrew Finn, and he eventually became attracted to blogging, initially on his first blog Underneath the Turban, which ran from 2005 to 2011. During the last few posts Tim started with experimenting with his legendary stick figures.

In 2011 Tim met his future wife Tandice and began dating.

On July 5, 2013 Tim Urban created the blog Wait But Why. Tim wrote about many topics between 2013 and 2015, such as procrastination, the social mammoth, putting time in perspective, and the dark secrets of the bird world. In 2013 Tim travelled to North Korea.

In 2013 Tim got a call from Phillip Detmer where they became good friends, with Phillip extensively aiding Tim on his book.

In 2014 he embarked on a post series called Odd Things in Odd Places and travelled to Russia, Japan, Nigeria, Iraq, and Greenland.

In 2015 he received a call from Elon Musk, asking him to do a post series about him, Tesla, and SpaceX. Tim visited a Tesla factory and SpaceX headquarters and wrote the series over 2015, consisting of four posts.

In August 2015 he got a call from TED, asking him to do a talk in February 2016. Tim chose procrastination as his topic.

After procrastinating a lot, he successfully presented it in February 2016, becoming one of the most watched Ted speakers and an international icon.

In 2016 Tim began the Mailbag series, and on June 18 Tim began writing the intiall parts of the Story of Us. Tim also began an outline of a VR post, testing out experimental technologies. It remains unreleased.

Also in 2016 Alicia Mcelhone started working with Tim as Wait But Why's Manager of Lots of Things.

The first, and so far only, Wait But Hi was held in 2016, involving gatherings of Wait But Why fans all over the world. Tim reported on this on his blog.

Due to the sheer magnitude of this task Tim began posting much less frequently, although he got another call from Elon Musk in 2017 to make a post about Neuralink.

In 2018 he got married to his wife Tandice.

In mid 2019 Tim began a series called the Story of Us, a supposed 12 chapter series about the polarisation of the US, why it's polarized, how it's polarized, and what can be done about it. After the publication of chapter 10 (A Sick Giant), chapter 11 kept getting longer and was never published, with the series going permanently on hiatus. It has since been taken down.

Tim decided to repurpose the series as a book called What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies.

In 2020 he and Kurzgesagt collaborated to create an app called Universe in a Nutshell, about the size of objects. Tim wrote most of the descriptions while Kurzgesagt drew most of the pictures (with the exception of one of Tim's stick figures).

In December 2021 Tim finished the first draft of What's Our Problem?.

In June 2022 he found out his wife was pregnant, causing a massive acceleration of his progress on the book, with version 2 finished in July 2022, version 3 in September, and version 4 in December. While all of this was happening many others involved in the publishing and editing process also went on overdrive, especially Alicia Mcelhone.

Tim also spent 45 hours in a recording studio doing the audiobook, with the book coming out in February 2023, 1 month before the birth of his child, who came 2 weeks earlier than expected.

He is currently working in his second and last book about the life and death of the universe.

## Trivia

* Tim is an atheist.
* Tim has two sisters.
* Tim is a GYPSY.
* Tim likes to visit the Natural History Museum in New York.
* Tim’s family usually gathers for Thanksgiving but they had to put it on pause during the Covid-19 pandemic.
* Tim wrote a New York Times opinion piece using the framework from his post the Tail End and applied it to the pandemic, noting that the pandemic made the limited time people have with their parents and siblings even shorter, but writing that people still have the choice to try to spend more time with them.
* Tim says that Wordpress hates happiness.
* Tim likes listicles a lot and actually wrote one in August 2005, a year before Buzzfeed was founded, which made listicles well known. Tim then watched in horror as one of his “favourite formats” of writing became the default format for lazy articles. Tim believes that listicles are not inherently lazy and will do them when he feels it fits the topic.