Tim Urban > Quotes

“Be humbler about what [you] know, more confident about what's possible, and less afraid of things that don't matter.”
― Tim Urban

“I’ve heard people compare knowledge of a topic to a tree. If you don’t fully get it, it’s like a tree in your head with no trunk—and without a trunk, when you learn something new about the topic—a new branch or leaf of the tree—there’s nothing for it to hang onto, so it just falls away. By clearing out fog all the way to the bottom, I build a tree trunk in my head, and from then on, all new information can hold on, which makes that topic forever more interesting and productive to learn about. And what I usually find is that so many of the topics I’ve pegged as “boring” in my head are actually just foggy to me—like watching episode 17 of a great show, which would be boring if you didn’t have the tree trunk of the back story and characters in place.”
― Tim Urban

“Depending on where The Great Filter occurs, we’re left with three possible realities: We’re rare, we’re first, or we’re fucked.”
― Tim Urban, Wait But Why Year One: We finally figured out how to put a blog onto an e-reader

“The Scientist’s clear mind sees a foggy world, full of complexity and nuance and messiness, the Zealot’s foggy mind shows them a clear, simple world, full of crisp lines and black-and-white distinctions.”
― Tim Urban, What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

“I think generally people’s thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It’s rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis. They’ll say, “We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way.” Or they’ll not do it because “Well, nobody’s ever done that, so it must not be good.” But that’s just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up—“from the first principles”
― Tim Urban, The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why

“Gen-Ys are delusional; Most people are not special—otherwise “special” wouldn’t mean anything. Even right now, most of Gen-Ys reading this are thinking, “Good point. But I actually am one of the few special ones”—and this is the problem.”
― Tim Urban

“I don’t know what a business is. All a company is is a bunch of people together to create a product or service. There’s no such thing as a business, just pursuit of a goal—a group of people pursuing a goal.”
― Tim Urban, The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why

“And learning, for Musk, is simply the process of “downloading data and algorithms into your brain.”3 Among his many frustrations with formal classroom learning is the “ridiculously slow download speed” of sitting in a classroom while a teacher explains something, and to this day, most of what he knows he’s learned through reading.”
― Tim Urban, The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why

“Instead of a blank canvas, school hands kids a coloring book and tells them to stay within the lines.4 What”
― Tim Urban, The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why

“The older I get, the clearer it becomes that our internal battle as the kindergarten teachers of our mind is like 97% of life’s struggle. The world is easy—you’re difficult.”
― tim urban, How to Pick a Career

“Humility is by definition a starting point—and it sends you off on a journey from there. The arrogance of certainty is both a starting point and an ending point—no journeys needed.”
― Tim Urban, The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why

“So if we want to think like a scientist more often in life, those are the three key objectives—to be humbler about what we know, more confident about what’s possible, and less afraid of things that don’t matter.”
― Tim Urban, The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why

“Insecurity can be solved the hard way or the easy way—and by giving people the easy option, dogmatic tribes remove the pressure to do the hard work of evolving into a more independent person with a more internally-defined identity.”
― Tim Urban, The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why

“The human cognitive weaknesses a genie tries to mitigate are the golem’s strengths. Confirmation bias tricks like cherry-picking, motivated skepticism, and motivated reasoning benefit hugely from economies of scale, as the snappiest and most convincing articulations of the sacred ideas spread quickly through the system. Individual biases, all pointing in the same direction in an Echo Chamber, scale up to make the golem’s ultra-biased macro-mind. And while individual minds inside a golem may have doubts about the sacred ideas, the social pressure of Echo Chamber culture keeps the giant as a whole steadfast in its beliefs. If the genie is the ultimate Scientist, the golem is the ultimate Zealot—a giant that’s totally certain of itself, totally unable to learn or change its mind, and worse at thinking than the average human.”
― Tim Urban, What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

“But here’s the crazy thing about humans—humans are smart enough that they know how insignificant they are. We are the only species on Earth that can conceive of either our own insignificance or our own death. Indeed, I am a microscopic particle here for only a brief moment who knows that I am a microscopic particle here for only a brief moment. A person is a speck of nothing who materializes for a split second, realizes where it stands in the scheme of time and space, understands that it will soon disappear back into nothingness for eternity, says “Wait, what the hell?”, and then disappears into nothingness for eternity.

A human appears out of nowhere—gets it—and then vanishes.

And all of this begs the question:

If I know that I am the tiniest speck of dust around for a split second only, then why was I so upset when my fantasy football team lost on Sunday?”
― Tim Urban

“Purpose in general is for me to do something I have fun in doing. 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. I'm very curious so I want to feel like a constant learner. I like having great conversations with interesting people [...]; I love creating; artistically creating; and it allows me to continually stay in excitable mode.”
― Tim Urban

“Over time, big industries tend to get flabby and uncreative and risk-averse—and if the right outsider company has the means and creativity to come at the industry with a fresh perspective and rethink the whole thing, there’s often a huge opportunity there.”
― Tim Urban, The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why

“In 1938, blues musician Lead Belly sang a song he wrote about “the Scottsboro boys,” a group of Black teenagers who were sent to jail after being falsely accused of raping two white women on a train (one of the women later admitted it was a made-up charge). After the song, Lead Belly talked about the case and advised fellow Black Americans “to stay woke—keep their eyes open.” Stay woke. The term has been a part of the Black American lexicon for a very long time. In more recent years, the term has evolved from the way Lead Belly was using it—warning Black people to stay alert to dangerous situations that might arise—to a broader meaning about staying aware of racist systems of oppression. After the release of Erykah Badu’s 2007 song Master Teacher, with a chorus that repeated the line “I stay woke,” the term exploded into the mainstream.”
― Tim Urban, What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

“The news and online media portraying a society where everyone hates each other is dangerous because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
― Tim Urban

“A company like GM is a finance-driven company who always has to live up to financial expectations. Here we look at it the other way around—the product is successful when it’s great, and the company becomes great because of that.” (This mirrored what Musk had told me earlier in the day: “The moment the person leading a company thinks numbers have value in themselves, the company’s done. The moment the CFO becomes CEO—it’s done. Game over.”) Von”
― Tim Urban, The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why

“The most important person to impress [...] is yourself.”
― Tim Urban

“What Hitler tried to do is essentially the same thing Alexander tried to do (though with more genocide), but it was so long ago that the tragic element of it carries no emotion today. If Hitler had done his thing 2,400 years ago, we might know him as Hitler the Great today.”
― Tim Urban

“A few million years ago, the genes that inhabit a particular population of great ape started innovating in an unusual way, trying out an animal container upgrade that had never quite worked before: super-high intelligence. All previous genes had passed up extra high intelligence in their housing because it requires a ridiculous amount of energy to maintain. It’s like running a small business and considering whether to hire an employee with a rare skill set who will only work for $1,000,000 a year. Doesn’t matter how good the employee is—no one is worth a million a year to a cash-strapped small business. But these ape genes tried it anyway.”
― Tim Urban

“Humans walked around or rode horses for 999 of the last 1,000 centuries. In this century, we drive cars, fly planes, and land on the moon.”
― Tim Urban, The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why

“But oversimplifying the real world is a bad idea—and unfortunately, that’s exactly what the Primitive Mind likes to do.”
― Tim Urban, What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

“Genes can’t talk to their animals, so they control them by having them run on specialized survival software I call the Primitive Mind:”
― Tim Urban, What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

“Separate realities are a natural consequence of market incentives moving from the North Star region closer to the lower corners of the Media Matrix, where there’s almost no overlap in coverage between the two sides. It makes sense that those most hooked on political media would be the most delusional, the same way consumers of political news in dog-raccoon-ville left the pro-dog and pro-raccoon crowds with totally different perceptions of reality.”
― Tim Urban, What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies

“The unpleasant feeling of existential confusion and intellectual insecurity is the gateway drug to real intellectual growth—but when you haven’t had the complete epiphany, it doesn’t feel that way.”
― Tim Urban, The Story Of Us

“not damaging enough to destroy your world, but bad enough to cause a long and scary global crisis. Short of an alien attack, it is the one thing that could make all humans in your world feel like they’re on the same team against a common enemy. The first and most crucial step on the road to a long-lasting species is the epiphany that you truly are a single team, alone in a dark and dangerous universe. We’re hoping the virus can help push you in that direction.”
― Tim Urban

“This highlights the massive difference between criticism and cancel culture. Criticism attacks ideas, cancel culture punishes people. Criticism enriches discussion, cancel culture shuts down discussion. Criticism helps lift up the best ideas, cancel culture protects the ideas of the culturally powerful. Criticism is a staple of liberalism, cancel culture is the epitome of illiberalism”
― Tim Urban, What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies