Elon Musk’s favourite blogger Tim Urban on how to build an audience, no matter your product

0:27Tim Urban Writer, illustrator, co-founder of Wait But Why, and the man behind one of my favourite TED Talks of all time. Wait But Why is a website where Tim writes on subjects like space, romance, AI, procrastination, almost everything actually, as he puts it. It's basically long-form blogging, and Tim's are the longest blogs I actually read by a mile. Each post is accompanied by Tim's drawings, usually featuring his iconic stick figures. I send this blog to all my friends every single time I read one. The site reached mainstream prominence after being shared online by no other than Elon Musk, who went on to collaborate with Tim directly.

1:08In fact, Tim was invited by Elon to spend a few days with him, which he then wrote about, and like everything else he writes about, it's pretty amazing as well. Wait But Why has built a cult-like following, including fanboys like me, particularly in the startup world. Earlier this year, Tim published his book, What's Our Problem? A self-help book for societies, which explores why everything feels like a mess these days and what we can do to fix things. The book took Tim six years to write after missing numerous self-set deadlines. Finding out his wife was pregnant was the final straw. The baby couldn't be born into a world where Tim still hadn't finished this bloody book.

1:45It was finally published in February and Tim's child was born in March, just in time, which is where our conversation begins. You know, for me, it's not been like, wake up one day and the baby comes out and I'm like a whole different person. That didn't happen for me. I feel like it's probably a very gradual change over a bunch of years. And I don't really feel like a dad yet because I'm not fathering anyone. I'm like taking care of a little fat ball. So I have this like new little thing that I love and that I'm very excited about and I like to see every day. And I'm learning a lot of stuff. But yeah, it's like it's hard to feel like anyone's dad at the moment.

2:22And I feel like that probably takes a while. I think in three years when I'm like talking to the person, giving parenting lessons. Yeah, I'll feel totally different. But at the moment, not so much. My daughter's almost two. And one of the things that my friends really appreciated about me when my daughter was born is when everyone was like, isn't it just the most existential, amazing moment of your life? I was like, no. Am I meant to feel like that? Because I don't feel like that. Everyone keeps telling me that I should feel like that. But exactly like you said, I was like, there's like a potato here, which is super noisy.

2:59And I can't immediately suddenly well up with all these emotions and this deep connection. And it has taken time for me. So I'm glad that you answered the way that you did. Because I think it's also kind of irritating when you hear every other dad just talk about how it was just the perfect moment and has remained that way ever since. Certainly not what I experienced. Now at least there's two of us. Totally. Parenting. Well, tell us a little bit about your parents then. What was childhood like? Childhood was pretty good. You know, no major complaints. I was an only child till I was five. So I feel like those are pretty formative years to have been kind of like hanging around in my own head a lot.

3:34Then two sisters were born after that. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like I was kind of a lot like I am now then. Like obviously much less developed version. But I do feel like I probably a lot of the ways I am and the ways I think and the things I think about were not that different from when I was five or six. So I used to think about dinosaurs and how big they were and how crazy it was that right where I'm sitting on this lawn in front of my house, there might have been a T-Rex here. If you just went back in time, there might have been a dinosaur right here. And then I would think about the planets and how big Jupiter and Saturn are and how that's crazy and how they look so weird and these big planets and that you can see Venus or Jupiter at night.

4:20And that was crazy. And like, look at all the stars and there's more stars than there are grains of sand in the world. So that's the kind of stuff that five-year-old me would have like told you all about. And like kind of the same stuff that like I marvel about today. Again, now I would say I have like 50 of those areas of Marvel and maybe I had three or four back then. But, you know, a lot of curiosity, a lot of kind of awe. And I think that worked out fine. I'm reading this book at the moment. It's been recommended to me a lot. So I finally got around to it which is the book you wish your parents read.

4:52It's quite interesting on the basis of like the overall thesis behind it is however you parent, there's some kind of reflection in how you had a child parent relationship too. Yeah, I think of it a little bit like your psyche or your kind of emotional palette or your worldview. All of that to me, I think of it as kind of like a boat. And your parents are, they kind of hand you the boat that they have in their head. They kind of hand it to you and you, they install this stuff in you when you're young and now you have it. And if you don't do any self-work or any reflection, like the kind you're talking about, you will basically just hand the same exact boat that you were given to your kid.

5:30And the kid will get in that boat and go down the river and you'll pass it down the street in the same boat. And if no one ever reflects, then 10 generations later, you have the same boat for better or worse, including some trauma from the Great Depression is now, you know, affecting people 300 years later or war or, you know, all the things that, you know, you don't realize how much the way that your parents raised you has just without them realizing it, it came from their parents and certain things came from their parents and certain things there came from the fact that they like had to immigrate because they were in a war and their sibling was killed in front of them and they were starving and had to get onto a new country.

6:06And then they get, and that has somehow a little remnants of that passed on to you and you're living your life in a certain way based on crazy experiences from a long time ago. So I use that thought to think like, yeah, you got to self-reflect. You got to try to improve. And when you grow, if you go to therapy as a human, you know, we think of it as a selfish thing and a totally fine way, but like you're going to make yourself better. You're going to self-improve any kind of self-help, self-improvement that you do. You're, you're also actually fixing the boat. You're repairing the family boat.

6:38You're repairing the family psyche. You're making little improvements, which is actually kind of your job. Your job is to actually hand a little bit better vote to your kids than you were handed. And to also be compassionate to your parents because maybe they didn't do perfect, but they probably did a little better than their parents did with them, which is all you can ask of them. If they did a little better than their parents did with them, then they did their job and you should do the same. And eventually, you know, you want the trajectory to be upward where kids are mentally healthier, emotionally healthier, every generation that goes.

7:05And, you know, it's hard when the world changes. That brings new problems in. But yeah, I think about this concept all the time. So what takes you into the world of blogging? Can we go from sort of the age of leaving school? Do you go to university? Like, what do you go into? You know, I had to choose my major at the age of 19. I had no idea what I wanted to do or what I, I knew I liked like astronomy, right? I knew I was like kind of interested in physics. I knew I was like kind of interested in, I liked like certain kinds of math. I didn't know yet that I liked history so much, but like I liked, you know, whatever.

7:37And I just didn't know what I wanted to major. And I thought if I majored in astronomy, I was kind of going to be doing a bunch of like, I don't know, like analyzing data and like calculations and not like talking about how big the biggest stars are, you know? So I was like, I don't actually think that's going to be fun. So I ended up doing government because it was broad. I could do history and poli-sci and philosophy and econ and all that fit under government, which I think was a kind of a good choice. The bad part about it was I had to write like 80 papers in four years because it's just humanities.

8:03And I hate papers. It's like my least favorite thing in the world. And I would procrastinate on them. And I would do them in the last second. And I wouldn't do that good a job. And it was a lot of reading. And I wouldn't do the reading. And then I would let it get to the end. So it was kind of a bad match for my personality. But that's what I did. But I didn't want to go into that as a career. I mean, in the US, that's very common. People, I don't really know why, but people constantly major in something they have no intention of ever going into. I graduated, moved to LA. And I was like, I want to write music.

8:31But I don't want to write lyrics and songs. I want to write just music. like a classical artist. So I guess I'll do movie scores because that's the way you can have a career just doing music. I did that for a little while. But again, I was I had a big procrastination problem. And like I was all I did in college was sit around and write music. As soon as it was the thing I was supposed to be doing, I found other things to do. Because it was now no longer fun. It was the icky hard thing I had to do. And I also just kind of didn't really realize if you want to be a happy film scorer, you really should just be a passionate film buff and TV person that you happens to be that your role is going to be music, but you really just want to be part of making a great movie.

9:06I didn't care about that. I wanted to write great music. And so that was kind of a bad match because I would be pissed off when they put the dialogue over my great theme. It wasn't a great match for me for a few reasons. And I ended up blogging on the side and doing music on the side while running a tutoring company, a test prep company, which was supposed to be my side job turned into my full-time thing. I started this little blog in 2005 and I wrote 300 blog posts over six years. Cause again, it wasn't the thing I was supposed to be doing. So I did it all the time. Uh, and that was fun. I got a little following, nothing huge, but, um, I kind of found my voice and I realized like, okay, this is, this is like, this is not like college writing.

9:41This is fun and you can go anywhere with it. And it's really satisfying to post something. I never went viral with that blog, but it's like, you know, this one like caught on a little bit. There's a lot more people reading this one than normal. Like that was really exciting. That was like 30. And I was like, I need to just go with one of these creative pursuits full time and had a business partner, Andrew Finn, who was like my best friend since we were five. And we were working together on this company. And on what company? Sorry, on the tutoring company. This is the test prep company. Yeah. But we had a weird arrangement where like we, you know, at one point we were like, oh, let's start like a podcast app.

10:13This was 2010. You know, we were like, podcasts are going to be huge. And actually we were right about that. We probably should have just really followed through with this, but we, we built like a podcast app and Andrew went and kind of built that while I like held down the tutoring company. And then this was like another version of that. I was like, I need to go do something creative, but maybe we can do it like something that also could be a business. So like, maybe I'll go and start like a media site, writing site, something like that. And you can hold down the tutoring company. And so that's what we did.

10:40And so I was like, okay, what did I learn from six years of blogging? And how do I like level up here and do like a way better blog? And I was like, well, just first of all, I'll just spend like 60 hours a week on this blog instead of five hours a week. And, you know, I started drawing little drawings in my last blog towards the end. That was actually because we had writing tablets in our office because we were doing online tutoring. And so our tutors were like doing their math lessons on, you know, using a little drawing tablet. So I had it and I was like, oh, maybe I'll draw in this blog post.

11:12And then that became something that I brought into Way But Why, the new blog, and was like, okay, I'm going to draw a lot. that's where it started 2013 and um got traction pretty quickly and so suddenly it was like there's a lot of adrenaline so i was like oh there's people here like serious amount of people and okay shit like let's gotta gotta do really gotta like crush each thing and so i had a lot of adrenaline which is really good it was like it was really helpful to have like to have the pressure on like like this is gonna seem by a lot of people and if it's bad that's really bad and if it's good that's amazing you know it's like there's the stakes got really high suddenly which was i think I think I thrive in that situation.

11:45Mistakes are high. I can work my own procrastination better and really give my best to something. So I started pouring everything into this blog. And that was 2013, 14, those first couple of years. And yeah, it was nightmarish. It was still like I'd still be cramming the night before I said I would post something and doing the same thing I did in college, but it was a lot more fun. The internet is flooded with content, obviously like you know like a crazy overwhelming amount of it you can't even no one even can scratch the surface of what's on the internet but that a lot of it was like you know companies churning out b-minus things quickly and trying to get you know be relevant at the in that moment that day you know based on what's happening that weekend and there weren't that many people doing a really good job like making great content on the internet there there were some there's actually a lot more today than there was in 2013, I think.

12:36And also, you know, so I did kind of feel like it's just a big world out there. And if I work really hard and I do like my best, I think I'll be making something that can catch on, that people will notice. So I thought that. What I learned as I went is that there's a lot of people who really, you know, it's a big, again, it's a big world. And there's billions of people on the internet, billions. That's just like a number that's unfathomable to us. And so if you're putting something out there that's high quality, even if only a one thousandth of people really hits for them. So if you take a thousandth of billions, you have millions of people who happen to have your exact sense of humor and interest level.

13:20And they want to read the same level of depth that you do. And they're interested in the same topics and the same style. And that was kind of this kind of epiphany that I was like, you know, this isn't like a set group of 100 people. And that's who they are. and I'm trying to win them over. No, I can do something where none of that, none of the average hundred like it. But if every 10 hundreds, one person's like, damn, I love this. I have a million people out there. So I started to realize that I don't have to try to write something. How do you write something viral? Let me try it, Reviva. Just write something that I would love if someone sent it to me, that I know that if someone just made this really complex diagram about how long the spans of time are, man, I would be so excited if someone said that to me.

14:05So that tells me that there are millions of people out there. It could be different countries, could be different languages, could be different ages and whatever, but millions of people who will also feel the same way. Once I realized that, you know, I started to get more confident, just like, I'm just going to do it because I would like it. Even if none of my friends would like it. Well, it doesn't matter because there's a million people out there just like me. It's a really interesting, it's an interesting point, because actually, this is also being communicated a lot, even in 2023, right? You know, know your audience.

14:36But actually, your audience can just be you, because every niche is enormous. I think people want to be, you know, unique in their world they're in, in some ways, you know, people want to be unique in some ways. But we also don't want to feel alone. When you come across something, I experienced this myself, You know, you come across some blog, some YouTuber, some author, you know, whatever. Man, this person gets me. This person is thinking the same way. Oh, my God. It's such a joyful moment because you feel like, oh, I just found like a best friend creator. And now I'm going to go back and read everything they've done.

15:10And like, so I've had that experience a lot. And I think it's actually that moment when you realize you're not totally unique. It's a good feeling. It's like, oh, wow. Okay. my favorite tim blog and thing that i have sent to so many people the one about time um which you did update um and that was actually a really lovely surprise for me one day i was like oh i've gone to share it with a friend oh it's updated well there goes another hour um but i think that is and you know it's hard on an audio based podcast obviously for listeners i would take your phone out right now wherever you're listening to this unless you're driving don't do that please but just search Tim Urban Time and it's a really important one because there are some really fun ways that you you're able to communicate just how long the earth has been around and how meaningless ultimately humans existence here has been so I wanted to ask you about this particular blog post first question is is it generally your most popular it's funny because you're talking about the one with the cascading timelines correct it's it's interesting because that's actually one of my favorites you know that's what it's like you know that's what i like did for myself basically like that's something i would have procrastinated on some other project in college by making some shit like that on my computer that was just for me because it was interesting to like how long did it take you to research that sorry that one took me about one week probably three days of procrastination i probably like you know four full work days you know it's also some perfectionism with i'm not a graphic designer so i'm really inefficient with probably i think i was using PowerPoint for that and to like line up all the things.

16:43And then it was fun for me because each successive timeline was like fascinating to look at. The same way that if you think it's interesting to read it, the first time I made each one, I was like, oh, wow, man, that's so small compared. And I was very adamant about making it, you know, like to the pixel accurate to scale. So like each thing is the exact right length in comparison to the others. Today, I would have some better fact check people to send this to. But at the time, this was early on, that was just me. So, you know, I probably had 200 tabs open and just trying to look up like every possible important date.

17:17And so I, yeah, I love that one. That one is like, I like, it's just, you know, it's visual and it's useful. You know, I like it because it's actually like, I also find myself, it's one of the few resources of my own that I will use for actual like research purposes. I'll go zip over to it to like check on something. So I love it. It was actually an interesting post because it was like one of the first 10 posts I ever did. And it didn't do that well. It was like, you know, it was like, okay, it was just like, got some traffic and whatever. And then like 10 posts in, I did a post that went super viral.

17:49It was the first really viral post I had done. Which was? It was called Why Generation Why Yuppies Are Unhappy. Really, today I would have named it Why Millennials Are Unhappy. I remember. But millennials wasn't quite a term yet at the time. And yeah, it just blew up. You know, sometimes you just hit the right post at the right time. And it was the right platform. Facebook was very viral platform back then. If you had a good piece of content, it could really explode on Facebook in a way that I don't think any social media network today even has that potential. I think it was a very, everyone was gathered in one place.

18:23There's not, that doesn't exist anymore. There was no Instagram yet. Everyone was on Facebook every day. And if you posted content, they just spread it everywhere. So onto people's timelines. So that's where I got a lot of my initial readers was Facebook and like posts like that, when a post goes viral, you know, you get all these new subscribers. So anyway, that one went viral. And then what happened was this other timeline one, which I thought kind of was a dud, went mega viral that same week. And it was a good lesson to me. If something doesn't pop, it's not necessarily that you did a bad job.

18:52It's that it might've been the wrong time. It might not have just hit that critical mass. And if it had the tipping point, it would have, you know, so it was a lesson to me as well to not like judge too much by numbers and likewise to not judge the other way where, you know, I've had posts like this millennials post that I've posted again a year later and it doesn't go anywhere. And I'm like, oh wow, you know, I got a little cocky. They were thinking I wrote the best article in history and that's why. And actually it turned out that it was a little bit of perfect storm and that, um, it's not, you know, that article wasn't guaranteed to always go viral.

19:21So it was very gratifying for this particular timeline's post to go viral because it was just like, oh shit, I love that one. I'm so happy. Like other people love it too. I suppose one of the things you weren't expecting was, you can't always know your audience and know who you're speaking to. But I think one of the, I'm assuming, more surprising and fun things you found out was that Elon Musk was one of your super fans and asked you to work with him. So can you share that story with us? Yeah, that was a surprising moment. I wrote a long blog post on AI. This was a little later. And instead of trying to write the edgy, catchy thing.

19:56I'm less afraid to write a really long, deep dive on something I find fascinating. If I can really write something interesting on a topic that I am obsessed with, again, that the other million people out there just like me are going to probably want to dive really deep into it as well. And again, this was one where I think I got a little lucky with the time. Someone recommended the book Super Intelligence to me by Nick Bostrom. This was end of 2014. Looks even more wise today than it did then. So I read it and I was like, holy fuck. AI, man, because at the time, it wasn't a big topic really yet.

20:29This was one of the books that really got it into the public consciousness. It was kind of a sci-fi, nerdy sci-fi concept until then. It didn't seem real. And the concept of artificial narrow intelligence versus general versus super intelligence, this was new. These terms, no one knew these terms yet. So I read that book, and then I went and immediately read a couple other books, including like Ray Kurzweil's Singularity is Near and two or three others. And then I read a bunch of papers and just just fully sunk into this topic for a couple of weeks. And then basically said, okay, that took everything that I learned.

21:01And I said, how can I distill this into, you know, this two weeks into a two, you know, maybe a one or two hour experience for someone reading on the internet. And so I wrote that post. And it turns out that, you know, Elon Musk is very, takes AI very, very seriously. He thinks it's a real big threat. He did then. Yeah, just by luck, just sheer luck. He ended up getting sent the article by someone. and he tweeted out the article and said, people should read this. And then I wrote part two, a couple of weeks later, again, he tweeted it out and said, people should read this. So I said, you know, wow, he like either someone sent it to him again, or he actually intended, intentionally checked that, which was like mind blowing at the time.

21:41And of course, when he tweets it out, there's this huge spike on Chartbeat or Google analytics or whatever I was using then as a blogger, you know, that's like the really fun moment, whether it's Elon or someone else, you know, it's just, you write something and you know, you hope it goes viral. And then you, you know, someone who you admire reads your thing. That's just an extremely gratified moment. So I was already excited and I kind of forgot about it and moved on. And a few weeks after that, someone from his team reached out and was like, hey, you know, would you be interested in ever writing about the industries that Elon's involved with?

22:10He'd like to work with you to do that. So obviously I said, yes, that was really, you know, and it's not just, it's not that I would actually have said yes to anyone in that situation, because as a blogger, you know, you want to, you still want to be driving the ship the way you want to drive it i don't know like i i think tom brady is awesome but if tom brady came to me and was like you know i want you to write about like the sports industry and you know you can interview me for it i probably would say no i'd be like i'd love to meet you but i don't it's not really my you tell but you would tell him no to his face so you'd be like yeah let's talk about it no tom thanks for the coffee in the last hour let's go take a football over to the field we'll toss it around and chat about it yeah in this case I already had SpaceX, Tesla, like those were already on my long list of potential post topics.

22:54So anyway, this was a perfect storm. It was like someone I admire who, you know, will let me work with him and people at his company to write about topics I already wanted to write about. So, of course, I said yes. Spent, really took up a lot of the rest of the year. I did not plan on that. I thought I was going to spend one good week on each, on four posts. So it was going to be an intro post to Elon and his story, then Tesla, then SpaceX, then what I think Elon's secret sauce is as the fourth post, which is what I did. It's just that instead of being one week each, it was like two, three months each.

23:23And it was a 95 ,000 word, you know, book length thing, the final four posts. But yeah, it was great. It was a lot of fun. I'm like, I learned a ton. And it was a little like AI where as I'm learning, I'm like, that's how you know it's a good topic. When the topic blows your mind even more than you thought it was going to. Like it's more, you're just riveted learning about it. I'm saying, okay, this is going to be great to write about as well. Did you get a chance to work with him on that stuff? Yeah. Yeah, no, he was very available. Like, you know, the first time we had a call scheduled, I thought it was going to be like, you know, he would say hi for a second and then I would talk to his like assistant or someone in the office.

23:55But he called alone, just him and just me and him talking for like an hour, just rambling combo about all the different stuff he's working on and what he thinks about the climate change and rockets and why colonizing Mars and Tesla. And so then basically the next plan was, okay, I'm going to come out to LA and see SpaceX factory and go to Fremont and see this Tesla factory. And, you know, it was this nice arrangement where basically it was a lot of trust. You know, he was like, you know, set me up to meet with a bunch of executives at both companies and a bunch of the people really working on building these things.