Lex Fridman Podcast #360 – Lex Fridman & Tim Urban
Topics Discussed: Human history, Greatest people in history, Social media, Good times and bad times, Wisdom vs stupidity, Utopia, Conspiracy theories, Arguing on the Internet, Political division, Power games, Donald Trump and Republican Party, Social justice, Censorship gap, Free speech, Thinking and universities, Liv Boeree joins conversation, Hopes for the future and much much more.
Tim Urban
Tim Urban has become one of the Internet’s most popular writers. With wry stick-figure illustrations and occasionally epic prose on everything from procrastination to artificial intelligence, Urban's blog, Wait But Why, has garnered millions of unique page views, thousands of patrons and famous fans like Elon Musk. Wait But Why (WBW) is a website founded by Tim Urban and Andrew Finn and written and illustrated by Urban. The site covers a range of subjects as a long-form blog. Typical posts involve long-form discussions of various topics, including artificial intelligence, outer space, and procrastination, using a combination of prose and rough illustrations. On May 21, 2014, Urban posted "The Fermi Paradox", a post that became extremely popular. A 2016 Ted Talk by Urban on procrastination, based on concepts from the blog, had garnered over 50 million views by December 2022. In 2019, Marie Boran of The Irish Times summarized the website as a collection of "lengthy, thoughtful and well-written blog posts", praising them for being an "accessible and entertaining primer on human nature". You can find the books mentioned in Tim Urban's Conversation with Lex Fridman below.
Books Mentioned in this Podcast with Lex Fridman & Tim Urban:
Book Title: What’s Our Problem? – A Self-Help Book for Societies
Author: Tim Urban
Book Title: Culture Series
Author: Iain M. Banks
Book Title: Why We’re Polarized
Author: Ezra Klein