Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Tim Urban.

Tim Urban is an American author, illustrator, and co-founder of the long-form blog, Wait

But Why, which averages over a million unique visitors monthly. He has one of the most viewed

TED Talks of all time called Inside the Mind of a Master procrastinator, and his new book, What's Our Problem,

a self-help book for societies, is the subject of our conversation today. We talk about how

the flaws inherent in human nature interact with the two-party system to create polarization,

echo chambers, and extremism. Tim focuses equally on the problem with Republicans and Democrats in his book,

but in this conversation, we focus more on what's gone wrong with Republicans for obvious reasons.

We also talk about the right way to be a skeptic and the wrong ways to be a skeptic.

We also talk about how to handle political differences with your family members

and in the dating world. So without further ado, Tim Urban. Okay, Tim Urban. Thanks for doing my show.

Before we get into your book, What's Our Problem? Which is really fantastic. I can't recommend it enough. I wanted to publicly thank you for something you did a few years ago related to my fiasco with TED. I had a whole controversy with them surrounding my TED talk where employees didn't want to

release the talk and deliberately under-promoted the talk. And, you know, when I went public about

this, I was at risk of seeming paranoid in what I was accusing Ted of doing, though I was right

about what they did to my talk. I could easily see how it would

have looked paranoid if you hadn't really said it first as the person with the either most watched

or second most watched TED talk of all time, which you didn't have to do, but you did. And it was, I don't know if I ever thanked you

privately for it, but I definitely want to thank you publicly because it was a very menschie thing

of you to do. I mean, yeah, I didn't, I didn't do it to be a mensch. I did it because it made me

angry at the time. And I, and I, it felt, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, I, the, the, I'm years ago. And I know them well, and they're great. I love that, you know, they're, I really like the head crew. You know, for all my, you know, I would also have criticisms of how they've handled,

you know, some of the stuff with the age of political tribalism.

I don't think it's gone so well over there, but I really like them as people.

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