What's Our Problem? with Tim Urban

The Preamble

Sharon McMahon

Government, History, Storytelling, Education

4.9 • 15.1K Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today, on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, co-founder of the website Wait But Why? joins Sharon to talk about a few big ideas, like censorship, the future of big tech, the role of government, and what we can do to combat corruption. They also talk about bad drawings of stick figures, and his new book, What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies.

Hosted by: Sharon McMahon

Guest: Tim Urban

Executive Producer: Heather Jackson

Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder

Researcher: Valerie Hoback

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey friends, welcome. So excited to have you here today and I'm very excited to be chatting
0:09.9	with author Tim Urban. Perhaps you have seen his wildly viral Ted Talk about procrastination.
0:19.2	Maybe you have been reading his blog, but why for years? And he has a new book out called
0:26.2	What's our problem? A self-help book for societies. And this book has so many drawings in it.
0:35.8	So many stick figure drawings. And I told Tim, your stick figures are better than mine. And he was like,
0:42.5	wow, I've never heard that before. We talk about so many big ideas about things like
0:49.1	censorship, the future of big tech, the role of government in society and what we should do
0:56.9	when we experience things like corruption. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon. And here's
1:05.7	where it gets interesting. I am really excited to be chatting with Tim Urban today. Thank you
1:12.2	for being here. Thank you for having me. Congrats on your new book, baby, and also on your new
1:17.6	human baby. Yes, the book baby took took a lot longer to make it really well. Publishing works
1:23.7	at a glacial pace. It's absolutely glacial, especially as a blogger at Wait, but why,
1:29.2	which is where probably a lot of people know you from or from your mega viral Ted Talks, etc.
1:35.4	Publishing a book takes freaking forever. Yeah, I mean, oh man, it's hard because with a blog post,
1:43.2	you can kind of like have an outline, simple outline, and just like power through it. But a book,
1:47.9	I mean, there's outlines within outlines, within outlines. And it's like, I'll be, you know,
1:52.8	have three quarters of the way in and I'll forget if I, you know, in the latest version,
1:57.2	did I even talk about this? I have to go back and refresh myself. Just a lot to keep in your head
2:01.0	at once. And this book, especially, just has a lot of different concepts in it. So it was a lot
2:05.9	to wrangle together, but it's nice to finish. It's very, you know, blog post is satisfying to
2:10.3	finish, but a book is really satisfying to finish. So I'm it's a, it pays off. I totally get it.
2:15.0	But I am excited to share your book, what's our problem, which is a self-help book for
	...

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