Tim Urban on Curiosity, Research and the Writing Process

Harry Stebbings asks Tim Urban, the writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, how he chooses which questions to pursue. Tim says curiosity is essential, but so is the excitement of explaining an idea or turning scattered thoughts into a useful framework.

When Tim first learned about Neuralink, he recalls wanting immediately to understand and explain it to friends. Other topics, such as procrastination or relationships, begin with recurring conversations and observations rather than a new technology.

For those personal subjects, the attraction is often making an explicit framework from ideas he has been turning over. He says he would make charts and work through questions for his own amusement even if he were not publishing them.

As an example of curiosity, he imagines converting millions of years of evolutionary history into a number of generations. The calculation is a rough mental illustration, not a biological account of humans descending from present-day chimpanzees.

He also leaves many subjects alone. Some philosophical questions feel too abstract to him; although readers requested a crypto explainer when interest was high, he did not feel drawn to write it. The deciding factor is whether a topic feels genuinely engaging to him.

When he chooses a topic, research is enjoyable because it lets him indulge that curiosity. Tim uses a personal scale from one, barely having heard of a subject, to ten, being a leading expert. He usually begins somewhere around two to four.

His aim is not to reach the level of a specialist who has spent years studying technical details and competing schools of thought. Instead, he wants to move far enough—perhaps to five or six on his informal scale—to develop a more intuitive understanding and explain the subject responsibly.

He may start with Wikipedia to see the shape of a topic and discover what he does not yet understand. He cautions that articles vary: some offer clear overviews, while others are too technical, incomplete or outdated.

Articles and YouTube videos help him see different facets before he goes deeper into books and papers. As sources repeatedly cite particular researchers or works, he follows those references. He mentions the origin of life as an example of a subject he was researching at the time.

Tim highlights passages in the Kindle app so he can return to them. In a simple text document, he keeps short references to useful explanations, including links to specific moments in videos or a location in a book, rather than copying entire paragraphs.

Early research can feel foggy: terms are unfamiliar and relationships between concepts are unclear. He says he is not ready to write while he still expects an expert to wince at his use of the terminology. As he reads, the pieces gradually begin to fit together.

He returns to strong sources that initially confused him. Understanding a video or article on a second pass is satisfying and also serves as a test: if the explanation still feels unclear, there may be a gap in his own grasp of the subject.

Harry asks whether some topics are too complex for a broad audience. Tim says finding the right depth is part of the writer's job. He gathers material, notices explanations or metaphors that make something click, and credits a source when he uses its metaphor.

A very broad explanation may tell an educated reader nothing new; too much specialist detail can lose a general audience. Tim tries to find a middle depth that is accurate and genuinely interesting for curious readers who do not already know the field.

He uses his own moments of surprise as an informal guide to what may interest readers. He wants to filter a long research process into a more concentrated reading experience, while recognizing that his reaction is only a proxy for an audience's response.

Some subtopics become less appealing as he researches them. He mentions investigating a section about ice ages and realizing that the explanation was more complicated than he had expected. If a section does not hold his own interest, he may decide not to include it.

Harry asks about a piece that the author loves but readers do not. Tim says he can see a post's overall performance, but lacks precise feedback about which individual paragraphs interested or bored readers; those details might surprise him.

During the first year of Wait But Why, he actively tried to make posts go viral and repeatedly misjudged which ones would catch on. An 'apple game' for describing the layers of a person's public and private character was a favorite among some readers, but did not become the sensation he had imagined.

A later post about unhappy members of Generation Y did spread widely. Tim says it drew millions of readers in a week, but he had made the same prediction for several earlier posts that did not take off. To him, virality is difficult to predict and involves luck.

Harry describes his own tension between repeating what performs well and following his interests. Tim says he still values reach, but once he had established a readership, a single viral hit mattered less than writing something he was excited about and his existing readers would enjoy.

The crypto explainer is his example: he thought it might attract a large audience during the boom, yet did not want to spend weeks researching it. Earlier, when he was trying to build an audience, he might have made a different choice.

For a blog post, Tim normally researches the topic, develops a framework and works through an outline before writing. With a self-imposed deadline and the structure in place, he says he can write several thousand words in a day.

A book proved too large for the same neat sequence. He found he needed to read, research, outline and write in an intermingled process. He distinguishes his own experience from a rule for all writers.

For a short project he can enter an intense, deadline-driven working mode, sometimes neglecting ordinary breaks. He says it is not especially pleasant and is not sustainable for the months required to write a book.

For his current book, he describes a stricter routine: 800 new words each weekday, with a shortfall made up later in the week. Extra research can interrupt the target, but the weekly commitment gives him a way to recover.

Tim calls his version of writer's block a snag. It might mean disliking the structure, not knowing how the next section should work, or discovering that he does not understand the next topic well enough to explain it.

At those moments he can feel untalented and inclined to procrastinate. Without external pressure, he says, he may spend weeks avoiding the difficult writing, doing more research or repeatedly rebuilding an outline that he dislikes the following day.

His preferred writing setup is a computer, either a laptop or an external monitor, with a keyboard and familiar shortcuts. He uses an iPad for reading and highlighting, but finds it less convenient when he needs to switch quickly into a document to capture an idea.

A phone is even less useful for his writing workflow, though he might listen to an audiobook on it for research. The best setup for him is the one that keeps moving between research, notes and writing frictionless.