Tim Urban

Tim Urban Speaking Topics

• AI Revolution & The Road to Superintelligence

  Back in 2014, long before Artificial Intelligence became the subject that everyone was talking about, Tim Urban began some serious research. It hit him pretty quickly that what was happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but, by far, THE most important topic for our future. After three years of diving deeply into the subject and all its future implications, Tim published “The AI Revolution and the Road to Superintelligence,” taking readers on a deep exploration of what AI is, how it works and why it will dramatically change our lives. Vox dubbed this Tim’s “epic series on artificial intelligence”

  Instantly, Tim established himself as the ultimate explainer of AI to a wide range of audiences—including Silicon Valley thought leaders. Elon Musk shared “The AI Revolution” twice on X, commenting, “Excellent and funny intro article about Artificial Superintelligence! Highly recommend reading.” Tim soon turned his fascinating exploration of AI into a gripping talk—one which the head of Sweden’s Øredev conference called “the best keynote in years.” After experiencing the same talk at Social Media Week in New York, conference founder Toby Daniels wrote that Tim “was brilliant, inspiring and terrifying at the same time, and left most of us speechless, breathless and in a mixed emotional state of wonder and awe at what the future holds.”

  As AI races into nearly every industry, every company and every part of our lives, Tim remains the ultimate (and frequently entertaining) explainer of the most transformational shift in the way we live, work and evolve as a society.

• Why Procrastinators Procrastinate: The Never-Ending Battle in Our Heads

  In college, Tim Urban’s procrastination problem got so bad that he found himself writing the first word of his 90-page senior thesis only 72 hours before it was due. After spending years trying to understand how his mind worked, he finally put his thoughts down on paper, creating three cartoon stick drawings—the Rational Decision-Maker, the Instant Gratification Monkey and the Panic Monster—to represent the major “players” in his head that battled over the steering wheel. The post went viral. And soon, Tim was explaining how procrastination works to a TED audience in Vancouver. A hilarious presentation that consistently delights and inspires audiences, it has been viewed by over 60 million people, making it the third most-watched TED Talk of all time.

  Since then, Tim has become the go-to speaker on procrastination, why we do it and how we can overcome it. He supplements the points from his TED Talk with a discussion of a famous tool called the Eisenhower Matrix, which reminds people of the difference between what’s urgent and what’s important. He then shifts to solutions, talking through six strategies for overcoming both the short• and long-term procrastination that plagues so many of us at work and in our personal lives. Using his trademark “time” visuals, Tim finishes the talk with a powerful reminder that time is precious. It’s a talk that leaves the audience spent from laughing and inspired to make positive changes in their lives.

Cooks & Chefs: What It Means to Be a True Original

Since 2015, Tim Urban has become Elon Musk’s go-to writer to help explain his companies and his vision to the world, and he has repeatedly been granted exclusive access to Musk and his companies. Tim’s epic blog posts on Musk’s companies have been read by millions of people, and Vox’s David Roberts called them “the meatiest, most fascinating, most satisfying posts I’ve read in ages.” In the final post, read by 1.7 million people, Tim addressed the question that interested him the most: “Why is Elon Musk able to be so successful?” Tim believes it’s not Musk’s intelligence or wealth or drive that separates him so far from the crowd, but rather the way he thinks. Tim compares Musk’s way of thinking to other world-changers like Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and John Lennon in a talk that explores the simple truth about what it means to be an original. In short, the secret sauce of so many legends is their knack for reasoning from first principles—something we all have the ability to do. Tim’s talk on the subject galvanizes audiences by leaving them with the belief that it’s fully in their power to be more original—simply by absorbing the epiphany that the world they live in was built by people no smarter than they are.

The Magic of High-Rung Thinking

e focus so much on “what” we and others think that we often forget to ask ourselves how we think. In this talk, Tim Urban explores how individuals think, how groups think together and how these two things are connected.

In 2020, Tobi Lütke, the CEO of Shopify, printed out Tim’s articles on what he calls “high-rung” thinking and bound them into booklets for his entire company to read. The articles, Lütke believed, held critical lessons for teams and leaders.

In this talk, Tim teaches these lessons directly. First, he explains the primary tool, the Thinking Ladder, which identifies four categories of thinking: a Scientist, a Sports Fan, an Attorney and a Zealot. Tim has explained the Thinking Ladder to audiences of leaders, creatives and strategists—all of whom can become far more effective by learning how to keep their thinking on the “high rungs” of the ladder. While the top rung (the Scientist) is ideal for brainstorming and “back to the drawing board” discussions, the second rung (the Sports Fan) is best for teams trying to execute a plan together. But what’s most important is to avoid something we all tend to do: drift downwards to the ladder’s low rungs (the Attorney and the Zealot), where we fall prey to confirmation bias.

Then, Tim explains how the Thinking Ladder applies to groups, introducing audiences to two broad kinds of intellectual culture:

• The Idea Lab: a “high-rung” culture where disagreement is encouraged, where people are always respected but ideas are not.
• The Echo Chamber: a “low-rung” culture that penalizes departure from the prevailing narratives at the company and incentivizes independent minds to remain “in the closet” about what they really think.

While Idea Lab culture unleashes the full intellectual power of a group of minds and gives the company a superbrain, Echo Chamber culture leaves that potential untapped—the company brain is simply the brain of the CEO, widely repeated.

These new terms are memorable and catchy, and audiences will be using them years after hearing the talk.

The Three Trademarks of Next-Level Leadership

In this talk, Tim Urban brings three of his most popular concepts together:

• The Cook and the Chef: Based on Tim’s close work with Elon Musk, the cook and the chef are symbols of two ways of reasoning. To be a cook is to follow the recipes of others—recipes about how to strategize, how to manage staff and how to live life outside of work. To be a chef means to “reason from first principles”—to actually mess around with “raw ingredients” and come up with an original recipe. In people like Musk and Steve Jobs, what often seems like genius is actually just an unusual knack for thinking like a chef.
• The Scientist and the Sports Fan: Tim introduces the audience to his popular tool, the Thinking Ladder, and explains the four “rungs” of the ladder. While the top rung (the Scientist) is ideal for brainstorming and “back to the drawing board” discussions, the second rung (the Sports Fan) is best for teams trying to execute a plan together. But what’s most important is to avoid something we all tend to do: drift downwards to the ladder’s low rungs (the Attorney and the Zealot), where we fall prey to dogma and confirmation bias and get stuck in outdated ideas.
• Echo Chambers and Idea Labs: Here, Tim introduces two kinds of intellectual culture: The Idea Lab, where disagreement is encouraged, where people are always respected but ideas are not. And the Echo Chamber, which penalizes departure from the prevailing narratives and incentivizes independent minds to remain “in the closet” about what they really think.

While Idea Lab culture unleashes the full intellectual power of a group of minds and gives the company a superbrain, Echo Chamber culture leaves that potential untapped—the company brain is simply the brain of the CEO, widely repeated.

Online, the articles about these three concepts have gone mega-viral, being read by over 2.5 million people. In this talk, Tim brings together the very best of these articles, leaving the audience with three memorable concepts they can use forever.

What’s Our Problem?

n 2016, Tim Urban looked out at American society and knew something was off. Political tribalism was on the rise, anger was overflowing on social media and productive discussions seemed impossible. Tim spent the next six years coming up with an answer to the question: What’s Our Problem?

In this talk, Tim zooms out on the American landscape, explaining how rapid changes in technology, geography, government and media have had unforeseen consequences.

Tim believes our political thinking and our conversations are constrained by the lens we use: the “horizontal” left-center-right axis. He introduces the audience to a new way to visualize politics, using the core tool in his book, What’s Our Problem: a vertical axis that can add a critical element of nuance into the picture. He supplements the political “left” and “right” with two new, incredibly useful terms: “high-rung politics” and “low-rung politics.” Full of hope, this talk also offers a solution for all of our divisions.