Wait But Why

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 70 million views by March 2024. A post on the blog about Elon Musk and Neuralink was produced with involvement from Musk himself.

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".

In 2023, Urban published What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies, analyzing what Urban sees as the major problems with politics as a whole. The book was endorsed by Elon Musk on Twitter.