302 - A More Beautiful Question - Warren Berger
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Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 302. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 302.

so

My name is David McRaney. This is the You Are Not So Smart podcast. On this program, we often explore intellectual humility, media literacy, and critical thinking. And asking questions is a critical aspect of critical thinking. And this is an episode about asking questions. So, I'd like to ask you a question. Why...

the sky do you know the answer to that question do you know why the sky is blue you may have learned the answer in school and if so I'm wondering right now how much of what you learned can you right now recite off of the top of your head in other words and you don't have to share this with anyone I'm not gonna tell anybody but I'm wondering if honestly when asked why is the sky blue

Is your internal answer kind of, I don't know? It's totally okay. It's totally okay if that is your answer. But I'm wondering, if it is, how long have you persisted in this very specific slice of ignorance? When is the last time you looked up the answer to why is the sky blue? Either to learn it for the first time or to refresh your memory.

We are more than capable than at any other time in history of answering questions like these. There was a time when if you were hanging out with your friends and someone, like they ordered like a bee's knees at the bar and someone said, I wonder why they call it the bee's knees.

Everyone just would go, "Hm? I don't know." And that's it. Nobody's going to look it up on YouTube or use a search engine. Certainly not an AI LLM. We just didn't have that stuff. And now we do. The device in your pocket can look up the answers to things in seconds. Yet we often leave a lot of the potentially knowable world around us unknown.

Why does ice float? Why do leaves change colors in the fall? How does our heart keep beating all on its own? In many cases, we are doing something relatively new when we persist in a state of not knowing such things willingly, by choice. Of course, there's another possibility. You may not know these things because you think you know these things.

But you don't actually know these things because you haven't checked to see if you are wrong, and you are. I know when I was a boy, several adults told me it was the blue of the ocean reflecting off of the sky. That was why the sky was blue. Which not only isn't true, it just leads to more why questions.

Why is the ocean blue? Why is the sky blue over the deserts and the forests where there's no oceans? Why aren't the clouds blue? Why? Why? And... We think kids are crazy when they keep asking why, but they're not. They're onto something. You know, they kind of instinctively know that sometimes you have to ask why repeatedly to get to the real truth of an issue. That's Warren Berger, an expert on, of all things, asking questions.

And we will bring him back in in just a second. But first, it feels like I should tell you why the sky is blue before we move on to the rest of the show. If you want to skip this part, it lasts about five minutes. So if you want to skip ahead and I'll see you on the other side.

Why is the sky blue? It's commonly presented as the example of a child's natural curiosity, of natural human curiosity. It's the first big question that a child asks. And I say big by it's like, how in the world does the world actually work? It's one of those kinds of questions, and it's usually among the first.

And it's a great example of our yearning to make sense of the natural world. It's a gateway question to the sort of pondering that led to philosophy and science and our current understanding of everything from physics to perception to consciousness itself. And we, as a species, asked that question for a very long time.

thousands of years before finally figuring it out. And we only just figured it out, but we did figure it out recently around 1899. That was when British physicist, John Williams Strutt, great name known as Lord Rayleigh, not that great of a name. It was a family dynasty name thing. That was when he Rayleigh died.

Building on the work of John Tyndall and Isaac Newton before him, mathematically explained with formulae that the blue color of the sky is due to molecules in the air scattering sunlight all over the place. What does that even mean? Well, all the colors of light, the full spectrum, it's all hitting the atmosphere. Red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, violet, blue, all of them.

And each color of light has a wavelength. And some wavelengths are longer than others, like red. Which just means the peaks of the red light waves are farther apart than the peaks of the blue waves. Imagine long, lazy curves versus tight, busy squiggles. That's red versus blue.

The atmosphere, which is mostly nitrogen with oxygen mixed in, is full of particles. Dust, pollen, ash, bacteria, stuff like that. And the long wavelength colors with their slow, lazy vibrations just don't interact with that stuff in the atmosphere nearly as much as the faster, busier, more frenetic wavelength colors do.

Therefore, the long wavelength light waves, they snake their way down to the surface of the planet without getting nearly as scattered. But blue, with its shorter squiggly wavelengths, interacts with a lot more stuff, creating a sort of optical static as it scatters and bounces all over the place. That static...

fills the upper atmosphere. It's just everywhere. Which means that during the day, from every angle, no matter where you look, there will be some blue light escaping that static and then making its way down to your eyes. And that makes the sky seem blue. I say seem because all of this is at some level an illusion.

It's all the result of nuclear fusion within a nearby star generating electromagnetic waves that travel across space to the planet you are standing on, scattering in its atmosphere before shooting into your eyeballs, striking your retina, and then getting chemically converted into electrical signals that your brain interprets as colors.

But yeah, back to the sky. When the sun is low on the horizon at sunrise and sunset, sunlight has to pass through a lot more atmosphere to get to your eyeballs, kind of like headlights in fog. So through all that muck, a whole lot more blue light is scattered and dispersed before it can get to you.

And in that situation, a whole lot less of those blue waves make it through the static, leaving behind the long red wavelengths that slowly snake their way down without interacting with as much of that junk. And that changes the resulting illusion generated by your brain into a less blue, more red version of the sky. Why is the sky blue? Well, that's a why question. But the truth is,

I didn't really just tell you why the sky is blue. To truly explain why I would need to recite an entire bookshelf of science textbooks. That's because

At any point in this explanation, we could have gone on hundreds of why tangents. Why does light have wavelengths? Why does anything have wavelengths? Why are the colors of the spectrum red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet? Why are they called those things? Why is the atmosphere nitrogen and oxygen? Why is there an atmosphere? Why does nuclear fusion generate light? Why do stars...

generate nuclear fusion? Why are there stars? Wait, wait, why is the ocean blue? Why are there electromagnetic waves? Why is there electricity? Why is there magnetism? Why are there waves? Why? Why, why, why, why, why, why?

Why is, to me, it's the great understanding question. It's the tool you use. It's like a shovel. You can use it to dig, right? Again, that's Warren Berger, question expert. We're about to get to him. But first, let me sum up this introduction to this episode by stating something that is strangely not completely obvious, which is

that there are other kinds of questions, not just why questions. There are why not questions, how come questions, constraint questions, counterfeit questions. There's a whole taxonomy, rhetorical questions, existential questions, pedagogic questions. And there are formats of questions. My favorite being self-inquiry in the form of a sort of self-directed Socratic method. For instance, the jugular question, so named by astronomer Arno Penzias, which goes like this.

Why do I believe what I believe? And there's a variation of this, a what question from author Daniel Pink. What did I once believe that is no longer true? And my favorite line of questioning like this, self-inquiry, it comes from author Will Storr. Ask yourself, am I right about everything? If the answer is no, then follow up with, then what am I wrong about? And if the answer to that question is no,

I don't know. Ask yourself, why don't I know and how could I change that? And of course, there are many, many forms of inquiry, questions we direct at others.

So, the classification and categorization of questions as a concept, as a type of language, as a form of communication is quite complex, so much so that one could devote an entire career to writing books about this and consulting businesses and institutions on how to ask better questions.

Well, you know, I sort of break it down into three types of questions that I'm really fond of. They are why questions, what if questions, and how questions. Once again, that is the voice of Warren Burger, a man who did that very thing, made a career out of classifying, categorizing, and making sense of the sorts of questions we ask,

and when we are likely to ask them, and how that can lead to all manner of outcomes, some positive,

some negative. My name is Warren Berger. I am an author and I call myself a questionologist, meaning simply that I study the art and science of questioning, asking questions, why questions are important, why we should be asking more of them. So that's my focus now. I've written three books on that subject. Yes, three books. Yes, a questionologist.

And yes, that's a term he invented. But yes, that really is what he does for a living. I even like one time called myself a questionologist in the New York Times. And as I like to say, no one questioned it. I have used one of your tricks a billion times. I just recently did a little consulting thing for the for wildlife fisheries and parks and

So long story there, they're dealing with conspiracy theories and how to interact with people. One of the things I pass along from you to them was, you know, you can just open with, I'm curious and then ask your question. It's a very powerful tool. Just a one word, just like, like just drop it in. I'm curious.

What do you, when you look at like whatever you say next, it is really, really softens the blow of the question in a way that the other person wants to share. And I think that's really clever. Right. And then, and then if you really want to build on that, what you do is what I call the question sandwich. Yes. Tell us about this. I love it. Yeah. The question sandwich is okay. Okay. So people often when I, when I go into companies and I talk to people working there, they often say to me, you

You know, I would like to question the way we're doing things here. I would like to question some of the policies, but I'm afraid of how that's going to be received. What you do is you add a rationale onto the end of the question. The question is now in the middle of a sandwich. The beginning of the sandwich is telling them you're curious.

The end of the question is giving them your rationale and the question is in the middle. So for example, let's say if someone was going to challenge, was going to question a policy, they would say, you know, I'm curious about one of our policies. I'm wondering about something.

Then they would say, why do we do this particular policy? And then they would end with, and the reason I ask is because, you know, sometimes this policy causes me to slow down in my work or it gets in the way of doing this or that. So now you've given them the rationale at the end. Now there's a solid reason why you asked this question. I can attest this works and I believe

recommend don't do this unless you are actually curious and you do have a rationale. Yeah, well, your rationale better be good. And in fact, it should be good anyway. If you're challenging a policy or asking something like that at work, you should have a good reason for it. I'm curious, Warren.

There's a question in your book called the weight question. And I'd love to hear you tell my audience about this. And the reason I want you to tell them about it is because I often am in situations where I'm helping people understand how to have better conversations. And I'm astonished to learn that one of the things that must be

communicated to people who want to communicate better is, you know, you have to listen and not just wait to talk. And it turns out there's a question for this. I'd love to hear you tell me more about it. Yeah. So yeah, it came from a psychologist who, who, who came up with that W A I T, which stands for why am I talking? And so whenever you're about, whenever you're about to interject, you should ask yourself the question, why,

Why am I talking right now? Especially if someone is in the middle of telling you something we all want to rush in with either Advice, you know, oh you're telling me something Oh, I can tell you what you should do here or we want to top their story with our own story Oh, you're telling a story about this. Oh, I've got a better story than that, you know, he was just saying, you know always

pause and ask yourself, is this the right time right now for me to be jumping in? And usually it's not. Usually you want to wait a little bit. And so that's the wait question. As you're talking, I'm getting excited. And I wanted to show you all the little things that connect to what you're talking about. And in my mind, I'm commiserating in some way. I'm like, I've had that feeling. I've shared that. I want to talk. But then

Your sharing thing gets longer than the thing that they just, and all of a sudden. You know, it goes well with the weight question is the awe question, the A-W-E. And that's a really great question for people to use. It's simply the A-W-E stands for and what else? So when you're talking to people about something, let's say an issue that they're dealing with,

And they tell you you know I'm having a problem at work because of you know you people are not listening to me and then you would ask and what else and Then they'll say well the other issue that's bothering me is that such and such and such and and then you might even ask again and what else and what happens is you're

you are kind of pushing people to dig deeper about what's really on their mind. And you are allowing them to go beyond the first thing. And oftentimes the first thing they tell you

is not the best thing, it's not the deepest thing. They have to kind of dig a little bit. So the and what else question is designed to help them dig deeper in what it is they really want to tell you. Yes. It's like writing an article where you don't really start actually writing it until you're about a couple paragraphs in and then you start over and you're like, okay, I'm starting to get an idea of actually how I feel about it.

Holding space for another person to articulate, they'll start to discover, oh, wait, I actually have a lot more to say about this than I thought. And my initial push in there was just sort of getting the conversation started so I don't feel awkward and say nothing when you ask me a question. It's a great tool. It reminds me of the Voss stuff, that very simple mirroring exercise where you just repeat the last three words-ish of a person's thing.

always works. Like someone's like, I went to the doctor the other day and got some news. And then you just say back to them, got some news. And then they, yeah, they told me that, you know, like I might need to look at my cholesterol. My cholesterol is getting a little high, a little high. Yeah.

Even when you tell someone ahead of time that's what you're about to do, it will still work. It works, although all of these things have to be used with common sense. You can't ask, and what else, six times in a row. You will drive people crazy. And you can't echo too many times in a row because, again, all of these things, if you overdo them, they will suddenly seem like a gimmick.

And then, so it's a fine line. You kind of have to know, oh, I can do it a couple of times and then I better not do it anymore. I used to own two pet stores back in the day. From age 18 to 23, I owned two pet stores. And we had a rescue bird named Clementine who just liked to say, what are you doing? That's all she would say.

And customers would walk in. And I learned so much from this because customers would walk in and she'd go, what are you doing? And they would go, oh, hey there. I'm just coming to shop for some dog food for my dog. What are you doing? Well, I'm here in town shopping for dog food. What are you doing? Oh, that's great. I came to town because it was my daughter's wedding and I want to see her. What are you doing? Well, I want to... And by the...

After a couple rounds of this, they're like in the fetal position in the corner going, I wasn't a good dad and I was trying my best. And this bird is only going, what are you doing? I love that story. What are you doing? That's fantastic. It would scramble brains and I saw it every day and it never got old. Oh, that's so good. That's so good. I mean, I wish I had footage of...

of that bird doing that because that would be a great, I would love to use that in a presentation. I think that's absolutely hilarious. Steal that and take it back. Her name was Clementine. She was a cockatoo who only asked, what are you doing over and over again? And every time a person felt like they were having a deep conversation with Clementine. We'll be right back with more questionology after this break. Music

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And now we return to our program. I'm David McRaney. This is the You Are Not So Smart podcast. This is an episode about questions. Our guest is Warren Berger, author of a lot of stuff, including...

Thank you.

Before that, he was a freelance journalist, and it was during his days as a journalist that he began to develop this obsession with questions.

I am a long-time journalist. I used to write for the New York Times and Wired Magazine and basically made my living as a freelance journalist for 30 years. And one of the things I kind of wondered that whole time was, you know, I used questioning like every day, right, as a tool of the trade as a journalist.

And it occurred to me somewhere along the line that I was never really trained in questioning when I went to journalism school, which I thought was kind of odd. You know, I don't remember a single course, at least when I was going to J school, maybe it's changed now, but I don't remember a single course that broke down kind of the art and science of questioning and said, you know, here's the difference between an open-ended question and a closed question. And here's how you have to use a certain tone with questions.

It was never anything like that. And I thought that was really strange that that was never really addressed in journalism school. So anyway, that was kind of in the back of my head. And then as I was writing, I tended to do a lot of writing about entrepreneurs or innovators or people who were doing breakthroughs of some kind. And I noticed this common link where a lot of them

were great questioners and they would, it's way more powerful. Yeah. And just the idea, just on the most basic level, they would find a question that nobody else was asking. Like why hasn't someone come up with a better way to blah, blah, blah, right? And what if you did this? What if you combine this with that? And they would kind of live with these questions for a while and work on them. And sometimes they'd bring other people into the question

And eventually it seemed to lead to something. It led to a breakthrough of some kind or an innovation. So I thought that was really interesting. And it changed my take on questioning a little bit. I, you know, I had always thought of questioning as just a communication tool, just something you do to get, you know, info out of somebody else. But now I was starting to think about, you know, what is the power of questions and

when you ask them to yourself, you know, and you go to work on them. And that was really interesting to me. So Warren Berger, journalist, writer for the New York Times, Wired, the Harvard Business Review, author of several books on innovation, design, and branding, wrote a book in 2014 about questions. And just this year,

came out with a new version of that book that's been completely revamped and rewritten in many ways to keep it up to date with the modern era. And it's all about how to ask questions in ways that lead to breakthroughs. That book would go on in 2014 to become a bestseller. And the new version is what we're going to talk about right now. And the title of that book is...

a more beautiful question. - It's a line from the poet E.E. Cummings who said, "Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question." I was writing at the time I started this book a lot about innovation and creativity. And I decided to focus my definition of a beautiful question

on the kinds of questions that sort of open up creativity or lead to something bigger. So I defined it as, you know, when you're asking a really ambitious question, but it's also actionable, you can take action on it, and it has the possibility to bring about change. So these kinds of questions can come from, sometimes they just come out of the air. You know, so many of the innovation stories that I wrote about

somebody would ask like, why hasn't someone come up with a different way that we can rent movies? Why do we have to have this blockbuster system where you get fined if the movie's late? This is the guy who started Netflix. He's asking these questions and it leads him to eventually say, what if we created a model of videos where they came in the mail and you joined it like a club?

And then eventually he asked, "Well, what if we use the internet to just stream the movies?" So he kept asking those kinds of questions. And to me, that's an example of a beautiful question. It may not be that profound, but it's looking at something in a different way. It's asking a question that kind of changes the way you think about something.

And it has the potential, if you can answer it, to bring about some kind of a real change. When we first met, I was eager to hear all about all the different kinds of questions that Warren writes about in his book. The big categories he referred to at the beginning, what, what if, and how, which we'll get into in a little while. But there was one category that

in particular that I wanted to ask about first. And that is the one created by the great comedian George Carlin. What's the "Vous J'Ade" question? Oh yeah, it comes out of Carlin originally. He said that, you know, déjà vu is when you've never been somewhere but it feels like you've been there before. And "Vous J'Ade" is when you've been someplace a million times but

but you have to try to make it seem new. You have to try to make it seem fresh. And, you know, I think in a way that was a reference to his own comedy work. He was always trying to

not get caught in the rut of doing the same kind of jokes over and over again. And he was extremely inventive. And so he would always try to figure out how to reinvent his work and how to see the world around him as if he was seeing it for the first time. I talked to Kelly Carlin a number of times when I was working on the book. And she said that George Carlin used to think of himself as an alien

from another planet who was observing us all and he was trying to figure out why we did things the way we did them and that became the source of most of his material you know and and it actually is a became a model for I think for a certain kind of observational humor that then was picked up by Seinfeld and a million other people you know but it was that idea of

Why are people, why do human beings do the things they do? And so to me, Vujadeh questioning is whenever you're doing that kind of questioning where you're looking at the world as if you're seeing it for the first time.

And you're asking really fundamental, basic questions about how things work, things that don't make sense. Why do we do things that way? And it's really useful in the world of innovation. It's one of the things that

you know, people like Steve Jobs were really, really good at. You know, they brought that beginner's mind to the way they looked at products in the world and then they would ask really basic questions about why in the world does it have a button over here? That makes no sense. So yes, as I said in the introduction, there are a lot of kinds of questions and they have names. We've already talked about the weight question and the awe question and the vuja de question.

Before we get into the main interview, here's one more, the constraint question. I call them constraint questions, which is, you know, the most famous constraint question would be, what if you only had 24 hours to live? You know, so the idea is you take a constraint and you either put it on or you take it off, and that becomes the question that you think about.

So, an example of putting the constraint on would be, you know, what if you had 24 hours to live? Taking it off would be, you know, you're trying to develop a product and you say, "What if we had all the money in the world? What if budget was not an issue? What would we try to do?" And so, that's taking it off. So, there's an interesting way you can use constraints either on or off to change reality just for a minute so you can think differently about something.

You say, and I'm paraphrasing, but facts are only as good as the questions that you ask. And so like the bat, it's odd to think this way, I think. I've spent enough time with businesses and institutions that it can be shocking to let them know that you have agency over the garbage in, garbage out thing that you might not be aware of. And you talk about this a lot. So let me, instead of saying it for you, when we're talking about

How to formulate these beautiful questions. What's a good example of a not beautiful question? I'm sure you've come across in your experience people who were like, you had to help them undo the way they were doing things. I'm sure you maybe have an example of this. Yeah, well, I think what I encounter a lot in the business world is people are asking very, very practical questions.

unimaginative questions. So in business, oftentimes the question they may be obsessed with at a particular moment in time is, how do we take this seven step process we're doing and turn it into a five step process? And that becomes the thing they're obsessed with. How do we knock two steps out of the process so it becomes slightly more efficient? And so then you bring in like someone, an outsider like me,

And what the outsider will ask is, wait a minute, you know, before you talk about that, let's talk about why you have this process in the first place. Like, why are you using this particular process? When you do that, it's really amazing how often you'll discover that

This seven-step process was created 10 years ago when the world was entirely different. The business was different. It made a lot of sense at that time, but it doesn't make sense now. So a lot of times the beautiful question can be as simple as asking, you know, why are we doing this? And it's something companies are loathe to do. They don't know how to do that. And they feel like if they're doing that, they're somehow –

taking a step backwards, like, you know, because they feel like, hey, we already figured this out. Why would we want to question ourselves and question what we already know? Because that's not moving forward. That's moving backward. So it's, you know, it's a hard idea to convey to people that a lot of times that kind of fundamental self-questioning is just critical. You

you are going to be focused on questions that are built on assumptions, questions that are assuming, okay, we're already moving in the right direction. So we just have to get two steps further down the road instead of asking, are we actually moving in the right direction? Maybe things have changed and maybe we need to shift our whole approach. So that's probably one of the biggest ideas I try to convey to businesses is the, you know, how can you get comfortable with that idea that once in a while you have to step back

and be willing to question almost anything you're doing in the business. Do it in very fundamental ways. Do it in very creative ways. Ask very imaginative questions. Hey, what if we try turning the whole thing upside down? What would happen if we did it entirely different? You're sort of trying to get them comfortable with that kind of questioning. Yeah, I would imagine there's a hesitancy there because...

Those kind of questions can feel a little bit like, or maybe a lot of bit like, you're questioning whether or not you should keep doing this. Yes, you are. You're threatening the institution, which is like the big no-no. I think it would have been really tough a few years ago to do that in companies, but right now it's not. They are so scared. They're so nervous about all of the change that's happening around them that a lot of companies, now they get it. Now they get it that they have to be in a whole different mode now of thinking

constantly learning, constantly adapting, questioning a lot of what they do, updating it all the time. So I think they've gotten, a lot of people have gotten more comfortable with that kind of thinking than they would have been just a few years ago.

I want to run through some of the categories you created and I love them very much. Let me start with naive questions, which are just the child questions. Why? But there's, but you also make a very important clarification that there's also the why not. And, you know, just starting with like, why is the sky blue? This, this reminds me of something, the, uh,

I like to think about questions you've never asked, but why haven't you asked this question yet? Like one of my favorite ones is how come when something gets wet, like a piece of clothing, it gets dark. Like it becomes a dark, it appears darker. The answer is that it comes from physics and involves understanding optics and how it bounces around in water molecules.

But like, why have you never even asked it? Like, why has it never even occurred to you? And similar to why is the sky blue? Like sometimes that'll come up, which leads to the deeper question that I'm trying to get to, which is why have you never looked into that? Why have you never asked yourself that? And Will Storr gave me this beautiful thought experiment that I've shared over and over again, which is the two question thought experiment.

Do you think you're right about everything? And then most people say no. A small sliver of people do not. But you ask, do you think you're right about everything? No. Then what are you wrong about? And it's great. And then you just sit back and let it happen. What happens next? And then you can ask, well, clearly you're wrong about some stuff. Are you not curious as to what that might be? Do you not have a system? And so I love all of that. And I

If all your book reminds me of that. So let me ask you about these naive questions. Why and why not? Like, uh, um,

What is the value in this and how do you typically approach telling people about the value of these things? Well, I sort of break it down into three types of questions that I'm really fond of. They are why questions, what if questions, and how questions. They each do something different. When we're asking why, we're trying to understand something. Why is it the way it is? Why did this happen? Why does this problem exist?

When we're asking what if, we're now moving sort of to the next stage of using our imagination. Well, what if we changed it by doing this? And then when we move to how, we're getting really practical now. We're saying, well, how could we actually do that? I mean, how would we get started?

So a lot of times people are more focused on how because it's a more practical question. How am I going to change this behavior I have or how am I going to get better at doing this or how am I going to do that? It's sort of the action oriented question. So we as human beings like that. We like to get cut right to the chase.

But what's so great about why questions is it's kind of the starting point and it kind of helps you to understand something, understand how it came about, what's the context of it. So I say to people that it's really good to start with why.

When you have any kind of a problem, any kind of an issue, you're trying to figure something out, start with why questions because that will help you get to the essence of the issue. And then you can move on to, okay, well, what

What could I do differently? Or how would I go about changing that? But why is, to me, it's the great understanding question. It's the tool you use. It's like a shovel. You can use it to dig, right? There's a process called the five whys where you just keep asking why over and over. And you're sort of digging and digging to get to the core reason for something, you know, the real reason why something happened.

is the way it is, which a lot of times is not immediately apparent. You have to keep asking why. We think kids are crazy when they keep asking why, but they're not. They're on to something. They kind of instinctively know that sometimes you have to ask why repeatedly to get to the real truth of an issue. By the way, the five whys is fascinating. The five whys came out of the Toyota Motor Company, the founder of Toyota,

realized that when he was trying to figure out why a problem existed, like let's say there was a problem on the assembly line,

If you asked why, you would always get the most obvious reason. You know, why did we screw up on these parts? And the initial answer would be, well, this worker on the assembly line messed up. And then the poor guy would get fired and everyone would think that's the end of it. But if you kept asking why, you would discover, well, why did he screw up? Well, he didn't have the training, the proper training.

Why didn't he have the proper training? Well, we cut back on the training program six months ago because we wanted to put more money into advertising. So, you know, what Toyota found out was if you asked why like five times like that, you would get to the real truth of the issue. And I think that's an important lesson for everyone that why is this great question that helps us kind of dig and get to the truth.

The kids asking why or no, it feels like it's adaptive in a million ways like you're describing. It also breaks through the begging the question barrier, the

the real for what begging the question actually means. And like full philosophical terms, uh, I, I, I cringe, but I don't say anything because I don't want to be that guy. When people say, well, that begs the question. I'm like, that's not what that means by the way. Uh, but the begging the question for anyone listening is, uh, when you repeat the question back as an answer. So like if someone says, uh, I wonder why we like puppies so much. And then they respond because they're so cute. Like that didn't give you any information. You just said, uh,

you basically change that to why do you, you could answer it in reverse. Like, why do you think puppies are so cute? Because we love them so much. So there's, it's just a circular nonsense answer, but asking why, why, why, why breaks through that? Like, why do we love puppies so much? Because they're so cute, but why are they so cute?

So you immediately have to go deeper and it breaks through that. So I'm a proponent of this. Also, you know, it was interesting. In my book, I probably had about 20 different stories of, you know, how a certain innovation or breakthrough started with a question. They're almost always why questions. Almost always. And the reason is because, you know, usually change happens because people notice something is not quite right.

They notice something's not working and they want to figure out why they want to figure out why it's not working. And then eventually they get to other questions that help them, you know, maybe change it. Like what if we tried this or how, but initially they're trying to understand the problem. And that's why, you know, if you look, you'll find almost all of these stories began with why I can give you one. If you, if you, if you want. Yeah, please. Yeah. So, so the Polaroid instant camera, which was created back in the 1940s, I,

a tremendous product. It was the, it was like the iPhone of its time, right? It just changed everything. So it all started when the founder of Polaroid is on vacation with his three-year-old daughter. And he's taking a picture with a standard camera at the time. He then puts the camera away and they, they, they keep walking. He keeps walking with his daughter and she asks him, can I see the picture you took? And he says, no, no, you can't, you know, we have to send it out

It's a whole process. We have to send it out to be developed, the film, and then we'll get it back. And, you know, in a few days you'll see the picture. And she asked him, why do we have to wait for the picture? So Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, said that question was like, it was like a mind blower for him. It's like it completely changed. It shifted his thinking because it made him step back and say, you know,

Yeah, wait a minute. Why do we have to wait? I mean, wouldn't it be amazing if you could take a picture and see the results right away? And then he sets about going to work on the Polar Instant Camera and then eventually it becomes a reality. But, you know, it's that why question at the beginning, which can come from anywhere. It can come from a naive perspective.

uh outsider and uh and it's it's just asking you know why does this situation exist it's not what we want it's not ideal why why are we putting up with it connective inquiry i love that term the is this the what if question i'm looking at my notes here i think it was something like if the

you cross the river here, not here. And so you're asking why, because, well, it's too deep in this section of the river. And the question is, well, what if we build a bridge? And so like, but also I love your example of an alarm clock with wheels. Like there's a way you get there. So if you could just talk about what if questions. Yeah. So, so, you know, if you think about how things come, new things come into the world,

it's sort of like nothing gets created from scratch, right? So everything is kind of out, the parts and the pieces are already out there already. So if you're gonna come up with a new,

form of music, you're probably going to be connecting something from this existing form of music with something from that form and just putting it together in a new way. That's the idea behind connective inquiry. There was also a term for this that was used by a designer. And of course, Einstein talked about this a lot too, but it's like combinations. This designer talked about smart recombinations. You're taking things that already exist and

you're putting them together in new ways. And that's how most of creativity happens. So what I say about what if questions is that they can help you do those kinds of smart recombinations. This happens in Hollywood all the time, right? What if we take a lawyer and we put him in a situation with cheerleaders or something like that? Jaws. Yeah, exactly. Jaws meets, you know, whatever, Superman.

So basically, you know, what if questions sort of allow you to do this kind of combining. You can say, what if I combine this with that? What if I try this? And that's why I think of what if questions as being the questions that free up our imagination. Those are the questions that allow us to experiment and do all kinds of blue sky creative thinking,

We don't want to be practical at that point. We want to ask, what if we try all this crazy stuff? At some point, you will have to get to the how. How are we going to actually do it? But it's a really great tool for this kind of wide open

brainstorming or question storming kind of thinking. Yeah, I love the what if the alarm clock moved out, move farther away from me every time I tried to turn it off. Yeah, that was a great creation. Yeah. And again, created, you know, created by that was a product called the clocky created by a college student.

And she had trouble waking up in the morning and asked why, you know, why am I so late for class all the time? And it was because she just couldn't get herself to not turn off the alarm clock every time it went off. So then she had the idea of, you know, what if you created an alarm clock on wheels?

And the idea would be the alarm clock would go off and then it would roll away. It would roll off the table onto the floor and you would have to get up to turn off the alarm clock. You'd have to chase it down, basically. And I just loved it because it was a great example of that sort of thinking, that kind of combination thinking that can lead to all kinds of interesting things. Yeah, it's great. The next question is, well, how did you do that? And then it's going to be, now you start back over again. Somebody's going to tell you,

Well, this is how this does. Well, why is that? Well, why not? Well, what if? How? And just ticker, ticker, ticker, ticker, ticker, ticker. Yeah, well, when you get to how, then there's all kinds of practical issues. Like she had to figure out, okay, if the alarm clock's going to roll off the table, what keeps it from breaking when it hits the floor? So now she has to design, you know, an alarm clock that's super sturdy and cushioned so that when it hits the floor, it doesn't break. So it's interesting. That's kind of the third part of the questioning stage.

You had this great study from Harvard where children, I have it in my notes here, between the ages of two and five ask about 40,000 questions.

And they don't just ask, how do I open this box? They ask, why this answer? But why? But why? But why? Tunnel, tunnel, tunnel, tunnel, tunnel, tunnel. I'd like to hear more about what you found looking into that. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. One of the interesting things I found was one study seemed to arrive at the four-year-old girl, very specific, the four-year-old girl as the ultimate questioner.

So that's when the questioning hits some kind of an amazing peak point of, you know, 390 questions a day or something like that. Most of them directed at her mother. And boys are not far behind. That four-year-old period is really intense. It continues into five and six. And then it seems to, by some studies, it seems to go down pretty rapidly.

And that's interesting. Like, why is that decline? Why is that rapid decline happening? Because it coincides with kids going to school. You know, so it's like you suddenly are wondering, well, gee, are they asking less questions because they're in school now? Which is kind of an interesting phenomenon. There's no one answer to the question of why the questioning seems to decline. So you've got the fact that the child was very comfortable

before school, the child is very comfortable with the parents asking questions. There's no fear of that. All of a sudden, the child goes into an environment where there are lots of strangers around and other kids and not quite as comfortable. And then there's just sort of the feedback or the

The sense that kids may be getting from school, that it's the answers that matter, not the questions. The only thing you get rewarded for in school is having the answers. You don't get rewarded for asking a question. In fact, sometimes asking a question is almost seen as like an annoyance. We don't have time for that right now. We have to move on. We have a lot of material to cover. Or you might be told that question is a little off topic.

kids pick up that message that you know questioning is not necessarily welcome and you're not going to get too much for it and i think that the motivation to question starts to um start to decline over time and that's one of the big things that you know that teachers are are working on and i talk to them a lot about this how can we

reverse that or stop that decline from happening. That situation where, as one education writer described it, children enter school as question marks and they leave as periods.

So we don't want that to happen. And so how do we keep the questioning alive? And a lot of it has to do with the environment they create in the classroom. Does it stimulate curiosity? Do kids feel safe questioning? Can you create activities and exercises where the whole point is to ask questions instead of having the answer?

Can you design this kind of an environment in a classroom? And if you can, then I think you increase the chances that students will ask more questions. In Vacation Bible School, which is one of the worst things in the world, growing up in the Deep South, I had to go there during the summer. And I remember a teacher saying,

showing us a picture book of Noah's Ark and I had a question and it was already, I was already a bit of a nerd. I liked sci-fi. I liked fantasy. I thought this would be a really cool answer. I just asked how come the animals didn't eat each other. And, but, but I wasn't trying to like question the authority of the Bible. I was thought that the answer would be, there was a spell or there was a magic rock or the Noah could talk to animals through telep, something. Yeah.

And I was eager to get like a nice, fun answer. And I remember the, she, she said, um, Oh, we don't ask those questions.

And that embarrassed me, but it also something weird started to get generated from that response. And I remember telling my father who was a, he's a Vietnam vet who for whatever reason didn't go to church anymore. I asked like, Hey, I told him all that story. And he was like, well, you don't have to go back if you don't want to. And so I did. So I was like, yeah, I don't have to go there. So a question got you out of that, that whole situation. Got me a probably out of a completely different life. Yeah. Yeah.

But because the answer was we don't ask those questions? We don't ask those questions?

the kids who didn't stop questioning. They kept doing it and a lot of times it got them in trouble. It got them in trouble. Some of them ended up being dropouts. It caused them to be the outsider or the person who was breaking the rules.

or something like that. And it's, it's, that's really a shame, but in any case, they, they persevered, you know, they kept asking their questions. And a lot of times that is what made them as successful as they are because then they get out there in the real world and they're still,

asking these kind of forbidden questions about, you know, gee, why are we doing things the way we're doing them? And by asking those questions, they end up being the innovators, the change makers, you know, those kinds of people. Talking about the idea of

a child being going in as a question mark and coming out of as a period it reminds me of in psychology there's this the worst named anything in psychology is the makes sense stopping rule i have to slow down to even say it i hate that term um but it just means when you get confirmation of your assumption you stop looking for more information so it's so

It's that search on the internet for like, I did my research thing where you look for and you get something that seems like, oh, that seems like the answer because it matches my identity, morality, political disposition, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. My current understanding. And so that makes sense. So I stopped looking. The makes sense stopping rule. And in school, like I...

I'm totally with you on this. I would rather in a science class, what I would hope you learn is the scientific method and how to ask questions. That's way more important than learning the facts of the matter, even though I do want you to know the facts.

But I don't want to just say, and now you've got everything you need to go out there and make a difference. That's the basics of critical thinking. And it's what we need. We're all going to need critical thinking more than we've ever needed it. You know, it's... Oh, I so agree with you. You know, it's like, think about AI, right? AI is a wonderful tool, but...

AI is only as good as your critical thinking. I mean, when that information comes back to you, you better be able to say, this sounds right, but this doesn't. And where is this coming from? Where's this info coming from? And if you can't do that, then you're just going to be misled. We already needed these critical thinking skills to be able to operate Google to our search of any kind.

But with AI, we're about to have video, audio, text, photo, and seemingly human agents completely proliferate across the web and beyond so that there will be more content than we'll ever be able to get to that will not be generated by human beings.

If you don't have critical thinking skills, that's just going to be a noise that's going to destroy every category of interaction online. Yeah, we need this more than ever. Carl Sagan was talking about this 30 years ago. He said, we need built-in baloney detectors.

And that was his term for just the ability to ask skeptical questions, the ability to have some understanding of your own biases and the fallacies you're prone to. He was talking about all that stuff and saying, and I came across a great quote from Carl Sagan, which was from the mid-90s, where he said, if we're not able to ask questions

Those kinds of skeptical questions, then we are completely susceptible to the next charlatan that comes along. And, you know, this was this is, I think, borne out in later years. And so I think it's it's it becomes more and more critical as we have more misinformation out there and more social media and all of that.

There's two kinds of dangers. One is what I just talked about, that we've arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it? And the second reason that...

I'm worried about this, is that science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.

If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.

It's a thing that Jefferson laid great stress on. It wasn't enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in a constitution or a bill of rights. The people had to be educated and they had to practice their skepticism and their education. Otherwise, we don't run the government. The government runs us.

That is it for this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast. You can find all of Warren Berger's stuff at warrenberger.com. That's W-A-R-R-E-N-B-E-R-G-E-R dot com. His book is A More Beautiful Question, now out in a 10th anniversary edition. And over on his website,

You can take quizzes to see what kind of questioner you are, find a list of every song ever written with a question as its title, and all sorts of other fun stuff like videos and presentations and supplementary materials. He tweets at Glimmer Guy, Glimmer Guy, because Glimmer is the title of one of his previous books.

For links to everything we talked about, head to youarenotso smart.com or check the show notes right there inside your podcast player. You can find my book, How Minds Change, wherever they put books on the shelves and ship them in trucks. Details are at davidmccraney.com. And I'll have links to all of that in the show notes as well, right there in your podcast player. Also, I am scheduling all of my lectures for 2025 right now. So if you'd like to invite me to your

business, institution, academic, or otherwise,

Go ahead and email me at davidmcgrady at gmail.com. On my homepage, davidmcgrady.com, you can find a roundtable video with a group of persuasion experts featured in my book, How Minds Change. You can read a sample chapter, download a discussion guide, sign up for a newsletter, read reviews, and more. For all the past episodes of this podcast, head to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music, Audible, all those places.

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