In 2019 Warren Berger joined us for an episode of Authors in August to discuss his groundbreaking book, "A More Beautiful Question."
Today he's back for a more open-ended conversation about the whys, what-ifs, and hows of asking questions — in business, in education, and in life.
To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.
This video was recorded on March 15, 2023.
David Gardner: Four years ago, August 2019 to be precise. Well, it was August and so for Authors in August, I had Warren Berger to discuss his book, A More Beautiful Question, which I'd read some years before he published it, I think in 2014. His Book of Beautiful Questions is a follow-up had just come out in 2018 and we talked about that one too and having re-listened to that August 7th, 2019 podcast this week, I can confidently say it stands up to any questions beautiful or otherwise that you might have about the power of asking questions or the benefits of listening to a podcast four years later.
We talked about investing, business life, baseball, artificial intelligence. We're not going to repeat that conversation too much this week. If you didn't already get to learn from Warren in my Authors in August 2019 interview, I highly recommend you go back to that. But that was then and this is now. I bet you've noticed it's 2023 a lot has changed and some important things too have persisted. When I find really interesting people, I don't just want to meet them to introduce you to them. I want to go back, learn again, deepen the relationship with the best ones anyway and such a friend like Warren Berger. Let's ask some questions. Shall we? Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.
Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. A delight to have you joining with me this week, suffering Fools gladly here in our eighth year of this podcast. The purpose of The Motley Fool is to make the world smarter, happier, and richer. My hope is that this week's interview will get a checkmark on all three of those boxes. I'm not sure my esteemed guest will promise to make you richer and I'm not going to promise to make you richer. But in my experience, if we make you smarter, that will often lead to happier, which I hope is enriching. Let's hope we can put a checkmark next to all three this week as I welcome back, Warren Berger.
Innovation expert and questionologist, Warren has studied hundreds of the world's foremost innovators, entrepreneurs, and creative thinkers, to learn how they ask questions, generate original ideas, solve problems. He is the author or co-author of more than 12 books on innovation. Of course, I mentioned at the top, his bestseller, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas. Also, the internationally acclaimed Glimmer, which he might talk a little bit about this week, his first book. It was named one of Businessweek's best innovation and design books of that year, somewhere around 2009. Warren's writing appears in Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Psychology Today, and nice Motley Mix here and the New York Times. Warren you still live in New York, am I right?
Warren Berger: Yes, I am. We're having a blizzard right now. I live North of the city in Mount Kisco, New York.
David Gardner: As we start our conversation today, this of course, airs always one day afterwards so this is debuting to the world on 3/15, but it's actually 3/14 Warren, which for you is?
Warren Berger: Yes. That's important because it's Pi day, PI Day. 3/14, obviously is the 3.14 or the numbers in Pi. It also is Albert Einstein's birthday. I've always considered this a questioning day. In fact, for a while, I was running a program in schools called question week where and I would kick it off every year on March 14. I would try to get schools that were participating in this to spend a week of encouraging more questioning in classrooms by having games or contests, see who can come up with the best question, that thing. It was really a lot of fun.
David Gardner: I know in the year 2020, you published a book about asking questions in schools, that you've spent a lot of time with teachers and students and I hope we'll get into that. I know we'll get into that a little bit later. I didn't have a chance to ask you about that in 2019 because it was still a glimmer in your eye, if you will. But I want to start, Warren really by asking you a question that Ralph Waldo Emerson was said to have asked friends he'd not seen in some time. It's a very simple, I would say it's a beautiful question. Warren Berger, what has become clear to you since we last met?
Warren Berger: Wow, what has become clear? I would say, well, a couple of things. One is that the questioning theme or idea is more powerful than I ever even thought. Got more legs to it, extends further than I ever thought, and that's the good news. The bad news is that I've discovered that I used to think of questioning, and this is probably true even the last time we talked, as an entirely positive phenomenon. I would quote George Carlin and Carl Sagan and others who said, you should question everything. Everything should be questioned.
It's interesting because I feel like in the last couple of years we've seen a take on that or a different way of looking at that in terms of a lot of times when people get into the idea of questioning everything, they don't accept anything and sometimes they can be susceptible to conspiracy theories and things like that. I've come around to the idea that while you should question everything, you should do so with a certain amount of responsibility. Question responsibly, do so with a healthy respect for evidence, and question them, but just be aware that evidence matters. Also just question with curiosity at the base of your questioning rather than by antagonistic approach where you're using questioning to try to make other people look bad or because you have an agenda that thing. I think that's become clear to me that it really matters how you question and what your intentions are and what your spirit is as you go into it.
David Gardner: Having listened back to our conversation in 2019, you were talking about how the world is changing and how unpredictable, how crazy things were in 2019. The obvious big question that I have is, did you expect a pandemic? I'm guessing you probably didn't. I sure didn't. That's not a beautiful question. It's more an observation about, wow, if the world was crazy in 2019, how do you view 2023?
Warren Berger: Yeah. One of the interesting things it's brought home to me is that this idea of embracing questioning and embracing curiosity and open-mindedness is even more important as the world gets crazier and as things get more unpredictable and just more chaotic. When you're in that an environment, it's going to be challenging no matter what. But if you have the attitude that, listen, I'm somewhat comfortable with a world of uncertainty. In some ways I find that even a little interesting because I don't know which way things are going to go and I don't know how I'm going to react and what opportunities might be there and I'm going through that. I'm going to be open rather than be in a defensive posture. I'm going to be more of open-minded, more curious. I really think that works well in a difficult environment in a time of great uncertainty.
David Gardner: You started not our podcast, but your book, The Book of Beautiful Questions with this. I did reference it last time. I want to say it again. "I'm a questionologist," you've written, Warren. "You may be asking yourself, is that really a thing? I asked myself that very question a few years ago. Then I did some research which turned up hundreds of different types of ologists ranging from the acarologist who studies ticks and mites to the zoologist but searching among the queues," you went on Warren, "I found no entry for questionologist. This led me to inquire why not? Isn't the study of questions as worthy of classification as the study of ticks and mites?" I think in a lot of ways you reified, by creating a word, you cause something to come into existence. We love the velveteen rabbit into existence. We made it a thing and I feel as if by coining the term questionologist, you create a reification which advanced in some ways human consciousness. Let me ask you back Warren, what are your reflections now about taking that title?
Warren Berger: I think it was a really good move because just from a purely selfish standpoint, it was good branding for me. It caused a lot of companies and entities like that to immediately understand or get a handle on me.
David Gardner: I agree. That's a great point.
Warren Berger: Then they were able to come to me and go, "Oh, questionologist, we like that idea. We could use some of that around here. We could use some questionology." It was really good branding. Now in the larger sense, I would like to think it could be the basis of the beginning of a movement. It's still very early on that and I'm still working on that, but I think by putting a name on it like that, I can then go to universities and I can go to various places and say, why isn't there a department of questionology within your school? Would you ever think about looking into something like that? That's how I think you spread something like this and you get it out there. Ultimately, I would like us to treat questioning with a lot more seriousness and respect and to say, this is worthy of its own study. It's an art and a science. We should know more about it and we should really devote ourselves to learning about it.
David Gardner: I'm curious about the young Warren Berger. I'm thinking of the really little Warren Berger, the five-year-old, the 10-year-old. Do you see now the seeds of questionology in your youth or was there some later eureka moment?
Warren Berger: I think there was some in my youth, I was the youngest of seven kids.
David Gardner: Wow.
Warren Berger: It was a chaotic household I lived in, a working-class family in the Queens New York. To get attention, I had to call out a lot and one of the things I was doing was asking a lot of questions and driving my parents crazy and driving my siblings crazy. Of course, I thought that was just me. What I learned later in my research was that that's a lot of kids. A lot of kids are doing that when they're 4, 5, 6 years old. Now the shame of it is they don't necessarily keep doing that. A lot of times that questioning drops off as they get older, but it was there for me. I would say probably dropped off for a while and I got quiet. I was a pretty shy kid in my high school years but then as I got into college, I discovered journalism and my older sister had gotten a career as a journalist so that was a model for me. Once I got into journalism, I now had an excuse for asking questions.
I had a legitimate reason to go to anyone even a celebrity or a business leader or someone very important, and I had a legitimate reason and excuse for asking them questions. I thought this was just great. It's great for a shy kid to get that power to ask questions because it just opens you up. It became a really big part of my development as an adult and as a young journalist. But an interesting thing, David was that when I studied journalism and I went to a good journalism school, at Syracuse University, there was nothing about questioning, which I thought was really weird. Journalists use questions every day of their work. Yet in the whole program, I took on journalism there was never a course that said, here's what you should know about questions. Here's the difference between an open-ended question and a closed question. Here's the tone you should use, nothing like that.
David Gardner: That's a great point.
Warren Berger: That just fed into this questionologist thing later on years and I thought about that. I thought, boy if even journalists aren't learning about questions, that means nobody is.
David Gardner: The beautiful question that I asked you last time, I coined this, I have another one that I'll share with you a little bit later this time, but last time it was, what's the beautiful question that I should be asking you about beautiful questions because I love meta questions and you glibly and you'd probably gotten that one before, but you answered the beautiful question about beautiful questions is, how can we get ourselves to ask more of them? You said, that's a big question and I feel as if that's exactly what you're speaking to right now. If even the professionals have not been coached or taught at a high level what a question is, open versus closed all of those things. Wow, this is an ology I think a lot of us at an even earlier level of schooling should be learning.
Warren Berger: Absolutely, and it's a funny thing about questioning. On the one hand, you could say it's instinctive because kids are doing it as soon as they can talk, they're asking hundreds of questions. It's obviously in us. Because of that, I think people think, oh, well, you don't have to teach it because it's a natural skill, it's a natural language thing that people just have. But the fact is, while kids are great questioners, they often don't understand the questions they're asking and they're doing it instinctively. You want to imitate children in terms of their curiosity, but you don't necessarily want to ask the exact same types of questions they ask. Ideally, you want to ask questions that are a little more thoughtful, a little more formed, a little more interesting in the directions they go in. That's why I think studying it as an adult or as it may be a middle school or a high school student. That's why that's so important because you can take that instinct you had as a five-year-old and now you can add jet fuel to it and really go to the next level.
David Gardner: It's interesting, you talked about your hope that this might become a movement in time. I'm thinking about somebody else that I think started moving by basically taking something that was so common, so assumed that we all knew it, that actually no one really did know how to do it, and Marie Kondo introduced how to actually tidy up. Sure we were supposed to learn that from our parents by teenage years when we're supposed to clean up our room, except our parents didn't really know some of the best ways to clean up. Similarly, whether it's tidying up or questionology, a lot of power can be sparked by looking at things that we're all taking for granted and saying, hey, most of us don't really know what's going, even the professionals don't really know what's going on here so let's start a movement.
Warren Berger: Yeah, absolutely, and also what I would say about it is we've been talking about learning how to question and learning some of the basics of questionology. But another important point to make is that you can more or less teach yourself to be a better questioner too. A lot of it has to do with just doing it more often and devoting more time to it. Questioning is a form of slow thinking. We have to slow down and reflect its reflections. I think if we are willing to just devote a little bit of time to that, we're going to get better at questioning just by practicing it, just by taking the time to do it and that's really important to keep in mind.
David Gardner: You provided a framework in your work and we could talk about a little bit now, especially for those who have not come across you before Warren, but why, what if, and how and in that order, could you just talk us briefly through that framework?
Warren Berger: One of the things, when I talk to people about questioning, as they say, what should I ask and how can I avoid just going around in circles and getting into almost one of those arguments you might have had in college about philosophy, where you just go round and round with why questions and never resolve anything? I came up with a framework that's designed to be almost like forward motion through questioning. The idea is that let's say you have a problem or something you're trying to answer, a situation you're trying to deal with, if you start by asking why questions about this problem, those questions will help you begin to understand the problem.
Why does this problem exist? Why hasn't someone solved it before? Why is it important? Why should I care? Those why questions are going to help form the basis of you understanding the problem a little more deeply. Then the next thing you want to do is use your imagination to say, I understand the problem. Now, what could I possibly do about it? What if I try this? What if I try that? I like to think of that as the what-if stage. We move from the why stage, to the what-if stage. Then the final stage we get to is when we're actually trying to maybe get something done, bring an idea into the world, solve a problem. We have to get a little more practical and that's where how comes into play.
How I'm actually going to get started? How I'm I going to do this? How much is it going to cost? How long will it take? I found this was a pretty common cycle when I studied innovators and people who were great problem-solvers. They would start with those understanding questions. Then they would start to use their imagination to come up with possible ideas. Then at the end, they get very practical. How do we do this? How do we do that? It's actually a nice framework to keep in your back pocket. You can use it say almost any situation. I'm thinking about moving. Why am I not happy in this place? What if I tried this and then you work your way to how? A lot of times people start with how when they're trying to solve problems. Because we all tend to be very solutions-oriented and very time-oriented and practical. But it's really good to start with why? Because then you'll understand the problem you're trying to solve a little better.
David Gardner: Warren, you've focused a lot of your career on business. We talked about that consulting with businesses to help them ask new questions that lead to new products, services, whole categories. I'm sure when we talked a few years ago, you had just come from Starbucks and you were headed over to Disney when businesses ask new questions, they not only have sometimes substantial resources to do the R&D, but they also have the resources to actually make them happen in the world at large that how that you just spoke to. Last time we were together, Warren, you shared how both Netflix and Airbnb were catalyzed by questions that the founders asked that launched those world-shaping businesses both, by the way, stock picks in mind. I'm wondering Warren, since we're in 2023, would you share with us another recent business story or two from your own experience where a question sparked another world-shaping innovation?
Warren Berger: Well, they're throughout the tech world, Uber, Spotify, all of these companies, not all, but so many of them started with a founder or a group of founders asking a question like, why hasn't someone connected the internet to a taxi service? Or in Spotify's case, Spotify was focused on a question if they were looking at Napster and where Napster had gone wrong and they were to figure out, how can we adapt Napster's model but make it work in a world where artists are not necessarily always anxious to share their information? How can we create an arrangement that works around that? They began working on that question.
Once they could answer that question, they had a business model. That's true with so many of the startups, they're usually trying to solve a problem and it's usually a big why question. It starts with why. It always starts with why. The why is, why hasn't someone connected this problem people are having with these resources over here? How can we put them together? How can we put all this together in a way that works? You just see it throughout the start-up world, but what I'm also seeing is that if you go to more established companies, there's an interesting role that these questions can play there. They don't need to start from scratch, but a lot of times they need to rethink the way they've been doing something.
I remember there was a great story with Intel where they had a particular product line and they were trying to figure out whether they should continue with this product line. It wasn't necessarily performing as well as it had been. The question they asked was, just a brilliant question, he said, if we sold the company and new owners came in tomorrow, what do we think they would do with this product line? The answer they decided was a new owner would get rid of it because the new owner didn't have the emotional investment in it and the attachment to it that they had because they created it, they'd started it. They did that themselves, they killed off that line. But it was interesting that they needed to use a beautiful question to do that because they needed that perspective that was different from the perspective they were taking.
David Gardner: A great end classic example. Warren last time I asked you, I already mentioned this. What's the beautiful question that I should be asking you about beautiful questions? Let me try another beautiful question this time for 2023 now with some years behind you as a questionologist. How does a questionologist know if he's succeeding?
Warren Berger: Wow. Well, I think it's just by the way, I judge it is by the level of interest in questioning that I see bubbling up around me. I'm seeing a fair amount of it in both the business world and in the world of education. I think that's good evidence that it's getting through. Then the other way you judge it is as I go into, let's say, an organization or a school, I try to judge how do they seem to be reacting to this presentation, I may have them do exercises. How are they reacting to it? Is it sparking something in them? If it is, then I know I'm doing what I should be doing as a questionologist.
David Gardner: One of my most enjoyable habits built now over more than 30 years is reading to my wife Margaret as she makes us supper. She's good at cooking. She enjoys it. I'm good at reading aloud. I really enjoyed. It's been a wonderful partnership. As we shared a little bit last night that I'd be talking with you today. Margaret started wondering aloud and I'm going to wonder aloud too right now, these two questions pick up either one of them, play with it, toss it away if you like. Are people asking questions differently today? And/or are people asking meaningfully different questions today than in the past? Both of these questions are, is there a new level of consciousness? A lot has been written about the age of empathy that we have far more empathy today than a century ago or presumably 1,000 years ago. It calls into question, are our questions themselves being asked differently? Why, what if, how with more consciousness, or not based on your own observations?
Warren Berger: I would say that there's a lot of answers to that. It's a complicated question. For instance, we can look at just the technology part of it. I think they're asking questions differently because of technology, and AI will only accelerate this trend. It causes people to ask questions in a way that their expectation is they're going to get a very quick and very comprehensive answer based on just their first question out of the gate. In the past, we would have had to work a lot more to get an answer to a question. So we would have probably worked on the question more. We would have had to do more research. We would have had to share that question with more people. In the process, we probably would have refined the question and improved it. Now with technology, it's like first thing out of the gate and you've got some kind of an answer.
I think that, in a way, diminishes our questioning skills. We've almost made it too easy. It also, I think, has an effect on our curiosity because one of the things that you find in the research on curiosity is that curiosity tends to build over time, and you get more curious if you don't get the answer right away, that your curiosity builds and your interests level builds. That's a good thing, but if you get answers really easily and right away, your curiosity doesn't have a chance to build that much. I think these are some of the ways the technology is maybe adversely affecting our questioning skills and our curiosity. Now it's also helping a lot because one of the things you can do now if you have a question is you have a lot of places just to start working on it because of technology, you have lots of places to go with your question.
You can share it much more easily than you could have shared it in the past so you can get other people to help you work on that question. I think it's a totally a mixed blessing. Then the other part you brought up about more empathy in the world. Yes, I would say what people are doing now, much more than maybe they did in the past is, they're using the questioning where you think about things from another person's perspective, which is one of the most important tools that you can do with questioning. I always say it's one of the biggest things a question can do is help you things from a different perspective. Right now we're in a world where people I think are trying to see things from other perspectives. I think they're using questioning to help them do that.
David Gardner: Well, I definitely want to talk some about artificial intelligence ChatGPT a little bit later. We're going to flag that for now, but let's talk some about 2023 because I would love, Warren, with your perspective. Now, we've already started this new year, but this is different. Are we post-pandemic? Some people say COVID will be with us for the rest of our lives like the flu, so you never really post that, but then again, things have opened up so much more than if we'd had this conversation two years ago. So I'm curious. Since I've got a question oncologist that I highly esteem here, do you have any beautiful questions in mind for this year of 2023? Where are you?
Warren Berger: I think we're in a period of reinvention. Coming back from the pandemic, it's like we know we're not going to go back to doing things exactly the way we did before. I think we're in this period where we're trying to find new models that are oftentimes a hybrid. They're a hybrid of the old way we did it and the new way we want to do it. We see that most clearly in terms of the work, the offices, and the virtual work situation. Everyone's trying to figure out a hybrid model for that. We're not necessarily going to go back to working 40-hour weeks in the office, but we don't want to have everyone just stay home all the time. How do we find that middle ground that works for everyone? I think what I see happening in 2023 is a lot of that questioning.
That involves a lot of why, what if, and how, David, because you have to say, "Okay, well, why is it people don't want to come back into the office? What is it they're getting out of the virtual work that they couldn't get in the office?" Then you have to ask, "Okay, well, what if we do this? When they come into the office, we're allowing them to do this differently. What if we use this approach of blending office and home?" We're going to have to do a lot of that, why, what if, and how questioning to put together the new ways of doing things post-pandemic. I think that's probably the biggest thing. Other than that, it's the same questions that we should have been asking in 2020, and 2017, and 2018, which is I think we all need to always ask questions about why we're seeing things the way, why we're thinking the way we do, why we believe the things we do? Those kinds of awareness-type questions we should be asking them all the time.
David Gardner: Warren, reflecting back on your two books, both A More Beautiful Question, which I understand by the way is coming out at a new edition next year, is that true?
Warren Berger: Yes, it is. Early next year, we're going to do an expanded edition of it, which I'm going to add in the very important chapter on questioning other people and in terms of your relationships, questioning as a communication tool, a trust builder, a way to build relationships with people. That was shortchanged than the original A More Beautiful Question because I was very focused on innovation and the kinds of questions you have to ask yourself to open up your thinking and think differently. That was the focus there, and that's still a big focus of the book, but I wanted to work in this idea of questioning as a communication tool.
David Gardner: That's wonderful. I'm looking forward to that new edition. Reflecting on the first edition, which is all that's out there right now for the rest of us, or your Book of Beautiful Questions, what one or two questions come back to you here in 2023 as enduringly powerful, timeless? I'm not asking you for your Mount Rushmore of Warren Berger's greatest four questions, but what might be one or two of them?
Warren Berger: One of the classic ones that was in the original book and it still holds up today, is that question that became very popular in Silicon Valley, which is, what would I attempt to do if I knew I couldn't fail? Gosh, I think that originated with a preacher or someone back in the 1970s, then it got picked up in Silicon Valley, it was very popular among the startups. It's a really good question because it allows you to open up possibilities to think about what you're going to do in a bold way as you've set aside your fear of failure, just temporarily because failure is a reality.
You can't make it go away, but if you can put it aside for a minute and you can say, "Well, what would I do if failure was off the table? If failure wasn't even something I had to worry about, then what would I try?" By exploring a question that way, you really open up sort of bold possibilities and bold thinking. Then you can always go back and say, "Okay, I know failure is a possibility. So how does that change some of these ideas that I came up with?" That one to me remains a really powerful question. I would point out, because this is interesting, it's a type of question called a constraint question.
A constraint question is where you take constraints off a situation or you put them on in order to get yourself to think differently. One of the most classic constraint questions is, if I had only 24 hours to live, what would I do? You're putting the constraint of 24 hours onto it so that you force yourself to think differently. Now the reverse of that taking constraints off might be, we have to introduce a new product, what if the budget was unlimited? What if we had all the money in the world to do it, what would we do? That question is taking the constraint off. Now it's saying no money issues, no whatever. Whichever way you do it, whether you put constraints on or take them off, it's a great device for framing a question because it allows you to think in a different way.
David Gardner: You spent a lot of time in classrooms with the kids, with the adults. You've written a book on it. That's one I haven't yet read, Warren, but as I think about, and one of my children is in classrooms every day teaching kids. I'm curious what Zach would think of this, "But what are children not learning from schools today that they should?" That's maybe a shot at a beautiful question. I'm pretty sure an easy answer for you to give would be the power of questioning and asking good questions. But what else might come to mind based on your time in the classroom? What are children not learning from schools today, that they should?
Warren Berger: Well, they're not learning that they should take ownership of their own curiosity and their own questions and that it's really not just about being handed answers or memorizing answers or getting easy answers off of Google or whatever. It's about harnessing your curiosity, focusing it on something that interests you, and then going to work on that. That is one of the most important things we can teach young people because that's what's going to serve them out when they get out there into the world.
They have to know how to do that. That's going to help them unlock their success, but in most schools, we don't teach it very well and it's one of the things I say to educators and teachers is you want to, number 1, encourage those kids to feel free to ask questions, but then number 2, you want them to stay with their questions, take ownership of them, and parents can do the same thing. Parents can play a role here too. Encourage your kids when they have an interesting question to feel like, "Hey, this is my question and I'm going to stay with it. I'm going to tell other people about it. I'm going to explore it and let's do something I'm going to pursue."
David Gardner: Really appreciate that agency throughout life, starting as early as possible, but even thinking about adults and of course, the ongoing discussions of lifelong learning and the importance of ABL "Always Be Learning" Warren Bennis and his wonderful book on becoming a leader, said very clearly to the reader that you are now responsible as you've graduated your final school, you're responsible for your education from now on and you better take it seriously. He was writing that a few decades ago. Meantime, all things have shown up like the internet and new possibilities, industries imploding because they are no longer relevant and new ones that we hadn't dreamed up yet starting. It seems even more important that lifelong learning piece, but underneath all of it, I think is agency, which I heard you just speaking to. Let me ask a slightly different school question, a similar question, but from a different angle, Warren. What topics are the highest performing most farsighted schools beginning to teach today, I presume you've spent some time in classrooms, you've observed schools that are really impressive, maybe on the bleeding edge. Are they teaching me something different than what I learned reading, writing, arithmetic?
Warren Berger: They're teaching a lot about technology, which they should be. I think they're teaching more about the humanities. They're teaching more about social situations, social services, and social justice. They're teaching a lot of that stuff. I think it's great. I think that there was a limit to what was being taught in our schools for a long time. I think they're opening up more possibilities now and more ways of thinking about history, ways of thinking about the current times, ways of thinking about the world we live in. I think they're doing a pretty good job of offering that stuff up to kids.
My only criticism would be in how they are asking the students to respond to that. Again, this gets back to agency. Are we just putting this information out there for the students to either absorb or not absorb? Or are we asking them to make their own judgments on it? Do their own thinking about it. The big thing to me, we're not teaching in schools and we haven't been for a long time, and we're still not today is critical thinking. I think that's where it almost whatever the curriculum is, whatever you're teaching kids, whatever the material is you're putting at them. It almost doesn't matter if you're not teaching critical thinking because they really won't know what to do with the information. They won't be able to use it as well.
They won't absorb it as well if they don't have good critical thinking skills. To me, that's the big challenge for schools is how do you do that? Schools are working on that and they've been working on it for a long time. It's a really hard thing to teach kids because it's hard. Critical thinking is hard, you're teaching people how to analyze information, how to make judgment calls, how to separate their opinion from fact. All of that stuff is very difficult as a high level of thinking, it's hard it makes our brain work, which a lot of times we don't feel like making our brain work that hard. It's a big challenge for educators, but I really think that's the priority or what should be the priority in schools right now.
David Gardner: It's funny because a lot of teachers feel like they have to teach to the test and that's because we ultimately give the test and so if you're trying to be practical as a teacher, you're being forced in many cases not to invite beautiful questions and answers from your classroom or invite them to ask questions you're just needing to give the material that will be regurgitated. I did have a good conversation with Thi Nguyen who's a philosopher about games for the University of Utah on this podcast a few weeks ago. He talked about the power of the GPA. Once you invent really a standard that everybody conforms to and we all get it 3.43922 all of a sudden, it flattens out all nuance and it forces us all into this big machine where the same cogs is striking the same other cogwheels and we're all having to go through the motions. I'm sure a lot of teachers do feel that and students may or may not even be conscious of that, but I think a lot of teachers probably feel frustrated. That's why I was asking you Warren about to me, who are the highest performing, most farsighted schools? Because I feel as if a lot of teachers probably feel like they're straight-jacketed a little bit.
Warren Berger: I think they are. I think what you're seeing is you're seeing new models for schools. A lot of them are doing something similar to what the Montessori schools have been doing for a while. You're seeing that approach start to fan out into other schools with changes. They don't do it exactly the same way. Everybody puts their own wrinkle on it or spin on it. But a lot of them are doing project-based learning and that's really important. It gets back to what we talked about with ownership. Teaching ownership and agency make young people take charge of a project. Make them work something through from the beginning to the end. Really important stuff. You're seeing them focus a lot more on collaboration. Kids working in teams, working in groups. Again, so important because you think about how they're going to have to work when they get out into the world. This is how they have to work. There is movement away from that memorization, repeating back answers on the test, everybody at their own desk doing their own thing. There's a movement away from that, which is really good, but unfortunately, it's happening primarily in private schools.
David Gardner: Outside the public system.
Warren Berger: The big public schools really had to turn that ship around. It's hard for them to have the resources or the time, or they have bigger classes, they're dealing with more kids, they're dealing with more chaos. Also one of the big obstacles sometimes as parents, parents are the ones sometimes who are really the starches defenders of this GPA system and measuring everything by the test, because they're very focused on the goals of getting the kids into the right schools and what's the pay off going to be in the end. You have to convince them sometimes that we need to move a little bit away from this regimented approach.
David Gardner: The final chapter of our discussion this time let's move over to, it's already been foreshadowed, artificial intelligence and maybe some ChatGPT. Last time we talked Warren four years ago, you were saying, and I'm quoting "Data are answers, artificial intelligence is going to prove me wrong in this at some point," you said, "but for now," you said in 2019, "I still maintain that answers are the domain of machines." I'm continuing to quote you hear from our podcasts together four years ago, "Answers or what machines and technology are really good at questions are still what humans are good at". Now one of the things I've discovered with ChatGPT, have you used ChatGPT?
Warren Berger: A little bit, yeah.
David Gardner: One of the things I've discovered is a lot of the time getting real use out of this new artificial intelligence chatbot involves asking it a beautiful question. Some of my best answers were elicited by my most imaginative questions. Now not everybody is a PG Wodehouse fan, but what are my favorite exchanges with ChatGPT was when I simply asked, "Could you write for me in the style of PG Wodehouse, some advice about how to spend a good weekend?" Out of that emerged six steps that are absolutely delightful to read and remind us of truly taking a break from things and truly enjoying the weeks. Of course, Wodehousian, not actually written by the man himself but with Wodehousian flare. I thought, why wouldn't I ask ChatGPT for some of its own beautiful questions for 2023. I'm going to flash a few of those at you. We can try to answer them together. All of a sudden the machines you're asking the questions we humans are filling in some data, but before we do that and play that little game together, I'm just curious. Any other thoughts that you have about the machines? Questions and answers?
Warren Berger: I still maintain that questioning is our strength as humans. The machines can cobble together questions, and they can cobble together interesting questions, but the one thing that the machines don't have, that to me is the driving fuel behind great questioning is they don't have curiosity and they are basically programmed bots. They know how to put stuff together. They know how to take vast amounts of information and recombine it in interesting ways. That is their thing, but in the end, they're still answer machines. We're the questionnaires. We're the ones that have the actual drive to ask questions that have the curiosity and they are the answer machines. I think it becomes more important for us to get better at our questioning skill because technology just ups the ante on answers that more and more answers available to us. But we better be able to ask good questions and we better be able to question the answers that come back to us because they may not be right. That's where it's on us to be able to say, how do I need to look at this answer that's come back to me? What sounds shaky? What do I need to double-check? That kind of thing.
David Gardner: All right, Warren Berger, well, let's have a little bit of fun together here in closing, I've got the three questions, the top three that came to you from ChatGPT. These are beautiful questions for 2023. For each of them, let me ask you to rate it 0-10 in terms of the beauty of the question, where 10 is of course, worthy of your books and zero would be worthy of my books. Then take a shot at answering it if you like, because I think these aren't bad, but you can tell me. The first one that popped out was, how could we use technology to create a more equitable and just world? How do you rate that and any thoughts back?
Warren Berger: The first thing I would do is do a slight correction on the GPT's framing or language. I would just say, how might we, as opposed to how can we, because how might we is a more powerful question frame, it opens up a little more possibility.
David Gardner: Love it.
Warren Berger: How can we sounds like it's just about our capabilities. But how might we is a much more open way to ask that question? But otherwise, I love it, the great question. It could probably be maybe made more specific in some ways, but otherwise I give it a seven. Yeah. As far as answering it, wow. Answering it is about awareness and effort to do it, to make those strides that we need to make and to always be cognizant of why we're doing it and why it's worth the trouble. If we don't keep asking why about this stuff, it starts to become wrote habit or it starts to become just accepted dogma. Then we might start to get resentful about it. We might start to say, why are we doing all this? Why are we paying all attention to this stuff anyway? That's why we have to constantly go back and ask, remind ourselves why it's important and why we're asking these questions in the first place.
David Gardner: You made it more beautiful. How might we use technology to create a more equitable and just world? Like a lot of beautiful questions, there's no need to have a pat answer or to answer it quickly right away. It might even occasion new questions, peel back the layer of the onion once or twice more, but I enjoyed that one. I thought that's not bad. The AI came up with that one, let's try two more.
Warren Berger: Yeah.
David Gardner: The next one, what role do the arts play in shaping our culture and society?
Warren Berger: What role does the arts play in shaping our culture and society? Yeah.
David Gardner: How would you rate that?
Warren Berger: I would rate that as a very good question. Let's see, how would I tweak that one? You see it would be hard to answer that because you have to define what we mean by role. That could get a little bit dicey.
David Gardner: Yeah.
Warren Berger: I might even turn that into a closed question. It might ask, in terms of are the arts a critical role as our society moves forward. Instead of saying how big a role which is hard to answer. Let's first establish that we agree that they play a critical role. Sometimes that's where a closed question can be really valuable because you need to first get on the same page about agreeing that the arts really do play a big role. I would say, let's start with the closed question about, are the arts really a key role in our world or not? Lets answer that question together. Then we can move on to, well then how do we strengthen their role?
David Gardner: This is so much fun asking a questionologist how to improve the questions and rethink them through. In fact, I said two more, but now I want to do two more from here because I'm finding this slightly addictive.
Warren Berger: Sure. Yeah.
David Gardner: Let's just do one extra. The third that I'm going to ask you of four is, what is the future of democracy in an age of political polarization and misinformation, 2023?
Warren Berger: Yeah. What is the future of democracy? Again, my only problem is the framing of the question, makes it a little hard to answer. If someone asks me, what is the future of democracy in an age of hyperpolarization? It's, I don't quite know how to answer that. I would prefer that the question be framed around what effects will hyperpolarization have on democracy or what effects is it likely to have on democracy moving forward? Then from that, once we establish the effects, we can then ask a question about what can we do about that? How can we address that? Yeah I like where the question's going. I think it's a really important question in terms of what it's addressing. I just might tweak the wording a little bit.
David Gardner: Thank you. It does feel very maybe a question we wouldn't have been asking 10 years ago, but it feels important today. I want to give ChatGPT a clap on the virtual back for thinking about that where we are right now.
Warren Berger: Yeah, I think what's interesting about those questions is that makes sense to me that ChatGPT is very aware of what is on people's minds. Because obviously it has to do with what's being fed into the system.
David Gardner: Yeah.
Warren Berger: It's weighing the things that are being fed in the most. It's coming back at us with the questions that really are on people's minds.
David Gardner: Thank you, Warren. Last one for you. I'm going to even tweak it because I know how can doesn't work as well as how might we. I'm going to improve it but for this one, I'm actually going to ask you this as a question seeking your answer, seeking your wisdom, which I know you have a lot of. You don't know what's coming. Let's have fun. How might we foster greater understanding and collaboration between people of different cultures and backgrounds?
Warren Berger: My answer is curiosity. Curiosity over judgment is the rule of greater collaboration particularly among people who are very different. Now of course, it's a lot harder than it sounds. But if we can get ourselves to have a default position of when we encounter someone who is different, who thinks differently, who looks different, who behaves differently, who comes from a different background. If our default position can be, I'd like to learn more of that or I'm curious about that as opposed to, boy, isn't that strange? Or what is that all about? It's really about a shifting attitude I think. I think questioning is a big part of it. Because questioning, it relates to curiosity and thing is how you act on curiosity. Curiosity is the itch, questioning is how you scratch the itch. But we need that curiosity itch whenever we encounter anything new or different or foreign.
David Gardner: Very well said Warren Berger. It strikes me as a little bit ironic because in many ways I feel as if there is a lot of polarization and prejudgment and writing people off these days. Yet I also at the other side of my mouth, right here in 2023, feel like there's more acceptance of minorities, more awareness, inclusiveness, more empathy in many areas of our society than by far than we've ever had before.
Warren Berger: Absolutely.
David Gardner: How to reconcile these two, this juxtaposition remains our most curious thing for me in 2023.
Warren Berger: Absolutely. My feeling is that we are making progress all the time. Then every time we take a step forward, of course, we're also taking half a step back because we're having reactions to the progress. We're having backlash and we're having people who feel threatened by progress will then voice their opinion and voice their feelings like, hey, this is going too fast. It's a natural thing to me. It's a natural part of how societies evolve, I think. I don't worry about it too much. To me, as long as it feels like in the end we're moving forward, then yeah, it could be rough. There could be a lot of battles along the way. But if it feels we're moving forward instead of back, then I think we're okay.
David Gardner: Some of the injustices that we see today in many ways we're seeing them for the first time. They've always been there, but now there's a camera on them, with social media noticing them, or the ability to socialize them and spread them. The awareness sometimes takes such magnitude, takes such hold of us that we start thinking that's a huge thing and it may not be as big as it looks. It just went viral. But the truth is, it's better to have a transparent world where you see these things than one where hidden injustice festers.
Warren Berger: Absolutely, because once we know about it then we can ask the right questions. What do we do? What are some possible solutions to this and where to go from there? We have to be willing to ask those questions. They're not easy. There's no easy answers on this stuff, but you start by being willing to explore the questions and explore them together. Collaborative inquiry, we have to ask these questions together, and that's hard to do, but we got to do it.
David Gardner: Well, next week we'll be asking an entirely different question about market capitalization. Yeah. Unbeautiful, maybe even ugly questions seeking straight fact filled answers. Questions like, what is the market cap of Uber or Lyft? Or any one of 10 different stocks pulled from the 500 most popular stocks at fool.com. Yeah, It's the Market Cap Game Show next week on Rule Breaker Investing. But to close for this week my thanks again to Warren Berger for more beautiful questions. Now updated for consideration here in 2023 with an assist from ChatGPT as well. You know, the clearest tip that I think you and I can take away from Warren and his work is so very simple. It works for the elderly, it works for little kids. It worked for people from one culture or another, every other. For school teachers, for students, for entrepreneurs, for those in democracies before they cast their next vote whenever that is. Here's the tip. Accept that you need to step back and question more.
