Joe: Lewis, I'm going to hit you with a number that sounds completely made up, but it's real. The average four-year-old girl asks her mother 390 questions a day. Lewis: Three hundred and ninety? A day? That's one question every two minutes they're awake. That's not a child, that's a tiny, relentless investigative journalist. My brain hurts just thinking about it. Joe: It's an astonishing number, right? It’s like they are the R&D department for the entire human species, as one psychologist put it. And that relentless curiosity is the central mystery in the book we're diving into today: A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger. Lewis: Ah, the 'questionologist' himself. I’ve heard this book is a favorite at some pretty serious places, from NASA to Microsoft. Joe: That's the one. What's fascinating about Berger is that he spent years studying top innovators, not to see what they knew, but to figure out what they asked. He found that breakthroughs at places like Google, Nike, and even the Red Cross didn't start with an answer, but with a powerful, game-changing question. Lewis: Okay, so if we all start out as these little questioning machines, these tiny Picassos of inquiry, what on earth happens to us? Where does that superpower go? Joe: That is the million-dollar question, and it’s exactly where Berger starts. It’s a classic mystery: The Case of the Disappearing Curiosity.

Lewis: So what’s the primary suspect in this case? Who or what is killing our curiosity? Joe: The evidence points to a couple of key culprits. The first, and maybe the biggest, is the way our education system was designed. Berger points out that it’s largely a product of the Industrial Age. Its goal wasn't to create innovators; it was to produce compliant workers who could follow instructions and provide correct answers efficiently. Lewis: Right, it’s about filling the vessel, not lighting the fire. You’re rewarded for knowing the answer that’s in the back of the textbook, not for asking a question that isn't. Joe: Precisely. There’s this incredible story in the book about a school in Harlem founded by Deborah Meier. A third-grader told her, "What’s different about this school is you’re interested in what we don’t know, not just what we do know." And that just perfectly captures the shift. Most of our schooling is obsessed with the "what we know" part. Lewis: I can feel that in my bones. I remember being terrified to ask a "stupid question" in class. The fear of looking dumb is a powerful silencer. Joe: It absolutely is. And that fear follows us right into the workplace. The second culprit is corporate culture. The great Clayton Christensen, the Harvard professor, observed that in the business world, questioning is often seen as one thing: inefficient. It slows things down. It challenges authority. It creates friction in a system that’s optimized for smooth, predictable output. Lewis: Okay, I get the school part. But in the workplace, isn't there a real danger here? That sounds great in a book, Joe, but in the real world, if you're constantly questioning your boss or the company's strategy, you're not seen as an innovator. You're seen as a problem. You're the person who makes meetings run long. Joe: That's the pushback, and it's a valid concern. Berger acknowledges this. But he points to companies that have weaponized questioning as their greatest asset. The former chairman of Google famously said the company "runs on questions." Their famous TGIF meetings, where any employee can ask the founders anything, are legendary for being brutally honest. It's not always polite. Lewis: But that's Google. They can afford to be inefficient. What about a normal company trying to make payroll? Joe: Well, research from Hal Gregersen and others shows that the most innovative and successful executives—the ones whose careers are "turbocharged," as he puts it—are distinguished by their tendency to question everything. They question their industry's assumptions, their company's sacred cows, and even their own beliefs. They understand that in a world that’s, as one futurist said, "always transitioning," the person with the right answer today will have the wrong answer tomorrow. The person with the right question, however, is always ahead of the curve. Lewis: So it’s like we learn this beautiful, complex language of inquiry as children, and then spend the next twenty years being systematically taught to forget it. And only a few manage to become fluent again. Joe: That’s a perfect analogy. We’re all native speakers of "Why?" who become rusty and hesitant. The book argues that our job isn't to learn a new skill, but to remember an old one. Lewis: But remembering is the hard part. It feels like you need a framework, a way to practice. You can't just tell someone, "Go be more curious!" Joe: You're right. And that brings us to the heart of the book. Berger argues the solution isn't just to ask more questions, but to get better at it. He gives us a framework, a kind of recipe for productive inquiry: a simple, three-step sequence.

Lewis: Okay, I'm ready. Give me the secret recipe. How do we start asking these "beautiful questions"? Joe: The framework is deceptively simple. It’s a progression: Why, What If, and How. It starts with confronting a frustrating reality, moves to imagining a new one, and ends with the hard work of building it. And the best way to understand its power is through a story. Lewis: I'm all for a good story. Joe: In 1976, a 21-year-old college student named Van Phillips lost his foot in a water-skiing accident. After the amputation, he was fitted with the best prosthetic available at the time. And it was, to put it mildly, terrible. It was a block of wood and pink foam, basically a cosmetic placeholder. He couldn't run, he couldn't jump. It was a dead end. Lewis: Wow, that’s devastating for a young, active guy. Joe: Absolutely. And this is where the first question comes in. He was surrounded by experts—doctors, prosthetics engineers—who all accepted this reality. But Van, as an outsider to the field, asked the fundamental Why question: "Why are prosthetic limbs so primitive?" This was the era of the space race, of incredible technological leaps. Why couldn't they make a decent foot? Lewis: He refused to accept the status quo. He was looking at the problem with fresh, and probably very angry, eyes. Joe: Exactly. That "Why" question took over his life. He enrolled in a prosthetics program, got a job in a lab, and started tinkering. This led him to the second, more imaginative stage: What If? He started connecting ideas from totally different fields. He looked at the C-shape of a cheetah's hind leg and how it stores and releases energy. He looked at the diving board at his local pool. And he asked, "What if a prosthetic foot could act like a spring? What if it could absorb shock and return energy to the user?" Lewis: That’s a huge leap. He’s moving from just replacing a limb to trying to replicate its dynamic function. He’s not thinking about what a foot looks like, but what it does. Joe: That's the breakthrough insight. And it led him to the final, and hardest, stage: How? How do you actually build this thing? And the answer was: through brutal trial and error. He built hundreds of prototypes in his garage. He’d test one, it would snap. He’d learn something, build another, and it would fail in a new way. Each failure was just an answer to a question he was asking with materials. Lewis: That sounds incredibly lonely and frustrating. The "How" part is where most ideas die, I imagine. Joe: For years, it was. But eventually, he perfected it. He created the Flex-Foot, the C-shaped carbon fiber prosthetic that completely revolutionized the industry. It’s the reason you see amputees running in the Olympics, climbing Mount Everest. It all started because one person was dissatisfied enough to ask "Why?" and imaginative enough to ask "What If?" Lewis: That's an incredible, life-altering story. It gives the framework so much weight. But can this apply to smaller, everyday problems? I mean, most of us aren't inventing a new limb. Can I use this for, say, my terrible coffee maker? Joe: Absolutely. The book is filled with examples at every scale. Think about Bette Nesmith Graham, a secretary in the 50s frustrated with the new electric typewriters that made it impossible to erase errors. She asked, "What if I could paint over my mistakes like I do in my art projects?" And she invented Liquid Paper in her kitchen. Lewis: So her "Why" was "Why is correcting typos so hard?" and her "What If" was "What if I treat a document like a canvas?" Joe: Perfect. Or Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix. His "Why" was pure frustration: "Why did I just get a $40 late fee from Blockbuster?" His "What If" was, "What if a video store worked like a gym membership, with a flat monthly fee and no late fees?" That one question completely upended an entire industry. Lewis: It's the same pattern. A point of friction, a moment of imaginative connection, and then the work of building the solution. It’s a powerful mental model. Joe: It is. And it’s a model that’s accessible to everyone. You don’t need to be a certified genius. You just need to be a persistent questioner.

Lewis: It feels like what this all boils down to is a fundamental choice we all face, whether we realize it or not. We can stick with the perceived 'efficiency' of ready-made answers, which feels safe and predictable but ultimately leads to stagnation. It’s the path of Blockbuster video and those old, clunky prosthetic feet. Joe: The path of the known. It’s comfortable, but it’s a dead end. Lewis: Exactly. Or, we can embrace the 'inefficiency' of asking beautiful questions. It’s messy, it’s uncertain, it can be frustrating, but it’s the only real path to any kind of breakthrough, big or small. Joe: That’s the core tension of the book. And Berger's challenge to us, and to our listeners, is simple. Don't just spend your week looking for the right answers. Try to find one really good question. A beautiful question. It could be about your job, a relationship, or even just a frustrating product in your home. Lewis: I love that. It’s a small, actionable step. And maybe the one question to start with is the one the Nobel-winning physicist Isidor Rabi’s mother apparently asked him every single day when he came home from school. She didn't ask, "What did you learn today?" Joe: What did she ask? Lewis: She asked, "Izzy, did you ask a good question today?" Joe: A perfect place to end. That simple question reframes the entire goal of a day, from consumption to inquiry. Lewis: It really does. It’s not about what you took in, but what you reached out for. Joe: This is Aibrary, signing off.