" Show what you know by the questions you ask." - Robert Doore Robert Doore carries two names, Robert Doore and Rides at the Door, and a journey most maps don't draw: from Big Red football on the Blackfeet Reservation to becoming the highest-ranking Native American in the NFL since Jim Thorpe. Now the President and CEO of Chief Mountain Sports and Consulting, he tells Ken he didn't learn the power of questions early on. He learned it at 21, in a Washington, D.C. room full of generals and cabinet officials, when he found the courage to ask a mentor, "How did you get to be so smart?" The answer, be well read, ask lots of questions, became his Jedi training. The conversation moves through Maslow's summer with the Blackfeet, teaching "Indian 101" to policymakers, representation as a door-opener, and fear as the cousin of failure. Robert's right now question: What does success look like? His answer isn't money. It's impact. This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com. Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions?)) Keep questioning!

"That is what a patriot is. Someone who loves the country enough to trade the myth for the question." - Ken Woodward We took a single question to two places: the garden of the Heurich House in Washington, DC, and a town-center street in Rockville. What are you asking, right now, about America at two hundred and fifty? We did not coach anyone. We asked, and we listened. What came back was not one mood. It was several, sitting side by side. A civility one immigrant was taught here and watched thin. A fear for the vote. An institution lost and a resolve to become one. The next two hundred and fifty years held in one hand and tonight's parking in the other. A whole country found again in a crowd at a pool. Underneath all five runs one thread: the fear lives at a distance, and the hope lives within reach. Agency far away arrives as something done to us. Agency close enough to touch arrives as hope. The episode follows that thread back to the founding, to Frederick Douglass, and to what the word patriot is supposed to mean. This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com. Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions?)) Keep questioning!

"When someone asks us about now, many of us answer with next." - Ken Woodward We took the mic into Union Market and asked strangers one question. What is your Right Now Question? Their answers, and the quiet trend running underneath them. On a warm June afternoon in Washington, DC, we stood in Union Market and asked the people passing through a single thing. Not what they do. Not where they are headed. Just this. What is your Right Now Question? What came back was a market full of strangers, each one carrying something. A job. A move. A book they could not choose. A neighborhood changing faster than anyone can hold. Listen for the trend running underneath the answers, then meet us on the other side for what we noticed. A few of the Right Now Questions we heard: Am I going to get this job? What does peace look like? Do I stay, or do I go? Do the new neighbors know what this used to be? Where will these protests lead us? What is so hard about being kind? This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com. Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions?)) Keep questioning!

"The avoided question and the awaited question. Same person. Two sides of one ache." - Ken Woodward Nearly all of the research on curiosity studies the person asking. A new study out of New York University, led by Dr. Niobe Way and Rachel Taffe, turned the lens around and asked the receiver instead. They gave 641 young people a single written prompt: what is the question you most wish someone would ask you, and why. More than ninety-seven out of every hundred had an answer ready. In this solo episode, Ken sits in that other chair. He walks the eight kinds of questions people long to receive and the six reasons underneath them, and finds that almost none of them are about information. People want to be seen, to be cared for, to be given permission to say the loving thing they have been holding back. Drawing on more than thirteen hundred conversations from his two years walking every street in Washington, D.C., Ken offers the lived proof: the woman undone by "good to see you," the friend he carries, the questions strangers had been waiting years for someone to ask. He closes on two pillars of the same practice. The question you are avoiding, and the question you are awaiting. A meditation on the plainest question in the language, and what it costs to drive around for years with one sitting unasked in the seat beside us. This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com. Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions?)) Keep questioning!

"Ian thought a question was a way to find out who was above him and who was below him. The fire taught him it was a way to find out who was beside him." - Ken Woodward Ian told me he had gotten better at asking questions, and then said the thing that caught my attention. He used to be afraid to ask. Partially fear of looking nosy. Mostly afraid that asking one question would open him up to being asked one back. I knew that fear from the inside, so the two of us got on a call to dig in. This episode follows what we found. The scarcity in the house that raised him, and how a stretched mind cannot afford a question. The old wiring that treats being pushed out of the group as a threat to survival. Why his fear was not timidity but an accurate read of how people actually work. And the small weekly circle, built on one plain question, that changed the physics until the thing he feared was simply no longer true. With a debt to Brian Fretwell and Finding Good, a nod to Seth Godin and Polly Wiessner, and a question at the end I do not have the answer to. This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com. Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions?)) Keep questioning!

"The question was not broken. It was unfinished." - Ken Woodward Buried in the introduction of the twentieth century's most famously unread book is the most precise dissection of a question ever written. In this solo episode, we open Martin Heidegger's Being and Time and recover his anatomy of inquiry: every question has a subject, a source, and an intent, and most questions fail not from bad wording but from missing parts. We test the anatomy against the streets of Washington, D.C., including a backyard in Marshall Heights where a five-hour-and-forty-five-minute conversation revealed what sixty-one years of an unasked question feels like. Then the reckoning. The man who drew the map of questioning joined the Nazi Party, deleted his Jewish teacher's name from his own dedication page, and spent forty-three years refusing the one question that came addressed to him. Knowing the anatomy is not the asking. This episode is about the difference, and the drive home. This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com. Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions) Keep questioning! Resources Mentioned Martin Heidegger Being and Time by Martin Heidegger Soul Boom Podcast Amanda Ripley Arthur C. Brooks Edmund Husserl Producer Ben Ford Beauty Pill

"The smallest act of authorship is a question." - Ken Woodward Nine months ago, Naomi Campbell of the Right Question Institute said one word that gave me a word I had been searching for: agency. I felt it land in my body before I understood it in my head. I promised my listeners I would come back with an answer. This episode is that answer. Agency is the authorship of our own lives. Not control, which none of us has. Authorship is something smaller and more stubborn. It is the refusal to be only what the world wrote about us. And the smallest act of authorship, it turns out, is a question. The moment we ask, we stop receiving the world and start writing on it. I carry two stories from my walk across Washington. A man I call Doc, raised by a mother who would not let him absorb anything without questioning it first. A woman I call Pearl, who answered the worst day of her life by building a neighborhood for the children coming up behind her. Agency is inherent. It can be suppressed, but never removed. The whole question is whether we pick up the pen. This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com. Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions?)) Keep questioning!

" The more you play around with it, and the more you see the power in a question, the more you realize that it actually is the cure for the uncertainty that ails many of us." - Larry Robertson Larry Robertson has spent three decades advising leaders on growth, innovation, and strategy. He is also a US Fulbright Scholar, a columnist, and the author of four award-winning books. His newest, Great Question: The Art of the Ask and Getting More of What You Really Want, draws on more than 140 interviews spanning neuroscience, psychology, business, and the arts. Larry believes we are not a storytelling species. We are a questioning species. He arrived at that conviction book by book, pattern by pattern, over two decades of research. In this conversation, we explore the power of questions as a form of agency. We examine intellectual humility and what happens when you stop performing certainty. We discuss leadership, polarization, and the Braver Angels framework. We also unpack Larry's five-element Art of the Ask. Questions are not a technique. They are a behavior. They are something you already know how to do. This conversation is a reminder to start practicing again. This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com. Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions?)) Keep questioning! Resources Mentioned  Great Question: The Art of the Ask and Getting More of What You Really Want  Sara Lawrence Lightfoot  Audre Lorde  Rebel Leadership by Larry Robertson  VUCA Ernest  Hemingway  Mark Leary  Fulbright Scholarships  Braver Angels  I Never Thought Of It That Way by Monica Guzman  David Whyte  David Pearl  Peter Drucker  A Deliberate Pause by Larry Robertson Larry Roberson on LinkedIn Larry's Website Producer Ben Ford Beauty Pill

"The invitation is not to be right. It is to be willing." - Ken Woodward The small decisions we make without examination carry consequences we never see coming. Ken calls this the long tail. It does not stay inside us. It speaks, votes, stays silent when silence enables harm, and over time shapes the people and institutions around us in ways no single decision can account for. Drawing on Roald Dahl's collapse, a question posed by author Jason Pargin about what we would actually do in someone else's position, and a personal story from a church lobby that still lands hard years later, this episode explores the difference between a foundation and a position. A foundation is what you would sacrifice almost everything to protect. A position is a conclusion you have built on top of lived experience that you have likely never examined. The invitation is not to abandon what you stand on. It is to know what you are standing on. And to have the courage to look when something challenges it. This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com. Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions?)) Keep questioning! Resources Mentioned Roald Dahl  John Lithgow Giant  James and the Giant Peach Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Jason Pargin Producer Ben Ford Beauty Pill

"A good answer can close a loop. A good question opens one." - Ken Woodward What if the quality of your questions has less to do with how curious you are and more to do with how much you know? A recent study from the Technion in Israel tracked 68 students over a semester of Introduction to Psychology. Researchers measured not just what students learned, but how their question-asking changed. The findings are worth sitting with. Domain-specific questions got sharper, more original, more complex. General questions did not improve. In some cases, they declined. Knowledge doesn't flatten curiosity. It sharpens it. This episode traces that finding through 32 years of Navy acquisition, through 1,300 conversations on a 2,085-mile walk through Washington DC, and through a conversation with Seth Godin about tension, rubber bands, and the question that only becomes possible after the preparation is done. The argument is simple. You don't become a better questioner by wanting to ask better questions. You become one by learning more about what you're walking into. This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com. Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions?)) Keep questioning! Resources Mentioned Raz, T. & Kenett, Y.N. (2026). Knowledge reshapes inquiry by changing question asking ability and impacting academic assessment. *npj Science of Learning*, 11, 19. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-026-00402-0 Seth Godin Ryan Holiday Producer Ben Ford Beauty Pill