Podcast
Curated Questions: Conversations Celebrating the Power of Questions!
Hosted by Ken Woodward · EN
Curated Questions: Conversations Celebrating the Power of Questions
Hosted by Ken Woodward, Curated Questions is a thought-provoking podcast that celebrates the art and science of asking profound questions. This podcast is for curious minds who understand that the right question can unlock new perspectives and drive personal growth.
What to Expect
Insightful Conversations: Experts from diverse fields share their journey in mastering the craft of inquiry, revealing how it has transformed their lives and careers.
Practical Techniques: Gain valuable skills to improve your questioning abilities, applicable in both personal and professional settings.
Thought-Provoking Topics: Explore how questions shape leadership, personal transformation, and societal discourse.
Why Listen?
In an age of abundant information, Curated Questions reminds us that true wisdom lies in asking better questions. This podcast will help you:
1. Enhance critical thinking
2. Improve communication
3. Gain new perspectives on complex issues
4. Develop a nuanced understanding of the world
Join Ken Woodward and his guests as they explore the transformative power of thoughtful inquiry. Curated Questions is more than just a podcast – it's an invitation to embrace curiosity, challenge assumptions, and unlock your full potential through the art of asking better questions.
Subscribe now and embark on a journey to master the craft of inquiry, one question at a time.
Website: CuratedQuestions.com
IG/Threads/YouTube: @CuratedQuestions
38episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
The Fear Is Far, The Hope Is Near: America At 250 | Ken Woodward #91
5d ago00:13:52Tap to summarize"That is what a patriot is. Someone who loves the country enough to trade the myth for the question." - Ken WoodwardWe 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!
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Right Now Questions - Union Market, DC: When Now Becomes Next | Ken Woodward #90
2w ago00:07:35Tap to summarize"When someone asks us about now, many of us answer with next." - Ken WoodwardWe 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!
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The Question We Wait to Be Asked | Ken Woodward #89
3w ago00:27:06Tap to summarize"The avoided question and the awaited question. Same person. Two sides of one ache." - Ken WoodwardNearly 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!
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Learning to Be Asked | Ken Woodward #88
4w ago00:29:23Tap to summarize"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 WoodwardIan 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!
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The Anatomy of a Question | Ken Woodward #87
Jun 1100:27:22Tap to summarize"The question was not broken. It was unfinished." - Ken WoodwardBuried 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 MentionedMartin HeideggerBeing and Time by Martin HeideggerSoul Boom PodcastAmanda RipleyArthur C. BrooksEdmund HusserlProducer Ben FordBeauty Pill
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The Smallest Act of Authorship | Ken Woodward #86
Jun 400:21:14Tap to summarize"The smallest act of authorship is a question." - Ken WoodwardNine 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!
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What Will You Soon Realize You Already Know? | Larry Robertson #85
May 2801:46:40Tap to summarize" 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 RobertsonLarry 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 VUCAErnest 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 RobertsonLarry Roberson on LinkedInLarry's WebsiteProducer Ben FordBeauty Pill
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The Long Tail: What Your Decisions Drag Behind Them | Ken Woodward #84
May 2100:20:35Tap to summarize"The invitation is not to be right. It is to be willing." - Ken WoodwardThe 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 MentionedRoald Dahl John LithgowGiant James and the Giant PeachCharlie and the Chocolate FactoryJason ParginProducer Ben FordBeauty Pill
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What You Know Changes What You Can Ask | Ken Woodward #83
May 1400:21:33Tap to summarize"A good answer can close a loop. A good question opens one." - Ken WoodwardWhat 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 MentionedRaz, 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/s41539-026-00402-0Seth GodinRyan HolidayProducer Ben FordBeauty Pill
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Who Told You That Was Good? | Ken Woodward #82
May 700:18:41Tap to summarize"My tree was planted in a metal bucket." - Ken WoodwardSome mornings, the ordinary holds the weight of everything. A walk to the garage. An attempt to correct a gait. A drift back to comfort. Ken opens this solo episode with that image and asks why returning to comfort is the default setting of an adult life.Drawing on the work of Nigerian-born British photographer and activist Misan Harriman, Ken investigates the mourning that accompanies genuine personal growth. The mourning for the world you thought you believed in. The mourning for the person you were sure was good enough.Ken traces his own reckoning through the identities that once added up to a clean equation. Each one a nutrient in the soil he was given. Each one another layer of metal on the bucket his tree was planted in. Growing. Just with no room to expand.This episode is about noticing the bucket. Cracking it open. And dragging your roots toward soil that can actually hold them.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 MentionedMisan HarrimanHarriman Instagram PostHeraclitusProducer Ben
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