Curated Questions: Conversations Celebrating the Power of Questions!

"It is easier simply to tell the truth, even if you've made a mistake, because what it does is build credibility over time." - Andrew Caulk What happens when the questions leaders most need to ask are the ones they're most afraid to voice? Andrew Caulk spent two decades in the Air Force as an information strategist, and he's seen how institutions, military, political, and personal, manage their narratives by avoiding the hardest inquiries. In this conversation, Andrew and Ken explore how misinformation and disinformation actually work, why truth is more strategically sustainable than deception, and how the attention economy is quietly rewiring our ability to think slowly. Andrew shares what senior leaders refused to ask aloud in military war games, what the casualty projections for a Taiwan conflict actually look like, and why American will to fight may be the most underexamined variable in geopolitical strategy. The conversation also turns to children, curiosity, and how the questions we allow, or suppress, in our homes shape the next generation's capacity to navigate a noisy world. 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  Cognitive Strategy Group  Right to Forget Law Helio Fred Garcia Inside The  Manosphere documentary  Battlefield Three  Ad Fontis Media Bias Chart  Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday Anchorman 2  Bloomberg Wall Street Journal Associated Press (AP) Reuters The Economist  SCOTUSblog  Freakonomics Ground News  Planet Word Museum  cognitive strategy group.com  Being Human Church  Dr. Kori Schake Jim Mattis Andrew Caulk on LinkedIn Producer Ben Ford Beauty Pill

"Those scripts are not wisdom. They are load-bearing walls for other people's power." - Ken Woodward Every room has a question nobody asks. Sometimes that's a failure of courage. Sometimes it's something else entirely, a hierarchy so explicit it pre-sorts who is permitted to speak before anyone opens their mouth. In this episode, Ken reflects on a $100M federal acquisition program derailed by a senior stakeholder who wielded disruption as a weapon. The question that could have changed the outcome existed. It just never reached the person who needed to hear it. Drawing on that experience, a chance conversation with a Vietnamese businessman named Kien, and the current civic moment, Ken explores why we swallow necessary questions, and what it costs us when we do. He offers a ladder of micro-courage for asking harder questions at every level of power, from the private to the public square. One braver question. That's the practice. That's where it starts. Fellow pilgrims, this one's for the rooms we've all been in. 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!

"The most powerful questions aren't really the ones that demand an answer, but really demand a presence." - Jenny Chan Jenny Chan founded Pacific Atrocities Education after her grandmother's death surfaced a box of wartime relics of military yen, rice rationing coupons, and decades of unexplained anger toward Japanese culture. That inheritance of unasked questions launched Jenny into the hidden history of the Pacific Asian War: comfort women, Unit 731's biological experimentation program, and the postwar immunity deals that let war criminals become CEOs and prime ministers. Jenny's research method centers on presence before inquiry. Sitting with survivors long enough to earn the right to ask hard questions. She sees historical memory not as a burden but as an essential context for understanding today's geopolitical decisions. Her work with survivors, students, and Japanese citizens seeking truth suggests that healing begins when forgotten stories are finally allowed to be told. 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 harm was architectural. It was not a matter of intention. It was a matter of never checking the blueprint before I opened my mouth." - Ken Woodward The Questions You're Living Inside: How to Stop Answering Questions You Never Chose is the premise of this week's solo episode. Every question builds a room. Most of us never notice the construction. In this solo episode, Ken Woodward explores what he calls the architecture of questions, the load-bearing assumptions embedded in every question we ask, answer, or inherit. Using a morning commute observation about a flatbed truck carrying prefabricated wall panels, Ken unpacks why the questions shaping our lives were often built by someone else, for someone else's benefit. Through two anchor stories, a painful misheard exchange during his 2,085-mile walk through Washington D.C., and an emotional moment from his conversation with Naomi Campbell of the Right Question Institute, Ken traces the difference between a question's skeleton and its resonance. The invitation is not demolition. It is something prior to answering. Read the blueprint first. 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!

"It's not having the answers I teach people — it's having the questions. And that just upsets the entire architecture of safe thinking." - Phil Liebman Phil Liebman spent years being mentored by one of the most relentless questioners he'd ever encountered. It changed everything about how he leads and coaches. In this conversation, Phil unpacks the difference between knowing mode and learning mode, why most of us were systematically educated out of curiosity, and what it actually takes to form a powerful question. He introduces his cycle of curiosity and certainty, a four-quadrant framework that explains why three-quarters of the best thinking happens before any action is taken. Phil shares hard-won lessons from decades of executive coaching, traces his intellectual foundation back to mentor Dr. Lee Thayer, and makes the case that leadership is a performing art, not a management science. The episode closes with a personal health scare that became an unexpected masterclass in what curiosity can do when fear shows up uninvited. 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 ALPS Leadership (https://alpsleadership.com/) Dr. Lee Thayer (https://thethayerinstitute.org/about-us/) Vistage (https://www.vistage.com/) Lynn Borton - Choose to Be Curious podcast (https://lynnborton.com/) Stony Brook University (https://www.stonybrook.edu/) Elon Musk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk) John Cleese (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cleese) Grace Hopper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper) Leonardo da Vinci quote: "It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sit back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things." Pablo Picasso (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso) Mount Sinai Comprehensive Cancer Center (https://www.msmc.com/comprehensive-cancer-center/) Phil Liebman on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/philiprliebman) Producer Ben Ford (https://www.producerbenford.com/) Beauty Pill (https://www.beautypill.com/)