"Listening is not real until the listener makes a sound back." - Ken Woodward

A sound-powered telephone runs on nothing but the sound of your own voice. No battery. No amplifier. I served on submarines, and I never forgot the joke we played on every new sailor: we sent him hunting the whole ship for batteries that do not exist. The power was in him the entire time. He only had to speak.

This is a solo episode about listening. About the repeat-back, the discipline of saying a message back until it lands correctly. About a 2025 study that found the follow-up question is the clearest sign that real listening is happening. About what Dr. Haru Yamada taught me, that to ask and to listen are one motion.

And it is about one officer I served with, a question I never asked him, and why I let it go unasked. The circuit is always live. Who is the station you have never called?

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!

"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)

Keep questioning!