The Great Askers (episode 1): Sara Hendren and Krista Tippett

The Great Askers is an occasional Origins Podcast extra, where we nourish a sensibility of asking and cultivate great askers by exploring it with people who have singularly practiced it.

Read about the idea of Great Asking here and join the Flourishing Commons community of listening and living

Behind the scenes of each Origins episode is one of the great struggles and joys of the show: the search for questions, new and old, insignificant and immense, articulated and ambiguous. Indeed, it has made me a student of the art of asking and the exhilaration of searching for, crafting, and asking questions has been the wellspring of nourishment for doing the show.

In my own practice of crafting questions, I'm reminded of Simone de Beauvoir's vision of freedom being a stretching of ourselves into an open future full of possibilities.

Why I listen to, make, and love interviews is because they are a way to listen to another mind, which is to say observe it in action. The best askers understand that and ask such that they inspire the utmost modes of the interviewee's thinking while also becoming invisible when that motion is happening. The art of asking feels like a literacy we need to cultivate for, as one of our guests today says, the world we are walking into.

So we are starting a new series called ‘the great askers’ to center the philosophy and practice of asking questions. We will do this be talking with the people asking the most meaningful, searching, even troubling questions and on their process for constructing those questions.

In this series we will explore people who have cultivated a singular sensibility of asking and draw out that sensibility — how it developed, how it is developing, what the practice looks like, what are the unseen difficulties and perhaps dark moments. The series will be a collective conversation among the people changing the questions that make so much that is new possible. 

Following the Origins style, we will attempt to draw out the WHY that was inexorable in their lives that they could not go on without asking.

So these will be conversations for anyone engaged with asking better questions: scientists, teachers and parents, interviewers, journalists, podcasters, philosophers, activists and change-makers, those seeking mindfulness. It is hard to imagine anyone outside of the group these conversations hope to speak to. Ultimately, the purpose of this series will be to nourish a sensibility of asking and to cultivate Great Askers.

It would be hard to imagine two people more capable of igniting this series than Sara Hendren and Krista Tippet.

Sara Hendren is a design researcher, artist, professor at Northeastern University, fellow at New America, author of the unexampled and award-winning What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World. She is a humanist in tech, and her inquiry is into how perspectives from the arts, humanities, and social sciences shape the "why" and "should" questions about the technologies we build. She is one of my favorite former guests on this show.

Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, a National Humanities Medalist, and a New York Times bestselling author. After studying theology at Yale Divinity School in the early 1990s, she launched Speaking of Faith — later On Being — as a weekly national public radio show in 2003. Her interviews and her three books, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living; Einstein’s God, drawn from her interviews at the intersection of science, medicine, and spiritual inquiry; and Speaking of Faith, have been salves to my life and teachers to my own practice of asking for years.

Thank you to Sara and Krista for being a part of this experiment and the start of a living conversation. Please enjoy this inaugural foray into great asking.