let's be honest we've all seen people asking questions for the sake of asking questions whether it's at school in a meeting on clubhouse this happens a lot and we've all had the thought of oh gosh that is such a stupid question um but on the flip side there were so many questions i did not ask because i was afraid of sounding stupid i don't know is this something i should know or am i actually asking a question that is interesting or will help us get to the answer after a long time of struggling with this testing different methods i finally found the way to deal with those moments in life where we have to participate in something we don't fully understand we'll use the cunning cunningham humble hannah and curious kathy to bring together psychology tools that we can use in questioning something that we don't fully understand and turn our lack of knowledge into an advantage and be memorable in a good way so let's get to the first one cunning cunningham oh and this is specifically for topics that we don't know much about if you want to know more about good question techniques you can check out the video here but let's get to cutting cunningham first this is where we're going to use that human tendency to want to correct others and feel good about ourselves now cunning cunningham comes from cunningham's law which is a trick used a lot by educators to engage students we've all been in the classroom before where no one can be bothered except for the penis unless the teacher says something like 0.99999 is the same as 1. all of a sudden the classroom comes alive and people are arguing between is 0.999 and 1 the same thing or not cunningham's law states that if you want to get to the right answer don't ask the right question but state the wrong answer first this will generate an emotional response which makes people care so we're going to adapt this to questioning let's imagine you are hosting a podcast interview and elon musk is your guest he is kind of a crazy genius and we don't want to sound dumb in front of him but he knows a lot more than we do most people will consciously or unconsciously want to hide the fact they don't know as much about airspace about electric cars as lylon does so the information extracted will be very limited the further you go the more obvious it is that you don't know as much so instead let's use cunningham's law say you want to talk about spacex but you don't know anything about space aeronautics you want to just articulate based on what you understand what space x is and get elon to elaborate and correct you here's an example from bradley hayes meyer interviewing elon exactly about spacex and in a moment we'll talk about how can we make this question even more effective we're at his rocket and spaceship company 2002 you start spacex are you just thinking yeah space exploration that's what i want to do how did this idea come about for you uh well i've been interested in space for for a long time okay basically from when i was in college there were three areas that i thought would most affect the future of humanity one was the internet another one was sustainable energy and the third was space exploration but particularly making life multi-planetary here essentially bradley was trying to say hey i think this was what you were thinking yes or no and elon musk went ahead and corrected him by elaborating and telling him the story of no actually i was interested in space back in college that's a pretty good start but if you are an avid fan of villons you know that he's been telling this story over and over again because people keep on asking the same questions over and over again so how can you draw something interesting and new out of elon with your questions how do you make yourself look good and memorable to elon even though you don't know anything about the topic and that's where we'll go to the second person which is humble hannah this is where we set expectations and be socially humble and socially humble is the key word let me give you an example let's say i was the one interviewing elon it goes something like what first jimmy to spacex was its ambitious bold clear message making life multiplanetary i don't know much about space exploration and a lot of people who are listening today are still wrapping their head around what colonizing mars looks like now let's break this down before i go to the actual question first you want to set the expectation of how much you know if it's not within your expertise you can go out and acknowledge that but you can connect it to your expertise for example i talk about communication so i put that in there and tell him that this is my point of view it's different from yours but here is how i see it this sets the stage letting the other person know yes you are the expert i'm not going to fight you on it because even as a speaker as a guest they are still nervous to some degree so you want to be able to help them open up and tell you the valuable information and when you tell them you are the expert i don't know much about it it helps them to over share now the second part is being socially humble bringing other people into this conversation it's so important especially in three big ways first it helps you normalize the fact that you don't know much about space exploration because most people aren't nasa geniuses that's one way of helping you normalize then it helps you to connect with your peers whether it's in a classroom whether it's in a meeting there are other people listening as well right so you want to bring them onto your side right that they don't know much and now instead of judging you they're thinking oh she or he is standing up and representing me and asking a question that i don't want to ask because i don't want to sound stupid so now you have people on your side then the third one is for the speaker to know which level of depth they need to go into in order to explain their thought process because if most people are beginners on this topic they will then adjust how they talk about now let's combine it with the cunningham's law something like living on mars sounds exciting but even nasa is just sending little robot rovers there so is colonizing mars really possible how long is it going to take and is it really necessary now here you can challenge the speaker a little right by saying is going to mars really possible or is it even necessary of course this is the wrong answer in the cunningham's law right i mean elon musk is doing this because you think it is both possible and necessary but because you set the stage i'm not here to fight you i have a very basic understanding of this i'm just speaking for the rest of us who have the same questions what are your thoughts this makes the speaker actually more likely to mention something new something interesting in a different way that they haven't talked about before now step three is all about the follow-up and this is so crucial because it helps you build a personal connection with the speaker which makes you more memorable as well as delivering value to the speaker even though you don't know much about the topic how do i deliver value to someone who knows a lot more than me and here value does not equal information as greek philosopher talis says the easy thing to do in life is to give advice the hard thing to do in life is to know yourself and you can actually help the other person know who they are what are they thinking by asking them questions and i saw this happening in brian grazer's book face to face he is an oscar-winning movie producer who's done eight miles with eminem american gangster a beautiful mind 24 apollo 13 arrested development and he holds curiosity conversations every two weeks with experts outside of the entertainment industry in fields that he doesn't know like politics president obama president bush with the japanese mafia and cia he holds it with astronauts physicians who's developed the polio vaccine all sorts of people and he brings value by asking questions and offering stories and here are some of his questions that are really profound to help the other person share something personal and help them think about who i am and why do i think the way that i think what is your unique view on the world what's most meaningful to you what's top of mind for you right now doesn't mean you have to ask these questions word for word but you can use these as inspirations to help draw out the context from the other person what were you thinking when you came up with this how were you thinking about the world when you made the conclusion of i'm going to go into space exploration and i'm sure many of us have experienced this where as we were talking with someone we come up with a really good point right and that's because the other person drew it out of us so we can do the same with our follow-up questions after the person has shared and corrected us in our understanding of their field and when someone makes us feel good about ourselves that helps draw out our genius then we want to engage with this person more so next time when you're engaging in a topic that you don't fully understand don't worry about sounding stupid think about cunning cunningham humble hannah and curious cathy if you found this helpful make sure you give it a thumbs up subscribe if you haven't already it really helps the channel i'll put up the other video on asking good questions as well as communicating clearly and i will see you in the next video bye