What If You Could Only Ask Questions?

I met a guy several months back that seemed to know a lot about a lot. The kind of guy that you felt like you could say anything and he would have an answer for it. But it wasn’t really a smart feeling. It was like he had an opinion on it, but it didn’t mean that he actually knew something about it.

There are some people who just legitimately know a lot about random things, but something felt off about this guy, but I couldn’t quite place my finger on what it was…until.

There was something I realized about him. It was that not one time, in the day and a half that I spent hanging with him, did he ask a single question. Every time he spoke it was to give information. He never receives information. This raised a huge red flag for me.

How could someone who doesn’t ask questions be so smart? How did he learn all of his information? Sure, there’s a thing called Google, but if he’s checking Google, it seems there’s a level of curiosity that would also cause him to ask questions…and yet he asked no questions.

This was a bright sign that said “I am untrustworthy!” If he never asked questions, was he taking everything he ever heard at face value? He heard something that sounded interesting and all of a sudden started using it?

I just thought of something yesterday though. What if humans were made so that they could only speak if they were asked to give their opinion on something? You could ask any question that you wanted to, but you could only respond or say anything if someone had directly asked you a question or you yourself were asking a question.

How would that change things? Would we hear from people who are wiser more often? What would a debate look like? How could you cold call a prospect..how even would you answer the phone?

Obviously we would get used to it and everything from our greeting to movies would adapt and change to the setup of the world. But it is fun to imagine what it might look like if we were instantly transferred into that, say tomorrow. The looks on some people’s faces when they couldn’t talk and the look of joy on all the introverts faces who only talk when they were asked a question anyway.

What kind of trouble might it keep you out of if you could only talk when asked a question?