Jesus asked 307 questions and answered three

Why Jesus's questions changed how Jeff talks to his AI assistant and the leaders he coaches.

The story

AI makes you less dumb. So why do most of us still use it wrong?

A note from Jeff.

Who is the smartest person who ever lived?

I would put Jesus near the top of that list. And every time I read the Gospels, the same thing surprises me. He asked far more than he told.

Martin Copenhaver counted. In *Jesus Is the Question* he puts the tally at 307 questions Jesus asked, 183 questions people asked him, and three that he answered.

Three of the questions he asked. Mark 10:51: "What do you want me to do for you?" John 5:6: "Do you want to get well?" Mark 4:40: "Why are you so afraid?"

None of those questions give anyone new information. Each one makes the other person say what they actually want.

Jump two thousand years forward. Fareed Zakaria asked Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, whether AI ends up doing our thinking. "I'm not asking it to think for me," Huang said. He asks it to teach him things he does not know. Putting a good question together, he told Zakaria, is hard mental work. He also said he spends most of his time as a CEO asking questions.

Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, described his own research the same way in a 1991 interview. You never know what you might accomplish, he said. All you do is pursue a question and see where it leads.

I call myself the least technical guy in the room, and I am enjoying this more than I expected to. I started asking my AI assistant questions like these:

• What am I not seeing?
• Argue the other side.
• What question should I be asking?

Information got cheap a long time ago and that is not news. Your phone will give you pi to fifteen decimal places. Jesus did this constantly, and it is what a leader most needs now: knowing what to ask, when to ask it, and how to ask it so the other person answers.

The same skill works outside the chat window. A question that gets a useful answer out of AI works just as well on your team, your kids, and the young leader you meet for coffee. For a lot of the CEOs I walk with, that comes as a relief. You do not have to have every answer. You never did.

More this week

Anthropic's co-founder asked religious traditions to keep questioning AI companies

On May 25 Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, stood in the Vatican's Synod Hall and asked the people in it to hold his industry to account. He was one of five speakers at the presentation of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI, listed by the Holy See as Anthropic's head of research on interpretability. In his published remarks he asked what it looks like for people, families and the world to flourish once these models are everywhere, and noted that parents already worry about their children's minds and workers about the future of their jobs. "These are not questions a lab can answer," he said. He asked for informed critics who will tell the labs when they are failing, and for moral voices that commercial incentives cannot bend.

Anthropic is not alone in asking. The Associated Press reported on October 26 that representatives of Meta, Google and Amazon have also met with the Vatican, and that Anthropic has sat down with scholars, clergy, philosophers and ethicists from more than fifteen religious and cross-cultural groups. Meghan Sullivan, who leads an ethics and AI initiative at the University of Notre Dame, was in one of those meetings and said the sessions are detailed and technical, which she meant as praise.

Not everyone thinks it works. Paolo Carozza, a legal scholar of Catholic social thought who sits on Meta's independent Oversight Board, told the AP that "any living, sophisticated tradition over time is capable of interacting with others outside of it," and that an AI system does not do that in an organic way.

The practice

Ask one question where you would normally give the answer

Most of us answer. Somebody brings a problem, we have seen it before, and we tell them what we would do. It is faster, it is usually right, and it teaches the other person to come back for the next answer instead of working it out.

So this week, pick one conversation where you would normally give advice and ask a question instead. One is enough. A direct report with a stuck project, a kid at dinner, the young leader you meet for coffee.

Then take one real decision to your AI assistant and ask it the same way:

The weak version asks for a verdict, and you will usually get a warm one. The strong version asks for something you cannot see from inside your own plan.

I think the best days for human thinking are still ahead of us. Do you?

Higher ground

Proverbs 18:13 names the habit Jeff is describing. Answering before you have listened is the quickest move available in any meeting, and it is also how a leader stops learning anything from the people who work for them. The three questions above work on an AI assistant because they work on people first. Use one of them before you give your answer this week, then stay quiet long enough to hear the whole reply.

The next step

The AI Edge is free and takes about four minutes. You work through a series of paired choices, and it names which of seven working strengths describes you, along with what AI is likely to absorb from your work and what it will amplify.

Find your AI Edge →

Then hit reply and tell Jeff what happened when you asked a question instead of giving the answer. We read every one.

Climbing with you,
Jeff and Jason