The Great Askers (episode 2): C Thi Nguyen and Julio Ottino
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. Find the inaugural episode here.
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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.
Questions reveal, even to ourselves, what our attention is, what our curiosity is. Your questions hold the contents of your history and your relationality and subconscious. So questions are, in a way, studies of time. Our questions become both the impetus that moves us and the screen upon which our innermost and outermost experience and being are imprinted. A tomography of a life and of a soul.
So we occasionally on this show add to a series called ‘the great askers’ to center the philosophy and practice of asking questions. We do this by talking with the people asking the most meaningful, searching, even troubling questions and on their process for constructing those questions.
The questions we ever utter are, of course, ever flattened versions of what is inside of us, but the Great Askers get closer to it than most and from their art of asking we can learn of the attunement that reaches further inward and connects farther outward. These Great Askers episodes are attempts to know beyond the collection of words that are a question and into the processes that produce them.
Indeed, the art of asking feels like a literacy we need to cultivate for the world we are walking into. In this series we explore people who have cultivated a singular sensibility of asking and draw out that sensibility. The series is 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. Today the conversation continues with Julio Ottino and C. Thi Nguyen.
Julio is a researcher, engineering scientist, artist, author, and educator. The breadth of his science is as wide as the breadth of his activities, touching nonlinear dynamics, geophysics, and complexity science. He is currently dean of the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University. Julio's book The Nexus: Augmented thinking for a complex world -- the new convergence of art, technology, and science with Bruce Mau has been making waves in the world since 2022.
Thi is professor of philosophy at the University of Utah focusing on the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value. He's published on trust, expertise, group agency, value capture, community art, cultural appropriation, aesthetic value, echo chambers, games, and much more. He's one of the great philosophers of games and one of the great modern philosophers. His latest book, out earlier this year, is The Score: How to stop playing somebody else's game.
And there's a singing line between them, Thi as a philosopher, Julio as a complexity scientist: both, in their work as in their lives, resist reduction, refuse facile categorization. They exist in complexity, embrace more of the world's complexity and bear witness to it. This is the site from which great asking emerges.
So, I wanted to have them on the show, together, to explore how they form, ask, hold, revise, and live their questions.