Curiosity is a Superpower

Curiosity and Its Discontents

“Curiosity is what creates empathy. It’s what lets us learn about ourselves and others. It’s what makes it possible to connect.”

Brian Grazer wants you to believe that curiosity is the secret ingredient. Not to wisdom, or justice, or moral courage, those would be too immodest, but to success.

His success. You may have seen his films: A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, 8 Mile. You may not know he got his first job by eavesdropping on a conversation through an open window, calling up Warner Bros. pretending to be pre-ordained for the role, and bluffing his way into a legal clerkship. This is presented as a story of gumption. What it is, of course, is a story of access. Grazer is amazed not by what the job entails, but by how “cushy” it is: paid for eight hours, usually working just one. His first act of “curiosity” is less a search for insight than a well-timed hustle. As he puts it:

“Curiosity has gotten me through every door I've ever entered.”

That’s the animating conceit of his book, A Curious Mind, a brisk, affable, occasionally disarming memoir-cum-manifesto that attempts to turn curiosity into a lifestyle brand. “Emotional curiosity,” he calls it. Not the Socratic itch to interrogate first principles. Not the kind of intellectual restlessness that might get you blacklisted, or burned at the stake. No, this is Hollywood curiosity: flattering, disarming, eager to connect. It's the curiosity of a man who believes every problem can be solved over a tuna sandwich. The “tuna sandwich” detail comes from Grazer's lunch with the LAPD chief, Daryl Gates, during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Amid the city's chaos, Gates calmly offered him a tuna sandwich..

But let’s not be glib. Grazer is not wrong that curiosity is undervalued. What he misses, or avoids, is why. If curiosity is so valuable, so generative, so blissfully life-enhancing, why is it so rare in institutions designed to educate, govern, and employ us? Grazer gestures at an answer, standardized testing, bureaucratic inertia, but he stops short of tracing the shape of the threat. Grazer writes that curiosity in the ‘obedient classroom’ of school was an irritant!

Curiosity, after all, is not neutral. To ask a real question is to introduce instability. Socrates knew this, which is why he was executed. Galileo knew it, which is why he was condemned. Grazer knows it too, but only glancingly: his nod to the Genesis story, where the pursuit of knowledge exiles Adam and Eve from paradise, is framed not as indictment, but as folklore. The serpent, in this account, is less a symbol of forbidden knowledge than a charming talk-show guest, politely indulged but never feared.

The deepest tell comes in Chapter 6, where Grazer describes a curious paradox: when he believes in a project, he shuts down his curiosity. He protects it from questions.

“When I believe in something, really believe in it, I stop asking questions about it. I don’t want to hear the other side.”

At the moment when real inquiry would test his convictions, he retreats into certainty. Curiosity, it turns out, is safe when the stakes are low. When the outcome matters, he discards it in favor of belief. This is not a bug in his worldview, it is the architecture. For Grazer, curiosity is not an ethic. It is a tool.

There is a deeper incoherence at the heart of the book: Grazer insists that curiosity is radical, but he weaponizes it for comfort. His curiosity conversations are rarely confrontational. He doesn’t ask Edward Teller whether the logic of the hydrogen bomb has made us morally obsolete. Instead, he notes feeling "kicked in the stomach" and is captivated by Teller's contempt for storytelling, a personality note, not an ethical rupture. As he says elsewhere:

“I don’t ask questions to be polite. I ask because I really want to know.”

But the wanting rarely survives contact with power. He doesn’t press Carlos Slim on inequality; he marvels at the man’s leisurely appetite for multi-course lunches. He wants to know what makes powerful people tick, but only so far as it reveals a technique, a trick, a secret. He’s not interested in the contradictions that animate a person, only the traits that made them “work.”

And when a conversation brushes up against something genuinely raw, as with Veronica de Negri, a Chilean torture survivor, he alchemizes it into narrative technique. Her pain becomes a resource. Her trauma is not explored for its political context, nor for its ethical demands. It is mined for psychological realism in Apollo 13. Grazer is explicit about the connection between de Negri's experience as a torture survivor and his film. He writes,

“It was Veronica de Negri... who taught me what it’s like to be forced to rely completely on oneself to survive. Veronica de Negri helped us to get Apollo 13 right as surely as Jim Lovell did.”

This is Hollywood curiosity at its most distilled: the impulse to extract poignancy without paying its moral price.

In this way, A Curious Mind is both a celebration and a missed opportunity. It reminds us, rightly, that asking sincere questions is harder than it sounds, and rarer. But it fails to follow its own advice. It does not ask what curiosity costs, who gets punished for it, who is licensed to indulge it. It trades in anecdotes about movie stars and moguls, while the far more vital stories go unasked. As Grazer puts it,

“Curiosity is not a luxury. It’s a necessity.”

…but what he means by necessity is often: a career advantage.

Grazer’s “curiosity conversations” are not philosophical inquiries. They are high-level networking, disguised in the soft language of personal growth. He is not trying to dismantle the master's house; he is asking for a tour. His goal is rapport, not revelation. He wants to understand powerful people to learn their methods, not to question the systems that sustain their power. He meets with etiquette doyenne Letitia Baldrige not to interrogate the class structures that made her relevant, but to absorb her codes. Grazer describes his meeting with the etiquette expert as illuminating the difference between “manners” (compassion) and “etiquette” (the techniques to express it), a set of codes he found practical and now uses “every day”.

That said, there is something undeniably human in Grazer’s compulsion. He wants to understand. That’s not nothing. His curiosity may be bounded by taste, tact, and the PR calculus of the studio lot, but it is genuine. And when it works, when it briefly escapes its instrumental frame, it can feel like a real encounter. As he writes early on:

“I’ve come to see curiosity as a kind of superpower.”

What Grazer gets right, perhaps unintentionally, is that curiosity is a kind of vulnerability. It requires the humility to say: I don’t know. The discipline to keep asking. And the nerve to follow an answer where it doesn’t want to go. His book is not that journey. But it is, at moments, the shiver before the leap.

We need more than that. We need a curiosity that is willing to be inconvenient. That doesn’t just ask how power works, but whether it should. One that listens not to optimize a pitch, but to challenge the premise.

Grazer says that curiosity nourishes romance and all human relationships. To ask honest questions and listen carefully to the answers. Curiosity equips us with the ‘skills’ for openminded, openhearted explorations.

The subtitle of Grazer’s book promises “The Secret to a Bigger Life.” But what we need now is something less palatable and more urgent: the courage to ask smaller, sharper questions that lead us not to a bigger life, but to a better one.

Curiosity can save you from mediocrity and add zest to your life.

Stay curious,

Colin

Image from the film A Beautiful Mind