Language Is a Technology — Chris Kantrowitz 2/6

New York, Los Angeles, and what gets lost when people stop building lives in place. That turns into a blunt look at remote work. Automattic made it work by hiring for written communication; most companies just broke the culture they already had.

Then we go somewhere stranger. Chris explains why he sees language as a technology, what his non-speaking son has taught him about communication, and why being in the same room still matters. We get into The Telepathy Tapes, blindfolded perception, psychedelics, lucid dreams, brain filters, and the experiments that might tell us what is actually happening.

It lands back on startups. Shared belief is not fluff. If a team cannot feel the same mission, no stack of tools will manufacture a heart-and-soul company.

Transcript

Pablos: When were you in L.A.? You grew up there?

Chris: I was born in New York. And then my parents came to Los Angeles when I was one.

Pablos: Oh, I see. Are you an actual New Yorker?

Chris: Living in LA, I always considered myself from Los Angeles because I effectively grew up there. But I always confuse people because I don’t act like—my dad’s from Brooklyn. He never lost his Brooklyn accent. Most of my family lives on Long Island. I had a lot of New York attitude in my house, my family. I think, I guess the best way to describe it is, I have California chill and Brooklyn murder.

Pablos: Something like that happened to me because my mom was from here. I grew up in Alaska.

Chris: Kind of like LA. Very similar.

Pablos: Not very similar, but something about her vibe definitely affected me. We relate to each other by arguing.

Chris: No bullshit thing.

Pablos: The no bullshit thing. And then there’s a website that launched today on the Gothamist called Official New Yorker. And you can apply for a certificate that shows you’re an official New Yorker. You should totally do it. There’s a bunch of hoops you’ve got to jump through.

Chris: I did find—it’s funny, I think, and this is probably common with a lot of Americans—like, because I was born here and I grew up in LA, I consider LA home. It didn’t have a history for me.

Just in terms of, like, there’s no family, like, there’s no roots there. Then when I moved back—and I wasn’t longing for that. In fact, when I moved back here, I didn’t really think about it other than, oh, all of my family’s here, and it’s awesome to be around them. For example, the Orpheum Theater down on Second Avenue—that was my great uncle’s theater; used to work there when he was a kid. And my great grandfather had a saloon down on Ludlow Street, and my grandmother got arrested for moonshine.

Pablos: Now you can sort of get these stories and appreciate them.

Chris: My mom was visiting one day, and she said, Akira, my son, he’s a fifth-generation Brooklyner. And I had not thought about that. We went and drove out to his great grandfather’s house. And that suddenly felt nice because I think, for most Americans, this is a melting pot country. Obviously, there were people here a long time ago, but most Americans and their families got here over the last, like, 150 years.

There’s only a few generations of them. You go to almost any other country in the world, and they don’t even think about it because, like, my family has been here for probably forever. To be in a place where that’s there, you do start to feel it more. Somehow it does start to—now you get a feeling of being home.

Because you have these reminders. My dad was in the clothing business in 1411 Broadway. He had a showroom. When I walked by there, it’s like, oh, my dad passed away.

Pablos: That’s cool in a way.

I think society overall is losing that. A hundred years ago, people probably were dead set on trying to put roots down, build a thing, develop that, and invest in a home, invest in the community, invest in building something. And now everybody’s just shuffling constantly. And I think it’s hurting people a lot.

Chris: Don’t disagree with that. One of my companies—we did work from home long before COVID. I knew Matt Mullen. I was sort of inspired by what he was doing. And for me, it was quality of life because I said to my team, how long does it take you to get ready in the morning? About 45 minutes. How long does it take you to work? About 45 minutes. Then you get to work. By the time you get to work, you’ve already spent an hour and a half just getting here and getting ready.

You go to lunch, then you come back, and then you do some work, and you go home. I’m like, at least four or five hours a day are just spent getting ready, getting home, all the things. I’m like, wouldn’t you just rather work from home? And since you’re making software, it’s easier to make more accountable because, like, either you’re writing code or you’re not. But then COVID happened, all the other things. And I just realized that, man, it’s just really nice to be in the room with people.

Pablos: I think what gets lost for a lot of people who use Matt as an example is, like, every single person he hires is basically ranked for their written communication skills. That’s what WordPress is about, is, like, people who want to write and post and share. And all the people who work at Automatic are built for that. And they can function.

Chris: They started that way.

Pablos: You built it that way.

Chris: When you switch to it, because you’re like—it breaks your culture. Because, like, if you start from scratch that way and you hire people that, like, you can do it, that’s one thing. But I think all the companies that switched—and obviously many had to—probably really suffered for it.

Pablos: Oh, this whole generation that just got out of college—their first job is a work-from-home thing—a disaster.

Chris: Living in New York, at least, even if you do work from home, you can walk outside and around people.

And every other one is just nothing compared to this. A little bit Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, to some extent, but it’s also pretty spread out.

Pablos: In Seattle, you can walk outside. You’re not going to be anybody there. Maybe.

Chris: Someone on their mountain bike.

Pablos: Totally. I think there’s a reckoning coming. We have to figure out how to make modern societies that are more functional for people.

Chris: I think the biggest thing is—to the point—is that people are used to communicating through devices. And I have a son who’s not speaking. He’s very telepathic.

Pablos: I did. I’m telling other people about it.

Chris: It’s funny. A lot of times when I tell people about my son, the first thing they say is, I’m sorry. And I’m like, why? I’m like, actually, it’s easier because he’s empathetic. This is my personal view. Maybe it’s true or not, but, like, language is a technology. We developed this language, maybe, that we can preserve stories, or whatever it was.

There’s actually—here in New York, there’s a group called Mind See—and what they’re doing is, they can teach you how to see through a black mask.

Pablos: This woman I met in Austin a week ago, she showed me the mask. It’s, like, the blackest mask of all time. I was impressed by the mask. She put it on, just opened my book, and started reading it.

Chris: Where’s David Copperfield?

Pablos: Totally. And she’s taught a thousand people, most of them kids, how to do it.

Chris: I’ve seen kids do it.

Pablos: Including skeptics, who I’ve sent in there.

Chris: Part two to what they’re doing.

Pablos: I didn’t listen to the second season of Telepathy Tapes, and I guess she’s on that. But I want to set up—my interest in this is, there’s clearly some communication channel that isn’t electromagnetic that these folks have been able to use. And it’s taboo in science to go find it. We should fucking try to find it.

Chris: This is the whole story of Telepathy Tapes.

Pablos: I wanted to try and help. I talked to her about it. I said, look, let me bring top neuroscientists.

Chris: Because the part two to this is that there is a—I think NYU—they’re doing a study there where they take people who are doing the process and put them into an fMRI machine. They can identify the part of the brain that’s illuminated when this is happening.

Pablos: I met a woman who did that. Not fMRI. She was using EEG, I think. But I want to figure out, like, we need to do those things. We need to figure out, like, what fMRI is doing. You can see what’s happening in the brain to some extent. But the thing—the reason I think it’s cool—is if you could find that channel, and there’s at least one plausible explanation that scientists accept, which would be quantum entanglement, which we know very little about. But it’s at least a way that maybe some message could be getting in and out of a brain. And maybe it’s something else, but one way or another, we should find it.

Because if we do figure it out, and we figure out how to read and write that channel, those nonverbal autistic kids become—and go from being kind of, like, in a lot of ways, the least useful humans to the most useful overnight. They’d have Chat GPT in their brain, Wikipedia in their head. They’d have the best brain-computer interface of all time.

Chris: I know we’re gonna probably bounce around this whole conversation, which I love. But that was the point about—I want to put a pin in the last thing—that even when we don’t know that, even we don’t tap into the telepathic parts of our brains, we are at times telepathic. Because there’s, for example, you think about someone, they call you, or whatever. Or, like, you’ll be with a friend that you’re really close to, and you’ll say something. You’re like, I was just thinking that.

That’s—we know it’s there. That’s part one. Then part two, going back to what we’re talking about, I think that’s also the problem with why not having people in a room together—because even subconsciously, we are communicating quantumly. And I always say to any skeptic, if you’ve done psychedelics, there’s no way you don’t believe in telepathy, because the experiences that you have on them are just pretty wild.

Actually, I’m a semi-not-professional lucid dreamer, but I do have them at times.

Pablos: Are there professionals who get paid to do that?

Chris: No, there are people that really do. I do.

I have really wild dreams with my son now, actually. But last week I had a dream where my whole family was under attack by some, like, thing. And I went to go, like, fight it. And I had to fight it with ideas, but telepathically. And then I realized that I was in a dream. And then I was, it was almost like, I wasn’t saying words, but I was like, It was like I was like phaser blasting my brain with it.

And in the dream, I had this realization. I was like, oh, I’m in this dream. These are my ideas. And suddenly this other being was like, you are correct. And the being I was attacking kind of dissipated. And then I said, no, actually, these aren’t my ideas. These are the ideas from the universe. And suddenly the being is like, now you are really correct. And it pulled me up out of where I was into the universe. And I was like, that’s it. And then the dream ended.

Pablos: We might be just blocking out all this good stuff.

Chris: That is kind of what the brain is designed to do.

Pablos: Maybe I don’t know. I just want to find it. If there’s a channel, I want to find it.

Chris: That’s kind of what the default mode network is.

Pablos: But all those things can be explained internally within one brain. And even the psychedelics, you could say, we don’t know if your brain is making it up. But if we have these repeatable tests, like the telepathy tapes showed, and if we can do them in a rigorous fashion and make them repeatable and measure what’s happening, I think we might be able to break this. In the same way that psychedelics was taboo for our whole lives, but in the last five, ten years, has been broken open as a legitimate area for research. That’s what needs to happen here. And maybe we can help. I want to get Penn & Teller to help. I want to get top neuroscientists to help.

Chris: The thing about the brain making it up, here’s one example. My son’s mother’s father is a musician. He’s a pretty successful musician. I was talking one day about his process for writing music. And he said, I write a lot of my songs in my dreams.

I remember, maybe a year later, I was having one of my lucid dreams, and I was in this white-box room, almost like an art gallery. But there was just one frame on the wall, and it was white in the middle—just an empty frame, basically. And I was like, huh, I wonder if I can paint a painting. And then suddenly a painting appeared. And it was a painting I’d never seen before. And it was not like the way I would draw something, which would be, like, scratch marks. I don’t know how to draw. Or paint. It was almost like a 16th-century master.

And I was like, I wonder if I can do that again. Boom, something totally different. How about again? Boom, something totally different. And also different genres, beautiful stuff. I was like, wow, it’s amazing. And then I was like, how about now? How about again? How about again? And then it went to like this. Wow. I was literally rolling paintings like this. And I was going, fuck, this is insane. And then when I woke up, I was like, oh, I can visualize paintings. Nope, I can’t.

Pablos: The thing is, I remember this documentary I saw. It’s been years ago at this point, but where they were using magnetic resonance on the brain. They’d have a guy like you draw a horse. And you’d be like, stick, figure, fucking horse. Then they put this thing on for, like, 15 minutes. It’s magnetic resonance. Basically numbs part of the brain, and they’re like, draw a horse, and then you can draw, like, a photorealistic horse. It’s in your brain.

Oh, it’s basically a magnet, but that’s just vibrating magnetic field. We don’t know.

Chris: It’s resonance.

Pablos: It’s resonance just means it’s oscillating.

Chris: Isn’t the basic construct of all matter in the universe sound?

Pablos: Vibration and magnetic vibration might be different than—like, they might be in frequencies you couldn’t get, manipulating things in a different way than you could get from sound waves. But the point being, they’re not able to turn on a part of the brain. They’re turning off the part that’s filtering what you use to draw. It’s this crazy thing.

And, like, in your dream, you’re tapping into the part that can draw and paint, which normally, when you’re awake, you can’t get to—that part of the brain. That’s what I think is going on. It’s exciting stuff to figure. We’re at this moment where we’re going to be able to start figuring some of this stuff out, I think.

Chris: We’ve had—I’ll give you a very recent experience with our son’s telepathy. His mom and I, we’re not seeking his telepathy. In fact, we’ve always had this thing where—and he’s also not autistic. A lot of these kids are autistic.

Pablos: He’s not autistic?

Chris: No. He has an unbalanced translocated chromosome at the moment of conception, one piece of one of the chromosomes basically broke off. Most people have balanced translocated chromosomes. When you have that, nothing happens. But when it’s unbalanced, something happens. And it depends on which chromosome, how much breaks off.

His pons and his cerebellum are slightly smaller. His center for language is just reduced. When I’m with him, I don’t even consider the idea that he’s nonverbal, because we communicate in many different ways. But one of the ways he communicates is with this device called AAC. It’s, like, an app that basically has words and pictures.

Everything’s done in, like, menu sections. It might be, like, food, breakfast, cereal. It’s, like, three layers deep to get the cereal.

Pablos: That thing speaks out loud?

Chris: Like cereal.

We like to put the names of people in his life in there. He can talk about them. We put her name in. We’re sitting there with mom, and I’m talking to his mom, and she’s doing her thing, and suddenly hear Croatia. And she goes, I’m from Croatia. And I looked at his mom, and I was like, did we know that? She’s like, I definitely never heard her say that. She’s like, I’ve never said that either.

Now, in order for him to get to Croatia, he had to go—her name’s Duda—doctors, people. Three levels up, and then places, countries, and then to a page that has 190 of them.

And he didn’t go, like, Grenada, Liberia, Croatia. It was, like, Croatia.

Pablos: And did they get to have a conversation about Croatia after that?

Chris: No, but I think that’s the thing. Companies—and I think also for founders, too—there’s a lot of unsaid connectivity that I think is critical to build a successful company. Because the culture, in a lot of ways, your culture might be more important in the business.

Pablos: I think that can be true.

Chris: Because you want people, at least for startups, that are willing to spill blood for it because they believe in it. And I think creating belief systems starts with connectivity. And certainly, there’s a lot of companies being founded today that are just a lot of people coding, and sure, that’s maybe an easy way to do it. But when you look at heart-and-soul companies, they’re all heart, they’re all human. It’s what people gravitate towards. And I do think—I think pendulums will start to swing. I think this is a generation of people that just didn’t know what it was like.

I do think humanity has a real innate ability to correct itself at times because the heartbeat’s still inside your body. What’s the point of starting a company unless the people working there are actually enjoying being there?

Pablos: You just have to share something. What you have to start with is you have to have some shared vision for what you’re trying to do. And if you don’t all have that and aren’t on the same page about it, then you’re fighting against each other. You’re not going to be successful anyway. It just feels so important. I think there’s been some analogizing in Silicon Valley that startups have to be like a cult. And I think that’s true in some sense. You’ve got to be able to get everybody to believe this thing is worth doing, believe it’s possible to do it, believe that this is the way to do it, that we can do it. All that has to come together.

Transcript

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Thanks, we need good co-conspirators.