Why Language is the Ultimate Human Technology

There's a technology you use every waking second that you’ve probably never recognised as a technology. It built every bicycle, every courtroom, every marriage, every World Cup final. It’s language. And we just handed it to the machines — with no guardrails. That's why AI frightens us at a level we can't quite name. And here’s what we can do about it. 

In Episode 8, I open the door on linguistic ontology — the field underneath the coaching I’ve practised for two decades, and refined into the method I call Effective Inquiry. This isn't something to believe. It's something to test on yourself: a lens that, once you put it on, makes every other tool you already use sharper rather than redundant.

Come and see the sea of language you've been swimming in, and learn how to put it to work in your own life before the machines do it without you knowing what’s happened.

Show notes

This is the first of an arc taking Effective Inquiry out of the closed training room and into a form you can run on yourself. It starts where almost no tradition looks directly: at language itself — not as a way of describing the world, but as a technology that creates it.

In this episode:

• Why language is the one technology we never recognise as a technology.
• The painting exercise: how to catch that you're not thinking, you're listening — to a conversation made of words.
• Declarations — the utterances that don't describe reality but bring it into being ("I find the defendant guilty," "You're fired," "Penalty!").
• The conditions a declaration needs: authority, legitimacy, a structure to catch it.
• A test you can run now: move one wish from I want to I will, and watch what surfaces.
• Why this augments Stoicism, CBT, positive psychology and mindfulness rather than replacing them — with a Vipassana retreat story that shows the difference.
• "But isn't this just The Secret?" — a straight answer for the sceptics.
• Why a "large language model" is exactly the thing we should have seen coming.

Mentioned: Episode 3 (seeing without explaining); YouTube video on shifting from "I want" to "I will."

A written companion to this episode is on Substack under my name. 

If something lands for you, share it with someone who'd benefit. 

If you'd like to take it further, the ways to work with me are in the links.

Come sceptical. Stay curious.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to episode eight. By creating artificial intelligence, we humans have given away our most powerful technology, language, before we've even properly understood its power for ourselves. No wonder we have such a visceral fear about what AI means for us. It's too late to put the poop back in the donkey, as the saying goes, but we can develop a proper understanding of what we're dealing with.

[00:00:23] Today, I'm gonna show you this and a few other things about language and about being human that you probably haven't considered before. I'll show you how language is our most powerful technology, and how you can use it deliberately to improve the quality of your life and maybe do a few things that AI can't do. And this is not about AI specifically, it's about being human. And you will see why we're so afraid of AI, because we've given it, this most powerful tool - I'm gonna show you today why it's such a powerful tool - and we've given AI no guardrails with that powerful tool. 

[00:00:56] This is What to Believe: Finding Signal in the Noise. I'm Neil Bierbaum, a journalist turned master coach, reporting what I've found across four decades investigating the bug in the human operating system. If you've been with me since the start, you'll know that I've spent a lot of time on three different ways that that bug shows up. That's being right, looking good, and asserting our preferences as automatic mechanistic ego reactions. And I've focused a lot on the one in particular, being right, and that's because it's important, and I'm sure you'll agree, incredibly relevant for today's world. But there's much more ground to cover, so we'll come back to those again and again, but we're gonna broaden the field today.

[00:01:36] And I'm drawing from a field called linguistic ontology, which has been developed into a modality called ontological coaching over the last few decades. I trained and became a trainer in that modality more than 20 years ago, and over that time, I've developed my own version of it, which I call Effective Inquiry. And today, we're gonna start exploring that landscape. I'm gonna start sharing some information that underpins the powerful practice of coaching that we've come to know in the world today, and I'm gonna do it in a way that you can start to use it for and on yourself. And you'll see this isn't something to believe or convince yourself of.

[00:02:12] It's a technology that you can use and test and build a case for in your own life, and that will inevitably impact what you believe. And what you will experience is that you'll get better at dealing with what's real and what matters.

[00:02:25] So what do I mean when I say language is a technology? Well, a technology enables us to do more than we could with our own bare hands. You wanna dig a hole? Well, you could use your bare hands, or you could use a spade, or you could come like our local, uh, electricity department does whenever their power fails or the water department here in Johannesburg.

[00:02:47] We often have power and water failures, and they come and dig with one of those big JCBs, those big yellow excavator backhoe loader thingies. They just haul everything, cables and everything out the ground and destroy the place in order to fix what is broken. So it can be used clumsily, yes, but technology certainly augments our capabilities. It takes them a lot less time to do it that way than if they got four guys digging with spades.

[00:03:11] So technology augments our capabilities. And the one technology we have that we don't recognize as a technology is language. Language is what distinguishes us from other living creatures. It's not walking upright or having opposable thumbs that gives us bicycles, cars, rockets, although those things do help, the thumbs and the being biped. But even with those things, we would still be unable to make a bicycle or car, rocket if we didn't have language.

[00:03:43] Let me walk you through what I mean. Try this exercise. If there's a painting near you or a photograph or on the wall, or in fact, any object you can rest your eyes on, just look at it for a second. Now, while you're looking at it, are you only looking, or are you also at the same time listening? And if you know about the observer mind, that's not where I'm taking this, so you want to stay doing the exercise.

[00:04:08] Pause this for a moment if you need to and check for yourself, because I'd put it to you that you're listening while you're looking. There's a voice. It's saying something like, "Oh, that's the one from so and so," or, "That frame's crooked," or, "Why am I doing this exercise? Where is he going with this?" Or, "I already know all this stuff. What am I doing here?" That's the voice. You're looking at the painting or the thing, and you're listening to yourself talk about it.

[00:04:34] We usually call that thinking, and we leave it there as if thinking explains it. And for those who are aware of the observer mind, you say you're observing thinking. But thinking is a vague word, a more generic word for a very specific thing. You're having a conversation. With yourself. In words. And that last piece is the key. Hold onto it, because that small observation, that the substance of the thinking is language, the form it takes is linguistic, is language, is the whole of what I want to get into today. And I'll be honest with you, it took me about twenty years of meditating to stop walking past it. It required somebody to point it out to me, even though it was there all the time for me to see.

[00:05:17] Now look outside of yourself. Look at the furniture around you. Maybe some of it's made of wood. Imagine you're the carpenter who made that furniture. You worked with wood. You, let's say you're the carpenter who works with wood. Your material is wood. You need to know about wood and how to use tools to impact that wood. You need to know what the different tools do and the texture and the use of different applications of different kinds of wood. And to learn that, you serve an apprenticeship, and you learn by doing, sure, but how do you know what to do in the first place, what to look for?

[00:05:51] Well, you get instruction from your master, right? And what form does that instruction take? Words, language. Now let's say you get promoted to manager of the workshop. What's your material now? It's not wood anymore, it's people. And what's the tool for people? The tool is conversations, instructions, guidance, feedback, handling conflict, all take the form of conversations.

[00:06:16] Now take that home, your relationship. Well, that's one long conversation, right? Never-ending conversation. Or being a parent, a friend. These are all conversations. Oh, and on the way home, you're in the traffic. How do you know what to do in the traffic? How do you all avoid crashing into each other? Traffic rules, which exist in language, which exist as language. Language and nothing else.

[00:06:38] And you stop to buy something on the way home. You know what you need because it's on the shopping list, in words. You take in the advertising, read the packaging. Language again. You spend money. What is money? It's an agreement, in language. You get home, and on the television is some sport. Those big rugby players could easily flatten the referee and just do what they want, but they don't. Why? Because they've agreed to a set of rules which are written in language, and the referee's decision, which gets spoken in words, tells them what to conform to, what to do. That's how the game is shaped. Let's say now at home you wanna show your child how to build something. You describe it using language, and your younger child doesn't know what something is. So what do you do? You give them language for it.

[00:07:26] We live in a sea of language. We're so soaked in it, we can't see the water. We literally could not have the world we have or be the beings we are if we did not have language. It all happens in language. It's actually hard to fathom just how significant this is And let me show you.

[00:07:45] We think language describes the world. For example, the table is white. Language tells you about something else, the color of the table. The color exists separately from the table. The ball is round. The ball and its roundness exist, and language points to it, points it out, lifts it from its background, you could say.

[00:08:04] Now take that into human behavior. All the philosophies from Stoicism through empirical sciences like behaviorism look at behavior and see that thoughts impact behavior, but they look past what those thoughts are made of, the language. They don't look at the material of thought, the language, the words as the thing itself.

[00:08:22] But some language doesn't point at anything, it is the thing. The saying of it is the existence of it. For example, " I congratulate you." The congratulation is the thing. You can give them a prize, a cup, but the congratulation exists in and of itself in language as a word. If there was no cup, there would still be the congratulation.

[00:08:43] If the person wasn't congratulated, they would still feel begrudged, whereas now they have a thing, the congratulation that was spoken in words in front of other people. You literally speak it into being. The speaking is the thing, and this is not in a woo-woo manifestation sense. It's literal. You can look at it and see.

[00:09:02] In linguistic terms, we'd call that a declaration. A declaration creates a reality forever in time. That person will have been congratulated. It means something. They can carry it forward. If they had not been, as I said, they would have something missing from their lives. They would develop a story out of that, one that might affect their lives. "Nobody ever cared what I did. Nobody noticed me." So it's real.

[00:09:26] Now to get technical, a declaration is an utterance that brings a new state of affairs into existence at the moment it's spoken. So let's look at a more consequential one than a congratulation. It's one of the strongest examples I can give you. Let's say a judge says, "I find the defendant guilty." Where is the guilt? It's not in the gavel. It's not in the bricks of the courtroom. It's not a fact lying around to be picked up. The declaration creates the guilt. A person's whole life bends. They're going to prison, and everything that follows flows from that sentence having been spoken out loud.

[00:10:04] Another one, "You're fired." Well, your life just changed. "Penalty!" Your team just won — or lost — the World Cup. Or, "The Oscar goes to..." Your professional value just went through the roof, or if it wasn't you, then it did not. In each of those cases, you can see a whole new reality hinges on the words that are spoken. Reality reorganizes itself around that utterance. It's not poetry, it's mechanics And it scales all the way down to your own life, which is where it starts to matter for you personally. I'll get to that in a minute.

[00:10:41] So of course, we need to acknowledge that declarations have conditions. The judge can declare guilt because there's a matching reality in the world. There's a legal system, a bunch of evidence presented in accordance with that system, all in language, by the way, the system and the evidence, and the authority that that system has granted him or her.

[00:11:01] There's also a structure to enforce it, the prison, that system. Or your boss has a legal system and HR. The Oscars have Clint Eastwood. The point is the utterance is contextually appropriate. You can't just walk into the street and declare yourself a billionaire if you have no money or declare yourself king if you have only your best friend handing you a crown. There's no structure to catch it, to hold it. Well, there are some institutions that take care of people who do that, but they're not the ones you want to be in.

[00:11:31] Still, within your world, within your legitimate domain of power, you do have authority to make declarations, ones that change the course of your life. And here's where this gets useful for you, because many people drift through life waiting and hoping that something will happen to them or for them without ever recognizing that they have this power in their hands.

[00:11:51] Notice the kinds of conversation you might have with yourself or with your best friend. "I wish I could get a better job. I hope I get offered that job. I want a better job." Try that on versus, "I will get a better job." Try that now with something you've been wishing for, hoping for. Change your languaging of it. Go from I hope or I want to I will

[00:12:11] What did you notice? Do you feel your energy shift? It's like putting a magnet under a pile of iron filings. Or maybe it awakens a fear in you or skepticism. Well, guess what? Then you're looking at the thing that's honestly been standing in your way all this time. That fear or that skepticism is the thing you need to deal with, and it arises because of the language that you used that forced it to the surface. The declaration lifted it out of its grey background. And if a coach was coaching you, that's what they'd listen for, and that's what they'd coach you on. And here going through this, you can start to learn to do it for yourself.

[00:12:46] We'll spend the whole of the next episode looking at how to use speech acts, that's what we call them, and the power that lies in using them, and what it costs you when you don't. If you can't wait for that, there's a video on my YouTube channel about changing your use of language from, "I want," to, "I will." You can look that one up.

[00:13:03] What I'm hoping to achieve today with this episode is to get you interested and inspired enough to join me for this whole journey and invite others to join too. I'm hoping you can see that there's something different going on here, something the world needs individually and collectively, and something that's not covered by other popular modalities, Stoicism, positive psychology, CBT, mindfulness. Those are all excellent. I use them all, all the time, and I'm not taking away from them. But this language lens makes your use of those tools sharper.

[00:13:33] My wife is a clinical psychologist with a PhD and thirty years experience. She's at the top of her field in this country, the leading practitioner in her field, and she can't get enough of this stuff. She's incorporated a lot of it into what she does, and she often comes home and tells me that it's helped her. She's learned from me as much as I've learned from her, and I've learned a lot from her.

[00:13:52] So those other modalities all work. They're all valid. I use them, as I said, all the time. The Stoic, for example, learns to meet what he or she can't control with equanimity. That's real. I use it, I do a whole master class on it. I'm grateful for it. The mindfulness practitioner learns to sit with what arises and observe with objectivity. The positive psychology research on flow and meaning is solid science, and I lean on it all the time. I've developed frameworks out of it. So none of that is in dispute.

[00:14:22] Here's the one thing I'll say, though. None of them looks directly at language as the thing. They work with the mind, on the mind, around the mind, with thinking as thinking. But this one fact that your thinking is made of language, that you exist as language - when you say I, it exists as a word, it comes out as language - that sits underneath all of them, and almost none of the great traditions turns and looks straight at it. So I'm not offering a replacement. I'm offering an additional lens. And the strange thing about this lens is that when you put it on, the other practices get sharper, not redundant.

[00:14:58] In fact, if I could ground that in an example of where I saw the difference that having this view of language as a technology can make was many years ago, probably close to twenty years ago, when a number of us who had trained in this ontological language-based coaching went on the Vipassana ten-day Vipassana retreat.

[00:15:17] So you are silent for ten days. You sit for ten hours a day, two hours at a time, meditating, no talking or eye contact throughout those whole ten days. And every evening there's a discourse. And on the last day, we had a gathering of everyone who was attending, and everybody shared notes, and we continued to meet with some of the attendees afterwards in further meditation sessions.

[00:15:38] And when the four of us who came from the ontological tradition who had attended and when we finally got together and compared notes, all four of us independently had landed on the same thing. We all felt that we had been getting those discourses and the whole meaning of the methodology at a different level from what we would have without this ontological lens.

[00:15:59] And we could say exactly why. It's because we had learned to separate out language as an entity on its own, as the substance of thought. Not thought itself, but a separate element. So while others were watching thought, feelings, and sensations, we were also watching language itself in operation. So we could see when we were using empowering or disempowering language, different speech acts internally going on. So we had that fourth distinction.

[00:16:24] And in linguistic ontology, we'd call that having a distinction, so a refinement in language that helps something stand out from a background. An example of that would be going into a field of snow with someone who lives in the ice and snow, and you go there with them, and they've grown up in a culture that lives in the ice and snow, and you see a white field of snow. But they see seven different kinds of snow, and they have a, a word for each one because they've languaged it, and so they can see the wet snow in the middle distance that you need special equipment for. They're not gonna get stuck, whereas you would. And how would you find out about that snow? Well, you'd either go and get stuck, and then you'd develop your own language for it, or they could tell you using language, and if you couldn't understand their language, you'd struggle to get the message.

[00:17:11] So the point here is it's all language, folks. When we have language for things, it gives us power over them, so language is a technology that gives us more leverage over reality. Recognize what we're doing. We're focusing on language as a technology, and there's so much power in this. What I plan to do in future episodes is to take you through this landscape of language, and you'll find new vistas, whole vistas of understanding and personal power opening up for you. It will improve your results, your relationships, and your experience of life. It will even transform the way you view politics and all the drama that's happening in the world because you'll learn to deal with what's real and what matters. And that's a promise from me. And a promise, by the way, is a declaration. A promise is the thing. It exists now because I spoke it into being. I now have to deliver on it, and you can rely on me to do that.

[00:18:02] While we're on the subject of language, maybe I can add in a few extra notes here, things that I know will come up for you in the next few days as you think about language, and they're all topics we'll cover separately in future episodes. So I'll just touch on them lightly here in a way that helps you to hold them peacefully, especially the skeptics among you like I am, my people.

[00:18:21] So some of the things that might come up, the one is the power to manifest. Like does this mean you can write down goals and they become real and true, et cetera? Does the use of speech acts equate to manifestation practices taught through books like The Secret? Well, yes and no. I've seen this work in remarkable ways where I've written down a very specific goal to get a car or to get a house at a time when it was important to do so.

[00:18:47] Not out of an ego thing, like I didn't write down Lamborghini, I did my maths, worked out what I could afford, what I needed. I wrote down very specifically what was required in those parameters, and when I went afterwards to check, I realized how remarkable it was, how accurately the thing had showed up.

[00:19:06] And I've also seen it not work, and my experience tells me that it points back to what I said earlier about a declaration requires a domain of authority and legitimacy. And in your personal life, well, you can't just impose yourself on reality where you have no authority, you haven't done the training, you haven't got the education, you haven't developed the constructs to make that money. If you don't have a leverageable business, you can't sell a, a business. If it's not there, it's not there.

[00:19:36] So you have to be in this conversation with reality where you are creating and then responding to what's happening in your world, what's the next step? So your words need to match your world. You need to listen as well to what wants to happen. It's more about taking the next step in harmony with what's already emerging. Then your declarations help to sharpen your mind as to what to look for, what decisions to make in response to what comes up. And then things will start to appear out of your environment that you notice and you start taking decisions in that direction. And it's not, as I'm saying, it's not like something you can wave a wand and, and throw around. It's something that requires some, some real precision and understanding and working with. So we'll go into that in some more detail.

[00:20:22] Another thing you might wonder is about, and notice is about how there's more language than ever. I mean, we've got more information than any humans who've ever lived, more words out there, and yet, funnily enough, less agreement about what any of it means. So we're drowning in information, and that always reminds me of the T.S. Eliot quote, "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?"

[00:20:44] And wisdom is about seeing things without explaining them, a direct experience of a thing without languaging it, explaining it. I covered this extensively in Episode Three. You can go back and have a look at that. And what is there to see? Well, what is the one thing we're not seeing? We're not seeing language itself. That's the whole point of today. We're lost inside the language. We're not looking at the phenomenon of language as a technology. When we do look at language as a technology, we can be more like what Henry David Thoreau said when he went off into the wilderness, into Walden, and he said that once you've read one news story, you've read them all because you can see the pattern, and it just keeps repeating itself.

[00:21:23] And he was talking about the behavioral pattern, the political pattern. And here we're seeing him and raising him by one degree. We're looking at the language pattern. What are the linguistic elements that people are using consistently? And when you learn to recognize that, you can see, oh, there are declarations, there are excuses, there are, false assertions, et cetera.

[00:21:43] And then you don't get lost in the content of that, arguing the content. You see what people are doing at a language level, and you can say, "Okay, I don't need to engage that," or, "This is what would be needed in that situation," or, "This is the appropriate response from me." So you start to deal with reality at a different level because reality is made of language, human reality.

[00:22:04] So stay with me and I'll cover those patterns in future episodes as we get more and more into the different linguistic acts or speech acts. You'll gain that capability, those distinctions, like the people in the snow, to be able to do things with words that you weren't able to do before, to avoid those certain swamps or that you would normally fall into, ending up having long political debates when it's not necessary because you can see what's going on as a linguistic element, as a linguistic feature.

[00:22:33] And the other thing that obviously comes up is what I started this episode with, is about AI, which is exactly what we call it, a large language model. Just think about that. So we've handed machines this technology, our most powerful technology, that we have not even recognized as a power, as a technology in and of itself. And no wonder we're so viscerally afraid of what it might do. We can sense it, but we can't quite put our finger on it.

[00:22:57] Well, I say here it is. This is why. And as I said, it's too late to put the poop back in the donkey, so what we need to do is augment our awareness of language as a technology. So I believe that what I'm doing here, sharing, is tremendously important and empowering for us as people to manage ourselves in the face of this new technology that we've unleashed into the machines.

[00:23:20] And so let me leave you something to actually do because the material in this show is not intended as mental chewing gum, but as something to experiment with and integrate into your life. So as you go forward, maybe for one day, maybe more if you can, spend some time noticing when you're thinking that you're actually listening. So when you look at something, catch the voice that immediately starts talking about it, and notice that it's a conversation that happens in your mind. Notice that it uses language as its material, its substance, the thing it's made of. So when you're looking at the painting, the email, the person across the table, you're also listening. You're listening to a conversation made of language.

[00:24:00] And to complicate things, 'cause I always do add probably a layer of complication that you don't need, but here it is, by noticing that you're listening, you're seeing something internally. You're seeing that you're listening to a conversation. So seeing is another added element here that we're working with as well. So we're doing two things. We're recognizing that we're listening and that it takes a form of language, and we're recognizing that we're able to see, that the observer position is one of seeing what's really going on inside.

[00:24:32] And this is the pathway that you'll use to develop a new way of apprehending instead of just comprehending reality. It's a pathway to awareness and wisdom, to getting out of the story narrative content that we get lost in, to a simpler yet more effective life. So you're looking at something with your eyes, you're listening to an internal voice, and you're seeing that you're listening. And the listening is to a conversation that's made of language. You're noticing that the internal voice is made of language. Then look outside of yourself and notice how everything is done through language. Notice how unaware people are of the role of language. So carry that around with you for the next few weeks and do that observation. It's a lot, I know, and I'm sure you'll gain a lot from doing it.

[00:25:18] Next time, I'll take the most powerful piece of all of this, your word, your own word, your power to make a declaration, to use the phrase, "I will," for example, and show you what happens when you platform your whole life on that instead of on your feelings which I'm sorry to say, are about as reliable a foundation as the weather, or our electricity supply or water supply in South Africa, in Johannesburg, here where I'm living.

[00:25:44] This is What to Believe. If you're finding value from this, please subscribe, rate, and review wherever you're listening. If something landed, not just made sense, but actually landed, then share it with someone who you believe could benefit from it as well. That's how this work spreads You'll find a written companion on Substack under my name, and if you wanna take it further, there are ways to work with me. You'll find the links in the show notes. I'm Neil Bierbaum. Thank you for listening. See you next time.

[00:26:09]