The Mind Readers

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On a long road trip over winter break, I listened to all 10 episodes of this podcast called The Telepathy Tapes.

The show is about a group of non-speaking autistic kids who are able to communicate using a method sometimes known as spelling or facilitated communication.

Essentially, someone, the facilitator, helps guide the kids using a keyboard or an iPad to spell out messages.

That already is a kind of magic, because kids who have been unable to communicate can now share their thoughts. But this podcast takes it to a whole new level of magic.
It's not just that they can communicate. These kids can read minds.
I'll bring Houston up to them and just tell them, hey, think of one little thing. And he writes it out on the board.
So he's read your friend's minds. He has read my friend's minds before.
I've seen it firsthand. By the end of the series, the kids are not just reading minds.

They're commuting with the dead, predicting disasters, and generally outclassing the neurotypical mortals. So again, she always tells me about these God visits, as she calls them, that happen at night.
And so I said, did he talk to you again last night? And she said, yes, unfortunately. And then she does dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

On that road trip, my partner and I got into a big argument about this podcast.

The mind reading scenes sounded so believable on the podcast.

But telepathy?

What is this phenomenon happening?

Why are his mind and my mind completely connected?

Why were so many people buying into this?

I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic.

Today, we're going to talk about how an idea like telepathy lands differently now.

The cultural conditions that make this old idea that's almost too fringe to bother debunking take off. And we're going to do that by looking at this blockbuster podcast, The Telepathy Tapes, which started out as this low-budget independent project.
And then in December, Joe Rogan started spreading the word. I think some telepathy is real.
It is real. I think it is real.
And then the host of telepathy tapes, her name is Kai Dickens, got an agent, did an interview with Rogan, and then more interviews, and now she has a documentary in the works. From the car that day, I sent a Slack message to an Atlantic colleague who knows a lot about facilitated communication.
December 28th, 4 o'clock p.m. Not a time that I was on Slack.
That is Dan Engber, a science writer at The Atlantic. I discovered that sliding my can of seltzer around on this table is sort of like an ASMR thing.
Dan started looking into facilitated communication about 10 years ago. It was developed in the 1970s in Australia.
As part of the disabilities rights movement, a form of empowerment. And it was seen in this whole tradition of liberating people with communication issues from basically the prison of lowered you know, they might not do well in an IQ test if they can't talk, but if you give them a way to communicate, they can reveal who they really are.
The way it works is a facilitator helps the autistic person spell out messages. By holding the person's hand or forearm or possibly their shoulder or touching them in other ways or holding the keyboard or the letter board in front of them, it's the facilitated part of facilitated communication means someone has to be there to help.
It always involves someone else there doing something to help the person type. Now, to be clear, spelling, facilitated communication, or FC for short, is not reading people's minds, or it's not supposed to be.
So it's a bit of a jump from FC to telepathy, which is why Dan agreed to look into the Telepathy Tapes podcast. It was a new, let's say, development.
Kai Dickens, the host of the podcast, is not a science journalist.

In interviews, she's referred to development. Kai Dickens, the host of the podcast, is not a science journalist.

In interviews, she's referred to herself as a science nerd and a skeptic. Generally, she makes documentaries, but since she didn't have the funds at the time to make this documentary, she decided to make it into a podcast.
By the way, The Atlantic reached out to Dickens for comment, but she didn't respond.

Okay, so the podcast begins with the series of spelling experiments that she's running, sort of living room experiments. What's the setup? Like, describe to us who and what is in this room.
Okay, the setup is she starts by, this is kind of her entree into this world. She hears a woman named Diane Hennessy Powell.
This is a psychiatrist based in the Pacific Northwest who's written a book about ESP and is very interested herself in the topic of people with autism who, in Powell's view, have kind of a savant skill for reading minds or ESP or psi phenomena. so dickens hears powell on a podcast and gets the idea that she wants to pursue this.
And so she starts working with Powell to get some of these people and to design, you know, experiments, ways to test them. And then she's going to film it and record audio from it and talk about it.
And so that's where the podcast starts. So they set up in a rented house in Glendale and they fly in a family from Mexico.
All the spellers only go by their first name. This is Mia.
Hi, Mia. Nice to meet you.
Yes, she's waving. So it's this girl, Mia.
I think she's a teenager. And they start running these experiments.
So, Dr. Powell, what numbers do you want to put in there? I would like to try three-digit numbers, so there'll be numbers between 100 and 999.
Powell will generate a random number on an iPad app. Powell's the scientist, remember?

Powell's the scientist.

Yeah.

Then she'll show that number to Mia's mom behind a screen.

Mia has a blindfold on.

They've taken extra care to make sure, you know,

they've covered up any mirrors in the room, even a TV screen.

That's a reflective surface there, the TV, so we need to cover that. Okay.
And this one too. And there's a mirror there.
And there's a mirror there? Yes, that's got to be covered up as well or taken down. So they're taking a lot of care to make sure only Mia's mom is seeing this number.
And then Mia's mom, who is the facilitator, sits next to Mia, and Mia spells out, using her letter board,

what her mom has just seen,

or she says what the number is.

There could be numbers on the board, too.

Can I take it off now?

She can.

Se puede quitar?

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

I'm going at six.

Nine.

Eight.

How is it?

So that's the test.

That's the telepathy experiment

as described in the first episode of the show.

I'll see to it. It is like a magic show.
I mean, when you listen to it, you do think, whoa, you know, how are they doing this in the way they're describing?

Like, how is this autistic child doing this?

Like, how the mother hasn't said a word.

You haven't heard the mother say a word.

So that's the feeling of listening to it.

It is a little like watching a miracle, you know?

Listening to a miracle without watching it.

And I think that's probably a key difference.

Well, I hate to say this to a podcast host, but, like, I think the problem here is there's sort of like a pernicious problem with audio that is in play here. It's all about voices and people's impressions, and it's so intimate, right? And I think these are all things that are echoed in the people with telepathy, supposedly with telepathy as well.
So I think it's worth talking this through. In listening to the podcast, you're hearing Guy Dickens, the host, just be so amazed by what she's seeing.
And then one of the members of her crew, she describes as this real skeptical guy, this real materialist. And he kind of has a conversion in real time on the podcast.
It's hard for me to not believe this is authentic. I'm looking at everything.
I'm watching her. I'm watching the mom.
I'm watching everything. And for me and my perspective, it's real.
So for the listener, you're not even hearing Mia. Of course, Mia doesn't speak.
That's the point. But you're hearing the people who are seeing Mia and you're getting their reactions and they are so amazed and it is so sincere that that emotion just transfers to you.
Also, the podcast is really, I would say, amateurishly produced.

I talked to one podcast producer who described it as having kind of like a Blair Witch effect,

which I thought was apt. It's like that just makes it feel a little more real somehow.
Uno. Tres.
Bravo, Mia! Bravo! Bravo, Mia! Okay, so back to my original question. Dan, as someone who knows about facilitated communication and spelling, what are we missing? Okay, so what is not described in that first episode is how spelling works, which involves the facilitator, in this case with Mia, her mom, sitting on the sofa next to her and placing her finger on Mia's forehead the entire time that Mia is spelling.
So, I mean, this is just, what does that mean? I know what it means. But like, I think if the average listener of the podcast were to watch the videos, and there are videos on the podcast website, you pay $10, you can become a member, and then you can watch the videos.
It's just like, gives you a first sense of, well, this process of producing the answers, you know, the messages from Mia. It's very intimate.
It's collaborative. Something here is going on.
It's not Mia on her own with a pen and paper writing out digits. It's this intensely cooperative process to produce the messages.

And that is the signal for what could really be going on here, which is this method, again, going back to the 1970s in Australia, has long, long, long been known to have a problem, which is it can be really,

really hard to tell who is the actual author of the messages being produced.

Facilitated communication found its way from Australia in the 70s to the U.S. by the 80s

and the early 90s. In a PBS frontline documentary called Prisoners of Silence that aired in 1993, Kathy Hayduke, the mother of a non-speaking autistic child, recalled the moment her daughter Stacey had a breakthrough, all thanks to FC and her daughter's new facilitator.
She said, Kat, she's telling me this and she's telling me that, and you've got to see it.

So one day she came over to the house and she said, Stacey, I know you're excited after

all these years.

You must have something you want to tell mom.

And Stacey typed out, I love you, mom.

I'm sorry. And Stacy typed out, I love you, mom.
I can understand a mom wanting to hear I love you from her child. So the relief was real.
And the emotions around FC were deep. But soon after the method came to the U.S., it was debunked, or at least declared wholly unreliable.
A lot of tests were done of people using facilitated communication to see if they could ever spell out a message with information that their facilitator didn't know. So if the problem is maybe your facilitator is really the one writing the messages, well, there's an easy test for it.
Like, okay, let me show you a picture of a sandwich. And then while your facilitator is not in the room, bring him back in the room.
Tell me what you saw. And the reality was few, if any, people using FC could pass that test.
To quote a program director in the PBS documentary who was involved in some of that testing, out of 180 trials, quote, we literally really didn't get one correct response. Are you suggesting manipulation or what are you suggesting exactly? Definitely not manipulation.
As we mentioned before, FC in its original form was just holding someone's hand or arm or shoulder while the other person typed on a keyboard. Potentially, at least optics-wise, lots of room for subconsciously guiding the person to where you want them to type.
But in Mia's case, on the Telepathy Tapes podcast, her mom just had a finger on her forehead, or she was holding her chin. I think this is really important.
It is extreme. You could have read or reported on this at great length, as I have, and it's still extremely hard to tell what's going on when you're seeing it with your own eyes.
So I think that's sort of how the podcast works. The people, the host, the camera guy, they're seeing it with their own eyes and then reacting.
And they're reacting the way most people would react, seeing this with their own eyes, which is not like, hey, this looks fake, but rather this looks real. Okay.
So the filmmaker had a certain reaction, which we can assume was an honest reaction. I mean, let's just say it was an honest reaction.
The filmmaker and the cameraman, they looked, they saw the hands on the forehead. They were like, whoa, something beyond my comprehension is going on here.
What did you see then? How did you assess the forehead touch? Well, I think what is so easy to miss or so hard to grasp, even if you know what you're looking for, is this idea that this might be working something like a Ouija board, where, you know, a couple of people, two or more people put their hands on something. And just the uncertainty of having multiple hands on it, I think it's called a plochette on the Ouija board, the thing you're sliding around to different letters.
Sure. It kind of feels like it's moving on its own, even when you're doing it, right? But even understanding, this is my point, even knowing that a Ouija board is a toy or a game, it works.
You know that, you know, a spirit isn't moving this thing, and yet it kind of feels like, well, who is moving it?

So Mia and her mom are doing what then?

Is it like a collective—I'm just trying to find a word or articulate what is happening in that room because you're not calling it

manipulation. You're not saying that me and her mom are kind of hucksters, you know, doing a circus trick to get themselves on a podcast.
That's not your characterization of them at all, right? No chance. And you're not saying that Kai Dickens, the host, or the cameraman are like lying.
We're not saying that.

No chance, as far as I'm concerned.

I can't read that Kai Dickens, the host, or the cameraman are, like, lying.

We're not saying that.

No chance, as far as I'm concerned.

I can't read minds.

I will admit that up front.

But I just, I've interviewed a lot of Spellers.

I've interviewed a lot of Spellers' moms.

I've never met one that I thought was lying about it.

There's one part in the podcast, actually,

where Kai Dickens is, like, addressing the skeptics that she knows are out there. And she just says, the idea that the facilitators might be somehow creating these messages is, I forget the phrase, like unambiguously false.
Like she just rejects outright the possibility that there's any unconscious influence from the facilitators, from the parents. And then she quotes one of the parents saying, the thing is, Kai, we can't all be lying.
Right. And the implication there is like, yeah, you know, okay, maybe you're so skeptical you think Mia's mom is, you know, a grifter or something.
But like, there are so many parents out here who feel that their kids have telepathy. Like, it can't just be a whole army of grifters.
Okay, so what's in the mix then? Let me just try this and you see if I'm with you here. So it's not lying, you think, is in the mix between this parent and child.
It's some form of communion, like love maybe even even connection. I would say like hope, like there's so much out there.
I'm a parent of an autistic child, though, not a nonverbal one, but so much hope of like inside the child. There's so much that this child wants to say and express with me and like a wish for connection.
Like there's a relationship or intimacy and that translates into something, but it's not clear what it is. Is it something like that? I think it is a profoundly intimate act.
I've had facilitators facilitate me. And it is, I mean, you're sitting with a stranger or or I was sitting with a stranger, and she puts her hand on mine, and I don't know what to tell you.
It's just like you suddenly are holding hands with someone you feel close to them, right? and there's just such a desire to i think i think we all have a desire to connect

and feel understood and feel like we're understanding people. Now, raise that desire to the hundredth power if you're talking about a mother or a father trying to connect with their child, to the thousandth power if that child is non-speaking and it's always sort of hard to exactly understand what's going on in your child's mind.
I mean, the desire is even shortchanging it. It seems like the most urgent need I can possibly imagine is to find a way to communicate with your child.
And here is this thing, and at first it's frustrating, it's not working, and then, wait, what's that? A glimmer of something.

Like, we're doing this method, and we spelled out a word.

And then it flowers from there, right?

And then now we're spelling out short sentences.

And now my son is writing poetry.

And now I'm learning about all this stuff.

Like, oh, he's got a girlfriend, and he's telling me all about that.

It's like, what more could you want than have your kid tell you about their first love? And so you can just see how the drive to make this thing work and to find meaning in it is so intense. And I think that is both very moving and very dangerous.
After the break, if you believe telepathy is real, what else might you believe? This episode is brought to you by Loom by Atlassian. Are you feeling stuck at work? Get your team unstuck with Loom video messaging and move work forward.
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So facilitated communication has been around for decades, and as you said, has been debunked. But this podcast goes way further than that, right? Right, yeah.
And this podcast actually invokes something that I didn't realize it, but has been present since the start of facilitated communication, which is just that, okay, if it is the case, if you're facilitating me and the messages that are coming out are actually, you are subconsciously writing those messages yourself, at some point, you might think, hey, wait a second, Dan just spelled something that was in my head, right? It is just a natural effect of how you have this Ouija board illusion, right? Just eventually, I might type something or spell something that, you know, information that only you know that I shouldn't know. And so this is in some way, just a byproduct of the Ouija board effect, right? Oh, so the flaws that you've already described in facilitated communication, if you're not seeing them as flaws, the other word to call them is telepathy.
Exactly. So it's really, it's just like you hit this fork in the road early in the process, right? There's two problems here.
If it is really true that the facilitator is the one who's actually creating the messages, there's two problems. One, if the speller knows something that the facilitator doesn't know, the speller can't spell that out.
That's the message passing test. That was the test that the scientists used to debunk this whole thing.
So that's problem number one. So you have to deal with that problem.
Problem number two, though, is exactly the opposite. Okay, why does the speller seem to know things that are in the head of the facilitator? Like they shouldn't, why can they do that? And so you can either see that happen and go, you know what, I'm a little worried that this method doesn't work.
And then you move on to other interventions to try to help the non-speaking person. Or you say, oh, I know what it is.
The spelling is valid, and they have ESP. Yes.
Oh, my God. That's so obvious.
I don't know why I didn't realize that. That's exactly what it is.
Of course, you would call that telepathy. Yeah.
Because you are, in fact, reading the thoughts of the facilitator. It's literally just a synonym for the problems you were describing.
Yes. Does the podcast talk about the history of facilitated spelling or telepathy at all? Yeah, the podcast gets into it.
I mean, there's a certain point right at the beginning. It's not clear what we're even talking about.
It's just, here's this girl, Mia, she can read her mother's mind. And as it goes along, it gets into the history of facilitated communication, the scandals, there were false sexual abuse allegations, there were the debunkings of the 90s.
And so the podcast has to engage with that, right? And what the host, Kai Dickens, does is she basically acknowledges that all that happened. She says, but look, people were experiencing telepathy from the very beginning and also the method has improved.
We now have these new versions called rapid prompting or spelling to communicate and they're much better and also she talks about one guy that she features in the podcast. What is that? What do you see, Akhil? A man named Akhil.
Who is, you know, according to the podcast, telepathic and can also speak to the dead. Akhil used to see, like when my mom passed away and I used to sit down and study with him, he would say that your mom wants to play with me.
And I said, where is she? She's sitting beside me. And he does this without being touched.
So, for her, it's like, there you go, that's proof. And what would you say about that? Because I do have to say, listening, Akhil and his mother are the most charming mother-son pair you will ever encounter.
I mean, this is, again, it's one of the complicating things about this. It'd be nice if you could just say, oh, FC is fake and everyone who uses it is, you know, the message is coming entirely from the facilitator.
But it's just such a diverse set of practices and it involves such a diverse set of people and people-facilitator pairs. It's just like a very complicated question.
Now, Akhil, you watched the video of him.

He's not being touched by his mother.

But there are cases where he appears to read her mind by typing into an iPad keyboard,

and she's not touching him or the keyboard.

Okay, so Manisha, come stand here.

I've taken a step back and changed my body position slightly, just in case.

I reach into the paper bag, and the new word is tiger. This one.
Okay. Okay.
Go, buddy. T-A-A T-A-E R Tiger.
Wow. Awesome.
I mean, it is really impressive. It looks like telepathy, but she is very involved in the process, right? She's making sounds.
She's moving. And I think it just goes to show how this influence, what I would say is like unconscious influence over the creation of the messages, can happen in many different ways.
Like it could happen if you're holding a person's hand. It could happen if you're holding their shoulder, putting your finger on their forehead, holding the letter board for them and not even touching them.
And my belief is that in the case of Akil, it's through these other cues. You can see in the video, she's like leaning her body to one side or the other in concert with the direction

that he has to move his finger to hit the next key on the keyboard. So he has to type, you know,

AR and those are on the left side of the keyboard and she's kind of leaning to the left and then he

has to type IPO, which is on the upper right of the keyboard and she's like leans her body in

that direction. Now, in order for Akil to pick up on those cues, I mean, the level of attunement that he must have to what, you know, she is, you know, perhaps subconsciously wanting him to do is truly exquisite.
I mean, it's amazing. The answer is 44,126,388.
Four. Four.
One. Two.
On the other hand, what's your other choice here is to believe that he really is telepathic and speaks to the dead. So you're confronted with, you know, two extraordinary skills, one far more extraordinary than the other.
Yeah, I have to say, listening to Akil and his mother, I mean, never was I more torn. Like, I was tearing up listening to them, but mostly because of the depth of their love and attunement for each other and her dedication to him.
Like, I wasn't so much paying attention to, is he telepathic? I just doubted it from the beginning. But just this specific kind of intimacy they created with each other was just amazing.
So what, you know, we've been talking about spelling and love. What are some of the more, can we say, outlandish claims that the podcast makes?

Yeah, so Dickens says that communing with the dead is, she describes it as a very common gift among these telepathic spellers. I mean, there's something funny about it, I'm sorry, about the fact that this is, you know, you've rejected from the beginning the possibility that this is a Ouija board thing.
And then the power that has emerged is like literally the conceit of a Ouija board is talking to the dead. But it's not just commuting with the dead.
I mean, you know, where it lost me is she's talking about universities in heaven. I mean, there are some of the parents who feel extremely influenced by religiosity or spirituality.
Yes. The people are talking to angels.
They're prophesying disaster. They're treating cancer.
They're, you know, reading hieroglyphics. The list of powers, I mean, again, in episode one, it's like, oh, I know what number my mom is thinking of.
By episode 10, it's in a really, it's like I'm astrally projecting to a place called The Hill where I am reading The Great Gatsby with angels. We hear about a telepathic parrot.
We hear about a group of elephants that for some reason is able to observe a memorial on a specific day of the Gregorian calendar. Like the claims really just, it's almost like once you've accepted that telepathy is possible, once you have broken out of what Dickens refers to as the materialist mindset, anything is possible.
Everything is on the table. Yes.
You're off to the races. Yeah, once you've gone through the portal, like magic happens.
Anything can happen. Yeah, there's a part in the Rogan interview where they're just taking this to logical places.
Like once you accept the premise, Rogan is like, imagine what the government would do with these kids. Isn't that disgusting? That's the first thing you think about.
If someone's extraordinary, like the X-Men. And Dickens is like, yeah, that's a totally valid concern.
That's what everybody worries. Yeah.
And it's a fair worry. I mean, it is a fair worry.
And, you know, like we try to be. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, I mean, it is a valid concern, right? Exactly.
Exactly. They're correct.
So you and I could sit here in our mutual podcast spaces and, you know, be skeptical. And yet the podcast has been enormously popular.
As you were reporting, it's now been a few months. How did you see the podcast evolve as a cultural phenomenon? Yeah, so, I mean, it really, it was getting big in December.
It was climbing its way through the Apple audio charts. And then Joe Rogan got into it.
On his Christmas Day episode, he said, here's the thing about all this. You know, I think telepathy is real.
He talked about this podcast. It is real.
Have you listened to the telepathy tapes? No. You haven't? And then it immediately, the telepathy tapes shot to number one.
And it's really been like in the top 10 almost ever since. So I think it was that moment of like, I think getting tapped by Joe Rogan.
It's funny if you actually watch the video of that episode, Rogan is wearing like a jester hat with bells, I guess, for Christmas. But it just makes it, you know, extra funny to have him talk about like how this, no, this is seriously is real.
And he's dressed literally like a clown. And then he had Kai Dickens on more recently.
Yeah, just last week. Kai Dickens was on the show for two and a half hours.
And I think what you see there, just to your question of like why now, is the way that, you know, different sets of, I mean, I would say sort of conspiratorial beliefs start to overlap and gravitate towards each other. And sometimes it's very clean and it makes sense.
And then other times like little tensions emerge. So for Rogan, and he says this, he talks on and on in this podcast about, oh yeah, you know, there are these skeptics who just, they're afraid of sounding stupid, and they just like to accept the mainstream narrative, and Dickens totally agrees, and, like, you can see how their worldviews are just, are copacetic, right? Like, yeah, why not telepathy? And you've proved it, and that's amazing, and they're, like, loving each other.
So, and, like, to the extent that, you know, Rogan has a whole set of other beliefs that I don't know if Dickens has, but they're bonding in having figured out the truth about what they won't tell you, what the media elites don't want you to believe. And so, I don't know, I was like, oh, this is the moment right here where there is such resentment against the standard narrative, the elite narratives, that any counter-narrative is appealing.
There have been people using spelling for decades, as we talked about. There have been people who believe that spelling reveals telepathy for decades.
There are people who believe a lot of kind of weird things. But I think until now, they've all been kind of living in their own worlds.
And now, I would say, in this moment, those people are kind of finding common cause. They're realizing that they kind of share an outlook with respect to the narrative, maybe, and they're forming alliances.
So, meaning that there have been people forever who have wanted to believe in counter-narratives or believe that you're being lied to, and just right now that's ascendant, like that energy is ascendant? I mean that there have been communities of people like living in their own realities, but that's just sort of like a private reality. And there are people who, for example, believe that childhood vaccines are deadly or cause autism or have other, you know, many, many other harms.
And they're sort of living in their slightly more public private reality. And there are people who believe in UFOs, and they have their own community.
Of course, these people have been around all this time. But I think there are moments in, if I can be so grand, in American history where the inhabitants of all these private realities kind of band together, and it becomes less like a menu of choices than a full meal.
That's what I mean by the alliances. So, I mean, just to give an example, Diane Hennessy Powell, the scientist in the show, she is anti-vaccine, who spoke in an event with RFK Jr.
RFK Jr. has likened people who are skeptical of spelling to pediatricians who deny the harms of childhood vaccines.
So right there, there's an alliance between anti-vaccine activists and spellers. Yeah, they do meet in this place where, you know, mystical ideas, you know, intuition, anything that mainstream science or the experts don't believe is ascendant.
Now, you are a person who is a science journalist who does want to align yourself with what the mainstream scientific institution finds to be true. So, what do you make of a moment like this I mean, I think sometimes the counter-narratives are true, and it is good when they get an airing and become ascendant.
It's just, I think what is interesting to me to observe is the way it's like open season on counter-narratives, right? And so you're seeing this negotiation among adherence to counter narratives, and it's playing out even like in the federal government. And so it's become, I mean, just to give one example, I'm sorry, this is going to sound far afield, but I think it speaks to the central point here.
So we have an anti-vaccine activist in charge of health and human services. There's also,

we're going to have a COVID contrarian take over the National Institutes of Health. Both those people, Jay Bhattacharya and RFK Jr., are into essentially paleo diets and the idea that carbohydrates are what's causing so much chronic disease in this country, as I understand it, Okay? So now maybe you're getting this other group that is, you know, been making this counter-narrative argument about nutrition, that the problem is not calorie intake, but sugars.
Like, now they have a foot in with this administration. This is just like somehow there's, you know, common cause between the sugar is toxic crowd and the anti-vaccine crowd and the, you know, like COVID contrarians.
And as I have said, like you can draw these connections over into the world of spellers and telepathy. Like, I just think if you mapped out all of these different groups with, you know, their own hobby horses, some of which I think are, you know, reasonable, like the reasonable arguments to have about what nutritional policy should be.
But, you know, there's just these new alliances. That's what's interesting to me about this moment.
Dan, you have thoroughly explained this phenomenon to me. Thank you so much.
My pleasure. This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Janae West and Kevin Townsend.
It was edited by Claudina Bade, engineered by Erica Wong, and fact-checked by Sarah Kralevsky.

Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio,

and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

Thank you for listening.