#0012 Ky Dickens (Telepathy Tapes)

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Speaker 3 On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience episode 2279 with guest Kai Dickens. The No Rogan Experience starts now.

Speaker 3 Welcome back to the show. This is the show where two podcasters with no previous Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan.

Speaker 3 It's the show for those who are curious about Joe Rogan and his guests and their claims, as well as for anyone who just wants to understand Joe's ever-growing media influence.

Speaker 3 I'm Michael Marshall, as you can hear, recovering from a bout of laryngitis, and I'm joined by Cecil Cicarello. And today we're going to be covering Joe's February 2025 interview with Kai Dickens.

Speaker 3 So how did Joe introduce Kai in the show notes, Cecil?

Speaker 6 Kai Dickens is a filmmaker and documentarian. She is the host and creator of the Telepathy Tapes podcast.

Speaker 3 Okay, and is there anything else we should know about Kai Dickens?

Speaker 6 So Kai Dickens did a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes, which is currently dominating new and noteworthy in our niche, which is neither new nor noteworthy, which kind of makes me upset.

Speaker 6 But it alleges that autistic children are telepathic, can talk to the dead, meet in the astral realm, talk to animals, and just so much more. This is all based on spelling to communicate.

Speaker 6 This is a form of facilitated communication. Also, her go-to autism expert on the show, Diane Powell, believes vaccines cause autism and spoke at an RFK anti-vax rally.

Speaker 6 Her podcast briefly knocked Joe off the number one spot late last year.

Speaker 3 It absolutely did. So I was mildly obsessed with this podcast when it first came out.
I was telling everybody about it. This is kind of like November, December kind of time.

Speaker 3 I think a listener to Skeptics with a K, my other show got in touch to say, have you heard this? You'd be right at your street. And I listened to it all in the space of like a day and a bit.

Speaker 3 And it is such a wild journey. So I was excited to see Kai finally come on this show.
Actually, I wrote about it for the Skeptic magazine.

Speaker 3 I also told Jonathan Jerry at McGill in Canada about it, an excellent science writer who we've mentioned on the show before.

Speaker 3 And he wrote one of the first piece of criticism of this this podcast for me so we'll link to both of both my article and jonathan's article in the show notes but this was your first experience of it wasn't it this was this was my first experience you get a chance to hear but my experience was as raw as marsha's voice absolutely yeah so what did they talk about in this episode well this was mostly that kids have autism and have superpowers of telepathy and natural projection.

Speaker 6 That was most of the episode.

Speaker 6 They mentioned that the kids can can read and speak in languages that they don't know.

Speaker 6 I guess,

Speaker 6 or I guess they shouldn't know, or because they're actually communicating in them, which is a weird way to say they speak in languages they don't know,

Speaker 6 but then they're communicating in these languages.

Speaker 6 The kids also have a big sort of astral projection parties where they all hang out in a place called the hill. And this is proven because the parents think it's real.

Speaker 6 One other big piece of this that we may or may not mention is that the power is only available through love.

Speaker 6 Yes. Very, very briefly they touch on billionaires and that wolves have ESP, I think.

Speaker 6 And then they also talk for a few moments about bear attacks because you can't go through a good Joe Rogan episode without some sort of hunting or bear reference.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's absolutely true.

Speaker 3 So the main event tonight, we're going to be digging into Kai's claims about non-verbal autistic children having these psychic powers.

Speaker 3 So when we say autistic children, we're specifically talking about kids who otherwise were assumed to not be able to communicate in any way.

Speaker 3 Suddenly being unlocked through these kind of means. But before we get into that, we just want to say a quick thanks to our Area 51 all access pass patrons.

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But now for our main event.

Speaker 3 So a huge thank you to this week's veteran voice of the podcast. That was Seth Kano announcing our main event.

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Speaker 6 So Marsh, before we dive into the main event, let's talk a little bit about background about what this is, because I think some people might not understand.

Speaker 6 Let's first, let's talk about the children, because you did mention it briefly in the introduction, but really these children, they are non-verbal in a way that is not, that's not that they just uh can't speak or something.

Speaker 6 They're not communicative really in any way is what we're talking about, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, absolutely. These are children with development, developmental disorders that have meant that they can't communicate.

Speaker 3 So it's not that they can, you know, just not say words out loud, but they they can write and they can type and they can sign language or anything like that.

Speaker 3 These are children who, up until the point of

Speaker 3 their appearance in this show or their reason for being in the show,

Speaker 3 had shown no ability to communicate with other people. So that's what we mean by non-verbal autistic children here.
And like I said, this is something I've actually written about previously.

Speaker 3 I wrote a piece for The Guardian in about 2009 about a child who wasn't autistic, but had cerebral palsy, but the same claims essentially, or very similar claims, were being made.

Speaker 6 So this is these types of claims have been around for some time and let's talk about the claims here because what the what what i was familiar with was something called facilitated communication now this is something that has been around for a long time this normally requires a caretaker of some of some sort who in some ways touches the child's arm or hand and moves the child's arm or hand in in they think in a way that the child wants but in many ways since it's never really been tested truly it it really feels like it's the facilitator who's really doing the communication.

Speaker 6 But they're essentially turning this child into sort of a human Ouija board where they're touching and the child is moving their hand. And then the child will write something.

Speaker 6 And this is something that it would be really surprising because the child hasn't actually sat down to learn to write anything because they're non-communicative. So

Speaker 6 now it's getting a little deeper with Kai, though.

Speaker 3 Yeah, absolutely. And when we say facilitated communication and writing through that method, we don't mean writing with a pen, like actually making marks on a paper.
It's through a spelling board.

Speaker 3 So somebody will hold up a spelling board or will have a

Speaker 3 sorry.

Speaker 3 Literally the letters of the alphabet on a cardboard or a plastic sheet in front of them. And

Speaker 3 the non-verbal autistic person will be pointing towards the letters to spell out the words. And of course,

Speaker 3 the way they're doing that is having a facilitator holding typically their hand or their arm to tell which direction they're trying to go in and to help them.

Speaker 3 And what happens, unfortunately, as you say, is if you don't realize the ease at which your influence can direct those hands, you can start pushing, like directing the person's hand to the letters you think are coming next.

Speaker 3 So if it's D and then O, maybe you're going to go to G and it's going to be a dog and you're filling it, you're autocompleting essentially. Sure.

Speaker 3 And people will even go as far as putting together entire messages and alleging all sorts of events and feelings and

Speaker 3 internal thoughts that they're putting in essentially the mouths of these people. And this can lead to very dangerous places.

Speaker 3 I mean, people have been sent to prison based on allegations of abuse that were put forward via this spelling method.

Speaker 3 Now, one of the ways that you would test this is to the facilitator has to know the answer for them to be able to spell it out accurately.

Speaker 3 So what you do is you take the facilitator out of the room, show the autistic child an object, and then bring the facilitator back and get them to say what that object was.

Speaker 3 And if they can't do that when the facilitator didn't know what the object was, then maybe it's not coming from the child, it's coming from the facilitator.

Speaker 3 Or you can be slightly sneakier and show the facilitator something and say, this is what we've shown the child, but you show the child something else. And then we see which word gets spelt.

Speaker 3 And when you test that, you find it's coming from the facilitator. There's a variant of that called spelling to communicate, where they say, well, we won't touch the child at all.

Speaker 3 That way, we can't be leading them. We can't be moving their arm.
But what they won't say is instead they're holding the alphabet board.

Speaker 3 And the alphabet board is the thing that moves towards the fingers. So there are different ways that this comes in.
Most of the time, almost 99% of the time, this is completely subconscious.

Speaker 3 You don't realize you're doing it, which means that you absolutely are able to fool yourself in these situations, unfortunately. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 6 Okay. All right.
Well, that's good background to get started in this.

Speaker 6 When we start the show, this is the first time you're ever going to hear part of the intro music.

Speaker 6 We started a clip so soon at the beginning of the show that you're going to hear a tiny remnant of Joe's intro music here.

Speaker 5 Nice to meet you as well. I really loved your series,

Speaker 5 the telepathy tapes.

Speaker 5 I had long suspected that there was some sort of a way to prove that there's something going on.

Speaker 5 There's no way that that would be a thing for so long that people would talk about certain moments where people could read people's minds or certain moments where there was something that was being exchanged that wasn't verbal, it wasn't facial expressions, it wasn't body language, there was something going on.

Speaker 5 And the telepathy tapes, excuse me, the telepathy tapes essentially proved it.

Speaker 5 But what has been, has there been pushback about this? Like, I know there's a lot of like hardcore skeptics that never want to believe.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think anytime you're pushing the status quo, there's going to be pushback, of course, you know, but I think the overwhelming amount of emails that we've gotten from families and others that have a non-speaking child have been so excited that this news is finally out there.

Speaker 1 Same thing with teachers that have been witnessing, like you said, for witnessing this in classrooms and in their homes for decades.

Speaker 3 So the framing here right at the very start is that Joe absolutely believes that autistic people have the incredible abilities that do you hear on the teleport tapes.

Speaker 3 This is not where you'd start this conversation if you're going to offer any kind of pushback or any kind of challenge at all. This is Joe being all the way in because of what he's heard on this show.

Speaker 6 Yeah. And he starts out right away with the idea that there's this sort of argument from popularities.
You know, people talk about this. And like, people talk about nonsense all the time.

Speaker 6 Look at trickle-down economics. A bunch of people talking about something doesn't make it true.
And we get 55 seconds in, Marsh, and Joe is saying there's proof of telepathy.

Speaker 6 I did not think that something like that could be that quickly done on Joe's show, but I guess if your standard of evidence is reading tweets and that's normally as far as you go, I guess we should have expected something like that.

Speaker 6 And we start the show too, Marsh, with a comment about how this is kind of the skeptics' fault. This is their fault.
And these people, they just don't want to believe anything.

Speaker 6 And it's, and, and I, I want to start out the show, and I probably will say this multiple times, I very much want to believe this. I want to believe that this is true.

Speaker 6 I think that what a beautiful thing if this is true, that there are these people who could never communicate before and they can now. I want this to be true.

Speaker 6 I just think that I don't, what I don't want is for us to trick ourselves into thinking this is true.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'm

Speaker 3 on exactly the same page there. Like, I don't know if you have nonverbal members of your family.
A cousin of mine is non-verbal. She's disabled.

Speaker 3 If it was true that we were able to access her thoughts and there was this rich inner life and these then remarkable abilities, I'd be over the moon.

Speaker 3 But before I believed in it, I'd want to be pretty thorough about the testing of it because I know how much the desire to believe is going to over is going to easily outweigh

Speaker 3 the logical critical faculties that might sense check stuff. So it's really important we get this right.
But I think Kai's framing again here by sort of blaming, well, the skeptics don't want this.

Speaker 3 This puts her in that kind of space of,

Speaker 3 well, everybody's pushing back against me, but I'm on this frontier and people don't want to believe that I'm on this incredible frontier, which is a very good place to put yourself because it puts you beyond reproach, beyond question, beyond testing or anything like that.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 6 Now we're going to be introduced to one of the main players in this, a gentleman by the name of Rupert Sheldrake.

Speaker 1 Rupert Sheldrake has talked,

Speaker 1 has written at length, a brilliant Cambridge biologist, about dogs, experiments he's done that kind of show the dogs know when their owners are coming home,

Speaker 1 and the other thing that's going to be a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 And many of us have had that experience of phone telepathy, where, oh, it's just thinking of someone and they call.

Speaker 5 People like to dismiss that as being just coincidence, but just, why do people want to dismiss everything? Like, that's the problem. It's like,

Speaker 5 I think the real fear is being fool.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 we should have a fear of being fooled. That's healthy skepticism is to like, I should figure out whether I'm being fooled or not.
So Kai here is talking about Rupert Shellbrigger. Sheldrake.

Speaker 3 I don't know if you knew much about Rupert Sheldrake at all,

Speaker 3 a name that's been, he's been very, very well known in skeptical circles, more so sort of 15, 20 years ago, even. So like she calls him a brilliant biologist.

Speaker 3 She's missing the fact that huge amounts of his work has been in the field of psy research, which is not a field that is widely accepted by experts, essentially, as being real.

Speaker 3 His work isn't widely accepted by experts in that field or in the broader psychological field as having a legitimate evidence of psi phenomena, psychic phenomena.

Speaker 3 Sheldreck has kind of plowed this relatively lone furrow for decades, really, and has come into contact with a lot of skeptics along the way, including the former editor of the magazine that I now edit, Chris French of The Skeptic, who is a professor of psychology, who has looked at these kind of things.

Speaker 3 She's talking about the experiment of

Speaker 3 the dogs who know when their owners are coming home.

Speaker 3 Other researchers have tried to repeat an experiment or experiment in the same kind of fields, and what they have found is that they are not seeing the effect that Rupert is having.

Speaker 3 They're not doing exactly the same experiments. They're experimenting in similar kind of ways.
Shelrick has said that...

Speaker 3 the replications of his work are successful, but as far as I'm aware, that's only if he's the one looking over the data himself.

Speaker 3 So when people have done the studies, they come to no conclusion, but he says, actually, if I look at the data, this is kind of

Speaker 3 how it actually works. So, like, that's not a replication, because the purpose of a replication is to see if there's effect there outside of the biases of the original researcher.

Speaker 3 So, you can't get the original researcher to look over the data and reintroduce those biases. And so,

Speaker 3 one of the teams of researchers who did actually look at are dogs telepathic? Do dogs know when their owners are coming home?

Speaker 3 Was Richard Wiseman and Matthew Smith, two psychology researchers who I know Richard pretty well. I emailed him actually about this.
So another one in my

Speaker 3 address book there.

Speaker 3 And his study is really interesting. But what he found was like he filmed a dog for a day with the owner being away.

Speaker 3 One member of the team's with the owner. There's a camera set up watching the dog.
And yeah, sure, the dog is coming to the window when the owner's coming back.

Speaker 3 But the dog's also coming to the window multiple other times throughout the day.

Speaker 3 And if you document all those times, you find that dogs go at the window quite often because there's noises or they're restless or all sorts of reasons.

Speaker 3 So the idea of saying when the owner is coming home, that's when the dog went to the window is a very, very fuzzy kind of metric to measure.

Speaker 3 And you have to ignore an awful lot of stuff to make it seem like there's some psychic ability there.

Speaker 6 Yeah, the ignoring part is the interesting part because this sort of falls into our today's toolbox that we're going to talk about later on, which is anecdotal evidence.

Speaker 6 But when you see your dog greeting you, You could look at the security camera from like five minutes and it could be really convincing, right?

Speaker 6 Here's one data point that's like, wow, this dog is doing this, but you'd have to, like you suggest, review the entire footage for every day.

Speaker 6 And then you'd have to do that for over a long period of time to make sure every, is every single day the dog greeting you?

Speaker 6 Is every single day your dog coming only to the window at that very specific time every single day?

Speaker 6 That still doesn't prove anything, but it at least, it at least brings us closer to what we should, you know, that we can just rule out that it's nothing at that point.

Speaker 6 There's something going on there. It might be they're hearing you or whatever it is, you know, whatever it is that the dog is doing.

Speaker 6 But I think like you've got to, you've got to work with all that data. And the same thing goes with this

Speaker 6 phone telepathy that they were mentioning about.

Speaker 6 You know, I don't just dismiss it out of hand. I just dismiss it because there's no evidence for it.
You'd have to keep an entire log of every single time you thought of somebody throughout the day.

Speaker 6 And then you'd have to reference that log to when they didn't call you.

Speaker 6 When didn't these people, like if I were to sit here and think about, you know, my friend or my wife or whatever, and then nothing happened, what happens at those times?

Speaker 6 You, of course, remember the times that that works, but you some very often forget the time that it doesn't work.

Speaker 3 It would be weird if whenever you were thinking of someone, they never messaged you, they never got in touch, because often you're thinking about the people who were in your life and those people are going to communicate with you

Speaker 3 quite often. Or people will say, ah, but it was somebody I hadn't thought about for such a long time.
Okay, but like,

Speaker 3 like you're saying, like, if you think about every time you thought about everybody you've ever met Once you add all the probabilities of all of that up then the chances that at least one of them is gonna call you at some point soon after you've been thinking about them You know, that's the thing that's gonna stick out But actually, it's just the way that probability works.

Speaker 3 It's just very large numbers kind of thing.

Speaker 6 Okay, so now we're gonna talk about how she finally sort of realized this was a

Speaker 6 in her words a real thing

Speaker 1 You don't ask the creative, whatever this god, muse, the ether, right, to to um to give this to you. You tell it, I'm gonna do this with you.
It's gonna be great. And so I said that that out loud.

Speaker 1 I was reading this book, I was in this moment of just major shift in my life, and I said, Whatever I do next, I wanna solve the question of where we're going and why we're here and what it all means, and do we have a consciousness and does it survive?

Speaker 1 And then, um, and no, I actually didn't ask it. I said, I'm, yeah, I said, I'm gonna do this next.

Speaker 1 And I didn't know what it was gonna look like, but then started reading, you know, all the things I could unconsciousness, tree communication, and about near-death experiences, and Ian Stevenson's work, and all sorts of things.

Speaker 1 And then I heard a podcast with Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell, who was a Harvard, you know,

Speaker 1 a Johns Hopkins educated, you know, taught at Harvard scientist, who was saying that non-speakers that she tested had demonstrated a remarkable ability for telepathy and reading minds.

Speaker 1 And that was like lightning. It just kind of hit like, this is the thing.
And I really believe if something's intended for you, it won't miss you.

Speaker 3 So like, it sounds here, what she's saying is she was looking to try and understand all of consciousness.

Speaker 3 That was the next thing she was going to do after her other kind of projects, which were much more about kind of social justice endeavors.

Speaker 3 But suddenly she's like, I want to solve the problem of consciousness. That is a massive thing to decide you're you're going to do with your next podcast or documentary project.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 you could say, oh, well, it's no coincidence that she found this.

Speaker 3 And maybe it's not a coincidence because if this is the mindset that you have, you're going to look, you're going to accept any affirmation that looks like it agrees that this is where you're on.

Speaker 3 When she's talking about this on the podcast, she seems to present this a slightly different way.

Speaker 3 She doesn't say that she was looking to try and solve the problem of consciousness when she presents this in the show. She just says she saw this interview with Diane Howells.

Speaker 3 Oh, and this got her suddenly out, wow, this is amazing. And she was interested.
So it feels like she's given a bit more of a different, a more skeptical origin story when

Speaker 3 she's presenting this on her podcast. Like she was slightly skeptical, but persuaded by the evidence.
From what she's saying to Joe here, she was absolutely primed to accept this from the dot.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and there's a link we'll put in the show notes examining Stevenson's evidence for reincarnation. This is who she mentions in this last clip.

Speaker 6 And I want to read a quote from it, quote, in sum, Stevenson does not skillfully record, present, or analyze his own data.

Speaker 6 It is reasonable to conclude that the other cases in which the data were first gathered by untrained observers are even less reliable than this one, end quote.

Speaker 6 So it's not a terribly reliable thing that they're even talking about.

Speaker 6 But again, this is one of those things that happens on Joe's show so often. There'll be a mention of, oh, this study, or, oh, this paper, or, oh, this, here's this website.

Speaker 6 And you don't really get an opportunity to really dig dive and deep dive into that thing. They just sort of mention it very quickly.

Speaker 6 And unless you're actually writing this stuff down, which you and I do while we work, when we work on this show, you and I do that work.

Speaker 6 But how many people are out there listening to Joe Rogan and be like, oh, there was a study? Well, I'll just believe that it's true. That's fine.

Speaker 6 It's a, I'll just trust that the person who was talking about this is saying true things.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it just becomes a brick kind of in the foundation that this conversation is then built on. But nobody will go away and and check that that brick actually does not hold that weight at all.

Speaker 3 This conversation is built like on very flimsy foundation.

Speaker 6 All right, this next bit is actually leaning again back into our toolbox for some anecdotes. So, this is uh, this is actually an introduction of someone by the name of Dr.
Diane Powell.

Speaker 6 Now, you mentioned that you knew who this was. Can you let us know who this? You said that she's an anti-vexor.

Speaker 3 So, Diane Powell is the go-to expert in this, uh, in this, uh, in the telepathy tapes on autistic children and specifically autistic children and their ability with ESP, psychic phenomena.

Speaker 3 But Diane Powell in 2017, in March, made a speech at a Revolution for Truth rally, which was which where she appeared alongside Judy Mikovich, Del Bigtree and RFK Jr., three very notable anti-vaxxers.

Speaker 3 And in that speech, she described the need to, quote, stop the insanity of damaging children with vaccines. She said, I got the medical meetings.
I just got back from one.

Speaker 3 These are medical meetings where I'm getting continuing education. And the doctors are saying that vaccines are oftentimes the final straw that tips a kid over the edge.

Speaker 3 She says, about 20% of the children who get diagnosed autistic have reversible symptoms, but we need to admit that what they have is a neuroimmunological problem.

Speaker 3 It's not only the toxins in our food, it's the nutritional deficiencies, and yet doctors are not allowed to test for deficiencies. They're not allowed to test for toxicities.

Speaker 3 So, and she goes on to say, the majority of people diagnosed as autistic don't have vaccines as a cause, but the problem is that several of the children being diagnosed as autistic have sensory mortar issues that are related to toxic overload and brain inflammation that was often triggered by a vaccine.

Speaker 3 So, here she's very clearly linking vaccines as the cause of autism. And to be clear, there is no evidence that that's the case.
It's been extensively studied, and they found absolutely no link there.

Speaker 6 All right, so now we're going to hear the introduction of Diane Powell.

Speaker 1 After I heard the interview with Dr.

Speaker 1 Diane Hannessy-Powell, Powell, I, you know, I zoomed with her and then I asked if I could go see her and meet her and talk about this a bit, you know, because I thought this could be the next project.

Speaker 1 And I just knew it was going to be the next project, right? So one of the first things I had her do was I was like, can you just tell me about some of the emails that come in from parents?

Speaker 1 I had her just kind of go through reading some emails from parents. And it was one after the other.
Like, I didn't believe this one. I didn't believe my wife.

Speaker 1 I didn't believe my husband that this could be possible, but we've tested it. We've tested it.
People were sending tests.

Speaker 1 And I thought, okay, whatever is going on here, these parents don't know that any other parents are going through this.

Speaker 1 They think a singular miracle is happening in their home, that this child can read their thoughts. And that this is where the story is: that there's so many parents who haven't been listened to.

Speaker 1 And so I really thought this was about parents at first, and then discovered, no, there's been teachers writing about this for 30 years,

Speaker 1 capturing it, videotaping this phenomenon going on, and scared to come out about it. And I think same with the families, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, what a weird thing to say, this child can read my mind, or this child seems to be able to do X, Y, Z, things that seem impossible.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, my first thought was, okay, I need to see this is my own eyes. And so Dr.

Speaker 1 Powell had just been reached out to by a family in Mexico who discovered that their 13-year-old daughter was inside. They didn't think she was, and she was able to communicate.

Speaker 1 And the reason they discovered that was during COVID, you know, they were in charge of homeschooling and started being like, okay, let's see what you know. And bing, bing, she starts spelling.

Speaker 1 She knew an awful lot. And I think they were shocked.
And pretty soon thereafter, she said, I can read your mind. And they thought, what? And they would do tests.
What did I just draw?

Speaker 1 And she'd say, what they just drew. You know, what are we thinking? And she would write it.

Speaker 6 I think one thing we got to remember in this is, you know, this is, I think, a lot, says a lot about the parents in this, because,

Speaker 6 you know, their child is different, but they want to, they, they, they just want their child to be, you know, like other children. So they think that they're extraordinary in some way.

Speaker 6 And I think we've got, you know, these are kind of the worst people that we should be taking the word of in this situation. There should be somebody who's a little more objective.

Speaker 3 Because they have such an emotional bias. Absolutely.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
And I think the way that

Speaker 3 they're portrayed here is that, oh, these are all just independent parents just doing their own thing, and they're all coming at the same conclusion.

Speaker 3 But for that to be true, I absolutely believe that the parents aren't colluding with one another, but they are all doing spelling. They're all doing facilitated communication.

Speaker 3 So this isn't just randomly coming up with the same experiences.

Speaker 3 This is, as you say, if we use the example of a Ouija board, if all these parents were off using a Ouija board rather than doing facilitated communication with a spelling board, we wouldn't be saying, well, because all these people with the Ouija board seem to be connecting with ghosts, therefore it's proof that there are ghosts.

Speaker 3 We would say the method of using a Ouija board should be examined to see whether it really does connect with ghosts or whether there's something else going on.

Speaker 3 So that's the issue here: they're all using spelling boards and spelling to communicate or facilitate a communication.

Speaker 3 Those methods are flawed, and they're flawed because they produce errant results like this.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and think about if we declared things true this way all the time.

Speaker 6 Just because my inbox is full of people sending me messages that UAPs were actually otherworldly craft, we have to accept that that very specific thing is true.

Speaker 6 Now, we can gather data from a bunch of emails that something odd was happening, but then we've got to stop. And then we've got to investigate each one of those claims independently.

Speaker 6 What we can't do is just accept that what the person who sent the email was saying is true. We can't say, this person sent an email that claims that this thing is true.

Speaker 6 There could be a lot of different things happening. They're just saying this one thing is happening.
And

Speaker 6 we've got to stop at the very beginning and be like, maybe there are data points, but let's start working on each individual data point and not just lump them all together and say, well, we believe these are in the true column now.

Speaker 6 This is a really interesting part. This is Joe trying to just trying to just trying to understand what's happening with these children.

Speaker 5 Do they say what they see?

Speaker 5 Or how they see it? Like if someone writes something down, do they see the word or do they know it?

Speaker 1 Well, I think that's a really good question.

Speaker 1 And, you know, we've done a few experiments that, you know, again, I'm not a scientist, like the experiments I was doing for the film, I mean, which is going to be now a film, but the podcast, was kind of me just trying to understand, like, proof of concept, what is going on here, right?

Speaker 1 And I can only say what spellers have told me, and there's been quite a few spellers who say I can see through someone's eyes or I can hear through their ears.

Speaker 1 And others who seem to have a merged consciousness with someone that they're very close to, whether it be a father or a teacher, a communication partner, father, or whatever,

Speaker 1 where this, like, we did some experiments with one mom where we'd show an image to her. Her son, who was sitting across the room, would all of a sudden start writing what the image was.

Speaker 1 But what was so fascinating is sometimes the mom wouldn't even know what the image was. So at one point, she thought it was paint.
No, no, she thought there was a food fight.

Speaker 1 It was ketchup and mustard, and he wrote paint. So at that point, it's like she's not obviously sending a thought, right?

Speaker 1 He seems to be tapping in the second the image is in her own mind. So for us, it was a big question of, is this just sheer telepathy? Because a few parents have told me, no, this is bigger than that.

Speaker 1 It seems like a merging of consciousness of some sort.

Speaker 3 And so here you can see the problem with these tests.

Speaker 3 If you're touching the subjects throughout, as she talks about them doing here in some of these tests, it is so easy to use accidental cues to guide the hand to where you expect them to go. So

Speaker 3 there's some of the tests on the website where they're holding up playing cards. Well, if you're going to ask, what playing card am I looking at? you know the answer to that.

Speaker 3 So you can, you can help them spell out the answer to the playing card without realizing you're doing it. And this is kind of what we're seeing with these tests.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I want to pay attention to some of the language they're using, because this is the language I mentioned earlier when I said write things down.

Speaker 6 And you very rightfully corrected me and said, no, they're just pointing to letters. That's a big difference.

Speaker 6 When you present it as they are writing things down, it makes it sound a lot more competent than it actually is.

Speaker 6 It makes it sound like, you know, these are, these are children with a very, you know, someone who's very lately touching them who is now maybe writing in cursive or writing in print letters or whatever it is.

Speaker 6 Or in their case, you know, some of these things later on, they're talking about how they're writing in like sumerian and all kinds of hieroglyphics etc but they're not writing in anything they're they're pointing at something and i think that's something we really really have to remember here when they're talking about this because it gives it this sort of false competency which isn't there yeah absolutely and the thing is there are videos of this and we'll come to this in a moment dickens says she's not using the technique where people are holding you know holding uh the children by the wrists but if you watch some of the videos of these tests or you see the the stillson videos parents are holding their children by their forehead.

Speaker 3 So, okay, you're not guiding their hand, but you are guiding their vision. And it's quite easy for that to have a very guiding effect as well.

Speaker 3 And Jonathan Jarry's article for McGill actually talks about this. He went away and downloaded the videos and actually watched them and does a review of those.

Speaker 3 We'll include the link in the show notes. Dickens will also say, okay, there are tests where the parents aren't even touching their children at all.

Speaker 3 But then if you watch the video of some of those tests, the parents are the ones holding up the spelling board.

Speaker 3 So yeah, if you watch them carefully, as I've done for when I when I looked at this for the magazine, you can actually stop the video at different points and see that the spelling board has clearly moved.

Speaker 3 If you put the video, the images side by side, the video is clearly showing that the board is moving around.

Speaker 3 So you're not guiding the kid's hand, but you are guiding what they're pointing at, which can have just as much of an effect. And all of this can be avoided really easily.

Speaker 3 Like I say, the way that you do it is you make sure that the person holding the hand or holding the board doesn't know what the right answer is. It's as simple as that.

Speaker 3 Show the parent the right answer, but don't let them

Speaker 3 interact with their child in any way. Just show the child the right answer, but the person who's doing the the facilitating doesn't have the right answer.

Speaker 3 And suddenly we'll see if this is a real thing. But when you try those tests, they fail.
And they talk about that on the show.

Speaker 3 And Dickens says, well, the parents will say it's because you doubted them, because the child consents that you doubted them by introducing this, or you didn't have a good enough connection.

Speaker 3 And that's why you weren't able to facilitate in this way.

Speaker 3 But throughout Joe's interview, then, whenever you hear about the amazing things that these children just knew, and we will come to some very amazing things, you have to always bear in mind that the person who's confirming what the children knew is the one who's holding the hand or holding the board, and they knew the information.

Speaker 3 It's a little surprising that the information can come out because it was in their head to begin with.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 And then the other thing that I think is really, really important to bear in mind here, the telepathy tapes, the podcast we're talking about, is an audio medium. So you can't see those tests.

Speaker 3 Joe's show is very much a video. Yep.
Kai knew she was coming on the show today. Joe knew she was coming on the show.
She has videos that she says proves that the children are psychic.

Speaker 3 And she keeps those videos behind a paywall on her website. She says you can see the full tests there.
You can't. You can see snippets of the test where it looks successful.

Speaker 3 But we're not even seeing those videos on Rogan here. There's not even a Jamie.
Could you pull that clip up right now? She's telling us what's in the videos.

Speaker 3 And we're meant to accept that she's doing so accurately, but she could just show us the tests at this point. And we have to ask, why aren't we seeing the tests here?

Speaker 3 Why isn't she talking Joe through the tests that are happening?

Speaker 3 I think it'd be much harder to say that the test isn't interacting with the person who's holding him in any kind of way if we could see the test and see what's actually really going on.

Speaker 6 We do this stuff when it happens outside of a lab all the time. We're bad about what we remember.

Speaker 6 We remember things that are odd or strange, and the rest of the things, you know, that we remember sort of get mushed in our memory as sort of standard behavior.

Speaker 6 So the odd and strange things normally stick out. So if you know somebody, well, he's a perfect example.
If you know somebody well, Sometimes they try to finish your sentence.

Speaker 6 This happens to me on occasion. Someone will try to finish my sentence.
And sometimes they're wrong. Sometimes they're just genuinely wrong about what they were trying to pick.

Speaker 6 Sometimes they're right. And I might remember the times that they're right, but there's often they're wrong as well.

Speaker 6 And, you know, that also takes into account body language and social cues and the previous context of that sentence that, you know, they had an opportunity to get it right.

Speaker 6 That doesn't mean that telepathy exists. It just means that sometimes they've picked up on these things and gotten it right.
And then sometimes they pick up on it and it get it wrong.

Speaker 6 And we outside of a lab, real bad about this. And

Speaker 6 what I want to keep stressing is that they just keep trying to add this data in as if it's true, but they're doing it in the person's home without any kind of real structure around it whatsoever.

Speaker 6 They're just putting it in a tape and being like, look, guys, look at what they're doing. This is data in the four column here.
And we've got to just ignore that completely.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, that kind of stuff is indicative that there might be something worth researching further.

Speaker 3 But when you research it further, you have to do it under very careful conditions because it's so easy for our emotional biases, I want to believe, to interrupt and to interfere with the answers and produce errant results that give the impression of telepathy when there's no telepathy there.

Speaker 3 And bear in mind, when it comes to facilitated communication, they could say, well, people need support with their arms, support with their body. They don't have good body motor function.

Speaker 3 That's why they could justify that they're holding their hand in some points. But for spelling to communicate, you're only holding the spelling board.

Speaker 3 If you wanted to test that, it doesn't have to be a human being holding up the board. You could prop it up on some books.
Inanimate objects are perfectly capable of holding up alphabet boards.

Speaker 3 Like, if you were going to do the tests quite accurately and sure that everything is independent, you could test it that way.

Speaker 3 But unfortunately, when you do that, it fails, which is why we're not seeing those tests. We're not seeing that being done in Dickens, uh, Dickens' experiments here.

Speaker 6 Okay, so now they are going to talk a little bit about the powers and ESP,

Speaker 6 their ability to read hieroglyphics, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 5 Your child reads hieroglyphics.

Speaker 3 What the hell?

Speaker 6 Like, what does that mean?

Speaker 5 Is that the Akashic record? Like, is this child pulling from all the information that's in the ether? Like, how would you be able to read a dead language?

Speaker 5 That, I mean, what percentage of the human population can read that without AI, without assistance?

Speaker 5 It's got to be tiny.

Speaker 1 It's remarkable.

Speaker 5 Tiny, tiny percentage.

Speaker 1 I mean, from a scientific perspective, and this is one of the things that there was a professor, Bernie Ribland, who first, I think, came up with this idea, and then I know Dr.

Speaker 1 Powell kind of expanded on it. Which Bernie Rimlund first saw this kind of gift in nonspeakers, I think, in the 70s, I mean, a while back, and was like, ESP should be considered a savant skill.

Speaker 1 And Dr. Powell has talked about this as well.
So Savant skills, right, are study or accepted by science.

Speaker 1 This idea that, like, how do you know the language or math or this or that when you haven't been exposed to it or haven't been

Speaker 1 educated with even maybe the most simplest music skills, but now you're playing a symphony, right?

Speaker 1 So savant skills are is being able to really excel something that you haven't been taught and savant there's people who are born with the savant skills and also sometimes you can be accidental savants so you get hit on the head and so yeah i read about a guy who got assaulted and all of a sudden you can get complex geometry yeah yeah complex geometry and stuff like that so um so what's wild is that the materialist scientific point of view accepts savant skills we don't know where they come from we don't know why we don't know how people can know the stuff they've been taught but we accept them as these real big question marks as it's real so what bernie Ribland said and later Dr.

Speaker 1 Powell was like, ESP should be considered a savant skill. These people know something and we don't know how they know it, but they do.
They haven't been taught it. They haven't been exposed to it.

Speaker 1 And that could be thoughts. It could be knowledge about the future.
It could be knowledge about language. And

Speaker 1 this is what the whole hope is about this lap of the tapes, right? Is that people will start to put money behind this research.

Speaker 3 I think this just shows what's really happening here is you start with some pretty flimsy evidence to begin with, and then you run this off into all the big conclusions. What does this prove?

Speaker 3 And how far can we take this? Without stopping to say, is this true? But there are very simple questions to ask along the way. They talk about hieroglyphics, for example.

Speaker 3 Isn't it amazing, Joyce? Is it amazing while that they can read hieroglyphics?

Speaker 3 But given that there's a facilitator there who's the one interpreting whether these hieroglyphics are being read accurately, either the facilitator can't read hieroglyphics, in which case the person verifying it can't verify it,

Speaker 3 or in a minority of cases, maybe they could read hieroglyphics, in which case it's them providing the information and not the child here. So like this falls apart when you examine it further.

Speaker 3 And they mentioned Bernard Rimland here.

Speaker 3 So Bernard Rimland was a researcher who spent a lot of his time in autism research, but he started the Autism Research Institute and the Defeat Autism Now campaign, which was started in order to push the notion that vaccines cause autism.

Speaker 3 That is another go-to expert here, cited expert on these claims, claiming and basing their stuff on the idea that vaccines are causing autism.

Speaker 3 He also supported chelation therapy, which is a form of, it's a form of removing heavy metals from the body, the idea that autism is caused by toxic metals poisoning from vaccines, which is not true.

Speaker 3 It's something that was spread for a long time, but isn't true. He also believed in using aversive treatments for autism, which is where you punish behavior that you want to discourage.

Speaker 3 So autistic people sometimes stim in order to kind of soothe themselves. And

Speaker 3 what you would do with aversive therapy is whenever someone starts stimming doing sort of movements or repetitive movements high energy movements that might kind of be self-soothing you discourage them through means that are uh disruptive or uncomfortable or you know trying to make them associate stimming with negativity with with this horrible experience they're having so it is it's considered abusive essentially he was in favor of that But interestingly, he wasn't in favor of facilitated communication.

Speaker 3 He wasn't in favor of the methods that Kai is using.

Speaker 3 In In fact, what he said was, quote, how is it possible that an autistic kid can pick up the last tiny crumbs of potato chips off a plate, but not have sufficient motor coordination to type the letter E?

Speaker 3 So, you know, then that, unquote. So he did not believe facilitated communication was providing this deep insight.

Speaker 3 So all of his other problematic ideas about autism were terrible, but not even he went as far as believing that this was proof that these, that facility communication was unlocking the abilities within these children.

Speaker 6 Well, now we're going to learn a little bit more about facilitated communication from Kai.

Speaker 5 There's still no influence on the words or letters being chosen.

Speaker 1 No. No.
No. And I think one of the things, so

Speaker 1 the stigma I think that really started for spelling was

Speaker 1 facilitated communication. Actually, this is like the first thing you asked.
We're going full circle. So for a long time, there was just no hope of getting

Speaker 1 people who weren't verbal and non-speakers out. There just wasn't.
And then all of a sudden, facilitated communication came along. And it was developed, I think, in Australia, I think.

Speaker 1 And this was ideas of if you put some pressure on someone's wrist so they can really feel where they're at in space, right?

Speaker 1 Like they'll be able to spell. And it was a miracle.
I mean, it was all over the news. This was great.

Speaker 1 And some of the first parents that were using facilitated communication started to reporting, there's telepathy involved. And this was at Syracuse University in the 90s.

Speaker 1 Syracuse knew about this and started kind of bearing that information. And there was a lot of like kind of,

Speaker 1 you'll be let go if you're teaching this and you're talking about this. So there was kind of big cover-up.
So this was new. This is not new that this this was going on.
But then

Speaker 1 there were some claims of sexual assault. There's awful things that happened where what was being claimed didn't happen.
And so people started blaming facilitated communication.

Speaker 1 Oh, well, maybe they're pushing their hand or doing this or doing that.

Speaker 1 And I think for a lot of people who train in facilitated communication, you're using your hand to put pressure so the individual knows where their body is in space, but you're not pushing their hand.

Speaker 1 But there probably are some cases where that had happened. Well, anyway, so then it got kind of just stigmatized, right? It's pseudoscience.
This is not the.

Speaker 1 And then, so spelling evolved into these forms where it was like, no touch, do not touch. And so, many of those spelling groups now are helping individuals.

Speaker 1 And the big tenant of this is you cannot touch them. And

Speaker 1 that's where spelling's at now: is that you learn to communicate and there's no touch involved.

Speaker 1 But I'm one of these people that thinks, like, whatever the individual needs to help them communicate, it's okay.

Speaker 1 If you need a little touch, you know where your arm is, or sometimes it helps you go faster if there's a little push. Like, I think go for it, you know, help these individuals get out there.

Speaker 5 Right, this touch is not guiding them towards specific letters. This touch is just an affirmation just to help, yeah, to help them relax, to help them connect.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and it was really, you know, on set sometimes because every once in a while, some parents like hold the board and hold it there for their child.

Speaker 1 And we would use these like dry erase, you know, markers on the screen to be like, is the board moving? And it wasn't.

Speaker 6 You know, if it's just pressure, Marsh, on the wrist.

Speaker 6 We are at a point now where I suspect we could create some sort of robot arm that puts pressure wherever the person moves to sort of not influence. The robot itself could be neutral.

Speaker 6 But I already know what the answer is going to be and the answer is going to be that you are putting too much pressure on the child the child doesn't trust the person or the thing that's doing it you need a connection you need a connection it's telephonic

Speaker 6 those types of things they're already going to put the kibosh on that before you even start the experiment by basically saying that there's no way that we can actually test this unless we test it in the way that we suggest.

Speaker 6 The only way that we can actually do this is the way in which we suggest. No other way is possible.
And I think this goes back to there's a great analogy that

Speaker 6 Carl Sagan does in his book, Demon Haunted World. It's a whole chapter called The Dragon and My Garage.
And the dragon in my garage, he says, there's a dragon in my garage.

Speaker 6 And you say, okay, well, let's go see it. And then you go there and it's invisible.
He says, well, it's invisible. And you say, okay, well, let's throw some flour on the floor and see its footprints.

Speaker 6 Well, it actually, it's a floating dragon. Well, let's get a heat.
gun and see if we can see if it's like where it is with infrared. And like, well, it actually doesn't get off any heat.

Speaker 6 So everything you suggest, they suggest another thing that says, well, the dragon is actually a little more hidden than we thought it was before. And this feels exactly the same.

Speaker 6 It feels like every time you would try to maybe put some sort of constraints on it to see if it's possible, they would just retreat back to the things so that you could never actually say it's not true.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think that's true. And I think it's really interesting that what she's describing is the move away from FC into

Speaker 3 at least holding the spelling board rather than holding the person because it was discredited and she's right that it was, you know, she talks about there being really issues.

Speaker 3 I think she sort of doesn't, she downplays the size of the issues.

Speaker 3 I mean, sometimes we're talking here about facilitators who believe they were in a consensual relationship with the person they were facilitating because they

Speaker 3 gained consent for sex through facilitated communication and was then having a sexual relationship with the person. Now, that is

Speaker 3 not a way to get consent. If that person was not consenting because FC doesn't work, what you were doing was abusing there.

Speaker 3 You might not have realized you were doing that, but that's what's happening. So really, really dark, murky stuff.
And that's why everything moved away from FC.

Speaker 3 And Kai recognizes that it moved away from FC, but she says, but I'm still of the mindset of whatever it needs, whatever needs to happen, whatever the individual needs.

Speaker 3 So she's saying, even though the world moved on from this technique, If you need, if that technique is the only way that you're going to get messages, we should rely on it.

Speaker 3 Well, no, Kai, the reason we don't use that is because those messages are not reliable at all. The last point that she says there, she proves that the boards aren't moving.

Speaker 3 She's dry erase markers that show that the boards aren't moving.

Speaker 3 That isn't, I mean, maybe that's true some of the time, but certainly of the videos that I've seen, the ones she puts in her trailer, you can see the board is moving. She has a static camera.

Speaker 3 She has a mum holding up a board in front of her son, and the board is evidently moving. You can see that.
I've even took screenshots of it in the Skeptic Mag article.

Speaker 3 So like she says that to Joe now. She isn't showing Joe the tests that prove the board isn't moving.
She's just saying, trust my word for this.

Speaker 6 All right. So now there's

Speaker 6 interesting. We're talking about how there is some sort of pushback.

Speaker 1 I keep thinking, you asked about the pushback around this. And what's interesting is it's not just from skeptics who don't want to believe in telepathy and that the

Speaker 1 non-visible world is real, but also from people in the spelling community who don't want people to mention telepathy out of fear that it's going to foil their efforts to make this like standard practice in schools.

Speaker 1 In fact, some of the teachers and others who've been involved in our project have been getting letters from the IASC, like a spelling group, saying, don't talk about telepathy or you're going to have your accreditation taken away.

Speaker 3 Why?

Speaker 1 I don't understand.

Speaker 5 Why would that mess with spelling?

Speaker 1 I think the fear is that if you

Speaker 1 I don't, I actually don't know.

Speaker 1 I mean, because most of the people I'm working with, almost all of them, every single one of the people I'm working with has sees this as happening in their homes and their classrooms, and it's not just teachers and parents and ministers and rabbis and parapsychologists and speech pathologists, and occupational therapists.

Speaker 1 Like, these are all the people reporting it, right? And for them, I think the thing is: truth is never harmful. It might be difficult, but it's not harmful.

Speaker 1 And what this truth means is that we have to change our systems, right, of education. We have to change how we think about things.

Speaker 1 And I think there is a deep fear of people having their darkest, deepest thoughts exposed.

Speaker 1 That's probably not comfortable for the government, for people in control, for people who are controlling things.

Speaker 5 Oh, I think that's coming, whether we like it or not.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But

Speaker 1 why I think this truth might be really uncomfortable for some, but it's so important to get get out there. You can't accept and love someone as a whole being unless you can see and know all of them.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so like people in the spelling community don't want to link it with telepathy, she's saying.

Speaker 3 But like that's because spelling to communicate in these situations is already heavily discredited when you've got someone who's considered non-communicative.

Speaker 3 So like they don't want to link it to something even more outlandish because they're trying to slip this discredited technique through.

Speaker 3 And if you say, oh, this technique that's highly controversial, that isn't well evidence, that a lot of people think is

Speaker 3 bogus, it also relies on proving telepathy is true and psychic abilities are real, people are going to realize that actually this is not something that should be supported.

Speaker 3 But if she is right, that most of the people involved in spelling to communicate also believe it proves telepathy, that only goes to show even further why there clearly is not enough reliance on evidence in that field and why we should be more skeptical.

Speaker 3 If a communication technique is that's considered controversial, any one, we should be cautious about it.

Speaker 3 But if the proponents also allege that it proves magical powers are real, that should up the ante

Speaker 3 so much further. And the last thing I point out right at the very end there, she says, and the thing is, you can't accept and love someone as a whole being unless you can see and know all of them.

Speaker 3 That to me,

Speaker 3 I find it very hard to react to that because for me, if you are putting words in the mouth of somebody, and getting to know the person that you're inventing through this kind of creative exercise where you're fooling yourself into creative writing their personality, you're not getting to know know them.

Speaker 3 You're getting to know this imagined being that you're putting together. And in doing so, you're eradicating the person who sat right there, whose hand you're holding.

Speaker 3 Like in these situations, the real person is that autistic, non-verbal person who has their own personality, who has their personality quirks and traits, who can be excited when they see you.

Speaker 3 And they'll show that in their own way. They just won't say it in poetry.
And they won't say it by communicating with the dead and things. They'll show themselves.

Speaker 3 If you really pay attention to who somebody is, you'll see that.

Speaker 3 But if you're expecting them to be something else, something otherworldly and mystical and magical and wise and all these wonderful things, you are eradicating the person who's genuinely there.

Speaker 6 That's a great point. Now she's going to make a comparison that,

Speaker 6 well, listeners, you let us know what you think about this comparison. I personally am not very, I'm not convinced.

Speaker 1 Sign language went through battles for, I mean, over 100 years to try to even get accepted as a real language. And it wasn't until the 70s or 80s when that happened.

Speaker 1 And then Braille, Louis Braille, who invented Braille, the people at the school where he invented it was like, you guys can't use this. We don't accept this.

Speaker 1 And we don't believe you can read by touching dots. And we don't believe you can type by poking holes.
That's impossible. That seems nuts.

Speaker 1 So when they did, they would do these tests with Louis and other students to be like, okay, you write one word and you spell, you know, and you read it with your dots. And they did.

Speaker 1 And then they'd say, it's fake. They planned it.
They pre-planned the words. And it wasn't until multiple, you know, variations that finally Braille was accepted.

Speaker 1 And now we're seeing the same thing thing with spelling to communicate. They need a communication partner, just like to read, you need glasses.
It doesn't mean they're not communicating on their own.

Speaker 1 They just need someone to help support their motor control. Got it.

Speaker 3 So I think this is an incredibly disingenuous, disingenuous comparison here. Braille is not a good comparison.
Braille is an alphabet, and we know how alphabets work.

Speaker 3 It's a series of dots that will represent letters, words, things like that. Anybody trained in Braille can pick up a Braille book and read it.

Speaker 3 It doesn't require someone to be there to help you pick up the book, help you convey the messages from that. Anybody can create a Braille book that everyone else who knows Braille can read.

Speaker 3 These are entirely independent. And yeah,

Speaker 3 I'm sure there was resistance. I'm sure you know a bit about the resistance on this.

Speaker 3 Even with resistance, the way you overcome that resistance is through demonstrating conclusively that this is accurate in ways that can't be fooled or can't be shenanigans or anything like that.

Speaker 3 And that's what you can do with Braille. And that's why Braille is respected.
The same is not true for spelling to communicate.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and she's distorting the Braille story, like you suggest. It's just trying to fit it to her narrative.

Speaker 6 Here's a quote from an article I found: quote, resistance to his system, talking about Braille, was immediate.

Speaker 6 At one point, the director of Braille's school burned the books he and his classmates had transcribed. The school did not want its blind students becoming too independent.

Speaker 6 It made money by selling crafts they produced, end quote. So she's distorting this thing as like, oh, they immediately didn't want it.
It's like they didn't want it for like a capitalist purpose.

Speaker 6 They didn't want it because the kids were making little things and they were selling those things. So, you know, that's a, that's a, that's kind of a shitty distortion.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And in fairness, she might just not know that.
She might not have looked into it at all because it fits her narrative to

Speaker 3 take the superficial reading that she has there and she doesn't need to then go further deeper into it to find out what was really going on. She uses the idea of reading glasses.

Speaker 3 Again, a terrible comparison because reading glasses have no agency. There is no, you're wearing glasses right now.

Speaker 3 There is no way that the words you're saying could be coming from the glasses and not from you because the glasses are inanimate objects.

Speaker 3 What we're seeing with facilitated communication and spelling communicators, the communication partner is holding the arm or the head or the spelling board for the speller.

Speaker 3 And that only works if the partner knows what needs to be spelled out. And when you do it with people who don't know, it doesn't work.
And yeah, they've got the excuse that they didn't believe in it.

Speaker 3 You didn't have a good relationship. Braille and reading glasses don't require your belief to work.
They just work independently. And that's how we know they're accurate.

Speaker 3 And it's why we know that FC and S2C aren't accurate.

Speaker 6 Okay, so now we're starting to get into

Speaker 6 a really great way to get Joe on board, start talking about money motivations.

Speaker 1 ABA therapy, which is now what kids go into, is a multi-billion dollar industry. And I think that they profit very much so from having kids go into this type of therapy.

Speaker 1 And I think ABA therapy can be helpful for some people. It can be, you know, but for a lot of non-speakers with apraxia, it's like traumatic because you're...
What is ABA therapy?

Speaker 1 It's behavior therapy. And that's like what insurance will cover if you have

Speaker 1 insurance.

Speaker 5 To get to the root of it. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I do think it is. I think there's a huge financial gain, ABA therapy and ASHA, and I think it's all embedded together.

Speaker 5 God, money fucks up every day.

Speaker 1 It does.

Speaker 1 But if anyone listening to this, the number one thing is that if you think of a human rights violation, right, that non-speakers aren't allowed to go spell in schools to communicate, to participate socially,

Speaker 1 because these are individuals with ideas and thoughts and career hopes and want to date and want to have friends and want to be involved.

Speaker 1 and and yes they can't control their bodies but they can do they can communicate and and and and to be leaving them out because oh we can't afford or we don't believe that you should have a communication partner in school it's so it's just mean it's a human rights violation I think it's bizarre yeah I mean that's yes it's also very bizarre and it's just it's it makes sense when you connect it to insurance and money in an industry that's where it gets gross they they're they're against the competitors yeah which is the which is probably truth yeah so now we've met Joe's biases We can continue, and Joe is not going to ask as many tricky questions.

Speaker 3 You know, once we can tie this to a conspiracy about money being made and money being withheld, those are the buttons that get Joe on side.

Speaker 3 And we've seen this so many times already with Joe, that if you want him to be on your side of an issue, just allege that there's a money conspiracy, that there's a cover-up, that people are making money out of it, and Joe will immediately be on your side.

Speaker 6 She could have doubled this up. Kai has a missed opportunity here.

Speaker 6 She could have said that they were trying to stifle these kids because they were staying slurs and it's a freedom of speech issue too.

Speaker 3 He'd have flipped the tape.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that is true. And the other thing, bear in mind, right? Let's say that Kai's right.
Let's say that it could be proven that these children were genuinely telepathic.

Speaker 3 Would there be a world where you would withhold that for financial reasons? Where it's, oh, it's just not worth the amount of money that would cost to train people up in this way.

Speaker 3 It's way too expensive.

Speaker 3 Absolutely not.

Speaker 3 Spending the money to train communication partners would be the smallest investment and the most sensible investment ever if you could prove that this was true because you'd then have these incredibly educated people with the ability to speak to the dead or all these other wonderful things now able to to bring those gifts to the world anybody looking at that from a purely capitalistic bottom line would not say well the the way we make the most money is by stopping that happening so dickens is alleging here that she's shown kids can communicate across the world that they can project their consciousness into that of another child across the world that they can speak to dead they can diagnose illnesses even.

Speaker 3 In the podcast, she talks about how some of those children can ingest and understand an entire book by touching the cover, just by putting the hand on the cover. They can understand the entire book.

Speaker 3 They can understand it when they're talking to somebody who's read the book, who's the facilitator. So suddenly it's amazing that the kid knows the ideas of it.

Speaker 3 So to suggest that big insurance would save money by denying the evidence for all of this and wouldn't try to monetize these very, like, very clearly easy to monetize gifts is obviously silly.

Speaker 6 So, our next bit here is wondering about the motivations of the people and whether or not it's a conspiracy.

Speaker 1 One thing is experiencing something, you just believe it, like I said. And I think anyone who has engaged with,

Speaker 1 walks into a room with a non-speaker who can do this, which from my experience has been quite a few,

Speaker 1 it's not hard to see. It's pretty easy to witness it.

Speaker 1 And so when you experience something over and over and over again, right, it's like, are all these parents and teachers all around the world and speech pathologists and principals and ministers and rabbis and everyone who's witness this lying?

Speaker 1 Did they all come in this great conspiracy to decide that like we're going to trick the world? Or they're experiencing something and telling the truth. And the first one is out there.

Speaker 1 That's like the most impossible thing to imagine.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, it is the most impossible thing to imagine, but we don't need that to be true. We don't require that all the people have to be lying for this to be not true.

Speaker 3 It only takes them to be wrong. And they have every motivation in the world to want to believe this at all costs and therefore to prime themselves to accept something that's wrong here.

Speaker 3 So, her idea that anybody, like the only version of this, like it's either true or everyone's lying is a nonsense.

Speaker 3 It could just be that these people have fooled themselves because we are very easy to fool when we have an emotional bias to believe.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I think the great conspiracy here is mistaking the great love that these people have for their children. It's not a conscious collusion.
It's like a common trait for a parent-child bond.

Speaker 6 I think in some ways, these people are really very vulnerable in this situation. They love their child.
The child can't communicate in ways that other children can communicate.

Speaker 6 And so, they're desperately wanting something like this to be true. So, the collusion is, in fact, that they're all just in the same situation.
That's the collusion. They're all in the same situation.

Speaker 6 And then they may have all of very similar narratives because they probably all feel a very similar bond to their child and they all want

Speaker 6 this particular thing to be true. They also keep keep bringing up love.
This is something that you hear a lot in this podcast.

Speaker 6 And I'm not sure we're going to actually play a clip where she says love is the thing that makes all this work, but she says that over and over.

Speaker 6 And I think this should tell you something about whether or not something like this is true.

Speaker 3 You know, it's...

Speaker 6 It's not that there's some sort of telepathic land where you become morally superior.

Speaker 6 It's that there's a, this, this phenomenon is sort of the projection of the love onto the child that the parent desperately wants.

Speaker 6 So of course the child is expressing love constantly and talking about love because that's what they're showering onto that child and hoping is reciprocated.

Speaker 6 So there's this sort of like thing that's happening where we're getting a chance to see this projection and she's taking it as the child, but really it's it's probably the parent who's the one who's really desperate for love in this situation.

Speaker 3 Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is, almost certainly in those situations, the child does love the parent.

Speaker 3 It's just the way that they're able to show their love is not what the parent can easily interpret. And so, they want a much more clear, unambiguous communication.

Speaker 3 She also talks about, well, the other reason that this is, well, they can't all be lying. She says, Well, do they have to be,

Speaker 3 what could they gain from this? You know, what financial gain? And she talks about how they're going to, they can't make money, they're not making money out of this.

Speaker 3 But bear in mind, gain doesn't have to be financial because what there is to gain here is a communicative relationship with your uncommunicative child.

Speaker 3 And the idea as well that they're not disabled, they're magical and wise and enlightened and involved and a higher being.

Speaker 3 And I imagine those ideas make it much easier to corp in those moments where looking after them is pretty tough because it will get tough. Of course, it's tough.
Like my cousin's got seropalsy.

Speaker 3 She's non-verbal. Looking after her was incredibly hard on my auntie for my cousin's entire life until my auntie died.

Speaker 3 And like, that doesn't mean that my auntie loved her any less, but it was an incredibly difficult thing. But pretending, therefore, that, well, my cousin is someone else.
She's someone she isn't.

Speaker 3 That isn't a solution to that.

Speaker 3 It doesn't increase the amount of love that you're getting back and it doesn't solve this situation. But I can understand why people have this

Speaker 3 need, this bias that leads them to fool themselves in that way.

Speaker 6 I'm going to summarize this next bit without a clip because the clip is quite long for this. And

Speaker 6 you don't really get a ton out of it. It's pretty easy to summarize.
She suggests, Kai suggests that these children, they all communicate telepathically and they all seem to go to one place.

Speaker 6 And this place is called the hill.

Speaker 6 And it's called the hill through many different people all call it the hill, right? So she says that it was called the hill.

Speaker 6 And Joe kind of actually asked at one point, did they all kind of come up with that idea that it was the hill?

Speaker 3 He asked some pretty good questions, actually. He does some pretty good, good, good questioning.

Speaker 6 And she says, yeah, you know, we all agree that this is a cup and this is a cup. So that's what they came up with was the name for the hill.
So when

Speaker 6 throughout the rest of this show and throughout the gloves off section, we'll be mentioning the hill a few times.

Speaker 6 So I wanted to make sure that we mentioned it here so that we can understand sort of what's being told. Like

Speaker 6 what are the children supposedly seeing? And it's a, it's like a, like an astrally projected place where everyone sort of congregates.

Speaker 3 All other autistic kids who are non-verbal can meet there and communicate in the show and telepathy tapes. She even talks about how they have relationships there.

Speaker 3 They have, they fall in love with people that they've never met in person, but they have these deep and wonderful spiritual, emotional connections, which again, we can understand where that's coming from because you want your child to have this full rounded life that you can't see them having so well it's it's great he has got a girlfriend he has fallen in love he has all these kind of wonderful things and when they talk about the hill she even says like well they all call it the hill and she says i spoke to another parent and their kid was calling it the hill and it sort of sounds in in this sort of conversation with joe like each of the parents sort of mentioned the hill independently to her and they all happen to be already calling it the hill When you hear it talked about on the telepathy podcast, on Tethy Tapes, it sounds a lot like one of the parents told her it's called the hill.

Speaker 3 And then when she's talking to the parents, she says, oh, do they do the thing that these kids did, where they go off into this astral plane place? They go to a place called the hill.

Speaker 3 And it sounds like the parents then go and ask their kid, do you know about the hill?

Speaker 3 And of course, the kid, through facilitated communication by the parents, says, yes, I do know about the thing that's in your head that you're asking me to confirm.

Speaker 3 And so it feels a lot more like the hill started as a word with one of the parents, one of the children, one of the parents kind of bringing it out in this kind of way, and then has passed through the relationships formed by Kai to confirm it through facilitated communication.

Speaker 3 But she presents it as if organically everybody came up with the name the hill at the same time.

Speaker 6 The reason why we bring that up is because this next clip really talks about how not only

Speaker 6 people who are non-verbal autistic can get to this hill, but in this case, there was someone else who was able to do it who happens to not be in that situation.

Speaker 5 This person who's a typical, a regular person, got in there.

Speaker 5 Had they had any experience in the past with any form of telepathy before this?

Speaker 1 Well, the reason his story is so beautiful, so again, he's in episode one of the talk tracks.

Speaker 1 And what happened is he had, he was diagnosed with a really rare like autoimmune disease and then like stage four cancer. And he

Speaker 1 kind of realized like if I need to, I need to save my life, I'm going to die if I don't learn to like think, control my thoughts. And he was able to cure himself.

Speaker 1 And he sent me scans and the cancer is almost all gone. But I think that attention to thought and how thought can change your world and dictate what happens in your world really

Speaker 1 did something in his brain that allowed him to live in that mental space.

Speaker 1 And I think that helped him. I think that really helped him get to the hill.
I mean, he talks about more about how he got there.

Speaker 1 And it took a few times. And for him, it was all audible.

Speaker 3 So this is one of the stories from the latest episodes of the show, which is this, the talk tracks. It's like the spin-off kind of show outside of the documentary where it's just conversations.

Speaker 3 So Kylie says she meets a man who claims he cured his own cancer through his thoughts, and that the act of curing his own stage four cancer granted him access to the hill.

Speaker 3 Now, this should be a major red flag for the credibility of this idea and the credibility of Kai Dickens for accepting it, because even if she did have proof that non-verbal autistic kids can be psychic, now her theory also has to account for being able to cure cancer through the power of thought alone.

Speaker 3 And then that by doing so, you also can become psychic.

Speaker 3 And the proof of all of that still remains those experiments carried out using spelling boards that we know are using techniques that are prone to imagination and other kind of interference.

Speaker 3 So like this should be a massive series of red flags.

Speaker 6 Okay, last clip in the main section.

Speaker 6 This is talking about, she's mentioning someone here, an English teacher that they're going to talk about and that was involved in.

Speaker 6 in some of this communication.

Speaker 1 One of the teachers that I've come to love so much, and she was also in England, She said that the first time she realized something like this was going on, she was working at a school where

Speaker 1 individuals weren't speaking. And she saw people of like a bunch of her class playing at recess.
And she's like, it was a fully orchestrated game.

Speaker 1 Like, this one needed to go here, and this one needed to go here. And they were doing this.
And then she's like, but they weren't speaking. And I was watching this through the classroom window.

Speaker 1 And I thought, they are communicating through telepathy. Because how else do this is a huge organized game? And she watched it over and over again.

Speaker 1 And then she thought in her head, I want to be in on this. I want you all to teach me.
I want to get in on this. And then one of the boys started,

Speaker 1 she'd start hearing him him in her head, like if he had fallen down outside or couldn't find his lunch money or, you know, something happened, skinned his knee.

Speaker 1 And she would hear him and like would know where to go find him. And she was like, oh my gosh, like he's, this is starting to work.
And then,

Speaker 1 yeah. And then like one of the students'

Speaker 1 mothers died and she became, and the mother said to this teacher, I want you to really take care of my son as he ages. He loves you.
Like he, he really respects you.

Speaker 1 And she's done that his whole life. And now, you know, he's a grown adult and they still communicate.
But she's like, now he communicates with me telepathically. I'll get these huge visual packages.

Speaker 1 And she's like, and sometimes I think, first, did this come from me and my making this up? But it'll be like an update on someone from, you know, that they knew both 20 years ago.

Speaker 1 And she'll be like, that can't be that this guy is unlay priest. He's so unreligious or whatever.
There'll be something that makes no sense.

Speaker 1 And she'll go look it up on Facebook and it proves to be true. So, you know, she'll constantly have to double check things.

Speaker 1 And she, yeah, I mean, so it's, it's remarkable, but I do not doubt that the wolves are probably using telepathy.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think chimpanzees do it too.

Speaker 6 Yeah, they include that little piece at the end there. That's what they were saying.

Speaker 3 We have to let into.

Speaker 6 It's not out of nowhere, everybody. There is a little piece where they're talking about how animals have telepathy beforehand.
And so that that's why they brought it back in at the end.

Speaker 3 The wolves is now out of nowhere. The chimpanzees absolutely is out of nowhere.

Speaker 6 This is 100%.

Speaker 3 Just

Speaker 3 throwing that in. But they're talking here about this teacher.
And I found this teacher, Jez Curzon. She's from Somerset in the southwest of England.

Speaker 3 And she now runs a website called AsherTree.com, named after Asher, who is this non-verbal pupil that she knew 25 years ago. And she writes about all this, so I don't don't feel bad.

Speaker 3 This is all on her website, so I don't feel bad explaining some of this.

Speaker 3 But what Kai's talking about, about being able to tell when he skinned his knee and when he's lost his lunch money and things like that, these are stories that Jez has recounted to her from back when she was teaching this child 20 to 25 years ago.

Speaker 3 So these aren't current stories. These are stories that Jez has told herself and told other people for a quarter of a century.
So we have to immediately question the veracity.

Speaker 3 These aren't proven stories. The memory adapts things over time.

Speaker 3 The edges all get rounded off but jez claims that she's been in telepathic communication with asher since then and dickens is saying oh he sends her remote downloads as visual packages she even says on the show that she's got i think notebooks of messages that he's communicated to her telepathically including she says on telepathy tips that he diagnosed her friend's illness despite the fact she hasn't seen him since he left her school 20 plus years ago Now,

Speaker 3 in my opinion, Curzon has been in a quarter century long pen pal relationship with a persona that she has inadvertently created. She's in a pen pal relationship with herself at this point.

Speaker 3 And it's one that is in absolutely no way related to the disabled child that was formerly in her care.

Speaker 3 And in doing so, she may feel like she's elevated this child into something like otherworldly and wonderful.

Speaker 3 But what she's actually done is completely erased who this child actually was, is in her life, was in her life, in favor of who she wishes he was. And that's not who he really is at all.

Speaker 6 All right, well, let's move on. We'll We'll go to our toolbox section.

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Speaker 6 So today we're going to be doing the argument argument from anecdote, Marsh. What is the argument from anecdote?

Speaker 3 So, the idea of the argument from anecdote is by saying that, well, to prove a point, I can tell you a story of it happening.

Speaker 3 So, when it comes to psychic ability, well, my auntie actually told me at one point that I would meet a friend that I hadn't seen for a long time, and then the next day I saw him.

Speaker 3 So, clearly, psychic ability is real because how do you explain that one story from my auntie? The problem is, anecdotes are uncontrolled. We don't know the full details of how things really happened.

Speaker 3 We don't know what other factors were coming in. We don't know how accurate the story is.
We don't know how reflective it is.

Speaker 3 And obviously, we also don't know every single time that someone said you're going to meet someone and you didn't meet them. That doesn't become an anecdote.

Speaker 3 So, individual stories aren't good to point us in a direction for where we should look further, but they're not evidence because they are so uncontrolled that we just can't really tell is this really a true effect or is this just a story someone's telling us?

Speaker 6 All right, so we're going to start out with our first example of this.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, it comes out in many cases that these individuals can read minds, have a plethora of other, for lack of better words, spiritual gifts, and then the parents and teachers often aren't believed about that either.

Speaker 1 So, it's like there's stigma every which way. Right.

Speaker 1 That and the podcast is kind of a collision of all these stigmas and really trying to break down those stigmas and be like, here's the truth: these people aren't there in there.

Speaker 1 Spelling is a valid form of communication. And yes, many of them say they have spiritual gifts, which I think we can pretty much validate at this point.

Speaker 5 When you say spiritual gifts, what do you mean by that?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so when when I first stumbled into this, which we can talk about later if you want, when I first kind of stumbled into this, I thought this was just about telepathy, right?

Speaker 1 And that there were these individuals and their parents and teachers were claiming they could read minds.

Speaker 1 And as I started meeting more and more and more of these families, and again, like I said, teachers, it's not limited to just families,

Speaker 1 one thing that they started telling me was telepathy is just the tip of the iceberg. And I didn't know what that meant.
You know, what do you mean telepathy is the

Speaker 1 iceberg?

Speaker 1 And it's true because I think whether or not it's ability to see disease or illness in someone and be able to diagnose it before this person knows that there's something wrong, reading an aura and saying that they can see a color around not just animals and humans, but plants,

Speaker 1 being able to speak multiple languages even though you haven't been taught them, or playing instruments and knowing music or being able to access almost any song and having perfect pitch, being able to visit people in dreams.

Speaker 1 And then, I mean, I think some of the more just like mind-altering, shocking things for me was how many non-speaking individuals have said that they are able to speak with people from the other side.

Speaker 1 And yeah, so it didn't just start with telepathy or end with telepathy. It's a plethora of things.

Speaker 6 I do like that Joe actually asks her to define what that is.

Speaker 6 You know, that's so rare that Joe will do that. Oh, yeah.
Where he'll actually say, oh, what exactly do you mean by that? That's a good, that's actually a good way to question.

Speaker 6 He doesn't, of course, question any of the other stuff, but he at least does one.

Speaker 6 He took one step down the path, March. Marsh, one step.

Speaker 3 He asks a few good questions in this show, actually. There's a few episodes, a few parts of this show where he does ask some good questions.
He just doesn't follow

Speaker 3 as far as I follow.

Speaker 6 And, you know, there's a lot to focus on here, but I think the big takeaway is the fact that she thinks that these individual stories have significant weight and that these are reasons to believe and that these stories are 100% true and that she automatically believes every single one of these stories.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and the more of the stories there are, well, that's even more evidence. She says more and more and more of these families, but each of these is just an individual story.

Speaker 3 And if you looked at any one of these individual stories and it didn't hold up, well, that's not evidence at that point.

Speaker 3 So we have to really either do this through properly controlled trials, properly tests at things with good controls, or we need to scrutinize every one of those stories to see what's going on.

Speaker 6 All right, so here's our next piece where she's describing the argument from anecdote.

Speaker 1 One of the stories that I loved

Speaker 1 goes back,

Speaker 1 so Rupert Cheldrick, the Cambridge biologist who's in this project, he didn't believe in telephone either. I mean, I think a lot of scientists, right, don't believe this stuff right away either.

Speaker 1 And he had a, you know, a senior professor that he really looked up to, Sir Rudolph Peters. And he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for being such a brilliant scientific mind, right?

Speaker 1 And then Sir Rudolph Peters was in like the tea room at Cambridge one time and telling young Dr. Sheldrake, young Rupert here, that

Speaker 1 he just heard of a blind boy that he tested who obviously is blind and can't read an eye chart. But if his mother is looking at it, he could read it.
Whoa.

Speaker 1 And that's how Rupert Sheldrake fell into this world.

Speaker 3 So this is a perfect illustration of the argument from anecdote, because we have here, it's a woe from Joy. This is amazing.
It's absolutely incredible.

Speaker 3 But this is Kai telling a story of Rupert Sheldrick, who told her a story of somebody he knew, Rudolph Peters, who was recounting to Sheldrick a story he heard about a boy.

Speaker 3 At the end of all of this, we've got an unnamed child that nobody involved in this conversation has actually met. This shouldn't elicit a woe.
This is so far removed from evidence.

Speaker 3 This is third or fourth hand testimony about an unnamed boy, an undetermined amount of time ago in a completely uncontrolled way about a story that may well never have happened because it's not even saying that Rudolph Peters met this boy he said he heard about a boy so we don't even know how Peters came across this story it's just completely wild that it came in it came up in this kind of way this should not make you go whoa this should make you go this should make you shrug yeah exactly shrug yeah because this this sort of stops exactly where the point of you know at the point of belief it should what it should do is be be okay Well, let's test it.

Speaker 6 If that's the case, there's plenty, there's plenty of ways you could easily test this to see if it's actually happening, whether or not this person who's sitting in the room, uh, this mother who's sitting in the room with the child could actually do this.

Speaker 6 There's plenty of ways to do it, even with the child in the room, etc. There's plenty of ways to do this that you could easily test this for to see if there's any kind of veracity to this claim.

Speaker 6 But instead, it just stops right where they believe that it's true, and then it never continues on from there. So, again, it doesn't elicit a whoa, it should be elicit either the next part, which is

Speaker 6 let's test it or just forget that it actually happened. Yeah.
Here's another anecdote about a person who's deeply involved in these telepathy tapes.

Speaker 1 The first person we saw being able to do it was this girl, Mia, and she was still in the early stages of learning to spell to communicate. So she was being touched.

Speaker 1 It often helps, like first with the wrist and then here and then here and then on the head and then often then there's no touch at all, right?

Speaker 1 It's just like learning that body and learning those supports to control your motor. So

Speaker 1 Dr. Powell was like, ah, no scientists will take this because she was being touched.
And I think a lot of us in the room were like, wait, people think she's her mom sending Morse code?

Speaker 1 Like they're planned. I mean, of course, that's ridiculous.
It really is. But then the next individual could do it across the room and wasn't being touched.

Speaker 1 And, you know, anyone that we saw thereafter wasn't being touched. So that was pretty remarkable.
And I don't think touch actually has.

Speaker 1 I think a lot of these are really cool if you're being touched, you know?

Speaker 3 But nobody is suggesting that she was being communicated with through Morse code. That was obviously a ridiculous thing.

Speaker 3 Kai says it jokingly, but it does show that she doesn't seem to fully understand what the criticisms of these techniques are.

Speaker 3 All of this, as she explains, it sounds incredibly impressive, unless you actually watch what it's like.

Speaker 3 So I mentioned that Jonathan Jerry and McGill in Canada, McGill University in Canada, did actually get access to the videos.

Speaker 3 He wrote about it in an article called The Telepathy Tapes Prove We All Want to Believe.

Speaker 3 And what he said about this clip is, quote, the video clip posted to the website clearly shows the mom not only holding the letterboard in front of Mia, but holding Mia's jaw as Mia points to the board.

Speaker 3 Mia does spell out pirata, which is Spanish for pirate, which is the the correct answer, but the mother's influence cannot be ruled out. Move the head and the finger will follow.

Speaker 3 In a different test, Mia's mother is touching Mia's forehead during the spelling, where it will be easy to subtly press down whenever Mia's finger hovers over the right number.

Speaker 3 And so here's actually a direct quote from Kai Dickens herself in the telepathy tapes about Mia's testing, okay? Quote.

Speaker 3 We tried to see if Mia could do the telepathy tests with her father. We tried random number generators, random picture generators, and she could absolutely not tell us what her dad was looking at.

Speaker 3 Sometimes we show her dad a flashcard or a number, and Mia would start typing and then stop. And sometimes she wouldn't even type at all.
The test with her dad wore Mia out, unquote.

Speaker 3 And the fact that it wore Mia out is, I think, something we should bear in mind, the emotional toll, the physical toll on these kids being forced to kind of go through this if they're not the ones communicating.

Speaker 3 But as Dickens gives a justification in the show, what she says is, quote, Mia wrote in her diary that she can read everyone's mind, but you have to believe in her for her to do it.

Speaker 6 Unquote. Sounds like a real convenient solution to forgetting the misses there.

Speaker 3 It really does, especially, and it's worth remembering at this point, if Mia isn't the one doing the writing here, Mia didn't write it in her diary. Because Mia doesn't have a diary.

Speaker 3 Mia's parents maintain a diary in her name is what's really happening here.

Speaker 6 Here's a two-part clip talking about language.

Speaker 1 So it's a tough idea that was the first one. And then I think the second one was the language stuff.

Speaker 1 A lot of parents saying, you know, we have no idea how, but she's speaking Portuguese and no one in a house speaks Portuguese. Or people talking about, you know, this has been documented?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes, yeah. It's quite common, actually.

Speaker 3 It's quite common. It's amazing.
Told like this, as an anecdote, as a story, this sounds incredible. She speaks Portuguese.
No one else speaks Portuguese. How would this child know Portuguese?

Speaker 3 It must be something going on. Well, let's hear how this actually came about, which Kai Dickens will now explain.

Speaker 5 When you say that they can speak Portuguese,

Speaker 5 they understand Portuguese. Do they write it? Like, how does this manifest itself?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so, I mean, there's one young girl I'm thinking of in particular, but there's this, again, this has come up now with, I don't know, 15 non-speakers that I've met.

Speaker 1 But the girl I'm thinking of,

Speaker 1 her, you know, she will work during the day with a paraprofessional and a spelling coach.

Speaker 1 You know, there's a, you know, the education system, there might be two or three people in a room and three people who are in the room this day.

Speaker 1 And she started spelling in a language and they didn't know what it is, so they looked it up and it was Portuguese.

Speaker 1 And then she started spelling in Spanish and they were like this is wild and she also said she knew hieroglyphics and what yeah

Speaker 1 and then they were like well how do we test this because if we know the answer she'll read our mind and know so they had to just which is wild already yeah like you have to worry about this kid reading your mind it might be bullshit so they had to like look up pictures of hieroglyphics and not know what the pictures were representing to be like okay here's the feather I mean I don't know what a hieroglyphic is whatever a feather on top of a stone or whatever the picture was of and here's this picture and this this picture.

Speaker 1 And then she identified them. And then they looked them up and they were right.

Speaker 5 Wow, all of them 100% accurate?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Wow.
Yeah. So, and I'm not saying, of course, not.

Speaker 5 What the hell is going on there?

Speaker 1 Not every.

Speaker 1 What is that?

Speaker 5 Well, I mean. That is, that's beyond bizarre.
Did you give her a cuneiform?

Speaker 1 I mean, I wasn't there for this. I, I, you know, her mom reported it to me and it has the email that she received from the staff.
And so, you know, the staff is just like, this is what happened today?

Speaker 1 And, you know, because these individuals are spelling to communicate, it can take a lot of time. It can take a lot of work and effort to get that information out.

Speaker 1 So, anything that comes out, usually, I mean, a good spelling coach will ask this child first, right? Is it okay if I share this with your parents, or is this private between us, or whatever?

Speaker 1 But if they say it's okay to share, they will and write a letter home. And this is what happened.
And that was in a letter home. This is what happened today.

Speaker 3 So, first of all, the idea that these spellers are saying, is it okay if I share with your parents what happened?

Speaker 3 That is a sign, it's just a reminder that this can get pretty dodgy because if they don't want to say to the parents what happened,

Speaker 3 the facilitators will spell out no, and they will keep a secret between themselves and the child that they're caring for here.

Speaker 3 But this goes from an absolutely remarkable experiment, you know, that she's able to do these amazing things with languages, even like hieroglyphical things.

Speaker 3 It's remarkable. But then when she digs down into it, oh, it's something that someone told Kai based on an email they'd received about something that had happened at school when they weren't there.

Speaker 3 So this isn't one of the tests that Kai's done. This isn't even something that one of the parents can testify firsthand to.

Speaker 3 This is an email the parents received of something they were told happened at school. So how controlled was any of this? We have no way of knowing.
We shouldn't treat this any more than just a story.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and it's not even in one of the videotapes that you suggest, right? Like, you know, the videotapes that they sort of use as proof, it's not even one of those.

Speaker 3 No, absolutely not. This just happened at school and then the school decided or someone at the school decided to email the parents about it.

Speaker 3 So, okay, they're testing her out in things like hieroglyphs. What are the chances that the people testing her at her special educational needs school knew how to read hieroglyphs?

Speaker 3 That seems incredibly unlikely. It feels like the much better explanation, which is like they said, well, what does this one mean?

Speaker 3 And then they read in the book to verify and they got the answer that they'd read in a book here.

Speaker 3 This isn't that they were accurately reading hieroglyphs here because nobody at the school could verify that that was true. So this is just a story and it's a story third, fourth hand even.

Speaker 6 And if this was common and something that these children could do all the time, there would be video of it.

Speaker 6 There would be something showing it all the time happening, especially when there's no one who knows what a thing that they're talking about.

Speaker 6 There would be many, many instances of this happening, regardless of if the child, right, like the child were being touched or whatever, if the child is able to pick things out that no one in the room knows, that's a big deal and should be shown all the time.

Speaker 6 That would be what I would be showing pretty much exclusively.

Speaker 3 Yeah, absolutely. And she says there's 15 non-speakers she's she's met that can do this, but her best example is something that was reported to two parents in email from a thing that they weren't at.

Speaker 6 This one is sort of exactly emblematic exactly of what anecdotal data is and what the argument from anecdote is.

Speaker 1 Because for so long, research around this type of stuff wouldn't be funded because it would be just dismissed. It's impossible.
It's impossible. It's impossible.

Speaker 1 And one of the moms in the telepathy tapes who, you know, I love so much. Her name is Manisha.
She talks about her son. She goes, Akil is a data.
You want to look at the data. You want the data.

Speaker 1 Like, look at my son. He's the data.

Speaker 1 And some of these parents are wanting, desperate for answers.

Speaker 1 They're not in the question of if it's happening. They're wondering how it's happening.
And I think I'm in that part too. Like when the people that are just,

Speaker 1 is it possible? Is it possible? I think for most of us in this world, it's like, yeah, you're like 10 steps behind, man. Like, it's possible.
It's not a matter if, it's why. And that's my hope is that

Speaker 1 there's like a

Speaker 1 the chains will be like, you know, let off the scientists.

Speaker 3 So yeah, an individual case here is not data. She says, my son is data.

Speaker 3 An individual case is not data, especially when it's an uncontrolled experiment with an experimenter who is understandably very motivated to find something incredible here.

Speaker 6 Look, if we presume that the things you're saying are happening, you have to be open to the fact that there's a very simple explanation of this that doesn't fit with what you suggest.

Speaker 6 And I think that the way that she's describing this, she's like, yeah, of course it's happening. Yeah, of course.
Yeah, you're 10 steps behind. Yeah, of course it's happening.
I've already moved on.

Speaker 6 I've moved past the actual testing of this claim. This claim is in her mind.
And I think in a lot of the minds of the people who she's communicating with, this claim isn't up for discussion anymore.

Speaker 6 And that's closing off the idea of, you know, whether or not she should be believed.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's closed-minded. Yeah.

Speaker 6 All right. So we're back to language again.
This is another piece of the argument from anecdote.

Speaker 5 Right. How often do you see the language thing?

Speaker 1 You know, I should send out another soup, like, like questionnaire, but probably every five individuals. Wow.
You know?

Speaker 1 But like, that's a rough number, but it would be interesting to like survey.

Speaker 5 Are there any other data points that would indicate that someone would be more likely to have these language skills?

Speaker 5 Is there any factors about these individuals, like the differences in their conditions or the environment?

Speaker 3 I mean, those are pretty good questions for George to ask. He's trying to understand this better.
He's trying to dig in. I don't mind that.
That's pretty good. Her answers aren't very good.

Speaker 1 Well, this is one thing that has been really remarkable, I think, especially since the celebrity tapes came out, is how much belief and just like acceptance of these types of things matters for them to show themselves, right?

Speaker 1 So, so I was talking to a parent the other day who's not in the celebrity tapes, of someone I've met through this, and she said, Look, my son, after the celebrity tapes came out, you know, he's about 19, said, I need to come out to you.

Speaker 1 I can also read your mind, but just never felt comfortable saying it because didn't think his parents would respond well, right?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 3 another teacher was telling me look now that this has come out and like i've realized this to be a truth in her clinic or classroom she will do a 10 minutes for thought sharing in the beginning of the day where they can all talk telepathy and hang out and she uh she said it's like the one of the only times when they're all quiet and they're just thought sharing so yeah so here we have either people are more likely to admit they're telepathic once you you open and you show that you're open up to it or the parents are more likely to ask the question and believe it once they've been told it's a thing and they start looking for signs because the the place that they're looking for signs is themselves.

Speaker 3 They provide the answers they're looking for.

Speaker 6 Yeah. And also once somebody suggests it, especially if that's an authority, someone who's around that sort of an authority, they're going to be more open to it.

Speaker 6 And so that's why it's so important to prove that something's like this is happening before we move on to the next piece, because, you know, you don't want to like find the method later.

Speaker 6 You want to find out if it's true first before you start looking for those methods. And I think, you know, they're they're skipping a step and trying to move towards these other things.

Speaker 6 The people who are facilitating are probably very open to this because someone who they trust is suggesting that this is happening.

Speaker 6 And then suddenly now their kid is also saying they're also telepathic. There's something there that I think you need to point to.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 All right.

Speaker 6 Last clip in our toolbox section.

Speaker 1 Before the telepathy tapes was out in the world, almost every single parent or teacher I met was like thinking this was an individual miracle happening alone in their house. They couldn't tell anyone.

Speaker 1 Even sometimes the spouses were fighting.

Speaker 1 I met one parent once, not in the, in the Sloppy Tapes, but I met her in the journey and she said, my husband wants to take my child away because he thinks I've lost my mind by saying that this is happening.

Speaker 1 Oh, Jesus. So, you know, so now that it's out there, I think it's a, it's, it, it's just think about it.
If you have kids, right?

Speaker 1 Like if you believe in your kids, I believe you, I believe in you, it makes a difference. The placebo effect.
Sure. We know placebo effect works.
If you believe in something, it makes a difference.

Speaker 3 So these aren't individual cases anymore because there's lots of them. Except each of these these cases is uncontrolled and highly susceptible to bias.
So they had to be scrutinized individually.

Speaker 3 Just having lots of them doesn't make each of these cases particularly strong. And just think for a moment of that story of the husband who wanted to take his kid away there.

Speaker 3 How bad must the situation have been for him to get to that point?

Speaker 3 And therefore, how much more motivated will the mum have to have been in order to prove that this is real at all costs, given the situation that they're in?

Speaker 3 We're talking about an incredibly emotionally charged situation there. And the fact that they're they're bringing in these pseudoscientific claims into that situation cannot be doing anybody any good.

Speaker 6 What do you think about the placebo effects mentioned there?

Speaker 6 It seems to me a weird sort of metaphor to bring up because the placebo effect has moments where there isn't anything at all that's happening and people trick themselves to believe that that thing is real.

Speaker 6 That to me feels like a weird metaphor to bring up to prove your case.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't think she knows that's what the placebo effect is because a lot of people have misunderstandings about the placebo effect and think it is mind over matter.

Speaker 3 You can will things into reality using your brain.

Speaker 3 And so, I think what she's talking about here is: if you really believe an inert substance will work for you, it will actually work for you because you can create your reality in that way.

Speaker 3 God, and unfortunately, that's not true about placebo effect either. That's an entirely different conversation.

Speaker 6 We'll have to get to that someday. When he has a placebo expert, yeah, I'll look out for some.

Speaker 3 I'm sure there'll be some somewhere.

Speaker 5 I'm the last person that thinks I'm smart. Trust me.

Speaker 6 Okay, Marsh, we're nearing the end here. Was there anything good about this episode?

Speaker 3 There's a couple of things. They aren't in the bits that we've covered, but at one point he talks about billionaires and the acquisition of wealth.

Speaker 3 He talks about how once you've got a huge amount of money, just adding notes to the end and the pursuit of numbers isn't a good thing. There's nothing positive about that.

Speaker 3 I think that's a pretty good kind of critique. I think he talks about the accumulation of possessions isn't good.

Speaker 3 He points out that it's ridiculous that Olympic athletes don't profit from the success. These are very good takes on capitalism, very good critiques of capitalism.

Speaker 3 They are noticeably absent when he talks to anybody rich. So, I mean, we'll cover it in the gloves off segment as well.

Speaker 3 But, like, when he's saying it's ridiculous that people who are incredibly wealthy just want to keep getting more and more money, he didn't say that when Elon Musk was on the show recently.

Speaker 3 He didn't say that when Mark Andreessen or Mark Zuckerberg or any of the billionaires that he knows. He doesn't bring it to them.
He He brings it to Kai.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 I, you know what? I just want to say that I got the feeling throughout this entire episode that Kai really does care about these kids. She really does care about these families.

Speaker 6 She really just is just a little bit too open to believing. And she's skipping the really hard part about proving that this is real.
She's skipping that part.

Speaker 6 And I think she's doing it out of empathy. And I think she's doing it from a place that does have a good, a goodness to it.

Speaker 6 But I just think that she's, you know, she's missing, in some ways, giving a lot of these families false hope, which is, which could be just as damaging, right? That's bad.

Speaker 6 And, and, but I think that it's at least coming from a good place. I don't think that she's a bad person, and I don't think she's trying to trick people for her own personal gain.

Speaker 6 I think that she is doing this because she really likes these families and she really wants them to have very complete lives with their children.

Speaker 6 And I think that that's that while that's admirable, I don't want her to skip the hard parts.

Speaker 3 I think that, like, at least her motivation is in the right spot for this yeah i think that's true i think that's i would also say that's true of the families i don't think there's anybody here who is lying i think they absolutely just want what's best for their kids and they've been persuaded for all these different reasons that this is what's best unfortunately like even though it is it's admirable in terms of its intent it is still harmful in terms of its execution what it's actually doing great point uh i also want to bring up that there is a super awkward sex worker story in this that talks about joe's friend brian and how he was dating this girl and Joe knew she was troubled from the beginning.

Speaker 6 Kai wanted to shoot out of that room as like and just land on the hill. She wanted to actually project herself during that moment.

Speaker 6 And you can tell she is squirming the entire time and it's delicious to listen to if you like cringe. If you like cringe, that is the cringiest part of this episode.

Speaker 6 All right, that's it for this week. Remember that you can access more than a half hour of bonus content every week for as little as a dollar an episode by subscribing at patreon.com slash knowrogan.

Speaker 6 Meanwhile, you can hear more from me at cognitive dissonance and citation needed, and you can hear more from Marsh at Skeptics with a K.

Speaker 6 And we'll be back next week for a little more of the No Rogan experience.

Speaker 6 If you love the show, please rate and share it. If you want to get in touch with us, become a patron, or check out the show notes, go to knowrogan.com.

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