One of the top podcasts in the world—even beating out Rogan for a few hours—is popularizing a well-meaning intervention for non-speaking autistic people. Unfortunately, that intervention happens to be a proven failure, and may set autistic and disability rights discourse back by decades.
Filmmaker Ky Dicken’s The Telepathy Tapes podcast delves into the world of Facilitated Communication, in which non-speaking people are believed to miraculously gain access to complex written language after lives of silence. According to Dickson, non-speaking people can also gather in transdimensional spaces and channel spiritual knowledge.
But there’s a problem. Every controlled test shows that the messages produced through letterboards and iPads are coming from the facilitators—not the non-speaking persons.
In this episode, Matthew interviews experts in pseudoscience and autism, including Janyce Boynton, a former (now dissident) practitioner of Facilitated Communication who explains how seductive and promising it was to practice, but how it ultimately steals agency and dignity from the autistic client.
And... this is also a story about parents dealing with crushing levels of unpaid and invisible labour. They are already doing miraculous work. A fantasy is no replacement for true support and recognition.
Show Notes
Podcast About 'Telepathic' Autistic Children Briefly Knocks Joe Rogan Out Of No. 1 Spot
Ky Dickens Director | Filmmaker
Facilitated Communication—what harm it can do: Confessions of a former facilitator
MD25438 - Powell, Diane Hennacy, MD - OR License Verification - 01/12/2025 11:07:47 AM
The Telepathy Tapes: Separating Science From Pseudoscience In Autism Communication
Stolen Voices: Facilitated Communication Devalues Autism | Psychology Today Canada
Multiple method validation study of facilitated communication: II. Individual differences and subgroup results - PubMed
The Telepathy Tapes Prove We All Want to Believe
"The Telepathy Tapes" is Taking America by Storm. But it Has its Roots in Old Autism Controversies.
Mixed Messages: Validity and Ethics of Facilitated Communication | Disability Studies Quarterly
Is There Science Behind That? Facilitated Communication
Controlled Studies — Facilitated Communication
Served people with severe communication impairments — Obit for Rosemary Crossley
More Doubts over Disability ‘Miracle’
Katharine Beals
Jonathan Jarry MSc - Science Communicator
FCisNotScience - YouTube — Janyce Boynton’s awesome YouTube channel
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Hello, everyone.
Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Rumsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Episode 241, Unraveling the Telepathy Tapes.
For decades, a very specific group of people have been claiming telepathy is happening in their homes and in their classrooms.
And nobody has believed them.
Nobody has listened to them.
But on this podcast, we do.
That is documentary filmmaker Kai Dickens with her stinger and tagline for a podcast series called The Telepathy Tapes, which has been crushing it in the metrics department, reaching its peak after Joe Rogan uncritically praised it on his Christmas reaching its peak after Joe Rogan uncritically praised it on his Christmas special episode with comedian And I think, Julian, that should have been our first red flag.
Absolutely.
But after that ping, the telepathy tapes actually beat out Rogan in downloads for a few hours on January 3rd.
And then it held steady at number two over the Mel Robbins podcast and, not gonna lie, with Kylie Kelsey for a number of days.
Now, the buzz has receded a bit at this point, but Dickens has found a groove with plans for a second season and a streaming documentary.
And most importantly, I think, the telepathy tapes has had a huge impact on autism discourse.
Now, Dickens is a highly accomplished videographer.
Her documentary subjects include high-powered women investors, TikTok influencers, the subjects of paid leave and folks who fall through the gaps of the Medicaid system.
And she's also directed commercials for Netflix, Google, Facebook, TikTok, and Johnson& Johnson.
She says that she's been involved in inclusivity politics since her school days, and her brother is an autistic person with low support needs.
But her bio doesn't list any journalism training, and as we'll see in what follows, that casts a long shadow.
Now, I reached out to her directly and through her team at United Talent several times for an interview for this episode, and I didn't hear back.
But I also know that she lives in L.A., and the fires have thrown so many people into precarity.
So I hope that Dickens and her people are okay, and I extend an open invitation for her to come on and speak to the many concerns we'll be raising today.
All right, Matthew, this has been, as you've said, a little bit of a sensation.
It's found quite an enthusiastic audience.
I've purposely not listened to the podcast yet, though I'm dying to dig into it.
So I'm going to let you be my guide as we get into this today.
All right, I'll be interested to know if you'll follow through on that after we finish.
Now, the telepathy tapes documents Dickinson's credulous encounters with an unregulated...
I'll be using FC in this episode sometimes for short.
Now, FC proposes to offer previously non-speaking autistic kids implausibly quick access to written communication.
They accomplish this through some kind of device, a letter board or a keyboard or an iPad, and the physical support of a facilitator who trains in the technique through a series of workshops.
The facilitator will guide the client's hand on the letterboard or keyboard, or touch their arm or shoulder or head, or in some cases move the letterboard in such a way as to influence the responses.
Okay, wait, wait, hold on.
So guiding their hand already is sounding kind of tricky, right?
Yeah.
Because how do you separate the facilitator versus the client's impulses and ideas?
Right.
But then that last piece about moving the board?
Yeah.
What's going on?
Well, it's a problem, and they try to mitigate this problem in a number of ways, but they never quite eliminate the possibility and the likelihood of influence through controlled testing.
Now, as we'll see, this cueing, as they call it, which gets very subtle at some points, can involve no physical contact in some instances.
But if the facilitator is present...
Research shows that they must be giving cues, and this is really the Achilles' heel of FC, which purports to be a strategy for giving nonverbal people, non-speaking people, independent communication.
Okay, just a quick note about terms.
You'll hear several terms used by myself and my sources for the subjects of telepathy tapes.
Non-speaking autistic kids or profoundly autistic, for example.
And these indicate that learning has been affected in ways that have impeded oral language acquisition.
For clarity, even though she isn't clear on the subject's diagnoses, which is totally fair for privacy reasons, Dickens' subjects are not autistic kids with lower support needs who may at times be selectively mute.
In telepathy tapes, you'll hear Dickens and family members refer to the kids as spellers because they are using FC, but whether they themselves are spelling is exactly what is in dispute.
And before people come at us saying that we're foreclosing on non-speakers being able to communicate in general, no.
Nothing in this episode will imply that families and loved ones are not communicating with non-speakers in unique and organic ways they figure out together with the help of evidence-based methods and that they use to function in daily life and express all kinds of love and intelligence and skills in various areas.
The issue is the method.
And as we'll see, the output of that communication, or why FC kids all seem to be saying the same things.
FC and its derivatives are making huge claims without showing their work, and that is misleading, and in some cases dangerous.
So, a little bit of background here.
FC was developed in Australia in the early 1970s by a school teacher named Rosemary Crossley, and then it was imported to the U.S. in 1989 by Douglas Bicklin.
He was a professor of special education at Syracuse University.
And in 1990, he published a study in the Harvard Educational Review alleging that 21 individuals who were previously unable to communicate began communicating using FC. And with this publication, FC rapidly gained support and was promoted by large universities, including Syracuse, where he was, but also University of Maine, UW-Madison included.
Now, these days, it's largely done in terms of being an academic study because it...
But it sounds like back when it was first developed, a lot of people thought this is a really hopeful breakthrough, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And we're going to hear from an early adopter soon who can describe some of that enthusiasm.
The telepathy tapes hinges on the premise that FC does, in fact, work, and that it provides proof that non-speaking people can communicate independently with the help of their facilitator.
Which is kind of a contradiction to begin with.
But the telepathy tapes uses that credulity in FC to go a lot farther.
With the help of her subjects and experts like Rupert Sheldrake and an endorsement from Deepak Chopra, Dickens winds up believing that the mechanism for how FC works is telepathy.
And that in reality, non-speaking people might choose not to speak because telepathy is so much easier and more accurate and more spiritual.
And so as the series unfolds, we learn that non-speaking teenage telepaths are regularly meeting with each other on the astral planet.
We'll get to that.
Now, Joe Rogan and his fans, they love that idea.
And, you know, so do millions more according to the returns on this podcast.
Yeah, I just have to break in and say that as endorsed by Sheldrake and Chopra is already a non-starter for someone like me because they're only really experts in a kind of laundering of paranormal claims through pseudoscientific and then like, you know, logical fallacies and sleights of hand.
It all actually feels quite dishonest to me.
And so then they'll turn around and say anyone who doesn't go along with them is just a reductive materialist.
Unsurprisingly, FC has been invalidated since the 90s because all controlled testing has shown that the author of the messages is never the subject.
It's never the kid.
It's always the facilitator, often the mother.
And despite study after study showing that it fails to encourage or produce independent communication, FC keeps sort of haunting the autistic community, the non-speaking community, like a zombie, often under different names like spelling to communicate and the rapid prompting method.
But each iteration is the same in that independent communication never happens or it's never proven to happen.
And worse, I think, the kids that FC is forced on, because consent is a tricky issue here, they come to be seen as wholly dependent on the method for representing themselves in the world when it doesn't really represent them at all.
Wow.
So there's a really sad and deep irony here in terms of what is independent, what does it mean to actually be speaking for yourself, and then when it's tested, how it turns out again and again that really what's coming through are the wishes and desires and fantasies and feelings of the facilitator.
It's not a surprise, I don't think, that Dickens fell into an idealizing vision of FC because this is a community of hope and yearning.
And the facilitators themselves have long thought that it's a miraculous technique.
And for this episode, I got to speak with Janice Boynton, an artist and educational assistant who used to be an FC practitioner 30 years ago.
And then she was swept up in what she thought was a powerful transformational movement.
When I first got involved with...
Facilitated communication.
It was brand new.
It was within a couple years of it hitting popularity in the United States.
So it kind of felt like right from the beginning.
Wow, you know, we're stumbling onto this new and exciting technique that could be used with students.
And it seemed like it was inexpensive.
It was accessible.
It seemed really easy to use.
We had results fairly quickly.
You know, all those things are very exciting.
And to think that my student was non...
I'd probably say minimally speaking, but, you know, like very...
Profoundly autistic.
And to think that I was part of that movement to open up her world and give her a voice was all very exciting.
And I don't think we knew what we were getting ourselves into.
I don't think a lot of people knew at the time.
There wasn't a lot of critical...
It's not like now with the internet where there's a lot of information out there, pro and con.
But the feedback we were getting from the university was, wow, this is really exciting.
Boynton's infatuation eventually led to exposing some of the grave dangers of FC. Her practice of it came crashing down when she actually ventriloquized abuse allegations through her client against the client's parents.
And this led to a court case in which Boynton agreed to have her technique properly tested, which is something that the FC community vigorously opposes.
And once she was shown that she was the unwitting source of the allegations, and all of the communications really, and the allegations were false and almost destroyed the family.
Boynton recanted the technique and has been speaking out against it ever since.
That's an indication of an extremely earnest human being who's willing to be that self-critical.
And I just want to say here, this is reminiscent of satanic panic stuff, which I know we're going to touch on, and how even with kids who are neurotypical, you can, just through interview technique, that being poor, even if it's well-meaning, you can get...
to all kinds of awful places in terms of allegations being made that are just completely fabricated.
So I can only imagine that that's magnified a hundredfold with someone who doesn't speak.
Boynton is the only person.
Who's come out so far, almost 40 years into this.
And she's incredibly sharp.
It was great to talk with her.
She has a YouTube channel in which she analyzes FC videos to show how the queuing happens.
So it's real James Randi stuff, but she delivers it all in a very calm and gentle, almost like melancholic demeanor.
Like, oh, I think you can see what's happening here.
And she can run it all down.
Her false allegation case was not isolated.
In another really bad situation, an FC facilitator used FC to pretend that her client gave her consent to have sex with him.
Oh yeah, there's a Netflix documentary about that, right?
Yes, it's called Tell Them You Love Me.
It's about Anna Stubblefield, who was a philosophy professor at Rutgers, and she used FC to really contrive sexual consent from her client, Derek Johnson, a nonverbal man with cerebral palsy.
It was really disturbing.
These terrible stories are terrible, but they are rare as far as we know.
But I'd like to point out some more common harms because research shows that once FC is introduced to a non-speaking person, they begin to abdicate their actual language skills because it's easier to comply with a facilitator cuing them than it is to build the skill that they struggle with.
And this raises the disturbing question about what happens If that facilitator moves away, or if the facilitator is the parent, what happens when they get sick or die?
So this is the sort of first entry point today, that the Breakout Viral podcast of January 2025 is based on a completely debunked pseudotherapy that distorts the real and crucial relationships between non-speaking autistic people and those who care for them.
But there's another part to the story, too, because...
I want to look at how, while Dickens fails to document telepathy, she unwittingly documents something very poignant, which is how easy it is for stressed adults to ventriloquize their hopes and dreams and fears through disabled children.
And this displacement is not new.
So, in more benign forms, we have adult-to-child ventriloquism going on all over the place.
It's a legacy of the mommy blog era, carried over into using kids to sell health supplements on Instagram.
And at worst, as you mentioned, Julian, these are the same dynamics that drove the satanic panic in which overzealous therapists implanted memories of ritual abuse in children who were probably sad for real reasons that...
They never really got to explore.
So, in my opinion, we have to understand why FC is so attractive to a population yearning for answers about disabled kids in an ableist world.
I want to look at why parents, and especially mothers, who might be vulnerable to a story that elevates them to the level of shamans and lightworkers...
Why that happens in a culture in which their real, impossibly hard labor is invisible and unpaid.
And on that note, I also just want to disclose here for the first time that I'm the parent of an autistic child.
So I'll be as fair as I can be today, but I'm not neutral on this.
Our kid has lower support needs than the people featured in telepathy tapes.
But in order to provide the support they need, my partner...
Has to go on leave from her career.
She's had to educate herself.
And then me in understanding neurotype, accommodations, and disability justice.
And that's all unpaid labor on her part.
So I am familiar with the social landscape of this story and just how desolate the general state of autism care can be.
Just one more point.
I'm not going to name or gender our kid or give personal details because, you know, their story is theirs to tell.
But secondly, germane to this episode, part of the problem.
of telepathy tapes is the exploitation of highly emotional anecdotes that flow from parents that describe private and intense challenges, usually on Facebook, and usually generating parasocial bonding.
Mainly through the first two episodes, Julian, which startle a lot of listeners because Dickens sets up an amateur theater of parapsychological testing that's compelling enough to fool her and her film crew.
And then they just run with the convictions that they derive from that.
So we have to dive in there, starting with just a little bit of background, which is that a few years back...
Dickens went through the untimely deaths of two close friends, and so in this period of grief and soul-searching, she heard a podcast featuring psychiatrist Diane Hennessey Powell discussing telepathy.
And Dickens was spellbound, and she reached out to Powell, and Powell sent Dickens a hard drive with video footage of telepathy tests with children.
And so Dickens...
Her first move was to interview Powell's camera guy to see whether he thought that it was all legit.
And he said, yeah, it was amazing.
And that was good enough for Dickens.
And so she started asking Powell to connect her with families of non-speakers to potentially meet them with the aim of replicating these film demos.
Okay, so hold on a second.
The work that Powell has shared, is that with non-speaking kids or just with kids in general?
Primarily with non-speaking kids.
Oh, okay.
So this is a direct, she's just essentially like taking this and going, oh, wow, this translates over into what I want to do.
Yes.
And so there's this leap between facilitated communication and telepathy, which becomes a point of conflict, actually, in response to this podcast.
Because while a lot of the FC community is happy about the exposure that it's brought, a lot of people are worried that mixing FC up with talk about...
Telepathy will make them look like social pariahs, and there's kind of a minor civil war going on within the community.
So, I mean, the irony there is that Dickens is trying to be supportive to an isolated and marginalized population, and there's a division that's actually caused because of these good intentions.
Yeah, I can imagine them feeling like, you know, this is controversial enough.
Now you've layered something even more controversial on top of it.
Yeah.
We find out much later in the series that Dickens kind of isn't bothered by the red flags in Powell's backstory because her psychiatry license was suspended by the Oregon Medical Board in 2010. And she has connected this to her publication of a book about ESP. But as friend of the pod who I interviewed for this episode,
Jonathan Jari, dug out from the public records, the reason for Powell's suspension was a pattern of practice including, quote, Now, she's retired, and that is pretty much behind her.
She actually cleared the requirements of the suspension a year after they were given, so she retired in good standing.
Now she's really just devoted to this.
And with her calm and semi-skeptical demeanor, she's a real anchor for the whole show.
And, you know, Dickens is able to position her as the censored renegade.
Yeah, we've seen this again and again.
All kinds of doctors and professors, people who've lost their tenure, people who've become anti-vaxxers, they'll point to any professional failures and incompetences that they have been criticized for as actually being censorship and suppression of their brilliant revelations.
Well, she plays that card, but low-key humbly.
She's not pugnacious or aggrieved like a lot of the Maha doctors that are filling out RFK Jr. staff.
And that works really well for her.
She's not a crusader.
She sounds like she really wants to find the truth.
So that's how Powell and Dickens meet.
And then once the word is out, a woman named Sophia reaches out from Mexico and tells Dickens about her cousin Mia's telepathic abilities.
And after a series of calls, Dickens rents a house in Glendale, California, to conduct telepathy tests with Mia and her family, her mother in particular.
She hires a crew.
She buys the test materials.
She plots out the tests as well as an amateur researcher could.
And Dr. Powell comes along for the event with the film crew, a translator.
Mia seems to be mystically aware of things that she can't see.
And this makes Dickens really giddy.
And so she goes on to, you know, find the next family.
And this turns out to be Akil and his mother Manisha.
And the team conducts tests on Akil, including word recognition, picture identification, and distance tests with Manisha always present.
And all of this is filmed.
And Dickens offers brief clips of the tests behind a $10 paywall on her site saying that she's fundraising for the eventual documentary.
But if you've been primed with credulity by the episodes, you'll probably miss, if you sign up, if you pay the $10 as I did, just how much information is left out of the clips.
Because each is framed and edited very.
In ways that cannot rule out how the moms of Dickens' subjects are or may be influencing the tests.
So, I mean, through her own aesthetic skill, because, you know, she shoots things beautifully, she hires good camera people, and also her earnest devotion to the subject, Dickens, I think, has unwittingly produced a level of mesmerizing video that you might associate with a David Blaine special.
Yeah, and I would imagine this would probably kind of fall at the first hurdle.
Of laboratory conditions, the kind of parapsychological tests that have been done for hundreds of years and have all turned out over time to fail.
Or you mentioned James Randi before, these would also fail to win the million-dollar prize that he offered for several decades.
Well, they would, and that's the continual challenge that's always sort of pushed aside or hand-waved away.
But to answer your question, you know, how do people get hooked?
it's really these first two episodes.
I've seen a ton of commentary from people who got completely pilled just from that much.
In fact, when Rogan pinged it, he admitted he hadn't listened to the whole thing.
And you'll also notice a fall off in comments about the episodes that follow because people rightly become more skeptical, I think.
But I do think that initial rush of commenting functions as an induction gateway for a lot of people.
Yeah, and we know from studies that around 64% roughly of Americans believe in some kind of paranormal phenomenon, and typically that significant majority of people are going to be excited and credulous when they come across something that seems to validate that belief.
It's like a button ready to be pressed or an itch that needs to be scratched, and then this really presses and scratches.
So to be clear about the tests...
All of the communication methods we see in telepathy tapes are susceptible to facilitator influence.
Most of the practitioners hold the letter board or support the kid while they point to letters.
This can lead to both conscious and unconscious cueing, where the facilitator guides the hand, arm, head, or gaze to the correct letters.
Even if the facilitator is not touching the individual per se, they may still be moving the board or cueing the individual through subtle physical.
And I want to be clear here that facilitators may be unaware of the degree to which they're influencing the messages.
That was certainly what Janice Boynton said, was that sometimes she was aware and then she would catch herself and say, oh, I won't do it the next time.
Or she was trying to find the sweet spot where she was really clear that she wasn't falling.
Prey to something called the ideomortar effect, which is the subconscious process where people involuntarily move in response to their thoughts.
This happens in a lot of situations.
Yeah, it reminds me of the old Ouija boards that kids play with, right?
Yes, exactly.
So Dickens runs these tests.
She's totally pilled.
And I talked to friend of the podcast, SciComm's expert, Jonathan Jari, who broke it down this way.
I think that Dickens is a good example of how the average person believes that they are adequately skeptical and that they would never fall for a scam and they would never deceive themselves.
They're not too skeptical.
They're not too gullible.
They think they've achieved Goldilocks skepticism.
And that's why she takes charge of testing on the show and she comes up with some clever ways to avoid falling for an illusion.
But unfortunately, she falls way short of proper skepticism because she allows the mother to know the word that needs to be telepathically acquired and to guide the child who has to do the pointing.
So that is the crucial problem here.
Yeah.
And what that means is there's no double blinding.
So you're not protecting against information being transmitted in ways other than the way you're claiming to test for.
Fiercely opposes double-blind controls.
Like Janice Pointon told me that that was made clear in her training.
Like, don't get tested because the environment will be bad.
It'll be hostile.
There'll be too many people.
The client won't trust the people in the room.
But the tests...
Always show that the facilitator is the author when they happen.
And we'll give all of the receipts to this.
The show notes are going to be plentiful.
There's like 35 controlled studies that have been done that have shown basically zero results in independent communication.
And the opposition that the FC community has to this extends to shunning practitioners who go for proper tests.
So what happened to Boynton back in the 90s is that as soon as she agreed to be tested, As part of the alleged abuse case...
Which was a good thing to do, by the way.
Her colleagues came out against her and said she was poorly trained.
Wow.
So there's this established self-protective in-group mechanism against doing real testing.
And there are brutal penalties.
You get shunned.
You get smeared for doing so, right?
Yeah.
Now, at this point, there are 10 national and international autism support organizations that strongly advise against using FC and its retreads.
But this doesn't seem to matter to large parts of the SE community.
I think that the dissuasions might even be backfiring because there's a parallel here to the Maha discourse in which institutional cautions against a non-evidence-based therapy are viewed as orders coming down from cold elites who do not care about the health and well-being of children.
And there are reasons why people feel that way that we'll get into.
Yeah, it reminds me of anti-vax discourse too, because I just think it's really common for what we might call motivated beliefs that contradict evidence to close any cognitive gaps or dissonance with some kind of conspiracy.
And that's the reason why we can't really prove what we're saying.
Okay, Julian, I want to talk about language acquisition.
because Let's just say that FC didn't face the controlled test problem.
Is this picture that it paints of previously nonverbal people suddenly being compelling writers?
Is that likely?
Is it possible at all?
If it were to be possible, it would require language acquisition to work in ways that it most often...
What Dickens wants us to believe is that the non-speaking person, prior to being liberated by FC, already has fully formed language in their brains just ready to pour out.
And this in itself seems like a religious idea to me.
It reminds me of how, you know, Tibetan Buddhists will say that fully formed scriptures in Sanskrit will come out of the mouths of Tibetan children because they were planted there in past lives.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, this is such a fascinating area, right?
Because it makes me think of...
How anti-elite sort of faux populism and New Age ideas will collide in this notion that everything you really need to know is already within you.
You don't need any intervention from credentialed experts or something.
And you're not actually learning it, but it's being awakened in you, or it's being channeled from the Akashic Records, or it's accessible through trusting your intuition, listening to your heart.
And this, I think, will often deny developmental processes.
To learn more about the language acquisition part, which I found fascinating, I spoke to Catherine Beals.
She's a linguistics professor in the autism program at Drexel University School of Education, where she specializes in language and literacy acquisition in autism.
Language technologies for autistic individuals and the problems with facilitated communication as an intervention.
She has an autistic son, and this is what she had to say about oral mapping.
One thing to think about is all the different skills that go into literacy, right?
So, for one thing, you need to understand the spoken version of the language.
You have to be able to map.
Essentially, you need to be able to map spelling to meaning.
So then how does a person learning language attach words to meaning?
The way this happens is you have to be embedded in a world of speakers and you have to be paying attention to those speakers.
And typically, our understanding of word learning requires that kids look up at someone's eyes and look at what those eyes are looking at or what the person is pointing to.
In other words...
You kind of have to get inside the head of the person who is using a word to figure out what they mean by the word, and that's how you learn what the word means.
And those are precisely the sorts of difficulties that individuals with autism have, more so depending on how profound they are.
And so this is where you go back to the early studies of infants who turn out later to be autistic, and the fact that there is much less So let's say that the non-speaker overcame all of those social input, eye contact, and motor control challenges without anyone noticing, you know, just through telepathy, let's say.
Then they have an even harder challenge ahead of them.
And Catherine goes on here.
To read and write, you have to be able to map oral language to written language.
And in a phonetic language like English, you need to go through some sort of phonics exposure instruction.
The majority of kids need to have at least a certain amount of deliberate phonics instruction.
Some can pick up the code to some extent on their own.
But it seems that even then, you have parents reading Dr. Seuss at night and following along with the words on the page, and that's still systematic.
You're getting a systematic exposure to patterns of sound and patterns of spelling that allow you to infer how individual letters map to sounds.
These are things that autistic kids, first of all, These individuals were not in regular education for the most part.
They weren't getting phonics instruction.
And in terms of attending to speech and bedtime stories and so on, there's just...
I certainly haven't heard any account of a parent of a profoundly autistic kid who reports that they're...
They were able to read Dr. Seuss to their kid and have their kids sustained attention and attention to the page.
So there just doesn't seem to be a route by which these kids are learning the phonetics code either.
The thing that really strikes me here, Matthew, in hearing an expert like this talk about language acquisition is the difference between understanding the developmental process that is going on over years.
that brings neurotypical people to the place where we're able to have the facility with language that we have versus an idea that the autistic person has had a sort of a sheet that's been laid down in between their whole self that has all of that already in place and being able to access it.
And that somehow there's a way to just remove that obstacle and then it'll just all be there already fully formed.
I hear the yearning and I hear the idealism that's contained within that idea, but it overlooks the reality of how language is acquired.
The control tests fail, as we see, and the model of language acquisition is implausible, as Catherine Beale says.
But for me, those two things aren't really the slam dunk.
To me, the slam dunk involves what Dickens and her subjects and the fans of the podcast want us to believe about what a ton of non-speaking people are speaking about.
Now, for anyone who hasn't listened to telepathy tapes, I would advise starting with episode 10 and just checking in with your response to hearing what Dickens says her subjects are telling her.
Because this is her true calling.
She has found a population of mystics.
Who have thus far been ignored, and she's going to boost them and platform their gifts to the world.
And she does this in episode 10, which turns fully to this task.
It's a mailbag episode in which she solicits emails from non-speakers in response to a leading question.
So I'm going to play a few of the answers that come in.
The first one comes from a person named Trevor and the message is read by his FC partner, his mother.
Here's Trevor's response to my question about what listeners should do with all the information they've learned.
I want them to see us in a different light.
I am an intelligent man with remarkable spiritual gifts.
I wish they would presume competence in non-speakers.
And for humanity, I desire compassion and understanding for who we are.
We are lightworkers.
I think I see where this is going, and it works because of this pre-existing belief that the parents have, that being more spiritually evolved entails being a lightworker with a New Age mission and a vocabulary.
And so that's going to be where these special kids find their sort of sweet spot of expression, right?
Here's a non-speaker named Anthony through his FC partner, Marianne.
Love is eternal.
Everything else is an illusion caused by separation.
Great change occurs when we join our souls as one.
The highest human power is love.
Spiritual evolution occurs when hearts are aligned in mass to create loving vibrations during all circumstances at all times.
Planetary upgrade is needed now.
Future humans must be driven by loving kindness.
Love purely.
Love openly.
Without conditions.
Love soulfully.
Feel God in every person.
Kindness is the best way to evolve.
Here's one more.
It comes from an unnamed person of unsaid age who speaks to a seeming paradox while offering some views that might be familiar to our regular listeners.
Most of us have quite an acute awareness of our own physical bodies.
Even if we appear to be disassociated from our own physical bodies, we are still able to help you enormously with diagnosis.
You are regularly missing out on the miracles that are occurring on a daily basis as we take care of ourselves despite the damage your drugs and diagnosis are doing to us.
And we would like to have access to more complementary therapies, sound healing, acupuncture, massages, kinesiology, tuning forks, shiatsu, and also give us a physical space to think, preferably outdoors, without the TV or the radio on, so we can heal ourselves.
Okay, so let's put a pin in those.
Yeah.
I asked...
Catherine Beals to connect me with someone in the autistic community who would be willing to speak out about the concerns with FC. And she put me in touch with Sharon in Scotland, an autistic person herself with a lot of years' experience supporting disabled autistic pupils and children.
And I asked her what she thought FC ultimately did to autistic kids.
She's pretty direct.
She wrote the following.
Julian, can you read that?
Facilitated communication takes bouncy, active, unique autistic children and robs them of their entire personality.
Their wants, their needs, their likes and dislikes, and their voices are all replaced with FC, a technique which largely consists of pointing at a board and advertising the FC method.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Okay, so she also wrote this.
There's another one there, Julian.
I think episode 10 is the most interesting if you're considering a cult perspective.
FC doesn't operate exactly as a cult, but the spellers consistently say things clearly intended to recruit more people into FC.
None of these young people have a favorite band or want the latest games console.
They all just want more people to use FC.
That's the slam dunk for me, Julian, because as telepathy tapes goes on, Dickens just spirals up and out from this initial mistake of believing that FC proves independent communication.
And so that means telepathy.
Not only that, non-speakers are going into their rooms alone, and while they may appear to be simply stimming for several hours, they are actually meeting in a trans-dimensional space called The Hill, where they are working out complex problems together for the benefit of humanity.
My heart breaks for these kids, but also for their parents, who of course find This fantasy of what's going on in the interdimensional space more appealing than the truth of what they're dealing with.
It goes farther, though.
There's a non-speaking couple who are in love.
There's a son who telepathically composes songs while he and his mother are sleeping, and then she wakes up with songs in her head and helps him record them.
There's a non-speaking guy in Israel who has gathered a following around him because they're eager to read his spiritual prophecies.
He also can allegedly read a book by placing his hand on the cover.
But Dickens' subjects also can mind meld with other people, perceive the energy of stones, communicate with spirits, predict the future, visit other realms.
They have healing abilities and can access collective consciousness.
Yeah, I mean, we've heard this before, right?
So many people are prone to believing that claims like these or that communities that sort of spring up around these kinds of claims are somehow unique or groundbreaking.
But if you're really interested in studying this stuff, you'll find these are really familiar illusions that are always in circulation somewhere.
There's always some group claiming to now have discovered this thing or it's been validated by science for the first time.
This is an old story.
At the end of the series...
Dickens is so assured of her status as a kind of angel advocate and whisperer that no hint of the presumed skepticism with which she started remains.
The testimonies rain in from all over the planet from the mailbag episode, and she is elated.
But there isn't a single passage that Dickens shares that carries any of the autistic uniqueness or prickly nature of a special interest obsession.
Or the literalness and hyper-focus detail that's well-known in autism communities.
And this, I think, is what disturbs me most about this series.
Because in the name of providing a voice for the marginalized, what Dickens actually does is use the marginalized to ventriloquize the most common self-help content that's been around for 50 years.
It's obvious that these texts are produced by members of a New Age book club.
Yeah, I mean, that's just really hitting me, right?
Is that if you were really speaking, if you're really providing a doorway into these kids' minds and what they're thinking about, what they want to talk about, it would carry all of the idiosyncrasies.
You would expect that there would be.
it would be recognizable.
It's like, yeah, this is generally how autistic people think and talk and what they're interested in.
Not only that, what teenagers are interested in.
Because like, what are the important fully formed thoughts that Dickens is drawing out here that, you know, the teenagers are lightworkers who want shiatsu?
None of them are talking about video games.
Nobody's talking about skibbity toilets.
Like, I'm sorry, if you believe you're talking with fully speaking teenagers who haven't spoken before and you're not hearing at least something about the new WWE or Godzilla skins in Fortnite, you're not talking to teenagers.
You're talking to the facilitators.
Yeah.
So I think it's really painful that the answer FC gives to the world for who non-speaking people are is not an answer really, but the invention of non-speaking people who are lovable, not for who they are, but...
Because they're really mystical angels.
And I think that is peak ableism, in a way, because non-speaking autistic people do not need to be magical in order to be loved or taken seriously.
At the moment, all of Dickens' subjects sound like wellness influencers, but I think we can imagine that the outcome of this popularization of telepathy goes another way.
because we already know that FC practitioners have produced false allegations of abuse against families through their clients.
If it becomes widely accepted that telepathy is just a real thing, what would the limits on that be?
Like what would prevent this concept from gaining more and more popularity and disrupting government or geopolitics or creating dozens of QAnon spinoffs?
Like how long before we're watching Senate hearings for Trump's nominee to RFK Jr.'s HHS department of facilitated communication, right?
I mean, for now...
I think the truly horrifying possibilities of widespread telepathy acceptance are cloaked by its value in spiritual bypassing.
We're recording this on Trump's Inauguration Day, and in many ways, the viral popularity of the telepathy tapes makes sense.
I was discussing it with a colleague, and they said, maybe...
Being on the eve of absolute political disasters, making people want to turn towards collective consciousness, extrasensory connection, whatever you want to call it.
if all this were true, we'd have a bit of a pillow to fall on after failing so hard at building meaningful community power.
So here we come to the homestretch questions of, how does this happen right?
Why is this so attractive?
Besides the high percentages of people likely to believe in the paranormal.
And I've got a few pathways here, Julian.
First, if we zoom out to the most basic stress of parenting a kid who is non-speaking, Catherine Beals sums it up this way.
I think that one of the biggest challenges of profound autism is this every parent wants to be able to, A, connect with their kid, and B, comfort them.
And when they're in distress.
Yes.
And with profound autism, you don't get eye contact.
You don't get a sense of connection.
They're often averse to being hugged and things like that.
At the same time, these individuals are often in serious distress because of a combination of sensory sensitivities and just inability to make sense of the world.
All these sensations are coming at you.
They don't go through the normal brain pruning of learning what to attend to.
It's just overwhelming.
And at the same time, they're very difficult to reach.
And so I think it's not even so much I need to know what's going on and I need to understand my child's personality.
It's more fundamental.
I can't connect and I can't comfort and I can't do the things a parent normally does.
Yeah, the helplessness really comes through there and how disorienting and confusing it must be because every...
Every parenting instinct you have and everything you've learned in your other relationships, which to the extent that they've been functional, is just not working to help your child.
So then what happens?
The parents reach out for help, and they have to confront the clinical world, and this can be harrowing.
And in telepathy tapes, Dickens repeats a refrain over and over again.
That parents of non-speakers are told that their child isn't in there and other borderline dehumanizing things.
They're told to adjust their expectations, to not hope for neurotypical development, and the whole thing just feels cruel and demoralizing.
What a shitty way of framing the condition, your child isn't in there.
I wonder how uniform that kind of language is.
It's just awful.
It's a phrase that comes up countless times in the discourse.
It's used over and over again on the podcast.
I've seen it all over the rest of the online literature.
I'm sure it happens.
Beals and others told me that they don't doubt that bedside manners can be lacking amongst some practitioners.
But she also said that in that moment of diagnostic clarity, it's pretty natural for the intensely.
You know, it makes me think, too, of how people are drawn into wellness influence, right?
Where maybe they've gotten a cancer diagnosis and they've been told, well, this is terminal and there's nothing we can do about it.
And then along comes the wellness influencer who says, well, if you do these wheatgrass enemas every day for three months, we can heal you.
And maybe we have a snapshot function where just the raw sentence of, we can't really do anything about this terminal condition, that's the snapshot, and what gets left out is, but we can improve your life in these ways and through these therapies as we take care of you.
That might not stay in the memory as strongly.
But after that diagnostic moment, Beals says that it's actually what happens next that is most troubling.
So here's a real problem, and this is really a big one, is that there simply aren't enough services to meet demand.
So what happens is you get this dire diagnosis, and then it's not that no one cares, but there just aren't enough people out there to help you.
And then, secondarily, when you're talking about profound autism, often it's very hard to move the needle a lot with the standard therapies that are out there.
So the standard therapies that are evidence-based Happened not to work that well with this population because profound autism is essentially a learning disorder, right?
It blocks you off from input that is necessary.
Yeah, I mean, if the quote-unquote mainstream therapies are not working, maybe there are some underlying assumptions and metaphysics there that an alternative therapy would be able to work around or provide an alternative model.
I just want to say here, living in LA, especially in my 20s, I interacted, so this is going back to the 90s, I never interacted with a Someone in training as a therapist or someone who was in the early stages,
given the age that I was at, of being a therapist that was specializing in working with kids who had autism, who did not sort of knowingly, you know, with that knowing look in their eyes, repeat the idea that these kids were magical, they were enlightened, they were indigo children.
It was just that the materialist model of Western science and psychology was not adequate to the task of really understanding that.
When really what the adequacy issue is, is really about services.
Because, you know, I can attest from personal experience that the empty post-diagnosis landscape is very real.
It's very isolating.
It creates a lot of feelings about the institutional support you lost as you realized, for instance, that the school...
You were at couldn't really help your family or, you know, losses of the community as neurotypical families begin avoiding your family and it becomes harder to talk with friends and neighbors about what's going on.
And sometimes that happens with family members, although we've been really fortunate on that front.
Our parents have been fantastically supportive and enthusiastic about learning all kinds of new things.
That's great.
So, yeah, you're just not sure about where you're going to find your people.
Yeah, Matthew, I just get the sense that that moment of diagnosis that we're talking about here is super disorienting and a life-changing milestone, but without the relief of infrastructure and resources and hopeful therapies that can really point the way forward.
Yeah, and doctors can do this thing of pointing...
We're enthusiastically at a kind of empty space, like a lack of services or services that won't sync up with the kids' needs.
And as you're going to hear from the love fest of Telepathy Tapes episode 10, if you listen to it, that feeling of connection and purpose and resourcefulness is what is on offer for these parents in FC and why I think they are so adamant about protecting their territory. that feeling of connection and purpose and resourcefulness is what I don't believe they have found a magical therapy.
I think they've found a way of compensating for their social losses through a kind of mutual support they're not getting from anyone else.
So the second reason why this is so attractive and effective at recruiting practitioners and families is that FC advocates really focus on this idea called fading, in which the practitioner tries to show that they are fading out their in which the practitioner tries to show that they are fading out their physical support while the kid still produces And if that happens, that means that eventually independent communication would be proven.
So what the communicator wants to do is to become more and more subtle in their cueing.
They'll hold the hand first, and then the wrist, and then the arm, and then touch the shoulder, and they might touch the person's back.
Eventually, they might not touch at all.
And to the facilitator, that fading of support is all indicative of a growing independence.
I mean, I can see why that seems legitimate and convincing.
Yeah, the thing is that what is probably happening is that the cueing is simply becoming more subtle and automatic and difficult to detect if you're not in that dyad.
We're talking, in some instances, about 25 years of mother-child intimacy, right?
The bond between the facilitator and the client is becoming more trustworthy and immediate, and the facilitator believes that they're doing a better job.
While they are actually reducing the independence of a client.
Hearing what you're saying, the thing that I hadn't quite grasped yet is the other side of the equation, which is that probably the child is being conditioned to go along with what is being ventriloquized through them because they get to feel close and they get to see that they're pleasing the facilitator, the parent in most cases.
I think that could be happening.
And there is some research to show something called abdication, which means just sort of...
Stepping back away from making the effort, right?
So the paradox is that the growing confidence of the facilitator is a sign of their deepening self-deception.
I'm going to release my full interview with Janice Boynton because she goes through this whole rabbit hole in detail.
Okay, so then if you find a bunch of people who are also doing...
You know, when we spend enough time with people who believe something deeply, we develop ties to them.
We befriend them.
And I can smooth over any initial skepticism that we may have had because now...
We're part of their community.
And we've got a feedback loop with real rewards for the parents.
And in my interview with Catherine Beals about what it might feel like for parents who come to sense that their kids are channels for some kind of higher truth, she said the following.
And I think that that sort of channeling does a number of duties for the parents.
So it gives you an explanation for the fully foreign language that comes out of FC. It gives you an explanation for the facilitator influence that comes from FC. And it also gives you yet another way to feel good about your child, which is that it's, you know, your child might look one way, but they're actually, they have these superhuman, wonderful, magical powers.
So what do you think, Matthew?
Does Dickens know what she's doing here?
When does earnest belief become a scam?
Okay, yeah, so we have the sincere scam conundrum.
I want to come back to that through how Dickens defends herself preemptively.
So as I mentioned at the top, I wanted to interview Dickens for this episode because she's made some indication that she would like to resolve the issues in future blinded tests supervised at the university.
Now that's one of her defenses, which is a seeming openness to this basic challenge put forward by skeptics, which is that you have to test the stuff for real.
But there's a stickier defense, Dickens mobilizes, that I'm going to call a pseudo-woke defense.
Because she'll say over and over again that skepticism in relation to facilitated communication is a form of ableism because it's based on the premise that the skeptic is not presuming competence in the non-speaking child.
According to Dickens, the skeptics' expectations for linguistic function are so low that they foreclose on the possibility that these kids really could be tapping out poems on their iPads out of the blue.
And if you don't believe this could be possible, Dickens implies, you're presenting a form of bigotry.
Now, this argument, I think, hits a vulnerable spot in an emerging popular discourse around ableism, which is the basic moral sense that you don't regard autistic people or anybody as worthless or hopeless.
Of course you don't.
But what Dickens ends up popularizing here is her own form of ableism, that the non-speaking child is amazing not because of who they are, but because they have a higher IQ than anyone else.
So I already asked above, What could be more ableist than using a child to speak your own values and desires?
But now I'm asking, how can you exaggerate the cognitive abilities of a non-speaking person to validate them without implying that people with real cognitive disabilities are somehow lesser?
So the last defense I'll mention, I think, is the stickiest.
And I'm going to call it, how dare you question my spiritual values?
At the start of Telepathy tapes.
Dickens is super preoccupied with the materialism of FC, with what its mechanism of action could be.
And that's why she sets up these flawed tests that don't work, because she's an amateur.
But it's on the basis of those tests, that supposed material evidence, that the vast majority of fans of this podcast get logged in.
But as the series goes on, she begins hinting at the objections that have been made from the evidence-based world.
But she doesn't have a specialist on.
She doesn't reach out to Janice Boynton.
She doesn't interview Jonathan Jari.
Eventually, she hand waves them away as being driven by a myopic commitment to materialism.
And bit by bit, as she tells her story, she begins to use New Age arguments against the relevance of material science to begin to suggest that the outcomes of her tests And any future tests, perhaps, and these are the same tests that pilled her fans, aren't that important.
So I think it's having your cake and eating it too, but then pretending you didn't.
Dickens wants to convince skeptics with material evidence.
But when she proves to herself that FC actually equals telepathy, the need to continue to test FC begins to recede because now we're in a spiritual zone.
And we begin to get the impression that continuing to question the validity of FC or telepathy per se amounts to wanting to suppress the messages of love and forgiveness that the kids are reportedly delivering.
Now, fans of her podcast will say that the skeptic is doing what they're doing because they feel threatened by the notion that the 17-year-old is a lightworker or by the message that we should love everyone, as if that's controversial.
If you are asking for testing, somehow you are flat-out rejecting humanity's need for spiritual relief.
So that brings me back to the question of sincerity and scams.
For me, it's also a question of growing awareness.
Dickens knows all of the controlled testing problems because she published Powell's response to Jari's critique of the podcast on her website.
So when does belief trip over into scam?
And does Dickens have a way out?
Let's listen to Jari.
And at this point, you know, she's announced season two of her podcast.
She's also announced a spinoff podcast called Talk Tracks, where she will interview guests about telepathy.
And she's raising money for a video documentary and saying that production will begin in a few months.
Very few people who are as publicly invested in a successful project like this would be seriously open to questioning the very core of it.
At this point, you're all in.
You're not going to seriously entertain the notion that you've been fooled and that this entire project is based on self-deception.
Now, if a skeptic familiar enough with research into parapsychology and into facilitated communication could have been there from the start, then this could have been avoided.
But now...
Yeah, she's unlikely to do a 180. Well, unless that was monetizable in itself.
I almost produced the Netflix streaming special that validated facilitated communication, but actually I figured out that I had gone down a rabbit hole.
And oh my gosh, I have Jonathan Jari here with me to tell me about how it's easy for all of us to fall into a hole like this.
Storyline is rarely super profitable.
Yeah, I mean, I, of course, agree with him completely there.
And it's one of the unique aspects of the times we live in with the online reach and then like the massive platform that a person can find with a tried and tested topic like this.
I can only imagine that just the deluge of attention and money.
Easily overwhelms any small voice of conscience deep inside there or recanting what you have previously said as the data becomes more clear.
I want to wrap up here by saying that I couldn't stop thinking about the mothers that Dickens is bonding with and spotlighting.
The unpaid labor involved in a completely invisible parenting struggle that will drag on indefinitely.
No one expects that kind of job, and there's no preparation for it.
FC provides community, recognition, and dignity for parents who receive none of those things from the state, or sometimes even their neighbors.
So what could we provide as a society to obviate this and disincentivize this need to compensate?
The parent of a non-speaking high support needs person will do incredible endless labor for an indefinite period of time with uncertain results.
Like, that is the definition to me of miraculous work.
So if that somehow could be recognized, then maybe we wouldn't have to look to stories of miracles in place of basic support and dignity and recognition.
I emailed Catherine Beals to ask her about this point, and she wrote the following back.
Julian, can you read that?
There is tremendous isolation for parents of non-speakers, especially if their kids have behavior problems that make it hard to get out and be with others.
And the services, as I indicated, are in short supply.
For those who are able to get their kids to tolerate...
FC, because not all will, FC does provide community.
And I think this is snowballing because if we aren't already there, we could easily reach a point where a majority of parents of non-speakers are using FC. This means, of course, that not doing FC will isolate you further.
In addition, the FC communities have a lot of communal activities, things like baking and poetry nights that strike me as potentially cult-like.
That becomes your new community.
But FC is part of what qualifies you.
And if you abandon FC or agree to control tests, you lose that community.
I think dignity and recognition are part of the picture, both for the parents themselves and for how they see their kids as being perceived.
I've wondered whether some parents sense to some extent that FC is an illusion.
But as long as the rest of society sees their child as highly intelligent and allows them into gifted classes, that's good enough.
Even among parents of neurotypical kids, there's a great deal of prestige associated with having a child in a gifted program.
I think the answer to some of this is a great deal more support for parents, including many more daily services that kick in right away.
Including respite services and also support groups that kick in before parents discover FC, where parents in similar situations can get emotional support from one another.
And just for listeners who don't know, respite services means like caregivers who are able to come to the house to give you a break because you've been doing something 24-7 for perhaps years.
Okay, so two last things.
We have some regular listeners and longtime supporters who found telepathy tapes really compelling and hopeful, especially those first two episodes.
And so when I floated an open question to our Instagram, have you heard telepathy tapes?
What do you think?
The comments were right down the middle.
One of them stood out.
And after subscribing an intimate paranormal relationship with a family member, this person said, I look forward to your perspective.
Although I've already wondered why your team has found it necessary to veer from important political and conspiratorial debunking into blanket critique of anything woo, that seems like two different and unnecessarily linked objectives.
Yeah, and I wanted to honor that challenge and question.
For me, the answer is this.
Not only is telepathy tapes harmful to disability justice in all the ways we've shown, The Maha
movement Janice Boynton, the former FC practitioner who has recanted, is so far the only person who has gone public with what's really going on in those interactions.
But she can't be the only one who realizes what they were engaged in.
So I asked Catherine Beals and my other sources about whether they knew of any parents who were once into FC but now realize that it was a mistake.
And no one is aware of a single instance of parents speaking up.
Now, Beals did say, however, that she suspects there are parents who have stopped using it because they simply faded away from the active online groups promoting the method.
The fact that none have gone public is a clue to how much social pressure there is to maintain the bonds of community based on this illusion.
Now, as you heard in the opening, Kai Dickens opens her show by saying that the parents of non-speakers and their kids who use FC have not been listened to before she came along with her microphone.
But that's not true.
Despite decades of scientific invalidation, FC continues to build a market among the desperate, and Dickens is monetizing that market.
So I'm going to give an invitation here that mirrors Dickens'.
As a journalist who has spent nearly a decade researching insular groups, my DMs are open to any FC practitioner or parent who's ready to share their experience with FC.
If you use this or a similar facilitated communication technique and were thrilled by its promise, but then realized on your own or through stumbling across the research that it wasn't what it said it was, I'd love to hear from you.
If FC has harmed your family or slowed down real language development for your non-speaking kid, I'd love to hear from you.
The email address here at the pod is conspiracypod at gmail.com.
I'm a good listener with good boundaries.
And I respect all autistic people for who they are, and I can protect your anonymity if that's what you need.
