Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Jenny McCarthy, discuss J.B. Handley's new book, "Underestimated: An Autism Miracle."
“Underestimated: An Autism Miracle” tells the remarkable story of Jamison’s journey to find a means of communication that allowed him to show the world that he was a brilliant, wise, generous, and complex individual who had been misunderstood and underestimated by everyone in his life.
Jamison’s emergence from his self-described “prison of silence” took place over a profoundly emotional and dramatic 12-month period that is retold from his father’s perspective.
Once Jamison’s extraordinary story has been told, Jamison takes over the narrative to share the story from his perspective, allowing the world to hear from someone who many had dismissed and cast aside as incapable.
Jamison’s remarkable transformation challenges the conventional wisdom surrounding autism, a disability impacting 1 in 36 Americans. Many scientists still consider non-speakers with autism — a full 40% of those on the autism spectrum — to be “mentally retarded.” Is it possible that the experts are wrong about several million people? Are all the non-speakers like Jamison?
I want the camera to see him, too, so everyone can see.
There he is.
Hey, Jamie.
First of all, congratulations on the success thus far out of the gate, JB, in this book, Underestimated, An Autism Miracle.
Bobby, I'm so glad that you, when you popped on, you said you just read it and were blown away by it.
Why don't we just dive right into it with your thoughts, Bobby?
You know, I, because I knew about it because I talked to...
And J.B., on and off while it was happening and was listening to this, you know, the tremendous excite.
And what really...
A couple of things really struck me about the book.
People should know J.B., who I've been friends with for many years, is a Portland, Oregon businessman.
Very successful.
His son, Jamie...
is a non-speaker who's had autism from when he was very young.
JB has also been one of the people who kind of brought me into the movement for safer vaccines and for medical freedom.
And he's been one of the really most articulate, sensible, common sense voices on this issue for many, many years, and has mentored many people in the movement just through his own conduct.
And we're all, I've been actually to the Victory School, Which is the school that JB created, or helped create, organized the creation, and I think probably funded a lot himself, although I don't exactly know what the details are, up in Portland, and that Jamie has attended all of his life.
And it's a school that's designed for kids who are non-speakers and kids who have autism.
And, you know, Jamie, I think, I hope you'll excuse me when I describe what Jamie's impression of his son was for the first 18 years of his life.
He believed his son was mentally retarded.
And he believed not only was he impaired by autism, but he had the intellectual disability, severe debilitating intellectual disability that was stopping him from speaking.
And at one point he called me and he explained this new process which had just been created by these incredibly intuitive teachers who developed this This ability to communicate with people who are non-speakers on whiteboards.
And what he told me then, which is one of the stories that's told in the book, is that this extraordinary discovery that these children Have absolutely exquisitely functioning minds and that their difficulty is motor coordination, particularly in small skills.
And so they aren't able to communicate, not because they're not having very sophisticated and profound thoughts, But because they can't force their tongue, which has all these nerves and muscles in it to actually articulate that, and their bodies are completely out of their control.
And essentially, the book, which is short, I read it in a single night, describes this incredible discovery of a loving father, devoted father, The son that he's known for all these years is actually a complete person who's probably smarter than any of us.
He learned to do calculus in essentially a day and his calculus teacher said, I can't teach him anymore.
You need a college level teacher because he's too fast.
And then the sensitivity and the kind of purity and the clarity of his initial communications with his father in which he's saying to him, you know, he's saying, I've been waiting to say these words to you for so long that I'm grateful for.
I know that this illness that I have has been as hard on you as it has been on me.
And I want to thank you for your patience and for your devotion and for the love that you've given me for all of these years.
And then, you know, that was just the beginning.
And then just this flood of extraordinarily acute observations about other people.
About teachers who were failing him, about the cruelty of the system that is used by many teachers, by the traditional format for teaching these children.
And one of the incredible stories in this book is, you know, there's this system called BCBA, which I don't know much about.
It's essentially an association of teachers who are certified in a certain way of teaching children with autism, and it's a very kind of authoritarian way of teaching that is a risk and reward that, you know, you get punished if you don't meet certain thresholds, and then you get rewarded for others.
And it's a very meticulous and extremely controlled and rigorous A method with all kinds of prescriptions that these people take years to learn.
And then JB has hired all these people for his school.
They're now running it.
And when he comes back from this trip with a, you know, utterly new enlightenment and saying, and Jamie starts talking to his teachers, And telling them, the way that you're teaching is not, you know, helping us.
It's a cruel way of, and we all ought to be on these letter boards.
And they are making up stories and saying, you know, this is, he's not really talking.
He's not really communicating.
And he'll tell them things that only he and they could know.
And that JB didn't know.
And yet they maintain this sort of delusion.
And it was reminiscent in a lot of ways of, you know, these orthodoxies, these mindsets that JB and I have run into and you've run into, Jenny, of course, in the vaccine space where you run into pediatricians who have been doing these things for many years that are very damaging to the kids.
And the evidence is finally complete.
You know, we have the studies here, we have the data that shows you should not be doing this, and they cannot come to the terms with the fact that all of the things that they've been doing for many, many years are damaging and are not helpful and are actually cruel and somewhat, I would say, barbaric, given what we know today.
Correct.
And I just want to jump in and say, it is shocking when you went back to the school, JB, and said, look at this miraculous method that has worked for Jamie.
It wasn't like the Lovos technique where they were electrocuting these kids.
It doesn't harm them at all.
It should have been like the 4th of July with everybody celebrating, and instead there was this just...
The bristling air of hostility and anger.
I know it must have been familiar to you, JB, that running up against a wall of bureaucracy and institutional ignorance.
Yeah.
Well, first off, Bobby and Jenny, thank you guys so much for Being here to celebrate in the book coming out yesterday.
So Bobby, just to build on a few things you said.
So a BCBA is somebody who is certified in Applied Behavioral Analysis or ABA. So ABA is effectively the autism industrial complex for treating children with autism.
And it deserves to be scrutinized a lot more than it has been.
Now, I'm not the first parent of a child with autism to come back and say that my child felt that ABA was torturous In terms of how they do it.
And, you know, at times ABA can be analogous to kind of like dog training, like it's very behaviorally oriented.
It inhibits the children from behaviors that may in fact be helping them stay regulated, etc.
And so what happened at Jamie's very well intended school, the women who run the school are well intended and they're not BCBAs and they were celebrating like the 4th of July As all this fluency came back with Jamie.
But what was happening within the school was with about two thirds of the teachers, every time we'd share these amazing stories, we'd get nothing back.
We'd hear nothing.
And we started to put together what was happening.
And thankfully for Jamie, the teacher who runs the high academic class at his school is not a BCBA. She did celebrate like it was the 4th of July.
She embraced everything that Jamie was doing immediately.
And she took him under her wing and really protected him from the rest of the school.
And it gets even worse.
Jamie's school has to have at least two thirds of their teachers with a BCBA next to their name in order for parents to get insurance to pay for the school.
It's wired all the way through the system.
They have been indoctrinated.
What they believe is that the letter board that Jamie spells on, they believe that this is a Ouija board and that the communication partner is the one who's actually, it's actually their words coming out of the board.
They actually take it even further.
They go, this is cruel because you're giving hope to families and you're You know, you're taking advantage of this poor child who's not capable of doing any of this, right?
Like, it's sort of a triple compounding of awful thoughts that they go through.
And what's so maddening about that, Bobby and Jenny, is how easy it is to disprove that.
And I talk about it in my book.
I have a whole chapter on this, even though I didn't want to write about it, honestly, because it's so stupid.
Like you said, Bobby, Jamie has shared things with different communication partners that he's had that they couldn't have possibly known.
He's shared things with me about his school day that I couldn't have possibly known.
But even more so, a number of these kids go from the letter board to a keyboard, which is what Jamie's working on now.
And the keyboard right now is one that I hold, and Jamie spells.
But then they go to a fixed...
Which means they're at that point an independent communicator.
And those kids already exist.
And so my simple comment for any hater out there trying to say, oh, this isn't really real, or it's a Ouija board is like, how many of the kids on the fixed boards do you need to tell you that the letter board was the transitional communication device that got them to the finish line?
How many do you need?
Do you need one?
Do you need 10?
And just to preface this, JB, Jamie's not the only one.
There are thousands that have successfully gone through this program, right?
Absolutely.
Elizabeth Vossler, who founded Spelling to Communicate, says that there are somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 There are fluent spellers in the world, a number of whom have gone through college.
In some cases, they've done so with what we call a communication partner.
In other cases, they've become independent and largely done it themselves.
Jamie's not a pioneer.
Really, he's riding the coattails of these amazing families that have already done this.
Many colleges have bent over backwards to accommodate these spellers.
What I can tell you is that Like in our school, which again is a well-intended school, Jamie was in a class of non-speakers and after we had this amazing miracle with him, obviously we wanted every other family to know what had happened.
And so we did.
We reached out to each family of a non-speaker and then a BCBA teacher went in behind us and talked each of them out of doing it.
It was pretty amazing.
Months went by, the lockdown happened, and then we realized what had happened.
We didn't know.
At some point, the parents have to take the initiative.
Months went by, and we realized what had happened, so we started inviting these families over to our house.
Sometimes people don't really appreciate what I'm talking about.
If you read the book, you will.
You realize the depth of what Jamie is capable of expressing.
Some people think, oh, he's hitting images on an iPad or Getting his basic needs met.
It's like, no, no, we have full, complex communication on any topic.
He can write a term paper, right?
He can express his deepest emotions.
He can analyze a situation.
And when parents sit in a room with Jamie for the first time, and they have a non-speaker, and they watch him start spelling, I mean, as you can imagine, it is a deeply, deeply moving spiritual thing.
Event.
There are tears flowing everywhere.
We've had parents who've just sat on either side of Jamie and just wanted to like soak in every movement of what he's doing.
They immediately engage directly with him and realize that nobody needs to interpret anything.
They can just ask him a question and it comes back out on the board.
And it's not until that moment that they really realize what we're talking about and we say like we've had the miracle of getting our son back.
So I just want to make that point to families who will invariably encounter skepticism.
I've already heard plenty.
You know, somebody posts, oh, this is just a Ouija board, this or that.
It's harmful and hurtful, and it's easily disproven for anybody with even a modicum of curiosity.
And Bobby, you mentioned it earlier.
This is orthodoxy.
And when you invest all your time in getting a BCBA and commit yourself to ABA therapy, This refutes much of the tenets of ABA. And I want to talk about something that I think is one of the most important points.
And I mentioned this in the book, but, you know, Jamie and I were told about this therapy by a mom named Honey Renacella outside of Philadelphia.
And she was experiencing a miracle with her son, Vince, and he was spelling all these amazing things.
And This was in December of 2019.
And so we got on an airplane and flew back to Northern Virginia to Growing Kids Therapy Center where Elizabeth Vossler invented Spelling to Communicate.
And I'd been told ahead of time, look, the core tenet of Growing Kids is the presumption of competence.
And this sounds kind of wonky.
What it means is Just presume that every kid is brilliant.
Okay?
Just think that always.
And when you go to growing kids, they don't even address the parent.
They walk right up and address the child.
They talk to them in a normal cadence.
They don't talk to them slow.
All the parents of S2C kids, they read their kids age-appropriate material and they teach them age-appropriate academics.
And It's such a beautiful and simple concept, and yet it's missing from 99% of how kids who are non-speakers with autism are taught.
People look at their mannerisms, they see the lack of eye contact, they see that they're not speaking, and they slow down their speech and they make these presumptions of incompetence.
And ABA is founded on a presumption of incompetence, and S2C is founded on a presumption of competence.
This really manifested itself in a simple and beautiful way.
So Jamie and I go into this clinic and I have no idea what's going on.
My head is still spinning and I'm fighting between hope and despair and fear and worry and what if it's not for him and maybe this isn't real and all these other feelings.
And Elizabeth Vossler brings Jamie into a room to introduce spelling to communicate to him and she turns to him and she puts her hand on his shoulder and she says, Jamie, I know how smart you are.
And literally, no one had ever said that to Jamie with that depth of sincerity and realness before.
And I've asked Jamie about that moment later, and he says the most amazing thing.
The first thing he said was, I thought to myself, how does she know that?
It's like he'd been sitting on this secret this whole time, kind of watching the world go by, watching people treat him like he's stupid.
And so he said, I thought to myself, how did she know that?
He said, and then I said, or then Jamie said to me, I thought to myself, she is the most adorablest person in the whole world.
Right?
And Elizabeth went on.
It was such a beautiful thing.
And the reason I can repeat it so perfectly in the book is because it's all on videotape.
This is every session Jamie's ever done was going to communicate.
And she basically explained to Jamie, Jamie, You know, I got lucky.
I was born and I could talk.
And for whatever reason, that part of your brain and your mouth did not connect.
And that's been really frustrating for you.
And she went through and explained how, just as Bobby said, autism is really a motor disability, not a cognitive disability.
She knows that speaking and typing and moving his eyes are really hard for Jamie, but she's going to give him a method to communicate that doesn't put as much pressure on those areas that are hard.
And it's going to be a way for you to be able to connect with the world.
And I really can't emphasize that simple concept enough because it's so important.
Just imagine for a moment if what Elizabeth is saying is actually true.
Imagine that there are three to five million children in the United States alone, which is the roughly 40% non-speakers within ASD. Imagine for a moment If they're all like Jamie.
Imagine if they're all cognitively brilliant.
Imagine if they're all being underestimated, as the book is called, and mistreated.
And imagine if they could all be unlocked with the right amount of patients and therapy and everything else.
And on the one hand, it is profoundly heartbreaking to imagine that we've missed it by that much.
And the scale of mistreatment alone.
I mean...
I'm just thinking about my own son, who was in a school with the best of intentions, who had teachers who loved him, had parents who loved him.
And yet, as the years were going on, he was becoming more and more and more frustrated.
And the number one reason was nobody believed in him, in his real intelligence.
And I think about that compounded over three to five million children and young adults.
And their families.
It's mystifying that we may have missed things that badly.
Jamie is certain that they're all like him.
Jamie is certain that every one of them is just like him.
Some may have more complex motor challenges.
Some may take longer to learn a way to communicate.
But he is certain that cognitively they're all like him.
JB, the center that you went to, didn't they tell you that they haven't met one child yet?
So I was, excuse me, yes, exactly.
So I was still, you know, we only went there for two days.
And I was really struggling with the scale.
What I was realizing was plausible.
And by the way, I'm just going to take a little side here.
So Jamie just said a funny little word to me.
And I've asked him about this, because this is kind of a thing that we do, where he'll say a word that's not really a word, and I'll repeat it back to him.
And so, you know, like a million other examples, I asked Jamie, so why do you do that?
Just like that, right?
Why do you do that?
Or what's the point?
He said, the point is, you repeat it, and I know you love me.
So you better say it right now, Jamie.
Exactly.
Sorry, I lost my train of thought.
No, so I was really like questioning all this and starting to internalize the potential ramifications of this.
And so I asked Elizabeth, I said, you know, have you ever had a kid who's come to Growing Kids Therapy Center with the autism label, non-speaker, and they actually were cognitively disabled.
Right?
Literally, low IQ, mind of a three-year-old, whatever terrible terms they use to describe our kids.
And she said, not yet.
Wow.
It's shocking.
So I want to read.
There are some comments coming in.
I want to read one because it's...
Before you start...
Go ahead, Bobby.
Maybe, will you just explain to the people who are watching...
Exactly.
How do you get around the motor skills issue?
Yeah, yeah.
So it's such an important question.
Okay, so let's just presume that The shared disability is one of motor planning or motor function or motor cortex, whatever term you want to use.
And the kinds of things you'll hear from the non-speakers is they'll say, my body is not my friend.
I can't get my body to do what I want.
You know, I want to fly to Hawaii, but my body goes to Alaska.
Like, I've heard a lot of different ways for kids to describe this.
And importantly, fine motor seems to be where things are the most challenged.
And one of the areas that I didn't appreciate at all that Virtually every kid I've seen is true, is ocular apraxia.
Being able to move your eyes properly.
So imagine trying to get up and down this letter board and point things in various corners when you literally have a hard time getting your eyes to even work, okay?
So what Spelling to Communicate does is they take it out a fine motor, fingers, mouth, and they put it in a gross motor.
You're moving your shoulder to point at a board.
And they have a whole brain map and explain this in a much better way than I ever could.
But what they basically say is when you do that, it's much easier for a child to get their thoughts out.
It's very hard for a non-speaker to retrieve words and bring them out their mouth, even if they can articulate.
There's like a block there, and Jamie experiences this and explains it to me.
But when they're not as taxed, when they're just moving that shoulder and really nothing else, it starts to flow.
And I want to be really careful to explain this.
The best analogy for me is somebody with a stroke and they lose the ability to move a part of their body.
Then they have to go through very rigorous therapy.
And what happens is basically a new map builds in the brain because you have neuroplasticity.
So a new movement area myelinates and then they slowly regain that ability to move because of neuroplasticity.
That's exactly what they're doing here.
They're building neural maps that didn't previously exist and myelinating them.
Just like you practice a golf swing and one day it becomes like second nature or anything else.
And so slowly pushing on gross motor with a ton of repetition, and I want to emphasize that, we worked with Jamie every single day on this.
He just slowly, slowly, slowly got better and better at pointing at letters.
And what they do is they take the kids through lessons on different topics and they ask the child to spell words from those lessons.
And then very slowly over time, they go from asking them to spell words to ask them to answer questions about the lessons.
Then they go from asking them to answer questions about the lessons to the magic threshold, which is they ask them to give their opinion about the lessons.
And that's sort of when you hit Nirvana.
Yes.
I'm going to tell this story really quickly because it is a great story and illustrative.
So Jamie learned how to spell from Elizabeth Vossler in December.
We went away and worked really hard and by late January we were down in Southern California with a woman named Dawn Marie Gavin who's another practitioner and Jamie was doing a lesson on the Boston Red Sox when they won the World Series back in 06 and he was spelling Fenway Park and all this other stuff and my dad was in the room and we were sitting there and I'm a diehard Yankee fan so I was suffering my way through the lesson and we got to the end and Dawn Marie Was on a 26-letter board,
which is needed to be able to spell any independent thought.
And she said to Jamie, Jamie, what did you think of that lesson?
And I was like, wait a minute.
No one's ever asked Jamie.
That doesn't have an answer.
That's an opinion.
Right.
You know, I look at my dad like, whoa, what's going on here?
And Jamie spells, and I'll never forget it, the Sox won, but the Yankees are champs in my family.
And, I mean, I was dead.
My dad was dead.
And it was the moment where the last barriers of hope or whatever came cascading down.
Where I was now a full-on believer that the world had changed in our family and in Jamie's life forever, and he knew it too.
I love that story so much.
And I just want to ask you, JB, just to reiterate, there's no age limit for this, correct?
I mean, so I know a story.
His name is Danny Witte, and he's got videos up now.
He's down in San Diego.
He's this beautiful, amazing man.
I've seen him, and I believe he began S2C at 33 or 34.
Much as a 70-year-old stroke victim can regain the ability to do certain things through repetition, there's no reason to think that a non-speaker of any age wouldn't be capable of doing this.
And if anything, I don't ever want to dissuade someone from starting early, but it seems like as they hit their teens, it becomes easier and easier.
Again, I don't want to say that it's easy, all right?
Because some kids may take a year to get to where Jamie got in three months.
I think the most important reframe that we parents can do for our children, and it's not an easy task, is to believe.
Is to firmly believe.
And I was surrounded by some amazing parents who I've credited and talked about explicitly in the book, who they kind of bridged hope and they bridged belief for me.
And even A day after Honey Renacella called me and I was I had already talked to another mom who was very schooled and was going to communicate and she'd really opened my eyes to this whole idea of treating the children age appropriately and teaching them age appropriately and I just decided to look at Jamie a little differently and never alter my cadence again.
Always presume he understands everything I'm doing.
You know they tell you um Jenny you appreciate this a little more because you're a parent.
Bobby they tell you These kids with autism never, ever, ever read body language.
Never read body language, right?
And that's where I think ABA has great fault.
You know, in ABA, they want the kids to look and behave like us, if you will.
Normal, whatever the hell that means.
And, you know, look into my eyes.
Put your hands down.
You know, Jamie tells me when my hands are shaking up in the air, I'm regulating myself.
I'm doing that to calm down, to make myself feel better.
So imagine being in the middle of something that allows you to maintain Your headspace in a room, and the teacher's snapping at you to cut it out and have quiet hands, as they like to say.
And what I say is, when the kid is bouncing the ball off the wall, picking his nose, looking out the window, making funny noises, they're listening the whole time.
These are the best listeners in the whole world.
Just let them be.
Just let them do their thing.
Learn to teach them within that environment.
And they're the keenest observers.
I mean, Jamie...
Jimmy knows Spanish because his brother and sister took Spanish in school and we would drill them in the family room and he's just sitting there absorbing everything.
Jennifer Larson One of the great stories I want to hear the rest of what you're saying Great stories in your book is that one of the first questions they ask them is they're telling them a story about popcorn and then they're Giving him a quiz to understand what his comprehension level was.
And he answers everything perfectly.
And then they say to him, where do you eat popcorn?
He says, there's a movie theater.
How did he know that?
And then he's gluten-free, so he doesn't even eat popcorn or Cracker Jacks.
Oh, Cracker Jacks, yeah, exactly.
And you say to him, what do you eat when you go to a baseball game?
And he immediately says Cracker Jacks, and he's never had Cracker Jacks.
There are, I mean, you know, it still amazes me, the millions of things.
You know, again, Elizabeth Vossler taught me, these are the keenest observers in the world.
I think there's something about the loss of one sense.
I don't want to speculate why.
I just know it's true in the case of Jamie and certainly other kids who I've met.
They don't miss a thing.
They don't miss a thing.
There's all these terrible stereotypes about autism, about lack of affection, this and that.
One of the many amazing things about Jamie is he cares more about his friends and family than anything in the world.
If a friend of his is down and out at school, That's all he wants to talk about, right?
His sense of priority for what matters in the world.
He doesn't do social media.
He's not on a computer.
Those things are too hard on his eyes, right?
Because he does have ocular challenges, like they all do.
He's in nature all the time, and he just loves his family.
He loves his big brother.
When his big brother goes away to college, he's devastated, wants to talk to him, loves his baby sister.
He's got a bunch of cousins and aunts and uncles around here.
That's what matters to Jamie.
And he grounds all of us.
He grounds all of us with his prioritization of what really matters in life.
And he's got a bunch of buddies on letter boards and they meet once a week.
They're all like him.
They're all so- The Dude Bro Social Club.
And many of them chose to write essays for the book.
This was a very exciting time in our weekly Zoom calls where we introduced this idea of this book.
And each boy was given the opportunity, if they wanted, to share some of their thoughts with the world.
And of course, we put those into its own chapter.
And I mean, some of the remarkable language that you see in terms of how these boys express themselves.
And I think that's something else that I want to touch on that is a little bit of a pet peeve of mine.
And Jamie has affirmed it for me, too.
There's a remarkable, a great book called The Reason I Jump.
And it's a Japanese boy who learned to spell on a letter board, right?
The only issue I take with the book is the way it's positioned.
It's positioned as like they found a Martian, like inside the mind of a boy with autism, like one in a billion that this happened.
We somehow got into their brain, right?
It kind of discourages other parents from giving it a go.
It's like, oh, okay, this was like a real anomaly.
Something weird happened.
No, it didn't.
Nothing weird happened.
And moreover, It's not a book about the autistic mind or whatever frames they use.
It's that kid's mind.
Like, if I wrote a book about my philosophy on the world, it wouldn't be a human's view of the world.
It would be J.B. Hanley's view of the world, right?
And Jamie takes real exception to that, too.
Like, first of all, he doesn't identify as autism.
He says, I'm a non-speaker, right?
I'm a non-speaker.
And moreover, I'm just me.
And I can tell you, like, being on the phone on a weekly basis with six of these boys, they have some shared values.
They're all different.
They're all different.
They're not all the same.
Why have we categorized these kids, right?
Oh, this is how people with autism think.
No, it's not.
That's how that kid thinks.
And so it just, it drives me bananas.
I've seen what beautiful individuals they are, just like the three of us don't agree on everything and have different views of the world and everything else.
Why do people do that?
Why do they have to over-categorize our kids?
So that's just a little rant of mine.
And Jamie's definitely affirmed it with me, that it bothers him as well, just to be, you know, they, oh, you have autism, therefore you think this way.
No, he doesn't.
He's just Jamie.
That's right.
I don't want to be a spoiler, but one of the most exciting things about the book is that the first half is written by you, Jamie, but the second half is written by Jamie.
And the interview there with him is, I've never read an interview that is poignant and just the clarity of thought and the purity of his soul just comes through and his humor and his power of observation and his constant engagement and the depth and the The profundity of his understanding of what's happening in his environment and
in the interactions, the social interactions of people around him.
You know, one of the things when people describe kids with autism or have Asperger's, one of the first things they say is that they have no social cues.
They can't read social cues.
And yet his capacity To understand these very complex social interactions at a really high level and the eloquence with which he addresses them is really beyond comprehension.
They all are extraordinarily sensitive.
Every kid I've met, I should say.
I shouldn't generalize.
The kids I've met are extraordinarily sensitive.
Jamie is extraordinarily sensitive.
Jamie is able to categorize people at his school as believers or non-believers in him.
Right?
Yeah, of course.
He picks up on it and he's declined going into certain classes because it's being taught by a non-believer.
You know, we share these observations with the school, right?
And it's a process.
And so, yeah, when they talk about like a lack of picking up on social cues or whatever, I mean, give me a break.
Right.
Give me a break.
And And again, that's what I go back to.
This was really Jamie's idea to write the book, and Jamie really wanted to write the book just to reach other non-speakers, right?
He refers to the experience he had for 17 years as being in a prison of silence, right, which is a really heavy way to think about it.
What struck me was just the scale and how we might have just gotten the whole thing wrong, and I just don't know if people can really wrap their heads around this like, Millions of non-speakers.
Three to five million people.
Right.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
And like so many things, there's pedigrees and money and brittle ways of thinking and non-open-mindedness that are keeping this from happening faster.
You have the American Speech and Hearing Association coming out with a repudiation of these methods a couple of years ago, which basically rendered...
All but the most bold SLPs.
SLPs are speech language pathologists who are very, very important to these kids.
It rendered all but the most bold of them unable to do this method with kids, even though, I mean, Jamie was on this touch icon device that he was carrying around his school.
He had this thing for four years, all right?
It got to the point where he could, like, touch enough pictograms to say a sentence they asked him to say, He never used it spontaneously to get his needs met.
In two months or three months, he's hyper-fluent with spelling to communicate, right?
We spent like eight grand on this device, right?
I mean, this thing was...
And, you know, we asked him, do you want to see this thing?
You know, no, he wanted to roof test it.
Like, I never want to see this thing again.
Right?
And like...
You present, I present this, like, present this information to the head speech pathologist at the school who'd introduced all these devices, and the poor guy, I mean, he's got, like, steam coming out of his head, and he just falls back on the Asha statement that what Jamie's doing isn't real.
You see how this, like, circular negative spiral can happen when these idiotic organizations Do what they're doing.
It's true.
And you know, one of the things that's, you know, a collective concern in the autism community with, as far as parents, is who's going to take care of my child after I die?
You know, who's going to be there?
This gives them a future.
This opens, this is a game changer.
If we're talking 3 million non-speakers have the same or similar cognitive ability as all of us, I want to give, I got to tell a story.
I don't think this one's in the book, but my wife and I had been organizing a farm-based living environment across from his school where we were imagining kind of handing him off for the adult years, you know, and being a part of that.
And because it's really hard to gauge what Jamie wants to do with his time after school when he can't tell us.
We're left to sort of divine it from like smiles when he does certain activities.
You know, what are we going to do?
So we're like, well, we'll create this community of others like him and all the parents will get involved.
And to the very thing you're talking about, Jenny, that intense fear of what happens when we're gone.
So we're pretty far along with these plans, right?
Now, Jamie's observed us doing all this over the years, right?
We could never get his feedback.
But so finally, we're at a point where we can ask him anything.
And so we're like, you know, Jamie, what do you think about the farm, right?
He knows.
He's like, yeah, I don't want to do that at all.
I mean, all I could do was laugh joyfully.
Absolutely.
What do we want as parents?
We just want our children to be happy doing what they want.
And, you know, Jamie's goal 10 years out is to be speaking and married.
I love it.
I saw one of the great parts of the book is when he's giving dating advice to one of his dude bros.
Yes.
Yes.
You know what?
They are...
You really see it...
I mean, this shouldn't be any surprise after everything you've already heard, but they drop into teenager cadence.
Right?
They drop teen lingo and...
You know, it's beautiful, right?
And they think about things that all teenagers...
Because again, these are...
I hate to use the word normal.
These are cognitively fully developed beings with a motor deficit that makes it hard for them to control their bodies.
And Bobby, I really think neurologists need to appreciate this because to me, they're giving a target within the brain for where the problem is.
I can't say when or how it develops exactly.
I don't know the answer to that.
But I know what Jamie tells me about what's hard for him to do.
I'm going to tell another quick story.
And this is kind of next level.
And this isn't in the book.
But I know there's a lot of parents who are listening.
And it's something that we're really working on now.
And I've written about this on jbhanleyblog.com.
But basically, Jamie's now doing therapy on something that they call initiation, which is basically that this brain-body disconnect also inhibits their ability to initiate.
Just initiate, just to do things you want to do for the very reason that, you know, imagine you had all this stuff you wanted to do with your day and you couldn't get out of the chair, right?
So Jamie does this exercise where we put three objects in front of him on a desk and then he spells on a letter board and the objects can be as simple as like, you know, coffee cup, iPhone, scotch tape.
Jamie spells on a letter board, I will pick up the coffee cup, okay?
Okay.
Then, my job is just to sit there, not to say anything.
Now remember, he's only spelled it on the board, right?
There's no verbal command from dad that he's very used to.
And then we'll ask him, how long do you want us to wait?
And he'll say, one minute, okay?
So we all just sit there and wait.
And Jamie sits there, and he just kind of sits there at first, when we first started doing this therapy.
After a minute, his therapist would say, eyes down.
Jamie would look down, see the object, then he'd grab it.
Everybody would celebrate.
And what Jamie explained to us is for that entire minute, I was trying to pick it up.
Wow.
I was trying to pick it up the whole time.
Okay?
If that's a shared disability by three to five million people, imagine how many ways that's misinterpreted.
That's right.
Imagine how many ways...
Jen Larson told me a story of...
Being down in San Diego, working with her son on letterboarding, and she went to put the room service stuff in the hallway, and the door closed behind her.
Son Cade is in the room by himself.
She starts banging on the door, right?
We can all picture the scene.
Well, Cade's already fluent on a letterboard, okay?
Cade's one of Jamie's best friends.
They have Zoom calls together.
He's amazing.
He knows exactly what's going on.
His mom is banging on the door, his mother that he loves.
She's a little panicked.
He never comes to the door.
OK, so she's able to get in, you know, calls the general manager or whatever.
She sits down with Cade.
What was going on?
Well, it turns out when there's a little bit of anxiety in the mix, that initiation thing gets even harder.
So imagine a child like Jamie or Cade under duress in a school environment being asked to choose between two simple objects.
He can't even figure out which block is red.
Right.
Like imagine how many ways this initiation disability is being misinterpreted as as a lack of intelligence by well-intended but misinformed caregivers.
And the epilogue for Jamie is that as the months have gone by through initiation therapy, he's now got objects across the room that he says, I will pick that up and put it on the desk, and he goes and does it.
And then what we see is...
Much more frequently, he picks up the letter board to get needs met from us.
And so we're seeing even initiation therapy can make it better and can help these children.
But imagine, this insight was so new to me, despite how many years I've spent trying to do the right thing by Jamie.
It was so new to me.
And then it was deeply disturbing to imagine all the times that he may have wanted to do things and simply could not get his body to do it.
Let me ask you something.
Because the test that you just described seemed to be like absolute indisputable proofs that the letter board is real, it's not a Ouija board, because it's a non-verbal communication.
You can write down which one he's going to grab, and he grabs the right one every time.
Have you ever Shown a demonstration like that to one of the people who are resisting.
And, you know, my real question is, have you ever been able to get through?
It took you 17 years to get through to your child.
Have you ever been able to get through to one of those people who was completely subsumed in that orthodoxy and just resistant?
Because, you know, that's what they were trying to do.
I want to try to put this in context.
In the last...
15 months, 99% of our energy has been dedicated to getting Jamie better.
And one of the things that we refuse to do is ever kind of choose, use Jamie as like the proof monkey, if you will.
Right?
And we have chosen not to engage with the haters.
We have chosen to let Jamie be a model and an example at school.
And the amazing teacher who brought Jamie in Is now training to be an S2C practitioner.
Wow.
Okay.
Every classmate who's in the high academic class with Jamie and they're all speakers have embraced him and they've recognized all his intelligence.
Rather than feel compelled to try to convince an idiot of what's obviously true, we're just going to manifest and let Jamie be the best student he can be.
And, you know, they can get on the train before it leaves the station if they want or they can't.
But I will be damned if I will sit in a room and try to talk someone with that scale of idiocy into something that is so patently obvious.
And it's beneath Jamie to ever utilize him in that fashion.
So the quick answer is no.
You also got the longer answer.
And it's embarrassing.
It's embarrassing.
The people who deny this, they're going to wake up one day.
It's unbelievable.
Elizabeth Vossler, she repudiated the statement from Asha with one of the most beautiful essays I've ever read.
You can Google Asha statement Elizabeth Vossler rebuttal.
And what she basically says is, when you sit down and bear witness to one of these children's spelling, you have a choice to make in that moment.
You have a choice to make, right?
You can either stay on the path of denialism, or you can recognize that what you're seeing is real.
And all the implications of that.
That choice needs to be made.
The people who can't make it, you know, they're the same people who were doing dances and believe that's why the sun came up in the morning.
I just don't even have time for them.
And some will come around and many won't.
But here's the thing.
The energy of a parent and a family who has a child come out the other side of this as a speller is so profound.
And if we just get a few more of those, there is no way all these schools and all these ABA caregivers will be able to survive.
And I want to be really clear about something.
ABA is the autism industrial complex here, okay?
They control the insurance, right?
Because they're the quote-unquote proven science.
And ABA therapists are really into their data, right?
They're really into their data.
And when Jamie was having behavioral issues at school, They had this fucked up Rube Goldberg like chart.
You know, if he sits for five minutes and he can put one foot outside for 10, but then he has to go back in and then he can do this.
And like, this was the way to like, he was having some outbursts in the outfit.
So this was their whole way to do it, right?
So we go away and do this spelling to communicate and we come back.
All of Jamie's behavioral issues are gone because guess why?
They were treating him like an idiot and that's why he was acting out.
So their stupid little decision tree It was completely useless.
At some point, people need to call out, like, this is just stupid.
Like, what you're doing is stupid.
You misunderstand these children, and many of the letter boarders, and I'll let each of them speak for themselves, because that's the beautiful thing about this community now.
These children are very eloquent, and young adults.
Most of them say ABA is torture and inhumane.
Okay, now that doesn't mean that there's not going to be a family who says, hey, it saved my child when they were two, three, and four, and I'm not about to say that we should throw all of it out.
What I can tell you is that many of the communicators who were non-speakers say it's inhumane.
Jamie says you have to be...
What was the word he used?
I don't want to misquote him.
People who do ABA are mean-spirited.
When I interviewed him, he said...
Look, I don't think that's true across the board by any stretch.
But I will tell you right now, Bobby, someone like you who's a little bit more objective...
I think knowing what you now know about these non-speakers, if you bore witness to an ABA session, it would probably turn your stomach because it looks like dog training.
It's very, very admonishing and curbing of behaviors, and that's not normal.
There's a lot of pushing their head for eye contact.
Oh, my God.
And I've seen them in the corner.
I've caught Evan with a therapist pushed up against a corner with the table against him.
I mean, that's the thing.
And, you know, they had some...
My wife, they had some aviation therapists show up in our house in California back when Jamie was two or three.
And they started doing this really kind of like, like, not corporal punishment, but like really like firm and aggressive.
And Lisa was like, you're out of here.
There's no fucking way this can be good for a kid.
Like she just, pardon my language, by the way, everybody.
She just knew that this couldn't be right.
So I just think that, and you know, the S2C people have been shouting this from the rooftops.
They just don't really have a platform, but they've been shouting this from the rooftops because, you know, Elizabeth and there are other spelling methods like RPM that's also been amazing for many children.
They're hearing from all the non-speakers.
They're just taking the data from the children who received the behavior.
And when you start to think about it from their perspective that they're brilliant, you start to realize, oh my God, can you imagine how torturous that really is?
You know, JB... You can buy JB's book because a lot of people are asking right now where to get it.
You can buy his book at HanleyBook.com.
I'm very proud that it's part of CHD Books, Children's Health Defense.
We have our own publishing company, our own imprint.
Many of you read some of our other books, but this one is just fantastic.
Are they selling it on Amazon?
It's on Amazon.
It's number one in the bunch of categories today.
That's me and Jamie signing one.
So at handlybook.com, you can get your own signed copy.
If you don't want a signed copy, then go to Amazon and get it.
Jamie and I, we got our stack of books, so we're signing them today.
We're signing them too.
And Jamie, how did we do in this little interview?
Did we bore you or was it good?
Okay, so I want to give a little bit of a frame as we let Jamie, you know, he's been obviously sitting here listening to everything.
Yeah, but I want to, like, I just need to give a little context because the one thing I never want to do is kind of like do something that might be discouraging for a parent later.
So this is like graduate level board, okay?
They actually start, I don't have one with me, with like an eight letter stencil board and It's really big, right?
And I mean, like everything, it's like training wheels and then you keep moving up.
So this is what we call a laminate in S2C land.
Okay.
And Jamie literally just like, you know, points and you call out the letters and when he's done, he hits done.
And that's how you know what he said.
But Jamie was very clear right before the book was launched that he only wanted to work off his keyboard, which is his new communication device.
And so what we have is a magic keyboard from Apple.
Got a little ring on the back so that I can hold the keyboard because he still wants it held in front of him.
I have an iPad right here.
And there's an app called Proloquo for text.
So it's P-R-O-L-O-Q-U-O for the number and then text.
And Jamie has become a lot more prolific in spelling ever since he's gotten Proloquo.
And the reason for that is I think that he gets the Immediate feedback mechanism from the iPad and he can really see it.
The other thing that's amazing, and again, I don't like to in any way, we're not doing this to prove the doubters wrong.
I just, I really refuse to kind of like go down that path.
But all I can say is like when you watch Jamie spell on the iPad, he's going to look at the keyboard and look at the iPad because he watches very carefully what he's spelling.
And he uses the delete key and he uses the space bar because he's spelling, right?
Just like we all do.
And then he hits return and what's really cool about it for him is when he hits return it says what he wrote so his dad doesn't have to and so it's a little bit more of an intimate interaction with other people because he doesn't have a human between them right it's all kind of him and as soon as Jamie started doing this only about a month ago he realized like oh this can get me independent and he's already said like I don't think we're going to need my communication partner much longer And he's told me explicitly
I want to be independent by summer, right?
And who's to doubt him?
So, Jamie, Jenny's question was, how are they doing so far?
Go ahead.
Our guys are awesome.
He said our guys are awesome.
What state are you in?
Are you in Florida?
We're in Milwaukee right now.
You're in Milwaukee?
We're in Hawaii right now.
We're very far from Milwaukee, Bobby.
I don't want to live in that Milwaukee.
We are on Maui.
It's 11 in the morning.
You know, I've been watching some of the questions, and there is one that's kind of reoccurring, which is about, does this program help a verbal child that is not 100% conversational?
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
And it's such a great question.
So what Spelling to Communicate people will say, F2C people will say, is that this is really for non-speakers and unreliable speakers.
And I think what unreliable really means is that You can get into these motor loops, right?
And so like, for example, if I ask Jamie a question, he'll typically answer yes, because it's just sort of been drilled into him, right?
That's not a reliable answer.
He may not want to do that thing at all, right?
And that's really confusing.
It's a motor loop, a verbal motor loop.
And so the board is reliable, meaning that what comes out of the board is what the child's actually thinking.
And so for unreliable speakers, S2C can be amazing.
Glad you answered that.
Well...
Any other questions?
How do you like Maui, Amy?
Oh, sorry.
Let me...
You got it.
You're doing great.
I love it.
I want to leave here.
Me too.
So I want to mention something because this is a source of criticism sometimes and misunderstanding.
So I'm literally holding the keyboard, right?
You can see his eyes going back and forth as he's spelling.
And when When kids first begin spelling to communicate, the practitioner who you work with is very, very likely to prompt much more using verbal prompts and using prompts with their hand.
They won't touch the child.
They'll never go hand over hand, which is what's called facilitated communication.
And so people will often mistakenly This is facilitated communication, and it's not.
But what you can see with me is that my prompts have really, really faded.
I'm basically down to going, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
I'm just giving him a little support underneath his typing.
You know, no different than a coach does with a player.
Because we're fading towards independence.
So if you get in a room for the first time, and you see that the practitioner is really, really, really prompting your child, it's because they're just trying to train their body.
This is not about cognition.
It's about motor planning, and verbal prompts help begin that process.
So I just want to make that clear to people.
Somebody asked, so handleybook.com is where you can get a signed copy.
Amazon, Barnes& Noble, most other booksellers are also selling the book right now.
S2C is not the same as Proloquo.
No, it's its own different thing.
There's an app called Proloquo for text, but I want to be really clear about this.
We're at PhD level with Jamie now.
If you begin S2C, you're going to begin on a letter board.
You're not going to have an iPad because fine motor is the thing that's really text.
And so it takes a lot of time to get to where we've gotten with Jamie, okay?
So this is different.
This does confuse people.
I think the other thing that confuses parents is they just don't realize the depths of communication that we're able to get out of Jamie and that, hey, we're not the only ones.
I just want to be clear.
I think if you read the book and you start to read his words, you're like, oh, okay.
Now I get it.
This isn't like a kid who can spell a word here and there to get a need met.
This is like a fully formed adult with a beautiful mind, able to express all his thoughts.
That's what we're really talking about.
Let me ask Jamie one more question.
I love reading about Sam.
Sam, like both J.B. and his wife were college athletes and his sports are very big for him.
Sam is also kind of a A very, very high level lacrosse player.
What's your favorite part of having Sam home?
Look at that smile.
Thinking about your bro.
Go ahead.
He makes me laugh.
Saw that big smile.
Bobby, can I just ask a real quick question for parents?
What can we maybe legally do to get these organizations to shift?
Yeah, so a couple things.
First of all, if you want to find a practitioner, go to i-asc.org.
International Association of Spelling to Communicate, i-asc.org.
There's more practitioners being trained every day.
They knew this book was coming out.
They're like trying to catch up.
I think that what's going to need to happen is that parents are going to need to submit expenses for spelling to communicate lessons to insurance.
Insurance is going to deny those expenses and then they're going to need to sue them.
And then that's going to force litigation To prove that this is a valid method.
We have science out of the University of Virginia.
About a year ago, it was an eye tracking study that affirmed very clearly, scientifically published in Nature, that it's the children choosing the letters.
Okay, so this was like the first of its kind, you know, to silence the doubters.
Again, I don't want to spend my time that way, but I think that's going to have to happen.
The method needs to be validated by the insurance companies so that they will Pay for this and for schools as well.
And so I don't doubt for a minute that it will take litigation to get to that point.
Agree with that, Bobby.
How do you answer that question?
Somebody says here, I also highly recommend Ido Kedar's book, Ido in Autism Land.
I mean, this is what's amazing.
Jamie is not a pioneer.
Ido is a pioneer.
He did a method called RPM, which is similar to S2C that we didn't do, but that many parents swear by.
And I think that's what's really important.
People are figuring out ways to get to these children.
And then people like Ido, he went off to college and wrote a book.
He's just like Jamie, meaning he's a speller and a non-speaker.
These beautiful stories exist for years past.
All we're doing is maybe getting this out a little bit broader into the community, but we are not the pioneers of this.
It's amazing to me that I didn't know about it, or that I didn't understand not just the applicability, but the scale of what we were talking about.
So I want to make that point clear to parents, because there's a lot of RPM parents who've been doing this for years, and their voices and their kids' voices deserve to be heard.
Can I read one comment that I saw that I really liked?
Sorry, I'm just scanning.
Yeah.
Sorry, we've got a bunch of comments now, which is awesome.
And people are saying left and right, like, hey, we've got a spelling group.
We've got a bunch of spellers.
I mean, I'm telling you, this is not, it's out there.
Just after my interview yesterday, there were people contacting me talking about their child that has gone through STC and it's working and amazing.
Again, we've never claimed to be the pioneers.
I'm just telling the story we have.
But what's amazing is you can go validate it with so many other people.
Like, here we go.
This was the post I was thinking of.
We have a whole group of non-speaking spellers on Long Island.
They're brilliant and I believe there are many thousands of them at the very least.
So Elizabeth Vosser says 1500 to 2000.
I don't know.
That's a data point worth gathering.
My son is one of them.
We didn't find out until he was 19 five years ago.
Totally life-changing.
This is obviously our experience too.
We use RPM developed by Soma for her son Tito, who has now authored several books.
But all these programs all work off the same premise.
Presume competence.
So beautiful.
It's happening.
And again, once it happens to you, you just want every other kid to have the chance.
So it's so cool for me to know that there's a whole group of these spellers in Long Island, because I can tell you that for community, all Jamie wants is his dude bros.
He likes to be with other spellers just like him.
Well said.
Well said.
Well, with that, do you guys want to wrap it up?
Jamie's probably like, yep.
Oh yeah, yeah.
He's enjoyed these interviews a lot and he'd also like to get back to like hanging out at the ocean.
We're on spring break right now, so...
Thank you, Jamie, for again helping change the world along with JB and Robbie.
As I'm looking at the computer, I'm looking at you guys going, I'm so grateful and so lucky to all of you.
Like, honestly.
You too, Jenny.
Thank you.
Underestimated, you guys.
Spread the word.
Shout it from the rooftops.
Let's make some change.
Let's do it.
We can do it.
And make it a bestseller.
Why not?
Come on.
Thank you so much, you guys.
You know, I'll just say it's a really quick read, and it was meant to be.
So if you got two hours, you can get through the book.
Absolutely.
Spread the word.
I love you, Jamie.
Love you too, Jamie.
She loves you guys.
You know that.
So, Jamie, you want to give a wave?
Yeah.
All right, you guys.
Jenny, Poppy, thank you guys so much.
To all the parents out there, don't believe the deniers.
