1395: The Telepathy Tapes | Skeptical Sunday

A hit podcast claims nonverbal autistic kids are telepathic. Michael Regilio doesn't need ESP to see through The Telepathy Tapes on Skeptical Sunday! Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by skeptic, comedian, and podcaster Michael Regilio https://www.threads.com/@michaelregilio! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1395 https://jordanharbinger.com/1395 On This Week's Skeptical Sunday: How The Telepathy Tapes, a chart-topping podcast claiming nonspeaking autistic kids can read minds, sells extraordinary claims to parents who desperately want them to be true — and why claims that big demand far more than anecdotes and tests no one can see. Why 140 years of telepathy research — from the Creery sisters and Smith and Blackburn to J. B. Rhine's ESP cards — keeps producing impressive results that vanish the moment experimenters tighten controls or put the subjects in separate rooms. What James Randi's planted magicians revealed about psychic research: scientists can sincerely believe they've ruled out deception while leaving loopholes wide open, because they're trained to study nature, not to catch someone fooling them. How Spelling to Communicate and Rapid Prompting echo discredited Facilitated Communication, where controlled tests showed facilitators authoring the messages — a flaw that led to false abuse accusations that tore families apart. Why the strongest defense against self-deception is noticing how badly you want something to be true. When news sounds too good, tell yourself, "I hope it's true" — then account for that feeling and check the evidence before you believe it. Connect with Jordan on Twitter https://twitter.com/JordanHarbinger, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jordanharbinger, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/THEJORDANHARBINGERSHOW. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] and let him know! Connect with Michael Regilio at Twitter https://twitter.com/Michaelregilio1, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/michaelregilio/, Threads https://www.threads.com/@michaelregilio, Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/michaelregilio.bsky.social, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpXvzUcF00hUwrjKkABEjpQ?view_as=subscriber, and check out War Bar https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FPZPPL9C/?tag=jordanharbing-20, his comedy special! And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/id1344999619?mt=2&ls=1 — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking https://jordanharbinger.com/course — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course https://jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser https://www.jordanharbinger.com/news/ newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanHarbinger/! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors https://www.jordanharbinger.com/deals/: Xero: Find out more: xero.com https://www.xero.com/Quince: Free shipping & 365-day returns: quince.com/jordan https://www.quince.com/jordanAT&T: Get an iPhone 17 Pro for $0: att.com/iphone or visit an AT&T store for details https://att.com/iphoneProgressive Insurance: Free online quote: progressive.com https://www.progressive.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 1:29Speaker 00

  Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today, I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, comedian, and skeptic, Michael Ruggilio. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. Our mission is to help you become a better-informed, more critical thinker. And during the week, we have long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers. On Sundays, though, it's Skeptical Sunday. A rotating guest co-host and I break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic. Such as astrology, circumcision, diet supplements, the lottery, crystal healing, energy drinks, and more. And if you're new to the show, or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode starter packs.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, disinformation, junk science, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit JordanHarbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, did you hear about it? The podcast that blew up the charts and had everybody talking? The telepathy tapes. I know I have personally received a number of emails here at the Jordan Harbinger Show asking if I've listened and what's my take on the idea that nonverbal autistic children actually have a secret way of communicating outside the normal ways that all of us communicate. They apparently use telepathy, according to this podcast. And to answer your question, no, I did not listen, but of course, I know someone who did.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  And this week's skeptic and comedian, Michael Ruggilio, is here to tell us all that he's gleaned both through extrasensory perception and good old-fashioned reading, watching, and researching about the telepathy tapes.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  That's right, Jordan. The Telepathy Tapes was a smash-hit podcast in which the show's producer, Kai Dickens, lays out the case that many nonverbal autistic children can communicate telepathically. Over the course of 10 episodes, she builds the case that nonverbal autistic children are literally mind readers who utilize an extra sense. She makes the case that these young people can receive information without any clues coming in from the five senses. She attempts to bridge the seemingly infinite gap between circus sideshow and verifiable science. Before we get into this episode, in which I, as a skeptic, am going to, of course, expose the telepathy tapes as either horribly flawed, or worst-case scenario, a total con, let me just say this.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  This is the most fertile ground imaginable for a grift. All the elements are there, including a group of people who have every reason in the world to want these claims to be true. And that is the parents of nonverbal autistic children. If you're a parent struggling to understand what your child is thinking and feeling, and someone comes along and tells you, your child can communicate. In fact, there's an extraordinary ability at play here. Of course, you're going to want that to be true. And that doesn't make these parents gullible. It means anyone making claims this extraordinary to families in that position has an enormous responsibility to make damn sure the evidence is solid.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  So, from the get-go, the burden is on the telepathy tapes, or more appropriately, Kai Dickens, the creator and producer of the podcast, to make its case and make it strong. Otherwise, it's her fault if we get the ick. And I'm here to tell you, I sat through every damn episode of this podcast, all eight hours and 53 minutes of it, and I got the ick. Eight hours and 53 minutes of that sinking, sick feeling in my stomach that I might be listening to someone sell extraordinary claims to parents who desperately want those claims to be true. Because the telepathy tapes isn't just telling these parents that their kids can conventionally communicate, which would be a fantastic claim unto itself.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  It's telling them that their kids have magic powers.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  And by magic powers, of course, you mean telepathic powers, right?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is the claim. So, I suppose before we get into anything, we better define our terms. Let's start with telepathy.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  I was just gonna ask, what is telepathy for people who don't know? Because near as I can tell, it's just a fancy word for mind-reading.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, the idea that one might communicate directly with another mind isn't new. You can find versions of supernatural mind-to-mind communication, prophetic dreams and visions in religious and folkloric traditions going back thousands of years. The Bible contains lots of stories of people acquiring information through dreams, visions, and divine revelation. Now, that's not telepathy in the modern sense, but it's where we get this ancient idea that the mind can somehow know things it couldn't possibly know through the five senses. That the mind can be a receptacle for information that comes from somewhere else, whether that information is psychic or divine.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, when you study the ancient world, you realize that for certain people, dreams were just like ancient newspapers. Oh, I dreamt of a smoldering tree, so our enemies to the north must be building up an army.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. In fact, in the Bible, the Pharaoh dreams of seven fat cows being devoured by seven thin cows, followed by seven healthy heads of grain being swallowed by seven withered ones. Which, in that particular case, I think it's pretty obvious what that means.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Well, I have no idea what that means.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Oh, you don't? Well, that's a little embarrassing for you. It clearly means Egypt will experience seven years of abundance, followed by seven years of famine.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, even with you telling me that, this is not my forte, reading between the lines of metaphor and all that stuff. Yeah, no.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think what you're pointing out there is that for every divine dream, there's always a skeptic to say, that's bullshit.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  In fact, Aristotle, for one, he wrote on divination in sleep, and he was skeptical of the idea of prophetic dreams. He really turned the thinking of its day on its head when he proposed that dreams weren't messages from the gods at all, but simply the stuff our minds do while we're sleeping.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  This is another incredibly fertile ground for a grift, like you said. If you can convince people that your dreams contain privileged information from the gods, suddenly you're not just some guy who had a weird dream. You have access to information nobody else has. And throughout history, access to supposedly divine information has meant power, influence, and of course, money. I mean, you see these oracles and things like that, and the courtiers. I mean, the whole thing is a grift.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  That's a really excellent point. And it kind of makes you wonder what Kai Dickens made off of the telepathy tapes. Now, I'm just thinking out loud here, but money is almost always the motivating factor.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  Okay, I'll stick up a little for a fellow podcaster here. Dickens says she deliberately didn't run ads during the original release because she didn't want people to suspect that very thing and that money was the motivator. And by the way, there's now a season two, and does that have ads?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, for one, I'm not listening to season two. I feel like eight hours and 53 minutes of season one qualifies as due diligence.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's fair enough. Dickens claimed that despite the enormous success of the first season, she was barely breaking even. Which, look, I don't know what her production costs were, and if you don't run ads, I guess, I don't know how you make any money at all. So, maybe that's true. I don't know.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  I got news for you, that's changed. The podcast now runs ads. I looked into it, and there are also paid subscriptions and merch.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  I'm just saying, apparently, telepathy eventually figured out monetization.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Merch. So, like, people do this with my show, too. They're like, hey, you can have merch, and we can have really crappily-made t-shirts, hats, water bottles, or whatever, made of, with your show logo on it. And I'm like, there's nothing I want my show fans to spend their money on less than something that they will never wear that gets landfillled. That's, you know, fast fashion-level clothing. If I get merch, it's gonna be something people use a lot, and it's just maybe we'll have our name on it somewhere. But it's gonna be, like, actually useful.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Totally. Well, she's got merch, she's got t-shirts, like you said, water bottles, and she's got cassette tapes.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  Cassette tapes of, how do you even, first of all, how do you even get a cassette tape in 2026? But, okay.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  I don't know what's on the cassette tapes, but I'm assuming it could be 70s hits, Dream Weaver, possibly Dream Police. I don't know.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  Sheesh. Ah, okay. Well, we should make an important distinction. The telepathy tapes isn't claiming that people can receive prophetic information through dreams. It's making the much more specific claim that information can pass directly from one person's mind to another person's mind without traveling through any of the five senses. And that's what we mean by telepathy. That's the claim the podcast is on the hook to prove.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. And having gone down this rabbit hole very thoroughly, I will tell you that she did actually make some bizarre claims about nonverbal kids getting in- Through dreams when she went on Joe Rogan, who surprise, surprise, asked very few questions that pushed back. But let's stick to the central claim of the podcast, telepathy. Telepathy as a supposedly scientific phenomenon is pretty much a Victorian invention. The word itself didn't even exist until 1882. That's when British scholar Frederick W. H. Myers coined the word telepathy to describe communication from one mind to another. And that distinction matters because people have believed in clairvoyance, prophecy, psychic communication and supernatural knowledge for thousands of years.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  But what Myers and his contemporaries were doing was taking those ancient supernatural claims and reframing them as something that could supposedly be investigated scientifically.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  I'm assuming they didn't prove it or provide compelling evidence since to this day psychic abilities have never met the scientific burden of proof, if I'm not mistaken.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, you are not mistaken. But in 1882, Myers and several prominent British intellectuals helped establish the Society of Psychical Research, or SPR. The organization is actually still around today and some members hold serious academic credentials, but nothing like in the earliest days. Its early membership included serious academics and scientists, people at the top of their fields. Philosopher Henry Sidgwick became its first president and people such as Harvard psychologist William James, Nobel laureate Lord Raleigh and future Prime Minister Arthur Belfour all became involved.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  In 1882, I imagine there were quite a few paranormal claims floating around because science was, you know, it was relatively early. So it's like, oh my gosh, how does this work? Anything a magician does today, a physicist and that magician, you know, if he's willing to disclose what he's doing, he could say, yeah, I do this. And the physicist goes, this is how this works. But back then a magician would just be able to do something. And it's like, how does that work? I don't know. I put this black rock onto this other one and the thing floats. I'm not sure what's going on here. And it's like, oh, this might have some serious scientific usage. I don't know. I just use it to trick people and take their money. But yeah, there's, wasn't also Ouija boards kind of the rage back then? Maybe they weren't called Ouija boards back then.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  You're 100% right about everything, especially the magicians, because we're going to get into magicians because they actually play into this episode quite a bit. But yes, there were Ouija boards back then, but they weren't the Parker Brothers version. Back then they were called talking boards or spirit boards, not Ouija boards. The Ouija board would have to wait another eight years because it was in 1890 that the Canard Novelty Company adopted the name Ouija for its talking board.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  So what does Ouija mean?

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Ouija means nothing.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  There's actually a popular story that it comes from the word oui and the word ya for French and German words for yes.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  The yes, yes board.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  The yes, yes board. But apparently explanation is wrong and the name means absolutely nothing.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Got it. So it's all branding, rather appropriate that a board that does nothing gets its name from nothing.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Well, I actually feel kind of bad about Ouija boards because my friend and I used to mess around with one in the cemetery in my hometown of Marblehead, Massachusetts. The cemetery was hundreds of years old. So naturally we figured the best thing we could do was put a Ouija board over an old grave and try and contact some spirits.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  And you feel bad because you were disrespectful to some old graves?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  No, I feel bad because my friend reached out to me about 10 years ago and was like, dude, I still think about the time we contacted that pirate who died in the American Revolution on that Ouija board. That shit was insane. And I had to be like, uh, yeah, that was me. I was moving it the whole time. There was no pirate, dude. Sorry that you spent the last 30 years thinking ghost pirates are real because you thought you talked to one in a board game purchased at Toys R Us. But seriously, by the way, my friend is a cardiologist. So that's terrifying.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I guess that exposes something important about this whole subject. Even really smart, educated people can fall victim to their own motivations. And if you really want to believe you talked to a dead pirate, it can be surprisingly easy to convince yourself that you talked to a dead pirate.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Yes, which helps explain the Society for Psychical Research because people kept reporting ghosts, mediums, thought reading, and all sorts of other paranormal phenomena. And instead of simply accepting these stories as true or dismissing them as nonsense, Myers and the other members of SPR asked a perfectly reasonable question. Can we actually test these claims?

• 14:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's science in a nutshell.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. And almost immediately they encountered one of the central problems that would follow paranormal research for the next century.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  Ghost pirates.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  No, fraud and inadequate experimental controls.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Okay, that makes more sense. I'm guessing those are still problems in testing paranormal abilities. I remember watching videos of this stuff in science class. I guess it was probably ninth grade or 10th grade, Mr. Cooper's class. And he would show these people moving like a cigarette or something with their hand, but not touching it, right? The telekinesis.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've seen that.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  And he's like, how do you think they're doing it? And I was like, aren't they just blowing it? And he's like, yes. And I was like, okay, what's the problem here? And he goes, you have no idea how long it took scientists to figure out the guy was blowing it. And I'm like, what are you talking about? It's the first thing I guessed and I'm watching it on video and 30 seconds in, half the class is like, isn't he just blowing it and making it look like he's not doing that because he's got a mustache? And this teacher was like, yeah, the scientist tested this, these guys for months and they couldn't figure out he was just blowing it.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's so interesting and we're going to get into that. But I think that just speaks to scientists just don't have the brain for deception. They're so trying to get at the truth. And the truth and the fact of the matter is that deception doesn't really cross their mind. And this gets to the heart of testing stuff like telepathy. The motivation to cheat is very high. If you can convince people you have telepathic powers, you can get rich fast. So it's not surprising that although the SPR was well intentioned, it was almost immediately hit with scandals. The first involved the Creary sisters, whom SPR tested beginning around 1882. They initially produced totally impressive results in thought transference, AKA telepathy tests.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Later, the girls were caught using a signaling code and the SPR acknowledged that this seriously discredited all the research.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  Oh, really? Yeah, I would say so. So that, yeah, that completely discredited the research.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  Since they were using a signaling code and none of it was real.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, more or less, but the discrediting wasn't even done yet because they kept going. And there was almost immediately a second scandal involving George Albert Smith and Douglas Blackburn, who amazed experimenters with, you guessed it, telepathy. The basic experiment was this. Blackburn was the sender. Researchers would show him something, a drawing, a number or color. Smith was the receiver. He was blindfolded and supposedly had no way of knowing what Blackburn had been shown. Smith would then try to identify what Blackburn was looking at. Smith was then asked what Blackburn is thinking about. If Smith identifies something similar, it counts as a success. In one series of 37 trials, only eight were classified as failures, meaning researchers

• 17:08Speaker 02

  considered Smith successful to some degree on 29 experiments.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  29 out of 37. That has got to be way better than blind luck, which I guess would be like maybe half if you're lucky. I don't know.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, 29 out of 37 is way better than blind luck. So it wouldn't be half, actually. For whatever reason, with this particular experiment, I looked into it, 25% would have been blind luck. So 29 out of 37 blows that out of the water. But here's the problem. And this is the problem that we see even today on the telepathy tapes. When Smith and Blackburn were put in separate rooms, their success disappeared. Decades later, Blackburn admitted that the whole thing had been a hoax. But let's keep this particular experiment in mind as we talk about the telepathy tapes because I think we're going to find that what is claimed to be telepathy in the year 2026 looks an awful lot like what telepathy looked like 150 years ago.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  It also sounds like the opening scene in Ghostbusters, Bill Murray's character giving that exact same test.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I thought of that too. And just like in Ghostbusters, everyone involved here is just acting.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  This wasn't the last time highly educated people became curious about the supernatural. There wasn't Freud all into telepathy and stuff like that as well?

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was. Interestingly enough, though, at the time Freud was getting interested in telepathy, psychoanalysis itself was still fighting for scientific legitimacy. A lot of the scientific community already viewed Freud's ideas as a bit out there. So.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  People would read Freud's ideas and they're just like, okay, I'm pretty sure this dude just wants to bang his mom.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's an old joke, when it comes to Freud, it's always one thing or your mother.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. My producer, Gabriel, who you know.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  He's got a shirt that says, Pink Freud, the dark side of your mom. It's really funny. And when I saw that, I lost my mind because I just thought, I was like, where do I even get, I need that shirt. It's so funny.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that might explain why Freud was so cautious about publicly embracing telepathy. So Freud was in a slightly awkward position where he truly was becoming increasingly convinced that telepathy might be real while he was trying not to ruin the reputation of a field that a lot of scientists already thought was pretty questionable.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  I guess not much has changed since I'm pretty sure I would ask for a new psychologist if they started talking about telepathy. I just, no kooks for me.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. The fact of the matter is Freud couldn't help himself either because he was just too damn fascinated with it. In 1921, he wrote psychoanalysis and telepathy. And then in 1922, he wrote dreams and telepathy, although he was careful to note that he had never actually witnessed telepathy.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  I'm starting to think that's because no one has ever actually witnessed telepathy.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, Freud's contemporary Jung went even further. Jung went so far as to say he considered it a legitimate phenomenon. Jung reported telepathic experiences involving himself and his patients.

• 20:02Speaker 00

  Again, I'd be out of there. If my psychologist told me he was developing a telepathic bond with me, let me guess, Jung didn't utilize any scientific controls in this endeavor either.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  No, in fact, in my research, I found it to be quite the opposite. The most famous case he had was with a patient. It's called the case of the golden scarab, in which a young female patient was telling Jung about a dream from the previous night in which someone gave her a golden scarab. While she was describing it, get this, Jung heard tapping at his office window. He opened it and caught a rose shaffer beetle. Now, hold on to your hat because it turns out that the rose sheriff beetle is the closest local equivalent to a golden scarab.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  Okay, and?

• 20:45Speaker 02

  No, that's it. That's the story.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Color me super duper unimpressed by that.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, Jung was super duper impressed and he wrote about it in his book Synchronicity in 1952.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  The good news is nobody needs to guide your hand towards the skip button. The bad news is I know where you live. Kidding, probably. Sponsors, we'll be right back.

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• 23:36Speaker 00

  and it was Peter Watson in 1960. So this is like, confirmation bias, for those who don't know, is like when, well, the example I give in my own life is when I was young. I dated a girl once who, when she would drive by this light on her street, she would be like, "It lights up." And I think it's my mother who had passed away, like signaling to me. It's sad, right? Because her mother was murdered when she was young.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Oh, my.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so, I didn't have the heart to tell her, but I'm like, you know, this is confirmation. But she doesn't notice the other 1,000 times she goes by that light and nothing happens. She only notices the time that it lights up. And I looked up why a light might turn off and on a streetlight. Apparently, this happens all the time, when they overheat or when there's nobody around, or like certain, it just can happen for so many different reasons. So a lot of times, these things are just off. And if it flickers when she drives by, she's like, "Oh, it's supernatural." And it's like, "Oh, man." I bet if you really tracked every time you went by this, one in every dozen times you go by this thing, something happens, and the rest of the time, nothing happens. So that's confirmation bias. You only notice when something goes the way that you expect it to. And that's kind of what I'm thinking Jung has here with synchronicity, like, "Oh,

• 24:44Speaker 00

  my patient brought up this bug, and here's a similar bug that I just caught." And it's like, "Okay, well, your patient mentioned a whole bunch of other stuff, and nothing else happened, so you're not catching any of that." So there's no synchronicity here. It's just something you noticed, because you didn't notice everything else.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, yeah. And, you know, Jung was talking about it in 52, and he said that was in 1960. So, I mean, he was off by eight years. Although, how did he not notice? I just don't.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Confirmation bias is one of those things that seems so obvious, once you know about it, that you think, "Oh, surely, everybody's known about this for hundreds of years. And I just didn't realize." But then you realize, like, "Oh, no, no, I was, I don't know, whatever, 30 years old by the time I'd heard of it. And with the rest of my life, I just thought these rare events were happening way more often than they were." And they weren't.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Totally. I mean, I think about, I've fallen victim to, you know, everybody will have this, where I was thinking of a friend, and then the phone rang, and I picked it up, and it was them.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  And I definitely have been like, "Oh, my God, that, maybe I'm psychic." And then the explanation I was given is that the brain is just constantly thinking all day, every day, and that you're constantly thinking of friends. But then you forget that you thought about your friends, because nothing significant happens. But when it just so happens that you're thinking of a friend, and they call, your brain says, "That's significant," and it remembers that. And it says there was something special about that, forgetting the fact that you thought about 30 friends that day that didn't call, you know?

• 26:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true. Back to your original point about psychics, those psychic performers on TV with audiences or whatever, they do this, too, right? They're like, "I'm seeing someone whose name starts with M, M, M. Oh, sorry, it's, maybe it's N, because nobody bought on M, right?" And then someone's like, "Is it Nancy?" And he's like, "Yes, it's Nancy." Right? That's, and everyone goes, "Oh, my God, he guessed this woman's aunt was named Nancy." And it's like, "No, he didn't. He said M before, and it was a man, and then it was N, and it was Nancy, and she's the one who yelled it." But everyone forgets that stuff.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. And it always leaves me going, like, what exactly are the spirits doing with these psychics? Like, just going up to them and going, "My name starts with N, N, N, N, N." Like, why wouldn't the spirit just say, "My name is Nancy?" Anyway.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Jung, who was obviously into this stuff, he was also inspired by a guy by the name of J.B. Rhine at Duke University, who, starting in the 1930s, he was also conducting tests on telepathy. And he actually came up with the new term, which was extrasensory perception, or ESP, which I think is what I called it when I was a kid.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, same old telepathy, fancy new name.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. And in Rhine's telepathy experiments, one person looked at a card, while another person, who couldn't see it, tried to identify it.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  This is the Ghostbusters test. I remember, didn't the cards have shapes on them and stuff? Wasn't that, that was a popular 80s thing?

• 27:27Speaker 02

  The joke was that Bill Murray's attracted to one of the testers. It's a beautiful woman, and everything she guesses is wrong, but he's pretending it's great. Meanwhile, the guy who he's not interested in is guessing everything perfectly, like he has telepathy. And anyway, it's just a very silly movie, but a good movie. I'm old. We loved our Ghostbusters back in the 80s.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  And so, Rhine, he reported results statistically above chance as well. Again, pay attention to this, because we're going to find that this is super similar to the experiments done in the telepathy tapes. In fact, spoiler alert, just about everything from the telepathy tapes is just a rehashing of things that have been tested and challenged many, many times before.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  What happened with Rhine? Was he outed as a fraud, or, or just a Freud?

• 28:13Speaker 02

  No. In fact, I don't doubt that he did his tests in earnest, but when other experimenters tried to replicate them, again, using more stringent controls, because that seems to be the entire thing with telepathy, is the controls, these spectacular results once again disappeared.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  Seems like the only supernatural thing connected to telepathy is the disappearing positive test result.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, like you said, the self-deception that comes from wanting to believe something to be true is powerful, and less-than-honest people have taken advantage of that for a very long time. Once, in fact, a friend of mine who believes in psychics wanted to convince me, so he paid for me to have a session with his favorite psychic. I walked in, met the woman, I told her I was a skeptic, and that I actually knew a thing or two about cold readings, and then I asked if this was going to be a problem. And she told me, she doesn't do psychic readings for skeptics, and gave my friend his money back.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  Wow. So telepathy has pretty much been debunked?

• 29:12Speaker 02

  No, not quite.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  What do you mean, "not quite"?

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Because it kept going. People kept testing it. And the next big test of it was the Gansfeld experiment.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  All right.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  And this began in the 1970s. Researchers developed another famous telepathy test. And this one, kind of weird, but someone sits in sensory isolation with translucent halves of ping-pong balls over their eyes while white noise is played at them.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Okay. That sounds like something straight out of A Clockwork Orange, right? Where they've got his eyelids taped open, and he's watching the ultra-violence, or whatever it's called?

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's interesting, because I was confused why the ping-pong balls, like, why not just a blindfold? Like, it makes no sense. But apparently, having translucent ping-pong balls over your eyes creates like this translucent haze that, I'm not sure exactly why that's better, but it's about creating a translucent, like, just pure milky whiteness in front of your eyes. But it is similar to Clockwork Orange. Or, in fact, if you go look at the YouTube videos of it, it looks like it's straight out of Clockwork Orange. And while the person sits with white noise being blasted at them and half ping-pong balls over their eyes, another person attempts to send them an image mentally. And the ping-pong ball person then tries to guess what they're thinking.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Okay. I've seen YouTube videos about this, but it's not telepathy. It's kind of like a sensory deprivation trick that makes you trip out without drugs.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've seen those videos, too. And it's the same exact experiment, but it's just another side effect that kids are experimenting with, or people are experimenting with these days. It's basically the, a cheap sensory deprivation tank.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  I see. How did the ping-pong experiment thing go?

• 30:48Speaker 02

  So, with the Gansfeld experiments, they reported a small positive effect. The hit rate is described as roughly 32% when it would have been, blind guess would have been 25%.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  Ah, okay. So seven percentage points above chance. Is that how that works?

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  It's not huge.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  But statistically interesting enough that researchers kept studying it. Enter, and this is important. This is what we've been talking about, James Randi.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  James Randi, the magician. I love this guy. Yeah. He's also like a skeptic.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Magician. Yeah.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah. James Randi becomes important here because he understood something that the scientists didn't. And we've already talked about this. Scientists are trained to investigate nature. Magicians are trained to deceive observers.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  Right. In fact, Randy went on to become a great debunker of all things paranormal.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Because he understood that scientists would think, we've eliminated every way this person could know the answer. While the magician is sitting there watching these experiments and thinking to themselves, I can think of six ways to know the answer that hasn't occurred to these scientists. And with there suddenly being actual statistical data suggesting telepathy might be real, Randy did something that to this day is a little bit questionable from an ethical point of view. But Randy arranged for two young magicians to present themselves as psychically gifted subjects at the McDonald Laboratory for Psychical Research at Washington University in St. Louis. Researchers studied them for years. The two appeared capable of remarkable paranormal feats. And then Randy publicly revealed his whole operation in 1983.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  This was of course controversial because people rightly questioned the ethics of deliberately infiltrating a laboratory with deceptive subjects, right?

• 32:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. But Randy demonstrated an extremely important methodological point. Researchers can sincerely believe they've been controlled for deception while leaving enormous loopholes that competent magicians can exploit. Because the history of telepathy isn't really a history of scientists proving that telepathy doesn't exist. It's 140 years of scientists wrestling with a much harder question. How do you demonstrate that information genuinely traveled from one mind to another rather than through some ordinary channel the experimental just failed to control?

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Enter the telepathy tapes.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Enter the telepathy tapes.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  Okay. So we got the backstory. Now tell me about the telepathy tapes, I guess.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Okay. Well, it's a podcast, like we said, that launched in 2024 and was created and hosted by the woman we've already discussed, a documentarian named Kai Dickens.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  So out of curiosity, what were her previous documentaries about? Anything related to paranormal stuff or telepathy or whatever?

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Great question. And no, totally normal stuff. She had a documentary following four people who were sole survivors of commercial plane crashes.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  Okay. Sounds interesting kinda so far. All right.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Another about the lack of guaranteed paid family leave and medical leave in the United States. And one about the disparity in venture capital funding received by women.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Okay. So just really just normal stuff. This is not like.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  A person who's filming only paranormal stuff and then she makes this and everyone should be not surprised. Okay.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. And what you're talking about there is the fact that she came into the telepathy tapes with some serious credibility.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  Right. Yes.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Which might help explain the crazy success of the podcast. And so the central claim, as we've talked about, is that some non-speaking autistic people can communicate telepathically. These people can access information inside another person's mind. Dickens portrays this as a real thing that's happening. I know, because like I said, I listened to the whole first season.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, thank you for your service.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Thank you. And the person the non-speaking autistic child is communicating with is almost always their parent. A parent might look at a number, word, color, or image without showing it to their child. And the child then spells or selects the correct answer. The podcast presents these results as evidence that something genuinely unexplained might be happening.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  And people went absolutely nuts for this thing.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. It started getting serious attention toward the end of 2024. Then when Joe Rogan talked about it, immediately afterwards, the telepathy tapes exploded up the charts. By the beginning of January, 2025, it briefly knocked Joe Rogan himself out of the number one spot on Spotify in the United States.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  That's no small feat. Trust me, that requires a ton of new subscribers or whatever plays in a short period of time. However, the Spotify algorithm works. So that's, that's a massive flood of traffic all at once is what does that.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. And in listening to the podcast, a person could be forgiven for being genuinely impressed. Impressed in a way that you would never be if this were actually a documentary film. You know, the thing that Kai normally makes.

• 35:31Speaker 00

  Okay. So you're saying the fact that you can't actually see what's happening is one reason why it's impressive. And that if you could see these feats of telepathy.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  You'd scream bullshit. Yeah. Okay. Let's start with what is kind of breezed by or misrepresented. These kids, and I can't stress this enough, and I know everyone listening knows this. The kids and parents are in no way responsible for anything misrepresented here. They are people in a tough situation who are simply doing their best.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  Of course, I do understand why you wanted to reiterate that, but gosh, oh, gosh, I, yeah. I'm not blaming any parent or any kid who's in this situation. If I had a non-verbal child, I think I would just want more than anything to be able to communicate with them or for them to communicate somehow. So I understand the desperation from these parents, but that makes this whole thing way worse, in my opinion. I assume we'll get into that. But that's just what makes this truly awful. It's the same thing with psychics who say they're talking to a dead relative and you're just, you see these women or guys or whatever crying over like a dead spouse or a child and they just want closure. They're missing, they're missing child and the psychic is like, she says that she vanished in the woods.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  I mean, we've done episodes on this too, right? Oh, she says she's vanished in the woods and she's in a dark place. And you're just like tormented by this. And meanwhile, the person is just making it up. And I'm like, oh my gosh, straight to jail.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  Straight. And then, oh, by the way, that'll be a thousand dollars for the reading. It's just like, oh my gosh, I hope you get hit by a garbage truck.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And there's some stuff that's sketchy going on here. And so the one thing that's not explained on the podcast, or at least not properly explained, is the method these kids are using to communicate. And that's a method called rapid prompting method or spelling to communicate.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  What is that?

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Okay. So this is a method in which a spelling board is placed or held in front of the kids. And another adult provides prompting or physical assistance as the child points to letters. Depending on the method, that could mean holding the wrist, elbow, shoulder, or actually just moving the letter board in front of the child as their finger comes down.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Oh, I see. Right. So they're kind of guiding their hand or they're moving the boards so their hand hits the key that. So they're doing the typing for them, basically.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  Yes. And although Kai would disagree wholeheartedly, I'm going to state it frankly. It's obvious that the person called the facilitator can influence the answer. And I don't come by that conclusion willy nilly. More on that in a moment. So the fact that someone else may be physically influencing the child's selection is truly breezed by. This next piece of information is why I said slash misrepresented. Because rapid prompting and spelling to communicate are not completely new ideas. They're basically an older method called facilitated communication. And here's the thing, facilitated communication has been thoroughly discredited. Like in court debunked thoroughly discredited.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  So you're saying these methods they use are just a rebranding of facilitated communication, which has been debunked. You say in court. So I assumed there was a jury trial and they tried to use it. And then an expert was like, here's why this is a bunch of nonsense. And everyone was like, oh yeah, you can't.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. Multiple trials and we're going to get into that.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  These techniques are not literally identical in every way to facilitated communication. But critics argue that they have the same fundamental problem. Another person is present and can potentially influence which letters are selected. So facilitated communication was developed in 1970s by Australian educator Rosemary Crossley. She wasn't trying to pull a fast one, but rather working to help a very misunderstood group of people who are often assumed to have profound intellectual disabilities because they could not speak. The group we now call non-verbal autistic.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  Okay. Now called the, wait, did we not do that before?

• 39:11Speaker 02

  No. Yeah. Sadly, autism was super misunderstood for many years. And non-speaking autistic kids were classified using terms we now recognize as outdated and offensive. So.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Is this where like, they were like, oh, he can't talk. He's dumb.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  It's like, he's not dumb. He's non-verbal. Yeah.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. They were classified as retarded.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  Oof. That's way worse. Okay. Oh geez. That's really sad.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  And so we now know that autism or autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental condition. It involves differences in how the brain develops and processes information. It's called a spectrum because it can look very different from one person to another. Generally autistic people have differences involving social communication and interaction, along with patterns of repetitive behaviors, focused interest, routines, or sensory sensitivities. Many autistic people live independently and need relatively or no support, while others need significant support. The telepathy tape focuses on people who speak very little or not at all. Obviously, non-speaking does not tell you what someone understands or how intelligent they are. That's just the way it is.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. I see what you mean when you say it's a tough spot because the kids must be really brave. I mean, I can't imagine sort of being stuck inside your head all the time.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. So the method Rosemary Crossley developed was based on the idea that some non-speaking people were not intellectually impaired, but were unable to express themselves through speech or independent typing. So facilitated communication involves a facilitator, that is to say, another person providing physical support while the individual points to letters or types on a keyboard.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  So this is all done with the best intentions, I suppose. Was it successful?

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Successful? I'm not sure that's the right word to describe it, but was certainly intriguing enough that it was introduced in the United States in 1989 through the work of Douglas Bilkin at Syracuse University.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  Confirmation bias is when you desperately want something to be true and start interpreting everything as evidence. Like me assuming everyone listens carefully to these ad reads. We'll be right back.

• 41:17Speaker 00

  This episode is sponsored in part by AT&T. You know that friend you haven't seen in months, but you still send each other something funny every day? Somehow you know exactly what's going on in their life, even though neither of you can find a free Saturday. That counts as staying in touch. And right now, AT&T has a deal that will keep the connection going. Right now at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with iPhone Trade-In, any condition. It has the most advanced iPhone camera ever and a big leap in battery life, so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection. This fall, maybe your group chat finally turns into plans. Get everyone together for the game, coordinate a trip home, or video call someone you wish could be at the table. Learn how you can trade in your iPhone in any condition and get the new iPhone 18 Pro at AT&T. Learn how a deal this good can keep the good times going. AT&T, connecting changes everything.

• 42:01Speaker 00

  Requires Trade-In of iPhone 14 or higher excluding iPhone 16E and eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply, subject to change. Visit an AT&T store for details. This episode is sponsored in part by Progressive Insurance. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance to Progressive is a better way to save than having to cut down on the things you love, like those morning iced lattes, one of your seven streaming services, and getting guac with your burrito bowl. So switch your home and auto insurance to Progressive and see if you could save without having to cut down on the things you love. Interested? Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  Come join us on the subreddit if you want to complain endlessly with other show fans about every little thing we do on the show, or give us some nice words. Your choice, really. That's on the Jordan Harbinger subreddit. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  I feel like it's relatively obvious that the controversial aspect of this would be that with someone else touching or guiding the hand, that just leaves the question of whether the messages were being authored by the autistic person or the facilitator, even if inadvertently. I mean, that's like, again, they're blowing the cigarette across the table. That's the obvious thing that all of us saw on the video.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, but people, again, confirmation bias, wanted to believe that this was a real thing. And so it did gain a lot of attention, and it was first heralded as like a super success. And in the early 1990s, there was an episode of one of my favorite shows, PBS's Frontline about it.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  You really are an old man. Frontline is one of your favorite shows? I mean, it's a great show, don't get me wrong.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  It's like one of my all-time favorites. And I liked it when I was 14 years old, by the way.

• 43:41Speaker 00

  That does not surprise me.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Anyway, so I was surprised that this episode got by me, but I watched it in prep for the show, and it's really fascinating.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  I also feel the need to tell you my PBS story really quickly. So I used to love Charlie Rose when I was in college, because I remember my friends were like, "Turn on Charlie Rose." And I was like, "Charlie Rose, who's that?" And he's like, "You don't watch Charlie Rose?" So I started watching it, and I was like, "This guy's really good." He's probably one of the sort of little germinated seeds or whatever in my head for like, I want to interview people, right? Because I remember watching Larry King and being like, "This is okay, but it's not like he's asking great questions or getting like an intellectual conversation." Charlie Rose was, right? So I would watch Charlie Rose, and I remember I was on this podcast probably in 2015 or 16, and the podcaster was a writer for Forbes, or something like that. And they wrote an article in Forbes about my show and me.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  And it was great, because in the Forbes article, this guy had said, "He's the Charlie Rose of podcasting." And I was like, "That's the kindest thing ever, I love it." And it was going out to print. I sent the draft to a friend of mine, even though I wasn't supposed to. And I was like, "Hey, check this out, an article coming out in Forbes about me," or whatever, and they're like, "This is great." And then, oh, it's like midnight or 2:00 AM where I'm at, and my friend sends me a message. Oh, I guess it must have been early in New York. And he goes, "You're gonna want to have him change the Charlie Rose thing in the article." And I was like, "Why?"

• 45:04Speaker 02

  I knew that was coming.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it was like 6:00 AM or 5:00 AM, and I'm in bed, and I'm like, "What do you want?" He's in New York, right? And he's like, "You better get the Forbes thing before this thing goes to print." And I was like, "Yeah, why? What's up? Charlie Rose is podcasting." He's like, "Yeah, you don't want to be the Charlie Rose of podcasting." And I don't remember exactly what had happened. Something, some controversy with his assistant, maybe some Me Too stuff, but I just remember...

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was Me Too, early.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what it was. And I remember the line also, "Toilet brimming with feces." So I called my friend from Forbes, and I was like, "Dude, can we change that?" And he goes, "Yeah, I'm already on it. I'm already, I'm fresh at the top of the..." No, how about the Larry King of podcasting? And I was like, "Fine. Okay, yes, let's do that instead." And then I remember for the whole day, I was like, "Come on, Larry, please don't let me down."

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Don't get Me Too'd, Larry.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  Yes, again, yeah, all right, anyway.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  So in schools that were utilizing facilitated communication, students who were once considered profoundly intellectually disabled were suddenly producing sophisticated writings, and in some cases, performing at really high academic levels.

• 46:08Speaker 00

  That is amazing.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  But from the beginning, there were questions, and many of them were coming from the parents of the non-verbal autistic kids. For one, non-speaking children were suddenly writing perfectly spelled poetry with words that were advanced even for the most gifted kids of their age.

• 46:23Speaker 00

  Okay, so that's either even more amazing or kind of a red flag that they're not the ones actually writing the poetry.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and actually, in the frontline, one of the mothers was saying like, "Oh, this is great." You know, they're saying that he, you know, we can do this facilitated communication. I'll do it with him. And the kid wouldn't do it with her. And she was like, "That's weird, I'm his mother, I'm his best friend. How is it that this facilitated communicator doesn't even know him, has him typing poetry, and I can't even get him to type a single letter?" Like, so there were red flags from the beginning. And they got even worse, because then came the case of Matthew. So Matthew was a non-speaking autistic child who was assigned a facilitator and was participating in the facilitated communication program at his school. And this is where it gets really sad.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  So the facilitator, who may have 100% believed that the communication was coming from Matthew, claimed that in a session, Matthew told her that his father had been raping him.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  Oh my God, that's horrible.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the police didn't really know how to handle this information, so they took the facilitator at their word that these words were coming from Matthew, and they arrested his father and charged him.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  Oh, no. Okay, well, I'm starting to see why you got the ick from all this, that's terrible.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Right, so it became of paramount importance that it be determined whether facilitated communication was really working or whether the words were coming from the facilitator and not the child. So Matthew's father's defense team hired an autism expert from Children's Hospital Boston named Howard Shane. And he came up with some rather ingenious tests. One in which a photograph was shown to both the facilitator and the child, and then the child was told to type what they saw.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  But what the facilitator didn't know was that the photograph being shown to the child was different from the one being shown to them.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  I see, so if the child types, or whatever, that says the picture that the child saw, we know the words are coming from the child, and if the child types what the facilitator saw, the words are coming from the facilitator.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  And controlled tests like this repeatedly found that when the facilitator and the child were given different information, the answer 100% of the time was what the facilitator saw and not what the child saw.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  Jeez, man, okay, wow, wow, so case closed, right? Thank God, I'm assuming Matthew's father was exonerated for this horrible, oh my gosh.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  The charges were dropped, so...

• 48:52Speaker 00

  So facilitated communication was indeed completely debunked, and it turned out like, "Hey, we tested this, and it turns out the facilitators are just making this up?"

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Look, controlled studies overwhelmingly failed to validate it, and major professional organizations eventually rejected it as a reliable communication method. But it was about to have a reboot. Enter Spelling to Communicate and Rapid Prompting, which was basically just the rebranding of facilitated communication. And then enter the telepathy tapes. Their claims go far beyond autistic children being able to communicate through these methods to autistic children being telepathic.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  And this is why you said it's best that it's a podcast, because if we could see this, we would just be super unimpressed, a la Carl Jung's Beatle thing.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, as in completely unimpressed.

• 49:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, so what exactly is happening in the telepathic sessions?

• 49:41Speaker 02

  According to Dickens, just like with all telepathy tests, the parents think of a word and the child types it. But just like with all telepathy tests, there's a flaw.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  A sentient, cogent human being sitting there guiding the hand of the child is a bit of a flaw, yeah.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  That'd be the very flaw I'm thinking about. Now, Kai tries to dress this whole thing up by bringing in what she calls "experts on telepathy." But a little bit of digging, and one finds the experts have some dubious methods themselves. First, she focuses on the word of Diane Hennessy-Powell, whose work started with the study of savants. And when I listened back to the episode, I kind of realized that there was a little sleight of hand going on here. So she's sort of skated by the fact that savants are a real thing. Savants are people who have an exceptional ability while having significant difficulties or disabilities in other areas. They may have extraordinary abilities in things such as mathematics, music, art, or extraordinary memory.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  Well, in fact, very often savants are autistic. I'm thinking of Rain Man, and I know this is a movie, but we had kids like that in my high school. I remember some of these kids, we found out later, they were like in their 20s, but they still went to public school with us, which I guess that's just the program that we had. They weren't in our classes or anything like that, but they would hang out with the gym teacher, I guess, because he was also like an aide. Anyway, they had kind of superpowers, so they'd be eating lunch at the same time as us. And sometimes we would go and socialize with them, because they were actually really interesting, the superpowers were interesting. And also, I think the aides kind of liked it. It's like, oh, the kids are coming over to hang out. There was one kid who would go, what's your birthday? What's your birthday? And you go, hey, Chris, February 24th, 1979, or whatever.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  And he'd go, it's a Thursday. You were born on a Thursday. And you're like, oh, my God, that's amazing. Right? So everybody knew, everyone in the whole school knew what day they were born on. And I remember even checking it with my mom. I was like, is that true? Or is it a guess? She's like, I'm pretty sure. And then she had to look it up. And you found like the newspaper announcement where they were like, uh, Jordan Harbinger born, you know, this time. She's like, oh, yeah, it was late at night. So technically you're born on a Thursday or whatever it was. Right? So it's just crazy. And there was another kid, this is even more impressive somehow. He would say, what street do you live on? And you'd say, what street do I live on? He's like, yeah, what street do you live on? And you'd say, oh, uh, Beach Road. He's like, Beach Road and what, what city, what city? And you say like, oh, Beach Road and Troy, Michigan. And he go, Beach Road connects to Avonhurst and Avonhurst connects to Adams.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  And Adams connects to Waddles and Waddles connects to Woodward and Woodward connects to, and he would just trace it all the way to his house.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  To his house?

• 52:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you'd go, wow, that's really impressive. But here's the thing, I thought, oh, okay, he knows how to get to his house from everywhere. That's really useful. And then you could say like, okay, how do I get to her house? And he'd go, what street do you live on? And she'd say, you know, whatever. And he would trace the route all the way from my street to her street. Really incredible mapping skill. He just had memorized every street sign and how they connect from when he was in the car looking out the window as a kid. So he knew the whole area.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  That's incredible.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  It really was amazing. But bear in mind, this is a kid who like couldn't blow his nose on his own. And I remember thinking back then, you're not unintelligent. Your intelligence is all just stacked in one set of discrete areas or like one specific area and the rest of it, instead of having like a baseline level is just at near zero, baby level, right? It's not running down your face, but you're 25 years old, but you could map the entire state of Michigan by rote memory. It's just, yeah, it's, brains are, are wild and

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. These kids were incredible.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  And at one time, a kid that had that capability would have been classified as mentally retarded. How crazy is that, you know?

• 53:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  But this is where I'm talking about like in the podcast where she's talking about savants. And then she's kind of trying to make the leap that because this real thing is real, that it's some sort of an emergent quality of that that gets you to telepathy, which is just, it's a make believe bridge that doesn't exist from savant to telepathic. But that is what she kind of does. She's trying to equate something real with something fantastic like telepathy.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, it sounds like there's a couple of sneaky things going on here. Like the fact that they switched the name of facilitated communication because somebody could Google that and find out it's a bunch of crap. So they just have a different term for it.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  You said it, but that was what I was thinking is that the entire point of changing the name was so that people couldn't Google what was happening and figure out that, hey, this is a problematic thing here. Cause you know, rebranding works. And she had brought on other experts too, which she brought on this guy Rupert Sheldrake, who is a British biologist and author, and this dude has serious credentials.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  And a British accent. So we believe everything he says unquestioningly. Yeah.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  He earned a PhD in biochemistry from Cambridge, and he did totally legitimate mainstream scientific research early in his career. But later in his career, he became known as the guy who thought dogs were psychic.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. My neighbor lady when I was growing up thought her dog was psychic.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Did you consider her to be a rational person?

• 54:44Speaker 00

  Oh, no, not even close. Well, after all, she thought her dog was psychic. So no.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. This guy Sheldrick is funny. He is, one of his claims to fame is that he has a banned TED Talk. But the more I learned about him, I was like, I think he did a TED Talk. And then Ted was like, yeah, we're not putting that out. I think that, that may be closer, but he wrote a book called Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, in which he kind of made the same claim. Unfortunately for him, when other researchers looked at this phenomenon that he had under controlled conditions, they did not find any convincing evidence that dogs were psychically detecting when their owners are coming home.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  So the telepathy tapes stacks dubious claims on top of other dubious claims.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you can stack all the anecdotes as high as you want, but you'll never make anecdotes equal data. Which gets me to the other podcast I sat through doing the research for this, which is Kai Dickens' appearance on Joe Rogan. And I don't know if it was just because this was a one-off appearance and that it wouldn't get the same scrutiny as her entire series, but she really laid on the anecdotal nonsense on that Joe Rogan appearance.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. Okay. Such as?

• 55:57Speaker 02

  She told a story of a man named Dan who cured himself of stage four cancer with only his thoughts. She brought no evidence, even, she didn't even bring a last name. But I found out that's because there was no evidence to be brought. And I spent more time tracking down this than I probably should have. But I found one case of a guy named Dan who said his cancer was in remission. And it turns out he, yes, maybe used his positive thoughts, but he also had surgery and chemotherapy.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, uh, not nearly as sensational as I cured it with my mind. It's like, I made this book levitate. I mean, I also used a table, but other than that, I used my mind to have it levitate.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  Well, you know what? The story of Dan was probably the most reputable story she told because, and man, this episode of Rogan is crazy. She went on to talk about how autistic children can speak languages that they've never encountered before. They have visitations from dead relatives and she brings back an old chestnut. She talks about prophetic dreams.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  Ah, a nod to the OG telepathy. Seven fat cows means your dinner is going to get burnt next week.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  And most damningly, she goes on to say that, and this is what blew my mind because it reminded me of my friend so much, that skeptics and scientists can bring their bad vibes into the room and make it impossible to properly test telepathy.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  Ouija boards, psychics, telepathy, humanity will believe almost anything, which brings us beautifully to the claims I'm contractually obligated to make about these next products and services. We'll be right back.

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  Thank you so much for listening and it really is important that you support those who support the show. I really appreciate that. That's a lot of supports in a row. Anyway, all the deals and discounts are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday.

• 58:54Speaker 00

  Don't you hate it when skeptics and scientists bring bad vibes and tools that measure things into a room and make it impossible to test telepathy?

• 59:01Speaker 02

  Yep. It apparently only works for people who already believe in it.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, you hate that. You said that if people could see the tests of psychic powers, they wouldn't believe it. So what is there to see?

• 59:11Speaker 02

  That's a great question, and I really don't have a great answer because the footage doesn't seem to exist anywhere. But this much we know. This is not simply communication between a parent and their autistic child. There is another sentient cogent human being there, like you said, who is part of it, who is guiding, or at least appears to be influencing the hand or the letter selection of the non-speaking autistic person as they type or point.

• 59:35Speaker 00

  So it's that obvious that they're guiding the hand?

• 59:37Speaker 02

  It's not always as obvious as literally guiding the person's hand. The facilitator might move or reposition the board, as I said, like in front of their hand.

• 59:46Speaker 00

  If you're moving the letter board in front of them, that's kind of what I was saying earlier, that if you're just moving the letter board around in front of the kid, the same thing is guiding the hand, right?

• 59:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. Look, exactly. And although I couldn't find much footage of telepathic, non-speaking autistic children, there's plenty of footage of facilitated communication. And yes, one of the techniques is moving or repositioning the letter board in front of the person's hand, which seems to me like the facilitator would have a lot of influence over which letter the finger comes down on.

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I'll be honest, going into this episode, I didn't believe in telepathy. And now I still don't. But if I had learned about facilitated communication without knowing the history, I might've thought it sounded like a pretty good idea. But now I feel like we've debunked that too.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  Oh, we didn't debunk it. It's been debunked many times over. In fact, sadly, in my research, I came across another case of a family destroyed by facilitated communication. In 2007, this one was so heartbreaking. A 14-year-old named Anslyn Wendro, a non-speaking autistic girl in Michigan, supposedly accused her father, Julian Wendro, of sexually abusing her. The accusation produced through facilitated communication. And in this case, the father, Julian, was jailed for 80 days and Anslyn and her brother were removed from their parents and put in foster care.

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  Oh my God, that is fricking horrible. Let me guess, none of it panned out, turned out to be a bunch of crap?

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. As the state was building its case against the father, it brought Anslyn in to be interviewed. And they brought in the same facilitated communicator who'd helped produce the accusations to assist. Them with the typing when they wanted to interview her.

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  That seems like a bad idea, but okay.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you can watch the video of the interview online. The facilitator is clearly exerting substantial physical influence over Anslem's arm and hand. And Anslem, quite frankly, isn't even looking at the keyboard half the time.

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  Okay, so he's not even looking at the keyboard at all?

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's something you'll see in a lot of footage of facilitated communication. The person may be looking around, like, looking around the room, not paying attention. And while the facilitator holds their hand and selects letters. In this case, it gets really graphic. Again, this is a person who could not speak and was suddenly producing highly detailed allegations of sexual abuse, which I won't even get into here.

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  So the police just sat there and watched a woman guide the autistic girl's hand and then just took the accusations seriously?

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, even worse, some of the facilitated answers got really basic, personal information wrong, including identifying family members wrong, and she got the family dog's name wrong. And I'm pretty sure she knew the family dog's name, but I do know who didn't know the family dog's name.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  The facilitator? Man, this thing is getting so disgusting, this whole thing.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, the more I found out, the more disgusted I was. The family was basically destroyed.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  Damn, this is really... So what happened at trial?

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  Well, before the case could proceed, the defense brought in Howard Shane again.

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  This is the same dude who previously debunked facilitated communication back in the day?

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  Yep, and again, he devised a test that was incredibly simple. He just had the facilitator leave the room while they asked Anslem the questions and then just brought the facilitator in to help with her answers.

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, wow, okay, I think I know... It's funny, because this guy's solutions seemed remarkably simple, and yet we're all like, oh yeah, good idea. So I think I know where this is going, of course, but what happened as a result?

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, the coherent answers completely disappeared. And you can watch the footage of this one, too, where it was like, you know, when the psychic, like, when they know that, like, the gig is up suddenly, it's just, oh, nothing's coming to me anymore. Like, suddenly, no typing was happening. It was very strange. It was almost as if, when the facilitator couldn't hear the questions, they couldn't help come up with the answers, and yes, the charges were dropped. And here's the crazy thing, this really broke my heart. Howard Shane says that he was personally involved in about a dozen cases involving serious accusations generated through facilitated communication.

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  So this kept happening? Look, as a lawyer, I don't want to get into any legal trouble here, but I can't help but wonder what motivated these facilitators to make these accusations in the first place? Come on, man.

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  Right, well, that's a great question, and one explanation Shane, who was asked about that, and other critics have offered, is that the facilitators may not have realized they were doing it. It can be a subconscious effect, similar to the ideomotor effect.

• 1:04:11Speaker 00

  What the heck is the ideomotor effect?

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  The ideomotor effect is when your body makes tiny little movements without you consciously realizing you're doing it. For example, with, surprise, surprise, the Ouija board.

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  Okay, the ghost pirate communicator.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  Yes, and people may genuinely believe it's moving on their own, even though they're unconsciously guiding it.

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  Or their a-hole friend is purposely moving it around.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  For fun, for fun, I was moving it around for fun. But when it comes to facilitated communication, there's also a kind of savior dynamic in which the facilitator wants so badly to help this person that they don't realize they're steering the narrative.

• 1:04:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a very generous way to look at it. When unfounded rape allegations come into play, though, I have to wonder.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  Look, I agree, man. Like, having watched the actual footage of the deposition of the girl with the facilitator, I'm just like, this facilitator's just... I don't know what her motivations are, but she had to have known that she was making it up, in my opinion, but yeah.

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  So none of the facilitators who made these accusations that fell apart were ever charged with anything, though, right? That's a slightly unsatisfying answer result.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  It is, but this might be a little more satisfying, and it also helps bolster the idea that at least some facilitators sincerely believed that they were helping. Let me tell you about Janice Boynton, the facilitator in one of these cases, and she eventually accepted that she, rather than a child, was authoring the messages. She stopped practicing facilitated communication and later became a prominent critic of it.

• 1:05:40Speaker 00

  That is fantastic. I mean, I don't know why anyone would still need to be advocating against it, since it so clearly doesn't work, but whatever.

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, but the telepathy tapes.

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  True.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  And it is great that she turned against it, and as recently as 2026, she was still publicly campaigning against it, and not just facilitated communication, these modern variants, spelling to communicate and rapid prompting. And she's been especially active because of the telepathy tapes, giving interviews and presentations, publishing critiques, and writing about the claims surrounding the podcast.

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  I mean, in one sense, I feel like an episode that started out with the goal of debunking telepathy didn't really need our help. Telepathy has been debunked a million times over, and some podcasts where you can't even see what's happening certainly isn't going to equal real evidence. But I also feel like we've done a decent job of debunking facilitated communication and its various rebrands here. I mean, look, we'd all love it if there was some miraculous way to type out full conversations with non-speaking autistic people, but wanting it to be true doesn't make it true. And it sounds like this methodology has been proven to be absolutely devastating for families when people get it wrong.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  I would challenge anyone listening to go watch some of these videos, particularly the Anslem Wendro case. There was actually, after her case, there was a follow-up, a news show that did a story on it, and there was a real case-closed moment for me. In the follow-up story, a reporter wrote down in big letters an A, a B, and a C on a piece of paper, and then asked her if she could point to the B, and she couldn't do it.

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  And I was like, how the hell can she spell out detailed accusations against her father if she doesn't even know which letters are which?

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, you said that there's an effect for facilitators called the savior effect, where they just, they want so badly to help, but they don't realize that they are the ones creating the narrative. I think we should all be careful of that. We see something like facilitated communication, we go, oh, great, oh my god, this is fantastic, there's finally help for these non-speaking individuals. I mean, that was actually my first reaction, honestly.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think we've uncovered something that's often overlooked when dubious claims are being bandied around. A lot of the time, there are well-meaning, honest people caught up bolstering these claims, not because of any ill intent, but because of wishful thinking. Wanting something to be true is a powerful motivator, and sometimes it can lead us to believe things without sufficient evidence.

• 1:08:07Speaker 00

  There's a sentiment that gets thrown around a lot. Facts don't care about your feelings, but in a way, I think that can be kind of wrong. I mean, what we perceive as facts absolutely can, quote, "care about our feelings." Our feelings can warp a dubious claim into something that feels like a solid, definitively proven fact in our minds. I mean, we're very good at deluding ourselves.

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, and as skeptics, we need to account for that. We need to ask ourselves, do I want this to be true so badly that I might be deceiving myself?

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  I mean, who hears that there's this incredible breakthrough for non-speaking autistic people that not only can they type out full dissertations, but they can communicate through telepathy? And who doesn't think, wow, that's amazing, I really hope that's true? I mean, that was my, again, my first reaction, and I think that's the takeaway, or at least one of them. We need to start saying to ourselves, hey, that's really great news, I hope it's true, so I should account for the feelings I'm having as I process this information and make sure that I'm not fooling myself. You started this episode by saying you got the ick listening to the telepathy tapes because of the vulnerability of parents of non-speaking autistic kids who desperately wanted this to be true, but the fact of the matter is, we're all empathetic human beings, most of us anyways, and when we see somebody struggling under an enormous burden, I think

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  we intrinsically wish it wasn't so. We want the world to be fair, right? And the telepathy tapes didn't become one of the biggest podcasts in the world, just because parents of non-speaking autistic children were listening. Everybody was listening. And maybe everybody was exhibiting their own confirmation bias, wishing that for every disadvantage a person has, there's some secret advantage that evens the scales that we just can't see or can't measure, until recently, of course. Although, I don't know what was going on in Kai Dickens' mind, maybe she was a victim of her own confirmation bias, wanting something to be true, and the end result was a thoroughly misleading, disinformational podcast. And I guess the good news here is this, after more than 120 years of telepathy being

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  tested from just about every angle imaginable, and repeatedly failing under rigorous scientific controls, maybe we can finally put to bed the notion that human beings can send their thoughts directly into another person's mind. At some point, you just have to say, case closed. And the telepathy tapes, instead of making the case for telepathy, may have inadvertently driven the final, or hopefully final nail, into its coffin. I'm thinking of a rating between 0 and 10 to give the telepathy tapes. I'll let you all guess what it is, because at the end of the day, that's all we human beings are capable of doing when it comes to someone else's thoughts, guessing what they are, don't you think?

• 1:10:37Speaker 02

  I guess so.

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, all right, thanks, Michael. And thank you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, you already know my email, or I'll just send it to you telepathically right now, but for those of you without ESP, it's [email protected]. Advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find Michael, at Michael Rogelio, on all social media. We'll link to that in the show notes, because as always, nobody can spell Rogelio. And this show was created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Tada Sidloskis, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer.

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  Also, we try to get these as right as we can, not everything is gospel, even if it's fact-checked, so consult a qualified professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and well-being. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  You may think you don't have an accent, which is exactly what your accent wants you to think. Every voice carries clues about class, identity, and belonging, and why what sounds intelligent, trustworthy, or normal often has more to do with power and familiarity than language itself.

• 1:12:02Speaker 04

  Every person has an accent, but what really is driving our attitudes towards what's a beautiful language and what's not is our familiarity with that language. So the more familiar a language is or an accent is, the more we tend to like it, but also our beliefs about the speakers of those languages. And that is like 50% of what drives our attitudes towards language. When we're talking about someone speaking a different dialect, what we're talking about is that they're using differences at many levels of linguistics, not just sound. So they're saying syntactic or sentence structure differences, they might be adding different endings or deleting endings, that's morphology, they might be using different vocabularies, but an accent refers to only differences at the level of sound.

• 1:12:47Speaker 04

  So when we're attending to accents, we're attending to sound differences. And with that general description of the difference, it shows you, there are so many different things you have to learn when you're learning a new language. There is more cognitive processing power when you hear a foreign accent. You have to recruit more neurons to unpack what you're hearing, because it's less familiar. So you are exerting more processing effort. A lot of people actually experience that as something more difficult and unpleasant, but in other contexts where paying attention is important, it probably actually does help you, but you are actually using more processing power. Here's a great piece of evidence as to how much our speech says about us without us being aware of it.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  Listen to linguist Valerie Friedland on episode 1349, and you may never hear anyone, including yourself, the same way ever again.