2003: The Telepathy Tapes B-Side part 1

Speaker: how i got into it This past December, a brand-new podcast rocketed past Joe Rogan and Crime Junkie to claim the top spots on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It's called the Telepathy Tapes and it's hosted by Ky Dickens, a documentary film maker. Then, my inbox started filling up with messages from listeners urging me to check it out. Listeners couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Many started The Telepathy Tapes as skeptics, but by the end of the first episode, they were questioning everything. This podcast is so compelling that it turned some of them into believers. By the way, if you haven't listened to the Telepathy Tapes podcast yet, don't worry. It's not a prerequiste for this episode. Although, I think you should check it out later for yourself. Here's the premise. The Telepathy Tapes podcast makes the case that some non-verbal autistic children possess telepathic abilities. The series explores a world where these children are not only capable of mind-to-mind communication but are also tapping into a broader, collective consciousness. Lets just say, this podcast exploded all over social media. So I listened to this new podcast and it is blowing my mind. It's called the telepathy tapes. Podcast recommendation. If you guys have not heard of the telepathy tapes and you know someone with autism, um, or you're autistic yourself, um, especially if you have, uh, interacted with or have interest in non verbal or non speakers, um, or spellers, there, this whole podcast is just mind blowing and very interesting. SOme of my listeners shared that they too have had similar connections with their child. Other Parents of non-speaking children started testing these techniques at home and posting it on tiktok. Okay, are you thinking about the number? Are you thinking about it? You get, no. Do you know what number it is? Okay, do you know what number So, you gotta really try though, okay? Okay. Ready? If you get it right, you get a candy Which one was it? Blue one. Good job. So good. Good job. Of course, many questioned what they were listening to on the show. Including some in the autistic community. Calling the Actually Autistic Community, have you been seeing the Telepathy Tapes podcast? It's this podcast that claims that non verbal autistic people experience telepathy and can read minds. And also that all of them can access this point called the hill. And at the hill, non verbal autistic people from around the world communicate with each other directly. You can't see his face, but trust me this tiktoker just wasn't buying it. To the point where your best friend could be someone halfway around the world who's just also a telepathic non verbal autistic person. I know I'm lo I am verbal. Someone can whatever. He's just shaking his head. In today's episode... we're going to take a critical view on the telepathy tapes. Is it real or is it junk science? My name is Javier Leiva and this is PRETEND... Stories about real people pretending to be someone else. INTRO Before publishing this episode, I asked my listeners to check out the Telepathy Tapes and tell me what they think. This is John. the telepathy tapes is fascinating to me for a number of reasons. Like, who's to say it's not real? Um, I, I'm in the middle. Like, as far as like, is this a real thing? What I do think it is, is it amazingly well edited, well put together. Thoughtful piece of entertainment that will get a lot of attention on a couple of issues. One of those issues is autistic kids. Another one of those issues is the scientific community. And another one of those issues still is alternative therapies. Now, I am a fan of all of those things getting attention. So I have to like the telepathy tapes on its face. Do I believe that these kids are communicating telepathically? Who are we to say they aren't at this point? Randy had this to say. Hi, Javier. I'm so glad that you're doing something on the telepathy tapes. I've been wanting to ask you what you thought about that. Um, I've listened to the entire series and I must admit I have really mixed feelings about it. Um, first of all, I got into some trouble on a, a different group that I belong to because they considered about it and using the word, um, autism and autistic people to be offensive somehow, which I find extraordinarily bizarre. But that aside, after listening to it, I really Feel myself torn. I tend, like you, to be a skeptic. I've had a lot of odd experiences in my life, but I hesitate to ever characterize any of them as anything more than possibly coincidence or our own thought processes interfering with what we See and hear because after all our minds are complicated strange things I've read up a lot on the whole subject of Facilitated communication and I know that magicians Use that all the time to do mentalist acts. However, the things that she talks about, and the fact that some of it has seemed to have occurred where there was no one touching the supposed telepathic speaker, I find that intriguing and Greg says that the jury's still out. Hi there, Javier. You know, I started listening to the podcast and I definitely was a skeptic at first, but I definitely ended up somewhere in the middle. And I mean, I'm open to the idea that there's more to the world than we can understand. But I really need solid scientific proof to fully believe it. But Kathy Watson wasn't so sure. In fact, she offered this warning. if it is true, then these autistic kids better watch out, otherwise, uh, governments are gonna be rounding them up to do all kinds of things. So, maybe they shouldn't go public about their skills. Just a thought. I even got emails warning me not to cover this topic. The person who wrote me said the Telepathy Tapes podcast gives a voice to a group of who have literally been silenced. And that neuro-typical people like myself shouldn thread lightly when it comes to this topic. That is coversation should be centered around autistic voices. And I get it. This is a tough discussion to have but an important one. This show is called PRETEND. And it's about deception. Most of the time that deception is intentional. But often times, we as people have the ability to fool ourselves. Take for example the confirmation bias. confirmation bias. It’s this common mental trap where we convince ourselves that something is true just because it fits with what we already believe. And when it comes to the Telepathy Tapes podcast, I kinda, sorta started believing it myself. I mean, how can someone who is blinded folded know the exact three-digits on a number generator. And not only that... get it right every single time. There's no doubt... The content the podcast host Ky Dickens presents is compelling. But hearing is not believing. Because as it turns out, when you see video of the experiments Ky Dickens is conducting, you start to realize that she's not giving us the full picture. More on that in a bit. If Ky Dickens, a documentary filmmaker, want to turn millions of podcast listeners into believers, she first needs the help from someone who seems credible. A scientist who studies autism. And she found one... that scientists name is Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell. About Dr. Powell Dr. Powell started her acaedmic research career studying savant skills in autistic children. Savants are people who pocess remarkable abilities —like photographic memory, extraordinary musical talent, or lightning-fast math skills. But what caught Dr. Powell’s attention wasn’t typical savant behavior. It was something stranger. She noticed some non-verbal autistic children seemed to be communicating with their parents in unusual ways—ways that defied logic. Some parents even claimed their children were reading their minds. This wasn’t just a case of memorizing dates or playing Mozart by ear. These children were apparently picking up knowledge they couldn’t have possibly learned or observed. Naturally, Dr. Powell was intrigued. Was this phenomenon just a series of flukes? Or was there something profound about the abilities of non-speaking autistic people that science hadn’t uncovered yet? So, Dr. Powell set out to investigate. She took the scientific route: testing the claims. She designed experiments to rule out chance or deception. One key method involved separating the child from their parent or teacher—the person they supposedly connected with telepathically. She would place a physical divider between them or have the parent sit a few feet from the child. According to Dr. Powell, some children were still able to point at letters on a board or type messages that matched the parent’s thoughts. In one experiment, Dr. Powell generated random numbers or images for the parent to focus on. The non-verbal child would then spell out exactly what the parent was seeing. It sounds unbelievable, doesn’t it? Yet, this is the data Dr. Powell was collecting. And she knew full well the risks of delving into something as controversial as telepathy. Pursuing this line of research could easily jeopardize her career and reputation as an academic researcher. But, as she explains, the results were too compelling to ignore. Here’s Dr. Powell discussing her findings on The Cosmos in You podcast. and, and is the time that they are correct is statistically significant. Oh, it's, it's, yes, it's, it's like over 95%. Over 95 percent of the time? Yes. What? These telepathic kids get it right 95 percent of the time! And that's how the Telepathy Tapes podcast was born. Ky Dickens, a documentarian, listened to this interview with Dr. Powell and immediately got the idea of produce a podcast about this phenomenon. The concept of telepathy, particularly in non-verbal autistic children, was too intriguing to ignore. She said she saw an opportunity to tell a story that would challenge conventional thinking and potentially redefine what we understand about human communication. Right away she contacted Dr. Powell to see if she was interested in participating in her documentary. She said yes. Dr. Powell agreed and introduced Ky to one of her research subjects—a 12-year-old non-speaking girl from Mexico named Mia. To put the claims to the test, Ky flew everyone out to California, determined to conduct her own experiments and document every step of the process. Ky and her crew shot each experiments with five different cameras. Now, I’m going to play you a clip from The Telepathy Tapes podcast, strictly for commentary and criticism purposes. There's a blindfold on Mia and she's on the other side of a partition from her mother. I got frustrated with myself when I re watched this for injecting myself too much in this moment because I was concerned that if Ileana didn't see the number for long enough, maybe the telepathy wouldn't work. The number that was generated was 6 9 8. Dr. Powell has just shown all the cameras in the room and she shows Ileana. Dr. Powell is putting the iPad face down. We're taking away the partition, and Mia is going to take off her mindfold, the blindfold, so she can type. Okay. All right, and if she wants to take it off now, she can. Se puede quitar? Mm hmm, mm hmm, mm hmm. I'm looking at six, nine, eight. How is it? Mm hmm. Very good. Mia got the answer correct. They did this over and over and over again. Ky says they conducted 20 tests with Mia and she was correct 100% of the time. Incredible. They conducted even more tests with random numbers and random pictures. One test involved Mia's mom flipping through a book and Mia was able to spell what her mom was seeing on her letter board. Ky Dickens, the host is clearly mindblown by this. So is everyone in the room. One cameraman said he is a skeptic and said that after witnessing Mia in action, he is a believer. I mean, I wouldn't do it as a skeptic. I'm generally a skeptic in my life. But seeing this, I can't, it's hard for me to not. I believe this is authentic. I'm looking at everything, I'm watching her, I'm watching the mom, I'm watching I'm watching everything. And, for me, my perspective, it's real. This confirms what Ky Dickens already suspected. Telepathy is real. But she acknowledges that none of the tests they conducted that day would be accepted by the scientific community. Is it because of lack of funding for these types of studies or is it a mass conspiracy in the material science community to rob non-speaking autistic people of their voice? Maybe the answer much simpler than that. Could it be that these experiments don't pass scientific rigor because there be something missing from their approach? Double Blind Intro Ky Dickens and her production team went to great lengths to cover every reflective surface. They set up multiple cameras to capture every angle. But Ky Dickens and Dr. Powell missed one crucial step. The one simple little step that could actually prove whether or not these kids are telepathic was never done. The passive listener may have missed it. But I sure didn't. And Ky Dickens and Dr. Powell know exactly which step I'm talking about. Yet they don't reveal it to the audience for several episodes. Maybe if they did, the telepathy tapes would have ended after episode one. We'll get into it after the break. ADBREAKDouble Blind Meet Amy Lutz.

Amy Lutz: I have five children actually, uh, and my oldest son Jonah, who just turned 26 about a week ago, is profoundly autistic. So meaning he, he struggles with the core deficits of autism, which are problems with social communication and rigid repetitive behaviors, but these are compounded by a significant intellectual disability.

Speaker: Much like the people featured in the telepathy tapes, Jonah struggles to social communication and has a significant intellectual disability. His IQ has been tested at about 40. Uh, he has minimal language. He does have some language, uh, but not too much. And he has a history of really challenging behaviors, including aggression and self injurious behaviors that are medically stabilized now. But, um, but we're always afraid they're going to come back and they haven't. disappeared completely, and he's basically always going to require around the clock supervision. Today, Jonah is diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. But in the 1990s, when he was born, the medical community was just catching up. In fact, the diagnosis "Autism Spectrum Disorder" wasn't even coined until 1994. We didn't have any idea. Nobody was really talking about autism that much in, um, 19 I guess it was 2000. He was born in 1999 in January. And so I mean, he was a very social baby. He was very precocious in terms of his motor skill development. Amy thought, well maybe Jonah has a hearing problem. So she took him to get a hearing test. I came home, my husband, you know, from the pediatrician's appointment when my husband came home from work, I said, Jonah might be deaf and maybe that's why he's not talking. And Andy just walked over to the TV. We had one of these like gigantic TVs that sat on the floor that people used to have in the old days, uh, before we hung our TVs on the wall. And Jonah was watching Sesame Street, which by the way, he still loves today. And Andy just turned off the volume on the Sesame Street and Jonah took Andy's hand and pushed it. up towards the knob, which in itself is a is a sign of autism using another person as a tool rather than pointing with a clear index finger point. We didn't know that. Um, but it was clear that Jonah was distressed that that Andy had turned off the sound. And so Andy turns to me and goes, Okay, he's not deaf. What next? It wasn't until Jonah turned two years old that he was diagnosed with Austism Spectrum Disorder. as Jonah's. challenges became more apparent. Um, I started writing more and more about autism, mostly because the autism we were living with at home looked absolutely nothing like the autism I was starting to hear about in the media. You know, this is when we started to see Uh, Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory and, and lots of news coverage of autistic kids who would sing with Katy Perry or, or kick a field goal and win their high school football game. And I was like, this is not the severe autism we are facing with at home where Jonah was displaying increasingly aggressive behaviors that were getting harder to manage as he got bigger. Um. You know, a lot of property damage, you know, he had a risk of elopement, you know, he had a compulsion to, to run away from a safe space that actually is about half of autistic kids exhibit this behavior. But that was terrifying. Uh, you know, we would, if we, if we took our eyes off him for a second, he would disappear and we'd find him like on the busy, Um, road. That's a kind of at the base of our hill that we live on. It's kind of a miracle that he was never run over. Um, and we didn't solve that problem until we put code locks on our doors that we have to enter a code to leave the house or to come in the house. And this was what kind of finally solved the problem. But we were living in a constant state of crisis. Amy Lutz started writing about her experience with severe autism to help other families who might be struggling with the same issues. She eventually went back to school and is now a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Amy Lutz is not only a parent of a minimally speaking autistic son, she is also a critic of facilitated communication.. the same technique featured on the Telepathy Tapes podcast. In her LATEST BOOK titled "chasing the intact mind" she offers parents fact-based history lesson about the harm these pseudo-science techniques pose on people with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities. I wanted to ask Amy the parent, not the scholar, if she realtes to the phenomenon some of these parents claim to experience. DID YOU HAVE THOSE FEELINGS?

Javier: And, you know, at this point, like you said, you're, you're just dipping your toes into this world or actually just full throttle, just diving right in. And, you know, this is a moment in time. Almost try to divorce your, uh, your intellectual brain for a second and everything, you know now, but like at that time, did you ever feel like you had this connection to your son or maybe your son had, uh, more intelligence or, or, or, you know, like, did you have those podcast?

Amy Lutz: So not the, not the telepathy part, but the, you know, what I, what I call in my book, the intact mind, the idea that there's like a brilliant mind inside, uh, autistic people who may even appear, uh, very disabled, we absolutely believe that. And, uh, the reason why for us is because Jonah. was hyperlexic as a child.

Speaker: And about 20 percent of autistic kids, I think, exhibit this splinter skill, which is that he knew how to read and write and kind of work with numbers without ever being taught. So when he was, you know, 15 months old, he was crawling on the pool table, putting the pool balls in order. He would do his puzzles upside down, the pieces upside down to make it a little more complicated. And he started. writing in chalk on the driveway before he could even talk. So when he was about four here, I just will never forget this. He was started with writing these giant letter M's on the driveway. And within just like a week or so that had evolved into writing out scripts from Sesame Street videos, including one of the first things he wrote was FBI warning, uh, which was hilarious because just to paraphrase from my favorite movie, the Princess Bride, we kept telling Jonah, like, whatever you think that means, Jonah, doesn't mean what you think it means. We just assumed for Jonah, FBI warning meant, you know, Ooh, the movie's about to start, you know? So that was all so miraculous. He wasn't being taught any of that. So, and it was easy to believe in that moment that he was a genius and Andy and I used to imagine what it would be like when he was, you know, this kind of extremely handsome, but totally socially awkward. MIT undergraduate who like had no idea that all the girls were after him, but he was just very busy doing his coding or whatever it is he was going to be doing. Um, we really did believe that. Now it, the, the sad truth is that hyperlexia is a very precocious ability to decode and Jonah could still read you anything that you handed to him, you know, any kind of scientific document or the Bible or whatever, just like, but he can't understand the plot in like a simple board book Non-speaking autism does not equal intellectual disability. Each individual is unique. And it’s important to avoid generalizing or making assumptions about a person’s cognitive abilities based solely on their inability to speak. There are several non-speaking individuals who have gone on to achieve remarkable things. But they've done so without relying on controversial methods like telepathy or facilitated communication. Okay, so you've heard me throw the term Facilitated communication around once or twice already. For those of you who don't know. Facilitated communication is a method to help non-speaking or minimally speaking people communicate by using a "facilitator." The facilitator, usually a parent, teacher, or therapist, supports the person's hand, wrist, or arm to help them point to letters on a keyboard or letterboard, or type on a device. If you haven't already, you should check out the netflix documentary "tell them you love me." Tell them you love me is about Anna Stubblefield, a Rutgers University professor who uses Facilitated Communication with a non-verbal, intellectually disabled man referred to as D.J. Through facilitated communication, Stubblefield discovered that D.J. was much more intelligent than anyone realized,. She said he was a "brilliant mind trapped in a disabled body." But the documentary took a twisted turn when we the audience realized that Stubblefied and D.J. were romantically involved. The question is, did D.J. consent to having sex with his facilitator? The whole thing was truly disturbing.

Zaid: my name is Zed Jelani and, uh, you know, I have a newsletter at Substack called the American Saga

Speaker: Zaid Jilani is a reporter who typically covers politics. But recently, he's been facinated with facilitated communications and the telepathy tapes. In fact, he wrote several artilces about it on his substack. Are there's a lot of ethical questions about what they're doing because, uh, what the scientific consensus and what the critics say. Is that these techniques don't actually enable these nonverbal people to communicate what they do is they make them dependent on another person who more or less ventriloquize is them So let's get back to the telepathy tapes. When you listen to the experiments conducted by Ky Dickens and Dr. Powell, you're left convinced that these children are telepathic. They offer up no other explination for the miracles you're witnessing with your own ears. But hearing is not believing. Ky Dickens points people to her website where you can actually see some of these experiments with your own eyes. The problem is, you have to pay $10 bucks to watch the videos. My curiousity got the best of me. Just like that time I walked by the snake woman trailer at the county fair, I had to pay the extra cash to see these telepathy tapes with my own eyes. And when you see what's actually happening, you realize that Ky Dickens is leaving out a whole lot from her podcast. The Snake woman at the fair was just a woman sticking her head out of a piece of plywood with a fake snake body wrapped around her. And watching the telepathy tapes videos was nothing like Ky Dickens sold us. Ky Dickens led us to believe that the non-speaking children in her experiments were pulling random numbers out of their parents minds. When instead, the facilitator or parent, who already knew the answer, was holding a letter board in the air, guiding the child's finger to the right letter. Another thing I noitced was that the facilitator, usually the mother, would hold the child's forhead or jaw. Could these parents be applying pressure when the child got close to the correct number? Ky Dickens does disclose that some of the parents do this but she dismisses that the parent is leading the child to the right answer. Here's another thing Ky Dickens doesn't tell you. When the kids are spelling on the board, the parent is doing weird nervous gestures. And not subtle gesture. It almost looks like a conductor at an orchestra. One mother, moves her wrists as her son is typing on an ipad. She moves her hand down to her lap and quickly raises her wrist to her face. I'm telling you, these movements were so distracting that I had trouble keeping my eye on the child. Back to my conversation with Zaid Jilani.

Javier: but this is a great segue now into the actual experiments because I know you paid the 9 or whatever it was, and I paid the 9 to watch some of these experiments when I heard it.

Speaker: I mean, that first, Episode was pretty compelling because Kai, you're not a scientist, right? I said, I'm not a scientist. She's not a scientist, but she's conducting these science, science like experiments, right? And she's has her documentary team film them. And the way she describes it, it almost sounds real, right? And then you watch the video and it's. painfully obvious to me and it's painfully obvious to you, but it's pretty convincing if you don't know what you're looking for, right? So describe some of those tapes and, and some of the experiments and your thoughts on that.

Zaid: Yeah. So, you know, I think that what Kai does is That first episode maybe is the most compelling in a way because it's the only episode that The host Kai Dickens is not completely like bought in or propagandistic on behalf of everything that's happening She actually is expressing some skepticism saying Look, we have to really figure out what's going on here.

Speaker: We don't know what's going on here. And so she goes through a process of designing, uh, experiments to test the telepathy. but I think one of the really misleading things. Is that the videos often differ a lot from what's described in the podcast. So the very first child that she meets, uh, who claims whose parent claims that she's telepathic, her name is Mia. And what they do is they do a series of experiments with different things. , they will have a random number generator, generate a number, right? So I can get an app that just. It tells you, I don't know, 242, right? And then that's shown to the mother, the child doesn't see it. And then the child gets an opportunity to spell out whatever the mother saw. So there's a series of experiments like that. You know, they also like open a book to a page. Um, the mother gets to see a word on that page. The child doesn't see it. Then the child gets an opportunity to spell it out. So all that Kai tells us about how Mia is spelling them out is that I think that she says that she has like a finger on her mother has a finger on her forehead. but if you watch the video, her mother's often doing way more than that. Uh, in, in the test where her, I believe in the test with the book, her mother is, is holding her entire face with one hand, like the entire hand is around her face. Uh, around her jaw and in the other hand is a printed board of letters, right? That the child has to tap to, right? So what that does is it creates a lot of opportunities for the mother to guide the child to the answer. And the mother always knows the answer, right? Like it's not like, you know, a very simple test would have been just for the mom and the facilitator to be different people, right? Even if they do believe in facilitated communication, if they do think it's legitimate. They didn't have to know the answer. The person sitting right next to them, touching them, didn't have to know the answer, right? That's, that's one weakness of all their tests And that is what is called a double-blind test. In a double-blind setup, the person helping (like a facilitator) wouldn’t know what the word or number is. And the researchers observing the experiment wouldn’t know either. only the parent is shown the number, word, or image. The parent could be in another room, focusing on the target while ensuring no visual or physical signals are passed to the participant. If the participant consistently identifies the correct target, it would support the telepathy claim But that's not what's happening in the Telepathy Tapes experiments. If you're holding the child and you're holding the board, you're creating many different ways to guide someone to the answer. You can tilt the board. So that they know where to tap on it, you can tilt her face so that she knows where to look. You can apply pressure when she's getting close because all these communication techniques, usually what happens is the child is hovering their finger over the board for a second, trying to figure out where to go. And then they tap. Well, all of that presents opportunities for queuing, right? Where you can cue the person where to go If you really want to test if this kind of facilitated communication actually works... there's a test for that too. And all you do with a double blind test is that you take a pair who is using facilitated communication, a facilitator and a child, and you show them different images. So let's say that I'm a facilitator and there's a child, the child is shown dog. I'm showing cat, but we don't know what each other were shown. Right. And then the facilitator goes to the child and says, Okay, can you please type for me what you just saw? What happened when they did these tests is that the child would type what the facilitator saw, not what the, not what the child saw. Right? And the reason why is because the facilitator was the one guiding the child the entire time. In these types of tests, the child typically types the image seen by the facilitator, not the one they were shown. This strongly suggests that the communication is being guided—consciously or unconsciously—by the facilitator, rather than coming from the child. It took 8 episodes, but eventually Ky Dickens acknowleges the problems with facilitated communication on her podcast. That's almost 8 hours before listeners mezomorized by telepathic kids learned about this unreliable practice. Facilitated Communication are dirty words in the scientific community, so its proponents have rebranded it under new names like Rapid Prompting Method or Spelling to Communicate. And Kai Dickens, I think, is the latest variation of this, right? She's telling us that. Everyone's telling these kids that there's nobody in there that they're not smart, but hey, with spelling, they can do all these things. And hey, actually, it makes them telepathic. You know, she's taking it to another level, right? But if you think about it, she kind of closed the circle because the advocates for facilitated communication never had a very good explanation as to why Children who had never had much of a formal education assessment could suddenly write book length essays and, you know, do all this complicated stuff. They just said, well, they just absorbed it over time. You know, they, they weren't speaking, but they were taking in information, which, you know, anyone who's worked in education can tell you that just doesn't really make sense because. To learn, you have to do, you have to like, kids have to practice. They have to be assessed. They have to learn from their mistakes. Like you can't just absorb information like osmosis. But if Kai's theory is true, it actually offers some justification for what the spelling advocates have said all these years. Because she's saying the kids picked up all this information telepathically. hidden brilliant minds

Zaid: my first piece on all of this back in October before the telepathy tapes, but it was about facilitated communication. I spoke to a couple of parents who are using facilitated communication or something similar to it.

Speaker: And it was a very difficult conversation in many ways because I think how a lot of parents and family members feel. Is that they want their son, daughter, sibling to be at the same level they are. And that's, that goes beyond disability. Right. I think anyone who's raising kids, like your parents, you know, they want your kid to succeed. They want them to do better in life than they did. Right. I think that's always the American ideal or maybe even the human ideal. And so I think with a lot of these parents, the two that I. I spoke to in particular, you know, one was a professor at Columbia university, uh, who's written several books and is very prolific in media, always doing popular media essays and stuff. And then the other one was a lawyer at the federal trade commission, also very accomplished. Right. And very, very smart people. And so for them, I feel like the bar is even higher, right? Like they want their kids to be writing books, right? They want their kids to be like white collar professionals, right? And I think when their kids were diagnosed with nonverbal autism, it must have been extremely crushing for them, right? Because that that kind of diagnosis because it's a cognitive impairment. It's not just a physical impairment. It's not a motor skill issue like what Stephen Hawking had with ALS and so on and so forth. This is actually a cognitive issue. With that kind of situation, it would be almost impossible for them to, you know, be a professor at Ivy league school. Right. Or to be like a top flight lawyer. Right. And I think that much of the promise of facilitated communication, prompting methods, finding to communicate this is batch of communications techniques is that these kids only have a motor function problem, right Like autism, their theory is that autism is actually a motor disorder. Something is wrong with their body and they have a mind body disconnect. But that their mind is basically intact and that they can function at basically the same level as anyone else. They can go to college, get their PhDs, be lawyers, blah, blah, blah. And that is a very promising story, I think, to tell a parent like this. Because it will, it will assuage a lot of their fears and their trauma, I think, from being in that situation of thinking to themselves, Wow, my kid will never reach what I did, right? Now they're thinking, my kid will. You know, they have to use these spelling boards to do it, but they can write entire books. They can, you know, uh, one of the mothers. Is having her son write a memoir, you know, her son was, I think diagnosed with a, I don't remember what exactly what the IQ was, maybe he's around 40 or something. Right. And he, you know, you see videos of him. I think he lives a very simple life and he's trying his best, but I, you know, I don't think he is someone who probably wants to write a memoir Which gets us back to Amy Lutz and her son Jonah.

Amy Lutz: it's still really great that Jonah can spell and, uh, and type on his own. So, um, you know, he can search on his iPad for the videos he wants to watch, but he's not searching for. complicated, you know, NOVA specials or things that, uh, you know, political commentary or disability rights documentaries.

Speaker: He's looking for Sesame Street videos, occasionally a Barney video, um, thrown in there, Richard Scarry video, um, I think Jonah's a very interesting case for debunking a lot of the claims that are made, uh, by proponents of facilitated communication and its current iterations that are most popular, including the rapid prompting method and spelling to communicate. That is, Jonah can type on his own and what he types reflects the kind of things he says, which is he asks for, um, you know, food or places to go. He always wants to go to the water park. He asks for people. He asks for my sister, who is his favorite person. Uh, he says what he doesn't want to do, you know, like he'll say, no brush teeth or something like that, but he's not, you know, waxing eloquently about what it's like to be trapped in a body that doesn't work or, um, writing poetry or things like that, which is. Um, at this extremely sophisticated level, the, the kind of output that comes when communication is facilitated. sever intellectual disability is a tragedy

Javier: And why do you think some families are drawn to this idea or like or frown upon some of these scientific critiques? You know, like, why do you think that they reject that?

Amy Lutz: Well, I think it's because nothing is more important than the intact mind. Right? Like, uh, um, all the things that, uh, are part of what you and I would consider, uh, part of the good life. That's a term that philosophers use to describe the things that make life meaningful for most people, which would be.

Speaker: having a fantastic and interesting job, uh, really rich interpersonal relationships, maybe it's being able to travel or to engage with politics or philosophy or history, literature, all of these things are predicated on having A kind of an at least a typical level of intelligence, and all of these things are precluded. Our Jonah will never have access to, uh, he won't ever even be able to just walk out of the house without someone with him because of his complete lack of safety awareness. So he's going to have a life that's very constrained compared to what any of us would choose for ourselves and certainly for our Children. You know, parents want to raise our kids to be, to launch, right? To be independent and have agency in the world. And it is, it's a tragedy. Um, I think severe intellectual and disability is a tragedy. You know, nobody would ever choose that path. Um, and it's parents are, you know, consider we are, I mean, that's what parents are responding to. Nobody wants that. And The facilitated communication offers a path to say you thought all this was denied your child, but no, not really. If you hold a letter board in front of them, you'll see that they actually are brilliant, uh, inside. And it's just a matter of tapping that brilliance. So all those things you thought they would never do, they can do that. And we've, we're seeing, uh, facilitated spellers go to. College, uh, to be kind of platformed at the highest levels of government and pursue PhDs, do all the things that parents want their kids to do. So I understand how seductive, uh, facilitated communication is to parents, um, who are looking at a pretty desperate future, uh, without that. But what I don't understand is parents. Absolute refusal to test the authenticity of facilitated communication, even though it is so easy to test. All you have to do is ask a letter board user to produce information that is unknown to the facilitator. But Amy told me that she doesn't understand why some parents refuse to test the authenticity of facilitated communication. Even though, it's so easy to test. All you have to do is ask the child to produce information that is unknown to the facilitator. And really unknown to the facilitator, not Being a parent of an severley intellectually disabled child has exposed Amy to several parents who believe in facilitated communication. there's a robust kind of a kind of robust spelling to communicate, uh, community right where I live. And I happen to know some of the parents that are involved just from living here with a severely autistic kid for 20, more than 20 years. And I was talking to one of the parents and I said, you know, You and your husband both spell with this, your adult son, you know, be so easy to kind of just confirm that it's really his voice. You're hearing all you'd have to do is, you know, one of you would read a New York Times. article with your son. They all like to read New York Times articles. Apparently, that's the sign of true intellectual achievement. Um, while the other one is out of the room, out of the house, whatever, absolute, make absolute sure that you can't hear. And then you switch. And if dad read the, uh, the article with the son, then mom comes in and dad leaves. And mom said, what did you read about with dad? It's a total normal kind of conversation that you would have. And you would see if, if the son could spell out. Details about the article from the New York Times and that would be evidence of independent communication and she was like, yeah, yeah, that would probably work, but she never circled back to me to say that she did that. Um, you know, the, these facilitated communication communities are really, uh, insistent that that type of testing is offensive. It is inaccurate. They have a million different reasons why they won't do it, but I don't, I just don't understand why parent given all the evidence. Which is overwhelmingly shows facilitator influence. to the point that in three decades, every dozens of controlled studies have documented that, um, you know, that in these facilitated situations, it is the facilitator controlling the output and not the disabled person, that parents aren't afraid of hijacking the The very limited agency of their children. So you have kids who don't have very much control over their lives, but maybe they are capable of saying I am what they want for lunch or what they want to do on a weekend afternoon. And suddenly they're spelling out, don't listen to what I say or don't pay attention to my behavior. All that matters is what I communicate on the letter board and what I wanted, what I want to do on the letter board is. Like, uh, go to a museum or, and what I want to watch is a, you know, kind of some kind of, uh, brainy documentary, not Sesame Street, you know, like, so suddenly the things that are meaningful to that child and the things they would choose to do are kind of taken away in favor of things that the facilitator imagines that this brilliant, intact mind would choose. the dangers

Javier: And so, you know, it makes me think that some of the, someone would say, well, Amy, I mean, this is just, this is hopeful, this is positive, but what are some of the dangers of, of believing in this kind of pseudoscience? Let's

Amy Lutz: harm is what I've just described. And that is depriving intellectually disabled people of their own voice. And that happens with every facilitated interaction, as far as we can tell from science. But there are also, um, other kind of more, uh, just there, there are kind of less common harms, but very devastating, such as false allegations of sexual abuse, which has happened in dozens of cases.

Speaker: I think there's. Over 60 documented cases of facilitated spellers who have accused their parents through the letter board of sexual abuse, which has led to, um, parents being arrested, especially the fathers, uh, these, uh, Very vulnerable kids being put in foster homes separated from the people who love them. I think this is a good place to stop. I reached out to both Ky Dickens and Dr. Diane Powell. Diane Powell was the only one to respond. She politely declined to be interviewed. If you want, take a listen to the first episode of the telepathy tapes podcast. Then we'll be back with part two of my critique of the podcast. You might walk away thinking, who cares if these parents think their child is telepathic. Let them believe. But like Amy said, believing comes with a price. In our next episode, we're going to talk about one case where a mother murdered her son because she believed he spelled out that he wanted to die. We're also going to take a deeper look at Dr. Diane Powell and some of her other beliefs. That's next time on PRETEND. /// END OF EPISODE 1 ////// START OF EPISODE 2 ///DANGERS OF FACILITATED COMMUNICATION

Amy Lutz: In 2010, Gigi Jordan, a socialite and pharmaceutical executive, handed her 8-year-old non-speaking autistic son Jude used a syringe and force feed him a deadly cocktail of painkillers, anti-inflammatories, vodka and juice.

Speaker: You killed Jude. I gave Jude, yes, an overdose of medication, yes This audio is from a CBS2 jailhouse interview with Jordan. I wanted him to be safe and at peace at any cost. So why did she do it? Why does she say she killed her own son? Because she believed her son Jude typed out that he was being sexually assaulted by his own father. She was typing. I'm afraid I'm scared. I'm having the memories of him raping me. The CBS2 reporter asked her about the typing. You know people are skeptical about the typing. They said you might have even done it yourself. Correct This case is shocking and extreme. If facilitated communication led his mother to take his life, it shows how dangerous these methods can be. And for the most part, Ky Dickens, the host of the telepathy tapes podcasts ignores these issues all together. Here's journalist Zaid Jilani again.

Zaid: And I think, like I said, the, like we were discussing earlier, the troubling part about this is it's not really just an infomercial for telepathy.

Speaker: I mean, there's all kinds of wooboo podcasts. Who claim all kinds of supernatural and paranormal things. Sometimes I like to listen to them. They're interesting and are fun. Why, why not? But what she's doing in particular is also trying to validate our method of communicating with nonverbal autistic kids that has a very troubling history. And that has led to really severe exploitations all the way through like sexual assault and even murders. INTRO

Zaid: In today's episoide, we're going to continue our discussions about the hit podcast the telepathy tapes. And we're going to take a closer look at Dr. Diane Powell who is the central scientific expert in the podcast. If she thinks telepathy is real, then what else does she believe?

Speaker: I'm Javier Leiva and this is PRETEND. Stories about real people pretending to be someone else. theme

Zaid: According to one academic paper titled, "Psychological Treatments that Cause Harm" there were approximately 60 known cases where individuals were falsely accused of sexual abuse based on messages produced through FC, with many of these allegations leading to severe consequences such as wrongful arrests and family separations.

Speaker: There's the 1990 case involved a 28-year-old woman known as "Carla" with severe disabilities. Carla was removed, twice, from her home by state authorities because of messages obtained through FC that she was being sexually abused at home. After a 15-month custody battle, the Guardianship Board reviewed evidence showing the woman had a severe intellectual disability and couldn’t differentiate letters, proving she couldn’t have authored the messages. Double-blind tests confirmed the responses only worked when the facilitator knew the questions. In 1991, a New York man was charged with abusing his daughter after the Department of Social Services received reports that his daughter, a 14-year-old with autism, had, through facilitated communication, disclosed being raped more than 200 times. Both parents faced charges, the daughter was removed from the home for 10 months... but the case was ultimately dropped because facilitated communication was their only evidence. We can go on and on. Example after example of families being destroyed because of this faulty pseudoscience. But you'll never hear about this on the Telepathy Tapes podcast. And she doesn't really tell her audience about any of this, like the most that she says is that there were some extreme cases many decades ago, and it was all chalked up to poor, poorly trained facilitators, right? Like they had bad training, right? But it, but she doesn't tell people that like, actually, no one has ever been able to make this work in the actual tests that they have. To test whether these things work, to test whether the spelling is really authentic to the children, whether they're really speaking their mind rather than the mind of the person who's helping them facilitate the communication. there's just a lot left out of the podcast, Another example left out of the podcast is the story of one honest facilitator named Janyce Boyton. In 1992, the parents of a 16-year-old nonspeaking autistic girl were falsely accused of sexual abuse based on messages from Facilitated Communication (FC). Janyce Boynton, the facilitator, misinterpreted the girl’s hitting and scratching during sessions as signs of abuse. Boynton reported this to child services, leading to the removal of the girl and her brother from their home. Here's Janyce Boyton talking about her experience on a youtube channel called Rationable. she started hitting me and I didn't really know why. And I was thinking everything was working fine. And in my head, I was maybe something's happening at home. Once that seed is planted, it can be a dangerous thing. And in my case, it turned to allegations of abuse against the family. It's hard to admit it. And this is why facilitators don't like to be tested. But the, all of the allegations were based on my My information, the information that I had are made up during, and you don't do it intentionally. You're thinking it's coming from the other person And I ended up deciding to test it. to go ahead and test it. So they did double blind testing, which meant that the information that I, that both of us were shown during the testing was blind to me. I didn't have anything to do with making the protocol or I didn't know what the activities were going to be. she was shown a picture, and I was shown a picture, and sometimes they were the same, and sometimes they were different, and I didn't know which. I was blinded to it, and all of the answers were based on photographs that I had seen. Here you have an example of a facilitator admitting that this approach just doesn't work. But again, Ky Dickens won't even bother going there because it doesn't fit the narrative she's fooled herself into believing. In fact, she reminds us about this in every episode. For decades, a very specific group of people have been claiming telepathy is happening in their homes and in their classrooms. And nobody has believed them. Nobody has listened to them. But on this podcast, we do. Nobody listened to them but we do. Any objectivity is thrown out the window. But still, it's presented like a fact-based documentary. To me, Ky Reminds me of a magician who keeps falling for the same magic trick over and o ver again. Speaking of magic... years ago, I interviewed a mentalist who goes by the stage name Banacheck. I revisited that interview because it's relevant to this conversation. Every time he stands up on stage... his audience is convinced he can read their minds. banachek_recording-1_2019-01-24--t12-57-31am--banachek (1): In other words, they're simulating what psychic power would look like if it was genuine. They're not saying they're psychic because if they were psychic then they would say they're psychic, right? But they're not saying that. They're saying, I'm mentalist. I'm going to do something and it's going to look to you like I can read your mind. You're going to believe that I'm actually reading your mind, but I'm telling you I am not reading your mind. It is. It uses one of those five things, verbal nonverbal communication, magic, psychology of perceptual manipulation, or uses all of them in a combination to convince you that this is psychic phenomena. But once again, It's not So I have a responsibility to my audience is to remind them. This is just entertainment. I am not really a psychic I think I owe that to my audiences. Banacheck really hates it when people claim to have real psychic powers. In fact, he challenges anyone claiming to have these abilities a million dollars if they can prove it. With the James Randi Educational Foundation, I ran the million dollar challenge for many, many years. Um, and now, you know, moving into the position of being the president for the James Randi Educational Foundation and the spokesperson for them. Um, but the million dollar challenge, we had a million dollars for anybody that could do anything psychic under proper scientific control, it wouldn't mean that the person is necessarily psychic because we always made the odds, the stats when we could in certain things, but on many, you couldn't. we automated one in a million and we had a preliminary challenge and a formal challenge and nobody passed the preliminary challenge. But here's the interesting thing with what you were just saying, the majority of people that we tested and we tested as a person almost every year at 10, which was the amazing meeting, which is no longer, uh, you know, happening. Nobody ever took the money And, uh, but there are the skeptical groups as psychon and a few others. And we hope at some point to maybe start testing psychics there on behalf of the J ref again. Um, But the majority of the psychics that I tested, I truly believe that they weren't scam artists. I believe that they came in and they were self deceived. And it's really hard when somebody is self deceived like that, right? Because I don't want to tear them apart. I don't want to tear them down because They're a victim as well to this, right? They're a victim to the pseudosciences out there. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prizes_for_evidence_of_the_paranormal) banachek_recording-1_2019-01-24--t12-57-31am--banachek (1): The James Randi Educational Foundation has since stopped taking new applications. But if you're one of the 39% of Americans cliaming to have some sort of psychic power, you're in luck. Because there are dozens of cash prizes, almost a million dollars combined, for evidence of the paranormal. Maybe Ky can fund her upcoming telepathy tapes documentary this way, who knows. Ky Dickens motivation

Zaid: The people who are running this podcast are not, you know, parents of nonverbal kids. You know, Kai Dickens is not in that situation. I think she has a sibling who's autistic, but they're high functioning. So like, they don't really have a cognitive, uh, impairment like these kids do. You know, I think for them, it's more of a like, I found something really cool.

Speaker: That's letting me going on, go on a spiritual journey. And also a lot of people out in the country would really love to see it. And I make documentaries for a living. And I think I can sell this to a network and like, you know, it's, it feels a little bit more exploitative what the producers of this podcast series and the upcoming documentary are trying to do, because they're not, you know, the parents of these kids. Right. But they're. They're seeing them as almost like an opportunity. And I think that also kind of rubbed me the wrong way. And when I was exploring this world,

Javier: Yeah, I mean, I definitely want to get into that too, because she definitely has the chops, right? I mean, you and I are both in journalism. She's obviously presenting this as journalism, but right off the bat, at the top of every episode, she lets the audience know that She's a believer, like there is no veil of like objectivity or like, I mean, talk about that, like about that approach and how listeners should digest that, like the media literacy for those listening to it, like when she lists that claim at the top of the show.

Zaid: Yeah. So the, you know, the telepathy tapes, this, this podcast series that Kai Dickens has created, you know, it's, it's sort of a 10 episode journey into this world of nonverbal autistic kids and the claim by the host, Kai Dickens, that. They're actually, they have telepathic powers. I don't know. She personally says that they all have them, but several people interviewed in the podcast say that like every single nonverbal child actually is telepathic.

Speaker: And if you start on the first episode of this series. Kai does express some skepticism, but she's not a hundred percent sure about this. Uh, she wants to test it and see it for herself. So she does go and see it for herself. But after, I would say about halfway through that first episode, you don't hear any more skepticism throughout the entire series, right? You go through the next nine and a half episodes and Kai just speaks about these things as if they're 100 percent proven. The phenomenon is a hundred percent real. And by the way, it, it almost reminds me a little bit like the founding of a new religion, because like one, you see a miracle. Kai sees. Children do this. So she says, she sees them do this in the first episode. And then every episode after that, the miracles kind of escalate or the revelations kind of escalate because not only are some of the children telepathic, meaning. Well, we'll get into the experiments, but you know, uh, she has very basic experiments to, to, to supposedly prove that, but the children have precognition, they can predict events before they happen out in the world. They can meet each other telepathically on a place called the hill from thousands of miles away across the country. Um, that no one has known existed until now. Uh, some of the kids can, can speak to the dead. Uh, some of them can see spirits.

Javier: And speak foreign languages.

Zaid: Speak, exactly speak foreign languages.

Speaker: And I think they hint that in the upcoming season, they want to discuss telekinesis and how some of them can do that. And I don't know how they're going to test for that. Uh, I don't know how you'd prove that. I'm sure that has its own history with magicians and stuff who, you know, do magic tricks with telekinesis. Um, but it just gets more and more fantastical as the host gets less and less skeptical, right? So you're in a situation where. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't feel like a work of journalism, right? It feels like a work of advocacy. Like she has become a paid infomercial, um, for this phenomenon Yeah. We focused a lot of our discussion on the telepathy which is just the first few episodes. In episode 3, Ky Dickens introduces us to all kinds of wild concepts like the hill. Here's a clip: When I first heard mention of the hill, I shared that with Maura, and she asked Amelia about it immediately. And I asked, do you talk on the hill? And she said, yes. And I said, do you have friends on the hill? And she said, yes. And I asked, you know, well, who are they? And she said. And the funny thing is, is that like three years ago at school, I said, who's your best friend. At school trying to figure out, can we do a play date? Can we do something? And she said Fiona. And so I tried to find Fiona at school and they couldn't find Fiona. And so we kind of dropped it. And this is like now three years later. And, you know, now she's telling me this friend. In The Telepathy Tapes, "The Hill" is described as a spiritual place where nonverbal autistic kids connect telepathically. It’s supposedly where they meet, share knowledge, and socialize in ways we can’t see. The podcast claims this is how they access hidden knowledge and extraordinary abilities. This explains how these children, with limited education, seem to have extensive knowledge about complex topics and abstract concepts. Then in episode 5, it's revealed that these telepathic kids have other abilities too. Here's a clip: Over the past five years, I've learned that Many of my students, all of them at this point, have telepathy and they can read thoughts and they can see spirits and in some cases have been able to predict events happening that's in the future. And none of this is challenged. It's just accepted as truth. Here's Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator with a Master's degree in molecular biology. Jonathan_Jarry: The podcast, which takes place over the course of about seven hours is slowly drip feeding you this magical thinking. And it starts with very small claims and then it kind of gets to bigger claims and larger claims and more extraordinary claims. So we start with the telepathy, but then. These children, they can also see ghosts, and they can communicate with ancestors, and there's a spiritual place called the hill, where they can all meet, and they can talk to each other. And then the fabric of our universe is a collective consciousness. And then materialism, which is sort of the, the main philosophy behind, behind science, well, it's all wrong, and these kids can also predict the future, and they can heal others, it will usher in a So when you, when you reveal all of this at once, um, it's, it, it sounds very incredible, uh, but when you slow drip feed it over the course of all these episodes and you have all these stories and you meet these people, these real people, you hear from them. Uh, it's, it's a lot easier to be convinced that, yeah, there is something there, and by the end of the show, you can be convinced of a much, much larger claim than the initial claim that was made. Javier_Leiva-1: All under the veil of this is a scientific approach to telling these stories, right? Because if, if, um, if episode one starts off with some sort of testing, right? And it seems semi credible to the untrained eye, right? But then, you know, when you get to some of the more outlandish claims, like the ghost and the hill and all that stuff, there is zero attempt at, Creating any experiment to, to test this double blind, you're right. Like it, um, it, the wheels fall off very, very quickly, Jonathan_Jarry: we're not interviewing us. So We're not interviewing skeptics. In this case, we're not interviewing magicians, for instance, people who would know how you can deceive yourself in a situation like this. And that is so important. No, instead we're treating this as a human interest story. And of course, It works as such. I mean, we've seen it. It's now the number one podcast in the world because it was not treated through the lens of science because if it had it would have been one episode and And it would not have garnered the kind of popularity that it has ABELISM

Zaid: that Kai introduces in the first episode and then brings it up later, which is that questioning the validity of the techniques that the children in the docu series are using is ableist or ableism. Right? Like you are someone who doesn't have any impairment, doesn't have any disability, and you're saying that these kids are not really speaking through these techniques.

Speaker: Right. And you know, it's a very. It's an interesting claim because if you look back at the history of facilitated communication, which is the technique that they're, they're using or some variation of it, they're using this kind of rhetoric has always been there, right? Jonathan_Jarry: when you're criticizing facilitated communication, when you're criticizing the claim that these children are telepathic. It can very easily be perceived as an attack on the parents, on the children, as a misunderstanding of autism. Uh, it can be seen as you are not being an ally to people with a disability, for instance, uh, and, and those are, those are separate things. Earlier we talked about the danger of taking facilitated communication at face value. Many families have been destroyed. Let's set that aside for a second. The cost of facilitated communication is expensive. Here's Amy Lutz, the mother of a severly autistic son. high cost

Amy Lutz: That is when you spend, um, all the time working with with severely autistic people with a letter board, you're not teaching them how to communicate independently using more evidence based methods. Um, and finally, and those, and finally there's cost, right? So it costs about 30, 000 a year per student to have a facilitator.

Speaker: An article in Psychology Today says Facilitated Communication can cost about $30,000 a year per student. The Hastings Center backs this up, reporting similar costs. (https://www.thehastingscenter.org/bioethicists-should-speak-up-against-facilitated-communication/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

Amy Lutz: And you know, right now my school district is spending off, um, a lawsuit from a family who wants a school district to provide a facilitator in the classroom, even though when the school district was, you know, went to kind of investigate and observe, what they found was that this student who is being served in kind of typical classrooms now, um, was unable to complete a history.

Speaker: It was a history assessment until the facilitator was given the answer key. As far as I'm concerned, as soon as you get a finding like that, that should be the end of it. But it's not. The family is kept up, kept appealing. The crazy thing about this thing is that there are other valid forms of communication that Ky Dickens just ignores all together. abelism con't

Zaid: And you know, I, I, I've thought a little bit about, you know, what this argument analogizes to, and You know, maybe it would be like calling somebody ageist, right, if they don't allow their two or three year old to ride the, you know, New York City subway alone, or, right, or if they don't, um, allow a small child to make decisions about themselves relating to medical care or something like that, right?

Speaker: When it comes to nonverbal autistic people, it's a cognitive impairment, right? Meaning that their ability. To perceive the world is not the same as your mind, their ability to, to comprehend things and to make decisions is not the same as your mind. So we do have to have some kind of care for them. And actually every single person who Chi documents in this podcast series, every single child, or in some cases, uh, you know, they're in their twenties, but they're still being taken care of by their parents. None of them can live alone, right? None of them can live independently. They all have to have their, either their parents or some other form of caretaker. Helping them with basic tasks, just as we would help, uh, toddlers with their basic tasks. Right. And is that ableism? I think that's just being responsible, right

Amy Lutz: the fact is that these kids, the severely autistic kids and even adults often have significant intellectual disability that limits, you know, the, the kind of complexity of what they can communicate.

Speaker: In other words, it's not the Peck system that is so limiting so much as it is the intellectual disability that results in in a very. Limited or lack of abstract concepts. That's what it took me a long time to realize with Jonah. Uh, just that, you know, the problem with Jonah wasn't his very rudimentary speech, which is how he communicates. Uh, you know, he can say. As far as I can tell, everything that he's thinking about, the, the impoverishment comes from his, you know, lack of abstract concepts and his, from his intellectual disability and his speech is sufficient to communicate what it is he wants to communicate.