2004: The Telepathy Tapes B-Side part 2

Speaker: END OF EPISODE 1 ////// START OF EPISODE 2 ///DANGERS OF FACILITATED COMMUNICATION

Amy Lutz: In 2010, Gigi Jordan, a socialite and pharmaceutical executive, used a syringe and force feed her 8-year-old non-speaking autistic son Jude 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 Gigi Jordan. I wanted him to be safe and at peace at any cost. So why did she do it? Why did she killed her own son? Because she believed her Jude typed out that he was being sexually assaulted by his 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 Jude's 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 involving a s28-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 a 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 on 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 their own magic trick over and over 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 with 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 these claims are challenged in the podcast. It's just accepted as truth. Austim author and researcher, Amy Lutz agrees.

Amy Lutz: I mean, it is, you're right. It got increasingly unhinged,

Speaker: it's not because the facilitators are controlling the output. It's because the spellers are psychic. They can read the minds of their facilitator. suddenly, these spellers are fluent in languages. They never were taught. They are reading and writing at very sophisticated level. They have mastery over subjects. They were never taught in their special education classrooms like physics or chemistry. But now we have the hill. We have this like, which I almost imagined, like the cloud, um, right where these Spellers would congregate and share, circulate all this information. So now you don't have to explain how it is your child who was never in a single math class can do calculus with their facilitator You can just say, Oh, well, obviously my child absorbed this from the hill. Certainly on the hill, there's some, some of these, uh, students have been you know Here's Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator. 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 //AD BREAK// Jonathan_Jarry: By now, it's pretty clear that I don't believe these kids are telepathic. But there's one video behind the paywall of the telepathy podcast wesbite that I just can't explain. In a lot of the examples on the webasite, the facilitator is holding the child's jaw or forehead. But in this video, the child is typing independantly without the mother's physical touch. I asked Amy Lutz about this. experiement

Javier: Yeah. Let me share. Let me share my screen. I want to show you. Uh, and maybe this is not the one that I was thinking about, but, uh, this is a very interesting one. Do you see, do you see my screen?

Amy Lutz: see your screen. Yeah,

Speaker: Z. A. R. D. Is it? I didn't touch at all.

Javier: is it cut off for some

Amy Lutz: It is cut off. Yeah.

Javier: Oh, that's weird. Hold on. Um, we got to figure that out because.

Amy Lutz: Oh, there you go.

Javier: okay. So I'm going to play it real quick just to get your feedback, but I just look at the moms.

Speaker: Okay, so she's not holding him or anything, but she's fairly close to him. They're sitting side by side on a sofa and she's holding. Let's see. I'll play it. I'm I just pressed the play button. She's holding an iPad and she's pointing to the iPad and it says Izzard, the word Izzard. Now, he's supposed to type the word Izzard on his iPad. And look at the way her hand is moving and her fingers. And the way she holds her hand up and down when he responds. She opens up her fist. It's almost like she's like a magician or something, manipulating, like, what, what's your

Amy Lutz: that out. The question is, could he do that with her across the room or in a different room? Right? So the story that's frequently told in to explain this kind of how subtle queuing can be is the story of Clever Hans, the horse

Speaker: Are you familiar with that

Javier: Mm hmm. Yep.

Amy Lutz: . The Clever Hans effect comes from the story of a horse in the early 1900s named Hans, who seemed to solve math problems by tapping his hoof. People thought Hans was brilliant, but a psychologist discovered he wasn’t solving problems—he was reading subtle cues from his trainer, like changes in posture or facial expressions.

Speaker: And this is not to compare at all to compare disabled children with, um, with animals. But just to say that we know that physical cueing can be extraordinarily subtle. And that is what's so hard about this topic. Because everyone wants the best for these children. And any critisim about this seems like an attack on the community. Here's Jonathan Jarry again. ABELISM 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. In the podcast, Ky Dickens reminds us over and over again that it's not our place to question facilitated communication. it feels kind of ableist and silly for anyone else to dictate how someone else should be communicating. in order to have their words counted. Jonathan_Jarry: But Zaid Jilani disagrees

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? Even in the, in the documentary, tell them you love me, which is a, which is a very good documentary that's on us Netflix now about a very high profile abuse case with facilitated communication. The professor in the series who engages in the abuse. Had written many, you know, uh, I don't know if they're journal articles or essays making similar arguments that, you know, we are all ableist if we don't presume confidence. If we don't believe that these kids are really. Writing these book length essays after having never written anything before, uh, once being handed these letter boards or these typing devices, right? If we don't believe that, if we're skeptical of that, we are engaged in ableism, this is discrimination against disabled people, so on and so forth. 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, high cost Jonathan_Jarry: 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.

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: And she's right. According to an article in Psychology Today, Facilitated Communication can cost about $30,000. 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 evidence-based forms for independent communication. that Ky Dickens just ignores all together. In fact, I have a transcript for the first 9 episodes and none of these Evidence-Based Techniques are mentioned. For example, AAC devices allow individuals to select words, pictures, or symbols on their own. PECS involves the person choosing and exchanging picture cards without reliance on another person guiding their movements. FCT teaches individuals to communicate in a way that is functional and self-driven 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 the ttp failed

Amy Lutz: what's striking about the telepathy tapes is how Kai Dickens really performs scientific inquiry, right? Like she, that's from the first episode, right? Like we are going to take every precaution to make sure that we are testing the telepathic abilities of these subjects.

Speaker: We're going to cover the TVs. We're going to cover the mirrors, the reflective surfaces. We're going to make sure that the, um, Um, That the spellers don't see the uno card or whatever it is that, uh, that they're asked to divine, but she fails to control for the most obvious answer to the phenomenon she's, she's kind of documenting, which is that the facilitator in the child's mother, in this case, who does see the uno card, uh, the color of the popsicle sticks or whatever. That she's actually controlling what the child is spelling. And it would have been so easy for, for Kai to control for that the speech therapist or the teacher is going to hold the letter board while the mother is, you know, shown the stimulus and see if telepathy can still occur. When you break that physical, uh, connection between the mother and the, You know, and the child through which the mother is holding the letter board or you kind of take away those opportunities for all the queuing that we know occurs. And the fact that she didn't do it is just transforms the telepathy tapes into propaganda rather than, you know, kind of legitimate scientific inquiry. ///ad break/// Jonathan_Jarry: When we come back, we're going to look beyond the telepathy tapes and talk about the other fringe beliefs HELD .BY the so-called experts behind the hit podcast. dr. powell Jonathan_Jarry: I reached out to both Ky Dickens and Dr. Diane Powell to come on my podcast and discuss some of the critism they've been recieving from the work they've put out there. As of this recording, I have not recieved a response from Ky. I have been in touch with Dr. Powell but she declined due to her busy schedule. But she has given interviews on other platforms. Like Zaid Jilani's substack called The American Saga. interview with dr. powell

Javier: So you had actually, you had Dr. Powell, you interviewed her, you've spoken to her about this. What was her reaction? To the podcast. It took me by surprise, actually.

Zaid: Yeah, so it was interesting. I, I, I interviewed her probably around Christmas week and that week Kai was traveling. I'm sure she had family commitments. Uh, but Powell was actually, was available and I spoke to her for about 90 minutes. And I learned a lot about her background, you know, where she's coming from much more than you get from the podcast.

Speaker: And I think a couple of things were clear to me. One was that Powell, I think, had a personal experience that shaped her tremendously when she was younger. Uh, that led her to really deeply believe in paranormal, uh, and parapsychology. Um, she was working at a hospital one time. And she met a woman who appeared to be clairvoyant, you know, she made some predictions about her future, you know, her husband and her were looking at moving in a few different cities, he correctly predicted which city they were going to move to, uh, so on and so forth, and I think with that woman, but it really made her like a believer in something like ESP. Right. And so I think she came into this kind of with a Fox Mulder mentality. Like she really wants to believe, right. Like the X Files. Uh, but second was, I think that. Although Powell wants to believe, she's also been in a context and an environment where she deals with, you know, people in the medical field. She's kind of a psychiatrist by training. She's not really a neuroscientist. I don't know why I keep saying that. It's not really, not really neuroscience to be a psychiatrist. But anyway, um. Um, she, I think she does seek credibility in her field. Like she actually wants to prove it, like she believes in it enough to want to prove it. Right. And so when I spoke to her about the experiments, she told me that she really didn't want to do any experiments where the parents were touching the child, that Kai kind of brought those in to the, into the documentary. And insisted on doing them. Uh, I found that kind of surprising because in the documentary or in the series, Kai and Powell always seem like they're in sync. And it seemed like Kai wouldn't be doing it unless Powell approved because Powell was her chief scientist and like her, all her credibility was based on Powell. Um, and I was actually surprised that Powell admitted that to me, that like, she didn't really like the experiments that she did in the podcast series and that she wants to do better ones. Um, because really there should be kind of a team, right? But I suppose Powell doesn't have a ton of media training and doesn't like, no, doesn't really know the etiquette about this. Um, And, uh, you know, it, it, it wasn't though that pal doesn't believe in it. Like she told me, she thinks me as probably telepathic. It's just that the experiment like, wasn't going to convince anybody because of how it was done. Uh, but it did convince, right, right. But it did convince Kai and it did convince her in the podcast. Right. So, uh, but Kai doesn't tell us any of this. Kai, Kai doesn't introduce any friction in the podcast. Right. Like. It's her journey of discovery. She's taking, not only is she, she proving telepathy, but she's taking down materialism, right? Like she's given us evidence of the afterlife and deities and everything. Right. Like it's just, it's just a whirlwind going through that journey with her, but there's no friction in it. There's no doubt in it. Right. And pal actually had some doubt about what they were doing and like, we didn't, we're never told that. Right. And I really appreciate that. Pala told me that because. It made me think that at least someone involved in this understands some of the flaws of what they're doing, even if she really wants to believe and she kind of does believe. She still understands they got to do better if they want to prove this to people. Um, Kai Dickens doesn't really act that way. Kai Dickens always portrays anyone who doesn't believe any of it as just like a cynical, materialist, part of the scientific establishment. So we know that Dr. Diane Powell studied at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She briefly worked at Harvard. But what do we know about her medical career? Well, it took 4 episodes into the telepathy tapes podvcast to find out that at one point, Dr. Powell's license was revoked. When Dr. Diane Hennessey Powell published her book, The ESP Enigma, the medical board fined her and revoked her license without even reading it. The mere mention of ESP was so taboo that she paid the price before anyone considered the science behind her work. That information would have been good to know. But... again, Ky Dickens isn't givign us the whole picture. So, Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator, looked into it. Jonathan_Jarry: she's being presented as an expert, uh, and also as somebody who has been shunned by the mainstream, uh, because her ideas were, uh, a little too out there, but maybe she's onto something and, you know, maybe she's been canceled. And that is of course, something that is, uh, very trendy these days. You know, this idea of somebody has been canceled or being censored, that must mean that they're onto something real. Uh, so I think that is a very, Juicy type of presentation, if you will, Javier_Leiva-1: in your article, you pointed out that the medical board in Oregon suspended her license. Right. And you point to those documents. I read them too. At first, you know, you're thinking, well, is this a direct correlation to the work that she was doing with facilitated communication or this topic in general? And it turned out to be something completely different. Can you tell me a little bit about that, how you found that and what, what your thoughts were on that? Yeah. Jonathan_Jarry: So on the show, it is mentioned that her medical license was temporarily revoked after she published a book called the ESP Enigma, uh, ESP meaning extrasensory perception, uh, but that it was reinstated after the board reviewed her research. Um, so of course I, I went to the website of the Oregon Medical Board. uh, to see what the official documents had to say and, and there was no mention of the book. There was no mention of a research into, into side phenomena. Uh, what is actually being said by the Oregon medical board is that they suspended her license for poor management of therapeutic boundaries for incomplete chart notes, for a disorganized approach to treatment, a failure to respond to significant patient symptoms and concerns over her management of patient medications. The offical reason for her licence being revoked was much more mundane. Why would Ky Dickens mislead us this way? the board even asked her to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. She was allowed to resume practicing medicine under a strict list of conditions, which was waived in 2012. And now the board's website lists her license as lapsed. Jonathan Jarry's article on Dr. Powell evoked a strong response. Ky Dickens went as far as issuing a statement from Dr. Powell on the Telepathy Tapes website. Dr. Powell wrote, and I quote: "Jarry misrepresents what happened between me and the medical board. He says I have a lapsed license, but I got my license back at the very next board meeting after it had been taken away. I don’t have an active license now because I retired last year." Jonathan_Jarry: she disagrees with that. She, she believes that she's, she's, she has retired. She would want the website to say, you know, that she's retired. But if she disagrees with their use of the word lapse, then she needs to take it up with them. harvard but only when it counts

Zaid: Um, yadda yadda yadda. Although, Kai Dickens Keeps telling us that Powell, uh, you know, taught at Harvard and she didn't teach at Harvard for a couple of years, but she brings it up repeatedly.

Speaker: She talks about how nice her house is. Uh, Rupert Sheldrake, another British guy who she interviews, she tells us, you know, she keeps telling us that he went to, that he was at Cambridge. Like she likes invoking these like credentials, you know, when it helps her argument. Uh, but you know, it. When people are against her, then they're the establishment and, you know, I, I found that to be a little bit of a kind of a disturbing, disturbing, uh, set of arguments from her because it seems like she's using these credentials to boost her case. Uh, but if they're against her, then they're just evidence of corruption or closed mindedness or so on and so forth. Jonathan_Jarry: just zooming out, uh, not to talk about Dr. Powell specifically, but I think we have to remember that, uh, there are people with fringe ideas. everywhere. Even, uh, people who have graduated from the top medical schools and the top universities around, uh, people who, who have received a lot of acclaim. Uh, there's a thing called the Nobel disease where people who have received Nobel prizes later on in their career go on to embrace very strange ideas, uh, that have, you know, no good evidence behind them. Uh, because they end up being surrounded by yes, man, uh, and they're so respected and they can very easily sort of go off, uh, the, the, the, the, the deep end, uh, especially in, in, in the field that they might not be entirely familiar with. And so we always have to remember that just because somebody has. Qualifications, you know, seems to be an expert in their field, does not mean that everything they believe in is scientifically accurate, uh, that they need to be taken seriously about everything that they say Javier_Leiva-1: Yeah. And in this case, there are well meaning people with fringe beliefs that could cause, you know, misinformation to Jonathan_Jarry: We are all susceptible to deceiving ourselves, even those of us with university degrees, even people with medical degrees, uh, I mean, we, there, there's, you, it can happen to all of us, right? Belief in, in, in a pseudoscience can happen to all of us. Uh, we're all drawn to conspiracy theories. Uh, this is, this is a fault of the human brain itself. And having a university degree is not a sufficient inoculation against these beliefs. Speaking of conspiracy theories... when you look further into dr. Diane Powell's history, you find out that she believes in more than just telepathy. In 2017, Diane Powell spoke at the revoltion for truth rally in D.C. The rally was put together by leaders in the anti-vaccine movement. Notable guests included RFK Jr. Here's reporter Zaid Jilani again.

Javier: Let's talk about Dr. Powell and her history and some of her other beliefs that maybe have nothing to do with facilitated communication.

Zaid: Yeah. So I don't remember where I was reading this, but some other people were discussing the podcast. They started going into the medical history of Dr. Powell. So I looked into it. Um, and Powell had actually joined, uh, I think this was 2017. This was the year that Trump was inaugurated the first time. So Trump had kind of made a commitment to RFK Jr.

Speaker: that he would help him sponsor some type of vaccine safety commission or something, and Trump actually backstabbed him, he never did it, uh, although this time RFK Jr. is going to be part of the they held a rally saying we got to set up this commission. We got to do vaccine safety. We're over vaccinating kids. Vaccines have a link to autism. Uh, one of the organizers of that rally was Dr. Diane Powell. Uh, there is a video of her that you can watch where she is very, very adamant, uh, saying we need to stop the insanity. INSERT DR. POWELL'S SPEECH HERE We live in a schizophrenic society, with lots of cognitive dissonance. When you have doctors doing things and they are doing harm, they cannot face it. So, I go to these medical meetings, I just got back from one, and many of the, these are, these are medical meetings in which I'm getting continuing education, and there are doctors saying that vaccines are oftentimes the final straw that tips a kid over the edge. And yet, they all say this. Real quietly, a woman who is a neonatal nurse, she said to me, and she's Jewish, her parents escaped the Holocaust. She said to me, I pray every day I go to work that I don't go to hell for what I do. But she has no choice, because she has a family to support. About 20 percent of children who get diagnosed as autistic. have reversible symptoms. But we need to admit that what they have is a neuroimmunological problem. By the way, there’s seriously is no scientific evidence linking vaccines to autism, despite persistent claims. Studies have consistently shown they’re safe and effective. While some research explores the immune system’s role in autism, the idea of "reversible autism" isn’t supported by science. OH, and claims of regret among medical professionals are anecdotal and don’t reflect the consensus of the medical community, not just in the US but across the globe.

Zaid: The problem is like in that video and in her cruise, her previous crusade. She was 100 percent confident that vaccines were creating, um, some kind of, um, immunological response, uh, in, in folks brains and causing autism.

Speaker: And she was a hundred percent dead set on it. And she even says during her speech or something like, like, we can't wait to like, You know, like she was, she was frustrated at the pace of studying it, right? Like she kind of, she was so confident this was happening that like, I need, we need an action now. And she, she just came across like Kai, right? Like, like a full blown advocate or activist for a point of view. And it's a very discredited point of view, right? There's like no evidence at all about autism and vaccines. And adding that to, to this, I mean, considering Kai put all her eggs in the Dr. Powell basket and she had no other autism expert whatsoever in her. Uh, series, you know, it, it, it did call into question a lot of like what she, what Kai was doing to establish the truths here, right? Like she, she had brought someone in who actually on the issue of autism has very, very, very poor credibility. And it turns out that Ky Dickens featured other antivaxxers on the podcast... yet she failed to tell us about their views. Houston is a young man. I think he's in the second episode of the podcast. He's actually from my neck of the woods. He's from Georgia. Uh, his mother firmly believes that a vaccine caused her son's autism. Like that's a very adamant belief of hers. It's like, I think the first thing she, maybe she tweeted, you know, it's on her, on her social media timeline. Right. Kai never tells us this, right. Kai. Doesn't Kai does everything she can to separate the parents believes from the beliefs of the children to not make us feel like they're imprinting on them or that they're utilizing them for communication. But she never tells us this. Kai also recommends a documentary called Spellers, which is about which is not about telepathy, but it is about spelling to communicate. Kai Dickens also recommends a documentary called Spellers, which is not about telepathy... it's about spelling to communicate which is the rebranded way of saying facilitated communication. Anyway, one of the producers of the film, JB Handley, is a champion for the anti-vaccination movement. And the one of the stars of that documentary and also one of the co producers JB Handley. Is a kind of a close, uh, he's closely linked RFK junior and he, his entire cause is about how vaccines cause autism and we need to reduce vaccination in the United States, right? Like if you go to his sub stack now, there's like dozens of posts about that particular topic. vaccines cause autisim > autism causes telepathy

Zaid: Uh, he hasn't really said anything about telepathy, which is interesting to me because like. If these people believe that vaccines cause autism, but they think autism can cause telepathy, are they going to be in favor of vaccines again?

Speaker: people who believe one thing that's just like really out there. They tend to believe a bunch of things that are really out there, right? Like the telepathy tapes discussion on Reddit, I followed it very closely because then when it started. The Reddit pages dedicated to telepathy tapes were very open. There were a lot of skeptics, people debating back and forth over the past couple of weeks, it's become very censorious. Like moderators are banning people left and right. Uh, some people are being banned from the most banal skepticism. And you look into the, you can look into the post history of users on Reddit, the moderators that are saying people who like, you know, are really deep into UFO discussions. Uh, you know, all the other paranormal stuff. They're in the, they're in the whole bucket, right? the burden of proof

Zaid: you know, if you're trying to prove something that's very difficult to prove, your job is always going to be really uphill, right?

Speaker: You have to dot every I, you have to cross every T, you have to make every effort. To, to show people that what you're, what you're demonstrating is real. And I think when it comes to this subject, the people involved have really not done that. And it seems like the fan base of it are just like threatened by anyone who doesn't believe it. Right. And they, they're not willing to prove it. You know, if, if, if telepathy is real. It should be very easy to demonstrate and lots of people should want their hands on it from like wall street banks to the To the military, yeah. Everybody would want to be part of it. Everybody would be trying to prove it HOW will powell and ky react when these experiments fail?

Zaid: But yeah, I mean, it was really interesting. I was really shocked that she admitted all that to me and it made me think that, um. You know, I'm wondering how Kai and Powell are going to handle this going forward.

Speaker: Like, let's say they do the kind of experiments that you and I just discussed. And actually I brought those up to Dr. Powell and she thought they were fine. Like they were good ideas. Let's say they do those and then they fail. What are they going to tell their audience? Like the entire first season, it's just like, this is the, this is the realest thing that ever existed. And like. There's no reason to doubt it. And then it's a season two is going to end with, Oh, we were wrong. It's actually a lot of reason to doubt it. Um, that's kind of the problem. Like, you know, I think is this a grift?

Zaid: a lot of people are saying a lot of people are like, is this a grift, like is kind of doing this to make money or fame or something?

Speaker: I kind of feel like she believes it. But there is an element of that there because now she's, she's staked a lot of professional credibility on it, right? She made 10 episodes saying that something is real with zero doubt in her mind and convincing thousands upon thousands of people as real. This is, this was the most popular podcast in the entire country, uh, over the Christmas weekend. It was beating Joe Rogan and everything. Thousands upon thousands of people listen to this. And so once you've staked out your reputation like that on a claim, you do feel a professional necessity, a matter of survival to defend it. And that's why I wish she hadn't gone so hard on this because now it's going to be really hard for her to climb down if she has to climb down and almost certainly she will, um, because I don't think this will survive proper testing, but.

Javier: Yeah.

Speaker: wrap up

Amy Lutz: maybe Kai Dickens didn't know that much about it before, but now that several criticisms, critiques have been written, making this point, it is really on her.

Speaker: If she wants to like support these outrageous claims, uh, to kind of address this issue back to jonah and how he communicates

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. we're all different

Javier: And, and possibly the, the simplest answer is that we're all different. We all have different like developmental abilities in terms of intellect and, and physical abilities. And the simplest answer is that we just should just accept people for who they are. Right.

Amy Lutz: course, yeah, you're not doing kids, autistic people, any favors by pretending away their impairments and deficits and putting them in environments that they wouldn't choose and that aren't appropriate for them. You know, you have to meet people where they are and, you know, kind of provide the supports that will give them the best lives.

Javier: Yeah, and celebrate the, the best of their ability, right? Like in terms of your son, he, he has some like some traits the way you described it that are, are just, you know, amazing, right? In terms of like his

Amy Lutz: I mean, everybody is amazing, especially to their parents. So there's a, there's a ton of stuff I love about Jonah. Um, but it's really important to me to engage with him in a way that's meaningful to him and not, you know, sit there and read to him, you know, like. Uh, like play opera for him instead of Sesame Street music, you know, like that isn't something that would make him happy.

Speaker: So I'm just all about building a life for him that makes him the happiest, whatever that looks like, even though it's not a life that would make me happy. Um, what matters is what makes him happy. close

Amy Lutz: This was a tough episode to produce. I'm not going to lie. It's tough because I have friends and family members with children on the spectrum. And I can't imagine how challenging it must be for them. This episode was a serious critique on Ky Dickens and her outlandish claims. Not about autistic people, their parents, or anyone in that community. I hope that came across.

Speaker: Like I said previously, even before this epiosde was released, I recieved emails tellign me to not crush parents hope. It might bring some parents comfort knowing that there is more to their children than we realize. And I certainly don't want to do that. But my job is to inform, not to give hope. I want to encourse parents to be critical of facilitated communication and embrace other more acceptable ways of independent communication. I STRESS. INDEPENDANT. Does that make sense? Just because you can't speak, doesn't mean you;re not intelligent. Those two things are not the same. Thank you for listening and we'll be back next week with a brand new epsisode. As always, you can get early and ad-free episodes on Patreon and PRETEND+ on a Apple Podcast.