QAA Podcast - The Human Ouija Boards of the Telepathy Tapes (Premium E340) Sample

Episode Date: June 14, 2026

The hit podcast The Telepathy Tapes claims to reveal a hidden world where nonverbal autistic people communicate telepathically, visit one another on an astral gathering place called “The Hill,” access cosmic knowledge, and perhaps even commune with psychic animals. But behind the paranormal framing is a much older and more troubling story: facilitated communication, the discredited practice that can turn vulnerable people into human Ouija boards. In this episode, Jack looks at the ideomotor effect, Clever Hans, “letter boarding,” the career of Diane Hennacy Powell, Ky Dickens’ rise as the voice of The Telepathy Tapes, and how New Age ideas about telepathy, dark matter, the Akashic Records, savants, parrots, dogs, and morphic fields have attached themselves to the desperate desire to give non-speaking people a voice. Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Check out our new podcast series network Cursed Media! All episodes of Spectral Voyager Season 2 are out now! Binge the entirety of Truly Tradly Deeply by Annie Kelly and Megan Kelly as well as Science in Transition by Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows: cursedmedia.net Produced by Liv Agar & Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Welcome to the QAA podcast, Premium Episode 340, the human Ouija boards of the telepathy tapes. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakitansky, Jack LaRoche, Julian Fields, and Travis View. For years now, a secret underground world has existed. It began in the late 1960s, early 1970s, this strange theory circulating via pamphlets and chat books that were traded in secret before moving to now defunct Internet forums. Over time, these forum discussions blossomed into real-life meetups across the United States and Britain. The news spread slowly at first, before reaching a fever pitch that brought it mainstream through Paul Potter B plots and persistent Stephen King tropes. Controversy relegated to the shadows once more, where it lurked in silence, the idea is steadily growing. It took one brave soul to rediscover it and another to bring it to public consciousness,

where the truth can once more be proclaimed to a mainstream audience through the powers of podcasting. This discovery could shift our very paradigm. This truth is inescapable. Autistic people are telepathic. They should have never trusted us podcasters. We'll break it all. Restless spirits and a smart horse.

If you consider yourself a podcast in enthusiasts, chances are you've heard of the telepathy tapes. I'm pretty sure all of you guys have heard of it, right? Yeah. Lots of people been recommending to me from my real life. Yeah, after that, you can go do what the bleep do we know. We've got chariots of the gods for you, ancient aliens. I got lots of stuff for you.

You can go back to zeitgeist. You know what's crazy is they used to, in college, I had a professor who like made us watch what the bleep do we know as like a school project because he thought it was like such an amazing film and he's like a good guy he's not a bad guy no no no plenty of good people plenty of good people read the late great planet earth and uh our world is worse yeah it was really weird so it's interesting hearing the the discourse around it now versus how it was introduced to me back in 2002 or whatever it was so this particular show if you aren't already overwhelmingly aware of it It took the world by storm in 2024.

It reached the elusive top of the Spotify charts, even beating out the Joe Rogan experience. Whoa. Won a Webby in 2025 for Best Independent Series. Yeah, where the fuck is our Webby, by the way? I'm going to say it right now. Nobody gives a shit about us, Julian. I don't know what a Webby is, but I want one, okay? It sounds pathetic.

And if I ever told someone, I want a Webby, I would probably off myself. Well, yeah, here's the trick, Julian. In order to win these awards, you have to, actively apply for them. You have to make the effort to say, I want that award. Here's my application. So, uh, this kind of a paradox. The only way to get a Webby is by applying for Webby and then obviously killing

yourself. Okay. Well, then forget it. I don't want a Webby. He needs to submit, kill himself. When it, kill himself again. You know, the process of just continue. You have to stop saying that. You have to stop saying that. We have to stop saying it. Holy shit. I couldn't I was like if I said 20 more times in this episode, I wouldn't have caught up to you. I need a counter on the bottom of the screen. So,

winning this Webby and not killing herself landed the host, Kai Dickens, a guest spot on the Joe Rogan experience. Now, all of this is a bit of old hat, but as of 2026, this podcast is up for about five more awards. So it generated a good deal of controversy in spite of all of this acclaim, based on its central premise.

That premise being that nonverbal persons, more often than not, have profound psychic abilities. Let me be clear that it is nonverbal persons that we're discussing because the claim that these powers extend not just to autistic people, but also to people suffering from neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and dementia, as well as to animals, with special attention paid to elephants, dogs, and one very particular African gray parrot.

So it's not just autistic folks. It's pretty much anyone who can't adequately advocate for themselves. I was about to say it's anybody who can't say, hey, wait, no, I'm not psychic. This is going to be an ongoing pattern within this episode. That's crazy. So today, we're going to be learning about the person who inspired Kai Dickens and first introduced her to this particular idea, as well as exploring the flawed central concept behind it, which is that of facilitated communication.

After a light debunking of all of this, we'll move on to some of the other ideas that are presented in the telepathy tapes, such as the place that autistic children gather on the astral plane together to teach one another all sorts of things and hang out. Oh, hell yeah. How the Akashic records are actually the dark matter

that fills our universe, as well as how animals can psychically communicate with people if they care about them enough. Okay, okay, they have to love you. They do. They do. The New Age claim that love is all you need is obnoxiously persistent throughout all of these tapes.

One thing I keep learning on this podcast is that the most vulnerable among us are actually the most powerful. They've got superpowers and they're coming for you. And they're the most dangerous, the most powerful, and should be the most feared. This is going to yield the most evil Xavier's. school for the gift. Jake, if you listened enough during Hebrew school, you would learn that the meek will inherit the earth.

Unless that's actually Christianity, where that said, if you listened enough to a little shop of horrors, you would learn this. I was interested in just like the chopping up of the body parts in little shop of horrors. I was like, I know this is, I know they're hinting at a violence that's beyond my comprehension at this young age. Oh, if you love that, you would love the Bible. No, in Hebrew school, we were talking about Heyman. You know, we were talking about, we were talking about Elijah.

We were talking about what's on the Seder plate. We're talking about why eight nights, you know, not a lot of Bible stuff really in there. So it's very nice that you're talking about chopping up people because before we begin, I want to make it extremely clear that I am not a non-biased person when it comes to the telepathy tapes. You know, I myself am diagnosed as autistic. So I'm not the most unbiased person here. And I sincerely would love for all of these people to be chopped up and fed to Audrey to. And I have a feeling that's going to come through regardless of how much I want to be objective here.

So I just want to lay that out on the table. Feed me, Jack. Feed me. So before we really dive into all of this bullshit, I want to provide a bit of context behind everything by introducing y'all to two particular things. Ouija boards and clever Hans. I'm pretty sure all of you all know what a Ouija board is. Multiple stories from me told on the pod about Ouija boards. He knows. He knows. He knows. He knows he's told them. Would you like to describe what a Ouija board is for our listeners?

Me? Yeah, sure. You have experience. I love to. Now, this was a game. This was packaged by Parker Brothers, right? I think it is. Okay. This is packaged by Parker Brothers or one of the other game, but one of the other big board game guys. And what it is is it's a board. It's a board. You open up the box, it's a board.

And on the board is the entire alphabet, not QWERTY style. Regular ABC, D, E, F, G. Get it? Yeah, the QWERTY alphabet, yeah. Now, in the corner, you got yes, you got no. And the game piece is a plastic dial, I would guess. It sits a couple, about a centimeter off the board. And there's a plastic window where you can hover over letters.

And the game basically is, look, did you see how I went from like character voice? Yeah, I was going to say regular speaking voices I get into the part that I believe in. You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast. For access to the full episode as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, why is that such a good deal? Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes plus all of our miniseries.

That includes 10 episodes of Man Klan with Julian and Annie, 10 episodes of Perverts with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of the Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View. It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting. for once, I agree with you. And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion. It's a fact. You're so right, Jake. We love and appreciate all of our listeners.

Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think, out of gratitude, maybe? That's not true. The part about be crying. Not me being grateful. I'm very grateful.