The Rich Roll Podcast - Inside ‘The Telepathy Tapes’: Creator Ky Dickens Reveals The Extraordinary Story Behind The Podcast Sensation

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

Ky Dickens is the award-winning filmmaker behind "The Telepathy Tapes," the viral podcast phenomenon. This conversation explores the intersection of neurodiversity and consciousness as Ky shares her journey documenting non-speaking autistic individuals with apparent telepathic abilities. We discuss her transformation from pragmatic skeptic to someone witnessing replicable telepathic demonstrations, the concept of "The Hill" (where individuals telepathically gather), and how these discoveries challenge our materialist conceptualization of reality. As I oscillate between wonder and skepticism, Ky provides a steady compass through my conflicted intellectual terrain. Ky's work is a profound invitation to question the crude facsimile we call reality. This conversation is mind-blowing! Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up   Today’s Sponsors: On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style 👉on.com/richroll Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF your first order 👉seed.com/RichRoll                               Momentous: 35% OFF your first subscription👉livemomentous.com/richroll                                        BetterHelp: Get 10% OFF the first month👉BetterHelp.com/richroll                            Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF 👉gobrewing.com  Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors   Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

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It seems as though my child can absolutely read minds and knows what we're thinking or can see through our eyes. It was person after person thinking they were alone in this unbelievable situation. Telepathy shouldn't be possible. It just shouldn't be possible, right? But if they just come into the classroom, come into the house, you'll see it.

Hey, everybody, welcome to the podcast. My guest today is Kai Dickens. Kai is the documentary filmmaker behind the surprise supersonic hit podcast series, The Telepathy Tapes, which is this deeply immersive as well as very controversial seven-hour exploration of the rather audacious proposition that certain non-speaking autistic individuals just might possess powers we've always presumed impossible. Now, if nothing else, it's a compelling X-Files-esque experience.

And as somebody who really wants to believe, I will fully admit to being absolutely captivated by this series. The scientific minded side of me, however, wants to outright dismiss everything extra perceptory as an egregious offense to basically everything we know and can prove about the material world. At the same time, I just can't stop thinking about it.

No one should take this off at face value. I mean, it's repeatable over and over and over again as many times as he wants to be. And it's not a question for any of us of like, if it's happening, it's just why and how. Not only is Kai challenging traditional notions regarding the inner lives of the neurodivergent, she's also asking a much bigger and more important question, a question I think we need to be asking that gets to the heart of the heart problem of consciousness. The answer to which she suggests just might completely upend the materialist paradigm upon which we define the very nature of reality itself.

It's a lot. I get it. Is this just all insane or is it possible that there is more going on here than meets the eye? Well, all I can tell you is buckle up lot of people because this one is a wild ride Out of consciousness came everything else and if that's the case then we can account for all these Mysterious abilities that we know These things happen. We have no idea how these gifts are possible or how someone gets the knowledge

But you can't unsee it. So then you just have to try to explain it. This is fucking crazy shit. It's crazy. Yeah. Kai, it's just an absolute delight to have you here. I am obsessed with the telepathy tapes. I was sharing with you a few minutes ago about a road trip that I was on with my youngest daughter who's 16 and studying filmmaking, super into documentary filmmaking.

And I had heard about the telepathy tapes and I knew that it was super popular, but I hadn't listened to it yet. And I was like, Chaya, let's check this out. And we listened to, I think like the first four episodes over the course of this drive. And we just kept looking at each other as we were driving.

We're like, what? I've been, you know, just kind of riveted by this subject matter ever since. And so I'm very thankful to have you here today to kind of expand upon these fascinating ideas. And you've been on quite a rocket ship with this thing. Let's just start with, you know, what is the telepathy tapes?

How did you get into this? And what is the kind of core thesis that you're advancing in this series? Yeah, for sure. So the telepathy tapes has been a multi-year project looking at non-speakers, which are individuals with autism and apraxia. So apraxia is a mind-body disconnect.

So you are very much in there, you're intelligent, but often because you can't speak, people assume you can't think, which is not fair. And so many individuals who are non-speakers have been kind of deemed incompetent or have been taught unfairly like their children and aren't understanding the world. So there was a neuroscientist

by the name of Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell. She studied at Johns Hopkins, she taught at Harvard for a while. And when she was studying savant syndrome, she came across a few parents who said, look, I think that some of our children are actually reading our mind. It might not be a savant skill,

like they've memorized every book on the shelf. I think actually if I open up to a page in the book, they can see through my eyes or they know what I'm thinking. So Dr. Powell started researching this, I heard a podcast with her and I went up and met her. And pretty quickly thereafter, I started meeting a lot of these families who thought they were in a silo all by themselves, that this miracle was kind of individually happening in each of their households, that their non-speaking children can read their minds.

But I think a big question that comes up next is, well, if they're non-speaking, how do you know that? So a lot of these individuals learn to spell, to communicate by pointing to a letter board. And the reason that's possible is speaking as a fine motor skill, whereas pointing as a gross motor skill. So it takes time, it takes effort, it takes a lot of practice,

but you can learn to like, you know, create neural pathways that help you spell to communicate. So as pretty quickly thereafter, the subject in the telepathy tapes, after they started spelling to communicate, they revealed at some point to their parents or to their teachers or to their ministers or rabbis. I mean, we've had a lot of people in the telepathy tapes

who witnessed this that they're able to read their minds and that that's often the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their quote unquote spiritual gifts for lack of a better word. So this idea of spelling is otherwise referred to as facilitated communication, right? Are these two things interchangeable or are they different? No, so spelling, I would say is a catch-all phrase.

There's been many different types of ways to spell to communicate. The first one that hit the world by storm in the 90s was called facilitated communication. And that one used some pressure or push on the hand to help someone along. Due to some scandals that happened around facilitated communication,

new spelling forms branched out of that in which there was no touch at all. So one of those was called the rapid prompting method. Another was called spelling to communicate. Now there's something called the speller's method. All of those make sure not to touch the individual at all. And so I'll kind of catch all that we use in the telepathy tapes is just say spelling

to refer to this way of communicating. And so your kind of introduction to this world is through Diane Powell. You hear her on a podcast where she's talking about this work that she does where she is taking these nonverbal autistic individuals and through this technique of spelling is able to demonstrate and replicate a sort of,

paranormal activity where these individuals seem to be able to tap into the thoughts of, their mother, their parents, their teacher. And this ignites something in you where you decide I need to understand. I'm like, wait, what? What is happening here? And you kind of go on this journey.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I was in between projects and looking for something new. And I've always been a social issue documentary filmmaker working at like broken problems in society, right? Like lack of paid family medical leave or, you know, the unaffordable inaccessible healthcare system that we have for many people, LGBTQ equality and their faith groups,

like just all sorts of stuff like this. And so doing something in this, of this ilk was never, was not my, was not of my interest, but I actually had two kind of close friends die. So I was going through my own process of really wanting to understand, like, does consciousness survive the body? Why are we here?

These questions we all ask. And often as a case with a documentary, you often spend months, if not years, reading something, researching something, becoming an expert in it before you even get funded or paid or anything like that. And I thought, if I'm gonna be doing that much time and effort and research, I wanna make it around this. What is consciousness?

Why are we here? And I want my next project to be about these ideas. And I was reading Big Magic at the time. I don't know if you know that book. I love Liz and I love that book very much. Yeah, so that was just random that I was kind of going through this own thing and I was reading Big Magic,

which I think in a nutshell, what I took away from that book is that this idea that the muse or ideas are kind of a disembodied consciousness that you can talk to and say, hey, you don't ask, you tell it like, look, this is what I'm doing next, come work with me on it. You know, and what I had said at that time is like, whatever I do next, I don't want it to be about solving the brokenness in society. I want to solve the brokenness in people.

I want to make a project that explains why we're here, where we're going and what it all means. So let's go. Not knowing what would come of it. I just started reading, reading, reading and plant communication, near-death experiences, Ian Stevenson's long work around reincarnation at University of Virginia. I mean, I was reading everything I could, also listening to podcasts. That's when I heard Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell. And you know, it struck me like a lightning bolt when I heard this and I thought, this is it, this is it.

This and it was just like no stopping at that point and hopped on Zoom with her. And maybe just like a few weeks later, I was up going flying to Oregon to meet her. And I think for me, when I first felt convinced, you know, obviously you start doing, you know, we can talk about this, but we started doing our own kind of homespun telepathy test. But what really convinced me at first was asking her to open up her email and just reading me some, you know, respecting HIPAA violations, of course, not giving names, which is kind of reading me some of the smattering of the emails she was getting from parents and teachers. And it was one after the other saying, I didn't think this was possible.

I didn't believe my spouse when they said this was possible, but it seems as though my child can absolutely read minds and knows what we're thinking or can see through our eyes. And it was person after person thinking they were alone in this unbelievable situation. And there was such a quantity of parents reaching out to her that it felt just so compelling and convincing. So I'm imagining the audience

like rolling their eyes right now. So perhaps provide an example or two of these experiments like walk us through what these experiments do, how they're constructed and what they kind of demonstrate. Yeah, so Dr. Powell did a few studies before Ivan came along. So for instance, the first individual she studied was a young girl in Wisconsin and she was adopted.

And I think she was most empathic with her father, but she also could read the minds of her spelling to communicate partners, kind of like her teachers. And so Dr. Powell put this young girl behind a partition and on the other side of the partition was the person she was telepathic with. In this case, it was two different therapist teachers. So they did one at a time and the girl could not see what the therapist was looking at, what cue was in front of them.

However, every time this therapist was shown a cue, this young girl was able to write accurately what word this person was looking at, what number they were looking at, even if it was a fake word, a made up word. So those were the first experiments Diane did. And I asked her to send me the videos of this, you know, right away.

And my first thought was, wait, I mean, it was so unbelievable and these kids were so accurate. So I thought I asked, I asked, can I talk to the camera guy who set all this up? I wanted to get his point of view because I'm a filmmaker by trade and I trust the people behind the scenes. So I called him and I said, what was this like for you?

And he said, it was absolutely unbelievable. I actually left my profession and had like a mind, you know, his life changed after witnessing it. And he's like, I was listening to the audio feed. There was absolutely no queuing. my profession and had like a mind, you know, his life changed after witnessing it. And he's like, I was listening to the audio feed. There was absolutely no queuing. There was no way that this young girl could see the person on the other side of the partition.

They were so careful and so thoughtful about how they set this up. She did it with two different therapists. And he's like, there's no explanation for it. There's no way that she could be doing this unless it was truly telepathy. So talking to him was like another just chip in my mindset of like, this sounds like this could be real.

So you seek her out and you yourself, kind of set up these experiments with a variety of individuals and families and teachers and caretakers, et cetera. And what's astonishing is that the results are kind of unanimous, right? Like in science, if you get a positive result in the, I don't know, 55 to 65% range,

like that's significant. And here it's essentially 100%, right? Like this is replicable, repeatable, time and time again in different situations with different experimental, you know, kind of paradigms, whether it's like cards or drawings or thoughts, it seems that the nonverbal individual, you know, is able to kind of like execute this, you know, properly,

like almost every single time. Yeah, so after this, I first met Dr. Powell and talked to her camera guy. I said, I wanna set up a test like this for myself. And I asked, who's like a new person who just reached out that you haven't met yet? Cause that felt like a good way to keep this like really clear that she's couldn't be influencing this at all,

Dr. Powell. So it was this young girl from Mexico. So I coordinated flying her up to California, flying Dr. Powell down to California. I asked a bunch of camera guys and audio people I've worked with for a long time for help, to kind of film this. We run it on Airbnb.

And I really wanted to take care of like setting this whole thing up myself. So there could be no funny business going on. I trust Dr. Powell completely. I mean, she's a very thoughtful scientist, but I just didn't know that yet. I didn't know her. I didn't know any of this world. So we covered up the televisions and took down the mirrors and made sure that our cameras

had something over the lens. You know, there's just no way that you could see reflections. We had a partition. We put the young girl behind a blindfold, which show the mom a number, a picture, word, and then we'd take the blindfold off, move the partition away, and the girl would spell the answer, and her name was Mia, and it was riveting to watch.

And one of the things that was like mind boggling when that was done is Dr. Powell said, as accurate as she was, which was like almost 100% of the time with her mother, it wouldn't count for signs because she was being touched and the people will not allow for touch, you know? And I was like, but you know, knowing Mia at this point, who had just learned to spell,

often individuals with dyspraxia don't know where the body is. So it can really help to be touched on the wrist and then often moves to the elbow and then to the shoulder and then to the tip of the head and then there's no touch at all. And so Mia, at this point now, there's no touch at all. When we had met her,

she still needed like a little touch somewhere, whether it be on the shoulder or the head. So that was happening. And I talked to other people in the room and I was like, do you think there's any way the mom was sending Morse code, you know, about a picture or number? And I mean, it felt ridiculous. And I don't think that is possible,

especially having watching her spell this way on Zoom calls and everything. But for the point of like high, the high caliber of like air tightness that these studies need, Dr. Powell was like, this wouldn't be accepted. So I was marveling at it, but it wouldn't count. And so the next test,

she said, go and see this young man, Akhil next. He's in New Jersey and he doesn't require any touch. And again, I was kind of funding all of this on my own and I didn't have the ability to be like, hey, let's send Dr. Powell. So I went up there with my camera guy and Dr. Powell didn't come on that test. So this was kind of just like proof of concept,

trying to understand what this was. So these weren't like airtight scientific tests. This is just me, we were just like playing to figure out what's possible here. And it was pretty remarkable because myself, the camera person, other people in the crew, producers would take turns writing down a word and we'd show it to the mom

and Akhil would be in another room and he'd spell it individually without being touched into a talker. Or one time we wrote down a word, crossed it out, he started writing the word that we originally had written. And then as we crossed it out and started writing a new word, he started spelling that word. The thing that was most mind boggling for me on that trip was, you know, we were like,

okay, he can do words. We tried numbers and he could do any of the numbers. And we did random word generators. And again, I brought these iPads, generated them myself. So there's no way like, any funny business was happening. But the thing that was the most surprising to me was at one point we had a random picture generator out. And there was a few pictures where mother Manisha

would see the picture and not really know what it was. Like one of them, she thought, I think she was like, oh, what is this? And it looked like a food fight, you know? And Akhil who was sitting across the room types paint, P-A-I-N-T, and sure enough, that's exactly what it was. But when you think about what telepathy is, you think, oh, well, that's sending a message,

you're sending something to this person. Nothing was being sent because she didn't know what she was looking at. And that was pretty remarkable. Cause I was like, is she seeing through his eyes? Like what is happening here? And what Manisha says is, I think she thinks you are all asking the wrong questions.

It seems as though him and I can share consciousness and we can just merge in some way. Yeah, that gets to the heart of the larger issue at play here. And I suspect was kind of the real place of intrigue for you to even like get involved in this. It's almost as if these quote unquote like telepathic individuals are just a doorway

into a broader conversation about the nature of reality and consciousness. Cause I think the docu-series operates on two levels. Like first you're addressing the misunderstood capacities of these neurodivergent people that challenges the traditional paradigm of kind of neurobiology, that these people are kind of non-compassmentous, right?

But are in fact intelligent and have rich interior lives, emotions, just like all of us desires, et cetera. But the second and larger issue that you're getting at that kind of comes, you tease it early, but it kind of comes out later in the series is this questioning of the nature of reality itself. Like positing that our materialist conceptualization

of reality may very well be wrong. And that consciousness isn't something that we have, but is something that is, it's like this field that is fundamental to the universe. And so in the context of telepathy, it's not, oh, your consciousness is localized in your brain and you're sending it to me or I'm receiving it or sending mine to yours.

It's more of a tapping into this field of oneness in which consciousness is like a unified kind of property of reality itself. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think when I started meeting more and more families, for them, it's not a question of if this is happening, it's why, you know, like anyone asking if, in their mind, I think it's just 10 steps behind the reality is happening, it's why. Like anyone asking if, in their mind,

I think it's just 10 steps behind the reality of what's going on in their classrooms and their therapy rooms and their homes. And so that why was something I was obsessed with. How is this possible? There's just no room for it in our current paradigm, which is- Or if it is, what does that say about like reality?

Right, exactly, yeah. And so, I started talking to various researchers reading a lot of books and I don't think a lot of people realize that we do live in a scientific paradigm of materialism, which is it's only real, right? If you can measure it and observe it. And our paradigm, we explained in episode six of the telepathy tapes has traditionally been considered

like if you think of it as a pyramid, right? Where there's like the base of the pyramid might be, there's physics and there's biology and there's chemistry and all these things that make up our world. And those things are true. I mean, we shouldn't throw away all the textbooks, but currently at the top of the pyramid, the result of all these wonderful scientific fields,

if you will, is consciousness. And there's no way to describe where it comes from or how it works and why it's there. But the other way of looking at it is if we think of consciousness as fundamental and that's at the bottom of the pyramid. So out of consciousness came everything else. And if that's the case, then we can account

for all these mysterious abilities that we know these things happen, right? Like whether it's a precognitive dream where you see something and, you know, or you have a conversation with someone who died in a dream or something like that, or a near death experience or telepathy, these things that we have not been able to make sense of, they do make sense

if we live in a conscious universe where it's thought and consciousness that is the foundation. Yeah, the problem of consciousness is called the hard problem for a reason. And that reason is that our materialist pyramid, our way of making sense of reality is flawed in that context and cannot resolve the idea of what consciousness is or is not, right?

Within that materialist paradigm. But if you upend that paradigm and say consciousness is fundamental to the universe, it seems to provide a way to resolve that hard problem. Because if it's fundamental to everything and not a product of complex matter aggregated, like the idea that like, the more complex a biological system,

the more complex it gives rise to a more complex level of consciousness is incorrect. And instead it's fundamental and is basically the fabric of the universe itself, right? And it's something that we can tap into. And it all sounds crazy and woo woo, but my sense is that science, physicists, like they're all starting to realize

that there is real merit in this idea. I just had Anika Harrison recently who has an audio documentary series coming out called Lights On and that she's basically asking that question and goes and talks to all these like fabulously intelligent people in their respective fields to kind of explore that notion. And I feel like there's a receptivity to that right now

that from like a timing perspective dovetails with what you're saying and this exploration that you've been on, although you're on very different kind of tracks with this. Yeah. Yeah, and I think one of the things, and you even just said it in your question, right? Like qualifying this stuff as woo-woo,

and I think that's what has happened for so long, right? Is that like within the materials paradigm, anyone who entertains these ideas, right? That like a psychic, their psychic abilities, or like maybe mediums actually can tap into this, or maybe precognition or telepathy is real. That's been kind of thrown out as like, well, this person is gullible or silly or not smart or not educated.

And so people who have an experience, it almost feels like coming out of the closet in the fifties or something, right? Like you kind of test the waters like, oh, is this person going to accept this or be open to it? And if not, you're like, oh no, that didn't really happen. All right. That was just whatever coincidence. But I think for most people,

if they're really honest with themselves, they've had like the two most, I think, common forms of psi, which is like psy abilities, psychic abilities, if you will, are telephone telepathy, where you think about someone before they call. And it's like, how did that happen? And often you just wave it off as coincidence.

But what's fun is if you look back in history, like Mark Twain was obsessed with this and he called it mental telegraphy. And this idea that like people would sometimes send a letter on the exact same day, it was postmarked the exact same day, even though they might have not talked for five or seven years or something like that.

And wow, okay, so that's even like a more concrete example of this, right? Or precognitive dreams where you dream something and like it happens the next day. But the materialist paradigm has been so great at making anyone talking about this feel silly or stupid or uneducated that has kept these ideas like out of the scientific community,

out of I think culture, but it wasn't always that way. The materialist paradigm has only been raining for a few hundred years. So I think people ask all the time, what was this something we can evolve into? Is this where we're going? And my answer to that is no, I think it's always been there. I think we've always had these abilities.

And if you actually go talk to various native cultures, they would think, why are you even questioning this? Of course, this is a thing. Of course, humans are capable of this. In the telepathy tapes, especially in episode five and six, we look at animal telepathy and you have to ask the question, like, how does a school of fish turn on a dime together? Or you know, murmur of birds do that. What's going on there?

It seems like they share a field of consciousness. Or ant communities, you know, all these sort of cooperative, you know, ecosystems of life that seem to kind of behave in a way where it feels like there's a shared consciousness. Yeah. Yeah. I think, especially with now, with the quantum fields of research, quantum physics, there's been such a greater exploration

into this weird stuff, right? Like spooky action at a distance and entanglement and how these things happen. And also people looking into this anecdotal evidence around near-death experiences and things that we just can't explain, but seem to be popping up everywhere. And I think there's enough scientists now who have said,

look, there's more than we can explain. And there's actually been something called the Academy of Post-Materialist Science that has kind of sprung up for scientists that say, hey, like we need to live in a post-materialist society, I don't, or scientific world, I don't think materialism has all the answers. It sure has many, it has many, but it doesn't involve them.

But if you're gonna challenge, the core paradigm of science, you're gonna get resistance. And I can understand why, kind of what you're saying, or what you've observed to be happening is going to be met with, kind of like, it's not gonna be exactly welcome. But at the same time, like what is science if it's not the courage to like ask crazy questions,

like maybe the earth isn't flat, maybe we're not at the center of the universe, like these people were pariahs, you know, for proposing those ideas at the time. And then science proves it out gradually. So this is, you know, hard stuff to get your head around. It's not surprising that people are gonna be, you know, kind of knee jerk, you know,

sort of dismissive of the whole thing. But I think within that, when I think about it, you're talking about people whose brains are wired differently than ours. And that confronts us with our own assumptions about the way a brain should operate, what intelligence looks like or doesn't look like, and what reality is, right?

Like we assume that, you know, everything that we see is an accurate reflection of reality, but we have a very crude kind of like filtering system of perception that gives us a version of that, that we presume to be real, but obviously it's a poor facsimile of that. There's all kinds of stuff going on that we don't have the perceptual capacity

to perceive or make sense of. And that's for a reason so we can survive because it would be too overwhelming. But if you take somebody with a brain that's wired very differently, such that they can't feel their appendages or they don't know where they are in space and time, just like somebody who is blind,

who has to develop like echolocation or finally attune another sense, these are people who have, I would have to believe, a more robust connection with and relationship with consciousness because they're living in their minds. And so it makes sense to me intuitively that they would develop like, you know,

a different relationship with that than we have because we're just being stimulated in ways that they're not. And they have to find different ways to communicate. And we have such a reductive idea of what it means to be intelligent or to be human because you can speak, that means you're one thing, and if you can't, you're another thing.

But like language is so crude, right? Like we're like these mouth breathing creatures, but what is language other than, you know, kind of waves of energy that come out of our mouth that are received by somebody else, like that are, that's invisible. Right, yeah, it's when you start thinking about it, it's wild.

Yeah, like the more you think about it, the whole thing kind of unravels a little bit. Yeah, yeah, and you know, the things that have been fascinating to me, and I remember just being like, what? When I first started hearing this from multiple parents and teachers was that many people with apraxia really don't know they have a body

or can't feel their body or can't find their body. And it can take a lot of like physical therapy, like here's your fingers, here's your hand. And that's why in facilitated communication in the beginning, it was like really helpful to actually put some pressure on a hand and be like, here, this is what you're using. They can locate themselves.

So you can locate yourself. And for me, it's like, if someone needs to be touched a little bit to locate themselves so they can communicate, like great, help them communicate. But I think that idea of not being as in your body, then where are you? You're probably living more in a mental space, right?

You're probably more in this consciousness world. So when I started thinking about it in that way, I was able to wrap my head around it, touch more, because for most of us, right, we do have this associative boundary, you know? It's like, this is this person and that's this person and I'm me and because it's connected to our body and our like little thing, but if we're out of our body

and people are describing that, right? When they try, there's been so much research into psychedelics now, and people who have a wonderful guided psilocybin trip or something, and they realize we're all one, we're bigger and we're more than just our bodies. And it's kind of a lot, it's really reflective of what these individuals are talking about.

And I think the same thing happens when you look into the near-death experience research, these individuals who say they leave their body, they can see it, they can hear conversations happening, that stuff has been validated when they come back down and verified. But what they felt at the time was this like unbelievable oneness

and connection to everything, and ability to like be and see more places at once. And this living without fear and separation that is all about love. And those themes that come up over and over again when someone has a kind of a psychedelic experience or has a near death experience

or what the non-speakers have been saying to me and working with this is this overwhelming idea of at this consciousness field, right? It's all about love. It's about connection. It's about oneness. That tracks very closely with those psychedelic experiences which involve not so much like lighting up

other areas of the brain as much as turning off certain areas of the brain. Like the default mode network gets sort of reduced, right? And that allows a more expansive experience where you have that feeling of the dissolution of self and the oneness of everything. But I'm imagining like these individuals like arrive at that more naturally

and are in some version of that type of experience by default rather than through kind of, you know, pharmacological intervention. Yeah, yeah. And all I can go off of is what, you know, the individuals I've worked with have told me and that's exactly what they say, you know, they just have access to more

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to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash rich roll. So the criticism revolves around the touching, as far as I can tell, like correct me if I'm wrong, but the primary criticism is a function of the spelling where the nonverbal individual is somehow being manipulated either through touch or through facial expressions or some kind of, or moving the iPad around

so that the finger hits the letter that the person wants them to hit. And this is akin to some version of like mentalism where it's all a big magic trick and we can't rely upon any of this. When I listen to your show, like there's just so many instances with different people, none of whom seem to have all that much to gain.

Like they're not grifters who are trying to sell anything, but they are people who are emotionally connected to these individuals. And I do suspect that there's some level of like, everybody wants to feel like their child is special or that there's something more going on here. And so does that lend itself to a little bit of cognitive bias,

but that is kind of what's been reaped in your direction. Like this is all who we, in every instance, there's some level of manipulation that might not even be perceptible when you watch these videos, but is undoubtedly going on because there is no other explanation other than that for what we're seeing.

Yeah, and I think skepticism is important, and I think I walked into this as a skeptic as well. Like you have to, this like telepathy shouldn't be possible. It just shouldn't be possible, right? But one thing I think first has to be understood is spelling and what it means to have apraxia. And many individuals who are spelling are independent spellers, you know, like, like a keel is typing into, you know, a spelling device without being touched, you know, and,

and we would put like little marks on our monitors when we were filming to make sure the letter board wasn't moving and it's not moving this way in that way to spell a word. It's just, it's just simply not, simply not. But I do think there are important things for people to understand, which is when you are spelling, you need a communication partner who's kind of learned this technique because they're helping you support your kind of mind-body disconnect and helping you to try to basically support your motor function and motor mapping so you can get this out. So one thing is like your hand might get lost in space. And sometimes if you're spelling independently

and you've figured out those neural pathways, great. You don't need any support. But like for some people newer into spelling or maybe who just need a bit more support, you need someone maybe when they see you getting lost, they'll take the board all the way away and then bring it back again. So they see, okay, here's where I am.

Here's what's going on. Or sometimes for the motor planning, you just have to say, okay, go get it. Like now get the letter. So it's like your body has that initiative, like, okay, now I should go. And those supports are necessary to help with the spelling. And I use the metaphor sometimes,

it's like reading glasses, right? Like just cause you use a support to read, doesn't mean you can't read, you just need the support to help you. So I think understanding that about spelling is really, really helpful. But once you get to that point and you see So I think understanding that about spelling is really, really helpful. But once you get to that point and you see that so many of these individuals are spelling,

and especially like in the film where people can see it, it's gonna be really helpful, like on a typical keyboard, like a QWERTY keyboard, like you and I might use on a keyboard, like they're typing independently and Akil can do that too. Or you see the letter board isn't moving around and isn't being shifted, right? At that point, it's like, okay, well, what's happening if there isn't some manipulation to the spelling, which there's just not. And I think parents and teachers also really wanna make sure

these individuals are getting their pure voices out. That's really important, right? To make sure that that's happening. So when once you kind of overcome that hurdle and you understand what spelling is and why supports are necessary, especially in the early stages, then the next question is, okay, so did the scores of teachers and parents and therapists and rabbis and ministers and siblings and paraprofessionals

and principals and speech pathologists that participated in the telepathy tapes and that I've been talking to and who've been living in this world, are they all coming together in some global plan to trick the world? No, either they're paid actors or they're all lying, you know, or they're telling the truth. And I think when you meet them, there's just this beauty and earnestness and wanting to get to the bottom of this, wanting science to study this. Manisha, Akhil's mom always says, Akhil is the data.

If someone wants to look at this, go look at him. He's the data. So I just think that's so important that you have to kind of have a rational mind around this a little bit. And there's so many people involved in this world who are experiencing these things that you can either account for it or not.

And that's a choice people have to make. But I think it's a big leap to say they're all deceiving people intentionally. Yeah, this grand exploitation. I mean, throughout the series, there's just so many people that you're talking to. And many of them weren't even comfortable talking about it publicly.

They felt like maybe they were crazy for thinking that, and you give them this permission to kind of talk about it. That almost feels cathartic for them. It's not like, oh, you know, I'm here to, you know, convince people that like my child is the most special one in the universe. And there's sort of a relief to it. Like there's a joy and that feels pure, I guess.

But with respect to like spelling, just so like the audience is clear, like for somebody with praxia who can't really find their body, the touching piece, like in the training, like getting people, these individuals, like acclimated around this, like there does, you know, you gotta like kind of do that for a while.

Over time, then they start to develop a greater facility for it until you can kind of, then all you have to do is touch the shoulder and they kind of know what's going on. And then you can kind of not touch them at all anymore for some people. Actually, it's way more extreme, I think,

for people going through some of these big spelling programs where you cannot touch at all. Like you should not be touching at all. And so I think most spellers aren't being touched at all. There's no touch, you should not be touching. But they needed to learn how to do that initially, right? Well, it depends on the family and it depends on how deeply committed they are

to the spelling program they're in. But I think when it comes to school, major conversations, it's like, make sure there's no touch at all. And I think a lot of parents are like, I'm not touching, I'm not touching. That's pretty important. Like the no touch is important. I really care about the individuals

who are trapped in their body. And if it helps to be touched, if someone needs to be touched to start the process, great. I think we should do that. I think we should be giving everyone every support they need to start communicating. But I'd say the vast majority of spellers who are learning to spell in today's world

are not allowed to be touched at all. That is like a huge part of the spelling programs. Well, there's also great resistance within the quote unquote, like spelling community itself. There's kind of an institution around this that ironically is resistant to what you have to say. And, you know, this is a confusing thing. So can you shed some light on like

what's going on behind the scenes? Cause you would think these people, of all people would be enthusiastic about, what you've discovered and what that means in terms of like spelling and people with apraxia. Yeah, and I would say all of them know about this as well. I've had conversations with multiple spelling coaches, teachers, people even in part charge these spelling programs

who are like, we're fans of telepathy tapes, we know this is real, we know this is happening. However, we can't make a public stance on it because we're fighting to get spelling in schools. And there's this fear that if like telepathy gets brought into the equation, the people who are anti-spelling are gonna say, oh, look, they're being influenced in some way,

these aren't their thoughts, these are the thoughts of their parents. So therefore spelling isn't independent because there's some influence that's occurring through mind to mind communication. I mean, there does seem to be some kernel of rationality in that. Like, hey, we're just trying to get these people

to be able to communicate better. And the minute you bring up telepathy, and then it's like, wait, what are we, you know, you're gonna have people like upset, like, oh, this is crazy town. like, what are we doing here? Yeah, I mean, what we can kind of gauge things by is the emails that we have coming in, and like 99.9% of the stuff we're getting from parents,

teachers, speech pathologists is like, so thankful that this is finally out, that they've been experiencing it and that type of thing. This idea that mentioning telepathy is going to make it harder to get spelling to schools is making the assumption one that, you know, it's such a paradox because it's basically saying that if you hear someone's thoughts, you don't have your own, right? But I can hear someone's words to me, I can read someone's thoughts, it doesn't mean I don't have my own.

So why would, you know, hearing someone's thoughts mean you don't have your own? So that's where this weird leap has entered the equation. I don't know how to rectify that. What I do know is the sheer amount of parents and teachers saying it's so important for this to be out there and non-speakers most importantly, because I think people want to be seen and celebrated in their wholeness and in their completeness. And so to ignore a huge part of an individual in any circumstance, I don't think is a good

thing to do. I think truth can be extremely difficult, but I usually don't think it's the wrong way to go. I think acknowledging truth as difficult as it might be, it means changing our institutions. It means changing how we think about education. It means changing how we think and how we've treated these individuals for decades, which has been treating them as though they're not in there and not smart. But most importantly, what I hear from parents, teachers and the like is, you know, if these

individuals can hear thoughts, then the thoughts that you have about them can be really damaging. You know, I even think about just, I have little kids. If I were to be thinking or telling them all the time, I don't believe in you, I don't believe you're smart, you're making my life more difficult, whatever might be happening with parents. I mean, it can be a very difficult diagnosis. That can be so damning to an individual self, right? Their sense of purpose and self-worth.

So making sure that we can clean up our thoughts so these individuals can help regulate themselves in a positive way, I think is really important. And every non-speaker that I have worked with has been adamant, keep pushing this message out. This is important. The truth needs to get out. The truth needs to get out.

And so, if you believe that they're competent, then my service is to these individuals who really want the truth about themselves out there. And it might be hard for us to handle. It might require us to change how we think and our institutions and how we operate, but I fully believe in their competence and I fully want to help them get the truth out about themselves. The history of humanity is one in which

we don't take kindly or have much of an open mind when it comes to things that we don't understand or that don't look like something that is familiar, right? And when you take a nonverbal autistic individual who can't feel their appendages and is hirking and jerking all over the place and is making moaning sounds and all kinds of, it's like, it's easy to have

a lot of judgment about that or to develop a belief that like, well, they're not like us. And so obviously they don't have the same, they don't have the interior life that we have. Clearly that's not the case. We know now that many of these people are deeply intelligent and you're advancing this idea that they have capacities that we lack.

Might have these super intelligences which normalizes kind of how we relate to these individuals. It's a different frame. It provides a new frame, right? It's one thing to say like, oh, we know these examples of individuals like this who have a facility for math or photographic memory

or what is it, calendarism or whatever, when they can remember. Calendar calculation. Yeah, like they know what the weather is on every single day of their entire life, et cetera. It's another thing to take the leap to telepathy. Like that's asking a lot of people. So of course people are gonna be like, whoa, right?

Yeah, you know what's interesting? And you know, I love this is one of Dr. Diane Hennessey Powell's theories is that ESP should be considered a savant skill. And this is where she's coming from, is that science tends to accept that some of these skills that we can't explain where they come from, right? Like you might be really great at math or music or language

or calendar computation, like you noted, but you know, Savant's skill, right? Is you haven't been exposed to it or trained in this, yet you have like an expert level of knowledge. Well, she was like, okay, science accepts these, even though we can't necessarily explain these. And what's even more fascinating is there's, you know, accidental or acquired Savants

where someone has a head injury and suddenly they can see math everywhere or they have a head injury and suddenly can play the piano like a full blown composer when they couldn't prior. So we accept that these gifts can come, even though you should have no reason to know them. So her, I think, you know, idea is like ESP should be considered a savant skill.

We have no idea how these gifts are possible or where, how someone gets the knowledge, but it just like these other savant skills, we also can't explain that. Savantism for me is kind of the way in to getting your head around this. Because when you see these individuals, a young person who can just play Beethoven

without having been trained or the person who, like I know there's that guy who had an accident and a head trauma or whatever, and then he could do incredible math, et cetera. There's so many stories like this. We have zero explanation for how this happens. To your point, we accept it as true, but science has no way of explaining it

other than, oh, well, well, this is, but there's no extrapolation on that. Like, well, should we try to figure out why this might be the case? Like, we're just sort of astounded by these things and the inquiry seems to stop there. And again, this is something where upending the materialism pyramid kind of allows you to, you know,

understand that there might be something more going on. And you have all these examples in the docu-series, particularly with language, right? Like talk about that a little bit. Yeah, and you know, I think some of the best cases to your point of like, let's remove parents who might wanna attach, my kid is special, which I think, again, I wanna say none of the parents that I've worked with

in any way I think are doing that. I think they all are just so grounded. But anyway, one of the best examples of this was a individual, a little girl in Wisconsin, and she was not with her mom. She was with her spelling coach and two other people, I think a paraprofessional. It was like three people in a kind of educational atmosphere.

And she started spelling in Portuguese one day. And then she was also able to spell in Spanish, and it was like, what? And had never been- Exposed to either one. And her mom and dad don't speak Spanish or Portuguese. And you know, she lives in, you know, outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. So not like a huge, you know, Spanish or Portuguese speaking population.

And you know, it was a bit of a mystery as to how this is possible. And one of the things I really enjoyed is when that episode came out, I was getting so many emails, not just from new families, but also some of the families I met saying, oh, my kid does that too. Or did you not know blank and blank blank can do this? Like John Paul can speak multiple languages. And I was like, what? No, you never told me that.

So it felt as though this ability to communicate or understand or spell different languages is like one of these, again, what I would call spiritual gifts. And one of the things that was super interesting to me was when I first met Mia, who was the young girl and the first non-speaking individual I'd ever met, first person I'd ever see kind of demonstrate telepathy. Before we did our tests, I met her family, we had dinner after they arrived, it was lovely. And even at the table there,

she was kind of doing some like homespun telepathy. I was like, what am I thinking of? And she would do it and spell it out. But one of the things that was most amazing is I remember asking her a question and we had a translator there because the whole family speaks Spanish except for the aunt.

So I was asking a question and waiting for the translator to translate it. But I think the translator was ordering or something. So I asked the question and immediately Mia starts writing back the answer in English. And then we all were just marveled, like how did she write it back in English? She wrote back the answer in English.

And it was just wild. So I'd seen this for myself, this like language ability. I certainly can't explain it. I'm not a scientist. What do you make of it? Well, okay. So, you know, again, like I've been banging my head against the wall for years,

trying to figure out what a lot of this means. And a few neuroscientists that I've talked to have a theory around consciousness that I was able to really, it was able to help me understand this. So the idea is, it's like, if you think of our brains, kind of like a TV set, right? Or maybe a better metaphor is like a smartphone.

Like your brain might have certain apps that mine don't, right? I have certain apps that you don't, but either way, like it doesn't work without the signal. Like you have to have a signal coming in from somewhere else and that will animate the phone. And if the phone is broken, it's not gonna work too well, right?

But maybe if it breaks a certain way, like it will work better. Like, you know, so, but you need both to animate like a functioning operational, amazing experience with this phone or brain. And so from that point of view, it makes sense because what if you have a head injury and you're able to better tap into a signal

because maybe one of the safeguards in our brain that keeps us from being overflow, you know, over flooded with information is turned off. Yeah. Right. So that idea that consciousness is something we tap into and not something that we generate helped me make sense of all of this. Right. So you might have certain apps on this phone

that prevent the other apps from working as well as they could. So if you delete those apps from your phone, maybe the other apps work better, right? And give this different frame. Yeah, yeah. This is fucking crazy shit. It's crazy. You know that, right?

Do you ever like go, wait, what am I talking about? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it is wild to think about all of it is wild, but I think the thing that like, you can't unsee these gifts, if you will, at work. And once you sit next to, I mean, now at this point, it's been scores of individuals and talking to scores of teachers and parents

who are like, this is happening, and you see the telepathy, it's just, you can't unsee it. So then you just have to try to explain it. And that's where I'm at right now. And I think a lot of scientists and the parents are at too, it's just like, well, how do you explain this? Yeah, again, like back to me being molder and wanting to believe, but also, okay,

maybe there's some fuckery going on in these experiments. Like I wasn't there, I don't know. And that guy at McGill, he's got a lot of choice words about what's happening here. But the savannahism, that's the thing where it's like, there's no getting around it, right? And we just kind of go, oh yeah, well, yeah, but don't make too much of that.

But you're like, wait a minute, hold on. And to your point about animals, bird migration patterns, and then the work of Rupert Sheldrake, you know, who's, he's like the OG, right? Like he was looking at this stuff for a long time, you know, many decades ago. Can I share his story?

Yeah, please do. Like explain who he is and why he's important to this narrative. Right, I think it's important that Diane Honey-Sipal, you know, we started this research around telepathy and non-speakers, but there was someone right before her, Bernie Rimland, who'd also said, look, I think ESP is a gift in some autistic people. So that's kind of been like valied around for a while. But beyond that, I started looking at other people who'd been studying telepathy because I wanted again to understand what this is and how this could

be possible. Like, are there a lot of people out there who are studying it? Yeah, there's definitely- Do they have to do it kind of quietly or they've already been, you know, kind of pilloried by the institutions? I think what's been really damning to scientists is not being able to have a freedom of inquiry.

I mean, that should be like the baseline for science, right? You're free to ask any question, explore where it takes you, look at the research, have it peer reviewed, have it replicated, does it bear out? If it bears out, wow, let's do more research. And so I think what's been happening with a lot of scientists is they get punished for even asking the question.

But then there's the rebels who have been like, no, I'm going to ask this question and follow it. There's like the CIA also, right? Like the men who stare at goats and all that kind of stuff. And we can talk about that for sure in a second. So Rupert Sheldrake, he's a biologist from Cambridge University. I mean, that's a very prestigious school.

He's an incredibly smart man. And I loved his story about how he fell into this. He didn't believe in telepathy or that psi abilities could be real. He was in the tea room at Cambridge and there was, I think he was a young graduate student or something at this point, I don't exactly remember, but I know he was early in his career.

And there was a scientist at the school, Sir Rudolph Peters. So he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his contributions to the scientific field within England. So this is a very prestigious professor. And Rupert was in the tea room with Sir Rudolph Peters, who said, I have just come across a blind boy who was able to read an eye chart when his mother was looking at it.

And that's fascinating. Well, how was that possible? And it sounds very similar to what we're talking about right now in this interview. Sir Rudolph Peters thought, well, this is fascinating. It seems like either this boy's seeing through his mother's eyes or somehow has a telepathic link. So they ended up doing like a telepathy test,

I think where they put them in rooms far apart and they did like a telepathy experiment between the two and it was statistically relevant. It was pretty remarkable. And that changed Rupert's life. It changed his perspective and it changed the questions he was asking. So he has written a ton of books on animal telepathy

in particular, the sense of being stared at, testing whether or not dogs know when their owners are coming home. And- Yeah, explain that one. This is my favorite study. Yeah, it's quite wonderful because I think a lot of us who are animal lovers have had that feeling, right? That your animal knows what's going on.

And so he tested, they would page, I think this is before the part time of cell phones, they would page an animal owner when it was time to head home. And they would have them take different routes, different cars, taxis, whatever it be, so that the dog wasn't used to the sound of the engine or the rumble of this particular gravel on the road. And they would make sure that person was coming home at different times. So when they did this experiment, they were trying to account for all these variables. And a statistically relevant amount of cases, the dog would come and wait by the door the

second that their owner's mental state was headed home when they were going home. And of course, there's a few moments where a car got a flat tire or someone got called back into work. And when that happened, they had the cameras up, the dog would go back and lie down and go back to, you know, whatever it was sleeping. And then if the owner turned their mind toward coming home again, the dog would come back up and wait. And so that was a really enjoyable study.

And it was statistically relevant in dogs and even in some cats, which I thought was great. So he's been studying this for a long time. And one thing that he postulated that really helped get my mind around this is that the mind has a mental field. And this is not uncommon in science, right? We know that the earth has a gravitational field. You can't see it, you know it's there,

you know it's powerful. You know the magnet has a magnetic field. Electromagnetic field, yeah. We don't see the magnetic see it, you know it's there, you know it's powerful, you know the magnet has a magnetic field. Electromagnetic field. Yeah, we don't see the magnetic field, but we know it's there, we know it's powerful. And so why wouldn't the, I mean, it's not an uncommon idea to think that our brain might have a mental field that extends outside of us,

that might help us to understand when we're being stared at or overlap with someone when it comes to telepathy or precognition or that type of thing. Yeah, we do have that intuition when somebody is behind us looking at us, don't we? It's pretty undeniable. We're dismissive of it, but I think we can all relate to that.

I just know I have two big dogs, our yard is fenced. Our dogs are out. They just kind of like roam around out in the yard. And when I'm driving home, I have an big dogs, our yard is fenced. Our dogs are out. They just kind of like roam around out in the yard. And when I'm driving home, I have an electric car, doesn't make any noise at all. And if I have the windows down, as I get close to our driveway, well before anybody can see anything,

the dogs are like right at the gate and they're barking like every time. Like they know when I'm coming. And I'm like, they have this incredible sense of smell. Maybe they can smell something about it. I don't know what it is, but like I've had my version of that experience. Yeah.

And like for me, I'd be like, I wouldn't trust that that's telepathy or something unless you were to try it in different cars. I never thought that much about it. But like, well, no, it could be, but I'm saying like, if you test it in different cars, right? You test it coming home a different way. You test it putting on, but I'm saying like, if you test it in different cars, right? You test it coming home a different way. You test it putting on like, I don't know,

trying to get like your smell off your body, like try everything you can. And if it's still working, then there's something going on. Like, I think that's so important that like, no one should take this off at face value. I mean, that's ridiculous to take it at face value. We're not gonna advance anything. We're not gonna become smarter as a human race.

We're not gonna become more educated or more thoughtful about become smarter as a human race. We're not gonna become more educated or more thoughtful about anything if we just take any of this at face value. Like you have to ask the questions. You have to do the science. You have to research it. You have to peer review it. You have to analyze it.

And I think, I mean, that's been my whole hope with the Telepathy Tapes podcast is just to try to get research funded for these scientists where so often it's hard to get a grant to study ESP or telepathy or clairvoyance because it has been historically seen as woo woo or impossible. Well, it should be hard to get a grant

because it's a big leap, right? So you better have an incredibly well-constructed study in order to put yourself in a position where that even begins to make sense. But if it's well-constructed, it doesn't seem fair, right? That researchers should be like shut down before they even get a chance to do it. What is the ultimate experiment

that you would like to see constructed? Like if funding wasn't an issue and you could have any of the experts or scientists of your choice to conduct that bulletproof experiment that would put all of the kind of hand wringing to rest. Yeah, yeah, okay. So I think this is a great question. And it's one of the hopes that we're gonna try to tackle

in the film is doing a few telepathy experiments. So much has come up around this, right? Is that like we are being emailed by a lot of scientists and they all have differing opinions of like how to make this airtight. Like if the parent needs to be in the room to help the child stay regulated, can we just put like white noise in their ears so they can't hear any audible cues, right? Or can't see the parent themselves. Or some people have said, wait, who cares if the kid is being touched? Like we can measure if the parent is like doing some sort of thing with their hand or putting Morse code in, if touch is helping them, isn't telepathy

still cool if they're being touched? Like who's deciding telepathy doesn't count if you're not being touched? So scientists are kind of in disagreement with themselves. So what we're going to do in the film is actually kind of bring a round table of scientists together, but also with the non-speakers because they have a right to be in this conversation, of course, this is them and their experiments as well, to talk about, okay, what's possible with the sense of maybe having an extreme level of autism

and being really sensitive to different environments or different things, like what's possible that feels comfortable for them and what's gonna advance the science. And then we hope to construct like two to three studies around that. I'm not doing the studies, I'm relying on brilliant scientists to advance the science. And then we hope to construct like two to three studies around that. I'm not doing the studies. I'm relying on brilliant scientists to help with this.

And I know Dr. Diane Powell is doing some research on her own that's getting ready to be peer reviewed and, you know, through the University of Arizona that she thinks is going to be really airtight. And so I'm trying to figure out if they'll be ready to film for the movie or not. Either way, she thinks that this particular test, which I don't know if I'm privy to, yeah, if I can give the details

of, will be pretty conclusive, which is great. But then I've had some very interesting conversations with the parents as well. OK, so we were planning to do a big experiment in a classroom. And a bunch of the parents for the non-speakers in this classroom were like, yep, every single kid who was participating was like, the parent was like, yes, they're telepathic. Yes, they can do this.

They can also remote view. They have precognition, like test anything. You pretty much be able to see it all. So these were really easy to see on the fly. You walk in a classroom, it's easy to see. So we started being like, okay, well, let's separate rooms and let's separate this and let's do this. And adding more and more, you know, kind of like parameters

around how to make this air tight. And it started really stressing out a lot of the non-speakers where they were able to do it, but it started becoming like a lot of pressure, a ton of pressure. And then the question was raised to me, which was, you know, why can't scientists just come into the field the way that Jane Goodall would go into the jungle

and study chimps to understand their communication and their culture and whatever. Or if you're studying fireflies or lightning bugs, in Vietnam or something that all light up at the same time, you wouldn't necessarily bring them into a lab, you'd go watch them in their natural habitat. So quite a few parents have said, can't we just have these people take off their lab coats,

walk into our living room and do the experiments in a way that's just like here? Because if they just come into the classroom, come into the house, you'll see it. You'll see it every time if you're open-minded. Yeah, I mean, the problem with that is then you're not controlling for all the variables. And there's all these subtle manipulations

that could be taking place that are influencing the answers and the questioning and whatnot. So if your goal is really to, you know, create a bulletproof situation that will sufficiently rebut all of the criticism, that becomes problematic. I don't think so, because you can still put those parameters in a house. And if this is really real, why can't it take place in a clinical Skinner box type environment? Well, I don't think that's true that you can't it take place in a clinical skinner box type environment?

Well, I don't think that's true that you can't have those parameters in a house because you could have white noise headphones, you could have a divider, a partition, you can make sure that they can't see each other. So I just think it's really important that, I mean, the non-speaking individuals are human beings, you know, and I think it needs to feel comfortable for them.

But the reflectability aspect of it, like would then come up, would it not? Oh, I don't think so, because I think you could have replicated two or three times, you know, there could be scientists there and researchers there. It's not like waiting for a unicorn to appear. It's very easy to see.

I think for any individual that I've met that I've been in communication with around this, it's repeatable over and over and over again, as many times as he wants to be. But it's also something that is fragile in that like it doesn't work for everybody all the time. Like they're, oh, well, this person can do it with their mother, but not with their father.

And if the energy is bad or they're like in a certain state, like the field gets interrupted, like all of those kinds of things are true and real as well, yes. Yeah, and I think that that's important, right? Like what most non-speakers I've been in contact with will say is that their telepathic link is strong with, you know, a few people. So it might be this teacher, it could be a sibling.

It could be, I mean, that's often a sibling, a parent. It might be both parents. So I think that the question, right, is finding who they're most telepathic with and doing the test with that person and repeating it with that person. That makes sense, right? And then making sure that who is seeing the cue

is not able to be, you know, obviously visually or physically or audibly influencing the speller. I think all that is pretty easy to achieve, with the right funding and just having the resources there to do it. So I think we'll be able to test this out pretty easily in the film. And I also think that more researchers are now willing

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Yeah, for sure. I mean, that happens all the time. I'm like listening to you and I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I'm like, wait a minute. Yeah. Like we're just way off the reservation here. Yeah, I mean, and that's the thing is like, I've learned for a while, I'd say for the first three years,

I was always operating on the baseline of like, okay, this can't be possible. Like maybe it's the first year and a half, like this, what's the loophole? Like, how can this be catering to the skeptic in the room? I mean, that was like kind of my baseline. And then it just got to the point where I'd seen it so many times that it's like, I have to operate

from the perspective that this is true. So to talk about it with me. And I've heard you talk about how it just became like routine, like it wasn't exciting anymore because you had seen it so many times, which is wild. Yeah, in fact, there was a gentleman, Dr. Jeff Tarrant, who was doing the QEG scans and three of the studies we did. Like, and again, like the studies I was doing,

I'm not a scientist. Like I didn't have like, oh, we don't have like Faraday cages and like partitions. I was going out with a film crew to decide if I should put my reputation, my money, my time behind this project. Like I just needed to know, is this worth it? Is this, is all of this worth it?

It will only be worth it if it's true. So that's why, you know, the experiments I was doing that we were covering the telepathy tapes was just my like proof of concept work, right? But for some of this, I did bring a QEG specialist, his name is Jeff Tarrant, to do brain scans. And so he was witnessing all this as an outsider. And it's really fun to hear him talk about it,

because he will know. We were really cautious about covering screens and doing all this and having partitions and making sure no one could see it. And I have loaded up the raw data for various scientists to watch the tests from all the camera angles so they can write their own papers about it. So I think there's like four or five scientists who have access to all my raw data right now.

And you know, it's, you hear us in the raw data being like, oh, did she see it? We have to do it over. We didn't see it. Okay. Hit that three more times to make sure that that, you know, we're always trying to muddle it up to make sure there's no possible way that there could be cheating. So Jeff really talks about observing all that, which I love, but then one of the things

he talked about as well is how pretty quickly after seeing the telepathy in these tests that we were doing 10, 15, 20 times in a row, being accurate, it was just like, all right, let's go to lunch. Like it did just become second nature after a while. You just normalized through the whole thing. And now it is normal to me.

It's like the water in which you're swimming. I think if you're a part of these families and classrooms where this has demonstrated itself to be true, which is quite a few. Yeah. I mean, imagine traveling back in time and going to the great library at Alexandria in Egypt and telling the librarian like, my library is better than yours.

And guess what? It's invisible. It's in the ether. It doesn't actually exist anywhere in three dimensions but it's fully accessible if you have a thing that can pull the frequency in. It's called the internet. And it gives you access to like everything.

Like that would just be unfathomable, right? And this is something like, oh yeah, this is just part of our life. It's not really a mystery. We have science to, science created it. We can make sense of it and the like, but that would just rewrite that person's notion of like what is real and what isn't.

Right, yeah. And that notion has been completely rewritten for me. And I think, again, like you talk to the parents, the teachers, the paraprofessionals, the speech pathologists, the occupational therapists who've witnessed this over and over and over again. And it's not a question for any of us of like, if it's happening, it's just why and how.

And just people take it seriously and just answer these questions. Like everyone wants to know how and why and what it means. And that's the world in which I'm now swimming. So it's kind of, for me, it's been a transformation of terror around talking about it. Like super nervous to talk about it when I was working on my other films or, you know,

working on projects or even with family members, friends, being so nervous about being judged, being judged for believing it, being, and then it got to a point where it's like, I can't stop, I have to acknowledge what I'm seeing here. And I just have to just surrender to the fact that like, with everything I've thrown at this to try to point, to find a hole or a loophole, it's real.

And I think that's where the parents are. And so now I'm at the point where it's like, someone can be skeptical and they don't have to believe it. That's fine. You can't reach everyone. But like, we all know our own truth, right? Like if you saw a rhinoceros and no one had ever seen one, you came back and said,

no, there's these huge animals with a horn on their head and they look like a dinosaur, but they're not, blah, blah, like someone could tell you that's not true. It doesn't exist. But if you saw it, like like what are you gonna do? Yeah, I'm a child of the seventies. You know, like when I grew up, when I was a kid, like ESP, like all we talked about was ESP all the time.

There was a TV show called, that's incredible. Like I'm older than you, you wouldn't remember, but it was like a network TV show. And they would just have, like it would just be all paranormal stuff all the time. So I kind of grew up in an era where, you know, me and my friends, that's what we talked about. And then that kind of went away, you know,

other than in the weird kind of like tabloids at the supermarket about UFOs and aliens and stuff. And maybe that's why it's like, that's part of like, I wanna believe like my whole life, you know, and you make such a compelling case. And then I'm like, yeah, but like, am I just being, you know, like she's got me right where she wants me. But time and time again, there's so many examples,

like the stories of the parents and the kids where it's not just like, hey, you know, what's the word I'm thinking of? It's like, I know my kid likes sweets. And so when I come home from the grocery store, like I have to hide them in this special place. And the kid always knows where it is. Cause the kid is like either seeing through

the mother's eyes or vibrating on that frequency. Like you have a bunch of stories like that too. Well, yeah. I mean, and those, again, like the anecdotal stories from parents are really fascinating. It's all anecdote, but like it kind of adds up after a while. Because that was a funny thing that parents would say,

it was like, I would watch a show or a movie and my child would be like downstairs with their earplugs on watching a totally different thing on YouTube. And I'd go find them, I'd be like, you not believe what I just read or what I just watched. And the child would be like, oh yeah, blah, blah, blah, and like completely reveal all the plot lines

or whatever was happening, or one individual who knew like the characters and plot points in a book. I forgot if it was like The Hobbit or Harry Potter or what it was. And the mom was like, how? We've never read that to you. And she was like, no, he was like, no, what my sister did.

And I was like hearing her as she read it. And I know all the facts about these books. That's just wild. But one of my favorite calls around this was for the film, we're filming a young individual in Atlanta who's not learned a spell yet because we want to show the whole process of like someone who's completely trapped inside,

who learns to communicate and then see what happens on the backend. And I started meeting this family long before the telepathy tapes was out. I didn't know if she really knew about the telepathy. So I felt completely bonkers asking her on a Zoom call, first meeting her, is there any way her son might be telepathic? I mean, how stupid do you feel asking that to someone you've never met?

And she was like, yeah. And I was like, oh, okay, why do you say that? And she's like, well, you know, he'll lick the salt off of the chips. So we started putting locks on all of our snack cabinets. And the second I think of where the key is, he's down there and he's grabbing the key and unlocking it. So then we've changed the key locks with like combination locks.

And sometimes I'll be thinking, oh, I'm gonna go get that. Like, what's the combination again? And the second I think about the combination, he's doing it. And she's like, or if I give him a directive in my head at night, like he'll be bouncing on his bed and I'm trying to sleep and I'll say, stop bouncing on your bed, he'll stop.

So she's like, there's been enough experiences in my life or I'll be craving orange juice or something and all of a sudden he'll come into the room with the cold jug of orange juice, where she's like, it's just uncanny. And I've always just thought, oh, we're super duper duper connected. But she's like, I never would have thought of it

as like the T word, right? All of the test subjects are young. They're all like teens or, you know, kind of young people. And I was wondering why there aren't any adults or older people as part of this. Yeah, I mean, they are older now. I think in the film now, a lot of them are 22, 25, 28, 32.

A 65 year old or a 40 year old. Yeah, I haven't met those people. I mean, I think what's so awful to actually think about what's happened, I think to so many non-speakers of previous generations, I think so often they've been put into institutions. And I don't wanna judge parents. I mean, it can be extremely difficult.

And sometimes you have absolutely no options, right? You have no support, you have to work. It's like, I want to be super compassionate to what parents are going through. But I also think for a lot of those individuals that were institutionalized, the lifespan of people who are labeled severely autistic and have apraxia is much, much less than ours.

And for a lot of those people, spelling, learning to spell, learning to communicate was just simply not even an option. So I think spelling, let's say, it really came about in the nineties is when facilitated communication first was, you know, hit the scene and these other spelling techniques which require no touch came out later, right? And early off and stuff. So if you think about that, most of the people who are spelling to communicate, whose parents

discovered this in a concrete way about their kids, it's because they're spelling. And those people are gonna be in a younger bracket, just due to when spelling and this idea of presuming competence hit our social ether. So we've sort of hit an inflection point where at least we're caring for the younger generation of these people in a different way

that then creates openness for the bond between parent and child such that like these ideas are starting to like percolate up. Yeah. This is essentially what you're saying. Yeah, for sure. We gotta talk about the hill. Okay.

Explain what the hill is. Yeah, and this was another thing that was just such a mystery. And I didn't know how to formulate an opinion on it at first. So it wasn't until I met Katie Asher in Houston, who are based in Atlanta, and they told me that Houston said he can telepathically kind of like enter a chat room, if you will,

for lack of a better word, with other non-speakers, that they can find each other through telepathy and hang out. And they can do this on an individual thing, but that there's also this like big group chat or hangout. And he named it, Houston named it the talk on the hill. And so when I first heard this, I couldn't dismiss it because I just watched Houston do like 20 telepathy tests,

but, or more, but it was pretty wild. And do like 20 telepathy tests or more, but it was pretty wild. And then I met one of his really good friends, John Paul. And while I was at the house, John Paul went to the hill and his mom brought me upstairs and John Paul had put all these pillows on his head to block out all the sounds and noises to the house to really concentrate.

And she's like, he does this. Like when he comes home from school, he can be there for hours. Sometimes he's laughing, sometimes he's crying. And he talks about going to this hill, this group chat. And he has a girlfriend, Lily, and they both will go there and communicate. And sometimes like instantaneously at the same house,

they'll come off the hill and be like, I wanna go see the other one or say the same thing. And so when I was leaving Atlanta after first experiencing this, I thought, okay, maybe this is like an Atlanta thing, and I didn't know how to explain it, but I just knew what the parents were saying to me, which is like, they don't have to be in the same zip code,

they don't have to be in the same room, they can do this. And it was astounding. And I just like put it into a bucket in my brain of like, I don't know what to make of this. I can't discount it because the parents seem so clear that this is happening. The non-speakers are so solid in saying that they do this. So it's just gonna sit there and I can't make a judgment.

Before the Sloppy Dames came out, before any mention of Hill was out there, I met a minister in Arizona. And he has like one of the largest youth ministries for special needs kids in the country. And I got connected with him because he was experiencing telepathy and precognition in his non-speaking ministry kids and was baffled

and wanted to write a book about it and didn't know what this was. And we were talking about it and we had a really animated zoom call where I'm like, you're not alone. This is just so you know, this has been reported on before. And then he kept trying to tell me things that like I might not know about.

And one of the things he talked about was the Hill. And he's like, you know, one of the boys I'm closest to my group talks about this place called the Hill. And I've actually heard him asking other kids from other youth groups in other states about the Hill. And he's like, do you know what that is? And you know, it was just like, wow. Called the hill. I mean, yeah, called the hill.

And it like shook me to my core. And then I remember talking to a teacher again, who I met later in the version, telepathy tapes weren't out yet. And she said, there's individuals in my classroom who talk about going to the hill. And she's like, but they seem to have different roles there or go there for different reasons.

One wants to talk about bee colonies and one wants to talk about this. And there's people from, I think she said like Finland that they like to talk to and different countries. And I was like, what? And so there were people from pockets who didn't know each other, who were talking about this place. And then I met another teacher and she was saying, it's not only that they talk about

the hill, but often they'll start sharing words that like we don't use that I've never heard, but they'll start, and she's like, spellers that I teach that don't know each other and aren't in the same class or aren't in the same session will start using certain words. Like one word was ploynk, which means play, that she's like, they all said that they talk about

ploynk on the hill. And these individuals who didn't know each other were using the same word. And she's like, what do you make of that? And I was like, I have no idea. I mean, some of this, I just, I can't make, I don't know what to make of it. I don't know how to answer it.

It's wild. But how do you account for it when people in pockets who don't know each other are all saying the same thing? Yeah, well, either everybody's lying and made it up, or they've all kind of been on the same, you know, real internet chat room where this was discussed and, you know, there's some kind of been on the same real internet chat room where this was discussed and there's some kind of consensus amongst this community to like adopt this idea,

which I mean, come on, like really? Or there's something real and legitimate about this that gets to the nature of consciousness itself and also sort of upends the idea that telepathy is like a peer to peer thing. Like I am volleying my consciousness to you and you back to me in that materialist way, but is rather this field that you can kind of tap into

and enter as a collective, right? It's just like, again, like I wanna believe, like it's so crazy. Like, you know. It is so wild. Like, and I remember the day I first met John Paul and he was on the Hill, he was talking about how kind of like dysregulated

he was feeling, because there were so many people on the Hill that day. And we wrote like how many and he said thousands. And we were like, why are there so many? And he's like, everyone wants to talk about the project, like the documentary, like they're excited that the word is getting out. And I have so many and he's like, everyone wants to talk about the project, like the documentary, like they're excited that the word is getting out. And I have that, like I play that for myself quite a bit.

One, because John Paul has since passed away, but also just this idea of that, like, was there really this collective excitement about this truth getting out? Like, that's the only thing that will keep me moving forward because this is a really weird path to be walking down. The relationship between John Paul and his girlfriend also is super interesting in that it gets to

not only the rich interior emotional lives of these people, but also kind of like the higher consciousness with which they approach their relationship that gets at this idea of like love in a more expansive way then we kind of define it and think about it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, the relationship was beautiful and I think it was as much part of the world.

Like they would physically kind of like be together and go on their dates, you know, but also it was telepathic from both of their accounts that they were able to communicate anytime, any place, mind to mind. And to know someone in that way, I mean, how intimate. Like, yeah, the intimacy of having merged consciousness, like is a level of intimacy that we,

I don't think that we can fathom. So you can make the argument that they had a deeper and more profound love than we kind of experience in our three-dimensional lives. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I don't wanna be a spoiler. People should listen to all nine episodes in order. But I think one of the things that I think made the series so meaningful to the grief community that I was not expecting at all.

This has really become, the amount of emails we're getting from people who are grieving has been really, really powerful. This idea that after John Paul passed, he was still able to communicate with people on the Hill and communicate with people telepathically, which was so astounding. Yeah. So you start with like, hey, look,

these people are telepathic and hey, not for nothing. Like they go to the hill and there's a shared consciousness and maybe everything we think about death isn't real. And oh yeah, our whole scientific paradigm based on materialism is upside down. Yeah. Do you get like crazy hate mail? Not really.

Has anybody like threatened you or anything like that? I mean, every once, but it's so rare. I mean, I had to hire two assistants to go through the mail and they can't even keep up. Most of it is just like me too, me too, their own personal stories, deep accounts of their own experiences with their own non-speaking

children. A lot of emails from speaking autistic individuals who've said, hey, this was my experience as well. Like there is a heightened awareness. I have these abilities, but they were gaslit out of me. And so I don't talk about them, you know, every once in a while, but seldom we'll get something that's like mean-spirited, you know? But I think the only thing that can keep you

on your ship righted is just the knowing that like why you're doing this and what it's for and that it's truth. I mean, for me it's truth, cause it's something that we've seen and the best thing that's happened in my life, I'd say in the past like few months, is bringing on staff to start helping with the film forever.

It was just me in this world with the families, you know, and Dr. Powell, when she did her tests and stuff, but like, knows it. And so now having producers and associate producers experiencing the stuff, seeing the stuff, hopping on a Zoom call where suddenly a non-speaker knows their name, knows their kid's names, knows this, knows that, like,

and they are like, what just happened? Because they're just coming at it from, you know. They're seeing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then there's been so many accounts of my kid can do this too, blah, blah, blah, and videos that have been so sounding that I'm like, I can't, I don't even have the bandwidth right now

to go meet these individuals and film it, but one of my assistants is gonna go out now and start meeting some of these individuals and film the telepathy tests and try to get more of the footage or even if it's just for a podcast episode. So it's been beautiful to watch other people have their world completely shifted

because walking into this hiring process, I was like, I don't know what they believe. I don't know where they stand on this process, but they're gonna soon see it for themselves. And that's been really fun. So you're a documentary filmmaker, you've made a bunch of films, you're well known in that area.

And now you're making the documentary film version of the telepathy tapes, while you've already made an audio document. Why did you begin with an audio documentary? Why didn't you just make, do what you know how to do and come out of the gate with a film documentary? Yeah, I mean, this is one of my favorite stories, I think of my life, because it just,

just shows how you never know what's gonna happen, right? So of course I wanted to make this a documentary first and start filming it as a feature and putting a lot of time and effort and energy into making sure this was real, that I could put my mind, my heart, my reputation, my money behind it. I started seeing that this was a huge world, way bigger than something I could ever put into a feature documentary. So I started talking to different production companies, partnered with one and we took it out to pitch as a docu-series, a four-part docu-series.

We took it all around town, pitched it to various networks and streamers. And it was met with often tears, people saying like, this is such an incredible story, pitch, we haven't heard this before, we love it, we love it, we love it. And we got nos across the board. It didn't fit the mandate, what was it?

It's not paranormal, it's not high celebrity, it's not true crime, it's not family necessarily. It's like, what was this? It didn't fit the mandate, what was it? It's not paranormal, it's not high celebrity, it's not true crime, it's not family necessarily, it's like, what was this? It didn't fit the algorithm. And my heart was like broken after that happened because I felt like this was the biggest news in the world. And I've worked on five previous feature films, I've all found them to be important,

but I didn't think it was like the biggest news in the world. This one I felt, this is different, this is so important. And how could no one see that? And then it's just, I went through my own cognitive dissonance of like, could I be wrong or does no one care? Like, am I just do not have my pulse

on anything that's important? Like what's wrong? And it felt pretty devastated. Cause when you get a no and you know how much money, you know, making a film takes. And so I was just like, I can't get this out. There's no possible way. There was just that kind of voice And so I was just like, I can't get this out. There's no possible way.

There's just that kind of voice in my head that was like, but you could make a podcast. And then it just kind of was like screaming at me one day, which is like, you don't need anyone. Just get it out there. You don't need someone to green light it, green light yourself. And I remember like running downstairs like, I'm making a podcast, you know? And like my whole family's like, you know how to make a podcast? And even talking to the families,

a lot of them were like, that's a terrible idea, Kai. You know, spelling is stigmatized, telepathy is stigmatized. You have to see both to believe them. You can't do this with just audio. You have to see it to believe it. And my mind is like, but this could be like the big nine hour pitch to the world. Someone will hopefully hear it and fund the documentary.

Like this is the pitch. And like, that was my hope, that it would get to like the right ears somehow. I did not anticipate that the podcast would become, you know, a global sensation. Right, right, right. That never occurred to me. It's wild.

And now it is the series, the podcast series is the ultimate pitch for the documentary because of how widely it's been received. But it's not surprising that you would know how to do a podcast like this because you're a storyteller and it's basically, you're making a documentary just without the visual part. Once I started it, I was like,

this is so much easier than making documentary. You don't have to have visuals, which is like just the audio storytelling. Plus you can insert yourself as like a VO, like the glue. So for me, I thought, wow, this like medium, things we've seen online or emails we've gotten have been people saying like, I've had a pull of my car and just start crying, you know?

And I was like, I don't know if that happens if you're watching television next to someone. It's different when you're processing something individually. Yeah, it's a profoundly parasocial relationship that you develop with your audience. And, you know, I had the same experience. Like I was very moved by aspects of the story in a way that maybe I wouldn't have been just watching it

on a screen in my house. But the visual image is a very powerful thing. And I think you're right to still pursue doing the documentary. But I think it speaks also to the shifting landscape of media, like as much as the tools of production and the democratization of access to filmmakers has been economized and made more accessible.

They're still gatekeepers, cost a lot of money to make a movie. You still need distribution on a certain platform and podcasting really removes all of those and allows you to tell your story unfiltered. And I think we've seen, I'm interested in what you think about this as a filmmaker. We have seen at the same time, a seismic shift

in what the platforms are open to in terms of documentary content. When I think back on the early days of Netflix, that was the greatest place in the world for documentary filmmakers. All these incredible movies that otherwise would have never been seen, suddenly were like on the homepage

and people were falling in love with documentaries and watching like edgy content and sort of contrarian content or all these kind of like really interesting ideas, like that was the place for it. But now these companies are so huge, they're interested in subscriber growth in foreign territories.

And it doesn't matter how good a movie is, if it is even in the slightest bit controversial, it's just not worth the headache if it's gonna create a controversy or kind of threaten that arc of subscriber growth. So they're just not gonna take them. And I've seen amazing filmmakers, Oscar-winning filmmakers have issues with their next film,

like the platforms are not interested, like no thank you. And then they're like, what are you talking about? Yeah. There's nowhere to go, right? Yeah. It's a real issue, I think, because I think algorithms are making decisions more than people.

And I think if you were to go back 10 or 15 years ago, there was a lot of like insight and heart to like, this has, I see the story here. Like it will resonate, right? And at a core level for people and like, okay, yes, I'm gonna throw my heart behind this. And I think now there's a lot of reliance on algorithms on what has worked, what hasn't worked.

Like how do we fit this into that? We know if you tell this story that at minute 430, like everyone's gonna tap out. It's crazy how much data they have. Yeah, and I don't think any amount of data and computerization can replace like that human instinct for like a good, knowing a really good story or a really good moment.

And I deeply hope that people can be back engaged in making these decisions. And of course they are to some degree, but I definitely think there's a big reliance on the algorithms and mandates. And I think that can be pretty limiting to I think some brilliant storytellers and creatives and visionaries at these streamers and networks

who probably want a green light more, but just feel, they feel limited, I think, by the algorithms and the mandates. I think the pendulum is always swinging. And when it goes too far, there's always a reaction. I think we're increasingly more and more attuned to like what's real and what's manufactured. And when a piece of content is the product

of what the algorithm favors, we kind of, we have our own spidey sense or intuition or telepathic sense like, hey, this isn't quite real, I'm craving something real. And when I watched the Oscars and a $6 million independent film, like, you know, basically is the biggest winner of the night to me, that's like, that's a vote for humanity, right?

Like there was something authentic about that story in the way that it was told that resonates deeply with us as human beings. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there was a big truth to that. And storytellers should be able to tell their thing and do it in their own way. And I think that the best stories will bubble up from that.

But when you're trying to take a circle peg and jam it into a square hole, because the algorithm says square, square, you're gonna ruin it sometimes. And at the same time, you being somebody who's never done a podcast before, isn't somebody that has like a gigantic digital social media footprint.

You create this thing. I mean, there's a narrative, it's too late for podcasting. There's millions of podcasts out there. It's just gonna get lost. Like there's too much noise out there. You do this thing and then it just goes right to the top. Like people are craving, you know,

this type of storytelling. And there's something about what you did that obviously like touched us as a species in a way that made it go viral in the way that it did. Like how fast did that happen? Like, what do you attribute that to? I mean, what's so wild, right? It's like, I'm not big on social media.

I even have other people now handling my social media. Like I've never been into social media. And like, so we had, when we started the podcast, people like, you should probably have a telepathy, tick tock and da, da, da, Instagram. And it was like, okay, we put up one thing. It was like the telepathy trailer. So we did not have any presence on social media. There was no budget. There was no money. I made this in a pillow fort in my bedroom. I mean, it was like really bespoke. And then beyond that, I didn't want any ads the whole first,

like during the whole rise of last year, no ads, because I wanted to make sure people understood this was pure. We're not trying to profit on this. This is not like, oh, we're trying to make some money here and like pull these stories together. Like it was like, let's keep it pure. And I don't know if that had made a difference,

but maybe it did, like not having ads on right away. So people understood, like they can spread this and share it and no one's gonna profit on it. I don't know if that made a difference or not, but I don't know what happened. I think it was like, I think TikTok at some point made it shift, you know?

And I do think that like a story that resonates, people will go tell other people to listen to. And I think it has to really resonate. And that's what I started seeing right away was we were getting text messages or emails from people I knew first, like, oh my gosh, I heard this. I just listened to it because it was you. I didn't know you. But now I'm telling people like they can't talk to me until I've listened to it or like

everyone has to listen to it before we get to Thanksgiving or my whole family has to listen to it. And mind you, this was during the heat of an election season that was extremely polarizing. And here's a show of story about love and unity and how we all matter and the connectivity of all of us. And I think that that was probably really refreshing and how damaged and effed up our world is right now, you know? But I think more than anything, then those people who heard it were telling their loved

ones that you have to listen to this. And that was what I was hearing back is that people were saying like, you just have to listen to this. And people were getting it from so many different sources. And then I just think there was that critical tipping point but I'll never forget, like I can't emphasize enough how much I don't really go on social media.

And my brother one day wrote me and he's like, I think you need to know that there's been like over a million posts or whatever about your show on TikTok. And I'm like, what? It was like, what? And went and opened it. And you know, there's the woman on the chairlift and the woman like with her big gulp

and the woman here and the man here and the guy here and people doing PowerPoint presentations. And my eyeballs were like spinging out of my head because I just had no idea that that was happening. And that was, I'd say like around November. And then by December, I think it was on Christmas Eve when the Selfie the Tapes topped Joe Rogan as the number one show in the world.

And it created like a media cycle. It was so wild. I can't even, I mean, I just, it doesn't feel real to me, but it was a fun thing for me to watch the families and teachers going through because here's individuals who've been experiencing this for decades without anyone believing them or listening to them. And then finally they're being listened to

in the most profound way. And that was the takeaway that was the most stellar. I went on Reddit and just searched telepathy tapes just to see the various threads and commentary. And it's one thing for you to say, oh, all the emails from all these parents or whatever. But I saw a lot of that. Like a lot of people who are like,

I finally feel seen and heard. I've been having this experience with my child or whatever, like again and again and again and again. That's great. Yeah, it's wild. How many people have listened to it? Do you know? Are you allowed to say?

Over 10 million. Wow. I mean, that's like the total downloads. I know it's over, yeah, I know it's over 10. I don't know the exact number. And had you just made the documentary and it premiered at Sundance or whatever and ended up in an art house theater for a week

and then on VOD on Amazon Prime, like you would have been thrilled to reach, maybe a hundred thousand people or something like that. Isn't that wild? It's crazy, right? I mean, and that's just, and this is why I love the story so much. And not because it happened to me,

I would love it like when searching for Sugarman, like as the same type of thing, right? Like just a story where like how you think something should go and will go, right? Like this docu-series is gonna get bought as a docu-series, you know, and streamed and people are gonna watch it. Like that to me was like, this is how it has to be. So people, it reaches people and blah, blah, blah.

And when that didn't happen, I was just devastated, you know, but like what was in store was so much bigger than anything I could have ever imagined. And it went the right way. Like the podcast had to go first. There needed to be nine hours of describing this and the behind the scenes stuff and crew having their mind blown

and conversations with crew and what they witnessed and parents and teachers and blah, blah, blah. Like all those things that you can't put in a documentary, you can't put in Zoom calls, that looks terrible. I mean, you can a little bit, but like not to the extent that we use them or like side conversations. Like a lot of that stuff that's the breaking the fourth wall

doesn't really work in a documentary a little bit, but not totally. So it's like having this forum, it just felt like, my goodness, this was always how it needed to go. And you had to get out of the way. It's sort of like you were incarnated for a reason. Part of that reason is to help tell this story.

Self-will enters, I know better. I know how this is supposed to go. Consciousness is like, hold my beer, like get out of the way. Like, you're interfering with the flow of how this is supposed to go. And when you kind of like relinquish your need to control it in that way

that your limited mind is telling you, this is the way it has to be. You create that space for mystery and magical outcomes like in a way that you could have never predicted. I love that you said that because no one else has like picked up on that. But there was that moment where, I mean, I was like praying, praying, praying,

like thinking, manifesting like things all over my house. Like it was incredible how dedicated I was to making sure that this four-part film version of the docu-series was- But with a certainty that like, I'm here to tell this story. I don't know why, you know? But it was like, and so when it didn't happen,

it was just like a tumbling down of the whole tower of cards. But then to what you just said was so interesting, because I almost forgot about this until you said that. I remember saying to God, to the universe, like, okay, I surrender. Like, I thought that I was shepherding the story the way I was supposed to, and clearly I wasn't.

So I surrender. However, if I'm supposed to work on it, great. If I'm not, fine. If it should be in someone else's hands, do it. Just you make the shots now, I surrender. If you want me to be a vessel, I will, I'm done. I'm surrendering. And that was like a conversation I had

that was just like, I clearly was not right doing this right in the driver's seat, like obsessed with it being a four-part docu-series. And I think it was like literally two days later that I woke up and ran downstairs, like it's gotta be a podcast. And it went so fast then it was just like all summer long. I mean, I was working like 60, 70 hours a week,

just writing, recording, writing, recording, and then, you know, listening to it over and over and then, okay, this episode's done, like the next one. And it was just, it was like a insatiable craze like that just carried me for like the next six months of my life, hours a week. And then it was just out, you know, but it's like when I got out of the way,

when I truly got out of the way and I was like, I surrender is when everything happened. And then more money than any documentary that I've ever had as far as budget flowed in from donors, you know? Just like with such love, just like keep the story your own, no strings attached, rock and roll. And it's been like, what?

You know, this just doesn't happen. There's an incredible life lesson in that, that has nothing to do with telepathy or documentary filmmaking and everything about like your relationship to life. Like it's good to have goals, ambition, passion, you know, this trajectory or this thing that you're trying to put out into the world.

But when you hold onto it too tight, you constrict it, you suffocate it. And it's the courage of the surrender. You know, I think it gets confused with cowardice, but like it's a very courageous thing to say, I'm willing to let this go, and let's let whatever it's meant to be, let's be in a state of allowing it.

And that's where in my life, like that's where all the stuff comes in, when you inhabit that space. It's funny, cause I think back to like, my friend Rebecca, who was the translator for the me episodes, she was there, she saw this with her own eyes and she's an animator and a director for animated projects.

So this was kind of out of her world. And when all this was unfolding, I remember just like with the devastation of it all, when everything let go, I think like she was one of the few people that I was just like, man, I'm crushed. Like I'm heartbroken. Like there's no way to go from here.

And she would be like, what's in store for you is so much bigger than what you have in your own mind. And I was like, come on, man. You're like, fuck off. No one wants to hear that. Yeah, and she would be like, what you are planning is so limiting compared to what the universe has in store for you.

And it was, I just like wasn't a place to hear it. And it was just like, oh no, I don't even know what it means, like stop. And like, it's so funny in retrospect to be like, gosh, like that like philosophy is so true and reigning, you know, if you just let go. But it's sort of doubly ironic because of the subject matter that you were covering, like of all people,

like you've just, you know, you're talking to these people who are like on the Hill, you know, I'm like of all people, like you've just, you're talking to these people who are like on the Hill, I'm like, it's consciousness and all of that. And then when you're confronted with your own kind of- Ego. Yeah, ego, right? Like you can't see the story that you're actually trying to tell. You're in your own way.

Yeah. And the idea that the universe could, you know, maybe provide something that you couldn't imagine is something you couldn't hear despite the fact that that was the entire story that you're trying to tell. Yeah, it was really weird. Cause Rebecca was like, let go of the steering wheel, dude. Like it's gonna be bigger and better if you're not driving.

And I was just like, what do you mean? Like I'm the driver, you know? And then it was just like, I did it. Someone was like, forget it. Okay, I'm getting out of the car, whatever. It's over. I've tried, I failed. Like that was my mindset.

So I surrender. And then anyway, it was a, it's a really, yeah, for me, that was like a, it was like the lesson I needed to learn, I think, right? Like you have to completely let go of ego. And I keep telling that to all the non-speakers and families that I'm involved with. Like there's two things, like I want to tell it the right way by you or not at all. If this

will never sell out, this will never be exploited, we need to keep the independence. And then two, if any of it ever gets too much or becomes too big, too fast, too wild, too overwhelming, pencils down, just will walk away over, just dropping it. And I think that's nice because it keeps the non-speakers in control. We're constantly checking in with each other, like how are we doing, how we feeling here? Because you're just in service to them and this story.

And in whatever way, you need to show up or recede into the background for their benefit, your willingness to do that is what allows the story to like have life breathed into it. I mean, they don't have a voice, you know? So it's like, there has to be such a, just, you know, they're just,

they just have to be front and center. And I'm actually really excited because on the documentary, we've hired five non-speaking members of the production team. So it's more than our speaking members of the production team. Two will's more than our speaking members of the production team. Two will be in charge of like graphics, helping depict with the GFX house what the hill looks like, what the realms look like, what it means. And they can go to the hill to make those decisions and have those meetings.

Yeah, they probably can. You're right. And we've been trying to find like a metaphorical film to hill and like I've been sending some pictures and I think sometimes the two non-speaking advisors are kind of like, I mean, it will work. It's like we're so far off the mark probably even. You hire like Alex Gray or somebody to conceptualize it. Yeah, yeah.

And then two non-speaking story consultants and they're actually a couple and that's great. And both type independently into like a keyboard which is really helpful. And then one non-speaker who is like in authorities and he is gonna be like our science consultant to kind of be like, does this feel good? Is this possible with the physiology,

kind of helping that we keep the good ethical guardrails around the testing from the non-speaking point of view. How has this whole journey impacted your life on a day-to-day basis? Like you catch yourself thinking more expansively about life and death and you're like, like what is a tangible kind of product of having, you know, walked this path?

And like, how does it show up? Like when you're at the grocery store or just doing mundane tasks and being in a body? Yeah, I mean, I think two things. I don't doubt now that consciousness survives the body after death. Like that to me has been the biggest gift in this that I was not expecting.

For me, it's a certainty. Like I don't feel afraid of dying. I don't even feel afraid of other people dying. I'm just, I mean, I hate that. You hate to say goodbye to people you love. I don't wanna live life without my spouse, my kids or my parents or, you know, but there is a certainty that like it's okay.

And that is really a calming thing to have that piece. And I think too, just this overwhelming sense of love, like always trying to tune to love and really seeing individuals as yourself. And I think I've always sort of been a kind of being, you know, I'd sound like a big reach, but really trying to be like what matters most is how we make other people feel,

how we care for others, doing right by other people is like the most important thing to me now more than anything else. As we kind of wrap it up here, like what is the core thing if there's any additional ripple to what you just shared that you want people to take away from the telepathy tape series?

Yeah, I mean, I've always had three goals. Like one is I hope people presume competence in non-speaking individuals. That just because someone can't control their body or can't speak doesn't mean they can't think. Trust that they're in there. Assume they're in there and proceed that way. And with that, I hope the education system changes.

The second thing is to validate spelling. I want spelling to be in schools, in our workplaces, in our communities so non-speaking individuals can be active members of society and that we're meeting them where they're at instead of asking them to come to where we're at. And I think that will change so many lives. And the telepathy was almost like a Trojan horse

to get people to care about the non-speakers. It's all real, but I think that's the most important thing. And then third, of course, is the shift in the paradigm. I do think it's ridiculous that people are made to feel silly or foolish or gullible or not smart if they believe this stuff. And I think it's unfortunate that scientists are made to feel like they're not real scientists if they're asking these questions. Because what if we are wrong?

What if the earth isn't flat? What if the earth isn't the center of the universe? What if disease is caused by germs? What if genetics does cause how we look like? All these things that have been dismissed throughout the course of time as wild scientific ideas when they first appeared, like this could be another one of those ideas.

And I would love to see scientists and researchers and just individuals be open to this idea and proceed to, you know, and just follow where it goes and see what happens, because our paradigm might be wrong. I love it. You're in the early days of the documentary. So obviously it's gonna be, this is not like on the immediate horizon, right?

It's gonna be probably two years or so. Oh, that soon? Yeah. Yeah, like a cool, that's pretty soon. We're gonna be done filming by August. Do you have a distribution partner already? Or you'll deal with that when it comes? Yeah, not yet, yeah. Right now we're like super focused on Do you have a distribution partner already? Not yet. Or you'll deal with that when it comes? Yeah, not yet. Yeah.

Right now we're like super focused on just keeping the family safe, right? Keeping this tight and loving and effective. And then we hope to have filming done by August, September. We've got an editor working full-time starting this month. Yeah, and then we'll worry about the next steps. Amazing. Was there any story or occurrence that you experienced

over the course of the projects that you're on with respect to this that was just too crazy? Like you're like, this is amazing, but like I can't quite prove it or it just doesn't, I'll get attacked or whatever. So I'm just not gonna put it in. Yes, and I think it's just like, we can't even end without saying this.

Like non-speaking individuals are like, they're not like oracles or human beings. They have teenage interests. Yeah, they're not free cogs like in Minority Report. Yeah, not at all. Like Lily, like we're filming in Atlanta, like wants to go like go-kart racing and biking. And like, you know, these individuals

have their age appropriate interests and ideas and wanna watch silly stuff on YouTube and have friends and get married and they have romantic interests. Like all the things that make a person a person are all there. Like this is just like a tiny little bit of also who they are.

So people focusing only on that is like a fear because, you know, these are human beings first. Well, it's incredible stuff. Like I said, I was riveted by the series. Everybody should check it out. And it was a delight to talk to you. And I can't wait to see the documentary. This is all like mind blowing shit.

It's crazy. Like I don't even know, like, I don't know what to say. Like I'm literally like, I don't even know how to end this. Like my mind is spinning, but it was really a pleasure to talk to you. And I'm a fan. Can't wait to see the doc. Thank you. Thanks, Guy.

Thank you so much. If people wanna find you, check you out, all your stuff, obviously the telepathy tapes, wherever you enjoy podcasts, but anywhere else, you have all this bonus content videos and things like that as well. That's on telepathytapes.com. Yeah, and all my handles are just Ky Dickens, KY Dickens,

and the telepathy tapes has its own, own everything now, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter as well. Cool, well when the doc's done, please come back. I will for sure. Cheers. Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation.

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