Telepathic Children Do Not Exist

The Telepathy Tapes podcast surpassed Joe Rogan on the charts. And it's full of shit.

Hi,

Back on inauguration day we launched a ridiculous RFK Jr. “brain worms” tee on the Webworm store, and I told you I’d be throwing my profits over to Mutual Aid LA and Rainbow Youth New Zealand. Just to show I am not full of shit, here are the receipts.

I topped up each donation so it would make a funny number — so that was $666.69 to Mutual Aid LA, and $666.69 to Rainbow Youth. Because, you know, satan. And sex.

To anyone who got a shirt — thanks! Also, I will be emailing the winners of the 10 limited edition Flightless Bird: Live tees later today.

Now I think the last time Webworm wrote about woo was four years ago, when I looked at how much-loved New Zealand lingerie brand “Lonely” went down the QAnon rabbit hole. That led to talk of the cabal, depopulation of planet earth, and communicating with intergalactic aliens.

I got that same little shiver up my spine a month ago when I started seeing people sharing a new podcast. It was called The Telepathy Tapes, and suddenly lots of people were talking on social media about “vibe shifts” and the “the return of magic”.

This wasn’t a small podcast. For a few days, The Telepathy Tapes managed to temporarily pass Joe Rogan on the podcast charts.

Number 1 on the “Top Series” charts, and beating The Joe Rogan Experience on “Top Shows”.

Friends were posting about it on their social media feeds with words like, “Amazing!” and “Finally!”

Released late last year, the seven part podcast is the brainchild of documentary maker Ky Dickens (who has previously made some non-woo stuff) and psychiatrist Diane Hennacy Powell (who had their licence suspended for “poor management of therapeutic boundaries, incomplete chart notes, a disorganized approach to treatment, a failure to respond to significant patient symptoms, and concerns over her management of patient medications”).

The podcast claims nonverbal autistic kids can use their brain’s “electromagnetic properties” to read the minds of their parents and caregivers.

The show’s bio describes it like this:

In a world that often dismisses the extraordinary as mere fantasy, The Telepathy Tapes dares to explore the profound abilities of non-speakers with autism-individuals who have long been misunderstood and underestimated.

An early episode is about a teacher who became convinced a student had telepathy because they listed the food she’d just bought at the store. Then there’s the mother who was shocked to discover her autistic son knew all about the TV show she’d been watching (alone!) upstairs.

This podcast’s magic is that it starts small, before going big. As in — it starts with some little claims that build and build, before landing you in territory that is so deranged you’d never consider taking it seriously if you hadn’t been gently led there.

Like any 2020’s true crime podcast, it pretends it’s learning along with you — but Dickens and Powell know exactly where they are leading you.

By the final episode, you discover these kids are actually tapping into another dimension (basically the biblical version of heaven) to understand every thought, language and event going on around them. “If there are no bodies there, it’s just consciousness, then all communication would be through telepathy!” narrates Ky Dickens.

To be clear: I don’t believe telepathy is real. I am Scully, not Mulder. I have zero doubt there’s a bunch of stuff science is yet to explain — but this ain’t it. People have been trying to prove telepathy, telekinesis, and precognition for about 200 years now and have failed miserably. But claims keep arising in new packaging — in this case, the worst type of packaging: A podcast.

I completely understand and have zero angst about the parents and caregivers interviewed in this series. They desperately want to communicate with their autistic children — and they probably believe they are doing so.

But there is no telepathy happening here. Instead, there are other very human and much more boring explanations. Of wishful thinking, chance, misdirection and most of all — a desperate hope to communicate better.

What I find troubling is that a podcaster would package all of this up, and sell it to parents who desperately want it to be true.

What I want to do now is hand this topic over to my friend Chris Cox. Why? Well, Chris has built an entire career on pretending to be telepathic. He has read my mind, and I have never been more stunned. I still don’t know how he did it. Reviewers are impressed, too:

He knows this world inside out — and so I asked him to weigh in on The Telepathy Tapes.

David.

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Thoughts on Mind Reading from a Mind Reader

by Chris Cox

I am a mind reader who can’t read minds.

I specialise in a form of magic called “mentalism”. I’ve toured the world playing to over a million people in places like London’s West End, Broadway, the Sydney Opera House and The Kennedy Centre. I don’t like to brag.

My whole schtick is based around the fact that I believe no one can read minds, no one has super powers, and no one can really do magic.

The joy of being a mind reader who can’t read minds is that I can let us all enter a world of artifice. A world where we know magic isn’t real, where we know what I’m doing isn’t real, but can pretend like it is for a moment. And the truth is, sometimes people think what I’m doing is real.

But it’s not. It never is.

I operate in the grey area between not being able to do the stuff I say I’m doing, but being able to make you think that I can do the stuff I say I’m doing.

The role of a magician is to present a fake reality, and what I do is about entertainment. I am an entertainer who does magic. Early in my career I leant more heavily into the world of skepticism and debunking, but then I realised people come to the theatre to be entertained and I didn’t want them to have to deal with those bigger issues, or insult their personal beliefs.

Now I just make it as fun, funny and entertaining as it can be. I aim to fool people, to make them think I can really read minds or influence or use psychology, or body language or whatever the hell you want to think, but really, it’s all just a trick. A very clever trick, built up through years of skill and practice, using many many methods to accomplish the seemingly impossible. But at the end of the day, I’m not pretending it’s real because there’s a very real danger in that.

Which brings us to this podcast.

I want to make it very clear that the most difficult part of debunking anything is the fact that in debunking it you are also pulling away hope from those who want — above all things — hope.

Be it someone trying to contact a dead relative, or a parent of a child on the spectrum who desperately wants to be able to communicate with their child. There’s no winners here, and I feel desperately sad for those parents who buy into this myth. It’s 100% understandable why they might believe what they’re being told and witnessing for themselves.

The problem is that this is a fake miracle, and there’s danger in seeking comfort in a fake miracle.

My fake miracles happen behind a proscenium arch, so we know they’re fake. These ones happen in the real world and are being sold to us via this podcast as true with the “skeptic scientists” being maligned for not believing it.

The Telepathy Tapes is really just an age old story of scamming, lying and grifting. Of slowly leading people down the rabbit hole one step at a time, each little steps leads you further away from reality and before you know it, you’re believing the unbelievable. And look, it’s called the unbelievable for a reason, because it’s, well, unbelievable.

There’s nothing in the experiments which I couldn’t recreate using the methods I use on stage. It is, in essence basic Ouija board style results. In the same way I can use non-verbal communication, guess work and gut instinct to make it look like I can read minds, I know what I’m doing.

Here, most of it is happening non-verbally and subconsciously. Just like if you were to take a pendulum and think about it spinning in a circle, you will swear blind the you are not moving it, but it will spin in a circle because our subconscious and ideomotor responses do it without us being aware, just like how you don’t think about breathing.

If you were to come and see me live (and you should, you might even get an “I Love Cox” sticker from me if you mention David!) then you’ll see me do incredible (and modest) things.

Like what, I hear you ask? (See, I’m already reading minds.)

Well, if I wanted I could ask you to think of your star sign and then tell you it, maybe even your exact date of birth. If we were in a bookstore, I could ask you to go pick any book and pick any page, then pick any word and I would be able to work out what that word is.

How? Well there’s a load of things going on at once to make this happen. Some of them are psychological in nature: They use my very refined gut instinct, me picking up on body language, verbal and non verbal cues, me leading you down the garden path and bamboozling you with words, hot and cold reading — and the fact I know what I’m doing and you don’t, so I can adapt and change without you ever knowing.

They use cunning, they use deceit, they use charm, they use lying, and they use magic methods. None of it is anything supernatural. Even when people after the show are insistent that I have powers or a gift, I can catagoricaly say, “I don’t”.

Let’s take another example. On stage in front of thousands of people I can do things that I couldn’t do in a room with just two people (but the opposite is true as well.)

So on stage I can get everyone in the audience to think of things they want to see me do and then I pick people at random and read their minds. I do what they’re thinking of then reveal things like their favourite films or foods, maybe where they live, what underwear they have on or their celebrity crush.

Often audiences assume these people are plants or stooges. They’re not. They never are. I’ve just worked out how to make you think that I can read minds — but remember, I’m not actually reading minds. You need to remember that you never, ever see the full story. I hide things from you. I plan well in advance what will happen. There’s stuff going on that you’ll never know about.

And that’s one of the problems with all the tests of telepathy in this podcast. We never see the full story.

So when we hear a mother attest that she was watching TV and discovered that her son (in another room!) knew all about the programme, we have to take it with a grain of salt. And again, before I go into this, I do not blame the mother for this, in the same way I don’t blame someone who visits a clairvoyant for wanting messages from a dead relative. Honestly, the mother probably truly believes this is true - but: I don’t think it is.

This was not a rigorous test, it wasn’t even a magic trick. It’s just an anecdote.

Just like the age old story of you thinking of someone, then they call you (or these days text you, as no one wants to answer a phone call, we’re not monsters).

Or you get a ping from your phone and you go, “I think that’s David messaging me”, and lo and behold it’s David. That’s not supernatural or clairvoyant — it happens for a number of reasons but at best it’s coincidence, and really, that’s all anything ever is.

So in the case of the podcast example, what’s more likely: The child has heard the show through the floor? The child has seen the show before? The mother has talked to her child about it before and forgot about it? The child made up some random choices about the show based on the knowledge he had and they were right (cold reading)? The mother is reading more into it than actually how it is? The mother has made it more amazing in her memory the more she’s recounted the story and now believes that? The mother led the child into giving the right answers through affirmation and positive reinforcement? Coincidence?

It could be all, it could be one, it could be a few of those things, but I’m pretty sure any of them make more sense than the child developing very specific telepathy talents based on what TV show is being watched.

There is one final problem with this podcast: It accuses skeptics of being anti-autism and shaming.

It makes the conversation about those who are desperately trying to communicate and those who don’t believe them and think they can’t.

Which really just distracts from the main question, which is: “Are they telepathic?”

Many years ago The Amazing Randi set up a foundation to debunk charlatans who claimed ESP, clairvoyance and any number of other similar arts. He offered a million dollars to anyone who could prove they did it for real. No one has ever collected that million dollars. This is exactly the sort of thing he would be debunking now, and until we do find someone who can actually talk to the dead, he’s not going to be able to do so.

-Chris Cox.

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David here again.

I think journalist James Marriot put it best:

“The Telepathy Tapes is animated by contempt for all the values that underpin science: respect for evidence, a willingness to be wrong, a commitment to what is actually true instead of what you wish were true. In a happier time Dickens would have merely been an anonymous crank. Right now her podcast is at the top of the charts in Britain and America.”

Ultimately, The Telepathy Tapes is preying on parents who desperately want to communicate better with their autistic children. That may not be the creators’ intent (maybe they believe their own horseshit, no-one is perfect) but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still predatory.

I suppose I’d note one other thing: The show surpassed Joe Rogan because Joe Rogan talked about it on his own show. If a show gets popular because Rogan finds it “really interesting” — well, chances are it’s not worth your time.

The podcast — now with a willing base of believing listeners — aims to raise $450,000 to make a documentary about telepathic kids.

They currently have $111,009 from fans.

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Before I go — speaking of documentaries — my friend (documentary idol) Erin Lee Carr texted me a few weeks back.

Back in 1999, Cruel Intentions was by far the horniest thing I’d ever seen — and apparently the new TV series Cruel Intentions features a line about Tickled:

I don’t mean to keep harping on about this thing me and my friends made back in 2016, but as someone who loves pop culture, this kinda thing still feels surreal.

While speaking of Tickled — for anyone based in New Zealand or Australia, two of my documentaries (Tickled and Mister Organ) are currently on documentary streamer DocPlay. Webworm readers can get 45 days for free with the code MISTERORGAN at docplay.com/discount.

Or just click on this link.

Sign up and watch for free for 45 days, and then cancel — or if you like it, stay on. They’re good people. If you’re not in New Zealand or Australia…. you may need to get creative.

Okay — see you in the comments to talk brain worms, tickling and telepathy.

Let’s survive this year, together, okay?

David.

PS: I think the last time Tickled had a fun pop-culture moment was on the director’s commentary to A24’s Everything Everywhere All At Once: