Review of Joe Rogan’s Interview with Telepathy Tapes Host Ky Dickens: The Stuff of Conspiracy Theories, Fantasy, and Urban Legends (Part 1)

Written By Janyce Boynton

A couple months ago, a commenter on my YouTube channel “dared” me to listen to Joe Rogan’s interview with Ky Dickens. Dickens is the credulous documentarian responsible for the Telepathy Tapes podcast. In the podcast, Dickens claims that nonspeaking individuals with profound autism have telepathic abilities. From what I can tell, she bases these claims on the anecdotal accounts of parents and educators who use FC/S2C/RPM and have convinced themselves that the facilitator-dependent spelling sessions produce unspoken, psychic interactions with their children and clients. (Katharine’s and my reviews of the Telepathy Tapes podcast are linked below).

Ky Dickens being interviewed by Joe Rogan (The Joe Rogan Experience, 2025)

Before I get to my thoughts about the Rogan-Dickens interview, I want to point out that I don’t need to be “dared” to listen to, read about, or watch pro-FC media. Simply (and preferably politely) asking me to read an article and providing details to the exact article you’d like me to read will suffice. It might take me a while to get to it, but I do read and/or watch the materials provided by our commenters, though for a variety of reasons, including time constraints, I may not respond to them directly. (Also, see our commenting guidelines here).

I prefer reading scientifically rigorous articles, but the blog section of this website is, largely, built on reviews of pro-FC books, films, podcasts, and articles. Proponents have a long history of bypassing the scientific community (or trying to) and spreading their often-unproven ideas through the popular media, as Ky Dickens has done with the Telepathy Tapes podcast. Sadly, it’s a marketing strategy that works because the standards for “proving” an idea or concept in popular media are significantly lower than they are for proving an idea or concept under reliably controlled conditions. And, while pro-FC media is generally devoid of scientific rigor, the benefit of reviewing these books, films, podcasts, articles, etc. is that they often provide researchers with first-hand accounts of the facilitators’ states of mind.

I have a particular interest in the beliefs and behaviors of facilitators, most likely due to my own experiences as a facilitator in the early 1990s. So, when I first started listening to the Telepathy Tapes podcast, I wondered why and how Dickens got to be a spokesperson for FC/S2C/RPM. Using her comments in the Rogan interview as a guide, it seems possible that she’s a self-appointed evangelist for the FC movement, though I think it’s likely she’s also getting funding from the S2C/RPM community to support her project.

The facilitator provides hand signals and controls the letter board by holding it in the air while the client extends a hand (and pencil) toward it. (image from the Tampa Bay Times)

The content of the Telepathy Tapes podcast often sounds more like an advertisement for the no-touch forms of FC marketed as Spelling to Communicate (S2C) or Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) than anything else. To me, the telepathy aspect of the program is just a gimmick to pull listeners in, though there are certainly facilitators who’ve believed from its inception that FC is a psychic phenomenon. (See Haskew and Donnellan’s bizarre take on FC)

But, to those of us who’ve been following the most recent revitalization of the FC movement (a movement that was resoundingly discredited by the mid-1990s in the United States), it doesn’t take much time at all to realize that the claims being made by Dickens and the other “experts” featured in the podcast are based on FC-generated spelling sessions influenced and controlled by facilitators using physical, verbal, and visual cues.

By way of example, I was recently in a copyright/fair use dispute on YouTube with The Telepathy Tapes for using 16 seconds of one of their telepathy test videos. 16 seconds. That’s all I needed to raise huge red flags about facilitator cueing during a “no-touch” spelling session. But, instead of welcoming feedback and responding to concerns about facilitator cueing (or just ignoring my tiny channel), The Telepathy Tapes tried to put a copyright strike on my video and get YouTube to take it down. The attempt worked, temporarily, but eventually YouTube restored the video and took the strike off my channel. Critiques for educational purposes (like calling attention to facilitator cueing in FC-generated spelling sessions) are allowed under fair use.

The Video Critique the Telepathy Tapes Didn’t Want You To See (FCisNotScience, 2025)

Despite Dickens’ claim that she is a “science nerd,” she doesn’t seem to have a good understanding of the difference between anecdotes, testimonials, and reliably controlled studies. Throughout the Rogan interview, Dickens fails to provide any evidence to back up her claims. Instead, she cites the many emails she’s gotten from parents and/or educators recounting personal, opinion-based, faith-based experiences with ESP (including accounts from facilitators claiming that their clients or loved ones telepathically visit an imaginary place called “The Hill” where nonspeaking individuals with autism supposedly meet to exchange ideas). She seems surprised that facilitators from all over the world are reporting the exact same experiences, without ruling out the possibility (probability) that these facilitators are interacting with each other via email, pro-FC support groups and conferences, pro-FC newsletters and the like. Mass appeal and opinions, anecdotes and testimonials, though sometimes compelling, are not the same as reliably controlled testing—testing that could, for example, separate facilitator behaviors from those of their clients and establish who, exactly, is controlling letter selection.

In the Rogan interview, Dickens brags about the telepathy tests she conducted. (We learn in a separate interview with mentalist Oz Pearlman that Rogan had not seen the videos at the time he conducted his interview with Dickens). And Rogan just takes her word for it that the tests produced “evidence” of telepathic abilities in nonspeaking individuals. He even worries that these individuals will be exploited by the government for their skills. I find this both sad and highly ironic.

In the most generous light I can muster, the telepathy tests that Dickens conducted were an (amateur’s) attempt to set up “blind” testing. But Dickens “blinded” the wrong people. Instead of preventing the facilitators from seeing the letter board and/or from having access to the test stimuli (e.g., target words, numbers, pictures) to rule out facilitator influence and control over letter selection, Dickens gave facilitators full visual access to the letter board and to the test stimuli while preventing the nonspeaking individuals from seeing the target words or numbers. In addition, the facilitators were allowed to use physical, verbal, and/or visual cues during letter selection. At no time were the facilitators out of visual and/or auditory range of the nonspeaking individuals during the FC sessions.

Whether by default or by design, Dickens ended up proving what critics of FC already know: that when facilitators have access to the test stimuli, are allowed to maintain eye contact with the letter board and are allowed to (overtly or covertly) cue their clients, the FC-generated responses reflect the information the facilitators are given. What Dickens’ tests do not show is whether the nonspeaking knew how to spell independently (e.g. without influence from the facilitators), comprehended what was being spelled on their behalf and/or whether that information could be telepathically transferred to their facilitators. To reliably test for FC/S2C/RPM authorship and/or telepathy, researchers need to control for facilitator behaviors that (wittingly or unwittingly) influence letter selection. None of those controls were in place during Dickens’ testing.

Like all the current day practicing facilitators, Dickens maintains a “seeing is believing” approach both to FC/S2C/RPM authorship and to the purported telepathic abilities of the individuals featured in The Telepathy Tapes. Like many before her, Dickens’ critical thinking skills seems to have been obfuscated by an emotional attachment to the idea that nonspeaking individuals have hidden language and literacy skills that are (magically) revealed when a facilitator touches their arm (or, in the case of one participate, her face), holds a letter board in the air, and/or uses visual and auditory cues during letter selection. Rather than “advance science,” as Dickens claims, her ineffectual attempts at proving telepathic abilities in nonspeaking autistic individuals seem to be at the expense of erasing the identities of her participants and replacing them with the fantasies of their facilitators—facilitators who imagine a world where debilitating conditions like profound autism don’t exist and where every nonspeaking autistic individual is a genius with an intact mind who can communicate telepathically.

I know it may not seem like it to those who criticize my stance against FC, but my sympathies often lie with the facilitators (at least at first). I understand the idea of wanting to make life better for people who exhibit severe communication difficulties. I, too, once fell for the illusion of FC. It’s heady to think, as a facilitator, you’re helping someone break free from the bonds of silence simply by providing them with physical and emotional support. And, even after all these years, I want to believe that most facilitators’ actions start with a sincere desire to help. But I find that my feelings dim significantly when I learn that promoters of FC, such as Dickens, are aware of the history of and scientific research into the technique, but choose to downplay, misrepresent, or ignore it under the guise of being an “open skeptic.” Dickens, in my opinion, distorts the meaning of open skepticism by demonizing the process of scientific inquiry and characterizing critics of FC specifically (e.g. those concerned that the facilitators are controlling letter selection) as materialist, ableist and/or against people with disabilities. As an “open skeptic,” you can’t throw out scientifically rigorous evidence just because you don’t like it or because it doesn’t advance your pet belief.

In my opinion, the Rogan-Dickens interview shines a light on some significant flaws in Dickens’ understanding of FC/S2C/RPM and in my next blog post, I’ll talk more specifically about her claims that S2C and RPM are not FC, that the FC movement was halted in the 1990s primarily because of false allegations of abuse claims, and that groups like the American Speech/Language/Hearing Association (ASHA) that oppose FC/S2C/RPM are against spelling.

 

Janyce Boynton
Next

Spelling to Communicate Goes on Trial: Part VII, The Conclusion