Ky Dickens

High-Level Overview

Filmmaker Ky Dickens, creator of the hit podcast The Telepathy Tapes, joins Joe Rogan to talk about her work with non-speaking autistic people and their families. Her series documents parents, teachers and therapists who say that non-speakers who communicate by pointing to letters can read minds, and that telepathy is only "the tip of the iceberg." She describes children who seem to know languages they were never taught, one who reportedly identified Egyptian hieroglyphics, and a shared telepathic space the non-speakers call "the hill." Rogan, who says he was fascinated by the series, is openly enthusiastic but also pauses to note his own inner skeptic.

The tone is warm, curious, and at times awestruck, with Dickens speaking as an advocate as much as a documentarian. The conversation moves from the case for presuming competence in non-speakers, through the science and philosophy of consciousness, into the politics of how spelling-based communication is treated, and then out into broad tangents on love, money, skepticism, UFO testimony, and how animals seem to communicate. It flows between personal stories, big-picture philosophy, and Rogan's hunting and animal tangents.

The Discussion Explores:

• Who the non-speakers in The Telepathy Tapes are, what apraxia is, and why Dickens says they are too often assumed to be incompetent
• The telepathy reports and the wider "spiritual gifts" families describe, including untaught languages
• Materialism versus the idea that consciousness is fundamental, with references to Dean Radin, Rupert Sheldrake and Thomas Campbell
• The history and controversy of facilitated communication and spelling to communicate, and ASHA's stance
• "The hill," a telepathic meeting place multiple non-speakers describe independently
• Love as the baseline for these abilities, and skepticism done well versus badly
• Rogan's tangents on money, status, UFO testimony, and animal communication while hunting
• Dickens's goals: presuming competence, access to spelling in schools, and a paradigm shift

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Non-Speakers, Apraxia, and Presuming Competence

Dickens explains that the people at the center of her series are non-speaking autistic individuals who often have apraxia, which she describes as a mind-body disconnect. Speaking is a fine motor skill, while pointing to letters is a gross motor skill, so many of them communicate by spelling on a letterboard, stencil or keyboard. Her first and most important message is that people have long assumed that because these individuals can't speak, they can't think, and she says that is false. Many, she says, can't feel or control their bodies well, which is why some wear boots or necklaces to know where their feet and chest are.

She offers practical advice: if you see a non-speaker struggling in public, one of the kindest things you can say is that you know they can't fully control their body. She also defends the use of a communication partner, arguing that needing support to point doesn't mean the words aren't theirs, just as needing reading glasses doesn't mean you can't read.

Telepathy and the "Tip of the Iceberg"

Dickens says she came in thinking the project was just about telepathy, but families kept telling her "telepathy's the tip of the iceberg." They described non-speakers who could sense illness in others, see auras around people, animals and plants, play music with perfect pitch, visit people in dreams, and say they communicate with people who have died. She recounts experiments for the series where a son spelled out an image his mother was looking at from across the room, sometimes describing what the image actually was when his mother misread it (he wrote "paint" when she thought she was seeing a food fight).

The language reports amaze Rogan most. Dickens says she knows 15 or 20 non-speakers who seem to know languages they were never taught; one girl began spelling in Portuguese and Spanish, and when staff tested her with pictures of hieroglyphics they didn't understand themselves, she identified them all correctly (Dickens notes she wasn't present and heard about it from the mother and school staff). Rogan wants to see them tested on cuneiform, Sumerian, or the undeciphered Voynich manuscript. Dickens describes the idea, which she credits to researcher Bernard Rimland and later Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell, that ESP should be classed as a savant skill, since science already accepts savant abilities it can't explain.

How Dickens Got Here

Dickens had spent years making documentaries about social issues like paid family leave and health insurance, and had no belief in psychics. After several deaths in her life, she wanted her next project to address what's broken in people, not systems. Inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic, which describes ideas as arriving from outside us, she declared out loud that she would explore why we're here and whether consciousness survives. Soon after, she heard Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell, a Johns Hopkins-trained neuroscientist, describe non-speakers who had demonstrated telepathy, and she knew immediately that it was her next project.

She read through piles of emails from parents who each believed a singular miracle was happening in their home, and learned that some teachers had been quietly videotaping the phenomenon for decades. The series became a podcast only as a last resort after streamers passed on it, and it shot to the top of the charts. She's now filming a documentary with five non-speakers on the paid production team, which she believes is the first paying job for each of them.

Materialism and Consciousness as Fundamental

Rogan says he'd long suspected something like telepathy was real, and that the real barrier is the fear of being fooled, since so many charlatans exist. Dickens frames the resistance as materialism: the reigning philosophy that only what can be measured and observed is real. She relays scientist Dean Radin's image of a pyramid with physics, chemistry and biology at the base and consciousness unexplained at the top. Flip it so consciousness is fundamental, and telepathy and precognition become explainable. She mentions the new Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences and predicts that, a generation from now, rigid materialists will look like flat-earthers.

Rogan ties this to Thomas Campbell's view that the universe is formed through consciousness, and to his own idea that ideas might be a kind of life form that people turn into physical objects. They cite Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake, whose interest began when a respected professor told him about a blind boy who could read an eye chart when his mother looked at it, and whose "mental field idea compares minds to gravitational and magnetic fields. Dickens also mentions Mark Twain's mental telegraphy" and Upton Sinclair's book Mental Radio, about telepathy experiments with his wife. Rogan brings up the early scientists who wanted to name a key ayahuasca compound after telepathy (it had already been named harmine) when users reported shared experiences.

The Spelling Controversy

Dickens gives a brief history. Facilitated communication arrived in the US in the 1990s, involving pressure on the wrist to help people locate their bodies in space; some parents at the time also reported telepathy, which she says was hushed up. After cases where false allegations were attributed to facilitators guiding hands, the method was stigmatized as pseudoscience, and spelling methods evolved into no-touch approaches. Dickens personally thinks light touch for reassurance is fine, as long as it isn't guiding letters, and says on her set they sometimes marked boards with dry-erase lines to check they didn't move.

She says pushback now comes not only from skeptics but from within the spelling community, where some groups have reportedly warned practitioners not to discuss telepathy or risk their accreditation. She also says the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) calls spelling to communicate pseudoscience, which makes it hard for families to get communication partners in schools. She compares the fight to the long struggles to accept sign language and Braille, and suggests the multi-billion-dollar ABA therapy industry and insurance coverage create financial incentives against change. Rogan's reaction: when you follow the money, someone is always profiting. Dickens calls excluding non-speakers from communicating in school "a human rights violation."

The Hill

The strangest story is "the hill," or "the chat on the hill." A boy named Houston described a telepathic chat room where he meets and even teaches friends; his friend John Paul would put pillows on his head to block out household noise and "go to the hill, where his mother says he has a girlfriend. When Dickens asked how many people were there, he answered about 4,000. She initially assumed it was an Atlanta phenomenon, until a minister in Arizona, a teacher, and a father in Israel all independently described non-speakers going to the hill," with separate hills in different places.

Dickens says families have corroborated details: one isolated girl named friends her mother had never heard of, and after the series came out, the family found four of them through Facebook groups, and they said they meet on the hill too. She describes a neurotypical volunteer, who says he recovered from serious illness by learning to control his thoughts, who reached the hill and passed a test where he gave a non-speaker information there and later had it spelled back to him. Dickens says non-speakers describe the space as protected, accessible only with good intentions, and she hopes people won't try to break in.

Love, Skepticism, and Human Nature

Asked what unlocks these abilities, Dickens says non-speakers keep saying the baseline is love, which they define as "anything that unifies." She cites neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge's precognition research, in which participants who report more unconditional love score better. On privacy fears, she says non-speakers describe needing an invitation, like being thought of, to enter someone's thoughts, and Rogan jokes that if you're scared of people reading your mind, maybe clean your brain out. Dickens adds that "truth is never harmful it might be difficult but it's not harmful."

Rogan distinguishes objective skepticism from self-professed skeptics who will never be convinced: "if you're only skeptical you're a closed-minded believer." He values skepticism as protection against cults and con artists, and shares a story of instantly reading that a friend's girlfriend was trouble. He also contrasts the vivid, credible fear in a friend's grizzly-attack story with the flatness he feels from many UFO contact stories ("I'm getting a flat piece of paper"), suggesting some may be deliberate disinformation around real classified programs, while respecting Jacques Vallée's skeptical research. He also riffs on billionaires chasing numbers on a ledger and prosecutors playing to win rather than for justice.

Animals, Hunting, and a Lost Sense

Rogan suspects abilities like these were once common and have atrophied, the way feet weaken in shoes. He points to bird murmurations and schooling fish that never collide, and to wolves and chimpanzees that seem to coordinate roles during a hunt. Dickens shares a teacher's story of watching non-speaking students play an elaborate organized game at recess without a word. Rogan describes bowhunting mule deer, the importance of wind direction, and the controversial HECS suits that claim to block the body's electrical signal from animals, noting there's plenty of anecdotal support but no controlled study he knows of.

Dickens closes with her three goals: that people presume competence in non-speakers; that spelling to communicate be validated and made accessible in schools; and a paradigm shift toward seeing consciousness as fundamental. Longer term, she wants to open centers in every city offering non-speakers spelling support, therapy and paying careers, and respite for parents. She ends with a student who, asked what he learned in years of being taught colors and shapes, answered: "I learned patience."

Conclusion

This is an episode that asks listeners to hold two things at once: deep respect for a population long assumed to be "not in there," and extraordinary claims about telepathy, untaught languages and a shared mental space called the hill. Dickens presents a large body of reports from parents, teachers and clinicians, while acknowledging the controversy around spelling methods and that formal testing is still ahead. Rogan is enthusiastic, philosophical and occasionally skeptical of his own skepticism, connecting her work to consciousness research, animal behavior and the idea that modern life has muffled older human senses. Whatever listeners conclude about the telepathy claims, the central plea for presuming competence and giving non-speakers a way to communicate comes through clearly.

This is a summary of "Ky Dickens" from The Joe Rogan Experience, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.