The Podcast of Magical Thinking

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On a long car ride recently, I listened to a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. I’d noticed it at the top of the charts, which I found curious. I later learned that was in part because Joe Rogan had recommended it. “I think some telepathy is real,” he had said. “It is real”—which is not a statement normally worth taking seriously. Except maybe now, when belief in telepathy seems to be joining forces with vaccine skepticism and belief in UFOs and nutritional remedies to create a Marvel Universe of conspiracy theorists banding together to fight the common enemy of Establishment Science.

The Telepathy Tapes starts with a small domestic miracle. It features nonspeaking autistic children who have learned to communicate using a method sometimes known as spelling, or facilitated communication. The facilitator, who in the podcast is mostly the speller’s mother, guides the child’s hand, or arm, or sometimes lightly touches them to help them spell out words. It’s a method developed in the 1970s to allow nonspeaking children to express their thoughts. Later tests proved the method to be wholly unreliable, although the podcast claims that it has evolved to be more so. And then the podcast ups the ante. Not only can the children communicate, but they are telepathic, and by the end of the series they are communing with the dead and predicting disasters.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we bring on Dan Engber, a senior editor on The Atlantic’s science desk, who started looking into facilitated communication about a decade ago. Engber explains how spelling and alleged telepathy have always been intertwined. And he theorizes why the forces of conspiracism have lately been aligning in a novel way.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: On a long road trip over winter break, I listened to all 10 episodes of this podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. The show is about a group of nonspeaking autistic kids who are able to communicate using a method sometimes known as “spelling” or “facilitated communication.” Essentially, someone—the facilitator—helps guide the kids, using a keyboard or an iPad to spell out messages.

That already is a kind of magic because kids who have been unable to communicate can now share their thoughts. But this podcast takes it to a whole new level of magic. It’s not just that they can communicate; these kids can read minds.

Houston’s brother: I’ll bring Houston up to them and just tell him, Hey. Think of one little thing, and he writes it out on the board.

Ky Dickens: So he’s read your friends’ minds?

Houston’s brother: He has read my friends’ minds before. I’ve seen it firsthand.

Rosin: By the end of the series, the kids are not just reading minds. They’re communing with the dead, predicting disasters, and generally outclassing the neurotypical mortals.

Maura:  Again, she always tells me about these God visits, as she calls them, that happen at night. And so I said, Did he talk to you again last night? And she said, Yes, unfortunately. And then she does: Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

Rosin: On that road trip, my partner and I got into a big argument about this podcast. The mind-reading scenes sounded so believable on the podcast, but telepathy?

Manisha: What is this phenomenon happening? Why are his mind and my mind completely connected?

Rosin: Why were so many people buying into this?

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

Today we’re going to talk about how an idea like telepathy lands differently now: the cultural conditions that make this old idea—that’s almost too fringe to bother debunking—take off.

And we’re going to do that by looking at this blockbuster podcast, The Telepathy Tapes, which started out as this low-budget independent project. And then, in December, Joe Rogan started spreading the word.

Joe Rogan: I think some telepathy is real.

Duncan Trussell: It is real.

Rogan: I think it is real.

Rosin:  And then the host of Telepathy Tapes—her name is Ky Dickens—got an agent, did an interview with Rogan and then more interviews, and now she has a documentary in the works.

From the car that day, I sent a Slack message to an Atlantic colleague who knows a lot about facilitated communication.

Dan Engber:  December 28, 4 o’clock p.m.—not a time that I was on Slack.

Rosin: That is Dan Engber, a science writer at The Atlantic.

Engber:  I discovered that sliding my can of seltzer around on this table is sort of like an ASMR thing.

Rosin:  Dan started looking into facilitated communication about 10 years ago—

Engber: Was developed in the 1970s in Australia.

Rosin: —as part of the disabilities-rights movement, a form of empowerment.

 Engber: And it was seen in this whole tradition of liberating people with communication issues from, basically, the prison of lowered expectations—just because: They might not do well in an IQ test if they can’t talk, but if you give them a way to communicate, they can reveal who they really are.

Rosin:  The way it works is: A facilitator helps the autistic person spell out messages—

Engber: By holding the person’s hand or forearm or possibly their shoulder, or touching them in other ways, or holding the keyboard or the letter board in front of them.

The facilitated part of “facilitated communication” means someone has to be there to help.  It always involved someone else there, doing something to help the person type.

Rosin: Now, to be clear: Spelling, facilitated communication—or FC for short—is not reading people’s minds. Or it’s not supposed to be. So it’s a bit of a jump from FC to telepathy, which is why Dan agreed to look into the Telepathy Tapes podcast. It was a new—let’s say—development.

Ky Dickens, the host of the podcast, is not a science journalist. In interviews, she’s referred to herself as a “science nerd” and a “skeptic.” Generally, she makes documentaries. But since she didn’t have the funds at the time to make this documentary, she decided to make it into a podcast.

By the way, The Atlantic reached out to Dickens for comment, but she didn’t respond.

Okay. So the podcast begins with the series of spelling experiments that she’s running, sort of living-room experiments.

Engber: Yeah.

Rosin: What’s the setup? Describe to us who and what is in this room.

Engber: Okay. The setup is, she starts by—this is kind of her entrée into this world. She hears a woman named Diane Hennacy Powell. This is a psychiatrist based in the Pacific Northwest who’s written a book about ESP and is very interested herself in the topic of people with autism who, in Powell’s view, have kind of a savant skill for reading minds or ESP or psi phenomena. So Dickens hears Powell on a podcast and gets the idea that she wants to pursue this.

And so she starts working with Powell to get some of these people and to design experiments, ways to test them, and then she’s going to film it and record audio from it and talk about it. And so that’s where the podcast starts.

So they set up in a rented house in Glendale, and they fly in a family from Mexico. All the spellers only go by their first name.

Sophia: This is Mia.

Diane Hennacy Powell: Hi, Mia. Nice to meet you.

Sophia: Yes. She’s waving.

Engber: So it’s this girl, Mia. I think she’s a teenager. And they start running these experiments.

Dickens: So Dr. Powell, what numbers do you want to put in there?

Powell: I would like to try three-digit numbers, so they’ll be numbers between 100 and 999.

Engber: Powell will generate a random number on an iPad app.

Rosin: Powell’s the scientist?

Engber: Powell’s the scientist.

Rosin: Yeah.

Engber: Then she’ll show that number to Mia’s mom. Behind a screen, Mia has a blindfold on. They’ve taken extra care to make sure, you know, they’ve covered up any mirrors in the room, even a TV screen.

Powell: That’s a reflective surface there, the TV, so we need to cover that.

Dickens: Okay. And there’s a mirror there.

Powell: And there’s a mirror there. Yes, that’s got to be covered up, as well, or taken down.

Engber: So they’re taking a lot of care to make sure only Mia’s mom is seeing this number. And then, Mia’s mom, who is the facilitator, sits next to Mia. And Mia spells out, using her letter board, what her mom has just seen, or she says what the number is. There could be numbers on the board too.

Woman: Se puede quitar.

Dickens: She’s pointing at six.

Mia’s mother: Nine, eight.

Engber: So that’s the test. That’s the telepathy experiment as described in the first episode of the show.

Rosin: And I have to say, listening to it, now just in the pure audio—obviously, I can’t see it, but I’m listening to it—it is like a magic show. I mean, when you listen to it, you do think, Whoa. You know, How are they doing this in the way they’re describing? Like, How is this autistic child doing this? Like, the mother hasn’t said a word. You haven’t heard the mother say a word. So that’s the feeling of listening to it. It is a little like watching a miracle, you know?

Engber: Yeah—

Rosin: Listening to a miracle. We’re not watching it. And I think that’s probably a key difference.

Engber: Well, I hate to say this to a podcast host, but I think the problem here is: There’s sort of a pernicious problem with audio that is in play here.

Rosin: Boo.

Engber: (Laughs.)

Rosin: It’s all right. Go ahead.

Engber: It’s all about voices and people’s impressions. And it’s so intimate, right? And I think these are all things that are echoed in the people with telepathy—supposedly with telepathy—as well. So I think it’s worth talking this through. In listening to the podcast, you’re hearing Ky Dickens, the host, just be so amazed by what she’s seeing. And then one of the members of her crew, she describes as this real, like, skeptical guy, this real materialist, and he kind of has a conversion in real time on the podcast.

Michael Ognisanti: It’s hard for me to not believe this is authentic. I’m looking at everything. I’m watching her. I’m watching the mom. I’m watching—I’m watching everything. And for me and my perspective, it’s real.

Engber: So for the listener, you’re not even hearing Mia. Of course, Mia doesn’t speak. That’s the point. But you’re hearing the people who are seeing Mia, and you’re getting their reactions, and they are so amazed, and it is so sincere that that emotion just transfers to you. Also, the podcast is really, I would say, amateurishly produced. I talked to one podcast producer who described it as having kind of like a Blair Witch effect, which I thought was apt. It’s like, that just makes it feel a little more real somehow.

Mia’s mother: Uno, tres.

Group: Bravo, Mia! (Applause.)

Rosin: Okay. So back to my original question: Dan, as someone who knows about facilitated communication and spelling, what are we missing?

Engber: Okay, so what is not described in that first episode is how spelling works, which involves the facilitator—in this case, with Mia, her mom—sitting on the sofa next to her and placing her finger on Mia’s forehead the entire time that Mia is spelling.

So, I mean, this is just—what does that mean? I know what it means. But, like, I think if the average listener of the podcast were to watch the videos, and there are videos on the podcast website—you pay $10, you can become a member, and then you can watch the videos—it just, like, gives you a first sense of, well: This process of producing the answers, you know, the messages from Mia, it’s very intimate.

It’s collaborative. Something here is going on. It’s not Mia on her own with a pen and paper writing out digits. It’s this intensely cooperative process to produce the messages. And that is a signal for what could really be going on here, which is that this method—again, going back to the 1970s in Australia—has long, long, long been known to have a problem, which is: It can be really, really hard to tell who is the actual author of the messages being produced.

[Music]

Rosin: Facilitated communication found its way from Australia in the ’70s to the U.S. by the ’80s and the early ’90s.

In a PBS Frontline documentary called “Prisoners of Silence” that aired in 1993, Kathy Hayduke, the mother of a nonspeaking autistic child, recalled the moment her daughter Stacy had a breakthrough—all thanks to FC and her daughter’s new facilitator.

Kathy Hayduke: And she said, Kathy, she’s telling me this, and she’s telling me that, and you’ve got to see it. So one day, she came over to the house and she said, Stacy, I know you’re excited. After all these years, you must have something you want to tell Mom. And Stacy types out, I love you, Mom.

Rosin: I can understand a mom wanting to hear I love you from her child. So the relief was real, and the emotions around FC were deep. But soon after the method came to the U.S., it was debunked—or, at least, declared wholly unreliable.

Engber: A lot of tests were done of people using facilitated communication to see if they could ever spell out a message with information that their facilitator didn’t know. So if the problem is, maybe your facilitator is really the one writing the messages, well, there’s an easy test for it. Like, okay, let me show you a picture of a sandwich. And then while your facilitator is not in the room, bring him back in the room. Tell me what you saw. And the reality was few, if any, people using FC could pass that test.

Rosin: To quote a program director in the PBS documentary who was involved in some of that testing, out of 180 trials, quote: “We literally really didn’t get one correct response.”

Rosin: Are you suggesting manipulation? Or what are you suggesting, exactly?

Engber: Definitely not manipulation.

Rosin: As we mentioned before, FC in its original form was just holding someone’s hand or arm or shoulder while the other person typed on a keyboard. Potentially—at least, optics-wise—lots of room for subconsciously guiding the person to where you want them to type.

But in Mia’s case, on the Telepathy Tapes podcast, her mom just had a finger on her forehead, or she was holding her chin.

Engber: I think this is really important. It is extreme—you could have read or reported on this at great length, as I have, and it’s still extremely hard to tell what’s going on when you’re seeing it with your own eyes. So I think that’s sort of how the podcast works. The people, the host, the camera guy—they’re seeing it with their own eyes and then reacting. And they’re reacting the way most people would react, seeing this with their own eyes, which is not like, Hey. This looks fake, but rather, This looks real.

Rosin: Okay. So the filmmaker had a certain reaction, which we can assume was an honest reaction. I mean, let’s just say it was an honest reaction, the filmmaker and the cameraman. They looked—they saw the hands on the forehead; they were like, Whoa, something beyond my comprehension is going on here. What did you see then? How did you assess the forehead touch?

Engber: Well, I think what is so easy to miss or so hard to grasp, even if you know what you’re looking for, is this idea that this might be working something like a Ouija board, where, you know, two or more people put their hands on something, and just the uncertainty of having multiple hands on it—I think it’s called a planchette, on the Ouija board, the thing you’re sliding around to different letters—

Rosin: Sure.

Engber: —it kind of feels like it’s moving on its own, even when you’re doing it, right? But even understanding that—this is my point: Even knowing that a Ouija board is a toy or a game, it works. You know that, you know, a spirit isn’t moving this thing, and yet it kind of feels like, Well, who is moving it?

Rosin: So Mia and her mom are doing what, then? Is it, like, a collective—I’m just trying to find a word or articulate what is happening in that room, because you’re not calling it manipulation. You’re not saying that Mia and her mom are kind of hucksters doing a circus trick to get themselves on a podcast. That’s not your characterization of them at all, right?

Engber: No chance.

Rosin: And you’re not saying that Ky Dickens, the host, or the cameraman are lying. We’re not saying that.

Engber: No chance, as far as I’m concerned. I can’t read minds. I will admit that up front, but I just—I’ve interviewed a lot of spellers. I’ve interviewed a lot of spellers’ moms. I’ve never met one that I thought was lying about it.

There’s one part in the podcast, actually, where Ky Dickens is addressing the skeptics that she knows are out there, and she just says, The idea that the facilitators might be somehow creating these messages is—I forget the phrase—like, unambiguously false. She just rejects outright the possibility that there’s any unconscious influence from the facilitators, from the parents.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: And then she quotes one of the parents saying, “The thing is, Ky, we can’t all be lying.”

Rosin: Right.

Engber: And the implication there is, Yeah. Okay. Maybe you’re so skeptical you think Mia’s mom is a grifter or something. But there are so many parents out here who feel that their kids have telepathy. It can’t just be a whole army of grifters.

Rosin: Okay. So what’s in the mix then? Let me just try this, and you see if I’m with you here. So it’s not lying that you think is in the mix between this parent and child. It’s some form of communion—love, maybe, even? Connection? I would say, hope?

Like, there’s so much out there—I’m a parent of an autistic child, though not a nonverbal one, but—so much hope of, like, inside the child, there’s so much that this child wants to say and express with me and, like, a wish for connection. There’s a relationship or intimacy, and that translates into something. But it’s not clear what it is. Is it something like that?

Engber: I think it is a profoundly intimate act. I’ve had facilitators facilitate me. And it is—I mean, you’re sitting with a stranger, or I was sitting with a stranger, and she puts her hand on mine, and I don’t know what to tell you. It’s just, like, you suddenly are holding hands with someone; you feel close to them, right? And there’s just such a desire to—I think we all have a desire to connect and feel understood and feel like we’re understanding people.

Now, raise that desire to the hundredth power if you’re talking about a mother or a father trying to connect with their child, to the thousandth power if that child is nonspeaking, and it’s always sort of hard to exactly understand what’s going on in your child’s mind.

I mean, “desire” is even shortchanging it. It seems like the most urgent need I can possibly imagine is to find a way to communicate with your child.

Rosin: Yeah.

Engber: And here is this thing, and at first, it’s frustrating. It’s not working. And then, Wait! What’s that? A glimmer of something. Like, We’re doing this method, and we spelled out a word, and then it flowers from there, right? And then now we’re spelling out short sentences, and now my son is writing poetry. And now I’m learning about all this stuff. Like, Oh! He’s got a girlfriend. And he’s telling me all about that. What more could you want than have your kid tell you about their first love?

And so you can just see how the drive to make this thing work and to find meaning in it is so intense. And I think that is both very moving and very dangerous.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: If you believe telepathy is real, what else might you believe?

[Break]

Rosin: So facilitated communication has been around for decades and, as you said, has been debunked. But this podcast goes way further than that, right?

Engber: Right. Yeah. And this podcast actually invokes something that—I didn’t realize it, but—has been present since the start of facilitated communication, which is just that: Okay, if it is the case, if you’re facilitating me, and the messages that are coming out are actually you subconsciously writing those messages yourself, at some point, you might think, Hey. Wait a second. Dan just spelled something that was in my head, right?

It is just a natural effect of how you have this Ouija-board illusion, right? Just eventually, I might type something or spell something that is, you know, information that only you know, that I shouldn’t know. And so this is, in some way, just a byproduct of the Ouija board effect, right?

Rosin: Oh. So the flaws that you’ve already described in facilitated communication—if you’re not seeing them as flaws, the other word to call them is telepathy.

Engber: Exactly. So it’s really—it’s just like, you hit this fork in the road early in the process, right? There’s two problems here. If it is really true that the facilitator is the one who’s actually creating the messages, there’s two problems.

One: If the speller knows something that the facilitator doesn’t know, the speller can’t spell that out. That’s the message-passing test. That was the test that the scientists used to debunk this whole thing. So that’s problem No. 1e. So you have to deal with that problem.

Problem No. 2, though, is exactly the opposite: Okay, why does the speller seem to know things that are in the head of the facilitator? Like, they shouldn’t—why can they do that? And so you can either see that happen and go, You know what? I’m a little worried that this method doesn’t work, and then you move on to other interventions to try to help the nonspeaking person, or you say, Oh, I know what it is. The spelling is valid, and they have ESP.

Rosin:  Oh my god. That’s so obvious. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that. That’s exactly what it is. Of course you would call that telepathy because you are, in fact, reading the thoughts of the facilitator. It’s literally just a synonym for the problems you were describing.

Does the podcast talk about the history of facilitated spelling or telepathy at all?

Engber: Yeah, the podcast gets into it. I mean, there’s a certain point right at the beginning—it’s not clear what we’re even talking about. It’s just, Here’s this girl, Mia. She can read her mother’s mind. And as it goes along, it gets into the history of facilitated communication, the scandals. There were false sexual-abuse allegations; there were the debunkings of the ’90s.

And so the podcast has to engage with that, right? And what the host, Ky Dickens, does is: She basically acknowledges that all that happened. She says, But look—people were experiencing telepathy from the very beginning, and also the method has improved. We now have these new versions, called Rapid Prompting or Spelling to Communicate, and they’re much better. And also, she talks about one guy that she features in the podcast.

Manisha: What is that? What do you see, Akhil?

Engber: A man named Akhil, who is, according to the podcast, telepathic and can also speak to the dead.

Manisha: Akhil used to see, like, when my mom passed away, and I used to sit down and study with him, he would say, Your mom wants to play with me, and I said, Where is she? He said, She’s sitting beside me.

Engber: And he does this without being touched. So for her, it’s like, There you go. That’s proof.

Rosin: And what would you say about that? Because I do have to say, listening, Akhil and his mother are the most charming mother-son pair you will ever encounter.

Engber: I mean, this is, again—one of the complicating things about this is it’d be nice if you could just say, Oh, FC is fake, and everyone who uses it is, you know—the message is coming entirely from the facilitator. But it’s just such a diverse set of practices, and it involves such a diverse set of people and people-facilitator pairs. It’s just, like, a very complicated question.

Now, Akhil—you watched the video of him. He’s not being touched by his mother. But there are cases where he appears to read her mind by typing into an iPad keyboard, and she’s not touching him or the keyboard.

Dickens: Okay. So, Manisha, come stand here.

Dickens: (Narrating.) I’ve taken a step back and changed my body position slightly, just in case. I reach into the paper bag, and the new word is: tiger.

Dickens: This one.

Manisha: Okay. Here you go, buddy.

Voice software: T-i-g-e-r. Tiger.

Dickens: Wow, awesome.

Engber: I mean, it is really impressive. It looks like telepathy, but she is very involved in the process, right? She’s making sounds. She’s moving. And I think it just goes to show how this influence—what I would say is, like, unconscious influence over the creation of the messages—can happen in many different ways.

Like, it could happen if you’re holding a person’s hand. It could happen if you’re holding their shoulder, putting your finger on their forehead, holding the letter board for them and not even touching them. And my belief is that in the case of Akhil, it’s through these other cues. You can see in the video, she’s, like, leaning her body to one side or the other in concert with the direction that he has to move his finger to hit the next key on the keyboard.

So he has to type, you know, a-r, and those are on the left side of the keyboard, and she’s kind of leaning to the left. And then he has to type i-p-o, which is on the upper right of the keyboard, and she, like, leans her body in that direction. Now, in order for Akhil to pick up on those cues, I mean, the level of attunement that he must have to what she is, you know, perhaps subconsciously, wanting him to do is truly exquisite. I mean, it’s amazing.

Dickens: The answer is: 44,126,388.

Voice software: 4-4-1-2—

Engber: On the other hand, your other choice here is to believe that he really is telepathic and speaks to the dead. So you’re confronted with, you know, two extraordinary skills, one far more extraordinary than the other.

Rosin: Yeah. I have to say, I—listening to Akhil and his mother, I mean, never was I more torn. Like, I was tearing up listening to them, but mostly because of the depth of their love and attunement for each other, and her dedication to him. Like, I wasn’t so much paying attention to: Is he telepathic? I just doubted it from the beginning. But just this specific kind of intimacy they created with each other was just amazing.

So, you know, we’ve been talking about spelling and love. What are some of the more, can we say, outlandish claims that the podcast makes?

Engber: Yeah, so Dickens says that communing with the dead is—she describes it as—“a very common gift” among these telepathic spellers. I mean, there’s something funny about it—I’m sorry—about the fact that, you know, you’ve rejected, from the beginning, the possibility that this is a Ouija-board thing, and then the power that is emerged is, like, literally the conceit of a Ouija board, is talking to the dead.

Rosin: But it’s not just communing with the dead. I mean, you know, where it lost me is: She’s talking about universities in heaven. I mean, there’s some of the parents who feel extremely influenced by religiosity or spirituality.

Engber: Yes, the people are talking to angels. They’re prophesying disaster. They’re treating cancer. They’re, you know, reading hieroglyphics.

The list of powers—I mean, again, in Episode 1, it’s like, Oh, I know what number my mom is thinking of. By Episode 10, it’s like, I’m astrally projecting to a place called “The Hill,” where I am reading The Great Gatsby with angels.

Rosin: Yeah.

Engber: We hear about a telepathic parrot. We hear about a group of elephants that, for some reason, is able to observe a memorial on a specific day of the Gregorian calendar. Like, the claims really just—it’s almost like once you’ve accepted that telepathy is possible, once you have broken out of what Dickens refers to as the “materialist” mindset, anything is possible. Everything is on the table. You’re off to the races.

Rosin: Yes. Once you’ve gone through the portal, like, magic happens. Anything can happen.

Engber: Yeah, there’s a part in the Rogan interview where they’re just taking this to logical places. Like, once you accept the premise, Rogan is like, Imagine what the government would do with these kids.

Rogan: Isn’t that disgusting? That’s the first thing you think about: If someone’s extraordinary, could the government—like, the X-Men?

Dickens: Yeah.

Engber: And Dickens is like, Yeah, that’s a totally valid concern.

Rogan: That’s what everybody worries.

Dickens: Yeah. And it’s a fair worry. I mean, it is a fair worry. And, you know—

Engber: And I’m sitting there, and I’m like, I mean, it is a valid concern, right?

Rosin: Right, exactly. (Laughs.) Exactly.

Engber: They’re correct.

Rosin: So you and I could sit here in our mutual podcast spaces and, you know, be skeptical. And yet, the podcast has been enormously popular. As you were reporting—it’s now been a few months—how did you see the podcast evolve as a cultural phenomenon?

Engber: Yeah, so, I mean, it really—it was getting big in December. It was climbing its way through the Apple audio charts. And then Joe Rogan got into it on his Christmas Day episode. He said—

Rogan: Here’s the thing about all this.

Engber: —I think telepathy is real. And he talked about this podcast.

Rogan: Have you listened to The Telepathy Tapes?

Trussell: No.

Rogan: You haven’t?

Engber: And then, it immediately—The Telepathy Tapes shot to No. 1. And it’s really been, like, in the top 10 almost ever since. So I think it was that moment of, like, getting tapped by Joe Rogan.

It’s funny—if you actually watch the video of that episode, Rogan is wearing, like, a jester hat with bells, I guess, for Christmas. But it just makes it extra funny to have him talk about how, like, No. This seriously is real, and he’s dressed literally like a clown.

Rosin: And then he had Ky Dickens on more recently.

Engber: Yeah. Just last week, Ky Dickens was on the show for two and a half hours. And I think what you see there—just to your question of, Why now?—is the way that different sets of, I mean, I would say, sort of conspiratorial beliefs start to overlap and gravitate towards each other. And sometimes it’s very clean and it makes sense, and then other times, little tensions emerge.

So for Rogan—and he says this—he talks on and on in this podcast about, Oh, yeah. You know, there are these skeptics who just—they’re afraid of sounding stupid, and they just like to accept the mainstream narrative. And Dickens totally agrees. And you can see how their worldviews are just copacetic, right?

Like, Yeah. Why not telepathy? And you’ve proved it. And that’s amazing. And they’re, like, loving each other. And to the extent that Rogan has a whole set of other beliefs that I don’t know if Dickens has, but, like, they’re bonding in having figured out the truth about what “they” won’t tell you—what the elites, media elites, don’t want you to believe. And so I don’t know. I really—I was like, Oh, this is the moment right here where there is such resentment against the standard narrative—the elite narratives—that any counternarrative is appealing.

There have been people using spelling for decades, as we talked about. There have been people who believe that spelling reveals telepathy for decades. There are people who believe a lot of weird things. But I think, until now, they’ve all been kind of living in their own worlds. And now, I would say, in this moment, those people are kind of finding common cause. They’re realizing that they kind of share an outlook with respect to “the narrative,” maybe, and they’re forming alliances.

Rosin: Meaning that there have been people forever who have wanted to believe in counternarratives, or believe that you’re being lied to, and just right now, that’s ascendant. Like, that energy is ascendant.

Engber: I mean that there have been communities of people living in their own realities, but that’s just sort of like a private reality. And there are people who, for example, believe that childhood vaccines are deadly or cause autism or have many, many other harms. And they’re sort of living in their slightly more public private reality. And there are people who believe in UFOs, and they have their own community.

Of course, these people have been around all this time. But I think there are moments in—if I can be so grand—American history where the inhabitants of all these private realities kind of band together, and it becomes less like a menu of choices than a full meal. That’s what I mean by “the alliances.” So just to give an example, Diane Hennacy Powell, the scientist in the show—she is anti-vaccine, who’s spoken at an event with RFK Jr.

RFK Jr. has likened people who are skeptical of spelling to pediatricians who deny the harms of childhood vaccines. So right there, there’s an alliance between anti-vaccine activists and spellers.

Rosin: Yeah. They do meet in this place where, you know, mystical ideas, intuition, anything that mainstream science or the experts don’t believe is ascendant. Now, you are a person who is a science journalist, who does want to align yourself with what the mainstream scientific institution finds to be true. So what do you make of a moment like this?

Engber: I mean, I think sometimes the counternarratives are true, and it is good when they get an airing and become ascendant. It’s just, I think what is interesting to me to observe is the way it’s, like, open season on counternarratives, right? And so you’re seeing this negotiation among adherence to counternarratives, and it’s playing out even in the federal government.

And so it’s become—I mean, just to give one example: I’m sorry. This is going to sound far afield, but I think it speaks to the central point here. So we have an anti-vaccine activist in charge of [the Department of] Health and Human Services. There’s also—we’re going to have a COVID contrarian take over the National Institutes of Health. Both those people—Jay Bhattacharya and RFK Jr.—are into, essentially, paleo diets and the idea that carbohydrates are what’s causing so much chronic disease in this country, as I understand it.

Okay, so now maybe you’re getting this other group that has, you know, been making this counternarrative argument about nutrition, that the problem is not calorie intake but sugars. Now they have a foot in with this administration. This is just, like—somehow there’s, you know, common cause between the sugar-is-toxic crowd and the anti-vaccine crowd and the, you know, like, COVID contrarians.

And as I have said, like, you can draw these connections over into the world of spellers and telepathy. Like, I just think if you mapped out all of these different groups with, you know, their own hobbyhorses, some of which I think are, you know, reasonable—like, the reasonable arguments to have about what nutritional policy should be—but, you know, there’s just these new alliances. That’s what’s interesting to me about this moment.

Rosin: Dan, you have thoroughly explained this phenomenon to me. Thank you so much.

Engber: My pleasure.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, engineered by Erica Huang, and fact-checked by Sara Krolewski.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.