The Telepathy Tapes, Autism, and the Paranormal

Mar 13, 2025

Zaid Jilani, a journalist focused on politics and culture, and Jeffrey Kripal, a philosophy professor and author, tackle the provocative claims of The Telepathy Tapes. They explore whether nonverbal autistic individuals truly possess telepathic abilities, critically examining the impacts of such claims on the autistic community. The discussion navigates the intersection of skepticism, science, and belief, emphasizing the ethical considerations surrounding facilitated communication techniques. They advocate for open-mindedness while calling for integrity in evaluating extraordinary claims.

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ANECDOTE

Alex's Scam Anecdote

Alex Grodd shares a personal story of being scammed by a fake electric company caller.
He relates this feeling of manipulation to his sense of being conned by the Telepathy Tapes podcast.

INSIGHT

Limits of Scientific Materialism

Scientific materialism is a belief system that insists on replicable evidence, which can be circular.
Paranormal experiences may be real but often lie outside current scientific methods of measurement.

INSIGHT

Telepathy's Broad Historical Context

Telepathic phenomena appear widely beyond autistic children and have been documented for over a century.
Such experiences cannot be fully explained or confined to specific individuals or scientific setups.

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Today’s disagreement is on The Telepathy Tapes, Autism, and the Paranormal. If you’re not familiar, The Telepathy Tapes is a cultural phenomenon and podcast that launched in Fall 2024. By early January, it was the number one podcast in the country. Today, it’s still in the top ten. Its core thesis is quite provocative: that there are non-verbal autistic young people who possess telepathic powers and are able to read the minds of their parents and teachers.

In this episode, we use The Telepathy Tapes as a springboard to ask some big questions about science, skepticism, and the nature of truth.

Is telepathy real? How should we evaluate the claims in the podcast? Do these claims adversely affect–even harm–the autistic young people being celebrated?

To have this conversation, we’ve brought together a journalist and a religious scholar with very different approaches to understanding the truth.

Zaid Jilani is a journalist whose work has appeared in The Intercept, News Nation and Alternet. He writes about politics and culture on his Substack The American Saga.

Jeffrey Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University and the Associate Director of the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute. Jeffrey is also the author of thirteen books, including most recently: How to Think Impossibly.

Before we get started, a note. In The Telepathy Tapes, the nonverbal autistic young people use a controversial method to communicate with the outside world. It’s called “facilitated communication.” There is an adult that helps to facilitate the young person’s communication—usually through some form of touch and holding a letterboard that the young person point to. We get into this in-depth on the podcast.

Questions or comments about this episode? Email us at podcast@thedisagreement.com or find us on X and Instagram @thedisagreementhq. Subscribe to our newsletter: https://thedisagreement.substack.com/