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It’s rare for podcasting king Joe Rogan to be dethroned from number one on Spotify’s charts. The Joe Rogan Experience has been the most popular podcast on the streaming app for the last four years and almost always holds the top spot, occasionally jostling with competitors like Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy.
But a controversial new podcast about mind reading has soared to number one, knocking Rogan off his perch in the USA. The Telepathy Tapes is a series which explores claims that certain non-verbal autistic children can read minds. The podcast is presented by documentary maker Ky Dickens, who says she is a “science nerd”.
Presenter of The Telepathy Tapes Ky Dickens is a filmmaker and self-professed ‘science nerd’
Ky Dickens / Instagram
Over the course of ten episodes, Dickens explores this “hidden form of communication which defies mainstream science”. She interviews parents who believe their children have telepathic powers and conducts experiments alongside psychologist Dr. Diane Hennacy, where parents are given numbers and words to think of which their child must guess. One child in the first episode is said to have 100% accuracy with her telepathic gifts.
The podcast is a hit with listeners: it has over 2000 reviews on Spotify and a 4.9 star rating overall. It promises to “challenge the skeptic in all of us” but has been met with doubt by some. “In a happier time Dickens would have merely been an anonymous crank,” said The Times in a zero star review. “What she emphatically is not is a science nerd.”
Anecdotal evidence forms much of the basis for the argument in the podcast, from parents who believe their children have mind reading powers. The fairness of the tests which Dickens conducts has also been questioned. Critics have argued that the parents might be cueing up their children to select the right answer through body movements or physical touch – whether they are aware of it or not.
While some have accused the podcast of peddling pseudoscience, one fan is Joe Rogan himself. On the Christmas special episode of his own show, Rogan described The Telepathy Tapes as “really fascinating,” adding that he thinks “some telepathy is real”. Perhaps he had a part to play in the podcast replacing him as number one.
