Are you ready to get weird? The Telepathy Tapes makes an extraordinary claim: some nonspeaking autistic people appear able to receive information that nobody knows how they could get. Plenty of skeptics think the whole thing is bullshit. Plenty of believers skip straight past the experiment. Both reactions are boring.

Spiros and I ask the more useful question: if there is even a clean, testable anomaly here, what experiment would let us find out? That takes us through entanglement, shared consciousness, Aikido, empathy and communication channels physics may not know how to read yet. This is not a declaration that telepathy is real. It’s an argument for being brave enough to test interesting things.

Transcript

Pablos: There's lots of polarized response to this. All the skeptics think it's complete bullshit. All the people who want to believe, believe. If you listen to the podcast, which is very important to do, it will make you feel something. These people they go visit, they're not sophisticated, they're not schemers, they're like, can you help us understand what's going on. Some of these kids can just do it with their mom or their caretaker. Some can do it with everyone. The contention is not just that some of these non-verbal autistic kids can do it, but that all of them can do it.

Leave the controversy aside. Just suspend disbelief for a moment. Here's why I think this is important. It might all be bullshit. Fine. But if it's not bullshit, we probably owe it to ourselves to try to figure out: there's some communication channel that we can't read or write right now. We don't detect it's not electromagnetic or something we understand well. It's basically heretical enough that no self-respecting scientist would come anywhere near this topic because the contention is it's telepathy and we know that's woo-woo bullshit.

Spiros: I don't think so. I think it would be such a simple double-blind experiment. I imagine a lot of scientists would be very excited to—

Pablos: They claim to have done this a whole bunch. Obviously nobody who wasn't there believes it was done well enough.

Spiros: Who said that, was it Carl Sagan, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? I don't even consider it extraordinary evidence to get a skeptic. We do it again, let's get double blind. Even for the kids, maybe they didn't know if their mom was the one writing or penciling the numbers or somebody, a random person—you randomize it.

Pablos: They claim to have done all that.

Spiros: What I care about is not the superpower, because I am somebody that believes everything is possible. To figure out how to get there: our iPhones are telepathic devices, right, because you can communicate with somebody across the world instantaneous like that. It would have been heresy a hundred years ago.

Pablos: Exactly right.

Spiros: For me it's more about treating the kids and the parents with respect, not little guinea pigs or something like that, but also this recognition: more than meets the eye and there are points of view and superpowers. People that often you like, oh yeah, you're not going to be able to do much—and you're like, what the hell are you talking about.

Pablos: Here's what I'm thinking: we owe it to ourselves to find this communication channel if it exists.

Spiros: You can imagine also doing some MRI studies on that and whatever it is.

Pablos: Some have been done, they've done fMRI.

Spiros: That's the best thing we can do, unless the best thing is the person who has that power can explain how it works. That's also for me the most important thing in science is not just to be a genius that figures things out, but to figure out how you figure these things out. You're not the only one who can do it. That's where empathy is so important, because you cannot figure out internally often how something works unless you talk to other people. These kids might be able to figure it out.

I don't know if I know anybody at Caltech who is a Ghostbusters level, for example.

Pablos: John Belushi.

Spiros: We have some incredible people doing optomechanics research and stuff like that.

Pablos: You came so close to describing this as possible before I brought it up to say: all these things are entangled, photons aren't real, that's just entanglement. If all that's true, the closest thing we would have to an explanation right now of how this could be possible is this quantum entanglement thing that was poorly understood. It's very telling when you listen to a bunch of these stories: the inadvertent things that happen in the experiments are even more interesting, which is: the kid can describe what his mom is seeing. The kid can express that in English or other languages. Somehow these kids know other languages they can't speak. It's almost a shared consciousness. Lots of little things point to it being more a shared consciousness than a communication channel. It's not like the mom is sending a message over text or iPhone; it's more like the kid is just seeing very weird stuff. Anyway, if we could find that channel and we could read it or write it or both, then something super interesting happens, which is overnight these kids who we think of as kind of the least useful humans, overnight they become the most capable humans in the world because they would have a brain computer interface. They would have ChatGPT in their head, and the rest of us would be relegated to being second-rate humans.

Spiros: I'm gonna push back a little bit because I think the people I care about the most are the kindest, most compassionate human beings, not the most high-powered one.

It feels like if only I had this friend who could solve my problem, or I know somebody to do this or that, and then you forget to enjoy the journey and you get there and you're like, I can read people's minds, and you're like, now what? Are they treating me with respect, or am I now a tool? Or do I treat other people with respect?

This is much more infinite. We already have within us the superpower of all superpowers: the ability to connect with other human beings is just also the hardest one to activate because you're scared. Wait, what if I lose myself, or who I am, or what I believe, or what my purpose is in life, or my identity, because I allow somebody else to come into that sacred space? And what a gift it is when somebody else allows you to be in their space, and you don't have to even visit and stay for too long.

The best way to do it is to go have dinner together, over something shared that you're like, this is amazing, I'm really enjoying this, and then you're just having a conversation. And the funny thing is that many of my closest friends on paper are the complete opposite politically, socially, this and that, and yet these are the people that I love the most and I appreciate them most.

I hang out with them every day, and I have trouble relating to others who on paper are exactly like me, and I'm like, what is going on? You went over the Telepathy Tapes. I don't want the world to lose again that feeling that comes with the journey of the adventure, versus oh, how can we exploit this to get to the other side, which is like now we have this extra superpower.

We already have it basically, with these phones and the ability to communicate over the internet and all that stuff. Survivor: yes, I know how to make fire, but will I ever really have the superpower? It's niche. I think it comes down to: even if we had all the superpowers, I think that would still be missing.

I'm with you, and it's so simple. I think it does not require even any technology, but we shouldn't also put technology aside. It's just going on that journey together, whatever the hell that means, and slowing down to appreciate the journey. Imagine if the Odyssey was about how it ended, and then he just arrowed everybody, and he was back with his wife and they were happily ever after, his dog died waiting for him — there was no emotional impact. It was like, what the hell? And the Laestrygones and the Cyclopes and all that stuff.

Pablos: The reason I trained in aikido has nothing to do with self-defense. Nobody was attacking me. It's the flow. It was the physical communication.

Before that, I've done karate and stuff, but you just punch and kicking in the air. You always have a partner. And it's that physical communication I was obsessed with, and that's why I defected to salsa.

Spiros: It has better-looking partners, maybe.

Pablos: Even now, why do I need to physically communicate? I can't put it in words. But I need that. It's one of the things that's baffling to me now, because when people talk about how robots are going to make them obsolete, I'm like, look, there are people who think they can dance better than me, and there are even people who I think can dance better than me.

I'm still dancing.

Spiros: That's right, because you're not doing it for a logical reason, or because you will only dance if you win awards.

Pablos: Never won an award, never tried to win an award.

Spiros: That's right. The thing you learn through all these different stories is the intensity and all this type of competition, but in the end it's about the human connection. They're going together. It's not like, oh, the Goonies because we found treasure that was just at the end of it, but it's like you found each other despite all of your crazy weirdness and all the stuff. I think all we need is really that, and everything else—whether we have food and sleep and sex or whatever—is just so that we can have that.

It's like the joke where this billionaire finally retires in Thailand and he's like, what a beautiful little village, and the fisherman over here is wonderful, and then starts hanging out with the fisherman going early and fishing in the morning every day, and he's like, you're really good with this. Have you considered expanding your whole empire? I can finance; you can have a whole empire. He's like, why would I do that?

Then you should be able to retire and go fishing like me, and I'm like I'm doing it. I'm doing the thing. You're like, oh shit. And I get it. Even for people like us, we're so lucky to be able to pursue our dream: to be so creative in science and inventing things. It's so freaking cool. It'd be so nice if so many other people had the opportunity to pursue their own creative director position: not clashing with others, going on journeys. There's no "my world is better than yours" and all that stuff. It's like there is enough room in space and time for everybody.

And especially when it is good stuff and not boring people from different cultures. You go to Greece, you're like, yeah, that's pretty good food. I don't speak the language, but Japan freaking amazing. India around the world, you're like, what the hell, these weirdos, but amazing. Why am I eating macaroni and cheese? Why am I still eating this shit? Fish and chips, I don't know, it's still pretty good. But that's the thing, that diversity. I want to find ways to level it up so it's just people have the opportunity to go deeper and enjoy these things instead of the superficial and saying I don't want to hang out with you, you seem weird or something.

That was the first thing you wanted to bring up, the Telepathy Tapes. Do we have anything else, or was that it? That's not weird at all, man. My friends, you're like perfectly normal.

I do hope that people like me, scientists, stop being asshole, and we try to bring others on the same exciting journey we are on, where it's not like we're just fact-checking. We're not just a knowledge base, and then if you're not going along with whatever we tell you, it's like you're out, you're just like you're stupid. Not at all.

That's how we started this whole conversation, right? To me, the most exciting part of being a scientist, even as a mathematical physicist almost closer to philosophy than even experimental work, is that journey—where you come up with something you're emotionally attached to it, like every human being is, and you're like, what, I'm pretty smart, I think this is how the world works, right, and I've done all this work, and then you realize nope.

And every time, if you survive each blow to your ego, right, you get to the other side, you're like, I wasn't really that far off, but the answer turns out to be even more interesting. Even though I thought, wow, it'd be amazing if I'm right, that turned out to be even more interesting than that. And because it has to connect and be self-consistent with all the other points of view that we haven't explored, you start gaining an appreciation for all the paths, all the journey you didn't even know existed, let alone the destination.

Pablos: Was just thinking a version of this is South Park versus Studio Ghibli versus Toy Story with Pixar. It's like, which one got it right? Which is the right world? Obviously none of them are right.

Spiros: Is it vanilla versus chocolate? Neapolitan is the answer. Yes, absolutely, every single one of them is amazing, and it's almost frustrating you don't have enough time in a day to watch all of them or to explore all of them.

Pablos: Maybe if a robot takes your job and gives you enough free time to do that.

Spiros: You can do it.

Pablos: Cool. Any questions for me?

Spiros: What's for dinner? Yeah, right.

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Recorded on May 4, 2025