Transcript - Episode 17: I Think We’re Getting a Little Animated
Hey, It’s Me
EPISODE # 17
Hosts: Mike Sakasegawa and Rachel Zucker
Transcript by: Leigh Sugar
Transcripts formatted after those from Disability Visibility Project
Please note: transcripts are transcribed directly from recordings of live conversations; as a result, quotes and statements may be approximate and there may be unintended memory errors.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Hey, it's me. So a while back, actually, I don't remember which episode it was, but on one of our, on one of our episodes, you mentioned a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. And you said that I, that you were hoping I would listen to it. And I did finally listen to the whole thing, and it was, it was very interesting. And I went on kind of an interesting journey with what the podcast was about and how they were presenting it. I went on kind of a, an emotional journey with it, and it's very interesting, and we can get into why I felt the way that I felt. I started off feeling very open, and wound out feeling kind of unsettled, and maybe that's worth talking about.
But I know that you also had mentioned it in the context of having a connection with Abram that seems kind of inexplicable, that seems like something more than just sympathy pains, you know? So I'm really interested to hear sort of your experience with this show and how you found it applicable to your situation, like what your takeaways from it were. So I'm hoping we can talk about that soon. Anyway. I hope you're doing okay. I'll talk to you later.
[Music]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Record, record, record. Recording in progress.
RACHEL ZUCKER: I just realized that you cannot actually see the huge, my father calls them “blemishes,” the huge pimple on my face, and yet I feel compelled to point it out to you.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Do you want this to go in the episode?
RACHEL ZUCKER: [Laughs]. I don't know, but I think I am just, I can't get past it until I mention it.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Real nice of your dad to bring it up?
RACHEL ZUCKER: [Laughs]. No, he didn't actually see it. I mean, I almost said, I have to tell, I have to mention, even though I realized, I thought it was gonna be the first thing you said, you know, knowing you, I thought you'd be like, Rachel, what's on your face?
No, I knew you weren't gonna say that.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: That's what I'm like?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah, that's what you're like. Okay.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Okay. It's good to be known so well.
RACHEL ZUCKER: [Laughs]. It's like we have telepathy.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: [Laughs]. Okay, so we're, we're talking about The Telepathy Tapes, the podcast that you mentioned, and I can't remember which episode we were talking about it on, but, so The Telepathy Tapes is, I believe it's in its second season now, and I haven't listened to the second season, but the first season is basically presenting this idea that non-speaking autistic children are able to telepathically communicate mainly with their caregivers, usually with their mothers, not always. And you know, as they go through the season, they move from a presentation of the idea simply, and then sort of trying to test it out, and then talking about a lot of these implications of what it would mean for our understanding of science and our understanding of spirituality and lots of different things. And you had mentioned this in the context of you and Abram.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And I remember specifically the anecdote that you offered at that time was a time when you two were not physically in the same room. I think you weren't even in the house at the same time as him. And that at the exact same time, you had experienced an extreme nausea, both you and Abram. And that one of the things in this podcast that's being shared is that it's not just like a transmission of language between two people. It's not just thinking words that then appear into someone else's head, that it is more like a sharing of consciousness, and that this was something that felt very relevant to you in your experience of taking care of Abra through this just illness.
[4:56]
And if I could extrapolate from that a little bit, I would say it actually seems like the two of you have been entangled in this way since before. It's just maybe a little more obvious and more acute now.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yes, and, and maybe just to add one little piece to that, that there's lots of different examples or moments of the experience that I'm having right now with Abram, and yes, much of it predates, it's just very intensified right now, that thinking about telepathy or shared consciousness and also nonverbal communication and, like, extralinguistic, which is not, in my mind, exactly the same as nonverbal communication, because, so it's, it's these moments like the one you described, where I can feel in my body something that's happening for Abram and his body, but also, Abram and I have a extremely different relationship to verbal communication.
I, as you well know, and anyone who listens to the show, I like to talk. And I need to process things verbally, you know, with someone else, and over the course of Abram's illness, he has gotten less and less verbal. I'm not in any way saying he's, you know, nonverbal or autistic, but for the most part, not entirely, but for the most part, he does not communicate with the doctors and the nurses who are caring for him. He didn't when he was outpatient, and now inpatient, this is, this is at times rather extreme. So I have become his way of communicating with the doctors and the nurses. So, you know, there, there's like all of these different levels, you know, in which I'm, I am connecting to this podcast. And then the other piece that I just feel compelled to like, add in there, and we can talk about this or not, is that in my most recent psychedelic experience, which I guess was, I've completely lost track of time…
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: It was last year sometime, right?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah, I think it was in December.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Or November, it was November 15th actually. One of the big messages for me was that there is an understanding that I am trying to move towards that is beyond or under or outside of language. And for me, as you know, a writer and a podcaster and someone who primarily experiences the world through language, this has been something I've really been struggling with.
So, so it's, it's kind of all of those levels, and also like, you know, sometimes being with Abram is a little bit like being at a silent retreat, and I try to recast his reticence and his like, lack of ability to like interact verbally with, you know, or even non-verbally with the hospital people, as a kind of noble silence, instead of a disability, which I think it could be both.
Yeah, so there's all these ways in which this podcast is like bringing up a lot about my relationship with Abram historically, at this current moment, my relationship with language, and with understanding and communication, and with knowing, like what kind of knowing is outside of language. And then there's also this theme, and maybe you'll talk about this, about like, what is good science and what is bad science, and what is science and what is spirituality and what is science and what is pseudoscience, and like, what is harmful to believe in, what is not harmful to believe in?
Like, I'm currently in a situation with Abram where like, holy cow, the science of what's going on is intense and amazing and miraculous, but also a lot of what's going on in the hospital is like, absolutely has nothing to do with science and barely has anything to do with medicine. And so, you know, that's also part of my interest in this, which is like, you know, how do, how do we know what we know? How do we know what's real, what's not real, what works, all that kind of stuff? Okay. Back to you.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: So I remember at the time when you had introduced this podcast to me, and I'm pretty sure that what's on the tape is that I said something like, “I'm kind of allergic to woo.”
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I don't think that's exactly accurate, but my orientation towards the world has been, you know, fairly rooted in materialist science for quite a long time. And there's sort of a couple of different ways we could go here, right? And maybe we'll be able to get to both.
[9:58]
There's a thing that you're talking about here about knowing things and understanding things and relating to things outside of the context of language that I think is very important. I think that language provides us a framework for understanding things in a certain way, but there's also an argument to be made that language in itself can only facilitate understanding, and not actually be an understanding, because the language only points to some other phenomenon that we already understand.
And I, it does make me wonder, you mentioned being a writer. But I know you also have a background in orientation towards visual art and particularly photography. And it makes me think about how when I'm engaging with something photographically rather than as a writer, it's engaging really different parts of my existence. And I wonder if that is something that might resonate with you to some degree or not?
The other thing that I am thinking about and have been thinking a lot ever since I was listening to this podcast is, I'm gonna share an anecdote. Maybe I'll, I'll be a little bit more Rachel in, in this explanation [laughs]. I don't think it's just you. I do this all the goddamn time too.
RACHEL ZUCKER: I love it.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: So back when I was married, towards the end of my marriage, my wife got a little more into the more woo woo side of wellness stuff, you know, and she, her career is in wellness, and it is a career that is, you know, rooted in best practices and certifications and, and all that kind of thing. But it is also adjacent to, you know, a lot of the people who have the same job that she has, also do things like, recommend people use aromatherapy instead of chemotherapy for cancer.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: She wasn't there.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: But she was getting a little bit more into the spiritual side of things. I remember she was reading this book, she and her best friend, who was also my friend, were reading this book, the title of which was Moonology. And basically the book is sort of an introduction to the, to different sort of moon rituals that you can do. It was primarily aimed at women, you know, and, and sort of like harnessing a sort of feminine energy, and doing this in rhythm with the phases of the moon. And so, with each phase of the moon, there are different rituals that you do in order to, you know, harness this moon energy, harness this feminine moon energy and, and bring it into your life. And it's, you know, more or less a form of magic. Right?
And I remember, you know, I didn't read the book in its entirety. She didn't actually ask me to, but from time to time, she would ask me to read passages from it, and she would describe some of these rituals that she would do. I remember, in particular, there was a full moon and a new moon ritual, and I can't remember which was which, but one of them was about letting go of things.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And one of them was about intentions for the future. What are you trying to bring into your life? And I remember talking to her about this and saying, you know, you know, I am kind of a, a pretty scientifically minded person, and I don't know that I can bring myself to believe in moon energy.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: But I'm also not sure that it matters, because to me, I can see a lot of utility and a lot of power, a lot of like practical benefit and centering, and a lot of these things, in having a ritual practice.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And having that ritual practice align with natural phenomena, natural cycles of the world.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Doing this regularly, that whether or not you believe that there is a magical moon energy that allows you to release things that you need to release, and allows you to orient yourself towards that what you desire, or whether you believe that that's just sort of an excuse for thinking about these things in a, in a structured way… either way, it feels like the benefit is the same. It feels like there is a really tangible, practical, useful, and meaningful benefit to doing these things. I had this same conversation with both my wife and her best friend, who at the time was, you know, one of my best friends as well. And I remember when I talked about it with my wife, she felt like I was shitting all over her spiritual practice.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And when I talked about it with her friend, she was like, yeah, that sounds like a very, like, accepting way to look at it [laughs].
It strikes me that, you know, when I listen to you talking about The Telepathy Tapes, it doesn't just touch on measurable kinds of phenomena where like, you know, at the beginning of the show, they're presenting these tests that they do of, you know, like having the caregiver look at a certain word and then having the child spell that word out, basically without having any way of knowing what that was.
[15:00]
You know, and they go to great lengths to try and make it so that you couldn't doubt the experiment; covering reflective surfaces, making sure they're not looking in the same direction, you know, things like that.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: That's one part of it. But as the, as the show progresses, it, it really goes much deeper than that into challenging the foundation, the understanding of materialism as a scientific method. It presents, you know, the possibility that, you know, all nonverbal autistic people can communicate over vast distances with people who they've never met, and that they have psychic meetings in these psychic spaces that they call the hill or things like that.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And ultimately that heaven exists, and that we are all connected, and that magic is real, and that we have an eternal soul that is greater than our body, and that no one ever dies, we just change state. When I present that quickly in the span of a minute and a half like I've just done, I think a lot of people would hear that and go, well, that just sounds fucking crazy.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: When you hear it over the course of a 10 hour, 10, 12 hour podcast, they, they ease you into it a lot, you know?
What I hear when you are talking about this podcast is what I, is that I'm hearing that it brings up things for you in your own life, in your own experience, and so the question that I would ask here is, does it matter if this is real?
It's certainly presented as real, it's certainly presented as, this is something that should change our understanding of the universe, but it's being suppressed by dogmatic, you know, conspiracy scientists. We could talk about that part of it, but I, but I'm not sure that it matters whether or not it's real. I'm not sure it matters whether or not telepathy actually exists or heaven actually exists, or the eternal soul actually exists. These are things that might be true, but does it matter? I guess that would be my question, you know?
RACHEL ZUCKER: So my first answer is, no, it doesn't matter. Or it doesn't matter to me. You know, because for the most part, I am using the show as a metaphor for my own experience, or I'm using my own experience as a way of connecting to some of the stories that I'm hearing on the show, and it's helping me, and this is connected to me for something else that you and I have been talking about in our messages, and something I've been working on for a long, long time in therapy, which is boundaries, and specifically boundaries with Abram, but boundaries in general as well. And it's connected to this idea of shared consciousness or telepathy for several reasons.
One being, you know, one reason why it might matter whether this is quote unquote real, right? Is that first of all, I think our understanding of the scientific method, and what is and isn't science, is, is highly policed and highly anxious. And in my experience as somebody who, you know, when I was a doula, when I trained to be a doula, when I was a practicing doula, I was, and continue to be extremely devoted to evidence-based care, right? Like, what can a doula do and what a doula can't do, and what are the studies that support this, and what is best practices? And, you know, I'm not anti-science by any stretch of the imagination, and what I see from my doula days and now in the hospital, you know, in this highly medicalized world that I'm in right now, even amongst the doctors, even amongst the research scientists, there's not a clear line between science and not science, in part because that's how science works.
You know, you, you come up with a crazy ass idea and then you test it, and then you test it again, and then you test it again. Abram’s entire experience is, we don't know if it's gonna work. And the only reason that they're doing this transplant is because there's been a study in France on 40-some odd people. This is how they're figuring out what works and doesn't work. Like it's, it's hubris beyond belief to imagine that we have the scientific tools at our disposal and that we've done the research that, that we need to do to disprove or prove some of these outlying ideas.
[20:00]
So I guess if it, it, it doesn't matter on the, on one hand, for me personally, it also matters very deeply for me personally, because the policing of what is and isn't science, or good science, is inconsistent, is based on, you know, money and capitalism and, you know, ideas about, you know, when we're gonna use science to back us up and when we're not, and, and you know, so, so that's when I think it really does matter.
And the second thing, I think it really does matter whether this is kind of like actual or not, is, you know, I don't have an autistic child. I don't have a nonverbal child. I have a very not so verbal child who, you know, there are other reasons why, you know, he doesn't speak so much. And one of them is extreme anxiety and social anxiety. And my experience in the hospital, and in the outside world, is that these doctors have almost no experience, understanding, or education about mental health. And I think they consider anxiety and depression to be non-scientific. To be magic. To be, I don't know what, and that is not my experience, you know, with my own children.
And so I do imagine what it might be like to be the parent of a nonverbal, autistic child with whom you, you can communicate, I'm not gonna say you feel, you can communicate… who with whom you are communicating and, and to have the rest of the world say, this is, this is bullshit. This is dangerous, right? Like, why is it dangerous? Why are they afraid of that? Right? And, and, and then materially refusing to provide resources, you know, for education, for care, for all of these other reasons in part because we have, I think, too narrow a view of what is science, what is good science, what is materialism, and also what makes someone a human being worth listening to, or valuing.
And we have such a, a, a, we, we prioritize and we privilege verbal communication for all these obvious reasons, and when there's someone in the world who cannot communicate in that way, the assumptions that we make, and the way that we treat those people, that's what seems very dangerous to me. And then to use science as an excuse, I don't get it. I don't get like, what are, what is everybody so fucking afraid of? Like, we know that people communicate non-verbally. We communicate non-verbally with babies. We communicate non-verbally with our pets. We commune, like, we communicate non-verbally with each other!
You know, I was thinking about this the other day, like, you know, I don't know if you have this experience, Mike, but like, when I was doing Commonplace, one of the things that I, that I noticed when I was editing, you know, my own, you know, editing my own podcast, was that my, verbal patterns would shift towards the person with whom I was speaking, the guest. And sometimes it was a little cringe, like I wasn't conscious of it, you know, during the episodes, during the conversations. But by the end of the conversation, I was speaking more like the person that I was speaking to than I normally would.
I have a kind of like chameleon almost way of, of interacting with people; so much of, I think what's good about me as an interviewer has to do with what's happening non-verbally, what's happening visually, what's happening in some kind of, I'm not gonna call it telepathy, but it has been my experience throughout my entire life that I know things about other people in nonverbal ways, and in, and, and not just in terms of gesture and tone, but including those things.
So, I mean, to say that telepathy, if you're gonna enlarge it to nonverbal communication, like, is, is a dangerous idea to believe in just seems insane to me. Like that's, like we, of course we have telepathy, if that's what telepathy is, and then I guess I'm just very confused about why, why it wouldn't make sense or why it would be dangerous to, yeah to believe… I don't know, I'm sort of trailing off here, but, o I guess, I don't know if I answered your question. I think it doesn't matter and I think it definitely does matter.
[25:05]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: [Laughs]. Well, so you're definitely touching on a lot of things here that are things that I was thinking about as I was listening, I mean, as you know, as we've talked about on this show many times, I strongly believe that I'm autistic. I'm obviously not non-verbal.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: But I strongly believe that I am autistic, and that definitely leans me in a certain direction when I hear about stories about other autistic people, whether they are verbal or not. I had intended to send you an episode of the BBC podcast Short Cuts. Did I send that to you?
RACHEL ZUCKER: You did, and I forgot to watch it, and then I forgot all about it. Sorry.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: So it was an episode called “In Colour,” and it was all about, you know, it, it, it's, it's a show that's a little bit like This American Life where they, they pick a theme and then they present, you know, three to five short documentaries or something like that, that, or, or audio art pieces on that theme. And the first segment of that episode - I'll find it and I'll put it in the show notes if, if people want to listen to it - was that there was this old film, medical film, I believe from like the fifties or the sixties, and it was just at the beginning of when the term autism was starting to be understood as a diagnosis, and there were these nonverbal autistic children, and it was basically showing their behaviors, you know? And they are behaviors that a lot of people who are neurotypical would find very off-putting or even distressing.
Things like flapping the hands or things like rocking, things like movements of the body that are un—that, that look uncontrolled, you know? Also, what kinds of things they paid attention to and things like, you know, lining up things or sorting things, this sort of behavior that's very common with autistic people of all different presentations. And then what the audio piece was, was that they took these adults, who were not nonverbal but are, are autistic, and had them watch it, and had them describe their own reactions to it.
And it was, it was one of the more beautiful things I've heard, because they're basically, they're, they're showing such compassion and such empathy for these children and saying, oh yes, of course you're, she's, she's upset, you've taken her stick away. Like, why shouldn't she be upset? Or, or, oh yes, look at this thing that she's doing. This is a thing that she's, oh, she's soothing herself. And like, and it's, it's being able to, to have this explanation in a way that a person who doesn't experience this can understand it.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Was, was absolutely beautiful to me. And that was something that was on my mind as I was listening to The Telepathy Tapes. Something that they talk about repeatedly is the ableism that much of the medical establishment and psychological research establishment has towards nonverbal autistic people, where there is, the phrase they use over and over again is that there is no assumption of competence.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: That they assume that there is nobody there. And that is something that I definitely resonated with. There has never been a time in my life where people didn't assume that I was in here. There have been many, many times when there is a wide gap between my ability to articulate to people in a way that they could understand what my internal experience was. And I have had, over the course of my life, many, many, many people assume that I don't have emotions because of the way that I communicate. So this was something that I could definitely relate to. I think that it is an important discussion.
They talk a lot about the skepticism towards this communication process that they use, which is called Spell to Communicate, and how this is something that is widely viewed as discredited in many circles because of the interaction that is involved between the spelling partner and the autistic child. They address that in the thing. I don't know enough about that to be able to render an informed opinion about it. I definitely know that it is very possible to have a lot of communication and influence and lead people in ways that are not intentional or even noticed. I also strongly believe that there is somebody in there, and I believe, and I know from experience that emotional dysregulation is a big part of the autistic experience. And so needing a support person in order to do these things makes a lot of sense to me.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And so it does seem like a, a bit of a, a double bind here, where it's like, if you cannot prove that this is communication without the support person, but the support person is necessary for the emotional regulation, then this puts you in kind of bind. There's nothing, no way that you can do these things. And I don't know of a good scientific method of getting around these concerns, which I think are kind of valid concerns.
[30:00]
RACHEL ZUCKER: Can I say one thing? I don't want you to forget where you're going. Will you forget?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: You can jump in and it's fine.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay. I'm so sorry. 'cause I know I will forget. I just wanna say like, yes. This is so important. This is so, this is so at the heart of what this show, you helped me remember something which is that like, one of the things that has been really painful is the expectations of the people around me and Abram of what he should act and be like as a 24-year-old, in terms of his independence and the, and, and one of the things that was very meaningful to me about listening to The Telepathy Tapes, especially at the time that I listened to it, in which I pretty much was convinced that I would be Abram's caregiver for the rest of his life, or the rest of my life, whichever end came first. And that had been, from my ableist background and perspective, a nightmare, a failure, a a a, an unendurable future for me, on some level, and to hear these parents and caregivers s you know, talk about the co-regulation and the communication and, and a different understanding of what it might be like to be a lifelong parent of someone who's not communicating in an, in a typical way, and to have, at least as these parents talked about it, coming to a kind of acceptance and pleasure because of their ability to use spelling, because of their ability to like, you know, have a level of acceptance. This also was a very deeply important metaphor for me, and, and, and a reminder to me that like, yeah, you know, nobody, nobody doesn't think Abram is competent. Nobody doesn't think that he's in there, like you're saying, but the, the expectations of what a, you know, able-bodied, you know, or even even someone with metastatic cancer, you know, should want in terms of their independence or their reliance on their parent has been very confusing to me, so I'm sorry. Keep going.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: No, no, no. Makes sense.
RACHEL ZUCKER: And, and, and, and I think dysregulation and co-regulation are a very important part of this.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah. And another part that, especially in the early episodes that I thought of you a lot, and then I also, even just outside of the context of you that I, that I had a lot of empathy for was how many of these parents were talking about how isolated they feel. And how desperate they were to have some kind of community because they felt like they were going through this completely alone.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And that is a terrible situation to be in. For sure. Another thing that got mentioned in one of the, one of the episodes, at one point they were talking about IEP meetings, you know? So these are special education meetings, independent or individual education programs, I think is what it stands for?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Or individualized education plan, something like that. Something like that. Yeah.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah. And this is something that I had, I had known about a bit because my ex-wife was a teacher. She had to have IEP meetings sometimes. I also know about it because, you know, I have friends who have kids with disabilities. Nikki Chung is somebody, we're not necessarily close friends, but we're friendly. And she has talked on social media extensively about how awful these meetings often are and how adversarial they are. And that was something that came up in this as well, that you, you just simply do not feel supported in these situations.
There is so much ableism. In the world. There is so much ableism in all of our social structures, whether that is school, whether that is hospitals, the medical establishment, all of this is extremely true. And there is something about the medical profession, the way that it is constituted right now, where doctors are not just often unaware of mental health and, and you know, things like a bedside manner, compassion, empathy. They're not just unaware of it. In many cases, they are actually actively trained not to be compassionate.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yep.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Because they are trained to be clinical, and they are trained to be, to not have any kind of emotional attachment to their patients, which is very different from how nurses are often trained, my understanding,
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yes.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: They are trained to see their patient as a symptom. And, you know, I also have friends who are doctors and, and I have talked to them about things like this. And they say that there is a certain necessity for doctors to be able to emotionally detach themselves from, from their patients, because if they don't do that, it would simply be too overwhelming. And I understand that. I also understand that that is really, really hard on patients and patients' families.
[35:12]
And that I, and I actually believe that, that in many cases it leads to worse outcomes, like measurably worse outcomes.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Definitely.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: So there is that as well. All of this is stuff that I, like you and I are on the same page about these things, right?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mmm hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: When we, when one place where I feel a little different is than you, is that my understanding of science and the scientific method and of scientists is, I think I just see things a little differently, which is that in my experience, I definitely know people who work in science who are condescending and who are, you know, who, who, who do things like, you know, the, the Richard Dawkins kind of thing of like, you know, being very confrontational about what they consider to be pseudoscience. And I think mostly those people, when they're doing that, are being assholes. I don't think that it's, it has not been my experience that this, that science as a whole, and scientists in general, are unwilling to, like that there is some conspiracy holding these things back the way that, which is not exactly what you said, but it is certainly what the, the, the podcast presents.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Although I agree with like, my experience also is that real scientists, actual scientists, are pretty open to like the truth of how much we don't yet know.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Like that's, you know, and that it's, it's often the policy makers who are different than scientists, or the social scientists, you know, who are scientists of course, who, who seem to really have a stake in, you know, and, and, and this, this makes sense too, right? You don't wanna misallocate resources. Right?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Well, when we, when you ask the question, what is dangerous about this? I think that it's important to note that in this podcast, for example, they're presenting things like faith healing, you know? And that has really material and dramatic consequences for people, and that we are seeing play out on a large scale these days. People who are skeptical of vaccines, for example, because they think they cause autism.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: People who believe that you should take vitamin A for measles, you know? People who think that sunning their perineum is gonna keep them healthy forever -
RACHEL ZUCKER: That's not a thing!
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: These are, it is a real thing! I swear to God, you look this up, Rachel [laughs]. I'm, I promise you, you go looking for this. You'll see people with like out in nature with their knees up over their face with their butt hole pointed up to the sun.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Then they, well, that might be nice [laughs].
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: No, they bel like, this is a real thing, Rachel. I swear to you.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay. Okay. Okay [laughs]. Well, yes, I definitely know that there are so many batshit crazy things that are really harmful, you know, or that, or that choosing those things instead of chemotherapy, for example.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Right, right. Yeah.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Abram would be dead.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yes. It's more than just it being dangerous in those ways, right? Because we have, we have mountains and mountains of historical information showing what kinds of things people do when things that are, when superstition is a big part of society. You know, we have things like witch trials. It's, yeah. But these are, I understand that you're gonna say that it's different.
RACHEL ZUCKER: No, no. I'm saying think of all the, think of all the people who have died in the name of science. Think of all the women who have died in childbirth because medicine fucked with birth against science. Like, you know, and, and what's important to separate medicine and science, even though they sometimes appear to be the same thing or practice, you know, research and practice, right. Like, so yeah.,
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Like even, even, even in other contexts, like right now, for example, you know, I have a number of friends who are fat activists, right? And talking about the ways that the medical establishment in, in, in conflict with what, like with real, like peer reviewed research in reputable journals is saying, you know, well, we just simply refuse to treat fat people until they lose weight. And that they will end up dying of cancer because they have giant tumors that they don't even check for. Like Yeah. Like, these things are really real. Yeah. I get it.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Science does fail us, and it does fail us precisely for these, the reasons that the people who are implementing the, the science, whether that is the research or, or, or implementing the results of that research in the real world are human beings who are biased and fallible. That is a hundred percent true.
[40:06]
It is also true that most of the time when I hear someone saying, when, as they very clearly do like, like almost for, like no, verbatim, they're, they the same argument that I hear all the time, which is that when you have a a, an idea, first they make fun of you, and then they, they try to stop you, and then they come to an acceptance, and that kind of thing is, that's the same thing that the, that the, the anti-vaxxers say, it's the same thing that like weird fad-diet people say. And most of the time that is not the kind of thing that actually happens. I mean, it, it's not to say that this hasn't happened in real life. Like obviously we know what happened to Galileo, right? Like that is the kind of thing that happens in real life in these ways, but…
RACHEL ZUCKER: I mean, there's a, there's a very big, I mean, I think I have to, I have to say one thing, which is, over the past few weeks that Abram has been in the hospital, I have said to Abram and to other people, like, under no circumstances will I tell anyone at MSK, or anyone that cares for Abram, that I had a baby at home by choice, and that I was an dam a home birth activist, because he will get worse care because home birth is an extraordinarily provoking, you know, thing for doctors in the hospital.
And, but I wanna say to you, I had a baby at home because it was safer. And that was based on a lot of research and a lot of, you know, experience, you know, with myself and births that I witnessed. And I do think that some of this, for me is, is underlie, you know, that having had a baby at home, I mean, that was a huge step away from the mainstream. I am not an anti-vaxxer. I am not gonna, you know, stick my perineum in the sun. I didn't, obviously did not recommend that Abram refuse chemotherapy or this transplant or any of the medical stuff.
And yet, if I were gonna have another baby, I would, unless there were contraindications, you know, which there have to, you know, you have to be careful, I would 100% have another baby at home. It, the hospital is, is, it may be saving his life. It is trying to kill him and me. And, and, and that's real. That's like really real. And so, so one thing that I would really take issue with is the idea that more people are harmed by having like a woo woo idea of like, you know, let me have some moon energy instead of radiation than are harmed by, by the medical industrial complex. I don't think statistically that's correct, Mike. I think many more people are, are helped but are also harmed, damaged and killed by the medical industrial complex. And I really don't think that that's a conspiracy theory. And I, and so it like, but like - I think that I -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I think that I - Rachel,
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I feel like we're getting a little animated right now. And I feel like one of the things that's happening here is that I'm starting from a position of trying to explain, trying to explain somebody else's point of view. Rather than, and before I've gotten to the point of my own point of view.
RACHEL ZUCKER: I'm gonna be quiet now. I'm sorry. You're right.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: No, no, you're fine. You're fine. I'm not, I'm not chastising you, because this is obviously something that is important. It's important to you, and it's important, like the ways that the medical establishment fails, is failing you right now, is something that, I hope it's been clear, I'm pretty sure it's been clear, that I'm very supportive of you. And I, and that I believe all of the things that you're saying, you know, I've said a lot of cuss words in our messages about the way that you're being treated by that hospital. I also, I un, I un I understand the things that you're saying. And I agree with them in context.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: When I think about why people would find these ideas dangerous, part of it has to do with what might be an overreaction, which is to say, so you've said that it should not be a controversial or a conspiracy theory kind of thing to, to talk, to talk about the ways that the medical establishment and the way that medicine is practiced in this country is very harmful to people, and there is a lot of research about this, and there's both research and there is a lot of anecdotal evidence, people's lived experiences.
[45:13]
That is true. It is also true that, you know, if you compare medical outcomes and life expectancy and any number of measures, you know, objective measures of people's health and things like that, compared to, say 500 years ago, that things are dramatically better now than they were then. There's not, it's not just because of medical science. A lot of it has to do with things like sanitation and access to clean water and all of these things. There is, I think, an overreaction among people who think of themselves as very scientifically minded, saying, if we go back to, to what I think of as pseudoscience or, or, or superstition, that we will go back to the literal dark ages, you know? To something that is like a thousand years ago, when people were living in mud huts and being ruled over in some sort of feudal European society and, and dying of dysentery, things like that, that we could go back to something like that. It's actually not completely outside of the realm of possibility that, that, that our society will crumble into something like that. We don't know what's gonna happen, but it seems unlikely, and it seems like saying, can we poke around the edges of this stuff? And can we, for example, talk about the ways that we, the ways that we practice medicine now are, are actually harming and killing people? Can we talk about some things that might be outside of the realm of what we're comfortable talking about in science?
Like, is that actually going to return us to the dark ages? Probably not, but I think that, that, my experience is that when people talk about these ideas as dangerous, that is where they're going. Right? It's not a completely unfounded fear, even if it is an overreaction, in my opinion. Does that make sense?
RACHEL ZUCKER: It definitely does. And I also think, you know, without straying too far, none of this is gonna matter if we don't listen to the environmental scientists. You know, like we're just, we're just fucked. Like, that's what's gonna bring us back to the dark ages, you know? Like, and human extinction, is like not listening to the scientists. You know? Yeah.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah. And, and, and not just, you know, and there's, for example, a lot of new awareness among climate scientists and, and other kinds of scientists of looking at the ways that, like, Indigenous practice was used to be considered very unscientific. And maybe that there are ways that we can interact with each other and with the planet, whether that's in terms of governance or social infrastructure or, or environmental science that would allow us to live in more sustainable ways. That is not necessarily the kind of thing that falls into the purview of what we traditionally think of as Western science. There are a lot of challenges to these, to this worldview that I think are not just legitimate, but important to consider, for sure. I'm not sure that any of that necessarily challenges the idea of materialism as a foundation for science.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: As this podcast says over and over again. Right? And I think one of the things here is like, can we, if we're gonna talk about what science can do and what it can't do, trying to reframe science into including things that can't be measured or tested, I'm not sure if that's a useful thing to do, even if it is a useful thing to do in a person's life.
RACHEL ZUCKER: I don't think that's the way I hear it. And I could be missing it -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: It was literally verbatim what they said.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay. So, I see the attacks on materialism by this podcast as, and maybe I am, you know, being too soft on, on this, but I see that as a way of passionately underscoring what you've already said, which is that there is a tremendous amount of inherent bias in science and in scientists. And so, you know, you earlier said like, there's evidence, there's anecdotal evidence, and you know, just like to say this, you know, we know for example, that so much of the research in the past 30 to 50 years that has been done on human beings, has been done on men and not on women. So anecdotal evidence has been essential for women's health in order to say like for, you know, for women to say like, wait, this is not my experience of my, of what's happening in my body.
[50:00]
Or for doctors to say like, wait a second. You know, we give, you know, people with uterus and people without uteruses this, this heart medication. And the ones with uteruses, aren't they working? Could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that we didn't do any of these, these studies with women? Right? And I guess I feel like our inherent bias about the ableism, the way that ableism interacts with this question around, as you were saying earlier, how do we design the studies that we need to have to investigate this anecdotal evidence around spelling, for example, and, and communication, nonverbal communication or the communication or shared consciousness or telepathy between nonverbal autistic children and their caregivers?
We just, because we don't have the, we haven't come up with the way to study it, that that works within the scientific method, as, you know, from a materialism construct, to my mind, yes, that might be a limitation of materialism. If materialism is limiting our ability to construct the necessary studies to work on this, then it's a problem. Then materialism becomes an inherent bias.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I guess I'm, the thing that I'm, that, that I would say about that is that, you know, the, the things that you're talking about, like for example, the medical research that historically only included White men right? Because it's not just women, it's also like Black people, for example, you know, that what I like, there is a huge amount of bias in how, how experimentation is done, how research is conducted. That is, at this point, a very well understood and acknowledged phenomenon. It is also within the structure of materialist scientific method that those biases have also been revealed now, you know?
And that part of the reason why I know. I'm not saying that this is something that like, maybe I should have known more, maybe there are, and maybe for example, all of the men who are doing this research should have thought about these things in the past and listened to the anecdotes and used those anecdotes to design studies in a better way.
Part of the reason why I know these things at all now is because now, there is more research being done, designed in a better way to control for those biases. It's obviously those, those, these newer studies are probably also themselves subject to different biases, but that within the, the structure of science, is ways in which we can interrogate these past biases that were really damaging, and try and correct for them, you know, that that doesn't require a shift in whether or not we understand reality as material, you know?now.
RACHEL ZUCKER: But, but of course we have limited tools to measure reality. We keep developing greater and greater tools, right? Like, but our tools and our, even our ways of understanding what's measurable and imagining what's measurable are limited. And we keep expanding them. But we're living now, you know, we're living now. And so there were years and years of people telling women like me not to take hormone replacement therapy and that it was gonna, you know, lead to breast cancer and raise my risk of breast cancer. I think I might be dead if I wasn't on hormone replacement therapy. You know, like, I'm sorry to get emotional about it again, but like, you know, when I turned 50 -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: You don’t have to apologize for being emotional. These are emotional topics.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah. I, you know, I neared my 50th birthday and I had intrusive thoughts of driving my car into a wall, and I was just like, what the fuck is that? I don't, I don't, that would not be a great idea. And I just kept thinking about it over and over and over again. And, you know, there is now more and more research, but it's taking a lot of time and it's not widely known that, like for women with a history of, of depression and anxiety, that, you know, when you, when your estrogen drops and your hormones change in, in perimenopause and menopause, you can have a, a basically a psychological, mental health crisis that, and, and for someone like me, based on the research that I have done, my risk of heart disease, osteoporosis, you know, and, and suicide is significantly reduced based on taking hormone replacement therapy.
[55:07]
And it turns out that the studies, that really one study, that was held up for years and years and years, about the connection between breast cancer and hormone replacement therapy was disproven. But because of so many things, primarily money, you know, most people don't know that. Even the doctors don't know that now. Like, I can't tell you how many women, and, and a lot of times it's like woo woo women, you know, they wanna go through it naturally. They don't wanna do anything. They don't wanna take anything like, and I'm just like, lady, if you feel like killing yourself and you're menopausal, you know, 'cause what'll happen is you usually go to the doctor and then they put you on antidepressants. Everybody loves to put women on antidepressants. Nobody wants to put anyone on, on estrogen. These are life altering decisions that are, you know, the science gets to the doctors and the science is, has this inherent bias in it. And then the doctors have inherent bias, and you know, all the steps along the way. And this is how, it's just, it's been so hard to fight for information.
So I guess what I feel like is, it's, it's like inconceivable to me that there's so little common sense, what I would consider to be common sense, you know, or listening and watching real human beings and their experiences, which, you know, I don't wanna glorify the olden days 'cause there's no good that comes from that, but like, we're so far from a family doctor who knows you holistically, you know, who's treated you and maybe other people in your family. We have these specialists, specialist specialists, and they're making medical decisions for you based on data that sometimes is absolutely incorrect or isn't relevant in your situation.
So I guess when I, when I, no, I don't, I don't think, for me, the claim that, like, if you believe that these nonverbal autistic children can communicate with each other, then you, then you have to throw materialism into the trash. That seems absurd. That seems ridiculous. But I believe that people can communicate in ways that we can't yet measure.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah, I'm a little concerned that the way that I'm talking right now is coming across as dismissive.
RACHEL ZUCKER: No.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I, 'cause it's really not my intention, because I don't think that you and I are actually that far apart on the things that you're talking about. If, if we're far apart at all, I don't think we are.
RACHEL ZUCKER: And oh, and, and to, and also there's lots of podcasts… you are, you are not saying this, but, but there are, there are a lot of articles that I've seen that are very, very alarmed at the claims that The Telepathy Tapes are making and also how popular it is. And, and the, and the popularity of pseudoscience in general, I think is a, is of great concern. So I’m not, I'm not like -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I think that a lot of this comes down to, how, on an individual level, how do we know what to believe? How do we know what to trust? Right? Because we know, for example, that there are a lot of snake oil salesmen out there. Who are, who are, whether they're doing it in order to, to take advantage of you on purpose or whether they are sincere, we know that this is true. We also know that this, that the infrastructure of our lives fails us all the time. You know, when you are talking about all of this disproven science, right?
I think one way you could look at that is to say, well, yeah, we, we do have limitations on what we're able to measure, but also as we, our, our measurement tools get better, we do revise the science. And that is a positive thing I think. As, as we become aware of these biases in the old studies, we perform new studies that, that show how wrong we were. And that is a positive thing to me, but, even with that positive stuff, it's very important to note that yeah, this, the research moves a lot more slowly than people's lives do, while we are waiting for these new results that people are suffering and dying. And even once the results are published, it takes a long time for them to become mainstream. It takes a long time for the actual practitioners to put it into practice. And that is also unacceptable.
You know, I think that someone who is more of an establishment scientist would say, well, we need to have a certain amount of inertia so that we're not just taking every crank idea. But, but it's also true that like, the existing paradigms that we live under of scientific understanding, or any kind of understanding, not just scientific, right? That these understandings have material negative consequences for people's lives, and so on some level, every single person has to make some decision for themselves, what am I gonna believe?
[1:00:15]
How am I gonna live my life? And it's really hard, I think, to come to that determination of like, I have a lot of sympathy for anti-vaxxers because it's, it's not like this comes from nowhere.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Right. It's not like it comes from nowhere. I like fundamentally and vehemently disagree with the conclusion that they've come to, which, in my opinion, not just, not only harms themselves, but harms everyone else too.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yep.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: But I understand where it comes from, and I have a lot of compassion for them. You know? Because we are all being failed by these structures all the time. And so we are, we have been put into a situation where we have to fend for ourselves, you know?
RACHEL ZUCKER: And we have, I'm, and as you know, so well, we are totally aligned on this, like, you can't separate science from politics, you know?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: No you can’t. Neither on the research nor in the implementation. That's, that's true.
RACHEL ZUCKER: That’s right. And so, you know, and we're talking about like, how does an individual know what to do, know what to choose? But of course, the, the real terrible and terrifying truth is that like most people don't have a choice. They don't have the ability to even make a choice, or things aren't offered, you know, or things aren't paid for, or things aren't available, or things aren't covered by insurance, you know, and we're about to, you know, go into this, you know, we're prob we're already there, right, with trans people and what's available medically for trans people. Like, those decisions are not based on science. Those decisions are based on politics.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
RACHEL ZUCKER: I guess I feel like to, just to say one other thing about this, I think, this is not a perfect solution by any means, but I do feel like, when I say, what is the danger of this? I think I'm speaking somewhat specifically in the sense of like, what is the danger of like having touch assisted spelling communication, you know, having people believe that that exists? And I mean, I guess I just feel like, you know, because of my doula training and because of my home birth experience, you know, whenever anybody comes into the hospital room and says, we're gonna do this or we're gonna do that, I say, what are the risks? What are the benefits? And what happens if we don't do that? Right? Like, I've been trained to do that, and I guess I feel like, you know, certainly in this situation, like what are the risks of trying this?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Can we, can we, I think we can answer that with something that was actually presented in the podcast itself.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Which is to say that, that they've been very, very clear in the thing that one, that the, the spelling methodologies have changed a lot over time.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: In large part to address the skeptics, but also that they acknowledged that when the spelling partners are not very well trained, that they, they do, they, they can and do end up leading the communication. And that actually can have harmful consequences for the person who is, you know, nonverbal. There is a danger in that, you know? It's not a danger that would necessarily say, we shouldn't try this, or we shouldn't try to find a better methodology or better methods of training or things like that. Or that the entire approach is wrong. But to say that it is, that there's no danger that someone could, by putting these, these tools into practice in a, in an untrained way, could not be dangerous for people… I think that might be understating it a little bit. You know?
RACHEL ZUCKER: I agree. And I think there's a, there's a bias on my end that's, that's, you know, causing me to say that, which I think is, you know, it may be in part because I am such a verbal person, the idea that I would be unable to communicate and that I would be locked in to a inability to connect to other people seems much worse to me than being misunderstood or than being, you know, manipulated. That to me is like very, very, very terrifying. And I would want someone to try to reach me, even if it was imperfect.
[1:04:47]
So that's, that's very emotional and personal and like, but just like I said before, like, you know, that's a bias that I have that, you know, to me, other people might feel like being misunderstood is worse.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I can tell you that spending your whole life being misunderstood is very difficult.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And it's very isolating, and spending your whole life trying really, really hard to learn how to communicate in a way that other people can understand is very challenging and very isolating. And it, it's the kind of thing that when you don't have a, a, a framework to understand why you need to do that, it makes you feel broken, and like there's something wrong with you. And that's been, that was the first maybe 35 years of my life.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: So obviously I have my biases here as well, you know, that are, and both of us are coming at this, looking at it through the lens of our own lived experience, you know. Something that I thought was, you know, when I think about ways of understanding, ways of knowing that don't involve language, right? You described being able to know things about people that they haven't communicated to you. One of the things that they talked about in, I'm not sure they directly talked about it, but maybe they did, I can't remember specifically, but one of the things about autism that is kind of known at this point, is that autism, at least in one sense, can be understood as having a brain with no filters on it.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: That if you think about it like, my ex father-in-law, for example, is, is a little hard of hearing, and he wears hearing aids. He's like 93 years old now. So it's not unusual that he wears hearing aids, but he doesn't like to wear hearing aids when he goes to a restaurant, for example. Because what he says is that when you're in a crowded room, that it amplifies everything, and you can hear the, the person at that table and that table and that table, and that table as exactly as loud as you hear the, the people at your own table. And it makes it really hard to concentrate.
That is what being autistic is like all the time. And that is why autistic people have sensory issues. Why they, they have meltdowns. It's why they have difficulty communicating and difficulty with social situations. It's not because we don't see the same stimulus, it's that we see a lot of things that the neurotypical brain just decides is not important.
For me, I mean, and I think for a lot of autistic people, this, this has both positives and negatives. The negatives are the overstimulation, the negatives are the, the difficulty with, with understanding social cues and things like that. The positive is, is that, I mean, just in a really material sense, it has enabled me to function in a, an exceptionally high level in my, in my career as an engineer because I am able to understand complicated systems all at the same time in ways that most engineers cannot do.
I am able to keep track of both the big picture and the details in ways that most people cannot do. As an interviewer, it has led me to be able to be present in the moment and be able to respond to how my guest is talking to me. I don't necessarily do the thing that you're talking about, where I take on someone's mannerisms or, or speech, but I do, my energy does bend towards that person. And I do, I am very aware of these things. I pick up on cues that other people wouldn't necessarily understand, like notice, whether that is in their work or how they show up in the conversation. And I strongly believe that that is because of my autism.
It also means I am really, really good, at this point in my life, I am better than most people at reading other people. I am much more capable of, of having an interaction with someone and saying, this is what you're feeling right now. And in fact, that is something that a lot of people—including you—do to me, ask me, how am I feeling about this? Why am I feeling like this? What's going on with me right now? That is a form of communication that is, and, and understanding that comes across, that's nonverbal, because it means I'm picking up on all of these little details that other people don't, and when I think about the kinds of communication that they're talking about in this, especially in the early episodes, that's what I'm seeing.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Not necessarily that it's magical, but just that you, you have so much access to so much more information, and that it can be overwhelming, but that if you are able to figure out how to process the fire hose of information that you're, that's being, you know, injected into your brain all the time, it leaves you with insights that to, to other people can seem magical.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And that is something, if you wanna see it as a superpower, you could see it that way. You know, if you wanted to see it as something like a, like almost as like a form of, of mystical intuition, you know, that it's not necessarily that we are telepathic, just that we are noticing things that other people don't notice.
[1:10:06]
I think that that is something that is still not super well understood, and it's not necessarily the topic of research. It's not necessarily something that ne necessarily even would be researched, because I'm not sure that that a, a lot of people would find it significant enough to warrant a study, you know?
Which is of course another, another issue with the way that science works, not necessarily with the methods of science, but that scientific research requires funding and so we have to limit it to things that people think are important and what people think is important is biased, for sure. I think that this idea of having an unfiltered brain or having a, a brain without boundaries on it, is something that is very central to my experience of life. And it was something that, as I was listening to this podcast, was something that resonated with me, you know, and it is also something that in my intimate relationships, whether they are platonic or romantic, is also something that I can feel very deeply connected to people, that I do take on people's emotional states sometimes even when they're not in the room. I have had, I have had many situations, including a few times with this new girlfriend of mine, where I'll wake up in the middle of the night and be like, something is wrong.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And I have no real understanding of how I could know that. And then like 30 seconds later, my phone will buzz.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And you know, I don't know if that is something that I would personally describe as telepathic. Maybe it is just my body making use of, of information that I'm receiving in some physical, but non-obvious way. You know, maybe it is something that I'm responding to, I mean, I always say that I don't have a lot of what we call intuition, because intuition is the process of knowing something without going through all the analytical steps in between. Usually I do have to go through all of those steps. Some of these things I'm able to do, I'm able to jump over steps because it's like when you're doing a math problem in school and you know, your teacher wants you to show every step, but then once you've done it a hundred thousand times, you don't need to do every step you can skip over it. Right? That's what life is like for me now, right? Doing it for almost 46 years and there are steps that I don't have to do, but it's not like the process of intuition where you don't know why you know the thing you know.
But I get, I think that there probably is also some, still some intuitive process in here where there are things operating on a level that I'm not completely aware of and I'm taking in stimulus and processing them and maybe, maybe the fact that I wake up at three o'clock in the morning some night when my girlfriend is just about to text me, maybe it's telepathy, or maybe it is just that I sensed something in her messages before I went to sleep that my unconscious mind was processing at the same rate that she was processing them. You know, maybe that's what it is. I don't know how it works, and in some ways I don't know if it's important how it works, but the connection is important, right?
So, and I also, I also think there are a lot of things that, because they can't be measured or tested are, are I think fundamentally outside the realm of science. But that does not mean that they're not important for us to think about and consider and integrate into our lives. The question of whether or not we have some existence that that persists after death is not a question that science I think will ever be able to answer. And yet it is a central question in our existence, whether we have just one life, or whether we have many, whether there is an afterlife. These are organizing questions that have profound meaning in how, in how we live the life that we are living now. Right? And they are entirely outside the realm of science.
And, you know, also things like, you know, one of the things that I often say to people when, when I'm like writing about things on, on social media, I will say things like, it, it's important for you to understand that you are not alone right now, no matter how you feel, even if you don't have people that you can talk to, that we are all connected in this great web of life. You know, whether that is through the, the infrastructure of our society, whether that is through the fact that we take other organisms into our body to nourish us, whether that is in ways that are unseen, but also ways, you know, unseen, but physical, like the, all of the, the, the complicated web of work that people do to sustain each other, whether that is simply existing around other organisms, but also in a spiritual way. Like I, there is a part of me that is very non-scientific that says, I literally do believe that we have a spiritual connection to all creatures and all beings and to the earth. And that's not something that's measurable, but it is very real. And very powerful and important and meaningful to me, you know?
[1:15:14]
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah. I think we're really on the same page, and I think you just described to me my own sense of reality and of my life and, and knowledge and, and understanding, because I know, I mean, for me, my intuition is very strong and I know things that I don't know how I know them all the time, and sometimes I can retrace my steps and say like, how is it that I know that this person is two weeks pregnant? Like, why, why do I know that? You know, it's happened so many times at this point that, you know, I can say like, was it that their breathing sounded a little different or, you know, whatever. But that's, for me, it's, it's not so much skipping over those steps because I've done them so, the steps so many times, it's like I'm trying to explain to myself and to someone else how I could possibly know by looking at my kid, without them saying or doing anything, that they have a fever, that they are, you know, what is happening to them, you know, that I have connections to, to people far away that I know sometimes, you know, that I can find my kids' keys on the, in the middle of a, a, of a beach in two seconds.
All I had to, I, all I did was I said, I'm gonna put myself in his mind. And I'm gonna see the keys, and I'm, and from two blocks away, I'm gonna see where the keys are. And then I walked right to the keys. Like, this shit happens to me all the time. And you know, I don't need it to be recognized by science, for a lot of reasons. But I think you, you're also helping me understand like why this is a, is a very dangerous belief for some people, which is that a lot of people are very invested in autonomy, and a sense of being separate from other people, and like being kind of in control of the boundaries of their bodies and their minds and like mind control is a very scary thing. And, you know, it makes sense to me why people would want and need to believe that, that, you know, we're separate entities in control of our own thinking and emotions and all this stuff. And it's just not my experience at all. And as you're saying, like it's also not so scientific, you know, like we know our microbiome, you know, changes all the time when we come in contact with other people.
Why wouldn't thoughts, you know, also be transmissible, you know, why wouldn't, you know, people are doing all this work to measure, you know, with MRIs and stuff like that, like the brains of meditation masters and Buddhist monks, right? And they're like, see, this MRI is is, is, proves that, you know, a life of meditation changes your brain. Like, I don't really need somebody to show me the MRI to know that a life of spiritual practice in particular, these kinds of meditative practices is gonna change your brain. Of course, it's gonna fucking change your brain. Like you don't have to be a genius scientist to know that.
So I guess it, I guess I feel like, I don't have a problem living side by side in a world with someone who is very invested in believing that they can't be influenced by other people if they don't wanna be, and everything, you know, it's either measurable or it doesn't exist. Like I also, you know, I don't share that belief that seems disproven both by science and by experience. But I don't know. And think that ultimately, like that's kind of what this podcast was, was bringing up for me was just like, I think I do believe that shared consciousness and telepathy exists. I don't know exactly the, the mechanism. I certainly don't know the mechanism, and I certainly don't know the definitions exactly, and I don't know what's reproducible and what's yet measurable and what's significant and what to do about it and what kinds of policies to enact.
[1:20:00]
But I guess I do really feel like on some level, this is not, even if the examples that she used were very, like provocative and moving or possibly fake, the underlying premise is something that I do believe in. I mean, 'cause it just, it's like, I don't know to, to try to convince me, which not, you are not doing this at all. In fact, you're saying exactly what I'm, you know, connecting to. But like, if someone were trying to convince me that all these ways of knowing things that I have experienced are just bullshit, is fine with me if you wanna think it's magic or intuition or coincidence or whatever. It's not. It's too many times, it's too many experiences. It's too, it's too, it's too foundational to like my whole life. Right?And I, and I'm just really speaking specifically about like knowing things I shouldn't know. Hearing things, connections with other people that are not traditionally mainstream measurable, that's all.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think for me, a lot of the question is really less, are these things real? What do I believe? And more like what am I gonna do with these beliefs?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yes.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: You know, there are beliefs that, for example, like my girlfriend and I sometimes talk about, I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in destiny. I don't know that I fully reject these ideas, but I think that they're not ones that, that feel good to me.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: You know, I can come up with like a scientific way of like a physics cosmology kind of way of saying why maybe destiny does exist. It doesn't feel good to me. To me, like if I ask myself, am I, am I fated to have fallen in love with this person or do I choose to fall, like, do I choose this person to be in my life? To me, it feels more meaningful to say I'm making this choice. You know? But if someone else feels like it's more meaningful to say that you are my destiny, who am I to try to take that away from them? I think that's another big part of this, is that like, it's one thing to say, okay, you are, your behaviors are affecting me materially. Right? Like an anti-vaxxer. Your behaviors are putting other people in danger. Including me.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: But if it's something like a belief in fate, a belief in the soul, a belief in the afterlife, is something that is meaningful in your own life and maybe I don't share that belief, but what does it, why would I try to take that away from you? It just seems mean-spirited. You know, and I definitely have known a lot of like atheists and, and like militant, evangelical atheists who are just assholes.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mm-hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: You know, and they're not doing it from some like, pursuit of truth. They're doing it because they feel small on the inside and they need to dominate other people in order to feel good about themselves. It's so obvious, you know? I also have known a lot of atheists who are some of the most compassionate people I've ever met. You know, I've known people of faith who are small-minded and terrorize other people with their beliefs, and I've known people of faith who are incredibly kind and giving and generous and helpful people. I don't think that that is the, the distinction, is whether you are scientific or skeptical, or whether you are, you know, believing. I think that it is your orientation towards other people. What are you gonna do with those beliefs? How are you gonna show up in the world? You know?
RACHEL ZUCKER: That's right. And that's really, you know, to maybe come full circle a little bit, it was extremely helpful to me to hear this podcast for all the reasons that I told you, and I think it, you know, the way it intersected with the circumstances of my life was really, really helpful because it enabled me, in a period of time where Abram was really relying on me to be his voice, in a lot of ways, and communicate on his behalf, it was really important to me to develop a practice that, and a connection that I already had with him, and to, and to, to kind of trust it and to kind of step into it and to, you know, do things concrete. Concrete is a weird way to describe this, but concrete things like Tonglen practice where, you know, there are a lot of times where I'll be sitting in his hospital room with him and he was you know, was in terrible, terrible pain.
[1:25:00]
And I will breathe in his pain and I will breathe out ease and comfort. And I will see him respond. He doesn't know I'm doing that. I will see his pain diminish from that practice. And that has been extremely, extremely helpful for me and for him. And, to come back to the question of what are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna do with this? As he continues to improve, and as he gets out of the deep emergency of it, even the fact that I happen to be quite good at this, and the fact that we have this very, very strong connection between us, does not mean I should be doing this forever. There are some real downsides to it, and I have to look for opportunities to separate again and to pull back and to have him find his own voice. And not to enable, not to assist, in this kind of communication with the world. It is not okay for me, and it is not okay for him to have this level of, of shared consciousness that we have right now.
And so, you know, again, that's like, that's really a great question, Mike. Like, it's not so much whether I believe in this right now. It's like, what am I gonna do with this? And it's, you know, it, it's gonna continue to change and it's gonna also inform my other relationships with other people and, yeah.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah. I hope I didn't say anything too upsetting.
RACHEL ZUCKER: No, no. And, you know, it's, it's so interesting because I, like, we've come a long way even in these, this podcast, in these episodes, but I feel like. Yeah, I started doing that thing where I like pull us or, or somehow we move in like opposite directions, and there's something about like the emotions that get me going. And I think you did a great job saying, I'm trying to tell you what someone else thinks, and you're responding to me as if I am saying this. And that was very helpful to me to take a step back, because there's something in, in me that goes to a kind of adversarial place and I don't quite know what that is, but I feel like we did a, a, a good job, kind of like especially you like kind of bringing us back to, bringing me back to seeing and hearing what you're actually saying, and what you actually are feeling and what you actually believe instead of like, kind of using you as a springboard to, to like, it's not terrible, it's not the worst thing I do, but it's like, it's like I get on a soapbox and it's, and it's, and I wanna like tell you my truth, and that's fine, but not at, not if it means that I don't, that I'm pushing you into this corner that's like not even who you are, you know, that's not okay.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Well, it is my suspicion that of our five listeners [laughs], that someone very likely will listen to this episode and that they will respond to me in very much the same way that you did. That has to do with the way that I communicate, right? That has to do with, it's something that a lot of people over the course of my lifetime have… it's gotten me into a lot of trouble because instead of starting with, because I provide too much context.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: You know, because I'm backing way, way up and providing a lot of, like a big funnel of information to try and get us down to the point. And that's not how neurotypical people communicate.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Hmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Neurotypical people communicate by getting to the point quickly. So if I'm starting out way out here, most people are gonna say, that's the thing that you're trying to say, instead of the thing that's gonna provide a context for the thing you're actually trying to say. And this is something that I know, and it's something that I've tried to adjust for over the course of my life. I'm, sometimes I'm better at it than others, but I don't think that there's any fault in you for hearing me in a, in a way that wasn't what I intended, because that's how I communicate, you know? But also -
RACHEL ZUCKER: I don't know. I think you deserve more from me. I do. Well, and I think, I think that, I think it's a knee jerk reaction on my part that I can work on.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Well, the other thing about knee jerk reactions, right? And you're saying why, why are you getting so worked up about this? People who have been traumatized have had to stick up for themselves. People who are used to being neglected or being abandoned or being abused by the world or by the people in it -
RACHEL ZUCKER: And disbelieved -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yes. People who are not listened to habitually, like then that the, the response to get loud or to get quote unquote emotional, right, that is a defense response. That is something that, like, if someone's not listening to you, then maybe you need to talk louder. You know, and that's, that's something that's there to protect you.
[1:30:34]
That's something, and even if I, even if I am not necessarily a person that you need to protect yourself from, right, because I know we trust each other. We both feel very safe with each other. So, but even if you can know that I am a person who can be safe for you in your body, you're not necessarily gonna feel that all the time, because the things that I do, especially because I'm a man, you know, and you're always telling me that like I'm, I'm like, you know, an exceptional man. And I appreciate that. But I am still a man, and I have a male voice and a male presentation, and every woman who I've ever met has an entire lifetime of men telling them that they're wrong about things. And men not listening to them, and men telling them that they're too emotional and men just doing all of these things. And so why on earth would your body trust that I am an exception to that? When you're in the middle of it, why would that happen? It wouldn't, and it doesn't, and it shouldn't, you know?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well, I'll say it this, I'll say it this way, this way. Yknow, I know, know, I'll say it this way, I want to get to the point with you, but, and, and also frankly more importantly, for with a future romantic partner, where I can respond more easily, like your ex-wife's best friend, who was also your close friend at the time than your ex-wife did, to the way in which you connected to the Moonology.
That's, that's my goal is to have enough confidence in my own knowledge and my own beliefs and my own sense of what is true and right for me, that I'm not so easily threatened by, by someone else who either disagrees or who's getting to a, a place of connection so that I can just kind of stand down a little bit and I can be patient and I can trust more.
And so, yes, I think there's all kinds of very good reasons why I am passionate and emotional and, you know, have, stick up for myself, you know, even sometimes when I don't need to. Those aren't bad things about me, but they're not, they're not ultimately serving me that much anymore with people who I want to be connected to. That kind of like back and forth conflict, which was the way that I connected in my marriage. Like Josh really liked that level of conflict. He, that was a kind of intimacy for him. That's not really serving me. And that's not that I wanna move beyond that, you know? And, yeah. Yeah.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Something else that I talk about with my girlfriend and that I talk about on social media sometimes is, you just mentioned having a confidence in yourself and your own beliefs. And, and that is I think really important. I also know for myself that it is much, much easier, it's more ready to hand for me to have a strong sense of self, for me to be confident, when I know that I'm being supported. And when I know that I'm loved, you know, that strength and resilience are not something that just come from within, but they're something that, that also come, like, that the scaffolding of our relationships helps that plant grow. You know?
RACHEL ZUCKER: You know… I know we’re -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: When you have a, a romantic partner again, I hope that he's somebody who can be that kind of a scaffolding for you.
RACHEL ZUCKER: I do too. And I know we're like way into the meta, meta aftercare part of this [laughs], you know, of this conversation about The Telepathy Tapes. But it does occur to me that something you said and and described about the funnel, gives me some information about, one of the things that's been so mysterious to me about our relationship, which is the sense that like, it couldn't, it wouldn't have developed to the depth and closeness that it had if it hadn't started asynchronously. And I think that that helps me understand why. Because all those times that you would leave me messages, there were -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Like 40 minute long messages [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yes, yes. There, there were moments, there are moments where you'll say something and I'm like, I don't know about that. And then because I'm not in the call with you, it's asynchronous, I don't have an opportunity to interrupt you, to defend myself, to clarify things, to ask you questions. And you get there, and I just listen.
[1:35:37]
And you, you, I don't mean you get there as if there's like a destination, but like if I just shut the fuck up, which is hard for me, I end up feeling deeply connected to you, and also with a much greater understanding because I didn't interrupt you, and I, and I was able, and I actually very, very much appreciate the context that you give. And, you know, I wouldn't want you to get right to the point, or to be, you know, what you're calling it like a more neurotypical way of, you know, presenting your thoughts. I don't want that from you. And so something about the asynchronicity enabled me to develop a kind of understanding of your, even though I didn't know the, to, how to articulate it, like over and over and over again, I would have the experience of like, of a kind of like, I'm not sure. And then, oh, yes, I see where you're going. I see what's happening. Just because I couldn't interrupt you. And I think that's really, I think that's really interesting. It's good to know. [Laughs].
Yeah. All right. We good? We, I mean, this is really long.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: We're almost at two hours now.
RACHEL ZUCKER: This is ridiculous [laughs]. I think we just, I just missed you. I think that's, that's what happened here.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I missed you too.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Alright. Until next time.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Until next time.
[Music]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: You've been listening to Hey, It’s Me with Rachel Zucker and Mike Sakasegawa.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Hey, It’s Me is a production of Rachel Zucker and Likewise Media.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Editing on this episode is by Mike Sakasegawa. Music is by Podington Bear, and transcription help is by Leigh Sugar.
RACHEL ZUCKER: You can find more information about the show, including contact information and transcripts, at heyitsmepodcast.com.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: If you'd like to hear more from us, you can find Rachel's other show Commonplace, at Commonplace.today.
RACHEL ZUCKER: And you can find Mike's other show, Keep the Channel Open, at keepthechannelopen.com. Thanks for spending this time with us. Take care.