In this episode, we discuss J.B.'s new book, Underestimated: An Autism Miracle, written with his son, Jamie, who is a non-speaker. Jamie has had autism since he was a very young, and for the first 18 years of his life, his father, Bobby, thought that his son was mentally retarded. And then, one day, something happened that changed his entire outlook on his son's future. He realized that Jamie was not only smart, but could communicate with people who are non-verbal, who are also not verbal. And that is what led to the creation of a school designed for kids with autism in Portland, Oregon, called The Victory School, which has since become a world-renowned center for the development of non- verbal students with autism. In this episode we discuss this amazing discovery, and how it changed the trajectory of Jamie's life, and the lives of many others like him, who have been left behind in the traditional education system. We also discuss the role of teachers with autism and how they can help unlock the full potential of a child with a disability like Jamie's. And, of course, we talk about vaccines and the role they play in the development and treatment of children on the spectrum. This episode is sponsored by Safe Schools, a leading non-profit organization dedicated to educating, caring and equipping children with the necessary tools to learn and grow their potential for success in the 21st century school systems. Visit Safe Schools to find out more about their mission, services, and programs to help students achieve their full potential in the best possible education, and to make the most of their potential and access to the opportunities they can access the best education and services they can receive. Visit safeschools.org/safeschools to learn more about what they can do to improve their opportunities to learn, and access the most effective and access their best opportunities to achieve the best learning opportunities, and get the most out of their day-to-day learning opportunities and practices. Learn more about the programs and services to support their most valuable resource, including early intervention programs, and support their success in life and services, including the support they receive, to help them achieve the most meaningful learning opportunities. You can find a list of resources to support the most impactful learning opportunities for students on the most challenging areas of the school system, at Safe Schools and the programs they need to be most effective in the field of education.
00:01:34.000is a non-speaker who's had autism from when he was very young.
00:01:40.000JB has also been one of the people who kind of brought me into the movement for safer vaccines and for medical freedom.
00:01:52.000And he's been one of the really most articulate, sensible, common sense voices on this issue for many, many years, and has mentored many people in the movement just through his own conduct.
00:02:07.000And we're all, I've been actually to the Victory School, Which is the school that JB created, or helped create, organized the creation, and I think probably funded a lot himself, although I don't exactly know what the details are, up in Portland, and that Jamie has attended all of his life.
00:02:29.000And it's a school that's designed for kids who are non-speakers and kids who have autism.
00:02:37.000And, you know, Jamie, I think, I hope you'll excuse me when I describe what Jamie's impression of his son was for the first 18 years of his life.
00:02:51.000He believed his son was mentally retarded.
00:02:54.000And he believed not only was he impaired by autism, but he had the intellectual disability, severe debilitating intellectual disability that was stopping him from speaking.
00:03:08.000And at one point he called me and he explained this new process which had just been created by these incredibly intuitive teachers who developed this This ability to communicate with people who are non-speakers on whiteboards.
00:03:29.000And what he told me then, which is one of the stories that's told in the book, is that this extraordinary discovery that these children Have absolutely exquisitely functioning minds and that their difficulty is motor coordination, particularly in small skills.
00:03:53.000And so they aren't able to communicate, not because they're not having very sophisticated and profound thoughts, But because they can't force their tongue, which has all these nerves and muscles in it to actually articulate that, and their bodies are completely out of their control.
00:04:14.000And essentially, the book, which is short, I read it in a single night, describes this incredible discovery of a loving father, devoted father, The son that he's known for all these years is actually a complete person who's probably smarter than any of us.
00:04:41.000He learned to do calculus in essentially a day and his calculus teacher said, I can't teach him anymore.
00:04:51.000You need a college level teacher because he's too fast.
00:04:55.000And then the sensitivity and the kind of purity and the clarity of his initial communications with his father in which he's saying to him, you know, he's saying, I've been waiting to say these words to you for so long that I'm grateful for.
00:05:16.000I know that this illness that I have has been as hard on you as it has been on me.
00:05:23.000And I want to thank you for your patience and for your devotion and for the love that you've given me for all of these years.
00:05:30.000And then, you know, that was just the beginning.
00:05:32.000And then just this flood of extraordinarily acute observations about other people.
00:05:40.000About teachers who were failing him, about the cruelty of the system that is used by many teachers, by the traditional format for teaching these children.
00:05:55.000And one of the incredible stories in this book is, you know, there's this system called BCBA, which I don't know much about.
00:06:06.000It's essentially an association of teachers who are certified in a certain way of teaching children with autism, and it's a very kind of authoritarian way of teaching that is a risk and reward that, you know, you get punished if you don't meet certain thresholds, and then you get rewarded for others.
00:06:29.000And it's a very meticulous and extremely controlled and rigorous A method with all kinds of prescriptions that these people take years to learn.
00:06:39.000And then JB has hired all these people for his school.
00:06:46.000And when he comes back from this trip with a, you know, utterly new enlightenment and saying, and Jamie starts talking to his teachers, And telling them, the way that you're teaching is not, you know, helping us.
00:07:04.000It's a cruel way of, and we all ought to be on these letter boards.
00:07:11.000And they are making up stories and saying, you know, this is, he's not really talking.
00:07:28.000And yet they maintain this sort of delusion.
00:07:32.000And it was reminiscent in a lot of ways of, you know, these orthodoxies, these mindsets that JB and I have run into and you've run into, Jenny, of course, in the vaccine space where you run into pediatricians who have been doing these things for many years that are very damaging to the kids.
00:07:57.000You know, we have the studies here, we have the data that shows you should not be doing this, and they cannot come to the terms with the fact that all of the things that they've been doing for many, many years are damaging and are not helpful and are actually cruel and somewhat, I would say, barbaric, given what we know today.
00:08:20.000And I just want to jump in and say, it is shocking when you went back to the school, JB, and said, look at this miraculous method that has worked for Jamie.
00:08:29.000It wasn't like the Lovos technique where they were electrocuting these kids.
00:09:03.000Well, first off, Bobby and Jenny, thank you guys so much for Being here to celebrate in the book coming out yesterday.
00:09:10.000So Bobby, just to build on a few things you said.
00:09:12.000So a BCBA is somebody who is certified in Applied Behavioral Analysis or ABA. So ABA is effectively the autism industrial complex for treating children with autism.
00:09:24.000And it deserves to be scrutinized a lot more than it has been.
00:09:27.000Now, I'm not the first parent of a child with autism to come back and say that my child felt that ABA was torturous In terms of how they do it.
00:09:36.000And, you know, at times ABA can be analogous to kind of like dog training, like it's very behaviorally oriented.
00:09:43.000It inhibits the children from behaviors that may in fact be helping them stay regulated, etc.
00:09:48.000And so what happened at Jamie's very well intended school, the women who run the school are well intended and they're not BCBAs and they were celebrating like the 4th of July As all this fluency came back with Jamie.
00:10:02.000But what was happening within the school was with about two thirds of the teachers, every time we'd share these amazing stories, we'd get nothing back.
00:10:10.000And we started to put together what was happening.
00:10:13.000And thankfully for Jamie, the teacher who runs the high academic class at his school is not a BCBA. She did celebrate like it was the 4th of July.
00:10:23.000She embraced everything that Jamie was doing immediately.
00:10:26.000And she took him under her wing and really protected him from the rest of the school.
00:10:34.000Jamie's school has to have at least two thirds of their teachers with a BCBA next to their name in order for parents to get insurance to pay for the school.
00:10:42.000It's wired all the way through the system.
00:10:48.000What they believe is that the letter board that Jamie spells on, they believe that this is a Ouija board and that the communication partner is the one who's actually, it's actually their words coming out of the board.
00:11:03.000They go, this is cruel because you're giving hope to families and you're You know, you're taking advantage of this poor child who's not capable of doing any of this, right?
00:11:13.000Like, it's sort of a triple compounding of awful thoughts that they go through.
00:11:18.000And what's so maddening about that, Bobby and Jenny, is how easy it is to disprove that.
00:12:05.000And so my simple comment for any hater out there trying to say, oh, this isn't really real, or it's a Ouija board is like, how many of the kids on the fixed boards do you need to tell you that the letter board was the transitional communication device that got them to the finish line?
00:12:34.000Elizabeth Vossler, who founded Spelling to Communicate, says that there are somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 There are fluent spellers in the world, a number of whom have gone through college.
00:12:48.000In some cases, they've done so with what we call a communication partner.
00:12:52.000In other cases, they've become independent and largely done it themselves.
00:12:58.000Really, he's riding the coattails of these amazing families that have already done this.
00:13:04.000Many colleges have bent over backwards to accommodate these spellers.
00:13:08.000What I can tell you is that Like in our school, which again is a well-intended school, Jamie was in a class of non-speakers and after we had this amazing miracle with him, obviously we wanted every other family to know what had happened.
00:14:14.000And when parents sit in a room with Jamie for the first time, and they have a non-speaker, and they watch him start spelling, I mean, as you can imagine, it is a deeply, deeply moving spiritual thing.
00:14:30.000We've had parents who've just sat on either side of Jamie and just wanted to like soak in every movement of what he's doing.
00:14:36.000They immediately engage directly with him and realize that nobody needs to interpret anything.
00:14:41.000They can just ask him a question and it comes back out on the board.
00:14:44.000And it's not until that moment that they really realize what we're talking about and we say like we've had the miracle of getting our son back.
00:14:52.000So I just want to make that point to families who will invariably encounter skepticism.
00:15:14.000And when you invest all your time in getting a BCBA and commit yourself to ABA therapy, This refutes much of the tenets of ABA. And I want to talk about something that I think is one of the most important points.
00:15:29.000And I mentioned this in the book, but, you know, Jamie and I were told about this therapy by a mom named Honey Renacella outside of Philadelphia.
00:15:37.000And she was experiencing a miracle with her son, Vince, and he was spelling all these amazing things.
00:15:45.000And so we got on an airplane and flew back to Northern Virginia to Growing Kids Therapy Center where Elizabeth Vossler invented Spelling to Communicate.
00:15:52.000And I'd been told ahead of time, look, the core tenet of Growing Kids is the presumption of competence.
00:16:17.000All the parents of S2C kids, they read their kids age-appropriate material and they teach them age-appropriate academics.
00:16:26.000And It's such a beautiful and simple concept, and yet it's missing from 99% of how kids who are non-speakers with autism are taught.
00:16:34.000People look at their mannerisms, they see the lack of eye contact, they see that they're not speaking, and they slow down their speech and they make these presumptions of incompetence.
00:16:44.000And ABA is founded on a presumption of incompetence, and S2C is founded on a presumption of competence.
00:16:52.000This really manifested itself in a simple and beautiful way.
00:16:54.000So Jamie and I go into this clinic and I have no idea what's going on.
00:16:57.000My head is still spinning and I'm fighting between hope and despair and fear and worry and what if it's not for him and maybe this isn't real and all these other feelings.
00:17:06.000And Elizabeth Vossler brings Jamie into a room to introduce spelling to communicate to him and she turns to him and she puts her hand on his shoulder and she says, Jamie, I know how smart you are.
00:17:21.000And literally, no one had ever said that to Jamie with that depth of sincerity and realness before.
00:17:28.000And I've asked Jamie about that moment later, and he says the most amazing thing.
00:17:34.000The first thing he said was, I thought to myself, how does she know that?
00:17:41.000It's like he'd been sitting on this secret this whole time, kind of watching the world go by, watching people treat him like he's stupid.
00:17:51.000And so he said, I thought to myself, how did she know that?
00:17:53.000He said, and then I said, or then Jamie said to me, I thought to myself, she is the most adorablest person in the whole world.
00:18:22.000And for whatever reason, that part of your brain and your mouth did not connect.
00:18:26.000And that's been really frustrating for you.
00:18:28.000And she went through and explained how, just as Bobby said, autism is really a motor disability, not a cognitive disability.
00:18:37.000She knows that speaking and typing and moving his eyes are really hard for Jamie, but she's going to give him a method to communicate that doesn't put as much pressure on those areas that are hard.
00:18:46.000And it's going to be a way for you to be able to connect with the world.
00:18:50.000And I really can't emphasize that simple concept enough because it's so important.
00:18:56.000Just imagine for a moment if what Elizabeth is saying is actually true.
00:19:00.000Imagine that there are three to five million children in the United States alone, which is the roughly 40% non-speakers within ASD. Imagine for a moment If they're all like Jamie.
00:19:11.000Imagine if they're all cognitively brilliant.
00:19:14.000Imagine if they're all being underestimated, as the book is called, and mistreated.
00:19:18.000And imagine if they could all be unlocked with the right amount of patients and therapy and everything else.
00:19:23.000And on the one hand, it is profoundly heartbreaking to imagine that we've missed it by that much.
00:19:36.000I'm just thinking about my own son, who was in a school with the best of intentions, who had teachers who loved him, had parents who loved him.
00:19:48.000And yet, as the years were going on, he was becoming more and more and more frustrated.
00:19:54.000And the number one reason was nobody believed in him, in his real intelligence.
00:20:01.000And I think about that compounded over three to five million children and young adults.
00:20:48.000And by the way, I'm just going to take a little side here.
00:20:51.000So Jamie just said a funny little word to me.
00:20:53.000And I've asked him about this, because this is kind of a thing that we do, where he'll say a word that's not really a word, and I'll repeat it back to him.
00:21:01.000And so, you know, like a million other examples, I asked Jamie, so why do you do that?
00:21:30.000No, so I was really like questioning all this and starting to internalize the potential ramifications of this.
00:21:38.000And so I asked Elizabeth, I said, you know, have you ever had a kid who's come to Growing Kids Therapy Center with the autism label, non-speaker, and they actually were cognitively disabled.
00:22:26.000Okay, so let's just presume that The shared disability is one of motor planning or motor function or motor cortex, whatever term you want to use.
00:22:35.000And the kinds of things you'll hear from the non-speakers is they'll say, my body is not my friend.
00:22:39.000I can't get my body to do what I want.
00:22:42.000You know, I want to fly to Hawaii, but my body goes to Alaska.
00:22:46.000Like, I've heard a lot of different ways for kids to describe this.
00:22:49.000And importantly, fine motor seems to be where things are the most challenged.
00:22:53.000And one of the areas that I didn't appreciate at all that Virtually every kid I've seen is true, is ocular apraxia.
00:23:00.000Being able to move your eyes properly.
00:23:02.000So imagine trying to get up and down this letter board and point things in various corners when you literally have a hard time getting your eyes to even work, okay?
00:23:11.000So what Spelling to Communicate does is they take it out a fine motor, fingers, mouth, and they put it in a gross motor.
00:23:19.000You're moving your shoulder to point at a board.
00:23:22.000And they have a whole brain map and explain this in a much better way than I ever could.
00:23:26.000But what they basically say is when you do that, it's much easier for a child to get their thoughts out.
00:23:31.000It's very hard for a non-speaker to retrieve words and bring them out their mouth, even if they can articulate.
00:23:38.000There's like a block there, and Jamie experiences this and explains it to me.
00:23:41.000But when they're not as taxed, when they're just moving that shoulder and really nothing else, it starts to flow.
00:23:47.000And I want to be really careful to explain this.
00:23:50.000The best analogy for me is somebody with a stroke and they lose the ability to move a part of their body.
00:23:56.000Then they have to go through very rigorous therapy.
00:23:58.000And what happens is basically a new map builds in the brain because you have neuroplasticity.
00:24:03.000So a new movement area myelinates and then they slowly regain that ability to move because of neuroplasticity.
00:24:10.000That's exactly what they're doing here.
00:24:12.000They're building neural maps that didn't previously exist and myelinating them.
00:24:17.000Just like you practice a golf swing and one day it becomes like second nature or anything else.
00:24:21.000And so slowly pushing on gross motor with a ton of repetition, and I want to emphasize that, we worked with Jamie every single day on this.
00:24:30.000He just slowly, slowly, slowly got better and better at pointing at letters.
00:24:35.000And what they do is they take the kids through lessons on different topics and they ask the child to spell words from those lessons.
00:24:46.000And then very slowly over time, they go from asking them to spell words to ask them to answer questions about the lessons.
00:24:53.000Then they go from asking them to answer questions about the lessons to the magic threshold, which is they ask them to give their opinion about the lessons.
00:25:02.000And that's sort of when you hit Nirvana.
00:25:05.000I'm going to tell this story really quickly because it is a great story and illustrative.
00:25:09.000So Jamie learned how to spell from Elizabeth Vossler in December.
00:25:13.000We went away and worked really hard and by late January we were down in Southern California with a woman named Dawn Marie Gavin who's another practitioner and Jamie was doing a lesson on the Boston Red Sox when they won the World Series back in 06 and he was spelling Fenway Park and all this other stuff and my dad was in the room and we were sitting there and I'm a diehard Yankee fan so I was suffering my way through the lesson and we got to the end and Dawn Marie Was on a 26-letter board,
00:25:43.000which is needed to be able to spell any independent thought.
00:25:45.000And she said to Jamie, Jamie, what did you think of that lesson?
00:26:50.000I've seen him, and I believe he began S2C at 33 or 34.
00:26:58.000Much as a 70-year-old stroke victim can regain the ability to do certain things through repetition, there's no reason to think that a non-speaker of any age wouldn't be capable of doing this.
00:27:08.000And if anything, I don't ever want to dissuade someone from starting early, but it seems like as they hit their teens, it becomes easier and easier.
00:27:17.000Again, I don't want to say that it's easy, all right?
00:27:20.000Because some kids may take a year to get to where Jamie got in three months.
00:27:25.000I think the most important reframe that we parents can do for our children, and it's not an easy task, is to believe.
00:27:34.000And I was surrounded by some amazing parents who I've credited and talked about explicitly in the book, who they kind of bridged hope and they bridged belief for me.
00:27:46.000And even A day after Honey Renacella called me and I was I had already talked to another mom who was very schooled and was going to communicate and she'd really opened my eyes to this whole idea of treating the children age appropriately and teaching them age appropriately and I just decided to look at Jamie a little differently and never alter my cadence again.
00:28:08.000Always presume he understands everything I'm doing.
00:28:10.000You know they tell you um Jenny you appreciate this a little more because you're a parent.
00:28:14.000Bobby they tell you These kids with autism never, ever, ever read body language.
00:28:35.000You know, Jamie tells me when my hands are shaking up in the air, I'm regulating myself.
00:28:38.000I'm doing that to calm down, to make myself feel better.
00:28:41.000So imagine being in the middle of something that allows you to maintain Your headspace in a room, and the teacher's snapping at you to cut it out and have quiet hands, as they like to say.
00:28:50.000And what I say is, when the kid is bouncing the ball off the wall, picking his nose, looking out the window, making funny noises, they're listening the whole time.
00:28:58.000These are the best listeners in the whole world.
00:29:09.000Jimmy knows Spanish because his brother and sister took Spanish in school and we would drill them in the family room and he's just sitting there absorbing everything.
00:29:19.000Jennifer Larson One of the great stories I want to hear the rest of what you're saying Great stories in your book is that one of the first questions they ask them is they're telling them a story about popcorn and then they're Giving him a quiz to understand what his comprehension level was.
00:33:35.000I've seen what beautiful individuals they are, just like the three of us don't agree on everything and have different views of the world and everything else.
00:33:47.000And Jamie's definitely affirmed it with me, that it bothers him as well, just to be, you know, they, oh, you have autism, therefore you think this way.
00:33:58.000I don't want to be a spoiler, but one of the most exciting things about the book is that the first half is written by you, Jamie, but the second half is written by Jamie.
00:34:10.000And the interview there with him is, I've never read an interview that is poignant and just the clarity of thought and the purity of his soul just comes through and his humor and his power of observation and his constant engagement and the depth and the The profundity of his understanding of what's happening in his environment and
00:34:41.000in the interactions, the social interactions of people around him.
00:34:46.000You know, one of the things when people describe kids with autism or have Asperger's, one of the first things they say is that they have no social cues.
00:34:59.000And yet his capacity To understand these very complex social interactions at a really high level and the eloquence with which he addresses them is really beyond comprehension.
00:35:16.000They all are extraordinarily sensitive.
00:35:58.000And And again, that's what I go back to.
00:36:00.000This was really Jamie's idea to write the book, and Jamie really wanted to write the book just to reach other non-speakers, right?
00:36:06.000He refers to the experience he had for 17 years as being in a prison of silence, right, which is a really heavy way to think about it.
00:36:17.000What struck me was just the scale and how we might have just gotten the whole thing wrong, and I just don't know if people can really wrap their heads around this like, Millions of non-speakers.
00:36:34.000And like so many things, there's pedigrees and money and brittle ways of thinking and non-open-mindedness that are keeping this from happening faster.
00:36:46.000You have the American Speech and Hearing Association coming out with a repudiation of these methods a couple of years ago, which basically rendered...
00:36:59.000SLPs are speech language pathologists who are very, very important to these kids.
00:37:02.000It rendered all but the most bold of them unable to do this method with kids, even though, I mean, Jamie was on this touch icon device that he was carrying around his school.
00:37:17.000He had this thing for four years, all right?
00:37:19.000It got to the point where he could, like, touch enough pictograms to say a sentence they asked him to say, He never used it spontaneously to get his needs met.
00:37:27.000In two months or three months, he's hyper-fluent with spelling to communicate, right?
00:37:32.000We spent like eight grand on this device, right?
00:37:47.000You present, I present this, like, present this information to the head speech pathologist at the school who'd introduced all these devices, and the poor guy, I mean, he's got, like, steam coming out of his head, and he just falls back on the Asha statement that what Jamie's doing isn't real.
00:38:00.000You see how this, like, circular negative spiral can happen when these idiotic organizations Do what they're doing.
00:38:09.000And you know, one of the things that's, you know, a collective concern in the autism community with, as far as parents, is who's going to take care of my child after I die?
00:38:27.000If we're talking 3 million non-speakers have the same or similar cognitive ability as all of us, I want to give, I got to tell a story.
00:38:37.000I don't think this one's in the book, but my wife and I had been organizing a farm-based living environment across from his school where we were imagining kind of handing him off for the adult years, you know, and being a part of that.
00:38:51.000And because it's really hard to gauge what Jamie wants to do with his time after school when he can't tell us.
00:39:00.000We're left to sort of divine it from like smiles when he does certain activities.
00:40:29.000These are cognitively fully developed beings with a motor deficit that makes it hard for them to control their bodies.
00:40:38.000And Bobby, I really think neurologists need to appreciate this because to me, they're giving a target within the brain for where the problem is.
00:40:49.000I can't say when or how it develops exactly.
00:41:04.000But I know there's a lot of parents who are listening.
00:41:06.000And it's something that we're really working on now.
00:41:10.000And I've written about this on jbhanleyblog.com.
00:41:13.000But basically, Jamie's now doing therapy on something that they call initiation, which is basically that this brain-body disconnect also inhibits their ability to initiate.
00:41:23.000Just initiate, just to do things you want to do for the very reason that, you know, imagine you had all this stuff you wanted to do with your day and you couldn't get out of the chair, right?
00:41:31.000So Jamie does this exercise where we put three objects in front of him on a desk and then he spells on a letter board and the objects can be as simple as like, you know, coffee cup, iPhone, scotch tape.
00:41:46.000Jamie spells on a letter board, I will pick up the coffee cup, okay?
00:42:47.000Being down in San Diego, working with her son on letterboarding, and she went to put the room service stuff in the hallway, and the door closed behind her.
00:43:39.000Like imagine how many ways this initiation disability is being misinterpreted as as a lack of intelligence by well-intended but misinformed caregivers.
00:43:50.000And the epilogue for Jamie is that as the months have gone by through initiation therapy, he's now got objects across the room that he says, I will pick that up and put it on the desk, and he goes and does it.
00:44:23.000And then it was deeply disturbing to imagine all the times that he may have wanted to do things and simply could not get his body to do it.
00:44:34.000Because the test that you just described seemed to be like absolute indisputable proofs that the letter board is real, it's not a Ouija board, because it's a non-verbal communication.
00:44:51.000You can write down which one he's going to grab, and he grabs the right one every time.
00:44:59.000Have you ever Shown a demonstration like that to one of the people who are resisting.
00:45:06.000And, you know, my real question is, have you ever been able to get through?
00:45:12.000It took you 17 years to get through to your child.
00:45:14.000Have you ever been able to get through to one of those people who was completely subsumed in that orthodoxy and just resistant?
00:45:22.000Because, you know, that's what they were trying to do.
00:46:03.000Every classmate who's in the high academic class with Jamie and they're all speakers have embraced him and they've recognized all his intelligence.
00:46:12.000Rather than feel compelled to try to convince an idiot of what's obviously true, we're just going to manifest and let Jamie be the best student he can be.
00:46:24.000And, you know, they can get on the train before it leaves the station if they want or they can't.
00:46:28.000But I will be damned if I will sit in a room and try to talk someone with that scale of idiocy into something that is so patently obvious.
00:46:34.000And it's beneath Jamie to ever utilize him in that fashion.
00:46:50.000Elizabeth Vossler, she repudiated the statement from Asha with one of the most beautiful essays I've ever read.
00:46:57.000You can Google Asha statement Elizabeth Vossler rebuttal.
00:47:01.000And what she basically says is, when you sit down and bear witness to one of these children's spelling, you have a choice to make in that moment.
00:47:21.000The people who can't make it, you know, they're the same people who were doing dances and believe that's why the sun came up in the morning.
00:48:48.000You misunderstand these children, and many of the letter boarders, and I'll let each of them speak for themselves, because that's the beautiful thing about this community now.
00:48:56.000These children are very eloquent, and young adults.
00:48:59.000Most of them say ABA is torture and inhumane.
00:49:02.000Okay, now that doesn't mean that there's not going to be a family who says, hey, it saved my child when they were two, three, and four, and I'm not about to say that we should throw all of it out.
00:49:11.000What I can tell you is that many of the communicators who were non-speakers say it's inhumane.
00:49:26.000Look, I don't think that's true across the board by any stretch.
00:49:30.000But I will tell you right now, Bobby, someone like you who's a little bit more objective...
00:49:34.000I think knowing what you now know about these non-speakers, if you bore witness to an ABA session, it would probably turn your stomach because it looks like dog training.
00:49:44.000It's very, very admonishing and curbing of behaviors, and that's not normal.
00:49:55.000There's a lot of pushing their head for eye contact.
00:50:09.000My wife, they had some aviation therapists show up in our house in California back when Jamie was two or three.
00:50:15.000And they started doing this really kind of like, like, not corporal punishment, but like really like firm and aggressive.
00:50:24.000And Lisa was like, you're out of here.
00:50:26.000There's no fucking way this can be good for a kid.
00:50:28.000Like she just, pardon my language, by the way, everybody.
00:50:30.000She just knew that this couldn't be right.
00:50:33.000So I just think that, and you know, the S2C people have been shouting this from the rooftops.
00:50:38.000They just don't really have a platform, but they've been shouting this from the rooftops because, you know, Elizabeth and there are other spelling methods like RPM that's also been amazing for many children.
00:50:49.000They're hearing from all the non-speakers.
00:50:51.000They're just taking the data from the children who received the behavior.
00:50:55.000And when you start to think about it from their perspective that they're brilliant, you start to realize, oh my God, can you imagine how torturous that really is?
00:51:03.000You know, JB... You can buy JB's book because a lot of people are asking right now where to get it.
00:51:10.000You can buy his book at HanleyBook.com.
00:51:17.000I'm very proud that it's part of CHD Books, Children's Health Defense.
00:51:22.000We have our own publishing company, our own imprint.
00:51:28.000Many of you read some of our other books, but this one is just fantastic.
00:52:04.000Okay, so I want to give a little bit of a frame as we let Jamie, you know, he's been obviously sitting here listening to everything.
00:52:12.000Yeah, but I want to, like, I just need to give a little context because the one thing I never want to do is kind of like do something that might be discouraging for a parent later.
00:52:21.000So this is like graduate level board, okay?
00:52:26.000They actually start, I don't have one with me, with like an eight letter stencil board and It's really big, right?
00:52:32.000And I mean, like everything, it's like training wheels and then you keep moving up.
00:52:35.000So this is what we call a laminate in S2C land.
00:52:46.000But Jamie was very clear right before the book was launched that he only wanted to work off his keyboard, which is his new communication device.
00:52:54.000And so what we have is a magic keyboard from Apple.
00:52:58.000Got a little ring on the back so that I can hold the keyboard because he still wants it held in front of him.
00:53:07.000And there's an app called Proloquo for text.
00:53:12.000So it's P-R-O-L-O-Q-U-O for the number and then text.
00:53:17.000And Jamie has become a lot more prolific in spelling ever since he's gotten Proloquo.
00:53:24.000And the reason for that is I think that he gets the Immediate feedback mechanism from the iPad and he can really see it.
00:53:31.000The other thing that's amazing, and again, I don't like to in any way, we're not doing this to prove the doubters wrong.
00:53:38.000I just, I really refuse to kind of like go down that path.
00:53:41.000But all I can say is like when you watch Jamie spell on the iPad, he's going to look at the keyboard and look at the iPad because he watches very carefully what he's spelling.
00:53:50.000And he uses the delete key and he uses the space bar because he's spelling, right?
00:53:56.000And then he hits return and what's really cool about it for him is when he hits return it says what he wrote so his dad doesn't have to and so it's a little bit more of an intimate interaction with other people because he doesn't have a human between them right it's all kind of him and as soon as Jamie started doing this only about a month ago he realized like oh this can get me independent and he's already said like I don't think we're going to need my communication partner much longer And he's told me explicitly
00:54:26.000I want to be independent by summer, right?
00:55:26.000You know, I've been watching some of the questions, and there is one that's kind of reoccurring, which is about, does this program help a verbal child that is not 100% conversational?
00:57:10.000So I want to mention something because this is a source of criticism sometimes and misunderstanding.
00:57:19.000So I'm literally holding the keyboard, right?
00:57:21.000You can see his eyes going back and forth as he's spelling.
00:57:25.000And when When kids first begin spelling to communicate, the practitioner who you work with is very, very likely to prompt much more using verbal prompts and using prompts with their hand.
00:57:43.000They'll never go hand over hand, which is what's called facilitated communication.
00:57:47.000And so people will often mistakenly This is facilitated communication, and it's not.
00:57:54.000But what you can see with me is that my prompts have really, really faded.
00:57:57.000I'm basically down to going, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
00:58:01.000I'm just giving him a little support underneath his typing.
00:58:05.000You know, no different than a coach does with a player.
00:58:08.000Because we're fading towards independence.
00:58:10.000So if you get in a room for the first time, and you see that the practitioner is really, really, really prompting your child, it's because they're just trying to train their body.
00:59:13.000I think the other thing that confuses parents is they just don't realize the depths of communication that we're able to get out of Jamie and that, hey, we're not the only ones.
01:01:05.000I think that what's going to need to happen is that parents are going to need to submit expenses for spelling to communicate lessons to insurance.
01:01:16.000Insurance is going to deny those expenses and then they're going to need to sue them.
01:01:19.000And then that's going to force litigation To prove that this is a valid method.
01:01:25.000We have science out of the University of Virginia.
01:01:29.000About a year ago, it was an eye tracking study that affirmed very clearly, scientifically published in Nature, that it's the children choosing the letters.
01:01:38.000Okay, so this was like the first of its kind, you know, to silence the doubters.
01:01:42.000Again, I don't want to spend my time that way, but I think that's going to have to happen.
01:01:46.000The method needs to be validated by the insurance companies so that they will Pay for this and for schools as well.
01:01:54.000And so I don't doubt for a minute that it will take litigation to get to that point.
01:02:18.000He did a method called RPM, which is similar to S2C that we didn't do, but that many parents swear by.
01:02:24.000And I think that's what's really important.
01:02:26.000People are figuring out ways to get to these children.
01:02:28.000And then people like Ido, he went off to college and wrote a book.
01:02:32.000He's just like Jamie, meaning he's a speller and a non-speaker.
01:02:36.000These beautiful stories exist for years past.
01:02:39.000All we're doing is maybe getting this out a little bit broader into the community, but we are not the pioneers of this.
01:02:46.000It's amazing to me that I didn't know about it, or that I didn't understand not just the applicability, but the scale of what we were talking about.
01:02:54.000So I want to make that point clear to parents, because there's a lot of RPM parents who've been doing this for years, and their voices and their kids' voices deserve to be heard.
01:03:04.000Can I read one comment that I saw that I really liked?
01:03:24.000I mean, I'm telling you, this is not, it's out there.
01:03:28.000Just after my interview yesterday, there were people contacting me talking about their child that has gone through STC and it's working and amazing.
01:03:40.000Again, we've never claimed to be the pioneers.
01:04:23.000And again, once it happens to you, you just want every other kid to have the chance.
01:04:27.000So it's so cool for me to know that there's a whole group of these spellers in Long Island, because I can tell you that for community, all Jamie wants is his dude bros.
01:04:35.000He likes to be with other spellers just like him.