Filmmaker Shining a Light on Female Inventors and Telepathy
Ky Dickens on her love of storytelling, consciousness, and why she wishes she moved to Toluca Lake years ago.
Ky Dickens invites us into her beautiful home she shares with her wife, two children, and pair of adorable Devon Rex cats whose collars you may hear jingling in the audio of our chat.
Hailing from the suburbs of Chicago, Ky says she was reluctant to move to LA because of the many myths she’d heard about traffic, neighborhoods, and quality of life. But now after living here for six years, wishes she had skedaddled from the midwest sooner.
Click the play button below to hear our entire episode with the documentary filmmaker where we delve into how much she loves Toluca Lake, to some of the fascinating films she’s made, and how her kids have taught her how to speak more inclusively. Or keep scrolling for some edited highlights.
Tony Pierce: Tell me a little about your new documentary.
Ky Dickens: Fish Out of Water (2009) was my first documentary ever. My fifth one that just came out is called Show Her The Money (2023).
Show Her The Money is about how only 2% of investment funds go to women. Yes, 98% of all venture capital funds go to men. So if you can imagine like a behind-the-scenes of Shark Tank, but women founders trying to get their inventions funded and why this is a huge problem and such a huge disparity.
Wait. Women have good inventions?
Yeah. I mean, incredible things.
These VCs want to make money, though, right?
Of course.
Are they blinded?
Well, yeah, but that’s one of the really fun things about our film: we follow some women who have started their own VCs, because there’s a ton of “whitespace” because no one else has put out the thing that’s gonna do things like stop hot flashes.
One of the founders that I was casting for this, but didn’t end up in the film, would take the ashes of a loved one and turn them into a diamond. I mean, it’s a cool idea.
Other ideas like canned wine — really fun ideas that make money.
The venture capital firms that are investing in women are making big bucks because women can make a $10,000 check stretch a lot further than men can because they’ve had to learn how to do it.
So in many ways they make better founders than a similarly situated man because they’ve had to become excellent.
I love the Bible, can we talk about your first doc?
Fish Out of Water, my first film, looks at the seven clobber passages that have been historically utilized —
Clobber?
That’s what they’re called, the clobber passages, which have been used to clobber LGBTQ people for being gay.
And what that film does is it deconstructs each of the Bible verses and shows their historical context.
So like that passage in Leviticus you mentioned, when we get into that particular passage in the film, we look at how it also says you can’t wear clothes, you can’t wear two different types of material, you can’t eat shellfish, you can’t plant two types of crops in the same field…
We’re not paying attention any of that. So why are we paying attention to the verse that says a man should not lie with another man?
And why do you think that is?
I want to really separate something here.
I think spirituality is very different, often, from organized religion, and organized religion throughout history has needed a victim.
It’s been women, it’s been Black people it’s been other religions… immigrants, gay people, someone that you can just hang all your —
A scapegoat.
Yeah, a scapegoat.
So what’s the purpose of creating scapegoats? So that those who aren’t those things feel better about themselves?
I have no idea. It has not served us very well.
Shaming, harming victimizing someone is not the Christian way. It’s certainly not what Christ would want.
He was a man of utter radical inclusion, bringing people in from the margins of society, healing and making them whole, helping them be seen and loved for exactly who they were.
When I came out in college, I also was leading the Bible study, and I got a lot of flack from my friends who were Christian conservatives. I went to Vanderbilt, and that’s what was down there.
I’m a curious person.
So I started going to different ministers around town and making appointments and being like, “what does the Bible say about… what’s going on here? Am I going to Hell? I don’t feel like I’m a bad person. I actually feel like I’m a really good person.”
And they would sit with me and say, “look this is all taken out of context. You have to look at some of the original languages in which this was translated and retranslated and re-transcribed.”
The word homosexuality was not even coined until about 100 years ago.
What they were talking about back then was, you know, male temple prostitution, ownership of women, how you couldn’t own a man, all sorts of different things.
It was not talking to, about, or referencing loving someone of the same gender. That was just not even conceived of as a possibility.
How do you feel about the Valley?
I love the Valley. I think being born and raised in the Midwest in Chicago (and my wife is from Minnesota), I always wanted to live in LA, but I just assumed you’d be in traffic the whole time and the yards would be small.
So when I was looking for houses… I have a lot of friends in Los Feliz, Highland Park, Eagle Rock, Glassell Park, that’s where I was looking…
Then at some point I came over to the Valley and I was just like oh my gosh: big yards and sidewalks and a lot of walkable neighborhoods. We could walk to Trader Joe’s and walk to all the restaurants and I was just in love with it.
It was a wide, spread out, beautiful suburbia / super progressive creative — I mean the studios are right here: you’ve got Universal, Disney, Warner Brothers. I just love this area of LA so much.
It’s not at all what we see on TV about LA.
It’s not. Toluca Lake, Burbank, this area of LA, right around Halloween is bonkers. They close down the streets, people decorate like you would not believe.
Huge themes like Pirates of the Caribbean or the entire Emerald City with Wizard of Oz, and an electric bill that probably cost more than the house.
It feels kind of magical and it feels suburban, but with a cool edge.
It doesn’t feel like where you and I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.
I hate the myths that Midwesterns tell themselves about Los Angeles because I absolutely love it. I wish I would have moved out here 15 years ago.
We have a nine year-old and a four year-old. We walk them to school every day. We know all the people who go to the public school and everyone in the neighborhood. It’s just dreamy. It feels like the ‘50s kind of, but in a not creepy-bad, white supremacy way. But just in a way that people still care about their neighbors.
In the ‘50s, I’m not sure that two moms could raise kids together.
That is 100% true.
So we can have like the charm of the ’50s, but the progressiveness of post-Obama?
Yeah, exactly.
So how many docs have you done so far?
I’ve done five feature documentaries, four shorts and I’m in development on a docuseries right now.
What’s the docuseries about?
It’s about people, non speakers, with autism, and other extreme gifts that the world doesn’t know about.
Telepathy?
Yeah. And it’s really widespread. It’s fascinating.
I had a friend die a few years ago and it kind of made me think I really want to start asking the bigger questions in my work.
If I can just spend five years, maybe I’ll figure out what I believe and what I think about.
Then I heard this podcast with a neuroscientist who was educated at Harvard and Johns Hopkins — a brilliant woman. And she had been working with non-speakers with autism.
So this is not about autism. This is about people who really can’t speak or have lost that sense, but are completely in there.
They’re brilliant people, often, they just can’t get out because speaking is a fine motor skill.
Pointing with a letter board, though, is a gross motor skill. Often these kids learn to point and learn to communicate via the letter board.
However, a lot of parents were starting to report to their doctor that their kids would freak out and hold their head if their mom or dad had a headache.
Or, if the parents thought about where they hid the Halloween candy, their kids would go get it.
Once she found some non-speakers who’d learned to communicate via the letter board, these kids would say, “Mom, I can read your mind. Dad, I can read your mind.”
So this neuroscientist started studying that with multiple cameras, she’d put a screen between the parent and the child, would show the parent made-up words, fake words, an image; and the child could tell you and spell out exactly what the parent was looking at.
It was very hard for me to believe. I’m a science nerd. I mean, I’m a nonfiction storyteller. I pretty much only read nonfiction.
So I went and watched the first time, and brought all my own cues. I bought a new iPad, I put my own random number generator on it.
I brought books by my father-in-law who has since passed away that he wrote that no one would have. I’d flip to a page in the book and the child could say what was in the picture that I was looking at.
You could point to a word on the book, you could write a word, scratch it out and write a new word. They’d know it.
I’ve now documented this in America and India and England, Pakistan, Mexico. We have subjects from all over the world.
The parents know this is real, it’s just that no one believes them. No one’s ever believed them. And it’s a hard thing to believe.
But this is what I will say about this. What I realized is it’s not paranormal: it’s normal. It’s just that our paradigm is wrong.
We have started to believe, as a society, that consciousness begins and ends in our brain. That’s it. There’s nothing more than that.
And what these kids have taught me is, no, consciousness extends outside of the body. How and why? I don’t know, but it does. And once you can start to see with your own eyes that telepathy is happening, then it really makes you question everything else and makes everything else impossible.
There’s a lot of efficacy involved. And I don’t think people realize this. But it’s really true that the second someone starts doubting them, they won’t do [the telepathy].
We’ve had people in the room when we were filming, who were sending out negative thoughts — which the kids can hear! I’ve had to ask those people to leave, and then all of a sudden, the kids are flying again, and doing it and they’re never wrong.
It’s not like they’re wrong 50% of the time — statistically irrelevant.
They’re right 100% of the time. They don’t miss.
I now have so many questions. Can two of these people talk to each other through telepathy?
Yep, that’s episode two.
Wow. Were you raised to be religious?
I was raised interestingly, because my mom, who was born in Sweden, is a Lutheran, a Swedish Lutheran.
My dad was a scientist at heart.
My mom would take us to church and I’d come home and my dad would be like, “we’re from monkeys.”
I had a 50/50 upbringing.
Which I think is great because then as an adult, you can really choose.
You can really choose.
So what did you choose?
I completely believe in God and the afterlife and I believe consciousness survives the body but I feel like because of this project, I’ve proof of that.
Do you think this is a reflection of God? Do you think this is a gift that God gave to these people?
Great question. I think that things like ESP and telepathy have always been a part of humanity and in the animal kingdom.
You have hive mind with bees. They know what they’re doing. Sometimes it seems like they’re sharing a consciousness.
There’s schools of fish that can move as one, birds who can move as one.
They’ve studied all sorts of animals that seem to be able to speak from far distances, and we can’t explain why.
And as far as human beings go, there’s been a lot of research in this and it gets disregarded and dismissed, because science and academia and our culture at large is so entrenched in materialism, the idea that the only thing that matters is what you can see and feel. And same with consciousness — it comes with the brain.
So where this has left me, and a lot of people who have spent time with it — we’re working with two who are neuroscientists from Harvard from Cambridge — bright people, there’s either two options.
One is that consciousness is kind of a signal coming to us from somewhere else. So if you think about our brain as being like a smartphone, depending on the apps you have, you can use it differently.
If your phone breaks, the signal won’t work very well. But if your phone breaks, it doesn’t mean the signal goes away.
So that’s one way to think of it: our brains are more like a TV or a cell phone and consciousness is a signal.
Another way to think of it is that we have a soul that doesn’t need a body. It is able to communicate without a body.
And possibly both are correct.
The docuseries is called Signal.
This is just a few of the highlights. Hear the whole conversation by clicking the play button.
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