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Podcast Notes: Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People - Episode with Temple Grandin
Episode Overview Episode Title: Temple Grandin: Different Minds for Different Times Guest: Temple Grandin Host: Guy Kawasaki Release Date: Not specified in transcript Duration: Approximately 1 hour 31 minutes
Guest Background
- Temple Grandin is a renowned professor of animal sciences, bestselling author, and prominent advocate for autism awareness.
- Recognized by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
- Featured in the Emmy-winning HBO film "Temple Grandin" and has contributed significantly to animal behavior and engineering.
Episode Description In this episode, Grandin discusses her new book, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions, exploring how visual thinkers can leverage their unique cognitive abilities in various fields.
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Key Concepts and Discussions
Visual Thinking
- Definition: Grandin describes visual thinking as "object visualization," where individuals think in photorealistic images rather than words.
- Associative Thinking: Visual thinkers often make connections between concepts through images rather than abstract concepts.
- Importance in Jobs: She emphasizes that visual thinkers excel in practical, hands-on roles, such as engineering and mechanical design, which are often undervalued in current educational systems.
Challenges for Visual Thinkers
- Grandin expresses concern about the decline of shop classes and hands-on learning in schools, which she believes are critical for developing practical skills.
- Standardized testing, particularly in mathematics, tends to disadvantage visual thinkers, pushing them out of valuable technical roles.
Contributions to Engineering and Innovation
- Visual thinkers are critical in industries that require mechanical ingenuity, including those that design and build machinery.
- Grandin cites her experiences working with individuals in heavy industry who, despite lacking formal education, hold numerous patents due to their innovative thinking.
The Intersection of Autism and Visual Thinking
- Many individuals on the autism spectrum are extreme visual thinkers, leading to unique strengths in specific fields.
- Grandin notes that educational systems often screen out these individuals, losing out on potential talent in skilled trades and engineering.
Cultural and Societal Observations
- Grandin draws parallels between historical observations (e.g., the decline in art quality in ancient civilizations) and modern infrastructure maintenance issues.
- She raises concerns about the aging workforce in skilled trades and the lack of new workers entering these fields.
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Key Takeaways
- Value of Diverse Thinking Styles: Recognizing and valuing different cognitive styles—visual, verbal, and mathematical—is essential for fostering innovation and problem-solving.
- Educational Reform Needed: There is a critical need to reintegrate hands-on learning in educational institutions to help students discover their strengths and interests.
- Importance of Observation: Grandin emphasizes the role of observation in scientific inquiry and problem-solving, noting that it often leads to practical applications and innovations.
Practical Advice for Parents and Educators
- Encourage exposure to diverse hands-on experiences to help children discover their passions.
- Recognize that traditional methods of teaching and assessment may not suit all learning styles, particularly for visual thinkers.
- Advocate for a balanced educational approach that includes arts, mechanics, and sciences.
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Conclusion The episode is a profound exploration of how different cognitive styles contribute to innovation and success in various fields. Temple Grandin's insights on visual thinking, autism, and the importance of hands-on learning offer valuable lessons for educators, parents, and industry leaders alike.
Call to Action Listeners are encouraged to engage with Grandin's work, particularly her book Visual Thinking, to further understand the strengths of visual thinkers and the need for educational reform that supports diverse learning styles.
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Additional Notes
- For further insights and future episodes, listeners are encouraged to follow the Remarkable People podcast.
- Guy Kawasaki invites feedback and reviews from listeners to continue improving the show.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00As we head into the new year, leaders everywhere are wondering how to help their teams do the best work of their lives. And here's the encouraging part. When people have the right skills, everything gets better. Collaboration improves, projects run smoother, innovation actually takes off. That's why Project Management Institute is such a powerful resource. As the home of the PMP and globally recognized certifications, PMI gives teams the confidence and capability to turn big ideas into real results. Invest in your people and watch remarkable things happen. Project Management Institute. Learn more at PMI.org.
0:37Listeners of the Remarkable People podcast will learn from some of the most successful people in the world. They provide practical tips and inspiring stories that will help you be more remarkable. If you live in the U.S. or Canada, text 831-609-0628 to get notified of each new episode.
1:06I'm Kai Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Today we have the honor of speaking with one of the most accomplished and influential figures in the world of autism, animal behavior, and engineering. Our guest is none other than Temple Grandin. Temple is a professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University and a best-selling author. She has been named to Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and she's been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She's also been featured in multiple documentaries, including the Emmy-winning HBO film Temple Grandin.
1:48And to top it all off, she also has the distinction of winning the Best Shirt Award on Remarkable People. Today we are discussing her new book, Visual Thinking, The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions. Join us as we delve into Temple's extraordinary life, her remarkable achievements, and the insights she has gained. I'm Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People, and now, here is the remarkable Temple Grandin.
2:25Visual thinking is called an object visualizer. Thinks completely in pictures, in photorealistic pictures. I didn't know that other people thought in words until I was in my late 30s. And then I discovered that other people think verbally. But everything is a picture. It's also associative thinking. On a podcast I was just on, a parent of an autistic child asked about their child having complex issues. Well, I saw housing development. Now, I know that's wrong for the word complex. I'm also seeing some signs for some businesses. I know that is wrong. One thing a visual thinker is good at is being very specific.
3:12I don't know what a child's complex problem is. Tell me specifically what the problem is, and then I might be able to help you. See, the verbal thinker tends to overgeneralize. That's what the verbal thinker does. Like, how do you make an inclusive environment? How do you implement it? I was just reading my MIT technology magazine, and they were talking about design thinking. and one of the problems they mentioned in that article was they don't talk about how do you actually implement something now where object visualizers are really good is inventing mechanical things i worked with a lot of them that build equipment for me because i spent 25 years in heavy industry supervising construction of my projects and i worked with object visualizers who barely graduated from high school that might have 20 patents each for complicated mechanical equipment.
4:06These are the things that object visualizers are really good at and were terrible at abstract math. And most of the people I worked with shop people that invented things are terrible at math. Then you have the other part of engineering. That's your mathematical side. And you need the whole team. And in a food plant, object visualizers build and design the equipment and the degreed engineer will do boilers, refrigeration, power of water requirements, wind loading on the building, snow loading on the building. You've got to have the whole team. Maybe that explains what an object visualizer is. But I know that some educators, especially now that so many schools took out shop classes, don't really understand what object visualization is.
4:50When I was doing a book signing for my book, Visual Thinking, in October, that's like just a few months ago. They did one of the talks at a school and I talked to the principal and he didn't know what object visualization was. He understood verbal and math thinking, but not object visualization. And I'm very concerned that object visualizers are getting screened out because we can't do algebra. But you need us. Another reason why you need us is if you want to build something now, like a new poultry processing plant, you got to import all the equipment from Holland because they did not take out shop classes.
5:25We also don't make the state-of-the-art electronic chip-making machine, as in electronic chips, not potato chips. The object visualizers need to be there. They're part of the team. Do you think that this lack of appreciation for object visualizers and the dependence on standardized testing and passing algebra to get further in STEM, You think it's literally a threat to our country? Well, I'm going to say we're losing skills. I'm very concerned about this. The next time you see somebody fixing an elevator, check out their age. They're turning gray and they're not getting replaced. The small shops that I worked with that built my equipment, they're all retiring out.
6:10They are not getting replaced because those kids are playing video games in the basement with an autism diagnosis. and I'm going to estimate that about 20 % of very skilled drafting technicians, people laying out entire factories with maybe a single drafting class, people patenting equipment, specialized mechanical equipment that I work with, are either autistic, dyslexic, or ADHD. And my colleagues are retiring out. They are not getting replaced. Now, we're going to have some problems. Who's going to keep the power grid from falling apart, the water systems from falling apart? And some people say, well, everything's going to be computers.
6:48Well, you still got all these mechanical devices controlled by computers. And I don't think elevators are going to have anti-gravity anytime soon. And they're going to be mechanical devices for a long, long time, maybe controlled by computers. I loved your story where you noticed that the mummies, the art was getting worse and worse. And you asked the person what's happening here. Can Can you tell that story? Well, that was a fourth grade field trip to the art museum. They had a big Egypt exhibit. And this is why I think it's important that schools have field trips. It was fourth grade and I was fascinated by the mummies.
7:25But then as we went through the different dynasties, going from the early dynasties to the later dynasties, the art wasn't as pretty. It was more crude. And I asked my teacher why. And she said their civilization was falling apart. That's what she told me. And is that what you see when you look at bridges and overpasses now? They're not being maintained. For one thing, I was just out doing book signing out in Maryland in a really affluent part of town and went over a bridge that was horribly not maintained, rusting out. Well, you see, my kind of mind gets really concerned about that. So as a visual thinker, are you, in a sense, cursed with seeing disasters and potential disasters everywhere?
8:07where you see the bridge, you see the overpass, you see the 737 MAX with only one sensor. I mean, is everything just like, you know, making your head explode? In my book on visual thinking books about disasters, thematically trained engineers calculate risk. Visual thinkers see risk. And when I found out why Fukushima burned up, to me, it was just unbelievable. How could you not put watertight doors on it to protect the electric emergency cooling pump? I can't design a nuclear reactor. I don't have the math skills for that, but I know that electric pumps don't run underwater. And when you need that pump, you really need it or you're going to have a disaster.
8:47And I think what happens is the mathematical mind doesn't see it. They had a 10 meter seawall. 30 minutes on Google, I discovered that looking at historical data, it only took me 30 minutes, that seawall would be breached, that that would not be high enough to keep the tsunamis out. That wasn't very hard. And what I'm realizing is that they don't see it. And I think the thing with the Boeing Max in the beginning was a visual thinking mistake. One sensor, very fragile. When I found out what an angle of attack sensor was, I'm going, this is very fragile. A pigeon could take that off a plane. And you wired it to one of them.
9:22And nobody asked the question, what happens if I just break it? What's the MCAS computer going to do? That's a very, very simple question. Then you're talking about a sensor that breaks all the time. That was easy to find online. And I just see a bird hitting that, and it's going to break it. They don't see it. They don't see it. Now, since the book was written, I sat on a plane next to a Boeing engineer. This is not in the book. And the engineer told me that the shop people had warned them, and they didn't pay attention. That's according to a Boeing engineer sitting beside me on a plane. And this is because it was all about time to market and lowering the cost to make and develop that plane?
10:11Well, there was other stuff that the flight manual, that was really bad. But in the beginning, it started out as a visual thinking mistake. And it could have been very easily corrected, very easily corrected. It wouldn't have been expensive at all to correct that in the beginning. And some of these problems is they don't see it. and I've looked at some of the reviews about my visual thinking book and some of the people have called it conjecture. Well, I think people that are verbal thinkers, they don't understand visual thinking. I can see a pigeon hitting that angle of attack sensor and breaking it off.
10:46And my thinking is associative. I'm also seeing a fake owl that they put on one of the jet bridges at the Denver airport, which I didn't keep the pigeons away very well. It's associative thinking. but to go back to the question do you always see these potential problems some of the best parts of my career was when i was out working on the working on these projects working with all kinds of people in the shops that barely graduated from high school and they have 20 patents to their name people that started out with a single welding class now own a big shop that sells specialized hydraulic equipment around the world and since they're not declared on their autism i have to be vague about what that equipment does.
11:24Got to be vague about. What is the relationship between autism and visual thinking? What tends to happen in autism is you have extremes. Most people are mixtures of maybe visual, mathematical, and verbal thinking. But when you have autism, you can have an extreme object visualizer or a very extreme mathematician who is brilliant at math and programs computers for Silicon Valley. They can also be autistic. And then there's some that are more verbal that learn 10 languages. You tend to get more hyper-specialized if you're on the autism spectrum. And I worked with shop people that I know are undiagnosed autistic.
12:04And what's happening right now is they're getting shunted into special ed. And then I talked to a special ed teacher just the other day right here in town. And she told me that they won't let these kids take shop. These are the individuals we need to be fixing things. we've got water systems that are falling apart electrical stuff with all kinds of problems and in engineering there's a place for the visual thinkers and we also have to have the mathematical thinkers let's take fixing power grid stuff and all those power plants froze down in texas everybody talked about it in abstractions if we got to figure out how to fix them let's make a list of the plants and what piece of equipment actually froze because some stuff's easier to fix than other stuff.
12:43I like to fix the easy ones first. But nobody talked about it in that concrete manner that you would need to make rational decisions about what may be to winterize first. And maybe some of them can't be winterized. Then it's up to the mathematicians to balance the power grid. I can't do that. Like I said, let's say we can get these three stations back online. Can we at least do rolling blackouts, scheduled rolling blackouts? That's not very nice, but that's better than it being completely off. And the mathematicians can tell me whether that's possible. You need both kinds of minds. But I see something like a piece of equipment froze me, I can build a building over it.
13:19Now you can't do that with the gas equipment, because they have to be open for so you don't have explosions. That equipment all has to be open to the atmosphere. Can't put a building over that. But that stuff I see, you see, then the older I get and the more things I see, the bigger my database. I'm like artificial intelligence. I'm visual artificial intelligence. I'm only as good as my data set, my training set. So the more stuff I get out and see, the better I get. I gotta say, Temple, I just love your metaphors. You know, in the book, you use the metaphor of your desktop versus what's stored in the cloud.
13:56And I loved how you use those kinds of metaphors in your book. Thank you. Well, I think it makes it clear when I talk to people about autistic sensory nervous system problems, I tend to use electronic terms because I think they explain it better. Like I have a slow processor speed. Some of these kids are like a phone on one bar of service. It takes time for them to get the word up and say it. And I find that people understand that better than using neurological language because people understand that a one bar phone, one bar service doesn't download a website very quickly. You are the master of the metaphor, I have to say.
14:35When you're a visual thinker, I have to understand things. I have to relate it back to something I can visualize. There's a lot of very abstract, top-down thinking, like have an inclusive classroom or an inclusive something or other. And it's all very abstract. But the visual thinker can think about how would I actually implement this? What do you mean by inclusive classroom? Well, for people on the spectrum, I want to get rid of the LED lights that flicker. That's big number one. That is something that is specific. It's not abstract. And it's something I can actually do. Let's say somebody's listening to this and they're buying into what you're saying.
15:15Is it possible to take a verbal or a math thinker and fine tune and add visualization to the repertoire? Or are you, you know, you're born and stuck as a type? Well, I think there are a lot of people that are mixtures, and that makes them a lot more flexible. But they pounded away on me with algebra, and there's nothing there to visualize. And you get in the extremes of this. I think a lot of it's innate. The first step, and I talk to a lot of business leaders, is you have to realize different kinds of thinking exist, and how they can bring complementary skills to the table. Like, for example, when Betsy Lerner and I did the visual thinking book, I would write the rough drafts, kind of associational.
15:57Now, Betsy, a super verbal thinker, would change the order and smooth them out. So that's an example of complementary skills working together, fully being aware of how they are complementary skills. I was going to come to this later, but you open the door right now. I have to say that I am amazed at just how beautifully written this book is. and as I was reading it I was always asking myself how is someone who says she thinks in pictures able to put text down so well can you explain that to me I would write rough drafts and they'd be more associational and if you want to see some of my thing my writing without you know co-writer you can look at stuff on grandin.com livestock stuff I've written and what Betsy did It is smooth it out.
16:47But on the other hand, Betsy would not have been able to write about the Fukushima nuclear power planner about Boeing. She wouldn't have been able to do that in a million years. So I wrote about that, but she smoothed it out. That's the different kinds of minds working together, recognizing our different skills. Everything with me is associational. And for certain kinds of stuff, it can be really valuable. Like, for example, I went to a travel website's corporate office to talk about disabilities. and you get a lot of abstract stuff. And finally, I asked a blind person that was there and we got to talking and he says, you know what really drives me crazy at the airport and I get so frustrated with is finding gates.
17:27Well, I'm thinking, well, make an app for his phone. As he walks down the concourse, the gate numbers will just get spoken to him. Now, you see, that's, I'm going to call it gate finder. That is something that is specific. And then I thought about, we could do it with transponders, like the little tags they have for the toll gates or maybe I can do it with AI if the gate number signs are big enough which they are at our airport I think an AI program could read the signs you'd have to hold the phone up which way would I go now that's something specific that somebody could actually do it's not talking about make an airport inclusive I don't know how to implement that so I immediately got to thinking about he told me the one thing that when he's at the airport that really was frustrating.
18:10Walking down a big concourse, trying to find the gates, having to ask somebody where they are constantly. You see, I visualized that. You'll have to look at something like the iPhone. Steve Jobs was an artist. He did not know how to program, but he made an interface on that phone where you didn't need a degree in engineering to use the phone. And that's why it was so successful. Programmers had to program it. That's a visual thinker made the interface and the mathematician programmed. Did you ever know Steve when he was alive? You two would have gotten along very well. I never met Steve, but I've read a lot of his things.
18:44I also have in my visual thinking book the collaboration between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the two Steves. Now, Steve Wozniak wanted more features on the computer, like five expansion slots and stuff like that. And Steve Jobs is going, well, that's too complicated for the consumer. We got to make a computer where you have a slot for the printer and one other thing and that's it. You've got to make it simple for the regular person to use. The engineer of mathematical mind wants to fill it up with so many features that nobody can understand. I've got so many electronic features on this car that I got.
19:17I don't know how to use most of them. I'm friends with Steve Wozniak and he's been on this podcast and I work for Steve Jobs. So your analysis of the relationship, as far as I understood it anyway, I thought was very insightful and very useful. But you see, there are different kinds of minds, but those two minds working together produced fabulous computers that everybody used. And what's worrying me today is my kind of mind is all these math requirements. I'm talking to students all the time trying to, let's say, community college, get a veterinary nurse degree, and they're on their second and third algebra class.
19:54They're flunking. And you don't need that to be a veterinary nurse or a veterinarian. You need arithmetic, yes. And there's a few algebraic equations for drug dosing that can be memorized. Those have to be learned. But we're screening out somebody that might be the very best veterinary nurse, actually the very best veterinarian that can visualize things wrong with animals. I'm going to go back to one more question about writing, okay? Because I'm a writer, so I'm interested in how you do this. So I counted 43 pages of references in this visual thinking book, and there's an average of about 20 references per page.
20:30So there's about 800 references. So I want to know how a visual thinker compiles and digests so many scientific studies into a book. I looked up all that stuff. This book was done during COVID. It was our lockdown project. both Betsy and I had nothing to do so did this but when I write I describe what I see so I've got a lot of stuff on grandland.com my livestock website where you can see my writing without any editing and it's been very effective in teaching people how to handle cattle teaching people how to build kraus I just describe what I see as I write it I describe what I see and I looked these papers up.
21:16And I wanted to make sure I documented. I've got a whole chapter in there on visual thinking, how it works. And I put all those references in there because I want to show people this isn't something I just made up, that there's actually some science behind this. And so I dug up every article I could find. And on the Boeing Max thing, I looked up all kinds of stuff and to support what I'm saying. And one of the things that I'm really good at, since I'm a bottom-up thinker, I'm very good at surfing the scientific databases, very good at surfing the internet. And I'll try different keywords. I always tell my students, and my students have to do a project where they look up scientific articles.
21:54Cattle has six keywords, cow, steer, bull, cattle. So let's say I want to look up the literature on feeding wheat to cattle. I'm just making something up. I also need to feed feeding wheat to steers. Because if the paper only had the word steer in it it's not going to be found with just the word cattle so i'll do what i call triplet searches so i'd put like feeding wheat cattle feeding wheat steers feeding wheat cows especially those steers feeding wheat bulls and those three four separate searches just for something simple like that but wouldn't you say that shows a great deal of verbal skills not visual I have verbal skills for describing the things that I see in my mind.
22:45And I have to thank the teachers when I was young that red marked up my work to correct the grammar. Thank the teachers for doing that. But I'm an associational thinker rather than linear. Betsy being highly verbal is very linear. But as we worked on the book, she got understanding individual thinking because she had some repair people come to her house to fix the fireplace and fix something else. And she says, I started to watch how they think, how they figured out how to put the rock on the fireplace and got a new appreciation for that. Do you think this concept of twice exceptional, do you think that it's always true?
23:25If you have a deficiency, you have something exceptional. Is it the two come together? So oftentimes the two come together. You know, you have a super brilliant mathematician who's also autistic. And then there's lots of people that are in the middle, mixtures of the different kinds of thinking. Lots of kind of middle of the road people. But some of these extremes, often they are twice exceptional. And what I see happening is verbal, when you go to meetings like the twice exceptional, maybe for gifted and for autism, and there's a lot of overlap. But you go to the book tables and the books have very, very little overlap.
24:05Each group is just reading their stuff. But I'm very concerned that a lot of visual thinkers that we need in high-end skilled trades, and I'm not talking about laying floor tiles. I'm talking about things like inventing mechanical equipment, electricians, plumbers, heating and air conditioning, things that really require high-level skills. Fixing elevators would be another one. They're not getting replaced. And a lot of these kids are getting screened out with draconian algebra requirements. I don't think I could graduate from high school in California, but there's backdoors into jobs. And somebody might say, well, that's just old-fashioned stuff.
24:40I mean, Temple Grandin's in her 70s, so that's old-fashioned stuff. There's some new ones. like a guy that got a job in a fiberglass tank factory. And six months later, he repaired every piece of equipment in that factory. That's now. That would be somebody who is an extreme visual thinker because he could see how the machines worked.
25:12so do you think that a country like germany where there's apprenticeships and there's not this sort of drive towards standardized testing and getting into an ivy league school do you think they're going to have an inherent advantage? Well, I can tell you right now that if you want to build a pork processing plant or poultry processing plant, you're going to be buying the equipment from Europe. Not the building, not the refrigeration, but all the mechanical devices. We used to make them. And that's a fact. In fact, after the book got written, another poultry plant went up in Canada and all the equipment is from Europe.
25:51Yeah, there's a link here between this and education and the visual thinkers are getting shunted in specialties. We can't do algebra. You know, pound away on algebra. There's nothing there to visualize. I can only visualize photorealistic pictures. Now I can understand something like pi times the radius squared for sizing hydraulic cylinders, but I see the cylinder on the excavator machine. It's not abstract. let's suppose that i'm a parent of a kid who is twice exceptional or just autistic or just a visual thinker or whatever how do i spot an institution or a teacher who will help a neurodiverse child well the first thing is a lot of those terms are very vague i've got to look at where the kid's skills are at and you might have a kid who's my kind of mind very good with legos but nobody thinks to progress the tools i'm seeing too many kids growing up today they never use tools i was using tools in second grade pliers hammer and screwdriver using them in second grade and kids are not doing that today by taking a lot of the hands-on classes out kids aren't getting exposed to enough different things to find out where they might be really good at something that's the problem and i don't think the verbal people understand that you've got educators today They don't know anything about heavy industry.
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27:14And I come out of that field. I spent hours and hours. I'd be building a big cargo plant. I was walking around the whole entire thing, even though my job was just to do the corrals and the cattle restrainer. But I watched them build the whole rest of the factory. And you realize that with some of these people, it's a different form of intelligence. And what would be your advice to teachers who encounter these kind of students? How can you help them best? I want to give them places where their skills can shine. If it's my kind of mind, building things. Art, mechanics, art, and photography, and animals all go together.
27:54Art and mechanics go together. Now, if you take the automobile shop out of the school, the child doesn't have a chance to find out he's good at motors. I worked with two people where big careers started in patented equipment with a single welding class. That's where it started. If you take that class out, that person isn't going to get the opportunity. All right, let's take a kid who's a math person that's twice acceptable, a math kid. If you don't have them do the harder math, he's just going to get bored and turn into a behavior problem. You got to expose them to the higher math. They have to be exposed to these things in order to do them.
28:34so I'm a big fan let's expose kids to lots of different things and see what they gravitate towards I get asked all the time how'd you end up in the cattle industry I was exposed to it as a teenager that's how I got involved in that you talk about your exposure to cattle and horses and what a big effect it had but you also had one teacher in particular that you highlight named William Carlock. Could you just explain the role he played in your life? I was not interested in studying. And bad grades in English and history was just goofing off. And by giving me interesting science projects, he showed me how studying was a pathway to a goal.
29:19It wasn't just to please the family. It was a pathway to a goal. So I knuckled down and started studying. Now, by the time I got to that age, I was a really good reader. And when I was eight years old. I had no reading and mother taught me with phonics. But he gave me interesting projects and got me motivated. He was very, very important. This is where a good teacher really makes a difference. See, first of all, you've got to get exposed to things. And then what you have to do is be mentored. And then there was a contractor named Jim Ool who helped get me into the construction business. He saw my drawings and seeked me out.
29:58Another important mentor, He showed me how to get my business started. But the thing is, we need all the different kinds of minds. You know, you have a kid who could be a math genius. If you don't expose him to higher math, he's just going to become a behavior problem. I've seen that happen. The other thing about these kids that are math geniuses, the verbal thinkers want them to show their math step by step. That's not how these kids think. Just let them do it in their head. They don't think the same way. And teachers have a hard time understanding that. They just see it. That's not my mind, but that's the mathematical mind.
30:32This is a very personal question that I didn't quite understand the nuance, which is you draw this really great distinction between pilers and filers in terms of neatness and stuff. No, I'm a piler. and but you discussed that there are pilers who pile stuff and then you bring in this example of i think it's mr patriarca and that's a shop teacher well he always kept that was in elementary school and you know he always kept things neat but i tend to have a lot of papers piled up and if somebody moves my piles on i can't find anything so what's the dichotomy in a sense he was enforcing neatness which you discuss positively but you also discuss that pilers know where everything is well i had this table at home where i had all my parachute and airplane experiment mess big table and i knew where the stuff was and that was at the same time that i would have been in mr patriarch's shop and mother but the rule was i could have any mess i wanted on that table but not in the rest of the house.
31:44I was wondering if I should force my kid to clean his room or not. Well, I think there's some stuff, you know, I can be messy and I don't know, one time years ago they made all the faculty clean up their offices and I did it. I tell you, one place I draw the line is food mess. That I don't have. I'm living by myself, but I hand wash the dishes every time I eat. Well, you're sitting in your kitchen. I can see that. Yeah, I draw the food mess. That I don't have. I can see things getting into my apartment I don't want. Ants and other stuff I don't want. I'd love to get your thoughts about chat, GBT, and AI.
32:29I've been working at that really carefully. It's a bottom-up thinker. It's a bottom-up thinker. And I'm horrified at the New York Times conversation with it, where it was asked to look at its Jungian self of what it might like to do, not allowed to do, but might like to do, talking about deleting all of Bing's files, making gibberish, and putting up offensive comments. It actually said that. I was reading that on a plane and getting creeped out. And now another was the chat GPT was in love with this person who said that wouldn't have a good dinner with their wife. And I'm going, I can't believe this thing's writing this.
33:08Another reporter was saying, I could steal your social security number and reputation. But you see, what they were doing was pushing it. So what Microsoft's going to do now is limit it to eight questions. but it can be pushed into bringing some real rubbish up but I can see how it thinks it thinks the same way I do like I got all those references in my book and I read those papers too this was done during lockdown so I had lots of extra time too but every one of those references I can relate it back to something in the book and normally as an academic I would have put the little reference numbers in, but the publisher says that they didn't want to do that.
33:48I would have had more pictures in it too. And they said it was too much money. So I went along with that, but I managed to put some of my drawings in there for decoration. I wanted people to see some of my drawings. I put all those references in there because if someone challenges, I can go back and get those papers and say that, you know, this is not conjecture. This is really true. But when I think that a lot of verbal thinkers have a hard time understanding especially the really verbal understanding thinking in pictures and then the other drawing program that does art it only takes pictures that have captions on them and then chat gbt is all language based but i can understand how it works it's bottom up not top down i might make the case that chat gbt and ai is going to replace many fundamental math skills and not visual thinking.
34:45It's going to be much harder to replace the way you think than the way algebra works. That's the thing. The other thing is for years in my class, my livestock handling class, I have to do scale drawing. I have lecture all about cattle behavior. There's a lab. But one of the things that I've been having them do for about 15 years is a database searching project. Because I found out that 30 % of my students, these are college students, did not know that databases like PubMed and Google Scholar existed. And I was pretty shocked at this. And this is going to get more and more important as you get chat GBT writing stuff on social media.
35:24I think more and more we've got to teach students. You've got to go back to primary sources. And your default setting kinds to be, well, you write on social media, everything has to be verified. And I'm going to be telling my students that. And then what I let them do is pick out an animal behavior topic, any animal behavior topic they're interested in. Let's say you want to ask a question. Do birds have a magnetic sense? That'd be something I'd let them do. And then they have to go on those scientific databases, not regular Google, but the scientific databases, two scientific studies on Google Scholar, two off of PubMed, two off of Web of Science and two off of the Science Direct Elsevier database.
36:05And do birds have a magnetic sense? And then you have to write an abstract, which I think chat GPT will be extremely good at. And students are probably going to use it. And I've also found out it passes the plagiarism software. But the thing I am most concerned about, I want them to know those databases exist, and they need to be looking in them. Okay, let's say something about politics. I don't discuss politics, but they need to go back to primary sources, Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, something that is a primary source when something on social media says a politician said something.
36:41Go back, verify. And I've been doing this database searching project in my class for 15 years. And after I found out about CHAT, GPT, and all that stuff, I think it's getting more and more and more and more important that young people learn how to do this. Primary sources, check stuff and check it from sources where you can verify chat. GBT doesn't give references yet, but let's say it did. Let's go back on the database and check it. The other thing is a senior. I'm appalled at the amount of scams I get on my phone. Your PayPal account has been compromised. They're going to close down your Amazon account.
37:21Fake insurance stuff, fake car insurance stuff, fake Medicare stuff, fake IRS stuff. Yeah, my default setting is scam until proven otherwise. A lot of stuff now. I showed somebody else the fake Amazon thing and they looked at that horrified. I just deleted it. But I think more and more we need to be teaching young people to verify sources. And now that ChatGPT is out there, I'm going to be pushing even more that what you're going to learn in this database project is how to search primary sources. And this is getting more and more and more important. Let me ask you something. So you consider the New York Times, Washington Post a primary source as opposed to the Journal of Applied Psychology?
38:10Especially for political stuff. I want to know who wrote it. I'm not saying the Wall Street Journal is perfect, but I think I would trust that more than some blogger. Okay, something that has No, but you're a blogger, but okay, if there's a big blogger, has a reputation. But I've read all about the troll farms. I read a lot of stuff. I get nature. I get science. I get wired. I get MIT technology today. I get it all in paper. I love to sit and have breakfast and enjoy a two-hour-long read of nature. I spend a lot of time reading The Economist. I'm not saying these things are perfect, but I think they're better than something where I don't know where it came from.
38:51and if chat gpt starts having references i'm going to start verifying them i'm going to go online and make sure that's in a database i mean i have to say as a senior the amount of scam phone calls scam mail i get scam text crap on my phone delete delete delete delete and then i show that to some of the young students and i show them the fake amazon text that my amazon account was blocked they're going and i go delete because i've learned how to look up look up the web addresses And yeah, I've learned all those tricks. I've read them in the stuff that I read at breakfast. No, I'm terrible. I'm getting like 10 of these things a week.
39:29That's what they're doing seniors right now. Suck them into a bunch of scams. Up next on Remarkable People. OK, right now the airlines are talking about feeding planes biofuels. There was one point where we had like almost half our corn crop going into ethanol. If you start exporting ethanol, it's no longer sustainable. Biofuels are only sustainable to a point. And then if you exceed that point, you're no longer sustainable.
40:19You discuss many instances of tech startups. And basically, most stories about tech startups are two guys in a garage. And it's two guys, laws and jobs. And they're both male and they're in a garage. So why is it always males in a garage? Well, in the people I worked with, it was one welder starts on the back of a truck. and the little tiny shop. I can remember some of the people I worked with, one of them on single welding glass, multi-jillion dollar business with a corporate jet now. And I remember when he was tiny, built a little tiny cattle handling facility for our experiment station. And the people that grew up working on cars and built equipment for me.
41:07And had 20 patents because I looked up the patents. I'm just saying what I see. But the thing is in every industry, little people innovate. little people innovate big guys buy up and copy little people innovate big people buy up now i'm seeing the borg and star trek assimilating people buy up and copy or copy stuff i do know one lady that has her own very successful business she's autistic lady and she has a very successful business. See, I had to search the database to find that. And she fixes programmable logic controllers on industrial equipment. Like for example, a programmable logic controller that controls a gigantic machine that makes gears, gears that are as wide as this room for giant industrial equipment.
42:02And she is a lady and it's not a huge business. It's a small shop. She has a niche, especially programmable controllers with some of the older equipment, like this gear milling equipment. This is very expensive stuff. And she has a niche market in that. Just started out small. I had a chance to go look at some of her work at the gear factory. And I noticed that the milling machine that she had programmed ran smoother. I could see it. See, now I'm in her file looking at what she's done. another innovator there's a lady that's making a cardboard box for berries and i've tried to be really supportive of that to get rid of the plastic box that would be a small startup that's woman-owned business and the thing is you've got to get a big customer finally you know to buy it and so that's a startup but since i was working on equipment most of the time the first things i pull up in my memory are the ones i directly worked with but then i started searching the database, just like that art program does.
43:08I have to keep all these people names out of it. But those are two women there in startup businesses. Little people innovate. That's a real basic principle. And I can tell you the biggest barrier that I had in the 70s was being a woman. Autism wasn't a barrier. Being a woman was a big barrier. I had to be twice as good as of guy i had to be whole whole much better and then the way i sold jobs since i was weird is i simply would show off my work there's one of my drawings right there i sold cargill i designed the front end of every cargill plant and i sent them back in the late 80s drawings and pictures from jobs that's how i sold this is your 30 second reveal right you blow them away in 30 seconds with your drawing, not your bullshit.
43:57I call it the 32nd wow. So when Mr. Fielding, the head of Cargill, opened this up, there was a, this is pre-internet, a big two foot by three foot drawing of one that was very similar to this. It wasn't this drawing, but it was a very similar drawing. And then there was a couple of pages of plastic pages with pictures, a brochure, and a couple of trade magazine articles, because I wrote about my stuff. Something you look at very quickly. It was like the elevator speech. Wow. Yeah, don't put much junk in it. And that was the packet of stuff. And when I do lectures, I show slides of that stuff, the stuff that I put in that packet.
44:33You mentioned Elon Musk quite a few times in very positive light. Has his recent actions changed your mind? Well, I have to wait and see. But I really respect him as an engineer, what he did with SpaceX and with cars. And the thing about Twitter is you got a lot more social stuff here. Everything I wrote was before Twitter. Let's just leave it that way. Let's say Joe Biden calls you up and says, listen, Temple, I need a secretary of education. I need someone who's going to bring back shop class and bring back art class and make it so that America can fix its infrastructure. I want you to be secretary of education.
45:15just revamp education in America. First, do you take the job? Second, what do you do? I would tend to fix it one school system at a time and then write about it. Because one of the ways that I spread my cattle handling stuff is I wrote about it. I wrote about it in the scientific press and I wrote about it in the cattle industry press. I just wrote about how to do it. I've seen a lot of very innovative stuff that some schools are doing and nobody's writing it up. Just how to do it. I put out all these publications, designs for corral systems, just put it out there so that people could just use it.
45:52And the first thing I would do is I want to get all the hands-on classes back into the schools. Art, sewing, cooking, woodworking, theater, music, auto shop, welding, and then kids try all this different stuff and they find out what they gravitate towards. But if they're not exposed, they wouldn't know that they might like fixing things. And this whole thing saying everything's going to be run by computers. Let's go back to elevators run by computers. And in my MIT magazine, I just read about a programming glitch in an elevator. Yep, that's going to take the computer people to fix. But elevators are mechanical devices.
46:29And I don't see them being anti-gravity anytime soon. They're either hydraulic or they work with cables. Those are mechanical things. And I've been on some rather questionable elevators lately that have not been served. One of my friends got hurt with a door that could have been really serious because it didn't work right. So this is a big hypothetical. So let's suppose that you and Jane Goodall and Greta Thunberg go into a bar and you're having a drink and they start telling you, Temple, the meat industry is creating climate change. It's the methane, It's the resources. It's moving the cows. Temple, what's with this?
47:10Do you see that maybe your work in the cattle industry is not helping climate change? Well, I wrote a paper about this at Open Access, saying basically that I've been in this industry for 50 years. Have I been in an industry this bad? And this paper is titled Grazing Sheep and Goats are an Important Part of a Sustainable Agricultural Future. First of all, I checked out the methane figures. Leaking oil field equipment is the same. Swamps put out way, way more. Another thing that one of the reviewers put me to a reference, that before Europeans came to North America, herds of bison put out 85 % as much methane as we're putting out today.
47:51Now, the other thing when activists say, well, cattle just take up too much land, we have huge amounts of land that can only be grazed. You cannot raise crops on it. There's not enough groundwater. there's not enough water coming out of the sky like for example if you go out the Denver Airport and you go east on I-70 you're gonna go about 50 miles that's about as far out as the houses go and then you are on a hundred miles not been there it's just there this fall of grazing land only can be grazed it's Plains land what do you do with that land a hundred miles of it also there's a place for the grazing animal in crop rotation.
48:32You know, we do know that cover crops improve soil health. Well, to make them pay, you can graze them. That also would cut down on artificial fertilizer. So this is a place where the grazing animal could actually help improve the environment. And I have a hundred references back up what I say that I got off the scientific databases. And this paper is open access. Grazing cattle, sheep, and goats are an important part of a sustainable agricultural future. Now, let's look at things like biofuels. Okay, right now, the airlines are talking about feeding planes biofuels. There was one point where we had like almost half our corn crop going into ethanol.
49:12If you start exporting ethanol, it's no longer sustainable. Biofuels are only sustainable to a point. And then if you exceed that point, they're no longer sustainable. They're talking about feeding garbage to airplanes. I get this magazine called Chemistry and Engineering News. I call it chemistry for people that don't know math. And it talks about the chemical industry. That's a little magic box, the shipping container thing, and start making garbage into airplane fuel. Then when I run out of garbage. But okay, I think that's a good thing. But what I'm seeing is it's only sustainable to a point.
49:49And now I'm seeing tubes coming off the top of dumps. Regular landfill dumps. They put out methane. And a bunch of it. See, let's just get this in perspective. And I looked all this stuff up. Now, you want to see the reference list for this paper? Show it to you right now.
50:14Right there, references. Another page of references. Another page of references. And these are numbered into the text. another page and another half page references and they're referenced into the text because it's a scientific paper and i did this paper this summer because i basically started out so i've been in this industry for 50 years have i been in an industry that's bad i spent 50 years of my life working in this industry and i've also been to the rural areas just about every state in the U.S. and every province in Canada. I've been to the outback in Australia. You've got a huge expanse of land that can only be grazed.
50:55What do you do with that land? I'll never forget flying over that land in a small plane and landing at a remote cattle station off the grid. That's the real serious stuff we got to think about. But you always have to look at your inputs. And we talk about veggie burgers. You might have five vegetarian ingredients to go into that. Each one of those as a supply chain with diesel trucks. Let's really figure out what your energy inputs are in that supply chain. Now, that's something I can visualize. It's easy for me to visualize that. Now, just recently, I was talking to a customer. I can't say what they were doing because I can't reveal what they did.
51:31We were talking about supply chain and I asked him where the factories were located that made a raw product for his product. He did not know where they were. There was a lady there too. She did not know either where the factories were located for the main raw material for their product. This is now. They had absolutely no idea where they were. And they're in charge of supply chain? You see, that's getting too language-based and way too vague. No, you need to know where the factories are. They didn't know. You see, that's why there's problems lots of times with implementation. And then I said, well, let's have done.
52:09They knew where they were. I would have Google Earth them right there in the restaurant. because I can get an idea of the size of the factories by Google earthing it and looking at all the vehicles in the parking lot. You see, now I'm seeing it. Now I'm seeing it with meatpacking plants. Oh, and by the way, meatpacking plants are paying a lot better now. I walked through the parking lot of one of our big beef plants, and there's a lot of very nice vehicles there now because they're making a lot more money. You see, there's a need for the visual thinker, and so much policy is so vague. They don't discuss about how we were actually going to do something.
52:44All right, let's go back to the inclusive classroom. Fixing LED lights that flicker is something I can actually do. And for 20 % of the population, it's really important. That's doable. So you always got to get back to implementation. Temple, I've known you for all of about an hour and five minutes right now. And I have known Gene Goodall for years. And I guarantee you the two of you would get along very well. Absolutely. Jane Goodall did a lot of pioneering work by observing. What she did was observation. And another thing I talked to my students about in my livestock handling class is the importance of observation.
53:24And you've got some people saying it's not science unless you have a hypothesis. Observation forms the source of a hypothesis. And after all, the James Webb telescope doesn't have a control. It observes. The most expensive, coolest projects ever done. It observes. There's no control. Do you have back on Earth or something for control? That doesn't make any sense. I see that and how stupid that would be. I see it back in the clean room. Is that the control? No. It's there strictly to observe. And so observation is important. And Jane Goodall, you know, found out the tool use and she had the patience to sit with the chimpanzees until they would do their natural behavior in front of her.
54:09You know, now I admit I'm a heavy user of airplanes and I know what they do in terms of carbon and stuff like that. But I think that when I do those flights, these are not vacation flights. And the places I go, I think to maybe do more good than the fuel the plane burns up. I've thought about it. And then I've watched them fuel planes, and I'm thinking of stuff I don't want in that plane's fuel, and that's palm oil. And I looked right at this plane. This was just a couple months ago. I hope they never feed you palm oil because there's nothing sustainable about that monoculture. See, that's an example of biofuels that are not sustainable.
54:48Now, if I can feed the plane garbage, that's sustainable until I run out of garbage. But you see, nothing's abstract. And then you got to look at your whole process. Okay, cobalt for batteries does not come from a nice place, for example. Nothing's abstract. So, Temple, what brand of boots do you wear? I used to wear just the regular cowboy boots. But then I had a very bad fall in a restaurant and broke everything in my nose. My nose hit the table going down, smashed everything in there. And that was the end of the cowboy boots. And I got lace-up Ariats because I got to wear a tight shoe. and that's what I wear.
55:31Okay. I'm comfortable, and I've got to wear a lace-up shoe. I've got to wear a tight shoe now because the cowboy boots contributed to falling down at the restaurant and it's breaking my nose all up, hitting the table going down. Thank you for listening to today's podcast featuring the remarkable Temple Grandin. We hope you found her insights and experiences enlightening and inspiring. Temple's work has been instrumental in advancing our understanding of animal welfare, autism, and engineering. We encourage you to explore more of Temple's work, including her latest book, Visual Thinking, The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions.
56:14I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. My thanks to Peg Fitzpatrick, Jeff C, Shannon Hernandez, Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magana, the drop-in queen of Santa Cruz, Madsen Nismar. They are the hidden gifts of remarkable people. Until next time, mahalo and aloha.
56:43This is Remarkable People.
From the publisher
Welcome to Remarkable People, where we bring you conversations with the world's most accomplished and influential individuals. Today, we are honored to have Temple Grandin as our guest.
Temple is a renowned professor of animal sciences, a bestselling author, and a leading advocate for autism awareness. Time Magazine has recognized her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and she has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Temple has also been the subject of numerous documentaries and biopics, including the Emmy-winning HBO film "Temple Grandin," chronicling her life and achievements.
In this episode, Temple discusses her new book, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions. She shares her insights into how individuals who think in visual patterns and abstractions can leverage their unique talents to succeed in a world that values linear thinking.
Throughout the conversation, Temple reflects on her remarkable life journey, including her experiences with autism, her groundbreaking work in animal behavior, and her contributions to engineering.
So join us for an illuminating conversation with one of the most extraordinary individuals of our time. Tune in to Remarkable People with Temple Grandin.
00:20 to 01:47- Intro
23:38 to 24:36 - Why visual thinkers could be useful in jobs that could fix equipment
38:46 to 39:18 - Teaser for next segment
39:18 to 39:42 - CTA + Rejoiner
55:01 to OUT - OUTRO
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Guy Kawasaki is on a mission to make you remarkable. His Remarkable People podcast features interviews with remarkable people such as Jane Goodall, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Marc Benioff, Woz, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Bob Cialdini. Every episode will make you more remarkable.
With his decades of experience in Silicon Valley as a Venture Capitalist and advisor to the top entrepreneurs in the world, Guy’s questions come from a place of curiosity and passion for technology, start-ups, entrepreneurship, and marketing. If you love society and culture, documentaries, and business podcasts, take a second to follow Remarkable People.
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