318. Autism, Academics, and Animals | Dr. Temple Grandin

Summary

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

Episode 318: Autism, Academics, and Animals | Dr. Temple Grandin

Date: December 29, 2022
Guest: Dr. Temple Grandin
Host: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

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Overview

In this insightful episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson sits down with Dr. Temple Grandin—renowned animal behaviorist, autism advocate, and professor of animal sciences—to discuss the intricacies of visual thinking, the pitfalls of contemporary education for non-verbal thinkers, and the profound impact of practical skills and neurodiversity on both animal welfare and society at large. The conversation weaves together Grandin's personal experience with autism, her practical work revolutionizing livestock handling, and her advocacy for recognizing and cultivating diverse forms of intelligence in education and the workplace.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Visual Thinking vs. Verbal Thinking

(02:22–15:16)

• Grandin's Early Realization:
  Grandin only realized in her late 30s that most people don’t think in pictures as she does. As a child, she categorized animals by assembling detailed sensory information and images—a process now known as bottom-up thinking.

  “When I was in my 20s, I thought everybody thought in pictures the way I thought. I didn’t know other people thought in words until I was in my late 30s.” — Temple Grandin [02:22]

• Verbal Internal Argumentation:
  Peterson explains his own primarily verbal thought process as ongoing internal debates, contrasting with Grandin’s visual associations.

  “A lot of my thinking… takes the form of something like internal argumentation.” — Jordan B. Peterson [05:32]

• Associative and Vivid Visual Imagination:
  Grandin remarks on her vivid, almost photorealistic imagination and associative thinking:

  “No, it’s very, very vivid. It’s completely vivid.” — Temple Grandin [10:40]
  She likens her associational stream of thought to Google Images: given a keyword, she retrieves a cascading stream of related, concrete images.

• Example of Tesla and Mechanical Visualizers:
  Nikola Tesla described inventions appearing fully formed in his mind—Grandin relates, noting many industrial inventors she’s known had similar abilities.

• Ability to Notice Anomalies:
  Both discuss how anomaly detection differs for visual and verbal thinkers. Grandin’s talent is instantaneous in the real world, even fixing on minute details—a single pixel out on a screen—while Peterson’s anomaly detection is primarily conceptual or verbal.

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2. The Loss of Practical Skills and Its Societal Impact

(15:16–35:42)

• Decline in Trades and Hands-on Skills:
  Grandin is passionate about how schools have phased out shop classes—the consequences being visible as skilled tradespeople retire and aren’t replaced:

  “The kids are playing video games in the basement on an autism diagnosis instead of fixing elevators. There’s a relationship here between what goes on with industrial things and what’s going on at school…” — Temple Grandin [15:18]

• Overemphasis on Math and Verbal Skills:
  The educational system's push toward university and academic achievement, especially heavy math requirements, screens out kids with mechanical talents:

  "Educators just don’t get it right." — Temple Grandin [17:10]

• Contrast with European Technical Education:
  Grandin praises countries like Holland and Italy, where students can choose between university and high-level technical tracks, fostering both innovation and manufacturing prowess.

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3. Types of Visual Thinking and their Cognitive Profiles

(19:56–25:32, 35:37–43:20)

• Object Visualizers vs. Visual-Spatial Thinkers:
  Grandin distinguishes "object visualizers," who think in photorealistic images (artists, mechanics, animal handlers), from "visual-spatial" types who excel in abstract patterns (math, STEM).

  “The visual-spatial type, pattern thinking… do well in math, so they’re going the STEM route. But… the object visualizer… can just see and make mechanical equipment, art, photography, animals.” — Temple Grandin [19:56]

• Educational and Professional Implications:
  These types are often mismatched with educational expectations, especially with the loss of hands-on learning.

• Practical Recommendations:
  Grandin advises hands-on exposure to build both visual and practical skills:

  “Let’s get them out building things. The mistake I see is that kids are super good with Legos, but… don’t introduce tools. I was using tools by second grade.” — Temple Grandin [41:27]

• Dangers of Over-Abstraction:
  Peterson and Grandin warn against policies and education systems that privilege abstraction, neglecting practical particularization and the skills required to maintain real-world infrastructure.

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4. Neurodiversity, Status, and Collaboration

(54:25–61:45)

• Status Competition and Dismissiveness:
  Peterson notes that abstract/verbal thinkers often dismiss the intelligence of practical workers, which is socially damaging:

  “Highly intellectual people … tend to be rather dismissive of the intelligence of more practical people, working people.” — Jordan B. Peterson [56:47]

• Need for Complementary Teams:
  Both agree that successful organizations need a mix of minds: object visualizers, visual-spatial/mathematical thinkers, and verbal organizers.

  “When we understand that different people think differently, they can work in teams where they can collaborate and have complementary skills.” — Temple Grandin [104:20]

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5. Animal Perception and Practical Design Innovations

(69:14–96:12)

• Grandin’s Breakthroughs in Animal Handling:
  Her animal welfare insights came from literally and imaginatively seeing through the eyes of the animals:

  “I got down in the chutes to see what they were seeing, and I would take pictures down inside… and people thought that was kind of crazy.” — Temple Grandin [69:51]

• Identification of Stressors:
  Cattle, as prey species, are hyper-reactive to anomalies like shadows, moving objects, or unfamiliar items, often causing logistical issues in meat plants.

• Practical Auditing and Fixes:
  Grandin’s work moved the industry from using “broken equipment, electric prods… and screaming at cattle” to calm, audited, measurable improvements. She established simple but effective audit measures (“no more than 3% vocalizing,” “95% shot on the first attempt,” etc.) that revolutionized animal welfare standards.

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6. Activism, Career Advice, and Broader Educational Reform

(93:09–105:11)

• From Abstract Justice to Practical Activism:
  Grandin cautions against vague activism and instead encourages people to focus on practical, achievable changes:

  “I talk to a lot of young people that want to do activism … and it’s way too broad. I want justice in the world… and I say, why don’t you do something more targeted?” — Temple Grandin [93:40]

• Exposure and Mentoring:
  She emphasizes early, hands-on exposure in childhood (tools, crafts, art, animal handling) and the critical importance of mentoring in skilled trades.

• Restoring Hands-On Education:
  Grandin strongly advocates for reinstating a wide spectrum of practical classes (art, shop, sewing, auto mechanics, theater) in schools for all children.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Decline of Mechanical Trades:

  "What's happening now is the little shops are not forming. And that's why we're importing all this equipment from Holland and Italy." — Temple Grandin [34:04]

• On the Dangers of Over-Abstraction:

  “We need all the different kinds of minds. … You need the whole team.” — Temple Grandin [60:37]

• When Faced With Philosophical Abstraction:

  “I really don't understand anything that you just said. I don't know how to associate it with anything practical. And I'm completely unable to answer your question.” — Temple Grandin [Paraphrased by Peterson, 105:54]

• On Her Motivation:

  “I was serving the goal of improving animal welfare. And I bent over backwards to do reverse conflict of interest.” — Temple Grandin [92:32]

• On the Importance of the Practical:

  “Kids today are totally separated in the world of physical things. They're not getting out and observing stuff out in nature. This is part of the problem.” — Temple Grandin [41:27]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:22] — Grandin's realization about thinking in pictures vs. words.
• [15:18] — The link between loss of shop classes, autism, and the trades crisis.
• [19:56] — Differentiating object visualizers vs. visual-spatial mathematicians.
• [35:37] — Importance of early practical exposure; examples from construction and European education.
• [41:27] — Grandin’s advice for developing children's hands-on skills.
• [54:25] — Status issues and neurodiversity in intelligence.
• [69:51] — How visual thinking led Grandin to improve cattle handling.
• [84:40] — Specific process improvements in slaughterhouses.
• [93:40] — Advice for young activists: specificity and practicality.
• [104:20] — Final summary: the necessity of all kinds of minds and practical education.

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Conclusion

Dr. Temple Grandin’s unique lived experience and professional achievements provide an essential perspective on the value of visual and practical thinking—not just for autistic individuals but for society’s overall well-being and industry resilience. The conversation is a powerful call to recognize, respect, and reintegrate practical intelligence into our social fabric, especially through education.

“When we understand that different people think differently, they can work in teams where they can collaborate and have complementary skills.” — Temple Grandin [104:20]

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Transcript

[A]

Hello, everyone. I'm usually excited to have whoever I'm talking to that day on my show because I pick people I'm excited about talking to, but I'm particularly excited about about my guest today, Dr. Temple Grandin. Temple Grandin revolutionized the animal handling industry over the last 40 years and has done more for animal welfare in a practical sense than anybody that I know of and perhaps anybody on the planet. I think you could make a case for that. She's a remarkable person. I saw her first in Tucson, Arizona. I'll talk about that a little bit in our interview. She gave one of the most compelling presentations I'd ever seen in an academic setting at a conference on consciousness and saw that about 15 years ago in and ever since then I'd really been wanting to meet her. And I got to do that today. So that's so exciting. So I'll just give you a brief bio and we'll pop into the interview. Dr. Temple Grandin is a professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University. Facilities she has designed for handling livestock are used by companies all around the world. Her work has been instrumental in implementing animal welfare auditing programs now used by McDonald's, Wendy's, Whole Foods, and many other major corporations. She has appeared on numerous shows across platforms such as 2020, Larry King Live, and Primetime. Dr. Grandin is also an accomplished author with books such as Thinking in Pictures, Livestock Handling and Transport, and the Autistic Brain. A few of her other publications, Animals in Translation as well as Visual Thinking, have even made it to the New York Times bestseller list. In 2017, Dr. Grandin was inducted into the National Women's hall of fame. And in 2022, she was honored once again as a Colorado State Distinguished Professor. We're going to walk through her book today and we're going to learn what she has to say now about thinking. Let's start with visual thinking and language. So do you want to tell people about your realization about different thought patterns?

[B]

When I was in my 20s, I I thought everybody thought in pictures the way I thought. I didn't know that other people thought in words until I was in my late 30s. Now, you've already mentioned how do I categorize? Well, I'll explain as a child how I learned to categorize, categorizing with individual pictures. So as a very young child, I categorized cats, dogs and horses by size. They because in our neighborhood at that time there were no cattle and there were no small dogs. Then a dachshund came into my neighborhood and she's the same size as a cat. And I remember looking at the dachshund, she was a black dachshund. And trying to figure out now what features does she share with a dog? She barks, her nose shape is the same as a dog and she smells like a dog bark. So I had to take other sensory based things like smell and what the dog sounded like to put the dachshund in the dog category. So the way I form categories is I have to have a bunch of information. Let's take the cat category. And you look at a leopard's face, lion's face, and even a house cat's face. There's similarities. And they also smell all the same too. If you go to the zoo, you can smell how they are different. So the first step for abstract thinking is put making categories. So when I finally figured out that other people did not think in pictures, if I ask most people, visualize your own home, your dog or your car, you will do it because you're so familiar with that. But one time at an autism conference when I was in my late 30s, I asked a speech therapist think about a church steeple. And I was shocked that the only image he saw was a very vague two lines like this. Where I see specific churches, they come up like a series of, well back then 35 millimeter slides, now the PowerPoint slides. And. And then I can start. As I see more and more of these churches, I can put them into New England type category. Stone cathedral type. Looks like a warehouse and it has a little plastic steeple type. I can make finer categories as I get more and more specific images. It's bottom up thinking. And I learned that that's exactly how an artificial intelligence program diagnoses melanoma cancer. It's given a training set of 2000 melanomas and another training set of every kind of skin rash and mosquito bite and infected whatever. And then it learns to categorize melanoma from non melanoma. That was very insightful to me when I learned that that's how the simple type of artificial intelligence programs work, diagnosing something like melanoma.

[A]

So let me ask you, when I'm thinking something through now, I can think in pictures. And if I'm building something or trying to design something to build, then I tend to think in pictures. But I would say 90% of the time my proclivity is to think in words. And I would say in part that's because my word thinking is so dominant, it just suppresses the image thinking and So a lot of my thinking, I would also say takes the form of something like internal argumentation. So I'll ask myself a question, I'll think up an answer in words and then I'll think up a bunch of reasons why that answer isn't sufficient and then I'll conduct an internal argument. And that's occupying me continually like 16 hours a day, non stop. And it's been like that ever since I was 2 years old, except for those times, let's say. So yeah. So how do you. Do you conduct internal arguments? Or like what accounts for the. So part of the creativity in my thinking is the outcome of these arguments. But you're thinking in pictures, so you're not having internal arguments.

[B]

Nope.

[A]

What's the stream of your thought like?

[B]

Well, when it comes to things like designing equipment, I often will kind of a lot of equipment design, someone gets an idea from something else. In one of my other books I wrote about the inventor of Velcro and he saw how Burdock stuck on his clothes, you know, cocklebursel and those kind of things stuck on his clothes. And that's where he got the idea for making Velcro. That would be visual thinking. The Burdocks and Velcro, they've got similarities on how they stick together in designing equipment. I can just see how it operates. I worked with welders that had 20 patents each that barely graduated from high school, but they could build any kind of a machine and invent industrial machinery. They just see it in their head right now.

[A]

Will you see? Okay, so I read Nikola Tesla's biography a long while back and it was extremely interesting. And he claimed, and I have no reason to disbelieve him, that entire inventions machines would pop into the theater of his imagination, detailed out to the point where he knew the angles on the screws that held the metal together. And he would try to write them down in something approx. Draw them out in something approximating something that would be that you could make a blueprint out of, let's say in that much detail. And sometimes a new invention would pop into his head so quickly that it would obliterate the previous one. He had to work very quickly to keep up. And so there's that incredible fluency in visualization. But then as I said, in the verbal world, I'll think of an argument and counter arguments. When you're thinking of industrial design, do you think of the object that you're attempting to design and then multiple variants of it and test them against each other or does it just come to you as a solution for a given problem?

[B]

It almost sort of just pops into my head. I also see mechanical abnormalities. I remember walking in and someone had made a cardboard old fashioned locomotive and the wheels have those links between them. And I go, they drew that wrong. Wheels are not gonna turn, you know. And it was just a cartoon train for a party. But I immediately noticed that they didn't draw it right. The other thing is, is my thinking's associative. All right, give me a keyword. Pretend I'm Google for images. Not something I can see in here with books and papers all around and photography equipment and stuff all around me, but something kind of a creative key word. And I'll tell you how I access my memory for that key word.

[A]

So, and with regards. So my wife has a very powerful visual imagination. She's able to do all sorts of remarkable things with it. And one of the things that strikes me as highly probable is that her capacity for visual imagery is a lot more intense than mine. Yes. And so like I was a fairly vivid dreamer for years, especially when I was reading Carl Jung's work in graduate school. Don't seem to dream much now or not. Well, I don't remember them much now. When I do think in pictures, it's not as vivid as seeing the real world. It's maybe 5% of that. It's sort of, it's. Well, it just doesn't have that intensity. And you.

[B]

No, it's very, very vivid. And while I was, while you were setting up all the camera equipment here I found. Here's a whole bunch of papers, more papers I found online supporting a lot of the things that are in the book. I just got surfing around and boy, you can sometimes find some great stuff when you look at the citations. No, but it's very, very vivid. It's completely vivid. Now when you mentioned the word imagination, I remember going to a long time ago, Disney World, kind of a ride that had imagination with people and dirigibles and things like that. Then I visited a studio where Disney made a whole bunch of their stuff. I'm now seeing that. Yes, I'm now seeing a non disclosure agreement. So I can't tell you what I did there. And I.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But now I'm seeing a very interesting discussion we had about designing things. Where you're designing things, there's the decoration part of it and then there's the mechanical part of a machine. Of course, at an amusement park you want to have decorations, but you also rides have to Mechanically work. They're kind of two separate things. They were kind of done by two separate departments.

[A]

You also spoke in your book about your ability to see things out of place. And so one of the things that characterizes autism is the fact that at least some autistic people are not very happy when they walk into a room, say that they're familiar with, and one thing is out of place. So, for example, an autistic child might walk into a dining room and one of the chairs is, you know, tilted 45 degrees to the right or to the left instead of being put straight in. And what seems to happen, correct me if you feel that I'm wrong, is that the fact that that chair is now askew means that the entire room is different in some important and emotionally significant way. So there's this response to anomaly.

[B]

I don't have that issue. That's not an issue for me. But if there's one pixel off on an electronic sign, I will notice that. I remember one time walking into the airport with somebody else and the United ticket counter sign was a whole row of television monitors. And there must have been 20 TV monitors making the word United over and over again. And one of the screens was scrambled, the whole screen. And I immediately saw it. And I said to the person beside me, did you see that that sign was messed up? No, they did not see it. And they were right beside me when we walked in. I immediately saw it. Now that it upset me? No, I just noticed that the sign was scrambled.

[A]

Right, but it didn't upset you?

[B]

No.

[A]

So, yeah, so that's that interesting. So for me, I think I can detect anomalies visually. So for example, one of the things I learned to do when I was setting up my house and renovating places and setting up my offices, like arranging my local environment, was to sit in the room and become meditative in some sense and then to feel out what was bothering me about the room, like what ugly feature might pop out, what part of it needed to be attended to. Right. And I think I was tuning myself to detect what was abnormal in relationship to the underlying aesthetic or the pattern of the room. But that pops out for you almost instantaneously. For me, anomaly detection is mostly verbal. Again, it's like all think up an argument and then think up counter arguments. And if one argument and the other don't jive, if they're contradictory, then that pops out for me.

[B]

Well, it's sort of like I fly all the time. So, like, I know when the pilots do the checklist and like we push back and we just take too long to turn. I'm going, uh, oh, we're going to have an air traffic control delay. And I can often predict that before they announce it. And I also can, I'm very conscious of on the biggest airplane when they start the little gentle push to push it back from the gate. I can feel it on the biggest aircraft there is.

[A]

Right.

[B]

All right. So now I just want to get there and I'm going, oh, please push back. But it's sort of like I don't get upset about it. It's just anything that's not routine, I instantly notice it. And I go, oh crap. I see a vest that says tech ops, we may have a delayed flight. Now that brings up another thing I want to talk about. The last month I've had, okay, mechanic come on a plane twice and both mechanics had gray hair. And this brings up a major issue that's in my book about skill loss, especially skill loss with mechanical things. I've been on a lot of questionable elevators and escalators lately that definitely needed servicing. And what's happening, and this is in my screened out chapter, is the kids are getting screened out of these trades because they've taken the shop classes out of the schools 20 years ago and we have so many higher math requirements that you don't need for something like fixing elevators, that the kids are playing video games in the basement on an autism diagnosis instead of fixing elevators. There's a relationship here between what goes on with industrial things and what's going on at school, which is a major, major thing that I'm interested in talking about.

[A]

Yeah, so let's talk about that a little bit. That's one of the things that popped out for me from your book. So I was trying to think that through. So you make the claim, as you just laid out, that our education system and maybe our entire culture as it's hypothetically de industrializing, is actually working against the best interests of those who think mechanically, those who think in pictures and those who can do hands on work.

[B]

Here's a paper I just dug off of Google Scholar on visual objectability, a new dimension of non verbal intelligence. And what a lot of educators don't understand is that object visualization, especially on solving mechanical problems, it is a different way of thinking. I worked with people that barely graduated from high school. Stutterers, they'd be labeled autistic today, they'd be in special ed, but they had big metal working shops and 20 patents each for mechanically complicated equipment that they are selling around the world. And this is something that educators just don't get it right.

[A]

Okay, so let's.

[B]

The reason why I wrote this book. I'll tell you what was the reason. In 2019, just before COVID shut everything down, I went to four places and I realized the magnitude of the skill loss. The first one was a pork processing plant where most of the equipment came from Holland. I went to another pork processing plant, equipment coming from Holland. Then I went to a poultry processing plant where all of the specialized equipment came from Holland in 100 shipping containers. And then I went to the Steve Jobs theater, and the structural glass walls are from Italy and Germany. Then after reading more stuff, I found out that the state of the art electronic chip making machine comes from Holland. And that goes back to their educational system. They don't stick their nose up at the high end skilled trades and look at it sort of like a lesser form of intelligence. When the kids get to about ninth grade, they can go university route or they can go tech route. And I want to emphasize high end skilled trades where you're really using that visual thinking for mechanical devices.

[A]

So I was trying to think through why this might be happening. So let me offer some hypotheses to you, and you tell me what you think about this. So first of all, we have learned, and you draw on Simon Baron Cohen's work in your book. We have learned that there is a difference, and we can try to map this onto verbal thinking versus imagistic thinking. Simon Baron Cohen talked about systematizing versus empathizing, and he considers that something akin to the continuum between autistic thinking and normal thinking. So the autistic types are more systematizing. And my suspicions are they're also the ones who are more likely to think in images in the manner that you describe.

[B]

Wait a minute. Now we got interest. Go ahead of thinking in images. And there's a nice paper that just came out relatively recently, Seeing and thinking in pictures, the review of visual information processing that came out in 2018. Like to keep my stuff up to date. Now I think in photorealistic pictures where the more mathematical type of thinking thinks in patterns. See, in your brain, you've got circuits for what is something. Okay, so I see a dog, and I go, yeah, that's a dog. Or I've got some china ceramic cattle on my coffee table here, okay? And I just look at the animals and name them. Then the visual spatial is, where is something? Where are you located in space? There are actually two different kinds of visualization And I have a whole chapter in visual thinking book about this and research to back this up. Now, the visual spatial type, pattern thinking or sort of where is something in space. Those kids do well in math, so they're going the stem, right? But let me tell you what's going on out in the food processing plants. The people I worked with in the big steel shops, now that a lot of it's closed down, we are paying the price now for taking out those shop classes designed mechanically clever equipment. The people I worked with and me, we never worked on boilers or refrigeration. We don't understand that stuff. That requires a lot more mathematical thinking or the load on the roof so the factory doesn't fall down if we get two feet of snow. You see, then I have seen this division of engineering labor in every single meat company I have worked with. They're all the same on.

[A]

So do you think that's a matter of like, let's say, something approximating focal depth? So is it possible that the first kind of people that you talked about are dealing at the object level itself, so they're dealing, say with a boiler or with a particular piece of equipment, whereas the other types are dealing with the relationship between pieces of equipment?

[B]

No, it's just.

[A]

No. You don't think that's it?

[B]

No, I think it's just real simple. You just see the objects and then after you work, you see an object visualizer. Gets better and better at designing mechanical equipment the more things you go out and see. Like when I started working my designing cattle handling facilities, I went to every feed yard in Arizona and I worked cattle and I go, this kind of a design doesn't work. This worked. So then I took all the good bits and like recombine them. It's bottom up thinking the more stuff I get exposed to, okay, whether it's cattle handling facility or maybe I'll look at how water flows through something. And then you watch how cattle move. I like to look at drone footage and a lot of that resembles water flow. And the visual spatial, they see patterns. It's actually very different. And what we're losing is the object visualizer, that person that can just. You see, I'm very aware of things. Like I go on an elevator now that hasn't been serviced and it's scraping in the shaft. You better believe it.

[A]

Right, right, right.

[B]

I hear it and I go, they haven't serviced that elevator. And I was at a fancy hotel recently. And the bellhop goes, oh, it skips that floor. We have to get that floor on the way down. Yeah, Real nice hotel, major city.

[A]

Right, right. Okay, so let me. I don't quite understand that distinction yet, so I'm going to push a little bit more on that. So on the visual side, you have the visual spatial types of, if I'm remembering this correctly, and that's the category that you fall into. And then you have people who are. What are they? Higher up on the abstraction chain in some sense the ones who can think more mathematically?

[B]

No, but basically object visualizers. I can tell you this from experience. We're good at mechanical devices, art, photography. I have talked to many, many photographers because I do a lot of interviews, find out they're dyslexic, they're about flunked out of school, and. And fortunately somebody introduced them to photography. And the other thing that my kind of mind's good at is animals. Then you have visual spatial mathematics, algebra. I can't do algebra. There's nothing there to visualize. Mathematics, calculus. I took a computer programming course when I was in college. I couldn't do it. I had to drop it. I was exposed to the same exact computer that Bill Gates had, and he could do it, and I had to drop the class. You know, these are the things that the more mathematical pattern thinking mind is good at. And some of these really smart kids, they can just look at algebra formulas and just see it. They don't have to do it step by step, they just see it and that's how they think. And then the teachers try to make them do it step by step. That gets the kids frustrated. You know, they don't think the same way.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And my thinking is also associative. I tend to jump around, but there's a logic to the association. And I think the best way to illustrate that associative kind of thinking is give me a single keyword, like on Google for images, and think up a creative keyword. And I will tell you exactly how my mind associates and how my mind can get off the subject. But there is a logic to the getting off of the subject. So give me a keyword, a single keyword.

[A]

Okay, how about rose?

[B]

Okay, I'm seeing some rose bushes that we had in our backyard when I was a child, and we had a lot of thorns on them. And we also like to dig around in the grass that was back there. So now I'm seeing the grass behind our house, and we used to go play in it. We'd catch some insects sometimes. Okay, now you can see how it's jumping around. I don't have that big a visual. I don't have that big a visual library of roses. So then I tend to Then go to something else.

[A]

How about cows?

[B]

What? Cows? All right, now I'm seeing like 10 cow statues right here in front of me. And so obviously those are coming up in my mind just recently. I tend to bring up recent memories. I visited with a. With a Black Angus bull. It was a pet. And he wasn't very happy with us because we didn't bring him any carrots. So my friend gave him one of those disgusting soy protein bars. And he goes, eh, not gonna eat that. He wouldn't eat it no matter how much we tried to feed it to him. And he was annoyed because we didn't bring him any carrots. Okay, then I'm. Now I'm on the. Now I've got the carrot word in my head. And when I was in fourth grade, I used my Singer sew handy to sew green crepe paper so students could be carrots. And I made the green carrot tops out of green crepe paper. So that's how I got interesting carrot.

[A]

So talking to you, talking to you that way reminds me very much of what used to happen in my therapy sessions when I was helping people interpret their dreams. And so dreams have the same quality of thought that your thought had when you just put it on display there, because the dream tends to be an intermingling. So imagine there's a center category, and the nature of the category is somewhat unclear. Maybe that's partly what the dream is trying to puzzle out. But what you get is a web of associations, some of which are autobiographical, that are sort of circulating around a main theme. And partly what you do when you analyze a dream is you walk through all the associated images. You also ask the person to let their mind loose to generate more associations. And then you try to use the associational web to triangulate on the central theme and to haul out the gist. And the gist of that array of images would be something like the interpretation of the dream. If you get it right, then it snaps into people. They think, oh, yes, that's definitely what that was about. But the dream is attempting to put something together that has a central category.

[B]

And structure are sensory things. Because I have some balance issues. So I often get dreams where I'm like riding a bike down a hill that's super steep like that. And I wish I wasn't doing that. And I know that that has to do with the fact That I have balance issues. I don't think it means anything, but I'm always up on some high place that I wish I wasn't up on and I've got to try to walk down it. And then I have other dreams where I can see it might have some meaning and other times where it doesn't. But the other thing with my thinking, when I'm working on design work, I can control the associations. I can control them. I've had before. There's now 3D simulations. Okay, let's say the company that's building this plant wants to show off how their equipment works. They can do a 3D simulation showing how the equipment works. I can remember sitting in a conference room and we were trying to discuss how to do some conveyors. And the other guys there were coming up with ideas for the conveyors. And I'm going, no, no. If you do that, you're going to yank the rails out of the ceiling. Oh, no, no, no, no, that won't work. They were almost using my mind like a 3D CAD program that was animated and I could test run in my head these different conveyors.

[A]

So let's go back to the issue of, say, taking shop class out of school. So Baron Cohen talked about systematizers versus empathizers.

[B]

Yeah, but what Baron Cohen did, he let the object visualizers, he was looking more at the mathematical visualization pattern thinkers. I agree with them about systematizing and verbal. But the object visualization.

[A]

But he didn't differentiate. He didn't differentiate the systematizers properly. That should be more.

[B]

Yeah, he didn't. The systematizers would have two categories, the object visualizer and the visual spatial. And a big mistake in a lot of perceptual studies is that they're not differentiating them. And some people, there's some verbal people in psychology that don't want to believe this stuff exists. Just while you were setting up the cameras, I downloaded six new abstracts that aren't even in my book on this, that show that they are different.

[A]

Right. Okay.

[B]

Got them right here on my lap.

[A]

So Cohen also talks about gender differences in relationship to this continua. So we can break the continua into two parts on the one end. And it is the case that autism tends to be preferentially a male disorder, although there are females as well. But so that systematizing mode of thinking that you've differentiated into the two categories also tends to be gender stereotyped to some degree at a biological level.

[B]

I avoid that issue as too Controversial, because right now I'm interested in one thing at the age of 75 of helping the students who think differently get into really good careers where they can have satisfying lives. And I avoid the controversial stuff.

[A]

Yeah, well, I'm not so much interested in the controversy. I'm interested in trying to address the issue of why shop courses, for example, have been taken out of schools. Now, we do know that schools are predominantly run by women and women are more likely to be empathized.

[B]

No, I think it's empathy.

[A]

So I'm wondering if there's a gender issue going on there and a prejudice against a certain way of thinking.

[B]

Okay, what's that? I think that one of the reason they took out the shop classes, they kind of just go. Everybody's going to go the university route and cost. Good shop classes cost a lot of money. Now people are starting to put shop classes back in. And you know what they're finding? They can't find anybody to teach the shop classes. I just heard about a brand new beautiful welding shop built here in Colorado at a community college, and they can't find somebody to teach it even after they dropped the university requirement. And I can tell you right now, we need people that can do these things before the power grid and the water systems fall apart. I'll tell you, that stuff I care about.

[A]

Right, right, right. Yeah, well, it's a. Okay, so you. Well, virtualization. Now, do you think virtualization has also played a role in this? I mean, the systematizing types, some of.

[B]

The 3D drawings I wrong. And that's not going to fix some of the serious problems we got with infrastructure right now. And you need both kinds of thinkers. Like one of the things I've got in my book is where a bridge fell down in Minneapolis and the workers were complaining. They were worried that when they were working on this bridge, it was going to collapse. Well, I looked up that bridge collapse and I saw all the twisted metal. And I took one look at that and I went, it's too light, it's too cheap. That was just from looking at the pictures. Then I found the engineering report on why that bridge fell down. And they cheated on the gusset plates that hold the beams together and they were way thinner than the spec. But I had already looked at the pictures and said, that bridge is too light, it's cheap before I read any engineering report.

[A]

So how was it in your life that you attained the practical knowledge necessary to facilitate your thinking? So we're talking about how.

[B]

I'll tell you how you do it. It's real simple. You got to get out and experience all kinds of stuff. Because the more information you put in the database, the better you get. And going back to teaching a computer how to diagnose melanoma, you had to give it like a couple of thousand melanoma examples and a couple of thousand mosquito bites, infected boils and everything else examples. In other words, the more. As I got older and I got more and more information in my database, I could think better and better and better and I could make smaller categories of things. Now a lot of the people that I work with in construction that build equipment for me that's used in every large beef plant now in the US One of them started and some of them would definitely be autistic. One of them started out working on cars, another one took a single welding class and now he's selling mechanical equipment all over the world. Started with a tiny shop that then grew into a big shop. And what's happening now is the little shops are not forming. And that's why we're importing all this equipment from Holland and Italy. Because when you look at their educational system, and I looked it up again recently online, Italy actually has three routes. University route, tech route, mechanical and art route, like for their fashion industry. And the Holland and Netherlands, you can go either university route or tech route. And that's why they're making the state of the art chip making machine that we don't make.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And I'm not talking potato chips, I'm talking electronic chips.

[A]

Right. I wonder if this is also a consequence of people increasingly moving away from farms, you know, Cause when you're on a farm, you'd have to do a lot of hands on stuff. You have to do a lot of fence repair, you gotta take care of your own machinery. And you know, as you move into the urban environment, everything in some sense even in the real world is virtualized. Cause you can always call on other people to do the day to day things that you need to keep infrastructure.

[B]

Well, I agree. A lot of kids are growing up today totally removed from the practical. And one of the things I talk about in the visual thinking book is I talked to a doctor and he told me he had trouble training interns to sew up cuts because the interns had never used scissors as a young child. I had a student in my class that had never used a tape measure to measure anything. And they're totally removed from the world. The practical where those kids that came off the farms. Yes. They had to figure out how to fix things. Absolutely. But I think what's happening now in schools is things are getting so verbal and they're going absolutely crazy on math requirements because I know people with 20 patents and they could basically do sixth grade arithmetic that I could do because I can relate that back to real things and things like.

[A]

Do you know of any research pertaining on how the more the people who visualize objects might be assessed for their ability?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

IQ test. Tilt towards the verbal.

[B]

There's a whole chapter in here and I never can pronounce their names right. Blanka and Colva. And I never can say the names correctly. But I have a whole list of references in there where the difference between the object visualizer and the visual spatial is being assessed. And there's a whole bunch of references on that. Now I have to look these names up because I can't pronounce them correctly. Let me find the reference list here for chapter two. Okay, it's Blaz Henkova. I've got 1, 2, 3 references in here from Blas Henkova on types of creativity. And then the other big reference I have lots of references would be Kozhevnikov if she's got trade offs. Object versus Spatial visualization. Reviewing the visual verbal dimension. Evidence for two types of visualizers. That's another paper, Spatial versus object Visualization. A new characterization of visual cognitive style. That's three papers right there, Kohesnikov, that are in my reference list. And I've got a lot of references where they are actual tests were done when I go through the citation lists. I just went in and we're working on the children's edition of the book right now. And one of the copy editors had a query about a reference and I had to look that up. And then I decided to just type in object visualizer visual spatial into Google Scholar again and find the same old papers. And then I found some citations. It's kind of a cool paper here in the journal Cognition. It's an old paper actually. Visual Object A new dimension of nonverbal Intelligence. I know from working in factories. I spent 25 years in heavy construction. And that is something that I don't think many teachers have done that and seeing how these guys think big, complicated Cargill plants, IBP plants, which are now Tyson Montfort plants. That company is now jbs figuring out complicated things with equipment. It's a different type of intelligence. And I think it's when I worked on the book with Betsy Lerner, my super verbal co writer who helped me organize things and she had Someone come in to fix a bunch of stuff in her house. And after we had discussed this, Betsy was telling me, well, I watched how he figured out how to fix the stones on the chimney. I had never really thought about it before, but she'd watched how he did things and then she started to understand there's a form of intelligence there that's absolutely not verbal. When she watched a person she hired to fix stuff in her house.

[A]

Right, right. Yeah. Well, you can imagine something. And this did pop into my mind visually. Can imagine somebody who's trying to put together a stone chimney has to rotate exactly to make sure that they're going like a Tetris game. That's a good way of thinking about it. I was thinking. Then again, because I'm thinking in images now that we're talking, I was thinking about my young grandson. He's only two years old. He had his Legos laid out in front of him. And when I was a kid, I played a lot with Legos and I played a fair bit with this Meccano set that was like a junior engineering set. And it was certainly the case that working with Legos was non verbal because you're rotating shapes in space and having them fit into one another towards some design end. And that's a nice kind of hands on learning and exposure to different mechanical principles. And so do you have recommendations for people who want to help their children train their visual, spatial and object visualization abilities?

[B]

Let's get them out building things. The big mistake I see with a lot of kids is they're super good with Legos. They don't think to introduce tools. I was using tools by second grade. I was not using a saw, but I was using hammers, screwdriver and pliers. I was taught how to use them safely. I've got another book of children's projects called Calling All Minds where I describe bird kites that I spent hours with tinkering to get them to work on tiggering with parachutes to get them to open up more easily. Kids today are totally separated in the world of physical things. They're not getting out and observing stuff out in nature. This is part of the problem. And I just went to a veterinary school where the students are so far removed from practical things that to give them dexterity skills and surgical skills, they have these plastic and they put children's puzzles inside them and they've got to just reach in and by feel put these children's puzzles together. Because when they were in kindergarten they never did this.

[A]

Right, right, right. Yeah. Well, my parents told me that when I was four, my favorite toy was a screwdriver and that I used to take all the cupboard doors off the cupboards in the kitchens. And so I was introduced to tools at a very early age. And there's a real practical utility in that too. Because now if I visualize a project in my house, shelving or something like that or any construction project of any sort, well, I can visualize the array of tools that's necessary to make that come about. And then I have the tools at hand, and I know how to use them. And that is a. Well, it's also. I really find that kind of work calming and engrossing.

[B]

Well, the problem is, we got kids growing up today totally removed from the world of the practical. They don't use tools. They don't use scissors. I had a student in a class who had never used a ruler or tape measure to measure anything, ever. I think that's a problem because if you haven't done practical things, then you don't understand how to fix things. Okay, like two years ago, they had the horrible mess with a power. Like a bunch of power stations froze. Well, I never heard so much abstract gobbledygook about that because the way I would work on fixing it would be, all right, let's look at each power station. What piece of equipment actually froze? I never saw anything written in the press that described, okay, what froze in this plant. What froze in this plant. Because my inclination would be to kind of rank them on, okay, a turbine haul, it froze. I can build a building over it. That's an easy one. You know, a whole bunch of gas wells froze. That's gonna be, like, really difficult to fix. But, you see, nothing's abstract. Because, okay, if I'm gonna try to figure out how to fix it, I don't really wanna argue who owns them. I'm not interested in the politics. I would just rank the power stations on expensiveness and difficulty to winterize and say, exactly what piece of equipment frozen. You know how I can find out? You let me loose in there, away from the managers. I'll find the maintenance shop. They'll show me everything. And I know enough about equipment that they can't BS me, right?

[A]

So maybe part of the advantage to that more visual form of processing is also its association with that kind of practical particularization.

[B]

One of the things I. That's right. Now, on the other hand. On the other hand, I have no idea how to balance a power grid. That's a job for the Mathematicians, you see, this is where we need to work together in a complimentary factor, in a complimentary way. And I tell people in big corporations, and I've done a lot of talk for businesses, your first step is that you've got to recognize different kinds of thinking exists. And let's take another example. Recently I visited two really nice dairies up in Quebec, Canada, that have the robotic milking machines where the cow can go in. She decides one, she wants to get milked and get fed. And both dairies had actually made some good mechanical modifications on that equipment, which the equipment company finally adopted. But one of the dairy producers said to me, I stop at the computer stuff, I don't mess with the program. That's somebody else's job to work on the software. But the mechanical parts of the device, they figured out ways to improve it.

[A]

Yeah, it's like a hierarchy. You can imagine a hierarchy of generalization with the highest resolution, lowest level being the particulars of a given machine. Then you can imagine people might specialize to operate at different levels of the hierarchy. Maybe the verbal types are operating at the highest level.

[B]

Well, that's right, they are.

[A]

But they lose that particularization.

[B]

That's right. That's basically right. Because the verbalizer tends to overgeneralize. One of the papers that I reviewed in my book on visual thinking was an interesting study where high school students that came for school specializing in the arts, another school specializing in the sciences, and another one specially in the humanities, which would be more verbal. There was teams of students in there, assignment was to create a new planet. So the art students heavily visualizing. They made a planet with crystals on it. Another one made a skyscraper planet. And then the more mathematical science students just painted a round, made a round ball and described the gravity and the atmosphere, you know, kind of boring pictures. And the verbal thinkers started to write it down. And then they go, oh, wait a minute, we're supposed to draw the planet. So. So they made kind of splotchy stuff on it. But the thing that was interesting is that the art minds, more my kind of mind, and the mathematical minds, they had big planning sessions on how to design their planet where the verbal thinkers, they didn't do any planning. You see, this is the problem. The verbal thinker will get big broad concepts of something we need to do. Right, but how do you actually implement those concepts?

[A]

Yeah, right.

[B]

There's no detail there. Now, in food safety, we have a thing that I really like. It's called hazard analysis, critical control points. So let's say I'M out there in a sea of things I can do. Well, I can't do all that stuff. See, now the critical control point, let's say in food safety in a food factory, I can't measure microbes and bacteria on everything in that plant. I have to pick out the places where I'm most likely to have contamination. That would be the critical control points. And one of them is doorknobs. Yeah. That's why some places, food factories have automatic doors, because that gets rid of touching the door.

[A]

Yeah. Well, one of the things that I always found a relief in working with engineers is that they were good. And I can see it in the terms that you're describing. They were very good at rank ordering, practical priorities. Right. And that seems to be part of this particularization. So I have this company, it's a software company that sells personality tests and writing programs for people to help them plan their lives. And my business partner's an engineer, and although he's also very intelligent verbally, he's more intelligent non verbally. And he knows the systems right from the code upward at every level of their machine instantiation. And so the huge advantage to that is that if anything ever goes wrong, he knows exactly what goes wrong and he knows exactly how to fix it. It's particularized down to the point where that makes action possible. Eh. And that's part of the problem with the verbal abstraction is that it makes sense conceptually, but that doesn't mean that it's detailed to the point where it's actually implementable and then it's like a pseudo knowledge. Right. Because it sounds like you've got the picture right, but when you actually try to implement it, you find out that it's really a hollow shell of conceptualization.

[B]

Well, I kind of look at like this is why when I learned about the food safety concept of hazard analysis, critical control points, or let's just call it critical control points. So I've got a big sea of stuff out there. What's the really important thing? Okay, now I only think in specific examples. So let's take frozen Texas power stations. The critical control point is, and I want it like in two sentences, what piece of equipment froze? And then you can very easily figure out the ones that'll be easy to winterize. And I've actually talked to somebody who installs gas wells and it only costs $5,000 to winterize a well when you to retrofit's a complete mess. He also said you have to have someone who knows how to turn the Valves. He said, that's me. I call him the guy in the pickup. And that person in that pickup truck is not getting enough credit. He knows how to turn those valves, right?

[A]

Yeah. So if you conceptualize that verbally, you end up saying something like, a bad winter storm took out the Texas power grid. And that sort of sounds like you've said something, but it's nothing like saying, well, the grid is made out of 200 different, like, industrial assemblies. Each of those is made of a variety of parts that's differentially susceptible to winter.

[B]

All right, well, that's still gobbledygook, because first of all, it wouldn't have 200 separate power stations. You know, it's more like 10. Something like that. And I would just write down the name of the station because I don't really care who owns it. And what we used to do with meatpacking plants when we were doing welfare audits is we'd always call them by their town names because you're auditing that particular plant. And I say, well, this power station had a frozen turbine haul. That's an easy one to fix. There was a coal fire that froze. Well, the lake frees up how the cold dumps in. That's probably fairly easy to fix. And if 50 gas wells froze up, that feed a plant, that's gonna be a mess to fix. But, you see, as I talk about these things, I see it, and I happen to know what some of the equipment looks like. You see, that also makes me a better troubleshooter if I know what stuff looks like. You see, this is where you've got to put things in my database. But I worked 25 years out in factories on heavy construction stuff, so I know what a lot of stuff looks like.

[A]

Right. So it means in some sense that to solve the problem is you take the verbal representation. So the verbal representation is a storm took out the Texas power grid. And then you say, well, there's 10 key components to the Texas power grid, so that differentiates that. And then you say, in each of the 10 systems, there are critically vulnerable points that are specifically sensitive to cold weather. We need to differentiate and find out what those key ones are. Then we have to differentiate that further.

[B]

You see? Now, okay, now, when I first started my work, there was no Google Earth. Well, the first thing I'd do, probably Google Earth and Street View the power stations. And the other thing I've learned, if I want to get accurate information, you don't talk to the managers. You got to get down in the shop and Then the shop guys have to be not worried about getting fired. That's another nasty issue that I'm going to have to deal with. But let's say I get three shop guys together and we. Okay, my industry said when we get rid of all the suits, that's going to be the manner. And the verbal thinkers, they won't talk in front of suits. They're afraid they're gonna lose their jobs. And this is something I know from all the years I've worked in this stuff. And then they'll take you out there and show you what froze. And then, oh, there's creative things. I talked to a guy who worked at a power plant and there was this one sensor, very important electronic sensor, and it get cold, and when it got cold, he put plastic garbage bags over it. And I'm going, well, I think we need to have something a little more permanent to keep that sensor warm than black plastic garbage, garbage bags. And that's what I told them.

[A]

Yeah. So that issue that the guys with the hands on knowledge have to worry about being fired is interesting too, because it seems like. So they have this extremely detailed knowledge that's practical about how these systems operate. And what happens is, if they bring that knowledge up the abstraction hierarchy, what they're doing in some sense is pointing out the manner in which their superiors, their hypothetically superiors. Well, that's the problem.

[B]

That's detailed knowledge. A very big problem I've had is they're worried about losing their jobs. Yeah, but you really want to solve the problem, they need to be able to talk to you freely because they're the ones who tell you exactly what froze.

[A]

Right. Well, the question is, why would their attempts to bring their practical reality to bear as they move information up the information hierarchy, why would that threaten people to the point where they would be intimidated in relationship to their job? Why is there this gap, this psychological gap between the practical and the abstract? You'd think that the managers would be calling on these people all the time.

[B]

You gotta drag those suits out of the office too, just when things are working normally. And so they get a better understanding of what the practical people are doing. Now, my animal welfare work, one of the things where I made some of the biggest difference in animal welfare work is auditing programs I helped develop with McDonald's, Wendy's and Burger King back over 20 years ago. And in this situation, we were taking vice president level managers out to the plant and they'd have these undercover boss moments just like that show. I'll never forget the day when the McDonald's vice president saw a half dead dairy cow go into their product. And he goes, yeah, we got some things here we have to fix. You see, before it was all an abstraction. Spreadsheets, numbers, okay, animal welfare, give it to lawyers, give it to the public relations department. But when they came out of the office and they saw something bad, now it was real, now they had to act. It was no longer abstract anymore.

[A]

There seems to be a kind of pride in that abstraction in some sense. I mean, I've also noticed that highly intellectual people, and maybe those are ones who think primarily in words, tend to be rather dismissive of the intelligence of more practical people, like working people. And that's. I come from a working class environment, so although I've hung around verbal people most of my life, so I can see that dichotomy. Do you have any sense of why it is that the more abstract thinkers have a heavy, contemptuous, practical.

[B]

Because they used to say, okay, the kids that are like failing in high school, stupid kids, go and shop. Well, I can tell you right now.

[A]

Right, exactly.

[B]

I worked big metal fabrication companies owned by these so called stupid people. And what they, they were inventing equipment. They had 20 patents and they were very proud of their patents. And one of them made posters out of them, put them up all over his place. And it's a different kind of intelligence. And it's not. There's things they can do that the verbal thinkers can't do. And what I'm really interested in is we need all the different kinds of minds. Because one of the problems with my kind of thinker, since I'm associative, is the point in a company, let's say I had a metal fabrication shop, I'd have to hire a verbal thinker just to run the business, the payroll, ordering materials, things, all of that part of it.

[A]

Do you think it's a competition, do you think it's a competition for status between different forms of neurodiversity? I mean, if I can claim that my intelligence is paramount, that increases my social status in some sense. Right. You can imagine there's a competition for that broadly going on in society.

[B]

What I have found is when you got the verbal thinkers out in the field, their eyes got opened that the important thing is you got to drag the suits out of the office. I've done a whole lot of that and let me tell you, they changed. I've done a lot of work on supply chain management. And when there's supply chain disasters like a factory burning up And a clothing industry is disgusting industry. They need to clean up a lot of stuff. Factory burns up 100 people selling blue jeans. Well, the suits didn't get out of the office and see what was going on in these factories until there was a disaster. The one they should have been preventing a disaster like that, right?

[A]

Well, yeah. So once you build up hierarchical organizations, it's very easy for the people who are operating near the top of the abstraction chain not to pay attention to the details and, and hopefully the details are working out so well that you don't have to pay attention to them. I mean that's in some sense the point of building a hierarchical organization.

[B]

But what you need to do, obviously the manager can't be doing every job out there in the plant, but they need to have enough contact with the field. And I'm going to use the field, be like the factory floor, farming, waterworks, any of these kind of things. So they, they understand that different, there can be things bad going on. But I tell business managers, and I've talked to many big corporations, computer companies, steel companies, pharmaceutical companies, that the first step is realizing that different kinds of thinking exist and that they can work together in complementary ways. And you actually need, you need the whole team. You need the whole team because we're kind of disorganized and associational. I'm going to need a verbal thinker if I got a really big business to keep the business going.

[A]

So what do you think of the suppositions and you talk about them a bit in your book, that the visual versus verbal modes of cognition map to some degree onto hemispheric specialization. The right is more oriented towards your kind. The right hemisphere is more oriented, broadly speaking towards.

[B]

Broadly speaking.

[A]

Broadly speaking, that dominates your mind.

[B]

Yeah, but broadly speaking that's true. You know, there are exceptions to some of that stuff. But the thing that I want to talk about is right now I'm seeing too many kids that are dyslexic, autistic or whatever. I ending up playing video games on a disability check when they could be photographers. I got a four person crew here right now doing this filming and that's an interesting career. Or they could be designing mechanical equipment and they never get an opportunity to do photography, art or mechanical equipment because they kind of look at them, these stupid kids.

[A]

Right, right. Okay, so there's a privileging of the semantic and that's partly because it's cheaper, it's easier, it's detached from the world in some sense. How do you think we should redesign schools for say, kindergarten kids and elementary kids in some practical way. You tend to think practically. What do you think would be a good start?

[B]

Well, like in the 50s, when I went to school, we had all kinds of craft projects. I was learning to use little blunt scissors probably in first grade. I'd be putting all the hands on classes back in the schools. And that's gonna include theater, music, cooking, sewing. When I went to elementary school, I loved art, sewing and woodworking. And if I hadn't had those classes, I would have hated elementary school. And I loved sewing. And when I was in fourth grade, I had a Singer sew handy, a toy sewing machine that actually sewed. And it was one of my favorite things because I could make things with it. Kids are not doing enough of that kind of stuff today.

[A]

Right, okay. So there's a return to. There's a need for a return to the practical in some sense on both sides of the gender spectrum, on everybody with regards to sewing.

[B]

With now I went when I was doing a book signing for visual thinking, I went to a physics lab in Harvard. This room's labeled physics lab and they had all kinds of 3D printers in there, but they also had a sewing machine and they also had a station for crocheting. This is the building labeled Engineering department at Harvard. Maybe they're realizing they've got to get them doing some hands on things. This is when I did the book signing for this as part of the book tour. The other thing I've noticed, I got into some interesting places. I stayed at this hotel where in Evansville, Illinois, where they had textbooks in the rooms from the 1930s. I wish I'd had more time to look at it. And I pulled out an electrical engineering book and it had a lot of math in it, but it was much more applied. They'd say, oh, this is how this generator works. This is the math that goes with it. But it would describe how the generator actually worked. It was much more applied. And now the physiology book that I had in the 70s, it'll explain how the kidney works, how the heart works, and then explain the chemistry. Now I look at a physiology book and it's much more verbal, a lot more math and chemistry. But how does the kidney actually work? I still have my old Duke's Physiology of domestic animals from 1970, and I want to go back and compare that to the Duke's physiology now. And it's like we're taking the practical out. I just got an email yesterday from the UK that they wanted to Take a technology and design course out of a high school. You see, I think what's happening now is mathematics is totally taking over. Yes, we need mathematics because my kind of mind is not going to touch boilers and refrigeration in that food processing plant. That's a job for the mathematicians. But what we're losing is the object visualizer.

[A]

Right, right, right. Yeah. Well, I wonder too if part of this is the fact that for a long time in our society a lot of this practical machinery just worked and so we could afford to ignore it in some abstract sense. Right. Because our cars worked and our power grids worked and we could take all of this low level infrastructure for granted. Now, that meant there were a lot of people on the shop floors who were busily working, making sure it worked. But it did mean that we had the luxury to engage in abstract specialization. And maybe we could fall prey to the psychological tendency to just dismiss all that.

[B]

Well, you see, when they first started about 20 years ago is when they started taking shop classes out of the schools. Well, you can get away with that for a while. And then the people I worked with, I'm gray now, are retiring. They're retiring out and they're not getting replaced. That's happening with elevator and escalator mechanics. That's happening with airplane mechanics. And I'm seeing that more and more and more and more as I travel. These are three things that I see all the time. And they are getting gray.

[A]

Right, right. So yeah, the retirement problem's going to be the retirement problem.

[B]

When it comes to industry, there's two gigantic mistakes that were made. Shutting down in house engineering shops. Twenty years ago we had a huge metal working shop called the Montfort Fab Shop. And it was part of the engineering of a company called Montfort. So they no longer exist now. Well, that's been shut down. And then at the same time we took out shop classes. Now in the short run, it was cheaper for these companies to just farm out engineering work they need to do in their plant. Yeah, that works fine until the shops retire out. And now what's happened? I can't go in the give you the name of the company, but I have a client right now where the one shop that's left is ripping people off at five times the price. And that's happening right now.

[A]

Do you see any positive consequences of computer technology for object visualizers and for the people who are working more on the visual spatial end of things?

[B]

Well, it's definitely useful to, you know, like the visualization and Stuff you can do on computers, but that doesn't replace real things. Let me tell you. Power grid. I lay awake at night about that, and that's so fragile that I'm not going to go into any detail because it's too fragile. And I'm not going to discuss the things that I visualize and lay awake at night about the power grid, because it's just too fragile.

[A]

Okay. I'm curious about that. Why not discuss them?

[B]

Because I don't want to give. I don't want to give people that have bad intentions any information on how to hurt the power grid. Okay.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

That's the reason.

[A]

I see.

[B]

That is the reason.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Because it's very easy to hurt it. And I don't want to give out any information that would help somebody damage the power grids. So I don't discuss the details here, But I'm seeing them right now.

[A]

Right, right, right. Yeah. Well, that's part of that ability to think about critical points of failure. Well, there's a engineering mind.

[B]

I know where the critical points of failure are, and I'm not gonna discuss them.

[A]

Right, right. So we can all be thankful that you're not a terrorist.

[B]

Yeah, be thankful I'm not a criminal.

[A]

Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Well, I've always often been afraid, when thinking along the same lines that you're describing, of just exactly how fragile things are in that regard and how much someone with a good imagination, how much damage they can. Could do if they targeted things properly. It is really quite frightening to apprehend.

[B]

Well, that's why there's certain things about the power grid I am not gonna discuss. And I'm seeing three big, fat critical control points right now. I'm seeing them in my mind, and they make me cringe.

[A]

Right. So could we talk a little bit about the specifics of your work? I remember one of the stories you told at this Tucson conference was about. You talked about cows, that they would do such things as go into a field and look at a. If you left a briefcase on the field, for example, the cows would eventually come and look at it.

[B]

Yeah, that's right.

[A]

A cow's in a line, might be stopped by something like a Coke bottle in their path. And so you used your ability to think like animals to design systems for animal handling that were much more humane. So could you walk us through that a little bit?

[B]

Well, the first work I did with cattle was in the 70s in Arizona, when I didn't even know that I was a visual thinker and other people were not A visual thinker. And I noticed that if there was a coat hung on the fence, the cattle would stop if there was a shadow or reflection off a vehicle. So I got down in the chutes to see what they were seeing, and I would take pictures down inside. And people thought that was kind of crazy. But now I like right. Just recently did startup at a really big plant. And at 10 o' clock in the morning, everything was working fine. And then at 3:00 in the afternoon, a big shadow appeared. I call it the spider monster. And it was just a shadow. And these cattle decided they weren't going to walk over that. So they'll have to build a roof over the facade so that the cattle can't see the spider monster. The other thing I show people how to do is watch your lead animal. Your lead animal will come up and stop and look at the thing. They don't like the same plant on the night shift. Okay, the shadow monster wouldn't be there. The guy calls me and he goes. They go halfway up the chute and stop. All right, what do I do? I said, now bring up a nice calm bunch of cattle. Watch your leader really carefully. He'll look right at the thing he doesn't like. And there was an LED light on the corner of a building, and they took that down and then everything worked fine.

[A]

How do you identify the leader?

[B]

Well, there's always a leader. When. All right, let's say I take 20 head of cattle out of a pan. There's a lead animal that walks out first, usually one of the more bold animals, not the dominant animal. The dominant animal that pushes the others away from the feed trough. He's in the middle of the herd, or she's in the middle of the herd. But the leader will come out of the pen first and the other cat will follow. And it's just the first animal in the group's the leader. It's that simple. You see, as we were talking about that, I'm seeing it.

[A]

Okay, so is that leader stable across instances of leadership? And is that associated with this ability to find what's anomalous and to deal with?

[B]

Well, and cattle that have lived together for a while tend to stay in the same order. You know, years ago when ear tags came out that were sequentially numbered. In other words, you could just buy a package of ear tags labeled 1 through 200 and they put them on their cattle. And one of the things that surprised ranchers when maybe 200 cattle came back the following year to go through the chutes to get vaccinated. They were coming through in almost the same order. Now that's a group of live together.

[A]

Okay, is there something. Okay, so you made the observation that the lead animal will stop and look at the thing that he doesn't like and so are the other animals. But also that lead animal wasn't the physically dominant animal. He's got some other characteristics.

[B]

The animal that's dominant at the pushing others away from the water trough or the feed trough. But once the lead animal walks, the other cattle usually will follow. Same thing with shape, the other animals will usually follow. So you remove the distractions that the lead animal's reacting to. And at this particular plant, we had two things we had to get rid of. We had to get rid of the spider monster shadow and we had to get rid of an LED light that was on the corner of a building.

[A]

So do you have any sense of why the other animals come to rely on the lead animal? Like what's the lead animal being selected for or is it just a first mover?

[B]

Well, the lead animal.

[A]

What's the nature of this lead animal?

[B]

You see, there's different levels of fear in animals. Genetically. Some animals are more bold, other animals are more shy, or you can call those high and low fear. And the animal that's more bold is more likely to be the leader than the animal that's more anxious. And a bunch of cattle that have lived together all the time, there'll be certain animals that tend to be the leaders. Then you've got the great big one with the giant horns and she shoves everybody else away from the feed trough.

[A]

There's something that's very profound about that because you're laying out the fact that it isn't the dominant animal that leads and that it's the animal that's exploratory and somewhat willing to take risks. That lead.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

But also that the lead animal will spot anomaly. Right, like the spider monster that you're describing. And so it's not like they're so bold that they're completely without fear. They're still acting cautiously in some sense. All right, so you can walk the lead animal down a chute and you can see what it's going to see. And you can actually do that because you go down there and do it and. But you also think that way you.

[B]

Gotta bring your cattle up really calmly to see because if you bring em up at a run, then the leader just turns back and you don't know what it's reacting to.

[A]

Oh yeah.

[B]

I said to him, now bring him up nice and calm. Watch the leader come up the chute, and when he stops, he'll look right at the thing he doesn't like. And he looked at the LED light on the corner of the building. Then they texted me a picture of it and they got rid of that and that fixed the problem.

[A]

Now, have you developed some sort of picture of the class of things that stop cattle?

[B]

Yes, yes, I have.

[A]

You talk about the spider mole.

[B]

Okay, so tell me what sort of.

[A]

Things tend to stop cattle?

[B]

I have pictures, I have checklists of things to look for. Reflections on water. At this particular plant, there was a gate handle. A gate handle that jiggled and it was right by the chute entrance. I said, that needs to be fixed so this gate handle doesn't vibrate.

[A]

So what's common, what's common about the things that stop cattle in their tracks or can you extract out?

[B]

Well, let's look at. Cattle's a prey species animal. So you're looking for things that might be a danger. Some little bits of rapid movement set them off. And something that sort of like shouldn't be there. Like you can put a white plastic bottle in the entrance of the chute and that'll about shut a meat plant down. They'll just keep turning back away from it. Turning back away from it.

[A]

Right. So they're looking for something that doesn't fit the environmental pattern and that's probably doing something like activating predator detection.

[B]

Well, that's right. It's like they're looking for stuff that, you know, a movement in the bushes. Maybe that's a mountain lion or a wolf, some little movement in the bushes. The other thing about new experiences, if you take something like camera equipment. Cattle love camera equipment. You put an expensive camera in the middle of the pasture, they will come up and knock it over and lick it to death. That's what they will do. See, things that are novel are attractive when the animal can voluntarily approach. And scary. If you suddenly shove it in their face. You suddenly shove it in their face, then it's scary.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And so the best way introduce new things to cattle is to let them voluntarily approach it. I don't know how many times people say to me, my horse was fine at home, he went crazy at the show. Well, you've got a lot of novel stuff there, like flags, for example. So you better get your horse used to flags before you go there. And the best way to get them used to flags would be to decorate the pasture with flags and let Your animal walk up and voluntarily approach them.

[A]

Right, Right. Well, you know, that's exactly what you do in psychotherapy when you're trying to help people overcome a phobia. Right. So if someone's afraid of an elevator and won't get in it, that often happens with agoraphobia. What you do is you say to them, okay, let's start by imagining elevators. So that's gonna make you a bit nervous, but imagine an elevator at some distance that doesn't make you uncomfortable.

[B]

Okay?

[A]

Okay. And then you say, okay, well, now you've done that. See if you can move yourself in your mind closer to the elevator door. And then you keep doing that. But it has to be voluntary. It's 100% absolutely necessary for it to be okay. So maybe you run them through this imaginal exposure therapy and then you say, okay, for our next session, what we're going to do is we're going to go out in the hallway. You know that elevator you wouldn't take? We're going to go out in the hallway. We're going to stand 200ft away from the elevator, and you're just going to look at it if you can. And so they'll do that has to be voluntary. And then you can get them 150ft away and 100ft away, and soon they'll be right up to the elevator door.

[B]

I was very anxious in my 20s, and I got terrified of airplanes because I was an extremely scary emergency landing when I was a senior in high school. They put the slides down and the whole thing very, very scary. And one of the ways I got over that is I had to make aviation interesting. And when I got the ride in the cockpit of a plane flying Holstein heifers to Puerto Rico, that made it interesting. You make something scary interesting. Because I know another thing they do on the elevator phobias is they show them how the safety mechanisms work, that the elevator's not going to fall down the shaft.

[A]

Yeah, well, you know, you even compel that interest to some degree. So, for example, once you get a phobic person inside an elevator, what they'll tend to do is look at their feet. And so you say to them, look, quit looking at your feet. Look at each corner of the elevator. Look at all the numbers. Look at the display panel. Like you have to facilitate their voluntary visual exploration. And to some degree, what you're doing is you're calling out their interest, say, attend to all of these things as if they're interesting. And then that's how they familiarize themselves with the elevator and they also note that while they're in there. Because you have to look at the elevator to know you're in an elevator, Right? Literally you have to move your eyes and point at all the different parts of the elevator. And the more that you can help people do that at a high level of detailed resolution voluntarily, the more likely they are not only to become less afraid of the elevator, is that that actually isn't what happens is you actually train them in a form of exploratory bravery. Because what you teach them is that if they use their eyes voluntarily to scan what they're afraid of, they'll become braver. And then that generalizes to all sorts of other instances too. So if you train someone to be less afraid of an elevator, they're much less afraid of other things as well.

[B]

Well, that's right. And the thing that we're seeing, I'm seeing right now in dogs. You know, we have very strict lease laws here. And there's more problems with dogs being afraid of the veterinarian because they haven't been out experiencing enough stuff, like strange people touching them, for example, just going to lots of different places. This is the reason why when they train service dog puppies, you take them everywhere so that there's almost nothing that will frighten them.

[A]

Yes. Yeah. Well, that's the same argument you were making earlier about the fact that to train people practically, we have to put them in a lot of different practices, practical hands on situations, so that they can generalize across all those instances. And so experience that's too narrow is too restrictive.

[B]

Well, I get worried that we're going to have people making policy on all kinds of important stuff when they're so far removed from the world of the practical. You see, we need to have both because the problem with us practical people is we're not organized enough. That's where just about every tech company has to hire a suit eventually, just to keep the company organized. Somebody's got to pay the payroll, somebody's got to pay the taxes, somebody has to make sure the rent is paid. If they need more office space, then they've got to go out and go shopping for office space. We really do need all the different kinds of mines.

[A]

Well, when I look at the ideological solutions that are being put forward to the world's problems continually, I do wonder the same thing you're wondering about, which is, is this empty ideological representation a consequence of the fact that the people who are doing this have no practical experience at all? It's like they're not thinking at the level of detail.

[B]

Well, I think that it's a problem because when I worked originally, this is over 20 years ago with McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's, and they took the top managers out into the field and implemented the auditing program. It was interesting to see how the animal welfare issue went from an abstraction, give it to legal, give it to public relations, to something real that they really needed to address. You know, half dead animals going into your products. Not okay.

[A]

Right, right, right, right.

[B]

Broken, stunning equipment is totally terrible and not okay. And that's mainly a management problem and failure to do maintenance. And when I worked that in 1999, I got five journal articles published on this. I saw more change than I'd seen in my whole career when these big companies were inspecting these plants. But I figured out a very simple scoring system. If you couldn't shoot 95% of those cattle dead on the first shot, you failed a McDonald's audit. It was that simple. Some very simple critical control points. If you had more than 3% of your cattle bellowing their heads off when you're handling them, you failed the McDonald's audit.

[A]

Okay, so why did that turn out to be the critical issue?

[B]

Well, broken stunners were a big issue. Now, on the handling, I figured out a way to score that. That's very simple vocalization. If you're poking cattle with too many electric prods or you're slamming doors on them or whatever, they're gonna be bellerin their heads off. And I better not hear any bellerin coming out of the place where they killed them. I hear bellerin coming out of there. Somebody needs to get kicked off the approved supplier list. It's that simple. That's one of the critical control.

[A]

Right, so you used animal distress as an indication of.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Efficiency of process. Okay, can you walk us through some of your designs? I mean, you designed these circular cattle enclosures as well to calm them down.

[B]

The circular designs are really nice, but I'm also very proud of the fact there were 75 plants on the McDonald's approved supplier list. Only three had to buy fancy, expensive equipment. Everybody else we fixed with management. Yeah, three managers had to be removed. I call that manager ectomy. A lot of non slip flooring had to go in because one of the things we measure is slipping and falling and lighting. Cattle are scared of the dark. Training people to move smaller groups of animals and put a solid side up so they don't see the vehicles passing by and these very simple changes, we were able to fix some of the older places. I used all my design ability to figure out how to make some of the older facilities work even though they did not have the fancy new equipment. And then we had three plants, only three plants had to do a front end remodel that was very, very expensive. That's three out of 75. I'm really proud of that. Oh yeah, that's all a big pork plants in the U.S.

[A]

Right. So tell me what your goals were. Okay, so let's walk this through at the level of detail. So why don't you tell people about how these cattle handling plants work, broadly speaking, from the time the cattle arrive till the time they were processed, let's say. And then how were you brought in to fix them?

[B]

Well, unloading a truck, make sure you have a non slip unloading ramp. Open the gates up, let them out. You do not need to scream at them, pound on the vehicle or stick electric pads through the holes in the side of the truck. Let the cattle just get off and they will. And then they should walk quietly out of the truck. If they got a scale, weigh them on a scale and then quietly walk into a holding pen, get a drink of water, maybe lay down. Then when it's time to go up to the plant, somebody should come down, bring a group of 20 out, not a group of 50 and you quietly walk them up the alley to where they get to where the round crowd pen is. And the whole thing should be at a calm walk without slipping and falling and without mooing and bellowing and. And almost no electric prods. And it should all be very calm. Walking is what it should be.

[A]

Right. And how many plants did you go analyze?

[B]

We had 75 plants on the approved supplier list and only three of them had to have extensive renovations. But we did have three plants where the plant manager had to be removed.

[A]

Right. And so in those cases. Yeah. Why did you remove the managers?

[B]

Well, the ones where we're able to get rid of the plant managers were the corporate ones, the plant. Then we had one plant that we used to call the problem child. And management was family and we couldn't get rid of it. And that plant would like, you know, fail an audit and then pass an audit and. But management has to decide that they're going to do things right. You can have the best equipment and it's not going to work if it's not managed. In fact, before we started these audits, I had a lot of equipment out in the field. Lots of equipment. Half my clients tore it up and wrecked it. And what the customer inspections and audits did is force the plant to manage the stuff they had, either brand new fancy stuff or older stuff.

[A]

And so how broadly did your innovation spread and how rapidly and what were the consequences of that for the meat handling industry in general?

[B]

Well, the auditing program was within six months in the year of 1999, was adopted by McDonald's, Wendy's and Burger King. And that covers just about all the big beef plants. And I saw more improvement than I'd seen in a 25 year career prior to that. People were no longer using broken equipment. They were moving smaller groups of animals, things were kept repaired and employees were better supervised. And boy, it made a big difference.

[A]

So why do you think you were able to do this? I mean, you obviously can solve the problem practically, but how were you able to make your way in the corporate world in a manner that actually resulted, A, in people listening to you and B, in changes actually being made? Because that's quite a remarkable change combination of unlikely achievements.

[B]

All right, let's start off. I started out with equipment. This was in my 20s. And I found that selling equipment was much easier than getting people to manage equipment correctly. And early in my career I made the mistake that a lot of young engineers make. I thought I could make a self managing cattle handling facility. That is BS And I got a lot of systems out there. The other thing that helped me to get systems out into the industry is I wrote about them. And I wrote about them in the meat industry and cattle industry trade press, wrote all kinds of articles just about how to do it. So now I had a lot of equipment out there, center track restrainer, and lots and lots of these big plants had one. It's a piece of equipment I developed with the guys in the shops that I talked to you about earlier. But half my clients tore it up and wrecked it. Then I worked with a lady named Janet Riley at the American Meat Institute and I came up with this very, very simple scoring system for evaluating meatpacking plans. And we wrote it up in our guidelines. Nobody used it for two years. Then McDonald's approached me to implement their animal welfare auditing program. And it started out taking vice president level managers out of the office. They saw some bad stuff and it started out as little training program. They already had food safety auditors in the plants auditing that was already being done. I took the trained the food safety auditors to do the animal welfare audit. Within six months I saw more change Than I had seen in my whole career prior to that. Then Wendy's got on board, then Burger King got on board, and I made sure that everybody used the exact same score. So it was absolutely clear. It was like traffic rules. They measure speeding. We measured how many vocalizations the cattle did. We measured how many animals fell down. Those things were measured. And the plants had to make certain numbers. It was absolutely clear. There were five critical control points and they had to do all five of them to pass the audit. I sometimes can't believe I pulled it off. It worked beyond my wildest dreams, but it was absolutely practical.

[A]

Right, right. Yeah. Well, it is quite a remarkable thing to pull off, to be able to make that kind of change in the corporate world so quickly. That's really quite remarkable.

[B]

The other reason I was able to make change, I practiced reverse conflict of interest. I had a lot of expensive equipment already out in the plants. I bent over backwards in the older facilities to figure out how to make that older facility work without buying expensive equipment. Let me tell you, non slip flooring, it can work wonders. We did quite a lot of that. But that's not expensive equipment. And I'm really proud of the fact that I took some of the older facilities and we made them work. And then we did have three. Only three out of 75 plants. They had to build an expensive front end remodel, and that was very expensive.

[A]

So what would you say if you had to put it into a few phrases? You weren't obviously pursuing mere narrow profit at that time. Not that there's anything wrong with profit. You were serving some other goal.

[B]

I was serving the goal of improving animal welfare. And I bent over backwards to do reverse conflict of interest. And I tried to take some of those older facilities, some of them a bit shabby, and make them work with simple changes like repairs. Non slip flooring, changing the lighting. And three plants had to have the plant manager removed. And that solved the problem.

[A]

So why were you so concerned with animal welfare? And how would you define animal welfare? Why did that become paramount in your hierarchy of goals?

[B]

Well, one of the reasons why I started working on the equipment is the way cattle were being handled was horrible. You know, electric prods on 100% of them falling down, crashing into things, people screaming at them. Cattle handling in the 80s was terrible, absolutely terrible. And I saw that as something that I could fix. Now I talk to a lot of young people today that want to do activism about some specific thing, and it's way too broad. I want justice in the world for Example, Right.

[A]

Yes, yes.

[B]

Might be something they would say.

[A]

Yes, yes.

[B]

And I say, why don't you do something more targeted, like using DNA to show that this prisoner was falsely accused. You see, now that's something a lot more targeted that you can actually do.

[A]

Yes, absolutely. And I think that is a huge problem with the way that kids are trained morally in universities is that that grandiose, vague activism replaces the actual practicalities of problem solving that you're describing that actually make a difference. Why do you think it was that animal suffering stood out for you? Is it partly because you can think like animals? Like, why do you think it was?

[B]

Well, how would you like to get shocked with electric prods and be slipping and falling and crashing into fences and things like that? You'd be terrified. And my goal was to improve how the cattle were treated. When I talked to students about activism, I said what I worked on wasn't everything bad happening to animals. I worked on something targeted. The thing that I'm seeing now with young people that want to make a difference, they say, I want to have justice in the world, or I want to like, animals are treated terrible, we got to do something about it. And I'm saying, you're gonna be more effective if you pick out something relatively targeted. I worked on cattle handling to start with. That's not everything to do with animals.

[A]

Yes, exactly.

[B]

Or the example of using DNA to show that this criminal was innocent. That's something much more doable and targeted that you can actually do.

[A]

Right. So how was it that the suffering of animals in meat and meat packing plants came to your attention to begin with? So you said the suffering, you found that unbearable?

[B]

First of all, it started out when I went out to the feed yards handling cattle back in the 70s. There was a lot of really horrible cattle handling. And I made a mistake in the beginning that a lot of young engineers make. They think technology can solve all their problems. And I mistakenly believed that I could build a self managing cattle handling facility. That's nonsense. I know that now. That's nonsense. Good equipment makes good handling better, but it doesn't replace management. And what the auditing program did is it forced people to manage the facilities.

[A]

And why were you at the cattle handling facilities to begin with? I mean, was this part of your academic training or was this part of the fact that you'd grown up on a farm?

[B]

Well, I got interested in after going out to my aunt's ranch. And this brings up the other things. Students get interested in stuff they get exposed to. It's that simple. One of the people I profiled in Visual Thinking was Michelangelo. Grubby little 12 year old dropped out of school, but he was running around all the churches seeing great art. And he grew up with stone cutting tools. Okay, that's the exposure. Then he started making some stuff and then an artist took him in as an apprentice. That's mentoring. Good careers start first with exposure. And the other reason why I'm so concerned about taking all the hands on stuff out of the schools is those things like let's say theater, for example, expose students. I didn't care about being in the play, but I loved making scenery and costumes that I loved doing. Now that's something that can become a career.

[A]

So we're running out of time on this segment. Let me ask you one more question and then maybe I'll sum up our discussion for everybody or try to extract out the gist. You think primarily in pictures, but you're also an extremely effective verbal communicator. I mean you've written a number of books. You can obviously talk your way into corporate environments and help people walk through the complex process of restructuring, say animal handling on a, pretty much on a national scale. How do you think you've been able to develop your verbal ability? Like what did you do to manage that?

[B]

All right. It goes back to when I was 7 years old in my neighborhood, all the kids when they were seven, when the parents had a party, you had to put your good clothes on, greet the guests and serve the snacks, be little hosts and hostesses. That's what you had to do. I sold candy for charity. That helped me on talking to people. The other thing I figured out very early on is back doors into jobs. And most people don't see this. In the HBO movie Temple Grandin, there's a scene where I go up to the editor of our State Farm magazine and I get his card. Cause I knew if I wrote for that magazine that would help my career. That's a back door writing. I did a lot of writing. There's how to handle cattle, how to design facilities. And I was so happy when one of my very early articles got picked up by two other magazines, you know, and it had made the national scene. Of course this is all, you know, pre Internet. And then that press pass got me into all kinds of meetings. That helped me to get into my next self made internship with a Swift plant. I recognized the back doors. Most people don't recognize the back doors, but lots of good jobs are gotten through the back doors door.

[A]

Right? So you Allied your ability to concentrate on focal details practically with the ability and the willingness to communicate at all sorts of different levels verbally. You were able to bring both of these.

[B]

Oh, see, that's getting too abstract for me. I just go, okay, I got the card within a week. I had done a master's thesis on cattle behavior in different types of squeeze chutes. And I. I sent them a good article and they published it. Then I went back to them and said maybe I could just write something for you every month. I just walked into the office and asked that job. So I did that as a volunteer for about three or four months. And then they started paying me. I wasn't shy to walk up and ask.

[A]

Right, right. So you developed a communication, Communication expertise and a communication network at the same time that you were trying to implement your practical solutions, and both of those facilitated each other.

[B]

Well, in the very beginning, I wasn't even designing facilities. And then I was just visiting all these feed yards and writing for the magazine. And that press pass got me into all kinds of places. I recognized the value of that press pass. It got me into meetings in the 70s with $600 registration fees. There was no way I could have afforded that. This is 70%.

[A]

Right? Right, right. So what are you working on now? You finished this new book that came out in 2022. What are you doing now?

[B]

Well, I'm very interested in seeing the kids who think differently get into good careers. And that's gonna be a major emphasis of the things that I do now. Be a lot of speaking engagements, a lot of interviews like this. Because I want to see those kids that are different get into good jobs. Okay. If they're object visualizer like me, maybe an art job, maybe photography job or a job building things if they're the more mathematical visual spatial, A good programming job, a good mathematics or chemistry job where you need the mathematics. There's too many kids that think differently. Some of them are just kind of going nowhere. I want to see him get into good careers and do things that will be constructive in the world. Do something constructive.

[A]

So we're going to switch over to the additional half an hour that I produced for the Daily Wire + platform to delve into some of the biographical details of your life. Before we close, I'd like to just sort of wander over the territory that we've covered and see if there's anything else. See if you think this is a reasonable summary and if there's anything else you want to add. I've been talking with Dr. Temple Grandin today, who's developed a spectacular career in modifying animal handling and also managed a lot on the more purely intellectual front as well. In terms of conceptualization of information processing. We talked a lot today about the difference in in the ways that people think, concentrating mostly on the distinction between visual thinkers, who tend to be more practical and detail oriented, and who can be broadly differentiated into two categories. And those would be object visualizers and people who think more visual, spatially and mathematically, contrasting them with people who think more verbally. We talked a fair bit about the prioritization of more verbal and abstract thinking at the cost of this practical thinking and training. In that practical thinking. We discussed how that's affected the school system and broader culture. We discussed the dangers that poses to the integrity of our society as we lose the people who have the hands on knowledge. We talked about the psychological danger that poses to people who think more practically, concretely and visually, who are in school systems that are optimized for the verbal thinkers. We talked about Temple's career at the detail level, ameliorating the suffering of animals across like nationally and internationally as it turned out, partly because she decided not to chase mere generalities, but to focus on an actual problem, which was the suffering of actual animals in actual plants, was willing to focus her emotional concerns on something that was practical and to marry that with a strategy that involved particularization and visualization and verbal communication and practical interactions with corporations. And also we close that with a discussion of the fact that what she's doing now is trying to bring to people's attention in podcasts like this, the fact that we seem to be working contrary to our own best interests by not building educational facilities that help optimize the ability of visual thinkers to function, but also for society more broadly to take advantage of the talents and skills of those people in innovation and in the maintenance of the infrastructure that we already have around us. And so I think that about summarizes what we talked about today. Is there anything you want to add to that?

[B]

That definitely kind of summarizes that we need all the different kinds of minds. And when we understand that different people think differently, they can work in teams where they can collaborate and have complementary skills. I think that's something that's really important. Also, one thing I would do with the schools is I'd put a lot of the hands on classes back in like art, sewing, woodworking shop, welding, auto mechanics, theater, because these are all things that expose kids to things that can become possible careers too.

[A]

Right? And those are all things that have to be done in an embodied sense. You actually have to. It's not purely abstract, any of.

[B]

No, it's not abstract.

[A]

It's something you act on.

[B]

None of those things are abstract.

[A]

Yeah, well, that's, I suppose a danger of moving so much education online as well is that it's going to increase the degree of abstraction.

[B]

Well, that's right. The abstracts are dealt with. When I went to did the book signing for Visual Thinking, I told you about the electrical engineering book from the 30s I found in this unique hotel room. But I also got put in the office of a professor in political science and I looked at some of those books and it was so abstract theories about politics. I didn't even understand it. It had nothing to do with right or left. It had to do with just abstractions that were so abstract it made no sense to me. And I'm going, oh, I wouldn't want this person in charge of figuring out what to do with the power grid.

[A]

You know, I remember at this Tucson conference where I first saw you speak after you spoke, very practical talk, very much like the one that you, you delivered today. When we were talking, a philosophy student got up because there were a lot of abstract thinkers at this consciousness conference and asked you something extremely abstract and philosophical. And you did exactly what I would expect a good engineer to do, which was to say, you know, I really don't understand anything that you just said. I don't know how to associate it with anything practical. And I'm completely unable to answer your question, which I thought was just. It was ridiculously comical. And I also thought, what would you say? Well targeted because it was the case that you had been talking about real practical realities, your ability to think like an animal, the fact that you had taken these practical steps to ameliorate animal suffering and that that had been so consequential and so of obvious worth. And then you were faced with this flight into abstraction and did what engineers always do, which is something like, well, yeah, but I don't understand that. What does it mean practically? Which is a really good question. It's a question that should be asked of abstract thinkers all the time. What are the devils in the details here that you're overlooking? How much do you know about the systems that you're abstractly representing? And the answer to that is usually almost nothing.

[B]

Well, it's sort of like, you know, we need all the three different basic, you know, different kinds of minds. You need the object visualizers. We go to get the arts, mechanical and photography and animals. You need the visual spatial mathematicians, computer programmers, chemists, things that require mathematics. And we need the verbal thinkers because they're going to help organize things. You see, you need all three different kinds of minds and they should work together in a complementary fashion.

[A]

All right. Well, that's a good place to end this segment I would say. I'm going to go. Thank you to everyone on YouTube and the associated podcasts for your time and attention. I hope you found this discussion interesting and engaging and practically useful as well. I'm going to switch over to the Daily Wire plus platform and I'm going to talk to Dr. Temple grand and a little bit more on the biographical end. I want to lay out how her interest in the issues that she did pursue professionally made themselves manifest in her life. Hello everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus. Com.