Temple Grandin: Different Minds for Different Times

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I'm Kei Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Today we have the honor of speaking with one of the most accomplished and influential figures in the world of autism, animal behavior and engineering. Our guest is none other than Temple Grandin. Temple is a professor of Animal Sciences at Colorado State University and a best selling author. She has been named to Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world and she's been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She's also been featured in multiple documentaries including the Emmy winning HBO film Temple Grandin. And to top it all off, she also has the distinction of winning the Best Shirt award on Remarkable People. Today we are discussing her new book Visual the Hidden Gifts of People who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions. Join us as we delve into Temple's extraordinary life, her remarkable achievements, and the insights she has gained. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now here is the remarkable Temple Grandin.

Visual thinking is it's called an object visualizer thinks completely in pictures in photorealistic pictures. I didn't know that other people thought in words until I was in my late 30s and then I discovered that other people think verbally but everything is a picture. It's also associative thinking. On a podcast I was just on a parent of an autistic child asked about their child having complex issues. Well, I saw housing development. Now I know that's wrong for the word complex. I'm also seeing some signs for some businesses. I know that is wrong. One thing a visual thinker is good at is being very specific. I don't know what a child's complex problem is tell me specifically what the problem is and then I might be able to help you. See, the verbal thinker tends to over generalize. That's what the verbal thinker does. Like how do you make an inclusive environment? How do you implement it? I was just reading my MIT technology magazine and they were talking about design thinking and one of the problems they mentioned in that article was they don't talk about how do you actually implement something. Now where object visualizers are really good is inventing mechanical things. I worked with a lot of them that build equipment for me because I spent 25 years in heavy industry supervising construction of my projects. And I worked with object visualizers who barely graduated from high school that might have 20 patents each for complicated mechanical equipment. These are the things that object visualizers are really good at. And we're terrible at abstract math. And most of the people I worked with shop people that invented things are terrible at math. Then you have the other part of engineering. That's your mathematical side. And you need the whole team. And in a food plant, object visualizers build and design the equipment. And the degree engineer will do boilers, refrigeration, power, water requirements, wind loading on the building, snow loading on the building. You've got to have the whole team. Maybe that explains what an object visualizer is. But I know that some educators, especially now that so many schools took out shop classes, don't really understand what object visualization is. When I was doing a book signing for my book Visual Thinking in October, that's like just a few months ago, they did one of the talks at a school and I talked to the principal and he didn't know what object visualization was. He understood verbal and math thinking, but not object visualization. And I'm very concerned that object visualizers are getting screened out because we can't do algebra. But you need us. Another reason why you need us is if you want to build something now like a new poultry processing plant, you got to import all the equipment from Holland because they did not take out shop classes. We also don't make the state of the art electronic chip making machine. As in electronic chips, not potato chips. Yeah, the object visualizers need to be there. They're part of the team.

Do you think that this lack of appreciation for object visualizers and the dependence on standardized testing and passing algebra to get further in stem, you think it's literally a threat to our country?

Well, I'm going to say we're losing skills. I'm very Concerned about this. The next time you see somebody fixing an elevator, check out their age, they're turning gray and they're not getting replaced. The small shops that I worked with that built my equipment, they're all retiring out. They are not getting replaced because those kids are playing video games in the basement with an autism diagnosis. And I'm going to estimate that about 20% of very skilled drafting technicians, people laying out entire factories with maybe a single drafting class, people patenting equipment, specialized mechanical equipment that I worked with, are either autistic, dyslexic or adhd. And my colleagues are retiring out. They are not getting replaced. We're going to have some problems. Who's going to keep the power grid from falling apart, the water systems from falling apart? And some people say, well, everything's going to be computers. Well, you still got all these mechanical devices controlled by computers. And I don't think elevators are going to have an anti gravity anytime soon and are going to be mechanical devices for a long, long time, maybe controlled by computers.

I loved your story where you noticed that the mummies, the art was getting worse and worse. And you asked the person, what's happening here? Can you tell that story?

Well, that was a fourth grade field trip to the art museum. They had a big Egypt exhibit. And this is why I think it's important that schools have field trips. It was fourth grade and I was fascinated by the mummies. But then as we went through the different dynasties, going from the early dynasties to the later dynasties, the art wasn't as pretty, it was more crude. And I asked my teacher why and she said their civilization was falling apart. That's what she told me.

And is that what you see when you look at bridges and overpasses now?

They're not being maintained for one thing. I was just out doing books signing out in Maryland in a really affluent part of town and went over bridge that was horribly not maintained, rusting out. Well, you see, my kind of mind gets really concerned about that.

So as a visual thinker, are you in a sense cursed with seeing disasters and potential disasters everywhere? You see the bridge, you see the overpass, you see the 737 Max with only one sensor. I mean, is everything just like, you know, making your head explode?

In my book on visual thinking, books about disasters, medically trained engineers calculate risk, visual thinkers see risk. And when I found out why Fukushima burned up, to me it was just unbelievable. How could you not put watertight doors on it to protect the electric emergency cooling pump? I can't design A nuclear reactor. I don't have the math skills for that. But I know that electric pumps don't run underwater. And when you need that pump, you really need it or you're going to have a disaster. And I think what happens is the mathematical mind doesn't see it. They had a 10 meter seawall. 30 minutes on Google, I discovered that looking at historical data only took me 30 minutes. That seawall would be breached. That, that would not be high enough to keep the tsunamis out. That wasn't very hard. And what I'm realizing is that they don't see it. And I think the thing with the Boeing Max in the beginning was visual thinking mistake. One sensor, very fragile. When I found out what an angle of attack sensor was, I'm going, this is very fragile. A pigeon could take that off a plane. And you wired it to one of them and nobody asked the question, what happens if I just break it? What's the MCAST computer going to do? That's a very, very simple question. Then you're talking about a sensor that breaks all the time. That was easy to find online. And I just see a bird hitting that and it's going to break it. But they don't see it. They don't see it. Now, since the book was written, I sat on a plane next to a Boeing engineer. This is not in the book. And the engineer told me that the shop people had warned them and they didn't pay attention. That's according to a Boeing engineer sitting beside me on a plane.

And this is because it was all about time to market and lowering the cost to make and develop that plane.

Well, there was other stuff that the flight manual that is really bad. But in the beginning it started out as a visual thinking mistake and it could have been very easily corrected, very easily corrected. It wouldn't have been expensive at all to correct that in the beginning. And some of these problems is they don't see it. And I've looked at some of the reviews about my visual thinking book and some of the people have called it conjecture. Well, I think people that are verbal thinkers, they don't understand visual thinking. I can see a pigeon hitting that angle of attack sensor and breaking it off. And my thinking is associative. I'm also seeing a fake owl that they put on one of the jet bridges at the Denver airport, which I didn't keep the pigeons away very well. It's associative thinking.

But to go back to the question, do you always see these potential problems?

Some of the Best parts of my career was when I was out working on the, working on these projects and working with all kinds of people in the shops that barely graduated from high school and they have 20 patents to their name. People that started out with a single welding class now own a big shop that sells specialized hydraulic equipment around the world. And since they're not declared on their autism, I have to be vague about what that equipment does. Gotta be vague about it.

What is the relationship between autism and visual thinking?

What tends to happen in autism? You have extremes. Most people are mixtures of maybe visual, mathematical and verbal thinking. But when you have autism, you can have an extreme object visualizer or a very extreme mathematician who is brilliant at math and programs computers for Silicon Valley. They can also be autistic. And then there's some that are more verbal, that learn 10 languages. You tend to get more hyper specialized. And if you're on the autism spectrum. And I worked with shop people that I know, undiagnosed autistic. And what's happening right now is they're getting shunted in special ed. And then I talked to special ed teacher just the other day right here in town, and she told me that they won't let these kids take shop. These are the individuals we need to be fixing things. We've got water systems that are falling apart, electrical stuff with all kinds of problems. And in engineering there's a place for the visual thinkers to. And we also have to have the mathematical thinkers. Let's take fixing power grid stuff. And all those power plants froze down in Texas. Everybody talked about it in abstractions. If we got to figure out how to fix them, let's make a list of the plants and what piece of equipment actually froze. Because some stuff's easier to fix than other stuff, like to fix the easy ones first. But nobody talked about it in that concrete manner that you would need to make rational decisions about what maybe to winterize first. And maybe some of them can't be winterized. Then it's up to the mathematicians to balance the power grid. I can't do that. Like I said, let's say we can get these three stations back online. Can we at least do rolling blackouts? Scheduled rolling blackouts? That's not very nice, but that's better than it being completely off. And the mathematicians can tell me whether that's possible. You need both kinds of mines. But I see something like a piece of equipment froze. Maybe I can build a building over it. Now you can't do that with the gas equipment because they have to be open for, so you don't have explosions. That equipment all has to be open to the atmosphere. Can't put a building over that. But that stuff I see, you see, then the older I get and the more things I see, the bigger my database. I'm like artificial intelligence. I'm visual artificial intelligence. I'm only as good as my data set, my training set. So the more stuff I get out and see, the better I get.

I gotta say, Temple, I just love your metaphors. You know, in the book you use the metaphor of your desktop versus what's stored in the cloud. And I loved how you use those kind of metaphors in your book. Thank you.

Well, I think it makes it clear when I talk to people about autistic sensory nervous system problems, I tend to use electronic terms because I think they explain it better. Like I have a slow processor speed. Some of these kids are like a phone on one bar of service. It takes time for them to get the word up and say it. And I find that people understand that better than using neurological language, because people understand that a one bar phone, one bar service, not gonna download a website very quickly.

You are the master of the metaphor.

I have to say.

When you're a visual thinker, I have to understand things. I have to relate it back. There's something I can visualize. There's a lot of very abstract top down thinking, like have an inclusive classroom or an inclusive something or other. And it's all very abstract. But the visual thinker can think about how would I actually implement this? What do you mean by inclusive classroom? Well, for people on the spectrum, I want to get rid of the LED lights that flicker. That's big, number one. That is something that is specific, it's not abstract, and it's something I actually do.

Let's say somebody's listening to this and they're buying into what you're saying. Is it possible to take a verbal or a math thinker and fine tune and add visualization to the repertoire? Or are you, you know, you're born and stuck as a type?

Well, I think there are a lot of people that are mixtures and that makes them a lot more flexible. But they pounded away on me with algebra and there's nothing there to visualize. And you get in the extremes of this. I think a lot of it's innate. There's the first step, and I talk to a lot of business leaders, is you have to realize different kinds of thinking exist and how they can bring complementary skills to the table. Like for Example, when Betsy Lerner and I did the visual thinking book, I would write the rough drafts, kind of associational. Betsy, a super verbal thinker, would change the order and smooth them out. So that's an example of complementary skills working together fully, being aware of how they are complementary skills.

I was going to come to this later, but you open the door right now. I have to say that I am amazed at just how beautifully written this book is. And as I was reading it, I was always asking myself, how is someone who says she thinks in pictures able to put text down so well? Can you explain that to me?

I would write rough drafts, and they'd be more associational. And if you want to see some of my thing, my writing without, you know, co writer, you can look at stuff on grandin.com, livestock, stuff I've written. And what Betsy did is smooth it out. But on the other hand, Betsy would not have been able to write about the Fukushima nuclear power plant or about Boeing. She wouldn't have been able to do that in a million years. So I wrote about that, but she smoothed it out. That's the different kinds of minds working together, recognizing our different skills. Everything with me is associational. And for certain kinds of stuff, it can be really valuable. Like, for example, I went to a travel website's corporate office to talk about disabilities, and you get a lot of abstract stuff. And finally, I asked a blind person that was there, and we got to talking. He says, you know what really drives me crazy at the airport and I get so frustrated with is finding gates. Well, I'm thinking, well make an app for his phone where as he walks down the concourse, the gate numbers will just get spoken to him. Now, you see, that's. I'm going to call it Gate Finder. That is something that is specific. And then I thought about, like, I do it with transponders, like little tags they have for the toll gates. Or maybe I can do it with AI if the gate number signs are big enough, which they are at our airport. I think an AI program could read the signs that you'd have to hold the phone up. Which way would I go? Now, that's something specific that somebody could actually do. It's not talking about make an airport inclusive. I don't know how to implement that. So I immediately got to thinking about. He told me the one thing that when he's at the airport, that really was frustrating. Walking down a big concourse, trying to find the gates, having to ask somebody where they are constantly, you see, I visualize that. You just look at something like the iPhone. Steve Jobs was an artist. He did not know how to program, but he made an interface on that phone where you didn't need a degree in engineering to use the phone. And that's why it was so successful. Programmers had to program it. That's a visual thinker made the interface and the mathematician programmed.

Did you ever know Steve when he was alive? You two would have gotten along very well.

I never met Steve, but I've read a lot of his things. I also have in my visual thinking book, the collaboration between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the two Steves. Now, Steve Wozniak wanted more features on the computer, like five expansion slots and stuff like that. And Steve Jobs is going, well, that's too complicated for the consumer. We got to make a computer where you have a slot for the printer and one other thing, and that's it. You've got to make it simple for the regular person to use. The engineer mathematical mind wants to fill it up with so many features that nobody can understand. I got so many electronic features on this car that I got how to use most of them.

I'm friends with Steve Wozniak, and he's been on this podcast, and I work for Steve Jobs. So your analysis of their relationship, as far as I understood it anyway, I thought was very insightful and very useful.

But you see the different kinds of minds, but those two minds working together produced fabulous computers that everybody used. And what's worrying me today is my kind of mind is all these math requirements. I'm talking to students all the time trying to, let's say, community college, get a veterinary nurse degree. And they're on their second and third algebra class. They're flunking. And you don't need that to be a veterinary nurse or a veterinarian. You need arithmetic. Yes. And there's a few algebraic equations for drug dosing that can be memorized. Those have to be learned. But we're screening out somebody that might be the very best veterinary for nurse, Actually, the very best veterinarian that can visualize things wrong with animals.

I'm going to go back to one.

More question about writing. Okay. Because I'm a writer, so I'm interested in how you do this. So I counted 43 pages of references in this visual thinking book, and there's an average of about 20 references per page. So there's about 800 references. So I want to know how a visual thinker compiles and digests so many scientific Studies into a book.

I looked up all that stuff. This book was done during COVID It was our lockdown project. Both Betsy and I had nothing to do, so did this. But when I write, I describe what I see. So I've got a lot of stuff on grandin.com, my livestock website, where you can see my writing without any editing. And it's been very effective in teaching people how to handle cattle, teaching people how to build corrals. I just describe what I see as I write it. I describe what I see and I looked these papers up and I wanted to make sure I document it. I've got a whole chapter in there on visual thinking, how it works. And I put all those references in there because I want to show people this isn't something I just made up, that there's actually some science behind this. And so I dug up every article I could find. And on the Boeing Max thing, I looked up all kinds of stuff and to support what I'm saying. And one of the things that I'm really good at, since I'm a bottom up thinker, I'm very good at surfing the scientific databases, very good at surfing the Internet and I'll try different keywords. Always tell my students. When my students have to do a project where they look up scientific articles. Cattle has six key cow, steer, bull, cattle. So let's say I want to look up the literature on feeding wheat to cattle. I'm just making something up. I also need to feed feeding wheat to steers because if the paper only had the word steer in it, it's not going to be found with just the word cattle. So I'll do what I call triplet searches. So I'd put like feeding wheat cattle, feeding wheat steers, feeding wheat cows, especially those steers feeding wheat bulls and those four separate searches just for something simple like that.

But wouldn't you say that shows a great deal of verbal skills, not visual?

I have verbal skills for describing the things that I see in my mind. And I have to thank the teachers. When I was young, that red marked up my work to correct the grammar. Thank the teachers for doing that. But I'm an associational thinker rather than linear. Betsy being highly verbal is very linear. But as we worked on the book, she got understanding individual thinking because she had some repair people come to her house to fix the fireplace and fix something else. And she says, I started to watch how they think, how they figured out how to put the rock on a fireplace and got a new appreciation for.

That do you think this concept of twice exceptional, do you think that it's always true? If you have a deficiency, you have something exceptional? Is it the two come together?

So oftentimes the two come together. You know, you have a super brilliant mathematician who's also autistic. And then there's lots of people that are in the middle. Mixtures of the different kinds of thinking, lots of kind of middle of the road people. But some of these extremes, often they are twice exceptional. And what I see happening is verbal. If when you go to meetings like the twice exceptional, maybe for gifted, then for autism, and there's a lot of overlap, but you go to the book tables and the books have very, very little overlap. Each group is just reading their stuff. But I'm very concerned that a lot of visual thinkers that we need in high end skilled trades. And I'm not talking about laying floor tiles, I'm talking about things like inventing mechanical equipment, electricians, plumbers, heating and air conditioning, things that really require high level skills. Fixing elevators would be another one. They're not getting replaced. And a lot of these kids are getting screened out with draconian algebra requirements. I don't think I graduate from high school in California. But there's back doors in the jobs. And somebody might say, well, that's just old fashioned stuff. I mean, Temple grands in our 70s, so that's old fashioned stuff. There's some new ones. Like a guy that got a job in a fiberglass tank factory and six months later he repaired every piece of equipment in that factory. That's. Now that would be somebody who is an extreme visual thinker because you could see how the machine work.

So do you think that a country like Germany, where there's apprenticeships and there's not this sort of drive towards standardized testing and getting into an Ivy League school, Do you think they're going to have an inherent advantage?

Well, I can tell you right now that if you want to build a pork processing plant or poultry processing plant, you're going to be buying the equipment from Europe. Not the building, not the refrigeration, but all the mechanical devices we used to make them. And that's a fact. In fact, after the book got written, another poultry plant went up in Canada and all the equipment is from Europe. Yeah, there's a link here between this and education. And the visual thinkers are getting shunted in specialties. We can't do algebra. Pound away on algebra. There's nothing there to visualize. I can only visualize photorealistic pictures now. I can understand something like PI times the radius squared for sizing hydraulic cylinders. But I see the cylinder on the excavator machine. It's not abstract.

Let's suppose that I'm a parent of a kid who is twice exceptional or just autistic or just a visual thinker or whatever. How do I spot an institution or a teacher who will help a neural diverse child?

Well, the first thing is a lot of those terms are very vague. I've got to look at where the kids skills are at. And you might have a kid who's my kind of mind, very good with Legos. But nobody thinks to progress to tools. I'm seeing too many kids growing up today. They never use tools. I was using tools in second grade. Pliers, hammer and screwdriver, using them in second grade. And kids are not doing that today. By taking a lot of the hands on classes out, kids aren't getting exposed to enough different things to find out where they might be really good at something. That's the problem. And I don't think the verbal people understand that. You've got educators today, they don't know anything about heavy industry. And I come out of that field, I spent hours and hours to be building a big cargo plant. I was walking around the whole entire thing. Even though my job was just to do the corrals and the cattle restrainer. But I watched them build the whole rest of the factory. And you realize that with some of these people it's a different form of intelligence.

And what would be your advice to teachers who encounter these kind of students? How can you help them best?

I want to give them places where their skills can shine. If it's my kind of mind building things, art, mechanics, art and photography and animals all go together. Art and mechanics go together. Now if you take the automobile shop out of the school, the child doesn't have a chance to find out he's good at motors. I worked with two people where big career started in patented equipment with a single welding class. That's where it started. If you take that class out, that person isn't going to get the opportunity. All right, let's take a kid who's a math person that's twice exceptional a math kid. If you don't have him do the harder math he's just going to get bored and turn into a behavior problem. You got to expose them to the higher math. They have to be exposed to these things in order to do them. So I'm a big fan. Let's expose kids to lots of different Things and see what they gravitate towards. I get asked all the time, how did you end up in the cattle industry? I was exposed to it as a teenager. That's how I got involved in that.

You talk about your exposure to cattle and horses and what a big effect it had. But you also had one teacher in particular that you highlight named William Carlock. Could you just explain the role he played in your life?

I was not interested in studying, and bad grades in English and history was just goofing off. And by giving me interesting science projects, he showed me how studying was a pathway to a goal. It wasn't just to please the family. It was a pathway to a goal. So I knuckled down and started studying. Now, by the time I got to that age, I was a really good reader. And when I was eight years old, I had no reading and mother taught me with phonics. But he gave me interesting projects and got me motivated. He was very, very important. This is where a good teacher really makes a difference. See, first of all, you've got to get exposed to things, and then what you have to do is be mentored. And then there was a contractor named Jim uhl who helped get me into the construction business. He saw my drawings and seeked me out another important mentor. He showed me how to get my business started. But the thing is, we need all the different kinds of minds. You know, you have a kid who could be a math genius. If you don't expose him to higher math, he's just going to become a behavior problem. I'm seeing that happen. The other thing about these kids that are math geniuses, the verbal thinkers want them to show their math step by step. That's not how these kids think. Just let them do it in their head. They don't think the same way. And teachers have a hard time understanding that. They just see it. That's not my mind, but that's the mathematical mind.

This is a very personal question that I didn't quite understand the nuance, which is you draw this really great distinction between pilers and filers in terms of neatness and stuff.

Oh, I'm a piler.

But you discussed that there are pilers who pile stuff. And then you bring in this example of, I think it's mysterious or patriarchal.

And that's a shop teacher. Well, he always kept those in elementary school, and, you know, he always kept things neat. But I tend to have a lot of papers piled up, and if somebody moves my piles on, I can't find anything.

So what's the dichotomy in a sense he was enforcing neatness, which you discussed positively. But you also discussed that pilers know where everything is.

Well, I had this table at home where I had all my parachute and airplane experiment mess, big table and I knew where the stuff was and that was at the same time that I would have been in Mr. Patriarchy's shop and mother. But the rule was I could have any mess I wanted on that table, but not in the rest of the house.

I was wondering if I should force.

My kid to clean his room or not.

Well, I think there's some stuff, you know, I can be messy and I don't know, one time years ago they made all the faculty clean up their offices and I did it. I tell you one place I draw the line is food mess that I don't have. I'm living by myself but I hand wash the dishes every time I eat.

Well, you're sitting in your kitchen, I can see that.

Yeah, I draw the line at food mess that I don't have. I can see things getting into my apartment. I don't want ants and other stuff I don't want.

I'd love to get your thoughts about chat GPT and AI.

I've been working at that really carefully. It's a bottom up thinker. It's a bottom up thinker and I'm horrified at the New York Times conversation with it where it was asked to look at its Jungian self of what it might like to do, not allows you, but might like to do. Talking about deleting all of Bing's files, making gibberish and putting up offensive comments. It actually said that I was reading that on a plane and getting creeped out. And now another was the chatgpt was in love with this person who said that wouldn't have a good dinner with their wife. And I'm going, I can't believe this thing's writing this. Another reporter was saying I could steal your Social Security number reputation. Well, you see what they were doing was pushing it. So what Microsoft's going to do now is limit it to eight questions but it can be pushed and bringing some real rubbish up. But I can see how it thinks. It thinks the same way I do. Like I got all those references in my book and I read those papers too. This was done during lockdown so I had lots of extra time too. But every one of those references I can relate it back to something in the book. And normally as an academic I would have put the little reference numbers in but the publisher says that didn't want to do that. I would have had more pictures in it too. And they said it was too much money. So I went along with that. But I managed to put some of my drawings in there for decoration. I wanted people to see some of my drawings. I put all those references in there because if someone challenges I can go back and get those papers and say that, you know, this is not conjecture, this is really true. But when I think that a lot of verbal thinkers have a hard time understanding, especially if they're really verbal understanding thinking in pictures. And then the other drawing program that does art, it only takes pictures that have captions on them. And then ChatGPT is all language based but I can understand how it works. It's bottom up, not top down.

I might make the case that ChatGPT and AI is going to replace many fundamental math skills and not visual thinking. It's going to be much harder to replace the way you think than the way algebra works.

That's the thing. The other thing is for years in my class, my livestock handling class, I have to do scale drawing. They got to. I have lecture all about cattle behavior. There's a lab. But one of the things that I've been having them do for about 15 years is a database searching project because I found out that 30% of my students, these are college students, did not know that databases like PubMed and Google Scholar existed. And I was pretty shocked at this. And this is going to get more and more important as you get chatgpt writing stuff on social media. I think more and more we got to teach students, you got to go back to primary sources and your default setting kinds to be well you read on social media. Everything has to be verified and I'm going to be telling my students that. And then what I let them do is pick out an animal behavior topic, any animal behavior topic they're interested in. Let's say you want to ask a question. Do birds have a magnetic sense? That'd be something I'd let them do. And then they have to go on those scientific databases. Not regular Google but the scientific databases. Two scientific studies on Google Scholar, two off of PubMed, two off of Web of Science and two off of the Science Direct Elsevier database. And do birds have a magnetic sense? And then you have to write an abstract which I think ChatGPT will be extremely good at and students are probably going to use it. And I've also found out it passes the plagiarism software. But the thing I am most concerned about. I want them to know those databases exist and they need to be looking in them. Okay, let's say it's something about politics and I don't discuss politics, but they need to go back to primary sources. Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal. Something that is a primary source. When something on social media says a politician said something, go back, verify. And I've been doing this database searching project in my class for 15 years and after I found out about ChatGPT and all that stuff, I think it's getting more and more and more and more important that young people learn how to do this. Primary sources check stuff and check it from sources where you can verify. ChatGPT doesn't give references yet, but let's say it did. Let's go back on the database and check it. The other thing is a senior I'm appalled at the amount of scams I get on my phone. Your PayPal account has been compromised. They're going to close down your Amazon account. Fake insurance stuff, fake car insurance stuff, fake Medicare stuff, fake IRS stuff. Yeah, my default setting is scam until proven otherwise. A lot of stuff. Now I showed somebody else the fake Amazon thing and they looked at that horrified. I just deleted it. But I think more and more we need to be teaching young people to verify sources. And now that ChatGPT is out there, I'm going to be pushing even more that what you're going to learn in this database project is how to search primary sources. And this is getting more and more and more important.

Let me ask you something. So you consider the New York Times, Washington Post a primary source as opposed to the Journal of Applied Psychology, especially for political stuff.

I want to know who wrote it. I'm not saying the Wall Street Journal is perfect, but I think I would trust that more than some blogger. Okay, something that has a no, but you're a blogger. But okay, if there's a big blogger has a reputation. But I've read all about the troll farms. I read a lot of stuff. I get nature, I get science, I get wired, I get MIT technology. Today I get it all on paper. I love to sit and have breakfast and enjoy a two hour long read of nature. I spend a lot of time reading the Economist. I'm not saying these things are perfect, but I think they're better than something where I don't know where it came from. And if ChatGPT starts having references, I'm gonna start verifying them. I'm gonna go online and make sure that's in a database. I mean, I get to say as a senior, the amount of scam phone calls, scam mail, I get scam text crap on my phone, delete, delete, delete, delete. And then I show that to some of the young students and I show them the fake Amazon text that my Amazon account was blocked. They're going to. And I go delete. Because I've learned how to look up the web addresses and yep, I've learned all those tricks. I've read them in the stuff that I read at breakfast. No, it's terrible. I'm getting like 10 of these things a week. That's what they're doing to seniors right now. Suck them into a bunch of scams. Up next on Remarkable People. Okay, right now the airlines are talking about feeding planes biofuels. There was one point where we had like almost half our corn crop going into ethanol. If you start exporting ethanol, it's no longer sustainable. Biofuels are only sustainable to a point. And then if you exceed that point, they're no longer sustainable.

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You're listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.

You discuss many instances of tech startups. And basically most stories about tech startups are two guys in a garage. And it's two guys was in jobs and they're both male and they're in a garage. So why is it always males in a garage?

Well, the people I worked with, it was one welder starts on the back of a truck and the little tiny shop. I can remember some of the people I worked with, one of them, I'm single welding glass, multi jillion dollar business with a corporate jet now. And I remember when he was tiny, built a little, tiny cattle handling facility for our experiment station. And people that grew up working on cars and built equipment for me and had 20 patents because I looked up the patents. I'm just saying what I see. But the thing is, in every industry, little people innovate, little people innovate, Big guys buy up and copy. Little people innovate, big people buy up. Now I'm seeing the Borg in Star Trek assimilating people buy up and copy or copy stuff. I do know one lady that has her own very successful business. She's autistic lady and she has a very successful business. See, I had to search the database to find that. And she fixes programmable logic controllers on industrial equipment. Like for example, a programmable logic controller that controls a gigantic machine that makes gears, gears that are as wide as this room for giant industrial equipment. And she is a lady and it's not a huge business, it's a small shop. She has a niche, especially programmable controllers with some of the older equipment, like this gear, milling equipment. This is very expensive stuff. And she has a niche market in that this started out small. I had a chance to go look at some of her work at the gear factory and I noticed that the milling machine that she had programmed with ran smoother. I could see it. See, now I'm in her file looking at what she's done. Another innovator. There's a lady that's making a cardboard box for berries. And I've tried to be really supportive of that to get rid of the plastic box. That would be a small startup that's woman owned business. And the thing is you got to get a big customer finally, you know, to buy it. And so that's a startup. But since I was working on equipment most of the time, the first things that pull up in my memory are the ones I directly worked with. But then I started searching the database just like that art program does. I have to keep all these people names out of it. But she, those are two women there. In startup businesses, little people innovate. That's a real basic principle. And I can tell you the biggest barrier that I had in the 70s was being a woman. Autism wasn't a barrier. Being a woman was a big barrier. I had to be twice as good as a guy. I had to be whole, whole, much better. And then the way I sold jobs since I was weird is I simply would show off my work. There's one of my drawings right there. I sold Cargill. I designed the front end of every Cargill plant and I sent them back in the late 80s drawings and pictures from jobs. That's how I sold.

This is your 30 second reveal, right? You blow them away in 30 seconds with your drawing, not your bullshit.

I call it the 32nd. Wow. So when Mr. Fielding, the head of Cargill, opened this up, there was a. This is pre Internet, a big 2 foot by 3 foot drawing of a one that was very similar to. This wasn't this drawing, but it was a very similar drawing. And then there's a couple of pages of plastic pages of pictures, a brochure and a couple of trade magazine articles. Because I wrote about my stuff. Something you look at very quickly. It was like the elevator speech. Wow. Yeah. Don't put too much junk in it. And that was the packet of stuff. And when I do lectures, I show slides of that stuff, the stuff that I put in that packet.

You mentioned Elon Musk quite a few times in very positive light. Has his recent actions changed your mind?

I'll have to wait and see. But I really respect him as an engineer. What he did with SpaceX and with cars and the thing about Twitter is you got a lot more social stuff here. Everything I wrote was before Twitter. Let's just leave it that way.

Let's say Joe Biden calls you up and says, listen, Temple, I need a Secretary of Education. I need someone who's going to bring back shop class and bring back art class and make it so that America can fix its infrastructure. I want you to be Secretary of Education. Just revamp education in America. First, do you take the job? Second, what do you do?

I would tend to fix it one school system at a time and then write about it. Because one of the ways that I spread my cattle handling stuff is I wrote about it. I wrote about it in the scientific press and I wrote about it in the cattle industry press. I just wrote about how to do it. I've seen a lot of very innovative stuff that some schools are doing and nobody's writing it up just how to do it. I put out all these publications, designs for corral systems. Just put it out there so that people could just use it. And the first thing I would do is I want to get all the hands on classes back into the schools. Art, sewing, cooking, woodworking, theater, music, auto shop, welding. And then kids try all this different stuff and they find out what they gravitate towards. But if they're not exposed, they wouldn't know that they might like fixing things. And this whole thing saying everything's going to be run by computers. Let's go back to elevators run by computers. And in my MIT magazine, I just read about a programming glitch in elevator. Yep, that's going to take the computer people to fix. But elevators are mechanical devices and I don't see them being anti gravity anytime soon. They're either hydraulic or they work with cables. Those are mechanical things. And I've been on some rather questionable elevators lately that have not been shirt. One of my friends got hurt with a door that could have been really serious because it didn't work right.

So this is a big hypothetical. So let's suppose that you and Jane Goodall and Greta Thunberg go into a bar and you're having a drink, and they start telling you, temple, the meat industry is creating climate change. It's the methane. It's the resources. It's moving the cows. Temple, what's with this? Do you see that maybe your work in the cattle industry is not helping climate change?

Well, I wrote a paper about this open access, saying basically that I've been in this industry for 50 years and I've been in an industry that's bad. And this paper is titled Grazing Sheep and Goats Are an Important Part of a Sustainable Agricultural Future. First of all, I checked out the methane figures. Leaking oil field equipment is the same. Swamps put out way, way more. Another thing that one of the reviewers put me to a reference that before Europeans came to North America, herds of bison put out 85% as much methane as we're putting out today. Now, the other thing, when activists say, well, cattle just take up too much land. We have huge amounts of land that can only be grazed. You cannot raise crops on it. There's not enough groundwater. There's not enough water coming out of the sky. Like, for example, if you go out the Denver airport and you go east on I 70, you're going to go about 50 miles. That's about as far out as the houses go. And then you are on 100 miles. I've been there. It's just there. This fall of grazing land only can be grazed. It's plains land. What do you do with that land? A hundred miles of it. Also, there's a place for the grazing animal in crop rotation. We do know that cover crops improve soil health. Well, to make them pay, you can graze them. That also would cut down on artificial fertilizer. So this is a place where the grazing animal could actually help improve the environment. And I have 100 references back up what I say that I got off the scientific databases. And this paper is open access. Grazing cattle, sheep, and goats are an Important part of a sustainable agricultural future. Now let's look at things like biofuels. Okay? Right now, the airlines are talking about feeding planes biofuels. There was one point where we had, like, almost half our corn crop going into ethanol. If you start exporting ethanol, it's no longer sustainable. Biofuels are only sustainable to a point. And then if you exceed that point, they're no longer sustainable. They're talking about feeding garbage to airplanes. I get this magazine called Chemistry and Engineering News. I call it Chemistry for People that Don't Know Math. That talks about the chemical industry, this little magic box shipping container thing, and start making garbage into airplane fuel. Then when I run out of garbage. But okay, I think that's a good thing. But what I'm seeing is it's only sustainable to a point. And now I'm seeing the tubes coming off the top of dumps, regular landfill dumps. They put out methane. A bunch of it. See, let's just get this in perspective. And I looked all this stuff up. You want to see the reference list for this paper? Show it to you right now. Right there. References. Another page of references. Another page of references. And these are numbered into the text. Another page, another half page. References. And they're referenced into the text because it's a scientific paper. And I did this paper this summer because I basically started out. So I've been in this industry for 50 years. Have I been in an industry that's bad? I spent 50 years of my life working in this industry. And I've also been to the rural areas, just about every state in the US and every province in Canada. I've been to the outback in Australia. You've got a huge expanse of land that can only be grazed. What do you do with that land? I'll never forget flying over that land in a small plane and landing at a remote cattle station off the grid. That's the real serious stuff we got to think about. But you always have to look at your inputs. And we talk about veggie burgers. You might have five vegetarian ingredients that go into that. Each one of those has a supply chain with diesel trucks. Let's really figure out what your energy inputs are in that supply chain. Now that's something I can visualize. It's easy for me to visualize that now. Just recently I was talking to a customer. I can't say what they were doing is I can't reveal what they did. We were talking about supply chain and I asked them where the factories were located that made a raw product for his product. He did not know where they were. There was a lady there too. She did not know either where the factories were located for the main raw material for their product. This is now. They had absolutely no idea where they were. And they're in charge of supply chain. You see, that's getting too language based and way too vague. No, you need to know where the factories are. They didn't know. You see, that's why there's problems lots of times with implementation. And then I said, well, listen, they knew where they were. I would have Google Earthed them right there in the restaurant. Because I can get an idea of the size of the factory just by Google Earthing it and looking at all the vehicles in the parking lot. You see, now I'm seeing it, and I'm seeing it with meatpacking plants. Oh, and by the way, meatpacking plants are paying a lot better now. I walked through the parking lot of one of our big beef plants, and there's a lot of very nice vehicles there now because they're making a lot more money. But you see, there's a need for the visual thinker, and so much policy is so vague. They don't discuss about how we would actually glean to do something. All right, let's go back to the inclusive classroom. Fixing LED lights that flicker is something I can actually do. And for 20% of the population, it's really important that's doable. So you always got to get back to implementation.

Temple, I've known you for all of.

About an hour and five minutes right now, and I have known Jane Goodall for years, and I guarantee you the two of you would get along very well.

Jane Goodall did a lot of pioneering work by observing. What she did was observation. And another thing I talked to my students about my livestock handling class is the importance of observation. And you've got some people saying it's not science unless you have a hypothesis. Observation forms the source of a hypothesis. And after all, the James Webb telescope doesn't have a control. It observes the most expensive, coolest projects ever done. It observes there's no control to have back on Earth or something for control. That doesn't make any sense. I see that and how stupid that would be. I see it back in the clean room. Is that the control? No, it's there strictly to observe. And so observation is important. And Jane Goodall, you know, found out the tool use, and she had the patience to sit with the chimpanzees until they would do their natural behavior in front of her. You know, now I'm a heavy user of airplanes, and I know what they do in terms of carbon and stuff like that. But I think that when I do those flights, these are not vacation flights. And the places I go I think do maybe do more good than the fuel the plane burns up. I thought about it, and then I've watched them fuel planes, and I'm thinking of stuff I don't want in that plane's fuel, and that's palm oil. And I looked right at this plane. This is a couple months ago. I hope they never feed you palm oil because there's nothing sustainable about that monoculture. See, that's an example of biofuels that are not sustainable. Now if I can feed the plane garbage, that's sustainable until I run out of garbage. What you see, nothing's abstract. And then you got to look at your whole process. Okay? Cobalt for batteries does not come from a nice place. For example, nothing's abstract.

So, Temple, what brand of boots do you wear?

I used to wear just the regular cowboy boots, but then I had a very bad fall in a restaurant and broke everything in my nose. My nose hit table going down, smashed everything in there. And that was the end of the cowboy boots. And I got lace up ariats because I got to wear a tight shoe and that's what I wear because comfortable and I got to wear a lace up shoe. I got to wear a tight shoe now because the cowboy boots contributed to falling down in the restaurant and breaking my nose all up hitting the table going down.

Thank you for listening to today's podcast featuring the remarkable Temple Grandin. We hope you found her insights and experiences enlightening and inspiring. Temple's work has been instrumental in advancing our understanding of animal welfare, autism and engineering. We encourage you to explore more of Temple's work, including her latest book, Visual the Hidden Gifts of People who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. My thanks to Peg Fitzpatrick, Jeff C. Shannon Hernandez, Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magana, the Drop in Queen of Santa Cruz, Madison Nismer. They are the hidden gifts of remarkable people. Until next time, mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.