Temple Grandin and Louis Carter on Neurodiversity as a Business Imperative

Identifying as a neurodiverse individual has increased as much as 600% in two decades, pushing neurodiversity higher up on the organizational agenda. From an economic, business, social, and cultural perspective, we must hire neurodiverse people. We must change our mindsets. And today, Temple Grandin will not disappoint in her brilliant insights, deep knowledge, research, and real examples of why and how we should and must change our mindsets to one of abundance around the neurodiverse community. Time magazine named her one of the world's top 100 most influential people. She was the subject of the HBO movie Temple Grandin, played by Claire Danes. Grandin has been an outspoken proponent of autism rights and neurodiversity movements. She's one of the first autistic people to document the insight she gained from her personal experience of autism. She's currently a faculty member with animal sciences in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Colorado State University. Temple Grandin, welcome. There's so much I want to ask you today and learn from you today.

Okay.

About, uh, about autism, neurodiversity, uh, working with companies as a neurodiverse individual and learning about the autistic mind and your new book, Visual Thinking.

Yeah, here's the galley proof right here. You can pre-order on Amazon right now, Visual Thinking, and it's a kind of thinking that business really needs because visual thinking in pictures is a different kind of thought, and people that are good at visual thinking are often very good at mechanical things. When I was out working on installing equipment that I had designed, I worked with a lot of very skilled tradespeople who often owned big shops. Maybe barely graduated from high school, but they've taken shop class. They had 20 patents inventing all kinds of complicated equipment. And one of my concerns is we're losing that skill. They're getting shunted off into special ed. They took the shop classes out. And we're paying a price for that right now.

And oftentimes students may perhaps not be as good at algebra, so they stop going to trig or geometry. And you're saying, well, help them go to trig and geometry because that's visual thinking so they can excel.

Well, this is the problem. And my concern about this math requirement screening out the visual thinkers on absolutely can't do algebra, it's too abstract. I can do math that's related to something physical, like pi times the radius squared. I can size hydraulic and pneumatic cylinders. But as I say that, I'm seeing hydraulic and pneumatic cylinders on pieces of equipment. And what's happening is that the people I've worked with are retiring. They're not getting replaced. I've talked to a lot of people in the meat industry, but also in other industries like the car industry. They need people who can fix equipment, who can invent equipment. People forget that maybe, okay, computers run the robotics, but somebody has to design the tool that goes on the end of the robotic arm. It's controlled by a computer. It's not a computer. It's something that my kind of mind can design.

And that's interesting what you said, my kind of mind. And to understand this sort of is very important for us all, this particular picture shows the trunk line, uh, in, in, in your brain versus other, uh, you'd say typical developing brains, and how that trunk line— could you tell us about that trunk line and how that enables more of a visual thinking and in effect gives you really a leg up? You like the way you think.

All right, let's put the slide up about the different kinds of minds. You had that slide. Okay. There's scientific research now that shows that there is different kinds of thinking. I am an object visualizer, photorealistic visual thinker. Everything I think about is a picture. Nothing's abstract. People with my kind of mind are really good at mechanical things, fixing mechanical things, inventing mechanical things. Factories really need us. We're good at art. We're good at photography. And we're also good at working with animals. But absolutely can't do algebra. I worked with all kinds of metalworking shops inventing all kinds of equipment, and the student had taken shop class. Then you have your pattern thinker. This is your music and math mind, your traditional degreed engineer, heavy in math. So if we're building a food processing plant, for example, my kind of mind is all the clever mechanical equipment. I call that clever engineering. A little more mathematician does power, water, boilers, refrigeration, make sure the roof doesn't fall down. They're good at music and math. They think in patterns. Then, of course, you have your verbal thinkers. Well, we'd sit in the shop, those were called the suits. And, uh, very organized in their thinking, think in words. I was shocked when I found out that other people didn't think visually the way I think. But we start realizing that these different minds exist. We can figure out how they can have comp— complementary skills. And they— and that we need them on many, many different kinds of projects. But the first step is realizing that different thinking exists. Now, when somebody gets a label, the types of thinking tend to be more extreme. Um, lots of people are kind of mixtures of the different kinds of minds. But we need the visual thinkers. Right now, I'm very concerned about loss of skills. And I didn't realize how serious this was until 2019. I went to a state-of-the-art pork plant, and all of the equipment, especially the mechanically clever equipment, mostly came from Holland. Then I went to poultry plant, all the equipment came from Holland, 100 shipping containers, because they haven't taken out shop class. And then the big shocker was I read in The Economist that the state-of-the-art electronic chip-making machine comes from Holland. You see, you have the mathematical side of chip-making, but you also have the clever engineering side. Very, very concerned about loss of skills. Yeah, you need us. We can't do algebra. I'm concerned about things like maintenance of electrical distribution equipment. This is something I look at everywhere I go.

And something that I would— that really stood out in your work is how you got past all of the, the kind of red tape and were able to show off your work. I know you mentioned Dell and other companies that you've spoken at and recommending really that in the interview phase you show off.

Basically, what I— an interview for me was to show off drawings. Now this is some drawings from my book Thinking in Pictures. It's a little bit of course, Warren, I've used a lot of video conferences, but I would simply show clients my drawings. An interview for me was showing off the work, put the drawings on the table, pictures of jobs. In fact, I designed the front end of every beef plant for Cargill, and the way I sold that job back in the late '80s is I sent the CEO a big drawing, some photos, my brochure, a couple of trade magazine articles. And, uh, 30-second wow, show off the work. And the other thing I did is I saw doors to opportunity. There's a very important scene in HBO movie, which is true, where I went up to the editor of the Farmer Ranchman magazine and got his card because I knew if I wrote for that magazine, that would help my career. That got me a free press pass to get in big expensive, um, national meetings. And then I got the card for the National cattle and industry magazines, and I wrote for them. This was a very important part of my career. Often people don't see back doors to opportunity.

These doors that you identified, they're really these pivotal moments, they're watershed moments in your life that you discover and you can visualize and saying, if when I get that card, when I change or shift this process that you saw, because you had seen this process. That was really hor—

horrible, right? Well, the first thing I noticed, um, in going around all the feed yards in Arizona was cattle would balk at a little shadows and things like that. And I often get asked what was the biggest barrier in the early '70s. I can tell you, being a woman, autism was not an issue. I'm— I had to be really, really good at what I do. But since I was a visual thinker And I didn't know my thinking was different when I did my first studies back in the '70s. I noticed cattle notice little things that people tend to not notice. I often get asked, are the cattle afraid of getting slaughtered? No, they're much more afraid of shadows and little things that we tend to not see. That's the stuff that cattle are afraid of.

Like the flagpole, the flagpole, the noises in the flagpole, noises in the wind.

Here's a brand new one right here. I call this one the Spider Monster.

The Spider Monster.

Shadow in a leaf. This is brand new, this picture I took this year, but that's a big shadow from an overhead structure. In the morning it was not there, everything was working fine. In the afternoon, Angus cattle decided they were not going to walk over that, so to fix it they built a roof over it. So that's something I worked on just this year. No, they were afraid of the spider monster, a shadow from an overhead structure.

So it's really what we don't see that we— when we uncover, that we can allow for new systems to take place. It's what we— it's what other people—

things I want. We need all the different kinds of minds. I'll give you an example. My grandfather, MIT-trained engineer, mathematical type of engineer, MIT. Was the co-inventor of the autopilot for airplanes years ago, prior to World War II. And he worked with another guy who was probably autistic. And, uh, the other guy, uh, Haig Andronikian, had this wild idea of three little coils. Everybody else thought it was ridiculous. My grandfather goes, you can make that work. So here's the mathematician maybe working with a more visual thinker, and they tinkered in a loft for years, finally got it to work. And the stolen version was in every warplane in the US during World War II. This is where my grandfather should have had a lawyer. Visual— a verbal thinker. Okay, he needed a lawyer. So you see, there's a need for all the different kinds of minds. And, um, and actually I've discussed that in, in my Autistic Brain book. I've got some of the early research on, on the different kinds of minds. And if you want to look up some of this research, use search terms Object Visualizer, that's from me, and then Visual Spatial for the more mathematical mind. And one of the problems we have in a lot of scientific studies is they've mixed those two together, and that's a mistake. They are different ways of thinking. One thinks in photorealistic pictures, other thinks in patterns.

You, you speak about on page 204 jobs for picture thinkers, jobs for word fact thinkers and jobs for pattern thinkers. And, and then the AQ test, of course, which is the, this Simon Baron-Kahn AQ test. But could you speak a little about that in terms of jobs that those different 3 types of thinkers, uh, may, uh, consider when they're—

I kind of mind photography. I've been interviewed for a lot of documentaries, and I've talked to photographers privately and found out they were dyslexic or Autistic. Um, also, uh, things like anything mechanical. I worked with several metalworking shops where the owner of the shop was definitely autistic, undiagnosed. So all kinds of mechanical things, and then working with animals because animals don't think in words, and then of course anything with art. Those things go together. Um, and then for our visual-spatial, they're going to be a more traditional mathematically inclined engineer. Computer programmers, um, and all kinds of mathematics, physics, chemistry. Um, I subscribe to Science and Nature, but one thing that amazes me when I look at the chemistry articles is the beautiful symmetrical patterns that are in all kinds of molecules. I'm going, oh, I just would love to show this to the little math nerdy kids in, in elementary school. I'm the— it's all pretty patterns. I'm kind of amazed at me. I don't understand the math, but I do see the patterns in these articles. And then you have your verbal thinker, and most of education now is run by the verbal thinkers, thinking completely in words. And one of the problems is they overgeneralize, and one size doesn't fit everybody in, in school. And I think one of the worst things the schools did is taking out all the hands-on classes. Sewing, art, woodworking, mechanics, welding, because these are the classes where the visual thinkers can excel. And some of these shops I worked with, it was single welding class that opened the door. I'm not saying welding's for everybody, but the problem I'm seeing now, and I've talked to lots of factory managers, they can't find people now to fix equipment. We still have some places where the shops still exist, and it's mainly in the middle of the country, in the farming country. Where the kids are growing up on learning how to work on equipment.

And when you, when you were on the cattle ranch, uh, with your aunt and uncle, you, you fixed the fence and you created your own machine.

I made that gate you could open the car. I actually did that. All the projects shown in the HBO movie are accurate. I actually did all those projects.

And you did it, um, to help the— also the cattle ranch, the cows and the noises around you, and, and, and to create a system that was best for yourself as well so you improved your environment for yourself.

Well, that's right. One of the things I had to do originally is sell it strictly on economics. I could, you know, if it was a large feed yard or a large meat plant, I could, you know, reduce labor requirements, reduce bruising. I could reduce workman's compensation. That was a big one that I used. And I could get the equipment in. And I got a lot of equipment out there, all through the '90s, and one of the problems was not managing it right. People thought they could buy the magical thing that solves all the problems. Now today's the magic computer that's going to solve all their problems. These things are not going to replace management. And then I developed a very simple auditing program for meat plants, very simple. I just measure 5 simple things like cattle vocalizations of falling down, stuff like that, and In 1999, I implemented that system and trained McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King to do it. And in 6 months, I saw more change than my whole career. First thing they had to do was start managing stuff and repairing stuff. It's one of the first things they had to do. You need the combination of both good facilities and good management and people to run things. You need to have both the management and the equipment. Now, one of the mistakes I made early in my career in the '70s is I thought I could build self-managing systems. No way, no way. Now people go, oh, AI is going to fix all our problems. No, things are still going to have to be managed. The other thing is the verbal suits need to get out of the office and find out what's going on out in the field. It was very interesting taking McDonald's executives on their first trips to farms and slaughter plants. It was like that show Undercover Boss. Animal welfare went from an abstraction— give it to lawyers, give it to PR department— to something real. I'll never forget the day when the McDonald's executive saw a half-dead dairy cow go in their product, and he's going, "Hmm, we've got stuff we gotta fix here." Getting the suits out of the office, really, really important. You cannot do it all from a spreadsheet. And when there's been major supply chain disasters, I don't care what industry you're in, one of the things that happened is the suits didn't get out of the office. When I talk about suits, those are the verbal thinkers.

And you learned that early on when you implemented your system, your— this beautiful drawing.

Well, that was, um, yeah, that was a big Bison facility. And then I had other drawings that, um, that I can show you of some of my other drawings that are in my book Thinking in Pictures. The curb, the curb facility. And the way I sold Cargill is I sent him a drawing of one of those curb systems. I sold the work. But then you still have to have management, especially on the night shift. People sometimes forget about what goes on in the night shift.

And, you know, and to go back, it's just the, the motivation behind that and your observation of seeing it go wrong. In your earlier years and how, uh, people simply were poorly managing it. The verbal thinkers were poorly managing it and killing cattle. That must have been really a huge motivational factor to focus on the management aspect as well when you saw the destruction that they could create.

Well, that scene in the movie where the metal plate got put in there, yes, and it did drown the cattle, and that actually happened. I was furious. And it got taken out. And where I had most of that kind of problem— middle management— that's where being a woman became a problem. Middle management. It was not the owners of the places or the top people. It was at the foreman level. That's where I had 90% of my trouble.

You know, and that, that good. And those are some of the people who interview as well, aren't they? They're the ones, right?

And the other thing you got to do is I gotta make sure I show the portfolio to somebody who's gonna care about it. Not your typical HR person. I made sure it got into the hands of the engineering department, or in the hands of the head of the company. Portfolio has to be shown to the right people that will appreciate it. The other big thing, I know a guy who was not autistic, but, uh, took a one-semester community college course in drafting and got into the engineering department of a major meat company. Just by showing off a homework assignment he'd done of a water valve. I designed a lot of projects with him.

It's incredible, isn't it, how, you know, people with great will, great thinking, and an open mind— really an open mind, um, and a caring mind with purpose— can achieve incredible things.

But we need— I'm concerned that too many of the people we need out there repairing factories, inventing factory equipment are playing video games in the basement because they never took a shop class. And we have lots— every, every— to where I go, I spent some time just a few weeks ago with someone who worked in a car factory. And right now they're working on putting in all these robots, but they farmed all the work out. The factories are losing their ability of doing in-house inventing because some bad decisions— I have to use my industry as a model. Was shutting down in-house engineering departments 20 years ago. Oh, it was cheaper to farm the work out. Yeah, that worked for a while. Now you got to get it in shipping containers from Europe. Yeah, we're paying the price for that now.

It's true. And you know what? Let me ask you a question going back to neurodiversity. You know, what would you say, you know, your advice for how a company can actually create sustainable changes in these— in neurodiversity? Efforts instead of these short-lived pushes? Like, what's the— what is the— should the larger system be like?

I'm going to estimate that about 20% of the people I work with, people that were doing design work, machinery, inventing, people with patents, people with big machine shops and welding shops, people I worked with over a long career— I've been around since the early '70s— 20% people owning big businesses were either autistic, dyslexic, or ADHD. 20% of them. I went back to all the jobs, I wrote down the names, they were never formally diagnosed. These people now retiring, ones I worked with, shun— now the kids are shunted in special ed. They never get a chance to do hands-on things. They never get a chance in school to, to show the things that they're good at because those classes have been taken out. They're playing video games in the basement. They ought to be out fixing the power poles that are about ready to fall over that I just saw the other day.

And they're not— you're noticing these systems and they're going and playing video games and this is being wasted really. And so is it potentially—

they're not even getting jobs in the video game industry.

Yeah, they're not even getting—

they're not even getting jobs there. They're collecting a disability check. There's a relationship here. And okay, I've been out in some of the plants. We've got one plant that kept some in-house capability. They had to fight corporate to keep it. I went to another plant that was outside of the farming area where you still got some kids taking welding and stuff like that. I went and took one look in their shop. That was 2022, and they can't build a little hydraulic thingy for me. They've lost all of their in-house capability. I could just tell by looking. Okay.

This new concept of kind of this push for inclusion, push for diversity, it's very temporary. And, you know, what I, what I've heard from you is it starts with the individual, starts with the training, the development, but also the willingness to stick to the skills and the practice, really, and not stay in the basement. It's up to the individual.

Well, the problem is, let's look at another thing with careers. Students have to be exposed to things to get interested. How to end up in the cattle industry? Well, I went to my aunt's ranch as a teenager. I was an Easterner flying out to Arizona. Okay, the people I worked with that own either small shop or a big shop, they took a welding class in high school. That gets back to exposure. I'm not saying everybody should go into welding. What I'm saying is you, you need to get exposed to a whole bunch of different things so you can find out what you're good at. And, uh, taking out all the hands-on classes, a lot of these kids are losing the opportunity to find out that they might be good at something like welding. Or good at programming. I've had parents that had an autistic 8-year-old, brilliant in math. Both parents were programmers, and they didn't think the teacher could program it. They got so locked into the autism label, you know. And this is one of the reasons why I did the visual thinking book. This is my big lockdown project, and I collaborated on visual thinking, which will come out in the middle of October, with Betsy Lerner. She's totally verbal. I'd write the rough drafts. They wouldn't be that well organized. Betsy would just make them flow beautifully. So that's an example of my kind of mind, object visualizer, working with somebody who taught— who thinks totally in words. And I learned more about how Betsy thinks, very different from me. But it was an example of collaboration between the two different kinds of minds. Yeah, pre-order on Amazon now. Shameless book promoter.

No, I love that.

I'll—

mine The first part of my model is systemic collaboration in my book In Great Company. So, what you're talking about is the collaboration for visual thinkers means that, like you said before about the programmer working with the lawyer, the IP lawyer working with the visual thinker for UX, for the user experience or animal experience. And that is so essential. And that's collaboration.

What I'm saying is these neuro— I mean, 20% of the people that I worked with in big commercial projects were neurodiverse. Absolutely. We need them. We need them for the business. We need those skills. I went out to the Steve Jobs Theater. Structural glass walls. Okay, the Apple mothership, structural glass walls. They're from Italy and Germany, and the roof, carbon fiber, came from Dubai. I tracked down all the vendors for the theater. Well, I'm getting really interested in these things because I want to sell it the same way I sold my first cattle handling facility. I had to sell it on the economic basis. That's how I sold it.

Because it's global.

Yes, I want to be nice to cattle, but that wasn't going to sell those projects. And you need these people that are different kinds of thinkers.

We need them here in the U.S.

Yes, we do.

Yes.

Well, I was shocked when I went to the state-of-the-art poultry plant 2019, right before COVID shut everything down, and I found out that equipment came in from 100 shipping containers from Holland. So I'm very conscious of where stuff comes from. When I go to a new plant, I'm looking at nameplates on machines. And it's beautiful machinery. Beautiful. We used to invent that stuff, but that kid who should be inventing it now is playing video games in the basement and not even getting a job in the video game industry, which would make me a lot less critical if they were getting a job in the video game industry or some other programming thing.

And I also, when I was reading your book, um, learning about how it could be cultural, you know, in the US we're focusing so much on the neurodiversity and autism that we're not seeing what people perhaps in Asia and Europe and are, are doing with their children, which is they're, they're encouraging them, and thus they grow up and they accept all different ways of thinking.

Like from Holland or from all these other, uh, the kid in Holland took, uh, took shop class, and they also don't stick their nose up at skilled trades. We have a gigantic shortage of plumbers, electricians, all of these kind of hands-on jobs. And what's happening, I don't even know if I could graduate high school today. But some of the people I worked with that owned big businesses barely graduated from high school. I know about 3 of them, single welding class, that was the beginning. Started out doing tiny projects and then that business grew, and one of them now has a corporate jet. I had— I can't go into any details because they're not, they're not publicly disclosed.

And I understand that it's, it's those who, we do not see, or, or in the, the regular patterns of thinking and learning that can be the most, uh, successful. It's just about unleashing it and enabling them to become truly great.

But they have to have opportunity to— you see, the hands-on classes is where my kind of mind excels. When I was in elementary school, I loved sewing, woodworking, and art. Those were my favorite classes. I had a toy sewing machine called a Singer Sew Handy, actually sewed. I loved it. I made, I made costumes for the school play on my Singer Sew Handy when I was in 4th grade.

You see, you, so you sewed and, and you saw these opportunities. When did you take that sort of leap where you saw, oh, I can see in pictures, I can sew, I can draw? Yeah.

I'm sorry about interrupting. This is one of my problems I have being autistic. I, I'm very slow processor. If I was a computer, I'd be an Intel 286 with the cloud. That's what I'd be as a computer. So figuring out timing, I didn't know I thought differently, but by having those hands-on classes, it's a place where I could excel. I also— kids have got to get out doing things. Field trips I think are important, going to museums, um, seeing lots of stuff. That's so important. I mean, Elon Musk has now disclosed that he's autistic. Um, it's, it's, uh, he always loved space stuff and he read science fiction books. He also grew up working in it with things in a shop too. The other big thing is that most of the people I worked with learned work skills really early on. I have granddads coming up to me all the time that find out they're autistic when the kids get diagnosed. They could be in computer programming, they could be an accountant, they could be someone building fences. Lots of different jobs.

How do you feel like determines the long-term success for neurodiversity hiring? You know, what is it that would keep an organization going with neurodiverse individuals?

Well, I'll just show my feeling on my I'm going to approach it the same way I approached selling my first cattle handling facilities. Economically, you need them, period. Uh, that's how I sold cattle handling equipment. Selling equipment wasn't that hard. Getting people to manage it was hard. Yes, I said workman's comp. Boy, I milked that cow. I'm— because I could save one or two big accidents a year in a large meat company. I'm These corporations need these people. We need them.

That really is it.

We need them. You need the visual thinker. You need the mathematics guy. You need some of these specialized thinkers. We need to pay attention to detail. See, the verbal mind tends to leave out too many details, overgeneralize.

And I love how you connected that to economics and to saving the business. You know, when businesses are failing, likely there are areas that we don't see. And for neurodiverse individuals, for you and neurodiverse individuals, us all who can see systems, right, and pictures, are able to see that inefficiency, right?

Like you said, yeah, I get asked all the time by big corporations, what's the first step? The first step is realizing that different people think differently. Basically, when I— when you say a word to me like church steeple, I start seeing the churches around the neighborhood. They come up, they are specific. They are specific examples of this category of things called church steeples. It's, it's bottom-up thinking where specific examples form concepts. And then I could separate them into chapels, New England-type cathedrals, as I get more and more information. That's the same way AI thinks. But when I asked the speech therapist, think about a church steeple, all she saw was that.

She barely see it. They just saw the—

barely, barely saw it. And then I've learned, and we've got more research in the Visual Thinking book on anphantasia. These are people that have no visual thinking at all. One of the reasons she became a speech therapist is she was a verbal thinker. If there's enough opportunities, people are going to kind of gravitate towards the things that they're good at. But if they're not provided with opportunities to try different things, they're not going to know that they could be good at something like maybe computer programming. I tried it. I was terrible at it.

Temple, can people build this? I think that, you know, I'm talking to a lot of verbal thinkers lately about, you know, how to create these diversity programs and neurodiversity programs. You know, the bottom line to all this is it comes down to the individual. And the behaviors.

Yeah, let's start looking at the different kinds of minds. Let's start there. Visual thinkers, I don't— we're not going to the programming department. I think I mentioned before that the computer companies are reaching out on Microsoft, Dell, IBM. I've done talks for all of those. So for the more mathematically inclined mind, there's been some good reaching out. But we also need things for the visual thinkers. And they need an opportunity to show off the work. But it's gonna be hard for a visual thinker to show off the work if they never took an art class, or they never did a shop class. Or let's say they were mathematically mind is good at music. They never took a music class. You see what I'm learning, and I've talked to hundreds of people about how they got into their careers, especially people that were probably neurodiverse. How do they get into career exposure? You have to expose to a career that needs to be starting with young kids, and then later on mentoring. Let's take Michelangelo, for example. Dropped out of school when he was 12, and kind of a dirty, grubby little brat, but he was running around all the churches and seeing great art. That's exposure. He also grew up with stone cutting tools. That's also exposure. So he started making some stuff, and then he got mentored. So exposure first and then mentoring.

So that's, that's a system right there. Exposure and mentoring inside of the system because it can happen at any age. It doesn't have to happen in the, in the younger years. Yeah, good. It can, it should happen.

Different kinds of minds. Now some of the verbal thinkers. Okay, how about the autistic verbal thinkers? Stream verbalizers love history, love facts. There's a bank I talked to about a year ago. And they had hired these verbal autistic people to sell complicated financial products because they knew all the details of the products. There's been some very big successes in car sales because the person knew every single car. Well, now the dealer only had 2 cars on the lot because of all the supply chain issues. But special, very specialized sales where they're valued for their knowledge of every kind of phone a store might have. That is, that's a skill that somebody buying phones would appreciate. They'd also appreciate not just trying to sell all the high-end stuff, but sell the right phone for that person.

Absolutely. And to, you know, to provide that kind of knowledge to a buyer, and to show the excitement for the facts is just incredible, right? I mean, sales requires the expression of knowledge. And the, and why, an incredible way for, for individuals who are artistic and who have that incredible knowledge to share.

Also not try to sell the customer the entire store.

Exactly.

People appreciate that. Try to sell them the right car, the right phone, whatever the thing is, sporting equipment, and how to do it diplomatically. I think in specific examples, let's say they're working at a sporting goods store and there's somebody wants to buy like the cheapest hockey stick in the place. Well, don't call it a cheap piece of garbage. No, why don't you just say, "That's a beginner stick. I think your kid might want to get a little bit higher quality stick than that." That'd be a diplomatic way to maybe move them away from the absolute cheapest stick. It's going to just break. You see, I'm I just see things in specific examples.

And have appropriate language as well.

That's right. This is where coaching— on my very first job at the Swift plant in Arizona in 1974, I criticized some welding and said it looked like bird doo-doo. And Harley, the old engineer, pulled me aside into his office in private, little tiny office in the boiler room. I remember it really. And he quietly said to me, uh, you're gonna have to apologize for that kind of rude talk, and Whitey the welder's in the cafeteria, and you're going right up there now and apologizing. He also explained to me that Whitey was his employee, and if I didn't like the welding, I should have come to him. So, explained to me quietly in private what I should do. Now, there's some individuals on the autism spectrum where there's hygiene issues. You pull them aside. In private and get it corrected. There's a scene in the movie where the boss slams the deodorant down. That scene happened. That's something where people just have to clean it up. Just have got to clean it up. Eccentric's fine. Eccentric's fine. Rude, filthy, dirty, uh, uh, slob, that, that's not fine. No, that's something where you— there's a little bit of conforming you've got to do on that. Then in the '80s when I was at University of Illinois, somebody thought I was stuck up because I didn't say hi to everybody when I passed them in the hall. Well, now I've learned to do that. You see, I have to learn social skills like being in a play. And this is where a good mentor pull you aside in private, tell you what you should do. Now, let's talk about some accommodations I need, but I never asked for them formally, but I also always made sure I got them. Any task that involves sequence, I need to write down a pilot's checklist. I do not remember verbal sequence. I need a pilot's checklist for things. Okay, unjam the copier, close out the cash register. Just thinking of simple stuff like that. There was a guy fired from a really good fence-building job because he got a new boss. The boss goes, "Buh buh buh buh buh buh." And then he built stuff wrong. If he had just been able to write it down. I can't multitask. A crazy busy McDonald's window, that's where I should not be. Vagueness does not work. When I was in a project meeting designing something, I want clear boundaries. Okay, my project stops at this rail switch. I'm responsible for everything from this rail switch back. I'm, uh, the— what stuff I can tear out, what stuff I can't tear out. You own the property on the other side of the fence. I'm seeing it now. Oh, can I have that? Pasture for the addition. Okay, yes or no? You see, I want very specific sort of on the boundaries of the job. Now, if it's programming, don't just go and say develop new software. That's too vague. You want to say I want software on this platform to do something specific. Now let that programmer design it, but tell them what the outcome of the project has to be, and you've got a deadline. Oh, and I work just fine with that. But specifics, vagueness, that's something that absolutely doesn't work. Some people will be bothered by noise. They might need noise-canceling headsets. They might need some sensory breaks. And one of the big problems we've got now in offices, and this would have been a big problem for some brilliant feed mill designers that I worked with, is flickering on LED lights. And it all depends upon what dimmer switches on it, what exact bulb. Just the other day I was at a chicken farm and we took an LED light apart. I couldn't believe the cheap little power supply it had. No wonder it broke. And, and about, I'm going to guess, maybe 10 or 20% of people with a neurodiverse label will have problems with flickering light. And that has to be fixed. And one of the ways I found out, a simple way to detect this I like simple things. A lighting contractor came up to me at a bookstore and he says, take your fancy phone and film the room in slow motion. And I'd recommend doing some waving in the picture because I want to make sure you play it back in slow motion. And when you play it back in slow motion, you can find the cheap lights that flicker. And that's probably the single worst thing that can happen in an office, especially if it has no windows. But it doesn't affect everybody.

Just the best, just the best talent.

I had a student that had the problem, and, um, oh, and, and there's some dyslexia that's caused by a problem in the visual system. There's a— the brain has to assemble the graphics file in the back of the head, and there's something wrong with the software. The head injury can cause problems with that, also just developmentally. But your best mill designer— and I tell teachers, once you look up feed mill and see these big complicated things that somebody with dyslexia is designing— and then when they retired after their business got bought out, they invented a whole lot of complicated equipment for another industry.

Temple, I think a lot of people are probably asking at this point, how do you find people that are neurodiverse? Because it sounds like we really need them in a way, because to be able to give somebody an outcome and tell them, say to them, could you create a system on it? That's not easy to find.

Well, I can tell you how to get the autistic adults, fully verbal autistic adults, off the video games. There's now been 5 or 6 successes with car mechanics. Car mechanics. And what that adult found is working on cars was a lot more interesting than video games. And you slowly expose them to working on cars. One of them is repairing trains now for the railroad, and they love it. Another one is doing oil changes. He's doing it in a place where he gets to see lots of different kinds of cars. Another one is doing custom cars. Yeah, we need to get them out of the basement and start exposing them to things like fixing mechanical things. Mechanics. See, mechanics and art go together. I know that seems kind of weird, but they go together. And I don't know of any other examples where young autistic adults were gotten off of video games with anything else. Well, 5 or 6 car mechanics successes. That's—

and, and also, I would think software programmers, Silicon Valley, you know, they're basically brought into there, right, by their parents. And the, the top ones, or, or sometimes they just go there because they create a new Y Combinator, uh, uh, somebody has to introduce the kid to programming.

The thing that bothers me is I'm seeing parents with a mathematically minded child and they're both programmers, but they're so locked into the label they don't think to expose the child to programming to see if they can do it. The other problem we have now, computers don't show their guts anymore. The old-fashioned computers, you get the blue screen of death when the video game crashed. I'm gonna call it the blue screen of knowledge because it was covered with code that attracted the kid. That's how some of the— they had to keep these games going. But now computers just freeze and crash and they don't show their guts off anymore.

And the code, you know, there's object-oriented, right, code, and people can— a lot of the nerd-first individuals can, uh, place in their, their objects, right, as in, in coding. And I would think a lot of companies like in Tal Dell, a lot of the larger companies and SAP even, or midsize, they should be looking for these skills.

Look, we need to be— things like robotics classes. Okay, let's say robotics classes have been around when I was a teenager. I would have been the one building the mechanical parts of the robot. I would not have been doing the programming. Okay, this is an example of complementary skills. And the thing that's good about the robotics is the robot has to do an assigned task. Now I think one of the problems that we've got right now with the robots, they're getting too expensive. I mean, I saw a really cool, like, little junkyard robot class where it had a size and weight limit and you had to make it out of— you could buy some Raspberry Pi stuff and the set of off-the-shelf electronics things, and the rest of it you just made it out of junk. And but if you have a robot that costs $20,000, Well, that's going to screen out a lot of your low-income kids that might be really good at these things.

Exactly. And then to be able to find for that—

another thing that's a mistake, because I've been involved with some stuff right now on where they're working on factory automation, um, the really clever tool to put on the end of a robot arm does not copy how a person would do the task. That's important. I went— this is proprietary, so I have to be extremely vague how I talk about it— but I went and visited a place where they were doing some stuff with robotics, and I think the mistake they were making was copying how a person did a task, and they didn't have enough machine tools in that shop to make things. And I could tell by looking at their COVID shield that was made out of like expensive things you put together with Allen head screws. That's a COVID shield. You don't have a saw and a chop, cut plexiglass.

You know, how can companies make the application phase more, uh, neurodiverse friendly, more autistic friendly for, for individuals?

I tell parents and people that are looking for jobs, find the back door. Forget all the online nonsense. Where the AI program just sprains them out. You've got to get the, the portfolio of your work in the hands of the right person. And, um, you might be in the supermarket line and there's an ID card hanging around somebody's neck, the name of a famous company on it, and you whip that phone out and you show them some drawings, some pictures, some programming. You're in the back door. That is something I figured out really early on is looking for those back doors, and they're everywhere. Front door doesn't work. Okay, you don't have certain educational requirements, the AI program screens you out. You don't have this, the AI program screens you out. Back door. You might sit next to them on the airplane, at a bus stop. One time I called the wrong number And it was some important guy at Hewlett-Packard right here in Fort Collins. You just never know where you can find it. But the problem I'm seeing is autism is now a big spectrum. You're going from somebody who can't dress themselves to, to, uh, you know, Elon Musk or Einstein, who didn't speak until age 3. And people are getting locked into the label. They don't think the kid can do anything. I'm seeing too many parents today where the 16-year-old student is doing well in school, has never gone shopping, doesn't have a bank account, hasn't done any just normal regular stuff that people need to learn how to do. The other thing that helped me— yeah, I was given a subscription to the Wall Street Journal when I was in high school, and they had all these articles about big corporations and the people in them. You see, again, this gets back to exposure. And hell, I think that helped me to figure out, um, ways to get into things. And I'm realizing now just how important that scene in the movie where I get the card, and then after I got the editor's card, I produced a decent article. I might not be able to do algebra, but I could write decently because my teachers marked up my work and made me correct the grammar.

So you had the, the mentors to help you to correct your grammar and to understand what's needed.

Well, and I produced a decent article and I produced it quickly. You know, this, this gets back to showing off the, showing off the skill. And, um, you know, this is where I'm seeing, I see some moms just can't let go when I suggest that their kid go shopping by himself to buy printer paper, for example. And one mom said she just couldn't let go. I said, you're a 16-year-old good student in school, you can't let go so I can buy printer paper? Every time I think about printer paper now, I, I see that.

Mm-hmm. Is it so sort of being open to allowing the discovery themselves?

Well, the thing is, this is why I think one of the worst things the schools ever did is, is taking out all the hands-on classes. I'm going to put theater, music, cooking, sewing, woodworking, welding, auto mechanics, drafting, computer programming. These are all things that kids need to get exposed to, and then they can find out what they're good at. I tried computer programming. I couldn't do it, but I tried it.

In your movie, it shows how you had a special mentor.

Um, I had a great science— let's talk about teachers and mentors.

Teachers, you meant your mentor?

With my speech teacher. My mother encouraging my ability in art and encouraged me to expand my art beyond horse heads. And then I had a great science teacher. I was a horrible student in high school. I had no interest in studying, and my science teacher gave me all these interesting projects to do and showed me how studying was a pathway to becoming a scientist. So I can't emphasize enough the importance of mentor. Another mentor was Jim the contractor. Jim Ool, a former Marine Corps captain, starting a tiny construction business. And he saw my drawings, and he hired me to design jobs and sell jobs. He was, he had a neurodiverse crew before anyone even heard of that term. He had an old businessman that had a bridge club to advise him on business stuff. He kind of wild and kind of crazy guy that was really good at welding and building things. I don't think he really realized he was hiring neurodiverse, but he was a Marine Corps captain, and so he understood the needs of different kinds of skills to get things done. And he really helped me get my business started. He helped me become a corporation, just basic business stuff that I had absolutely no idea how to do.

And he gave— I would assume he gave structure too, didn't he? With that kind of structure.

Well, it's always— the structure was the job. Everything's by project. So we'd land a job like those dip vats, and I remember when I took the job, said give me 3 weeks. I had absolutely no idea how to do the concrete work. I got on that phone and I got the drawings for how to do a reinforced concrete tank. I didn't try to wing that, but I went and I found the information.

You, you researched, you did it to the standards and even better, right? So you—

Well, then the parts I invented was the cattle entrance design. And so I got rid of having to have two people there with big fork sticks just shoving cattle down. The entrance design, I invented that. But other things like reinforced concrete tank, I just had to get specs for that. And I did. And there was no internet back then. I got on that horn. And I started calling.

And you found out about all the volume of the water?

So, oh yeah, I found all that stuff. I, I, uh, people had to mail it to me in the mail, so that's why I said give me 3 weeks, because I'd figure 2 or 3 days of solid phone calls and then they got to send it to me by mail. But even now, I, I was looking for, um, some specs one time in a dairy on really good sand for bedding dairy cows on. And I had a hard time finding that online because it's in some textbook. You know, this is where there's still a place for the horn. I had one of my students get on the horn. We were looking for some genetics testing stuff for pigs, and she got so shocked. I actually talked to the inventor, and we found a test that wasn't too expensive. I said, there's a place for getting on the horn and calling people up.

It's incredible.

With the internet.

And that gives that human connection to say, this is me, I'm working on this, I need a community. That's what we did. Yeah.

And I said, you're going to get on the horn. That's what we used to call the phone when it was shaped like a horn.

Yeah, sure.

You know, and, and I found that my paper library skills transferred right over to the internet.

Absolutely. The internet, the advent of the internet, and that must have been incredible for your, your research and your work. And CAD design, uh, all the computer-aided design now that's available.

Well, there's all kinds of things. And but what I found, it was interesting watching the industry switch in the '90s from hand drafting to CAD. We started getting some weird mistakes on drawings. You'd have somebody that took the class but they'd never built anything and they'd never drawn by hand, and we get strange mistakes like the center of the circle of the crow pen was not the center of the circle. They would change the dimension of the steps and didn't realize that they had to put in more steps. And this is major companies making these mistakes. The program, they were not seeing the drawing. And I went, ah, you've made this ramp with steps like this, and then it went like that.

Ah, so that's something to be said, is that the ability to see the mistakes.

Well, they weren't seeing the mistakes, and these were a different type of mistake compared to something doing a layout mistake for cattle. These were more perceptual mistakes. And I'm still seeing them. I'm seeing some really bad drawings. I got a set of drawings where they left all the reinforcement rods out of it and just had it in the written spec. And I took a pencil and scribbled in all the reinforcement rods and said, take that back to that fancy engineering company and have them draw all that stuff in there. That's recent. That's 3 years ago.

It's 3 years ago.

That's 3 years ago. That's now.

It's, it's incredible. I mean, we, we need this so much.

We need, we need— I'm very concerned that the object visualizer, the one that can't do algebra, you need us. Keep the power supply equipment falling apart, plumbing, electrical, fixing equipment, inventing, you know, mechanically complicated equipment, and And Temple, you know, it's, it's that we need them economically. We need these mines. And as soon as I get out away from the central United States, so we still got farm kids coming off the farm, I've lost our ability to make equipment. We're having to import it from a country, high-wage country, that has kept all the shop classes and doesn't sort of look at as a lesser form of intelligence. Now, I worked with brilliant people on big complicated projects. I was amazed what some of these people could do, and they had barely graduated from high school.

Well, you've said so much to help so many people today, Temple, and to also encourage corporate America, everyone anywhere, to begin the process of finding these wonderful people who can help propelling.

Maybe one of the things, well, I know the computer companies have been doing like sort of some hackathon kind of events and things like that for the mathematically minded. Maybe we need to be doing a Maker Faire and that corporation should start doing for little kids and teenagers and get them working on mechanical things and finding out how interesting that is.

Your conference in Boston each year, I know it stopped during COVID Are you going to continue those?

Uh, oh, I'm still doing conferences. I got a trip to Alabama coming up. Oh, I do lots of talks at autism conferences, and I talk about the skill loss. I'm trying to bridge the gap between the educators and the parents and what's going out on the industrial world. And I've got pictures I show of the, of the plant where all the stuff had to be imported, and I said, you see everything out there on that floor? Import high-wage country because we took out shop class.

We got to bring—

that's the reason for doing my book on visual thinking.

There it is, a whole chapter in here on screened out.

Yeah, they can't do algebra. I can't do algebra, and I managed to get out of it. Thank goodness it wasn't required for freshman math. When I took freshman math, can't do abstract math. I— there's nothing there to visualize. I have to relate math back to something real, like a hydraulic or pneumatic cylinder. And then I can memorize the formula for that.

And Temple, in your book Visual Thinking, does it begin to show how— I know you're alluding to it as well— how we're bringing more chips to America. Intel maybe bring— and in America is about—

Well, we're building chip factories right now. Well, I probably can't get the chips to make the chip-making machines. And I've looked into the chip industry. I've got— I was supposed to tour plant and the COVID kept me out, but they showed me the confidential inside video. A lot of conveyors, lots of stuff in there for my kind of mind to work on. Somebody else can do the programming, but you need my kind of mind. And we do not make the state-of-the-art electronic chip-making machine. It's from Holland. The basic physics work was done here. We're not making that machine. You see, there's a connection. That's really, really serious. Yeah, we got to get those kids out of the basement and show them that there's a world out there in factories a lot more interesting than video games. Much more interesting. And it can start with dragging them out of there, get the old mechanic down there in the shop to start showing them how interesting cars are, and then that can spread to other things.

Everybody come out and buy Temple's new book Visual Thinking. We show it one more time.

Yep, I'll show it one more time. When you go to Amazon, make sure you put my name in there, Temple Grandin, Visual Thinking, so it just brings up the book and not other visual stuff.

I'm gonna put a link to it as well.

Yeah, it's on Amazon. We're doing pre-orders right now. And then I've got a number of other papers online too about visual thinking and the autistic brain. Book, which is available right now, does have some of the basic research that shows the difference between object visualizer like me and the more mathematical pattern thinker view.

Well, Temple, thank you so much.

I really, really enjoyed