Different, but Not Less
Robert Graboyes and Temple Grandin discuss the economic virtues of neurodiversity
In 2021, I conducted eight podcast interviews with seven great thinkers in the fields of healthcare and technology: [1] and [2] TEMPLE GRANDIN, animal scientist and world-famous autism icon. [3] PRADHEEP SHANKER, Ohio radiologist and statistical slayer of COVID mythology. [4] DEVI SHETTY, legendary cardiac surgeon and pathbreaking hospital entrepreneur in India. [5] ERIC TOPOL, cardiologist and medical innovation visionary. [6] KEITH SMITH, anesthesiologist and healthcare pricing revolutionary. [7] JASON HWANG, internal medicine physician and co-author of the 21st Century’s most important book on healthcare innovation. [8] DAVID GOLDHILL, healthcare CEO and documentarian of America’s healthcare failures and opportunities. The podcasts were originally housed at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and will all be reposted at Bastiat’s Window.
Below are attachments containing the audio recording of the first Grandin interview and a PDF transcription of that audio. Following those attachments are excerpts from the interview, lightly edited, truncated, and rearranged for brevity and continuity. We talked about Temple’s life and career, the overstandardization of America’s educational system, the abandonment of skilled trades trining in K-12 education, America’s loss of skilled minds with hands-on experience, the importance of many different types of minds, problems with replicability in scientific journals, the importance of small companies to innovation, and more. You’ll also find some worthy videos and links to more resources.
DIFFERENT, BUT NOT LESS:
Temple Grandin and the economic virtues of neurodiversity
Conversation between Robert Graboyes and Temple Grandin, March 12, 2021. Click below for the full audio and/or for the complete transcription of the conversation.
NOTE: The audio link in an email may or may not work on some machines. If it doesn’t, click on the title at the top of the page (“Different, but Not Less”) and try the audio link on that page.
WHO IS TEMPLE GRANDIN?
GRABOYES: Dr. Temple Grandin is one of the most fascinating and influential people on the planet. I’ve been riveted by her stories since 1995, when the late Oliver Sacks, the bard of neuroscience, described her in an essay titled “An Anthropologist on Mars.” Temple’s story was also the subject of a magnificent HBO movie called, simply, Temple Grandin.
Temple is a professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University. She’s perhaps the single most important proponent of humane methods in the livestock industry. She essentially reinvented stockyards and slaughterhouses, making the lives of hundreds of millions of animals more pleasant and their deaths less painful, and she did so in ways that benefited the meatpackers’ bottom lines.
Perhaps one-third to one-half of all cattle slaughtered in America are processed through plants that Temple designed, and she did all of this in an industry that was quite unwelcoming to women when she began. These accomplishments alone are enough to make Temple a legend, but it is the life that preceded her work that made her the worthy subject of a major film. Temple is probably the world’s most visible face of autism, and the life we celebrate in this podcast could easily have been derailed in early childhood.
At age four, Temple had not yet spoken, and she had grown emotionally remote and detached from those around her. Doctors diagnosed her as autistic and suggested that she be institutionalized for life and essentially forgotten. Her mother rejected the conventional wisdom offered, a theme that repeated itself over and over throughout Temple’s life.
In time, she learned to speak, went to school, earned a bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate, and did all of this with enormous help from family and educators, often in pitched battles against an array of naysayers who would have broken most of us. She changed the meat industry, and equally, she became a preeminent spokesperson for autism, helping change how the world perceives neurodiversity.
OLIVER SACKS
GRABOYES: You first came to my attention in Oliver Sacks’s essay. … He wrote stories. I’ve read dozens, maybe a hundred stories he’s written about interesting people like Temple and other interesting neurological patients he had met with. I always said that every time I read one of his essays, afterward I knew less about the human brain than I knew before I read it, because he just impressed on what a mystery the human mind is.
LEARNING BY DOING
GRANDIN: I got introduced to the cattle industry when I was 15 at my aunt’s ranch. This brings up [a] really important thing: Students get interested in careers they get exposed to. If I hadn’t gone to my aunt’s ranch. … … I worked cattle in every feed yard in Arizona, and I picked out design features that worked and design features that did not work.
EMPATHY FOR ANIMALS
GRABOYES: You’ve said, “Nature is cruel, but we don’t have to be.” And I’ve been fascinated by the way that your designs have put that into motion.
GRANDIN: I get asked all the time, do cattle know they’re going to get slaughtered? I had to answer that question when I first started.
THE ECONOMICS OF NEURODIVERSITY
GRABOYES: You have spoken and written extensively about the ways in which your autism conferred a distinct advantage on you over other designers.
GRANDIN: When I’m drawing a drawing, I can visualize the entire system, and I test-run it in my mind. When I first started, I didn’t know other people weren’t able to do this. I didn’t fully learn this until I was in my early 40s. I found that other engineers calculate things more mathematically. There’s now been research where there’s different kinds of thinking. [See Temple's TED Talk.] I’m an object visualizer; that’s the scientific name for what I am. The more mathematical mind is the visual-spatial. For example, when designing something, they’ll calculate the loads on something, where I just see it. We actually need both kinds of engineering. … … I’m going to estimate that 20 percent of these people would be special ed kids today, either autistic, dyslexic, or ADHD. The thing that saved them was having a shop class in school.
AMERICA’S LOSS OF ENGINEERING SKILLS
GRANDIN: We’re actually losing skills. We have two brand-new poultry processing plants—state-of-the-art—one that’s about three years old, one that was just finished, where every bit of equipment inside that plant was imported from Holland. A hundred shipping containers per plant. We’re paying the price for taking skilled trades out of schools 25 years ago. … … There’s a tendency to stick [one’s] nose up at skilled trades. Now I’m talking of high-end skilled trades. I’m talking about a guy who took welding in high school. He’s now building factories, but he’s getting close to retirement age now. I’m very, very concerned about these people not getting replaced.
TEMPLE’S LEGACY OF INVENTION
GRANDIN: My grandfather on my mother’s side—MIT-trained engineer, [was] co-inventor of the autopilot for airplanes. Now, in some ways, it’s similar to some of the stuff I did because I have a piece of equipment that I developed. It’s in all the big meatpacking plants. If you want to see it work, you can look up Beef Plant Video Tour with Temple Grandin.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SMALL COMPANIES TO INNOVATION
GRANDIN: Little companies innovate. I don’t care what the field is. One of the problems you get in the big corporations is they get very guarded of their intellectual property. I have found that the companies—and I’ve worked for every major meat company, where I’ve got to sign five nondisclosure documents and turn in drawings after the job. I’ll tell you what the secret is. They’re obsolete.
[Steve Jobs, whom Temple suggests was autistic] had a lot of access to hands-on stuff that his father had in a shop. All of these big companies started out small in garages, dorm rooms, scavenged computer equipment. I think I remember reading something about one of the companies got computers out of recycled trash to start some of their stuff—starting out very, very, very small and gradually building it up and having a vision to do it. You see, you get in a big company—it’s like the Star Trek fan—you get assimilated by the Borg.
FAILING SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS
GRANDIN: There’s been a lot of problems in scientific journal articles right now with replication of research, especially in biomedical. It gets down to methods. As a visual thinker, the part of the paper I look at to try to figure out why one scientific study is different from another scientific study is, I look at the methods section. There’s a famous case in cancer studies where all that was different was the way they stirred their cancer cells, and it totally changed the result.
AUTISM AND CREATIVITY
GRABOYES: I would recommend [your wonderful book], Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition to anybody. … … Your book was filled with fascinating quotes. One that I just keep thinking about and thinking about and thinking about was, you quoted some fellow as saying, “I have an interface problem, I don’t have a core processor problem”—that the problem was, he can think anything, but getting information in and getting it out is his problem.
GRANDIN: Einstein did not talk until age three. … … A child in that situation, no matter what label you put on, may be in special ed today. Where would he have ended up? I’m a big proponent of developing strengths. I had really good ability in art [that] showed up when I was seven and eight years old. I was always encouraged to do lots and lots of different kinds of art. I think the biggest mistake the schools have made is taking out all the hands-on classes.
OVERSTANDARDIZATION IN EDUCATION
GRABOYES: There’s a book—I think it’s the most important book on healthcare innovation in the last 25 years—Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang, called The Innovator’s Prescription. Quite a bit of what you’re saying has crossover with that. … … Christensen wrote that medical schools have this problem—that they’re structured because of things that were written in 1910. All medical students were expected to proceed at precisely the same pace through precisely every course. You have different kinds of learners, and you waste time, and some people never actually learned pieces of it.
GRANDIN: We’re screening out people that we need. This is the problem.
[NOTE: Jason Hwang, mentioned above, was another of my podcast interviewees. I’ll post his audio, soon.]
LITERATURE AND FILM
GRABOYES: I will have to say, [HBO’s Temple Grandin was] just stunning. … … You’ve told me, and I’ve seen you say elsewhere, that they did a really strikingly good job of portraying you and your work and autism. I was just mesmerized by Claire Danes’s portrayal of you.
GRANDIN: The most accurate thing in that movie is how they show my visual thinking. That is absolutely accurate. Claire Danes became me, and she was given all these old VHS tapes from the late ’80s and early ’90s. She practiced and practiced and practiced. All the projects are real—the dip vat project, the gates, the optical illusion room—I did those projects. And the main characters, like Mr. Carlock, my aunt, mother—they were shown really nicely.
GRABOYES: I highly recommend it—wonderful descriptions of automated processes and where we go wrong in the design of them.
GRANDIN: I [also] have a TED talk I did. It’s called The World Needs All Kinds of Minds.
TEMPLE TACKLES AN OPTICAL ILLUSION
This video is perhaps my favorite scene from HBO’s Temple Grandin. Her teacher and mentor, William Carlock (David Strathairn) gently pushes the volcanically frustrated Temple (Claire Danes) to replicate an Arnes Room, a classic optical illusion involving a distorted room. I’ll also recommend the film’s making-of featurette.
Thank you for this post. I have read several of her books, and I saw the movie about 5 years ago. I am on the spectrum myself, although I have never been officially diagnosed. My grandchildren have been diagnosed--all ten of them. Why so many? We've figured out that in my family we have been marrying other autistics for at least 3 generations. It may go back farther, but we don't know enough about the behavior of earlier generations to be sure.
The reason for the "autism epidemic" is rather simple: they are finally looking for us! When I was growing up, in the 1950s and '60s, in most places they were not looking for us at all. It was rare for someone like Temple to be diagnosed back then. And the practices proposed by many back then for autism have largely been discredited now.
On the skilled trades: I graduated with honors from both high school and college; some thought I would end up a professor. But that path did not work out for me. I ended up in a small business, and then fixing up a couple of houses for my family to live in got me into the home remodeling field. Being intelligent was not a disadvantage for me; I was able to talk to my clients and explain why I did things in certain ways, and why some approaches did not work. I never got rich, but I made a living. My autistic "hyperfocus" meant I could do the picky jobs that drove everybody else crazy; but I could not lead a crew--I mostly worked alone or with one of my sons for a helper.
The labor shortage in the construction industry began in the '90s. At the last new house I worked on, in 1997, over the weeks we were there, I only saw one man who looked to be under 30.
I keep seeing politicians talking about building massive amounts of "affordable housing." It can't be done--we do not have the skilled manpower to produce it. During my high school years I lived in a subdivision on the north side of Cincinnati, OH that had been built from scratch starting in 1954. By 1960 it had 8000 people; and they were not only building houses, but streets, utility lines (water, sewer, electric) that had not existed before. These days you might see a builder working on a couple of streets--not a whole town.
Thank you for bringing this back into view for those of us that missed it the first time. The video was skillfully done and an amazing story. Interesting that the actor playing the teacher was Jason Bourne’s boss and nemesis and Claire Danes did an amazing job as a CIA agent in Homeland. Both of these showed highly intelligent people thinking differently, and the actors were totally believable in their roles. Something to ponder about creativity and courage to be different, while still remaining capable of the interfaces needed to work with others.