Second Conversation with Temple Grandin
America's destructive disdain for vocational-technical education. Innovation's need for small, nimble firms. Real-world eyeballing as check on academic stats. Different kinds of thinkers. Etc.
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 [2] (the second 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. The first Grandin interview is “Different, but Not Less: Robert Graboyes and Temple Grandin discuss the economic virtues of neurodiversity.”
SECOND CONVERSATION WITH TEMPLE GRANDIN:
Mathematics, visual thinking, innovation, education, and more
Conversation between Robert Graboyes and Temple Grandin, April 9, 2021. Discussion covers the role of small firms, skilled trades and failures of American education, different kinds of thinkers, and the cost of “curing” neurodiversity. 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 (“Second Conversation with Temple Grandin”) and try the audio link on that page.
Dr. Temple Grandin is one of the most fascinating and influential people on the planet. She vaulted to worldwide fame in 1995, when the late Oliver Sacks, the bard of neuroscience, described her in an essay titled “An Anthropologist on Mars.” Temple’s early life was the subject of an HBO movie titled “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. (Her mother is a striking character on her own and authored a fascinating account on her journey with Temple (A Thorn in My Pocket.)
In time, Temple 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.
What follows below are snippets from my April 2021 podcast with Temple Grandin. We discussed her work, her mind, and her history in considerable detail, along with science, business, and education.
SMALL FIRMS
GRABOYES: [I]nnovation seems to come from small firms [for three big reasons, I suspect]: [1] [U]nconventional thinkers. People who are autistic, ADHD, etc., are the source of a great deal of the world’s innovation … [2] [L]arge, established organizations—governments, large corporations, established corporations—resist hiring people like Temple Grandin. If they do hire someone like you, they waste the gifts that you have by trying to force you into a conventional employment path. [3] [T]he one environment that gives free rein to people like you is a small business—an entrepreneurial enterprise, where you’re not answering to HR and a big bureaucracy.
GRANDIN: Well, the vaccine’s a perfectly good idea of—small guys innovate. Little guys innovate. It’s Pfizer-BioNTech. Pfizer bankrolled it. I want to commend them for doing that. Little guys innovate. And they lots of times will innovate with stuff that’s considered weird ideas. … I used to say, “Big corporations get bureaucratic hardening of the arteries,” … where they’re too rigid to take a new idea. … I know people that are on the spectrum, people that are different; they all have small businesses. Or they work in a big business where he’s the strange guy in the shop. I worked with one of those in the ’80s and the early ’90s. He’s the weird guy in the shop and they just let him do his thing. Then he got shipped off to another factory and that was a disaster for him because they didn’t let him do his own thing.
THE COST OF “CURING” NEURODIVERSITY
GRABOYES: What would happen to innovation if we suddenly “cured” autism and ADHD and those were gone from the population?
GRANDIN: We’d pay a horrible price for that. In fact, there’s a paper I love, and the title of this paper is “Genomic Trade-Offs: Are Autism and Schizophrenia the Steep Price of the Human Brain?” The same genes that give humans a huge brain are also involved with autism. What happens in autism is you might build extra circuits back here in the art and math department. In schizophrenia you build a skimpy network that falls apart. … It takes a different kind of mind to come up with totally innovative things—like the RNA vaccine, as an example: a totally innovative thing.
VISUAL THINKING
GRANDIN: When I designed cattle facilities, I could see them in my head. Now, in order to be able to do that, I had to visit a lot of existing things—because I have to have pictures in the [mental] database. For certain kinds of problem-solving, visual thinking’s a real asset. Now, the problem I’ve got is I can’t do algebra. That is something that just keeps you out of a lot of things. … I spent 25 years working with construction—big projects. I worked with a lot of really brilliant, skilled tradespeople that invented all kinds of stuff. Some of them barely graduated from high school, but they were inventing things.
DIFFERENT KINDS OF THINKERS
GRABOYES: The late great physicist Richard Feynman said … “mathematically equivalent information formats need not be psychologically equivalent.” In other words, how you present the data, how you present statistics, matters a great deal. Not everyone responds the same way to every presentation. …
GRANDIN: That’s probably true, but one thing: as a visual thinker, I am into practical outcomes of things. How do you actually build a factory and make it actually work?
SIMPLICITY
GRANDIN: Sometimes, something very simple makes a big difference. I just got sent an email. It had a picture of a ramp on it for loading sheep, and I’m going, “Wait a minute, the cleats are too far apart. The sheep will slip.” That’s a very simple thing, so you just add an additional cleat and the sheep are going to be able to walk up there a lot easier.
LEARNING BY DOING
GRABOYES: My wife and son and I loved to go to … Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural studio in Arizona. [He] required the students there in the architecture school to do everything. They were not allowed to build a house until they had personally dug a foundation, laid bricks, hammered beams. They weren’t allowed to design a kitchen until they had actually spent time cooking for the whole school …
GRANDIN: And I’ve done things like that. I’ve operated all the equipment I designed, for example. I have a thing where I say, “We’ve got to get the suits out of the office,” so that something is not just a spreadsheet.
ORTHODOXY
GRANDIN: If you haven’t, in animal research, used the latest statistics, you don’t have rigor. Now, I’ve reviewed a lot of journal articles, and I looked at the methods section and I go, “OK, you may have all these fancy statistics, but you didn’t tell me what breed of cattle you used and how you housed your animals. Or some rodents. You didn’t tell me how these mice were housed, and that can affect the results of the experiment.”
REAL-WORLD DATA
GRABOYES: When I was at Columbia University, there was another student who was telling me about … his doctoral dissertation … . It was something to do with the distribution of liquor. [He] had a question of trying to resolve how liquor stores operate and was having trouble teasing it out of the data. …
I said, “Well, why don’t you go to some liquor stores and ask them?” He was horrified. It was “No, you can’t do that. It’s all in the algebra and the statistics.”
GRANDIN: Well, you have to go to the stores and find out what’s going on. OK, I’ve done some stuff. I’ve been in the back room of a lot of stores and stuff. One of the things is their supply chain. How much room do they have—how much inventory can they store? …
The Economist [magazine said] , “Let’s do just-in-time for car manufacturing.” We’ve got problems now with not enough electronic chips to put in cars. Just-in-time, when you have supply chain disruptions, is not too smart. You see, mathematically with all your algebra and everything else, it would come out great. But as soon as something goes wrong—you’ve got one little, tiny part this big—they can’t build the car.
VO-TECH’S DEMISE
GRABOYES: When I was in high school in the late 60s, early 70s, vocational education was a huge part of the school. They had shop, they had auto repair, they had plumbing, they had electrical—and all that stuff’s gone. I went on Facebook after [our first podcast] and asked, “Tell me about shop. What did it mean to you and what did it do for your life?” I got endless lists of people talking about, “Changed my life completely.” “I became a mechanic in the Navy, all because of what I had learned in high school.” …
GRANDIN: I found an article in the Economist magazine … about the state-of-the-art machine for making electronic chips. It comes from Holland, not the U.S. It’s based on physics research done in the U.S., but it’s from Holland. There’s a picture that the company gave out to the press, where the covers are taken off. This thing’s the size of a bus. You can see all these mechanical pipes and stuff. I go, “Wait a minute, it took a lot of skilled trades to build that.”… The reason why Holland’s making the chip-making machine and the poultry processing plant is because they didn’t take the skilled trades out [of schools] and they don’t stick their nose up at it.
WORLD-CHANGING IDEAS
GRABOYES: When I’ve been asked who are the most important people of the last century, I like to include some lesser-known names. One on the top of my list is Malcom McLean, who invented the shipping container. I assume that some mighty serious visual thinking went into the miracle of that invention and what it could possibly do.
GRANDIN: And it’s something that was such a radical idea, and you also had to invent all of the cranes to put it on the ship. But you also had to think about, well, backhauls—you don’t want to just give shipping containers away. …
I know that we get a lot of goods over here from Asia and China and other countries, and then you’ve got to have backhauls. We’re backhauling stuff like alfalfa hay to feed cattle. Just to have something to put in it for backhaul … bulk commodities, just so you have something to ship back, so you don’t pay to ship an empty box back.
GRABOYES: I read a book a couple of years ago. [The Sushi Economy] … [T]hey had all these planes bringing electronics from Japan and nothing to carry back on them. Someone got the idea of, let’s put Canadian fish on there and send it back to the sushi markets, and that [gave rise to the worldwide] sushi boom.
UNCONVENTIONAL WORK
GRABOYES: I always talk to Uber drivers because their stories are interesting. One of them was a young guy who was a strong-looking guy who had been a construction worker and had cancer. He was apparently on the mend; he was free of the cancer, but he no longer had the strength to work eight hours a day in a straight stretch.
He said, “I can work four hours. Then I have to go home and take a nap, and I can work four hours again. On a good day, I can take another nap and work another four hours, but I cannot work a stretch.” He said, “I wondered whether I would be able to earn a living, and someone told me about Uber.” He said, “I’ll do that. I’ll do three shifts. I’m making plenty of money. I’m independent, but I could never work in a conventional job.”
And his case made me wonder—for neurologically atypical people, ADHD people, for instance, who might not be able to work nine-to-five and be productive but can work in short bursts and bursts and bursts.
GRANDIN: I say, do internships, try on jobs. Everybody in animals wants to be a veterinarian because that’s the only animal career they get exposed to. OK, now you need to go shadow a veterinary practice and find out, is a pet practice something you really want to do? One student tries that and says, “I love it.” Another student goes, “That’s not for me.” …
Too many students get pushed by their parents to become a doctor, a lawyer, and hate it. You don’t want to end up doing that. … I find a lot of parents are so much into the verbal educational world. They don’t think to maybe have their autistic kid work at their friend’s florist shop. Just something simple like that, that doesn’t have too much multitasking, where they can learn some job skills.
The other thing is, the educational establishment in the verbal world is totally separated from all things in industry. They don’t understand how a shipping container even [works] —they don’t even know what it is.
THE WORLD NEEDS ALL KINDS OF MINDS
This video is a fine intro to Temple, her way of thinking, her work, and the economic importance of neurodiversity.
Inspiring story though I have to say that the most visible face of someone on the spectrum is Elon Musk.
"I have a thing where I say, “We’ve got to get the suits out of the office,” so that something is not just a spreadsheet."
An unpardonable faux-pas amongst the Professional Managerial Class. Same with the "ask at a liquor store" response.