318. Autism, Academics, and Animals | Dr. Temple Grandin
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 53 minutes
Words per Minute
169.89459
Summary
Dr. Temple Grandin revolutionized the animal handling industry over the last 40 years, and has done more for animal welfare in a practical sense than anybody else I know of. She is a professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University, and her facilities she has designed for handling livestock are used by companies all around the world. Her work has been instrumental in implementing animal welfare auditing programs now used by McDonalds, Wendy s, Whole Foods, and many other major corporations. In 2017, Dr. Grandin was inducted into the National Women s Hall of Fame. And in 2022, she was honored once again as a Colorado State Distinguished Professor. We re going to walk through her book, Thinking in Pictures, Livestock Handling in Transport, and The Autistic Brain. Let s learn what she has to say about thinking and language. She s also an accomplished author, with books such as Thinking In Pictures: A Guide to the Animal Brain, and Animals in Translation, as well as Visual Thinking, which has even made it to the New York Times Bestseller list. She has appeared on platforms such as 2020, Larry King Live, and Primetime, and is a regular guest on the Tonight Show with Rachel Maddow. Let s take a moment to remember that you are not alone in your journey. You are worthy of a brighter future you deserve it! Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, Daily Wire Plus is a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling Depression and Anxiousness. With decades of experience helping patients. Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series. With a roadmap towards healing, he provides a roadmap toward healing. If you re suffering, you re not alone, and there s a path to feeling better. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future that you deserve to be part of the brighter tomorrow you deserve. . Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. P. Peterson's new series on the Daily Wire PLUS on Dr. Petra Grandin's show on Depression and Anxiety, now and let me know how you re feeling better! . . . ...and let s all of us know what you think about it! . . , and ... , , and what you can do to help you feel better. . , . . and ... and how you can be a better version of yourself in the next episode.
Transcript
00:00:00.960
Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480
Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740
We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100
With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420
He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360
If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780
Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460
Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420
Hello everyone. I'm usually excited to have whoever I'm talking to that day on my show because I pick people I'm excited about talking to.
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But I'm particularly excited about my guest today, Dr. Temple Grandin.
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Temple Grandin revolutionized the animal handling industry over the last 40 years and has done more for animal welfare in a practical sense than anybody that I know of and perhaps anybody on the planet.
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She's a remarkable person. I saw her first in Tucson, Arizona. I'll talk about that a little bit in our interview.
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She gave one of the most compelling presentations I'd ever seen in an academic setting at a conference on consciousness and saw that about 15 years ago.
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And ever since then, I'd really been wanting to meet her, and I got to do that today, so that's so exciting.
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So I'll just give you a brief bio and we'll pop into the interview.
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Dr. Temple Grandin is a professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University.
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Facilities she has designed for handling livestock are used by companies all around the world.
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Her work has been instrumental in implementing animal welfare auditing programs, now used by McDonald's, Wendy's, Whole Foods, and many other major corporations.
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She has appeared on numerous shows across platforms, such as 2020, Larry King Live, and Primetime.
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Dr. Grandin is also an accomplished author, with books such as Thinking in Pictures, Livestock Handling in Transport, and The Autistic Brain.
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A few of her other publications, Animals in Translation, as well as Visual Thinking, have even made it to the New York Times bestseller list.
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In 2017, Dr. Grandin was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
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And in 2022, she was honored once again as a Colorado State Distinguished Professor.
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We're going to walk through her book today, and we're going to learn what she has to say now about thinking.
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So do you want to tell people about your realization, about different thought patterns?
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When I was in my 20s, I thought everybody thought in pictures the way I thought.
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I didn't know that other people thought in words until I was in my late 30s.
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Now, you've already mentioned, how do I categorize?
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Well, I'll explain as a child how I learned to categorize, categorizing with individual pictures.
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So as a very young child, I categorized cats, dogs, and horses by size,
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because in our neighborhood at that time, there were no cattle, and there were no small dogs.
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Then a dachshund came into my neighborhood, and she's the same size as a cat.
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And I remember looking at the dachshund, she was a black dachshund,
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and trying to figure out, now, what features does she share with the dog?
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Her nose shape is the same as a dog, and she smells like a dog.
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So I had to take other sensory-based things, like smell and what the dog sounded like,
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So the way I form categories is I have to have a bunch of information.
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And you look at a leopard's face, a lion's face, and even a house cat's face.
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There's similarities, and they also smell all the same, too.
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If you go to the zoo, you can smell how they are different.
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So the first step for abstract thinking is put making categories.
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So when I finally figured out that other people did not think in pictures,
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if I ask most people, visualize your own home, your dog, or your car, you will do it,
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But one time at an autism conference, when I was in my late 30s,
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I asked a speech therapist, think about a church steeple,
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and I was shocked that the only image he saw was a very vague two lines like this,
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They come up like a series of, well, back then, 35-millimeter slides.
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And then I can start, as I see more and more of these churches,
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I can put them into New England-type category, stone cathedral-type.
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Looks like a warehouse, and it has a little plastic steeple type.
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I can make finer categories as I get more and more specific images.
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And I learned that that's exactly how an artificial intelligence program
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and another training set of every kind of skin rash and mosquito bite
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And then it learns to categorize melanoma from non-melanoma.
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when I learned that that's how the simple type of artificial intelligence programs work.
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So let me ask you, when I'm thinking something through,
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now I can think in pictures, and if I'm building something
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or trying to design something to build, then I tend to think in pictures.
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But I would say 90% of the time, my proclivity is to think in words.
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And I would say, in part, that's because my word thinking is so dominant.
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takes the form of something like internal argumentation.
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And then I'll think up a bunch of reasons why that answer isn't sufficient.
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And that's occupying me continually, like 16 hours a day, nonstop.
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And it's been like that ever since I was two years old,
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So, yeah, so how do you, do you conduct internal arguments?
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Or like what accounts for the, so part of the creativity in my thinking
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But you're thinking in pictures, so you're not having internal arguments.
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Well, when it comes to things like designing equipment,
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I often will kind of, a lot of equipment design,
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In one of my other books, I wrote about the inventor of Velcro,
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You know, cockle burrs on those kind of things stuck on his clothes.
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And that's where he got the idea for making Velcro.
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well, they've got similarities on how they stick together.
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In designing equipment, I can just see how it operates.
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so I read Nikolai Tesla's biography a long while back,
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And he claimed, and I have no reason to disbelieve him,
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detailed out to the point where he knew the angles on the screws
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And he would try to write them down in something,
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that you could make a blueprint out of, let's say,
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And sometimes a new invention would pop into his head
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so quickly that it would obliterate the previous one.
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And so there's that incredible fluency in visualization.
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do you think of the object that you're attempting to design
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and then multiple variants of it and test them against each other?
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Or does it just come to you as a solution for a given problem?
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and someone had made a cardboard old-fashioned locomotive,
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you know, and the wheels have those links between them.
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You know, and it was just a cartoon train for a party.
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But I immediately noticed that they didn't draw it right.
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and photography equipment and stuff all around me,
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And I'll tell you how I access my memory for that key word.
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That's right, there's a whole underground economy
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That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash jordan
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so my wife has a very powerful visual imagination.
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She's able to do all sorts of remarkable things with it.
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And one of the things that strikes me as highly probable
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And so, like, I was a fairly vivid dreamer for years,
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while you were setting up all the camera equipment,
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supporting the, a lot of the things that are in the book.
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and, boy, you can sometimes find some great stuff
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where they, where Disney made a whole bunch of their stuff.
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And then there's, then there's the mechanical part
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but you also, the rides have to mechanically work.
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They're kind of done by two separate departments.
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And so one of the things that characterizes autism
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in some important and emotionally significant way.
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But if there's one pixel off on an electronic sign,
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And they were right beside me when we walked in.
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So for me, I think I can detect anomalies visually.
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So, for example, one of the things I learned to do
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when I was setting up my house and renovating places
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So like I know when the pilots do the checklist
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we're going to have an air traffic control delay.
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I can feel it on the biggest aircraft there is.
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my kind of mind is not going to touch boilers and
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part of this is the fact that you know for a long
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machinery just worked and so we could afford to
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our cars worked and our power grids worked and we
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could take all of this low-level infrastructure for
01:09:05.920
granted now that meant there were a lot of people on
01:09:08.240
the shop floors who were busily working making sure it
01:09:11.400
worked but it did mean that we had the luxury to engage in
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abstract specialization and maybe we could fall prey to the
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psychological tendency to just dismiss all that
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well you see when they first started about 20 years ago is
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when they started taking shop classes out of the schools well
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you can get away with that for a while and then the people I
01:09:34.320
worked with I'm gray now are retiring they're retiring out and
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they're not getting replaced that's happening with elevator and
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escalator mechanics that's happening with airplane mechanics and
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I'm seeing that more and more and more and more as I travel these
01:09:51.360
are free things that I see all the time and they are getting gray
01:09:56.320
right right so yeah the retirement problem is going to be
01:10:02.000
the retirement problem is going to be a big one
01:10:04.320
when it comes to industry there's two gigantic mistakes that were made
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20 years ago we had a huge metal working shop called the Montfort Fab Shop
01:10:16.960
and it was part of the engineering of a company called Montfort so they no
01:10:21.200
longer exist now well that's been shut down and then at the same time we
01:10:25.920
took out shop classes now in the short run it was cheaper for
01:10:30.800
these companies to just farm out engineering work they need to do in
01:10:34.560
their plant yeah that works fine until the shops retire out and now what's
01:10:40.560
happened like I can't go in the name give you the name of the company but I
01:10:44.040
have a client right now where the one shop that's left is ripping
01:10:48.280
people off at five times the price and that's happening right now right
01:10:53.000
do you see any positive consequences of computer technology for object
01:11:00.680
visualizers and for the for the people who are working more in the visual
01:11:04.040
spatial end of things well it's definitely useful to you know like the
01:11:08.920
visualization and stuff you can do on computers but that doesn't replace
01:11:14.120
real things let me tell you power grid I lay awake at night about that and
01:11:19.800
that's so fragile that I'm not I'm not going to go into any detail because it's
01:11:23.240
too fragile and I'm not going to discuss the things that I visualize and lay
01:11:28.040
awake at night about the power grid because it's just okay fragile
01:11:34.200
okay I'm curious about that why not discuss them because I don't want to
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give I don't want to give people that have bad intentions any information on how
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to hurt the power grid okay okay okay that's the reason I see
01:11:46.280
that is the reason right because it's very easy so when you
01:11:50.760
hurt it and I don't want to give out any information that would help somebody
01:11:54.200
damage the power grid so I don't discuss the details here but I'm seeing them
01:11:58.680
right now right right right yeah well that's part of that ability to think
01:12:04.600
about critical points of failure well there's so much characteristic of
01:12:08.200
engineering mind I know where the critical points of failure are and I'm not
01:12:12.040
going to discuss them right right so we can all be thankful that
01:12:16.840
you're not a terrorist yeah I'll be thankful I'm not a criminal yes exactly
01:12:23.400
exactly yeah well I've always often been afraid when thinking along the same
01:12:28.360
lines that you're describing of just exactly how fragile things are in that
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regard and how much someone with a good imagination how much damage they could
01:12:37.320
do if they targeted things properly it is really quite frightening to apprehend
01:12:42.040
well that's why there's certain things about the power grid I am not going to
01:12:45.480
discuss and I'm seeing three big fat critical control points right now I'm
01:12:55.560
right so so could we talk a little bit about the specifics of your work I
01:13:00.360
remember one of the stories you told at this Tucson conference was about
01:13:04.520
you talked about cows that they would do such things as go into a field and look at
01:13:09.000
a if you look left a briefcase on the field for example the cows would
01:13:12.280
eventually come and look at it that's right a cows in a in a line might be
01:13:17.320
stopped by something like a coke bottle in their path and so you used your
01:13:23.240
ability to think like animals to design systems for animal handling that were
01:13:29.560
much more humane so could you walk us through that a little bit
01:13:32.600
well the first work I did with cattle was in the 70s in Arizona I when I
01:13:38.520
didn't even know that I had was a visual thinker and other people were not a
01:13:41.640
visual thinker and I noticed that if there was a coat hung on the fence the
01:13:46.200
cattle would stop on if there was a shadow or reflection off a vehicle so I
01:13:52.760
got down in the chutes to see what they were seeing and I would take pictures
01:13:56.760
down inside the chute and people thought that was kind of crazy but now I'm I like
01:14:04.520
right just recently did start up at a really big plant and at 10 o'clock in the
01:14:08.920
morning everything was working fine and then at 3 o'clock in the afternoon a big
01:14:13.480
shadow appeared I call it the spider monster and it was just a shadow when
01:14:17.960
these cattle decided they weren't going to walk over that so they'll have to build
01:14:21.880
a roof over the facility so that the cattle can't see the spider monster
01:14:27.000
uh the other thing I'm I show I show people how to do is watch your lead animal
01:14:32.280
your lead animal will come up and stop and look at the thing they don't like
01:14:36.040
the same plant on the night shift okay the shadow monster wouldn't be there
01:14:40.520
they either the guy calls me and he goes they go halfway up the chute and stop
01:14:46.120
all right what do I do I said now bring up a nice calm bunch of cattle watch your leader
01:14:51.000
really carefully he'll look right at the thing he doesn't like and there was an LED light on the
01:14:57.160
corner of a building and they took that down and then everything worked fine how do you identify
01:15:04.920
the leader well there's always a leader when when all right let's say I take a 20 head of cattle out
01:15:11.320
of a pan there's a lead animal that walks out first usually one of the more bold animals not the
01:15:18.760
dominant animal the dominant animal that pushes the others away from the feed trough he's in the
01:15:23.320
middle of the herd or she's in the middle of the herd but the leader will come out of the pen first
01:15:27.800
and the other cat will follow and it's just the first animal in the group is a leader it's that
01:15:32.920
simple you see as we're talking about that I'm seeing it okay so so is that leader stable across
01:15:40.600
instances of leadership and is that associated with this ability to find what's anomalous and to deal
01:15:46.440
with well in cattle that have lived together for a while tend to stay in the same order you know
01:15:54.360
years ago when your tags came out that were sequentially numbered in other words you could
01:15:58.440
just buy a package of ear tags labeled one through 200 and they put them on their cattle and one of
01:16:05.480
the things that surprised ranchers when maybe 200 cattle came back the following year to go through
01:16:10.360
the shoots to get vaccinated and they were coming through in almost the same order you know that's
01:16:17.320
a group of cattle that live together okay is there something okay so you made the observation that the
01:16:25.080
lead animal will stop and look at the thing that he doesn't like and so are the other animals and but
01:16:32.040
also that lead animal wasn't the physically dominant animal he's got some other characteristics
01:16:37.160
the animal is dominant at the pushing others away from the water trough or the feed trough
01:16:41.720
but the but once the lead animal walks the other cattle usually will follow same thing with shape
01:16:47.720
the other animals will usually follow right so you remove the distractions that the lead animals reacting
01:16:53.000
to and and at this particular plant we had two things we had to get rid of we had to get rid of this
01:16:58.520
shadow the spider monster shadow and we had to get rid of an led light that was on the corner of a building
01:17:03.880
so do you have any sense on of why the other animals come to rely on the lead animal like what's the
01:17:13.320
lead animal being selected for or is it just a first mover like what's the nature of this lead animal
01:17:18.760
you see there's different levels of fear in animals genetically some animals are more bold other
01:17:24.280
animals are more shy or you can call those high and low fear and the animal that's more bold is more
01:17:31.880
likely to be the leader than the animal that's more anxious um and and uh you know if you know
01:17:41.640
a bunch of cattle that have lived together all the time you know that there'll be certain animals that
01:17:46.200
tend to be the leaders and then you've got the great big one with the giant horns and she shoves
01:17:50.920
everybody else away from the feed trough there's something that's very profound about that because
01:17:55.640
you're laying out the fact that it isn't the dominant animal that leads no and that it's the animal
01:18:01.000
that's exploratory and that's right somewhat willing to take risks that that's right but also absolutely
01:18:07.320
also that the that the lead animal will spot anomaly right like the spider monster that you're describing
01:18:14.040
and so it's not like they're they're so bold that they're completely without fear they're still acting
01:18:20.600
cautiously in some sense all right so you can walk the lead animal down a chute and you can see what it's
01:18:26.120
going to see and you can actually do that because you go down there and do it but you also think that
01:18:30.760
way you gotta bring your cat up really calmly to see because if you bring them up at a run then the
01:18:35.080
leader just turns back and you don't know what it's reacting to oh yeah i said to him now bring him up
01:18:39.640
nice and calm watch the leader come up the chute and when he stops he'll look right at the thing he
01:18:45.640
doesn't like and he looked at the led light on the corner of the building then they texted me a picture of
01:18:50.600
it and they got rid of that and that fixed the problem now have you have you have you developed
01:18:59.240
some sort of picture of the class of things that stop cattle yes yes i talked about the spider okay
01:19:06.200
so tell me what sort of things tend to stop cattle i have pictures i have checklists of things to look
01:19:12.760
for reflections on water uh at this particular plant there was a gate handle a gate handle that
01:19:19.960
jiggled and it was right by the chute entrance i said that needs to be fixed so this gate handle
01:19:25.640
doesn't vibrate so what's common do you what's common about the things that stop cattle in their
01:19:33.800
tracks or or can you extract out let's look at let's look at cattle's a prey species animal so you're
01:19:40.840
looking for things that might be a danger some little little bits of rapid movement set them off
01:19:48.840
and and something that sort of like shouldn't be there like you can put a white plastic bottle
01:19:55.720
in the entrance of the chute now about shut a meat plant down
01:20:00.440
i they'll just keep turning back away from it turning back away from it
01:20:05.560
right so they're looking for something that doesn't fit the environment that's right and that's
01:20:09.880
probably doing something like activating predator detection well that's right it's like that you
01:20:14.600
know they they're looking for stuff that uh you know a movement in the bushes maybe that's a mountain
01:20:20.440
lion or a wolf some little movement in the bushes the other thing about new experiences if you take
01:20:27.480
something like camera equipment cattle love camera equipment you put an expensive camera in the middle of
01:20:33.080
the pasture they will come up and knock it over and lick it to death that's what they will do see
01:20:39.720
things that are novel are attractive when the animal can voluntarily approach and scary if you
01:20:46.760
suddenly shove it in their face you suddenly shove it in their face then it's scary
01:20:53.080
right and so the best way that's a introduce new things to cattle is to let them voluntarily approach
01:20:59.560
it i don't know how many times people say to me my horse was fine at home he went crazy at the show
01:21:05.480
well you've got a lot of novel stuff there like flags for example so you better get your horse used
01:21:10.600
to flags before you go there and the best way to get them used to flags would be to decorate the
01:21:15.080
pasture with flags and let your animal walk up and voluntarily approach them right right well you know
01:21:21.800
that's exactly what you do in psychotherapy when you're trying to help people overcome a phobia
01:21:26.360
right so if someone's afraid of an elevator and won't get in it that often happens with agoraphobia
01:21:32.040
what you do is you say to them okay um let's start by imagining elevators so that's going to make you
01:21:39.560
a bit nervous but imagine an elevator at some distance that doesn't make you uncomfortable okay
01:21:46.360
okay and then you say okay well now you've done that see if you can move yourself in your mind closer to
01:21:52.920
the elevator door and then you keep doing that but it has to be voluntary it's 100 absolutely
01:21:59.080
necessary for it to be okay so maybe you run them through this imaginal exposure therapy and then you
01:22:05.240
say okay for our next session what we're going to do is we're going to go out in the hallway you know
01:22:08.680
that elevator you wouldn't take we're going to go out the hallway we're going to stand 200 feet away
01:22:13.000
from the elevator and you're just going to look at it if you can and so they'll do that has to be
01:22:18.760
voluntary and then you can get them 150 feet away and 100 feet away and soon they'll be right up to
01:22:24.200
the elevator door i was very anxious uh as you know in my 20s and i got terrified of airplanes
01:22:32.360
because i was an extremely scary emergency landing when i was a senior in high school
01:22:37.480
they put the slides down and the whole thing very very scary and one of the ways i got over that is i had
01:22:43.720
to make aviation interesting and when i got the ride in the cockpit of a plane flying uh holstein
01:22:50.920
heifers to puerto rico uh that made it interesting you make something scary interesting because i know
01:22:59.640
another thing they do on the elevator phobias is they show them how the safety mechanisms work
01:23:04.760
that the elevator is not going to fall down the shaft
01:23:06.920
yeah well you you you know you even compel that interest to some degree so for example
01:23:14.440
once you get a phobic person inside an elevator what they'll tend to do is look at their feet
01:23:21.640
and so you say to them look quit looking at your feet look at each corner of the elevator look at all
01:23:27.640
the numbers look at the display panel like you have to facilitate their voluntary visual exploration okay
01:23:35.000
and to some degree what you're doing is you're calling out their interest to say attend to all
01:23:40.600
of these things as if they're interesting and then that's how they familiarize themselves with the
01:23:45.640
elevator and they also note that while they're in there because you have to look at the elevator to
01:23:49.960
know you're in an elevator right literally you have to move your eyes and point at all the different
01:23:55.000
parts of the elevator and the more that you can help people do that at a high level of detailed
01:23:59.800
resolution voluntarily the more likely they are not not only to become less afraid of the elevator is
01:24:06.360
that that actually isn't what happens is you actually train them in a form of exploratory bravery
01:24:12.600
because what you teach them is that if they use their eyes voluntarily to scan what they're afraid of
01:24:18.200
they'll become braver and then that generalizes to all sorts of other instances too so if you train
01:24:25.560
someone to be less afraid of an elevator they're much less afraid of other things as well
01:24:29.480
well that's right and the thing that we're seeing i'm seeing right now in dogs you know we have very
01:24:35.640
strict lease laws here and there's more problems with dogs being afraid of the veterinarian because
01:24:40.760
they haven't been out experiencing enough stuff like strange people touching them for example just
01:24:45.320
going to lots of different places you know this is the reason why when they train service dog puppies
01:24:51.000
you take them everywhere so that there's almost nothing that will frighten them
01:24:55.640
yes yeah well that that that's the same argument you were making earlier about the fact that to train
01:25:03.960
people practically we have to put them in a lot of different practical hands-on situations
01:25:08.840
and so that they can generalize across all those instances and so experience that's too narrow is too
01:25:15.160
is too restrictive well when i get worried that we're going to have people making policy on all kinds of
01:25:20.280
important stuff um when they're so far removed from the world of the practical you see we need to have
01:25:29.000
both because all the problem with us practical people is we're not organized enough that's where
01:25:35.080
just about every tech company has to hire a suit eventually just to keep the company organized
01:25:41.400
somebody's got to pay the payroll somebody's got to pay the taxes somebody has to make sure the rent is
01:25:46.680
paid you know if they need more office space then they've got to go out and go shopping for office
01:25:52.440
space you know there there's uh well and we really do need all the different kinds of minds
01:25:59.960
well when i look at the ideological solutions that are being put forward to the world's problems
01:26:05.080
continually i do wonder the same thing you're wondering about which is is this empty ideological
01:26:12.840
representation a consequence of the fact that the people who are doing this have no practical
01:26:17.400
experience at all it's like they're not thinking at the level of detail well i think that it's a
01:26:22.680
problem because when i worked originally this is over 20 years ago with mcdonald's burger king and wendy's
01:26:28.120
and they took the top managers out into the field and implemented the auditing program it was
01:26:34.920
interesting to see how the animal welfare uh issue went from an abstraction give it to legal give it to
01:26:41.960
public relations to something real that they really needed to address you know half dead animals going
01:26:48.680
into your products not okay right right right broken stunning equipment is totally terrible and not okay
01:26:56.040
and that's mainly a management problem and failure to do maintenance and and i and and when i worked on
01:27:03.400
that in 1999 i got five journal articles published on this and i saw more change than i'd seen in
01:27:09.960
in in in my whole career when these big companies were inspecting these plants but i figured out a
01:27:16.920
very simple scoring system if you couldn't shoot 95 of those cattle dead on the first shot you failed
01:27:23.160
the mcdonald's audit it was that simple some very simple critical control points if you had more than
01:27:28.600
three percent of your cattle bellering their heads off when you're handling them you failed the mcdonald's
01:27:32.840
audit okay so why why why did that turn out to be the critical issue well they um broken stunners
01:27:40.200
were a big issue now on the handling i figured out a way to score that that's very simple vocalization
01:27:45.960
if you're poking cattle with too many electric prods or you're slamming doors on them or whatever
01:27:51.160
they're going to be bellering their heads off and i better not hear any bellering coming out of the
01:27:56.760
place where they kill them i hear bellering coming out of there somebody needs to get kicked off the
01:28:01.400
approved supplier list it's that simple that's one of the critical control right so you used so you used
01:28:07.880
animal distress as an indication of that's right efficiency of process okay can you can you walk us
01:28:14.120
through some of your designs i mean you designed these these circular um cattle enclosures as well to
01:28:20.680
to calm them down the circular designs are really nice but i'm also very proud of the fact there were 75
01:28:26.280
plants on the mcdonald's approved supplier list only three had to buy fancy expensive equipment
01:28:33.800
everybody else we fixed with management yeah three managers had to be removed i call that manager
01:28:38.280
ectomy um a lot of non-slip flooring had to go in because one of the things we measure is slipping
01:28:43.880
and falling and lighting cattle are scared of the dark um training people to move smaller groups of
01:28:51.960
animals and and uh put a solid side up so they don't see the vehicles passing by and these very
01:28:59.400
simple changes we were able to fix some of the older places and i'm very i used all my design ability to
01:29:05.320
figure out how to make some of the older facilities work even though they did not have the fancy new
01:29:10.280
equipment and then we had three plants only three plants had to do a front-end remodel that was very
01:29:17.560
very expensive that's three out of 75 i'm really proud of that oh yeah that's all the big pork plants
01:29:23.320
in the u.s right so so tell me tell me tell me tell me what your goals were okay so let's walk this
01:29:30.920
through at the level of detail so why don't you tell people about how these cattle handling plants
01:29:35.640
work broadly speaking from from the time the cattle arrived till the time they were processed let's say
01:29:41.320
and then how are you brought in to fix them well unloading a truck make sure you have a non-slip
01:29:48.680
unloading ramp open the gates up let them out you do not need to scream at them pound on the vehicle
01:29:53.960
or stick electric pads in through the holes in the side of the truck so let the cattle just get off
01:29:58.920
and they will and then they should walk quietly out of the truck if they got a scale weigh them on the
01:30:05.080
scale and then quietly walk into a holding pen get a drink of water maybe lay down now when it's
01:30:11.080
time to go up to the plant somebody should come down bring a group of 20 out not a group of 50
01:30:17.640
and you quietly walk them up the alley to where they get to where the round crowd pen is
01:30:23.720
and the whole thing should be a calm walk without slipping and falling and without mooing and bellering
01:30:30.280
and and almost no electric prods that and it should all be very calm walking is what it should be
01:30:38.440
right and and how many plants did you go analyze we they we we had 75 plants on the on the approved
01:30:47.480
supplier list and um only three of them had to have extensive renovations but we did have three
01:30:54.360
plants where the plant manager had to be removed right and so in those cases yeah why did you remove
01:31:00.120
the managers well the ones where we were able to get rid of the plant manager was the corporate ones
01:31:05.880
uh the plant then we had one plant that we used to call the problem child and management was family
01:31:11.320
and we couldn't get rid of it and that plant would like you know fail an audit and then pass an audit and
01:31:16.440
ah uh but management has to decide that they're going to do things right you can have the best equipment
01:31:23.720
and it's not going to work if it's not managed in fact before we started these audits i had a lot of
01:31:30.760
equipment out in the field lots of equipment half my clients tore it up and wrecked it and one of the
01:31:35.880
what the customer inspections and audits did is force the plant to manage the stuff they had either brand new
01:31:43.800
fancy stuff or older stuff and so how broadly did your innovation spread and how rapidly and what were the
01:31:52.280
consequences of that for the meat handling industry in general well the auditing program was within six
01:31:58.920
months as the year of 1999 was adopted by mcdonald's wendy's and burger king and that covers just about
01:32:05.160
all the big beef plants and i saw more improvement than i'd seen in a 25 year career prior to that
01:32:13.000
people were no longer using broken equipment they were moving smaller groups of animals
01:32:18.120
uh things were kept prepared and um and employees were better supervised and boy it made a big
01:32:25.720
difference so why do you think you were able to do this i mean you obviously can solve the problem
01:32:32.760
practically but how were you able to um make your way in the corporate world in a manner that actually
01:32:39.720
resulted a and people listening to you and b and changes actually being made because that's that's
01:32:45.320
quite a remarkable combination of unlikely achievements all right let's start off i started
01:32:50.440
out with equipment this was in my 20s and i found that selling equipment was much easier than getting
01:32:56.680
people to manage equipment correctly and early in my career i made the mistake that a lot of young
01:33:01.720
engineers make i thought i could make a self-managing cattle handling facility that is bs and i got a lot of
01:33:09.720
systems out there the other thing that helped me to get systems out into the industry is i wrote about
01:33:15.400
them and i wrote about them in the meat industry and cattle industry trade press wrote all kinds of
01:33:21.960
articles just about how to do it so now i had a lot of equipment out there center track restrainer and
01:33:28.520
lots and lots of these big plants had one it's a piece of equipment i developed with the guys in the
01:33:33.480
shop that i've talked to you about earlier but half my clients tore it up and wrecked it then i worked
01:33:40.360
with a lady named janet riley at the american meat institute and i came up with this very very simple
01:33:47.800
scoring system for evaluating meat packing plants and we wrote it up in our guidelines nobody used it for
01:33:54.680
two years then mcdonald's approached me to implement their animal welfare auditing program
01:34:04.120
and it started out taking vice president level managers out of the office they saw some bad
01:34:10.520
stuff and it started out as little training program they already had food safety auditors in the plants
01:34:18.040
auditing them that was already being done and so i took the trained the food safety auditors to do the
01:34:24.920
animal welfare audit and within six months i saw more change that i had seen in my whole career prior to
01:34:32.680
that then wendy's got on board then burger king got on board and i made sure that everybody used the
01:34:38.200
exact same score so it was absolutely clear it was like traffic rules you know you know they measure
01:34:44.440
speeding we measured how many vocalizations the cattle did we measured how many animals fell down those
01:34:50.360
things were measured and the plants had to make certain numbers it was absolutely clear there were five
01:34:56.520
critical control points and they had to do all five of them to pass the audit i kind of sometimes
01:35:02.200
can't believe i pulled it off it worked me on my wildest dreams but it was absolutely practical
01:35:08.040
right right yeah well it did it is it is quite a remarkable thing to pull off to to be able to
01:35:14.840
make that kind of change in the corporate world so quickly that's that's really quite remarkable the
01:35:19.400
other reason i was able to make change i i practiced reverse conflict of interest i had a lot of expensive
01:35:25.640
equipment already out in the plants i bent over backwards in the older facilities to figure out how to make
01:35:32.280
that older facility work without buying expensive equipment let me tell you non-slip flooring it can
01:35:38.120
work wonders you know we did quite a lot of that right right but that's not that's not expensive
01:35:43.880
equipment and i'm really proud of the fact that took some of the older facilities and we made them work
01:35:49.160
and then we did have three only three out of 75 plants that had to build an expensive front end remodel
01:35:56.280
and that was very expensive so what would you say if if you had to put it into a few phrases
01:36:05.080
you you weren't obviously pursuing mere narrow profit at that time not that there's anything
01:36:10.680
wrong with profit you you were serving some other goal i was serving the goal of improving animal
01:36:16.760
welfare and i've been over backwards to do reverse conflict of interest and i tried to take some of
01:36:23.960
those older facilities right some of them a bit shabby and make them work with simple changes
01:36:31.400
like repairs non-slip flooring changing the lighting and three plants had to have the plant
01:36:37.240
manager removed and that solved the problem so what why were you cons why were you so concerned with
01:36:43.240
animal welfare and how would you define animal welfare what why did that become paramount in your
01:36:48.440
in your hierarchy of goals well one of the reasons why i started working on the equipment is like the
01:36:54.040
way cattle were being handled was horrible you know electric prods on 100 percent of them falling down
01:36:58.760
crashing into things people screaming at them uh cattle handling in the 80s was terrible absolutely
01:37:05.000
terrible and i i saw that is something that i could fix now i talked to a lot of young people today
01:37:12.840
that want to you know do activism about some specific thing and it's way too broad i want justice in
01:37:18.760
the world for example right yes might be something they would say yes yes and i say why don't you do
01:37:23.720
something more targeted like using dna to show that this prisoner was falsely accused you see now that's
01:37:31.000
something a lot more targeted that you can actually do yes absolutely and i think that is a huge problem
01:37:38.040
with the way that kids are trained morally in universities is that that grandiose vague
01:37:44.680
activism replaces the actual practicalities of problem solving that you're describing that
01:37:50.280
actually make a difference why do you think it was that animal suffering stood out for you is it is
01:37:55.800
it partly because you you can think like animals like what why do you think well you would how would
01:38:00.440
you like to get shocked to electric prods and be slipping and falling and crashing into fences and things
01:38:04.840
like that you'd be terrified um and my goal was to improve how the cattle were treated when i talked
01:38:14.360
to students about you know activism i said what i worked on wasn't everything bad happening to animals
01:38:22.280
i worked on something targeted the thing that i'm seeing now with young people that want to make
01:38:26.760
a difference they say i want to have justice in the world or i want to like animals are treated terrible
01:38:32.280
we got to do something about it and i'm saying you're going to be more effective if you pick out
01:38:38.440
something relatively targeted i worked on cattle handling to start with that's not everything to
01:38:44.840
do with animals yes exactly or the example of using dna to show that this criminal was innocent
01:38:52.360
that's something much more doable and targeted that you can actually do right so how was it that the
01:38:59.160
suffering of animals in meat tracking in meat packing plants came to your attention to begin
01:39:04.280
with so you said the suffering you found that unbearable first of all it started out um when
01:39:09.480
i went out to the feed yards uh handling cattle back in the 70s there's a lot of really horrible cattle
01:39:15.160
handling and i i i made a mistake in the beginning that a lot of young engineers make they think technology
01:39:23.320
can solve all their problems and i mistakenly believed that i could build a self-managing
01:39:29.560
cattle handling facility that's nonsense i know that now that's nonsense good equipment makes good
01:39:35.800
handling better but it doesn't replace management and what the auditing program did is it forced people
01:39:41.960
to manage the facilities and why why were you at the cattle handling facilities to begin with i mean
01:39:48.680
was this part of your academic training or was this part of the fact that you'd grown up on a farm
01:39:53.800
well i got interested in going out to my aunt's ranch and this brings up the other things students
01:39:58.840
get interested in stuff they get exposed to it's that simple in in one of the people i profiled in
01:40:06.920
visual thinking was michelangelo grubby little 12 year old dropped out of school but he was running
01:40:13.960
around all the churches seeing great art and he grew up with stone cutting tools okay that's the
01:40:19.800
exposure then he started making some stuff and then an artist took him in as an apprentice that's
01:40:25.320
mentoring good careers start first with exposure and the other reason why i'm so concerned about
01:40:31.400
taking all the hands-on stuff out of the schools is those things like let's say theater for example
01:40:36.440
expose students i didn't care about being in the play but i loved making scenery and costumes
01:40:43.080
that i loved doing now that's something that can become a career so let let me we're running out
01:40:50.360
of time on this segment let me ask you one more question and then maybe i'll sum up our discussion
01:40:54.680
for everybody or try to extract out the gist you think primarily in pictures but you're also an
01:41:00.600
extremely effective verbal communicator i mean you've written a number of books you can obviously talk
01:41:05.320
your way into corporate environments and help people walk through the complex process of restructuring
01:41:11.080
say animal handling on a pretty much on a national scale how did you how do you think you've been
01:41:17.160
able to develop your verbal ability like what what did you do to manage that all right it goes back to
01:41:22.760
when i was seven years old in my neighborhood all the kids when they were seven when the parents had a
01:41:27.560
party you had to put your good clothes on greet the guests and serve the snacks be little hosts and
01:41:32.760
hostesses that's what you had to do um i sold candy for charity that helped me on talking to people
01:41:40.440
the other thing i figured out very early on is back doors into jobs and most people don't see this
01:41:46.680
in the hbo movie temple grandin there's a scene where i go up to the editor of our state farm magazine
01:41:51.960
and i get his card because i knew if i wrote for that magazine that would help my career
01:41:56.760
that's a back door writing i did a lot of writing this how to handle cattle how to design facilities
01:42:06.360
and i was so happy when one of my very early articles got picked up by two other magazines
01:42:11.880
you know and it made the national scene of course this is all you know pre-internet and then that press
01:42:18.120
pass got me into all kinds of meetings that helped me to get into my self-made internship with a swift
01:42:24.680
plant i recognized the back doors most people don't recognize the back doors but lots of good
01:42:31.000
jobs are gotten through the back door right so you allied your ability to concentrate on focal details
01:42:39.400
practically with the ability and the willingness to communicate on at all sorts of different levels
01:42:45.080
verbally you're able to bring that's getting too abstract for me i just go okay i got the card
01:42:51.400
within a week i made i had done a master's thesis on cattle behavior in different types of squeeze shoots
01:42:58.200
and i i sent them a good article and they published it then i went back to them and said
01:43:04.040
maybe i could just write something for you every month i just walked into the office and asked that job
01:43:10.440
so i did that as a volunteer for about three or four months and then they started paying me
01:43:13.720
i wasn't shy to walk up and ask right right so so you developed a communication communication
01:43:23.720
expertise and a communication network at the same time that you were trying to implement your practical
01:43:28.920
solutions and both of those facilitated each other on the very beginning i wasn't even designing
01:43:34.360
facilities and then i i was um just visiting all these feed yards and writing for the magazine and that
01:43:41.880
press pass got me into all kinds of places i recognized the value of that press pass it got
01:43:49.240
me into meetings in the 70s with 600 registration fees i was no way i could have afforded that this is
01:43:55.640
seven right right right so what what are you working on now you finished this this new book that came out
01:44:02.360
in 2022 what are you doing now well i'm very interested in seeing the kids who think differently
01:44:08.280
get into good careers and that's going to be a major emphasis of the things that i do now be a lot of
01:44:14.760
speaking engagements a lot of you know interviews like this because i want to see those kids that are
01:44:20.600
different get into good jobs okay if they're visual object visualizer like me maybe an art job maybe
01:44:27.240
photography job or a job building things if they're the more mathematical visual spatial a good programming
01:44:33.720
job a good um uh mathematics or chemistry job where you need the mathematics there's too many kids that
01:44:42.040
think differently um some of them are just kind of going nowhere i want to see them get into good careers and do
01:44:48.760
things that will be constructive in the world do something constructive
01:44:54.120
so we're we're going to switch over to the additional half an hour that i produced for
01:45:00.760
the daily wire plus platform to delve into some of the biographical details of your life
01:45:06.760
before we close i'd like to just sort of wander over the territory that we've covered and see if
01:45:11.160
there's anything else see if you think this is a reasonable summary and if there's anything else you
01:45:15.720
want to add i've been talking with dr temple grandin today who's who's developed a spectacular career in
01:45:23.880
modifying animal handling and also managed a lot on the more purely intellectual front as well in terms
01:45:31.320
of conceptualization of information processing she's uh we talked a lot today about the difference in
01:45:38.520
in in in the ways that people think concentrating mostly on the distinction between visual thinkers
01:45:45.000
who tend to be more practical and detail oriented and who can be broadly differentiated into two
01:45:51.240
categories and those would be object visualizers and people who think more visual spatially and
01:45:57.000
mathematically contrasting them with people who think more verbally we talked a fair bit about the
01:46:03.080
prioritization of more verbal and abstract thinking at the cost of this practical thinking and
01:46:09.880
training in that practical thinking we discussed how that's affected the school system and
01:46:14.760
broader culture we discussed the dangers that poses to the integrity of our society as we
01:46:20.680
lose the people who have the hands-on knowledge we talked about the psychological danger that poses
01:46:26.440
to people who think more practically concretely and ver and visually who are in school systems that
01:46:33.480
are optimized for the verbal thinkers we talked about temple's um career at the detail level um
01:46:44.200
ameliorating the suffering of animals that across like nationally and internationally as it turned out
01:46:51.640
partly because she decided not to chase mere generalities but to focus on an actual problem which
01:46:58.200
was the suffering of actual animals in actual plants was willing to focus her um emotional concerns on
01:47:07.080
something that was practical and to marry that with a strategy that involved particularization and visualization and
01:47:13.400
and verbal communication and practical interactions with corporations and also we close that with a
01:47:20.360
discussion of the fact that what she's doing now is trying to bring to people's attention in podcasts
01:47:25.800
like this the fact that we seem to be um working contrary to our own best interests by not uh building educational
01:47:37.640
facilities that help optimize the ability of visual thinkers to function but also
01:47:44.440
for society more broadly to take advantage of the talents and skills of those people
01:47:50.840
in the in innovation and in the maintenance of the infrastructure that we already have around us and so
01:47:56.920
i think that about summarizes what we talked about today is there anything you want to add to that
01:48:01.160
that definitely you know kind of um kind of summarizes that we need all the different kinds of minds and
01:48:07.880
they can when we understand that different people think differently they can work in teams where they can
01:48:12.440
collaborate and have complementary skills i think that's that's uh something that's really important
01:48:19.720
also right right the thing i wanted one thing i would do with the schools is i'd put a lot of the hands-on
01:48:27.080
classes back in like art sewing woodworking shop welding auto mechanics theater because these are all things that
01:48:35.400
expose kids to to things that can become possible careers too
01:48:42.040
right and those are all things that have to be done there in an embodied sense you actually have to
01:48:46.760
it's not purely abstract any any it's not abstract you like none of those things are abstract
01:48:53.400
yeah well that's i suppose a danger of moving so much education online as well as that it's going to
01:48:58.440
increase the degree well that's right the other thing when i went to did the book signing for visual
01:49:04.680
thinking i told you about the electrical engineering book from the 30s i found in this unique hotel room
01:49:10.120
but i also got put in the office of a professor in political science and i looked at some of those books
01:49:16.760
and it was so abstract theories about politics i i didn't even understand it it had nothing to do
01:49:23.640
with right or left it had to do with just abstractions that were so abstract it made no sense to me
01:49:30.280
and i'm going oh i wouldn't want this person in charge of figuring out with the power grid
01:49:35.640
you know i remember at this tucson conference where i first saw you speak after you spoke very
01:49:42.120
practical talk very much like the one that you you delivered today when we were talking a philosophy
01:49:47.720
student got up because there were a lot of abstract thinkers at this consciousness conference and asked
01:49:52.600
you something extremely abstract and philosophical and you did exactly what i would expect a good
01:49:58.360
engineer to do which was to say you know i really don't understand anything that you just said i don't
01:50:04.280
know how to associate it with anything practical and i'm completely unable to answer your question
01:50:09.480
which i thought was just it was ridiculously comical and i also thought um what would you say well
01:50:15.960
targeted because it was the case that you know you had been talking about real practical realities your
01:50:21.720
ability to think like an animal the fact that you had taken these practical set steps to ameliorate
01:50:27.480
animal suffering and that that had been so consequential and and so of obvious worth and then
01:50:34.680
you were faced with this flight into abstraction and and did what engineers always did do which is
01:50:41.720
something like well yeah but i don't understand that what does it mean practically which is a really
01:50:45.960
good question that you know it's a question that should be asked of abstract thinkers all the time
01:50:50.600
what are the devils in the details here that you're overlooking
01:50:55.000
how much do you know about the systems that you're abstractly representing and the answer to that is usually
01:50:59.240
almost nothing well it's sort of like you know we need all the three different bases you know
01:51:06.040
different kinds of minds you need the object visualizers and we're going to get the arts
01:51:10.680
mechanical and photography and animals you need the visual spatial mathematicians computer programmers
01:51:18.040
chemists things that require mathematics and we need the verbal thinkers uh because i'm
01:51:23.960
they're going to help organize things you see you need you need all three different kinds of minds
01:51:30.040
and they should work together in a complementary fashion all right well that's a good place to end
01:51:36.840
this segment i would say i'm going to go thank you thank you to everyone on youtube and the associated
01:51:42.600
podcasts for your time and attention i hope you found this discussion interesting and engaging
01:51:49.080
and practically useful as well i'm going to switch switch over to the daily wire plus platform
01:51:55.240
and i'm going to talk to dr temple grandin a little bit more on the biographical end i want to
01:52:00.360
lay out how her how her interest in the issues that she did pursue professionally made themselves manifest
01:52:06.600
in her life hello everyone i would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest
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