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Express don't live life without it.

1:01

Hugh

1:02

and Betty and the Nancy's

1:04

and pills and Joe's and James

1:07

will find in the study of science a

1:09

richer, more rewarding life.

1:14

Hey, welcome to inquiring minds. I'm

1:16

Endriva's Conte. This is podcast

1:18

that explores the space for science and society

1:21

collide. We wanna find out what's true,

1:23

what's left to discover, and why it matters.

1:32

This

1:34

week, we get to talk to Temple Granite.

1:37

She's a pioneer in our understanding of

1:39

how autistic minds work, and

1:41

in particular, visual thinking.

1:44

She's also made a huge impact in

1:46

improving the welfare of farm animals,

1:48

which

1:48

she attributes to the way she thinks.

1:51

She's a professor

1:51

of animal science at Colorado State

1:53

University, and her previous best selling

1:56

books include animals in translation,

1:58

the autistic brain, and

1:59

thinking in pictures. Thinking

2:02

in pictures, by the way, if haven't seen

2:04

it, was made into an HBO movie

2:06

starring Claire Danes. Her

2:07

new book, visual thinking, builds

2:09

on several decades of research that she

2:12

both in terms of surveying the literature and

2:14

talking to thousands of people who think

2:16

in pictures. to better understand

2:18

this underappreciated way

2:20

in which some of our minds work.

2:27

temple grandin. Welcome to inquiring

2:29

minds.

2:30

Great to be here.

2:31

It's such a pleasure for me to read your

2:34

book on visual thinking. because

2:36

although you have written about,

2:38

you know, this idea, you you know,

2:40

many years ago, I felt like

2:42

this time I got a much

2:44

better understanding of the

2:46

entire spectrum of ways

2:48

of thinking visually. And I and

2:50

I really you know, wanna say

2:53

that it's remarkable the work that you've done

2:55

over the last few years to sort of really

2:57

understand more deeply, not just your own

2:59

thinking, but other people who

3:01

also think in pictures. No.

3:02

I was I've one of the reasons for doing

3:05

this book is I'm very concerned

3:07

about skill loss.

3:09

And in the first part of the book,

3:12

I wrote about a trip

3:14

I did in two thousand and nineteen, right, before

3:16

COVID shut everything down. I went to four

3:18

places. and I found

3:20

that there's equipment we're not making anymore,

3:23

state of the art pork processing

3:26

plants, state of the art poultry

3:28

processing and the Steve Jobs

3:30

Theater. And the food processing

3:32

plant equipment, most of it all came from

3:34

Holland in a hundred shipping containers at

3:36

one of the plants. And

3:38

what I realized

3:39

is we're paying the price for taking our shot

3:41

classes twenty years ago. This

3:44

serious problem with skill loss.

3:46

Yeah. And and for those for

3:49

those students whose minds don't

3:51

gravitate easily

3:52

to the traditional teaching methods

3:55

that relies heavily on language. So

3:58

let's let's start with

4:01

telling our listeners what what do we

4:02

know about visual thinking and

4:05

how it works. Can you describe

4:07

it for us?

4:08

Well, in the book of visual thinking,

4:11

I discussed some of the research and I I

4:13

went over a lot of research. The

4:15

research shows that there definitely are two

4:17

types of visualization. There's

4:19

the object visualizer like

4:21

me. with things in photorealistic pictures.

4:24

That's a terrible time with things like algebra.

4:26

We're good at things like working with animals,

4:29

art, and mechanics and

4:31

also photography. Then you have

4:33

the visual spatial and things in patterns.

4:35

This is your mathematician, your chemist,

4:38

your musician and

4:40

computer programmer. And

4:42

they're actually kind of two opposite kinds of visual

4:44

thinking. You won't find an extreme object

4:46

visualizer, an extreme mathematician

4:49

in the same person. And lots

4:51

of people are mixtures And

4:53

then, of course, third type of thinking is

4:55

verbal thinking

4:56

in words. So

4:58

I just wanna say that that was kind of a revelation

5:01

to me that you could have a visual thinker

5:04

who wasn't good at algebra. because

5:06

to me, I always put visual and

5:08

spatial thinking in

5:09

the same bucket. That's wrong.

5:12

Yeah.

5:12

And that was really helpful for me

5:14

to know that.

5:14

That is wrong. And unfortunately,

5:17

A lot of research studies have mixed

5:20

them together. And the magic

5:22

term you need to be using when you search for the

5:24

stuff online is object

5:25

visualizer.

5:27

because that's different

5:29

from

5:30

the mathematical. Because

5:32

the mathematical is more thinking in

5:34

patterns. Like, I'm not very good at chess

5:38

because that's more thinking purely

5:41

in patterns. They're

5:43

two different things. One is thinking in patterns.

5:46

The other is thinking in in

5:48

pictures. And I've

5:50

designed a lot of equipment for the cattle

5:52

industry, and I worked with a lot of brilliant

5:54

machinery designers that

5:57

also had can't

5:59

do algebra, they've taken a welding

6:01

class in high school, and they

6:03

have big metal fabrication shops.

6:05

But the problem is the people I

6:07

worked with are all retiring. I'm

6:10

seventy five now. So the people

6:12

I've worked with are all retiring. They're

6:14

not getting replaced. Big

6:16

skill loss issue. and I

6:18

didn't realize how bad it was until I went to

6:20

the poultry plants, the pork plants,

6:22

and the Steve Jobs Theatre. Now,

6:24

beef, we actually know how to still know how to build

6:26

the plant. but

6:27

the people are getting old.

6:29

Are they going to get replaced?

6:32

And

6:32

there's a connection here with education. because

6:35

the kids that ought to be building

6:37

infrastructure, for example, waterworks, power

6:39

plants. They're

6:41

getting shunned into special ed.

6:43

they're growing up and they've never been exposed to

6:45

tools. I

6:47

was using tools by the time I

6:48

was in second grade. You

6:50

know, one of the things that it reminded

6:52

me of is this other

6:54

this other way of thinking about are

6:56

characterizing people's visual

6:58

imagination. So I

7:00

don't know how aware

7:02

of you are of this recent

7:05

research on the fact that some people,

7:07

I mean, it's related to visual

7:09

thinking, But some people, like,

7:12

can't imagine in their minds

7:14

eye something as simple

7:16

as a sphere. and they

7:18

can even work in highly

7:21

visual settings. Like, one person I'm

7:23

thinking of is Ed Kathmell who

7:25

cofounded the animation studio

7:27

Pixar and then led Disney

7:29

Animation for a long time. And he does not he

7:31

is he is not does not have a visual

7:33

imagination

7:33

in that way. But there are

7:36

people

7:36

animators that he worked with that

7:38

would only need to see a movie

7:39

once because they could remember frame

7:42

by frame, they sound like object

7:44

visualizers as you're describing. I mean, also

7:46

getting into autism, Savant skills,

7:48

which I'm not. I don't remember a movie

7:50

frame by frame.

7:51

Yeah. And so there's the spectrum of

7:54

of people too who not only maybe

7:56

can see visually, but

7:58

can remember everything they've seen.

7:59

Well, I can't remember everything

8:02

I've seen. I don't remember

8:04

every hotel room I've been in. I'm

8:06

in a hotel room right now. Maybe

8:08

I'll remember it because we've talked about it.

8:10

I'll remember that thing in the background. But

8:13

I don't care about hotel rooms.

8:15

I'll remember the really awful ones and

8:17

the really weird ones. those

8:20

I do remember, something where I

8:22

attracted my attention. But

8:24

hotel rooms are pretty low on my list

8:26

of interesting things. So

8:28

most of them are not going to be remembered

8:30

because I don't care about hotel

8:33

rooms.

8:33

And that seems like a

8:36

very useful thing to

8:38

forget is all the hotel rooms that

8:40

all seem the same. There

8:43

in your book, you have a

8:45

visual space identifier

8:46

fire quiz

8:47

that people can take to

8:49

sort of see where

8:51

they might fall in the spectrum of visual

8:54

thinking. And I found it really

8:56

interesting. Some of the questions

8:58

on it, I thought I could I would ask

9:00

you how you would answer them because I I

9:02

thought this was Some

9:03

of them are more, like, what you

9:05

would expect. So for example, do you think

9:07

mainly in pictures instead of in words?

9:09

But then there are things like,

9:12

do you often lose track of

9:14

time? And I wondered, like, what does

9:16

that have to do with visual thinking?

9:18

Your sense of time?

9:19

Well, I I actually

9:22

am pretty good on time. I ask how long

9:24

the interview is, usually pretty good

9:26

on timing it. Now I've

9:28

found on construction projects, verbal

9:30

thinkers always underestimate the amount of

9:32

time it takes to build something. Oh, interesting.

9:34

No. I'm always leaving extra time to

9:36

go to the airport because there's a construction

9:38

project on the Freeway, and I had a

9:40

forty five minute traffic jam because for

9:42

no reason they cut it down to one lane of

9:44

traffic. And I

9:46

have a good sense of of

9:48

time because I'm visualizing okay,

9:50

takes an hour and fifteen minutes to get the

9:53

airport. But if something goes wrong,

9:55

I always

9:55

like to allow an extra hour.

9:58

for

9:58

some kind of problem on the on

9:59

our interstate which is under construction.

10:02

You see

10:02

now I'm seeing a real gnarly parts

10:04

to one part like curves like that

10:07

and know, I'm seeing it.

10:09

And then they're shutting down exits

10:11

at night, and I can't

10:13

go around the exits because it's far enough

10:15

south that I'm seeing it now. And

10:17

I'm like, Highway thirty fours closed.

10:20

You know, I'm seeing I'm seeing

10:22

it. I'm seeing all the concrete

10:24

divider things and And

10:26

then that yeah. And then

10:27

that would affect how you,

10:29

you know yeah. How how much time

10:31

you allot to a particular

10:33

task or

10:33

journey. Well, that's right. And then I had

10:35

a way to go around the construction, but

10:37

now the construction's moved and

10:39

the place to

10:39

go around it can be blocked. So

10:42

there's

10:42

another one. Number thirteen, can you

10:44

feel what others are feeling? That

10:46

was a surprise

10:47

too to see it on the list. Well,

10:49

of being an autistic person, I have

10:51

to learn

10:51

more about

10:53

I've you know, I

10:55

don't

10:55

know. It's like to be angry or happy, but

10:58

there's a sort of like social

11:00

stuff that just doesn't interest

11:02

me, where I have friends and

11:04

friends through shared interests.

11:07

that's

11:07

where I have friends. Like, I was on a

11:09

flight and we spent an entire flight talking about

11:12

concrete forming systems. And

11:14

that's the kind of stuff that I find really,

11:16

really interesting. See, kinda

11:17

social chit chat for the sake of chit

11:20

chat just is very interesting. And

11:22

I see people having so much fun

11:24

doing it kind of almost

11:26

rhythmically, and I

11:27

can't even keep up with it. Right.

11:29

I'd

11:29

rather talk about interesting stuff

11:32

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think

11:34

that, you know, I think I think you're not alone in

11:36

that. And I do think that there are some people who

11:38

I think in some ways too, there's

11:41

there's a variety. There are some people who really love the

11:43

chit chat, and there are people

11:45

who, you know, just do it

11:47

when they need to or not at

11:49

all. But it was interesting to me to think about

11:51

how that relates to being a

11:54

visual thinker. But

11:56

I guess, the

11:56

idea would be that if you enjoy that chit

11:59

chat, you're more of a verbal

12:01

thinker as well. You probably would more of a

12:03

verbal thinker if

12:03

you enjoy that chit chat. which I don't.

12:05

The thing that amazes me about some of

12:07

this chit chat is they're having

12:09

such a great time and there's almost no

12:12

information in the chit chat. that's

12:14

interesting. I mean, can you talk a

12:16

little bit more about that? About

12:18

what what information do

12:21

you find most interesting?

12:22

like, what that well, let's say,

12:24

I think of an example, a member of dinner

12:26

I went to where pharmaceutical

12:28

reps were kind of joking back and

12:30

forth about university mascots

12:32

and the color of cattle were in Madison,

12:35

and it was kinda sports themed

12:38

chit chat. but there was no

12:40

information, you know, like the strategy of the

12:42

game. That'd be information. And

12:44

I was kind of amazed at the lack of information

12:46

in this conversation but they were

12:48

having such a great time. So

12:51

interesting.

12:51

So now

12:53

we know sort of the two types of visual

12:55

thinking and

12:57

In

12:57

terms of helping people understand

12:59

how visual thinking works,

13:01

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

13:04

Well, everything I think about

13:06

is

13:06

a picture.

13:08

I don't think

13:09

in words words narrate the

13:12

pictures.

13:12

And

13:13

now some stuff, if I talk about it enough, I can

13:16

almost get, like, a tape recorder downloaded

13:18

when I was in high school. And I got bullied in TCs,

13:20

he's calling tape recorder. for

13:22

using the same phrases. But

13:24

when I'm designing equipment, as

13:26

I

13:26

draw a drawing of a gate,

13:29

I see the gate. Okay.

13:31

We were talking about remembering hotel

13:34

rooms. Well, now I remember one really

13:36

awful hotel where

13:38

my socks just got black and dirty walking on their

13:40

carpet. I'm now seeing

13:42

the black and dirty socks from a

13:44

disgusting hotel that was near a major

13:46

airport that I

13:48

unfortunately stayed in. And

13:50

so that's what you so that's how you remember

13:52

that room is that you have this picture of

13:54

those socks. I had the pictures of socks. and

13:56

then stuff that didn't work too in it.

13:59

Yeah. have been faucets

13:59

in the bathroom. So,

14:02

you

14:02

know, one of the things that you

14:04

know, most people find is that

14:07

pictures tend

14:07

to be

14:09

more more

14:11

like they

14:12

they tend to make you feel angry

14:14

or afraid or disgusted

14:16

more easily than a verbal

14:18

description. So Like, if

14:20

you showed me the pictures of the

14:22

socks, I'd probably feel more

14:24

disgusted than you just telling me

14:26

about them. Well, I would agree I

14:28

would agree

14:28

with that, like, I'll read movie reviews.

14:31

Uh-huh. And some movie would be

14:33

really violent or some other really icky thing. I

14:35

go now I'm not going to that one. I'll

14:37

read the review. That's it. I don't need

14:39

those pictures on my hard drive.

14:41

Yes. And so I but I made me wonder

14:44

that as someone who always you

14:45

know, sees or thinks in pictures.

14:48

Do you think that over the

14:50

course of a day, you have more

14:52

of these emotional reactions to

14:54

the things that are going on in your mind

14:57

than, say, a person who thinks verbally?

14:59

Well, in the visual thinking

15:01

book, I looked at some of the

15:03

research on PTS d,

15:05

post

15:05

traumatic stress syndrome, and people that tend

15:07

to get post traumatic syndrome, stress

15:09

syndrome, think in pictures, because then they're

15:11

reliving the stressful

15:13

event. or if you're told a verbal thinker,

15:15

maybe it's easier to suppress it because

15:17

you're not playing the video

15:19

back. That's

15:20

right. And so you don't have full emotional

15:22

impact of that image every

15:24

time

15:24

you remember it.

15:31

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loves buying holiday gifts. But

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something too. Sorry, not sorry. So pop

15:58

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15:59

visit old

15:59

navy dot com.

16:02

Hello. It's

16:02

Amrada aka Emily

16:05

Radekowski. I finally have

16:07

a podcast It's called high

16:09

low with Amrada. I'll

16:11

be talking politics philosophy,

16:13

yes, feminism, and

16:16

also sex gossip TikTok,

16:19

all of it. I'll be here every week.

16:21

I'm really looking forward to joining

16:23

me. I'm hoping it'll be like we're FaceTiming

16:25

and I'm going off. from Sony

16:27

Music Entertainment and something else,

16:29

listen to high low with Amrada wherever you

16:31

get your podcasts.

16:33

You made it here.

16:37

Finally, checked out of office to

16:39

check into the sweet views of That

16:41

place you've always wanted to go. You

16:43

know the one? It's nice.

16:46

Eaten the kids like it. This place is

16:48

so cool. And they never like

16:50

it. Mom, can we go to the pool? Look

16:52

at that. Not even asking for the

16:55

WiFi. When you're with Amex, it's not

16:57

if it's going to happen, but

16:59

when American Express don't live

17:01

life without it.

17:03

So in

17:06

your book

17:09

too, you talk about what we're doing

17:12

wrong in education.

17:13

So let's

17:15

talk a little bit about that.

17:17

What

17:17

did you find in your

17:20

research in talking to

17:22

people about how we're

17:24

losing kids who

17:26

who are primarily visual thinkers or whose

17:29

brains aren't

17:29

geared towards the way they are being

17:32

educated. Well, the worst

17:33

I think the schools have done is taking out all

17:35

the hands on classes. So that was an elementary

17:37

school and woodworking,

17:40

sewing, art, and made the costumes for

17:42

the school play, my little toy sewing

17:44

machine that actually sold. You

17:46

know, if you if you don't get a chance to do

17:48

those kind of things, you don't know whether you can be

17:50

good at it. you know, I think schools need to put in

17:52

theater, back, cooking, sewing, woodworking,

17:55

welding. Of course, now you'd have three d

17:57

printing and robotics. but

17:59

kids need to be doing those hands on

18:03

things. And how

18:04

can you find out you're good at welding if

18:06

you never try it? I

18:09

have people. I worked with people who

18:11

built my equipment that had taken a

18:13

single welding class and then

18:15

owned a great big huge shop and they're

18:17

selling specialized equipment all around

18:19

the world and they can't do

18:21

algebra. But

18:22

they're selling and patenting specialized

18:25

equipment and sewing it very successfully.

18:27

And there are

18:28

people that are getting up in my

18:30

age and they're not getting

18:33

replaced. because kids are growing up today. They

18:35

don't use tools. They don't use

18:37

rulers. They don't

18:39

use scissors. One of the things

18:41

we talked about in my

18:42

book visual thinking is that a doctor was

18:45

telling me he had a hard time training in

18:47

terms of saw op cuts because they've

18:49

never

18:49

used scissors. Wow,

18:51

that's amazing. Do you

18:53

have any

18:53

sense of why it is that these things

18:55

have have been taken out of education?

18:58

I think it's a combination of budgets and then

19:01

things like trying to improve test

19:03

scores. But I worked in a lot of

19:05

brilliant people that had a hard time graduating

19:07

high school visual thinking the

19:09

object visualizer is a different

19:11

kind

19:11

of intelligence. I worked

19:13

with crews that were putting up

19:15

great big cargo plants and

19:17

looking at some of the complicated stuff they did with equipment

19:20

and with construction that

19:22

was totally visual. She does

19:24

two parts of engineering. there's

19:26

the visual sort more industrial design part, and then

19:28

there's the mathematical part. And all

19:30

the different meat plants I worked

19:32

in, I saw a division of labor

19:35

where my kind of thinker who cannot do algebra was making

19:37

all the clever equipment,

19:40

mechanically clever devices

19:42

and the more mathematical

19:45

engineers were doing

19:46

boilers refrigeration and make sure

19:49

the snow doesn't collapse the roof. it

19:51

brings

19:51

to mind the fact that those

19:53

kinds of sort of math and engineering

19:55

skills right now, you know, that that

19:57

fall under this umbrella of, you know,

19:59

science technology narrowing in math stem are

20:02

highly valued by a lot of parents,

20:04

but the kind of visual thinking

20:06

that you're describing seems

20:08

to me equally important in those. Yes. It's

20:11

equally important. And

20:13

we

20:13

don't make the state of the art electronic

20:16

chip making machine because

20:18

there's a lot of that chip making machine

20:20

that needs my kind

20:22

of mind.

20:24

And And

20:25

that technology actually was invented

20:28

here,

20:28

but the Dutch made it.

20:30

Because you see,

20:31

back in Holland, they don't stick their nose

20:34

up at at the

20:34

skilled trades. A kid in ninth grade can

20:37

go tech track or it can go

20:39

go university track. And

20:41

the

20:41

thing is you need both kinds

20:44

of minds and we're losing skills for things

20:46

like maintaining and building,

20:48

things like water systems,

20:49

just

20:50

repairing stuff like elevator, I've

20:53

been on some pretty dicey elevators recently that

20:55

were doing things like skipping floors

20:57

just real recently because they're

20:59

not being

21:00

serviced. And you know,

21:01

it there's also kind of a a joy

21:03

in terms of when you make

21:05

something with your hands, you can

21:07

see the progress step by step.

21:10

and it's harder to see that in some of the other ways

21:12

in which kids are educated. And

21:14

so I wondered if you had to give advice

21:16

to either parents or

21:18

educators about, like, how

21:20

to bring this back? What would

21:22

you say? Well, we're gonna have

21:24

infrastructure just gonna fall down if

21:26

we don't bring this stuff back.

21:28

it's just that simple. You see, there's two

21:30

parts of engineering. There's the mathematical part,

21:32

which we're doing fine on. And

21:35

then

21:35

there's the object visualizer

21:37

that doesn't do higher math apart.

21:40

And when I found out about the

21:42

poultry processing plant and the hundred shipping

21:45

containers from Holland, I'm going

21:46

we've got a problem. Yeah, I mean,

21:48

it's not just all the labor and the

21:51

cost, but also the environmental cost

21:53

of shipping hundreds of

21:55

containers. you know, across the world, you

21:57

know, for for these plants. No.

21:59

Well, not

21:59

and and there's a lot of equipment where where

22:02

that's happening. A

22:04

lot of the big three d printers are being made

22:06

in Europe. You

22:07

know, they're complicated mechanical devices

22:09

that are controlled by computers.

22:12

you know, a lot of them come out of Japan. I went into

22:14

a shop that makes highly specialized

22:16

machined equipment and

22:19

of

22:19

state of the art machine tools

22:21

were from Japan.

22:23

yeah Yeah. I

22:24

mean, you know, there are these European

22:26

countries and and countries in Asia like

22:28

pan where where there is a real elevation

22:32

of craftsmanship of that true

22:34

relationship. That's true. Which we don't have in

22:36

the US, which is strange. I mean, in some

22:38

places, it's coming, it's coming back. Like,

22:39

you know, in San Francisco, we've got people

22:41

who are who are kind of

22:44

focusing a little bit more on

22:46

making things from scratch and and

22:48

focusing on the details. But I think in

22:50

general, across the US, it's

22:52

hard to get people to pay for the

22:54

extra cost that good craftsmanship

22:56

demands. Well, you

22:57

need it. And the people I worked with

22:59

are retiring out. Yep.

23:02

And Right

23:03

now, I saw my equipment

23:06

that's in the big meat plants. There's a piece of

23:08

equipment called the center tracker strayer system.

23:10

Every big beef plant has one. I

23:12

worked on developing that piece of

23:14

equipment. Well, cattle have gotten fatter

23:16

these days, and it's gonna have to

23:18

be widened. And

23:19

the the few shops that are left

23:21

right now are price gouging, big

23:23

time. Right. Right. So if

23:25

there was more competition in

23:27

a sense there would be lowering

23:29

of prices for that same

23:31

craft. Well, that's right, but the problem

23:33

is just that most of the people I've worked

23:35

with are retiring out. and

23:38

the and the little shops are not

23:40

forming. I was just out in Nebraska,

23:42

went out to a big feet lot and they

23:44

can't find somebody to repair their

23:46

feet mill. that's really

23:48

serious. That's right

23:49

now. And then,

23:51

okay, let's take another piece of equipment. There's a

23:53

piece of equipment called the Apollo Chicken

23:57

Harvester. This thing picks up

23:59

broiler chickens. It

24:00

does it's very clever. It looks like

24:02

a combine. It works really well.

24:04

It's

24:04

from Italy, and they

24:06

can't get parts for it

24:08

right now. Why

24:09

aren't we inventing it? The chicken

24:11

harvest or thing. You can look it up the Apollo chicken

24:14

harvester. You can look the thing up

24:16

online. And

24:16

that's the kind of stuff that the

24:18

kid who came to algebra should

24:21

be inventing That's

24:22

the problem. And when we have

24:24

to we're building these chip factories.

24:27

There's all kinds of moving stuff in there

24:29

and conveyors and things. that

24:31

needs my kind of mind. You know, like, say, well,

24:33

the whole factory is computerized, but wait

24:35

a minute. You're talking about mechanical

24:37

devices controlled by

24:39

a computer. mechanical devices

24:41

need my kind of mind. That's right. And

24:42

when they break, they need your kind of mind

24:45

to, you know, fix the pieces. Well, and

24:46

we've got problems right now. Is that

24:49

the airport the other day, I looked at four

24:51

people working on an escalator, and

24:53

only one was young.

24:55

That's a problem. And when you take an

24:58

escalator apart, you better believe it. There's conveyors

25:00

inside it. It look just like the stuff in meat

25:02

packing plants.

25:02

Mhmm. It's the same kind

25:05

of stuff. So one

25:06

other big section of your book is on

25:09

collaborations. And I wondered if you could talk a

25:11

little bit about some of these really successful

25:13

collaborations between visual and

25:15

verbal thinkers. Well, let's

25:16

look at architects versus

25:18

the engineers. Engineers do

25:20

not separate form and functions. So

25:22

I'll likely build you a gray box.

25:25

And if you look nice, you're gonna need the

25:27

architects. That's different kinds of minds

25:29

in working on the book. I did

25:31

the

25:31

rough drafts and Betsy learned

25:33

my coauthor smoothed out the writing.

25:36

Okay. That's a verbal mind collaborating with a

25:38

visual thinking mind. You see, there's

25:40

complimentary skills And

25:42

I already talked about the example, the factory where

25:45

things like boilers and refrigeration, that's

25:47

gonna be done by the mathematical engineers.

25:50

and my kind of mind is out there in the clever

25:53

engineering department. You know, have

25:54

you ever seen those machines that make ice

25:56

cream novelties? Mhmm. That's an

25:59

example of clever engineering

25:59

department. And then there's people like

26:01

Rogers and Hammerstein. That's right.

26:03

I hadn't thought about

26:04

it. Now, I see there's a lot of

26:07

things the

26:08

skills are complementary. And I tell

26:10

business people, the first

26:11

step is realizing these different kinds of

26:14

thinkers exist. We also need to start

26:16

looking at changing some of the hiring practices

26:18

because HR is gonna hire them

26:20

social people, but the most social person

26:22

might not be a best mechanic.

26:25

That's the problem. So how do you I

26:26

mean, this is a I think this is a really

26:28

interesting problem of,

26:31

you know, if you

26:33

have a person in HR or or a person

26:35

anyone who who's hiring someone else, it's you know,

26:37

we always gravitate towards

26:39

people who are more like us. You know,

26:41

that's right. Yeah. So how what how

26:43

do you if you're if you're specifically

26:45

looking for someone who doesn't think like you,

26:47

who thinks differently, and you have a

26:49

a choice of three

26:50

or four candidates how you choose

26:53

which

26:53

one would be

26:54

the best fit? I mean, are there

26:57

some sort of categories or

26:59

things that you look for that tell you

27:01

this visual thinker is, like,

27:02

particularly good at what they do? Well,

27:05

let's look at the work. The way I used

27:07

to sell my cattle handling jobs

27:09

I showed off my drawings and I

27:11

showed off pictures

27:13

of jobs, drawings of jobs,

27:16

pictures of finished jobs.

27:18

In other words, I sold the work.

27:20

Okay. Somebody who's a programmer could

27:22

show some of their programming to

27:24

people that could appreciate the programming.

27:26

It's not gonna be HR. It's gonna be the

27:29

computer

27:29

department. Or for

27:30

me, it would have been the plant manager

27:32

or the plant

27:33

engineering department. Yeah.

27:35

So maybe in these kinds of hiring practices,

27:37

you can't just leave it to HR.

27:39

You have to include people from other

27:42

departments. Exactly. Exactly. Really,

27:44

really important because

27:46

these I I just can't believe

27:49

it. The No

27:50

one can even find any mechanics now.

27:52

Electricians huge shortage

27:53

right now. And that's also

27:55

really good advice for people who are visual

27:57

thinkers who have trouble finding jobs.

27:59

to

27:59

really focus on showing the

28:02

work how however they are

28:04

able to do that, whether it's, you know,

28:06

things that they've done and And it

28:08

also that under underlines how

28:10

important it is for these young

28:12

kids to get the experience

28:14

in schools so that they have some work

28:17

to when they're going out on the job market. The other

28:18

thing you've got to learn is to do work

28:21

that other people want. Before I was

28:23

designing cattle facilities, I had a

28:25

little sign painting business. in us

28:27

in high school. So my very first

28:29

sign client was a

28:31

beauty salon and I had to make

28:33

a sign a hair salon would

28:35

want. You see, you gotta learn do

28:37

the work that somebody else is gonna want.

28:39

And if I put flying saucers on

28:41

the sign, I don't think they would have liked

28:43

that very much. So how did you

28:46

learn to do that? Was it through conversations

28:48

with the salon? Was it by giving them

28:50

a lot of different options and then seeing what

28:52

they pick? did you No, ma'am. Actually,

28:54

I picked the Breck shampoo lady and

28:56

I decorated the sign with her. They

28:58

liked it. Okay. But

29:00

what if they hadn't liked it? What would have been

29:02

your next step? No. I would have

29:04

asked them, you know, first of all, I tried to

29:06

talk

29:06

to a client. She went into my

29:09

crowd dissolves. talked client enough

29:11

beforehand. So when I designed something, they are

29:13

gonna like it. And I

29:14

do a lot of sometimes rough sketches

29:17

beforehand.

29:17

but when I sell the job, for example, I

29:19

sold Cargill, and I designed the front

29:21

end of every Cargill beef plant.

29:24

Back in

29:24

the late eighties, I sent a big two foot

29:26

by three foot fold out drawing to the head of cardiobold bill

29:28

building and send him

29:30

pictures of jobs in a brochure, a

29:32

couple of trade magazine articles.

29:35

so that he'd open it up and it'd be a thirty second

29:37

wow. I didn't send him a phone book

29:39

worth of stuff. I sent him just

29:43

you

29:43

know, stuff he can look at really quickly

29:46

and see my abilities. That's

29:48

great.

29:48

That's great

29:49

advice. You also sort of in

29:52

the book talk a little bit about some your

29:54

goals to sort of help parents guide their

29:56

kids. And I I had a question about this because a

29:58

lot of kids who

29:59

who have neurodiverse

30:02

brains who whether it's, you know, they're

30:04

autistic or they have ADHD or

30:06

they have, you know, some other way in which their

30:08

brain is different. Sometimes a

30:11

portion of these kids also have low

30:13

frustration tolerance. They get

30:15

frustrated very quickly. And

30:17

that's a hard thing if you're trying to learn a

30:19

skill. And I wondered if you had some

30:22

advice to either parents or teachers

30:24

or even the kids themselves about

30:26

dealing with frustration when you

30:28

can't immediately do the thing that you wanna do.

30:30

Yeah. And I had some

30:31

issues like that. I remember getting mad

30:34

at some pieces plexed

30:36

glass I was trying to cut, and

30:38

that did not help the

30:40

situation any. Now,

30:41

I

30:42

didn't have that problem with drawing.

30:45

and most

30:45

of the work in the in the livestock industry

30:47

was withdrawing. So I kind of figured out how

30:49

to put the metal working shop into

30:52

my head. and

30:53

then I would just erase it if I did it

30:55

wrong. Another problem

30:56

with some of these kids is they'll throw

30:58

away words that they consider not

31:01

perfect. Right.

31:02

And the thing I had to learn is it had

31:04

to be really high standard. It could never be

31:06

completely perfect. And how

31:08

did you learn that? Do you do you have a

31:10

sense of, like, was it just

31:12

over time people encouraging you? Or

31:14

did you was it something that came from you

31:16

yourself that you just accepted? That it wasn't

31:18

gonna be perfect? how did that No. I thought

31:20

of things in physics, like absolute

31:23

zero. Absolute zero is when

31:25

all atomic motion

31:27

stops. You can

31:28

approach it, but you can't get there.

31:30

Yeah. That's a really great analogy,

31:32

is that you'll never it'll

31:34

never be absolute zero. you

31:36

can never get to Absolute Zero. See, I thought about

31:39

that, but I've gotta be to a really

31:41

high standard. it's

31:43

just like working on some my animal welfare stuff. I figured

31:45

out really simple ways to evaluate animal

31:48

welfare. Let's take lameness and dairy cows.

31:50

That can never be zero. but

31:52

it

31:52

needs to be at a very low level.

31:55

So if there's a person who's

31:57

listening now that, you know, wants

31:59

to learn more about their own ways of thinking, I

32:01

think one of things that's remarkable about

32:03

you temple is that over the many

32:05

decades, you've you've really

32:07

learned how your own

32:09

mind works. And for a lot of us, it's still

32:11

a mystery our own minds work. And so

32:13

I wonder if you could tell people, you

32:15

know, what how did you discover

32:18

that? And what what are some of the things that they can

32:21

do to get a better sense of of how their own

32:23

minds work. Well, I think reading my

32:24

book visual thinking will help. They might

32:27

also wanna

32:27

read my older book thinking

32:30

in pictures because I've had parents

32:32

come to me say that that book helped

32:34

them to understand how their child

32:36

thinks. You see, I

32:36

think, I was in my

32:39

late thirties when I discovered that

32:41

different people think differently.

32:43

I didn't

32:44

know that. Let's just look at another

32:46

example of collaboration. I'm kind of an

32:48

associate of thinker. Take Steve Jobs, probably on

32:50

the spectrum. He was an artist. He

32:53

designed the interface on the cell

32:55

phone to make it easy to

32:57

use. the

32:58

engineers and the mathematicians had to make it

33:00

work. So that's a

33:01

visual thinker making the interface

33:04

mathematicians making it work.

33:06

Yeah.

33:06

And I think that a lot of times, you

33:09

know, I mean, I think we all recognize

33:11

Steve Jobs as being a genius in

33:13

what he did. But a lot person

33:15

who has that visual side, you

33:17

know, is in our society

33:20

considered less sir then or, you know Well,

33:22

it's a different

33:22

kind of intelligence. Yeah. See, this is

33:24

the thing because they used to say, oh,

33:27

stupid kids go soft

33:29

classes. Well, I'm sorry, I worked on

33:31

it in too many big meat factories

33:33

with too many super skilled people. Let

33:35

me tell you, it's not stupidity.

33:38

it is a totally different kind of intelligence.

33:40

And it's a

33:41

kind of intelligence that's absolutely

33:44

needed to keep infrastructure going in to build

33:46

new

33:46

infrastructure. So

33:48

I wanna remind listeners that

33:50

Temple's new book, visual thinking, the

33:52

hidden gifts of people who think

33:54

in pictures, patterns, and abstractions,

33:57

is now

33:59

available at book sellers everywhere.

34:02

And I just wanna also give

34:04

credit to your co

34:06

author, Betsy Leerner. who's also, you know, involved in the book. And another

34:09

example of a great collaboration.

34:11

That's right. Temple. Thank you so

34:13

much for being on inquiring minds,

34:15

and it was such a pleasure to

34:17

talk to you and to learn more

34:20

about how you think and what we can do

34:22

to make society better. It

34:24

was great to be on

34:25

your show. So that's

34:28

it for another

34:29

episode. Thanks for listening. And if

34:31

you wanna hear more, don't forget

34:33

to subscribe. If you'd like to get an free version of the show, consider

34:35

supporting us at patreon dot com slash

34:38

inquiring minds. I wanna especially

34:40

thank David

34:42

Noelle Hering Chang, Sean Johnson, Jordan Miller, Kaira Rihala,

34:44

Michael Galgoul, Eric Clark,

34:46

Yushie Lynn, Clark Lindgren, Joel

34:50

Stefan Meyer Awald, Dale O'Master, and Charles Blyle.

34:52

Inquiring Mines is produced by Adam Isaac,

34:55

and I'm your host, Andreyvus Contus.

34:57

See you next

34:58

time.

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