Temple Grandin on Autism and the Power of Thinking Differently

Dr. Temple Grandin, Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, has had a unique and profound influence on the world’s understanding of autism and neurodiversity.  As one of the most prominent voices for autism, and named one of Time Magazines 100 Most Influential People, Dr. Grandin shares insights into the diversity of the human mind, her experiences as an autistic individual and visual thinker, and the ways in which understanding and embracing the spectrum of neurodiversity can enrich society as a whole. 

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Transcript

00:00:01 Johnandrew Slominski 

Welcome to this episode of the Autism Annex Podcast. I'm Johnandrew Slominski 

00:00:08 Johnandrew Slominski 

My guest today is Dr. Temple Grandin. Dr. Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, and she has written and spoken prolifically about animal behavior, autism, and the ways in which different types of brains navigate the world. She has appeared on 20/20, the BBC, Prime Time, and was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. 

00:00:37 Johnandrew Slominski 

The 2010 film about her life won several Emmys, a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award, and introduced millions of people to Dr. Grandin’s remarkable life for the first time.  I was among those people about 14 years ago, and it's a great honor to have you on the podcast today.  Dr. Grandin, thanks so much for being here. 

00:00:58 Temple Grandin 

It's great to be here. 

00:01:01 Johnandrew Slominski 

You've done countless interviews over the years. Do you ever get tired of being introduced? 

00:01:07 Temple Grandin 

Well, I want to get information out to people. 

00:01:12 Johnandrew Slominski 

You've been very influential in two spaces, both animal science and livestock management, and in shaping our cultural understanding of autism and neurodiversity. 

00:01:25 Johnandrew Slominski 

At first look, these might seem like unconnected worlds, but you've written about how your ways of thinking have made a natural connection between the two. 

00:01:34 Johnandrew Slominski 

Could you talk about where your interests overlap and how you've come to understand different types of autistic minds? 

00:01:43 Temple Grandin 

Well, I'm an object visualizer. Everything I think about is a picture. Now, I thought everybody thought the pictures until I was in my late 30s. But since I think in pictures, it was obvious to me in my very first cattle work to go on in the chutes and see what cattle was seeing. We noticed they'd stop at a reflection, had a shadow chain hanging down. Coat on a fence. Stuff like this. They'd stop at and other people hadn't thought about looking at what they were seeing. 

00:02:10 Temple Grandin 

Other people thought it was weird to look at what cattle were seeing. 

00:02:15 Temple Grandin 

Yes, but there is overlap because being an object visualizer helped me be very good at designing equipment. 

00:02:22 Temple Grandin 

Now what it made me bad at, I couldn't do algebra—absolutely couldn't do algebra.  But I worked a lot with highly skilled people who invented mechanical equipment, owned machine shops, couldn't do algebra either, but they invented all kinds of equipment. And one of the things I want to see is I want to see the skills get developed. 

00:02:42 Temple Grandin 

Because you can have object visualizers like me, but another kind of autistic mind is the mathematical pattern visual spatial mind. They think in patterns. And there's scientific research to show that these different kinds of thinking exist, which I've talked about in my Visual Thinking book.  

00:02:57 Temple Grandin 

And they're very good at computer programming and more traditional engineering with advanced mathematics. And then there's a third type of autistic they're the, the I call them the word fact thinker that know all the facts about some historical figure or about some sports teams—whatever they're interested in, they're very, very good with verbal facts. And I want to see these individuals when they grow up, get into you know, good jobs. 

00:03:26 Temple Grandin 

The other big problem we got with autism is you're going all the way to Einstein at one end of that spectrum, with no language to age 3 to somebody that might have no speech, and that also gets called autism. So you have this huge spectrum. And what I'm seeing today, especially on the fully verbal end, is I'm seeing too many kids not making the transition into work, not learning skills like shopping and ordering food and restaurants, just not getting the learning how learning life skills. 

00:03:55 Temple Grandin 

And then I was an industry, I was in heavy construction for 25 years and I worked with two shops where they were definitely autistic, undiagnosed. And they owned big shops. And then I go over to the autism meeting and I find out this an 18-year-old that needs to learn how to do welding and they won't let him take welding as he's in Special Ed. Well in my generation Special Ed owned the shops. 

00:04:19 Temple Grandin 

And this is the thing that frustrates me as I go back and forth between the two fields and I make a point in my conferences. I want to do some autism conferences, but I also jump at the chance to do industrial conferences too. 

00:04:32 Johnandrew Slominski 

I want to ask you more about your thoughts on early childhood in a moment. But let's stick with young adults in transition. 

00:04:39 Temple Grandin 

All right, let's find let's work on the adult stuff, because that's where we've got some of the biggest problems because where they have good early childhood programs, things are great. But there are some parts of the country, especially in some of the rural areas where 2-year-olds are being put on a two year wait list.  That is not acceptable. And we all know we need to start early intervention early. 

00:05:01 Temple Grandin 

But in the places where they do have decent programs, we're doing a much better job with the little kids than they are with getting the more older kids, transferring into living by themselves and the world of work. 

00:05:15 Johnandrew Slominski 

And that's the place where they're likely to fall off the so-called services cliff, where... 

00:05:20 Temple Grandin 

Yeah, that's right. 

00:05:22 Johnandrew Slominski 

So, what should we be doing to make sure kids have the skills to be independent once they age out of services? 

00:05:29 Temple Grandin 

But we need to get them—what we've got to do is make a transition into work before they age out. 

00:05:34 Temple Grandin 

You know, we need to start working on chores when kids are little. A lot of well-known successful people that are autistic that worked in business, they had paper routes and they sold papers when they were 11 years old. So, they learned entrepreneur skills. They learned working skills. We need to find substitutes for that, like church volunteer jobs, help out at the farmers market, where they're working for somebody outside the home. 

00:06:03 Johnandrew Slominski 

And it's not a one-size-fits-all solution, right? I mean it stands to reason that if different minds think and conceptualize and work differently, they probably need different things as well as having different kinds of strengths. 

00:06:05 Temple Grandin 

Yes. 

00:06:17 Temple Grandin 

Well, for my kind of mind, we can't do algebra, so don't keep pounding away on algebra. You know, I think some people think you have to have algebra for thinking. That's not how I think. A visual thinker just sees the solution to a problem. It comes up like a picture.  And I'm seeing them—I think they need to be putting all the hands-on classes back at the school, so we need to be exposing kids early to lots and lots of different things because I'm seeing too many individuals just get addicted to video games. 10 hours a day of video games is not veryhelpful and one of the ways you can get them off of that—and it's been very successful in Denver. There's a program called TACT. 

00:06:55 Temple Grandin 

Teaching autistic citizens trades and they gradually wean young adults off of video games and teach them how to fix cars, and they find out that motors are more interesting than video games. And then they place them in a car dealership and have a job coach there for another two months. 

00:07:14 Temple Grandin 

And that's worked out really well. 

00:07:18 Temple Grandin 

You see the best kinds of transitions are gradual, so you're gradually learning work skills, starting with the jobs at 11 years old. I was given a book up in Montana, a wonderful super interesting little book about famous copper miners and silver miners, and one of them was a stutterer. He was running a silver mine. 

00:07:38 Temple Grandin 

Well, he was selling papers when he was a child, you see that taught that entrepreneur that that's really helpful. He'd probably be a Special Ed kid today. 

00:07:51 Johnandrew Slominski 

I think it's safe to say, and correct me if I'm wrong here, you are relentlessly optimistic and encouraging when it comes to autistic and neurodiverse kids and their abilities. Where other people might focus on limitations, you see possibilities and you focus on strengths. 

00:08:10 Temple Grandin 

And we need their skills. I travel all around the country, I'm finding broken elevators and broken escalators everywhere I go. In one of the rural states, they only had two elevator technicians for the whole state. I learned that just a week ago. The people that I worked with when I spent 25 years in heavy construction, 70s, 80s and 90s, and I worked with people that are retired out now, they are not getting replaced. 

00:08:36 Temple Grandin 

Little shops are not forming and turning into big shops and we need these skills. We have infrastructure falling apart and then we need the mathematicians. We're not developing our math kids either. 

00:08:48 Temple Grandin 

I'm hearing story after story of little elementary school kids, bored stiff with baby math because they aren't moving them ahead and then they get bored and they do bad stuff because they're bored. 

00:08:59 Temple Grandin 

Well, I'd like to get little math kids fixated on data centers. Yes, and this is what you're going to do. Look at all the electric power this data center takes. I want you to design computer circuits that will run on half the power and do the same thing. That's the kind of thing I want a brilliant math kid obsessed with because he'll grow up and actually do it. 

00:09:19 Johnandrew Slominski 

So clearly, we have a long way to go in supporting teenagers and young adults and providing those opportunities for the math kids and the visual thinkers. But do you think there are places where we're getting it right? 

00:09:36 Temple Grandin 

I think one of the things been done right is education programs, some of those are really done right now. I'm glad that ABA now has made a lot of progress on the little kids’ programs. But I think sometimes the autistic label is holding the teenagers back because I'm seeing too much where they're becoming the label and they're not learning basic things like driving for example. 

00:09:57 Temple Grandin 

If I hadn't learned to drive, I would not have been in the cattle industry. It's that simple, because that was all in rural areas. It's going to take a whole lot longer to run to drive. More and more and more practice in a totally safe place. I started out in the middle of a horse pasture on a manual transmission. 

00:10:16 Temple Grandin 

I'll even show you what I started out on. That's the truck I start out on right there. Squeezy toy truck from our credit union. I don't know why our credit union was giving us out, but they were. And then my aunt's mailbox was 3 miles away on a dirt road. So that gave me 6 miles of driving six days a week in a very safe place on a dirt road. 

00:10:40 Temple Grandin 

Lots and lots—a lot more practice.  Drivers’ Ed crams them into it too quickly then they think they do everything with simulators. I tried one of the simulators—I thought it was just terrible and it didn't steal like a vehicle—it didn't steer right and it said I failed. Well I couldn't—the way the steering worked was not realistic at all. 

00:11:02 Temple Grandin 

No, let's get a real car and we're going to start out in the giant parking lot in the middle of it. Let's find one with no poles, nothing to hit. 20 minutes a day. Might spend a month, 20 minutes a day, driving around in that parking lot. 

00:11:17 Temple Grandin 

And then gradually back roads, fields. If again, you don't want to go out in mud holes in fields. But you've got to get a lot more practice and it's going to require more practice than a neurotypical person. 

00:11:31 Johnandrew Slominski 

Speaking of your childhood, you've been very open about how you grew up and some of the challenges you experienced. What were some of the lessons that you remember learning? 

00:11:44 Temple Grandin 

Well, it was—being in the 50s, you know, manners were taught in a much more structured way. There were a lot more expectations, but accommodations were made. And I did a lot of deep thinking about this because last week I talked to a mom and her 9-year-old pitched a big fit and wouldn’t put his phone in the X-ray machine. 

00:12:07 Temple Grandin 

That is something that kind of problem would not have happened with me. But when we went on vacation, we went on this ferry boat with this horrible horn and the first time it went off, I flung myself on the deck and I screamed. Then they let me ride in the cabin below. That was an accommodation. Yes, we are going on the ferry and that was the last fit I threw on the ferry—see, an accommodation. Maybe we could go to family gatherings. You know, there was a room. I could go into the in the spare bedroom where I go play with some toys to get my exercise, and they let me play beat the elevator at my grandmother's apartment, and I could run up five flights of stairs faster than the elevator. 

00:12:43 Temple Grandin 

And that kind of run the energy out of me. You see, that's an accommodation. But then on the other hand, I was expected to learn to eat properly with utensils. There was one little accommodation made when I held my fork, holding it like this. My finger on it. 

00:13:00 Temple Grandin 

The meat ended up on the floor, so I held it in my fist, which is little but, but then I could eat neatly. 

00:13:08 Temple Grandin 

There was a little coordination problem there. I still hold it in my fist. OK, that's a little accommodation, but there were—there were expectations for doing normal stuff like going to a movie, going to family gatherings. 

00:13:24 Temple Grandin 

You know this, and then manners were taught in a much more structured way. You were taught to shake hands. All the kids in our neighborhood and eight years old, you had to put some good clothes on and greet the guests. 

00:13:35 Temple Grandin 

It was taught in a very much more structured way and there was nothing mean about it. You know, I wasn't forced to sit under that horn on the ferry. They let me go in the cabin down below. 

00:13:46 Temple Grandin 

The other thing to prevent a lot of kinds of problems is no surprises. All right, let's sit with the whole TSA thing. Well, let's watch the video. Sometimes they have to touch people. You don't want to have that be a surprise. 

00:14:01 Temple Grandin 

Let's look at videos of insides of airplanes. When we got to the airport and watch them take off. Let's make it interesting without surprises. Surprises scare. 

00:14:12 Temple Grandin 

That's just a real basic principle. 

00:14:16 Johnandrew Slominski 

I know your mother was a huge advocate of yours when you were young. What kind of understanding do you think she had of how your brain worked? 

00:14:26 Temple Grandin 

I think Mother was visual thinker. And neither of us knew that other people weren't visual thinkers. I remember talking to mother like, I don't know, 30 years ago, and we were discussing thinking. And she says, well, I thought everybody's a visual thinker, and she was very visual thinker. And I think that helped her on figuring out some of the accommodations because, like, when I talk about riding in the cabin below in the ferry, I see the cabin and I can feel the seat I sat on. 

00:14:50 Temple Grandin 

It had a window where you could slide down part of it. 

00:14:55 Johnandrew Slominski 

The neurologist, Oliver Sacks, wrote a book in 1995 called An Anthropologist on Mars, which is actually how you described yourself in the book. 

00:15:01 Temple Grandin 

That's right. 

00:15:06 Temple Grandin 

That's right, because I said I had to figure out social skills like I was an anthropologist studying them. 

00:15:12 Temple Grandin 

You know, I have to figure them out. An autistic need really, really clear feedback when they're at work, about social, you know, mistakes they make, you know, they end up getting a job and then they get fired because they're socially bad. But the bosses can't just say,  you're rude with colleagues. You need to give—when they do something rude you need to be very specific as to what they did wrong. On my very first project, I criticized some welding and I said it looked like pigeon doo-doo. 

00:15:38 Temple Grandin 

And the plant engineer pulled me into his office. I remember it really well. Little boiler room office. 

00:15:43 Temple Grandin 

And he told me that I had to apologize. He didn’t scream at me. He told me exactly what I had to do, that I had to apologize for that rude talk.  Now I didn't tell the welder the welding was wonderful, but I apologized for the rude talk. He told me exactly what to do, and he says he's up in the cafeteria now. And you're going up there right now. 

00:16:04 Temple Grandin 

Thank you, Harley. You're a great job coach. 

00:16:08 Johnandrew Slominski 

Well, and it sounds like Harley was both kind and empathetic and also very clear in his feedback for you. 

00:16:16 Temple Grandin 

That was very helpful. And at the time—see, and especially as I've gotten older and I'm looking back on these things, I realized what Harley did was just so important. 

00:16:28 Temple Grandin 

He did it very calmly and he explained to me exactly what I needed to do. And then I'd make sure I didn’t do that again. 

00:16:37 Johnandrew Slominski 

In your book Animals in Translation, you write about the similarities between the minds of the animals you've studied and your own. What surprises you most about the minds of other humans? 

00:16:51 Temple Grandin 

Well, how illogical they are. I just can't believe some illogic. OK, election, we don't even discuss that.  No, I'm kind of horrified at just how illogical human beings can be. 

00:17:11 Temple Grandin 

I can't believe some of the conspiracy theories people could believe. All right, I think this is safe to talk about: airplane trails are a government plot. Well, just the other day, I watched the—for some reason airplane trails were really low and you could see the airplanes, usually you can't. 

00:17:27 Temple Grandin 

I'm going, really? And I was on a plane one time and this girl was showing all these dumb pictures on her phone, these ridiculous websites about airplane trails. 

00:17:38 Temple Grandin 

And guess what? Southwest Airlines was whipping by outside the window leaving an airplane trail. Yeah, that kind of nonsense. I just don't know how people can believe some of this nonsense. 

00:17:49 Johnandrew Slominski 

Do you feel in a way that animals are more logical than human beings? 

00:17:56 Temple Grandin 

Well animals, one thing is that they're more predictable in how they think. I mean, like we did a very interesting experiment with horses where why is the horse sometimes spooked for no reason. So, we took a children's play set that has a little slide and the swing; they’re about 4 foot by 4 foot by 4 foot, little toddler play set. Now think about it. This book was the slide. It looks different in this orientation than that orientation. 

00:18:23 Temple Grandin 

So we walked horses by this thing like 15 times, so they no longer stopped. They no longer did this. When that place that was rotated, it became a new object. Because the memory is a picture. I love that experiment. 

00:18:38 Johnandrew Slominski 

And your findings make sense, and to bring it back to humans with autism, that seems to correlate with a couple of challenges that are typical for individuals on the spectrum, right, namely perspective taking and generalizing knowledge and skills when situations change like the play structure that you're talking about in your study with the horses. 

00:19:02 Temple Grandin 

Well, when we walked them by it, we left it at the same orientation. They would walk by it 15 or 16 times at the same orientation. Then the place that was turned 90°. So the slide then goes from this to that.  See how different that looks?  Just the slide on the play set would look veryd different. 

00:19:24 Johnandrew Slominski 

Do you have animals at home? 

00:19:26 Temple Grandin 

No, I don't. I'm traveling 85% of the time now. I thought about getting a dog during COVID and I said, well, I'm going to get back on the road after COVID you know, I live a very busy life and you know, at the age I'm at now 77 years old, I want to see these kids that are different, that have different labels grow up and get a good life and we got to get them out doing things. And we do have to make some accommodations, some noise. OK. They didn't think the autistic kids could tolerate shop class and you know how you get them over that noise sensitivity? You give them an electric drill and say, you're turning it on and off. Here's some wood. Here's some metal. Now drill some holes in it. You see, when they make the noise, when they turn it on, it's much better tolerated. You know what they should have done with me? They should have taken me up where the captain was and when the ship comes into the harbor, they said, now you pull the cord. 

00:20:15 Temple Grandin 

You see, when the autistic person initiates the sound, it's much better tolerated, and do that with vacuum cleaners, hair dryers. One family took their kid down to the fire station to let them turn on the siren. 

00:20:29 Temple Grandin 

That made a difference. Now, I still have problems with hearing in noisy restaurants. This is where some socializing is really hard because I can't hear. I was at a party just the other day. We went to a really nice steakhouse and I just kind of tuned out and was looking at stuff on the wall because it was just too much noise and I couldn't hear what people were saying. And then I think maybe I've gotten older now it's gotten somewhat worse, but. 

00:20:55 Johnandrew Slominski 

As a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, what are your classes like? I imagine you work with students of all different kinds of minds and experiences. What sorts of things do you do with them? 

00:21:08 Temple Grandin 

Well, I teach a class in livestock handling and I give a regular lecture on behavior. Then they have to do a scale drawing. 

00:21:16 Temple Grandin 

And some say, well, why would you ever want to do a scale drawing? Well let’s say you're remodeling a house. I've got students today that have never used a ruler. 

00:21:23 Temple Grandin 

OK, if a cattle shoot’s 30 inches wide, they don't realize that 2 foot 6 inches is 30 inches. I am not kidding. This is recent stuff. 

00:21:33 Temple Grandin 

And then I have them do another project where I teach them how to use scientific databases like Google Scholar, PUB Med, Web of Science and the Elsevier databases. 

00:21:44 Temple Grandin 

OK, maybe they won't believe so much garbage if they can look up science. These databases access all the scientific literature. Pub Med is medical and veterinary, but the others are everything and Pub Med and Google Scholar are free. 

00:22:03 Temple Grandin 

You know, so you can look up—OK, there was all those discussions about medicines for COVID. You better believe it, during COVID, I spent hours online looking at stuff up. 

00:22:15 Temple Grandin 

But I think that's gotten controversial, so I'm not gonna tell you what I discovered, but I figured I could save my butt if I got COVID. And I was worried about it because I'm a senior. 

00:22:25 Temple Grandin 

You better believe it. I was first—well, I was—instant I could get the vaccine I did. See, that's another example of the illogic. 

00:22:33 Johnandrew Slominski 

You're a huge advocate for the skilled trades and I want to ask you more about that. 

00:22:37 Temple Grandin 

Now I'm really pushing the trades and the reason why I'm pushing the trades is AI is going to knock out a lot of animation jobs, a lot of video game design jobs, and a lot of just, you know, run of the mill illustrations. Then you have the visual spatial math pattern thinker. 

00:22:54 Temple Grandin 

Math pattern thinker. They think in patterns. They're going to be very good at the mathematical part of engineering. Let's take building a food processing plant. My kind of mind builds the mechanical equipment and invents it. the mathematician’s needed for the refrigeration system. We don't understand refrigeration. We don't touch that stuff. 

00:23:15 Temple Grandin 

That requires mathematics. So in order to make the whole factory, you've got to have both. 

00:23:21 Temple Grandin 

And then you have another autistic. That's a word fact thinker. Loving their favorite sports teams. Every fact about them. Some historical things, love every fact about it. 

00:23:31 Temple Grandin 

And they can be very good at specialized retail, very, very good. A bank hired two of them to sell specialized financial products because they know every detail of every different product. There was a successful entrepreneur who sold business insurance, specialized business insurance. Car dealers, selling cars. 

00:23:51 Temple Grandin 

That's another one's been very, very successful. They'll know every feature of every car on the lot. I call that specialized, quiet retail. Now let's talk about some accommodations. We talk about accommodations with me asa little kid, but let's say for the grown-ups on the spectrum. 

00:24:08 Temple Grandin 

Pilot’s checklists. Any task that has a sequence of stuff you have to do. 

00:24:14 Temple Grandin 

A verbal instruction doesn't work. Let me write it down. Bullet points in a pilot's checklist format to show me how to close out the cash register at Walmart, for example. 

00:24:25 Temple Grandin 

Because you just tell me the steps, I don't remember them. I need an external working memory. Also, maybe the thing—let's say I worked at Walmart and you wanted me to shelve different stuff. Then I want to write down—I'm going to do the cosmetic aisle, you know, and make a list. 

00:24:41 Temple Grandin 

You know, because lots of times they get fired and well,  they didn't follow the directions. Well, long strings of rule instruction just do not work. That is an accommodation that's absolutely needed. 

00:24:51 Temple Grandin 

And let's avoid the chaos. Multitasking jobs. Take-out window chaos. Holiday chaos store. That's the sort of stuff to probably avoid. Those are two things that have come up. And then at the university, extra time on tests. But you see what I've done so many talks. I've talked to many people that they these accommodations I've just told you, they come up all the time. 

00:25:15 Temple Grandin 

These are on the “have-to” list. 

00:25:18 Johnandrew Slominski 

And these things like visual supports or pilots’ checklists—and I love that term. These are evidence-based practices that we know work. 

00:25:27 Temple Grandin 

That's right. 

00:25:29 Johnandrew Slominski 

What are some of the general challenges that you see people with autism facing in the workforce? 

00:25:34 Temple Grandin 

But with the...person, I'm sorry to interrupt. One of the things I have a problem with, I have a hard time figuring out when to break in—into the conversation. 

00:25:45 Temple Grandin 

But I've seen and heard some very sad stories of people that have had a job for maybe like 30 years. And then the company gets sold or shuts down, or they get the new boss getting a new boss is a dangerous time. 

00:25:58 Temple Grandin 

In fact, I almost lost a job. At one of my first jobs working for State Farm magazine when the magazine was sold and we got a new boss and Jim thought I was weird. Fortunately, Suzie, the lady who did the ad layout, says, Jim doesn't like you. We're going to need to make a big scrapbook of all your articles and show it to him. 

00:26:18 Temple Grandin 

And then when he saw all the work I did, he gave me a raise. 

00:26:22 Temple Grandin 

See part of the problem I had, why the new boss didn't know how much I had done was that three-quarters of my stuff was not bylined, so he didn't know. 

00:26:33 Johnandrew Slominski 

So, you basically had to take your work and present it to him in a way that he could make sense of it? 

00:26:39 Temple Grandin 

Well, that's right. And that's how I way I sold the jobs. Well, here's one of my drawings right here. The way I sold jobs was to show people my drawings. That's how I sold jobs. 

00:26:52 Johnandrew Slominski 

And for listeners who can't see us right now, you're showing me an incredibly intricate drawing of one of your livestock handling facilities. 

Where did you learn to draw like that? 

00:27:04 Temple Grandin 

Well, I worked for a while for feedback construction company. There was a wonderful draftsman named Davy and I'm pretty sure he was on the spectrum, and we were best buds. 

00:27:14 Temple Grandin 

And I watched how he did it and I went out and I got the same pencils. But before I could learn to draw, I had to learn to read a drawing. And now you might realize, how does how on a floor plan, a column that holds up the roof might be just shown as a round circle or a square. I had to learn to see that. 

00:27:35 Temple Grandin 

And I had a chance to take a set of drawings at the Swift beef plant, walk all around the plant and relate everything on the drawing to the actual structure. 

00:27:43 Temple Grandin 

You have to learn to see the structure when you look at the floor plan and the best way to do that is walking around in the place. 

00:27:51 Johnandrew Slominski 

Right. 

00:27:52 Temple Grandin 

And then in the drawing, I learned the drawing really fast. I just pretended I was Davy. But there was a whole period of learning how to relate, especially the columns in a building, to the floor plan. 

00:28:07 Johnandrew Slominski 

With so many inventions and with your designs now practically standard equipment in the livestock handling world, what are you proudest of? 

00:28:17 Temple Grandin 

Well, I worked on a piece of equipment called the center track restrainer system and it's in all the big beef plants. I think that’s doing pretty good for somebody they thought was stupid. And one of the things that really motivated me is that I want to prove I wasn't stupid. I still can't do algebra. I can't do any higher math. That's why I majored in psychology. I had to be tutor, tutor, tutored in statistics. 

00:28:36 Temple Grandin 

But one of the things I did do is when I failed my first quiz, I asked for help. 

00:28:44 Johnandrew Slominski 

What was it like working with Claire Danes and then seeing her on screen playing the character of you? I could imagine it being sort of odd, something like an out of body experience. 

00:28:55 Temple Grandin 

Well, I worked with her for about four hours and then I gave all these ancient old VHS tapes and she imitated my voice so good that when I was interviewed, they had the scenes for the movie played and then her voice in the movie I almost mixed us up. 

00:29:15 Temple Grandin 

Between me talking then—almost makes this up. I thought they did a good job on it. There's a new movie called An Open Door that's been made by John Barnhardt and John Festervand at CSU. But that concentrates more on my professor life, later on in life. 

00:29:32 Johnandrew Slominski 

So many people got to know your story through that film and you've spent a lot of your life now in the public eye. When you think about your legacy, what's most important to you? 

00:29:44 Temple Grandin 

Well, I can tell you the handling of animals has gotten a whole lot better. That has really, really improved. I think I had something to do with that. 

00:29:51 Temple Grandin 

But right now, at the age I’m at now, I want to help these kids that’re different get out and get good jobs and we need their skills. I mean, we’d better develop our math kids so we can develop the small circuits that don't eat up energy at a data center. 

00:30:05 Temple Grandin 

And then you're going to need my kind of thinker to keep the infrastructure from falling apart because it's falling apart. 

00:30:11 Temple Grandin 

You see, you’re going to need both. There's autism in in both of those. 

00:30:16 Johnandrew Slominski 

You're so committed to this mission of helping kids who are different, as you put it, find their place in the world. Looking back, can you point to people that instilled these types of values in you when you were younger? 

00:30:30 Temple Grandin 

Well, of course let's start with my mother. She had the most profound impact on me when I was in elementary school. 

00:30:37 Temple Grandin 

And then even then, when I had to go to a special school, she picked out three schools and she let me choose. There was always some choice. You know, we can do this or we can do that. And then Anne out at the ranch, another really important mentor. 

00:30:53 Temple Grandin 

My science teacher, Mr. Carlock. I was an unmotivated study, couldn't care less about studying. But then when Mr. Carlock showed me how being at—studying could lead to becoming a scientist, I turned that motivation around overnight. Now there was a reason to study. So that was with Mr. Carlock, my mother, Anne, and then Jim, my contractor, who seeked me out, showed me how to set up a business. The other thing I want to emphasize with these students that are different. 

00:31:20 Temple Grandin 

Neurodiverse students: expose them to lots of different things. 

00:31:23 Temple Grandin 

When I was a kid, I was exposed to a little flute. I couldn't play it. Another kid’s going to take off with music. 

00:31:28 Temple Grandin 

I had piano lessons. I was terrible at it, you know. But you expose kids to lots of things. Find out what they're good at. But if they're not exposed to stuff, how can they find out what they're good at? 

00:31:38 Temple Grandin 

Math kids need to be exposed to higher math.  My kind of mind, you know, I got interested in cattle as a teenager. 

00:31:43 Temple Grandin 

Horses—that started as a teenager. Horses were basically, they saved my life as a teenager because they were one of the places where I had friends riding horses. Super important. But you got to be exposed to horses to get interested in in them. 

00:31:59 Temple Grandin 

Exposing them to lots—see, it takes exposure, and then mentoring. 

00:32:05 Johnandrew Slominski 

You're now 77, and it seems like you're busier than ever. Teaching, writing, traveling months out of the year for conferences and speaking. Do you have any plans to slow down? 

00:32:18 Temple Grandin 

You know, I kind of, my back hurts. So I've got quite a lot of pain. Every time my back hurts, I think about this 80-year-old flight attendant. She just wanted to get a fun job, and this is the Embraer jet and the door has a big handle. You push down like this. 

00:32:32 Temple Grandin 

And I got upgraded to first class and I got to watch her close the door on that plane and shove that handle down. 80-year-old flight attendant.  So when my back hurts, I think about her. 

00:32:43 Temple Grandin 

And I'm going, 80-year-old flight attendant? She put me to shame. You just keep going. You stop moving? I've heard—I've talked to a lot of people who’ve said, you look like, my doctor said I was a young 77-year-old. 

00:32:55 Temple Grandin 

And then talk about this, there are people in the early 70s and barely walk. You gotta keep moving. 

00:33:01 Johnandrew Slominski 

When you were starting out before your PhD, before your first inventions, did you ever have any idea that this is where life would take you and that your message would impact so many people? 

00:33:14 Temple Grandin 

No, I had no idea. I was—I was starting out little tiny projects. I started out little sign painting business when I was in high school. And the first sign I made for pay was for a hair salon. So I decorated it with the Breck Shampoo lady. And then I remember, like, how much I cared about my little tiny ranch projects I had. 

00:33:32 Temple Grandin 

Yeah, it started out slowly. One little project at a time and then gradually getting bigger projects, and that's the same way these machine shops I've worked with, the way they developed. They  started out with small projects and then a big factory hires them. They do a small project. They like them. Then they have to do a more complicated project. 15 years later, they're doing the plant edition. 

00:33:53 Temple Grandin 

I've seen that that.  There's a scene in the HBO movie where I get the editor’s card. That's a true scene. It's really true because I knew if I wrote for that magazine that would help my career. I had the guts to go up and get the card.  That scene’s really important because working for that magazine really did help my career. 

00:34:12 Temple Grandin 

And then I wrote for the state magazine and wrote stuff for the for the national cattle magazines. Yes, that made a big difference. That’s seeing doors to opportunity. 

00:34:22 Temple Grandin 

It's a very important scene in that movie, and it's absolutely real. 

00:34:28 Johnandrew Slominski 

Temple Grandin, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk with you today. 

00:34:32 Temple Grandin 

All right, great to talk to you. I'm gonna go visit my—some good friends tonight.  

00:34:37 Johnandrew Slominski 

Well, safe travels and stay well. 

00:34:41 Temple Grandin 

OK. Thank you so much. 

00:34:44 Johnandrew Slominski 

You've been listening to my conversation with Dr.Temple Grandin. 

00:34:49 Johnandrew Slominski 

A professor of animal science at Colorado State University, she has revolutionized the understanding of animal behavior and is one of the world's most influential voices on autism. Thanks for being with us. 

00:35:05 Johnandrew Slominski 

The Autism Annex podcast was developed by STAR Autism Support. I'm Johnandrew Slominski. 

00:35:13 Johnandrew Slominski 

In our next episode, I talk with Danny Combs, founder of TACT in Denver, Colorado. TACT, which stands for Teaching the Autism Community Trades, has taken Temple Grandin's message to heart and put it into practice. 

00:35:28 Johnandrew Slominski 

I hope you'll join us to learn more. 

00:35:31 Johnandrew Slominski 

Until next time, take good care of yourself and one another.