https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=XYZP1wuGBD8
So the Hebrews created history as we know it. You don’t get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper. It’s going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert. And we’re going to see that there’s something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest ethical spirit to which we’re beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny. Yes, exactly. I want villains to get punished. But do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That’s such a Christian question. One of the reasons why I started working on the equipment is the way cattle were being handled was horrible. Electric prods on 100% of them falling down, crashing into things, people screaming at them. Cattle handling in the 80s was terrible, absolutely terrible. I saw that as something that I could fix. Now I talk to a lot of young people today that want to do activism about some specific thing, and it’s way too broad. I want justice in the world, for example. Right, yes. It might be something they would say. And I say, why don’t you do something more targeted, like using DNA to show that this prisoner was falsely accused? You see, now that’s something a lot more targeted that you can actually do. Yes, absolutely. I think that is a huge problem with the way that kids are trained morally in universities, is that that grandiose, vague activism replaces the actual practicalities of problem solving that you’re describing that actually make a difference. 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, but I’m particularly excited about my guest today, Dr. Temple Grandin. 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. I think you could make a case for that. She’s a remarkable person. When I saw her first in Tucson, Arizona, I’ll talk about that a little bit in our interview, she gave one of the most compelling presentations I’d ever seen in an academic setting at a conference on consciousness. I saw that about 15 years ago, and ever since then, I’d really been wanting to meet her, and I got to do that today, so that’s so exciting. So I’ll just give you a brief bio and we’ll pop into the interview. Dr. Temple Grandin is a professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University. Companies 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 McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Whole Foods, and many other major corporations. She has appeared on numerous shows across platforms, such as 2020 Larry King Live and Prime Time. Dr. Grandin is also an accomplished author, with books such as Thinking in Pictures, Livestock Handling and Transport, and The Autistic Brain. 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. 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 today and we’re going to learn what she has to say now about thinking. Let’s start with visual thinking in language. So do you want to tell people about your realization, about different thought patterns? When I was in my 20s, I thought everybody thought in pictures the way I thought. I didn’t know that other people thought in words until I was in my late 30s. Now you’ve already mentioned how do I categorize. Well, I’ll explain as a child how I learned to categorize, categorizing with individual pictures. So, as a very young child, I categorized cats, dogs and horses by size, because in our neighborhood at that time, there were no cattle and there were no small dogs. Then a dachshund came into my neighborhood, and she’s the same size as a cat. And I remember looking at the dachshund, she was a black dachshund, and trying to figure out now what features does she share with the dog. She barks. Her nose shape is the same as a dog, and she smells like a dog. So I had to take other sensory-based things like smell and what the dog sounded like to put the dachshund in the dog category. So the way I form categories is I have to have a bunch of information. Let’s take the cat category. And you look at a leopard’s face, a lion’s face, and even a house cat’s face, there’s similarities. And they also smell the same too. If you go to the zoo, you can smell how they are different. So the first step for abstract thinking is put making categories. So when I finally figured out that other people did not think in pictures, if I ask most people, visualize your own home, your dog or your car, you will do it, because you’re so familiar with that. But one time at an autism conference when I was in my late 30s, I asked a speech therapist, think about a church staple, and I was shocked that the only image he saw was a very vague two lines like this, where I see specific churches. They come up like a series of, well, back then, 35-millimeter slides, now PowerPoint slides. And then I can start, as I see more and more of these churches, I can put them into New England-type category, stone cathedral-type. Looks like a warehouse and it has a little plastic steeple type. I can make finer categories as I get more and more specific images. It’s bottom-up thinking. And I learned that that’s exactly how an artificial intelligence program diagnoses melanoma cancer. It’s given a training set of 2,000 melanomas and another training set of every kind of skin rash and mosquito bite and infected whatever. And then it learns to categorize melanoma from non-melanoma. And that was very insightful to me when I learned that that’s how the simple type of artificial intelligence programs work, to diagnosing something like melanoma. So let me ask you, when I’m thinking something through, now I can think in pictures, and If I’m building something or trying to design something to build, then I tend to think in pictures. But I would say 90% of the time, my proclivity is to think in words. And I would say, in part, that’s because my word thinking is so dominant, it just suppresses the image thinking. And so a lot of my thinking, I would also say, takes the form of something like internal argumentation. So I’ll ask myself a question, I’ll think up an answer in words, and then I’ll think up a bunch of reasons why that answer isn’t sufficient, and then I’ll conduct an internal argument. And that’s occupying me continually, like 16 hours a day, non-stop. And it’s been like that ever since I was two years old, except for those times, let’s say. So yeah, so how do you conduct internal arguments? Or like what accounts for the… So part of the creativity in my thinking is the outcome of these arguments. But you’re thinking in pictures, so you’re not having internal arguments. What’s the stream of your thought like? Well, when it comes to things like designing equipment, I often will kind of, a lot of equipment design, someone gets an idea from something else. In one of my other books, I wrote about the inventor of Velcro, and he saw how bird-ox stuck on his clothes. Cockle-birds and those kind of things stuck on his clothes. And that’s where he got the idea for making Velcro. That would be visual thinking. The bird-ox and Velcro, they’ve got similarities on how they stick together. When I’m thinking designing equipment, I can just see how it operates. I worked with welders that had 20 patents each that barely graduated from high school, but they could build any kind of a machine and invent industrial machinery. They just see it in their head. Right now, will you see… Okay, so I read Nikolai Tesla’s biography a long while back, and it was extremely interesting. He claimed, and I have no reason to disbelieve him, that entire inventions, machines, would pop into the theater of his imagination, detailed out to the point where he knew the angles on the screws that held the metal together. And he would try to write them down in something, draw them out in something approximating, something that would be, that you could make a blueprint out of, let’s say, in that much detail. And sometimes a new invention would pop into his head so quickly that it would obliterate the previous one. He had to work very quickly to keep up. And so there’s that incredible fluency in visualization. But then, as I said, in the verbal world, I’ll think of argument and counterarguments. When you’re thinking of industrial design, do you think of the object that you’re attempting to design and then multiple variants of it and test them against each other? Or does it just come to you as a solution for a given problem? It almost sort of just pops into my head. I also see mechanical abnormalities. I remember walking in and someone made a cardboard, old-fashioned locomotive. The wheels have those links between them. And I go, they drew that wrong. Wheels are not going to turn. You know, it was just a cartoon train for a party. But I immediately noticed that they didn’t draw it right. The other thing is, is my thinking’s associative. All right, give me a key word. Pretend I’m Google for images. Not something I can see and hear with books and papers all around and photography equipment and stuff all around me, but something kind of a creative key word. And I’ll tell you how I access my memory for that key word. Start the new year off right with Black Rifle Coffee. Black Rifle has all the best brewing gear, thermoses, mugs, and apparel designed for folks who love country and coffee. Black Rifle sources the most exotic roasts from around the globe. All coffee is roasted here in the U.S. by veteran-led teams of coffee experts. Every purchase you make with Black Rifle helps support veteran and first responder causes. Go to blackriflecoffee.com and use promo code JORDAN for 10% off coffee, coffee gear, and apparel. Or join the Black Rifle Coffee Club for automatic deliveries to your door on your schedule. Save 10% with promo code JORDAN. That’s blackriflecoffee.com, promo code JORDAN. Black Rifle Coffee, supporting veterans and America’s coffee. So and with regards, so my wife has a very powerful visual imagination. She’s able to do all sorts of remarkable things with it. And one of the things that strikes me as highly probable is that her capacity for visual imagery is a lot more intense than mine. Yes. I was a fairly vivid dreamer for years, especially when I was reading Carl Jung’s work in graduate school. Don’t seem to dream much now or not, well, I don’t remember them much now. When I do think in pictures, it’s not as vivid as seeing the real world. It’s maybe 5% of that. It’s sort of, well, it just doesn’t have that intensity. And you? No, it’s very, very vivid. And while you were setting up all the camera equipment, here I found, here’s a whole bunch of papers, more papers I found online supporting a lot of the things that are in the book. I just got surfing around and boy, you can sometimes find some great stuff when you look at the citations. No, but it’s very, very vivid. It’s completely vivid. Now when you mentioned the word imagination, I remember going to a long time ago, Disney World, a kind of a ride that had imagination with people and dirigibles and things like that. You know, then I visited a studio where Disney made a whole bunch of their stuff. I’m now seeing that. Yes, I’m now seeing a non-disclosure agreement. So I can’t tell you what I did there. And now I’m seeing a very interesting discussion we had about designing things. Where you’re designing things, there’s the decoration part of it. And then there’s the mechanical part of a machine. Of course, at an amusement park, you want to have decorations, but you also, rides have to mechanically work. They’re kind of two separate things. They’re kind of done by two separate departments. You also spoke in your book about your ability to see things out of place. And so one of the things that characterizes autism is the fact that at least some autistic people are not very happy when they walk into a room, say, that they’re familiar with and one thing is out of place. So for example, an autistic child might walk into a dining room and one of the chairs is tilted 45 degrees to the right or to the left instead of being put straight in. And what seems to happen, correct me if you feel that I’m wrong, is that the fact that that chair is now askew means that the entire room is different in some important and emotionally significant way. So there’s this response to anomaly. I don’t have that issue. That’s not an issue for me. But if there’s one pixel off on an electronic sign, I will notice that. I remember one time walking into the airport with somebody else and the United Ticket Counter sign was a whole row of television monitors. And there must have been 20 TV monitors making the word United over and over again. And one of the screens was scrambled, the whole screen. And I immediately saw it. And I said to the person beside me, did you see that that sign was messed up? No, they did not see it. And they were right beside me when we walked in. I immediately saw it. Now that it upset me, no. I just noticed that the sign was scrambled. Right. But it didn’t upset you. No. Yeah. So that’s that interesting. So for me, I think I can detect anomalies visually. So for example, one of the things I learned to do when I was setting up my house and renovating places and setting up my offices, like arranging my local environment, was to sit in the room and become meditative in some sense and then to feel out what was bothering me about the room, like what ugly feature might pop out, what part of it needed to be attended to. And I think I was tuning myself to detect what was abnormal in relationship to the underlying aesthetic or the pattern of the room. But that pops out for you almost instantaneously. For me, anomaly detection is mostly verbal again. It’s like, I’ll think up an argument and then think up counter arguments. And if one argument and the other don’t jive, if they’re contradictory, then that pops out for me. Well, it’s sort of like I fly all the time. So like I know when the pilots do the checklist and like we push back and we just take too long to turn. I’m going, oh, we’re going to have air traffic controls away. And I can often predict that before they announce it. And I also can, I’m very conscious of, on the biggest airplane, when they start the little gentle push to push it back from the gate, I can feel it on the biggest aircraft there is. Right. All right, so now? I just want to get there and I’m going, oh, please push back. But it’s sort of like, I don’t get upset about it. It’s just anything that’s not routine, I instantly notice it. And I go, oh crap, I see a vest that says tech ops. We may have a delayed flight. Now that brings up another thing I want to talk about. The last month I’ve had, okay, mechanic come on a plane twice and both mechanics had gray hair. And this brings up a major issue that’s in my book about skill loss, especially skill loss with mechanical things. I’ve been on a lot of questionable elevators and escalators lately that definitely needed servicing. And what’s happening, and this is in my screened out chapter, is the kids are getting screened out of these trades because they’ve taken the shop classes out of the schools 20 years ago and we have so many higher math requirements that you don’t need for something like fixing elevators that the kids are playing video games in the basement on an autism diagnosis instead of fixing elevators. There’s a relationship here between what goes on with industrial things and what’s going which is a major, major thing that I’m interested in talking about. Yeah, so let’s talk about that a little bit. That’s one of the things that popped out for me from your book. So I was trying to think that through. So you make the claim, as you just laid out, that our education system and maybe our entire culture as it’s hypothetically deindustrializing is actually working against the best interests of those who think mechanically, those who think in pictures, and those who can do hands-on work. And here’s a paper I just dug off of Google Scholar on visual object ability, a new dimension of nonverbal intelligence. And what a lot of educators don’t understand is that object visualization, especially on solving mechanical problems, it is a different way of thinking. I worked with people that barely graduated from high school, stutterers. They’d be labeled autistic today. They’d be in special ed. But they had big metalworking shops and 20 patents each for mechanically complicated equipment that they are selling around the world. And this is something that educators just don’t get it. And the reason why I wrote this book, I’ll tell you what was the reason. In 2019, just before COVID shut everything down, I went to four places and I realized the magnitude of the skill loss. The first one was a pork processing plant where most of the equipment came from Holland. I went to another pork processing plant, equipment coming from Holland. Then I went to a poultry processing plant where all of the specialized equipment came from Holland, 100 shipping containers. And then I went to the Steve Jobs Theater and the structural glass walls are from Italy and Germany. Then after reading more stuff, I found out that the state of the art electronic chip making machine comes from Holland. And that goes back to their educational system. They don’t stick their nose up at the high end skilled trades and look at it sort of like a lesser form of intelligence. And the kids get to about ninth grade, they can go university route or they can go tech route. And I want to emphasize high end skilled trades where you’re really using that visual thinking for mechanical devices. So I was trying to think through why this might be happening. So let me offer some hypotheses to you and you tell me what you think about this. So first of all, we have learned and you draw on Simon Baron Cohen’s work in your book. We have learned that there is a difference and we can try to map this on to verbal thinking versus imagistic thinking. Simon Baron Cohen talked about systemizing versus empathizing. And he considers that something akin to the continuum between autistic thinking and normal thinking. So the autistic types are more systematizing and my suspicions are they’re also the ones who are more likely to think in images in the manner that you describe. Wait a minute. Now we have two kinds of thinking in images. And there’s a nice paper that just came out relatively recently, Seeing and Thinking in Pictures, the Review of Visual Information Processing, that came out in 2018. I like to keep my stuff up to date. Now I think in photo realistic pictures where the more mathematical type of thinking thinks in patterns. See, in your brain you’ve got circuits for what is something. Okay, so I see a dog and I go, yeah, that’s a dog. Or I’ve got some china ceramic cattle on my coffee table here. Okay, and I just look at the animals and name them. Then the visual spatial is where is something? Where are you located in space? There are actually two different kinds of visualization. And I have a whole chapter in Visual Thinking book about this and research to back this up. Now the visual spatial type pattern thinking or sort of where is something in space, those kids do well in math. So they’re going the STEM right. But let me tell you what’s going on out in the food processing plants. The people I worked with in the big steel shops now that a lot of us closed down, we are paying the price now for taking out the shop classes, designed mechanically clever equipment. The people I worked with in May, we never worked on boilers or refrigeration. We don’t understand that stuff. That requires a lot more mathematical thinking or the load on the roof so the factory doesn’t fall down if we get two feet of snow. You see, I have seen this division of engineering labor in every single meat company I have worked with. They’re all the same. So do you think that’s a matter of like let’s say something approximating focal depth? So is it possible that the first kind of people that you talked about are dealing at the object level itself, so they’re dealing say with a boiler or with a particular piece of equipment whereas the other types are dealing with the relationship between pieces of equipment? No, you don’t think that’s it? No, I think it’s just real simple. You just see the objects and then after you work, you see an object visualizer gets better and better at designing mechanical equipment. The more things you go out and see, like when I started working my designing cattle handling facilities, I went to every feed yard in Arizona and I worked cattle. And I go this kind of a design doesn’t work. This worked. Then I took all the good bits and like recombine them. It’s bottom-up thinking. The more stuff I get exposed to, okay, whether it’s cattle handling facility or maybe I look at how water flows through something. And then you watch how cattle move. I like to look at drone footage. And a lot of that resembles water flow. And the visual spatial, they see patterns. It’s actually very different. And what we’re losing is the object visualizer. That person that can just, you see, I’m very aware of things like I go in an elevator now that hasn’t been serviced and it’s scraping in the shaft. You better believe it. Right, right. I hear it. And I go, they haven’t serviced that elevator. And I was at a fancy hotel recently and the bellhop goes, oh, it skips that floor. We have to get that floor on the way down. Yeah, real nice hotel. Major city. Right, right. Okay, so let me, I don’t quite understand that distinction yet, so I’m going to push you a little bit more on that. So on the visual side, you have the visual spatial types, if I’m remembering this correctly, and that’s the category that you fall into. And then you have people who are, what are they, higher up on the abstraction chain in some sense, the ones who can think more mathematically? No, but basically object visualizers, I can tell you this from experience, we’re good at mechanical devices, art, photography. I have talked to many, many photographers because I do a lot of interviews, find out they’re dyslexic, they’re about flunked out of school, and fortunately somebody introduced them to photography. And the other thing that my kind of mind’s good at is animals. Then your visual spatial, mathematics, algebra, I can’t do algebra. There’s nothing there to visualize. Mathematics, calculus, I took a computer programming course when I was in college. I couldn’t do it, I had to drop it. I was exposed to the same exact computer that Bill Gates had. He could do it and I had to drop the class. You know, these are the things that the more mathematical pattern thinking mind is good at. And some of these really smart kids, they can just look at algebra formulas and just see it. They don’t have to do it step by step, they just see it. And that’s how they think. And then the teachers try to make them do it step by step. That gets the kids frustrated. They don’t think the same way. My thinking is also associative. I tend to jump around, but there’s a logic to the association. And I think the best way to illustrate that associative kind of thinking is give me a single keyword, like on Google for images, and think up a creative keyword. And I will tell you exactly how my mind associates and how my mind can get off the subject, but there is a logic to the getting off of the subject. So give me a keyword, a single keyword. Okay, how about rose? Okay, I’m seeing some rose bushes that we had in our backyard when I was a child. And we had a lot of thorns on them. And we also like dig around in the grass that was back there. So now I’m seeing the grass behind our house. We used to go play in it. Catch some insects sometimes. Okay, now you can see how it’s jumping around. I don’t have that big a visual library of roses. So then I tend to then go to something else. But they’re… How about cows? What? Cows? All right, now I’m seeing like 10 cow statues right here in front of me. And so obviously, those are coming up in my mind. Just recently, I tend to bring up recent memories. I visited with a black Angus bull. It was a pet. And he wasn’t very happy with us because we didn’t bring him any carrots. So my friend gave him one of those disgusting soy protein bars and he goes, not going to eat that. He wouldn’t eat it no matter how much we tried to feed it to him. And he was annoyed because we didn’t bring him any carrots. Okay, then I’m getting… Now I’ve got the carrot word in my head. And when I was in fourth grade, I used my singer Sew Handy to sew green crepe paper so students could be carrots. And I made the green carrot tops out of green crepe paper. So that’s how I got… Interesting. So… …cattle, carrots. So talking to you that way reminds me very much of what used to happen in my therapy sessions when I was helping people interpret their dreams. And so dreams have the same quality of thought that your thought had when you just put it on display there. So because the dream tends to be an intermingling… So imagine there’s a center category and the nature of the category is somewhat unclear. Maybe that’s partly what the dream is trying to puzzle out. What you get is a web of associations, some of which are autobiographical, that are sort of circulating around a main theme. And partly what you do when you analyze a dream is you walk through all the associated images. You also ask the person to let their mind loose to generate more associations. And then you try to use the associational web to triangulate on the central theme and to haul out the gist. The gist of that array of images would be something like the interpretation of the dream. If you get it right, then it snaps into people. They think, oh yes, that’s definitely what that was about. But the dream is attempting to put something together that has a central categorical structure. Well, and there also are sensory things because I have some balance issues. So I often get dreams where I’m like riding a bike down a hill that’s super steep like that and I wish I wasn’t doing that. And I know that that has to do with the fact that I have balance issues. I don’t think it means anything. But I’m always up on some high place that I wish I wasn’t up on and I’ve got to try to walk down it. And then I have other dreams where I can see it might have some meaning and other times where it doesn’t. But the other thing with my thinking, when I’m working on design work, I can control the associations. I can control them. I’ve had before, there’s now 3D simulations. Okay, let’s say the company that’s building this plant wants to show off how their equipment works, they can do a 3D simulation showing how the equipment works. I can remember sitting in a conference room and we were trying to discuss how to do some conveyors and the other guys there were coming up with ideas for the conveyors. I’m going, no, no, if you do that, you’re going to yank the rails out of the ceiling. Oh, no, no, no, no, that won’t work. They were almost using my mind like a 3D CAD program that was animated and I could test run in my head on these different conveyors. Men, is it time to stop mindless scrolling? Time to finally gain that higher quality of life you know you’re missing out on? 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So let’s go back to the issue of, say, taking shop class out of school. So Baron Cohen talked about systematizers versus empathizers. Yeah, but what Baron Cohen did, he left out the object visualizers. He was looking more at the mathematical visualization pattern thinkers. I agree with him about systematizing and verbal, but the object visualizers. But he didn’t differentiate the systematizers properly. That should be more differentiated. Systematizers would have two categories, the object visualizer and the visual spatial. And a big mistake in a lot of perceptual studies is that they’re not differentiating them. And some people, there’s some verbal people in psychology that don’t want to believe this stuff exists. Just while you were setting up the cameras, I downloaded six new abstracts that aren’t even in my book on this that show that they are different. Right. Got them right here on my lap. So Cohen also talks about gender differences in relationship to this continuous. So we can break the continuum into two parts on the one end. And it is the case that autism tends to be preferentially a male disorder, although there are females as well. But so that systematizing mode of thinking that you’ve differentiated into the two categories also tends to be gender stereotype to some degree at a biological level. I avoid that issue as too controversial because right now I’m interested in one thing at the age of 75 of helping the students who think differently get into really good careers where they can have satisfying lives. And I avoid the controversial stuff. Yeah, well, I’m not so much interested in the controversy. I’m interested in trying to address the issue of why shop courses, for example, have been taken out of schools. Now we do know that schools are predominantly run by women and women are more likely to be empathizers. No, I think the reason why they took it out. So I’m wondering if there’s a gender issue going on there and a prejudice against a certain way of thinking. OK. What’s that? I think that one of the reasons they took out the shop classes, they kind of just go, everybody’s going to go the university route and cost. Good shop classes cost a lot of money. Now people are starting to put shop classes back in. And you know what they’re finding? They can’t find anybody to teach the shop classes. I just heard about a brand new beautiful welding shop built here in Colorado at a community college and they can’t find somebody to teach it even after they drop the university requirement. And I can tell you right now, we need people that do these things before the power grid and the water systems fall apart. I’ll tell you that stuff I care about. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, it’s OK. So you virtualize. Now, do you think virtualization has also played a role in this? I mean, the systematizing types. Some of the 3D drawings I see it drawn. And that’s not going to fix some of the serious problems we got with infrastructure right now. And you need both kinds of thinkers. One of the things I’ve got in my book is when a bridge fell down in Minneapolis and the workers were complaining. They were worried that when they were working on this bridge it was going to collapse. Well, I looked up that bridge collapse and I saw all the twisted metal and I took one look at that and I went, it’s too light. It’s too cheap. That was just from looking at the pictures. I found the engineering report on why that bridge fell down and they cheated on the gusset plates that hold the beams together and they were way thinner than the spec. But I had already looked at the pictures and said that bridge is too light. It’s cheap. Before I read any engineering report. So how was it in your life that you attained the practical knowledge necessary to facilitate your thinking? So we’re talking about how kids think in the vision. I’ll tell you how you do it. It’s real simple. You’ve got to get out and experience all kinds of stuff because the more information you put in the database the better you get. And going back to teaching a computer how to diagnose melanoma, you had to give it like a couple of thousand melanoma examples and a couple of thousand mosquito bites, infected boils and everything else examples. In other words, the more as I got older and I got more and more information in my database I could think better and better and better and I could make smaller categories of things. Now a lot of the people that I worked with in construction that build equipment for me that’s used in every large beef plant now in the US. One of them started and some of them would definitely be autistic. One of them started out working on cars. Another one took a single welding class and now he’s selling mechanical equipment all over the world. And with a tiny shop that then grew into a big shop. And what’s happening now is the little shops are not forming. And that’s why we’re importing all this equipment from Holland and Italy. Because when you look at their educational system and I looked it up again recently online. Italy actually has three routes. University route, tech route, mechanical and art route. For their fashion industry and Holland and Netherlands you can go either university route or tech route. And that’s why they’re making the state of the art chip making machine that we don’t make. Right. And I’m not talking potato chips, I’m talking electronic chips. Right. I wonder if this is also a consequence of people increasingly moving away from farms. Because when you’re on a farm you’d have to do a lot of hands on stuff. You have to do a lot of fence repair. You’ve got to take care of your own machinery. As you move into the urban environment everything in some sense even in the real world is virtualized. Because you can always call on other people to do the day to day things that you need to keep the infrastructure up. I agree. A lot of kids are growing up today totally removed from the practical. And one of the things I talk about in the visual thinking book is I talked to a doctor and he told me he had trouble training interns to sew up cuts because the interns had never used scissors as a young child. I had a student in my class that had never used a tape measure to measure anything. And they’re totally removed from the world of practical. Where those kids that came off the farms, yes, they had to figure out how to fix things. Absolutely. But I think what’s happening now in the schools is things are getting so verbal and they’re going absolutely crazy on math requirements. Because I know people with 20 patents and they could basically do sixth grade arithmetic that I could do because I can relate that back to real things. And things like… Do you know of any research pertaining on how the more the people who visualize objects might be assessed for their ability? Yes. IQ tests tilt towards the verbal. There’s a whole chapter in here and I never can pronounce their names right, blank and colva and I never can say the names correctly. But I have a whole list of references in there where the difference between the object visualizer and the visual spatial is being assessed. And there’s a whole bunch of references on that. Now I have to look these names up because I can’t pronounce them correctly. Let me find the reference list here for chapter two. Okay, it’s Blazhenkova. I’ve got one, two, three references in here from Blazhenkova on types of creativity. And then the other big reference, I have lots of references. It could be Kozhevnikov. And she’s got trade-offs, object versus spatial visualization, reviewing the visual-verbal dimension, evidence for two types of visualizers. That’s another paper. Spatial versus object visualization, a new characterization of visual cognitive style. That’s three papers right there, Kozhevnikov, that are in my reference list. Okay. And I’ve got a lot of references where they were actual tests were done. When I go through the citation lists, I just went in and we’re working on the children’s edition of the book right now. And one of the copy editors had a query about a reference. And I had to look that up. And then I decided to just type in object visualizer, visual spatial into Google Scholar and find the same old papers. And then I found some citations. It’s kind of a cool paper here in the journal Cognition. It’s an old paper actually, visual object ability, a new dimension of nonverbal intelligence. I know from working in factories, I spent 25 years in heavy construction. And that is something that I don’t think many teachers have done that. And seeing how these guys think. Big complicated Cargill plants, IBP plants, which are now Tyson, Montfort plants, and that company is now JBS, figuring out complicated things with equipment. It’s a different type of intelligence. And I think it’s when I worked on the book with Betsy Lerner, my super verbal co-writer who helped me organize things. When she had someone come in to fix a bunch of stuff in her house. And after we had discussed this, Betsy was telling me, well, I watched how he figured out how to fix the stones on the chimney. I had never really thought about it before. But she’d watched how he did things. And then she started to understand there’s a form of intelligence there that’s absolutely not verbal. When she watched a person she hired to fix stuff in her house. Right, right. Yeah, well, you can imagine something. And this did pop into my mind visually. Can imagine somebody who’s trying to put together a stone chimney has to rotate the stones. To make sure that they’re going like a Tetris game. That’s a good way of thinking about it. I was thinking then again, because I’m thinking in images now that we’re talking, I was thinking about my young grandson. He was he’s only two years old. He had his Legos played, laid out in front of him. And when I was a kid, I played a lot with Legos and I played a fair bit with this Meccano set that was like a junior engineering set. And it was certainly the case that working with Legos was nonverbal because you’re rotating shapes in space and having them fit into one another towards some design end. And that’s a nice kind of hands on learning and exposure to different mechanical principles. And so do you have recommendations for people who want to help their children train their visual spatial and object visualization abilities? Let’s get them out building things. The big mistake I see with a lot of kids is they’re super good with Legos. They don’t think to introduce tools. I was using tools by second grade. I was not using a saw, but I was using hammers, screwdrivers and pliers. I was taught how to use them safely. I’ve got another book of children’s projects called Calling All Minds, where I describe bird kites that I spent hours with tinkering to get them to work, to agree with parachutes to get them to open up more easily. Kids today are totally separated in the world of physical things. They’re not getting out and observing stuff out in nature. This is part of the problem. I just went to a veterinary school where the students are so far removed from practical things that to give them dexterity skills and surgical skills, they have these plastic tote boxes and they put children’s puzzles inside them and they’ve got to just reach in and by feel put these children’s puzzles together. Because when they were in kindergarten, they never did this. Right, right, right. Yeah, well, my parents told me that when I was four, my favorite toy was a screwdriver and that I used to take all the cupboard doors off the cupboards in the kitchens. And so I was introduced to tools at a very early age and that there’s a real practical utility in that too, because now if I visualize a project in my house, shelving or something like that, or any construction project of any sort, well, I can visualize the array of tools that’s necessary to make that come about. And then I have the tools at hand and I know how to use them. And that is a, well, it’s also, I really find that kind of work calming and engrossing. We’ll be back in one moment. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan’s new documentary, Logos and Literacy. I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor’s home was the first school and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80% of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing. We have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone. From Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all of history. And hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that. Well the problem is, is we got kids growing up today totally removed from the world of the practical. They don’t use tools. They don’t use scissors. I had a student in a class who had never used a ruler or tape measure to measure anything ever. I think that’s a problem. If you haven’t done practical things, then you don’t understand how to fix things. Okay, like two years ago they had a horrible mess where a bunch of different power stations froze. Well, I never heard so much abstract gobbledygook about that. Because the way I would work on fixing it would be, all right, let’s look at each power station. What piece of equipment actually froze? I never saw anything written in the press that described, okay, what froze in this plant? What froze in this plant? Because my inclination would be to kind of rank them on, okay, a turbine hall, it froze, I can build a building over it. That’s an easy one. You know, a whole bunch of gas wells froze. That’s going to be like really difficult to fix. But you see, nothing’s abstract. Because okay, if I’m going to try to figure out how to fix it, I don’t really want to argue who owns them. I’m not interested in politics. I would just rank the power stations on expansiveness and difficulty to winterize. Exactly what piece of equipment frozen, you know how I can find out? You let me loosen there away from the managers, I’ll find the maintenance shop, they’ll show me everything. And I know enough about equipment that they can’t BS me. Right. So maybe part of the advantage to that more visual form of processing is also its association with that kind of practical particularization. That’s right. That’s right. On the other hand, I have no idea how to balance a power grid. That’s a job for the mathematicians. You see, this is where we need to work together. And in a complementary factor, in a complementary way. And I tell people in big corporations, I’ve done a lot of talks for businesses, your first step is that you’ve got to recognize different kinds of thinking exists. Let’s take another example. Recently I visited two really nice dairies up in Quebec, Canada that have the robotic milking machines where the cow can go in, she decides when she wants to get milk and get fed. And both dairies had actually made some good mechanical modifications on that equipment, which the equipment company finally adopted. But one of the dairy producers said to me, I stop at the computer stuff. I don’t mess with the program. That’s somebody else’s job to work on the software. But the mechanical parts of the device, they figured out ways to improve it. Yeah. It’s like a hierarchy. You can imagine a hierarchy of generalization with the highest resolution, lowest level being the particulars of a given machine. And you can imagine people specialized to operate at different levels of the hierarchy. Maybe the verbal types are operating at the highest. Well, that’s right. They are. But they lose that particularization. That’s right. That’s basically right. Because the verbalizer tends to overgeneralize. One of the papers that I reviewed in my book on visual thinking was an interesting study where high school students that came life for schools specializing in the arts, another school specializing in the sciences, and another one specializing in the humanities, which would be more verbal, those teams of students and their assignment was to create a new planet. So the art students, heavily visualizing, they made a planet with crystals on it. Another one made a skyscraper planet. And then the more mathematical science students just painted around, made a round ball and described the gravity and the atmosphere, kind of boring pictures. And the verbal thinkers started to write it down. And then they go, oh, wait a minute, we’re supposed to draw the planet. So they made kind of splotchy stuff on it. But the thing that was interesting is that the art minds, more my kind of mind, and the mathematical minds, they had big planning sessions on how to design their planet, where the verbal thinkers, they didn’t do any planning. You see, this is the problem. The verbal thinker would get big broad concepts of something we need to do. But how do you actually implement those concepts? Yeah, right. There’s no detail there. Now in food safety, we have a thing that I really like. It’s called Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points. So let’s say I’m out there in a sea of things I can do. Well, I can’t do all that stuff. You see, now the critical control point, let’s say in food safety, in a food factory, I can’t measure microbes and bacteria on everything in that plant. I have to pick out the places where I’m most likely to have contamination. That would be the critical control points. And one of them is doorknobs. Yeah, that’s why some places, food factories, have automatic doors, because that gets rid of touching the door. Yeah, well, one of the things that I always found a relief in working with engineers is that they were good, and I can see it in the terms that you’re describing, they were very good at rank ordering practical priorities. And that seems to be part of this particularization. So I have this company, it’s a software company that sells personality tests and writing programs for people to help them plan their lives. And my business partner is an engineer. Although he’s also very intelligent verbally, he’s more intelligent non-verbally. And he knows the systems right from the code upward at every level of the machine instantiation. And so the huge advantage to that is that if anything ever goes wrong, he knows exactly what goes wrong and he knows exactly how to fix it. It’s particularized down to the point where that makes action possible. That’s part of the problem with the verbal abstraction is that it makes sense conceptually, but that doesn’t mean that it’s detailed to the point where it’s actually implementable. And then it’s like a pseudo-knowledge, right? Because it sounds like you’ve got the picture right. But when you actually try to implement it, you find out that it’s really a hollow shell of conceptualization. Well, I kind of look at, like, this is why when I learned about the food safety concept of hazard analysis critical control points, or let’s just call it critical control points. So I’ve got a big sea of stuff out there. What’s the really important thing? OK, now I only think in specific examples. So let’s take frozen Texas power stations. The critical control point is, and I want it like in two sentences, what piece of equipment froze? And then you can very easily figure out the ones that will be easy to winterize. And I’ve actually talked to somebody who installs gas wells, and it only costs 600 registration fees. There was no way I could have afforded that. It was the 70s. Right, right. So what are you working on now? You finished this new book that came out in 2022. What are you doing now? Well, I’m very interested in seeing the kids who think differently get into good careers. And that’s going to be a major emphasis of the things that I do now. There will be a lot of speaking engagements, a lot of interviews like this, because I want to see those kids that are different get into good jobs. Okay, if they’re an object visualizer like me, maybe an art job, maybe a photography job, or a job building things. If they’re the more mathematical, visual, spatial, a good programming job, a good a good mathematics or chemistry job where you need the mathematics. There’s too many kids that think differently. Some of them are just kind of going nowhere. I want to see them get into good careers and do things that will be constructive in the world. Do something constructive. So we’re going to switch over to the additional half an hour that I produced for the Daily Wire Plus platform to delve into some of the biographical details of your life. Before we close, I’d like to just sort of wander over the territory that we’ve covered and see if there’s anything else. See if you think this is a reasonable summary and if there’s anything else you want to add. I’ve been talking with Dr. Temple Grandin today, who’s developed a spectacular career in modifying animal handling and also managed a lot on the more purely intellectual front as well. In terms of conceptualization of information processing. She’s, we talked a lot today about the difference in the ways that people think. Concentrating mostly on the distinction between visual thinkers who tend to be more practical and detail oriented and who can be broadly differentiated into two categories. And those would be object visualizers and people who think more visual spatially and mathematically. Contrasting them with people who think more verbally. We talked a fair bit about the prioritization of more verbal and abstract thinking at the cost of this practical thinking and training in that practical thinking. We discussed how that’s affected the school system and broader culture. We discussed the dangers that poses to the integrity of our society as we lose the people who have the hands on knowledge. We talked about the psychological danger that poses to people who think more practically, concretely and visually who are in school systems that are optimized for the verbal thinkers. We talked about Temple’s career at the detail level, ameliorating the suffering of animals that across, like nationally and internationally as it turned out, partly because she decided not to chase mere generalities but to focus on an actual problem, which was the suffering of actual animals in actual plants, was willing to focus her emotional concerns on something that was practical and to marry that with a strategy that involved particularization and visualization and verbal communication and practical interactions with corporations. And also we closed that with a discussion of the fact that what she’s doing now is trying to bring to people’s attention in podcasts like this the fact that we seem to be working contrary to our own best interests by not building educational facilities that help optimize the ability of visual thinkers to function but also for society more broadly to take advantage of the talents and skills of those people in innovation and in the maintenance of the infrastructure that we already have around us. And so I think that about summarizes what we talked about today. Is there anything you want to add to that? That definitely kind of summarizes that we need all the different kinds of minds and when we understand that different people think differently, they can work in teams where they can collaborate and have complementary skills. I think that’s something that’s really important. Also, the thing I wanted, one thing I would do with the schools is I’d put a lot of the hands-on classes back in, like art, sewing, woodworking, shop, welding, auto mechanics, theater, because these are all things that expose kids to things that can become possible careers too. Right, and those are all things that have to be done in an embodied sense. It’s not purely abstract. No, it’s not abstract. None of those things are abstract. Yeah, well that’s I suppose a danger of moving so much education online as well is that it’s going to increase the degree of abstractions that are dealt with. When I went to do the book signing for visual thinking, I told you about the electrical engineering book from the 30s I found in this unique hotel room, but I also got put in the office of a professor in political science and I looked at some of those books and it was so abstract, theories about politics. I didn’t even understand it. It had nothing to do with right or left. It had to do with just abstractions that were so abstract it made no sense to me. I’m going, oh, I wouldn’t want this person in charge of figuring out what to do with the power grid. You know, I remember at this Tucson conference where I first saw you speak, after you spoke, very practical talk, very much like the one that you delivered today when we were talking, a philosophy student got up, because there were a lot of abstract thinkers at this consciousness conference, and asked you something extremely abstract and philosophical. And you did exactly what I would expect a good engineer to do, which was to say, you know, I really don’t understand anything that you just said. I don’t know how to associate it with anything practical and I’m completely unable to answer your question, which I thought was just, it was ridiculously comical. And I also thought, what would you say, well targeted, because it was the case that, you know, you had been talking about real practical realities, your ability to think like an animal, the fact that you had taken these practical steps to ameliorate animal suffering and that that had been so consequential and so of obvious worth. And then you were faced with this flight into abstraction and did what engineers always did do, which is something like, well, yeah, but I don’t understand that. What does it mean practically? Which is a really good question. You know, it’s a question that should be asked of abstract thinkers all the time. What are the devils in the details here that you’re overlooking? How much do you know about the systems that you’re abstractly representing? And the answer to that is usually almost nothing. Well, it’s sort of like, you know, we need all the three different, you know, different kinds of minds. You need the object visualizers, you’ll go to get the arts, mechanical and photography and animals. You need the visual spatial mathematicians, computer programmers, chemists, things that require mathematics. And we need the verbal thinkers because they’re going to help organize things. You see, you need all three different kinds of minds and they should work together in a complementary fashion. All right. Well, that’s a good place to end this segment, I would say. I’m going to go thank you to everyone on YouTube and the Associated Podcast for your time and attention. I hope you found this discussion interesting and engaging and probably interesting. And practically useful as well. I’m going to switch over to the Daily Wire Plus platform and I’m going to talk to Dr. Temple Grandin a little bit more on the biographical end. I want to lay out how her interest in the issues that she did pursue professionally made themselves manifest in her life. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guests on dailywireplus.com.