August 22, 2024 • 43 mins
---------- Originally Aired on the Good Foods Podcast ----------
It was a special privilege for me to be able to speak to Dr. Temple Grandin and hear her story, be inspired by her insights and to get a better view of how she and others like her view the world.
I was extremely blessed to be able to ask her what her thoughts were about the career readiness program that our parent company, Commonwealth Autism started earlier this year at Good Foods grocery.
Temple Grandin is a Distinguished Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. Facilities she has designed for handling livestock are used by many companies around the world. She has also been instrumental in implementing animal welfare auditing programs that are used by McDonalds, Wendy’s, Whole Foods, and other corporations.
Dr. Grandin has appeared on numerous TV shows such as 20/20 and Prime Time. Her books include Thinking in Pictures, Livestock Handling and Transport and The Autistic Brain. Her books Animals in Translation and Visual Thinking have been on the New York Times Bestseller List.
Dr. Grandin was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in September 2017, in 2022 was named a Colorado State University Distinguished Professor, and in 2023 was inducted into the Colorado Authors’ Hall of Fame.
Dr. Grandin's Website ➡️ www.grandin.com
The Good Foods podcast was created and hosted by Shardan Sandoval in March of 2023 and was active until September of 2024.
It was a special privilege for me to be able to speak to Dr. Temple Grandin and hear her story, be inspired by her insights and to get a better view of how she and others like her view the world.
I was extremely blessed to be able to ask her what her thoughts were about the career readiness program that our parent company, Commonwealth Autism started earlier this year at Good Foods grocery.
Temple Grandin is a Distinguished Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. Facilities she has designed for handling livestock are used by many companies around the world. She has also been instrumental in implementing animal welfare auditing programs that are used by McDonalds, Wendy’s, Whole Foods, and other corporations.
Dr. Grandin has appeared on numerous TV shows such as 20/20 and Prime Time. Her books include Thinking in Pictures, Livestock Handling and Transport and The Autistic Brain. Her books Animals in Translation and Visual Thinking have been on the New York Times Bestseller List.
Dr. Grandin was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in September 2017, in 2022 was named a Colorado State University Distinguished Professor, and in 2023 was inducted into the Colorado Authors’ Hall of Fame.
Dr. Grandin's Website ➡️ www.grandin.com
The Good Foods podcast was created and hosted by Shardan Sandoval in March of 2023 and was active until September of 2024.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hi, I'm Temble Brandon. I'm Distinguished Professor of Animal Science
at Colorado State University. Also on autistic and I had
a New York Times bestselling book, Visual Thinking, the hidden
gifts of people thinking pictures, patterns, and abstractions. And I'm
really pleased today to be on the Good Foods Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
All of us are on a journey towards better health,
and we're grateful that you've allowed us to join you
on your quest.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
In this episode, there's stuff that we don't make it anymore,
and one of them is the state of the art
chip making factory. You know, electronic chip making machine. We're
not making that. And it goes back to taking out
shop classes and then when they have shot classes, they
won't let the autistic kids take them because of liability.
But back when I was working with heavy construction, this
would have been seventies, eighties and early nineties. People with
(00:53):
dyslexia and autism that are undiagnosed owned the shops.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
This is the Good Foods Podcast And now here's your
host show.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Dan, doctor Grandon, thank you so much for joining us
on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Great to be here.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
What was the world like for you growing up?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Well, one thing that helped me was a lot of
very good teachers. I had no speech into age four,
so I had excellent speech therapist. I had a great
third grade teacher. Mother taught me to read with phonics
when I was in third grade because I didn't know
how to read. High school was terrible. Childhood was pretty good.
High school was terrible and bullying and teasing. And I
(01:32):
managed to get to elementary school without bullying and teasing
because the teacher told the other students that I had
a disability that was not visible like a wheelchair, and
they should be helping me, not portraying me. High school
was horrible. I kicked out of a regular school for
throwing a book at a girls retired my gook book editor,
and I went to special school and they basically put
(01:54):
me to work running their horse barn, and so I
learned how to work. This is really important and this
is a different skill from academic skills. And then where
I had friends because I was plenty of bullying going
on at the new school too, was shared interests riding horses.
Big believe were in getting students involved in friends who
shared interest. I mean today it might be robotics club
(02:17):
or it might be music or band, and this is
where they can get friends. When I was in college,
I still had them hard times socially. And we had
a school wide variety show and I made scenery for
it and I sung a silly song that helped open
up some doors.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
So that commonality was very useful to you, bridging that gap.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, that's right. I had a good friend. We'd rode
horses together and we showed them together, and that was
really a good thing.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Was there a moment for you when you realized when
you were growing up that you were seeing the world
differently from everyone else.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
I didn't realize that I was a visual thinker seeing
the world differently until I was in my late thirties.
I was really old. I thought everybody thought in pictures
and the way I found out that other people think
verbally by say to you think about a church people,
how does it come into your mind? I see specific ones. Well,
(03:14):
getting back to my generation, that come up like thirty
five millimeter slides. Today it would be PowerPoint slides. But
I asked a speech therapist that same question, and she
just came up with a very vague representational, no detail,
would not name where it was that's all she saw.
That was my first inkling that other people didn't think
(03:34):
in pictures the way I do. Now there's been research
that shows that there's three kinds of thinking. I'm discussed
in this book visual Thinking. There's the object visualizers like
me who think in photo realistic pictures, have a horrible
time with higher math, but often very very good with
animals and mechanical things. Then you have your music and
math pattern thinking minds, visual spatial music and math minds.
(03:59):
And then we've got word thinkers, and then you've got mixtures.
And there's now scientific research that supports this. But all
through my twenties and a good part of my thirties,
I couldn't understand why people didn't see the things I
would see. They thought it was really weird that in
my very first cattle research I got down into the
shoots to see what cattle we're seeing. They'd stop at
(04:20):
shadows and reflections and things that most people don't notice.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
And cattle were also, or animals right in general, were
bothered by waving flags.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Well, flags, any little thing that moves would stop the animals. Now,
if you have a dairy cow that goes into a
milky parlor. Every day. She'll learned to walk over the
drain and walk over the shadow. When an animal that
is going into the facility for the first time, they're
going to stop at the brain, They're going to put
their head down and look at the reflection on the
wet floor. And I found if I removed these distractions,
(04:53):
they cattle moved through the facilities a lot easier.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
And in the world today, what is your world like?
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Well, I've done a lot of research. Started out on
The first jobs I ever had was in my twenties
was being livestock editor for our state farm magazine. That
really helped to get me started because being a woman
in the cattle industry in the seventies was difficult. And
I went up to the editor at a cattle event
and I got his card, and then I wrote my
(05:21):
first article. It was a summary of my masters stasis
on how cattle behaved in different types of squeeze shoots.
And then doing design work. I worked with a really
good contractor. Then when the economic recession came in nineteen eighty,
I figured it I have two years to get classes
done for PhD. That dragged on for about nine years. Meanwhile,
(05:43):
working on more equipment, and then in nineteen ninety I
became a professor of animal science at Colorado State University
after I got my PhD. And then further work I
did was developing animal welfare guidelines and an audit procedure
for evaluating slaughter plants which were sold in a lot
(06:03):
of improvements. You know, now I'm seventy six years old,
and the thing I'm really interested in now is encouraging
those students who are different to get into things that
can be really good careers that would use their areas
of strength. Can you give me some examples of that. Well,
I used visual thinking to design things. One of the
(06:23):
things I learned a working on equipment for the beef
industry was that you have a whole bunch of people
in the shops that invent equipment and they cannot do algebra,
usually a lay of a high school education, and they're
inventing stuff and they're patenting it. And what's happening right now,
they're retiring out, they're not getting replaced. And about twenty
(06:46):
percent of these people who definitely had either were autistic
dislike sick er ad h state and they had decent
jobs and We've got a real problem with not replacing
these people, and we need these skills. And I'm kind
of shocked. And some educators think you need algebra for
logical thinking. You don't. I think by associating pictures, and
(07:09):
I think the first step, and I tell educators and
business leaders you have to realize that there are differences.
And when a kid gets a label, they can often
be an extreme visualizer or an extreme mathematician and maybe
running a tech company out in Salton Valley. And I'm
seeing too many kids kind of get shunted in special ed.
They're not doing enough to develop their area of strength.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Joe Saladson Polyphased Farms said, his concern is also of
all these farmers that are aging out.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
That's right, I have the same concern I'm concerned with
a Joe Saladan. Here's the other thing in every industry,
little people innovate, little companies innovate. Lit'st get chat cheept
that came out of a little company. And then the
whole principle of how AI circuits work was one graduate
(08:00):
student using two video game graphics borts butt from Amazon
to figure out the initial programming in a bedroom in
his parents' house. That's little person innovating.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
How do you think we could go about, or should
go about attracting the younger generations to learn from those
before they age out. Well, and we need to do that.
And one of the big problems is land for young
people to farm on. That is a really big problem.
You know, in a lot of cases are going to
end up at least land. That can be a really
(08:35):
big issue. But first of all, young people have to,
you know, learn that career exists. Like for example, with me,
I didn't come from a cattle background. Well, I was
raised back East. I got exposed to cattle as a teenager.
It started as a teenager. See that brings up the
really important thing about exposure. You've got exposed kids to
(08:57):
all kinds of stuff and any kind of see what
they would gravitate towards. But I'm seeing a lot of
the people that should become tomorrow's clever engineers. These are
the people that invent mechanical things that don't have college degrees.
They're playing video games in the basement and I wouldn't
bother at doing video game design. AI is going to
take that over the hands on stuff. How about fixing elevators,
(09:21):
making sure the water system's going to work, the power
grid's going to stay on it. That stuff's not going
to get done by chat cheepy Tear any other AI program.
You're right there. How can those of us who are
not autistic understand those that are better?
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Well, the thing about an autistic person is a lot
of people on different kinds of thinking. They're mixtures, and
the autistic person might be an extreme object visualizer, absolutely
terrible in higher man. I majored in psychology to dodge
math classes. One of the reasons why I'm majored in that.
And we've got to get kids, you know, trying lots
(09:59):
of stuff. I've seen too many kids labeled autism or
some other you know, labeled and not learning basic skills.
Parents tend to overcoddle them. They're not learning shopping, they
don't know how to order pizza online, they don't do
Bak account, they aren't doing any of the regular life skills.
And I think this is a very, very big problem.
(10:22):
You know, I was shopping when I was seven and
eight years old. I had a little allowance and fifty
cents a week. I could buy five Superman comics. But
if I wanted a sixty nine cent airplane. I had
to save for two weeks. And look at the mess
we've had now with Bowing. I didn't like sitting in
the airport and reading about loose rudder bolts and that
(10:43):
Boeing had sold their factory to private equity. Let's look
at how we need the different kinds of minds. All right,
let's go back to those both some of it and
did not get put in that door. The mathematician specs
out the bolt, the metal, the diameter, the length, the threads.
Authmatically figures out what's the perfect bolt, and then purchase
(11:05):
ain't has to buy the bolt and as to pay
for the bolt. This is where corners can get cut.
Those are the verbal thinkers. Then what's a visual finger
though installable and inspect it to make sure it's installed correctly.
You see, you need all the kinds of eyes. And
if you ramp up the factory speed too fast, then
people are going to have a hard time putting the
(11:26):
bolts in correctly. Okay, there's an example, very simple of
three kinds of minds. Well, our parent company, Commonwealth Autism,
is starting the program. We started it just recently. We're
bringing autistic people into the store to train them good,
to learn how to interact, and learn how to be
in the world, because we all need to be in
the world well, and we've got to get them out there.
(11:49):
And let's just look at a few simple accommodations. Let's
avoid the rapid Mulli task and chaos jobs like a
takeout window at lunchtime. Let's avoid that. The other thing
is there's working memory issues. So let's say they have
to take a piece of equipment apart. You give them
a pilot checklist take apart steps, cleaning steps, reassembly steps,
(12:12):
anything that has sequence. Don't yack it to them verbally.
I can't remember that sequence. Give them a pilot's checklist
of how to do it. And for the cleaning the machine,
I would make it, you know, disassembly, cleaning, reassembly. Do
it like that. That's the same way that the airplane
checklists work. They have like pre tax say pre take off,
(12:34):
it's chunked and it's in a certain order. It's the
same all the time, right, that's right, And pilots are
required to use a checklist. It's not optionals required. But
that's a very simple thing. I heard a sad story
where a person lost their electrical apprenticeship job because the
boss will go yack and yac yah yah, yeah yack,
and then need install the wrong fixtures in the wrong
(12:56):
places where if he just written yeah, would have taken
two minutes.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
We hear the term autistic and the spectrum. What's the
difference between the two and is one more correct to
use than the other?
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Well, I think the spectrum happens because you're going with
Einstein at one end of the spectrum. Then you have
something be very severe NonStop epilepsy, mobility issues and being
nonverbal at the other end, and then you've got some
nonverbal people that don't speak in the middle. They can
actually type on an iPad or some other tablet and
have a normal brain inside the dysfunctional body. And so
(13:31):
you've got this wide variety with the name of autism.
Where dyslexia it's problems with reading ADHD, there's problems to
the tension. It's much more narrowly defined. But the thing
is they're all autistic.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
I want to circle back a little bit to how
we're bringing people into the store to train them, and
the pilot checklist is brilliant. What else could we do
what else would make that I don't want to say easier,
but what else would help both parties.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
They're making social mistakes in the store, like maybe kind
of stalking customers around the store, standing too close to them.
Now you want to pull them aside in private, quietly
tell them what they should do. You know, you stand
near like three feet away when you talk to a customer.
The other thing is ask a customer just once that
(14:20):
they need help, and then back off. Just simple things
like that, right in the moment when something happens, you
give the instruction. You know, like sooners there's no customers around,
you'd pull them aside and you would tell them. You know,
like the customers don't like it when you come up
to four at times and ask if you can help them.
You approach once, then you back off. There's a very
(14:44):
very very simple things that they can do, and you
just give the instruction quietly. Don't say you're bad with
interacting with customers. You've got to be specific on what
the problem is without scolding them. Instead of scold, you
tell them what they should do. You might say, watch Susie.
(15:05):
Susie's really good at interacting with customers. Wat's what she does.
You see, that's something that's specific. You see, verbal thinkers
tend to overgeneralize, tend to do a lot of overgeneralization,
like teachers say, well, how do I teach autistic kids? Well,
are we talking about three year olds or are you
(15:26):
talking about teenagers adults? What is the problem that's too generalized?
Do you believe that in our own way we are
all on the spectrum to a certain degree. Well, the
spectrum basically is kind of a I'm interested motigs in
what I do. Some of the social circuits still left
that I'd say half of all the population would be
(15:47):
on the spectrum because a brain can either be more
social emotional or it can be more cognitive interested in
what they do. So half the population probably would be
somewhat autism spectrum. And the problem is one to slightly
peaky get labeled on autistic, and in the mildest forms
is just a personality variant. It is most mild forms.
(16:10):
Now I had speech to late to age four, so
obviously that's not normal. Now that they took out the Aspergers,
which is basically socially awkward with no speech delight, now
you've got that all merged in and so the amount
of people getting diagnosed is increasing because to get any
kind of a service at a school, you have to
have a diagnosis. A a white insurance won't pay for it.
(16:33):
But I'm seeing situations they're sire in the workfront where
I think that autism is holding you back because the parents,
they aren't learning to do the simplest things. I just
go in the store, buy something, talk to the store staff.
Parents do everything for them, you know, And you start
out with little baby steps like okay, you haven't ordered
(16:55):
the pizza online, and then the next time you go
to the peach shop and pick it up, and you
order it in the restaurant, and with your gas station
pumping gas and mom could send them in to buy
something in the store, and you do it at a
neighborhood gas station, you know, and you're right there. You
(17:15):
can see into the shop while you're putting gas in
the car. See, those are things I just visualize. I've
had a twelve year old toll up to meet the
airport with her mom. Found out she hadn't shopped. I
gave her five dollars bill and the shop was fifty
feet away. We could see it. I said, go in
that store and buy something, and she bought a drink
and she gave me back, say change. First time she
(17:36):
shopped by herself, and the mom had a hard time
letting go and wanted to go in there really bad.
So little she'll be fine, she was.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
We're afraid to release the training wheels because of the fear.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Well that's the problem, and I'm talking about doing the
most innocent, simple little things. I'm appall at the number
of fully verbal autistic teenagers that have never gone shopping
by themselves. They've never ordered food in a restaurant. This
is just ridiculous. And you mentioned the term aspergers.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
That is being not used as much because of the
negative connotation with it, or.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Well, there were some negative connotations with asperger. But you see, originally,
let's just look at the autism part of it. To
be autistic, you had to have speech delay. And then
when the Aspergers came in the early nineties. Now it's
possible to be on the autism spectrum with no speech daily,
but the two things were separated. I'd rather just call
it socially awkward with no speech delay. I'd rather call
(18:35):
it that. And then when you merge all those together,
you see all these people I worked within, these mechanical
shops and walding shops, most of them probably had no
obvious speech delay. And now they're all included in the spectrum.
And then what happens on a lot of cases the
school puts them all in the same classroom. So you've
got the ones that are totally verble with no speech
(18:59):
delay in with others were maybe very severe problems. And
then the kid that's son, you know, he ought to
be taking computer science classes or something else, is not
being moved ahead, and we need to build up on skills.
From my kind of thinking, I'm saying, let's get rid
of some of the algebra class barriers for things like
a veterinary technician, for example, and maybe making substitute geometry
(19:23):
or business math, or maybe accounting or statistics. I'm not
suggesting totally get out of that. The problem I have
with algebra as a visual thinker, there's nothing for me
to remember. You say, I have to have a picture
in order to remember.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
And probably I'm going to guess, but maybe part of
the problem is that we're still kind of trying to
funnel people. As far as education, it was still trying
to funnel people down a single hallway as opposed to
opening that up.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
And I think that's wrong. And I want to one
of John Markle's talks about neurodiversity. I was just ated
Chico University Disability Conference, and this is one of the
things that he brought up, is just too much of
a single way of doing education. He brought that up,
and so he was kind of lumping neurodiversity together a lotism, dyslexsia, ADHD.
(20:13):
You'll look at all these different things. Maybe he would say,
maybe twenty percent of the population might have some degree
of being neurodiverse. And the thing I want to emphasize
to business leaders, and I do a lot of talks
to him, is that we need the skills. We need
that person that can fix anything. That you can see
how something works, see where something is wrong.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
We need to project a brighter scope, and as you
were saying earlier, kind of like show them different avenues,
different ways, as opposed to a laser point. We need
maybe have a water hose and say, look, these are
all the things maybe that.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
You could learn or you could go down. They're stuff
that we don't make it anymore. And one of them
is the state of the art chip making factory. You know,
electronic chip making machine. We're not making that. And it
goes back to taking out shop class. And then when
they have shop classes, they won't let the autistic kids
take them because of liability. But back when I was
working with heavy construction, this would have been seventies, eighties
(21:09):
and early nineties, people with dyslexia and autism that are
undiagnosed owned the shops and they had multiple patents, and
I've looked some of those patents up. They're retired now
most of them, and the things they invented are still
being used. Obviously the patents expired, but they weren't just
Doley equipment. They were inventing equipment, especially mechanical devices.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Doctor Grandin, what do you feel would help us bridge
the gap between those of us not on the spectrum
per se with those that are well. The first thing
you have to realize is that different ways of thinking exist. Also,
the person on the spectrum being social for the sake
of socials, not what makes their world go round. I
find it very interesting to talk about construction, or talk
about animal behavior, or to talk about sustainable egg backed up.
(21:56):
Got a paper and I don't know if you've seen
this grazing cattle, sheep and old. It's an important part
of a sustainable agricultural future. And if you use the
grazing right, you can improve the land, you can reduce
fire hazard. But you have to do the grazing right now.
What do you do with the.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Twenty percent of the land that can only be grazed.
You see, as I talk about this, I'm seeing eastern Colorado.
They tried to grow corn on it and it only
got as high as my desk. That's like ridiculous. Why'd
you bother the planet? There's not enough water there, either
in the ground or coming out of the sky is rain.
(22:36):
And the people you take Joel Salata, you see, he
probably is a visual thinker and it's a lot we
can learn from him. But every field, the little people innovate,
care what the field is. And we need to be
getting more young people involved in in some of this
egg sustainable egg stuff, and we need to figure out
really practical solutions. I also think that ultimately, you know,
(23:01):
we talked, you know, like in the organic it's like, oh,
you got to be totally pure. The thing is probably
going to work in the futures, a hybrid mostly organic,
a little bit of Raylar, you thinking pictures? Yes, How
did your book Visual Thinking help people understand how you
and those with autism view the world? Because it explains
how we think and it also presents research not talking
(23:25):
about the kinds of jobs that the different kinds of
thinkers are good at. The first step is you have
to realize different thinking exists. I didn't know it exists
in dollars in my late thirties, which is seems crazy,
but that when I first asked about the church steeples
and the speech starter was just a pointy thing. And
there are a few people that have and fantasia that's
(23:46):
discussed in my Visual Thinking both and these are people
that have no visual thinking at all, and they're often
in math and sciences.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
What would your advice be to teachers and educators of
younger children on how to hone their skills better recognizing
the strengths and weaknesses of these early learners.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Well, we pound away too much on this on the
deficits and we don't do enough on the skills. Let's
say you have a child that is a little math genius,
then he needs to be moved ahead that child needs
to be moved ahead in math. Don't make them do
boring math. They're going to turn into a big behavior
problem if you make them do boring math. And my
ability in art was always encouraged by my mother. I
(24:26):
like to build things when it's a little kid. If
you can make it out of cardboard, I made it.
I see it too often kids that are super good
with legos, but they fail to graduate the tools. I
think that's a problem. Seeing twoity kids today, I've never
used a tool. I think it's ridiculous. You've got exposed
kids to a lot of different stuff. I was exposed
(24:47):
to musical instruments. I couldn't figure out how to play
this little flute. Another kid's going to take off with it.
You know music ability, Yeah, that needs to be encouraged. Well,
you have to have access to musical instruments and some teaching.
Big fan of exposing kids to lots of different stuff.
And got to see what they gravitate too. Since you
think in pictures, is this conversation we're having difficult for you?
Speaker 2 (25:11):
No?
Speaker 1 (25:11):
But as I talked about it, I saw the little flute,
I saw the art supplies. Had an elementary school I'm
seeing an ancient, old algebra book that for me would
be a door stop, but maybe for another third grade
or that book is a door that third grader needs
to be given that book, and he might just take
(25:31):
off with it. You know. Catherine Johnson, the famous mathematician,
Her education was done right. She was moved ahead in math,
way ahead quickly.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
Are there any tools that we can use to help
us communicate better with one another?
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Well, you see, that's a kind of vague, kind of
top down verbal question. I have a hard time answering.
But what I'm seeing now I don't. There's things that
we don't make electronic chip making machine, poultry processing equipment.
That's comic Muhalland and it goes back to taking out
the shop classes and then when we put them back in,
(26:06):
we don't let the autistic kids and the dyslexic kids
take shop. But some of the best people I worked
with that invented lots of stuff were either dyslexic or autistic.
The dyslexic ones were diagnosed. They had a giant company
that built feed notts. They were all dyslexic. They would
have been visual thinkers. What should someone without autism think?
(26:28):
About or what should they focus on to help them
better communicate with someone on the spectrum. Well, the one
thing you see, the vague, top down verbal thinking doesn't work.
Let's go back to training people to work in your store.
Saying you're too aggressive with customers or you're rude to customers.
They're not even to know what that means. You have
(26:49):
to get much more specific in say, now, approach a
customer wants the way Susie does. They need help and
back off. You said to a customer, go find the
merchandise yourself. Well, that's no way to talk up. You
quietly tell them what they should do. You see. Vague
directions do not work. Do not work. You see. And
(27:10):
this is the thing that a lot of teachers ask
me very very vague things. A lot of school policy
very very vague. And I have to have specific directions.
Like when I was out designing projects all the time,
I wanted to know we were remodeling a play it.
I wanted to know exactly what I could tear out
what I could not tear out, you know, foremants of
(27:31):
the equipment. And I wrote all this stuff down. I'll
do the designing, but I have to know Okay, what
is the right of way to the railroad crack because
they got to stay away from it. That's the sort
of thing that has to be written down. So a
specific and laundry list specific, and then the pilot's checklist.
There's two kinds of jobs. There's one where you might
(27:53):
take a machine atpart to clean it, and that checklist
is the same every time. And then the other kind
of checklist would be tasks to do each day, like
which shelves am I going to restop? And you'd list
the shelves and then you say, no, what the box
is flattened and put in the recycle bind They have
to be flattened and you do not put a grubby
(28:15):
pizza box in there because that recks of cardboards are recycling. Well,
I know enough about stores that I could think of
things that how I would explain to the autistic employee.
It has to be specific. Do you feel like you
have a gift and the rest of us are just
trying to catch up? Well, I have a gift in
one area, deficit in another. But what I found in
(28:37):
working with engineering. Your mathematical engineer designs a different part
of a food processing plant. But I call the clever engineers.
That's people like me who cannot do higher math. We
do the mechanical equipment, and we also lay out the
entire factory. Degreed engineer make sure the roof doesn't fall down.
Does the math on that, and balers and refrigeration much
(29:01):
more mathematical. We don't touch that stuff. Like I just
saw an airplane hangar that fell down. You see, I
tend to be associated, and it was obvious by looking
at the scrap metal la it turned into that the
beams were not strong enough. I couldn't believe that you
build an airplane hangar with would steal that light? You see,
That's something I just see it. And now I'm seeing
(29:24):
a bridge that fell down in Minneapolis. And I looked
at the rubble pile of the bridge, I go cheap,
it's too light. And then I found the engineering report.
They had cheated on the gusset plate that joined some
beams together a whole bunch like half the thickness. So
you see, the engineer, what a calculator, what thickness of
metal would have had to have for those gusset plates.
(29:46):
But then somebody cheated there, and the visual thing could
be very good inspecting the gusset plates and going, no,
they're half the thickness that the speck says, and that
bridge did collapse.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
So like a detective before the internet happens.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
But you see it because the gusset place had been
and had and just when I looked at it, too light.
That was the first thing, I it's too light. And
then I dug around online and I found the engineering report.
So they had cheated on the gusset plates. But let's
go back to the Boeing thing. There were bolts that
(30:21):
were not installed correctly in the rudder mechanism involve was
steering the airplane and that wasn't installed correctly. See the
problem you got the verbal thinker. Private equity owns this fact.
They're sitting in an office in Chicago and then Boeing
moving their office to Chicago's another dumb thing they did
because that got them away from the factory and they're
(30:42):
looking at the spreadsheets. But it's all an abstraction. They go, oh, well,
if we can get too fuselages built in the day,
you know, we can make more money. And then they
know they're understaffed. They probably shouldn't be doing that. You
can get this with any kind of a factory. You see,
it's all an abstraction. It's one thing I've learned about
(31:02):
a verbal thinker. For them to understand something like okay,
assembling the rudder, mechanism of the pale or anything that said,
you know, mechanical thing, they've got to get out of
the office and see it. And I'll never forget reading
an article. I think it was a Business Week or
one of those magnets years ago. There's an aerial view
of a power plant and the new CEO was in
(31:25):
a helicopter, came out of finances and he looks down
at that power plant from the helicopter and goes, I'm
in charge of that that complicated thing. I don't even
understand it. But until he saw it, it was an abstraction.
And I worked with Betsy, my wonderful verbal co author,
on this and to teach her to concept like leverage,
(31:47):
she has to experience it. I've tried to teacher leverage
from a little kids science websites. That didn't work. That Finally,
I said Betsy, and he ever taking a screwdriver and
just prigged the lid off a paint can. I said,
that's leverage. Then she got it. Then she got it,
and then I talked about a three D players, a
mechanical device controlled by a computer. Well, she had od
(32:09):
on three D player videos and then she got it. Otherwise,
the verbal thinker over generalizes, but maybe gone out of
the factory and said, these are the bulls that control
the movement of the planes. Rudder, that's one of the
things you steer with. And then he's thinking, do I
(32:30):
want my family on them plane? If they haven't tightened
those bolts correctly. You see that it's real, But to
a deverbal figure, it's not real.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
To you.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Drag those suits out of the office and we see it,
and somebody explains it to them so they understand it.
You find out that's a rudder lankage that's more important
than part of the totally one that's just messy.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
True. True, you do need to rudder more than a toilet.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Yes, you do.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
What sort of things did you see in your early
days working with cattle that no one else was paying
attention other than what you already mentioned.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Well, the shadows. The biggest thing I noticed was the
things that made the cattle refused to walk through the chute, shadows, reflections,
coat on the fence, puddle of water, those kind of things.
I noticed that kind of stuff right off the bat,
and nobody else noticed it, and they thought it was
weird that I got down in the shoots and most
people just wanted to force the cattle. And back when
(33:24):
I first did that, that was radical stuff, you see,
But I didn't know that most of the other people
were much more verbal in their thinking, so they wouldn't
think about what cattle was seeing. That was the first
stuff that I did. I want every feed yard in Arizona,
and I've worked cattle, and then I found where there
was design mistakes that made the shoot look like a
dead end with no place to go out. But you see,
(33:47):
visual thinking's a different type of problem solving. So you
take people that are doing like Joe Salad and doing
really great stuff with agriculture. He sees it, he sees it.
It's not an abstraction. He sees the big picture right away. Well,
you see, that's one of the things a visual thinker
can do. As a verbal thinker is much more linear
a visual thinker. It's associate. Okay, I was talking about
(34:11):
one kind of engineering thing about the plant roof. And
then just the other day on the news of something,
there was some airplane hanger felt down for private planes.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
I couldn't believe the flimsy little steel they used. I'm going,
that's cheap. I can't imagine any structural engineer would have
signed off on that.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
You gave me the example of the steeples. Does your
mind act like a virtual reality environment? Well, yeah, I
can test run equipment. I remember sitting at the conference
room and we were talking about different ways to position conveyors,
and I could go the other sucking a word, No,
you do that. You can pull the rails out of
the ceiling. Then I could run these little like three
(34:53):
D simulations. But I'm not very good at abstract rotation
of objects. See when I wrote Tate the od, I
walk around it in my mind. I walk around the facility,
or I fly over, like I can say to a camera, crudou,
if you get on the corner of that roof up there,
you'll get the perfect picture. And they said, well, how
do you know that? I just see it. So it's
(35:15):
the temple drone in your mind.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Yeah, I had a temple drone and I've still got
some ancient old video of cattle filing into a pen,
and that was from a corner of a roof that
we got up on.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Are you someone that remembers your dreams, and if so,
are they the same as when you think during the
day in pictures.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Well, the dreams do get a kinds of wild stuff.
I have some balance issues, so I'm fine. I'm trying
to ride a bike down you know something that's like
that that's really scary. And then I have airport anxiety
dreams like I'm driving to the airport and the crater
opens up and I twenty five.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Well, who doesn't.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Oh, I'd look at my watch and the place go
leave twenty minutes from now? How am I going to
get to the airport?
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Well, doctor Grant and everybody, we all have issues with airports.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
We all are have a little bit of fear there. Well,
I can tell you, you know, making sure I make
my flights on time. I always allow an extra hour
for a traffic jam. One time I was driving to
the airport and just as I want to go on
the bypass, the police blocked it because the President had
come into town, and it took an extra forty minutes
(36:20):
for me to go around to get to the airport,
and I've had a car accidents in construction to other
things that slow down the trip.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
Doctor Gradman, what's one of the things that you're most
proud of?
Speaker 1 (36:33):
One thing that really made the biggest difference. So a
very simple scoring system I made for animal welfare to
slaughter plants, because by the nineties I had a lot
of equipment out on the beef plane. So I had
designed them stockyards and a center track restrainer for all
the cargilt beef plants in North America. A lot of
other plants had it too, and a lot of people
were managing things right, they were tearing up, equipment, wrecking.
(36:55):
So what the scoring system did is it made them
make an ASIAT. You had five simple things you had
to measure. You hang it up and ask to be
dead ninety five percent first shot efficacy on studding no
more than three catalog of one hundred mooing during handling,
one percent falling, and you had to get seventy five
percent and with no electric pride and used to be
five hundred percent. And they had to make those numbers.
(37:18):
And in the year of nineteen ninety nine I had McDonald's,
Burger King, and Windy's all enforcing the same thing. And
in most of the plants they didn't have to buy
a whole bunch of new equipment. They had repair the
things they had, then manage it and put in some
non slip floor. That was another thing that they needed
to do. And only three plants out of the seventy
(37:40):
four plants had to buy expensive new things. We made
some shabby old dumps work with just simple changes understanding
how good foods is approaching this training program that we
have from our parent company, Commonwealth Autism. What are your
thoughts on that, What could we do right and what
(38:01):
could we maybe better hone our teaching skills for those
All right, let's look at grocery store board. One of
the big things I see with a vocational stuff is
for certain individuals a grocery store is a suitable career,
but for somebody like me, it should be a summer
(38:21):
training job. And I often don't see this differentiation being made.
You know, I don't think I should have had a
career of cleaning horse stalls for the rest of my life,
but I basically ran a horse bar and there was
a responsibility and I was proud of the fact that
I ran it, but I had to then move on
to something else. And the other problem is a lot
of people that work in autism and vocational rehab. They
(38:45):
don't know anything about factories. They don't know about all
the interesting stuff that's out there. I read a lot
of business magazines. You read about all this stuff that's
going on, and read about things like how AI first
started two video game boards. I actually booked them up Amazon.
I came run up. I could have bought them for
like five hundred and forty dollars video game graphics cards
(39:09):
bought from Amazon. You know, bad troup. You see that
there was a whole different way of looking at programming.
And the student's paper has over one hundred and twenty
thousand citations. Little guys innovate, but it's hard for the
verbal thinkers, you know, the differentiate, Well, this person ought
to do this. Now. One program I really liked is
(39:33):
TACKED in Denver, teaching autistic community trades. And they start
with young adults and they go to a camp where
they can try on cybersecurity, welding, carpentry, car mechanics, and
whole bunch of stuff. Then they have small classes with
six students where you have a mechanic and a job
coach there and they have to be on time, show
(39:55):
up for work, have the right clothes on. And then
when they're placed to the car dealership with no interviews,
they're contracted with car dealerships, there's a job coach for
another two months. Then they've about eighty percent success rate
project search. Now they've gotten out of the medical field
and doing other jobs with intensive internships, and this seems
(40:17):
to be working. Then I have grandparents. They come up
to me all the time. They discover their autistic when
the kids get diagnosed, and they would be the type
that would have had no speech delay. They had paper
routes at age eleven, and I said, tell parents, we
got to come up with new paper route substitutes walking
the neighbor's dog, somebody else's dog because the boss has
(40:38):
to be outside the family. There's things like that that
can be just done in the neighborhood, you know, schurts,
volunteer job, community center, volunteer job, helping out in an
old folks hall. Things that can just be put together
in the neighborhood. We've got to encourage the next generation
to get out work on sustainable farming things, and we've
(40:58):
got to find practice cool stuff that's going to work.
And that's why I wrote my grazing paper, and the
grazing animal is part of the sustainable agricultural future. But
you have to use the right that lends itself back
to the exposure comment that you were making. Well, you
see that's what tax found. You're gonna find one kid's
gonna love welding, the other ones wanting to do cybersecurity,
(41:19):
a lot of low level programming. I think AI is
going to eat it up. It's going to be taken over.
But we're going to need cybersecurity and fake photographs and
fake video detection, and some of it's getting really good.
I've seen some of the deep fakes.
Speaker 3 (41:34):
And finally, doctor Graddan, what would you tell someone that
isn't on the spectrum the best way to reach or
engage with someone else maybe in a public function or
meeting a strangers making a new friend.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Well, I've made friends who shared interests.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
You know.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
When I was in high school, it was a horse's
riding together. When I was in college, I went in
a school variety show and I made friends there. You know,
getting involved in school clubs, getting involved in things where
you can do friends who shared interest really important. The
all there's things I like to talk about, animal behavior,
animal welfare issues, a sustainability, construction. Those are all things
(42:12):
I find really interesting. I remember a great plane trip
I had. There was a lady construction manager and we
geeked out on cocreteforming systems and tilt up warehouse construction
for two and a half hour, three hour flight. That's
a great flight, you see. That's an example of shared interests.
Doctor grand And thank you so much for being with
us today. Okay, it was great to be here. Thank
(42:33):
you so much.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
The Good Foods podcast is for entertainment purposes only. The claims, comments, opinions,
or information heard should never be used in place of
your medical provider's advice or your doctor's direction. Thank you
for listening, Follow us on social media and wherever you
get your podcasts. Good Health through good food, Good Foods
Grocery
Hi, I'm Temble Brandon. I'm Distinguished Professor of Animal Science
at Colorado State University. Also on autistic and I had
a New York Times bestselling book, Visual Thinking, the hidden
gifts of people thinking pictures, patterns, and abstractions. And I'm
really pleased today to be on the Good Foods Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
All of us are on a journey towards better health,
and we're grateful that you've allowed us to join you
on your quest.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
In this episode, there's stuff that we don't make it anymore,
and one of them is the state of the art
chip making factory. You know, electronic chip making machine. We're
not making that. And it goes back to taking out
shop classes and then when they have shot classes, they
won't let the autistic kids take them because of liability.
But back when I was working with heavy construction, this
would have been seventies, eighties and early nineties. People with
(00:53):
dyslexia and autism that are undiagnosed owned the shops.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
This is the Good Foods Podcast And now here's your
host show.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Dan, doctor Grandon, thank you so much for joining us
on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Great to be here.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
What was the world like for you growing up?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Well, one thing that helped me was a lot of
very good teachers. I had no speech into age four,
so I had excellent speech therapist. I had a great
third grade teacher. Mother taught me to read with phonics
when I was in third grade because I didn't know
how to read. High school was terrible. Childhood was pretty good.
High school was terrible and bullying and teasing. And I
(01:32):
managed to get to elementary school without bullying and teasing
because the teacher told the other students that I had
a disability that was not visible like a wheelchair, and
they should be helping me, not portraying me. High school
was horrible. I kicked out of a regular school for
throwing a book at a girls retired my gook book editor,
and I went to special school and they basically put
(01:54):
me to work running their horse barn, and so I
learned how to work. This is really important and this
is a different skill from academic skills. And then where
I had friends because I was plenty of bullying going
on at the new school too, was shared interests riding horses.
Big believe were in getting students involved in friends who
shared interest. I mean today it might be robotics club
(02:17):
or it might be music or band, and this is
where they can get friends. When I was in college,
I still had them hard times socially. And we had
a school wide variety show and I made scenery for
it and I sung a silly song that helped open
up some doors.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
So that commonality was very useful to you, bridging that gap.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, that's right. I had a good friend. We'd rode
horses together and we showed them together, and that was
really a good thing.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Was there a moment for you when you realized when
you were growing up that you were seeing the world
differently from everyone else.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
I didn't realize that I was a visual thinker seeing
the world differently until I was in my late thirties.
I was really old. I thought everybody thought in pictures
and the way I found out that other people think
verbally by say to you think about a church people,
how does it come into your mind? I see specific ones. Well,
(03:14):
getting back to my generation, that come up like thirty
five millimeter slides. Today it would be PowerPoint slides. But
I asked a speech therapist that same question, and she
just came up with a very vague representational, no detail,
would not name where it was that's all she saw.
That was my first inkling that other people didn't think
(03:34):
in pictures the way I do. Now there's been research
that shows that there's three kinds of thinking. I'm discussed
in this book visual Thinking. There's the object visualizers like
me who think in photo realistic pictures, have a horrible
time with higher math, but often very very good with
animals and mechanical things. Then you have your music and
math pattern thinking minds, visual spatial music and math minds.
(03:59):
And then we've got word thinkers, and then you've got mixtures.
And there's now scientific research that supports this. But all
through my twenties and a good part of my thirties,
I couldn't understand why people didn't see the things I
would see. They thought it was really weird that in
my very first cattle research I got down into the
shoots to see what cattle we're seeing. They'd stop at
(04:20):
shadows and reflections and things that most people don't notice.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
And cattle were also, or animals right in general, were
bothered by waving flags.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Well, flags, any little thing that moves would stop the animals. Now,
if you have a dairy cow that goes into a
milky parlor. Every day. She'll learned to walk over the
drain and walk over the shadow. When an animal that
is going into the facility for the first time, they're
going to stop at the brain, They're going to put
their head down and look at the reflection on the
wet floor. And I found if I removed these distractions,
(04:53):
they cattle moved through the facilities a lot easier.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
And in the world today, what is your world like?
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Well, I've done a lot of research. Started out on
The first jobs I ever had was in my twenties
was being livestock editor for our state farm magazine. That
really helped to get me started because being a woman
in the cattle industry in the seventies was difficult. And
I went up to the editor at a cattle event
and I got his card, and then I wrote my
(05:21):
first article. It was a summary of my masters stasis
on how cattle behaved in different types of squeeze shoots.
And then doing design work. I worked with a really
good contractor. Then when the economic recession came in nineteen eighty,
I figured it I have two years to get classes
done for PhD. That dragged on for about nine years. Meanwhile,
(05:43):
working on more equipment, and then in nineteen ninety I
became a professor of animal science at Colorado State University
after I got my PhD. And then further work I
did was developing animal welfare guidelines and an audit procedure
for evaluating slaughter plants which were sold in a lot
(06:03):
of improvements. You know, now I'm seventy six years old,
and the thing I'm really interested in now is encouraging
those students who are different to get into things that
can be really good careers that would use their areas
of strength. Can you give me some examples of that. Well,
I used visual thinking to design things. One of the
(06:23):
things I learned a working on equipment for the beef
industry was that you have a whole bunch of people
in the shops that invent equipment and they cannot do algebra,
usually a lay of a high school education, and they're
inventing stuff and they're patenting it. And what's happening right now,
they're retiring out, they're not getting replaced. And about twenty
(06:46):
percent of these people who definitely had either were autistic
dislike sick er ad h state and they had decent
jobs and We've got a real problem with not replacing
these people, and we need these skills. And I'm kind
of shocked. And some educators think you need algebra for
logical thinking. You don't. I think by associating pictures, and
(07:09):
I think the first step, and I tell educators and
business leaders you have to realize that there are differences.
And when a kid gets a label, they can often
be an extreme visualizer or an extreme mathematician and maybe
running a tech company out in Salton Valley. And I'm
seeing too many kids kind of get shunted in special ed.
They're not doing enough to develop their area of strength.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Joe Saladson Polyphased Farms said, his concern is also of
all these farmers that are aging out.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
That's right, I have the same concern I'm concerned with
a Joe Saladan. Here's the other thing in every industry,
little people innovate, little companies innovate. Lit'st get chat cheept
that came out of a little company. And then the
whole principle of how AI circuits work was one graduate
(08:00):
student using two video game graphics borts butt from Amazon
to figure out the initial programming in a bedroom in
his parents' house. That's little person innovating.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
How do you think we could go about, or should
go about attracting the younger generations to learn from those
before they age out. Well, and we need to do that.
And one of the big problems is land for young
people to farm on. That is a really big problem.
You know, in a lot of cases are going to
end up at least land. That can be a really
(08:35):
big issue. But first of all, young people have to,
you know, learn that career exists. Like for example, with me,
I didn't come from a cattle background. Well, I was
raised back East. I got exposed to cattle as a teenager.
It started as a teenager. See that brings up the
really important thing about exposure. You've got exposed kids to
(08:57):
all kinds of stuff and any kind of see what
they would gravitate towards. But I'm seeing a lot of
the people that should become tomorrow's clever engineers. These are
the people that invent mechanical things that don't have college degrees.
They're playing video games in the basement and I wouldn't
bother at doing video game design. AI is going to
take that over the hands on stuff. How about fixing elevators,
(09:21):
making sure the water system's going to work, the power
grid's going to stay on it. That stuff's not going
to get done by chat cheepy Tear any other AI program.
You're right there. How can those of us who are
not autistic understand those that are better?
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Well, the thing about an autistic person is a lot
of people on different kinds of thinking. They're mixtures, and
the autistic person might be an extreme object visualizer, absolutely
terrible in higher man. I majored in psychology to dodge
math classes. One of the reasons why I'm majored in that.
And we've got to get kids, you know, trying lots
(09:59):
of stuff. I've seen too many kids labeled autism or
some other you know, labeled and not learning basic skills.
Parents tend to overcoddle them. They're not learning shopping, they
don't know how to order pizza online, they don't do
Bak account, they aren't doing any of the regular life skills.
And I think this is a very, very big problem.
(10:22):
You know, I was shopping when I was seven and
eight years old. I had a little allowance and fifty
cents a week. I could buy five Superman comics. But
if I wanted a sixty nine cent airplane. I had
to save for two weeks. And look at the mess
we've had now with Bowing. I didn't like sitting in
the airport and reading about loose rudder bolts and that
(10:43):
Boeing had sold their factory to private equity. Let's look
at how we need the different kinds of minds. All right,
let's go back to those both some of it and
did not get put in that door. The mathematician specs
out the bolt, the metal, the diameter, the length, the threads.
Authmatically figures out what's the perfect bolt, and then purchase
(11:05):
ain't has to buy the bolt and as to pay
for the bolt. This is where corners can get cut.
Those are the verbal thinkers. Then what's a visual finger
though installable and inspect it to make sure it's installed correctly.
You see, you need all the kinds of eyes. And
if you ramp up the factory speed too fast, then
people are going to have a hard time putting the
(11:26):
bolts in correctly. Okay, there's an example, very simple of
three kinds of minds. Well, our parent company, Commonwealth Autism,
is starting the program. We started it just recently. We're
bringing autistic people into the store to train them good,
to learn how to interact, and learn how to be
in the world, because we all need to be in
the world well, and we've got to get them out there.
(11:49):
And let's just look at a few simple accommodations. Let's
avoid the rapid Mulli task and chaos jobs like a
takeout window at lunchtime. Let's avoid that. The other thing
is there's working memory issues. So let's say they have
to take a piece of equipment apart. You give them
a pilot checklist take apart steps, cleaning steps, reassembly steps,
(12:12):
anything that has sequence. Don't yack it to them verbally.
I can't remember that sequence. Give them a pilot's checklist
of how to do it. And for the cleaning the machine,
I would make it, you know, disassembly, cleaning, reassembly. Do
it like that. That's the same way that the airplane
checklists work. They have like pre tax say pre take off,
(12:34):
it's chunked and it's in a certain order. It's the
same all the time, right, that's right, And pilots are
required to use a checklist. It's not optionals required. But
that's a very simple thing. I heard a sad story
where a person lost their electrical apprenticeship job because the
boss will go yack and yac yah yah, yeah yack,
and then need install the wrong fixtures in the wrong
(12:56):
places where if he just written yeah, would have taken
two minutes.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
We hear the term autistic and the spectrum. What's the
difference between the two and is one more correct to
use than the other?
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Well, I think the spectrum happens because you're going with
Einstein at one end of the spectrum. Then you have
something be very severe NonStop epilepsy, mobility issues and being
nonverbal at the other end, and then you've got some
nonverbal people that don't speak in the middle. They can
actually type on an iPad or some other tablet and
have a normal brain inside the dysfunctional body. And so
(13:31):
you've got this wide variety with the name of autism.
Where dyslexia it's problems with reading ADHD, there's problems to
the tension. It's much more narrowly defined. But the thing
is they're all autistic.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
I want to circle back a little bit to how
we're bringing people into the store to train them, and
the pilot checklist is brilliant. What else could we do
what else would make that I don't want to say easier,
but what else would help both parties.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
They're making social mistakes in the store, like maybe kind
of stalking customers around the store, standing too close to them.
Now you want to pull them aside in private, quietly
tell them what they should do. You know, you stand
near like three feet away when you talk to a customer.
The other thing is ask a customer just once that
(14:20):
they need help, and then back off. Just simple things
like that, right in the moment when something happens, you
give the instruction. You know, like sooners there's no customers around,
you'd pull them aside and you would tell them. You know,
like the customers don't like it when you come up
to four at times and ask if you can help them.
You approach once, then you back off. There's a very
(14:44):
very very simple things that they can do, and you
just give the instruction quietly. Don't say you're bad with
interacting with customers. You've got to be specific on what
the problem is without scolding them. Instead of scold, you
tell them what they should do. You might say, watch Susie.
(15:05):
Susie's really good at interacting with customers. Wat's what she does.
You see, that's something that's specific. You see, verbal thinkers
tend to overgeneralize, tend to do a lot of overgeneralization,
like teachers say, well, how do I teach autistic kids? Well,
are we talking about three year olds or are you
(15:26):
talking about teenagers adults? What is the problem that's too generalized?
Do you believe that in our own way we are
all on the spectrum to a certain degree. Well, the
spectrum basically is kind of a I'm interested motigs in
what I do. Some of the social circuits still left
that I'd say half of all the population would be
(15:47):
on the spectrum because a brain can either be more
social emotional or it can be more cognitive interested in
what they do. So half the population probably would be
somewhat autism spectrum. And the problem is one to slightly
peaky get labeled on autistic, and in the mildest forms
is just a personality variant. It is most mild forms.
(16:10):
Now I had speech to late to age four, so
obviously that's not normal. Now that they took out the Aspergers,
which is basically socially awkward with no speech delight, now
you've got that all merged in and so the amount
of people getting diagnosed is increasing because to get any
kind of a service at a school, you have to
have a diagnosis. A a white insurance won't pay for it.
(16:33):
But I'm seeing situations they're sire in the workfront where
I think that autism is holding you back because the parents,
they aren't learning to do the simplest things. I just
go in the store, buy something, talk to the store staff.
Parents do everything for them, you know, And you start
out with little baby steps like okay, you haven't ordered
(16:55):
the pizza online, and then the next time you go
to the peach shop and pick it up, and you
order it in the restaurant, and with your gas station
pumping gas and mom could send them in to buy
something in the store, and you do it at a
neighborhood gas station, you know, and you're right there. You
(17:15):
can see into the shop while you're putting gas in
the car. See, those are things I just visualize. I've
had a twelve year old toll up to meet the
airport with her mom. Found out she hadn't shopped. I
gave her five dollars bill and the shop was fifty
feet away. We could see it. I said, go in
that store and buy something, and she bought a drink
and she gave me back, say change. First time she
(17:36):
shopped by herself, and the mom had a hard time
letting go and wanted to go in there really bad.
So little she'll be fine, she was.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
We're afraid to release the training wheels because of the fear.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Well that's the problem, and I'm talking about doing the
most innocent, simple little things. I'm appall at the number
of fully verbal autistic teenagers that have never gone shopping
by themselves. They've never ordered food in a restaurant. This
is just ridiculous. And you mentioned the term aspergers.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
That is being not used as much because of the
negative connotation with it, or.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Well, there were some negative connotations with asperger. But you see, originally,
let's just look at the autism part of it. To
be autistic, you had to have speech delay. And then
when the Aspergers came in the early nineties. Now it's
possible to be on the autism spectrum with no speech daily,
but the two things were separated. I'd rather just call
it socially awkward with no speech delay. I'd rather call
(18:35):
it that. And then when you merge all those together,
you see all these people I worked within, these mechanical
shops and walding shops, most of them probably had no
obvious speech delay. And now they're all included in the spectrum.
And then what happens on a lot of cases the
school puts them all in the same classroom. So you've
got the ones that are totally verble with no speech
(18:59):
delay in with others were maybe very severe problems. And
then the kid that's son, you know, he ought to
be taking computer science classes or something else, is not
being moved ahead, and we need to build up on skills.
From my kind of thinking, I'm saying, let's get rid
of some of the algebra class barriers for things like
a veterinary technician, for example, and maybe making substitute geometry
(19:23):
or business math, or maybe accounting or statistics. I'm not
suggesting totally get out of that. The problem I have
with algebra as a visual thinker, there's nothing for me
to remember. You say, I have to have a picture
in order to remember.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
And probably I'm going to guess, but maybe part of
the problem is that we're still kind of trying to
funnel people. As far as education, it was still trying
to funnel people down a single hallway as opposed to
opening that up.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
And I think that's wrong. And I want to one
of John Markle's talks about neurodiversity. I was just ated
Chico University Disability Conference, and this is one of the
things that he brought up, is just too much of
a single way of doing education. He brought that up,
and so he was kind of lumping neurodiversity together a lotism, dyslexsia, ADHD.
(20:13):
You'll look at all these different things. Maybe he would say,
maybe twenty percent of the population might have some degree
of being neurodiverse. And the thing I want to emphasize
to business leaders, and I do a lot of talks
to him, is that we need the skills. We need
that person that can fix anything. That you can see
how something works, see where something is wrong.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
We need to project a brighter scope, and as you
were saying earlier, kind of like show them different avenues,
different ways, as opposed to a laser point. We need
maybe have a water hose and say, look, these are
all the things maybe that.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
You could learn or you could go down. They're stuff
that we don't make it anymore. And one of them
is the state of the art chip making factory. You know,
electronic chip making machine. We're not making that. And it
goes back to taking out shop class. And then when
they have shop classes, they won't let the autistic kids
take them because of liability. But back when I was
working with heavy construction, this would have been seventies, eighties
(21:09):
and early nineties, people with dyslexia and autism that are
undiagnosed owned the shops and they had multiple patents, and
I've looked some of those patents up. They're retired now
most of them, and the things they invented are still
being used. Obviously the patents expired, but they weren't just
Doley equipment. They were inventing equipment, especially mechanical devices.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
Doctor Grandin, what do you feel would help us bridge
the gap between those of us not on the spectrum
per se with those that are well. The first thing
you have to realize is that different ways of thinking exist. Also,
the person on the spectrum being social for the sake
of socials, not what makes their world go round. I
find it very interesting to talk about construction, or talk
about animal behavior, or to talk about sustainable egg backed up.
(21:56):
Got a paper and I don't know if you've seen
this grazing cattle, sheep and old. It's an important part
of a sustainable agricultural future. And if you use the
grazing right, you can improve the land, you can reduce
fire hazard. But you have to do the grazing right now.
What do you do with the.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Twenty percent of the land that can only be grazed.
You see, as I talk about this, I'm seeing eastern Colorado.
They tried to grow corn on it and it only
got as high as my desk. That's like ridiculous. Why'd
you bother the planet? There's not enough water there, either
in the ground or coming out of the sky is rain.
(22:36):
And the people you take Joel Salata, you see, he
probably is a visual thinker and it's a lot we
can learn from him. But every field, the little people innovate,
care what the field is. And we need to be
getting more young people involved in in some of this
egg sustainable egg stuff, and we need to figure out
really practical solutions. I also think that ultimately, you know,
(23:01):
we talked, you know, like in the organic it's like, oh,
you got to be totally pure. The thing is probably
going to work in the futures, a hybrid mostly organic,
a little bit of Raylar, you thinking pictures? Yes, How
did your book Visual Thinking help people understand how you
and those with autism view the world? Because it explains
how we think and it also presents research not talking
(23:25):
about the kinds of jobs that the different kinds of
thinkers are good at. The first step is you have
to realize different thinking exists. I didn't know it exists
in dollars in my late thirties, which is seems crazy,
but that when I first asked about the church steeples
and the speech starter was just a pointy thing. And
there are a few people that have and fantasia that's
(23:46):
discussed in my Visual Thinking both and these are people
that have no visual thinking at all, and they're often
in math and sciences.
Speaker 3 (23:54):
What would your advice be to teachers and educators of
younger children on how to hone their skills better recognizing
the strengths and weaknesses of these early learners.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Well, we pound away too much on this on the
deficits and we don't do enough on the skills. Let's
say you have a child that is a little math genius,
then he needs to be moved ahead that child needs
to be moved ahead in math. Don't make them do
boring math. They're going to turn into a big behavior
problem if you make them do boring math. And my
ability in art was always encouraged by my mother. I
(24:26):
like to build things when it's a little kid. If
you can make it out of cardboard, I made it.
I see it too often kids that are super good
with legos, but they fail to graduate the tools. I
think that's a problem. Seeing twoity kids today, I've never
used a tool. I think it's ridiculous. You've got exposed
kids to a lot of different stuff. I was exposed
(24:47):
to musical instruments. I couldn't figure out how to play
this little flute. Another kid's going to take off with it.
You know music ability, Yeah, that needs to be encouraged. Well,
you have to have access to musical instruments and some teaching.
Big fan of exposing kids to lots of different stuff.
And got to see what they gravitate too. Since you
think in pictures, is this conversation we're having difficult for you?
Speaker 2 (25:11):
No?
Speaker 1 (25:11):
But as I talked about it, I saw the little flute,
I saw the art supplies. Had an elementary school I'm
seeing an ancient, old algebra book that for me would
be a door stop, but maybe for another third grade
or that book is a door that third grader needs
to be given that book, and he might just take
(25:31):
off with it. You know. Catherine Johnson, the famous mathematician,
Her education was done right. She was moved ahead in math,
way ahead quickly.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
Are there any tools that we can use to help
us communicate better with one another?
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Well, you see, that's a kind of vague, kind of
top down verbal question. I have a hard time answering.
But what I'm seeing now I don't. There's things that
we don't make electronic chip making machine, poultry processing equipment.
That's comic Muhalland and it goes back to taking out
the shop classes and then when we put them back in,
(26:06):
we don't let the autistic kids and the dyslexic kids
take shop. But some of the best people I worked
with that invented lots of stuff were either dyslexic or autistic.
The dyslexic ones were diagnosed. They had a giant company
that built feed notts. They were all dyslexic. They would
have been visual thinkers. What should someone without autism think?
(26:28):
About or what should they focus on to help them
better communicate with someone on the spectrum. Well, the one
thing you see, the vague, top down verbal thinking doesn't work.
Let's go back to training people to work in your store.
Saying you're too aggressive with customers or you're rude to customers.
They're not even to know what that means. You have
(26:49):
to get much more specific in say, now, approach a
customer wants the way Susie does. They need help and
back off. You said to a customer, go find the
merchandise yourself. Well, that's no way to talk up. You
quietly tell them what they should do. You see. Vague
directions do not work. Do not work. You see. And
(27:10):
this is the thing that a lot of teachers ask
me very very vague things. A lot of school policy
very very vague. And I have to have specific directions.
Like when I was out designing projects all the time,
I wanted to know we were remodeling a play it.
I wanted to know exactly what I could tear out
what I could not tear out, you know, foremants of
(27:31):
the equipment. And I wrote all this stuff down. I'll
do the designing, but I have to know Okay, what
is the right of way to the railroad crack because
they got to stay away from it. That's the sort
of thing that has to be written down. So a
specific and laundry list specific, and then the pilot's checklist.
There's two kinds of jobs. There's one where you might
(27:53):
take a machine atpart to clean it, and that checklist
is the same every time. And then the other kind
of checklist would be tasks to do each day, like
which shelves am I going to restop? And you'd list
the shelves and then you say, no, what the box
is flattened and put in the recycle bind They have
to be flattened and you do not put a grubby
(28:15):
pizza box in there because that recks of cardboards are recycling. Well,
I know enough about stores that I could think of
things that how I would explain to the autistic employee.
It has to be specific. Do you feel like you
have a gift and the rest of us are just
trying to catch up? Well, I have a gift in
one area, deficit in another. But what I found in
(28:37):
working with engineering. Your mathematical engineer designs a different part
of a food processing plant. But I call the clever engineers.
That's people like me who cannot do higher math. We
do the mechanical equipment, and we also lay out the
entire factory. Degreed engineer make sure the roof doesn't fall down.
Does the math on that, and balers and refrigeration much
(29:01):
more mathematical. We don't touch that stuff. Like I just
saw an airplane hangar that fell down. You see, I
tend to be associated, and it was obvious by looking
at the scrap metal la it turned into that the
beams were not strong enough. I couldn't believe that you
build an airplane hangar with would steal that light? You see,
That's something I just see it. And now I'm seeing
(29:24):
a bridge that fell down in Minneapolis. And I looked
at the rubble pile of the bridge, I go cheap,
it's too light. And then I found the engineering report.
They had cheated on the gusset plate that joined some
beams together a whole bunch like half the thickness. So
you see, the engineer, what a calculator, what thickness of
metal would have had to have for those gusset plates.
(29:46):
But then somebody cheated there, and the visual thing could
be very good inspecting the gusset plates and going, no,
they're half the thickness that the speck says, and that
bridge did collapse.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
So like a detective before the internet happens.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
But you see it because the gusset place had been
and had and just when I looked at it, too light.
That was the first thing, I it's too light. And
then I dug around online and I found the engineering report.
So they had cheated on the gusset plates. But let's
go back to the Boeing thing. There were bolts that
(30:21):
were not installed correctly in the rudder mechanism involve was
steering the airplane and that wasn't installed correctly. See the
problem you got the verbal thinker. Private equity owns this fact.
They're sitting in an office in Chicago and then Boeing
moving their office to Chicago's another dumb thing they did
because that got them away from the factory and they're
(30:42):
looking at the spreadsheets. But it's all an abstraction. They go, oh, well,
if we can get too fuselages built in the day,
you know, we can make more money. And then they
know they're understaffed. They probably shouldn't be doing that. You
can get this with any kind of a factory. You see,
it's all an abstraction. It's one thing I've learned about
(31:02):
a verbal thinker. For them to understand something like okay,
assembling the rudder, mechanism of the pale or anything that said,
you know, mechanical thing, they've got to get out of
the office and see it. And I'll never forget reading
an article. I think it was a Business Week or
one of those magnets years ago. There's an aerial view
of a power plant and the new CEO was in
(31:25):
a helicopter, came out of finances and he looks down
at that power plant from the helicopter and goes, I'm
in charge of that that complicated thing. I don't even
understand it. But until he saw it, it was an abstraction.
And I worked with Betsy, my wonderful verbal co author,
on this and to teach her to concept like leverage,
(31:47):
she has to experience it. I've tried to teacher leverage
from a little kids science websites. That didn't work. That Finally,
I said Betsy, and he ever taking a screwdriver and
just prigged the lid off a paint can. I said,
that's leverage. Then she got it. Then she got it,
and then I talked about a three D players, a
mechanical device controlled by a computer. Well, she had od
(32:09):
on three D player videos and then she got it. Otherwise,
the verbal thinker over generalizes, but maybe gone out of
the factory and said, these are the bulls that control
the movement of the planes. Rudder, that's one of the
things you steer with. And then he's thinking, do I
(32:30):
want my family on them plane? If they haven't tightened
those bolts correctly. You see that it's real, But to
a deverbal figure, it's not real.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
To you.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Drag those suits out of the office and we see it,
and somebody explains it to them so they understand it.
You find out that's a rudder lankage that's more important
than part of the totally one that's just messy.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
True. True, you do need to rudder more than a toilet.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Yes, you do.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
What sort of things did you see in your early
days working with cattle that no one else was paying
attention other than what you already mentioned.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Well, the shadows. The biggest thing I noticed was the
things that made the cattle refused to walk through the chute, shadows, reflections,
coat on the fence, puddle of water, those kind of things.
I noticed that kind of stuff right off the bat,
and nobody else noticed it, and they thought it was
weird that I got down in the shoots and most
people just wanted to force the cattle. And back when
(33:24):
I first did that, that was radical stuff, you see,
But I didn't know that most of the other people
were much more verbal in their thinking, so they wouldn't
think about what cattle was seeing. That was the first
stuff that I did. I want every feed yard in Arizona,
and I've worked cattle, and then I found where there
was design mistakes that made the shoot look like a
dead end with no place to go out. But you see,
(33:47):
visual thinking's a different type of problem solving. So you
take people that are doing like Joe Salad and doing
really great stuff with agriculture. He sees it, he sees it.
It's not an abstraction. He sees the big picture right away. Well,
you see, that's one of the things a visual thinker
can do. As a verbal thinker is much more linear
a visual thinker. It's associate. Okay, I was talking about
(34:11):
one kind of engineering thing about the plant roof. And
then just the other day on the news of something,
there was some airplane hanger felt down for private planes.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
I couldn't believe the flimsy little steel they used. I'm going,
that's cheap. I can't imagine any structural engineer would have
signed off on that.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
You gave me the example of the steeples. Does your
mind act like a virtual reality environment? Well, yeah, I
can test run equipment. I remember sitting at the conference
room and we were talking about different ways to position conveyors,
and I could go the other sucking a word, No,
you do that. You can pull the rails out of
the ceiling. Then I could run these little like three
(34:53):
D simulations. But I'm not very good at abstract rotation
of objects. See when I wrote Tate the od, I
walk around it in my mind. I walk around the facility,
or I fly over, like I can say to a camera, crudou,
if you get on the corner of that roof up there,
you'll get the perfect picture. And they said, well, how
do you know that? I just see it. So it's
(35:15):
the temple drone in your mind.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Yeah, I had a temple drone and I've still got
some ancient old video of cattle filing into a pen,
and that was from a corner of a roof that
we got up on.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Are you someone that remembers your dreams, and if so,
are they the same as when you think during the
day in pictures.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Well, the dreams do get a kinds of wild stuff.
I have some balance issues, so I'm fine. I'm trying
to ride a bike down you know something that's like
that that's really scary. And then I have airport anxiety
dreams like I'm driving to the airport and the crater
opens up and I twenty five.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Well, who doesn't.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Oh, I'd look at my watch and the place go
leave twenty minutes from now? How am I going to
get to the airport?
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Well, doctor Grant and everybody, we all have issues with airports.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
We all are have a little bit of fear there. Well,
I can tell you, you know, making sure I make
my flights on time. I always allow an extra hour
for a traffic jam. One time I was driving to
the airport and just as I want to go on
the bypass, the police blocked it because the President had
come into town, and it took an extra forty minutes
(36:20):
for me to go around to get to the airport,
and I've had a car accidents in construction to other
things that slow down the trip.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
Doctor Gradman, what's one of the things that you're most
proud of?
Speaker 1 (36:33):
One thing that really made the biggest difference. So a
very simple scoring system I made for animal welfare to
slaughter plants, because by the nineties I had a lot
of equipment out on the beef plane. So I had
designed them stockyards and a center track restrainer for all
the cargilt beef plants in North America. A lot of
other plants had it too, and a lot of people
were managing things right, they were tearing up, equipment, wrecking.
(36:55):
So what the scoring system did is it made them
make an ASIAT. You had five simple things you had
to measure. You hang it up and ask to be
dead ninety five percent first shot efficacy on studding no
more than three catalog of one hundred mooing during handling,
one percent falling, and you had to get seventy five
percent and with no electric pride and used to be
five hundred percent. And they had to make those numbers.
(37:18):
And in the year of nineteen ninety nine I had McDonald's,
Burger King, and Windy's all enforcing the same thing. And
in most of the plants they didn't have to buy
a whole bunch of new equipment. They had repair the
things they had, then manage it and put in some
non slip floor. That was another thing that they needed
to do. And only three plants out of the seventy
(37:40):
four plants had to buy expensive new things. We made
some shabby old dumps work with just simple changes understanding
how good foods is approaching this training program that we
have from our parent company, Commonwealth Autism. What are your
thoughts on that, What could we do right and what
(38:01):
could we maybe better hone our teaching skills for those
All right, let's look at grocery store board. One of
the big things I see with a vocational stuff is
for certain individuals a grocery store is a suitable career,
but for somebody like me, it should be a summer
(38:21):
training job. And I often don't see this differentiation being made.
You know, I don't think I should have had a
career of cleaning horse stalls for the rest of my life,
but I basically ran a horse bar and there was
a responsibility and I was proud of the fact that
I ran it, but I had to then move on
to something else. And the other problem is a lot
of people that work in autism and vocational rehab. They
(38:45):
don't know anything about factories. They don't know about all
the interesting stuff that's out there. I read a lot
of business magazines. You read about all this stuff that's
going on, and read about things like how AI first
started two video game boards. I actually booked them up Amazon.
I came run up. I could have bought them for
like five hundred and forty dollars video game graphics cards
(39:09):
bought from Amazon. You know, bad troup. You see that
there was a whole different way of looking at programming.
And the student's paper has over one hundred and twenty
thousand citations. Little guys innovate, but it's hard for the
verbal thinkers, you know, the differentiate, Well, this person ought
to do this. Now. One program I really liked is
(39:33):
TACKED in Denver, teaching autistic community trades. And they start
with young adults and they go to a camp where
they can try on cybersecurity, welding, carpentry, car mechanics, and
whole bunch of stuff. Then they have small classes with
six students where you have a mechanic and a job
coach there and they have to be on time, show
(39:55):
up for work, have the right clothes on. And then
when they're placed to the car dealership with no interviews,
they're contracted with car dealerships, there's a job coach for
another two months. Then they've about eighty percent success rate
project search. Now they've gotten out of the medical field
and doing other jobs with intensive internships, and this seems
(40:17):
to be working. Then I have grandparents. They come up
to me all the time. They discover their autistic when
the kids get diagnosed, and they would be the type
that would have had no speech delay. They had paper
routes at age eleven, and I said, tell parents, we
got to come up with new paper route substitutes walking
the neighbor's dog, somebody else's dog because the boss has
(40:38):
to be outside the family. There's things like that that
can be just done in the neighborhood, you know, schurts,
volunteer job, community center, volunteer job, helping out in an
old folks hall. Things that can just be put together
in the neighborhood. We've got to encourage the next generation
to get out work on sustainable farming things, and we've
(40:58):
got to find practice cool stuff that's going to work.
And that's why I wrote my grazing paper, and the
grazing animal is part of the sustainable agricultural future. But
you have to use the right that lends itself back
to the exposure comment that you were making. Well, you
see that's what tax found. You're gonna find one kid's
gonna love welding, the other ones wanting to do cybersecurity,
(41:19):
a lot of low level programming. I think AI is
going to eat it up. It's going to be taken over.
But we're going to need cybersecurity and fake photographs and
fake video detection, and some of it's getting really good.
I've seen some of the deep fakes.
Speaker 3 (41:34):
And finally, doctor Graddan, what would you tell someone that
isn't on the spectrum the best way to reach or
engage with someone else maybe in a public function or
meeting a strangers making a new friend.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Well, I've made friends who shared interests.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
You know.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
When I was in high school, it was a horse's
riding together. When I was in college, I went in
a school variety show and I made friends there. You know,
getting involved in school clubs, getting involved in things where
you can do friends who shared interest really important. The
all there's things I like to talk about, animal behavior,
animal welfare issues, a sustainability, construction. Those are all things
(42:12):
I find really interesting. I remember a great plane trip
I had. There was a lady construction manager and we
geeked out on cocreteforming systems and tilt up warehouse construction
for two and a half hour, three hour flight. That's
a great flight, you see. That's an example of shared interests.
Doctor grand And thank you so much for being with
us today. Okay, it was great to be here. Thank
(42:33):
you so much.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
The Good Foods podcast is for entertainment purposes only. The claims, comments, opinions,
or information heard should never be used in place of
your medical provider's advice or your doctor's direction. Thank you
for listening, Follow us on social media and wherever you
get your podcasts. Good Health through good food, Good Foods
Grocery
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