Interview with Dr. Temple Grandin

showing oh i can remember uh the frustration of not being able to talk horrible frustration because i have a temper tantrum because i&#39;m so frustrated hey guys welcome back to another saturday live show when i say live i mean we recorded this live but it&#39;s uh obviously pre-recorded anyway guys today it&#39;s awesome it&#39;s a good day i feel honored uh to have a special guest with me today which has been a long time coming i believe because a lot of people have asked for me to be interviewing this guest so today i am welcoming dr temple grandin to the show dr grandin how are you i am just fine now thank you for having me it&#39;s my pleasure um so for anybody who doesn&#39;t know do you want to just give me like a quick like summary of who you are what you kind of do well i&#39;m uh temple brandon i&#39;m a professor of animal science at colorado state university and when i was a little kid i had no speech to age four very fortunate to get into very good early intervention had wonderful teachers i also had a great science teacher mentor because i was a bad student who was not interested in studying until my science teacher gave me a lot of interesting projects and then studying became a pathway to a goal of becoming a scientist and that motivated me to study i love it and so you&#39;re you&#39;re on the autism spectrum as well um uh so you have a diagnosis of what were you diagnosed with well i&#39;m 74 years old so when i went to the doctor nobody even knew what autism was on first doctor i went to was a neurologist she tested me for epilepsy that was negative tested me for deafness and referred me to a little speech therapy school that two teachers thought out of their home and diagnosed me with minimal brain damage and then later on i definitely got an autism diagnosis i had all of the classic symptoms wow that&#39;s interesting and what kind of due to my age um doctors didn&#39;t know what it was this is fascinating that is fascinating and and what kind of like you know just just our interests like what were some of the traits that you were kind of um you know experiencing or showing oh i can remember the frustration of not being able to talk horrible frustration because i have a temper tantrum that i&#39;m so frustrated sensory problems loud noises hurt my ears in fact now i&#39;ve discovered that if you have the child initiate the same let&#39;s say it&#39;s a car horn or a vacuum where they turn it on and off they can sometimes get tolerated if they control the dreaded sound sound sensitivity couldn&#39;t stand scratchy clothes socially awkward uh when i was in high school i got bullied and teased now it&#39;s called tape recorder because i always say the same things over and over again the same phrases i didn&#39;t know why they were calling me that um the teenage years absolutely worst part of my life yeah i can vote for that too um yeah that&#39;s fascinating you know it&#39;s such an interesting um thing to hear somebody you know for your generation uh having this kind of experience it&#39;s just absolutely fascinating but um i i thank you so much for sharing that information with us i&#39;m sure that&#39;s very valuable for for the people who watch my channel and um just just out of interest a lot of people want to know um do you have a high iq i know it&#39;s a bizarre question but what would you do you know your iq no i wanna i had high enough iq that they knew that i wasn&#39;t done i wasn&#39;t stupid yeah my ability and art showed up very early when i was eight years old and i would saw the same horsehead over and over again and mother encouraged me to draw lots of different things yeah and to broaden the skill i can&#39;t emphasize enough the importance of developing strengths i was one of these kids who&#39;s a visual thinker everything i think about the picture it&#39;s called an object visualizer in fact i discussed that in my book the autistic brain some of the science behind some of the different kinds of thinking and being an object visualizers helped me my work with livestock equipment to somebody because i can just see it but i cannot do elsewhere i absolutely cannot do elsewhere and i&#39;m saying a lot of kids that are object visualizers just can&#39;t graduate from high schools they can&#39;t do elsewhere that&#39;s a lot of jobs you don&#39;t need that some visual thinkers are very good with mechanical things and then you have your math thinker your visual spatial mathematics thinker that tends to go together with music and then of course you&#39;ve got your word thinker and you want to take this strength and i want to just make one distinction between a strength and an interest things like art math or music those are strengths an interest might be horses or or cars or something like that that would be an interest and people tend to mix those things up what you&#39;re going to do is broaden that interest you know you can read about cars do math with cars broaden it that&#39;s perfect like you&#39;re speaking my language here um so i i was diagnosed at 20 well so i&#39;m 35 now um so a little bit younger than yourself but uh back where i live in wales is quite rural right and um and there was nobody to diagnose autism back in the 80s and 90s where i live and so i was diagnosed at 26 but i i had some other diagnosis all the way up to that but you know what you&#39;re saying about being a visual thinker i totally relate to that um and i&#39;m also i&#39;m a chemist i have a degree in chemistry uh bachelor science and chemistry and so i was really into algebra but i&#39;m also a multi-musician so i play a lot of different punishments but i like maths and music so it&#39;s kind of like amazing that&#39;s more the mathematical mind because what the science is showing and i describe it in the autistic brain and there&#39;s a lot more science that backed the substance that book was published i&#39;m an object visualizer i think in pictures you sound more like the visual spatial thinker because you&#39;re good at algebra that&#39;s more of a pattern kind of thinking it&#39;s visual but it&#39;s more pattern and that&#39;s a different kind of thinking than than main object visualizer then you have a verbal facts guide then you have a lot of people just regular so-called normal people that are verbalizers and that total verbal thinkers and it was a shock to me when i was in the late 30s to discover that other people did not think in pictures that was really a shock to me yeah i i&#39;m i&#39;m yeah a hundred percent i have this argument with my my spouse all the time she&#39;s like i think in pictures but she doesn&#39;t i&#39;m like you know i have to be visual and especially when we&#39;re describing things i have to have them like drawn out you know it&#39;s difficult to read kind of like just written lists rather than if i don&#39;t see images of those you know well when if there&#39;s something like how to how to do something i&#39;d rather just see a diagram of it than re-environment right i totally i totally relate so that leads me to uh the fact that we are here today um and i really thank you for your time as well um is that you have or you have a new book coming out or it&#39;s already out right that you&#39;ve you&#39;ve wrote with um deborah deborah moore navigating autism and one of the things that&#39;s really important is developing the kids strengths i&#39;m seeing too many kids whether it gets hung up on the diagnosis that they&#39;re they&#39;re not accomplishing much there&#39;s many famous people that are autistic this is a book about elon musk by ashley vance and these are post-it notes i put in here many years ago in the pages where i thought he was autistic he&#39;s now come out on a comedy show yeah and in all seriousness has revealed that he he&#39;s on the autism spectrum einstein uh no speech in age three would probably be an autism program today and so autism is going all the way from someone like elon musk einstein okay myself and you to somebody who cannot dress themselves and that it&#39;s all about the same name from a service standpoint educational standpoint doesn&#39;t really make very much sense um it&#39;s a behavioral profile it&#39;s not a an exact diagnosis like saying you have the delta variant of culvert that&#39;s an example of an exact diagnosis that&#39;s really interesting um so your new book navigating autism right so who is this who&#39;s this book kind of aimed towards who&#39;s it written for it&#39;s aimed it was original i ain&#39;t more professionals um uh and try to get them sort of out of the um uh just getting stuck in the box with the labels uh there&#39;s a lot of crossover between autism and adhd about a third of the symptoms of brain scan stuff the genetic information crosses over so that&#39;s why those get mixed up um i&#39;ve designed the front end of every cardio beef plant in north america and i worked with a lot of um uh really talented uh welders machinery designers people that have 20 patents and i&#39;m going to estimate that about 20 percent or so of the people i&#39;ve worked with that were laying out entire big factories were either autistic dyslexic or adhd and i am saying that seriously and one of the worst things the schools did is take out all the hands-on classes yeah auto shop welding art cooking sewing woodworking because these are all classes that can lead to really good careers and in the us right now we&#39;ve got a huge short to high-end skilled trades and people that can fix equipment in factories run uh logistics problems they&#39;ve got horrible supply chain management problems um and and you need people like me who can&#39;t do algebra to help make stuff work yeah yeah yeah 100 that&#39;s super important as well um so like you know a lot of your work is based on like your own understanding of who you know who you are and your kind of autistic you know reality i guess why do you think it&#39;s important to share the knowledge that you&#39;ve learned about yourself you know with other people because i think it can help other people i see too many parents and maybe this is more of a problem in my country than yours i&#39;m not sure um but a lot of parents overprotect their kid that i see situations where you have a smart kid in high school doing really well who&#39;s never gone shopping never had a bank account not learning just the basics of life i was shopping when i was seven and people will say to me well why do you just tell about your own experiences you see my mind thinks in specific examples verbal thinkers are very top-down okay you gotta learn life skills um but when i look back at things i was taught in my generation like having an allowance and learning how to save for toy airplane i&#39;m realizing now the really important skills that that that that taught me and and and kids are not having that and that&#39;s why i came out with some other kids books like outdoor scientists get kids off the devices and get them outside doing things we&#39;ve got to get these kids doing things and they&#39;re often reluctant to do things but being a bottom-up thinker uh when i was a teenager uh i didn&#39;t have very much data in the database so i&#39;d make associations that were kind of nonsense and as i got older and i got exposed to more and more things then i could think better and i&#39;ve had parents say to me when they finally got their kid out on their first job they&#39;ll say me he just they&#39;ll tell me he just blossomed that&#39;s because he&#39;s getting exposed to more things now for good first jobs we&#39;ve got to avoid multitasking don&#39;t stick them on the mcdonald&#39;s takeout window also any task that involves verbal sequence give them a written pilot&#39;s checklist of the sequence i cannot remember long strings of verbal information never have been able again do you know um it it&#39;s really interesting because i think uh there&#39;s a lot of that you know like one of the things that i&#39;d say is strength in my life i can relate to what you&#39;re saying is that when i was when i was a kid i would see not being diagnosed with autism until i was in my 20s my parents put me to a mainstream school right and they were just like okay go to this club do that thing and i was forced to be in those circles so i learned loads of those things like you know being a you know a kid in i wasn&#39;t bubble rough basically and i always talk a little bit about us before we start recording but my parents never bubble wrapped me they just kind of pushed me out there and i think one of the okay yeah it was a bit of a struggle like the social interaction like you said you know i i was a bit more of a robot and kids didn&#39;t really understand me but you know i learnt so much from being in those situations i think that&#39;s super important and it&#39;s nice you talk about that well i think it&#39;s really important because i have a lot of grandparents that come up to me in good jobs engineers accountants various different jobs and they discover they&#39;re on the spectrum when the kids get diagnosed and there&#39;s quite a few older adults that get relieved when they get a diagnosis because it explains their relationship on problems the other thing for me i was getting bullied and teased the place where i had friends was friends who shared interests i cannot emphasize that enough friends threw shared interests in high school for me it was horseback riding and model rocket club and electronics lab and for somebody else it might be art it might be music could be a choir it could be a lot of different things yeah no i you know i did i do this little um course on my website and one of them is uh how to how to make friends and i&#39;m trying to teach you know the parents try and and encourage those shared interest classes like if it&#39;s a minecraft group or if it&#39;s a like you said if it&#39;s a modeling club or a you know pokemon card club it&#39;s those kind of shared interests that you&#39;re going to build that relationship with because it&#39;s going to be effortless communication right you&#39;re going to already know each other and the no that&#39;s absolutely right and that&#39;s where those little places i had friends in fact one enterprising mom with minecraft uh had a bunch of wood blocks uh cut up and had the kids paint and sand them to have minecraft blocks in the driveway or you could save up the boxes from all the other home deliveries you get and tape them up and paint them and have giant minecraft blocks that&#39;s a cool idea and that&#39;s something it&#39;s really easy to do and this one kid became the hit of the neighborhood with his minecraft blocks whoa that&#39;s cool that was very cool i do you know what&#39;s funny i have a strong relationship with minecraft because i did my dissertation uh on my thesis in in chemistry i actually built a um a teaching tool in minecraft to teach kids how to use molecular symmetry and group theory which is quite a difficult thing for some people to grasp but now are you working in chemistry right now i&#39;m not currently you know i&#39;m a social media influencer which is you know my this channel and my social media channels and stuff so that&#39;s what i do now but i don&#39;t i you know unfortunately i was going to do my phd and they closed the chemistry department down in my local university so that&#39;s too bad yeah yeah it was it was it was a i mean i do a lot of on you know consulting about autism now but i still think it&#39;s important to still be a professor of animal science i teach in my class we&#39;re back now with masks on in-person classes which is wonderful doing in-person lab last week cattle handling and uh still doing uh re-doing research projects involving animals horses and cattle and i think it&#39;s important you know like to have some some other career other than autism oh 100 yeah i i i totally agree because it&#39;s kind of like a it&#39;s that outlet isn&#39;t it like i love researching and stuff like that so i love researching different types of kind of uh more like biochemistry stuff and it&#39;s just such a nice such a nice outlet to to do stuff like that and i think you&#39;re right you know maybe i should we should do more um all right you need to get i think you need to get your chemistry model shut out there i&#39;m also want to emphasize i&#39;m sorry about interrupting this is a problem i still have i cannot time on my processor speed so slow i cannot time what exactly to cut into a conversation it&#39;s okay that&#39;s not a problem um and i do the same thing so i think we&#39;re just gonna just us for 20 minutes talking over each other um but um you know in terms of um the book um you talk a lot about something called the whole child um what is what is it what why is it so vital like what do you mean can you explain that a little bit that idea well the problem is in a lot of cases they just um look at the label and they don&#39;t look at other things about the child like maybe he&#39;s good at music or good at math or um or like some other you know interest and other things he&#39;s good at uh they just look at the autism and and you need to look way beyond that yeah it&#39;s like a i think you mean it&#39;s like looking at the the person as a whole rather than just looking at that small section that you know you can control right it&#39;s like what what else can we do here what else can this channel i&#39;m seeing too many people getting sort of locked into the medical model and then they kind of assume a child can&#39;t do anything and we need to be getting these kids out doing more stuff mother would always give me choices and then she realized that when i got tired in the big noisy environments you know i might start screaming um she kind of had a good sense of how to stretch me giving me choices to do things like when i was a teenager i was afraid to go to my aunt&#39;s ranch and that&#39;s one of the reasons why i got into the cattle industry and my mother said you can go for a week or you can go all summer not going to not option but if you hate it you can come back in a week she always gave me some places she had a very good sense of how to stretch me without throwing me into a situation where it would just be too overwhelming to handle it got out to the ranch and i loved it good sounds like your mother really understood who you were right my parents really didn&#39;t unfortunately but it sounds like your mother really got who you were you know she was very in tune with you from what you&#39;re saying well she was she&#39;s very much visual thinker she was doing a lot of um like semi-professional theater stuff when i was a child she was very artistic at our little school fair she helped them put on plays and and uh she was very very creative oh it&#39;s lovely it&#39;s lovely so um you know you advocate for customized interventions right for children with asd what what do you mean by that i would love to kind of get a more well let&#39;s say sensory problems for example are really really vertical one kid it&#39;s got sound sensitivity another kid may have visual sensitivity where certain fluorescent lights or led lights will flicker you know that would be an example something customized uh one of the things is known now is that sensory integration types things the air is a sensory integration that is now an evidence-based treatment that you would do along with speech therapy or behavior therapy or some other thing um also i always say to parents you need to have an effective teacher and what&#39;s that you get progress if it&#39;s little kids more speech more turn-taking i was taught how to wait and take turns more basic skills i always ask parents they said well should be in that program or that program and i always ask is your kid improving okay tell me how much more speech he&#39;s gotten i don&#39;t like abstract stuff this is one thing i learned from 25 years in stealing concrete and mechanical construction at factories um i don&#39;t like abstractions okay tell me exactly how he&#39;s progressed you know less tantrums um uh the sensory problems getting you know less severe can he dress himself they&#39;re learning shopping [Music] things i can visualize you see i don&#39;t think abstractly thing i&#39;m learning about the verbal thinker the regular neurotypical verbal thinker because they have a big over generalization but they don&#39;t how to implement things you see both my mind the visual thinker in your mind the math thinker we&#39;re bottom-up thinkers concepts are formed from specific examples and you get a whole bunch of specific examples and you can put them in different categories you know the and and a verbal thing is very very top-down and they don&#39;t plan okay we&#39;re supposed to have an inclusive school well how do we do this you see when i think about that and thinking about well here&#39;s the situation that did not work and i see it here&#39;s another situation that worked fine one teacher started a star wars club because the autistic kid liked star wars and that enabled him to get friends that was a really simple thing to do but that&#39;s specific of some specific example of something that worked because i&#39;ve had people write on the chat well temple just um uh talks about our own experiences or i&#39;ll talk about somebody else&#39;s experiences yeah yeah but my mind works in specific examples yeah of course i&#39;ll tell you something that does not work for a job take an 18 year old girl shove her in a chaotic busy clothing store christmas time as a first job and you started at christmas time that did not work no no that was yeah i wouldn&#39;t say that was a good thing to do that was a that was a bad mistake and i talked to that family so that was a bad mistake yeah you know let&#39;s try something quieter like the clothing store not at christmas time here&#39;s a success there&#39;s an autistic guy at an auto parts store and that&#39;s relatively quiet i&#39;ve been in the auto parts store here and they loved him he didn&#39;t need the computer he memorized every part number for every part in the warehouse that&#39;s excellent no no it&#39;s good it&#39;s good example um okay so here&#39;s the last question about the book then um in in the book you kind of focus on different types of medical conditions that are associated with autism um and so how can you know additional conditions impact or affect the child&#39;s progress if they&#39;re artistic well let&#39;s look at one case let&#39;s let&#39;s check for epilepsy okay um that is a you know i hate the word co-morbid i think it&#39;s an awful term it&#39;s a weird term isn&#39;t it i it simply means when two conditions contin uh consists of exist yeah to me it sounds like something&#39;s dead yeah that&#39;s what i said a lot of medical terminology i don&#39;t really like but you can get well adhd and autism often go together you can get ocd and autism together gastrointestinal problems and autism tend to tend to go together there&#39;s research that shows that yes you know so those are examples autoimmune problems i have genetic testing done on me hey i need to explain why i&#39;m missing six adult teeth i&#39;ve got small teeth my skin is messed up and my brittle nails just break off and what&#39;s been learned about the autism is many many many genes contribute to that the same genes that make the brain big in humans are the same genes involved with schizophrenia and autism there&#39;s hundreds of them it&#39;s polygenic what&#39;s that mean lots of little tiny bits of code contribute yeah simpler genetics explains why i have brittle nails that that&#39;s simple genetics and i also learned from it that i had a bleeding disorder and if i ever have a hip replacement they have to be very careful not to give me too much heparin i could bleed to death wow that was something i learned from it that uh that could save my life yeah a hundred percent yeah goodness me you know i actually have so my my calm of it my co-existing conditions uh so i have adhd uh which i take medication for i also have uh dyslexia um and i also have extreme eczema as well so my skin i have eczema i&#39;ve got that too headache yeah obviously that that tends to go together see that kind of fits in with a lot of the um uh the kind of autoimmune abnormalities and things like that but another thing is a lot of famous scientists and musicians and stuff um i&#39;ve been looking up michelangelo isaac newton tesla the inventor of the um yeah i&#39;m edison yeah or thinking or a brain can be social more social emotional yes it takes processor space for this stuff i tend to be more thinking like i find it really interesting to have long conversations about animal behavior or long con conversations about supply chain logistics i just find this stuff like really super interesting i totally agree with things like that like i i can talk for hours about things um a lot of the time is a marketing um you know online marketing and seo building and how how how you market a product online i just love talking about that stuff i actually consult with with companies about that you know as well as a side hustle and i but i&#39;d love it you know and some of the companies they were like oh you know we&#39;re just starting it up we haven&#39;t got a lot of money i say look i&#39;m just going to do it because i love doing it you know i just love talking about it and and and trying different things and testing things because you know like you&#39;re saying about the supply chain uh on the internet you know to market a product on the internet you know what if say you&#39;re launching a course or a book there&#39;s a certain line of of distribution that happens there and that has to be optimized well i can remember when all the internet on the internet all started and everybody just thought it was just going to be in a computer well now you have huge warehouses that that create the supply chain yes you have huge data centers full of you know miles and miles of uh computer servers yes in gigantic warehouses and then i like to ask young students where the movies live online oh yeah i love to ask them that and some will say in a satellite and i&#39;m going really uh then some will say yes server but then when i show them how big the warehouse full of servers is it just blows their mind yeah it&#39;s unbelievable i think um i think facebook&#39;s got some servers in alaska and they&#39;ve opened the top just to cool up cool them down well that&#39;s the problem you see and they put them in cold places but there&#39;s a huge physical infrastructure yeah it just it&#39;s enormous and one of the problems we got today with a lot of young people because we&#39;ve taken out the practical things um you&#39;ve got young people that are going to grow up and make policy about stuff and they don&#39;t have any idea how anything works hundred percent i couldn&#39;t work yeah i understood in my class that who had never measured anything with a ruler that was this year oh my goodness [Laughter] that is unbelievable unbelievable wow so sample your book when is this uh when is the book out is it art already in the u.s is going to be i think it&#39;s september 20th it&#39;s right around there it&#39;s coming out sure in the us and and then of course i&#39;ve got um in my own book thinking in pictures i&#39;m i where i talk at my own autobiography and it&#39;s just come out with a new afterward oh cool new updated afterward and you can get these on amazon i&#39;m guessing yes yeah all everything i have everything that i have and then deborah moore also has another book i worked with around the loving push and one of the things we discussed in that book yeah was all the problems with video game addiction i&#39;m seeing so many kids get addicted to video games and they&#39;re not getting jobs they&#39;re not working for game companies they&#39;re just playing video games all day and i tell parents you&#39;ve got to get that under control you don&#39;t ban it but it&#39;s got to be yeah it&#39;s going to be structured and because they&#39;re not having good outcomes no you know i did a i did a documentary with the bbc um about about that exact thing um and it was a it was like a it was almost aimed towards teenagers and we were trying to get them to realize the the difficulties that you may have if you become addicted to video games and that&#39;s all you do and it was it was startling the figures of people who are addicted to video games it&#39;s uh it&#39;s it&#39;s like and there&#39;s we&#39;re here let me tell you where there&#39;s been some successes i know of three young adults weaned off of video games it was replaced with auto mechanics uh okay because a lot of visual thinkers are good with mechanical things and one of them now works for railroad and fixes trains and they really like them um and it tends to be some of the visual thinkers and math thinkers that are getting addicted to them the verbal thinkers probably don&#39;t care that much about them and in autism you can get all three of the different kinds of thinking and the difference with an autistic person is you&#39;ll be an extreme visualizer or an extreme visual spatial math person or an extreme verbal person so-called normal people are more mixtures of the different kinds of thinking yeah but the scientific research that shows this actually exists but we&#39;ve got to wean them off and replace that video game with something else and i&#39;m not saying auto mechanics is for everybody but for my kind of mind yeah um the mechanical things is really a good a really good feel because i worked with people that designed equipment like for meat factories and they were my kind of mind i worked with a guy who&#39;s a stutterer autistic dyslexic terrible student took a single welding course now owns a big metal fabrication company and sells his equipment around the world holy smokes see this is what makes me kind of crazy as i go back and forth between the autism world and the industrial world yeah yeah dude you know i it&#39;s fascinating i think i could talk to you for hours about everything because we have quite a lot in common um so where could people find you do you have a website or do you have like a i have brandon.com it&#39;s my autism website okay and i have grandin.com it&#39;s my livestock website okay i i&#39;ve got books listed on both of them amazon has got all my books okay um also i&#39;m a professor of animal science at colorado state university and i can be tracked down through the university website excellent okay and do you have any social media handles um i let other people handle that okay maybe i&#39;m really showing my age here but i but one thing i do is i try to answer correspondence and and uh uh the other thing i&#39;ve tried to do is write up a lot of stuff i&#39;ve got to sell the book the way i see it um a lot of little short chapters some of it&#39;s my experience one of the things i&#39;ve discussed in in thinking in pictures is i take medication i&#39;ve been on antidepressants for anxiety for since 1980 they saved me yeah and if anybody&#39;s interested in that i really strongly recommend reading thinking in pictures because i don&#39;t want any misun understanding about the medication so i&#39;d rather have you read it i&#39;d love to read actually i might get that today and thinking in pictures and you get into all this discussion about medication and you get the same discussion about dogs because prozac works on dogs and it works on people and should you give dogs prozac well let&#39;s give the dog more exercise and more interaction with people first see how he gets home yeah then let&#39;s see you know i&#39;m but on the other hand i can&#39;t be totally against medication um you&#39;ve got a dog that comes in is totally scared or he tears apart the vet clinic you know then it might be good to give it a sedative before you bring it in but that doesn&#39;t mean you just do it every dog if this is where the sensible thing to do is something sort of more in the middle there&#39;s way too many medications given out to young children way too much way too much way too much any duty medications with bad side effects yeah there&#39;s a lot i mean you know that&#39;s a whole different topic but you know i i i can agree with you i started taking medication about four years ago um because i got to a point where um because having adhd and autism kind of like um it was just it was just bad you know it was a bad i just couldn&#39;t rock myself out of um a bad condition so i started taking a an antidepressant that was kind of designed and and treated for people who were diagnosed with asperger&#39;s right which is what my diagnosis was um and so far you know i i feel great you know it&#39;s really helping me a lot well that&#39;s good and i went on an old-fashioned antidepressant that&#39;s so old this before prozac and stuff like that was invented the thing i want to warn you low doses yeah too often too often i&#39;ve had people say oh he did great on a low dose we doubled the dose and then you got agitation and insomnia the other big mistake that people make once they get stable on on a really good med is thinking oh i can go off this i&#39;ve seen some real messes with that yeah i was thinking that recently i had this thinking i feel great you know maybe i could you know but i don&#39;t think it&#39;s it&#39;s not a good thing and you know i did it because i&#39;m not like i&#39;m against medication i just thought like i&#39;m quite a i&#39;m gonna you know muscle through this i&#39;m gonna figure out these problems myself but it got to a point where it was kind of breaking point you know i just felt so i was so low absolutely well what happened to me is i was i went through my 20s i got more and more and more anxious just over nothing and my health was coming apart colitis attacks that just wouldn&#39;t stop all kinds of stress-related health problems and i went on the anti-depressant and three days later it was like wow this works now depression doesn&#39;t lift in three days but my problem was anxiety that lifted within three days and that&#39;s why the chapter in thinking in pictures is called a believer in biochemistry yeah um because it was wow and you get the right match one little match that&#39;s all i take and and uh i can i can i can totally agree because you know i got to a point my anxiety was so bad that when the mailman would between eight and like half nine in the morning uh the male mom would post a letter through the doll but it makes me so anxious i i would just be i just couldn&#39;t concentrate just getting anxious over nothing you see and that&#39;s the same thing that was made any little thing i was just having a panic attack over it i kind of look at it like okay there&#39;s an old if you know old-fashioned carburetors i&#39;ve got um an idle adjustment screw yep well it was like my fear center and i&#39;ve since learned brain scans that my fear centers three times larger than normal was revving up like just the rpm meter just maxing out and and then when i took the um the medication it like turned the idle adjustment screw on the old-fashioned carburetor and i still have cycles of anxiety but instead of going i&#39;m gonna have to use english measurements here 200 miles an hour to 100 miles an hour i&#39;m now going 100 miles an hour to 75 miles an hour yeah in other words it still cycles but it like ramped everything down and i don&#39;t know what would have happened to my health if i had not taken the medication i would have had to have you know really invasive treatments to get the colitis stopped and the colitis almost completely cleared up wow when i went on the medication i still now have a little bit of problems with it but it&#39;s very minor compared to what it used to be it&#39;s incredible and so yeah i mean you know meds can work it can work very well well they can work really well and then and then used wrong i see way too many bad things where i&#39;ll talk to a parent the kids on like seven medications yeah and i asked the parents well what kind of thought went into it then i&#39;m finding out that they were just throwing prescriptions at it throw three meds at a time yeah instead of trying something carefully and and seeing what&#39;s gonna work you don&#39;t start three of them at the same time and i find when i talk to them there&#39;s no thought went into it yeah that is the problem yeah and a lot of the time the doctors are just trying to sell them at the other day because they got there&#39;s somebody taking a commission somewhere and they&#39;re saying we&#39;ll try this one out and so well sometimes that&#39;s true but i think some of it also is just uh get them to quiet down get out of my office and throw a prescription at it because i i talk to a lot of low-income families and that&#39;s where i really see some of these problems and the doctor is super busy and doesn&#39;t have time to carefully ask the questions and troubleshoot it yeah yeah there&#39;s no uh yeah it&#39;s more of a conveyor belt right you know just he&#39;s a freaking guy that&#39;s the problem and and and the other thing i&#39;m finding on a lot of you see some people say well that&#39;s terrible you should never use them or just drown everybody in meds yeah that&#39;s going to balance the sensible thing to do is the younger the child less meds i like to use but i was one of these young adults where mets saved me a single little man saved me and i think yeah that&#39;s that&#39;s a good thing to to to say because i think there&#39;s a fine line yeah you have to have that balance between like finding the right amount of medication but the right just testing the one that you need you don&#39;t need to drown yourself in medication to feel better or even to just you know help with the situation you just need the right one at the right time but yeah and the only side effect basically i have is i have to drink a lot of water but that&#39;s a side effect i can live with and you&#39;ve got to get um you know and there&#39;s different whole bunch of different medications in the same medication class so you can try different ones and they&#39;re slightly different i&#39;m just different enough so they don&#39;t violate each other&#39;s patents yeah yeah yeah i had to stop taking a sleep medication to take my uh my kind of prescription medication because they would kind of overlap and could be all kinds of stuff going on but anyway again i could talk to you for hours uh the other thing i found that helps i have to do a burst of hard vigorous exercise every day in order to sleep 100 sit-ups every night hate them and i was having sciatic nerve problems and i switched to kind of push-up things right but i&#39;ve got to do this burst of hard exercise walking doesn&#39;t do it every day and that also is very helpful i i hear you i have to do the same thing i have to run at least like three miles to get that i don&#39;t i just that&#39;s why i just doesn&#39;t want my head wet i just came in i had a run i had a shower okay and then we did this interview so i i i totally understand it&#39;s so bizarre how we have the same kind of things but i have to have that like really intense because it&#39;s intense because um you know when i was traveling all the time and doing you know like i added up how much airport walking i was doing and it was several kilometers um walking and that just didn&#39;t seem to do it and i spent more time doing the airport walking than i did doing the burst of hard exercise and the burst of heart exercise was much more effective than walking yeah i still do walking for my back like when i was during all the lockdowns i walk around the neighborhood every day just for my back but i&#39;m i&#39;ve been getting back out on the road traveling and traveling in the us and loving it right dr gundan thank you so much for um coming on the show i&#39;m sure everyone&#39;s going to be interested in this new book i will leave all the links that we discussed in the show notes and the description of the videos so please check out dr brandon&#39;s book the new book which is navigating autism very excited for you guys to check that out

showing oh i can remember uh the frustration of not being able to talk horrible frustration because i have a temper tantrum because i&amp;#39;m so frustrated hey guys welcome back to another saturday live show when i say live i mean we recorded this live but it&amp;#39;s uh obviously pre-recorded anyway guys today it&amp;#39;s awesome it&amp;#39;s a good day i feel honored uh to have a special guest with me today which has been a long time coming i believe because a lot of people have asked for me to be interviewing this guest so today i am welcoming dr temple grandin to the show dr grandin how are you i am just fine now thank you for having me it&amp;#39;s my pleasure um so for anybody who doesn&amp;#39;t know do you want to just give me like a quick like summary of who you are what you kind of do well i&amp;#39;m uh temple brandon i&amp;#39;m a professor of animal science at colorado state university and when i was a little kid i had no speech to age four very fortunate to get into very good early intervention had wonderful teachers i also had a great science teacher mentor because i was a bad student who was not interested in studying until my science teacher gave me a lot of interesting projects and then studying became a pathway to a goal of becoming a scientist and that motivated me to study i love it and so you&amp;#39;re you&amp;#39;re on the autism spectrum as well um uh so you have a diagnosis of what were you diagnosed with well i&amp;#39;m 74 years old so when i went to the doctor nobody even knew what autism was on first doctor i went to was a neurologist she tested me for epilepsy that was negative tested me for deafness and referred me to a little speech therapy school that two teachers thought out of their home and diagnosed me with minimal brain damage and then later on i definitely got an autism diagnosis i had all of the classic symptoms wow that&amp;#39;s interesting and what kind of due to my age um doctors didn&amp;#39;t know what it was this is fascinating that is fascinating and and what kind of like you know just just our interests like what were some of the traits that you were kind of um you know experiencing or showing oh i can remember the frustration of not being able to talk horrible frustration because i have a temper tantrum that i&amp;#39;m so frustrated sensory problems loud noises hurt my ears in fact now i&amp;#39;ve discovered that if you have the child initiate the same let&amp;#39;s say it&amp;#39;s a car horn or a vacuum where they turn it on and off they can sometimes get tolerated if they control the dreaded sound sound sensitivity couldn&amp;#39;t stand scratchy clothes socially awkward uh when i was in high school i got bullied and teased now it&amp;#39;s called tape recorder because i always say the same things over and over again the same phrases i didn&amp;#39;t know why they were calling me that um the teenage years absolutely worst part of my life yeah i can vote for that too um yeah that&amp;#39;s fascinating you know it&amp;#39;s such an interesting um thing to hear somebody you know for your generation uh having this kind of experience it&amp;#39;s just absolutely fascinating but um i i thank you so much for sharing that information with us i&amp;#39;m sure that&amp;#39;s very valuable for for the people who watch my channel and um just just out of interest a lot of people want to know um do you have a high iq i know it&amp;#39;s a bizarre question but what would you do you know your iq no i wanna i had high enough iq that they knew that i wasn&amp;#39;t done i wasn&amp;#39;t stupid yeah my ability and art showed up very early when i was eight years old and i would saw the same horsehead over and over again and mother encouraged me to draw lots of different things yeah and to broaden the skill i can&amp;#39;t emphasize enough the importance of developing strengths i was one of these kids who&amp;#39;s a visual thinker everything i think about the picture it&amp;#39;s called an object visualizer in fact i discussed that in my book the autistic brain some of the science behind some of the different kinds of thinking and being an object visualizers helped me my work with livestock equipment to somebody because i can just see it but i cannot do elsewhere i absolutely cannot do elsewhere and i&amp;#39;m saying a lot of kids that are object visualizers just can&amp;#39;t graduate from high schools they can&amp;#39;t do elsewhere that&amp;#39;s a lot of jobs you don&amp;#39;t need that some visual thinkers are very good with mechanical things and then you have your math thinker your visual spatial mathematics thinker that tends to go together with music and then of course you&amp;#39;ve got your word thinker and you want to take this strength and i want to just make one distinction between a strength and an interest things like art math or music those are strengths an interest might be horses or or cars or something like that that would be an interest and people tend to mix those things up what you&amp;#39;re going to do is broaden that interest you know you can read about cars do math with cars broaden it that&amp;#39;s perfect like you&amp;#39;re speaking my language here um so i i was diagnosed at 20 well so i&amp;#39;m 35 now um so a little bit younger than yourself but uh back where i live in wales is quite rural right and um and there was nobody to diagnose autism back in the 80s and 90s where i live and so i was diagnosed at 26 but i i had some other diagnosis all the way up to that but you know what you&amp;#39;re saying about being a visual thinker i totally relate to that um and i&amp;#39;m also i&amp;#39;m a chemist i have a degree in chemistry uh bachelor science and chemistry and so i was really into algebra but i&amp;#39;m also a multi-musician so i play a lot of different punishments but i like maths and music so it&amp;#39;s kind of like amazing that&amp;#39;s more the mathematical mind because what the science is showing and i describe it in the autistic brain and there&amp;#39;s a lot more science that backed the substance that book was published i&amp;#39;m an object visualizer i think in pictures you sound more like the visual spatial thinker because you&amp;#39;re good at algebra that&amp;#39;s more of a pattern kind of thinking it&amp;#39;s visual but it&amp;#39;s more pattern and that&amp;#39;s a different kind of thinking than than main object visualizer then you have a verbal facts guide then you have a lot of people just regular so-called normal people that are verbalizers and that total verbal thinkers and it was a shock to me when i was in the late 30s to discover that other people did not think in pictures that was really a shock to me yeah i i&amp;#39;m i&amp;#39;m yeah a hundred percent i have this argument with my my spouse all the time she&amp;#39;s like i think in pictures but she doesn&amp;#39;t i&amp;#39;m like you know i have to be visual and especially when we&amp;#39;re describing things i have to have them like drawn out you know it&amp;#39;s difficult to read kind of like just written lists rather than if i don&amp;#39;t see images of those you know well when if there&amp;#39;s something like how to how to do something i&amp;#39;d rather just see a diagram of it than re-environment right i totally i totally relate so that leads me to uh the fact that we are here today um and i really thank you for your time as well um is that you have or you have a new book coming out or it&amp;#39;s already out right that you&amp;#39;ve you&amp;#39;ve wrote with um deborah deborah moore navigating autism and one of the things that&amp;#39;s really important is developing the kids strengths i&amp;#39;m seeing too many kids whether it gets hung up on the diagnosis that they&amp;#39;re they&amp;#39;re not accomplishing much there&amp;#39;s many famous people that are autistic this is a book about elon musk by ashley vance and these are post-it notes i put in here many years ago in the pages where i thought he was autistic he&amp;#39;s now come out on a comedy show yeah and in all seriousness has revealed that he he&amp;#39;s on the autism spectrum einstein uh no speech in age three would probably be an autism program today and so autism is going all the way from someone like elon musk einstein okay myself and you to somebody who cannot dress themselves and that it&amp;#39;s all about the same name from a service standpoint educational standpoint doesn&amp;#39;t really make very much sense um it&amp;#39;s a behavioral profile it&amp;#39;s not a an exact diagnosis like saying you have the delta variant of culvert that&amp;#39;s an example of an exact diagnosis that&amp;#39;s really interesting um so your new book navigating autism right so who is this who&amp;#39;s this book kind of aimed towards who&amp;#39;s it written for it&amp;#39;s aimed it was original i ain&amp;#39;t more professionals um uh and try to get them sort of out of the um uh just getting stuck in the box with the labels uh there&amp;#39;s a lot of crossover between autism and adhd about a third of the symptoms of brain scan stuff the genetic information crosses over so that&amp;#39;s why those get mixed up um i&amp;#39;ve designed the front end of every cardio beef plant in north america and i worked with a lot of um uh really talented uh welders machinery designers people that have 20 patents and i&amp;#39;m going to estimate that about 20 percent or so of the people i&amp;#39;ve worked with that were laying out entire big factories were either autistic dyslexic or adhd and i am saying that seriously and one of the worst things the schools did is take out all the hands-on classes yeah auto shop welding art cooking sewing woodworking because these are all classes that can lead to really good careers and in the us right now we&amp;#39;ve got a huge short to high-end skilled trades and people that can fix equipment in factories run uh logistics problems they&amp;#39;ve got horrible supply chain management problems um and and you need people like me who can&amp;#39;t do algebra to help make stuff work yeah yeah yeah 100 that&amp;#39;s super important as well um so like you know a lot of your work is based on like your own understanding of who you know who you are and your kind of autistic you know reality i guess why do you think it&amp;#39;s important to share the knowledge that you&amp;#39;ve learned about yourself you know with other people because i think it can help other people i see too many parents and maybe this is more of a problem in my country than yours i&amp;#39;m not sure um but a lot of parents overprotect their kid that i see situations where you have a smart kid in high school doing really well who&amp;#39;s never gone shopping never had a bank account not learning just the basics of life i was shopping when i was seven and people will say to me well why do you just tell about your own experiences you see my mind thinks in specific examples verbal thinkers are very top-down okay you gotta learn life skills um but when i look back at things i was taught in my generation like having an allowance and learning how to save for toy airplane i&amp;#39;m realizing now the really important skills that that that that taught me and and and kids are not having that and that&amp;#39;s why i came out with some other kids books like outdoor scientists get kids off the devices and get them outside doing things we&amp;#39;ve got to get these kids doing things and they&amp;#39;re often reluctant to do things but being a bottom-up thinker uh when i was a teenager uh i didn&amp;#39;t have very much data in the database so i&amp;#39;d make associations that were kind of nonsense and as i got older and i got exposed to more and more things then i could think better and i&amp;#39;ve had parents say to me when they finally got their kid out on their first job they&amp;#39;ll say me he just they&amp;#39;ll tell me he just blossomed that&amp;#39;s because he&amp;#39;s getting exposed to more things now for good first jobs we&amp;#39;ve got to avoid multitasking don&amp;#39;t stick them on the mcdonald&amp;#39;s takeout window also any task that involves verbal sequence give them a written pilot&amp;#39;s checklist of the sequence i cannot remember long strings of verbal information never have been able again do you know um it it&amp;#39;s really interesting because i think uh there&amp;#39;s a lot of that you know like one of the things that i&amp;#39;d say is strength in my life i can relate to what you&amp;#39;re saying is that when i was when i was a kid i would see not being diagnosed with autism until i was in my 20s my parents put me to a mainstream school right and they were just like okay go to this club do that thing and i was forced to be in those circles so i learned loads of those things like you know being a you know a kid in i wasn&amp;#39;t bubble rough basically and i always talk a little bit about us before we start recording but my parents never bubble wrapped me they just kind of pushed me out there and i think one of the okay yeah it was a bit of a struggle like the social interaction like you said you know i i was a bit more of a robot and kids didn&amp;#39;t really understand me but you know i learnt so much from being in those situations i think that&amp;#39;s super important and it&amp;#39;s nice you talk about that well i think it&amp;#39;s really important because i have a lot of grandparents that come up to me in good jobs engineers accountants various different jobs and they discover they&amp;#39;re on the spectrum when the kids get diagnosed and there&amp;#39;s quite a few older adults that get relieved when they get a diagnosis because it explains their relationship on problems the other thing for me i was getting bullied and teased the place where i had friends was friends who shared interests i cannot emphasize that enough friends threw shared interests in high school for me it was horseback riding and model rocket club and electronics lab and for somebody else it might be art it might be music could be a choir it could be a lot of different things yeah no i you know i did i do this little um course on my website and one of them is uh how to how to make friends and i&amp;#39;m trying to teach you know the parents try and and encourage those shared interest classes like if it&amp;#39;s a minecraft group or if it&amp;#39;s a like you said if it&amp;#39;s a modeling club or a you know pokemon card club it&amp;#39;s those kind of shared interests that you&amp;#39;re going to build that relationship with because it&amp;#39;s going to be effortless communication right you&amp;#39;re going to already know each other and the no that&amp;#39;s absolutely right and that&amp;#39;s where those little places i had friends in fact one enterprising mom with minecraft uh had a bunch of wood blocks uh cut up and had the kids paint and sand them to have minecraft blocks in the driveway or you could save up the boxes from all the other home deliveries you get and tape them up and paint them and have giant minecraft blocks that&amp;#39;s a cool idea and that&amp;#39;s something it&amp;#39;s really easy to do and this one kid became the hit of the neighborhood with his minecraft blocks whoa that&amp;#39;s cool that was very cool i do you know what&amp;#39;s funny i have a strong relationship with minecraft because i did my dissertation uh on my thesis in in chemistry i actually built a um a teaching tool in minecraft to teach kids how to use molecular symmetry and group theory which is quite a difficult thing for some people to grasp but now are you working in chemistry right now i&amp;#39;m not currently you know i&amp;#39;m a social media influencer which is you know my this channel and my social media channels and stuff so that&amp;#39;s what i do now but i don&amp;#39;t i you know unfortunately i was going to do my phd and they closed the chemistry department down in my local university so that&amp;#39;s too bad yeah yeah it was it was it was a i mean i do a lot of on you know consulting about autism now but i still think it&amp;#39;s important to still be a professor of animal science i teach in my class we&amp;#39;re back now with masks on in-person classes which is wonderful doing in-person lab last week cattle handling and uh still doing uh re-doing research projects involving animals horses and cattle and i think it&amp;#39;s important you know like to have some some other career other than autism oh 100 yeah i i i totally agree because it&amp;#39;s kind of like a it&amp;#39;s that outlet isn&amp;#39;t it like i love researching and stuff like that so i love researching different types of kind of uh more like biochemistry stuff and it&amp;#39;s just such a nice such a nice outlet to to do stuff like that and i think you&amp;#39;re right you know maybe i should we should do more um all right you need to get i think you need to get your chemistry model shut out there i&amp;#39;m also want to emphasize i&amp;#39;m sorry about interrupting this is a problem i still have i cannot time on my processor speed so slow i cannot time what exactly to cut into a conversation it&amp;#39;s okay that&amp;#39;s not a problem um and i do the same thing so i think we&amp;#39;re just gonna just us for 20 minutes talking over each other um but um you know in terms of um the book um you talk a lot about something called the whole child um what is what is it what why is it so vital like what do you mean can you explain that a little bit that idea well the problem is in a lot of cases they just um look at the label and they don&amp;#39;t look at other things about the child like maybe he&amp;#39;s good at music or good at math or um or like some other you know interest and other things he&amp;#39;s good at uh they just look at the autism and and you need to look way beyond that yeah it&amp;#39;s like a i think you mean it&amp;#39;s like looking at the the person as a whole rather than just looking at that small section that you know you can control right it&amp;#39;s like what what else can we do here what else can this channel i&amp;#39;m seeing too many people getting sort of locked into the medical model and then they kind of assume a child can&amp;#39;t do anything and we need to be getting these kids out doing more stuff mother would always give me choices and then she realized that when i got tired in the big noisy environments you know i might start screaming um she kind of had a good sense of how to stretch me giving me choices to do things like when i was a teenager i was afraid to go to my aunt&amp;#39;s ranch and that&amp;#39;s one of the reasons why i got into the cattle industry and my mother said you can go for a week or you can go all summer not going to not option but if you hate it you can come back in a week she always gave me some places she had a very good sense of how to stretch me without throwing me into a situation where it would just be too overwhelming to handle it got out to the ranch and i loved it good sounds like your mother really understood who you were right my parents really didn&amp;#39;t unfortunately but it sounds like your mother really got who you were you know she was very in tune with you from what you&amp;#39;re saying well she was she&amp;#39;s very much visual thinker she was doing a lot of um like semi-professional theater stuff when i was a child she was very artistic at our little school fair she helped them put on plays and and uh she was very very creative oh it&amp;#39;s lovely it&amp;#39;s lovely so um you know you advocate for customized interventions right for children with asd what what do you mean by that i would love to kind of get a more well let&amp;#39;s say sensory problems for example are really really vertical one kid it&amp;#39;s got sound sensitivity another kid may have visual sensitivity where certain fluorescent lights or led lights will flicker you know that would be an example something customized uh one of the things is known now is that sensory integration types things the air is a sensory integration that is now an evidence-based treatment that you would do along with speech therapy or behavior therapy or some other thing um also i always say to parents you need to have an effective teacher and what&amp;#39;s that you get progress if it&amp;#39;s little kids more speech more turn-taking i was taught how to wait and take turns more basic skills i always ask parents they said well should be in that program or that program and i always ask is your kid improving okay tell me how much more speech he&amp;#39;s gotten i don&amp;#39;t like abstract stuff this is one thing i learned from 25 years in stealing concrete and mechanical construction at factories um i don&amp;#39;t like abstractions okay tell me exactly how he&amp;#39;s progressed you know less tantrums um uh the sensory problems getting you know less severe can he dress himself they&amp;#39;re learning shopping [Music] things i can visualize you see i don&amp;#39;t think abstractly thing i&amp;#39;m learning about the verbal thinker the regular neurotypical verbal thinker because they have a big over generalization but they don&amp;#39;t how to implement things you see both my mind the visual thinker in your mind the math thinker we&amp;#39;re bottom-up thinkers concepts are formed from specific examples and you get a whole bunch of specific examples and you can put them in different categories you know the and and a verbal thing is very very top-down and they don&amp;#39;t plan okay we&amp;#39;re supposed to have an inclusive school well how do we do this you see when i think about that and thinking about well here&amp;#39;s the situation that did not work and i see it here&amp;#39;s another situation that worked fine one teacher started a star wars club because the autistic kid liked star wars and that enabled him to get friends that was a really simple thing to do but that&amp;#39;s specific of some specific example of something that worked because i&amp;#39;ve had people write on the chat well temple just um uh talks about our own experiences or i&amp;#39;ll talk about somebody else&amp;#39;s experiences yeah yeah but my mind works in specific examples yeah of course i&amp;#39;ll tell you something that does not work for a job take an 18 year old girl shove her in a chaotic busy clothing store christmas time as a first job and you started at christmas time that did not work no no that was yeah i wouldn&amp;#39;t say that was a good thing to do that was a that was a bad mistake and i talked to that family so that was a bad mistake yeah you know let&amp;#39;s try something quieter like the clothing store not at christmas time here&amp;#39;s a success there&amp;#39;s an autistic guy at an auto parts store and that&amp;#39;s relatively quiet i&amp;#39;ve been in the auto parts store here and they loved him he didn&amp;#39;t need the computer he memorized every part number for every part in the warehouse that&amp;#39;s excellent no no it&amp;#39;s good it&amp;#39;s good example um okay so here&amp;#39;s the last question about the book then um in in the book you kind of focus on different types of medical conditions that are associated with autism um and so how can you know additional conditions impact or affect the child&amp;#39;s progress if they&amp;#39;re artistic well let&amp;#39;s look at one case let&amp;#39;s let&amp;#39;s check for epilepsy okay um that is a you know i hate the word co-morbid i think it&amp;#39;s an awful term it&amp;#39;s a weird term isn&amp;#39;t it i it simply means when two conditions contin uh consists of exist yeah to me it sounds like something&amp;#39;s dead yeah that&amp;#39;s what i said a lot of medical terminology i don&amp;#39;t really like but you can get well adhd and autism often go together you can get ocd and autism together gastrointestinal problems and autism tend to tend to go together there&amp;#39;s research that shows that yes you know so those are examples autoimmune problems i have genetic testing done on me hey i need to explain why i&amp;#39;m missing six adult teeth i&amp;#39;ve got small teeth my skin is messed up and my brittle nails just break off and what&amp;#39;s been learned about the autism is many many many genes contribute to that the same genes that make the brain big in humans are the same genes involved with schizophrenia and autism there&amp;#39;s hundreds of them it&amp;#39;s polygenic what&amp;#39;s that mean lots of little tiny bits of code contribute yeah simpler genetics explains why i have brittle nails that that&amp;#39;s simple genetics and i also learned from it that i had a bleeding disorder and if i ever have a hip replacement they have to be very careful not to give me too much heparin i could bleed to death wow that was something i learned from it that uh that could save my life yeah a hundred percent yeah goodness me you know i actually have so my my calm of it my co-existing conditions uh so i have adhd uh which i take medication for i also have uh dyslexia um and i also have extreme eczema as well so my skin i have eczema i&amp;#39;ve got that too headache yeah obviously that that tends to go together see that kind of fits in with a lot of the um uh the kind of autoimmune abnormalities and things like that but another thing is a lot of famous scientists and musicians and stuff um i&amp;#39;ve been looking up michelangelo isaac newton tesla the inventor of the um yeah i&amp;#39;m edison yeah or thinking or a brain can be social more social emotional yes it takes processor space for this stuff i tend to be more thinking like i find it really interesting to have long conversations about animal behavior or long con conversations about supply chain logistics i just find this stuff like really super interesting i totally agree with things like that like i i can talk for hours about things um a lot of the time is a marketing um you know online marketing and seo building and how how how you market a product online i just love talking about that stuff i actually consult with with companies about that you know as well as a side hustle and i but i&amp;#39;d love it you know and some of the companies they were like oh you know we&amp;#39;re just starting it up we haven&amp;#39;t got a lot of money i say look i&amp;#39;m just going to do it because i love doing it you know i just love talking about it and and and trying different things and testing things because you know like you&amp;#39;re saying about the supply chain uh on the internet you know to market a product on the internet you know what if say you&amp;#39;re launching a course or a book there&amp;#39;s a certain line of of distribution that happens there and that has to be optimized well i can remember when all the internet on the internet all started and everybody just thought it was just going to be in a computer well now you have huge warehouses that that create the supply chain yes you have huge data centers full of you know miles and miles of uh computer servers yes in gigantic warehouses and then i like to ask young students where the movies live online oh yeah i love to ask them that and some will say in a satellite and i&amp;#39;m going really uh then some will say yes server but then when i show them how big the warehouse full of servers is it just blows their mind yeah it&amp;#39;s unbelievable i think um i think facebook&amp;#39;s got some servers in alaska and they&amp;#39;ve opened the top just to cool up cool them down well that&amp;#39;s the problem you see and they put them in cold places but there&amp;#39;s a huge physical infrastructure yeah it just it&amp;#39;s enormous and one of the problems we got today with a lot of young people because we&amp;#39;ve taken out the practical things um you&amp;#39;ve got young people that are going to grow up and make policy about stuff and they don&amp;#39;t have any idea how anything works hundred percent i couldn&amp;#39;t work yeah i understood in my class that who had never measured anything with a ruler that was this year oh my goodness [Laughter] that is unbelievable unbelievable wow so sample your book when is this uh when is the book out is it art already in the u.s is going to be i think it&amp;#39;s september 20th it&amp;#39;s right around there it&amp;#39;s coming out sure in the us and and then of course i&amp;#39;ve got um in my own book thinking in pictures i&amp;#39;m i where i talk at my own autobiography and it&amp;#39;s just come out with a new afterward oh cool new updated afterward and you can get these on amazon i&amp;#39;m guessing yes yeah all everything i have everything that i have and then deborah moore also has another book i worked with around the loving push and one of the things we discussed in that book yeah was all the problems with video game addiction i&amp;#39;m seeing so many kids get addicted to video games and they&amp;#39;re not getting jobs they&amp;#39;re not working for game companies they&amp;#39;re just playing video games all day and i tell parents you&amp;#39;ve got to get that under control you don&amp;#39;t ban it but it&amp;#39;s got to be yeah it&amp;#39;s going to be structured and because they&amp;#39;re not having good outcomes no you know i did a i did a documentary with the bbc um about about that exact thing um and it was a it was like a it was almost aimed towards teenagers and we were trying to get them to realize the the difficulties that you may have if you become addicted to video games and that&amp;#39;s all you do and it was it was startling the figures of people who are addicted to video games it&amp;#39;s uh it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s like and there&amp;#39;s we&amp;#39;re here let me tell you where there&amp;#39;s been some successes i know of three young adults weaned off of video games it was replaced with auto mechanics uh okay because a lot of visual thinkers are good with mechanical things and one of them now works for railroad and fixes trains and they really like them um and it tends to be some of the visual thinkers and math thinkers that are getting addicted to them the verbal thinkers probably don&amp;#39;t care that much about them and in autism you can get all three of the different kinds of thinking and the difference with an autistic person is you&amp;#39;ll be an extreme visualizer or an extreme visual spatial math person or an extreme verbal person so-called normal people are more mixtures of the different kinds of thinking yeah but the scientific research that shows this actually exists but we&amp;#39;ve got to wean them off and replace that video game with something else and i&amp;#39;m not saying auto mechanics is for everybody but for my kind of mind yeah um the mechanical things is really a good a really good feel because i worked with people that designed equipment like for meat factories and they were my kind of mind i worked with a guy who&amp;#39;s a stutterer autistic dyslexic terrible student took a single welding course now owns a big metal fabrication company and sells his equipment around the world holy smokes see this is what makes me kind of crazy as i go back and forth between the autism world and the industrial world yeah yeah dude you know i it&amp;#39;s fascinating i think i could talk to you for hours about everything because we have quite a lot in common um so where could people find you do you have a website or do you have like a i have brandon.com it&amp;#39;s my autism website okay and i have grandin.com it&amp;#39;s my livestock website okay i i&amp;#39;ve got books listed on both of them amazon has got all my books okay um also i&amp;#39;m a professor of animal science at colorado state university and i can be tracked down through the university website excellent okay and do you have any social media handles um i let other people handle that okay maybe i&amp;#39;m really showing my age here but i but one thing i do is i try to answer correspondence and and uh uh the other thing i&amp;#39;ve tried to do is write up a lot of stuff i&amp;#39;ve got to sell the book the way i see it um a lot of little short chapters some of it&amp;#39;s my experience one of the things i&amp;#39;ve discussed in in thinking in pictures is i take medication i&amp;#39;ve been on antidepressants for anxiety for since 1980 they saved me yeah and if anybody&amp;#39;s interested in that i really strongly recommend reading thinking in pictures because i don&amp;#39;t want any misun understanding about the medication so i&amp;#39;d rather have you read it i&amp;#39;d love to read actually i might get that today and thinking in pictures and you get into all this discussion about medication and you get the same discussion about dogs because prozac works on dogs and it works on people and should you give dogs prozac well let&amp;#39;s give the dog more exercise and more interaction with people first see how he gets home yeah then let&amp;#39;s see you know i&amp;#39;m but on the other hand i can&amp;#39;t be totally against medication um you&amp;#39;ve got a dog that comes in is totally scared or he tears apart the vet clinic you know then it might be good to give it a sedative before you bring it in but that doesn&amp;#39;t mean you just do it every dog if this is where the sensible thing to do is something sort of more in the middle there&amp;#39;s way too many medications given out to young children way too much way too much way too much any duty medications with bad side effects yeah there&amp;#39;s a lot i mean you know that&amp;#39;s a whole different topic but you know i i i can agree with you i started taking medication about four years ago um because i got to a point where um because having adhd and autism kind of like um it was just it was just bad you know it was a bad i just couldn&amp;#39;t rock myself out of um a bad condition so i started taking a an antidepressant that was kind of designed and and treated for people who were diagnosed with asperger&amp;#39;s right which is what my diagnosis was um and so far you know i i feel great you know it&amp;#39;s really helping me a lot well that&amp;#39;s good and i went on an old-fashioned antidepressant that&amp;#39;s so old this before prozac and stuff like that was invented the thing i want to warn you low doses yeah too often too often i&amp;#39;ve had people say oh he did great on a low dose we doubled the dose and then you got agitation and insomnia the other big mistake that people make once they get stable on on a really good med is thinking oh i can go off this i&amp;#39;ve seen some real messes with that yeah i was thinking that recently i had this thinking i feel great you know maybe i could you know but i don&amp;#39;t think it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s not a good thing and you know i did it because i&amp;#39;m not like i&amp;#39;m against medication i just thought like i&amp;#39;m quite a i&amp;#39;m gonna you know muscle through this i&amp;#39;m gonna figure out these problems myself but it got to a point where it was kind of breaking point you know i just felt so i was so low absolutely well what happened to me is i was i went through my 20s i got more and more and more anxious just over nothing and my health was coming apart colitis attacks that just wouldn&amp;#39;t stop all kinds of stress-related health problems and i went on the anti-depressant and three days later it was like wow this works now depression doesn&amp;#39;t lift in three days but my problem was anxiety that lifted within three days and that&amp;#39;s why the chapter in thinking in pictures is called a believer in biochemistry yeah um because it was wow and you get the right match one little match that&amp;#39;s all i take and and uh i can i can i can totally agree because you know i got to a point my anxiety was so bad that when the mailman would between eight and like half nine in the morning uh the male mom would post a letter through the doll but it makes me so anxious i i would just be i just couldn&amp;#39;t concentrate just getting anxious over nothing you see and that&amp;#39;s the same thing that was made any little thing i was just having a panic attack over it i kind of look at it like okay there&amp;#39;s an old if you know old-fashioned carburetors i&amp;#39;ve got um an idle adjustment screw yep well it was like my fear center and i&amp;#39;ve since learned brain scans that my fear centers three times larger than normal was revving up like just the rpm meter just maxing out and and then when i took the um the medication it like turned the idle adjustment screw on the old-fashioned carburetor and i still have cycles of anxiety but instead of going i&amp;#39;m gonna have to use english measurements here 200 miles an hour to 100 miles an hour i&amp;#39;m now going 100 miles an hour to 75 miles an hour yeah in other words it still cycles but it like ramped everything down and i don&amp;#39;t know what would have happened to my health if i had not taken the medication i would have had to have you know really invasive treatments to get the colitis stopped and the colitis almost completely cleared up wow when i went on the medication i still now have a little bit of problems with it but it&amp;#39;s very minor compared to what it used to be it&amp;#39;s incredible and so yeah i mean you know meds can work it can work very well well they can work really well and then and then used wrong i see way too many bad things where i&amp;#39;ll talk to a parent the kids on like seven medications yeah and i asked the parents well what kind of thought went into it then i&amp;#39;m finding out that they were just throwing prescriptions at it throw three meds at a time yeah instead of trying something carefully and and seeing what&amp;#39;s gonna work you don&amp;#39;t start three of them at the same time and i find when i talk to them there&amp;#39;s no thought went into it yeah that is the problem yeah and a lot of the time the doctors are just trying to sell them at the other day because they got there&amp;#39;s somebody taking a commission somewhere and they&amp;#39;re saying we&amp;#39;ll try this one out and so well sometimes that&amp;#39;s true but i think some of it also is just uh get them to quiet down get out of my office and throw a prescription at it because i i talk to a lot of low-income families and that&amp;#39;s where i really see some of these problems and the doctor is super busy and doesn&amp;#39;t have time to carefully ask the questions and troubleshoot it yeah yeah there&amp;#39;s no uh yeah it&amp;#39;s more of a conveyor belt right you know just he&amp;#39;s a freaking guy that&amp;#39;s the problem and and and the other thing i&amp;#39;m finding on a lot of you see some people say well that&amp;#39;s terrible you should never use them or just drown everybody in meds yeah that&amp;#39;s going to balance the sensible thing to do is the younger the child less meds i like to use but i was one of these young adults where mets saved me a single little man saved me and i think yeah that&amp;#39;s that&amp;#39;s a good thing to to to say because i think there&amp;#39;s a fine line yeah you have to have that balance between like finding the right amount of medication but the right just testing the one that you need you don&amp;#39;t need to drown yourself in medication to feel better or even to just you know help with the situation you just need the right one at the right time but yeah and the only side effect basically i have is i have to drink a lot of water but that&amp;#39;s a side effect i can live with and you&amp;#39;ve got to get um you know and there&amp;#39;s different whole bunch of different medications in the same medication class so you can try different ones and they&amp;#39;re slightly different i&amp;#39;m just different enough so they don&amp;#39;t violate each other&amp;#39;s patents yeah yeah yeah i had to stop taking a sleep medication to take my uh my kind of prescription medication because they would kind of overlap and could be all kinds of stuff going on but anyway again i could talk to you for hours uh the other thing i found that helps i have to do a burst of hard vigorous exercise every day in order to sleep 100 sit-ups every night hate them and i was having sciatic nerve problems and i switched to kind of push-up things right but i&amp;#39;ve got to do this burst of hard exercise walking doesn&amp;#39;t do it every day and that also is very helpful i i hear you i have to do the same thing i have to run at least like three miles to get that i don&amp;#39;t i just that&amp;#39;s why i just doesn&amp;#39;t want my head wet i just came in i had a run i had a shower okay and then we did this interview so i i i totally understand it&amp;#39;s so bizarre how we have the same kind of things but i have to have that like really intense because it&amp;#39;s intense because um you know when i was traveling all the time and doing you know like i added up how much airport walking i was doing and it was several kilometers um walking and that just didn&amp;#39;t seem to do it and i spent more time doing the airport walking than i did doing the burst of hard exercise and the burst of heart exercise was much more effective than walking yeah i still do walking for my back like when i was during all the lockdowns i walk around the neighborhood every day just for my back but i&amp;#39;m i&amp;#39;ve been getting back out on the road traveling and traveling in the us and loving it right dr gundan thank you so much for um coming on the show i&amp;#39;m sure everyone&amp;#39;s going to be interested in this new book i will leave all the links that we discussed in the show notes and the description of the videos so please check out dr brandon&amp;#39;s book the new book which is navigating autism very excited for you guys to check that out

Transcript for:Interview with Dr. Temple Grandin

Transcript for:
Interview with Dr. Temple Grandin