Dont put me on the McDonalds takeout window, Temple Grandin said over Zoom from her home in Fort Collins, Colo. Not going to do very well there cant multitask, cannot follow long strings of verbal instruction. Its a little humbling to hear what Grandin says she cant do, considering how insubstantial it is compared with what she can do and has done. The author, scientist and Colorado State University professor is as responsible as anyone for broadening our understanding of autism, through her tireless lecturing and the many books she has written on the subject. (Thinking in Pictures: My Life With Autism, published in 1995, is the classic.) Grandin, who is 74, also helped transform the meat industry through her design of more humane handling systems for livestock. Though she has been so influential on how we think and feel about autism and animal welfare, its the more tangible things that matter most to her. I am interested in my practical projects, Grandin says. Where I can actually do stuff.

During the pandemic, there has been a lot of discussion about whos vaccinated and whos not, and historically, a fear of autism is one of the things that antivaxxers I will make only one comment: I have two Pfizers and a booster and a flu shot. Thats all Im going to say.

Well, if its OK, I have another couple of questions about vaccines and autism, and you can choose if youll answer or not. Thats a subject where thats pretty much all Im going to say. I am glad that I have my vaccinations. I dont have to worry about going to the hospital. Ill leave it at that.

In the past, youve expressed openness about people who felt skeptical about vaccines because of No comment.

Is it your understanding that the concern that certain parents have with vaccines is No comment.

OK, Ill move on for now. Youve written so much about being a visual thinker. How does a thinker like yourself think about moral problems, which often begin as abstractions? I have to convert it to a picture with a specific example. As Ive gotten older and loaded more and more pictures into my mental database, then I can search that database sort of like Google for images. So when I think about moral things, I see them as little video clips. Now lets explain how I categorized things as a young child. Lets take dogs versus cats: All the dogs in my neighborhood when I was 4 years old were large. I sorted horses, dogs and cats by size. But when a dachshund came into the neighborhood, I could no longer sort dogs by size because it was smaller than the other animals Id sorted as dogs. I had to find other sensory-based features that dachshunds shared with dogs: barking, nose shape, smell. I had to use the different criteria to put the dachshunds in the dog category. Id like to talk now about three kinds of thinking: Theres an object visualizer like me, who thinks in photorealistic pictures; then the other kind of thinker is the visual spatial, pattern thinker; then of course youve got your verbal thinkers. One of the big problems with verbal thinkers is they tend to overgeneralize. Theyll talk about some concept like an inclusive classroom, but theyll have absolutely no idea of How do I implement that?

Temple Grandin in 1993. Laura Wilson

On the idea of moral questions and visual thinking: Youve been asked a million times about the morality of someone like yourself, whos concerned with animal welfare, being part of the meat and poultry industry. Ive done a lot of thinking about that.

I understand how one could visualize something like a more humane slaughterhouse. But how do you visualize the moral aspect of something that might be harder to see, like, say, the negative ecological impacts of the industry? Ive been thinking about that very much. About four years ago, I went to a really important departmental seminar, and we had an older agronomist, a crop person, come talk to all the livestock people in our department, and he told me something that was a game changer on how I thought about things. I learned that the animals made some of the best crop land. If you do grazing wrong, it wrecks land. If you do grazing right, you actually improve the soil health and improve the land, and you can also sequester carbon. Also, theres research on things like seaweed that you can feed cattle to reduce the methane they put out. Now, thats not going to be sustainable youd strip the oceans of seaweed if you did use that but we need to find out whats in the seaweed, and then you could probably manufacture that ingredient. The other thing we need to think about on sustainability with some of these plant-based burgers is that they have a whole lot of ingredients different grains, peas, stuff like that. Each one of those ingredients has a supply chain, and that involves diesel-powered trucks and equipment to harvest that crop, grow that crop. Some of that could get unsustainable.

Do beef manufacturers have enough incentive to change to more sustainable behaviors? I learned a long time ago the importance of economic incentives. Some of the first research I did was on bruising. What I learned from that is if you had the wrong economic incentives, you had more bruises. If you had the right economic incentives, you reduced the bruises. I dont like to I have a no politics policy, so Im not going to get into specifics, but the United States and other countries have subsidies that motivate practices that are not sustainable. Ill leave it at that.

Im not going to ask you the specifics of your politics Im not getting into politics.

But given that politics touches everything, what does it mean to have a no politics policy? And why have it? Because politics interferes with the stuff I care about. Right now, at the age of 74, one of the big things I care about is I want to see the kids who think differently having successful careers, successful lives. Im seeing a lot of parents that overprotect their kid. Theyve got a 16-year-old who might be doing well in school, but he has never gone shopping. Youve got to get them out doing things. Thats stuff I care about.

Do you find politics too abstract? One of the things that bothers me is when its all gobbledygook, because theyre not talking about how youre actually going to fix something. Like when they had the power failures in Texas, they just talked gobbledygook. My approach to that and I know a lot about equipment is I would visit each of those power plants and find out exactly what froze. I wouldnt be fighting over who owns them, because I only have one goal: I dont want that mess to happen again. But I dont want to talk to suits. Get me alone down in the maintenance shop in that plant, and Ill find a guy who will sing to me. Hell tell me everything. As soon as the suit walks in the room, that guy will clam up because hes afraid hell get in trouble. Ive got to talk to the good technical people. Theyll tell me whats wrong, and they cant tell me much abstract BS.

What about when people talk about issues of race or polarization? Is that abstract? I try to figure out specific ways to solve something. One of the things thats really shocking is the rsum studies. You put different names on them, and theyre not called back for interviews. Its disgusting. Ill discuss that because thats hard scientific data that is specific, and I can look those papers up on Google Scholar.

There are specific studies debunking the idea that vaccines have a causal relation to autism, right? No comment. No comment. No comment.

You dont think it could be useful for people to hear your opinion? No comment. No comment.

I got it. You better get it. Because Im not discussing it.

Have you gotten in trouble for talking about this subject before? No comment. Ive had my two Pfizer shots and my booster. If they require a fourth shot, Ill be first in line, thank you.

I was just reading about how nearly 10 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions are the result of the cattle industry. Do you think we should be moving toward a future where we eat less beef? One of the things we need to be doing is reducing food waste. The amount of food that we throw out is absolutely disgusting.

And reducing food waste would be a sufficient counterbalance? Its certainly going to help. Theres simple ways you can reduce it. A lot of university cafeterias got rid of giving you trays, because if you put your food on trays, you take more stuff and waste more stuff. But, you know, theres methane emissions, but there are also carbon emissions, and the power plants and transportation put out the most carbon emissions.

Grandin teaching at Colorado State University in 2010. William A. Cotton/Colorado State University

Do you feel protective of the beef industry? I want to work on improving the beef industry. The work that probably brought about the greatest change was when I worked with McDonalds, Burger King and Wendys on implementing auditing and inspection of plants. I developed a simple scoring system, and the plants had to get acceptable scores on things like electric-prod use, stunning. When you have a big buyer insist on standards, I dont care what industry youre in, that can bring about great change. Thats also something thats a doable project. I avoid the vague things because they interfere with doable projects like my audits that brought about a big change. I dont want talk. I want measurements. Something I can observe with my eyes.

Youve had such success conveying your experience of autism to neurotypical people. Are there aspects of your autism that you feel you havent been able to convey? Thats too vague a question for me to even begin to answer.

In Oliver Sackss New Yorker profile of you, its evident that your search for meaning in life was driven by anxiety and fear. Why those emotions? I think Ive got that simplified now: The meaning of life is if something that you did made something better. Like, I get an email from a parent: Thank you so much. My kid is employed now because I read one of your books. That is a little piece of the meaning of life right there. Thats something that I did. I also think, having spent so many years in heavy commercial construction, its about finishing a project and making it work. I take that same approach to working with some of these autistic kids. If a smart autistic kid ends up on a disability check playing video games all day, thats a failed project compared with, lets say, he could learn a skilled trade and now owns a metal fabrication shop.

A handful of times now, Ive asked you sort of philosophical questions, and each time your answer was about a practical, tangible thing. I understand thats what Thats what I do.

Thats what you do. But Im interested in knowing whether you see any interrelationship between the philosophical and the practical because Im going to just talk about the practical.

But isnt the philosophical what helps determine how practicality is put to use? For example, making the philosophical determination that animals should be treated with respect then drives practical decisions about their treatment. Does that make sense to you? All right, Im going to give you an example: I got my brand-new copy of Nature that I like for my breakfast reading. I was looking at a complicated article about superconductors that can be used in computers. Ive read a lot of articles on batteries, and there are issues with mining rare earth metals to make batteries. Now, theres research going on where we could make some of these things out of easy-to-get materials like iron, for example. Im putting something thats more philosophical together with an engineering thing: If you can make batteries out of easy-to-get stuff, then it solves a lot of problems with mining rare earths where its likely to cause social-justice issues.

Do you feel social-justice issues are intrinsically important? Yes, they are important, but I want to avoid the politics. Ill give an example of a social-justice thing I totally believe in: We use DNA testing to prove that a prisoner did not do a crime. Thats a practical application of something that involves social justice.

Might there be impractical applications of social justice? Theres all kinds of theories that dont work. Id rather talk about stuff we know works.

I realize that maybe earlier I should have just asked this question bluntly: Do you believe vaccines can cause autism? Im not discussing that. I will give you one thing about vaccinations: I listened to the news, and a doctor was complaining about having heart-attack patients die because they could not get into the emergency room because the hospital was so full of unvaccinated Covid people. And then I talked to this person that was not vaccinated about, you know, maybe all these people filling up this hospital killed some heart-attack patients. He said, I never thought about that. That I will talk about.

But why not vaccines and autism? I dont want to talk about that.

Im curious about your reluctance. Im not discussing it.

OK. There are certain things I dont talk about because it interferes with stuff I care about. Its that simple.

Going back to that Oliver Sacks profile: You didnt give an answer for why it was fear and anxiety that motivated your search for meaning. When I was young, I was totally driven by anxiety. I found out my amygdala was three times bigger than normal. Ive been on antidepressant medication, an old form called desipramine, since 1980, and it stopped all that anxiety, that frenzied looking for the meaning of life. That made the frenzy go away. I have done some of my best work when it comes to design after I went on that drug. I just visited one of my projects: Its over 35 years old, and Im so pleased. None of the gates are broken off got the best gate hinges in the industry. Yeah, Im proud of that.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.

Opening illustration: Source photograph by Matthew Eisman/Getty Images

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and the columnist for Talk. Recently he interviewed Brian Cox about the filthy rich, Dr. Becky about the ultimate goal of parenting and Tiffany Haddish about Gods sense of humor.

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Temple Grandin Wants Us to Think Differently About Kids Who Think Differently - The New York Times