Today I am with Margoliet Fox at Chelsea Market. One of my readers wrote to me about Margoliet, quote, she is by far the best writer of amongst all those employed by the New York Times. She is arguably the most humorous writer, has the best sense of irony, and the most inventive writer. She is in fact one of the main writers of obituaries for the New York Times. She also has written very well-reviewed books, has a book coming out about historical true crime in Edwardian England, and I'm here to talk with Margoliet Fox. Welcome. Thank you very much, Tyler. The fact that you write obituaries makes you especially interesting, and my first question has to do with human lives. How well do you feel family and friends actually know a person? You get to know them fairly well when you write there a bit. How well do others know them? Those closest to them? Well of course those closest to them are the ones by definition who know them best, and so for various reasons, including just one of basic reporting smarts, we are obliged to spend time on the phone with families and close friends where there are such people to be had. But how often is the family or the close friends surprised by what's in the obituary? Divorces they didn't know about, children they didn't know about. They may have been an alcoholic when they were in their 20s, something they did in their career. Well remember that we the reporter are starting almost always from an agnostic state. Of course there are essentially two categories of obituaries that The Times does, and one are the marquee names, the presidents, the kings, the queens, the captains of industry, old-time Hollywood film stars, and so on. People who are in the history books, people whom everyone has heard of, their lives are well documented and so there are rarely any surprises either for the family or for the reporter working on the story. On the other hand, there is this whole other category of people whom I call histories, backstage players, these unsung men and women who are not household names, but who because they invented something, had an idea, wrote something, you know way back perhaps in the 1940s they put a wrinkle in the social fabric and changed the world. I've done for instance the inventor of the Frisbee, the inventor of Etch-a-Sketch, the inventor of the plastic lawn flamingo, of stove-stop stuffing. Now about those people, although clearly they did something that changed the culture, was transformative in some way, we reporters are almost always going in cold. We very often never heard the name, much less anything about what this person did and so for that of course we're obliged to rely to an extent with appropriate double checking and backstopping on family knowledge because their knowledge is better and a far, far longer duration than ours. What's the most surprising thing you've learned about an ordinary life writing one of these obituaries? Not a famous person, but here's one. I brought one with me. There was a very good photographer who worked for The Village Voice for many years, a man named Fred McDara and he died in 2007. Now his work as a photographer for The Voice alone would have been more than enough to get him a news obit in our pages, which it did. He took for instance a very famous photo of Bob Dylan, a young Bob Dylan, all in black in Sheridan Square Park in New York, facing the camera and saluting and that photo has been everywhere. That was taken by our guy, Fred McDara and because of when he worked in the 50s and 60s, he was famous for documenting photographically the beat generation to my surprise and delight when I started pulling old clippings and researching the obit, we found that not only did he document the beat generation, but he enterprisingly started a business called Rent a Beatnik for these society matrons who wanted to be au courant, wanted to have a beatnik play the bongos or read poetry at their fancy parties in Scarsdale, but didn't quite know how to go about it. So. Rental markets and everything, I would say. Exactly. So the lead of our obit, we say Fred W. McDara, a self-described square who was a longtime photographer for The Village Voice, documented the unwashed exploits of the beat generation and as an enterprising freelance talent agent, rented out members of that generation, washed or unwashed, too wide-eyed suburban society gatherings died, etc., etc. So that was great fun. Now one thing I find interesting when I read obituaries is how much subtle humor is in them and how much of an attempt is made to make the first sentence be especially interesting and often the last sentence contains a kind of nugget or surprise or twist on the story. Now the other parts of the newspaper typically aren't like this, be it the New York Times or elsewhere. So why do obituaries have this special status where there's room in them for this kind of humor and invention? Or alternatively, why don't more parts of the newspaper actually copy this if it works, which I think it typically does. Well, as to what more parts of the newspaper do or don't do, I can't speak, but of course as you know there are very ironclad conventions for the structure of news articles and historically obits were no exception to that. These conventions actually have been in place during the Civil War and it's worth digressing about them quickly because they're quite fascinating. Anyone who's ever taken journalism 101 has heard about the inverted pyramid which is this upside-down triangle that's supposed to be the model for the lead paragraph of any news story and in fact for the structure of the new story as it flows along. Broad-based information first and then finer and finer, finer grain detail down to stuff at the end that you could possibly dispense with if you're short on space. And that model is an information processing model. It has endured for over 100 years because it's cognitively perfect. It came about during Civil War battle coverage when they had the medium of telegraphy for the first time available to reporters. Like much new technology it was bulky, lines went down and reporters learned in a do or die sort of way get the broadest information through first so if the lines go down at least your readers back in Boston or Baltimore will have something and your editor will have something to put in the paper. That model has endured because it's how we process information. It's cognitively perfect. And so obits too were behold into that model plus way down further by all of this boilerplate that has to be there so and so died when, where, of what illness, at what age and that is why historically obits were considered one of the most boring sections of any daily paper. Happily in the last 20 or 30 years particularly we at the Times have realized that underlying all of that potentially very leaden boilerplate is a pure narrative arc because what does an obit do? It's charged with taking subjects from the cradle John Doe was born on January 1st 1900 to the grave John Doe died yesterday and that gives you a built-in narrative arc and indeed obits turn out to be the most purely narrative genre in any daily paper. And so the reason we have these great leads and we hope great kickers as we call them at the end is that we are exploiting very happily this inherent narrative potential that is a news of it. In terms of the structure of the newspaper certain rules and procedures have not been imposed on obituaries that are imposed on other news stories. What do you, what do you think it is about the nature of obituaries or maybe the role in the newsroom that has allowed that freedom to evolve because people who report on crimes you could imagine I'm talking to one of them and they would say well this is the perfect narrative arc and we developed all these freedoms but typically not. There's a pretty rigid structure to a crime story. See I don't know that I agree with your initial premise because there is also a pretty rigid structure to an obit. It's there to put it in Chomsky in terms in old-time Chomsky in terms it's the deep structure. It's there undergirding everything otherwise the story wouldn't cohere. There's a birth and a death right. But all of the stuff is there the trick is if you want to make it good art but also have complete fealty to the tenets of journalism which we must adhere to the trick is to disguise all of that infrastructure all of those girders and to make it where thematically appropriate to make it kind of light and frothy and dancing and a really good read. Now if I look at a lot of British obituaries it seems to me they often have a different structure and you can tell me in a moment what you think that difference is but often I see the death buried in the middle of the British obituary. There's maybe a greater tendency to poke fun at the person who has passed away and often the obituary won't be printed say several weeks later which is not say how the New York Times typically operates. What do you think are the differences between British and American obituaries and how have they evolved? What accounts for that? Well that's a huge question and because I'm not a historian of journalism I can't account for how it's evolved that's beyond my can. British obituaries and British journalism generally it's that Fleet Street model are more catty than news stories in almost any section of an American paper. Again we have to have complete fealty to the truth we have to have complete impartiality we have to be disinterested in the pure sense of the term where we are detached observers and an obit is no different but at the same time because we have wonderful marquee name writers in our section, Biff Grimes, Bruce Weber, Sam Roberts, Margalitha. We are able to put a really interesting gloss, gloss in perhaps both senses of the term on top of this basic structure that has to be there.  Edward Lowe in 1947 as memorialized in the famous obituary by our late great obit writer Robert Nick G. Thomas was the man who because he had an idea one day invented the product that became known as kitty litter and it did indeed cause social change because it made cats much easier to keep indoors than formerly for the first time a few decades later cats actually passed dogs as the most popular American pet so again here's somebody who did something spontaneously because he was inspired and who put a wrinkle in the social fabric he changed the culture no he wasn't doing it to get famous I don't you know Andy Warhol hadn't yet said in the world of the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes I think very few people about who we write do things for fame the fame comes post hoc you know applied by people like us in the news media so I don't think there's any incentivization of fame for the vast majority of people about whom we write in fact it it never even occurred to me so you're one of the gatekeepers of one of the world's most exclusive clubs so numbers I've seen of every year about two and a half million Americans pass away and in that same year the New York Times might run about what a thousand obituary for space reasons and I realize some of this process may be confidential but apart from the obvious candidates former presidents and the like how is it determined who gets covered who gets entrance into this highly exclusive club what are the standards and what kinds of discussions do you have and what are some features about a person that maybe wouldn't be so intuitive to our listeners that actually are quite dispositive for determining whether you let them through the gates there is no one hooky cutter model for who gets in and who gets out how could there be lives are so different and indeed apart from the people who are the shoe ins the president the kings and queens there is this whole other 90 percent of the iceberg that's hidden but which we may want to expose in our pages and these are these fascinating backstage players the inventors of kitty glitter and the lawn flamingo etc what we look for generally and the question that's asked by our three section editors who agonize every day over the volume of submissions we get from families from funeral homes stories we read in out of town papers foreign papers the wire services things come flooding in and these decisions have to be made every day indeed it's like the meeting of the admissions committee of the most selective university in the world and and it's what three of you five of you there are our section head bill mcdonald and his two deputies jack catten and peter keep news the editors are charged first and last with the responsibility of deciding who gets in every day and roughly the length to whom it's assigned they often do it in consultation with the writers my original training was as a cellist i later trained in linguistics so if they have questions on classical musicians linguists they say is this person important is this person doing i'm worth doing i may weigh in my colleagues weigh in similarly in their subject areas the criterion we look for if we had to pick a single question that can be asked of every applicant at our gates is did he or she change the culture so who invented the lawn flamingo a very interesting man a Massachusetts man with the wonderful and appropriate name of don featherstone and he trained as a sculptor he got work in the post war years at a plastics factory it's that like that wonderful famous old line from the graduate i have one word of advice for you plastics well he took that advice and the plastics factory made all sorts of three-dimensional ornamental pieces for the home he had the idea and again just in a stroke of inspiration of making a creature that would connote the ongoing pleasure of endless summer i think we say in the obit the saturated pink promise of endless summer and it took off in ways that he never imagined sold millions and millions and millions and literally changed the landscape of America but now we have the saturated pink promise of endless summer because of him we do i mean perhaps had he not done it someone else would have but the point is he did and he was transformative enough albeit in a perhaps can't be way when viewed through a postmodern lens the times put him on page one now say take his obituary was a version of that written in advance because you were thinking my goodness the lawn flamingo you know that fellow has to pass on sooner or later we're going to be ready or is there some other process through which you learned his passing maybe a local paper or a wire in his case it was a ladder and i believe it was both the local paper and the wire it is indeed the case that obits for many of these major historical figures presidents supreme court justices members of congress old-time silver screen stars those are indeed written in advance and the selection criterion is does this person have a life that it was so long in the public eye so rich so complex and so deeply documented that we wouldn't want to get caught short writing his or her obit on deadline of course very often we do because we're a small department and things happen right things happen rockers od planes go down things happen but in general we try to have a certain level of preparedness with the major figures so we do indeed have the advance obits all but the top as it were written edited on file we have about 1700 that said the vast majority of what my colleagues and i doubt in the trenches do probably 90 percent of our working life are daily obits that are found out about reported written edited copy edited put in the paper all in the space of a single day just like any other article in the paper so of the thousand times obituaries over the course of the year how many of those have some early draft ready to go of course it needs to be modified but there's no way to predict sometimes we can literally have a day where three of our advances drop at once and the editors get very busy trying to find either the original reporter or if that person's unavailable someone else in the newsroom who can call the family call the funeral home get confirmation that indeed this person has died sometimes you can go for six months without having an advance drop it again this is all in the hands of fate and we are only men and women but on average below half above half half i've never kept track of it because it's it's not quite in my wheelhouse this is the editor's headache i have other headaches but there's no certain half of all the ones we have on file half of all the ones we run no a very small percentage i would say of of those we run in the print paper every year our advances a number i couldn't tell you i'm sorry now this is not at all true of your work or the times today but it used to be a long-standing joke that in the obituaries pages women and black people never die because there was an emphasis on white males say 30 40 years ago but remember think about what an obit is it is not only the most narrative genre in the paper it is the most retrospective we are writing about the movers and shakers who made our world i think of obit's obit writing as the act of looking through a sliding window onto the past the kind of window that slides back along the rails of time and when i first started the job in 2004 we were writing overwhelmingly about the people on either side of world war two we edged up into the cold war we're now writing about the vietnam and the civil rights era and no matter how we feel about it in light of modern sensibilities the stark reality of our world is pretty much the only people who were allowed to be actors on the world stage in the 1940s 50s were overwhelmingly white men i'm happy to say that in the 12 years i've been doing this job as that window has slid up into the civil rights era and even the women's movement that page of ours has started to diversify i had the great privilege for instance of writing our page one obit of betty fridant knowing full well that it had not been for her writing the feminine mystique in 1963 and launching the modern women's movement i would not very likely not be in the newsroom of the new york times writing a page one story but do you have a sense which by the way i would completely favor that somehow other people's notions of history are not diverse enough but that with obituaries by choosing a wiser selection or a deeper understanding of who is important to bring a greater balance to our understanding of history by deliberately trying to introduce greater diversity to the selection of who gets covered again i'm the wrong person to ask the our section editors make those calls because we can write about so few people we are writing by definition about newsworthy people who either made news while they were alive or who quietly did something that made news again and i will repeat myself until i'm blue in the face through no fault of anyone's who is active in the world today those people regrettably were overwhelmingly white men we are not in the revision business we can't revise history no matter how much it may be painful to look on it with hindsight are there obituaries of economists that stand out in your mind or maybe some you've written well interestingly there is one as i said my original training was in classical music and so my editors almost jumped out of their skins with excitement when they discovered they could assign me the obituary of a Harvard economist named Richard T. Gill now why did they give that to me because as we say in the lead of the obit Richard T. Gill in all statistical probability the only Harvard economist to sing 86 performances with the metropolitan opera died etc etc i remember reading that one that was before i knew that you were you i was me then you just didn't know it correct and in fact he it's again one of these wonderful unexpected twists for all concerned no one more so than for Richard T. Gill he discovered when he was in his 40s that he had this really good voice started taking lessons and amazingly was good enough to sing at the men while teaching at Harvard some newspapers don't seem to run obituaries at all i think one example would be the well street journal what determines the level of interest in in a newspaper obituaries the journal does and again i can't speak to that because i'm not in newsroom administration i'm not a publisher but of course you're an economist it's economics i mean sadly even many major papers are scaling back or even eliminating their obit departments in this age of retrenchment in the age of the incredible shrinking news hole in the age where heartbreakingly newspapers are dying i mean i i fear the last one to turn out the lights will be writing the obit of whatever is the last newspaper standing do people whose obituaries are being written those where the draft is written in advance do they engage in much rent seeking trying to sway what the paper will do how they will be covered they ask to see a draft there are publicists elbow people in the obituaries department that they try to manage their reputations or does this really not much occasionally although of course we would never let them and it is absolutely verboten for anyone to see a draft of his or her obit the times is not permitted to comment on or divulge the contents of any forthcoming news story and of course if you think about it an advance obit is kind of the ultimate forthcoming news story so famous people for reasons of ego perhaps can make an educated guess as to whether we have an obit of them on file but they're certainly never going to see it but if they say well would you let me send you my bio you just turn them away or do you know because it may be useful to us for study purposes we are not going to tell them whether we're going to use it or not and we do get not for advance obits so much but for daily obits on deadline where the subject has actually died if a person has been in public life all of his or her life and we usually see this for either politicians or particularly hollywood people and he or she has had a publicist in life that publicist will occasionally send us this glossy press kit and I find it quite fascinating that there is this one last act of spin control attempted in death every now and then and especially tragic event happens obvious example I guess for New York would be 9 11 and my sense is an especially high proportion of well-known people died on 9 11 and when there's a large number of deaths you might be covering all at once how was that handled well I was not involved with that in any way nor was the obituary department directly I would beg to differ with the contention that a large number of high-profile people died on 9 11 they became in a sense high-profile people because of the way they died but very very few of them were famous in conventional terms you know that was one of the great heartbreak it was these ordinary working men and women the people who had to be at work at a quartered aid here in New York the Times of course did this marvelous very moving series of little capsule obits on almost all of the 3000 cold portraits in grief but that was not handled out of obits a special team was convened in metro to deal with that and this was long before I was on the obit desk in any case two individuals who are clearly obituary worthy so to speak one would be Thomas pension the other JD salinger both disappeared from public view for decades on end so if one has to write the obituary of those individuals what is it that one actually does there are blank decades or you know things already the rest of the world doesn't know or well again I've not been involved with either but I can make an educated guess as to what one would do one would comb the clippings this would be an advance over where the reporter would be given the comparative luxury of time which means a week or even two weeks instead of four or five hours to put something together combs the clippings of course makes every attempt to get to this elusive person which is probably going to be impossible but you have to try and then you interview around them you interview their editors you interview friends you interview neighbors you interview old lovers you interview anyone and hope they haven't been forbidden to talk or if they have been they don't take it seriously and you assemble the best you can while of course explaining to readers this famously incommunicative person made sure that his life was obscure here's what we know that's all you can do it's an interesting question you know people who knew them and maybe who were told not to talk you think there were any privacy issues with the vituraries that we should worry about so in general we believe in the public's right to know correct absolutely there's a political candidate a historical event but when people have passed away obviously in some key ways they matter much less and especially people who are not historical figures but nonetheless there's an outline of a life that may involve drug addiction or alcohol problems illegitimate children strange things that happen to them that maybe they want to keep secret do you think for a person who's passed away there are privacy rights of the sort that we should not tread on no we're not in the veneration business you know if this were not eulogists we will occasionally get families particularly families who are not conversant in dealing with the press who say oh please put in he died surrounded by his loved ones please put in he touched the life of everyone he ever knew and apart from the fact that we would never use such hoary Victorian cliches we know that's the first thing to go on the cutting room floor it has no place in a modern news orbit a modern news of it is a news article like any other and the particular subtype it is it's a profile and just as a profile of a living person you'd read in a newspaper or magazine has to be balanced so to do our portraits indeed you sometimes get families who withhold information on dad's earlier marriages other children and you'll get children calling you up the day and all that runs understandably in tears saying how dare you write me out of my father's story and the only answer you can give us we were never told you existed so we learned to ask all kinds of preemptive questions to try to forestall omissions like that so part of your job must in a sense be as a therapist that you're handling grieving family members or non-family members people who have agendas maybe people jostling over the well or having that in mind some occasionally may even be happy but more often than not they're tragically bereaved and all of these individuals you talk with you have to manage you get them to cooperate so in a sense you're a psychologist of sorts well my oldest childhood friend actually has two degrees one in journalism and one in counseling and she says the elicitation of information that process is identical where they diverge of course is what you do with the information once you have it and indeed we need to be very careful we're calling families at vulnerable times they're grieving they're exhausted their sleep deprived they have a million things to do and we need to be very careful that we not however unwittingly present ourselves as their friend their advocate their grief counselors now that said it behooves us both journalistically so they feel comfortable enough to talk to us and be candid and in purely human terms to treat them as well as possible within allowable professional limits doing all this what do you think you have learned about the psychology of death that say maybe I wouldn't know I don't think there's anything I've learned that any of us wouldn't know what I've learned is death sucks but I think I pretty much knew that before and I think you pretty much know that too but worse than than maybe you thought 15 years ago before you were doing this actually no the reverse if anything I'm very often asked oh you write obits you're around death every day isn't that depressing and I must admit when I started the job full-time in 2004 I worried about that a little bit going in and to my great joy and great relief I found out right away it's almost never depressing for all these reasons we've discussed in an obit of perhaps a thousand words where you're writing about someone fascinating who did something really interesting often really wonderful maybe a sentence or two will be about the death and the other 98 percent of the story is about the life so in a strange way with rare exceptions writing obits is a kind of very life affirming thing to do and also wonderful because my colleagues and I are paid to tell stories and it doesn't get much better than that so it's often said for instance that the greatest works in the theater are tragedies family one king leary two examples of many and maybe we're attracted to tragedy because in a sense it's life affirming or it's somehow cathartic and writing about the deaths of individuals you feel it gives you a better or maybe healthier perspective on life in the same way that going to see a tragic work in the theater might but again think of what was just said it's not tragedy that's that's my point writing about it's not the case that writing about obits is life affirming because it's tragedy writing about obits is life affirming because it's not tragedy there's a custom in some cultures often eastern european that if an individual has a terminal disease they don't tell the patient that and so the person gets sicker if it doesn't know he or she is going to die do you have a view of this i have never encountered that if you think it could possibly make sense could you imagine say that a person might prefer not to know he or she is going to pass away and i would have to be a physician a psychologist a philosopher a cultural anthropologist to answer that again that's beyond my can i'm not going to take on something that's beyond my can it would be horribly inappropriate and is there any way in which you feel writing so much history you know put aside the obituaries side of it but just so much american and international history has it changed how you think about your own life what you should do with your time well it does give one a sort of carpe diem sense often when i lecture particularly to young people they who are so far from death are kind of obsessed with it and they always ask me what's the weirdest cause of death you've ever had and i say well one of my colleagues had a man who was eaten by a crocodile and um indeed he was a naturalist going down a river a crocodile just leapt up and grabbed him it's a pretty horrific way to go but it for me it became kind of a metaphor you never know as you go through life whether or not that crocodile is around the next bend in the river so you might as well try to live as good a life as you can and enjoy the hell out of life before you get to that crocodile and you ever think of what you're doing in any kind of theological terms so for instance i went back i looked at a very good book by your husband it's called essential judyism by george robinson that's him it's a wonderful book and there are two quotations from that book i'll read them one is a dying person should not be left alone the other is escorting the dead is one of the basic acts and not just those who are jewish but i think many people would view this as an appropriate philosophy for thinking about death dealing with death you ever think of what you're doing as a kind of written version of carrying out some of this sort of is escorting the dead in a literary way and being with them and having society process that in a manner which has a dimension which is not just news reporting but hide interviews of the sacred and higher values was that totally separate for you well again i'm not a colonist so i'm paid to have no opinion which means but your personal opinions which means i'm paid to have no discernible politics and also no discernible religion and whether or not i am a religious believer in my private life is is not germane sure but metaphorically indeed there is an aspect of writing obits that where one feels one is charged with the rather weighty responsibility of ushering people out now these are not always people to whom you know flights of angels will sing to rest we are obliged to write news obits not only of the great heroes of history but also the great villains i wrote the obit of jim clark sheriff jim clark the great enforcer of segregation in jim crow alabama was his billy club that was coming down on demonstrators heads as they tried to cross the edmund pettus bridge i've written obits of nazi war criminals so we run the whole gamut again the salient question is did this person make history for good but also for ill and so we have to usher those people out too and in those cases uh you don't have a warm fuzzy feeling you feel like you want to go home take a shower and have a good stiff drink afterwards but it's part of the job has to be done right now there's a segment of all of these conversations it's called underrated overrated i mentioned a name or a thing i ask you if you think it's underrated or overrated you're free to pass on any of these but i'll try just a few uh the pet rock overrated or underrated well i'm coming from a position of extreme bias because i again did the obit of the inventor of the pet rock a man named gary doll and it was neither overrated nor underrated it was a beautiful example of what it was it was a totemic thing that caught the fancy of this kind of cheesy salmony pop culture so with hindsight overrated perhaps but had it not been overrated we wouldn't have gotten the story out of it now you have a background as a chalice i understand so paulo casals overrated or underrated wonderfully rated i mean i think he can never be rated highly enough but it was he and this is well documented through his series of televised masterclasses around the world in the very early 60s who really caused the instrument's popularity to soar but most people had really not conceived of the cello as a solo instrument before it was just sort of going um pa pa at the bottom of the orchestra so um i mean he was rated magnificently but by the same token uh you can never rate him too highly because he was wonderful but what if i say well casals was a bit like schnavel he had incredible profundity but there's just too much scraping on a lot of his recordings and in some ways they're hard to listen to today he was path breaking but if you were to sit down and put on say the Bach cello suites actually very few people including cello lovers would pick casals right they pick jenna starker they pick uh heinrich schiff or do you agree or not it's true in light of modern sensibilities uh you can certainly hear uh squeaks and uh occasional bits of strangeness in the casals cello suites i suspect he was older when he recorded them he lived to be of course almost a hundred uh recording technology has improved since then and i think he uh was on such an exalted plane that he gets a buy you he he can be and should be forgiven any of these little transgressions that make him seem mortal if you had to pick a favorite cellist i know what's hard to do but do you have a pick oh it depends on the genre uh i like different cellists were different things the uh the great uh doomed jackal into prey of course uh was a wonderful cellist um ross republic starker uh who's all that i wrote you have a wonderful book called the riddle of the labyrinth the quest to crack an ancient code where you study the world before ancient greece fantastic book it's a story of how after cracking the code we learned a lot of it was actually about accounting economic themes but i'll ask you homers odyssey overrated or underrated oh again can't rate it highly enough can't rate it highly enough we agree adverbs overrated or underrated overused overused so they're overrated in a sense more recent doc the author of famous children's stories where the wild things are maybe the wild things are the children right overrated or underrated oh again uh can't rate him highly enough and his legacy will endure again his over that i had the privilege of doing times put it on page one that's you know when is the time's ever going to put a picture big book author on page one that's how magnificent he was and how newsworthy was there something surprising you learned about him doing his a bit i think just uh what a melancholic he was now that's far from unusual for creative people but it was um his personal story was rather painful he was someone you know as someone who grew up poor jewish knowing he was gay in this very repressive era um he was a deeply deeply melancholy man and of course it comes through in the work as well studying all these different lives from so many walks of life different countries to some extent different eras what in life do you feel is underrated or overrated say by your readers there's various cliches like oh i spent too much time in the office not enough with family so many people say that i don't actually believe they necessarily really mean it but what do you feel on that after studying all this history what in life is underrated well i think list questions are overrated if you'll forgive me um what in life is underrated silence stillness reading real books on paper those are all underrated yet having real human contact rather than the um social media that's become in our atomized postmodern lives a substitute for real contact how important do you think dear abbey was for american life dear abbey and her twist twin sister and lander's both of whose obits i had the privilege of doing were fascinatingly important and and remain so retrospectively as barometers of the way the country was going to go they were both these very pragmatic women who while not being firebrands in any sense were just a little bit left of center uh because they embodied a kind of progressive mid-century humanism and so they were a very very interesting index of the direction in which progresses were trying to nudge the country country in those years now you have another book it's called talking hands it's about the sign language which developed in a bedouin village in israel correct is that a fair way to describe it absolutely so you have these two books there's also an e-book of your obituaries which you can buy for your kindle and then there are the obituaries you write do you see any underlying unity to your writings including your next novel on it it's kind of edwardian crime story what ties it all together it's a nonfiction book my next book which is my third after these two is narrative nonfiction i'm capable only it seems of writing nonfiction i wasn't born without the fiction writing gene alas uh so what underpins the two of my books that are out the third book that's coming my work at the times is narrative i care passionately about narrative i care passionately about storytelling and the privilege of telling stories albeit in the nonfiction genre somehow the idea of cracking a code or unraveling a mystery to me seems to run throughout all your work there's a kind of mystery of a life which you're never going to state that may be very subtly hint at especially with those first and last sentences talking hands is about figuring out a sign language and how it came to be riddle of the labyrinth is very explicitly about cracking a code so is that a common theme in your thought or yes solving this edwardian mystery i haven't read that book yet but i think that's right i'm passionately interested in heuristics when i was a kid my friends and i you know back when kids engaged in real play and didn't just sit with their palm devices we used to make little treasure hunts for each other and so it's all about heuristically following clues from a to b to c to get and you know the goal is not the thing itself the treasure was just some silly little prize or nothing at all but it was just the chance to work through all the clues and see if you were on the right lines and here too unpacking a sign language that's never been analyzed in riddle of the labyrinth unraveling this angian script that was unearthed on clay tablets in 1900 not solved for 50 years because they not only didn't know what the tablet said when they were unearthed on crete they didn't know what language they were in so it's a black box how do you penetrate and in all this too what are the heuristics of a life that allows someone to get from a to b to c to t all the way to z when i get them in his or her life how much of that is free will and how much of that is determined by pure blind fate so i get that you may not have that much spare time given all that you do but if you're going to read something for fun in your spare time what's that likely to be research aside narrative nonfiction the great contemporary masters john mcfee tracy kitter plus the wonderful old masters of sas eb white red smith twain of course always twain people twain is is completely symptomatic for the people i love to read uh because you not only get you know the paramount stylus the non-parade of stylus but you can also see through the writing it's a window onto how the man's mind works and that i love it's a final question i know this is a tough one but someone comes up to you and says i so much admire your work i would love to write obituaries for a living i know there are not many paths into this but what advice would you give them i would say don't feel you can or should specialize the child has not been born who comes home from first grade clutching a theme that says when i grow up i want to be an obituary writer be a journalist first go to journalism school that's what i did when i was 30 i chucked my uh unfulfilling jobs in book and magazine publishing and went to columbia journalism school got a masters and have been in newspapers ever since so uh go to journalism school be a journalist writing obits and here we've come nicely full circle writing obits is just one way of doing journalism a very satisfying narrative way thank you very much and we all look forward to your next book coming out next summer thank you our pleasure


organizations and events with the people who fuel them in our city, state, country and world. As a disclaimer, any views or opinions expressed by me are strictly my own and not connected with any organization. Joining me in the studio today to kick off the new year and the new decade, even though I know it's not technically the new decade, it feels like one because it's a 2020, is Carol Mandrick, director of OSHA Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Welcome to the show today and thanks so much for being my guest. It's a pleasure to have you here. Oh, it's great to be here. So if I may, I'd just like to read a little bit about your background.  You're an award-winning instructor in anthropology, and this is your fourth year serving as the director of the OSHA Lifelong Learning Institute at UH Manoa. You've got over 30 years of experience as a teacher, researcher and administrator at universities and colleges across the US and Canada, including here at UH Manoa Departments of Anthropology and Geography. So in 2016, you came over to this program. So were you at the Department of Anthropology and Geography right before that when you came over and this opportunity came up? No, I wasn't. It's a pretty complicated, long story, but I'm one of those people who bounces back and forth between mainland and Hawaii. And I actually was at Anthropology and Geography from 2005 to 2009. Then I was in Virginia at George Mason, then I was in Colorado, and then I came back here. That is quite a bit of bouncing around and quite a difference from Colorado to here. So your educational background was you got your bachelors in anthropology in Beloit College, and then your master's in anthropology and museum studies at George Washington University, which must have been a very interesting course. And then your PhD in Quaternary Studies at the University of Alberta. What is Quaternary Studies and what did you do your thesis on just sounding curiosity? So Quaternary Studies is basically the last two million years. So it's everything in the last two million years. But my interest was paleo environments, but paleo environments that relate to humans. So sometimes people will say, don't you want to do environments about the dinosaurs? And I'm like, if there weren't people there, I'm not interested. So my dissertation was evaluating the viability of the ice recorder, which is a theoretical way that people could have migrated from Asia into the new world, conveniently right through Western Canada and determining when and if people could have come. So it required reconstructing environments, geology, I cored lakes and do vegetation, and then a whole bunch of math to figure out if people could have lived there. And of course, anthropology, because I was in an anthropology department. Okay. So it's really interesting background that you've had yourself. And then so you were Colorado right before this. And I know Rebecca Goodman preceded you in this role as director because I've been taking classes at OSHA Lifelong Learning Institute for a number of years. And then after she left, then obviously the position was becoming open to transfer over. And how did you hear about it? And what made you interested in taking this job? Well, you know, I'd been trying to come back to Hawaii. And so I'd been looking for jobs either at UH or a Bishop Museum. That was kind of things that would appeal to me. And this job was advertised. And luckily, this is when Becky was still here when she was getting ready to retire. So I interviewed with her and met her and knew right away that this would just be perfect for me. And that's how it happened. And I know that it has been just by seeing all the wonderful offerings that's blossomed since you've been there as well. And for the folks now that don't know what is Ole or OSHA Lifelong Learning Institute, tell us about the background of this program and what's its purpose. Okay, so first of all, this particular program here at UH started in 1996. And back then it was called Adult Lifelong Learning. And it was started by Becky Goodman and Abe Arkoff and a bunch of other elders on the campus who wanted to have an adult lifelong learning program. Now, about 10 years after that, there was this wonderful person, Mr. Osher, who was in Maine, Bernard Osher is his name, and he lucked upon a lifelong learning program at the University of Southern Maine that he was just really impressed with. And he thought, boy, it would be great to make this kind of thing available to more people. And so basically what he's done, he was very successful at making money and wanted to do good things with this money. And he started giving small grants, and then endowments to a number of different institutions to have lifelong learning programs for people over the age of 30. That's the deadline, I mean, the age that they use. And some alleys, so we, you know, we say alley instead of OSHA Lifelong Learning Institute all the time. Some alleys applied to OSHA to create program, and others were pre existing programs that applied for the endowment. And so that's what happened with the one from the University of Hawaii. So Becky and the other people working with her were able to get a series of $100,000 grants in 2003, 2004. And then in 2006, they got a million dollar endowment in 2007, they had a second million dollar endowment. And so that's one reason why this gets to do so much, you know, we get a payout from the endowment each year, except apparently in 2008. And, and that's part of an important part of our funding. And the charge is to offer courses for seniors that and you know, we try to avoid seniors with seasoned learners, older adults, but to offer courses that enrich, you know, you cognitively they're interesting, maybe it's things you wanted to take in college and you never got to but not just the classes, not just the cognitive engagement, but providing a place where you're engaging socially with other people with peers. And you say it's a come for the come for the courses state for the friends or what's your slogan that you know? Yeah, yeah. So there's 124 alleys around the country now. And, and they we all share best practices. And it was one of the other alleys that had that phrase. And I just love it, because that's that's really what happens. And people come and they meet people. And then they end up the next semester planning their courses together, you know, they're going to go take classes together, share rides, etc. Now you're located at the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus. And we'll show a map later on. But if folks want to follow along, and they want to go to your website, so they can see what we're talking about, what is the website? Should they just Google OSHA lifelong learning Hawaii? That will get them there? Or what's your specific website? Well, Googling Googling OSHA and University of Hawaii will get them there.  And I'll, I'll frequently just do OLLI Hawaii. Okay. And I do OSHA Manoa. So it all pops up at the top there. But if folks that want to come along. Now you say courses and but it's more than just courses. And what are we looking at here? Is there some requirement to get in some testing, something that you have to do to get in? Or how does that work? The only requirement is that you're at least 50 years old, and you're curious and you want to learn, you know, so there's no education requirements. There's no other requirements. There's another program on campus like a Puna program that requires a TB test. We don't require a TB test. I don't know why they do and we don't. You don't have to be a Hawaii resident to come to us. You know, some programs you need to be Hawaii resident. Basically, you just need to be interested and come interested and come and there's a ton of different classes which we'll get back to there in a little bit. But you know, I think I got in when I was under 50. Is that possible for some people to sneak under the radar? It happens on occasion. Okay, but just generally speaking, there's no grades. There's no test. There's no pressure. That's one of the things we like to say there's no test. There's no grades. We can sort of say there's no homework, although in certain classes, there's definitely homework, you know, in the literature class, you need to read a chapter so you're not going to have fun in the conversation. But but there's no actual homework. And there's definitely no tests into grades, no grades. So you're definitely learning for the thrill of learning. Learning for the thrill of learning. I love that because it does stress that the lifelong learning, this is not just something I tell younger people, they think, Oh, I'm done with college. I'm graduating. I was like, no, that's a commencement commencement ceremony means beginning not ending. So you are, you're, you're still going to continue on and whatever you have to do, whether it's professionally and taking your continuing education courses, or learning how to better yourself as a human being or just these courses where you where you stay intellectually stimulated, but there's other classes than just intellectual stimulation. For example, some art classes or some physical classes, or classes where we learn how to literally move our bodies in ways that I took a class last term that was that was like that where a lady was teaching us literally looking at our walk. How were we walking? And was that beneficial for our bodies and our structures? And was it, could it be improved upon? It was really interesting to see the results up to just one class.  And by the end of the class, she says, I haven't stood up and walked like this in years. And I was astounded by that, not that that's the thrust of the programs, but it's a variety. Right, we have a wide variety of classes. Now, I greatly increased the number of course offerings. When I came in, there were 10 to 12 a semester. And now we have, well, this semester, we have 80. Okay, that doesn't mean we have 80 classes, because we have what we call courses, which are things that need more than twice. And then we have what we call special events, but maybe we should just call single lectures or something. So we like this semester, we have about 32 of those. And the courses really vary and how long they are. But, but, but if I just think of the topic areas, like we have classes in art and art history, we have film, music and theater, the category you were just talking about, we have this category called wellness, health, fitness and exercise. Now, that could mean a whole bit of different things that could include meditation, include Tai Chi, we have Tai Chi every semester. Now, only about 25% of our classes repeat every semester. Most of our things are new every time. And the most popular topics in our age group and our demographics seem to be history, film, politics, a certain amount of art, I'm trying to get in more art, because I like art, trying to get in more science, because I do science. But there's always been a little bit of all of those things. And so people go online, they can find our course catalog for the semester. And on page 24 and 25 of the course catalog, it lists all the courses by topic, you know, so it'll say, okay, here's the science stuff, here's the multidisciplinary stuff. And different alleys might specialize a little bit in certain kinds of classes, although I think we all try to be a bit reflective. But I know that some people think, oh, we should have just, you know, the hoity-toity kind of classes. But but I figure we should just have a little bit of everything. You know, there's there's some people who think a certain kind of climate change class is going to have too much science in it. But we try to make everything accessible. And so that you can deal with a difficult subject at a simpler kind of level. And we talked to instructors about things like that. So one person was teaching physics. And after the first class, I said, let's think about how we can get all those concepts across with less math. But other classes, you know, we want them like we're going to have a history of mathematics class this semester. But the idea is there's so many classes that you can choose the type and kinds that you want. And as many of the same type are not that you want. In fact, I think that this semester, which hasn't started yet, it's going to start next week, if I'm correct. Yes, and plenty of time for people to still sign up for a lot of classes. The number of a class of fellow students in the class. Are we talking hundreds of people or dozens or how many is in typical class? How many are in a typical class? In a classroom. Okay, so is that like 25 people? It's not 600 like in a lecture hall for a beginning sociologist? We currently have three classrooms in Crow's Hall. One only sits 10 people. One sits 25 to 35 and one maxes out at 35. So we have one room that's for lectures and films, one room that has this giant conference table. Yeah, so so you would have it most 35 other people with you. Sometimes we use some of the other rooms around here. If we have a really, really popular talk, we might be in a room that that fits 60 people. But most of the classes you're talking about 20 people or less. And that's why you meet people and you have conversations. Exactly. And would you say that the average person, let's see, when you sign up for classes, you can sign up for three courses and then an unlimited number of sort of special events. Is that how it works? Okay, here's how it works. When I came in some old timers told me, and I don't mean like old people, I mean people who have been members for a long time, that they didn't necessarily like the first come first served thing, that if they didn't get in here quick enough and talk to Becky quick enough, they didn't get into a class. So I researched what other alleys did and I initiated this priority kind of system. So you're allowed to take at least three classes and at least three special events. But on the registration form, and this is whether it's the online one or in person, I asked you to put down five choices and number them 12345. And pretty much, you'll probably get your first three choices, except certain choices, okay, hiking, life writing, certain art classes, they fill up really fast. And I tell people, if you have your heart set on those, you have to put number one. If you don't put number one for hiking, you're not going to get it. Then we wait list you for the other classes you're interested in. And a week before each class starts, because that's the other important thing, our classes don't all start on Tuesday or Wednesday, our classes staggered through the semester. So a week before each class starts, we let you know if you got into a wait list in course. So it's space available. It's at least three and then space available. So are you sending out those course notifications of who got into what class today or tomorrow or something like that?   Okay, so we'll wait with that. I did actually. I finally got a directed registration this morning. So we're going to get on that. Okay, and I did sign up for the history of mathematics course. So I hope I do get into that because it looked really interesting and something that I would never taken as a young person. Now, we have get to some more logistics and some specific classes that we might be looking at. But right here we got to take a quick break. So we will come back in about a minute. I'm Winston Welch. This is out and about on the think tech live streaming network series and we are delighted to talk with Carol Mandrick, director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. So stay tuned. We'll be back in a minute for more of the story. Hi, I am Yukari Kunisue, host of Konnichiwa Hawaii, think tech Hawaii's Japanese program, broadcasting every Monday from 2 p.m. I usually invite a guest in Japanese language community. That's an interesting thing. And I'd like to share stories with you guys. Please tune in and listen to Konnichiwa Hawaii. Hello, I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's just kind of scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on thinktechawai.com 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons. And then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up and please follow us. We're always giving you current relevant information to protect you. Keeping you safe. Follow us. And I'm Winston Welch on Out and About on the think tech live streaming network series. Talking today with Carol Mandrick, director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Thanks so much again for being here today, Carol. I know it's a busy week for you. You've got the courses coming out next week and the entire university is starting up as well right now. We were talking about your really interesting and varied background and how you where you went for your Bachelor's, Master's, PhD, how you bounced around from a few different campuses and that's probably been a lot of really good grist for the mill for this particular job that you've had for the last four years. Is it now that you've been there? I'm on the fourth year, so three and a half years. Okay. And you know this the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute is primarily, as we were saying, for 50 and better, although sometimes some youngsters will slip in there. And it's just a place where you can come and enrich your mind, have engaging support of social environment, make new friends, and just stay connected to the community, which is so important now as we're getting more and more fragmented. And I think that, you know, on one of my other shows, we were talking about diseases of despair. And this is one way to overcome that. But you got to get up and go out to these courses so people can go online to Osher, they could just Google Osher Lifelong Learning Institute Hawaii or Manoa or any of those combination of words and they'll come up and they'll be able to see the course offerings that you have this this term. And they're not all that's not that they meet every Tuesday at nine for 12 weeks or 15 weeks. It may be that they meet every fourth Tuesday or on Saturday mornings, or three times or twice in March or April. Is that right? So they could just be here and there and some are longer, some are shorter and some are one offs. First, I want to say something to something you just said about the diseases. Sure. This this program is definitely like an anecdote to loneliness. Okay, so let's just say that part that's great for that. Now the way our courses work is summer four weeks long, summer six, summer eight, we have a couple that go all 12 weeks of the semester, but we stagger them throughout the semester and we find that a lot of our members might be people who travel or you know, some people live here part of the year on the mainland part of the year. And it works that they're able to find classes that work for them, no matter which part of the semester they're here. So you don't need to be tied here for an entire semester to take classes. Okay. Generally classes meet once a week. We don't have Saturday classes, but we do have a number of Sunday classes now since parking's free on Sundays and we're trying to take a manage of that. That's a great idea.  But there's of course shuttles and you could ride your bike or walk and a lot of different things. It's right at UH Manoa across from the parking structure, the law library as it were in Krause Hall and we'll show a map of that here in a minute. But so they the classes meet about is it one or two hours or something like that for class typically? They're typically a class is two hours long summer one and a half hours. One's where they show films might be three hours, but most of the classes, there's a break in the middle.  Okay, and we had a. I took a class the last it seemed it was like part one, part two, part three. It was the most interesting class that I had taken in. It was Supreme Court cases, religion and Supreme Court cases and instructor was just absolutely fabulous.  I think that you have it. Oh, where do you find your instructors? How do you get them to teach the classes? Can we teach classes if we want to? How do you how do you find all these classes? Okay, that's such an exciting question. Okay, first of all, I find instructors everywhere. I send out an appeal to everybody I know and everybody that I know and any of the Kapuna networks here, saying, you know, we're looking for instructors and I do that once a semester. I also, you know, I overhear people talking in coffee shops and I said, Oh, can you teach that? You know, I get a lot of people that way. I'll see articles in the star advertiser or things in the UH 101 News. And I'm like, can you come and talk to us about that? And oh, can you maybe talk four times? But also, we're always encouraging our members to teach. And what I like to say to all of your viewers is you don't have to have been a professor to be an instructor here. It depends on like, what is your passion? And I love the example that one of our most popular Shakespeare and classical literature teachers was an attorney. That's what his job was. And one person who does travel logs was a CPA. You know, you could have done one thing and had a passion in something else. And this gives you the opportunity to learn more about that and teach that passion. I love that because it's not only that you get to be the learner, but you can also be the teacher and share, you know, the class that I had with religion and the Supreme Court cases. We would get briefs that we would read beforehand and and then just have discussions in the classroom. And it was just it was a stimulating, fun, interesting environment with people who are interested. And yet there's no pressure to to have a test or something afterwards. And I have just found it an incredibly enriching experience. And I wonder what I might teach. But there's probably we all have a lot of things that we could teach.  And some other your foodie. Interesting, because I come up with all these great ideas. And then sometimes I can't find people to teach them. But I want to teach them. And that's one of the best parts of this job is that I get to do that.  Right. So I did have this class called food for thought. And it was about it started being about, you know, connections between food and memory and emotion and family and all that kind of stuff. And we would talk about food memories and things our parents had made. And we'd talk about recipes and people would bring food in. And it was supposed to last one semester, but the people wanted it to never stop. So we do that every semester. Also, you know, I worked on climate change stuff. I've done climate change things.  And just makes me really happy to focus on something like that. I used to spend inordinate amount of hours walking diamondhead beach. And I've had a couple field trips where I call it the landscape history of diamondhead beach and just explain why it looks the way that it looks and what you can see about former sea levels there and things like that. And even things like why is that a good beach for sea glass? I love those kind of things.  And I've had classes in furniture refinishing and covering seats and knitting because knitting is good for your brain. And when we are doing the climate disruption thing, we made our own beeswax wraps. We've done tie dye shirts. So I have to like tell myself, Carol, you know more classes because you have stuff to do, but just think if there's anything you ever wanted to teach, you can teach it if you have time to. Okay, and we got a couple slides here just to show some other ideas of what we got at the besides those wonderful examples that you mentioned, and that's just from one wonderful teacher. But so we got a maybe on slide number two, we've got a try pick here, which shows on I guess it's on the viewer's left, there's a looks like a group in Machu Picchu and another group around a table. And then the third one looks like it's it is that a submarine and it's maybe a field trip. Right. And so the one on the left, that's Machu Picchu. And that was a trip they took quite some time ago. But what's interesting about that is time shear and lend that trip. Now we haven't had an official travel program. But this year we do again, and we're going to have a trip to Spain and Portugal in April. And Tom Sheeran is going to be the resident instructor who goes along on that trip. I'm not sure what they were doing in that middle photo, but that is our good great seminar room. And that's a table we inherited from a wonderful office downtown. And I think the field trip was when they went to see some of the UH research submersibles. Okay, so we do have a lot of fields. Just a lot of really interesting things like that. And like there's a travel log for people that may not be able to go along. I noticed one of the classes with Tom was teaching where he shows you about trips that he's taken. So maybe as to what your appetite or just to enjoy as an armchair traveler. We've got another slide here. So it's a sort of a breadth and depth of type of class that you might have here was fall of 2018. Slum and influence on the Renaissance. Really just, yeah, examples of the kind of classes that we do. And that's like our history type of class. And that's Tom Klobe and he's great. We're trying to get him back to teach another class because we're going to put right now. And we got another one here. This is like the restless earth the first 4 billion years. So something also very different classes, art classes. These take place in Kraus Hall, which is a beautiful little duck pond area right outside the classroom. So that's looking straight on is if people were let's see that is looking diamond head, I guess. And the bulk of the campus is to the left to the right is Dole Street, which you can't see because this is an enclosed courtyard. But Dole Street is right there. And then the the law library is there. So on the next map, you can see there's Kraus Hall almost right in the middle there next to Sakamaki Hall and across from the parking structure. So really encourage viewers to go online, Google OSHA Lifelong Learning Institute, University of Hawaii, Manoa or any combination of those words will be able to see what you've got there. We unfortunately are out of time. I hope that you will come back again and be a guest and talk more about this wonderful program or something else that you would like to talk about of interest to you. So thank you so much for being here, Carol, and I and I'm sorry, but we are out of time and we have to wrap it up. It has been my great pleasure to be talking with Carol Mandrick, director of the OSHA Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I am Winston Welch. This is out and about on the ThinkTech live streaming network series. And you can catch us here every other Monday at three o'clock. I'd like to thank our broadcast engineer, Robert McLean, Haley Ikeda, who put things together for us technically and for J. Fidel, our executive producer who conceived of this and is behind all of this effort, as well as Carol. Carol, what's Carol's last name? Yeah, anyway, she's not you, not you Carol, the other Carol that sponsors this one. Anyway, thanks so much, folks, and we look forward to seeing you the next time. Thank you, Carol.


So just recently I found out about this super lucrative side hustle that is extremely under saturated right now. Interesting! This hustle has such a low barrier to entry, pretty much anybody can do it. I can do it. I can do it. And before everybody starts doing it, I suggest you get on it immediately. So make sure you check out this video all the way through so you know exactly how you can start. Now this hustle requires zero experience. No previous experience required. You really don't need to know absolutely anything regarding any of the topics, although if you do know a little bit, it will work to your advantage. But realistically speaking, you don't need any experience. The barrier to entry is super low and we're really going to be using AI for the majority of everything that we're going to be doing. So to start, these are the different web pages that we're going to be using. We're going to be using ChatGPT, we're going to be using Kittle, which is a design service, and we're going to be using Audible and Amazon. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to head on over to ChatGPT. And once we're on here, we're going to go ahead and ask it, what are the top trending books in the self-help niche? Now for this one, I just asked it self-help niche, but you can ask it for the top trending books in any niche. That's the good thing about this. If you're into a certain niche, like let's say me, for example, I like anime, I can ask it for the top trending anime books and see what it gives me, or I could just put in my own input based off of what I know. But again, you don't need to know absolutely anything about any of these different types of books or any of these different topics. That's why we're using ChatGPT. That's why it's so easy to get into because again, you don't need to know anything. ChatGPT is going to be doing all of the work for you. So in the self-help books, some of the top ones are going to be atomic habits, the subtle art of not giving a, I can't say that on YouTube, becoming Prime Michelle Obama, daring greatly and educated. Those are just the top five. Now the next thing we're going to do is we're going to head over to audible.com. Now for this, you do need a subscription, but if you sign up, you get some free credits. So you can start off for completely free. You can start off with a free trial. As you can see here, you can click to try for $0 and you have 30 days free. Now the way audible works is it typically works on a credit based system. So you get a certain number of credits each month that you can use towards audio books. Now what we're going to do is simply look for some of these different books to see if they are in an audio format. So first off, let's go ahead and look for atomic habits. Let's go ahead and paste it on here and perfect by James Clear, atomic habits by James Clear. So now that we can see that it's on here, we can go ahead and continue. If you scroll down a little bit, you can see in the listeners also enjoyed the subtle art of not giving an F. That is also one of the suggestions that ChatGPT gave us. But what we're going to do now is we're simply going to go ahead and open up a new tab. So what we're going to look for is audible affiliate links. Now the first one that we see is going to be audible affiliates. Click on that. And all you have to do is join the audible creator program. Now you can start recommending these different audio books. So once you sign up to become an affiliate with audible.com, you're going to be able to get your own personalized links to all of the different books that are on this website. So whenever you recommend something to somebody, they click on your link, they make the purchase, or they just simply download the book, you're going to get a credit. Oh, and I forgot to mention you also get a credit if they sign up for the service itself. So if they sign up for the monthly or the yearly, you're going to get a commission for that. So now the next thing we're going to do is we're just going to simply run back over to ChatGPT and we're going to ask it for a summary on atomic habits. So give me a summary about atomic habits by James Clear. So this is what it gave me and it gave me a pretty short summary. It actually gave me something a lot smaller than I expected it to. So you're going to have to play with the different prompts until you're happy with what it gives you. But let's give it one more try. So I'm going to tell it to make it a bit more detailed. Go by chapters. Okay, never mind about going by chapters. If we do that, it's going to be way too long. So let's try something else. Let's try go by main topics. There you go. Perfect. So now it's giving us an intro. It's giving us the relationship, make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy. So I guess these are all the different main points that the book is trying to make. So we can work with this. So now what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and paraphrase or rewrite what ChatGPT gave us. Now to do this, it's super easy. Just simply go on over to quillbot.com. Quillbot is another AI system that can help us proofread, rewrite and a few other things. So what I'm going to do here is I'm simply going to go ahead and just copy over some of the points that it's giving me, paste it on here, paraphrase, and there it is. It's completely rewritten. Now, of course, like I mentioned earlier, some of these might be longer. Some of these might be a little bit shorter. It all depends on what you're asking ChatGPT to do and what you're happy with. But pretty much what we're going to be doing is just this. So we're going to take each section, we're going to go section by section, and you're going to keep paraphrasing. Let's go ahead and copy that. Now, what's the point of what I'm doing? So after this, what you're going to do is you're simply going to go to either your website or wherever you're able to write a blog. Let's say Tumblr, if that's even still around, I'm really not sure. But you can go to your own website even if you're running a Shopify store and you can create a blog using what you're paraphrasing here. So let's say, for example, you can start a website that can give you different summaries of books. So readers can go to your website, search up a particular book, and read a quick summary on it. So you can do this as many times as you want. I highly suggest you do this as much as you can with as many books as you can, because as we all know, there is an endless supply of books. So my suggestion is try to niche down. Don't go too generic when it comes to the books. Try to niche down per website. So maybe you can have one or two different websites, each focusing on a particular niche. One could be for entrepreneurship. The other one could be for fitness. The other one could be for self-help and so on. But go ahead and start a website for a particular niche, start a blog on there and start organizing your different blogs through categories, through niches, through titles, however it is that you want to do it. But the whole point is going to be the summary of the book that the user is reading. And then once they get to the end of the summary, you're going to put your affiliate links on there for your audible.com links. So once you sign up for the Audible Creator Program, like I mentioned earlier, you're going to get your own links to these different audiobooks. So once you finish up and you polish your summary on atomic habits, at the end, you can go ahead and put the link to the audiobook itself. Now, another way you can monetize this particular blog as a quick bonus is simply by placing different ads on there. So for this, it's really easy to do.  Once you sign up, then you're going to be able to access different ads that you can place on your website. Whenever somebody clicks on those ads, you could get a small commission, all depending on the terms and conditions. But putting a few ads on your website can help you increase a little bit of revenue by pretty much not doing anything. Oh, and I almost forgot the AI images. How could I forget? This is what's going to really set apart your blog from a few of the others. You're going to have your own images, and on top of that, your own unique images. So for this, we're going to use a service called Kittle. Now Kittle is spelled K-I-T-T-L, and you can sign up for completely free. Of course, they have a paid plan, but you don't need to get that for what we're going to do. So the first thing you need to do is go ahead and sign in. You can create an account for completely free. And once you're in, just go on over to AI tools. Once we're on here, go through AI Image Generator and start creating with Kittle AI. Now what we're going to do is, we're going to go based off of a section. So the first one is the power of atomic habits. Clear introduces the concept of atomic habits, which are small incremental changes that lead to significant improvements over time. So this is something that we can use to come up with an image. Of course, like I said, it needs to be relevant to this particular chapter or to this particular topic or section. So let's go ahead and do that. Now, one of the easiest ways that I can think of doing this is simply by taking the text, going back down to chat GPT and telling it, how can I represent this as an image? And then in quotes, put what it told me and now let's see what it tells us.  Start with an image of a seed or a small plant. This represents the idea of a small initial change at arrows or an upward trend line to symbolize growth and improvement over time. Surround the plant or seed with smaller arrows or dots representing the concept of tiny improvements. So let's go ahead and take this, copy it. Let's run over to Kittle AI and let's paste it on here. Now this is pretty detailed. I'm not sure how this is going to come out. We might just have to rewrite it for ourselves, but let's see. As you can see through Kittle, it is based off of a credit system. So every time you use the AI, you're going to use a credit or two or three. I don't know how many uses, but you're going to use credits. So this is what it gave us. And obviously this doesn't really work. So let's try something else. So I changed it up completely. And I just wrote person reading in a dimly lit room because that could be an atomic habit that you start to use or you start to build. And this is what it gave me. Now this is a completely unique image. You have all the rights to use it. So nobody's going to be coming after you for using this image.  We're going to use either PNG or JPEG. PNG typically is the higher quality, but you can go with either or. Now the whole point of this is going to be simply to put it either at the top or at the bottom of each main topic. So you can either put it right under the introduction or right under your summary. It's going to be the same thing for section one, section two, three, four, and so on. And that's the easiest chat GPT side hustle that you can start right now. As you can see, it's really easy to start. It has a very low entry barrier and the possibilities are endless. You can choose any niche. You can choose any book. You can choose every book. Whatever it is that you like, you can go ahead and choose. So remember that right now, this particular hustle is very under saturated, meaning there's not a lot of people in it. So get in early, start right now, and start making some money. Huge thank you to everyone for watching, especially if you made it all the way to the end. As always, it truly means a lot. Please, if you did enjoy this video, make sure you smash that like button. And while you're there, hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on any future videos. Huge thank you once again to everyone for watching. My name is Mario with AutoDS. And I'll catch y'all next time.


My name is Dr. Daniel Pang. I'm an assistant professor in the veterinary clinical and diagnostic sciences department at UCVM. Through working in one of our local clinics where we do clinical research, I'd heard about a rooster that they'd had turned into them that unfortunately lost both of its feet probably due to frostbite. As a result of having an office a couple of doors down from Dr. Mark Ungren for a few months, I knew that he had a 3D printer in his laboratory. We thought that perhaps there'd be the possibility of him building or printing out 3D feet for this rooster to use as prosthetics. My name is Douglas Condrow and I'm a mechanical engineering student at the Schulich School of Engineering at the University of Calgary and I'm specializing in biomedical engineering. I was given the project to create some sort of prosthetic for this rooster so that he'd be able to walk normally and live a normal life. My first steps were just to look through different feet. So for example I had a T-Rex foot that I printed off. I had some simple rooster feet that I printed off and these were hopefully something that I could use as templates for the model but what I found it was quite difficult to find exactly what I needed so I used a turkey foot and I 3D scanned that in and that's where I got the model itself. I would use the 3D printer and these 3D printers print with PLA which is a hard plastic. This is an example of the 3D foot that I would use as a template and once I was completed I'd take a mold of his foot itself and put it place it in and I'd paint on silicone onto it which was flexible and soft for the rooster and I'd get a final product where the foot itself is quite sturdy and quite flexible. Even though things really started out purely by chance this collaboration is really a very good example of how clinical sciences can tie in with basic researchers to try and solve a very real and very very acute problem. Working on creating prosthetics or simulators for animals or humans is something that is my end goal and working on a project like this was a really good opportunity for me to pursue that. If things work out well in the long term there's certainly possibility of looking into exploring other avenues either with other brands with similar kinds of damage or other species such as dogs and cats.