[SIC] Day is offered exclusively to paying subscribers of [SIC]. All imagery is mine, except where noted.
Hi folks.
I’m getting into the swing of things here with these [SIC] Talks interviews for paid subscribers; as I did last week. Anyway, as I hope will be custom on Tuesdays going forward, I am including the full video and transcript here from my conversation with Nicholas Rhodes , the founder and CEO of Outsnapped and author of the Artificially Intimidating newsletter, which has become a frequent source of mine in the last few months.
Nicky, as I know him, has been a fixture in the New York nightlife scene for decades as a party photographer and general image maker in the music and downtown scenes. Lovely guy, always bright, enthusiastic and a dab hand with a shot, but it surprised me when he started popping into my inbox with a newsletter all about daily developments in the world of AI. I asked him to drop by to the show to explain what he’s up to, how he’s using AI, and how Artificially Intimidating seeks to fit into the new media landscape. It’s a fun conversation, but honestly it’s also really illuminating and I would highly encourage you to listen in or to read the lightly edited (by Perplexity, it should be noted) transcript below, particularly the bit about how Nicky creates his newsletter, which is in the latter third.
There were a few links that I wanted to get into with Nicky, but actually none of them even came up in our brief conversation. I’ll have to get his take on them some point soon.
Brands Are Paying to Make You Mad: OpenAI wined and dined influencers
The rise of million-dollar companies with just one employee.
The Hottest New AI Chatbot Is Just a Guy Answering Your Questions
Why Normal People Aren’t Using AI Agents. The tech industry is realizing it needs to build agents based on what regular consumers want, not just what its AI models can do.
So - here’s my conversation with Nick and some links from the back half of today to tide you over till Sunday.
All right, everybody, [SIC] Talks number 121. We’re here with Nicholas Rhodes, who I know from his days as Nicky Digital, which—I don’t know—maybe still exists, maybe it doesn’t.
Yeah, it’s still my moniker on the internet.
Okay, good. As is mine, @dietznutz. Nicky and I got to know each other through going out in the late aughts, circa my time at VICE and his time out in the clubs, taking pictures and having a digital destination—not dissimilar to Cobrasnake or Last Night’s Party.
But Nicky was hustling, and I mean that in the best possible way: somebody who was there because there was something else going on. When he popped up a couple months ago in my feed as the author of an AI-dedicated newsletter called “Artificially Intimidating” on Substack, I was like, “Wow, this is an interesting pivot from nightlife photography to this very informative and interesting newsletter about the daily developments in AI.” So anyway, I asked him to come on the show, and here he is. Nicky, what’s up?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there was a good 20-year period between those two things, right? Give me some time to play. You were the one saying you were driving your son up. I don’t have kids yet, but I cannot believe I’ve been on my block in the Lower East Side now 20 years. So it’s wild.
Wow, wild.
Yeah, and I appreciate you noticing the hustle. Nightlife’s an interesting place. There are a lot of people in it for different reasons. I was there because it was really engaging, entertaining, and vivacious for me. I grew up playing music, loving music, but at a certain point in your life you decide what’s a hobby and what’s not a hobby.
For me, the best way to stay really engaged with music and that kind of world was by documenting. I wasn’t up there playing piano; I was photographing the piano player, or photographing the person who enjoyed the piano player. One thing that was really different about that was I also had to be up early enough to post those photos that people from last night wanted to see when they woke up. So there was a lot of hustle in that.
As opposed to staying up late.
Well, sometimes that happened too. But for the first two years of Nicky Digital, I had a full-time job. Talk about being young enough to stay out till 4 a.m., wake up, edit, and go to work. It was crazy then.
But if you think about it, it was really similar in the sense that I’ve made a career of being two steps ahead of everybody else when the technology is exciting. I like to think I was a decent photographer, if not a good photographer. But what made me really important in the city was the fact that I could get a photo on the internet, which sounds absolutely absurd now.
Getting a photo on the internet was not easy in 2005, 2006, 2007. We think about it now: with an iPhone, it’s instantly on the internet. But that’s what gave me that leg up.
The pivot into AI stuff hasn’t been a quick one. At the beginning of this year, there were so many mic-drop moments from everyone every single day. I had been writing, just musing occasionally when I had an idea to do something. I had been doing a dedicated Substack of a monthly playlist as my way to stay in it.
I stopped doing Nicky Digital as a project in 2017-ish and started OutSnap, which is now my full-time gig. It’s still event-based, but we do interactive photo and video for events—photo booths, lots of AI stuff. My first foray into AI was actually for SoFi a handful of years ago. They did a Face of Finance campaign when generative visuals first started. I had been fascinated with it and already playing with it on my own.
They came to us and were like, “Hey, we need a photo booth that’s going to turn people into AI outputs that match this TV campaign we did.” We built this system that allowed us to ingest photography, make generative AI outputs, and put it out. Now, with Nano Banana and ChatGPT, it’s easy—but it was not in 2023.
Yeah, well, let me ask you that question, because I think the first time I saw the potential of Midjourney was in 2022 or 2023, at Cannes Lions. Mick, whose name I can’t think of right now, who is the head of space at Airbnb now, showed me something.
I had this jokey concept with my friend Heather about an animated show called “Horse Force,” which is about these intergalactic horses that save the galaxy from the octopus people. Mick was like, “Let me just type that into Midjourney.” In an afternoon, he generated a bunch of imagery that we ended up putting in a pitch deck for this show, which never happened. By the way, anybody who wants to develop that show, just let me know.
Ha ha.
Sorry, Mick Mulvaney. Shout out Mick. Anyway, Mick sent me that stuff over and I was just like, “Wow, this is really interesting as a technology.” But I could imagine all of my friends who are photographers, image makers, graphic designers, or whatever, are going to feel really threatened. It sounded like you heard about it and were like, “Yes, please, I’m going to get straight into it.” Is that right? Or did you go through some sort of existential dark night of the soul first?
I mean, I feel like if you put yourself under the artist label, you’re just in that constant existential thing. Decide which thing to be existential about today.
When I was applying to colleges in 1999, there were some schools that were really excited about getting rid of film and going all digital. I thought that was crazy. But when I was in college, I did a lot of film and a lot of digital, because it would be crazy not to.
The example I always use is my nephew. He’s an incredible 12-year-old, and my parents think he’s the best artist on the face of the world. Bo, if you’re listening, you’re wonderful. There’s a lot of slop, right?
Shout out Bo.
Yeah. Bo will maybe someday be an incredible artist. He’s not there yet.
When people have this existential thing about AI, it’s that they think it’s actually really easy. And it’s not. It’s gotten easier, but it’s the same way people had existential crises about digital photography and Photoshop. I have someone on Facebook who I haven’t talked to in 20 years telling me I’m ruining the world by making a silly selfie with AI, and asking how I could do that as a photographer.
My rebuttal is that every new tool should be played with, and you should decide if you want to use it or not. I do think there are things that are not great for the environment, but the other side of the argument is that I’m sure everybody’s doing things that are not good for the environment. Stop driving a car, et cetera. That’s a whole other conversation. I’m always excited by it. I want to see what I can make.
It’s not that I’m less interested in the moral argument, but I think more importantly is the personal, existential one around career and figuring yourself out, because that’s going to be your incentive to make the choices that affect the macro generally. So fine, you start exploring with AI—how does that take you to this newsletter, which is devoted to AI news?
Something I want to circle back on for a moment: right around the time Midjourney was getting accessible, affordable, and available to anyone, I was working with an archivist. I started during COVID, going through my own archive of photos from New York City, travel, photography, et cetera.
Do you want to take a guess how many photos we got in a 15-year span of New York City nightlife? I was way off.
How many photos you took of New York City nightlife in a 15-year span? This is like that interview question at Google. You’re probably out four nights a week on average, and you probably took 500 images per night. So that’s 2,000 a week, times 50 weeks—that’s 10,000, no 100,000 a year. Times 15: 1.5 million.
Yes. 1.45 million photos. Not by Price Is Right rules—you’re over—but conservatively.
No shit. I got that right? What did you think it was?
I thought a million was such an absurd number. I could say in a conversation, “I took a million photos,” but I didn’t necessarily ever stop to think about it. The archivist’s wife is an economist, and she casually mentioned that if I spent eight seconds per photo, it was going to take me around eight years to look at every photo I’d ever taken.
I was like, “Wow, okay. So I guess this project is not going to be a coffee-table book by the end of the year.”
As I was looking through them, I don’t know if you’ve gone through old galleries from that time, but it’s like this memory that had been gone is all of a sudden back. It comes in like a never-ending gobstopper: “I remember that person and that night, and this happened, and that was crazy.”
Then there were photos I’d look at and be like, “That looks like my photo. I know that person. Everything checks out. I would have been there on a Thursday.” But I have no recollection.
Then Midjourney came out, and I was thinking about my life and how all these people before me have informed these things. I started thinking about these music moments that were so clear in my mind that I could picture them, but they happened before I was born. I thought, “I’m going to learn how to use this tool by creating my actual photos of these moments.” Does that make sense?
It does. That’s interesting. I talk all the time about a line from “Losing My Edge” about kids and their visions of the unremembered ’80s. That concept was so resonant to me when I heard it the first time, and it comes back to me all the time. I’m getting it. I drove up here, speaking of driving, past the site of the original Woodstock in 1969.
Cool. I love poking fun at James. This is like James Murphy playing Daft Punk for the punk kids. I wasn’t there, but this is me recreating what my photo was.
For the rock kids.
Right. The other joke was Daft Punk playing at James Murphy’s house. I crucially found photos of James Murphy’s loft from an interview, so I could put Daft Punk there. And then this one was before I was born: there’s Grandmaster Flash.
Gotta tell you, we are not beating the hipster allegations here. I love that.
No. But for me, this was such a fun project. It was something really fun for me to be able to, as a creative director, get this thing made.
The other thing that was really interesting, and maybe informs my feelings around this: I think it was The New York Times article on what the major models were trained on that came out a handful of years ago. The Nicky Digital archive is a sizable part. It’s not like a percentage, but it’s on that. To me, I was like, well, if they’ve taken everything already, I may as well dive in and use it. If my style’s in there.
Wow, really?
A college classmate of mine is lead counsel at Anthropic and negotiated the deal with the book owners, where these half a million book owners are getting $3,000—or I can’t remember what the numbers are. It’s half a million volumes, $3,000 a book or something like that. In any case, it was $1.5 billion. Are you looking for recourse, or is your recourse proactive use of the tools?
Yeah. I think around $3,000, yeah.
I mean, okay, we can talk about your previous employer. The amount of times that VICE used my stuff without paying me—come on. All of these places have been taking from artists for years and years and years. A musician posting my photo—
First and foremost, I was unaware of that and I apologize for that. That’s not acceptable. Sorry.
I know, I know. I’m not picking on you.
I’m not even necessarily saying that in terms of, like, they stole editorial usage of a photo. You don’t necessarily need to license it, right? But ultimately, if you’re serving ads on a website and making traffic from it, yes, it’s fair use—however, you’re making money off it. So this is not a VICE-only issue.
Fair use, yeah, sure.
And the amount of artists who’ve used my photos to promote something on Instagram, et cetera, or the amount of money Meta’s made off of my library. To me, at a certain point, I stopped losing sleep over that because the concept of ownership of copyrighted content is different now than it was when I started. It just factually is. I’m not out there advocating ripping people off.
But it would be an endless fight, and I would never sleep again if that’s where I put my energy.
Not to be fatalistic about it, but it’s like: you can deny or resist gravity if you so choose, but you’re probably not gonna have a lot of fun.
Yeah. The thing in the Anthropic case that upset me the most was that they destroyed the books. They had all these rare books. They could have opened a library for the greater good of humanity, where you could go—a book museum.
Well, let’s use that as a point to get into what Artificially Intimidating, the newsletter, now does. You take a pretty neutral view on all of this news, but you’re presenting what the development is each day, why you think it’s important, and your take on it.
It’s easy to get excited about all of this stuff and the possibilities involved. It’s easy to get scared by all this stuff and the possibilities inherent in it—models jailbreaking, viruses being created, and all that sort of stuff. That’s just news from today. What motivated you to start cataloging it in this way?
I got excited about it and I was documenting my way into it. At the beginning of this year, the news cycle was so incredible. Every single day, OpenClaw opened these floodgates of what was going to be possible. As a result of OpenClaw coming out, it forced a lot of these big companies’ cards on doing things that I don’t think were on their initial roadmaps for this year.
I don’t think we’d have Cowork the same way we do. I don’t think we’d have Codex the same way we do. I was really interested in how all these things were informing one another.
As someone who runs a few small teams on a few different projects, we’re always on a shoestring budget. If I have a tool that can make someone on my team’s life easier, that’s why I started getting really excited about these.
One thing I talk about a lot is: as a solopreneur, I have two companies, each with about six people working at them. These tools can give us superpowers. I’m not at a giant company where someone’s coming and telling me it’s going to take my job, which is what a lot of people are feeling. I’ve come from the other side of it. I wanted to learn this stuff and document it so I could share internally.
I think it may have started with realizing you can use Claude to teach you how to do a thing. During the day at work, something interesting would pop across a tweet or something, and I’d throw it in and be like, “Make me a lesson.” At night, or if I had a coffee break, I would go through it and learn.
Interesting. Okay.
Then I had made my own curriculum.
One of the other really big unlocks for me: I’ve always been very, very insecure about my writing. But I’ve always found that if I could dictate a concept, I was good at it or capable of explaining it. It was more of an insecurity that kept me from blank-page ideas.
Now, with the ability to dictate my thoughts, or even throw in an article—I could put a New York Times article into a chatbot and say, “Hey, let’s talk through this. I think my feelings on it are this, but show me the other side and let’s have that banter with one another.”
I was learning a lot about what my thoughts were based on how I teased these conversations out, but also putting together these playbooks for myself. Then I started publishing them.
I had had a Substack for a handful of years where I just did monthly playlists. They were mostly comped to friends, and it was my way of staying remotely involved with people in the music world. All of a sudden I started getting traffic and subscribers. It didn’t start on purpose, I guess is the easiest answer.
What I wanted to do was have conversations a lot like this one with people in the open-source community. The daily podcast was also an accident of learning how to process all these things together. I made it first in Hermes, then I turned it into a Python script.
Now, the daily podcast process is: I’ve built a bunch of little tools that allow me, before bed, to see the things that I read about that day. I voice-dictate my notes about it. AI will write, in my tone, the who, what, where, why, and when. “Read Between the Lines” is my actual thoughts on it as a human.
That all goes in around 4 a.m. to the Python script, which makes the audio podcast. It’s the first thing I listen to in the morning when I walk the dogs, to make sure there’s nothing factually incorrect in it. Then I read it through, do a top-line edit, and press send. I’m using my own tool to learn about this stuff, and if I find it interesting enough, I share it.
That’s fascinating. Two things: with the introduction of this Substack tool with Pangram last week or two weeks ago, do you run the newsletter through the AI-generation tabulation? What does it come back at if you do?
So here’s the deal. This morning I was trying to decide if there are too many powerful dumb people or if there are too many smart people. I don’t know.
The answer is both, but yes. Go ahead. Sorry, please.
Right. Substack introduces this tool at the same time that they highly encourage you to post multiple Notes a day. They’re like, “Hey, please infuse the system with an inhuman amount of content,” and now we’re going to act like we want it both ways.
That’s my two cents on the Pangram thing. I’ve put stuff in Pangram that was 200 percent written by AI and it comes up saying human. I’ve put stuff in there that I, as a human, wrote and it said AI. That’s my two cents.
The fallibility of the system is not at issue. What I find interesting is the writer’s stance: yes, I am using AI to do this, and I’m down to disclose accordingly, whether the measure is accurate or not.
I mentioned this in a different recording on Monday, but this conversation last week with Michelle Lhooq, who I worked with at VICE: I asked Perplexity to transcribe it into an interview block so that it could be more readable than the AI-generated transcript of the actual human conversation. That transcript came back 100 percent human-written, despite the fact that AI generated it.
Now, it was a transcription of a human conversation, but nonetheless, how are we judging these things? It seems odd. To me, it’s down to the creator to be like, “Yeah, I used AI,” or, “No, I didn’t.” Same as always, you have to put your trust in that person or source of information.
I think there are two things at play. There have always been people making garbage, and there have always been people making things that aren’t garbage. Some of it is made with tools, and some of it is made without.
Jackson Pollock is a painter. Do I think he’s my favorite painter? No. He’s using different tools than a paintbrush.
I don’t know if it’s about disclosing the tool or disclosing the honesty of whether or not you created it. That’s my two cents.
Something else that informed this, and I don’t normally say this publicly: at the same time as starting my own Substack, I started a completely fabricated one. I’m not going to say where it is; y’all can go and try and find it on the internet. But I’ll tell you some metrics.
It’s doing the exact same conceit, but I don’t have anything to do with it. I don’t check it; I check in on it every few weeks. It writes content every day based on the same sources that I have access to. It has full editorial control over what it’s doing. It’s running through Paperclip. It literally has its own brain and can go find things that are trending and write about them.
I wanted to see who would get more subscribers. I’m happy to say that situation, despite having content every day for several months, has like eight subscribers. I don’t know what the difference is. It could just be because I’m having conversations like this, or because I have a friend group that gave it an initial boost somewhere. I wanted to see if SEO and AEO would favor or pick it up.
That, to me, gets to the nut of the modern media conundrum or creator conundrum, whatever you want to call it. Nobody knows how these discovery mechanisms actually work. We can guess, we can try, and we can develop best practices, but at the end of the day you’re just as likely to be spitting into the wind as you are rolling a boulder downhill, to mix metaphors.
That’s fascinating. I encourage my diehard listeners to go sleuth that up.
Yeah, it’s probably—I’m probably one of the four people following it.
We can start by filtering for eight subscribers.
Yeah.
Speaking of your news sources, I’m using Artificially Intimidating as a news source for both my own edification and for SIC on a pretty much daily basis. Where are you getting your stuff from?
Yeah, a lot of places. Twitter, Hacker News, Perplexity News. I like Perplexity News a lot, actually, because I think it’s actually not as good as it was. I’ve been finding it giving me news that’s kind of old, so I have to check the sources a little better.
But it’s kind of a little bit of everywhere. If you’re on the internet throughout the day, you inevitably end up in different places with 20 tabs open.
Hacker News is a really good, reliable source. Often AI, but often just a weird deep cut about something that I find interesting that doesn’t get shared in this particular newsletter.
The open-source community has been really interesting for me. It feels very early internet. One of my favorite things about the internet when I was a kid—growing up in the suburbs with weird hobbies—I loved magic. I wanted to be a mime when I grew up, go figure. I was able to literally find humans on the internet that I could talk to these things about, much to my parents’ chagrin. I made friends with lots of elderly magicians from around the world. There’s just a sense of community.
Doesn’t surprise me.
Right. You can find those Easter eggs, the pictures of me as a magician as a kid.
When NFTs and Clubhouse started, there was this really fun moment again that was very community-driven. It was partially this new technology that we had been told blockchain was going to save the world, plus Clubhouse. We were all sitting at home, scared, and needed people to communicate with. These things converged and made community, and then it turned into a weird money-laundering scheme for the art world.
Not even for the art world, just money laundering.
Right. Under the guise of art.
With a lot of the vibe coding—or agentic coding, I prefer the term—the open-source community has been incredible. Through a lot of those folks, I’ve made friends around the world again based on the project I’m interested in this week. I’ve been really hands-down on Buzz the past few weeks. I love Paperclip; that team’s incredible.
You meet people in GitHub who are also doing things, or in the Discord channels, and inevitably someone shares a link about something. The same way I share music with my music friends—“I think you’d like this track”—I’m getting links now daily from people saying, “I think you’d find this interesting.”
Yeah, it’s amazing, actually. It’s funny: those early Clubhouse days—I never got into the NFT thing from a creation or buying perspective, but I was very involved in a discussion, in a theoretical community way, because it reminded me of the kind of sharing economy that was like the skateboard scene I grew up in, the hardcore scene I grew up in, or the early days at VICE. I found that really interesting.
It makes total sense to me that you would track in that way. What I wonder is: where do you go with it now? Are you pursuing your natural affinity and a passion for it, or are you taking it someplace that leads to OutSnap as a business result, or to Nicky Digital as an AI photography creator?
So I think we use AI and the things that I’m learning about daily already in my companies. I run this photo-booth company, which is the easiest way to explain it, but because of COVID and the inability to actually do live events, we’ve become more of a small dev shop for people who want a specific type of development—usually around photo or video for a live experiential scenario.
This is actually a fun data point: our number one right now is tied between our old-fashioned sit-in booth that prints crisp black-and-white photos and AI video. Those are our two most popular things right now. I think it’s a really good metaphor for how people are excited but also pushing back at the same time.
The notion that two things can be true. You can want the analog and want the digital and reconcile the two. We exist in such a binary world where we’re encouraged to think those two things can’t coexist, which is wrong. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
Yeah. I think for me, I’m in my mid-40s, which I can’t believe. I was trying to describe to someone on my team that I never imagined what my life would be like in my 40s. I just kind of skipped them. I was like, okay, well, I gotta get to 21, someday I’ll be 30, and then I’m gonna be a grandpa. There’s that whole middle-age thing that I just didn’t imagine as a kid.
So I’m here, and I’m mostly happy with most of my life, but I’m trying to decide a lot of the things that you just asked. I think there are a lot of avenues right now, similar to the early internet, when everyone was like, “Everyone needs a blog, everyone needs a Twitter, if you don’t have an Instagram, you’re not a business.” I think there are a lot of smaller businesses that could really benefit from the things that I’ve learned.
I’m trying to decide if that’s something I’m passionate about. Do I want to go into another really heavy service scenario? I was playing with some open-source stuff, building some genie-in-a-bottle-type agent stuff, but it’s all moving so quickly that to compete against Google or Anthropic or any of these guys is an absolute absurdity.
Yeah.
OpenClaw came out, changed the world, and then four days later Anthropic’s like, “Here’s Cowork. Here’s the competitor for that.”
Well, not until after he got acquired, right? That’s the other vector.
Yeah. Right. That got acquired by OpenAI, who still hasn’t really put their version of the thing out.
Well, I guess this is sort of my question: you’re a real one. You’ve been in it for a long time, doing things to your own satisfaction. This represents, in a way, how you could translate that into this liquidity event if you positioned it as such. But not everybody thinks in those terms, and God bless them for not, because if everybody thought in those terms, we’d live in a really boring fucking world.
Yeah. What I was really excited about was that I thought I’d be able to really help other small businesses, individuals, artists—really anyone who needed that extra set of hands.
Do you know Rick Webb? Rick is like an unofficial mentor, someone I’ve known for years and years. I’m always like, that guy has 40 hours in his day somehow—the amount of things Rick can do in a day.
For me, if I could have a 25th hour in my day because I don’t have to do something else, that would be incredible. What I found was I could get these things up and running. OpenClaw would be running great for two days and then it would break. Hermes has been 85 percent better than OpenClaw, but I was running the podcast for a month and a half on it perfectly, and then one day it stopped. It took me five hours one morning to fix it.
I have the affinity to do that, but I don’t think most other people who are trying to run a business, have a family, and do all these things would necessarily have the energy for that. For me, it wasn’t, “This thing sucks.” It was, “I hit a hurdle. Now let me figure out how to fix it and patch it so it doesn’t do that in the future.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yes, I’m very bullish on trying to help people and teach people. I’ve been trying to figure out how to do that. I don’t want to sell an online course; I don’t have an affinity to do that. But I would love to help people learn and make their lives better, easier, and more creative. Daily practice stuff has been really great for me with this.
The answer is I’m trying to figure it out. If anyone is listening and wants to throw a lot of money at me to learn a thing, please. I’m not a starving artist, but I pretend to be one. Take your money.
I think that’s actually a perfect place to stop, because I learn a lot from you. So it’s working. I appreciate it. Nicky, thank you for taking the time and explaining it all. Beyond that, the enthusiasm and energy that you’ve displayed for years has always been inspiring to me. Nice one. Thank you.
Thank you. I appreciate that. One last question for you: what do you like the most? Do you like learning about the news and how things are connected, or do you like learning about a new tool? What have you taken and used? Then I’ll let you go.
That is a very important, imperative question for me, because I have learned a lot and I’m trying to figure out what to use. So far, I haven’t used anything, though.
Yeah. Well, there are about to be a lot of tools.
Okay.
I’m happy to hear that. There are a lot of tools that are about to be a lot easier to use. If anyone is wanting to play with a thing, the Hermes desktop agent is a really good place to start. I have mine living in a cloud; if I were setting it up now, I’d probably just do it locally.
At first, it was very scary to give it access to everything, but it’s pretty locked down now. That’s a place that I think is a really good 101, but also has real teeth to do a lot of things.
I love that. Great advice for everybody listening. Everybody, once again: Nicky’s newsletter is Artificially Intimidating. It’s on Substack, it’s excellent, you should subscribe. Beyond that, OutSnap is the company that he is founder and CEO of for all of your event-directed photography needs. Nicky, thanks. Great to catch up with you, and we’ll catch you soon.
Yeah, thank you.
Great to catch up with you.
My pleasure.
and finally, a few more links of note from this afternoon.
Corollary? “Are they birds? No! They’re robots.”
Starbucks is ending GLP-1 coverage for weight loss as employer costs climb
The dark underbelly of “Paw Patrol” Why a debate over a hit cartoon is more than culture-war madness
Falke’s Maddening, Perfect Sock Families: What we talk about when we talk about socks
From Piers: An Artist Reimagines Frieze London’s Loos
Harry Belafonte’s Daylight Came. How the Harlem-born son of Caribbean immigrants made an LP that topped the charts for 31 weeks, outsold Elvis, and transformed a dockworker’s lament into an anthem the world still sings.
Stuff to do:
TOMORROW August 8 at Celebrate Brooklyn in Prospect Park, 3-8pm BRIC Presents Aaliyah: One In A Million 25+ musicians, singers, DJs, speakers, and more give flowers to the wildly influential Brooklyn-born R&B artist Aaliyah, on the 25th anniversary of her passing.
And on August 20th: the Guggenheim Late Shift Block pARTy, A free, end-of-summer, percussion-heavy block party with live music, art making, games, food, and drinks featuring Debit DJing her global club mutations, Latin drum collective A.B.E.L.A. (Asociación de Bateristas ElektrónikXs de Latinoamerika) and Fogo Azul, a 40-member strong samba drumline marching band.
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