Will tech companies and startups continue to have layoffs?
It’s not just early-stage startups that are feeling the burn.
Updated: Aug 4, 2022 at 2:10 p.m. EDT.
What goes up must come down.
High-flying startups with record valuations, huge hiring goals and ambitious expansion plans are now announcing hiring slowdowns, freezes and in some cases widespread layoffs. It’s the dot-com bust all over again — this time, without the cute sock puppet and in the midst of a global pandemic we just can’t seem to shake.
Founders and investors are preparing for what looks like an economic downturn — and perhaps even a recession. In May, Y Combinator sent an email to its portfolio founders warning them to “ plan for the worst.” The startup accelerator cautioned that the downturn would likely most affect “international companies, asset heavy companies, low margin companies, hardtech, and other companies with high burn and long time to revenue.”
It’s not just early-stage startups that are feeling the burn. Big tech companies including Meta, Salesforce and Netflix have also recently announced hiring freezes or layoffs in the midst of cost-cutting pressure and rising inflation, coupled with a looming bear market and rising interest rates. Industry stalwarts (Microsoft), upstart social media companies (Snap) and crypto newbies (Coinbase) haven’t announced layoffs, but they’ve all slowed hiring after poor quarterly results. By late May, the S&P 500, dominated by tech stocks, had lost over 20% of its value since the beginning of the year.
On Blind, speculative posts about layoffs like one called “Layoff safe companies that are still hiring?” have drawn hundreds of comments. One user wrote, “No company is lay-off safe. You need to make yourself lay-off safe. Get some seniority and work hard to make yourself irreplaceable. Or at least a strong contributor.”
The bright spot? The tech industry may be under siege, but American job seekers overall still have substantial bargaining power. What we’re seeing in one sector — though a substantial one — stands in stark contrast to the rest of the economy, with U.S. employers adding 428,000 jobs in April, more than expected, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Average hourly wages are also still continuing to grow (but still below the pace of inflation).
Layoffs range from the small-scale to, in the worst cases, mass layoffs conducted via impersonal video messages that have left employees gutted and the industry questioning, “ Are Zoom layoffs ever OK?” In mid-May, former Employment Development Department director Michael Bernick told KTVU that tech layoffs were at their highest point since January 2021, and they’ve come for both the giants and startups. A crowdsourced tech startup layoffs tracker, Layoffs.fyi, recorded 60 tech companies with layoffs in the last month or so, with more than 16,000 employees laid off. Some of the companies that have cut staff in the last few weeks include nutrition startup Noom, on-demand grocery delivery service Getir and fintech company Bolt, according to Layoffs.fyi.
Lacework
Cybersecurity firm Lacework laid off 20% of its workforce on May 25. Though it didn’t disclose the number of people this would affect, the company had previously reported having more than 1,000 employees as of March 2022. Lacework said in a blog post that the decision was part of “restructuring and modification to the company plan.” Cybersecurity professionals have been in high demand, with companies like Microsoft announcing plans to help with reskilling efforts to account for the widening gap in jobs and those with the knowledge to fill them.
Gorillas
On-demand grocery app Gorillas cut half its corporate staff, or about 300 employees around the world, on May 24. In a message to staff, Gorillas co-founder and CEO Kagan Sumer said: “Two months ago in March, the markets turned upside down, and since then the situation has continued to worsen.”
PayPal
Just weeks after laying off more than 80 employees at its San Jose headquarters, PayPal let go of additional employees in risk management and operations in Chicago, Nebraska and Arizona on May 26.
Bolt
Maju Kuruvilla, the CEO of payments company Bolt, told employees that the company is undergoing “several structural changes,” and cut more than 100 staff members in order to “secure [Bolt’s] financial position” amid shaky market conditions on May 25.
Carvana
Online used car dealer Carvana laid off 2,500 employees, many of them over Zoom, on May 10. The laid-off employees mostly served in operational roles and made up about 12% of the company’s workforce. Carvana said the decision was due to “macroeconomic factors” that “have pushed automotive retail into recession.”
Mural
Several employees at collaboration tool startup Mural were let go, according to LinkedIn posts from affected employees, on May 6. The exact number of employees laid off was not reported. Leah Taylor, a spokesperson for Mural, told Protocol that staffing reductions were “focused on redundancies.” On June 21, Taylor confirmed that Mural implemented a second round of layoffs.
ClickUp
Productivity app ClickUp laid off 7% of its staff in an unexpected move on May 24. CEO Zeb Evans told Protocol the goal was to ensure ClickUp’s profitability and efficiency in the future, saying it puts the company “in a position to accelerate our timeline to profitability and ultimately achieve our goal of going public.”
Klarna
“Buy now, pay later” company Klarna laid off 10% of its workforce on May 23 as it has reportedly been looking for more funding, potentially at a lower valuation. Klarna has about 5,000 employees, according to website. In a prerecorded message to the entire staff, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said the company set its business plans last year in “a very different world than the one we are in today.”
Cameo
Celebrity video greetings startup Cameo laid off 87 staff members on May 4, affecting some of Cameo’s most senior executives, including CTO Rob Post, top marketing executive Emily Boschwitz, CPO Nundu Janakiram and Chief People Officer Melanie Steinbach. CEO Steven Galanis pointed to pandemic-fueled hiring as a reason for the cuts, as “market conditions have rapidly changed.”
Robinhood
Trading app Robinhood laid off roughly 9% of its full-time workforce on April 26. Following a period of “hypergrowth,” the company cut down on duplicate roles and job functions as a way to mitigate “more layers and complexity than are optimal,” CEO Vlad Tenev said in a blog post. And on Aug. 2, the company cut an even larger amount of staff, laying off 23% of its workforce. Together, both layoffs affected more than 1,000 employees.
Netflix
Netflix first laid off a number of journalists working for the company’s entertainment site Tudum in late April. The company laid off an additional 150 employees in mid-May, then cut an additional 300 in late June. Following the company’s less-than-stellar Q1 earnings report, Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann said that the company would be pulling back on some of its spending to get costs under control.
Loom
Enterprise video messaging company Loom laid off 34 employees across product and operations teams on June 1, representing 14% of its staff, according to TechCrunch. In a statement, CEO Joe Thomas said that the decision was made in order to ensure that the company is able to “move forward sustainably.”
Gemini
Gemini, the crypto exchange run by brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, announced its cutting 10% of its staff on June 2. Gemini did not disclose how many total jobs were cut, but the company employs just over 1,000 people. The Winklevoss brothers said in a memo to staff that the crypto industry is “in the contraction phase that is settling into a period of stasis.”
Seven weeks later on July 18, news leaked that Gemini laid off more staff. The company did not communicate the layoffs publicly, though a source close to the company told TechCrunch that 68 members, or 7% of staff, were removed from the company’s Slack channels Monday morning.
Cybereason
Cybersecurity firm Cybereason disclosed layoffs affecting 100 employees, or about 10% of its staff, the company told Protocol in early June. Venture-backed Cybereason cited its inability to go public in the near term as the driver for the cutbacks. With the tech IPO market now “essentially closed, companies like us must now exercise more strict financial discipline,” the company said in a statement.
IRL
Social media startup IRL laid off around 20 employees, The Information reported in early June. The company is backed by SoftBank, and had around 100 employees prior to layoffs.
Policygenius
Insurtech company Policygenius laid off 25% of its staff, Axios reported June 6. Though the number of affected employees was not confirmed, reportedly 170 were laid off. The company had raised $125 million in Series E funding in March. CEO Jennifer Fitzgerald said in a statement that the “sudden and dramatic shift in the economy has forced us to adapt our strategy.”
Tesla
Tesla announced it was cutting about 10% of salaried workers on June 3, or an overall 3.5% reduction of its headcount. Musk told fellow executives he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy, and told CNBC that the company has “become overstaffed in many areas.” The layoffs don’t apply to anyone “actually building cars,” said Musk, and follows the CEO calling both Tesla and SpaceX employees back to the office for 40 hours a week. The company then reportedly laid off around 200 employees on its Autopilot team on June 28.
Cazoo
British online used car dealer Cazoo announced June 7 that it is cutting 15% of its staff amid the rising risk of a recession in the U.K., the company said. Cazoo employs around 3,500 people.
Bird
Scooter startup Bird is slashing 23% of its staff, affecting a range of positions from new hires to senior staff. Bird told TechCrunch on June 7 that “macro economic trends impacting everyone have resulted in an acceleration of our path to profitability.” Bird has around 600 employees.
OneTrust
Security software company OneTrust laid off 25% of its staff on June 9, affecting around 950 employees. CEO Kabir Barday said in a blog post the move was a response to the shift in sentiment in the capital markets.
BlockFi
BlockFi cut 20% of its staff on June 13. The crypto lender said it must respond to a “dramatic shift in macroeconomic conditions worldwide.” The company has a head count of around 850, meaning the layoffs will affect roughly 170 staff members.
Coinbase
Coinbase is laying off 18% of its staff “to ensure we stay healthy during this economic downturn,” CEO Brian Armstrong said June 14. The company first slowed, then froze hiring and rescinded offers on June 2 as it looked to “reprioritize our hiring needs against our highest-priority business goals,” COO Emilie Choi said. The company later created a database of laid-off employees to help them find new work.
Redfin
Real estate tech company Redfin is laying off about 470 employees, TechCrunch reported June 14. The company cited low demand for home buying as mortgage interest rates surge.
Compass
Real estate company Compass is laying off 10% of its staff, or about 450 people. A company spokesperson told TechCrunch on June 14 that the staffing cuts are due to “clear signals of slowing economic growth.”
Notarize
Online notarization company Notarize laid off 110 employees, or 25% of staff, the Boston Business Journal reported June 15. The cuts trimmed its workforce down to 325 employees.
MasterClass
Celebrity education tech company MasterClass cut 20% of its staff on June 22, or around 120 employees. The company said the move would “strengthen our position both financially and strategically.”
Backstage Capital
Investment firm Backstage Capital, which funds startups led by underrepresented founders, cut all of its operation staff on June 27 due to fundraising challenges, according to its founder Arlan Hamilton. The firm cut 75% of its staff, going from a dozen employees to three. It is still seeking to raise a $30 million opportunity fund.
Amount
Fintech company Amount, which reached a valuation of more than $1 billion last year, laid off 18% of its workforce on June 27. CEO Adam Hughes blamed “the current macro-economic environment.” The company did not say the number of employees affected.
Niantic
Gaming company Niantic cut around 8% of its staff on June 29, affecting around 85 to 90 employees. The company also canceled four projects as it is “facing a time of economic turmoil” CEO John Hanke said in an email viewed by Bloomberg.
Substack
Newsletter company Substack laid off 13 employees, or roughly 14% of its workforce, on June 29. CEO Chris Best said in a letter reported by Axios that the company’s goal is to survive tough market conditions without “relying on raising money.” The cuts were made across HR, support and operations departments.
Unity
Game development tools provider Unity laid off more than 200 employees, approximately 4% of its staff, on June 29. The company said in a statement to Protocol that it “decided to realign some of our resources to better drive focus and support our long-term growth.”
Celsius
Crypto lender Celsius cut around 150 employees, or a quarter of its staff, on July 3. The company blamed “extreme market conditions” after pausing withdrawals three weeks prior.
eToro
Online brokerage eToro laid off 100 employees, or 6% of its total workforce, on July 5. The company also canceled its SPAC merger with blank-check company FinTech Acquisition Corp.
Twitter
Twitter reportedly laid off 30% of its talent acquisition team on July 7. Prior to this, CEO Parag Agrawal announced in a memo that it would freeze hiring and pull back spending. Two key leaders, Kayvon Beykpour and Bruce Falck, left the company. Agrawal said the company made these decisions after struggling to meet audience and revenue growth goals, though the company has faced some internal turmoil amid Elon Musk’s takeover deal. It’s also been reported that Twitter started rescinding job offers.
Argo AI
Ford-backed driverless car startup Argo AI cut 150 employees, or around 6% of its staff, on July 8. A spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that the company needed to correct an aggressive period of hiring and make “prudent adjustments” to its business plan.
GoPuff
Grocery delivery company GoPuff told investors July 12 that its cutting 10% of its workforce, affecting 1,500 employees. It will also close 76 of warehouses. The company had cut 3% of staff in March and put its plans to go public on hold. GoPuff co-CEOs Yakir Gola and Rafael Ilishayev said in a memo that the cuts are “not only accelerating our timeline to profitability, they are taking us back to our roots of keeping profitability at the core of every decision.”
OpenSea
NFT marketplace OpenSea is cutting 20% of its staff, CEO and co-founder Devin Finzer said in a tweet on July 14. In a memo to staff, Finzer said the company has entered “an unprecedented combination of crypto winter and broad macroeconomic instability, and we need to prepare the company for the possibility of a prolonged downturn.”
TikTok
TikTok reportedly started laying employees off on July 18 as part of a global restructuring plan. It’s unconfirmed how many people were affected, but a TikTok staffer told Wired that fewer than 100 people would be cut.
Lyft
Lyft cut around 60 employees, or about 2% of total staff, on July 20 as it consolidates global operations. The company also cut its in-house car rental service, which was running in five locations. Lyft’s layoffs reportedly mainly affected its operations teams.
Varo
Neobank Varo is cutting 75 staff members, or 10% of its workforce, it said July 20. CEO Colin Walsh wrote in a blog post that the company “must make some difficult decisions to ensure that Varo has sufficient capital to execute on our strategy and path to profitability.”
Blockchain.com
Crypto exchange Blockchain.com cut 25% of its staff, affecting around 150 people, citing harsh financial conditions. The company is dealing with a $270 million loss from lending to Three Arrows Capital.
Shopify
Shopify is cutting 10% of its staff, or around 1,000 employees, CEO Tobias Lütke said in a memo on July 26. Then company mostly laid off recruiting, support and sales roles. Lütke said the company needed to correct overhiring done to meet the rapid growth of ecommerce demand in the early pandemic.
Rivian
Rivian laid off 840 employees, or 6% of its workforce, on July 27. CEO RJ Scaringe said in an email to staff the company needed to adjust to a world that’s “dramatically changed.”
Change.org
Online petition service Change.org laid off 19% of its team on July 28. Nick Allardice, CEO, said the move was a part of the company’s goal to “sharpen our focus.”
Career Karma
Edtech company Career Karma conducted layoffs. Though the company did not confirm the number involved, TechCrunch reported on July 28 that a third of the staff was cut, and top executives weren’t affected.
CoinFlex
Crypto exchange CoinFlex cut a “significant number” of staff across all departments and geographies, the company announced July 29. The company said the cuts would reduce its cost base by 50% to 60%.
Ola
Indian transportation company Ola laid off 1,000 employees, according to the Economic Times, with the goal of focusing efforts on its electric mobility business. The company is also reportedly eyeing a merger with Uber.
Imperfect Foods
Delivery startup Imperfect Foods cut 50 jobs and shut down its 38,000-square-foot San Francisco warehouse in late July. The company cited “shifting market dynamics” in a memo to employees.
SoundCloud
Music streaming app SoundCloud is slashing 20% of its workforce. In an email to employees in early August, the company reportedly said the cuts were “necessary given the challenging economic climate and financial market headwinds.”
Though major companies haven’t had to make drastic cuts, several are slowing down or freezing hiring, citing disappointing earnings and a battered tech sector, but continue to reassure staff that job cuts aren’t imminent. A lot of these hiring slowdowns, like at Microsoft, are contained to specific departments rather than companywide.
Microsoft
Microsoft slowed hiring for its Windows, Office and Teams software groups in late May. The slowdown is specific to those teams, as they’ve expanded recently. A spokesperson for the company told Bloomberg that Microsoft is “making sure the right resources are aligned to the right opportunity” as the new fiscal year approaches. On July 20, the company cut a slew of job listings, including in its cloud and security business units.
Nvidia
Nvidia will slow hiring later this year, the company said in its latest earnings call. Nvidia told Protocol that the move is “to focus our budget on taking care of existing employees as inflation persists.”
Lyft
Lyft is slowing hiring to focus on critical open roles. President John Zimmer told staff in a memo that the company would be cutting costs in response to “an economic slowdown and the dramatic change in investor sentiment.”
Snap
After struggling to meet earnings estimates, Snap announced that it would hit the brakes on hiring through the end of the year. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel denied both layoffs and a hiring freeze. The company pointed to a few reasons for the slowdown: rising inflation, rising interest rates, supply chain, the war in Ukraine and Apple’s new ad-tracking policies.
Uber
Uber is cutting back on hiring and other costs to address a “seismic shift” in the market, according to an email that CEO Dara Khosrowshahi sent to staff. Khosrowshahi said hiring should be treated as a “privilege,” and that the company would scale back on the “least efficient” marketing and incentive costs.
Salesforce
Per an internal memo, Salesforce slowed hiring and cut back on other expenses, including corporate travel and some upcoming off-sites. The company didn’t provide a reason for the cutbacks. Salesforce’s stock price has plunged almost 50% in the last six months.
Meta
Meta is perhaps the biggest company to have announced a hiring freeze for certain roles as it works to control its spending amid an “industry-wide downturn.” Mark Zuckerberg assured employees at an internal all-hands that job cuts aren’t planned. The hiring cutbacks will hit “almost every team across the company” and will last for the rest of the year. On June 30, Zuckerberg reportedly told employees that the company is slashing its hiring goals for engineers by at least 30% this year, and told them to brace for “one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history.”
Intel
Intel is freezing hiring for at least two weeks in its division responsible for desktop and laptop chips, according to Reuters. The company is “pausing all hiring and placing all job requisitions on hold” for the divisions with the goal of cutting down costs. The company is doing this while it reevaluates its hiring priorities, but all current job offers will be honored.
Spotify
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said in an email to employees that it would slow its hiring targets by 25%. Prior to this, CFO Paul Vogel said at the company’s investor day that it is “clearly aware of the increasing uncertainty regarding the global economy” and would evaluate head count in the near term.
Google
Alphabet-owned Google announced to staff on July 20 that its pausing hiring for two weeks, The Information reported, following news that it would slow hiring and spending through the rest of the year. Senior VP Prabhakar Raghavan said the pause would not affect offers that have already been made, but that the company isn’t making any new offers until the pause ends.
This story was updated on May 31, 2022, to correct the audience of Klarna’s prerecorded message.
Nat Rubio-Licht is a Los Angeles-based news writer at Protocol. They graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in newspaper and online journalism in May 2020. Prior to joining the team, they worked at the Los Angeles Business Journal as a technology and aerospace reporter.
Michelle Ma (@himichellema) is a reporter at Protocol covering climate. Previously, she was a news editor of live journalism and special coverage for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she worked as a staff writer at Wirecutter. She can be reached at mma@protocol.com.
The SEC says nine tokens in the Coinbase insider trading case are securities, but they are similar to many other tokens that are already trading on exchanges.
While a number of pieces of crypto legislation have been introduced in Congress, the SEC’s moves in court could become precedent until any legislation is passed or broader executive actions are made.
Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com.
When the SEC accused a former Coinbase employee of insider trading last month, it specifically named nine cryptocurrencies as securities, potentially opening the door to regulation for the rest of the industry.
If a judge agrees with the SEC’s argument, many other similar tokens could be deemed securities — and the companies that trade them could be forced to be regulated as securities exchanges. When Ripple was sued by the SEC last year, for example, Coinbase chose to suspend trading the token rather than risk drawing scrutiny from federal regulators. In this case, however, Coinbase says the nine tokens – seven of which trade on Coinbase — aren’t securities.
The case cuts to the heart of what’s long been a huge source of uncertainty in the crypto industry. The SEC has far-reaching legal authority over how stocks and other securities are traded, as well as who is allowed to buy and sell them. But the agency has thus far shied away from issuing a clear definition of what criteria are used to determine whether or not a token is a security. As a result, cryptocurrency firms, exchanges and traders have been operating for years in a legal fog.
SEC officials have previously made statements that align with the agency’s claims in the current case. The previous chairman, Jay Clayton, for example, said he felt that most ICOs looked like securities, and Gary Gensler, the current chair, has said that most tokens are likely securities.
But there are some notable new points of emphasis in the case against the former Coinbase employee. For one thing, the suit appears to distance the agency from a 2018 speech by then-SEC Director of the Division of Corporation Finance Bill Hinman, said Meghan Spillane, a partner at the law firm Goodwin Procter and an expert on litigation and digital assets.
Hinman’s speech was considered by many in the industry to be a regulatory guidepost, laying out ways that a token that was launched as a security could later be considered not a security. “If the network on which the token or coin is to function is sufficiently decentralized — where purchasers would no longer reasonably expect a person or group to carry out essential managerial or entrepreneurial efforts — the assets may not represent an investment contract,” Hinman said.
But Hinman’s views were never codified, and if the agency ever espoused them, it appears to have changed course. Several of the token projects named in the case have behaved in a way that Hinman suggested could be sufficient to avoid being considered a security: They changed over time by building governance features or a foundation that increases decentralization of the projects. Spillane said the SEC doesn’t appear to be considering any of that in the current case. “Basically the analysis is kind of frozen in time. And none of the allegations seem to account for how projects grow and develop over time,” she said.
It’s unclear why the SEC chose these nine tokens — AMP, RLY, DDX, XYO, RGT, LCX, POWR, DFX, KROM — as they are mostly small market capitalization projects. AMP is the largest at a $640 million market cap, while some of the others are not even over $100 million, indicating they may not have gained substantial traction. While the SEC said 25 tokens were involved in the insider trading case, it’s unclear whether the SEC did not consider the other 16 tokens securities or whether the agency just didn’t include them in the case.
The SEC’s approach in this case is also different from its action with Ripple, where the agency directly filed an enforcement action against the purveyor of the currency XRP.
Right now there aren’t clear rules on what is and isn’t a security, said David Pakman, managing partner at CoinFund, an early-stage crypto investment firm. “I think that the industry, which is largely filled with people with good intentions, struggles to pick a path that will allow people to launch tokens … The problem is there is no guide.”
Pakman noted that some projects have made an effort to keep a token from trading until it is fairly well developed, citing the FLOW token built by Dapper Labs, which his firm invested in.
The nine tokens cited in the Coinbase case are varied in their intended applications; some were meant to help facilitate digital payments, others for yield farming, energy trading, geolocation or helping creators promote their work. Some did an ICO in 2018, while others started selling tokens later on using different approaches. Some filed a Form D with the SEC to register the sale of securities, while some didn’t. Some had a DAO or foundation, while others didn’t. Some were started by incorporated companies; some were not. This raises questions about how many other tokens already trading could be implicated if the nine currently under scrutiny are legally deemed to be securities.
The SEC’s complaint did highlight a few specifics, such as the token not functioning when it was first sold, the heavy involvement of management in building it, management’s commitment to developing the token in the future, management’s token allocation and the availability of tokens on secondary markets.
These all appear to be an effort by the SEC to meet the Howey test, a basic way to determine whether something is a security: were people investing in a common enterprise with the expectation of profit from the effort of others?
For example, if a token isn’t functional when someone invests, that implies future profit when it launches. And management staying involved and committing to working on a project can also show future expectation of profits, while secondary trading can show the intent to profit (as opposed to the intent to use the token as a utility in and of itself).
Some in the industry see the SEC’s move as political — part of a struggle in Washington between the SEC and other agencies over regulation. “It feels like this question of what tokens are securities and what’s not is caught up in a much bigger political question, as opposed to the pure legal argument,” Pakman said.
Caroline Pham, commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which could be jockeying with the SEC for regulatory control, criticized the SEC’s case, calling it “regulation by enforcement.”
The companies behind the nine protocols named in the case declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for comment. The SEC declined to comment.
One crypto executive who has worked with Flexa, the company behind the AMP token, which is named in the case, believes AMP is a utility — it’s meant to provide collateral while crypto transactions settle — and shouldn’t be considered a security. “The idea that something like AMP would be considered a security was crazy,” said Josh Swihart, SVP of growth, product strategy and regulatory affairs at the Electric Coin Company, which invented the ZCASH token. “The token has a utility … to ensure that there’s enough money in the system to make sure that somebody gets paid, that you can have finality on either side of the transaction. The token is this necessary element to allow that to happen in a decentralized fashion.”
Meanwhile, David Berkowitz, who used technology made by Rally Network to create his own personalized CMO “social token,” said he hadn’t heard from the company about what the case means for their tokens or the product. The RLY token, which is the governance token of the Rally Network, was named in the case. He and others have created their own individualized tokens using Rally.
While a number of pieces of crypto legislation have been introduced in Congress, the SEC’s moves in court could become precedent until any legislation is passed or broader executive actions are made. That leaves the industry where it has been: reading the tea leaves on SEC speeches and enforcement actions, and then making moves that may or may not be later considered illegal.
Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com.
Protocol talks to Soul Machines’ CEO about the power of AI in the metaverse
GREG CROSS (CEO, Soul Machines)
GREG CROSS (CEO, Soul Machines) is one of the original tech nomads, spending his career traveling to and living in every major tech market in the world. He now lives in New Zealand but creates businesses that compete on the international stage. Most recently, PowerbyProxi, a wireless charging company he co-founded, was sold to Apple in 2017. In 2016, Greg co-founded Soul Machines to build a Human OS™ for Artificial Intelligence and explore the future of human-machine cooperation.
Soul Machines is at the cutting edge of AGI research with its unique Digital Brain, based on the latest neuroscience and developmental psychology research. Partnering with innovative people and brands like Carmelo Anthony, Procter & Gamble, NESTLÉ® TOLL HOUSE®, Maryville University, and The World Health Organization, Soul Machines is re-imagining what is possible in the delivery and underlying economics of empathetic customer experience. Greg holds multiple chair positions, is the Sir John Logan Campbell Executive in Residence at the University of Auckland Business School, and was inducted into the New Zealand Hi-Tech Hall of Fame in 2019.
Nicklaus meets and chats online with his Digital Twin in May 2022.
Soul Machines co-founder and CEO Greg Cross and his co-founder Mark Sagar, Ph.D., FRSNZ are leading their Auckland and San Francisco-based teams to create AI-enabled Digital People™ to populate the internet, at first, and soon the metaverse. As this field has grown over the past six years, enterprise brands and celebrities have increasingly turned to Soul Machines to digitize their workforces and level up in how they engage with customers and fans.
They humanize AI to create Digital People that take input from the environment — a question, a facial expression like a smile — and respond in real time. Digital People, such as the one used by Nestle to serve as a digital cookie coach on its website, allow brands to offer an empathic and ultra-personalized customer experience.
Using similar autonomous automation technology, Digital Twins take the customer and fan experience to another level. The celebrity-based avatars boast lifelike features because a real person is captured, creating a “Digital Twin” of the star’s likeness. It can answer customers’ questions with responses that are aligned with the celebrity’s expertise, background and legacy.
The entertainment and sports industries could benefit from developing interactive digital avatars, but the cross-pollination of virtual animation and AI must veer far from 2Pac-hologram territory. Soul Machines’ approach is layered with next-gen AI applications, such as its Digital Brain technology, which allows for natural-language processing and empathetic, responsive behavior. In layman’s terms, that means we could talk to these Digital Twins in real time, but in the entertainment world, that relationship could get even more compelling.
Protocol spoke to Cross to learn more about their newest release, a Digital Twin of Jack Nicklaus, the retired golfing champ who’s won a stunning 117 tournaments. Depicting Nicklaus at 38 years old, his Digital Twin represents the potential of this technology, allowing fans to ask questions and hear stories from his 60-plus years on the links.
Digital Twins will soon partner with retail brands (among others) to offer expertise and recommendations on products and services, as well. Cross takes us on a tour into a technology that may be nascent now but could soon become the competitive edge that sets successful brands apart from the rest.
Extensive capture technology maps Nicklaus’ facial expressions.
What motivated you to launch Soul Machines with Mark Sagar, and what makes your Digital People appealing to brands?
I’m a serial tech entrepreneur, and I just came out of a previous business that sold to Apple. I started looking around for my next move and, through a mutual friend, was reintroduced to Mark. I had met him before, and he blew me away with who he is as a person and his commitment to his life’s work. He’s won two Academy Awards for the animation technology he built that was used in films such as “Avatar” and “King Kong.”
We had a beer, and he talked about coming up with a new paradigm for animating digital characters, and Soul Machines began soon after, in July 2016.
As for our Digital People, we see them as the future of customer and fan engagement. We’re living in an increasingly digital world, and the major challenge for brands is creating those personal connections with fans in a more digital world. And that’s where Digital People become important.
We, as humans, are hardwired to emotionally engage face-to-face. Soul Machines technology can autonomously automate back-and-forth conversations that are each unique. We see Digital People being such an incredible way to create scalable customer interactions in digital worlds.
What competitive advantage would these avatars offer to enterprise brands?
If I create a digital workforce, all of a sudden, I’ve created a highly scalable workforce that is always on. Those customer-centric Digital People can have 1,000 or 100,000 conversations, and these are uniquely personal interactions that are hard to achieve and staff in the real world today. Conversational AI becomes that repository for the brand experience.
Also, brands get a smoother consistency of experiences with Digital People who can retain all that data from those interactions. Especially as we move into metaverse worlds of tomorrow, adopting this technology will truly offer competitive advantages to brands.
The Digital Jack Nicklaus avatar is fascinating to us. How did you create it? How did he react to the idea?
We’ve always wanted to be in the digital celebrity experience space. We first worked with rapper will.i.am in 2019 by creating his Digital Twin for an AI documentary series.
We wanted to test this concept further by having amazing CGI lead to hyper-realistic people who are autonomously animated to create the ultimate fan experience.
We are in talks with a range of different celebrities. We enjoyed the enthusiasm Jack Nicklaus and the Nicklaus Companies have for moving the brand into the future.
With Soul Machines, he wanted to extend his brand to the next generation of golfers. He wanted to be 38 again, when he was at the prime of his career, so we scanned him and his son Gary, who looks so much like him. The kind of storytelling engagement that will come from Digital Jack will build off all the tournaments he’s won and the many golf courses he’s designed.
Share your vision for how you think the metaverse will mature in the coming years, and how Soul Machines will play a role in that maturation.
We are only at the beginning of the metaverse. The hardware that brings it to life hasn’t matured yet, and isn’t defined as a tech stack now. The most important thing for us is to encourage brands to think about how investing in something today creates seamless experiences tomorrow.
AI gets stronger and better with each interaction, and that’s why Digital People provide the most personable and scalable customer experiences that will live on the metaverse and elsewhere. We envision a digital workforce that can move seamlessly between 2D and immersive worlds, and that’s really exciting to us.
The longtime chief technology officer talked with Protocol about the AWS customers that first flocked to serverless, how AI and ML are making life easier for developers and his “primitives, not frameworks” stance.
“We knew that if cloud would really be effective, development would change radically.”
Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol’s senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the ‘Big 3’ cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.
When AWS unveiled Lambda in 2014, Werner Vogels thought the serverless compute service would be the domain of young, more tech-savvy businesses.
But it was enterprises that flocked to serverless first, Amazon’s longtime chief technology officer told Protocol in an interview last week.
“For them, it was immediately obvious what the benefits were and how you only pay for the five microseconds that this code runs, and any idle is not being charged to you,” Vogels said. “And you don’t have to worry about reliability and security and multi-[availability zone] and all these things that then go out of the window. That was really an eye-opener for me — this idea that we sometimes have in our head that sort of the young businesses are more technologically advanced and moving faster. Clearly in the area of serverless, that was not the case.”
AWS Lambda launched into general availability in 2015, and more than a million customers are using it today, according to AWS.
Vogels gave Protocol a rundown on AWS Lambda and serverless computing, which allows customers to build and run applications and services without provisioning or managing servers. He also talked about Amazon CodeWhisperer, AWS’ new machine learning-powered coding tool, launched in preview in June; how artificial intelligence and ML are changing developers’ lives; and his thoughts on AWS providing customers with “primitives” versus higher-level managed services.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
So what’s the “state of the state” on AWS Lambda and how it’s helping customers, and are there any new features that we can expect?
You’ll see a whole range of different migrations happening. We’ve had folks from Capital One that migrated old mainframe codes to Lambda. [IRobot, which Amazon announced plans to acquire on Friday], the folks that make Roomba, the automatic [vacuum] cleaner, have their complete back end running as serverless because, for example, that’s a service that their customers don’t pay for, and as such, they really wanted to minimize their costs yet provide a good service. There’s a whole range of different projects happening and whether that is pre-processing images at some telescope deep in Chile, all the way up to monitoring Snowcones running in the International Space Station, where they were in Lambda on that device as well and actually can do processing of imagery and things like that. It’s become quite pervasive in that sense.
Now, the one thing is, of course, if you have existing code, and you want to move over to the cloud … moving over to a virtual machine is easy — it’s all in the same environment that you had on-premises. If you want to decompose the application that you had, don’t want to do too many code changes, probably containers are a better target for that.
But for quite a few of our customers that really want to start from scratch, but sort of really innovate and really think about [what] event-driven architectures look like, serverless becomes quickly the sudden default target for them. Mostly also because it’s not only that we see significant reduction in cost for our customers, but also a significant reduction in their carbon footprints, because we’re able to do much better packing on energy than customers would be able to do by themselves. We now also run serverless on our Graviton processors, so you’ll see easily a 40% reduction in cost in energy usage.
For me, serverless means that our customers don’t have to think about security, reliability, managing performance, managing scale, doing failover — all those kinds of things — and really controlling costs.
But always I’m a bit ambivalent about the word “serverless,” mostly because many people associate that with when we launched Lambda. But in essence, the first service that we launched, S3, also is really serverless. For me, serverless means that our customers don’t have to think about security, reliability, managing performance, managing scale, doing failover — all those kinds of things — and really controlling costs. And so, in essence, almost all services at AWS are serverless by nature. If you think about DynamoDB [a serverless NoSQL database], or if you think about Neptune [a graph database service] or any of the other services that we have, most of them are serverless because you don’t have to think about sort of provisioning them, managing them. That’s all done for you.
Can you talk about the value of CodeWhisperer and what you think is the next big thing for or the future of low-code/no-code?
For me, CodeWhisperer is more an assistant to a developer. There’s a number of application areas where I think machine learning really shines and it is sort of augmenting professionals by helping them, taking away mundane tasks. And we already did that, of course, in AWS. If you think about development, there’s CodeGuru and DevOps Guru, which are both already machine-learning services to help customers with, on one hand, operations, and the other one sort of doing the early security checks during the development process.
CodeWhisperer even takes that a step further, where if you look how our developers develop, there’s quite a few mundane tasks where you will go search on the web for a … piece of code — how do we do [single sign-on] login into X, Y or Z? Most people will just cut and paste or do a little translation. If that was in Python and you need to actually write it in TypeScript, we may do a translation on that.
There’s a lot of work, actually, that developers do in that particular area. So we thought that we could really help our customers there by … using machine learning to look at the complete base of, on one hand, the AWS code, the Amazon code and all the open-source code that is out there, and then do a qualitative test on that, and then include it into this body of work where we can easily help customers by just writing some plain text, and then saying, “I want a [single sign-on] log-on here,” and then the code automatically appears. And with that, we can do checks for security, we can do checks for bias. There’s lots of other things that are now possible because we’re basically assisting the developer in being more efficient and actually writing the code that they really want to write.
When we launched Lambda, I said the only code that will be written in the future is business logic. Well, it turns out we’re still not completely there, but tools like CodeWhisperer definitely help us to get on that path because you can focus on what’s the unique code that you need to write for the application that you have, instead of the same code that everybody else needs to write.
People really like it. It’s also something that we continuously improve. This is not a standing-still product. As we look at more code, as we get more feedback, the service improves.
If I think about … software developers, it’s one of the few jobs in the world where you can be truly creative and can go to work and create something new every morning. However, there’s quite a bit of heavy lifting still around that [that] sort of has nothing to do with your creativity or your ability to solve problems. With CodeWhisperer, we really tried to take the heavy lifting away so that people can focus on the creativity part of the development job, and I think anything we can do there, developers like.
In your tech predictions for 2022, you said this is the year when artificial intelligence and machine learning take on the undifferentiated heavy lifting in the lives of developers. Can you just expand on that, and how AWS is helping that?
When you think about CodeWhisperer and CodeGuru and DevOps Guru … or Copilot from GitHub … this is just the beginning of seeing the application area of machine learning to augment humans. Whether there is a radiologist somewhere that is late at night looking at imagery and gets help from machine learning to compare these images or whether it’s a developer, we’re really at the cusp of how machine learning will accelerate the way that we can build digital systems.
I was in Germany not that long ago, and there the government told me that they have 80,000 open IT positions. With all the scarceness in the world of labor, anything which we can do to make the life of developers easier so that they’re more productive, that it makes it easier for people that do not have a four-year computer science degree to actually get started in the IT world, anything we can do there will benefit all the enterprises in the world.
What’s another developer problem that you’re trying to solve, or what are developers asking AWS for?
If you’re an organization like AWS or Amazon or quite a few other organizations around the world, you make use of the DevOps principle, where basically your developers also have operational tasks. If you do operations, there’s information that is coming from 10 or 20 different sides. There’s log files, there’s metrics, there’s dashboards and actually tying that information together and … analyzing the massive amounts of log files that are being produced by systems in real time, surfacing that to the operators, showing that there may be potential problems here and then give context around it because normally these log files are pretty cryptic. So what we do with DevOps Guru, for example, is provide context around it such that the operators can immediately start taking action, looking for what [the] root cause of particular problems are. So we’re looking at all of the different aspects of development and operations to see what are the kind of things that we can build to help customers there.
At AWS re:Invent last year, you put up a slide that read “primitives, not frameworks,” and you said AWS gives customers primitives or simple machines, not frameworks. Meanwhile, Google Cloud and Microsoft are offering these sort of larger, chunkier blocks such as managed services where customers don’t have to do the heavy lifting, and AWS also seems to be selling more of them as well.
Let me clarify that. It mostly has to do also with sort of the speed of innovation of AWS.
Last year, we launched more than 3,000 features and services. And so why are we still looking at these fine-ingrained building blocks? Let me go back to the beginning of AWS — when we started then, how software companies at that moment were providing infrastructure or platforms was basically that they would give developers everything [but] the kitchen sink on Day One. And they would tell you, “This is how you shall develop software on this platform.” Given that these platforms took quite a while to develop, basically what you operate is a platform that is already five years old, that is looking at five years back.
Werner Vogels gives his keynote at AWS re:Invent 2021. Photo: Amazon Web Services, Inc.
We knew that if cloud would really be effective, development would change radically. Development would indeed be able to scale quicker and make use of multiple availability zones and many different types of databases and things like that. So we needed to make sure that we were not building things from the past, but that we were building for how our customers would want to build in 2025. To do that, you don’t give them everything and tell them what to do. You give them small building blocks, and that’s what I mean by primitives. And all these small building blocks together make a very rich ecosystem for developers to choose from.
Now, quite a few, especially the more tech-savvy companies, are more than happy to put these building blocks together themselves. For example, if you want to build a data lake, we have to use Glue [a serverless data integration service], we have to use S3, maybe some Redshift, Kinesis for ingestion, Athena for ad hoc analytics. I think there’s quite a few customers that are building these things by themselves.
But then there’s a whole category of customers that just want a data lake. They don’t want to think about Glue and S3 and Kinesis, so we give them a service or solution called Lake Formation. That automatically grabs all these things together and gives them this higher-level component.
Now the fact that we are delivering these higher-level solutions, for example, some customers just want a backup solution, and they don’t want to think about how to move things into S3 and then do some intelligent tiering [so] that if this data isn’t accessed in two weeks, then it is being moved into cold storage. They don’t want to think about that. They just want a backup solution. And so for that, we provide them some backup. So we do have these higher-level services. It’s more managed-style services for you, but they’re all still based on the primitives that sit underneath there. So whether you want to start with Lake Formation and later on maybe start tweaking things under the covers, that’s still possible for you. While we are providing these higher-level components, where customers need to have less worry about which components can fit together, we still provide the underlying components to the developers as well.
Is quantum computing something that enterprise CTOs should be keeping their eye on? Do you expect there to be an enterprise use for it, or will it be a domain just for researchers, or is it just too far out to surmise?
There is a back-and-forth there. If I look at some of the newer developments, it’s clearly research oriented. The reason for us to provide Braket, which is our quantum compute service, is that customers generally start experimenting with the different types of hardware that are out there. And there’s typical usage there. It’s life sciences, it’s oil and gas. All of these companies are already investigating whether they could see significant speed-ups if they would transform their algorithms into things that could run on a quantum machine.
Now, there’s a major difference between, let’s say, traditional development and quantum development. The tools, the compilers, the software principles, the books, the documentation for traditional development — that’s huge, you need great support.
In quantum, I think what we’ll see in the coming four or five years, as I listen to the Amazon researchers working on this, [is that] much of the work will not only go into hardware, but also how to provide better software support around it, such that development for these types of machines becomes easier or even goes at the same level as traditional machines. But one of the things that I think is very, very clear is that we’re not going to be able to solve new problems necessarily with quantum computing; we’re just going to be able to solve old problems much, much faster. That’s why the life sciences companies and health care and … companies that are very interested in the high-performance compute are experimenting with quantum because that … could accelerate their algorithms, maybe by orders of magnitude. But, we still have to see the results of that. So I’m keeping a very close eye on it, because I think there may be very interesting workloads and application areas in the future.
Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol’s senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the ‘Big 3’ cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.
A new campaign is using social media to target voters in progressive districts to ask their representatives to vote against the Inflation Reduction Act. But it appears to be linked to GOP operatives.
United for Clean Power’s campaign is a symptom of how quickly and easily social media allows interest groups to reach a targeted audience.
Lisa Martine Jenkins is a senior reporter at Protocol covering climate. Lisa previously wrote for Morning Consult, Chemical Watch and the Associated Press. Lisa is currently based in Brooklyn, and is originally from the Bay Area. Find her on Twitter ( @l_m_j_) or reach out via email (ljenkins@protocol.com).
The social media feeds of progressive voters have been bombarded by a series of ads this past week telling them to urge their Democratic representatives to vote against the Inflation Reduction Act.
The ads aren’t from the Sunrise Movement or other progressive climate stalwarts, though. Instead, they’re being pushed by United for Clean Power, a murky dark money operation that appears to have connections with Republican operatives.
While the campaign itself is not particularly sophisticated — the tagline “no reconciliation without comprehensive climate change” seems to forget that climate change is not desirable, in a bill or otherwise — it is an illustration of how social media is still being leveraged to sow doubt and confusion despite platforms trying to clean up the information environment.
The blitz started on the day Sen. Joe Manchin and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that they had arrived at a deal for $369 billion in climate investments as part of a reconciliation bill. On Thursday, conservative Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema signaled she supported the bill after agreeing to a few tweaks to the tax policies, indicating it will likely clear the Senate.
But the votes in the House aren’t quite tied up yet, and the campaign — which newsletter FWIW first identified — has been using a swath of strategies that include social media advertising, direct text messages to voters and even a sponsorship of the POLITICO New York newsletter to try to chip away support from the left.
(Both POLITICO and Protocol are POLITICO Media Group publications, and are owned by Axel Springer.)
FWIW found a series of digital ads running on platforms like Facebook, whose parent company Meta has received at least $11,500 from the group so far, and on Google, where the group has spent at least $9,900. The campaign seems to specifically target constituents of progressive lawmakers like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, and urges those voters to push them to “demand environmental justice or kill the reconciliation bill.”
United for Clean Power is a symptom of how quickly and easily social media allows interest groups — both nefarious and not — to reach a targeted audience.
“Social media has allowed people to target super-specific audiences with messages about energy,” Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center, told Protocol. “The scariest thing about social media is that you can test if a message is working.”
A review of both Meta’s and Google’s ad policies by the climate newsletter Heated suggests that United for Clean Power may be abusing at least Google’s policy, which doesn’t allow “coordinated deceptive practices.” POLITICO did not respond to questions from Protocol about whether a sponsor misrepresenting its position on an issue would typically be a cause for refusing to work with them.
The campaign is also targeting voters in districts represented by noted progressives via text message. Huffington Post journalist Alexander Kaufman lives in Ocasio-Cortez’s district in Queens and received one, and Sarah Loschiavo, a progressive constituent of Omar’s who has voted for the Democrat more than once, received one as well.
United for Clean Power’s Facebook ads and one of its text messages sent to Sarah Loschiavo.Images: Sarah Loschiavo; FWIW
United for Clean Power has been around since 2015, though its previous campaigns were not necessarily climate focused. In 2018, it mounted a campaign against Ohio Republican Rep. Kyle Koehler via a Facebook page that has been quiet ever since; a 2019 tax form shows that the group spun out Ohioans for Efficient Government, which has virtually no internet presence.
The campaign’s 2018 tax forms show it spent over $135,000 enlisting the GOP-focused firm Majority Strategies for advertising services. The 2019 form, which is the most recent that is publicly available, shows the group had revenue of nearly $208,000. Neither the campaign itself nor Majority Strategies responded to requests for comment.
What is so striking about these ads is how wildly out of step they are with the reality of what progressive politicians have been pushing for on climate. While progressives had pushed for more climate funding as part of the Build Back Better Act, the Inflation Reduction Act is still historic and may be Democrats’ last best shot to pass climate legislation with the upcoming midterms likely to result in the party losing one or both chambers of Congress. Though it has not made it to the House yet, progressive independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has explicitly said that the climate funding is “a step forward” despite it coming alongside breaks for the fossil fuel industry; while he said he would submit some amendments, he seems prepared to vote for it given Democrats are moving ahead with the legislative process.
The campaign seems to ignore these dynamics entirely. But Davies said this and campaigns like it are designed to exploit the ongoing division within the party, political reality notwithstanding.
“[The campaign is] hitting a nerve that is raw, and somebody is aware of that and trying to divide the Democratic camp based on real divides that exist,” Davies said. “They know that there are divisions on the left that remain from the Green New Deal … It’s really difficult for some people to bite their tongue at this point.”
Lisa Martine Jenkins is a senior reporter at Protocol covering climate. Lisa previously wrote for Morning Consult, Chemical Watch and the Associated Press. Lisa is currently based in Brooklyn, and is originally from the Bay Area. Find her on Twitter ( @l_m_j_) or reach out via email (ljenkins@protocol.com).
Don’t know what to do this weekend? We’ve got you covered.
Nick Statt is Protocol’s video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com.
This week we’re jumping into an overnight, free-to-play brawler; one of the best Japanese dubs we’ve heard in a while; and a look inside a fringe subculture of anarchists.
MultiVersus, the new fighting game from Warner Bros., has proven to be more than just a Smash Bros. clone. Developed by Player First Games, the free-to-play brawler, out now in beta, features a truly bizarre assortment of playable characters from across the Warner Bros. Discovery portfolio, including “Scooby Doo” favorites Shaggy and Velma, Finn and Jake from Cartoon Network’s “Adventure Time,” LeBron James (from his “Space Jam” role) and Arya Stark from “Game of Thrones.” It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but MultiVersus has miraculously become an overnight hit, rising on the Twitch charts and attracting the attention of the pro fighting game community.
The latest movie from Japanese animator Mamoru Hosoda is a visual feast of film, featuring gorgeous color work and animation alongside stunning set pieces and character design. The film is a take on the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast” with a modern twist that helps the movie transmit relevant themes about the internet, social media and human connection in ways a more straightforward adaptation couldn’t.
The English voice cast, which includes lead actress and singer Kylie McNeill performing the film’s original songs, translated from Japanese, also makes the dub one of the best I’ve heard in years. “Belle” released this week on HBO Max, and it’s well worth the time of any Miyazaki fan or those who’ve been acquainted with recent fantasy hits like Makoto Shinkai’s “Your Name” and “Weathering With You.”
The podcast industry has ballooned into a powerful pillar of the modern media industry, but a dark secret of the guest appearance circuit is the rampant pay-to-play. Some guests are forking over as much as $50,000 to appear on popular pods, according to a new report from Bloomberg, with hosts and guests rarely informing listeners of the deal. The story sheds light on what appears to be a widespread practice in podcast categories like wellness, cryptocurrency and business, undermining the integrity of shows that are effectively running advertising without disclosure.
HBO’s new documentary series “The Anarchists” is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the stunning growth of a fringe subculture of anarchists who fled the U.S. to Acapulco, Mexico, to try to build their utopian world: no state authority, taxes or drug laws. The director, Todd Schramke, is deep within the community, having befriended many of its high-profile personalities over six years of filming. The series, which airs its fifth episode on Sunday, offers a profoundly intimate look at the personal lives of a sprawling anarchist community, its flagship conference in Acapulco and how the whole affair devolves into crime and tragedy.
A version of this story also appeared in today’s Entertainment newsletter; subscribe here.
Nick Statt is Protocol’s video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com.
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