Chris Dixon leads crypto investing at the storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z. He’s responsible for leading funding rounds for Coinbase, which went public about a year ago, the NFT marketplace OpenSea, and Yuga Labs, which is behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club among others. He is also a prolific user of Twitter, where he posts lengthy threads about crypto and web3. He is at once one of the biggest investors in the space, and its biggest booster.

Links
Decoder is nominated for a Webby. Vote!
1000 True Fans
My first impressions of web3
A comprehensive breakdown of the Epic v. Apple ruling
SEC v Howey Co.

Transcript
https://www.theverge.com/e/22784768

Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Sr Audio Director is Andrew Marino and our Executive Producer is Eleanor Donovan.  
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Chris Dixon thinks web3 is the future of the internet. Is it?

Decoder is a show from The Verge about big ideas — and other problems. Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks to a diverse cast of innovators and policymakers at the frontiers of business and technology to reveal how they’re navigating an ever-changing landscape, what keeps them up at night, and what it all means for our shared future.

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For nearly 20 years now, the web has been Google’s platform; we’ve all just lived on it. I think of Decoder as a show for people trying to build things, and a lot of people have built their things on that platform. For a lot of small businesses and content creators, that’s suddenly not stable anymore. The number one question I have for anyone building things on someone else’s platform is: What are you going to do when that platform changes the rules?

Links: 

How Google is killing independent sites like ours | HouseFresh

HouseFresh has virtually disappeared from Google Search results. Now what? | HouseFresh

Google Is Killing Retro Dodo & Other Independent Sites | Retro Dodo

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web | The Verge

Will A.I. Break the Internet? Or Save It? | The New York Times

Google confirms the leaked Search documents are real |The Verge

An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them | SparkToro

Mountain Weekly News

Telly Visions

E-ride Hero

That Fit Friend


Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google Zero is here. Now what?

Today, I’m talking with Joseph Cox, one of the best cybersecurity reporters around and a co-founder of the new media site 404 Media. Joseph has a new book coming out in June called Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s basically a caper, but with the FBI running a phone network. For real. 

Joseph walks us through the fascinating world of underground criminal phone networks, and how secure messaging, a tech product beloved by drug traffickers, evolved from the days of BlackBerry Messenger to Signal. Along the way, the FBI got involved with its very own startup, ANOM, as part of one of the most effective trojan horse operations in the history of cybersecurity. Joseph’s book is a great read, but it also touches on a lot of things we talk about a lot here on Decoder. So this conversation was a fun one. 

Links: 

Dark Wire by Joseph Cox | Hachette Book Group


How Vice became ‘a fucking clown show’ | The Verge


Cyber Official Speaks Out, Reveals Mobile Network Attacks in US | 404 Media


Revealed: The Country that Secretly Wiretapped the World for the FBI | 404 Media


How Secure Phones for Criminals Are Sold on Instagram | Motherboard


A Peek Inside the Phone Company Secretly Used in an FBI Honeypot | Motherboard


The FBI secretly launched an encrypted messaging system for criminals | The Verge


Canadian police have had master key to BlackBerry's encryption since 2010 | The Verge



Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How the FBI built its own smartphone company to hack the criminal underworld

Today, I’m talking to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who joined the show the day after the big Google I/O developer conference. Google’s focus during the conference was on how it’s building AI into virtually all of its products. If you’re a Decoder listener, you’ve heard me talk about this idea a lot over the past year: I call it “Google Zero,” and I’ve been asking a lot of web and media CEOs what would happen to their businesses if their Google traffic were to go to zero. In a world where AI powers search with overviews and summaries, that’s a real possibility. What then happens to the web? 

I’ve talked to Sundar quite a bit over the past few years, and this was the most fired up I’ve ever seen him. I think you can really tell that there is a deep tension between the vision Google has for the future — where AI magically makes us smarter, more productive, more artistic — and the very real fears and anxieties creators and website owners are feeling right now about how search has changed and how AI might swallow the internet forever, and that he’s wrestling with that tension.

Links: 

Google and OpenAI are racing to rewire the internet — Command Line


Google I/O 2024: everything announced — The Verge


Google is redesigning its search engine, and it’s AI all the way down — The Verge


Project Astra is the future of AI at Google — The Verge


Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? — The Verge


YouTube is going to start cracking down on AI clones of musicians — The Verge


AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born — The Verge


How Google is killing independent sites like ours — HouseFresh


Inside the First 'SEO Heist' of the AI Era — Business Insider


Google’s Sundar Pichai talks Search, AI, and dancing with Microsoft — Decoder



Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23922415

Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Google's Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web

Last week, TikTok filed a lawsuit against the US government claiming the divest-or-ban law is unconstitutional — a case it needs to win in order to keep operating under Bytedance’s ownership. There’s a lot of back and forth between the facts and the law here: Some of the legal claims are complex and sit in tension with a long history of prior attempts to regulate speech and the internet, while the simple facts of what TikTok has already promised to do around the world contradict some its arguments. Verge editors Sarah Jeong and Alex Heath join me to explain what it all means.

Links: 


TikTok and Bytedance v Merrick Garland (PDF)

TikTok sues the US government over ban | The Verge

Senate passes TikTok ban bill, sending it to President Biden’s desk | The Verge

The legal challenges that lie ahead for TikTok — in both the US and China | The Verge


Why the TikTok ban won’t solve the US’s online privacy problems. | Decoder 

Biden signs TikTok ‘ban’ bill into law, starting the clock for ByteDance to divest it | The Verge


Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TikTok's big bet to fight the ban bill

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has been at the top of my list of people I’ve wanted to talk to for the show since we first launched — he’s led Adobe for nearly 17 years now, but he doesn’t do too many wide-ranging interviews. I’ve always thought Adobe was an underappreciated company — its tools sit at the center of nearly every major creative workflow you can think of — and with generative AI poised to change the very nature of creative software, it seemed particularly important to talk with Shantanu now.

Adobe sits right at the center of the whole web of tensions, especially as the company has evolved its business and business model over time. And now, AI really changes what it means to make and distribute creative work. Not many people are seeing revenue returns on it just yet and there are the fundamental philosophical challenges of adding AI to photo and video tools. What does it mean when a company like Adobe, which makes the tools so many people use to make their art, sees the creative process as a step in a marketing chain, instead of a goal in and of itself?

Links: 


How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao 


Adobe Launches Creative Cloud (2012)


What was Photoshop like in 1994? 

Photoshop’s Generative Fill tool turns vacation photos into nightmares - The Verge

New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and others sue OpenAI and Microsoft - The Verge

The FAIR Act: A New Right to Protect Artists in the Age of AI | Adobe Blog

Adobe’s Firefly generative AI tools are now generally available - The Verge

This Wacom AI debacle has certainly taken a turn. - The Verge


Transcript: 
https://www.theverge.com/e/23917997

Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Chris Dixon thinks web3 is the future of the internet. Is it?

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