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We’re back to start the year off with a very special live interview with Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan, which we taped in front of a terrific audience at Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas during CES. Razer is obviously best known for making mice, keyboards, and gaming PCs in its signature black and bright green, with a smattering of RGB LEDs to set everything off. But the company always makes splashy announcements at CES, and this year was no different — and along with the hype, there was plenty of controversy. This year, Razer earned those splashy headlines and more than a little controversy for something it calls Project Ava, an AI companion that has a physical presence in the real world as an anime hologram that sits in a jar on your desk. Ava is powered by, you guessed it, Elon Musk’s Grok. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. There are a lot of choices bundled up in all of that, and Razer can’t really fall back on the “it’s just a prototype” defense. It’s taking $20 “reservations” and entirely expects to ship this thing, potentially even this year. So I spent a good chunk of time in this interview asking Min some very obvious questions, to which I’m not sure I got very satisfying answers. I really wanted to know if Min and Razer had really thought through the implications of building AI companions, after a string of stories detailing the mental health issues chatbots have caused for so many people. And of course, I wanted to know why Min and Razer had chosen Grok, which is facing outrage around the world for allowing users to create deepfaked pornographic images of real women and children. Min says they chose Grok for its conversational capabilities. But he was also not very convinced by the notion that products like this always end up being turned into creepy sexual objects, despite an entire year of headlines about AI psychosis and people turning chatbots into romantic partners. That exchange really set the tone for the rest of my conversation with Min, which focused on why exactly he’s pushing Razer so hard into AI when it does not seem at all clear that the core gamer demographic wants any of this. The gaming community at large has been absolutely rocked by the AI art debate that’s ripped through the broader industry in the past 12 months, with concerns over labor, copyright, and even just experimental AI use in game development putting some of the industry’s most beloved studios into full-blown crisis mode. Gamers themselves are fairly hostile toward AI, which you can see in the comments on Razer’s own CES AI posts. So I asked Min about that, and how he would know if he had made the right bet here in the face of all this pushback. As you can tell, there was a lot of back and forth here, and this was a really good conversation. Min and I really dug into some of the biggest issues in tech and gaming, themes that are going to be central throughout 2026. It’s also great to do these kinds of episodes live in front of an audience. I think it’s going to give you a lot to think about. Okay: Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Hello, welcome to Decoder. I’m Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I’m talking with Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan. Welcome, Min. Thank you for having me. Nailed it. Thank you to our audience. We are live at Brooklyn Bowl at CES. I’m very excited to be doing this in front of a live audience. You’re going to hear them throughout the show because Min has no shortage of extremely controversial things to say. We’ll see, we’ll see. I was promised “extremely controversial.” Oh, is that right? I mean, that’s what they told me. Let’s get into it. You’ve made a bunch of announcements here at CES. You’ve obviously been with Razer for a long time. You founded Razer, and you’re…

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