Recode Decode, Hosted By Kara Swisher

Today, we’re going to talk about reality, and whether we can label photos and videos to protect our shared understanding of the world around us. To do this, I sat down with Verge reporter Jess Weatherbed, who covers creative tools for us — a space that’s been totally upended by generative AI. We’ve been talking about how the photos and videos taken by our phones are getting more and more processed for years on The Verge. Here in 2026, we’re in the middle of a full-on reality crisis, as fake and manipulated ultra-believable images and videos flood onto social platforms at scale. So Jess and I discussed the limitations of AI labeling standards like C2PA, and why social media execs like Instagram boss Adam Mosseri are now sounding the alarm.  Read the full transcript on The Verge. Links:  This system can sort real pictures from AI fakes — why aren’t we using it? | The Verge You can’t trust your eyes to tell you what’s real, says Instagram | The Verge Instagram’s boss is missing the point about A

Today, I’m talking with Allan Thygesen, who is the CEO of Docusign. You know Docusign, it’s the platform that lets you sign stuff online. It turns out 7,000 people work there, which is one of those facts floating around that’s always felt like perfect Decoder bait. What are all those people doing? And what kind of product roadmap does a company like Docusign even need? Alan has only been CEO of Docusign for three years, so he has some interesting perspective on where the company was, the changes he wanted to make, and where he thinks this is all going. Hint: it involves AI.  Read the full transcript on The Verge. Links:  Docusign's AI will help you understand what you're signing | Fast Company Docusign on ‘transformational journey,’ CEO Says | Bloomberg How Docusign Is modernizing the age-old business contract | Barron’s Docusign unveils next-gen eSignature with AI | Docusign Docusign brings its contract AI to ChatGPT | Docusign Interview with Docusign CEO Allan Thygesen | Motley F

Today, we’re talking about the bidding war over Warner Bros. Discovery, which is the biggest story in the entertainment industry right now, and for good reason. It has pretty much everything you could want in a buzzy Hollywood saga — big names, big money, and big drama. To help me make sense of it all, I wanted to talk with Julia Alexander, a Verge alum and now media correspondent at Puck News who’s one of the best in the business at analyzing corporate strategy, Hollywood, and what’s next in entertainment. Julia really helped me break down why Netflix is the clear front runner to acquire Warner Bros., why David Ellison of Paramount Skydance is so desperate to win, and, perhaps most importantly, how the tech industry fits into this puzzle. Links:  Netflix is buying Warner Bros. for $83 billion | The Verge Paramount launches hostile $108 billion bid to snatch Warner | The Verge Netflix revises Warner Bros. bid to an all-cash offer | The Verge Why Netflix needs Warner Bros. | Puck News The

Experian is one of those giant multinationals convoluted enough to have multiple CEOs all over the world, so first I asked Alex Lintner, Experian's CEO of technology and software solutions, to dig into the classic Decoder questions and explain how all of that even works. He oversees big operations like security and privacy, and now, of course, AI. If you want to participate in the modern economy — rent an apartment, buy a car, get a job, etc  — you’re part of Experian’s ecosystem, whether you like it or not. At its heart, Experian’s core service is data about people and the choices they make. And this extremely valuable data weirdly makes Experian a part of your life  — a life that becomes much smoother if the data the company collects about you tells a good story.  Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links:  Roughly half of Americans are knowledgeable about personal finance | Pew Research How Americans view data privacy | Pew Research Consumer voices on credit reports and scores

Grok, the chatbot made by Elon Musk’s xAI, is able to make all manner of AI-generated images on demand, including non-consensual intimate images of women and minors. It's the kind of "controversy" that would have completely sunk a platform five or 10 years ago, but now it seems clear that Elon wants Grok to be able to do this. A lot of people feel like someone should be able to do something about a one-click harassment machine like this. But who has that power, and what they can do with it, is a deeply complicated question,tied up in the thorny mess of history that is content moderation and the legal precedents that underpin it. So I invited Riana Pfefferkorn, from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, to come talk me through it. Links:  Grok’s gross AI deepfakes problem | The Verge Grok is undressing children — can the law stop it? | The Verge Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards | The Verge Senate passes a bill to let nonconsensual deepfake victims sue | Th

We’re back to start the year 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. At this year’s show, Razer made headlines 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. It’s powered by, you guessed it, Elon Musk’s Grok.  There are a whole lot of choices bundled up in all of that, as well as Razer’s decision to go all-in on AI at a moment when the gaming community is outright rejecting it. So Min and I really got into it. I think you’ll have a lot to think about with this one.  Links:  Razer is making an AI anime waifu hologram for your desk | The Verge Razer thinks you’d rather have AI headphones instead of glasses | The Verge Baldur’s Gate 3 studio says it won’t use AI for concept art or writing | The Verge In 2025, AI became a lightning rod for gamers and devs | The Verge Razer p

Hey everyone, it’s Nilay. We’re settling back in here after the winter break and CES, and we’ll have new episodes for you starting next Monday. In the meantime, we wanted to highlight one of our favorites from last year: an interview with journalist and author Megan Greenwell about her book Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream. My conversation with Megan last year was extremely illuminating as to why private equity does what it does to industries like healthcare, media and real estate — and just how deeply it's affecting the everyday lives of Americans everywhere. It's a really great conversation that feels just as timely today as it did last summer. Enjoy.  Links:  Bad Company | HarperCollins How private equity kills companies and communities | Decoder Private equity bought out your doctor and bankrupted Toys ‘R’ Us | Decoder Private equity makes its first college sports play | Axios Private equity Is gutting America — and getting away with it | NYT I was

We’ve got something special for you today. It’s my friend Hank Green, longtime YouTuber, science educator, and viral TikTok star, interviewing Dropout CEO Sam Reich.  Hank did this episode as a guest host over the summer, and it’s a fan favorite, bringing together two internet personalities that’ve known each other for a very long time and who have a lot of inside knowledge about how the internet, Hollywood, and entertainment all intertwine. Links:  Dropout’s Sam Reich on business, comedy, and keeping the internet weird | Decoder How Dropout broke through in 2025 | AV Club Dropout CEO on launching ‘Superfan’ tier, crossing 1M subscribers | Variety How CollegeHumor reinvented itself for the new internet age | People CollegeHumor shaped online comedy. What went wrong? [2020] | Wired ‘I believe in this enough to try to do it myself’ [2020] | Digiday Jacob Wysocki needed a minute to process that Game Changer | Vulture Game Changer smartly weaponizes its online following | Masha

Hey everyone, it’s Nilay. Decoder is on our holiday break. We’ve got a lot of fun stuff coming up in the New Year, though, including a special Decoder Live at CES. Stay tuned for more details, including how to RSVP for free tickets. In the meantime, we’ve got a great episode of the podcast Channels, featuring two of the best media reporters in the business. Host Peter Kafka sat down with Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw to talk about the bidding war between Paramount SkyDance and Netflix over Warner Bros. Discovery. It’s the biggest story in entertainment right now, and this episode breaks down everything you need to know about the contentious acquisition.  Links:  "Neither Side Is Used to Losing”: Lucas Shaw on the battle for Warner Bros. | Channels Five things we’re getting wrong about Warner Bros.′ Netflix deal | Bloomberg Warner Bros.’ bidders brace for a fight that will last months | Bloomberg WBD wants its shareholders to reject Paramount’s latest offer | The Verge There are no good outcomes

Hey everyone! Decoder senior producers Kate Cox and Nick Statt here. We’ve had a big year, including nearly 100 episodes, a new YouTube channel, an ad-free podcast feed, and a slate of great guest hosts while Nilay was on parental leave. It’s been a lot! We’ve also had a lot of great questions and comments this year from you, our audience. So we pulled together all the feedback we’ve received on topics like CarPlay, Monday episode guest suggestions, and — of course — AI. And then we turned the tables on Nilay to ask him his thoughts on the past 12 months: What we liked, what we want to improve, and how he’s making decisions for Decoder in the new year.  Links:  Answering your biggest Decoder questions, 2024 edition | Decoder The DoorDash Problem | Decoder How decision making changes when AI answers are cheap and (too) easy | Decoder Why GM will give you Gemini — but not CarPlay | Decoder Rivian CEO: ‘We’re really convicted’ about skipping CarPlay | Decoder How SharkNinja took over th

Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar was last on the show in 2022 — just one month before ChatGPT launched and upended literally everything for Stack Overflow in a deeply existential way.  He called a company emergency, reallocated about 10 percent of the staff to figure out solutions to the ChatGPT problem, and made some pretty huge decisions about structure and organization to navigate that change — all of it pure Decoder bait. Links:  2025 Developer Survey | Stack Overflow The people who make your apps go to Stack Overflow for answers | Decoder OpenAI, Stack Overflow partner to bring technical knowledge to ChatGPT | The Verge Stack Overflow feeds programmers’ answers to AI whether they like it or not | The Verge Stack Overflow cuts 28 percent of its staff | TechCrunch AI-generated answers temporarily banned on Stack Overflow | The Verge Stack Overflow’s strike is over, but problems persist | Jon Ericson A new era of Stack Overflow | Stack Overflow Subscribe to The

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and I agree it seems like democracy is on the line right now, especially around the First Amendment and the increasing pressure the Trump administration — especially FCC chair Brendan Carr — is putting on free speech. I also had a lot of questions for Sen. Markey about the supposed TikTok ban, which no one seems to know anything about, and all the other problems we’re facing in 2025. Links:  Even the lawmakers behind the TikTok ban have no idea what’s going on | The Verge Carr’s FCC is an anti-consumer, rights-trampling harassment machine | The Verge The FCC is a weapon in Trump’s war on free speech | Decoder Here’s the Trump EO that would ban state AI laws | The Verge Silicon Valley is rallying behind a guy who sucks | The Verge Silicon Valley’s man in the White House is benefiting himself and his friends | The New York Times Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the

Today, I’m talking with Willem Avé, who’s the head of product at Square. You know Square — it was started by billionaire Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame more than 15 years ago, and it got big on the back of that little magnetic reader that once plugged into the headphone jack of the iPhone and let small businesses accept credit cards. Nowadays, of course, Square is more than a credit card reader, and sadly, the headphone jack is ancient history. The company itself is now part of parent organization called Block, which is made up of a very interesting mix of financial services like Afterpay, Cash App, and, yes, the streaming music service Tidal. So Willem and I really got into where Square is headed next with AI and automation, why he’s excited about crypto and Bitcoin specifically, and even what it means that the US is discontinuing the penny.  Links:  Square’s public roadmap | Square Jack Dorsey is reorganizing the entirety of Block | Fortune How Block turned Square into a financial services giant

Today, I’m talking with Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field about some of the people responsible for studying AI and deciding in what ways it might… well, ruin the world. Those folks work at Anthropic as part of a group called the societal impacts team, which Hayden just spent time with for a profile she published this week on The Verge.  The team is just nine people out of more than 2,000 who work at Anthropic, and their only job, as the team members themselves say, is to investigate and publish quote "inconvenient truths” about AI. That of course brings up a whole host of problems, the most important of which is whether this team can remain independent, or even exist at all, as it publicizes findings about Anthropic's own products that might be unflattering or even politically fraught.  Links:  It’s their job to keep AI from destroying everything | The Verge Anthropic details how it measures Claude’s wokeness | The Verge White House orders tech companies to make AI bigoted again | The Verge

IBM was instrumental to the entire 20th century of computing — but it's a lot harder for most of us to see what it's been up to during this century. That's because it's fully an enterprise company, and CEO Arvind Krishna says that business is booming. But there’s a huge change coming to that business as well, as Watson-style deep learning has given way to LLMs and generative AI. Sure, Arvind says IBM got there a little too early. But he doesn’t seem concerned that IBM would be stuck on the sidelines.  Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links:  Computer wins on ‘Jeopardy!’: Trivial, it’s not | New York Times (2011) What Ever Happened to IBM’s Watson? | New York Times (2021) America Forgot About IBM Watson. Is ChatGPT Next? | The Atlantic IBM acquires Red Hat | The Verge IBM and Groq Partner to Accelerate Enterprise AI Deployment | IBM IBM’s Jerry Chow on the future of quantum computing | Decoder IBM: quantum computing partnership with AMD is bearing fruit | The Verge

Hey everyone, it's Nilay. It’s been great being back in the Decoder chair this fall, and we’ve got a bunch of great episodes coming up to round out the year. But the production team is off this week for the holiday, so today, we’re going to share this episode of The Gray Area with you. This time, host Sean Illing is talking to data scientist Hannah Ritchie — about climate science and how although the crisis is definitely real, it’s not all bad news. There are actually a lot of great indicators out there in the data that show real progress in limiting emissions and boosting clean energy. It’s a nuanced, hopeful take at a time when, admittedly, it kind of feels like all the news about everything is pretty doom and gloom. Links: We can have growth while fighting climate change | Vox The Grey Area | Apple Podcasts Clearing the Air | Hannah Ritchie Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Ne

Okay, let’s talk about AI and what I’ve been calling the “DoorDash problem.” This is about to define the next battle in AI, and it might completely transform not only how you order a sandwich, but also how the entire internet economy works in general. If you’ve been listening to the show this past year, you’ve heard me bring up the Doordash problem nearly a dozen times. I’ve been asking CEOs and leaders in tech and AI about it any chance I can get. Now, a lawsuit between Amazon and Perplexity is bringing this exact issue to the forefront, kicking off a major AI browser fight that could define the future of agents and the web itself.  Links:  Amazon and Perplexity have kicked off the great AI web browser fight | The Verge Amazon sues to stop Perplexity from using AI tool to buy stuff | Bloomberg Amazon's Cease and Desist letter to Perplexity | Amazon Bullying Is not innovation | Perplexity Amazon gets hit by a Comet | Platformer Humans Only! Why Amazon doesn’t want AI shoppers | NY Ma

Jamie Simonoff, founder of Ring, won't let me call him the CEO. He says his title is and always has been 'chief inventor.' His mission with Ring is to make the world safer, and he has a pretty expansive view of what that means. He told The Verge last month he thought Ring could 'almost zero out crime' in some neighborhoods within a year or two. That's a big promise — and also potentially a very troubling one, as we face the erosion of privacy and a surveillance panopticon that only ever seems to expand. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links:  Ring CEO: Cameras can almost ‘zero out crime’ within 12 months | The Verge Ring plans to scan everyone’s face at the door | The Washington Post Ring’s Search Party is on by default; should you opt out? | The Verge Ring now works with video surveillance company Flock | The Verge US spy agencies getting a one-stop shop to buy personal data | The Intercept Do Video Doorbells Really Prevent Crime? | Scientific American Ding D

So a lot of people think AI is a bubble. So we sent Verge senior reporter Liz Lopatto out to report on the AI bubble  — whether it's real, how it might pop, and what all of this means. She’s joining the show today to talk about a particular company that sits right in the middle of all of it. That company is called CoreWeave, and Liz has spent considerable time diving into its history, its financials, and the truly fascinating story that all of that tells us about the modern AI boom. Links:  CoreWeave CEO plays down concerns about AI-spending bubble | WSJ Why debt funding is ratcheting up the risks of the AI boom | NYT Inside the data centers that train AI and drain the electrical grid | The New Yorker How a crypto miner transformed Into the multibillion-dollar backbone of AI | Wired CoreWeave signs $14 billion AI infrastructure deal with Meta | Reuters CoreWeave, Nvidia sign $6.3 billion cloud computing capacity order | Reuters Nvidia turned CoreWeave into major player in AI yea

Today, I’m talking with a very special guest: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Tim is a legend in the history of the internet. He created HTML and HTTP. It doesn’t really get more foundational than that — Tim was there at the very very beginning of the modern internet. He also has a new memoir out called This Is For Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web. So Tim joined the show to talk about the state of the web, as well as his current work at the decentralization startup Inrupt, and, of course, where AI fits into the conversation.  Read the full interview on The Verge. Links:  This Is For Everyone | Macmillan The Semantic Web | W3C Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, now wants to save it | The New Yorker Why I gave the world wide web away for free | The Guardian Amazon, Perplexity kick off the great AI web browser fight | The Verge Web War III | The Verge Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’ | The Verge Cloudflare will now