In October 2024, a business interview produced an argument about who owned the interview. Nilay Patel had asked Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi about TurboTax and the company’s tax-policy lobbying. Afterward, Intuit’s communications chief asked The Verge to delete the disputed section. The published episode’s subtitle was two words: “We declined.” For anyone wondering what Decoder sells, this was a useful demonstration. A guest could bring an explanation. The guest could not buy the final edit.
- Business interviews that follow the reporting lines.
- Executive answers alongside reporter-led explainers.
- Free audio, written transcripts, and video; ad-free audio for Verge subscribers.
Decoder is The Verge’s podcast about business, technology, and power, hosted by its editor-in-chief. Its subject is the distance between what a company says it wants and the machinery it builds to get there. That distance can explain a surprising amount about the apps, services, and policies that end up in everybody else’s life.
The org chart gives the game away
Imagine asking an executive why a product disappointed its customers. There are plenty of comfortable answers: market conditions, unexpected demand, a difficult transition. Now ask who reports to whom. Ask who controls the budget. Ask how a disagreement becomes a decision. You have moved from a story about intentions to a description of authority.
Those are Decoder’s recurring moves. Across interviews, Patel asks about organizational structure and decision-making. Repetition gives the listener something a single inspirational conversation cannot: a way to compare. Does this leader describe a framework? Can they explain its trade-offs? Do the product decisions match the structure they have just described?
In a 2026 mailbag conversation, Patel explained his ambition to turn those answers into something useful for young people entering work. The appeal is concrete. Listeners can learn the vocabulary of the organizations they must navigate. A reporting line, suddenly, becomes a clue.
Consider the difference between a company organized around products and one organized around functions. The first arrangement may make ownership easier to identify; the second may concentrate expertise. Neither tells you, by itself, whether a company is well run. But each suggests a different place to look when teams disagree. That is the attraction of Decoder’s approach: it makes an abstract business conversation easier to interrogate.
A new show with an old address
Decoder arrived in October 2020 as a relaunch of Recode Decode, Kara Swisher’s interview show. Mark Cuban was its first guest. That lineage matters: the project began with an existing podcast audience and publishing infrastructure. It did not have to teach the internet that executive interviews were a thing.
Patel brought the experience of running a technology newsroom and interviewing the people who build its subjects. Decoder’s expertise sits at the intersection of management, product design, and policy. A conversation can move from corporate organization to government rules because both help determine what the company can actually do.
Free to hear. Paid to skip the ads.
The product is available in several forms: audio in podcast apps, interview transcripts on The Verge, and video on Decoder’s dedicated YouTube channel. A commuter can listen; someone preparing for a meeting can search a transcript; a viewer can watch the exchange unfold. Each format gives the same conversation a different job.
There are also different customers. Listeners supply attention. Advertisers pay to reach that attention. Verge subscribers receive ad-free Decoder as part of a wider publication bundle. The podcast therefore has a role in both advertising and subscriptions, while drawing on a newsroom that already reports on its guests.
Free listening includes advertising. Ad-free audio sits inside The Verge subscription.
For context, The Verge’s December 2024 subscription launch was priced at $7 a month or $50 a year. Those were launch prices for the whole publication. The important business choice is the bundle: a regular podcast gives readers another reason to maintain a relationship with the publisher.
For a listener, the immediate cost is time and attention. Choose an episode around a problem you already have, rather than treating the entire archive as homework. For an advertiser, the appeal is the context: people listening closely to a business conversation. Those two interests can coexist, but the interruption is part of the listener’s experience. The ad-free option puts a price on removing that friction.
The audience asked for a picture
In February 2024, Decoder added a regular Thursday explainer, with executive interviews on Mondays. The first Thursday installment examined the electric-vehicle transition with transportation editor Andy Hawkins. The change gave the show another way to answer a question: bring in the reporter who has been investigating it.
The next adjustments came from a different source. In their 2025 year-end episode, producers Kate Cox and Nick Statt recalled two frequent audience requests: YouTube and an ad-free option. Both arrived that October. The friction was practical. People wanted to watch, and paying readers wanted fewer interruptions.
That is a modest, useful lesson in changing a media product. Preserve the conversation people came for; improve how they receive it. The team also described full video for Thursday explainers as more resource-intensive. Adding a camera feed is a production decision with costs, rather than a checkbox on a distribution plan.
Take the questions to work
Decoder occupies a particular corner of business media. Hard Fork offers another route into technology news, Pivot into business commentary, and Acquired into company histories. Decoder’s recurring structure questions are especially useful when you want to examine a present-day leader’s account of how the organization operates.
Try borrowing the method. Before a project begins, ask who decides when two teams disagree. Ask what success will be measured against. After a failed launch, ask which assumption changed and who had the authority to respond. These are applications of the interview habit, not promises that a podcast can fix your workplace.
“How do you make decisions?”
Nilay Patel’s recurring Decoder question
The autumn 2026 lineup shows the range: an Atlassian interview about enterprise AI and organization, a conversation with Senator Adam Schiff about regulation, and a reporting-led discussion of a Utah data-center dispute. Business decisions spill into public life. The show follows them there.
The method has limits. An executive’s explanation is still testimony, and a clear framework does not prove good results. The format depends on a guest’s willingness to answer and a host’s willingness to follow up. Listen for gaps, compare claims with reporting, and resist converting one CEO’s preferences into universal advice. Then take the useful question into your next meeting. See what happens when someone has to answer it.