On a recent episode of the Verge podcast Decoder, editor-in-chief Nilay Patel spoke with Sasan Goodarzi, the CEO of the financial software juggernaut, Intuit. It's a good episode overall, though perhaps not as shocking or juicy as, say, Patel's 2023 interview with Substack CEO Chris Best.
But that didn't stop Intuit from reaching out to Patel after the interview and demanding that he duplicitously edit the content on the company's behalf. As Patel writes:
I got a note from Rick Heineman, the chief communications officer at Intuit, who called the line of questioning and my tone "inappropriate," "egregious," and "disappointing" and demanded that we delete that entire section of the recording. I mean, literally — he wrote a long email that ended with "at the very least the end portion of your interview should be deleted."
We don't do that here at The Verge. As many of our listeners and readers know, we have a very explicit and very strict ethics policy. The most important thing to note is that we never allow anyone to preview or approve interview questions, and we certainly do not allow anyone to review or alter the work that we publish. I told this to Rick, and he came back and asked that we "delete that which takes away from the conversation," which he defined as "raised voices" or us "speaking over each other," so that "listeners understand your question and the answer Sasan gave."
I have to be honest with you — that's one of the weirdest requests I've ever gotten.
If you don't want to listen to the full episode, Patel has excerpted the relevant transcript section on The Verge's site. The basic gist is that Patel—in what genuinely seems like a pretty friendly back-and-forth!—asks the CEO of a company that financially benefits from a complicated US tax system why he spends millions of dollars on lobbying to keep things unnecessarily complicated. It's a fair question! And I would argue that the most damning thing about Goodarzi's response is how perfectly boilerplate and PR-friendly it is. He's clearly had some good media training, and largely attempts to talk around the subject—though his refusal to address it head-on speaks volume by itself.
At worst, the most damning thing that Goodarzi openly reveals in the course of his response is how much he has drank the "private-industry-is-always-superior-to-public-services" kool-aid. Which should not be surprising! Of course he believes that; it's how he became CEO. It's impossible to make a man understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
From Intuit's perspective, I suspect the problem has less to do with Goodarzi's response—and more with the fact that Patel bluntly pointed out the obvious hypocrisy the company has exploited for years.
Fortunately, Decoder refused to give in to Intuit's demands.
Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode [Nilay Patel / The Verge]
