Welcome to the high and low podcast. This is your host, Bravo, Bravo, Ducking, Bravo,

and today we are gathered to review the book, Careless People, a cautionary tale of power,

greed, and lost idealism. The author is Sarah Wynne Williams. The book is described as a

captivating story of one woman's life and

career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet. Careful people gives

you a front row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped the world events in recent decades

and the people who made them. Careless people. I heard about this book when I saw Sarah Wyn Williams doing interviews

to hype it in other countries. And what she was saying was so shocking that I had to watch

it twice and be like, is this real? And once I confirmed it, yes, she is a real person and she really

wrote this book, I did a rush delivery. I moved it to the top of the queue for the books I'm reading. And I'm going to review this book the same way I kind of go over Real Housewives episodes every now and then where I read a little bit, then we talk about it. Read a little bit and we talk about it. And I'm doing it that way because I anticipate a book that is chalk full of tea. Now, immediately right off the bat, we find out why she named this book, Careless People. There's a quote from the Great

Gatsby when you open it. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smashed up things and

creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was

that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made. I like this lady already.

While I'm five pages in, I'm in the prolog and I really like the way this lady writes. She tells a story about being at a 2015 summit of the Americas, where nobody gave a shit about Mark Zuckerberg, and he was very upset by that. So she's trying to introduce him to people, and she's trying to get him to sit somewhere next to someone he actually wants to talk to, so she's moving

place cards around and somebody keeps going back and fixing them. And some people are straight up saying, like, no, I don't have any interest in talking to Mark Zuckerberg. And he's like within earshot, which, I mean, I love that for him. And then that they escape out of there through like this tunnel where horses had come out of because they just didn't want to be at this meeting and nobody wanted them there. And it's at that point that she says, I was there for seven years. If I had to sum it up in a sentence, I would say it started as a hopeful comedy and ended in darkness and regret. I mean, isn't that what every job is? Don't you start every job hopeful? And then by the end of it, you're like, this is hell. She said, I was one of the people

advising the company's top leaders, Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg, as they were

inventing how the company would deal with governments around the world. By the end, I watched

hopelessly as they sucked up to authoritarian regimes like China's and casually misled the public.

I was on a private jet with Mark the day he finally understood

that Facebook probably did put Donald Trump in the White House and came to his own dark

conclusions from that. But then she goes on to say that working there, working on policy,

it wasn't Machiavellian, it wasn't, you know, brilliant and strategic that instead, she says it was

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