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NPR's Book of the Day

'Private Equity' analyzes the ethical and personal costs of a career in finance

NPR's Book of the Day

NPR

Books, Arts

4.2 β€’ 672 Ratings

πŸ—“οΈ 26 February 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There's a moment in Carrie Sun's memoir, Private Equity, when she remembers trying to answer a text for her high-pressure hedge fund job while running on the treadmill. It ended poorly β€” and Sun says, looking back, it was a good metaphor for the toll her career was taking on her life. In today's episode, Sun speaks with Here & Now's Scott Tong about the moral, mental and physical sacrifices we normalize for work, and why maybe that's not such a good thing.


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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. A great poet once wrote the lines,

0:08.1

Work sucks, I know. And today's author is backing that up with her own personal story.

0:13.6

Carrie's memoir, Private Equity, is about her time in the trenches of high finance. And in this

0:18.9

interview with here and now Scott Tong, yeah, they get to

0:22.0

talking about the nitty gritty of Wall Street, the high pressure stakes and all that. But they get

0:27.3

to something more universal and really challenging how we see our self-worth in our jobs and

0:32.9

what we do for money. Because maybe it's not work itself that inherently sucks, but our personal relationship

0:39.8

to it.

0:40.5

That's after the break.

0:42.2

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

0:46.9

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, sources and methods.

0:53.5

NPR reporters on the ground bring you

0:55.3

stories of real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.

1:00.8

Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:06.3

So what happens when your dream job begins to haunt you, begins to chew away at you, first

1:12.2

physically and then emotionally, and you kind of don't realize it for a while? Well, let's ask our

1:18.0

next guest. Carrie Sun, MIT Brainiac, takes a job as a personal assistant to a Wall Street

1:24.0

Titan, and before long, she finds herself sucked into the vortex of high finance.

1:29.1

Luxury purse and elite living that, you know, like a big investment, becomes hard to unwind.

1:34.4

Carrie's son writes about this in her memoir, Private Equity, and she joins us now from the NPR

1:39.5

studio in New York.

1:40.9

Carrie, good to have you.

...

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