Joe: Alright Lewis, I'm going to say the name of a company: Facebook. You have to describe its internal culture in just three words, based on the book we're talking about today. Lewis: Okay... 'Cult,' 'Chaos,' and... 'Genocide'? Joe: Wow. You went there. And honestly? You're not wrong. That's the terrifying arc we're exploring today. We're diving into Sarah Wynn-Williams's explosive 2025 memoir, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. Lewis: And this is the book that Meta, Facebook's parent company, actually tried to legally block from being promoted, right? That's a pretty big endorsement. Joe: Exactly. Wynn-Williams wasn't just any employee; she was a former New Zealand diplomat who became Facebook's director of global public policy. She had a front-row seat, and the book became a number one bestseller despite the legal battle, largely because of what she reveals. Lewis: A diplomat inside Facebook. That’s a fascinating combination. It’s like sending an etiquette coach to a pirate ship. Joe: That is the perfect analogy. And the book starts not with a policy debate, but with a bizarre, almost funny story that perfectly captures that pirate ship energy.

Joe: The author, Sarah, finds herself in Panama in 2015. Her mission is to get Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, to engage with world leaders at the Summit of the Americas. She manages to get him an invitation to a state dinner held exclusively for heads of state in some ancient archaeological ruins. Lewis: Okay, so far, so good. High-stakes diplomacy. Joe: Well, they arrive, and the path to the dinner is lined with guards in ancient costumes and... seminaked performers depicting scenes of ritual and fighting. Lewis: Wait, what? Seminaked performers at a state dinner? Joe: That's exactly what Mark Zuckerberg whispers to the author. His first words are, "Why are there naked people at a state dinner?" It’s this moment of pure culture shock. The tech world, which runs on hoodies and code, smashes headfirst into the bizarre, protocol-driven world of international diplomacy. Lewis: This sounds like a scene from a comedy movie. I’m picturing Mark Zuckerberg just completely out of his element. Joe: Completely. The author tries to swap his name card to get him a better seat, but it keeps getting swapped back. Then, during the cocktail hour, she tries to introduce him to the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper. She asks Harper if he'd like to meet Mark. Harper just stares at her and says, flatly, "No, I wouldn't." Lewis: Ouch. That’s a brutal rejection. For a guy who was used to being the center of every room, that must have stung. Joe: It did. For the rest of the hour, Mark, the king of Silicon Valley, is just a ghost. No one talks to him. He's a fish out of water. The night gets even weirder when a horse show suddenly blocks their exit, and the author has to yell "Run! Follow me!" as she leads a terrified Zuckerberg through a tunnel of galloping horses to escape. Lewis: You're not making this up. Galloping horses? Joe: I am not. They end up lost in the Panamanian wilderness. And this story is the perfect entry point for the book's first major theme. Wynn-Williams argues that this chaos, this absurdity, was the company's DNA. She describes working on policy there as being less like Machiavelli and "way more like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money." Lewis: That’s a terrifying thought. It’s funny when it’s about naked performers and horses, but what happens when those fourteen-year-olds are making decisions that affect billions of people? Joe: Exactly. The carelessness stops being funny. And that brings us to the leadership culture, particularly the hypocrisy at the very top, embodied by the queen of corporate feminism herself, Sheryl Sandberg.

Lewis: Okay, so this is where the story turns. Sheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In, the woman who built a global brand on empowering women in the workplace. The book must have a different take. Joe: A profoundly different take. Wynn-Williams paints a portrait of a leader who, behind the scenes, fostered a culture of fear and demanded a level of personal sacrifice that is just staggering. The most chilling story takes place on a private jet. Lewis: I'm listening. Joe: The author is heavily pregnant, flying back from Davos with Sheryl and her inner circle. Sheryl, who has her own private bedroom on the jet, emerges in her pajamas and says directly to the author, "Sarah, come to bed." Lewis: Hold on. Her boss? On a work trip? That is... beyond inappropriate. Joe: The author is stunned. She tries to deflect, saying she has work to do. She looks around for help, but all the other senior colleagues just stare at their laptops, avoiding eye contact. Sheryl's tone hardens. She repeats the demand. The author then makes a silent, pleading look to another young female assistant, Sadie, hoping she’ll volunteer to go instead. Lewis: And what does Sheryl do? Joe: Sheryl sees this and snaps, "Sadie’s slept over lots of times and I’m not asking Sadie. I’m asking you." Lewis: Wow. That's not just a request; it's a power play. It's a loyalty test. And the fact that it's happened before with other assistants... it's a pattern. Joe: It's a pattern of blurring personal and professional boundaries to an extreme. The author, deeply uncomfortable, finally refuses. And she says in that moment, she felt something break between them. This wasn't 'leaning in'; this was a demand for personal submission. And it gets worse. The author recounts how, during the actual birth of her first child, while she was in active labor, she got an urgent request from Sheryl for talking points for a meeting. Lewis: You have to be kidding me. Joe: Her husband and the doctor begged her to stop, but she insisted on sending the email between contractions, because she was terrified of the consequences of not responding. She says her doctor told her, "Sheryl will understand," and her immediate, gut-wrenching response was, "She won’t." Lewis: That is just heartbreaking. It’s a complete abuse of power. It perfectly illustrates the book's title, which comes from that famous line in The Great Gatsby about Tom and Daisy Buchanan: "They were careless people... they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness... and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Joe: Precisely. The author argues that Sheryl and the other leaders were smashing up the lives and well-being of their employees and then retreating behind their brand of empowerment and their immense wealth. But the 'mess' they left behind wasn't just emotional or professional. In some parts of the world, it was tragically, literally, a matter of life and death.

Lewis: Okay, so this is where we get to the third word I used at the beginning: 'genocide'. It feels insane to connect a social media company to something so horrific. How does the author make that case? Joe: She makes it through a detailed, devastating account of Facebook's failures in Myanmar. The core of the problem was that Facebook, through its Internet.org initiative, had become the de-facto internet for the entire country. For most people in Myanmar, Facebook was the internet. Lewis: So they had a massive, captive audience with no alternative sources of information. That sounds dangerous. Joe: It was a powder keg. And the author's team saw the fuse being lit. In 2014, they started seeing virulent hate speech spreading on the platform, targeting the minority Rohingya Muslim population. They raised the alarm internally. The response from the content moderation team? They said they had it covered because they had just hired one—a single—Burmese-speaking contractor in Dublin. Lewis: One contractor? For an entire country on the brink of ethnic violence? That's not just careless, that's criminally negligent. Joe: Wynn-Williams calls it "lethal carelessness." A few months later, a fake story about a Buddhist woman being raped by a Muslim tea shop owner went viral. It directly triggered riots. Buddhist mobs attacked Muslim shops. People were killed. The government shut down Facebook. Lewis: And what did Facebook do? Joe: The government demanded the inciting posts be removed. The content team in Dublin admitted they couldn't even read the posts because Google Translate didn't support Burmese. The single contractor they had was at a restaurant, without his laptop. The author's team had to bypass the entire system and get the posts removed from California. It was a complete systemic failure. Lewis: So they knew. After that, they had to know how bad it was. Joe: They knew. The author's team presented a mountain of evidence. They discovered the Community Standards weren't even translated into Burmese. The 'report' button didn't work properly in the local language. Most critically, the platform didn't support Unicode, the standard for the Burmese language, making it almost impossible for their systems to detect hate speech. She pleaded with leadership—Elliot, Javi, Sheryl—to prioritize fixing these basic issues. Lewis: And their response? Joe: They told her it wasn't a priority. They were busy building censorship tools for their hopeful entry into China. The author's team was so desperate they translated the rules themselves and printed them on physical leaflets to hand out. Lewis: That’s insane. They were fighting a digital fire with paper flyers because their own company wouldn't give them a fire hose. Joe: Exactly. And it all culminated in 2017. The UN later released a report on the Rohingya genocide. It dedicates over twenty pages to Facebook's role, concluding the platform was used to incite violence and spread hatred. The military had run a coordinated campaign with hundreds of people to weaponize the platform. All the systemic failures the author had been screaming about for years were listed as contributing factors. Lewis: So they had the data, they had the warnings from their own staff, and they just... let it happen. Joe: The author's conclusion is blunt and devastating. After running through all the possible excuses—that they were too busy, that they didn't understand—she lands on the simplest, most chilling explanation. She writes, "It was just that Joel, Elliot, Sheryl, and Mark didn’t give a fuck." She calls them "sins of omission." They didn't pull the trigger, but they watched the massacre happen and chose to do nothing.

Lewis: Wow. So you start with a funny, absurd story about a disastrous dinner party, and you end with complicity in genocide. The arc of this book is just... staggering. It really does read like a 'moral thriller,' as some of the critics called it. Joe: It is. It’s a journey from naivete to horror. And the author's final warning in the epilogue is that this same DNA, this same culture of 'lethal carelessness,' is now being applied to the development of Artificial Intelligence. She argues that if we don't learn from these mistakes, the stakes will be infinitely higher. Lewis: That's a chilling thought. It makes you wonder, what's the one question we should all be asking ourselves after hearing these stories? Joe: I think the author puts it best. She challenges what she calls the "luxury of not having to know" the consequences of decisions made by the powerful. This book is a call to reject that carelessness, in our leaders and in ourselves. It forces you to ask: what are we ignoring, and at what cost? Lewis: A powerful question to end on. This is Aibrary, signing off.