YouSaid · the spoken record

Brett Harrison

lines on the record: 174
first: 2023-03-13
most recent: 2023-03-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, he was just sort of emotional. He was worked up. He told me, I completely disagree with you. I mean, he said, like, I think you're completely wrong. He said, I think the stuff that I've done for PR is maybe the greatest thing that's happened to this company. I should do more of it. I didn't think it was physically possible to do more of it. And I realized at that moment that this was not really going to work super well long term. We're not in a relationship where I can give sort of my direct superior like real honest constructive criticism that I thought was for the good of the company that this wasn't really going to work.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interviews and podcasts and flying to banking and private equity conferences. And it was so much time spent on this stuff. And also, it was completely taking away from the management of the company. People would sometimes send, say, I'm a Slack or signal messages and not get responses for weeks at a time. And it felt like he was spending virtually no time helping the company move forward. It was so much about image and brand and PR. He was really angry at hearing this criticism directly.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm just like not being afraid of just like saying when something seems wrong to me, and sometimes I'm just totally wrong and don't understand the full picture. And sometimes it results in something better happening. And people will thank me for having been honest and bringing to attention something that's actually wrong. And so I said to Sam, you know, I think you're doing way too much PR and media. First of all, it's really diluting you and the FTX brand to constantly be doing”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes he was nice about it, and he would say, you know, yeah, I see where you're coming from. I do think what we've done so far has been really valuable. And we probably should do some more of it, but maybe at some point we should stop. A lot of this sort of like hedging language that was ultimately non-confrontational, non-committal. I mean, he was a very non-confrontational person, very conflict avoidant person within the company. And then at worst, it would just, you know, there were other times where I brought up a specific things I thought like he was doing wrong. There was one really unfortunate time where it was the first time I visited the Bahamas in, I think it was like November of 21. And I'm the kind of person who, like, if I see something wrong at a company, it doesn't matter what company I've worked at or how junior or senior I've been, like I like to go to the person most senior in charge and tell them this thing seems wrong to me. And that's, I feel like it's one of my superpowers.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of the spending. Mean on everything from lavish real estate to all of these partnerships to very, very large venture deals, these were the kinds of things in the company where people I asked, like, when does it stop? Like to one end, are we doing a lot of these things? And some of those resulted in sort of like direct confrontations, like just, you know, why are we doing yet another deal with like a sports person or a celebrity? This is like This is ridiculous. This is not doing anything for the company. And we're completely distracting from the role that we thought we all had, which is to build a really great core product for people trading crypto on crypto derivatives.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, the biggest example for me was this was sort of posts my kind of effective resignation, but some of these strategic acquisitions that were being done in the US during the summer of 2022, I would find out from the news or it would sort of be mentioned on a signal chat or something that this was happening. And there was like no opportunity to actually wade into the discussion about how this is going to greatly affect like the US business. It's going to greatly affect our priorities. And it wasn't clear if this was like a good decision or a bad decision. It was just like a unilateral decision that was made. Like, oh, we're acquiring this company or we have the option to acquire this company.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, the bottom line is on kind of like the day-to-day operational stuff, especially the decisions within some of the things I was responsible for, like the stocks, trading platform that I was working on. I had a fair amount of discretion. And people certainly looked up to me for management and advice and direction. Ultimately, the discretion ended up with this small group in the Bahamas who not only What often make decisions and not communicate with the senior people on the U.S. side? And we would just sort of find out things were happening”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was so frustrating. Poaching from your own company. Exactly. It was such a constant battle. And at some point, I kind of gave up on this idea that I was going to be able to actually grow the separate developer team.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was it? Yeah, hiring, for example, I pushed for many months that we should hire more people. Eventually I got permission for us to interview people, but then those would ultimately have to get finally approved by the people in the Bahamas. And they would frequently say no to people who I thought were good candidates. Finally, we hired one person. And this person was doing well. He was here in Chicago. And they invited him to go spend like a month in the Bahamas to kind of hang out with him and supposedly just ramp up on the system. And this person comes back to Chicago and they say, you know what? Like I really want to move to the Bahamas. They really kind of convinced me to do it.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think an open question now, only thinking about this in hindsight, was how much of this very cloistered organizational decision around the development team was a function of the various things they were doing that they were hiding from the rest of the company? Or was it really this sort of like one ultra paranoia about growing too large too quickly and losing control of the organization? And two, an almost like sort of cult-like belief in this small team being the but for cause of all past, present, and future success.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In real time, if you hoard everything to yourself and your own brain, you end up with a code base that is just only understandable by that one person. And so it was the kind of thing where a lot of people talked about this internally, like if Gary got hit by a bus and couldn't come to work anymore.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, again, it was one share repo. I mean, there was an enormous amount of code. And one of the big problems, another problem that I raised while I was there was that 90 plus percent of all the code of FTX was written by these two people. And it was very hard to follow. I don't know if you've ever seen a large Python code base before. So whenever there were issues that arose, you know, oh, like there's like this particular problem with like an account on the exchange. The only answer was call in the shot call Gary, which I also knew to be unsustainable from the organizational perspective. Like one of the guiding principles at Jain Tree, for example, was, you know, mentor your junior dev so that you can hand off all your responsibilities to them. And the process of handing off responsibilities, you make the code better, more automated, more robust problems, more easily debugged.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember, like the FTX US side of things was like strict subset of FTX. So in that sense, it kind of flowed into FTX US, with the exception of the FTX-US derivatives, the Ledger X stuff was actually a completely separate team because that was through an acquisition.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell me, like, look, we're not trying to be like Jane Street or Citadel in terms of our number of software engineers. Like, we want to stay lean. That's our comparative advantage. And most importantly, they didn't want two separate development teams, like one in the US, one in then the Bahamas. Like they wanted to keep the nexus of software development underneath, you know, Nashad and Gary in the Bahamas, which I just thought wasn't going to be sustainable long term. Like if you run a broker dealer in the US, you need to have staff that is specifically allocated towards broker-dealer activities. It can't be that if Finra comes and says, like, well, who's working on the broker dealer? You say, well, it's like this Gary guy who lives in the Bahamas who sometimes awake at like 4 a.m. spends 20 minutes a day thinking about stocks, that can't fly.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The conventional wisdom now is a lot of big tech companies overhired for software engineers. And not only was it sort of an expense on the balance sheet, but it was also expensive in terms of slowing down the kind of operational efficiency of the organization. And having a small lean team can help you get to your first or your nth product a lot more quickly. That's great for a startup. But once you're like north of $10 billion valuation company, like promising the world to customers and investors, two software developers doesn't really cut it anymore. I mean, at some point you have to grow up and face the reality that it's time to actually grow an organization into a real kind of managed enterprise with teams of software engineers specializing in certain tasks. And so there was always pushback.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sam would frequently talk publicly about how And all of these crazy organizations that hire thousands of developers and can't get anything done, like they should learn from me about how a small lean team can be much more effective. And there's some truth to that. I do think”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I really wanted to grow the US team significantly to at least be more than a handful of developers. And so, yeah, that was one of the initial points of contention.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I can write code, but I feel like that's my comparative advantage is helping kind of to leverage teams of people to get them to work towards the common goal of building out large distributed systems that are complex and multivariate in nature. And the best use of my time was not me programming between the hours of like 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. every night while trying to keep on board with like what all the personnel were doing. Yeah.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we were like between 75 and 100 total people in the US and it was challenging. It was one of my biggest complaints, which I'm sure we'll get into, which was that”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I was very proud of that accomplishment. And then on a personal front, it was great to get embedded into the crypto industry. I was very excited by everything that I saw. It was great to make all the connections through FTX with like the different people in the crypto ecosystem and become friends with these people and I certainly has an influence where I am today. So I'm sort of proud of all of that.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I guess on a professional and personal front. So I guess on a professional front, I'm most proud of establishing out our team and making significant headway to a lot of our goals to establish this regulated businesses. So for example, Ledger X, we acquire Ledger X and we had this application to the CFTC to enable kind of real-time direct-to-customer 24-7 margining and cross-collateralization. It was an extremely innovative proposal and it felt like we were making real progress towards establishing new and very exciting regimes for CFTC regulated derivatives in the US. I also established a broker dealer in the US for the purposes of letting people trade stocks like some more to Robin Hood. I wrote like 90% of all the code for that stocks platform myself.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, I don't know about you, but I've never gotten an offer to a company and said, before I sign, please show me your audited financials. It's just like not a thing that happens.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I wanted to do this exchange business. And what Sam told me was the same thing he said publicly everywhere, which is that, yeah, like Alameda is basically running itself, all of Sam's time is on FTX. They're kind of walled off from the FTX people. And their access to the exchange is just like any other market maker. Like there's like the public API feeds. you know, benefits from market makers that trade enough volume, but it's not like Alameda had any special privileges in that sense. And so I thought they were just basically separate.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I did. I mean, it was definitely of interest to me because, I mean, for the primary reason being that I wasn't interested in doing prop again. I worked at Jane Street. I worked at Headlands Tech. I was at Citadel Securities. If I wanted to continue doing prop trading. Would have stayed at one of those places”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, for selfish reasons, My family is here, you know, and I wasn't going anywhere. But also, I thought Chicago was a great place for FTX US because if our main goal was to establish regulated derivatives, like Chicago is really the place where that happens. We have the CME, we have many of the top proprietary trading firms, a lot of like the Futures Commission merchants and various brokers are all here historically, like the floor of like the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, like they're here. And so it kind of felt like a good place to be.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were separate entities, they weren't subsidiaries, there was technology sharing between them. So like the FTX US exchange technology was like licensed from FTX. You could think of FTX-US was like FTX stripping away most of the interesting parts of FTX, right? Because it was just a dozen or two spot tokens. And when I joined, there were very few people within FTX US, maybe like two or three dedicated people. Over the course of the next year or so, my job that I sort of fit for myself was to like open up some offices, like hire a bunch of people, establish separate compliance and legal and operational and support teams, start to build out these regulated entities.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Sam wasn't someone who loved thinking hard about titles and even like what my original title was going to be was like a point of contention. But I'm not sure it was clear exactly what my role was going to be. I think Sam wanted me to write software for FTX and FTX US. But to me, I sort of thought there was like this bigger opportunity to kind of kind of work with Sam to lead this other startup, which was FTX US, and kind of build it up and sort of follow in FTX's footsteps and its success. And that was the part that was most exciting to me because this is what I've been doing now for years, it's like managing large teams of people, thinking about strategy, getting people together, you know, occasionally doing some software development myself, but that was the primary reason for wanting to join.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About kind of longer term desires to be a single app or marketplace for everything, not just crypto. So launching a stocks trading platform as well. And so that was, I think, one of the reasons I think you wanted to bring me on was because I had all this experience kind of inside of regulated broker dealers and sort of knew roughly what it took to get that started.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so FTX was doing quite well. I mean, it was basically finished its first second year of operation. And it was maybe the fourth. And it was also one of the primary destinations for institutions, proprietary trading firms, hedge funds to trade crypto and derivatives especially because of how it was designed. And so it was doing really well. FTX US was virtually non-existent. They had started the entities. They had started the exchange, I think, in either December 2020 or January 2021, but it had like de minimis volume compared to the other exchanges around the world, especially in the US too. And Sam talked to me a lot about a lot of the aspirations for the US business. One, to grow the spot exchange, of course. Two was to be able to find a regulated path for bringing some of these offshore products like Bitcoin and Ether futures and options onshore in a regulated way. And on top of that, Sam had also told me.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And very quickly, like an offer came together, and I thought, you know, this is like a really cool opportunity to jump into a field and take a role that was very different from stuff I'd done in the past. And I signed up.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was interesting. So at the time I was running what was called the semi-systematic trading technology at Citadel Securities. And so this was the group of technologists working on systems for ADRs, ETFs, options, and OTC market equities. It was around 100 software engineers or so that rolled up to me. And that was going well. But Sam and I started talking. It was, I guess, March of 2021. And he was like telling me a couple things going on at FTX. And then he said, you know, if you're interested in coming over to FTX, we would still love to have you. And I thought, still, we never talked about doing this before. But sure, like, let's entertain this. And then we started talking and he had meet him and Gary and Nashad over, you know, video call. I was in Chicago, they were in Hong Kong at the time.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, not at all. I mean, Sam told me a little bit about it, but this is over the course of years now where I had two different roles, one at Headlands, one at Citadel Securities. Sam was starting Alameda. We spoke maybe once a year briefly on the phone. So all this stuff was happening in the background and I had no clue. The first time I even heard about FTX was one of my colleagues from Citadel Security told me, hey, did you ever work with this? Like Sam Beckman Fried guy and I was like, yeah, a little bit. Why? And they're like, do you know he's like a billionaire and he has this Hong Kong crypto exchange? Like, what? No, what since when? And then started to see him pop up in articles. There was like a Vox article about him and a few other things, especially related to his political donations. And that's kind of when I got back in touch with him and we started talking a little bit.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wanted to kind of rewrite everything from scratch in a different programming language. There's another half that said, like, okay, we can make some small incremental changes from here and fix things up. And Sam and Gary and Ashad were more in that ladder crew. That former crew kind of broke off and started their own thing. And that's what originally happened.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I pieced together some details over the years because he told me a little bit more after I first joined, I heard a little bit more later from other people, then saw some reporting kind of post-FTX collapse. I think there were two things. One was the infrastructure they had built, I think was really poor in the beginning. A lot of like Python scripts slapped together. And a couple times they had sent tokens to the wrong wallet and ended up like losing millions in the process and they had some big non-arbitrage directional bet on in some token. It might have been ETH or something. And it went against them. And so they lost a lot of their trading capital. And then the other thing was that after some of their technical problems, there was internal disagreements supposedly. This is what Sam told me about how to move forward with tech. You know, there was half the crew that”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Else. And when I asked him, he said, I think I'm going to work on political prediction markets. And I was like, okay, it doesn't sound super exciting to me. I'm going to continue on with what I was doing, which was moving to Chicago, taking a new role. But then fast forward, I guess that idea, maybe he wasn't telling me the whole truth at the time, but I guess that idea became FTX and he had supposedly like resuscitated Alameda in the process.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, off and on. You know, when I first left Jane Street and he left Jane Street around the same time him before me, he had told everyone at Jane Street that he was leaving to join the Center for Effective Altruism full-time. And I guess he did that. I'm not sure if it actually happened because he very soon after started this trading firm and tried to pull lots of Jane Tree people to join him to do this trading firm, which didn't make people super happy. It was funny. We had a phone call and he told me that it wasn't really going super well. He said it was really great in the beginning. Like they made a lot of money. They had this arbitrage trade. And then a few things kind of went by the wayside. And, you know, they had taken out these huge loans to be able to get their initial capital for Alameda. And also there was a big fracture within the company, you know, half the company split, people left. He really didn't tell me much about that at the time. And he said he was probably going to do something.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, it wasn't like EA was super popular at Jean Street. I feel like that's a bit of recent sampling bias. Among this younger crew of Jane Streeters, there was definitely, I think it was because of a lot of association prior to joining Jane Street that they were into effective altruism. But there were a couple people there who really were fairly vocal about the fact that they were donating the majority of their yearly salary and bonus to charitable causes. And Sam was one of them. And yeah, started to become known for that.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there was much that stood out, although he was again pretty precocious at that particular time period. One anecdote that sort of drew me closer to him was Jane Street's offices were in 250 Vesse, they still are in New York City. And there's a big food cart on like the second floor. And so I once went down to meet with a development person from a nonprofit that works in animal welfare and something that my wife and I had donated to for a long time. And I met with this guy and he said, you know, you're the second person I met from Jane Street today, which was wild because Jane Street was like only a couple hundred people there. This is like a pretty niche organization. And I was like, that's crazy. Who did you meet? And they said, oh, Sam Bankman freed. And I was like, you know, Sam, I just came down from talking with him upstairs. And so I went back and we sort of realized we had this kind of shared interest in helping kind of animal welfare causes. We were both vegan.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so at this time, I was sort of leading the group of software developers building the technology that was closest to actual trading. You can think in a HFT or any kind of sort of trading firm, there's lots of different developers, people who work on stuff relating specifically to the trading technology, people who work on kind of the core systems, networking, kind of internal automation tools, tools for developers. So we were on the part of the spectrum that was closest to actual trading. And so my job was to like go over to the different trading desks within the company, talk to them about their specific strategy for the products they traded, understand how to like their priorities about what venues they want to connect to, what different systems they want to create, what different parameter changes they need in their automated trading systems, what kind of research tools will help them do their job better, what user interface would make it easier for them to understand what's going on in the market and kind of all of that.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slowly started to. Sam was on one of the largest trading desks at Jane Street and had 50 or 60 people on it. He had several managers. And one of my roles at Jane Street was to work with all of the different trading desks on the designs of their particular strategies and systems. And so I would frequently go over to his desk and talk with his managers about stuff. And I started pulling him into conversations more and more, specifically to talk about some of the lower latency ETF harb stuff we were doing, some of the original OTC automation things we were working on. And so he started actually contributing more to the actual design and thought behind some of these systems and thought he was precocious and had a lot of really good intuitions about the markets.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a smart kid. He was nice. He kind of got along well with other people in his class. You know, he was definitely above average, but not like, you know, completely standout at the top, although then again, the bar was extremely high at Chain Street. So I think that's already sort of a compliment. But yeah, but people liked him a lot and thought he had a lot of promise, but he was a young guy like everyone else.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. So I was at Jane Street from 2010 to 2018. Sam was at Jane Street for a couple years in the middle of that, I think 2013 and 2017. And one of the things I did at Jane Street was I started this program called OCaml Bootcamp. It was a yearly course for the new trader hires to spend four weeks with me learning programming in OCaml, which was like the esoteric programming language that we use at Jane Street, along with a lot of our other proprietary systems. And Sam was in one of the first cohorts of students. And so I got to meet him through that experience.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, well, probably not like children. I think it's more like anecdotes about the pension fund behind this state government needed to get exposure to some diversified asset class and came to one of these companies and said like we want to move like a $5 billion portfolio. Can you help us do it in an efficient way? And it ends up saving them like significant numbers of like percents or basis points over what would happen if they went to the market. And you can say, well, like there's like a direct connection between the price that someone like Jane Street gives them and the amount of money that they ultimately get to save and ultimately pass on to the people in their state who are part of their pension plan. And so like there's like a direct connection there.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“30 or so partners and senior employees who have been there for a really long time and have carried through the core culture of that company up to the present day. And with that large number of people at the top in a very flat environment have actually been able to propagate that culture and maintain it throughout the company. I think you'll find a much more kind of homogeneous view on their social value, which I think they would say is that they provide the best like pricing and access to markets that are critical for facilitating capital allocation throughout the world and allow people to very efficiently invest in vehicles that are global in nature.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really depends on the company and depends how diffuse the culture is. At older firms that have Sort of fewer people impacting the culture on any significant way, I think you might not get a clear answer on this. I think for a place like Jane Street, where the firm is really run by”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my particular role as a developer, actually being able to understand the technological stack and say, oh, I can tell and can sort of verify that these particular safeguards in place and it is actually as trader-proof as I think it is, I can sleep at night knowing nothing too bad is going to happen. I mean, the times I actually lose sleep are a trader in London or Hong Kong calls me in the middle of the night to say like, hey, can you explain how this thing works? I need your help. Like those are the times where I actually lose sleep. But it's not over being concerned about risk.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe the job selects for the people who don't kind of crumble under the theoretical stress of that job. But personally, I don't lose sleep overnight over that because within any mature financial institution, like a trading firm, there are typically many layers of The goal is to make something trader proof. No matter what some trader clicks on or does or configures with their system, there's a limit to how badly they can actually go. And so especially”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or they'll be more selective in the kinds of things that they give to or contribute to that don't just involve getting their name on a building of a school or something.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we'll have to play this out over the next decade or two to really see where this goes. If I'm going to be an optimist about this, I'd like to think that When it was older, single or married males hoarding a large amount of wealth, that for the most part, they kept it to themselves and kind of waited until later in life to do anything with it. And were the kind of people who really stated their same career their whole lives, as opposed to if younger and younger generations are amassing wealth through what they can actually perform with their skills, then I think that hopefully injects more dynamism into the distribution of that wealth later on because those millennials will then like, or Gen Z or whoever will go on to like found new companies and maybe they'll be able to seed the company themselves with their own money and have a lot easier time bringing interesting new things to market or they'll be able to donate to like really interesting causes or they'll be able to help out their friends and family more easily from a young age.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe it's not like justified to Hawaii, but it's like bring your 10 friends to Hawaii with you or something. Or get involved in a charitable organization in a way that someone who is 24 normally wouldn't be able to do surely by being able to donate a lot.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source