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

“It's probably a lot closer to Walmart t shirts than it is Waffle Wall Street. I mean, certainly it is now, even when I started, it was pretty inconspicuous. I don't think it was that way in the previous decade or two before I joined finance. I guess I'm not really sure, but I got the sense that the current culture around inconspicuous consumption is sort of a function of millennial consumption habits where people are focusing a lot more on experiences than having shiny material objects. I think that's had a lot large effect on kind of like the high earning tech and finance culture that exists today.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Injection of creativity into some of that stuff to maybe think slightly outside the box of, as you said earlier, get slightly faster to go to Nasdaq or something, which is like, okay, might be fine, but it's not that creative would be good for those plant firms. At the same time, the sheer approach to pragmatically getting something done and out there and sold and making money would help a lot of Silicon Valley firms that kind of like hang out in this sort of creative land for too long and don't end up getting a product to market.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I have a ton of personal experience in the Silicon Valley culture or the tech culture since I've only really worked at kind of finances my finance places my whole life. But the sense I get is that the kind of New York Chicago quant finance dev culture is one about extreme pragmatism. Like you know what the outcome is. It's like be the most profitable at the strategy and you kind of try to draw a straight line between what you're doing and that profitability as fast as you can. Compare it to, I think the Silicon Valley culture is much more about creativity and doing things that are new, that no one else has done before, a healthy amount of cross-pollination would be good for both where I think a lot of trading firms are doing like the exact same things that all the other trading firms are done and some like healthy”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“ADR desk. And I realized very soon into that that one, no, like actually the developers have just as much, if not more, impact on the outcome of success of the company. And two, I just enjoyed it a lot more. It was just much more at my alley and my training. And so I ended up going that route instead.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so in college, I studied computer science in math, and I really liked programming, but I think I didn't quite know what a career in programming looked like. I think the conventional wisdom, at least like in 2009 when I was applying for internships, was like, okay, I'm going to sit in the cubicle and like stare at a screen for 16 hours a day. I'm going to be miserable. And it's not going to be a very social job. And I consider myself like a pretty social person. I had a lot of friends who had had these various internships in quantitative finance, like mostly from the trading side. And so when eventually I went to Jane Street as an intern, I had kind of like a hybrid summer of doing some dev stuff and some trading stuff. And to me, I thought like, okay, the traders are much more much closer to the real action of the company. And like, I want to be a part of that. And so when I joined James Free, I was hired as a trader on the”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There for sure is, which is why the companies have to work as hard as possible to make their experience as good as possible, which is like it's good for the interns. When you go to Jane Street, like not only do you learn a lot, but they pay you really well. And also, you get to visit one of the foreign offices for like a week or something. Also, like they have all these really fun programs where they bring like famous speakers to come to the office and speak to the whole intern class. And they have, you know, like parties.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe it sort of breaks even if you consider the time to train them, but it's extremely worthwhile because when those interns come back full time and Jane Street hires a significant percentage of its incoming classes from their internship program, that they're already trained. They're ready to go day one. They're almost immediately useful because they had that like three month period where they got trained and only the ones that really liked it and were good come back. So it's like rather than wait for them to come on site, train people, and maybe half of them aren't good, or half of them don't fit with the culture. And you kind of don't know what to do with them. The internship program provides like a really good place to get like on-the-job training. And then only kind of select on both sides for the ones that are the best.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The short answer is yes, but the long answer to why I think they do that is the starting salary for the top people in not just finance but in tech is sort of in this like low to mid six figures now. And you can debate whether you think that's like the appropriate starting salary for a person with like no experience coming out of college or not, but just sort of the reality is that the talents pool is extremely competitive from the employer side. So if you start with that as like a reasonable salary plus bonus for an employee, I think change rate's mentality is these interns who are coming here, like they're doing real work. It should be paid like a full-time employee just like paraded for the time where they're actually here. And so that ends up like checking out to be the right numbers.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is definitely a learning curve, and I think for basic scripting, you want to use something like Python. But exactly, if you're writing low latency distributed infrastructure that has to never fail, Rust is a pretty good choice.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's great and it's come a very long way in the last three to five years. I think crypto has something to do with that. It seems to be like one of the languages of choice for people to write blockchains and smart contracts. And so there's been enormous amount of open source contribution to Rust. And so comparison, when I last looked at it a couple years ago, it's a lot easier to write really good, sophisticated programs now in Rust and get all of the type safety and the speed that you get, which is very comparable to C++ on the speed side.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that case, I would say yes, because I think that you get a lot of the sort of static typing and compile time safety in Rust that you get from OCaml, but the base level program that you can write in Rust is much, much faster than one you can write No Camel. Because of the way OCAML's design, where there's this kind of automatic garbage collection, the worst thing you can do in a high speed finance is do any memory allocation that results in garbage collection. And so you have to write very, very careful OCAML that almost ends up looking like C in order to end up staying in functional programming land, but not actually creating tons of memory on the heap or the stack that ends up getting collected later.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I guess the world is if they could snap their fingers and suddenly replace all their okay infrastructure with Rust at zero cost, like, would it be worth it? Yeah.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like the companies with really strong brands, I mean, that's one of the things we saw at Jane Street was like, I heard stories in the old days of Jane Street that the first resumes from Harvard were like the people were terrible. Like they couldn't do like basic math and they just wrote this like the worst candidates compared to other people that they were able to find. And then they established this brand and this recruiting pipeline and this reputation for having very difficult interviews and for paying people really well and having this like amazing work environment that all of a sudden all the people getting through the pipeline from Harvard were like really, really great. And it wasn't like the quality of students at Harvard changed. There's probably a bell curve there like there is everywhere else. It was just like the positive selection resulting from the branding efforts and the like mission driven focus of the company that really brought that positive selected population to them.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hiring market is highly inefficient. Maybe the pipeline of orders from Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale to Jane Street, and Citadel Securities is a very liquid pipeline. But there are many, many universities and colleges throughout the country and the world that have extremely talented individuals whose resumes will never end up on your doorstep. So you might end up with a resume from some graduating senior from college who has no internship experience. And your trader mindset might think, okay, this is terrible adverse selection, but it actually could be that person, if he's willing to put themselves out there and apply to your company from this relatively unknown university, then that might be the signal that that is like the best person in that entire region. And that might be a positive selection. So I think that it's not exactly the same like at”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In hiring, there are one many more opportunities for positive selection versus the negative selection you usually encounter in finance. And the other thing is that Most financial markets are in the US when you think about trading in general, you're thinking about liquid markets.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say the United States except what's happened is US companies like Nasdaq have licensed their exchange matching engine technology to other exchanges around the world. So the NASDAQ OMX technology powers a number of the exchanges in Europe and some in Asia. So it's hard to sort of say that is the technology American? Like I guess so. I'm not sure exactly who wrote a lot of the stuff underneath the NASDAQ technology.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in theory, they help mitigate the advantages of high frequency trading. Because if you know there's going to be an auction every 30 seconds and it's not going to be by time priority, it's going to be by price, then it doesn't matter if you send that order at the beginning of the 32nd period or the end of the 32nd period. Like it's really the price that determines that you get filled, not something to do with particular latency to the exchange. I think in practice, the couple of exchanges around the world that used to have those have switched away from them. I think Taiwan stock exchange used to have a periodic auction system and they just thought the liquidity and price discovery wasn't good and it was like complained about a lot and they eventually moved off of it to a continuous matching system. So I guess in practice it doesn't quite work as well. But it's hard to tell. It's really hard to tell.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your order reaches the exchange, it'll always be kind of a predetermined fair price based on the kind of prevailing liquidity at the time. So one can imagine a Nasdaq for interstellar market is kind of similar to building Uniswap now on Ethereum in terms of order magnitude and speed. But there's other things you can do too. You could establish periodic auctions instead of continuous matching and things like that. That could potentially help mitigate some of these issues.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think there's actually kind of real world analog of that, which is automated market makers on slow blockchains. Because if you're used to working on Nasdaq where Nasdaq processes a single message in somewhere between tens and hundreds of nanoseconds per order, a blockchain like Ethereum processes what? 15 to 50 messages per second. So significantly slower by numbers of orders of magnitude. And yet they've been able to establish like pretty mature financial marketplaces by saying that rather than you having to send orders with prices on them and then cancel them when the prices aren't good anymore, there will be kind of an automated function that moves the prices at the matching engine. And so whenever”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, without making any changes to a matching engine, there is nothing that says that when an order comes in, it can't be older than X time, right? What it does mean is that the actual sender, like they're sending a market order from halfway across the world, by the time that the order reaches the exchange, they might end up with a very different price than the one they were expecting when they sent it. And therefore, like there's probably a lot of adverse elections sending a market order from halfway across the world than in a co-location facility. So you can technologically run an interstellar exchange. It just might not be good for that person living on the moon.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, all the companies, I mean, Titadel securities, but really all of the ones in this sort of this finance sphere, I think we're extremely resilient. I think a lot of them found that their pre-existing ideas that in order for the team to succeed, everyone needs to be in the exact same place. And it was very important from an IP perspective to make sure that people weren't taking a lot of this work home with them completely went out the window and people had to completely adjust to the idea that actual trading teams that are used to be able to have eye contact with each other at all times need to adjust to this pandemic world. And they largely did. I think, at least from a profitability perspective, it was some of the best years of HFT firms, P&Ls in recent history.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, there you have an actual event that has occurred, and then in the face of the event, what do you do right now? I think that's different than what do we do about the potential for AI to destroy civilization in the next hundreds of years. Or, what do we do about the next potential biological weapon or the next pandemic that could occur?”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I think that people in my circles were quicker to take action in the face of knowing about COVID. There are a lot of people who kind of stuck around in cities and their existing particular situations, like not knowing kind of where this was going to head long term. And I think if you have the fortune of having the financial flexibility to be able to do something like this, a lot of the people in financial circles kind of immediately recognize, okay, there's this big risk, this unknown. And I don't want to get adverse selected against in terms of being able to get out of the locus of bad pandemic activity. And so people immediately were fleeing cities, I think, faster than other people.”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, again, I think it helps you at estimating probability of rare events. But it does not translate super well to what action then do you take in the face of knowing those rare events?”
2023-03-13 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brett Harrison — FTX US former president speaks out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source