Pete Campbell tries to scam a prediction market but gets phished instead.
Peggy uses peptides she has to write a slogan for.
Don writes an ad about AI helping you be more human. He steals a broken Waymo and drives along the PCH then picks up a waitress at an oyster bar.
Everything is a trade.
The you school you picked over others? Trade
Starting a company in a hot sector? Trade
Choosing which girl will be your wife? Trade
Everyone is a trader
bro it isn’t generally intelligent bro its only read every book and paper ever written and just making connections between them bro. its only thinking for twenty hours bro it’s just brute force thinking bro. its only solving erdos problems bro it could never be an accountant bro
What I love about finance is that opinions don't matter, the market will decide who wins and loses. But I'll just say, this isn't like competing against taxi companies. We're extremely technologically sophisticated firms that have been in a death match for decades.
Had a Jane Street phone interview in 2016. "Price a 6-month forward on carrots."
There's no carrot futures market, so I build one from scratch: seasonal harvest cycles, USDA demand elasticity, cold storage decay rates.
One trader stops me. "Your storage cost function– you're modeling the carrot as dead inventory. Like grain in a silo." He asks me the metabolic respiration rate of a post-harvest carrot at 2°C. I estimate.
"Your forward is overpriced by exactly that shrinkage. The underlying is consuming its own sugars. It's alive." Good correction. I adjust the model. I think I've recovered.
Rejection email comes the next morning. Subject: "Ethical Review." My framework, they write, "relied on the severance of the root organism from its growth medium." The question about respiration was a test. The carrot was still alive and I'd built an entire derivatives structure on top of its death without questioning whether harvest was an acceptable act.
I pull up the recruiter's original email. It doesn't say Jane Street. It says Jain Street– a non-violent quantitative commodities fund.
The carrot was never supposed to be priced. It was supposed to be refused. I later learn the only candidate who passed that round was a former monk from Gujarat who sat in silence for eleven minutes and said, "I cannot put a price on life." He's now a partner.
My base case for AI since 2023 was always that this was a (then young) bubble that will take a few years to fully develop and rupture. But if AI starts generating ROI and becomes a genuinely profitable business while users start to get production gains it could un-become a bubble or further significantly lengthen the runway/timeline.
During my Jane Street interview they asked me to derive Rho going back thousands of years, converting into all of the historical currencies and doing the different Purchasing Power Parity calculations.
#teamrho