YouSaid · the spoken record

John Arnold

lines on the record: 144
first: 2025-07-01
most recent: 2025-07-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Set aside or in line of sight. And so they're able to do these things. And that's one of the reasons that make this kind of country so great. I don't know if I answered your question”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Around us is stronger. And that's why people do it. Whenever we have the needs of our family, whenever our family is secure, then I think it's natural as human nature to start thinking about the community and however you define your community, whether it's your group of friends, your city, your country, might be shared experiences, but everybody kind of goes through that process of defining his or her own community and then uses the resources of time and money to try to help that community to the best extent they have. There's no right answer in how you define your community. There's no right answer as to how you improve your community. But it is remarkable just this culture of giving and in philanthropy that exists in this nation. I think largely because we are a wealthy nation, right? More people are more secure here. People have more likely to have the needs of their family.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In many ways, what we're doing is not remarkable. So many people in this world, or especially in the United States, are very generous with time, with resources relative to what they have, relative to the time that they have, relative to the money that they have. So it can just be done at a different scale, but I think there are some people who are much more altruistic than we are. There's people who give away 10% of their money when they're making $100,000 or $50,000. That changes their quality of life. There's a sacrifice, a trade-off by doing that, and they still do it. And there's a small movement called Further Pledge where you pledge to give everything above a relatively small salary, like $30,000, maybe up to $50,000 to charity, knowing that that dollar you're giving is creating more total good than you spending it. And that's huge. And I think we as a society benefit when our community...”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be going to get the lunches for everybody else, not vice versa. You need to be trying to climb up the organization, not be gifted the checkbook on day one.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really important that they're not part of the foundation at a young age because there's a downside and it's whenever you have that checkbook people look at you differently and treat you differently. Your jokes are funnier and people have a sense of their own best behavior around you because there's always something that they want funded or that they're involved in and are going to come with an ask at some point. And we minimize this largely because of the types of things we fund and we've made it very clear about what we do fund. But if somebody's growing up in their teens and their 20s and is looked at by the rest of the world as a checkbook first, I think that's a very damaging way to grow up. It's not reality.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. And it ends up being both. I think you need to teach kids about humanity, about the love of the individual. So we can't say no every time, but also have to teach them about not going to give all the money away dollar by dollar to somebody on the street. I've thought a lot about what's the kid's role in this going forward. And Laura and I are very much on the same page here. We don't want their lives to be defined by their parents. So we don't want them working at the foundation. We don't want them, at least when they're in their 20s probably in their 30s, to be working at the foundation if it's still open then. We want them to go have their own life experiences to find their own, create their own life. And then after they've done that, if they want to come join the work here, that's great.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They certainly understand, and have been high principles about what we do. We're a philanthropist, they know what that means, they know that we give money trying to make the world a better place, but we do have those conversations when we walk past a homeless individual who's asking for a dollar. And my daughter says, we need to give him a dollar, right? And having those conversations about, okay, do we give this dollar here or do we give it to someone trying to more strategic way to try to get at the root of the problem, right?”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Republicans talk about the issue and be a productive partner. And I think it's going to have to be, again, it has to be bipartisan for it to be sustainable. Perhaps Democrats win the White House to perhaps Democrats win the Senate for 2021. They might take down the filibuster. But what happens when that changes? And do those rules and laws stay enacted or do they get repealed? And so that's why I think all these things that we work on need to be done in a bipartisan way, including the pharma. We've got to bill passed through Senate Finance Committee, Republicans, Democrats come together, get this close, and we just can't get it onto the floor. That's where we are.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Advocates, the funders in the climate space do come from the left, that I think we can try to support those efforts, those organizations and politicians that are on the right who want to start taking the steps because this has to be a bipartisan effort to solve. It's hard to imagine today how that happens, but Republican Party is moving slowly, very slowly, but you start to see some people with real credibility within the Republican Party and they're thought highly of start to think about there's an acknowledgement that there's a problem. There is dispute about what level of investment is merited to deal with it. And I think that Democrats don't help Republicans get there. When you put the whole Democratic platform into a climate change bill, I don't think it helps.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or changing how elections are conducted, or the pharmaceutical pricing, or surprise billing things were the day we enter it, we probably have committed the most money of any other philanthropic actor in the system already. What strikes me about the climate field is that there are remarkable people, there's brilliant people who are working on this today, who are very thoughtful philanthropists who are working on this today who oftentimes either make this their single issue or one of two or three issues that they'll be working on. So I always think about what's our additionality into the problem. And one of them is that I think because we work with both the left and the right and we're not a political organization and many of those who are both the researchers,”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we do a little bit on climate change. I think as a trader, and again, someone who thinks about risk, it's a problem where the downside possibilities are so enormous that it makes sense as a society for us to make the investments today to try to decrease the probability of those downside scenarios. I don't know what probability it is of those downside scenarios that are truly catastrophic from an economic standpoint, from a life standpoint that change how humans really live, but it's greater than zero. It's less than 100%. It's somewhere in there, but the downside is so great that society needs to make that investment. So we typically get drawn to the areas where I'd call them orphan areas, where there's not much focus, especially philanthropic focus. Things like public pension reform.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first decade, his winds were so small, his advances in it. It was like he was trying to get invited to give a talk at a class at the military academy was a step forward. And you could see at any given time he could have spent five years with very little visible progress and just stopped and said pushing this rock. I've been hitting the wall. I'm not making any progress. This is a waste of my time. I should be doing something else and gone and done something else and not achieved success. But he stuck with it. And the second decade, he ended up getting the policy reversed. And it led the effort. And I think about that story a lot of it's hard to know during that time, like five years in, are we wasting our time and this is never going to pass? Or is the wall going to crack tomorrow? And you just don't have that feedback mechanism in this work.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And you're right that the trading world has that instantaneous feedback about whether you're right or not. And used to have the P&L marker up in the corner of the computer screen that would tell you at every moment in time what the market was telling you about your position. And a lot of these efforts that were involved in on policy change, number one, it took a long time. And second, as you described, you don't know if you're making progress often because it feels like you just have the hammer against the wall, have the hammer against the wall driving yourself crazy and wasting money. And then all of a sudden it happens. This great book I read. It was written by an advocate who was trying to get rid of the don't ask, don't tell policy in the military and allow gays to openly serve. And this turned out to be close to a 20-year campaign.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The current drugs, and we're not investing in the antibiotics. We're not investing in vaccines because the financial incentive isn't there for Lowe's. So we're spending tons of money as a society and not even getting good returns for it. Sorry, that's my rant.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Triple them. There'll be more incentive for innovation in that world, but that's not the world that I believe we live in. I believe there is a trade-off in that a dollar put into pharma innovation is a dollar less for everything else. It could be other healthcare innovation or healthcare services that aren't getting provided today. Or it could be in education. It could be in making our prisons better so that there's less recidivism. All these ways and somehow the pharma industry has been able to create this island. Every other industry has to fight for the dollars and try to convince the state and federal government give me an extra dollar. Here's why. And the pharma system has just been able to create this island where they don't have to compete with anybody. It's a messed up set of rules that incentivizes the wrong thing. So even within that, we're not getting the drugs that we should be getting. We get a lot of marginal oncology drugs that probably don't provide any real benefit versus.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we've certainly seen double digits now, but we've seen double digit interest rates before in this country. And the decimation that would take place if that happened again is immense. And so I always think about, I want to help the world. I want to solve problems. But if the answer is just shovel more money at it, that's not a sustainable answer in my mind. So everything becomes how do we improve the system without spending more money? Or how do we prove the allocation of resources today? And that gets us back to pharma is that a dollar spent on pharma, which some portion of that goes to innovation and creates incentive for innovation. Well, innovation is great. In a world of no trade-offs, there's no problem with that. And if you believe that there are no trade-offs with how we spend our resources, then pharma prices are fine. In fact, double.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it could. The debt, people argue we should do more deficit spending today because interest rates are low. We can borrow for 10 years at very low rates. Reality is we borrow generally short term, but even if we put all the borrowing at 10 years or 30 years, we never actually pay off the debt. It's just accumulating. So as long as GDP is growing faster than real inflation, it's okay because on a real basis it declines. But that's not what happens. Debt's increasing much faster than real GDP. And so the real debt is increasing and we never pay it off. And we're not sure whether the low interest rates are going to be around forever or not. It was 2007 when interest rates were close to 5%. Just imagine that now if interest rates went back to 5%, what it would do to stock prices to businesses who are so leveraged to cities and states to everybody, to households. If you raise the cost of borrowing.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From fiscal and monetary tools is inflation. And in fact, you have to go the other way. And that's when things get really bad is when you have to be cutting fiscal spending, when you have to be increasing interest rates to try to combat inflation. And so I don't know if the inflation comes. I don't know if it ever comes. As someone who thought a lot about risk in their career, I'm very concerned about the downside should it come. We just don't have a political environment now where tough decisions can get made. And so what happens if we start seeing high inflation then forces up interest rates that causes all the repercussions, negative repercussions of that, because we have the system now so levered with debt at the household level, at the business level, at cities and states, at the federal level.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is enormous budget deficits today and an enormous debt that has had a lot of people sounding alarms for decades. Now, those alarms and those concerns about the debt and what it's going to lead to have not come true today. It doesn't mean they're not going to come true in the future. And I think that's the greatest concern is that the United States is not going to default on the debt. We can just print the money. But what can happen is high inflation. And again, people have been talking about this for years, and I don't know if it ever comes true or not. But we in this country now have a fiscal or monetary response to every problem. And the one problem you can't solve.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We spoke earlier about the downsides of the state having to balance the budget, and that's that it can't make the high ROI investments that it should. The upside is that it forces the states to consider trade-offs. They can spend a dollar on healthcare or a dollar on roads or a dollar on education or a dollar on social services. And they have to decide where's the highest value and they look to save money. The federal government, without that constraint, at least in today's environment, doesn't have to make that trade-off. So any proposed legislation where somebody gets harmed, unless it's only or concentrated mostly in the other party's constituency, that will not pass because no hard decisions want to get made. And so the ramification of that.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're 3% of the world's population. United States, 3% of the world's population, we pay 50% of the pharmaceutical revenues of the world. So there's no doubt that the prices that we're paying is helping in creating incentive for more medicines that others then get to benefit from. But one of the talking points I have in this is the NIH spends so much money on the basic science that's required to get these drugs started. And in return, the pharmaceutical companies charge us 2x, 3x the prices of other countries. We should be getting a discount because the United States taxpayer is funding some of the basic science, much of the basic science, but some of the total cost of developing these drugs. But rather than, we don't get the discount, we don't even get the same prices, we get the highest price. In the world by a large measure.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The three things you need to do now, the pharmaceutical industry is perhaps the most complex industry of any. And so there aren't the three things that should be done. There's the 20 things that should be done because it is just such a broad and complex system with so many loopholes and bad incentives that's driving bad behavior that to get at it is not here's the one thing. Here's the 20 things. The downside is you start to lose policymakers when you hit number four because they only want to speak in lists of three.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it was that the political window wasn't open eight years ago when we started the work. We could see cracks in it. You could see cracks in that window. And I think that's one thing that we've been good at at a foundation is trying to identify where's the political window going to open up in the future, whether it's in changing the bill system, whether that's in doing pension reform or in pharmaceutical prices. We've gone to these areas and we were early. And so when the window opened, we had evidence-based ideas that we could present to policymakers and could properly document the problem. There was a whole effort on communications to both individuals, to society about what the abuse in the system are in any of these areas, and including in drug pricing, but then also had ideas that he could go to him and say, here are”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that the political window might open in the future such that there was demand by the public and thus by politicians to actually adopt some of this stuff. And so kind of using those three criteria, we ended up with how do we create a more rational system to price pharmaceuticals that balances interest, balances incentives that are necessary for the private sector to do the innovation that they're doing. It balances the financial interests of the state and the federal government that's largely paying for a lot of this stuff and that maximizes access for the patient.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and you're right, it's just such a big issue, complex, the number of things that one could work on in health policy is immense. And so I did the same thing where thinking about where in health policy should we be focused. We started working in this area about eight years ago. And after doing that same type of canvassing that we did in criminal justice work, we realized that our first area should be on drug prices. And I've identified that as an area where a very obvious flaws in the existing system that there were ideas that one could conceive of being enacted on how to fix it.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's certainly a line of the work. Some of it is more about values. It's should we keep someone detained in jail before they've gone to their court date because they don't have the money to pay bail. That's just a value. So the criminal justice has this mix of things that you can talk to ROIs on some things. Other things, it's just, is this how our society should be functioning? Is that a right thing? Does that balance the interests of the system? I think a lot of times when you sit down with people and you're like, is this an American value? Is this an American ideal that the system works this way? They'll say no. Okay. Then how do we fix it more closely represents American values without while minimizing any potential second order effect? Negative second order effects.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It now, and it's going to be hard to find the funds today to make that investment, but there's great evidence if you can find those funds that five years from now, everybody's going to be better off. The state's going to be better off, society's going to be better off, the person re-entering, society is going to be better off. And so you got to make that argument, but you have to be able to provide that high quality evidence of effectiveness because everybody shows up saying my program works. My program works.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so in the private sector, they would make that investment every day. But in the public sector, it's on a cash accounting. You have to balance the books this year. And you have a fixed amount of money. You can raise taxes and raise revenues, but it's hard. Nobody likes to raise taxes. And so you have a fixed amount of money. So how much money goes to the investment even if it has a strong ROI? And I think that's where the philanthropic sector can be an active player or actor in this system is by providing the funds to experiment with different ideas, different programs in prison, and then funding the high quality evaluation to see what is the ROI. Can we get good data so we can go to the state and say, look, this program has a very positive ROI. I know it's hard in the short term to deviate money away from just the way we're doing it.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What should people who are stuck behind the bars? What should they be doing with their day? How can we try to maximize the percent chance that they don't come back here when they're released? Because the recidivism rate is incredibly high. Again, we just haven't found ways to lower that through programs that reach people when they are released.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly what you said about what's the role of prisons? What do we want society to do? The struggle is that states and cities, states and counties that fund this are often constrained financially. And so they're trying to figure out how do I meet today's problem, which is I got a lot of people in prison versus how can I make investments to improve outcomes over the long term and how much of the budget can go to improving outcomes over the long term while we have to meet today's needs. And anytime that there's a financial shock, you stop investing in the investments because you try to meet today's needs. And so I think so much of the public money has gone to the day-to-day work of it that not enough is trying to step back and think, how could a system be redesigned?”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I agree with everything you said. It's very hard to design effective recidivism programs after someone's come out. They just, we've tried this as a society in many different forms and shapes for a long time. And the evidence is very poor that they have. You study it in a diligent way that these programs work. It's a very tough problem. And so there's a theory which I believe and kind of going on what you said that the nature of prisons has to change. That if you wait until the day someone's released, that's way too late. It's like if you wait until someone drops out of school to step in with some more social services, it's too late. And so we have a couple projects trying to reimagine prisons, think about”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disinvestment in these communities. And the question is kind of how do you both provide the public safety while not causing the damage that some policing techniques cause today?”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody wants the police to leave entirely. There still has to be that function of deterrence and trying to clear cases that have been committed. So how do you create a policing system that tries to address both of those, that treats people more equitably, more justly? It recognizes their constitutional rights while protecting those communities because the cost of policing on communities is high, the cost of violent crime on communities is high as well. And that's the struggle with the policing reforms. And there's things that we absolutely should do. A lot of those are getting enacted now, or at least being discussed now. But it's not just, problem doesn't get solved just by passing one new policy. These problems got created over decades, over centuries, over decades of policing techniques over centuries of”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the psychological effects of being a black man in America, especially in a low income neighborhood that has, and especially if it's an aggressive police force there. I think one of the dilemmas has been that minority communities have felt both overpoliced and underpoliced at the same time. They feel overpoliced with the techniques that the police are using in their neighborhoods. So the random stops, certainly back in the era, stop and frisk and a presumption of guilt and that people, especially young black men, are likely to be up to something bad. However, there is still a crime problem. Most crimes committed in one's own community or in the very near geographic area around the community. And there is a huge cost to society of violent crime.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's obviously been a lot of debate or discussion this year on that very topic. And there's no doubt the disproportionate nature of the criminal justice system on minorities and particularly on the black community for so long, the political incentive and so much of the focus has been just on crime rates with no regard for the secondary effects that the criminal justice system causes on these communities and on families. And I think that's one of the things that we as a society are trying to grapple with now, not for the first time, but for the first time this has gone into a mainstream discussion.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's really hard to see how you solve that problem without a massive infusion of resources into the courts and into prosecutors and defense attorneys, which is not where we want to be spending money. We'd rather spend money on preventing crime, on social services, to not have that problem to begin with. And so how do you get rid of this culture where the system can't handle everybody going to trial has a great answer for?”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This crime, but there's a 20% chance I get found guilty. I get a 20 year sentence, or I can serve, I can plead down to a lesser charge and get six months of which I've already been here for three months, so three more months than I'm out, or my life's over”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't want to get too far over my ski tips on this and misrepresent the research. I think part of it has been longer sentences. Part of it has been the conviction rate. So once you're arrested, we can get convicted. What percent of the people done so? And it leads into the system is built to demand a plea bargain. We just don't have the court resources, the defense attorneys, the prosecutors, the judges, the court systems to hear a vast majority of cases. And so it ends up being less than 5% of cases actually go in front of a judge. Most of them just get pled out. And for a long time, because those resources don't exist, there's been incentives that have been built into the system that almost coerce people to plead guilty to crimes that they may not have committed. Because just from a risk reward, it is, I didn't.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'll take the latter question first. The best report I've seen on this is from the Brennan Center that really looked at, spent significant amount of time trying to piece together what were different responses and how much of it was just kind of demographic trends, how much of it was economic growth and drop in better education, better skilled police tactics, all these different avenues. And I'm doing a short shift on all the things that they've assigned some causation to. I think the summary is it's hard to see any one of them being really causal in the shift in crime. It was most tellingly you saw this same trends happening globally. Different countries had different reactions to this. And they all had that move up in crime over time into the 90s and then this downward trend.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Times have changed. So we still had on the books the reaction from an environment that was very different. And the question is, we've seen what those policies did to neighborhoods, and we've seen the financial cost of those policies and the trade-offs associated with some of those policies. And I think you saw both Republicans and Democrats come together trying to rethink what's the right way to structure the criminal justice system, all aspects from policing and courts and prisons and reentry. What's the right way that we should do given the environment that we're in right now?”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which was we're going to jack up our number of police, we're going to jack up the penalties for any criminal act, have it severely intensify the war on drugs, and then all the second and third order effects that came with it happened. Now, crime ended up peaking in the early 90s. And some of it was because of some of the policies passed, but a lot of it wasn't. So you can see different areas that adopted policies at different times. And it seems like the drop in crime was relatively independent of when communities both across America as well as globally adopted some of these policies. So why did crime go down over the past thirty years is still a mystery to some great researchers have looked at this and tried to figure it out and it's a lot of like, okay, a small piece of it's this, a small piece of it's this, et cetera.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was important to figure out how we got to the current system. And in this world of real partisanship was a bipartisan response to the growing violent crime that was happening starting post-World War II and then really peaked late 80s, early 90s that got everybody, all politicians concerned and scared and they felt they were being elected based upon crime rates based upon the amount of violent crime and trying to get a handle on that. So the violent crime was also destroying communities and so you had Democrats, Republicans, whites, blacks, Hispanics all come together.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've always realized that the goal is not to just do research or just do idea generation. The goal is to have real positive policy change. And policy change requires some advocacy, political action. It just does. And so we used to have those, the C4, which is the advocacy arm, is a separate tax vehicle. And there had to be a Chinese wall between the C3 and C4, but the C3 being the traditional philanthropic vehicle. And we realized was that having that Chinese wall really was harming our ability to have positive impact. And so we combined the two entities into an LLC so that the same employee who was the expert in fines and fees and the options on how to change fines and fees to make them more equitable and just could also go sit there and talk to a life. Legislature about why the problem existed and what the optimal solutions were.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly impatience. We have all this money sitting in the account. The goal is to do good with it. And we'd rather figure out how to do the most good today rather than waiting until tomorrow. So there was this natural impatience. But I think we've been smart enough to realize that it's smarter to invest wisely tomorrow than do something that's unlikely to have impact today. And so that's just kind of a necessary function of it is bring in some experts, but really study where is the leverage that a foundation can have on the problem. That's very different from the other actors that are already in the system. It's different from what politicians can do or government policymakers or judges or police. Everybody has a role. And the question is, how can a philanthropy or foundation that is not a natural actor in the system but has a checkbook?”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. A couple examples like that really led us again to, okay, the systems change, the policy focus is where we want to spend the time, that there's higher potential reward. It is harder work. The chance of success is lower, but the impact, if successful, is so much higher. If you can improve how the system works. And so we started looking at a number of areas of the criminal justice system, I guess first we spent a year and hired someone to leave that work. We spent a year just thinking about all the ways, the inefficiencies in the system that lead to bad outcomes that don't promote public safety, that destroy neighborhoods that aren't fair and equitable for those that are charged or convicted of a crime, et cetera. And where could we as a foundation, where could we be effective?”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wrongful convictions, they started looking at the policy angle as well. So it wasn't just about the one person or the hundred people that they were saving, although massively important. They started thinking more strategically about how do we change the system so that the wrongful convictions don't happen in the first place.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Laura really drove us entering this field. She was a lawyer by training, although on the corporate side, I think she was just from having the legal background. You see the world in a different way. One of the first organizations that we started sending some checks to was the Innocence Project. And we had met the head of the Innocence Project, Barry Schecht, at some event, and start hearing the stories that will just tear at your heart someone who's been wrongfully convicted and was going to die except for the actions of DSS project. And we started funding that just because it was the right thing to do. It was a way to help save a life that was going to be terminated without that. Great respect for the Innocence Project because as they started building up dozens and into hundreds of examples of people that they got off death row or out of prison for”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work or generally already part of the fabric of society. K 12 education. We know that works, what works. These programs that have clear evidence of successor are generally already funded by government, already part of Fabrica Society. So what's our role? Are we just going to supplement with a few extra dollars on the side? I didn't want to do that. So where could our dollars go the best? And that really led us down this issue of how do you change and improve the system and the incentives and the rules of a system rather than what's the next program we can fund? Because the frustration of trying to find that program just became immense.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dig deeper in, start seeing there's huge battles within this research sector about what the evidence really shows what it demonstrates and the quality of the evidence that's going into all these claims about success. And I think in every area that we thought of, look at work training programs. The first scan through everything works, it's all great. writing checks there is a great way to invest money. And then you dig deeper and start getting into, okay, the problems with those research that organizations are holding up saying, here's our evidence that we're successful. And it got very frustrating because the more we would study, the less we knew about what worked, what didn't. One of the learnings was very few programs worked or new programs. So the things that”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have about 120 employees of the foundation today. We had no desire or interest to have 120 employees 10 years ago. That was not by design. We thought giving would be easy. I remember very specifically thinking or giving was going to be find the five highest social return projects or organizations and just write those five big checks every year, make it easy, make it fairly passive. We started down this route and I started pulling the research. I had kind of metrics background and college was smart enough to read the papers. I could figure out what they were saying. And so start with a topic like preschool. You see three papers that say preschool is amazing. It generates all these outcomes later in life. And then you see one evaluation of the Head Start program that shows it doesn't really have an effect.”
2025-07-01 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #818: John Arnold with Dr. Peter Attia — The Greatest Energy Trader of All Time on Lessons Learned, Walking Away from Wall Street, and Reinventing Philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT