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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“Really, it's hard for the small donor to do that. It's really geared towards the large national foundation. And so that's really where we see our role.”
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
“So there is this rule for strategic philanthropy to come in and say, How can these actors and these systems perform better? And I think that's where we've largely focused on our giving is looking at systems change. It's structural and it's scalable to a way that just providing another dollar for a program largely is not. There's different roles for different types of givers. Anybody can write the check to the food bank. And again, we write the check to the food bank, but the smallest giver can also write the check to the food bank. Looking at the strategic side, which is requires a lot of manpower and expertise and hiring experts and getting access to experts and thinking about here are the ideas that have been tried in the past, what's worked, what hasn't, here are the current ideas. What's the theoretical framework for those ideas and why they could work? What are the potential second order effects of those and making those decisions?”
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
“Roots of issues to prevent those problems from developing tomorrow. Both are really important. There's not a priority or hierarchy between those two. We give some charitable dollars. We give money to the food bank. We give money to the homeless shelter in town. You do have to meet those needs. But there is a role for how does the philanthropic money complement government services to make them better? What does the market failure as to why government is not working as well as many people believe it should? How can the school system be better while the school system now is so focused on is already a budget constrained, is so focused on just providing the day-to-day activities. And the same of all these nonprofit social providers is that they're so focused on the day-to-day job that they don't get to experiment like they should.”
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 about 1% of the economy. So, one of the things we've thought about is what's the role of philanthropy? Because the government is giving a benefit to people who give money to nonprofits. There's a tax deduction. And so there is a stake. There is some type of tie that I think exists between the donor and what that money should be going for. And so we've thought about how should that 1% of philanthropic funds, what's the best use of that? And you can think about, or we think about it can either supplement government services. So by providing more money to the homeless shelter, a service that the government already provides, but you can supplement that with more resources. And that's typically described as charity, trying to solve today's problems. And then there's what some would describe as strategic philanthropy of trying to get at the core.”
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
“Of the total economy, the private sector is approximately 60%. Governments approximately 40%. The philanthropic sector is about two percent. Now when you take out giving to museums to religious organizations, to the arts in general and religious organizations, you get down to about 1% of the economy is philanthropy for social services or social goods.”
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 regulator needs to make sure that all kids are served because we need to make sure that ideal that every But it is largely out of the business of providing the service of education.”
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 too often today, I think those systems are structured to regulate themselves. And so you don't get that innovation. You don't get the quality control. And so the vision is, and what we saw in New Orleans after Katrina was this change of going from the school system to the system of third-party nonprofit operators that are given the chance to have the resources and responsibility to educate kids, K-12 kids, and the theory, again, if it works well that the parents, the kids have real choice, get to choose what type of model they want, whether it is an immersion program, whether they want high discipline or regular discipline, whether they want an art school, et cetera. That demand, if you're given real choice to the kids, to the parents, that that's the best quality control that can happen. And then the government...”
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
“Good stuff in public education, there's no natural mechanism for them for that to grow, and there's no mechanism that really works in the public school system for it to go away, for the things that aren't working to stop. And then the irredibility of traits, you need the learning organization aspect of it, which I will tell you as a school system is not good at any government monopoly is not good at quality control. It's not good at innovation to provide that variance. And so the theory with City Fund and the theory of our K-12 work is that the school system needs to become a system of schools, that the natural role for government is not to be the service provider. The natural rule should be the regulator. And right now, those two functions are bundled together into one, and no system can regulate itself.”
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
“Area, it doesn't have much variance. It might have a school that's Spanish and Mercant. It might have a school that's for the talented and gifted. It might have another school that's a magnet or something. But generally, it's the same curriculum, the same process, the same way of hiring, of training, of trying to develop teachers, how your principal development is. You don't have that variation. The differential fitness of do things that are working, do they grow or do they go away?”
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 I guess I'll give you the theory of change that drives our work of late in K-12. And that's that strong and robust systems of any kind have the attributes of biological evolution, right? And so in living organisms, that's the phenotypic variation. Do you have variance amongst the organisms, the differential fitness? Is there a different rate of survival and reproduction? the heritability of fitness And I think this is true of any organization, it's true of businesses, it's true of any system and it's true of the healthcare system, the criminal justice system, it's true of the school system so you need to have a strong, robust system that's getting better over time you need those three traits and the traditional public school system does not have them so if you think of a school district that is monopoly”
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
“Watch that journey and was on the journey along with many other philanthropists of is it small schools? Is it better principles? Is it better teachers? Is it the curriculum? Is it technology? All these things kind of bouncing from one idea to the next, trying to find what's the idea that skills and create structural change. And so we're still involved in K-12. I think it's just the most fundamental issue facing long-term health and viability of this country. And when you talk to almost any social service provider, they always refer back to education. And so I think it's one that we've spent a lot of time thinking about and happy to get into that if you want. But it was the first and continues to be a major effort of the foundation.”
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
“As I said, I gotten my start in giving with K-12 education. And kind of over the years, it just gotten deeper and deeper into those questions of why does one school have different results from a school down the street serving the very similar population of kids? What's the theory of change in K-12? It is such a massive system that's broken down at the school level. And how can we as a country try to get results that we're happier with knowing all the hurdles that go into that and all the factors that go into education and behavior? So how does that scale? How does those small gems that you see, how can you scale that? And this is a question I think the education reform movement's been struggling with for decades.”
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 appreciate the comparison, but it's not close. I agree, I've gotten to know Bill over the years and agree with your assessment of him, that his breadth and depth of knowledge is something that I have never seen in somebody else and an incredibly impressive in that he knows the background and knows the issues of almost anything you can think of in a way that is scary. And I am certainly not that way.”
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
“Had similar thoughts along the years that they want to go do something else. A lot of times those people left and couldn't find what to do or couldn't find satisfaction at their lives doing something else. And so even though that they were unhappy in the trading business, they ended up back in the trading business because they were even more unhappy what the other thing that they had tried to go do. And so that was my fear was that a year from when I close up I'm going to miss it and I'm not going to find satisfaction in this other thing. And then what? What do I do then? Am I really going to go start it up again? It took me those 24 months to really get the confidence to say I can't find happiness here. I can find other things to do and to close it down.”
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
“To really figure out, to make that call that it's time, it's time to close us up and go find happiness somewhere else. And I think part of that struggle was I had seen many other people in the industry who had”
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 becomes very volatile and leads to booms and busts to one that was in perpetual oversupply and kind of bouncing around marginal cost to produce. And so the opportunity had changed. And so I'd given back $3 billion back to investors. And I was at the point where by 2012, I need to give back another 50% down to a billion and a half, just the market opportunity is not there. And it's hard when you've been playing in Vegas with the $25 table to go back down to the $5 table. It's just not as emotionally interesting. And so that happened. I got married. We had kids. The regulation in the business, partially, in fact, maybe largely due to the Brian Hunter episodes that had when the price distortions that wasn't good for the market had just become harder and it had just lost the focus. My interest in the foundation side. So all these things came together and it still took me two years.”
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 was hard. That's who I was as certainly a professional and who I was largely defined as a person as well was as a natural gas trader. Had been the place where I'd had the most success of anything I had tried to do in my life. And so starting in about 2010, I knew this was the decision I needed to make. It was hard. It was a hard decision to make. It got easier because things had changed in the market. If you look at the graph of natural gas prices, you see them peaking about July of 2008, maybe late June 2008, and just being on a steady decline and the volatility starts to change as well. The shale revolution took the market from one that was ever increasing demand and harder and harder to get the next molecule of gas out of the ground. So having to try to balance that through price.”
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. Aries was spent more than a decade living, breathing after work, go out with other people in the industry and talk about natural gas, dream about natural gas. I would wake up in the morning. First thing you do is check the prices, get in the shower, think about it, what could go wrong, what do I want to do today? What's the plan? And it was just all-encompassing in life. I think to be successful in these competitive fields, whether it's in health research or in trading, you have to give it that 100% focus. And if you don't, you're going to see it in the results. It's just too competitive.”
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
“Really, the signal to me that I want to be spending my time on the other side of the table and I'm physically and mentally emotionally exhausted with trading natural gas is the only thing I had done as a professional again from a few days after graduating college. And here I am 17 years later still doing pretty much the same thing and I want to do something else with my life. And so that was 2012 and that's when I decided it's time to shut this down.”
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 same. And by 2008, she had gone full time with our nascent foundation. We had started hiring a few people. And I was starting to spend more of my energy, call it ten percent, fifteen percent of my energy on the foundation, which became troubling a little bit because it's obviously markets are efficient in the long term. The markets are smart, the competitors are smart, competitors entered. You had to keep finding new ways to stay above the competition. And one of those was you have to be 100% focused on this job. It's too competitive to not be 100% focused. And when I went 90%, then it got harder. And as the preceding years happened and I started thinking more about giving the money away than making more of it, that was.”
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, so I met my wife in early 2006, and she had moved to Houston. She was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer and had moved to Houston to help start an energy company and spent, I forget exactly how long, but call it 18 months on that job. She and I had started in the meantime, we'd gotten married and were starting to think about what should we do with our lives now. We had this momentous event of marriage. What does she want to be doing? What do I want to be doing? We have the financial resources to do what we want with our time. And so she answered that question by saying I don't want to work at the energy company anymore. I want to focus on our philanthropic activities, which we had both been doing a little bit on the side at this point, call it 2006. I was spending maybe 3% of my energy on philanthropy.”
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 so twice a year there was a mechanism to get you back close to fair value. And if you compare that to a tech stock today, have all these debates about some stock, there's nothing that necessarily has to get that tech stock back to one's belief of fair value. There's not that forcing mechanism. And if you're talking about gold, there's no forcing mechanism in gold if you have a surplus of gold, you can just stick it in a safe someplace. With limited storage in natural gas and the need to have a certain amount of storage when you enter the winter, it caused that forcing mechanism, which got you back to fair value. So while price could deviate from fundamental value for parts of the time of the year, twice a year it kind of had to go back to that, which was great as a fundamental trader. There's a lot of commodities where they don't necessarily”
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
“Publicly accessible, and they couldn't trade on it. So there had to be the Chinese wall between the trading group. And when we compare that versus oil, Exxon can own the oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico's ticket on an Exxon ship, take it to an Exxon-owned refinery, and put it in Exxon gas stations. And so as an outsider trying to figure out and track those molecules, it's impossible. And that's why the best and most profitable oil traders have to be in the physical business, have to be moving molecules. And the third is that natural gas, because it was a seasonal product, you store it during the summer getting ready for the peak winter demand, that there was a window of storage that the industry almost required when you go into the winter, and there was a window of what it should be when you exit the wind.”
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 think there's three main differences that made natural gas a great product to trade. One was it was this closed system that you described that the molecules for the most part just stayed in North America. There was a little bit of LNG business. It was mostly baseload, so it was easy to predict what those flows were going to be in the future. That wasn't a big variable that was going to cause price moves in the future. And because it was this closed system, you can model it with much better accuracy. Second was that the deregulation that got the pipelines out of the business and the pipelines had to be third parties that couldn't take ownership of the gas. The only service that they could provide was transportation. And by doing so, they didn't have the pipelines, which had the most fundamental information about where the gas came from and where it was going. They had to publish all this information in a way that was”
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 above average returns. But I think we were always fundamentally focused. It was, and this came from the days that Enron, which was the largest physical mover, shipper of gas, was count the molecules, try to count as many molecules as you can. Where did it come from? Where did it travel? How was it consumed? And so you can build a molecule about if you know how every molecule behaved yesterday, you can model how those molecules are going to behave tomorrow and how those molecules are going to behave in six months. Now, your confidence level is not as good in the six-month model, but you can start doing that and then you can start doing the speculative trading on top of it. And so I think we probably had the biggest fundamental research department of any competitor in this space at Centaurus. And that was really what I thought our advantage was, was that we're going to invest in the fundamentals more than anybody else.”
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
“Whenever I trade against a counterparty and they're putting on the opposite trade I am, what are they thinking? What do they know? Can I replicate as best I can the knowledge that they have so that I can make an educated and confident decision, do I want to be on the other side of this bet? And to do so, we were at an information handicap just in terms of BP had more information that would come through their shop than we did. So we had to make it up by having better analysis and knowing where to get third party information and how to analyze that information, how to craft better models that described what the past was, and thus what the future is going to be, and then try to overlay some good, smart trading and structuring of trades on top of that 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
“So by being a hedge fund structure and not being in the physical business, not dealing with customers and dealing with pipelines, we were at an information disadvantage going in. When we were thinking, 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
“And then, how's the market price today? Certainly at that time, there were people who weren't allowed to be short. There were people who were only going to be short if it was way mispriced relative to expected value. And I think that's what got him was that it was already so That even had you had this supply shock happen, what's the upside now? We're already priced for 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
“Right, right. The market was so scared. And so people were hesitant. People were only going to put on that short trade if they thought the market had already priced that in. I used to think about it as you have this unknown weather event. How cold is the winter going to be? What's the hurricane situation going to be? And you can think about it. You had this probability distribution function of the possible outcomes. And then think about, okay, under each outcome, how would I think about what fair value is of the commodity at that time? And then did your simple math and you come to expected value and that really simplifies the process down much too simplistically. But that was the type of thought process that would go in is, okay, if it's 80th percentile hurricane damage, what is that? If it's 90th percentile, if it's 99th percentile, what if it's 10th percentile, right? And think about all these.”
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 he couldn't hold it anymore, so he kind of single-handedly that position bankrupted this macro hedge fund. And I did well during that trade. I think I may have had on 25% of the opposing position. I was very cognizant that it is possible that a hurricane comes and has a short-term price spike. And I don't want to blow up if and when that happens. So I need to size this appropriately. I don't think he had sized it appropriately given the alternative scenario.”
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 supplies are ramping up and talked about earlier that the supply demand was tight in 2002. Supply demand got very loose in 2006. And so the market was just oversupplied. It was a very bearish market. But Brian Hunter kept this trade on. It was a very bullish trade on and kept the prices supported even though the fundamental picture was deteriorating by continuing to buy more and more and more of this one product. But a long story short, he distorted the relative values in that market so much. It gets told now that the trade was me versus him, and that's very not much the case. It was the whole market versus him because he was such a large position in this as started to get into the first, the very early part of hurricanes season and there was no hurricane and then prices were starting to collapse.”
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
“Brian Hunter in 2005, he was long during that time and made a lot of money for his fund. And at the time, he worked for a fund Amarinth Advisors, which was a macro hedge fund, meaning they do everything. They trade stocks, they trade bonds, Brian Hunter was the natural gas trader for them. Now, in 2005, as I understand it, he was by far the most profitable trading desk and trader large hedge fund. And so he was given a lot more position size or capital to trade with. And I think he had the belief that something similar would happen or at least a big scare would happen next year and would cause the same type of move. The difference was partially in reaction to the spike in prices that we saw in 2005, it sent the signal to every producer to increase supplies. So every producer gets that price signal, every producer puts more money into drilling for gas. You start to see that in 2006.”
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 after that time, I think two things happened. First was as ocean temperatures were rising, there started to be a belief the number of hurricanes and the intensity of hurricanes and thus the damage from hurricanes to the energy sector and natural gas sector was structurally increasing. And second, that there'd be a great fear amongst any trader to be short during that time period, the hurricane season, and if August and September and peak hurricane season. So he had done very well in 2005.”
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
“2005, I hope I get all these facts right. My memory gets a little bit cloudy from those days, but 2005 was Hurricane Katrina. It came in and caused significant damage on the offshore natural gas production as well as the processing natural gas processing facilities that were onshore Louisiana. And because of that, the price of gas spiked significantly. People were short supplies.”
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. So it was always driven by how do I want my money managed? What do I think is a good investment for me? And then if other people want to put money alongside, 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
“Right, from very shortly after I started, I was the largest investor in the fund. And I was in it for the return on my money. That's how I managed the fund. And that's how I would pitch it to central investors was I think this is a great investment opportunity. This is where I want my money. This is the risk where I am on the risk spectrum for my money. And if you want to join on that journey, I'd be happy to have you. But I'm going to run a risky business. And you have to be prepared for that going on because I wasn't in it to make the management fees. That's not how I wanted to, that wasn't my business.”
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 I wanted to be the best in the world at North American natural gas and power trading. That was the business. Didn't want to trade oil, didn't want to trade natural gas stocks or natural gas bonds, didn't want to trade agriculture, stick to our expertise, don't try to build an empire here. Just do this one thing. And I think by doing so, I think by keeping focus, it allowed us to achieve that mission of being the best in the field. I think it also started, it put a natural limit as to the amount of assets that we could manage. So we just couldn't be too big relative to the market. And the amount of money”
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
“Natural gas and all the other hedge funds should, it was a signal to them, go figure out what's going on over there. How's he making this much money and see if there's something for us to do? So during that time, as will happen in any market whenever there's kind of above market returns going on in a field, new entrants come in. And that's certainly what happened during that time. It made a very deliberate decision that I was going to keep the focus of the business narrow.”
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 was a trading magazine that came up with a list of highest paid traders, and that was from specifically from the hedge fund world, where most of the highest paid traders existed. And it was not only what was the return on your investment in the fund, but what was your incentive fees and kind of trying to estimate that? And they would create these lists of top 100 for the year. I don't remember what year it was, but somehow they got a hold of my returns and started doing the math on it and figured out that I was not only one of the top 100, but I think top five that year. And that was the first time a broadcast to the world that I was making big money, but also was a broadcast to the rest of the industry that something's going on.”
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 got scheduled to go do a tour, went did a tour. They had no idea who I was. At the time, I wasn't a rich guy back then, but I came home and wrote them a check, a five-figure check. And I get a call from the founder who I had not met on that original tour a couple days later, and this was back when kind of five figures was really significant to the organization. And he said, thank you. And who are you? And I need to cultivate this relationship. And that was the start of my very long journey thinking about K-12 education in the country. And so in this time, 2022, 2003, I was getting more interested in it. I check size was going up, but it was something I thought about one percent of the time.”
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
“Always recognized the limited social value of trading. I think there is a need for someone to provide risk warehousing and liquidity to markets. But trying to tell the story about how I was adding value or contributing to society was hard. And that always bothered me. So when I first started getting my first $100,000 bonus back when I was at Enron, shortly thereafter was at a supermarket and I see a magazine that says top 50 nonprofits in America. And I pick it up and throw it into my grocery basket. I take it home and immediately turn to the education section. I think a lot of younger philanthropists, a lot of people from the finance industry get drawn to K-12 education. One of the organizations was based in Houston. It was KIP. KIP charter schools. And so I called them up.”
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 remember calling my mom pretty much saying those words that were set, we have financial security now forever regardless of what happens.”
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 Think so, yeah. It all starts to blur together now. But you had this massive spike in price of gas, I think approximately doubled in if two days. And that was the day the fund also had more than doubled in those two days in terms of assets. And that was the day when it was like, I feel rich for the first time. I am set for life 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
“Now the weather event was maybe a one out of five probability, but I think the bets were pricing them that it was one out of 50. And so as I'm making money on market making and providing liquidity, I was putting on some of these trades, just putting a little bit of money into this trade at various points. And that winner ended up being the one in five weather event. And there was a two-day stretch in late February.”
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, so that first year was remarkable for many reasons. But one of the things that happened was that the gas market ended up being very tight, that demand was high and supply wasn't keeping up. And so the outright level of inventories was okay. But the trend was that we were drawing inventories or not putting gas in the ground like we should have been doing. And again, had the market been more efficient. I think other traders did notice this and others put it on. But there were some trades that I thought were very misvalued from a risk-reward perspective. And that was that if we were to have a cold winter, that first one, 2002, 2003, if that winter was cold, the gas market could experience some significant shortages. And the price bikes that would correspond to those shortages.”
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 was just risk reward. It was don't even bother about taking risk. Yeah, there was so much free money in the market by providing that service. Just do that. You can think about the business as kind of a bundled product. One was the market making providing liquidity and getting paid for that service, warehousing some risk. And second was trying to make a call on where natural gas prices were going next. There's some synergy of having those together. There's a lot of synergy in having those together, but that's the two strands of the business.”
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. So then second month, I'm up 33%. Third month, I'm up 38%. And I'm sending the notes out, the investor notes out to everybody that was in my Rolodex that expressed interest. And now all of a sudden, three months in, I'm up, what's the compound rate, probably 150% in three months. And so some of the people start calling me back and saying, hey, maybe I'll send you some money. And so those first few years, it was doing a lot of the low risk trading to create the base and this upward trend in profitability and then layering on some speculative trading on top of that. And I was able to play bigger than my asset size because I had this upward trend in profitability. If I was wrong on my market call, I wouldn't be decimated because I was still making money on the market making arbitrage side of the business.”
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 shouldn't exist in a normal functioning market that existed for that next year just because the market players had been so decimated. So the first month, it was up 36%. On a percentage basis is high. On an actual dollar basis, we made $3 million.”
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
“One of the things after N1 went bankrupt is Wall Street started looking at all the copycat enrons. So all the other pipeline companies and electric utilities who had started out these merchant businesses or trading businesses. And Wall Street essentially says, we're not funding those businesses anymore. There's too much risk. And so what happened was that there is great need for risk intermediation and for risk warehousing in the business. half of the largest players are out of that business over the first six months of 2002. And so the market became incredibly inefficient and was willing to pay for the task of intermediation at a very high rate. And so just by setting up the computer, there was, going back to the arbitrage, it was very low risk or arbitrage.”
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
“Whether I was going to jail or not, all these questions. And so everybody who was banging on my door to invest pulls back. But meanwhile, I've rented office space. I've hired employees. I've bought computers and telecom systems. I got to move forward. I have almost no money to do this now. I ended up starting in August of 02 with $8 million of capital, some of which was mine, and I had two outside investors.”
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