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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“So it was an interesting time, to say the least. So right after Enron declared kind of the first quarter of 2002, I was getting calls. By a lot of people, people I didn't know saying, if you are going to do your own thing, I have interest in investing with you. And my intent was to try to raise $50 million of day one capital and just start there and let it grow organically and increase over time. And I thought I'd be cutting people back. I thought fundraising would be very easy. There was going to be $200 million of interest and I was going to cut everybody. You can invest 25% of what you want to. Second quarter of 2002 dramatic change. This is when a lot of the investigations into Enron start to bear fruit, if you will, and the headlines come out. And the headlines are, say, every week there's a new scandal that's coming out. And now the people who had called me, one they don't know if the profits that were posted in the New York Times, whether those are real or not.”
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 and I looked at the deal, and kind of for the first time stepped back and started thinking what do I want to do with my life. And that's where the decision was, I don't want to go with this entity. I have different views on how this business should proceed in the future. And I want to go try it somewhere 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
“And so when it finally November of 2001 was kind of shortly after 9-11 and that caused some havoc in the financial markets. And then that's when Wall Street was not going to give you a second chance in that environment. And Enron arguably didn't deserve one. And so it all happened so fast that whenever Enron lost credit worthiness in the business, then it just, it was over, business over. There was some time spent trying to find a credit worthy JV partner to come in and Noron would contribute the intellectual assets and someone would contribute new money and keep the trading operation going because it had been so profitable. If it was just swept away in bankruptcy, it was a loss of a lot of potential value to what was then the estate of Enron, the creditors of Enron. And so there was a lot of focus on trying to cut that deal and a deal was eventually cut with the New York Bank.”
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 happened so quickly that there was damage control that I could see from my perspective in the company. Again, my perspective was sitting at a desk with two phones in my ear for most of the day. Didn't get much of a sense of what was going on outside of what natural gas prices were ticking up. So it happened so quickly that there wasn't much to be done from the trading side perspective. This was all kind of all those decisions end up in the finance side.”
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
“Meant that whenever mistakes were made, there wasn't the admittance to Wall Street that this was a mistake and we're going to change. It was swept under the rug. And Enron, the process of bankruptcy kind of happened so quickly because all these financial businesses, which at the time Enron had morphed into a financial business, is completely contingent upon having the faith of your creditors, having the faith of Wall Street. And once Wall Street loses faith in you and refuses to fund you on a day, the business is toast. And that's what happened.”
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 easy in retrospect, yeah. I think the disintermediation, which not only anyone was doing, but was a broad theme in the business world at the time was real. And the investment community was valuing companies who were disintermediating the same way that they do today in the tech sector. There's a lot of value to be created if you can just intermediate a business chain. I think Enron, trying to approach it from the commodity side and trying to do it with water, trying to do it with electricity, doing it globally in places where the quality of law and of intellectual protections isn't what it was in America. And then having the culture of never being able to admit failure that existed not only in Enron, but again in many other companies at the time as well.”
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 have the right answer for that. And new things in the company and other divisions. I had friends that worked in other divisions. We would go have a beer after work. I would hear their stories about some crazy deal that their division was doing that they thought was stupid. I would hear stories about this, but our day-to-day in the trading group was just so focused on the one activity that we didn't have firsthand knowledge of any of that. It was always kind of the hearsay. the trading group was making so much money that there was a thought, I think, that could actually see this whenever earnings were getting released, that the trading group would support the other divisions until they stopped making the dumb mistakes and became profitable on their own. I can't speak exactly about why the trading group was making so much 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
“Think you said that well. The notion of going in saying, I think we're right about this, but it might not work, or we might be wrong. It's going to write down our theory and test it along the way and see if it's playing out the way it should and not get wedded to this theory that everything we're doing in the foundation is evidence-based, but the evidence is never perfect. So we're taking the best available information and saying how much risk should society be willing to take to test a different idea.”
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 market is wrong, then you're going to blow up. And so it's how do you have the right level where it's like, I'm confident in my view on this, but I know I might be wrong”
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
“Think it was just innate. I think this is how I was born. That detachment from the emotions that doesn't affect my decision making process. And so I think that's one of the two superpowers, quote superpowers that I had. I think I also fell perfectly on the confidence spectrum. And I say that it takes a certain amount of arrogance to be a trader because the market's usually right. And to be a trader, you have to say, I think I'm smarter than the market here. I think the market is wrong. I think I am right. So it takes that arrogance in order to be willing to put on a trade. And I've seen people just get paralyzed or they just say they're so concerned about the downside and it being wrong that they can't do anything. So you have to be arrogant, but you can be too arrogant. And that's been the destroyer of many trading careers is if you stick with it, I am 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
“You couldn't tell. It was just 100% focus on executing the process. So my views would change, but the process of how you look at the market can easily get swayed by emotions. Whenever, and there's the phrase fear and greed that drives a lot of price trends in financial assets. You're either greedy or you're fearful, and that's driving your behavior. And to the extent, I think that you can eliminate those two emotions from the trading and from the process, you get better. And you know me well enough. You wouldn't describe me as an emotional guy, 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
“So I've definitely seen traders that had that dopamine aspect to their trading personality. I've gotten the question many times, why were you a good trader? Why were you considered one of the best traders in the market? And it's always been hard for me to answer. I think part of it is I had this emotional detachment from the business. So if I was having one of my best days or having one of my”
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, exactly. It is not a healthy lifestyle. As I grew up, I was able, I learned how to handle the stress better. I got tired of the drinking and partying and gambling, and especially kind of as I got into my 30s, as I got married, as I had kids, that all starts changing. But it also can be a reason why people start to get repulsed by that career is the lifestyle that doesn't necessarily go along with it, but oftentimes does.”
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, I didn't realize it. Kind of looking back probably after I eventually lost the weight that I gained during those years and cut down on some of the drinking, started exercising a lot more looking back at the health of my life was a bit telling, even like going and putting on some of the clothes that I used to wear, seeing how so differently built today than I was back then. You had to find some method to relieve stress.”
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 they had customers or somebody needed to put a hedge on because of another deal that they did. And so it was just nonstop action. And the stress level was intense. I think I'm very good at handling stress. The stress level was intense to a point of not being healthy. And I think this is true of many trading floors, especially back in those days. I think it's why traders generally have short lives, trading lives, trading careers. It's hard for the body to handle that level of stress for decades and 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
“A given day, I was trading billions of dollars of notional value of gas. So a lot of it was trying to buy it, $2, trying to sell it at $2.5 penny for enormous volumes. And so Enron was the largest market maker, was the largest speculative trader of gas that had the most customer business coming through it. And so being at the center of that, being the head trader there, it was just from the moment you sat down in the morning until about three, four o'clock, it was just non-stop trade. Someone would bring food and put it in front of me, I'd run to the bathroom and run back. Internet trading was starting to take off then, so there was still the trading and the pit on the trading floor, like trading places style. So there was that. There was trading that was happening on the internet. There was trading that was happening with other people within the company.”
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. It is almost hard to believe. It was a company that was very merit focused, I think, by giving out that responsibility. It was fantastic to work at a place like that. I think it ended up being the downfall of the company as well as there just wasn't the controls on people who were given too much responsibility, too much of the company's balance sheet to use without their adequate controls on 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
“Enron people. Go hire someone kind of mid level, give them a promotion and a raise, and have them come over to your company. And so that was happening all the time, which was great for the young guy at Enron because the guy above you was leaving to go get a better job. And so it was an environment where if you could prove that you were responsible and that you were smart, you could rise much faster than you could at a mature company or in a mature industry. And so that next four years for me was really the roller coaster where every nine months or so I would get a promotion again like much faster than I would have gotten had I been at a more mature company and ended up by the time I was 25 I was the head natural gas trader at the largest Natural gas trading company in the industry”
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 my first job in the Nat Gas Division was they put me as an assistant trader with a gentleman who had expertise on the physical side of the business. Didn't know anything about trading, but he knew natural gas. And I knew nothing about natural gas, but knew something about trading and was good with numbers. And they essentially put the two of us together and said, you guys, go figure this out, work together and run this book. And so that was my first real trading job where, although I was an assistant trader on the book, but where I was involved in the trading. At this time, Enron started to become a darling. And it was certainly within the energy side and within the pipeline business had become this darling. Its stock was higher than all other stocks. So every other company was trying to figure out how do I more like Enron. So what's the easy way to be more like Enron is go higher?”
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
“But people who had spent their career in gas wasn't sure if they knew anything about gas either. They knew the fundamentals about the physical molecules, but what the historical pricing relationships were, it was a whole new game. So I went down there knowing nothing, but it felt like the whole industry was trying to figure out what does the world of natural gas look like today going forward given everything's changed.”
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
“London and you work in the oil group there or go downstairs and work in the natural gas trading group. And as a 21 year old getting offered an expat package to go to UK, it was extraordinarily tempting because I'm thinking going back to business school anyway. It was a hard decision, but I realized the core of this company is natural gas. That's where I need to be that. I need to learn that. And so I went downstairs and started natural gas. And that was on its own just very fortuitous timing. I spoke about in 1992 was when the full deregulation happened. The winter of 96 was the first time that natural gas prices really blew out. It was extremely cold winter. And all the historical relationships that gas had just completely changed. And so going down there, I knew nothing about gas.”
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
“Early 1996, I was supposed to be on a formal rotation six months on one desk, six months on a different business within Enron and kind of rotate four rotations over two years and then go back to business school. And after six months, I think the team there liked me and I liked being there and kind of got made in to be an exception. So I didn't have to rotate. But kind of shortly thereafter, one of the traders, I was speaking earlier about mistakes are costly in the trading side and there was an older gentleman who kind of made a mistake, kind of did a trade that ended up going bad. And they reorganized the whole group. And the new boss came up and I worked for him for a couple months. And one day he pulls me aside and says, I have to blow up this group. I like you. It's not going to be good for your career to be here. You need to find a different group. And he gave me two options. One was go to.”
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
“Unbiased nature was always a gas company. It was gas focused. The oil group was small. It was kind of the red-headed stepchild. It didn't make much money. It was necessary because some customers wanted to transact on oil with the same company that they were doing their gas transactions with. But it was always a small group”
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
“Quickly. I look back at all the good timings and kind of good decisions that went into my career. And one of them was I found the perfect job from my skill set as my first job. And I think that's pretty rare. And it happened by accident could have very easily ended up mergers and acquisition investment banker at Merrill Lynch. But I ended up trading commodities at a relative upstart of a company. That was just the perfect spot for my skill set.”
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 certainly was not trading. I was kind of an assistant on the desk, which meant doing a lot of spreadsheets or running analytical studies and correlation studies, building models, getting lunch, doing all the things that first years do, trying to learn 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
“Transplant your first thing, right? I had expressed interest on the trading side when I went through the interview process, and they called me in April and said, a couple people recently left our oil trading group, if you can start immediately, you can start in trading. And I said, well, I graduate in 10 days. How about 12 days from now? I'll be there. And so I literally graduated, drove from Nashville to Houston that weekend and that Monday show up at work in the oil trading group at Enron.”
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 very rare for someone at Enron and even someone at an investment bank to be put on the trading floor. There's just mistakes are expensive on the trading floor. And so they don't want the kid that's a few days out of college.”
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, I think this was a trend in corporate America then was go asset light. So get rid of your big assets. Coca-Cola spins off its bottling business. They just become the seller of the syrup because that's wider on assets. But your return on equity is higher if you have fewer assets. And so that was the direction of corporate America generally and the one that Enron took”
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 Ken Lay was chairman and CEO shortly after I joined, I think May of'95, there had been two aspects of the company. I had the historical pipeline business, and then it had this new, let's call it investment bank side. And there was what I later came to realize was the great decision point for the company was who was going to be the number two at Enron? Was it going to be the head of the pipeline business or was it going to be Jeff Skilling who is the head of the energy bank? And so shortly after I joined, Jeff was promoted up and Rich Kinder ended up leaving and starting Kinder Morgan.”
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, it was historically a pipeline company. And over the decades, natural gas, which went from a highly regulated business and all the troubles associated with trying to regulate a commodity, that you end up having these huge booms and busts, way too much supply or way too little supply was deregulated and that deregulation ended in 1992. And that was really the emergence of Enron as it became the late stage company was that previous to then you had the pipeline was responsible for providing the merchant services to the buyer and seller. So the producer of gas would sell to the pipeline and then the pipeline would transport the gas and sell it to the customer. It was viewed that this was negative because it was pipelines or natural monopolies frequently. And so the services and the cost of those services were too high.”
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 did. So at the time Vanderbilt was probably a tier lower than it's considered today as a school. And the investment banks didn't do much recruiting there. So there was maybe one or two in some of the regional banks. And then I was able to talk my way into a couple of interviews. But I didn't get those jobs. So I was a bit crushed. Here's what I want to do. And I got things that were close to that working at the regional investment bank. And then one of the jobs I got, which I thought was closest to what I wanted to do to being in that game, was at the company Enron. And Enron at the time was in this transformation trying to become essentially an investment bank to the energy industry and specifically the natural gas and electricity industry.”
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, take 18 hours every semester. Did summer school one summer came in with some credits and I was the guy that was trying to get out of there and into the game as quickly as possible. Every day I was at college was one last day that I had to be in the game. And I think my grades probably reflected that. I was not academically focused, either in high school or in college. I think academics came relatively easy to me. So it didn't instill a great work ethic at school, but I just wanted to move on. It was a task to complete to get me to the next stage.”
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 reading Liar's Poker, and I think barbarians at the gate, both classic books about Wall Street. And although growing up in Dallas with my mom as an accountant, my dad as a corporate lawyer, I didn't have a census as to what Wall Street was except through these books, except by reading Wall Street Journal every day. And it seemed like that was the biggest game around. I got drawn to that game or the desire to enter that game. And so my goal throughout college was to get the job and the classic post-college analyst job at a big Wall Street bank.”
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 would describe arbitrage as taking advantage of price differences with little to no risk. They think true arbitrage is no risk where you bought it for one and you've sold it at two and you've taken no risk in doing so. In reality, there's always a little bit of risk. And so by knowing that the market in New York valued something at $20 and it was trading in Texas at $15, I could take advantage of what I call geographic arbitrage there that the market in Texas was different from the market in New York. Now, of course, today with the internet, a lot of those arbitrages and inefficiencies, pricing inefficiencies have gone away or have been, what do you call them, the trade, arbed out. And so now you see the high frequency traders trying to make a hundredth of a penny on a share of stock and have huge incentive to do so and do so at massive volume. But it's like buying and selling.”
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 I got my driver's license at a young age. I think it was at 14. My father at the time was going through an illness. He had Crohn's disease through his life and kind of a chronic condition that especially in my teen years became a bit debilitating for him. And so I was able to get, I forget what the name of that particular license was, but because there was a kind of family hurdle, family handicap that I was able to start driving when I was 14”
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 one thing led to another, and I ended up spending a couple summers just kind of full time on this baseball card, really geographic arbitrage and information arbitrage that I would have a sense of who the best buyer was for every product, wherever they were in the United States or even into Canada and would go around and try to find any bargains I could in the Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana tri-state area, going to do day trips down to Houston and go to the big fairs down here, go canvass all the dealers. And that was really my first 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
“And there was a small bulletin board of baseball court dealers where they would do the wholesale trading. And the market was so volatile at the time. If a particular player went on a good streak for two weeks, that card would get hot, especially in the region he played. And you'd start seeing number one, volatility in prices and second kind of geographic differentiation in prices. So the market for hockey cards was very strong in the Northeast and in Canada, a little in Michigan, they would sell them across the nation. Now, the guys that bought them in Texas, there wasn't much of a local market. So I could go buy the hockey cards there, ship them up to a dealer in New York, and make a few dollars. And that few dollars I would then reinvest and do it more than the sports card business was going parabolic at 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
“At a local trade show for $30 and going and putting a lot of the collection on the table and trying to sell it. And again, the sports card business was booming and so came home with maybe $100 from the $30 investment. Now, of course, the cost of goods sold didn't really factor that in. Maybe that was a sunk cost at the time. But it started getting me interested in this as a potential business. And I kind of quickly figured out I didn't want to be spending my weekends sitting at the local trade fair and couldn't. I played highly competitive soccer, so I had things to do on the weekend. But there was a wholesale market that didn't require as much time. And so this is really kind of the, again, during the”
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
“First business, so probably mowing lawns. I was sitting around one summer and said, I want to make some money. So what can a 12-year-old do to try to make a dollar? Not much. And so went knocking on every neighbor's door and tried to find a lawn demo and realized that everybody either cut it themselves or had a lawn service already set up. And so that wasn't going to be my path to riches. And then kind of around age 14, I ended up getting into the baseball card business pretty actively. So this was right around 1988, 89, 90, when the sports card business was taking off. And I had a small collection at the time, but I always thought of it more as an asset rather than a collectible that I wanted to put on my desk and look at every day. And so the first experience was just renting a tape.”
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 grew up in Dallas in a very boring, great upper middle class lifestyle in Dallas, went to Dallas public schools, ended up going to Vanderbilt.”
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 give about 400 million a year. The assets in the foundation are a little over 2 billion. Then we have a couple other giving vehicles, specifically a DAF. We contribute money every year as well. So we have a high spend rate, but our philanthropic intent is to give away the vast majority of our money during our lifetimes.”
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 tend to be louder whenever you're in conflict with them than when they're showing appreciation. I think part of how we've chosen issues to work on is we're looking for these system problems that have a lot of impact in people's lives, where the two sides, the left and the right, have historically been divided for some reason, and that they're starting to come together. There's a reason why there can be a solution that's viable today that wasn't viable five years ago or 10 years ago. And that ends up being a component of almost every issue we work on is that the left and the right are coming together. And so we need to be able to work with both sides. And so we've tried to tamp down the politics both personally and professionally over the years and try to see in the Venn diagram of things the left will support and the things the right will support, even if it's for different reasons or different motivations. Let's explore those territories and see what can be done.”
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
“Like, that we don't approach all problems with the same ideology. I think problems are different, problems are complex, and the type of solution for each problem is different. So we don't say that the free market is the right answer for everything. Don't say government's the right answer for everything, but it depends on the makeup of the problem, the actors, the market failures, et cetera, as to what the right solution is. And therefore, over the years have managed to make mad both the left and the right and sometimes simultaneously.”
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 it's essentially that I've been called the next Koch brother by the far left, and I've been labeled the next George Soros by the far right. And I think I write that I'm an equal opportunity special interest pot stirr. And I think it does label me a couple ways. First is our actions at the foundation, which has been its current form for about 10 years, have led to getting into a lot of squabbles with both the left and the right. And at times it's been frustrating. At times it's been liberating, but it has brought a lot of conflict, which one doesn't normally think about when you think about philanthropy and a philanthropist about having conflict and fights and battles with a lot of these issues. And that's generally been a component of our work, not by design, but by necessity. And then I think the second part of it that I”
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