John Arnold: The most prolific philanthropist you may not have heard of

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is John Arnold. John is probably the guy that'll go down in history as the most successful natural gas trader of all time. And we spend the first part of this episode explaining that story. And you might think, well, what does that have to do with anything? Well, it's only by understanding how John came to amass a fortune of billions of dollars trading natural gas. Can you understand the second part of this discussion, which is how at the age of about 37 or 38, he shut it all down and turned all of his attention to the full-time craft slash business slash art of philanthropy.
John's philanthropy is as serious as his natural gas trading. And his foundation, Arnold Ventures, which he is the co-chair of along with his wife, Laura, focuses on really the hardest social problems imaginable. And in this episode, John discusses at great length where philanthropy fits into the broader picture of the nonprofit sector, differentiating it from charity and how that fits into even the broader umbrella of public or government spending and even private spending.
And it's only by understanding that lens that you can really understand how someone like John thinks about deploying the types of resources they do, which are legion, to be clear. The foundation currently spends about $400 million a year in grants.
And John's goal is to basically spend their entire fortune in their lifetime solving very hard problems, problems like criminal justice reform, health policy reform, K through 12 reform, public finance, things like that. We obviously don't go nearly as deep as I would love to go into all of these topics. And yet somehow this podcast managed to be probably two and a half hours, if not slightly more, which certainly leaves ample room for a part two of this at some point in time. I guess one thing I would say about this is, I'm obviously fascinated by this topic and could sit here and talk about natural gas trading forever. If that subject matter isn't that interesting to you, what I would suggest is paying close attention to the timestamps in your podcast player. You'll probably wanna listen to the first part of this, because it's, I think, John's background and growing up and his card trading business, his baseball card trading business. I think that stuff is really important to kind of understand John's mentality. You may actually wanna skip his career where he goes from college to work at Enron. And don't worry, he's one of the good guys at Enron. And then you may wanna sort of skip to the part where he decides to shut his own hedge fund down and instead focus on philanthropy. Again, I'll leave it up to you, but I guess the point I wanna make is, I wouldn't be put off by the fact that if you're not interested in natural gas, you won't find this episode interesting. I think this episode is interesting start to finish, but there may be some people who only find one part of the string or another. So just pay attention to where that is. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with John Arnold.
Hey John, awesome to sit down with you. I'm bummed we are not able to do this in person, because anytime we sit down in person, it is a long and fruitful discussion where I just feel like I'm learning at a geometric rate. But nevertheless, I'm excited that we're finally getting to sit down and talk, because there's so many things on my mind. Now, a lot of people listening to this podcast will not really know who you are, and I've struggled to think about the best way to introduce you. So I thought one of the funniest ways to introduce you is to do so through the tweet that you have pinned at the top of your page. So remind me, your handle on Twitter is, is it John Arnold Foundation?