"My guest today is John Arnold. John is probably the most famous energy trader of all time and certainly the most successful. One of the things John says was that he wanted to cultivate and build the b..."

"Everyone listening, I think, is somewhat interested in what's going on in China. Your lessons that you shared were so interesting, and I'd love you to just share some of the highlights from that trip ..."

"Which company visit was the most illustrative of these big lessons? What was the company visit that looking back on the trip taught you the most? So, I've been fascinated with the EV market in China, ..."

"Did you learn anything about robotics or AI that just that surprised you? The number of robotics companies, there's over a hundred now in China. As I understand the process, each five-year plan, China..."

"Obviously there's tons about of understanding about what the state of China wants and is trying to accomplish. But if you add up all your conversations with all the people that you met across the week..."

"I'd love to rewind the clock a little bit. I mostly talk to investors on this show. I rarely have talked to some of the world's great traders through history. At a point in your career, you were proba..."

"I don't know if I felt I was the best. I felt I was among the best. I had also managed to create probably the best seat in the industry. say more about that. >> So, my first job out of college was at ..."

"I like this concept of like developing the best seat in your in your industry. Are there any other interesting or useful components to that if someone is listening and they're an investor or some or e..."

"Can you tell me about the baseball card business that you built in high school? And I'm curious about it because I always wonder where the initial spark comes from. You mentioned the importance of pas..."

"Can you describe the actual instruments that you were trading like when you were trying to put positions on and take them off? What what were those positions? What were they in on average? And I I wan..."

"And so in a given day like how much volume and activity would there be? Like how many decision key decisions would you make in a given day? So it changed over time. I was for a long time the largest m..."

"It strikes me as someone that looks at a lot of young companies that it is exciting. Energy is exciting. Again, maybe it's just because of data centers and AI and the the new demand uh that's coming o..."

"If you were describing the industry today to someone that knew nothing about how the US energy system works, what would be the highle way that you would approach that problem of explaining it to someb..."

"What is if you could imagine a US energy future? I'd love to paint the polls and have you imagine uh the best possible scenario you can imagine for us 10 years from now and what the components of that..."

"If you think about that bad case scenario both supply and demand wise, um I'm curious starting with demand, how certain you feel that this increase, this big increase in demand for really the first ti..."

"And what about our ability to meet that demand? What would screw us up on the supply side the most? I think it's policy. It's gotten harder and harder to build in this country over the years and there..."

"If you were a politician, would you use the China story as fuel to the fire to try to communicate and market this concept that we're sort of getting lapped by someone that's sort of our, if not advers..."

"If I was an uh, you mentioned the asset side being so exciting on the energy side. If I was a energy asset investor and I really wanted to fund stuff that would help us solve this problem where you go..."

"Transmission is certainly a component of it. It's not the only component. We can talk about supply chains, can talk about land use, um but transmission is a huge component of it. Uh I actually started..."

"What do you think about nuclear? Both new forms of fision, but also the, you know, the panacea potential of fusion. >> Promising, but very, very difficult. The innovation hasn't been proven. We can bu..."

"What do you think about the basket of startups that have been launched and raised in some cases a lot of money about the prospects of good returns for those dollars that are going into these companies..."

"Solar has two trends. One is technology and manufacturing costs keep going down. Technology is improving, manufacturing costs are going down. So the end product of a solar panel, >> mostly in China, >..."

"There's a number of companies that are trying to kind of make the buildout of the data center a less labor intensive through robotics. That's an interesting source. It could be a very crowded space th..."

"I think advanced geothermal is one of the most interesting components of the system today. It is a base load energy source that is, you know, friendly to the environment. Um, it is coming down the cos..."

">> We've talked a lot about energy infrastructure specifically. Are there other parts of US infrastructure non-energy that interest you most? The housing discussions that are happening across the nati..."

">> Yeah. >> Unless there's just a massive government subsidy. And I think that's one of the risks of this affordability push is that it's been decades in the making um from all these regulations, all ..."

">> I'd love to apply your sort of system thinking to some other areas that you've studied carefully and been really involved with with the foundation. But before we do that, maybe to have you describe..."

">> Any institution gets less effective over time. I think it's true of companies. I think it's true of countries or you know governments. I think it's true of foundations that you know you have your b..."

">> And I think organizations become more bureaucratic, more risk averse over time. And so they're not able to do one of the main functions of a foundation. There's this difference between charity and ..."

">> You know, I talked about the easiest money to raise is a university that's going to build a new building because a donor, you know, has trust in that institution and they know that if I give a doll..."

">> What about criminal justice? Like describe your work in that part of the world. What progress have you made? What progress do you think needs to be made to that system? We first got involved in thi..."

">> And so they were using the individual to try to improve the system. And with that entry we started looking more and more into criminal justice system. And we heard a lot of anecdotes about some of ..."

"A lot of people who are who are committing crime, you know, don't have that, you know, the ability to process if I get caught, will I have a 5year sentence or a 10ear sentence and that's going to chan..."

"And meanwhile we have this cash bail system that's largely based upon do you have money to post to get out or not. We've worked with a number of states both Republican and Democratic states over the y..."

"I think one of the things that distinguishes us is we always try to think about kind of what are they all the goals of the system. Well, you know there's the goals of the criminal justice system, righ..."

"Do you think that the best place to improve things is just that probability, subjective probability that you'll get caught? Like, is that where we should invest, you know, the outsized amount of our t..."

"The way you do that in a society where number one we there's not the public funds at the city level to really significantly increase the number of police. Um and second is that communities are hesitan..."

"But and so kind of the question is like you know if you don't have a lot more money and um communities don't want a lot more officers just kind of walking around then and of what's the solution and I ..."

"What about education as something upstream of of crime? Is there have you observed or discovered in your work a useful or interesting relationship between those two things? And how do you think about ..."

"So the relationship is strong like better K through2 equals better outcomes. Yes, there's strong correlation, right? And then you try to like okay, is there causation here? Right? If I can improve the..."

"I always had to try to catch myself to be not too overly optimistic about technology solving all of our problems, but it sure does seem like AI could solve a lot of the problems in education. Maybe I'..."

"And you talk to any of these providers of an edtech platform and they have all this data they're going to show you about the remarkable results that they get from their students. And then you step bac..."

"Is that kind of like the solar thing where the solar, you know, the AI system is the equivalent of the solar panel, like it's getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper, but that's not actually..."

"I think there's a question of, you know, how do you engage with kids? You know, often times kids have short attention spans is probably more true today than has ever been. And we can all probably thin..."

"And the question is, you know, can this some combination of AI plus AR or VR try to create some type of more engaging uh both content as well as the delivery of the content uh that we haven't seen bef..."

"We got drawn to journalism um because you know view it it's called the fourth estate that it's you know a check on both government and on private actors um that there is a public good of you know both..."

"Our view is that there is a need for philanthropy to fund some of this. The same way that philanthropy funds the opera house and museums, you know, and parks that having a vibrant journalistic outlet ..."

"You get to see so many parts of the system probably more than almost anyone I've ever talked to. What has you the most excited about the world? >> Innovation. It's very easy to get pessimistic. It's v..."

">> When I do these interviews, I always ask everyone the same traditional closing question. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? >> When I was really deep into trading and about ..."

">> I love the closing idea that uh saying something hard to someone you care about can be a great kindness. A cool and unique answer. John, thank you so much for your time."