#69 - Paid News, Burning Money & Solving Climate Change

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by Superside. So, superside.com, if you need something designed quickly, go to superside.com, give them a try.
So, I am humble and smart.

**Shaan Puri** (0:20)
What up, Sam, how are you doing?

**Sam Parr** (0:22)
Hi.

**Shaan Puri** (0:23)
You got a sweatshirt on that says, it's only money. What are you trying to say?

**Sam Parr** (0:29)
I'm trying to say that when I look at my portfolio and look at my losses, it's only money.

**Shaan Puri** (0:36)
It's only money.
You know, I met this guy once and he was like, he, I don't know, doesn't matter. Met a guy and we were talking and I'm easily excitable. So, if you start talking to me and you start talking a little bit of sense, I get really excited and I will triple down and make some kind of commitment that I don't want to make. But I did that with this guy where we were both talking about money and we were like, you know what? Fuck money, right? Like we need to fuck money.
And we agreed to do a money burn in San Francisco. We were like, okay, $1,000. You bring $1,000 and we're just going to burn it.

**Sam Parr** (1:10)
God, that's so stupid.

**Shaan Puri** (1:11)
And of course, exactly.

**Sam Parr** (1:13)
Does money burn?

**Shaan Puri** (1:15)
Yeah, it's paper, right?

**Sam Parr** (1:16)
It's not paper. It's cotton.

**Shaan Puri** (1:18)
What?

**Sam Parr** (1:20)
So, there's a, it's like a riddle. What weighs more?
All the money printed in a year or all the trains that have ever passed through Grand Central Station? And the answer is they weigh the same, which is they're both weightless because trains don't pass through Grand Central Station and money isn't made from paper.

**Shaan Puri** (1:40)
Ah, okay, good. I love riddles.
Thank you for that.

**Sam Parr** (1:44)
It's made of cotton. So, in fact, it does grow on trees.

**Shaan Puri** (1:48)
But I'm pretty sure money burns. I think I've seen this in movies, unless they're using fake paper there.
But anyways, we didn't end up doing it because I pushed out because I was like, do I really want to burn $1,000? I don't think I do.
And also I was like, this is going to get so much blowback and no one's going to care about the intentions behind it. It's just going to come across as a douchey thing to do. So I didn't do it. So I'm sorry to my friend. I backed out of it. But I do like the idea of sort of letting go of the attachment to money. But anyhow, yeah, it's only money.

**Sam Parr** (2:16)
It's only money. And I paid $50 for this hoodie. $80 or something.
I bought it because Dave Portnoy. Have you seen what he's done?

**Shaan Puri** (2:25)
What do you mean? Which part of it?

**Sam Parr** (2:27)
The founder of Barstool.
Founder of Barstool is trading. He put $3 or $4 million into an account and has been day trading and filming the whole thing. I think he's down $600K right now.
And it's awesome. It's so good. It's really exciting to watch. And he wore one of these. So I bought it.

**Shaan Puri** (2:47)
Nice. His plan is going according to plan, I think.

**Sam Parr** (2:51)
I love it. He's losing a lot of money.
You want to get into this?

**Shaan Puri** (2:56)
Yeah, let's do it.

**Sam Parr** (2:57)
Okay. I think I have two or three interesting things.
Have you read what I wrote?

**Shaan Puri** (3:02)
I've been looking at it right now. So are we talking?
We talk about three things on this podcast, right? Ideas. So like kind of, you know, interesting ideas based off of trends, observations, etc. We talk about people that are doing interesting things or live in interesting lives. And then the last one is that we talk about, you know, just cool stuff we saw or stuff we're trying ourselves. And so which one, this first one, which one is this?

**Sam Parr** (3:24)
I have number one and I have number two. So the there's two of them.
The first is let's do the Japanese one. Okay. So one of my favorite things to do, and it's kind of a nerdy thing, is I love looking at, and I've told you this, I love looking at what other countries do and figuring out why it's interesting and why we don't have it in America or the other way around.
And the Japanese and Chinese cultures, which I know close to nothing about, I don't entirely understand if they have anything in common. Like, I don't know if like the similarities between Japan and China is the same as America to China. Like, so I don't know. But what I've noticed that both the Chinese and the Japanese are wonderful at monetizing news apps. And there's a few reasons. The first reason is in Japan, I don't know if this is true in China, but in Japan, it's still quite common to buy newspapers and to subscribe to news. That's still common. In China, I don't know why it's so much popular, but for example, in China, the people who have podcasts like this, they monetize significantly better with subscriptions.