YouSaid · the spoken record

Rey Flemings

lines on the record: 67
first: 2023-08-22
most recent: 2023-08-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“What if the richest people in the world were also the kindest? What if the world's wealthiest humans were disproportionately charitable? Not most charitable because they have the most money and giving away one or two or three, but far and away, massive percentages of their income. What sort of societal impact would that have? You know, right now, if you went to, I imagine, school-age children and asked them, draw a picture of it, tell me what philanthropy looks like. They might draw or paint many pictures of what philanthropy looks like, but they wouldn't describe it as cool. And making this idea of giving back and helping other people cool and sexy, that's really where I think we have to go with it.”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He wrote a great book called Connected. We know that we can catch COVID we were talking about earlier. We know we can catch flu, but Nicholas is a world-renowned academic and just great human. He's a sterling professor at Yale, and he's done all this fantastic research. And basically, you can also catch obesity. You can catch smoking. You can catch suicide, depression. You can also catch happiness. You can catch sadness. You know, all of these things. And so I think because society has kind of placed this ideal, go get rich is the number one thing. And there is social contagion, essentially, right? This idea has spread that we're chasing that thing. And I believe if we brought in that definition, if we set a more holistic example of what success could look like, and what if the richest people in the world were also the nicest?”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We think that we need to broaden the definition of what success looks like to be more holistic, to not just be money. And we are all socially connected. Have you ever had Nicholas Christakis on as a guest”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is, I think, that every child we grow up like, hey, I want to be successful. Your parents say, go be successful, right? And we chase success. In our society, broadly speaking, we have made the definition of success how much money you have. And so that's led to work, work, work, work, work, hustle culture, entrepreneurial culture. You see all the blogs. You see all the tweets, you know, I'm out there hustling. Got to make money, got to make money. But there is no end to that, right? And so you wind up in a scenario where you have made it. You have a wealth event. You've got $100 million, but that's not enough because someone has $500 million. Become a billionaire. That's not enough because somebody's got 10 billion.”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know money has been proven to have some negative effects on people. We become the richer we become insensitive. Wealth is also isolating the rich become very, very insular. Billionaires become a dirty word. It's becoming a pejorative. People are very, very concerned. And so, yeah, I think wealth can have several different effects on you. We think that when people get to a point where they have everything that they want financially, they move kind of out of this luxury mindset and into a place of what we call post-luxury, where it's not necessarily about the nice thing. It's about experiences. It's about connection. It's about people. And we're building an organization to help folks find other people of like mind.”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the secret of our business is that we're not just randomly going out trying to do an impossible thing for a random person with a lot of money. We're actually matchmaking. We work very closely with our clients to understand them, to understand what they want, and to understand the value exchange. A lot of things are in that impossible number five category because people, it's about more than money. They have certain non-financial considerations like who is the buyer. And by understanding what the seller wants and how to make that happen, the levers, and by understanding out of all of our clients who the right clients are for that thing, we can make really unique things happen for them.”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, in those two instances, in the security instance, they are repeatable in the ventilator. Obviously, that was kind of a once in a lifetime, hopefully, you know, sort of global pandemic. But a lot of what we do, our business is more repeatable than it seems. It's just not openly commoditizable.”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had a client who was vacationing in Europe and he wanted armed private security in a nation that did not allow for armed private security. The only people who could carry a gun in that country were on duty, military and on duty, essentially federal police. The client had some security concerns. He was on vacation. And we essentially got security, an exception made by the government to treat him like a diplomat. And the president of the nation actually gave a member of his own, the equivalent of the secret service of his own security detail to secure a private American citizen. I mean, the degree of difficulty on getting stuff like that done is, you know, kind of off the off the chart.”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Number three, we call off market. And so these are things that sellers want to sell, but they never list or make available on a website, artist credentials to go see your favorite band and all sorts of other things that are never on public sale. Category four would be stuff that's hard, walking red carpet at the Medcala or being on stage with your favorite artist, etc. And then the fifth category are the impossible requests like the ventilator chase or all of these other sorts of wild and interesting things that we get called on to do.”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The easiest way to think about what we do is this five step spectrum where to the left things are simple and to the right they're difficult, too impossible. So one, two, three, four, five. On the left, anything that you can purchase on a web browser, you want to rent a home to stay in when you go to LA. Well, there's Airbnb for that. You want to buy a ticket to Coachella. Go to Coachella.com. You've got a VIP pass. Number two is hard. These are things where maybe they're available online, but they're still difficult for you to get your hands on. So these would be things like booking a private jet. Yeah, you can book a private jet online, but it's so confusing.”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Miriam is a community and concierge for people who are super successful. And in the course of, you know, people come to us because they want enhanced access to relationships, people that they don't know, and to things that they want in their life. And we help them get those things. And I think all people want to feel special, certainly successful people want to feel special. So accessing things that other folks can't readily get their hands on is at the heart of our business.”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To find out that the state of New York ultimately did not want the ventilators. I had no idea why I'm still kind of don't know why. I would note as a footnote that a year and a half or so ago it came out that the state of New York had kind of falsified the death numbers from the nursing homes and things of that sort. But a very, very interesting experience to go get 2,000 ventilators in the middle of COVID and then have the ventilators turn down after doing the work. So yeah, that's that story.”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody needed one. Everybody wanted one. Governments were willing to pay whatever it took to get them. And whenever a thing is that valuable, it invites all sorts of criminal elements, fraud, every crazy thing that you could ever want to have happen. So at the end of the day, it was a complete mess. We wound up hiring a medical device inspector locally in China or a group of them to basically run from warehouse to warehouse to make sure we weren't buying rocks in a box and sit on the ventilators physically and kind of tape them down as we found different allotments of them. We made some arrangements to have them essentially brought into the United States through essentially smuggled out of China.”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Distribution or sale of ventilators to America. They were kind of angered by the kung flu comments and these other things. And they were like, no, no ventilators. And so the reason that the state of New York couldn't just go and buy them direct is for this reason. Now these are life-saving instruments. You know, it sounds like we're setting up to go and run drugs or something, right? We're literally just seeking ventilators. But at that moment in time, those devices were the most valuable commodity on earth. Every hour it seemed like the price on these things was going. So the week before we took that project on, I think the average price of those devices was less than $6,000. By the end of the 10 days or so that we worked on this project, the price reached nearly $400,000 for a ventilator.”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at this time, you remember there was all these, you know. These crazy people who were essentially defrauding governments over medical supplies and PPE. And so the call from the FBI was basically to let you know we're watching, right? And so it's like go out here and try to get these ventilators and you're also under, you're being essentially watched by the FBI while this stuff is going on at the same time. I think the task was we had 72 hours to get, I can't remember the exact math, but a couple of thousand ventilators, whatever the math worked out to be, and get them into Manhattan. and to get them out of China. Well, there was a problem. It was never really public news, but China had embargoed”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On April 1st, I believe 2020. Now, you've got to set the scene, the world is crazy If you remember at that time, Manhattan had scores of refrigerator trucks, right? Because the Morg system could even process the bodies. This is a very scary time. It's not, you know what I mean? This is peak unknown COVID, right? No one knows where this thing is heading. And we get a call from Governor Cuomo's office. The call was that the state of New York needed ventilators. So in my company, we have a practice where we take on special projects, things which are incredibly difficult to do. Some would say impossible, things that are really, really hard, we'll get those phone calls. And this was one of them. And so We got two things that day. We got a wire from the state of New York for $45.9 million and a phone call from the FBI.”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every child we grow up like, hey, I want to be successful. Your parents say, Go be successful. And our society, broadly speaking, we have made the definition of success how much money you have. Work, work, work, work, work, hustle, culture, entrepreneurial culture, you see all the blogs, you see all the tweets, you know, I'm out there hustling, out there hustling. Got to make money, got to make money. But there is no end to that. And so you wind up in a scenario where you have made it. You have a wealth event. You've got a hundred million dollars. But that's not enough because someone has $500 million.”
2023-08-22 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Rey Flemings: A Different Definition of Success · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT