Transcript

I’m probably not someone you’d think of as a nepo baby.

My parents aren’t celebrities.
I didn’t grow up ultra-wealthy.

But the truth is, I am.

Not because I inherited a résumé. I know, you can’t inherit a résumé.

But because I benefited from early exposure and modeling that conferred advantages long before I earned a single credential.

I grew up in rooms where work was treated seriously.
Where art wasn’t a hobby but a discipline.
Where adults talked openly about decisions, tradeoffs, responsibility.

I listened closely.

I watched how authority shifted.
How disagreement was handled.
How problems were framed before they were solved.

By the time I entered professional spaces of my own, I wasn’t learning how rooms worked.

I was ready to make contributions.

What looked like confidence was often familiarity.
What looked like talent was often repetition.
What looked like ease had been built slowly, over years, in environments I did not create but absolutely absorbed.

We tend to talk about advantage as though it were visible.

Money.
Connections.
Famous last names.

Those are obvious forms.

But most advantage is quieter.

It comes early, through exposure and modeling.
Through being invited into conversations you don’t totally understand.
Through watching adults navigate institutions as if belonging were assumed.

When excellence is treated as the default, you calibrate upward.
When asking for help is framed as an essential strategy rather than weakness, you harness resources without shame.
When you can focus on thriving, not just surviving.

Those, those are not small things.

They compound.

Fluency becomes ease.
Ease gets read as talent. And talent gets rewarded.

By the time credentials begin to accrue, the architecture is already in place.

Everyone is shaped by their family. But not all shaping confers institutional advantage.

Now, conferred advantage does not negate effort.

It precedes it.

Effort still matters.
Work still matters.
Discipline still matters.

Most of us are shaped before we choose.

The question is what we do with that shaping.

If advantage has been conferred, we can pretend it was earned in isolation.
Or we can make the architecture visible.

We can replicate opacity.
Or we can widen access to the rooms we learned to navigate.

Advantage isn’t random.

It’s built.

Advantage is architecture.