Stuff You Should Know - Nepotism: When Hiring the Best Just Won't Do

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

Nepotism is something that is very hard to avoid, and very hard to resist, even if you know it may be the wrong thing to do. We all love helping out families get ahead, but you're also costing someone else an opportunity when you play ball. Learn all about nepotism in today's episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Rowland over there.

And that's the McDonald triad, Stuff You Should Know. McDonald triad, what's that? Really? I'm just, I'm... Wow, you are spacey today. We've literally talked about it 10 minutes ago. Oh, that? Yeah.

Oh, sorry. You know, bedwetting, fire-starting, harming animals. Yeah, I was thinking of... I call fire-starting. McDonald, I call bedwetting. All right, Jerry's animal-harmer. Well, we know that's not true.

But the first thing I thought it was a McDonald's because I am totally spacey today. And plus you could probably use the McDonald's right now, I'll bet. Well, I already ate, but if I hadn't have eaten ramen, I could have totally partied on a quarter-pounder. Quarter-pounder, definitely not a Big Mac, right? I don't do Big Macs.

It's the sauce. It's a weirdo sauce. Yeah, just, I don't do it. And you don't need another third piece of bread. No, it is a great standard of measure, though, isn't it? What do you mean? Big Macs, you know, this is like X Big Macs of calories or something.

It's a unit of measure here in America. I don't think I've ever had a Big Mac in my life. I've had, like, maybe one, maybe two. Yeah. I've pretty much learned my lesson the first time. Yeah, I'm a quarter-pounder guy. I like quarter-pounders, but really, there's nothing better than just their plain old

double cheeseburger. Oh, just their little smashburger? But the double cheeseburger. And there's a difference. They have a double cheeseburger and a McDouble. Did you know that? From what I can discern, what I can discern, the only difference is the double cheeseburger

has two slices of cheese. The McDouble has one. Everything else is the same. Where's the one piece of cheese? Why would you even sell it like that? That's weird. It doesn't make any sense. You could say McDouble with just one slice of cheese.

The McStupid is what they should have called it. Yeah, pull forward and hang your head in shame and we'll give you your stupid sandwich. I'm going to go to McDonald's and order a McDLT. Remember those? Oh, yeah, the Hot Side Hot McCool Side Cool, right? Yeah, and you could like fold the little Styrofoam container. Which, I mean, it kind of makes sense

because even though I don't do the big garden on the burger anyway, part of the reason I don't is because I don't like hot soggy lettuce. Right. So the McDLT would solve that. It would. But it was really just like, here's even more Styrofoam. Yeah, and like, yes, it was terrible for the earth,

but that was like the look of my youth. You know what I'm saying? The McDLT. Yeah, well, no, the Styrofoam container that everything came in, everything. Like there's cinnamon roll used to come in a Styrofoam container for God's sake. Yeah, you'd be like, can I have a pack of salt,

and they'd put it in a Styrofoam container? You would, yeah. All right, that was, got some big McDonald's dollars coming our way now. So I want to paint a picture for you, Chuck. Let's say you owned a McDonald's franchise here in town. Oh, OK. And you decided that you wanted your daughter

to take over the business. Sure. If you just said, OK, I'm ready to retire, it's your turn now, come on in, see you later, good luck. You would not be doing what's known as nepotism right. You'd be doing it wrong. There's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. But either way, what you're engaged in is nepotism.

Yeah, they say. Wait, I've really pulled that one out. Of your butt? Yeah. I didn't know if you pulled it off or pulled it out of your butt. I meant pulled it off. OK, you did very well. Nice transition for the nepotism.

That's all I was looking for. Yeah, they do say, I mean, some experts will say if you do have a family business and you want to eventually hand that over to your kids, if you really want to do that the right way, have them work outside the, or in that industry, maybe for another company for a while. Yes.

Gain some experience outside your own company because it can be very problematic to the other employees when that happens, because even if they're qualified, there's a bit of a target sometimes on their back. Yeah, it's unfair to them. It's unfair to the other employees. It says a lot about you, too. It sends signals, whether you mean it or not.

It sends signals that you're insecure in your leadership, and you need to surround yourself with people who you know will generally agree with you. And even if they don't agree with you, you are bringing them in in a position where they really owe you a favor. There's a lot of opportunity for people to be like, this person's not even qualified for this position.

I'm more qualified. I'm just not their son or daughter. This is BS. And then it also has a real chilling effect on morale around the company, too, where it's like no matter what I do or how good I am, I'm never going to get ahead because this employer, this boss is into nepotism and I'm not related to him.

So I might as well just quit or go somewhere else or milk the clock. Yeah, I mean, this can go take so many forms. Like, it is a time-honored tradition to start a small family business to pass along to your children. Like, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Right.

But then there's also the scenario where mom and dad start a business and the son's off gambling and living up, tripping the lights, fantastic, painting the town brown. Yeah, basically acting like Oscar Wilde or something. Yeah. And then it's just handed the keys to the kingdom and they run it into the ground.

But that happens. Yeah, there's a saying. The first generation starts the business. The second generation carries on the business. The third generation ruins the business. We grow the seed, nature. No, we plant the seed, nature grows the seed, she sowed the seed.

Did you just make that up? I think that was... Something like a hippy t-shirt. The Young Ones. It's like Cochopeleon or something. If I would have done it in my Young Ones accent, you probably would have... Did you watch that?

The Young Ones, yeah, the British TV show? How was that on the Young Ones? What, that saying? Was it like a recurring thing or? No, I think it was just in one episode, it just stands out to me. Well, I guess so. I love the Young Ones.

I haven't seen that in a while. I'm sure there are like eight people that heard that were like, oh my God. Right, yeah. Young Ones riff. So there is a right way to do nepotism, but for the most part, especially in America, especially in modern Western society,

nepotism is largely frowned upon by the general population. But like you said, it's time honored, it's age old, and there's this great article that we're working from by the Grabster who basically says like, you can make the case that nepotism is what civilization was originally built on. Yeah.

And that really what you're seeing, this disregard or dislike or disdain for nepotism, is actually a tension between a meritocracy and nepotism, which are essentially two opposite socio-political sides of the same coin. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, and it's interesting too,

I had no idea that in the animal, in biology in the animal kingdom, that they actually refer to animal behaviors as like things like natural selection as nepotism. Yeah, like kin selection, where you will go out of the way. We had a great podcast on that. I couldn't remember if we actually did it or not,

we did, huh? We did it. Okay. We did it. Good. But they will talk about in the animal kingdom, things like a squirrel is more likely, let's say, to give a warning call or whatever a squirrel does.

That was a squirrel. Oh, okay. To give a warning call of a predator approaching, if they're near family members, and if there are no family members around, they're kind of like, whatever. Good luck. Which proves your point that squirrels are jerks.

Right. See in hell, Todd. And they only think about their own, family-wise. But that is what, if you're a wildlife biologist, you would call that nepotism. Yeah. Okay. So there is a, there's actually an equation for it.

Yeah. Take it away. Okay. Cause I looked at that, you're talking about the Hamilton rule. Yes. But I got, you know, my eyes kind of glazed over. It's tough.

Hopefully we won't go down a false positives rabbit hole. Yeah. Like we did in that episode. Yeah. But there's this guy, Mr. Hamilton. Dr. Hamilton to us. There's a million things he hasn't done. And his name was William D. Hamilton.

This is from the 60s. This struck me as it would, like it would have been old, but whatever, he's a technocrat biologist. And he basically said, there is a formula for calculating why an animal would do something that seems altruistic. And it has to do with nepotism or kin selection. And this equation is R times B is greater than C.

Done. Okay. We want to just stop there. Did we talk about this in kin selection? We had to, right? I don't think so, man. It does not seem, I think we talked about it without ever saying the name

of it and the formula itself. Okay. We just danced around it. Basically, so just real quick. R is the genetic relatedness of the person doing the altruistic act and the person benefiting. B is the benefit of it. And then that has to be, so multiply those two things.

And that would be, it has to be greater than C, which is the cost. So the little worker B's and the worker ants that know, hey, I'm never going to rise to the top here, but I'm going to bust my butt for the queen because everyone else will benefit from it. So that, so for each worker B, the cost would be one. They're one, they're going to die.

They're not going to be able to reproduce and pass on genes, but they're related to the queen, say by sharing 50% of their genes. And the queen is going to go on and make 10,000 newbies. So you've got 10,000 times 0.5 is the left hand of the equation and that is way, way greater than cost, which is one. So therefore Hamilton's rule would apply

in that circumstance. It seems dumb to me. I think that there's way more going on in life than that. I don't think you can boil animal behavior down to a formula, especially such a simple formula. I mean, sigma doesn't even appear in this formula. It's that simple, right? We can read this formula.

It's that simple. Yeah, I almost got it. It's that simple. So I think it's reductive, I think is what I'm trying to say, which is a word I just picked up recently. You've been throwing it around a lot. I've heard it before, but it's really kind of made sense to me lately.

So I think that it's a reductive formula and I dismay the use of it. All right. This I'd found super interesting is the origins of the word itself. Sometimes word origins are kind of cool like this. Well, you're big time into it, aren't you? Yeah, when it, you know,

sometimes it'll light my fire. You know what I'm saying? Like the McDonald's Triad. But it has the Latin root Nepos, N-E-P-O-S, which means nephew, and this came about because of Catholic priests who, as everyone knows, aren't supposed to make sex. So they don't.

Not always. Oh, okay. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they have children. And in order to promote their sons, they would- Without having to say this is my son. Exactly. They would call them their nephew. And that's where it actually,

that's where the root Nepos means nephew. That's where it comes from. Yeah, I saw somewhere, I think in Adam, so, you know, Saul Bellows, the writer, his son, Adam wrote a very, very long article in The Atlantic in the early 2000s, arguing in favor of Nepotism, I think unsuccessfully. But I think he said one of the remaining definitions

of nephew is an illegitimate son of a Catholic priest. Oh, really? Still today. Huh. Isn't that weird? And then the three types that the Grabster, I like to liken it to the Corleone family. Okay.

Self-determined, coercive, and opportunistic. So self-determined being when you take a family, job a family member offers, because it aligns with your own career goals, which would be sunny. That's pretty ideal. Sunny Corleone. Oh, oh, I got you.

I thought you meant sunny like, great. It's sunny days. Coercive Nepotism is when you take a job because you feel forced into it, which is clearly Michael. Michael. And then opportunistic, which is I don't feel pressured and I just take the job because it's the easiest path,

which is Fredo through and through. That really works. It really does. Nice job. Interesting. I mean, it stood out to me like a sore thumb. Sure. It did not stick out like a sore thumb to me.

That's really something. Yeah. Okay. How about that? You want to take a break? Yeah, I might just leave. Okay. Drop your mic.

All right. See you. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, everybody, I talk Chuck into staying

for the rest of the episode during the ad break. I'm here. So you've got the definition of nepotism in the biological sense. There's also the sociological sense which we kind of touched on in the workplace. Wait, we still haven't even said what nepotism is, just like we do.

Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. Well, so nepotism is basically doling out favors, typically jobs by a person in a position of power to people who are their relatives. Yes. There's another very, very closely related thing

called cronyism, which is doing the same thing but handing it out to people who are friends or friends of friends and building a network, whether it's a business or a political institution or whatever, where there are favors done, reciprocal favors owed, and you have this very dense web that overlays that company or that overlays that institution.

It makes it very tough for outsiders to get into, which is why a nepotism is the opposite of a meritocracy. A meritocracy is you are good at this job. This job is open. We want you to come fill it. Instead, with nepotism, you say, we've got this position open. Let's get my nephew, meaning my illegitimate son in here,

because I want him to prosper in life and this position will enrich him. Yeah, it's a really tricky thing because you want to do friends and family favors, but it's a slippery slope if they're not qualified. Even if they are, it has an ugly connotation to it, but myself, I would be like, yeah, I want to hook up my friends and family

and I want to be hooked up. Right, so you kind of hit it, man. It seems to me from everybody, and I don't necessarily agree with this, but it seems like everybody says it's not going anywhere. The best you can hope for is a healthy mix, and I guess it seems like a healthy mix is the best way to do it

because you don't want a pure meritocracy because what you end up with is an institution that has all brains and no heart, whereas if you have the opposite side, the other side of the spectrum, pure nepotism, you have lots of heart, but no brains. So you want a mixture of the two. And one of the places where nepotism

has traditionally been frowned upon here in the US is in government. Like we basically say, go do whatever you want in your own business, run it however you like. Even a publicly traded company that started out as a family company will sometimes still have a family member running the show, but with government, we say no.

Nobody can do anything nepotistic in government. We've said it from the outset, and we've also broken that rule from the outset too. It's a longstanding American tradition to include nepotism in government. Yeah, whether or not you're John F. Kennedy, and you say, well, I'm gonna make Bobby, my attorney general, even though he has no law experience,

or if you're the current, what'd you say? That was a great Ted Kennedy. But not John F. Kennedy. Or if the current president giving his daughter and son-in-law positions on his White House staff, which I thought this was interesting, the law, as far as doing that, after John F. Kennedy appointed his brother

as U.S. Attorney General, that was a law pass, federal law saying, you cannot appoint a family member to an important position. But in 2017, the DOJ said, a president can appoint a family member to their own personal White House staff, but after FOIA documents were released in 2017, Freedom of Information Act,

we learned that since the Nixon administration, you could not even appoint White House staff. And it was overruled, there was a reversal of this. And was it to allow Trump to do that? I think it was just a reversal of the pattern, not like they said, okay, we'll reverse our ruling. There was just a history of the DOJ ruling against nepotism in White House staff.

No, it says that the January 2017 ruling was a reversal. Right, a reversal of the pattern, since Nixon, I think, is what they're saying. Oh, it says reversal of the policy, so I thought they literally changed the rule. So what I saw is that the ruling against it is actually counter to the tradition

of the president's picking his advisors without any input or oversight from Congress. Gotcha. The government, the president's advisors are supposed to be the president's own picks, and whether it's family or not, TS, that's the president's own picks. That apparently is the way that it's always been,

but then since Nixon, they started shooting down that idea. Right, and the reason we're talking about politics now is because it's one of the clearer examples of how it can go wrong, because the reason nepotism is so harmful in politics is because we're set up in a way in this country in such a way, supposedly, to have a system of checks and balances

to where no one person is above the law, and obviously if you fill positions with family members, the rule of law and the good of the country has a very good chance of coming in second place to protecting your family member. Yeah, so one of the explanations I saw was that the reason nepotism is bad for democracy is when you have people working in a democracy

and the actual government of the democracy. Those people are supposed to be defenders of that democracy and loyal to the democracy, not loyal to the person in power. Nepotism inverts that to where the people who are running the show are loyal to the person in power, not the institution. So what you're seeing again right there

is a tension between the meritocracy where you have people who are loyal and dedicated to the institution and nepotism where you have people who are loyal and dedicated to the person in power who's doling out the jobs. And the reason that's bad for democracy is the people who owe their job to that person in a very direct manner may look the other way

on wrongdoing. They may also not be qualified for the job, so they may not even be aware that there's stuff that they're supposed to be loyal to, that they're not being loyal to, like in the institution. There's a lot of pitfalls and pratfalls to nepotism as a general rule of thumb in a presidency. Yeah, and I know I brought it up before,

but it still makes me laugh every time I think of Jared Kushner taking his first tour of the White House after the election when he was meeting all the people. And he said, everyone's so nice. You know, how many of these people are staying on? They're like, nobody. They've worked for President Obama.

That's not how this works. And I get, oh. Is he like a Democrat or was he a Democrat originally? I don't know. I saw back in like an article from 2015 or 16, and he said, he was asked if he would be voting for Hillary or for Trump. And he said, family first.

And they said, well, there's pretty good reason why he was given this position of power. He's very loyal to family. Apparently when his dad was in jail for tax fraud, he went and visited him every week. And if you are, if you were a candidate for nepotism, you, like loyalty to family is basically, that's your qualification.

If you're running a massive 350 million population democracy, what you want are people who are qualified to do the position that they're in. Loyalty to family has nothing to do with that kind of thing. And that's why some people say, you need nepotism because loyalty to family is still important. Right. You don't take another break?

I think we should. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? Also leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

So Chuck, I said before the break that like family, loyalty to family, that's the heart of nepotism or the basis of nepotism, right? And family is very much associated with nepotism. And the family is, if you look at the world and humanity from a sociological perspective, that is the smallest unit of community. Yes.

There's the individual, but the individual doesn't represent a community. A family represents a community. And so basically throughout history, throughout time, all over the world, the family has been the basic unit of society. And then it just kind of builds from there, right? Yeah, you've got your family

and then many families forms your tribe. Your tribe forms your community. And then outward until you have cities, counties, states, nations. Right, and it just gets more sophisticated from there, but you can reduce all of it, which is very reductive, back to the family, the basic unit.

And I think that's one reason why cults are so unpalatable for so many people who aren't in cults. Because one of the main characteristics of cults is that they break apart families. The family unit does not exist in the cult. The cult itself is one big family. So that these natural family units have been broken into their constituent pieces

and reformed into part of this larger whole, which I think strikes some people as highly unnatural in like a really visceral way. Are you watching or have you watched Wild Country yet? Is it good? Is it good? It's bananas.

I gotta see it. I mean bananas. Is it straight up documentary? Straight up documentary. Oh man. And I had never heard of this stuff. We're talking about Wild Country on Netflix, the six-part documentary series.

But I won't get into it. But it's, I had never heard of it. And it was such a big thing. I wondered how I'd never heard of it. Because it wasn't like the Source Family and Father Yod. I mean, it was half a million people around the world. It's bananas. That is bananas.

I gotta check it out. God, it's so good. I've been watching Black Mirror lately. And I haven't seen the new season yet. I've never seen it before in my life until like two days ago. And I'm like, where have you been, Black Mirror? Yeah, it'll put you in a dark frame of mind though. I'm usually there anyway.

You're like, it's kind of been lightening me up. I actually, it's true. I've been working on existential risks, which has me like in the gutter right now. So like it kind of is to tell you, I'm like, well, this is kind of funny. That's funny. I actually, I saw the episode San Junipero.

Did you see that one? I don't remember the names, but I saw all of them. One where like it's in the afterlife and the two women like basically find each other in the end of their life. And they get to go spend eternity together having fun. It was really sweet. Yeah, that one was.

That one was good. It's like Twilight Zone every now and then had a heartwarming episode. Right, but I didn't realize that Black Mirror was our Twilight Zone. No one told me. What did you think it was? I don't know what I thought it was,

but I didn't get it in that sense. And once I did, I'm like, give me all this that you got. I want it all, all at once. So Confucius says, and this one I didn't fully get. I think Ed's talking about the tensions throughout history between family loyalty and loyalty to the state and how that played out in China. Because Confucianism talks a lot about family loyalty.

But then Communist China, like Confucianism says, nepotism can be a good thing, right? But in Communist China, that was all about meritocracy, is that correct? Right, but then the meritocracy got so powerful that people had a tremendous amount of unchecked power and they ended up just resorting to nepotism. Okay, that sort of makes sense now.

So I think what Ed was saying, I had trouble with that too. It took me a few times. I think what he was saying is that is a great encapsulation of just those desktop executive balls that click back and forth. On one end you got nepotism, on the other end you got meritocracy

and they're just constantly going back and forth. And every once in a while you get a good mix right in the middle. When all the balls are settled, you get a nice mix of nepotism and meritocracy. But then when one ball's in the air and one's out of the other, you got too much and the system inevitably shifts toward the other direction.

That's what I think it is. Yeah, and it seems like too, when he's talking about the Roman Empire and stuff, like eventually it's gonna bite you in the butt if you just keep, it's almost incestual. And sometimes it literally was. But if you keep promoting your own family, you're gonna eventually promote the doofus

who has no idea how to run an empire. Cousin Ken. Yeah, Ken. Ken's in there. Destroying the Roman Empire from within because he's a moron. Right. So if you get enough cousin Ken's,

throughout your empire, the empire collapses because you need people who know what they're doing. And I think that's one reason why so many people are just totally up in arms about the idea of Jared Kushner having such a first rate job in the White House is they're like, oh God, the whole 250 year old experiment's about to collapse because of this guy.

That's probably not gonna happen. But these people recognize that the system is fragile. It's not made of steel. And if you do that enough times, if that becomes the system, then the system does collapse. It's probably not gonna collapse just on that first person, but it can give it enough time and if it spreads out enough.

And I think that's what people are really upset and scared about. Yeah, and you know who thinks the whole idea that nepotism is a bad thing, it's hysterical? The monarchy. Right. Like what are you talking about? That's what it's all about.

We have a whole system, very detailed system as to who has assigned the throne and the lineage. Right. So get out of my face with that stuff. Yeah, there was a system of primogenitor, which is the first born son was the one who inherited everything. You had entitlements like the title of the father

passed down to the son as well as part of the estate. The states were passed down intact. They went from the father to the son. The state didn't have anything to say about, give me some of that. And if you listen to our trickle down economics episode, you know that Josh enomics frowns on that kind of thing. That's right.

And one of the main points of the American, the founding of America was to get away from that. To break up, like in the colonies, some of those landed estates in Great Britain had made their way over to America. And one of the reasons why there was such a thing as a death tax and the idea that your estate could be taxed and that there was no such thing as titles anymore,

it was to get away from nepotism that was so rampant and that the UK had been built on. Yeah, I mean, Thomas Jefferson, he was one of the main dudes who kind of pushed for that, right? Yeah. Saying let's break up these huge land estates that are just passed.

And that's kind of one of the problems with nepotism as it can, it just sort of feeds that, feeds that thing that creates the 1% which is anyone of any minority population, good luck. Like you don't have a shot because you don't have the relatives in those positions to help you out, you're never gonna get ahead. I read this really, really great article

from the Boston Review called The Dream Hoarders. And it was saying like everybody targets the top 1% as the people who are like hoarding the American dream. Actually, it's the top 20% that do it. And they do it through things like nepotism and cronyism, like, hey, my kid needs an internship, can you hook him up for the summer? And then some kid who's dad isn't friends with the guy

who runs the company, doesn't get that. And so you perpetuate this, the top 20% get to kind of keep going and become this elite group. And what Adam Bellows was saying, I think in this case quite rightly is that no matter whether it's a nepotistic one or a meritocratic one, you have an elite that forms. And that's like this crust that forms

on whatever institution you have. And one breaks up the other. And nepotism breaks it up, which I think is what's going on with the Trump White House right now. It's breaking up the meritocratic elite. And then eventually the meritocratic elite will be like, enough of this nepotism, we need to get that back.

But you have an elite that forms and that's when the other side pushes in and breaks it up. Yeah, but it's so, like I said, I think we're all guilty of making that phone call. Being like, you know, my cousin, let me make a call, let me see what I can do. Right, this Boston Reader thing said, don't do that. If you really believe in merit,

if you really believe in the meritocracy, don't do that. Like you are committing essentially a moral crime against a poor kid. I know, man. It's really tough to reckon with that as, it's really tough to reckon with that because like my nieces and nephews, I would do anything to try and help them out.

And they would earn it because they are great and smart. And it's not like, oh, he's a real screw up, but let me see if I can make a call. But even if they are qualified, it disrupts the system and might keep someone who doesn't have that opportunity down and for sure does. And the nepotism has been called a form of discrimination.

You know, like if you, I would assume that most of your nieces and nephews are white, right? They have 100% of them. Okay, well, I mean, if you have some adopted like people in your family, it might not be, but for the most part, when people pick up that phone and make that call, they're actually helping out their own race,

their own ethnic group. There's certainly their own socioeconomic class. And so it is a form of discrimination in that sense too. It can also, and it was for a very long time, a form of sexism as well, sexist discrimination, because whenever we had anti-nepotism laws, it was very frequently in the form of a no spouse rule.

So your spouse couldn't come work at the company. Well, usually the men were already in the company, so it kept women out of the workplace. Right, and then there's also, you know, you see examples of, I guess, what some people would call positive nepotism or cronyism, like in the film business, let's say when, let's say there was a TV show

where an African-American was running the show, which is a rarity these days, but they may or like Spike Lee famously did for many years. You know, I'm gonna hire a black crew and give them an opportunity as much as I can. And a lot of people would say, well, that's a form of positive nepotism or cronyism, which is interesting.

Right, and that's just a whole other kettle of fish, right? But it is still a form of cronyism and it is still a form of nepotism. I thought this one study was interesting. Granted, it was in the 80s, but 1989 there was a paper that found the child of a doctor has a 14% greater chance of being admitted into medical school than someone whose parents

were not doctors. And that's after they controlled for variables. So that's called legacy admissions to universities, things like that, that all just sort of reinforces that thing of, again, usually like white people with a little more money getting admitted into these universities and into these programs, not based on merit.

And it's so funny too, because there's so many people who consider themselves like liberal and progressive and all that, but they wouldn't hesitate to pick up the phone and support this entrenchment of this ruling class or group that they're a part of. And I mean, it's tough, like that tension you felt over that,

over the guilt of doing that and the guilt of not doing that, that is the tension between meritocracy and nepotism right there in your heart. Yeah, like I can't imagine my niece, if I had an end to a company or whatever that she was interested in saying like, I'm sorry, I believe in meritocracy,

I'm not gonna help you out. You could though. Such a hard life lesson, you know? You could, but yes, she'd be like, I hate my uncle's guts. You ruined my life, Uncle Chuck. I thought this was interesting too, is when it comes to businesses,

there was a study that found that companies who promote CEOs based on family ties performed 14% worse in the ensuing years, which is really interesting. Yeah, but I think that probably entails a lot of those worst case examples of nepotism where it's like, you're my son, you're a total screw up and all you wanna do

is get all Oscar Wilde with it, right? But you're going to be CEO now. Whereas if it were like a business owner who said, you're going to be CEO one day, go to school, learn this, go work for one of our competitors, learn their thing, and then you can come around and you gotta work in this department,

that department, this department, that department, and then eventually, once you gain the respect of everybody in the company and all of our customers, then you'll be ready to take over. That would probably lead to a good outcome for your company. Well, and Ed also points out that a lot of times the good outcomes come when your company is very idiosyncratic.

If it's very specific knowledge that you need to run this company. Like if you're a bank that only does business with goats, that's idiosyncratic. Yeah, if you're a goat bank, for sure. Then you might benefit as a company by handing the reins over to your son or daughter who dealt a lot with goat.

Goat banking. Goat banking. Sure. Yeah. You try to find an idiosyncratic business, you can't find it. Well, I don't know. I think I was thinking like Cobbler, but sure. Goat banking? Yeah, I guess Cobbler wouldn't have heard it, too.

You got anything else? I don't think there is anything else. I think we kind of covered it mostly. Nepotism. If you want to learn more about it, you can type that word in the search bar at HowStuffWorks and it'll bring up this great article by the Grabster.

And since I said Grabster, it's time for listening in. I'm going to call this one answer about paramedics, private paramedics. Okay. And boy, a couple of things here. We really heard from a lot of paramedics. So I think a lot of those folks are listening out there while they're driving around.

Yeah. What else are you going to do? Well, yeah. Nothing. And we really heard from you, Utah. We put a call out to Utah about a show. We heard more from people from Utah than we did paramedics even.

And there were a lot of paramedics in Utah that are listening. To trifecta. So Salt Lake City, we're going to work it out for this year sometime. Yeah. It's on the map. It's on the list.

And because of proximity, Phoenix. Phoenix. We're going to try and work it out for you because it's a hop, skip, and a jump plain-wise from Salt Lake City. Yes. So you guys went by proxy. That's right.

So we're hoping to do those two cities later in the year. So stay tuned for that and quit emailing us. All right. Hey, guys, just want to email you with information about private ambulances. My girlfriend and I have almost 20 years of experience in EMS. And she's currently attending paramedic school. There are two different types of private ambulances,

for-profit and non-profit. For-profit ambulances make a majority of their money from hospital discharges, where they contract with area hospitals to take patients home or to a rehab facility. Contracts with nursing homes, transport them to and from dialysis and medical appointments, and transport to and also from inter-facility transfers. Private ambulance company I worked for

had a contract with a rural hospital to transport emergency patients to a larger hospital with more resources. That's like the feeder hospital, the farm team. Private ambulances can also have contracts with the municipalities to provide private 911 services, provide paramedics, if the municipality operates on an EMT level, or to provide backup

to the primary service. What? I think that kind of, you'll just listen to it on slow motion later. Okay, all right. You'll get it. A non-profit private ambulances can be hospital-based or municipality-based and usually provide

911 emergency services. Very rarely do they do non-emergency medical transport. The fire department I volunteer on operates a non-profit ambulance service, and all money made goes back to the operational costs. Whoop. That is from Jay Haley. Thanks, Jay.

Thanks to you and your girlfriend for 20 years of EMT service between you guys. That's great. Did you ever hear the story about the guy who drove the cab, who picked a woman up and found out that he was driving her to hospice and was basically took her on a tour of her memory lane or something like that and drove her around for hours.

She was like, turning around like my old house or something like that. And just basically drove her around for hours and then when she was finally ready, took her to hospice and wouldn't take a dime from her. Yeah, I think I remember that, and I think I remember weeping. Sure, it's a great story.

It didn't weep, but you know. That's because you're dead inside. It's good for you. If you want to get in touch with us to tell us a great story, we love hearing great stories. You can tweet to us if it's a very, very short story. I'm at Josh Elm Clark, Chuck's at Movie Crush, and we're both at SYSK Podcast.

You can join us both on facebook.com slash stuff you should know or Chuck at facebook.com slash Charles Lovichuk Bryant. Can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts.