The Pressures of Privilege

In this episode of Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli sits down with Peter Lazar — therapist, consultant, and consulting clinical director of Adventure Recovery — for one of the more honest conversations you'll find in this space. Peter has spent 30 years in the trenches of addiction and mental health, working specifically with high-functioning individuals who have every resource available...

In this solo episode, Diana Oehrli draws a fascinating contrast between two ways of looking at the same world. Her cousin Daisy Prince, founder of The Digital Party, documents how affluent communities build connection, culture, and community in the new 20s. Diana documents what that world costs on the inside. Using a recent Wall Street Journal piece on the ultra-wealthy's obsession with extreme pr...

In this episode of Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli reconnects with a longtime friend whose life story reads like three careers collapsed into one remarkable person. Roman-Marcus Rittweger holds both a medical degree and an MBA from INSEAD. He built Germany's first digital health insurance company, then turned around and assembled a 500-person pharma services platform spanning Europe and...

In this solo episode of The Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli does something most high achievers never do. She stops. She looks back. And she tells the truth about what was really driving her. Diana Oehrli has lived an objectively extraordinary life. Piano since age five. Seven years in journalism. A pilot's license. Corporate strategy consulting for a German bank. Karate. A 100,000-word b...

In this episode of , host Diana Oehrli sits down with é — Swiss entrepreneur, family advisor, mediator, and author of Family Mind: Overcoming the Myth of the Shirt Sleeves Curse — for a conversation that goes far deeper than succession planning. Daniel spent nearly his parents built from nothing after immigrating from Hungary and Romania to Switzerland. When he finally sold it just before COVID hi...

In this solo episode of The Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli opens with a memory that stopped her cold — standing in the terraced gardens of Villa San Michele on the island of Capri, watching her children disappear through a colonnade of ancient stone, feeling the pull of a life she didn't yet have words for. That pull led her to a man she'd never heard of before that day. Axel Munthe — S...

What happens when you spend decades winning at a game you never actually agreed to play? In this episode of Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli sits down with Bill Burnett — Executive Director of Stanford's Life Design Lab and co-author of the New York Times number one bestseller Designing Your Life — for one of the most honest conversations you'll hear about high achievement, meaning, and t...

In this episode of The Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli takes listeners into the Swiss Alps — and into one of the most counterintuitive lessons that high achievers rarely learn before it costs them something they can't get back. Drawing from her years as a single mother in a remote Alpine village, Diana shows how nature became her most demanding — and most honest — teacher. From a morning...

Diana Oehrli takes listeners inside a transformative week at North Country School in the Adirondacks, where she discovered what America's founding families understood about privilege that today's wealthy parents have forgotten. Through intimate stories of fourth graders mucking stalls before breakfast and teenagers who've never felt the pull of social media, Diana reveals how real strength comes f...

Diana Oehrli sits down with Dr. Constant Mouton, an addiction psychiatrist from the Netherlands, to explore why traditional family intervention models leave everyone dysregulated and stuck. Dr. Mouton shares how families can move beyond the exhausting cycle of confrontation and detachment by understanding the nervous system's role in addiction recovery. Diana guides the conversation through practi...

Diana Oehrli sits down with Octavian Graf Pilati, whose family owned the same Austrian forest since 1730, to explore what happens when privilege meets crisis. After his family lost everything to fraud when he was just 25, Octavian discovered something most wealthy families never learn: comfort creates fragility, and hardship builds strength. In this raw conversation, listeners will discover how to...

Diana Oehrli sits down with 60-year music industry veteran Ned Albright to explore how unlimited resources can become a death sentence... and what it takes to survive them. Ned's résumé reads like rock and roll history. Record deal at 15. Songs for the Monkees and Glen Campbell. Sessions with Michael Jackson. His band opened for Bob Marley. He played on Montego Bay and had a multi-artist supersess...

Diana Oehrli sits down with Grant Calder, founder of Fleet and her first coach over a decade ago, for a deeply personal conversation about the limiting beliefs that keep us stuck and the tools that set us free. Grant shares how a Tony Robbins fire walk shattered his belief that he was "too old and incapable" of pursuing an MBA... a moment that completely redirected his life toward coaching and lea...

Diana Oehrli sits down with seven-time Inc 5000 honoree and bestselling author Ryan Levesque to explore how chasing conventional success nearly cost him his life... twice. After being rushed to the ICU at 30 with organs shutting down, Ryan rebuilt his business around health instead of hustle. But even that wasn't enough. In this raw conversation, Ryan reveals the unexpected moment that led him to...

What does it actually take to keep reinventing yourself... without burning out in the process? Leslie Hocker went from being one of the first female executives in petroleum to opening Houston's first Pilates studio to building a thriving wellness business. But here's what makes her story different... she's not running FROM something. She's running TOWARD a life where her future self will thank her...

Diana Oehrli sits down with Hunter Ziesing, former Wall Street exec turned longevity revolutionary, for a conversation that'll make you rethink everything about healthcare. After losing his father in his early 60s and watching five friends die from preventable diseases, Hunter did what any brilliant, slightly obsessive person would do... he left Wall Street and built Longevity Health to democratiz...

What happens when the very wealth that's supposed to solve all your problems... becomes the reason you can't get the help you desperately need? Dr. Paul Hokemeyer doesn't do surface-level conversations. Harvard Medical School grad, lawyer-turned-therapist, and the guy who's spent decades actually treating billionaires in crisis (not just reading about them in textbooks). In this episode, Diana sit...

How do you build something meaningful when every cell in your body is screaming for instant results? Diana sits down with her longtime friend, business thinker Dorie Clark, for an honest conversation about patience, privilege, and the lonely road of playing the long game. This isn't your typical business podcast. You'll learn how to recognize when busyness is just armor against loneliness... why s...

My piano teacher Grigorios joins me to talk about what happens when you stop forcing things and start flowing instead. We go back to Greece where his mentor Yorgos threw music at him as a teenager. Grig learned 20 concertos by age 18. But here's the thing—the more relaxed he got, the faster he learned. Tension kills the music. Tension kills the memory. You have to find a way to let it flow. We tal...

In this conversation, Rossella Vasta shares her profound journey as an artist and educator, reflecting on her experiences with paralysis, the healing power of art, and the importance of community and spirituality. She discusses her project, the Table of Silence, which commemorates the victims of 9/11, and explores the roles of women in spirituality and the influence of St. Francis. Rossella emphas...

In this conversation, John Messervey and Diana Oehrli explore the complexities of family dynamics, wealth distribution, and the impact of modern technology on relationships. They discuss the four key concepts that guide family interactions: power, control, conflict, and intimacy, and how these elements shape family businesses and personal relationships. The discussion also touches on the challenge...

My great-great-grandfather, Frederick H. Prince, built a fortune on stockyards, railroads, and meatpacking. By the early 1900s, he controlled hundreds of miles of rail lines and nearly a million acres of land. He had two sons: Norman and Frederick Jr. He expected them to carry on his empire. Both refused. The son who died free Norman, the eldest, loved flying and learned from the Wright Brothers....

In 2002, Christopher Hill was a banker in London taking a vacation to South Africa. He went on safari, explored Cape Town, and did something unexpected—he helped build a house for a family in a township. That experience changed everything. Christopher discovered that the real treasure of travel isn't just seeing amazing places. It's connecting with people. He felt empowered knowing he made a real...

I used to think having a little more money than someone I was dating was no big deal. Then I learned about "status pursuit" research. Turns out, people with certain traits specifically target partners with higher financial resources—not for love, but for status enhancement. Four patterns emerged from my Costa Rica trip that match the research perfectly: → The guilt trip ("must be nice to have that...

What if everything you've been told about helping an addicted loved one is backwards? Kate Duffy, interventionist and family addiction expert, challenges the conventional wisdom that families are powerless until their loved one "wants help." After her own recovery in 2013, Kate began doing emergency room interventions with overdose patients. When nearly every person asked her to "talk to my family...