The Pressures of Privilege

In this episode of The Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli sits down with Peter Holmes à Court, author of Riding with Giants, former co-owner of the South Sydney Rabbitohs alongside Russell Crowe, a media leader at Davos since 2012, and today the Chief Convener of Afrika House in Nairobi, for a conversation about what a person with a lot of opportunity owes to the people who never got the same chances.

By his own account, Peter was the youngest CEO of a top 100 company in Australia when he realized that at his pace he would never see his twin boys grow up. He used to say that in a million-dollar salary, $500,000 pays for your work and $500,000 pays for your soul, and he was not prepared to hand over the second half. When his children moved to Europe, he gave up a dream job running the brand of Sydney to follow them and ended up in a French village of 11 people next door to a handmade bicycle factory.

Diana, who first met Peter through a writing group in Switzerland, talks with him about what that factory taught him about excellence, why he thinks Davos leaves out the people most affected by its conversations, how he rebuilt his life in Nairobi after a train accident at his wedding, and how he uses his position as an outsider to point a spotlight at African artists and photographers.

By the end of this episode, you will know:

→ How to decide which part of your life belongs to your soul, and why Peter left a job he loved to be present for his children and to invest in young people, whether they are his own or not.

→ What a handmade bicycle factory taught Peter about excellence in work, why he believes meaningful work is built into human beings, and what a spotless kitchen shows about work you do for how it feels to you.

→ What Peter says Davos gets wrong, how to pack a room with a real cross-section of people, and why he is proud to have helped seat a man from a refugee camp as a Davos co-chair alongside the CEO of Microsoft.

→ How Peter calls himself a compulsive convener and why he can handle not knowing whether three people or 42 will turn up tonight.

→ How helping others became part of Peter's recovery after a train accident at his wedding in Zimbabwe, and why he says there is no hierarchy of trauma.

→ How to use your privilege and your outsider status as a spotlight on other people's excellence, from Kenyan photographers who see their own country differently than a visiting photographer does to artists who cannot get a visa to attend shows of their own work abroad.

→ How Peter builds a different deal with each artist at Afrika House, from a 50-50 split to 80-20, to helping a mate for nothing so the relationship does not become exploitative.

→ Why he calls GDP the wrong scorecard and what he wants politicians held accountable for instead.

This episode is for anyone who holds the title, the seat at the table, or the opportunity... and has started to ask quietly what it is all for.

In this episode of The Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli sits down with Dr. Jud Brewer, a psychiatrist and brain scientist who runs research at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University and wrote the New York Times bestseller Unwinding Anxiety, for a conversation about why money and control fail to quiet an anxious mind.

Dr. Brewer's lab began with smoking, then moved to eating, and found that anxiety was driving the eating. A suggestion from the 1980s that anxiety runs like a habit became the foundation of a new program. In a randomized controlled trial with people who have generalized anxiety disorder, it produced a 67% reduction in anxiety, compared with 14% for people who received medication and psychotherapy. He has treated billionaires, and he says their anxiety works exactly like anyone else's. Only the subject of the worry changes.

Diana, drawing on her own experience of how control can become its own addiction, talks with Dr. Brewer about willpower, grit, unearned guilt, raising children in privileged families, and Your Life the Game, the game he is building to teach teenagers curiosity and kindness. They also touch on Mindshift Recovery, the free program he co-founded for people breaking addictive habits.

By the end of this episode, you will know...

→ How anxiety forms a habit loop in which the feeling triggers worrying, which hands you an illusion of control, and how to map your own loop with one question: what am I getting from this?

→ Why there is no evidence that any amount of anxiety improves performance, and how a 1908 study of Japanese dancing mice grew into a myth that still shapes how people think about stress.

→ Why Dr. Brewer says there is no neural evidence for willpower, and what is actually driving the habits you credit to discipline.

→ How to meet a craving or a wave of worry with curiosity, and why the longest craving any patient has timed in Dr. Brewer's clinic lasted 13 minutes.

→ What distress tolerance is, why Dr. Brewer says it has more science behind it than grit, and how Diana learned to sit with unearned guilt and then do the right thing anyway.

→ Why wealth cannot buy a way out of your relationship with yourself, and what Dr. Brewer has seen in his billionaire patients.

→ Why protecting children from discomfort can leave them less prepared, and how Dr. Brewer's lab practices leaning into discomfort with a weekly hill workout.

→ How to stay balanced when someone you love is suffering, so you can help without turning their pain into your own distress.

This episode is for anyone who has quietly believed that enough money or enough control would finally settle the worry... and has never been shown what to do when it doesn't.

In this episode of The Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli sits down with Mark Drax, an ICF-certified addiction recovery coach and a disciple of Dr. Gabor Maté, for a conversation about what happens when a boy from a secure home, with private schools and every advantage on paper, grows into a man who spends decades hiding.

Mark was never into drink or drugs. At six foot eight, with white hair pulled into a ponytail, he walked into his first treatment center in 2004 and was told to stop and be a good boy. It took years of searching and the right therapist to find what sat underneath: an addiction to secrecy and rage that began with a nanny who beat him for the first four years of his life, beyond his parents' knowledge, long before he was sent away to boarding school at eight.

Diana, who met Mark about 10 years ago at addiction conferences in London and Cape Cod, walks with Mark through the night in September 2018 when a chaplain stayed with him and the work of building a life with nothing left to hide.

By the end of this episode, you will know...

→ Why addiction so often has little to do with the substance or the behavior, and how to ask what problem it is solving, using the question Mark puts to every client: why?

→ How to tell whether a habit has become a problem, using Mark's test of stopping for a week, then three weeks, and noticing the irritability and frustration that surface.

→ Why a child who is hurt by the adults responsible for his safety decides that he himself must be bad, and how that belief grows into the monster so many adults think they carry.

→ How to tell your therapist the whole truth, and what it cost Mark to spend years telling his therapist only what he thought she wanted to hear.

→ How to respond to a child's curiosity, from the spilled apples in the supermarket to the wire hanger near a power socket, so the child learns he is lovable.

→ Why the fear of asking for help gets built in childhood, and what Gabor Maté's question, "When all this was happening to you, who did you tell?" reveals about a generation of children who tell no one.

→ How to make peace with parents who gave only what they were taught to give, so you can miss them and love them without guilt or shame.

→ What it feels like to stand in front of a room with nothing to hide, and why Mark says the truth sets a person free.

This episode is for anyone who has spent years believing something monstrous lives inside them... and has never once been asked what happened first.

In this episode of The Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli sits down with Tammy Buss, founder of BlueRoots and a family enterprise advisor, for a conversation about what happens to a family when a business gets handed down and the hard conversations never get had.

Tammy spent more than 30 years building her own business in financial services, then lived through her own succession, selling parts of it to an employee, a third party, and one of her sons. She thought the first podcast she recorded with her husband and sons went well. They told her afterward that she had never said any of it out loud. For the last 10 years she has worked full-time as a family enterprise advisor, helping families say what they have been assuming. She is also the author of Passing Down Your Success and Dream It, Build It, and Pass It On.

Diana, drawing on her background as a Mayo Clinic-trained coach and her own lived experience with a family trust that reached its liquidation date after trust between family members had worn thin, walks with Tammy through the three-circle model and the assumptions that cost families the most.

By the end of this episode, you will know...

→ How to use the three-circle model of family, ownership, and business to work out which of the seven positions you and each relative occupy, and why knowing which hat someone is wearing changes how you answer their question.

→ How to separate a business perk from a family perk, using Tammy's example of the sales role that comes with a car and the sibling who wants one too.

→ Why assumptions are the biggest cost in a family business, and how Tammy interviews each family member separately to surface what everyone believes before anyone sits at the same table.

→ How to answer the question "When should the family have known?" when an owner brings in an outside partner and a child working in the business feels blindsided.

→ How to run a first family meeting: send an agenda in advance so no one braces for bad news, list everything the family owns (the cottage included), and let the family choose where to start.

→ Why founders struggle to walk away even when they know it is time, and what Tammy asks them to picture five years from now.

→ How a family can let one branch take its share while another carries the business forward, and why the feuding often begins years later when the outcomes look very different.

→ Why you can keep a business in the family without running it yourself, and what Tammy means by keeping the golden goose and having someone else farm it

This episode is for anyone who inherited a family enterprise or stands to, and has quietly wondered how much of what everyone believes about who gets what and who leads was ever actually said out loud.

In this solo episode of The Pressures of Privilege, the third in her stewardship series, host Diana Oehrli returns to a February night in 2012 in the Swiss Alps, when snow kept piling up outside her chalet in Gstaad, her phone stayed silent, and an iced-over windshield made the two-hour drive to Geneva almost impossible to see through.

Diana was in the middle of a painful breakup, barely sleeping, and trying to get one person to love her back. She had just read Belle Burden's Strangers, and Burden's account of rejection and hollowness took her straight back to that drive. Diana shares a story that has mostly stayed private until now, along with what she took from Burden's choice to turn her pain into contribution.

Drawing on her own lived experience of how little money protects you from heartbreak, Diana draws the line between two ways of asking the same life question: the consumer asks, "What am I going to get?" and the steward asks, "What can I do with what I have?"

By the end of this episode, you will know:

→ How to recognize when your whole focus has collapsed around getting something from another person, such as reassurance or validation, and why Diana calls that the consumer's question.

→ How to ask the steward's question, "What can I do with what I have?" when pain has narrowed your world down to who left and who loves you.

→ Why Belle Burden's pro bono legal work for immigrants fleeing violence is stewardship in Diana's eyes, and why judging a wealthy person's pain by her balance sheet leaves the pain unseen.

→ How to move from asking who is going to love you to asking who you could love, starting with the people already in your life.

→ Why the writing Diana did at the Geneva Writers Conference began her journey back to herself, and how putting your own story into words can be a first step for you.

→ What Dr. Dan Siegel and Dr. Tara Swart said at the Oxford Transformed Trauma Conference when someone asked how you can love yourself when no one loved you, from journaling and gratitude to a loving community and the risk they say you have to take.

This episode is for anyone who has quietly wondered who has sympathy for the pain of someone who seems to have it all... and what to do with the love they still have to give.

If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide or self-harm, you're not alone. In the U.S. call or text 988. In the U.K., call Samaritans free on 116-123.

In this episode of Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli sits down with Dr. Lindsay Emmerson, a psychologist and mother of four who has spent her career turning decades of parenting research into tools that hold up in the middle of a real meltdown, not just on a whiteboard.

Lindsay's research points to something most parents have never been told: getting it right about half the time is enough to raise a child who turns out great. She walks through the four parenting styles psychologists actually study, why the pendulum swung from strict households to permissive ones and back again, and why only one of the four, not the other three, is genuinely linked to bad outcomes.

Diana, drawing on her own years raising two kids as a working single mother in a Swiss mountain village and the guilt she still carries over a garbage bag full of Playmobil, walks with Lindsay through the research, the mom rage nobody wants to admit to, and the small shifts that change a family's whole dynamic.

By the end of this episode, you will know...

→ How to use Lindsay's 50 percent rule to measure your own parenting instead of an impossible standard, and why the research says warmth and consistency about half the time still produce the same secure, thriving kids.

→ How to tell the difference between authoritarian, permissive, authoritative, and neglectful parenting, and why only the last one is the one that actually damages a child.

→ How to use the scaffolding method, laundry included, to hand your child real independence one rung at a time instead of doing it for them or expecting it all at once.

→ Why the after-school meltdown you dread is proof of a secure attachment bond, not proof that you are doing something wrong.

→ How to build a chore routine your kids will actually stick with, and why doing them together beats assigning them and hoping.

→ How to praise effort instead of traits without abandoning the plain, ordinary good job or saying you're smart, and how Carl Rogers' idea of unconditional positive regard separates a hard moment from your child's worth.

→ What the research on daycare, nannies, and working parents actually says about attachment, and where the real risk line sits.

→ Why “mom rage” caught Lindsay by surprise even with a psychology degree, and what she now tells parents caught in the yell-then-apologize cycle.

This episode is for anyone who has stood in a wrecked living room, a garbage bag of toys in hand, wondering if today was the day they finally proved they weren't cut out for this...

In this episode of Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli sits down with Sara Vetter, CEO of the Soul of Money Institute and a longtime work partner of Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money, for a conversation about what it takes to feel at home with yourself when a full bank account has never been able to do that for you.

Sara grew up in a big Italian ranching family in Central California that farmed almonds and had lots of land. The money belonged to her mother, who held all the power in the house, and it was never discussed. Everything was about appearances. She later married into more wealth and built a beautiful life in Silicon Valley, and the more she had, the less she felt like enough. When her marriage ended, she went looking for what sat underneath the money. That search led her to Lynne Twist, who became her work partner for the next 18 years, and eventually to more than 50 trips into the Amazon rainforest with the Pachamama Alliance.

Diana, drawing on her background as a Mayo Clinic-trained coach and her own lived experience navigating the hidden costs of a privileged life, walks with Sara through her money story and her body story and through what Indigenous leaders in the Amazon showed her about wealth held in community.

By the end of this episode, you will know...

→ How to trace your own money story back to the unspoken rules of the home you grew up in, and why Sara says almost everyone, at every income level, carries some version of not enough.

→ How to spot the three toxic myths about money in your own thinking (there's not enough, more is better, and that's just the way it is), and why the third one keeps so many people of wealth resigned and quiet.

→ How to ask for money, whether for your own coaching work or a cause you care about, by treating it as enrolling someone in something that will benefit them, and why a no can still hold a gift.

→ How to examine the story you tell yourself when one partner brought the money and the other did not, and what a partner contributes beyond a dollar sign.

→ What Indigenous leaders in the Amazon taught Sara about money, including how they make decisions as a community and why they have no hierarchy around it.

→ What it means to lead from the body, and how Sara moved from performing to being in front of a room.

→ Why working through your money story in a group teaches you things that private reflection can't, and what happens when you hear that someone else is going through it too.

→ Why Sara points to Dolly Parton when asked what happens when the power of love replaces the love of power.

This episode is for anyone who has stood inside a life full of beautiful things and quietly wondered why the feeling of enough never arrives.

What actually happens inside a family when someone is drowning in addiction... and everyone around them is quietly drowning too?

In this episode of Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli sits down with Dr. Louise Stanger, who is a nationally recognized interventionist, licensed clinical social worker, founder of All About Interventions, and author of six books, including her most recent, Trauma Is Your Superpower. Named Interventionist of the Year by Harvard-affiliate McLean Hospital in 2024, Dr. Stanger has spent over 40 years working with families at their most vulnerable. She has also lived through six sudden deaths of her own, navigated loss in ways that would break most people, and emerged with a philosophy built not on theory but on hard-won truth: keep falling up.

Diana doesn't come to this conversation as a passive interviewer. She brings her own lived experience with love addiction, unprocessed childhood grief, and the particular silence that wealth and privilege tend to demand. That shared honesty makes this exchange something rare.

What listeners will learn from this episode is genuinely practical.

Dr. Stanger dismantles the dangerous myth that someone must hit rock bottom before help is possible - and explains what to do instead of waiting. She walks through her invitational approach to intervention, including how to prepare the people in the room, how to write a letter built around heart, hurt, and hope, and how to gently break through what she calls the honeycomb of denial without confrontation or ultimatums.

She also speaks plainly about how privilege quietly enables addiction—not through cruelty, but through the very resources that allow consequences to disappear before they land.

Diana and Dr. Stanger explore how unprocessed grief becomes one of the most overlooked gateways to compulsive behavior, why over-diagnosis can obscure rather than clarify what's really happening, and how to choose a treatment center based on something far more important than price or reputation.

And for anyone who has been sitting on the fence, unsure whether to say something or do something or make one uncomfortable phone call on behalf of someone they love...

Dr. Stanger makes it very clear what courage actually costs compared to what silence does.

What if "why work?" is the wrong question?

In this solo episode of The Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli takes on a question she's heard more than once, from a relative who asked why she'd work when she didn't need the money and from an ex who said he'd take her back if she got a job. She traces it back to a call with her Swiss lawyer, who told her an inheritance meant a bigger social security bill unless she took a job.

That contradiction sends her looking past the usual answer. She talks through Sister Teresa's advice to a friend's wealthy children (skip the ice cream, give the savings to your own neighbors), the Van Gogh locked in a bank vault while a print hangs in its place in the film A Good Year, and the line she was raised on: to whom much is given, much will be required.

Diana lands on stewardship: the care, cultivation, use, and transmission of whatever you've been given, money included, but also time, health, talent, and opportunity. It's her case for trading privilege guilt for something closer to gratitude and for treating paid work as real contribution, not a lesser version of it.

If you've ever been asked why you still work, or asked it of yourself, this episode gives you a better question to sit with.

In this episode of Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli sits down with Howard Kaplan, CEO and founder of Personal Strategic Design, who spent 30 years as a Harvard MBA, CPA, and wealth manager telling accomplished people how to retire, before his own life forced him to admit that doing everything right hadn't delivered what he actually wanted. 

Now he helps successful people in the second half of life find health, happiness, and emotional prosperity, drawing on life design training with Stanford's Bill Burnett and personal mastery work with Srikumar Rao. He didn't build his own next chapter until his 60s, and his upcoming book is proof the door doesn't shut when everyone says it does.

Howard traces the moment that changed everything: a month before turning 50, sitting at a Cheesecake Factory with his wife Sherry, then wandering into a Barnes & Noble and picking up a book called "Are You Ready to Succeed?" That single afternoon led him to call the author, enroll in a 10-week immersion program, and start unraveling why a Harvard MBA and a thriving CPA background still hadn't made him feel like he'd succeeded.

They get into why Howard now refuses to use the word "retirement" at all (he says it literally means coming to an end), what he calls "the gift years" instead, and the health scare he had to face before he could ask anyone else to change their life.

By the end of this episode, you will know...

→ Why Howard believes the word "retirement" is the actual problem, and the "gift years" reframe he uses instead.

→ The Cheesecake Factory afternoon that sent a Harvard MBA, CPA, and 30-year wealth manager into a decade of what he calls "personal R&D."

→ Why he hid a type 2 diabetes diagnosis for years, and what becoming "the role model" for his own son finally forced him to confront.

→ The "internal operating system," beliefs, patterns, self-talk, and identity that Howard says have to shift before anyone can design what's next.

→ Why real change requires both pain and a clear vision, and what happens when people escape the pain without ever building the vision.

→ The five areas Howard uses instead of the traditional "wheel of life," and why it stops being about money once someone reaches this stage.

→ Why he split his own practice in half once he studied the Experience Economy, keeping products and services on one side and transformation on the other.

This episode is for anyone who has done everything they were supposed to do, built the career, hit the number, and still feels like something hasn't clicked yet.