The Pressures of Privilege

Ep42 Todd Ormiston—How to Raise Resilient Kids When the World Keeps Selling Them Outcomes Over Character

What if the biggest gift you could give your child is the chance to fail safely, in public, and get back up? In this episode of Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli sits down with Todd Ormiston, executive director of North Country School and Camp Tree Tops in Lake Placid, New York, a place Diana attended as a child, alongside three generations of her family before her. Todd grew up on a farm in the Catskills, spent nearly three decades running elite ski academies that produced Olympians, and then chose something different: a school built on ruggedness, resourcefulness, and resilience instead of rankings and transcripts. Together, they show you how to raise children who find meaning in process instead of chasing outcomes, why autonomy and consequence teach more than advice ever could, and what happens when kids are handed real responsibility instead of protection from failure. They get into barn chores before breakfast, letters home instead of screens, and why a nine-year-old feeding a pig learns something no classroom can teach. If you've ever wondered whether giving your child everything is quietly taking something away, this episode was made for you.

Ep41 Lynne Harlow—The Art of Taking Away: Discovering How Giving More Means Doing Less

What if taking something away could be the most generous thing you do? In this episode of The Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli sits down with Lynne Harlow, a reductive artist with work in the Met, MoMA, and the RISD Museum, who has also spent twenty-six years inside the philanthropy world managing grants for the Lily Auchincloss Foundation in New York and now runs her own advising firm, Tangerine Advisors. Lynne's whole art practice rests on one belief from her own artist statement: that taking things away from a piece is an act of generosity, and that the right amount of limitation makes everything sharper. She and Diana talk about why a little pressure creates clarity, why general operating support beats restricting a grant to a single program, and how she knows when a sculpture or a foundation's mission has finally said enough. Together, they show you how trusting the people closest to a problem, and stripping away what isn't essential, can make whatever you're building stronger. If you've ever held onto something past the point it was helping you, just because letting go felt like losing, this episode was made for you.

The Art of Showing Up Every Day

What if hitting the target was never the point? In this solo episode of The Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli revisits a discipline she has kept since childhood: an art practiced every single day, the way her sensei once told her to brush her teeth. Drawing on Eugen Herrigel's 1948 classic Zen in the Art of Archery, the karate teachers who shaped her, and the piano instructors who caught her holding her breath through difficult passages, Diana shows you what daily practice is actually for. She traces Herrigel's six years studying Japanese archery just to grasp Zen Buddhism, the moment his master warned him that aiming at the target guarantees he'll miss it, and the ki-ai, the single breath karate releases through a punch or a kick. Each thread leads to the same lesson: breath comes before precision. Together, they show you how to turn whatever art you keep returning to into daily proof that showing up matters more than getting it right. If you've ever pushed so hard for a result that you forgot to breathe through getting there, this episode was made for you.

Ep40 Eames Yates—How to Find Peace When Every Achievement Still Feels Like a Fraud

What happens when the chase that built your entire career stops making sense? In this episode of The Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli sits down with Eames Yates, the journalist who landed interviews most reporters only dream of: CIA directors, Navy SEAL commanders, Alec Baldwin, and, eventually, the Dalai Lama himself, in his home in India. Then he walked away from all of it to open a yoga studio built on a single idea: love over fear. Eames opens up about the addiction that fueled his rise and the self-worth he tied entirely to professional achievement. Then he gets into the slow, humbling work of getting sober while becoming a father. He and Diana talk about the difference between happiness and peace and the danger of believing your own first thought. Forgiving yourself, he says, might be the most radical thing you ever do. Together, they show you how to separate your worth from your output and how to forgive the person you used to be without losing the progress you've made. If you've ever built a life that looked impressive from the outside while something quietly came apart on the inside, this episode was made for you.

Switzerland Is Counting The Wrong Foreigners

What happens when an entire country is certain something is disappearing but is wrong about who took it? In this solo episode of The Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli returns to Gstaad, the Swiss village where her grandparents lived and where she watched the butcher shop, the bakery, and the dining room at the Olden close one by one. After Swiss voters rejected an initiative to cap the country's population, Diana names who is actually reshaping towns like Gstaad: the oligarchs and billionaires who buy the hotel, close the farmer's entrance, and vanish behind an underground door, while the Polish worker on the train and the Romanian nurse in the hospital take the blame. She validates what Swiss voters are feeling. Crowded trains, scarce housing, full hospitals: the strain is real. Using Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play The Visit as her frame, Diana shows you how to tell the difference between participation and possession, between people who show up to work and money that never has to explain itself. If you've ever watched the place you grew up vanish and couldn't quite name what took it, this episode was made for you.