Ep32 Chris Blachut—How to Discover What You're Actually Built For When Every Advantage Pointed You in the Wrong Direction

What happens when you're given every advantage—the education, the connections, the career, the passport—and still end up at 27 with a one-way ticket and no idea what you're actually for? In this episode of The Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli sits down with Chris Blachut, creator of Innate Edge and the writer behind The Zag. Chris walked away from a promising corporate finance career, spent a decade failing at startups and blueberry exports and travel blogs, and eventually found his way to one obsessive question: what is innate in us, and what is just conditioning we've mistaken for ourselves? Chris decodes people's core wiring—the single verb that explains every meaningful choice a person has ever made—and helps them stop building a life around someone else's blueprint. Together, Chris and Diana show you how to find the engine underneath all your misadventures, how to tell the difference between clean fuel and dirty fuel in what drives you, why privilege without self-knowledge is just resource without direction, and how to give yourself permission to afford the patience it takes to build something truly extraordinary. If you've ever felt the quiet weight of having every advantage while still feeling fundamentally lost, this episode was made for you. Chapters (00:00:00) - Why Having Everything Feels Like a Trap(00:00:38) - Privilege: The Pursues of Success(00:01:30) - Exporting a single ton of blueberries in 2013(00:05:45) - The Unconventional Route: How to Build Your Life(00:10:30) - Tim Ferriss on Life Logging(00:15:43) - What's the most surprising thing about yourself?(00:20:58) - Does Having More Resources Make You Less Real?(00:26:08) - Does Extroversion Affect Your Sensitivity to Negative Emotion?(00:26:52) - Do Obsessive-Compulsive People Need More Money?(00:32:32) - Sit With the Confusion(00:34:00) - The Practice of Logging(00:40:08) - What Do You Walk Away With From Your Work With People?(00:41:16) - What Would My 95-Year-Old Self Be Frustrated(00:42:52) - What Are You Optimizing For?(00:46:50) - The Importance of Stewardial Life(00:52:59) - On Values and Virtues(00:54:28) - Ari Kapela on His Arc and Resonance(00:55:57) - What Do You Want Your Child To Inherit?(00:58:38) - Does a Spiker Fit Into Society?(01:00:02) - Idea for the extraordinary(01:04:29) - An Override Orchestrator(01:06:36) - How to Find the Right Balance in Your Life(01:11:59) - The Core Wiring X-Ray(01:13:38) - A Taste of Wealth