OverPressure Podcast

Austin Holmes

OverPressure is a weekly podcast that brings authentic, unfiltered conversations from veterans,service members, entrepreneurs and advocates. Hosted by Austin Holmes, the show highlightsresilience, leadership, and the real challenges faced during and after military life. Each episodeoffers inspiration, practical advice, and powerful storytelling designed to empower the veteranand entrepreneur community.

  1. 1d ago

    OverPressure Podcast Doug Katz & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Doug, a West Point grad who served during the Cold War drawdown of the '90s, watched his unit transform from a rarely-deployed "Fort Cartoon" outfit into a fully mobile force under the Army's Force 21 modernization, and left active duty in 1998 into a corporate world that, in his words, promised "everything you like about the Army, but you'll make more money" a pitch he found largely untrue. He bounced through tech, lending, and a string of side businesses before landing, nearly by accident, on an adaptive kitchen knife company built to solve a problem he had himself. The best material isn't the entrepreneurial résumé, though it's a genuinely instructive one. It's the honest accounting of every venture that didn't work a luggage-wheel phone charger with a team that couldn't commit, a disaster-preparedness business pitched the wrong way, divorce-lending consulting nobody wanted to pay for reframed not as failures but as a slow discovery that the missing ingredient was always the right team, not the idea. It's the moment the knife business clicked specifically because it was personal: his arm hurt when he cooked, and building a solution turned out to attract people who actually believed in the vision rather than people just chasing a paycheck. And it's the deeper mission the company found almost by accident, once the team realized their adaptive knife wasn't just useful for people with upper-body limitations, but for the vision-impaired, seated cutters, meat cutters at risk of repetitive stress injuries, and a friend from West Point with MS who hadn't eaten a steak without tearing it apart by hand in ten years. Quick gems from the episode: → ADHD, framed as being "wired differently" rather than diagnosed, often channels directly into entrepreneurial thinking the same traits that once got kids routed into gifted programs show up later as founders who move faster than everyone around them. → None of his earlier business attempts were true failures each one taught him a specific missing variable, usually team composition, not viability of the core idea. → Bringing a physical product to market costs far less than most people assume his company's first knife order ran about $10,000, a number within reach for almost anyone serious about the idea. → AI collapsed the barrier that used to keep non-marketers and non-designers from building physical products alone asking an AI tool to be "brutal, like Shark Tank" replaces feedback he used to have no way of getting honestly. → Corporate America's ageism is real, and rather than fight it, he treated it as information: build something you can still be doing at 70, because eventually the market stops rewarding tenure the way it once did. → Insurance and Medicare treat food consumption as a covered necessity but food preparation as an uncovered luxury a policy gap directly blocking adaptive kitchen tools from reaching the people who need them most. The thread connecting a Cold War cadet who watched the Army reinvent itself twice, a string of ventures that taught him more about teams than ideas, and a knife built from his own kitchen frustration that turned out to change strangers' lives is what makes this conversation land not as a startup story, but as an argument that persistence pays off precisely because it lets you find out which lesson each "failure" was actually teaching. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Doug Katz & Austin

  2. 6d ago

    OverPressure Podcast Ange Dove & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Ange, a copywriter who grew up moving constantly as an RAF kid in Malta, went to Singapore 30 years ago to teach English on what was supposed to be an 18-month stint, and instead built a copywriting agency there for two decades right as the industry itself went from nonexistent to essential to disrupted by AI, all within her career. The best material isn't the industry history, though it's a striking one to have lived through firsthand: starting when Singaporean design agencies handed her dummy text with zero respect for the craft, watching Google create real demand for content almost overnight, and then watching ChatGPT arrive and, in her words, nearly kill the whole profession  before she reframed it as a tool that made her faster rather than obsolete. It's the confession underneath the business success story: she spent her early years hiding behind her company's brand, refusing to put her own name or photo on her website even though being a Westerner writing in Singapore at the time was genuinely in demand and she watched, in hindsight, how much opportunity that cost her. And it's the honest account of scaling fear itself: her first office rent of $1,000 a month felt terrifying, and by the time her overhead hit $80,000 a month with a full staff, she could look back and barely recognize the version of herself who'd been so afraid of that first thousand dollars. Quick gems from the episode: → AI tools work best treated as a genuine back-and-forth, not a one-shot request the "chat" in ChatGPT is the actual instruction, not a footnote. → The hardest question in business isn't "what do you do," it's answering it briefly without losing what makes it true precision under a word count is harder than writing at length. → Trying to speak to everyone means resonating with no one. Write for one specific person with specific pain points, and the message lands with force instead of dissolving into noise. → Repetition isn't redundancy it's necessary. If you're bored of saying your message, you've probably just reached the people who needed to hear it for the first time. → A job means one customer: your employer. A business means many customers, so losing one doesn't take everything down with it reframing which path is actually riskier. → Every level of growth resets your sense of scale. What terrifies you at one stage looks laughably small once you've cleared the next one and you only see that in hindsight, which is exactly why you have to take the step first. The thread connecting a childhood spent constantly moving, two decades building a business with almost no template to follow, and a late realization about the cost of staying invisible is what makes this conversation land not as a copywriting tutorial, but as an argument that the biggest risk isn't stepping out on your own, it's never finding out what you were capable of building. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Ange Dove & Austin

  3. Aug 12

    OverPressure Podcast Chip Schulz & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Chip Schulz of Schulz Leadership Development, who got laid off from a job in LA 28 years ago, packed five cats, two or three dogs, and his wife into a 19-foot travel trailer, and drove cross-country to North Carolina arriving unable to spell "consultant" and starting his coaching business almost by accident. It later turned out his biggest client, the Haskell Company, connects directly back to Austin's own father, a 44-year veteran of the firm. The best material isn't the origin story, though it's a good one. It's the frog riddle Chip uses to teach his framework: six frogs sit on a log, one decides to jump off how many are left? The trick answer is five, but the real answer is six, because deciding isn't the same as doing. That distinction anchors his "5 Cs" coaching model context, clarity, conditioning, choice, character which he leaned on hardest not in a boardroom but recovering from a stroke in 2012. It's also the sharper argument underneath his leadership philosophy: that most people get promoted into management because they were excellent individual performers, with zero evidence that skill transfers to leading people, and that most never make the shift from leadership as something you do to leadership as something you become. Quick gems from the episode: → "You manage resources, you lead people." Confusing the two is why so many technically excellent employees make frustrated, ineffective managers. → Roughly half of any new supervisor's job becomes leading people a skill set almost never tested by whatever got them promoted in the first place. → Leadership isn't widely treated as its own profession requiring deliberate study, which is exactly why so few people ever get good at it. → Moving frequently trades away the depth of long-held relationships for breadth of perspective neither is free, and knowing the trade you're making matters more than avoiding it. → Reading one book and overhauling your whole leadership style around it, then repeating that every six months with the next book, is a trap. Reading broadly across viewpoints beats treating any single book as gospel. → A stat that stuck with him: 57% of college graduates never finish another book cover to cover after graduation. The thread connecting a spontaneous cross-country move, a stroke that forced him to actually live his own framework, and a career spent watching great engineers refuse to stop being engineers is what makes this conversation land not as a leadership-tips episode, but as an argument that leadership is a shift in identity, not a reward for doing your old job well. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Chip Schulz & Austin

  4. Aug 6

    OverPressure Podcast Dr. Chase Spears & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Dr. Chase Spears, who spent 20 years as a military public affairs officer after what he calls "God's idea of a practical joke gone way too far" a career neither he nor his family ever expected. He grew up loving news and broadcasting, planned to go into newsroom management, graduated in 2001 into the worst possible job market for it after mass media consolidation gutted the industry, and enlisted after a chance conversation with an Army recruiter he happened to meet in a courthouse hallway. What he thought would be a single four-year enlistment became two decades. The best material isn't the career arc, though it's a genuinely unlikely one including the lunch that changed everything, when a full colonel spotted a nervous E4 eating alone in Kuwait and, over a meal Spears assumed meant he was in trouble, told him flatly to submit a packet for Officer Candidate School. It's the slower story underneath: a public affairs officer sent to Georgetown specifically to learn strategic communication skills, who then got quietly ostracized by his own branch for actually practicing them writing publicly, engaging policy topics, thinking in print. It's the moment in 2022 when a superior, aware of his faith, deliberately assigned him to lead communications on policies he was religiously opposed to. And it's the retirement paperwork he filed exactly one year out, turning down a Lieutenant Colonel promotion and a $20,000 raise because he could no longer serve as the public face of an institution he felt had strayed from its own values followed by the Sergeant Major of the Army spending an entire day tracking down a soon-to-be-retired officer with 220 locked followers on X, just to argue with him about a single critical post. Quick gems from the episode: → Public affairs, he argues, isn't treated as a real profession inside the military the way law, medicine, or chaplaincy are despite requiring comparable skill, it gets dismissed as "anyone with a smartphone" work. → There's a wide gulf between written military policy and unwritten cultural norms wide enough, in his words, "you could drive a carrier battle group through it." → He initially tried to hide his veteran identity entirely after getting out, jaded by his last four years of service no unit shirts, no giveaways. Over time he reclaimed it deliberately: unit pins in his suit jacket, a salute instead of hand-over-heart at the anthem. → Veterans remain stakeholders in the institution even after they leave historically the ones who vouch for service to the next generation, a role easy to abandon out of bitterness but costly to lose. → An all-volunteer force living on bases and ships, mostly out of public view since 1973, has let the country grow casually detached from what military commitment actually costs a detachment he believes veterans are uniquely positioned to correct. → Most wars in his lifetime, he contends, haven't been necessary from a genuine national security standpoint and veterans speaking with authority and restraint are one of the few checks capable of pressuring that calculus. The thread connecting a courthouse conversation that led to two decades of service, a scholar quietly punished for doing the thing his branch sent him to learn, and a retirement filed on principle instead of promotion is what makes this conversation land not as a military career story, but as an argument that integrity sometimes costs exactly what it looks like it costs, and is worth it anyway. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Dr. Chase Spears & Austin

  5. Aug 4

    OverPressure Podcast Ofer & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Ofer, a serial entrepreneur who got his first computer at seven, was writing code by that age, had his first job at a computer company at 12, was freelancing by 16, and founded his first company at 20. Roughly 15 years ago, he pivoted from pure technology into neuroscience, driven partly by watching his own son struggle through special education, and founded Excellent Brain in 2015 to treat ADHD through neuro feedback, a brainwave-training method that's existed in research circles for over a century but remains largely unknown to the public. The best material isn't the technical pitch, though it's a genuinely compelling one training sessions where a trainee wears a forehead sensor and moves a car on screen using nothing but sustained attention, essentially learning to hold focus the way an athlete trains a muscle. It's the warning underneath it: a clear-eyed distinction between passive EEG sensors that read brain activity and newer devices that write directly into the brain with electromagnetic signals, which he considers genuinely dangerous given how little is actually understood about how the brain works. It's his blunt rejection of the term "artificial intelligence" itself pure mathematics and pattern-matching on enormous datasets, he argues, with no understanding or consciousness behind it, a buzzword that's dangerous precisely because people form emotional attachments to it as though it understands them. And it's his insistence that nuclear weapons and ecological collapse remain the two real existential threats to humanity, while AI anxiety absorbs attention that could go toward those. Quick gems from the episode: → ADHD neurofeedback training runs twice a week for 20 minutes, roughly 30 sessions over 15 weeks early sessions feel like a game, later ones require confronting genuinely boring material, which is where the real gains happen. → Attention is where life happens. Improved focus in training translates directly into reading longer, listening better, and sustaining conversations and relationships. → He resists slapping ADHD labels on young children, arguing the label itself shapes a child's self-concept before anyone's addressed the underlying challenge. → Integrity, in his definition, isn't about always keeping your word it's about honoring it and taking full responsibility when you don't, a trait he sees eroding broadly in leadership today. → A trained leader and an untrained person can face identical pressure and walk away with completely different interpretations of what happened that gap in perception, not the event itself, is what leadership training actually builds. → Most entrepreneurs quit right before their breakthrough. Dedication and resilience, more than any specific tactic, are what separate the ones who make it through. The thread connecting a seven-year-old writing BASIC, a father searching for tools to help his son, and an entrepreneur now warning about brain implants and AI bubbles in the same breath is what makes this conversation land not as a tech founder story, but as an argument that the tools reshaping human attention deserve the same scrutiny as the ones reshaping the brain itself. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Ofer & Austin

  6. Jul 30

    OverPressure Podcast Jack & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Jack, a former minor league umpire turned wealth management advisor who spent eight years, including six winter ball seasons, calling games before getting released at 30 with a pregnant wife and no savings. He knocked on Ernst & Young's door in New York as a 30-year-old ex-umpire, talked his way into their tax department, then passed all four parts of the CPA exam in one sitting and stacked on a CFP, securities license, insurance license, and a master's in taxation, inspired by a Lee Iacocca line about getting as much education as possible and then doing something with it. The best material isn't the credential list, though it's a genuinely improbable one. It's the moment a Major League Baseball supervisor told him, over dinner after his final Triple-A season, that he was "too smart to be an umpire" a line that became the title of his book decades later, one that several major league umpires have since told him they loved rather than took offense to. It's the pivot into wealth management alongside a young CPA, at a time when CPAs legally couldn't accept commissions, and the two of them literally marking up lobbying legislation in New Jersey to help change that. And it's the leadership philosophy underneath all of it: never once saying an employee "worked for me," building a quantified bonus system so a team would hold each other accountable instead of him having to, and eventually mentoring two employees to the point where he sold them the business outright and walked away without needing to be needed. Quick gems from the episode: → Every meeting with a client started with a worst-case-scenario conversation, before a dollar was ever invested, so no one was blindsided when markets dropped. → Market declines were never stressful to him he treated them as sales, converting IRAs to Roths and buying missed opportunities whenever prices fell. → People yelling at umpires, coaches, or advisors are usually showing love for someone else, misdirected. Recognizing where anger actually comes from changes how you respond to it. → A one-page cash flow plan, done in real numbers rather than vague worry, turns anxious clients into confident decision-makers almost immediately. → Curt Schilling lost his entire $50 million net worth within a year of retiring from baseball proof that no amount of career success protects against a bad financial plan. → In theory, a healthy company's stock should rise every single day it does business. It doesn't, because short-term noise obscures a long-term trend that dollar-cost averaging is built to capture. → He hired for complementary skills, not clones of himself one hire loved the accounting work he found "repulsive," another became "director of first impressions" with zero industry background but a gift for making people comfortable. The thread connecting a broke ex-umpire knocking on Ernst & Young's door, a decade as his firm's top-producing advisor, and a business handed off cleanly to two mentees is what makes this conversation land not as a finance success story, but as a case study in building a process good enough that the results, and eventually the exit, take care of themselves. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Jack & Austin

  7. Jul 28

    OverPressure Podcast Earl David Reed & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Earl David Reed, a 65-year-old comedian whose father, a Marine staff sergeant, was killed in Vietnam in 1966 pulling two men out of an ambush. Reed didn't learn much about him until after his mother passed in 2005, when a sealed trunk of military artifacts finally came open. The best moment isn't the career, it's the encounter. Years after leaving a message on the online Vietnam Wall memorial thanking a father he never knew, a Marine named Robert J. Turner read it, tracked him down, and stood up mid-show in Las Vegas to announce he'd been with Reed's father the day he died. The room stopped cold. It turns out Turner lived a block from a venue Reed happened to play in Montana a year later and the two have stayed close ever since. Quick gems from the episode: → There are no rules to breaking into comedy Reed points to opening for a then-unknown Shane Gillis twelve years ago as proof talent shows up long before recognition does. → Success, to him, isn't fame, it's marquee power: a venue only needing to print his name, no explanation required. → Jerry Seinfeld's rule stuck: you can joke about anything, Hitler included, as long as it's actually funny. → Stand-up rewards reps, not talent alone once a week on stage makes you decent, five times a week makes you sharp. → He's heard "no" too many times to fear it anymore. The only thing left to prepare for is "yes." A grieving kid, a stranger's decade-long search, and a career still gaining momentum at 65 proof neither grief nor a big break run on anyone's schedule. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Earl David Reed & Austin

  8. Jul 23

    OverPressure Podcast Wes & Austin

    The Overpressure Podcast's latest episode features Wes, an Australian digital agency owner of over 20 years who builds websites for trades, construction, and industrial brands out of Melbourne. He spent the business's first decade taking on any client for any reason, learned that trying to please everybody pleases nobody, and eventually niched down after noticing his best clients kept looking strikingly similar to each other. The best material isn't the niching lesson, though it's a hard-won one. It's the story behind it: a brilliant lead developer growing visibly bored, Wes sensing he might quit, and pitching him a hopelessly complex dating-website project outside the agency's wheelhouse entirely purely to keep the guy engaged. The developer said yes, a proposal went out, the work was won, and a few weeks into a months-long build, he quit anyway, leaving Wes to deliver the whole thing himself through lost sleep and lost money. It's also the admission that followed years later: a controlling streak that kept him from inviting his own team into decisions about how the agency operated, until three or four years ago when he finally opened up the standard operating procedures to their input and watched profitability jump. And it's the mental health thread running underneath the business one a psychologist, breath work, a cold plunge, a sauna blanket, and the blunt observation that he could track the agency's financial improvement against the exact point he started going to the gym. Quick gems from the episode: → Niching down isn't just about focus, it's about speed. Once you've seen the same scenario enough times in one industry, you know how to win fast instead of reinventing the wheel per client. → As AI makes the technical build cheap and abundant, the value shifts to guidance: helping someone choose the best option out of too many, rather than just building the thing. → The old marketing funnel treated the customer as the endpoint. Wes now treats the customer as the starting point turning finished client projects into case studies, reviews, and story content that only that client could produce, since it can't be replicated by AI-generated filler. → Trust has eroded so thoroughly that third-party proof PR, reviews, endorsements is becoming the most valuable marketing asset a business can have, precisely because it's the hardest thing to fake. → Large language models are already pulling from media coverage and customer reviews when someone asks about a company. A bad client experience that gets picked up doesn't just cost that client, it can shape what AI tells the next hundred people who ask. → One new client turned out to have built commercial landmarks recognizable well beyond their region work they'd been sitting on for years without realizing its marketing value, simply because they were too close to it day to day. → Paying for a gym membership he didn't want to waste turned out to be enough of a lever to change his health, which changed his business results proof that the fix doesn't have to be complicated to work. The thread connecting a costly project taken on for the wrong reasons, a controlling instinct he had to unlearn with his own team, and a business built on human guidance in an increasingly automated industry is what makes this conversation land not as an agency growth story, but as an argument that the hardest lessons in business are usually about people, not technology. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

    OverPressure Podcast Wes & Austin
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About

OverPressure is a weekly podcast that brings authentic, unfiltered conversations from veterans,service members, entrepreneurs and advocates. Hosted by Austin Holmes, the show highlightsresilience, leadership, and the real challenges faced during and after military life. Each episodeoffers inspiration, practical advice, and powerful storytelling designed to empower the veteranand entrepreneur community.

Information

  • Creator
    Austin Holmes
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    36
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 OverPressure Podcast
  • Show Website
    OverPressure Podcast