OverPressure Podcast Bart Merrell & Austin

From OverPressure Podcast · 50:09

Show by Austin Holmes

The Overpressure Podcast’s latest episode features Bart, a Utah-based entrepreneur who calls himself the “Side Hustle Samurai” and asks the same question of everything that crosses his path: how can I monetize this? The habit started when his dream of joining the FBI to chase serial killers died after the eye surgery he got during a summer on his dad’s New Mexico farm automatically disqualified him. He finished his accounting degree anyway, took a contract to help build a bungee tower in Japan, and never looked back.The best material isn’t the hustle list, though it’s a wild one. It’s the way each side business grew out of something that landed in his lap: a gym friend in Japan who wanted to import camping trailers and diesel pickups from America, neither of them knowing how, so they figured it out together under Richard Branson’s rule of saying yes and learning later. A Rottweiler who weighed 90 pounds at eight months and didn’t know the word “no” became a dog training business that cleared roughly $150K between him and his partner in year one. And it’s the story at the center of his book, Monetize Your Mindset: a call from his wife in Japan saying early tests pointed to cancer, and his unsettling second thought, “we can’t afford this.” That moment pushed him to build multiple income streams for options rather than riches. When he later had his lower left leg amputated in 2024, he turned that into income too, contracting with his prosthetist to mentor future amputees.Quick gems from the episode:→ “Say yes and figure it out.” The Branson line that launched his import business in 1997 and still guides how he treats opportunities he isn’t yet qualified for.→ Practice in the rain. Musashi’s Book of Five Rings trains warriors in bad weather, and Bart applies it to mindset: build your resilience while things are good, because you won’t have time to count to ten when disaster hits.→ Luck is opportunity plus preparedness, and he adds a third ingredient: action. Without it, the first two do nothing.→ He compares walking into the hospital for his amputation to a death row inmate walking to the chamber. He admits it was the scariest thing he’s ever done, and credits a lifetime of small preparations for getting through the doors.→ Money isn’t everything, but it buys options. His multiple income streams exist so that a health crisis becomes a problem to manage, not a catastrophe.→ Everyone has something monetizable in what they’ve lived through, but most people don’t think that way unless someone modeled it for them, as his pig-farmer dad did by example.The thread connecting a derailed FBI dream, a Rottweiler who wouldn’t listen, and a leg he knew he’d lose six months in advance is what makes this conversation land, not as a hustle playbook, but as an argument that preparation done in calm times is what lets you turn the worst moments into something useful. Check out the Overpressure Podcast for the full conversation.

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