Welcome to Invest in Yourself, the The Entrepreneur Podcast. Join the podcast mogul Phil Better as he interviews successful entrepreneurs that make their living in the digital world. Now, let's join your host Phil Better as your special guest today on on invest in yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast.

Gentlemen. Welcome back to invest in yourself, the podcast series. I am, of course, your host with the most feel better. And today, I am excited to have, our amazing guest, Rachel Oswald, who is the host of Your Story Doesn't End Here, a military mental health podcast. Rachel, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

I I love how you muted yourself while I was doing all that. I was I was like, did she forget? And I'm over here to to think. It's like, no, the guest has requested the mute. I'm like, okay. Oh, okay. Let's see what's going on here. Rachel, so thank you for that. Obviously, you're a podcaster, so you know how all the fun stuff, intros, and all that.

So can you just introduce yourself, to my audience so they get to know you a bit better?

Yeah. Absolutely. My name is Rachel. Born and raised in the Podcast, transplant to the Pacific Northwest where I have lived now since 2015. The military is what brought me out to the Pacific Northwest. And, when I separated from the military in 20 21, my family decided to stay out here. So, launched my Podcast, your story doesn't end here at the end of 2021, a few months after I separated from the military. And, it really started advocating for military mental health while I was still active duty, but continue to do it to this day.

And, you know, we can get into more specifics about that, but I'm incredibly passionate about what I do. It's it's one of those needed and necessary conversations that a lot of people don't wanna talk about. So I absolutely love it and, don't plan to stop anytime soon.

Good. We need more more of that because it is, it's a huge thing, from having friends in the military, veterans, and still active duty about all the fun stuff you guys get to have, and deal with. And I use the term fun both ironically and truthfully because you guys get to do some fun stuff, like blow up big things.

Yeah.

But also you have to deal with a whole bunch of other stuff that's not too much fun. When when did you become aware that you wanted to start Podcast podcast, specifically? So, you know,

I toyed around with the idea of YouTube for a few years. I wasn't a huge podcast listener myself. I knew they existed. I really didn't know what they were for a long time. And self admittedly, even to this day, I was just, they were for a long time. And self admittedly, even to this day, I'm not, like, the world's biggest podcast listener. I have a few personal development ones, some other educational ones. I've tried the true crime.

I, you know, I don't have the time to dedicate to listening to full episodes a lot of the time. So, you know, podcasting wasn't really on my mental for a long time. I have a friend who has one of the top 10% personal development podcast in Australia, and he started this podcast course teaching people how to launch and scale their podcast as well right around the time that I launched mine. And so that's when I started toying with the idea of, oh, well, it's not as difficult as I thought it would be. It's a lot easier than trying to launch a YouTube channel. I don't have to deal with all the video editing and all the stuff that comes with YouTube. So I said, you know what? Why not? And I really just started before I was ready. I kinda pitched the idea out there to a few people to try to get some stories together.

A lot of people were all about it. They were really excited. And so, you know, I recorded a few episodes, and then I just launched. I created my own artwork on Canva. Had no idea what I was doing outside of that short course that I took, and it did not scale to the top 10% at the US. I think it's a little harder in the US than it is in Australia.

Slightly slightly higher.

Scale like that, you know, different countries. But now I really, really enjoyed it, and it's impacted so many lives so far.

So, first of all, I love that that it was a a friend who who inspired you with a pod their podcast for you to jump into it. And, I'm looking forward to learning more about that person after the episode because I wanna focus this on you. What was it that decide was there a specific moment that you were like, I wanna do it on mental health? Or was it like from the moment you said, hey, I'm gonna do a Podcast, it was mental health?