Eric Christopher RushThe Story
Eric Christopher Rush · Founder & CEO, Prime Pitch Podcast Network Inc.
"Sometimes the best way to understand yourself is to genuinely understand someone else first."
Some call me Rush. I'm a Bronze Star combat veteran, a builder, a storyteller, and the founder of Prime Pitch Podcast Network in Frisco, Texas.
But the work you find here did not start in a studio. When I came home from deployment, my life came apart. My marriage ended. My truck was repossessed. I was drinking, and the substance problems that came with it took me all the way down, until I was incarcerated. I spent most of that time being treated for substance use. For a long stretch I was not building anything. I was just trying to survive myself.
I went to the VA for something else entirely. A doctor asked if I had ever been diagnosed with combat PTSD. I hit my knees.
They confirmed combat related trauma, and for the first time I started getting treated for the thing that was underneath everything else. Then I went back to school. I got accepted to Baylor University. It took seven colleges in all, but this time I finished. Three degrees: a degree in Digital Video Production, then a bachelor's in 2019 and a master's in 2022 in Interdisciplinary Studies, focused on communications and learning technologies.
Somewhere in there, podcasting found me, and it forced me into a season of listening. In that listening, I learned how to tell my own story. Every guest who sat down and shared theirs was holding a mirror up to mine the whole time. That is when it hit me. I was never alone in what I carried, and it woke me up.
I call it outrospection. You understand yourself by first understanding someone else. My podcasts and my advocacy are a source of my rehabilitation. I expect I will be in recovery in some form for the rest of my life, and I have made my peace with that. That season of listening is what turned into speaking, and it is why I am on stages now.
A combat tour and a Bronze Star. The discipline and the brotherhood, and the weight that does not come off when the uniform does.
Coming home, I lost the marriage, the truck, and myself. Substance use, and then incarceration, where most of my time was spent in treatment.
I had gone in for a separate matter when the VA confirmed combat related trauma. Almost twenty years without a name for it, and only then could the real work begin.
Seven colleges and three degrees. Digital Video Production, then a bachelor's in 2019 and a master's in 2022 in Interdisciplinary Studies.
One microphone grew into a studio, then a network, now home to more than five hundred productions and North Texas's #1 podcaster.
Advocacy I believe in, with the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, TDCJ, and the Airpower Foundation. A podcaster and a keynote speaker, for good.
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