Hey, what's going on guys? Welcome back to the Mike Force podcast. Ha ha. We got our stuff together now video. I think we're gonna drop this video on YouTube. It's a little bit more higher quality. I'm not used to seeing the pores in my face or the wrinkles in my eyes. Um, but you can't see it.

I can't see this nifty, uh, Philcraft survival shirt that I'm wearing. These are actually really well made shirts. I'm proud of these.

John, do you know when these drop?

A couple of weeks. Yeah, sometime this week. Ha, maybe even in time for this podcast. That's amazing. Um, so got a whole bunch of stuff to talk about.

I first want to cover because this podcast in part is about resilience, but also mindset and mental health. I want to talk about this Neil Curry situation. Not in the way that you think, but talk about who Neil was as a friend of many people.

My experience being involved in the viewing and the funeral procession, the ceremony, which is a, it's wonderful as a ceremony can get when you lose a friend. It was respectful. The military was out there. They had like some guys in uniforms and ceremony of blues. That photo, the flag over nails, casket and it was, it was, it was a good tribute.

A good send off to an amazing man. If you didn't hear it, Neil Curry in my last podcast, I talked about him. Neil Curry passed away. Uh, at the family recently a statement about his tragic passing due to suicide.

A lot of people will be afraid to talk about this and I get it. But I want to go out on a limb and just say from my perspective, suicide is an important thing to communicate about.

Because a lot of people are going through mental health issues and crisis that aren't commonly advertised because we're proud people, you know, especially men, especially men from the military who grow up in a world where talking about your feelings is not advantageous and evolving in your military career.

So in my own issues, which I've been suicidal before that that even hurts to say it out loud because it's profound weakness seemingly with the reality that's my truth.

I mean, I've been in the dumps when I transition from my military experience through a six month period of waiting for the government to give me a call to let me know that I had a job.

I was sleeping on an air mattress was not in a good head space separated from my wife at the time and felt really bad.

But also a lot of that was chemical imbalances and then you take that compound alcohol, drugs, all of these things and being that I was on.

It was a recipe for disaster how I came out on top of that is not a testament to my own fortitude. It's just damn luck.

I told the story once before one of the reasons I was saved is because I decided to go to a yoga class and I went to a hot yoga class that was 90 minutes of me getting my ass beat and it reminded me of the feeling through chemistry of what it felt like to be a member of the military and suffering and then getting through hardship.

And it also woke me up and pulled me outside of my head because I was definitely in my head looking down and in not looking up and out.

A lot of us go through these type of things on the surface of social media.

Neil is a very happy person. I know Neil personally. Neil was a personal friend of mine.

He helped me through my own difficult challenges and he was a happy person. A proud father of six beautiful, amazing children, two younger children with his current wife Casey and four from his ex relationship, his past relationship.

But so much involved in a life with those children and it would beg the question why would a man like Neil was so much to live for take his life.

I don't know. I am not in Neil's head. I can certainly speculate but I won't do that out of respect for the family.

And out of respect for friends of Neil. But here's what I'll tell you in my own experience. It's complicated.

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