See I grew up on an airport and my dad flew these little Cessnas and Pipers, nothing bigger than a four-seater, and I'd fly with him sometimes.

The first time he let me pilot was when I was seven and we were climbing and he told me to lower the nose just a little bit, and to my seven-year-old brain that meant to just go ahead and jam the yoke all the way forward, and we went into a scary dive.

But my father was able to regain control pretty quickly, so perhaps it's an exaggeration to say that I almost crashed it, but it still horrified me and could possibly be the genesis of my terrible fear of heights, which I still have to this day.

But sometimes you just have to face your fears, and people will tell you that facing your fears is how you defeat them, but that's not always true.

And I hate to be the one to tell you this, but sometimes your fears will stay with you no matter how many times you face them.

So your bravery needs to be persistent.

Dear young men, you are a powerful force, and because of that, there are very opportunistic influences that are constantly seeking to weaponize you, to use you as a soldier for their cause, and they do so by appealing to your fears.

Always beware when people appeal to your fears to get you to try to do certain things or to think a certain way.

They know that if they're able to get a hold of you while you're young, then they very well may have a lifelong soldier for their cause.

In the Bible, in Proverbs 22, verse 6, it says, 22.

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.

Now, that's a double-edged sword, because it can be good advice for a parent, sure, but it can also be sound instruction for the propagandist.

Young men, certain forces know that you are vulnerable because you are suffering from various problems, problems which nobody seems to care about.

To so many others, you probably feel invisible and disposable.

You see, the forces who want to use you have always been around, but the problem is perhaps more pronounced now, because the people who should have your back just don't seem to be there for you anymore, or it seems like they even see you, yourself, as a problem.

So you are in a very vulnerable spot, a crossroads of sorts, a position in which you are in danger of being manipulated by sinister forces to become a soldier for someone else's cause, because they're the only ones left who claim to appreciate you.

They are seizing an opportunity.

They are seizing you.

I know how you feel, because I was like you when I was young.

I have been a very happy and fulfilled person for a long time now, but when I was a young man, it was quite a different story.

I was miserable, and there were two great fears that constantly plagued my life.

I was afraid of being homeless, and I was afraid of being alone.

And neither of those things came to pass, but they were very real fears at that time, fears that someone could have easily exploited.

You see, I didn't have a sense of self-worth, so I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to hire me and pay me enough to survive, let alone experience the American dream.

I wanted the American dream, but it didn't even seem like an option to someone like me.

My fears of being alone were quite similar.

Because of my lack of self-esteem, I couldn't imagine a woman wanting me enough to be in a relationship with me.

Well, I was wrong on both accounts.

I'm living the American dream, which eludes so many now.

Many years ago, I got married to a woman who loves me, and we bought a house, and we had kids, and we're still together to this day, almost 30 years later.

People don't always want that.

I know some people want different things, and that's okay.

We should be okay with that.

You just have to know what you want and be accurate about what that is, and surprisingly, that's not always an easy thing to know.

Sometimes you can get exactly what you thought you wanted, only to realize it's not really what you wanted after all.

But for me, I wanted the American dream, and somehow, beyond all odds, I got it, and it But before all that, my life felt very grim and very hopeless, because I desperately wanted that dream, but it felt so far out of reach.

And I know that's probably how you're feeling now, and for a very good reason.

So there's a very material difference between us, one that presents more challenges for you.

See, I grew up in an era in which nobody had cell phones, and nobody had the internet.

There weren't a million different voices whispering poison into our ears.

Your friends called you on the telephone that was attached to your wall, and you made plans to meet up.

And you had to hurry up and get off the phone, because your parents would complain about the phone bill.

And you went out, and you met up with your friends in public, and you hung out with other people too, even if you didn't know them.

That's how I met my wife.

She was the friend of a friend of a friend.

And you went to the club, the bar, the arcade, the mall, the movies, the park, the concert, the car meet, the drive-in, the beach, the block party, and a million other places, and throughout it all, not a single person was on a cell phone.

Nobody had Instagram, or TikTok, or Twitter, or YouTube, and I'm not trying to be the old man Luddite shouting at the clouds about kids these days and the evils of technology.

No, I don't blame entire generations, and I like technology, but technology can be exploited.

People are only people, and technology is only as good or bad as the people who use it.

Now, we could still be manipulated back then, of course, but the methods were very different and far more cumbersome.

Our pockets were empty of instruments recklessly commandeered for indoctrination by whomever could get the most attention.

We didn't have vultures who appropriated the dopamine machine to fill our heads with madness.

And the American dream was still available to us, because our economic masters had not yet realized just how much we would allow them to take from us, and they will take from us exactly as much as we are willing to give them, which turned out to be far more than any of us imagined.

For a young, miserable man without many prospects, everything was about being a badass.

Now, I was very heavily into combat sports and weightlifting.

I had not just one, but two black belts before the UFC even existed, and those eventually became third-degree black belts.

And when the UFC started, I was immediately into that.

It was a much different sport back then, with only a couple of rules and no weight classes.

It was far more brutal.

The original Mortal Kombat video game was still new back then, and this was back when the only place you could play it was at an arcade.

Huge crowds gathered around that machine.

It was like a real fight.

And I was on the football team, too.

All very masculine, macho shit.

I was constantly trying to prove myself.

Back during those high school days, my best friend and I used to talk about how cool it would be if civilization would just collapse.

I think we talked about such things because we were invisible in the real world.

We were all latchkey kids, raising ourselves.

But if everything collapsed, we could finally matter.

We could be like Mad Max, which is very immature and unrealistic.

Sometimes I see young men online expressing similar desires today, thinking that it would be fun, like a Fallout video game.

And that saddens me.

Because not long after high school, I learned exactly what it would be like without civilization.

You see, my favorite movie back then was Rambo First Blood.

I never paid attention to the moral lessons of that movie, of course.

All I knew about it was that I wanted to do what Rambo could do.

And it would be an extra bonus if I could do it for my country, so I joined the army.

Amazing, huh?

The movie literally told you that Rambo's country fucked him over and threw him away, and apparently the lesson I got from that was sign me up.

And it was extremely easy to find a recruiter who was more than happy to take advantage of my naivety as a young, miserable man.

And of course, it helped very much that the army offered me a way out of homelessness, offered to solve a great fear that I had.

I wanted as much badass shit as they were able to shove into my contract.

But all the badass shit required airborne school, which meant I had to jump out of airplanes, and heights still terrified me.

But if I didn't get it in my contract when I enlisted, I'd have to wait years before I could get into airborne school, so I just bit the bullet and signed up for it.

Because of all the martial arts and weightlifting, I was in really good shape when I shipped out to basic training, so I took to it really well, despite all the yelling.

It was a lot more difficult for most of the others than it was for me.

The drill sergeants even used me to properly demonstrate how to do everything to the rest of our platoon, and sometimes even to the whole company.

And I was very proud of that.

At last, I was being acknowledged, and not just by anybody, but by the hardest people I had ever met.

So I blew through AIT, which is Advanced Individual Training, and my MOS was 11B, which means that I was an infantryman.

I immediately went into airborne school after that, which I dreaded.

But I did it anyway, and that was much less of a physical challenge and much more of a psychological one.

We skipped jumping off the tower due to high winds, so I never got to do that.

We went straight to airplanes after two weeks of practicing PLFs, Parachute Landing Falls.

That's important because we used these old Dash-1 Bravo parachutes, which the Army doesn't even use anymore.

They're different from civilian chutes.

You see, you're a target in the air, so those chutes drop you really fast, and you hit the ground hard, so you had to land a specific way in order to avoid breaking your legs.

My cousin was dropped into Panama, and he told me that his chute was riddled with bullet holes by the time he landed.

So getting down fast is important, but it's also dangerous.

But that's okay because the Army paid me a whole extra $100 a month for hazardous duty pay.

Our first jump kept getting canceled due to high winds.

We'd prepare, do our checks, go up in the plane, fly around for a bit, and then land.

And that happened a couple of times, so we got kind of used to it, expected it even.

But then one time, the conditions were right, so we had to jump.

The mood on the plane immediately palpably changed when we realized that we were not going to be landing with the plane that day.

A lot of these soldiers were just baby-faced kids.

Some of them even started tearing up.

And there was one person ahead of me, and he chickened out entirely.

He unhooked his static line, which was a big no-no, so they benched him and made me go first.

I had to stand in the open door on the side of the fuselage of the C-130 and look at the ground 1,250 feet below and wait for them to tell me to go, which seemed like it took forever.

And it was really hard to believe that they really wanted me to jump out of a damn airplane.

But when the time came, I didn't hesitate.

I threw myself into the void, and the noisy world immediately became very quiet.

And everyone else followed behind me okay.

I was really proud of that, too.

I'm sure they had no idea how scared I truly was because I hid it well.

I refused to show it.

Not everyone who jumped had identical levels of bravery, because fear is a requisite of bravery.

If you had no fear of jumping, then you didn't need any bravery to do it.

But if you had a lot of fear, then you needed a lot of bravery to overcome that fear.

And as someone who was afraid of heights, it would have been a lot easier for me to be the 10th person out the door, or the 20th, because I would have seen others do it first, and I could have just followed them.

The first person I ever saw jump out of an airplane was myself.

And today, now, I'm really glad that I was the first that day, because I had no example to follow.

I had to be the example, even though it terrified me.

Let me ask you, are you being the example, or are you just following along?

I could have let that first guy who'd shaken out be the example, and his example would have made it easier for me to do the same.

But I did not do the same.

By the way, it's bullshit when people say there are no atheists in foxholes.

That first guy was a chaplain, and I was an atheist who was scared of heights, yet I gave not a single thought to any god that day.

And I never saw that chaplain again.

He got kicked out of jump school, and I always wondered why he was so afraid of going to heaven.

We were still plagued with high winds, and even jumped once when we definitely should not have, and we ended up losing a lot of people due to broken bones, and I'd definitely call that a near-death experience.

The worst jump of my life was my third jump.

When I got close to the ground, I knew I was going way too fast, and I thought I was going to die.

Because I was still inexperienced, I pulled the wrong risers, which actually made me go even faster than slowing me down.

It was a really rough landing, but I was okay.

It was sort of like falling off a motorcycle.

My chutes canopy dragged me across the drop zone like a sail until I was able to collapse it by releasing one of my risers.

We lost about a third of the class to injuries.

I successfully completed the rest of my jumps.

I even got to jump out of a Starlifter, which is a jet that you can now only see in a museum.

The rest were dismantled.

And after getting my wings, I went on to the ranger indoctrination program and ended up hospitalized with pneumonia.

Imagine trying to run 12 miles with a 103 degree fever.

I never even told anyone I was sick.

I just woke up in a hospital bed one day.

I think by then that was like the fourth or fifth near-death experience.

So I went on to air assault school, where I learned how to repel and fast rope out of Blackhawks and hook up sling loads to Chinooks.

I almost fell out of a Blackhawk once, flying low and fast over a forest at night.

That was terrifying and did nothing for my fear of heights.

But remember that it's not brave if there is no fear.

So at least I proved to myself that I was brave.

That I could repeatedly face my fear and function well regardless.