My phobia's specifically about rollercoasters: the clack-clack of the lift hill, the lack of control, and especially that stomach-drop feeling you get when you crest a hill too fast in a car. No emergency stop button, no pilot, no brake, no way out other than to push through it: that absolutely terrified me. If you've been on 'Pirates of the Caribbean' at Disney World? Even that tiny drop bothered me, I got that awful stomach-drop, tense-tingling, panic feeling going over it. (Some lucky folks won't know what I mean here, because they don't get that stomach-drop feeling. If that's you, I'm envious.)

Over years of making videos, I've been lucky enough to film things that chipped away at what I thought I knew. I did a loop in a glider: I felt the stomach-drop, but not strongly. I got to fly in zero gravity: no stomach-drop, no panic. And I thought, that's odd. Then I got to do high-g, and inversions, and aerobatics. No stomach-drop. Turns out stomach-drop isn't some built-in freefall reaction. It's just fear. You can turn it off: if you're not afraid, then stomach-drop, the thing I hate... it just doesn't happen.

With that knowledge, what was left behind was the core: the phobia of rollercoasters that I've had since I was a kid. Rollercoasters looked really fun. I just needed to not be afraid.

To be clear: I'm not acting (I can't act), I'm not playing it up for the camera. If the phobia or my reactions seem overblown to you, then I want you to imagine whatever it is that you're scared of, whatever it is that you would never ever want to meet, whatever the basic, animal part of your brain screams about. Spiders, clowns, deep water, whatever it is that sets all your nerves on edge. I want you to imagine that in just a few minutes, you'll be meeting that. This was a big deal for me.