At the philosophical center of his speech, Hanks drew on the words of early American naval commander John Paul Jones—'If fear is cultivated it will become stronger; if faith is cultivated it will achieve mastery'—to frame the fundamental choice facing every generation. Standing in a Yale courtyard where Nathan Hale once lived, Hanks connected colonial-era wisdom to the challenges of 2011. Hanks defined fear as the large-scale, systemic force that intimidates and paralyzes, and faith as the American ideal of self-determination—something deeply personal that must be cultivated from within. He drove the point home with a parable about three men who climb a mountain to seek wisdom from a sage. The wise man cures one man's fear of death and another's fear of strangers with profound counsel, but when the third man confesses his fear of spiders, the wise man says, 'Why do you think I live way up here?' The joke brought the house down, but the message was clear: fear gets the worst of the best of us, and no one is fully immune.