The actor and director — best known as Starsky in Starsky & Hutch — spoke to Stanford medical graduates from the deepest personal experience imaginable. His wife Elizabeth had contracted HIV from a blood transfusion during childbirth in the early 1980s, before blood was screened for the virus. Their daughter Ariel was infected too. Both died. Rather than being destroyed, Glaser and Elizabeth founded the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which transformed pediatric AIDS research worldwide. Drawing from this journey through grief and from his work directing actors, Glaser argued that fear is not something to avoid but something to sit with — and that the part of us that can observe our fear is not the same as the fear itself.