Paul Michael Glaser, the actor known for Starsky & Hutch who became an AIDS activist after losing his wife Elizabeth and daughter Ariel to the disease, delivered a deeply philosophical commencement address to Stanford medical graduates. Having spent years working alongside doctors and researchers through the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, he spoke from a unique vantage point — that of someone who had witnessed medicine's power and limitations from both sides. Glaser drew on the teachings of great spiritual masters — Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad — to argue that fear is not the enemy but the pathway to compassion. The insight that fear is something you experience rather than something you are was the pivotal distinction. When you can observe your fear from a place apart — what Glaser called 'the witnessing place' — you gain the freedom to choose how to respond. For medical students about to enter a profession defined by encounters with mortality, this was practical spiritual counsel: acknowledging fear doesn't make you weak, it makes you human, and from that humanity flows the compassion that distinguishes healers from technicians.