haha the Joe Rogan experience the the virus thing just made me think I think I was talking to my dad a lot about about my grandfather and just brought it it made it so real to me because I studied World War two a lot this especially the Holocaust and all that but like the the fact that just learning about my grandfather just made it so real to me it kind of connected everything together plus there's a book I recommend people read is um by Albert Camus called the plague that he wrote right after World War
two is I don't know if you know if he is he's like an existentialist philosopher existentialist believe that you know you have to live like life is absurd life is life is suffering and there's no meaning to it all you just have to live the moment and take take each moment as it comes and live it to the fullest kind of kind of idea so he described his town that got overtaken by the plague in the book the Blake and that kind of similar to bubonic plague basically similar characteristics and writes about how everybody reacts
in different ways the main character is a doctor who basically sees the the absurdity of the suffering around him that there's no meaning to it all that's the thing about the virus like with the Nazis and with Wars there's an enemy you can kind of trace back and understand what was happening I mean the virus it just seems like it can't comes out of nowhere you know and it breaks the spine of the way we think of regular life like some people try to cling on to regular life as if nothing is happening which by
the way it's kind of like what a lot of our society is doing right now we're not yet we haven't really felt the pain yet and and hopefully we won't but there's this kind of dull the calm before the storm kind of period and then some people become like more religious they start to search for the bigger meaning of life outside of the material possessions and then the doctor represents the idea that no matter what he he gives himself fully to his to his craft of helping other human beings and overall there's a story that
this idea that suffering is just part of life and the only way there's a natural temptation when there's cruelty and suffering all around you to isolate yourself and to uh to withdraw from life because anything you do in life is going to lead to suffering you know dating like if you get married it's gonna lead to suffering because eventually you're going to lose the people you love so there's a natural desire to withdraw but in fact what he found the doctrine what he saw around him is that love and compassion like giving yourself fully to
the love of other human beings into his community is the only way to deal with that kind of suffering that's a to me it's a really profound story about like about love being the right response in a time of crisis called crisis and the crisis that hits everybody they you want to kind of hide from it but it actually were more suffering happens so it's a it's a kind of profound book that I recommend we got a that I recommend people read most people have read like in him in high school for this book called
the stranger but that one in particular seems so connected to oh sorry he wrote in as an allegory for World War two so the plague in that case is the Nazis mm-hmm that it just hits out of nowhere and his book was really popular I think in 1947 he wrote it because you know as a kind of allegory of World War two a way to talk about these the virus that first infects the rats and then affects the weaker humans it affects everybody it was a connection and an allegory in analogy to the Nazis and
so I saw the connection see now and and the Nazis of course the scale their world World War 2 was much more intense and and and finally just how like fragile this whole damn thing is like that my grandfather had probably single-digit percentage chance of living you know like most people died most soldiers died in the especially in those early years of 1941 when the Nazis I think basically Stalin was using Russian soldiers and just human beings as human shields but yeah just through bodies at the problem so the fact that my dad my grandfather
survived seems crazy like and I do all these things I'm here talking to you wearing a stupid tie like all of that is connected to like he somehow survived I think all those look real ripple effects me doing research you know I hope to impact like billions people one day you know those like a little ripple effects like how fortunate I am to be part of that I mean it just always seem to be connected to me [Applause]
