Hey, podcast listeners, it's Anne here. And I don't know about you, but I'm having kind of a hard time these days, cutting through the bitterness and polarization that's all around us. So for a change, here's a story about hope and idealism. A story about a guy who went looking for enlightenment and wound up helping to eliminate one of the worst diseases in history.

His name is Larry Brilliant.

He's a doctor, and he's one of the key players in the fight to defeat smallpox.

In fact, he presided over the last known cases.

He also founded a nonprofit that cured more than two million cases of blindness,

and he also directed Google.org. But none of this is how he started out. In his new memoir,

sometimes brilliant, Larry tells the story of how he met Martin Luther King Jr. in college

and joined the civil rights movement. And then he got swept up in the whole

summer of love, psychedelic hippie thing. Eventually, he landed in the Himalayas at an Indian

ashram, where his guru told him that he was destined to cure smallpox. As Larry told Steve Paulson,

his whole life has been an unlikely series of events

starting with becoming a hippie. Well, I was from Detroit, Michigan, which I think explains that

I hadn't seen very much of the coasts. And I certainly was unprepared for what I would see

in the summer of love in San Francisco.

And it really wasn't fair to do to a young boy like me from Detroit, Michigan.

And I didn't resist.

I have to confess, it was like opening up a candy box to a kid.

And that candy box was freedom and self-expression, playfulness, a sense of humor, a little bit too much hedonism.

Sex, drugs and rock and roll is what you're talking about, right?

Sex, drugs and rock and roll without any question. And it was amazing.

And it wasn't just hedonism, hedonism, hedonism, hedonism. It was, this is the beginning of the age of Aquarius.

This is a time of freedom and justice and partying.

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