Recently, I was watching an [interview][1] that John Conway did with [Numberphile][2]. By the end of the video, Brady Haran asked John:

> If you were to come back a hundred years after your death, what problem would you like to know about ?

John replied:

> I would really like to know why the Monster Group exists. 

From what I have read, it seems like research has moved on toward exploring the connections between the monster moonshine conjectures and other fields such as conformal field theory. I do know that Conway didn't particularly like the idea of the existence having to do with CFT, e.g.,

- Siobhan Roberts, [Curiosities: pursuing the Monster. What lies beneath a structure with an unimaginable 196,883 dimensions?][3], IAS, 2013



Therefore, I am trying to understand what he means by "why". I couldn't really find any papers where he further went into the question, why can't the existence of the group be a coincidence? Have there been any further developments in relation to this question?

Update: So I found another interview, in which John explains a bit further: ["I think there is something so fundamental about this object that there should be a simpler definition or a simpler construction"][4]

  [1]: https://youtu.be/xOCe5HUObD4
  [2]: https://www.youtube.com/@numberphile
  [3]: https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2013/roberts-monster
  [4]: https://youtu.be/lbN8EMcOH5o?si=C80LxUyprTHeGTVZ