Historical Name-dropping in Lost

The hit show "Lost" is replete with historical name-dropping, but who are all these people mentioned in the show? In this episode, our resident history buffs crack the case and track down some of the historical names used in "Lost."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Candice Kanner. And Candice and
I are both really big fan of the TV show Lost,

(00:22):
Love Lost. Sarah got me hooked over the summer. I
broke my foot and couldn't move, so Little Jupiter the
jack Wrestle and I sat around and watched almost the
entire series of Lost. She still has season six to watch,
So for this episode, we're gonna have to be careful.
I guess about what we reveal at the very end
of Lost. I don't want to ruin anything for you
in the podcast, I came back as a favorite to

(00:45):
my fabulous friend, Sarah said, on't blow lass. All right,
So this is a pretty unusual episode. We're gonna be
talking about characters and Lost who share the names of
famous philosophers, famous physicists, and all the fag connections between
what these people believed and did in their lives and
what the characters Unlost do to hold up those points

(01:08):
of view. We're kind of blown away after looking into
some of these lives in more detail. How carefully the
writers must have researched all of this and planned for
all of it. It's pretty amazing, it is. And to
keep his light and fun for all of you, We're
not going to go into a lot of heavy details.
We're going to give you the gist of some different
philosophies and then start a conversation with you about the characters.

(01:31):
So if we cover your favorite philosopher in five minutes,
don't get too offended. No, just think it's it's lost.
Things are supposed to be the culture, y'all be fun
and crazy. So the first one on our list is
John Locke. Of course, he is one of the major
characters on the show. He's the quote man of faith
and he always thinks that everything happens for a reason,

(01:53):
and he's kind of this pitiful character but also inspiring sometimes.
He never he never really comes into his own I
guess he's always searching, right. Um. So, the real John Locke,
which he's probably the most famous or most easily identifiable
philosopher name from the show. The real John Locke is

(02:15):
this anti authoritarian British philosopher and he's best known for
theories about personal identity and for believing in religious tolerance.
And he was a father of political liberalism and modern
philosophical empiricism. And if you if you know his name,
it's probably in connection with the Declaration of Independence or

(02:36):
the U s Constitution, or just helping kick off the
Age of Enlightenment. Young John Locke had a fairly tumultuous childhood.
He came of age during the English Civil Wars, so
he's immediately a little skeptical of the king's divine right
to rule. He's well educated, he studies some medical chemistry,
and he writes his first major political work in sixteen sixty,

(03:01):
which is ironically the same year that the monarchy is restored,
and it's called Two Tracks on Government. And not long
after that he grows very close to this lord and
benefactor interestingly named Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper. You might recognize
the name Anthony Cooper. It is Locke's father, his wayward
father on the show Crushy Weltha Balcony Foss Steal your organ, father, um.

(03:27):
But this John Locke becomes the Lord's physician and helps,
you know it, just helps run his household, picks up
a lot of his ideas. They have this weird organ
connection which again on the show strange organ donation. Um
Locke devises the silver tube, and it inserts it into

(03:47):
the Lord's liver. This tumor and his liver. It helps
drain it away when it's getting inflamed. Sounds awful. I
don't think I would want the silver tube inserted into
my liver, but if you need one. His biggest philosophical
piece is an essay concerning Human Understanding. It doesn't publish
until six eighty nine, but it takes about his whole

(04:10):
life to work on distilling these ideas he comes up
with in his youth. UM it publishes when he's fifty
seven years old, and most of his major works published
after that. That's another connection we saw because John Locke
unlost is he's a He's probably in his late fifties
or so, and clearly this is the most exciting interesting

(04:31):
time in his life. He worked at a box factory
before um. But John Locke the philosopher was really interested
in the idea that human reason could grant access to
moral truth, and in sixteen sixty four Essays on the
Law of Nature, he wrote, since man has been made
such as he is equipped with reason and his other
faculties and destined for this mode of life. They're necessarily

(04:55):
result from his inborn constitution, some definite duties for him
which cannot be other than they are. That sounds a
little familiar, a lot familiar. Now he has a purpose,
he has a duty. Um. So John Locke comes back
to England. He's been in and out of the country
with his benefactor who keeps falling in and out of favor,
comes back to England after the Glorious Revolution, actually on

(05:19):
the same ship, within the same party as the future
Mary the Second, and um just sort of works a
little more on setting up this new government, helps write
the English Bill of Rights, and then retires to a
friend's house and lives with her and her family until
his death. And just to give you one last picture

(05:39):
of John Locke's major, huge, broad philosophies encompassed into a
short kernel of information. He argued that humans would be
able to eke out the natural laws that make us
understand right and wrong by ourselves. We should be able
to do that by ourselves, and therefore we shouldn't be

(06:00):
too much controlled by government or police. Even though he
conceded that a few rules here and there certainly help
people do the right thing. But he thought that, you know,
we had the rights to our own bodies into the
labor that comes from our bodies, and because we're capable
of this thought, um, we should have a fair amount
of power over ourselves. I think that again kind of

(06:23):
an interesting connection. The philosopher certainly seems a lot more
confident in his ideas than the island man, but still
some some connections about just how they see the world. Well.
Number two on our list, yes we have a list,
just like the others had their list is Jean Jacques Rousseau,
and he was born in seventeen twelve, and he's often

(06:46):
grouped him with the Enlightenment thinkers, but some of his
thoughts were a little bit more romantic, and I'll elaborate
on that in just a second. So what he proposed
was that as we become more invested in science and art,
we become more bankrupt. But despite that belief, he went
on to Paris in seventeen forty two to become a musician,
and one of the works that he composed was an

(07:08):
opera titled The Village Soothsayer, which leads me to point out,
in case you need to be hit over the head,
that his uh lost mirrored person is Danielle Rousso, who
was a village soothsayer in her own right. So uh
Russo the philosopher had five children with his partner, but
he turned all of them over to the Paris orphanage,

(07:30):
which is ironic considering that Danielle Rousso spent her entire
adult life on the island seeking out the one child
that she had had. Alex So Rousseau suspected that a
lot of philosophers were actually self serving and they were
alienating people from nature. And I think that this point
of view is really nicely summed up from the Stanford

(07:51):
Encyclopedia Philosophy. Rousseau essentially sought to preserve human freedom in
a world where human beings are increased only dependent on
one another for the satisfaction of their needs. And if
you need a visual to part with that, think about
the camp on the beach where all the lost, these
lived people are incredibly dependent on someone to fish for

(08:13):
them or help them make a shelter. And so no
one can be entirely self serving. But Danielle Rousso, by contrast,
lives on her own, but she's not self serving. She
is self sufficient. Do you see the difference there, okay.
So Russo goes on to state that everyone needs to
have an identity independent from society's opinions of them. But

(08:33):
you may wonder, and an autonomous community, can everyone actually
be equal? Or is it better to live alone? And
if you flash back to some of the power struggles
that we saw in the Lost Camp, you may think
Danielle really did have the right idea, striking out on
her own. So I mentioned that some of his ideas
were more romantic in nature. So if you think about
romantic poets like Blake or words Worth or Coleridge, who

(08:56):
marvel at mountains and seasons, native populations are essentially communing
better with nature, and that's what Rousseau thought that we
should be doing. So Danielle Roussel, we say, living alone
and in nature, being totally self sufficient. What are some
other similarities that she might have with Rousseau the philosopher.

(09:17):
I thought it was interesting how she liked music and
how delighted she was when Zaid repaired her music box.
She never could quite bring herself to assimilate with the
Losties at their camp, but she was definitely there when
they needed her helpful. She was very helpful. Uh. And
if that's not enough of a connection between Danielle Roussel
and Russo the philosopher, I'll point out one more Rousseau

(09:40):
who she could be connected with, and that's en Ri Rousseau,
the French painter, and he primarily painted jungle scenes, even
though he never really left France to step foot in
a jungle. I have a poster of his on my desk,
the Tiger in the Jungle in the rain, and he
once said that he had no teacher other than nature,
and among his jungle scenes, he had two more that

(10:02):
stood out to me as being interesting and perhaps pointing
to Danielle Rousseau. And those titles are the Boat in
the Storm and Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest. And
you can google image those to see for yourself. So
it sounds like she's a combination of these two, I
would say, so pretty interesting. So the next guy on
our list, he is a Scottish philosopher that gives you

(10:24):
a little hint. His name is David Hume and his
character double is Desmond Hume, who is the constant. The
rules don't apply to Desmond. He's one of my favorite
characters and he's kind of our first outsider character. He's um,
I don't know. He stands out compared to the other ones,
considering he had this horrible isolated time where he's living

(10:47):
in the hatch by himself. Um, he's a little more
adjusted than the crash survivors, I think. But the real
David Hume was born seventeen eleven. He's a Scottish flow suffer.
He's a historian. He's an economist, and he attempted to
understand the mind and came to the conclusion that we

(11:07):
can only know what we experience, which I think I
can see a little connection there. He was inspired by
Isaac Newton and surprise, surprise, John Locke. He was born
in Edinburgh and the son of a small time ward.
He got into law but never really practice it, didn't

(11:27):
really like it. Um His most famous works were written
in his twenties, even though he later came back to
it revised it over and over again. But some of
his more popular works came in seventeen fifty one, where
he started to revise some of his earlier writings, and
in this work, The Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals,

(11:49):
he suggested that the internal consciousness or ideas came from impressions,
which were things that we actually experienced, so so your
ideas come from or impressions. And he also developed a
theory of causality, where one impression or idea would bread
another one. So if I dropped a book, Candice knows

(12:11):
that it'll fall um it's it's just what you can
assume will happen, because everything else in your life has
told you that's what will happen. And it was this
causality that he believed was in itself belief if the
ground was wet, it must have reigned earlier. And he
defined this belief as a vivid idea, so it was

(12:32):
more than just a regular idea. It was a lively
idea or a vivid idea. It was something extraordinary. It
had a lot of faith behind it. In his middle age,
he got a job keeping the Advocates Library at Edinburgh
and he became a historian there, which is something he
had always wanted to do. He wrote a history of England.
It went through fifty editions. It was really influential at

(12:55):
the time, like very readable and about all sorts of
people besides king, and comparably impartial to a lot of
histories written at the time, and these make him famous.
The Catholic Church actually bands his all of his writings,
which is a true measure of fame for an author.
And in seventeen sixty three he goes to Paris and

(13:16):
meets up with none other than Jean Jacques Rousseau, and
Rousseau doesn't treat him very well, so um Hume takes
him back to England Rousseau is being persecuted, you know,
offers him a place to stay. But Rousseau is a
little paranoid, you know, like another Ussons, and starts suspecting

(13:37):
there's a plot against him. Flees back to Paris in
the middle of the night and starts slandering Hume, saying
you know he was after me. Um Hume is forced
to publish all of their correspondence together to clear his
name to prove no, I didn't I wasn't planning on
doing anything evil to Rousseau. But he returned to Edinburgh

(14:01):
in seventeen six to nine and died there in seventeen
seventy six. And even though he's not that well known today,
he proved to be quite influential to later philosophers, including
Emmanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham, who's going
to pop up a little later on our list. It's
another name you might recognize. But before we get to

(14:22):
Jeremy Bentham, let's talk about the Russian anarchists on our list,
and that is Mikhail Vakunen, who shares the exact same
name with his last counterpart. Although I don't have a
whole whole lot to say about him, and not too
many similarities to draw from, but I figured having the
exact same name, you all would be upset if I
did not delve into it, so here goes. He was

(14:44):
born in May eighteen fourteen, and one of his first
accomplishments was translating Hagel into Russian. And a very famous
line from his first essay that gives us a taste
of Bakunen's ideas is this the desire for destruct is
at the same time a creative desire to And he
ended up being sentenced to death in eighteen forty nine

(15:08):
for revolutionary activity, but that sentence was commuted to life
in prison. But he was very productive. This is where
he did some of his best writing. And here was
the idea that Bakkunen had about government. The problem with
government was that it existed. He had a big problem
with authority, and what he was promoting instead was something

(15:28):
called instinctive socialism. What this means is that the people
would revolt against the established society and after the revolution,
they will instinctively find a type of labor that appeals
to their natural skills and then organize themselves according to
their labor. However, uh, there needs to be some sort

(15:48):
of secret organization that can just oversee society, keep an
eye on things. But this can't be a typical state
run government. Has to be sort of a big brother,
some sort of initial too, if you will, because a
state run government would end up being too powerful and
self serving. So what do we have to say about
our our lost Mikhail. Basically, as you remember, he came

(16:11):
to the island after responding to the newspaper ad would
you like to save the world? And perhaps he did,
or perhaps he just wanted to get away from one
point he did. Yeah, he had hopes that he could reform,
he could revolutionize, and yet he liked to live alone
and work alone. So they installed him at the flame.
Took a bunch of c four in his basement. That's right,

(16:32):
that's right, And not surprisingly, he defied death several times,
perhaps the most defiant act being when he stepped inside
the pylons and foamed at the mouth and blood from
the ears. Good John the guy. All that was really dramatic,
but he was really good at taking orders to preserve
the island. He responded to that secret level of government.
He knew he had to listen while he was doing

(16:54):
his job, and he finally died of his own accord
when he detonated the hand gar name in the looking glass.
That's pretty interesting. So our next entry is actually just
kind of another famous dead man, Jeremy Bentham, and he's
he's not a real person at all. This is John
Locke's alias when he returns to the real world in

(17:18):
this attempt to get the Oceanic Six to return, and
he starts off really confident, really brave. You know, he's
gonna he's gonna get everybody to come back. He's going
to rescue all the people stuck on the island. He
ends up with a new surround his neck, having this
heart to heart with Benjamin Linus, and um, things are
are very good. That's a dark, dark scene and lost

(17:41):
one of the darkest, I'd say, But the real guy
Jeremy Bentham. He's a moral philosopher, and he's best known
for his ideas on utilitarianism, which was the belief that
we should evaluate actions by how they create happiness. Um,
even if that was like the happiness of the greater good,
and you try to create happiness for as many people

(18:03):
as possible, which I think can apply to our our
lost alias as well. Bentham was also a critic of
law and a legal reformer as well. Um. He's influenced,
not too surprisingly by John Locke and David Hume. So
I feel like the writers must have had all of
these guys in the same philosophy class. They took her something.

(18:26):
But Jeremy Bentham was born in London. He came from
this family of attorneys, and he was really precocious. He
starts learning Latin at age four. He doesn't I know
I did, um. But his first book is sometimes called
the Beginning of philosophic Radicalism, and it catches the eye
of a Lord Shelburne, who reads the essay and calls

(18:48):
on Bentham and makes him his friend and his patron,
and by five Bentham starts traveling, ultimately heading to Russia.
I don't know, maybe he could meet some anarchists there.
He had stressed to visit his brother and writes his
first essay and economics and starts to get into prison

(19:08):
reform too. He's a man of many talents. Comes back
to England hoping to get into politics. That doesn't work out. Instead,
he starts writing about legislation, writing about law, and publishes
an Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, in
which he defines utility as quote that property in any

(19:29):
object whereby it tends to produce pleasure, good, or happiness,
or to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or
unhappiness to the party whose interest is concerned. And he
assumed that men work to avoid pain to pursue pleasure
and happiness. And therefore legislation should cater to the quote
greatest happiness of the greatest number. Ak A, you six

(19:53):
people should go back to the island and save all
those other people. Um. He became pretty famous at home
and abroad. He was made a French citizen. Um. And
then this is honestly my favorite fact about this guy.
It's just really weird. Okay. After he dies, he asks
that his body be dissected in front of his friends,

(20:14):
his head be momified, his skeleton mounted and then talked
with this new wax head, and then the whole thing
would be dressed in his old clothes and mounted and
preserved in a glass case. And you can still see
it at the University College in London. And I mean, clearly,

(20:34):
I think this is why they picked a Bentham here.
I definitely agree. The fancy body weird stuff, the fancy
body weird. I like where you're going with that, al right.
Next on our list is C. S. Lewis, or Clive
Staples Lewis, who is our lost mirror of Charlotte Staples.

(20:55):
Lewis a redhead like myself, so of course she's my
favorite character. So a little bit on C. S. Lewis. First,
he's known primarily as a Christian apologist. He was a
Christian as a child, and then when he went to
Oxford University he became an atheist, and then leader in
his life would convert to Christianity. And this is all
chronicled in the Pilgrim's Regress. If you want to read

(21:16):
his words for yourself, so when C. S. Lewis went
to Oxford, it was during a time of heated debate
between realists and idealists, and realism explained that the universe
is composed of unalterable, fixed truths that don't depend on
you believing in them or a god or absolute being
to control them. And the idea here is that life

(21:38):
can be meaningful without a god. Louis ultimately was a
joy seeker. This is how he describes himself. He thought
that realism would bring him the joy that he sought,
and when he searched for it, he trusted only empirical evidence,
things that he could see, things that he could touch,
facts and figures. However, when his tutor W. T. Kirkpatrick died,

(21:59):
he began to doubt that realism could actually bring him joy.
And so this is when he starts turning to Theism
and then eventually Christianity. And it's very hard to sum
up a lifelong spiritual pilgrimage, but perhaps this phrase from
him will help. It is more important that heaven should
exist than that any of us should reach it. So

(22:21):
something joyful to strive for. And when you think about
Charlotte and lost Uh, some obvious similarities being that she
was also Oxford educated, but she was striving for something
her whole life, and that was the Island because after
she left it as a child, her mother denied that
it existed, and she was determined throughout her whole life
to get back there, and this is why she became

(22:43):
an anthropologist. And even though she was very serious, we
did see moments of joy from her. So think back
to the moment in Tunisia when she discovers that polar
bear skeleton and big Big grin ecstatic. So if we're
to look at Charlotte's life like C. S. Lewis is lying,
we see that completion of the pilgrimage from the land

(23:03):
of Joy to a world with plenty of doubt and
empirical facts, back to a place where she found much joy.
But unfortunately for Charlotte to finally proclaimed that this place
was death, I don't know that it was too joyful.
I kind of wonder if if they brought her, since
she is a character from late in the series. I
wonder if they brought her in after so many people
Compare Loss to Narnia the Chronicles of Narnia, which is C. S.

(23:28):
Lewis's most famous work. Right, that's a very valid point.
And I don't remember Narnia too well, but I do
think that one of the characters tried to affirm that
Narnia existed and was told by a parent that now,
in fact, it was false. So those of you out
there who've read it can assure me of that. So
now we're going to move away from the philosophers a
little bit and head into the realm of physics, although

(23:50):
the character is still going to match up somebody who
arrived with Charlotte, another fun character, Charlotte's love, Charlotte's true love,
and that of course this Daniel Faraday, also known as Twitchy,
and he's the skinny tie wearing physicist, and he's a
very helpful introduction to the series because he can explain
what on Earth is going on with all this time

(24:13):
shifting and traveling, and he can explain when everything starts
flashing and they hear the terrible noise and grab their
ears that were unstuck in time and send John Lock
back as Jeremy Bentham to try to remedy. So Daniel
Faraday is named after Michael Faraday, who was born in

(24:33):
seventeen at and surprise, surprise. He's a physicist. He's best
known for his experiments and discoveries in electro magnetism, and
he was the first guy to produce electric current from
a magnetic field and invented the first electric motor and dynamo. Um.
He's a pretty well known chemist as well. He wrote

(24:55):
a book on chemistry. He discovered several organic compounds. But
he has this great Cinderella scientist story, like Rag stir
Riches all the way. He was born the son of
a blacksmith and a very intelligent wife, and his father
was six so he couldn't work very much and the
kids were often hungry. Um. But he starts working as

(25:17):
a paper boy and he takes the time to read
the papers. He's also working at a book binder's shop,
you know, just sort of running errands, but using every
spare moment he can to to read some of the
stuff he's delivering. And eventually he got an apprenticeship with
a bookbinder, and he got really inspired by an article

(25:37):
on electricity that he read in the third edition of
Encyclopedia Britannica. After that he started conducting his own experiments,
building his own We'll take pile and stuff, and his
life really changes when he's given a ticket to see
Sir Humphrey Davies speak of the Royal Institution in London,
and young Faraday is absolutely mesmerized by a speech. He

(26:00):
takes all these notes, and he must be a super
fan because he binds his notes and sends them off
to Davy and asks for a job. And there isn't
one available immediately, but as soon as one comes up,
as soon as this other assistant inspired for brawling, Davy
thinks of this precocious boy and hires him on as

(26:22):
a lab assistant. And this is eight twelve. They worked
together for almost ten years and Faraday just learns everything
he can. You know, he's had a pretty light education
up until this point. But by the time he strikes
out on his own in eighteen twenty, he's a master
of chemistry and finds his fame as a chemist. Initially,

(26:43):
he's called on by courts as this expert witness, which
I kind of like the sound of. That said that
a case would need and the physicist witness, Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um.
He starts producing compounds of carbon and chlorine, and he
discovers benzene and then he starts getting into his first

(27:04):
love again, electrical experiments experimentation, and he creates the first
electric motor in one and publishes a related work on that.
But the main idea about electricity that kept him going
was he just didn't think that electricity was a fluid,
which a lot of people thought at the time. I

(27:25):
can kind of see that if you look at lightning,
maybe you would think it was just something flowing down
from the sky. He didn't think it was a fluid though.
He thought that instead it was this vibration or a force.
And he also thought that all electricities were probably the same,
so that the lightning that came down from the sky,
the static on my purple fleece, they're ultimately the same thing.

(27:49):
And he set about trying to to prove that some way,
and he discovered electromagnetic induction in eighteen thirty one, which
it meant that electricity could finally leave the realm of
fun interesting but not very applicable experiments and becomes something
possibly very useful for man because it's the principle behind

(28:12):
the electric transformer and the electric general both understandably pretty
useful things. He helped coin words like electrode and cathode
and ion, And in eighteen thirty two he started those
experiments to prove that all electricities were the same, and
his findings ultimately drew him into a theory of electric chemistry. Um.

(28:33):
He owes work. You can imagine it takes a toll
on him, kind of like very day. You know, he's
a little worn down. Um. And in eighteen thirty nine
he has a nervous breakdown. It takes him years to
recover from it, and then by eighteen fifty five his
mind is beginning to fail. Victoria offers him a house
and knighthood just because he's been such a tremendous asset

(28:57):
to the country for so long. He will only accept
the house. He turns down the knighthood. He just doesn't
ever want to have to devote himself to things outside
of science. Any word on whether Victoria gave him a
leather bound journal. Oh, possibly with a with an inscription,
and he could he could maybe write something about Desmond

(29:18):
Hume in it. Well, the very last famous person on
our historical name dropping lost list is someone really wacky
and Um. As Sarah mentioned at the beginning of the podcast,
I have not yet made it through season six, and
as I understand, this person comes alive and really becomes
unfolded like all the layers of an onion in this

(29:38):
final season. So she's going to help me out a
little bit when we move from the historical reference to
character importance, the lost reference. Uh Richard Alpert, oh, the
man with eyeliner A Sawyer called him. He is a
strange character and he is actually as someone who really
lived in history, played a very significant role in Still

(30:00):
Alive today. But you will not find Richard Albert if
you go searching for him online. You will find Rom Doss,
the guru Rom Doss, And I'll tell you why momentarily. So,
Richard Albert started out his career with a PhD from
Stanford and went to work at Harvard University. And he
has one of the most famous co workers and all

(30:23):
of US history, and that's Timothy Learry, who Richard Nixon
once called the most dangerous man in America. And Timothy
Leary and Richard Albert were a dangerous duo because they
were testing psychedelic substances on willing students and prisoners. They
would conduct sessions where people would trip and the record observations.

(30:44):
This was the beginning of the counterculture movement, and Albert
really thought that psychedelic drugs would revolutionize that was his word,
psychology and religion. Now he was forced to leave Harvard
with Leary, but they continued their experiment in a Boston
neighborhood where Albert bought a home on Kenwood Avenue in
nineteen sixty two, and the neighbors tried to get it

(31:06):
shut down, but Albert's father, George, was a lawyer and
appealed their complaint. Now this house existed long before it.
Leary had his his mansion, his country home where he
continued on with his experiments, so it was just focus
on the little neighborhood home. Leary is the one who
came up with the line turn on, tune in, dropout,
and this was the idea behind the counterculture movement, that

(31:30):
you could essentially change your life with these drugs. You
didn't have to be the buttoned up nineteen fifties businessman
that your father was. And Don Latin, who wrote a
book about the two men called the Harvard Psychedelic Club,
describes Leary as the charmer of the experiments and Albert
as the intense professorial type intense. Would you say that

(31:53):
lost Richard is intense? I think it's him now, Richard
Albert became friends with an under graduate named Ronnie Winston
who had approached him with his friend Andy while about
getting involved in these experiments. But because they were only eighteen,
they said, now that was not going to be okay
with Harvard. Ronnie is the same Winston whose family is

(32:15):
the Harry Winston diamond family, so he had plenty of
money and had a lot in common with Albert that
came from wealthy backgrounds, with a lot of class and prestige,
and they formed a very intimate but not sexual relationship. Meanwhile,
Ronnie's friend Andy, who had also appealed to Albert but
had been turned down and didn't get into this inner

(32:36):
circle of friendship. Uh. He became the now famous Dr
Andrew Wile, who is the face of integrative medicine, and
you've probably seen his vitamins or his picture by the
Origins counter in your favorite department store. He was not
pleased at being shut out of the circle, and he
eventually exposed the professor's practices and the Harvard Crimson newspaper,

(32:58):
which was one of the factors that led to are
being dismissed from the faculty. So all of that background
at school leads us to the fact that in nineteen
sixty seven, after the house on Kenwood Avenue he left.
He went to India to study yoga and meditation, and
while he was there, Albert became Guru Ramdass, which means

(33:18):
servant of God. And when he returned to the United States,
he began a foundation to help prison inmates find their
spiritual moorings, and he became associated with a Dying Project
which aids terminally ill people and their caretakers as they
consciously accept that they're dying. And a stroke in seven,
which was a year after Timothy Leary died, left him

(33:40):
partially paralyzed. But if you go to Ramdass's website you
can see that he still has online materials and videos
and waits for you to learn more about him. As
for our friend Richard Albert Unlost, I think we can
definitely give him the title of spiritual intermediary. Definitely. I mean,
he's a he's helpful guy. He he acts as the

(34:02):
intermediary between Jacob, which is I mean, without giving away
too much to Candice who has not seen season six again.
You know, he he accepts that role. He wants it
because he feels that Jacob's hands off approach is not
really working. But um, ultimately he's kind of frustrated by
how little he knows, which I think is interesting that

(34:25):
this Richard Albert leaves. He goes to India to study
yoga and meditation, looking for something else, you know, something
to help explain what he's been doing and what his
life is about. So you could say that Lost Richard
also leads a countercultural movement of sorts by changing the
way that the island has been lead and conducted and

(34:47):
ushering a new Richard era in very interesting. Uh. Something
else about Lost Richard is that even though he perhaps
stands for a greater good that is sometimes terrified ing
and inexplicable, he's pretty non violent. He seems to be
um inclusive of others. When young Ben approaches him and

(35:08):
says that he wants to join the others, he he
agrees to take him in, but he's going to have
to be patient, He's going to have to become in light.
He's a patient man. He's for man for most of
the show, and then he's not anymore. And that is
as much as I know about Richard, and I'm sure
that some of you listening are itching to list off
more comparison, So I would advise you to send your

(35:31):
thoughts and ideas to Sarah via email, and as soon
as I catch up with season six, I will have
to join that conversation. And again, we know that there
are plenty more famous people in history who share names
with people un lost, So perhaps you can send us
your favorite characters and the historical counterparts and draw some
conclusions and similarities or even striking dissimilarities of your own. Yeah,

(35:55):
you can email us at History podcast at how stuff
works dot com. Also, if you want to read a
little more about loss, you know, if you're sort of
starting to miss it, it's about the time of year
when you start getting geared up for the next season.
I think I'm starting to miss it a little bit.
But if you want to read some on it, you
can go to the website and search for the Dharma Initiative.

(36:16):
Tracy Wilson wrote an article a few years ago, pretty
interesting stuff. You can find it on our web page.
It's www dot how stuff works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics because it how
stuff works dot com The how stuff Works dot com.
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