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, 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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. My phone app is coming soon. 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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, 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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. My phone app is coming soon. 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