Lost!

[Ghoulish Delight]

So I'm reading a biography of Timothy Leary. There are a lot of names in it, I'm pretty bad at retaining names when I'm reading biographies. So when I reached the period in Leary's life when he became a faculty member of Harvard's psychology department, I assumed the familiar name of a fellow faculty member and ally to Leary through his controversial psychedelics experiments was someone from earlier in Leary's life that I had forgotten about.

It took me about 50 pages for it to click.

Richard Alpert.

Interestingly, the real Alpert went on to become a spiritual leader, known as Baba Ram Dass, and taught, among several other things, Buddhism. With the show's many other references to Buddhism, I don't suppose that's mere coincidence, though I assume it's more simply a clever nod and doesn't imply that the character has any actual relation to the real Alpert.

Ram Dass was also apparently the inspiration for the roller skating guru disguise in Fletch.