Sasha Sagan
speaker
98 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Sasha Sagan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hello, it's so nice to be with you both. Thanks for that hilarious and charming introduction.
Well, thank you. I do. I mean, a lot of my work and definitely my worldview is based on my parents' work. So I feel like it's part of my identity.
Oh, it's a wonderful treasure. I mean, I feel so lucky. I mean, both my parents, my mom, Andreanne, and my dad collaborated on books and essays on the original Cosmos series in the 80s, which my mom has written and produced and directed the new version of with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Yes, absolutely. No, she's amazing. And both my parents, I mean, you know, in terms of like, is it a burden? It's really not. I feel so lucky. I lost, you know, my dad was amazing and he was a really fun, great dad. And I lost him when I was 14.
And so when I meet people who have questions about him or read his work, like, you know, started reading his work a couple years ago when or even weren't even born in 1996. I feel this immense joy and gratitude that in this way, in this totally secular, real way, he is living on. And no, I love talking about it. And my book is partly about growing up in that household and growing up
with the worldview of, you know, that science is the pathway to not just understanding and like, not just to like reality, but to awe and wonder and joy and that spine tingling feeling that we are a part of something larger than ourselves.
Why would he do such a thing? No, I feel like I mean, I feel like the it's interesting because I think there is this correlation between, you know, the conspiracy theories and so much of the history of religion, because we are so uncomfortable not knowing it is torture for us. The future is so unrelenting with its, you know, our inability to predict it. It's miserable.
And I mean, right now, as we are, I don't know when this is going to air, but as we are in the lead up to the election. I mean, it's like- What's happening? What's going on right now? Oh God, you're going to want to have a seat because it's really intense.
But I think that like just this discomfort with not knowing the answer to small and deep, profound questions, we humans, you know, we fill stuff in because even if it's something bad, even if it's something disturbing, we somehow are more comfortable with that than just the open space of a question.
Exactly. And I think that if you're raised with the worldview that there is someone, a man in charge who makes decisions that you cannot possibly understand, and it seems like it's a bad thing, but maybe there's a good reason and you're not allowed to ask any questions and you just have to agree. It sets you up for all kinds of other ideologies.
Yes. Well, I think it's a combination of two things.
Like, so like if you were to take like, so part of the reason I'm interested in this is because when I was a kid, my dad would like love to do these thought experiments about like, how would I, like, if I were to meet someone from, you know, another planet, how would I explain what we were doing and why we were doing it?
And it was great because also when you're a child, you are kind of like, you know, you're new on earth and you're still getting a hang of all these norms. And it's very easy once you become an adult to become very blasé about, well, that's just the way we do things. But when you're a child, you're like, well, why do we... say something after someone sneezes, but not after they burp.
And then parents sometimes get very annoyed with the long list of why questions, because then they have to ask themselves these. And so I loved always looking at the things we do from the outside. And so that's sort of the impetus for the Strange Customs podcast. Like if you were an anthropologist from somewhere else, how would you explain
you know, marriage, anything from like marriage and, you know, rituals around birth to like April Fool's Day or, you know, I mean, Halloween is a perfect example. I think it's that. And I'm also really interested in customs and traditions because as a non-religious person, I still want to mark time and process change. And I still...
you know, want to grieve when someone dies and I got married and had a wedding. And like when the seasons change, I want to have a celebration, but I don't have the infrastructure of religion. So how do we do that?
No, I don't think we must, but I think that it gives us sometimes, depending on the ritual, it's either the illusion of control, if it's a ritual that we believe changes something, makes something happen, or it's about processing change, right? Like, Someone's alive and then they are not alive. The thing, whatever this is, goes away. How do we make sense of that? How do we process this change?
Or if you think about all the coming of age rituals around the world, right? Someone is a child and then like, oh, all these chemicals come in and their voice changes and there's hair and then they're in a weird mood and everything's different suddenly. And then they're an adult. And like that threshold, we have to acknowledge that.
And I think that, you know, when we sort of look at so many rituals around the world, when you peel back the first layer of like the local set design and costumes and script, we are almost always celebrating the same things. And they are so often scientific phenomenon, like puberty is like a biological change, right? The changing of the seasons is
It has to do with the biology of the plants and it has to do with the axial tilts of the earth, right? And all these holidays that fall around the solstices and equinoxes. It's because we're all, you know, we sometimes make up a different backstory, but we're all trying to process the same patterns and make sense of them and find the beauty in them and alleviate our fears.
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