The One You Feed - Sasha Sagan on Science and the Sacred

Episode Date: August 25, 2020

Sasha Sagan is a writer who has also worked as a television producer, filmmaker, editor, and speaker. Sasha’s writing has appeared in New York Magazine, O Magazine, Literary Hub, and others. Her latest book is called, For Small Creatures Such As We: Rituals For Finding Meaning In Our Unlikely World.In this episode, Sasha Sagan and Eric talk about bringing a sense of sacredness to a scientific world, maintaining our awe and wonder, and the role and importance of ritual in our lives.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Sasha Sagan and I Discuss Science, the Sacred, and…Her book, For Small Creatures Such As We: Rituals For Finding Meaning In Our Unlikely WorldMaintaining our sense of awe even as we discover the explanations for thingsSitting with the discomfort of not knowing to foster wonderFollowing our curiosity and having questions as we follow the threads to discoveryGoing through the right of passage of an existential crisisThe fact that things end makes them preciousHow so much of ritual is processing changeRitual being a 3 step path from a state of separateness to a state of togethernessThe wisdom in having rituals that mark timeCreating ritualsThe positive and negative of our human tendency to find patternsTolerating ambiguityThe need for nuanceInterconnectednessSasha Sagan Links:sashasagan.comTwitterInstagramBLUblox offers high-quality lenses that filter blue light, reduce glare, and combat the unhealthy effects of our digital life. Visit BLUblox.com and get free shipping and also 15% off with Promo Code: WOLFPlushcare: Provides excellent primary and urgent healthcare through virtual appointments. It’s easy to book online and you can even get same-day appointments. They accept most major insurance carriers, are available in all 50 states and you get prescriptions sent to your local pharmacy. Go to www.plushcare.com/wolf to start your free 30-day trial.Calm App: The app designed to help you ease stress and get the best sleep of your life through meditations and sleep stories. Join the 85 million people around the world who use Calm to get better sleep. Get 40% off a Calm Premium Subscription (a limited time offer!) by going to www.calm.com/wolf If you enjoyed this conversation with Sasha Sagan on Science and the Sacred, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Lesley HazletonGretchen RubinSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everyone, just a quick shout out to all of our new Patreon supporters. We have Chase M, J.U., Shay P, Sarah H, Layla S, Joseph B, Erica J, Stripper M, Adam C, Lucy H, Angie O, and Rex M. Thank you so much to you guys and to all of our Patreon members. If you'd like to experience being a member and all the benefits that come with it, go to oneufeed.net slash join. We're very lucky to be here at all. And crucially, it's more special because it's not forever. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. writer who has also worked as a television producer, filmmaker, editor, and speaker.

Sasha's writing has appeared in New York Magazine, O! The Oprah Magazine, Literary Hub, and others. Today, Sasha and Eric discuss her book, For Small Creatures Such As We, Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here, Eric. I'm excited to talk with you about your book called For Small Creatures Such As We, Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World. And we will get to that in a moment, but we'll start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandmother who's talking with her grandson and she says, in life, there are

two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandmother and he says, well, which one wins? And she says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, first, let me say I love it. I think it's such a beautiful way of communicating something so much larger than just the few sentences that it takes to tell that story. The first thing that comes to my mind is the questions of like wonder and curiosity and awe and how we get that, how we tap into that. It's so easy to be blasé about the natural world,

about our place in the universe, about reproduction, about all these things that we get to know when we're young and we become very ordinary in our lives. And I think there's something about feeding the awe, feeding the wonder, and even the things that are very, very simple. Like we eat food that grows in the ground. It grows because it gets light and water and nutrients from the soil, and it grows, and we eat it, and we live. If we can tap into the part of ourselves that can feel some sense of awe about just that, if we feed that part of ourselves, I think that grows. And the more curious we are, even about very ordinary things, and the more we can pursue that outlook, I think that's the wolf that I want to

feed. I love that. Yeah. Curiosity is such a big piece for me. So one of the things I love about your book, you say very early on that in your household, being alive was presented to me as a profoundly beautiful and staggeringly unlikely, a sacred miracle of random chance. And I love that idea because a lot of what you're trying to do in this book is bring back a sense of sacredness to a scientific worldview. And you say elsewhere, which I absolutely love, you say, why does the provability of something rob us of the thrill of it. And so talk to me about how we can keep a sense of awe and mystery, and if you'll use the word sacredness, sacredness around things that we can explain. Why does being able to explain something tend to take away the importance we give it? It's such a good question. And it's such a

strange thing. I think we have this idea, you know, I always say we malign facts as cold and hard. And we have this idea that if you just look at the data, it's unromantic and it doesn't give you the spine chilling thrill that a mystery gives you. But I think the way that we've been able to understand the natural world by following scientific evidence is so much more astonishing than a lot of the mysteries that we concocted for ourselves or the things that we were most comfortable leaving unknown. When we come face to face with the reality of our place in the universe, what we're made of, how we got here, all these deep old questions, it's startlingly beautiful. And I think one of the things my parents did when I was a kid was they would sort of describe things

saying, imagine if you were from another planet and you noticed that humans were doing this, or imagine that you had never seen this before, or the moon appeared one day and it hadn't been there this whole time. And to sort of take a step back and see very ordinary things or things that we understand deeply, or even things that we've just discovered in the last generation and take the tools we use to describe fairy tales and myths and ancient stories that haunt us. The best example I can think of is if we told children there's a secret code in your blood that connects you to your ancestors and whether you believe in it or not, it's there. And it holds information that maybe you don't even know. But we have figured out how to decode it. And we can find out all these things

about ourselves that we never knew before, with this amazing decoding system that we've just discovered, but was here all along. Instead of just having like the worksheet that you do in middle school with the alleles and the RNA and the, you know, all this stuff that doesn't get presented like this grand, sweeping, beautiful thing. You know, I think that there's so much there. We all feel this craving for the sacredness, as you said, for a connection to the immense grandeur that we're all part of. And I think whether you're secular like me, or you're religious, or you're somewhere in between, or there's elements of religion that you really connect to, and there's elements that you find alienating, wherever you are on that spectrum, I think that that desire to feel that feeling that even the earliest humans

must have felt looking up at the night sky at the Milky Way to connect to that, I think there's ways to do that, that rely just on the information that is supported by science. Yeah. And I mean, what we learned from science is usually, at least for me, way more mind bending and miraculous and like, what? Then the myths we have, you know, the myths are like, well, yeah, okay. So, you know, it's one thing to think, well, the universe was created five or 6,000 years ago by creating two people. And it's like, okay, I kind of understand that.

I understand how we birth babies. Okay, maybe. But then you go, hold on a second, 14 billion and it all came out of nothing? And for me, those are sacred experiences when I'm actually able to touch the awe of it all. I couldn't agree more. And I think that one of the things that we really struggle with as a species is the tolerance for ambiguity. And sometimes when we have a really large question, but we don't have the answer for it, or even a really small question, you know, in our daily lives, but we don't have the answer for it, the urge to just put an answer in to not sit with the discomfort of not knowing is so strong that we're willing to settle for answers just to not have that anxiety of having this empty space when we have a

profound question that is really at our core. And so I think the more we can get comfortable with saying, well, this is the information we have now, we may get more information that disproves this, or we may get more information that supports it, but we're going to follow the evidence and it's going to lead us somewhere we could never expect, but at least we'll know that it's not a product or it's less likely to be a product of our wishes and hopes and fears. Yeah. And I think that's an interesting thing to hold, how to hold that idea, because it's really easy to be like, well, this is true because science said it's true. But science said all sorts of things were true in the past that we know now. Like,

well, no, that was completely wrong. I partially like really want to be like, wow, that's amazing. And then there's another part of me like, well, what, maybe that's not it at all. And like you say, holding that ambiguity is interesting. And it's one of the areas that I found like a deeper spiritual life, particularly in a mystic dimension, helps with that. Because the mystics ultimately go like, well, you can't really know any of this. Like, at a certain level, you pass beyond intellectual understanding. And having some experiences like that sort of lead, have led me more naturally to holding scientific truths a little bit more lightly. Like you said, I think you said it very well. That's what we believe now. May not be 100%

true. We don't know for sure, but that's the best guess we have. I think the thing that's so powerful about science, it's not just like a list of bullet points to be compared with, you know, another list of bullet points, you know, from any other tradition, but it's a tool to try to figure out what's going on. It's very hard for us to not project what we want to be true or what we hope to be true. And so if we can sort of just over and over again, test our views and see what stands up to scrutiny and let the stuff that doesn't fall away and be okay with that. I think that's a pathway to a deeper understanding coupled with our getting comfortable with the idea that what we know is still such a tiny fragment of what there is to know. You state that eloquently throughout the book, sort of this idea of this is a puzzle that we're never really going to solve. Like thinking like, oh, if I just gather

more knowledge, I will be able to put all the pieces together. But it seems to be the more we know, the more we go, what on earth is going on around here? Right. And the more questions we have, and I think that the idea that that's great and having questions is good, you know, following that curiosity isn't necessarily a problem, I think, is something that can be so joyful. And it's something that you see with small children very often that they're just so excited to have questions and they will just keep going. And, you know, the why, why, why phase can be exhausting, but it's also such a thrill because there's so much information for them to absorb. And, you know, following those threads down all the paths that there are is something that I think adults, you know, maybe can take a little page from that toddler book. Yeah. One of the things that happens, I think, as you move from a religious worldview to a secular worldview, I don't want to put science opposite religion, so I'll just stay with secular for now. preacher that God loves and God knows you and you're this thing. And then you come over here

to the secular worldview of, okay, I am one speck of dust in the grand scheme of things. I am a, I am a, I am a speck of dust in a flash of lightning, you know, like, boom, that's it. So what that can feel like often is, oh my God, what happened to meaning? It's the existential crisis. It's the meaninglessness. I'd love to talk about how you and your parents before you, because they obviously informed that, held that issue and how they found meaning in what, if you're not careful, looks like just a meaningless existence. I think you really hit it on the head with the existential crisis. And I think even if you're not leaving a religious upbringing, even if you're brought up secular as I was, the existential

crisis, I think it's almost a rite of passage. I think that's real. And I think it's important. And I think you have to go through that very painful looking glass that says, you know, life is not forever. We are all mortal. And we are here in the grand scheme of things for the blink of an eye. And even though I was not ever told anything otherwise, I still as a teenager, and I write about it in the book, had to really come face to face with that idea viscerally. I mean, it's difficult. It's painful. It's really hard. But on the other side of it, what I think is there, the other side of the coin is, well, I'm right here right now. It's happening. And the countless circumstances that could have gone just a

millimeter in the other direction, and I would be someone else or I wouldn't be here or some medical problem 1000 years ago, some ancestor didn't make it to adulthood. And you're not here all the people who it took and before them, all the non-human primates and down to the single-celled organisms who it took for you to be here right now listening to this podcast. It's astonishing. It's amazing. It's worthy of celebration. It's beautiful. And I think, you know, my parents really raised me with this idea from the earliest time that I was aware of mortality that we're very lucky to be here at all. And crucially, it's more special because it's not forever. If we lived forever, there would be no hurry to do anything. There would be very little thrill and beauty and excitement. And, you know, it takes both sides of the coin. Without death,

there is no life. And I think that, you know, that's true of all things, you know, cold and hot, long days, short days, darkness and light, all those things, you know, we have to have the other side, not in a spiritual way, necessarily, in a very literal way. Summer is hard to appreciate if there's no winter. Yeah. You're saying that made me think of two artistic renderings of that. One is a Matt Haig book, I think, called How to Stop Time, and it's about vampires, but essentially, they've just bored out of their mind. Jason Isbell wrote an amazing song called If We Were Vampires, which is this beautiful love song to his wife, basically saying, if we were vampires, this wouldn't be so special. Because we'd just go on and on forever.

It's the fact that I know that one of us is going to lose the other. It's a beautiful and heartbreaking song. That gave me chills, you describing it. And I think that that's something that sometimes certain religious traditions that suggest that, you know, there is something after this and you will be reunited. Well, and that this is just the dress rehearsal for something else. Well, if that's not true, that really robs us of something right now, here and now that this isn't the dress rehearsal, this is the show. And it's up to us to make the best of it and do what we can to do right and to enjoy and to have some happiness. You say that the biggest drawback for you of being secular is the lack of a shared culture. Say more about that. Yeah. I mean, I really like,

you know, parties and celebrations and holidays and rituals. And I lost my dad when I was 14 and not having a infrastructure for mourning was difficult. So for background, we're Jewish. We don't believe, we don't adopt any of the theistic elements, but culturally, you know, of the theistic elements, but culturally, you know, expression wise, cuisine wise, holiday wise, you know, we are Jewish and we found ways to connect to our ancestors without necessarily taking on their theological points of view. So we had Hanukkah and Passover, but we did them in a secular way. And I loved that. And, you know, for a while I thought, oh, well, Judaism isn't, you know, it's so weird how it's like a culture and a, you know, sort of ethnic group and a religion and these overlapping Venn diagrams. But as I got older, I realized that this is very

common. I mean, Christmas is celebrated in a secular way, all that stuff. And I mean, I've had several people reach out to me recently saying that they consider themselves culturally Mormon. They don't believe in theology anymore, but they were brought up Mormon and they still connect to elements of that. And I think every person, even if you're very devout, we're all navigating, well, what are we going to emphasize in our own lives that was passed down to us? And what are we going to slightly repurpose? And what are we going to let fall away? And we've been doing this for generations, no matter how traditional you think you are, you're doing something differently than they

were doing a couple of hundred years ago. So I think a celebration and a party and a rite of passage and a coming of age ceremony and a wedding are so much more powerful when they're not just going through the motions, when they really reflect the philosophy of the people involved. And so that's how I really got interested in what eventually led to my book is this idea of, well, how can we still mark time? Because so much of ritual is about processing change, births, marriages, deaths, year changing. The days are short. The days are long. It's cold. It's hot. Time is passing. How is this happening? I can't feel the earth moving. And yet here we are. Time is passing. And so I think really craving that, but craving it in a way that reflects what I really believe is become

a lot of what I think about and a lot of what's interesting to me. Yeah, I agree. And I think ritual can be so important. You've got a young daughter. I've got a son who is 22 years old. And as I look back, one of the regrets I think I might have was not finding ritual there that was consistent with him. Luckily, I think he got it from his mom's side of the family. And I think they do a better job of that. I think when I was younger, holidays were just like, ugh. And so now I kind of went to the other extreme. But in looking at it, I agree with you. And I think ritual can be such a useful and powerful thing. You say that, I do not believe that my lack of faith makes me immune to the desire to be part of the rhythm

of life on this planet. And I think that's so well said in that idea of marking time. Yeah. And it's so funny because it's these events that so many of our holidays and rituals around the world are built to top our real scientific, biological, and astronomical events. I mean, many, many holidays around the world are tied, especially to the winter solstice and the spring equinox. The phases of the moon is very central to keeping calendar in Judaism and Islam and many other cultures. And this idea of these changes like birth, coming of age and death, these are biological events.

It's very easy to see a sweet 16 or a quinceanera or a bat mitzvah as this purely cultural thing. But it is about a biological change. thing, but it is about a biological change. Someone going from being a child to getting to the point where they get to be in the club of adults and that the group gets to go on one more generation. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk

about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really? No, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really? No, really. And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You talked about somebody who saw rite or ritual as a three-step path from a state of separation to a state of togetherness. Talk a little bit more about that because I think that's really interesting, both the idea that there's actual steps that are important in a ritual and that it takes us from separation to togetherness. Yeah.

That's its important point. Yeah. Van Hennep, who coined the phrase rite of passage, and he was a European philosopher, anthropologist, sociologist, I guess. And he had this idea of the ritual as a threshold. And you had this preliminal phase and postliminal phase. So before and after and then the event. And it rings so true. I mean, the easiest example is like a wedding. You start out, you are unmarried, two people, you go in to the venue or whatever it is, and you have this

ritual, this event that everyone there agrees is this portal really from singleness to marriage. And there are so many rituals, even very small daily rituals. I mean, you know, you do the thing you do first thing in the morning and say, okay, my day is starting. And it's like, you're going from sleep world and and you whatever you make your coffee or you do your jumping jacks or whatever it is you do. Hopeless snobbing. Oh, I like to start the day. That counts, too. Yeah.

Any of the above, you know, you're like green juice, whatever it is. And then it's the day, you know, and there's very large events, you know, that happen the world over. I mean, New Year's, right? Time is passing all the time. We've arbitrarily, you know, different cultures have different ideas of what year it is, but we've agreed on this calendar that we use, you know, by and large, and it's, you know, based on the Christian religious calendar, fine. But we have this idea that at December 21st at midnight, whatever time zone you're in, now it's a new year. I mean, it's totally artificial, but we have this threshold that we pass through and we play the music and we kiss each other on the lips and then it's

a new year. And I think there's so much in very large and very small events that we do that follows that pattern. Yeah, it is interesting. I just had one of the big birthdays that you would have. I just turned 50. Happy birthday. Oh my goodness. And you would never have thought that, I know, from looking at me. I appreciate that. I was just going to say you look fantastic. I'll preempt you on that. But people will say like, how does it feel to be 50? And I'm like, honestly, not very different than yesterday. But I also get it's a chance to reflect. It's a chance to mark time. It's a chance to contemplate. I mean, I guess on one hand, yes, we can trace it back to

the day I was born, but it's not like I became 50 that day. And so a lot of ritual is that way. And again, as I said, I think for years, I tossed away a lot of ritual or celebration because I went, well, this is just artificial and made up. And I think as I'm, you know, now that I'm old, you've seen it so much younger. I'm starting to see more of the wisdom in marking time because you're right, it just goes. And I think there's something about when you're brought up with very strict set of rituals, which I wasn't, but I know a lot of people who were, and you shake off the philosophy, let's say, that those rituals are built around. It's really easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, I don't want anything to do with any of that. And I think that, you know, there is this sense, we have this feeling that traditions are intrinsically valuable if they're old, but if they're new, it's a little contrived. And I think as we are as a culture, I hope shaking off some of the very old things that are part of our identity and our idea of what is right and wrong. And we come face to face and really reckon with what we actually believe. We can

sort of take some of the value off of things that are old and say, and actually look at them and say, well, what do we want this to be like? Because change is inevitable. And the question is, what kind of change do you want? And if it's slow change or the change that takes place when you look at something carefully and say, I don't need this. I don't want this. This is what's right instead. This is what's better. And I think that we can do that for a lot of this stuff where we think, oh, well, the way that people have been doing it for hundreds of years is the only way. I think we got to let some of that step go and create what is meaningful to us and reflects our values. Yeah. I'd like to talk a little bit about that now, about creating ritual. The one that I'll

call to your attention, and then I'll ask you for any others that come to mind that you've created, but you created a really great ritual, the Ladies Dining Club. Did I give it the right title? Yeah, the Ladies Dining Society, which is unnecessarily fancier. Much better than club. So you created this thing that is really such a great idea. It's something that I have thought of doing for years. Tell us a little bit more about that and how your understanding of ritual affected that. Yeah. So again, I think because, you know, sometimes you just can't appreciate something until you have the antithesis. I'm very lucky. I have a lot of really amazing, really smart, really hilarious, close girlfriends. And I don't know if I fully appreciated,

this is when I lived in New York, and I don't think if I fully appreciated, this is when I lived in New York, and I don't think if I really appreciated them as much as I should have until my now husband, then boyfriend, and I went to live abroad for a couple of years. And I missed them so much. And when I came back, and I was seeing everybody one-on-one and trying to catch up. I was like, this is not efficient. And also I have all these amazing women who should know each other in my life. How can I make this happen? So I felt like kind of silly doing it. I'll be totally frank. It was like, you know, one of those things where you're like, is this awkward? Is this so embarrassing? But I started a monthly dinner party at a restaurant that I just organized.

And for, I don't know, I think four or five years from when I returned home to New York before we left New York, we did it with only three exceptions once a month. And sometimes only a few people showed up. Sometimes it was packed. Sometimes it was like, you know, weather was bad, everyone was busy. And it was like me and three friends, which was so great and so fun. But so many friendships and actually professional relationships to sprung out of this. And a lot of people left New York because as you get into your mid to late 30s, it becomes, you know, people settle down other places. And it's, you know, a lot of people left for jobs and relationships and to have a backyard and all

those good things. But these relationships and these friendships have continued. And it was so much fun. And it was so special. And other people then, when they moved away, started little chapters where they were. And it took on a life of its own. And now I don't do it anymore. And I'm a mom. And I live in Boston. And everything's different. But it lives on in this other way.

And I'm really proud of that. And it was something that I derived so much joy from. And it was such a source of support too. I mean, you know, if I was religious, I might have a monthly women's event or club of some kind. But, you know, when you're secular, you have to do the legwork of organizing that stuff yourself. But it's so worth it. And you did it monthly. You know, not all rituals should be monthly, but talk about the benefit to that. You know, it's true. I think each ritual,

depending on what it is, you know, you have to sort of work out the timing for yourself, but monthly felt right because it's, you know, it's not as much of a time commitment and, you know, just 12 times a year doesn't sound that bad. And, you know, people are busy and have jobs and it's expensive to go out to dinner in New York and all those reasons. But as the rhythm started, there was this other layer that felt really poetic, which is, you know, there's something very female about once a month. And I had always believed that the female cycle was once a month because we were somehow linked up to the moon and it had to do with the face of the moon. And I totally believe that. And I told people, and then when I went down to research it, to write about this in my book, I discovered that there is no evidence to support, you know, two roughly 28 day cycles, but they appear to be unconnected, which isn't to say we might not someday discover a connection.

But as of now, I have to reserve belief without evidence about that one. Yeah, it's such a great ritual. It sounds so fun to think about having done that for several years. And I think sometimes it's like we think, well, it's just once a month. What's that really going to be? But that really can build something special. But boy, people are busy. It is so hard to get any sort of commitment. It has to be a great thing that happens because things that aren't great,

they don't make it. Totally. And so much of creating a new ritual is trial and error. And there's some nudging involved. But I think also, you got to read the room. If it's not, if it's not working for the other participants, you may have to let it go and try something different. But it doesn't have to be a dinner party. I mean, you know, people have these rituals that they don't think of as rituals. I mean, if it's just like, Thursday night, with your coworkers or your friends, you all go to the same yoga class once a week, poker night, movie night. There's a million things people do on a regular or semi-regular basis that someone organizes and, you know, is fulfilling in some way to the group that sort of does fall into this category of a ritual. Yep. There's another ritual that a lot of religions have, which is on a different time schedule, which is weekly. Sabbath, the Jewish holiday, is probably, at least to me, the best

known and the best example of, you know, it's a day that's really set aside for deeper contemplation. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, church services on Sunday, you know, weekly prayers all over the world and on, you know, schedules that are close to weekly also that, you know, in Eastern religions, there's so many versions of this. And I do think there's something maybe sad for taking a step back once a week and also finding a formal way to break up work and, you know, play for lack of a better word. There's something about that that's really valuable. Yeah. There's been some really interesting movements around digital Sabbaths.

Yes. Are you familiar with some of those? A little bit, but just the idea, I mean, you know, for Orthodox Jews, part of Shabbat or Shabbos is this idea that you don't, I mean, obviously a lot of this predates cell phones, needless to say, but that you don't use electricity, you don't handle money, you don't cook. And especially like mechanical, you know, you don't turn on the stove, these things that sort of are early machinery that we might have had in our homes. And I think there's something now in a secular way. I mean, of course, if you're Orthodox, you also don't use your laptop. But I think for secular people and non-Jews, there is a look towards having a day off from social media and from

texting and from all these things that are very easy to just do every day forever and ever until you die if you don't think to take a break from it. Yep. One of the things that you talk about that is in ritual, but it's in so much of other things in our lives, language and math and music is patterns, you know, and that we as humans love finding and creating and repeating them. And I'd like to talk about that in its positive sense, because we are incredibly good at it. And also, it has its negative elements. Great topic I'm fascinated with. So, yeah, pattern recognition is so powerful. I think it's the key to everything we've been able to do as a species. I mean,

I'm making totally arbitrary sounds out of my mouth right now, but you know what I'm saying because we have agreed on the pattern of language and we have learned it from infancy. And if you speak English, you know what I'm trying to communicate, even though there's no intrinsic meaning to the sounds, it's just a pattern that we recognize. And this is, you know, architecture, everything, mechanical, everything we do that's really astonishing, in my opinion, requires this pattern recognition. And it's a biological advantage. It's a huge advantage. I mean, right, if you can learn which berries make people sick, and which berries are good to eat, that's a pattern. If you can learn, this is the time of year when this animal

comes this way. I mean, that is a huge, huge ancient survival advantage. But we're so good at finding patterns that we're like, I think we're addicted to it. And we find patterns where there aren't any. And I think that so much of pseudoscience, and so much of a lot of stuff that we, you know, again, because we have such a hard time tolerating ambiguity, and we see these patterns, you know, whether it's like the man in the moon, you know, human face in the moon, or it's every time I do this, this happens, you know, all the little superstitions we have, that is about our addiction to patterns and our desire to see them even when there aren't any. And I think that one of the things that's so important and so powerful and useful about science is the ability to look at the evidence and take a step back and just not just count the hits and not the misses or the other way around and actually see, is there something here that we can rely on and recreate and independently see?

Or is it just our fears and our wishes coming up in this part of our brain that is so, so powerful? Yeah, I love that you said counting the hits or counting the misses, because that tends to be the thing that we see there. And then, you know, the even darker side of patterns is the sense that we put people into patterns, right? You talk about astrology in the book a little bit, and it can be a fairly harmless sort of thing. And it's another version of thinking, if I know this one little thing about you, I know a lot about you, or I know everything about you, which leads to really awful things like racism, right? Yeah. That line is connected. And I'm always fascinated by this because I like personality tests,

like the Enneagram and other ones. And so there's part of me that's drawn to that. And there's part of me also that's completely repelled by it because I don't want to put myself in any kind of box because I know that we start to conform to what we believe. I totally agree. And I think this, again, connects to tolerating ambiguity. You meet someone, you see someone, you hear about someone, and you know one thing about them, and very often the color of their skin or where they're from or something about their gender or sexuality.

something about their gender or sexuality. And because we are so uncomfortable often with the idea of that's one tiny thing, or maybe even something significant about this person, but they're a whole complicated human being with all these characteristics and thoughts and feelings and ideas and perspectives, but we're impatient or we're just unwilling to leave that open and say, okay, this individual person, I don't really know anything about them. And we just have this urge to categorize and see patterns where there aren't any because we're so uncomfortable with all the things that we don't know. Who is this person who I don't know very well or I just met or I saw on television? person who I don't know very well, or I just met or I saw on television. And I think that the more we leave ourselves open to curiosity, and the more we are comfortable with the idea that we know

virtually nothing, not just about the great philosophical questions, but about other human beings who we just met or didn't meet, I think the more we can, again, get in touch with what's real rather than our fears. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us how are you hello my friend wayne knight about jurassic park wayne knight welcome to really no really sir bless you all hello newman and you never know when howie mandel might just stop by to talk about judging

really that's the opening really no really yeah no really go to really about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app,

on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The whole diving deeper into racial issues and really looking at it, at least I'll speak for myself. If I'm honest with myself, I see things that I'm doing there that I'm like, ugh. I have beliefs that I believe everybody should be treated equal and I do my best to bring those things into the world. But if I look at the way that my brain defaults to, oh, I see a person like this or a person like that, it's not only color of skin, it's cultural

attributes. It's all these different things that I will then think, oh, I kind of know a lot about that person based on those things. And that's just not true. Well, I think the goal is not to have no preconceptions. It's to examine them ruthlessly and to see what they are and to take them all out and look at them and ask some really hard, deep questions to ourselves. Of course, we're all a product of the culture that we grew up in, and we have these unconscious things that we have to now do. I mean, now, ideally, always, but especially now in this moment, we have to do the work, so to speak, to examine them. And it's not right. It's like no one is born perfectly enlightened just to extend the metaphor. It's not that scientists have no hopes and wishes of what they're going to find in their experiments. It's that they have to look at what's really there

and come to face to face with it and not judge it to make themselves feel better. Yeah. I'm always interested within science. And I know this would be judging a group of people, scientists, as a whole collective group, like all scientists, right? They all follow this, you know, there's some old saying, I never get it right, but that like, you know, science doesn't change its mind. It's just that old scientists die. Right. Like it's not quite as beautiful and enlightened as we think it is. And it's interesting for me because so much of the work that I do, people that I talk to are in the social sciences.

And, you know, we know in there, there's mass problems with reproducing these studies. And so it gets back into what we were saying kind of much earlier in the conversation, like holding what we know lightly. Because even with science, we're seeing that it's almost impossible not to have prejudice. It's almost impossible not to want prejudice. It's almost impossible not to want a result out of a study, particularly when all the incentives line up in a certain direction. And so I always think it's useful to sort of look at that in ourselves and in others. Yeah. And I mean, scientists, like all people are, you know, flawed human beings and, you know, all people are, you know, flawed human beings. And, you know, everybody has their own fears and ulterior motives and subconscious wishes and all those things. But the question is,

is there a system in place that takes that into account? I guess that's the thing. Yes. And, you know, one of the things that my parents really instilled in me that's so powerful and so wonderful about science is that you are celebrated if you prove those who came before you wrong. That is a great thing to do. And I think there's something about that, like that idea, if we had that in a larger cultural way, we're realizing, oh, the people who, I don't know, let's say founded this country were truly screwed up and did horrible things.

And we can now take that and make this country better and fix some of the problems that are hundreds of years old by coming to terms with the reality that these were not saints, that these were people who did some terrible, terrible things. And now we can recalibrate and rebuild the system to be better than the one that was passed down to us, rather than this idea that I think falls much more in line with a religious outlook, which is we have to have this unquestioning respect for these patriarchal figures who we were brought up to revere from childhood. Right. Well, and I think what that gets to also is exactly what we're talking about, which is tolerating the ambiguity. Because yes, there were awful things

that were done. And there were also amazing and wonderful things and beautiful ideas that were generated. Both those things are there. And it's being able to keep what's beautiful and criticize what's not. And that takes a certain amount of ambiguity that just does seem to be missing. You know, I often think right now the biggest problem I see in so much of what's happening is that there isn't room for nuance. Yeah. Discussion from both sides of the aisle. Right. There's and things are nuanced. Like if we want to talk about like coronavirus, like what's the right path forward? Boy, is it nuanced? Right.

Like because, yeah, we have got to find a way to, as our president would say, live with it. It's going to stay here, right? Yes, that's true. But we also can't just be wildly running around letting infection rates get out of control. It's a very nuanced discussion, but no nuance is happening. None. I use the phrase in the book, the war on nuance, and I say that. Oh, I must have missed that phrase somewhere because I would have immediately, that would have been near the top of my list. I mean, it's four words and it's totally understandable. But I see that every day.

And I think it's something that, again, like this, we are, some part of us is just more comfortable with this very rudimentary idea of good and bad versus this complicated idea that being an adult on this planet in this year requires. And I think that, you know, finding a way to describe things with accuracy first. And the level of detail that is required is just, you know, it takes a really talented person to do that at a time when, you know, the soundbite and all that, the, you know, 140 character tweet, it really takes somebody who has an immense amount of clarity and understanding and ability to communicate these really complex ideas.

And I think so often people think that the public is not as smart as they are and treats them, you know, treats us. I'm a member of the public myself, treats us like we are unable to grasp complicated things. And I just don't think that's the case. I couldn't agree more. I don't know the path back, I guess, except to try and have a nuanced discussion where possible. Yeah. Lead by example, I guess. Yep. Yep. You quote it in the book. One of your dad's most often repeated phrases is, if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. And I'd like to talk about that in the sense of interconnectedness, because that's another idea that has a very much a spiritual element. And,

and, you know, like I'm, I'm primarily, you know, if I have a leaning, it's primarily Buddhist, I practice Zen pretty rigorously. And interconnectedness is really at the heart of it. And it can be this mysterious idea, but it's also not mysterious at all. It's absolutely tangible and real. And I think your dad's phrase captures that so well. So give me your favorite way of thinking about interconnectedness or describing interconnectedness. Oh, that's such a great question. I mean, the web of life on this planet and the way that it evolved and the way that we can see those connections in our DNA to one another and members of our species and beyond to all the life on earth and you know plants and bacteria and

and all of this the all the symbiosis that is required and we see that now as with you know climate change and deforestation and how many species go extinct on a daily basis, that it's not isolated. These things are not just happening in faraway places. Those consequences are going to catch up with us, are catching up with us right now. And it's because we're all part of this one blue dot, pale blue dot together. And the more we see ourselves from that vantage point, as though we were coming to this planet from afar, and the more difficult it is to build these walls, literal and figurative, between us and the other creatures on Earth, the other people on Earth, and say, oh, well, that's happening far away. That person's different than me. That doesn't have anything to do with me. And the more I think we lean into the idea that we're all in this together, we are on this tiny little boat in this immense, vast ocean, and all we have are one another,

I think the better off we'll be. I couldn't agree more. Well, thank you so much for coming on. You and I are going to talk in the post-show conversation. I just want to ask you a couple of questions about what it's like to be the daughter of someone as famous as your father. So you and I will discuss what it's like to be Carl Sagan's daughter a little bit in the post-show conversation. Listeners, you can get access to that and a mini episode from me each week, as well as ad-free episodes and the joy of supporting the show by going to oneufeed.net slash join. So again, Sasha, thank you so much for coming on.

I've really enjoyed this. My pleasure. Thank you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community.

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