It's hard to read the news these days without asking yourself, how did we get here?

Fiasco is a history podcast for the co-creators of Slow Burn.

In our first season, Bush v. Gore, we examine an unmistakable turning point in American politics,

the 2000 election, which resulted in a high-stakes stalemate, ended with one of the most controversial rulings in Supreme Court history.

So if you're trying to make sense at the present moment, check out Fiasco, Bush v. Gore. Listen on the IHeart

Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Why do you think if you are 30 trillion cells as a self? Does an ant colony have a sense of self?

And could you think of all those ants as a liquid brain? What does any of this have to do with how the brain of a caterpillar transitions to the brain of a butterfly, or how we might

think of a memory as a pattern that stays alive and has its own life.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and in these

episodes, we dive deeply into our three-pound universe to uncover some of the most surprising

aspects of our lives. In the last episode, I talked about who we are and how we change through time.

The pieces and parts of every single cell in your body degrade and get replaced continuously

such that you are, physically speaking, a totally new person

every few years. And yet, we experience the illusion that we are the same person we've always

been. We have this illusion of constancy. So last week we explored this by considering the thought experiment of the

ship of Theseus. The story here is that each plank of a famous ship is replaced one by one

over time, which raises the question, is it still the same ship, even after every plank has been replaced,

and nothing of the original remains? We considered this question, of course, because like the ship,

we, too, exist with physical changes that never stop, and yet we perceive ourselves as constant through time.

The planks of Theseus' ship map onto the cells and molecules in our bodies. So what maintains

your sense of self over time? Okay, so maybe the thing that links our different selves through time is our memory.

But there's a problem here as well, which is that memory is notoriously unreliable.

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