Dr. Daniel Crosby

Yeah, so Yuval Harari certainly didn't discover this idea, but he does get a lot of credit for popularizing it.

And I did love Sapiens.

I thought it was a fantastic book.

So basically what he talks about in there is that

shared narratives are humankind's greatest invention, right?

So, you know, more than anything else, you know, COVID aside, like let's pretend we didn't live in a world with COVID.

Now we'll remind a few years ago.

So in 2019, my wife and daughter flew to Australia, right?

So they flew to Australia because my brother-in-law married a woman, married an Australian woman.

So my wife and my daughter,

flew to Australia.

They got off the plane in Australia and presumably they bought a sandwich or a water or a drink or whatever.

And they transacted business with a person from another country who they've never met before and who they'll never meet again in all likelihood.

And the thing that allowed them to do that was the shared narrative, the shared fiction of money.

So we have all these shared narratives, like the borders of a country are a shared narrative.

The laws of a religion or a state or a country are a shared narrative.

You know, sort of the rules of business, the rules of the road, all of these things are a shared narrative.

And they allow us to give order and form and function to our world.

So money is the biggest shared narrative of all.

But what's interesting and what Harari talks about is because it's a shared narrative and nothing that sort of exists in physical material form, it's subject to some sort of psychological distortions.