Welcome to a new and ancient story, a show dedicated to the transformation of self and society. We're moving from the story of separation to a new story of interbeing. We explore it all, technology, spirituality, agriculture, healing, economics, politics, ecology, relationships, education, because the changes that are gathering today will leave no aspect of our world untouched. For deeper engagement with these ideas, join our community at newandancientstory.net. Yeah, so here we are again, Charles Eisenstein for a new and ancient story, and my guest today is Chris Martinson, famous for the crash course and other things. And I'm not sure what we're going to talk about, but it's going to be interesting. Yeah, so welcome, you're here at the Martinson homestead. That's right. You know, and we've been working on this for a long time, and this is a part of the life of my life that I don't think people get to see a lot. You know, I'm writing about economics, and we're recording this, we're just hours away from the Fed's most important rate decision of the whole world's waiting, you know, and that's just all this fantasy stuff. And then this, this, what you're here seeing, this is my life. This is my reality side of the equation, you know, and yeah, which it's a bit reassuring to me because if somebody is radical and thinking on the edge and pushing the edge in some way, and then I go visit them and their life is totally orthodox in every other way, then I start to wonder, well, what good is it really going to do if it's not, you know, going to be incorporated into the rest of life, you know, because our society isn't wrong along just one axis. The whole thing has got to change, not just, not just, you know, economics or not just medicine or not just education. So at some point, I think this happens to a lot of people when you start questioning orthodoxy, then your whole life changes. So yeah, we have a, I guess, an unorthodox lifestyle here, but you know, we live in a suburban area, there's like, you know, everybody's on a couple acres and there's...  Yes. Yeah. My favorites. I love the grape vines. They're like, those are my surrogate girls. Grape vines are the feminine to me. They just untamed, wild and amazingly abundant. Yeah. And it's just unbelievable.  That's a kind of wealth that I don't think any amount of money can substitute for. You know, you could have the most magnificent Park Avenue apartment and you wouldn't get that. You know, you could have a 70 foot yacht and that wouldn't give you that. And I think a lot of the pursuit of monetary wealth and a lot of the insecurity around that kind of reflects a deep insecurity and sense of not belonging in the world and not being nourished by the world, not being, having intimate connections with nature, with community.  But as we're seeing with the whole financial merry-go-round now, how much, you know, like sometimes I'll read Zero-Hedge or one of the insider financial websites and people are so paranoid and I guess anxious is the word for it. And these are the people with money. Most of them are in the top 1% or close to it. And it's just so obvious that it almost seems like wealth is causing them anxiety. It is. And it should be because for a lot of these people they've wrapped their identity up in it. And so that's their narrative. They're running around with this narrative that identifies themselves with their wealth and they know on some level that this is fantasy wealth because all you have to do is read any one of 100 books now on the subject that says money is printed out of thin air, which means it's an idea. An idea that one segment of society in a very small one gets to just literally make out of thin air. So it's like your whole identity depends on what the magician is going to do next, you know, and that's not something you know deep down you can't control that. But for a period of time, financial wealth and real wealth are the same thing. They are the same concept. But then there are all these other periods of history again, easy to find where humans behaved like humans decided to take the easy road out, print money out of thin air debase the coinage if we were in Roman times, print the physical currency on paper stock if we were in Weimar times, or today, the electronic equivalent, which is harder to track and feel. So it treats that little undercurrent of dread people. It's not like you can see the bank notes piling up in the street, right? You know, where do you get your clues from? And they're a little bit harder to track, and that's part of the the devious nature of our current monetary system. It's just one step too complex for the vast majority of people to follow. But for the people who can follow it, and I interact with these people all the time, people who are up to their eyeballs 30 years deep trading 24 hours a day in their hedge fund, you know, they're the most nervous people I know. They're the ones who are buying retreat compounds with bunkers and beans and all of that stuff, right? Because they can imagine a binary outcome. It's either works or it doesn't. And that gives them a lot of dread. But the other dread for all the people who are just sitting around wealth is this, their identity is wrapped up in it. So they have that narrative. And what happens if your money goes away? Well, then who are you? Am I a nice person? Do I have other marketable skills? Have I ever been vulnerable so people can find out who I truly am so I know how the world really reacts to me, not my shell, not my money, not my face that I put out there. And so this becomes I think the existential dread. There's a quote that goes way back that says, there are none so poor as those who only have money, right? And it's speaking to that same idea because your wealth becomes you. And if it goes away, you go away. And our money's fantasy, it's just, it literally, we saw it in 2008, we're going to see it again, there has to be a financial reckoning. We know this because the world has amassed over 200 trillion dollars of debt. And it could only do that if it had this one narrative running, which is the future is going to be bigger. So we can pay all that back plus all the new debt we're going to accumulate as we go there. The whole thing works as long as everything's expanding. And what do you do? You open the paper yesterday, what do you find out world wildlife foundations like, Oh, 70% of the world's fish are gone. Oh, wildfires are burning out of control all over the place. Oh, we're having a lot of difficulty. Our aquifers are disappearing. Oh, you know, just it's just one body blow after the other to the narrative of we can just keep doing this forever. Yeah. And part of that narrative is kind of this faith in technology that that whatever resource we deplete will come up with a technological substitute and market forces will actually stimulate the creation of that technological substitute because it'll be when the aquifers are all gone will be so much money in artificial water that some brilliant person will engineer a substitute for aquifers and for fish and for pollinators and for the air, you know, for the planet. And so part of the whole narrative is this Masters of the universe narrative, which is interesting that that, you know, Wall Street has been also associated with the phrase Masters of the universe. And I think that that like you're saying money is an idea. I like to call it a story. Sure. Because, you know, it goes along with all of these, all of these narratives and agreements that that people have to agree to the idea. And but it's also, and you were kind of referring to this to magic. So today, the by the time people listen to this, this will be past history. But so the the Federal Federal Reserve is going to decide if they're going to raise interest rates. And the way that they do that is basically through incantations. They're their words have this kind of magical power. They they proclaim something. And it's not like they have a gun to somebody's head and say, you know, you better start buying more securities on the open market. They simply proclaim it. And as if they had some voodoo power, people begin to do to act accordingly. And I got the sense in the 2008 crisis that the power of these incantations was wearing thin.  Maybe that was actually Hoover, but but you know, he would say that and it wouldn't work. You know, yeah, and we have there have been multiple bubbles running in and it's a it's a distinctions importance.  And that was the the proximate cause of everything. And the truth is that was a side bubble. The main bubble started in the late 1980s, when we got on this crazy idea that we could create debt in the United States at twice the rate our income was growing. And we did that for 45 years, faithfully for 45 years running in the data series, debt was compounding at 8% per year, which might not sound like a lot, but but we're using the magic rule of 72, we can ask this question, how long before something that's growing at eight years, 8% how long will that take before doubles in size? 8.6 years, right? Yeah, you know, it's just thing, right? So every eight years ish, right? So every eight years ish, our country said we need twice as much debt twice as much debt, twice as much debt, we did that reliably for 45 years, that's what broke in 2008. And the housing bubble was a side component of that of that phenomenon. Yeah. And so think that through every 8.6 years, we need things to double. Yeah, twice. And really, I even see the whole debt bubble as as a symptom of something deeper, which is the end of growth. The system doesn't work like you were actually saying this before. You know, if money is created through debt, then there is always more debt than there is money. So to prevent bankruptcies and deflation, you have to keep printing even more money, which comes along with even more debt to pay off the existing debt. And that has to go on forever. And that can only happen as long as the real economy is growing sustainably. If the real economy stops growing, then the debt grows faster than the ability to repay it. So that's why all the political elites and economic elites say, well, the solution is to stimulate growth again. If we could only return to the days of high growth, then everything would be fine. And they're right. If we could return to 1870s rates of growth, we could grow away out of the debt. But for one thing, the ecosystem can't sustain that. And there's other arguments too for the end of growth that basically talk about the saturation of demand. How much does a human being really need that is measurable in money? How many appliances? One time I asked, when I was teaching at a university somehow, I asked the class, how many TVs do you own? And it ranged from the lowest number was three in your family and your household. The highest was 11. Someone had 11 TVs in their house. And we have this idea that the more stuff we have, the wealthier we are, but how many refrigerators can you have? How many TVs, there's kind of a saturation. And then, well, what about services? Maybe we can grow services. But what is a service actually? It's the replacement of a relationship with a monetized relationship. So say your family member gets bit by a dog. In the old days, excuse me. In the old days, you'd have a lot of folk knowledge about how to take care of that bite. You'd have maybe the village grandmother next door who knew how to do it with herbs. And none of that would be paid for. And you'd be living in a house that you built yourself with the help of neighbors. And if your house burned down, then everybody would help rebuild it. So these have been converted into services called medicine, called homebuilding and called insurance. Insurance is basically a substitute for community helping each other out, taking care of each other. How many of these services, how many of these relationships can be converted into paid services until there's nothing left? I'm speaking at a coaching conference in a couple of weeks. And I'm going to ask that question too. Like, is this the monetization of friendship, of wise advice, something an uncle used to do, something a village elder used to do? And so we're so depleted, no more community and no more nature. And can we keep doing this? Do we want to keep doing this? Do we even want sustainable growth? What about some other kind of wealth? Well, think about this idea. So Adam Taggart and I have just written up another book and it's coming out in a month or so. And what we've done is we've been talking about all these different forms of wealth for a while. And then we came across this work by Ethan Rowland and Gregory Landau out of the permaculture side, called it the eight forms of capital that different eight forms. We said, Oh, this is a good organizing framework. And, you know, we had slightly different forms. But the idea that there's, you know, to make it that explicit that these are forms of capital, we've talked about it as wealth, but people seem to like this capital idea, particularly on... Makes you sound smarter, if you call that capital, right? But what you're talking about, there's this idea that when the local healer and the neighbors rebuild those things, that's what happened there was those threads of social connection got woven more deeply into strings and strings become ropes, right? And the thing about a financial transaction is once you exchange the money, it's over. It's done. No obligation remains. Yes. And that's both it's brilliance, it's cost effective, it's efficient. It's a lot of things. So those are things we elevate in our current narratives like, Oh, yeah, we want to sell more stuff to more people and as cheaply as possible. That's our mantra. And when we do that, we do it really well. But when you do sell stuff like childcare services, like entertainment, like the things that you talk about that we used to do for ourselves, when you do that transaction, when I sell out 300 bucks to go see a rock star, you know, that's it. I get that one experience and it's over. And so this idea then is that it's efficient, but what are we missing? And that's the part I feel like the conversation we never have like, Oh God, look how much better your smartphone is. Well, what did it take away by being so much better? Because it is better. What's missing on the other side of that, right? Maybe social interaction, maybe I'm losing the ability to exercise the parts of my brain, they can calculate eight into 72, maybe I'm losing whatever these pieces are, right? You know, so there's always something lost with the new thing gained. And I think elder cultures used to have a more careful process for saying, wait a minute, here's a new thing. That's fine. But what does it really mean? I was really enjoying last night, you had people over and it was a potluck and people were singing. And that's a good example. If the economy crashes, you can also sing together, you have that social capital, you won't be impoverished in the way that that someone would be who doesn't have access to, you know, people who can create fun together. It makes you more resilient. We were talking about, you know, this isn't a kind of wealth that is hard to get. You know, it's kind of readily available. And everybody's hungry for it. But we have social structures. And even kind of the infrastructure of suburbia keeps us separate from it. We were talking this morning before we were recording about how a totally different world is really, really close.  And they're on more and more drugs. And then they take this herbal remedy and the pain's gone. It's a miracle. Oh, it's astonishing. And that's not going to contribute to GDP. There's no big research apparatus, clinical trials. I mean, you know, you couldn't patent it and sell it for $1,000 a pill for $100,000 for the course of treatment, like this company did that figured out how to cure hep C, right? Hepatitis C, terrible, it ruins your liver. And so they discover this drug and they're selling it to us here in America for $1,000 a pill, just about, and it will cost you $100,000 to get through.  So here's this idea that a company, you know, and that's what we support, like, oh, Gilead Biosciences, good job, you discovered this life-saving remedy, but now they're going to gouge for as much as they think the market can possibly bear in a little further. The cannabinoids, there's no market like that because you can't patent it. It's a plant, it grows for free. You know, I'm sure Monsanto is working on figuring out how to create a strain that, you know, is theirs through the magic of GMO. But I first came across the cannabinoid story when I watched this TED talk by this guy who was one of the first pioneers and they're called CBDs, cannabinoids. And the CBDs were, had been known to have these properties and they'd really been investigating and they grew these astonishingly high CBD ratio plants. It looks like marijuana, but the ratio between THC, which is the psychoactive one that people smoke, the hippie smoke at the Grateful Dead parking lots to get high versus the CBD, they grow in strains that have so little THC you could smoke it all day long and never experience a buzz. So it's just a plant with no psychoactive properties, but it has these other things. And our bodies are loaded with cannabinoid receptors. We're still trying to figure out what they do. They're in our central nervous system. They're out in our peripheral nervous system. They're there. And he was talking about this case of a girl named Charlotte. And by the time he'd seen her first, she was five years old. She'd been born as a twin. Her twin was fine, but she had a certain type of epilepsy, one of the most severe forms. And by the time she was three, she was having upwards of 20 to 30 grand mal seizures a day.  And the doctors had basically gotten to the point where they said, there's nothing we can do. Her mother had already had to do Reviver through CPR twice. And they said, that's it. Just get ready. They had to do not resuscitate. The DNR was on this little girl for the next big episode in the hospital. And so that's where they're at. And they wrote through a wit's end and they said, what can we do? Maybe. And they'd heard about this cannabinoid oil. And so they went and they tried it. She gets a teaspoon in a syringe under her tongue. She swallows it. Two days later, she's down to one petite mal seizure. And that's how she's been ever since. And now she's caught back up and they have her in the audience.  She has to continue taking this medicine, right, which is an oil that comes from a plant. And it took cure. And here's the heartbreaking part. There are about 1100 other families with children in the same type of epilepsy, a rare form. And they are not allowed to have this substance shipped to them. So they've had to make the hard family decision. They have to move to Colorado where it's legal to produce and distribute this stuff because the federal government has decided that anything that says marijuana, even if it can't get you out, it's still a schedule one drug. And if they shipped this stuff across state lines, it would be they would be in federal prison. And that's so when you say, are there things right in front of us that we could change this story right there, right? And if we were a wise intelligent country, we would go, oh my gosh, not only is the CBD stuff great for epilepsy certain forms, but it shows huge pain management. It's got exceptional characteristics for certain types of cancers, like stops it in its tracks, like kills it kind of a thing. And if we were a wise country, we'd say, let's, let's put several billion US federal taxpayer dollars into this to really study it so we know the best doses for the right things, we can get this treatment out to people who need it, and we'll make that all free. That would be a I think a a useful wise response in what's happening. Eric Holder's Justice Department under Obama has been fighting this every step of the way, including rating these dispensaries and trying to shut it down and pretending as if the people voting for themselves that they want to have either recreational or medical marijuana in the state, pretending as if that was somehow a horrible thing for people to vote on something that went against the wishes of the federal government, because they have a DEA who has a budget that they would love to protect and taking a big bad marijuana out of their budget would be a horrible thing for thousands of bureaucrats. Yeah. It's hard to know what to say. Well, it's just an example, right? It's just one of those little, that's just a little story, but we could fragment that story a thousand times.  I mean, schools are a lot like prisons in a lot of ways. And what we could talk about agriculture, I mean, the same kind of chemical treadmill that happens to people pharmacologically also happens in agriculture, where you, you know, apply one herbicide and then that, you know, does something and you have to apply a second one and then an insecticide and then a fungicide, you know, and, and, and it's just this kind of addictive pattern where the solution to the problems caused by technology is even more technology. You know, I get drunk, I feel good the next morning, I feel shitty, my life starts to fall apart to make myself feel better, I get, I drink even more. That works again. And, and, you know, again, it's the same pattern as a technological fix and the debt crisis is the same. You know, how do you, how, how are these, how are we going to keep the system running a little longer? How are we going to pay, how are we going to enable the debtors to pay their, to make their payments while we can lend them even more? It's the same pattern. And I think that it fits in with the guiding ideology of civilization, which is a growth ideology and essentially because the ideology essentially says there is no limit to our ability to engineer ourselves out of whatever situation that we're in because, and there's kind of like the holy grail in physics is the theory of everything in technology. It's maybe nanotechnology, genetic engineering that it says that someday we'll have perfect understanding and perfect control over physical reality and social reality too. And, and using the, the methods that were developed in the 16th, 17th, 18th century, the scientific approach to solving problems. Using these methods, we will be able to engineer all problems out of existence. You know, what's, and it's a reductionistic ideology too. What's the cause of suffering?  And so if we can have complete enough control over that, then we'll be able to eliminate suffering. You know, what's the cause of crime? What's the cause of poverty? If we can only gather enough data and exert enough force in the right places. And according to the right equations, and that's why it's called the social sciences. That's why economics pretends to be a science. It says you can reduce reality to something measurable, to something quantifiable. So economics, as it's known today, is purely the study of the quantifiable. Usually it's the study of money, but some economists try to expand it and use some other metrics. You know, so you hear about alternative metrics, but it's still about metrics. It's still part of the ideology that, that only what's measurable is real. And that's an ideology that goes back to Hume and Galileo even. And I think that the, the transition that we're in, and this involves money and economic thinking too, with the transition that we're in is toward, is back toward the unquantifiable, toward the qualitative, the things that actually make life rich. And so even with the, you know, cannabinoids, you're saying it differently, something like that. I've always said cannabinoids, but it's probably wrong. Even with that, like to make it into a drug, whether or not it's patentable, to make it into a drug, you have to extract. You have to extract the active ingredient. And the ideology says that there is an active ingredient, that its efficacy is based on a certain something inside of it, and not on the holistic interaction of all of its ingredients. But many people find with herbs that the raw herbs more effective. And the same thing when we're talking about permaculture too, like you were talking about these guys, I'd like to hear about that again, these guys out in California, they're getting incredible yields. But it's not because they've isolated the factors behind incredible yields and are, you know, that's called the chemical fertilizer. So we've done a podcast with Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser of Singing Frogs Farm in Sebastopol, California. And then I had an opportunity to go for a farm tour. And I was like, I was pretty excited. Now I would actually drive hundreds of miles out of my way if I was anywhere near to go take one of their farm tours, because it was the seeing, it was the being in what they had created. They're incredibly intelligent. And they didn't start out saying, you know, we're going to demonstrate that permaculture works. They didn't even know the word. They were two ecologists. And they were saying, how can we grow in a way that's ecologically right? And so one example, they understood predator-prey relationships. If you understand how coyotes and rabbits come along, you understand that rabbits breed very quickly. They tend to get out of control. The coyotes breed much more slowly, but eventually they catch up. And there's this whole dynamic relationship predator-price. They said, well, insects are the same and insects are your problem in any farm. So what do we need to do? Well, simple things like interspersing rows of crops, but then they planted these hedge rows with very, very diverse species in them. You know, the ones I saw had these giant lavender and rosemary, all the things that can grow in their zoning awesomeness out there in California. And so they built these hedgerows every so often under the theory, the idea that your crops, when you take them down, you remove basically the substrate that insects live on, which so you would take your pests out, but you take the predators out as well. So the hedgerows are for the predators because they're longer living, they're slower reproducing, and they need a place to hang out. And so they created all these hedgerows. When I was there, I'm a gardener. I love gardening. I didn't see any pest pressure. Right? They had huge rows of brassicas, all different kinds, not one cabbage looper flying around, not one little moth eating thing. Like, do you have trouble with these little green worms in your broccoli?  And they're like, no, we don't have those. Like, how can you not have those? While I was standing there, I counted as one of the things I do, over 30 species of birds in the local area. They have these catchment ponds that they've tested fully for nitrogen. They have no nitrogen runoff. Their soil just won't let it out. And I saw nightherons, a kill deer, what I consider to be very sensitive apex species that I honestly, I haven't seen in a while. And they had them all, right? And I'm just watching this go on. And it was just nature. It looked a little unruly, but these people measured everything. So here's one measurement. They're getting $100,000 per acre in gross revenue off of their farm. The average organic farm in the region gets $14,000 an acre. They get seven crops a year because they can grow right through the winter. And they said, oh, by the way, we have a crappy microclimate here. We are eight degrees colder than the average farm around here because of this little nestle that we're in. So they have a harsher January, February, but like our plants are so healthy, they can weather even a pretty good knit. And so they're growing all year round. And they said, but here's how this plays out. We're not like a normal CSA where we have to sign people up every June. And then we lose them every October because we're out of stuff. We have, we keep our CSA member supply all year around. So we don't have to go through that regular boom, bust thing. We're selling tomatoes in May. Nobody else's. So we're out there at $5.56 a pound. By the time everybody's hitting the markets with tomatoes in August, we're not. We're onto some other crops that nobody else, you know? So they've just, they've been smart about every way that they've stacked and layered when and how they produce in the relationship they're in. And the real measure is, and they said, everything's about your soil health. That's the one thing they optimized for is soil health. And so when they harvest now, and this was, this changed how I've been gardening for 30 years, they just come through like, let's say you've got Roe Broccoli, they clip them at the base with clippers and they leave the roots in the soil. Because they said, as soon as you disturb the soil, there's a three to four month recovery process for it every time. So when we do that, we leave the roots in.  Bacteria live on them. And they've just put compost right on top of it after they've clipped. And there are plants in the ground within three hours from the starts that they have. So they're just like, never disturbing the soil. And there's always crop cover. And that's it. That's their magic.  So for one thing, this is coming from, it's not just, this is very different than kind of an intensification of the engineering mindset. Because you're no longer seeking, you're no longer seeing the soil as a resource from which you're trying to extract something. But you're actually, I phrase it in terms of gift, you're in a mutual gift relationship to the soil, and you're saying, how can I, like you said it, how can we enhance the health of the soil? Because we know that if the soil is healthy, we're going to be healthy too, in every way, you know, physically, financially, whatever. And that mindset, if you generalize it, it says, my health, my well-being depends on your well-being, which is the opposite, the opposite from classical economic thinking, which puts us all into competition with each other, and says that we are all driven to maximize rational self-interest defined as the interest of the separate self. So in a competitive economy, in fact, especially in an interest-bearing debt-based economy, your well-being is not my well-being, because we're all in competition with each other for not enough money to pay the debts that create the money. So I see the transition to permaculture to where I would even say regenerative agriculture, because we're serving the health of the story. It's part of a larger trend of the soil. It's part of a larger transition in our economic thinking too, in our political thinking too, that says the same thing, you know, how do I make the soil of society healthier? How do I contribute to the well-being of the people in my community, my social and my ecological community, because I know that if I do that, I'll be healthier too, I'll be better off too, because we're fundamentally not separate from the soil. We're not separate from each other. That's a big shift. And the alternative, you know, I wrote an article comparing regenerative agriculture that sequesters carbon with geoengineering, which is an intensification of the same thing. It's reductionistic. The problem, too much carbon. The solution, well, you remove the carbon.   The problem, not enough phosphates in the soil of the solution, you add some, you know, it's reductionistic. And as I was saying before, more of the same just gets you more of the same. And so this is, it's not just a shift in strategy, but it's coming from a different conception of ourselves in relation to the world that's no longer separate. And when we move to that, the problems that were impossible to solve before become easy. They disappear. Just like the medical cannabis can cure conditions that required enormously expensive chemical management that wasn't even as effective before. Yeah. And so with the reductionist approach, we're usually treating symptoms. And sometimes you can treat a symptom all day long, right? And not ever do anything except find yourself in a loop of treating that symptom over and over and over again. So I think what we're really talking about here is that what needs to happen is the swing back towards relational. So if we were isolationist and reductionist, relational is the answer. And so these people, it's saying frogs farm are in relationship with their soil, right? It's a, it's a, and that relationship will be complex. There will be the year you got 10 inches of rain in 24 hours. There'll be the year it didn't rain. And there'll be different things. And if you're intelligent, you just understand the aspect of that, right? Like in my garden, I'm in relationship with my plants. I can look at plants and tell you whether it's stressed or not. It takes me some time to figure out why it's stressed. Is it too little nitrogen? Is it too much water? Is it fungus? I don't know. But they tell you really clip quickly when they're stressed. And, and then the answer is usually to figure out what that thing is that's stressing them. And then water is the only thing I know that's, that's, that's, you know, a one and done fix. If they're stressed for water, you fix that with water, right? But everything else requires a thought process, you know? And so I want to get back to this point, though, this idea that we have all of these things that are, that our solutions might be too strong word, but we have intelligent responses to pretty much everything that's vexing us at this point, right? That we could do, but we would have to decide that's what we want to do. And the great news is we could all wake up tomorrow and do those things as a culture. But there are a lot of people who are wholly addicted to business as usual, you know? And it's astonishing to me to see like just how cartoonish we are as cultures. So I'm looking at this refugee crisis in Europe. And it's this cartoonish that the media are saying, oh, here's another boatload of Syrians, and they're clearly Somalians, right? They're not even the right color, right? To be Syrians. So there's, they're getting this whole migration and refugee pattern coming out of places that NATO bombed, and that are otherwise being depleted of the resources they need through climate change through other things in over population. It's like, you try to make what's happening is that the economic system makes it, makes these places unlivable. So we make it unlivable. And then when people don't want to live there, we try to keep them out. And the symptom, of course, is the immigration. But what if we address the cause, which is that they're being made unlivable, and stop doing that? Like, do people actually want to leave their ancestral homelands behind and go on this dangerous journey into the unknown? Is it because they're, you know, want to come and get us? Or like, that question is never asked. I've been been looking at the news. No one's asking that. And it's the economic system. It's the debt. It's again, like the, the, you know, they're there. Well, and here's the thing. So, you know, here's my prediction. Europe, are you listening? Here it is. The 500,000 that you're struggling with is not even the tip of the iceberg. I bet you there's 100 million people who would who are going to get ready to migrate in the next two decades, right, for reasons like desertification, aquifer depletion, final soil erosion, crustification, you know, a thousand year rebuild process, whatever the story is, that the larger systems are broken. And so we have this warfare extractive system that just keeps applying its muscle and might, you know, the IMF will continue to loan bad loans into, to allow people to advance that certification faster, convincing themselves they're doing God's work and doing good work, right? You know, they're, they're, let's help them build dams. Although they're actually, they're actually use a lot of, in some of the, some of the best regenerative agricultural practices are being developed now on the Sahel. So there is, you know, the, the new world is actually gaining momentum. It is. And those efforts are wonderful. Those aren't the ones being pushed by the big banking systems. No, no, no, those are happening to supply. Because you can't get a financial return from those. Right.  You know, when you get together with your neighbors and sing songs together, instead of going to a concert or a theater, then that's, you know, a few thousand dollars in services that are no longer in the economy. When you make your own grape juice, you know, and your own herbal medicines and your own fermentations or whatever the things you do and share it with neighbors, that's one less thing that people buy it. And it's one less business opportunity to that a bank can lend into and generate new money. And it's, you know, one less job from somebody for somebody somewhere, like you're actually, and so no wonder the banks don't support. I mean, you look at sustainable development in quotes here. And the only things that get let in to the paradigm are the ones that are going to somehow generate foreign exchange. They're going to generate some kinds of goods and services. Otherwise, it doesn't fit into our financial system. Right, right. Here's a quick side point. I get asked this a lot. Chris, what do you think about socially responsible investing? This sounds so good. It sounds so heartwarming. And many of the stories are heartwarming. But what's happening with socially responsible investing is they're still trying to get an 8% per year return. They're trying to at least meet or hopefully exceed the S&P, which means they themselves are still wedded to the growth paradigm. Whether socially responsible or not, I think of that as like fluffing the pillows on the bus that's headed over the cliff. We feel better about it. It's more comfortable ride. But if you're still saying what we need is a return that can accrete passively to people who just have air quotes here, capital, right, financial capital, that model is still predicated on this idea that the world will always be able to give us more of stuff that we can extract. And that's where we are in the story to me is we're at that uncomfortable part where the engineers are looking at like, I don't know if the Saturn V rocket's going to clear the launch pad anymore, right? The thrust is going as hard as it can, but it's not really gaining like it should. And they're worried the nose is about to tip over. And it's an awkward moment, right? That's the pit in the stomach people have. We're like, all engineers watching the Saturn V rocket go, I don't know. And the hard part for me is, you know, I too sometimes get to speak at colleges. And I was at Berkeley a few weeks back and there's usually the usual stunned, I'm giving a dose of reality to the students, but I always get this one or two of them come up and go, I want to work with you. You're talking about real stuff.  I'm paraphrasing. But that's the thing. It's like there's this new reality that younger people can just detect. You know, they can feel it that the narrative is wrong. And so when somebody comes along and says, Hey, the narrative is wrong. Here's, here's why it just has that ring of truth. So I feel like, you know, I was talking with this woman who was an elder in this art of mentoring community that everybody came back from. And she was big in the civil rights movement at the time was living in Alabama, this black woman. And she said, you know, for the longest time, I felt like, wow, I was just really, I was so important. And I helped really push something.  And she said, now that I'm old enough, I realized that only happened because the time was right. And I was one of the people who was there when the time was right. It was ready for that to happen. And yes, I was a motive force within it. But I could have been even 10 times better than I was. And if the time was wrong, it wouldn't have happened. So there's a that I have that growing sense that the time is right. It's the your right. We are, we are in service to something much larger than ourselves that wants to be born. Yes, I was speaking to Julio Alaya, who's one of the founders of the coaching movement. He's been doing it for decades and decades. And he's he was saying when he 30 years ago, 20, 30 years ago, when he would ask people, okay, what are your goals? Or your organization's goals, your personal goals from this coaching relationship? And they would say, Well, I want to make more money. I want to be more successful. I want to be more effective. Today, he says no one is saying that no one they want to contribute more. They want to align with their passion. I heard John Perkins saying the same thing. You know, it goes to business schools and speaks and and people are no longer saying tell me how to make money. You know, it really is changing. And I think that at the beginning, you were talking about some of the wealthy people who are, you know, trying to set up their armed compound with their food supplies and stuff. You know, I would ask them, I would question that on two levels. One is, is that really what your heart wants to do as the world burns to hold out a little longer? You know, like there are people to help out there. And I know that there's something in you that wants to to take in refugees that wants to help your fellows. And the second thing is, it's not even going to work. Because we are all interconnected. And unless you are going to become a professional warlord, then this is a dead end. Because if things get really bad, people are going to come. Oh, you know, here's your fortress where you have gold and supplies and stuff, they're going to come with guns and they're going to take it. Unless you have bigger guns, like if you're not going to become a warlord, then by far the best security that you could have right now, the best investment you can make is to give it away, to be generous, to strengthen your community, to generate goodwill, to be somebody who has given so much over the years that people will take care of you too. And I'm finding sometimes I do also speak to people who are in SRI or impact investing. And I say, yeah, the paradigm is shifting. In the past, it was given the unchallenged parameter of an 8% return, how do I do the least harm and the most good. So the return came first, like you were saying. Now it's changing or wants to change, where you put the result first, and you let the return take care of itself and you let go. And it has to be a real letting go. And that's the principle of the gift.  But if it's a real gift, Lewis Hyde says it's like giving it, you give it around the corner, you give it into the mystery. That is the new, and that fits into the regenerative agriculture paradigm too. You give to the soil and you trust that if the soil is healthy, I'll be healthy. You trust that if I give into the mystery, if I make a sacrifice, I mean religious texts, talk about this, if I make a sacrifice, a sacred gift, that's what a sacrifice is. If I do that, then I know I will be okay because I'm not separate fundamentally from that which I'm giving to. And that's why I even thought of starting a radical investment newsletter that's about this, about the gift, you know, totally turning it on its head. Yeah. It's such an important concept buried in there and there was one I got a transmission on every so often, like I'm aware of these moments now where somebody says something and all of a sudden I'm changed. And I was at one of these art of mentoring things last year and they had this Native American, very interesting guy, just super bubbly, bright, young, and he had resisted the call of his culture for a long time.  And so he really picked up a lot of it. And he'd held this sort of shamanistic space during the whole time. And but really lightly, he was just cracking jokes the whole time. And then he said, Oh, I have a few things to give away.  He said, I don't know, I just assemble things that are important to me. And then if it's right, I give it. Right. And so he gave away some really important stuff. He's like, Oh, I didn't plan to give this away, but this is the only necklace I have for my grandmother. And here it is. And I'm honoring you at this moment for doing that. And, and it was really heavy, you know. And so after he'd given everything away, he broke the tension. He said, Oh, by the way, I will not even remotely be offended if I see that necklace at a tag sale next week. And I'm not kidding. He's like, it's yours. I don't know what happens to it next. I have like the fact that it was important to me, in my culture, the minute I give that away, that's gone. It's now yours. And you do something with it. Right. And it was just, that was a transmission to me because in my culture, I think giving comes with strings. Right. You know, it has a little thread to me. And I like that idea of that when you give, that's what that's that that moment is that's what happened. Boom. You give into that mystery. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be, I mean, that's kind of a pure example. Like realistically, there might be expectations and things, but as long as there's at least some element of letting go, then it's a gift, you know, like, like, for example, I'm staying at your house now.  So there is kind of an expectation, but you're not doing it so that that will happen. But it is creating kind of a social tie between us. Right, it does, but it but the ties on this other level, it's not about the thing anymore. Yeah. You know, because when you give the thing away, man, it's gone, right? But there's other, the other aspects of this can certainly be resident, right? Yeah. And yeah, I'm sure that, you know, if you found yourself in a situation where one person was just taking, taking, taking, taking, taking, that would over time, that would just that would impact all things. It's about, you know, the more I, the more I, the older I get, the more I realize that life is about flows, right? And I feel like a lot of our culture, particularly around masculine, feminine, male and female, we bottle up stuff, you know, we've asked men to bottle up their emotions. We've asked women not to be women, but to be more like men. That's what we honor.  It's not Groundhog Day.   And it makes us unhealthy in a lot of ways. And so, you know, that whole idea of giving is important, but so is receiving. You know, for me, that's hard. That's something I wrote about in this book is, is really that for me, giving is easy, way easier, because I'm, I'm burdened with my sense of in debt, like I don't like to receive because it makes it look like I need help, which maybe exposes me as weak and, you know, I don't like that vulnerability and giving's like, And then you also owe something too. And I owe something to the person or to the universe because you've received so much. Right. So, so, but in the, in this concept of flow, what is giving? If nobody's there to receive, right? And so the act of giving generously is one side of the equation. But if you want that social capital to really rev up, the other side has to be there. It's the person has to graciously receive, right? So I've learned a little this watching like my, my wife at Christmas, any present she gets, you can't detect like, was it really wanted or not?  It keeps the energy going. So for me, my battle is to learn how to receive, not even just receive that somebody gives me something, I'll be very gracious, but I won't ask for anything still. That's hard for me. Like to come to you and say, Charles, I need help. Yeah. You know, I need your advice. That's still a hard moment for me. Yeah. I, I, yeah, I resonate with that. For me, sometimes even to receive a compliment is difficult. I'll kind of brush it off. You know, someone might, might say, yeah, your book really changed my life. And I'll be like, well, you know, it was just the catalyst. You were having that change anyway.  And I'll say, and that might be metaphysically true. You know, it's not like I'm the life changer, but energetically, I'm kind of pushing away the gratitude. Right. And I'm, I'm learning to take it in now without kind of, you know, minimizing it with some self deprecating joke or denying their experience of it, you know, it's really damaging to refuse a gift. Yeah. It is, is, it keeps us separate. Yeah. Yeah. Instead to just come up with, thank you so much for telling me that that's important for me to know. Yeah. Because it is. Right. Yeah, same thing. So that's a, that's a, and that's, that's such a clear way to build this social capital to put that capital term in, but, but this idea of it's time to reengage, I think with the larger world. I think that, you know, by the numbers, the culture we built for ourselves, we would not rebuild it if we just sat down clinically with the numbers like, well, let's look at things. Where are we obesity and psychoactive drug use and workplace violence and prison population, children with, with, you know, psychological issues based on the way that we're reining and training and putting them into the, to the school to prison pipeline, as you put it and all of that, we might say, gosh, there's some things here we wouldn't recreate intentionally.  You never see the Milky Way. You never hear silence.  And, and you cannot drink from any of the streams anymore without fear. Like, do you, do you want to sign up for that? We take it for as normal. Yeah. Yeah. I interrupted you. Well, I know that sparks where I wanted to go with all this, which is, so one of the things I've learned and more of my spiritual questing side is that, and, and this is as close as I have this, this is my faith. Here's my faith. My faith is that the universe will always provide exactly what I need when I need it. I'm using the word need carefully. It's not what I want. Now your ego thinks it needs. No, no, my ego thinks it needs. And it's certainly not what I want, because sometimes what I need is a hard life lesson. So, you know, people had other expressions of this God works in mysterious ways. You know, why did he take my son? Why did this thing happen to me? And, and, but as long as you think there's some entity out there that personally levied that upon you, you know, this punishment, that's one, one way to look at it. The way I look at it now is that literally everything I need will be delivered to me, but our culture has got this story that nothing bad should ever happen to us. We should live in a risk free society. We won't have playgrounds outside because kids might fall and break an arm. So let's not do that. We'll put big rubber mats under everything. Or, you know, we have to live in a completely safe society, which from a psychological standpoint, little odd because we're reigning death on the world outside our borders. But inside, we're demanding complete safety at all moments from everything that might happen. Right. And, and that violates this tenant, which is to say that we can control outcome or that we should or that when air quotes bad things happen, that those shouldn't happen. And I'm of the view now that when things happen, they happen for a reason. Yes. So I've known people who got injured. And that was exactly the thing they needed to kick them out of their, where they were, which was not a great place for them into a greater expression of who they are in their gifts. Yeah. And some people say cancer was the best thing that ever happened to them. Right. Or the heart attack.  Like this happens a lot. And but what you're saying is actually tapping into a new mythology.  And therefore, that progress is the imposing of human intelligence onto nature. And that's the engineering mindset, you know, to order everything, to organize everything and to imprint our intelligence and our image onto everything. That's the old story. And the new story, which is also the ancient story says no, these qualities of intelligence and consciousness and purpose and and and all of the qualities of a self, those exist outside of ourselves too. And even in the events of our lives, these have an intelligence, even in the soil, the plants, animals. So it's kind of the the I look at it as the third stage of the Copernican Revolution, where we no longer put ourselves at the center, even psychologically. And we acknowledge that we live in a living intelligent conscious universe. And then when we acknowledge that, then no longer do we seek to dominate it. But we seek to listen to it. And that's what I think brings together a lot of the kind of alternative and holistic practices, right, you know, from agriculture to medicine. And you could even probably extend it to finance, you know, or to, to, they're all different kinds of service to something larger than ourselves. I agree. And I think of that's such a great point. And I think of this as an and not an or. It's not either we use our intelligence or, you know, we go back to some more archetypal, indigenous way. To me, it if you have the and in this story, the and is we are really intelligent, capable of shaping our our experience sort of a species. And if we were really intelligent, we would understand we would have a greater amount of humility around that, because the more we learn. So as a scientist, I learned this, the more you dig in, the more you realize how much you don't know, right? There's just like, you can go down that reductionist thing, but it's just like, even how a single cell functions, really functions, totally eludes us. It's so magnificently complex. And we're finding things out now. We're just discovering that the 100 trillion cells in our gut biome that have the first pass at processing the things that come in your body, actually have an impact on all kinds of things about your experience of health and well being neurological, psychological, nutrition, health, all that. And a study that just came out in the New York Times, they discovered that children of Holocaust survivors, they had noted for a long time, statistically were way more prone to anxiety and and depression and all kinds of things. And so now we've done the studies to prove that epigenetically, we can look at what's going on, that the people who had that experience, past that experience on to their children, cultural, wounding and trauma, right? We now are starting to understand the mechanism, which means our DNA is talking to the world. It's not you or Charles, this box, you were born with a genetic component, it's a strain, we can read it, decipher it and know you. Like, oh, no, no, no, no, it's way more complicated than that. We're in constant relationship, and we're more porous as entities than we understood. So with that, should come this humility that says, we don't really have, okay, we're smart, but there's a lot going on here that we don't get yet. And we should, we should reserve space for that. Yeah, yeah, I'm not trying to deny our human gifts. But to put them in service to, you know, rather than domination, but in service. And I guess we should probably wrap this up. But I'll just say one short thing. We were talking about causes and symptoms and really addressing the root cause. And I think it is this experience of separation that keeps us afraid, makes us want to dominate. And, and the antidote to that is really to spread love, generosity, kindness, compassion. And I think we're at a key moment to do that. And everybody listening to this can recognize that as their real work. And whatever work you're doing in the world is the vehicle for that. Because we're really in crunch time, and it's time to act from that story. Yeah, it's time to bring out your greatness. All right. I'm very good. Thank you for this conversation. It's been wonderful. Yeah, likewise. You've been listening to a new and ancient story with me, your host Charles Eisenstein. To engage more deeply, you can join our community on new and ancient story.net, where we have live chats, forums, meetups, and all kinds of other tools for collaboration. If you want to find out more about my work, then visit my website, CharlesEisenstein.net.


Update. Okay folks, Billy Ray Valentine reporting for TFNN today on the 26th of June. We have a bifurcated market, as Mr. Basil Chapman would say. We've got the S&P and the NASDAQ are down slightly and we've got the Dow Jones up slightly and the Russell up slightly. So there's a little bit for everyone. We've got the bond market basically unchanged up very little. Same thing with the Treasury notes. We've got gold and silver up slightly and the rest of the markets are just meandering pretty close to where they were last February. The news came out on Saturday that there was a potential military coup going on in Russia and that absorbed all of the airtime on the news channels and of course Sunday morning the coup mysteriously disappeared and the leader of the coup was going to live in Belarus quietly for the rest of his life, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I'll give that till Thursday. Anybody think this thing is over? Oh boy, I think you'd have to revisit that very very soon anyway. The coup draw market reacted a little bit to it and it backed off a little bit but not really very much happened folks. The one thing you got to remember from the news is that just keep it with a tongue in cheek and you know I haven't watched the news closely. I mean I watched the headlines when something really big like this thing with Russia popped out but when you hear things that go on we've seen this over. I don't want to hash that over. I'm a technician folks. I look at these charts. If the prices are going up I try to find a pattern. If the prices are going down or sideways I just try to find a pattern. That's what I do. I don't play golf. I rather do this than play golf and of course golf is a tough game anyway. I do have a two handicap in golf by the way. The mental game and also putting and the long game. Those are my three handicaps that I have for golf. My first round of golf I shot a 36 and then they tell me that there was another hole. Are you kidding me?  Alright let's move on to a couple other things. We've got the Federal Reserve out of the picture now for a couple of weeks but of course everybody is still talking about interest rates and they're bouncing around. It's strong resistance up there today at 128-25 and the high was 128-26 so a lot of things happening over there. Just getting started. We're going to take a break<PHONE_NUMBER>.


So Mario Plus Rabbids Kingdom Battle is the game we just announced, we're super happy we were announcing the game yesterday at the conference and since then we start to show a bit of the gameplay so we're super happy to show today more of the basics and combat basics exploration and so that's what we're going to do and in terms of the game itself so what happened is the rabbits have just been teleporting to the kingdom. A twisted version of the mushroom kingdom. Yeah and it changed completely the kingdom in itself by twisting it so you'll have a lot of surprises and elements in the environment but basically Mario doesn't know anything about the rabbits when the game starts so we're still at the beginning of the game here but basically that's when things start to go a bit crazy with twisted elements. We even have this plant here that's a bit special. So yes we tried to recreate a very immersive world by using the misproportion so you feel that you are small and in a huge environment which is enveloping you and everything around you is animated like for example this plant it's incredible because it's animated by hand and it's following the music of Grand Kirikop which is the composer of the game so it's one of the things that I love about this game. It's part of things that Mr. Miyamoto, Nintendo and us as well, Ubisoft wanted to see as well in terms of details, things that we wanted to play with so yeah let's go and a big part of the game as well as the combat itself. And when the players see those enemy flags in front of them they know that they are about to play in a fight. Before we go in actually there are a couple interesting characters that's following Mario. Let's talk about them a little bit. Yeah so aside the big goomba that has been almost played with because of the rabbits and stuff for the characters and the heroes themselves so we have Mario of course he's a true hero he's a fighter-like character in combat as well so he's really strong almost everywhere but he also have a rabbit peach she's a hot tempered quite fun of Mario but hot tempered rabbit and a very strong personality as well and rabbit Luigi the third one he's a wizard-like type of character he's really clumsy naive but at the same time he's quite dangerous in combat and as the game progresses as well so yeah it's a it's a nice cast and this cast is the beginning cast so as you'll progress into the game you'll unlock new heroes so you don't unlock the heroes at the beginning you unlock them throughout the adventure. Now can we say what other characters there will be in the game as well? Sure absolutely so the player will control eight heroes we could we'd be able to choose between eight heroes at the end so that would be the player's roster and we really wanted to play around this contrast between Mario character and the rabbits one like in order to create the humor so if there is something that the rabbits learn from Mario throughout the game is how to become heroes and Mario loves how to crack the joke so we go for the fight yeah let's do it let's do it yeah definitely all right so you switch from exploration mode to battle mode this way so basically when you see those two flags you switch to battle mode and you don't control anymore directly your characters you control Bipo a little cursor you see in front and this little guy in fact is telling you you can tell him where to go and the characters will follow so that's a big difference between the two and for us it was a good match you know between exploration and combat in terms of the feeling we have so let's go. So as soon as you start the combat a fly cam is showing you the battleground but you can always use the tactical which is a tool that will let the player observe the surrounding to decide what to do the best move take and as you can see in the top right part of the stream the mission objective it's a rich area so it's not really important to defeat the enemy there but to really decide the best way possible way to arrive directly at the objective so the player will have two choices directly in front of the enemy that seems a little bit risky or moving a little bit on the right to use the cover and being protected by the attack of the rabbits so what you see right now is Xavier which is controlling the heroes in this case we each heroes can perform three different type of action as we are quite early in the game right now we have only movement and attack later on there will be techniques which is way more let's say an indirect way to deal with an enemy and it's more magical but the blue line is defining where the characters can move and in this case Xavier could for example go behind the cover in order to be alpha protected or just go in front of them so as soon as you press the character moves and like David said we can attack but it will show first the movement phase itself you can do whatever you want you can move first attack then it's up to you to decide in fact you you can advance towards another corner such for example as a rabbit region is doing or even better you can move the cursor behind one of your teammate in order to activate what we call the teen jump the teen jump is expanding your area of movement allowing you to go much further than your normal area of movement right and this is also allowing you to feel the gaps such as the small river that you can see in front of you after that you you can choose but there is no sequence like exactly so basically here we just finished the movement phase and now we can see in this fight that the enemies are positioned in a way to zerg you they called ziggies those guys are don't have a lot of life points but they're really they dash you all the time so it's good that i'm on the other side with mario thanks to the team jump so when you're ready you press a you attack and what you may have seen just over the the enemy is the percentage hit percentage so 100 percent means 100 percent chance to hit if they are behind a half cover full cover it changes so we'll see that just later on so i'll continue with the uh the attack here and even defeat the enemy in the process he's zapped out and in terms of story basically they're not dying uh they're going back to the hub as white rabbits so we're actually saving the rabbits here that's great then you feel good about the yeah absolutely that's the whole point because they i don't want to spoil too much about the story but they have been controlled by a force and by defeating them you are removing this force from them and they are part of the gameplay look look of the the players because they will go back to the pitch castle and the more you free them the more they will build the structure that will help the player throughout their adventure so we saw there mario was attacked but he's behind a full cover so the enemy had zero percent chance of hitting him but the cover did take damage i noticed so exactly so we um it's actually something really important in the combat itself um they are actually a side one that we have later in the game no cover that is really infinite like they have this amount of damage and if they uh get destroyed you don't have any cover anymore to defend yourself so for example here if i go and attack this enemy i know i'm not gonna hit it zero percent chance but i just to show you the the damage on the cover itself this is a wood cover so in two hits it's going to be destroyed and the one you see here next to rabid luigi is a brick uh cover so this one is a bit more tough so three hits so basically that's really important in the game itself to use this the enemies will do it you will do it so and this is cool because uh you can also use interactive element in the battleground such as the rabid's pipe the rabid's pipe really helps you to go in other places where you couldn't reach just with your aerial movement so when you use that tactic and spot those pipes and you know use that to plan out your strategy so that's why the observation part it's important and we gave this tool to the player in order to really study if they want to the battleground definitely it does count for you you do have to explore a bit to really figure out that turn based strategy and find out what the best advantages you have especially in this new level of environment that you're encountering exactly here you know it's uh even we showed some gameplay yesterday uh at the conference it was uh justified after this one is before like david was saying we don't even have the techniques but one thing here that is really important for us in terms of design and philosophy was you see the water uh this is creating a gap so it teaches you to use team jump a lot but the enemies do not use team jump those guys are dashers you don't have glow trodder go towards the second archetype we have they do team jumps but here we really want to show the player like hey you can protect yourself uh they will dash you eventually because they will take the pipe by the end of the map trying to rush you but it depends because according to where to you are in the fight we never know what the enemies can do but they should do that in this map because again we want to teach you this is the way you can play as well you can reach um you know bigger zones and reach new areas but also you can go over gaps like water and this is quite cool and later in the game you'll even have a height so if you go up there you have an advantage in terms of damage so it starts to build up you know we start to put the ingredients together and this map is 30 minutes into the game so it's really a good map to start to get those things and yeah the players are still learning here so it's really up to them where to move they want to go directly against the enemy and risking to be dashed but they maybe could arrive at the objective sooner or they want to take maybe a more safer route like the one we are taking right now because we are moving helping each other uh using the protection of the course right and you had mentioned earlier the objective for this battle is really to get to this final checkpoint yeah there are different different battles where you actually have to defeat all the enemies so here it's a tricky map of course we're playing we know pretty much the map but for the player it's going to be a first tricky map because they could take this as oh we like to defeat all the enemies but the issue is that we have a lot of respawn and the more you wait the more more enemies will spawn and it's going to be very complicated so here it's a reach objective you need to reach when your character needs to be in the zone and this is something key for the players to do and then we have multiple enemy objectives we have defeat defeat all defeat this type of enemy uh reach escort and those type of objectives throughout the game uh to really challenge the player again to do the right decision when it matters so rabbit luigi is really close now he's not close enough because we met it to arrive at the mission objective and definitely there's something that you that we've never seen before really with mario and he's pairing up with the smash up but also you know we have uh you know mario for the first time you're really using a weapon a projectile weapon and uh yeah yeah you know mario has never been afraid to take whatever power ups are you know available to him so it's cool to see these new types of weapons that he can play with he's adapting to the surroundings right yes plus they are very very lighter than funny because the weapons in our game are not just there uh in order to damage the enemies but they are also a tool to create fun because uh you can plug additional behavior such as you can glue an enemy on the ground there is a particular particular enemy that is very powerful in using the techniques you can freeze his face so he cannot speak anymore therefore he cannot use the use the techniques there is someone very good at shooting you can hink his face so he cannot see you and he cannot shoot at you you can burn enemies so they are running with their bottom on fire and there is also propagation so if an enemy on fire is touching another enemy will propagate there are some crazy behavior that could happen uh within the battlefield and that's what we call the domino effector so you can chain multiple effects and the output could be very very crazy also when you finish a fight you can go back of course to the zone in free movement in exploration mode all the the coins you have on your battlefield is because when you destroy covers you gather coins as well so even if you hit an enemy behind a cover and the cover is destroyed it's rewarding as well for the players so you can go back and buy better weapons thanks to coins uh but if we have a few minutes we just wanted to show something as well here just a quick fact you know we we went that way for the fight itself but in fact the most effective way let's say advanced way would have been to go that way even if it's dangerous the first round you get you know dash and stuff second round you really dashed the enemy well so a good strategy would be to put mario on the right side he's a good damage output in terms of his weapon uh right which is not really good with his weapon but he's good with dashing so you can put it in front line and then you go really quickly to the zone here so yeah we just reveal something for people when they will play they know how to play the map now but yeah it's up to the player to decide they can go front or go left right whatever they have uh in mind they can go for it depends on the player's playstyle itself because a good tactical game should give the player the choice to choose their strategy so not only in terms of how you want to customize your character which kind of weapon you want them to be equipped with but also the plan that you want to take into the battlefield so we didn't want for the battles to have only one possible solution but multiple so um let's go to the peach castle to show the hub itself yeah take a look we didn't present it yet although it's a big part of the game of course um so it's of course it's a peach castle it was not destroyed by the arrival of the rabbits so thank god this is good but the issue or let's say the challenge for a peach uh as a princess as well is that the castle will evolve as the game progresses so as you progress you'll see more stuff built by the rabbits a bit randomly or not randomly like this one balance you to change your team change your weapons change your skills in the skill tree um access to new worlds so this one is the first one uh ancient gardens and you also have many puzzles around that you have to solve um and as you finish a world you get new contextual actions and exploration as well so you can progress and see other places that you couldn't go before um so this is key as well for the player to you know go back to the hub and see what they could do now that have new abilities so yeah this hub will evolve throughout the game and um we won't be able to show today you know the other worlds but uh as soon as you finish a world you can access a new one uh with this new ability and uh the canon takes you and then shoot you in the world itself and um and we just saw an example here of um a little puzzle that we we have with the right coins that we have in the game as well so we have yellow coins red coins blue coins as well in the bug zones museum where you get all the collectibles from the game you can gather in the game this one is still broken when you're at that moment in the game but it's the washing time machine that's what they use to come in the world itself of Mario and it will be useful in the future you can go back and revisit and get better scores in all the fights that you've done and also um other elements that uh here are you know teasing that uh the the player will discover new worlds here xr xr so that's really an important part of the game as well this hub and how it will evolve with the game itself and I do remember that the hub was one of the first things that we decided to do we did in the game like a really a point of contact for the player to to really help me throughout the whole game and uh I remember when uh we uh were told that uh we were about to work with Nintendo in a game that was featuring both Mario and the rabbits and we immediately understood that it was a lifetime opportunity we worked really night and day in order to find something new nicks for the rabbits but as well for Mario so as we are huge tactical fun we say okay we should use them to propose something fresh something new in the turn based uh combat games and but at the same time we wanted to stay true to the Mario universe and therefore we decided to mix those two different phases but in a seamless seamless way like the combat and the adventure and uh at the end when we felt that we had a solid idea we decided to meet with Nintendo and I remember that we had only three weeks and a half it was crazy to remember uh to to really prepare something and when I finally met Mr. Miyamoto I felt like he's the creator of my favorite game it's the inspiration of my career as a game designer and I felt like if I was divided like in two so the passionate Nintendo player and the Ubisoft creative director the urgency to ask for an autograph and the responsibility to present the game the most professional way sure but at the end the effort paid off because he said he told me that he was impressed and uh keep asking how come that we had Mario and Luigi in our prototype but the truth is that uh even if we spent uh we had only three weeks and a half to work on the prototype we recreated Mario and Luigi from scratch the model animation the rig in order to try to translate their essence in our prototype and I guess I think that this is was the moment where we truly convinced Nintendo about our commitment and passion so from that moment on we kept meeting with them in Kyoto it was an incredible journey and Mario plus Rabbids Kingdom battle become really a work of love a labor of love that's such an amazing story yeah I think you guys have a lot to be proud of and and I know that uh Mr. Miyamoto you know he's hard to impress and and you guys have worked really hard and and super proud of what you guys have come up with like I can't wait to play the full game and it's just beautiful looking at all the graphics and the technical style but also the exploration of the game it's it's a new style that we never really encountered before so we didn't sleep a lot these past month and years but um we're super happy to be here and uh and talk about the game it it feels great like uh you know we were almost like in the cave you know walking and working in this game and I think for the team the whole team dev team all the studios to be here today to talk about the game show the game finally it's just uh yeah super exciting yesterday press conference was uh yeah it went very well and all the emotions we had on uh it was great and I think uh now showing the game like that it's uh just incredible thank you awesome thank you so much guys for coming um so this was Mario plus rabbits uh kingdom battle


Okay. The next talk is Comcomitting Restriction with Art Mali. By Dr. Gantli Kri, Oksana Rodina-Laya, and Mariana Lecombe, and Steve Rice, Oksana Rodina. Thank you very much for the introduction. So before I start my talk, I just want to warn you that this is a very theoretical result. And if somebody here is allergic to confiscation, well, I won't. So let me start with a motivating example. Let's say we have a bunch of ciphertexts encrypting some messages under the same public key. And let's say the adversary gets to open some of them. And what do I mean by open? Well, it gets to see randomness and the plaintext which is encrypted. Can we still guarantee security of unopened ciphertexts? And our intuition tells us, well, encryption scheme should protect security, but life turns out to be miserable. So it turns out that this answer actually depends on whether the adversary is adaptive or not. So in particular, consider the static case first where adversary has to tell beforehand before he sees a ciphertext which exactly ciphertext he is going to open. So he says, I want to open number 1, 2, and 5, and then he actually sees the whole thing. In this case, you can show away a simple hybrid argument that unopened ciphertexts actually protect messages. But in adaptive case, we cannot perform the same proof. And actually it turns out there is a specially crafted counter example when this thing breaks completely. And let me just tell you what it is. So consider a secret sharing scheme with threshold T and let's say adversary gets to see encrypted shares and can open some of them. Such that open threshold shares he learns do not allow him to actually reconstruct the secret. Can you guarantee that the adversary doesn't learn the secret? Well, intuitively, you want to say that other shares are protected by encryption but this intuition turns out to be completely false. So there exists a very specially crafted secure encryption scheme such that adversary can learn the secret. So what is our takeaway from this example? Our takeaway is that adaptive security is a complete mess. In adaptive case, standard encryption doesn't provide you guarantees which you expect. Now let's move to a more serious example of generic protocols. Again, you can consider two settings, all static protocols and adaptive protocols. And in a static setting, adversary has to commit beforehand on to which part he is going to corrupt. In adaptive security, adversary can make adaptive choices. He can first absorb communication and later decide to corrupt some party and maybe he learns some important information from this. So now he knows that those two guys are very important and he can actually target his attack. So this security notion turns out to be much harder to achieve but it much better captures real life. And so non-committing encryption, which is the title of this talk turns out to be a very important building block for such protocols. Namely, it allows you to implement secure channels in adaptive setting. So you start with the secure channels, you encrypt your message. You start with a protocol which is secure in secure channel setting and then you encrypt every message under non-committing encryption and the result in protocol turns out to be secure. If you just encrypt with a standard encryption there is no guarantee whatsoever on security of the final protocol. Okay, so let me talk about definitions. Essentially, non-committing encryption is adaptively secure encryption. So you can think about this as a protocol which allows you to transmit a message out. So what does this mean for this protocol to be adaptively secure? So it means that the adversary may first absorb communication which in symmetric case is just the cybertext and then corrupt parties and learn all their internal state which is their message and the key. And if you want to guarantee security you need to provide a simulator who would simulate the view of the adversary which means that first it has to simulate communication which is the cybertext and he has to do this without knowing the message. So your simulator has to show the cybertext without any message inside. But later when corruption happens the simulator has to simulate random coins of every party. So you put this dummy cybertext there was no message inside and now somebody tells you my actual message was this and you have to provide a consistent key for this specific message. So here is the exact syntax and security tells you that the real cybertext and the real key are indistinguishable from simulated cybertext and the simulated key. In particular if you try to encrypt or decrypt things should look consistent. Just a simple example in the symmetric case one time bad is a great non-committing encryption because the simulator can choose a random cybertext and later when the message comes in you can open it to any message that is. So what about the public key encryption you can consider the same notion with the public key setting. So now the simulator has to simulate the whole communication which is public key in the cybertext and later given message M you have to provide consistent random coins which are randomness of encryption and randomness of key generation. So in the symmetric case we have a very very efficient non-committed encryption scheme with rate one. And what about the public key case? But before we go there let's talk about how do we define the rate of NCE in the public key case. So in symmetric case it's very easy just the cybertext, the number of bits you send in the cybertext per number of bits of the index and in asymmetric case it's something unexpected you need to actually count not only the cybertext but also the public key size. Why I say this is unexpected? If you talk about standard public key encryption you usually don't include your public key inside rate. Why so? Well because your public key can be reused. So you send one public key and then you send a lot of cybertext and essentially your public key gets amortized. So you don't include this into rate. But non-committed encryption it turns out that public key cannot be reused. And just in case you care non-committed encryption NCE actually means not full for environment. So there is a lower bound which says that the size of the secret key should be as large as the size of the message. Why so? Well remember how the simulation works. You first simulate some empty cybertext and then for every message there should be a corresponding secret key. So you have to have as many keys as you have messages and basically once you set your key with this size of the secret key you can only send that many bits. So it makes sense to view non-committed encryption not as a public key encryption but as a two round protocol. If you need to send many bits you just send out many public keys and you get back many cybertexts. And the rate of such thing is just the total communication over the total number of bits you send. And let's talk about some prior works. So we started with a bunch of works which roughly followed the same approach and what they did they encrypted their plaintext bit by bit and the resulting rate was very high. You need to send the security parameters where bits of cybertext per each bit of plaintext. And recently we got some new works from Algebra which got a much better rate in particular the last work what the rate which is polylogarithmic and secures the parameter. And in our work we show almost optimal rate which is almost one and I will talk about more what this means but we assume a very very strong things. So we need authorization and we work in something called a common reference string order. So this is our result. And more strictly the theorem says assuming IO and boundary functions you can have NCE which is rate which can be anywhere close to 1 in the common reference string model and our scheme is actually the first perfectly correct way of making an image. So what is a common reference string model? Basically this is a model where both parties have access to some pre-generated string. Think about Microsoft publishing some code on its website such that every party can go and download it. And let's talk about the rate in the setting so now by rate we mean the total communication including the size of the common reference string over the number of bits you send. And why do you want to include the size of the CRS? Well if your CRS allows you to send only one bit and you need to get the new CRS every time then you cannot really say that your rate is small, right? You need to download the whole thing every time. But luckily in our work the CRS is reusable for any polynomial number of distributions. So essentially you get your CRS once and then you can send your bits as many times as you like. So the size of the CRS gets advertised just like in public key setting you can advertise your public key size. And just more completely the size of a single public key in our scheme is just two lambda and the size of the cybertext is two lambda plus l. And so if you do computation then you see that our rate is essentially this. So it's one plus something lambda over new message and as long as your message is sufficiently large this rate goes to one. And if the bigger message you are sending the smaller rate will be. So let's talk about the construction. So we are going to do this in two steps. First we will build a primitive which we call sense and the thing about this is a non-committal encryption with erasures. And then we are going to bootstrap it to full non-committal encryption with constant rate. And at the end we need to start with a non-committal encryption here which has a short cycle. So what is this sense? It's a non-committal encryption with two additional properties. First property is that security holds only as human erasures. So it's not a full non-committal encryption you are actually allowed to erase some information. And which information are you allowed to erase? You don't need. So for example the sender doesn't need his randomness once the cycle takes it out so you can erase that. And the receiver doesn't need his randomness of key generation so you can erase this. But he still needs his secret key. So secret key should be still there. And in particular this is exactly what the adversary expects to see. So this is what we need to see. So that's one thing. And the other thing is called the same public key property. And this is a very technical property which is needed deeply inside the proof. It says that if you generate your public key from some random coins here honestly using the real generational rhythm and here you simulate them using the same random points then those two public keys are exactly the same. So usually you require just a utility of real and fake public keys. So this is a stronger property. It says start with the same randomness you get exactly the same string. So this is our sense. And we build the sense from IO and one of the functions with a very short cycle text which are just two loud double sounds. And the scheme is perfectly correct. And before I go into the construction let me just say a word about IO. So we have several notions of obfuscations.  But unfortunately we don't have this notion. So we can only work with something called indistinguishability obfuscation which says that as long as two programs are identical you cannot distinguish between their obfuscated functions. So for the purpose of this talk you can really think about black box obfuscation but in the paper we need to work with IO and so this is the main technical challenge. Ok so how to construct this sense? Recall this symmetric key encryption from PRF which says that to encrypt the message L you one time paired your message with PRF on random SR and you publish R and SR and to decrypt you do whatever you expect to do. So to build a sense we obfuscate encryption and decryption already. So my public key is going to be obfuscated encryption code and my secret key is going to be obfuscated decryption code. So what's going on in the scheme? The receiver will sample some randomness and use it to create obfuscations and once obfuscations are created he doesn't need this randomness anymore so he erases it and he keeps the secret key for himself and he sends out the public key and the sender can use the public key which is encryption program on his own random codes to encrypt the message M and send it over. So this is basically the scheme, very simple just obfuscated encryption and decryption and this scheme has a very short time index so you need for some reason you need to run the beads for the randomness and then the second part is just the size of the message and it has the same public key property our simulator will generate exactly the same public key. So we are done with the first step we build the sends and now how to transform the sends into the real non-committal encryption. So here is a high level idea in the CRS we will put two special programs which will help parties to sample some common parameters of underlying sends and the receiver will in round one will send some very short almost random stream T which will use which will be used by both parties to derive the same key of sends namely the receiver will somehow derive the secret key of sends and the sender will somehow derive the public key of sends and then the sender can just use this public key to encrypt his message and send it back and the receiver decrypts so essentially the core of the scheme is underlying sends and then is how exactly do you perform this sampling. So little bit more in detail those two programs GenN and GenDeck will have a shared master secret key and they will sample the same public key and secret key of sends using this master secret key and now let's go over the actual code so the receiver picks his generation randomness from GenDeck on this randomness and here is what happens so first this program applies some very special hash on this randomness and gets this short T and remember T is going to be used to sample the common parameters here how we do this we apply a PRF with master secret key on this T and get the randomness is actually used to sample public key and secret key of sends and then the program outputs whatever the receiver needs to know which is the secret key and the short T now the sender is going to pick two random strings one is randomness for generational illusion and he will run his GenEck program on this randomness and the T he got in round one so this program will run the same PRF with the same secret key on the same T and not surprisingly it will get exactly the same randomness R as the other program and then it will sample exactly the same public key and the secret key of sends after this it will output the public key but not the actual public key but obfuscation of this public key so why do we need obfuscation here well this is somewhat technical and you need to know the proof so whilst he knows obfuscated public key he can pick his random points of encryption and run an encryption algorithm output the secret text and the receiver can be created so this is the secret and you can check that it has all properties beneath it is as correct as the underline NCE it is secure because essentially remember that underline NCE was only secure under erasures so you had to erase your key generation randomness R from the whole picture here it's present but it's sort of sitting deeply inside the programs so nobody actually knows this key generation randomness including parties only problems know it so that's why very roughly why security to security of underline sense and finally the communication size is very short, small you send just the D which is size of two lambda and you send the underline cyber text of sense which we built to be very short okay let me summarize so we built a rate one public key NCE so technically speaking this is almost as good and bad you get rate one but of course this is very very practical because in our scheme we have to use triple nested applications so you have to take the code obfuscative append some more code obfuscative so it would be interesting to build a practical NCE with constant rate not just rate one any constant rate or if you cannot do that it is to reduce the number of nested applications in this construction I think it's also very interesting I'm really curious to see any real definition we use for nested applications I wonder if this is possible okay thank you very much thank you


Kiss Thor, because like Thor is pretty cool, and I feel like Wonder Woman is like really kick butt, but I would just avoid her. Avoid Thor, and I don't know, kiss Wonder Woman, because I mean I would, any day, that's like 50-50. Like Thor standing there, you know, like Wonder Woman's there, what am I going to do there? I'd probably marry Black Panther because they're all super talented and impressive, and I feel like my life would be not in danger. I would marry Black Panther. Oh, I don't want to avoid any of them.  They're all so amazing. I'm kissing Black Panther and avoiding Thor. I don't want to avoid Thor. Thor is cold. I'm going to marry Wonder Woman. I feel like I need something very stable and strong.  Who's not kissing Wonder Woman? If you don't pick that something wrong, if somebody picks somebody else, then kissing Wonder Woman? Gosh, I mean, I'd have to kiss Thor, and as much as I love Gal Gadot, I think I'd have to avoid her.  I don't even know how you answer that question.