Welcome back to Forbidden Knowledge News. I'm your host Chris Matthew. Today I want to welcome back to the show Matt LaCroix He is an author and researcher grew up exploring outdoors of Northern New England after college he began studying ancient civilizations philosophy Quantum mechanics and history. His focus became uncovering and connecting the esoteric Teachings from secret societies and ancient cultures that disappeared long ago He also works as a writer and researcher at Gaia and has appeared on shows such as ancient civilizations The unexplained and mystery school of truth Matt welcome back. How you doing? I'm doing great Chris. It's always an awesome conversation sitting down and talking to you about these mysteries of our past Oh, yes, and I'm super excited for today. We're gonna once again make history This is new groundbreaking information that you've been covered You've been mapping out artifacts and evidence of a connection from the ancient Sumerians and a Nuna to Atlantis in a timeline of events as well as a possibility of an undiscovered Advanced civilization. Oh, this is gonna be amazing now before we get into any of this for the audience It might not be familiar. Just tell us about yourself and your work Yeah, I know that was like a mouthful what we're about to share and I that was those are great comments Chris I want to just echo that When I get excited about something It's usually for a reason and in this case I think this is this work is going to be up there with the work I'm doing with binary star and catastrophes as well as erudu and the eagle and the serpent and a lot of those areas that Put into some of my niche of study And this is gonna be one of those ones that's added to it And I want it to be one of the focuses of the new book I'm writing in conjunction with earth catastrophes and discussing this binary companion But discovering these this new lost civilization about to present and how it connects with this entire story of Sumer and Atlantis and how the entire ancient world came together So I'm excited to sit down Chris and I to answer your question again. Yeah for those who don't know me I am a very eager Author and researcher who has made it my mission I guess in life to uncover the ancient secrets of our past where we come from But in a way that empowers us taking all of these ancient tablets and mysteries and stories about where we came from and who We really are and how the entire thing lays out in a timeline and in a way to understand When things happen and when the rise and fall of civilizations occurred and if our entire history is Dramatically different than we've been taught in school. So that's why today Chris. We're gonna rewrite history. I love it, man I love it and the more I learn from wonderful researchers like yourself the more History becomes dramatically different than what we've learned from academia and our modern history books and much older as well So I'm very much looking forward to getting into this. Where should we start with this today, Matt? Well, I guess we'll start with a pretty comprehensive presentation I've put together for this and for those who want to see how serious I am this represents about six months of work So this isn't just something I threw together last minute it's a very significant body of study and evidence that I've put together which I believe is Provides concrete evidence to connect something that I don't as far as I'm aware of no one's Provided a direct connection of in terms of archaeological evidence and new sites I want everyone to wrap their heads around the idea that we'll move up to show you is Both some ancient knowledge as well as brand new discoveries Most of these are less than ten years old. Some of them are less than five years old talk about cutting-edge stuff Thankfully because of technology and the ability to be on the ground seeing these things firsthand and Photos just being uploaded, you know from a week ago in some cases We are able to see what's going on right now in the most what I consider the most exciting new discoveries that have been made in Last 20 years, you know move go back to be a side for a minute and get ready for what we're about to present here Now these are all real images everything I have in here is directly related to what I'm about to present It's not something that oh this looks good, but hey by the way, it's from across the world. It doesn't it's not relevant here that these are all Taken from very specific on these ancient sites and we're gonna connect a story that I don't believe has ever been connected the lost connection of our ancient past with the Sumerians leading up to the ancient Babylonians and the ancient Egyptians and the Atlanteans and how the entire Asia Minor Europe as well as the Mediterranean Basin played a role in this entire story and that's what we're gonna do today We're gonna connect dots and we're gonna connect something that I think is honestly gonna blow people's minds So here we go. Chris. You ready? I am ready. Can't wait, man Okay, now I'm not gonna be able to just spend an enormous amount of time on topics that I've already extensively discussed You know for those who are getting into this that don't know a lot about the Sumerian Babylonian Assyrian Pantheons of gods talking about how you know you have N. Lil and then L. Lil in Assyria is the same person with different spelling names For you know, forgive me if we go a little bit too fast on some of these areas but I do have a very large wealth of Videos on a library on my channel Matthew LaCroix that I have a lot of this these discussions and conversations to expand on this So we're not gonna be able to do a lot of that today We're gonna have to just sort of jump forward, but let me just briefly give a tiny introduction for those who don't know a lot of this okay So according to the oldest stories we have on in in mankind, I mean anyone can argue that some people might argue the Vedic texts are older, but Truthfully, how could they be? because paper as is It's well been studied and discussed in ancient text is only 500 to a thousand years old at a max We know paper can't last longer than that So the only way to truly preserve a message that can that can stand the tests of time is through ancient stone and clay And that's exactly what the Sumerians understood They mastered something that then would would branch out and it's called cuneiform writing It would branch out to not only the Sumerians, but the later Babylonians Assyrians Akkadians as well as up into the Hittite region and Turkey and a lot of those areas But it all began in Sumer and I do agree with that But I don't agree with when and that's we're gonna branch off from what we exist the existing knowledge of what we talk about Extensively a lot of the individuals my field and we're gonna move into these new areas So all according to the ancient tablets, whether it's something like Eridu genesis or Audra hasis We find out that Eridu was the first city ever created on earth Not simply something where nomadic hunter-gatherers came together But a divine lowering of kingship where it stated that it was created in a very specific location and that the river Euphrates River was designed and channeled by the Egeegi to possibly be an exact representation of the Eridonis constellation again The connection between heaven on earth that bridge the law of correspondence That's what we're we have to focus on here as we as we expand out to understand this story So according to them they build the first city Eridu and then they continue and they build other Magnificent ancient ancient cities with the last of them being what's called Sherupak. Now in the ancient tablets Sherupak is supposedly the last of these ancient ancient cities before a catastrophe comes through and essentially wipes out the old world Now I want to briefly go back really quick where I have all these question marks We know the similarities of the gods and Sumer and the similarities of other civilizations that rise such as Atlantis With the sons of Atlas and connections with Poseidon We know the similarities there are very very closely tied with Sumer because we know it's the same gods and we know that the same This is simply Enlil from Sumer, but how does the whole thing connect? How does Sumer possibly connect to Atlantis? That's where this is going to get fascinating now according to our mainstream academia as of now, what is the accepted age of Sumer and the Sumerian civilization and as of now Yeah, thank you, Chris. It's good to establish that if you were to say go into Ancient history and you're learning about it whether it's in high school or college You're going to be taught that the ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia arose 6,000 years ago in that area of the Fertile Crescent and then had this linear growth that then led to like the Egyptians and then later You know the Greeks and eventually up to art our narrative But the problem is that that window that 6000 year window is isn't is an old number That's more based on ancient religion. It's this idea of creation in that in that time period So that what they did is they almost mixed in the model theist model theist at Christian religions with this idea that That the earth is only like 7,000 years old or all these things and they mixed it in with this very very Primitive mindset of civilizations being just gradual and linear and that's where the issues come in is that throughout You know the last let's say 80 years to 100 years there have been a lot of archaeologists that have come along that are completely challenging that narrative What we're seeing is that it's instead of civilization Arising only 6,000 years ago in Sumer it looks like civilization may have arose in Sumer more than 50,000 years ago And that's what and I have a timeline woven in this presentation to not totally boggle people's minds here But what we have to do is instead of separating out and saying well look it's not just a 6000 year timeline Let's say it's a 13,000 year timeline to include the Ice Age or whatever two civilizations No wife that one clean too. How about three or four civilizations? Three or four rises that have risen up been destroyed and have risen up and eventually had Lost the influence of some of these patron gods of Sumer and became more primitive had to start over again But what about that entire period of rises and falls? That's where this archaeological evidence is gonna blow that entire narrative open as well as discussing bloodlines So you ready Chris, I'm ready So in these these two tablets you have in front of you are some of the most popular and famous of the of the two Sets of Kiné form tablets from ancient Sumer and Assyria and what you have is the Audra hasis Which is a set of tablets that was found in Nineveh in 1849 now That was important because they then also found the epic of Gilgamesh which had the same stories Woven but over the course of separating itself by thousands of years and What that why that's important is that we can take these stories and the similarities and the things that they say in them and Literally recreate the ancient world, but that's not enough and only gets us so far What about the actual evidence in proof that this is real? That's what's so exciting about this is that we're about to take what is considered still largely myth Even in some sectors of our groups and realize that most of it is not myth So in the Audra hasis you learn that the this is written from the story of the biblical Noah character And I want that to be so clear because I feel like it gets lost the Noah character in Genesis and in in the Christian text was originally not called know it all and in fact that story became Turned into kind of a silly tale. I wanted us to just sort of strip most of it away Except for a couple key things where he landed The core of his family and bringing some with him that was absolutely true And the reason we know that is because of these tablets now these tablets are at a minimum 10,000 years older than Genesis in the Christian text I just want to get that out there at least not just a thousand years old at least 10,000 years old So all those stories they come from here. They're ancient Mesopotamian stories And what they state is that this last great city that was created by these Anuna patron gods of Sumer known as Sherupak Was ruled by a king known as Ubaratutu and he had a son who became the figure known as Noah Now his son rose up to power to be a great man and his name was Untana Pistam or in the epic of Gilgamesh He's called Zayasudra. So in the tablet on the left, Audrahesis, he's called Untana Pistam And then in the other tablet, he's called Zayasudra. It's important to understand that because we get into The names are can be confusing But what both stories tell is that this ancient king the last king We'll call him the last great king of this first civilization of Sumer that arose He was warned about this coming catastrophe by his patron god Enki Because Enki had stated that he was this top bloodline that was directly down from the gods and the reason that's important Is we're not even gonna get close to talking about race today. I don't even want to approach that all humans are amazing What we're talking about our genetic gifts because of bloodlines that come from ancient Sumer now in the stories Enlil Enki Enki warrens Untana Pistam Noah that this catastrophe is coming and tells him he has to build a specific kind of craft to survive And he tells him about bitumen, which is funny because bitumen we still use today in construction and building and back then the ancient times They knew it was about mixing certain key elements to create like almost like a glue like very very very tough type of material to bind things So he's told to create this craft to survive a coming catastrophes And he repeatedly tells him that he needs to create a roof that is so tough that it's like the the ceiling of the Abzu like the underworld In order in a basically what he's they're saying is you're gonna have things coming from above You're gonna have water You're gonna have like it's like the end of the world and you have to build this craft that can survive it now By craft did he mean see going craft or? Okay, well and that's what I'll be very careful of we want to look at I know some people like how do you know well it describes it as needing to Float on water and it describes it as needing to get through a deluge So we know that it's that okay At this point in time We don't see any high level of sophistication for technology that I'm aware of and I want to make that clear Mm-hmm. We see a high level of knowledge, but we don't see a high level of building yet In fact what we see is the opposite in the Sumerians in the ancient Anuna preferred brick Brick doesn't last a long time though. It's unfortunate But they preferred brick because of the elements and the different things but that changes as we go along Anyway, let's continue because I don't want to get lost here is that in this flood story The in Utena Pishdom this this last great king of a bloodline The flood comes and literally destroys everything it destroys the entire old world and it's described that he takes his entire family All of his family. He's got three sons He's got a wife and he's got he takes they take some animals because they have to eat and all these different things They don't take two of every kind though They just take what they can and the catastrophe comes through and it wipes everything out and it it talks about how he's Floating across endless oceans remember he sends the dove out and then it eventually doesn't come back. That's from Genesis That's true and what and where he lands Where he lands is All this turned into a myth, right? He lands on Mount Ararat and the whole thing Well, let's take a take a moment and pause there for a second. Just pause every minute. What if it's true? What if the whole thing is true? But not not from the Genesis perspective, but from the ancient Sumerian Babylonian perspective now And this is where we're gonna get to it The first place to start is that Eridu in those stories in all the stories whether Smith of Dapa Eridu Genesis atreases doesn't matter what it is It's always talked about as being the first city ever created But all most biblical scholars and all archaeologists had considered those stories merely myths that none of it was real And then here we come 19 the late 1800s into 1946 Oxford University and the an Iraqi museum they find Eridu Oops, guess what? It's not a myth anymore. This was a real place This was the first city ever created and of course, I have an entire campaign And lots of videos talking about Eridu. So I'm not going to do that today But I just want to point out here's myth number one that wasn't supposed to be real and it is real Myth number two Sherupak The last of the cities of the pre-de-living cities where Obara Tutu ruled and then his son Noah Lincoln epistium that wrote the whole story. Was it real? Yes, it is. Here's Sherupak uncovered in Iraq in 1931 and So it was a real place and what was more important look at the picture here They had to dig through in some cases 30 to 50 feet of soil to get to the ruins meaning that they had been flooded Just like Eridu by a massive amount of mud and and And debris on these sites exactly like they're described and and furthermore What was fascinating is they done studies in the last 30 years to 40 years Where they have gone to these sites and they've been like wait it's the Genesis myth of a flood true and they actually did studies where they looked at that first 30 to 50 feet Because they thought there had to be another occupation in there And there had to been other things going on. It can't really be a true story of a flood, right? What they found is that largely between this 30 feet to 50 feet, which is enormous by the way of a material They found nothing human no human Tools nothing means it was truly a massive amount of debris that just piled on top of these places Bearing them and sealing their fates for thousands of years. So there's myth number two all these ancient cities were real So now let's keep going. Let's break all these myths and connect it Now can I ask you something real quick? You said that Babylonian the Sumerian civilizations were The first civilizations could it be possible that there were older civilizations that had Some sort of been subjected to a major cataclysm that have been wiped out before that Well, that's the thing is they clearly state that they were the first like it's it's very very well stated that Eridu and the civilizations of Sumer were the was the first place that it all began but The time period is huge That's the thing we got to remember head around is that in between there there have been many many other civilizations It's some that have reached again like Atlantis And that's where is it and that the actual Sumerian Babylonian Nakedia region region like there's there's what's called an old Babylon The neo Babylon and then the later Babylon they use the same sites over and over again all over the world That's the problem is that we see a recycling of the same places because the other cultures knew that they were important They knew that at one time And I want to break this down so people understand this is important Why are they building all these temples? Why are they building these specific sites? Why are they doing all this in a specific way? Well, my research is uncovered and it gets into this term to biru. I want to clear this whole thing up It's this understanding of Remember a bridge between heaven on earth We know that the orion three bell stars of orion is the mimp is being mimic on the in the Giza plateau with the Three great pyramids, right? We know that they're mimicking the stars for an energetic purpose The same thing is happening though across the world at teotihuacan Those the this temple of the the moon the sun and the ketsu temple of ketsu kwadal It's the same thing that's aligned the three bell stars orion all around the world Like an aerodonis with the aerodonis aligning to the pre deluvian cities of sumer We see this obsession in the ancient world With not only mapping and connecting the heavens heaven like heaven on earth and bridging this gap But also creating temples that were literally the bridge between heaven on earth So they would create temples in a very specific place like for instance in the ancient world There was of uh, there was an ancient city near mozal. That was uh, Basically a patron city to enlil and he had a temple there Temple of enlil and the temple of nibiru. Okay, that's where the the term nibiru first came from It came from a term called the temple of nibiru and it was a temple dedicated to enlil And if you look up the term nibiru and it actually is termed the crossing What about the crossing of heaven on earth the bridge? The bridge between the higher realms and the lower realms is the crossing And it seems like there's an obsession with temples all around around the world built for that very purpose The purpose of these emissaries these great demigod kings Were going there and that was where they were meeting and communicating Where where laws were handed down rules where Governing and advice it was these places and that was what their obsession was And I want to make that clear because as we go forward we're going to see those themes come up over and over and over again. Okay Does that make sense chris? Yes. Yeah, okay very interesting now Here's mount ararat It's one of if not the most prominent mount on earth It's an incredible mountain. It's like it's like top three most prominent mountains on earth It's a massive stratified volcano. That's largely dormant now, but it's so big It's over 16,000 feet tall It's so big that it just dominates everything as far as you can go If you were to try to find the next largest mountain besides mount ararat you have to go the himalayas And why that's important is that in these descriptions? It states that this was the only land that was above water During these catastrophes. How could that happen not rain? Wrap your head around the idea of like crustal displacement and plates moving and Massive tsunamis and tectonic shifts with water just cycling around the world because everything's everything's being um being adjusted Now in the story though, you gotta go get a connect to it. He lands here What happens in the audra hasis as we continue the stories of this or the audra hasis here is that He he survives with his family and enlo and enki come down from heaven from the higher realms And they they enlo's furious They had created this catastrophe. They wanted to wipe out all of humanity And he and his bloodline sons directly Genetically connected to enki these gifts of the anuna, right? That's imp. That's incredibly important for this To understand that that's what these inherent gifts are within us These telekinesis gifts and these powerful gifts as creators It came from that and that's why His the bloodline that we're about to talk about and the archaeological evidence is so important because it directly leads into sumer and even lemur in my opinion So in into this description chris He supposedly lands on there and enlo comes down furious There was not to supposed to be any mortal men Mankind was not supposed to survive that doesn't mean there weren't other humans that survive obviously But I think it was more like this divine bloodline wasn't supposed to survive and What happens is and enki says well, I I saved him Because he's my bloodline and you decided to create a catastrophe blah blah blah and ultimately they come up with an agreement In the death of bill games bill games is another name for gilgamesh You find out that there was an agreement made where this king Noah and tend to pitch them was the last man ever given immortality ever That's what they state He was the last man ever given immortality and subsequently he sort of disappeared from our realm And that's such a weird thing to think about but his sons didn't And the reason we know that in terms of him disappearing is that gilgamesh ends up meeting him on a journey Remember he meets him on this journey into the underworld and he finds him in the underworld Which means by the way the trick in terms of immortality. You can't be a physical being here in the third realm That's your trick. You want to be you exist internally in the underworld forever? That's what happened He's in this other realm gilgamesh goes on a spiritual journey. It's not a real thing He goes on this out-of-body journey and he goes and he meets him on this journey And he tells and and he proceeds to tell gilgamesh of an ancient story Right, I love this where he tells him that shirupak is far older than he ever know Then he's ever aware of that it's way before him and gilgamesh is an ancient king and but what he tells him is that basically You can't achieve immortality and then gilgamesh ends up going home like empty-handed But the point of that is we know what happens to this character That's what's so fascinating. We know that and we also know that gilgamesh meets atana Who's the first king Of the new world after these catastrophes go through it states that kish is reloaded in ancient sumer So that's there's there's some things going on in sumer, but there's other things going on too And that's where this gets interesting Now chris I want to blow this whole thing open because this is where it gets fascinating In eastern turkey next to mount errat I have been doing a lot of research and doing a lot of digging to try to see if I can connect a theory I had Again with the sons and bloodlines of that noah character Creating an entire lost civilization that eventually led to to the rise of atlantis Again, remember he's a sumerian king his sons are ancient sumerian bloodlines from this So what did I discover? I believe this is what is is the most cutting-edge part of this that I want to try to explain And present the fact that I don't believe anyone has ever connected this or presented it So it's very exciting and what happened was I stumbled across zernaki tepi about six months ago Which was zernaki tepi is in the northern part of what's called leg vaan Leg vaan is the largest lake in turkey and it's one of the oldest lakes in the world It's an ancient ancient lake That's was around way before the ice age in eastern turkey. That's just west of lake or of mount errat Okay I started started getting curious about zernaki tepi Quite a while back because I had found well look it just got discovered They were starting to uncover it and they were getting some some interesting mysteries out of it some big cute Some cuneiform writing and some big megalithic blocks in ancient kings lists So I started going on this crusade around lake vaan To prove a theory I had about a lost civilization that wasn't known as the urations That's what they're just like the hittites are not really the civilization of anatolya. They're a later civilization that came These are not the urations civilization. This is what's known as the mount errat civilization Brand new civilization that I believe is the second iteration of of civilization here When civilization began to up rise To another level that then led to atlantis and you can see that because we can follow the technological sophistication At this site So I want to point out some information here so we can see this Look at the names of the locations on here because we're about to break them down and show you pictures In the north on lake vaan is zernaki tepi just discovered less than five percent excavated incredible place To the south of it is cavus tepi that most people have never even heard of That site contains what I would consider the finest megalithic stones anywhere outside of egypt and peru That should pp people's interest right there and we're even going to follow back to that connection with egypt and peru after And then to the west here on lake vaan We see a place called kef kalesi That I don't believe anybody's talked about because I I found it by accident and it's not even been It's been zero excavated and it's I only have a couple there's only a couple photos that even exists of it What this totality represents are three major archaeological sites that present what I call the new civilization that hasn't been uncovered called The mount error at civilization which I believe was the offshoot of the summaries that have then led to atlantis Now let's get into it. Yeah So you're saying that this civilization Wasn't as advanced as atlantis as it at its pinnacle, but was on the upswing from the summary in civilization None of these civilizations were Remaining independent with their patron influences what I mean is When a civilization was created the primary influences of those civilizations often moved on So they would create this there's the sons of untianed a patient would rule there But the the ingeniousness and the knowledge because we know that sumer the knowledge of everything in our reality came out of nowhere We know that the summaries invented We know they meant it mathematics writing Agriculture metallurgy animal husbandry agriculture astronomy. Jeez. I could go on and on and on everything Where did it come from? Well, they say it was standing is handed down to them from above It was like they wanted it was blueprints for civilization to be created. And that's what kingship was same thing here But the next iteration and this sophistication we're about to follow We can trace directly west and go all the way to atlantis now. Here we go First thing I want to point out I am not the first person to connect bloodlines here. That's not what I'm saying archaeologically I'm I'm bringing this new but in terms of genesis and All the way back to the 16 1700s It's been widely discussed and before that that it was very known that there was a specific bloodline that populated this region It was it that's not new. It's very spelled out I simply wanted to prove it and I wanted to prove that there was more to that and that's where we're going to go from turkey To back to back to iraq through syria and then we're going to go right into the Mediterranean okay Here we go Welcome to kef kalesi absolutely stunning sight This is a giant Rock relief that if you look at if you look at the similarities that this was sumer it's uncanny Okay, same lion depictions the ancient lion is a symbol of power throughout sumer in egypt as well as turkey But at the top look at the pinecone being handed over But instead of a handbag He's a king He's he's passing over kingship in this case And now this god if you if you go into ancient armenian and your the Eurasian you find out his name is god haldi sometimes spelled caldi with a k But god haldi and if you look at his descriptions, it's exactly the same as enlil Now what's fascinating about that is that enla was the one who came down a mount errat To meet up with untianed epistem to give him some kind of agreement Remember he gives him the agreement of immortality. But what does he get? I believe he gets the the right to rule this entire region Here's the proof behind it because the descriptions and the and the depictions of this god haldi Is a war god to create like a powerful empire And we know the similarities there and how the story goes it makes total sense Now let's follow this all the way to the ancient Athenians and all the way the atlantians This so this depiction shows he has the horns on his helmet. He's passing the pine cone He's standing on the on the lion showing power and he's literally handing down A new kingship empire That's exactly what this is the new kingship empire here to create and and if you look at the top You see the same depictions we see all the way through these ancient empires throughout history Welcome to kef kalesi. What's above ground? Now what's fascinating about kef kalesi Go back to here is it's sitting right below a massive volcano not mount errat But another volcano called sufan doggy that is third over 13,000 feet high Which is incredible for this region. And so it's no coincidence that kef kalesi sits Right beneath this volcano sitting over a massive mountain that looks over this whole lake Okay, so so again, we're gonna come back to that again Here's kef kalesi. Look at these massive Basalt and granite megalithic blocks strewn across this plateau. No one's touched anything Chris nobody is even done anything here is look at this site. Tell me In your opinion, doesn't it look like some kind of catastrophe wiped out whatever temple used to be here Very possible highly possible from the looks of this And so what you have is these scattered remains of an ancient ancient temple site That was dedicated in honor of this god haldi and lil in terms of building this empire, but this is just one place We're gonna let's go underwater to underneath this mountain Welcome to nine 2017 welcome to the underwater ruins of kef kalesi as well So we're looking at a massive complex of temples on the on the mountains and underwater megaliths Now You'd have to ask that curious question which researchers did in 2017 How could these ruins be found on the bottom of a massive lake? If the civilization is less than 6000 years old Right, doesn't make sense. Hmm. It doesn't in fact Some have even called this lantis And since the article came out it's not of course, but it ties to it But more importantly it proves to us that this civilization is well over 12 000 years old And if you look at the megalithic blocks in this picture They match the same architecture that we're about to see in these other sites as well So this is kef kalesi ancient Ancient kings list coming out of here showing haldi hanging down divine kingship and these this empire emerging at a nowhere Now welcome to the next site Now we're at zirnaki tepi which is just to the northeast of kef kalesi and in here and in this site We see massive polygonal megalithic blocks that look you might have to do a double take to make sure you're not in peru or in egypt These blocks and and and i want to just use my mouse here if you can see it This this block right here on the top right you can see what looks like Some advanced technology and tools used here like boreholes and and cutting up these precise Maybe like a some kind of a rope system to hold pulleys like who knows what this is but What I want you to see and notice about this is that in zirnaki tepi just like in kef kalesi We found ancient cuneiform writing connections to the samaritan kings Kings lists just like we see in sumer as well as other places But it's just the tip of the iceberg This is just one other temple that's connected to kef kalesi one of who knows how many How many more of these are around this lake? That are that are showing us what may have been a population of 50 hundred thousand or more we have no idea But this is the birthing of discovering an entire advanced civilization Well, you said that the the the construction was similar to that of what you'd find in peru Could it be possible that this was a maritime culture that had The ability to traverse the globe and may have shared The the the constructive abilities Exactly that's exactly where I was going to go chris That's why i'm trying to look at the show these blocks and have them being grained into your into your mind is that This became the builders This is the inspiration for where all of peru all of egypt came from it started here Okay, some people might not like that, but remember When we look into ages look into zeptepi in egypt We know that we know that that's 30 000 years ago. That's 40 000 years ago Atlantis is supposed to be 50 000 years ago according to the best evidence we have which is great But it's supposed to be arising 50 000 years ago, but we know when it was destroyed From the egyptians and playdough. We know is destroyed 11 600 years ago So we know that and we know atlantis if elantis is 50 000 years ago Right and the egypt is 38 000 years ago Then it means that egypt just like thoaf toaf says in the emerald tablets it arose out of the destruction of atlantis But what came before atlantis? That's what this whole thing is is that this is the birthing of a new form of technology a new form of Sophistication that instead of bricks and sumer all the scene we see giant megalis appearing out of nowhere Using basalt and granite and all these hard tool all these hard materials that we have no idea how they built them Now if you look at the bottom left that's zernaki tepi It's been Tiny a little bit has been excavated that you're seeing these pictures all those squares are all temples And so it's just the beginning of what this civilization is going to become and how sophisticated it will be We're going to get even more sophisticated. Sophisticated chris. You ready? I'm ready Welcome to have this tepi now. This has been incorrectly Shown online. I've seen it multiple times as being in peru Which is kind of funny, right? This has actually been shown in like three or four social media posts As being an example of high level sophistication in peru guys. This isn't peru This is kavis tepi turkey That's why this is so fascinating because it's exactly like something we see in peru Yeah, like the valley temple in egypt Now it tells you an interesting story chris though. Look Do you see this right here? Yeah. Yeah, you did the original basalt blocks of this incredible civilization These blocks you ready for this these blocks and it doesn't there's no other logical thing that we can make sense to this These are over 50 000 years old Wow, how else can we explain it these blocks are over 50 000 years old? How could that be possible basalt and granite is one of the hardest materials on earth? It does not erode guys. These are built with precision now. What happened? Well, the urations here they are. I didn't say they weren't here. They're right here They're right here. They found this they tried to build around it on top of it Yeah, why are they built underneath it though chris? Why do you think they might have built underneath something that was older? I'm gonna give you I'm gonna go back as a hint Right see that? Yeah, it's all it was all in pieces so they tried to reassemble it Thank you. Exactly. They couldn't do it again. They tried. Look You guys want to you guys want to separate our timelines? It's right here. It's right here They tried to mimic it with sandstone guys. This is sandstone or limestone something softer This is basalt or granite. They couldn't do this not only that these stones don't even come from here Who knows where they come from these stones could come from 500 miles away as far as we know At the point of because we know that because of the aswan core in egypt We know that the blocks in the great pyramid of giza. We know that the king's chamber the massive granite blocks came from 500 miles away in aswan egypt We know that they were going to do that and they were willing to do that So that's fine But it's just interesting because the the other civilizations that came later the urations they look at they're just They're using much softer stone and they tried to mimic and they just they couldn't really do it Wow, that is incredible. Now. This is where it gets even more fascinating. We're going to add up We're going to just blow everybody's mind here. You go look up cavus tepi This isn't me. Go look up anything i'm saying right now. Please go look up cavus tepi You'll learn that it's ruled by king hake Go look in king hake and he is credited in every resource Every searcher is being a direct descendant of japeth japeth Or i'll go back in a second japeth as we have a whole chart coming up in a second guys japeth is one of the direct sons of noah in genesis There's a there's an actual real Descendants of untanepishtim who landed on mount errat and his sons did go out and literally Were descendants of throughout the world, but they were done in a way Where they're like the great kings and sages that went around and there was like this sacred bloodlines Is that why there's so much obsessive and kings throughout history in these royals? Yeah, I think it is It's because of all this now This is going to add another layer that's going to blow this because blow blow everybody's mind because i'm going to connect summa right here This is in northern iraq here in northern iraq We find a later iteration of sophistication that's kind of goes out of nowhere that doesn't look anything like southern iraq In a northern iraq near jerwan all of a sudden we start seeing megalithic blocks appearing during the time of senaka rib Who was a lot older than we're told by the way. He's one of the ancient kings um Senaka rib and we find these giant megalithic blocks with enormous cuneiform writing almost like for a giant Right look at that person chris. This is not an illusion. That is a real picture of a researcher I've never seen cuneiform writing that large anywhere in the world Like it's rich for giants Keep that theme going because we're going to see more examples of that as we go forward because we know the sons Of these bloodlines were often giants. That's every bloodline throughout history whether it's egypt with akkadon They're all elongated heads and ancient bloodlines and genetics that we're going to connect around the world and we got the evidence for it So here we are in northern iraq and what we have is not only of giant Giant megalithic cuneiform blocks for the first time that had fed down in there from the civilizations of mount ararat And the re-lowering of kingship to kish Two places at the same time not one So an emergence of civilization with enlil That's i want to be clear about that with enlil and mount ararat and his sons And then an emergence of civilization again in sumer through kish Through enki and the bloodlines of that. So there's there's things going on here that are complicated The point is you also get the first rock relief anywhere in iraq That then ends up being what we see in turkey and iran and petra jordan and in um, saudi arabia It's what i'm saying is The the large megalithic building sophistication. We see we can trace two like van As well as the first rock relief structures We can trace to the turkey area in this part of iraq because those two types of architecture giant rock reliefs in mountains like in india and in iran And giant blocks of stone polygonal stones became the two most sophisticated types of building everywhere in the world That's why i'm trying to point them out because we're we're seeing where they they began right here So this rock relief on the right is a gigantic massive cliff And it's been largely destroyed by war and isis and different things over time But you can still see here's king sinakarib being handed kingship by enlil and Nilo's consort right here now look on the left right here chris you see this yeah That's vitrification that means that this rock melted Proving that this is ancient ancient and talking about earth catastrophes By the way to melt this rock which is largely granite based again As I always say this would have to be temperatures that would exceed 2000 degrees Which is what wiped these civilizations out Now we're going to add more layers to this before we get into bloodlines because i want to save that Just a bit more. We'll we'll get there in a second As we progressed to the to the west and southwest We see progression of sophistication increase Welcome to a place that nobody talks about and it's so sad You're ready for one of the saddest sites chris besides iridu Welcome to aim Aindara syria destroyed by turkey bombs in 2018.  I'm sure they meant to drop those bombs For group of insurgents and they just accidentally happened to land on one of the sophisticated ancient temples in the world I've seen those those deliberate attempts to erase history in the middle east and a lot of those areas I mean, there's no doubt that they are intentionally destroying a lot of that stuff That theme is everywhere. This history we're doing right now. This is what's trying to be wiped out. Mm-hmm That's what this is now aim dar in syria Most people have never heard of it when they originally discovered it a farmer discovered it because this gigantic basalt line on the right Was just sticking his just his head was sticking above the ground And they uncovered it and they realized it was a massive temple, but it had some strange attributes to it First of all, everything was built in basalt chris remember where we saw the basalt building. Hmm. What about hadas tepi What about in Cape kef kilesi basalt the hardest rock we know And then all of a sudden We see it in syria But we see it in a weird way. We see it building massive lions, which is an originally a Sumerian symbol Yeah, but only that we see the first place anywhere on earth with giant footprints That is not an illusion. Go look up aim dara They created this temple and they actually created intentionally footprints that are enormous And supposedly like it's a temple to the gods and they that was their footprints And a lot this temple was dedicated to ishtar and ishtar Becomes a major figure in role in these regions as well as animal and enki. This whole thing is like a battle of ancient gods It's very interesting to create civilizations. So here's the first one You see I just I need to point out some people be like, I don't understand the big deal about this basalt's one of the hardest rocks on earth to create these Multimassive megalithic stones with the tools were told would have been impossible to and truthfully We would have trouble in some of these stones today The precision and the ability for them to do this We have no idea how they did it the tools or anything and that's the that's what I want to echo with all of this This emergence of this civilization began It's the beginning of when we became advanced And what's keep going? Let's go to the next place As we continue southwest and west We get to a place called ebbla Syria and I've talked a little bit about ebbla, but I want to bring it up again Now in ebbla the megaliths are a little bit different, but they're similar Um, they look like something more like zernaki tepe So there's maybe some influences slightly of different Differences, but but they're similar there in ebbla. We find the primitive work on top Just like we see throughout all this is all primitive work by the way except for right here And right here. Yeah Right, this is the original remnants of the original temple This is and then they of course they came later and had other civilizations that built on top of it But ebbla ended up at this at this time period in history ended up becoming one of the most important and prominent Trading cities in the world because this is proximity to the Mediterranean ocean Egypt and Turkey It was the center of everything And that's what it became and it had the second largest library Besides the asher bonapal library ever found in the world The library found at ebbla is again, I want to reiterate the second largest library ever found and it contains cuneiform writings not only from asyria Not only from Babylonian, but from Sumerian And that's important because they're going to see Sumerian had no place here And that it was a later Assyrian civilization, but we have Sumerian writings here, but not only that chris Because this is the glue that holds it all together. We have Egyptian writings here We have Sumerian writings here and we have The Mount Errat civilization, which we know as ancient Armenian. That's the writing they used in cuneiform It's all here and from Cyprus in the Mediterranean All of a sudden you see where everything connects is that they had made their way Towards the Mediterranean become more and more sophisticated as they went along And it gave rise to other civilizations like the pre classical Greeks Knows the Ionian Greeks or Athenian Greeks and we'll get into that in a second But the point is we have the megaliths here. Look at here's your megaliths Highly precise incredible compared to the other stuff Only in a couple segments and the ancient libraries here that connected all now Again, there's that library I wanted to show it for people that want to see it because most of these ancient texts haven't even translated It's still like like the Sumerian stuff. This is what they found just like the asher bonapole library Another incredible library of ancient knowledge Who knows what secrets will come out of this one in the future as well But it's it's that site where all of a sudden we can connect it now I want to get into where this is like It starts to make even more sense for people This is from Isiadors Ancient encyclopedia It's like basically a Hebrew Bible and I know that we have to be careful on religious stuff. Obviously we know that but We have to still consider the possibility that some of this is true not the dating But some of the other aspects of it and that's what I want people to see this Is that this is exactly what we're finding We're three sons of Ziazudra, right shem, ham and jabbath now remember way back here chris King hake is considered a son of jabbath And it just so happens. It's right next to monerat completely coincidence right and the fact that We see similarities with enok in egypt and enok is supposed to be directly connected to this as well It's the more you get into this the more you start like scratching your head and be like Well, okay, we'll look at this for a minute. So shem goes to asia Right, so did you shem then he took this rock relief building technology and created all the indian temples And then all the southeast asian temples and then created lemuria mu is is that possible? And then jabbath moved west through europe and goes from turkey and creates the ancient ethanians And they eventually become the the atlantians And then look at look at um ham ham, you know, ham or ham depending on your pronunciation goes down and eventually Creates egypt and the dogan and king atlas and maritania and There's something going on here chris. There's something going on here because it can't be a coincidence that that these Areas are like divine direct connections to the ancestry of untanepishtim and all these bloodline kings Now let's take another step further. This map was already created showing that It looks exactly like the way these structures were built chris. Look the areas in red sons of jabbath Here's the black sea. Here's mount errat Look, it's his territory. Look at africa ham's territory with egypt. But look at this. Look at shem Right down through the persian gulf in this hole. It's like exactly the way it's we see it depicted in these and then What we're going to do here is i want to then expand on this right here this map on our right now imagine If we read playdough's description of the timmius incredius with atlantis You find atlantis had a rival civilization known as the athenians And that's that's going to be in the new season that i am so excited guys We do see how much work We put into this but the new season of ancient civilizations Is going to go into territory it never has we're going to break open this entire war the ancient athenian civilization That's never talked about the point is its patron god is enlil zeus right it's the same movement west west From jabbath's sons and enlo being the patron god in creating the megaliths We find the same megaliths in ancient greece guys delphi the oracle of delphi the stories there All of it connects is that what we find is that all of a sudden megaliths appear in western turkey too And we see these demigods and these rulers like king mitis and the figrian valley And as we move into anatolya with sam simian and gobekli tepi guys That's where it comes from it starts spreading west and it goes all the way down through syria northern iraq I ran and it gets in the mediterranean and it creates the ionian and athenian greeks And they become incredibly sophisticated for their level and then it moves out But it doesn't go directly west from here And this is of course a whole nother slideshow we can get into But what it looks like more so is that enlil and his sons and this civilization mount ararat Perfected themselves in greece. They stopped that was there That was where they went to create their perfected civilization And at the same time because we find the megaliths there guys too on the bottom most levels It's right there, but the same time something else happened It atlantis isn't described as starting from the greeks It's not described as that at all. It's described as being egyptian and it's described as being african Because when we go to maritania in western africa You find the atlas mountains and the sons of atlas became the great ancient kings of atlantis with persidium So what does that mean? It means that enlil in japeth took europe and the mediterranean for their civilization with ishtar Their civilization and enki and other sons like thoth They they traveled in africa and egypt, of course may have been created many times We have no idea how many times that's been started But they went through africa and i think that's where the whole story of the dogan comes in The dogan meeting This whole idea of this aquatic being that teaches about serious and all this stuff It's because they were traveling through africa and creating all these things so they created Eventually, you know egypt, uh, the land of kem and then the dogan and then the ancient kings of molly molly in maritania Maritania became the launching pad for when the sons of atlas then created Atlantis and that's it came off of the offshoot of here And that's why we see such african influences with the omec in mexico because this essentially the omec are like the dogan It's it's all there as a migratory route of great sages and kings to create what would eventually become The lost legendary civilizations of atlantis and luma maria But i believe they all came from the errat civilization and the sumerians and that's i believe that's how It's spread around the world to create This incredible sophisticated chapter of civilization from peru and egypt all the way up through the atlantians and ethanians And the sumerians and the iranians and up in the persians again and up into turkey and they're all wiped out chris they're all wiped out and that was a chapter that like we largely think is a myth and we have trouble connecting i believe This is incredible matt. This is amazing the connections you've made with this Now i want to go back for a second to the gods and your understandings of who or what these beings Were you were saying that the the kingship and the knowledge was handed down from above Now does this mean the gods came from somewhere else? Or were they just advanced more robust larger human beings that had advanced consciousness abilities and knowledge or were they actually from Somewhere else coming here giving us this this advanced knowledge and abilities This has been probably the hardest question of my life chris and because i have read More ancient tablets than i know of than anyone and i have looked and just obsessed over anything that talks about origins of the anuna Anything relating to anything that they have in there, right? And the only thing that makes sense is the way that george smith describes it george smith was the first a Seriologist he was like honestly one of my greatest heroes and the greatest heroes of mankind that hasn't been Properly identified he was the first person to break the samaritan code Meaning samaritan was a dead language that had died out for thousands of years and nobody left alive knew how to speak it That's what's so fascinating about it. Is it truly is the alien language you've been looking for it's samaritan It's a language isolate, which means it doesn't share any similarities with any of the other languages on earth Meanwhile ancient armenian is the core root language that then eventually became the greeks in a lot of the turkish languages So there's another layer there for you to consider is that the armenian highlands mount errat Is the birthplace of that language that then spread out throughout europe Now to get into your answer george smith He was like a master at understanding the ancient world and the ancient samarians and he translated more text than anyone in his time He was the first And he he once said at the end of the chaldean account of the chaldean account of genesis That he all he could figure out is that the annunas seem to be beings that came from before and then later in different time periods of our history to make specific Contributions here for a reason one of them being creating civilization here and creating us and other things being Potentially even like stabilizing in creating the world as we know it today And I know that's an extremely difficult thing to wrap your head around But we have to understand that the more you dig into this in the depths of how The obsession over these kings and the obsession over the gods that then appointed them And how the obsession over these bloodlines and we're not even done yet chris. I have a couple more slides Yeah But the obsession over that is real and it's because it comes from a place that we've forgotten We've forgotten that we are gods We are them and we have forgotten that that is this legacy that we're that we're missing now chris, where do they come from? As far as I can tell they are They may be someone most powerful beings in the universe and they likely came from another universe It's that's all I can say it's like beyond my comprehension because they seem to be Omnipotent and and nothing is beyond their power. They talk about creating entire like moving planets and creating an entire Ecosystems and things like that in the enumetlish. It's bizarre They seem to take an interest in the natural world and they seem to be battling against the chaos of the natural world It's echoed that throughout history that they want something to be in a certain way But something is chaotic and can't support life in a certain way. So they alter it Interesting. It's very I think we should my my I guess what I want to say chris is Based on what I've studied I think we need to change the narrative a little bit and start never start underestimating How powerful we are and how powerful This whole story is and how it connects to them this it's all we're all connected We are them they are us our stories are interchanged but I want to give you the genetic proof chris Yeah, because when I find there are gonna be people right now that just listen to this So like I don't believe it still I don't believe it. Atlanteans were created by a space force that came down. I don't believe it. Okay Fine, but how about this? We find this very similar architecture in other parts of the world That's what just showed you in turkey and other places right in egypt and other areas but we also find Proof of it being connected the proof is besides the stories of the ancient Ancient Peruvians and Inca saying that virekoshia was their great sage and then besides the similarities with kukukon In ketsu kwadal to the Aztec and Maya. Let's just put those aside for a second who are all the same by the way Besides that we'll be fine that a wonderful man researching in brian forester Who has spent a lot of time along with gaya studying the skulls of paracus peru chris Do you I'm sure you remember these right? Oh, yeah, I've interviewed brian before yeah skulls of paracus peru Are bizarre number one of they're elongated And number two They've done genetic testing on them and the results came back shocked everyone The genetic testing for the paracus skulls came back for being from the caucus black sea area of near mont errat in turkey That's where the genetics came from for peru is the exact area of mont errat civilization There it is I'm people want to bring Alternative theories for that or challenge me. How else can you explain it? We see the exact same architecture same gods same influences and we have genetic testing that proves that it came from that same area Not only that chris in malta Malta is located here. I'll go back here malta is located here In malta in the hippo gem known as the oracle chamber We found elongated skulls there as well That also were genetically traced to the caucus mounds black sea of turkey Same thing So we have the genetic the genetic traits in the mediterranean for the ancient ethanians As well as the peruvian and the traits here that we know are part of the atlantic civilization So we're we're piecing this story together chris and we're bringing it back and and we're almost done We have two slides left. This is just a quick little thing to show look Our earth goes through catastrophes cyclical catastrophes that are on a scale we can imagine. That's why these these Ruins are destroyed. Some are under water. Some are sunken. Some are just gone forever It's because our earth has gone through traumatic tremendous Good apocalyptic changes and it's wiped these stories out In many cases if they were written on paper and they weren't written in q and a form they would have never survived So that's why there's so little left. We have to wrap our heads around How volatile the earth's history is now last slide chris Just to some just to get the whole thing for people to wrap their heads around Um, I had instinctively not instinctively I should say but when I created this timeline a long time ago I had put all of these ancient Sumerian stuff before 50 000 and people thought I was crazy But it turns out this was right Now I have the odd cases written here because I think this is when it was written But it's a story that came from here Now that's how this whole thing fits in in my opinion Uh, if I was going to move one thing in here chris, I might move kish back up over here Hmm I I might move I'm I'm starting to lean on Moving kish and some of these a little bit older. I think this could adjust a bit I think some of these things might be able to be moved around But largely this is something I want people to wrap their heads around to encompass what I just talked about To get a better understanding of how these rises and falls seem to happen But to make it very clear just to point out younger driest catastrophes Don't even seem to be related to the original Sumerian stories at all It seems to be a much earlier event and I know that some people have pointed that out and I appreciate them saying that It turns out they were right. So that's what we're looking at chris is that We are uncovering an entire connection to a lost chapter in human history For the first time showing evidence and genetic testing to back up the whole story to recreate our past To to finally understand the struggles the triumphs We've gone through to lead us to where we are to remember how incredible we once were and how incredible we can be again I love it man And I I loved looking back at where you've come from from our first shows that we did together Until the time that you first started this timeline until now You've done such incredible work and you've brought so much to the table It it truly is changing history matt. I want to thank you so much for all the work you've done This is incredible Before we close out what can we look forward to you said you've got some some things coming out on gaya? yeah, um The new season of ancient civilization season five is going to have a whole host of some of these Topics i'm bringing a lot of this new knowledge into that So just get excited guys because this is going to be an incredible season as well as the new The new book i'm writing. I have decided to make a huge focus of that book be this So what it's going to be is the new book is going to be more like I'm changing the title around us to incorporate the dead binary star with the the connection of Catastrophes and how sumer connects to atlantis So I want to tell this story how catastrophes have destroyed them Introduce the whole alternative hypothesis of the binary star influence with these catastrophes So that'll be something that is not an easy little task to take on but as we go forward chris I want to present this again, and I want to make this established and really get this thing moving Forward and continue adding more discoveries and more connections to it. Yes, definitely I love it mad. This is incredible We'll definitely have to do this as you come up with more information and research And we'll do it again soon and before you head out let everyone know where they can find your work The best way to access your stuff and social media all your good stuff Thanks chris. Um guys if you want to check out my work and you're just sitting more Please check out my website the stage of time.com as well as my youtube channel matthew LaCroix and I'm on instagram at the stage of time and we got a lot of exciting things to come And I just want to give one last announcement for people that are asking Um, we had some unfortunate delays on the epic of humanity, but it is going to ship soon I promise guys it's supposed to ship in june and at the latest july So look for that coming soon and then we can move forward on some other exciting new things All right, don't don't miss that book guys because it's got to have it's the most ancient text even more than the stage of time It is your library of of ancient knowledge. I love it man My brain's about to leak out of my ears right now. This is so exciting Matt will do this again soon and until next time everyone have an excellent evening We will talk again on sunday. We'll see y'all then


Welcome to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes. This podcast was created to provide you the information and tools Doc Snipes gives our clients so that you too can start living happier. Our website, docsknipes.com, has even more resources, videos, and handouts, and even interactive sessions with Doc Snipes to help you apply what you learn. Go to docsknipes.com to learn more. Welcome to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes, practical tools to improve your mood and quality of life. We're going to continue with our segments on the causes of depressive symptoms and ways to address them. In this segment, we're going to talk about the causes, consequences, and possible interventions for agitation and restlessness. Now, a lot of times when you're depressed, you're not thinking about agitation and restlessness, but there are many, many people who have these symptoms when they are depressed. They can't sit still. They're agitated. They feel like they need to stay moving all the time. They're depressed. They're not getting pleasure from most things. They're having difficulty sleeping. They meet other criteria for depression, but they've also got this other symptom going on. So we're going to take a look at that. Agitation and restlessness is often, but not always, accompanied by worry. Sometimes people worry a lot. When you worry and worry and worry, eventually you just start running out of gas and you start feeling hopeless and helpless because you're not able to make that worry go away, which is when the depression starts kicking in. But there's also people who are depressed or even when they're depressed that have agitation and restlessness and it's not even associated with worry really. They just can't sit still and they're trying to find something to do that's going to make them happy and nothing seems to work. Noripinephrine is your get up and go neurotransmitter. Too much of it or too little serotonin can cause feelings of agitation. So whether you don't have enough serotonin or you've got too much noripinephrine, you need to look at what's going on. Either way, you're going to feel agitated. When your body perceives stress for too long, it'll determine it may be unwinnable and may reduce noripinephrine and dopamine, turning down that threat response system that we've talked about, leading to fatigue and apathy.  There's nothing we can do about this. I surrender. I give up. I'm going to save energy for when it's really important for when I really need to fight or flee. Unfortunately, when your body tries to save energy and it reduces its response, you don't feel pleasure either. You need noripinephrine to feel pleasure in addition to feel stress. It's your get up and go. Whether it's get up and go and woo-hoo or get up and go and fight or flee. So agitation busters is what we're going to call them in this segment. Exercise helps release serotonin. They've done many, many studies. They've found that exercise can help with depressive symptoms. That's great. It doesn't mean you've got to get into the gym and get into target heart rate range and all this kind of other stuff, especially if you haven't been exercising or if you don't even like exercising. Exercise means get your body moving.  But anything is better than nothing. You don't necessarily have to get what we typically think of as exercise.  It'll help release serotonin. It also uses, if you want to use that term, excess nervous energy. I find when I'm really stressed out and I'm agitated, especially if it's maybe I've got a job interview coming up or some sort of other thing coming up that I'm a little nervous about. I'm not persistently worried, but I'm a little stressed. I may have more nervous energy. If I get up and I put that energy to use for something, then I'm not dwelling on whatever it is that I'm worried about, and I'm also getting the benefit of getting something positive done. Cut down, if not out, stimulants. Remember if you've been using caffeine for a long time and you just cut it out cold turkey, you're going to likely get headaches and stuff. Anytime you switch anything in your diet, start an exercise program, talk to your doctor, but be aware that switching to decaf can help or, hey, even water. Water is even better, but I'm being realistic here. Some things to be careful of, and I've noticed even more since I've quit using caffeine after like 10, 30, 11 o'clock in the morning, is the lot of fast food restaurants that you go to don't have an option for anything caffeine-free that is also sugar-free. Because I don't drink sugar either, I usually end up with water. Water is great for you. Don't get me wrong. That's wonderful. But do be aware that it's not just coffee that has caffeine. Caffeine is found in root beer, Sprite, ginger, or I'm sorry. Caffeine is found in Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, and Mountain Dew, and other drinks like tea. Beer, Sprite, ginger ale, 7up, decaf sodas, and Powerade-type drinks generally don't have caffeine in them. I put the links down here for, actually I didn't, for caffeine. You can Google what has caffeine in it. Just Google things like soft drinks and caffeine amounts. And there are lots of different websites that have charts that will show you how much caffeine is in various different things. The other stimulant that a lot of people use is nicotine. Again, in an ideal world, we would cut it out. If you're not ready, willing, or able to do that, you may want to consider cutting back on nicotine. There are smokeless tobacco products as well as cigarettes that have much lower levels of nicotine than other brands. So if you're trying to gradually cut back down, you can look at these different websites, and find something that has less nicotine than what you're currently using. Again, also you can talk to your doctor about nicotine replacement therapy and things like that. But there are options, I guess is my point to you. You're not going to stick to something if you feel miserable. So figuring out what's realistic for you is going to be really important in busting that agitation, because if when you get stressed out, you tend to reach for a cigarette or some other sort of nicotine product, if you cut that out, then when you start to get stressed, what do you reach for? So there needs to be something in there to help you bridge that gap until you develop new habits. And you want to make sure that you're not going to get so stressed out about quitting the nicotine that it makes your agitation even worse. Nutrition. Eat foods high in taurine, mackerel, eggs, and brewers yeast. You can do a internet search to find other things, if none of those sound really good to you. But taurine can help your brain produce GABA. GABA is one of your calming neurotransmitters. Drink enough water and don't let your blood sugar get too low. When your body systems get out of whack, think about your car and how you have to check all the fluids all the time and make sure that you've got the right kind of gas. Same thing for your body. And most of us, and I'm not saying everybody, but most of us, when our blood sugar gets too low, we get hangry, which is a cross between hungry and angry. We want food and we want it now. Some people also get shaky, which adds to their agitation and irritability. Get focused. Too many irons in the fire can keep you on edge. If you've got 14 different projects going and you feel like you're being pulled in 14 different directions. Yeah, you're probably going to be agitated and stressed because you're trying to juggle too many balls. So see how many you compare it down to and do it in a succession. So maybe get three goals accomplished and then add three more and then work on it like that instead of trying to do 15 at once. Make sure when you're getting focused and you're prioritizing those goals, you're focusing on those goals that are going to help you move toward those people, things and goals that are most important to you. Because that'll increase your motivation and reduce your agitation because you're going to feel good about what you're doing. Stay busy. If your agitation is just, you know, I'm trying to do something to feel better, they're sitting still. I don't feel good moving. I don't feel good. Sometimes it's helpful just to stay busy, pick up a hobby like crocheting or reading or doing crossword puzzles. You can go down the Pinterest rabbit hole. I know my daughter does that on a regular basis. We'll be sitting there in the evening and all of a sudden I won't hear anything from her for like an hour and she's just down that Pinterest rabbit hole. But it is occupied her for that hour. You can clean. If worse comes to worse, clean. That's when I was in college, that used to be my go-to. People could always tell when I was a little bit stressed or agitated because I would be cleaning the baseboards. That was my thing. I've always been a freak about floors and baseboards. Mindfulness, identify your vulnerabilities. And I have other presentations, other podcasts that I've already done on understanding vulnerabilities, being mindful of what you need in order to be less vulnerable to getting upset. So think about it. If you wake up and you're feeling rested, you're well nourished, you're hydrated, it's a sunny day outside. You know, you've got good friends. You feel loved. You know, you are really buffered against stress as opposed to the days that you wake up and you're not feeling well, you're running late for work, you didn't get enough sleep, yada, yada, yada. And you kind of wake up and you're in a bad state. Those days you probably react more strongly to anything negative that comes your way than the days you get up and, you know, you've got that good buffer going. So identify your vulnerabilities and work with them. You know, ideally you want to prevent as many as possible and try to work on making sure that you're taking care of yourself. But sometimes like last night, we had thunderstorms all night long and y'all know I let my dogs sleep in the bedroom. And one of my dogs is terrified of thunder. So every couple of hours when a thunderstorm would come through, he would get up, jump off the bed and start pacing around like an expectant little father just waiting for the thunderstorm to go away. So I didn't sleep well last night knowing that coming into work today, I knew I was going to be less productive and I just accepted that.  So identify your vulnerabilities, prevent as many as possible.  Give yourself some compassion and go, you know what, I just got to kind of roll with the hand that I got dealt this morning. Identify your strengths, figure out what you're good at.  You've got something to bring to every situation and identify thoughts you're having, which are triggering your agitation. If you're having some distress, intolerant thoughts like I can't stand this or I have to get this, why do you have to get it? Is the world going to end? You want to look for cognitive distortions and unhelpful thoughts that are triggering anxiety and triggering your inability to feel grounded and content. Meditation or yoga can help you focus on your breath. And if you're focusing on your breath, you're not focusing on everything out here. You're really focusing on paying attention to inhale and exhale. Maybe listening to your heartbeat, whatever it is that you do in your practice. Get a physical.  You may feel more agitated or on the other side, you may feel lack of motivation and apathetic. So it's important to rule out, rule out any of the easy things. As we age, all of that stuff gets a little bit wonky. So it's important to work with your doctor and it may not be taking pharmaceuticals. It may be a matter of getting more exercise or taking additional vitamin supplements to help you maintain the energy levels and stuff that you had when you were 20. Oxytocin is a great agitation buster. That is our bonding chemical. We find that a hug that lasts about 20 seconds or more can help release oxytocin and help people feel calmer and less agitated. Now, we can't necessarily, when we're at work, walk up to somebody and go, I need a hug. And you may not have an animal at your office place either.  So if you can get an animal that is conducive to that. My cat Mojo, love the little guy, but he is the greatest therapy cat. And I know you think cats aren't therapy animals, but he is. He can tell when I'm stressed and he whenever I am, he gets on my stomach and will pad on my chest for a little while and then he'll just lay down and get all comfy. And he knows that I'm not going to move as long as he's comfortable. So we both end up kind of calming down or he calms me down, whatever you want to say. But when I'm not stressed, he would rather not be in my lap. So it's definitely a direct correlation between my agitation levels and, you know, he helps me feel calmer and more grounded. So animals are great. Examine your environment. If you are an extrovert and you're not getting enough stimulation, you could be getting restless, which could cause agitation. You're pacing around kind of like a caged animal going, I got to talk to somebody. I got to be around somebody because I feel like I'm just rattling around in between these walls. Knowing that you can take steps, find meetups online, sometimes online chat rooms are helpful. But for a lot of extroverts, you really actually need the human face-to-face interaction. Perceivers, on the other hand, with too much structure may feel like a caged animal. So perceivers are the ones that tend to like spontaneity. They don't like too much structure.  Perceivers are going to get very agitated and very restless with that kind of structure. So it's important that they figure out ways to integrate spontaneity and some fun into their lives so they don't get resentful and agitated. Agitation and restlessness are caused by neurotransmitter and or hormone imbalances, which can be caused by worrying about things. You know, that's kind of the obvious one. Physical causes and it can be just aging. It doesn't have to be anything life-threatening or overwhelming. It can be just you're getting older or environmental causes. So paying attention to what lifestyle factors may be contributing to your agitation and just inability to sit still. If agitation is due to anxiety, then it's important to address whatever threats are causing you to feel like you need to fight or flee. So, you know, you can work on that with a therapist. You can make a list of the things that you're thinking about and identify which of them are worth your time to address and which of them you just kind of need to let go and then figure out how to do that. If agitation is due to something else than minimizing vulnerabilities, getting enough sleep, eating well, having good social support and aiding your body and rebalancing will be imperative. So sometimes agitation is caused by, like I said, aging. So you want to do your best to give your body as much energy as it needs to rebalance so you can feel really good. And that will help you feel better and probably reduce some of your agitation. If you like this podcast, you can subscribe on your favorite podcast. Join our Facebook group at docsnipes.com or join our community at docsnipes.com.


Good afternoon everybody and thanks for attending my presentation. Thanks for having the conference and for having a chance to share what I have been doing in the last three years at the Center for Development Research in Bonn. I'm based in there as a PhD student and I've been working with colleagues there. Joachim von Braun was a big support and in both countries I had local support which I couldn't present the findings I'm presenting today. It's an attempt to do a synthesis of two chapters of my thesis and I haven't done that before, so bear with me if I... Yeah, maybe the consistency can be improved. But I will try to share and I will start with a brief outline of the trend of large-scale land acquisitions in the last six, seven years and I will then say how I conceptualized the phenomenon and how I went about the analysis and then I will come into the case studies I picked. It's a case study approach so there is limitations for generalization but I still think there's some findings which might hold true for other settings. We can discuss it afterwards and I'm happy to see that there's more research coming because there is need, obviously I leave a lot of blanks. It's difficult to get data on these land acquisitions. The attempt was done by the land matrix who use media reported deals and cross-checked them in country with partners. Those are the numbers they have produced. They are like a week old. They update and continuously you can go on the web page even if you know a new case you can tell them. I have doubts about the total reliability because there's media bias and everything but it's a nice approximation. These are the investing countries so you see Europe is there, Africa has quite a lot of deals but Asia is a big investor and South Africa also from Latin America we have a number of investments. Those are the recipient countries where the investments are targeted. We see that East Africa is very prominent, West Africa as well and Southeast Asia, Laos and Cambodia receive a lot of attention. This has partly to do with how vividly governments also promote these investments and what is the situation of land availability. What is the situation? There's a number of risks. Land grabbing is often labeled so if legitimate users lose their right to land be it the private farmland or the communal land around the village is a big threat. The unsustainable resource use is another threat not to be underestimated exploitation of labor but there's also opportunities. It might generate additional employment opportunities which then reduce poverty. Market access might improve as well as infrastructure. The question arises can they serve as an engine for growth and can this growth be inclusive? What do I mean by inclusive? We can discuss on that. I insert Eric Tobbex because he mentioned it this morning. I consider if it's pro-poor so the poorest part of the population is gaining at least proportionally to others and so inequality is not raising. I see those impacts not happening directly but through a number of channels. I identify five main channels for my research. There might be others in the two settings I was working those I think are the most important ones. Here we go. Three of them I consider as the factors of production so land maybe not surprising as the main transmitting channel labor and natural resources. The values of these factors might change land might become more valuable or less transferability of land might change and who gets access. Similarly for labor there might be more jobs but who has access to them and what is the wage level? Natural resources I think is important to underline that small holders and rural population they're not only farming and business people but a lot of them are also foresters in a sense so they use forest products to complement their income in the dry season. Natural resources surrounding these communities are important and I will show how that is the case for the Ethiopian case. Technology could be a big impact. Martin was telling yesterday at the opening that that is one of the ways to overcome poverty traps technology and knowledge about new technology this could spread through an investment potentially they could introduce new crops new production new ways of producing and also organization of production. So this is if we think an institutional economic power that is the kind of where the contracting and the organization of production might change and then there is the institutional level and the market level so property rights could be affected or violated and the property right regime might change so customary systems might be challenged and because the center might enforce the legal system in an area where before it wasn't enforced so there might be for the local setting kind of distinct change. How do I go about it? What I'm trying to do is impact evaluation and the biggest problem is attribution. I mean the world doesn't stand still while these investments happen there's other things happening and some of the change you will only see after a certain amount of time. Broadly there's two type of impact evaluations you could do one is the counterfactual based impact evaluation which is very rigorous you have a counterfactual and then you can see what is the treatment effect and you can measure effect. I'm not able to do that in my cases. There was no good data for the Ugandan case and in the Ethiopian case it's an early stage so it's too early to say anything about the impact. The data I collected could be used as a baseline in three, four, five years to do some measurements but so what did I do? I combined an ex-post and an ex-anti-analysis to share, to look at the both case studies. So one case the Ugandan case the Ethiopian case is an early stage investment Ethiopian was promoting these investment activities since 2008 and there was a big number of investments coming in and the case I looked at also started and I used the survey data I collected in 2010-2011 as a baseline to calibrate a model which then shows some potential future evolution of the project. The other case, Uganda is an old investment it has changed in the ownership but the routes go back to early colonial, post-colonial times in the late 60s and there I also was there in 2011 to get my data so I could use the observation from then and try to understand how we reached that situation so it's a more analytical narrative approach institutional economic like and today I will try to combine those two. Data sources so I used a lot of qualitative sources to get myself acquainted with the situation in both settings I spent significant time in both country contexts I mean that's what a young researcher is good for he doesn't have the big support but he has time so he can go there and sit and talk with the farmers and that helped a lot I understood much better what the situation was but I was also able to do a survey not very big 140 households in Ethiopia and 117 Uganda but still it tells something about the local population and yeah I will show some of that this is the Uganda case we're located in the eastern part of Uganda close to Kenya this is the main road going to the port and to the coast so quite a lot of traffic there's markets and shops around the road it's one of the poorer areas in Uganda and you see here those green areas are wetlands and the red area is the investment the investment has a history it started as a Chinese rice development scheme after 20 years the Chinese left and the government took over and was operating as a state farm and then it was privatized and now it's operated under an Indian UK private company the other case Uganda, Ethiopia is located in the very far western corner of Ethiopia Gambela region is the lowland part of Ethiopia bordering southern Sudan it's quite remote so in that sense it's quite different from the Uganda case and it's not very densely populated it's only a few people per square kilometer and there's two distinct ethnic groups in the Uganda case it's much more mixed there's a number of settlements those dots are the local villages and I did surveys in all these villages the investment is planned to be 10,000 hectares this is the size of the investment and there's a lake where they use irrigation both investments are producing rice so I have a similar crop to compare and in the simulation I will show the results of later I basically assumed an area of 100,000 hectares being the affected area so I used proximity to define the local context which I'm interested in I'm looking at the local implications and then I run some simulation where I take away 10,000 hectares out of these 100,000 and see how the situation changes but I come to that in a minute this is the situation today in eastern Uganda it's the rice producing part of Uganda for lowland rice and let's see how did we get there so I identified four drivers that led to the conversion of wetlands so today all the wetland is converted into rice fields situation you know from Asia for Africa it's not yet that popular a first driver was after the Chinese started and some people had worked there they acquired the skills and spent after work some time to plant on their plots a second driver was the restructuring of these commercial farms so when the Chinese left and the state government took over a large share of the worker were laid off two thirds of the worker so they lost their main source of employment and they started using their skills rice to produce a cash crop and the same thing happened again in the 90s so the organizational change was actually a big technology push which was not planned but it happened in addition there's two other drivers population increase and relative price change the source of knowledge so I was asking the today's rice farmers so where do you know where did you learn from how to cultivate rice and parents and neighbors are the most important source and if we look at the history even initially neighbors were important but the parents are becoming more and more important it's a small sample but it shows some of the representative some of the shares the other so the work at the investment side also matters and especially if I asked people so you learned it from your uncle where did your uncle get it from often the uncle used to be a foreman at the farm and teach them so the spread from the knowledge spread is something we can see land values I mentioned already there's a vivid rental market now in Uganda so all the wetland is converted but farmers who don't have land can rent land from neighbors and they change the plots very often on seasonal basis and I was interested to find information how did that change in the past and when was actually the point that all the land was converted and it was difficult to get good data on these issues but I did some recall questions and what is happening today is actually that they pay 120 USD per acre per season so that's quite an amount the local users pay on the rental market that tells something about the probability of growing rice in that area and the importance for the livelihood actually much more than the investor pays this is the situation in Ethiopia at the top you see the construction work going on on this large scale farm and here you see the test field which might be a situation in a couple of years if they manage to really operate 10,000 hectares the model I did and that model is always a kind of an approximation I basically considered those two groups which are quite distinct along a number of features and I have another paper on that I'm not going into detail each of the group has seven livelihood activities so mixed livelihood approach and for each of the activities they have each of the activities creates an output which are then priced in monetary terms and requires a set of inputs and then I can say as the investment evolves those might change the shadow prices of the inputs might change and there's two constraints in the area which I motivate from observation and from literature there's a market constraint the area is very isolated at the beginning but as the investment arrives more demand for local produced services will increase and there's a labor market constraint it's a very remote part in Ethiopia there's little labor rental between the farmers and there's no other jobs than the civil service with a few jobs and one hospital I do... well I did a bit more scenarios but what I present now is three scenarios the base run which shows the mix of these activities for each of the groups then I take away 10,000 hectares of forest savanna land and see what is the impact on the local populations and the local income and per capita terms then a second scenario is the evolution of the big investment to 10,000 hectares size that is the plan and the investor is very ambitious to following up and then putting a lot of money there so he might succeed it's a question when it will be profitable but they are trying to get it done an alternative scenario which is a utopian inclusive policy measure so if the Ethiopian government would decide to have only given away half the area to a foreign investor but invest also in smallholder productivity so increase some extension service a little bit more infrastructure so basically lower the isolation and increase the productivity of smallholders the moment is quite low compared to what can be reached in this area and those are the results of these simulations so you see the indigenous group on the left and the settler group on the other side and those groups, what do I distinguish here the indigenous is a nylotic tribe group that lived in the area for more than a century and the settler group is also a group that have been moved there by the former regime in the 80s but they are using different technologies for example the settler group is using ox-plowing agriculture while the indigenous group is mostly relying on manual agriculture so this dotted line is the per capita income for both groups and we see that the investment will lift people out of poverty on average for both groups however the gains of the settler group are even higher I will show that in the next table and we see a kind of structural change that employment, or farm employment is increasing not so surprising I'm running out of time so I have to be quick those are the relative changes of each of the activities and you see agriculture activity goes down so the gathering, so the relative importance and absolute importance, it remains an important contribution and employment is the biggest push for total income and incomes go up by 50% if the investment really evolves to this mega size with a lot of jobs created what happens to shadow prices, that's one of the nice features of doing the simulation that you can say what are the constraining inputs and what happens to their appreciation by the local population so one finding is that farmland per se is not scarce in that area, it's the labor invested in the land which is the limiting factor people could convert more of the savanna land into fields but they just don't have big enough families to do so and shadow price for labor goes up as other opportunities arrive forest land remains relatively high with the indigenous group and it is lower already in the beginning but it even falls by 50% for the settler group and the settler group has a more structural shift compared to the indigenous group okay, to sum up the value for land might increase and might not it did in the case of Uganda there is more population pressure and there's already high intensity of use in the Ethiopian case land per se is not scarce labor has the potential to increase income in both cases, the off farm employment was a big part of the simulation part in Ethiopia and also of the stories in Uganda natural resources remain important in the Ethiopian case if they lose 10% of the forest land they were using it causes 4-5% loss of income for the indigenous group so the impact is quite significant it's compensated by off farm employment but it's still important and that is not considering general biodiversity gains of forest land technology diffusion does happen but not automatically so in the Uganda case the early phase is to be said that the Chinese were also focusing on transmit technology, the big investor nowadays doesn't and it mainly triggered through shocks when people were laid off institutions in both cases the property right regimes were not violated when it comes to the private land so the farm land people had but the communal land was taken away and you could see a change in the power balance that was made as an important one what can I say regarding to the title of the paper it's a relative positive picture to growth, so the growth in both micro settings has been stimulated by the investment mainly through the employment channel but also through business activities of the shops and everything inclusive, mixed and here it depends whether we go for what definition we take in both settings it was the better off parts who could gain better, who were earlier like those who had access to wetland could gain into rice and everything but also the land less had a chance to get jobs the role of small holders in the Egypt in case I did the simulation it has similar poverty effects if you would focus on small holders besides in the Ugandan case and I probably didn't mention that the laying off also led to that people who had worked together in the brick factory or in other units they formed farmer organizations so there was actually transforming of the groups and some of these groups are very innovative in the rice growing in the area so the role of small holders remains very important thanks for your attention and thanks to those who funded my research