Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here to the whole gang. And this makes this an official episode of the Stuff You Should Know. Please disregard some previous ones where it was just me and Chuck. Just disregard him. I don't even listen to them, And if you have listened to them, actively forget what you learned. Have you ever seen before well, let'sen not reveal what's happened. Did you ever see the Georgia guidestones. I was a bit of a schlub and assume that I would just be able to some other time. Okay, did you No? I never had any interest. I wasn't like passionately interested, but I thought i'd be kind of cool. And then I looked on a map. I was like, oh, that's where they are. I don't really feel like going over there, so I'm just going to put it off and put it off. I always thought it was kind of silly, and I still do even more so probably, but sure it's fun to talk about. No, for sure, like this is um I think if you don't take it as partially silly. You are being a little too serious. But that's also not to say like they were intended and as any sort of joke or with any sort of silliness. I think the earnestness with which they were put up, along with the earnestness which with which some people took them, that's what really kind of makes it silly. From like an outside observer's point of view, I think, yeah, I agree. And what we're talking about are what's known as the Georgia Guide Stones a k a. America's Stonehenge. Are are ancient, going all the way back to the nineteen eighties. That's why I always thought it was kind of silly anytime they say like something sort of hyperbolic like that, like this is our stone hinge erected in right circa forty two years before present? What is that? Ghostbusters? There's six years before Ghostbusters? Oh we are we doing that again? No? Maybe just this one time, you know, okay? Um. I get why they call them America's Stonehenge though, because they look a bit like Stonehenge, these giant granite slabs uh set on end with cap stones and such. But I think maybe we should go back now. That we've at least told people what the heck these things are. They're inscribed with words. Uh. And that's all we'll give you for now, and then let's go back and talk about the history, because the story of it is is kind of interesting, I think, definitely interesting. I mean there's a lot of mystery that was um purposefully I think, kind of generated around the whole thing, and that mystery starts at the very beginning when a guy named R. C. Christian showed up in Alberton, Georgia. I believe it's the county seat of albert County, which is in the I think extreme east of Georgia, close to the South Carolina border. Correct. Uh, it's it's about thirty five miles sort of east and north of Athens, Georgia, which is, if you don't know where Athens is out there, it's about a hundred miles Athens isn't But Elberton itself is about a hundred miles north and east of Atlanta, so it's headed towards South Carolina, but it's not like on the border. Okay, And for those who aren't familiar with Atlanta, chuck, how far is Atlanta from? Uh? From Montgomery, Alabama. Oh boy, let me get up my map. So it's in the east of Georgia. It's in as One, I think the publisher of the local paper put it. It's as rural as rural can be. And um, there's like at the time that all this happened nineteen seventy nine, when Narci Christians showed up, there were not even six thousand people in the whole town, nineteen thousand people in the entire county. And it seems like the kind of place where there are probably more cows than people at the time. Yeah, I mean, Athens is a great city and a great call down and there's some the classic city uh and there are some great little uh towns outside of Athens, but you know they're small towns in the further creep outside of Athens against superbural. Have you ever been to Madison, Georgia? Sure, Madison is great. It's gorgeous. Man, it is just this hidden littles And yeah, okay, So back to Alberton, right and R. C. Christian in particular summer of nineteen seventy nine, and he shows up in Alberton and probably stuck out like a sore thumb he wore a very expensive suit. He had a certain air of refinement around him. He seemed to be a little erudite. And he showed up. He presented himself at the offices of Alberton Granite Finishing Company. And we should tell you a little bit about Albert County and Alberton in particular. They consider themselves the granite capital of the world, and they make a pretty good case. They are apparently sitting on some of the finest granite in the world in in like right, in like fifty different quarries in the air. You so, if you wanted to get something done in granted, say like America's Stonehenge, this is where you would logically show up. And R. C. Christian did show up, and he talked to the president of Alberton Grant Efficient Finishing Company, Joe Finley, who welcomed him with open arms and got on board immediately. Yeah. I mean I think Joe Finley, as he probably should have been, was a little um well, he was two things. A like you said, he was impressed with this sort of finely dressed, intelligent gentleman, but he was also once he started to hear what this gentleman wanted a little wary of him and thought, all right, this guy is a little weird to me here in Elberton, and maybe some kind of crackpot because Mr Christian, who we would find out that's a pseudonym, uh, said, I represent a small group of loyal Americans and I would like on their behalf to be the liaison to commission a massive structure built out of these huge granite stones that will be here for millions of years. Irony upcoming just put it been in that and it was for the purpose of guiding humanity after the apocalypse. And Finley was like, m you said a little strange to me in his head, but here's what I'll do. I'll do it for this price. And I don't know, I mean, he named a very expensive price, apparently a few times higher than anything he'd ever worked on. And I think it was probably in part because it was one of the bigger jobs he'd ever worked on, and and there may have been a little city boy, country boy thing where he was like, oh, well, I can take this guy for some money. Yeah. Apparently it was far and away the biggest project that the Alberton had ever seen. The next biggest project was the town's bicentennial memorial fountain that they put in the middle of the town, which is nothing to sneeze at, but compared to these Georgia stone projects, it's yeah, it's a little aputian um. Compared to the Georgia guidestones, it's it is you could sneeze all over it. So it was a big project. So it was smart that he was like, I need a lot of money for this um, because he ended up needing a lot of money for it. But I get the impression that he made out pretty well too. Yeah, so uh, Finley of the rock Query said, go see my buddy, Whyatt Martin, he's the president of the local bank here, the Granite City Bank, and go talk to him about how we can finance this thing. And Finley called ahead apparently and told Martin, like, this guy coming over as a little cookie, but you ought to see the suit just way, which is way to you smell. The guy so fine and he's so intelligent. And Martin apparently was also impressed with the guy as well. And this is the point in the story where um, we learned that Wyatt Martin, of the president of this bank, is basically the only person who ever learned the truth about who R. C. Christian really was, because you can't do banking and do this sort of high profile transactions, uh, with pseudonyms. So he tells him his real name, but said, here's the deal, man, I gotta we gotta keep this quiet. I can never be known. Who I'm doing this on behalf of can never be known. And you gotta promise me you're never gonna tell anyone. And once we get all this stuff done and it's settled, you gotta you gotta burn all these documents so it can remain a secret. Yeah, And I mean he chose the right guy to confide and because Wyatt Martin later said in an interview I think in two thousand thirteen that even if you put a gun to his head, he wouldn't tell you the actual I love that part, right, the ideality. Sure, I'm on board. Yeah, he really, he really went full board. From everything that I've ever read, he didn't even tell his wife, like he just took the secret to his grave. He died I think in um and uh he never told a single person. And so after that um RC Christian went back to the Alberton Granite finishing company gave Joe Finley a U shoebox with like a little wooden model of what they were looking for, with some Fisher Price people in there for scale, and then there was like ten pages of instructions that were that were accompanied at and he said to Finley, Uh, you'll never see me again. But he did keep in touch with Martin because Martin agreed to be his and then in turn that group of sponsors representative overseeing the project as as as well as the money man and so um. They ended up becoming pen pals over the years. They kept in touch, um, and they would go to dinner every once in a while UM in Athens. Uh. And yeah they were. They got to be pretty close actually, but um, at the time it was just Martin who was running the show, and just Finley, who was the only other person who had knowingly met this RC Christian guy. Yeah, you know, I waited tables in Athens during the years of I guess that was probably And I always wondered, like that I served this guy one night. Could I have met this mysterious stranger. I do remember a man that smelled really nice in a soup one time, MEXICALI girl did you. Yeah, did you ever serve a stone silver fox in like a nice suit once with another guy who seemed to be a bank president. I did, and he he signed his name anonymous so on this check. So it was very very weird. Like that seems suspicious, but it's college, so I don't care. But here's what happened. This is a very big job for this company. Like we mentioned, um, these stones were not small like you said. They ended up having to jackhammer fourteen feet into the pyramid quarry quarry, which is it quarry Corey? All right? I always say like k w O R r y quarry, Yeah, because query sounds like a query that you said someone. It sounds like the way arc Christian probably said it. Yeah query. I don't know why I said it southern, because we really have no idea where he was from. He could have been from Boss and for all I know, we have potentially an idea. Well that's true, would have been in that too. Uh. So they had to jackhammer down fourteen ft Uh. They had to use a hundred foot tall crane uh to put these stones where they needed to go. And they needed a location, and it turns out there was a local I don't know if he was a real farmer, but he had cattle at least in a lot of land. And it was a point at the highest elevation in the county. Um. It's not you know, some big mountain or anything, because it's pretty flat land over there, but it is the highest elevation and very importantly had really clear views um all around it. Because that'll come into play with sort of the purpose of what these things. What they ended up needing them for. Uh. And so we got five acres for five grand and said here, you and your family forever more can still graze your cattle here. I just want to put these guide stones up. Yeah. Um. And I think the guy, the guy he bought it from, his name was mullen Ax and he wasn't just a straight up farmer. He was a contract or and part of the deal was his company got to um build the base that the whole thing was put on. Just to swen Yeah, there's like a molinex Ford. I'm like, there's no way they're not related. Somehow, I don't know what to school some mullonexis. You never know. Well look him up, chuck on Facebook, friend them and get to the bottom of this mystery. I'm not on Facebook. I'll have to send a letter via carrier pigeon like I used to. There there's one other thing I just want to point out real quick, like this, we said that this project was the biggest that this this county had ever undertaken, and it served as like a point of civic pride from like that point on, Like, no matter how anybody in town felt about the guidestones themselves, they were probably prideful about the amazing job that this this county. The workers in this county came together to produce when they were called upon to do so. That was definitely part of it because it was a huge, massive undertaking. And it also not only does do you have like hats off to the people of Albert County for having done this, think about people who used to quarry stuff, like the people who made Stonehenge without like hundred foot cranes and jackhammers to go fourteen feet into the ground like that. It's just mind boggling when you think of it like that too. Absolutely uh. And as far as Albert County goes, they got a a genuine tourist attraction which they didn't have before and so this was sort of one of the reasons apparently that Christian picked this spot because he kind of figured and was right that they would be prideful and kind of take care of it. Um. Apparently he had some ancestors that were from the region to um. But he also said, you know, our wishes that maybe one day the people of Albert County will come together or maybe just conservationist in general and uh and do some more big stone rings around this thing. Uh. That never happened. He never got that wish, But like you said, they did take care of very good care of it. Yeah, and like he helped he helped established that by by transferring the rights to that land over to the people of Albert County, so that that was like they would have even more pride in it because they owned it. It was public land. From that point on, should we take a break, Um, Yeah, let's take a break, and well then we'll talk about the monument, right, yeah, and it's about it's about to get a little sinister right after this stop. Maybe I overstated it doesn't quite get sinister. Uh, But from the beginning of this project, the local townsfolk, while prideful, there were some that were a little worried about it, and this said, you know, when you're out in the country and Georgia like that, it's nineteen seventy, Like, what do you mean you're gonna build this big monument? This sounds to me like, you know, the occult or the work of the devil or something. And there was a sandblaster that worked on the job named Charlie Clamp who will come up a little bit later, but he, for one, said that when he was working on carving these characters in the stone, that he heard strange music and disjointed voices. Uh. And you know, once these things were up, apparently some some Wiccans and some Pagans did come out and do like some dancing and chanting every now and then, which I'm sure was very harmless, but would spook the locals. Oh yeah, I mean good lord. Yeah. Like I think it happened almost immediately, like this thing went up in March of eighty. I think like the Atlanta pagan community had adopted by there's like public land, what are you gonna do? Exactly? So another thing that makes this whole feat um so amazing is that you know R. C. Christians showed up with the idea in the summer of nineteen seventy nine, and they dedicated the thing on March twenty second night, two days after the Spring equinox. No, that is fast turnaround, because not only did they have to were it, they had to do a lot of other stuff to it. These are not schlubby slabs. Slubby they are, they were. They were pretty neat. They required a lot of extra work. Rather than just quarrying and cutting and polishing. There was more too, it wasn't there. Yeah. Absolutely, Uh, they had a big grand opening. There were you know, quite a few people, like three, three or four hundred folks apparently showed up for the christening. And uh, like you said, it was, it was a big deal. They were um, not only large, Uh, they were you know, very I believe, like nineteen feet tall each. Is that how tall they stood? Yeah, which is I mean, that's taller than Stonehenge. So take that England Stonehenge, take that ancient people's uh so nineteen tall. They weighed about close to a hundred and twenty tons and like we mentioned earlier, four thousands sand blasted letters and characters about four inches high. Piece that we'll get to what these all said. But they're also some cool strological features, right, Yeah, So um, Fendley went to the University of Georgia and said, I need an astronomer because I'm being asked to do some stuff that I do not know how to do. UM and the guide stones were considered a clock, calendar, and compass, all kind of ingeniously built into one because you've got those four slabs that were arranged in an X. Like you said, there's a center stone known as the nomen stone, and then on top of it all is a capstone, a square capstone that covered the nomen and parts of all four of the other slabs that radiated out from the nomen And so they had UM you could tell what day of the year it was, and that it was noon. Um you could see the um summer solstice, and I believe the winter solstice as well. Like the x is were the like the X or the edges of the X word position so that it followed the sun or the moon's migration annual migration across the sky. There was a lot going on that like the average person, including Fendley, could not just just you know, guess at it needed to be really precise. Yeah. Absolutely, they're cutting these holes basically, uh, and these little slots all around this thing to where you can peek through and see those uh sun rises and things during the solstice, uh, winter and summer. You can look through one hole and look at the North Star. So, like you said, it's super exact. Um. There was a plaque on site that listed R. C. Christian as the author of these words, and it said a small group of Americans who seek the age of reason. Uh, And then basically says, there's like a time capsule here, here's where the time capsule is. And they left this central message that said, let these be guidestones to an age of reason. And that was in Egyptian hierocliphics, Babylonian Cuneiform, Classical Greek, and Sanskrit. And then it lists did and we're gonna read these out, but it listed ten guides and eight different languages Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, English, Russian, Hindi, Spanish, and Swahili. Yeah. And so each side of those four slabs that radiated from the Noman the center stone had a language, so that all all four had two languages on each side, right, and in English these were what these these rules or guidelines or guides, however you want to call them, that were inscribed on the stone. What they said? The first one, chuck, was maintained humanity under five hundred million in perpetual balance with nature. You here's another one. If you don't like that one, you're not gonna like this one either, Guide reproduction wisely improving fitness and diversity. Yeah problematic? Okay, Well how about this one. You're gonna love this. Unite humanity with a living new language. Uh, it could be problematic unless we're sucking. Uh. What is that one language we did on the years ago? Esperano? Esperanto? Did we do one on? I think we did a video on it. I don't think we ever did this, did we do? Yeah? It gets confusing once you get back to two thousand eleven twelve, that kind of thing. We were all confused. Shall I go on? Or you want to take over? Go ahead? This is fun? Okay Um. The next one says rule, passion, faith, tradition, and all things with tempered reason. Down with that protect down meaning like you're down with it or down the opposite. I'm down with it. No, that sounds great. Up with that. I'm down with that. Protect people in nations with fair laws and just courts. Sure, who wouldn't let all nations rule internally, resolving external disputes in a world court. M that sounds a little creepy potentially. The next one is something the libertarian and all of us can appreciate, avoid petty laws and useless officials. I love that one. I wonder what that sounds like in HINDI. Uh, drain the swamp. Right. There's also balanced personal rights with social duties. It's a great one too, if you balance it correctly. Uh. The next one is prize truth, beauty, love, seeking, harmony with the infinite. Pretty new ag. Yeah, I like it though. And then be not a cancer on Earth, Leave room for nature, Leave room for nature. And then the last one Sabbath rules for the z. I thought you're gonna say, Megadeth rules Metallica drules Metallica does not drouble. Well, I thought Megadeth fans didn't like Metallica. I think that old beef. Sure, but it's totally unnecessary because both are great, Okay, especially eighties both were great? How about that? Oh? Sure, yeah, we're yeah, absolutely so what I'm talking about give me some credit. Um. So from the beginning, the people that heard about this and uh sort of took it as maybe what to do after the apocalypse. But apparently Christian had written a little pamphlet like guide book kind of thing that talked about, um, not necessarily after the apocalypse, but here's how we might can avoid catastrophe more along those lines. Yeah, I found a quote from one of the from that book that he wrote that said, we are like a fleet of overcrowded lifeboats confronted with an approaching tempest. And then he says there are alternatives to armageddon. And I couldn't find out what those alternatives were. Um, but if he didn't provide alternatives, then that's just letting everybody's imagination run wild. The other thing that a lot of people point out to is that this was These were inscribed in nineteen smack dab in the middle of the Cold War, which at that time had no ending in sight. Um, and a lot of people were very worried about a nuclear winner. So if he did mean it like um, you know that that it was meant to rebuild humanity after a nuclear war, you can understand how he would have been coming from that way. The other way though, makes a lot of sense too, because at the time that whole idea that humanity was going to keep growing exponentially was really popular. Still. Do you remember Zero Population Growth episode where we talked a lot about that. Yeah, that that was that big book in sixty eight, the population Bomb, which really scared a lot of people. Uh, And I don't think we mentioned too that. Um. Christian initially said that they had been he and his people had been working on this idea for twenty years, so it would have been all through the Cold War and all through this sort of population scare if he was telling the truth that they were coming up with these ideas. But even even though the population bomb came out in night, this this kind of thought was going around because remember our friend Norman Borlog, he saved the world in the nineteen forties, and people were predicting like exponential growth. I mean, Mauthis has been predicting exponential growth since the eighteenth century. So the population bomb really kind of presented it in stark contrast, um, and it turned out to not be correct at all. But at the time, again, people were worried about it. But if you were really into that kind of thing. You were probably at least a little xenophobic. Um, you're possibly outright racist, and your concerns were not about how how fast America's population was growing. You're probably concerned about how fast Bangladesh's population was growing, or how fast some sub Saharan African nations populations were growing. And ultimately you might not have said it what that meant for the white race and the white races access to all the resources we need to keep being happy. Yeah, and you'll see this pop up a little bit throughout this that some of these notions were possibly guided by um, white supremacy or xenophobia, you know it. It It sort of danced around those fringes. Um. Not the least of which was that first, you know, limit the world population to five hundred million. Uh that were close to four and a half billion people on the planet in nineteen eighties. So that's a pretty drastic reduction. That's an eight percent reduction. Um. So that's a that's a pretty foreboding thing to list as your first guideline, I think, right exactly, it's but yeah, especially if you don't mean it as like a post apocalyptic guide, but something we need to do in the future. That is just downright scary because first of all, that means a lot of people are going to die, but also who exactly is calling the shots about who lives and who dies and who are these people to to say or do something like that. So it takes a pretty pretty large amount of just entitlement in general to choose that and then inscribe it as your first guide on some rocks that you leave standing ostensibly for hundreds of years. Yeah, and so you couple that with guide reproduction wisely improving fitness and diversity. That's improving fitness is sort of the key line that sort of reeks of eugenics obviously, uh. And then also you're not humanity with the new living language and the idea of a world court. All these things are sort of ideas that have been bandied about and on the fringes of uh, the Internet and conspiracy minded sites about the new world order and things like that. And we're not going to dive too deep into that world, but suffice to say that these are the kind of alarm bells that are going off when certain people read the Georgia guide Stones. Yeah, because I'm not I couldn't find out who originally interpreted as such. But the Book of Revelations apparently has been interpreted to talk about a world government and be wary of a world government because that's the Antichrist who's going to be leading it, and they will lead you know, the world into darkness and the final fight with God and all that stuff. So, um, if you read the quotes, you're like, I don't quite know how you got here. But there's a lot of people who's subscribe to that. So when they were talking about you know, world courts, that really kind of raised the antenna of some fundamentalists and fringe Christians. Yeah, it's good way to say it, um, But we we can talk about some of the theories as to um, maybe who this group might have been, because again Christian said that he represented a group of people and it wasn't just like his you know, this idea of some you know, rich billionaire, although you never know it could have been the case because we don't know the truth. But the Rosa Crucians, and I believe we talked about them and one of our episodes at some point really rings a bell. But they were, uh, this society a secret society. Those are always fun. That started in the fifteenth century Germany, and the person who started it may or may not have even existed. It's a gentleman named Christian rosen Crates Um may be a fictional human maybe not, but was the founder of the Rosicrucians or the rose Cross Society. Yeah so, um, the founder rosenkreuz Um supposedly got together some Turkish Sufi Persian mystical knowledge, put it all in like a nice three ring binder turned to some doctor friends and said, let's form a society based on this mystical knowledge and do all sorts of neat like incantations and stuff like that. And I don't know, let's just take over the world while we're at it too. And I don't even get the impression that we're a certain that any of this ever existed, that it was written about years later, maybe centuries later. Um, but that it was possibly one of those things where it was like a self fulfilling prophecy, like new groups actually did establish themselves after the fiction came out. I'm not sure, but um, it definitely did. Whatever those books were that introduced Rosicrucianism to Europe, um. They definitely did influence the Enlightenment and Enlightenment thinkers, including Thomas Payne and um. Thomas Paine is kind of one of the overlooked founding fathers uh, and he really was a founding father. He was, um, he was, he founded the or, he came up with the idea for the Declaration of Independence. He really kind of um lobbied for a constitution in America. But he also wrote Age of Reason being an investigation of the True and Fabulous theology. He was a deist and he thought you could use rationalization or rationalism to investigate religion and that a lot of it was just superstition. So if you're like a hardcore Christian, you don't really think very highly of Thomas Paine. But the Age of Reason thing, remember on the cap stone that said let this be a way into the Age of Reason on the guidestones. That's how a lot of people connect the Rosicrucians to the Georgia guidestones, right, because Thomas Paine was apparently connected to them. Right. Yes, Okay, so the rose it's hard to say that word for me, The Rosa Crucians, I keep wanting to say the Rosa Christians for some reason. Uh, Like you said, they popped up before the Enlightenment and then kind of went away, and then later pop back up in the nineteenth century when there was a big revival in the Europe and the US of these sort of occult slash secret societies. A couple of them are still around today. Apparently the ancient mystical order Rose Crucis uh and the Rosicrucian Fellowship are still around. Um. But again, who knows if any of the original stuff was actually real or just the work of fiction. Either way, um, people you know, some people think it might have been the Rosicrucians behind these guidestones. And again, like the rose Crucians is, it's a secret mystical society, but it also is potentially engaged in trying to take over the world. So that's what we'd give it, a really ominous association, right yeah. And or it also has been theorized that it was just a red herring to make people think it it was the Rosa Crucians when it really wasn't at all, just to get people to sniff them off the case. And so the Rosa Crucians there are a widely held suspect um and then of course that um logically leads to the next subspect Ted Turner. This is very tenuous to me, I guess because Ted Turner was really rich um, maybe a little eccentric, but not really um in the grand scheme of things. But he did create what's known as the Turner Doomsday video, which was this video that he created and said basically, this is the last thing CNN should air if the world was ending. And you think, oh my god, what was the Turner doomsday video. It's just this one minute video of a military band playing the hymn Nearer My God to the with one of the loveliest ms out there, is one of my favorites. But that that's all it is. That's it, that's it. There's over the instructions for surviving the apocalypse, nothing like that. It's the lamest doomsday video of all time. It just has a network sign off, is what it is. Right. But he the reason they called the doomsday videos because when he brought CNN onto the air, he said that, um, it would keep it would stay on the air until you know, the end of the world. So that's where the doomsday thing came from. And then the other thing that, like you said, Ted Turners maybe was a little out there or whatever, at least for his time, like he did oversee Captain Planet, that cartoon on TBS in the early nineties. Um, but he also gave a billion dollars which at the time was a third of his wealth to the u N to to establish the u N Foundation, which was involved in gender equality, which I think might have had some aspects of family planning to it. So maybe that's where the eugenics tieing comes from, or the population control. And then also has really engaged in environmentalism too. So um, that whole harmony with be not a cancer the earth thing just really implicates Ted Turner. Yeah, if you if you grew up in Atlanta in the seventies and eighties, Ted Turner was a big deal. Uh, it was a name you heard a lot. He owned the Braves, He owned the Falcons for or no, no, I think he owned the Braves and the Hawks. Yeah, um for a long time, and uh was our sort of most famous uh dude in town. And I remember seeing him at a Willie Nelson concert at Chastain Like it was a while ago, but it wasn't way back then. It was in the probably early two thousand's. Uh, and I got a real kick out of it. I was like, I've never seen him out in Atlanta before. I was like, holy cow, there's Ted Turner. I tipped my scotch to you know. He was with a couple of uh, younger women. He's with a couple of younger ladies. But I think they were, Um, I think they might have been family members or something, is what someone told me. I don't think he was like out Fox Stratton with a couple of gotcha young young girls. He was no stone silver Fox like RC. Christian. Oh sure he was. He kidn't make now. He was a handsome man. But the upshot of Ted Turner's involvement as one of the suspects is basically strictly because of his proximity to Alberton. That's it, Yeah, that is it. If Ted Turner was a billionaire in Kansas, his name would have nothing to do with this whatsoever. So that makes him a very lame suspect. I think we're gonna say suspect denied. We need a little sound effect there. Uh if Jerry listened to these episodes and we might actually get I know it's gonna be great that because we're gonna say all this and it's gonna pass by silently. Alright. So who else we could talk about, um some religious galbaty cook. Because from the beginning, there were Christians nearby that said, this is the work of the devil. Uh, and this is like satanic occultis stuff. Um. There was a Christian minister named Reagan R. Davis who visited in two thousand to the Guide Stones and said, these are the ten commandments of the Antichrist and this is a culling of the human population by the anti Christians, is basically what we're looking at. And then of course all kinds of right wing conspiracy crack pots get involved and start calling them, uh, you know, Satan based or Luciferian secret societies and the New World Orders coming and all of that fun stuff that exists on the fringe, right yeah. And so I mean there's some holes in those theories that this is a the new World Order headed by the elite who are actually following the anti Christ who was being powered by Lucifer himself. And where the holes, right, the holes are that this monument, which is it was impressive, right, is a neat feat, especially for the people of Alberton, but it objectively pales in comparison to even the ruins of Stonehenge. That this is the best that the Luciferian elite of the New World World Order, right, the richest of the rich, the most powerful of the powerful. This is this is the best they could do. And they put it in Alberton, Georgia. And there's just the one. And this is how they revealed their plans. Right. They wouldn't just go ahead and carry out like mass sterilization projects, or actually go ahead and create the one world currency in government. They would just erect this relatively small monument in the most rural of rural Georgia and just leave it at that. Yeah, and wait decades for the news to trickle out from the Alberton County Times to the Alberton six o'clock news and then the Atlanta six o'clock news and so on and so on until it takes over the world. Yes, so, and I saw it like put his like that, really it was the New World Order, like having a laugh by making just so blatant and just even more ridiculous, Like you know, I didn't when I when I was like, we should do one on the Georgia guidestones, it didn't even occur to me that it was going to take us down the path of conspiracy theorists. But it really did because they latched onto this, and so I was thinking about this, Chuck, I was like, why, why, you know, what is it about that? I mean, obviously it's mysterious, and you know, some of the stuff that's talking about is kind of weird and scary and possibly downright immoral, right, But I think more than anything, it's like people who are into conspiracy theories are unsettled by uncertainty, and so they need, like it's way scarier to have an indifferent world that that couldn't care less about you, that doesn't even know you exist, and that is so complex it can't possibly make sense to anybody that's way scarier than you. No, there's actually a cabal led by the Antichrist that it probably involves Nancy Pelosi that we can like focus all of our attention and energy on. It makes it less scary, It gives it a form. Whenever you give something form, it becomes less scary. And then also this is my own theory, it also puts the conspiracy theorist on some sort of equal footing, so it gives them importance because they are a sworn enemy of that antichrist led cabal, and so they're important as well. So I think for all of those reasons, it's that's that's why things like the Guide Stones attract conspiracy theorists, and I think that's why conspiracy theorists exists in general. They're afraid of the world. They're afraid of the world, so they make it what seems to the rest of us like a far scarier place because they can't accept that it's just not that way at all, that things just aren't that neat and tidy and black and white. They're basically all gray. Yeah, And they're also fed a steady diet of paranoia and doomsday uh news and paranoia news, and it in filtrates their brains. So you know, you can also go outside and the planet flower and drink in some sunshine, take a walk. Yeah, yeah, it did. It's very sad, like I don't. I'm not mad at them, I feel bad for them. I'm mad at like the people who profit off of it, the ones who like stoke those claims. I consider them. They're like expansive thinkers with small minds. That's what like the leaders of conspiracy theorist kind of world remind me of, you know, no, But otherwise you're right, it's a very sad life. It is because you're just scared or mad all the time, all the time, my soapbox. All right, we'll mention Freemasons and take a break and reveal some some clues here. But obviously the Freemasons are gonna pop up anytime you talk about the New World Order. Alberton itself, um, of course as a small town in Georgia, so there are Freemasons there. Uh. Samuel Albert, who founded Elberton, built a Masonic lodge. A lot of people say that family and Martin were both Masons, which is no big surprise in a small town. That's a very common thing for civic and business leaders to be Masons. So, but Freemason's are always targeted with a conspiracy minded stuff, so of course they were going to be mentioned as well. You can listen to our episode on Mason's that we did years and years ago, many years. Um. So let's take that break and we'll come back and perhaps reveal the real identity of R. C. Christian right after this stop. Okay, Chuck, So we're back, and I think it's high time that we revealed the possible identity of R. C. Christian. And it is not nearly as um earth shaking as you'd think, because it's possible it as a crank from Iowa. Maybe. UM. There's a documentary from about seven years ago called Dark Clouds over Elberton, Colin the True Story of the Georgia Guidestones. It's a Christian documentary filmmaker name named Christian Pinto that's as Christian as very much. And this filmmaker basically said, there's a gentleman named Herbert Henzi Kirsten Uh from Fort Dodge, Iowa. He was a doctor born in nineteen twenty and he was outed as and there's some pretty pretty good little convincing clues here for sure that this might have been the dude. So. UM. He was a Republican, check, he was into the environment, he was a conservationist. UM. He supposedly in a letter to the South Florida Sun Sentinel, UM talked about like how David Duke was one of the few politicians representing America UM and The thing is, though, is he's saying like David Duke is leading America. And remember, David Duke was like the head of the ku Klux Klan who kind of supposedly disavowed the clan and tried to run for public office many times in the eighties. He won at some point, right, did he please tell me he did? And I thought he was unsuccessful every time. I'm pretty sure what it was off the dumb, but I'm pretty sure he won at one point. Well, that is pretty shameful. Whatever state elected David Duke, that's pretty in Louisiana. Okay, okay, so um, But he was supporting David Duke in this quote new era of internationalism, So it sounds like he wasn't down with internationalism, which would kind of go against the whole idea of creating world courts and the like. Uh. I had to look it up. David Duke. Yeah, he was in the Louisiana State House of Representatives for a little while. Um. Yeah, that's a good point. Um. But also in his obituary when Kirsten died in two thousand five, it said that he was very involved in environmental and world population issues. Uh, and held ay quote broad vision of humanity. So I guess some stuff kind of checks out, some stuff kind of doesn't. One of the things that links him though, to at least Um Martin. Whyatt Martin, Um, the banker from the Granite State Bank who was the one person who knew who R. C. Christian was, was that there was definitely correspondence. Uh that was I guess it was written down in a log or something, but that Herbert Kirsten and Whyat Martin did correspond at some point. So that's I think what really kind of links them more than anything. Oh okay, I see what you mean. Um. Interesting, And I don't think we mentioned too when Christian arc Christian corresponded with Martin. They were letters sent from kind of all over the United States, I guess in a bid to keep the identity a secret. Yeah that's what I took it as too. Okay, I didn't know that Kirsten actually was in touch, So yeah, I mean, pretty pretty good clue there. But we should also say that that South Florida's on Sentinel Calumnists said that his letter from is full of exclamation points and underlined words, which automatically says, don't take me seriously. Um, there's another theory that I think it's pretty lame. Basically is that the Alberton Granite Association kind of surreptitiously or at least under the table, ordered this thing, uh to stir up a lot of um maybe not conspiracy, but just interest as a tourist attraction, and it was just sort of an inside job for the county to begin with, and it ended up you know a lot of people people from around the world eventually would come and see this thing, uh and check it out in person. So it did work. But I just don't know if if that holds up well. Even at first in the internally in the town, Friendly and Martin the grantit finisher and the banker were accused of being the ones behind it, and they actually took very publicly lie detector tests I think it Alberton City Hall and both passed. So after that they the cloud of suspicion they were under kind of past. But um, yeah, that was I guess kind of a bit of a controversy from the outset because you know, um, Findley really kind of made out with this job and it just kind of dropped into his lap. So I think some of the other granite finishers were suspicious of it. So the guy Charlie Clamp, this carver who heard the voices and stuff, his son Mark Clamp, which is a great name. UM, would like propose the idea for like week long festivals, and they would use that as evidence that it was an inside thing. But I just saw that as like a younger generation saying like, hey, we got this thing, let's like try and make some money off of it. Yeah. I think there are plenty of people in town. I saw in and there was a Wired article that in two thousand nine it was like the definitive story that for a long time. UM. And they said that it literally put Alberton on the map because it was first included in two thousand five and National Geographics Geo Tourism Map Guide to Appalachia. There you have it. Yeah, And like Alberton would not have been included in that had it not been for the Georgia guidstone. So yeah, like it definitely had an impact on the local economy for decades because it just brought people who otherwise would not have shown up. Alright, So the guidestones are there for quite a long time, beginning in sort of the mid two thousand's. Uh, there was some vandalism that started popping up here and there, UM spray painting them Jesus will beat you, Satanist, the letter you uh no one World government. Uh. Some of them talked about nine eleven being an inside job. Some talked about Obama like Obama berthers and saying that he was a Muslim. My favorite joke, can I share? Yeah, I think you're about Yeah, go ahead. My favorite was the Council on Foreign Relations is ran by the devil, talk about sticking into the new World Order? Am I right? My favorite was the isis one which was reported to the FBI, But it said I am isis Goddess Love, which is you know, talking about the Egyptian goddess? Isis not not Isis? Isis not isol isis whoever alerted the FBI makes no distinction between those two apparently, Uh, that's right. And so these things have been sort of vandalized over the years. And this culminated in uh just a little over a month ago, July six this year, UM, at four am in the morning, a bomb went off in and destroyed enough of the Georgia guide stones to call them dangerous and call for their complete demolition by the county. Um, they have it on video because they did have cameras kind of monitoring this thing. Uh, and there was a you know, kind of a blurry video that you can look it up online. You can see the bomb going off. Um, you don't really get a very clear look at the car. You don't get a very clear look at a human to silver sedan. I looked up just today to see if there were any new leads and I think they're kind of coming up empty so far on who actually demolished this thing. Yeah, I saw that the a t F is trying to figure out what explosive was used, and the g b I is looking for this person who is going to charge them with a terroristic act or whatever. But sadly, Albertson voted to give the remains over to the Granite Council, and the Granite Council voted not to rebuild, So the Georgia guidestones are gone forever. Because when there's fundamentalist conspiracy theorists around, we just can't have nice things. You can't have nice things. You got anything else? I got zero nice things left? All right? Well, since Chuck said that everybody, it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this a couple of breakfast emails. Are that episode just dropped today? I r l about our breakfast foods and people seem to like it. The first thing I'm gonna say is I misspoken. Said sour cream on my bagel instead of cream cheat what everybody's been talking about. Yeah, I didn't. Obviously, it was just a verbal typo and you didn't even catch it. So um. The people that said, hey, you clearly misspoke, thank you. The people that are like, what you eat sour cream on bagels? Like come on, come on, come on? All right, So there's there's a couple of them. Hello, Chaps, really enjoyed your show about breakfast. But have you ever had a great British fry up a k a. A full English breakfast? It's basically a heart attack on a plate. Bacon, sausage, grilled tomatoes, baked beans, mushrooms, black pudding, toast and or fried bread, hash brown patty style and at least two fried eggs, the ultimate hangover your cure, and the greatest meal of all time, washed down with copious cups of hot tea and complimented with HP brown sauce that is from Donna Kay in the UK, and uh, yeah, don I've had that. I don't like the mushroom part, and I'm not really big on grilled tomatoes. What about the beans? Do you like the beans? I do? I love them. I'm down with all the really because you know, you see those beans and you're like, man, all that's gonna be low too with brown sugar, and then you take a bite and you're like, oh nope, they're not like Georgia barbecue. It tastes like Roger Daltry. That's good. Think what a great who reference. I'm pretty proud of that one too. Did you write that down? You just think of it because you didn't even know. This is coming, very very well done. All right, here's the other one. Hey, guys, Breakfast episode is wonderful. We're gonna do a little Judge John Hodgman here. We're gonna actually intervene here and make a decision. I keep having to pause the episode to text my partner, Uh new mind blowing facts that I had learned, and I was hoping you would say something that would validate my opinions on brunch, but at last you did not brunch is breakfast food at lunchtime, and this is the hill I will die on. I start this debate regularly as my in laws like to plan brunch no lunch food at all for nine am, and I argue that the word they're looking for is just breakfast. I have no leg to stand on. Thanks for all you do, and this is from Stephanie. Uh. And so I asked Stephanie a couple of follow up questions. Basically, I was like, um, do they sort of alcohol at this nine am quote unquote brunch? And do they usually eat it like five am? And so this would be much much much later for them? Uh? And Stephanie said, Uh, my mother and father in law don't really eat breakfast normally. Everyone else probably does have something and possibly early since most of them are teachers. Um, but nothing agreed. Just I think mimosas are fair game, so maybe that's fair enough to get it class about his brunch. But uh, most of these mimosas are mostly o J unless I'm in charge of making them. So I'm gonna rule this is just breakfast. Yeah, I would call that boozy breakfast. Yeah. And that ain't brunch brunch. You gotta eat it after after ten thirty at least more like Yeah, no, I would say ten thirties the early, the earliest you'll walk past the rooster crowing. Maybe yeah, at that time nine a m. Is it's just I'm sorry, Stephanie's in laws. It's breakfast and we have ruled on it. I'm Jesse Thorn. I mean throw a throw a tuna melt on there. Maybe you have a case, but if you're deserving breakfast items at nine am, then it's breakfast. He really is. But then also, Stephanie, I want to put in a word for your in laws, like you just lay off whatever you want to call it brunch if they want to. But you're right, yeah, you are correct. If you want to be like Stephanie and can solva dispute, No, we can't do that, John Dodgment, does that best? The other person? What's the other person's name? The first guy? Oh, I got you? The first person was I like that swinging in though, Chuck, that was great stuff. Donna Kay. Okay, So if you want to be like Stephanie and Donna Kay and get in touch with us, we would love that you can send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.