Did you hear you could win €500 every day for a month with Shickin Sosta? Really? The Irish full-on flavor chicken. That's over €15. No peckin way. What do you have to do?

Keep it down.

Sorry, sorry. Go on, I'm listening. It's easy. Look out for promotional packs of Shickin Sosta in store. Scan the QR code and follow the instructions. Oh, thanks for the heads up. You could be an even happier chicken. Visit shakingsosta. Ie/win. Terms and conditions apply. Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robé. And me, Simone Bois. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.

Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side.

Hello, friends. We will see you live in person somewhere in the United States this year.

That's right. May 29th, we're going to be in Medford, Mass. On the 30th, we're going to be in Washington, DC. And then on May 31st, right there in New York City. In August, we're going to hit Chicago, Minneapolis, and Indianapolis on August seventh, eighth, and ninth. Then we're going to wind out the year in Durham and Atlanta on September fifth and seventh.

You can get all the info and ticket links that you need by going to linktree/sysklive or going to our website, stuffyoushouldknow. Com, and clicking on the Tour button.

Welcome to stuffyoushould A production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. And this is stuff you shouldn't know.

That's right.

Do people still say that?

Sure.

I mean, I just did, so I guess somebody does.

I think of that every time I see one of those pharma commercials are the worst.

Do they say Nizzo on that a lot?

Well, Sky Rizzie is... Oh, yeah. I can't even remember what it is.

I think it's for rheumatoid arthritis. Like, everything is for rheumatoid arthritis these days.

All I know is whenever I see those commercials, I just die laughing and think, what a terrible name.

So I know a lot of those jingles, and I think Sky Rizzie's is, Nothing is everything.

And then Snoop Dogg comes in at the end?

Yeah, he goes, For Shizzle.

With Skyrizzel.

Yeah, I've had that same thought, too, and it is pretty funny.

All right, so enjoy the free ad.

Yeah. Novo Nordisk, whoever you might be. Yeah, Yeah, we're not talking about pharmaceuticals today, although I'm sure there's plenty of pharmaceuticals floating around in the area we are talking about today. Okay.

Nice segue.

It's probably screwing the frogs up. Something fierce.

Yeah.

Because we're talking today about the Everglades. And I know at least one person who has been recently, and I'm sure thought it was amazing. But they're in a lot of trouble, it turns out. We've been monkeying the Everglades for a century or so, and it is starting to be like, That is enough. I'm sick of this. You guys better restore me or else I'm gone.

Were you talking about me?

Yeah.

Okay. I didn't know. I thought you might have known someone else who recently went.

You are the only human being I've ever met who's gone to the Everglades.

That's not true. Yeah, Emily's parents moved down that way, or at least part-time. Oh, cool. We took an airboat tour of part of the Everglades, a very tiny, tiny, tiny part, obviously.

Yeah, you sent Jerry and I a little video of you on the airboat.

Yeah, riding toothless. It's my first airboat experience.

What did you think?

Well, they're super loud, so it's not like a relaxing boat ride.

Not for you, not for the wildlife, not for anybody.

Yeah, I wondered about all that. But getting in the Everglades, and I had done a previous, probably one of the most amazing trips I ever did was a three-nighter in the Okey Finokey Swamp. So I've always been entranced by swampland. And when I was down there, especially now that I'm older, the Okey Finokey thing was 20 something years ago.

Sure.

I was like, when you're older, you just appreciate things a little more, I think, like that.

Oh, definitely. When you're a kid, you don't know what the heck is going on. Yeah.

So I just marveled at mainly the bird life, honestly. The alligators were fine, but the birds is what really or what really knocked me out. And this is how we learn stuff. As we see stuff, we think, Oh, well, I I had a job where I can actually learn that as part of my weekly pay. Right.

And so here we are.

And so here we are. And it was amazing, and I'm super excited about it.

Well, what questions did you have that made you want to research the Everglades more?

I mean, just to know more about it, our Airboat guy, shout out to Kenny, true interior Florida man. But he knew a lot, it seemed like, and he was giving us some pretty good information, I feel like. It wasn't just driving us around. He was into it, working for those tips.

Sure.

But it was just the tip of the mangrove, so to speak.

Very nice. Thank you. And by the by, Kenny is such an interior Florida man. He once robbed a gas station with a snake. Has that happened? It probably has. At least once, for sure.

That's pretty smart, actually. I'd give up the cash register if someone put a snake in my face. For sure.

For those of you who don't I don't know. And there's probably plenty of you who don't know exactly where the Everglades are, although I would wager that you've heard of them. But they essentially are a... I wanted to say a wetland, but it's a patchwork of diverse ecosystems that are extremely unique, peculiar to the Southern half of Florida. Essentially, if you want to talk geography and natural history, they go from just below Orlando all the way down to the Florida Quays. That's technically the Everglades. And then there's one strip from about Palm Beach down to Miami of high ground that holds the Everglades in place. And that represents the one border aside from the top or the Gulf of Mexico or the Florida Quays that bounds the Everglades. Does that make sense?

Yeah, totally. And it's a part of what makes the Everglades so unique. And you mentioned different ecosystems. There's a bunch of overlapping ecosystems that don't normally overlap necessarily elsewhere in the world, which is always going to... Any time you have brackish or salty water mixing in in places with fresh water, it's It's just going to create a unique environment. The Everglades are that. It is seminal for... Well, actually, the seminal name for Everglades is Pahayoki, and it means grassy waters, and they have called them grassy waters, various people, or riverglades for a long, long time until finally, in 1823, the word everglades first appeared on a map.

Yeah. And everglades itself is just one of those words you've so long, you take for granted it's its own thing. Totally. But it actually has an English meaning, too. A Glade is a big grassy opening in a wooded area, and ever is like a short for forever. So it's like this endless Glade. And what they're talking about is that river of grass. There's actually a couple of what are called slues, S-L-O-U-G-H is how it's pronounced. In America. Or how it's spelled. In America, you pronounce it slue, and you punctuate it with an eagles cry. And the slues are what most people probably think about when they're thinking of the Everglades. It's wet, marshy wetland that's pretty much flooded year round with a specific grass called saw grass that can grow anywhere. You could take some saw grass to the moon, and it'll be like, great, thanks. I'm going to drive here. It'll grow in the water. It'll grow on dry land. It'll grow in saltwater. It'll grow on in fresh water. It'll grow under basically any condition. And so it's this flooded grassland that are really just a couple of specific ecosystems that make up the Everglades are what most people think of when they think Everglades, but it's far from the complete picture.

Yeah. And when we were driving over those grasses, and well, you couldn't tell because they look like little roads through there, little wet roads. I was like, Are these here because you drive over them? And he said, Yes. And I think he saw my frowny face. But he said, Man, this stuff dries up and grows right back up, and you'd never know when anyone was here, at least in this part. So I still say it was fairly disturbing, at least the noise.

Well, it's less impactful in the other mode of transport they use in very swampy areas called swamp buggies, which just have these huge tires that you can't possibly get stuck in. Those definitely are more disruptive to the ecosystem than an airboat is. Yeah.

Every time he stopped and turned that engine off, I would look down and I was like, Kenny, brother, we're in three inches of water. Yeah. And he said, It doesn't take much, man. He just goosed this thing and it'll get you going.

Yeah.

And also every time he stopped it and then would recrank that, it sounds like an airplane motor. It is, I guess. All I could think of was, Please start.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Because it's a little like there's something about swamps. When I was in the Okey Panokey, it's the same thing. And it's not just alligators, but I think it's just not being able to see into the water because that water looks like brewed ice tea. There's just something scary. When I was a kid, I remember thinking there was nothing scarier than... Because I'd seen a lot of movies set in swamps and stuff. I was like, There's nothing scarier. If you go into a swamp, you're going to die. Yeah. And that's just not true.

That was the clear lesson from Swamp Thing and Swamp Thing, too.

Totally. Libia helped us with this, but it's also important that we point out that there's Everglades National Park And then the Florida Everglades. And Everglades National Park encompasses a lot of areas that aren't what we think of as Everglades, and the Everglades extend well beyond the boundaries of the park itself as well.

Yeah. It sounds a lot more confusing than it is. We'll line it all up into neat little tidy packages for everybody. How about that?

How about this? Everglade, very large National Park, smaller area within and beyond.

You did it. We can end the podcast right here, essentially, because you already mentioned alligators, birds, and ice tea swamp water, so we're good.

Well, I think we should talk history because you dug up some... It looks like the quintessential rundown of how we got there, right?

My friend, yes, I wrote that.

That was good stuff.

Thank you very much. I appreciate that. For some reason, when I started to research a little more and more of the natural history of the Everglades, it just got more and more fascinating. Totally.

Take it away.

So Florida is a peninsula, for those of you who don't know, and it's on top of some very, very solid bedrock, part of the continental plate that it's on. But atop that is a layer of limestone bedrock, and it's formed from old corals and shells, because for a very long time, what's now Florida was under a sea or an ocean, right?

Yeah, and potentially might be again one day.

Right. So over Sometimes there's sea level changes and rises because the Earth likes to go through glacial and interglacial periods. And during the last period where the ocean covered Florida, a new layer of really porous limestone was laid down atop of that limestone bedrock, and that forms what's called the Biscayne Aquifer. And that aquifer is a holding tank, essentially, for drinking water for the nine million people who live along the Atlantic Coast of Florida. And it's just super flat. I think there's a difference in elevation, Chuck, from the bottom of Lake Okeechobe, which is essentially the northern boundary now of the Everglades, all the way down to the Florida Quays. It just drops by 12 to 15 feet, I think, in elevation, all those hundreds of miles.

And that is one thing I love about Florida, especially when I was a kid, too, is it's hot and stuff, but walking and jogging and riding bikes and stuff, they don't have any of those hills. So it's just much more palatable for a dude like me.

Yeah, it is very flat.

It's the hills the killers.

Exactly. Yeah, everybody knows that for sure. It doesn't matter whether you're walking, whether you're biking, whether you're rolling uphill. It sucks.

The important part that you mentioned, though, is that there's not much elevation, rise, and change, but Florida does slope just ever so slightly, I guess what, southeast. And so all the water in Florida wants to go southeast.

It does, but it runs into the Atlantic Coastal Ridge, which sounds tall, but at its tallest point, it's like 20 feet above sea level.

Yeah, that's a ridge.

But Florida is so flat that that actually contains the water in the Everglades from going and spilling off into the Atlantic. So it funnels it down toward that Southern, Southwestern part of Florida. And over time, as sea levels rose and declined, it rose and declined. We went through glacial periods. At the end of the last Ice Age, which is about 12 thousand-ish years ago, sea levels started to stabilize. And the current climate that Florida has, this subtropical, monsoonal climate, where there's a dry season and a rainy season, and they're in the rainy season, it really rains. There's hurricanes, that stuff. That started around the end of the last Ice Age, right? And so over that last 12,000 years, that big old Lake, Okeechobe, that forms the northern boundary of the Everglades, would periodically flood, and it would send a ton of water down toward the bottom of Florida, the Southern Southwestern tip. Simultaneously, all of that sea level rise and decline deposited things like shells and mud and all sorts of stuff. And that formed a natural dam, a barrier, that keeps a lot of the water from flowing out of the Southwestern part of Florida, and it forms the Everglades, which is essentially an extremely slow moving body of water.

It moves so slowly that the water has time to percolate downward through the soil into that aquifer, become purified, and be held. So during times of the wet season, it's a big repository for stormwater. During the dry season, it's a source of drinking water for the people who live in Florida.

And some say that a drop of water, some meaning you, and I imagine you got this from somewhere reputable, right?

I didn't make that up.

That a drop of water takes about a year to go from Lake Okeechobe to the Florida Bay, which all of this talk sounds like Florida is a very scary place. It sounds like it's held together by reedy roots and duct tape.

It essentially is, for sure, but it's so flat that you're really not in any danger, and it's also very shallow. I think that Florida Bay that extends between the Florida Quays and the Southernmost tip of the Florida mainland, that's like five feet, an average of five feet deep.

Oh, could you walk to the Florida Quays?

I believe so, yeah, because from what I saw, the average depth is- Through water? Yes, it is five feet.

That's pretty cool. We should do that.

It is pretty cool. I never thought about that, but yeah, you could. From what I can tell.

If it can be done, it has been done, I'm sure.

You'd think so, for sure.

I mean, I imagine Jimmy Buffet walked, traversed that many times. Probably. In his life.

Yeah.

Is that good on natural history? Should we take a break?

I think so. Did we cover everything? I don't remember.

I think so. I think that spells it out very nicely. All right, so we're going to take a break, and we're going to come back and talk about what Livia calls America's Greatest Swamp.

Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by Danielle Robé. And me, Simone Voice. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. Thank you for taking the light, and you're going to shine it all over the world, and it makes me really happy. I never imagined that I would get the chance to carry this honor and help be a part of this legacy.

Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side.

Truck Stop brothels run by a web of ex-cons. A Commonwealth attorney wasted on whiskey and power. Protection exchanged for cash and flesh. This is Hooker Game, criminals and libertines in the South. And I am your host, Dr. Lindsay Byron. Three years ago, I came across a gold mine of news clippings detailing a scandal that rocked my small Southern hometown. As I flipped through each page, this forgotten story came back to life. I was told that it was just supposed to be a massage parlor.

The big shot in Dan Wolf Barker.

He beats me continuously.

If you print anything that you hear in that grand jury, you will be put in jail.

I never gave any massages.

Listen to Hooker Gay, Criminals and libertines in the South on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Who hasn't heard names like Achilles or Odius, Cassandra, Medusa? But how much do you know about them from the ancient world? Let's Talk About Myths, Baby is the podcast bringing the ancient sources to life. Greek myth and history is timeless, and unless you've been living under a rock, you have seen just how true that is today. But there is so much more to these characters and stories than what pop culture can do justice. I'm Liv Albert, the host of Let's Talk About Myths, Baby, and every week I bring you stories from the ancient world, both mythological and historical, to breathe new life into these thousands of years old stories. I'm also regularly joined by some of the most brilliant names in the field of archeology and ancient history, authors of your favorite retellings from today, and everyone in between. Join me as I dive into the wild world of the ancient Greeks and their stories. Listen to Let's Talk About Myths, Baby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, so we covered natural history.

We should talk about the people of Florida. Southern Florida was... It was really as far as settling the Americas, it was one of the last pieces of the Americas to be settled by human beings. But there's still, I think, 1,200 BCE is where the Indigenous population started out there, so still nothing to sneeze at. And you still see that Indigenous, I guess, representation everywhere. It feels thick just from the names and just everywhere you go. It's apparent, almost as if you were, I feel like, out West in the United States. You get a little bit of that in Georgia and the Carolinas, but it just feels heavier in Florida.

For sure. Yeah, there's a lot of Native American words that are used as place names still, for sure. Is that what you mean?

Yeah, I mean, more than that, but it feels like a clunky way to say what I probably didn't even get across.

Well, the thing about the Everglades is it's housed people for, like you said, a very long time thousands of years. And I think what blew my mind is the Everglades is we know them today, or as I guess we would have known them if we came upon them in 1850 or something like that. There were only like 3,300, 3,200 years old from what I saw. I saw some places 5,000, but I think the National Park Service said they're only about 3,000 years old. So people and the Everglades came around that area around the same time, and they've been inhabited in some way, shape, or form ever since. Because as Europeans pushed further and further west and further and further south, the Everglades, you couldn't do anything with them. When Florida first was settled by people of European ancestry, they were like, this is just a completely valueless expanse of swamp. We can't do anything with this. You go live there.

Yeah, for sure. And in a sec, we'll get to what the United States started doing once they They acquired Florida from Spain in 1819 with the Adams. Was it Onus Treaty? That's probably not pronouncing it right.

I'm not sure. I didn't see that one.

Well, that was the treaty where the United States got Florida. But as far as original inhabitants, we're talking about the Tecesta, the Yega. I don't know. I tried to find the pronunciation for the AIS tribe. Do you know what that is?

Yeah, it was AIS. It was an abbreviation. That's pretty good. You almost got me. The Eyes, maybe?

Maybe. I tried to find. It's hard to dig up pronunciation sometimes for some of this stuff. But they lived on the East Coast, and then you had the Calusa in the Southwest, and And then they're all over the Everglades. They're living there in their raised huts. What were those called? Chicky huts?

Yeah. And those were Seminal, I believe. A Seminal invention, which is just a platform like the one you stayed on in the Okey Finokey swamp.

Well, even better.

Right. But it has sides and a roof and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. So it's a house. It's a platform house that was designed to be lived in the Everglades.

Yeah. In the Everglades, you mentioned Seminal, they were formed from a lot of displaced Creek Indians, some other Indigenous groups. And then there were some Africans who were fleeing the slave trade. And a lot of these people ended up just hiding in the Everglades because it is a great place to hide.

Yeah. And so still, the Seminal tribe has a reservation in Big Cyprus, one of their reservations in Florida. And the Micosuke tribe, apparently, is made up of former Creek members. Rather than be moved westward to Oklahoma during Indian removal, they said, No, I'm staying down here. And they ended up forming basically their own tribe over time that's still around today.

I It's like the idea of, We're going to be in the middle of the Everglades. Come and find us.

That's exactly what they did. Yeah. They were like, We'll go brave this. You come after us if you want to see what happens, malaria boy.

And then I'm there going, Don't go in there. You die if you go into a swamp. Exactly. You don't know what's under that water.

It's the lesson of swamp thing.

And where they're like, You know what's under this water? Food.

Yeah. Bedrock.

You mentioned the land being valueless. That was literally what the first state legislature said, that it is, quote, wholly valueless, and said, We got to figure out how to get this water out of here and make this into land we can use.

Yeah. There's like, some people are actually adapting to living there. Can you believe that? We want to tame this thing. And so they did. Very quickly, they started digging canals and ditches to drain water from Lake Okeechobe, which again has traditionally flutter its banks and sent water into the Everglades. That's where the Everglades gets most of its water. It has over time, and then it takes so long to slosh out that it stays generally wet throughout the year. If you dig canals to divert water to other places, like, say, an existing river or the Atlantic Ocean, you're not going to have those banks flood anymore. And the people that live along those banks are not going to die being covered in a mudslide or a flood, or your crops aren't going to be ruined. And so that was the first attempt to really tame the Everglades. It was by cutting off its water supply from the north, from Lake Okeechobe.

Yeah. And that happened up through the first couple of decades, at least, of the 20th century, until in the 1920s, some people, not too many, but some people started standing up and saying, You know what? We're wrecking an ecosystem here. It's heartening, I guess, to think that this was happening all the way back in the 1920s. But in 1928, there was a land developer named Ernest F. Co, a land developer who actually developed a campaign to protect part of that area as a National Park, which eventually bore fruit in 1947.

Can you believe it? He was a unicorn.

I know.

Another champion of the Everglades who came along about 20 or so years later was a journalist named Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, whose name, sadly, has become synonymous with a school shooting in Florida as well. I didn't know anything about her, but she was this amazing champion of civil rights, of women's rights, of protecting the environment Ironman. And we're talking in the '40s. And she was a really good writer, and she wrote a book called The Everglades: River of Grass, which is a great title or whatever, but it was apparently a very popular book that changed people's attitudes toward the Everglades. It wasn't like, this isn't something to be tamed for industry and real estate. This is something to be preserved and protected. And because she helped point out just how unique the Everglades was as an ecosystem, it became protected, not because it's incredibly beautiful. It's actually not in some ways. It's not ugly, but it's featureless in a lot of places. It was protected because of the life that it housed. Yeah.

I get that it's not the Rocky Mountain National Park and all the amazing things you get out West, but I was blown away by the way it looked. I know that swamp just has a connotation as when the US first got a hold of it, they were like, This place is gross. Let's get all this water out of here. But I was knocked out, and The same thing happened in the Okeee finoake. I just think it's an amazing, visually amazing place as well.

That's awesome. Well, you would have been a great early proponent of protecting the Everglades.

Totally. I don't want to walk around in there.

Right. Because you'll die. I wanted to exist over there.

And again, I talked about the birding, but apparently there was a conservative governor named Spessard Holland who was like, Well, hey, there's tons of birds here. We could probably bring in some money as a tourism hotspot with the Everglades.

Yeah, those nerds are loaded. They usually don't have kids or anything else to do. Really well-paying job. Bring them in.

Oh, God bless the birders.

So the park started out at 400 something thousand acres, and eventually just started ballooning very quickly. I think it's about one and a half million acres now, about 2,300 square miles.

It's big.

A God-gigant gigantic amount of kilometers. And it is. It's giant. And you're like, wow, 2,300 square miles. It's a huge, staggering size. But compared to the actual historical natural boundaries, and I'm talking like the... Taking anything anyone's ever said, this is the Everglades into account. Naturally speaking, it's about an eighth of what the actual Everglades are meant to be. There's supposed to be something like 18,000 square miles or about It's twice the size of New Jersey.

So basically, the entire lower half of Florida.

Yeah, up well into central Florida. Yeah. For sure. So it might even be closer to the bottom two-thirds. I don't know. But it's a significant, huge amount of land. And the idea that the park is just protecting it, that it's like an eighth of its size, it It's misleading in one way because there's actually a patchwork of Native American reservations that are protected and state parks and areas that also enjoy some- Wildlife refuges. Yeah. So it's actually bigger than just the National Park. But at the same time, it's still a shadow of its former south. And there are two things that caused the Everglades to become a shadow of its former South. One is real estate development. Florida is amazingly beautiful and sunny. Yeah, there's rainy season, but it's still worth hanging around during to make it through to the dry season because it's so nice. And then number two, agriculture. Because the Okeechobe traditionally overfloated its banks to the south, it deposited tons of nutrient-rich silt. So just to the south of Lake Okeechobe is some of the most fertile land in the United States. And they're like, This is wasted. We need to damn this thing.

We need to build levees and dykes and everything to keep this thing from overflowing and plant there. And that's what they did. So the Everglades were drained for real estate in this patchwork way and then cut off, again, like I said, from its source of new water, Lake Okeechobe.

Yeah. And one of the main projects that got that going in more recent history. It was in 1948. The Hurricane George came through in 1947, a. K. A. The Fort Lauderdale Hurricane, did a lot of damage. And Congress said, All right, we got to do something about this for real. So they authorized a Central and Southern Florida project for flood control and other purposes, otherwise known as the C & C Ampersand SF.

Cnsf.

And that's what basically got it going in 1948, like you were talking about, when just more and more canals, more levies, creating more farmland and urban areas just swelling going outward.

Yeah, because if you weren't on board with the idea of real estate, development, or agriculture, and you wanted to protect the Everglades, every once in a while, an enormous hurricane would come through and kill a couple of thousand people. It would be like, We got to do something about this. So it would bring everybody else into the fold, and that's how that happened. Over time, these projects became so successful that still today, the canals and the ditches and all of that stuff that diverts water away from the Everglades outward so we can live and farm in Florida, carries about 1.7 billion gallons of water a day to the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.

That's incredible.

Still today. So Yes, the Everglades is essentially, you would hope it's in this holding pattern. It's not. It's been cut off from its natural source of fresh water coming from the north and Lake Okeechobe, and it's slowly dying, essentially. It's still huge, but it's still being carved up. Agriculture is still being carried out. It's still being drained, and it's in a little bit of trouble. So we'll talk about that. But I say we take a break and then come back and talk about some of the stars of the Everglades.

You know who else agrees with you on these points?

Who?

Kenny.

I'll bet.

All right, we'll be right back. Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robé. And me, Simone Voice. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends friends, inspiration, and so much more. Thank you for taking the light, and you're going to shine it all over the world, and it makes me really happy. I never imagined that I would get the chance to carry this honor and help be a part of this legacy.

Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search the Bright Side.

Do you think Abuelita knows best? Wilmer Valderrama here, executive producer of the podcast, Day My Abuelita First. And we definitely do. Join us while our host, Viko Ortiz and our Abuelita Liliana Montenegro play matchmaker for you loving hopefuls out there. Biko? Yes, Wilmer. We are ready for another wild ride. Listen, every Thursday as Abuelita Liliana and I meet three single cuties who will vive for a date with one lucky dater. Except to get their heart, they have to went over Abuelita first. How PG is this? Not at all. Totally are. Abuelita is here, so bring it. Through speed dating rounds, hilarious games, and AI, Abuelita's intuition, one contestant might be lucky enough to become the perfect match. Let's see if chistas will fly or if these singles will be sent back to the dating apps. Listen today, my Abuelita first as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Who hasn't heard names like Achilles or Odyssias, Cassandra, Medusa? But how much do you know about them from the Ancient World. Let's Talk About Myths, Baby is the podcast bringing the ancient sources to life. Greek myth and history is timeless, and unless you've been living under a rock, you have seen just how true that is today. But there is so much more to these characters and stories than what pop culture can do justice. I'm Liv Albert, the host of Let's Talk About Myths, Baby, and every week I bring you stories from the ancient world, both mythological and historical, to breathe new life into these thousands of years old stories. I'm also regularly joined by some of the most brilliant names in the field of archeology and ancient history, authors of your favorite retellings from today, and everyone in between. Join me as I dive into the wild world of the ancient Greeks and their stories. Listen to Let's Talk About Myths, Baby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, Chuck. So the National Park Service carves the ever Everglades up into nine habitats. Because I think we said at the outset, the Everglades is actually this amazing patchwork of different kinds of ecosystems. Nine, to be exact. And the reason that there are so many different ecosystems is because, again, Florida is so flat, the Everglades are so shallow, that just in a rise of a few inches can create a completely different ecosystem than one that's a few inches shorter than it, because it can be dry. And so then there can be hardwood trees, and then all sorts of different life comes in flocks to these little islands that form over time as the tree roots capture dirt and the ground rises slowly but surely over time. Those are called hardwood hammocks, and they're just one of the ecosystems found in the Everglades.

Yeah, and people should understand every time we say the word dry, that's heavily quoted. Right. Dry meaning can sustain birds walking around on it and like a tree to grow. Yeah.

And it'll get flooded periodically, but it's not constantly wet.

And imagine if you jump up and down and stand in place, you'll sink a little bit.

You will be very sorry.

You've also got the pine Rock lands. These are just beautiful areas. These are areas of forests, and it's very unique. It's only found in South Florida and the Bahamas, and mostly in Florida. But it's got this pine canopy. Florida has got these beautiful pine trees. I know people often think of just coastal Florida with palm trees and things like that and sand. But you get into interior Florida a little bit, you got these beautiful pine forests, and that forest canopy means that stuff grows there that doesn't grow anywhere else on planet Earth.

Right. And one of the things that's really important to the pine rock lands is they can sustain fire. And so fire periodically comes along. These days, the National Park rangers set fire on purpose for prescribed burns to mimic natural fires. And that keeps those hardwoods from coming in and establishing dominance and turning those places into a hardwood hammock, so it stays a pine Rockland, which is cool. It's its own thing, and it's probably always going to be its own thing as long as everything stays exactly the same.

Freshwater slues, they are the shark river slue that goes to the Gulf of Mexico and the Taylor Slou that goes into Florida Bay. They're basically two giant marshy saugrass Rivers.

Slow moving.

Very slow. Yeah.

And again, that's what people think of, typically, when they think of Everglades, right?

Yeah. The rafting, not so good.

There's Marl Prairies, and Marl is like the opposite of peat. It needs aerobic conditions to form. Did you just pet because it has to do with scotch?

No, just because we talk about peat later, and I think peat is just amazing.

I do, too. Yeah. Plus also It makes scotch pretty great.

Yeah, sure. That's part of it.

But the Marl is made up of a bunch of different weird stuff like algae and microbes and calcium, carbonate. It's a very specific mud or dirt, basically, that feeds a lot of very diverse wildlife.

Yeah, absolutely. Those are the Marl prairies? Yes. Yeah.

What about the Cyprus trees? They have their own ecosystem allotted to them, but they seem to grow in various places, too.

Yeah. I mean, they can grow in water, like the standing water. They do really well in the wet areas. They're beautiful. They also grow in dry areas that don't have great soil, so they're pretty hardy species.

Okay. And I think I would be the jerk of the year if I took a mangrove forest.

You know I love my mangroves. I asked Kenny, I was like, Are those mangroves? He said, No. But There are some. So what I was seeing was... I'm not sure what I was seeing or exactly which area I was in now that I'm looking at them all. I mean, it's Northwest of Fort Myers is where I was. And we were driving around through the marshy section, but there was a very large lake there that I think you said was the second largest lake.

I don't know. I'm not familiar with that area, but it sounds like you're talking about Cape Coral area.

Maybe. I tried to find that lake on the map, but I couldn't find anything today.

Does Kenny exist? Is anything real?

He does. I took a selfie and he jumped in the back of it. He photobombed us. Nice. But anyway, mangrove forest, there are mangroves there. They're in the coastal channels around the Southern tip of Florida in that Brackish water, so I wouldn't have seen them where we were. And listen to our mangroves episode to learn all the great things they do.

Yeah, for sure. And they are really great trees. The Everglades, apparently, has the largest contiguous mangrove ecosystem in the entire Western hemisphere. And I read that some of them are like four stories tall, Chuck. Can you imagine seeing a four-story tall mangrove tree?

Man, that's amazing. I did say, listen to that episode, but we should say, at the very least, that one of the big things, because this will come up later, that mangroves do, is protect against high water and storms.

Yes, exactly. And so there's areas that get such high waters and get such high winds during hurricanes that the mangroves are like, Nuts to this. I'm moving elsewhere. And those areas where they move away from or where they just can't exist are called coastal lowlands. And these are the antithesis of what people think of when they think of the Everglades, because it's essentially a scrub desert.

Yeah.

Isn't that nuts? There's scrub desert ecosystems in the Everglades.

Yeah, it's incredible. All the ecosystems are so varied. It's really amazing. Yeah.

So it's populated by low-growing, salt-tolerant plants that can handle being blown around in 180 190-mile-an-hour winds.

Like succulents.

And then there's Florida Bay. And this is, again, the very, very shallow coastal area that's bounded at the south by the Keys and at the north by the Florida mainland. And there's amazing fishing there. And most people would think, That's not the Everglades, but it's technically included in Everglades, in particular, Everglades National Park.

Absolutely. We got to talk about some animals here. We're not going to go into too much detail, but we got to talk about alligators and crocodiles, because as you know, if you've listened to the show, that's the only place on planet Earth that has both, which is pretty remarkable. Yeah, it is. A lot more alligators and crocodiles, of course. I think about 200,000 gators compared to 2000 crocs.

Yes, but the crocs numbered 200 back in 1975. That's pretty good.

They call it a comeback.

Yeah, because they were never gone. Same with the Panthers. They're still in a very precariously low population density of about 200, but that's up from 20 to 30 in the 1970s. It's crazy. So these are the yields or the dividends that protection yielded. The Florida Panthers should not exist any longer were it not for people like E. F. Co. And Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. They would just be long on, and now they're starting to slowly come back. And those things are beautiful.

Yeah, they are gorgeous big kitty cats.

Yeah, 6 to 7 feet long.

Yeah. We saw a wild cow. What? Yeah. Kenny said they're not wild cows. What do you call them? Like...

Feral cows?

No, maybe he did say wild cows. But wild, just meaning they're not anyone's cows. That's pretty cool. There's a word for that. I just can't think of it.

Unowned cows?

No.

Possessionless cows?

They were leased cows, I think.

Yeah, that's pretty neat, though. I don't understand how those things survive because an alligator could take them down so easy.

This cow was 50 feet from an alligator.

It's so weird. I don't understand nature sometimes, even though I love it.

You've got your water mammals. Everyone loves to see a manatee or an otter or a dolphin. The manatee, there was, I feel like a push to save the manatees started in the '90s or maybe even earlier.

Something like that because they were in trouble, and they've come back, too.

Yeah, I think they went from endangered to threatened in 2017. But just a few years ago, they had what's called an unusual mortality event, which looks like it is because of a loss of sea grass and water quality.

Yeah, that's a huge one. So Lake Okeechobe, as we'll see, is a toxic dump of farm runoff in nutrients. And because it's diverted, that water is diverted now to the Eastern Coast and the Western Coast, there are very frequently algae die offs or algae blooms that lead to fish kills and die offs, including the sea grass. So it's a huge, huge problem. Not only is it not providing the Everglades with water right now, that's actually good, because if it were, the Everglades would be even more poison than they are. So instead, the coastal areas are getting poison, and that's where the manatees live. And when the sea grass goes away, the manatees go away. So now they've taken up programs of feeding the manatees expired heads of cabbage and lettuce and stuff from grocery stores around the state. And it seems to be sustaining them. But the key here is to figure out how to treat Lake Okeechobe. That's the key. You can treat Lake Okeechobe, you can start moving water from Lake Okeechobe down into the Everglades. You're taking an enormous first step toward restoration. Yeah. And you're also saving coastal areas that are now just completely trashed by algae blooms and agricultural runoff.

Do it. Turn the water on.

Well, that's what they're doing. So are we on to conservation and climate change?

Well, I want to shout out our bird friends real quick. Sure. Because like I said early on, the alligators were neat, although we did see baby gators, very, very cute, all piling on one another, trying to I guess, get out of the water. It was like 10 of them. They were just climbing all over each other. They don't like it either. Like 5 feet from us. It's very cute. But the birds is what really knocked me out. Emily and I have gotten much more into, I wouldn't even say birding, but just...Appreciating birds? Enthusiasm. We got a bunch of feeders now and cameras, and we're looking them up more, and she puts out her phone, and then the Cornell app listens and records. So we've gotten more into it. We don't actually go out with the binoculars yet.

I I have a magazine, you got me a subscription, too, that I hadn't heard of before that I love, that I think you'll like, too. It's called Birds and Blooms. Oh, yeah? Essentially, it's almost ad-free. I don't know how they publish, I guess, just on subscription. And it's all about birds and how great birds are. And, oh, check out this plant. Isn't this plant beautiful? It's almost like just appreciating this stuff for preaching. It's not shoving conservation down your throat. It's not...

There's no agenda.

There's no agenda aside from appreciating birds and plants. It's a really great magazine.

Oh, my friend. I appreciate that. That is going to be coming Emily's way, and I will tell her that you and Yumi are to thank. Sure, if you want to.

But anyway-It'll probably never get back to me if you don't.

The birds down there were just amazing. Cranes and herons. The showstopper was that pink, what's it called? The Rosette Spoonbill. We came upon a big mess of them, and I was just like, You got to... It was in the swamp road ahead of us.How tall are they?I knew what he was going to do. He cut the engine and we watched them and stuff. But then he drives and they fly away. All I could think of was, Sorry.

Sorry for disturbing you. How tall are they?

They were about the same size as a heron or a crane, it seemed like. But just the spoonbills are cool-looking, and then when they take off and fly, they're just this like, Flamingo pink. It's amazing.

That's really cool, man. Yeah. Lots of butterflies down there, too, which I'm a big fan of as well.

Yeah, and hopefully, we're going to be doing, if you're saying, how can you not talk about orchids? I think we're going to do maybe a shorty just on orchids. Yes.

So As I was saying, there's some steps that need to be taken to restore the Everglades. And there's been a huge push to restoring the Everglades for decades now. Unesco put it on its World Heritage List in 1979. And even long before that, people have been like, We've got to stop screwing with this stuff. We have messed it up so bad with the system of canals and ditches and dykes and levees and dams. We've got to just undo some of this. And there was a huge push to actually do that. And in 2000, back when Congress was capable of being bipartisan, they passed the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, SERP. And SERP essentially said, We're going to undo as much of that C and SF project work as possible, and just let the Everglades be what the Everglades are. And had anyone been on the ball and funding come through early, it would be done by now. It was projected to cost $8 billion in 20 years, and that is not at all how it worked out at all. They're actually just now starting a lot of the projects, and by a lot of the projects, I mean a tiny fraction of what's needed to be done.

Yeah. And Kenny said the same thing that there's still real estate encroaching and developers encroaching. So it seems like a one step forward, two steps back situation. Yeah. That they're still draining more wetlands to expand living space and grocery stores and everything else that people use further and further into it. So it's fairly discouraging. I know there It was at one point a deal to buy back a bunch of land from US Sugar, but thanks to the 2008 financial crisis, that went belly up, right?

Doesn't that just anger you? So this would have been a huge, huge step because this was prime agricultural land that was below Lake Okeechobee. And if they could basically flood that again, it would restore water back to the Everglades. It would have been huge. And US Sugar, who up until you said it, I've been pronouncing in my head, US Sugar, they were on board. And a lot of people were critical that Florida was going to spend $1.75 billion to buy like, 180,000 acres from US Sugar because it was a struggle juggling company to begin with and yada, yada, yada. Bailing them out. But it made it through all of those political obstacles. It was basically a done deal. And then the financial crisis happened, and all those stupid banks that screwed up the entire global economy also prevented the Everglades restoration from taking that enormous step forward because Flora is like, Oh, we don't have any money all of a sudden, and we really need every penny we can get.

Yeah, that's a real thumb in the eye.

Yeah.

Well, we promised a little bit more talk of Pete, and I'm glad Libia found this because I think both of us are pretty knocked out by Pete. Maybe we should do a Pete cast one day.

Yeah.

But there's a lot of that peat-rich soil underneath the marshes there. And you talked earlier about what was it that was the opposite of peat?

Morrow.

Yeah, Morrow was the opposite of peat. Peat forms from organic materials that don't have oxygen. They're shielded from oxygen, so they don't break down. And that's why you can find amazing discoveries in peat bogs. The wetland dries up, though, and that stuff can all of a sudden burn. That's going to release a carbon into the atmosphere, and all of a sudden, the peat is threatened as well.

Yeah. So there's a lot of problems with climate change that climate change is going to bring to the Everglades. And one of them is that restoration. The restoration plan that was adopted in 2000 did not plan for climate change. So they're having to figure out how to implement these things now, the projects now, without going back to the drawing board and starting over and losing tons of ground in time, but also without spending billions of dollars on things that aren't going to work because the Everglades are going to change with the climate. So that's currently what they're trying to figure out.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. And I recommend two different articles that have two really different views of what's going on for a really sunny view that I almost found suspicious, as if some AI wrote it, knew what I was researching and wrote it and served it up to me just in time for me to report on it to you guys. I don't think that's the thing yet, but it made me think like that's coming in the future. I think it's called a bypass surgery for the Everglades. It's on Fizorg, and it's pretty good. It's very interesting. But again, it's got a really sunny outlook. For the opposite outlook, there is a up first public radio interview with Jenny Stiletowitch, who's a public radio reporter who who reports on the Everglades and has forever. And that's called How to Save the Everglades. I strongly recommend listening or reading to that as well as that Fizorg article. And it'll give you a pretty clear perspective on what's going on.

Fizorg Sounds like Snoop Dogg. Name that. What a perfect way to end.

Very nice. Well, Chuck made another Snoop Dogg reference to circle things up again. And of course, that has just triggered listener mail, whether we like it or not.

We're going to shout out. I don't know if you... Did you see that flood of emails come in from those high school kids?

No.

Okay, you will. It was right in the last hour before we recorded, we got 10 or 12 emails all at the same time for my high school class. So it was like, somebody had an assignment. Nice. I'm going to read one of them and shout out the rest. This was called subject line, My teacher forced me to do this. I'm not going to say which student Ms. Tiak wrote this one, but I bet you could probably figure it out. Hey, guys, really enjoy listening to your podcast. I've been listening for the past month or so. So far, I've learned a lot from it. One of my favorite topics was the origin of math symbols since I'm a big math person. I'm an AP English language student at Wasco High School. My teacher is a huge fan of both of you guys, and has been making us listen to a podcast episode every week. Nice. So we gained general knowledge for our argument essay in the AP exam. She is now forcing us to send a listener mail for a grade. If you happen to see this, can I get a thank you to Ms. T-yack?

How do you spell it? T-y-a-c-k.

Great name.

Unless the T is silent, then it's just Yack. Or unless the Y is silent in this tack.

Sure. What if the A is silent?

Then it'd be tight.

What if the CK is silent?

It'd be Tia.

Very nice. Anything else? I think we've the big ones.

I would actually like to thank you for giving our class more knowledge in order to hopefully use it in the exam. Again, thank you. Keep educating the world in an entertaining way. Actually, that was a nice email, so I'm going to go ahead and say that was from Anil. Thanks, Anil. Big shout out to Jessica, Damian, Elijah, Abel, Daylen, Mariana, Yair, and Angel.

Great lineup of names.

Or Angel, I'm not sure.

It's a great lineup of people, too, I'm Hey, this just in.

We don't normally do this, but we got a bunch of more emails from kids from this class. You can't just read a third of the kids' names and be done with it.

Chuck, what day is it? What's going on?

I mean, this is much later, but you got to read all these kids' names. We're going to do that right now. This must be many classes. There's no way all these kids are in class. But in addition to the ones we read, can we also shout out from that AP class, Ian and Bre, and Megan and Eileen and Jocelyn, and Marisol, and Amanda, and Alexis, and Charisma, and Celeste, and Nicholas, and Cecilia, and Giarelli, and Alex, and Ines. You think I'm done? Yeah. Nope, halfway there, my friend. Wow. Because we also have to thank Paulina, and Arturo, and Jacquelyn, and Antonio, and Lauren, and Brittany. I see you, Brittany. And Victoria, and Issik. What a name, Issik. And then finally, Juliet, Jasmine, Ava, Sebastian, and of course, Dearest Kierden. All rode in, and there was one student that was like, Don't read my name.

Hooper Humperding.

We're not going to, but Just wanted to give everyone in the class a shoutout.

That's awesome. Sounds like a great bunch, Chuck.

Yeah. Ms. Tia, give everyone a great grade, and a big shoutout to the AP English class at Wasco High.

Yeah, huge shoutout. If you want to be like Ms. Tx class and get in touch with us for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. You can send it via email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio. Com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robé. And me, Simone Voce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.

Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side.

It's been almost 3,000 years, and Greek mythology has proved that it is not going anywhere. But it can be difficult to find entertaining and engaging retellings of these myths that aren't fictionalized. Lucky for you, I'm here. Let's Talk About Myths Baby is the Greek mythology and ancient history podcast of your dreams. I dive into the convoluted and confusing ancient sources, so you don't have to. Listen to Let's Talk About Myths Baby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

This is Angie Martinez. Check out my podcast, Angie Martinez IRL, where I talk to Super Bowl halftime performer and the newly married usher about relationships.

Trust is the main component to happiness and success in a relationship.

Being able to actually hear each other and speak up. I think most of the time we all just want to be heard.

Listen Angie Martinez IRL on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcast.