Eco-Disasters 101: The Salton Sea

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 46 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too.

Speaker 47 And this is Stuff You Should Know.

Speaker 49 It's a little bit of a jazzy earth science edition, I think.

Speaker 37 Yeah.

Speaker 51 And I mean, we might as well get into it because I just told Jerry the name of this was Salton Lake.

Speaker 54 And even though it's called the Salton Sea.

Speaker 55 Right.

Speaker 56 Which is

Speaker 39 an inland lake in Imperial and Coachella Valleys in Riverside and Imperial County in California, Southern California.

Speaker 10 And I said, it's not really a sea.

Speaker 24 And he said it's an inless sea.

Speaker 59 Then he said, save it.

Speaker 53 He said, this is gold.

Speaker 48 I didn't say save it like that.

Speaker 54 Well, no, I mean, I'm not going to do my Josh impression.

Speaker 62 You just did a really mean Josh impression.

Speaker 47 Save it.

Speaker 60 No, no, no.

Speaker 6 So I guess we need to determine this.

Speaker 51 Why do they call it a sea?

Speaker 64 I mean, it's an inland sea. I don't know.

Speaker 15 I just know that most people call it that.

Speaker 66 I failed to go look up whether it is a sea or a lake.

Speaker 36 I mean, I don't think it has any outlet to the ocean anymore, right?

Speaker 55 No, not anymore. We're going to talk about that.

Speaker 40 Well, that makes it a lake.

Speaker 47 Save it.

Speaker 37 I think that's,

Speaker 67 see, I nailed it.

Speaker 2 I think that's the difference between a sea and a lake.

Speaker 39 I think a lake has no outlet to the ocean and a sea does.

Speaker 37 Oh, goodness.

Speaker 58 If I'm not mistaken, I might be wrong about that.

Speaker 16 I didn't look it up, but I think California has a lot of work to do.

Speaker 71 They need to go rewrite all their pamphlets and update their websites and all that stuff.

Speaker 73 It's now the Salton Lake.

Speaker 74 Well, now all their pamphlets just say, don't even bother coming here.

Speaker 37 Right.

Speaker 40 To the Salton Sea, that is, not at California.

Speaker 75 I love California.

Speaker 55 Exactly.

Speaker 79 And the reason that they would have pamphlets that say, don't come here, is because the Salton Sea is a genuine ecological disaster.

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Human made it every step of the way.

Speaker 82 And it's got a really interesting history, too.

Speaker 85 It's just a good all-around topic, if you ask me.

Speaker 71 Plus, it was a so-so movie starring Val Kilmer back in the

Speaker 88 late 90s or early 2000s.

Speaker 37 I think it was early 2000s.

Speaker 50 It was okay.

Speaker 37 I saw it.

Speaker 63 The extra supporting character was meth.

Speaker 37 Yeah.

Speaker 5 It was very methyl.

Speaker 75 Yeah, I've been here, by the way.

Speaker 16 I was wondering that.

Speaker 52 Yeah, on my big out west trip many years ago after college, where I spent several months driving around with my best friend Brett.

Speaker 58 We went through the Salton Sea.

Speaker 68 And

Speaker 40 it wasn't great back then.

Speaker 92 I imagine it's, well, it sounds like it's even worse now.

Speaker 75 But when did we talk about this before?

Speaker 2 Was it it desertification?

Speaker 55 Oh, maybe.

Speaker 90 Because I know we've talked about it.

Speaker 69 That doesn't ring a bell.

Speaker 92 But I mean, so much so that I was convinced we did a whole episode, but it could have been one of our ill-conceived videos that we used to do.

Speaker 65 That's possible, too.

Speaker 48 Because I think

Speaker 85 I could see us taking the angle that there were ghost towns there.

Speaker 37 Oh, okay. You know,

Speaker 94 there are.

Speaker 73 There's a lot of ghost towns there.

Speaker 62 As we'll see, the area was once quite developed, and for good reasons, again, as we'll see, people largely abandoned this area.

Speaker 48 But let's talk about how the Salton Sea even came to be, because that is an interesting story in and of itself.

Speaker 97 Yeah, it totally is.

Speaker 40 It's in the Salton Basin, and that's S-A-L-T-O-N, by the way. Right.

Speaker 59 And that is a very large trough,

Speaker 54 just sort of a natural geological trough that...

Speaker 57 that led into, at one point, the Gulf of California, but

Speaker 97 there were other seas before this sea, or lakes, if you want to go that route.

Speaker 16 Yeah, from the oldest I saw is that we have geological evidence of inland seas or lakes, depending on your definition,

Speaker 102 going back at least 40,000 years, and that it was almost cyclical.

Speaker 89 There'd be a lake that was there for a few hundred years, and it would dry up or flow out to the Gulf of California, and then it would happen again a couple centuries later.

Speaker 70 And the thing that made it happen was the Colorado River, which flows to the east along the border of California and Nevada and California and Arizona down into, I guess, the Gulf of California, right?

Speaker 56 Are you asking me?

Speaker 78 I think so.

Speaker 81 So that would make the Colorado River a sea.

Speaker 47 But it flows into there, and every once in a while, there's a lot of snow melt, there's a lot of rain, and the Colorado River will flood its banks so much that a bunch of it gets diverted into the Salton Basin, forming one of the Salton Seas over time.

Speaker 74 Yeah, for a while, like you said, you know, it could be there for a while.

Speaker 40 Eventually, it's out in the middle of the desert, so eventually it's going to evaporate.

Speaker 35 Right.

Speaker 90 But as the river flowed in there, it carried a lot of silt with it.

Speaker 52 And eventually that silt gummed up the outlet so it couldn't get anywhere.

Speaker 40 So there was a natural dam that was formed.

Speaker 68 Right.

Speaker 59 And, you know, it was, like you said, it was

Speaker 58 a lake for a long time.

Speaker 92 Sometimes it was a saltwater lake.

Speaker 10 Sometimes the heat would dry it out and evaporate it.

Speaker 37 And it would just become a dry bed once again and it just it was this kind of weird uh geological cycle i don't i mean i'm sure this has happened elsewhere but this seems particularly noteworthy for this area it does it seems kind of unique you know yeah i think so uh it uh there's also one of these lakes or seas you'll like this one because they call it a lake lake lake kahuila which formed about 1300 years ago, as well as geologists can tell.

Speaker 83 And it stuck around for hundreds of years, possibly up into the 1500s.

Speaker 47 And at one point in the 1500s, it flooded.

Speaker 48 So it was already there and it grew to about 26 times the size of the Salton Sea.

Speaker 94 Oh, wow.

Speaker 84 Which in and of itself, that sounds pretty impressive.

Speaker 112 But I came up with a few comparisons for some of our listeners around the world, if I may.

Speaker 37 Sure.

Speaker 65 For our northern listeners, that is larger than the size of Lake Erie.

Speaker 37 Okay.

Speaker 73 For our Canadian listeners, it's four times larger than the capital city of Ottawa.

Speaker 99 For our European listeners, that's larger than Belgium.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 12 In the UK, that's bigger than Wales.

Speaker 78 In Australia, that's two times the greater Sydney metro area.

Speaker 84 And for our friends in California, that's 26 times the size of the Salton Sea.

Speaker 79 Wow.

Speaker 57 You did your homework.

Speaker 53 I did.

Speaker 67 Is there a program that you use, like just like joshconverts.com?

Speaker 103 There are, yeah, I make like $12 a month on web apps.

Speaker 50 That's great.

Speaker 89 No, there's websites that says like they're called like the size of or something like that.

Speaker 115 So usually it's type in what's the size of 10,000 square miles, which is what that would be.

Speaker 54 Is a landing page just a banana?

Speaker 37 Yes.

Speaker 52 It starts from there.

Speaker 55 Yeah.

Speaker 110 Where did that come from using a banana for scale?

Speaker 63 Do you know?

Speaker 37 Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 56 I never, I mean, who starts any of these things?

Speaker 114 Okay.

Speaker 115 I didn't know if it was something that you had kind of brought up or something because I know the stuff you should know.

Speaker 110 Army is crazy for that.

Speaker 56 No, it's just an internet thing.

Speaker 44 Okay.

Speaker 58 Except Ron's doing all of that stuff.

Speaker 114 Get all of Ron.

Speaker 78 He comes up with the best memes.

Speaker 26 All right.

Speaker 97 So that was the cycle for thousands of years, depositing that silt.

Speaker 75 One of the byproducts of that is it made that soil very rich and stuff could really grow on it if it rained ever, which it doesn't.

Speaker 54 So that was a problem, and irrigation is going to solve that problem.

Speaker 60 So in the early 1900s, the Imperial Canal was built to say, hey, let's divert some of that Colorado River toward us so we can have drinking water and so we can irrigate this rich, rich soil that lies beneath our feet.

Speaker 10 And they completed it and, you know, it was

Speaker 36 pretty good, but that same silt is going to keep clogging up even, you know, kind of any moving body of water.

Speaker 58 And that eventually happened to the canal like in a bad way not too long after they opened it.

Speaker 73 No, just in a couple of years.

Speaker 53 Um, and this one clog was so bad that they were like, We're not going to get rid of this anytime soon.

Speaker 101 So, they dug a bypass around it, you know?

Speaker 119 Yeah.

Speaker 64 Which makes sense. It's smart.

Speaker 82 And they just expected it to last like a couple of months until they cleaned that silt deposit out and could go back to the original canal.

Speaker 99 The problem was, because they thought it was going to be temporary, they didn't install the proper headgates.

Speaker 16 Headgates control the flow of water in a canal.

Speaker 53 So that means that the water in that bypass was literally out of control, which was fine.

Speaker 100 They dug it well enough that under normal circumstances, the water was flowing normally.

Speaker 108 But the year after they dug that bypass,

Speaker 107 it stayed around longer than expected.

Speaker 99 And the year after, there were some genuinely abnormal circumstances that caused a huge problem for everybody.

Speaker 44 Yeah, it rained a lot.

Speaker 5 A big rainy season.

Speaker 74 And then, you know, snow melt in the Rockies can always be a problem if it was extra.

Speaker 40 And that year it was extra coinciding with those rains.

Speaker 60 The Colorado River swole up again.

Speaker 40 And it, you know, did what water does.

Speaker 58 It goes downriver in a pretty impactful way and really overwhelmed that temporary channel that they were using to divert around the Clogged Canal. Yeah.

Speaker 74 It carved it.

Speaker 10 It just made it bigger and deeper.

Speaker 116 And eventually it started overflowing into that salt and sink and just became one big body of water.

Speaker 64 Yeah, so essentially the Colorado River decided, I'll go this way instead.

Speaker 109 So it actually changed its course from the way that it had been going for millennia to this way directly into the Salton Sea.

Speaker 84 And it started flowing so fast that 90,000 cubic feet of water per second was flowing into the Salton Sea, right?

Speaker 87 That is the size of an Olympic-sized pool.

Speaker 104 That much water flowing in every second.

Speaker 51 Yeah. And for our friends in the north, that's an Olympic-sized pool.

Speaker 44 Right.

Speaker 124 I'm not going to keep going.

Speaker 71 Well, what about our friends who like McDonald's?

Speaker 54 Oh, I mean, if you did a Big Mac conversion, that's really going the extra mile.

Speaker 120 It is exactly 2,295,918 Big Macs all flowing into this Salton Sea.

Speaker 67 per second. So delicious.

Speaker 72 It does seem delicious, but imagine them all kind of flowing at once and smacking into one another.

Speaker 78 It probably get kind of gross.

Speaker 93 Yeah, pretty gross.

Speaker 39 So, I mean, that happened for a couple of years, and they tried to redirect the river.

Speaker 58 It was a pretty expensive proposition.

Speaker 127 It was a pretty frantic thing.

Speaker 40 The U.S. government got involved.

Speaker 58 The Southern Pacific Railroad got involved.

Speaker 10 They fully sealed it in 1907, but that's like, what, three years later?

Speaker 68 And, you know, by that point, it was too late. They were like, all right, now we got a 400 square mile inland sea or lake, depending on who's podcasting many years from now.

Speaker 128 Right.

Speaker 71 Yeah, the way that they sealed it, the Union Pacific Railroad, because their lines were threatened, they're like, we better do something because these government yokels have no idea what to do.

Speaker 17 And so apparently it took two, they built a trestle across the river to install a dam made of 2,057 carloads of rock, 221 carloads of gravel, and 203 carloads of clay, all dumped into one spot to finally fill that breach.

Speaker 18 That's what it took.

Speaker 80 That's how big of a breach it was.

Speaker 57 How many Big Macs?

Speaker 50 A lot.

Speaker 119 I didn't do that one.

Speaker 103 Sorry.

Speaker 37 It's okay.

Speaker 26 Should we take a break now, or is that a should we? It seems like a good time for a break.

Speaker 64 Yeah, the Salt and Sea is now there.

Speaker 96 The breach has been sealed, and people are saying, what the heck are we going to do with this?

Speaker 52 Yeah, we're going to water ski eventually.

Speaker 60 So we'll come back and talk about that right after this.

Speaker 129 Learning stuff from Joshua

Speaker 34 Charles.

Speaker 34 The stuff you should know.

Speaker 2 Support for the show today comes from public.com.

Speaker 4 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 5 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side.

Speaker 9 The point is, you're engaged with your investments and public gets that.

Speaker 11 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously.

Speaker 15 On public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 17 Stocks, bonds, options, options, crypto, it's all there.

Speaker 22 Plus, an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 4 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously.

Speaker 23 Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

Speaker 3 That's public.com slash SYSK.

Speaker 27 Paid for by Public Investing.

Speaker 29 All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 30 Brokerage services for U.S.-listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC.

Speaker 32 CryptoTrading provided by ZeroHash.

Speaker 33 Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

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Speaker 129 Better yet, reporter.

Speaker 129 Heard that one before, but it was so nice. I learned it twice.

Speaker 129 Everybody, listen up.

Speaker 129 Oh, it's Charles and Joshua.

Speaker 129 Let's stop, it's stop, it's stopped.

Speaker 97 All right, so when we last left you,

Speaker 68 human experimentation and sort of error and rain and snow melt caused a 400 square mile,

Speaker 58 almost 35 mile long and 15 mile wide, about 30 foot deep on average lake to form in the middle of the California desert.

Speaker 51 Because it's where it was, eventually, if humankind had not intruded once again, it probably would have eventually just completely evaporate like it had been doing for millennia.

Speaker 75 But like we mentioned, that soil is good stuff.

Speaker 68 So they started to build, you know, farmland out there and irrigate that land.

Speaker 10 And what do you do when you irrigate stuff?

Speaker 40 You got to have runoff.

Speaker 97 And so they're running this irrigation water off into the lake, which basically, it's like, hey, we're putting at least as much water as you're evaporating.

Speaker 57 So you're not going anywhere.

Speaker 103 No, yeah, that's right.

Speaker 78 So it stabilized the lake indefinitely, just the agricultural runoff.

Speaker 53 One of the other things that the other impacts that this had, because they started doing that in the 20s, is that agricultural runoff is chock full of salt, which I didn't realize, but this irrigation produces a lot of salt, and that stuff was flowing right into the salt in, and it turned it salty.

Speaker 45 Today, I saw anywhere between one-third or 50% more salty than the Pacific Ocean.

Speaker 63 The Salton Sea has become because of all that introduction.

Speaker 84 So it started freshwater, and then because of agricultural runoff, it turned into a saltwater inland sea/slash lake.

Speaker 40 That's right.

Speaker 40 And because it's located along the Pacific Flyway, which is a great migratory bird route, the birds were like, hey, this is great.

Speaker 67 Now there's water here.

Speaker 60 The locals were like, we should put some fish in here.

Speaker 75 So they stocked it with tilapia, a lot of tilapia, and sport fish for sport fishing.

Speaker 10 And of course, the birds love that even more.

Speaker 57 So all of a sudden, by the 1930s, you have a sort of a brand new wildlife refuge forming, such that the U.S.

Speaker 52 Fish and Wildlife Service even created the Salton Sea Wildlife Refuge to protect all the stuff that was there now.

Speaker 84 Yeah, so when the Salton Sea first formed, everybody's like, this is actually kind of great.

Speaker 76 This is a mistake that turned really wonderful for everybody.

Speaker 55 We turned river water into lemonade, in other words.

Speaker 119 That's right.

Speaker 84 So there were some other weird things that didn't make it, but that were introduced, flamingos, which I guess aren't that weird.

Speaker 103 But a guy introduced sea lions, too,

Speaker 84 at one point, and they were accused of stealing pigs in the area.

Speaker 123 But the guy who introduced sea lions and flamingos, he had a legendary restaurant out on an island in the middle of the Salton Sea called Mullet Island, which is actually just sitting atop a dormant volcano.

Speaker 70 It's very important to remember this for later.

Speaker 78 It's a dormant but not extinct volcano. It's just kind of sitting there chilling, waiting to go up.

Speaker 124 That's right.

Speaker 74 And, you know, once you have flamingos, you're going to have people because people want to go see this flamingo.

Speaker 61 So by the 1950s,

Speaker 58 developers had come along and turned it into what they called the California Riviera or the Salton Riviera or Palm Springs by the Sea.

Speaker 134 And it's exactly what you think.

Speaker 9 It's tiki bars, it's restaurants, had a very Palm Springsy vibe.

Speaker 58 Like, you know, Elbis performed there, Frank Sinatra performed there.

Speaker 40 They had, you know, I wasn't kidding about the water skiing.

Speaker 58 People yachted, people swam.

Speaker 57 It was just a big recreation area.

Speaker 35 Out there in the middle of a desert in, you know, Southern California, they were like, yeah, we'll take another one of these.

Speaker 59 We got plenty of people around.

Speaker 9 And Palm Springs gets a little crowded.

Speaker 4 So now we have this beautiful inland sea lake.

Speaker 80 Yeah, people started building vacation homes there.

Speaker 104 There were very famous speedboat races that were held there every year.

Speaker 78 At one point, some developers sunk $2 million in 1960 money

Speaker 78 into building the North Shore Beach and Yacht Club, which became basically the crown jewel of the Salton Sea area.

Speaker 73 There were postcards that said greetings from the Salton Sea.

Speaker 99 There was a Bombay Beach resident who's quite a bit of a postcards?

Speaker 53 They had postcards. Swear to go.

Speaker 67 Did they sell shot glasses?

Speaker 50 I,

Speaker 45 yes.

Speaker 105 There was a Spencer's gifts on the Salton Sea in the 60s.

Speaker 45 All right.

Speaker 83 You could also get a Bitch and Grateful Dead poster and a Latoya Jackson and Lingerie poster.

Speaker 44 Right.

Speaker 57 Is she in a Lambeau?

Speaker 16 No, that's Garfield.

Speaker 37 Oh, okay.

Speaker 123 So there was this Bombay Beach resident, which is one of the little party towns on the Salton Sea, and it's still there.

Speaker 100 There's something like 350 people that live there.

Speaker 80 But he said back in the day, it was like a spring break party all the time.

Speaker 14 The problem was the Salton Sea, as much fun as people were having on it, it was this ticking environmental time bomb just growing underneath their water skis, essentially, day by day.

Speaker 63 Until finally, in around the 70s, it became clear that the Salton Sea's glitz was starting to wear off and there was rotten Big Macs underneath.

Speaker 91 Do you know what I thought you were going to lead it in with when you said the problem is?

Speaker 54 I thought you were going to say is that spring break is not meant to last forever.

Speaker 84 Oh, that's a great one.

Speaker 78 Yeah. Let's go back and edit that in.

Speaker 8 Just a note.

Speaker 81 Okay.

Speaker 114 There'll be no context.

Speaker 62 You'll just add it in, and then we'll leave the part where you suggest it into.

Speaker 37 I agree.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so yeah, things will go downhill pretty quickly.

Speaker 40 You know, I hope we've hammered home enough that this thing just sort of appeared because of people and it's out in the middle of the desert and it's not supposed, it wasn't supposed to be there really.

Speaker 125 So obviously it's not going to rain.

Speaker 10 so that's not gonna fill that thing back up they had that agricultural runoff for many years but as we'll see that would end up being a big part of the problem yeah

Speaker 124 um developments would flood uh you know because they were building you know lakeside properties and stuff like that so uh

Speaker 59 you know whenever you try to intrude I feel like and build a big natural thing out where there probably wasn't supposed to be one I feel like it usually goes south like this in some way yeah it's hubris yeah

Speaker 71 so yeah that runoff would sometimes flood the lake.

Speaker 84 There would be so much of it, and those developments would flood, like you were saying.

Speaker 53 The other problem with the runoff is that it not just salt, it brings lots of pesticides and fertilizers with it.

Speaker 96 And remember that there was no outlet for this lake, which made it a lake in the first place.

Speaker 94 So, all of this toxic water didn't have anywhere to go, right?

Speaker 69 It just stayed in the lake.

Speaker 109 Yeah.

Speaker 96 And anytime you have a lot of fertilizers introduced into a body of water, especially a warm one, you get algae blooms.

Speaker 88 You also get bacteria blooms.

Speaker 69 And when the algae decays, the microbes that eat it also suck up a lot of the oxygen in the water.

Speaker 81 And that kills off all the stuff that needs that oxygen.

Speaker 78 So it creates dead zones.

Speaker 45 And then, even worse, that bacteria that blooms,

Speaker 99 some kinds of it, actually produce toxins that can do things like damage humans' livers or their DNA or cause respiratory failure.

Speaker 99 So all this stuff is starting to like happen in the Salton Sea starting in the 70s and 80s.

Speaker 63 And it's just becoming clear that there's problems that are starting to brew, like literally brewing within the Salton Sea.

Speaker 97 Yeah, it's called eutrophication.

Speaker 93 And there are some pretty staggering and very sad statistics that we're going to kind of run through here as far as the die-off because,

Speaker 24 you know, the fish die off, and then eventually because of the fish die-off, the bird die-off was really massive.

Speaker 40 um this one is is fairly staggering just over a five-month period from december 91 to april 92 150 000 uh little small water birds are called what are those eared grebs

Speaker 37 yeah

Speaker 57 is that what is that how we're pronouncing that i was going to say grebbies but i think you nailed it I'm not really sure, but they're little small water birds, and 150,000 of them died over five months on the Salton Sea.

Speaker 74 Another 20,000

Speaker 68 in 94,

Speaker 68 10,000 white and brown pelicans died out in 1996 about 10,000 other fish-eating birds and this is the really sad one even though it was I say only a thousand that's a lot but they were endangered brown pelicans and apparently that was the largest sort of single die-off of an endangered species to ever happen yeah Yeah, and all this is going down on the Salton Sea.

Speaker 2 Or the tilapia, man.

Speaker 60 How about that stat?

Speaker 100 Yeah, the most eye-popping stat that I've found is that 8 million, 8 million tilapia died in one single day in August of 1999.

Speaker 55 How do they figure that, you know?

Speaker 107 I don't know. They must have counted one in like a square foot and then multiplied it by a big mash or something.

Speaker 54 Yeah, by, well, in this case, fish tacos, maybe.

Speaker 37 Gross.

Speaker 54 That was probably insensitive.

Speaker 76 What, fish tacos?

Speaker 67 Well, I mean, tilapia is good for, I don't eat tilapia much, much, but it's pretty good for a fish taco.

Speaker 53 Aren't they the rats of the sea?

Speaker 68 Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 35 I used to eat it more.

Speaker 88 I'll eat tilapia.

Speaker 114 I'm not that fancy.

Speaker 37 Oh, oh, yeah? Yeah.

Speaker 84 I'll eat tilapia right in front of you.

Speaker 40 Well, I'll be dining on my Chilean sea bass.

Speaker 37 Nice.

Speaker 67 Or what was that?

Speaker 9 It was something toothfish, right?

Speaker 37 Didn't they read that? Patagonian toothfish.

Speaker 50 I forgot. Yeah, Patagonian.

Speaker 110 That's the real name for sea bass.

Speaker 54 That's right.

Speaker 93 Suckers.

Speaker 64 So, yes, again, I think it's worth restating.

Speaker 87 8 million tilapia died in a single day in 1999.

Speaker 112 The previous record before that had been set the summer prior, and that was 500,000 that died on a single day.

Speaker 46 So clearly things are getting worse by the year at the Salton Sea by the time the 90s roll around.

Speaker 58 Yeah, and so, I mean, they were running incinerators around the clock around town because, you know, the smell of fish carcass was everywhere.

Speaker 41 And you had all these, very sadly, all these animal bodies all over the place i guess you could call them carcasses but i'm gonna say bodies

Speaker 62 so there's another there's an explanation for this too and it's actually pretty simple in addition to those um the eutrophication uh dead zones that are produced by those algae blooms just simple summertime heat in a really saline body of water can kill fish en masse and that's exactly what was going on as the salt and sea warmed as summer started to kind of get going, and there's like 105 degree August temperatures,

Speaker 88 hot water, warm water, carries less oxygen than cooler water, and salt water carries less oxygen than fresh water.

Speaker 69 So when you have warm, briny water, fish can suffocate, and that's what was happening.

Speaker 81 And so fish die-offs are just an annual part of life around the Salton Sea.

Speaker 93 Yeah, and I mean, not only that, it's just losing surface area, it's shrinking.

Speaker 61 So 10%

Speaker 24 has been lost in recent years.

Speaker 54 They're projecting 40% by 2030.

Speaker 40 And when that's happening in a really salty area and all those pesticides and metals and everything that have been, you know, deposited over the years due to the agriculture all around, it just makes it more concentrated.

Speaker 92 And it's just, you know, it's a bad scene.

Speaker 97 It's getting just saltier over the years.

Speaker 74 It's getting more, you know, chock full of more densely packed pesticides and things.

Speaker 24 And they're saying that the salinity is probably going to increase another, maybe three times in the next 10 years, basically kind of taking care of anything else that might still be living there.

Speaker 37 Right.

Speaker 78 And just from the fact that it's shrinking too,

Speaker 81 I saw that there's houses that were built along the shoreline back in the heyday that are now like a football field away from the shoreline now.

Speaker 114 That's how much it's shrunk.

Speaker 95 And they expect it's going to shrink another 40%

Speaker 99 by 2030. So things are getting dire here, right?

Speaker 85 And you can kind of imagine that as things started to go downhill, tourism dropped off.

Speaker 84 And that happened exactly as you'd think.

Speaker 70 That North Shore Beach and Yacht Club that was the crown jewel, it closed down in 1984

Speaker 79 because there was a flood from agricultural runoff.

Speaker 94 And then I saw a really cool, eerie picture, Chuck.

Speaker 100 There's a drive-in movie theater.

Speaker 86 Again, from back in the day, it's in Bombay Beach.

Speaker 76 And for some reason, the cars are all parked like they're there to see the movie but they're all junked and abandoned mostly missing wheels and they're just they just got put there like that and it looks like everybody just kind of left the salt and sea mid-movie it's really cool to see i i would strongly suggest looking up that picture i don't remember where i saw it Well, I'll do you even better.

Speaker 58 There's a video on YouTube because that's a very, I mean, people aren't tourism-wise.

Speaker 125 They're not flocking there but people like me and people that are the same kind of people go to like abandoned

Speaker 40 roller coaster parks amusement parks will still go to the Salton Sea to kind of check things out right and one of these videos

Speaker 40 it's from the gnarly speed shop and I think if you just look up abandoned cars at drive-in on YouTube gnarly speed shop

Speaker 40 They do a cool video sort of walkthrough of the drive-in and the surrounding area.

Speaker 40 There's this very, like every picture you see of this, there's a, a very kind of striking old orange maverick car sitting in the front of frame because I guess it's, you know, kind of closest to the road.

Speaker 58 Right.

Speaker 40 And there was graffiti on it, and I could never tell what it said from the pictures, but on the video, I was able to pause it and it says, you infected me in a way I didn't know was possible, which is very creepy.

Speaker 40 I don't know if that was like a message to a long-lost love or if it was, you know, relating to the Salton Sea and what happened there.

Speaker 60 But it's a pretty cool video.

Speaker 24 And there were boats in the parking lot, too.

Speaker 40 So I don't think it just looks like everyone got up in the middle of the movie.

Speaker 75 I think people just went and

Speaker 54 parked their cars in this abandoned lot is what happened.

Speaker 75 Sure, sure.

Speaker 69 Yeah, I know that they didn't do that.

Speaker 45 It didn't happen that rapidly, but that's what it looks like.

Speaker 50 I think it's so cool.

Speaker 44 You know,

Speaker 44 I didn't think you thought that.

Speaker 118 So

Speaker 114 I remembered where I saw it, Chuck.

Speaker 121 I saw it on a slideshow on All That's Interesting. Great.

Speaker 79 Okay, so

Speaker 102 do you want to take a second break and come back and talk about how it has gotten even worse than what we've said so far?

Speaker 37 Yeah, let's do it. Okay.

Speaker 34 Learning stuff from the guys you want and child.

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Speaker 130 Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about. Your couch.

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Speaker 8 Lately, I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or aluminia.

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Speaker 41 I learned it twice.

Speaker 41 Everybody, listen up.

Speaker 41 Oh, it's Charles and Joshua.

Speaker 41 It's up, it's stop, it's stop.

Speaker 84 Okay, Chuck, so um, the Salton Sea is really gone downhill.

Speaker 119 There's no denying it.

Speaker 80 People have decamped from there, not just vacationers, but people who lived there too, just moved away because it's gotten so gross.

Speaker 78 We didn't mention it, but one of the things that happened, I think I don't remember what year it was, there was a

Speaker 76 sulfur dioxide cloud that wafted basically all across Southern California, all the way to Los Angeles.

Speaker 120 And it stunk like rotten eggs.

Speaker 73 And they traced it back to the Salton Sea.

Speaker 86 It was all of the decomposition of all the muck, all the dead fish, all the everything.

Speaker 79 It was so bad bad that you could smell it all over Southern California. So, this is the state that the salt and seasons.

Speaker 65 People are like, we need to do something about this.

Speaker 11 And for years and years, starting in the early, late 90s, early 2000s, the idea was, let's just restore it to its former glory.

Speaker 85 And that idea became a non-starter, essentially for the next couple decades, because that's just a bad idea.

Speaker 87 You can't do it now. It's too late.

Speaker 15 But it took a while for the California government to figure that out.

Speaker 58 Yeah, we'll talk about a bunch of the stops and starts over the years.

Speaker 24 In 2003,

Speaker 132 the water districts of Southern California signed off.

Speaker 74 There was this deal that they had been negotiating for years called the Quantification Settlement Agreement, QSA.

Speaker 91 And basically what they were trying to get done was say, hey, let's once again take some of that Colorado river water.

Speaker 132 And

Speaker 74 the stuff stuff that they had been using for irrigation is now being redirected to, like, you know, a lot of the area was then built up into more urban areas in the Coachella Valley and like San Diego.

Speaker 40 And they're like, well, we want that water now. Right.

Speaker 40 And in exchange, those areas would say, all right, now what we're going to do is pay the farmers there a lot of money to upgrade their old equipment.

Speaker 58 It was really inefficient irrigation equipment.

Speaker 39 The newer versions won't have nearly as much waste water.

Speaker 97 And so they're like, let's do a trade-off here. We'll pay you to upgrade your stuff.

Speaker 40 And in return, you give us a lot of the water that we need.

Speaker 50 Right.

Speaker 78 So the problem, as far as the Salton Sea is concerned, that agricultural runoff, remember, was keeping it going.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 83 So since there's less irrigation runoff because these irrigation techniques have been vastly updated,

Speaker 72 there's no, not really any agricultural runoff coming and feeding the Salton Sea any longer.

Speaker 103 And part of that quantification settlement agreement was: we need to take some of this water that the Imperial Valley farmers used to use and feed it into the Salton Sea for 15 years.

Speaker 89 They even paid the farmers to leave some of their land fallow so they could direct that water to the Salton Sea.

Speaker 78 In retrospect, that seems like total madness.

Speaker 69 They were essentially wasting all of that water, but it actually turned out to be prescient, even though they didn't quite realize that it was a good thing for there to be water there until we figure out what to do.

Speaker 74 It's sort of like leaving the water on in your tub with the drain slightly open, and just being like, We're just going to leave the tub water on for 15 years so we can keep this body of water.

Speaker 80 Yes, but your tub you got from an abandoned house,

Speaker 103 and it had

Speaker 47 bath water that's a hundred years old and full of pollutants and algae, and you're just running your water into it.

Speaker 124 Yeah, so it's a horror movie tub.

Speaker 76 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 65 That's exactly what it is.

Speaker 40 Yeah.

Speaker 60 So you might be asking, like, hey, if this thing wasn't supposed to be there to begin with, if the whole idea of a body of water out in the middle of the desert like that is just going to dry up naturally, like, just let it dry up naturally.

Speaker 40 And, like, what's the big deal?

Speaker 60 One of the big deals is, is that there's still a lot of biodiversity there.

Speaker 24 It's not like it killed everything.

Speaker 10 It seems like that eventually might happen, but it's still a habitat.

Speaker 58 It's still a migratory stop for birds on that fly route.

Speaker 40 And it's because, you know, Southern California has been developed so much, a lot of the other natural habitats for them have gone away.

Speaker 52 So the Salton Sea was, as sad as it was, was like an oasis for them almost.

Speaker 7 Right.

Speaker 37 Yeah.

Speaker 80 That is sad because if the Salton Sea is the more attractive option because that's all that's left,

Speaker 80 those poor birds are in trouble.

Speaker 78 It's not just the birds that are in trouble.

Speaker 55 There are people that still live around there.

Speaker 78 In fact, I was really surprised to find find the Salton City, which I believe is the biggest town along the Salton Sea.

Speaker 84 It's on the northwest shore.

Speaker 95 Their population actually increased since the 2020 census by almost a thousand people.

Speaker 94 But you're like, oh, wow.

Speaker 88 A thousand people, who cares?

Speaker 105 Well, they were less than 6,000 in population at the time of the 2020 census.

Speaker 14 So people are moving there because the housing is so affordable.

Speaker 18 It's insane.

Speaker 15 So there's people there.

Speaker 63 In the whole region, there's something like 650,000 people and all of those people are at tremendous risk right now of a cornucopia of health hazards that are starting to develop because as the salt and sea evaporates more and more and more because the runoff isn't sustaining it anymore and it's so hot that exposed seabed or lake bed that's so chock full of toxins that you can barely look at it is turning to dust that's getting blown off into the surrounding areas and causing all sorts of problems.

Speaker 40 Yeah, asthma, they've already found an uptick in asthma.

Speaker 93 There's a doctor named Jill Johnson, a PhD, who's an assistant professor of preventative medicine at Southern Cal.

Speaker 118 And she's working on a research project called the Saltan Sea in Children's Health colon, assessing Imperial Valley respiratory health and environment and the environment.

Speaker 59 along with partner Shore Farzan, another PhD.

Speaker 116 And they're basically following following elementary school children in that area and seeing how their health is advancing.

Speaker 40 And right now,

Speaker 74 pretty bad asthma rates and

Speaker 57 they haven't proved causation yet, but it seems like it's probably headed that way.

Speaker 78 Yeah, apparently they just like this month published an article on their findings from this in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Speaker 45 You know, that rag.

Speaker 118 Yeah.

Speaker 115 And it basically is like, this is, yes, this is causing asthma at the very least in little kids.

Speaker 94 There's all sorts of other stuff to worry about too, because there's metals, pesticides, DDT's been found in there.

Speaker 62 There's just so much crud in there that now that it's drying up, is turning into dust and getting carried as particulate matter that you don't want to breathe that stuff in.

Speaker 12 And yet it's just blowing around because, again, now that's turned into desert, but it's toxic desert.

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 97 And that's that's just like health issues.

Speaker 40 There's also like a financial impact.

Speaker 127 There was a study about 11 years ago or so from the Pacific Institute.

Speaker 58 They're a think tank in Oakland that deals with water policy.

Speaker 74 And they said the financial toll could be as much as $70 billion over the next 30 years.

Speaker 44 Right.

Speaker 54 Like property values, like you said, going south, public health, which we've mentioned.

Speaker 40 the continued loss of recreational revenue and natural habitat.

Speaker 74 So, you know, there's a big financial burden.

Speaker 132 So, you know, obviously because of that, California over the past like, you know, 25 years has had various stops and starts with funding for different projects that'll get approved and then the money just gets diverted or never shows up.

Speaker 79 Yeah.

Speaker 84 And especially before that 2014 study from the Pacific Institute, people are like,

Speaker 98 this $8 billion seems like a little much to

Speaker 79 restore the Salton Sea.

Speaker 62 One of the reasons why is because the area that that the Salton Sea is in, the people who live around it are fairly low-income.

Speaker 80 It's a very rural area.

Speaker 15 And a lot of the people who are affected live in Mexico.

Speaker 70 So back in Sacramento, the capital of California, which is pretty far away from the Salton Sea,

Speaker 53 the political will just hasn't been there.

Speaker 94 And one of the things you could do if you were a senator, a congressperson, a governor, you could fully go after a bunch of funds to save the Salton Sea and remediate the area and get it back to its former glory.

Speaker 79 And then your legislature would say, no, we're not funding that.

Speaker 87 And you'd be like, oh, man, I tried.

Speaker 88 And that seems like what the pattern was for the first,

Speaker 94 like about 20-ish years, maybe a little more than that, that people started coming up with ideas to

Speaker 46 do something about this.

Speaker 24 Yeah, Gray Davis, when he was governor in 2003, signed the Salton Sea, I'm sorry, Restoration Act and the Salton Sea Restoration Fund, but that didn't receive funding.

Speaker 58 So a fund without funding is not a fund. No.

Speaker 40 Just like a sea without an outlet is a lake.

Speaker 44 Right?

Speaker 76 Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 134 All right.

Speaker 127 In 2007, the Corps of Engineers, the Army Corps of Engineers, got authorization to spend up to $30 million on projects.

Speaker 127 The money was finally appropriated in 2015, and the Obama administration spent a couple of hundred grand is all on a study, another study even.

Speaker 15 That was the 30 million.

Speaker 86 That's what it turned out to be from what I can tell.

Speaker 99 It went from $30 million to $200,000, and it was for another study.

Speaker 78 Isn't that crazy?

Speaker 59 Yeah, I mean, none of this, though, is going to make any difference.

Speaker 74 I mean, even a $30 million thing, or I think

Speaker 40 there was one plan,

Speaker 74 yeah, a 10-year salt and sea plan to cost $383 million, but that's not even for restoration because, like you said, that ship has sailed.

Speaker 58 It is a multi, multi-billion dollar thing if they want to get this thing back to the California Riviera.

Speaker 57 So it doesn't seem like that's just ever going to happen.

Speaker 40 It's not even possible.

Speaker 83 No, so now they're looking at restoring parts of it to turn it back into wetlands for birds.

Speaker 47 Right.

Speaker 85 And that 10-year plan, it was estimated to cost $383 million just to do that.

Speaker 22 Yeah.

Speaker 99 And it looked like it was just going to be another

Speaker 62 pie in the sky proposal that would never get funding.

Speaker 88 But California came up with something like $200 million of that.

Speaker 118 They're under Gavin Newsom in the last couple of years.

Speaker 82 There's been huge, crazy movements compared to what had been done the last couple of decades.

Speaker 84 And California came up with $200 million.

Speaker 12 Out of nowhere, mind-bogglingly, the federal government shipped in another $240 million,

Speaker 112 $45.

Speaker 113 So now this project that needed $383 million has almost half a billion.

Speaker 18 So not only are they now on the Salton Sea saying like, you know, when are we ever going to be able to do anything about this to we can actually do more than we wanted to do in our 10-year plan, the things are starting to pick up and they're starting to restore wetlands.

Speaker 96 And

Speaker 46 it actually looks like it's going to not be quite the ecological disaster that it would have been had California just sat on its hands.

Speaker 36 Yeah, I think between 2003 and 2016,

Speaker 74 just a few dozen acres of the wetland were restored.

Speaker 5 Since then, about 2,000 more.

Speaker 59 And the Species Conservation Habitat Project has a plan over the next decade to restore another 9,000 acres.

Speaker 74 So that'd be like roughly 12,000 acres of restoration, which is pretty good.

Speaker 2 They also think that, you know, it's Southern California, so it's a moneyed area in general.

Speaker 125 Not that exact area, but they're saying like, hey, we can like, we've got this great land there that we can make money off still.

Speaker 132 Remember that mullet island that's on the dormant volcano?

Speaker 117 That means there's some hot spots there.

Speaker 74 And so some people are saying, hey, let's let's put a few billion dollars toward a geothermal electricity plant.

Speaker 37 Yeah.

Speaker 51 Or maybe mine some lithium.

Speaker 133 Yes, I believe they're already building the plants there.

Speaker 79 And then the lithium, I don't know if they've actually started that, but there's a lot of lithium there.

Speaker 48 And that is like 21st century gold because you use that in batteries for electric vehicles, for giant batteries to back up your power grid.

Speaker 47 And there's a push and pull over whether to lithium mine there.

Speaker 16 And of course, they're going to end up lithium mining there because it's just so valuable.

Speaker 80 But some people are like, it's already an environmental catastrophe.

Speaker 109 Who cares if lithium mining makes it a little bit worse?

Speaker 62 It's better than mining in a more pristine area and really screwing that up.

Speaker 47 And other people are like, no, we're trying to restore it.

Speaker 84 So lithium mining is going to not only undo that stuff, it's going to make it even worse than it was.

Speaker 119 But my money is definitely on them lithium mining.

Speaker 44 Yeah, agreed.

Speaker 115 There's a couple other things that are noteworthy about the Salton Sea.

Speaker 78 I guess we can leave that part.

Speaker 79 There's actually hope for it right now.

Speaker 110 But along the way, like you can imagine such a bizarre place generated some really interesting urban legends over the years, right?

Speaker 44 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 12 Some of them are actually true.

Speaker 72 The Navy used to use the Salton Sea to drop test bombs or dummy bombs to basically train their bomber pilots how to drop bombs.

Speaker 79 And they actually supposedly practiced for atomic bomb drops.

Speaker 121 And they are, so there's dummy bombs under the Salton Sea still.

Speaker 78 And of course, locals are like, that's just a cover story.

Speaker 86 They actually lost an atomic bomb, and that's what's hiding there.

Speaker 107 There's an undetonated atomic bomb under there.

Speaker 84 There are a bunch of Navy planes that did crash.

Speaker 95 I think 18 flyers died over the years, but there's 24 planes sunken in the Salton Sea right now.

Speaker 78 And then there's this one really weird legend that predates the Salton Sea.

Speaker 73 It's the lost ship of the desert.

Speaker 47 Have you ever heard of that?

Speaker 37 Never heard of it.

Speaker 76 Well, it's apparently this legend or lore that there was

Speaker 70 anything from a Spanish galleon to a Viking ship that sailed up the Gulf of California and eventually got stuck and that turned into desert and the ship was swallowed up.

Speaker 84 And some people are saying it was actually in the Salton Basin, which is now underneath the Salton Sea.

Speaker 65 So there's this whole idea that there's a Viking ship potentially under there, too.

Speaker 44 Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 60 There's a great dive bar.

Speaker 101 The Ski Inn, right?

Speaker 40 Yeah,

Speaker 59 that's in that video. They go to the Ski Inn and play creepy old piano and have some beer.

Speaker 112 Yeah, they call it the lowest dive bar in the western hemisphere because it's

Speaker 78 237 feet below sea level, I think.

Speaker 40 yeah right there at uh i don't know if they still call it bombay beach or if they took that name away but

Speaker 114 bombay non-beach because a beach without water is not a beach right uh there's also it's attracted a lot of artists too like uh slab city is essentially a taken over military installation um there's a folk art installation called salvation mountain there's another whole like outdoor gallery um called east jesus i believe is what it's called so there's a lot of art that's being made there

Speaker 84 that's kind of turning it into

Speaker 53 a really

Speaker 66 neat, weird, decrepit art place.

Speaker 37 Cool. Yeah.

Speaker 107 You got anything else?

Speaker 37 I got nothing else.

Speaker 85 Okay. Well, that's it for the Salt and Sea, everybody.

Speaker 49 We'll have to keep an eye on it and see what happens.

Speaker 105 And in the meantime, I think it's time for Listener Mail.

Speaker 97 Well, speaking of art, before I read Listener Mail, I want to give a plug to dear old Ben,

Speaker 116 our comrade here at Stuff You Should Know, our colleague.

Speaker 74 He is a producer along with Jerry.

Speaker 10 And Ben is a musician, Ben Hackett, and he put out a great

Speaker 52 piece of art.

Speaker 127 He put out a record called Songs for Sleeping Dogs not too long ago.

Speaker 7 And Ben's awesome.

Speaker 24 Songs for Sleeping Dogs is great.

Speaker 52 It's very vibey, instrumental.

Speaker 116 I think you dig it, actually.

Speaker 8 And so, yeah, go check it out.

Speaker 67 Yeah. Wherever you get music, basically.

Speaker 84 Yes, Ben is probably our most beloved stuff you should know member because he's just so cool and chill and nice.

Speaker 37 Whoa.

Speaker 45 Yeah.

Speaker 9 You can say that in front of Jerry?

Speaker 37 Mm-hmm.

Speaker 37 Okay.

Speaker 37 All right.

Speaker 53 Listener mail time.

Speaker 54 We've got a couple over the next couple of episodes on MTV and VH1 because we got great response.

Speaker 10 And it was also another one of those weird things where we did an episode.

Speaker 40 And then something in real life happened.

Speaker 74 And we had no idea that when we did our MTV episode, that like the next week MTV would fold, basically.

Speaker 52 Yeah.

Speaker 24 It's music channels.

Speaker 74 It was just one of those strange stuff you should know things that happen sometimes.

Speaker 120 I didn't quite understand.

Speaker 19 So like it was just its music channels.

Speaker 106 I didn't know that it had any music channels left.

Speaker 24 Yeah, I think we talked about that, that there was still some music happening. Well, Jerry just buzzed in and said it's just in Europe, so I don't know what to believe now.

Speaker 79 Well, they definitely did something, and it was right after our episode, for sure.

Speaker 75 Yeah. All right, so this is about MTV.

Speaker 24 Hey guys, hoping that you would touch on this, especially toward the end when Josh is talking about the social impacts of MTV.

Speaker 117 But I'm talking about the MTV cut.

Speaker 40 Before MTV, the average shot in a film or television show lasted an average of eight seconds.

Speaker 60 And the MTV cut whittled that down to two seconds.

Speaker 127 In college, circa 2000, it was called the MTV cut.

Speaker 24 Now the MTV cut is the norm.

Speaker 40 You'd be hard pressed to find a show that stays on one shot for eight seconds consistently anymore.

Speaker 5 I wonder if people changed or if the MTV cut changed people

Speaker 75 and the way we watch.

Speaker 135 I'll bet that's one of those things where if you saw it now, you'd be like, wow, this is really weird and not quite put your finger on why, but it'd just be almost unsettling to see an eight-second cut.

Speaker 74 Maybe.

Speaker 58 I mean, I remember people talking about like quick cut because of music videos.

Speaker 40 Like it was a thing.

Speaker 2 That is from Chris Singleton,

Speaker 59 who is

Speaker 2 an ops manager for Independence Rock Media.

Speaker 105 Very nice. So, Chris knows what they're talking about.

Speaker 3 I think so.

Speaker 14 Well, thanks a lot, Chris.

Speaker 83 That was very interesting. And we want to hear from you too.
If you've got anything interesting to say, you can email me.

Speaker 47 You too.

Speaker 100 Yeah.

Speaker 121 You can, yes, we want to hear from Bono and the Edge and the other guys.

Speaker 124 Oh, boy.

Speaker 81 What

Speaker 2 Adam and Larry, come on.

Speaker 47 There you go. Thank you.

Speaker 115 I could have come up with those given a couple of months for sure.

Speaker 85 Sure.

Speaker 85 So, yeah, if you want to be like the band you too, you can email us at stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Speaker 2 Support for the show today comes from public.com.

Speaker 4 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 5 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side.

Speaker 9 The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and Public gets that.

Speaker 11 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously.

Speaker 15 On Public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 17 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there.

Speaker 22 Plus, an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 24 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously.

Speaker 23 Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

Speaker 3 That's public.com/slash SYSK.

Speaker 27 Paid for by Public Investing.

Speaker 29 All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 30 Brokerage services for U.S.-listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC.

Speaker 32 CryptoTrading provided by Zero Hash.

Speaker 33 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 21 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 83 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 21 Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production, in partnership with Argenix, explores people discovering strength in the most unexpected places.

Speaker 21 Listen to Untold Stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 21 Here, with one last reminder to keep you off the naughty list this holiday season, stuff your stockings, your pantry, your gift closet, anywhere you can with Duracell batteries.

Speaker 21 Because there's nothing worse than opening a gift on Christmas morning and realizing you don't have batteries for it.

Speaker 21 Duracell batteries are the only battery brand with power boost ingredients, which are a unique blend of nickel and lithium designed for long-lasting power.

Speaker 21 So, stock up on your double A's and your triple A's so you'll be A-O-K for the holidays. Choose the only battery brand with power boost ingredients.

Speaker 53 Choose Duracell.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.