Stuff You Should Know - How (O)possums Work

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Josh and Chuck take a listener’s suggestion – many, many suggestions – and learn that possums are pretty great and very much misunderstood. By the end of this episode you will too!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. This season, we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you. Each week, you'll hear stories from survivors who

have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and their process of healing. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is a episode of Stuff You Should Know. I thought you're gonna say welcome to the possumcast. I thought about it, and my brain wouldn't form that together. I was like, there's a pun in here, and I can't quite grasp it, so. That's good. Your pun gene is being dulled. Yeah, it's funny. Those pun genes, they're bald, and they have, like, sheet white skin.

I'm not even sure what that means. It means that they look a lot like Jonathan Strickland. Oh, I wondered if that's what you meant. Yeah. Goodness me. Man, I haven't heard from him in a long time. You don't think Strickland tans up? No. No, I think Strickland abhors the sun. Okay. Just a little note between you and me. I got a question for you. Okay. Does this episode on possums or opossums, they're both correct. Spoiler alert. It's fine either way. Right. Does this have anything to do with a certain Instagram follower? It does, as a matter of fact. Oh, good. We have an Instagram follower. Their handle is underscore G-I-O-I underscore G, and I clicked in on it, and

they have a pronunciation, so I guess it's D-O-Y-A. Okay. And they have been posting since April. They said they, I think I found their first posters on April 14th, and they said, I'm going to post every time you post asking for a possum episode until you finally do, and they have been doing that ever since. I don't think they've missed a single one. Yeah. I mean, she's persistent. I'll say that. Yeah, for sure. And maybe you get what you want when you're persistent, because we're doing the episode. I'm just curious what she's going to be up to after this. Nothing. They always ghost us after that. They're like, thanks chumps. Well, here's what I have to say to you, stranger but friend on Instagram. Don't just come at us

with some new topic and badgers about that one. Especially not badgers. Especially not badgers. You're getting your possums, so just settle down and enjoy it. You got what you wanted. Yeah. I have to say, not just persistent too, but they were also, they got kind of funny, because after a while, they just got sick of saying like possum episode, please. So for the Nintendo episode, they said that NES is the only system we had as kids. Otherwise, we played outside with possums. I don't know. She's gotten very creative with how she works in the possum thing. And I think that's, that was part of the charm of it. Otherwise, it would have just ignored it out of some weird game. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Absolutely for sure. So yes, that is,

that is the impetus for this possum episode. But I'm glad that they, they suggested it because I was fine with possums before, but I learned a lot about possums, oral possums, researching this episode. And I got to tell you, I'm a friend of the possum now. I am too. At some point, you'll hear a first person possum story from me. I just don't know when I'm going to work it in. That's what in the biz, they call that a teaser. And if you want to just stop before you even listen any further, if you're near somewhere where you can watch a YouTube video, okay, just look up butter, B-U-T-T-E-R, the possum pet on YouTube. And just go ahead and tell me after that that you think possums are like gross or scary or weird. After you see butter work,

butter's charms. Okay, I'll go look, I'll go look up butter later on, but I can imagine. There's a pet possum who was rescued, rehabbed, I think with the idea of going back into the wild. But as we'll see, that doesn't always take because sometimes that possum just wants to go back inside and snuggle. Yeah, it sounds like butter's rehab or checked all the right boxes. Yeah, it's a very cute video. So one of the things that I learned about possums is that I've got, not only my friend of the possum, I've got possum pride now. Ah, possum fever? A little bit of that too, but more pride than anything because, Chuck, there's one specific

possum, the Virginia possum, that is native to the United States, traditionally the Southern, Southeastern United States. And that Virginia possum is the only marsupial native to the United States. And our friends listening in Australia are like, crikey, we've got a million of those here. Well, get this, Australia, your marsupials seem to have come according to the fossil record from the Americas, which means that our possum friends are actually the predecessors of your marsupials, which means, Chuck, that means that the wombats, the dumb bats, the dumb arts, the kangaroos, koalas in the koals, the bilbies in the bandicoots, Tasmanian devil, Tasmanian tiger. Bandicoots.

Not to mention the wallabies, they all descend from a North American or South American possum because that's where all marsupials came from. You forgot about fairy toast. Yeah, which apparently you don't toast. Yeah, big correction. Sorry, Australia. Libby a little bit astray. You don't toast fairy bread. I registered an angry email to the editor of the blog that I got that idea from, by the way. Oh, that was from you.

What, the fairy toast? Yeah. Yeah, you didn't mention it, did you? No, I thought that was submitted by Libya. No, I think I found it. No, no, I found that one. I'm throwing myself under the bus. All right. Well, I'm driving that bus, buddy, so I'm going to hit the brakes. And I'm going to back up so you don't get hit.

Beep, beep, beep. Oh, I got you. That's an inside joke right there, yeah. So your little spiel on possums pointed out a couple of things that I want to point out. One is that possums are not rodents. I think a lot of Americans probably think they're kind of in the rat family or something because they look sort of rat like, but they're not. Like you said, they're marsupials. Mm-hmm.

And the other thing is, well, that's it, they're marsupials. So they have little pouches just like kangaroo friends. Yeah. And they keep a little, they're called joeys too. They're little babies or joeys. Yeah, a baby opossum is called a joey. Boy, they're cute. I like, I knew what marsupials were, but what I didn't realize is that it was, as far as I can tell, one of two categories that mammals can land in,

depending on how they, their young gestate. And a marsupial is just a type of animal that evolutionarily speaking really emphasizes the lactation phase of development of their young. Whereas us and just about every other mammal, we're called placentals, we gestate our young in the womb for much longer. Possums, it's a very short time, and then they're in the pouch, lactating for a really long time. Yeah, I was surprised to see that when they were born, they're very, very tiny, like on the order of just a inch or so. Yeah, so a honeybee size in one place.

That is a small baby opossum. That's a little posum. And then they're in that pouch, like sometimes up to like 70 days, yeah, getting mother's milk from Mama Possum. Yeah. So we'll get to that. We'll get to that. Don't, don't, let's not get ahead of ourselves. I know I'm excited to Chuck. But back to the fossil record, so it turns out that the ancestor of all marsupials seems to have emerged in North America, maybe South America. At the very least, if they emerged in North America,

they traveled down to South America, and then Antarctica and then Australia, back when all that stuff was connected. And I mean, they're really, really old. I saw 140 million years old. And then the immediate ancestors opossums, which look very similar to today's opossums, they have not changed very much. Since about the time the dinosaurs went away, 65 million years ago, right? And since then, we've had opossums of various types running around Earth. But at one point, they died off in North America. Luckily, there were a bunch left in South America. And when the isthmus of Panama rose again from the sea, like Poseidon,

or like the Red October. Yeah, just as good, maybe even better, Chuck. They were able to travel back up to North America. And about a million years ago, our friend, the Virginia opossum, evolved and basically said, I really like the Southeast, and I'm going to stay here for the next million years. That's right. And you know what? I forgot the other thing I was going to say after your spiel was that you Aussies out there, you do have something called a opossum. Oh, yeah. It's not what we have as a opossum. It's a different animal all together. So there is a little bit of confusion there. So if you're buttering up your fairy toast right now

and you're really upset, you're like, I've got opossums all over these trees. You probably do, but they're not. And I looked them up. They're very cute too, but they're not like our opossums. They are. The ones that I saw are called bush tail opossums, and they are super cute, but that's a big difference. Our opossums, the Virginia opossum, spends most of its time on the ground. It climbs trees, maybe to find food, maybe to escape a predator. The bush tail opossums basically live in trees. They live high up, but they're both marsupials. But there's actually, we can pinpoint the jackass that actually created this confusion back in the 1750s. His name was Joseph Banks, right?

That's right. Sorry, the 1770s. 1770s. What'd you say initially? 1750s, I think. Oh, okay. Close enough. I should have said the 1750s, give or take a couple decades. Banks was a Brit. He was a naturalist, and he went to Australia with James Cook. And in 1770, founder marsupial, and basically said it was the same thing that we had in North America, and it really wasn't at all. And that's where that all came from. Yeah. So there's your confusion. I guess technically Australia, that means that our

possums are the real possums. I'm not trying to start a flame war here. I'm just saying that seems to be the case. Yeah. And since we're there, we might as well cover the opossum thing out of the gate, and then we can really get down to business because they're all correct. Opossum is just fine. In fact, that's the original wording that came from an Algonquin word, A-P-O-S-O-U-M, a possum, I guess, which means white beast or white dog. And you can use either one. You can say opossum. You can say possum. You can spell it opossum. You can spell opossum. Yeah. And apparently in Europe, in the Enlightenment period, the 18th century,

they were nuts for these things. And I guess somebody gave them one to the Royal Society in London. Sorry, this was back in the mid 17th century, so the 1600s. And they looked at it, and they're like, this thing has a pouch. It's weird looking. I declared that it's probably a cross between a fox and an ape, some sort of hybrid. And that turned out not to be the cases. We'll see. Like you said, possums are their own thing. So let's talk about where you find them here in the United States. Because we should say from this, basically from this point on, we're going to be talking about the Virginia opossum, the American, the United States possum. Right. That's right. You can tell by their little flashy red, white, and blue jumpsuit that they

wear. It's very cute. So you mentioned the Southeast, and that is very much true. That is where they were really hanging out for a long time. But starting in about, or I guess I should say at least the 19th century, they started moving on along elsewhere in the country. And they kind of spread around. They were, I think they saw them in the mid 1800s in New York, and then other parts of New England, and then the Midwest. And basically as like farms and cities and urban populations started springing up, possums kind of followed suit because possums as we'll find out. And you know, every animal is really food motivated. But boy, it seems that possums are really, really food motivated. So then there were things, you know, a lot more things to eat and a lot more

places. So possums started traveling around naturally. And apparently people even took them and dropped them off in other parts of the country, including Washington state. So I'm not really positive, but it seems like you might find a possum almost anywhere in the United States now. It's weird. I saw a map of their distribution. And if you go up from North Texas, and then spread out toward Idaho, to the left, and then up toward like, maybe Ohio, Illinois to the right. Okay, back over to Midwest. It's almost like a cartoon tornado shape coming out of Texas. They're not there. You're not going to find them there. It's really weird, but you will find them in the Pacific Northwest, California, Texas, Mexico, and then all down the southeastern United

States. And now up the eastern side of the Midwest and all along the eastern seaboard, up to Ontario, the lower upper peninsula of Michigan. Talk about a mindblower that is. Yeah, I think they got their passports in order and wandered into Canada. Yeah. So these people are so friendly. Yeah. And they talk kind of funny and they're very charming. Yeah. That's right. You just nailed Canada. And leftover poutine in the back alley is nothing to turn your little pink nose up at. No, and food definitely did help them. They're like, I like these humans. They're pretty great. I'm glad they came along because yes, they're a huge constant food source. But we're also a source of shelter, too, because possums

have a very bare naked tail that is really off-putting to a lot of people. And understandably so, their ears are also naked. And when you put those together, they can get things like frostbite. They cannot survive the cold all that well. They do develop a winter coat, but they like it warm for the most part. But as humans have moved further and further north, and the possums have followed us because we have barns, attics, crawl spaces, wall voids, like just places for possums to live in the colder months. So that's another reason why their range has expanded, too. Yeah. And the old Virginia possum, you've seen them around. They're about the size of a cat, like a house cat, weigh anywhere from four to 11 pounds. An 11-pound possum, that's pretty decent

sized possum. I saw up to 14, my friend. Oh, I'm sure the tubbier varieties can pack it in for short. That'll make your forearms burn carrying that around. Two to three feet long, and that's with the tail. And generally, the Virginia possum, you would describe as sort of whitish gray. Their faces are a little more white. Their bodies are kind of gray, but sometimes they'll have little splooches and splotches and bands and things like that. All right. So I think that's a good teaser. You're anatomically speaking. And Adam, what's the word? I think you had it anatomically. Is that right? Yeah, it doesn't sound right, though, does it? No, it sounded weird. But let's take a break and we'll sort that out. And then we'll come back and talk about possum penis right after this.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we

just have to do the ads? From iHeart podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub and also slightly dangerous. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace because it turned out it was actually not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeill. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it, the users. Because what happened in

the MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. Listen to Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace, on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. Narcissists are everywhere, and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was love bombed by the Tinder swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did. And that's even way worse than the money he took. But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse

myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life. Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. It's all you. You just bring it on out, please. Well, a possum has a forked penis. And if you can look up a picture and it, well, I guess it looks like, what do you think it looks like? I am not a sicko, so I didn't look it up.

Oh, you didn't? No. Look at me, you're a sicko. I know, I'm teasing. I didn't look it up. I know kind of what it must look like, because from the description Olivia put of both the forked penis and the multiple vaginas that female possums have, I got the gist of it. Yeah. Well, you just there, there it is right there. I buried the lead. Although we should say that colonial Americans once again prove that they had some ingenuity

going, but sometimes it could be quite dumb because they saw this forked penis and they said, oh, well, that is because they impregnate the female through their nostrils. What else could it be? We know this because we saw the female possums sticking their nose into their pouches and they're giving birth and sneezing out their little joeys that way. Right. Not right at all though. No. No, I'm saying you got that right.

Oh yeah. They got it super, super wrong. No, sure. But no, it's because they, so yeah, if you look up there, it looks a lot like a nematode, a worm of some sort with like a club foot, basically. Yeah. Yeah. So, but yes, the reason it's forked is because the females have two vaginas that can be fertilized by sperm or that can move sperm to their ova.

Yeah, I think I got it right. And they have a third one for actually giving birth. So that's why the penis is forked because they're just like, you know, double your pleasure, double your fun. They look like little pincers actually, like a... I guess I'm not seeing a close-up. All the ones I'm seeing are like, they're like, get a load of this. It's really long.

Oh, really? Okay. Let me just type in possum penis close-up. I'm just going to go for it. Where were you typing in before? Possum penis. Tasteful possum penis. Right. Oh, I had the Google filter on. I see.

Yeah. There's one very clear picture. It looks like a little, look like little pincers from an insect or something. Safe searches on. No, look at you. I'm just kidding. Tell you. I see now. What the heck was, that's not at all what I just saw.

All right. Oh, no, that's a baby possum being born. I was like, what is, regardless, it has a forked penis. Okay, can we move on? It's got a forked penis. Let's talk about their teeny, tiny brains because they do, and Livia even put that wording, teeny, tiny brains, one of the smallest brain to body ratios in mammaldom.

And it's kind of cute. Livia also included a little brief thing of like, how do you find out how big a brain is in little mammals? Well, you take their skulls, if you're a scientist, and you put dried beans in there, and then you, I would say, you would probably guess the beans as an office, like, you know, white elephant gift kind of thing. But then they obviously count the beans,

and that's how they tell. It makes very good sense, but it seems kind of cute and rudimentary. It does, but I mean, it does reveal something really surprising about the possums. They have a really small brain to body ratio compared to other animals their size. Like, the possum's brain case held 25 beans. Just 25 little beans.

Not that many. What kind of bean, I wonder? I'm gonna say lentils. No. No, that's really small. The fun version is jelly beans. Sure, that's kind of big, though. Maybe a black-eyed pea or something.

Okay, we'll go with black-eyed peas. Dried black-eyed peas. They hold 25 of those. A cat's held 125. A raccoon's held 150. And that actually seems to support this longstanding notion that possums are actually kind of dumb. Not true.

They're not really dumb at all, and in fact, there's plenty of tests that they've shown they're actually surprisingly intelligent. They've beat out rats, rabbits, dogs, cats, on remembering where to find food, and then the maize, the old standby for proving intelligence in an animal. They actually can beat rats and cats in learning mazes.

That's right. And also can remember if they've had something that made them sick to eat, that they even just tasted like a year later. So again, I think this food thing is really important because it seems like they score really well when there's food involved. Right.

Like you mentioned, they're found in a lot of places in the United States. They really love a dense forest, but you'll see them in cities all over the place. They eat everything basically. They eat little mammals. They eat worms. They eat insects.

They eat birds and reptiles. They eat seeds and fruits and obviously garbage. They're like the raccoon. They will, you will find them in a garbage can just go into town on like a pizza box or something. Yeah. But I saw Chuck that they're often unfairly blamed for knocking over garbage cans

because they're the ones who come along after the thing that knocked it over, let's say a raccoon or a dog or something. And they're just scavenging, but they get the blame because they're the one that gets caught. Not fair. Just another miscarriage of justice.

Exactly. What about when you see one walk around the day that means they're rabid, right? No, again, another misconception. That's right. If they're walking around the day, it means that the eaten is so good that they've abandoned their nocturnal ways

and are just doing the human thing and eating whenever they want. They don't have to wait until nighttime to look for food. They can find it anytime. So no, if you see a possum, it does not mean it's rabid. And as a matter of fact,

possums tend to actually be cleaner than other animals, both disease-wise and with fastidiousness. There is fastidious as cats and cleaning themselves and they actually clean themselves in similar ways, licking their paw and rubbing their face with the back of their paw. So cute.

It is super cute. And while they do that, Chuck, they stand up on their hind quarters and balance themselves with their cute little weird tail. They also have mouths that are cleaner than other animals like cats. And because they have a really low body temperature, they're very unlikely to catch rabies,

which means they're also very unlikely to transfer rabies to you. So if you're ever bitten by a possum, which is a very unusual thing indeed, as we'll see, you are probably... You can just go start reading the newspaper. Right. You don't even have to go to the hospital or anything.

Just sit down and get back to your coffee. Right. Like it's 1987. Well, drinking coffee, reading the newspaper? Sure. Don't you know that Gen Z is really into throwback stuff? Are they? Are they reading newspapers now?

If they're not now, I predict they will be in six months. And then in 17 months, they'll be done with newspapers. Right. Possums are also great to have around, your neighborhood or your farm. They will eat...

And this is astounding. They love ticks and they will eat 5,000 ticks in a single three or four month period over a season. Man, talk about possum pride, Chuck. Oh, huge. That's a very big deal for people like me that spend a lot of time in the woods. And tick-borne disease is such a big thing in the South.

Yeah. Like I said, if you had a farm, they're going to eat critters and vermin that are going to be making your crops not so great. They're going to be eating slugs. They're going to be eating beetles. They're going to, you know, that rotten fruit and that apple tree that you don't care for.

They're going to love that tree because they're going to eat everything that's dropped on the ground. And if there are mice and rats around, they'll probably chase them off or eat them and or eat them. Yeah, because they will eat basically anything, like even actual garbage, like you said.

They'll also eat carrion, which makes them a really unusual animal because there's not many animals out there that actually are carrion eaters. But if they come along roadkill, they'll eat the roadkill. And in fact, they've been known to eat entire rabbits that they find as roadkill

because they have such a need for calcium. They will, they will eat the entire skeleton because they have to, they got to get that calcium big time. But because of this, because they're so good at cleaning up an environment, an ecosystem that they come along to, they're sometimes called nature sanitary engineer.

Oh, see, no one ever says that. Well, we're saying it now. I love it. Possum pride. We should get shirts. I think we should, too. As far as they're bedding down and stuff like that, they are not ones that are typically

going to build their own den. They're more like rehabbers. They will go into someone else's abandoned den and they'll fix it up a little bit. They'll bring their own grass and twigs and leaves and kind of line it and cover up any drafty areas if they want to stay warmer. But they're not going to stick around for too long.

They just hold up on these dens for a few days. They're probably resting there during the day. They have found that little mamas may be there for a few weeks at a time if they found a really good hidey hole because they've got a lot going on with their little joeys in there or if it's in the wintertime or something.

But they do travel. They will get around in a surprising fashion, right? Yeah, some guy tagged them with RFID trackers and found that some of them will move up to 15 miles in a few weeks, maybe. That's a long way with those little legs. Yeah, and that's actually an argument against keeping possums as pets

is that you're probably not going to be able to get them the exercise that they would get in the wild. They move around a lot. Yeah, I think that's what you'll say. Just FYI. Or another way to put it is, if you have a possum pet, you need to take them out for a walk quite frequently.

Oh man, I'd love to see that. You mentioned how they'll line the dens or burrows that they borrow from other animals with twigs and leaves and stuff like that. The way that they collect that stuff is they have opposable thumbs basically on their front and back feet. And so they'll gather leaves with their front hands,

basically is what they're called. They'll push them under themselves to their back feet. With their feet, they'll bunch them up and then they pick it up with their tail and they'll carry it off to the den in their tail. Like the old person with the bundle of sticks on the cover of Led Zeppelin 4. But with the tail instead.

Yeah, the old guy with the tinder bunch on his back. You know, speaking of tails, we've kind of dropped little tail tidbits here and there. They can hang from those tails. It's not something you're going to see a lot. And I get the impression just from looking at pictures that younger possums hang from their tail a little bit more than full grown ones.

It's probably because it's taxing. Once you're like a, you know, 11 pound possum to hang from your tail. But they will do it every now and then. If you look up pictures of hanging possums, they'll use that tail to wrap around a branch every now and then. Yeah, I think the only animal in North America with the prehensile tails, right?

Which means they can use the tail as like a fifth hand. Yeah. The other thing about that though is the idea that they sleep upside down hanging from their tails, which seems to be a cartoon myth, essentially. They don't do that. They sleep in their burrows. Yeah, they're not like, they're not bats.

No. Do you want to talk about little baby possums now? Yeah, they're super cute. I guess the sad part that we should go ahead and say is that a possum's life is pretty short. It's about two years in the wild. Maybe three or four if they're living in someone's house. Yeah, you hear two years and you're like,

well, yeah, all those cars are skewing it downward for sure. But no, if they're in captivity and it's just another year or two more, they're just not destined to live very long. Yeah, I'm sure the cars don't help though. No, for sure. I've never ran over a possum, thankfully. That's great.

I think you should have a keychain that says that. But you know what I did do one time. What? I think it's a good time for my story. Okay. Oh, you know what? Let's save the story for the next break. Oh my God.

As far as their litters, this is another thing that's a little, you know, I guess it's sort of why they've been around for however many tens of millions of years. But it is a little sad. They will have way more babies generally than they have ability to feed them. The mom has a maximum of 13 nipples, sometimes not even that any, and sometimes they will have

up to 25 little half-inch babies anywhere from four to 25. But you know, that means in some of these litters, half of them literally just won't have literally, won't have food for mama. And they're just, you know, they're basically abandoned. Yeah. The mom's like, natural selection sucks, kid. Sorry.

No, but we survive over the long term. So, like we said, the little baby possums are about the size of a honeybee when they're born. They gestate in the womb for, Livia says 12 to 13 days. I saw 28 days. And then after that, they're born, but they're kind of just partially born.

They emerge from the womb wearing something called a paradigm, which is essentially like a placenta that they can, that's wrapped around them. It's like a snuggy, but a placenta version of it. And the only openings they have to them in the world are holes for their nostrils, because they use their sense of smell throughout their lives. But even like the first thing they do is use their

sense of smell and then their mouth, which they use to latch onto the nipple. And when they come out of the birth canal, they climb up to that pouch, climb in, and latch onto a nipple. And the reason that they know to climb upward is because they have a sense of smell. So they know where to go based on the sense of smell.

They also know to climb upward, because the other sense that they're born with is a sense of gravity. So they know what's down and what's up. And with those two things, they can emerge blind and deaf with only a sense of smell in a mouth to climb up and basically survive if they can find a nipple latch onto. Oh man, birth order really matters in a situation like this. Yeah, it really does.

You know, we don't want to be that 24th possum. No. No. Here I am. Let's party. As far as the kind of sounds they make, they are pretty quiet generally. Like, it's not like they walk around howling

or making weird noises. The mom will use sort of a clicky sound, either during mating season or to call their little babies back to the pouch. And they can make a sort of hissing, let me describe as a growl too, but in my experience, tease again, it's more of a hiss when a possum feels cornered.

Okay. Yeah, that's all I've ever seen is a, like when a possum is angry, it's hissing. That's it. Right, or potentially playing possum. Right. And that is a thing. It's not a choice that they make.

It's almost like a fainting goat kind of situation. It is an involuntary response. If they have an extreme fear situation, and this is after they've tried everything else, they will go limp like a little fainting goat. They will fall down. They may poop themselves or pee themselves. They may stick their tongue out and drool.

And it all sounds kind of funny, but it's kind of sad because they can't do anything about it. And when they're like this, another animal could just be ravaging them and they will still be in that state. The thing is, is that the animal's probably not doing that because when they just fall over and seem dead,

all of the triggers that create predation behavior in that animal that had them cornered, it just suddenly turn off. And the animal's like, what was I doing? Oh yeah, I was chasing this ball. And that's it. The possums left alone typically. So it actually works really well,

but that's like the last resort. The possum's also really good at bluffing. Showing its teeth, they have 50 teeth. They can bear their teeth, hiss like you said. They can growl. They can seem kind of intimidating, but the thing is, it's all bluffing. Like they do not wanna fight your cat or your dog or you.

And if you have a possum that is sitting there hissing at you or your dog or your cat, you're actually being really cruel to it. They just wanna be left alone and they're in an extremely stressful situation that they know they can't really win. They're not good at fighting. So they basically do what they can to appear sick.

Like they'll drool, they'll release a really nasty fluid and then hope that you'll just leave them alone. And you should leave them alone, but also when you're leaving alone, realize like that possum wasn't gonna do anything. It's just all talk basically. And that makes it even cuter in my mind. I agree.

I think it's a great time for a second break and a perfect setup for my story. [♪ upbeat music playing What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic... And occasionally ridiculous... ...deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations

of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the Internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub, and also slightly dangerous. This is the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace, because it turned out it was actually not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace,

I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it, the users. Because what happened in the MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. Listen to Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with Season 2 of my podcast,

Navigating Narcissism. Narcissists are everywhere, and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was loved-bombed by the Tinder swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did, and that's even way worse than the money he took.

But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life. Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love-bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back, and here is my story. Senior year in high school, going back to my very first girlfriend's house, Mallory. Hi, Mallory. She just ran for Congress in Georgia. That sounds so made up, Chuck. No, she did. She lost. I had to go for new nurses from Canada, and she ran for Congress. But she was my very first girlfriend.

We were going back to her house after a date, walked her up onto the front porch like I traditionally would do for a little good lip smack, and probably, and we kind of were laughing like we were always doing, and ran up on the front, very small front porch, probably one of those like little five-by-five front porches, and there was a possum on this porch, trapped, and immediately turned around and started,

it was like something out of a movie, immediately turned around and started hissing at us. Mallory starts screaming. I'm not sure what I did. It was like a rose, I think, like what am I supposed to do here? And this possum immediately then tried to squeeze under the railing to get off the porch, and was so tubby, he got his little body stuck. And this little possum was kind of stuck and hissing and wriggling,

Mallory screaming. I was probably thinking, well, I'm definitely not getting any lip smacking. Thank you, possum. You're like, I'll see you later. That was my possum story. He eventually wriggled his way free and ran off, and we had a good laugh about it, and no one was hurt,

but I had a very, very, very close encounter. We're talking inches to feet, and it was funny. It was a very fun memory for me. I wonder if that possum remembered it later on, too. It was just laughing and shaking his head like, I got to lose some weight. I wonder if that possum tells that story on its podcast. Does Mallory remember that story?

Oh, I'm sure she does. We're not very much in touch, but I did see her a couple of years ago at my nephew's wedding, and we had a great time catching up in her meeting Emily and me meeting her family, but we did not talk about the possum. Oh, okay. I bet anything she would remember.

I think that was a missed opportunity, Chuck. To talk about the possum? Yeah, I probably should have mentioned it. So that's a great possum story. The only possum story I have is I remember finding one in the wood pile outside of our house in Ohio, and my dad grabbing it by its tail and carrying it over to the woods to release it,

and that thing was trying to curl up toward my dad's arm, and at the time I was like, God, that possum would kill my dad if it had the chance, and now I realize that possum wasn't doing anything. He was just really mad and really scared. Yeah, and they have those big fangs we should mention, so it's a little intimidating when one is, when you're 17 and one is hissing at you on the front porch.

Yeah, for sure. But, you know, your dad was country strong. I guess he was. I never thought about that, but yeah, he is kind of country strong. We mentioned having them as pets. It's not a great idea that they're not great pets because they don't let you know when they're sick.

You're probably not going to have a diet that's quite right for them. They're probably going to be undernourished, under-exercised. They're just not an animal that you should keep in the house. Some states say you're not allowed to. Others say you can if you have a permit. But like you mentioned earlier, there are rescue people who rehab them

because, you know, if mommy gets hit by a car or dies by any other way, the babies are out there a lot of times, and their aim is to rehab them and send them back into the wild, but sometimes it doesn't take, and they end up cute pets on YouTube. Man, that was a mouthful, but you got it right, though. Yeah.

So there's another way that people can interact with possums, and that is by eating them. Yeah. Apparently the indigenous tribes of North America, and I'm guessing South America, too, because there's plenty of possum down there as well, but different species, they ate them, and this got passed along very quickly

to the earliest colonists to the Americas, who said it tastes like pig, basically. Yeah, that seems to be, like, there are several quotes here from Libya where everyone roundly agrees that they taste like pig, so I'll take their word for it. I will, too, but I'm like, okay, I can totally understand why you would eat a possum, and all you have to do is hear one time

that thing over there tastes like pig, and people are gonna eat it, because, you know? Yeah, sure. Everybody likes the taste of pig, but if you feel guilty about eating pig, you got the possum alternative out there for you. I guess so, and the way it worked a lot of times is they would want to catch the possum alive

rather than kill it, so they could bring the possum home, and for a couple of reasons, they could either save it for Sunday dinner, because it was a little more special of a meal, maybe, and the other important reason is, you know, you want to make sure that possums not carrying, again, they're not big disease carriers, but they may not have known this back then,

so the sort of wisdom at the time was to wait a few days, feed it something good, maybe fatten it up a little bit, and make sure it's not sick, and then kill it and eat it. Yeah, and I think, in addition to making sure it was not sick, just not knowing what ate, but knowing that a possum will eat anything, and if it hasn't passed that stuff yet,

then you're kind of eating it, and you might be like, guh, dead vulture. What eats a dead vulture? A possum does. So the other thing that you could do, too, is if you have it alive, you can wait until Sunday dinner, which was a big thing, and the joy of cooking, Chuck, had a recommendation that if you feed a trapped possum, or if you trap a possum alive,

feed it milk and cereals for 10 days. Yeah, that's cruel. I guess, like, maybe cookie crunch or something. Yeah. No, cookie crisp, that's what it was. Honey Nut Cheerios, you name it. Have you had the multi-grain Cheerios? They're really good.

Yeah. Rubizos, they're good. They're good. And then for 10 days, you feed them milk and cereal, and then you can have them for dinner. And then there's one other thing about it, too. It was apparently traditional Thanksgiving food in a lot of Southern places, right? Yeah, in Thanksgiving,

they're going to be eating all kinds of acorns and chestnuts and things like that. Mast. We had the American chestnut. There's that word again, mast. And I think that would fatten them up and improve their flavor as well. So then you got this naturally fattened possum

for Thanksgiving, where you might make something called possum and tater, which is a very, very popular dish, which was like red pepper or possum baked with some sweet taters. Yeah. And the other thing is you didn't need a gun. You wouldn't typically go out and shoot a possum,

which made it a very, like, low barrier to entry for hunting mammals. You would just, like, tree the possum and then basically shake the tree and get that possum to fall out. Right. And at that point, the possum may even be plain dead, so it's pretty easy taking, I think.

Exactly. Which is so sad. I mean, they're easy to hunt because they're kind of docile, you know? Yeah. Tell that to Jimmy Carter. Yeah, Jimmy Carter ate a lot of them, apparently. He said that his family got through the depression

by eating lots of possum. And he's far from the only president that's possum-adjacent. Apparently, Washington sent some to an Irish member of parliament, Sir Edward Newenheim in 1789. Yeah. Jefferson liked to give them out to the French when he was the minister to France. And then Taft, William Howard Taft,

was famously served one by the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce in 1909. Yeah, and this one led to a, you know, because of, we should do it, either a long one on Theodore Roosevelt or a short one on the teddy bear. Okay. Or maybe a long one on the teddy bear.

But, you know, the teddy bear came along thanks to Theodore Roosevelt. And there was a cartoonist, Louis C. Gregg, who had this idea, well, now we have William Taft. So what about Billy Possum instead of Teddy Bear and even gave this Billy Possum stuffed toy to Taft.

And I think Taft said, oh, this is great, but it seemed like, you know, it just didn't fly. They tried to get it to take off, and it just didn't take off. No, Billy Possum never took off. But we have a great tidbit to end on that I think maybe the fact of the show. What?

Which is that Possums are highly, highly resistant to not only just snake bite, but venom, period. Right, that's absolutely true, man. And apparently they found this out by accident. They were observing Possums in the wild and saw one get bit by like a rattlesnake maybe in the Everglades. And they were like, man, this Possum's toast.

And Possums just looked, yeah, just kind of brushed his shoulders off and shrugged and walked away. And the researchers were like, what is that? So they captured Possums and started exposing them to snake bites, which is really mean. But those Possums were like, what are you guys doing? This is nothing.

So they're like, okay, fine, Possum. We're going to start injecting you intravenously with massive amounts of snake venom and nothing. Like the most they could get out of the Possums was something that would look like a human that wasn't allergic to a bee got a bee sting. Yeah, and we're talking like cobras and asps, or an I didn't see asps, but vipers.

Yeah, pit vipers. Pit vipers, rattlesnakes. It wasn't like the more severe venom had a worse effect. The Possum was still just like, have you not got it by now? The venom doesn't bother us. Right, exactly. Please stop biting me and giving me shots. So they started looking into the Possums mechanism

for not getting sick or dying from venom. And they have a special protein. They may be the only animal that has it that encapsulates and deactivates the venom when it enters their bloodstream and just does nothing. And they're actually like, this Possum protein might actually save lives. And then weirdly, in a weird twist,

it also protects them against botulism too. And to put a cherry on top of all of this, they have synthesized what's called as LTNF, lethal toxin neutralizing factor protein. They've been able to synthesize it now and they don't even need any more Possums. They can just keep re-synthesizing it. And they're thinking like, hey, this may be a literal cure

for snake bite. Right. Yeah. For sure. Like how far away are they from just calling it and saying, all right, guys, we got it. Days. Really?

Okay. Days. At the very least, pit vipers, and those are the ones you got to worry about, you know? Sure. Yeah. Way to go Possums. Great.

Am I right? Possum pride. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, big shout out as an FYI to Jerry's daughter Inez, who Jerry tells us loves Possums, which means that Inez is ahead of the curve because she loved Possums before we did.

So big ups Inez. I love it. Yeah, for sure. And since I said big ups Inez, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this more defensive me and Gordon Lightfoot. You just can't let this go. Can you?

Hey, I keep getting emails. I've let it go. I think I know the one you're talking about, and I agree with this person if it's the one I'm thinking of. Yeah, it's for Mimi. And Mimi says this. Hey, guys, just listen to the Listener Mail on toast. And I feel like I should apologize as a Canadian

for the Canadians accusing Chuck of yum yucking for not liking Gordon Lightfoot. This is the one. And Mimi says, by the way, I don't even know Gordon Lightfoot because I'm a millennial. People are allowed to have opinions and not like things, especially when the thing is so subjective, like different tastes in music and movies.

I thought yum yucking was criticizing or judging people negatively because of what they like. Yes. I think in this way, Chuck is actually being yum yucked by other people for the music he doesn't like. It's all very meta. And on a personal note, please come back to Vancouver. I'd seen you when you came in 2017.

Ford Pinto, no idea what that was before your show even. Mimi, where do you live? Well, apparently near Vancouver. Yeah. It is younger, so, you know, that explains a lot. Sure. Anyway, head tickets to your March 2020 show before it was canceled.

Oh, we had to cancel Vancouver? Yeah, we just did San Francisco, maybe, or we did one before. I can't remember. I think we only did two shows and, yeah, Vancouver got canceled. Well, we owe it to Vancouver to come back then. I didn't remember that that was on the canceled list.

Sorry about that, Mimi, but thank you for getting my back. And here's the deal. When we come back to Vancouver, just reply to that email thread that we had going and say, guess list and you're on it. And say, it's me, Mimi. That's right. Thank you, Mimi.

I agree with you. I think Chuck was being yum yucked. I also kind of see why some people were upset with him. So I'm just, I'm Switzerland over here. Okay. Wish you washy. If you want to be like Mimi and get in touch with us to defend Chuck or, you know, take him down to Peg,

whatever, as long as it has nothing to do with me, you can send us an email to stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt.

I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet feel like a nightclub.

And it was the first major social media company to collapse. My name is Joanne McNeil. And my new podcast, Main Accounts, the story of MySpace. I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it. Listen to Main Accounts, the story of MySpace on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

I am Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. This season, we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you. Each week, you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and their process of healing. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.