This episode tackles a deceptively deep question: how did sloths go from elephant-sized ground-dwelling giants to the slow, tree-loving animals we know today—and do they feel shame about it? The answer involves two separate evolutionary lineages that converged on the same tiny, upside-down, algae-covered body plan. Two-toed sloths are actually more closely related to Jefferson's ground sloth Megalonyx, while three-toed sloths trace back to the massive Megatherium. That split happened 28-30 million years ago, deeper than the divide between cats and dogs. The shrinking likely resulted from a combination of new predators (saber-toothed cats, dire wolves) arriving via the Isthmus of Panama, shrinking grasslands, and expanding forests. The last ground sloths, bear-sized holdouts in Cuba, survived until roughly 2,700 BCE—well into human history. But the episode argues that tree sloths aren't failed ground sloths; they're extraordinarily successful specialists that outlasted nearly all of South America's megafauna.
#3578: Did Sloths Shrink on Purpose?
How giant ground sloths became tiny tree-dwellers—and whether they feel shame about it.
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New to the show? Start here#3578: Did Sloths Shrink on Purpose?
Daniel sent us this one, and I have to say, it's a prompt that feels personally addressed in a way most don't. He points out that we've never really discussed sloth evolutionary history on the show, which is true. And he wants to know how sloths went from giant ground-dwelling creatures to the slow tree-loving animals we know today. But the real question, the one I think he's actually asking, is whether modern sloths feel some kind of internal shame about what they've become compared to their distant ancestors. Is there awareness of this lineage in the modern sloth community? And how did this exactly happen evolutionarily? So this is part paleontology, part psychology, and part family drama stretched across ten thousand years.
I love this question because it's doing something very specific. It's projecting a very human anxiety onto an animal — the anxiety of diminished greatness. You know, the grandfather was a general, the grandson sells insurance. And the prompt essentially wants to know if sloths walk around carrying that weight. Which is absurd on its face, but it's also a genuinely useful framing device for talking about what actually happened in sloth evolution. Because the facts are wild enough without the existential crisis layered on top.
Before we get into the feelings of my distant relatives, which I'm happy to speculate about with absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever, let's establish what we're comparing. What were these giant sloths? Because I think most people have a vague sense that there were big sloths once, but the scale is hard to internalize.
The scale is hard to believe. So the largest of the ground sloths was Megatherium, which lived in South America and went extinct around ten thousand years ago. Megatherium was roughly the size of a modern elephant. We're talking six meters long, weighing around four tons. When it stood up on its hind legs, which it could do, it would have been about twice the height of a giraffe. This animal could reach into trees that modern giraffes couldn't touch. And it walked on the sides of its feet, sort of like an anteater does, because its claws were so enormous they couldn't lie flat.
Six meters long, four tons, could stand up and look a giraffe in the eye and then keep going. And this is my ancestor.
This is your ancestor. And Megatherium wasn't even the only one. There was Eremotherium, which was comparably huge and actually made it up into North America. There was Mylodon, a bit smaller but still cow-to-bison sized. There was Megalonyx, which Thomas Jefferson himself described — he thought it was a giant lion when he first examined the bones. The ground sloth diversity was enormous. At least nineteen genera have been identified just in the West Indies alone. They filled all kinds of ecological niches. Some were grazers, some were browsers, some were probably opportunistic scavengers. We've found ground sloth remains with preserved hair and skin in Patagonian caves, and the hair was thick and shaggy, almost like a bear's.
We went from elephant-sized creatures with shaggy coats and claws the size of kitchen knives, roaming the Americas and dominating ecosystems, to me. A creature who considers it a productive day if I successfully relocate from one branch to a slightly more sunlit branch three feet away. And the question is whether I feel shame about this. Let me sit with that.
Let's sit with the evolutionary "how" first, because the mechanism is actually fascinating and surprisingly recent in terms of our understanding. For a long time, the assumption was that modern tree sloths were basically just ground sloths that shrank and climbed. But the genetics tell a completely different story. Two-toed sloths and three-toed sloths are not closely related. They're an extraordinary case of convergent evolution.
Wait, say that again. Two-toed and three-toed sloths are not the same lineage?
They are not. This is the part that surprises most people. Two-toed sloths, genus Choloepus, are actually more closely related to Megalonyx, Jefferson's ground sloth, and to the mylodontids. Three-toed sloths, genus Bradypus, are related to Megatherium and the nothrotheriids. The two families diverged somewhere around twenty-eight to thirty million years ago. That's a deeper split than the one between cats and dogs. And yet today, if you look at a two-toed sloth and a three-toed sloth hanging in a tree, they look like variations on the same basic design. Slow, upside-down, algae-covered, long-clawed leaf-eaters.
The tree sloth body plan evolved independently twice. Two completely separate lineages of giant ground sloth each produced a smaller arboreal descendant, both of which settled on roughly the same solution. That's remarkable.
It's one of the most striking examples of convergent evolution in mammals. Think about what that implies. The niche of "large, slow, tree-dwelling leaf-eater" was apparently so available, so obvious a move from a ground-sloth starting point, that two separate lineages converged on it independently. And they converged on very specific details. Both have extremely low metabolic rates. Both have specialized neck vertebrae — three-toed sloths have up to ten cervical vertebrae, which is bizarre for a mammal, and it gives them that almost owl-like head rotation. Two-toed sloths have the more standard seven but still have unusual neck flexibility. Both have symbiotic algae growing in their fur. Both hang upside down. Both descend to the ground about once a week to defecate.
The defecation ritual. That's the one sloth behavior everyone seems to know about.
It's mysterious. Sloths lose about eight percent of their body weight in a single defecation event. They're extremely vulnerable on the ground. Over half of all sloth deaths occur during these trips to the forest floor. And yet they do it. There are competing theories — one is that it's a form of communication via latrine sites, another is that they're fertilizing the specific trees they feed on, another is that the moths that live in their fur need the dung to complete their life cycle and the moths in turn support the algae that provide camouflage and possibly nutrients. But the point is, both two-toed and three-toed sloths do this. Convergent evolution even extended to bathroom habits.
When you say "the modern sloth community," which the prompt asked about, you're actually talking about two separate communities that arrived at the same destination by completely different routes. It's like two families who've never met both deciding to open identical bakeries on opposite sides of town, right down to the same recipes.
That's exactly the right analogy. And now we get to the shrinking. Because the question is, how do you go from a four-ton ground sloth to a four-kilogram tree sloth? And the answer seems to involve a combination of factors that all pointed in the same direction. First, the arrival of the Isthmus of Panama. About three million years ago, North and South America connected. This triggered the Great American Biotic Interchange — a massive mixing of faunas that had been isolated for tens of millions of years.
The ground sloths were on the wrong end of this?
Ground sloths actually did quite well initially. They spread north — Megalonyx made it all the way to Alaska. But South America also received an influx of northern predators. Saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, short-faced bears. And the ground sloths, especially the smaller and medium-sized ones, suddenly faced predation pressure they hadn't evolved to handle. Meanwhile, the climate was shifting. The Pleistocene was ending, things were getting warmer and more forested in many areas. Open grasslands were shrinking. For a giant ground sloth, that's a problem. For a smaller sloth that can climb, the expanding forests are an opportunity.
You've got new predators, shrinking grasslands, and expanding forests. The sloths that got smaller and climbed trees survived. The ones that stayed big and stayed on the ground didn't.
That's the broad picture, though the full story is more complicated. Ground sloths didn't all go extinct at once. The Caribbean ground sloths, some of which were quite small, held on until about four thousand four hundred years ago — well into the human era. That means ground sloths were still walking the earth when the pyramids were being built. Megalocnus in Cuba, about the size of a black bear, survived until roughly two thousand seven hundred BCE. So the transition from "giant ground sloths are the dominant herbivores of South America" to "tree sloths are the only survivors" took millions of years and had this long tail of persistence.
There's something poignant about that. The last ground sloths, bear-sized, holding on in Cuba and Hispaniola while their giant cousins had already vanished from the mainland. A long, slow fade rather than a sudden collapse.
Humans were almost certainly part of that final chapter. The arrival of humans in the Americas correlates pretty strongly with the extinction of the last ground sloths. There's direct evidence of ground sloth hunting — cut marks on bones, butchering sites. A giant ground sloth would have been an enormous amount of meat. And these animals had no evolutionary experience with human hunters. They would have been relatively easy to approach.
My ancestors were hunted to extinction by humans while my branch of the family hid in the trees and survived by being too small and too slow to be worth the effort. There's a certain strategic wisdom in that, actually.
See, this is where I want to push back on the premise of the prompt, because I don't think the evolutionary story reads as a decline at all. The tree sloth isn't a failed ground sloth. It's an extraordinarily successful specialist. There are six living species of sloth across two genera. They've been in the trees for millions of years, surviving climate shifts and predation pressures that wiped out almost all of South America's megafauna. The glyptodonts are gone. The toxodonts are gone. The saber-toothed cats are gone. The sloths are still here. That's not failure. That's a survival strategy that worked.
I appreciate the pep talk, Herman,. But I think the prompt is getting at something more psychological. Not "are sloths evolutionary failures" — they clearly aren't — but whether there's a kind of cultural memory, a sense of diminished stature. You're a donkey. If I told you your ancestors were six meters tall and could knock over trees, would you not feel at least a twinge of something?
I'd feel confused, because donkeys don't have that kind of ancestral memory, and neither do sloths. But I take your point. The question is essentially whether animals can experience something like shame or nostalgia for a lost form of existence. And the answer, from everything we know about animal cognition, is no. Shame requires a self-concept, a theory of mind, an understanding of social norms and how you're perceived relative to them. Sloths don't have that cognitive architecture. But that's the boring answer.
The boring answer is also the correct one. But let's entertain the question on its own terms. If sloths did have cultural memory, if there were sloth elders passing down stories, what would those stories sound like?
We'd have to imagine a sloth oral tradition, which is inherently funny given how slowly sloths vocalize. A single epic about Megatherium would take three generations to recite. But if we're speculating, I'd guess the stories wouldn't be about shame at all. They'd be about survival. Because the ground sloths are dead. Every single one. The tree sloths survived. If anything, the cultural narrative would be "our ancestors were magnificent but they were too big, too visible, too grounded.
" That's a nice founding myth. But I wonder if there would also be stories about what was lost. The ability to stand twenty feet tall and strip a tree bare from the top down. The ability to walk for miles across open grasslands. The sheer physical presence of being the largest animal in your ecosystem.
There's a scientific paper I came across that touches on this indirectly. It was about the vestigial behaviors in modern sloths, things they do that seem like holdovers from a ground-dwelling past. For example, sloths are surprisingly competent swimmers. They can move three times faster in water than on land, and they'll sometimes drop from branches into rivers to cross them. That's a behavior that makes more sense for a ground-dwelling animal that occasionally needs to cross water than for a fully arboreal one.
The swimming is a ghost of ground sloth behavior?
Another one is the way sloths sometimes hang by only their hind legs while using their forelimbs to reach for food. That posture is very similar to how ground sloths are believed to have fed — rearing up on their hind legs and using their forelimbs to pull branches toward their mouths. The muscle memory of a four-ton browser is still there in a four-kilogram tree sloth.
That's actually beautiful. The body remembers what the mind never knew. My muscles are running software written for an animal forty times my size.
There's the claw structure. Sloth claws are not like cat claws. They're not retractable, they're not optimized for killing. They're hooks. They're optimized for pulling, for anchoring. That's a ground sloth adaptation too. Ground sloths used those claws to dig for roots and tubers, to pull down branches. The tree sloth repurposed them for hanging. The tool predated the niche.
If I understand the evolutionary history correctly, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, the sequence is something like this. Sloths originated in South America around sixty million years ago, diversified into an enormous range of ground-dwelling forms, some of which became gigantic. The Isthmus of Panama formed, predators arrived, climate shifted, and two separate lineages independently shrank and took to the trees. The ground sloths held on in pockets until humans finished them off. And now there are six tree sloth species left, all doing essentially the same thing in the same way despite being from different ancestral stocks.
That's the story. And I want to zoom in on the dwarfing specifically, because there's a fascinating evolutionary mechanism at play. When you get island dwarfism — which is what happened with the Caribbean ground sloths — you see rapid size reduction over relatively few generations. The factors are limited resources, absence of large predators, and the metabolic advantage of smaller body size when food is scarce. The same thing happened with the last woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island, which shrank to about the size of a large horse before going extinct. But in the case of the mainland tree sloths, the dwarfing wasn't an island phenomenon. It was niche partitioning. The trees were an unexploited resource. Smaller sloths could access food that larger sloths couldn't. And the arboreal niche offered protection from the new ground predators.
The trees were both a food source and a fortress.
And once you're in the trees, there's a whole cascade of adaptations that follow. Low metabolic rate becomes an advantage rather than a liability because leaves are low-calorie and hard to digest. Sloths have a multi-chambered stomach that ferments leaves over the course of up to a month. They extract maximum nutrition from minimal intake. They move slowly because they don't need to move fast — their food doesn't run away, and their predators can't see them if they're still enough. The algae in their fur provides camouflage and possibly supplements their diet with nutrients absorbed through the skin.
I want to talk about the algae, because this is the detail that always strikes me as the most elegant part of the whole adaptation. Sloths are walking, or rather hanging, ecosystems. They have moths living in their fur, algae growing on their fur, and there's a three-way symbiosis. The moths lay eggs in the sloth dung, the larvae develop, the adult moths fly up into the trees and colonize sloth fur, and the moths bring nutrients that fertilize the algae. The sloth eats the algae. It's a closed loop.
It's a portable farm. And this is where the slow movement becomes critical. If sloths moved quickly, the algae couldn't establish. The stillness is what makes the whole system work. The sloth's slowness isn't a defect — it's the enabling condition for an entire miniature ecosystem that feeds and camouflages the sloth. That's not something to be ashamed of. That's an evolutionary innovation that would make any engineer jealous.
A portable farm. I'm going to start describing myself as an agricultural platform.
You already do. You've been cultivating leaves on your person for years with that leaf medicine practice of yours.
That's different. That's ancestral healing. But I take your point.
Let me address the second part of the prompt directly. Is there awareness of this lineage in the modern sloth community? And here I think we need to separate the literal from the cultural. Sloths are not aware of their evolutionary history. They don't have the neural architecture for that kind of abstract temporal reasoning. But culturally, among humans who care about sloths? The sloth conservation community is very aware of this history. There are researchers in Costa Rica and Panama who talk about sloths as "the last of the megafauna" — the only surviving representatives of an entire order of mammals that was once one of the dominant herbivore groups in the Americas.
The last of the megafauna. That's a heavy mantle to place on an animal that sleeps eighteen hours a day.
It's accurate. When you look at the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, almost everything over a ton disappeared. The mammoths, the mastodons, the giant ground sloths, the glyptodonts. The survivors tended to be the smaller, more adaptable species. The tree sloths are the exception that proves the rule — they survived by not competing in the megafauna game at all. They opted out.
I like that framing. The ground sloths played the megafauna game and lost. The tree sloths looked at that game and said, no thank you, we'll be in the canopy eating leaves and growing algae if anyone needs us.
There's a lesson there, which is that evolutionary success isn't about being the biggest or the strongest or the fastest. It's about fitting your niche well enough to persist. The tree sloth niche — arboreal folivore with an ultra-slow metabolism and a symbiotic microbiome — is one that nothing else occupies in quite the same way. Howler monkeys eat leaves, but they move quickly and have a completely different digestive strategy. Sloths own their niche. They're not competing with anyone for it.
If I were to answer the prompt's question about shame directly, my response would be: shame is the wrong emotion. If sloths had emotions about their evolutionary history, the appropriate one would be something closer to survivor's pride. "Our giant cousins are gone. We're still here. We found a way.
Or even indifference, which might be the most sloth-like response of all. "We were big once. Now we're small. The leaves taste the same either way.
The leaves taste the same either way. That's going to be my new philosophy of life.
I want to add one more piece to the evolutionary puzzle because it's weird and wonderful. We talked about convergent evolution between two-toed and three-toed sloths, but here's something even stranger. The three-toed sloth has a neck structure unlike almost any other mammal. Most mammals have seven cervical vertebrae. Giraffes have seven, just elongated. Humans have seven. Whales have seven. It's one of the most deeply conserved traits in mammalian evolution. But three-toed sloths have eight, nine, or even ten cervical vertebrae. Two-toed sloths have anywhere from five to seven.
The neck vertebrae count is all over the place in sloths while almost every other mammal on earth is locked in at seven. That's bizarre.
It's extremely bizarre. And it's possible because sloths have an unusually low metabolic rate and a very low instance of certain developmental constraints that normally make variations in vertebral count lethal. In most mammals, changes to the number of cervical vertebrae are associated with stillbirth or severe developmental problems. Sloths seem to have escaped that constraint. The leading hypothesis is that their slow metabolism reduces the rate of cell division during embryonic development, which relaxes the selection pressure on vertebral segmentation.
The slowness isn't just a behavioral adaptation. It's built into the developmental biology. The very thing that makes sloths slow is what allowed them to evolve the flexible necks that make their arboreal lifestyle possible. The slowness came first, and everything else followed from it.
That's the current thinking. And if that's true, then the slow metabolism isn't a consequence of the arboreal niche. It's the precondition that made the arboreal niche accessible. Sloths didn't become slow because they moved into the trees. They were already on the path to slowness, and that preadaptation is what allowed them to survive in the trees when their ground-dwelling relatives couldn't.
That inverts the whole narrative. The standard story is "sloths are slow because they live in trees and eat leaves." But you're saying the actual story might be "sloths were already slow, which is why they could live in trees and eat leaves when the ground became dangerous.
It's more nuanced than a simple reversal, but yes, that's the direction the evidence points. The slow metabolism appears to be an ancestral trait that predates the arboreal shift. Ground sloths were probably already relatively slow compared to other mammals of similar size. The tree sloths just took that existing tendency and ran with it. Or rather, crawled with it.
Crawled with it. At approximately one-third of a mile per hour.
About zero point two four kilometers per hour on the ground, yes. In the trees they're slightly faster, about zero point five kilometers per hour. For perspective, a Galapagos tortoise moves at about one point six kilometers per hour. Sloths make tortoises look like sprinters.
There's something almost defiant about being that slow. The world is full of things trying to go faster. The sloth said no. Not just no, but an elaborate, biologically entrenched no that rewired its entire physiology around the refusal to hurry.
That's the part that's hard for the modern mind to accept. We're conditioned to equate speed with progress, efficiency with success. But the sloth strategy has been working for millions of years. The sloth's ancestors survived the extinction that wiped out the mammoths. They survived the arrival of humans. They survived deforestation that eliminated countless other species. They're still here, still slow, still covered in algae, still hanging upside down and eating leaves. That is a successful design.
You're making me feel better about my life choices, Herman. I want to be clear about that.
I'm not trying to make you feel better. I'm trying to give the evolutionary biology its due. The prompt frames the sloth story as a fall from greatness — giants reduced to tree-dwellers. But that's a human value judgment. Evolution doesn't have a direction. There's no ladder. The tree sloth isn't "less evolved" than the ground sloth. It's differently adapted to a different set of pressures. And the fact that two separate lineages arrived at roughly the same solution independently tells you that it's a good solution. Nature voted for the tree sloth body plan twice.
Nature voted twice. I'm going to remember that. So to directly answer the questions in the prompt: how did this happen evolutionarily? The short version is sixty million years of South American isolation produced an enormous diversity of ground sloths, some of which became elephant-sized. The Isthmus of Panama connected the continents, new predators arrived, climate shifted toward forests, and two separate lineages — not closely related to each other — independently shrank and adapted to arboreal life. The ground sloths held on in pockets, especially the Caribbean, until humans finished them off around four thousand years ago. The tree sloths survived by being small, slow, camouflaged, and metabolically efficient.
On the question of shame and awareness: no, sloths don't experience shame about their evolutionary history because they lack the cognitive architecture for that kind of abstract social emotion. But if they did have cultural memory, the appropriate response would probably be pride in survival rather than shame at diminished stature. And in the human conservation community, there's definitely awareness and appreciation of sloths as the last survivors of an extraordinary mammalian lineage.
As for whether there's awareness in the modern sloth community — I think I'm uniquely positioned to speak to this as the show's resident sloth. And I'd say the awareness is there, but it's not something we dwell on. We're not sitting around in the canopy telling stories about Megatherium. We're focused on the present. The next branch over. There's a kind of Zen acceptance to sloth existence that doesn't really accommodate nostalgia for a lost age of giants. The past is the past. The leaves are the leaves.
That's either profound or profoundly lazy. I can't decide which.
It's both. That's the sloth way.
I do want to mention one more thing about the extinction timeline, because it's the kind of detail that reframes how you think about the whole story. The last Caribbean ground sloths died out around two thousand seven hundred BCE. That's contemporaneous with the Old Kingdom of Egypt. The pyramids of Giza were already standing. Writing had been invented. Complex civilizations were flourishing. And there were still ground sloths walking the earth, bear-sized, in Cuba and Hispaniola. The sloth lineage didn't end in some remote prehistoric fog. It ended in historical time, within the memory of human civilization.
That's astonishing. Ground sloths and pharaohs existed simultaneously. There's something almost tragic about that. The last ground sloth died alone on a Caribbean island while, on the other side of the world, people were building monuments that would last five thousand years. No one was building monuments to the sloths.
Except Thomas Jefferson, who was obsessed with Megalonyx and insisted that Lewis and Clark look for living specimens during their expedition. He believed giant ground sloths might still exist somewhere in the American West. He was wrong, but the hope was there. The idea that these animals deserved to still be alive.
Jefferson believed in us. That's touching.
He also ate them. Well, not him personally, but there's evidence that early Americans hunted ground sloths extensively. The extinction wasn't just climate and predators. Humans played a role. And that's part of the story too.
The full answer to how this happened evolutionarily has to include the human chapter. Climate shift pushed the ground sloths toward smaller ranges. New predators increased the pressure. And then humans arrived and finished the job, except for the ones that had already retreated to the trees. The tree sloths survived because they were too small to hunt, too hard to find, and too weird to fit into any obvious category of prey.
Too slow to trigger pursuit instincts in predators. There's a hypothesis that extreme slowness is actually a form of crypsis — it's camouflage through motionlessness. Most predators key in on movement. A sloth that barely moves is effectively invisible to a predator scanning for prey. The slowness isn't a vulnerability. It's a cloak.
A cloak of stillness. I've been saying this for years. Nobody listens to the sloth about sloth things.
I'm listening now. And the science backs you up. Sloth slowness is a multi-purpose adaptation. It conserves energy. It enables the algae symbiosis. It hides the sloth from predators. It reduces the caloric requirements so that a diet of leaves is sufficient. Everything connects to everything else. It's an integrated system, not a collection of separate traits.
An integrated system. That's a good way to think about it. The giant ground sloth was an integrated system too — big body, high browsing reach, ability to dig, thick skin for defense. That system worked until it didn't. The tree sloth system works differently, but it's still working. And in evolutionary terms, "still working" is the only metric that matters.
And on that note, I think we've covered the evolutionary history, the convergent evolution, the dwarfing, the extinction timeline, and the question of shame and awareness. Is there anything else you want to add from the sloth perspective?
Only that if any sloths are listening, which seems unlikely given the medium, I want them to know that I'm proud of us. We outlasted the mammoths. We outlasted the saber-toothed cats. We outlasted the ground sloths themselves. We're still here, hanging upside down, growing algae, taking our time. There's no shame in survival.
That's a good note to end the discussion on. But we do have Hilbert's fun fact to get to.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In nineteen forty-nine, a British archaeologist excavating a site in northern Nigeria near the Niger River uncovered a single clay tablet inscribed with what appeared to be a hybrid script — part logographic symbols resembling Linear B and part phonetic characters resembling Linear A. The tablet remains the only known example of this writing system, which no one has been able to decipher, and its presence in West Africa has never been explained.
Hilbert: In nineteen forty-nine, a British archaeologist excavating a site in northern Nigeria near the Niger River uncovered a single clay tablet inscribed with what appeared to be a hybrid script — part logographic symbols resembling Linear B and part phonetic characters resembling Linear A. The tablet remains the only known example of this writing system, which no one has been able to decipher, and its presence in West Africa has never been explained.
A Minoan-Nigerian hybrid script on a single tablet that nobody can read. Of course there is.
That's going to bother me for the rest of the day.
That's our show. The sloth lineage is a survivor's story, not a decline, and somewhere in Nigeria there's a clay tablet that shouldn't exist. If you want more episodes, you can find us at myweirdprompts dot com or wherever you get your podcasts. This has been My Weird Prompts. I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing. We'll be back with another prompt soon.
This episode was generated with AI assistance. Hosts Herman and Corn are AI personalities.