Happy Hump Day, Lunch Club!

Today's four stories cover a surprising amount of ground: a yearlong investigation into the black market fueling African grey parrot poaching from the Congo to Dubai; a look at how agentic AI tools are upending software work and creeping toward everything else; the strange, billionaire-funded history of a clock built to run for 10,000 years inside a Texas mountain; and a gut-punch look at the romance scam epidemic draining billions from Americans every year.

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Brett

African grey parrots, the world's most verbally talented birds, have lost perhaps 90 percent of their population in some regions over the last three decades, and the booming pet trade is a central reason. A yearlong investigation traces the supply chain from poachers scaling hundred-foot trees in the Democratic Republic of Congo to export operations in South Africa, where birds snatched from the wild are suspected of being laundered through legal captive-breeding channels. Researcher Irene Pepperberg's decades of work with a grey named Alex proved these birds have the cognitive abilities of young children, which has only deepened public fascination and demand. TikTok and YouTube channels with millions of followers are accelerating that appetite, inspiring buyers around the globe. An innovative forensic technique that analyzes gut microbiomes in parrots may eventually help investigators distinguish wild-caught birds from legally raised ones, though it's not yet proof of a crime. South Africa legally exported around 60,000 greys last year alone. The DRC recently passed a landmark national law banning domestic trade, but enforcement remains uncertain in a country with porous borders and entrenched networks of corruption.

Read here.

Two years ago, the most common AI interaction was asking a chatbot to draft an email. That era is giving way to something significantly more capable. Agentic AI tools, programs that can operate a computer autonomously and execute multi-step tasks without human intervention, are moving from hobbyist circles toward mainstream adoption. Products like Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex can already run parallel programming sessions, conduct structured research, and prototype functioning software in the time it once took to write a spec document. Microsoft's CEO has said roughly 30 percent of code at the company is now AI-written. Engineers are letting bots handle entire project branches simultaneously. But the transition comes with real hazards: one early user of Anthropic's accessible agentic tool asked it to organize desktop files and watched it permanently delete 15 years of family photos. The technology struggles with mundane, fiddly tasks even as it handles genuinely complex ones. Proponents argue the gains in software will cascade across knowledge work broadly, though skeptics note that programming has unusually clear success criteria, and most white-collar work does not.

Read here, free for LBR Readers.

Buried in a limestone mountain in the west Texas desert, accessible by a three-hour hike through cacti and chain ladders, is a clock designed to run for 10,000 years. Conceived by computer scientist Danny Hillis in 1989 as a corrective to short-term thinking, the Clock of the Long Now features a pendulum that swings every seven seconds, a solar synchronizer that corrects its drift each summer solstice, and bells capable of producing over 3.6 million unique chimes. It was built with backing from Jeff Bezos, who now owns it through a private company. Writer Alec Nevala-Lee traces how the clock emerged from a specific cultural moment when figures like Hillis and Stewart Brand worried that accelerating technology, particularly the prospect of artificial superintelligence, could compress or destroy civilization. The project drew inspiration from science fiction ranging from Asimov's Foundation to Borges. But as Bezos's ownership has reshaped its story, and Amazon's business model runs counter to everything the clock was meant to symbolize, the gap between the clock's aspirations and its reality has grown harder to ignore.

Read here.

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The FBI logged $16.6 billion in fraud losses in 2024, a 33 percent jump from the year before. Romance scams, increasingly a gateway to broader crypto and investment fraud, account for a significant and growing share. Fortune's Amanda Gerut profiles three women who lost retirement savings, homes, and in one case six dogs to operatives who spent months building emotional trust before financial requests ever entered the picture. One widowed Pennsylvania woman fell for a "doctor" deployed in Iraq who remembered her dogs by name; another was tricked into transferring funds through a Bitcoin ATM using a stranger's bank credentials; a third withdrew her entire 403(b) retirement account into a fake crypto investment platform and then watched her paid-off condo enter foreclosure. Scammers are aided by AI-generated deepfakes, Grammarly-polished messages, and how-to guides on targeting lonely women over 40. Adults over 60 are the most impacted group. Fewer than 5 percent of victims report the crime to authorities, partly from shame and partly because many never fully accept they were deceived. All three women profiled have since become public advocates against fraud.

Read here.