Deepfake scammers are now running full Zoom meetings, birds are lining their nests with cigarette butts like it’s a homewares trend, and Europe’s climate could be one ocean current wobble away from doing something dramatic. This week, Will and Rod bounce between AI crime, urban wildlife hacks, climate tipping points, and a fruit fly brain getting uploaded like it’s just another file transfer.

We start in Hong Kong, where scammers used AI deepfakes to impersonate colleagues on a video call and convinced a CFO to transfer a huge amount of money. We then headed outside, where birds have started collecting cigarette butts for their nests.

From there, we get serious with the ocean currents that help keep Europe mild, and why scientists are worried about what happens if that system collapses. And because the future refuses to wait its turn, we also look at a fruit fly brain mapped neuron by neuron and uploaded into a virtual simulation, plus a quick detour into hats as status symbols and tools of punishment.

CHAPTERS:

00:00 AI Zoom Scam

01:31 Show Intro and Lineup

03:02 Pipe Smoking Animal Tales

06:28 Birds Using Cigarette Butts

08:32 Nicotine as Parasite Control

11:20 School Smoking and Odd Uses

15:29 AMOC Climate Tipping Point

19:33 Uploading Brains Fruit Fly Model

23:50 Connectome Driven Fly

24:47 Virtual Embodiment Claims

25:20 Scaling Up To Mouse

26:48 Hybrid Bio Machine Futures

28:13 Hat History Detour

30:27 Hats As Social Signals

SOURCES:

• https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/15/critical-atlantic-current-significantly-more-likely-to-collapse-than-thought
• https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/04/asia/deepfake-cfo-scam-hong-kong-intl-hnk?_bhlid=3bc010593bc73c17aa86ed0b6e79b5ae720c787f
• https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/BE4E11BFE7F8CCF5A5A7081869710925/S0018246X26101460a.pdf/the-cultural-social-and-ideological-role-of-the-hat-in-early-modern-england.pdf
• https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2026/ay/d5ay01801c
• https://futurism.com/science-energy/birds-cigarettes-nest
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347226000011
• https://nsojournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jav.01324
• https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024BiInv..26.1705P/abstract
• https://futurism.com/science-energy/research-fly-brain-matrix
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07763-9
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39533006/

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