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💦 Welcome, friend. The AI current keeps getting faster, and you’re already in it. Come on in and make a Splash.

HERE’S WHAT’S IN THIS ISSUE:
🎯 Turn one oddly specific skill into a searchable side hustle.
💼 Build a pre-call dossier before you embarrass yourself.
⚠️ Spot satellite images of events that never happened.
🤯 AI turned six weeks of hotel modeling into a breeze.
🛠️ ChatGPT and Gemini can find rentals and book the tour for you.
🫠 Road trip planning can turn into a racing video game. 

But first, some trivia. Stanford just dropped its AI Index, the closest thing AI gets to an annual physical. One stat tells the story: U.S. private investment in AI hit $286 billion last year. That’s 23 times what China spent. We built the models, the chips and the data centers. Nobody else came close.

Then Stanford measured something different. What percentage of people in each country actually use AI? America’s report card gets awkward. 

🤔 Where does the U.S. rank in using AI? A) First, B) Eighth, C) 24th or D) 51st? Keep reading, the answer is waiting at the end, judging us quietly. 

🔒 They found a notebook in the killer’s car: When police searched the man who assassinated a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband in their own home, they found a handwritten list of 11 websites. Not weapons sites. Data broker sites, the kind that sell your home address for a couple of bucks. Type your name into one, and there you are: your address, your phone, your family, a photo of your front door. That’s why I use Incogni. Get 60% off.* 

✅ Quick favor: Check your spam folder. If I’m in there, drag this to your inbox and add me to your contacts. The algorithm treats us all the same until you tell it otherwise. — Kim

I know there’s some weirdly specific thing you’re good at. Spreadsheet sorcery. Finding vintage denim. Teaching better posture. Fixing the printer after everyone else has threatened to blow it up. And you’ve probably convinced yourself nobody would pay you for your odd talent. 

The big mistake is skipping the side hustle that could work because you misjudged demand, described your offering poorly or priced it like you’re apologizing for being there.

Marketplaces like Fiverr, Etsy and Upwork run on search intent, not common sense. Fiverr says over half of searches are specific, long-tail phrases. Buyers aren’t just looking for “graphic design.” They’re searching “TikTok thumbnail for 50+ professional life coaches” or “PDF template for LA county landlords.”

That weird precision is the business. Upload your résumé, LinkedIn profile or a plain list of skills to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok, then paste:

Paste this next:

For example, “I fix tech stuff” turns into “Mac Mini setup for remote lawyers.” Same skill but different search bars and pay scales. My side hustle building model boats in my attic is going so well I might have to move. Sales are through the roof.

📥 Send this to someone who is genuinely great at one strange thing and keeps calling it not a real skill.

Nine minutes before a call with a show sponsor, I was scrolling a 10-week-old email thread, trying to remember what I’d promised. An intro to somebody? Didn’t they mention a kid graduating? New agency initiative? I found none of it, hopped on the call and opened with the most humiliating sentence in professional life: “Remind me where we left off?”

For years, that kind of prep relied on memory, sticky notes or customer relations info nobody’d updated since 2023. AI can ease that pre-call panic with a 30-second job. ChatGPT can connect with Gmail, Google Calendar and Contacts, while Gemini can search older Gmail threads and pull calendar details. Your entire paper trail with a person is searchable in one prompt. 

Before your next call, paste this into your favorite chatbot with your email and calendar connected:

Then do the human part. Skim it two minutes before you dial. If it surfaces a promise you dropped, address it in the first 90 seconds instead of praying they forgot. AI is now your pre-meeting producer, the backstage crew that hands you the cards before you walk out. 

One caution: AI reads words, not tone. It’ll miss the polite sentence that was actually a warning shot. If the summary feels weirdly calm about a client you know is annoyed, trust yourself over the bullet points.

Your move this week: Pick one call on your calendar, run the dossier 10 minutes before and open with the promise you owe them.

📺 WATCH ON YOUTUBE NOW OR LATER

A raccoon named Jimothy went viral because everyone thought he looked too weird to be real. Tiny body, bowling-ball energy, rare spine condition, but exactly what the internet needed. Seattle turned him into a local celebrity and raised nearly $60,000 for a food bank in his name. 

This week, we break down the new game of “AI fake or real?” From chatbots giving dangerous answers to robot dogs doing backflips, DoorDash drops and a poop-scooping drone that may be the grossest billion-dollar idea around.

Also this week: Meta glasses filming in public, hotel Wi-Fi hijackers, SIM-swap theft, AI in city government, AirTags hidden in kids’ shoes and the airline rule finally banning speakerphone goblins.

Plus, Guy Kawasaki joins us to talk Canva, AI and why the weird human question still beats the robot one.

Hit play below, so you know what’s real, what’s AI and what’s just a raccoon having a moment. 👇

▶️ AI fakes, smart glasses and poop drones →

🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.

A satellite photo of the U.S. Capitol underwater goes viral. Looks real. You open Google Earth to check it, except Google Earth is where the fake came from.

For one day last week, Google Earth let anyone zoom in anywhere on the planet, tap “create image,” type whatever they wanted and get an AI satellite photo of it. No knock on the door, no expertise, no restrictions worth mentioning. NPR generated Iran’s Kharg Island on fire and a flooded Capitol complex. 

One open-source researcher tried refugees at the Mexican border, a nuclear plant in Iran, a bombed hospital in Gaza. Nothing was refused.

Google pulled the feature a day later, saying it needs “stronger guardrails.” A little late. 

This matters because satellite imagery was one of the last forms of visual evidence most people assumed was difficult to fake. Investigators use it to verify atrocities. Fake images of damage to a U.S. base in Bahrain, apparently created with Google’s tools, circulated in Iranian media during the ongoing conflict.

Run the picture through a free reverse-image search such as TinEye or Google Lens. Upload the picture, sort TinEye’s matches by “Oldest” and see whether it previously appeared with a different date, location or description. Getting no matches isn’t proof that it’s real, it only means the service couldn’t find an earlier copy. 

Google Earth used to settle arguments. Now it starts them.

📩 Send this to someone who believes Godzilla destroyed Tokyo because of satellite images.

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Nothing burns money faster than discovering your plumbing wants to occupy the same space as your air conditioning.

A design team tackled a $31 million, 190-room hotel by hooking an AI model, Kimi K3, into its modeling software. The AI studied blueprint photos alongside plain-English descriptions, then built the entire coordinated model itself. Result: six weeks shrank to nine days, three engineers became one reviewer, and costs reportedly dropped from roughly $47,000 to about $10,500.

Fewer construction surprises is a win for everyone involved.

Architecture software has been producing shiny renderings for years. The high-risk hard part is making sure the plumbing, electrical wiring, ventilation and structural supports can all coexist inside the same walls without starting a turf war. AI is surprisingly good at preventing million-dollar games of “Who put the pipe there?” 

The result? Specialists passed files back and forth, flagged conflicts and rebuilt sections whenever one change rippled through the rest of the project. Move an air duct 6 inches, and suddenly a pipe, ceiling panel and sprinkler line may all need a new home. 

AI can trace those knock-on effects much faster than a human clicking through thousands of components one at a time.

The engineer didn’t disappear, either. The job shifted from assembling every piece manually to reviewing the finished model, catching weird decisions and ensuring the software hadn’t designed something technically possible but deeply annoying to build. 

The AI checked 190 rooms of pipe in nine days. My plumber checks one faucet in that time, and that’s with the good coupon.

It looks like an old school screensaver, check it out.

This week: Zillow in ChatGPT & Gemini

AI can go apartment hunting for you. Short of actually opening the door, Gemini and ChatGPT can do all the time-consuming, nitty-gritty research.

Ask for two bedrooms under $2,500 in plain English without opening a single browser tab, and book a tour within minutes. 

ChatGPT has had a Zillow app since 2025, but that was for home sales. Rentals plus tour booking is the new part. Free, U.S. only, rolling out in waves. Setup takes about a minute with my walkthrough and this exact prompt.

Planning a road trip traditionally requires Street View, reviews and that one friend who booked the Airbnb in the middle of nowhere saying, “It didn’t look that far.”

Someone built an app that skips the research and drops you directly onto a playable version of the route. Roads built from OpenStreetMap, terrain shaped by elevation data, and the world generates as you drive. You can cruise solo or multiplayer. 

Think Need for Speed made by a caffeinated cartographer.

The gameplay itself is a bit glitchy, but what a cool concept.

Here’s your haul for today: You found a better way to package and price your hidden skills, turned old emails into a one-page meeting brief, learned why satellite imagery now needs a fact-check, saw AI tackle a hotel’s plumbing and electrical maze, discovered how Gemini can search Zillow rentals and surface tour times and saw the future of road trip planning. Not bad for five minutes of reading.

🇺🇸 The answer: C) 24th. Only about 28% of Americans use AI, while the country wrote the biggest checks on Earth to build it. The champ? The United Arab Emirates at 64%, with Singapore right behind at 61%. Even Norway, Ireland and France beat us. 

We built the world’s most expensive gym, bought the fancy equipment, then drove past it every morning, which feels pretty on brand. Somewhere, a $286 billion treadmill is holding a very expensive pile of laundry.

Stanford’s data says America sits a full 13 points below where a country this rich should be. Why? Trust, mostly. Only 33% of Americans think AI will make their jobs better, and just 31% trust the government to regulate it.

🔒 Remember the Minnesota lawmaker and her husband murdered in their home? When police searched the killer’s car, they found a notebook. Inside was a handwritten list of 11 websites. Not places to procure weapons. These were data broker sites. Your name might be on those same sites right now. That’s why I use Incogni. It sent over 2,748 removal requests on my behalf while I did nothing. Get 60% off with code KIM60.* 

Make one splash this week: You’re reading an AI newsletter. You’ve got prompts saved and a chatbot on your home screen. That puts you ahead of roughly 7 out of 10 Americans. You’re not behind the curve. You are the curve. The future doesn’t belong to the people who built AI. It belongs to the people who use it.

Forward this to ONE person who needs to be with the AI program. Thanks for diving in, see you next time! — Kim

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, Nelko, @solvaix via X, @DVLPLONDON via X

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