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💦 Welcome aboard, friend. AI keeps moving at light speed, and you’re right alongside it. Come on in and make a Splash.

HERE’S WHAT’S IN THIS ISSUE:

🎯 Two AI prompts that expose a stock’s ugly side before you buy.
💼 Turn ChatGPT into your personal speech coach.
⚠️ Facebook wants a video selfie for its new verification badge.
🛠️ ChatGPT finds real restaurant reservations while you chat.
🫠 A burger joint run entirely by robots.

But first, some trivia. The Velvet Sundown, a “classic-rock band” with big Spotify numbers and absolutely zero awkward van arguments, pulled in more than a million monthly listeners. Then came the tiny catch: No band. No photoshoot. No tragic backstory. Just AI in fake leather jeans. 

🎸 Now the money question. By best estimates, how much did the fake AI band rake in from about 14 million streams? A) $700, B) $50,000, C) $500,000 or D) North of $2 million? Rock on, the answer’s waiting for you at the end. I can’t hold a tune so this one really caught my attention.

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I’m at a dinner party when someone leans in and whispers, “Buy this stock. It’s the next big thing. It’s got AI, blockchain and data centers all rolled up into one.” I nod thoughtfully, open my brokerage app and realize I have no idea how the company stays in business.

This is how bagholders are born. The average retail investor trails the market by roughly 1.2 percentage points a year, usually because we trade too much or skip the homework. On a $50,000 portfolio, that’s $600 annually. Don’t get me started on meme-stock trading. 

The uncomfortable details rarely appear in the investor presentation with the tasteful rocket graphic. They’re buried inside earnings reports, 10-Q filings and transcripts.

Before buying anything, paste the company name, earnings summary or filing into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok and use this prompt:

Then, the fun part. Make the bot argue against the investment:

Thirty seconds here can prevent an $8,000 stock tip from becoming a $1,600 tax-loss souvenir.

AI can’t see insider information or predict interest rates, recessions or prices. Use it to clarify the business, not bless the purchase. I also never paste brokerage statements or account numbers. 

📩 Send this to the friend who texts you, “Should I buy this stock?” five minutes after reading about it on X. 

I give speeches a lot. I've talked cybersecurity to every single NASA employee, keynoted a NAB luncheon, and spoken to a ballroom full of Texas teachers.

That last one taught me something. Afterward, I was in the lobby, head down, texting, paying attention to exactly nothing. Eventually I noticed about 500 people lined up behind me and asked the guy next to me what the line was for. He said, "You. This is the autograph line." So I stood there and greeted every single person. For hours. Missed my flight doing it, and I'd do it again.

Here's my confession: even with all my stage and radio time, I'll still spend 30 minutes agonizing over one joke, then deliver it with the confidence of a hostage reading a statement. There's a reason people fear public speaking more than actual death.

Presentations used to run on gut instinct, trial and error or an expensive coach who politely explained that I say um every nine seconds, then sent me the bill.

Now, AI can break a speech into things I can fix: pacing, clarity, tone, transitions, audience interest and whether my closing lands or simply stops.

I paste the speech or presentation into AI and use this:

Here’s where it goes to the next level. Rehearse your speech with ChatGPT Voice (use Voice, not just transcription), asking it to critique your pacing, pauses, tone, confidence and where you’re losing energy. 

AI can’t read the room. It doesn’t know the groom’s mother considers the mullet a sensitive family matter or that the investor across the table breaks out in hives when someone says scalable solution.

Your move this week: Pick one upcoming toast, presentation, sales pitch or team update, and run it through the prompt. Then record one rehearsal before changing anything else.

📺 WATCH ON YOUTUBE NOW OR LATER

Arizona has cactus cams. Connecticut has fake construction workers. Glendale had cops dressed as Easter bunnies. And New Jersey? A full-grown officer hiding in a bush costume, catching distracted drivers like law enforcement’s least chill shrub.

This week, we break down the sneaky new ways tech is watching you, on the road, in your car, at school, in your house and even through your kid’s laptop.

Also: Sam Altman’s AI parenting idea, Google’s Nest settlement, BMW turning dashboards into movie ads, school-issued laptops tracking students, fake Walmart sites, smart TVs spying on your viewing habits and why your car’s data file may know more about you than your spouse.

Plus, a mom shares a chilling digital kidnapping story, a 12-year-old AI founder makes us all feel lazy and a romance scam drains $250,000 from one family.

Hit play below, so you know who’s watching, what’s tracking and why that bush on the corner suddenly has binoculars. 👇

▶️ Flock cams, car spying and AI parenting traps →

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

I’d ask what Facebook’s obsession with my face is, but it’s literally in the name. 

Meta recently launched Facebook Verified, a free “real human” badge you get by taking a video selfie. Their facial recognition matches that selfie against the photos on your profile. The badge shows up in Marketplace, Groups and Dating.

Here’s the part that matters. Once your face becomes proof of identity, a leak gets personal fast. The selfie isn’t stored as a cute photo. It becomes a face template, a mathematical map of your specific geometry. The same biometric data could be used to impersonate you, match you across accounts or fool systems that use your face to approve access.  

You can change a password. You can freeze a credit card. You can’t cancel a face. 

Open Settings & Privacy > Face Recognition > check whether verification is already switched on. New accounts often are.

If you do verify, don’t use a photo that also lives on your banking or work profiles. That’s how faces get cross-matched.

📩 Send this to the friend who clicks verify on anything with a blue checkmark.

As an Amazon Associate, some links pay us a commission at no extra cost to you. Keeps this newsletter free. Thank you.

💧 Before it floods: Smart leak detectors (20% off, $44) text, email or ping your app the second they sense water.

🔌 One-click power: Tessan’s light switch (20% off, $15) turns any plug into a remote-controlled one. Plug it in, click the remote, done.

Kill the glow: Annoying LEDs at night? Light-dimming stickers (20% off, $8) cover them up without fully blacking them out.

🏠 My virtual house tour: Check out all the home tech staples I swear by. →

I found you a reservation assistant that never puts you on hold and doesn't want a tip.

ChatGPT can now book your dinner table. You type: "Saturday, 7 p.m., four people, Italian, near me." It comes back with open times, then does the booking through OpenTable, Resy or Yelp. It'll even put you on a Yelp waitlist for spots that don't take reservations.

I tested this myself. It took about a minute, and I never opened another app. It works on every plan, including free, on mobile, web and desktop. And it never asks for a card. FYI, if a chatbot ever wants your credit card number “to hold the table,” that's not ChatGPT. That's a scam. Close it.

One more thing: the confirmation email still comes from the restaurant platform, so peek at your inbox before you drive over. Hungry and table-less is no way to spend a Saturday.

My walk-through, exact prompt and the fine print on cancellations were too much to squeeze in here. It's all on my site, one tap away.

⏱️ Do the 60-second setup →

Robots and fast food are the modern toxic relationship. 

California’s CaliExpress by Flippy is billed as the world’s first fully autonomous AI-powered restaurant. Burger-flipping bots run the grill, taking about 120 seconds per patty, while automated ordering kiosks use facial recognition to remember customers and their preferences. Yeah, like I want to be the person known for ordering a triple-deck burger. 

It’s a McJob run by Transformers that could lead to fewer staffing shortages, more consistency and presumably zero complaints about weekend shifts. A robot grills your burger in two minutes. It still can’t fix the shake machine.

Watch it in action here. How does a burger introduce his wife? Meet Patty.

Share this now:

Here’s your haul for today. You made AI interrogate a stock, turned it into a speech coach, learned why Facebook suddenly wants a selfie, met Google’s whole-body robot brain, discovered ChatGPT can help book dinner and watched a robot chef. Not bad for five minutes of reading.

🎸 The answer: B) About $50,000. Surprised it’s that low? That’s the real lesson. Streaming pays peanuts. A human band would split that four ways, then pay the label, the manager and the gas station.

But in this case, the “band” is a prompt. No studio time, no drummer, no dental plan. The top 10 AI “artists” on Spotify pulled in an estimated $593,000 last year, and the biggest one banked $157,000 in four months. 

Take a listen to The Velvet Sundown. I hate to admit it, but I kinda like it.

🛡️ Your antivirus might be asleep at the wheel: Modern hackers don’t merely crash your PC. They install silent software to watch you type. Old antivirus misses this. I use Webroot because it is cloud-based and lightning fast. I don’t put my name on junk, and this is the protection I rely on. Don’t browse unprotected. Get my exclusive 62% off deal now.* 

💫 AI won't replace you. But the person who learns it might sit at the table you wanted. Pull up your chair now. Forward this to ONE person who needs to be with the AI program. Thanks for diving in, see you next time! Drop a rating below and leave a comment, I read every single one. See you next Thursday! — Kim

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

Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, Webroot, SOLPEX, Ciowain, @knowingyour.history via Instagram

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