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💦 Welcome, friend. AI is a waterfall this week. Come on in and make a Splash with me. We’ve got a lot to cover!

HERE’S WHAT’S IN THIS ISSUE:

🎯 AI finds money leaking out of your bank account.
💼 Your job title may be hiding better-paying careers.
⚠️ HOA cameras track every car entering your neighborhood.
🛠️ Three ChatGPT settings make it remember how you work.
🫠 Fake robot waitress dispenses soda from her mouth.

But first, some trivia. Taco Bell put voice AI in the drive-thru lane at more than 500 locations. It takes your order, upsells your Baja Blast and never needs a smoke break. Then one guy in one car found the glitch in the matrix, and the clip went viral for all the wrong reasons.

🌮 What order broke Taco Bell’s drive-thru AI? Think about it. Was it? A) 100 Crunchwraps, B) A burrito with no tortilla, C) 18,000 cups of water or D) Asking for McNuggets? Keep scrolling, the answer’s waiting at the end. No, it cannot make that a combo.

💡 Dark corners around the house? Linkind solar spotlights brighten the spots nobody’s watching. Use them near paths, fences, flags, patios or the side yard. They’re waterproof, adjustable and on sale for $50.*

Quick favor: Check your promotions or 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

🎯 YOUR AI POWER MOVE

Find money leaks

Image: ChatGPT/Kim Komando

I hate wasting money. Not in a clip-coupons way. In an I-remember-what-broke-felt-like way.

When I started this company, dinner was ramen noodles. Every night, for longer than I want to admit. I still can’t eat them. Not one bite, even now. And one morning, I came outside and discovered my car was gone. Repossessed, right off the street, while I was inside working.

So I do this exercise every month. Not because I’m disciplined. Because I know exactly what the other side of not paying attention looks like.

It all adds up fast: streaming services, delivery fees, apps, games and, of course, the two gym memberships, the Peloton subscription while the bike collects dust and a ClassPass that keeps charging you while gobbling up your “expired” credits.  

Our brains hide the evidence. Behavioral economists call it mental accounting. I don’t think twice about my $6 matcha, but that’s $2,190 per year. Broad bank categories such as groceries can hide a $60/month wine habit beside the eggs.

🔍 Feed AI the boring data

Open your bank or card app and copy last month’s transactions. Merchant descriptions and amounts only. No account numbers, no logins, no full card digits. Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok with this prompt:

You’re a financial analyst. Sort my transactions from last month into clear categories including dining, subscriptions, transportation and impulse buys. Flag every recurring charge, including ones hiding behind generic merchant names. For each, show the monthly cost and the annual total. Then rank my five biggest leaks by annual dollars: [paste spending].

No avocado toast lecture. It simply notices the multiple streaming services and the membership for the gym you last visited in February.

💰 Then make it cut

Go one layer deeper:

Based on those leaks, give me three cancellations to make this week with dollar amounts and their cancellation pages, two spending caps with a specific monthly number and one cheaper swap for my single most expensive habit. Total up what I’d save over 12 months.

Your statement isn’t lying to you. It’s just very quiet.

Cancel the dead subscriptions the same day you see them. Your future self is a liar with a busy schedule. Run the exercise again next month. Subscriptions grow back like weeds, usually right after you forget the free trial ever existed.

Find $17 a month, and that’s $204 a year back in your pocket. Find $50, and you’ve hit $600. Same lifestyle, more money, which is the only raise you can give yourself without scheduling a meeting.

📩 Send this to someone who swears they don’t spend money on anything.

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💼 YOUR AI EDGE

Image: ChatGPT/Kim Komando

I have a friend, call her Sarah. Twelve years in marketing, and she job-hunts by typing “marketing director” into a box. She calls it a hallway with no doors.

She runs six-figure budgets, reads dashboards better than the analysts, manages four people and ships launches on deadline. Tech calls that product operations. Health care calls it program management. Finance calls it strategy and pays more. She’ll never find any of them, because none of them say marketing.

📃 Title-shaped problem

Companies hire for what you actually did. Postings are being rewritten around skills instead of titles, and the applicant systems match the same way.

Your title was picked by a manager in 12 seconds. You’ve spent 12 years outgrowing it.

Upload your résumé and paste this into your favorite chatbot:

Ignore my job title completely. Read my résumé and extract only what I actually did: systems I built, people I managed, budgets I owned, data I analyzed, deals I negotiated, problems I solved. Turn that into a list of transferable skills with evidence for each. Then name 10 roles in industries I’ve never worked in where those exact skills are in demand. For each one, give the common job titles used, the skill I already have that matters most, the one gap I’d need to close and the search terms I should be typing instead of my old title.

The list is worthless sitting in a chat window. Search those titles on LinkedIn and Glassdoor, read five postings and see whose language matches your evidence. Rewrite your résumé summary in their vocabulary, not yours.

Fair warning: AI is good at telling you what you’re qualified for and completely useless at telling you what you’d tolerate on a Tuesday. It has never sat in that company’s all-hands. Talk to a person who works there before you get excited.

Your move this week: Pick one AI-suggested role outside your industry, find three live postings and message one person who holds that title.

📩 Send this to whoever’s been stuck applying to the same job with a different logo.

📻 MY NATIONAL RADIO & YOUTUBE SHOW

📺 WATCH ON YOUTUBE NOW OR LATER

Netflix put a man in a fake house 30 feet above Sunset Boulevard for three days, and somehow that wasn’t the weirdest surveillance story this week. Still, the billboard stunt had traffic crawling, people yelling, “Are you AI?” from the sidewalk and one actor reportedly making $75,000 to eat cereal in a bathroom. 

This week, we break down Flock cameras getting smashed, cops misusing license plate searches, Meta glasses catching an attack on video and why “pervert glasses” may be the new public place panic.

Also: Claude adds AI text watermarks, AI cheating clauses in prenups, Starlink as home security backup, ChatGPT books dinner, Google’s search bar fading into Gemini, insurance companies photograph your roof, sketchy gas detectors, fake businesses opened in your name and data centers quietly juicing your electric bill.

Plus, Bryan Johnson talks cloning his cells to grow replacement organs, a caller builds the world’s worst AI wife, hackers mess with airplane Wi-Fi after Defcon and NASA has to explain that gravity is, in fact, still working.

Hit play below, so you can spot the scams, the cameras and the billboard guy before everyone else does. 👇

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

⚠️ THE AI TRAP

Image: ChatGPT/Kim Komando

⚠️ Your HOA is watching

The Flock camera on my street came down at 5:30 in the afternoon. Sun blazing. A guy in a hoodie, no rush at all. That’s the temperature on these things now.

The board voted it in to stop package thieves. Solar, free to install, and it read every plate that rolled into the neighborhood. Color, make, model, roof racks, bumper stickers and that dent you were meaning to fix. It logged your car leaving at 6:40 a.m. and coming back at 11 p.m. Every day.

Hundreds of HOAs have signed on with vendors like Flock Safety, which runs more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and logs about 20 billion plate scans a month into one searchable database.

Here’s what matters: national networks. Plate reads from your cul-de-sac can be searched by thousands of connected agencies, not just your local police department. Audit logs have already caught officers running the system on exes and neighbors.

🔒 Lock it down

Ask your board for the vendor contract: how long footage is kept, who can search, whether national sharing is on by default and if there’s any opt-out clause. Check the meeting minutes for when the board voted and whether residents got notice. No ready answers? That tells you plenty.

Ask to join the resident safe list, if one exists, and get in writing what privacy protections that status provides. Package thieves are a real problem. Permanent private surveillance isn’t the answer.

📩 Send this to someone who smiles for the camera.

🧠 SMART STEALS OF THE WEEK

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🛠️ THE ONE-MINUTE UPGRADE

Image: ChatGPT/Kim Komando

This week: ChatGPT’s hidden big three

Three of ChatGPT’s most useful settings are sitting there doing nothing. 

  1. Custom Instructions tells ChatGPT once who you are and how you want it to answer, so you don’t have to retype “act as an expert in” at the top of every chat. 

  2. Memory keeps useful details across conversations, but it sometimes emphasizes the wrong stuff. 

  3. Temporary Chat is the closest thing ChatGPT has to incognito mode.

These three can be a game changer for your daily chatbot life. Setup takes about a minute, and my walk-through, the exact instructions to paste and the privacy fine print are one tap away.

🫠 WTF (WHAT THE FUTURE)?

Image: @stat⁠.us⁠.ai via Instagram

🥤 Soda pressing

Humanoid robots are supposed to cook dinner, fold laundry and eventually steal your parking spot. 

A very fake AI video shows a robotic waitress with a human face and soda buttons built into her chest. Press one and she dispenses your drink directly from her mouth like a $100,000 soda fountain.

Obviously, this Chuck E. Cheese animatronic with a Coca-Cola vendor contract doesn’t exist. But it’s a hilarious preview of how people see humanoids fitting into everyday life.

I’ll have the bottled water. I’m robot-curious. I’m not robot-backwash curious.

Share this now:

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🎬 END OF PROMPT

Here’s your haul for today. You found money hiding in your bank account, broke out of the job title box, learned what your HOA camera may know about you, fixed three ChatGPT settings and watched a robot dispense soda from its mouth. Productive day. Not bad for five minutes of reading.

🌮 The answer: C) 18,000 cups of water. The drive-thru AI didn’t laugh or disconnect. It tried to ring the order up. The prank was one customer’s way of forcing a human onto the speaker, and it worked so well that Taco Bell’s own tech chief admitted, “Sometimes it lets me down.” The company is coaching restaurants on when to let AI take orders and when to send in an actual person.

Here’s the part worth remembering: AI can pass the bar exam, write your emails and fake a CFO on video. But a bored teenager in a Honda beat one with a water order. Humanity’s secret weapon was free refills all along.

This trivia really holds water. (You saw that one coming!)

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💡 Every AI answer starts with a question, and that part is all you. Ask better ones and watch what happens. See you next time, friend. Kim

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

HOW’D I DO?

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, Linkind, Bluedee, @stat⁠.us⁠.ai via Instagram

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