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💦 Welcome, friend. The floodgates of AI are wide open, and you’re right in the stream. Come on in and make a Splash.

IN THIS ISSUE:
💰 AI finds a better home for cash earning nothing.
🧠 ChatGPT quizzes you before meetings.
🚗 Hertz’s AI spots rental car damage.
🩺 Gemini finds pros and can book appointments.
🍟 McDonald’s knows when you’re coming back for fries.
🦾 A weight-lifting robot learns a very human gym lesson.

But first, some trivia. AI assistants are everywhere, but here's the plot twist: the biggest name isn't the one people actually like using. YouGov spent five months asking folks how satisfied they were with the AI assistants they'd tried. Turns out fame and satisfaction are two very different things. (Just ask any celebrity marriage.)

💬 So which AI do people enjoy the most? Is it A) ChatGPT, the household name, B) Claude, the quiet overachiever, C) Gemini, Google's do-everything machine, or D) Copilot, Microsoft's chatty cubicle mate? Lock in your guess. The answer's at the end. And no scrolling ahead. I'm watching you. I've got AI for that now.

✅ 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 realized I’ve got $15,000 sitting in a savings account, earning a magnificent 0.01%. That pays $1.50 a year. I could move it to an account paying 5% and earn about $750 before taxes, but every time I start comparing high-yield savings, CDs and money markets, I meet six tabs of fine print and quietly retreat.

This is cash paralysis. Sound familiar? Go peek at your rate right now. I’ll wait. 

The highest rate wins my attention, then I find the minimum balance, monthly fee, withdrawal rule or CD penalty buried underneath it.

Open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok with web access and have it compare the accounts, using pages dated this week. Marcus by Goldman Sachs, Ally Bank and Vanguard are useful starting points, but rates move quickly and product types differ.

I’d paste this:

That last sentence keeps your chatbot from hallucinating with your financial future. Nonnegotiable. I don’t let AI freelance with my money, and neither should you.

Turning $1.50 into roughly $750 per year takes about 20 minutes of research. I’ve wasted longer deciding what to order for dinner.

📩 Send this to someone who has money sitting in the same savings account they opened decades ago.

I once sat on a call where someone asked me to weigh in on a report I had absolutely read. Read it twice, even. What came out of my mouth was a book report written by someone who’d only seen the cover. Nobody said anything, but I noticed. 

OpenAI’s interactive quizzes in Study Mode work inside a conversation. Everyone thought that was just a student homework feature. You know, flash cards, biology midterms. Fine. The same machinery that tests you on the Krebs cycle will drill you on your HOA bylaws, your Medicare plan summary, your employment agreement, the 30-page vendor contract your boss forwarded with “quick look?”

The bar used to be “Did you read it?” Now it’s “Did any of it stick?” Reading a thing and being able to use it under mild pressure are two different beasts, and only one of them makes you money. A quiz is the cheapest way to find out which skill you’ve got, while there’s still time to fine-tune instead of finding out in the room.

Before your thing (whatever your thing is: board meeting, HOA showdown, Medicare call), paste what you’re supposed to know into ChatGPT and do this. Type @study in the composer, select Study and use this prompt:

The reask part is the whole trick. Being forced to recall something, fail and recall it again is the one study technique with decades of research behind it. Recognition feels like knowledge, but it’s not. Retrieval is knowledge.

You’ve felt the difference. It’s the gap between humming along to a song and singing it alone in the car.

One caution: The quiz only knows what you fed it. Thin source, confidently thin you. Feed it the real document, not the summary of the summary.

Your move this week: Pick the one meeting on your calendar with actual stakes, quiz yourself the night before and walk in as the person who remembers.

📩 Send this to someone who highlights every page and retains none of them.

📺 WATCH ON YOUTUBE NOW OR LATER

McDonald’s knows when you want fries. Not metaphorically. Literally. One reporter asked for his app data and got 515 pages back: orders, locations, app opens, Monopoly codes and even predictions about when he’d be back for nuggets. Big Mac? More like Big Tracker.

This week, another Flock update because those cameras are multiplying faster than HOA group chat drama. One cop was accused of using the system to track his ex-wife 717 times. 

Also: Bill Gates’ daughter gets tangled in a cookie-stuffing scandal, Tesla Autopilot faces another “keep your eyes on the road” reality check, ChatGPT drafts a fantasy football team, and trade workers are cashing in on the data center boom.

Plus: AI romance, insurance sticker shock, fake AI “silver fox” scams, Zoom security flaws, McDonald’s privacy portals and the reason your TV may be watching what you watch.

Hit play below, so you can spot the tracking, the scams and the suspiciously cheap nuggets before they spot you. 👇

▶️ McDonald’s data files, Flock cameras and AI pranks →

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

You hand back the keys before sunrise. Nobody walks around the car with a clipboard. Eleven days later, your card gets hit for $195 over a dent you never saw. This is the section where I get mad on your behalf. Stay with me.

Hertz’s damage detection runs on UVeye’s system. You drive through an arch at pickup and return, and it shoots 360-degree images of the body, tires, glass and undercarriage. AI compares the before and after, and anything past its threshold gets billed automatically.

In one case, the repair was $80. The other $115 was a detection fee plus a processing fee. You paid extra for the privilege of being caught.

Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal wrote to Hertz demanding answers about those fees and whether human inspections are being phased out. InvestigateTV and WHDH are collecting stories from people charged hundreds for scuffs they swear weren’t there, sometimes weeks after return.

Here’s what I do at every rental counter, and I want you doing it, too. Do the boring thing.

Take a slow walk-around video with the date visible on your phone screen, all four corners of the vehicle, wheels, windshield, roof, before you pull out of the lot and again before you drop the keys. Ninety seconds. It’s the only evidence on your side of the arch.

If a charge lands, dispute it in writing and ask for the raw scan images, the time stamp and the threshold that got tripped. Make a person defend the robot’s math.

📩 Send this to whoever books the rental car on your next trip.

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💡 Lights to the rescue: Screw some rechargeable bulbs (10% off, $22, four-pack) into any socket, and they stay lit during blackouts.

Car trouble after dark? Ditch the old-school flares. Bright LED warning lights (20% off, $16, two-pack) shine a mile down the road.

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Stash for years: These aren’t regular AA & AAA batteries (36% off, $25, 48-count). They last up to a decade in storage, so you’re always covered.

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I found an AI shortcut for two adult chores I avoid until the situation gets expensive: finding a plumber and booking a doctor.

Gemini can connect to Angi and Zocdoc. It can help you find a home pro through Angi and find and book a doctor through Zocdoc. It also works with Ticketmaster and Pandora. Google began rolling it out mid-August, so I’d check before counting on it during a leaky sink emergency.

Setup takes about a minute, and my walk-through, the exact prompt and the privacy fine print are one tap away.

Somewhere, a robot just discovered why humans invented spotters.

A clip shows the machine lifting a small weight, successfully getting it off the ground, then abruptly experiencing what can only be described scientifically as a full-body “nope.” It drops the load, scrambles around like a slapstick comedy bit and topples sideways with the timing of a cartoon character realizing there’s no floor underneath him.

So yes, robots can work out. They’re also capable of doing what every gym newbie eventually does: wildly overestimating themselves.

Check it out here.

Share this now:

Here’s your haul for today. You found a better way to shop savings rates, learned how to quiz yourself before an important meeting, saw how Hertz’s AI can turn a tiny dent into a surprise bill and connected Gemini to some very grown-up chores. Not bad for five minutes of reading.

👾 Trivia answer: B) Claude. It got the highest net satisfaction score at 56.2, ahead of Gemini at 46.5 and ChatGPT at 46. Copilot trailed at 37.2.

That doesn’t mean Claude is the biggest or most widely used AI. It means the people who use it are apparently the happiest with what they’re getting. They all cost nothing to try. Being stuck with the wrong one costs you every single day.

Guess you could say Claude is on cloud nine.

ICYMI: 🎙️ Your meetings, transcribed while you just sit there. The Plaud Note is the AI recorder that sticks to your phone, records with one press, then transcribes and summarizes everything in 112 languages. 30 hours of battery, 300 free AI minutes a month, $159 on Amazon. Take note. (It sure will.)

🏊🏼‍♀️ What five-letter word typed in all capital letters can be read the same upside down? SWIMS. And you’re doing the backstroke with all the AI knowledge! 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

Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, BLAVOR, @DramaAlert via X

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