🪞 AI wrote my memoir

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It’s Thursday, {{first_name | friend}}. Ever accidentally deleted all of your vacation pics or recorded American Idol over your wedding VHS tapes? Oof. Imagine that, but instead of beach selfies, it’s a cosmic-level oopsie.

📼 NASA accidentally recorded over historic footage back in the ’80s. Take a guess what it was: A) First shuttle launch, B) Apollo 11 moon landing footage, C) Buzz Aldrin’s spacewalk or D) Secret UFO briefings. Think you know it? Check out the answer at the end.

💧 Issue 2 of Splash of AI is out today. This is my once a week AI focused free newsletter. Only a small group is getting it while we warm up our email servers. This week: the exact AI prompt that turns your 18-minute doctor's appointment into something you actually walk away from with answers. Plus the AI trick to stop airlines from charging you more than your neighbor for the same seat. Five minutes. No jargon. Get on the list before the next one drops. SplashOfAI.com. I’ll post a link here tomorrow so you see today’s issue. I think it’s some of my best work. — Kim

📬 Someone forwarded this to you? Smart friend. Want it in your own inbox instead of waiting on them? Sign up here. It’s free, and I promise not to spam you.

⚡ TL;DR Key Takeaways

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

You’ve seen the trend. Everyone’s asking AI to turn them into a cartoon character, a video game avatar, a Pixar version of themselves.

Cute. Fun. I get it.

But I kept thinking: What if you asked AI for a portrait that actually meant something, a reflection you’d still be thinking about tomorrow? I keep meaning to write my memoir, but never get around to it. It's my oughta biography. AI can help.

Open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok, and spend a few minutes talking to it. Tell it about yourself. Your job. Your family. Something you love. Something you’ve survived. A weird detail or two that makes you, you.

The more you give it, the sharper what comes back will be. Then paste this:

That last line is the secret weapon. Hit send. Then brace yourself.

Word for word.

I couldn’t fit it all in the newsletter. You can read the rest on my site here.

The title I’d never have picked? Don’t Be Afraid. But the more I sit with it, the more right it is.

Under the hood, AI has been listening to you describe your choices, your life, the things you keep coming back to. When you ask it to reflect that back as a story, it finds the thread you didn’t know was running through all of it. It’s not magic. It’s a mirror you weren’t expecting to look into.

I have a feeling this is about to be everywhere. You saw it here first.

Israel allegedly hacked Tehran’s surveillance grid for years, quietly mapping the movements of Khamenei and his security detail. When the strike came, it wasn’t guesswork. It was the result of a “pattern of life” built from thousands of hours of street-level footage.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

🛰️ Iran pings Michigan: Nothing says grim modern warfare like a Michigan medical device company getting dragged into the Middle East fight. Iranian-linked group Handala says it hit Stryker (a Kalamazoo-based medical device giant) on Wednesday, knocking systems offline across its global offices and leaving thousands of workers locked out (paywall link). Some Windows laptops and phones were reportedly wiped clean. Stryker isn’t some small mom-and-pop shop. It’s a 56,000-person company in 60+ countries. If your business touches infrastructure, congratulations, you’re on the radar.

Servers as targets: Ever think about where the cloud actually lives? Spoiler: real buildings, real addresses, real problems. Guess what that makes it? A big ol’ target. Iranian outlet Tasnim named six U.S. tech companies, Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia and Oracle, and published alleged office and cloud sites in Israeli cities and some gulf countries, saying they support military use. I miss when tech drama was a billionaire embarrassing himself online, not server racks in blast radius.  

Blue-collar spring: That’s what Wall Street is calling it this year. AI is squeezing screen jobs first, like writers, translators, ticket agents, entry-level sales and web developers. Electricians, plumbers, mechanics, the people who deal with real-world stuff, look a lot safer. The work is physical, messy and changes by the minute. The era of looking down on blue-collar work? Over. Done. AI can draft an email, but it can’t crawl under your house (yet). 

💼 Stop interviewing the wrong people. You post a job online and suddenly your inbox is a disaster. Résumés from people who are nowhere near qualified, and zero time to sort through all of it. LinkedIn Hiring Pro is built differently. It actively matches your open role with verified professionals who have the exact skills you need, so you’re only talking to candidates worth your time. Use my exclusive deal and get $100 off your first job post on LinkedIn Hiring Pro.*

Always-on ads: I’d lose my mind. Hisense has people reporting non-skippable ads when they do regular TV stuff, like switching HDMI inputs, hitting the home screen, powering on, even changing channels. Complaints stretch back a few years across Spain, the UK and Germany. Hisense says it was just a test limited to Spain. The crazy part? Support can kill the ads remotely if you send over your TV’s ID. How convenient! Soon the mute button will be a premium subscription.

👁️ Your eyeball upgrade: Losing the ability to read feels especially terrible. But get this. Researchers tested a 2-millimeter wireless eye implant (paired with special camera glasses) for older adults with advanced macular degeneration. A bunch of them could read letters and short words again after a year, an average gain of about five lines on an eye chart. Not full sight, not driving, not faces across the room. But reading a label or phone number again? That’s an eye-opening comeback. Love this.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Stop opening and closing emails to get back to your inbox. Gmail has a quick toggle that splits your screen. Inbox on one side, message on the other. Click the Settings in the top right, under “Reading Pane” select Right of inbox or Below inbox. Pick your layout and never go back. Should’ve been the default.

Windows fixed some scary security issues: Some of these could have handed hackers access to your computer. Yikes. Go to Settings > Windows Update > Check for updates to make sure you’re protected. On Windows 10, there’s a patch for a bug that was stopping devices from shutting down properly. Don’t wait on this one.

⚡️ Your iPhone calculator has a secret scientist inside it. Open the Calculator app and rotate your phone sideways. The whole thing transforms into a full scientific calculator, square roots, logarithms, trigonometric functions, all of it. Been hiding there since iPhone OS 3.1. Also: made a typo while entering numbers? Just swipe left across the display to delete the last digit. No backspace button needed. Apple never told anyone either of these things. Typical.

That little gas pump symbol on your dash is smarter than you think. Next time you're in a rental car or any car glance at the fuel gauge before you pull up to the pump. See the tiny arrow next to the gas pump icon? It points left or right. That's the side your tank is on. Every car has it. Nobody tells you. So instead of doing the awkward pull-forward, pull-around, block-the-whole-station shuffle, check the dash. Three seconds. Problem solved forever. You'll never circle a gas station like a lost tourist again.

📏 Measure your yard, roof or driveway from space for free. Open Google Maps on your computer, right-click your house and select Measure distance. Click around the edges of your property to drop points. Google calculates the total distance as you go. Perfect before calling a fence company or landscaper so you already know the numbers. On mobile, tap and hold to drop a pin, swipe up and tap Measure distance. Satellite view. Zero cost. Should've been on the homepage.

Hollywood’s newest AI actor with no acting credits is teasing the Oscars, which feels bold for someone whose biggest role so far is being disliked online.

Tilly Norwood’s latest project is a pro-AI music video, and it’s pulling a brutal ratio: roughly 4,000 views in hours, about 80 comments, and most of them are roasting it and its creators, blaming everyone involved for AI water shortages. 

Give it a watch if you want your morning ruined. It somehow took 18 people to make it. It appears we peaked at the Chuck E. Cheese animatronic.

🔜 Coming tomorrow: You didn’t install malware. You installed convenience in the form of things like a flashlight app, and it came with surveillance. I’ll break down 13 apps that have sold, shared or leaked personal data, and the safer alternatives you can switch to in minutes. You can’t afford to miss this list.

Answer: B) Apollo 11 moon landing footage. Yep. The reels got recorded over during the ’80s because NASA had a shortage of magnetic data tapes. The original slow-scan TV (SSTV) footage captured directly from the lunar surface of the 1969 moon landing was among the hundreds of tapes on the recycling block.

🌝 The moon landing was obviously fake. It’s still up there, it didn’t land anywhere.

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⚙️ Progress is just small upgrades stacked over time. You got this. — Kim

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

🏆 THE KIM CHALLENGE: Forward this to ONE person who needs to hear it today. Pick the person who popped into your head while reading. You know who it is.

Photo credit(s): ChatGPT, Sansui, @tillynorwoodhq via YouTube

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