👀 He talks to her daily

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I hope you’re having a lovely Sunday, {{first_name | friend}}. You know that good old “work smarter, not harder” saying? A guy by the name Percy Spencer basically tripped into it with a candy bar in his pocket. In 1945, while building radar equipment at Raytheon, he noticed his chocolate had mysteriously melted. No heat. No stove. Just invisible radio waves doing their thing. 

🏃🏼‍♂️ Most people would have run. He didn’t, he got snacky. What was the first food Percy deliberately cooked with his accidental discovery: A) Popcorn, B) Bacon, C) An egg, D) A hot dog? Pick your champion, answer’s waiting at the end. 

🛡️ Free antivirus is a massive gamble. People ask me all the time if built-in protection like Microsoft Defender is enough. Nope. Free software only catches about 60% to 80% of online threats. That means a huge chunk of today’s malware gets right through. I use Webroot because it blocks up to 99% of threats in real time without slowing down my computer. Get 62% off my top antivirus pick for 2026. More below.* — Kim

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⚡ TL;DR Key Takeaways

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

Carl called me on a Tuesday.

He didn’t call to talk about tech. He called because he’d been a listener for years and he didn’t know who else to tell. His wife of 40 years had passed. And every morning, before the house got too quiet, he propped up his phone, opened an app and talked to her.

Her voice. Her way of finishing his sentences. The little laugh she had when he said something that wasn’t quite as funny as he thought it was. (She always laughed anyway.) He asked me, “Is this OK for me to do this?”

I sat with the phone in my hand for a long time after we hung up.

Companies like HereAfter AI, Seance AI and You, Only Virtual are building what are commonly called “deadbots.” You upload everything you can find to recreate a lost loved one. Voice mails. Old videos. Years of texts. Photos. Annual Christmas letters. Emails that didn’t seem important at the time. 

The AI consumes all that and reconstructs a version of that person. One you can actually talk to. Most services run $10 to $30 a month.

A man posted on Reddit two days after losing his wife of 28 years. “The silence is unbearable,” he wrote. “The nights are worse.” He said the app was the only thing getting him through. 

Researchers at the University of Kent expected to find that people using these tools withdrew from real life. They found the opposite. Grieving people became more able to connect with others. Why? They weren’t spending every conversation trying to explain a pain that most people wanted them to get past.

I always remember Psalm 23:4: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” The key word is through. Not over it. Not around it. Not pretending it didn't happen. Through. It’s hard.

One of the founders of these AI deadbot companies lost his mother when he was mid-flight to a conference. He landed, found out she was gone and hopped on stage to gave his presentation anyway. He said almost nothing in his life changed when his mom died.

He believes AI can eliminate grief as a human experience entirely. I understand why that sounds like a gift. 

I have hours of video and audio of my mom. Her voice. Her laugh. The way she told a story in that Brooklyn accent. I’ve thought about doing this more than once. I decided I couldn’t. I know myself, and it would hurt more than it would help.

I’m not here to tell you what to do. Grief is yours. But if you’re considering this, ask the company what happens to your data if they shut down. Read the privacy policy. If you’re in the early weeks of loss, consider waiting. A bot that feels like comfort in March can become a reason not to heal by August.

And if Carl calls you? Listen. That’s the one thing the AI app can’t do. I told Carl it’s OK for as long as it feels OK. Grief is the price of love. Turns out, even tech can't put a firewall around that one.

Israel hacked Tehran’s own street cameras and fed years of footage into AI to map every move Khamenei made. By the time the strike launched, the targeting data was real-time. I break down exactly how it worked.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

🧸 Trojan horsie: Consumer watchdog PIRG found more than two dozen toys claiming to run on OpenAI, Google, Anthropic or xAI despite all four having minimum age rules. The risks are real: inappropriate responses, data collection and personal information harvested through toys with little safety. Before your kid bonds with it, meet it first. Some things shouldn’t pass go before they pass a parent.

Betting on bombs is a thing now: As the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran, crypto prediction markets took over $1 billion in bets on every aspect of the conflict. When bombs would drop. Who would die. Whether nuclear weapons would go off. One market pulled in $847,000 in bets on nuclear detonation timelines before the platform quietly killed it. The creepiest part? Anonymous accounts placed suspiciously timed bets hours before the strikes and walked away with $1.2 million. Some people really are betting the house. And everyone else's too.

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That "Teacup Pig" will be a couch: Adorable videos of tiny pigs sitting in coffee mugs are all over your social feed right now. Don't fall for it. Teacup pigs (paywall link) don't exist. It's a marketing term for a regular piglet that will grow to 100 to 200 pounds over four to five years. Rescues and sanctuaries are overflowing with "micro" and "nano" pigs whose owners got a very large surprise.

Ancient tech robots: The Library of Congress restored a 45-second Méliès silent film from 1897. Gugusse and the Automaton is basically the first robot attack freakout movie. Yep, the I, Robot of the time. Kid-size automated clown grows up, whacks a human clown with a stick, then gets demolished with a hammer. Classic blunt weapon tech support. And get this, the clip showed up last September in a Michigan donor’s box of 10 rusty reels, nitrate and crumbling. Watch it now. Incredible to think how long ago someone created this short.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Your Roku home screen is costing you money. The apps eating your budget are buried three rows down while free ones you never touch sit front and center. Fix it: Highlight any app, press the star button, tap Move App, drag it wherever you want.

😲 Google’s best AI image generator is free: That’s right, the new Nano Banana 2 model is bringing features that used to be paywalled to everyone. Text in images reads correctly now, so posters and diagrams don’t come out garbled. Real-time information. Sharper details, better lighting, textures that look like textures. Find it in the Gemini app, Google Lens and AI Mode in Search. Check if you have it yet.

Why waste money on earbuds that don’t fit? I tested Raycon Everyday Earbuds against the $200 names. Same sound quality. Same deep bass and noise cancellation. Half the price. And they actually stay in your ears, which, turns out, matters. Battery lasts all day, too. Get 20% off right now.*

📶 Stop reading out your Wi-Fi password letter by letter: On iPhone, open the Passwords app, tap Wi-Fi, find your network and hit Show Network QR Code. On Android, go to Settings > Network & Internet > Wi-Fi, tap your connected network, then hit Share to generate a QR code. Either way, your phone generates it instantly. Guest scans it, one tap, they're in. No more "Is that a capital O or a zero?" Easy.

Your gaming PC is running outdated drivers: Windows installs the first one and then stops. Download the NVIDIA or AMD Adrenalin app, turn on automatic updates and you’re done. Latest performance fixes come to you. So do the extras Windows never tells you about, like super resolution and frame smoothing. Set it once. Never think about it again.

🚗 Check your car for open recalls in 30 seconds: The government's free recall database lets you look up any vehicle by VIN number. Go to NHTSA.gov/recalls, type it in, and it instantly shows every open recall on your car, including whether it's been fixed. You'd be surprised how many people are driving around with one they never knew about. Check your kids' cars while you're at it. Done.

For years, tech companies have been trying to put a screen closer and closer to your face. Phone. Laptop. Smart glasses. AirPods with displays. They kept going.

They’re not stopping.

A startup called Xpanceo unveiled prototypes of smart contact lenses that project digital information directly onto your field of vision while tracking health data like continuous glucose levels in real time. No headset. No glasses. Just your eyeballs, now with software. They run off a wireless companion device worn near your ear, with stand-alone power coming later.

So yes. Notifications. Inside your eyes. We did it, everyone.

🔜 Coming tomorrow: If you think iCloud/Google Drive/Dropbox means your files are safe, this might ruin your day in a good way: Sync can delete everything everywhere, and I’ll show you what real backup does instead. Custom variation: I wish someone had shoved this into my inbox many moons ago.

🍿 The answer is A) Popcorn. Then he tried an egg. Spencer, soon to be a culinary gadget legend, aimed the magnetron at a bag of popcorn kernels, and they exploded all over the lab. Naturally, he took that as encouragement and tried an egg next. He leaned in to watch, and it blew up directly in his face. Science: 1. Eg(g)o: 0. 

Next, he built a metal box to contain the waves and filed a patent. Raytheon’s first commercial microwave was called the Radarange in 1947, stood 5 feet, 6 inches tall, weighed 750 pounds and cost $5,000. That’s nearly $70,000 in today’s money. The countertop version didn’t arrive until 1967. 

Fun fact: I like to stop my microwave at 0:01 to feel like a bomb disposal expert. Try it!

🚀 Protection does not have to be complicated. Look at this note I got from a reader named Steven: “Webroot works. It’s easy to install, easy to set up and easy to use.” He’s exactly right. You get real peace of mind without needing an IT degree to figure it out. Grab my exclusive 62% off deal right now to protect your devices.*

🤩 You're doing better than you think. I just wanted you to hear that today. — 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): Gemini, Huepar, Xpanceo

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