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Welcome to your Sunday, {{first_name | friend}}. For centuries, church has meant candles, choirs and organs. In one town? It meant a software update.
At St. Paul’s in Fürth, Germany, the pews were packed, and the service started right on time. But no pastor stepped up. A theologian handed about 98% of the whole thing over to tech. The sermon, the prayers, even the blessings. All machine-made.
⛪️ So who, or what, led the flock without a pulse? A) A robot standing at the pulpit, B) Four AI avatars on a big screen, scripted by ChatGPT, C) A hologram of a famous televangelist or D) A pastor in a cardboard robot costume? The answer’s waiting at the end. No offering plate required.
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Oops, my bad. Yesterday’s YouTube link was broken. Here's the one that works. It's my national radio show, the one airing on 450+ stations, and now you can watch it on YouTube. Three reasons to hit play: You'll hear from a mom who lost her daughter, and her story will stay with you. You'll learn exactly what Meta knew about hooking kids, and when. And hear what happens when a guy did not tip at Shake Shack and went viral. This time, the link works. Promise.— Kim
TODAY’S DEEP DIVE
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Image: Kim Komando
🤯 WOW! In 79 A.D., Mount Vesuvius buried a Roman villa and baked its library of 1,800 papyrus scrolls into charcoal. For 270 years, every attempt to open one destroyed it. This June, scientists read an entire scroll, 22 columns of ancient Greek, without unrolling it. The first word anyone recovered was found by a 21-year-old college student.
Why it matters: There are hundreds of scrolls left, and nobody knows what’s in them. Stick around for what the first one said.
📖 Read time: 2 minutes
See that pic above? I took that when we were walking in Pompeii. I remember wondering how many fathers and sons walked that same path and what they talked about.
Perhaps they were debating a book nobody has read since the Romans.
In 79 A.D., Vesuvius erupted and buried the town of Herculaneum under 60 feet of volcanic mud. In one seaside villa sat a library: about 1,800 papyrus scrolls, the only intact archive to survive from the ancient world. The heat didn’t burn the documents up. It turned them into lumps of charcoal, rolled shut.
🌋 Hot off the press
Workers dug them up in 1752. Then the damage started. People sliced them, soaked them, peeled them with a machine. Scroll after scroll crumbled into black flakes. The rule became simple: Don’t touch.
Enter Brent Seales, a University of Kentucky computer scientist, who spent 20 years on one idea: If you can’t open it, scan it. Put the scroll in a particle accelerator, X-ray it at the resolution of a few thousandths of a millimeter and virtually unroll it on a computer.
One problem. The ink is carbon. The papyrus is carbon. Under an X-ray, the writing is invisible.
🔍 Reading without looking
In 2023, Seales and two tech investors threw the scans online with $1 million in prize money and told the internet to figure it out. Thousands tried.
The person who cracked it was Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old Nebraska student interning at SpaceX, who trained an AI to spot the faint texture that ink leaves on papyrus. The first word it found: ΠΟΡΦΥΡΑϹ. “Purple.”
By 2024, Farritor and two other students had pulled 2,000 characters off one scroll and split $700,000.
This June came the moment.
Scroll PHerc. 1667, 4.6 feet long, read end to end. Twenty-two columns. It’s a Stoic treatise on ethics, human nature and how people can better their lives.
One line: “We will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves.”
Two thousand years buried, and the advice is “stay grounded.” Some things don’t need an update.
A year ago, it would have been “crazy” to believe a whole scroll could be read this way, Seales says. There are hundreds left in Naples, and for the first time, every one of them is a book instead of a briquette. Lost plays. Lost histories. Maybe the missing works of Aristotle. All waiting on a scan.
The world’s oldest unread library got a library card. Scroll with it.
🎯 Send this to someone who still owes you a book they borrowed. Two thousand years is the record.
📱 Text-worthy: Vesuvius turned 1,800 Roman scrolls into charcoal in 79 A.D. Every attempt to open one destroyed it. This June, scientists read an entire scroll without unrolling it, using particle accelerator X-rays plus an AI a 21-year-old trained to see invisible ink. Hundreds more are waiting.
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WEB WATERCOOLER
🎤 Scammers faked Dolly Parton within two hours of her death: We lost Dolly Parton last week at 80, and while the world was still crying, the crooks got to work. AI-generated audio and video "of" her scams hit across Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube. Fake charity accounts, phony memorial merch, donation pleas in gift cards or crypto. Type dollywoodfoundation.org yourself and give there. Dolly spent her life giving. Don’t let a scammer use her name, or a fake AI version of her voice, to take.
Your cable bill is now basically a second electric bill: Median cable/satellite: $125 a month. Median electricity: $129, per doxo's data from 10 million+ households. Four bucks apart, and 74% of homes still pay it, $172 billion a year. Vermont tops states at $1,980 a year and Louisville tops cities at $2,439. Tonight's homework: pull the bill, hunt for rented equipment and channels you never watch, then call and ask for the promo rate. And add up your streaming first. Cutting one cord doesn't help if you tie on five.
💥 Your hard drive is going to crash. It’s not a question of if, but when. When it goes, your documents, financial history and every photo you’ve ever taken go with it. Data recovery costs $300 to over $3,000, and that’s if the techs can save anything. That’s why I use Carbonite. It backs up every file to the cloud automatically, without you lifting a finger. Get total protection right now and save a massive 50%.*
🐕 K-9 to 5: Get this, Atlanta is sending four-legged AI robots with HD cameras, thermal imaging, sirens and loudspeakers to patrol streets, parking lots and apartment complexes. Around the clock. It’s kind of cute until you remember it can record your porch, kids and your “I should probably leave my house for the first time in two days” walk around the block. No one asked for a dog that watches you pick up after yours.
Tomb with a view: Here’s something for your Sunday. Researchers are using ground-penetrating radar and digital mapping to investigate beneath an active holy site, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, without tearing it apart. Nobody found a nameplate saying Jesus slept here, but details match Gospel descriptions of a garden tomb outside the old city. Amazing. I’d love to visit someday.
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Image: Lisen
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🎤 PODCAST: DIGITAL LIFE HACK
AI drafts fantasy football teams
Tired of losing in your fantasy league? I have the exact AI prompt to build your entire draft board. Sleepers and busts included. Plus, Andrew unveils how chatbots made his dream team.
🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.
DEVICE ADVICE
⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Your phone might be able to go from a two-hour charge to around 30 minutes. 🤯 Search your model’s max charging wattage, then check the print on the wall adapter. Way lower? There’s the bottleneck. Use a USB-C fast-charging cable and stronger adapter. Bonus: I found a 45W iPhone two-pack and a 60W Android bundle on sale.
🔥 Ask AI to roast you: Want to see what your chatbot really thinks? Open ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and paste this: "Based on everything you know about me from our chats, roast me. Be brutal but funny." If you've been using it a while, it has receipts, and the results are scary accurate. Mine dragged me for asking it to shorten things, then making them longer. Fair. When you stop laughing, flip it: "Now tell me what those habits say I should change." Congrats, you just turned a joke into free coaching. The robot burns you, then hands you the aloe.
📱 New phone, less money? I switched to Consumer Cellular for affordable, reliable service, and I’m glad I did. Right now, get a new 5G phone with EasyPay Financing, plus save an additional $50 on your service with code KIM50.*
Clear the junk from your phone’s browser search bar: Sick of seeing trending searches and celebrity gossip you couldn’t care less about? On Safari, go to Settings > Apps > Safari and turn off Search Engine Suggestions and Safari Suggestions. In Google, tap your profile picture > Settings > Other settings, then switch off Autocomplete with trending searches.
🚗 CarPlay looking a little fuzzy? Your whip might be able to show it more crisply. On the CarPlay screen, open Settings > Display and turn off Smart Display Zoom. The screen may go black for a second while it refreshes, then come back sharper. Give both versions a look and keep whichever one looks better to you.
KIM’S DAILY DEALS
As an Amazon Associate, some links pay us a commission at no extra cost to you. Keeps this newsletter free. Thank you.
🧑🍳 Steals worth dishing on
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Prices and deals were accurate at the time of publication.
WHAT THE TECH?
Image: @JeffBezos via Usenet
📦 Prime candidate
Before Amazon could deliver toothpaste to your door faster than you remembered ordering it, Jeff Bezos himself was trolling internet forums for programmers.
His 1994 job ad wanted C/C++/Unix developers who could build complex systems in "about one-third the time that most competent people think possible." Translation: no sleep, all Mountain Dew. Early dot-com culture was born fully caffeinated.
The startup was still called Cadabra back then, a name Bezos ditched after his lawyer misheard it as "cadaver." Good call. "Add to cart" hits different when the store sounds like a morgue.
Compensation? "Meaningful equity ownership." Yeah, I bet. Whoever answered that ad and held on is reading this from their yacht. The rest of us are checking if our toothpaste shipped.
Speaking of dream jobs: I'm hiring, too. No yacht promised, but I’m a lot more fun than Jeff.
LOGGING OUT …
🎓 What you learned today: AI helped read a Roman scroll buried 2,000 years ago, execs are buying Chief AI Officer credentials, and robot dogs are patrolling Atlanta streets. Not bad for one email. Millions of people downloaded apps that looked harmless, then crooks flipped them into malware after the good reviews rolled in. Tomorrow, I’ll show you which ones might still be sitting on your phone.
⛪ The answer: B) Four AI-generated avatars scripted by ChatGPT on a big screen. Yep, two men and two women delivered an almost entirely machine-made church service at St. Paul’s, with AI handling the sermon, prayers, blessings and music cues.
An AI led a church service, and the reviews said it lacked soul. Well, yes. That was never in the training data.
My take? I'm all for using AI to draft your grocery list or plan your vacation. But faith, comfort and community are human jobs. A chatbot can quote scripture all day long. It can't sit with you when you're hurting. Some things should stay gloriously human.
But I want to hear from you. AI in the pulpit: good idea or bad idea? Drop me a note when you rate today’s newsletter below. I read them all.
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🪜 Attempt 11 looks exactly like attempt one, right up until it does not. — 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): Kim Komando, LISEN, Overmont, @JeffBezos via Usene
Companies and products denoted by an asterisk (*) within this publication are paid sponsors or advertisements. As an Amazon Associate, the publisher earns from qualifying purchases. Statements regarding products denoted by a double asterisk (**) have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration; such products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This newsletter is provided for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, medical, or professional advice of any kind. Readers should consult with a qualified professional before making any decisions based on this content. The publisher disclaims all liability for any loss, damage, or injury resulting from the use of or reliance on the information contained herein.