📺 Streaming became the cable bill

I hope your Wednesday is off to a great start, {{first_name | friend}}. In 2024, a few folks allegedly tried to pass off damage to luxury cars as a bear attack, but the “bear” looked suspiciously like a man wrapped in a rug. They’d put a guy in a fuzzy bear costume, then film him attacking cars from the inside and submit videos to insurance companies as damage. 

🐻 The victims: a 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost, a 2015 Mercedes G63 AMG and a 2022 Mercedes E350. The plotters hoped to collect $142,000, which brings us to today’s trivia. 

What did California investigators officially call this case? A) Operation Furgery, B) Operation Bear Claw, C) Operation Yogi Heist or D) Operation Teddy Ruxpin? Paws for effect. Keep scrolling, your answer’s hiding at the finish line. Spoiler: AI helped seal the case.

I write this for you: Everyone’s using AI to save hours, dodge scams and sound smarter at work. Don’t be the last one to figure it out. Get my Splash of AI free newsletter every Thursday. Sign up right now at SplashOfAI.com, so it hits your inbox tomorrow morning. — Kim

📬 Get tomorrow’s tech news before your coworker forwards it to you. Free. Get it here. No spam.

⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

YouTube announced its a price hike. Starting June 7, YouTube Premium jumps from $13.99 to $15.99/month for individuals. Family plans climb from $22.99 to $26.99. (If you’ve been on the fence, you have until June 7 to cancel without paying the new rate.)

YouTube isn’t the only one.

Netflix bumped its ad-free Standard plan to $19.99 and Premium to $26.99 last month. HBO Max ad-free is $22.99. Disney+ ad-free hit $18.99. Add Hulu, Apple TV+, Peacock and Paramount+, and the average household pays for 5.8 streaming services.

Quick math: 5.8 services at roughly $14 each is $81 a month. That’s $972 a year. Cable in 2010 cost about $75 a month. We cut the cord and ended up spending a bit more than where we started.

You don’t have to pay full price for any of this. You have to play the game.

The biggest mistake? Treating streaming like cable. Set it and forget it. That’s exactly what these companies want.

The play is rotation. Keep one or two services year-round (the ones with shows you watch every week). Rotate the rest one month at a time. Subscribe to HBO Max, binge what you want in three weekends, cancel. Pick up Hulu in June for the new season of The Bear, cancel.

I tested this for six months. Saved $42 a month. That’s $504 a year for 15 minutes of admin work.

Streaming was supposed to free you from the bill. Take back the remote. I hope this helped you do that.

🗣️ TEXT/POST THIS STAT

YouTube Premium hits $15.99 a month on June 7. Netflix is $26.99. The average household pays $972/year for streaming. Streaming officially became the cable bill you cut. GetKim.com has the playbook.

📩 Send this to someone who complained about streaming’s price hike at brunch last weekend. Use those icons below.

Your sweet kid disappeared the moment the tablet showed up. Sound familiar? Dr. Michaeleen Doucleff is a scientist and mom who studied exactly how screens hijack a child's motivation system. In her book Dopamine Kids, she breaks down "anti-dopamine parenting" and the simple swaps that bring play, focus, and your actual kid back.

▶️ Screen-addicted kids? Try ‘anti-dopamine’ parenting →

Or for audio only, click your favorite podcast player below:

💀 Scammers plant Facebook grief-bait: A nasty ploy is making the rounds on Facebook. You get a message from a “friend” saying, “He died in an accident” with a link to a news article. Click it, and you land on a fake login page that steals your credentials. Your account gets hijacked, and the scam sends the same message to everyone you know. Never click grief-bait links. If a friend posts something alarming, call them. These scammers count on your panic. Don’t give it to them.

Citations by séance: Ever ask a chatbot a health question because you didn’t feel like booking an appointment and sitting under fluorescent lights? Maybe don’t. A Swedish research team invented a fake condition called bixonimania, uploaded two sham papers in 2024, and major AI tools, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, started explaining it like it belonged in a textbook. And get this. Peer-reviewed papers cited it, too, even though the hoax papers dropped giant references to The Lord of the Rings and Star Trek. Really.

Eye of the beholder: Glad I’m married. Nothing says modern romance like having Sam Altman scan your eyeballs before you flirt. His company, World, announced Tinder users worldwide can add a verified-human badge if they’ve used one of its Orb iris scanners. You also get five free boosts, which usually cost money and can put your profile in front of up to 10 times more people for 30 minutes. Great, now dating has a biometric cover charge.

⏳ Your antivirus shouldn’t take hours to run a scan. Really. If it does, it’s using a 10-year-old “bloatware” model. People always ask me why Webroot is so fast. It’s cloud-based. It checks for threats in seconds, not hours. Get my exclusive offer: 62% off Webroot Essentials now.*

Sky Pokémon: For its 100th anniversary, American Airlines is bringing back retro plane trading cards starting in early May on flights. You have to ask the pilot. First come, first served. Can’t say bothering the person flying the gigantic tin can is a good idea, but hey, I don’t make the rules. The lineup includes the 787 and A321neo, plus classics like the DC-3, MD-80 and 707-123.

🛍️ This is big bucks: So Walmart is getting ready to let ChatGPT do the part where you spend money. This fall, you can browse Walmart’s catalog and buy items directly inside ChatGPT. Not simply search help, actual purchasing. It’s funny how we spent 20 years building beautiful websites to end up shopping through a text box.

“I told my wife I might not wake up.” That’s what David Grant said when his doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. When he turned to ChatGPT, it diagnosed him in minutes. I speak with David about the moment AI saved his life.

Click your favorite podcast player below to listen now or later:

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

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Phone on silent and swallowed by the couch? Make it ring anyway. From any browser, head to iCloud.com/find (iPhone) or android.com/find (Android), sign in and tap Play Sound. Full volume for two minutes, even if silent mode is on. Beats tearing apart the living room, yelling, “CALL ME!” at the family. That’s what I call a sound strategy.

Laptop internet down? Your phone can bail you out. On iPhone, turn on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, then go to Settings > Personal Hotspot > Allow Others to Join. On Android, open Settings > Mobile Hotspot and Tethering. It’s perfect for sending a few emails or editing a Google Doc in a pinch. Just don’t start streaming in 4K unless you want to cook your data plan.

🖨️ Print web pages without the junk: Need to print a web page without all the ads, giant photos and other nonsense eating your ink? The PrintFriendly Chrome extension cleans it up fast. Install it, open the page, click the PrintFriendly icon in the top right, then choose PrintFriendly Page. You’ll get a much tidier preview where you can resize text, highlight sections, print or save it as a PDF. Your printer deserves better.

Google Photos can edit pics with your voice: Open a photo, tap Edit, then Help me edit. Say something like “brighten this and remove background clutter,” or type it in. No digging through sliders, no pretending you know what half the tools do. The only catch? It seems to be rolling out slowly on Android and iPhone, so check if you are one of the lucky few.

📺 Get an “art TV” for less: Today, Amazon launched a 55-inch TV that looks just like Samsung’s $1K+ Frame TV. The idea is the same, showing art or photos when it’s off. But it’s almost $100 cheaper. Don’t mind fewer features? Amazon’s new Ember TV shows art, too. Only $460 for the same size.

Hong Kong’s Global Sources show is back, packing 2,000 exhibitors and 150,000 products into one massive preview of what’s coming next. 

New this year, its first-ever humanoid robot zone with dancing bots, kung fu demos and a band that doesn’t need snacks or breaks.

This is a good preview of what’s going to land in U.S. stores in 18 months. Your next robot vacuum, maybe your next desk lamp, is being paraded in a Hong Kong convention hall right now.

Share this now:

🔜 Tomorrow: That note in your medical chart? It might have a robot coauthor. AI scribes are quietly recording doctor visits and drafting your records, usually with zero heads-up. I'll show you what they capture, what it means for your privacy and accuracy, and the one sentence that gets you out of it.

Before you go: Someone reading this email has 85 referrals. Eighty-five. They are 15 away from a virtual sit-down with me. Meanwhile, dozens of readers have already claimed their free AI Prompt Hack Pack, some have snagged their Kim Komando mug or tumbler, and a handful are closing in on a swanky hat from me. “Share The Current” is moving fast. Your referral link and your count are both at the bottom of this email. Where are you? 

🐻 The answer is B) Operation Bear Claw. Scout’s honor. The whole scheme started Jan. 28, 2024, at Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains. It’s an area famous for black bear activity, so the suspects thought the location would sell the story. It almost did. 

There were problems. The three attacks happened on the same day, same place, different vehicles. The bear moved like a person. The color was wrong (California has black bears, but this one was light brown). And when the insurance company asked a biologist, the verdict was, quote, “clearly a human in a bear suit.” They put all the facts into AI and it said the same thing.

Reminds me of the bear who walks into a bar and orders, "I'll have a whiskey and … … … … coke." The bartender asks, "Why the big pause?" The bear says, "I was born with them." (Oh that was so bad, it was so good!)

Your referrals get you great rewards!

Send your unique link below to friends and family.

👉 Your link is: {{ rp_refer_url }}

They get tech-smart. You get prizes. Win-win. The more referrals, the more prizes. (Yes, even a meet and greet with me. I’d love that!)

Your referral count is: {{ rp_num_referrals }}

🎉 I want you to win — Kim

Photo credit(s): Gemini, MONOZEL, No Comment

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.