⚠️ WhatsApp trap is live

Happy Friday, {{first_name | friend}}. Here’s a fun one to distract you from whatever spreadsheet or work chat convo you’ve been pretending to focus on: How well do you know your QWERTY keyboard without looking?

🇺🇸 Turns out, only one U.S. state name can be typed using only one row of the keyboard. Talk about home row advantage. Can you guess without peeking down at your laptop? Is it: A) Texas, B) Alaska, C) Ohio or D) Minnesota? Tap the virtual keys in your mind, and choose wisely. The truth is unveiled at the end!

🕒 Tomorrow morning, something lands in your inbox that I think you’re going to love. I’ve been building a rewards program for the people who already do what you do: tell others about this newsletter. You’ll have a unique referral link at the bottom of every issue. Share it. When someone subscribes, you earn real prizes. Tonight, make your list. Your gym buddy. Your neighbor who keeps getting robocalls. Your college friend who still doesn’t know how to spot a scam. They need this. And starting tomorrow, you get rewarded for telling them so. Amazing. — 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

📖 Read time: 3 minutes

You fire up YouTube on a Friday night. You scroll. You watch three minutes of something forgettable. You scroll more. You end up watching a stranger’s home renovation for 45 minutes, and you cannot explain why.

Here’s what I want to show you instead. YouTube is hiding entire worlds of genuinely great content that the algorithm never surfaces unless you know where to look. Millions of people have already found these channels. Tonight, you can, too.

Airline Videos Live is a 24/7 livestream of planes arriving and departing at LAX and other places. That’s it. Kevin Ray, a former news photographer, points cameras at the runway, pipes in live air traffic control audio and narrates the whole thing like it’s Monday Night Football. The channel has more than 850,000 subscribers. Put it on your TV and tell me you don’t watch for an hour.

I don't know how to explain this channel. One guy in the Australian jungle builds everything from scratch. Shelters. Forged metal. Clay tiles. Thatched roofs. No talking. No music. No explanation. Just a man and raw materials and an almost supernatural level of competence. He has 11 million subscribers and almost every single video tops at least one or two million views.

Jelle’s Marble Runs has 1.46 million subscribers and 206 million total views for one reason: marble racing. Jelle Bakker built elaborate tracks, named the marbles, invented teams and rivalries and hired a sports commentator to call the races. Watch five minutes. You will have a favorite team.

Oddly Satisfying has over 4.3 million subscribers and over 2.29 billion views of kinetic sand being sliced, soap being carved and pressure washers blasting years of grime off driveways. There’s actual neuroscience behind why this is relaxing. Your brain interprets these videos as tasks being completed perfectly, and it rewards you with a small hit of dopamine every single time. 

Then there’s NRK, Norway’s public broadcaster. It aired an uninterrupted train ride almost 10 hours long through the countryside. The full journey is on YouTube. Mountains, tunnels, snow and the rhythmic sound of the rails. Millions of views. Perfect for background noise, napping or staring at something beautiful when life gets to be too much.

It’s a big internet. These are five very good corners of it. Have a channel you like? Let me know when you rate this newsletter at the end. Maybe I’ll feature it in an upcoming newsletter.

📩 Send this to someone who says they can never find anything good to watch on a Friday night. Use the handy links below.

Share this great YouTube List now:

Hot new job? Teaching your replacement. Companies are handing out fat paychecks to people who teach robots how to do their work. I also cover the viral Anthropic chart showing which jobs AI is coming for first. Here’s what the findings mean for your career. Plus, ChatGPT’s X-rated mode, a Google Maps upgrade and a man who used ChatGPT to save his dog’s life.

Listen right now on Komando.com →

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

🏦 The funded bot: That cute ChatGPT box is attached to a money furnace. OpenAI just raised another $122 billion (at an $852 billion valuation), and it also put out some crazy figures. It makes $2 billion a month. A month! 900 million people use it weekly. A whopping 40% of their money comes from business customers. They’re not using that moola to buy nicer office chairs, either. They’re buying the power plant, then building a bigger brain, then installing it in everyone’s workplace.

WhatsApp used as a weapon: Microsoft warned that hackers are sending malicious file attachments through WhatsApp on Windows computers. You click what looks like a normal file, and hidden software installs itself, giving criminals full remote access to your machine. The attack is active right now. Don’t open file attachments from WhatsApp on your PC, even from people you know. This one is spreading fast. 

Zoom seat belt CSI: Ever been caught in a lie you make worse by doubling down? A Michigan woman joined a virtual hearing from a moving car and swore she was only the passenger. The judge said he doesn’t take cases with people in cars, let alone behind the wheel, then noticed the driver’s side seat belt. He asked which seat she was in and to show the driver. She stepped out on the driver’s side. The other side won. 

🌿 The “secret” supplement I use to help manage cravings: Always reaching for snacks or hitting that midafternoon wall? Same. My team and I created a clean GLP‑1 Support formula that actually works. No caffeine, no harsh stimulants, just steady energy, clear focus and fewer cravings. Try it today for up to 37% off with free shipping and a gift.**

Google’s got a new game: They’re launching a screenless Fitbit band later this year, a gray cloth bracelet that looks like a fancy sweatband. Steph Curry teased it the other day. The business model? Very Whoop: Pay for the hardware, then pay monthly to unlock the good stuff. Basic stats are free. Everything useful costs extra. Whoop hit a $10.1 billion valuation doing this. Google looked at that number and thought, “We want a piece of that wrist.” Same arm. Deeper pockets.

Cheating upgraded: Get this. Students are renting smart glasses that look normal but can send exam questions to an AI through the lens and receive answers back in real time. The usual cheating tells are gone, and professors are losing their minds. One instructor got so fed up she dumped computers and hauled her class back to typewriters. Ah yes, fighting AI with office gear from the Nixon administration. Imagine failing chemistry because your cheating glasses froze and rebooted into Duolingo.

🦿 Brace for relief: If your knee sounds like a bag of gravel when you stand up, this is for you. Researchers reviewed nearly 10,000 people with knee osteoarthritis and found braces, hydrotherapy and plain old exercise eased pain much better than every medication studied, minus the side effects. The boring stuff won. Better yet, it skips the stomach bleeding and heart risks tied to common anti-inflammatory drugs. I’d ask your doctor about these options before the pill ad people tackle you.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Smart speaker acting dumb? Don’t tuck it against a wall or inside a shelf. Nearby surfaces can mess with the acoustics, so the mic picks you up worse. Move it into a more open spot, make sure the mic isn’t muted and try bumping up wake-word sensitivity. Sometimes the device is not broken. It hates your bookshelf.

⛽ Cut your gas bill: Amazon Prime member? You can get 20 cents off per gallon every Friday at participating stations. That adds up to about $156 a year if you fill up a 15-gallon tank weekly. Want extra savings? Stack it with a rewards credit card that earns points on gas. Link your Prime account at the pump, and the discount applies automatically. With gas prices high, I’ll take every cent I can get.

💸 Tired of paying for subscriptions you don’t even use? That app from 2021 is probably still charging you. Rocket Money hunts down those sneaky fees, shows them all in one clean dashboard and can cancel the junk for you. I use it because it saves time and money. Try it now!*

Your Android can flash when a notification comes in: Great for when your phone’s face down or you’re somewhere loud. Go to Settings > Notifications > Flash notification and toggle on Camera flash, Screen flash or both. Apply it to every app or just the ones that matter. That important text won’t slip past you anymore.

Copy something on your iPhone, and paste it on your Mac: No AirDrop, no emailing yourself, no nonsense. It simply works. Select what you want on your iPhone, copy it, then paste straight into your Mac. Text, photos, videos, anything. FYI, both devices need to be on the same Apple Account with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Handoff turned on. That’s it. Universal Clipboard. Use it.

🚨 Chrome needs an emergency update: A big security bug hackers were exploiting got patched. It could let them crash your browser, mess with how pages display or corrupt your data. Don’t wait. Open your browser Settings > About Chrome and let it install automatically. You should be on version 146.0.7680.177/178. Do it now. Seriously.

Instagram used to be fake in a manageable way. Filters, Facetune, maybe a suspicious vacation caption. Now apparently, someone can borrow your entire body.

A model posted that another influencer allegedly used AI to swap her own head onto the model’s body, then geotagged it as Miami like she was serving courtside glam at the Open last weekend. 

One big problem: The original photo was taken at the U.S. Open two years ago. This is bigger than one weird post. It’s a reminder that everything on social deserves the same skepticism as a guy with crypto guru in his bio.

Share this crazy story now:

🔜 Tomorrow: That buffering circle on your TV might not be your router’s fault. I’ll show you how internet providers can slow your speeds right when you want to stream, game or scroll, and how to prove it with a simple test.

💡 The answer: B) Alaska. All the letters in “Alaska” live happily on the middle row of your keyboard (QWERTY supremacy!). No pinkie stretching or mid-sentence finger yoga required.

Bonus brain snack: The QWERTY layout was originally designed in the 1870s to slow typists down, so typewriter keys didn’t jam. Yup, we’re all still typing slower, on purpose, thanks to 19th century hardware drama.

🤠 One for the road in case you guessed Texas: A man sits down at the bar and orders a beer. “Why is this so huge?” the man asks. The bartender says, “Well, everything’s big in Texas!” Then the man orders a cheeseburger, and it’s enormous. After his meal, he asks the bartender, “Where are the bathrooms?” The man forgets which way the bartender said to go. He wanders to the right, falls into the swimming pool and screams, “Don’t flush! Don’t flush!” (I saw you shaking your head on that one!)

😄 Curious people age better. Believe this. I do! — 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, Renpho, @tatianaelizabethh via Threads

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