🤐 You're talking 28% less

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📬 Did someone forward this to you? It’s ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5-star rated. Sign up here. Tomorrow: what your Ring doorbell knows about you. Don't miss it.

Happy Sunday, {{first_name | friend}}. Before ring lights. Before “link in bio.” Before anyone was pretending their morning coffee was organic content, there was a woman drawing crowds of thousands at a world’s fair and quietly inventing modern marketing.

🤳 No Wi-Fi. No hashtags. No awkward “Hey, guys, so many of you have been asking about my skin care routine.” This influencer turned curious passersby into loyal customers on the spot.

This is a tough one. Which brand launched what historians consider the first modern influencer campaign? A) Mr. Peanut, B) Aunt Jemima, C) Betty Crocker or D) Chef Boyardee? Take your pick, the answer’s at the end. No filter required.

💾 Don’t be the person who learns this lesson the hard way. I’ve taken the tearful phone call from a friend who lost everything. Wedding photos. Videos of the kids. Tax returns. Years of work. Gone. Carbonite backs it up automatically. Get Carbonite for 50% off with my exclusive offer.* Let’s do this! — Kim

⚡ TL;DR

📖 Read time: 3 minute

Barry and I were at dinner the other night. The table next to us? Both parents heads-down on their phones. One kid, maybe 4, had an Amazon tablet propped up with headphones on. The other had an iPad game or movie playing. Nobody said a word to each other. Not one.

I thought, How sad. Why even leave the house?

And the worst part? You could tell this is how they eat. Every night. The kids think dinner is supposed to look like that.

We’re speaking to each other less than we did 10 years ago. That’s the WSJ headline (paywall link).

Researchers tracked our daily words for over a decade. In 2005, Americans spoke 16,632 words a day. By 2019? Down to 11,900. That’s a 28% drop. And it’s almost certainly worse now.

Young adults under 25 are losing words fastest: 451 fewer words spoken every single day. They’re growing up in a world where texting replaced talking.

This is crazy. Parents on phones speak 16% fewer words to their babies. When mom’s scrolling Instagram, baby gets less language. That translates directly to smaller vocabulary, weaker cognitive development and worse school performance. Measurable. Documented.

We order lattes on apps. We text our mom instead of calling. AirPods make us look unapproachable. Self-checkout killed small talk. Even community gatherings dropped off.

Conversation is cognitive chess. Listening, responding, reading body language, all in 200 milliseconds. Lose the practice, lose the skill.

Narrate your day around kids. “I’m making coffee. The water is hot. I’m pouring it slowly.” Every word builds vocabulary.

Chat with the cashier. Call instead of text. Read aloud. Point things out. “Look, a red car.” The researchers found something hopeful. If each of us talked to one more person a day, we could reverse the whole trend.

Try this at dinner. We have a family rule. Phones go in a pile in the middle of the table. Whoever touches theirs first buys dinner or cleans the kitchen. You’ll be amazed how loud the table gets.

📩 Send this to anyone who scrolls through dinner. No judgment. We’ve all done it. But the kid across the table is keeping score, and that scoreboard shows up at parent-teacher conferences a few years later. Forward this. No lecture needed. The article does the work.

Trevor in Los Angeles is caught in a messy divorce, but the drama isn’t confined to the courtroom. He found a charge on his bank statement for spyware and is convinced his wife is using it to track his every move.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

🤖 AI, Captain: Nothing eases the nerves quite like hearing “battlefield decisions” and “tech startup partnerships” in the same sentence. The Pentagon announced Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, SpaceX and Reflection are bringing AI into its highest-secret networks to crunch data and help make battlefield decisions (paywall link). Anthropic? Hard pass on mass surveillance and killer bots, and now they’re locked in a legal fight over it. Somewhere a four-star general typed this prompt, “Summarize this war, but make it actionable.”

Bad lunar parking: I swear, even the moon can’t avoid other people’s junk. A used 45-foot SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage from an early 2025 lunar mission is expected to slam into the moon on Aug. 5 around 2:44 a.m. EST, near Einstein crater, at Mach 7 (about 7x the speed of sound at 5,400 mph). An astronomer tracked it more than 1,000 times and says it won’t threaten people or active spacecraft. Still, we’re turning space into a drawer full of loose batteries.

Synthetic identity fraud is exploding: Scammers take your SSN, pair it with a fake name and address and create a “Frankenstein” version of you. Because this fake person doesn’t exist, it can take years to realize someone is racking up thousands in debt using your credentials. NordProtect monitors for these synthetic threats and alerts you the second your data shows up where it doesn’t belong. I use it. Get 79% off (only $2.84 a month).*

🩻 The scan knew: If there’s one thing that could use an AI glow-up, it’s early detection. Mayo Clinic and MD Anderson built an AI tool, REDMOD, that reread old pancreas CT scans and spotted cancer clues (paywall link) doctors missed. In testing, it flagged 46 of 63 future pancreatic cancer cases, about 73%, roughly 16 months early. Radiologists caught 38.9%. But big caveat before you hand your life to Robot House, it falsely flagged 81 of 430 healthy people, so this is still second-opinion territory. Share this with who came to mind when you were reading it.

🖥️ Buffett's Bare-Bones Web: Berkshirehathaway.com (tap or click to see it!) still looks like Netscape just shipped. No photos. No mobile version. No animations. 16 plain bullet points and a font size that screams 1996. Warren Buffett retired in December but the site he cobbled together with finance chief Marc Hamburg back when Seinfeld aired hasn't budged. Fans adore it. Load times are blazing, the design is charming, and a footer note politely warns the corporate office can't actually reply to your feedback. Some sites compound interest. This one compounds nostalgia.

Tracking apps can help you find your phone, unless a thief disables them. Here’s how to stay one step ahead.

Listen on Komando.com →

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

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: If your cell service drops, swipe down and turn on Airplane or Flight mode. Wait 10 seconds, then turn it back off. Your phone will reconnect to the nearest tower, which can bring your signal back from the dead. ICYMI, also turn it on while charging in a hurry. It shuts off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other background connections, so your battery can fill up faster.

📺 YouTube TV lets you build your own custom multiview: Pick the live channels or events you want and build a split-screen setup with up to four streams. You can even mix content from different packages, like YouTube TV and NFL Sunday Ticket. Pin your picks or browse the categories. Remember, it only works with live content, not your emotional support reruns. Brillant.

Still using QuickBooks? Does it match bank transactions, close the books and flag what needs your attention? NetSuite rolled out an AI-powered close manager that does all the reconciliation for you. What used to take your team weeks became automated. If your business is scaling and your close still takes 10 days, this is your sign. Download the free “Demystifying AI” guide today.*

📍 Stop the “are you close?” texts: In Google Maps, enter your destination and start navigation. Swipe up, tap Share trip progress, then choose the person asking where you are every 11 seconds. They’ll see your live location, route and ETA in real time. Traffic can explain itself for once. Bonus: Tap your profile pic > Location sharing to share where you are without starting a trip.

Rename your ChatGPT chaos: If the sidebar is becoming a graveyard of “New chat” and vague nonsense, clean it up. Hover over any chat, click the three dots and choose Rename. For the old ones you are not using, hit Archive. They are not gone forever, just tucked away under Settings > Data controls > Archived chats, where they can be less annoying.

👏 Always losing your phone? Try an app called Find My Phone by Clap on iOS or Android. Download it, give it microphone permission, then clap, and your phone will play a loud noise so you can find it. It can also flash the light in the dark, and you can pick different sounds or adjust the sensitivity. FYI, the ads are annoying, but set it up once and let it run in the background.

🚶🏼‍♀️ Take me on a walk: Click to listen to my latest show on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeart, Pandora or wherever you get your podcasts. I also make walks go by faster!

You can outsource your emails, your driving, your dating profile. But screwing in a light bulb? That was ours. The last quiet, perhaps even noble, human skill.

Then Eka Robotics took it from us.  

Here’s the part that should freak you out. (Or thrill you. Depends on the day.) Eka isn’t a one-trick pony. It shows general-purpose dexterity, the holy grail of robotics. Force, slip, inertia, intuition. The messy physics of our actual world. It learned in simulation, then improvised in real life. Kind of like pilot training but for a metal toddler with hands. They have some cool videos on their site.

How many robots does it take to change a light bulb? One. And he didn’t even ask his wife where the spare bulbs are. (Relatable, I know.)

📺 Now playing on my show: A man is trading his $8M estate for Anthropic stock, and he’s dead serious. Plus, police used a geofence warrant to catch a bank robber, a case that could reshape your privacy rights forever. A Florida surgeon wanted for manslaughter spent a year hiding as a Lyft driver with a 5-star rating. And Apple’s foldable iPhone is almost here with a price tag to match. Watch this week’s episode and don’t miss a thing.

🔜 Tomorrow: Ring just reversed course. Nest can hand over your videos in an “emergency.” And the FBI pulled footage from a camera that was disconnected, with no subscription. In your inbox tomorrow, what your doorbell knows about you. You can’t afford to not know what’s really going on.

The answer: B) Aunt Jemima. A woman named Nancy Green was hired to portray Aunt Jemima at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She cooked pancakes live, told stories and drew such massive crowds that security had to manage the lines. 

🥞 The campaign invented the human brand ambassador at scale. Why is it so rare to hear good pancake jokes? They usually fall flat. Nancy Green was the exception. She made history rise. (Oh, that was so bad, it was good!) Tomorrow’s trivia is about why we get caught up doom scrolling. It’s a shocker.

🚗 You wouldn’t dream of driving a car without insurance. Why are you using a computer without a cloud backup? Stop playing Russian roulette with your memories. Carbonite is the only backup solution I trust for my own data. It is simple, automatic, and right now it is 50% off for my readers. That is total peace of mind for less than $4 a month. Get Carbonite for 50% off with my exclusive offer.*

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

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT, Ciowain, Wired

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