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Happy Saturday to you, friend.Here’s something most don’t know. Every time you ask ChatGPT to write an email, plan a recipe or settle an argument with your spouse, a data center somewhere is drinking water. A lot of it. Those servers run insanely hot, and water is how they cool down.
💦 So how much water does one typical AI conversation use? A) 17 drops, B) Half a cup, C) A small water bottle, D) Enough to fill a kiddie pool. Take your best guess. The answer is cooling its heels at the end.
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Haul of the deals
Image: ChatGPT/Kim Komando
⚡ TL;DR
Amazon quietly built its own answer to Temu with over 1 million items under $20.
Many items are under $5 and backed by Amazon’s A-to-z Guarantee, unlike Temu.
Free shipping at $25. Free returns. Delivery in 1-2 weeks. Check out my picks.
📖 Read time: 3 minutes
You’ve heard of Temu. You’ve probably gotten 47 ads for it. And you’ve thought, “That looks sketchy.” Your gut isn’t wrong, but here’s the thing. Amazon built its own version, and most people have no idea it exists.
It’s called Amazon Haul. Go to amazon.com/haul (then bookmark it, so you always have a quick link to it). Most items are under $10. Plenty are under $5. Over a million items. Selection grew nearly 400% in the past year alone.
🤔 Why this isn’t Temu
Here’s what actually matters. Amazon Haul is covered by the A-to-z Guarantee. Damaged? Defective? Not what you ordered? You have a real path to a refund. Drop it off at Whole Foods, Kohl’s, UPS or Staples. Temu can’t say that.
The only trade-off: Delivery takes 1-2 weeks instead of two days. Fine. Stack your cart to $25, and shipping is free. Hit $50 and you get 5% off your whole order. Hit $75 and that jumps to 10%. Fill the cart, let the savings stack. That’s the whole game.
💡 15 great finds under $10
I dug through Amazon Haul so you don’t have to. All prices were accurate at the time of publication. These things sell fast, so some may be gone. If you’re on a desktop and see a QR code, scan it with your phone or open it in the Amazon app.
OK, go get yourself a bargain right now!
🏠 Home & kitchen upgrades
1. Gorilla Grip can opener (10% off, $8.87): One tool, two jobs. Tackles cans without sharp edges, then flips to bottle opener duty.
2. Potholder set (32% off, $6.79, two-piece): Your hands deserve better than a folded dish towel or some burnt offering. These are heat-resistant, easy to hang and machine washable.
3. Scrub sponges (11% off, $8.72, nine-pack): Scotch-Brite doesn’t make wimpy sponges. Made for cast iron, grills and the baked-on stuff you’ve been avoiding.
4. Rug gripper tape (38% off, $4.99, eight-pack): Don’t fall. The fix for every rug that’s been slowly migrating across your floor. Works on floors and carpet.
5. LED night-lights (42% off, $6.97, two-pack): They automatically flip on at dusk, off at dawn. Only 0.3W, so they’re friendly on your electric bill.
✨ Personal care hits
6. Travel makeup mirror (33% off, $9.99): Touch up anywhere, anytime. There are 1x and 3x magnification sides, plus a built-in LED light. No more squinting in bad lighting.
7. Slant tweezer (14% off, $5.99): Revlon’s slant tip is engineered to grab exactly what you’re targeting. Handles brows, splinters, chin and ingrown hairs without missing.
8. Body & hand soap (20% off, $7.99, two-pack): Regular soap dries you out. Dove packed these bars with real moisturizing cream. Skin stays soft, not tight.
9. Memory foam slippers (30% off, $6.99): One reviewer says they “feel like walking on tiny warm clouds.” Available in women’s sizes 7.5 to 10.5. Wear them on the kitchen tile and thank me later.
10. Burt’s Bees lip balm (35% off, $3.92): Dry, cracked lips need more than a swipe. This squeezy tube delivers beeswax and shea butter right where you need it.
📱 Useful tech finds
11. Magnetic cord holders (10% off, $8.99, six-pack): Stick them to your desk, nightstand, TV stand or wherever cords go feral. Forget fishing for your charger in the dark.
12. Tablet & phone stand (20% off, $7.99): This adjustable holder keeps your devices upright for video calls, recipes and streaming. Your neck will notice the difference.
13. Surge protector power strip (28% off, $8.98): You get eight outlets, four USB ports, a flat plug and a 6-foot cord, all in one strip. Mounts on a wall or sits on any flat surface.
14. USB-C adapters (25% off, $7.49, four-pack): Still have USB-A cables everywhere? These convert them to USB-C, so they’re compatible with your new tech. Tiny fix, big convenience.
15. Duracell AA batteries (17% off, $7.61, six-count): While you’re at it, stock up on long-lasting alkaline batteries. Because finding out your smoke detector is dead at 2 a.m. is nobody’s idea of a good time.
🗣️ TEXT/POST THIS STAT: Amazon has a hidden store with over 1 million items, most under $10, backed by the same A-to-z Guarantee as regular Amazon. It’s called Amazon Haul. Most people have never heard of it. Shop here.
📩 Send this to someone who keeps complaining about Temu packages that show up three months late looking nothing like the picture. Use the links below!
On my show this weekend: Turns out that innocent peace sign photo you post online could expose enough detail for someone to recreate your fingerprints. Yes, really. That’s one of the jaw-dropping stories this week.
AI is making IVF cheaper and more effective.
A magician explains how thieves steal Apple Watches mid-handshake.
Waymo drives off with a man’s luggage.
AI systems are beginning to replicate themselves.
Kids fooled age-verification AI by using fakes.
WSJ writer Danielle Crittenden shares a moving story about the devices still connected to her late daughter.
Hit play below before everyone else is talking about it. 👇
⚠️ Patch your stuff: If you are running Windows, today isn’t the day to skip an update. Microsoft’s May Patch Tuesday fixed 120 security flaws across Windows, Office, Word and Excel. Seventeen are rated Critical. Go to Start > Settings > Windows Update, hit Check for updates, and restart when prompted. Don’t wait on this one.
📵 Let it be live: Paul McCartney has had enough of our collective desire to document concerts. The 83-year-old Beatle wants phones down at all his shows. He told fans the screens make him feel like “a performing monkey,” which is a rough thing to hear from the man who survived Beatlemania. The research backs him up, filming a show dulls the experience. Your camera roll gets fed, your memory gets crumbs.
Flash in the gram: Instagram invented unedited photos the same way I invent dinner by reheating pizza. Its new app Instants is what happens when Snapchat and BeReal have a baby. No editing. Just real, unpolished moments. Then photos disappear. Rolling out in Italy first. To turn it off, go to your profile, tap the three lines, then Settings > Content Preferences and toggle Instants off.
📘 Don’t let the AI revolution leave you behind. Your competitors are already using it to work faster and smarter. If you feel overwhelmed by the buzzwords, you need NetSuite’s free “Demystifying AI” guide. It explains exactly how to use this tech to boost your bottom line. Download the free guide today.*
Stock moves:Bill Ackman told the world he loaded up on Microsoft stock after the price dropped. Shocking, right? Buy low. The billionaire said Wall Street underestimated it. Meanwhile, June 12th is the targeted NASDAQ listing for SpaceX, under the ticker SPCX. It's targeting a raise of about $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation. That blows past Alibaba, Meta, and Visa combined. And Elon Musk? The man who already runs Tesla, xAI, and the internet's loudest comment section is about to get a whole lot richer. Genius.
👓 Face war begins: Google launched its Gemini display edition AI glasses, built with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Its rival? Meta’s Ray-Ban AI glasses, which already crossed 7 million pairs sold. Google’s pitch is productivity. Meta’s pitch is fashion. Both are genuinely impressive but concerning. I’m not sure if I want either Meta or Google on my face all day.
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🎤 PODCAST: THE KIM KOMANDO SHOW
She uses AI to build her own Facebook Marketplace
Johanna Abzug got fed up with Facebook Marketplace and decided to build her own. No coding degree. No tech background. Just AI tools and a problem she wanted to solve. She’s proof that you don’t need to know how to code anymore to build something real.
🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.
DEVICE ADVICE
⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Accidentally closed a browser tab? Press Ctrl + Shift + T on Windows or Cmd + Shift + T on Mac to bring it right back. Works in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. Keep pressing it to restore multiple tabs in order. You’re welcome. (Seriously, burn this one into your brain.)
📺 YouTube has a secret mood light: Dark mode is fine. Ambient mode is the glow-up. Click your profile icon > Appearance > Dark theme. Then open any video, tap the Settings gear and flip on Ambient mode. It pulls the dominant colors right off the screen and softly haloes the whole player. Already there. Just off by default.
Gmail is hiding rows of emails from you: All that extra spacing? Wasted screen real estate. On PC, click the Settings gear (top right), look for Density and pick Compact. You’ll see nearly twice as many messages without scrolling.
📚 Your Mac is a secret dictionary: Hover over any word in Safari, Notes or Pages and press Control + Command + D. Instant definition, synonyms, everything. In Safari, the same shortcut on a hovered link pops up a page preview before you even click. Built right in. Free.
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WHAT THE TECH?
Image: Toru Yamanaka
🐺 Fur real
Japan’s latest high-tech anti-bear strategy looks less like wildlife management and more like a demented Chuck E. Cheese animatronic escaped into the woods.
Meet the “Monster Wolf,” a robotic scarecrow with glowing red eyes, fake fur and speakers blasting over 50 sounds, from howls to electronic noise complaints. It swivels its head, flashes LEDs and can screech loud enough to be heard over half a mile away.
Basically a $4,000 demonic lawn ornament running on solar panels and unresolved trauma, but hey, it works.
Just because. A bear walked into a bar and ordered a whiskey and …… a Coke. The bartender asked, “Why the big pause?” The bear looked down and said, “I was born with them.”
LOGGING OUT …
🔜 Tomorrow: A photo of your passport on your phone sells for $600 on the dark web. I’ll tell you the five photos to delete.
Coming up in tomorrow’s trivia, the tiny app that turns one quick video into a missing chunk of your life.
💧 The answer: C) A small water bottle, about 17 ounces per typical conversation. That’s a UC Riverside study finding. One 20- to 50-question chat uses roughly the same water as the bottle in your gym bag. Not for you. For the servers doing the thinking.
Sam Altman pushed back in 2025, claiming newer systems use barely a drop per query. Maybe. But total AI water consumption still hit tens of billions of gallons globally last year. That’s basically the world’s entire bottled water output. For AI. Wow.
Now remember, a bottle of water can’t quench the thirst of a bird, but toucan.
Oh, a reminder to check out Amazon Haul. Go to amazon.com/haul now and spend like a billionaire on a budget. I mean, almost everything is under $10!
🦷 Tough times don’t last. Tough people floss anyway. See you tomorrow and thanks for being here! — Kim
Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily
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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.
CPI ran hot. PPI ran hotter. Services inflation arrived. The Fed got a new chair who wants cuts and data that won't allow them. The AI trade kept running anyway. The market chose the earnings cycle over the inflation cycle. By Friday, both were at record highs and both were right.
MARKET PULSE
The S&P 500 hit 7,500 for the first time. The Dow crossed 50,000. The Nasdaq set multiple records. All three indexes closed the week at all-time highs.
All of it happened while consumer inflation reaccelerated, producer prices posted their largest monthly jump since early 2022, the Fed got its most hawkish handoff in decades, and the bond market priced out every rate cut for the rest of the year.
The market looked through every one of those things. A narrow group of chip and AI infrastructure names did the lifting. Everything underneath sagged. Here are the six things that actually drove the tape.
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CPI Didn't Just Surprise. It Changed the Architecture of the Problem.
April CPI came in at 3.8 percent annually against a 3.7 percent estimate. That alone was not the issue. The real problem was where prices firmed.
Services inflation moved higher. Services prices are not a one-time supply shock. They do not reverse when the Strait reopens. They reflect wages, rents, and demand. They are sticky and they feed on themselves. When services moved higher on Tuesday, the war stopped being a supply story and became a rate story.
Nick Timiraos wrote that rate cuts are no longer a 2026 story. Three months ago the market priced multiple 2026 cuts. Now the question is not when the Fed cuts. It is whether the Fed needs to hike. Goldman Sachs (GS) and JPMorgan (JPM) both removed any 2026 cut from their outlooks. Nomura put the probability of a June hike at roughly 20 percent.
Watch Signal
The 10-year inflation breakeven ended the week above 2.5 percent. A move above 2.6 percent next week means the bond market has fully repriced the inflation regime and the easing bias removal at June's meeting becomes the base case.
THEME TWO
Warsh Gets the Chair. The Data Gives Him No Room.
Kevin Warsh was confirmed as Fed chair in a 54-45 vote, the closest in modern history. Powell's term ended Friday. Warsh took the gavel into the hottest producer prices in four years and a president demanding rate cuts.
PPI rose 1.4 percent in April against a 0.5 percent estimate. Annual PPI hit 6 percent, its highest since December 2022. Wholesale energy jumped nearly 8 percent in a single month. Cutting into a 6 percent PPI is not credible. Hiking into a slowing economy is painful. The toolkit doesn't match the problem.
Warsh inherits three committee members already pushing to drop the easing bias, a president demanding cuts, and two consecutive hot prints. That combination is not a challenge. It is a defining constraint on every decision he makes through June.
Execution Bias
Duration names priced for cuts face the clearest risk in this environment. Own cash-generative names with pricing power. A Fed on hold into rising services inflation is not a forgiving backdrop for long-duration growth bets.
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THEME THREE
The Summit Delivered Partial Relief. The Strait Is Still Closed.
Trump and Xi met in Beijing. China publicly committed to the Strait staying open, the first time it named it specifically. China signaled it may reduce Iranian oil purchases. The US cleared roughly ten Chinese firms to buy Nvidia's (NVDA) H200 chip.
Those are real developments. None of them reopened the Strait.
The most important insight of the week came from Saudi Aramco's CEO. Oil markets won't normalize until 2027 if Hormuz stays disrupted past mid-June. The total supply loss since the war began is already around one billion barrels. Traders are calling it the NACHO trade. Not A Chance Hormuz Opens. Iran monetized the Strait this week, setting up a toll agency for all ships passing through. A closed strait can be reopened by a deal. A monetized strait is a recurring revenue mechanism Iran now has every incentive to preserve.
Watch Signal
Watch Brent at Sunday's open. Below $95 means the summit relief is holding. Above $105 means the ceasefire is being repriced as broken and credit spreads follow within the session.
THEME FOUR
Cisco Doubled Its AI Order Book. The Full Stack Got Validated.
Cisco (CSCO) raised its AI order forecast from $5 billion to $9 billion in a single quarter. CEO Chuck Robbins called it a networking supercycle. The stock had its best session since 2011. Record revenue. Guidance raised. Four thousand jobs cut to fund the pivot in the same release.
This matters because OpenAI's revenue miss two weeks earlier had raised doubts about whether AI demand was real at scale. Cisco's order book eliminated that doubt. The buyers are spending. The infrastructure is accelerating across every layer, not just chips.
Applied Materials (AMAT) reported after Thursday's close and confirmed the same thing. Chip equipment growth guided above 30 percent for 2026. When the picks-and-shovels names confirm demand at this level, the cycle has legs beyond the chip designers themselves.
The demand is real. The question is increasingly price paid versus duration of growth.
Execution Bias
Own the full infrastructure stack. Networking, optics, security, and power all benefit from the same buildout. Cisco's supercycle call is the broadest single validation of the AI capex thesis this entire earnings season.
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The Rally Is Running on Three Names. That Is the Risk.
The S&P hit records while two-thirds of its components closed lower on the same sessions. The Nasdaq led while most stocks sagged. Nvidia, Micron (MU), and Cisco did most of the lifting. Options data showed record gamma concentrated in a small cluster of chip names. The last period with comparable concentration dynamics was late 2021.
Cerebras (CBRS) debuted on Thursday and closed near a hundred billion dollar market cap. It raised more than five billion dollars, the largest US tech IPO since Uber (UBER) in 2019. The appetite for AI hardware exposure is deep enough to absorb a new entrant without draining the broader complex.
But breadth is the tell. More names fell than rose on days the index hit records. That pattern holds until it breaks. It breaks one of two ways. Either the rally broadens into industrials, staples, and energy. Or the leaders exhaust and everything falls together.
Investor Signal
Watch whether Applied Materials and Cisco's beats pull the equipment and networking tier into the rally next week. If they do, broadening has a leg. If they don't, the crowding is peaking.
THEME SIX
Services Inflation Is the Variable That Changes Everything
The consumer split this week along the same fault line it has followed since February. The divide is no longer between premium and value. It is between services and goods.
Disney (DIS) beat on streaming and theme parks. Uber reported resilient bookings. Both are service businesses. Both held. Whirlpool (WHR) cut full-year guidance by more than half and called it recession-level industry decline. Planet Fitness (PLNT) paused a price hike because customers are too cash-strapped. Both are goods and access businesses. Both broke.
The IEA revised its global oil demand forecast from an 80,000 barrel per day decline to a 420,000 barrel contraction. Every dollar spent at the pump is a dollar not spent at a store. Retail stocks had their worst week since October.
The services-versus-goods split matters because services inflation is structural. It does not reverse when oil falls. When the Fed sees services prices rising alongside goods prices, the case for cuts disappears entirely.
Execution Bias
Own consumer services with pricing power. Reduce discretionary goods names with fuel cost exposure and deferrable demand. That gap widens with every week oil stays above $90.
These are blue-chip companies with fortress balance sheets, elite dividend track records, and the staying power to outperform in bull and bear markets alike.
Some are Dividend Kings, others are on the path there, and all are proven wealth compounding machines.
The week gave the market everything it was waiting for. A summit. Chip export relief. Cisco's order book doubling. Records on the S&P, Nasdaq, and Dow simultaneously.
It also gave the market two consecutive hot inflation prints, a new Fed chair with no room to cut, a Strait that is being monetized rather than reopened, and a consumer whose quality of spending is getting worse even if the quantity is holding.
The market chose the earnings story. The data is writing a different one.
