The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Can Meta's Muse AI Agent Save You Money?
Episode Date: September 30, 2026A new show in the Prof G universe by writer and investor Jack Raines! Each week, Jack takes a big story in tech or money and asks what it means for your life and your wallet. Meta’s new AI assist...ant, Muse, promises to do more than answer questions. It can shop, handle tedious tasks, and potentially find money you didn’t know you were owed. Jack looks at why Meta is giving it away, what happens to businesses that profit from customer inertia, and whether AI agents could put a dent in the “annoyance economy.” Plus, investor JC Barr de Stefano shares what happened when he let an AI agent try to score a hard-to-get dinner reservation. Want to be featured in a future episode? Send a voice recording to officehours@profgmedia.com, or leave us a text/voicemail at (201) 472-3656. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in.
Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore.
What we have been seeing increasingly is people breaking rules.
Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me?
This week on Explain It to Me, How to Mind Your Manners.
New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Scott, and I want to introduce you to the new show from Profitty Media hosted by Jack Rains.
Each week, Jack takes a big story in tech, money, or markets, and asks what it means for your life and your wallet.
Today, he's looking at Meta's new AI assistant, Muse, and what happens when AI starts doing the things we've all been putting off?
Here's Jack.
Meta just released an AI assistant called Muse.
It's free to try, and the pitch is that it can do more than just answer your questions.
Give it access to the right accounts, and it can actually do things for you.
Find a better price, deal with a subscription, or help sort through administrative tasks that eat up your week.
AI agents are still pretty new.
They really only became useful around December of last year, as AI models had a noticeable step-up in coding capabilities.
But until recently, using an AI agent often meant buying a separate computer and spinning out,
wiring together different apps and workflows,
or hooking up some sort of cloud server
with a database backend,
and nobody wanted to do that,
except a very small group of people
in Silicon Valley or addicted to X.
Mews has actually abstracted away
all of the complicated setup steps,
giving users a do-everything-everything-on-my-computer
for-me tool wrapped in a bow.
Mark Zuckerberg's new big bet
is that millions of ordinary people
are ready to skip all of that
and simply ask an assistant to get something
being done for them. If that bet proves to be correct, it will change how we spend our time and our
money. I'm Jack Raines, an investor at early stage venture capital fund, slow ventures, writer of the
substack newsletter, Young Money, and author of the new book, Young Money, a field guide to wealth and
purpose in your 20s. In this show, we take a big story in tech or money and ask what it means for your
life and your wallet. So let's get into it. What exactly is Muse?
Per Meta's launch announcement a few weeks ago, Mews is a personal AI agent.
It doesn't just answer questions.
It actually does the work.
It helps people stay on top of things, takes tasks and projects off their plate, and turns
long-term goals into action plans.
So MES officially announced the Mews launch on September 8th.
And in the last three weeks or so, Mews has had an estimated 3.4 million downloads and over
76,000 ratings on the App Store. For context, chat Gpt, which is still the biggest consumer AI
app, has about 11 million ratings, and Claude Anthropics AI app is at around 270,000 ratings.
So most of the consumer applications for AI so far have been a chat bot. You open chat GPT,
you ask it for the weather, or to break down a spreadsheet, or you treat it like Google.
And for more than 90% of people, that's kind of been what AI has been since 2022.
Meta came out with Muse and is advertising it as an always-on AI assistant that can do work.
Of course, Muse can be used as a chatbot, but as soon as you sign into Muse and open your account,
they instantly want you to connect your calendar, your email, your iMessage, your notes app.
It's very obvious that, one, they're trying to aggregate as much data as possible on their users,
and two, they get very, very easy for the AI to both read from and use all the tools that you connect to it.
Of course, Meta already has a bunch of data on you and me through Facebook, Instagram,
WhatsApp, threads, and just browser cookies.
What's been really interesting is how many companies have also partnered with Muse off
the launch.
We have PayPal, Shopify, Expedia, Stripe, Best Buy, Walmart, Instacart, American Eagle, Dick's
Sporting Goods, Fanatics, Gap, Wayfair,
and plenty of others. Notably, one company who is not working with Mews is Amazon. We'll touch on that
later. They also connect to your contacts, your calendar, your email, your browser, your Google
Drive, note-taking apps like Granola. You can connect your Spotify, even Peloton, an Open
table, and most importantly, Platt for all your financial accounts. Basically, Zuckerberg and his team
have made it as easy as possible to connect as much of your life as possible to Mews, so Mews can
see all of your data and it can interact with all of your accounts. But the most interesting thing
about Mews to me is that they're giving all this away for free. ChatGPT has a free plan, sure,
but it uses its weaker models and you hit usage limits quickly. Mark Zuckerberg is giving
away 100 million tokens per week, which is a ton of compute. For power users, you can pay $20
a month for 500 million tokens a week, or for max users, you can pay $100 a month for $3 billion
tokens per week. But, you know, read between the lines. He wants as many people as possible
using Muse as much as possible, and he's willing to subsidize that. Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI
publish their free allowance numbers exactly the same way Meta does with the tokens per week.
But as a user of both Claude and ChatGBT, GBT, I think usage limits a lot. You know, you send
hundreds of messages over the course of one to two to three hours, and you get rate limited for
the day on both platforms. The reason that Anthropic, Open AI, and these other AI labs tend to have
stricter usage limits for their users is they can't afford to just give away all this compute.
Something that Meta has, that Open AI and Anthropic don't have, is meta is a massive
advertising business. And the last quarter alone, Meta did $59 billion in advertising revenue.
The entire rest of the business did $1.5 billion. Meta is an advertising.
company. Anthropic and OpenAI are not advertising companies. Yes, OpenAI has started launching an
ad business and they are starting to monetize their free user base through ads. They are largely
an AI consumption business. You either pay for a subscription plan to get access to higher models,
or you're paying for an API plan or you're getting charged on your token usage. They only get paid
based off of how much you're using the models. Meta is getting paid by how much time you spend
scrolling on Facebook and on Instagram.
Therefore, they can use all that ad money to subsidize their ability to roll out a new
AI agent platform.
The result, Meta can afford to subsidize demand while other AI players are forced to rate
limit their users.
And so far, the stock market seems to love it.
Meta's stock is up from $613 a share the day before Muses launch to around $720 a share
today at the time of this recording.
My take from this, never bet against Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuck was getting dunked on three years ago for going all in on the Metaverse.
I mean, he literally changed the name of Facebook to Meta
because the Metaverse is the next big bet.
Everybody's probably seen the picture of the cartoon image of Zuckerberg
in the Metaverse or Horizon Worlds,
or whatever they were calling that platform three years ago.
And there were all the memes going around of,
oh, meta stock has collapsed 80% while Zuckerberg is trying to make the Metaverse a real thing.
The Metaverse didn't really work.
Meta's original VR bets like Oculus and Quest never really worked.
But it doesn't matter.
Zuckerberg keeps going after what he sees is the next big thing.
And when AI became the next big thing in 2022, he didn't hold back.
He bought a big stake in Scale AI.
He made Scale AI's CEO, Alexander Wang, their head of AI.
And over the last year and a half, Meta has aggressively gone all in on building out their own AI platform, training their own open source models.
now launching Muse as their AI agent.
However, as we record this,
META also just announced a new business line
to sell to the enterprise.
They'll sell AI tools, including MUSE,
a coding tool,
and access to its top models
and business-specific agents to different businesses.
Former MongoDB CEO, C.J. Desai will run it,
reporting directly to Mark Zuckerberg.
MongoDB also makes database software
that companies use to store and manage the data behind their apps,
which has been increasingly important as AI usage has exploded.
Zuckerberg's statement says the business will draw on strengths, quote,
few other companies have, models, agents, infrastructure,
and years of relationships with businesses.
As of right now, there are no pricing or operating details yet.
For context, META is spending more than $100 billion on AI infrastructure this year.
In July, META's stock price fell 10% after hours
when Mehta raised the low end of its spending guidance,
investors didn't like Zuckerberg's answers.
Meta's stock prices dropped 4% today at the time of this recording,
but all this goes to show that when Zuckerberg wants to take a big swing,
he's all in, and it's very obvious that the current swing is AI.
But that's enough on the enterprise.
Let's go back to focusing on AI agents and the consumer.
The last few weeks have been the first period in which AI agents
have been released and marketed specifically to the average person.
Several months ago, OpenClawl had a moment,
as did ClaudeCode, Codex, and Cursor.
But all of these were largely AI coding assistants
that were being used by tech insiders,
nerds in Silicon Valley,
and the folks that are terminally online on X.com.
OpenClaw was all the rage back in January and February of this year.
Basically, OpenClawl was this non-lab-associated AI assistant.
But to make OpenClawe work, you had to install it on a separate computer, like a Mac Mini.
You had to download dozens of programs.
There were a lot of formatting issues with having to go into the settings and making sure it had access to your email and this and that.
Users had issues with OpenClawn not actually remembering certain things that they had told it and they had to tweak their databases.
Basically, the normal user or the normal just consumer was not going to spend the hours it took to get OpenClaught set up and actually wired them with all their systems.
and they also weren't going to trust that it wouldn't get hacked.
They wouldn't suffer from a prompt injection,
that it wouldn't accidentally leak their data or buy something that wasn't supposed to.
If you had to spend 10 hours to get your open claw working correctly,
most people just weren't going to do that.
The thing that Muse got right is the onboarding is so, so simple.
Within five minutes, you can have every piece of your life wired into Muse,
and then you can just start asking your questions, and it will do things for you.
Some critics would say, no, I don't want to give Mark Zuckerberg or Muse or Meta access
to all my data. Me personally, I love targeted ads. I don't give a shit about data privacy.
I would much rather Mark Zuckerberg see all my data and send me like better ads, more useful
information through Muse. I would like to think that they can have a much better handle on my
data than say me building my own privacy systems and trying to use open claw or working with another
like YC back startup that can barely spell stock two compliance. One of my hotter takes is I really just
don't care about my personal data that much.
And if I give a much smarter company access to the data
and I get better outputs because of that,
I'm going to do that all day.
And I think most consumers feel pretty similarly
given how much time we spend on Instagram and Facebook.
It's almost like a very boomer mentality
to turn off ad targeting.
Like, I love targeted ads.
So what does this broad proliferation of AI agents
mean for the AI landscape?
For the last three years, AI has always just been code.
LLMs are good at two things,
writing and coding,
because coding is really
just another form of writing.
The way that LLM's work
is just next token prediction.
They make a good guess
on what the next word or letter
or number should be
and keep going from there.
Coding adoption took off
really quickly with AI
because, one,
we have a ton of verifiable training data
needed to train these coding models,
and two, there's a lot of economic upside
in automating coding with AI
because so much of our world
runs on software now.
If you can make coding
faster, better, and more efficient because AI can do it better than humans.
There's a lot of money to be made, and therefore a lot of reasons to invest heavily in AI
coding. That's why we've seen Anthropic double down on CloudCode. That's why we've seen
OpenAI start pushing Codex as their biggest thing rather than ChatGPT. Silicon Valley realized
that coding agents could basically do anything on a computer, and for the last year,
basically since Claude Code got good in Q4, 2025, coding agents were all the rage. What we have not seen
until now, this broad consumer use of AI. Only 3% of Bank of America customers, for example,
were using paid AI services as of February 26. There was a huge divergence in what AI was
capable of doing at the beginning of this year and what the majority of Americans thought AI could do.
Muse is the first real chance for a cutting-edge consumer agent to hit escape velocity. I'd like to note
that Muse is not the first AI agent platform for consumers, a new startup called Instinct,
hit 100,000 users within seven months of entering private beta.
Instinct is an iMessage-based AI agent that can book flights, read your email, send follow-ups
based on your calendar, and it has a bit of a cult following right now, and they're rumored
to be raising more funding at a $10 billion valuation.
Grockbot, which was launched by SpaceX AI cursor, the whole conglomeration of Elon Musk companies
now, hit 418,000 weekly users one month after its August launch.
but Grockbot was geared toward the enterprise.
Instinct has a cult following,
but they don't have the same distribution that meta has.
Muse is smoking both of these apps
with 3.4 million downloads
in its first couple of weeks.
So while Muse wasn't the first consumer agent,
it is the first agent platform
that benefits from both one, broad distribution,
and two,
meta's ability to give it away for free
thanks to its killer ad business.
It's only a matter of time
before more and more of the big tech players,
get involved in the consumer agent battle.
Apple will probably have a consumer agent.
They're partnering with Gemini for the new Siri AI models.
Google should also have their own version of Muse,
considering they have Gmail, they have your calendar, they have Android.
It's actually shocking to me that Google didn't beat Muse the punch on this.
There's also some interesting implications of AI agents
both being commoditized and accessible to the public
in terms of insane spend on compute.
Open AI and Anthropic need to go public now
because the private markets are basically tapped out.
They keep needing to raise more and more money
to buy more and more compute,
to keep servicing more and more customers.
They aren't profitable.
They are in cash burn mode.
They've been raising hundreds of billions of dollars
to continue to subsidize this demand.
They're spending a ton of money
on training frontier models
that quickly become commoditized
as the other model catches up.
You'll see OpenAI published
that they had a new model come out
that breaks all these benchmarks.
Then Anthropic publishes another model
that beats them.
And then you'll have a Chinese model
that's 95% as good for 5% of the price.
So whatever edge that these companies get
with their new model
seems to get fully commoditized
within just a few weeks of launch.
Meta and Google have massive advantages
in that they generate a ton of free cash flow
from their advertising businesses.
When you're making hundreds of billions of dollars
with your main business line,
you can then afford to give away
billions of dollars to compute for free
just to get users to use your AI agent over theirs.
If you're using Muse and it works nonstop,
for you all week and you're using chat GPT and you keep getting rate limited.
Sooner or later, you're just going to choose the AI tool that doesn't break.
One of the more interesting things about the Muse launch is seeing which companies did
partner with Muse and which ones have not yet.
So PayPal, Shopify, Expedia, Stripe, Best Buy, Walmart, Biglin, Instacart, American Eagle,
Dick Sporting Goods, Fanatics, Gap, and Wayfair have all partnered with Muse.
you go on, they have a connector, you can plug it in,
and you can access all those platforms through your accounts.
Amazon, notably, blocked Muse.
A lot of users were using Muse to try to buy stuff on Amazon a couple of weeks ago,
and Amazon went out and blocked Muse to be able to access the platform,
claiming it was violating user-determined conditions.
There was something about, like, safety issues
and making sure data privacy and blah, blah, blah.
It's not a surprise they don't want Muse coming in
and screwing up their advertising business.
And they also have their own opportunity to keep,
building out their own AI agents that have Amazon's inventory, that have user purchase history,
where if your muse is connected to your Amazon and it gets your purchase history, that's a lot of
data where they can better target goods or in agent ads, not even sure what that would look
like yet. But Amazon's big enough, they have leverage, they don't have to partner with
Muse. It's something that is fun to watch is just which companies are very open to agents being on
platform, which companies are absolutely against it. We're about to talk to one of my buddies,
J.C., who had gotten banned from Rezi for having an AI agent try to make a bunch of reservations
of Fort Charles. Meanwhile, OpenTable is integrating with Mews. So nobody actually knows how this
is going to play out, but it will be fun to watch over the next six months, which companies
are very pro-agent being on platform and which ones are trying to block it at all cost.
Here's J.C. Barr de Stefano, a venture capital investor at Better Tomorrow Ventures.
I got recommended to use instinct, and it was this, like, mysterious
kind of like,
aura-filled agent where, like,
nobody really knew what was going on with it.
It had this website that was, like, very, very limited.
And, you know, like, we're VCs,
we're, like, trying to be, like, cutting edge
and use all of these tools when they come out.
So I started using it.
And the first kind of, like, oh, shit moment that I had with it
was I was trying to see my doctor do my annual physical.
And it would have been a year after my last physical would have been in August.
So I called them in July and said,
can I come in in August?
And they said, the next appointment that we have is in January.
And so I just texted instinct with like very, very little prompt or guidance and said,
can you figure out a way to move up my doctor's appointment?
And I swear to God, like 10 minutes later, I got a call from the doctor's office saying,
hey, we saw your request.
Like, we just had a cancellation.
We have an appointment in late September.
Do you want to come in?
And I was like, whoa.
I was like, whoa.
because it was like real world,
it all happened in the background
without me knowing.
And then I figured out
that it like basically figured out
how to get into like my doctor's web portal
because it can pull the OTP
from the email when it's trying to sign in with my Gmail.
So I was like, wow, this is,
this is pretty magical.
Finally, I'm like, okay,
let me give it the ultimate test, right?
Like figuring out how to get a reservation
at a restaurant in New York
that I've always wanted to go to.
Like I was born in New York City.
I've been here most of the time post-college
and I've still never been to Fort Charles.
And like,
this is the OG, right?
Like, this is like people have been writing bots and scripts to try to get
reservations of poor Charles forever.
People have, you know, have been deploying these things and then selling them on
secondary marketplaces.
It's like a whole world in and of itself.
And so I was like, this is the ultimate test.
So I texted it.
And the prompt was literally, because I reviewed it afterwards, just get me a res at
for Charles.
And so then for the next four or five days, it would check in with me.
And it would say, hey, by the time I got in, it was all gone.
Like, I'm going to try again tomorrow.
And a couple days later, I was like,
actually trying to get a reservation to go to dinner with my parents.
And I kept trying to get into my resi account and I couldn't get in.
And I was like, oh, this is weird.
And then I thought about it and I was like, I wonder if Instant did anything and something
happened with my Resi account.
And so I checked my email and like, sure enough, like an hour before I had an email from
resi saying you violated our terms of service.
You've been banned from the platform.
And so I go into Instinct and I ask it.
I was like, what did you actually do to try to like accomplish this task that I gave
you. And it comes back and it's like, oh, I was calling their APIs, you know, multiple hundreds
of times per hour, thousands of times per day over the course of like, you know, one to two weeks.
Like, it was not applying intelligent logic. Like, this is the time of day when cancellations
happen or like I should like put all of my efforts into like when the reservation drops.
Like it was just like paying it constantly nonstop all there. And so I saw that and I was like,
oh, of course I got them. Like that's not, that's not surprising at all. And so I tweeted saying
nice-going instinct. And it was just like a screenshot of the email. And that email ended up
getting like millions and millions of views. And then I also like quote tweeted that with the
like, this is what it actually did to get the reservation. And I think it was it was just very
timely. Right. Like everyone's talking about like if we all have these agents, like what does it
actually look like and feel like? But it is funny seeing like who's leaning into agents and who is
saying like no, like we don't want this. There's a real like bifurcation in the market of like just
consumer interfaces right now.
Yeah.
I mean,
like my observation on it so far is,
is it totally depends on the business model, right?
And like,
I think it was,
it was last week when Muse was just,
like,
banging out,
like,
announcements about new integrations,
right?
They had,
they had Shopify,
they had PayPal,
they had Expedia,
and they had Instacart all,
all in the span of a couple days,
when Amazon also came out and said,
no, you can't do this.
But, like,
if you think about those business models,
right,
like Expedia and Instacart
in particular, like, they don't want to be disintermediated by agents that can go do all of these
things without them being there, right? So, I mean, their incentive surely is, like, if we don't do
this, then the agents can either bypass us or go to booking.com or kayak or DoorDash instead.
And so we have to do this for fear of existential risk run our business model. And then PayPal and
Shopify, they don't care. Like, they make money as long as money flows. So if an agent does it
or a human does it, it doesn't matter. Like, the pie is just going to grow for them. And so they just
to make sure that they're in the transaction flow
and the payment flow,
regardless of who the end user ends up being.
But then you think about like Amazon and Resi,
which have kind of taken a different approach.
It's like, if I own the inventory here,
then what is my, like, I mean,
this is particular issue of Resi,
if I own the inventory, then like,
what is my incentive to do this?
Like, I am only incentivized to do this
if we get to a point where there is so much activity
that economically it makes sense
because I'm going to be able to do more reservations
if I do that.
But until then,
I'm not under the same type of existential threat and risk.
Like, is someone really going to build like an agent-first resi?
Like, I don't think so because that's not the hard part about the business.
The hard part about the business is the relationships with the restaurants and getting them on to the platform.
It's not hard to build a tool that help people do, you know, reservations.
And then Amazon is like, I don't want anyone to do this because, you know, my, like,
$20 billion a quarter in ad revenue.
They need the eyeballs to see the knockoff, like, Chinese slop that goes above the regular stuff.
That's how they made their money.
But, dude, thanks for coming on the show. Good to chat.
And, yeah, dude, keep doing weird shit with your agents.
All right, man. You too.
Sweet. See, JC.
We'll be right back after a quick break.
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One of the last points that's also really funny about the muse launch is OpenAI and Anthropic have been gearing up for their IPOs.
and they are not profitable.
They do make a shit ton of revenue.
And part of the, whether or not it's intentional marketing strategy or they actually believe
this or both, one of the common through lines, particularly from Anthropic, has been,
oh, there's a 10% chance that AI could end civilization, and yet we keep building
AI.
And even Sam Altman, Elon Musk, they've had similar thoughts where they aren't necessarily
being doomsayers, but they are recognizing that there's this like existential risk of
AI and like bio threats and weapons and whatever.
And then META comes out and they make their muse avatar mascot, whatever.
It's this cute little like sloth stuffed animal.
And basically, while everybody else is saying, oh, AI is like this potential society altering
or ending technology, meta is like, oh, look, our cute little stuffed sloth will like shop for
you and help you save money.
and Meta's new chief AI officer, Alexander Wang, co-founder of Scale AI, has just been ripping
memes on X all month long. And they are, like, I actually didn't realize, I don't know if he's
running his account, if he has a really good social media team, but they have just been
absolutely crushing it with the Muse memes. It's not, like, memeability is a very underrated
part of consumer buy-in, where people think thing is cute. It pops off on TikTok and Instagram and
X and whatever, and then all the normies who aren't terminally on Twitter find the thing
and start using it.
So in a period of about two weeks, we've gone from AI agents are used for software engineering
and AI is going to kill everybody to, hey, my mom can find coupons and discount codes
in her inbox by asking the little sloth to like save her some money.
I think the most interesting second order and just longer term effect of Muse and these
AI agents in general is how they impact the annoyance economy.
Groundwork Collaborative has a pretty good definition of the annoyance economy.
Hours spent on hold with customer service or lost in convoluted insurance paperwork,
the relentless pinging of spam calls or political messages warning of doom unless we donate,
the steady creep of extra fees and surprise surcharges on everyday transactions.
We call it the annoyance economy, what we pay in time, fees, and irritation to navigate our daily lives.
Groundwork Collective estimates that the accumulated cost of the annoyance economy,
is around $165 billion a year and lost time and wasted money for American families.
This is everything from being stuck on hold to spending time clicking through endless series of pages to cancel subscription,
to screening spam calls, or trying to change a flight.
Agents are really good to doing all this stuff, and they don't care about getting bored.
So it's a really interesting thought experiment to think about how agents will begin to upend this annoyance economy,
both saving people money by reducing the cost of going after the money we leave on the table to zero,
and potentially eating away at the profit margins of companies that have largely monetized friction and inertia.
A few data points on how Muse has been helping people save money so far.
Mews helped the user find about $730 in Amazon store credit for more than three years ago that was given to the state to hold.
It also found a $272 refund from when this user,
switched from Sprint to another phone carrier and unused gift cards lying in his Yahoo
mailbox.
Another search by the same user identified $800 in closed bank account balances, health
insurance claims, and a potential payout from a class action settlement.
From the Mews' case's X account, quote, somebody gave Mews access to their medical provider
portal and told it to question every line of every bill.
Double charges, mystery fees, discounts no one mentioned.
Over $4,000 found so far.
If you have your Mews or Grockbot or personal ClaudeCode thing you built,
constantly looking at different interest rates and different bank accounts,
where you can then just move from one account to another with Plaid,
you might as well do that,
which means that that could massively impact net interest margin for some of these companies.
Stock market has also taken notice of the Mews and the AI agent impact
on companies' potential profitability.
Goldman Sachs put together a consumer inertia basket
which basically is flagging companies that benefit because customers keep paying, renewing,
booking, or buying out of habit whether or not they're actually using the product.
Last week, that bucket got crushed.
On September 22nd, Planet Fitness was down 9.5%.
LPL Financial was down 7.5%.
The New York Times was down 7.2%.
Schwab was down 6.1%.
And Allstate was down 5.5%.
hilariously a couple of years ago at my last job,
I was working for Sherwood News, media subsidiary at Robin Hood,
and I did a piece on how Planet Fitness,
their entire business only worked because people just didn't go to the gym.
I can't remember the exact numbers on it,
but basically if you took total number of locations,
average occupancy per location,
and hours open, and the total number of members,
they would have had to,
every hour they were open,
be massively over occupancy to, like, service all those people if people went to the gym
three or four times a week. It just didn't make sense. Planet Fitness is a really good business,
or at least it has been a really good business, because a lot of people sign up for a gym membership
out of guilt in, like, January as a New Year's resolution. They never go, and they make it
really easy to sign up, but then you have to, like, send them a letter or show up in person
to cancel it. So nobody wants to get shame for going to cancel their gym membership because
it makes them feel like a loser. Therefore, Planet Fitness keeps getting that subscription revenue.
But if you can have your agent figure out how to mail a letter, or at least just like make it as simple as possible for you to cancel that subscription, you might cancel the subscription.
So this applies across the entire economy.
It seems like the first eugenic platform that could really hit broad distribution of several million users actually using this thing daily or weekly.
And in mass, as more and more of these stories come out about people saving money by using an AI agent, other people are going to think, oh, where am I getting ripped off?
and they're going to want to do the same thing.
So I don't think markets are all that efficient,
given that this is a thing that we kind of saw coming a couple of months ago.
But it is interesting to see companies losing billions of dollars in enterprise value
because of a little cute sloth that's saving people $500 on overcharges by their health insurance.
So to wrap everything up, for three years, AI mostly helped people who write code.
Mews is the first real test of whether or not it can help everyone else just,
live their life, be it your mom, your parking ticket appeal, the gym membership you've been meaning
to cancel for nine months. Whether Meta is the company that pulls this off is a separate question,
but Mews has certainly put AI consumer agents on the map. That's it for this episode. Every week,
we take one big story in tech, money, or markets, and figure out what it means for your life
and your wallet. If there's a story you want us to break down or a money question you can't stop thinking
about, send it to office hours at profgmedia.com. That's office hours at profgmedia.com.
We read everything and your questions mighten up on the show.
