Can Meta's Muse AI Agent Save You Money?

A 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 assistant, 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 [email protected], or leave us a text/voicemail at (201) 472-3656‬. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:00Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Scott, and I want to introduce you to the new show from Prof G 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.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  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 spending hours 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

• 3:08Speaker 02

  addicted to X. Muse has actually abstracted away all the complicated setup steps, giving users a "do 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 that and simply ask an assistant to get something done for them. If that bet proves to be correct, it will change how we spend our time and our money.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  I'm Jack Rains, 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 God to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties. In this show, we take a big story in tech or money and ask what it means for your life and your wallet.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  So let's get into it. What exactly is Muse? Per Meta's launch announcement a few weeks ago, Muse 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 Meta officially announced the Muse launch on September 8th, and in the last three weeks or so, Muse has had an estimated 3.4 million downloads and over 76,000 ratings on the App Store. For context, ChatGPT, which is still the biggest consumer AI app, has about 11 million ratings, and Claude, Anthropic's AI app, is at around 270,000 ratings.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  So most of the consumer applications for AI so far have been a chatbot. You open ChatGPT, 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

• 5:28Speaker 02

  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 Muse 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.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  You can connect your Spotify, even Peloton and OpenTable, and, most importantly, Platte 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 Muse, so Muse can see all of your data and it can interact with all of your accounts. But the most interesting thing about Muse to me is that they're giving all this away for free. ChatGPT has a free plan, sure, but it uses 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,

• 6:55Speaker 02

  you can pay $100 a month for 3 billion tokens per week. But, you know, reading 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 ChatGPT, I've hit 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, OpenAI, 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.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Something that Meta has that OpenAI and Anthropic don't have is Meta is a massive advertising business. In 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're 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.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Meta is getting paid by how much time you spend scrolling on Facebook, not 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 Muse's 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.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  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's 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 as 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

• 9:46Speaker 02

  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 CJ 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

• 10:27Speaker 02

  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 Meta raised the low end of its spending guidance, and investors didn't like Zuckerberg's answers. Meta's stock price has 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.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  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, OpenClaw had a moment, as did Claude Code, 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, OpenClaw was this non-lab-associated AI assistant. But to make OpenClaw work, you had to install it on a separate computer, like a Mac Mini.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  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 OpenClaw 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 OpenClaw set up and actually wired it 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 OpenClaw working correctly, most people just weren't going to do that. The thing that Muse got right is the onboarding is so, so simple.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Within five minutes, you can have every piece of your life wired into Muse and then you can just start asking it questions and it'll 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 OpenClaw or working with another like YC-backed startup that can barely spell SOC 2 compliance. One of my hotter takes is I really just don't care about my personal data that much.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  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 LLMs 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.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  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 Claude Code. 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.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  What we have not seen until now is broad consumer use of AI. Only 3% of Bank of America customers, for example, were using paid AI services as of February 2026. 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 had 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.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  And they're rumored to be raising more funding at a $10 billion valuation. Grokbot, 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 Grokbot 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.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  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. OpenAI 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.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  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 publish 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 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 of compute for free just to get users

• 17:35Speaker 02

  to use your AI agent over theirs. If you're using Muse and it works nonstop for you all week and you're using ChatGPT 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, big one, Instacart, American Eagle, Dick's 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 of those platforms through your accounts. Amazon notably blocked Muse.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  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 from being able to access the platform, claiming it was violating user term and conditions. There was something about like safety issues and making sure data privacy and blah, blah, blah. Like, 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

• 19:05Speaker 02

  on platform, which companies are absolutely against it. We're about to talk to one of my buddies, JC, who had gotten banned from Resy for having an AI agent try to make a bunch of reservations at Four Charles. Meanwhile, OpenTable is integrating with Muse. So nobody actually knows how this is going to play out, but it'll 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 costs. Here's JC Barr de Stefano, a venture capital investor at Better Tomorrow Ventures.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  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

• 20:22Speaker 03

  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, 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

• 21:04Speaker 03

  to go to. Like, I was born and raised in New York City. I've been here most of the time post college, and I've still never been to Four Charles. And like, this is the OG, right? Like, this is like, people have been writing bots and scripts to try to get reservations at Four Charles forever. People have just, 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 Four 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 of 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,

• 21:46Speaker 03

  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 Instinct 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

• 22:28Speaker 03

  reservation drops, like, it was just like paying it constantly, nonstop, all day. And so I saw that and I was like, oh, of course I got banned. 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, like, like millions and millions of views. And then I also like, 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?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, like, my observation 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 of 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

• 23:54Speaker 03

  for fear of existential risk on 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 need to make sure that they're in the transaction flow and the payment flow, regardless of who, 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 particularly for 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, the same type of existential

• 24:38Speaker 03

  threat and risk. Like, is someone really going to build like an agent-first resi? Like, I, I, 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 onto the platform. It's not, it's not hard to build a tool that helps people do, you know, reservations. And then Amazon is like, I don't want anyone to do this because, you know, my like,

• 24:56Speaker 02

  They do like $20 billion a quarter in ad revenue. They need the eyeballs. Yeah, they need the eyeballs to see the knockoff like Chinese slot that goes above the regular stuff. And that's, that's how they make their money. But dude, thanks for coming on the show. Good to chat. And, um, yeah, dude, keep doing weird shit with your agents.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  All right, man. You too.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Sweet. See you, JC.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  We'll be right back after a quick break.

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• 28:41Speaker 02

  We're back. 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 is this existential risk of AI and bio threats and weapons and whatever. And then Meta comes out and they make

• 29:24Speaker 02

  their Muse avatar mascot, whatever. It's this cute little 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 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 like, meme-ability is a very underrated part of consumer buy-in, where people think thing is

• 30:08Speaker 02

  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 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

• 30:49Speaker 02

  ping 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 in 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 at doing all this stuff, and they don't care about getting bored. So it's a really interesting thought

• 31:31Speaker 02

  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. Muse helped the user find about $730 in Amazon Store credit from 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

• 32:15Speaker 02

  bank account balances, health insurance claims, and a potential payout from a class action settlement. From the Muse cases X account, quote, "Somebody gave Muse 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 Muse or Grok Bot or personal Claude code thing you built, constantly looking at different interest rates in 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. The stock market has also taken notice of

• 32:57Speaker 02

  the Muse 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, a 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 Robinhood, and I

• 33:41Speaker 02

  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 opened, and then total number of members, they would have had to, every hour they were open, be massively over occupancy to 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 January as a New Year's resolution. They never go, and they make it really easy to sign up, but then you have to send them a letter or show up in person to cancel it. So, nobody wants to get shamed for going to cancel their gym

• 34:25Speaker 02

  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 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 agentic platform that could really hit broad distribution of several million users actually using this thing daily or weekly. And en masse, 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

• 35:07Speaker 02

  losing billions of dollars in enterprise value because of a little cute sloth that's saving people $500 on overcharges by their health insurance.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  So, to wrap everything up, for three years, AI mostly helped people who write code. Muse 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 Muse 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 [email protected]. That's

• 36:00Speaker 02

  [email protected]. We read everything, and your questions might end up on the show.

• 36:19Speaker 05

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com/AppleWatchSeries12.

• 36:49Speaker 01

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