1:12:43My First Million · Talking Head
We Tested Instinct, Muse, and Grokbot
Shaan Puri and Sam Parr compare three AI personal assistants and map out the billion-dollar war breaking out over who controls the buying decision.
September 30thThe argument in one line.
Instinct AI is trying to be the plug-and-play version of OpenClaw's personal AI agent, but Meta's free Muse already ships the same agent, email, and virtual-card features with none of the setup.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You've heard about OpenClaw or 'personal AI agents' and want a plain-English rundown of what they actually do.
- You're curious whether a text-message AI assistant that can email, pay, and schedule for you is worth the setup.
- You want to track which company, Instinct, Meta's Muse, or the OpenAI/Anthropic incumbents, is actually winning the personal-agent race.
SKIP IF…
- You're looking for a hands-on setup tutorial; this is two hosts discussing the space, not a step-by-step walkthrough.
- You already run OpenClaw or Muse day-to-day and know the current feature set; there's no new technical detail here.
The full version, fast.
Instinct AI is reportedly raising a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation for a personal AI agent the hosts call 'OpenClaw for normal people.' OpenClaw is the DIY version: an always-on agent that lives on your own machine, often a dedicated Mac mini, texted through apps like Telegram, with real setup and sandboxing required. Instinct skips that setup and runs through iMessage instead, and gives each agent its own email address so it can book appointments and sign up for things without flooding the owner's inbox. The hosts argue Meta's free assistant Muse, built in part on the acquired startup Manus and now partnered with Stripe for disposable virtual cards, already does most of this with none of the friction.
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00:00 – 00:43
01 · Instinct AI's billion-dollar buzz
The hosts open on reports that Instinct AI is raising a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation, a company most of corporate America has never heard of.
00:43 – 02:04
02 · OpenClaw and the Mac mini craze
Connor frames Instinct as 'OpenClaw for normal people.' OpenClaw is a personal AI agent that runs on your own machine around the clock, which is why people started buying dedicated Mac minis just to sandbox it.
02:04 – 04:01
03 · Why Instinct skips the setup
Unlike OpenClaw, which Connor says took half a day of debugging to configure, Instinct runs on its own server with no setup and is controlled through iMessage.
04:01 – 05:29
04 · A trillion-dollar gap and the agent-email trick
The hosts note that companies like Apple were positioned to ship this and haven't, then highlight Instinct's standout feature: giving each agent its own email address so it can act online without spamming the owner's inbox.
05:29 – 08:24
05 · Testing Meta's Muse
Connor shares hands-on impressions of Meta's Muse, its Stripe-powered disposable virtual cards, and why OpenAI and Anthropic have stayed away from letting agents handle payments directly.
08:24 – 10:30
06 · Why nobody's agent is a work tool yet
The hosts compare early personal-agent use cases to the first weeks of Claude Code, when nobody could think of much beyond cleaning up a desktop, and discuss why Meta can take more safety risk than OpenAI or Anthropic.
10:30 – 12:48
07 · Subsidized agents and Muse's Manus lineage
Jaeden explains why he switched to Claude Cowork instead of setting up OpenClaw, and the two trace Muse's roots back to Manus, the agent startup Meta partially acquired before the deal was unwound.
12:48 – 14:05
08 · Phone calls, guardrails, and the sign-off
Muse's new phone-calling feature draws skepticism, the hosts weigh the privacy and security tradeoffs of agents that call, email, and pay on your behalf, then close with a review ask.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Instinct AI is reportedly raising a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation for a personal AI agent still in invite-only beta.
- OpenClaw is a DIY personal AI agent that lives on your own machine, which is why a wave of users bought Mac minis just to sandbox it.
- Instinct AI skips OpenClaw's setup process entirely and runs through iMessage instead of requiring a dedicated always-on machine.
- Instinct gives each AI agent its own email address, so it can book reservations and sign up for things without flooding the user's personal inbox with spam.
- OpenAI and Anthropic have avoided letting their agents handle payments and phone calls directly because of safety and liability concerns.
- Meta has little to lose by taking safety risks other AI labs won't, since it trails on AI but has billions in cash to spend.
- Meta's assistant Muse partnered with Stripe to issue disposable virtual credit cards an agent can use for a purchase, then freeze to stop future billing.
- Muse traces back to Manus, an AI agent startup Meta partially acquired and then had to unwind after its Beijing-based ownership pulled back.
- Muse is currently free to use, which the hosts say makes it hard for paid competitors like Instinct to win on price alone.
- A virtual card that can be frozen after one purchase solves the common problem of subscriptions that are nearly impossible to cancel.
- Running a personal AI agent only through a browser, not a native app, means it can act on its own server but can't fully control the user's actual computer.
- One host dropped his work-focused AI agent because it couldn't outperform Claude Cowork, but kept his personal agent for scheduling and reminders.
Personal AI agents are still early
AGENT REALITY CHECK
Giving an AI agent its own email, its own virtual card, and permission to act while your computer is off is powerful, but most of today's real use cases are still personal chores, not work.
02OpenClaw and the Mac mini craze
- OpenClaw is a DIY AI agent you run on your own machine, which is why a wave of users bought a dedicated Mac mini just to sandbox it away from their main files.
- A personal AI agent gets broad permissions on whatever device it runs on, so isolating it on separate hardware is a real safety step, not just a flex.
03Why Instinct skips the setup
- OpenClaw reportedly took about half a day of trial-and-error debugging to set up, which is the exact friction a managed competitor like Instinct is selling against.
- An always-on agent that works whether or not your laptop is open, controlled through iMessage instead of a dedicated server, is the core value proposition.
04A trillion-dollar gap and the agent-email trick
- Giving an agent its own email address lets it book, sign up, and negotiate on your behalf without flooding your personal inbox with confirmations and spam.
- Reported demo claims like 'it can use a phone' often mean the agent is sending emails on your behalf, not actually placing voice calls.
05Testing Meta's Muse
- Meta's Muse partnered with Stripe to generate disposable virtual credit cards an agent can use for one purchase, then freeze to block future billing, solving the 'impossible to cancel' subscription problem.
- OpenAI and Anthropic have avoided letting their agents handle payments directly because of safety and liability concerns that Meta appears more willing to accept.
06Why nobody's agent is a work tool yet
- Early personal-agent use cases skew toward chores like scheduling and reminders, not professional work, from both real capability limits and a lack of imagination about what to ask for.
- Meta can absorb more safety risk than OpenAI or Anthropic because it has less AI market share to protect and a much larger cash reserve to spend.
07Subsidized agents and Muse's Manus lineage
- A free, well-funded competitor like Muse makes it hard for a venture-backed paid product like Instinct to win purely on price.
- Meta's Muse incorporates technology from Manus, an AI agent startup Meta partially acquired before the deal was unwound after its Beijing-based ownership pulled back.
Terms worth knowing.
- Instinct AI
- A personal AI assistant company reportedly raising a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation, built to run as an always-on agent without the setup OpenClaw requires.
- OpenClaw
- A do-it-yourself personal AI agent that runs continuously on the owner's own machine, typically controlled by texting it through an app like Telegram.
- Mac mini sandboxing
- Running an AI agent like OpenClaw on a dedicated Mac mini instead of a primary computer, isolating the agent's broad permissions from the owner's main files and accounts.
- Agent email
- A separate email address an AI agent uses to sign up for services and make bookings on the owner's behalf, keeping confirmation emails and spam out of the owner's main inbox.
- Virtual card
- A disposable credit card number, generated by a provider like Stripe, that can be used for a single purchase and then frozen to stop future charges.
- Muse
- Meta's free personal AI assistant, built in part on technology from the acquired-then-unwound startup Manus, that can browse the web, use virtual cards, and now place phone calls.
- Manus
- An AI agent startup, previously known under a different name, that Meta partially acquired before its Beijing-based ownership pulled the deal back.
Things they pointed at.
00:43productInstinct AI
01:06toolOpenClaw
04:19linkWall Street Journal: "The Latest Viral AI Assistant Rocketing Across Silicon Valley"
06:04productMeta's Muse
07:09toolStripe
07:09toolMercury Bank
10:15toolClaude Cowork
12:19productManus
Lines you could clip.
00:48
“Instinct in a nutshell is basically just like OpenClaw for normal people.”
05:30
“It's out on the internet signing up for things and doing things for you, and it's not creating an unlimited amount of email spam and subscriptions that you automatically get added to.”
07:40
“If you really wanted to be an absolute psychopath, you probably could have Claude or ChatGPT co-work approving your Muse purchases so you don't have to approve them.”
11:03
“I was an inch away from buying the Mac mini and didn't.”
13:35
“Zuckerberg is saying push the frontier, do not slow it down.”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogystory
There is a new in the AI industry, and that is Instinct AI, a new company that is going viral. I'm seeing posts about this all over X. Connor has been begging me to talk about it, so he's got a really good inside scoop.
on what Instinct is doing, but I think it just goes to show how fast times can change. This might be a company that a huge percentage of certainly corporate America has never heard of. Maybe it goes viral on X and all of a sudden everyone starts talking about it and using it.
These companies can grow very quickly. So kicking this over to you, Connor, explain to us what Instinct AI is and what their main value proposition is. It's the kind of thing that you wouldn't have necessarily heard of unless you're in this world, Jaden, right?
You kind of people hear like, oh, Instinct. And they just raised, I just want to. kind of grab this number i think it is they're reportedly raising a billion dollars at a 10 billion dollar valuation it's one of those things jayden where you know things you don't even hear about are now valued at 10 billion dollars instinct in a nutshell is basically just like open claw for normal people right so what do we mean by that well when you think about the value of open claw We're in the era of agents here.
The value of OpenClaw is that you don't have to open Clawed code. You don't have to open Codex. OpenClaw lives on your machine and you can just text it right through.
People tend to use Telegram. I use Telegram. People tend to keep it.
This is where the Mac mini craze came because everybody wanted to sandbox it, which means just essentially keeping it away from your stuff because you're essentially giving it all permissions in a way that Codex and Clawed code don't have endless permissions. on your machine, even though it seems like they can do anything that you can do on your computer.
That's not exactly true because there are regulations both set by Apple partially, but also mostly just set by OpenAI and Anthropic themselves. So Instinct is going after this market of a personal always -on assistant. So why do people buy Mac minis?
People buy Mac minis because it's essentially a server, right? So if you think about it, probably most of us work on laptops or maybe desktops at your office. You turn those off at the end of the day or you close your laptop.
The difference with something like OpenClaw and also with new products like Instinct AI is that these things work whether or not your machine is on, and that's a really big deal. So I haven't used Instinct AI because it's invitation only, but I do use OpenClaw. And so, Jade, with OpenClaw, I just text it, right?
And I have two OpenClaw agents. One is for work. One is for personal.
I don't know if you have to go any deeper than that. But essentially, you know, I kind of named them like, you know, Robin is my, as in Batman and Robin is my work one. And Henry is just as in, I like the word Henry.
Name Henry is my personal one. But the thing is, it really requires a certain amount of setup. It requires you to have, it doesn't require, but it's safer for you to have your own kind of sandbox machine for this, et cetera.
But again, the value proposition, Jaden, is that it can just at any time of day or night, you can just say like, hey, help me do this, help me do this, and it'll just do it without anything being open. Okay, so where does instinct come in? Instinct comes in as there's no setup like there is with OpenClaw.
OpenClaw probably took me half a day to... really set up i was you know debugging it and what do i know about debugging i was just sort of doing what claude was telling me to do so it was a real setup process it can break it's it's a little weird i have to have my own machine for it etc what they say about instinct is it's all those things but it lives it has its own you know server it lives on but it's also integrated into imessage which is pretty cool so you can just kind of text it through imessage So the things people are doing, and by the way, I don't want to get carried away with demos here, Jayden.
I don't know about you, but I'm a little bit tired of these demos, but it's like it can negotiate Comcast bills for you, and it can sort of like book haircutting appointments, and it says it can use a phone. Guys, it can't really use a phone. What it does is essentially emails, which is, again, what OpenClaw does, right?
It's like, hey, can you email the hair salon and make me an appointment? And it will do all those things, right? So I'm trying to draw a distinction here because everybody sort of like went through this OpenClaw phase, but most people didn't actually get OpenClaw.
Well, Instinct is the answer to that. This is sort of like the reason why it's now at a $10 billion valuation reportedly is because the people that should be doing this are like Apple. Do you know what I mean?
And yet they just can't. We all think AI is easy. AI is not easy.
It's the reason why Google has sort of fallen behind a little bit. It's why OpenAI and Anthropic tend to be ahead a little bit. This is not easy.
So Meta has launched Muse, which is sort of something similar. You can kind of do the same thing a little bit with Dispatch, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, I'll stop there, Jayden, but I just want to sort of like.
The reason I wanted to kind of like highlight this and spend a little time explaining it is because we really do know that this is kind of a future, something you can just text. It will feel very, very human, but how useful is it for people? I'm not sure.
Okay. So, so many different thoughts. The first thing that I like about it is a feature they did just announce.
And I think it's creative that I haven't seen anyone else do it. So I'm going to give them some flowers for this. That is that they created in agent email, meaning your quote unquote.
Agent has its own email. And if you say, hey, go get me a reservation at this restaurant, it's going to, it has its own email. It's going to.
set up the reservation with his own email and it will forward you the reservation to your email, presumably. But I actually really love this because as it's out on the internet signing up for things and doing things for you, it's not creating an unlimited amount of email spam and subscriptions that you automatically get added to.
That's just a pain. So I actually freaking love that feature. It's like, go do everything for me on the internet and use your own email for it.
Don't bogged down my inbox. Okay.
So that's one thing that I think they really crushed it on. What a lot of people are talking about is the payment processing, being able to give these agents an actual credit card to go and buy things. And of course you have to approve stuff.
And so I think this is the direction that they're moving in. But with all that being said, you mentioned something which was Meta's Muse that came out. And I don't know, have you tested Muse yet?
I haven't tested it. I haven't tested that or Grokbot, which, by the way, is also similar. Yes.
So, yeah. Yes. So I've been playing with Muse for the last all day yesterday, basically.
And I'm going to be honest, as someone who has basically written off meta as slow and I would never use meta AI unless, you know, someone said they were going to stick a fork in my leg if I didn't. I love Muse. Muse is an incredible tool.
It's an amazing product. It works so well. I have some qualms with it.
So I would say the absolute quote unquote frontier is still going to be Claude cowork and chat GPT work because they have desktop apps. And I actually think I saw that Muse has a desktop app or something. I couldn't figure out how to, how to get it working.
So maybe that's, maybe that was just me. So I was just using on the, on the browser, on the browser, the drawback was. That it was just running it on its own server and its own browser.
So it wasn't actually controlling my computer. I probably have to figure out how to get the app. Otherwise, it was doing everything that Cloud Code and ChachiBT work could do.
So I, you know, right off the bat, I'm like, okay, this is impressive. The biggest thing that Muse has done that I have not seen anyone successfully accomplish is that Muse made a partnership with Stripe to have basically like, there's a lot of businesses and business credit cards that will do this where they'll spin up like virtual.
credit cards basically for you so like i have mercury bank for some of my businesses and mercury is really good you just click a button it spits up a virtual card i can go use it for one purchase of a thing i don't know if you've ever had the experience where you subscribe to a subscription and it's like impossible to cancel and it's just a ginormous headache well if you have a virtual card you could just freeze the card and it's done they can't ever bill you again so i like that concept they brought this into muse and your agent you can actually go tell it to do things it can go buy things And you can approve them, but like it can go do all the purchasing for you, which Anthropic and OpenAI both shied away from is like, oh, that's like dangerous or scary.
They're just jumping in as like, well, there's probably some useful things and you can approve it all if you want. I mean, I'm sure there's like, if you really wanted to be an absolute psychopath, you probably. Could have Claude or ChatGPT co -work approving like your Muse purchases so you don't have to approve them.
I probably wouldn't want to, but like you could have agents work. Like basically the structure is there where these tools can actually go buy things for you. So all this being said, that's a really cool company.
But I think Muse is also stealing a lot of the thunder here. It's a really, really useful product. Yeah, it's so okay.
So this is where I want to now get into the applied version of AI applied because. I mean, I'll be honest. These things are very, very cool.
And the demos are amazing. And people freak out. And OpenAI essentially bought OpenClaw in as much as you can, right?
I mean, they brought Peter Steinberg, I think, or something like that, like, on board. So obviously, they're trying to meet the moment here. I don't think, you know, OpenAI really has this product yet.
But also, there's huge, as you were sort of alluding to, huge safety concerns with all of these products, right? Absolutely huge. And that's why generally, you know, OpenAI and Anthropic doesn't touch it.
They just have too much to lose. I don't know if you'd agree with this, Jayden. I feel like Meta just doesn't have anything to lose.
They have, you know, a trillion dollars in the bank account. They're way behind on AI. They just need to take a few, you know, moonshots.
No pun intended with the Chinese company Moonshot. But Jayden, the thing about... instinct for example is that it's pretty clearly not a work thing right i mean like it's really for personal it's really for hey you know again but it sort of reminds me of the early days of clogged co -work where people say like well what can co -work do and everybody's like well it can clean up your desktop Like, what do you mean?
Well, you know how you have all these files on your desktop, but it'll clean it up. It's like, great, what can it do? It's like, well, did we mention it can clean up your desktop, right?
It's one of these things where just for the first weeks, it's the only thing people could think of to have it do, partially because of capability, partially because of lack of imagination, partially because of safety concerns. And I feel like we are in that moment with instinct as well. People see the possibilities, how we're doing, by the way, the monetization.
I don't know what they're doing. They don't want to charge for it. So good luck, everybody out there.
I don't know what, this is another one of these. ridiculous valuations based on, I don't want to say nothing. It's frustrating.
But Jaden, the thing about instinct is it's really supposed to be personal. And to a certain extent, I have that. So I will just tell you my own personal thing.
And I know we're sort of like closing out the episode here, but like when I use OpenClaw, I started off using my work one, like Robin, who is tied into all my work stuff. And I really stopped because it was. It was not as good as Cloud Code.
It was not as good as Cowork. It was not as good as Codex, everything like that. And I didn't necessarily need to do tons of work while I was, you know, on a run or something like that.
I'd rather sit at my laptop. Whereas Henry, which is my open cloud agent that does personal stuff, I use all the time. Hey, this is like, I need to book a flight for this.
I need to look at this. Hey, I'm just going to screenshot my mom's flight coming in. Can you remember this?
Cause I'm going to need it. Hey, this is where Finn, my son Finn has to get his cast off. Can you remember where this is and when this, do you know what I mean?
Like it really is just like, Hey thing, remember this and then help me out any discrepancies. It's like, Hey Connor, you booked it for that time, but you said you're going at this time. I'm like, Oh my gosh.
So personally, I think it's super useful to work product here. I just don't see the huge application. Maybe other people do.
I'd rather sit at my desk and do work, but that's how that's been my experience on this. stuff yeah i totally agree i never got into the open claw i tried setting it up and as i was in the process of pulling my hair out i got a notification on my phone that anthropic dropped claude co -work and i was off to the races from that point on so i feel bad i was an inch away from buying the mac mini and didn't that being said i feel like a lot of these programs are just running on your computer basically killed that in a way i like the open source and people in the open source community i know get mad about it but this subsidized The subsidized programs are just so impossible to beat.
Last thing I'll say about Muse is that it is currently, I mean, it's basically free to use and to run. You get way more usage out of it than OpenAI and Anthropic. I mean, I think Meta, they have a lot of money and they just want to get users.
So you can use Muse for free. It's freaking awesome, especially after, you know, Meta went and purchased that company out of Singapore, if you remember the name. Yeah, it's true.
The logo is a snapping finger. Guys, we'll figure this out. Hold on.
Go on. Yeah. Anyways, the old name of the company before they changed it was something like Red Butterfly.
But anyways, Manus, Manus. Okay. So I think this is where essentially Manus, Beijing pulled it back from Meta and made them unwind the whole acquisition.
And I think they said, that's fine. We learned everything we needed to. And Muse is Manus plus plus.
And it basically has all the features. So I think Meta is not going to lose here. I think they're going to win.
We have a lot of people saying that. A lot of the use cases. Oh, the coolest feature that Muse added is I'm now becoming like a Muse fanatic.
They added phone calling, Connor. So you can tell Muse to go call your insurance company and negotiate your rates for you. Okay, wait.
This is what Instinct says as well. And I went really deep on this. And I could not find anybody who had to actually make a phone.
What is it? Jayden, there's no way it's going to do that. There's no way.
It's going to do it, Connor. So I've actually also seen a bunch of people. I saw some people that said they renegotiated their internet bill and brought it down hundreds of dollars.
I saw some people saying they used Muse to go renegotiate their car insurance, switching from Geico to State Farm. I've done that with Claude Code extension, the extension in the browser, to have them work with chatbots. But a phone call?
I'll find it for you. We'll cover it inevitably. I'll test it out this week.
I'll let you know if we're actually able to do this. But I mean, essentially, this is what the pipeline is. Phone calls, emails, credit cards.
I mean, basically, they have to be open AI and anthropic. And this is the way that they're trying to do it. They're trading some of that privacy and security, which some people are concerned about.
But if they have good guardrails on it, it should be good. Zuckerberg is saying, push the frontier, do not slow it down. So he's on the acceleration route.
I think Muse is going to get pretty cracked if I'm being honest. All right, guys, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, guys.
We just passed 200 reviews. So I'm not going to ask you to leave a rating review because we did that for like an entire month up to the 200 reviews. But I will say I appreciate it.
If you do drop a review to get us to 250, we will not complain. It would help the show out a ton. But anyways, hope you guys all have a fantastic rest of your day.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Two AI podcast hosts open with word that Instinct AI is reportedly raising a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation, then spend the rest of the episode arguing over whether a text-message AI agent is actually useful yet, or whether Meta's free Muse already beat it to the punch.
Named ideas worth stealing.
05:29concept
The personal-agent stack: DIY, managed, subsidized
- OpenClaw: DIY, self-hosted, controlled via Telegram
- Instinct AI: managed, invite-only, controlled via iMessage
- Meta's Muse: subsidized, free, browser-based
The hosts implicitly rank three competing approaches to a personal AI agent by how much setup they demand and who's paying for the compute.
Steal forExplaining why a free, well-funded entrant like Muse can undercut a venture-backed startup like Instinct on price alone.
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
13:48subscribe
“We just passed 200 reviews... if you do drop a review to get us to 250, we will not complain.”
A soft, low-pressure ask tied to a specific numeric goal rather than a hard sell.
Visual structure at a glance.
