Apple Folds & Meta Muses

Travis Hoium (0:02)

Apple has this duo, and we have a trio. Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now.

Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm Travis Hoium. Joined with my trio of Lou Whiteman and Jason Hall. Guys, we have a lot to talk about here, but I do want to start with what I think might be the underrated biggest news of the day. Maybe this is our tech bubble, maybe this is the investing bubble. But Jason, Meta came out with its Muse app. Have you tried this yet?

Jason Hall (0:35)

I haven't tried it, but I've read through their copious marketing materials in the demo videos and things that they've put together for it. On the surface, and it's funny, right? Because the big thing we're talking about physically, foreshadowing will be the next segment. But I do think this is by far the best packaged AI agent that we've seen for consumers. But we really don't know how well it's going to work in the real world for regular people once we get beyond the initial early adopters, the tech folks that have been involved in building it, that have been using it in their real lives.

I think we can all relate to wanting a personal assistant to helping making our lives easier. But there also seems to be a risk that this thing is actually going to throw more noise at people in the beginning. And the question is, is there going to be enough emotional payback for people to stick with it long enough to actually deliver the promise of making life easier?

Travis Hoium (1:31)

Well, let's get to what this app does. So this is another artificial intelligence app. I know I was almost rolling my eyes when this came out because we have so many now.

There's Gemini from Google, we got Claude, we've got ChatGPT. And to be fair, a lot of the functionality in this Muse app exists elsewhere. It's just kind of hard to use. So the interesting thing, and I downloaded it, I started playing with it a little bit. What was fascinating was it was very Apple-like. And I think you were kind of alluding to that, Jason, but I hooked in, I have a little, we need to talk a little bit about the privacy concerns and frosting Meta with all of your information. But what I thought was interesting plugging in just my calendar and email is, you can just go, hey, I asked to add the schedule for my kids' baseball game. And it figured it all out and it was perfect. And that is one of those massive pain points.

As a parent, as a person in the world, I get so many emails, where's that one that has the schedule for this thing? And it does just kind of figure it out. So it almost seems like, first of all, it's Meta taking a page out of Apple's book. And that's partly from the people who they hired about a year ago. Nat Friedman, I think, was one of the people who's really instrumental in this app in particular. But also, it seems like our digital lives have gotten far more cluttered over the past decade. So many emails, so many text messages. And this is almost like the decluttering of that. So maybe that's the bullish case for AI use case, at least in a consumer standpoint.

Jason Hall (3:04)

You mentioned kids' sports, and I think you might have sold me, Travis. I have three different apps that I use for my son, just one kid for his sports.

Travis Hoium (3:16)

And not to mention schools. Well, schools are on 18 different, I mean, it is a mess.

Jason Hall (3:21)

There's band, and then there's math club, and it's so much to handle. So if it's something that can start filtering those things down, it could be maybe a surprising success. Lou?

Lou Whiteman (3:31)

It just requires work. And I don't mean that to be lazy, but the fine thing about enterprises is, if you can go into an enterprise and say, we can save you two cents on a dollar, you're halfway towards a sale, and they will do the work to put it in, because it's a long time savings. Consumers aren't like that. Consumers are, any barrier to entry is too much.

Travis, you're kind of whistled by the trust issues, but this is Meta we're talking about, okay?

Travis Hoium (3:57)

It's a big one.

Lou Whiteman (3:58)

Yeah, this is a quite, so you're asking me, and especially with all the headlines right now, you're asking me, can go ahead and sign over my email account, sign over my calendar, sign over all of these things to a company that, you know, the trend over the last 10 years is, do they know too much about me already? I, you know, even if it wasn't Meta, that's still work I have to do.