· Alexandr Wang, David Senra
[00:00:00] S1: Yeah, no, this is actually one of the things about... I don't know how int- it was like somewhat intentional, but definitely modern product marketing is very screenshot-driven. I think to have a modern consumer product, it has to work on the screenshot. The screenshot has to fly, so to speak, either through group chats or word of mouth or online. And I think that's been a big part of it. This wasn't intentional or engineered, but I think the fact that we had the little guy in the screenshot was a big deal. Because I think having Jolly or whoever your Muse is in the screenshot immediately communicates this is a Muse screenshot. It's just like the best marketing you could possibly have. [00:00:00] S0: So are you on your Muse all day long? What is your own personal usage? [00:00:00] S1: I mostly set up a lot of workflows using it, and then I guess my meetings a lot of the time. So in practice, I think in my job, quote-unquote, I'm supposed to pay attention and be pretty present and interact with people. I set up a bunch of workflows and kind of treat it as like a second brain. [00:00:00] S0: Yeah, you said that in the post that you wrote, and it was really short, and I think I saw last time it was five and a half million views so far. But you said, I love how you described Muse, like, "Well, if everyone had a second mind beyond their own."
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: Yeah, you said that in the post that you wrote, and it was really short, and I think I saw last time it was five and a half million views so far. But you said, I love how you described Muse, like, "Well, if everyone had a second mind beyond their own." [00:00:00] S1: I think this is, philosophically speaking, one of the most interesting questions about what does it mean to be human when you have powerful AI, and what is that relationship like, and how exactly does that look? And different people have different takes on what exactly that looks like. I think the sort of fear case is obviously that AI is above us and that we're just sort of doing what they do, and there's other worlds where that relationship is different. [00:00:00] S0: Before you go on, what is your own personal view of that?
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: Before you go on, what is your own personal view of that? [00:00:00] S1: I really believe in Muse. I believe in the personal agent as a long-term form factor of just it is human nature to have wants and desires and dreams. And I think AI and personal agents like Muse will be the mechanism and the bridge that enables us to accomplish those things and continue accomplishing them. And then humans will dream bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Kids will dream of having their own star systems or whatever, and Muse will help them do that. There's this thing that Bezos wrote in, well, I think it was one of his shareholder letters, which is the beautiful thing about consumers is that they're always beautifully unhappy or something like that, or beautifully unsatisfied with the options they have. That is one modality of our relationship with AI. I think that there's other modalities. I think that AI will start doing more and more of the scientific discovery process. I think AIs will start inserting more and more into various parts of the economy. But I do believe in this form factor long term of everyone having an AI that supports them and what they want. [00:00:00] S0: So you see AI as kind of removing all the kludge of life, right? The stuff that we don't want to do. I think in the piece you said something like, "The world is full of gatekeepers and obstacles, and Muse can get around this for you without spending any more of your time so you can actually focus on stuff you want to do."
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: So you see AI as kind of removing all the kludge of life, right? The stuff that we don't want to do. I think in the piece you said something like, "The world is full of gatekeepers and obstacles, and Muse can get around this for you without spending any more of your time so you can actually focus on stuff you want to do." [00:00:00] S1: I think Muse can give everyone the adulthood they dreamed of in childhood. Everyone, when they're kids, they have big ideas and big dreams. And when they imagine their life and they sort of play it out, they imagine this life where they can be an astronaut or they can save the planet or they can change the world or whatever it might be. They think big. And then for a variety of reasons, by the time people finish school, they enter the workforce, by the time they have been in a job for a while, it's that all that hope and ambition and ability to dream has been sucked out of them. [00:00:00] S0: No, it's been beaten out of them. Life has beaten out of them.
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: No, it's been beaten out of them. Life has beaten out of them. [00:00:00] S1: I think as adults, I don't think we just appreciate the degree to which we're all zombies. We lost our agency and we lost our... I think ambition is really a good word for it. One of the promises of AI, broadly speaking, and I think through products like Muse, is to keep it going from when you're a kid. You're a kid, you have big dreams. Use AI, help make those things happen. Then dream bigger, make those things happen. Dream bigger, make those things happen. And kind of experience this escalator of agency, an increase in agency throughout your life, versus a sort of you have lots of agency and then it gets crushed. [00:00:00] S0: You know what I was thinking of when you were speaking just now? You mentioned earlier this experience that you and Nat Friedman went through where you had this disturbing psychological audit coming in waves from this AI. It's like, yeah, what if we had that, but it's the opposite of what you're saying. It actually gave you more self-confidence, gave you understanding the world is malleable, and if you push on it hard enough, you go after it with enough energy and drive, you can actually change it around you.
· David Senra, Alexandr Wang
[00:00:00] S0: You know what I was thinking of when you were speaking just now? You mentioned earlier this experience that you and Nat Friedman went through where you had this disturbing psychological audit coming in waves from this AI. It's like, yeah, what if we had that, but it's the opposite of what you're saying. It actually gave you more self-confidence, gave you understanding the world is malleable, and if you push on it hard enough, you go after it with enough energy and drive, you can actually change it around you. [00:00:00] S1: Yeah, I think this is something that certainly the most impressive entrepreneurs exhibit, which is I think they dream big, they accomplish that, then they dream bigger. And then maybe they work on that for, like, a decade, but then if they accomplish that, then they dream bigger. Like, Elon is obviously a great example of this. I think Mark is a great example of this. But I think a lot of the iconic entrepreneurs, this is kind of like their lived experience, and I think there's a version of that that should be true for every person. And I think what's kind of tragic is, I think for most people, you have bigger dreams, big ideas, you enter the corporate workforce, you kind of become a zombie. Maybe at some point you want to go tackle your dreams, but then it's really, really hard because you have all these commitments. You maybe have a family, maybe have whatever it is. It's almost you become trapped in this sort of zombiehood.