A (0:00)

Foreign I'm Dan Runcy and you're listening to Trapital. We got a fun one for you today. Payment plans at Coachella, 2B's, long game, metaverse, the FTC, Lucian Grange, and how I use AI at Trapital. This is our Trapital mailbag episode. We haven't done one in a while, so excited to dive in. But we're going to do things a little bit differently in this episode. Most of the time the mailbags come straight from the listeners. Today we got a bit of a mix. Some from the listeners, some from the AI tools which I'll tell you more about, and some that are just plain questions that I had myself that didn't quite fit one of our upcoming episodes, but I really wanted to talk more about them with you. But before we get into it, I do have a request. If you get value out of listening to Trapital, then please tap that star button and give us a follow on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or follow us on YouTube, overcast or wherever you listen to the show. Let's dive in. So first we gotta talk about Coachella the Payment Plan Debate A few days before the festival, Dave Brooks from Billboard released an article that shared the stat that 60% of the general admission attendees from this year's Coachella 2025 purchase their tickets with the payment plan auction. These attendees paid a $41 fee for the opportunity to spread their ticket cost over several months. On the surface, this is something that helps consumers spread out the cost and not pay the roughly $600 fee to attend Coachella for their three day pass up front. And on the festival side, the payment plan is a way to get more people in the door that you may not otherwise get, which is especially important to Coachella and other music festivals, which have not only declined in demand, but have had a challenge with getting the biggest superstars to play and perform at the festival. It's hard to convince a superstar artist whose stadium tour at Sofi stadium can gross $15 million in one night to instead headline Coachella where they get $5 million per weekend for a 10 million dollar fee total. But you and I have talked about that before. Let's get back to the payment plan. I shared my thoughts about this on LinkedIn, which led to a ton of messages. I love the dialogue and I love how many people have strong opinions about this and I stand by mine. And for the sake of this, it's probably easiest if I just read you directly what I wrote and shared on LinkedIn. 60% of Coachella attendees opted for payment plans this year. It's noteworthy, but people have made this into a bigger deal than it should be. I've noticed a narrative around the statistic. Many commenters see this as a troubling sign festival goers going into debt just to experience Coachella. They frame it as a symptom of our struggling economy, skyrocketing entertainment costs, financial desperation among young consumers, and more. But is this really that different than other forms of commerce? When booking hotels, I often choose to pay later for flexibility, even if the price is higher for flights I booked, refundable flight options, or premium booking tiers that cost more but provide peace of mind if my plans change. And I know I'm not unique. Coachella's payment Plan is a $41 fee to spread payments across three dates before the festival for a ticket that cost around $600. Let's not act like it's a predatory payday loan. I'm not saying there aren't some that are going into debt to attend festivals, but it's too sweeping to assume that this applies to Most of the 60% of attendees who chose this option. What's your take? Do you see festival payment plans as financial flexibility or an economic warning sign? Have you used payment plans for purchases like this? One important thing to note is that this is not the first year that Golden Voice or Coachella has had payment plans. The first year that we have reported data on this publicly is from 2009, and that's when 18% of users chose to do this plan. Now, 60% is clearly a lot more than 18%, but that was also 16 years ago, so it's hard to compare this in apples to apples. Way to really try to make a connection between the current economic times that we're in right now and as opposed to what the number might have been in 2022, 2018, 2014 or so on. Additionally now and Pay later concepts are everywhere. We've seen the rise of Klarna. It's one of the largest unicorns in Europe. Look at StubHub. There are plenty of financing options on StubHub. Look at Amex. They have a Planet option as well. Buy now, Pay later is everywhere. Layaway for concerts, festivals, big events has been an option for a while. Sure, it may seem like it's growing in popularity, but this is nothing new. Sure, music festivals themselves from an optics perspective, may seem like they're having a little bit of a turbulent time, but it's important to not just look at the headlines and really look at what's happening Overall, yes, there was a massive boom of music festivals in the 2010s, but just because supply exceeded demand, and now there's a lot of festivals that have since declined or shut their doors, has anyone actually looked to see, okay, but net net, are there more music festivals today still in 2025, despite the decline, than there were in 2015? So it is very important to keep all that context, especially when live music has become an even more important revenue stream for artists and musicians than it was 10 years ago, and the demand for these events has continued to increase. It's important to make sure that the headlines are not taking away from what may actually be happening here. The other thing that is really hard to do with the data is when we look at this 60% of people that are using these payment plans. It's hard to make a true judgment on these people unless you can really understand two things. One, are these new people that didn't attend Coachella or festivals like this, let's say five, 10 years ago, that are now in financial trouble and need to use payment plans in order to attend? Or are there people that wouldn't otherwise have attended or didn't attend in the past that are now using a payment plan? Again, these are tough questions to answer, but they're important questions to get at before we just make broad, sweeping assumptions based on what the narrative is. While I haven't looked at all the data, there's a few signs that point to me that demand for these events is still high. And if anything, it may just be attracting more people that weren't able to go to these events before. Plus, with the heightened impact and the increase of Instagram and social media and people wanting to be seen at these events. That's why the ticket prices for so many of these things are higher. Because. But all that to say these are signs that demand is increasing for these concerts. People are willing to pay more, but there's also people that are willing to pay those prices if they can stagger those payments. Both things can be true. There might be some people that may be going into debt when they shouldn't be. But also there may be people taking advantage of the financing options that are there. And when it comes down to a pure economic scenario, if you give me the opportunity to pay for something today versus paying for something several months from now, even if there might be a small fee attached to it, a lot of people will pick paying for something several months from now because a dollar tomorrow is worth less than a dollar today. Next, let's talk about Tubi. The question about Tubi is this. Where does this company's long term strategy fit in a world where competing in video means competing against YouTube, Netflix, TikTok, Meta, and maybe even Fox itself? With some of the future plans that Fox has in video now, some high level numbers at the beginning of 2025, Tubi announced that it had 97 million monthly active users. In 2024, the company grew its viewing time overall by 57% compared to 2023 and its ad revenue by $31 million. Certain estimates put its 2024 revenue right around $900 million and the company expects to surpass $1 billion in revenue and in fiscal year 2025. It's been a strong past few months as well. Looking at Tubi's platform, they had a free simulcast for the super bowl which fit timely because this was Fox's year to be able to show the super bowl because it takes turns with CBS, NBC, ABC. Plus Tubi also had some strong advertising spending right around the 2024 election. And with all of the scandals that pop up every time I open Tubi, there's some new documentary that's released by TMZ that's about the latest in the Diddy scandal or some other crash out celebrity story. From a personal perspective, one of the things that I do like most about Tubi is that it brings me back. There's a nostalgia trip of going to Walmart or going to Target in the early 2000s and mining through the DVD case. Not the ones that are at the front that are on sale for $20 or $24.99. I'm talking about the $5 bargain bin where you could find some classics in there. Not Godfather Part one and Part two classics, but I'm talking like next Friday and Friday after next and the original Friday classics in there. One of the things that's been clear about 2B's strategy is leaning into black audiences, black voices and black creators as well. It's given a platform to a lot of these shows that may not exist elsewhere. It's given platforms to comedians and others like Katt Williams said in his 2024 interview with Shannon Sharpe about Netflix or Tubi and comedy specials being on there for Cedric the Entertainer. While of course he was saying that as a dig on Cedric, he made a good point that brought some awareness to the type of comedy specials and the type of content that Tubi is known for. They leaned heavily into black voices and black creators. And if we know anything about the entertainment world, this has been a playbook for a lot of companies and especially Tubi's parent company Fox. We wrote about this a couple months back, so I want to read this excerpt here because I think it's relevant and especially helpful for this conversation and also calls out some questions that I have about Tubi and where the strategy may be going moving forward. This is from my Trapital memo on August 15, 2024. The piece is titled Tubia is Great, but Will it Follow the Fox Playbook? Quote A Brief History of Fox When Fox launched In the late 80s, it stood out with its edgy shows that pushed boundaries like the Simpsons, Married with children and Beverly Hills 90210. The network also leaned into younger black audiences with In Living Color, Martin and Living single. It was TV's version of the Interscope Records strategy. The film and TV industry wanted in on this black cultural renaissance, but Fox's diverse programming soon became a temporary tactic to gain leverage a Fox used its early audience ratings to land major sports packages. The NFL on fox started in 1994 with John Madden and Pat Summerall calling big games for NFC teams like the Dallas Cowboys, San Francisco 49ers and the Green Bay packers, all dominant in the 90s. In 1996, the MLB on Fox started just in time for baseball's post strike steroid fueled ratings boom. Plus the league's marquee franchise, the New York Yankees, were in dynasty mode. Those deals were game changers for Fox. Unfortunately though, the rise of the black middle class didn't quite happen as fast as they expected. Advertisers became less bullish on the opportunity since certain shows didn't cross over to non black audiences. The programming shift was underway. Fox moved on from a living color and put more energy into the X Files. And the network ended Living Single and started Ally McBeal and concluded on Martin right around the time that it launched that 70s show rinse and repeat. Unfortunately, Fox was not alone. UPN and the WB followed the same playbook. Black viewers were their early adopters but soon became the low hanging fruit until the networks moved up market to programs with broader wider appeal. From 1997 to 2001, the number of black primetime sitcoms dropped from 15 to 6. And while I haven't seen direct signs to know that that is what Tubi may or may not be planning, that has been a playbook that plenty of media companies have used since then. You look at the biggest streaming services today, go back 10 years ago, eight, 10 years ago, what were the biggest genres and the biggest artists that were being pushed on those platforms and. And how big are those artists being pushed today? Look at the social media platforms and the concepts of Black Twitter and look at where Twitter now exists today and where Black Twitter itself falls. This is a pattern that we've seen in media. Again, we haven't seen this play out with Tubi yet, but it's still early. What does feel inevitable with Tubi, though, is that something will likely begin to shift, not necessarily within Tubi, but within Fox overall. Because we've already seen this with the SVOD services, where Netflix, Amazon and others are no longer solely focusing on subscription revenue. It's no longer this divide where your FAST and your AVOD channels are pure advertising and your subscription channels are paid. If the subscription platforms are now taking advertisers, there's only so much advertising revenue to go around. And if you add in the current economic factor with where we are now, with tariffs, fear of a recession, and, and what are the things that the biggest companies in the world cut first if pockets get tight and they want to pull back their money? It's advertising and marketing. So while it's great that Tubi is expecting a billion dollars in revenue in 2025, there's more competition for it now more than ever, especially given a player like Netflix and everything that it wants to do in live sports, live broadcasting, which have been huge businesses for advertising. And while Lachlan Murdoch at Fox has been clear that Tubi is on track for its profitability and its growth targets as well, We've also heard Fox and Lachlan talk about Fox's overall goal to eventually launch another streaming platform. This streaming platform would be a subscription service, so it's not quite sure whether they see this as something that would be pitched as a bundle in the future. The same way that you have Disney plus and Hulu and ESPN as a bundle that you could have together, or the way that you have Disney and Hulu together, where sure they're both for the same company, but they serve different audiences in that type of way. Time will tell. But when we hear that it's clear that while Tubi is great and clearly has momentum, there's other ways that Fox wants to strengthen its position. The tough thing for Fox, though, is that this is a very tough time to launch a paid streaming service. Look at all the consolidation that we expect to see in this space. And look at Fox's competitors. And it's not like Peacock and Paramount plus are knocking it out of the park from a streaming perspective. People are selling their shows to Netflix because Netflix is the one that's becoming the more dominant player. Look at the position that Disney and Max currently have. They're in a much stronger position than Peacock or Paramount plus are, but they still aren't close to where Netflix is. So there's plenty of risk for Fox that launching a third app could shift strategic focus further. But Fox also knows that while Tubi's strategy is great, adding a paywall to Tubi may be a bit too countercultural for where it sits. Expecting Tubi to compete with YouTube in that way might be a little bit too difficult because it is not a UGC platform. So what do you do when you have a product that may be somewhat in the middle between the two of those and you still want to have some consistent subscription revenue? There needs to be something else there. So it'll be very interesting to see how Fox navigates all this and frankly, what changes we may see with Tubi and Fox overall as they look at this moving forward again. Again, big fan of the platform. We've also seen how these type of companies make decisions over time, so it'd be very interesting to continue to follow this one, especially in the next couple of years. Hey, before we get into it, I want to tell you about another podcast you should be listening to. Want to stay ahead of the world of tech startups and venture capital equity? TechCrunch's flagship podcast has the inside scoop. Every Wednesday and Friday. They're diving into the stories that matter most, from expert interviews to in depth discussions and roundtable chats with their team of TechCrunch reporters. Whether you're an entrepreneur looking for tips or just curious about what's shaping the world, they've got you covered. Tune into equity wherever you get podcasts. So next, let's talk about Lucian Grange. This is a question that I got on Twitter from someone whose name is Lux agms. How instrumental do you feel Lucian Grange has been to the development of umg? Could his potential successors, whatever that may be, bring the same level of value and impact on the company in industry as a whole, like he has done? I love this question because UMG is clearly centered to most music strategy. People look at Lucian Grange's letters as a bellwether for where things are and aren't in the industry and how that impacts other companies in the industry as well. But Lucian is always someone that stands a bit unique in the industry. I often think back to the piece that Anna Nicolau and Financial Times had put out. I believe it was in 2021 that referred to him as the last mogul, the last true mogul in the industry. It was a really interesting read, but if we're talking about Lucian and succession plans, he's such an interesting career to look at and analyze. It's been 14 years in the job so far. He became CEO of Universal Music Group in 2011, which is a very different time for the industry. And of course, Universal Music Group has evolved considerably since then. We've seen the impact of streaming and how it's truly transformed the business. But if we look at Lucian's rise and the success that Universal has clearly had, especially from the dark days where 2011, 2013, 14, that was the lowest point for the recorded music business. And we look at where it is today and it's hit all time highs. How much of that can you attribute to Lucian Grange himself and the decisions and the moves that he's made as CEO versus how much do you contribute to the broader tide of where music and streaming has gone thanks to companies like Spotify and others with the platforms that they've had? Again, a lot of this is a chicken and egg thing. It's really hard to nail these things down. But if I look at Lucian the same way that we look at someone like Bob Iger, it's a bit more clear to be able to look and compare Bob Iger at Disney and see, okay, well, he went about this differently than Michael Eisner did before him, or he went about this very differently than the very brief tenure that Bob Chapek had in between the two Iger terms recently. And Iger's succession plan for when he leaves Disney is a whole nother thing. But it's interesting to talk about Lucian in this way. So it really forced me to dig down and answer that question. What are the big strengths and what are the big weaknesses that we can look at through the Lucian Grange tenure? And let's start with the things that are strong first. I don't know if Lucian gets a lot of credit for this, but from an M and A perspective, he's made some really smart moves. First of all, one of the big things he did when he was there was moving forward the EMI acquisition. Being able to fold that business into Universal, and making a deal like that truly solidified Universal as the strongest major record label, which then gave Lucian himself as a leader, even more authority over the entire industry as it sits. And that's something that I think has afforded him and the record label and the type of deals and partnerships that Universal has been able to sign with the labels under its belt, secondly is the artist relationships. You've heard Taylor Swift, you've heard the weekend, you've heard Drake. Well, maybe not Drake right now. He clearly is upset with Universal Music Group. But you've heard the biggest artists in the world. The money makers for Universal Music Group credit their relationship with Grange as part of the reason that they stick around and they want to work with them. Part of its financial part. Universal and its labels like Republic and others are willing to offer artist friendly deals to attract and keep these superstars. Whether it is the nine figure advances, the friendly distribution terms and others deals that you may not see at Warner or some of the other competitors or labels under Warner. But that's the lay of the land and that's how they've been able to do that. And a lot of them attribute that to that relationship building. So being able to do both of those things is very important in this role. Next we have to talk about Spotify. And I know there's a lot of nuance in the Universal Music Group and Spotify relationship, but Universal was the first of the majors to do a early deal with Spotify in the United States. And getting that early movement there and also getting the ownership stake in Spotify was extremely monumental for Universal Music Group. Not just because of the equity stake that it acquired, but but again it set the tone that the other record labels followed and therefore solidifies UMG further as the company with the strongest position in the industry. And while that rev share in the early years was clearly very favorable to Universal Music Group and you could argue that it's still favorable today despite the increased power that Spotify has had over the years, even though company like Spotify has clearly grown in value, especially in the past couple of years. You look at the market cap for Spotify, it's is higher than all three of the major record labels if you were to hypothetically put their market cap together combined and maybe at this point even higher than the largest non major record labels too. Sure you could run those numbers, but relatively speaking that's a much better position that Universal's in because its own strength as a company has increased in the past decade plus 14 years, it's a much stronger position than Universal and the relationship that it had a decade earlier with Apple. And if you look similarly to the dynamic between Doug Morris, who was running Universal Music Group at the time, and Steve Jobs, the number I always go back to, and I'll continue to quote this, is that in 2001, right before the ipod and itunes itself launches, Apple's market cap is sitting right around 6 or 7 billion dollars. You fast forward to 2006, 2007, right before the iPhone launches, you're at 70 billion dollars. Apple 10X's its market cap and gains well over 60 billion dollars in market cap value where recorded music and their major record labels declined in that same time didn't have anything to show for it, at least in this scenario. Granted, you could argue that there's certain things with the Spotify and Universal Music Group relationship that could have went better, but it was a lot better than where it was before, especially if you're trying to compare predecessors and relationships and things like that. The other thing we should mention is I do think that the IPO was a win for Universal Music Group, being able to make that happen in 2021. Granted, there's been a lot of people that have critiqued the amount of money that Lucian himself made from that ipo, but it was a smart move for Universal Music Group, and especially if they continue to move themselves onto a United States stock exchange, which I know that Bill Ackman and others have pushed to do, that's a much stronger position for this company than it was sitting under ownership of the French company Vivendi prior to this. Now, like any leader, they have their downsides. One of those for Lucian is the TikTok situation in 2024. I've talked about this countless times on the podcast, no need to rehash it all, but UMG held its ground and it lost in a public way the flagship artist. They had decided to go around and do her own direct deal with TikTok instead of standing alongside Universal for that three month period where it's pulled its music off of TikTok. Now, depending who you ask, that may not have been a sole push from Lucian. Bill Ackman and others may have had a voice there as well. All these things are a team. You need the board, you need others to sign off. But that is a situation in retrospect and in hindsight, the company probably wishes went differently. Second, I put AI integration and adoption in its own category. I don't think that the way that the majors are handling AI itself is necessarily the best way to do it. I understand that there's lawsuits against your companies like Suno and Anthropic, and I understand that there's a desire to not just give away everything to OpenAI or others like other publishers of content have done by everyone seemingly having some type of deal with OpenAI except the new York Times I know that in music things are much more consolidated from a power perspective, which do give them some strength, but it also slows down the innovation, the opportunity to be able to have progress in AI and have people tap into the massive user generated content opportunities that exist with this. My take that I've always had in the beginning is that the issue is less that neither side wants to have a licensing deal or believe that it exists. I'm not necessarily speaking about Jack Dorsey or Elon pushing to delete IP law. I'm talking about the people that are actually in these types of cases. Everyone agrees that a licensing type of deal should be in place. I think the dispute is more about how to split the pie. I understand that there's nuance there because even earlier in this conversation I gave a lot of credit to Lucian and UMG and how they handled the Spotify licensing. But I also gave criticism about how they handled the TikTok licensing in the most recent deal. Some elements of how they've handled the AI one make me think that it could potentially go down the route of the TikTok one. And again, there are broader opportunities here at play, especially when the artists and others you serve have sometimes competing incentives with other revenue streams that they rely on. And I do think that coming to terms and being able to agree on a plan moving forward can help unlock tons of opportunities for artists, creators and everyone to help grow the pie. That's what everyone's trying to do, right? Grow the pie. Now on the succession plan piece of it, this one might be a little bit tougher to break through. Lucian turns 65 this year. Who knows how long he plans to be in the game? From people I've talked to, I haven't heard any indication that he plans or wants to step down anytime soon. Soon. So I also haven't heard much about what a succession plan might look like. But let's say in a hypothetical world that John Janek, who is head of Interscope, Geffen A and M, and that Universal Music Group west side of the business since they did the restructuring last year, let's say that he was to replace Lucian at some point in the future. I think there are similar strong relationships there that he has with Olivia Rodrigo, plenty of the artists on Interscope and others. Maybe there's less experience, at least as it sits now with some of those deep M and A type of deals and the things that Lucian has pulled off there. But a lot of that may just be based on opportunities and exposure given as well. I do think that there are strong leaders within that ecosystem. So it's hard to say what a replacement could or couldn't look like. It's not something where it's as drastic as like, oh, like what if Daniel Ek, left Spotify, right, Lucien is not the founder of Universal Music Group. But transitions always take some time, but until then, most of this is just speculation. Our next topic, Meta and the ftc. This is one that I picked because when Tatiana and I had last talked about Meta, we talked a lot about feature conversions and how a lot of these social media platforms all have the same features, all have the same functionality and options, but how we use them is completely different. And a lot of that stems on the culture and the habits that have been adopted on those platforms. And sometimes those habits can supersede the dominant consumer behavior. For instance, people love short form video. Now every app is trying to do short form video in some form. But there's a reason why short form video works better on Instagram and why it works better on TikTok and YouTube and other platforms than maybe, let's say LinkedIn and others, where they're still trying to figure it out. And it may not be quite as smooth as it could be on other platforms. Consumer behavior matters a ton, and I bring this up because there was a very interesting slide deck that Meta had shown in its presentation during this case this past week. They had all the social media platforms listed there. You could see the timeline from 2005 to today on when they added each of these features. But then you also additionally see some of Meta's frustration about how it's being unfairly positioned. Part of the crux of the FTC case is that they believe that Meta has a monopoly, especially as it relates to advertising, setting advertising rates and controlling inventory, and therefore they see an opportunity to break the company up, specifically separating WhatsApp and separating Instagram, two of the acquisitions that were approved in the 2010s. After reading Meta's presentation, they do make some interesting points, I do have to say, especially their points on all of the features that exist in Meta but also exist elsewhere. They pointed to shopping and marketplace and how there's also marketplaces on Nextdoor. They talked about recipes and how there are also recipes on Reddit. They talked about texting and DMs and WhatsApp and being able to use that for messaging, but how that also exists in imessage. There are plenty of examples like that. And that's because this definition that the FTC has of a provisional social networking service is a bit loose, especially when you consider all the companies that are there and granted all the growing options that people have. And I think one of Meta's key things is that it is not just competing directly in this narrow definition of a category. It is competing for your attention. And there's all these other platforms, not to mention gaming, not to mention Netflix and other things that are competing for that attention. There's also a very hilarious slide in the deck that just shows a screenshot of what the MySpace front page looked like in 2005. And the title of the slide just says evolve or die. So I guess that's their way of saying that, hey, we had to do these things not only to save ourselves as a company, but to save these other platforms and make them stronger. This is a case I continue to follow. Just given the nature of the work that we do, it will set a huge precedent as well, especially for all these other companies that are copying each other's features. It also has implications when you look at TikTok and how the United States government is trying to position that. And part of Trump's whole strategy of his issues that he's long standing we had with Meta, a platform, a company that had de platformed him after the January 6 insurrection. But all of these things become intertwined, especially when you think about the decisions that the FTC may face. But that one's definitely worth looking at. So I encourage you to look at the slide deck there. And last but not least, how I use AI save this one to the end because it's less about a particular topic. But I do think for the people that are really listening to the end of a mailbag episode and be interested in how we do things at trapital would really appreciate it. So the tools that we currently use, ChatGPT and Perplexity several times a day, constantly. Whether it's helping to augment existing research that I probably would have done just through different Google searches, or trying to look for particular things. There are things that I used to pay people to do for trapital. Being able to create quick guides to be able to help save me time with certain prep for whether it's particular topics or episodes, things that I was already familiar with, but they can just save time from an efficiency or cost saving perspective. It's been great at those things. Perplexity is great from a fact checking perspective. I'm not looking up things that I don't know the answer to, so I have to be very careful there. You still want to read through everything because these tools can Sometimes hallucinate, they'll sometimes make things up because they sound good in a narrative. Speaking of sound good, I do want to give some credit to ChatGPT's O3 and its deep research model in general because the tools are fantastic. There are two things that I've done recently with queries that I think are amazing that have even blown my mind from things that I thought were possible just a few months before. So the first was I wanted to get some analysis on my podcast data and downloads with particular trends and things that we've been seeing with different listeners across different platforms. I uploaded my CSV for Megaphone, Apple Podcast and Spotify. It looked up and down different trends noted where they may have seen a spike in some place versus others. I would need to pay to trade consultant to be able to do that type of thing for much more than the $20 a month that I'm paying for ChatGPT plus to be able to run, experiment and see these queries. The second thing that I had done with it that really impressed me while I can't share specific information, being able to look up both private and public companies, being able to do different SWOT analyses and not from me, uploading information that is proprietary to the platform to be clear, the tools mining and being able to find particular things that are helpful about an industry that I already understand but to help give me a primer for me to ask more detailed follow up questions or to double check something to see how it sounds. The other tool that I use often is Claude. Let's say I have a newsletter or a memo that I'm about to send out and and I want to do a double check to say hey, how does this argument sound? Is there anything that can be tweaked here, made stronger? What are the holes? What are the areas to find gaps? It'll analyze, it'll tell you areas to find gaps and you can then take its suggestions. Two important caveats there. One, I'm not just asking it and sending it a prompt and then putting that output in a newsletter that is not helpful and I don't think that the tool is helpful from that perspective. But if I already have a draft in mind of what I've put out there and this is something that I would otherwise be ready to send out and then putting it firm there, it just makes the output even stronger and that's something I've held myself to, which I do push the platforms to do as well. One other quick thing that I do want to mention about ChatGPT these platforms can be a little bit too agreeable and validating. So you have to include in your prompt that, hey, I either want you to be brutally honest or I want to have clear, objective feedback on this. I don't need validation. I don't need to feel as if my ideas are being supported. Keep it real. I don't want agreeability. I want to get to the truth and get to the strongest angle possible. The other thing I use it for descript Descript is a tool that I use to edit both the audio and video that we use for the podcast, video clips and things like that. Put it in, the transcription comes through, put between me and the editor that I work with. We trim it down. We only include the most critical pieces. This is something that could have taken a lot longer, but because of the nature of the script, you could almost work on it like a word doc, the same way you would with someone else. And then when the output of what you have is ready, you could have it analyze the copy, use it to create show notes. You can also create different summaries or different takeaways from things. Or it can be helpful if you're trying to repurpose the content you already have out there and put up some social posts as well. Truly strong for that. I think that's probably one of the more helpful things that we've done. The next tool that I use a lot is Granola. Granola is your AI note taker. Let's say that you're in a meeting. It can capture the biggest takeaways. If you have a zoom call or a meeting with someone else, it did not take a recording of the call the same way that some of those other AI note takers do. It only listens to the audio that comes out. Of course, I always think it's important to make sure that you're asking for consent whenever you're capturing notes in this kind of way. But it's also helpful for other use cases too. Let's say you're just sharing some thoughts on your own and you want to speak out loud. The tools can synthesize that. ChatGPT can do this as well. But granola, this is what it's trained to be able to do. Let's say you want to listen to a YouTube or podcast video in background. You could have that, and granola can listen to it, and then it can synthesize those key thoughts for you in that way. And that's a really powerful use case. So overall, these tools have saved a ton of money They've also saved a lot of time and hopefully enhances and improves my workload. I still believe there's a way to have an operation that does run lean. And especially for a small business like Trapital, it's always helpful to keep this mentality. And these tools are also a lot of fun to be able to use and reach out and think about ways that it can not just enhance the work that we do, but make sure that we're delivering the most value to people like you who are listening and watching and reading the work that we put out at Trapitol. And that's a wrap for our Mailbag episode. It's been a while since we did one of these and this was fun. We got to do these more often. So thanks again for the people that sent in questions. Again, it was cool to be able to mix it up a bit and answer some questions that I had that have been on my mind as well. And just to recap, you heard us talk about the Coachella payment plans and the future of that. We talked about 2B's long game. We talked about Lucian Grange and his impact on Universal Music Group and what the future could look like. We we also talked about Meta and the FTC and the latest in that case, and we concluded with trapital's use of AI and how we'll continue to evolve things there. Please always send us your questions as you have them and we'll keep a stockpile of these, especially some of the evergreen ones that we may want to include in future episodes. You can email us@podcastrapital.com and we'll get those. And that's a wrap for our trapital Mailbag, our first one of the year. Thanks again to luxagm and everyone that sent in questions. Next time we're gonna add the voice memos in too. We did that once in 2024 and it was great. I loved it. It was so much fun to actually hear from you all on the show. Thanks again to G and Eric, our audio and video producers, for everything you do to help make this show possible. And thank you for listening. Appreciate you spending the time. If there's one person you know who would also really enjoy listening to trapital and really get a lot out of these episodes, send them a link to the episode. Whether it's this one specifically on the mailbag or any of the conversations that we've had, word of mouth is still the best way to grow. So appreciate you sharing. And if you're listening on the podcast player of your choice if you could hit that star button to follow the show or if you can leave a review or rate the show as well, that's great. That helps more people discover and learn about trapital. Thanks again. Talk to you next time.