AI Update #1 for November. Twice a month, paid subscribers get plain-English AI tips from a history guy who can barely work the TV remote.
Writer here.
Give me a blank journal, a mechanical pencil, and a couple of Coke Zeros, and I’m happy for hours. Hand me a video timeline in CapCut, or (shudder) Canva, and I want to go fetal under the desk.
So how’d a guy like me end up with a Caesar battle video pulling 400k views? Nice of you to ask.
AI did a lot of it, with a bit of guidance from yours truly.
If you make things for a living and you’ve been side-eyeing AI, this paid-subscriber newsletter is for you. Twice a month, I’ll give you the lowdown on what works for me, a history/writer guy, in the AI world, plus what goes to hell in a handbasket.
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A writer, not a video guy
“I’m a writer, not a video guy,” I blabbered as recently as May 2026.
Then I had to admit something: if you want your articles to get seen, Mr. WRITER, you’d better become a video guy.
At first my son made my 45-second videos. He did well, but he has 2 jobs. Busy busy. So I laid them out myself in CapCut for quite a while. Kinda fun! Then came the captions and effects, and it got less fun.
I have a rule. Don’t we all? A 40-second video for an article should take me 10 minutes, tops. Beyond that, it’s a pointless time suck.
I had no stock footage for most of what I cover (try finding B-roll of the Battle of Cannae), every video took forever, and the result?
Meh.
So I handed the job to Claude. Claude does a solid job, but I still need to hand it images and stock footage.
With good instructions, AI kills my CapCut work
For the anti-AI folks out there, as my wife and I say to each other: I respect your feelings, but you’re wrong.
Grok Bot’s an upgrade from Claude. It just needs instructions from yours truly. It’s fast and effective.
Captions, slow zooms on old paintings, title cards, music levels, all the fiddly stuff I used to wrestle with for an evening. I do it all in less than 10 minutes while I read East of Eden (recommended, BTW).
I select the story and write every word of the content. The AI pushes the pixels around and handles the details.
Open high and wide, and the thumb stops
Your first shot decides whether somebody keeps scrolling. If it’s boring, they’re outta there. Way of the online world.
I do Caesar battle videos, among other things, and I learned a neat trick to stop the scroll:
Open with a high-angle, pretty shot of fields and thousands of soldiers. Nothing stops the scroll better. My Battle of the Sabis video opens on a Roman camp dug into a hillside, a river below, and dark forest on the far bank. You see the whole board before the game starts, and you want to know what’s hiding in those trees.
When you ask AI for that first image, say “high-angle wide shot” or “aerial view.” Faces come second. When you do faces, go with a familiar one, like a reasonably accurate Julius Caesar…. and make sure you mention his bald spot.
Paid subscribers get the rest: the exact prompt I give the AI, a template you can copy, what works best in my short videos, and every blunder that cost me hours.
