On the Road With Cap Cut

Hello from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where the ZVG team has been on the road at the African Union Summit.

Thanks for all the visits to therundown.studio and for checking out the Quick Tips. There are more to come. Let us know if this has been useful.

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We are building our courses, developing an AI news whip update, and creating an interview series for our paid subscribers. Thanks to all of you who keep me going and pushing this.

While I’ve been here, drinking the most amazing Ethiopian coffee, institutional buyers (Fidelity, BlackRock, Ark Investments, etc.) have acquired more than $5 billion in bitcoin since the ETF and continue to hoover up as much as possible. Retail investors (you and me) will soon be priced out of bitcoin and will only have the option to buy Alt Coins (i.e., not bitcoin). Bitcoin was intended to be both a store of value (like gold) and a currency exchange. The first has happened. The second has not.I used to think that, as a communications shop, we would acquire BTC and pay creators with it one day. Bitcoin has become too valuable for that, as it is now poised to break all-time highs and enter price discovery.

Instead, what I am seeing is a preferred use of stable coins as a preferred mode of exchange.

Anthony Pompliano makes an excellent case for this.

A stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to another asset, such as a fiat currency or gold, in order to stabilize its price. Stablecoins can be used for minimizing volatility, trading or saving assets, earning rewards, transferring money cheaply, and sending money internationally

It’s transparent, efficient and cost-effective, with lower fees. USDC and USDT (tether) are the most popular. I am exploring stables as a way we can pay our creators in the future, especially in Africa.

Another mind-blowing development while I’ve been in Ethiopia. Sora. The text-to-video model that Open AI is teasing and testing is phenomenal.

Sora is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions. Sora is able to generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background. The model understands not only what the user has asked for in the prompt, but also how those things exist in the physical world. - Open AI

Generative video is going to make major strides in 2024. All content creators, pay attention here. It changes costs, workflow and business models. I have been using Runway Gen 2 for experimental text-to-video, which has been awesome.

And Ethiopia will start mining Bitcoin. The approach is intended to be sustainable, it will use renewable energy. I love the idea. Do not love the Russia angle.

Live Events and Tech

All our AI and sexy tech came into play on the road. We used:

• Otter AI for meetings, transcripts and summaries
• Chat GPT 4 was very useful with the right inputs and prompting to create speech baselines and off-the-record briefing summaries. Note: Claude AI was unsupported in Addis
• Perplexity AI to check the news and second-source facts
• Cap Cut. This was the star.

Cap Cut

I have mentioned this video editing tool once before in this newsletter. It really boosted our speed in content creation. We were able to subtitle quickly for social. We easily fixed the lighting and shadows. All of this was on our mobile phone. And on the move. It’s great for making reels. There are great templates to use and a teleprompter!

There’s also a remove eye bags feature, which I used here! I was very tired when I recorded this, but you can not tell as Cap Cut makes me look fresh as a daisy. These were portraits shot for social.

And just before hosting an event, I was able to explain where I was, what it was about, have it edited, captioned, color corrected and posted immediately. We could have easily added music, branding, and more pictures just from our phones, but we kept it simple.

Capcut also generates script-to-video with instructions. You can prompt it to write a script or write your own. It can generate the video based on your script. If it’s anything to do with Africa, the images are pretty lame and stereotypical. Other areas seem better. However, the best bet is to use your own shots and just drop them into the editing timeline.

Now imagine what I could do if that video generation caliber was Sora!

The ZVG team on the ground in Addis, 6a (not edited with Cap Cut, eye bags and all!