Nathaniel Whittemore

And it turns out that at this point, Google and Gemini have pretty much all of those in-house.

So as we started talking about this idea for this episode, I pitched them on this, and here we are.

So what we're going to do today is walk through the sequence that I used to ultimately produce that faceless YouTube channel, which I'm calling the Masked Medici.

the companion website for their YouTube channel, and even an early 1990s-style strategy game based on the same themes.

So let's walk through how we did it.

First up, of course, was setting up Gemini to be our build and creative partner for this entire experience.

First thing I did is set up a gem to keep all those conversations in one place, and then we started to brainstorm.

Now, like I said, I had this concept for this Renaissance-focused faceless channel right from the beginning.

And so where we started instead was thinking about all the different things we could put around it, plus all the different tools we could pull in.

One of the things that I wanted to brainstorm first was how to get the most value out of some of the most unique parts of Google AI Studio, particularly its ability to integrate Gemini's AI and multimodal capabilities into whatever it was that we built.

No boring text-based websites for us.

Pretty soon we started to hone in on some sort of interactive experience as a companion to the YouTube.

And as we started to refine what the content for both the companion web experiences plus the YouTube channel could be, I also switched Gemini out of its architecture mode into its historian mode to think about a few key historical moments to focus on for this channel's launch.

So to keep track, the first Gemini capability that we're using is effectively all the dimensions of its strategic planning, with a little side of its historical knowledge, although very quickly we turned and doubled down on that specific knowledge and the capability to research and go do more.

I knew that one of the stories that I wanted to focus on was the Pazzi conspiracy.

This was this incredibly dramatic moment when the feud between the Pazzi and Medici banking families came to a head with the attempted assassination of Lorenzo de' Medici, who would eventually go on to be known by history as Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Although Florence technically had no ruler, it being led instead by a very proto-democratic body called the Signoria, there was no doubt in anyone's mind, even by that time in 1478, that the Medici's were the true rulers of Florence, the power that ran the city even if from behind.

Now, part of what made the Pazzi conspiracy more than just a bloody feud between families is that the plot had the backing of the papacy under Pope Sixtus IV.

And as if that weren't enough, it also had the military support of the Kingdom of Naples.

And yet, while the day extracted a heavy toll, with Lorenzo's younger brother Giuliani being killed in the fray, Lorenzo himself survived and go on to consolidate power in a way that the Pazzi family would never recover from.