night.

Yes, and it was very international indeed.

It's a Portuguese play by Chago Rodriguez, who is, interestingly, a non-French director of the Festival d'Avignon in the south of France.

So he covers the continental waterfront.

This is a play called Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists.

Pretty provocative title.

Premiered in Portugal in 2020 and has been touring since then.

Let's talk about Josh O'Connor, who's back on the London stage in Clifford Odette's Golden Boy.

But in your experience, and this is a two-pronged question, in your experience, why is this approach not sustainable? And why is it so difficult for founders to shift their mindset?

Yeah, so why is it not sustainable long-term or why does it not work? The simplest answer is a lot of these folks just have not had the opportunity or had the guidance to figure out how to tell the right story to the right people.

And that's, to us, that's brand strategy.

That's the easiest way I can describe brand strategy.

It is the thing you do before marketing and it is the work of figuring out what that story is.

So if you don't have that strategy in place and if you aren't telling the right story to the right people, nothing will be sustainable.

That's the reason why so many people have had bad experiences with marketing, why they feel like they've wasted so much time and money on it, especially in the B2B space.

And they're kind of like, I don't know, they might be the same as the last guys, right? So how does having that right brand strategy build that

Yes, Cate

Blanchett and the German actress Nina Haas, who worked together, of course, in the much-laurelled movie Tar, and now they're working on stage together in this kind of extraordinary thing called Electra Persona, which, if anyone thinks that the theater is being dumbed down, this is proof that it isn't.

It's very rigorous, very austere.

It mashes up Sophocles' tragedy about Electra and Clytemnestra with Ingmar Bergman's 1966 movie about an actress who becomes mute during a performance of Electra and the nurse who tends to her.

The two performers decide who's going to play who because of a coin toss at the start of the show.

I have to say it's wonderfully audacious.

It didn't get me in the gut.

Tell us about this.

You used to have to pay like 10 grand a month a year to do something like this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In the last conversation that Kip and I had, we actually showed how I built my second brain where I sort of ingest all of the YouTube videos and content that I come across.

Well, I built the second brain tab here that looks at that same obsidian folder for me and then resurfaces five things twice a day.

So it comes in at 7 a.m. and 2 p.m. and it resurfaces five things from my second brain every day.

And what it's doing is because Codex has access to my Slack and my Gmail and my Google Calendar, I give it access to Granola so it can see transcripts from meetings and things like that.

The stuff that it's resurfacing from my second brain is the five things it thinks are going to be the most relevant to me in that moment based on what it knows about me.

the

She was one of a kind.

You can sure say that.

I mean, a friend of mine, one of the first things she did was she called me up and she goes, "You know, there's a lot of strife in this world, but if there's one thing that everybody could agree on, it was that Dolly Parton was queen, the undisputed queen of country music." And, you know, you touch on some interesting things about her because it wasn't always about the Grammy Awards, right? It wasn't about the countless hits that she had and whatnot and everything.

You know, I spent a good chunk of the afternoon just soaking in what she was about.

And basically, the bottom line is, you know, she was a good human.

And I think everything from her charitable works to her, uh, Imagination Foundation, all that good stuff, we can all take little pointers from that as how we direct ourselves in life.

Because, you know, here's, here's a woman, right, who literally, literally came from dirt.

Nine to Five and Steel Magnolias, right? Two of the most iconic movies for women out there, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Both sides live up, up in my head.

Some areas where I will get help with videos is I will have LLMs help me outline a video, right? Never the script, but sometimes an outline.

And the way I typically do that is I will, um, do the sort of unloading process, right? I will turn on a microphone and say, "Hey, I wanna make a video about what should be automated with AI versus what shouldn't be automated with AI, and here's my thoughts." I'll brain dump for 20, 25 minutes into one of these things and say, "This is the content of the video.

I wanna make this video.

Don't change my thoughts, don't add any extra information.

Just outline this so it's in more of a logical order." If I just brain dump that into a video, it probably wouldn't be a logical flow.

So we have the ability to publish some amazing things that we never did before, but it's up to us to capture our own way of thinking first, and then use the tools in a way that we can actually go out there and be the powerful creators that we all are.

What would you say the state of the union is today when it comes to websites and what should most companies be looking at or businesses that have a website on, hey, here's my checklist, here are the things, are we still doing this? Here's where we need to evolve to.

Boy, you know, that's interesting because I don't know that it's evolved as much as it should have because you still have a lot of, I mean, the state of the union is you probably have most businesses out there still in brochure mode, like you said.

What brochure mode really means, though, is people are telling their own story first.

They're leaning into their own story.

How about them? I'm a story brand consultant.

I'm one of the old guard, one of the, at this point, original story brand consultants.

And what that teaches, it teaches people to stop focusing on their story first and instead tell the story of the person who's the potential client, who's the actual audience.

just the audience?

What do you see, like, what do you feel like you learned from theater that translates directly into or your life in the theater space that translates directly into the marketing world?

So many things.

Before I do that, I just want to say, because I don't think you know this, you were a big part of my StoryBrand journey because when I got to Nashville and I was scared out of my boots about taking this new leap in life that you just described, right, from theater to...

I felt like the theater kid that snuck into the marketing world.

But there you were on stage and sharing your story and so good at what you do.

And I was like... okay, someone else made the leap.

I think I can do it too.

But when you are listening to your customers and trying to develop their point of view, what are some things that you're listening for? How do you – I guess really bottom line what I'm asking is how do you help people show up – with their voice in their marketing? Not just like being bland in the market, but how do you actually help listen to them and help them show up with a voice like you would as a director?

But that's exactly what's happening.

Isn't it wild? I mean, I was just looking at some of the figures here and everything as far as streaming shows go versus traditional broadcast.

And, I mean, when you talk about a show like The Pit – which has been nominated now 25 times this year for its second season.

It says a lot, and you look at the other shows that were a surprise.

Like, out of nowhere, this Spider-Man Noir series on Amazon, which basically, to sum it all up without getting too much in the weeds, it stars Nicolas Cage.

as an alternate version of Spider-Man from the 1930s.

Think Humphrey Bogart with superpowers.

That's on what, HBO? Oh, my

Mm-hmm

...

in a minute here, and he was using a IDE or coding platform.

This actually works with, you know, Claude Cowork, Claude Code, or Codex, or Cursor, or any tool you wanna use.

It doesn't really matter.

I personally use Codex.

But what you do is you use your IDE, and you save these markdown files into Obsidian.

Mm-hmm

Yeah

... easier ones to sort of understand and use and grasp the first time, um, because they don't really need you to understand, like, what an API is or that sort of thing, right? Like, you can just kind of go and press a button to connect to another tool, and it just sort of automatically connects.

When you're using n8n, it does a lot of the same stuff, but it's more advanced and it does sort of expect you to know how to connect APIs a little bit more and things like that.

But you can do a lot more advanced stuff with it, like sort of make it loop back on itself.

So I have, for instance ...

So I built a workflow recently that, like, reads all of the AI newsletters for me and summarizes all of the news that came across in all of the newsletters.

So here's the actual workflow built out in n8n.

Uh, I did think AI animation is gonna be huge, uh, uh, on the rise for kids especially.

Let's get into the show.

All right, so on today's episode, I'm going to show you a really cool new tool.

I'm going to show you how to use AI Studio from Google as well as Stitch from Google to create an awesome website.

It's going to design the website for you and then build the website for you.

And if you're a business or marketer and you need landing pages or sales pages or checkout pages, this tool and this sort of process I'm about to show you can do all of that for you.

It is really, really cool.

Let's check it out.

Ready to dive in? What's Elysian?