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Introduction 0:03
Welcome to the #PirateBroadcast, where we interview #interestingpeople doing #interestingthings. Where you can expand your connections, your community, #kindnessiscool and #smilesarefree. Let’s get this party started.

Russ Johns 0:21
It's a great day for a #piratebroadcast and interviewing #interestingpeople doing #interestingthings. I just want to welcome you, I know that we're going through this whole election thing, so calm down, everyone. It's okay, we still have a pandemic on our hands. I just want to let you know that we can be found on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and also Twitter. So depending on where you hang out where you want to hang out, and where you want to get your information, go there and hang out. So I have an interesting guest in the house today. Dustin Miller, polyinnovator, and we're gonna be talking about innovation, talking about creativity and what it means to be a polymath. Dustin, good morning, how are you?

Dustin Miller 1:10
I'm good, good morning to you.

Russ Johns 1:12
It's a great day. The sun is up. You know, days go and moving forward. We're here having a great conversation and sharing a few tips, I hope, for the audience. Nuggets of knowledge. So first of all, I have a diverse background, a very diverse background and I'm not really sure...I kind of want to dive into this idea of polyinnovation and what it means to you and how you came up with this, this philosophy and this idea, and how you're sharing it and what's your journey to this point in time. So give us the backstory, Dustin, walk us through this.

Dustin Miller 1:59
So growing up, I was always interested in being an entrepreneur. Even at age 10, I wanted to have my own business selling temporary tattoos. As I got older, I'd be like, okay, I want to be a CEO. So the ambitions, obviously grew there a little bit. Then for some reason, as a teenager, I'd always say I wanted to be a CEO of an international company driven to innovate technology and ideology. Those were the words that were coming out of teenager's mouth. And I was thinking like, okay, what do I do about that? How do I become a CEO? Well, college didn't really find me a good fit for it, so I was like, okay, so I'm not going to college for it. What do I need to do? I decided to work on this company I was wanting to make called the United Living Construct, which was supposed to be a hub of innovation. So people all around the world could work on projects together and actually get some stuff done and make a change. I felt like it didn't really work out too much. That's what really got me into consecration, though. So I started doing that back in 2011-2012. Because of that, I was able to learn how to create content, learn social media, marketing, and even back then, and I brought it back around 2015-2016. Around the time, I was like, I need a personal brand too, because I need to exemplify my own traits. That'll help me with the construct. So I created polyinnovator at that time, or actually, as I called it then, a polyocian. So, ocians are kind of like the people of the United Living Construct. These uniters, the leaders, the creators, okay. And I had this idea of a polymath, but, in that sense, so Polyocian. That evolved, because it just doesn't roll off the tongue very well, Polyinnovator. And that's where that idea came from there.

Russ Johns 3:37
Very cool. Very cool. So it was an evolution and much like most things, we have this idea, a seed that gets planted, and then we have to kind of test it out. Especially the entrepreneurial journey is never a straight line. There's never a straight A to B. situation, it's one of those, oh, that's not gonna work very well. Then yeah, let's adjust that here. Make some innovations and adjustments along the way. So what adjustments are you making right now? What is it that you're focusing on in terms of bringing the audience together or bringing the content together? Or is it content based or community based at this point?

Dustin Miller 4:24
Both, but at this point, since the community is small and traffic's very low, I focus more on the content. It's funny about you saying bringing things together because I've been blogging, like I said, since the early 2010s, but I have been on so many different platforms. I started out with WordPress, then moved to Wix, then moved to Medium, which that was a whole debacle.

Russ Johns 4:44
That's a whole other adventure.

Dustin Miller 4:46
Yeah. Recently, I moved all hundred plus stories because I actually made two publications. Polly innovated and edited the construct on there and with both off a medium and on the subject, and I was also trying to do a daily writing habit, as well, so I had all these different blogs everywhere. I also had my main one on my site. I decided to move to Ghost CMS. So literally this past couple days, I've been spending all my time manually moving.

Russ Johns 5:14
How do you like Ghost?

Dustin Miller 5:16
I seem to like it a lot more. Ghost is so minimalistic and that's such a nice feeling, after dealing with WordPress for so long. It's so clunky.

Russ Johns 5:27
For those that aren't in the tech space, Ghost is a platform much like WordPress, or Wix or Squarespace that is a platform that you can actually produce some actual content. You could share your content on...it's a platform that you can share content on. I've seen Ghost, I've opened it up, but I haven't really created anything on Ghost recently. So I'm sure that it's changed and evolved since I looked at it a few years ago. There's a couple other places, platforms that are emerging as well. I've noticed on Reddit and CMS tools that are coming out and what I see the trend is is very minimalist. Thin, lightweight, built for speed kind of platforms. Is that? Is that what you're looking for with Ghost?

Dustin Miller 6:31
No, since everyone's evolved from just doing vlogs, like you're doing a live stream right now, it is gonna get repurposed into a video, I'm sure from what I saw from all the stuff from you that you're gonna turn this into micro content. You might even transcribe it. Content repurposing is almost a necessity nowadays. We're creating multi format shows now and yet all these content management systems are focused solely on the written portion. Yet, we still have podcasts, we still have, in my case, polycast, and videos and all these different areas that are creating content. I wanted a site that can allow me to exemplify all those content pieces. So if you go to the sites, you can watch my videos, you can go listen to the podcast without having to leave it. My main series, actually, this leads me to Polyinnovator, but is the Omni content where I literally focus on that. I create a blog post, I turn that into a slideshow. I might kcik that part out, though, because I'm not sure how I like SlideShare anymore after they got bought out. But I use this video, and then I turned that into a polycast. So I have a whole cycle there.

Russ Johns 7:34
Yeah, that's like the #piratebroadcast. The whole purpose of the #Piratebroadcast is to experiment with the broadcast in the morning and podcast in the afternoon. It's a transcription, it's on multiple channels, not all channels, but, it's on multiple channels, and the ability and the opportunity to share the conversation is compounded now. The downside of that, though, and Dustin, I'm sure you can probably have some thoughts or can share some information about this, how do you manage these platforms effectively? Because YouTube has a different personality than Twitter, Twitter has a different personality than Facebook. Facebook has a different personality than LinkedIn. So the challenge that I run into often is, how do I invest time and effort into those platforms to make it personal enough, that I'm attracting an audience and a community there, as well as continue to manage my clients and my workload and everything else, day to day life? It's a balance. So how does polyinnovator work on that stuff?

Dustin Miller 9:05
Well, actually, it's kind of a great thing. The polyinnovator, for those who are listening in, though, is a polymath of innovation, which we'll get into what a polymath is here in a little bit. But I like to take the polymathic approach to everything I do. So I think that's the same prime example when it comes to the platforms and learning about the platforms being curious about them. If you're just on there for the sake of being on there, and I've been there, I've been doing that, too. It's not very good. So you often find a way to repurpose your content enough to where you can actually be on the platform, and you have to actually use it. Go on there, engage with people and use it. For example, I've been on tik tok for nearly two years now. I actually go on there and use it. Granted, it is a time waster, but it is enjoyable, much more enjoyable than other platforms. At this point, I get my news from there. I get people who I know are trustworthy. Even the Washington post is on tik tok and it's interesting this being able to see some election results or something like that from last night, which I won't get into. But it is interesting how they were making videos about it. You know what I mean? It's always the front page of the internet , besides Reddit.

Russ Johns 10:12
Yeah. You can't avoid some subjects. However, I think it's really fascinating, and I've always been curious, I've been completely curious even since the early days of technology. The last century, I started with technology. So you can actually identify, some of the content that I've created, years and years ago, so it lives on and it continues to breathe. And it's like, okay, well, continuing to innovate is really what it's about, keeping the curiosity alive and maintaining some skills in some of these areas. I still build websites, and I still create content for other people. I produce shows for other organizations, so it's really a bit about how you fit into that role. Am I content creator? Yes. Am I a show host? Yes. Am I a consumer of content? Yes. All of these things, blend in together after a while, for some people like yourself, you're creating all over and you're creating a lot of content, you're bringing people's attention to what that means, and how that takes place. So where do you see the trends going, now that you're on Ghost? And two years of theTik Tok, where do you see that evolving?

Dustin Miller 11:47
So for one, I'm happy because I was able to consolidate all my posts into ghost. So that's 180 blog posts over the past decade or so that I've revamped over the years that I was able to now finally have it all there. Once you have a back log like that, then you can focus more on the future. So you don't have to worry about people getting scatterbrained on your brand of stuff like that. So I see the future as something..you have to be experimental, you have to go on new platforms like Tik Tok and experiment with it. GaryVee is always right when it comes to some of the things he talks about. A lot of people think he might be a little too eccentric at times. But I do think that when he says...go on LinkedIn or go on Tik tok, because there are underutilized platforms. He was right. I've seen literally people in two months get a million followers, there was this one girl, KallMeKris, who I saw seven months ago joined Tick tok. I literally saw some of her first videos and now she has 9 million followers. Nine million,.I've been on there for two years, I barely have little under 3k and it's like, it's insanely viral. Gotta be on that platform. LinkedIn is another platform that was like Facebook, when it's like Facebook, back in 2008-2009, something like that. That's how LinkedIn is now where you go on there, and you get organic reach, you create content, like articles, those do really well, people see it, CEO's see it.

Russ Johns 13:07
Yeah. It's amazing how these evolve in the virality of content and how it evolves is really, I think, more fascinating than the how it takes off. Some of the platforms that you thought might take off. Nobody's talking about Snapchat now. Nobody's talking about what what's going on with Snapchat. At least I don't hear it. I think that's the other part of the equation, unless you're all over, and you're really testing all of these out, all of the time, sometimes, what shows up in your feeds, based on the algorithm is kind of what you're doing. That's the reason why you have to go out and test other things, is to evolve your algorithm, evolve your visibility into what's taking place, because if you're not staying on top of stuff, all of a sudden you get in a groove and all of a sudden, it disappears. It kind of goes away. Has that been one of your experiences?

Dustin Miller 14:20
I mean, there are certain aspects and for those listening, and I'm sorry, they're doing construction outside.

Russ Johns 14:24
It doesn't come across, Dustin.

Dustin Miller 14:26
Ok, good. I could hear it really loudly. So I was worried about it. Thank you, Wendy in the comments. So when it comes to some of the platforms going away, and issues when it comes to stuff like that, because like you said, no one's talking about Snapchat anymore. I do think that there's a purpose on being some of those platforms, especially if you enjoy being on that platform. It is trial and error and stuff that doesn't work, get rid of it. And so that's what happened with me when it came to medium and some other platforms where I was like, okay, I've tried on the platform. I even tried blogging on Korra or vocals.media or even Kotaku, I typed blocking on all these different sites. And partially I just wanted to have like the backlinks to the site. But I decided to consolidate all that because then it made it more conducive to people actually understanding the brand more. Polymath itself is kind of a complex subject. I felt like when it comes to platforms, I didn't need to simplify it, despite the fact I want to be on the channel. So I do think there's sacrifice involved when you opportunity cost, that's the right word.

Russ Johns 15:27
Yeah, there's opportunity cost. I like that. The biggest challenge I have right now, and this is what fascinates me, I'd like you to kind of expand on it for yourself. All of my work that I have, generating revenue right now is a direct result of having relationships I've built either online or in person. I know that there's a lot of people that work really hard online to get business. You can get business online and you can book business online. The downside is once you get really busy, it's harder to stay busy online, you know? It's hard to participate on some of these platforms and it's like, okay. You have to find the balance, what's the groove you're going to get into? Where do I fit? Where do I feel right? Being innovative enough to stay consistent and curious and present and still maintain a balance of revenue in business. So how does that process work for you?

Dustin Miller 16:54
I'm still working on that. One of the reasons why I moved to ghost actually, I was so frustrated by all the different social media management tools and Cost Management Systems content management systems, that I was thinking about making my own, either through bubble IO, or trying to find a way to learn to code like that. Because there's no reason why I shouldn't be able to take a paragraph out of my blog posts and automatically make them into a tweet. When I make that paragraph, I mark it with some kind of marker in CMS and have it automatically tweet out. So there's rebel mouse, which is a CMS that is pretty janky looking, but it does something like that, where they have their article accelerator or something like that. It's interesting how...I wanted to try to do something like that when it came to omni channel marketing. So if you could automate as well as repurpose, I think that's the key right there. Because that way, you're not remaking more content and using up more of your time. All you're doing is chopping up the content more. It takes half half the time to do it. And with tools like repurpose.io, or even streamyard, and all these other platforms that get you many places at once, you can find ways to automate certain platforms. For example, I'm on Pinterest, I'm not active on Pinterest, I just have my Instagram.

Russ Johns 18:09
I'm on Pinterest, too.

Dustin Miller 18:10
That's how my Instagram posts go over there, or I'll share stuff periodically. But as long as I have a slight presence, and just from that, I get 1000 to 5000 views a month, just from the automation.

Russ Johns 18:22
Well, as somebody that's on the back end of the CMS, it's your backlinks and things like that. It's really interesting. Sometimes I sit back and I'm thinking to myself, it's almost like a chess game. You're playing chess with the algorithm. They change the algorithm and highlight different things at different times. A year ago, my views on video were extremely high. Now they're not as high as they used to be. I know part of that is because, one, I'm not chasing the algorithm, I'm just doing my show, doing my thing and sharing awesome people like yourself, doing amazing stuff. If I were chasing the algorithm, I would have a whole series of things that I would be doing during the show after the show, next week, and just continue to keep it fresh and keep it live, repurposing it over and over again. That's the way podcasts grow as well, is repurposing it. It's just one episode is not just an episode. It's continuation. Some of the episodes I've had over the past year, I've got almost 280 episodes right now in my inventory. That's an amazing body of work that a lot of people don't realize that there's that much content there. So I could send that out again in different ways, in different formats and like repurpose.io. Hani Mourra, whose the developer, we're friends and that's a great tool for that purpose. There's tools out there that you can do that with. And it's like you said, sometimes they work well, and sometimes it's just work.

Dustin Miller 20:27
Yeah, I had Hani on my show, too. I met him when I found repurpose.io. In fact, back then I was small enough to where...when I went on to a little message, like, hey, I need some help to learn more about this. It was him responding to me. He was on a call with me, it was fantastic. I love him so much. Shawn, this conversations is about content management systems, and marketing and that kind of thing. Speaking of the algorithm, a lot of the social media websites that I was reading, like on co schedule, or buffer and all these different blogs, they often talked about the best time to post. So I always wonder reasons why I had such bad luck with social media management tools is that you can't really make campaigns with most of them, unless you do it extremely manually, which in this strategy is not really viable. Because what I want to do is create a post today or a day later, a week later, a month later, half a year later, and then a year later, and I don't really want to think after that or put too much focus on it. But most of the...like this video here, we might be talking about certain platforms, but it's still pretty evergreen. If someone were to see this two years from now, it'll still be really great information, great mindset, and stuff like that. Polymath is definitely gonna be around that, too. So this video can be shared out a year or two from now and that whole strategy there is just echoed out long enough so that people can actually get a chance to see it.

Russ Johns 21:45
A long tail effect. Hey, I just want to give a shout out to some of the individuals that have joined us today. I was on with Gabriel last night. Good morning, gentlemen. Gabriel. Hope you're doing well. I hope the show ended well for all those that joined in. Hiett Ives. Thanks for joining us here today. Paolo, from Italy, hello, everyone. Again, an interesting pirate. And then who else? We have Gabriel? Oh, Gabriel. Good morning, everyone. And then we went in the comments. Yeah. Wendy's in the comments here. She's an awesome pirate. So wise, so young, so inspiring. And Dustin is cool, too. Love you, Wendy. Thank you, Mary. Ellen Shea. This is good stuff. Thank you so much, Mary, for joining us. I appreciate you. Then also Jeff Young jumps in .Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. Good concept PORE (post once repurpose everywhere). Namaste. Network and make all sorts of terrific energy. The LinkedIn guru. Good morning, pirates from Columbus, Ohio. Jeff is an amazing individual that always is out helping others. Shawn. What is this conversation about? Shawn, this is about technology and content creation. Michelle, Good morning. Thank you so much for being here. Russ, are you saying pirates don't chase algorithms? We only chase booty. Pirate booty, of course. Well, we chase all kinds of pirate treasure.

Dustin Miller 23:38
Take the tides of the algorithms, we sell the tides.

Russ Johns 23:43
Sell the ties of the algorithms. Write that down, that's a great subtitle. So what's in the future? What's on the horizon for you? Experiencing growth and expansion.

Dustin Miller 24:02
So you mentioned you have a big backlog of your show. I actually have multiple different series for my polycast. So I had these little micro episodes and the normal sized ones and then the Omni content, like I mentioned earlier, gets repurposed into polycast. Around me, though, I decided, due to the quarantine, to start doing interviews. I always really wanted to do interviews, but I never really knew how to get started. There's this tool called matchmaker.fm, which is a fantastic tool. And so it's one of those things where I was able to meet people with that tool. Actually, at this point, I've interviewed almost 70 people on my show, and it's only been since May.

Russ Johns 24:40
Yeah, good deal. So how long have you been on matchmaker?

Dustin Miller 24:43
Since the beginning, basically. I was one of the first 30 or 40 people on there.

Russ Johns 24:47
Okay, cool. Yeah. I've had quite a few interviews. People jump on the show from that platform, so I really enjoy it. Then we have, if you're familiar with it, but there's a couple other platforms that are out there that I've been invited back here or podcast guests.

Dustin Miller 25:12
Pod match or podcast guests.

Russ Johns 25:15
Yeah, that's one. I'll have to think of them all and put them in the show notes and share them out. But I don't know if people are looking for more shows, they're looking for more guests, activities and more. Are you looking to be a guest? Are you looking for other guests to be on your show?

Dustin Miller 25:41
Both. I think that you can get your word out there. Go on other people's shows. That's one reasons why I said yes to this show is because I thought it was cool. But it's also a chance to be on another show. I'm happy to have been on because we've been able to roll from the very beginning, I was a minute late and we just get straight into it. A lot of other shows have been like that as well. We're all in was with Jordan, we literally just jumped right in, no chance to breathe or anything like that. So it's sink or swim in this case.

Russ Johns 26:13
Absolutely. I want to make sure that we...where's the best place for people to connect with you and learn more about what you're doing. I know you're on LinkedIn and a few other platforms?

Dustin Miller 26:26
Before I go into that, I want to make sure I mention, before we close, the polymath, the aspects because I didn't really quite explain that. Polymath is someone who is heavily knowledgeable or interested in many different areas. It's not like a jack of all trades, because people say the jack of all trades master of none. But also sometimes better than a master of one is the full saying for that. When people get the realization of a jack of all trades, is something better than what it actually is perceived to be. People can understand polymaths more, the polymaths are multi specialists. They have a deep level of knowledge in many different areas. That's what I'm aspiring to be and that's what I'm hoping to inspire with my show, where I go and interview multi-disciplinary people, so people can find my show at http://www.pod.co/polycastt or my website, which is moving right now, so there might be some funkiness. If you go there, when I'm changing domains...

Russ Johns 27:15
DNS is not our friend always.

Dustin Miller 27:18
Yeah, polyinnovator.space. You can find pretty much find all my stuff on there, even on the new website. I'm gonna have a hard time with some of the links, but I'm gonna try to make sure you can find all the links on that site.

Russ Johns 27:32
Very cool. Very cool. I love the idea because there have been times in my life...I've been a farmer and a firefighter, a director and a safety director, all of these different disciplines, and each one has its own characteristics. Nothing is perfect. Everything has...it's a journey. So I've always enjoyed the journey of learning. And then, once I get to a certain point, it's like, okay, well, I'm gonna go learn something else.

Dustin Miller 28:15
That's what you've got to do, though, with constant stimulation, constant learning, indulging your curiosity. I see in the comments here, Rick Wolf, he says, does he call this fans polyamorous? Well, it doesn't really have anything to do with polyamory, but I call my fans innovators or polyinnovators.

Russ Johns 28:31
Yeah. Fantastic. Thanks for bringing that up. It's really amazing to me, the diversity in the community here in the polyinnovation, and also the #piratebroadcast. So yeah, pirates. So we got lots of pirates crossing over and doing some great work here. So you'll be updating the website, making sure that people could come and find you. And then you'll be hanging out? Where do you like to hang out?

Dustin Miller 29:03
Primarily? Yeah, that's a good question. I find now I've been focusing a lot on Instagram and Tiktok. Just because those are one of the more obviously, like ancient platforms are. When it comes to LinkedIn, I really do want to scale that up. Part of my Omni content strategy is to make a LinkedIn article every time it's related to the actual main episode, but it's not necessarily a extension of it's actually a separate entity. So I like to do LinkedIn articles. I like connect with people on LinkedIn, like you sent me a connection request. I'm going to go on there right after this and accept it. So it's one of those things to learn, like to talk to people on there and make friends and find polymaths. It's amazing.

Russ Johns 29:42
Well, thank you so much, Dustin, for being here today. I just really appreciate the fact that you're here sharing a couple of ideas and concepts that probably not everyone is familiar with. I just really appreciate that. I love the curiosity, and I'll have to go check out ghost as well. There's one I saw on Reddit the other day that it was like, okay, I don't know if I need to go down that rabbit hole or not. I'm not a programmer; however, I would love the opportunity. I keep thinking to myself, somebody's going to come up with these Lego building blocks style programming elements that I could assemble something, and have it be become a program that I want to do something with. And it's a class.

Dustin Miller 30:28
There's two websites that come to mind actually WebFlow for web design and Content Management System, or bubble.io.

Russ Johns 30:35
Bubblel.io, I looked at.

Dustin Miller 30:38
I've looked at it and I don't like it so much when it comes to the graphic designer and the UI designer, but I can use figma and use that to design the front end.

Russ Johns 30:47
Yeah, that's true. Sometimes it takes more than one tool, right? Well, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for joining the #pirate#broadcast. We love to have you join us, make comments, get involved and engage, reach out and connect and have a conversation today. Don't be afraid. Connect with some of the individuals in the feed, as well, because we're just here in the pirate community having a great time and great conversations. So, as you always know, #kindnessiscool. #smilesarefree, and you #enjoytheday. Don't go away.Thank you for joining the #piratebroadcast.

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