Exploring Information Management and Podcasting with Dustin Miller - PolyInnovator | Glasp Talk #2
This is the second session of Glasp Talk!
Glasp Talk delves deep into intimate interviews with luminaries from various fields, unraveling their genuine emotions, experiences, and the stories that lie behind them.
Today's guest is Dustin Miller, a founder of PolyInnovator, which is a solutions architect for people, and multidisciplinarian. As an aspiring #polymath, he created #PolyInnovator as a foundational means to build out the various careers he wants out of life. He's on a mission to create a Modular Education Platform to revolutionize how we approach education as a whole.
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Transcripts
Kazuki: Let's get started. Yeah, so welcome to the show and grasp talk and Dustin you know today we have Dustin Amira a poly innovator so we want to interview him you know about his work you know profession and his background and so on so yeah let's let's get started so Dustin how are you
Dustin: I'm good thank you guys for having me
Kazuki: Thanks so you know first of all uh can you introduce yourself you know for the people who don't know you yet
Dustin: Yeah, so I'm probably innovator that's my personal brand I started creating content around 10 years ago when I started blogging and so I'm more of a writer first but then around six years ago I started creating podcasts and it took me a while to get comfortable being on camera like right now I'm looking at you I'm doing all these different hand gestures I'm comfortable on camera now but it took me a while to kind of get past hearing my own voice seeing myself on camera doing all that and the same thing happened with podcasting hearing your own voice is hard but eventually you get past it the more you do like literally you just gotta put the numbers and the Reps in right he's got to do more of them I got past that so I've made videos for about five years tick tocks for about five years too as well so like three thousand of those but yeah like I've done a lot of content over my short life
Kazuki: All right cool seems like you are pointed masks and you know doing a lot of things and yeah and I I I've seen you know you are like uh also you're a you know Pro question about you know information management and content management and then yeah broken and so on so uh I'm curious you know your history of you know like create a history and what you know let's you said you know you started you know uh vlogging 10 years ago but what made you to become a Creator or you know posting something or creating something
Dustin: So, I think you kind of asked two questions there mainly that what started me as a Creator but also you kind of hinted towards like what kind of information systems I've used and I think that that could be something we could talk about later on but they're kind of go hand in hand information architecture and content Management Systems as you guys know personally they're pretty close in nature and I noticed that I couldn't get the creative side of me out in the systems that I had used before so I had started out on wordpress. com which is especially back then this was like 10 years ago right so it was not nearly as good back then it was very limited you had just the basic templates I didn't even pay for it I don't think so I didn't even get access to the premium templates and so I was limited to this newspaper style website and I wanted to share my ideas I created what I call the United living construct it was meant to be like this Hub of innovators and the idea was World Unity through self-development so I had topics of Technology philosophy and self-development and so I was writing about all that on this crappy WordPress website and I could not get it to look as well as I wanted to so I moved to Wix Wix is actually kind of a downgrade in some people's eyes even back then because it's very slow it's a lot it's like clunky kind of thing there's a lot of code in the background and but it allowed me to create a visual website to my heart's desire I got probably a little too creative with it and that probably slowed it down more but I was able to get some really unique ideas out in front of me like how I had the menu off to the side and it was kind of like a nice unique little thing there I had my colors very bright vibrant and very visually appealing however it was slow it didn't really get the job done and so I had moved to I think WordPress again but this time. org and I had a blue I use Bluehost I made my own website and that gave me a lot of trouble because the odd information architecture you still have the you know server architecture and actual taking care of the website maintaining the website and I had a lot of issues with my host so I think I moved to hostinger down the line my point is I I didn't want to mess with all the server stuff I didn't want to keep up the website maintaining that part I just wanted to focus on the actual content WordPress had a lot of meta work the way that it was set up was still kind of early 2000 style where you had all this different metal work by the time I wanted to get to my blog post it'd take me like eight clicks or I would have to do a whole bunch of updates something like that all this annoyingness I switched to ghost CMS which is a lot simpler it allowed me to create I'm skipping some steps there is actually switch the medium then sub stack and then ghost but ghost was the one I used now it allowed things to be much more minimalist and I was able to organize my content through tags and so I was able to create a better information architecture from that and I'll stop that there because I don't want to go in too many tangents
Kazuki: Cool cool yeah thank you yeah that's so interesting and and so you were looking for something like you know the the system that you can manage easily like throwing like via talk or is that what you prefer to manage content
Dustin: So it wasn't necessarily what I prefer it was more about I can't build a CMS right now I don't have the technical skills and I was very frustrated as a Creator because most creators come from the point of view as either a writer a podcaster or a video creator and there's a lot of the big creators out there garyvee Lewis house they're all three right garyvee's not much a writer but he has tons of blog posts but they have all three content types no CMS out there really supports all three you can do custom post Types on WordPress but it really kind of changes the dynamic and it makes it really hard to structure that given the fact that it's an extra piece it's not built into the CMS if it will if you will and ghost whereas WordPress had categories and tags and you had to kind of balance that out like is it a category I kind of wish I kind of like categories because then I could do categories as like videos podcasts or blog posts and then tags will be the topic so now in retrospect I probably could have organized it a little bit better but in ghosts since everything's a tag I didn't have to necessarily do that I just had tags were just the topics like what is the subject I'm talking about or what is yeah basically and they have private tags so I was able to use that as like is it a podcast or a video and for the most part I've been able to keep my organized content really well I should note that the reason why it was so important is that because I'm polymathic and do a lot of different things my topics can very very widely I have a ton of range in what I write about and so I need to have that organization
Kazuki: I see that totally makes sense and give me one okay yeah sorry it's super hot in here
Dustin: Oh, no it is
Kazuki: so you tapped into like the the yeah CMS you know content management system and you know like uh across some media type like video podcast and and broadcasting that's that's really interesting interesting part and and I at the same time like I'm more curious about your motivation behind you know creation so what you know can you can you share us you know a bit about you know why did you why did you start you know creating you know why why you want to create something you know you're your kind of motivation behind content you know or content creation
Dustin: I can't quite explain why I started but I but I tell you why I going because I mean even this past week I went to the hospital I had pneumonia and that's a crazy thing for someone who's 28 to have and so this whole last week I've been sick and yet every day I still get up and I try to make content I want to make sure I get at least something done each day and a lot of people don't have that dedication or motivation and it's been a lot of days where I feel like I don't have that motivation but when you look at my results I'm still coming up with stuff almost every day and it's not so much the fact that I have motivation it's more of just like I have so much I need to get out there I'm motivated by sharing ideas there are certain Concepts that people just don't talk about like polymathy for example that's a subject about some so for people who are listening to polymath as someone who has multiple expertise and curiosity in anything basically insatiable curiosity so it's not just like a generalist where you're doing many things you're an expert in multiple Fields I often call myself a Proto polymath because I'm on that journey to become one that's kind of the main theme of my scientist the journey becoming a polymath some people call me one some people don't it's really just a matter of perspective but I digress my point is not enough people were talking about that and and our history as a human species we've had generalists throughout our entire time span and yet over the last hundred years we've been so focused on Specialists become good at one thing good at one thing good at one thing when in actuality we're a species that's really good at doing many different things or multifaceted species and so I wanted to highlight that and I mentioned the old block that I had it's a pretty Grand ambition World Unity through self-development I thought that in order for the world to get better each individual person had to get better for that to happen and so that perspective is something I wanted to write about and share then I also want to write about like how do you start self-development what do you do I've worked in Fitness for the last decade and especially swimming in particular and so teaching people Fitness and self-development and something I naturally do I thought I'd translate that into content and so that's one motivation Factor as well soon
Kazuki: yeah thanks for sharing so so in terms of like instead of improvements instead of development friends of philosophy technology so there are a lot of content so on topic but how would you do the topic or article you like neighbors that talk
Dustin: What was the last bit there how would I choose uh the topic to like the article they liked or like you know talk about on the podcast or on YouTube uh not on YouTube video or podcast so it's not a matter of choosing per se it's prioritization which is so it's a very good question you asked there a lot of the time people are choosing between different topics and for me it's a matter of I have all my ideas listed out I have a few thousand ideas in my system right which is ridiculous but part of it was I used the content idea generator but most of it was just me coming up with ideas that I just wrote down quickly like you know when you're taking a shower or going to sleep you get into that relaxed Alpha wave stayed in your brain which is the most creative state and in those moments I try to write down the ideas I don't know I don't remember who this was but there was like this really cool author or writer who had a lot of famous books basically he really wanted to tap into that creative state so he would sit in the chair and have like his head attached to a bell and anytime he would fall asleep Bell would ring and so that way he stayed in that Alpha way State he induced that state because he's getting tired he's falling asleep but the Bell would wake him up so he could write down the ideas and that's another reason why information architecture is so important because being able to reach those ideas when you need to and actually something I'm facing right now maybe you guys can maybe help me think about this is that I moved from notion to obsidian but in both cases both tools weren't able to do everything I needed it to do and then particularly what I need most is being able to plan out my content ahead of time and so I've been using this reminder plug-in and obsidian but it's not about choosing what I need to do it's more about just what do I need to get out the soonest right and like what's the most important concept because what I'm thinking about is creating a consistency layer of content sowing the seeds maybe for swimming or exercise or self-development whatever topic I'm talking about sowing the seeds through my basic content and then through courses and books and maybe big long form videos creating the actual meat of it based off of that seed that I sowed a year ago or whatever it may be
Kazuki: Yeah, that makes sense and so yeah this is pretty common question for Clear turbo lighter but so if you need to make a content for making articles or videos you need to be download or listen to a lot of content so yeah in general so to light or to your outfit so what what is the yeah what your like resources so to learn something
Dustin: Well, I will say I spent the first seven years after Secondary School pursuing self-development just extremely amount so I spent a lot of that time learning that's how I became a podcaster video creator I just a better blogger is by learning and learning learning I went to a conference last week uh or a week and a half ago or so and that's a place where you would learn a lot but I realized very quickly that the panels and the Keynotes that they were talking about weren't going to share anything that I didn't already personally know which sounds egotistical but it's just a matter of fact I spent so much time learning that I spent too much time learning which is probably funny to you guys considering what you guys built but I spent too much time learning and the fact that like I didn't have enough outputs and so there's a balance between input and output and I think that I mean it mainly just focused on meeting people at the conference rather than learning but a conference is one way podcasts are one way uh it was a podcast conference ironically and then you know articles and any kind of videos I still watch videos nowadays so for example Colin Samir are two great podcasters on YouTube and they have been interviewing huge people Mr Beast uh the yes Theory playful they had a mastermind Roundtable of the biggest YouTubers they released literally just like a couple days ago and this video is like an hour 13 minutes long but it was all these big readers sharing their Theory sharing their thoughts and so while I'm kind of at the point where I might be a small Creator but my knowledge of the platform is of the bigger creators but I still don't know everything so I want to try to learn from those bigger creators and that's what I'm kind of going for
Kazuki: I see like a learning from people who went through you know like you know where you are now like
Dustin: Exactly
Kazuki: Yeah, I see that makes sense at the same time you know when you uh consuming some information or listening to some you know podcasts or you know like like big creators videos and I think you got some ideas you know some ideas spark in your mind and how to capture the you know like you know the ideas or or Inspirations you know for for a future you know creation you said you know someone used something you know when they when they sleep off anything oh I got it again and say that later but did you have some kind of you know uh system in your workflow
Dustin: Yeah, so I mentioned uh obsidian a notion before and I know I've talked to you guys about that in the past I love using these what's the word you know second brain kind of tools and I used to have my notion database where I would just add an idea to that but when I moved to obsidian that complicated things because obsidian's local to my computer when I'm out and about I usually go for a walk when I listen to a podcast so I can't just like well I have an idea I can write down so I used a mobile app of obsidian and just copied it over so right now my idea capture is not ideal but yeah
Kazuki: Yeah, you generally just like write it down through one of these apps do you use like a physical note or just using an upper note
Dustin: So, just I I don't like paper I don't generally use physical that's just a personal preference though some people really love notebooks I mean I have this one right here where it's like I do write a little bit but like not much
Kei: Sorry could you tell me the reason why you admitted from motion to overseer
Dustin: Yes, that's a good question so notion is a more collaborative database tool and I love databases I moved to notion from airtable because I had an extensive learning database I created my modular degree in Excel Excel wasn't good enough to move the air table air table was good but I needed the power of notion so I moved the notion and I created a my I don't use a certain second brain I created my own system called the poly Innovation operating system the pios because it's a different way of doing things and I used notion so much but then there was times where Amazon web services would go down and so notion would go down and I lost access to my daily tool that I would use or my databases got so big that notion was just extremely slow it was ridiculous how bad it was at optimization and I also realized too that I wanted to be able to use AI more and I didn't want to use reflect or Tana I wanted to use AI on my computer I wanted to have the privacy and so at the time Auto GPT which is a autonomous AI tool was you could install it on your computer locally so that way it wouldn't necessarily send any data to open AI I realized that if I had all of my data all my content and all my ideas and articles that I saved on my computer I could then feed that to one of these AI tools and then basically kind of create my own Proto Jarvis if you will granted I never got around to actually using the AI plugins or tools but I moved everything to obsidian took me like a whole month because I have so much data on notion and then lo and behold none of none of the plugins that I thought would work work the way I wanted to and then I never even used it for AI so it's like dang it I just moved for basically no reason but yeah that was the reason why I did it and also too obsidian's graph feature like I you want me to share my screen real quick it's so fascinating this real quick let me close this so as you can see it's already still expanding out and this is just these are all the articles that I saved right and then these are a lot oh that's not what I want well you get the idea all these different connected dots are different notes all the green ones are tags it's kind of crazy and the 3D version of this is even more insane but that's part of why I moved too because I wanted to see how all my data interconnected
Kei: Foreign
Dustin: Well, there is a couple plugins that are like called Journey or something like that or smart connections where it'll you give it a start Point endpoint it'll give you Connections in between so let's say that I want to write about self-development well there's this article that I know I really like that I have saved that I think will be good to help write it there's also this article and then the tool will give you a journey between different articles maybe like five different things so you chose this one but the the tool gives you three more then you can use all five to create that new article and so that's one way that that kind of graph could be useful I haven't quite done that much ironically I don't need new ideas like I mentioned before I have way too many in the backlog and I'm behind on that trajectory because of my Creator Journey how I've the choices I've made as a creator has put me behind in some areas and ahead in others and so I have kind of a backlog of content that I need to get out there I'm still I still feel behind basically and so that's why I was saying I need a tool to help me plan out my content so I could try to get it out as soon as as quickly as possible I can't burn out I have to make sure I don't do that but I also need to make sure that I have a solid plan I need to see a calendar of content that's why I'm thinking about I might move back to notion at least for my content plan because I want to be able to have that calendar view and obsidian's calendar kind of sucks
Kazuki
: I see so and and you but at the same time you tap into the AI tools like you care about privacy but you know I think what you mentioned like you know planning or you know thinking like about you know like headlines you know or future content it's like AI can have like alternative way I can help and like especially if I didn't know what I was going for sorry so I'm curious you know do you use any AI writing tools or AI tools
Dustin: I spent a lot of time with AI tools my friend I don't use them in my actual creative process like I don't use them the right articles for example but I've played around with Surfer SEO I played around with Jasper I was actually looking into AI writing tools a year or two years ago before the whole explosion of all these there was like articulo or writer or you know super SEO and then of course uh Jasper that everyone knows soon at this point I was looking at those tools like two years ago actually probably longer than that because some of them are running around for a minute but they weren't necessarily using chatgpt yet they were more doing their own thing I think and they weren't really that good and I also I'm a writer first like when I make a video I generally write about it first and so that's how I make my videos I just use those as bullet points I tried doing the whole scripting thing for YouTube and it just didn't work for me right now you're asking me questions I come up with it on the spot because that's just how I think I need that improvisation and writing gives me the time freedom to be it an improvisation person uh but you might get a kick out of this so the last two days of last year so that's December 30th or whatever I finally get around to playing with Chachi PT I had a whole bunch of friends tell me oh you should play around with it you should play around with it and I had I think I looked into gpt3 before but I never actually used chat GPT and at that point I was asking things about like polymass and things about self-development and content planning but there was one thing that really exploded for me I have always been a video game person I've always loved gaming one thing I loved doing was playing Pokemon and growing up I would take the little Sprites all the little 2D characters from the games and I would edit them I would enhance them I would revamp them I would make my own sometimes too I even made my own world maps as well but I was never really good at like making them from scratch that well but I could come up with ideas really well and I thought about like hey I want to make my own Pokemon fan game because there's always those tons and tons of those fan games out there so I came up with my own Pokedex I came up with my own ideas and my own region but using chat GPT I was able to flesh out the ideas it didn't come up with ideas for me it just took what I had already and fleshed it out and so I was able to start coming up with ideas for trainers and a story the plot the world I changed all the names from Pokemon to face evos and all the different kind of terms so instead of like a professor I have a face assist because these creatures come through face riffs I was coming up with my own IP my own video game series using chat TBT being able to flesh that out and I'll stop here in a moment but I was able to use AI image generation tools to come up with Pokemon beta designs as well so now I have like 500 beta designs I only using like 100 of them in the first region so my point is I used AI for the ideas for the plot and the quests and all that jazz I also use AI to come up with the beta designs for the creatures and I even started playing out with the video and music generators as well but those aren't as good yet so yeah
Kazuki: Yeah, it's more like for entertainment right and you know purpose I think
Dustin: No, no, it's my own IP I can release it like once I once I modify them to be a little bit more consistent in style and I can because I'm gonna take all the beta designs because they're all different kind of styles and and shapes I'm going to make them all one consistent style either by using human or using a better AI down the line and then I can turn those good designs into Sprites because that's something I can do I can take the pictures and turn them into little 2D characters and then I can also animate those and put them in the game I started actually it started uh sorry it caused me to start learning how to develop games using like the Godot engine I looked at unity and unreal but they weren't as good but the Godot engine so I started like learning game development and trying to figure out how I could make this game happen throughout the entirety of January that's part of why I'm behind this year because I spent the whole first month doing something else but yeah this is a game I can actually make and sell and put it on like Xbox or Playstation or whatever this is my own IP
Kazuki: Interesting so yeah hey now how about like you know using 30 people like vlogging so do you have plans to do that
Dustin: Why not you have
Kazuki: I have a whole series plan no okay but I have to um I mean so yeah you are like gaming a IP so like you know you're planning and developing it so they have any like real plans to release it
Dustin: Yeah, I just need to learn how to develop better at this point because coding is not something I've ever been good at that's why I couldn't create my own content management system I I actually actively thought about how I would make my own CMS because I got so tired of being a creator of multiple format types and not no CMS was able to handle that right you could sometimes you could do blogs and podcasts but they would never include videos too and I also forgot to mention earlier that I have a series that I do my main series The Paulie and content Series where it's a video blog post and podcast all in one every episode is all three excuse me and I consider that a separate content type since it's all three it kind of acts like a fourth type and so there was no CMS out there that could do all four let alone help me with social media management and stuff like that and so I need to learn the code probably the biggest thing because I think that's going to help me a lot when it comes to making that video game or that content management system but yes once I can get the coding down I plan on making the game a reality
Kazuki: interesting yeah that's interesting yeah looking forward to seeing it so but still you mentioned that you are using Code like ghost blog yeah you don't need to record it so like if you are in like you know pay the plan so you can adjust it by coding
Dustin: Yeah, okay so I know the HTML and CSS had a tiny bit of JavaScript I can code a little bit but I could never get past that I tried learning some Python and it started sticking a little bit but I could never learn any of the harder languages in any of the deeper languages and python is still something I kind of want to learn because I still want to maybe make my own Proto Jarvis kind of thing like I I have a lot of ideas that I could make if I could just learn the code I have the ability to make these things a reality but I just I've tried learning to code more than six times in my life and this it hardly ever stuck like the only reason why I know HTML and CSS and JavaScript is because I learned it like six times five times and it just eventually some of it just stuck and then the the JavaScript and ghost is actually a custom framework called handlebars and it's a very simple framework it's one of those things where I was able to pick it up pretty quickly I'm using a custom theme that was off GitHub GitHub and I heavily modified it myself but it's one of those things where I I mainly just had to copy and paste a lot of things I didn't have to that's probably what a lot of coding is a lot of time too but I mainly just had to move things around and that was about it
Kazuki: Got it yeah that's totally interesting yeah you know that GPD will help you for how they learn code so yeah I've tried to activity the code too but that wasn't super successful but I mean maybe now that it's getting better yeah so you mentioned that well you are like doing like interviewing and broadcasting with other professionals like or who are you know that you know you'll get and what kind of product are you talking about
Dustin: So, most of my content Falls underneath this polymathy umbrella but underneath there I have my different phases whether it's self-education or content creation swimming gaming that kind of thing those are kind of my main topics that I talk about and my first season of my show was all solo cast I actually just wrote about this today on like a Facebook group because it was really fascinating to me when I started doing interviews I had already been a podcaster for three years and I had essentially three podcasts but they were all basically the same for the most part so I had my polycast which I had two episodes of and I was literally talking about self-education because my first phase for poly innovator was around self-education so my first you know 100 pieces of the content was all around that topic of my modular degree my self-learning that kind of thing and then I had that old blog that I mentioned before the one that's around self-development and World Unity that had its own podcast and I was around 17 episodes there or 16 episodes but that was mainly self-development and philosophy and then I had my Fireside micro polycast which was something that I I came up with because I wanted to have like hey if I have a random idea instead of writing it down I want to talk about it right and so I came up with these three to nine minute episodes and made it into a thing well I only had two episodes and my main podcast feed and I started doing these interviews or started talking to people about interviews I was like I'm thinking to myself if they look at my podcast and only see two episodes they're gonna think that like I'm not good they're gonna think that I'm not experienced and while I wasn't super experienced at doing interviews I was experienced at podcasting and so I thought to myself well basically all three of these shows are essentially the same topic and I'm not continuing the the United living construct one that was not continuing the polycast one I'm mainly doing interviews for which means the only separate one really is that Fireside one I thought to myself well I could do the Fireside small micro episodes and then the interviews side by side and so I combined all three together into one feed and I totaled out to be like 42 episodes which there's a old American movie where 42 is the meaning of life and so I thought okay 42 is a good number that's my first season the next season I'll start doing interviews and from there that's where I kind of started and so I talked to people who are multi-disciplinary so basically people who do many different things I talk to them about their life how do they do their life and yeah like from there it's expanded a little bit actually after the conference that I just went to I actually refined and restructured my show a little bit and so yeah
Kazuki: yeah interesting so people need to go through do you have any advice or tips before like you know arthriting interviewer interviewer so they talk about the topics or how to get you know actual long time or like what kind of public what kind of like general question are you asking what do you have a conversation with them
Dustin: So, one thing I learned very on early on was that preparation is key right I had always known that I wanted to do interviews I can't explain why but I would see garyvee and all these other creators do these really cool interviews with these really cool people and I was like I want to do that one day same thing with Keynotes like doing you know presentations on stage like I saw that I was like I want to do that and so both of those two things I knew I wanted to do I just didn't know how I could do it and as soon as I got my first guest on the show I started doing research right I started learning a lot Lewis house had a really good video and I wish I could find this again and just save it somewhere I think I might have but I don't know basically he talks about the pre-show is the show so what you do before the show is what makes up the show itself and I love researching I think you guys could probably you know understand I love digging into rabbit holes and stuff like that and finding out all the little key details about a certain topic well that topic could be a person and so what I usually do is I get my person I usually do a Google search I also go to their websites whatever links they give me ahead of time too or at whatever links I know of I opened up all their links I look at all their profiles I scroll through their Instagram I try to consume at least one content type fully so if they're if they're a YouTuber I check out their almost their whole Channel if they're a blogger I try to check out their whole blog now with people like me where I have 500 blog posts you can't quite do that but you can at least check through scroll through see their biggest posts look at those that kind of thing sometimes I had guests that were researchers so I read their dissertation whether or not I understood it fully I can't say but I tried or I read their book something like that now it's kind of hard to do when you have so many guests but it's something I try to do very well I try to do a deep amount of research and then I make my questions from that so I usually have too many questions which is it's better to have too many than too little and then by the time they're coming on the show I sent them the email with the questions and the link to the video chat the night before or the day before and that way they don't have too much time to prepare I don't want them to over prepare on the questions I just want to send those questions ahead of time in case one of them is not good like oh I don't do that anymore and I really don't want to talk about it so could you please take that off so yeah that's only happened to me a couple times but it's just important to make sure they feel comfortable or maybe they're just like I just need to see the questions so I don't worry in my head and then when I first get him on the call I'm like Hey we're not recording yet don't worry uh have you gone to the bathroom do you need a drink of water you want to have a chat first Sometimes I just have a chat anyways with them like you and I are talking for a few minutes before we got started and then we start recording and if they mess up I edit it out but that preparation beforehand is what makes the episode so juicy
Kazuki: that totally makes anything thanks for advising yeah we wanna we wanna follow that you know advice and yeah so by the way this is you know the question from my curiosity uh but you know I don't know like what's your thoughts on the current degree systems let's say you know people are pursuing MBA or master's degree whatever but you know it costs a lot and I I think you know there are so many Nano degrees you know or micro degrees you know and I think it's concept is resonate with your kind of poly must you know concept too right and so what's the what do you think the you know future will look like you know in education office or a degree system
Dustin: I don't have any thoughts on that bro my whole first phase was around this if you look at the first 40 videos of my channel it's literally talking about courses and micro credentials uh so yeah it's a perfect question what I'm saying is that I think that the pro it's going to become more and more modular that's why I created the modular degree right this do-it-yourself degree system because I think that it's going to be bits and pieces of a lot of different things you could take up MBA sure or you could just go to 100 nba. com and do that or you could go to no pay MBA which is another website where a girl literally made her own that girl a woman made her own education MBA in education using courses just pure courses and so she literally got all the topics from like Harvard like the you know the syllabus okay those are all the classes I'm gonna find them on Coursera and then she made her own MBA and I kind of did the same thing with my own education but mine was way more vast I didn't have a specular topic I wanted to learn about Smart City development there was no degrees on that subject so I created my own however it eventually shifted to be more podcasting focused and in content creation focus and then how do I active listen how do I interact with people really well those are the different subjects that I taught myself in my own modular degree but a key word is modular my focus my need for learning shifted I did not need to learn about you know smart cities anymore because that wasn't my focus at that time I needed to learn interpersonal relationships I needed to learn podcasting so that modular degree changed to what I needed and then when it comes to micro credentials I think they're still not nearly enough of them yet the one that I really think is fascinating is by MIT there's actually two of them by MIT where if you take this micromasters they have you don't have to have any college history as long as you take that micromasters and pass you can go straight into a master's degree in MIT which is fascinating like you don't have to have a bachelor's to get a master's degree and so I was actively trying to take that course and you know what stopped me I didn't know our programming and I didn't know statistics two very I want to say but statistics is hard our propaganda is probably not that hard but two dense skills that I needed to learn on my own so I started learning a little about you know data science and trying to shift to that eventually I stopped pushing for that but my my point is that if you take that micro credential you can take it into a degree directly and it would be a lot cheaper than doing four years before
Kazuki: Yeah, that's impressive yeah and that's a great path and you know like just not you know diving into MBA or massage course but you know before that you know prior to that you know they can get some acquires some like uh micro decrease and then they can decide if they want to go or not and yeah and in that sense you know knowledge is knowledge itself it's like you know distributed and on the internet and people can get you know whatever they want to master or learn and then you're done on the internet at the same time you know some people say still you know I I by the way I told Sarah really uh with what you mentioned at the same time some people say you know still you know if you go to school or your master's program and you you know network is the biggest you know like takeout from from the master that's not what you learned yeah yeah and or yeah like but you know their experience still you know is better than like uh like a degree itself you know credential itself what's your take on these things
Dustin: Well, I was gonna say like I don't mean to interrupt you there the delay is kind of weird but it's not what you know too you know right and that's why when I went to the conference a week ago I didn't really pay much attention to the panels I didn't really care about what they were talking about on stage because I already knew half of what they were going to say and that was because I spent so much time learning on my own and again that sounds egotistical but it is true like I basically knew most of what they were going to talk about and I figured too I could probably listen to the panels after the fact which I don't know if I can or not now in retrospect but ironically I thought I could listen to it afterwards and so I focused mainly on just connecting with people I met like a thousand people at the conference that's a third of the conference I spent the entire time networking because that's the most important thing same with college it's not what you know it's who you know ironically a lot of times people the people you meet in college don't always really matter because they're either academics which means that they're only going to be able to help you in Academia for the most part that's a generalization but or they're just fellow students and they might go in a whole separate field so ironically meeting people in college is not necessarily the most important thing I've met better Connections in person like PhD people in person I have a neighbor who's a PhD person that connection is way more valuable than maybe up here in my psych 101 class in college also social based learning too I think is a very important thing me and Kai have talked about this quite a bit in the past as well obviously with glass but that's what you're trying to do you're trying to have that more social based connections like hey they highlighted this maybe that'll help you out and with my monstrous agree system which me and we're talking about too I've tried to think about it in peer-based learning as well like hey if I make my modular degree about podcasting and it's just that short little mini degree that I made about this particular topic I'm no longer doing it because I finished it I don't want to add any more to it anymore but I have this podcasting micro or my degree right here well then you guys started your podcast right now you want to learn more you can take my Mantra degree you can just be like hey that's cool I want to learn from it too I'm going to add this and this and this and boom I take it and that's kind of a peer-based kind of system
Kazuki: That's really interesting concept yeah we're gonna yeah we're going to do that and that's great
Dustin: All right. Don't be stealing my idea that was fine [Laughter] I didn't make this platform I want to make this platform so bad I just don't know how I can do it that's why I stopped working on that first phase of Education because or like the modular degree because I did as much as I could I created a notion template for people to download and use and make their own modular degree but from there I can't really make this platform a reality just yet and so I can't really do anything with that face so that's on the side burner that's on my like that's that's on the back burner so to speak and then I focused on doing interviews while I don't consider it interviews a phase it kind of took all my focus in that time and so my face shifted and then I started doing swimming content and then ironically all these AI tools came out all these content purposing tools came out so even though I was focused on swimming I had to kind of split my focus between swimming and content repurposing because all these tools came out and no one was talking about them and so there was a perfectly blue ocean Niche right there that I wanted to tap into so I'm kind of juggling a lot of things this year but yeah well hopefully I can get back to that first phase at some point
Kazuki: I see yeah anyway yeah. Thank you so much for sharing so many things and sorry if I think you know uh we asked of the question most of the question we we had today uh you know yeah I'm just getting warmed up come on now you got one more in the favor but so how do people build their like expertise or professions or they're learning so for like foreign
Dustin: I don't understand the question.
Kazuki: I have people how do people flute for proof they're like you know learning experience to expertise professions or something but if it's like micro credentials or like modular regulated then the people consider photos degree ask them as like you know standard marketer
Dustin: Really probably not but do you guys have a degree in business per se
Kei: No.
Kazuki: No, do you have a degree in web development
Dustin: That's my point you guys made a great website great user interface you obviously know web development really well you have the proof I'm looking at it right now I have the the website up right now right obviously you know web development you're creating a business here technically speaking while you might not be charging for a glass but you're creating some sort of content business around glass in order to generate income for the product or maybe you should be doing if you're not yeah already doing it but my point is you have business and what development despite the fact you don't have a degree right that's your proof right there for me my proof is content and I've always kind of talked about this too garyvee really drilled this home for many years document over create so document your journey creating this website creating this brand creating this company or maybe document your journey doing some kind of self-development and by making content doing that it's showing your progress and so that's why the first few videos on my channel are me documenting my journey through my modular degree now I stopped making that content because my focus shifted from my module degree to helping others create that modular degree and perhaps I should have kept that content going but for the most part by creating content like hey I learned this today so I'm going to write a blog post about it that shows that you had learned it and people can see that's more valuable than a piece of paper saying that you took four years at Harvard or whatever
Kazuki: Yeah, exactly yeah thanks for shouting oh yeah that's all wrong like from me because if you want to add something
Dustin: Well if you guys have any questions about podcasting I figured that you guys are getting started with podcasting perhaps maybe I can answer something like that too
Kazuki: So is that more like a platform or something
Kei: I'll say this podcast in general yeah
Kazuki: Okay so yeah do you have any otherwise or tips yeah to grow our podcast
Dustin: Hmm, refine your what's the word I'm looking for one second refine your pre and post right so I talk about the pre-show a lot but also the post show as well keep in touch with the contact like you guys did fine with me you you I got the emails and We messaged on LinkedIn or whatever but like hey if you're running behind on your schedule tell your guest that like hey I'm running behind sorry just wanted to let you know that kind of thing or if you want to get them to share like I'm obviously going to share this show and I'm going to put it on my list so I can put it on my website that kind of thing but that's because I know how to be a good guest as a host you can make Clips out of this video and then send me just a few Clips saying hey here's something that you said that was really cool can you share it on social media and tag us right and by providing the clips ahead of time don't just ask me to share but give me something to share that puts me in a framework to be like hey I don't mind doing that it's awesome clip I was totally sharing it and that's something I need to get better at marketing is not something that I'm I am good at doing I'm just not been good at doing it basically I know how to Market I just haven't been doing it myself so I'm giving you advice to help as well but then like create kind of a pattern that's the word I was looking for a pattern for each show have your intro like hey welcome to the glass show or something like that whatever you want to call it and then at the end like hey welcome to clash Royale I'm okay I'm Kazuki this is Dustin Miller poly innovator let's get on with the show and then at the end of the show be like hey thanks for coming on poly innovator I'm Kay again this is Kazuki this is this show like tell the audience what the show is so that way you have that consistency and then you know have the outro like I always ask the same question at the beginning share something about yourself that no one knows about you because it helps break the ice right it makes people feel like oh that's kind of a hard question but as soon as they answer that hard question everything else is easy from then on at the end I ask like what's the call to action what do you want the audience to do or whatever and that helps us create kind of this full circle.
Kei Foreign um good job I just wanted to mention like what you could do in the future.
Kazuki: So, in that sense you know do you have any any like a general advice you know whatever you you happen to mentioned today or you but you want to tap into in this in this interview
Dustin: so that's a good question it kind of reminds me of a question I used to ask where it's like hey is there anything that we talked about or that you wanted to talk about that we didn't do today is that that's a good question to kind of wrap up with for the most part I mean I really like talking about podcasting and content creation and I think that a lot of creators Focus too much on one type so I was a writer right that's my main one people see me as a podcaster or a blog or a video creator but I was a blogger first right but I'm all three I'm good at all three I'm great at writing though and so I make sure I I do my anchor but a lot of creators don't realize you should be doing all three like you should if you're doing a podcast interview definitely do video because obviously you're missing out a lot when you're just through audio nowadays I think that you really can't get away with doing interviews anymore without video that was a concept that they talked about a lot at the podcast conference too but it was kind of funny being there at a podcast conference they all saw me as a podcaster despite the fact I was a multi-format Creator so so with some people I had to correct I was like I'm not just a podcaster though that's technically my podcast my interviews is my secondary series my main series is that video podcast and blog all in one and so framing yourself and learning how to Brand yourself and understand how to present what you do well I think that's really important.
Kazuki: Oh, that's a great advice and yeah thank you so much for yeah thank you so much for taking time and you know all the advice and you know like the feedback you know or nothing end up on a podcast yeah yeah thanks so much
Dustin: Thank you.
Follow Dustin on social:
Website: https://polyinnovator.space/
Instagram: @polyinnovator
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1p3ClCyMyYoeTEhcYWFsaR
