HS 270 - Wearable Technology Connecting You to the World with Chris Dancy

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Welcome to the Holistic Survival show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival show is your family's insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats, and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you'll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

Welcome to the show. This is Jason Hartman, your host, and every 10th episode we do something kind of special, kind of different. What we do is we go off topic. So regardless of which show it is on the Hartman Media Network, whether it be one of the financial shows, economics, real estate, investing, travel, longevity, all of the other topics that we have, every 10th episode we go off topic and we explore something of general interest, something of general life, success, value. And so many of our listeners around the world in 164 countries have absolutely loved our 10th episode shows. So that's what we're going to do today. And let's go ahead and get to our guest with a special 10th episode show. And of course, on the next episode, we'll be back to our regular programming. Here we go. It's my pleasure to welcome Chris Dancy to the show. He's been featured on the COVID of Business Week's Global Tech, Fox News, NPR, BBC, TechCrunch, Mashable, Wired, TED, and a 2016 Showtime special dedicated to his life as the most connected human on Earth. He's also known as the mindful Cyborg. For 25 years, he's been serving in many leadership roles within the technology and healthcare industries. It's a pleasure to have him today. Chris, welcome. How are you?

Hi. Thank you. And I'm doing well.

Good to have you. Give our listeners a sense of geography. Where are you located today?

I'm currently in Nashville, Tennessee. I live just south of Nashville in a city called Brentwood.

Fantastic. How did you become the most connected man in the world? What is that about?

Good marketing. It's such a long and convoluted story, but basically Bloomberg picked up on some work I'd done maybe four years ago, ran a story where they referred to me as the world's most monitored person. And that kind of morphed into another news agency that called me the most surveilled man. And then somebody heard me on stage and said, you're the most connected person. So I don't know where it actually came from, but it's just a media moniker. It's not really me.

Yeah, well, I'd say that's a better moniker. I mean, most people since Edward Snowden broke the NSA scandal, you know, they don't want to be surveilled and monitored. Right. How is this a good thing currently.

In its current state? I don't think it is a good thing. Many of the multi billion dollar industries we've come to rely on depend on mass surveillance. They just call it personalization or club cards. I don't think it's a good thing. And we don't have an Edward Snowden for our bodies yet.

That is certainly true. Well, what are you doing that earned you these different monikers? You know, whether good or bad or indifferent, what are you doing? You're keeping track of yourself, right? And the quantified self.

Yeah, I started about 2008 when the economy took a downturn, just looking at what's important to people and how does the world function in 2020. That was kind of my goal. I just met Ray Kurzweil at that point and I was really influenced by some of his ideology. I've since reconciled that I'm no longer a Kurzweilian, but it got me inspired to think about how our world functions in the future. And my main takeaway was understanding that we don't need keyboards or screens. Behavior is very much an input device. And then I started looking for ways to understand behavior and came across personal analytics as a class of study. And then in 2009 found a quantified self group just north of San Diego. It was kind of a journey. By late 2009, I was starting to record things. So it started off with just simple things I would do on the Internet using RSS feeds or Yahoo pipes to move information around. By 2010, I had most of everything I did on the web automatically collected. So if I posted a comment, if I created a blog, if I watched a YouTube video, if I listened to streaming music, it would all go into buckets, you know, entertainment or content or feedback. And then late 2010, I started combining financial information. Early 2011, the first sets of wearables, my body media. And then I just started looking at my life as just this big function, this big mass that never actually went offline. If I appreciated the breadth of technology enough. And that's when I started designing a system to take all this information on a very low, what's referred to as low friction data collection. So I just want to live life. I want to talk to you, I want to brush my teeth, I want to watch tv and I don't want to record anything. And I wanted ways to have that happen. And I found the quickest way was just looking at some of the consumer companies. Once I had a good three years worth of data, I thought, what could I do with this? Because I was collecting it and storing it and I started saying, well, gosh, the first thing I could do is I could search it. So I just started looking because I stored it all on a Google Calendar. So I just started searching Google Calendar for events when I was extra tired or angry or all sorts of parameters. And it just became obvious to me that I stumbled onto something very profound. I turned myself into a Wikipedia.

This is fascinating. So to give a comparison and I want you to tell us a lot more about this. I've got a lot more questions for you. But to just give a comparison, you know, when most people say myself included the quantified self, they're talking about things like I do been monitoring my sleep with a sleep cycle app for the better part of two years or a little over two years. Yeah. And it's been interesting to, you know, once you collect some data for a while, it's been interesting to notice some patterns. I've got a Fitbit on my wrist. My car, I just bought a Tesla. So that car is now connected and that monitors all sorts of interesting things. And I can monitor it. There are a bunch of things like this, but you've taken this to a whole new amazing level. Tell us about these connections. Like, you do one thing and then you've got this diary of sort of everything you've ever posted and how you were feeling and how are you connecting all of this? That's incredible.

Thank you. So I have an IT background. I was a SQL DBA for most of the 90s and early parts of the 2000s.

What is a DBA?

Database analyst. So large structured data. So I understood the basic element. If you've ever done a spreadsheet or any type of just balancing a checkbook, this minus this goes here. So I understood the relationships of information. For me, it was really about understanding the different types. So, you know entertainment, well, entertainment's a lot of things. It's going to the movies, it's listening to music, it's reading a Book. It's purchasing a book. But purchasing a book is finances and entertainment. Well, what are finances? Well, finances are paying for the lights. Well, the lights is also environment. Why? Because lights are bright. How bright are they? About 200 lumes. So there's this interesting relationship in our lives when you experience everything through a connected interface that you realize there's filtered information that you could benefit from. And companies like Progressive will give you a discount off your car insurance if you put a snap sensor and let them monitor your driving. Yet they don't tell you how often you speed, how often you hard brake more on Fridays or Mondays. And they certainly aren't going to work with your bank to say, is it before or after you go on a spending spree? And I just felt, as kind of an IT person, back before anyone knew what I was doing, that we owed it to ourselves to try to start to explore this evolving world of personal informatics and just how connected we were. To be honest with you, Jason, you're probably just as connected, if not more connected than I was when I started. You just. No one's given you the tools to start to map it and understand your life.

Interesting. Okay, so tell us more about what you're doing and then maybe what we should be doing, if we're doing sort of the basic things that, that I do and lots of listeners are doing.

Well, the most important thing, I think, for listeners, just remember your phone's already doing all of this. So many people worry about privacy and they get really upset about it, but they roll around with a key ring full of club cards. They have no problem giving their phone number to every store in the world to get the discount, but they don't understand that that's just quantified self for the store.

Quantified store, quantified customer base.

Yeah, right, exactly. It's a loyalty card, but it's not loyal to you.

Right, sure.

So the loyalty is one direction. So we're entering an age very rapidly. In the next four years, I'd say we're already. It's done. But where you can't afford to live without the Internet. So if I were to say, how much money would it take for you to actually not have the Internet? No one can afford it.

Right.

So all that takes a lot of money to run. And what it's running right now is our behavior. I personally feel we're not designing software and, or services and. Or systems to return any of that value back to us. It returns a lot of convenience. I mean, I've seen People on the street who won't run because their Fitbit's not in running mode. I saw a guy today at a store get mad at the AT&T salesperson because he couldn't get Siri to understand his voice. And he 10 minutes training it when he just could have driven someplace or asked for directions. So, you know, for me, I did a lot of things. I lost a bunch of weight. People love to focus on that. I became a Buddhist. People love to focus on that. But there's just so many things that we could do with our own information. And then you're getting started. You know, I think checkbooks are a great place to get started. A lot of times, you know, we log what we spend, but we categorize it. And, you know, something that I found very early on was instead of putting it in a category, put it in a feeling. So how did I feel when I spent the money? It's much different Checking ledger when it's sorted by a feeling.

Just for example, you know, if someone wants to do this, how many feelings did you. Did you separate this into? I mean, there are thousands of words to describe feelings, both positive and negative.

But, you know, simple things like angry or excited. What was the other one that used to come up a lot? Oh, frustrated was also one. So, you know, frustrated was always when I was spending money or paying bills, talking to customer service people that involved giving them a credit card.

Massive frustration.

Yeah. So, you know, that's one thing you could do with quantified self. I think the quantified self and, you know, regular everyday people, they just need to look at how they're using the information that is collected about them and see if there's any benefit to it outside of how they're normally looking at it. I mean, information is so much more powerful than just the bits and bytes. You know, we talk about big data, but data is so low on the food chain when it comes to your life. I mean, data's. It's data, information, knowledge, wisdom is the order in which the, the hierarchy functions. I'm wondering where are the businesses out there that are challenging the status quo and turning people's information into something of value? I'm not sure really where it is. The health implications of what I've done are massive and transforming. Just patient adherence to medicines would be rapidly changed by just using data in the phone. Apple understands this. They're exploring those avenues with their research kit, which is built off of health kit. But there isn't an industry that isn't touched by What I've done, and there's a million more Ubers and Facebooks out there that will be founded in what I call the Internet. So the information between you and the devices in the world around you as we leave the Internet.

So the Internet, that's interesting. Tell us more about what is the Internet. Explain that in a little more detail, if you would.

Sure. So in computers is what we call traditional networking, but there's this hybrid of networking which they refer to as mesh networking. And that's where small networks work together and can be cut off from the outside world. So the original Internet was just a mesh network. After the Hurricane Sandy, parts of Red Hook, New Jersey became a mesh network, which technically means the Internet could go down, but they could still communicate with the buildings around them. So the Internet is really just a mesh network between you, the devices that are on your body or on your person and the space around you.

Would that be the same as a peer to peer network? I mean, and I mean peer to peer, not by people to people, but. Well, in the case of Hurricane Sandy it was. But in the case of, you know, one person such as yourself and then their devices, those devices are peer to peer without the broader Internet.

Yeah, you nailed it. So you're quite the technologist. So we early, we used to call this peer to peer, but mesh really took over. With mesh there was more of a self contained, whereas peer to peer still dependent on an outside conduit. So if you think about it this way, my earpiece, my Bluetooth earpiece, which I don't have one, but talking to my phone is a peer to peer network. My Bluetooth earpiece and my phone talking to some piece of technology on my body that's then talking to the room and changing the lights or adjusting the temperature or sending a message to a loved one on behalf of a behavior would be an Internet or a mesh network of your body and environment combined together. Again, I just have to go back to. Since you have a network about finances and stuff, I would not spend one more dollar building one more app. They're not going to be relevant in three years.

Why wouldn't apps be relevant? Because it'll just be the Internet directly.

Just the Internet. Internet, we don't have a word for it yet, so I call it the Internet.

Well, yeah, but apps. See, I think apps, the possible downfall of apps may be to just better mobile websites, better mobile optimized websites. Like why do you need an app for Chipotle? I'll just, I don't know, whatever. Like you have. Now I have the Chipotle app on my iPhone. Right? But if the website itself for Chipotle does all that, and it makes it really simple for a small screen device and a mobile device, and it runs really fast like an app would, why do you need an app? Right.

Because you still have to type in a website address.

Right?

So, I mean, just apps and websites and all of the mobilized stuff was inherently written for a paradigm that went from bulky room size computers to bulky desktop computers to something that fits in your hand. But we still have a keyboard on the phone. I mean, Steve Jobs want any of this?

Yeah, we still have this input device.

And we have the world's largest input dice, which is our behavior. So if I haven't had lunch and it's six hours later and I walk into a Chipotle, my phone knows all of those pieces of information.

Okay.

My last time I was there, they know what I purchased.

Right.

This is not a leap. This is not some technological breakthrough. It's just something that will start to happen as businesses say. I mean, business. I think Starbucks does a really good job with some of this.

Well, okay, so let's just take that example you gave. You have to somehow tell your mobile device, you have to tell your phone that you didn't eat lunch. I mean, how does it know? It doesn't know that.

So if you're logging food, your phone knows.

Right.

So if you live in a home like mine where, you know, I have cameras that watch everything I do. They know when I eat.

Literally the camera has visual recognition software that understands if you're eating or not. Is that what you're saying?

I don't have that. I actually have someone monitor my feed from home real time.

So you have a virtual assistant that watches you. Oh, my God, this is crazy. And it logs whether you eat that person, does it?

It's the Truman show. Except I'm Truman and the director.

Oh my gosh, you are funny. Yeah. But that still requires a person with an input.

Correct. And right now, a lot of these middleware things, you know, humans are taking up these middleware jobs.

Right.

As technology over the next four years becomes more pervasive and we go from something like an Apple watch, which has right now just heart rate, but has the guts for blood oxygen, it's not difficult to say that. You could have also spectrometry in that, you know, there's been a couple prototypes of things that just analyze your blood that know you just ate and you just ate not a bagel, but a Cream cheese bagel.

This is.

There's this thing in technology called Moore's Law and it's how fast and powerful.

Computers getting 18 months doubles, right? Yeah, it's actually faster now. But yeah.

What we're not taking into account with Moore's Law is the rise of mems. And MEMS are these multi integrated sensors that go in phones, everything from barometers to accelerometers. And as the sensors that go into devices become more prevalent, while the computer itself isn't getting faster, the ability to understand all the inputs. So the newest iPhone actually has a pressure sensitive screen so you don't actually have to open up apps. You can just press on the screen a little bit different and understands pressing. So if you take just something as simple as an unlock key on your iPhone that can read your blood with spectral imaging, which is completely something we can do now with mobile technology and say in four years. Why would you log food? It would just know when you ate. And for someone with a health condition, it's just something that would be commonplace. But for the rest of us, restaurants will start saying, hey, if you track your food with us, we'll give you X, Y and Z. The move will be swift and it will be fast and it will come under the guise of health care.

Interesting. Yeah, very interesting that people are excited about the day which is rapidly approaching, where our toilets are all being monitored to see what we can eating and drinking.

Right, yeah, well, they have those now.

I'm sure they're available, but you know, nobody's using them yet. Except probably you.

Yeah, I don't have a smart toilet. No, there's some parts of my house that aren't monitored. You know, where I have sex and where I use the restroom or not.

Okay, this is good. Yeah, right.

I'm 47, so I have a little line there in the sand.

Okay, good, good. So in other words, if your device is monitoring your eating habits and you're getting a discount, like the discount card to, you know, CVS Drugstore or petsmart or whatever, then they can market to you because they know you're hungry, they know when you're hungry.

Absolutely.

And they know what you had yesterday or this morning and they know how that might affect your taste patterns. I mean, that's an interesting thing about quantified self that I'm sure is coming.

So let's. Hold on one second. Did you know there's a place on earth that does all of the things you just suggested right now? No, it's called Disneyland.

Tell us about that.

Disneyland has magic bands, and magic bands have your park tickets, and they sync to different attractions within the park. Disneyland also encourages you to use their WI Fi. So now your phone is on their network. So when you're paying for food at Disney with your MagicBand and you're optimizing which lines to go to Disney's, I mean, they're not calling it this, but Disney's already designed the system that we just talked about for Chipotle.

Wow. Amazing.

And you give Disney your thumbprint when you enter the park. The first time you get a magic band. Disney is probably the most surveilled, convenient, safe space on Earth.

Huh. Very interesting.

Okay, so I just encourage people really start to slow down, back away from the fantastical world of technology and just look at the places that are using this and you'll find that, you know, it's not hard in businesses that will borrow that very Disney methodology or they're waiting to be invented.

Amazing. It's. You know, I always like to say it's an amazing time to be alive, but it's also a pretty scary time.

I agree with you. I mean, this first, if you don't, you have people on one side of the aisle throwing fud, fear, uncertainty, and doubt about your baby monitor being hacked and your car being hacked, you know, and you go to the other side of the aisle, people saying, you're going to live forever. You know, and it's. People are anxious and they're depressed and they're scared and they should be. President Obama was on television the other night saying the economy's new and the security of a job is gone. And, you know, call it what it is, you know, tech is moving faster than Our ability to upgate. Our ability to domesticate horses took hundreds of years. Our debilitate to understand machine and machine farming took decades. Our ability to keep up with computers took maybe 5, 10 years. Our ability to keep up with mobile now is taking weeks, months, days. Our ability to keep up with the quantified self will be minutes, hours. Our ability to keep up with technology beyond that will be moments.

So are you an optimist or a pessimist about this? Which side do you fall on? Or is it just a mix of both?

I'm a Buddhist, so.

I try not to. I mean, I'm not gonna lie to you. It's hard. I'm human, right? I'm gonna be dualistic about all of it, sure. But it really depends on the day, and it really depends on how I see people using information more Often than not, I'm a pessimist because I see people say, well, you know, I just read this and like, well, how did you read that? You know. Well, you know, I was, you know, kind of alert on my phone. It's like people don't have the ability to not weaponize facts. And we live in a world full of, you know, facts and data. So I see people all the time. You know, my mom used to weaponize coupons, right? She'd clip a coupon, go to three different stores. My father would say, yeah, but think of all the cash you wasted, right? You know, so it's one fact versus another and we.

Why do you call that weaponizing?

I haven't seen anyone use information in a kind way in a very long time.

Okay, but how do your mom weaponized coupons? I don't understand.

Yeah, so my mom liked to go out and look for deals. Okay, so she enjoyed shopping. So going to one store for one item, one store for another item, a third store for another, and saving $6 was her way of doing something she enjoyed. And the weapon she created was, I saved $6. My father, Charles would say, but you wasted using some more data, information, this much gas. So it's just I use weaponized information on purpose because it's provocative and people have a real hard time dealing with data without making it. Just in this very scenario, without saying, wait a minute, what do you. What are you talking about? And I just don't think as a species we have the ability to look at information in a non judgmental way. Yet legal system tries, I think medical information tries, but the rest of us are kind of, you know, kind of hokey pokey with it.

Interesting. Yeah. You met Ray Kurzweil a while back. I would love to get him on the show. I haven't achieved that one yet, although I've had a lot of famous guests. You know, he talks a lot about how we are approaching the singularity. He believes it'll be 2030. And you've got to have a lot of thoughts about this, I'm sure, because that's really, you know, you seem to be moving in that direction.

That's how I got into it.

Well, I just want to explain to the listeners who may not know what is singularity first and then have you comment on it. I can explain it or you can. I'd rather have you do it, though.

I'd love to hear your take on it.

My more layman's take probably than yours is just that when man and machine Merge when there's really no noticeable difference between the two. Kurzweil talks about how a $1,000 computer in 2030, just 14 years away from now, will be as powerful as the human mind. You know, then it begs the question of what are we? What really makes us us? Is it our body? Is it our mind? Is our personality? You know, what dimension? If our bodies die and go away, but our consciousness is still there, then are we still alive? Go ahead and correct and comment.

As you know, I, you know, I think these are very important questions. They refer to philosophies and spiritual studies as wisdom based studies. You never hear of math referred to as wisdom. There's no mathematical wisdom. So I do think we're in an age where a lot of these questions are going to be addressed. As far as a technological singularity, you put it eloquently. I'm not sure that we can really say that there will be one or won't be one, because to actually recognize a singularity, we'd have to recognize what sentient is in ourselves. I think it's wildly optimistic on Mr. Carswell's part to assume that we'll be able to measure humanness. Now. Machines having the capability of a brain, absolutely. You know, 100 monkeys can type out something, but that doesn't mean that they'll be aware. The people, I think that were really going to be urgently important. As we move into quantum computing. With D Wave computers being rolled out, encryption then is instantly broken and the massive amounts of surveillance and data that we're collecting are coders.

What is D Wave?

D Wave is a computing company out of British Columbia. I think they make quantum computers. So they have, and have had for three years now the first successful quantum computer. So computers that don't work with bits or bytes, but work at a quantum state. And normally a computer works by saying something is on or off. So it makes a judgment. Yes, no and enough. Yes, nos can give you the letter A. Enough yes, NOS can give you Siri. Quantum computing actually works with the quantum state. And in quantum states you can actually have yes, no, and yes, no, and all the states in between. So there's something in quantum theory called the observer effect, where something actually changes based on whether it's being observed or not. So with quantum computing, what we're going to be able to do is approach what Ray Kurzweil is calling the singularity. It won't be done on the computers we have now. I can tell you that. That's just. He didn't say the singularity would happen on the current chipset. He goes through transistors and then he goes through silicon. So in quantum computing, that's where we approach what he's calling the singularity. And we have those computers now. Google's using them. The problem is they're hard to program for and they're very unstable. A lot like the first PCs back in the 70s.

Sure, sure. Well, many would argue that the Microsoft PC of today is very unstable.

But only an Apple user would say that, I guess, right? Oh, gosh. Or maybe only a Microsoft user would say that. But it depends.

I made my life, my living off all of them.

Good stuff. Well, you know, Chris, what else would you like people to know? Maybe any question I haven't asked you. Just an area we haven't touched on. This is a fascinating topic.

Just know that it's okay and you're going to be fine. And that anxiety and fear you have about life and people and attention, it's normal. We're all feeling it. We don't talk about it. When we do, we usually judge people. Why aren't you paying attention to me? Why doesn't anyone listen to me? You know, all that frustration you have inside is we all have it. It's not technology. It's just where we are as a species. And just know that you're not alone and there's nothing to be afraid of right now. Except for maybe the fact that you don't have enough people telling you it's okay and it's okay.

Yeah. Very interesting stuff, Chris. Give out your website. Tell people where they can find out more about you.

Thank you. That's really kind of you to offer that. My website's just my name. Chrisdancey.com, C-H-R-I-S-A-N-C-Y.com and I'm on Twitter usually ranting in a negative tone about technology. Hrisdancy on Twitter.

Fantastic. Chris Dancy, the most connected man in the world. Thanks for joining us today.

Thank you, Jason.

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