>> Oscar Naim: Hello and good morning everybody. It’s a pleasure for me to introduce you to Chris
Dancy. I met Chris last year at Defrag 2013 in Colorado. And you know, I was really impressed by his
presentation. He’s a great speaker but more than that, he’s going to be talking about some very, very
interesting topics today. Chris is considered the most connected man in the world, and that’s not his
term, it’s the term that—you know—people have used. So he’ll talk a bit more about that. He’s also a
Data Exhaust Cartographer, and again, he’ll be mentioning some of those things later. But you know, I
really hope that you enjoy the talk and by all means—you know—ask questions and the hope is that this
is going to be interactive. And the same for people in the webcast; please feel free to send me
questions and I’ll ask those on your behalf. And without no further ado, I’ll leave you with Chris Dancy
here. [applause]
>> Chris Dancy: Thanks. It’s a real honor to be here and actually hold, like, an actual Microsoft-branded
cup. It’s very exciting. So, Data Exhaust Cartographer: I’ve never had anyone actually use my title
before so it’s kind of changed everything I was gonna say. So data, we all know what that is, right? Data
exhaust is like all the information falling off of you. Do you remember Pig Pen? How many of you know
Charlie Brown? Remember Pig Pen, he always no matter what happened he had that just… just afollowing around? So data exhaust is like everything that you are, even if you’re not carrying anything
electronic, ‘cause all the information that you create you’re walking around with. And as a child, my
parents weren’t… didn’t have great means, so I got a book in elementary school of a hundred and one
things kids can do for free. And one of the things was you could write to the different states in the
United States—this is the seventies for some of you—and then you could ask them for things from their
state. So all the states I started writing to would send me maps, and then my room which was covered
with maps. And then finally I started writing to countries once I actually got a little bit of…I could afford
postage, and countries would send me maps. So I grew up in love with maps, and then I always
dreamed that I would be in those cities. And then when, as maps kind of evolved over the decade or so
that I wrote around and asked for maps, maps got more complex. They’d have like populations and like
topography and they became very complex. They weren’t just very simple maps from 1975. By 1985, I
had really cool looking maps. But I always thought, “Gosh, how amazing and how much information and
how much perspective you can get from a map.” So cartography is the art of making maps. So when I
started this—I don’t even know what to call it—experiment or project five years ago, I really just wanted
to understand what it… what or how I describe it to someone. I said, “Well it’s kind of like making a map
of your life.” And I thought, well that doesn’t make sense. So I said, “I want to use cartography ‘cause
it’s a fancier word.” So, Data Exhaust Cartographer: so that’s kind of what that means.
So the appointment was called The Human Information System. So we’re going to cover a lot of
different things and BYOD and other stuff. This is from an old talk that I really… I took and just threw a
lot of it away and just created something unique for you guys. And I’m okay with machines going off
‘cause—you should come visit my house [laughter]. It’s like, uh, “What’s going on? Why are all these
things talking”? So I created a fauxgenda ‘cause we’ll never actually make it through all of this, or we
will and we won’t cover any of it adequately. But I like to talk about my bias, because it’s a good idea
you know. You know what my bias is already because of some of the things you’ve heard about me or
my introduction, but I think it’s good to just… for me to say them. And then, where this title came from;
and then the three driving problems I see in today’s world from a technology standpoint; the three
driving data types are driving those problems. I call it Wearables one hundred ‘cause if you want to do
Wearables one-o-one, there’s just someone in the room who can actually do that for you and do it
properly. Although I use wearables, I’m no expert in wearables. I think I’m an expert on what it looks
like when it all put together in five years. Some solutions, ‘cause it’s nice to tell you guys how I think you
should think about your jobs, but more importantly your careers. You know, I’ll be working for an… I’m
forty five; I’ll probably be working for another forty years. So that’s a long time. A lot can happen in
forty years. And then these concepts of existence as a platform—which I think are really important to
understand—humanity as the platform, which is the evolution beyond that. And then, the… I would
really like to get to this, and I think we will because I’ll move very fast if it’s okay with you guys. And
that’s, kind of, what’s really driving why we’re seeing this rapid change? And I think it’s this collapse of
three basic human elements: and that’s ownership, narrative, and identity. We all have… we all kind of
grew up in a world—unless you’re under ten, those are the magic children. Anybody have children that
are ten? God, those are magic children. We all grew up with some concept of ownership but most
people won’t… don’t have… their starting to lose their concept of ownership. Narrative: we all grow…
have a concept of a story—a narrative, a timeline—but we’re losing that very rapidly. And we all have a
concept of identity—and we talked about that before this session—that we’re starting to lose, kind of,
very rapidly. And then, kind of, three core solutions if I was creating products or looking at jobs in the
future.
So, I’m gonna go over three quick slides, they’re kind of like joke slides, because you know how every
speaker does the terrible joke slides that are supposed to make you laugh. But these three slides are
specifically addressing digital dualism. Is anybody familiar with the term digital dualism? Okay. So it’s
this concept that there’s an online and offline world. ‘Cause there really isn’t an online and offline
world; there’s a world and then there are people who put you or subjugate you into one of those things.
So, objectify you, “Oh look you’re online, oh look you’re on your device, oh look you’re not paying
attention,” right? And when you introduce technology to that you have this digital duality, right? “Oh,
you’re not on vacation, you’re taking pictures of vacation.” And we do all these very pathological things
to people to kind of make them feel less than human or make you feel more human than they are
because you don’t have a relationship with technology. I love how everyone perks up during this
section. And it’s okay, right? We didn’t conquer email etiquette. We didn’t conquer table etiquette.
We aren’t gonna conquer phone etiquette because there is no such thing. We’re all individuals. We’ll
do what we want to do and that’s the way it is. But I thought I’d just go through my, kind of, three joke
slides on digital dualism. So, the first one is Tech Fetish, alright. So everybody has this concept of tech
being this really great thing that’s gonna save the world. So in this case you’ve got this guy saying, “You
kids with your cloud computers and your googly docs. In my day we attached files to emails and we
liked it that way.” And he says, “Dave, you’re only two years older than me,” right? [laughter] So—you
know—there’s this whole thing where like you can just play the age card or the maturity card or the
experience card and like, shame someone to thinking that their—you know—not doing their job. And I
don’t think tech is something to be shamed or celebrated, so… although I might have elements of tech
fetish in my presentation, I want you to know I certainly don’t fetishize tech. Although I would like to, I
just have learned that it’s not that sexy.
The other thing is Tech Pathology and we were talking about this earlier, right? Tech is ruining us. It’s
making us more isolated and—you know—there’s this narcissism and everything else. And this is a
picture from, I think, the 1930’s of people on a bus or a train and they’re not paying attention to each
other. And I like to remind people all the time, although I’ve recently started dating someone new and
it’s been really difficult for me ‘cause this person’s constantly on their phone—I don’t know how people
who are dating actually get… live—but there’s this concept that I used to talk about on stage, which is
now a little uncomfortable because it’s affecting me personally, that if someone’s not paying attention
to you, they’re on their phone, that somehow they have an attention problem. But it’s truly, if I’m on
my court, if I’m at my best, I’m rested and fed, if someone’s not paying attention to me ‘cause they’re
on their device, I have the attention problem. I need it, alright? So, I think we have to be very careful
with this.
And the last piece of pathology that we’re going to look at is this, and it’s from a principal publication
from 1815. It says, “Students today depend too much on paper. They don’t know how to write on a
slate without getting chalk and dust all over themselves. They can’t clean paper… or slate properly.
What will they do when they run out of paper?” So it really doesn’t matter how we look at any of these
cool, fun, futuristic topics, somebody’s going to break them apart and make you feel ugly. So I just want
you to, like, have that Dove commercial moment and know that you’re okay. [laughter] Okay? ‘Cause if
you don’t know, Dove commissioned this thing where they asked… I think it was they asked friends of
people to describe them and the sketch artist drew them, and then they asked that person to describe
them. And then they had the ladies come back in the room and the ladies saw the picture that they
described versus the picture their friends had described, and they’re so beautiful with what their friends
described, but when they described themselves they’re just not as beautiful. So, I just want you to
know, from a technology standpoint, you’re all very beautiful to me. I don’t care what you do with it.
That being said, I do know that once you get to about seventy percent on your phone’s battery, you
start feeling like life is gonna end. Because anything is possible between ninety-five and one hundred
percent battery, but after that you start to know there’s only so much time left, alright? You can do…
alright? But when you’re at a hundred percent, do you ever notice you feel a little bit better when your
battery’s at a hundred percent? So we have a very real relationship with technology, I just don’t know
why we’re not talking about it more. It’s so real though that we’re doing crazy things with it. So, these
are just some fun examples I pulled out from a very old deck ‘cause I think they’re very relevant. So this
was a guy… he’s a homeless guy. So they paid homeless people, two years ago, three years ago to be
human hotspots for advertising during South by Southwest. So you walked up to these homeless people
and got wireless access. This is…FedEx paid people to be a charging station. There’s stories of children
who live—you know—in video games—I think this might even be through an Xbox. Facebook had this
great message last year in April. They tweeted out and they said, ”Hey, your friends are waiting inside
your phone, set them free.” And I thought, “Wow! Do people realize what they’re saying? Okay, that’s
cool.” See a little bit digital duality there? See any playing with that? “Wow, you’re in your phone.”
And then you notice there’s this whole concept of people talking in memes? And we’ll of talk a little bit
about some of this kind of crazy stuff later. And then—you know—people are their phones, and that
sort of thing. Well, we have all sorts of fun things to talk about. And then of course, people waiting in
line to buy tech for you. So this is a taskrabbit who was paid to wait in line to buy tech.
So, world’s most connected human. So I didn’t name myself that. Last year when I was… when people
started writing about me I was known as the world’s most surveilled man and now I’m the world’s most
connected human. And it was BBC that kind of coined it and then Mashable ran it and spun it and then,
I mean, NameDrop the media outlet, and I was just on the cover of Business Week three weeks ago
and—you know—world’s most connected human and a whole spread. I’m shirtless in it which is really
embarrassing, but um… And you’ll find out why it’s embarrassing in a minute, for a second. But I didn’t
make that up. It’s a media thing and maybe you’ll figure out why when we get more into what I did. So,
this whole journey starts off with a very simple day in time. Nineteen sixty… nineteen sixty-eight I was
born; in two thousand eight I turned forty. So turning forty is one of those things where you dread your
whole life till it happens and you go, “That’s it? Like, there’s no parade and like I don’t get an adult card
or…?” All the things you think will happen when you turn forty don’t happen. So, you don’t die, you
know. I just had all these things that were gonna happen. But I did know that I was wearing like, a
blazer and like, I had this totally ridiculous hair and like, I had like this cheesy business smile, and like—
you know—it’s perfect for LinkedIn, right? But in reality it wasn’t me, right? But at forty I said to myself,
“I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to make the same amount of money that I make now when I’m fifty.”
I was looking at the year twenty-twenty. It’s like, “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make that
money in twelve years when I’m fifty.” So what do I need to know? So, at forty I thought, “Well, I can’t
go back to school—I could go back to school but I don’t know if I can learn enough to actually be
employable and make the same income.” So I went through all the things I could learn that actually
could either teach myself or learn through reading, and personal informatics was the one I picked. And
it was very, very, kind of interesting. Personal informatics has been around a long time but because of
the digital revolution, personal informatics was, kind of, new again. So I said to myself, “Wow, what
could I do if I wanted to document or record parts of my life?” Fast-forward to two thousand thirteen
and then we’ll talk about what happened in between 2008 and 2013. 2013 I was sitting at something
called Cyborg Camp in… I’m sorry, 2012, I was sitting in the Fall in Portland, I was sitting in something
called Cyborg Camp—and your friends always love it when you tell them you’re going to Cyborg Camp—
and this guy said, “Hey, are you—you know—the guy with the crazy something?” And I’m like, “Yeah.”
And I showed it to the organizer whose name is Amber Case—wonderful, wonderful, beautiful,
beautiful, very intelligent, kind person. She says, “You need to show everyone this.” And I’m like, “No,
I’m really embarrassed.” She says, “You need to show everyone this.” So I showed everyone. Next thing
happened, Wired ran a piece on me and then 2013 happened. And 2013 was just crazy because I was
still relatively heavy and I was like, on the radio and then peop… my friends were calling me saying, “I
heard you on the radio.” And then like, I’m doing live video casts of Wired and like, I just wasn’t ready
for this ‘cause I’m like an opera… an IT operations guy, SQL is my thing, exchange is my baby, you know.
So, I’m like, “I’m that guy. I’m the guy like, that keeps all of it running and makes you feel bad about it.”
I wasn’t ready to become this kind of freakish cyborg person because this was just a hobby. But there
was a lot of interesting things that came out of 2013. One of them was people on the internet are really
mean. [laughs] I’ll just save that alone. So, and… [laughs] They’re just really mean. In the Fall of 2013 I
actually… I can’t do this. This is really too invasive. People were calling my home and following me
around and just strange stuff and—you know—you just don’t want to be the Paris Hilton of tech.
[laughter] You just don’t want that, alright? That’s a very tweetable thing by-the-way. So I said, “I’m
gonna stop.” So I just hid for like three months. And my work—this is really hard when you have a real
job too, and I say real job with a lot of dualism in there too—‘cause your real companies are mad at you,
like, “Why aren’t you talking about our products?” Well it’s got nothing to do with like me—you know—
like, but they—you know—kind of deal with it. So I hid, but then 2014 came and then the Wall Street
Journal, Mashable, Fox—if you can make it through a Fox News interview, you can do anything—BBC,
Independent—just globally, it just started exploding this year. Been really, really difficult in some cases.
Some people who really follow tech will see me in the street and go, “Hey you’re the guy.” It helps if I
don’t gear up—I don’t have a lot of gear on today—so people don’t notice you when you’re not wearing
tech, which is a whole ‘nother story we’ll talk about. And then it just kind of went crazier and then I was
like, I kept getting alerts from all these different countries, all these people on Facebook following me in
different languages, asking me questions in different languages I couldn’t answer. Because… I think a lot
of it’s this picture. People love these freaky pictures. There’s stories behind those types of things too.
And then, just this month—oh sorry, we’re in July—in June for the global tech issue of Business Week
I’m on the cover. There’s little me and this is the internal spread in it where they actually tell my story,
which you can watch this thirty or forty minute chat in three minutes if you want to on their website in a
video, or read the article in ten minutes or less.
So, that’s how I got here. How did I do it? Well I, in my journey to become employable in 2020 and
understand personal informatics said, “What’s the biggest problem I face now in personal information?”
And mine was I didn’t understand my health. At forty I weighed a little over three hundred pounds. At
my highest I weighed three hundred and twenty pounds. I weigh a hundred and ninety pounds today. I
was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. I was drinking about thirty cans of diet coke a day and
drinking pretty good…pretty good clip on the weekends. But at forty in a high tech job you’re livin’,
that’s when you’ve earned it, alright? And you can just eat what you want and do what you want. I
thought, “Well, gosh—you know—maybe I should understand my health.” So I started by trying to work
with my doctor I’ve had for twenty years. He’s really wonderful. Doctor Alfred’s actually seen videos—
oh, I just said his name, I try never to say his name—[laughter] he’s seen videos of me speak and he
understands now why I talk about him. The problem was he just was really unaware. I have a chart
after twenty years of the same doctor that’s like this thick and another chart that’s that thick and he
can’t find anything in it. I’d go to visit him and we’d talk about the weather. We’d spend five minutes
talking about everything and he’d go, “What do you need again?” And like I’d say and he’d write a script
and walk out of the room. And that was my relationship with my doctor. Well some very Mayberryish
but never was. So, I started—you see it here in 2006—I started in Notepad, Microsoft Notepad, keeping
track of my visits to my doctor and what he told me and my own stats and stuff so I could just do a
control F and find what he didn’t know. And he [indiscernible] and freak him out and he’d get really
mad at me and stuff. And then around 2008 I started using WebMD a lot so I count… find out how many
cancers I had so I could go in and tell him I was dying so he could invalidate his medical degree and he
could give me the prescriptions I actually wanted. And then in 2010 I went in after about a year of
collecting my own information from him and just got all of those medical records and then sent them
through Mechanical Turk… had them all scanned then sent them through Mechanical Turk and actually
had them all put into spread sheets and flat files so I could search my own medical history and start to
look at my own information. By 2012 I was using some big data sources like Google, Slow Trends, just
hard to try to figure out—you know—“Yeah, I think I have flu symptoms, this is about the time of year I
get them and actually they’re in my neighborhood.” And say, “Oh, okay.” So then I’d go to my doctor.
And about 2011 is when I was fired from my doctor. I still see him as… on a personal basis and if I have
something that’s—you know—that I actually need to see him for but he won’t see me anymore ‘cause
he says, “Can’t you just sum that up on your fancy stuff?” [laughter] It’s a whole ‘nother Oprah when
you walk into your doctor with the types of information that I had. And then by 2012 I was just using all
sorts of stuff at home to measure everything from blood pressure to blood glucose and stuff that
nobody really cares about but I just thought was really interesting. Also the same time I started playing
with uBiom which is microbiomes and twenty three and me and then also finding random labs that
would do bloodwork without cons… ‘cause you can’t just have bloodwork done. You actually can, it’s
kind of like black market. And you can actually have genetic testing done. There are a lot of companies
that do this now so I started really messing with that. So this is really kind of what I’m focusing on. This
and psychology for stuff I’m doing next year. So everything you’re seeing now is stuff I kind of hidden
for a while.
Problem two was: I was connected to a lot of stuff, so behind these placards—travel, content,
environment, entertainment, spiritual, work, social, money, opinion and health—are my data. So like, I
had to go in to a bunch of different systems to understand what I was doing, and I just think that’s really
painful for people. Like, you shouldn’t have to go into like eleven different sites and twenty-one
different applications to know what you did, alright. If you want to find something you should be able to
find it. The fact that I can pull up my phone and go on Bing—yes—or Google or anything I want and like,
find a local Chinese restaurant that has a kid’s menu within two miles that can seat six within three
minute… within an hour, I can find that out instantly. But I can’t tell you what I did last Tuesday. That,
to me, is criminal that we’ve done this with technology. We’ve made it so convenient that we’ve
distanced ourselves from any type of relationship. So I thought to myself, “Well, how can anyone
function like this?” Especially if you just consider like, some of the bigger problems we grew up… like
someone said—you know—“Learn to balance your checkbook” or entertainment was a big one—like,
“What are you reading? What are you listening to?” You know all the types of things we rely on so
heavily.
The third problem was probably the biggest one that I found, and that was from Nintendo, and that’s
everything not saved will be lost. And that’s just a fact. I mean, if you throw it away, you’ll want it.
It’s… I mean, how have… many of you have dug through trash looking for something important like keys
or a receipt or…? We will dig through trash looking for something we’ve thrown away, because it’s like
we’re so used to throwing things away.
So I took those three problems—my medical, all the information I was touching, and then everything not
saved—and said, “There has to be a solution for this.” So what I did was I broke things into three layers:
soft data, hard data, and core data. So soft data is anything you touch electronic or you can manipulate
or construct an identity. So social networks are probably the easiest one to understand, ‘cause a lot of
people construct identities in social networks, but you can construct an identity by e-mail. You all know
people who reply to all to say thank you; you all know people who—like, you know—just do crazy stuff,
right? You have constructed images digitally, but they’re becoming easier now that we have a lot more
ways to manipulate them with photos and filters, location, and a lot of other information. Hard data
that—the data from sensors on you—that’s harder to manipulate, right? Unless you’re a yogi of some
type and you can lower your heart rate and your body temperature, right? That’s… it’s really hard for
most people to manipulate their… how you’re sitting in your seat is how you’re sitting in your seat—how
far forward you are; how far back you are; how your feet are propped or not propped. I’ll tell you the
biggest problem with being connected like me is you see information; you’re like that kid from The Sixth
Sense—I can’t look through this room without just seeing crazy… it’s like The Matrix to me at this point.
It’s like… damn! [laughs] You know? Do you guys know what’s around you? But you’re just in a room
talking to some guy—right—but, yeah, I see more. But hard data is harder to manipulate, and I think
this is really important, because hard data being harder to manipulate is fundamentally important to
core data. Core data is the genetics and blood work and all the things that are… make you you—who
you are at the core.
The interesting thing about this is: you can manipulate core data—genetic information, blood work, and
other things—through environmental information, which is hard data—the temperature is the
temperature is the temperature; you are standing; you are the body weight you are; your blood
cholesterol is what it is what it is what it is until it’s influenced through an environmental or behavior
change by you. Are we all on the same page? So you can actively change your… what you’re given at
birth or at conception, but you need to look at this. Soft data’s here is because most people are living in
this world of soft, constructed data and identity, and we’re talking about wearables, so… the hard data.
But that’s how I broke it down, ‘cause I thought, “I need to understand these systems, and how I can
influence one system to another.” If I wanted to lose weight, do I stay off of Facebook, or do I run?
Right? Do I not listen to this type of music, or do I spend more money? Right? All of these things
actually work together to lose weight; you just don’t change your diet to lose weight. If changing your
diet and exercising to lose weight worked consistently, a lot of people would fluctuate in weight a lot
more, ‘cause while they’re changing our diets and moving more or less all the time, and their weight’s
not changing that much. So it’s a lot of instants… different systems that actually make that happen. So
for me, I’ve got the health systems all the way from—you know— simple, little things that you have on
your body and you can test to my experience systems, and a lot of those are in my vehicle, on my pets,
in my home, around my home, and they all kind of work together. So at any given time, there’s upwards
of a hundred and seventy at minimum to seven hundred—simultaneously—data points being collected
on me. You’re like, “How is that even possible?” Well, right now, I’m speaking at a certain tone; my
phone’s capturing everything I’m saying. If I speak at this level, it just triggered that it just went up a
decibel. I actually know the difference in decibels. Also, how I’m standing is changing—when I’m
moving my hands, when I’m not, where I am, my relationship to you. A lot of these things are changing,
and there’s applications to pick up all of this type of information; we just don’t use the information—no
one releases a need for it now—but everything not saved will be lost, and you can’t look at it if you
don’t have it.
So just using one application, you touch thirty different systems. How many of you—you know—I… in
one of the articles I did, I said—you know—I counted most people were attached to at least a hundred
and fifty to at least two hundred systems at minimum; they just don’t think about their life as systems
when they swipe a club card or use a credit card or get in their car and all the computing in their car.
Remove all of what we call laptops and phones, you are touching a lot of stuff, but you have no idea
what that relationship looks like, and what could you learn if you could pull it out? We all on the same
page so far? This is interesting? Thank you.
So nervous… I was telling her… I grew up on Microsoft. It’s like I’ve spoke all over—I’ve spoke at Google,
I’ve spoke at like all the cool places you’d want to speak… I’ve spoken at all these place… all these
countries… it’s like, I’m going to Microsoft. Like, my God, you were on my keyboard for like twenty
years. [laughter]
So the three areas I really focused on in the beginning were: activity, sleep, movement, and
environment—and that was ambient light, ambient sound, temperature, humidity, and air quality.
That’s really how I got started; if I could just figure out my activity verses my sleep versus my movement
versus those things, I could really start to get a handle on things. And we talked about this earlier, and
it’s not in this presentation, so I’ll just give you an example, ‘cause I was showing everyone earlier. A
great little company called Cube makes these little sensors for your room, and of course you know you
can measure your sleep with all these little sensors. Well, Cube will monitor light, sound, temperature,
air quality, and some other things, and then of course, one of these sensors will measure your sleep—
deep or not—right? But there’s this great little routine I have that actually just puts all of these things
on a graph, right? I’m not gonna draw a bunch of graphs, but what’s neat is when you look at your
sleep—like, “Oh, I was a little bit restless there,” and you go, “Oh wow, the air quality was really funky
right there.” You can actually see it—right—and you’re like, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” And then—I
was explaining earlier—and then you pull in things like lunar activity or solar activity, and you actually
put them on the same thing; you’re like, “Wow, I’m affected by the sun.” NASA’s got some really great
open data that you can look at with that sort of thing. But if you just stayed small—like your body in
your room—like, that’s cool stuff to know, and you can actually do things, like then say, “Okay, if the
temperature—or air quality or one of these other things you can actually environmentally manipulate—
changes and it affects my sleep—you know—hack my nest’s thermostat to change the temperature,
servo arm one of the windows to crack the window to get some more fresh air in.” You know, little
things you can do in the environment so you just sleep deeper, right? You don’t need Ambien; you need
algorithms. Ooh, that’s a good one. [laughter] I wish I could—you know— … actually, I am recorded for
your… for my safety.
So what I said next was: Okay, I need a really… a low-friction way to collect this information, ‘cause it’s a
lot of work to write stuff down. For those of you who are writing, God bless you. [laughter] So I said,
“Okay, so what does data collection look like?” And I said, “Well, like if you’re writing on a cave wall and
it’s like two hundred thousand years ago—or whatever your belief system is—that’s a lot of work, right?
You burn a stick, and draw, and pray it stays. Alright. And then, like… and if you go to, like—you know—
seven or eight hundred years ago, and you have to deal with a shaman—right—you know, if he dies,
you’re—you know— you’re sc… you’re kind of out of luck, ‘cause like, he knew everything.” Interesting
thing about child mortality: we became really interested in children living longer once we actually had
the printing press. No one really looks at—you know— the relationship between child mortality rates
and how much we cared about children living versus the elderly living and how that switched once we
could record information. So the ability to save information changes a lot of relationships, but I don’t
want to get your heads too flipped out just yet. Then we got into, like, the printing press and then
recording information by newspapers—which is just a book that happens every day—then mass media,
computing—we all got into computing—and then, kind of relationships with sensors and then—you
know—you get into neuro, and biological, and automation here. I think a lot of our economic woes are
stuck, because we are stuck right here in between five and six inches—we have mass media and
computing, and we’re not doing anything else with collecting information easily. We’re storing lots of it;
everyone likes to talk about big data—like, I don’t know why. But like… that’s like saying—you know—
“Oil, yeah, we’ve got lots of oil.” You know? It’s like 1976 in the oil crisis, except like now we’re calling it
big data—you know— and there’s—you know— money to be made from big...there’s no money to be
made from big data. I mean, sure, you can make money selling idiots information, but the idea is: you
need this information.
So how could I low-frictionally collect this information? So I wouldn’t use a system unless I could get it
by not doing anything; I didn’t want to have to record anything; I didn’t want anything to happen. So I’ll
give you a little hack. A lot of times, a lot of these closed-loop systems, whether it’s—I don’t know; I
don’t want to pick on any particular product—Spotify—I’ll pick on a product—Spotify won’t let you
know what you’re listening to, right? But they will let you create a relationship between Spotify and
Last.fm. Last.fm has this thing called scrobble… scrabble… how do you pronounce it?
>>: Scrobble.
>> Chris Dancy: Scrobble, scrabble, scrubble? Which basically scrubs and tells you what you’re listening
to. So everyone… someone can see what you’ve listened to all day long. Well, you can then use an RSS
feed from that to port that information into something you can actually manipulate. So what you listen
to and how you’re feeling is really a fun little thing to play with. Fitbit—lovely little company they are—
they’re like the roach motel of wearables, because you can’t get your information out at all, and you
have to go into their app to look at it—it’s like, you know, it’s terrible. Thank you. But Fitbit won’t give
you your information in any kind of tangible way, but they will let you tweet it. So this is like the
greatest hack in the world: almost every system you use has a auto-share feature, so I just created
hundreds of fake Twitter accounts that were hidden, and turned everything to auto-share, and then
scraped Twitter, which I could get to. [laughter] Alright? So there are ways you can get to your
information if you want it; you just have to know, like, what… how does it fit in the bigger scheme of
things?
So I broke life into really ten areas: health, which then broke into food, activity, sleep, restroom, gas—I
know that’s ugly; it goes into more… deeper than that, and then each one of these actually has
subsections; so activity has subsections. I was talking earlier… what I did was I created a human data
table of elements, kind of like a periodic table of elements: entertainment—so what I listen to, watch,
read—environment, social media—‘cause you spend a lot of time on your phone connecting with other
people—knowledge work—what I would do to get paid at my big company that I don’t work for
anymore—travel—where I go, what I do—opinion—I think this is a really important one. Sometimes we
take time to leave feedback for people—whether it’s for a restaurant or for an… or for our friend—and
how and when you have opinions or feedback for people is so critical for your development as a fullycentered person. I didn’t understand how important it was when I gave feedback that wasn’t angry…
how… why I was doing it. I don’t want to get all crazy on you, but opinion was important for me to start
to understand. Content creation—did I actually create something that was useable for someone else
and they consumed it? A lot of times in marketing, they like to talk about—you know—metrics and
views and things like that; well that’s interesting, but did it help someone’s life? You have to look at two
systems emerging then. Money and then spirituality—so I started practicing MBSR mindfulness about
three years ago, because the volume of information that I was looking at was a little bit overwhelming,
and I wanted to start to pull it all together, and Oscar will tell you I’m a little bit different now than I was
just last fall, because a lot of these things are starting to align. My neurology and my actual belief
systems are aligning with my body; as my body’s changing, they’re all starting to affect each other. But
for those of you in the room, it’s just a big feedback loop; I’m nothing special; I don’t have amazing
powers. I have good feedback loops, alright? I’m just a rat in a cage, right, just like out of Bra—what—
who sang that? Rat in a cage, da-dunt-da-da-da…which band? Smashing Pumpkins? Thank you for
whoever just sent me Smashing Pumpkins through the air ‘cause I felt it and I was one of you in here
who did that. So then I said, “Well, this is great that I have this little friction and I’m not like, if I touch it
it gets recorded oddly, but how do I know whether it’s good or not?” Like, so what? I touched it. Is it
good or not? So I took the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs— that actually is color-coded if you actually
look at it. I mean they’re there but they’re also put a… they put a spectrum on it. So I just said, based on
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, “How important is some of this stuff?” So if I’ve got time to travel and
create stuff that people love and share my opinion, I’m really at a high level, alright? But I actually need
like, a really healthy life and my environment needs to be good. I need to make money and you know,
what I do—you know— for entertainment and meeting people and stuff—you know—there’s a need.
So once I understood kind of where my data lied at its highest level and I was collecting it, I said, “Well
now the most important thing is can I see it?” Like, I know I can like, write it all down and collect it all,
but can I see it? So, I have this very simple mantra that I use for my information: reflect, collect, protect,
project. So this is collect, alright: collect the information. So I said, “How do I see myself?” So what I
did was I just used a calendar. So basically, anytime anything happens it gets written to a calendar
automatically in the background, color-coded to what I was doing. So, it was easy ‘cause I could say,
“Show me environment and finances,” and I could see the relationship from a visual point of view.
“Show me spirituality and health.” Is there a relation…is there at least a visual relationship I can start to
understand? And this is when I came to the first concept that I think is just so really important; and
that’s if your phone’s turned off, no matter what type of phone you have, if it’s got the…if no… there’s
no emitting light, you can see a reflection of yourself, alright? And you’re beautiful like the Dove
commercials say. But if you turn your phone on is there anything, any app you can open right now that
shows me anything nice about you? Maybe Facebook but that’s not you, that’s what your friends think
of you. You’ve been—you know—taught to behave like a, like—you know—like—you know— you’ve
been trained to behave a certain way on Facebook. I’m not gonna ruin your day, but that’s not you. But
is there… what can you open that shows me how good you are? Nothing, right? I just think we all do so
many successful things every day. We have nothing in our lives that reinforce that. I sometimes say
it’s—you know—instead of big brother, big mother, right? It doesn’t have to be big brother, we can
create a big mother.
And then protect: so like moving everything in the flat files and other storage systems to actually…so I
can search and manipulate it. Some more project, some moving into spreadsheets, online spreadsheets,
manipulating it, looking at it, and then finally projecting. I use Stanford’s deep learning engine to dump
volumes of information into it to kind of get sentiment analysis on kind of just a flat file of data for a
week to understand kind of, was there something that I could have learned that I didn’t know myself.
So, how does that work? So, during my interview for BusinessWeek—and like—you know— I didn’t
know I was going to be on the cover and the centerfold and all the other kind of crazy stuff— but they
said to me, “Hey, we’re gonna run the story. It’s a great story, we think it’s really interesting but we
need to fact check you. I’m like, “What does that mean?” He goes, “I need to ask you a question right
now and you need to answer right now.” I said, “Okay.” He goes, “Well, what did you do on August
eleventh, 2013?” This is what I did. So, I’ll just warn you that this is hundreds of pages for August 13th,
but I just started reading to him ‘cause I put the calendar in diary view instead of like appointment view
and I just read it like a script from the time. And, of course, he was like, “You are just good, you’re just…
this is amazing, you know.” And so it’s fun because when you can search your life, you actually have an
interesting way of looking at things. I mean you’re not just looking for things that help you, you’re
looking at things that are you. So—you know—that’s really, really important and I’ll just leave that up
there because people love… I used to show Facebook and people would just stop paying attention to me
and just look at my Facebook screen, but now I put this up and people just go crazy ‘cause there’s a
certain amount of authenticity that comes across that just beats Facebook’s head in, like bashes it in
when you have this to share. And, like I said, this is just really the simple highlights of that day. But for
me it doesn’t stop there—you know—I go a little bit deeper, as I said earlier, with using the genetic
information. I’m really into microbiomes now and how they affect my life. But some very simple things
for you to think about as far as my journey’s concerned. So, the environmental relationship is a very
simple indoor sensor versus a sensor in my vehicle. And this is a very simple co2 chart telling you
what…how you function at different co2 levels. Now I couldn’t understand why some days I was
actually more hostile, more aggressive, or more sleepy. I was just all over the map with some behaviors,
and it first came to me when I was in my truck and started having sensors on my pets and realized, “Boy,
there’s some days where the pets just aren’t as happy and I know I’m not driving any different.” And
that’s when I started looking, kind of digging through the needle in the haystack and it was actually
environmental—what was happening in the house before we went out and hopped in the truck. And
again—you know—this is information I think that should just be available to people, but we’re just…I
think in some ways we’re not thinking too much about it. This is something else interesting that I found:
I would perform an activity and then systems would go and have relationships with that activity that I
was unaware of. It’s very creepy the way these things start to talk to each other and how just a—you
know— a pebble in a pond creates this ripple effect across all these things you touch in your life—very,
very, very, very spiritual at a very deep level when you see how interconnected these digital things are.
>>: Can you give a concrete example of that?
>> Chris Dancy: Nothing that won’t freak everybody out. [laughter] It’s just really uncomf…
>>: Yes. [group response]
>>: Freak out.
>> Chris Dancy: No, it’s just really…it’s really…I have an example two slides from now that I’ll show you
that’s not as crazy but it’s kind of fun. So the coolest thing was after I had three years’ worth of
information, I said to myself, “What can I do with this information? So, can I do anything meaningful
other than visualize it and start to explore my life? And I thought, “Well, actually I have three years
information, why don’t I figure out…I’ve got a weight problem and a smoking problem and—
[indiscernible] all the problems—but I had some issues. Can I use the information to help me within
these issues? So I started constructing what I call a data assisted life. Just like you’d have a GPS, like all
the information is the GPS, but telling the GPS where you want to go is a goal. So, I took the last two
years and I stopped smoking and lost a hundred and twenty some…almost a hundred and thirty pounds,
cut my diet coke, I meditate pretty regularly, I’m a lot kinder, a lot calmer, a lot slower, but I have a lot
of feedback loops that are constantly buzzing and saying—you know—well, okay, how are you doing
that? And there’s some very simple things you can do. If you’re eating three thousand calories a day
and you want to lose weight without a whole lot of effort you really only need to cut out around two
hundred calories a day to lose a little bit of weight. The difference between three thousand and twentyeight hundred calories is not a lot. You won’t miss it, I promise—it’s literally a cookie. Alright? The
problem is you don’t know what happens on the three thousand calorie day that doesn’t happen on the
twenty-eight hundred calorie day. With me? I do, so I just literally started orchestrating my
environment to create twenty-five hundred calorie days not three thousand calorie days, and without
really thinking about it started losing weight. And to this day I’m still losing weight. I have to actually be
careful. I wish I could turn some things off now because like, I don’t know what I’m turning into. But—
you know—it starts to massage you a little bit into this. And then you’re like, “Oh, I actually have lost
enough weight to go for a walk,” right? And then you actually do it the proper way. But there are some
things you can do in the beginning that are, I think, very helpful. Any questions about that concept
because it’s a big concept for people? Any questions so far? Interesting?
>>: Absolutely.
>> Chris Dancy: So, to the point that was asked earlier, there’s this quote down here: “The machine is a
tool but it’s not a neutral tool. We’re deeply influenced by the machine while we’re using it.” One of
the things that I’m presenting at Buddhist Geeks, which is a conference at the end of this year, is I took…
last year I watched three friends of mine for a year on Facebook. And I watched…I took pictures of their
posts, and their posts that got likes I actually kept track of and screen shotted, and I started watching
how they posted to create a presentation of how they became what their friends liked about them right
down to how they dressed, to how they took pictures, where they were. So they were algorithmically
moved in or herded into a behavior pattern. And I wanted to show that this isn’t happening to me, it’s
happening to all of us, but it’s happening through the systems we use. But this is just one kind of weird
example where Rocko has seizures, and Rocko had a seizure one day and it had this really crazy ripple
effect across the rest of my systems where like, bef… right after Rocko’s seizure—I should say—I was a
little bit less active, my sleep was off, but I also…and Rocko’s had seizures for nine years, so it’s not like
they bother me anymore, but they do at enough of a level that I’m not sleeping as well, I’m driving a
little bit more aggressively, and even electronics in my house act different after Rocko has a seizure. So,
everything is strangely connected, I just don’t think we have the ability to see it yet. I think—you
know—scientists would say, “Well, of course it is. You know, we’re all just made of stardust,” or
something like that. No, literally, we are all connected at a really deep level and not just we or even me,
this is like—you know—it’s a cup—no, I’m telling you right now it knows I’m here. There’s a… there’s
something, but I’m not a scientist. I’m a SQL guy, remember that. Don’t ever get confused with who’s
talking to you.
So, I said to myself, “What would it look like if you took the internet of things, and you combined it with
the quantified self”—which is the movement to measure and record things—and at those meetings they
bring up simple thing: what’d you do, how’d you do it, and what’d you learn? That’s the three things
they ask you. So I call that the Inner-Net. So it’s very simple: just like the internet works today, the
Inner-Net works in this principle. All the information’s there; it’s searchable; you can use the
information in any way you want; you can have a social part of the Inner-Net; you can have home pages
on the Inner-Net. And literally this week, some person—I don’t know this person’s name; I’m gonna
assume it’s April—but she published her page; it’s called AprilZero, and I think it’s just Apr… if you just
Google AprilZero. And I don’t know this person, but I salute what this person is doing, but there’s…
she’s—I’m assuming it’s a she, and I’m so sorry if it’s not—but she has a page out there where she’s just
tracking… you can click on these things, and actually see where she is, and see her blood in real time,
and her activity in real time, and all this information that just most people would never share, right? She
took what I did and just made it stunning in real time, alright? And this—I think—is such a perfect
example of how the Inner-Net is going to start to morph the internet, because there’s a level of
authenticity and interest that—in home and health and all sorts of improvement—that happens at this
layer of openness that we’re not really used to. With me? Alright.
So like I said, I don’t know anything about wearable tech. There’s a wearable tech and IOT person and
all those other kind of other smart people here, but I just have a couple of slides on this, because I think
it’s important, because wearable tech really makes a lot of this possible. First, I just want to salute the
people who have diabetes or who have heart disease or anything else, who’ve been… had to use tech
for the last twenty-or-so years, because if you ask somebody who’s a diabetic, it’s not easy, alright? It’s
a lot of work, and they don’t get Fitbit-like apps; they don’t get easy, simple solutions, right? And I just
want to say—you know— people with hearing problems, people who wear eyeglasses, we all know
these are not simple things, and it’s funny how we’ve leap-frogged, and we’ve left some of those things
behind. That’s just my little political platform; I just wanted to say that, and get it over with. The other
thing is—when it comes to wearable tech—I think—you know— we’re really looking at, ultimately, this
is the only wearable tech most of us will have is our phone in a while. I think there’s a lot to be said
about that.
The other thing I want to make sure we all understand just from a base [indiscernible] is just because
you think wearable tech is gonna function in a certain way doesn’t mean it should. So I talked about this
earlier with the group; I mean, we did a terrible thing when we created computers and we put forms on
them, ‘cause why would you put a form on a computer? It’s paper—right—‘cause there’s more you
could do with a computer. And the fact that there’s forms to fill out on your phone now is crazy. Your
phone’s really smart, but we don’t use our phones for as smart as they are.
And wearable computing doesn’t have to look like this crazy exoskeleton that’s consumerized now in
Japan, it can be just very simple things—and this is kind of a history of wearable computing—but I do
want to salute—‘cause I really love people who’ve broke you know—AprilZero or whoever this young
lady is—or young man—is a pioneer, I think. But Steven Mann is a real pioneer in wearable tech. In
1995, he was wearing head-mounted cameras with a lot of body stuff and streaming what he was doing
to the internet—in 1995. I met people today at Microsoft who’ve shared with me their visions for this
stuff long before anyone was talking about it or some freak like me, who’s like, “Oh, how are you so
popular all of a sudden?” Well no, it’s not me. There are people who did this stuff much better—this
locker project in 2007 wanted to do the same type of thing—just it wasn’t easy—you know—it needs to
be easy and simple.
And then as far as like, should you even consider, like, these types of concepts, I just want to say I have
one single rule in my life: if Disney does it, it’s safe. That’s my whole… that’s… I live on that all the time;
I go, “If Disney would do it, would it be… will I do it?” You know, if Disney wouldn’t do it, I won’t do it.
Would Disney put it in a movie? Would he put it in a ride? So—you know—this was the hats, but now,
they have magic bands—so—you know— Disney hats wearables, right? So, if Disney will do it, then it’s
safe. Amazon, two months ago, came out with a marketplace just for wearable technology. If you’re
not con… you know, familiar with wearable—you want to start to look at it—what I’m talking about with
the data collection is way on the other side of wearables, if they would open up these ecosystems. I just
kind of did this, but check it out. You know, a narrative camera’s pretty cool, ‘cause you wear it and it
just takes a picture every few seconds, and you can just see your whole day—you know, thousands and
thousands of pictures—a nice little algorithm to find out the important things.
You know, but where we’re heading with it, I think, really falls into a lot of different categories. You
know, shirts that actually change based on your heart rate or the air quality, life logging, fitness—we all
know a lot about fitness—adaptive. So—you know—how many of you ever used you phone GPS while
walking? Have you ever done that? Has anyone ever walked with their phone GPS? And do you spend
a lot of time doing this?
>>: Oh yeah.
>> Chris Dancy: Okay, so—you know— it’s a very simple concept: shoes with Bluetooth with haptic
sensors that give me a little vibration on the left or right, inside, inside, front, back; tell the GPS where
you want to go, put it in your pocket, and as you need to walk or turn, they move. They don’t move you,
they move from side to side. The information is kind; it’s simple, right? It’s assistive; it’s not in the way,
right? So environmentally, if it’s gonna rain, the lights in my house change colors just a little bit; if I need
to move… leave for a meeting—physically leave for a meeting—my chair vibrates a little bit; my lights
will blink if it’s real close to a meeting and it’s online or a phone call, right? So I have all these kind of
very soft little “Oh…,” you know “Ah,” and you know, “Ah.” It’s like a drug-induced state—you know—it
does, it’s really interesting, you know?
And then—you know—they’ve got these crazy things that people have done, like this jacket that it… that
hooks to your phone that when someone likes something on Facebook, it hugs you—you know—and
then clothing that acts like… as a user interface—you can change the volume on your music. I… anyone
play with Parrot Zik headphones? They’re headphones—I should have brought them—they’re… I mean,
you can get them… the crazy thing about all this stuff is you can just get it online. It’s just headphones;
it’s Bluetooth, but you actually… switch songs you just swipe; to turn up the volume, just turn it up, take
a phone call. See what I mean? It’s just a lot simpler than looking at the phone—you know—other kind
of stuff. I wish you could give voice commands—you know, “Play, you know, whatever’s popular today;”
I always say Michael Jackson, ‘cause I’m a huge Michael Jackson fan. But there’s lots of wearable stuff—
you know—I don’t… you know, there’s a deck that you can see that’s got a lot of cooler stuff in it, but—
you know—babies, dogs, everything’s wearable.
But I want to go into the dark part that everyone likes to, like, talk about with this kind of thing, and
that’s surveillance. So the opposite of surveillance is sousveillance; veillance… the… is the… to observe,
but sousveillance is French for to watch yourself, and when you get involved in watching yourself,
there’s a whole different arena of awareness that starts to happen with you, and I think this is a great
quote that I read to you a little bit. I read something similar to this earlier, but we start to become like
the machines that we’re watching, so if we could watch ourselves, what could we learn if we were to
create a self-feedback loop? So the first thing is: we need to get over this concept of surveillance.
Surveillance can be a good thing. So this is the surveillance the media likes to talk about—right—drones
and cameras all—you know—on… in cities and in corp… great places. This is the police officer—very
attractive, by the way [laughs]—who liked… well, saw me wearing Google glass, and I don’t wear it exp…
I don’t wear them, ‘cause people lose their minds lately. But… and I said, “Well, you’re wearing a
camera,” and he said, “Yeah, I just think that’s so cool,” and I said, “Well, let me take a picture of your
camera,” and he goes, “Let me take a picture of your…” so. You know, so there’s all this kind of
surveillance going on, which isn’t a bad thing, but then there’s your surveillance, right? And there’s…
this is the narrative camera, and this is me out with my partner, and we were having dinner. I couldn’t
remember the name of the salsa—they had six different salsas on the menu; I’m telling you the world
doesn’t have a problem with resources; the world has a problem with choice—so I couldn’t remember
the name of the salsa, so I used the narrative app just to say, “Oh, I was here last time; what was the
salsa that I had?” And then did it, right? But that’s self-surveillance, right? And then there’s the
Capture audio wristband which basically records everything until you tap it and then it saves the last
sixty seconds. I mean, you can go through, “What was that thing you said? Oh, yeah, that was really
good.” So self-surveillance is really good but I think it’s hold based on permission model. Ultimately,
there’s some really cool projects out there. There’s one called Open Informant which you can get the
code off of Git and get the hardware. Basically it’s a little teeny device you can put together and it
shows you all the information you’re leaking which is really profoundly interesting. I was just in Cannes
speaking at the festival there in France, and one of the things this guy was showing me was this new
Samsung phones and he said something so profound to me, and he said, “It’s gone from a phone that
takes pictures to a camera that makes calls.” And I thought to myself, “How actually interesting that is.”
And I think for a lot of people their phones, especially if you look at some of the newer phones with the
newer information that are in the phones they’re becoming medical devices. So I think soon we’ll say—
you know— it’s a medical device that posts pictures—you know—it’s a diagnostic device.
So for me, it was very simple when I designed it, it was just technology. Humanity had this kind of
foundational relationship, but 2011 I added in, actually, this concept of Knowledge Lockering; so actually
putting stuff in silos. What part of my life did it live in? And then how much of my whole life, not just
my physical health—I think that’s where people get confused. They go, “Just my physical health.” No,
you need to know what you’re spending money on. And then Reputation, or what we would call
influence or algorithms. And then the measurement that’s created there, the trust and measurement
that’s created here, the foundation. To 2012 when I actually debuted this at a conference and then took
it to Defrag, which is what I call existence of a platform, which is your quantified existence: everything in
your life and environment, body, and stuff like that. Your environment tied with algorithms all stored in
the knowledge locker to create a quantitative, qualitative, suggestive, reflective, assistive, anticipatory,
anecdotal, or adaptive interfaces to your world. Sorry, I sped through that really quick. But remember,
I’m not a UI person and I’m not a UX person and I’m not a computer scientist, although people keep
saying, “You actually are pretty smart.” I’m a SQL hack, so don’t forget that. But I just thought I had
enough information to go, “This makes sense.” What happens if you took the keyboard and the screen
away from life and you were the user interface? You. And that’s how it would work, so. Oh, and again,
all this information’s online, I don’t care, I just—you know—people are always borrowing it.
So how far off was I in 2012 when I said that this was gonna happen between like what your body does
and what the environment does and how it’s stored and how it all works together. Well, luckily for us I
wasn’t too far off. It’s two years so; Apple announced HealthKit, Google announced Google Fit, and
then now Samsung has announced something. So that’s their health version of my model and then
Apple announced HomeKit and Google announced Nest Connect. Now Microsoft might have some
health… another HealthVault which I love and they had it like a decade ago. You guys might have some
bodied thing that people on the mobile device and some environmental thing that you’re actually after,
but to me I think this is a big deal that we finally have two companies or maybe more than those
companies focusing on body and environment—you know— and once they pull those two things
together you end up with, well that, but you’ll get here. So it makes sense. So existence as a platform
really then becomes the quantified self plus the internet [indiscernible] platform so your devices,
applications, sensors and services that you use every day whether it’s Facebook or a sensor in a room or
just a sensor in a store. You’ve got engines, API’s that collect information and move them around.
You’ve got storage and analytics and data and visualization. And you’ve got user experience and activity
that just happens because of the information that was collected. So what would the user interface be?
It’d be any of the applications you use, any sensors in your life, any of the devices in your life, or any of
the services. You know, just using a service—you know—one of these services to—you know—when
you put a file in one of these services, what else was going on when you did that? You’ve got
automation, so you’ve got services like Zapt, Zapier, and IFTTT, and API’s that actually then can
automate these things together to make things really, really simple. So you end up with these little tic
tac toes. You’ve got your applications, sensors, devices, services to your home, environment, work and
health, just a few of these. But then you can do crazy little things like, if I run a mile, over a mile, lower
the temperature a little bit, dim the lights when I walk in the house and post a picture to Instagram. You
know, you start playing tic tac toe of environmental stuff, so elaborate if-then statements. You create a
very assisted environment, so that’s really how I lost the weight—my environment became assisted.
And then you can create what I call preconditioned environments. So now, if I have something
important that I have to do, like speak at Microsoft, I actually start preconditioning up to a week in
advance the environment to look at how to be most optimal for that day. Just like an athlete would
train, you just use the information to say, “This is what I need to do: I need to be clean, I need to not be
sweating ‘cause I’m nervous, I need…there’s a bunch of things I need and what does that look like and
how do you slowly ramp up to that moment when you actually have to do that? The power of the
unaided mind is highly overrated, the real powers come from devising external—sorry this isn’t
wrapping— aids that enhance your cognitive abilities. ‘Cause that really is the power of being human,
right? If we never picked up a hammer to kill a bear, we’d all…none of us would be here, right? Or a
rock, right? So, harnessing those things that help us be ourselves.
There are companies like the Human API—so it’s just Human API you can check them out on the web—
that are taken a lot of these things, but they’re just doing basically right now behavior, or, I’m sorry, just
health information. They are connecting out to some genetic stuff and they are actually becoming a
platform for people to develop applications based on your systems. This is…I think they are just a rip-off
of HealthVault, but—you know—it is what it is. There’s also, services that are actually using…taking
your information and making it searchable and accessible to you. And then there’s this company called
Exogen. It’s a consumer service that actually will sequence your DNA and look for damage, so if you
want to try a vitamin or something you can see if it’s working. And then there are even services that will
do genetic testing on you for free but then they push you ads, so that’s how it works.
So, I just want to go over these, a few driving factors. I know I’m running over. I wanted to be done in
one hour, but we started at five minutes after so actually I’ve got four minutes. So it’s good, actually.
Consumerization of the Enterprise. So, everyone likes to talk about this consumerization of the
enterprise. I’d like to say that it’s not happening; it’s actually the corporatization of the individual.
You’re not bec…we don’t need to build consumer apps for enterprises; we need to build enterprise
apps. We need to build corporate apps for individuals, that’s what’s happening. We’re not taking home
to work, we’re becoming work. And that’s not good or bad, it is. This is a great quote by Marshall: “In
the electronic age, by creating an instant involvement with each of us to all people, we’ve begun to re-
pattern the very nature of identity.” So you all are familiar with, or maybe you’re not… or you’ve heard
of mirror neurons? Neurons that actually help you be… actually be human [indiscernible] used to mimic
their behavior and you don’t seem as scary. But when you have that same type of mirror neuron
relationship with other people and other systems, you start to re-pattern yourselves and you all become
very, very identical in that way. So, I think the three things that are really driving this decade and why
this decade seems to be moving so fast are: we have a collapse in ownership, narrative, and identity.
Collapse in ownership comes from really this concept of… I mean, my Mom wrote checks for everything;
my Dad would make her take money out of the banks so she wouldn’t just become too dependent on
checks. We’d actually take and take travelers checks on vacation because we couldn’t trust checks or
cash ‘cause someone might steal those. Then they got credit cards, then debit cards, and then gift
cards, then one click buying, then in-app purchasing and then crypto currency; we just lost a relationship
with anything tangible, not only tangible but it’s like when it’s crypto currency it’s completely not visible.
I mean the money wasn’t really real at this point, but when you get out here you don’t know what
you’re really dealing with anymore. I grew up with records. I can still smell [sniffs] if… I can smell it right
now what a record smells like. How many of you sniffed to records. So… [laughs] some of you are like,
“What the heck is going on in this talk?” I can still smell them. I can remember the smell of plastic
coming off the CD ‘cause I tried the first few CDs to see if it had a smell and it does have a smell, but it’s
not as pretty. Talking about how they were shining, when they’d get scratches on them you’d get really
paranoid like your life is gonna end, like your battery’s at forty percent if your CD has a scratch. And
then we started subscribing to mu… or digitizing our music and getting it that way. Now we subscribe to
music. I asked the… I’ve been having this thing lately where I talk to twenty year olds and I ask them
questions. And I said—you know—“What do you do?” Oh, I listen to Spotify and this service or that
service.” And I go, “What do you do… if you don’t want to listen to commercials, what do you do?” “I
just borrow my friends log and ID.” So it’s like the new loaning someone your album is borrowing your
friend’s log-in credentials—you know—and I’m just like, wow. I just somehow miss that people don’t
have a relationship with ownership when it comes to music. This… you know, the record player was a
great way to play the records you bought, but once we kind of got digital you had to have higher-end
equipment, got much more complicated—you know—and now you just—you know—you have… you
can listen to your same music on here.
But I’d like to clear up a misconception about—I think—tablets and phones in general. They’re not
consumption devices; they’re purchasing platforms. Your phone is a purchasing platform; your tablet is
a purchasing… it might as well have Visa on the side of it, because that’s what you do with it. You look
for stuff you will eventually buy or look to buy something. I wish we’d get rid of money and just use the
devices. They’re… make a… much more sense and take care of a lot of problems. And then—you
know—Denver’s full of these car-to-goes now, where you don’t actually have to own a car. There’s a lot
of examples of this collapse of ownership. I love Burner—if you’re going to a conference, you use three
Burner credits, get a temporary phone number. Everyone you meet, you give them that phone number;
it lasts for two weeks, and then it goes away. They can text you, they can call you, and then it just goes
away, and it doesn’t really matter, right? I just think it’s really wildly interesting that you could, for all
intents and purposes—and there was a story last year about this—live off your phone. So there was a
guy last year who said… he quit his job and paid his data plan, and then started doing TaskRabbit for
work, and then started using Meetup to find free food and drink, and used CouchSurfing to find places
to stay, and basically lived and got paid off his phone. For all intents and purposes, we call him
homeless, but he was living this glorious life using micro-ish task services to actually give and live. But
these micro task services get disrupted, [indiscernible] was disrupted by lift, [indiscernible] disrupted by
something like CouchSurfing .
The important takeaway about, kind of, the collapse of ownership is what’s happening with worth. A lot
of the big tech companies that get bought—Blogger, YouTube, Instagram, SlideShare, Vimeo, Tumblr,
Waze, Snapchat—you notice these prices are crazy at the companies they’re getting bought for, but the
thing that’s even crazier about these acquisitions of some of these very popular companies is the level of
ephemerability in the applications. So in Blogger, it was a very long form… format—people take a lot of
times to blog—YouTube, it was really hard when YouTube got bought to create videos, right? By the
time we—in 2012—when they bought Instagram, not a lot of people were doing it, but it was easier,
right? SlideShare, Vimeo—Vimeo was fifteen-second video format—Tumblr—if you’ve ever been on
Tumblr, it’s like, really fast; it’s like watching, you’re like, “Ah, ah, can’t keep up with it,” right? You
know, Waze—right—did anybody know what Waze is, W-A-Z-E? So basically, it’s an application; if
you’re on the road, you can report, like, accidents or traffic or speed traps…
>>: Police.
>> Chris Dancy: Huh?
>>: Or police. [laughter]
>> Chris Dancy: Police, speed traps, things like that, but what’s amazing about this is Google spent a
billion dollars for Waze, and how long is a speed trap information good for? Two hours? Three hours?
So what we’re willing to pay for information that literally evaporates is ridiculous. Alright? Because
what you throw away, everything lost that’s not saved. Alright? And then—you know—you… if you’ve
ever played with Snapchat, the whole level of ephemerability in there—you know—and again, Waze, I
just think is such a perfect example; if you’re willing to pay a billion dollars for somebody’s idea that
something’s happening that… yeah, it’s just crazy.
Narrative—you know—Facebook and all of these problems are what’s going on now. They show you
nothing in the future, and they make it impossible to search the past. The other thing about Facebook
is: it’s one of the few places where narrative has collapsed, because we live all of our ages at once. On
Facebook, you can be friends with people you went to elementary school with, and people that you
work with now, and people that you might work with or marry in the future, so you literally are all ages
at once at Facebook. And we’ve never had a time in our history where we had a relationship with
technology where we were ageless. We always were proportionately equal to our relationship with
technology with our age and position in life. Now, our relationships to technology are directly tied to
our position in life. Television and media has also lost narrative. If any of you grew up in the sixties,
seventies, eighties, or nineties—anybody grow up in the sixties, seventies, eighties, or nineties? You
knew, when you watched M*A*S*H, or Gilligan’s Island, or Friends, or The Brady Bunch, the entire story
before the show started. “This is the story of a man named Brady…” There’s a bunch of people who
went to war; they were shipwrecked. You knew everything. Today, it’s the same housewives of
Atlanta—just the faces change, alright? The same… it does not end; there is no end to this. American
Idol will never end, right? It’s on a continuous loop pulling forward. When you remove ownership from
someone’s psyche, and you remove the ability to have a sense of time, people change.
Websites—this is a website called Medium—they actually post stories by how long it will take you to
consume them, so they understand that time is the factor here. For smokers, if anybody ever tried an ecigarette—you don’t have to admit to it—but for me, as a smoker, I thought, “Oh, e-cigarettes. That
solves all my problems. It’s healthier, and I can smoke.” Well, I tried one, and the first… my first… I
almost had a meltdown. They don’t end. A cigarette stops; you have to… you will burn your fingers—
trust me on this one—if you continue to smoke. E-cigarettes don’t stop. So we’re removing our
relationship to time everywhere we can, so we’re in this constant state of what Douglas Rushkoff calls
“present shock.” We cannot wake up from this relentless velocity of now, and we weaponize it—the
hell out of it—and hurt each other.
Books—I don’t know if any of you have had this happen to you—but my books are now updating—the
last couple of years—on Kindle. The authors made new editions, and had update… books should end
when you finish them! [slaps podium, laughter] I don’t know; I think there’s certain, like, laws, like the
sun comes up every day; when you finish a book, you’re done, alright?
And then, identity is the last big thing—I think—that’s going. I think—you know—this whole idea of
societal—you know—I won’t go into all that—becomes very different, but this wider, wider, wired were
the first story about… I had this really interesting thing on this blog from, like, a decade ago. Everybody
smirked at this stuff a decade ago—yourself, your invented persona, other people’s opinions becomes
kind of wild thing. This… people are obsessed with selfies now—I don’t know what’s going on but selfies
have been around for a long time—even famous artists did selfies. We don’t have a problem with
selfies; we have a problem with judging. Online games… and then this really freaks me out, because I
see people doing this on Facebook: for about a year, maybe two years now, they’re using these. Have
you guys seen these—they’re called bit strips or something? So people, like, post, like, how they’re
feeling and what… how their day was based in cartoons. So they’re like… not only have they fallen into
the application, but they’ve become animated inside it, and that’s how they communicate.
Which kind of leads us to this kind of thing I’m debuting at the end of the year about identity, and it goes
into—and I talked about this earlier with the data needs—but your human data needs, your personal
data systems, your business systems, your lifestyle, your social… what you… your content, your vanity,
your identity—so Maslow, but based from a data point, but then overlaid with Freud: ego, id, superego,
and then a very opposite view from a philosopher named Alexander Bard, who talks about the
consumtariat, which is the people who just use the internet to look at porn and buy nasty stuff, versus
the netocracy who use the information. So I just put all of my services in there, just so I could start to
see how—you know— what I was really doing, and what type of person I was as far as identity. But
identity also becomes really important when you want to escape what you’ve created online. So for
Amazon, there was SilkRoad, right? For LinkedIn, there’s Glassdoor; for Facebook, there’s Secret.
Alright, so for every online network—for every online soc… for every online environment—there’s a
ephemeral, temporary-identity version of it. There’s… have you… something called star piloting, where
you actually can give anyone who’s liked any of your stuff or favorited any of your stuff the access to be
you for one post by the API. So they can slip into your digital skin, do one post, and then slip out; so you
can loan your online identity to someone else. So it’s kind of fun.
Ultimately, I think it’s really important—‘cause we’re winding up here—what if I told you that your life is
actually the user interface that you all will deal with in ten years? So really, the foundation comes to
low-friction data collection, kind reflections of yourself, ambient notifications, and what if you were the
UI? I think the success model for this—and I’ve never shown this in public, but I’m showing it here—is a
passive collection of IOT and QS, tied with a nice reflection of how you’re living, what your life is like,
something that’s nice. You know when you’re doing bad; you don’t need it forced down your throat:
“You didn’t walk enough steps.” Some type of analytics tied with some type of goals; I’d like to do
something and then tied to some new habits that you want or have. Then some type of store front-end;
so other applications and services that reinforce these things, so why not sell habit packs? And then,
some type of API platform that actually plugs into this that replaces login with e-mail or login with some
type of social identity—and that’s what I call the existence API.
I love data stories. I went to a conference last month, and someone said, “Hey, can you just show us,
like, what it was like to come here?” So I was like, everything from, like, when I left in the morning to
the end of the day; it’s a very visual version of the text version, but a lot of people like that sort of thing.
But these data stories aren’t extremely new; a lot of people are doing them. These are shots from the
quantified self-homepage of people who share their data stories. Data stories win people over and keep
them engaged. Adobe has a product called Adobe Voice, where it just kind of… you talk and tell a story,
and then you kind of create a little story—people love these little stories. I think the most interesting
thing that Facebook’s doing right now—they’re doing… or it’s not Facebook, Google—I think the most
interesting thing Google’s doing right now—has anyone seen Google stories or had it pop up yet? So
Google actually will take your… how you use your phone and turn it into a story it plays back to you—
right from where you were, how long it took you to get someplace else, the pictures you took, and all
this crazy stuff. And I thought to myself, “Wow, how sticky.” Right? You know, that’s kind of… really
kind of interesting. Facebook did this last year with Lookback, where they gave you part of your life
back. They… you gave Facebook a year; they give you thirty seconds in video. But there are beautiful
things you can do with this technology. This is something called TapTap; so it’s a wristband that you
wear and your spouse wears—your significant other, anyone you care about—and when you’re thinking
about them, you tap it, and they get a vibration. You know, I think that’s lovely; that’s really lovely, you
know? Build a ecosystem around that, you know?
And then participatory. This is a guy who wrote a book and then at eight he recorded himself writing
the book, and then the people who will read the book when it comes out will record themselves reading
the book and they’ll mesh up the data. I’m gonna end with, who’s gonna prosper in—kind of—this kind
of new economy? And I think the most important thing to remember is: people who don’t need money.
And that doesn’t mean you’re rich. It just means you have a relationship with information that is
independent of an employer, alright? You can have information and be homeless, you just need the
right information. Like I said, that guy was homeless earlier, he just had enough to go by.
When the only value left is time, the world becomes a clock though. Everything you touch is time and
information, so have a relationship with that. So, thank you very much. I hammered through that,
alright in a lower…I did not as fast as I wanted but I think was pretty good. I got caught up with some of
those kind of crazy examples. Do you have any questions about me or those concepts? I broadened the
talk. I think he’ll tell you I was supposed to come in and actually keep it very narrow around just my
experience, but I thought my experience is interesting but I think what’s happening is more interesting
‘cause I’m a symptom of what’s happening.
>>: Questions?
>>: First, thank you for this. It’s fantastic. It’s really, really insightful and interesting and…
>> Chris Dancy: Thank you.
>>: We’re all threaded into that as well and it’s a great perspective. I notice you didn’t mention
anything about privacy or hacking identities or identity theft. Recently my Visa was—you know—
swiped, and in forty-five minutes someone spent gazillions of dollars in… at a smoke shop and
[indiscernible] store.
>> Chris Dancy: [laughs] Stores you would not be at.
>>: But I just was curious what your thoughts are around, sort of, the vulnerabilities that we have
around the cloud and all of these things that are sort of floating in the ether here?
>> Chris Dancy: So, I have a lot to lose if I’m hacked, and I’m hacked on a daily basis ‘cause everyone
wants to get into see this. You know, two factor authentications and I have like, eleven factor
authentication. So to me security and privacy is really important only because I get asked about it. I
think—you know—unfortunately for me also, because I’m very public, if I’m hacked, it’s gonna be… it’s
gonna be news. Like, the world’s most connected man hacked, right? So, there’s a certain amount of
influence you have to have where you’re actually… you’re kind of safe from hacking ‘cause you’re gonna
be covered. Barack Obama gets hacked, he’s covered, but he’s covered anyway ‘cause he’s Barack
Obama. So there’s all… scales all the way down to like—you know— somebody who maybe has a job at
Walmart who can’t pay their rent… I mean just barely pays their rent every month who gets hacked and
has that happen to them, about wipes them out, right? And you’ve got professionals like you, you might
get hacked and someone might say something in your Twitter or put something in your LinkedIn that
gets you fired and then, it’s just ugly. So there’s a spectrum of that. Unfortunately, I think that’s just the
cost of digitizing information. There’s a very simple concept someone told me about and I never really
thought about it but—you know— if you go back—you know— fifty years most people lived in small
towns, knew everything about everybody. So—you know—privacy is a social construct that is base…
tied around… an illusion tied around influence and money. And I think if we were honest about what
privacy is and why we constructed it, we wouldn’t have so much of a problem with it. Your case is very,
very hurtful. Having that happen can feel scary and damaging, so I’m really sorry. But I don’t have any
solutions for that. And I’m afraid for me, working on solutions to build gigantic locks on things that
ultimately should be yours— ‘cause I bet even though it was stolen you still don’t know what you spend
on it or how you spend or where you spend, what time of day do you spend a lot. I’d have more
problems with your credit card company than you… the guy who hacked you. Why won’t they tell you
when you’re eating bad and you’re using your card? Why won’t they tell you when you’re spending too
much? So, I wish I had a good answer.
>>: You just led right into my question with that.
>> Chris Dancy: Of course, I’m the world’s most connected person. [laughs]
>>: You know there’s… you’re right. There’s data collected all the time, a lot of times we store it.
>> Chris Dancy: I’m speaking there, by the way.
>>: Oh, you are?
>> Chris Dancy: Uh huh.
>>: Nice.
>> Chris Dancy: In Spain.
>>: Yeah? In Barcelona? ‘Cause I… I’m on the team for the program.
>> Chris Dancy: Oh. Well I’ve been asked to.
>>: Been asked?
>> Chris Dancy: Who knows?
>>: It makes sense.
>> Chris Dancy: Yeah.
>>: It’s on the future mobility so…
>> Chris Dancy: Sorry guys. [laughs] I didn’t mean to…I don’t know if you… What is it? Can you tell
them what it is?
>>: Yeah, so it… I work for the [indiscernible] outreach program Microsoft, so we just… we work with
basically thirty-five leading companies around the world like top, global one thousand, spread across
industry and they’ve given us, like, a club for senior innovation executives to get together and talk about
future disruptions and…
>> Chris Dancy: It’s TED for TED.
>>: Yeah. But it’s all member funded and stuff so we invited Chris to come speak on the quantified…
>> Chris Dancy: Did you know that?
>>: Yeah.
>> Chris Dancy: Okay. So you’re a plant. [laughs]
>>: Well…[indiscernible] just an interesting…
>> Chris Dancy: This is the audition to see if I cook… make the cut. [laughs]
>>: But my question’s you know I feel like such a big… You’ve done an amazing job to get access to get
your data. What’s… why is it, now I’ve got my own theories, but what’s your theory on—you know—
why we can’t get access to our data. I feel there’s this… one of the big problems is—you know—data…
companies believe data is…
>> Chris Dancy: Valuable.
>>: Revenue and so, especially I notice this in health care where I spent a few years. And trying to get
your information from the hospital, if it’s possible, it’s on paper and they charge you for it.
>> Chris Dancy: Twenty-five cents a sheet.
>>: So how do… so, but there’s this shift that’s like where corporations and businesses and services start
to feel onus. It’s like a barrier of entry for services to allow consumers access to their own information.
And what’s preventing that and how do you think it will change or what’s the…?
>> Chris Dancy: I don’t think anything’s preventing it. I think consumers haven’t asked for it yet. I think
when consumers start to ask for it they’ll get it. There are signs consumers want their data. Every time
someone says privacy, what they’re saying is “my information.” Every time someone says surveillance is
they’re saying “my memories.” But they just don’t know how to make the transit. They just… it’s me
versus that thing; and, like, we are that thing. But companies making the ownership; I think it will
happen. I think the companies that are coming along, that create applications and services that reflect
back to you who you are, again, I defy you to open your phone and show me one thing that tells me who
you are. Nothing. There’s nothing helpful in here. It’s a soul-sucking, killing machine, alright? But that
doesn’t mean it’s bad, alright? I mean, there’s probably a soul-sucking, killing machine is good for
vampires, right? And werewolf’s, they are good, right? But what can we do with that? So I think
companies are coming along that will do something by handing your information back to you in nice
ways. I think if you just took—you know— Walgreens and took their club card, and if they actually sent
you an email with statistics on your purchasing habits, they would make so many customers for life and
they’d be much more interested in signing for your club card. Every time it says, I mean, do you have
your club card I say, “No, I have my wits,” alright? You know, I have my sensibilities. I want this
information. When you give… “What do you mean?” You know, I’m talking to a cashier at twelve dollars
an hour who hates me. So, I think as companies start to turn that over… the companies that are success
at Google stories—I think Facebook is an example of… collect information and hand it… they handed it
back to people. They give them thirty seconds. But I think the companies that are gonna just nail this in
the next three years—cause it’s gonna flip upside down right now, you can feel the swing—are the ones
that are gonna hand it back in a way that makes it consumable but is also use for you. The problem is
right now is they think it’s so valuable, and if it’s valuable that creates jobs in the company and it keeps
the board happy and it can… and everyone’s turning—you know— “look at all the information we’re
collecting, look at… look at what we can do with it.” Well, you don’t know what to do with it. It took
me, like, some little guy, to say, “This is what you should do with it,” right? And it’s gonna take each of
you to decide what you do with it. You get a bunch of money in your paycheck every month and you
decide what you do with it, right? I’m just saying why can’t you get a bunch of information and you
decide what you do with it? The problem is it’s not a dollar, right, it’s a bunch of bits.
>>: So, I mean, I agree it’s happening more, but I still… it feels like it’s part of the problem because if
you’ve got a bunch of single… well, companies starting to deliver the…
>> Chris Dancy: Back.
>>: insight back and the data…
>> Chris Dancy: Yeah.
>>: back to you, right? Because then if… let’s say every company does that but everybody does it in
their own silo.
>> Chris Dancy: Exactly, we talked… yeah. We talked a little bit about silos earlier.
>>: Yeah, so that…
>> Chris Dancy: That’s why I think… that’s why I called the inner-net because—you know— it’s very—
you know—we need an open protocol for this information to make sense so that people can actually
have access to it.
>>: Across services.
>> Chris Dancy: Across services and across life’s… It doesn’t have to be computer. It doesn’t have to just
be health. It needs to be across things. I mean, you eat what you eat—you know—it happens. I… you
know, so… but the problem with the question you’re asking is the trillion dollar question because it
actually replaces economies then. And when you talk about replacing economies you sound like a
lunatic. And so… but—you know—how long can we go with the disparity in income and the type of
work that we do? Who’s going to be sitting at a desk sending emails in ten years? No one.
>>: I was curious about how you consume… I mean you showed us a lot of stuff, but in terms of, like,
just your life. Like, do you spend an hour at night actually reviewing your day?
>> Chris Dancy: Yeah.
>>: What is your…
>> Chris Dancy: I used to, ‘cause it used to be kind of fun. [laughs] You think selfies are fun, you should
try this. I used to, but I don’t anymore. I mean, now I just get feedback loops, so... I was talking about…
I had a meeting—a small meeting—with a team before this. So if you take glass, a wrist display, a phone
display, a haptic display, and an environmental display, there’s five different ways to get information.
So now, I just create alarms for information. Like, so I don’t review anything, but I have elaborate
routines that look for problems—just like a dashboard light—and then, depending on the severity of the
problem, it goes one place or all places.
I prefer—now—environmental cues than anything looking at something—you know—we all glance at a
clock how often, right? Because, you know, there’s no environmental cue. Well, we had one; it was
called the sun, [laughs] but you know, we love technology, so we will replace environmental cues every
chance we get—God, that’s good. We just kind of have to go back to that type of thinking, because I
think the people who really are slightly aware and have a relationship with environmental cues will
design systems around them. Disney was an amazing example of environmental cues and information in
feedback. So Tower of Terror was the first ride in history that actually would… they would randomize
the rides, so you never had the same ride twice. Well now, with the next generation of magic band, you
will actually be part of the ride; so your relationship to how you’re feeling in the ride changes the ride.
So think about that: again, if this… the keyboard and a… and this went away and you were the interface,
how would that work? So how much different time… I don’t spend a lot, because I’ve got a lot of fun
stuff going on, and I seem to be happening—I like me in this. Like… sorry, I sometimes feel like a stylist
for life—God, that’s another good one. So I know, and…
>>: You should turn off your recorder.
>> Chris Dancy: I know, I know. I need to, sorry. I really… I actually optimized for today, so it’s probably
why it’s happening. Anyone else?
>> Oscar Naim: We’ll probably have one more question. Yeah?
>>: I was just curious. I mean, you’ve done quite a bit of—kind of—figuring out some of the problems,
and I’m sure you’ve attempted to build some of your streamlined processes in a number of different
ways, through a variety pf services. Do you have—sort of—your published best case mapping put out
somewhere? Like—you know—I was noticing your pets, right? I have a couple of dogs; I was like, “I
thought of that, but like, they always seem a little weird and hokey.” But it seem like you’ve wired them
up, so do you have: “I tried these three; this is the one I like.”
>> Chris Dancy: Yeah, yeah. So I call them insights, and I have a hundred and twenty of them, and I do…
I’m actually in the middle of writing a book with a publisher. So they’ll be there. Someone said… I’m
actually working on a television show and a bunch of other crazy stuff too, so… yeah, don’t ever do
anything cute in TeX; everyone wants the… so yeah, there’s just some simple things I can do, but then
again, there are… I think they’re individual. I think the real power of this system comes where… if
there’s three of us working together and we actually have good, segmented data and we can say, “How
can the three of us work together best?” Like, “Now we should meet in an hour.” You can… you… we
know that, right? We shouldn’t meet today; we know that. There’s certain times when you shouldn’t
do certain thing. We know that, but—you know—getting that information back to you.
So for me, there’s just some really simple things. I would encourage you, if you’ve never played with
IFTTT—have you ever played with it? You know, just do something very simple, like low-friction location
check-in—you can even use Moves—you know, something very low-friction in the background and have
it write to a spreadsheet in Office. And just have it write to a spreadsheet, and then just go look for
something interesting. Most people—you know—it takes one… literally take you three minutes to set
up something to write one piece of data to a spreadsheet, and it’ll change your life. So I have my own
best practices, but for me to sit here and tell you yours…
>> Oscar Naim: Okay, cool. So I think with that, I will thank our speaker.
>> Chris Dancy: Thank you. [applause]
>> Oscar Naim: And by the way, if you have any other questions, please…