 Welcome to the closing keynote for Tech 2021. We're an amazing two days of content. Tech really exists to bring the subject matter experts together and give you the practical and applicable knowledge you need to do your job better each and every day, and this year's Tech has truly delivered. Now onto the closing keynote. We are welcoming back Chris Dancy. You heard from him in the previous two keynotes. He is the most connected person. Trust me, Google it, most connected, you'll see him. From the Waffle House to the White House, there's not an IT job that Chris hasn't tackled. His love for IT got him thinking, what about applying those same principles to other aspects of his life? With that, welcome back Chris, take it away. Thank you, Stephen. After joining a day one and hearing all the great things Alex had to say about security, and a day two with Jeffrey hearing all the amazing things coming up with innovation and the office and Active Directory and everything that is Microsoft. It was a passion project of mine to really think about how to share my story through this lens, and then it just thought to myself, this is just so easy to do. I'm excited to take you on this little journey, Disaster Recovery for Life. Let's get started. Welcome to Disaster Recovery for Life, how technology saved my life and can save yours too. I am really excited to share this presentation with you. Now, it wouldn't be a real tech presentation without an agenda. We're going to go over six main areas. The first section is called System Logs where we go over a little bit about my life. The next section is called The Crash where we talk about what happened to me and how I hit rock bottom. Then Clean Install, what I did to start to rebuild my life, then my Directory Migration as my family grew, Security Patch or my entry into Zero Trust Disaster and Resiliency for a modern day living, and then finally Deployment View, three things, three apps, and three types of thoughts you can have about how you can take care of your own career and family and future at the end. With that, let's get started. If you go to Google right now and you put in Most Connected, just those two words, my name will come right up. Well, how did that happen? Well, I'm one of these folks that had a pretty regular career in Tech we'll talk about in a little bit, but I also had some pretty neat things. While I've done one TED Talk, there are actually four, almost five different TED Talks that mentioned me. I've been on the cover of Business Week. You've probably never heard of me. I got to show on Netflix called Darknet. You can check out right now and I've worked for some of the biggest companies in the world. I have a book called Don't Unplug How Technology Save My Life and Can Save Yours Too. But more importantly, I'm just like you. I hate buzzwords. I hate the idea that we're always being told to catch up and keep up and all the things that make tech so stressful. So I'm going to try to not use any buzzwords or try to go into the whole disruptive zone because this is really about you understanding what brought me to the point where I can make such drastic change in my life. Which takes me to life and work. You know, like so many of you, my entire life was defined by technology. I'm 53 years old. So in the late 70s, early 80s, I had a computer in my room, a very small computer. You can see it right down there next to the bird cage. By the 90s, I had the pagers and got the 911 text messages from my work. I had the cell phone, the mini cell phone almost like Zoolander and multiple monitors and screens. By the early 2000s, I had a server in my basement that's connected to everything. I could possibly get to. So I was completely immersed in tech. But it wasn't just at home. It was also about work because whether it be lying to get my first job in tech, which was at a strip center where I backed up Tandy machines to the early 90s where I actually did work with SEO Unix and was one of the original folks hired at a company you know as WebMD. To the mid 90s to deploying SCO and then Microsoft Exchange. I had my A-certificate everything out to the early 2000s where my career was really going to take off. I was basically traveling in the world, putting in tech systems for everybody from, like they said, the Waffle House to the White House. Getting to see early cloud disruption was an early customer for something called BPOS, which today is Office 365. All the way to working to some of the biggest companies like Jeffrey mentioned, service now and the integrations that we see today. To finally coming full circle and going to do a world tour for Microsoft in 2014 for this program they had about innovators where I talked a little bit about my life. So all of this kind of created the platform for me to start to say, my life is full of tech, but it always wasn't good because I was about to hit a crash. You see, if you fast forward to the age 35, at that point, I was doing well at work, but I was spending so much time behind a desk, so much time in different consoles managing different systems, I allowed myself to absolutely get unhealthy. At that point, I was 40 years old, I was on two different heart medications, two different antipressants, and this is for over 20 years. I had reached 320 pounds, I was smoking two packs of cigarettes in a day. Remember those old school IT for you go out for a cigarette. 36 cans of Diet Coke. I loved me some Diet Cola. I'd been in rehab three times. I'd been in jail for DUI twice and been in one institution. Needs to say, I had hit rock bottom, but the technology was still running and it got me thinking, what is it about what I do at work that I could actually transfer and start to apply to myself? So I had to think about doing a fresh install for all the ways that my life was connected to technology. When you think about it, you go back to the mid 2000s, we were still connected to a lot of tech. While we didn't have as many things as we do today, we had laptops, we had home computers, we had our pagers, our cameras, our phones, and I needed to find a way to get all of that information out of those systems so I could map who I was across all of those platforms and visually see it. Now the only way I thought to do this was through a script that anytime I touched something technical, I used something back then called Yahoo Pipes. It would grab a copy of what I touched, what I was updating social media and post it someplace. But where do you post your entire life automatically? Cause I didn't want to sit down right down every time I was doing something. So I wrote a script that slowly started scraping the internet and moving everything to my calendar. And back then Google calendars was one of the easiest places to write information to. So slowly, but surely my entire life started backing up to Google calendar. This allowed me to start to say, well, what parts of my life can I capture? And what does the internet know about me? Is it more than just the emails I send to my boss? Cause every email I went to my Google calendar, is it more than the appointments? Obviously they were there. What about the money I spent? What about the music I listened to when I was starting to stream? Or when I lowered or raised the temperature on my house? You see, there's so much of your life that is happening automatically every time we touch something. And if you remember in Jeffrey's talk, he talked about this idea of being able to go out and start to see context around this information. Well, for me, the context was so important. So I created this coding system where certain colors of appointments, i.e. data for my life, were good and certain ones were bad. And slowly, but surely, not only was my life filling up on my calendar becoming visible, but I could know by simply looking at the colors in a day, what type of day it was. So maybe I could start to think about what I was eating a little bit more diligently. Maybe I could even scrape the calendar and prompt me when that started to see a bad trend. And this data visualization caught me so much about myself. So for example, in early 2007, 2008, if I was spending too much time on social media, I was actually only getting feedback from my friends and family when I would post something really bad. If I was drinking too much or smoking too much or acting crazy on social media, everyone loved those things. If I was saying, I'm gonna go take a walk, no one noticed. If I was binging too much stuff on streaming television, I would procrastinate when getting things done. If I was on yelp complaining about somebody who didn't say yes to me the instant I wanted, I was treating people poorly in real life. So just the ability to see what I was doing online and then have the shadow of those behaviors captured, a lot of me start to say, there's a real relationship between what I do and how I behave and how it all happens in the technological reflection. But I was fat, I was smoking, I couldn't do anything. So even though I had these neat little fit bits back then which there weren't as fancy as they are today, I couldn't even make it 10,000 steps. So I started to have them to combine different types of data on my calendar to understand. It couldn't just be the number of steps because I couldn't make 10,000. It had to be tied to something else. What about the price of food? Because I was also logging how much time I spent on things. So while a typical meal at McDonald's was $5 and it was a half a mile, I could eat at McDonald's as much as I want as long as I walked. But if I went to Subway, which was a little bit more expensive and let's be honest, just a little bit healthier if you don't get the bread, which an iron was considered cake because there's some sugar in it, I could spend $7 and that was a mile and I could slightly jog up there or I could actually go to Chipotle where if food was actually the healthiest out of all the nutrition I was eating, it was the most expensive, but I had to take a bike there. So by simply looking at the different ways I got to things and how much money I would spend, I could start to actually think about my weight a little bit more. But it was more than social media or health data. It was all the data that I was having, beyond work, beyond money. What about the environmental variables in my house? So many of us have connected homes nowadays when we're working or when I was traveling, I was always getting out of plane and flying someplace. What about trying to meditate because I was constantly angry? There was a lot of data. So then I went and said, well, how much more scripting could I do? So I created my first really cool script. And this one was on Friday nights, I would sometimes come home from a road trip where I was out deploying a system. And the first thing I would do is head to the bar and at the bar I would always get in trouble. So I wanted to try to nip this in the butt. So what I did was as soon as I got to the bar, a timer would start on my device and start watching me. And if I started spending too much time at the bar, which at that point was about 45 minutes, my phone would actually get a message from my subsystem called the bar alert subsystem, which was reading from my calendar, telling me to go home. If I stayed, it would then pull in the bartender and their group message, tell her to cut me off. And if I actually continued to stay, it would start texting my family at that point and telling them, Chris is drunk at the bar, go get him. You see, what I had learned was everything about what I did was reflected in technology. And that meant technology had to have a purpose or a value to it. So I started looking for value systems. And so many of us have seen or maybe heard of something called Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's a great way of looking at the things you absolutely need, like food, shelter, clothing, before the things you should have. And I started using my technology and ordering my technology through that lens. So every single application, device, center, service that I use at this point got mapped through Maslow's hierarchy of needs and then was reordered, not to find what I thought was good or bad, but what I needed or didn't need. And this allowed me to start to see technology in a completely new way that was value based. So much so, one of the things I always struggled with by financial management, I created a little program for Google Glass that when I was at the mall and it was before payday and I was running close to the end of my budget, it would actually track my credit card spending, pushing me messages to my Google Glass when I was just in the mall and then cut off my credit card. The cutting off my credit card also worked at the bar. So two great geo offenses and lots of great solutions. But what about all the trouble I would get in? Cause sometimes at work, I was not the most pleasant person to be around because it's stressful working with people who are always breaking rules, always go against policy, always want like a route around and approval that you can't give them. And I would sometimes be in remote meetings like we all are now, but my voice would raise just a little bit and I'd get in trouble. So I used a sensor in my office called a Netatmo and the Netatmo would monitor my voice. And as long as I stayed up below 74 decibels, right now I'm about 76 decibels, although the audio person could tell you for sure, everything would be fine. But the minute I went above 74 decibels to 75, the lights in my office would slightly dim. Now, just like today, you barely see it through the camera. No one would know, but I would get a cue like, hey, you're getting stressed, calm down. And this allowed me to start to say, wow, there's a way I can use technology to nominate, live with my values, but to start to reflect back behaviors that only I value, but are good for me and other folks. So between 2008 and 2018, I mapped everything. It didn't matter what system it was. I tried to find a way that I could use it and get more out of it for not only myself, but for everything I was about to become, because I had been single my entire life. So that was about to change because in 2016, I met someone and finally after two years on 2018, I did my first and only major directory migration and got married. And during that time, everything changed because when you get married, you go from technology of one, very P and personal computer to not so P. Now you've got multiple people, you've got a spouse and a family and everything else. So that meant I had to go back to the drawing board and a Google calendar wasn't gonna do. I had to think carefully about all the different ways my life was connected, not only to me and my bills and my customers, but what about my spouse and my in-laws and our pets? This allowed me to start to say, well, what is life through a technology lens toward the end of this last decade? This meant not only mapping for myself, but mapping for my spouse and all of our family, including my small business. During this time, I learned the most important thing I could do was set down a policy that defined every interaction, whether it be spending money, a task or calendar appointment or even working with a new customer. And that policy had to be pushed through a new data element I called values. Now we all talk about values all the time, but I took time with my spouse and my in-laws to actually map our values. What are they? How do they work? What are they tied to? So at any given point, no matter what decision my family is making, we know what priority that value is, which money's being spent for that value, how much time we're spending for that value. So all of our reports in our life look completely different. This allowed us to take our entire life operating system as a family and map it out now that the value structure was taken care of. We could see our assets, our liabilities, our revenue, our record keeping. We could plan for disasters and the inevitable challenges that we all face as we get older. But it allowed me to start teaching, not only in my spouse, but my in-laws who were never very good at managing their lives, what I call life scripting. So because all of these buckets existed and they were funneled by our values, bill paid look like a series of interactions. A task with a bill tied to an account, tied to the interaction and the ledger tied to the asset. What about a new customer, someone that I might come on and start working with me? What about shots for the pets? Everything had a scripting routine in my life that maps through my entire family that everybody does do. Even my doctor and my vet have a portal on the web that they deal with. This way of seeing our entire lives and our family allows us to look at reporting differently. Suddenly we didn't have rent or food shopping, we had health, we had home as our categories. So this changed everything. And in 2019, we were able to start doing stand-up meetings. So just like we had back in tech, we actually would get together once a week, we'd take our values instead of our open project and map them to on a shared board with the in-laws and even my friends where we all work each week, what we did that we all liked and valued and what we could have done better. This got us out of that awkward shame and blame game that happens so often in tech and got us more in, hey, we all have this project, we're trying to get done called life, how are we doing and are we aligning to what we want? Finally, because we were doing such amazing interactions with us, we were allowed to start to create our own version of on this day. We've all seen this in social networking where they show you kind of what you did. But unlike the calendar of a decade ago, now using these connected database systems, we can go into any point on a map or any point on a calendar and zoom into our lives and integrates into all of our calendars and all of our friends and family can go to any day because it's a shared feed and see what we did, what we valued and how we lived our lives. It just was remarkable. But it couldn't stop there. We had to start to think what is going on because we all know the world is kind of a messy place sometimes, right? And as we heard earlier with this whole idea of zero trust, resiliency, planning and security, there's a lot to think about. It goes beyond just kind of heavy geekery at home. We have to think about things we didn't have to think about 10 or 15 years ago. I live in Texas. We have a lot of challenges with climate, whether it be excessive heat, freezes, flooding, violent weather. Societal issues, civil unrest, financial issues, biological things like pandemics, industrial. We have a lot of plants down here that will have shelter in place because it's a leak. And then how they actually map to the infrastructure. This is before you even get to a hacker or someone coming in and making things possibly unsafe. So when you think about that, today's browsers and today's browser shortcuts have to look different. So we actually have browser shortcuts for societal collapse. It's kind of tongue in cheek, but allows us to start to think about these things and think about how our values and how our planning for a zero trust world map. For instance, when we bought our house here in Spring, Texas, we bought it with some very specific criteria. While most people were looking for square footage and most people were looking for a certain layout, I wanted certain infrastructure actually close to us. So this is the map that I created when I wanted to understand what was the infrastructure for our home as it relates around us because where we live, we lose power often, all sorts of things have happened because of different hurricanes and evacuations. We wanted to make sure all of these things were taken care of. It was really funny when we bought the house for almost three years ago. Sorry about that. We didn't have an appreciation of how much planning went into it, but it ended up actually saving us a few times because in 2017 our beautiful house looked like this after Hurricane Harvey. So that mean we had to think differently about all of these difference of systems of resiliency and disaster. First thing is some of you may remember in May of 2021, we had the hack of the colonial pipeline which created massive gas shortages here in Houston and all the way through the Eastern seaboard because of flooding. We have to keep track of the flooding and probability of actually losing our home to floods again. What about air pollution? Like I said, the shelter in places that we often get here in Texas. What about electricity? We had huge trees which hurt some of the Texas electric grid back earlier this year. So we had to make sure that our house we covered for that with generator. Also being close to the police station actually keeps our house power more often than not. And then finally water out just during these things. All of these failover systems combined with external failover systems we have in our house. So we have a complete security system like a lot of people do, but that's tied to a weather-based system that lives in the backyard which is tied to stream sensors which have been deployed by the city which combined all of that together to give us a heads up for when we might need to get out. Even our pets have sensors in our track so we can always tell where they are, how they've been not only from a health and welfare standpoint health and welfare standpoint but if we are separated how we can find them. And last but not least we got rid of the Tesla in 2018 because it's nice to have but it's not gonna do anything and we actually have a Ford Lightning on order right now and if you haven't heard of the Ford Lightning it's a pickup and if you live in Texas you need a pickup truck but it actually can power your entire house should you lose the grid. It's an amazing, amazing thing. But what about you? What are some of the things you can do if you don't wanna go through all of the things I've done over the last 20 years? Well, I have three great apps and three thoughts for you when you think about this because it's all about harnessing a better you for disaster recovery growing life. The first thing you have to realize is life is changing. It's not like it was in the 70s and the 80s when I was growing up. Here we are in the 20s and 30s and technology is moving closer to us and some ways it's totally surrounding us. So many ways of thinking about the smart home no longer are really kind of that futuristic. Everyone's got something in their house. And this means we need to think about how deeply we're influenced by technology because everything you're connected to and everyone you love is deeply influenced. So we need to think about this through the lens of how would you manage an IT system of humans? See, the point is we can't escape technology because we've become it. So my favorite app to get you started on this if you wanna start to get a really good holistic view of your life is something called Gyroscope. It runs on all of modern operating systems. There's a web portal, there's an app. It frictionlessly logs everything in the background and helps you start to understand not only how much time you're spending at the office, but maybe the music you listen to, sleep steps, everything else like that. Fun, simple, free app to get going. What about your family? If you're like me, it's not gonna be enough just to optimize your life. You have to think about your folks and your family. So to build a better family, we have to start to think about something that Jeffrey was talking about. And that's the role of AI in our lives. So often, whether it be our children or our spouse, a lot of decisions are made for us. There's a lot of ways these systems can start to keep us safe. So we need to think about in the future, how can we make sure AI understands our family and makes the right and good decisions for us? Because we don't know how to measure what we care about, so we care about what we measure. And this means we need to find a way to have tools in our family that help us define what we value as a family. One of my favorite tools for this, just like Gyroscope for yourself, is something called Lifecycle. Lifecycle allows every person in your family have a passive donut that categorizes their time all day, every day, without them interacting with anything. What's great about this category is you can define values around them. So maybe when you're out at the mall, you can call that family time. Or maybe when you're at the park for a soccer game, you can call that exercise. By allowing you to passively record where and when and assign values to it, you and your family can easily spend time once a week, once a month or once a year deciding where you've actually gotten the most value. What I love about it is you'll get push messages that say last week you spent more time on love or family or health. And those are the types of messages that you can define. Last but not least, teams. We all know what it's like to work with a team of people today that are distributed or maybe in the same office as we all start to go back. So I think thinking about teams as we end this is super important because also as Jeffrey said, we're now at a planetary scale of technology. That means the things that we used to think were super important for just a few of us are becoming massively important for all of us. So planetary scale means we need to stop valuing our schedule and start scheduling our values. And that way my favorite app for this is something called Outvalance, another app I use all the time. It allows me, my family and my team and also my neighborhood again to anonymously passively in a real time track how often we're getting out, how often we're seeing each other, how much we're working or working sleeping and not sleeping enough. With that, I just wanna thank everybody. It's been an amazing two-day conference. I can't tell you how excited I've been. This presentation is available from downloads. If you're like, where did I get the presentation? Or you're watching this in the future on demand, you can scan that code and get it. A copy of my book, I've worked with my publisher to get everybody who came today a copy of my book on PDF. I can't get you the audible because they charge you for that but I can get you a copy of the PDF but you can hear me in audible if you wanna spend eight hours with this voice. There's a something I created called the Habit Store which is the habitstore.io. Again, you can scan this with all the apps tools, tricks that I've talked about on the site for everyone who comes to Tech 21. And then finally, last but not least, if you're listening to this now and you were inspired, scared, hopeful, delighted or overwhelmed, that is actually my email and my phone number. My friends will tell you I get phone calls all day long from random people. It's okay. Call me, reach out to me. I'm not just the most connected because of how I use tech but because I believe each and every one of you have a right to hear someone and from someone. So with that, I'm gonna go back to my friend Steven and see if he has any questions about this talk. Hey, thanks Chris. Wow, that was really inspiring. I think back, you've gotten to a level that is light years ahead of back in grade school when they just tried to get us go to the right place for the tornado drill, right? So you are definitely taking that a resilience approach to our life. And I really liked that. You said a couple of things there. One thing I wanted to really bring up. So a lot of our folks that are at tech, they're security professionals, they're dealing with constant threats in Microsoft 365 and juggling nonstop updates. You obviously script a ton to find resilience in your life. Given their capabilities, what's one area they should just focus in on? You know, it's the same old thing as always. Just focus on yourself. I think if you're not taking an equal amount of time to make sure that you're kind of, I hate to say this, but rested, rest is the most important thing you can do. And if you're someone who's having trouble sleeping, there's probably some other factor in your life. So I hate to say it, but just like Jeff said, just like Alex pointed out when you're talking about multifactor authentication, you need kind of multifactor authentication for your wellbeing. And that meant if you're not trading yourself well, have someone who's life will step in and say you need to. And hopefully it's your boss if you're spending a lot of time at the work, but number one thing, take care of yourself. You know, and I think that segues into another thought I had is, we hear all the time about work-life balance, separate the work from your personal life, but your approach was different. Your approach was taking, hey, this is what I do in my professional life. What if I apply it here? So like what would you say to some naysayers who are like, hey, have that separation. Don't take work home. Don't take, get that separation. Like what are your thoughts on that? I mean, if you can separate your work and your life more power to you. I was one of those people that I obsessed more about my work when I was separated from it. I would have to take a day off after vacation to get ready to go back to work because I was so worried about, and that was like the only day I had off because I helped during work, I was checking things. If you have that bandwidth, but there are so many tools today to kind of lock us out as a band that'll like shock you if you check email now. But I much rather people take the approach that there is nothing wrong with valuing your work if you're on vacation because that's part of what you are. One of my favorite things someone once told me and they kind of read my story was you made your work life, your life's work. And I think if every single one of us made our work life, our life's work, you wouldn't have to separate anything. Yeah. And I mean, you bring up something that's amazing there is you obviously made some incredible improvements in your health, improvements in your behavior, improvements in who you are as a person, leveraging that same technology and same approach that you would take out your work life. I guess one of the things is we get close to closing up this Q and A. What are, you know, you were here at Tech this week. What are some things you observed or take away that you're gonna be like, oh, I had a moment there when I heard that? Yeah. I mean, I was really moved. I had the opportunity, I kind of cheated a little bit to learn and watch a lot of Jeff's work before he presented. Also with Alex, I got to go and read a lot about what he was doing with security. You know, I think the kind of big aha moment for me was what a great time it is to be in tech. Whether you're on an older system when you're migrating to a newer system at work or you're on the latest and greatest system and you're fortunate enough to actually do the stuff we're supposed to do, which actually support the people in the infrastructure to the values of the business, just like my family values. It doesn't matter where you are, the tools and the time and the talent have finally met. And I think if you go back over the last two days and you look at every single person who presented, you look at Quest and Tech and this entire conference and the event that it is, you'll see the tools, time and talent have met. And that means that each and every one of us have not only an opportunity to make ourselves better, but everyone around us. I know it seems kind of rough out there right now, but I'm telling you right now, if we could fast forward to Tech 2022 in Atlanta, we'd see that life is even better than it was today. We just got to keep pushing forward. Excellent point. Thank you for bringing that up. Chris, I do wanna thank you for joining us and riding along with us all week. As Chris just noted, you know, Tech 2022, we are gonna do live and in person in Atlanta at the Lowe's Hotel, September 20th and the 21st. Go to theexpertsconference.com to always, you know, get the updates and see how to register from there. You know, I wanna extend a big thank you as we wrap up Tech 2021 to our two keynote speakers, Jeff and Alex. A big shout out to Chris for his insights. And a lot of people don't understand that there's dozens and dozens of people in the background that made this event happen. I wanna thank all of them personally. They're all right now online, making sure everything is working. And then one other piece, I do wanna thank someone who was the visionary and really the person who drove and brought back. Jennifer Lepiba, thank you for your strategy, your vision and helping us execute this. If you see it on LinkedIn, say hello, give her a shout out and we will see you in Atlanta for Tech 2022. Thank you.