 I'm going to introduce Chris Dancy. He's going to talk about existence as a platform and quantified life. I've met him in 2012 when he showed up to Cyborg Camp Portland, and he was telling me about something very interesting he was doing, and I encouraged him to share it with the rest of the unconference group, and the rest is Christory, I guess. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. He's a joke, so you can groan at him. So he utilizes 300 to 700 sensors, devices, applications, and services to track, analyze, and optimize as many areas of his existence as he can think of. This quantification enables him to see the connections of otherwise invisible data resulting in dramatic upgrades to his health, productivity, and quality of life. His name and avatar are synonymous with the future of work, edutainment, technically enabled external evolution, and his quantified life or existence. He travels extensively and speaks on these topics and more, and has been featured in Fox News, NPR, BBC, TechCrunch, Business Week, Wired, Bloomberg, Huevea, and The Guardian. As the most connected human on earth, you can follow Chris Dancy on Twitter at Service Fear or at Chris Dancy. Chris, thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Amber. Hi. Am I on? Hey. It's great to be here. Thank you so much, Amber, and everyone who invited me and for putting on the show, Willow, for organizing this. It's great to be in such a living space. I don't know. I've been to a lot of conferences. I've never been to one where people are walking around, and it's the coffee machines making noise, and people are going up the steps, and it's like the iPhone is all around us. And I think that's really exciting that we all get to be multiply distracted because you really didn't have enough problems before this. So 17,000 hours ago, I sat in the audience like you, and actually it's not exactly 17,000, but it rounds nicely to 17. And that was my badge, and I was into human plus and quantified self, and my badge today says quantified self and kindness. And I want to tell you that cyborg camp can do a lot for you, but more than anything, it'll do a lot to you. And you won't feel the effects probably for a few hours, it's one of these implants that you'll have an inflammatory mental reaction to. Cyborg camp was in Portland, and at that time I got to meet Aaron Perrecchi, who I think is my data godfather in some sort, and Amber up there. And that's me and Amber, and I look a little bit different, and Amber looks a little bit different, but hey, 17,000 hours can do a lot. So I really want to talk about something today that's important to me, and that is all information worth saving. You know, I get a lot of questions like Amber talked about, people asked her about Google Glass, I get a lot of questions about my life and why I've decided to do what I do. And one of the ones I get all the time is, do you save everything, and is everything important? People are really obsessed with, is everything important? And I think if you have a question about, is everything important, you have more of a question about you than everything. Because everything is important, and we're going to talk about why I believe that. Quantified self talks are really broken into three areas. What did you do? How did you do it? And what did you learn? So I'm going to do that today. What did I do? How did I do it? And what did I learn? But I'm going to add one extra special piece just for today for this, because I never thought I'd ever speak at a cyborg camp. So it's really humbling and so exciting. So what did I do? Well, I never went offline. I decided I was going to live online completely, every system I could, every way I could. And I did that in a bunch of ways, but it's a 20 minute talk, so I'm just going to focus on three. The first thing I did was I looked at my health. My physician had no idea who I was, although he'd been my doctor for 15 years. So I started using a non-smart phone in 2006 to write down everything that he was telling me when I saw him and then searching it whenever I would go back, and this really made him upset. By 2008, 2009, I was using WebMD to go in and tell him what things I was dying from that he had to prescribe me drugs for that I looked up in a PDR. In 2010, I asked for all my medical records, so several thousand sheets. I had them all scanned, and then I had someone in Mechanical Turk actually put them all into spreadsheets and then transcribe all my medical records so they were searchable. And by 2011, I was using big data flu trends to figure out to see the diseases marching toward me that I could then find historically in my medical records, then I could then verify it with WebMD and then go back to my doctor and say, you need to do this now. You don't understand, there's a pandemic outside. I'm probably one of the few people on earth who has been fired by their physician. But we're really good friends, and I think he's a big proponent now. I also got really into crowdsourced medicine, so I like to compare how I was feeling to other people, so I really like this site called Patients Like Me because I could go on and say, hey, I'm about to put this pill on my mouth. These are the reactions I'm going to develop instantaneously before it even goes into my body. Do you guys feel this? And I just really loved the idea of intermingling with other people online about my body and what I was experiencing. The thing I think I noticed the most that was most provocative for me was that Walgreens looked like a genius bar, and it kind of struck me. If I could go in and get like 17 different types of tests and 31 different types of medical devices and then actually walk up to a bar and have a flu shot, talk to a doctor and then get drugs, that we weren't moving toward a world of technology. We were moving toward a world enabled by eMed or some type of technology evolved medicine. And of course, this includes wearables. Everybody likes to talk about wearables. I really think they're kind of overblown as Ambrose taught me over the years and I've learned everything as a wearable technology. If you didn't have a rain jacket and it was Cambridge 1650, you'd think I was from the future on a witch if I handed you a rain jacket. But that doesn't mean that technology is any less technology, right? So we need to be really kind to that process. Like what is really important to us? And like a lot of other people, I did 23andMe and got all excited about that except people friend me now on 23andMe before they do on Facebook, which is awkward because you want to know how much Chrome Magnum Man I am, not if I have a cat. And that's the problem that we need to discuss. And then I love microbiome, you biome, me for microbiome research and understanding how it all ties together. So it's kind of a soup to nuts review of my body. The second thing I really had to understand to bring myself completely online was my identity. To me, I think the first smartphone interface was 1970 when Barbara Eden turned into smoke and went into her bottle because she really couldn't get out and it was just gorgeous in there. And while she didn't hate it, she got really comfy quickly. And she was ordered into her bottle and then she would come out when she was good again. And even Superman, if you think about the 1970s, Superman II, Zod was sent into space and trapped in glass. Superman actually went into a crystal cave to avoid being affected. So we have this relationship with climbing into things to become evolved or avoid things. For me, that meant going into all of these different systems that I touched. So everything from my medical records to the social tools I used, to the tools I used for work, to the tools I used for travel. And these are actually the information systems, hundreds of them that I screen shot it over weeks when I was trying to solve this problem of who am I? What is my identity? And I realized very quickly my identity was being captured and cataloged and narrated in so many ways in moments. But more importantly, those moments were data rich. So in 2012, I was taking photos and overlaying them with API calls, with the weather and songs I was listening to. I remember showing this to Aaron Preckie and saying, look all the information. You get one Instagram photo, Aaron. And he kind of looked at me like, slow down, Chris. I love the way the guy thinks. In 2013, I was doing posture and a lot of other information. This year, I'm doing everything from my gait when I walked to how far my legs are apart to any biological response I got to velocity. Velocity is a really interesting one when you're looking at behavior, for me at least. And then ambient noise levels and ambient light levels. I'm constantly measuring and monitoring because light makes me eat faster, brighter light. You'll notice that it's not really the quality of the food or how much the food costs, but how bright a restaurant is. So it'll tell you how good the food is. And then what I did is an experiment. I was just in Vienna, and I wanted to see if I could change the atomic weight of one Instagram post. So this is one Instagram post. You can see it on my Instagram, Chris Dancy. But I wanted to see how much information I could shove into one picture. And my friends absolutely loved it. But what I didn't tell them I was doing was seeing how much I could get into their feed, how much information could they see. And you'll notice the atomic weight of what you're putting online has exponentially going up. And you know what you need to do more and more and more to keep the amount of people inside the genie bottle interested in what you're doing. So this really is important because I think it changes the way we look at how we're collecting information and what information we're collecting. The final thing I had to do to really come to terms with bringing myself completely online was have an idea of perspective. So I knew medically who I was. I knew I had an identity. But I wanted to look at the kind of my perspective of myself. And this is from a Nintendo. Everything that's saved will be lost. Interestingly, there's a theme today in what we're hearing about information. You know, if you go back to the first human drawings on cave walls 30,000 years ago, they lasted. Stone tablets lasted tens of thousands of years. Paper from 2,000 years ago is still around. Books from 500 years ago are still around. Now, we only have small fractions of that information, but we still have something. Floppy drives last at most 15 years and the average webpage has changed 100 days. You're dissolving in front of your very own eyes any time you use something digital. The reason I'm interesting to people is not because I've got 7,000 things monitoring me. I'm documented. I can prove I existed. And I think a lot of us, this velocity, this fear we feel that things are going faster or that we're super busy, isn't that things are going faster or that we're super busy? It's that we don't exist. We can't tangibly see ourselves because we've built systems in the 70s that constrained who we were, that literally said you can only get so much space and then it has to be purged off. And if you think about things like Snapchat, we're actually purposely creating information that dissolves now. So who were you, who are you, and who will you be is all determined by a system that was designed not to store anything for very long. So if you really want to live in the future, climb into a cave and start riding on rocks, it lasts. To me, your digital life looks a lot like the Ark of the Covenant. You're basically taking the most valuable thing you have, rolling it back into a warehouse and closing it up. So how did I do it? Well, the first thing I did was I had to really look at the information itself. So it fell into three categories for me. Soft Ado was the information that I constructed or made up about myself. So if I replied to a text message and I said, hey, I'm doing well, I'm completely lying, so I'm constructing an identity. If I put something on Facebook that said, hey, look at me, I'm a media lab and I'm so excited and this is the perfect world, that's all really true. But I'm also dealing with a lot of personal issues today that I didn't think I'd be dealing with in my first big talk, but I'm pushing through, right? So yeah, it looks exciting that I'm here, but I'm dying inside. I'll talk about that personally later with you. Second thing was hard data. So are there sensors I could wear on my body that wouldn't lie about my identity, right? And I think that's the interesting thing about wearable sensors, unlike soft data and behavior data, it's hard to manipulate that information. The temperature in this room is what it is. Now it's a little bit fluctuated from space to space. The luminescence of the lights and the sound is what it is, but you really can't construct that identity. And then there's core data, it's the blood and genetics and everything you heard about from our last speaker that really, really make you up. And it's really interesting, you can't really fudge that stuff and it all affects each other. So what you construct in the soft data really affects how you react with hard data and has a profound effect on changing your genetics internally. So I brought a term from, I heard at Cyborg Camp 2012, which was low friction data collection. And I realized that I could move the data collection that I was doing to a lower and lower level. The next thing I did was I parsed everything I touched or put on my body or everything from credit cards to my dogs and moved them into 10 areas of my life. So health, entertainment, environment, social media, knowledge work, travel, opinion, content curation, money, and spirituality. Anything I could measure from those areas, any piece of data fell into one of those buckets and then each one of those buckets had hundreds of buckets below it. I then tied those 10 areas to Maslow's hierarchy of needs because I thought it was important to know, maybe I should have a job before I'm sending Instagram pictures of my whole life to all my friends. I then wrote a complex system to move information out of one system into a central repository. For me, that central repository was a Google Calendar. So my Google Calendar has thousands of events. By default, the Google Calendar only shows you 15-minute slices. But if you were to look at the agenda view of my Google Calendar, you'll see anywhere from 5,000 to 11,000 individual diary entries every single day. Right now, I'm doing diary entries because I want to be able to find out where I was. You owe it to yourself to search your own life. I think it's great that we can find a Chinese restaurant within three blocks of the Media Lab, but you can't tell me what you did last Tuesday is a crime. We owe it to ourselves. So is all information worth saving? Yes. What did you learn? Well, I'm only gonna go over two things today. The first was value of identity. And this is a lot of the work I've watched and read from Amber is about this. And these machines really do construct our identity. My phone, for all intents and purposes, it's interesting when your phone is turned off, what you can see your reflection. But when you turn your phone on, you disappear. I don't think that's a mistake. You know, so how do we get ourselves out of these systems? You know, if you've ever played Lion King, you know, to get a signal, you know, your phone's in control. If you've ever, like, contorted your body to get a selfie, your phone's in control. But more importantly, the systems you don't think about, if you've ever been to a grocery store and tried not to make a mistake when scanning groceries. And you don't want to make a mistake because you don't want to talk to that human, right? And you don't want those people to judge you. So if you're contorting your body to technology, the robot takeover that you fear is in the past. And my favorite is this tweet I found. It says, the car to the gas pump isn't working, so I have to go inside and pay like a poor person. So the fact that she had to interact with another human and not a piece of technology was really important. And the most profound thing is I found myself, I prefer to use automated systems like ATMs and these self-scanners than to talk to a human. And I had to really come to terms with why that is. And that's because automated computer systems are sub-standardly consistent. Humans are consistently amazing, are inconsistently amazing. So the computer systems are just consistently sub-standard, humans are inconsistently amazing. And I will take inconsistently sub-par over occasionally nice, every moment of the day. There is so much hate and sickness going on that I will be abused and contort my body. So the first thing I learned was you become what you bend into. And that bending is your choice. The second thing was the power of perspective. And I had no idea, I'd heard the word for a long time but I had no idea what it meant. For me, I started seeing a lot of systems on my phone that were showing me perspective. Wearables are popular not because they're counting steps but they're showing you time. They're showing you not your steps for the day, they're showing you who you are. It's the first glimpse of the mirror from your phone. No one cares how much they slept, they care that they slept. The pathology over how you slept is a secondary identity system. You slept and you have proof. But these systems that are showing us ourselves, I love the ones that actually do memories. Time hop is one of my favorites. There's one called oLife, you'd respond to an email, you get an email back in the future with that response that said X amount of days ago. So 800 days ago you wrote this and then I'd respond to it and then sometime in the future would come back to me. And I always tell people, if you really want to change your life, start sending yourself physical letters in the mail to be delivered in the future. Because if you can hold something from yourself in the future, you suddenly have an anchor back to this perpetual now that's killing you. So the second thing and the final thing I'm gonna talk about that I learned is this very act that resilience is the act of perpetual perception. Resilience is the act of perpetual perspective. So if you can perpetually live, not in the now, but perpetually live with some perspective, you automatically by design cannot help but be kind. You cannot have perspective and be unkind. It is actually impossible. So is all information worth saving? Yes. The Japanese have this thing called the tsunami stone. It was put there 600 years ago and they hadn't had a tsunami in hundreds of years. So they built over top of it. And then a few years ago they had a tsunami that wiped out the whole town and they found the tsunami stones. Because they weren't worth saving, there was no tsunamis. You all have tsunami stones in your lives and you're building over top of them. I'd like to talk about my tsunami stone. This is my mother, Priscilla Dancy. She was born July 27th, 1943. So you now have one of my security questions. Her last name is Brewster if you wanna go all the way. She was a great, great young girl. I didn't know her, but I'm sure she was just as cool as she could be, because as an adult she swore and smoked, like chain smoked. It was absolutely wonderful. In 1953 her father committed suicide and shot himself. She wasn't even a teenager yet. Two years later, right after Christmas her mother died from a massive brain tumor and she was basically raised by neighbors that she didn't know very well as pretty much an orphan. She had no idea who she was related to or where she was coming from and she just made her way through life and never really talked about any of this. In 1965 she graduated and became a nurse and by 1968 she had me. I'd like to say I remember the day when my mom had me, but I don't. But from the pictures, the few that I could find scan, it looks like it was a pretty cool day and it was great. Unfortunately there aren't a lot of pictures of me from 1968 or from any time of my childhood. There's a few, but not as many as my friends. And one of the reasons was, is my mother had to work. My father was one of these people who couldn't keep a job or the job he could keep, he just was so bad at that he just never made any money. And my mother had to work in the morning to at night. And I remember one time when I was 13 or 14 I was going over to my friend Brad Patterson's house and my mom said, I'm sorry I wish I was more like Brad's mom. And I didn't understand what she was talking about but I knew in the back of my mind that our family was different. We were that family and I never knew it from my friends. It was actually how my friends' parents treated me that kind of taught me who I was. But from 1982 to 2000 I grew up and I became a much different person and life got busy and I developed a lot of bad habits. And I sent my mom this letter in 2001 and it said, mom these are the things I'm worried about. I'm drinking way too much. I have no relationship with God and my mom was really, really spiritual. I know I'm probably infected with HIV. I weigh 300 pounds. I am chain smoking. I drink 36 cans of Diet Coke a day. I need help, mom, I don't know what to do. Well my mom called me up as soon as she got that and we talked for a little bit and she said, Christopher you just need to have some perspective about your life. You need to see how far you've come. Yes, you're doing these things but you don't have to be bound by these things. In 2002 my mom, after I had lost a little bit of weight and I'd cut back on my smoking, she sent me this note and said, to see and feel your new health and your courage of your mind to change your life and be back in my life forever, love mom. And I just thought, how great that she saw that I was actually doing this. Well 2003 came and I had this slip and I thought, oh shoot, I'm back drinking really heavy again and doing all sorts of really bad behavior and I don't know what to do. So I contacted my mom and she said, well we'll get through it and at Christmas all these boxes started coming the day before Christmas and I didn't know what they were and my partner at the time said, I have to keep these aside and Christmas morning you can open these boxes and you have to call your mom. So Christmas morning came and I couldn't wait, started opening up all these big packing boxes and I sat on the floor and each box had a big number on it and inside each box there was a big binder and these big blue binders and some were different colors had big numbers on them, one, two, three and I sat there reading each one with my mom and I remember opening up the page to the very first one and it talked about that the fact that I was about to be born and unbeknownst to me my mother had spent the majority of my life, although I never saw her, writing down and collecting everything I'd ever done from report cards to band-aids that were on my knees with labeled with the date and how I cut myself on the story behind it and suddenly I had 30 years worth of information on who I was and where I came from and that I was not brought up alone. My mom was always there just because I couldn't see her. There's a difference between big brother and big mother and I think we need to get over this fact that surveillance isn't about me, it's about us and there's a lot of kindness in that. My mom died a year later and I don't know she'd planned to do this. I don't know when she was gonna give me these books but she gave them to me at the right time and it changed my life. All information is worth saving because you don't know when you're gonna need that Japanese tsunami stone. For me, that's meant I haven't smoked in five years, I haven't had any massive amounts of alcohol and even longer, I've lost 120 pounds but some things require long-term thinking, kindness and unshakable faith and time. I'd like to close with just a very simple idea. I was in Italy recently and everyone reaches out when they're begging and they don't show their faces or have signs, they just lay on the ground and when you stop to give them money, they won't look up and I asked this one lady if she would look up so I could tell her thank you and she just started crying because no one had ever talked to her or asked her to look up. We need to stop solving our human problems with technology and start solving our technology problems with our humanity. Thank you. So you talked a little bit about things being the idea of truth, like that this information is true versus and so it seems like there's a positivism, the idea that there is such a thing as fundamental truth behind this idea of quantified self for you. I was curious if you think that that's inherent in it or whether you get to, how much agency you have over what pieces you decide are true? For me, the quantified self is really interesting because I think the more I experience it, the more I realize the act of recording is the act of amnesia and what you can forget you can become but I think if we would actually get into the questions of agency, the one thing that's controversial that I feel now that I didn't feel before is I don't believe we have any free will. That sounds like an unconference session right there. Oh my goodness. Question from the live stream is why the analog watch? Because it's, why the analog watch? So I have lots of sensors and I have lots of gear and people always expect me to be wearing all of it. And to be honest, I only do it because that's what people want me to do. You can't have a job as a kid's clown at a birthday party and show up in a business suit but I figured if there was some place safe I could come and actually wear a watch. It was probably a cyborg camp. So, you know, again, I'm okay with the fact that I don't have to be adorned in technology to feel good about myself and I'm okay with analog watches. So go analog watches. So how do you go back and look at the data and find it useful patterns? So yeah, that's a really good question. So what I did was two years ago when I had three years worth of data I went through and I looked for days that had 3,500 calories. This is just one example. And days that had 3,300 calories. So I looked for days that had about a 200 calorie difference and I looked for the people, places, things, activities, what I'd listen to, where did I go, what was, anything I could and found similarities. And I tried to find as many days with those same similarities. I then created ambient feedback loops throughout my life or on my body to then give me a kick, so to speak, that something I was heading toward did not align with a 3,300 calorie day, a 3,500 calorie day. So the mining, the information really came from putting it into a calendar so I could visualize it and color code it. The second thing was putting it into spreadsheets and flat files so I could analyze it and run reports and understand them. And then Stanford as a great deep learning engine you can just dump text files into if you need some backup. As far as like spending time on how much do I look at my data every single day, I don't need to now because if I get fat again, I'm okay. If I stay thin and great, that's okay. It's interesting, I can Google myself which is really pornographic because you know, it's like, oh, look at that, there's that day. But I mean, the way I use my information now is really just absurdly simple. Is I'll just get, I use a couple different apps just every day, say to me, this happened last year exactly this day. So last year exactly this day I spoke at the Quantified Self Conference in San Francisco, stood on stage and talked about it. And I know how I felt that day, literally, at a very detailed level. So that act of being mentally prepared with some perspective really helped me this morning. So I don't do a lot of analytics anymore. Three years ago I did a lot. But most of the things I need, I've actually reconditioned myself to automatically do now. The interesting thing about it is I found that it's harder to break a good habit than it is to break a bad habit. So I'm actually turned on. I'm getting healthier, fitter, and actually younger looking. And sharper. I don't know, it's really weird. I'm evolving very fast now and I don't know why. But I think it's because everything in my life it's constantly nudging me toward a better state. Okay, last question. I thought it was really interesting how you were talking about keeping everything because in Zen philosophy you accept impermanence and keep nothing. So really your talk was also- Not that you keep nothing. It's that nothing's permanent. Permanent, right. Buddhist. Buddhist, yeah. And how kind of we see this in our lives at different times. As a photographer I had my basement flood and I lost a lot of my photographs and negatives. And you have to just accept that and move on. So your perspective on keeping everything I think is still a major part of your philosophy which honestly was the hardest bit for me to accept. Like being aware of everything that you do digitally is one thing and even implants are another. But just this idea that you actually want to keep everything in that you will have a permanent life after you are gone to someone is I think probably the most controversial part. Yeah, I mean, thank you. It's very controversial that I think that everything is worth saving. All I can tell you is for me personally it saved my life. I had no ability because I'd become so ingrained in technology that to actually have any perspective of all because I was living at the perpetual now and the perpetual now offers you no look back. It only offers you this relentless look into this now that's not going to happen because you're so focused on the next now. So for me, I don't think maybe it's good for everyone. I've been asked in interviews I used to say yeah, everybody probably should quantify their lives. I actually don't think most people should. I mean, Amber will tell you because she's known me for two years. I've lost almost 90% of my friends. I've changed jobs three times. I'm so not stable that I'm stable. Everyone else can't handle the velocity of my change. Now it brings good things and it brings bad things. So I liken it to like being in a coma. You do not wake someone up and go, you've been asleep for 10 years because that's what will happen if you try to do any of this. You will literally freak out but you will freak out in the most beautiful way because you get to be really kind to yourself. Thank you so much everyone. I also love that Chris pointed out that we are in a living space that is constantly under construction. So thank you for giving so much attention to an amazing topic.