#473 Tech Expert: Why Life Speeds Up As You Age (And How To Slow It Down!)

Chris Dancy (0:00)

Practicing being old helps you become old. That if you just wake up one day and say, why can't I lift this amount of weights? Why can't I go out and run this mile? Why am I not as virile in bed? All of the things that come with aging, it'll probably kill you. The quality of your relationships is not defined by the length of their time. Quality of your life is not defined by the length of it. It's what you do with it in the moment you're in it.

Siim Land (0:23)

Chris, welcome back to the show.

Chris Dancy (0:25)

Long time no see.

Siim Land (0:27)

Yeah. We had our first podcast in 2018, I think, which is seven years ago. And many people might not be aware of you because my channel has grown a lot since that time. So maybe you can introduce yourself as many people call you the most connected man on earth.

Chris Dancy (0:48)

Yeah. So my name is Chris Dancy. I got a chance to go back and listen to the show. We'll talk about that in a minute.

I am known as the world's most connected person. In 2008, I was turning 40 years old, and I was having a lot of health issues. I was about, oh my gosh, I don't know, in kilos. I used to be able to do this really fast, but I was over 320 US pounds. And then maybe you can do the kilos while I'm doing the rest of it. I smoked a couple of packs of cigarettes a day. I'd been on antidepressants at that point for 22 years, and benzodiazepines.

I drank too much. I used a lot of recreational drugs, a lot of crazy stuff. But I was doing great at work, and I thought to myself, gosh, I'm 40, it's going to soon be 2010 What does the world look like in the future? And then I made this crazy assumption that in the future, there were no screens, no keyboards, and everything just reacted to you. So, I started writing little recursive programs that when I touched my computer or I was on my phone, I was doing anything in my life, if I was connected to the Internet, having that write an entry into a Google Calendar. And from 2008 to 2011, this Google Calendar collected thousands and thousands and thousands of little data points, like if I were to go someplace or eat something, because I was logging food at that point, things like that. And it really remarkably changed my life. And by 2012, so four years into it, I had completely changed my friend group, my physicality, my mind. And then I was at a conference, someone sitting behind me saw my calendar automatically creating entries. And it was a writer from a magazine called Wired, which is a big tech magazine. It was really big in the 90s and 2000s. I think they're still around. I don't know. I'm sure they are. I just don't read a lot of magazines. And that was it. I mean, a story came out, and then a week later I was on TV, and then a week later I was on the cover of Business Week, or I was like six months later, and then around the world for TED Talks. And then I got a book deal to write a book back in 2016 called Don't Unplugged. Did a couple TV shows literally toward the world multiple times talking about my journey. And then I met you and I think I was actually over in the Nordics doing a roadshow in 2018 And then, yeah, and then of course, the pandemic happened and I didn't travel as much, but I just kind of took those skills and moved them into other areas to apply toward populations. So that's it kind of in a nutshell. There's a lot of good visuals. I give good Google if you just put in most connected.

Siim Land (3:38)

Yeah. Yeah. So you're I guess main transformation or not transformation, but your tool was using technology to essentially hack your time and hack your health with different self-quantification technologies and tools. So how did you use technology to lose weight and get healthier? Because I'd say a lot of people just use technology to counter calories or track their weight or track their sleep or something like that. But you took it a bit beyond that, and you had a lot more, I guess, more detailed approach with that.

Chris Dancy (4:16)

Well, yeah, I mean, just tracking calories, you're going to lose anywhere from 40 to 60 percent more weight than not tracking calories. So that's just, there's studies after studies after studies, just writing down what you eat if you even want to track the calories. But for me, it was more of a holistic approach of looking at all the ways this data could feed back into my life. Is it okay if I share something with you?