#62 How to Biohack Time with The Most Connected Man on Earth Chris Dancy

Chris Dancy (0:04)

It's almost as if all of humanity is running on two time tracks, all the time.

One we're consciously aware of, and one we're unconsciously aware of. Immediacy and access to technology that has immediacy actually makes things go very fast.

You feel like life is going away from you very, very fast. How you categorize your life defines your life. It's when you're living super fast like that, you treat other things differently. You treat other people differently. You have a sense of entitlement when time is not on your side that you don't have when time is on your side. Like it doesn't matter what you get paid to do. You only have one job. You have to die. Like everything else you do in life is optional. But the moment you're born, you have to die. And the difference between a good death and a bad death is how you treat the last moments of life.

And how you treat the last moments of life are the work you do every day when you think you're living.

Siim Land (1:06)

Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_3 (1:08)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (1:13)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_3 (1:15)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (1:19)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land and our guest today is Chris Dancy. Chris is an author, a speaker, a technologist, a biohacker and human optimization enthusiast.

He's known as the most connected man on earth because of his thorough self-quantificating experiments that involve tracking daily activities, measuring health, fireworkers and even biohacking time.

Chris Dancy (1:44)

My name is Chris Dancy. I'm a health and wellbeing professional and I've been called the world's most connected human.

Siim Land (1:50)

Chris, I'm glad that you could make it to the show and I want to welcome you to the podcast.

Chris Dancy (1:55)

Thank you. It's exciting to be here.

Siim Land (1:57)

Yeah, and I think like everyone who is listening, they would like to know how did you become the most connected man on earth and what does it actually mean?

Chris Dancy (2:08)

It's good Google indexing, I think, but it started in 2012 I did a TV interview here in San Francisco and they called me the world's most surveilled person. And then about a year later, I did an interview for the BBC in England and they changed the word surveilled to connected.

And then as soon as news organizations started writing stories, it kind of morphed into the world's most connected man and it was the most connected man. And today you can just Google most connected, just those two words and it comes right up. So I'm really hoping that sometime in the next year, I could just Google most.

Siim Land (2:50)

That would be like quite good exposure or good publicity in the sense.

Chris Dancy (2:54)

Yeah, good search optimization for my life.

Siim Land (2:58)

For sure, for sure. Like, and definitely we're going to talk about all this stuff that you've been involved with, but can you tell us like maybe what are some of the gadgets or tracking that you're doing right now as we're speaking?

Chris Dancy (3:09)

Yeah, so it started out, it's easier to explain what I'm doing now if you understand it to the lens of how it happened and what it and how it came to be. So this is year 10 of me doing this. And in the beginning, it really started out that I was just tracking my online behavioral information. So basically, my digital doppelganger. So anything that I did that involved using a piece of technology. So it's most aligned in the early days of if you could see your browsing cookies or your web history and then tie that to some type of behavioral information.

So it wasn't as real time as it could have been in certain areas of my life. So by the second year, so by 2010, the online stuff had morphed into more real time. So even though I was doing things like sending email or posting on social media, I was then posting, logging when I ate on a website called, I don't know what it was called, Food something or another. It was one of these real old, old websites. But that was sometimes hard to get to a browser because there weren't a lot of iPhone apps in 2010 There was still a new field, nascent in a lot of ways.

But slowly I brought on 10 areas in my life that were important for me to track. And the biggest thing in the beginning, outside of the digital behavioral information, was understanding my life through this lens of what is a life? What is it that you do? Today, traditional biohacking really understands this in a much more nuanced way, from everything from hacking asleep to hacking diet to hacking activity and behavior. But for me, I needed to look at my entire life because I had so many bad habits that were interlinked. The 10 areas of my life at the beginning were social media, entertainment, and social media was anything I did online that involved someone else consuming something I recruited. That could be Facebook, that could be Twitter, that could be Instagram, it didn't really matter. My space in the beginning, literally my space. After social media, it was entertainment. So anytime I streamed any music or television or watched any videos, so that was things, everything from YouTube to Spotify back in the day. Then the third area was opinion. So anytime I left feedback for a system, so that could be a restaurant review or that could be a services review. But there are a lot of systems that ask us for our feedback and our everyday lives online. And there's a lot of under, I'd say almost digital subconscious information that comes from how you answer those feedbacks and when you take the time to do it.