Head of Endpoint Security Product Management Chris Goettl talks with "the world's most connected human" and author of Don't Unplug: How Technology Saved My Life and Can Save Yours Too, Chris Dancy!
In this first half of the conversation, they cover:
Head of Endpoint Security Product Management Chris Goettl talks with "the world's most connected human" and author of Don't Unplug: How Technology Saved My Life and Can Save Yours Too, Chris Dancy!
In this first half of the conversation, they cover:
Adrian Vernon: Hi, everyone. Welcome again to another episode of Ivanti Insights. I'm Adrian Vernon. Hey, today's an exciting and a different kind of episode here on Ivanti Insights because I'm not only joined by one of our regular podcasters, that's Mr.
Chris Goettl. Chris, good morning? Welcome.
Chris Goettl: Good morning, Adrian
Adrian Vernon: But Chris, we also have another Chris in the studio. We have a special guest stepping outside of Ivanti, Chris Dancy. We look forward to unpacking this with him. Now, Mr. Goettl, I'm going to call you Mr. Goettl so we don't get the Chris's mixed up. So, Mr. Goettl, Chris Dancy is known as the world's most connected human. He's made appearances on the BBC, Wall Street Journal, and Showtime. There have been Ted Talks where he has been the subject of Ted Talks. That's when you know that you've made it and he's been on a host of other media outlets.
He's a keynote speaker and he's the author of Don't Unplug: How Technology Saved My Life and Can Save Yours Too. And we're going to dive into that and unpack that. So, Mr. Goettl, are you ready to dive in with Chris Dancy, the most connected human in the world?
Chris Goettl: Yeah. This is definitely going to be an exciting topic. What he's gone through and the different ways that technology is impacting our lives is something that I don't think we stop and think about enough. And getting his perspective on this, I think, is going to be really eye-opening for a lot of people.
Adrian Vernon: Yeah. I agree. I think that time is just going to fly by. Chris Dancy, we really appreciate you coming on. I want to start with this title, this moniker you have, "the world's most connected human". I've also seen "the most connected man on earth". It makes me think of that Dos Equis beer campaign, not too long ago, about “the most interesting man in the world.”
I'm sure you've probably heard that but tell us, this moniker, is this self-proclaimed, or was this bestowed on you by some media outlet? How did it come about?
Chris Dancy: Like all Silicon Valley lore, there's a little story. I think it was 2012; I was scheduled to be on Bloomberg, which has a tech news show out of the Bay area. They record on the Wharf and a guy named Corey who was the host at that time, he's moved on, I think he's in NBC or something, interviewed me. They filmed me walking around the city and they were taking pictures of my sensors and all this other kind of stuff.
And during the segment, he said, "Chris Dancy, probably the world's most surveilled man." That's okay. It's a little exciting, a little titillation there, right? I didn't like the whole idea of surveillance, but it's okay. Month or two months later, I was being interviewed by BBC and they had, I guess, seen that. And then the broadcaster said, "Chris Dancy, you're probably the world's most connected person." And I think he was picking up the other one.
And then that slowly morphed; most connected person, most connected man. And then between 2013 and now, here we are in 2021, or depending on when you're listening to this show, 2022 or the future, it'll literally just become bigger and bigger.
My favorite fact is you can just take two words, most connected. You don't have to do man or person. You just take "most connected" and it comes up in every country in Google, regardless of language.
Adrian Vernon: And let's clarify that. When you say most connected, it's not about you having the most connections on LinkedIn and being a Kevin Bacon, six degrees of separation type. It's really about connectedness through technology.
Chris Dancy: Correct. So think of nodes on a network, most of your listeners are IT folks, think of connections or configurations from asset management or an ERD or any of the other things we do. All I did was take my early maybe affliction I would call it with service management and IT systems starting back in the late 70s, and then in mapping my life, I made these connections visible.
People thought that was interesting and then they go, "Oh my gosh. Look how connected you are?" And I didn't tell them that they're actually just as connected.
Adrian Vernon: Now, I've seen a stat that says you're connected via something like 700 devices. Is that number still accurate? Has it gone up since that was last published? And you're saying that people actually have a lot more connected devices than they even imagined. And maybe they're even closer to that 700 than they thought.
Chris Dancy: I'd say in 2021, most people are probably anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 connections simultaneously throughout the day, the average person. They just don't think about them through the lens that you normally would if you were thinking about managing a network. We're used to where you're connected to what you can see, but that's just not true when everything's in the cloud.
So I always like to tell people, "Okay, let's just walk back to the old quote that magazines use: 700 devices, sensors, applications, and services." There are four, right? So it's four things back like 10 years ago, devices and sensors. Well, you can have a device like a phone and that phone can have multiple sensors in it. Right away, a device with multiple sensors creates multiple configurations.
So the ambient light sensor plus the device is one configuration. The ambient device sensor plus the sound microphone is another configuration. Light plus on becomes a third configuration. Is this making sense? I want to go real slow. So that's devices and sensors. Now, you've got applications and services. Let's talk about applications. You've got your Ivanti app or whatever app you're using to manage your systems. You've got your information security app. Within that, it probably is backed up by some cloud systems.
Maybe it's an Amazon cloud system; maybe it's a security management system that actually manages the authentication.
What most people don't see when they look at their life, remember the old fiber optic from MCI back in the 1990s, it's just from one point to another. What most people don't see us from one point to another, you're going through a lot of pipes. They used to call it the internet pipes.
I was just one of those people who as carefully as I could because of my background in service management in IT said, "What are those pipes? Where am I stored? And how do I extract myself out?"
Adrian Vernon: So Mr. Goettl, and we don't like the formality here in Ivanti.
Chris Dancy: You can say Chris.
Adrian Vernon: All right. Do you think we can get away with that? Maybe we can. So, Chris, being on the security side, when you hear about Chris Dancy being connected in this way, what alarm bells does that ring for you, if any, from a security standpoint, thinking about it from a corporate enterprise perspective?
Chris Goettl: Chris, this was one of the parts that I was really looking forward to talking to you about and getting your perspective. Over the last 20, 30 years, there's been some just tremendous evolutions in how connected we are, where our personal data is. I mean, it's surprising it took us as long as it has to really get to these more serious privacy and regulatory policies, things like the California Privacy Act, GDPR, other things like that.
To start with, what surprised you early on as you dug in deeper into all of these things and found out how much of your information, how much of your personal life was really out there? And today, what is still surprising you? And that might even be people not fully understanding how connected they are as you've already pointed out. I think most people really don't understand that.
I'll throw a personal story out there. When it comes to social media, kids have no understanding of that. And their parents probably even less. Different social apps have touted the fact that "Yeah, you can do anything on here and then suddenly it's gone. You snap this and then it's gone." Well, those things don't necessarily go away. And I think that's a huge misunderstanding.
So I guess I've asked a couple of questions in there, starting with what surprised you back in the day and what continues to surprise you. And then the perspective of others and how their understanding really fits into it.
Chris Dancy: I think the biggest thing back in the day if you go back to 2007 when I was using Yahoo pipes to dig myself out of the internet, was just how much fragmentation there is an identity. It's so easy if you're managing a server farm with a bunch of applications on it, and those application stacks roll up differently... I mean, let's be honest. People diagram that for a living, right? But when you think about your life, it's just like, "Oh my goodness. If I'm on Myspace and I write something, where is it going? Who's seeing it? And how do I have a record of it?" You have to go to Myspace to get rid of it.
So I think the first thing that blew my mind was just how absolutely untenable it is to try to understand and extract yourself from the internet. It's almost like tentacles. So that involved me building a lot of systems and infrastructure. And I'll be honest with you, just wrote a nomenclature for how to understand these systems; the biological systems, the behavioral systems, the environmental systems. Where in the stack are they? Is it a time stack layer? Is it an activity stack layer? is it a location stack?
There's so much to it. I think today if I'm being honest and a little provocative, the thing that makes me most mind blown about folks today is they seem to care about privacy when it's convenient. But when they need something, it goes out the window. So they will easily hand over their phone number and everything else to get 10 cents off a bag of chips but they're worried that Mark Zuckerberg can knock at the front door, asking for their firstborn child.
And I just think you can't have those two things in the same life. You have to see all of your information to the same lens. And to me, that lens isn't privacy; it's safety. We have to stop negotiating with ourselves and our family safety under this illusion that somehow we're more powerful for it.
If you want to be powerful, ask Sam's Club for your purchase history. Find out why you gained weight in the last 10 years. Don't worry about what they're doing with it. There's a level of autonomy that's missing in the privacy debate.
And I think the last thing you said about moving forward, we really need to sit down and talk to our kids because the jobs in the next 10, 20 years, I'm 53 years old now, I started my first computer in the late 1970s as a 10-year-old right. You've got a kid who's 10. You should be teaching them about the data that makes up their lives. Not about the service. There'll be 100 Facebooks. There'll be something after the iPhone, but we need to have these talks with our family.
Adrian Vernon: Now, Chris, we mentioned earlier that you have authored a book a couple of years ago, Don't Unplug: How Technology Saved My Life and Can Save Yours Too. How did technology save your life? Give us that background.
Chris Dancy: Oh, my goodness. Like a lot of people, especially today, I was doing well. If you're in tech, you're kind of doing well. You might jump from job to job. I was doing well but I was having a lot of emotional, physical, and biological problems. I'll be honest with you. It was in a job I had between the 1990s when I started GoldMine, which became huge, which became LANDesk, and then ServiceNow, and then BMC and any of these jobs. There was some job I had where I wasn't successful at what I was doing but my body looked otherwise.
I was 320 pounds at that point. I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. If a salesperson needed something, I had to jump on a demo. I would do that. If a consultant needed me to jump pitch in and do that, I was always on a plane. I was constantly angry at everything.
I put on a good act. You're paid well to behave, but at the end of the day, no one was managing the IT of me, a human piece of capital. I think they call it human capital now is what Amazon calls humans. And I just thought to myself, "I'm going to die".
I was 40 years old and I was on all sorts of medicines, "This is not going to last." And then I started looking at my life through like we said earlier, and actually creating routines. So if I put something on the internet or touched a piece of tech, it grabbed the data from that and threw it on my Google Calendar. That's simple. Where most people use calendars for appointments, I used Calendar as data storage. But what I did was I created different calendars within Google Calendar: one for physical health, one for the environment, one for socializing. And these calendars filled up with that data.
And what I started doing was color coding data so that if it was the kind of behavior I wanted, it was one color. Email will kill you, especially the email that comes in before you wake up. But no one really measures that. We measured the security of an email, but not how it's affecting the people. I always believe that human resources and IT really need to merge in the future because we're treating people like IT and we're treating human... There's a lot there to unpack.
So when I say that technology saved my life, it absolutely did. I would not be here today had I not done what I did and not got in touch with myself. Does it continue to save my life? There are days like everyone else, where it's really stressful even for me who manages it all really well. But at the end of the day, understanding who you are and what you value changes the way you use your technology. And if you can use your technology to express your values, whether it's a hashtag for something provocative or donating to a cause you really like, that's the human capital we should be focusing on.
Adrian Vernon: Okay. Don't Unplug: How Technology Saved My Life and Can Save Yours Too. Now, I have to admit, Chris, when I first thought about that and don't unplug because there are times where I think, "God, I just need a break, man. I need to unplug." And there's a book that I read a number of years ago, it came out about 10 years ago.
It's called The Winter of Our Disconnect. I don't know if you've heard of this book. And the subtitle is How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and a Mother who Slept with Her IPhone) Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale. And it took place where they lived in New York city and it was about a six-month period where they were just totally disconnected and just to recharge and refresh.
And, of course, the winner of our disconnect, that's Mr. Goettl, you must know. I don't know if you're a novel historian, but John Steinbeck in 1961 wrote a famous novel called The Winter of Our Discontent. And it actually helped him win the Nobel prize for literature in 1962. So there's a little literature history.
So that book is kind of playing on that. And so, Chris, what would you say to someone who says, "God, I need a break. I need to unplug. I must unplug."? What would you say in that case?
Chris Dancy: Listen, this book was written in 2017. I've been living that life at that point for at least eight years. If someone said to me today, "I need to unplug," I don't think I'd say don't, today in 2021. The book was actually not called Don't Unplug. It was changed in the last week before it actually went to print. The book was called IMU Tomorrow, which is really a little interesting tidbit nowadays. We'll see how that works out.
Again, I'm not going to tell people how to live their life. If you need to unplug, unplug, But my problem with unplugging, my problem with these digital Sabbaths, my problem with the social dilemma, and all of these other things is really simple. We cannot spend a decade telling people technology is breaking them and then lock them in a house where all they can use is technology.
Chris Goettl: Yeah. I think that's an interesting point. Chris, I live up in Minnesota, and as you may know, we have some long and hard winters. So there's a couple of things that I do that absolutely are technology, but they're the ways that I unplug from the stresses of technology to embrace something I enjoy, but still involves technology. So I do a lot of reading, writing blog posts.
I can't tell you how many emails I read a day, articles that I have to research, or things like that. Writing blog posts, things like that. I hustle my kids to go and unplug and read a book every once in a while, yet when I go and unplug from work, I usually go and listen to an audiobook. And my wife and my kids are like, "Oh, that doesn't count." I'm like, "Well, doesn't it though? I'm reading and writing all day long. This is just listening to somebody else read to me."
One of the best things you can do for your kids at a young age is read to them because they're still getting a lot of that value. So I think I really like, Chris, how you described that it's the value of what you're doing.
The other thing that I did especially this last winter is I'm using VR goggles to do workouts. I read a couple of blog posts from somebody who basically created a total body workout around his VR goggles. And I have things like Beat Saber and a boxing app. It's a great one. It gets you a really good workout. So a variety of different apps like that; all the apps that I've got on my Oculus are all workout-related. It's just good activity, but using technology doesn't necessarily mean it's unhealthy. It really is how you use it.
And I really liked that aspect of what you're doing in your own life is looking at how you're using technology and how to use it for the values you care about and in good, healthy ways.
Chris Dancy: Yeah. And we're in a renaissance right now for that. You can see it everywhere. You are starting to feel it. Again, it used to make me really angry and it kind of still does it for me; this whole unplugging because being the world's most connected man, that's like a slap in the face.
But I think if we could just come to terms with, well, what is it you don't like? Let me give you a couple or scenarios that I think are really just so provocatively compelling when you work through them in your mind.
When I first met my husband five years ago, he used to always send me selfies. Now, listen. I'm dating you. I already know you're attractive. I don't need reminders every day. And for the first month or so, I thought, "Well, this is kind of vain. I'm not sure if this is going to work out. This is not the type of person I want to date because I'm aging now." So I certainly don't want to take selfies every day.
That's just a reminder like Dorian Gray is locked in my phone; that was for your literary reference, Adrian. But at dinner one night, he said to me, "How come you never send me back photos?" I'm like, "It's just not my thing, Fernando. I'm not really into the whole selfie thing. I used to take a lot of them, but it feels kind of cringy to me now."
And he goes, "I work so hard on them." And I'm like, "Literally, it's a front-facing camera. It's not a lot of work." And he goes, "No, sometimes it'll take me three minutes to get it just right." And I said, "What are you talking about?" He goes, "Well, look." He hands me his phone and he says, "Look." And I see hundreds of similar photos before I see the one that he sent me.
He was actually taking time because live photos were brand new, to embed messages and phrases after the keyframe telling me how much he cared for me. And I thought it was just a selfie. I wasn't pressing on the photo to see if there was something after. Do you understand what I'm saying? And in that moment, I realized, man, am I just a selfish, self-centered person? I didn't realize that love was actually faster than narcissism.
And in that way, it freed me because I thought to myself, "I have to stop looking at what everyone else is doing as if it's some type of narcissistic, selfish pursuit." Because here was someone I cared for who was spending a lot of time, who had sent me a month's worth of really nice messages. Sometimes blow a kiss, sometimes mouth things to the camera because, in my photos, you can put things in there. I had no idea. So that was kind of a big deal.
And then the second thing was, today with COVID and stuff, so many of us only have a choice to see people through cameras. So I just think it's really important we talk about value tech. I can't stress it enough because love is out there and we're doing a really hard job at finding it.
Adrian Vernon: Wow. You know what, Mr. Goettl, not the typical dialogue that we have on Ivanti Insights, but I'm loving it. The time has flown by. Guys, we've just about reached our limit for this episode.
So I'm going to ask both Chris's if you can stick around, I'd love to further our discussion, but we're going to break this into two parts. We're going to end up at seven here. We're going to flip over to episode eight, and we're going to ask people to come in and make sure that they join us post-episode seven for the continuation of this. We want to talk a little more about security. We want to talk about the Everywhere Workplace and Ivanti right now.
Chris is about empowering the Everywhere Workplace and in a non-pandemic situation. You're traveling the world and working from everywhere. So we still have a lot more to unpack. We'd love it if you could stick around for a little while longer and join us
on the other side.
Chris Dancy: I'm so excited because I love getting techie. It's always weird when I slip into the mindful cyborg away from the most connected person. Yeah, that'll be fun.
Adrian Vernon: All right, folks. We're going to continue our conversation in episode eight, with Chris Dancy, the most connected human in the world. For now, till next time, stay safe, be secure, and keep smiling.