Hanover
Dancy found that some potential partners were a little weirded out by activities that had become, to him, commonplace. For example, he showed them sensors that could measure a person’s heart rate and feed the data back into a computer app, which would read moods like anger, happiness or fear.
“I might put something on them to help them understand how they were feeling,” said Dancy, now 50 and preparing to speak on Sunday at a Dartmouth College conference.
But the typical reaction wasn’t what he hoped for. “ ‘He’s bizarre,’ ” they would say, or “ ‘he’s got too much technology.’ ”
That didn’t steer Dancy, a Tennessee native, away from tech.
If anything, he doubled down. By then, he was eight years into a mission of tech-enabled personal improvement, and he was gaining a global reputation as “the world’s most connected human.” Dancy’s story has become well-known in certain tech circles. It began in 2008, he said, when he was a 40-year-old, highly paid but unhappy information technology administrator, bouncing from one tech job to the next.
“I weighed 320 pounds,” he said. “I smoked two packs of Marlboro Lights a day. I drank 36 cans of Diet Coke a day. I was on an antidepressant and anti-anxiety medicine. Two different blood pressure medicines. A thyroid medicine. An over-the-counter medicine for acid reflux. … Then the normal stuff, like I had been in multiple rehabs for drugs and alcohol over the first 20 years of my adult life.”
One day, it occurred to him that having a clear and easy access to his internet search history would be helpful in learning more about himself. From there, it was a short jump to the realization that having clear and easy access to all of his digital history also would be helpful.
“Any time I touch a piece of electronics,” he thought to himself, “I’m going to save a copy for my own records.”
Soon, a rich stream of data — much of it the same data that companies buy and sell to create targeted marketing campaigns — was integrated into his Google calendar. But while companies use that data to sell products, Dancy used it to improve himself. Today, the slim and happy 50-year-old Dancy would be almost unrecognizable to his 40-year-old self.
“I’m a vegan, Buddhist, nonsmoking, healthy person,” he said.
He uses up to 700 sensors, apps and data tracking services to improve his life in ways large and small. A posture band helps him avoid slouching. When he walks into a grocery store, his system reminds him to show kindness by striking up a conversation with the cashiers. If he sits for too long, he is nudged to stand up.
Dancy decided to apply his tech prowess to his hunt for love. He upgraded to a premium membership on a dating site, and created a set of filters that would, collectively, identify his “perfect match” — a clean-cut, single man between the ages of 25 and 43, who is into safe sex, at least 5 feet, 8 inches tall, less than 220 pounds, in the Nashville area and meets various other features on an exhaustive list of likes and dislikes.
Before long, Dancy was pinged with a picture of Fernando Albarran, a 25-year-old schoolteacher who was visiting Tennessee from Texas. To Dancy, he looked like a “Latin Clark Kent.”
“His eyes are brown with a little glint of light that doesn’t go out, no matter how dim the room is,” Dancy said. “I’ve never heard him raise his voice. He will literally stop and push in extra grocery carts to save other people time. He’s the closest thing to Jesus on Earth.”
After two days of near-continuous texting, Dancy and Albarran met and kissed for the first time, literal fireworks (it was July 3) lighting the sky above.
Today, Dancy, who bills himself as a “mindful cyborg,” spends much of his time speaking to groups as a sort of a cross between a tech proselytizer and a life coach.
During Sunday’s event, Dancy will host a welcome reception and signing of his new book, Don’t Unplug: How Technology Saved My Life and Can Save Yours Too, beginning at 5 p.m., followed by a keynote address at 6 p.m., and capped by 45 minutes of “iPhone Palmistry” and more book signing at 7:15 p.m. The event, which will be held at the Hanover Inn, is part of The Dartmouth Institute’s Microsystem Academy Fall Retreat.
Some of Dancy’s messaging is wrapped up in sound bites. He advises his audiences that instead of valuing their schedule, they should schedule their values. He tells them that, while his mother often said, “you’re the five people you hang out with the most,” he maintains that instead, “you’re the five apps that you like the most.”
The palmistry capitalizes on a strange skill that Dancy has picked up from a decade of app immersion. It’s the high-tech equivalent of palm reading: People stand in line for hours for the privilege of showing him the display page of their iPhone and hearing his insights into their lives, wants and needs.
“It’s the most rewarding thing I do,” he said of the opportunity to help individuals to gain insight into their own psyches. “People cry. They become emotional. They become angry and defensive. They become joyful.”
Reading phones is just one of the abilities that Dancy has acquired while getting real-time feedback.
He knows which direction north is. He knows the temperature. He has spent so much time attuned to his heart rate that he can very accurately read the heart rate of those around him.
“If you gave me the temperature within one foot of your body, and your heart rate,” he said, “I can probably tell you what you’re doing.”
In just a few years, Dancy said, the mainstream culture has shifted so firmly toward an understanding of technology and data that people are finding his lifestyle to be more ideal than strange.
“Over the last four years, every time I speak, the audiences get smarter and smarter,” he said. “I can tell it in more and more detail.”
Unlike many of his earlier dating partners, Albarran embraced Dancy’s use of technology, which is easy to do, Dancy said, because it is for the most part invisible, humming along in the background of his life like a well-designed master program.
Once, a few months after they began dating seriously, Dancy became distressed at the airport when he discovered his Fitbit was nearly out of power.
“I said, ‘I have to charge my Fitbit before I get on a plane,’ ” Dancy said.
Albarran’s next actions taught Dancy that data is not a goal — it’s a pathway to something else.
“He put a bracelet on my wrist. He said, ‘It doesn’t need charging,’ ” Dancy recalled. “ ‘And it’s got all the heart you need.’ ”
They got engaged in February 2017, and were married earlier this year.
“Regardless of this book’s success or global fame, I can die happy right now,” Dancy said. “It has nothing to do with numbers. It has everything to do with love.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.