#7 The Low-Hanging Fruit is Rotten - Adam Malone on Fixing Workplace Jargon

Listen to this Episode

In this conversation, Adam Malone discusses the pervasive issue of corporate jargon and its impact on communication and productivity in the workplace. He defines corporate jargon, explores its origins, and highlights the confusion it can create among employees. Adam categorizes common expressions and acronyms, emphasizing the need for clarity and inclusivity in communication. He also addresses the cultural implications of jargon, suggesting that it can foster a false sense of busyness and hinder genuine understanding. The conversation concludes with practical advice for detoxing from jargon and improving communication effectiveness. 

Visit Adam’s Consultancy website here: https://thetenaciousoperator.com

Episode Takeaways

  • Corporate jargon is often well-meaning but can create confusion. 
  • Expressions like ‘think outside the box’ can alienate non-native speakers. 
  • Overused terms like ‘synergy’ often lose their meaning. 
  • Acronyms can be efficient but may exclude others. 
  • Corporate hustle culture can lead to unnecessary complexity in communication. 
  • Asking for clarity can improve understanding in meetings. 
  • Insider speak can make individuals feel excluded and less confident. 
  • Consultants often introduce jargon to sound more knowledgeable. 
  • Reducing jargon can lead to more productive meetings. 
  • Effective communication should prioritize clarity over complexity. 

Episode Transcript

Santiago Tacoronte (00:01.413)
Hi Adam and welcome to Productivity!

Adam (00:04.226)
Thank you, great to be here.

Santiago Tacoronte (00:08.035)
What is corporate jargon? How do you define it?

Adam (00:12.462)
Well first I would just say I think it’s well-meaning for the most part so I think it’s language that’s well-meaning But it can really easy easily create confusion or make some people feel like they are outsiders Sometimes it’s acronyms, right? Sometimes it’s words or phrases that are used in a kind of abnormal way I think like the great example of this is Thinking outside the box

Right? There’s a huge story around that. can go Google, like why did people say, start saying, think outside the box. But fundamentally, like the short story is there was a consulting group in like the seventies and they use this little diagram to like basically show people that they were smarter than them. And that’s where we got this whole phrase of thinking outside the box. Your listeners should go like Google that and read it. Cause it’s very interesting. But, but now we have this phrase that we say, well we need to think outside the box and like,

We assume everyone knows what that means. The background is that fundamentally it was to make some people feel like outsiders because these consultants wanted to show off a little bit as consultants sometimes do. And now it’s like taking on a life of its own. And people say, think outside the box all the time. They don’t know like the history of it. They just say it without really knowing exactly what they mean. And then they just like have all this assumption about

what it means for themselves or their teams. And it’s just unhelpful and exclusive language that sometimes it doesn’t even do what you want it to do.

Santiago Tacoronte (01:48.871)
You know what’s funny about this expression? I hear it so many times and when sometimes people take it literally and they think outside the box and then someone comes in like, no, no, we cannot do that. You need to think inside the box because you cannot go that far, you know? it’s…

Adam (02:06.99)
Yeah, well, I think I think it’s really interesting and we’ll talk about some of these in a minute, but like. It’s even more different like if you’re used to working in a given region like I’m based in the southern United States. So like even within the United States, there will be phrases and words that don’t have the same meaning across the country. But then I’ve worked with teams in Australia and Asia and Europe. You you work in in Europe and in a global team.

And so sometimes there’s even more confusion created because you have like non native English speakers who are saying, well, we need to think outside the box. And so people literally like go looking for a box. It’s like, no, no, no, it’s just a phrase and like, it just creates confusion. Whereas if you just said, Hey, can we, can we think creatively about this issue? They’re like, I know what that means. Like I know what it means to think creatively as opposed to this phrase that actually can create a ton of confusion across language barriers. Right.

Santiago Tacoronte (03:05.923)
What is your top five corporate expressions that impact productivity that you, as you just well said, people might not even understand or people is like, well, what does that even mean?

Adam (03:20.024)
Yeah, yeah. So I want to put them into categories because I think that there’s differences. So one, there’s just like overused. So to me, like synergy. People say synergy a lot. And I actually think that no one knows what synergy means. And now the dictionary definition is based on how it’s used in the business world. It’s not actually it’s like a made up word, right? And then sometimes there’s just weird language like peel back the onion.

You know, there’s all these layers to an issue, so we need to peel back the onion on that. It’s kind of weird when you think about it to say in a business context, but maybe the ones that frustrate me more often are when people use a big word when a small word will do. So like my biggest offender here is utilized. People love to say utilized or we’re going to utilize this technology. Like the word they want to say is use.

It has the same first letter. It has similar sounds, but we think we sound smarter. And so we say, I’m going to utilize this tool when like you could just as easily and accurately say, I’m going to use it. But you sound really smart when you say utilize. So I think there’s just some like different categories here. Some of it’s overused, some of it’s weird language, some of it’s big words when small words will do. So that was three, synergy, peel back the onion, utilize.

A couple others. Sometimes we bring in language from other aspects of like the world, so like Colin audible. I don’t even know if if that like resonates for you because it’s a it’s a it’s a term from American football, right? And it’s it’s to say like when you’re on the scrimmage line and you want to change the play because the quarterback is, you know, trying to do something different. And so he literally like changes the call out loud and he calls an audible.

Santiago Tacoronte (05:11.335)
Thank you.

Adam (05:17.334)
Well, it’s super regular for people like bring that into the business setting. we’re going to call an audible on this. And again, only people who have a football background really know American football background really know what that means. And we’re actually like we’re not on a scrimmage line, but we’re going to use it. So was fourth, call an audible. Let me see. What’s another good one? yeah, here’s one. A stakeholders. People love to say stakeholders.

Santiago Tacoronte (05:35.687)
Thank

Adam (05:46.882)
when they could just say like interested people, right? But they want to say stakeholders because it sounds a ton.

Santiago Tacoronte (05:54.663)
So you already translated a couple of them. That’s all right. That’s totally all right. What would you say instead of peel back the onions, I sense naturally and people understand it.

Adam (05:57.127)
sorry, yeah, I went ahead.

Adam (06:07.758)
Let’s just talk about the details. Or let’s get into the details, or is there some more that we should understand here? Like ask a question instead of saying like, Santiago, will you peel back the onion? You’re like, OK, I don’t want to cry. Peeling onions makes people cry. Whereas you could just say, hey, could you go into a couple layers of detail here so we all understand a little better? yeah, I can totally do that.

Santiago Tacoronte (06:10.001)
Mm-hmm.

Santiago Tacoronte (06:32.103)
What about synergies?

Adam (06:35.994)
well, so synergy is actually a made up word like 40 years, 40 or 50 years ago. Like synergy didn’t even exist as a word and it was created by consultants again for the purpose of sounding good and specifically sounding good when they laid off a bunch of people. But I think usually instead of synergy, you can just say efficiency. Like what you’re saying is hey, we think if we combine teams or we combine efforts that will get some efficiency because we’re not.

overlapping in our responsibilities. You don’t have to make it hard. It’s efficiency, it’s not synergy.

Santiago Tacoronte (07:13.959)
What about the American football one called the audible call

Adam (07:18.286)
Oh yeah, yeah, call an audible. I again you can just say what you’re doing. Hey, I think we need to do something different. I know it’s last minute to make a change. But again, like that’s a good one like that one didn’t really even resonate for you. Your American listeners will be super familiar with that, but your you know your European listeners they might be like I don’t even know what calling an audible means.

It’s super applicable because in the US, you know, we’ll have the Super Bowl in the next couple of weeks. And so that people are going to be talking about that all the time.

Santiago Tacoronte (07:54.375)
True. You’ve spoken about the idea of signaling and how people use big words. Why do you think people do that? They want to imitate others. You hinted it. They want to sound big and, you know, fancy and smart.

Adam (08:02.478)
Mmm.

Adam (08:11.011)
Yeah.

Adam (08:15.054)
Yeah, so signaling just just so we’re all on the same page signaling is this idea often within economics that is. Hey, I do something and that signals something about me so for an example there can be a debate. You know our people from Harvard successful because they went to Harvard or are people who go to Harvard just naturally successful so like going to Harvard is sometimes a signaling effect that someone is will be capable.

but not everybody that goes to Harvard is capable, right? And so a signaling effect here I think is there are people who are really smart and do really well and they might use big words and phrases just because it’s who they are, not because they’re trying to like be something different than who they are themselves. But once people see that success, they’re naturally going to imitate it.

And so it can, this, this idea of big words and phrases can show up as a signaling effect because, whenever my VP or CFO talks about these sorts of things, they use these really big fancy phrases. And so I need to use these big fancy phrases as well. And it could be that that person who’s been super successful, they are using them from a legitimate standpoint of like, this is the right word for the right time.

And they’re successful. And so then that language starts to trickle down and it actually can lose its effectiveness because now people are leveraging are using these terms that they may not completely understand. And they’re just trying to signal that they are capable or hardworking or variety of things.

Santiago Tacoronte (10:01.531)
I, I, that totally resonated with me, Adam, because I think corporate jargon is almost pandemic in a way that if you hear a leader or in a town hall saying something like, don’t boil the ocean in a matter of hours, everybody’s not boiling the ocean in every meeting across the, the organization. that, that was super, super spot on acronyms.

Adam (10:15.118)
Mmm.

Adam (10:20.024)
Right.

Adam (10:27.98)
Yeah.

yeah, yeah we gotta talk about those.

Santiago Tacoronte (10:31.609)
Yeah, seems to be a significant portion of corporate jargon. Do you think they’re necessary? mean, like shortening words, you spoke about efficiency before. Shortening words somehow make sense. But I would dig into extreme. Do we need it? Is it complicated communication?

Adam (10:35.874)
Mm-hmm.

Adam (10:44.259)
Yes.

Adam (10:49.996)
I think it is. So I agree. Like I’m a big fan of efficiency. And so there are times when it makes sense to shorten words or create acronyms of a sort. Like in my business, we used to say KPI for key performance indicator a lot. And really we meant metric, which is kind of funny. Like we didn’t actually even mean it the right way, but we said KPI.

And so I think it’s important to like accept acronyms at some level because there is some efficiency like when you’re writing slides or you’re talking about things, if you spell out every single thing like that’s not a good answer either. But my response is always going to be something like do less, have fewer acronyms, do as little as possible in that simply so you can create a more inclusive environment because

Acronyms are naturally insider language and the more we use them, the more likely that we’re going to alienate someone. And so the smaller the group is or the more homogenous a group is, the better or more effective your acronyms are going to be. So when you’re presenting with your team or your direct team or within your business unit, the acronyms are going to make more sense. But as soon as you go to a cross-functional group,

Santiago Tacoronte (11:50.087)
Mm-hmm.

Adam (12:11.148)
your acronyms are going to start to fail and there’s going to be people who don’t understand what you’re talking about. And so my lens is always use as few acronyms as possible and make certain that you actually kind of tell people what that acronym is as a part of the discussion.

Santiago Tacoronte (12:28.401)
So break them down. If you are saying, for example, FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, you recommend to break them down.

Adam (12:30.402)
Yeah.

Adam (12:34.414)
Yeah.

Adam (12:40.172)
Yeah, do it once right like in your let’s say in a slide presentation include them one time or like include a definition parentheses FBI and then after that you can say FBI but that’s just a super easy way to make certain that everyone’s on the same on the same page which by the way I just use some jargon right there being on the same page we all love to get on the same page.

Santiago Tacoronte (13:01.959)
Well, you think that corporate jargon has created some sort of like fake hustle culture where people sounds busy. You don’t even need to look busy. You already sound busy using these sort of terms of some things that come to my head and let’s circle back. Right. It’s already gives the impression that you’re so busy that you cannot tackle this at the moment.

Adam (13:14.222)
Mmm.

Adam (13:31.31)
Mm hmm. Yeah, I absolutely think that’s a great way to talk about is like corporate hustle culture. I like their culture reference because so in my consulting work, I work with organizations a lot on the culture that they’ve developed and is it a trust based culture? And I think this is actually a great sign. That you don’t have high levels of trust in your organization.

because people feel the necessity to look really busy. Instead of saying, hey, I’m going to take a look at that and I’ll get back to you. That’s what you could say. But instead they say something like, we’re going to do a deep dive analysis on the risks and opportunities related to the implementation of the project or whatever. Huge words, lots of them. But really all you mean is, we’re going to look at that and see if there’s anything going on.

But you feel uncomfortable saying that because it doesn’t sound like you’re doing much work. And so to me, that’s why I say it’s an indication that your culture may have a trust or psychological safety sort of issue because people feel like they need to make their work sound really big. Because maybe people don’t trust them. Are you really doing much work if all you’re doing is checking for issues?

Santiago Tacoronte (14:54.311)
And what about people, the concept of corporate cruising? Do you think that people use corporate jargon to divert, delay, and, and, know, I always use this term corporate pace and take things at a very, let’s say, calm pace.

Adam (15:04.312)
Mm-hmm.

Adam (15:15.074)
Yeah, so in the email you sent me, I’d never actually heard the term corporate cruising, so that was really I like that term. I think it definitely can create an environment where we’re not speaking directly and whenever we’re not speaking directly, we slow things down either intentionally or unintentionally. And so instead of saying.

Santiago Tacoronte (15:37.51)
Hmm.

Adam (15:44.064)
We need to go look at the problems with that and get back to everyone. We then talk about all these things we’re gonna do so we can circle back at a future date. And it just slows everything down because we don’t all know exactly what circle back means or when it means or a couple different details like that. And we could just communicate a lot more clearly and say, hey, Santiago, we’re gonna go to some work and I’ll talk to you next Tuesday about this.

But instead we use this whole big phrase of like, yeah, we’re gonna do this and then we’ll circle back in January and okay. Why?

Santiago Tacoronte (16:19.707)
Yeah, there are many of these that I feel that sometimes are a bit of a diversion. One of them that comes to my head, we need to unpack this. Yeah, we need to double click into the mutes, right.

Adam (16:28.844)
Uh-huh.

Adam (16:32.708)
yeah. Yeah, that was on my list too. I made a list before we got on double click is one and to me that’s another great one. That’s an example of. It actually doesn’t make sense. If you like look back 20 years ago. Like double clicking no one double clicked like it wasn’t an action that we did and so it wasn’t in the vernacular in the language. But then if you think like my kids now.

They don’t even use a mouse. So like this idea of double clicking like it doesn’t make sense to them either. So it’s actually even it’s a jargon sort of phrase that will use like double click or move the needle or whatever. But there’s actually a very small window of people that it actually makes sense for. If you use technology where you double clicked it makes sense. But my parents don’t say double click and my kids don’t say double click right. It’s like.

you know elder millennials are saying double click and that’s it

Santiago Tacoronte (17:31.961)
Elder Millennials, I like that. Have you been ever in a meeting where there was so packed with jargon that you didn’t even know what the meeting was about or what they were talking about?

Adam (17:45.198)
For sure. So my some quick background. was I worked at the same company for 17 years, so that’s most of my career. And I spent 10 of that like on the corporate side. And there was a metric that we used that was it was the bedrock of all of the financials that the corporate teams talked about. It’s it’s an insurance term. It’s called incident rate often gets shortened to IR.

So I spent literally 10 years of my career with that being the number one thing I talked about every day. And then I got tapped to move over into our operations team and move into our supply chain. And I was in this meeting and these people kept talking about IR. It was on every slide, IR this, IR that. And I spent 45 minutes of a 60 minute meeting.

Santiago Tacoronte (18:42.151)
You

Adam (18:42.868)
I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about because like this doesn’t make sense like you are not talking about incident rate. I don’t think I don’t you guys seem like you don’t even know what you’re talking about. And so finally I kind of like sheepishly raised my hand and like hey. What is IR mean to you guys and like it means internal repair. Like it means what like yeah it means internal repair so that was like a supply chain thing. It’s like even within the same company.

you transfer between business units and some acronyms or phrases might be used. And like I was totally lost. And I think that can happen to lots of people because everyone else in that room had been in that business unit for a long time. So they didn’t think that IR was a term, was like an insider term. So yeah, that’s my example of like same company and having that exact same, like that exact issue even like after a business unit transition.

Santiago Tacoronte (19:40.295)
What is the most ridiculous piece of corporate jargon that you have heard recently? I’ll tell you mine. recently something that I’ve never heard about that, that says something like, let’s open the kimono.

Adam (19:48.0)
Alright, yeah, let me hear yours.

Adam (19:55.342)
yeah, that’s actually a terrible one.

Santiago Tacoronte (19:58.215)
It’s a bit rude even,

Adam (20:00.462)
Yeah, it’s a problem. You should not open your kimono. That’s not something you should do, especially in mixed company. And so here’s an example where that can play. Interestingly, I worked in our international division, so I did a good bit of work with our Japan teams. They wear kimonos in Japan. You know it’s a part of their culture and they certainly don’t open them like it’s extremely rude to do that.

Santiago Tacoronte (20:09.255)
Thank

Adam (20:28.234)
And so I had part of my team on a call one time and someone started saying open the kimono and you could see that the entire Japan team just like went. And they were like they were not happy about this phrase and so even like across cultures and all kinds of stuff like that’s it. That’s a great one. My example is going to be a little different because it’s not necessarily corporate jargon. But in the US we just went through the election.

And so there’s so many cable news channels that just for five months all they did was talk about the election. And so, you know, every break they would say things like, and when we come back, we’ll have an analysis of this. And they would use all these big phrases. And really all they were saying was like, hey, when we come back from the break, we’re just going to talk some more about the same stuff that we’ve talked about for the last three months. But they couldn’t say that because that sounds, you know,

Like they can’t get paid millions of dollars if that’s what they’re doing. And so they use all these big phrases and words about the analysis that they’re going to do on the election results or the poll this or that. And the truth is like they were just going to talk about the same thing again with maybe like a different guest. So that was like really salient for me just because we’ve had the election in the US and just no matter where you went everyone was going to talk about their.

Santiago Tacoronte (21:42.311)
Thank

Adam (21:54.828)
views on the election or whatever but but they didn’t want to say it that way because they wanted to sound like smarter and more important or something.

Santiago Tacoronte (22:03.559)
Let’s talk solutions and advice. For someone that is trying to rise in their careers, how can they resist falling into the corporate jargon trap and still sound competent?

Adam (22:05.943)
All right.

Adam (22:16.936)
Mm hmm. So I first I just love that question because I think I think it’s a trap that we all fall into because we want to be successful. And because we want to be successful, we naturally going to start imitating behaviors, even if we don’t understand those behaviors. So a couple of things. One is I don’t I don’t think I don’t want people to leave this conversation and think that you or I are saying.

Hey, you should never use an acronym or you should never use a phrase in your business. But instead, the first step is just. How would like a high school graduate? Like hear what you’re saying? Are you using actual English or using whatever your native languages? Are you actually saying things that if you if you wrote it down, someone could relatively kind of know what you mean or

Is there so much insider speaking acronyms in there that like fundamentally people can’t even know what you’re talking about. So if you’re seeking to rise to the ranks sure like you need to do some signaling that’s a natural thing to do. But put the filter on yourself like did I speak English just now. Did I actually say something that’s intelligible or does it have no real meaning. It’s all just vapid. And the second thing is.

to really consider your audience. And again, like I said, the more homogenous you’re presenting to, in some ways the more okay it is to use this insider language because there’s more, a higher percentage of insiders when it’s a small group. But the larger your group is, the more cross-functional your team is, the more you should seek to define terms, bring clarity to what you’re talking about.

Santiago Tacoronte (24:10.119)
Yeah.

Adam (24:12.032)
And then the third thing is define things for people. And I think I see this happen a lot with metrics where a business will have a defined metric. And so they then create an acronym for that. Like that metric gets named some acronym. And then five years later, you actually found out that no one knows what that acronym stands for anymore. And that means that there’s

that the metrics don’t match when different business units do the analysis because I think it means this and you think it means that. And so we fundamentally do analysis wrong because we’re not clear on what that metric is. And so I say that to say we all have an opportunity to define those and kind of make certain, hey guys, this is what we’re talking about. This is how we define that metric in our business unit. Do you guys have any questions about that? Does that match how you all think it? Think about it.

Santiago Tacoronte (24:47.193)
Hmm.

Santiago Tacoronte (25:08.187)
Mm-hmm.

Adam (25:09.376)
And that simple question or conversation right there, sometimes that’s a five minute discussion and you’ll find that there’s huge amounts of value or huge amounts of wasted effort happening because business units are talking past each other because they’ve defined something almost the same way. But they they’re always fighting about why their analysis doesn’t match or whatever.

Santiago Tacoronte (25:30.351)
If someone is surrounded by jargon heavy colleagues, what is the subtle way of telling them that you are not getting it or bring them back into plain language without being offensive or something like that?

Adam (25:37.015)
Mmm.

Adam (25:49.699)
Yeah.

Adam (25:54.604)
Yeah, so I think part of it’s just being comfortable asking for clarity. Hey, I just want to make sure I understand what we all mean when we say that, especially you can see this like in a meeting context where, you know, some leader is kind of like giving out deliverables to people to go do and they may define, hey guys, we want to do a deep dive postmortem analysis on, you know, whatever. Like be kind.

to the people that are kind of receiving that instruction and say, can we just all agree like, what’s a deep dive postmortem? Like, what does that mean to you? And you don’t have to ask it in an attacking sort of way, but you can ask it in a way of, hey, I wanna make certain that I or the team give Santiago what he wants. And so when Santiago asks for a deep dive, I should say, hey Santiago, what would be good to have in a deep dive for you?

Santiago Tacoronte (26:30.695)
Mm-hmm.

Adam (26:49.494)
And that conversation automatically brings us into natural language. and it has the benefit of preventing the team going off and doing a bunch of work and then coming back and presenting it to Santiago. And you’re then disappointed because the team didn’t do what you wanted. and so it’s like, we can actually increase kindness. can also increase the team’s efficiency by pushing and pulling and asking questions like, Hey, what do you mean by that? Or.

When I hear that, I think this, is that what you meant when you said that? I want to make certain I give you what you need.

Santiago Tacoronte (27:25.095)
At the beginning of this interview you mentioned excluding people. What’s the impact of insider speaking and how does other people feel when they are exposed to these insider ways of communication?

Adam (27:34.007)
Mmm.

Adam (27:46.55)
I really, I like that question because I think we get a lot of network benefits within our teams when everyone is together and understanding and we lose a lot of efficiency and benefits when people don’t understand what’s going on. So when, when, we, I just lost my train of thought. What was the question? Will you say it again? I’m sorry.

Santiago Tacoronte (28:16.454)
The Insiders speak.

Adam (28:18.154)
yes, the impact of insider speak. I’m sorry. So it the issue it causes is anyone who’s not willing to like stand up and say, hey, I don’t understand. They’re automatically at a loss. And so they’re going to have less information. They’re going to feel is not a part of the group. And so insider speak, whether that’s acronyms or like special phrases that your team uses.

It’s just going to reduce their efficiency and they’re also just naturally going to be scared potentially to say they don’t understand because everyone acts like they do understand. And so I think it can be part of the impact is simply. It makes people feel excluded because the expectation is that they understand and then they’re going to be afraid. To ask a question.

Santiago Tacoronte (28:58.407)
Hmm.

Adam (29:14.03)
Because they don’t want to feel dumb and they don’t want you to think that they aren’t a strong member of the team. So that naturally hurts people, I think.

Santiago Tacoronte (29:23.687)
Who invents, who brings these sometimes strange expressions into companies?

Adam (29:35.15)
I don’t want to take out like a really super too strong stance against consultants. I’ve worked for a lot of consultants. They were super great. Lots of my mentors have come from that industry. But I do think consultant speak is part of it. And it’s because fundamentally consultants are seeking to sound smart because they want you to pay them for being smart. And often within companies, those consultants are engaging with very senior leaders.

And as a result, people within the company want to compete at the same level as the consultants. And so they’re then kind of doing that. So I do think consultants are part of it. I think another and I referenced this earlier is I think some of it is there are highly successful people that that are using these words and phrases legitimately like they aren’t trying to be jargony. And so.

Once those people are successful, it’s going to trickle down and pass down to others. So I don’t think it’s necessarily a malicious thing that this happens, but it’s almost always gonna like originate from the top in some way because once people see that, they want to emulate those leaders. know what mean?

Santiago Tacoronte (30:57.125)
If we could almost eliminate corporate jargon and acronyms and weird expressions, do you think we will be more productive?

Adam (31:02.702)
Mmm.

Adam (31:10.03)
I have no question about that. think we would be more productive. We would have probably shorter meetings frequently. We would often have more understanding, but also like they’d be less awkward. I think a lot of times these like jargon sort of meetings, if you like were a fly on the wall, kind of watching what was happening, you would you’d be like, I don’t even understand what these guys are saying. Are we certain that they understand what they’re saying?

I don’t think that word means what you think it means sort of conversations. And so I think the more we could reduce jargon, the more efficient our meetings would be. And I’ll just give that one caveat we’ve referenced before. Sometimes a well-priced acronym or a shortening or those sorts of things, those do increase efficiency when they’re done right. But they reduce efficiency when you look at a slide and it’s like, you know,

Santiago Tacoronte (32:01.447)
Mm-hmm.

Adam (32:09.512)
It’s like alphabet soup. Like you’re just looking at it there’s nothing but uppercase letters that are all kind of mushed together. Like I don’t I don’t really know what that means.

Santiago Tacoronte (32:19.749)
If you could eliminate three buzzwords together

Adam (32:24.791)
Hmm.

Santiago Tacoronte (32:25.733)
All together forever from corporate, what would be your choice?

Adam (32:31.342)
Synergy, I’ve kind of already talked about that one. I just wish people could say efficiency or benefit. Like why do we have to say synergy? Low hanging fruit. To me, it’s just a weird phrase. Like, can we just say easy opportunity? Like to me, low hanging fruit doesn’t actually sound good. Like, do you want your fruit to hang low? I don’t know. And then I’d also get ready to utilize. I don’t know that there’s any time when people say,

we’re going to utilize when they shouldn’t just say use. And you said three connective a fourth. Okay. I wish people would use leverage correctly. So often utilize or leverage are kind of frequently kind of used interchangeably. But the truth is like leverage is when you have a lever like you have something there’s a fulcrum point like it’s an engineering term.

Santiago Tacoronte (33:06.385)
Yes.

Santiago Tacoronte (33:11.879)
Give an example.

Adam (33:29.344)
And it references that you can, through the benefits of things like mechanical engineering, you can get to a better, easier outcome because you have a lever and a fulcrum. But often people say the term, like use the word leverage when they just mean use. But like a leverage is a fantastic business concept that brings a lot of value. if done, if we use leverage correctly in our business, we are much more efficient.

and we’re more capital efficient, like all kinds of things. And so I wish people would stop using leverage in the wrong way, but really get used to using leverage, not just the word, but the concept within their business in a way that drives more efficiency and more profit, because that’s what leverage will do for you. Leverage isn’t just using something, it’s doing something much more than

Santiago Tacoronte (34:21.543)
You just remind me of one that I have a lot of doubts about it. People say align, but I have the impression that people want to say agree. What is the difference between aligning and agreeing?

Adam (34:25.741)
Adam (34:31.403)
yeah.

Yeah, so I I think that’s a great question. I actually do think there’s a difference and this is this is a great example of one that the word is so overused that it loses some of its meaning. Because I believe that our teams and our companies we should have a culture of. What I say is disagree and commit. Meaning it should be totally acceptable within our culture to.

In a trusting way disagree with each other and after we’ve all disagreed we commit to what we’re going to do. And and so I think of alignment in that context of when used correctly. Alignment means that we all understand the path that we’re going down. Whereas agree gives the idea that I agree with everything we’re saying and that’s not true like there there should be times as leaders that we.

Santiago Tacoronte (35:21.009)
Mm-hmm.

Adam (35:30.476)
We don’t necessarily agree with each other, Santiago, but we should be aligned at the business outcomes that we’re seeking. And then we have a strategy that we, that we all believe is focused on delivering that. We don’t all have to agree that every component of that strategy is perfect. But I think, I think you’re right. People use like agree and align interchangeably and, they’re like, it’s a alignment. a very powerful concept when used correctly. And when like embedded into your trusting culture of your team.

Alignment is an important concept where people don’t have to agree to be aligned. And I wish again, kind of like leverage that we could use that a little bit more appropriately so that the word means what it should mean.

Santiago Tacoronte (36:13.221)
What advice do you give to the many people that listen to this podcast if they want to do a detox, vocabulary detox and improve their communication at work for more impactful and efficient communication?

Adam (36:29.053)
So one, think is just review your communications and kind of see where am I not saying things that I could say. Like I’m using words or phrases that are big or unwieldy or unnecessary, whereas I could just say something that is more direct and clear. One thing that helped me is years ago, about three or four years into my career, so 15 or

18 years ago, I found this book called Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, which is a fantastic title for a book. And then like the subtitle was a bullfighters guide. Bull, you get it. And so I would recommend that resource to people like go look for that book. Why corporate people speak like idiots. And it kind of talks about so many of these things in a really funny way.

that helps highlight kind of how silly it is. And then the last thing on a detox is approach everything from a lens of how would an outsider see this? So how would someone who’s new to the team perceive this? Or if we were presenting this information cross-functionally, would the cross-functional audience understand? And even more impactfully, if you’re someone who deals with clients a lot,

the more you can kind of think of like, would my client understand this? Am I using language that is specific to my company or my business unit? Well, your client isn’t in your company or your business unit. And so approaching things from that level of how can I make this more understandable to my partner? Because our goal in communication should be to help our partner to understand as opposed often we think of our goal in communication is

to say what I want to say. And really our goal is to be understood by our partner. And so putting that lens, that outside lens looking into what we’re saying, I think will help all of us just be a little bit more empathetic and caring to those around us when we’re communicating.

Santiago Tacoronte (38:27.719)
Hmm.

Santiago Tacoronte (38:45.189)
That sounds amazing. Adam, how can people get in touch with you or companies get in touch with you and you can help them improve their communication and use this jargon and other things.

Adam (38:59.854)
So appreciate the question. The fastest way to get me in lots of ways, I’m super active on LinkedIn. I post every day about great leadership and trust and building culture in your teams. So always welcome for people to contact me through LinkedIn and check out my content there. The other thing you can do is my website is thetenaciousoperator.com. You can email me at adam at thetenaciousoperator.com.

and would love to talk about leadership and culture and figure out how we can help build a more trusting team where people don’t feel afraid and they don’t have to use jargon to sound like they’re accomplishing things.

Santiago Tacoronte (39:41.243)
Adam, thank you so much for number one, not using that much jargon today, and also for demystifying some of the most common heard expressions in meetings across the world, in thousands, millions of meetings across the world. And we wish you the best and we will follow your advice.

Adam (40:00.984)
Thank you, Santiago. It’s been so much fun. I’m glad we could do it.

 

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Episode Transcript

Santiago Tacoronte (00:01.502)
Hello Riley and welcome to Productivity.

Riley (00:04.344)
Thank you, Santiago. Happy to be here today.

Santiago Tacoronte (00:08.094)
So you’ve been called the CEO whisperer for helping high performance sleep better. What is the most shocking transformation you’ve witnessed in your clients after you optimize their sleep?

Riley (00:21.09)
Yeah, it’s a really good question. And there’s so many different case studies that come to mind. But you do see the same overlapping issues that a lot of CEOs have. And a lot of the time that is stress. And they like to keep their stress sort of under the radar. They don’t want to show it. And they bottle it all up until it becomes too much. And then they just can’t sleep anymore. And they go towards sleeping pills or alcohol and different things like this that they only know that’s available to them. But I had one individual in particular named Jordan. He’s probably 49 years old CEO, three kids, wife.

stay at home mom and he was not able to sleep at all. And this was, this guy was a hustler, very successful CEO. I think he had a couple of businesses and we were able to help him just sleep better, get his deep sleep in his REM sleep back on track and get between an hour and a half or about two hours of deep sleep and REM sleep, which is really that sweet spot we need to really restore the mind and restore the body. And then as a result, he didn’t need coffee the next day. Didn’t need sleeping pills to get to sleep.

You can do it naturally if you find the root cause of like, where is this coming from instead of just looking at symptoms.

Santiago Tacoronte (01:24.628)
This is incredible. you saying that someone goes from not sleeping at all to sleeping like a baby. How do you perform these magics?

Riley (01:35.374)
Yeah, sleep is something that’s universal across all types of industries, right? We all need it. Some people need a bit more, some people need a bit less. But really what it comes down to is it’s case by case via everyone’s biology. Some people need a bit more work, some people not as much. Sometimes people have diagnosable sleep conditions, sleep apnea, rest of the legs syndrome, insomnia, but other people just need a little bit. So where I find the best…

Way an approach to look at people is look at the root cause and what we do is we send lab tests To their house and they would take a urine saliva stool sample Send it to the lab and we’ll figure out what is their cortisol like what is inflammation their body like do they have leaky gut is their heavy metals moles toxins in their body What is our their brain neurotransmitters telling us do they have too much dopamine that’s turning to adrenaline and that’s Keeping them sort of up at night. Maybe they don’t have the GABA which are the breaks in the brain to kind of chill out

Is it serotonin, which is the happiness neurotransmitter to really help them feel that sense of ease while they’re falling asleep? You know, there’s these imbalances within our body. And if any one of those is out of balance, it’s a bit like the game Jenga if you’ve ever played. You’ll pull out one puzzle piece here, create stress on the other side. You’ll pull out a piece here until the whole thing comes tumbling down. And so it’s like our body’s the same way. When each part becomes in balance over time, the full thing can come tumbling down.

And that’s where like the communication between all the different parts of the body, they’re just not as efficient as it should. So if you think of your body as like a machine, a system, it’s much the same way. We want all the different parts of the brain to communicate with the gut, the hormones communicate with the different organs. And it’s like a beautiful orchestra in unison. But if one instrument’s playing too fast, too slow, then the full song is off. And so that’s a good analogy that I feel kind of encapsulates high level view what I do with people.

Santiago Tacoronte (03:23.1)
Lots of people think of sleep as a routine. Night comes and then you go to sleep. But you have quite a scientific approach to it. What has been your most surprising discovery? You have analyzed the sleep of more than 2,000 people and gathered a lot of data and markers around it. What was your most surprising discovery?

Riley (03:48.878)
Yeah, the biggest one for people that I see consistently, and this is hidden. I think it’s going to be more well known as time goes on because it always takes a while for the mainstream to catch up when there’s something cutting edge that’s out. It can take five to 10 years sometimes. And what I think that’s going to be is parasites inside of the gut. And the reason why is parasites are something people can, sure, get second, third world countries. But you can also get it from contaminated, like uncooked meats, fish, sushi. You know, you’re swimming your local lake. You might swallow some of the water.

And if somebody has a resilient immune system, which most of the immune system is located in the gut, we’d be able to fight these things off. But for a lot of people, these parasites can stay there. Pathogens, H. pylori, there’s a lot of different evil little critters in there. And they can stay in our gut for years at a time. And essentially what they do is they can steal the nutrients of the foods we’re eating. So we might be eating a healthy diet and you know, I’ll talk with people and they’re doing all the right things, all the healthy things, and they can’t sleep and they don’t know what’s going on.

And so we look at their gut, we run a test and we can see they have got parasites and that’s causing the parasites to steal the nutrients from the food. Now they don’t have the building blocks that they need for their hormones, for their brain, no transmitters and all the different functions in their body. And so once we remove it, all of a sudden the body is very self-correcting and self-healing when you give it the right inputs. And so once we remove those usually over about 30 to 60 days, then we will see drastic improvements in how they sleep because

Now cortisol is not going to be as high anymore. Sometimes these things will come more awake or active at nighttime. And so that’s one of the biggest ones that I would see. There’s other things too, like heavy metal and molds, but that’s like one of the biggest epiphanies that I’ve seen. And people think, well, what’s a parasite in my gut related to my brain? And there’s a lot related to your gut in your brain. And that’s why they call your gut the second brain, because they have a two, two way lateral connection to the vagus nerve.

Santiago Tacoronte (05:43.208)
So is it easy to get parasites in your gut, in your intestine, and continue having a normal life without noticing or not having clear symptoms?

Riley (05:54.518)
Yeah, and that’s another good question too, because everybody genetically and based on their environment has a different size stress bucket. And there’s in our stress bucket, it’s called our allostatic load, we can put an internal stressors and external stressors. External, know those ones stress with work, drama and relationship, we can manage that through meditation or something. But the ones that are hidden are the internal ones. And one of those can include a parasite. Now, depending on

how many stressors you put into somebody’s bucket, depending on how big it is, some have a big stress bucket and a parasite might not even bother them at all. Other people are extremely sensitive to this. And so that’s where there is no cookie cutter, one size fits all approach. It has to be individually tailored to the person.

Santiago Tacoronte (06:40.52)
Let’s speak sleep hacks. The internet is full of sleep hacks. You open TikTok, Instagram, know, from breathing 10 times consecutively, very deeply, almost until you’re out of breath. Does these things work?

Riley (06:54.732)
Hahaha

Riley (06:58.478)
It’s a good question too. They all work and there’s different layers to this game. So you always wanna do the basics and the fundamentals first. You can go advanced with all the events biohacks, but unless you get the foundations in place first, the advanced stuff is pretty useless. starting with the basics, I’ll give you probably, you know, between five and 10. So number one is cool bedroom environment temperature. That’s between about 16, 18 Celsius, 65, 67 Fahrenheit.

And that’s number one, because within a 24 hour period, our body’s the coldest internally within about a couple hours after a sleep. So we want an external environment that’s conducive to that. Number two is we want it to be pitch black. Now ideally we would want it to be so pitch black that we don’t see our hand in front of us. It’s a good measuring stick and that’s idealistic, but to be realistic, we just want it to be as dark as possible. So that means blackout curtains.

Even in the morning when sun’s coming through, we just wanna make sure that like the curtain, the window, they’re pinched as much as possible. You can wear an eye mask, but we still have these light receptors around our eyes that can detect light at a subtle level. And even electronics within our room, like heaters, fans, cable boxes, we wanna turn those off or cover those with tape or whatever it is, because those can also impact our sleep as well. And it doesn’t seem like it, it seems like it’s so small and nuanced, but it does have an impact on our sleep.

Speaking of light, the second thing is going to be blue light. So blue light can directly inhibit our melatonin, which is our master sleep hormone. And within a 24 hour period, melatonin is highest right before we go to sleep, couple hours into sleep, and lowest when we first wake up in the morning. And it has an inverse relationship with cortisol. So when we go to bed, we want cortisol to be lowest and melatonin to be highest. But a lot of people, they don’t have melatonin as high as it should be because they’re looking at blue light before they go to sleep.

So maybe they’re looking at their phone, they’re watching TV before bed, and a couple things you can do is get blue light blocking glasses. Now there’s a lot on the market, but my favorite ones are called the TrueDark Twilight Classics, and they’re gonna make you look like Cyclops. They’re red, but again, I mean, we’re looking for results here, and it’s great, because it’ll block side from the periphery, and there’s other forms of light besides blue light. There’s green light, violet light, that can be stimulatory, but blue is on the top.

Riley (09:24.302)
for suppressing that melatonin. And there’s a lot of, like you can just Google blue light, potential risk of disease, not sleeping well. I think we’re gonna see more about the science with that too. So that’s that one. Now another one that a lot of people don’t realize is people think it’s all about the evening routine, but it’s also about the morning routine. So what that means is when we first wake up, we wanna expose our eyes to sunlight as soon, within about an hour when we wake up. The reason why is because light goes into our eyes and it.

comes to something known as our SCN and sort of our internal master clock, that is going to send a signal to all of our organs, all of our hormones, that it’s time to turn on, to hit that on switch. And that’s when that timer begins where, you know, 12, 16 hours later, our body knows when it’s time to go to bed. And you know, our bodies, our brains are really these outdated monkey machines. you know, our technology has increased, but our bodies haven’t changed too much since the, you know, during the age of our ancestors when we were hunting.

you know, hunter-gatherer society. And so we, it’s called the Savannah principle where there is this mismatch. So what we have to do is when we first wake up, expose your eyes to the sun. On a sunny day, you want between about 10 and 15 minutes is enough. Don’t look directly at the sun, but just try and get the light in the eyes. On a cloudy day, you want about 30 minutes. If you’re in a part where I’m like Canada, where we don’t get a lot of light at this time of the year in the morning, you can get something called a lux light. Usually you want to look between about

you know, 10 to 12,000, 50,000 lux, you just put it like on the 45 degree angle in the morning when you’re, you know, first working or something, put it on for 30 minutes. And that’s a great way until the sun goes up and then you can go for a walk earlier that morning too. So those are a couple of things that people can utilize. And there’s more too, but let me know if you want to keep me to keep riffing here, but those are some helpful ones.

Santiago Tacoronte (11:12.244)
Let’s switch to another important part of productivity. You work with people that is busy and successful.

Productivity, it’s addictive in a way, and success is also addictive. How do you convince people, clients that are super busy, that are successful, that are sleeping not so much because they have a lot to do? How do you tell them, time out, leave a few things because you need to get your sleep?

Riley (11:48.834)
Yeah, because what got them to the place they are is hustling, right? Burning the candle both ends, sacrificing sleep. A lot of these guys see sleep as a liability and something that’s kind of getting in their way. And if they had their way, they wouldn’t sleep at all. some of these guys are genetic. There’s about 1 to 2 % of the population that need less than about four or five hours of sleep. And if that’s them, then great. But if you’re sacrificing your sleep, can develop a risk.

health conditions down the road like Alzheimer’s disease with plaque building up in the brain, the list goes on. But functionally what I have to show them is yes, you know, the less you sleep, of course, the more you can get done. But look how much that’s impacting you during the day when you could be focusing better. You could be in, you know, deep flow states. You could have unlimited energy. You could have very good emotional intelligence so you could be a better leader. And if you know the game for them is all about efficiency. And so yes, it might take

more time to sleep, adding a couple hours, but the efficiency in your day of the hour spending your waking hours, that is going to be significantly more across all KPIs throughout your business and your personal life. And then I also want to tell them to like, sometimes you don’t have to sleep eight to nine hours, we can increase the sleep quality of your deep sleep, of your REM sleep and other markers to your heart rate variability, resting heart rate, the list goes on. And from there, we’re able to sometimes sleep less.

and actually feel better because we’ll track their sleep with an aura ring. I’ll be able to look at their stats day and night, what it’s showing me. And there’s so much room for improvement that when we make those improvements, sometimes they can slice hours off their sleep and they just feel better too, because their body is less inflamed. It’s just more healthy. And then they just feel better too. So when I put it in that lens, then they start to see and then they start to visually feel it. And then they never want to go back to what they were before because they just see how much better they feel.

Santiago Tacoronte (13:45.908)
Let’s talk a little bit about bad sleep. I read this week or last week something like, no matter how bad you’re feeling today, you’re only one sleep away to be the best version of yourself. But let’s say for the sake of the example that you had a bad night for whatever reason. You had dreams, you had nightmares. How can people recover and go back to being a normal being?

after a bad sleep.

Riley (14:18.03)
Yeah, that’s a good question too. One of the things that you can do is you can try a nap in the afternoon, but you don’t want to have a nap after 3 p.m. and you want to make your nap about 26 minutes exactly because if you start going over the 30 minute mark, you can start going to deeper phases of sleep and you’re going to wake up ending up feeling groggy. But if you didn’t get a good sleep, having a nap, you know, between 11, maybe 2 p.m. that’s a great way to do a recharge. Some countries do that and you know, the employers.

show great results like they have sleeping pods in different working organizations. I believe I think the last one I saw was in Japan, but it’s coming more popular in different parts of the world. So that’s one thing that you can do. Of course you can drink coffee and you can do these short-term things, but think of it like a bank account. If you’re taking withdrawals out of your bank account by having caffeine, that is going to put you in a deficit. We want to be in a surplus all day. And so you first have to go to the baseline of

If you were so much in a surplus, like if your bank account was let’s say plus a thousand, maybe you didn’t have a good sleep. Now you’re down to let’s say 700, but you’re still in a surplus. So you’re still feeling fine and sleep’s not going to impact you as much. It’s just that people are always hovering around maybe just plus 100 surplus. So when they get a bad sleep, now they’re in a minus 1000 deficit and they feel horrible. And so now they go to coffee, they go to alcohol, they go to sleeping pills just to try and feel better. So the first thing is make your body so resilient that

Even a bad sleep won’t interrupt you too much. But of course we all have busy schedules. So you can try coffee, you can try slight melatonin. But the best thing is to sometimes take the hit for that day and then plan on just going to bed at the same time and getting a good sleep that night. Because the moment that you try mixing around the schedules, sleeping for three hours, having too much coffee that day, what you’re gonna find is going to impact the next couple days afterwards.

the net result of that is sometimes a worse impact. But besides that, you can do a cold shower, you can do an Epsom salt bath, you can do like a minor exercise to get your heart rate going, you can expose your eyes to the sun. But some days if we have those, when those days do happen, we just have to take it a little bit more easy. And that’s where awareness comes in of like, we have all these tools available to us, but what ones do we take out at the right time based on how we feel?

Santiago Tacoronte (16:38.386)
Riley, I’m a data geek. It’s my profession and I love it. Let’s speak a little bit tech. Smart devices such as the rings, auto rings, FitBit, smart watches that measures your sleep. Number one, are they reliable?

Riley (16:40.942)
Thank

Riley (17:00.056)
They’re probably about 30 % off for the most part. So I don’t like to see them individual days. Like I wouldn’t take that data too, too seriously, but I do like to see the trends. And so if we can get 14 days, 30 days, I probably want at least 30 days of data to get a good baseline for somebody. But if I can see like three months of data, six months of data, and we can correlate that to how they’re subjectively feeling, then they can rate themselves. We see the data on that and we.

do different, you know, we’ll change the diet. How do their biometrics respond to that? If they’re exercising, how do their biometrics respond to that? And so we can tinker with that by changing one variable at a time. But the best sleep device on in the market today, it’s an expensive one. It’s called the eight sleep. And that’s a pad that goes over your bed that dynamically adjusts the temperature. You can think of like your, your mattress pad while you sleep. And that is so good for your sleep.

and it’s probably the most accurate for tracking your sleep. Number two is probably gonna be the Aura Ring. Now the version four just came out, so that is probably the best on the market today. The one below that, might be Whoop Band, it could be the Apple Watch. All the other ones sort of tie together, but you know, technology has reached a point where they are all pretty good for the most part, if we’re tracking the trends, but the 8 Sleep and the Aura Ring are still on top.

Santiago Tacoronte (18:24.752)
Have you heard about the technology applied to clothing, to apparel, to sleeping? Have you heard about brands like Daxmeyan that keep your body cool and the temperature at the same level while you sleep? What do you think about those?

Riley (18:42.87)
Yeah, I think they’re great. There’s a lot of technology coming out right now, whether it’s clothing or electronic gadgets. I’m a big fan of those things and I’m trying these different things. I mean, I’m a bit of a guinea pig myself. know, everything from like biohacker type clients to, know, EMFs. So they’ll paint their walls with a special paint that’s black. you know, the frequency won’t come in or EMF blocking close. Similar to what you’re saying.

I think it all is valid. Is it that one thing? No. But does it add, you know, it might be 5 % to their solution. And then it’s a combination of everything combined that you really get the most amount of results.

Santiago Tacoronte (19:24.308)
Let’s talk about, you’ve mentioned it a couple of times already, a few times. Let’s talk about the most consumed drug in the world, caffeine.

it doesn’t make people more productive and what are you trading off when you are exchanging caffeine for a big of let’s say energy against your sleep?

Riley (19:50.894)
Yeah, so caffeine and again everybody’s different. So some people genetically Are a fast metabolizer of coffee and we all know those people who can go for a cup of coffee in the evening They feel fine and they can sleep. Okay That’s one group of people. The other group of people is they’re slow metabolizers of coffee They can even have one cup of coffee at 10 a.m. And still feel wired at you 11 p.m. So they have to be careful Most people in the middle, know, what I suggest is if you’re going to bed at about 10 p.m

Your last cup should probably be at about 10.30 to 11 a.m. Just to be safe. They do say, you know, wait seven, eight hours, but I’ve just seen a half-life a lot more than that of coffee, that it can last for people. Now what coffee is doing for you is, and again, everybody responds differently, but you are increasing cortisol and you’re increasing adrenaline. Now there are studies that show the benefits of coffee. You know, it’s antioxidant property and everything else.

And there’s pros and cons to everything. You just have to weigh what is best for you and what are you looking for. But what we see is when we run a hormonal test, it’s usually a urine-based test where we can see somebody’s cortisol throughout the day. And when we first wake up within 90 minutes, our cortisol is at its highest. Throughout the day, our cortisol goes down to its lowest throughout the day before we go to sleep. And when somebody has coffee, and especially their adrenal glands, which secrete cortisol,

What we can see is that can be very detrimental for somebody who is in a state of adrenal fatigue or adrenal dysfunction. And so if their cortisol just baseline without coffee is too high, they’re running on a dirty source of energy and it’s very short lasting. And so the coffee is going to add to that where it’s going to spike up and it’s going to come down like a roller coaster. And what you’re doing when that happens is you’re now tapping into the backup generators and the backup resources of the body.

when it shouldn’t be there, you should be able to go, for example, plus one, minus one, just maintain that same level of consistency throughout the day. But now let’s say you have coffee and it spiked your cortisol up to plus 10, well, that’s gonna come crashing down. Again, there’s a couple things you can do with coffee, like having it with fat, MCT oil, things like that to make it more of a slow release. But for the most part, if somebody feels like they’re burnt out and they’re in stage two, three, four adrenal fatigue,

Riley (22:16.022)
you need to probably go off it for a period of about 30 to 60 days. And it’s tough. I mean, don’t get me wrong. You can get headaches, can get withdrawal symptoms. Coffee smells great in the morning. It’s a great ritual to have. But if you can get over that initial hump, you’ll see how much better you feel. And it’s like putting training wheels on a bike. You got to put the training wheels on the bike, learn how to ride the bike, give your system a break so it can build itself up again. And then once it feels healed and ready, you can take the training wheels off, go into maintenance mode.

and then just have it whenever you feel like it. But depending on how you feel, like a lot of these CEOs are so burnt out and they relied on coffee their entire lives to get to where they are, but their body just biologically can’t support that because sometimes their adrenals just don’t have the cortisol to to output anymore. And as a result, we got to give their body a break.

Santiago Tacoronte (23:09.276)
If you would need to change just one habit tonight about the hundreds of thousands of people that are going to listen to this podcast, one thing, what will it be?

Riley (23:25.678)
If they were to change one thing, I would say the earlier you can go to bed and it’s very cliche, but it’s very true. The earlier you can go to bed and the more that you can have a one hour ritual prior to sleep to make it like a sacred ritual before sleep and see it as an investment. Like sleep is an investment that is going to pay you dividends the next day and keeping your bank account in this big surplus so that

it’s only going to pay you back and you’re gonna be able to achieve what you want to. Just perceive less effort, easy, in a way that’s fun. We all are better people when, you we’re our best selves when we sleep better. And I think Matthew Walker said a quote, you know a lot more about somebody, not asking how’s it going, but ask how do they sleep? You’ll learn a lot more.

Santiago Tacoronte (24:20.18)
How do you reconcile this with social life? See, I’m an early sleeper and I’m totally with you. But it costs me sometimes tough conversations with people when I tell them that if I want to have an amazing day tomorrow, I might go to sleep at 9 p.m. And a common answer is like, you’re wasting your life. How can you sacrifice so much of your, particularly people that is busy or people that works the whole day?

It’s a bit of a struggle to say that you finish, you’re off work and dinner and whatever at what, seven, 7.30. And you have literally one hour, one hour and a half or two of me time before going to bed.

Riley (25:06.734)
Yeah, so we all need a social life, right? We all need to, we can’t be too strict every single day. And for the most part, like what I say to people is we need an outlet to let go. We need a social life. Sometimes people wanna have a glass of wine. That’s fine. I don’t wanna stop people from doing that. And maybe that’s good on a Saturday night, but maybe one extent, like instead of going to bed at 9 p.m.

Maybe it’s 11 p.m. like you can still do that with a social life or maybe it’s midnight if you’re really stretching it. But ideally it would be every single day you’re going to wake up at the same time and going to bed at the same time every day. But if you find that you are wanting that social life and it’s getting in the way of your sleep, then there are things you can do that when you wake up you can recover faster. So for example, like a cold shower.

or you can do like an Epsom salt bath or you can go to like the hot cold types of therapy. There’s biohacking devices if you’re somebody that wants to do that. But what you have to understand is bio the biohacking devices are good to supplement, you know, all the good healthy stuff you’re doing. But if again, if your bank account is in a surplus, you can sometimes get away with the social life of staying up later.

If you feel completely wiped the next day because you stayed up later than you should have, then that might be a sign that you should focus on other parts of your health to bring that up so you can get away with it once in a while. But if you feel like you can manage it and you’re going to wake up the same time, going to bed at the same time every day, then sometimes that can work out too.

Santiago Tacoronte (26:54.686)
What is one myth about sleeping that you wish it will disappear? Something that you say, gosh, this is not true.

Riley (27:06.67)
I’ve heard a lot of them. would say, you know, sleep is for the weak. I’ll sleep when I’m dead. you know, why would I sleep when I could get a bunch of stuff done? It’s a lot of it’s it’s at least for these high performer types, they, they want to remain really productive. So they again, see sleep as that liability. And so that’s the biggest myth, but I can change their minds pretty quickly when I’m visually make them feel better. It’s just people don’t know.

what they don’t know, right? You sometimes have to experience a new reality and then you’ll look back and see how far you’ve come.

Santiago Tacoronte (27:42.996)
Have you ever struggled with sleeping yourself?

Riley (27:45.494)
I did, yeah. Probably eight to 10 years ago, I was struggling with an autoimmune disease and sleep was a massive one. When I improved my sleep, a lot of those symptoms started to improve for me. But it was definitely something genetically that I didn’t have a good time with. And the healing process for me with all that was addressing all these parts of my body with lab testing. I did all the top 10 tips, dark bedroom environment, temperature.

making sure it’s cold, but it never worked for me. And so I went deeper and I went to the advanced things and I went to the lab testing, seeing there was molds in my body, I had parasites. The list went on, like there was a massive list of everything. And so once I removed those hidden stressors from our stress bucket, now my body had more bandwidth, just like a computer that’s full of viruses. Once you remove the viruses, you have more RAM, you have more bandwidth available on your computer. Now it runs a lot faster and more efficiently and my body was the same way.

Santiago Tacoronte (28:44.276)
Let’s try to predict the future, Reilly. Where do you think this science, I’ll call it science, the field of sleep optimization will be heading in the next five years?

Riley (28:56.45)
I think we’re going to be getting a lot into personalized medicine in combination with AI. You’re going to see AI, like for example, people’s biometrics from their Oro ring or whatever device they have using that in correlation with AI based on, know, what they like, what time they’re going to bed, what do they do for exercise? And I think they’re going to integrate people’s habits and daily schedule into some modality with that, I think.

and utilizing AI of giving people prompts at different times of the day when they should wake up, what time should they go to bed? But I think they’re also going to be able to measure more biomarkers like somebody’s blood sugar, somebody’s inflammation in the body. And to be able in the future, you take one prick sample and they can detect a form of disease coming up in the same way with sleep. I think there’s going to be a lot of interesting revolutions around their coming with sleep. And maybe it’s going to be integrated into somebody’s house with, you know,

virtual screens around people’s houses, giving them reminders of what they should and shouldn’t do.

Santiago Tacoronte (30:00.796)
sounds really cool. Let’s do a quick round of a shoot out of quick questions.

Riley (30:07.662)
sure.

Santiago Tacoronte (30:10.568)
or advice based on your experience. What do you do with nightmares bars? You wake up in the middle of the night, terrible nightmare. What do you do next?

Riley (30:19.116)
And yeah, you wake up with nightmares, you can’t get back to sleep. The best thing that you can do is listen to something called binaural beats. And cause when you wake up from nightmares, your heart’s probably racing. Your brain is in a really like gamma brainwave state. So you want to slow those brainwaves down. So there’s an app on your phone you can download. It’s called brain.fm and you wear headphones that will put your brain into, and there’s a sleep mode on there and that will put your brain into a more sleepy.

state. And so that’s a quick hack to kind of get back into those sleepy states if you find you’re awake.

Santiago Tacoronte (30:52.296)
Water. Water, it’s basically fundamental and everything works much better in our bodies when we drink water. But if you drink water before going to bed, it’s likely that you will wake up in the middle of the night because you need to do pee-pee. What do you do? Water or no water before sleeping?

Riley (31:11.406)
Right before sleep, I went through water. probably saved my last cup like three to four hours prior to bed. But what can be beneficial if you find you’re waking up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, having salt, like good salt, like Celtic salt, pink Himalayan salt, this can help retain your fluids. It’s known as a hormone called aldosterone. And it can help so you don’t wake up as much to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Because if you’re low on electrolytes and minerals and you’re waking up a lot,

that could be a sign that maybe you want some salt. So maybe you had like half a cup of warm water, put in some salt in there, maybe an hour or two before bedtime. That can be beneficial.

Santiago Tacoronte (31:47.89)
interesting. Jet lag. Stay awake, sleep a little bit, don’t sleep at all. How do you fight this?

Riley (31:56.288)
Yeah, good question. So you a couple days prior to leaving for your destination time zone You’re in your current time zone You want to start adapting to that destination time zone a couple days if you can and then when you arrive in your destination time zone You want to expose your eyes to sunlight like as soon as you wake up putting on those bullet blocking glasses In your destination time zone and just adapting to that as fast as possible But also doing things like grounding like walking in like swimming in a body of water

walking with your bare feet in sand, dirt, grass can also help. And then you can also utilize melatonin in your destination time zone. And even prior, you can imagine if you’re in your current time zone, start using melatonin as if you were going to sleep in the destination time zone. And that can also help as well. So whether you go to bed earlier, you go to bed later, that can also help.

Santiago Tacoronte (32:50.558)
The red zone for sleeping in hours. You… Yeah.

Riley (32:54.306)
between seven and nine hours is usually the sweet spot. Everybody’s different based on their chronotype. Sometimes people are a morning person like yourself. They like to go to bed at nine or 10 p.m. And then you have the night owls. And usually the night owls are about one, two, three hours later for bedtime than the morning larks.

Santiago Tacoronte (33:16.756)
For those struggling, Riley, to sleep, it’s a serious thing. If you don’t sleep well, or if you don’t sleep at all, I have seen people that is really miserable and that are really sick of not sleeping. How they can start with your platform, with you, how they can start with a consultant like you, how can they improve their sleep?

Riley (33:44.376)
Yeah, great question. mean, for what I have is a bunch of free resources available if people want to go to the sleepconsultant.com. On the of there, there’s top 10 sleep tips, things you can do. There’s questionnaires to figure out why you might not be sleeping and what exactly you can do about it. But the most important thing is to start with the basics first. Sleep is one of the biggest and easiest things to fix compared to doing a full new nutrition plan compared to going to the gym, lifting heavy weights.

A lot of that stuff can be uncomfortable, but with your sleep, you just need to change certain things once and the ROI you can see on the next days, weeks, months ahead can be massive, but always start with the lowest hanging fruit, simple things first, and then you can get advanced.

Santiago Tacoronte (34:26.772)
Riley, thank you so much for your time today. I’ve learned a lot. We have all learned a lot about sleeping. And you have just said about your website. anyone that wants to learn, which the first step probably, and to understand how they sleep and why they sleep. Any read that you recommend, any book?

Riley (34:47.956)
A book for sleep?

Santiago Tacoronte (34:50.404)
book to understand better sleep and and yeah.

Riley (34:56.066)
Yeah, the best one is by Matthew Walker and it’s called Why We Sleep. That’s one that I highly recommend. And he was also Matthew Walker, you can just YouTube him. He was on Joe Rogan and other podcasts too, but he brings a childlike wonder to sleep that will make you lot more interested in sleep too. So that’s one I highly recommend for any beginner.

Santiago Tacoronte (35:16.98)
Thank you so much, Riley. This was super interesting. It’s 7 p.m. where I am now and I’m excited to go to sleep. Thanks so much and hope to see you soon in the podcast.

Riley (35:29.954)
Thank you, Santiago. Talk soon.

 

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