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Is intuition just a gut feeling, or is it actually data-driven? 🤯 In this episode of ProductiviTree, Eric Sandosham challenges the idea that intuition is irrational. Instead, he explains how our instincts are shaped by hidden data patterns, much like artificial intelligence processes information.
We also dive into computational thinking and how blending structured problem-solving with human intuition leads to smarter, faster decisions. Whether you’re navigating business strategy, hiring, or daily productivity, this episode will change how you think about thinking! 💡
Key Takeaways:
✅ Intuition is NOT random—it’s based on years of collected data and experience
✅ How AI mimics human intuition with artificial neural networks
✅ The role of computational thinking in structuring better decisions
✅ Why businesses undervalue intuition in a world obsessed with data
✅ How to train your intuition to make faster, smarter choices
🎧 Listen now and discover how to sharpen your instincts while staying data-driven!
Santiago Tacoronte (00:01.265)
Eric, welcome to ProductiviTree
Eric Sandosham (00:03.928)
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Santiago Tacoronte (00:07.283)
So computational thinking, it sounds technical, sounds geeky. Can you break it down in everyday terms?
Eric Sandosham (00:19.982)
Sure, okay. think maybe it sounds geeky and I think it throws people off because of the word compute in there, or computational, and they then tend to associate it with computer science, right? And even in the title in your podcast suggested, or thinking like a computer, there are some aspects of it, yes, but actually it’s a little bit different from thinking about computers, right? Computers are quite mechanical, so this is actually a…
sort of human cognition skill and humans also compute, know, and we compute in different ways from computers sometimes. Now computational thinking can be, okay, if I look at Wikipedia, right, so the Wikipedia’s explanation is quite nice and short. It says that, it’s a thought process, right, how to formulate problems so their solutions can be represented as computational steps and algorithms.
may still sound a little bit abstract. Personally, I tend to think of computational thinking in the following ways. Now, if we look at the space of, problem solving, there are two halves to it. There is the problem framing part, and then there is the solution articulation part. Computational thinking actually sits in the solution articulation space. And it’s a way to work through a
Santiago Tacoronte (01:35.87)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Sandosham (01:46.742)
logical, efficient method to get solutions executed, as opposed to what am I looking at, what is the problem statement. Actually that’s not really the space of computational thinking, much more in terms of the solution design element to it, and it’s about decomposing a complex solution into reproducible computational steps.
Santiago Tacoronte (02:13.646)
You have written that Excel is one of the Excel, Microsoft Excel is one of the best tools to develop computational thinking. Why?
Eric Sandosham (02:18.05)
Yeah.
Why? Actually, Excel, I think when Excel, if you look at all the different tools out there, Excel has probably undergone the least change in terms of the fundamental structure, right? And then if you look at any executive, junior to senior, everyone sort of uses Excel and it speaks to the utility of it. On the surface, it seems like it’s so plain and simple. It’s just a canvas with grids, rows and columns.
But the brilliance of Excel is actually it forces you because of the rows and columns, it gives you or sometimes forces you to think in intermediate deconstructive steps. So if you had to sort of, you know, compute like employee value, customer value, or you want to figure out some kind of permutations or classification of your data,
Logically, think of, let’s make some intermediate variables. You open either new columns or rows. Most people use it as columns. And then you write some simple formulas to clean up the data, to concatenate it. And then as you make more columns, you recombine some of these data into something much more complex. And even if you look at the embedded formula that’s most used in Excel, the if-then statements,
The if-then statements are actually very hierarchical and very linear. And that is one of the key elements of computational thinking, right? To be able to now break it down into a hierarchical sequence and then to execute each of those steps in a way in a very linear manner, right? So that open canvas style of Excel, in fact, sort of gets you into that frame of mind, how do I put things in buckets and in places?
Eric Sandosham (04:13.164)
so that I can see how they relate to each other.
Santiago Tacoronte (04:17.651)
You’ve been working in business analytics for decades. When did you notice that computational thinking was an underrated skill? When did you say, hmm, this thing is something that everybody should have as a skill?
Eric Sandosham (04:26.261)
it.
Eric Sandosham (04:33.134)
If it comes back to Excel, so a little bit myself, my background is actually an abstract mathematician. That was my bachelor. And when I mean abstract mathematics, it’s really without computation. It’s logic, oriented, right? I specialize in abstract algebra, in fact. And I started using Excel or became familiar with it actually when I first started work in the 90s.
I think there was, at that point, Excel was already gaining traction. But when I saw how people used it, I realised, I was quite shocked. I worked in a bank and thinking everyone’s computationally efficient. And I was quite shocked at how they were using Excel. They were actually calculating outside of the solution using calculators and then punching in the data or the results into Excel, using Excel like a ledger or a record keeper.
rather than exploiting the value of Excel to break down or to recompute information and to link information up. And that’s when I realized, my gosh, people are not using the tool that has all these abilities in it. And why do they not see it? Why do they still come back to calculating by hand, calculators, and then punching it as record keeping? Yeah, so that fascinated me.
Santiago Tacoronte (05:52.874)
Let’s break down computational thinking. You speak about decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction and algorithmic thinking. Can you explain each one of them in layman terms?
Eric Sandosham (06:09.794)
Okay, big words, decomposition. decomposition in some sense, suppose another familiar word may be deconstructing, but decomposing in a, speaking, is actually breaking down into basic, reusable or almost standardized blocks, right? And if you think about blocks, I mean, so if you think in the world of the physical analogy,
Lego is a naturally decomposed sort of play thing because each block is the actual element and you build it up, right? So when you think of building a sort of a whatever the outcome you want to build it in Lego, you have to think in terms of the Lego bricks, which is that decomposed blocks. If you think about it in the world of software or coding, there are codes that
sort of copy and paste, right? For go to GitHub and copy paste and all that. Those codes are sort of reusable and they come as chunks of scripts that can be inserted and reused in different places. So that would be a way to think about decomposition into those individual elements. Now pattern recognition is about seeing things that repeat, okay?
And why are you looking at pattern recognition? Because ultimately when you want to compute, you want to be able to exploit the pattern so that it can iterate and it can repeat itself systematically. So you’re looking for patterns that repeat, not one-off, and the patterns in some sense ideally can be broken into linear steps to be replicated.
Think of the third term abstraction, again another big fancy full word, but ultimately it’s about zooming in on key attributes of, let’s say in this case, say a complex solution here trying to use computational thinking to improve it or to try to understand it. The abstraction is about trying to zoom in on key attributes and taking out all the stuff that’s just…
Eric Sandosham (08:21.688)
what we will call noise. it’s the information signal versus noise. You’re just zooming in on things that contain useful information signals, and the rest of it is not important. So as a simple example in a layman’s term, when you meet someone and you meet a new acquaintance or a new friend, and let’s say your spouse asks you, you had a great time meeting this new person, can you describe this person to me?
you would probably talk about maybe the hair, the facial features, whether the person had short hair, long hair, a beard or not, the colour of his eyes. You may not talk about the length of his shirt or his trousers or what belt he was wearing, unless it was particularly useful, right? So the rest of it is noise in the way that doesn’t really mean anything about the person. could.
But we tend to now distill this into sort key essence. And so that’s the idea of abstraction. We can get it wrong sometimes. We sometimes think it’s noise, but actually it is information signal. The last one on algorithmic thinking, it’s about iterative executionable instructions. We don’t have to think about it like a computer, because you can think in the world of operations or manufacturing in the past when it was not automated and you rely on manual…
human hands to get things done. They would have these things like SOPs, call it, right? You know, your procedural operating procedures. And in those operating procedures, you actually have those sequence, right? Do A to B to C, make sure it’s fine. And then you can repeat the process again, rinse and repeat. That is a way of sort of breaking this out into algorithmic thinking.
Santiago Tacoronte (10:12.361)
That’s brilliant, Eric. But I have some news for you. The people that listen, the thousands of people that listen to this podcast are not interested in abstract mathematics. So how can computational thinking and these four blocks from decomposition to algorithm thinking make you more productive?
Eric Sandosham (10:16.032)
OK.
Eric Sandosham (10:21.326)
Yes.
Eric Sandosham (10:28.471)
Yep.
Eric Sandosham (10:34.094)
Okay, so why… Okay, I mean this term computational thinking, think not everyone may have heard of it and people may have encountered it but may not have labeled it as such, right? Ultimately what we’re trying to do with computational thinking is efficiency, right? Things that can… you can zoom in quickly, you can see it, you can repeat it, you can execute it. For a lay person, for example…
why is computational thinking important has these few elements. So one, it gets into a solutioning design faster because you are able to, in the idea of abstraction, you are able to distill the key attributes and not get overwhelmed or get sidetracked by the noise. Two, the computational thinking, because of the decompositional and sort of algorithmic process, allows you
to troubleshoot or you make your solution auditable, right? And we know solutions are not always perfect. And when you make them sequential or structured, you can go back and figure out where in the solution things did not work out in the way that you thought they would, right? So the ability to troubleshoot or even to hold yourself accountable to an audit becomes useful. And then lastly,
With computational thinking, you’re making things reusable. Because once you can articulate it in that manner, you can transfer that knowledge, transfer that solution to someone else, put it into instructions, and they can execute with a high level of fidelity and replication.
Santiago Tacoronte (12:11.785)
When you say solution, I’m immediately going to the more IT-derived solution stuff Can you apply these methods to build your daily agenda, your daily habits, your email, your inbox management? How can you do this for very simple day tasks and improve your process, your flow with computational thinking?
Eric Sandosham (12:18.562)
Like application, you’re thinking application. Okay.
Eric Sandosham (12:28.896)
Okay. Yeah.
Eric Sandosham (12:36.6)
Yes.
Eric Sandosham (12:40.142)
Okay, perfect question. In fact, you raised this thing email, right? So I was thinking about in your daily life, how would you apply it or where do people sometimes not do it correctly? I think email is a classic one, right? I mean, if you’re deep in the corporate world and all that, most people, and particularly when people get more and more senior, their email box tend to be overwhelmed. I remember when I was working in the bank as a senior.
I would get about 200 emails a day. Just one day. And the work I do was data. So imagine many of these emails had attachments with data to look at, and it was just not possible to go through 200 emails a day. The way people tend to think about emails is as and when it comes in, I respond to it quickly. There’s a philosophy to that, right? Just in time, sort of. Just get it off your desk and then quickly get back to your work.
Some people use email like we use YouTube. It’s a distraction. They’re doing a little bit of work and they feel a little bit tired. And let’s go to the email box and look at what new emails have come in. And then sometimes they get carried away and never come back to the work. If we think about email, it’s a real time sucking process to a day. Now, if you think about computational thinking, we can say, look,
We know, I mean there’s enough literature, know multitasking actually is not particularly productive. And the human mind actually doesn’t truly multitask. We actually in some cases of the world need to get into deep thinking and into a flow. So being able to block the time out. So for example, say look will spend every 30 minutes, I will spend 10 minutes on email. Let’s say I cannot block it and only do emails in the morning. That’s fine. So every 30 minutes of work I will stop.
Santiago Tacoronte (14:32.252)
Okay.
Eric Sandosham (14:32.438)
I will spend 10 minutes of work on email. So if you chunk it out in sort of composable ways, decomposable ways, that time bounds it. And then when you look at that email, you can already set up even simple computational thinking rules. You can say, look, let’s do an internal prioritization. And you can do it with most email, know, Outlook and most email application. You can set your internal rules and say anything that is two is a high priority. Anything that is CC is a secondary priority.
Anything that’s 2 with an attachment maybe is even a higher priority. Anything that’s 2 and then from a certain group of people is even higher priority. And when you create that and you rank order that kind of your inbox, then you get the most important stuff done. If you’re cc’d and you missed out and you didn’t read, for example, because you’re not expected to reply, there’s no real penalty.
You may be a little bit embarrassed when you go into a meeting and say, yeah, I didn’t say sorry, I copied you but I didn’t read it, that’s fine. But if you didn’t reply to a tool, particularly there’s an attachment which means there’s much more information to download, then that can be quite significant to have not replied. So I think we’re just setting that sort of simple rules. as human beings, we can think of the rules quite intuitively and logically. Now putting that into a step.
as rules into your email application would be a form of computational thinking.
Santiago Tacoronte (15:58.174)
That’s brilliant. Let’s talk about the keyword of the decade. AI. So AI has a big promise, a little bit of hype also. And it’s in fact making automation or is automating certain things and making our life easier. That’s for sure. But you still argue that we need computational thinking. Why Eric? Why can’t we just ask
Eric Sandosham (16:06.541)
You either love it or you hate it. It’s a bad word for some people.
Santiago Tacoronte (16:28.079)
AI what we want or what we need.
Eric Sandosham (16:30.894)
Okay, so maybe I’ll start with a hypothetical future state. We don’t know how AI is going to pan out, right? Everyone’s talking about, you know, sentient AI and all of that. Who knows? It may or may not come, right? But ultimately, I think the golden grill that everyone is trying to go for is an AI that looks and feels and have the intelligence of at least a human being, right? And you can interact it in a
in a very human-like manner. Let’s say that some future state that we achieve, even if AI looks and feels and behaves like us in human terms, human to human, we still struggle to communicate. So imagine anyone who’s ever had people reporting to them and giving instructions, which in your mind was absolutely clear. And then when they come back with the results, it’s not what you thought. And you say, how did you get it wrong? I mean, it was so obvious, right?
And it was not that they were cutting corners or lazy, they just understood it in a slightly different manner. And so human to human, we never even truly get communication perfectly right. We attempt to get it to near 90%, I think that’s good, but it’s never 100%. So imagine if the AI was like a human being, you would still have to be able to communicate in very precise terms, repeatable.
reproducible terms for the AI to be able to do what you want like a regular human being and you delegate the work and they come back to you with the result. So this idea of AI being super intelligent at some point sort of removes the need for us to have computational thinking, I don’t think so. Maybe less so, but not entirely so. But if we look at the state of AI today,
The way computational thinking, again computational thinking, I want to be very clear, it’s not about computer science and not about coding, it’s about the structure, right? It’s a cognitive process. You can think about the state of current AI with prom engineering, right? And you see DeepSeq had just come out from the Chinese, and we’ve got various different AI solutions from everyone. And what people love to do, let’s try to do prom engineering and see whether we can make the AI break down.
Eric Sandosham (18:48.8)
And they’re so happy with that, right? wow, I brought it to his knees. And that from engineering is a form of computational thinking, because you’re trying to see whether the computer can block the back door and, know, and it’s algorithmic because you’re trying to do it over and over again. Is it repeatable and reproducible? So from engineering is a form of high level coding because the human AI interface continues to evolve.
Santiago Tacoronte (18:48.989)
Hmm.
Eric Sandosham (19:16.206)
Maybe it may not be prompt engineering in words, maybe it becomes speech. And if you say, well, maybe I put a microchip in my head, it becomes brainwaves and thoughts, but I will still have to structure it in a specific manner for the other recipient to able to take it on and act on it. So I don’t see computational thinking as a principle, those four elements, know, going away, but the form of it, today we talk about computational thinking in terms like coding, right? That actual executional method
may evolve to match the human AI interface.
Santiago Tacoronte (19:49.885)
Hmm.
see many business tools nowadays are completely hiding the computational part from it and making it almost conversational and super simple. You just need to message the AI and it will come back with the result. Is it a good thing that we’re hiding everything, that we’re creating a black box and hiding everything that happens behind the prompt? Or is it a bad thing?
Eric Sandosham (19:59.586)
Okay.
Eric Sandosham (20:19.886)
Okay, so good and bad. That’s a loaded word. Is it a good thing? The is no, it’s not a good thing. Is it a desired thing? Yes. It’s like, do you want to eat highly processed food, sweet sugary stuff, drink too much Coke and drink too much coffee? answer is yes, we want to. But is it a good thing? Not necessarily. And the vendors are sort of feeding into
the desire of human workers for taking, I suppose, I hate to use that word, taking shortcuts. And again, because it’s not entirely the fault of the human being. mean, as all living creatures, we have to use energy, expand energy to get work done. And so it is in our interest as living things to be energy efficient. That’s a nice way to say, some people are lazy, but we should be energy efficient.
People tend to now distinguish what they feel is important, what’s less important, and the non-important stuff, I just want to get an outcome and output. I don’t really need to know all the working details as long as I can trust that output. I just want to get my job done. So it’s not really the fault of the human worker to say, get something, hide it, hide that complexity for me. But when we think like that and say, everything is hidden, two things happen. So one, when you hide a lot of these op-
Santiago Tacoronte (21:28.243)
Hmm.
Eric Sandosham (21:43.764)
of computational complexity or operating complexity in a solution, you also lose flexibility. Because now you only can interact and use that solution in very structured ways, because that’s how they’ve sort of set it up for you, right? They’ve black box it and because you’re unfamiliar how it works, you will tend to limit your interaction in very predefined ways because you don’t know where the boundaries are.
and you’re uncomfortable if I deviate from there, maybe the output or outcome is not what I want. And that in itself then sort of weakens our ability of thinking and asking, but particularly if you think about the world of digital data, data is noisy and it can be biased, it can be incorrect, invalid, not representative and all of this. And if we disassociate too much,
Santiago Tacoronte (22:11.785)
Absolutely.
Eric Sandosham (22:39.886)
and don’t see how that information gets processed or gets worked on, we then may take on false information or incorrect information and then use it for work. And today, many people, I would argue, have lost a little bit of their smell test. When they look at a piece of information, they don’t see what’s wrong with it. And of course, the boss says, look, it’s wrong. They say, yeah, I missed it. Actually, they didn’t miss it. They didn’t see it at all.
And in the past when people were much more hands-on with it, they could actually see that, there’s something wrong with how this data is coming in. Something has gone wrong with the process or the upstream processes and all of that. So I feel, having seen it, people have lost a little bit of that smell test.
Santiago Tacoronte (23:30.153)
By now we know that computational thinking is more about problem solving than becoming a computer. You have led large analytics teams. You have hired a lot of smart people. What is the biggest mistake companies make when hiring for problem solving roles?
Eric Sandosham (23:40.065)
Yes.
Eric Sandosham (23:53.116)
okay.
I feel… Okay, so I come back to this thing I mentioned earlier on in the conversation about think about the world of problem solving. There are these two classes, the problem framing piece and the solution articulation piece. We tend to hire people for solutioning skills.
Santiago Tacoronte (24:16.285)
Hmm
Eric Sandosham (24:16.658)
in the data analytics, data science practice. So have you built a machine learning algorithm? Have you had exposure doing neural networks, those sort of things? But we under-emphasize on the problem framing part. So the solution design and solution articulation corresponds to a computational thinking. And you can test for that whether a person able to take a complex problem, you know, decom…
and all of it great and that’s what hackathons do essentially, right? But we put too much weight, feel, sometimes on this side because solution articulation presupposes that you’ve already understood the nature of the problem. And now of course you’re just trying to find a better, more efficient, more optimized way to solve it. But too often in my experience, actually we have not understood the nature of the problem. We’ve understood a little bit of it superficially and we think that’s all until we rush
Santiago Tacoronte (25:08.489)
Thanks.
Eric Sandosham (25:12.59)
towards solutioning because the data scientists are predisposed to that skills and then they find that, it’s not complete, it’s sometimes irrelevant and then the business people get upset, they throw it back. And so a little bit of that weightage, I wish people could change it to focus a little bit more on the cognitive talents and skills on the problem framing side.
Santiago Tacoronte (25:34.057)
Eric, for people that want to improve their comp- people that is listening this podcast episode and thinking, hmm, this sounds interesting, I want to improve my computational thinking today, what is the fastest way to start?
Eric Sandosham (25:49.006)
It’s a bit of a mindset shift because if people tend to take… I mean, if you look at the thing, most people want to jump to conclusions very quickly, and it doesn’t mean the conclusions are necessarily wrong, but we want to sort of shortcut it and skip the steps. To be able to take something and break it into steps, decompose it, right? And say whether it’s repeatable, is there a way to even make it faster and more efficient?
a bit unnatural for most people. And I think one is of course I would encourage people to read because I think again the topic in itself feels a little bit abstract, elusive. The more they read and they read with the case studies and all that, I think it will start to register in their minds, actually it’s not about computers, actually it’s just a way to think, right? And of course then they can start putting to use some of this from a habit.
perspective, right? The two things I would say they can start to strengthen in the four components that make up say computational thinking, right? The two things that they can start to focus on would be decomposing and abstraction. And why? So if we can think of big complex things in terms of smaller sort of identical blocks or components allows us to see the world
sort of in terms of reproducible parts and then you can start to recognize, this also has similarity here, that also is similar because the decomposed elements are the same. It’s just that when you build them up, you can make different pieces with it, right? And that, once you understand those kinds of things, the ability to transfer knowledge and process and working behaviors tend to be a bit easier because you recognize similarities once you have that decomposing state of mind. The other
Santiago Tacoronte (27:22.569)
you
Eric Sandosham (27:46.51)
It is on attraction. So attraction basically in a simple term, how do I separate information signal from noise? if someone and you have met colleagues or if you’ve had that subordinates working with you and you ask them describe, you know, come to me with a problem, please describe it and you have some that will go round and round and round and they never get to the end. Whereas others would hit the nail on the head in that one single sentence. That ability to train yourself and say what is the essence here?
what matters and the rest of it maybe is just context or just noise becomes important because again our minds are not trained to just sometimes just look at the key essence that we take everything in all the time.
Santiago Tacoronte (28:32.713)
This question has been there for years and I think it’s already embedded in some educational programs and the so-called STEM educations. Should non-technical professionals learn how to code or the basics of coding in order to acquire some of these, you know, decomposition, algorithmic, iterative thinking skills?
Eric Sandosham (28:57.966)
100 % yes. Okay, this speaking from a person, I put a caveat, speaking from a person who hated coding. So I’m not speaking from the point that, oh, I’m a computer scientist, I love computers and all that. My first exposure to computer was when I started work. Again, I was an abstract algebraist, so I didn’t need computers. I don’t even have a calculator when I was studying. Everything was just pure theory.
And when I took a little bit of coding classes in high school and I hated it because it’s just too technical and I can’t seem to get it right. And frankly, maybe it wasn’t so well taught. So I sort of lost interest in it. I picked up coding because of the nature of my work later in data analytics that I forced myself to then pick it up. What has dawned to me, if I look back, if we approach coding.
not as a STEM subject because it sits under that space, right? And so there people who say, I’m not STEM trained or I don’t like STEM topics, so it turns them off. Think of coding really as a language. Today, why would you learn any language? I say we’re speaking in English is because I need to communicate with my fellow human beings in a digitalized world and increasingly so, we would need to communicate with computers.
whether you like it or not, that’s a fact. And so we have to learn a little bit of how the computer understands the language that could be as an intermediary for the interaction. So if we approach coding as language, I think people may appreciate it more because it is language, it has syntax, it has grammar, it has to be written in specific way just as you would write English or any other language. And I think learning coding is just a…
other way to expand the language toolbox now with another entity that you are going to interact with anyway and I think that maybe helps to remove a little bit of that mental barrier to the task.
Santiago Tacoronte (31:04.169)
How do we blend the uniqueness of humanity? I’m talking about intuition. This sixth sense that many humans have with computational thinking, because let’s face it, Eric, there is something unique in humans. And sometimes you see someone that says like, my God, how could he, you can call it heuristics, right? Or whatever you want, but how this
Eric Sandosham (31:14.926)
Okay.
Eric Sandosham (31:23.922)
yes!
Eric Sandosham (31:31.703)
Mm-hmm.
Santiago Tacoronte (31:32.531)
guy so quickly process this information, how he came with this strategy, that is how he jumped into this business idea, even though computation I thinking he was saying, hmm, it might not be a great idea. So how do we blend these two things?
Eric Sandosham (31:37.688)
Correct.
Eric Sandosham (31:44.568)
Maybe not, yeah. Yeah, okay. So the first thing I would say is, so people use this term intuition. I feel in a very negative way today, given the rise of data and digital, we use negatively, right? And we say this gut instinct, gut feeling, like it’s a bad thing to do. For me, intuition is data-driven.
Santiago Tacoronte (31:59.625)
Hmm.
Eric Sandosham (32:13.386)
It is data-driven. The analogy perhaps, a way to understand how intuition works. I think we’re all familiar now with the nature of AI and the underlying technique they call artificial neural networks. In case the readers may not be familiar, what it does is this, talk about say open AI, have trillions of parameters or billions of parameters. What are these parameters? These parameters are sort of just weights assigned to different
small decomposed information signals, and these small little pieces of information signals either turn on, turn off, turn on, turn off, depending on the context. So each of them carries certain preference to turn on and off, and obviously if I have a billion or a trillion parameters to turn on, turn off, I have more flexibility to shape different kinds of outputs. So it’s a very simple way to understand it. Intuition works pretty much like that, because…
The whole artificial neural network in some sense is, you know, thought through or modeled after the human brain, not precisely, but elements of that. And the human brain works exactly like electrical signals. It turns on, turn off, turn off, turn off, right? And with small decomposed information signals. So intuition over time is when you’re repeatedly exposed to a scenario, you learn to turn it on when you see it again, or you learn to turn it off when, you know, depending whether on and off works positively.
And intuition comes, it doesn’t arise from nothing, intuition comes because of repeated exposure. People who have good intuition, because they’ve lived those experiences, they’ve lived those lives, they’re repeatedly exposed. So it’s exactly how we are training the large language models. And if we accept that, then we have to accept intuition is also valid, right? And just like the large language models, things sometimes go out of whack and hallucinates, the signal turns on when it’s not supposed to.
just as well human beings, sometimes the intuition is wrong. But the intuition was derived from repeated exposure. Now, when I think about now this New World Data-Driven way of working, Daniel Kahneman, the very famous, who passed recently, a Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman on The Economist, right? And he had a book that he talked about thinking fast and slow, and then he introduced this idea of system one, system two thinking.
Santiago Tacoronte (34:33.961)
Thank
Eric Sandosham (34:36.438)
In a way, intuition is system one thinking because it’s already hard-coded. Whereas computational thinking in many ways is system two to slow down and reconsider. Now, you need both. I mean, if you had no intuition or no system one ability, you have no reactive speed. And there are many times we have to be able to react instantaneously to situations that evolve around us. So we do need that.
Santiago Tacoronte (35:04.36)
Sure.
Eric Sandosham (35:05.806)
But if we say that some of it where the impact or the outcome can be quite significant and we are not entirely sure or even we think we are sure but the outcome is still significant, yes, then let’s slow it down a little bit. I know my gut tells me this. Fine. Now let’s take a breath. Let’s slow it down and see if I did a computational thinking approach. Do I also come to the same conclusion? If I do, great. If I don’t, then why don’t? Doesn’t mean one is right or the other is not. But where is that difference arising?
And I think it can be useful as a complement rather than a replacement to intuition.
Santiago Tacoronte (35:42.825)
Rapid fire questions. Answer in less than 30 seconds. One book or resource to master computational thinking.
Eric Sandosham (35:46.318)
Wow, okay.
Eric Sandosham (35:52.798)
Okay, actually there’s so many books right, but I think the one everyone will probably relate to will be this book called Algorithms to Live By. I think it’s probably one of the most cited books. It’s non-technical in a sense because it’s written for access to the layman. I think that probably would be a good way to enter the topic.
Santiago Tacoronte (36:12.945)
Excel or Python? If you had to pick just one for professionals, which one?
Eric Sandosham (36:17.006)
Excel.
Santiago Tacoronte (36:22.161)
What’s one everyday task that people do inefficiently because they don’t think computationally?
Eric Sandosham (36:31.15)
Email management. So we talked about that.
Santiago Tacoronte (36:35.677)
What is the biggest misconception about data-driven decision-making?
Eric Sandosham (36:40.782)
Okay, so that decisions are made by having the word data-driven decision-making, it presupposes that decisions are made without data. And that’s not true. All decisions are made with data. It’s just whether they are the right data or not.
Santiago Tacoronte (36:58.886)
What is a common but stupid measurement companies rely on?
Eric Sandosham (37:05.358)
Okay, I think you’re referring to one of the other articles I was writing. Okay, I mean there are many sort of silly sort of measurements and I use the term stupid maybe just to provoke people’s emotions but stupid have many many definitions of stupid right so whether it’s sort of influence or is usable for decision making.
Santiago Tacoronte (37:11.207)
Yep, we’re going there, slowly going there.
Eric Sandosham (37:34.35)
whether it even represents the thing that you are trying to measure, is it calibrated. So these are the sort of three things I will look at. If it doesn’t possess these three attributes, to me, a measurement is stupid.
Santiago Tacoronte (37:50.92)
If you would need to give advice to people, before you said that you need to change your mindset, you need a bit of a mind shift if you wanna be more computational in your life, what is one habit, one simple habit that you will recommend people to start doing today?
Eric Sandosham (38:11.022)
I think I would train to look at things in a decomposing manner. Because in some sense you can think about it as slowing down, stopping and smelling the flowers as they say. And so you notice the details rather than just take it in as a whole picture. Pay attention to how things are decomposable.
and they are made of maybe similar stuff, similar elements, particularly even software, you look at say even the software interaction interface, actually they all have very much similar decomposable units, and they are sort of just reassembled differently.
Santiago Tacoronte (38:53.96)
Yeah, I think I’m going to try this. I love cooking. I do cook a lot. And I think a lot of opportunities in cooking for decomposing and looking at things from a decomposed and modular perspective, perhaps.
Eric Sandosham (38:56.078)
Eric Sandosham (39:09.358)
Yes, right. Yeah, so even the ingredients today, unfortunately, when we look at ingredients and cooking, they are all sort of already aggregated because you buy it off someone that’s sort of put it together for you, right? Yeah.
Santiago Tacoronte (39:21.809)
Eric, how can people get in touch with you and avail your services?
Eric Sandosham (39:25.664)
LinkedIn would be the best way. I I write a sort of weekly article on things that annoy me in the practice of data analytics, data science. If they look me up, my name is quite unique in LinkedIn and I have a medium account under the same name. I also have a corporate website, so I run a, together with my partner, we started a consulting practice in data science.
for the last 12 odd years and that’s called Red and White Consulting and you can look at some also on the website here.
Santiago Tacoronte (40:01.489)
Eric, thank you so much for your time. It has been an episode different in the context itself of your way of thinking and how you look at productivity from almost completely different and very abstract point of view. But I love how you managed to decompose it into small parts. So it’s very digestible. Thank you so much for being with us today, Eric.
Eric Sandosham (40:25.038)
Thank you.
Eric Sandosham (40:30.958)
Thank you very much for the opportunity.
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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