Edward Dziuk

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

You can’t think your way into change.

The mind doesn’t lead the body — the body leads the mind.

Read: https://t.co/OAThPJmfvJ)

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

@BrianB_83 @MattWalshBlog That’s exactly the problem. They did everything they were told to do. A good education teaches people how to think when the world changes. A bad one teaches them to expect the world to reward compliance.

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

@AmbroseBacchus @MattWalshBlog Inflation, weak job markets, and economic headwinds are real. So is human ingenuity. If hardship alone determined outcomes, no generation would ever have prospered.

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

@Zombielicorice @MattWalshBlog In the 1960s, an elderly math teacher summed it up beautifully: “My children don’t need my wealth. My estate will buy a lot of soap for the needy.”

The assumption that every dollar belongs to the next generation is hardly universal.

[J Hbert @Hbert1J]

@ed_dziuk @MattWalshBlog Exactly! I might have 4 more decades to live and need nursing care. And Matt wants me to just hand it over now? That is crazy.

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

@jennaeel @MattWalshBlog I’m sorry to hear that. Sometimes all you can do is read ’em and weep. The only life we ever really get to manage is our own.

[Cary Kelly @CaryKelly11]

A woman asked me the difference between prime and choice.

I said it's the difference between 94 and 87 octane.

Both will fill your tank but one costs more and offers a premium experience.

She understood instantly.

Is it worth it to you?

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

@AfterTheRocket @MattWalshBlog You’re treating inheritance as a moral scorecard.

It isn’t.

The size of an estate tells me almost nothing about the quality of the parenting that preceded it.

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

So do you want a medal or a chest to put it on?

You’re assuming money is evidence of care.

Sometimes it’s evidence of love.

Sometimes it’s evidence of guilt.

Sometimes it’s evidence of convenience.

And sometimes it’s an attempt to compensate for years of absent parenting.

They’re not the same thing.

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

@MattWalshBlog Matt, I certainly am struggling with your mentality. You’re treating wealth transfer as a proxy for family commitment.

It isn’t.

Some parents leave millions and fail their children. Others leave very little and raise capable, productive adults.

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

I think you’re onto something, but there may be a confound hiding inside much of the literature.

The strongest objection to the ketone argument is that if ketones were simply superior brain fuel, we should see large and consistent cognitive advantages in healthy adults. We generally don’t. That’s a fair criticism.

What I’m less convinced about is the baseline being used for comparison.

Many “healthy” Western adults are not metabolically healthy in the sense our ancestors would have recognized. Subclinical insulin resistance is common. Chronic inflammation is common. Frequent consumption of refined carbohydrates is common. If those conditions impair cerebral glucose metabolism even modestly, then fasting is not being compared against an optimally functioning glucose-fed brain. It’s being compared against a compromised one.

That distinction matters.

The more interesting question may not be whether ketones are better fuel than glucose. It may be whether ketones provide an advantage when glucose metabolism is impaired.

If that is true, then averaging metabolically healthy and metabolically impaired individuals into the same study population could dilute the very signal we’re trying to measure. A benefit that is large in one subgroup can disappear in the average.

To be clear, this doesn’t rescue the strongest version of the claim. It doesn’t prove that the fasted brain is inherently superior or that ketones are universally better fuel. The human evidence isn’t there.

What it does suggest is that the relationship between fasting and cognition may be more dependent on metabolic health than many discussions acknowledge.

The mechanistic case is strong. The animal data are compelling. The human clinical evidence is suggestive but not yet conclusive.

That leaves me with a narrower conclusion: ketones may be particularly valuable for brains that are struggling to use glucose efficiently. Whether they are superior fuel for healthy brains remains an open question.

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

@romanhelmetguy The disturbing part is that if you gave this presentation at TED, half the audience would nod thoughtfully and the other half would ask for the investment deck.

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

@romanhelmetguy At last, a startup with realistic milestones.

Year 1: Hot pigs.
Year 10: Very hot pigs.
Year 20: Dragons.

Finally, a business plan I can understand.

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

One doesn’t need thirty years of research to see a similar problem in higher education.

The issue isn’t education. The issue is who gets to define it.

Accreditation bodies and professional organizations have spent decades equating competence with classroom hours. In accounting, the 150-hour CPA requirement became a perfect example. Students paid for an extra year of education. Universities collected an extra year of tuition. Employers still had to teach new hires how to do the job.

I learned accounting in college. I learned to be an accountant after college.

Those are not the same thing.

When states reduce CPA education requirements from 150 hours back to 120, they are quietly acknowledging a question that should have been asked years ago:

Did the additional 30 hours produce better accountants, or did they primarily produce additional revenue for institutions?

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

This reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

We often mistake certainty for competence because, from a distance, they look remarkably similar.

They’re not.

Incompetence often produces certainty because the person cannot see what they’ve missed. The world appears simple because they lack the experience to see its complexity.

Competence frequently produces caution. Not because the person knows less, but because they’ve spent years discovering exceptions, edge cases, and things they once believed that turned out not to be true.

Then something interesting happens.

At the highest levels of competence, certainty sometimes returns. Not certainty about everything. Certainty about a few things that have survived repeated contact with reality.

The problem Altman describes isn’t expertise. It’s identity.

The moment a belief becomes part of who we are, evidence becomes a threat rather than a teacher.

Reality is perfectly willing to prove us wrong. The question is whether we’re willing to be corrected.

The strongest beliefs I hold today are not the ones I’ve defended most fiercely. They’re the ones that survived the most collisions with reality.

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

@ihtesham2005 For once, I’m not challenging the premise. I think Ihtesham is pointing at a real problem. Complex systems have a habit of defeating confident predictions, especially when we assume we know what would have happened otherwise.

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

The invitation to chat hit my inbox before the chat was ready. That sentence contains everything wrong with how many companies do customer service.

I recently experienced two companies operating in completely different centuries.

Yesterday, my knee woke me at 4:00 AM with an urgent request for a brace. I didn't argue. At that hour, a knee gets what a knee wants.

Using a search tool, I found Copper Star Home Medical Supplies. I left a question in the website chatbot and went back to bed.

The company was closed. The business wasn't.

Around 9:00 AM I received a text. By 9:30 AM I had enough information to order. The entire transaction—from problem to purchase—happened while the building was dark and the doors were locked.

That's worth noticing.

Today, I received an email from another company confirming an automatic shipment I didn't order. The email invited me to chat if I had questions.

I clicked the link. The system said it would help at 6:00 AM. It was 5:45 AM.

The invitation to chat had arrived before the invitation to chat became possible.

I waited until 6:00, then explained I wanted the shipment stopped.

The representative asked me to verify my account information.

I explained they already had enough information to identify my order. They had sent me the confirmation email.

The representative asked me to verify information. I explained this again.

The representative asked me to verify information.

We exchanged several more messages. We didn't reach an agreement.

Customers aren't interested in your procedures. They're interested in solving their problem. When that happens, friction disappears.

Copper Star never asked me to understand how their business worked. I had a problem. They helped me move toward solving it.

The other company seemed deeply committed to helping me understand theirs. Every message reinforced that their system mattered more than my outcome.

This is how most businesses create friction.

Customers want outcomes. Companies give explanations. Customers want answers. Companies give procedures. Customers want progress. Companies give policies.

Each moment asks the customer to expend a little more effort. Most won't complain.

They just leave.

When a business makes it difficult to buy, it doesn't see the ninety people who arrived ready to make a purchase, then left due to delay, confusion, or effort. They can't measure the loss they can't see.

Most businesses are solving the wrong problem. They spend resources attracting more visitors while overlooking the effort required to actually do business with them. They count inquiries. They don't count departures.

Most customers don't leave because they decided not to buy. They leave because they decided not to wait.

The real competitor isn't another company. It's the effort required to do business with you.

I complimented Brynley on the experience. She asked if I would leave a Google review.

I said I would and hoped the request was automated.

She smiled and said it was.

Nobody had to remember to follow up. Nobody had to create a note. The business was designed so routine interactions didn't depend on anyone remembering what to do next.

That's the difference between a business run by systems and a business run by hope.

I told her: "What a pleasure to do business with someone from the 21st century."

I wasn't complimenting her technology. I was complimenting her thoughtfulness.

One company was closed and available.

The other was open and unavailable.

How many customers are encountering the second version of your business right now? And how many will you never see because they decided the effort wasn't worth it?

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

A friend once told me that if we don’t attend to our attention, we have no idea where we’re headed.

At first I thought he was talking about concentration.

Years later I think he was talking about life.

Most people assume they choose their destination directly. A career. A business. A marriage. A reputation.

I’m no longer sure that’s how it works.

A person who spends ten years paying attention to grievances becomes different from a person who spends ten years paying attention to opportunities.

A person who pays attention to problems sees a world full of problems. A person who pays attention to solutions sees a world full of possibilities.

Neither made a conscious decision to become that person.

They simply noticed different things, day after day, until the habit became a lens.

William James wrote that attention is a moral act.

That sentence bothered me for years.

Morality seems like it should begin with what we do.

But perhaps it begins earlier.

Perhaps it begins with what we choose to notice.

The destination may be visible long before the traveler recognizes it.

If someone wanted to know where I will be in five years, they might learn more by watching what captures my attention than by listening to my plans.

What have you been paying attention to lately?

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

I think the discussion may be focused on the wrong scarcity.

Information isn’t scarce anymore. Access isn’t scarce anymore. AI is rapidly making expertise more accessible than at any point in history.

What remains scarce is the ability to stimulate people to think beyond the problems immediately in front of them.

Stanford’s greatest contribution may not have been educating Sergey Brin. It may have been creating an environment that challenged capable people to take on bigger questions.

The next century may not belong to institutions that concentrate brilliant minds. It may belong to systems that awaken dormant capabilities in ordinary people.

History’s biggest advances rarely came from making geniuses smarter.

The printing press made literacy available to ordinary people.

Public education made mathematics available to ordinary people.

The personal computer made computation available to ordinary people.

The internet made information available to ordinary people.

AI may do the same for reasoning, analysis, and problem solving.

The question isn’t whether the next Google comes out of Stanford.

The question is whether millions of people who never would have attended Stanford can now develop the same kinds of capabilities.

That seems like a far more consequential possibility.

[Edward Dziuk @ed_dziuk]

I posted on LinkedIn this week:

A teacher once told me that things often die long before people realize they are dead. The roots are gone, but the leaves still show life.

I thought of this when LinkedIn asked if I need a web designer. I design systems. The problem is not that LinkedIn failed—it succeeds at something other than what it was built to do.

This pattern follows business owners. They arrive knowing the solution: “We need a website.” But they have never seen what a website could be. They plan in the abstract, the designer builds what was described, and six months later the owner realizes the site does not solve the actual problem because nobody showed them what was possible.

The answer is to show first, plan later.

The Blueprint is a working prototype—two wireframes loaded with every element that might matter. Most is new. You are not making choices. You are reacting to something real.

You do not have to know how to plan a website. We give you the first draft. You show us what does not fit. We turn that into the final build.

When you see the site take shape, you finally see your business clearly. The tool seemed to be about planning.

The real value is diagnosis.