Connection

Nobody joins a protocol. They join a community.

For Episode 6 of Connection, I'm doing something a little different. With Nostr Valley III happening this weekend in State College, Pennsylvania, I'm sharing a preview and practice run of my presentation on what we've learned building Zap Cooking.

Three years ago, we started with an idea: bring people together through food, Bitcoin, and an open social network called Nostr.

Like many builders, we spent a lot of time talking about the technology. Relays, wallets, encryption, NIPs, and protocols. All important things, but not necessarily what people care about.

People don't want to learn a protocol. They want to connect, share, create, and belong.

Over the past year, we've been putting that lesson into practice.

In this episode, I explore:

• Why food is one of humanity's oldest forms of connection

• What Pleb Lab taught us about building a product and community

• How AI and open-source collaboration accelerated Zap Cooking

• Why we simplified onboarding, wallets, and the user experience

• How our new curated food relay brings together years of recipes and food conversations

• Why community, trust, and shared experiences matter more than the software itself

• What Nostr Valley has taught me about turning online relationships into real friendships

We've built a lot this year, including new mobile experiences, AI cooking tools, and a curated feed with roughly 40,000 food-related posts across 44 topics.

But the biggest lesson isn't technical.

Community takes work. And the most important thing we're building isn't software. It's connection.

Whether you're building on Nostr, starting a business, growing a community, or simply trying to bring people together, I hope there's something useful here.

Join the food community: https://zap.cooking

Explore the curated food relay: https://feed.zap.cooking

Learn about Nostr Valley: https://nostrvalley.com

People. Ideas. Food. Community.

Connection — presented by Zap Cooking. ⚡️🍳

What if social media's biggest problem isn't that our networks are too small—but that they've become too big?

This week on Connection, I'm joined by UTXO, the developer behind Wisp and a longtime builder in the Nostr ecosystem.

We start with a simple problem: everyone talks about wanting an open internet where we own our identity, data and algorithms. But none of that matters to normal people if the product sucks.

From there, we get into what Nostr has learned about adoption, why censorship resistance isn't enough, the tradeoff between sovereignty and convenience, spam and moderation, and whether users should be able to choose the algorithms that shape what they see.

But the conversation eventually goes somewhere I find even more interesting:

Maybe we're thinking about social networks at the wrong scale.

Instead of another platform connecting billions of strangers and optimizing for virality, what if the future looks more like smaller communities built around people, places and interests?

We also talk about AI-assisted development, open-source software, why UTXO was happy to see us fork Wisp for Zap Cooking, local AI, cooking, the future of Nostr, and why we're both optimistic about what the next generation will build.

Maybe we don't need another bigger social network. Maybe we need a more human internet.

Connection is presented by Zap Cooking. ⚡️🍳

What happens when the barrier between having an idea and actually building it starts to disappear?

For the first guest episode of Connection, I'm joined by my friend and Zap Cooking partner, Daniel.

Daniel's path didn't start in software development. His background was in design, branding and marketing. Then came Bitcoin, Nostr, community building, and eventually AI-assisted coding. Suddenly, ideas he previously couldn't build himself became things he could actually ship. Pasted text Pasted text

We talk about the early days of Nostr, meeting internet friends in real life, Harlem Bitcoin, Node Stretch, Lightning, building a Bitcoin point-of-sale for a Harlem restaurant, and the long road that eventually led Daniel into building wallets and tools across the Nostr ecosystem. Pasted text Pasted text

We also get into AI and the move toward “superintelligence,” vibe coding, what these tools are doing to creativity, and what happens when people who never considered themselves software developers suddenly have the ability to build.

But underneath all the technology is something much simpler:

Community.

People helping each other. Learning together. Building things that solve real problems. Making mistakes. Trying again. And turning online connections into real relationships.

Daniel and I have been building together for years. This conversation is really the story of how a lot of those pieces came together — and why we're both optimistic about where they could go next.

People. Ideas. Food. Community.

Connection, presented by Zap Cooking. ⚡️🍳

What skills will a 10-year-old today actually need when they're working in the 2040s, 2050s, or even 2070s?

We can't predict the jobs they'll have or the technology they'll use. But we can probably make some good bets about the skills that will endure.

Curiosity. Critical thinking. Communication. Problem solving. Creativity. Learning how to learn. Building things. Working with other people.

In Episode 3 of Connection, I explore why curiosity may become a superpower in a world where answers are increasingly cheap and instantly available.

I get into why saying “I don't know” can be the beginning of learning, how manufacturing taught me that root-cause analysis is really structured curiosity, and why understanding someone doesn't require agreeing with them.

I also explore my personal perspective on education: what foundational skills kids still need, how AI could enable more individualized paths to learning, the idea of an infinitely patient AI tutor, and why technology should ultimately give teachers more time to do the deeply human parts of teaching.

And inspired by a Taoist lesson on mockery and ridicule, I come back to a simple choice we all face when encountering something unfamiliar:

Dismiss it, mock it, or get curious about it.

Maybe the future doesn't belong to the people with all the answers.

Maybe it belongs to the people who know how to ask better questions.

Stay curious. ⚡️

Connection is presented by Zap Cooking.

We spend a lot of time consuming everything that’s wrong with the world. The latest outrage. The next crisis. Why AI is dangerous. Why the economy is going to collapse.

But what if we spent a little more time asking a different question:

What did I build today?

In Episode 2 of Connection, I explore the difference between consuming and creating, why I believe AI can be an intelligence amplifier, what manufacturing and continuous improvement taught me about developing a builder mindset, and why we should be willing to try things before they’re perfect. 

I also talk about gratitude—not as pretending everything is awesome, but as recognizing how much good already exists around us while still working to make things better. We’re surrounded by human cooperation every day, and most of the time we barely notice it. 

This week’s challenge is simple:

Create something instead of consuming something.

Build something. Cook something. Fix something. Teach someone. Call someone. Start the project you’ve been talking about.

It doesn’t have to scale. It doesn’t have to make money. Just put something positive into the world that wasn’t there yesterday. 

More bloom. Less doom. 🌱⚡️

Connection is presented by Zap Cooking.

We’ve gotten really good at pointing out everything that’s broken.

Money is broken. Social media is broken. Politics is broken. Food is broken. AI is coming for us. Society is falling apart.

Some of those criticisms are legitimate. But what if we’ve become so focused on what’s wrong that we’ve stopped noticing what’s good? And what if, instead of waiting for everything to collapse, we tried to build something better?

In the first episode of Connection, I explain why I’m starting this podcast and how my experiences in manufacturing, continuous improvement, building software, Bitcoin, Nostr, and Zap Cooking have shaped the way I think about the world.

This isn't about blind optimism or pretending problems don't exist. It's about rejecting doomerism as the answer.

We'll explore food, people, ideas, building, and gratitude, and talk with people who create things, challenge assumptions, change their minds, and make the world a little better.

I don't think we're doomed.

I think there's an incredible amount of good happening around us.

Maybe we just need to do a better job connecting it.

Connection is presented by Zap Cooking. ⚡️🍳