I’ve gone on record about social media. More than once, on this very show, I’ve pointed at it as part of the problem — the isolation, the division, the way it can take whatever’s worst and amplify it.

Then we flew to Portland and spent an evening with Daniel Zajic, and he quietly dismantled my argument.

You might know Daniel as Anatomy of a Drink — one of our favorite cocktail creators, a feed full of gorgeous, impossibly polished drinks posted nearly every day for five years running. What you might not know is that by day, he’s a college anatomy professor. Two lives that look nothing alike on paper, until he explains them: in both, I’m just trying to make something intimidating feel accessible. Anatomy scares people. So does a craft cocktail. He spends his life convincing people they can do the thing they assumed was out of reach.

He handed me a drink the moment we sat down — a Night Nurse, his riff on a Negroni, because it happened to be Negroni week. (It’s named partly for the pre-nursing students he teaches. The man commits to a bit.) And then he told me the truth about how those beautiful videos actually get made.

There’s no studio. There’s a dining room table where his bottles live, and a lighting setup upstairs. He makes the drink down here, then runs up the stairs — sweating, he admits, which is exactly why his face isn’t in the shot — pours it over ice, and races to photograph it before it dies. He’s on his tiptoes behind a reflector he can’t see over. Sometimes he overpours, it spills everywhere, and you hear him swear off camera. That’s it. That’s the machine behind the magic.

I told him the truth: for years I’d imagined people like him had some massive professional operation. A bar at the college. A production team. The grandiose version my brain invents when I’m on the receiving end of a perfect feed. He laughed. We have no idea what’s behind anyone’s posts. His favorite thing to watch is other creators’ behind-the-scenes — the guy using a chunk of packaging styrofoam to block light. The unglamorous, human reality underneath the gloss.

But here’s the moment that got me.

I realized, sitting there, that Daniel isn’t just doing social media. He’s taking the thing people have done forever — making a drink for the people they love, in a warm and social place — and he’s sharing that with a hundred thousand small communities. People who then turn around and make his drink at their own tables. Tables he will never sit at.

I said it to him like that, and I watched it land on him for maybe the first time. He replies, he told me, to every single message — “I made this for me and my husband,” “me and my wife” — within a day. His partner Tom tells him to get off his phone. He does it anyway. He’s not farming an audience. He’s tending a hundred thousand living rooms.

That’s the thing that broke my own argument. Social media isn’t the problem. What you pour into it is. Daniel pours in genuine hospitality, real craft, and the belief that you can do this too — and what comes back out is connection. Garbage in, garbage out works in both directions. He’s the proof of the good one.

And because he stands in front of young people every day, I asked him what he sees. He teaches the generation everyone calls the loneliest in history. His answer stuck with me: even the quiet ones, he said, are longing for connection. They want to belong. They just need a way in — a study group, a club, a passion that gives them a door.

Which is exactly what he’d tell one of them, and what he’d tell you. He started on a bare dining room table with no lighting and his phone. Just go for it. Start where you are. Keep grinding, and eventually it turns into something you’re proud of.

We asked what he’s proudest of after five years, a hundred-thousand followers, a logo, a website, invitations to brand trips around the world. He didn’t name any of that. He named his support system. Tom. His friends who’ll try any new drink. The strangers who reshake his cocktails and send him photos. The other creators who share everything they know.

In other words: his neighbors.

You can find Daniel’s recipes — every one of them, searchable by ingredient and printable, because he’s old-fashioned like that — at his site, and @anatomyofadrink on Instagram. Go make one for someone you love.

Listen to the full conversation wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube.

Talk less. Love more.