Tom Bean

Sziasztok, Jánó vagyok. Közép-Európa első világraszóló podcast csatornáját hallgatjátok Magyarországról. Ez a Budapest.fm. Hi, my name is Ray, and you're listening to the number one podcast station in Central Europe, Budapest.fm, podcasting to the world from Hungary. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the first ever episode of Talking with Willie, from the people that brought you Walking with Willie. As they say, beszéljünk Willievel magyarul. And today I am here with probably, I would say, either top five, top four, top three, top two best friends in the entire world, the one, the only Tom Bean, Bob Tamás, as the Hungarians call him. He is from Iowa, and he is from afar, and that is where I would like to start. Tom, tell us about the state of Iowa. All right. Well, first of all, let me thank you for having me on this wonderful program. Been a huge fan of Walking with Willie, even before it was called Walking with Willie. When it was living with Willie. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It was even better back then, and we're gonna get back there. So yeah, I'm Tom. I'm from Iowa. Iowa is a great place. It's a little state in the middle of the United States. I actually, I always say that Iowa is very similar to Hungary in some respects because they're both sort of flat places that have a lot of agriculture and similar sort of, in the sense like the east of Hungary, especially Debrecen and places like that. I see, I don't know about you, but I see a lot of similarities between Iowa and Hungary. Yeah. Certainly from the, yeah, the geography, I guess you'd say, I was incredibly flat, probably flatter than Hungary. But we were in, I can't remember where, maybe like an hour west of Budapest recently, and it was so reminiscent of Iowa. It was crazy. Just plains, completely flat. That's my favorite thing about Iowa. That's why I say it's kind of deceptively beautiful because you can just, you know, look on the horizon, and it's kind of bizarre to just watch the land just seep into the horizon and just fall into the haze. It's like a really beautiful, in a weird way, it's super captivating and beautiful, like the ocean. The ocean's really boring, but when you sit there, it's, you know, still super cool to see the— It's like, well, the Hungarians obviously don't have an ocean. They have the Alföld, which is the Great Plain, and Petőfi, one of their greatest poets, he always talks about the plains and the sunsets in very captivating tones, and it just seems to me like Iowa would be the same. I've never been there. I've got to come soon, I hope, to your farm. You live on a farm, right? Yeah, yeah. I grew up at a hobby farm, probably is a more appropriate name for it. So modest, the farmers, so modest. So modest. Why I say a hobby farm is because the farm is not where my family's bread and butter comes from, as they say. We have some alpacas, which allegedly—not allegedly, I saw this happen—my dad gave it to my mom, gave the three of them to my mom for her birthday. Birthday present. Happy birthday, here's some alpacas. Here's some alpacas. Take care of them. It's gonna be fun. You're gonna feed them and take their wool and make some alpaca shit. So, yeah, we have alpacas. We have some bees, you know, making some honey. Nice. We used to have goats. We have only one goat now. We got chickens, some wild guinea hens, they're called. They were just running around the woods. Do you have any named animals? Any animals with names? The alpacas have names. Oh, what are the names? Jubilee, Bijou, Saffy. And Jubilee Bijou and Saffy. I literally this weekend, I watched the Hungarian cartoon that was based on a Yokai Moore novel, the Cigán Baró, the Gypsy Baron, and Saffy was the name of the main character. Saffy was, so that's interesting. That's crazy. Look at all these connections. I mean, he wasn't alpaca, though. He was just like a little boy. Alpacas are pretty weird animals. They're pretty cool. They're not super human-friendly. You can't really pet them and play with them, but they're cool. They have long necks and they kind of spit when they are feeding, which is cool. Nice. And so was that something that you were interested in when you first came to Hungary? Tell us about that. You came in 2016, and you were here to study, right? Yeah. So I took six months, one semester to study here in my third year of college. And I actually walked into the study abroad office, and we actually went to the same university, Middlebury College, Vermont. Shout out. And very strong language program at this university. And so if you wanted to study abroad, you had to either take the language at Middlebury. You had to be taking the language to go to that country, or you could go to a country where Middlebury didn't offer the language. So in other words, you could go to Italy, you could go to Spain, you could go to France, but only if you studied in a Middlebury-specific program. Exactly. Whereas what you did was— So Middlebury didn't have a language program for Hungarian. Of course not. I mean, they should, but— They probably should. We could probably start that one day. We could go back and, yeah, start a little language program. J-term Hungarian co-professors. Co-professors. Second language speakers, loose grasp of the language, teaching kids how to mispronounce words, you know. That sounds great. Introduce palinka to the Hungarian J-term. We just—I mean, you could do all sorts of things with Hungary and Middlebury. All right, anyways, back to what you were saying. You came here through— So I just went into the study abroad office and I knew I had limited choices, so I was like, hey— I'm not taking a language here, and I'm studying computer science. Show me some schools that would be cool. And one of the top, at the top of the list was Aquincum Institute of Technology. Aquincum is a region outside of Budapest, on the Buda side, District 3, as they say. Ancient Roman Budapest was in Aquincum. That's what the Romans called it, was Aquincum. So you went to the school in Aquincum on the Buda side. Exactly. And what did you study there? It was a math and computer science school. So it was, it's sort of loosely affiliated with BME. So BME is the math engineering school here in Budapest. And so they have a lot of professors who teach one course at AIT while they do the rest of their courses at BME, and they also have professors from other universities as well. So it's a math school with focuses in math, computer science-based things like cryptography and linear algebra and stuff like that. And it's near the, it's next to Graphisoft Park, which is also a Hungarian business institution of some sort. So it's in Graphisoft Park, and the founder of Graphisoft—I forget his name, I apologize—but the founder of Graphisoft is also the founder of AIT. Oh, cool. And he created Graphisoft Park with the, what, it was a side project after he succeeded with Graphisoft so well, and it was supposed to kind of emulate one of these campuses that you see in America with these... You know, they have a lot of the utilities and buildings that facilitate good work for tech companies and all kinds of companies, and inside that campus, they also have AIT, the university, and there's also the IBS, the International Business School. Oh wow. And so it's kind of, it's cool. It's sort of like a college campus, but with schools and companies. And it's a nice, it's a nice, one of the best walks in Budapest, I would say, is on the Buda bank of the Aquincum campus. You just get that nice look at the Sziget Festival, Óbudai Sziget Island, and it's very, very tranquil and lovely. It was the best, just leaving school and walking down the river, just, yeah. And there's also this, right next to Graphisoft Park, before you get past the Óbudai Sziget, on the Buda side, there's these old mansions, just enormous houses, not quite run down, but not really kept up either. So, you know, your imagination goes wild places, you know. I would love to be inside your head on one of those walks in the summer of 2016 after a day of computer programming. But I actually did visit you, and you took me to the campus in 2016, which was an amazing visit for myself. And I guess my question to you would be, was that experience that summer in Budapest, did you know instantly that you wanted to move here, or is it something that happened a little bit more gradually? How did that all come together? This is, this was one of the most fun questions for me to consider in the first, you know, six months when I moved back here, and also before I left when I was studying. And I think what I have come to is that while I was studying here, you, when you're in university, you're not really like an adult that's living a normal life. You know, you're going to school every day. It's a different kind of schedule, and you're surrounded by people who are peers and, you know, doing the same kind of stuff. So I was not really, I didn't feel like I was experiencing Budapest to a... To the most, you know, to its fullest extent. Exactly, exactly, to its fullest extent. And the fact that I was missing that, there was something there that I—and I enjoyed Budapest so much all the same. It was still such an incredible and visceral experience. And so I knew that there was more to be had there, and I didn't even know what that looked like. I just needed to discover what it meant to be here. So you had a little taste, and it was probably very interesting. Obviously, you grew up in Iowa. You went to the same school as me, which I know is a very farm-based campus with a lot of, you know, countryside elements. So I guess coming to Budapest for the first time, living in a city, one as crazy as this one, must have been a wild experience. Yeah, that's one of the—also the other thing that always came up in conversation was just people asked me, Oh, do you like living in Budapest? What's it like? And I was just saying, Look, I came from a town of like 10,000 people, and I lived in the middle of nowhere. I went to a school in a town of 20,000 people, which was also in the middle of nowhere. And now I live in, you know, a city of 3 million people, and that is such an immense change. It's so much fun to be in a city, especially such a lively city as this one. Well, when I came to visit you, I was—when I was 29 now, I think 24, 25, 25, let's call it—and that was in the spring of 2016. And I remember coming here, and I've traveled all over Europe, but for some reason, Budapest to me was just this— Magical place that was so interesting and unique. And I think obviously being here with you, you probably one of my best travel friends, if not the best one ever to just be living life with. So that was great as well. But the city just really, like, just spoke to me on so many levels. And I think that that was when we were actually at that Corvin Tető, the nightclub that has now closed down. We said to each other, I don't know who said it first, but the other one said it as well, and we were just like, Wow, we got to live here one day. And then what brought you back here when you actually made the decision to live here two years later in 2018, I think it was? What was the initial thing that brought you back here? Explain that. It was when I left, I just, just like you said, we were hanging out, we were on Corvin Tető, and we basically said, We're going to move back here. So that seed was in my mind since that moment. And that was also just at the tail end of a hell of a two days. I mean, I think there was multiple bathhouses, maybe three or four, a couple of parties, ruin bars, this, that, the other thing, and very little to no sleep, actually, in that whole— Probably less than no sleep. Yeah, but sorry, I interrupted you. No, no, it was a good sidebar. The only kind of sidebar. What was I saying? Something about how you got back here through— So that seed was always in my head, and it was just growing there. And in a way, people were applying for jobs, you know, senior year, and they were all— And I, through AIT, I had some connections to Prezi, and I had started talking to an engineer there, and I had just heard that they were probably hiring, and there was just a nice relationship with them. I had some casual calls on Facebook, and then— And Prezi is the— Oh, sorry, the presentation company, right? Yeah. So Prezi is one of the most famous tech startups here in Hungary. It started in 2008, and it's a presentation software similar to PowerPoint, or it's a competitor to PowerPoint back—that was its focus back then when it started, and— And it's one of the actually the most impressive Hungarian companies, I would say. I mean, when you told me you were working for Prezi, at first I was like, okay, that's cool. I think it's cool. I didn't really know anything about it. But now, knowing how integral a role it plays in the Hungarian civil society and especially a lot of just cool social work that they do. Like, I know every year you go to, what, BOG? Yeah. How do you spell BOG? It's like B-O-G. B-A-G. BAG. BOG. BOG. Yeah, also without the X. And you go there and you guys build houses, right? There's all kinds of different projects. There's a group that we work with that we basically work through them. They have projects that are running year-round, and Prezi, we have a day basically in the spring when we go. We have a big group, I think it was like 50 people last time, and we just basically have a hardcore day where everybody's going and we try and complete one piece of a project. Last time I went there, we were building fences around basically home areas, and that does multiple things, but just giving a family group like a sense of actual property and everything, and it helps keep things organized and stuff like that. And so Prezi, as I've said, I've just been growing more and more impressed with the company the more I've known about it. But when they first got in talks with you and stuff, you decided to come to Budapest. Was that like a hard decision for you to make? Did you have to talk to your family, or was it just something that you were like, okay, I had such a good experience here in 2016, something's right about it. It feels right. Let's do it. It was kind of that seed. So I was like, okay, I'm going to move back here. And then these conversations are very casual, and I was hoping there was a job opportunity, and I was sort of being led to believe that at some point in the future there was going to be an opportunity. So it was kind of nice to be able to leave college and be like, okay, in the next six months to a year, there's going to be a job opening and I'm going to apply and go. And so I had the chance to just explore and not really worry about work for a while, and that was really good for me. And then when the opportunity came, I did the interview process. It was all pretty quick, happened over two weeks basically, and then I got the job and I had the choice. And when I got the job, I got the email, like, okay, you have to decide now. Here's the contract. That was the first time I think I really came to terms with the fact that I was about to make the decision to move to Europe and completely leave the life in America that I had led for 21 years. And that's where I think having you actually was a big way to make that decision not feel so Right. Like such a scary change because we were, you know, we knew each other, and you were also American, so I knew that we could—and we went to the same college, so we had so much to share that it didn't feel like I was ripping myself up and planning in some brand new soil I had no idea about. Yeah, I would say likewise for me that helped a lot with my decision to move here. I think you had a little bit more of a firm footing of what you were going to do when you got here, whereas for me it was after I did my master's, I didn't really know what direction I wanted to head towards. But, like, when you said you were moving here and made the first step, and then I remembered how we were sitting there with stars in our eyes as the sun was rising on Corvin Tető in 2016, and I was just like, well, it's kind of meant to be. And, I mean, definitely everything that's happened since has been a validation of that in one way or the other through all the ups and downs. But I would say that that was a nice joint comfort that we had when we moved here together, and that was 2018, and we lived—where did we live, Tom? You tell the people where we lived. When we moved here, I don't even know if Prezi knew this, so Prezi, for a month before, they give you a month to find an apartment, and in that interim you stay at this wonderful establishment called K9 Residence. The K9 Residence. Sort of like a... Like a hotel, basically. It's like a short stay type of place. You wouldn't want to live there for a month. You could live there for a month. It wouldn't be that bad, taking the kids through college maybe, maybe no, but somewhere in between a month and that. Yeah, it was cool. We moved there, and then I think near Deák Square. Right near Deák Square. Right near Deák Square. And we lived there for like a month, and then you found this apartment on Dohány utca, Tobacco Road. Dohány utca. Tobacco Road, which, yeah. And that was in the Seventh District, right next to the New York Cafe. And I am proud to announce that—I don't think—no, you went there. I never went to the New York Cafe. I went there once with Eddie, who we might get on the phone later in the episode if fate has it that way. But regardless, the New York Cafe, which was on the start of Dohány utca, when I saw that you found that apartment and it was on the street with New York Cafe, I was like, that's great. Really, really, you know, happy. I'm from New York. This is the arrogant New Yorker thing. Every time I see anything in New York, which is literally every day because everyone has New York shirts and New York hats, and, yeah, it made me happy to see the New York kávézó, nice giant monumental building, lots of literary interesting history. In my opinion, nowadays not really the first place I'd go because it's a little bit more geared towards tourists. But it's still very interesting because they said when it was opened, they threw away the key into the river, into the Duna, into the Danube, so that it would never close. I mean, that's something that they say. But there was just such a literary environment there. Yeah, but it's very much changed, like what it is now and what it was back then. I mean, it used to be kind of a much more genuine place that people, you know, like you said, authors and, you know... Educated people would go to hang out and share their ideas with each other, and now it's more of a place where, you know, all the tourists go to have a nice, expensive cappuccino. And that was what I liked when I first visited Budapest with you, was seeing that there was two sides to the city. There was a side that was very geared towards tourism, which we certainly, especially as younger people that were interested in that side of the life maybe a little bit more indulged and plenty. But there was also this sort of air of, like, authenticity, even to non-conventional places. I always think that Budapest is cool because it has these sort of mid-range places that aren't necessarily expensive or cheap, but they're just sort of Hungarian and you can enjoy that. And I would say that's probably one of those that played into this feeling of needing to come back here after studying, because part of being, you know, part of this, being a part of the people who are studying here, I wasn't so much able to connect with the Hungarians here and the Hungarian culture because I was here temporarily. And, you know, that always came up in conversation whenever you met someone, and that if you were meeting a Hungarian and, you know, they knew that you were someone studying abroad here, you already fit into a certain category. You know, you're going to leave soon, so that, like, already rules out a certain amount of connection that can happen. And, you know, that played into everything. It played into what kind of places you hung out, where you went to, you know, get a beer, who you hung out with, and I could sense that when I was here, and I wanted to— Right, right, right. There was something behind the curtain. I think that we, when we went out on those nights that we were in Budapest together, we went to a lot of the traditional sort of expat—not even expat, really, more like travel student-type places. Oh, nice. Radius brought us. What is this? Unicum? All right. Thank you, Ray. Egészségedre. Cheers to Ray. Egészségedre. Egészség. Egészség. Egészségetekre. Mindenkinek. Oh yes, Unicum is perfect for what I was talking about before. It's just weird and Hungarian. I love it, and I don't know why. And I think a lot of people don't necessarily love it, but it's just great. You know, it grows on you, especially both over time and, you know, over long periods of time, like years, but then also over the night. You know, it gets better and better as you go. And a funny story about Unicum, actually, my mom loves to, you know, participate in whatever way she can in all of her children's endeavors. And when she found out that I was moving to Budapest, to Hungary, she's like, Oh, okay, I'm going to buy some Hungarian movies. I'm going to get some Hungarian products. And she bought some Unicum. I think she thought she bought just a, you know, a bottle to try it. She ended up buying a case of Unicums. So now we have this, like, 24 bottles of Unicum just sitting in our, like, entry closet, just waiting for my arrival. Just one has been opened and maybe two shots have been drank or something. That's awesome. A lot to drink when I get there. The Unicum is definitely interesting. What do you think about pálinka? Love pálinka. Love pálinka. Favorite pálinka? Do you have a favorite? Not a, not a... I think it's hard to say, like, Oh, my favorite is pear, because, you know, every pear is going to taste different. I just like the, you know, stuff that's made from the heart, you know, made by an individual, not necessarily factory produced. Yeah, I love that. That's one of the reasons I said before I love to travel with you, is that you always find these, like, hidden gems of people that all of a sudden I look over across the bar or something like that, and Tom's ensconced in conversation with the bartender, and he's, Oh dude, that guy, he's actually, his family member is producing artisanal crackers or cheese in the hills somewhere over there. And somehow the next day, like, you're talking to this guy and you have these really deep relationships with people out of nowhere. Is that something that you would say is unique to your character? I don't know. I don't want to judge myself too much, but I like to, I like to—maybe not unique, but that's certainly a quality that you have. Yeah, yeah. I like to ask questions, you know? I think that that's some of the best. It's sort of like a conversational principle. I mean, whenever you're having a conversation, it's, if—I don't know—if you truly want to continue the conversation or you want to hear things from the other person, it's all about, like, hitting the ball back, you know? Always asking a question that puts it back in their court and just see what they can give back. And especially when there's maybe a little bit of a language barrier, you want to learn something, and I don't know, I just like to learn, and so I like to just lob the ball back, you know, hear what people got to say. And then usually people like—people love to talk, you know, especially about things that they know and care about. You're very good at making everyone feel welcome because it's so genuine from you. No matter who you're talking to, you're always—I envy it, actually. And I'm someone that loves to talk, obviously. I run my mouth every day, but I envy your ability to just really just genuinely be so interested in what people are saying, which is great. Do you have someone that you've met maybe in Guatemala or in Hungary or even, I don't know, somewhere else that you've been that—Panama—that you have in mind that was like a really good conversation? Well, actually, I mean, you brought up Panama, and the person who actually formalized this idea for me was my roommate in college, Eduardo, who is Panamanian from Brazil. Formalized the idea of hitting the ball back and forth. Yeah, yeah. It's just that whenever a conversation is happening and somebody says something, our initial reaction is to, like, anecdotalize. Like, they give us maybe a problem they've had or some story that they tell, and we usually put that in the frame of our lives and figure out what is something that's happened to us that's similar, and that's what we want to talk about because our initial reaction is to share our experience because that's what we know the most. And he just taught me that. If you're really trying to, and sometimes that's okay. Sometimes that's how you share yourself with other people, and that's how you connect. But if you want to have a conversation and get the other person to share more, you have to suppress that urge and figure out the right question to push them further along the story. So that's maybe a nice conversation. He's always fun to talk to, but that was a moment that I think I'll remember forever. Nice. I don't know. I mean, I love conversing with you. I think it's because we both have similar, like, love to learn and talk about anything. Yeah, it's very nice to converse with someone. And we were talking before about our conversation that we had on the roof of the Corvin Tető back in 2016. And something else that, for me personally, is special about the Corvin Tető was that I met my girlfriend, Alexa, there. And then you also have a Hungarian girlfriend, Vivian, right? The wonderful, beautiful Vivian. She's my barber, and she's a great barber, really good barber. I actually turned down several other barbers around the city to stay with Vivian because she started last year, and, like, the first haircut that she ever gave me, right off the bat, really good. And ever since then, just completely improving. It's nice to have a barber in the family, so to speak. Exactly. It's wonderful. I always look fresh and primped. Yes, you do. Yes, you do. And yeah, it's a big change from before, so I'm very thankful. And actually, so I wanted to say this earlier, and it's what is the allure to Budapest, kind of, and then we come back to this conversation about Corvin Tető, and I think it also relates to what we were talking about with conversation. So the thing about the conversation and taking the ball back and finding the right question is that you challenge the other person, and that allows them to enter parts of their understanding that they maybe haven't shared before, and that's why it's so fun to be a part of one of these conversations. And that's something that happened to us at Corvin Tattoo and in Budapest in general, is that there's so much available that it's beyond your imagination what can happen and what happened to us at Corvin Tattoo when we decided to move here. It was, we were challenged by the city. We were, the ball was hit back to us by the city with the experiences we were having, and we were challenged in a way that was so much fun and such a formative and, like, I don't know, just wonderful experience that we needed more of it, I think. Yeah, that's probably true. Something that maybe clicked. It's probably also because we're American. The Hungarians are always baffled at how, like, optimistic Americans can be. I don't think I really realized it till maybe I moved to Hungary, but they always tell me, like, about these American tendencies, and it sort of solidified in my head. America is, like, a crazily optimistic place in some respects. In other respects, it's incredibly pessimistic, but I don't know. I mean, America, what do you think of all the things that have happened recently with the election and Donald Trump and all that nonsense? What's Joe Biden even? What's your opinion on the political mania in America, let's say? Yeah, mania indeed. I would say I don't really know how to say it in an articulate manner quickly. I would just say that I'm happy and, I don't know, it's kind of worrisome because it's a bit, I think it's a bit of a pendulum. So the pendulum swung in a direction that for me was concerning and not a great direction, and it was, like, just a public endorsement of basically not being nice to people, which, I mean, just being kind of, like, just not... Not embracing humanity and being nice to most people. And I think the pendulum is swinging back in a direction where we'll see four years of probably more of that mentality. And I just hope that in these four years, we'll find a way to cut the pendulum return a little bit. That's why I like talking to you about politics as well, is that you have a very philosophical view on things, in terms of being slightly apolitical in some senses, I would say, which I admire in your personality, is something that's like very bird's-eye view and very analytical about things. So it's easy to make a decision like, well, Trump, he just fits into the bad category. We know that all politicians are going to be on some scale between good and bad. A lot of them are bad. Some of them are good. But for me, and I think probably for you as well, Donald Trump was just like on that side of the wrong side of things. Outside of even the political world, he just, like, whether or not what was portrayed in the media was right or not, it's just he didn't portray humanitarian friendliness to all groups. Like, that just wasn't his, to me. Yeah, and maybe I'm being fed, you know, not the most honest information, but I think that— No, but that's also, I like the Iowa mentality, I think. And that's another parallel I see between Iowa and Hungary is sort of like New York, for instance, you paint it into the liberal category right away, like definitely New York, East Coast liberal. So crisp, open sound. Iowa is just more like— They can be swung either direction. Iowa sometimes goes Republican, they sometimes go Democrat, but the question is at least up for debate. And I like that in the Iowan mentality. And I can see you, you give everyone a fair shot. You're not going to just jump into the Democrats' bag right away just because they offer to buy you a drink at the bar. There's like a little bit of an analysis going behind it. Yeah, it's super hard to characterize. I mean, we all experience this. I think this is one of the things I noticed the most about being here, and every American experiences when they meet anybody. And every person from any country, you can't be put in a box. As an American, you know, the bunch of states, 50 of them to be exact. A lot of the culture across America is super different, and not only that, but within the states it's so different. So I went to, like, a pretty, like, I would lived in an upper-middle-class town basically in a really nice public school district, so I did go to public school, but a lot of well-educated, well-off people. Public school. Public school. Public school is better. Public school better. So, yeah, I mean, I was surrounded with this kind of people, but I also, you know, lived in the— didn't, you know, I didn't live in a neighborhood. I lived in a rural community, and just what I'm saying is that where I grew up in Iowa is pretty different from the majority of Iowa, actually. While there was, you know, a good representation of maybe the— in my high school, but it's just like it's very different across the state, so it's kind of hard for me to even say I understand Iowans, you know. Yeah, that makes sense. And in terms of your brother, who I wanted to talk about before, Eric. Which one? Eric. Because I think that you've had a lot of conversations with him about, like, philosophy and life, and Eric is someone that also I see as a very interesting... A person in my life that I've met, Eric is Tom's brother, and he looks the exact copy of him, just a little bit, maybe half an inch taller. Is that fair to say? He's an inch taller. All right, I'm glad that you can admit it. And he's—I mean, it's a number. It's not even up for debate. And you're pretty damn tall, let me tell you. I'm sitting next to Tom, I'm like, don't even stand a chance. Nothing to envy, really. But Eric is taller than you, and he's, like, slightly blonder, definitely a little bit blonder. And he was adopted. Yeah, he was. I'm sorry, he was not adopted. That was kind of an ongoing joke. I feel bad. But he is someone that's also interesting because maybe that's also—that having to do moving to Budapest, he was living in Spain, right, for a few years? Yeah, so that was a bit of the—that also—so, like I said, you moving here relieved some of the pressure, and another thing that relieved the pressure was the fact that he lived—my brother lived in—Eric lived in Spain for five years. And, you know, there were a lot of things that I heard from his experience, from a philosophical perspective, if we'll use your words, just that it's nice to, you know... Put yourself in a completely new environment with different kinds of ideas, different kinds of people. And yeah, I wanted to pursue that and see what that was like. Cool. Yeah, he's a really cool guy, and I also enjoy hearing your secondhand philosophy from him because it sounds like when you go back to Iowa and have your little family get-togethers, you guys talk about a whole bunch of interesting— My whole family. Yeah, Eric, I think it's something that, I mean, we do it because our whole family does it. So with each of my siblings and my parents, yeah, it's very much— So you have Eric, who's your—you're 26 right now? Yeah. Eric's five years older than me. Five years older than you, so he's 31. Uh-huh. And then you have Jared, who's 35. He's eight years older than me. Eight years older than you, so he's 34. And then you have Whitney, and then your mom, your dad, and now you even have nieces and nephews. So the whole Bean clan is like this giant clan. I always say that they have the Bean machine because they just sort of different versions of each other all put into the matrix. We're farmers, and we have a bean field. Oh, that's— We're growing beans. That's nice. That's a lot more natural and— Yeah, a bean factory is also fine. Bean machine, that's— Well, we need machines to farm the bean farm, and those can be called the bean machines. That's good. I like that. And that's also interesting about your own personality is you have this computer programmer, machine-oriented rationalist, like very functional side, and then like a romantic farmer that just like lives off the fat of the land from Iowa. So I don't know. Do you have anything to say about that? Um... Yeah. Yes, I agree. I don't know. I mean, yeah, I like to think that rationality— No, I mean, I think I know. I mean, I like the question. Let me get that out there. I'll remember that. I like the rational part, so I like to try and break things down. Yeah, from a what makes sense perspective. And I think that comes a lot from what I've learned before I studied. I mean, I studied computer science when I was 18, but when I went to college, I didn't do anything like computer-related, really. I was more of like I built little machines on the farm, let's just say. And I guess the farm mentality brings you to this sort of like bit of a functional ideal from, you know, animals live and die, you know, stuff happens. Let me interrupt you right there, because that was a fundamental thing that I realized when we were in Georgia in Tbilisi. This was intense. Walking down the hills, scrambling down the back roads, when all of a sudden a cat crossed the path that I had been photographing and felt like I had a genuine relationship, and the thing got smacked by the car, and it unfortunately passed away. But I thought that was a very interesting experience because I saw not a lack of humanity, but a very interesting— From your perspective. No, no, no, no, it was from my perspective. I got a little bit too upset about it. I mean, I think it was a lack of humanity from your perspective. For sure, yeah. That could also be said by some people in the audience. But either way, whichever side of the debate you are on, on the side of the cat or not, would you say that that was very interesting to see, just like you grew up on a farm, and for you, like the death of an animal, albeit sad and like truly worthy of respect, is not necessarily as shocking as it was for a little bitch city boy like me? I think maybe we both went a bit far into extremes that were unreasonable. I think I should have cared a little bit more, maybe. And yeah, I mean, six and one half a dozen of the other. But that, on the other side of the coin, which is the main reason we should talk about that trip, was that going to Georgia, that was a fairly magical experience that I think meant a lot to both of us. What do you have to say about the country of Georgia? I have too many things to say about the country of Georgia. That was a spectacular— sorry, it was a spectacular trip. I can't remember how we came to decide Georgia was the place to go. I think that we were sort of saying that we should go skiing, I think. And we wanted to go off the beaten path for a skiing destination. And Georgia would fit that bill. So did Bulgaria and Bolivia. Not Bolivia, not Bolivia, sorry. You go skiing in Bolivia on a sand dune or something. I don't even know if they have that in Bolivia. But the decision, I think, was ultimately made by you to go there. And it was like, okay, let's go to Georgia. And then there was that restaurant, Khachapuri in Budapest, which is really good. And we ate there once, and we ended up in Georgia, and we went— What I'm trying to understand, I feel like we sort of, if it was me who made that decision, I don't know what drove me to that before. Now Georgia is like the epitome of everything for me, and I would do another Georgia trip in a minute. But before we went there, I don't think I knew anything about Georgia. You're the one who showed me the Anthony Bourdain video. We met the two Ninos. Ah, that's true. And that's also nice about Budapest, that you meet so many people from different countries. But we had a dinner with two Ninos. Nino being a Georgian queen, and so there's a lot of Ninos in Georgia. And we met two of them on the same night, and they both said, Come to Georgia sometime, and it was an amazing trip. That is true. I think Georgians are really good at pushing their country and pushing their culture. That's one of the things that I think we— You love Georgian food, right? Georgian food is just out of this world. Out of this world. Crazy. It's a culinary awakening, let's say, because it's not really European food. It's not really Asian, like Eastern. It's not really Middle Eastern either. But they have dumplings, and they have really crazy kinds of bread. They do a lot of amazing things with grilling meats. And yeah, it was just one of those, when you can go to a place and experience a completely novel cuisine, I think that's a wonderful, wonderful thing to do. Yeah, well, Hungarian cuisine is also very novel. Would you say that you have a favorite Hungarian dish? Is there something that you've— I'd like to say lecsó. Lecsó. Lecsó is really good. One of those, you know, sort of peasant, simple dishes that I just really love. Gulyás, gulyás. I don't know which way we're pronouncing it. And a lot of— there's so, so much, so many good things about Hungarian cuisine. I love lecsó, let's say that. You do love lecsó. I think I've had a lecsó that you prepared before, perhaps. Probably not me. It was probably the wonderful Vivian Barka. Yeah, Vivian does make a nice lecsó as well. And there's— a bogrács is always a good experience. We made a bogrács at your birthday. Where was that, somewhere on the Lake Balaton, right? Yeah. Yeah, on the Balaton. I can't remember exactly where, at the Konyári Pincészetház. Yeah, that was a very nice, very nice place, and we made a nice gulyás there. And we didn't have a gulyás; we had a slambuc. A slambuc. Slambuc is like, it's bacon, you know, chop up a bunch of bacon, throw it in the pot, fry it up, and then you throw in— do you remember? Onions, I guess. There was a lot of stuff thrown in. I think I forgot. It's relatively simple. It's like with onions, and then there's paprika and water, and then you add a pasta. Maybe potatoes as well. Okay. Potatoes. There was something potato. I think there might have been potatoes. There's like a potatoey pasta. It's definitely pasta. Slambuc. You guys, look it up. Hungarian pronunciation, so slambuc, slambuc. What's your favorite bathhouse? Living or dead? I mean, like existing or not? I understood. It just made me hesitate into what I thought myself. Living. Okay, so the winner's out, obviously. Who is it? Király. But they're dead. Exactly. So living. So the winner's out. The winner's out. Is it the winner for me? Is it the winner for you? Yeah, yeah, it's the winner for me. The winner's out. Yeah, sorry. So for me, if we're living, the winner is out. Is it only Hungarian? Okay, the best, my favorite Hungarian bathhouse is, let's say... I don't want to say— You don't want to say Széchenyi. Széchenyi. Oh, that's bad. That almost escaped your lips for fear of, like... I almost didn't want to say it because it gets, I think, maybe an uncool rap because it's the tourist bathhouse. But living here, you get to kind of go beyond tourism. You know, you can go at weird hours where, you know, tourists wouldn't really be there. And Széchenyi is just, bottom line, it's insane. It's huge. There's a ton of pools. You can get lost there. It's a really fun experience. But beyond that, maybe Lukács. Yeah, I mean, I think that I would agree that Széchenyi is almost overrated and underrated at the same time because it's such a ridiculously overpopulated bathhouse during normal functioning, non-COVID Budapest tourist season, and you just sort of get lost in the shuffle there and overwhelmed. But then if you go at good time, as we've done before, the day after a soccer match or something like that, early hours, lying in the sun with Louis, then it's very nice because you get to enjoy everything and you're like, wow, this place is a palace. Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. It's the closest thing you're going to get to living in a palace, to feel like what it's like to live in a palace. Yeah. You might go there and there's, you know, 40 other people there and it's, you know, six-acre palace. I mean, that's— It's enormous. But it's huge. It's enormous. It's enormous. It's got all the features, all the bells and whistles. Király is my personal favorite just because I've spent the most time there and I love the story. Rest in peace. Rest in peace. Allegedly. I mean, I still think we can bring the thing back. It's still sitting there. They say that it's closed. I don't know what that means. Let's lead the brigade. If that's what they say.

As Sam Daly's uncle, who lives in France, Richard Daly told me, all politics are local, so we can make a difference and save Király. We are currently located at the top of the issue list. But it would be nice to save because, I mean, it's like a 16th-century monument to, like, the art of bathing in Budapest, and it would be a shame if it closed. Yeah, I don't want to go back on my answer, but I will say that there's something to be said about the Király, like the Király, the small, you know, the intimate, the intimate octagonal central pool. I mean, there's nothing that quite beats that, and you don't get that experience in Széchenyi, which is why I will go back on my— No, I'll give a hard second to Lukács. I think that Lukács, the reason that I love Lukács so much, and I know you as well, is that it's sort of a hybrid between the two. Actually, little fun fact, Lukács and Király, they share water through a Larchwood tube that runs under the ground. Larchwood. That's what it says on the Google Translate of whatever the Hungarian is, was larchwood. Wow. But it goes under the ground and they share a water source, so Király takes the Lukács water. And you'll also notice across the street at Lukács, there's this little, like, sort of bathhouse-looking thing behind a wall, and it's an old Turkish gunpowder mill that ran on the steam power from the underground thermal springs of Budapest. I mean, so this is one—how much of the, like, the dynamics or the mechanics of bathing do you understand? So are we—is Király getting the backwash Lukács water, or no? There must be some kind of, like, split in the tube there. I think that there must be a split eventually. I don't understand how these thermal baths work. Where's the— I mean, where's it coming from? What's happening? That's another thing that I love about Budapest is it's like ever since it's been a place, people have just known that, like, you poke through the crust of the ground and there's hot water and there's a river. But especially, like, the Romans, you know, they want to have somewhere to chill out and bathe or just heal, because before we have these modern medicine, I don't know, probably hot water was even more important. And so we just sort of plugged into the ground, like made this little mining hole in Budapest, and a civilization popped up. I'm not sure if it's the case still, but the parliament is heated in the same way. The parliament, like the crazy amazing— Yeah, it's heated by, like, the whole building is heated by, like, a duct system that's fueled by the thermal water in Budapest. I think it might actually be renovated into now it's actually, like, mechanical and they heat the air and send it through, but that's how it was when it was originally built. Well, that's interesting. You always wonder how they pick, like, why is the parliament there as opposed to, like, there? Or why is some—in any city—why is something there, there, there? And there's all these natural residuals of, like, the first people that set up little huts, and then all of a sudden, I don't know, I never played any of those visit video games, but you have Age of Empires and things like that, and you just see, like, the, oh, the civilization is growing. I just bought one of those games from Alza.hu, great little electronics website. Alza.hu. Yeah. Where is it? It's huge. It's, like, it's not even Hungarian. I think it's Czech. It's like the Best Buy. It's Best Buy in Europe, but not quite. Anyway, I'm very into it when it comes to electronic purchases. If you need to buy a hard drive or something like that, go to Alza. Okay. Anyway, I bought Civilization and it came to my house. No game card. And it had a little code for activating. Activated it. Not available in Hungary. They duped me. They duped me. They duped me. You were the mark. I was the mark. What else do you like to purchase in Hungary? I buy a lot of stuff from Alza, like too much. I buy a lot of SD cards. Oh, we probably need a 512 gigabyte SD card for our Raspberry Pi we're never going to use. Well, I've been the beneficiary of your residual generosity from missed acknowledged purchases many, many times in the past. I've gotten many SD cards for my videos, things like that. I got a bunch more if you need any SD cards. This is the hardware behind the whole operation, is Tom Bean. And what else would you say, like why do you love collecting electronics and things like that so much? Like what's so interesting about it for you? There's a certain amount of opportunity that's really nice to have, so I like to... I have a lot of ideas that I want to work on, but I've found that it's kind of hard to give myself strict requirements. So I have requirements at work where I have to do some things, and if I try to tell myself, okay, I'm going to work on this project this Saturday, and then basically if I do that, my work week turns from, you know, 40 hours a week to, you know, 80 hours a week because I'm trying to work on so much stuff. So I try to leave these projects as more of, like, inspirational-based. And so whenever I have inspiration on a certain idea, I want to be able to work on it. And so it's kind of nice to have the utility. So I bought a Raspberry Pi, for example, with no specific... Raspberry Pi is like a small computer. It's like a... and I also have an Arduino that I got like five years ago or something that I always had with me in college. I had a sixth grade science teacher named Mr. Arduino. What a cool name. Arduino is like one of the most famous microcontrollers. It's like a little computer as well. It's used for, like, robotics. Anyway, so when I have these tools with me on a weekend, when I want to build my own Hey Google or Hey Alexa thing, I can just, like, I have the equipment, and I can just, okay, it's finally time to use this thing that's been collecting dust. And it just, in a way, it enables me to capture my inspiration whenever it comes, because it's kind of hard to, like, force your inspiration into a direction for me. That's really cool. I like that idea of not forcing inspiration. That's something that you taught me at the Klauszal Cafe by the Klauszal pair when we were having that dinner. One of the first nights we were in Budapest, actually, we had this conversation about, I forget the name, Feynman? Richard Feynman. Feynman. And he's like a famous sort of mathematician, programmer type. Physicist. Physicist, okay. I'm completely off on that. The Manhattan Project. His whole thing that you were talking about to me was that he sits down at bars and just falls into these, like, crazy stories and things like that. But, like, one of the main reasons that it happens is that he doesn't force it. He just waits. He doesn't—he says the best way to start a story or whatever is to just, like, sit there and let the story happen, because if you try to force it, it will never happen. If you don't try to force it, it always happens. Yeah, yeah. His little series of short stories, like, What Are You Talking About, Mister Feynman? That's the name of the book, and it's, or something like that. They're amazing, yeah. And they're just a series of a bunch of really entertaining stories that just happened in his life. And that's what he addresses towards the end of the book, is he says, I didn't go out and make these stories. Like, these are not intentional. These are just recounts of things that happened to me. And I think at some point he realized that he was trying to force them to some extent, and he wasn't having as much fun. And he just realized that it's like they happened to him because he was who he was, not because he was trying to make them happen, you know. And yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, that book was super fun to read. It's, well, that's something that you've opened my eyes to as well, is that I think as like a more maybe artistically pursuant person, you sort of think about like computer programmers, for instance, or physicists or mathematicians as, I would say, obviously artistically pursuant person. You think about this group of people, this category of people, initially as perhaps maybe like non-artistic in some way, but then you realize that behind the curtain, like the thirst for figuring things out and understanding the rationality and the functionality behind things is incredibly artistic pursuit. So that's one of the reasons I've always enjoyed having your conversation and I guess Feynman as well, if I could talk to him. Is he dead, alive? I don't know. But the main thing that I would like to say is that his short stories that I think that you've had in your philosophy and have sort of been artificially embedded in my philosophy, it's been very elucidating towards like what the computer programmer mentality mindset is. And what do you think has the life as a computer programmer? How do you view that? Is that something that you always wanted to do, or was that a more gradual thing? Not something I always wanted to do. Like I said, I think my interest in programming came first just from living on a farm, and I like to take things apart. You know, like I took apart the VCR and, you know, this thing that everybody did. You know, I took things apart. I liked taking them apart. I was never very good at putting them together, but it was fun to just be like, Whoa, look at all these gears making these things work. And now they don't work, but that's okay. And also just building things out of wood and just this concept of being able to manifest a creation from nothing, that's beautiful, you know? And I think that's what drew a lot of people to computer programming. What drew me there was just, it's the least barrier to entry to creation from like a mechanical perspective. You don't need screws. You don't need tools. You need a computer. That's it. And you can build the most complicated thing you can imagine. The only thing that stands in your way is a computer. Once you have that, you can do whatever you want. All you need is knowledge. So that's what's super cool about computer programming. And I think that that also answers the creativity question and whether or not they're artists. And I think that that's the root of all. At least computer programming, it's incredibly creative. You know, you're manifesting something from nothing. You're writing words, and you're creating a visual experience or some kind of interaction, and that's super artistic to me. That's really cool. And I always try to think about what would a computer programmer be a hundred years ago? What would a computer programmer be two hundred years ago? What role would they fit in society? Because I think that you have, like, a certain temperament or a certain coalition of characteristics that have come together through a lifetime of experience, and they've manifested themselves in the pursuit of a life as a computer programmer. And then I think, what is the analogy of that in, like, 16th century, 17th century, like on the seven seas on, like, a pirate ship? What do you think a computer programmer would be? What would he be on a pirate ship? Ooh, they would be the dude doing, like, managing the shipment logs, you know, like making sure that on a pirate ship. So I think on a pirate ship, still, like managing, you know, books and balances and, like, what you've stolen and what you've sold and how much it is and how to distribute it to people. I guess that's more of an accountant today. But what I'm getting at is just the algorithmic approach is a very computer science thing. So algorithm is just like a series of instructions, like a recipe is an algorithm. Like, do these steps and you'll end up with this. And that's all a computer program is. It's just an algorithm. And so that's what a computer program would be at any time, somebody who thinks in a stepwise algorithmic pattern. Ah, okay. So that's a very good answer because that now gets me thinking, like, that you found the manifestation of the principle, and it's someone that thinks about things algorithmically in a stepwise manner. And so then who would, on a 17th century pirate ship? In the middle of the Caribbean. Probably the boat builder. Who would be, I don't know if that's a pirate ship. What is a boat builder? Boat builders are insane. Boat builders are crazy. Can you talk about that for a minute while I run to the bathroom about boat builders and if you've ever known any, like, cool ones? Oh, sure. I know almost nothing about boat building, but I'll just riff. My dad is super into this guy—oh, we're talking? My dad has recently discovered YouTube to an extreme degree, let's say. And now instead of TV, I don't think we have a cable provider anymore. Now it's just YouTube. And there's a guy—I also am forgetting this man's name, which is, I also am sorry—but he has a wonderful show, and he has a four-year-long project where he's rebuilding a boat called Tally Ho. I like the name. Yeah, Tally Ho is cool. Built in the late 1800s. It's a wooden boat, and he bought the wooden boat. And what I don't understand—this is a philosophical question as well—if you take a boat out to sea, the boat's name is Jim, and then while at sea, you have to replace every single piece of the boat, like every wooden plank, the mast—you do it incrementally, but you end up replacing the entire boat—do you come back with Jim, or do you just come back with a thing named Jim that actually has none of the original Jim-ness? Yeah, that's interesting. So this is basically what the guy is doing. The boat was built in the late 1800s, and now he's rebuilding the boat. I think some of the original pieces are still there, but he's rebuilding the exact shape of the boat named Tally Ho. So... I think Willie's Natalie. Tally ho. Tally ho. Really cool YouTube series. This is really high production value, really cool guy. It might explode. I don't know. I just walked back to the table with a warning of explosions. Yeah, yeah, it might. I don't really know. I opened one. Yeah, yeah, it's a pop. It's a bottle opener. I only opened one white wine that looked like that, and it blew up. That's a cool thing about natural wines. It's always like a little bit of game of chance. That's part of what we— so we have a natural wine here. What we were saying is that, so in traditional winemaking process, when they are about to bottle or before they bottle, at some point they add sulfates, which kill the— the sulfates act as a preservative, and I'm pretty sure that they kill most of the bacterial yeast that's turning the alcohol— that's turning the sugar. Oh, there we go. Yeah, it's going. A great warning. Yeah, yeah. You could have ruined thousands of dollars of technological equipment on the first podcast. I was really thinking about bringing that or not, because I knew it would probably explode. So yeah, because they don't add sulfates to the wine before they bottle it, the wild yeast is still alive, and so it's eating all the sugars in the bottle, and it's creating pressure, you know, carbon dioxide, and then it makes it explode. So I think— I don't understand how they make it not carbonated, though, because I've had wines that are not carbonated without sulfates. So somehow they get rid— they kill the yeast. Erdekes, erdekes, erdekes, erdekes. What's your favorite Hungarian word? Erdekes. Um, erdekes. Interesting, erdekes. You texted me that the other night. I like erdekes. It's cool. Um. I always find that the Hungarian words that are— Yeah, what's your favorite Hungarian word? Yeah, it's some sediment. Yeah, it's good. It's good. Thank you. And you should try some as well if you want. Okay. Kümé. This wine is like a nice— So this wine is produced in Tokaj, probably the most famous wine region in Hungary, famous for dessert wine. It's partially— so, Willie, you know about the Tokaj wines are made with two different wine varieties. What's the variety? This wine is called a bogi. It's upside down, szőlő. Szőlő, yeah, very Erdély branding. Bogi pétnat, természetes magyarországi furmint pezsgő. Kettős erjesztéses kilenc. And then all sorts of information. So basically, this is a wine producer from Tokaj, and they make this wine in a natural way without adding sulfates or preservatives and stuff like that. And I'm pretty sure, I don't know if this wine's made this way, but this is made in the Georgian way. And that was one of the interesting things about going to Georgia. Exactly. In addition to cats dying left and right, they had amazing, delicious qvevri, I think, cured wine, Kvevri or something like that. Kvevri, yeah, yeah. And what is qvevri wine? It's just like a different— so Georgians say that they had wine before traditional wine because they make wine a different way, not the traditional way with wooden barrels and like that kind of stuff. They make it in clay pots buried in the ground, and it's just like a different fermentation process. But it's still made— it's still, you know, alcoholic juice made from wine. And these people in Tokaj make natural wine the Georgian way. All right, well, let's give it the Tokaj-Georgian wine taste test review. Egészségedre. Egészségedre. Egészségedre. Egészségedre. Nagyon érdekes. It's very brightening. It's sort of like lights up your life a little bit, in a sense, but a little bit sour. Hard to classify it as, you know, you wouldn't classify it as a white wine. No. I mean, you know, if you didn't know any better, if you only knew. It tastes refreshing, delicious, fresh, natural. I've been sold on the Cavery Georgian cave method, which must be a little bit, like, overly difficult to produce, but it's weird, especially at the end. It's kind of like sweet. I don't really know. It's fruity. It's amazing. It's refreshing. It's like apple juice. What would you say on the score? Do you know the days of the week scale? Yeah, I love the days of the week. I feel like it's always very controversial to see how you rate the days of the week. Yeah, it's pretty— Actually, I think, like, for me, a Saturday— Is it a Friday? Is this a Friday? Okay. Yeah, this is a Friday. Friday night, maybe. Friday night. Friday night, yeah. Friday night. Friday, like at, like, 6 p.m., like you're just chilling, having, like, a glass of wine, and then you're not going to drink it the whole night, because that would be, like, a ridiculous decision. You might, but you're not planning on it. You think you could. That's what the most fun thing about— I've basically been drinking a bottle of natural wine every day for the last week and a half, and the biggest, the biggest benefit is I don't feel a thing when I wake up. That's great. I just— Yeah, exactly. I just got— yeah, I just got— got vomiting everywhere. No. Just got to wash a lot of clothes. I just— yeah, the hangover is non-existent in my experience, my brief one week of experience. So everybody who's been doing it for longer, please give me a break. People in the past were never hungover, or— You know, alcoholics, they just were, like, living in the past, and it's part of the romantic tapestry. So it's nice. It's nice that we can do this now with natural wine from Tokaj. The Tokaj wine region in particular is somewhere that I've been really speaking the praises of since I went there in April, May, June. Forget... The Mád... Tokajba, Alexa... Tokaj nekem legjobb hely Magyarországon, mert nagyon-nagyon gyönyörű, és szép, és szép hegyek, szép bor, minden, minden, minden, minden szép. But the Tokaj wine region, like, honestly, is just captivating, and it's amazing. I really hope that you get the chance to go there. I think that you will go on some more of these explosive... Menjünk együtt, really, really well. Menjünk együtt. That sounds like a great plan for the spring. It's nice to get some things on the horizon. You were speaking of sunsets earlier and boats, and I always try to think it's nice to have something on the horizon. It's been a, I don't know, for me, what do you think about the whole corona thing? Like, it's a little bit interesting with disappearing and vanishing horizon points, how everything always gets pushed off a little bit, and one second, like, the horizon's here, it's going to end. Next second it's there. How do you feel about corona, generally speaking, and in terms of where do you think is going to be the end of corona? Is there going to be an end of corona? Is this the new normal? Thoughts? So, to, for the second question, is this the end? I'll leave that, table that for later. Two comments about how is corona thing. I'll start with the positive one. I might have a dissenting opinion. I think the change in... Just lifestyle, societal structure. During COVID has been super rewarding for me because partially relating to this having hobbies that I want to work on, but that kind of are mostly driven by inspiration. And I also love people and talking and conversing, as we've said. And so those often act as kind of like butting heads because I want to go see people and I want to do social things, but at the same time I also have these, you know, interests that are much more internal and much more like kind of hobbies that are solely myself. And so COVID gave me this opportunity to, well, like forced me into this space where the social part of life basically stopped existing, and I just was faced with all this time for inspirational hobbies to occupy, and it was a super explosive time for me to work on these kinds of things, and that was great. Well, that's interesting you say that because you're 26, I'm 29, and I'm just thinking about if that moment happened three years ago for me, yeah, in some senses I would have even—oh, I just would have been grateful for it in general because it is a nice time to harness yourself maybe a slightly earlier. But that also maybe comes from your role as a younger brother in your family and an older brother in my family. I feel like you've always had a little bit of an older soul, which is maybe why we've connected so well. But either way, the whole idea about Corona giving you a harness point for your interests and passions is, I think, very true, and that's something that is more optimistically minded about Corona, that you can really use it as a time to do away with distraction, which is definitely something that I've struggled with, is distraction. But on the other side, so on the flip side of the coin, something I really had to come to terms with before I really got into that really positive experience because of this change was recognizing this change of horizon, because I had plans before Corona. I was kind of sort of planning of moving back to the U.S., and there were vague plans, but there were ideas of what should happen before Corona was even an idea, and then Corona happened and then this societal change happened, but I was unable to really— You know, take the reins and enjoy it, because I was still stuck with that, with the previous horizon, like the horizon of the previous situation, and maybe so stressed because I kept coming back to these concepts like, okay, how do I make that previous plan work? How do I see that same horizon? And I just didn't realize that you're looking in a different direction now. It's, like, different. And when I realized that, that's when it became so fun, when I just recalibrated, you know? Yeah, I think there's obviously a very visceral side to Corona, which is the idea of death and the idea of, you know, the economy grinding to a halt. And these are society-wide things, and often they hit the individual, particularly a closer level if it's someone that you know that has passed away, which can be very, very difficult, as I've experienced, as other people have experienced. But then on the other side, from an individual level, if you look at things with this sort of, as we said, American maybe optimism—I don't know if I want to describe it as American; that's a very American thing to do—but the idea of having a little bit of an optimistic side to your personality, you could think about things in a way where it really does give us a chance to slow down, take a break, take a second, and have an opportunity to think about these plans, because you said before about the plans about going to America. We've always had very similar discussions with Alexa and thought about when do we go. But now Corona, this year in between, has been a great time for me personally to sort of take a little bit of a slower role and a slower approach towards things and realize that life is so precious, and there's so many things that you can do to make yourself a more survivable person and someone that can actually withstand the crazy things that happen throughout all points of human history. And that's what you learn when you study history, is that this type of Corona stuff has been going on for hundreds of years, and cycles and plagues and wars and conflicts, and all that we can really do is make ourselves, like, best fit to survive the certain hand that we're dealt. So I think from an individualist perspective, as you were really sort of alluding to before, and I think it's a very important, important, important mentality to keep during this time period, is that you can Try to withstand things as much as possible, and particularly on an internal psychological perspective. Yeah. I mean, the withstand— so, I think there's one thing that I just have to recognize, is that, like you said, I'm not experiencing most— the largest pitfalls or negative sides of the corona. Like, I don't have too many people close to me that have been impacted. My job is still, you know, very safe because I'm working kind of in an industry that's actually kind of benefiting from this whole change in societal structure. So I'm in the most positive group possible, so it's easy for me to say all these positive things. Maybe there's another wrinkle in the person on the pirate ship that is a computer programmer is that they think algorithmically, and they position themselves to benefit from societal chaos. Is that potentially a rogue element? Maybe, but that wasn't on purpose. Disastrous decisions on land or something like that? Yeah, there are probably some manipulative MFers, you know, if we can say that. That's cool. That's cool. That gives you an extra wrinkle. You're a person in the book. You're not just like the cannon fodder. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm a character. I've got credits in the back. You know, I'm scrolling. For a little while, we were worried, but you made it. Yeah, I made it. I've got at least a line, you know. I'm not a no-liner, you know. Stuntman 3. That's good. That's not me. That's good. Stuntman 3, like Iron Man 3. Like what, the Jarvis? Tell me about Jarvis. You're building like a computer thing. Yeah, yeah. Just reusing the name Jarvis because Avengers is everything and the creativity has grinded to a halt because Marvel is making every good movie. But yeah, Jarvis. I mean, Tony Stark's a cool guy. Let's not avoid it. Yeah, I mean, I was— I was fascinated and frustrated by the fact that these, like, voice interaction computers are so horrible. And all you can do is ask it a terrible joke and have it tell you the weather in the morning. And now it can turn on your lights pretty effectively, but there's just so little that you can talk to a computer for. Like, you use your phone for so much stuff, but you have to use your thumbs, and it's very difficult to, like, get the same amount of utility with your voice. And so I wanted to start building a sort of system to just understand why it's so hard. Or just, I thought, I thought when I started building it, I was like, I'm gonna build it. It's gonna be so much better. And then I built it, and then I realized, okay, this is really hard. Like, there's a reason it doesn't exist better, because it's hard. I love the idea that you hit on just a moment ago about auditory harnessing, like harnessing the power of auditory, because I think that that's very something that I've grown to become a little bit distracted with is just this idea of, like, fixated screen time and how, like, the more you, like, want to be engaged and interactive, and the more you, like, are sort of expending your eyes as a sense. And I don't know if ears might get expended as well if we just listen too much, but it does seem a little bit more meditatively inclined. Like, you feel a little bit more relaxed when you're just sitting there doing the dishes, listening to a podcast. It's a time that you can think about other things. Listening to this podcast. Listening to this podcast, doing the dishes. No, but keep going. So you were saying it's a bit more rewarding to be doing the dishes listening to a podcast versus— Not necessarily more rewarding. Maybe more like just more... Easy in a way. You feel your thoughts flow a little bit looser towards, like, the sides of your brain, and, like, things aren't so, like, I don't know, stressed out. You get a chance to cycle through the background thoughts that only come when you take your mind off the actual manual functions that you're making. Yeah, it's a little bit less demanding on your focus to just speak, you know, maybe. But that's also—well, no, I mean, you were the expert on it, because this is like, you know, we lived in the same house and we always read different books, but I always read the books and you always listened to them. And I tell people—but I tell people that my friend, he listens to books the same way as you or I would read them. I'm listening to a crazy book right now. What's that? It's called The Future of the Mind. Do you know Michio Kaku? That's the Japanese guy. Yeah, crazy. I don't know if he's Japanese. Disclaimer. I don't know if he's Japanese, but he's Asian. It's the person that I'm thinking about I heard or I didn't hear, but I read one that was on your shelf in the 2882 Dohány utca tobacco road apartment, and it was— No, that's Haruki Murakami. I'm very ignorant. Who's this guy? But which one did you read from Haruki Murakami? Because that's a totally different direction, but also fascinating. I don't know. It was someone that was juggling change in their pocket waiting, and they were deaf. In the elevator? I only read— Yeah, in the elevator. Yeah, crazy scene, right? I read—okay, that scene and I turned it—I shut it. This guy is Haruki Murakami. He's a Japanese author, mystical realism, Kafka on the Shore, a bunch of other books. Really cool. He has What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Oh, I listened to that book. Well, that was the nice part about living with Tom, is that I always got snippets when he was, like, himself doing the dishes, listening to his Haruki Murakami What I Talk About Running. You get nice little snippets of information. But audiobooks, you've kind of opened my eyes to those as, like, a format, because I love to read, and I love, like, the tactical, physical feel that you get from a book and the collector's ideal of just, like, having a nice book that's interesting, and even less than the collector's ideal, just feeling something and touching it. But when I listen to books, I get a much different and, like, even richer experience in some regard. Well, it's totally different because you're— I mean, yeah. I think when you read, you're still creating the voice in your head, and the voice has different intonations, and it's, you know, interested about different things, and it creates a different character and all that kind of stuff. With audiobooks, I don't know. To go back to the Haruki, no, Michio Kaku. The, yeah, the guy, the book that I was listening—the book that I'm listening to right now is about the brain. About the brain? It's about the brain. He's a futurist. He's a physicist who focuses on basically the science of the future, like where we're going, like long times from now, hundreds of years, centuries, thousands of years from now. And he kind of theorizes based on where science is going. So you're more of a futurist. I'm more of a historian, I would say. You're more of a futurist. Yeah, yeah. If we were to put ourselves in boxes, and those are the only two choices, yeah, we would be there. You're in a box. Yeah. I'm rolling around in the dirt. You're a historian. That counts. Exactly. We're just rolling around in the dirt. Yeah. But also, audiobooks are amazing. What would you like to do this weekend? Drink Necker wine. Not... just go with the flow. I have no expectations for myself. That's the one thing that's changed since kind of Christmas. Just, I'm really happy with the work I'm doing at work, which leaves me super satisfied to just be afterwards, and it's a really great feeling. That's cool. It's like another step in the direction of never having a priority for my hobbies. That's nice. My hobbies only come to me, like I only do them if I want to. It's the same reason when you want to sit down and watch a show. I'm getting to the point where I just want to sit down and just work, like just do something else. Like I don't want to watch a show. I want to learn about some hobby. And it's a really bizarre feeling, and I don't think I've really had to this degree before. I think it's because work is so stimulating right now. Yeah, and you've had a very different conventional, or a different type of unconventional working experience where I would say that computer programming is like, well, in some respects as a computer programmer, it must feel conventional, but to the rest of us plebeians, like it feels like, yeah, he's a computer programmer. It's a little bit— actually, I think it's more conventional in Budapest. There's a lot of computer programmers. And I think today it's super conventional. Like being a software engineer is kind of like the most vogue thing ever. Exactly. So you're becoming weird. Yeah, it was better to be a pre-vogue computer programmer. I need to become a shoemaker or something just to get back to my roots. Before you were like the guy that knew how to make the explosives for the cannon, and now that gunpowder manufacturing has become more mainstream, you're like just sort of one of the guys that knows how to make the gunpowder for the cannon. Yeah, that's true. That's probably maybe better than the boat builder. It might be the, you know, the cannon expert. Or maybe you went from boat builder to cannon expert. True. You built the boat and then they were like, All right, see you later. You're not going to get any of this plunder. And you're like, Okay, but by the way, I build cannons as well, so bring me on board. I'm a full-stack cannon maker. I'm a full-stack shipbuilder. I go from design, built, to plunder. And now you've gone all the way to becoming a pirate. You're just a pirate on the seven seas. Yeah, no, I'm just stealing people's money on the internet. It's the same thing. Seven seas of the internet. Well, okay, I see what you mean. On the water. On the water. That doesn't work with the internet. I think I took it to the internet, but you meant. I've learned several times with my electronics, I do not work in water. I think between the ages of—what's the worst water incident? Worst water incident with electronics, when I fell into Matt Poulton's pool after we won, like, the state sectional or regional soccer, and I literally had, like, a BlackBerry with a little scrolly ball thing and the things, and I just fell into the pool and it broke. That was the worst experience you've had with water and phones? I would have thought this would be much worse. Yeah, well, there's several. There's several. I've left a few phones in the laundry. I've left one in a toilet accidentally. But these were all problems that I've really rectified. Like, I wouldn't say rectified. They've become less egregious as I've gotten older. I lived a very tormented existence until, like, the age of 25 of just, like, ridiculous, irresponsible action. But, I mean, not in, like, a way that really manifested itself that seriously ever, but certainly in a way that expended a lot of electronic equipment and a few too many wallets, a couple of keys, maybe three licenses. Learned a little bit, though, so that's good. I mean, and now you're 25, 20-whatever you are, and you're doing it less, which is, that's the key. Yeah, it's the ticket. It's the ticket. It's the ticket. What is your score, though, out of 10? Out of 10? I thought it was a Friday. It's a Friday. Oh, what is a Friday out of 10? That's better. Yeah. What is a Friday out of 10? Yeah, that's what's nice about the week scale, is that you don't— I'm gonna try to get Durs on the phone and see if he can explain this. Yes, that's a nice call. Holy days of the week scale. I don't know if he can. Just to preface this call, if Andreas Radlauer does answer, this might be the single funniest person— Not by content, but— Yo, Andres? Yes. One second. Okay. How you doing? You're on a podcast with me and Bean. No way. Yeah, dude. Right now, literally just one, and his name is Ray, and he's sitting next to us frantically trying to decide if the Rodecaster Pro is connected to Bluetooth, and it says that it is on my phone. And I think that the only question that I would have— If the phone has to be turned out for you. Would be, what is the days of the week scale? Days of the week scale, my, my, my. How long do you have— Wait, wait. Before you give your full answer, I think Ray just figured out the solution. Wait, there's— wait, wait for— wait for— Okay. Days of the week are meant to communicate value, and it's complex and, frankly, a bit idiosyncratic to each person. So I think we can all agree Monday is unquestionably the shittiest day of the week. So, and you can really apply it to anything. Like, if you're talking about girls, for example, a girl can be a Monday if she just really has nothing going for her, you know, like not attractive in a conventional sense, not even like something a little bit, you know, off the run. You know, but also is, like, pretty boring and just, you know, very few redeeming qualities. Yes. So you can go through each day of the week. What about in, like, a sense of non-girl situations? What are, like, the things that it manifests itself in, like a food review, for instance? Yeah, what's a food Monday for you? Food Monday? I mean, I think Monday is obvious. I think what you want to do is, like, go for, like, a Wednesday. So, like, Wednesday has a few things going for it. Like, some people really don't like it because Wednesday is the furthest from the weekend, right? So, like, you don't have any stories from last weekend, and you're not really—at Thursday, where it becomes appropriate to start talking about next weekend's plans. However, for example, if you're, like, Willie Gevertz and Liverpool plays Champions League on a Wednesday, like, you've found something there that, like, keeps you coming back a little bit. So it's like, I don't know, Bean, what's a food that, like, you don't really like, but once in a while you're like, I could go for a little bit of that. Like, I've got a little craving. Like Fo? Twizzlers. Like macaroni and cheese. Mac and cheese. No, pho is more like a Saturday. Pho is a Saturday. Twizzlers are generally pretty— Twizzlers. That's a good Wednesday. That's when I see someone eating one and I'm like, That actually looks pretty good. All right, actually the biggest, I think it's pretty agreeable that, like, Saturday is the best, Friday is the second best, maybe Thursday is third best. Wednesday might be fourth best, depending on what you feel about hump day, if it's, like, really a hump day and it sucks, or if it's, like, kind of fun and Champions League-y. But, like, what the big debate that I want settled by you is the main reason that I called you, actually, is what is the difference between a Monday or a Tuesday? Tuesday's amazing. They called in on the, as the expert on this, I feel like I should have a better idea, but I don't think I've talked about the days of the week scale for six years. That is not true. That is not true. I remember specifically talking about it with you when we had that delicious breakfast on the banks of the Danube in Budapest. What day of the week was that? That might have been like a Tuesday, probably. Tuesday. I think that's why the conversation came up. We were like, This is a fucking good Tuesday. This is the best Tuesday I've ever had. It might be the best. Tuesdays go, dude. I mean, it's a low bar. It's a low, low bar. I feel like—

Tuesdays are better than Mondays. I mean, Mondays are just the worst. All right, that's perfect. That's the type of clarity that we called you for. Thank you very much, Andres, and we'll talk to you soon, hopefully on another Tuesday. Tacos on Tuesday. Taco Tuesday. That's true. That's why they need all the branding. All right, see you later. Thank you. One thing I will say about the days of the week scale is what's nice versus, you know, everybody knows that nine is one less than ten, eight, two, whatever. With days of the week, you're embracing the imperfection of communication. So when I say I love this thing to somebody who never says they love things, that's a ten out of a— that's a huge statement. To someone who says they love it to everything, it's like, okay, they don't really know what that means. With the days of the week scale, you're embracing that this rating means nothing. It means something to me, and to you it means something totally different. That's what's kind of nice. It's less pressure to say that this wine is a Friday. Yeah, that is the days of the week scale. That's what's nice about it. All right, so this wine plugs in at like a Friday night, and is there anything else that you remember about our two and a half years of, like, living together that would you say stuck out to you as a particularly nice moment? What about the time that I came back to the house and you— Define living together, first of all, before you— Well, that's what always people wanted to know. I've gotten a lot of serious inquisitions about whether or not we were in, like, a romantic relationship. It's still a mystery, and we're going to leave it that way. That's what I told people as well. Yeah, yeah. Just throw them off balance, see what they think. Yeah, yeah, keep them off balance, exactly. And now you're still off balance. So am I. Yeah. What happened was, one thing was—this is gonna sound bad—but you teaching me that cold showers not a big deal. A cold shower is not a fucking big deal. You used to take cold showers by choice. We had a water heater. It worked. Willie, I would just hear him in the shower just fucking going like—like just, like, obviously suffering from how horribly not fun it was to be in a cold shower. And I would just ask him, like, Dude, what was going on in there? And you would just be like, I'd just take cold showers because— I now want to—I want people to know that I do take hot showers now. I think that's very important that we establish that as a main fact. But the beautiful thing was—you, so why were you taking cold showers then? The reason that I took cold showers originally was that when I was living in London the year before I came to Budapest in 2017 with Elliot, my roommate, English guy, great guy, great guy. Elliot was just like a salt-of-the-earth awesome person that is a wizard about, like, sustainable fashion. And he was growing, like, kelp in my sink to make, like, the next new revolutionary textile. And he taught me a lot, a lot. Elliot taught me so much about having a much more, like, visceral attitude, because that's what I think something that I identify with the British and the Hungarians. If you go back to, like, Széchenyi, István, he lived in England, and he always, like, took a lot from the English. And the English are just much more, like, matter-of-fact about things. They're not too, like, caught up in the ridiculous, over-caffeinated American romanticism. They have a much more, as I said, visceral mentality. Perhaps that comes from, like, being a fallen empire, I don't know, but it was— What do you mean by visceral? Like, maybe just more, like, cerebral is a better word. Just more able to, like, analyze the situation and just, like, pick something out, go in that direction, not get caught up with all the, like, gung-ho, here we go type of thing. And the Brits, to me, that's why, like, I love the wit of, like, the Brits and the Irish. They have a very, like, critical, more, you know, more dissecting, more... Persnickety. And that's why I took cold showers, was that when I lived with Elliot, our shower heater broke for literally like three months. We had a whole bunch of different problems in that apartment. Most of them were caused by me. Another situation with water. So we had this lady living downstairs, living or living, I don't know, but her name was Natasha, Tosh, Tash. And she was the victim, I would say, of my irresponsibility because the washer dryer was in my room, and it was like a really aggressive washer dryer, and it was very, very, very loud and noisy. And I just made the assumption that, like, I could move it, basically. So I just one day went back there and, like, looked down behind the back thing and poked my head under the weird manufactured closet that it was built in, decided to unscrew the water faucet, took it out. All of a sudden, the shit is just flooding everywhere, like everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. Elliot was in the shower at the time, and I remember knocking on the door. He's like, Mate, what? And I was just like, I think I fucked up the washing machine. And he's like, All right, I'm coming out. And he came out, and he looks— I'm just sitting there with a garbage bag filled up to the fucking brim, and all of a sudden we get a knock on our door, and it's the lady downstairs, Tash, and she's like, What's going on? What's going on? What the fuck is going on? What are you doing? And Elliot answers the door, and he's like pretty smooth about it. He's like, Oh, I'm just having some problems with the wash machine. I think I remember I hear myself saying, like, Elliot, I got it, I got it, it's all good. He comes back in, he's like, All right, mate, I've just told her she's gone downstairs, and I'm sitting there with, like, a garbage bag filled with water to the brim. And we shut off the faucet in the back, and then as Elliot gets in, the garbage bag breaks and floods the entire downstairs of Tash's apartment. And she comes running, What the fuck are you doing? This is a fucking apartment. Who the hell do you think you lads are? And it was just like a nightmare for the next year of just constant complaints from her to our landlord. But besides that, I loved, loved living in London, like really on the edge of London Fields, beautiful park in East London, amazing trees, and that was really where I just fell in love with, like, the artistic life, was just living in London with Elliot. And so I just wanted to say that, and I don't know. But that's what you learned from Elliot, the importance of water. I learned from you the, how easy it is to just throw warm showers by the wayside, and when carbon monoxide alarms started going off in our apartment at random— Yeah, that was also true. We had a lot of problems. I just decided, well, who needs hot water? We turned the hot water heater off, and I took cold showers for like three months, and it was a beautiful experience. Yeah, but the carbon monoxide alarms still kept going. And then we turned it on, the guy came, fixed it, and then we turned it back on, and that's why we were so— they kept going off, the carbon monoxide, and we were just, okay, more cold showers, and I just turned it off. And because we were great tenants. We were great tenants. Great tenants. We don't care. Throw it out there, great tenants. The paint was falling off the roof, and we were like, well, we don't really want you to come over. We're happy with just being alone. To be fair, our guy, Janos, he didn't ever really come, so what can he do? Yeah, hey, Janos, we got carbon monoxide here. Can you come fix that water heater? He's like, yeah, I'll be there in two months. Okay. That might be why we're so well dispositioned for the Corona lifestyle, because we had a constant blaring alarm of death over our heads at all times, and now we've grown into the role. Exactly, exactly. All right, there you go. There you go. That was here. It was really not that bad. Our living experience together was like, honestly, 99.8 percent of the time incredibly delightful. It was very much our fault that it wasn't fixed. Tom actually met his girlfriend across the street from our apartment because she worked in a cafe that, like, literally you could see probably into each other's windows. Oh yeah, I could totally see her working. Romeo and Juliet type thing, and it was kind of, that probably put the rubber stamp on the whole thing that it was so nice. Yeah, we met. There was a new cafe that opened across the street, and that was one of our biggest complaints of living there on Dohány Street, is that there was almost no food, really. Igen, met, met, met, met. ... Negyes és Hatás ... mellett van. We lived above the 4-6 line, and that was very—it was like less bully district than inside the 4-6 line is, I would say, non-bully. In between Városliget és Negyes és Hatás ... között van. In between the 4-6 and the Városliget, the city park. So that really, for us, made it like a little bit more of a refuge than traditional Pest, I say, would be, because I often say to people, Oh, I used to live in Pest, I used to live in... and they're just like, Oh, too noisy for me. Or like, Oh, some people say, Oh, why don't you live there now? It's so good, so good. What are you, a Buda or are you a Pest guy? Because right now you've sort of cemented yourself as a Pest guy. We both had a chance to pick a second-generation Budapest apartment. We did. You went on the Pest side, I went on the Buda side. I would say if I were to get another apartment here in Budapest, it will be on the Buda side. It doesn't mean I'm a Buda man. Okay, that's good to know. I think there's huge value to living in Pest, the just accessibility to everything. I live currently like a five-minute walk from Városliget, and I think Városliget is one of the most underrated parks. Super cool to be in the city, just so, you know, ten-minute walk from anything you want, you know, any of your deepest desires in terms of nightlife. That's amazing. But Buda is so beautiful and so cool. I mean, they both have such awesome benefits, it's hard to beat. Yeah, that's true. That's very true. I think that I know you would, like, love and fall in love with Buda, like the second you move there. But I also remember and have, like, a very nostalgic feeling for when I had lived in Pest, because you get a little bit more of an interesting city-based experience. Buda is a little bit more like countryside, suburban, really, I would say. And that's probably why I love it, because I grew up in the suburbs in New York. And I think that Buda, for me, really, especially when you talk about, like, Tizenkettő kerület, 12th district, or Tizenegy kerület, 11th district, I live in the Castle District, right behind the castle, so it's a little bit atypical. But when you get into the hills and you get into those regions, there's a very suburban-type feel, and you get a little bit more removed from the city. So I think moving into your upper twenties, maybe for me Buda's been better. But when I remember living in Pest, I just have fond memories of, like, not even necessarily, like, the party tourist aspect, because I think you get, like, a little bit sick of that pretty soon, which is why I was glad to live above the 4-6 line. But you still have a more in reach of very easy access to bars, restaurants, things of that nature. Not as important now because of Corona. That was going to say. That changes this question so much. So that's actually interesting. Like, Pest post-Corona. How is Pest post-Corona? We want to move so badly, basically. Really? Yeah. I mean, now living in Pest makes no sense, because you spend all of your time at home. And what makes—why does it make sense to spend every waking hour in a freaking four-walled box in the middle of, you know, a city? And if you go outside, it's just smelly, and there's cars everywhere, and it's dirty, and it's like you have no, like, to get to a refuge, it's—and you work all your time. So the nice thing when you're living in the city in normal life, you know, you commute to work. That's something that, you know, before COVID, it was like, Ah, to commute to work. And now it's like, Oh, sweet, I get to go outside and, like, go to a different setting, and that's super cool now. So I think that that's another thing that can be cool about COVID is you realize that commuting to work is actually really beautiful. You don't have to spend every waking moment at home. That would actually be detrimental in the end, which is what we're seeing now if your home isn't super welcoming for— Well, my internet's been so bad recently, I can't even tell you. It's driving me crazy. I've spent, like, probably upwards of 70,000 forints worth of data in, like, the past month, and it's just because my internet is, like, unusable. It's not just me. It's not just our apartment. It's, like, the downstairs neighbors. It was the provider. Nemtudom. Igazából nemtudom. No, Alexa handles the internet stuff, so I think that we're gonna get it rectified, but it's just gonna be very frustrating until we don't. But at the same time, what can you do? What can you do? It's not that bad. It's, like, a very minor, minor, minor, minor inconvenience. I mean, it makes you realize that it's not that— I mean, if you're working and your internet at home breaks down, it's like, it's not that minor. Yeah, that's true. But, I mean, it just shows you how dependent, we're dependent. We're dependent. But that goes back to, like, the whole idea of Robinson Crusoe, because that is, like, a book that I think you introduced into my life, which is apparently the first novel that was ever written. Which Eric introduced into my life. Oh, Eric, the guy, the blonde guy. He's taller than you. The blonde guy, yeah. The not adopted brother. The not adopted brother. Yeah. Full circle. He introduced me to Robinson Crusoe. He was like, It's a tough read, but it's a wonderful experience, I think. I said the same thing to you, basically. So Eric Trojan horsed me into Robinson Crusoe. Yes. Can I call one more person? Yeah. To ask them about the Trojan horse? Because I— Don't put him on speakerphone. I think that was a problem. Oh, that was the problem. Okay, cool. Working it out. I'm glad to know that it was my fault. It was your phone's fault, Willie. Maybe it was the Wi‑Fi as well. It was. I mean, his home Wi‑Fi, not the Wi‑Fi. It was the guy that I'm about to call's fault. There it is. Oh my God. If he answers, another beautiful human being. He sent me the best message like two days ago. He might be at work right now. No, he should answer anyway. He sent me such a funny message. I almost want to read it. I talked to him last night as well. There's too much context. Let's ask him if he can take a bathroom break, and then we'll call him back. But I talked to Phil last night. No way. And he said a lot of things about—he wanted to make a podcast with us, and I think that me and you have had a lot of discussions about doing a podcast in the past. We tried. We made a couple episodes. We made a recording of a podcast. We ended up just drinking way too much rum. Just really drunk. It was a pirate podcast. The night that you came back with the podcast, how many bottles of rum did we have? I brought back like five bottles of rum. There was the 23-year, the 13-year, the 18-year. It was all different countries. Yeah. Whatever that. Yeah, I don't even remember. And Robinson Crusoe was the book that we wanted to talk about. Yeah, that was the point. And what did you love about Robinson Crusoe? Because I think I know what I loved about it. I love the idea that, like, Robinson, he just goes off into this far-fetched land, and, like, a bunch of crazy shit happens to him. His boat sinks. He gets all sorts of scrambled eggs. Doesn't know what's going on. And he just always adapts. Yeah, that's what I would say is my favorite part. Yeah, I mean, the book itself is fascinating because of what you said. He's a super adaptable and smart fellow, and he just creates something out of nothing. The same kind of principle, just being resourceful and flexible, and he just does a good job. But what really made me love it is I started looking up literary analyses of Robinson Crusoe, and I watched some, like, University of London recorded class about Robinson Crusoe, and I started to learn—I love literary principles, like what you did in high school when you broke down a book from, like, a literary lens and you started, you know, putting on different glasses, like, you know, the feminist lens and the Marxist lens, and you could, like, draw different conclusions from the same kind of text based on how you looked at it. Anyway, that was what this class was doing, and the teacher, the professor, was talking about how back when that book was written, which I think was like 16, 17, 1800s, and it was written by an author who was really good friends with a seaman at the time who was on boats that were actually going around the world and doing the trade routes, and so it was real stories. And he was an artist who was creative who was being fueled by true stories. So it wasn't just totally made up. It was made up, but it was, you know, fueled by true stories. And the reason, I think when it was initially released, it maybe wasn't that popular, but at the time was when the New World was discovered, so this idea of exploration and finding new things was super in vogue. And the book was that. The main character was a guy who wanted to see the new world, and then he took a risk, and it ended up going horribly because he got stranded on an island by himself, but then he ended up surviving. So he took a risk, he failed, and then he ended up making a completely new story, which is kind of the story of the New World. It's, like, totally uncertain, but it's a new world that you have no idea. So everybody was into this idea of exploring. Because I'm thinking now that you say that, like, is that why, like, we're Americans and we're so optimistic about things, for instance, that we've just been, like, a derivative of these, like, New World standards, or alternatively— Is it because you and I think about these type of things that we have, like, a little bit more of this mentality of being like, are we thinking about this consciously as individuals, or is this an American thing? I think it's a generational thing. So that was what was cool about the class, is that it was so popular in the 1600s, 1700s when it was released, because that was the mentality of the time. It was explore, new world, let's do stuff. Now today, in like late 2000s, 2010, with social media and, like, travel bloggers and all this stuff, it's like a resurgence of the same exact mentality of explore, see the world, like, go see what's so beautiful out there. Do you think that there's really been that much of a gap between the 17th century and today? Yeah. Or is this more of a recurring theme? I think it's a social media thing. You think it's a social media thing? I mean, travel bloggers, I don't think—I mean, yeah, it was kind of cool, like Lonely, but it was niche. Lonely Planet before social media was, that was, you know, kind of—I don't know, from my perspective, like when we went to Italy, that was what my mom used to find the places to go and all that stuff. And now imagine going to travel to Italy now, like you would be so flooded with information, it would be insane. Yeah, everybody's a travel blogger because it's so popular. And that's what actually dissuaded me from, like, really going down more of the route towards, like, travel blogger, because I think when I moved down here, I really—but the thing is, I never wanted to be a travel blogger. If I'm really honest with myself, I never wanted that. But it sort of, like, manifested itself as, like, exactly the thing to do. Maybe that's the same with, like, what you were saying with computer programmer, is we sort of latched on these, like, podcasts as a way to maybe, like, harness a skill set, and now it's been a little bit, I don't know, more tempered by the idea that everyone's doing it and it's not as unique. I don't know. I mean, things are popular for a reason. So, I mean, in a way, it's, like, kind of good to follow these super popular trends, but—and there's, you know... There's so many undercurrents, and I think you've caught a super freaking cool undercurrent of the whole thing, why travel is cool in the first place. Like, travel blogging became cool because people are like, Oh, let's travel for no other reason but let's travel. And then that is empty, though. The branding ruined it. Like, yeah, yeah. It was popular for reasons, but it became overpopular for surface-level reasons that weren't that deep. And I think that you've discovered one of the many super cool deep reasons for travel, which is the super insane, like, context and, like, creative inspiration you can experience from the historical, like, backdrop. Well, thank you for saying that. I appreciate that. I think that it's interesting to look at the whole scope of, like, travel and discovery, and you always worry about being, I guess, a little bit of, like, a poser or something. And I think this is something that always everyone worries about because you see, like, little literary references in, like, a Hemingway book or a Fitzgerald book, and there's always little side characters that's, like, a poser, and he's, like, peering in. They make a little commentary about it. And I think it's an interesting way, like, maybe they're just thinking that when they're writing, like, Oh, okay, this is the type of person, like, I don't really want to be, or whatever. So you always worry about it. Like, are you just going to be, like, a travel blogger or someone that's leeching onto things? But then that's what I wonder about with, like, Anthony Bourdain, for instance, because that's someone that's made, like, a pretty big impact on my life. I would say he was, like, the archetypical sort of new media travel experience guy. And then all of a sudden he's 61 and he kills himself, and it's sort of like an interesting, like, reference to look through, like— That life of sort of ultimate ideal, everyone wants to be an Anthony Bourdain because he gets to travel and see the world. So then I wonder, is that something that he was personally, like— You would consider Anthony Bourdain like the new media, like kind of the figurehead of...? I would say that—I don't know. I would think that, like, the Instagram person who posts fancy pictures of nice food. But because the difference with Anthony Bourdain is he's a chef, right? Yeah, and he's rooted in food making. And that's a very good point. He is someone with an actual skill set. And he explored the other undercurrent. So you're talking about history. He found the real undercurrent of travel. Like, he was like, Look at all the amazing novel food that's around the world. Yeah, and he was so good at food that he brought it to life in a real colorful way, which is what you're doing with history. But no, that's why I feel like a complete fraud, because, like, he actually had, like, a real, like, tangible talent. And, like, I always say, like, the people that ask me, like, Why are they so interested? or, Why—you had some news articles and stuff and stuff— and I said, I don't know. Like, they're just interested because I'm interested in Hungary. And that feels like my only talent. Whereas, like, Anthony— What is a historian now? I mean, other than being interested in— Someone that rolls around in the dirt. Right. Yeah, exactly. I mean, Anthony Bourdain, the only difference is that he's super interested in cooking, and he can show you that he can make a dish. The only thing you can do is that you can show people that you know what history is. And what do you think about the fact that he killed himself? Like, is that— I don't know, I didn't— I read his book, The Kitchen Confidential, which is super cool. I mean, I listened to the first, like, three fourths, but I didn't get to the end, and I know he had a lot of problems with drugs, and I think he ended up overdosing. He didn't kill himself. Did he kill himself? He committed suicide, yeah. I don't know. I mean, it's always an open question. You never know. With a media figure, who knows what happened? Yeah, I mean, I hear he had a crazy wife. You know, there's a lot of different things that can happen when you're, like, living in, I guess, a life of celebrity that you don't really know the true story. And that's also interesting with this idea of celebrity, is that I've thought about, like, in history, like back to the ancient Romans, you have all these, like— testaments to the fact that this was a very celebrity-driven society, whether you talk about the ancient gladiators or the idea that they had these statues that apparently weren't just pale white marble, but covered in paint. Really? And I think, yeah, this idea of, like, the neoclassical pale white structural ideal—really? If you look at the pigment tracing and everything on the actual structure, not true. They're all painted? Like the David? The David was painted? No, the David, because that's neoclassical, that's Renaissance era, and that was like a recreation of what had been back then. So they thought, because they didn't have the techniques that we do today of analyzing, like, analytically analyzing things—calm down—and talk about the statues, they were not as, like, colorful as they actually were. Uh-huh. And so, like, it's interesting to think about, like, maybe the Romans, they had just as tacky of, like, an Instagram-supersaturated culture that we did. Hey, this is something I actually took a history of Rome class, and it was probably the most influential class I took at Middlebury, and one of the most. And the only paper—I was always bad at writing papers—the only paper that I was truly spoken to by, and I was like, holy shnikes, this is insane. I want to do this more. I hated writing papers, but it was about the gladiators and just the impact of sports, organized sports, and how that calmed the masses. And I think today—Bread and circuses. Organized—yeah, yeah. Organized sports are ridiculous. Ridiculous. I think it's insane to, like, from a bird's-eye view, conceptually, ridiculous. Can you riff on organized sports for one more moment while I embarrassingly go to the bathroom a second time before you went once? Yeah, okay, that sounds good. So I think—so I don't really know. Just I'm always shocked by the fact when you watch an organized game of soccer or basketball, right. And you realize that these people, men, women, are playing this sport, and it's kind of hard to, like, explain, but in a stadium with 80,000 people, all these people paid tickets to come watch this arbitrary decision of what is winning. So they're just like, okay, we have to put the circular ball through the hoop or through the thing. And it's just like, we want to watch the people play the game. It's like when you do work to provide some kind of service for people, like if you're running a company that collects trash, like that's very much tangible benefit to your life. Your house doesn't smell like trash. Or, you know, Uber. You're running a service that gets you from point A to point B. All sports is, and it's not even—it's different than acting and doing movies. They're not even, like, portraying real life. They're just playing an arbitrary game. And their whole life, all the athletes, their whole life is, I don't know, it's just weird. To what you were saying before, I think it's just the derivative of, like, needing to have, like, someone conquer someone else, because based on the old school, it was to the death. Yeah. Back in the day, it was to the death, and we need to feed that. Yes. And so it's a different class than entertainment. Like, it's different than watching a movie. It's different than—you're actually doing it for kind of a different primal reason of conquering, which is weird. It's just weird. And I don't think we consciously understand that today. And I think it's just there's been this undercurrent that we don't understand, and this is why sports are so cool. And people are crazy into sports. People are so much more into sports than they are into movies. Like you won't have people fighting each other over, like, a Denzel Washington—like, whether or not they're fans to Denzel Washington, but they will kill each other if they're—I mean, not kill each other, but I mean maybe—just like crazy shit that people do because of sports teams, and it's crazy. I have a conflict about everything. You want me to— I have to go to the bathroom. You want to take my seat? No, no, no. I do have to go to the bathroom. I'll just put my two cents in. I don't know. You know, he's got a point there in regards to this. Did you understand, like, from the beginning he was talking about, like, how, you know, back in the day where it was like people were basically—it was a life or death situation. You have these two gladiators in space, and they were both basically, as a game, who could survive this process, and you had a winner, you had a loser. So there's been an evolution from the days of the gladiators until the present day of just people facing up against each other with literally something to fight for that could be life or death. And now that's manifested itself into, like, an NFL stadium in terms of, like, people watching, like people clash helmets and butt heads, and, like, actually that's life or death also. It's just a little bit more gradual. It's not necessarily dying at the sword. That's actually very interesting to me, is, like, the idea of, like, back in the day there's a little bit more of a romantic decision-making process to become a gladiator, but you didn't really have a decision because you were forced to do it. So it's similar, though. It's almost similar in that space. I mean, because, I mean, if you think about, like, okay, maybe basketball and football are the same, but what is the most popular sport, or what is the most growing sport right now? UFC. Yeah. That's a life or death situation. The only thing that's saving the guy's life is the person that's in the—the third person that's in that triad, right? Exactly. That's true. So it's the same concept, really, and people get off on that, and it's the fastest growing sport in the last three, four years. So I think the primal aspect of it is, like, they really—people want to experience not just the win or lose, but the feeling of you, you're living, you're dying, so to speak, even theoretically. You're crying as a fan because you're— Friend or brother or whoever that person is is, like, lost or died, per se. So you have these people on this side, and you're happy about them crying over there because you're a winner. It's like this dynamic that's— Well, that brings in the whole idea of, like, who is the real person that we're talking about here, the athlete or the audience? Yeah. And you look in, like, a poor community somewhere, anywhere in the world, whether it's American football down south or soccer in Buenos Aires, Argentina, or a kid that's growing up in the Balkans or something like that. The idea to become a professional athlete is very much something that is put into motion, given ignition by ability to take yourself out of the working class of society, which can feel like the only option that you have. And then you see how that manifests itself back in ancient Rome as the person that became the gladiator, whether through coercion via slavery or through the opposite of coercion, which is something that I cannot reference right now if I even had a moment to think about because of that delicious white wine that we had before, that Tokaj natural wine. And right now I just saw Ray, and he is popping open a bottle of red, vörös bor, naturalis. Little Fred, kish Fred. I don't know. Nagy Fred. Nem. I did not bring. This is big Fred. This is big Fred. Okay. Because I knew that this was going to get real, so I decided that big Fred was more appropriate. I'm actually glad that you brought big Fred. Yeah, me too. Never had this one before. Really excited. Wow, the world is so different with headphones on. Yeah, it's much different. It's, like, weird. It kind of makes me want to only— Well, here's the big Fred. Yeah, it's Fred. To Ray. To Ray for having us. It's been a really amazing experience. Best podcast I've ever done. Best podcast. First one. First one. No, no. Oh, we did a few. We've tried. This is so much better than when we tried. Yeah, it's so much better. We were trying to do too much on the background. Now we have Ray here to set up the nice microphones. We can hear each other speak. It's a whole new experience, a whole new ballgame. Yeah. I still haven't tasted the wine. It's good. Oh, yeah. Fred actually is also a nickname for Ferenc, kind of, because Ferencváros is a football team, and we are in Ferencváros right now, and they call Ferencváros Fradi. And so I think that that can be coalesced into Freddy. But what is Ferenc? Ferenc is more like Frank. Yeah, so it's a name. What's Frank City? Why Ferencváros means city, so Ferenc. Ferencváros is Frank City. It's Frank City. But who's Frank? Ferenc. Yeah, but who is Ferenc? He was Francis I, who was the king of Hungary after Károly Gyula. 1792, I. I feel like I'm missing a king in between, but he was the emperor, the first emperor of Hungary after the Holy Roman Empire was disbanded. Ferenc was the emperor, and he was the emperor in the buildup until Ferdinand V, Útodik Ferdinand, and then that led to the War of 1848, Negyvennyolc. So Ferenc, not a great king, but we love Ferencváros all the same. So, at the risk of getting too detailed, what's Bird's-eye Hungarian history? Can you toss it at me? I've asked this before. So we have Roman Empire, which is like 500 to 1500. No, Roman Empire is the year basically like 49 BC until 420, 430 AD, Attila the Hun comes in, conquers the Romans. So 420 AD, okay, and then Attila. Roman Empire collapses 476. Okay, so there's like basically like a little overlap between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the instigation of Attila and his consolidation of a mini Hunic empire, 450 thereabouts, 550 thereabouts. After Attila dies, the whole empire collapses. There's a huge vacuum of power. The Avars come in between the years like 550, 896, mixed bag Avar Empire. Avar. Avar. Alexa used to live. Avar also means in Hungarian fallen leaves. Okay, okay. And the Avars, also fallen leaves, they fell away and left the power vacuum. We're talking like 700s. All of a sudden the Magyars come in from the Ukrainian steppe land, coming in through a series of migrations, a couple hundred years, 896, the year that they say the Honfoglalás occurred. The Magyar Empire, the Arpads, the kings from the King István. He was instituted as the first official Christian king of Hungary in the year 1000 on the nose. Next 300 years— First Christian king of Hungary in the year 1000. He was the first Christianized king of Hungary, and it was a big debate for a while whether the Hungarians would go Western towards Rome, Catholicism, or whether they would go Eastern. Philosophically or like— No, like who was going to be— Taking land. No, the religion, because Byzantine... Time and Rome, they had a split, the schism, in like the 11th century, maybe early 12th century. All of a sudden you have Catholic Church, the Pope, and you have the leader of the Eastern Byzantine Church, Byzantium. And Hungary was there in the middle. And there was a lot more connection between the Greek kings and Hungary back in the day. For instance, Harmadik Béla, he married a Greek wife. He almost became literally the Byzantine emperor. Oh, Philly. In the middle of that, we have Phil calling us. Phil's coming back. Should I pick up the phone? Yeah, yeah, we should. Phil's great. Do you remember what you called him for in the first place? No idea. Okay. Hey, Phil. How you doing? Yeah, you're on. Yeah, you're on. Okay, you're on. Oh, wow, this is sick. This is sick. You sound legit. Welcome to the pod. Welcome to the pod. Oh, Beans? Bean's here. What's up, dude? Not much, man. What's up, man? Not much. Nice, dude. Nice. My friend. Just talking to Matthew. He's on the treadmill right now. Matthew's? Yeah, I'm teaching at a special ed school right now. Oh, great. Nice. And yeah, it's been pretty sweet. But yeah, Matthew's on a treadmill right now, yeah. But yeah, what's going on, dude? So we're having a pod right now. We're talking all about Hungarian history, natural wine, things of like a philosophical sort, Robinson Crusoe and the Seven Seas, this, that, the other thing. Oh, wow. Yeah, we actually, you know who we called before was Ders. We called him about the days of the week scale, and he gave us a very funny clarification on whether Monday or Tuesday was the better day of the week. Do you have any input on that? What would you prefer, Monday or Tuesday? I mean, on paper, Monday is the worst day, but I find myself every week really hating Tuesdays more than anything. You know, it's just one of those weird things, you know? That's a much more erudite answer, or erudite, I don't know. Monday. What did Durs say? Durs, I think he said Monday was just like the fucking worst. So, like, Monday, obvious. I mean, I agree with him, actually, but not really. I don't know. What is the worst day of the week scale? It's so... fucking Sundays are the worst. You wake up and you're hungover and your whole day ruined. Sunday sucks. Those could also... Sunday's the most depressing. Sunday's the best. But it could also be the best. It could also be the best. Yeah, yeah, true. Free day. I guess depends on how your life's going, you know? Yeah, that's true. If you don't like work, you know, you're gonna really hate Sundays. That's true. And what are your thoughts on the recent election of Joe Biden? Oh, that's a really good question. I mean, I'm glad Trump's out of there, you know? That's kind of what we said before. Yeah, like Trump, you know, he just had to get him out. You didn't really care too much about the inner workings. I happen, being from New York, and this is something that I tell people, I've always thought that Donald Trump was a son of a bitch. He's just kind of like a slick, snake oil salesman. It used to be funny reality TV show host. All of a sudden has control of the nuclear weapons. Not so nice anymore. Either way, you just have to get him out of there. And what do you think, what about the direction that America is going into now? Like, how do you feel? Optimistic, pessimistic? Being in America, let's clarify that Phil is currently in America. Yeah, Phil, where are you calling from? Right. Where is this? Yeah, I'm calling from Bedford, Massachusetts. It's a state located in the northeastern part of the U.S., if your viewers have looked at a map of the U.S. It was actually, it was the first state— no, it was Virginia, actually. But yeah, I'm calling from Massachusetts. But, I mean, yeah, the election was crazy, man. It was crazy. I'm just happy Biden's in there. I don't know, see, I forget your question now. But what about as a maybe final or second-to-final penultimate question, what do you think about Jupiter? Okay. Oh, dude, I think— okay, so I can go off on this. So, the thing about the gas giants is that they tell you that they're gas giants, but, like, until you look into it, you don't realize that, like, that whole planet is just gas. Like, if you landed on that, like, you wouldn't be landing on a planet. Like, you'd be on gas, dude. Like, I've had images of, like, you know, I fantasized about going to Jupiter, and, like, I've always imagined, I've always imagined that, like, I'd be, like, kind of like on, like, an orange, like, dusty rock. But no, like, the dream of going to Jupiter is dead. Like, you can't go to Jupiter. It's just gas. Wait, Phil, let me maybe reignite some of your dreams right now, because there are some, I think, like, significant and realistic predictions from science that life could easily exist on gas giants as well. They just don't exist in our solar system because of reasons. It's just chance. What? But it's, like, very possible that different types of life, probably, I mean, still organic-based life, but they just, they, you know, they metabolize and do things, like organisms would live in a different sort of branch in gas giants. So they just like chill in the gas? I think they highly rely on, like, helium and other gases that are super prevalent in gas giants. Well, that's kind of true, actually. That is so cool. You have to read Red Rising. We Are Bob. We Are Bob. We Are Bob. Amazing, amazing book. You would love it. Yeah, that's a sick title. Bob is also a very, like, Phil-like name. Like Phil, Bob, they kind of—even Tom, even Tom. My brothers always make fun of me because my five best friends from college were Tom, Jack, Chris, Sam.

It’s like you made them up. Like they never existed. Tom, Jack. Your brother thought you probably had no friends. Tom, Jack. Exactly. He’s still thinking I have no friends. You just burned that into his memory. They’ve been my friends. Tom, Jack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just say that when someone asks, ‘Who are your friends?’ Tom, Jack, Phil, Will. You can’t even remember them. That’s why you’ve never survived in my world, living as a droid in the 21st century. All right, Phil, do you have any other thoughts that you’d like to share with the group? Oh, you know what? Speaking of— wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Speaking of space, speaking of space, I think that there was a very foundational moment in my life between you, Tom, and myself when we went to Interstellar in the Middlebury Repertory Theater, and I’m pretty sure it was just the three of us. And I’m pretty sure that I had, like, a complete mental breakdown in the back of the theater with, like, a weed brownie or smoking too much or something, and just could not handle Matthew McConaughey traveling off into space. I believe, if I’m not mistaken, that you had already seen the movie, and Bean hadn’t, so you became, like, my shepherd into, like, the normal world. Oh my God. Dude, that was crazy. I tell that story every few months randomly. I don’t know why. Oh, really? But yeah, I’m glad to have been part of it. Yeah, I was absolutely your shepherd, and I remember telling you about my life plan to hop on a ship and travel around the world just being a decksman. I’m glad that you mentioned that. That was it. And I thought that that inspired you to go do your thing. Yeah, I mean, it very much did. It very much did. You and Bean have been two foundational inspirations in my life, all stemming from a bad weed brownie and Matthew McConaughey. If we can bring it full circle, Phil, if there was a computer program living on a 17th-century pirate ship, what occupation would he be holding? Wait, say that again. In other words, Phil, if you could take a 17th century computer programmer equivalent, someone that thinks very algorithmically— No, no, no. You're leading him. You're leading him. He needs to be led. You need to be led. Take a computer programmer today, right? The same person, and just take them back 300 years. Put them through their ancestor, their identical ancestor, in the days, the golden age of piracy in the 1700s in the Bahamas. That same person is on a successful pirate vessel. What is their role on that vessel? Is this like a trick question? No, no, no. We have answers, different answers, and I'm just curious what you think, where you would put that type of person. Or if you can say that they belong at the middle of the ocean and stuff. I mean, I would think like navigation. Like they're probably good with, like, longitude and latitude and numbers, so they could probably read a map. Better answer. That's a much more concrete answer than I came up with. That's really— that's why we called you. That's why we called you. You had a few. What was the next one? I'm curious. No, that was literally the only job I could think of. Oh, okay, perfect. Actually, Phil, I think that the kids need you. What do you think about calling back next week? Same time, same place. Yeah, that sounds— I'll have a lot more flexibility once I start my new job. And I'll just— I'll leave you with this, because I thought of this segment the other day about cliché comments that you hear, or, like, conversations you've heard, like, multiple times. So, like the comment about, like, when people are talking about Bitcoin and they make the comment like, You know, money's just has value because we give it value, is one example. And I thought you could just rip, rip a bunch of those off. So statements that are like, Money just has value because you think it has value, like that. Yeah, exactly. All right. So you have to think of another one of those, and then the conversation next week will start with that, is whatever you have to say, like the same thing as the Bitcoin guy doesn't necessarily have to be Bitcoin guy, it might be, but something of that nature. So we'll see you here in, what is it, 24, 48—fuck, lost track—262 hours from now. Exactly. Perfect. That was sick. That was sick. All right. So, good guest. Good guest. Pretty good guest. Very good guest. What was the topic before we descended into phildom? Yeah. We were on a roll. People could say that. Is this, by the way, I was wondering this, did they tell you about the 1075? Is that like the year that the wine or this place was made? Is that nothing, 1075? That might be the zip code. I really would love to know more. So this wine is from Tablo. Remember when we went to Slovakia? Yes. On that game when we played, that was the first month in Budapest, I think, and we went and we played a semi-pro Slovakian team in, like, Nitra with the Budapest Celtic. And tell me a little bit about Budapest Celtic. What is that? What is Budapest Celtic, actually? That's a better question to ask. I joined Budapest Celtic when I came here to study. I was playing soccer in university, so it was pretty important to me to play soccer while I was studying abroad. Found this team. Budapest Celtic. Budapest Celtic. And there were three other players in my school who also joined, and we joined the same team. The first thing we did when we joined them is we just met them on a train, and we met two of them on a train going to Slovakia. We had never played with them before, never knew anything about them. They were just like, Okay, we're going to Slovakia to play this game. We thought it was just a normal thing. This is 2016. 2016. Turns out, probably one of the coolest parts of this whole club. So we get on the train, not knowing anybody, go to the game, and we play like a legit team. They have a stadium—not a stadium, they have, you know, stands—and they have legit jerseys and, like, a locker room, and everything's branded for them, and there were fans there. We played them and we won, and we were pretty good at this point. We had, like, three kids in college who were playing actively and, like, a bunch of other people from around. So Budapest Celtic is an expat soccer team that plays in the amateur soccer league here in Budapest. It's not a professional division. When we joined, there were ten teams. And now me and you play together on Budapest Celtic. You're talking about the trip to Slovakia that you took first time, 2016. When I first came here, probably in the first month that I was here, first couple months, we went there. It was a crazy trip. We played, we won the game, we went to a bar with the team afterwards, and we all were drinking, and the team bought us, like, three bottles of Jameson. And just, I barely knew Budapest at this point, didn't know any of these players. And then at the dinner table, we were all drinking Jameson, and the players drew up a contract for the three of us, the three Americans who came from college, to sign this contract to join the team, and it was all very cool. Anyway, whatever, and we played with them while we were studying. And then when we moved back, that was one of kind of the core—another one of the stress relievers of moving to a new place was the fact that we had this society of people who we shared interests with, which was playing soccer, and there were like 70 people because there's three teams in this club. And you and I play on the same team now. Totally. It's a very unique, very unique thing because I've really found this parallel in every place that I've lived. I would say the main places I've lived after college, I would categorize as Cape Town and London. And in Cape Town I found— And Budapest. And Budapest, of course, Budapest. But against Budapest, South—Cape Town and London, I found like an expat soccer community to be amongst. And Cape Town, it was amazing and was special, and London, it was amazing and was special. But Budapest soccer in Budapest, it's a very unique type of community because it encompasses a huge amount of people. And it's like three different teams, people from Ukraine, Italy, England, U.S., this, Egypt, that, the other, everyone—like literally just a melting pot of like crazy people in Budapest. And that's another thing that I like to think about with this, like, pirate ship analogy, is just this idea of like different people from different trades and different categories of life coming together and melting amongst Hungary, which is interesting because Hungary is a landlocked nation. But in some ways, to me, Hungary feels like a city. Yeah, and what's cool about the pirate ship as well is the people who are melting together, like they don't have a real reason to be there. A lot of the times, I mean, I don't know, it's based off one book that I read about pirates, but it's just like a lot of them just kind of fell there, like out of whatever reason. Like it's not like they intended to pursue piracy; that just kind of became an opportunity that was attractive to them. And now, you know, when you're playing soccer, like it's not like they came there because they were dying to play football or whatever. They just kind of ended up there and they, like, I don't know. Well, also, but Hungary really being laced with rivers like the Duna and the Tisza, and being a country that is landlocked, the rivers all of a sudden take on a bigger importance. I just learned that especially this week when I was researching for the episode, reading Az aranyember, which is a book by Jókai Mór, and they talk about this guy Mihály, who is the captain of a ship traveling up the Danube in like 1825, between 1830, somewhere thereabouts. And there's like the Turkish Empire on the outside, the Austrian Empire on the outside, and it's this whole sort of just land of like— Misunderstanding. No one really knows whether they're on this side of the table or that side of the table, and this is what I want to ask you about this book. I was really excited reading this book. I really actually sent you a passage the night during the week. I had no idea what it was from. Do you remember anything about that passage? Because I actually kind of do, I think, but I was hoping that you might. But actually, wait—the guy, he went to Brazil, and that was what reminded me of Robinson Crusoe and the parallel between that book and Robinson Crusoe, because the character that went to Brazil. And it was just this idea of the new world, and how hungry—we think about things in such modern terms all the time because we're very, like, narcissistic and self-centered and, like, a bio-evolutionary level. And so we think about things in, like, a very self-framed reference. But when you think about history, it's immediately non-narcissistic in a sense, because you have to think about not only all the people that live on Earth with you right now, but all the millions of iterations of you and other people that have come before you. So it, like, almost hedges you in. And the same thing when you're thinking about the future, it forces you to think about things a little bit more society-level, society-wide. And I think that's what attracts me to it most of all, is that it, like, sort of harnesses my mentality into, like, a society-wide lens and not necessarily just thinking about the present all the time. That's cool. Never considered that before. That's really cool, that it kind of, like, puts everything—it forces you to put things in perspective if you think from a historical lens. Or a futuristic lens. Or a futuristic. That's also cool. I did not— Maybe more in a futuristic lens. I mean, those are more pertinent issues. Maybe, like, a historian's work is a little bit narcissistic in a sense, because you're sort of doing it for the pleasure and the interest and looking back at things and thinking about how things were, rather than the futurist level is thinking about how things will be. But then again, maybe not, because maybe the future doesn't even really exist and the past is the only thing that matters. That's also crazy. There's some philosophical argument that I still don't understand, but it's rooted in the fact that there's only been 100 billion humans, which I was shocked by. There's only been 100 billion? You threw that out like that was the— I just learned that. That was the only thing I got from this philosophical talk about kind of thinking about humanity from the future, and it's sort of— it's called the destructive, or— okay, now I'm just talking about things I don't understand, but that was one fact that was crazy. There's only been 100 billion humans. I thought the number would be bigger. Philosophy is actually ever-present. That's something that you can never get tired of. I mean, what do we look at back in the past? What are they going to look at 1,000 years, 2,000, 3,000 years from now? They're going to look at the philosophers, because those are the only people that matter. But what was before— before— oh shit, there was something that you brought up before. What if Aristotle was just like a fucking Greek shipping magnate that just, like, branded himself really well? What would that mean? I mean, if he was— I mean, he probably was, no? I don't know. Maybe he was just an interest that a lot of people put a lot of work into. He was Aristotle. He was the one of the Greeks that owned the ships and gave his name, and then his grandkids made a very successful company and hired, like, a really good poet to make a lot of lines for them. That's very possible, right? I mean, why not? Yeah. I mean, Greek and Roman complex society was even more complex than ours was. Wow. I mean, that's hard to— I mean, it's like saying that today everyone's more distracted than they were. It's impossible to say. Are you an extrovert or an introvert? There's this weird classification of where are you gain— so it's more than just extroverted and introverted. You either— it's where you gain and release energy. You release— So you're either extroverted or introverted, but within where you gain and release energy. So you gain energy around people, and you release it alone, or you gain energy alone and you release it around people. Well, now that you say that, I'm definitely the first one that you said. I release energy when I'm alone, and I gain energy around people. But I manifest energy maybe more, like efficiently, more towards a specific end when I'm alone. Like, I don't know. Like, it's a time when I'm, like, using all the energy that I get and all the experience I get. Like, for instance, this Tuesday—excuse me if I was a little bit away from the mic for a little bit—I get a little bit excited, I go back in the chair, but I was in Komarom, and I met this guy, Whiskey Barlong Janos, and he was just this epic, epic, epic individual, a local of Komarom who knew all about, like, specific whiskeys and had a crazy whiskey collection. This was your episode that you released yesterday. The episode that I released yesterday, yeah, yeah. Did you watch it? Yeah, yeah. What were your thoughts? The thoughts—hilarious that you went to Slovakia. I don't even know if that's legal. Like, was that difficult to cross the border? No, I just walked across. They didn't— Did you talk to anybody? On the way back, I did. I saw they were talking to the cars on the way over there. I don't know why. They just let you walk across the bridge to a new country? You could have easily just walked and just stayed in Slovakia. Well, I did, but then I saw the Jokai Mor statue. That's what I went for, and then I went back to— But you met the guy in Slovakia, right? No, no, no. Oh, you met him in Hungary. So you just walked—oh my God, that makes it so much funnier. Yeah. So all those crazy fortresses were in Hungary. They were in Hungary. Oh, that's cool. I just went to Slovakia just to, like, say hi to Jokai Mor, and then I came back. That's bonkers. Well, there was not much to interact with in Slovakia because I don't speak the language. I looked at like these, like, three signs, and they were all in Slovakian. It was great to be there. I mean, ancestral land of my... It was nice editing. I was convinced the whole thing was filmed in Slovakia. Anyway, so the guy... The other thing that shocked that I just remember is when you met the guy, I could just... It was so nice to hear him say, Willie. It was just, it's like when you, you know, grew up watching somebody. It's just weird because I know you so well, and I also have a lot of YouTube fangirl things where I just, or fanboy, where I just like love them. And if I had the opportunity to like take them, you know, on any kind of tour of things that I knew, I would be so pumped to meet them. And when he met you in the van, it was so cool. He was like, Willie, man. Yeah, well, I mean, you've inspired me towards YouTube more than anyone else because I was just Instagram. Like, not even like there was no, no, not even one iota of like belief that like, oh, Instagram is better. None of that. It was just out of like pure disorganization and like not able to like work up the impetus to go towards a certain direction. But you definitely steered me in the direction. You were like the rudder on my ship if you want to just be really annoying with all these like ship philosophy adjectives. Let's be annoying. Yeah, let's be, just throw them, shmatter them on top. But you steered me into that direction and got me thinking about YouTube. And it honestly allows itself to be made into more compelling narratives because it just feels more authentic to me, which is kind of ridiculous because when YouTube came out, that's like the less like social media, new media type thing. But now YouTube has more of a legacy because it's 2006 it was created, whatever, 2005. And I still remember the first YouTube video I saw was Andy Chavez on the Mets making a catch over the center field wall with his, like, elbow hanging across the wall. And I watched it with my grandpa and my brother sitting in the living room, and we just went to YouTube to watch it, and it was a crazy catch. But YouTube, for me, I've never been that into YouTube. I never watched YouTubes. I never did YouTube. I didn't know anything about it, just Instagram. And then you were like a big YouTube guy. Yeah, because, but wouldn't you think that just the platform of Instagram and the type of videos that you made for that, wasn't that very much... Like a formative process on your creative experience and just, like, how you... So when you make an Instagram story, what's really cool, like, because I used to love making stories. And what's so cool is that you look back the next day, like, What was my story yesterday? And it makes a story. It makes, you know, if you put ten videos up, you're like, Wow, that's a narrative. Like, there is a weird arc there. There's a weird story that I told, and none of it was on purpose. I just did ten-second clips ten times, and at the end it was actually really fun, a hundred seconds to watch. So didn't that influence you? Yeah, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely. I'm very glad that you said that. I've actually traced that out, like, before, and thinking about, like, how stories happen in, like, ten. I think ten is a good number because it gives you, like, what, four on either end, two in the middle, or three on either end, four in the middle, depending on what kind of story you're telling. And it just, it's very, it's, it's, it's very interesting to see how stories can be carved out into different segments. And I think actually when I came to Budapest to visit you, it was like, honestly, when you were making Snapchats and I had no idea what Snapchat was or any—like, I knew what it was, I just wasn't that into it—you might, you might have perverted me into this twisted mentality. I was a perverted—I was a perverted, like, social media person. I loved making social media so much. You were the king of social media. I loved making Snapchats. It was so much. I loved it. It got me off. I loved it. What do you mean by it got you off? It was just that thing of just making—you made something the day before, and then the next day you'd look back and you would just look and you would just say, Oh, I enjoyed what I made yesterday. And it was more than just what you made because you made it on accident. You put the story, like the— The end creation was more than what you actually did in pieces. And it's the same thing with programming as well. Like, you—everything you do, you do in bits. Yeah, yeah. And it's so impressive when you see the bits come together into a whole. Well, that's what I think is, like, potentially lacking from— I wouldn't say lacking. That's probably a negative way to look at it. It's interesting that we talk about optimism and pessimism, American this way, the other way. I think we're all individually optimists and pessimists within our own minds, and it depends what side of the coin you fit in, whether, like, you let that side win out or not. But as an optimist, then I would definitely define myself and yourself as, like, eternal optimists, because what other way can you really be? But, like, still, as an eternal optimist, you have to have that negative mindset ticking within you, where you at least understand the negative side of the argument. Otherwise, how can you let the optimistic side win out? Yeah, it's kind of hard to be just optimists and pessimists. Is it too black and white? Yeah, it's too black and white, because there's, like, arrogance as well. If you're too optimistic with no aspect of pessimism, then you're just arrogant, and then that's not that good. And so—but at the same—I don't know. It's really hard to classify these things, because it's really hard to be an optimist without, like, coming off as arrogant. What about Big Fred? Do you think he's an optimist or a pessimist? Big Fred? When you're a bottle of wine, it's pretty easy to be black and white, and I think Fred's an optimist. Let's double check. Oops. Just wanted to get some ASMR in there. You can see what the color is. ASMR. Ray, would you like a little more? Would you like a little more? See that. So where did you get that shirt? I got this shirt at a wonderful store in Portugal, in Lisbon. Lisbon blew my mind. We went there just for one day before going to Lagos to get on a boat, me and the wonderful Vada Gavivian, to say it in the Hungarian way. And we just went on a walk, and so cool how this comes full circle. So we went on a walk in Lisbon before leaving the hotel. So we arrived in the evening, got to the hotel. In the morning, I pushed her that we watch Anthony Bourdain's clip of Lisbon, because this was after Georgia and I saw how good Anthony Bourdain was about making a place seem super fun. And then we proceeded to leave the hotel and just walk through Lisbon, and we ended up, half on accident, at this bar that Anthony Bourdain was to drink some cherry liquor. On the way there, we stopped at this shop to buy this amazing shirt, drank the cherry liquor that Anthony Bourdain drank, had an incredible time. Lisbon is amazing. And yeah, just, yeah. Since then, I've used Anthony Bourdain's kind of skits and reports on places to educate myself before going there, and it's actually a nice exercise. For me, Anthony Bourdain was like one of the greatest artists to ever live. I mean, I just love his personality and the way that he was able to capture things, like, in the media in which he lived in. And I think that's where I— He's loud as well, you know? He doesn't hold back. He reminds me of you a little bit, because you guys—he was also fucking tall as shit, like six foot four, just, like, swanking around the place. Everyone notices him and has something to say, and then just makes the best of it. Yeah, it's the same. Like, so if you're too optimistic, you become arrogant, and just, there's this amount of— Like, checking is like you can go as far in any direction as you want, as long as you check yourself properly. And he was super loud and super, like, arrogant in a lot of ways. And same with Action Bronson, which is why we love Natural Wine and everything. All those guys are super loud and arrogant and just kind of, like, in a way they seem annoying, but they check themselves in just, like, an eloquent way that makes them so attractive. If you're listening to Tom and I talk at a restaurant and we're being loud and annoying, just remember deep down we're eloquent and attractive. Well, if we're not, you should tell us that we need to work on that, because that's what makes great people. We have to make sure we check our— Is that important to be a great person, or should you just be a scumbag and make a lot of money? I mean, importance is up to you. To me, yeah, it's important to be. I mean, I want—I mean, I would prefer not to be a scumbag. Is there a difference between the two? Like, how do you feel about, like, Marxist ideology and the idea that, like, everyone should be just, like, completely equivalent and just give their share? No, no, no. There's, like a—there's a pyramidical—there's a range. There's a structure. I mean, everybody, every place—you never go full retard on either direction. Whoa. No. Yeah, I mean, you can, but what I mean is that there's a, um, spectrum. There's a space for everything. So there's a pyramid. So, like, there's—not everybody can be great, but there—and it's difficult to be great, but there's a lot of, like, subclassifications below great which also are very good and essential and supportive to a healthy society and a healthy group, especially the bottommost layer. That, you know, and there are people who are at a layer that, you know, if you were to put yourself in their shoes, you would feel like, holy shit, this kind of sucks. But there are people, I think, that are satisfied with that life, and they, you know, they embody that. Well, to be honest, yeah, I think they're the foundation of life. I think that's true, and I think that there's all sorts of different manifestations of personality through no matter what socioeconomic class you're in, whether you're in a high socioeconomic class, a low socioeconomic class, in the middle. That's just like the rich tapestry of life, is that, like we were talking about before with computer programmers, golden age of sail, 17th century, Americans living in Hungary now, going back to whatever context you want to look at, humanity is just this, like, rich tapestry of different motivations, different personalities, and it's all just, like, coming together at once to drink natural wine. Sure. Natural, thanks. To drink anything natural. Everything natural. But tell me, you're going to Croatia next month, right? We will live in Croatia for a month. I'm going to do some sailing schools in Biograd. Oh, you're also a boat captain. Also a boat captain. That's what I did before I moved here. I went to the Bahamas and got my captain's license. And you got a plane captain's license in a light aircraft, and you got certified the day that Roy Halladay died. Yeah. Oh yeah, you're a baseball fan, which is weird. Yeah, yeah, I was in—I was studying the—I was just going to a flight school with the experimental aircraft called the A5 on the day that Roy Halladay, a famous pitcher, died flying. Toronto Blue Jays, Philadelphia Phillies. Nice beard, very average-looking guy, but exceptional pitcher. Yeah, and he died. In the A-5 aircraft, which is an experimental—experimental, at the time it was an experimental light aircraft amphibious vehicle, which means it could land on water and take off from water. And now it's just the plane that Roy Halladay died in. Yeah, yes. For some people, yes. But anyway, I went into class the next day, because I was there for a couple days, I went into class and they were like, Hey. They weren't like, hey; they were very bothered that it was clearly something was wrong, and I had no idea. And they just said, We're not flying today, and we just did class. And then when I went home, I was staying with my aunt and uncle, and they were just, like, super shocked. They were just, Are you okay? Somebody just died in that plane. I hope you weren't flying today. And anyway, it's kind of a little bit—it basically was not the plane's fault that the accident happened. So I continued to fly later, and it was a crazy experience. That's awesome. It's nice to know a boat and plane captain. It's good. I'm not a plane captain. I would not want to fly a plane. That experience solidified the fact that I will never be flying a plane. Okay. Well, I was about to say that's the only reason I hang out with you, but no. I can still pilot a boat, but not a plane. That's good. That's good. Oh, actually, how about we call our— Wait, what were you going to say? I was going to say, how about we call our last guest of the night. Yeah, let's call our last guest. I was just going to say that we started on a history tangent, and we only made it to, like, 1800s when the Huns left. But I don't know if we want to go back there, but— So, yeah, last time we talked, I mean, before we got derailed by numerous things, we were talking about history and just— I'm always fascinated to dig into what other people know. Clearly, you know history. We were talking about Hungarian history. We made it to the 1800s. The Huns came in after the Romans. So we made a little bit in between that, actually, because the Huns came in after the Romans, then you had the Avars, then you had the Honfoglalás, 896, the founding, 1000, first year of the Christian king, 1240s, let's say Tatárjárás, Negedik Béla rebuilt the country, stone castles. Then you go to the Anjou kings, the Renaissance kings. Wait, 1200. What happened between 800 and 1200? The Árpád dynasty. So you have István the First, all the way to, I think, Armedik István. Maybe, maybe Uttedik. It was Hungarian. So from 1000 to 1300, you have Hungarian Árpád kings. Okay, cool. And when you talk to Hungarians, like the Árpád kings, they're the real people that came from the steppe lands in István created the Hungarian dynasty, the Árpád dynasty, lasts for 300 years. And then you have the Anjou kings, and they're more like French, Sicilian, European. And they come in. You have Károly Károly Robert, Lajos, László Nágy, Louis the Great. And that's like a real, like, great period of Hungarian history, because it's very, very, like, monumental. It's the 1300s. 1300s, 1400s. Mid-1400s, you have a little bit of a crisis, because basically you have Ulászló the First. He's the king, in some respects, he's a Polish king, but then you have a bunch of Hungarian kings that want to be the king, Negedik László, all these other guys. But where are these kings who are not Hungarian? How are they getting appointed king? Because there's like a little bit of a controversy between who the nobles and the barons want to be the king, who might be a derivative of a certain blood family, or who is— But who's making the king in Hungary if they're not Hungarian? Based on a religion? It's more based on, like, who held the land of Central Europe at the time, because there's, like, the Polish little interest here, there's the Hungarian little interest here, and there was more like one of them held the whole region. So, like, for example, Albert of Habsburg, he held, like, the Holy Roman Crown, he held this crown, he held that crown, he held that crown, and that just shows you what a mix-and-pot Central Europe was. And then you go to the Hunyadi kings, János Hunyadi, he was from Transylvania, so he's more like a real Romanian, erdei, as the Romanians call it. He's more of a real Hungarian figure. And then you have him and his son Mátyás, and that's, like, one of the golden ages of Hungarian history. What years are this, Mátyás? This is 1456 through 1490. And we're still in the Heroes' Square, Hősök tere, Hősök tere. Yeah, we're still in that. These people are represented in that monument. János and Mátyás Igen. Persze. Utána, you have basically a period of, at the beginning of the 16th century, we're talking about 1500 to 1520s, you have a period of plague and unrest and civil disquietude, because you have Ulászló the Second, Második Ulászló, and his name, his nickname was Dobzse, which in Polish means okay, because he was also a Polish king, just like Ulászló the First, who got killed at the Battle of Varna on the coast of the Black Sea. Ulászló the Second, Második Ulászló, he was just a very impotent leader, and there was a peasant uprising under Dózsa György, because he came in and he was like, Oh, we're gonna just overthrow the king, all this stuff. A lot of tumult, a lot of disquietude. This all leads the path to Mohács. 1526, one of the most important dates on the Hungarian calendar. That's when the Turkish Empire comes in, they take over, they kill the king, Lajos II, Mátyás Lajos, at the Battle of Mohács, where we went once for Busójárás. Insane. What was Busójárás, by the way? This is the Scaring Away Winter? Scaring away winter. Yeah, yeah. Just bizarre. Probably one of the more bizarre kind of old-timey town festivals I ever have been to, because it was so true to its goal. So the goal was to scare away winter and just to be kind of weird and obnoxious to make winter want to leave. And I went there and I was like, This is so obnoxious and scary that I want to leave. But not in a way that I would leave. I just understood that the whole point was to try and scare away winter, and there were just these people in these, like, giant sheep clothes— So you are winter. You’re winter. I mean, I didn’t want to leave, but I just thought it was so cool that over all these years that this concept still was shown through. Just these people in these scary little costumes, these scary masks, making a ton of noise, being super annoying, and just, like, just touching you and being annoying. They also had crazy busó masks on, which was wild. It was weird and scary. You got really scared. And there was fire, and I was just like, Wow, this is—I want to leave. But not—I wanted to watch. I was gonna—yeah. Well, it was a very scary, bizarre experience. Amazing. I would go again. Well, they must have done it this weekend, which I think they did, even though we weren’t in any tours, because now winter is scared away, and we are— Probably would have been the best festival in centuries. That’s true. Just imagine how crazy that would have been. Well, someone told me today about Orfű Festival, Lake Orfű, where we once went. In the winter for the Búcsújárás in February, someone told me about Fishing Orfű. It's a festival in Hungary in the summer, and it sounds amazing. It's like an alternative rock, I don't know, crazy. But I like going to, like, different genres of music than you usually listen to, because then you get all sorts of weird people that you've never met before, and they're always, like, the best friends. So if we skip through Hungarian history, through the Hunyadis, through the Turkish period, then you go until the period of reform, which I was talking about before. You get the 1848, the revolution, 1867, the joint appendage of the country, Austria-Hungary officially, and then you go into the modern day. And this period between 1867 and 1914, the outbreak of World War I, is really an important period for Budapest history particularly, because that's when a lot of the buildings that we see today were built, particularly for 1896, Millennium Exhibition, Városliget City Park. What is the Millennium Exhibition? It was a thousand years of the Hungarian founding, because it was founded in 896. So they say. We don't really actually know, but they said, Okay, let's decide on that date because we need to make all these amazing buildings, so let's do it. How many buildings did they make? Well, they made— Which ones? Like the Szabadság híd, the Vajdahunyad Castle in the City Park. That's an amalgamation of— That is made for— Oh, no. That's seven different architectural styles from around Hungary. It's weird. It's a weird castle. It's different things. Hősök tere was first initiated during then, but I don't think it finished completely until the 1930s. And then you have, like, the Művész... museum, the art museums on the other side. Basically all of City Park was— Oh, okay, those museums on the side of the... Okay, okay. The Mucsarnok. Mucsarnok. Yeah, there's museums there, both of them, the Hungarian— Yeah, okay. That was made around— 1896 was, like, the apogee of the Hungarian realm, and that was when Vienna was just, like, at the top of its game. You know Berlin nowadays? That was Vienna, 1896 Hungary. Austria-Hungary. And then you also had Budapest is like two capitals. They're just going back and forth. Who wants to go to Austria? Vienna, probably people that weren't so cool. Who wants to go to Budapest? Probably people that were a little bit cooler. One man talking. Don't know if that's the real truth, but either way, two joint capitals of this huge empire in Central Europe. World War One comes along. The Austrians and the Hungarians, especially the Hungarians, they got completely fucked, for lack of a better term. Hungarians lost 66% of their territory. They lost the Felvidék, where this wine and my ancestors are from. They lost Romania, Erdély. They lost a lot of Slovakia and Croatia, all these different lands. A lot of arguments to be made whether there's different nationalities that are there first, there second. Either way, they were Hungary and now they're not. 33% of the territory contracts, become a nation state. World War Two, they want to seek those territories back. So they ask, like basically the Germans, can we get them back? They make a deal with the devil, Admiral Horthy, who was basically the dictator of the country between the 1920s and the 1940s. He decides to go on the German side of the war. They get the stuff back for a little while. They march into Slovakia. They march into this place, that place. Hey, we're back. We're hungry. Not really a good deal. Germans lose. They lose all the lands. Now they're back to where they were post-World War One. Russians come in, liberate them from the Germans. Not also really that great because the Russians are potentially worse than the Germans from an intrinsic society-wide entrenched level. Now until 1989, you have a communist system. It gets a little bit looser in the 1970s. That's why they call it gulyás communism. It's a mixed bag. It's potatoes, it's peppers, it's carrots, it's soup, it's this, it's that, capitalism, communism, this, that, the other thing. 1989, fall of the communists. And then you have the post-communist system, which has been good. It's been bad. Don't really know what to say. And then we're in the future. And you take it from there, because you're the futurist. What do you see as the future of Hungary before we wrap this up? I mean, coming from a non-native, I have almost nothing of substance to say. I just hope that, you know, the country stays here at the very least, and, you know, they keep making wonderful wine. You know, the people keep being, you know, wildly interesting. Do you see that, though, as like a little bit of like an apolitical, like agnostic view to have as Americans that don't really feel any consequence of the system? That we're just like very easy to be like, Okay. I just don't want to impose myself where I don't have the right to. So, you know, I don't want to say what the future of Hungary is going to look like because I've only been here for three years, and I've been here in such a, you know, fractional manner because I'm not a native. I don't vote. I don't pay attention to politics. So, like, you know, it's hard for me to really say what it's going to look like. I just hope that I can continue to enjoy the wonderful company that I have here. And I think in a three-hour podcast, we've boiled down the difference between the New York and the Iowa mentality, and that's a good thing. Cheers. Thank you for the opportunity. And, yeah, it's been a wonderful time, and I hope we can do it again. To Talking with Willie. See you next week.