Sounds Serious

28/10/2025

Our new project...

In this first episode of Hungary for Change, host Drew Leifheit sits down with Márta Pardavi, co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, for a candid conversation about what it means to defend the rule of law under Viktor Orbán’s...

07/12/2023

Who do you turn to when you need a REAL podcast?

17/01/2023

If you're like me, you're astounded by people who literally run towards they eye of the storm instead of retreating, and come out stronger and ready for more after they've survived. That's why I'm really excited to interview a person who's made a life out of confronting adversity.

On 17 January (3pm CET), I'll be interviewing wise warrior Robin Horsfall on the latest edition of Making Waves, "From Northern Ireland to Ukraine - The Takeaways of a Wise Warrior." Please join us, ask questions and be inspired.

FYI I'll be asking Robin about his provocative and thought-provoking posts about the

On 17 January don’t miss our LinkedIn Live chat with Robin Horsfall, a decorated British military veteran whose varied and extraordinary life experiences hav...

02/01/2023

Why Sounds Serious? (The origins of DREW, part 1)

Recently, while walking my dogs in our picturesque hamlet, I ran into an artifact on the street that sparked something way down inside of me. It was such a distant-yet-distinct memory, an old friend of sorts reminding me of certain aspects of my past.
It revealed a clue. Why I am who I am.

It was a plastic case containing empty soda water bottles to be picked up and replaced with filled ones (which is, miraculously, still possible here in Hungary).

For me, however, the returnable bottles weren’t that interesting, while the plastic case they were in, was.

It was emblazoned with the label of Royal Crown (RC) Cola (FYI RC Cola International), a soft drink brand that was legendary in the 1970s, especially in my hometown of Rockford, Illinois, and in my family. RC Cola also had its own diet drink called Diet Rite, which was the number one selling diet cola in the 1970s.

My father, who started out as a “route man” delivering the product - most often in 16 ounce glass bottles, which were 24 in a whole case - worked at various incarnations of the company: as a supervisor in Rockford, where RC outsold both Coke and Pepsi; running a whole plant franchise in Sacramento, California for a gentleman called Doug Lee; and, shortly after, becoming a representative of the parent company for the entire state of California.

Dad’s parent company job meant that he was incessantly driving and flying to cities throughout California, wining and dining the owners of the RC Cola plants in Chico, Santa Rosa, San Jose, San Diego, Los Angeles.

My dad’s career had gone stratospheric. He was young, ambitious, handsome and confident.

30/11/2022

Hear a man who is truly TOMORROW (1 Dec) 3pm CET/2pm London/9am New York. That's when I'll be interviewing Robin Horsfall in a session called "Northern Ireland to Ukraine - The Takeaways of a Wise Warrior." https://www.linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:7001233097203564544/

18/10/2022

Yikes! I really failed my clients—but I wasn't even aware of it.

It’s as if no one wanted to tell me. The documents I was sending back to them as finished work—my completed edits—were actually a jumbled mess. This would truly be an embarrassment for anyone in the copy editing/proofreading business, but for me it’s that and more.

If you do business writing of any sort, you’re more than likely aware of the “Track Changes” function on Microsoft Word. When you turn it on, it shows the other people working on a text the changes that others have made, so all stakeholders can see the modifications, for example, that I’ve made to a document. Usually, there’s very little deliberation unless there are industry terms involved that I’ve changed erroneously.

I’m the native English speaker who’s supposed to make things better when non-native English speakers send me a text, and I pride myself on being able to do that. When I send the document back to the “owner” of the document, they get to review the changes and can accept or reject each one.

Recently, one of my clients asked why the tracked changes I was sending back to them were so weird. The words I had corrected, deleted or changed were in text boxes that they'd have to delete first and then replace by typing in my suggestions.
The end result was, I was making additional work for my client (and all of the others who were seemingly afraid to say something!).

I thought I had such a great system. By synchronizing my new Mac with Google Docs, I'm able to work on the various texts that clients send me, and they're all saved in an organized fashion on my Google Drive.

It makes things very convenient when I need to work on something but don't have my own computer in front of me, because I can log into my Google Drive from other devices, anywhere.

Also, when a client also uses Google Docs, it's amazing because both sides can work on the “living document,” which is shared between us. They can see and reply to my edits and comments, and vice versa. Great for finalizing things, but not all businesses use Google Docs (thus the conversion problem!).

And for those who don’t, I’m sorry for sending those weird texts and appreciate your business even more. (No worries, I’ve found a solution.) Please, don’t be afraid to tell me if our work together is anything less than seamless.

26/07/2022

Wow, I’m a video star!
Things to consider when scripting and starring in a promotional video

Producing videos (and feature films for that matter) is kind of like making sausage - it’s a messy business, because putting together scenes, narration and b-roll according to a script is akin to sewing together a patchwork quilt. You also have to make sure the sound is clean(!). There are a million little things that can go wrong, and often do, which people in dark rooms do their best to clean up and smooth over in post production.

I feel their pain! In the last couple of weeks I was the narrator/host on two video shoots, which required a ton of optimism and resilience.

The objective of the video production itself is to explain how a research institution here in Hungary is taking initiatives to simplify matters between people building a house and the authorities, ostensibly to make things easier for home builders navigating through the bureaucracy.

My first assignment for the production was to translate the script into English, a task full of unanticipated minefields. Many times, clients are convinced of how important their jargon and industry acronyms are, but a video script needs to use as simple language as possible - the ultimate objective being that the audience watching the video is able to follow the entire production, meaning they understand what’s happening throughout. That’s why scripts for “broadcast” need to be elementary rather than a word-for-word translation, otherwise the viewer is overwhelmed in detail and “loses the plot.”

We went through several versions of the script before the client signed off on it, but when I got to the shoot and figured out there was no teleprompter I realized I was facing a challenge. I had only been notified a couple of days earlier that I’d have to recite the script by heart. Unfortunately, it was full of clauses, acronyms, words not used in colloquial English, foreign names, etc.

When you have to spit out several such sentences in a row in one take, things get tough. Throw in some hand gestures, walking while talking, a head-turn and the attempt to appear cheerful and interested throughout, and it can feel almost impossible.

Fortunately, the director (Braun Zsolt) and cameraman were patient and helpful, but it was not easy spitting out some of those convoluted lines. We did many, many takes! On one occasion, I had the director hold up a piece of paper with keywords on it, which was a big help. I wish I'd brought a white board from an office supplies shop for that.

My takeaway is, put more time in on the script before shooting starts to make things easier.

16/07/2022

It's a terrible to feel that you've been ripped off when you're trying to have a relaxing summer . Have any of you out there ever felt that you've been fleeced when changing money while on vacation in ?

Don't get me started! An incisive YouTube post by Wolters World has rung all sorts of bells (and drudged up memories infused with resentment) in my head.

When my friends and I first came to Hungary in 1990, changing dollars into Hungarian forints sounded like a wonderful prospect, because one "yankee dollar" was worth around 62 Hungarian forints, and all sorts of things - restaurant meals, beers in a pub, etc. didn't cost much more than a dollar.

If I remember correctly, a beer in one of my favorite bars, Tilos Az A, cost about half a dollar, and you could have a full-blown homemade sausage lunch in a butcher shop for about the same (leave your low cholesterol dietary restrictions at home!). A full-blown meal in a restaurant, including drinks, rarely cost more than $2-3 dollars, if memory serves.

However, changing money had its challenges. Official money changing offices in Budapest enjoyed capitalizing on foreigners' confusion over how much things cost, meaning that there was often a huge differential between what the official exchange rate was and how much one would actually receive after having submitted their dollars.

That meant the exchange office might post the rate as HUF 66/USD 1, but you might only receive HUF 55 because one of the posted rates was how much they bought forints for a dollar, while the other was how many forints you'd receive for submitting a dollar. It could be confusing and such offices thrived from what I think was intentionally confusing the situation.

To this day, unsuspecting travelers to Budapest Airport get totally ripped off by believing it's prudent to change money while they're collecting their luggage - for those in the know, it's like they've been robbed right off the bat!

Imagine my surprise when, years later, traveling to Prague with the woman who would eventually be my wife, we almost got totally ripped off by a money changing office in the capital of Czechia, which I've never felt was as predatory in its approach to tourists as Hungary is.

The exchange office, which was right in Praha's center near a gorgeous Art Nouveau municipal house (Obecní dům), wanted to charge us EUR 40 for changing EUR 200 into Czech koruna. The trick was, one had to change EUR 1,000 to receive the "normal rate" that was posted on the board; in fact, there was a very tiny asterisk which led to a footnote explaining this contingency.

My guard was down because I love the town, but then I did a rough calculation and figured out how I'd been had. I was so infuriated, that I refused to leave the cashier's counter, asking him if he felt good about having defrauded me.

My Italian temper got the best of me! I yelled and really tried to make this poor employee feel like the sh****ad he was for doing this to oblivious tourists like myself. "Do you like ripping people off, you as***le?" I implored.

I made all sorts of threats that I'd call the US Embassy, the police, whomever I could think of. I made some calls and was told that it was totally legitimate and legal what had happened to me(!). Nothing seemed to be working.

But then, I started telling every tourist that came into the little change office about what had happened, that it had cost me 40 euro to change 200 euro - and most of them believed me and walked out.

It was at that point that the money changer said he'd give me the rate posted on the board if I'd just get the hell out of there.

You can also get fleeced by the choices you make at ATM machines in Europe, so be sure to watch this video for a quick and crucial tip!

It is not just Americans, it is anyone that does not have the local currency as their home currency. NEVER TAKE THE CONVERSION. If you are using an ATM in Eu...