I started out
watching the news instead of cartoons.

This is going to sound made up, but I was the kid who sat through the eight o'clock news on purpose. Not the funny bits. Not the weather. The politics part. I had friends who could name every player in the Champions League. I could tell you who was in the cabinet. Neither of us was winning the schoolyard popularity contest.

It wasn't because I was smart. It was because I genuinely didn't understand how a country got run, and nobody around me could explain it. It looked like adults were making up the rules as they went, and I wanted to know if that was the case or if there was actually a system. Turns out, there's a system. It's just mostly covered in jargon nobody bothers to translate.

I know. Read it again. My first real obsession in politics was Donald Trump, and it was never because I agreed with him. I was fascinated by the mechanics.

Because you have to admit, the man is a case study. He talked his way into everything. He turned a news cycle into a movement. He broke rules that seemed unbreakable, and the rules just... let him. I watched him the way other kids watch a magic trick. I wanted to know how it was done.

That turned into a whole thing. I'd be reading about a Senate race at 1am like it was my homework. It was my homework. Nobody assigned it.

Then I found Joe Biden, who is the exact opposite. Slow. Steady. Older than every other person in the room. And somehow still magnetic. The way he treated politics like a craft instead of a performance got me. Two wildly different styles, same obsession on my end: how does this actually work?

Back home in the Netherlands, I kept doing it. Jesse Klaver, Mark Rutte, the whole thing. I'd watch a debate and think: that's not an argument, that's a strategy. Politicians don't say what they mean. They say what scores points. Once I could see that, I couldn't unsee it.

Here's the thing nobody tells you. I wanted to study politics. I looked into it. You cannot study politics at MBO level in the Netherlands. It is not on the list. I'm not saying that to make it sound dramatic, I'm saying it because it was genuinely annoying.

So I made the practical choice. Software development. I figured: at least I'd learn how systems work, and that's kind of the same thing. You build a system, you find the weak points, you make it run. Politics is that, but with people instead of code. People are worse. They don't have error messages.

It worked out better than I expected. I got good at it. I started my own company when I was 20. Which makes for a good story until you remember I was 20 and mostly terrified of everything that moved. The money was real though.

In 2022, I started PolitiekPraat. The pitch was simple: explains Dutch politics in normal words. No jargon, no agenda, nothing to sell. Just telling people how the thing that runs their life actually works.

I did not expect anyone to read it. This is not false modesty, I genuinely thought it was a hobby. Then people started reading it. A lot of people. We're talking tens of thousands a month now, which is a ridiculous number for a side project about Dutch politics.

I also built tools for it. Not because I'm a tech genius, but because I wanted to know things. There's a stemwijzer, and a tracker that shows you how MPs actually vote. That one's the fun one. Because here's a fun fact: what politicians say in a debate and how they vote are often two completely different things. The tracker makes that impossible to ignore.

So here's the part people find weird. I stopped taking on software clients. I founded a company, it was working, and I just... stopped building for other people. The company still exists. I just don't do that work anymore.

When you tell people this, they look at you like you're crazy. You don't walk away from a working business to go back to school. That's the sensible-world version of it.

But I'd rather be a student who actually gives a damn about what he's studying than a developer who's just cashing checks and feeling nothing. Call it a mid-life crisis at 21. I call it finally doing the thing I've wanted to do since I was 11, watching a news broadcast I was way too young for.

In September 2026, I started European Studies in The Hague. It's an English-language program that throws politics, economics, law, culture and a couple of languages into one room. For the first time in my life, I'm studying the thing I've been obsessing over since before I could drive.