Sanja Milosavljevic: Good afternoon. My name is Sanja Milosavljević and I am going to be your host for today. Our guest is also Sanja – Sanja Popovic Pantic and she is President of the Association of Business Women of Serbia. In that sense, she is an excellent guest for the topics we are dealing with in this podcast. This whole podcast is sponsored by the US Embassy in Serbia and I thankful for having the opportunity to share the stories of women who are either in business – running their own business – or working at universities, institutes, or engaging in entrepreneurship and promoting women’s entrepreneurship, a formal theoretical way as Sanja deals with this topic. I am going to enjoy this conversation, hope you will enjoy it as well. Hello Sanja, how are you?

Sanja Popović Pantić: Hello! Hello, Sanja, to repeat myself. I’m fine, it’s a sunny day and somehow spring, as always, arouses some beautiful emotions in the sense that it brings something new. I believe that glass is half full, so I believe that this new is a cure.

Sanja Milosavljevic: I agree, it’s a matter of one’s perspective of choosing whether we want to see the glass is empty or full. Can you tell us something about yourself? Can you tell us what you do now, what your education is and how your formal education correlates with what you do today?

Sanja Popović Pantić: Yes. Well, I am a graduate Economist, I also got my doctorate here, at my faculty in Belgrade, Faculty of Economics, in 2013. Before that, I got my Master degree in 2005. In short, after graduating from college in the 90s, those awful years, 1993, in the midst of the highest world inflation ever in the history of economics, I graduated from college, graduated and started looking for a job. I always joke that everyone wanted to hire someone with an average grade of over 9, and when you hire them, you don’t pay them anything because the inflation rate eats everything up, so, who wouldn’t use that. So there were choices, in that sense, even though they were in some ways illusions of the economy and everything was upside down in relation to books and what we have studied. But somewhere in those years they strengthened us and taught us in fact how not to act, and then we slowly realized how to, how some of our economy was introduced into some of our market conditions, but in a way I was certainly marked by the whole that- In the 1990s, I was also very active in the non-governmental sector and in the European Movement of Serbia, the Association of Business Women of Serbia was founded in 1998, to which I joined, and after two years I have been elected to be a president by the members. In a way, I really found myself in that need to help women, above all who then and now we’re always a more vulnerable part of the population and in a way, they really needed some support, and I found myself in that, that I can learn a lot from them, and that simply at a time when my generation was leaving the country and becoming that first generation of new emigrants, I was thinking about it as well, but when I heard the stories of those women of ours who lost so much during the 90s. And jobs, many of them lost, as they testified, the identity because they came from other parts of the former Yugoslavia. They also lost someone close and, on top of all that, they were starting from the beginning. I somehow really got the inspiration that this is what I want to do, where I will dedicate myself in some way, I still didn’t know exactly how to support such women. And in a way, as this democratization of society started, it really inspired me, I felt like a young person at the time that I could contribute and have that strength, energy, will, love and women really gave me that inspiration that  leads me to this day.

Sanja Milosavljevic: Wonderful. Then you can actually tell us a lot about how to take challenging times – you just said how you finished college at the most inconvenient time and started building a career or looking for a job – what challenging times can teach us? What can they teach us? In what way can we use them? It is clear to me that maybe not everyone always has an idea or capacity or strength, but it can also be presented to them as here, there is a crisis, there is a problem, we had a crisis in the 90s, we had a crisis in late 2008 it was the great world economic crisis and nothing happened. I mean, we overcome it.

Sanja Popović Pantić: We were also bombed. We forgot about that. We had-

Sanja Milosavljevic: Yes, we were bombed. I remembered that yesterday. So how can we use these times of crisis to transform, or to strengthen.

Sanja Popović Pantić: Well, I can say the same thing on my personal example and on the example of a woman with whom I have been in contact all these years. First, personally, it really helped me to invest in learning and in self-development. And it happened that we have the most free time for those activities in times of crisis. In a way, last year, the year of Covid, it opened up a lot of spare time since I didn’t travel that much anymore – in fact, I didn’t travel at all. And in a way, everything changed and thanks to the fact that I spent more time in the office, that is, in the house that became the office, it somehow happened to me at the right time and I could dedicate myself to writing my monograph, “Two Decades of Women’s Entrepreneurship in Serbia ”and in some way gave shape to everything I did academically regarding that topic. In fact, I didn’t really managed, because, you mentioned that I were theoretically engaged in women’s entrepreneurship, but in fact I always had in a parallel – accompanying work, projects, support, consulting, work that I did professionally and for European projects – all together, was always related to practice, I did not manage to shape it into some academic forms and I had the desire to do that. And as a consequence, an obligation as an employee at Mihajlo Pupin Institute. I forgot to say that during 96, I graduated in 1993, I became 96, in the meantime, I was working in that field, in economics, and I was actually working on interesting projects, considering the overall situation. I worked on first – on marketing support for the first multimedia CD-ROMs where our culture was presented, for example the “Khazar Dictionary”, so some really interesting projects and I was kind of curious. It’s something that drew me into some new stuff and I guess I had that kind of drive to always find something that inspires and moves me out of some dark side of reality. In 1996, I applied for a scholarship from the Ministry of Science and learned that there were scholarships. Of course, no one at the faculty told me that, although I fulfilled all the prerequisites needed, but you hear that info from people who were already in it and I received that scholarship and I was told that there is a position in Mihajlo Pupin Institute. I said okay, but I’m not an engineer, what am I going to do at that type of institute? They told me that there is one center that is multidisciplinary and deals with research into the development of science and technology, innovation in the transfer of the economy and so on. That seemed very interesting to me and after a year of some research work, I got a job here, they accepted me. And since then, I have been here, and since then I have been in parallel, to say the activist, part related to women’s entrepreneurship. And then at some point I connected that research part and what I was doing, but in a way, I didn’t do it with purpose, honestly. I was first drawn to the story about women and support for women’s entrepreneurship projects, something that is happening fast here. However, science is a slower thing and something that somewhere binds a person more to the office and, to say at least, a more patient way of working, and those are some two sides of, probably, my personality. I could say that doing science is a luxury. Because sitting, researching, reading, it’s wonderful, really, I really like it. But on the other hand, it is in a way the privilege of the rich people. Strange as it may sound. Because scientists are not rich, mostly. But it’s simple – on the other hand, projects are dynamic, projects are something that allows you to express yourself creatively faster and easier, and at that time, when you are young, you start a family and so on, it is important to do something that brings money. The consulting business is something through which I had that side covered so that I could deal with these other things non-profit. So I don’t know, it seems to me that I realized all this quickly and managed to find myself in every aspect and satisfy some – never something excessive, some desire for some material stuff, as much as a huge desire for some new knowledge, new situations, contacts with people and that pulls you. It somehow went without a strict plan. I now listen a lot to my daughters who follow people on Instagram and so on now there are various life coaches- they are not life coaches either, but they are motivational speakers, so I don’t know-  you should have a plan, so … of course I am for that you need to have certain goals and that is certainly important. I had them too, but be careful, I had a goal, for example, to work safely in a marketing agency and to deal with marketing, which is the course of study I completed, so that it turns out very quickly that it doesn’t really inspire me enough to work in that field, the zeal of promoting someone I don’t know, a hygiene product or some, I don’t know, healthy food or a product that is poisonous. It was that ethics in marketing for me, it was quite problematic for me anyway, and I wouldn’t be able to dedicate myself to it when I don’t feel it. But the promotion of some ideas, support for something like women’s entrepreneurship, is just like me. It’s what matters to me.

Sanja Milosavljevic: Well great, that’s good. Fortunately, that’s right. Yes, because it seems like a simple thing and it seems to people like a one-dimensional thing, to promote or support women’s entrepreneurship, and in fact it is not at all. Let’s just start from the fact that we live in a deeply patriarchal society and that in our region – and talking to women from all over the world, it’s not just our characteristic. In one way or another, it can be found in China and it can be found, I don’t know, in South America. Or in Africa. We live in that one patriarchal world where women have no place in business at all and they shouldn’t even get carried away by taking it seriously. I mean luckily things are changing so it’s not like that anymore. And what is the condition – in what condition is the woman entrepreneurship? In fact, I’d like to ask you one question before that. Do you differentiate entrepreneurship and woman entrepreneurship? Are there any different rules for entrepreneurship, in general, and then some special rules that apply to women’s entrepreneurship?

Sanja Popović Pantić: Well, there are. Of course, because there are certain specifics, because if we start from that principle of equal rights for all, we will already encountered a problem there. Because they are not. First of all, in order for a woman to start a business like a man, she needs start-up capital, right? Now, in Serbia, for example, it’s like, from 10 to 15-16% of women own some real estate, and real estate needs collateral, for example with banks for any loan. Therefore, since they are in the minority owners of such assets, they are initially discriminated against, and that is a consequence of gender stereotypes and the fact that it is inherited even today through the male line regarding the real estate. I was shocked – yesterday I heard from my daughter about the case that her – there is a girl thinking that everything should belong to her brother, even though she lives in Belgrade for several generations. So that’s really shocking to me. Because, after all, since I have been in this topic for a long time, I am surrounded by a lot of emancipated women, although of course we also see women who have these problems or had them at the beginning, of course. But still in a way something like that sobered me up. To say, I am mostly in communication with emancipated women, gender-conscious, I am all in that through these various programs, institutions, and then I really say yes, it still exists. And I’m sad, because after all, I’m talking about this Z generation – our children, our daughters, girls, why do they think that way? How come? So from here, from this cultural environment, cultural and social, which is obviously moving forward, but slowly. Very, very slowly and there are some contradictions that are really present. Here is a short answer to your question. And I apologize for just one second – I have a seemingly urgent job here, and I’m in the middle of shooting, so I have to tell my colleague … here’s the multitasking I’m talking about, especially for women, that we can do at the same time as octopuses a thousand things. And that is not a problem for us.

Sanja Milosavljevic: Although, recently, I’ve seen something like memes, posters, it doesn’t even matter, on social media – “Multitasking is proof that I can do multiple things wrong at the same time.” I mean it’s a bit clumsy translation, but it’s proof that I can now “get it wrong” if I’m juggling, if I’m doing more things at the same time, although I agree that we can do more things. I start from myself, I can focus, but I can really focus on one thing, and then there can be 20 more less important things to do. Well, yes.

Sanja Popović Pantić: But I mean, you know what, I believe synergy, at least in my case, helps me a lot to really minimize that risk of error because it’s impossible to focus on different things with the same zeal, what you said. But that is why it is very important to achieve that synergy  wherever possible. So I was lucky that in the space where I work, in the building of the Mihajlo Pupin Institute somewhere around 2000, the Institute was really quite empty. People left, emigrated, engineers left, you know, brain drain, and so on. And there was a lot of space and the then director said, please, you can establish various professional associations. He probably hoped it would be engineering and the like. When I came up with the idea of having an association of business women there, he laughed. But of course-

Sanja Milosavljevic: But why? Why did he laugh? What was funny with that idea?

Sanja Popović Pantić: Well, I don’t know, probably because he meant something completely different. So he had an engineering association in his head and so on. But at that time, it wasn’t really like that – absolutely no one existed, there wasn’t a single association of business women or women entrepreneurs in ’98 and after 2000, when we actually moved here. There wasn’t. There were some groups of women in the homemade industry, but entrepreneurs or business women, that did not exist. Today, there are a lot of different associations and the whole scene is different, and that was really shocking then. And really, when I think about those years now, quite often when I would introduce myself and mention to someone, the Association of Business Women, they would be like: what is it? Like, what? I mean, what is that for? Such questions are very rare now – I really don’t encounter that anymore. I think that through that, if we look at it as a society, we have matured a little, a little more. I see something else and there are some new trends in politics and I really welcome that. And somehow it’s quite different now. 

Sanja Milosavljevic: Fortunately. I started a private business when things were already in place, at least some tools were available to me or at least the support and help of other women and men was available to me. I don’t know what it would have looked like if I had entered a private business 20 years ago.

Sanja Popović Pantić: Well, yes, support is important. We have been here at the Institute for 20 years, it really is renting space, but not everyone can be a resident of such an Institution, and the fact that I work at the Institute, which predominantly deals with information technologies and that gender aspects, I think is accepted. Because both European trends and European projects are different like women in science and so on, all this somehow influenced the whole story to get more attention and significance and it helped me personally because people would always refer to you, whenever it is a situation where someone looks at you with suspicion because you speak about European trends, and everyone would be ashamed to say that they not for Europe or that it is like “what Europe” and so on. They may think so, but at least they don’t say it. And then in a way, for me personally, it meant many times that I somehow raised the whole story to a higher level, and I really always advocated for that. So this field must have scientific support, it must have statistics, data, we must not be reduced to who brings breakfast to whom because it is a devaluation of the whole topic.

Sanja Milosavljevic: Yes, and that is actually a derogation of the whole topic when it comes down to some of them, like, who is the boss in the house. I also don’t like it, we need to deal with the fact that there must be a structure, that there is a plan and goal, what we want to achieve in the end, and not just deal with gender equality and women’s entrepreneurship in a semi-joking tone. And tell me, where is women’s entrepreneurship today? Or, how many women today start their own business? How many women enter the business in general, what are the trends, what are the sectors they choose. Are they still traditional: food industries and some services related to accounting and so on, or is something changing here, and there is a breakthrough and change?

Sanja Popović Pantić: Well, look, the bottom line, that share of women entrepreneurs in the total number of companies is about one third. These are now some minor variations and so on. Unfortunately, we do not have these regular statistics, which is sad. But there are also criteria that a women’s company is quite fluid and have not been established at the European level either. Now, let’s not go into that digression, but just to say briefly that I am part of an international group of the Swedish Institute for Standardization and the International Trade Center. To define in fact a women’s company, they divided in fact the companies where women are the founders, the companies that women manage and whether what percentages are in which category.

Sanja Milosavljevic: Is it 51-49%?

Sanja Popović Pantić: Well, 51% is when the ownership is, you know, it’s a women’s company, and 30% when it’s managed by a woman and in order to be considered – in fact not ownership but to be considered a company run by a woman, at least 30% to be owned or managed. Which is okay in a way. The only thing that bothered me was that 51% of the ownership. Because very often it is – I know about our women, also in Serbia who had to – how many of them; they are in fact, they are more than 50-50 with her husband in business, but if in the BRA, they are 49-  51%, they would divorce. So there were situations like that and the woman is in business, even though she founded it, even though she is the brain of the operation, and then she made some balance for those small percentages, like, it doesn’t matter. I mean, they are very – they look like unimportant things, but real life stories and some gender relations stand for the assessment. And you asked me about the current situation, so … I think the quality of women’s entrepreneurship has improved. How do we measure it? We measure it through, first of all, the fact that women used to enter homemade small scale entrepreneurship, with women’s entrepreneurship fairs in small towns and so on. Which still exists and which is still perfectly fine because some other stories can grow out of that, but they don’t have to after all. It is simply a kind of creative creation more than a business. On the other hand, today we have already developed companies that are also exporters or are recognizable in the domestic market, have some development path, and are able to be innovative and it is a measure of how much they absorb funds, institutional grants, intended for development, competitiveness, innovation. We measured it through various researches and that percentage was about 10, below 10% somewhere in the middle of the 2000s, and then it increased a little and somehow women were more courageous in taking these grants and help, participating in those programs where they were co-financing them. Usually, these are schemes where someone gives you a certain amount, and you co-finance another part. And then the percentage of women who were able to co-finance, so that they could buy some modern equipment or enter some larger investments and some innovations, was slowly increasing. This is changing, slowly but it is much better. And in a way, now, it seems to me, the number of young women who enter especially in the industry sectors based on knowledge, on IT, is also increasing. For example, last year I was with my colleagues from the Center for Public Policy Research, we had the topic on women’s digital entrepreneurship. And here, for example, they came to the conclusion that some inequalities from the offline sphere were transferred to the online. So that women online do lower paid jobs like translation and so on through digital platforms, and why? Why not be encouraged to work and to a greater extent, look for jobs that are paid better? So there are interesting things here, but the trends are changing a bit and the processing industry is still there, primarily food processing is something where women dominate, but these services have diversified so much. They used to be, you know, bookkeeping and so of course personal services, the beauty industry, but now they have diversified a lot and there are also human resources and financial consulting that is more than just bookkeeping, to business coaching, to some skills development, there women are quite successful and a lot of those businesses are now emerging there.

Sanja Milosavljevic: Yes, that’s what I noticed. There are now a lot of companies run by women, and they are, they use technique and technology and not only work in our domestic market, but they work, they have clients all over the world. Which is phenomenal to me. Somehow they decide to do it, let’s just say, there are more and more women who do programming. So there is an increasing number of women who may develop some of their own software tomorrow or will develop some of their own software with their team that will be able to sell.

Sanja Popović Pantić: Or, designing in construction or web design, I think there is a lot in the creative industry. It really has added value. 

Sanja Milosavljevic: I see yes. I see that it changed a lot and that’s how it is for me, that … it’s nice. I’m not happy, I’m glad. I have the impression, I was a little worried that you said that this inequality was transferred from the offline world to the online world because I thought that in the online world it doesn’t matter if your name is Sanja or your name is Sanjin, what … when you work on line the results are measured differently because the one who hired you doesn’t see you, it doesn’t have to mean anything to them, what gender you are, it matters to them how you finished your tasks. Here, you have daughters – well, they are big now – 16, 17, 20 years old. Right?

Sanja Popović Pantić: Yes, 17, 18 this year, and the older one is 20, yes.

Sanja Milosavljevic: Yes, so you have already raised two young women who should enter the labor market tomorrow. How- when should we start? And should we pay more attention to the upbringing of girls or the upbringing of boys? I mean, where does gender equality come from 

Sanja Popović Pantić: You know something, I don’t know – I’m not a boy’s mother and I don’t know – we were just joking about being a boy’s mother like they can’t imagine me. I tell them, give birth to a boy so we’ll see how I would be as a grandmother. It would be nice to have a small bat spinning there, with curls like they had when they were little. Well, this is how I think that in general, children are really in that educational system, looking at our educational system, the more creative they are, the more primitive inside them exists, they have the opportunity to express, from first to fourth grade. As that education system progresses, it molds them more and more and pushes them into that mainstream, whatever it is. And simply that their creativity is somehow truncated. When you don’t practice that, you stun. And if they would rely only on the education they receive in the schools, a lot of children rely on it and they are hardly bored. And they don’t really have – there are few educators, let’s say professors, educators, pedagogues, but simply transmitters of some knowledge and information. And then they don’t try to work with those children and to awaken something in them. And children know how to reward and appreciate when they feel that the professor is present, to challenge them, how they like to say, and to ask them to think of something, to approach a teaching unit in a different way and so on. That is really rare. It was also rare in our time, let’s be clear, there wasn’t much of that, but those extracurricular activities were different, they were stimulated. Whoever wanted to, could … get some exceptions. There is something similar going on today, indeed, there are wonderful educators. But in general, as a system, even those professors who are creative and have a real love for that job, somehow they are not rewarded. They even punish them in a way. Even colleagues condemn them. And I mean, that’s what is really bad and what creates and destroys that will and desire to contribute. However, what is good, are social networks. And they just need to be taught, children, to choose quality content. So that’s it now – that’s why we participate in this project Girls’ Day, in fact, when we start working with them, they are in the seventh grade, age – 13. It is not our innovation, it is simply the International Girls` Day and Information Technology Day, which is celebrated every April on the last Thursday of the month. And then the girls, in our version of the event, go to the companies of our members, and then these big IT companies that gladly joined this project, they spent the day, listen to examples of successful managers, engineers, popularize these occupations where women are less represented so they visit women entrepreneurs in general, to spend that one day, to see what it’s like to be an entrepreneur. And really these are great things where- we came up with them, with their help, with the help of the girls we came up with the “Catch the Idea” competition where they make a short video on how they see entrepreneurship or how- last year it was like struggling with the Covid crisis, how to be creative in that period, what to do smart to spend your time in lockdown in a smart, creative way and that was great. So we got a lot of those good videos where they say they choose a variety of content that develops their skills, communication, engaging on those online platforms. There is that. My younger daughter, for example, is looking for such content for this show on RTS “Promaja”, she also has her own portal and her sister, my older daughter and her, found it themselves. First, the younger one found this and told the older one because the younger one was too young for that competition. Then the older one went and took her friend with her because she was afraid to go alone, so they were both admitted. Well, when this younger one came of some age, she said that it’s not fair, so I can’t participate in it anymore, there is no longer that competition. So the older said that now something is being sought for social networks, to find these contents for young people, like smart contents. And then it turned out that it was an ideal thing for the younger one because she is very curious and she is really interested in all that. And then she opened up the whole world to me. UNICEF has this, UN has that. Last year, she also received an award for an essay on “Cooking without waste” and then she wrote about it, as she also has her own page on Instagram. I can’t say which one because she doesn’t want it to be known.

Sanja Milosavljevic: And I wanted to share the name of Insta profile. Good that you told me, so I could stop myself.

Sanja Popović Pantić: Yes, because there are a lot of followers who are actually older than her, and she thinks that they would be disappointed if they saw that such a young person was behind it. Now, that speaks again about that kind of discrimination by age, that it is difficult for a young persons … but you see, she understood somehow and I couldn’t say “no” because I really don’t know. I think maybe she’s right and I respect that, so I won’t reveal it. But here, I want to say that social networks have a good side, only we adults cannot defend them “don’t, it’s not good” but it is required of both parents and educators, I mean professors, to offer them to be modern enough and those who are in contact with them to say, hey, look, I don’t know history, here is an application – maybe there is a game – from which they can learn in an interesting way about the history of the Serbian people. Some kind of multimedia interactive platform. Maybe there is, I really don’t know now, but I believe that there are various modern things where children can learn in a much more receptive way. But someone should tell them that and open that world to them.

Sanja Milosavljevic: Yes. Well, Sanja, I would like to ask you, for the end, how are you? How are you, really? How did you endure this previous year, that Zooming, that work from home, here- how did you manage to overcome- now you may not have had, I hope, but at some moments I had that problem, and I couldn’t get out, we were in a lockdown, and I couldn’t visit my mum. I had some kind of anxiety – I can’t say anxiety, but some things bothered me. Because I want to be good and respect the rules, but again I have some of my needs that are suddenly interrupted. So how are you – at the same time, you are in a very responsible position, you had a “Flower of Success” that was performed in a hybrid form, it was necessary to organize and find a way to conduct a manifestation that has 20 years of tradition and work on various projects and suddenly everything is different. So how are you?

Sanja Popović Pantić: So how am I. Yes. I don’t know – you know what, once this is over, we may finally see the consequences. Somehow we’re used to burying things, you know? After the bombing, for example, we are now joking about it. I know that when I work with my colleagues in the EU, I cooperate a lot with them, since I also lead that sectoral group in the European Entrepreneurship Network, which is specifically intended for women’s entrepreneurship. Colleagues are from other sectoral groups and we have those meetings. You know, you see – of course, they have a lot of experience, I learn a lot in that communication from them, and on the other hand, I think that it is much harder for them to have such extreme situations – this is the first in their lives. Global, social. And for us, we counted at the beginning of conversation, the third. So the 90s, then 2009-2010, then the bombing and now this. This is our fourth.

Sanja Milosavljevic: The fourth one, yes.

Sanja Popović Pantić: Fourth. So, well there it leaves a mark of course on all of us. I think we’re somewhere – you mentioned anxiety. There is a lot of that, it surrounds me, occasionally I see children come in those situations in my own house, that fear and it should be extinguished, that fire, and they should be encouraged, and in a way you are scared, yourself. I lost two kilos in the first week of Covid, which is great, but the reason was, I think, that I was running around abnormally, I was running to buy rice, water, I don’t know, other necessities. Because somewhere – okay, that was the trigger when there was a bombing. And I remember that at the same time, on March 24, I went rushing to buy water. It just started that same mechanism and it’s really scary. On the other hand, there are people around you who react differently, who are either tense or nervous or angry or out of fear they are aggressive and now you have – you have to deal with all that. You know, they looked at me in my own home, of course the children didn’t want to listen to anything, they looked at me like, this woman is crazy. What is she doing now bringing stuff – to say, I did not have the support for it.

Sanja Milosavljevic: But it seems to me – I’m sorry to interrupt you now, but it seems to me that this really comes to us now as an instinct. I think that, because we went through it once, the second time and now the “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me” but then the third time I know what to do. For the third time, I have already been taught what steps I should take in such situations.

Sanja Popović Pantić: Well, yes. That is the instinct, that intuition, something that is taught, so to say 

Sanja Milosavljevic: Readiness.

Sanja Popović Pantić: Fear, yes, and readiness, mixed with anxiety. Because you don’t know, it’s uncertain. In that sense, it’s much easier now, you understand. I mean, you know in a way – but while doing this research work of mine, I came across studies many times. European studies of the impact on economic development and so on, where climate change was mentioned in the first place, and pandemics in the plural, in the second place. What was it to me in 2018 when I read it for the first time, in 2018 -2019. I was like, pandemics as these people who write this normal”. So, I even left that out from some of mine later writings because it seemed to me that it was complete nonsense. I always even connected pandemics – unfortunately, probably – with the African continent, and then it was as good as Ebola, but here no one talks about it anymore, it has disappeared. I don’t know, swine flu or something like that. So it was simply built into official documents as phenomena that will be immanent to the future that has come in a couple of years. So it is not some distant future. Now, we are already used to it somehow, that vaccine appeared, we will live with those masks for sure for some time. I do not know. I can’t estimate, I think for sure another year. It is the most realistic for me to be able to reach that point, but I must not dare to say anything else. Well, I don’t think it’s so scary that this vaccination will take place here and there more often in the future, it’s just that at least here, our culture is such that we have swallowed various antibiotics and drugs. In Croatia. I don’t think it’s good at all, but it is just some ability to adapt and just thinking about it brings me to a state of balance. On some level. And that`s it. I think that Europe really sees, but since I am fortunately and in frequent contact through this project of a European network that has completely gone online, digital, all meetings, everything happens online, no travel at all. Of course, they have even worse lockdown measures. They are all in the houses and they are really – people have gone crazy. It can be seen – it is much different. But, it is something that now, in a way, I think we will live differently for some two or three years, so we will get used to it. Or we won’t get used to it, so it’s going to be a lot harder for us, you know. But now I’m starting from these children who were born two or three years ago and now they are two, three, four years old, so I see them with those masks. They live with it and it’s completely normal for them, they think it’s cool to wear it now – it’s like wearing a jacket and shoes when you go out, so you wear that face mask. And then, in a way, I envy them in a positive sense, that they don’t know better, they don’t know for different.

Sanja Milosavljevic: And they accept those things more easily. They do not make a question about it. I know how much struggle there has been with some people from my immediate environment that you have to accept that you have to wear a mask. And they are like educated people, I don’t know 40, 50 years old, they are like – they are not children. In fact, children are much more willing to adapt, they are much more-

Sanja Popović Pantić: Yes. It’s so fluffy! What you mentioned, for me is a – it’s just a striking example of how people refuse to learn and change some of their patterns in their heads, you know. And now, in fact, what is happening, these terrible things and deaths, punish them so cruelly for that. And then I really say, oh my God, so no one deserved to be punished because then maybe they didn’t act or didn’t put on that damn mask because they didn’t realize that they really need to stick to those measures. You can’t – people act like children and say “hey, did they tell us that we have to wear masks there?” You know? That logic is so immature. For  me, in a way – but I’m sorry that a man is terribly punished for that because he thinks so naively and then ends up in the hospital and has, God forbid, some consequences and passes away. It’s kind of cruel, those “rules” are conditionally speaking, cruel, that if you don’t respect them, you can be the one – you can be punished in the most severe way. If you can’t fight against something, you can’t say, I don’t care about you Pandemic. 

Sanja Milosavljevic: Yes, no way. It turned out that those who ridiculed the most and denied the consequences the most, were the ones, what you say, were just punished. I’m sorry too, but it’s their choice. My choice is to disinfect my hands, wear a mask, and keep my distance. Your choice is whether you will act in accordance with something that is prescribed and obviously gives results. So if, I don’t know, Japan or China have good results because they keep their distance and wear a mask, so why are we smarter than them? Yes, we have to pretend to be wiser than the rest of the world, which already has much more experience in these situations than we do. We had swine flu, but I don’t think anyone wore masks, nor did we see it as a big problem. The masks were probably worn by people who were ill or with some chronic diseases. But at the level of the whole country or city, masks should be worn, this is happening to us for the first time and we really needed time to learn that wearing a mask is okay. I think that’s the solution. One of the solutions.

Sanja Popović Pantić: For sure, it is. One of the solutions. You know what else, now it is true that such situations emphasize the role of the state. Institution. It is our problem that we identify the person with the institution. To us, the institution is like a man. Why, how, I really don’t know. But these are, these are terrible things in which the institution must come to the first place. I mean the institutional infrastructure in the sectors that are relevant in these situations. But, for example, what to do when you don’t have a vaccine like in the EU. People get sick, die and so on. The health care system and the way it is – much better than ours – so there are problems. I mean, I’m telling you, I don’t know if I’d be smart enough to invent something other than to say hey people, you can’t move between those cities now and so on, we don’t have a vaccine, we can’t vaccinate you, you have to stay at one place. And now what?

Sanja Milosavljevic: For your own good.

Sanja Popović Pantić: For your own good. And you take care of the health of the nation. And you have to fight with someone and egoism that is inherent to people and that just won’t … I think of it in that way, you know. For me, it is again a kind of mechanism to adapt, but not to blunt the edge of the fact that maybe someone will abuse it. If I start from that, I somehow have confidence in myself that I will be able to say listen, wait, don’t ask me from more than that. You know? So I don’t know. That’s how I look at it.

Sanja Milosavljevic: Oh, yes. We don’t – you said that nicely. I remember when I talked to the lady from China, I talked to her first, she said one very simple thing – they trust their institutions and when they were told to wear masks, they all started wearing masks. Without any persuasion, without any flattery, without any discomfort. Quite naturally, because they have absolute trust in their institutions, and if someone told people that from tomorrow, is such and such a situation, they were shown what is happening and what the possible consequences are. And like – that’s it. No drama. There is no convincing why something is good or bad

Sanja Popović Pantić: Well, yes, they have learned. That’s- that’s what makes me sad. We were tormented during these last decades and in one way or another, have lost confidence in everything, even in something that is in our own interest. And when a certain person you don’t trust tells you to do something that’s really good for you, a lot of people won’t do it.

Sanja Milosavljevic: Out of spite.

Sanja Popović Pantić: It’s self-destructive, you know. And I’m sorry about that. I am very sorry about that, because as a nation and people, we suffer more. And that loss of trust is objective. When you look back, you know … it’s hard to find a period when we were really so enthusiastic. And about the vaccines – in China, the same thing you mentioned, my friend who works with Chinese partners when the vaccination started, she says “So you were vaccinated with your vaccine?” and they said: “Of course.” We trust our state. And she said, I was just ashamed. And of course they started with vaccination a long time ago, they are doing their jobs, communication is going on, they still wear masks, they are still following all the rules and continuing with their lives. They live life. Life must be lived normally.

Sanja Milosavljevic: You have to live, it cannot stop. Thank you a lot, thank you for your time. Thank you because especially since I know you had another Zoom before this, and it’s not always easy to hold headphones and talk into a microphone. Thank you a lot, thank you for your time. Thank you- I hope you don’t mind, I wanted to show that Sanja, not only Sanja who writes and does something and makes some important decisions, but Sanja is actually that – a woman who is there with us, with some other women who are of flesh and blood.

Sanja Popović Pantić: Of course. And I’m much more than what you said. I mean work, work, okay, we all work and I love to work. But I’m much more than what you said and I actually, I enjoy all these ordinary things, maybe more than some other people. I have less desire for some luxuries, for me luxury is the content of emotions. Here is our beautiful conversation today, which we shared as if we were having coffee somewhere on our Danube quay, which is a part of both my and your childhood. I made my first steps there. So, it was a pleasure. Thank you very much, of course, on this occasion.

Sanja Milosavljevic: Oh, you’re welcome. Dear people, you watched and listened the Mondopreneur podcast. If you like it, you can always follow us on social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Just type Mondopreneur. Stay good, stay in good health and see you in a week.