– Not long ago I ran a survey about children and technology and asked parents what they want their children to be when they grow up. I barely came across “cosmonaut” or “astronaut” among the answers, while when I was a child it would have dominated. Why do you think we ended up here?

– You know, I've wondered about that more than once myself: every single launch of a rocket carrying a satellite or astronauts has always struck me as a majestic sight! But I think Artemis II gave us a partial answer to that question. After the mission returned to Earth, there were people from science and technology who said:

“I didn't realize how important this mission was to me until I saw it become reality.”

I understand perfectly what they meant, because I felt it too: watching astronauts take off for the Moon, watching the Earth recede and shrink in their window and the Moon grow larger—that was something completely unknown to our generation!

Artemis II showed us what was lost after December 1972, when the Apollo 17 mission flew. Imagine it: children in the '50s and '60s read science fiction, they read about robots, about flights to other planets. Then, in December 1972, human flights into deep space come to an end, spaceflight shrinks back to low Earth orbit, and over the next half century, true, we have some majestic achievements—for example, building the International Space Station, the size of a football field, and establishing a permanent human presence in space.

That doesn't change the fact that

we entered the 21st century with a world that looks far more like the world of the Flintstones than that of the Jetsons.

Under those circumstances a collective disappointment was inevitable. And so being an astronaut is no longer as attractive as it used to be.

But now that crewed expeditions into deep space are resuming, now that we have artificial intelligence and humanoid robots are probably coming soon—for real this time!—the 21st century is finally starting to look the way it should.

– I hope that's really true, but… it seems a large part of society never even found out about the success of the crewed lunar mission. Why?

– In 1968, when Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, the crew of Apollo 8, read passages from the Book of Genesis on Christmas Eve, it happened in front of billions of viewers. But back then the mass media were far more limited than today. There was television, radio and newspapers. That's it. In today's world of the internet and social networks, public attention is badly fragmented. There are countless places where a person can get informed—quite apart from the fact that a huge share of those channels spew disinformation, and artificial intelligence only amplifies that.

Still, let's not forget that, in spite of everything, Artemis II attracted considerable interest. As the most recognizable space popularizer in the country, my problem was a different one—I couldn't be everywhere at once. I was invited to comment in many places, and I had to turn some down—not that I didn't want to, but with work, a family and two children, it was physically impossible to be everywhere. Even this interview of ours we had planned several months ago—and we're only doing it now.

– True, but… in my view, news like this deserves much more discussion and a return to the center of public conversation. The fact is that the sciences exploring the Universe aren't there today. Do they gain or lose from that?

– I don't agree that they don't make it into the center of public conversation—after all, I've been actively popularizing spaceflight for two decades. Back then, 20 years ago, the situation really was depressing—there was none of the private momentum we see today. But

I have witnessed space coming back into public view,

first, thanks to private players like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and second, thanks to a new generation of science fiction in novels and films—Andy Weir's The Martian (and now there's a lot of talk about Project Hail Mary too), and Ronald D. Moore's series For All Mankind. Broad public interest, naturally, isn't constant, but it always flares up when something interesting happens—say, Perseverance landing on Mars in 2021, or the Artemis II flight to the Moon.

But I agree that there are never enough people to do the work. My field is citizen science—I'm a discoverer of asteroids, supernovae, brown dwarfs, binary star systems. Even there, in the various projects where we make discoveries, there is always a need for new volunteers to join in! The field is open—

today it is much easier to make discoveries than it ever was before,

but it still takes the will to put in hard work.

– How do you explain the fact that aliens have lost their “halo” as the public's favorite thing to fear, now that we have artificial intelligence?

– Aliens are perceived as something distant and abstract, compared with real threats like pandemics or wars, for example, which are very close to us.

Artificial intelligence also adds a serious element of uncertainty about jobs—and right now, at that. But modern astrobiology (which, by the way, has recently started developing actively in Bulgaria—we have a master's program at Sofia University!) is looking for an answer to the question of whether we are alone in the Universe—and doing it in an academic way that is radically different from the picture lodged in the public mind of flying saucers or little green men.

The truth is that over the last 30 years—that's how long it has been since the discovery of the first exoplanet around a main-sequence star like our Sun—we have learned an immense amount about the Universe, about planets and their conditions, so that

when we discover alien life, we'll be better prepared. And therefore less frightened.

– I keep asking and can't find an answer for myself: how is it that we sent people to the Moon, we sent Voyager with technology that looks primitive by today's standards, and yet for half a century no human foot has set down even on our own satellite, let alone another planet?

– I strongly object to the claim that the technology of the '60s and '70s was primitive. People usually look at the computing power of the Apollo guidance computer and compare it with the modern personal computers every one of us owns. That's how they fall into the trap of thinking: “Oh, that computer is complete junk next to my phone, I can't imagine how they got to the Moon.” But let's look at its specs—a 1 MHz clock, 4 KB of RAM, 72 KB of ROM. Computers with specs like that only reached people's homes in 1977—I'm talking about the Commodore PET and Apple. In other words, the Apollo guidance computer was almost a decade ahead of its time.

Besides, it was perfectly adequate for the tasks involved in navigating the Apollo spacecraft.

By the way, the paradox is that while that computer was once ahead of home technology, today it's the exact opposite—

modern space computers are often modest compared with consumer ones.

The computer on NASA's newest Mars rover, Perseverance, which landed in 2021, has a single-core 200 MHz processor, 256 MB of RAM and 2 GB of flash memory. From the point of view of today's user, that is hopelessly outdated technology. But its job isn't to run heavy programs—only the strictly specialized software needed to get around on Mars.

The reason it took 53 years to resume our flights to the Moon has nothing to do with better microelectronics or computer technology—it's because

only now, half a century later, do we once again have super-heavy rockets for crewed missions in the class of the Saturn V.

Rockets like that have rarely been built and can be counted on one hand—in the past there were the Saturn V, the N1 and Energia. Only very recently have we gotten new super-heavy rockets like Falcon Heavy, the Space Launch System (the rocket that carried Artemis II), Starship and New Glenn.

The problem was that in the past the existence of such rockets couldn't be justified—fine, they can be used to send people to the Moon, but for what else of practical use? Spy satellites, geostationary communications satellites and robotic space missions could all be launched without trouble on more modest rockets. Now, though, that may be changing—there will be a market for super-heavy rockets thanks to megaconstellations, and above all those meant to build orbital data centers.

– You mentioned the positive role of private space ventures. Many of the big tech leaders of recent years—Musk, Bezos, Richard Branson—are tied to space. How do you see this race? Do you think they contribute seriously to progress in space exploration, or do they rather harm national programs?

– They're useful—and we can say that categorically, because

before these billionaires came along, the United States faced the possibility of being left without any significant launch vehicles at all.

In 2011 the Space Shuttle was retired, and NASA had no way of sending astronauts to the ISS except as passengers on Russian Soyuz spacecraft. For satellite launches and interplanetary missions there were expensive rockets like the Delta IV, as well as the famous Atlas V with its Russian RD-180 engines. After 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, the Americans had to stop buying RD-180s for their Atlases.

The truth is that if SpaceX hadn't created the Falcon 9, the Western world would have been in very bad shape. And recently Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket has entered service too.

– Why do all these people, joined by political leaders, turn out to be so generous with promises and so much less so with results? SpaceX's rockets are undoubtedly a phenomenon and a big step, but if we believe Musk, we should have sent people to Mars long ago, with him among them…

– It's true that among the billionaires, Elon Musk has succeeded the most with SpaceX, while the others have disappointed us. Yes, not all the billionaires succeeded—and there are logical reasons for that; few of them realized what the risks of the space business were.

Richard Branson turned out to be the most naive: he expected to take ready-made technology—air launch from the belly of a plane, demonstrated by the first private crewed spacecraft, SpaceShipOne, in 2004—and immediately start making money. And although he created orbital rockets (LauncherOne) and crewed tourist spacecraft (SpaceShipTwo) that were technologically successful, his orbital rocket company went bankrupt and the tourism one is on the verge of it—the numbers didn't add up.

Technological success doesn't guarantee market success.

Also, to succeed you have to surround yourself with good people—and that was precisely Jeff Bezos's mistake. For a long time his company, Blue Origin, couldn't build its rockets and spacecraft on schedule, because it was run by CEO Bob Smith—a man who came from the old aerospace industry, with all its bureaucracy and inefficiency. But recently Smith was replaced by Dave Limp—and right after that the successes began. The New Glenn rocket is already flying!

As for Elon Musk, he's the most successful of them all, and his rockets, as you said, are a phenomenon. So why hasn't he sent people to Mars yet? The truth is that even his successes come after drastic delays. In 2010 Musk expected to have the crewed Dragon spacecraft by 2012–2013, but it was only ready in 2020. Yet it's the best there is today—apart from Soyuz, only Dragon can carry crews from Earth to the ISS and back. So

Musk revolutionized crewed transport to orbit. Mars, however, is much farther away and requires a bigger ship—such as Starship.

Its development began in 2018 and it is still in testing. It's unclear when it will be finished—but if the story of Dragon's success has taught us anything, it's that it will happen later than we'd like.

– What is humanity's next great goal in space? Over the years I've been left with the impression that it remains rather vague…

– For many years it was vague, yes—because all sorts of possibilities were floated in public: flights to an asteroid, flights to the Moon, flights to Mars. It was especially visible whenever presidential administrations changed in the U.S. George W. Bush supported flights to the Moon, Obama was against them—he wanted a human to go to an asteroid first, and then on to Mars.

But things are different today—the Chinese are on the verge of sending a human to the Moon and building a permanently inhabited base there. That is exactly what turned out to be the catalyst that unleashed the new space race between the U.S. and China.

The goal is clear: the Moon. So is the task: to establish bases and a permanent human presence on our natural satellite.

The stakes are high—who will tap the Moon's resources? Who will start mining helium-3? Who will deploy a radio telescope on the far side of the Moon? Who will manufacture satellites and spacecraft on site?

The Moon is also an important intermediate step before sending humans to Mars. I think it's clear to all of us, but let me stress it once more: it's hard to dream of flights to Mars before we've mastered the Moon.

– I hope such steps really are coming; I think they'll definitely be a good sign for us as a civilization. Crewed flights certainly attract a lot of attention, and they have history behind them. But haven't we shifted toward far more uncrewed missions? Isn't that exactly why public interest faded—because we started sending probes far away instead of people? What do we gain?

– As someone who works mainly with data from uncrewed missions in my citizen science projects, I admit I'm somewhat biased toward them. I love them! We mustn't forget that even if humans visit the destinations I've already talked about—the Moon, asteroids and Mars—there are many places that will stay out of our reach for a long time. The hellish surface of Venus, or the moons of Jupiter, where the radiation is far too strong.

But I don't agree that uncrewed projects don't generate strong public interest. A few examples: the landings of the Mars rovers, the flight of the Ingenuity helicopter on the Red Planet, the images from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Uncrewed missions are unquestionably more numerous, and always will be, because they are cheaper and carrying them out involves smaller risks,

including business and political risks in case of failure.

To your question of what we gained, I'll answer directly: scientific data. Uncrewed spaceflight has always delivered far more data, far more discoveries, far more papers in prestigious scientific journals than crewed spaceflight. Unfortunately, the scientific contribution of the International Space Station—the main focus of modern crewed spaceflight—is rather modest.

But I think you'll agree that Artemis II brought public attention back to spaceflight in a special way. For a few days I looked at the Moon differently. I kept telling myself: “There are people flying out there.” And imagine what it will be like when we build bases. We'll be saying: “There are people living out there”! In that respect we undoubtedly lost something in the half century after Apollo, with no serious programs to settle the Moon with humans and not just robots.

– And still, I'm convinced the buzz around the mission should have been bigger and reached further. Of course, it's not too late, especially if we follow through with the next steps we talked about. Is there an alternative, in your view, to terraforming Mars as humanity's future?

– Oh, yes—that is exactly the clash between Musk and Bezos. For Musk, we have to go to Mars to save ourselves—to have a colony as a plan B in case something goes wrong on Earth, to guarantee that humanity survives. Bezos's vision is completely different—he believes there is no plan B for Earth and we must do everything we can to protect it as our unique home.

But protecting the planet can only become reality if we move heavy industry off it, into space and onto the Moon. It will be interesting to see how these two visions clash in the future—and whether they might just end up intertwined.

– Apart from Artemis II, what have been the most important breakthroughs in this field in recent years that never reached most of the public?

– I'd single out three main breakthroughs that excite me personally. The first is the arrival of rockets with reusable first stages—so far that means Falcon 9 and, recently, New Glenn. It makes launches possible every day or every other day.

The second is the rise of microsatellites, standards like CubeSat—these allow ordinary companies, not just space agencies with billion-dollar budgets, to run their own missions.

The third is in space astronomy and astrophysics—thanks to new space telescopes we're learning more and more about the nature and conditions of exoplanets, a brand-new field, since the first planet around another star was discovered only some thirty years ago.

It turned out that most exoplanets look like none of the planets

in the Solar System—they're intermediate in size between the Earth (the largest rocky planet) and Neptune (the smallest gas giant). And although we can determine their orbits, sizes or masses, we know practically nothing, almost nothing, about the conditions on their surfaces. These are an entirely new type of planet, which we label with terms like “super-Earths” or “mini-Neptunes.”

But what is on them, whether they could be habitable—we don't know!

– And what's the big story you can't wait to cover on your site?

– I've already covered it—Artemis II. For me the most long-awaited event was getting to cover a crewed spaceflight beyond Earth orbit. I didn't care what kind of flight exactly—what I cared about was

humanity finally beginning to break away from low Earth orbit,

where we'd been circling endlessly for the past half century. I wanted something different from flights to stations or free laps around the Earth. I'm glad I lived to see it again.

– Here's to going further still! I truly admire that for 20 years now you've kept stubbornly writing about this on your site. I'll be glad to talk through the next big space news with you too!

Play the video

Two people stare at each other in total concentration. Each has 45 seconds to identify the pictures that will appear in front of them and win the duel.

I have no doubt that last night you watched the first episode of The Floor, the new and innovative game show on NOVA, one of Bulgaria's main TV channels. If you didn't, it's not too late at all—there are still 12 whole episodes to come. It is a reason to celebrate in itself that a game about knowledge, not scandal, has made it to prime time, and I believe it will be the hit of the season. Rumor (and ChatGPT) has it that I'm in it too.

But we're here for a slightly different digital story, one closely tied to the game. It comes to show us that when we are together, we are capable of miracles. That if people brought together supposedly to compete and beat one another can reach out a hand for something bigger, then our society can do it too.

Do you like to provoke and test your knowledge? Are you looking for meaningful causes to help, knowing for sure that your help goes to the right place and supports something important and lasting?

If your answer is “yes” to even one of these questions, then this Digital Story is just for you!

Let me introduce Quizza! A website we built as volunteers. Where you can challenge yourself by taking any of our many permanent quizzes on all sorts of topics. Where you can face off in a weekly contest against some of the heroes you know from online and offline competitions! And, last but not least, where you can discover causes that each of us stands behind with our own name!

An Optimistic Theory of the Bulgarian Quiz

You have hardly ever seen 100 more varied souls at Sofia's Vasil Levski Airport than on one early morning before a flight to Amsterdam. People “of every age, sex and occupation,” united by the fact that they had dared to challenge themselves in a competition being made for Bulgarian television for the very first time.

What happened on The Floor you will see for yourselves (and I definitely advise you not to miss a single episode). So many colorful and different personalities, so many stories and so many causes. And although in the end there is supposedly only one winner, it turned out that we were all winners, because after the rather demanding and far from easy shoot we came back with new friends, new causes and new ideas.

Do you know what a quiz is? I know, I'm changing the subject abruptly, but The Floor has plenty of unexpected questions and sudden twists too.

The truth is… nobody knows. The origin of the word itself is shrouded in legend. According to a popular story from Dublin, a theater manager named Richard Daly bet that he could invent a meaningless word that within a matter of days would be the talk of the whole city. In 1791, the story goes, he scrawled the letters Q, U, I, Z on the walls, and soon everyone was talking about this strange word.

The story may be dubious, but you'll agree it's a charming one. The word “quiz” appears in print toward the end of the 18th century, but with a different meaning—an odd or eccentric person. Only in 1867 is it first found in the sense of a set of questions to test knowledge.

Strange People

We used to have a different word for the same thing: “viktorina.” A quiz is nothing more than a pleasant way to challenge and test your knowledge. A contest in which you try to solve puzzles—alone or as a team. They can be general knowledge or on a specific topic. Every duel you will see on The Floor is a quiz of sorts, and so is every other popular TV contest built around knowledge.

TV quizzes are a favorite pastime all over the world. It's enough to mention the Russian classic What? Where? When?, the American Jeopardy! or the homegrown Minuta e mnogo (A Minute Is a Lot). But in the online world quizzes come alive with full force on the web as well.

For many people, quizzes happen mainly… in pubs. I mentioned that “quiz” first turned up in old newspapers, so here is one more quote from a press review of ancient, prehistoric times.

“At first glance—a pub like any other. But if you look closely, you see sheets of paper and pens on the tables between the full beer mugs and the fries. And if you watch the people more carefully, you notice them staring thoughtfully at the sheets and puzzling over something that seems very important.”

The quote is from a Saturday feature in the daily 24 Chasa from 2009, headlined “A New Craze: Sport for the Brain in a Pub”. Perhaps you've guessed: I wrote it. In the years since—they have almost come of age by now—far more people have become convinced that pub quizzes are an extremely enjoyable pastime. Today almost every town has its local versions, and in the bigger cities you can choose where to join in with friends every day of the week.

Quiz Vadis?

The people who frequent such places have got used to calling themselves “quizzers,” though in my view we could try a little harder with our word-making.

What sets them apart from the “non-quizzers”? Erudition, perhaps, pretension, experience? I think the only difference is that the former have already discovered how pleasant it is not just to meet friends for a drink during the week, but also to try to get your brains moving together. That way even the beer tastes sweeter…

You may be wondering what all this has to do with the beginning of this story. Let's skip straight to the climax.

The Floor adventure in Amsterdam came to an end (although for viewers it is only just beginning!). And we decided that… we wanted to do something more! Many of the contestants love quizzes, and a good number of them talked about important, worthwhile, valuable causes they would support. So we wondered: isn't there a way to bring all of this together? Then, one word leading to another, we figured out how to make it happen.

Let me introduce Quizza! A website we built as volunteers. Where you can challenge yourself by taking any of our many permanent quizzes on all sorts of topics. Where you can face off in a weekly contest against some of the heroes you know from online and offline competitions! And, last but not least, where you can discover causes that each of us stands behind with our own name!

Bits and Soul

In some contests (in most of them, I'd even say) winning is not what matters most. I confess I wouldn't have guessed that 100 Bulgarians, most of whom had never met, sent off to compete against one another for a prize, could set an example of… community?

Could this be a direction, an idea, a hope that we can bring to life on a larger scale?

The idea for the site came about quite spontaneously. There aren't many places in the Bulgarian online space where you can put your knowledge to the test. At the same time, many people in our community create quizzes, and quite a few of us have an important cause we would like to support.

Can a good idea and a meaningful cause unite people, inspire them?

It turned out they can.

In a time when social networks have torn apart the dialogue between generations and points of view. In a time when authorities are as scarce as public conversation. In a time when artificial intelligence calls fundamental human notions into question…

Could it be that knowledge is what can bring us together?

A Quiz for a Cause

More than half of the contestants from the first season of The Floor are already part of the venture!

The programmers among us took on the site itself, and our designer is responsible for its wonderful look. The copywriters pitched in with texts, and the quiz authors with a huge number of quizzes varied in difficulty, topic, logic, even format, a challenge for anyone! We have quizzes for the most seasoned masters, quizzes for beginners, even quizzes for kids. We have sports and science quizzes, picture quizzes and text quizzes. A quiz for every taste and for everyone with taste!

On top of that, everyone had the right to propose a cause they stand behind with their own name.

Waiting for you already are 69 quizzes with 1,777 questions, contests twice a week and no fewer than 37 causes you can support if you so choose. Behind the venture are 88 of the 100 people from the Floor!

You can see who we are and what our causes are here.

I'm not starting with thanks by name, because here the strength truly lies in the team. In the example, in the meaning.

In the message that when an idea can unite us, we are capable of miracles. Of creating something useful for others. With no thought of profit, fame or personal success.

Is there anything more important?

Now it's your turn.

Come and try our quizzes!

(For fans of The Floor there is a special challenge with 100 questions—one for each of the topics on the “floor.” Score 60 points and you win a certificate!)

Join our contests.

Explore our causes.

Conquer the game!

I'm sure the best is yet to come…

In this life you shouldn't, and can't, only take. If you don't give—in return or entirely for free—you have lived in vain, as the popular hit song goes. Even if we know it, it is worth reminding ourselves often. I hope this Digital Story reaches more people. I believe that if more Bulgarians recognize its lessons, we are all capable of reclaiming the conversation and helping our country flourish. Of fulfilling the great dream of the protagonist and narrator here—that our children will WANT to stay in Bulgaria.

Tenko Nikolov is not only one of Bulgaria's most successful tech entrepreneurs. Starting from scratch, he, SiteGround's founder Ivo Tsenov and their team built a global business—one of the leading technology companies in the world.

He is a visionary who believes in the power of a close-knit team, shared values and “a little healthy madness.” He turns the office into a favorite place for the people who work there, mistakes into lessons, and success into an opportunity to give back to the community. For him, profit stopped being an end in itself long ago; it is a means to do something meaningful—from supporting education and science to investing in “moonshots” that could change the world. Today we have the chance to hear him tell his story of luck, the courage to take risks and the power of setting an example.

Play the video

This piece is based on the conversation I had with Tenko Nikolov at the DEV.BG Leadership Agora event in November 2025 at Sofia Tech Park. You can watch and listen to the conversation here.

Never Grow Up

Pippi Longstocking, you may remember, never wanted to. What will you be when you grow up? To me, this question and children's answers to it say a great deal. So does the way they change from generation to generation.

As a child, Tenko has no clear idea of “what he wants to be” until one day his grandfather gives him his first computer—the legendary Pravetz 8M, the Bulgarian-made home computer of the 1980s. It is a momentous meeting. “The moment I saw the computer, I already knew I wanted to be a programmer,” he recalls.

Computers are a rarity in those years, but Tenko is lucky enough to get a second one—a reward from his parents after he is admitted to the Language High School in Stara Zagora in 1991.

From then on, his interest turns more and more toward technology. And although life leads him down a different path and he never does become a programmer, computers shape his destiny.

The Wheel of Fortune

Ask Bill Gates, if you like, about all the stereotypes surrounding great tech success. The moment we start talking about wealth, we quickly arrive at the image of a straight road paved with luck.

But that is exactly why stories remain the last bastion where artificial intelligence lags far behind. Their strength lies in the seasoning, in the things beyond the words themselves.

SiteGround's story begins modestly and unexpectedly—in a student dorm at the American University in Bulgaria in Blagoevgrad, where a group of friends decide to try their luck in the hosting business. Tenko Nikolov isn't even among them, but he joins very soon—when the team numbers just four people, by then working out of a small apartment in Borovo, a neighborhood in the capital, Sofia.

At that point the venture looks close to hopeless. There is no money; the team scrapes by from month to month. “Everyone did everything. I worked around the clock, my partner Ivo did too, everyone around us worked around the clock.”

Tenko's office is in the kitchen, where his colleague Dima makes pancakes in the mornings.

Never Give In—Never, Never, Never, Never

One Friday the team gathers and his partner Ivo Tsenov says, exhausted: “Well, we tried, it isn't working. It's not going to happen…”

The business simply isn't taking off. It's time to close the company. But since it's Friday, they decide to wait until Monday.

Meanwhile… a small miracle happens. The team is still together, “drowning the failure,” when a message arrives: the first sale has been made. After months of hard but fruitless work, things are finally happening, and someone somewhere has paid for their service! Saturday morning brings… a second sale.

And so on Monday the office is euphoric, and the end is postponed. Yes, we know fate has a sense of humor: a little later a message arrives that the money has been charged back—it turns out the first two “purchases” were made by a fraudster with a stolen credit card.

The joy turns out to be premature. “But that's why we still exist today—because of a failed thief and a wink from fate at just the right moment,” Tenko smiles. The third sale soon follows, and the wheel slowly but irreversibly begins to turn, before rolling at an ever more dizzying speed.

The Wheel of Time

Is success a matter of luck? To some extent, yes, Tenko Nikolov believes, but with an important caveat: “Luck is always part of it. But you have to provoke it. It doesn't work with luck alone, and it doesn't work without it.” A lucky break on its own isn't enough if you don't have the right team beside you and you don't take risks. “Without the right people, nothing works. And of course the right moment matters too.”

How does a fledgling business choose the right people? From day one, Tenko says, they looked for colleagues who thought alike, with the same ideals and value system. Today that sounds like a cliché from an HR post, but at the turn of the century, when this story begins, even clichés weren't what they are now.

At the time Bulgaria has many well-trained engineers and system administrators—many of them self-taught talents capable of working wonders. And that, according to Tenko, is a paradox, because back then the education system isn't capable of training them, and the big companies haven't arrived in the country yet. Still, the talent is there, and SiteGround quickly figures out how to attract it. With an idea and a team, not just with promises of a high salary.

“The hosting business has never been the sexiest venture in the world,” Tenko smiles. So the strategy isn't to lure people with grand promises, but with a different approach. “We tried to attract people by doing things differently, by making them interesting,” he explains.

“Never Mind, I'm at Work”

I'll confess: one of the saddest sights for me is people who don't love their work. Time is our most precious resource, and I can't imagine what it's like to give such a large part of it to something you don't like.

Today's protagonist thinks the same way. “It's very common for people to hate their jobs, and when they get together with friends, the venting is aimed either at their other half or at their work,” Tenko says. “We can't do much about the other half, but we decided to try to change the direction at least when it comes to our employees' work.” At SiteGround, the philosophy that work can be a pleasure arises naturally, not out of a textbook. Today many companies talk about “shared values” and “team culture”—but all too often these remain mere good intentions.

The company grows fast. The first apartment-office in Borovo becomes too cramped once the team passes 10 people. They move to another, bigger apartment. And there, every time they have a problem to solve, Tenko and Ivo go outside and launch into a heated debate. They argue for hours about what to do, and many of their unconventional moves are born on the street. One of them is expanding beyond Sofia—a rather exotic decision for an IT company in those years.

After Plovdiv comes Stara Zagora, Tenko's hometown. Meanwhile, the Sofia team keeps growing, and by 2011 it's time for SiteGround's next step. The age of apartments is over; they need an office in the traditional sense of the word. Here comes one of those fateful street arguments between the partners. They tour buildings around Sofia and come across something that both attracts and frightens them—an entire floor of 3,500 square meters in a modern office building. “It's big,” says Ivo. “It really is big,” Tenko agrees. But an idea is nagging at both of them: “I think we should take it.”

A Big Heart

At first the sight is surreal. Twenty-five people occupy a space that could hold hundreds. “Thirty percent of the office was used as working space,” Tenko recalls, “the rest we turned into… fun.” The two partners decide to invest part of the profit in things that will make their people happy. Game rooms, foosball tables, pool tables, even an indoor tennis court.

Tenko tells a funny story from that time. Coca-Cola Hellenic also has its office in the same building—a corporate giant occupying six floors. One day he runs into its director for Bulgaria in the elevator. “He's in a suit from head to toe, with a tie. He greets me and says frankly: ‘You should know I really envy you. You have the most beautiful office, the happiest employees. And on top of that, you come to work in flip-flops!’”

“People don't need all that much to be happy. Someone just has to think about it,” Tenko says, returning to the story. “We realized early on that it was very important for us to spend some of the money on making our people happy.” He doesn't hide his satisfaction that their example has gradually become the norm.

Give and Take

And here we come to what, for me, matters most in this story. Already in SiteGround's first years, Tenko and his partners begin asking themselves: “What can we do that is positive not only for us, but also for the ecosystem in Bulgaria, for the developer community in general?”

They realize they use an enormous amount of open-source software. It quickly occurs to them that they can build on these projects and give them back to the community. To be not just users but also creators of free software.

Ten years later the results are impressive: 160 contributions to the Linux kernel, millions of lines of code used by programmers around the world. “Today a pretty solid percentage of the internet runs our code,” Tenko notes proudly.

Doesn't this defy the logic of competition and the market? Doesn't it hand an advantage to competitors, who can use the code ready-made?

“Strong competition produces a good product for the end customer,” Tenko says. “We've been weakest as a company when we didn't have strong competition. So if your competitors get stronger—thanks to your code or anything else—you'll get stronger too.” And he adds: “You can't only take. If you do, at some point the apples on the tree run out. If you don't plant a new one, there won't be any left, not only for your children but for you yourself.”

A vivid metaphor, wouldn't you say?

Coding It Forward

This effort to “plant” in the soil of the community proves extremely valuable. At first it's hard—it takes discipline and a different way of working, but the effort pays off. And as the results become visible, the team's confidence grows too. They see that a (then) small Bulgarian company can contribute to the global software ecosystem.

Then comes time for the next step. Tenko and his colleagues start asking: “What else useful can we do?” They want to build on the idea of giving. And so the company's first internal initiative is born: before a Christmas party, Dima (the same colleague with the pancakes) suggests that everyone together support a meaningful cause. She has prepared a list of three ideas for the team to choose from—the company will give employees a chance to donate, and it will double the amount raised.

The result exceeds all expectations—they raise an unexpectedly large sum. They announce the three chosen causes, explain why they matter to society and set out the donation box. “We expected people to give 2–3 leva (about $1–1.70),” Tenko recalls, “and everyone was putting in 50, 100. We raised an impressive amount.

That's how we understood that the problem isn't that Bulgarians don't want to give, but that it's hard for them to do so. Dima had put in a huge amount of work, she had researched dozens of proposals and picked 3 of them. She had checked carefully and assessed exactly where a donation was not just needed but would have a lasting effect. Most people would find it hard to do that work on their own if they decided to give 5 or 50 leva to a good cause. Especially the element of sustainability,” Tenko stresses, “not just giving some money, but wanting something to happen in return for it. That's broadly missing here—people either don't trust, or don't know where to donate, or can't be bothered to check. And that leads to apathy and the nihilistic belief that nothing depends on us and that every cause is suspect.”

The Wrong Way Round

And so we arrive at today, when Tenko has even handed the day-to-day management of SiteGround over to his trusted team. Instead, he is active in running the Za Primer (“Set an Example”) Foundation, which has the important and ambitious goal of supporting causes that make Bulgaria a better place to live in a lasting way. Quite an impressive transformation, wouldn't you say? Among the foundation's main areas of work are education, sport and health.

And since we've touched on sustainability, it's no surprise that education gets particular emphasis. You may remember the Digital Stories series on children and technology—one of the few opinions that unite parents is that today's education system is out of step with the times we live in and needs serious change.

So why doesn't anything much change?

Tenko Nikolov has a firsthand answer: despite hundreds of proposals for changing the education system, very few have actually been implemented. And real change remains as far off as ever. The reason, in his view, isn't a lack of will or expertise, but that everything always runs into the same wall—the institutions.

“The bureaucratic machine is so ossified that a handful of people can stop any initiative,” he adds, and gives a telling example. Unhappy with the food his children get at school, he digs into the subject. It turns out that pupils' food is prepared according to the so-called School Meals Recipe Book, which hasn't been updated… since 1968!

Tenko's team notices that the solution isn't complicated: they propose hiring top chefs to update the recipe book. The condition is that the food mustn't get more expensive—a healthier menu has to be achieved within schools' existing budgets. “An apple instead of a sausage roll.”

The first problem is surprising and, once again, has to do with apples—this time not metaphorically at all. It turns out there aren't enough Bulgarian apples in the country to supply all the schools. The bigger problem, though, is once again the will for lasting change at the national level.

An Insight into INSAIT

Here, however, comes a particularly important and telling example that big change is possible, even in education. I mean the most successful and promising venture in this field in Bulgaria, which would not have been possible in its current form if Tenko Nikolov in particular hadn't put his trust in it.

Sometimes solutions come from unexpected places—through remarkable people with vision and courage. Like Prof. Martin Vechev, well known to readers of Digital Stories.

One of the most important components in building a complex structure like INSAIT is attracting the best artificial intelligence scientists in the world here, to Bulgaria. Beyond state funding, this requires additional money for part of these people's salaries, especially the first ones to start at INSAIT, since they set the level for everyone who follows.

Tenko remembers how, halfway through his meeting with Prof. Martin Vechev, he interrupted the professor and said: “Even if you do a third of what you're telling me, it will change our country a great deal. Tell me, how can we help?”

SiteGround's founders were among the first to put their trust in this ambitious undertaking, and to date they are INSAIT's largest donors, with more than €6 million. This money has been key to bringing some of the world's most renowned artificial intelligence scientists to Sofia in person (such as Prof. Luc Van Gool). Although today INSAIT is supported by the entire Bulgarian ecosystem and by companies such as Google, Amazon, Toyota and many others, SiteGround's initial and continuing support has been fundamental to INSAIT's success.

“You have to be a little crazy and believe that even the impossible is possible. Clearly, without a little madness, it just won't work for us,” Tenko sums up.

Setting an Example, for Example

Can this story be repeated in other fields? Tenko believes it can. “There are Bulgarian professors at top universities. People need to have the desire to do something here. Where there's a will, there's a way.”

It's no accident that his foundation is called Set an Example. Good is “contagious”—all it takes is to show that something can be done, and it will give wings to everyone who follows.

What does someone like Tenko Nikolov dream of today? As it turns out, the same thing I do. “I dream that my children will want to stay in Bulgaria. Right now it's a strange period, and a lot has to change for that to happen.”

But I believe that when people like him set themselves dreams and goals like that, it can't help but happen. It's time for a little more optimism, for reclaiming the public conversation, for shared goals.

And besides, it's true—a person is as big as their dreams. Especially if they have the courage to follow them…

As soon as autumn arrives, Sofia starts gasping under the traffic of hundreds of thousands of cars it was never built to handle. And all of us start asking the almost rhetorical question: is there really no way to change this? To get more people onto public transport, onto their bikes… We know the benefits very well.

Public transport, alas, is often inconvenient. Even though it is supposedly connected to the most modern online platforms, that doesn't help us enough. I say this in the first person, as someone who gets around by bike and by bus, and climbs into a car only when there is no way around it.

Platforms like Google Maps are invaluable for planning your route, but… they almost always give inaccurate information about when the next bus will come. They don't tell you whether it will be crammed to bursting, whether it will be dirty and neglected, whether the driver will cheerfully wait for you or turn out to be a sourpuss ready to slam the door in your face.

This can change, though, and once again technology comes to the rescue. The idea of open data may prove invaluable in helping Sofia (and not only Sofia) to “unclog” and start breathing. How? You'll find out from the fascinating story of my fellow programmers at the company Codexio.

Always Full, Never Empty

Less than a month ago a piece of news appeared that could hardly mean much to the general public, but it certainly thrilled the IT community. For the first time, Sofia Municipality published the data it holds on the city's public transport system. Around the world it is common practice for municipal and national administrations to freely share information from their databases in all sorts of areas.

Because in the world of information technology and artificial intelligence, data is everything! With every step we take, we leave behind a trail of information that lets us live in the comfortable world we inhabit today. Yes, this creates problems, such as the potential for manipulation, but it also opens up enormous possibilities—like, in this case, making public transport as convenient as it can be.

So what happened here? A convenient form appeared through which anyone interested can gain access to information. On the one hand, about the timetables at the stops; on the other, about where every bus, tram and trolleybus is in real time. What's more, it uses a standardized format called GTFS, created by Google, which makes the data convenient, understandable and easy to work with for any software engineer who wants to use it.

Quite a few IT specialists reacted at lightning speed, and within a matter of days several applications using this information appeared. Some took the form of mobile apps, others of websites that can be opened on both a computer and a phone.

Trains Leaving in Every Direction

TrackTheBus. “Follow the bus.” That's the name of the page created by our three protagonists—Ivan Yonkov, Yoana Borisova and Mihaylo Oleshchuk from Codexio.

Ivan, who is now the company's CEO, arrived in Sofia 14 years ago, and one of the first things he became a fan of was… public transport. “I used it to learn the city. I'd get on a random bus just to look around, to see where it was going. To this day I'm super curious about the little hidden streets it will turn into.”

So the moment he learned that the data on public transport vehicles was becoming public, he found kindred spirits in his colleagues Yoana and Mihaylo and got to work.

It's clear that we live in the age of artificial intelligence, but not everyone yet realizes what that means. If you don't work in IT or have no direct contact with it, you may not have heard of the trend called “vibe coding.” Sometimes, without writing a single line of code, a person can now create a website that works surprisingly well. Yes, imperfections are inevitable. Yes, the more complex capabilities are (still) in the hands of programmers, but the road from an idea to something that can be shown and tested is drastically shorter. In vibe coding, projects are built almost entirely through instructions to an AI, which writes the vast majority of the project.

And so, in just a few days, Ivan, Yoana and Mihaylo (who doesn't even have a programmer's background) managed together to create TrackTheBus. The platform not only conveniently shows you the stops and vehicles near you, but also promises to grow into a kind of social network that would make using public transport considerably more convenient and rewarding.

Everything on the Map

“The potential for a social platform is something useful that can go far beyond Google Maps,” says Yoana. Since every vehicle in the data coming from the Urban Mobility Center has a unique number, every user can add information about it. That way you'll easily find out whether a given bus is packed, or whether a tram “smells” in a way that definitely suggests you'd better not get on. Whether the driver has put up fresh signs, or whether one of the still few but eye-catching double-decker buses in the capital's fleet is on its way.

And this, as Ivan points out, can go much further. The municipality's complaints platform is soon expected to open up to external apps as well, so that any more serious problem can be addressed quickly.

“This gives far more room for civic initiative and for raising the quality of the service. Anyone can follow how a given problem has developed. A bus isn't clean, then it is, which means those complaints have made a difference,” says Ivan.

Dear Passenger

Of course, the venture is at an early stage, as the notes left on the page itself make clear. But its goal is to grow, to add features and to build a community of people who care about topics like public transport and, more broadly, how to make getting around Sofia easier and more convenient.

And not just in the capital. Since, as mentioned, standardized data is being used here, any other municipality that decides it's a good idea to give free access to its public transport information can be added without much effort.

But why would a team at the head of a company take on a venture like this… purely out of goodwill?

“That's the whole point of civic initiative,” says Ivan. “First, we want to use it ourselves, because there's no convenient app that offers these possibilities. We want something better. We want different aspects of life in Bulgaria to develop, and to make it clear that opening up data makes sense. Sofia Municipality has shown initiative, and if we citizens don't seize it and start using the data, there will be no reason for it to continue. With more data opened up, remarkable ventures can appear!” the programmer adds.

One example in this direction is the schedule of the traffic lights. If it became public, apps would appear that could determine far more accurately the fastest way to reach any destination in the capital.

Pull Up Next to Me

Or take another painful topic: parking in Sofia. If data on free spaces in the green and blue zones—the city's paid parking areas—were public, it would make planning any trip considerably easier.

And if information on road markings appeared in open form, IT specialists could analyze it and propose concrete ideas about what could be improved, where and how, so that the city's big boulevards could finally unclog.

Then there are the trains—public data is missing there too, and yet the rail network here is designed to complement the urban one. Despite the not exactly glittering image of Bulgarian railways in recent years, they certainly can, and deserve to, become a convenient way to get out of the capital, an alternative to the nightmarish traffic jams on the highways.

Which brings us to my favorite mode of transport—bicycles. Our capital is one of the few in Europe for which even Google Maps gives no specific information on the best way to reach a given point by bike. If open data were embraced, we could see serious progress here too.

On the Road

“Our idea is to integrate all the static and live data that the municipalities will ever open up. To bring it together seamlessly, in a single platform that's useful for everyone. Not separate pages, but a place where you can see how everything connects,” Ivan adds.

“The big topic is open data,” Mihaylo adds. “It makes it possible to build up statistics, to build up knowledge. To use mathematical models to solve everyday problems that affect all of us. The idea is to improve people's quality of life.”

It's worth reminding ourselves more often that this is exactly why we create technology. To make our lives better. And when open data and open-minded people join hands, good examples are bound to follow.

Can you tell a real human voice from one generated entirely by artificial intelligence—and in Bulgarian, no less? A serious challenge awaits you, and there are prizes! But before we get to the experiment, let me tell you a full-throated digital story that, I believe, will go on echoing with a timbre all its own.

It's no news that AI generates images and texts that (we checked!) cannot be told apart from those created by humans. Video still seems to lag behind, but… Can you imagine a voice indistinguishable from a human one reading the news? Or calling you on the phone without the slightest chance of you telling the difference? We're not talking about the popular trick of cloning a voice, but about one created entirely artificially that is nonetheless this convincing. And in pure Bulgarian, which is almost impossible for anyone who isn't a native speaker!

And what a challenge awaits you on Tuesday…

The Right to a Voice

Although it doesn't have a commercial name yet (I suspect its creators would welcome interesting suggestions), this is a venture that is already being used successfully in practice. Thanks to the heroes of this digital story, for half a year now listeners of Radio Focus all over the country have been hearing regional news read specially for them by their favorite hosts.

Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova and Ivan Vankov (Gatakka). If you follow Digital Stories, these names are familiar to you. Assoc. Prof. Todorova is paving the way for futurology in its modern form in Bulgaria, and every year she joins me for an important conversation about what lies ahead and the big questions we ought to be asking ourselves. Gatakka, for his part, is a tech specialist with vast experience who long ago won popularity for his knack for explaining technology and peering into its future. What could possibly unite these two undisputed authorities? Precisely the project whose skills we will put to the test at the end of this encounter.

A Voice as Sweet as Honey

In an era when the media still face the great task of reinventing themselves, personalized content is proving more important than ever. A personal touch, the right selection, but garnished with the authority that the media (ought to) provide. The conversation on this topic was opened by Assoc. Prof. Todorova, who at the time hosted a regular segment on Radio Focus, and the station's owner, Kiril Naldzhiev.

“Almost as a joke, he asked whether someone could make an AI that would clone the host's voice,” the researcher recalls. “I suggested Ivan, and half-jokingly we decided to experiment. We cloned the voices of two hosts—Bilyana Bozinareva and Zhivko Georgiev. The results were surprisingly good, especially for Bulgarian!”

The joke quickly became a working venture. Since September 2024, the cloned voices of the two hosts have been “reading” eight newscasts every day, different for each of the 11 regions where the station has a local channel. I listened to the news… the result is definitely impressive.

Voices

“It's not that this would be impossible with radio hosts reading the news, but it takes a lot of resources, and the station didn't have them,” says Assoc. Prof. Todorova. “So with one simple solution, Focus became the biggest radio outlet for regional news. This democratizes knowledge, because it makes it more accessible—people who don't have time to read will hear it. People with visual impairments and older people also get the chance to take in the information.”

Personally, I can't wait for regional quirks to be added! If I hear Zhivko Georgiev reading the news for the Northwest as if it had been written by Torlaka in the style of his dialect-soaked “Severozapaden roman” (Northwestern Novel), and so on from region to region… life will become more interesting and colorful.

“Но! вината” (No! vinata, a pun on novinata, “the news,” that reads as “But! The Blame”)—that was the title of the first of what are now more than 450 articles on this site, in which, four years ago, I imagined how technology would take over even more of journalists' work. I don't know about you, but I choose to be enthusiastic rather than frightened that everything I described on the subject in that piece is actually happening. Let the next impressive technologies come; how we introduce them and where we keep the human touch in them is better left for a separate conversation. One so important that it has kept me writing two digital stories every week for four years.

Voiceless, to the Letter

The project of Assoc. Prof. Todorova and Gatakka (tell me they don't sound like a superhero duo!) has proven itself in practice, and it's time for it to grow further. Yes, cloning is getting easier, but… might the next step be a good idea—creating voices, so that under the familiar credit “text read by” we hear the words of people who don't exist?

That is precisely today's challenge facing our superheroes, and how well they rise to it we'll soon have the chance to judge together.

Why would the sound made by a person need to be generated at all? First and foremost, because of copyright. Our voice is our own, just like our fingerprints, and that can always create problems of this kind. That's where the next step of the venture comes in. It is focused on Bulgarian, with the ambition of moving on to other rarer (against the backdrop of the world's diversity) languages of neighboring countries.

Glasnost and Democracy

Personalized news. A newsreader who reads texts selected specifically for us… it still frightens me, however much I lean toward optimism. At the same time, I understand how useful something like this can be if those texts are verified, thought through, presented in context and with sufficient guarantees of reliability and competence.

“In creating content, there is still no way for humans to be replaced,” Assoc. Prof. Todorova says firmly. “There's no one else to do investigative journalism, to write with a particular sense of humor.”

But then a generated voice has so many other applications. Announcements at airports or train stations, for example, can be made by it quickly and easily. Stores that sell huge numbers of items could prepare short information about every product and make it available to every customer. And what about the pharmaceutical industry? Everything important from the leaflets for medicines can easily be turned into audio, accessible to older people too, and even personalized.

Many lessons and lectures could be turned into audio, which would make life easier for students and schoolchildren. In tourism, too, it's easy to imagine the next step—personalized information that is also read aloud in different languages. Assoc. Prof. Todorova can talk at length about the many applications that already seem so close…

Not in the Mood to Sing, Not in the Mood to Laugh

The technology of generating a voice that doesn't exist is a fascinating subject. Yes, lately there are plenty of projects that rely on cloning—an AI is trained on long recordings and creates its own audio based on your favorite actor or host. But a voice out of nothing, one that also copes with Bulgarian, a language exotic for neural networks… turns out to be a difficult undertaking, full of many unexpected challenges.

“Cloning a voice turns out to be surprisingly easy,” says Gatakka. “We use our own model; the entire architecture is ours. There's nothing innovative about it—I went through the papers, saw what works, took the best of seven components and put them together. But when the idea came up to generate completely synthetic voices, with no reference and no data… It turned out to be possible again, but I had to add important things of my own. It requires a new architecture, serious changes and some ideas I'd rather not reveal.”

Can you guess what turns out to be hardest in Bulgarian specifically? I couldn't have—stress. “We've worked magic to feed it in the right way so the model understands it,” Gatakka smiles. “In Bulgarian there are words that have three different meanings depending on where the stress falls! Add context and there are even more. Some 9,000 words in Bulgarian change their meaning depending on stress, while in English there are only seven or eight!

We met with linguists from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and they explained that there are no rules to go by. You get two dice, you roll them, and that's that. “Той бе уверен, че тя ще дойде” (“He was sure she would come”—or, with the stress shifted, “He was assured she would come”). If the stress isn't explicitly marked, how can you be sure you'll grasp the meaning of the sentence? Увèрен or уверèн? The same goes for the models; they can't tell them apart either.”

One of the next steps along this path is to give the voice emotion. Not just reading in a monotone, in the spirit of “the level of the Danube in centimeters,” the water-level bulletin that has droned on Bulgarian radio for decades, but with that certain something—emotion, an actor's touch that can make an audiobook even more than just a book. “It's achievable, but it's hellishly hard,” says Gatakka. “Technically there's no problem doing it; it's just no longer a job for a few people but for a team with very serious hardware. With the right investment, I know technically how it could be done in any language, but it's a lot, a lot, a lot of work.”

Time for an experiment! Will you be able to tell the generated voices from the real human ones? The challenge awaits you on Tuesday!

“A person’s worldview depends substantially on their information metabolism.”

“Man is a bot to man. And bot is man to bot. But what kind of man is the bot? And what kind of bot is man?”

Ivan Popov was a master of syllogisms, and much more. He was a writer who left us a small number of works from the beginning of the new millennium. Although he published only one novel in his lifetime, and in a small print run at that, his name remains mythical.

Because he presented the future in an inimitable way. He caught the trends, gathered the sparks of knowledge that paint the colorful picture of technology’s tomorrow. He managed to bring science and literature together, so that they could search, shoulder to shoulder, for the human and the superhuman, and catch the trends.

An author who one day should make it into literature textbooks… if, of course, there are still textbooks by then. And literature. That will happen only if we don’t lose the battle for the future to a future we are not ready for.

Department for Relations with Reality*

*The subheadings are also titles of works by Ivan Popov

The most important thing is to do what you do with heart… and with кеф (kef, sheer enjoyment). K.E.F.—but as an abbreviation of the Bulgarian for “cyberpunk, heuristics and futurology”—was the name of the website where for several years Popov, who described himself as its “irresponsible editor,” published most of his essays. He also created the pages Podkrushieto and Laboratoriya po ezikovo inzhenerstvo (Laboratory of Language Engineering).

Born on May 28, 1970, in Sofia, Ivan Popov graduated in physics and went to work at the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS). He ended up in the department where not only digitization but also the early applications of machine learning first arrived in earnest. He worked on neural networks at a time when even in the West this sounded like an exotic field.

“Historical time flows unevenly,” writes Ivan Popov. “Long epochs of stagnation, when it seems that the order is eternal and everything stays the same as ever, are suddenly interrupted by periods of turbulent development (and sometimes of degradation). And when it seems that development will go on forever, it unexpectedly stops and a new stagnation begins…”

Well, for the writer time flowed very fast. Yes, he had chosen an institute devoted to space, yet space is almost absent from his works. Quite understandably: in the 1990s concepts were suddenly turned on their heads, and the topical easily proved stronger than the stars.

Besides, by all appearances, Popov was driven forward more by technology. By the broad view of where it is leading our civilization.

Wandering Ants

“According to popular belief, humanity progresses roughly along this scenario: technology develops constantly, and as a result life keeps getting better,” writes Ivan Popov. “At some point, in keeping with Hegel, quantity turns into quality and the social order changes (from primitive to slave-owning, then to feudal), and progress continues ever upward.

The moments of a ‘qualitative leap,’ when the entire social structure changes—the principles of the economy, the law, morality, people’s mentality—can be called moments of the arrival of the future. In history so far there have been only a few of them (from 3 to 6, according to different scholars), the latest being the Industrial Revolution in Europe, and now a new revolution is expected to begin—or has already begun—that will lead to the so-called information society.”

In the 1990s the writer decided to stay in Bulgaria, even though his parents set off on a long journey full of adventures that took them all the way to New Zealand. Over the following decades they would invite him to join them, but he would always refuse.

The physicist worked for three years at the space institute, and that period would later show in almost every one of his works. He left BAS to carry on as a freelance translator and writer.

Jesus, Muhammad and Bill Gates: Instructions for Use

“Futurologists predict almost unanimously that the twenty-first century has large-scale social changes in store for us,” writes Ivan Popov. “Civilization will enter a new phase (informational, or post-industrial, or ‘the Third Wave society’; for short we shall simply call it ‘the future’). Futurology strives to calculate the future, while cyberpunk strives to paint it in color, Dolby and stereo. The two form something like a neat couple, like the left and right hemispheres of humanity’s collective brain. In one place they present the future in theories, in the other in images and action…”

Yes, the paths of futurology and cyberpunk rarely meet and intertwine, and perhaps never as successfully as in the words of this Bulgarian writer. On one side come science’s attempts to forecast the future; on the other, the science fiction genre, in which the arrival of new technologies is shown through their social impact and the dangers they bring.

At the beginning of the new millennium Ivan Popov abandoned his scientific career for good, and one of his favorite occupations became translation. Thanks to him, works by Stanisław Lem, by the cyberpunk writer Victor Pelevin, by Nick Bostrom and many other authors reached Bulgarian readers. He began writing essays and stories of his own. He published in the pages of Tema magazine, and two of his pieces even appeared in… Playboy. Yes, a classic and at the same time inimitable figure from those 1990s days of punk and cyberpunk…

On the Apostolic Activity of Muscle Gangs

“The future may be as progressive as you like, as white and fluffy as you like, but for it to arrive, for the present to be defeated, we must pass through a great civilizational crisis,” writes Popov.

“What is more, from the point of view of the present, the ‘white and fluffy’ future would strike us as completely insane and impossible to live in. Just as the primitive hunter is not adapted to life in an agricultural society, nor the ‘natural’ peasant to life in a modern city.

In the ‘great leap,’ along with everything else, the value system of society changes radically, as do its notions of good and bad, of proper and improper. The psychological makeup of the individual changes too; a ‘new man appears in place of the unsuitable old one.’ To live in the future, we need a new coordinate system in our minds. Measured by the old coordinates, the future is utterly harmful and provokes a struggle against itself…”

Popov became part of the Ivan Yefremov science fiction club, named after the Soviet science fiction writer. Even in the darkest times of the transition from communism and the end of the century, and to this day, Bulgaria has always had an active group of people, generation after generation, who love science fiction. As a rule they have stood apart from the mainstream and the commercial, but they have existed in order to make the future.

Yes, their names will be recognized only by people with a special interest in books; for them it is enough to mention Yuriy Ilkov, Nikolay Tellalov, Atanas Slavov, Kalin Nenov. If you haven’t heard of them, it is not too late—that will be the subject of a future digital story.

It was Yuriy Ilkov who invited him, known as the General or by his pen name Makriya Nenov—a special figure in the history of science fiction in these lands, who for decades has made apostolic efforts to make sense of the genre and popularize it. And so Popov found himself among them, among kindred spirits who were excited by where the world was going, who loved literature and knew how to value it…

In Search of the Future Man

“A person’s worldview depends substantially on their information metabolism,” writes Ivan Popov. “Part of the worldview is one’s idea of the future.” In his texts he brings together so many scientific fields and so many directions of knowledge that one could quickly get lost, were it not for the writer’s sense of humor and his captivating ideas, which keep pulling you back.

TIM, or “type of information metabolism,” is a term rooted in Jung’s research that describes the way a person perceives the news and the world around them, and the way they process it and make sense of it. Today it fits more than intriguingly with how we cope with the news of the day, with the sea of information.

Under this system, people fall into 16 groups. Popov writes that he dug into the classification after coming across meaningful discussions at the Sofia science fiction club. He found it hard to explain to himself why visions of the future differed so much.

“I tried to understand why for every debater there are ideas they will never give up, and others they will never be willing to accept…”

He classified himself as an “intuitive-logical introvert,” a person who “sees the future as a consequence of our actions and plans, but not in a design key, rather in an anti-design key: as a consequence of the side effects of our activities.

He predicts developments mostly in the near term: for him, the future is hidden just around the corner, and to understand what it is, we must remember which futures have sprung up before humanity at previous historical ‘corners.’” The same group includes Stanisław Lem, Boris Strugatsky, Philip K. Dick and Victor Pelevin.

The Bricklayer-Plasterers of Babylon

“Horror! The personal communication bot has switched itself off. A month ago already, but nobody noticed. ‘What must my mother in Chicago be thinking,’ Sidorchuk frets. ‘She’s used to the bot calling her every two or three days. That is, to thinking it’s me calling. Though who knows, maybe she’s set up a bot too?…’ It is fashionable now for bots to do the talking, since people have no time. And yet they must show attention to their loved ones.”

The quotation is from Hakeri na choveshkite dushi (Hackers of Human Souls), Ivan Popov’s first and only novel, published in 2004. Curiously, before that he had published two other texts with the same title, which set off in different directions. It is said to be the first Bulgarian cyberpunk novel and was the first title in the Tera Fantastika series. It appeared in a modest official print run of 200 copies, although today it is known to anyone interested in the genre.

The novel won 2 awards—the Eurocon 2004 award for a debut and the HuGoa award for the best Bulgarian science fiction book of the year. In 2005 it was also nominated for the VIK award.

The novel is truly unusual—as gripping as it is perceptive. Short but concentrated, bursting with humor and vision. As the aforementioned Yuriy Ilkov writes, “a strikingly common trait of Ivan Popov’s works is that his fiction is steeped in science, while his scientific texts are highly literary.” Which in this case becomes a treasure.

The book transports us to an invisibly distant future ruled by advanced civilizations that rely on their technological dominance. It revolves around flows of information, and the main tool for manipulating and programming people is language. “Humanitarian technologies” are used, behind which lies social engineering. “Man is a device for processing information. And an object of control by means of that very same information.”

Users: The New Serfs

Sound familiar almost two decades later?

The book is divided into two parts, and the second sounds even more familiar. The heroes head for a “state of the fourth or fifth functional type,” a “mandated territory of evil,” to find out who is behind the cases of human brains being hacked. As Vasil Velchev writes in the afterword, “the allusions to Bulgarian reality during the transition are many, and the science fiction novel comes to look downright like social satire.”

Sometime around 2011 Ivan Popov stopped going to the club, and over the last decade his name was not heard in literary circles. The only exception came in 2015, when one of his earlier stories was translated into English and published in Sci Phi Journal. That placed it among the 120 texts competing for a prestigious award the following year. We can only imagine how things would have turned out if he had won it…

Alas, I could not find much testimony about his life in that decade; I cannot tell you what he did, what weighed on him and what moved him. Nor whether he saw so many of the things he had described come true.

Problems with Reason

“Humanity will be divided into two unequal parts according to a criterion unknown to us, and one of the purposes of ‘human-machine’ interfaces is to spare the user the need to know the internal workings of the machine; the human is required to know only the interface. There are other people who created this interface and therefore must know what lies beneath it, must poke around ‘under the hood.’

We shall call these two types of people users and programmers, respectively. In religion this is the division into shepherds and flock, in politics into party apparatus and flock, and so on. Some develop, maintain and service the interface; the others passively line up according to its requirements. Today the most important ‘programmers’ are the media, show business and advertising.

There are people who set themselves the task of mastering ‘the undocumented capabilities of the device hidden under the hood.’ Such people may fittingly be called hackers. The hacker as such exists outside the context of the social division into users and specialists. In other words, he hacks not only the technical interface, but also the social interface coupled with it.”

Ivan Popov took his own life in August 2019. Few traces of the news remain on the internet; he never liked to talk about himself or draw attention to himself. Which is a pity—readers would surely have been glad of more interviews, stories, details.

As Vasil Velchev writes, Popov would not have included even a biographical note in his novel, because he was exceptionally modest.

Cyberpunk: The Highest Form of Realism

“It is important that each successive type of civilization uses the human waste of the previous epoch as its ‘building material,’” writes Ivan Popov. “The future is born on the garbage dump of the present and uses the energy of its decay. (Example: industrial workers are former landless peasants, the waste of agricultural civilization.)

What waste do we observe today? For example, the jittery crowds on internet forums and chats. This human resource (mainly school and university students and BOWs—bored office workers) could somehow be put to work, for instance in systems for collective (game-based) decision-making.”

Facebook? Or are we yet to find a way to truly seek collective decision-making from the “BOWs,” instead of using them to monetize advertising?

“Paradoxically, as the density of communication flows increases, so does the cost of getting a given piece of information through to society. The reason: the more people shout, the lower the audibility and impact of any single message. Large-scale media campaigns are within the reach of only a small number of big social players.

Under these conditions the system (society) reacts by splitting into ever more specialties and subcultures, by fragmenting communication flows into separate ‘information cocoons’ with weakly connected ‘reality tunnels.’ More and more important information remains out of reach not only of the ordinary person, but of narrow specialists as well.”

In 2020 the collection Kiberpank, evristika, futurologiya (K.E.F.) (Cyberpunk, Heuristics, Futurology) came out, compiled by his father, Georgi Popov, who returned briefly from New Zealand. The book cannot be bought; it does not even have a price… it is only given away and exchanged. A true apocrypha of the digital age, gathering Ivan Popov’s texts from the website of the same name.

Psychotechnics and Ideological Engineering

Just as the internet has its own apocrypha. Although his three websites are long gone, the web has a memory of its own, thanks to which words live on for many years. So it turns out that online manuscripts don’t burn either… (See here.)

“We modern people are used to the idea that the economy must necessarily grow—by a few percent a year. Yet every mathematician knows that no process in the real world can grow exponentially forever: both humanity and the Earth are finite systems, so there can be no infinite growth in them…” writes Ivan Popov.

And also: “In the phase of linear development, disproportions, contradictions and imbalances accumulate in the system. That is, the crisis is a consequence of the changes accumulated in the linear phase, and it seeks a resolution, the elimination of the disproportions through a radical change in the mode of functioning. It is no accident that ‘krisis’ in ancient Greek means decision. And it is no accident that all the ‘qualitative leaps’ in human history, all the instances of a new socio-economic order being born, came after ferocious civilizational crises.”

Progress Through Downgrade

His texts contain serious economic analysis, but perhaps the most interesting thing is the way he combined his knowledge of history with his scientific instinct and experience. Decades earlier he was already aware of all the challenges the advance of artificial intelligence would confront us with. Of the big questions that are truly looming as technology advances. Of topics that most of us still do not think through in depth today, although it is long past time. But besides the questions, many of the answers are there too, and they can sound merciless.

But no, don’t think there is no optimism.

“In the future we can expect a uniquely large information inequality between people. At the bottom there will be degrading masses, their knowledge and outlook limited to the picture tube of the television set; at the top, a thin stratum driven upward not so much by economic motives as by a hunger for knowledge and skills. ‘The crazy new man’ will probably take shape in this thin stratum, will win the competition for resources (= jobs) and at some point after that will become an obvious role model for everyone else, including the degraded masses. That is, he will be recognized as normal and desirable.”

Once again, his father Georgi and the science fiction club launched the first short story competition named after Ivan Popov, whose first winner was the incredible storyteller and friend of Digital Stories Nikolay Tellalov.

The Future Comes by Breaking In

And so—the future. The future is the great theme that is coming. Is the future already here? If we believe Ivan Popov (and there is good reason to), not yet. Because when it comes, nothing will be the same anymore. As Nikolay Genov, to whom I owe enormous thanks for drawing my attention to today’s hero, put it, Popov “develops a very interesting thesis—that classical futurology merely stretches out the present, while the future is always hostile to it, it is its complete negation, so radically different that it means nothing less than its death.”

“The emerging new social order—however progressive it may seem to us from the distance of time—from the point of view of the contemporaries of the ‘great leap’ looked either like mass madness or like a deep, irreversible degradation,” explains Popov.

“The real future is not the one we strive toward, but the one we fight against,” the physicist futurologist also writes. “So it will arrive not necessarily in the most developed parts of the world, but where they fail to chop off the tentacles it sends out. And if we take into account that the more developed a society is, the stronger its regulatory system, it follows that the future will arrive not at the center of Western civilization, but somewhere in its weak but technologically receptive periphery. (Don’t go thinking I mean Bulgaria, heh-heh! There are even shabbier and more disorganized countries, such as Ukraine, Moldova or Colombia…)”

Decree on the Abolition of Society

“We can only regret that Ivan Popov did not write in recent years,” notes the astronomer and science fiction writer Valentin Ivanov. “His satirical cyberpunk was a remarkable, original and innovative phenomenon in Bulgarian science fiction. I laughed and cried at the same time as I read about the mutri—the thick-necked racketeers of 1990s Bulgaria—exploiting the country’s scientific resources.”

“One of the trends I expect in the future is a fall in the cost of innovation (a radical one, at that), as a consequence of the introduction of artificial intelligences (in the broad sense),” writes Popov. “The price of human intelligence will probably fall too. The question is what the future information civilization will look like, and above all, what the future consumption of information goods will be.”

“Ivan Popov had one of the sharpest and most merciless minds I have ever encountered,” adds the science fiction writer Atanas Slavov, a wonderful author who, alas, did not long outlive today’s hero. “Gentle and kind as a person, a considerate friend and companion, he was uncompromising in exposing human delusions and ‘mass hallucinations,’ as he called ideologies and religions.”

“With enormous gratitude I have ‘borrowed’ from his essays,” Slavov continues, “the wonderful analogy of a worldview as an operating system that time ‘installs’ and ‘uninstalls’ in the mind of the ordinary person. The Bulgarian, he used to say, is in a ‘cross-eyed state’ in his value system, because he has lived through three installations of social operating systems—monarchist, socialist and capitalist. The first two have already been ‘uninstalled.’ How do you expect him to know where he stands?”

Toward a Revolution of the Hallucinated Classes

“The historical trend. Human IQ is increasing, but slowly. It roughly doubles every thousand-odd years. And how fast does the amount of knowledge double? About every fifteen. Communications grow stronger faster still. From the shaman, people heard a few one-liners a week at a corporate meeting… or whatever it was called back then. Whereas we get our heads pumped full every minute by televisions, newspapers, books and who knows what else. Now they pump them full through our eyeballs too…”

“The author’s light, playful language does not hinder him—on the contrary, it helps him describe deep and precise situations,” writes Yuriy Ilkov. In his view, it is time “to see Ivan Popov not only as the high priest of cyberpunk in Bulgaria, but as a figure in our culture for whom even the strongest words fall short of capturing and appreciating his manifold creative work and describing the rich nuances of his artistic, scientific and philosophical incarnations.”

“The history of intelligent machines began with a whole heap of idiotic delusions,” writes Ivan Popov. “They thought one had to arrive at a humanlike intelligence. But what the devil for?! Does any other machine physically copy the human body?”

When the Bogomils Were Virus Writers

I also read a comment online—the Bogomils, I should add, were a medieval Bulgarian heretical sect: “If I ever get the chance to meet Ivan Popov, I would find him a donkey so he could ride into the city of the mandated territory, and I would weave him a wreath of palm branches. He deserves them.”

Without any futurist pretensions, I can’t wait for the future in which some publisher will recognize this author’s worth and present him as he deserves.

Will we ever truly appreciate his contribution and ideas, will they help us cope with the future? Will they reach more minds now, when technology demands it more than ever… who knows.

The most important thing is that hackers keep existing—not the criminals, but those who embody the writer’s idea of the word. Those between the programmers and the users, the people outside the system who can change it and make sense of it. Just as Ivan Popov knew how to do, and will go on doing for a long time to come.

P.S. Ivan Popov’s messages are powerful, stirring and thought-provoking today, more than ever. My heartfelt thanks to Nikolay Genov, who drew my attention to this remarkable writer, forecaster, journalist and scientist. I believe it is important for his words and his name to reach more people. I will be glad of any support—stories from people who knew him, help in making his work better known, or simply good ideas. Write to me!

He is 21, and he has already helped more than 200 children take their first steps in a professional field that could grow into a successful career.

Today Vasil Anastasov has taken up another cause: using modern technology to make Bulgarian museums more attractive, more appealing to the young. At first he walks the road to the magic of the past himself, to grasp the meaning and importance of exhibits that otherwise hide behind baffling display cases with uninviting labels.

Come on, let's go treasure hunting together! Let's try to find the paths that matter in the overgrown meadow. Paths that lead to turning museums into magnetic places for the young. To where curiosity hides, along with the urge to share knowledge and to help. To stories told against the backdrop of the most modern technologies in the development of computer games and augmented and virtual reality systems. Roll up your sleeves, an adventure awaits!

Yo-Ho-Ho and a Bottle of Rum

You walk into the museum and a row of display cases greets you. If you're lucky, the right guide will be there—someone who loves the job and knows how to tell the story so that it touches you. Otherwise your gaze simply slides across the exhibits, with nothing to hold it. Here and there something will impress you with its beauty; elsewhere a label will tell you an interesting story…

The world is different now. It's time for technology to enter this part of our lives on a much larger scale. With its help, the plots of the past can come alive, the most curious exhibits can tell their stories in an engaging and meaningful way, and a visit to the museum can become a thrilling experience.

On this site, as you know, we're in no hurry. We'll get to how all this is possible, but first let me introduce our protagonist.

Vasil Anastasov is 21, and he already has seven years of experience developing video games and virtual reality projects. His main goal is not to keep climbing and build large-scale projects (though he could, believe me!), but to help more children learn the basics of what excites him. To show them what game development looks like from the inside, to win them over to his favorite field. To lend them a hand the way others helped him when he was starting out. Everything else—the projects, the apps, the ventures—comes along so that his workshops can reach more and more young people.

The Gold Rush

“The mutual teaching method.” If you paid attention in history class, you'll surely remember the principle—the monitorial system, in which older pupils teach younger ones—that laid the foundations of Bulgarian education in the 19th century. There's no way the associations won't lead back to the Bulgarian National Revival, even when the main subject is a treasure hunt. Not only because of Vasil's name—Vasil Levski, the revered hero of the struggle for liberation, shares it—but because of his goals.

People like this young man with dyed hair and lip piercings remind me how the National Revival began. With persistence, with faith, with a desire to share knowledge in search of freedom—the kind that is the step that comes even after liberation.

“Why do you do it?” I ask Vasil cynically. What makes him share his knowledge and make that his main work, while his real “work” of building software projects exists only to keep the workshop afloat… I can afford the cynicism because I sense the answer coming; I've lived it. This site is my main work too, and my “work” exists to let me work on it.

“When I was 14, I started making my first video game with my older brother,” Vasil recalls. But the two of them start from zero. As if not knowing the basics weren't enough, they decide to make things harder for themselves by building a virtual reality game. Such games became especially popular with the rise of BeatSaber; they layer virtual, nonexistent objects onto photos, videos or real-time images of the real world around us.

I apologize if my description is fuzzy—even defining it for the uninitiated is hard, let alone actually developing such projects as two boys with no experience at all.

Unloved and Unwanted

Still, Vasil progresses quickly and is soon ready to earn a certification in Unity—the software he works with, and the most popular one for this kind of task. That takes him to Romania; at the time, there are no such courses in Bulgaria. He travels with his parents, and once the exam is over, they ask him whether he might like to stay another day, because a major event is about to start for IT specialists who develop games.

The organizers are delighted by his youth and enthusiasm and invite him to stay, giving him a free ticket. His father and mother agree.

“I went… Me at 14, and everyone else with the same number of years, but of experience in the industry,” Vasil remembers. “I was super nervous at first. I walked into a workshop on ‘how to run a successful crowdfunding campaign.’ Gabriel, the man leading it, saw that I was really young and nervous, found out I was making a game, and turned the whole workshop toward me. Most people gave me advice. A few even came up and offered me code. I was super surprised—wait, isn't that something you're not supposed to give to other people?

I realized that every developer not only has to keep teaching themselves, but also has to share their knowledge with others. Not to work in a closed environment where everyone hides their own stuff—people have to keep exchanging ideas and solutions to problems. I got really fired up and decided I wanted to do something like that!”

Danube Bridge

Still a student, Vasil goes to his school principal with the idea of teaching a course during elective classes, and he finds support. Although he offers to bring his own computer and virtual reality headset, Asen Aleksandrov, the principal of the 51st School “Elisaveta Bagryana” in Sofia, named after one of Bulgaria's great poets, takes the idea to heart and provides two sets of the necessary equipment.

Afterward Vasil seriously advances his skills and creates a series of apps, even though he is not yet of age.

Teaching, explaining, sharing knowledge is more than a challenging task. Especially at 15, which is how old our hero was at the time.

He not only likes it, he finds enormous meaning in the training sessions. Students come, impressed by the chance to develop in the field of video games, and many of them carry on.

Then Vasil graduates, by now convinced that teaching is his purpose. He has met a kindred spirit—Boyan Ivanov—and the two quickly manage to find other enthusiasts to support them along the way.

Treasure Island

That's how DevHubOne comes about. The young entrepreneurs' company earns the trust of like-minded people and becomes a hub where, every Saturday and Sunday, students are welcome free of charge to get a taste of what modern game development can do. The room is equipped with 16 modern workstations and usually hosts eight kids at a time, who go through intensive training.

Most often they are students around 14 or 15. On the first day Vasil shares his knowledge in a workshop on video game development and game design with Unity. On Sunday it's another teacher's turn—Kosta, who demonstrates 3D modeling in Blender.

“The idea is that during the workshop the kids make their first small project, see what it's all about, and if they want to and they're interested, keep going. After that they can use the room for free twice a week to develop their projects,” Vasil says.

More than 200 students have come through so far. Some of them continue in their professional development, while others go on to different fields, successfully using the knowledge and skills they've gained.

And game development, by all signs, may well turn out to be a needed field even when machines become flawless at writing computer code. Gamification—inventing not just a game, but a way for it to become a useful tool—is as old as the world. We are all Homo Ludens; humans need play.

That idea also underpins the newest venture of Vasil and his collaborators.

Night at the Museum

But weren't we going to talk about a museum, to hunt for treasure?!

Well, the time has come for both. Vasil and his team have a great idea for making museums far more magnetic places for young people. Through story, through storytelling. By turning a visit to each new destination into a treasure hunt.

“Treasure UP” is the name of the platform created by Vasil and his colleagues, which already links four Bulgarian museums—the ethnographic and natural history museums in Sofia and the history museums in Vratsa and Blagoevgrad. Through a mobile platform, visitors hunt for “treasures” in them.

“The idea is to present museums and their exhibits in an interesting and fun way,” Vasil says. “People install the app, and when they visit the museum, they start hunting for treasure—through a series of questions they move through the main exhibition and try to guess the answers. That way they get to know some of the most important exhibits and the stories hidden behind them.

El Dorado

The first questions are multiple choice, the next ones are open-ended, and the third kind come with a picture. At the end of the hunt, tourists receive a medal—bronze, silver or gold, depending on their results. The bronze gives them a camera filter—a photo as if they were part of a museum poster. The silver comes with augmented reality—an exhibit from the museum. The gold medal, earned with at least 90 percent correct answers, unlocks an augmented reality filter on the user's face featuring exhibits from the museum. From Blagoevgrad, a helmet; from Vratsa, a medallion; from the Ethnographic Museum, an amulet.

Then there are rewards beyond the virtual. Every season, tourists who score above 90 percent will have a chance to win physical prizes. And every holder of a gold medal can also receive a 3D-printed coin with a themed image from the respective museum.

The idea is to bring in many more museums; the list will grow every season, Vasil says. The platform is ready to welcome galleries too, and after that all kinds of other tourist destinations.
“The main thing we do is gamification. A game, but with some higher purpose. A game you can learn from, build on, grow with.”

Hidden Treasure

Before this venture, Vasil wasn't much of a museum lover. Yes, he'd visited quite a few, but only after getting to know the subject more closely did he realize how many interesting things he could have seen.

“I was one of those people you can hardly drag into a museum. I'm interested in history and artifacts, but I see 150 stones and a label saying they were dug up somewhere. Every museum has so many exhibits, there's no way I can focus and learn something specific. That's exactly how the idea for ‘Treasure UP’ came about,” he says.

“It's not easy to realize the value of what you're looking at. For example, in Vratsa they have a nephrite amulet shaped like a frog. If I'd just walked past it, I'd have thought, ‘OK, really cool.’ But it's more than 8,000 years old, and to this day nobody knows how it was made. And the Ethnographic Museum has an amulet that looks like it came straight out of the anime series Yu-Gi-Oh! Exhibits like these are very, very interesting and deserve to reach more people.”

Could it be that curiosity really is what matters most? If it's there, each new generation will rediscover what is worth rediscovering. And will keep going. For me at least, the story of Vasil and his students shows this very powerfully. I wonder what the next successes will be—his, and those of the people he has decided to show the way.

It's here, it's alive—the spirit of the National Revival, in its finest modern dimensions. Some stories, some messages and ventures simply pass through time…

– We've known each other for a long time, but the reason for this conversation is the topic you suggested—that it's time for digital literacy to become a national priority. But why? Every generation is already on one social network or another; they're obviously coping with the digital…

– That isn't digital literacy. There's more than one definition of what it is, but it certainly doesn't just mean having a smartphone and being on Facebook. It means being able to work with information online—to search for it, analyze it, use it, generate it. And, which is extremely important, to understand how much your own safety matters.

That's a fairly broad explanation, but it means you truly have a conscious attitude toward the digital environment. Add to that the arrival of artificial intelligence over the last two years in tools like digital avatars and voice clones, and

a conscious attitude toward consuming and creating digital information comes to the fore.

Being able to understand what is happening around you. Quite a lot of people lack that digital literacy.

– That's true. I've been building this site for four years now precisely because I, too, think that the digital literacy of the individual and of society today is an existential question. But how do you think we can work in that direction? Hardly by forcing people to take some kind of training, or with advertising campaigns. And in the online din, there's no chance it will happen just by creating quality content.

– That's my pain point too, from the perspective of a company offering a digital solution with artificial intelligence. We've been on the chatbot market for eight years, we've been in the ChatGPT era for two, and most people still have no idea what an AI chatbot is. I meet all sorts of people, and everyone has their own idea. Many businesses still don't realize they have a problem, while the market already has plenty of solutions for it.

Here digital literacy comes down not only to your personal level of knowledge but to how it affects the quality of your life and work. AI is already becoming part of functional literacy.

When a person with limited digital literacy makes leadership and management decisions, that affects how entire companies function,

the decisions management makes—how well suited they are to today's environment. In my view, it's no longer a matter of “do I want to learn or not,” “do I want to become literate or not,” but rather that

if you want to be up to the job and still have one in the next five years, you have to start.

I also believe it won't be AI that takes jobs, but the people who understand AI and can manage it. Two months ago the World Economic Forum published a report saying that more than 90 million jobs will be lost in the coming years because of AI being built into companies' business processes, but at the same time twice as many—more than 170 million—will be new jobs, where, however, people will need to be literate enough to work with AI tools.

– Though most analyses still show that the jobs lost will far outnumber the new ones. But how could digital literacy actually happen in practice? It's clear if it comes at a personal level, but people are often passive, skeptical…

– I think through campaigns, even at the state level, that explain in plain language that we need to set out on this path. You have to start somewhere and draw people's attention to the topic calmly, without screaming headlines.

How did smartphones and computers enter our lives? I remember when I worked in a newsroom, computers appeared and gradually the newspaper's prepress work was automated. Several colleagues said: “I'm not learning that, I can't do it, I'll keep using my typewriter.” Well, yes, but then you've dropped out of the process. Like it or not, they sat down and pecked at the keyboard with two fingers, then faster—necessity is the best teacher!—and at some point it turned out everyone could work on a computer.

The same thing happened with smartphones. They turned out to be super fast and convenient, we forgot ordinary phones without noticing, and now we can't imagine life without smartphones. That happened in a very short time compared with other technologies.

I think AI will enter everyone's life in the same way. It's already here; we've long been using AI tools—and daily at that. Some people will realize it's extremely convenient to run their personal tools, to make life easier, to stop dealing with routine tasks they don't want to do anyway and find tedious.

The curiosity born of that convenience will convince these people that they want to do it.

For others it will come because employers demand it. A third group will simply be faced with a choice: “either I do it, or I'm at the unemployment office.” So AI will enter people's lives in different ways, but in the end the result will be the same. We'll have to know how, to be able to.

Yes, there will be people caught with one foot on each side. “Me, learning at 40?!” Although I'm over 50 and I'm doing it. There's no age limit, and applying AI tools isn't complicated—you don't need to learn how to build them.

But what can the state do? In the United States, for example, 95 percent of schools have already added lessons on artificial intelligence to the curriculum.

It's important to invest in the next generations, and this has to be part of the educational process.

– Do you think it can happen in Bulgaria? I don't.

– I think it can, as long as there's the will.

For me, most of society's problems are solved with adequate education.

On a personal level, people and teachers are interested. If the system itself allows it and says it's important, I think it will catch on quite quickly.

Teachers who use AI and experiment together with the children will be more successful. I came across an example where learning AI tools happened through children creating animated pictures and images, as in an art class. They write prompts to draw interesting images, animate them, give them voices. In that playful format they get used to linking AI tools together and using them in their everyday lives.

I work with university and school students, and they tell me that at school and at university they aren't allowed to use ChatGPT. Why? Quite the opposite! Let them test, experiment and apply what they've learned. Let's adapt the learning process so that it allows studying and practicing AI tools. They were created to make us more productive, to help us grow faster.

– But isn't that dangerous too? Because it teaches them the easy way. If we choose to show them AI early, we need to place much more careful emphasis on the fundamental subjects and topics.

– I completely agree. That's why it shouldn't be introduced chaotically but systematically. Like reviewing the whole curriculum and deciding in what formats and when it will come in, so that children also develop a sense of safety in the digital environment. Because, as we said, one of the elements of digital literacy is cybersecurity. These things go hand in hand.

– You, too, (like me) are someone who landed in the IT world from a very different field. What surprised you most about it?

– The fact that

translators are needed so that the IT world and everyone else can talk to each other.

Maybe because of the technicality, the jargon, the terminology, which is very far from the language of the ordinary person. When you stand between clients, employees, partners and anyone who writes code, you sense, to a greater or lesser degree, that they aren't speaking the same language.

These two worlds definitely need translators! Maybe it comes back to people's digital literacy again, that they can't take in the terminology used in the IT world. You have to look for synonyms that make it accessible to everyone else.

– It's not even just the terminology, it's the whole worldview. The same thing surprised me, and that's why I made the site, to try to do that kind of translating. It doesn't happen in society, because it isn't easy for the tech side either.

– Not in any way! The tech world is built logically, mathematically. It's a way of thinking, and when you run into a user trying to say in ordinary, human language what they have in mind, it's often hard to dress that up in IT terminology.

– You've been working with chatbots for eight years. Did you expect that precisely this kind of project—ChatGPT—would unleash the whole AI revolution? There were GPT-2 and GPT-3 before it, but it took the chat for the world to go crazy over it and realize that something big was happening…

– I've always believed chatbots would go a very long way; that's why I took up this direction. I believe in the need for this technology.

I'm on the applied side of AI chatbots for business, and I think there's still enormous room for them. However many different AI tools you have as part of a business's operational setup, there will be a need for some point of contact with the user who talks to these systems. The business AI chatbot is exactly that point—between a business's outer and inner world.

I've always believed in chatbots. When I started with them, they didn't have artificial intelligence yet, they were a bit dumb, but I thought they would develop and become something big. I still think there's much more to come.

Large language models turned out to be the intermediary between humans and the world of AI. That's exactly why ChatGPT exploded the way it did—it's a super accessible, simple, humanly convenient application for communication, and at the same time it's a door to knowing the world and everything in it. It's a chance to step off the little “islands” we live on and look toward expanses we never imagined were within reach.

– It's no accident that we anthropomorphize it so much and call it “he” or “she,” even thank it.

– I even have a name for it; we greet each other. A few months ago it blurted out a compliment to me without my having put it in the prompt—I didn't expect that from it. At first it really surprised me; now I'm used to it. But by now

I can't imagine managing at work without this assistant.

– When will we reach the point where we can't tell who's on the other side—a human or a chatbot?

– We're already there. It's just that these solutions are at a super high level—digital twins of people with a voice, with emotional intelligence, knowledge, a persona. “Digital humans” are very expensive right now, which is why we don't see them every day. But over the next few years they'll become affordable.

I recently signed up for an AI course in the United States, and I get phone calls from the lecturer's digital assistant. It asks me how the lecture went, whether I need help, and it introduces itself first—it's required to say it's a digital assistant. Still, there's a slight delay, which for now is my sign that there isn't a human on the other end.

– In the end there's the barrier that you know. That's why I do a lot of experiments in which people don't know, and then it turns out they can't tell the difference…

– That's right. These tools already exist, and not being able to tell them apart isn't some distant future. It's the present. For digital twins, that same lecturer puts his own copy up next to himself. There it is, speaking with his voice and gestures, the two of them standing side by side. Two peas in a pod!

So these technologies are already here. It's just that in Bulgaria we haven't run into them yet, so we haven't understood, haven't felt that they're here and are even seriously entering business.

– Is there anything that frightens you about technology now being so good at imitating humans?

– No. I'm one of the optimists. Maybe because I've been doing this for seven or eight years now, and it came into my life much earlier than for other people. I've had time to think, to adapt to these tools. I'm among

the people who believe this technology gives us the chance to be better human beings.

To go back to what it means to be human, to our values as a species. For it to give us back the time to practice humanity and everything that comes with it. The things we're strong at. Empathy, creativity. Even creating, which involves far more than creativity. To be able to develop the talents we have.

Do you know how many Michelangelos go to work from 8 to 5

at some machine? And they don't know they're Michelangelo, or Leonardo da Vinci, or Pushkin. They've never had the chance to develop their own talents, because they have to go to a boring job. They're lost human potential!

Each of us is born on this planet with potential, and a huge number of people never reach even a small part of it, because they have to earn a living, feed their families. What if they were given a chance to develop it? To have the time and the opportunity to learn to paint, to create new things.

You can't paint with brush and paints, can't play an instrument? Paint with words, write music! AI makes it possible now: text to image, text to audio, text to video… A time of unlimited possibilities for each of us!

I'm one of those people who firmly believe that if we play our cards right, a wonderful era lies ahead of us.

– So do I. But based on our experience with technology so far, I don't think it's especially likely we'll play our cards well. I don't see the preconditions, because so far I see how inadequately, and without any public conversation, we introduce these things. This way they free up our time, which they then take back, through social networks, for example.

– But we have a chance! And besides… isn't that exactly why we're talking about digital and AI literacy today? About handling the tools of the digital world consciously.

I heard this somewhere and remembered it:

“If we don't control the algorithms, they will control us.”

Let's learn and be the ones in control!

– Let's hope… What are the latest trends in chatbots? What are the newest big steps?

– Very recently we launched the newest AI module for chatbots on our platform, where we give GPT a little more freedom to perform operations. In practice, chatbots still work with their own database, so that the business has control over the information GPT uses. It doesn't search the site or the internet; it uses the facts about services and products selected by the business. But the information is provided in only one language, while GPT answers in the user's language. We support 29 languages—all European languages, including the Balkan ones, plus Chinese.

So right now, being a business and having a multilingual chatbot becomes extremely easy as a process of building and managing it.

On top of that, GPT sees the rest of the content in the chatbot—various forms, information sections and so on—and can judge, based on the history of the conversation with that particular user, what to attach from that other content to the generated answer, for an even more personalized experience.

Communication with chatbots is becoming super personalized and far more useful than just “question and answer.” With the help of AI tools, chatbots today are a multifunctional and flexible tool that helps businesses.

– So in your view there's no business for which having its own chatbot isn't useful, do I understand you correctly?

– We already have them for individuals too; it isn't even just for businesses or organizations. I'm about to make my own chatbot as well, so it can take over some tasks.

You can make a chatbot even for your hobby. Anything with repetitive information, processes that can be automated because they're routine, user data that can trigger task automation—in all of those situations an AI chatbot can be used.

– In the beginning, when advanced AI appeared, many predicted that support and customer service specialists would be the first whose tasks the technology would take over. Did that actually happen?

– Yes, at the first level. I use the example of the Pareto principle to explain to clients how routine communication with users is. Eighty percent of customers ask 20 percent of the questions. Eighty percent of employees' time goes into handling those 20 percent of routine questions and tasks. First-level support deals with exactly those.

At the second level we get to more specific, harder questions, where a human is still needed. AI assistants, chatbots and agents today, if they're well planned and built, are fully ready to take over the first level. Because wherever there's routine, it can be automated.

Over time, by building the right systems and linking more tools together, it will be possible to automate the second level too, where the harder, more specific tasks are. And I don't think it's a matter of decades, by no means. Much sooner.

– Will there always be a third, higher level that can only be work for humans?

– There will. For me it's a must, for several reasons. First, because we're in a time of transition—customers are adapting differently to the change in communication. I see it in our clients' chatbots too. There are users who insist on talking to a chatbot—most often introverts or younger people. Others go into the chatbot to find a way to reach a human. Still others use the forms in the chatbot not to register or buy something, but to describe their case and wait for customer support from a human to get back to them.

In this transitional period, until people start to feel comfortable working with these tools and serving themselves, there will be a need for a human team, but it will be much smaller than it is now.

There will also still be specific situations where automation won't help. Here's an example from a hotel. You can make a reservation automatically through the booking system. You ask about price and availability, the bot gives you the details—you choose and book. But at this stage it can't help you if three generations are traveling, you're bringing a dog, you aren't sure whether you need two rooms or three, one of them has to have a connecting door to the other, but they have to be as low as possible so grandma doesn't have to climb stairs, and so on. The booking system can't help. Here you need a human touch, to know your product and service very well and be able to say: “Aha, for this family the best fit is rooms 101, 103 and 105. Let me see if they're available; if not, I'll do some shuffling.” Here human expertise can't be replaced. At least for now…

– Who knows for how long… Let's finish with something further from technology. So readers understand what these exotic photos are. Many people dream of living on a tropical island, in an endless, exotic summer. You spent a full 17 years as a hotelier on the island of Saipan. How and why does a person leave a place like that to take up technology in Bulgaria?

– It isn't easy, but it was a natural progression. I truly spent exceptional years on those islands, not only in terms of my career, rising to general manager of a hotel and marketing consultant to the local tourism organization, but also in touching the local culture, history and nature.

Saipan is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the place with the most consistent year-round climate—an average of 27 degrees Celsius, with a fantastic ecosystem, 4,000 km from the nearest mainland.

At home I bathed in rainwater; my house was in the jungle, with a view of the ocean. With mango, papaya, jasmine, macadamia and orchids in the garden.

Besides being a hotelier, for a while I was also general manager of a tour operator running adventure tours—buggy rides through the jungle, diving, jungle trekking.

But there came a moment when I realized my development had stopped. My life was flowing against a wonderful backdrop, but I wasn't part of the lives of the people closest to me, and they were in Bulgaria. It took me two years to make the decision to come back.

Then life here quickly showed me that the problems I had faced, especially in business-to-customer communication, and had solved in many ways, were neither island problems nor hotel problems, but ones that exist in every company. From that “Aha!” moment, the next step was easy—if I'm going to start from scratch, let me try to solve them with the help of technology. The rest was… luck, or maybe fate? Umni.bg and chatbots appeared in my life very quickly.

– A real Korekoredut, the storybook tropical island of plenty from Bulgarian childhood! Let me seize the chance, since for the first time I have a longtime resident of the Mariana Islands as my guest… Could you tell us something we would never imagine about a place like that?

– Oof, that's a tough question. I could tell you about the flying foxes and the coconut crab, but I think the most worthy answer to this question is the coconut. What do we know about it here—that you drink its juice, that the flesh is made into coconut flakes and flour, and oil too, that the shell is made into little bowls. And that with two of them and some string we can make a bra.

When I landed on the islands, I learned about coconut sashimi—a fantastic delicacy! While the coconut flesh is still “young”—like a little jelly—it's eaten with wasabi and soy sauce.

Have you heard of the coconut apple? When a coconut starts to sprout—one or two little leaves and a root about 20 cm long—a white ball the size of a tennis ball forms inside it, soft and fluffy like a little cupcake and super tasty. That ball contains everything the coconut needs to grow before the root starts feeding the young tree.

The fibrous husk of the shell is made into sturdy ropes. All in all, it's the universal plant and fruit of the tropics. The ancient navigators, who traveled for weeks in their boats between the islands, took only coconuts on board. I even learned, though I can't guarantee it's true, that during World War II in the area around the islands, the wounded were given coconut juice instead of blood, because there was none, and the juice is extremely nourishing.

Let's not forget coconut tuba—the sweet tropical wine made from coconut…

– And let's stop here, because we'll all start daydreaming, and in our latitudes it's hard to find a coconut like that… Let's hope technology helps, not global warming. Thank you for this conversation!

– What is the point of children learning to read today? We live in a technological world, reading and books are visibly not much of a social value, and we rarely ask each other about our favorite reads…

– It’s very important to clarify here that we have different definitions of reading. Mine is that it is the cognitive process that helps us extract and analyze information from various sources so that we can make sense of it and make decisions.

It is impossible to develop in any direction at all if we don’t know how to read.

Science confirms that if we want to retain information lastingly and be able to connect it into a big picture and with what we already know, it’s important to read on paper. That is the surest way to transfer information into long-term memory.

And although in our society reading really is understood more as something we do in our free time, on the beach, it is very important to make an effort not only to teach children to read, but to have them do it willingly, rather than to answer the question “what did the author mean.” Otherwise we are doomed, and so are they.

– What determines whether they do it willingly?

– Many factors. Another thing we don’t realize is that reading is a complex process. We need to develop and build many neural connections, because it isn’t built into us by evolution.

To read willingly, children first of all need support in the family and a good example. A child who has been read to since birth knows the object called a book, knows that books contain interesting things, and will learn easily. If that happens, if they see information that interests them and explains the world, they will be much more inclined later, when they learn to read on their own, to make that effort even if it’s hard.

Access to books matters a great deal too. When children have at hand editions that look like bad brochures, and texts that offer them nothing, they naturally won’t read for pleasure, because it isn’t an interesting, fun, useful or pleasant activity.

But reading for pleasure also depends enormously on access to new technologies, which change the way the brain takes in information. We adults read shorter forms too, and we struggle to concentrate. That applies with full force to children, who, however, never get to learn that reading brings satisfaction, even if it is delayed.

Reading for pleasure depends above all on support, on access to books and on sensible adults who help the child in every way,

without pulling, pushing and shoving them and telling them what they must read and which is the greatest book.

– But how can we lead by example when 40 percent of Bulgarians say they didn’t read a single book last year?

– That is our big problem: adults treat reading as something unimportant and set it against new technologies.

We all want our children to do well with technology. As parents, that is our big worry—to be sure they will adapt, that the professions of the future will be something they can handle. But this opposition distorts our understanding of reading. We don’t realize that we read all the time. Everything we can decode, as long as we know the code, we read.

If the family can’t support the children for one reason or another, the teachers and librarians step to the fore. They work with large groups of children, and their main role should be to support them in becoming active readers.

– Can that happen if a child is already used to the phone to the point of addiction? To quick stimuli, TikTok… The book is the competition, a slow carbohydrate; it demands more effort, which children aren’t inclined to make, because it’s harder for them to find intrinsic motivation.

– That’s true. Alas, the answer is more likely no. If the parent doesn’t introduce limits, it can’t happen, especially if the child has had access to devices from an early age, when they still can’t filter information. And if we’re talking about TikTok, the extremely rapid switching of video content,

to me it looks like a rabbit standing frozen in a car’s headlights, too terrified to run.

I firmly believe that instead of giving in to the familiar “but everyone does it” or “I don’t know what to do, my child whines all the time,” we have to be very clear that devices can “fry” the brain. That this undermines our children’s ability to concentrate for long, to process large volumes of information, even to know what they are looking at. Because often they can’t name things, objects, and that creates problems.

That is exactly what I am calling for—to realize that we are not bad parents if our child complains that we’re different from the others and limit screen time.

– But if we’ve already let it happen and at some point realize that screen time has grown too much, can we turn the book into a substitute and a helper?

– That takes a comprehensive approach. First of all, the child has to have access to great books that can compete with devices. Whether they are encyclopedic editions with various features, 3D filters that show different animals, or game elements. Or comics, which have little text but are often hard for adults to read, because they demand serious powers of concentration and observation, which we gradually lose once we get used to reading huge volumes of text.

We have to find the right books and help the child see that they are interesting, by reading together, explaining, sharing, spending quality time with them.

In the teenage years, when life runs entirely through the internet, we could hardly impose limits, but with younger children we can easily do it.

My son is in fourth grade and has only 15 minutes a day of internet access on his phone; almost all apps are restricted. Of course, he uses a computer, watches TV and plays games now and then, but the rule I apply is balance.

– I give my boys half an hour each, but it often happens that the older one doesn’t want to use up his “quota” so that he has time to read. That’s more enjoyable for him right now. He’s in first grade, but he’s on the fourth volume of Harry Potter.

– By the way, I’ve noticed that children who read a lot often find it hard to make friends. My son was like that too. At some point he found his crowd; now he reads only in the evening, but regularly, about 100 pages.

– How do we choose the right book? When I go to the book fair, I find it very hard—I’m met by an ocean of children’s titles, many times more than those for adults. They’re all glossy, cute… What do we do then?

– We go to detskiknigi.com. My colleagues and I have been reading and writing professional reviews for 15 years. Right now we have a great category on the website of the Orange bookstores, part of the campaign “We Read—We Unfold Worlds.” There we put a “recommended” seal only on books that really work. Of course, parents should take a look to judge whether they suit their child, but they can trust us on quality.

Statistics show that our recommendations are 98 percent successful.

The child’s taste matters too. My son, for example, doesn’t like fantasy. I wouldn’t recommend Harry Potter to him—we’ve read it, but because I’m a big fan. He likes technology, encyclopedic editions; many children prefer comics.

It’s important, on the one hand, to try

not to be swayed by the recommendation that “this book is the biggest hit,” because it usually isn’t the best one. To seek advice.

At the same time, to give the child freedom, the right to choose. The little ones especially, of preschool age, choose intuitively, and that turns out to be exactly the right book. I don’t know how they do it!

It’s good that there are libraries too. The children’s section of the Sofia City Library is well developed, and the big regional libraries are also trying to meet the needs and interests of their readers.

For me, the most important are school libraries. There, though, the situation is very grim, because there isn’t always a librarian to judge which book will suit a child according to reading level, age and interests. Or, if there is a librarian, there are no books. But school libraries with qualified librarians could solve our literacy problem.

– As a parent, I often rescue myself with classic books, ones I read myself. Often, when I talk about children’s books with friends, we always end up at Astrid Lindgren, Erich Kästner, or Elin Pelin and Ran Bosilek, the beloved Bulgarian classics of children’s literature. Why is that?

– I, on the other hand, think of encyclopedic editions and biographies…

For many of today’s children, even Pippi isn’t all that easy to take in.

Classic works are very important, and I don’t support calls to remove them from the curriculum. Yes, it has weaknesses; up to fourth grade, the focus should rather be on actively developing reading technique with books that are accessible to children.

On the other hand, classic works are a bridge to the past. And if we cut them off, children will never read them on their own, because they would struggle without knowledge of the historical period, the context, even how, say, French names are pronounced, if we think of Les Misérables, for example.

Cognitive psychologists say that

if more than 2 percent of the words in a text are unfamiliar, the brain stops following the big picture,

because that requires too much effort.

But classic works can and should be read together with a parent. The parent can give an introduction, explain what Sweden was like in the 1930s, give information about household objects, a woodbox, for example, because the child may have no idea that wood stoves exist, if we go back to Astrid Lindgren’s stories.

We have to share them with children, not hand them over and say: “This is the greatest book, nothing else matters. I insist you read it.” I see three parental mistakes here that can put a child off reading altogether. Because unconfident readers give up very quickly if the text is too difficult; they aren’t inclined to like a text just because we feel sentimental about it; and the adult’s insistence turns reading into a tedious chore that kills any desire.

It’s not bad to recommend our favorite books, of course. We just have to make an effort to present them in an engaging way, and at the same time be ready for our child not to be moved at all. I really like Gena the Crocodile, and we must have read it 30 times when my son was of preschool age. And on the 24th time I realized that he thought Gena lived on Golyama Pasta Street as in toothpaste, not the pastry, since паста (pasta) means both, and he had no way of knowing this quirk of my childhood. You can always be surprised by what your child saw and sees, and that is the foundation of building good bonds.

Reading is the glue between parents and children.

– Beautifully put! In that context, what do you think of the modernized version of Under the Yoke?

– Rusi Chanev’s version is good, because it would help children and their parents enter the big picture and the plot. The fact is that many of today’s parents wouldn’t understand a large part of the words in the original text.

This, of course, should also make it easier for children who don’t get enough support in their families, whose teachers don’t have time to explain every detail the children don’t know. Also for Bulgarian children who don’t live in Bulgaria or whose mother tongue isn’t Bulgarian, but who are part of the education system, and we can’t isolate them.

I’m well disposed toward it, but I think that on the whole

the drama around Under the Yoke is one we adults create.

If, before they have to read this novel, children have good knowledge of Bulgarian history, they won’t have any problem with the Turkish loanwords; they pick up the context and can cope. My daughter is a good example. She read it in three days in an edition from the 1960s, which has no footnotes at all, because back then the Turkish words were clear to everyone. And she said: “A great love story!”

I was shocked—come on, she can’t not have asked me anything. And she replied: “None of my classmates knows what a ‘minder’ is. I know, because when we go to museums, you explain everything to me, I’m honestly sick of it. I understood what was going on. These Turkish words aren’t a problem for getting the whole idea. And it’s a great love story!”

That shows that if they have enough information about the period, they will appreciate Under the Yoke. By the way, there is also a comic adaptation, made by Zhan Nare in the 1960s. Very few adults know about it, and it deserves to be offered to today’s generation.

– I hadn’t heard of it either, interesting. Back when I started reading in the ’90s, somehow comics came first, then gamebooks. What comes next for today’s teenagers? This genre they call “young adult”?

– We adults often don’t consider either comics or gamebooks to be books. I personally have been fighting a long-distance battle with teachers over this for years. Convincing a teacher that comics are worth offering, that this is reading and it is complex, takes a lot of effort.

Otherwise teenagers, unfortunately, in my view, mostly don’t find books that interest them.

They either read e-books in the original English or listen to audiobooks. They are a very different generation. Many of them don’t have well-developed skills for reading on paper, and the topics offered in books don’t excite them.

There are others, though, who, once they’ve been through fantasy and young adult,

jump very quickly to the classics. That amazes me,

the leap is to truly serious works.

Otherwise publishers, and this is global, don’t put out that many books for teenagers. It’s a great pity, because books suited to that age aren’t translated, and then people say: “They don’t read.” But what are they supposed to read? It’s a paradox.

The same goes for books for boys; there are almost none. They’re usually girls’ stories, with one boy thrown in for color, but the dynamic plots that appeal to boys are missing. And this isn’t only in Bulgaria; it’s driven by the market.

It’s a great pity. In this case, I think the theory of self-fulfilling prophecies applies too.

– You say the child doesn’t read, and the child doesn’t read…

– Absolutely! What’s more, parents say it in front of their children. “He’s a boy, he’ll be a footballer, he doesn’t read.” How is he supposed to show interest when you crush him with your words from the very start?

This affects everything. Because

when you don’t train your reading skills, you have problems with critical thinking, with understanding the consequences of your actions,

which is a serious problem; it leads to slower economic growth, even to problems with democracy.

– It’s precisely because of these topics that this site exists… Do you believe we can change this on a broad enough scale?

– If I had given up on the idea entirely, I would probably have stopped doing what I’ve been working on for 15 years. Yes, I’m an idealist, but it’s getting harder and harder.

People usually say we have to change something at school. But these problems start much earlier. You have

seven years, and if they are missed, the first-grade teacher has a very hard time.

The children who come to that teacher are already formed, with a value system in place; they’ve usually already had heavy access to devices, their concentration is reduced, their knowledge is reduced. More and more psychologists and speech therapists say that children start talking with great difficulty and late. That, too, is largely due to misguided investment in supporting families.

– Still, as far as I can tell, over these 15 years of working in this direction, you see mostly negative trends.

– That’s true, but I console myself with the thought that if no one had done anything—my colleagues and I, and the many people we work with on the ground, teachers, librarians, specialists from all over the country—

things would be far scarier than these 53 percent of 15-year-olds who are functionally illiterate.

Right now, though, thanks to social media—we’re all watching it happen—the general level is falling drastically. On social media you measure yourself against the crowd, however intelligent you are. Thanks to Facebook, the network of older people, who are the more active teachers and parents, we see the level dropping headlong. That is frightening.

– Against all this, how do you explain that so many people write children’s books?

– Because it looks easiest. Often someone who has a child, or has become a grandfather or grandmother, decides they’ll string five words together in rhyme and the book is done.

We have no understanding of what a quality children’s book is, because we have no literary criticism. Expertise no longer counts.

So everyone thinks they can publish the very best, unique and one of a kind, and that is yet another confirmation that people don’t read. If they had taken the trouble to read a few more children’s books by established writers, I don’t think they would dare.

This is where the realization comes in that children’s books are the most important ones, because they lay the foundation.

If you give your child junk food, you’ll see them gain weight and their health decline. The same happens with books, but you don’t see the effect right away, and that is very frightening.

I feel myself becoming more and more critical in my book reviews—of both translated and Bulgarian books. But I don’t know how we can deal with this phenomenon. Usually these “creators” think they’re doing brilliantly and don’t use editors. Social media helps them. If you’re loud and invest your efforts the right way, you’ll easily sell the print run, and that gives you confidence. A phenomenon like this is very frightening. Our children don’t deserve it.

– Let’s end on something good, and practical too. Recommend me some authors I haven’t heard of, for different ages!

– Books by good writers usually aren’t the most popular. The great books that work best usually go the most unnoticed. That makes sense, because they aim higher.

Take the books of Roald Dahl, which fewer and fewer parents offer their children. Dahl is an exceptional author: spicy, frank, with a magnificent imagination and style. I used to recommend him widely to children from 6 or 7 up, but today I see that he is quite difficult for many readers aged 9 or 10. If I had to choose one of his books, it would be his autobiography, Boy.

The same goes for the novels of Michael Morpurgo, who writes about important social issues and offers children layered novels with rich language that make them think, take a position, look for answers. My favorites are Becky’s Diary, An Elephant in the Garden, Shadow and Private Peaceful—magnificent reads that would appeal not only to children but to adults too.

I really like encyclopedic editions, because they give children extra knowledge about the world, which we often fail to offer them. People have clutched like drowning men at a straw at Einstein’s idea that we should read them fairy tales. When we read fairy tales, we develop emotional intelligence—the ability to see how the other person feels, to be tolerant. But that way we fail to tell them what kind of world they actually live in.

An encyclopedic edition I recommend is Bees. A wonderful book, large format, looks impressive, works perfectly from 1st to 12th grade; we’ve tested it in our reading clubs.

Tsveta Brestnichka is also one of the writers whose books I love working with. Nebivalitsi s bukvite ot A do Ya (Tall Tales with the Letters from A to Z)—parents usually buy it for first grade because it has the alphabet, but in 3rd and 4th grade this book really opens up: children can play, invent, build their vocabulary.

Of course, you can find all the recommended books in the category we curate for Orange. We try to update it every month, and I personally use it when I need to recommend a book, because we’ve divided everything by age. We work with many children; we get feedback from 10,000 children every year through the Biserche Valshebno (Magic Little Pearl) award.

You’ll find the book recommendations for different ages here.

So far in the series “Digital Children”:

• How do today’s children encounter technology? – a survey

• Hedgehogs Are Born Without AI

• “An era is coming in which we will have to reinvent ourselves.” What will the professions of the future be, and what is worth learning today? – futurologist Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova

• Why does a programmer advise parents on how to get off the grid? – Alexandrina Georgieva of Offline Kids

• What should education look like tomorrow? How do we choose the best teacher? – Evgenia Peeva.

If you have ideas about other important aspects of this topic, I’ll be glad if you share them with me here.

– I ran an experiment: I asked 15 Bulgarian tech leaders about their favorite books, and in a few days I'll reveal the results. You've been a proven expert at recommending books for so many years. Can you guess what kind of books made the list?

– That's interesting. I'd guess they are mostly biographies or autobiographies of iconic figures like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos or Phil Knight, perhaps the books of Simon Sinek or Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd also bet on at least one of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books?

– Warm, warm… But it turned out there were some far more unexpected titles too, at least to me. What would surprise you (pleasantly or not) to find there?

– I'd be pleasantly surprised by science or history books. Apart from the tons of studies of World War II, I think they're an underrated genre, with both wonderful titles and a great deal to learn from them. It would be unpleasant to see esoterica or something similarly pseudoscientific or conspiratorial. I expect the people who are changing Bulgaria not to get carried away by fabrications.

– So do I. And the interest in history lately really is remarkable… Which books would you recommend to people in senior positions in the IT sector, given their work and the challenges they face?

– I'd definitely bet on some of the authors I mentioned, like Phil Knight's Shoe Dog or Taleb's The Black Swan, but also on different books that everyone needs, like Sir David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet or Norman Davies's upcoming Vanished Kingdoms,

so they don't forget that everything in this world vanishes if we don't take care of it.

– The idea came to me from an interview with Daniel Penev, who said that around the world politicians and public leaders often talk about their favorite reading, while in Bulgaria they don't. Why do people like Musk or Bill Gates keep publishing such lists?

– Because

for these people reading is not only a value but also a source of inspiration for the next wonders they will create.

In Bulgaria, people in positions of power don't read, or they hide it well if, by some exception, they have this passion. And maybe they're right: most voters wouldn't be impressed by anything like that.

– What's more, a very large share of the recommendations from people like Musk are fiction. I've never heard tech people in Bulgaria talk about fiction in public.

– Fiction mainly teaches empathy. It lets you develop emotional intelligence and build the habit of seeing things through other people's eyes. I've never heard any of the tech leaders call any of these skills valuable.

– We'll see whether we can change the cliché… Why is there no such tradition in Bulgaria? Can we change it, and is it worth it?

– Of course it's needed, because books aren't just the last retro pleasure, as I like to call them—

they are the only way for a child's mind to be fully shaped for the modern world,

to learn to build rich inner worlds through imagination and to be ready to face the dizzyingly fast-changing world outside.

– What does a person's favorite book tell you about them?

– I flatter myself that it tells me everything, but that's a beautiful illusion.

For many, though, it shows when they stopped reading

—if they cite one of the required school texts, say, or some title so overhyped it has become banal.

– Do you think the books we read influence the important decisions we make? Specifically in the digital world, does where Sam Altman, for instance, takes artificial intelligence depend on what he reads?

– I very much hope so, because books—and science fiction in particular—are the most effective way of looking into the future. Countless possible scenarios have already been played out in them. At the very least they show how easily the weaknesses of human nature can wreck even the best-planned grand change. And if those weaknesses aren't taken into account, we'll have to live through some already foreseen tragedy in real life.

– Is there a book you consider “mandatory” for every leader in the tech sector?

– I wouldn't go as far as mandatory, but it would be useful for them to have read Carl Sagan—whether Pale Blue Dot, The Demon-Haunted World or Cosmos. He manages to convey stirring messages that belong to all of humanity and reminds us what truly matters.

– Which are your favorite biographies that say important things about the tech world?

– Earlier I would have said Ashlee Vance's book on Elon Musk, but I expect his upcoming biography by Walter Isaacson to show him in a very different light. Right now, though, I'd recommend Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's epochal American Prometheus, about Oppenheimer. Few people have carried such responsibilities on their shoulders and coped with them.

– Do you think you've already read AI-generated literature without suspecting it?

– Quite likely. We receive so many manuscripts that it seems inevitable to me. But I very much hope I haven't yet selected AI literature for publication… I'm counting on the fact that every manuscript is read by several people with different literary backgrounds. Hopefully we manage to catch such attempts.

– How would you tell whether ChatGPT came up with any of the questions on this list?

– I have no idea, I admit.

– I don't think there's a way anymore. A few Digital Stories ago, it was the algorithm that came up with my first questions for Zachary Karabashliev. Things are moving very fast in that direction, now that even professionals can't tell generated poetry apart… Which books have given you the most useful knowledge about artificial intelligence?

– Jokingly, I'd say William Gibson's Neuromancer—it's a true self-fulfilling prophecy—but I'd rather settle on Ray Kurzweil's How to Create a Mind.

– And the next book by Kurzweil is on its way. Far from giving up, he is even raising his expectations of the great changes ahead… As an author, an editor and a writer's helper, where do you see the future of AI in publishing? (Here, by the way, is the interesting take of your future colleagues on the subject.)

– I think that in the near future there will be a new kind of editorial work:

humanizing AI-generated text to hide its origin.

Some kinds of translation will certainly be handed over to AI, but I believe the literary translation of truly good books will always remain in human hands and minds.

– What's the most boring book you've ever read?

– Pass. I wouldn't call any book “boring,” at least not in writing… and sober.

– Maybe we should have done this interview at a different time… Do you have books that surprised you with prophetic predictions about humanity's development through technology that actually came true?

– I mentioned William Gibson's Neuromancer—it definitely gets a lot right (and there's a wonderful explanation that the book's influence is so strong it quietly steers digital evolution). Mind you, many others make predictions I'd rather stay on paper.

– How has technology changed the way we read and discover books today?

– Social networks have completely taken over book discovery.

I still mourn the short-lived era of book blogs. Facebook swept them away quickly,

before surrendering in turn to Instagram and now TikTok. In short, wherever young people's attention is, that's where books are discovered; there's an inevitable and constant evolution. Reading itself, though, doesn't change, even if it takes different forms with e-books and audiobooks, insofar as we can count those as books too.

– To me, both e-books and audiobooks have become different, complementary forms rather than competitors to the good old paper editions.

– That's exactly what I meant. There was talk that they would overtake paper books, but at least so far there's no sign of it. People still know that withdrawing with a book is a different experience from yet another screen in front of their eyes.

– What might come next on this list of technologies to change the way we read?

– It's logical to expect video books, but I can't imagine what exactly that experience would look like, and I hope I won't have to. Or stories written on the fly by AI that change according to the reader, something like the good old gamebooks, but with infinitely more variation.

– The good old gamebooks and the personalized future… On my site I try to explore the ways technology changes us and will go on changing us. One of the main problems it has brought is that it has trained us out of concentrating, out of reading long texts. That, by the way, is also what Ivo Ivanov told me. But how do we reverse this trend?

– Here I'm a pessimist.

I don't think it can be reversed—at least not while children are put in front of screens from a very young age to keep them occupied.

That destroys the brain's chance to focus on anything that isn't colorful, beeping and easy for the mind to digest. And in fact it makes the brain unfit for anything other than the empty consumption of meaningless content.

– How do we get young people excited about reading more?

– They read a lot, far more than people assume in public discourse.

The question is how to get them to reach for something other than entertainment fiction,

and that's a question I have no answer to myself. But I persist in publishing important, valuable books, even if they have so few readers.

– In recent years I've been struck by the decline of science fiction, the shortage of large-scale, prognostic books like those from the days of the Strugatsky brothers, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanisław Lem. In exchange, there's a remarkable fantasy boom… Are my observations well-founded?

– Half-jokingly, I blame the Harry Potter series. Its global success across several generations definitely created dreams of casting spells rather than the dreams of conquering alien worlds our generation grew up with. But the truth is that

ambitious, wonderful science fiction is coming out in the West; there's just no way to publish it here.

Or at least there wasn't until recently. There seems to be a turn back in that direction; I hope it lasts.

– Let's hope so! Do people like reading about technology? Why do these topics struggle to make it onto literature's “agenda,” when today, in my view, they're a matter of life and death, of the future of our entire civilization?

– I think it's because we're so surrounded by technology that in reading we look for escape. It's hardly a coincidence what huge hits books about an idealized past are: plots set in villages with wise old men, real or invented customs and the inevitable passionate love stories, with no internet or phones.

– How do you explain the big success of the What Are You Reading… group?

– Success is relative. The group is big enough to have become a miniature version of Bulgarian society, which also means it's full of strong antagonism, frequent scandals and mutual intolerance. But for 10 years now I've been enforcing draconian rules. I think they're useful, and they let interesting, different books that readers have discovered one way or another slip in among all the endlessly repeated posts about the current hit titles.

– What will the last book look like?

– Richly illustrated, with handmade elements and very expensive to produce—just as books were before the invention of printing,

when every single book was a work of art in itself. There's

no way the book won't remain as a symbol and as an expensive, precious gift, even if mass publishing disappears for one reason or another.

– Let's finish with the question I asked 15 tech leaders; I'll reveal their answers on Friday. “Recommend three of your favorite books!” In this case, let them be connected to technology in some way…

– Let's see. I've already made some suggestions, but so as not to repeat myself, let them be these:

• The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley

• Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

• The Circle by Dave Eggers

– And so I've found a recommendation for myself too—I haven't read Ridley. But the guests from the IT world added plenty of very interesting things… Thank you!

– Many people don’t believe that anything remarkable has happened in the world of AI. How do we convince them? My way is to test and show—look, poetry competition juries no longer just fail to tell the difference, they award prizes to poems written by ChatGPT. How do we convince people that there is now a tool that is extraordinarily good at so many tasks?

– Usually that is part of my job. There are many approaches, and different things impress different people. I prefer to show a person something that can be useful to them and save them a lot of time. That is what our product, Team-GPT, is about too. We get on a call with people, do a demo, explain how to use AI for their needs, and they start doing it.

Another approach is FOMO—the fear of missing out. “Do you want to fall behind while everyone else moves ahead, or do you want to be one of the first to take advantage of this technology?” Because

AI is a departing train—whoever has boarded it becomes better and faster at everything they do.

The truth is that the people who don’t believe are simply falling behind. It’s a big problem in many companies—the gap between the people who use it and everyone else shows up first in knowledge and skills, and then in pay.

I know a lot of people who already work several jobs thanks to AI. One of them is a programmer; he used to work at three places, now “only” at two. I asked him, “Why don’t you bring AI into your company?” “Oh, why would I tell them? If they find out, I’d have to work only for them, wouldn’t I? Right now I get a double salary and work less!”

That’s more or less the situation. In “statistical language,” we have a bimodal distribution: some people are way ahead, and the others can’t be bothered with it.

In the beginning I tried to persuade people, I put time and effort into training them, into trying to open more people’s eyes. I can’t fight the current. I can’t convince someone who doesn’t believe at all.

But if someone is a little curious and opens their mind, I can show them very well how to use AI.

Be more open-minded, be more curious—you can only win from it!

– Sometimes even authorities don’t help here. People often quote Yann LeCun to me, who says the models are “as smart as a cat.” Or Linus Torvalds, for whom AI is 90% marketing hype and 10% real applications. But that’s not how it is—we can see it.

– It depends on which bubble you’re in. I’ve been working on artificial intelligence for 10 years, and it’s crystal clear to me that this is the future.

All of science fiction for more than 100 years has been talking about it, and here we are—the time of artificial intelligence has come.

From here on it will only get “worse.” The course on deep neural networks I created in 2016 began like this: “Google Maps tells you where to go. People no longer choose which road to take; artificial intelligence chooses it. They no longer choose what to buy—from Amazon or eMAG, the big regional online retailer—AI shows them. They don’t choose which movies to watch; Netflix does.”

At some point you realize that AI has been here for a long time. I wrote that 7 years ago, and it had already been around for another 7 before that. Since 2010, AI has been deeply embedded at a mass, global level in everything around us. And we pretend it’s something new. This technology is 15 years old, and it has been in development for more than 50.

It’s just that now is the moment when something has changed more sharply. And my way of putting it into words is this: until now these algorithms could say 0 or 1, categorize, perform limited tasks.

The difference GPT brought is that artificial intelligence can now pretend to be a human. And be completely indistinguishable!

It won’t just win competitions—it is breaking the education system, the way we assess knowledge.

And the education system is broken as it is. I got a 6.00—the top grade on Bulgaria’s six-point scale—on the Bulgarian language matura, Bulgaria’s school-leaving exam, when I graduated. How? I went to the education ministry’s website and read the criteria used for grading. You have to use at least one simile, at least two metaphors… I memorized them and reproduced them. Well, artificial intelligence does that out of thin air, and it’s much better at it.

– But what are we supposed to do? And not just with poetry competitions, but with everything else, now that we can no longer tell the difference? AI, as you said yourself, has already changed the way we get our information, shut us inside bubbles and created all the big problems we have as a society right now. That we can’t talk to each other, that truth has become fluid…

– You’re asking me what the author meant. I rather think the way to look at these things is the other way around: beauty is in the eye of the beholder!

In fact, it doesn’t matter whether something was written with AI or not.

If this thing creates an emotion in you, if it makes you feel a certain way, it’s art, it’s something good. And if a poet is unhappy that AI is taking his job, he isn’t a poet but an egocentric who wants to be famous for his poetry. He isn’t doing it for the sake of poetry itself.

The people I know who write poetry do it to pour out their emotion, their soul. I write essays all the time; I can’t write poetry. All my thoughts take the form of essays, usually I aim for 300 to 2,000 words. I’ve published almost none of them, but I write them for myself. And,

fine, AI can probably write a better essay than me. But I write it for myself. What’s the point of using the artificial thoughts of artificial intelligence?…

– That’s exactly what I think too, and it’s the same reason I write Digital Stories. I don’t care whether better texts could be generated… But most people are prejudiced once they know something was generated. How long will that last? They’ll always say, “I don’t like it,” just because they know it wasn’t made by a human. I see it everywhere.

– There are many ways to approach this. The Luddites come to mind.

Every time there’s a technological revolution, there are two “tribes”—one is very excited, the other is against it.

Usually they’re driven by some fear that it will replace them. I think people simply need to be more open and try to see whether they can move from one tribe to the other.

What are we going to do? A hard question, and I can’t solve it.

What worries me is that people aren’t interested. Never mind that they’ll fall behind on technology—that’s their own problem. The real problem is that they can’t take part in the discussion about AI, because they don’t understand at all what it’s about.

– Exactly. That’s why this site exists. And my survey, which 750 Bulgarians took part in, showed how scattered we are on these topics. Meanwhile, one of the few things we agree on is that we don’t discuss it enough.

– If you want to make policy, for example to regulate artificial intelligence, you first have to get to know it. That seems to me to be a fundamental problem. Usually the people who are against AI haven’t gotten to know it at all.

– You help companies bring AI into their work. Everyone expected that very soon after the ChatGPT moment these technologies would make their way into practice. Elon Musk and 500 scientists even wrote a letter calling for a six-month moratorium. Two years have passed, and it seems these technologies are arriving more slowly than expected.

– Every new technology takes time to be adopted. There are various reasons, and people’s attitudes are one of them, but not the main one. A far more significant reason is that there aren’t enough servers, there isn’t enough hardware to run AI on. It isn’t fast enough, it isn’t cheap enough, it isn’t environmentally efficient enough. Half a year ago it was said that every ChatGPT request uses a glass of water to cool the servers. All these things need to be solved.

There also isn’t enough data for it to develop faster. We’ve already trained on all the data that is publicly available.

The next thing we’ll run short of is electricity—we don’t have enough to power all the AI things we’re going to build. Which means we hit one limit after another. We’re starting to solve them, but it can’t happen quickly. Building a new data center takes three years or more, even if you’re Microsoft.

ChatGPT came out in 2022, and GPT-4 came out at the start of 2023—for me that was the real revolution. So, by 2026 we’ll be securing more hardware. After that we’ll have more, but the models themselves will be even more powerful. There will be problems again.

If we look a bit more globally, I’d say that

this type of AI will take at least 20 years to be adopted on a mass scale in companies. I expect the first big, globally adopted software products to appear in the next 5 to 10 years.

Maybe their first versions already exist!

– Which sectors and which specific tasks will change first?

– AI is being adopted absolutely everywhere—take the whole technology sector, for example. Starting with hardware: chips are so tiny that we use AI to create them, while at the same time they are changing so they can develop AI better.

At the infrastructure level, it affects servers, data centers, cooling systems, energy consumption, and so on and so on. Only then do we get to software. There you can already create visual elements without writing code. You can dynamically spin up extremely complex systems in minutes.

But it’s a natural cycle. Ten or fifteen years ago everything happened on the computer. And when phones arrived, there were no apps, no websites ready for them—a complete rewrite began. Now everything is oriented mainly toward phones; 70% of our traffic comes from mobile users.

– It’s the same with Digital Stories, even though we’re talking about long texts.

– And just as everything had to be rewritten to meet the requirements of phones, chips became much smaller, we developed miniature cameras and sound systems, batteries became much more powerful, because they had to. In exactly the same way, AI will change the hardware and software industries from the ground up. There will be one enormous rewrite until all systems become AI-first.

Another comparison is cloud technology—everything used to happen locally or on your own servers, and at some point everything moved to the cloud. Software had to be completely rewritten.

The changes will be everywhere, but how can each person benefit? Everyone can do it individually, but naturally it’s faster and easier for some. When it comes to ChatGPT or similar models, the industries we see adopting them fastest start, of course, with software. Programmers and other IT professionals understand what it’s about and manage to adopt and use these models in creative ways much faster. Then comes the marketing industry—people in that business had long been waiting for something like this, and their work got easier. As someone with experience in the field, I know their problem is that they have lots of ideas that never get realized. In marketing the problem is always focus, but it’s clear that it’s better to experiment until you find the idea that works best. Generative AI makes it possible to test far more ideas in a very short time! You can create videos, texts, all kinds of content in hours instead of days.

The next area is business development and sales. We clearly see it in education too. All the teachers who use it are thrilled, because it can not only prepare their materials but also check homework and essays. We also work with universities that use AI technologies actively—Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Yale.

In law, they work only with documents—an ideal environment for these models. Finance is the slowest, because it works with a lot of numbers, and we know GPT doesn’t handle those well enough. But I’m sure very serious progress awaits us soon. Simply because the people developing these systems understand this above all—math and programming—so there’s no way the solution will be delayed.

– But could there be a winter? Many people say every technological field goes through this natural stage, and it has already happened to AI at least twice.

– Yes, 100%. The more investment pours into artificial intelligence… Imagine AI will create 100 units of value. If we invest 150 units in the form of money, there will be a winter, because we’ve put in more than the value even is.

That happened with cryptocurrencies—I’m not a big fan of them. Yes, there are cases where they can be used. But on a similar scale they’d bring 5 units of value, while 100 units of investment were poured in, and that’s why the bubble burst.

The same with real estate. Perhaps the biggest crisis of our time, in 2008, came from there—huge investments into value without sufficient backing. In the end, we can only live in one apartment. That leads to a lot of mismatches. With AI, the hype isn’t just hype. There are an enormous number of applications, and inevitably every field will be changed by it.

In my view, it should be compared with mobile phones, cloud technology and the internet.

Just as the world can no longer exist without the internet.

– But there was a kind of winter there too, the so-called “dot-com bubble” at the start of the century.

– It came because we didn’t yet have a distribution system. I want to read the Digital Stories site, but I don’t yet have Facebook to find you on. I don’t have LinkedIn to connect with you, or Google to land on your page. I’d have had to know exactly what your site is called and type it in by hand—and we didn’t even have the browser in its present form.

It took quite a few years to build the infrastructure so that we could make Team-GPT in two weeks, put up a WordPress website in four hours and have made $300 in sales the following week. That was impossible 20 years ago.

Everything takes time. In 2007 Steve Jobs unveils the iPhone; his competitors from BlackBerry are in the hall, stunned by what they’re seeing, realizing the future is here. Microsoft, meanwhile, laughs at the iPhone. Fifteen years later BlackBerry is gone, Microsoft has uncompetitive phones, and the iPhone is the best phone ever and everyone copies it. But it takes quite a lot of time to get here.

AI is something different, because we already have a lot of infrastructure—the internet, phones, cloud services. There’s a distribution network through which it can spread everywhere. You have a software development program, you add AI, and it gets better.

– I can see that you think these phenomena through and follow them closely. Can you guess what the next big thing in the tech world will be after AI?

– In 2014 I won a competition about what the next financial crisis would be, and Capital, a Bulgarian business weekly, published me. It later turned out I wasn’t right at all, but I took first place because they thought it sounded very smart. In the same way I could tell you something that might sound smart, but nobody knows.

There are definitely a few trends that will be very big. One is energy and nuclear fusion. Many companies around the world are working in that direction—you put in one unit of energy and get out more. It’s only a matter of time before that happens and scales.

Energy will become more and more important, both because of politics and because of AI. On the other hand, it’s a conservative field that depends on many factors, but the change will happen, sooner or later.

Biotechnology, healthcare, robotics—all fields we expect a lot from. There are already robots that plaster walls and paint. They’ll become widespread and good at their job. Whether in 10 years or 100, I don’t know, but I’ve already seen a robot that’s relatively good.

Biotechnology will be the most profitable industry there is, because people are interested in longevity. AI is now helping us discover new things in medicine, and I’m very enthusiastic about that direction. Above all because of eliminating diseases. Right now cancer and cardiovascular diseases are the main things killing us. They’re predictable if you have data. If you have good data with which to track these diseases and their progression, you’ll have very good predictability and prevention.

Genetics and brain-related technologies will also be very important. After AI, I personally would be very happy to devote myself to research on how the brain works.

Biotechnology definitely presents quite interesting problems that will be solved this century.

– Definitely. And robotics, AI in genetics, longevity are all topics I often write about in Digital Stories. And it’s no accident that people like Sam Altman are also investing seriously in this kind of technology.

But are there things that scare you? What could go wrong in this process of introducing artificial intelligence that would create problems for us?

– There are dozens of dystopias I can imagine. I always recommend Isaac Asimov and the classic science fiction writers—they predicted nuclear fusion, AI and who knows what else.

Many, many books of fiction, of science fiction, foresee these inventions. In part they steer people to think in that direction.

– And it’s no accident that this is a genre that has been in crisis in recent years, and in my view it has very few meaningful authors.

– Right now all the books on these topics are dystopias. They usually go like this: the world in 2100 has gone wrong in this and that way. Here’s what society looks like… it’s never good.

I can imagine the world “breaking” in many ways, but I don’t like doing it.

What interests me is how to make sure it doesn’t break. To give something good!

What worries me? The most fundamental, simplest abstraction is that bad people will have great resources in the world. What are the resources that matter today? Energy, data, access to artificial intelligence. Bad people having power is always a problem. What good people need to do is get to know AI and learn to use it, because the bad ones certainly are.

When Team-GPT came out, we had inquiries from military units, which is perhaps the equivalent of “we fight the bad guys by having more technology than them.” I stay away from such deals. But the military is always the first to mobilize when there’s a new technology.

The truth is that if we don’t take things into our own hands, the ones running the world will be the military (good or bad) and the porn industry. They’re always the first ready to jump on a new technology and use it for their own purposes. I don’t like that one bit, and if anything it frightens me.

– What frightens me is that it will make things too easy for us, that we delegate everything far too easily while we give ourselves over to hedonism and knee-jerk arguments online. Experience shows that when technology frees up our time, we don’t use it to read and write books and to get to know the world, but to scroll the feed.

Do you think we’re close to the limit of large language models? Will GPT-5 be better than 4 by as much as 4 was than 3?

– ChatGPT isn’t just a language model, and neither is Claude, nor Team-GPT. In our case it’s clear that we’re not a language model; we use other companies’ language models and add value in other ways.

A language model can’t work with files, spreadsheets, images. It’s a combination of hundreds of tools that together make up the ChatGPT product, and the language model is one small piece.

I believe that

the step taken with GPT-4 is already enough for us to build these applications that can be orchestrated and be fully capable for all kinds of tasks.

If you go to ChatGPT and tell it to write an article about Ilia Valchanov, one of its tools will look up who Ilia is and what he has said so far. Another will create images for the article. It will use additional tools to read a file—yet another technology. And in the end we create an article entirely with ChatGPT—the model has arranged the words, but it rests on the efforts of many other applications. Everything else is a combination of 10 to 20 tools.

The language model is just one piece of the puzzle—but, yes, a very important piece.

– What will artificial intelligence never be able to do? Is there anything like that at all?

– Hmm, a philosophical question. René Descartes says it will never think, because that is a human thing.

I think about this question more in three dimensions. We live in the world, we have a human body. You have to sleep, eat, go to the toilet.

Being human is much more than thinking. You have a brain, but you also have a body and an inner, spiritual life.

These three things are deeply connected. When you’re a self-aware person, when you’re happy, that has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. We keep saying, “Oh, artificial intelligence will do this and that.”

No, it will perform certain operations that are intellectual in one way or another. It may do certain things, but in the real world being human is much more than working, writing a text or creating an image.

Just like the poetry we started with. Being human means writing the verse, feeling it, trembling at what you’ve made—not churning out some text and winning some competition. To feel… that will always be reserved for humans.

Play the video

Just a day after Team-GPT’s record funding was announced, Ilia was a guest on the podcast Creative Life, sharing fascinating stories from behind the scenes of the startup, from its long and thorny road, and about what the team faces from here on. Watch it also if you’re curious why it’s worth more men giving up shaving…

You love computers, and to be able to use them… you buy magazines!?

Isn't that strange? Isn't everything online? It is today, but this digital story was born in a computer past that feels both recent and very far away. A kid dreams of getting an unfamiliar magazine with James Bond's face on it, which has caught his eye. He gives up his pocket money to buy it, but just a few hours later the “big guys” take it from him. That, however, is how his interest awakens in the cult computer magazines of the end of the last century, the favorite reading of an entire generation.

Decades later the boy “meets” the same Bond again, and the magazine sets the rest of the story in motion. Thousands of stubborn hours go by until, today, Project Lazarus is complete, and anyone can browse the full collection of the legendary computer magazines of the 1990s and the first years of the 21st century. A peculiar Bulgarian cultural phenomenon that is hard to explain to the young people who came after…

Which magazine did you love? PC Mania, Gamers Workshop, or another one from the long list?

Game On

This remarkable phenomenon reminds me of the story of gamebooks. It begins in the late 1990s, when the internet became more accessible and computers began to appear in homes en masse. Its speed, however, was far from today's, and so for quite a few years computers lived side by side with paper. We bought books to learn how to use the net. And, even more often, the computer magazines we'll be talking about today. Most were devoted to games, and they often came with a gift—a disc of game demos and programs. Plenty of readers bought them for the discs; the net was still in its early stages, and downloading even a picture was slow and expensive.

Little by little, computer game magazines grew into a culture of their own. Different schools took shape, and each publication had its own profile (more on that soon). Some of them gradually managed to gather their readers into a community that talked actively about the topics it cared about.

Then the speed went up, and with it came the end of the magazines. Some turned into websites, others quietly slipped into history. The very place from which they are now returning…

The Game of Toys

And here this cultural phenomenon is again, thanks to our hero today. Diyan Karolev is a journalist with serious experience who in recent years has been working in computer game development. And after 8 years and 5,000 hours of stubborn volunteer work, anyone can now read, on the Project Lazarus site, every single one of the 440 issues of computer game magazines ever published in Bulgaria! Together with the games section of the magazine Computer, Diyan's enormous labor covers no fewer than 659 issues.

Try it, leaf through them virtually—it's such fun. A time machine that, for me at least, filled me with nostalgia for my school days…

But how did our guest decide to take on such a massive task for the common good? As you've already gathered, the story begins more than two decades ago, and it involves none other than Agent 007.

The odyssey (it may not be in space, but still) begins in 2001. Diyan, born on the first day of the watershed year 1989, is only 12 and often goes to the bus station in his hometown of Pleven, where there's a toy shop. “After school I'd stand there with my nose pressed to the window, staring at a Batman I finally bought many years later. At some point I also started looking at the newsstand, where I noticed some colorful magazines with titles that meant something to me—PC Mania, Master Games,” Diyan recalls.

Tomorrow Never Dies

At the time he doesn't even have a computer at home, but he often spends hours at the computer club next to the school—back then these were favorite haunts for kids. But… “My eyes stayed glued to those covers, but they also stayed glued to the price. I'm in sixth grade, I get 50 stotinki a day for school”—stotinki being the Bulgarian cents, a hundred to the lev—“and the magazines cost 2 leva (about $1.10) without a disc and 4 leva with one.”

Those 50 stotinki are for a sandwich during the long break, and that's also what an hour at the computer club costs, but our hero has already developed an obsession—to buy a magazine, and one specific issue at that. A little earlier he has seen the latest James Bond film, and it's the cover with his favorite hero that becomes his dream…

Except that a cavalcade of unpleasant surprises awaits him—by the time he has saved up the money, that issue has sold out, so he buys another magazine instead: a PC Mania with a purple cover featuring the game Oni. And to top it all off, before he has even read it, the “big guys” from the upper grades take it from him that same afternoon.

Just a few months later, though, the dream comes true in the most unexpected way. The boy is sent to his older cousins for the summer holidays, and since they can't be bothered with the little one, they hand him a whole pile of computer magazines to keep him entertained. He devours them cover to cover, even though… he doesn't understand much.

We Played Well…

“I had no idea what I was reading—first the foreign words, second the specialized terminology I was discovering for the first time. But once I got used to it, I got really hooked. I was hugely impressed that there were people who wrote about games, and were probably even paid for it.”

So his next, much bigger childhood dream is born—since he loves to write, he starts thinking how wonderful it would be one day to earn his living by writing about computer games.

That is exactly why he later turns to journalism, graduates in the field and starts working at Bulgarian National Television (BNT). And although by then the computer magazines no longer exist on paper, he also fulfills his dream of writing about games, on the PC Mania website, which is still running today.

The Love of Words

And so all these fulfilled childhood dreams lead up to the last one, the one that has brought us here.

We move to 2013—the magazines are long gone—when our story proper begins. Diyan is already working as a journalist and stumbles online upon something that takes him back in time.

He remembers one of his favorite childhood books, The Cucumber King by Christine Nöstlinger, and decides to find it online. It turns out to cost just one lev. “That seemed terribly insulting to me—the courier would cost more than the book—so I decided to look at what else the same shop was offering… And at that moment I see the purple cover of the first magazine I had ever bought and had stolen from me, a precious childhood memory,” Diyan recalls.

He spots a few more magazines, buys them all, and as he leafs through them he travels back to the phenomenon. That's when the next idea comes to him—to make a documentary about the history of computer magazines, because it's so interesting that it simply has to be told. He starts meeting his favorite writers from back in the day, collecting… And he notices how hard it is to find the old magazines today: some carry unjustifiably high prices, and others can't be found at all.

With Dragons in the Heart

“Because I love collecting things, I ended up hoarding them like Smaug the dragon and gloating over them. I met writers, did interviews, and then I thought—these magazines, I'm literally sitting on them like the dragon and they're gathering dust. Why not share them with people?”

First he decides to check whether there are any legal restrictions, and it turns out that PC Mania and Gamers Workshop are the only trademarks still registered. He manages to get their blessing and rolls up his sleeves…

He chooses to call the project Lazarus, after the biblical Lazarus. That way the magazines rise again from their paper death.

And so, 8 years and about 5,000 hours of scanning later, all the magazines can now be browsed on his site.

In his work he is careful and precise; each magazine takes him about 3 hours. He “takes apart” the issues, processes the images, straightens them. We joke with him about how useful the sharp eye he's developing will be if the software industry falls victim to artificial intelligence and we all have to move into construction.

Game On

Diyan is so meticulous that when an image has a hole in the middle because of a prepress error, he hunts down a replacement, swaps it in and adjusts it. Why, when he could always leave the hole and it would be authentic? Because he wouldn't be able to sleep if he did. Lately, generative artificial intelligence has helped him quite a lot.

And why does he put in all this enormous work?

“I've always imagined the project as a library devoted specially and only to game magazines. It costs me out of my own pocket, but I don't see a problem with that. I want to be able to share with other people the thing that inspired me to write in the first place. It seems only fair to me that there should be free and open access to these texts, because otherwise they'll be lost.”

Magazine Makers

“The magazines had a huge influence on all of us; they're a cultural phenomenon,” Diyan says today. “1998, around the release of StarCraft, is the moment when suddenly everyone decides to make gaming magazines. That's when the cult titles Gamers Workshop, PC Mania and Top Games appear—the last of which is renamed Master Games after two issues. Each has an extremely distinctive style and way of covering games and everything related to them.”

At the time, as we said, the internet is slow, expensive and runs over the phone line. Most kids don't have computers; others don't have internet. So, according to Diyan, the magazines on the one hand become a rescue from having to search for information in English, and on the other they provide programs and game demos that can't be found anywhere else. And then all of this turns into a community, which is more of an unexpected side effect. Many of the early magazines organize tournaments; others open their own clubs.

The magazines come out actively until about 2010; the last survivor is Gameplay. From one of his interviews Diyan learns that their usual print run was between 10,000 and 15,000 copies, higher in winter, when more games were released.

Still Not Played Out

Plenty of people thank him for his stubborn work. Writers who wrote for the magazines and never kept copies. “There were several emails like that: ‘I saw the site, found my articles and cried with emotion.’ Others write just to congratulate me. ‘Hey, well done, man!’ Very often, especially on social media, I see the sentence ‘Thank you for your work.’ To be honest, that confuses me a little. I'd never heard or seen it before, and I've never thanked anyone for their work either,” Diyan admits. “But maybe I should.”

How valuable it is sometimes simply to say thank you. And how important it is to keep the strong moments of childhood, to treasure them and bring them back to life. Surely many people will return to them thanks to the enormous work Diyan has put in. Few things are more precious to us than childhood memories…

Which Were the Cult Magazines?

Diyan's quick take on his favorites

Top Games isn't a separate magazine but the games section of the magazine Computer. Yet that's where it all started, back in 1992! Gathering the complete collection was a real adventure—it took a year of going around libraries.

PC Mania were very precise and clear; they're like BNT. Always there, you know what you'll get. It may not be the most original journalism, but they'll cover everything that's important, everything you're interested in, and you'll get the discs. From a certain point on it was written by young people, which, for me at least, added a lot of extra value.

Gamers Workshop—if you follow them from beginning to end, you could write a whole book about a group of friends who get together every week, talk things over, do things together, and you share it all with them. They were very natural; you could tell when someone was joining or leaving, when someone was sad, when something had happened in their life. They were also extremely honest in their opinions, regardless of whether they were objective—that was never their goal anyway; the goal was to be sincere.

In Master Games I like the abstract art—there you can see a complete chaos of words, visuals, colors. The magazine itself isn't consistent at all and at the same time covers an awful lot, jumping from topic to topic. Not just games—sometimes reportage, articles about aliens, about conspiracy theories—you never know what you're going to get. I remember an article about a game with the subtitle “Monologue to a Cat Close at Hand.” I have no idea what that means, and I'm convinced it has nothing to do with the game being written about, but it makes an impression. The whole magazine was written in that contrarian style, and it's also famous for the comic about Doctor Gas.

Computer Games is also an impressive magazine. I found it incredibly interesting how, back in 1993–94, they managed to dig up information about the development of Myst, about how Roberta Williams's Phantasmagoria was made—topics on which, even today, it's hard to find lesser-known facts, yet they managed it.

Kompyutarni igri (Computer Games) is a magazine published by Softpress that was never announced, and even the publisher itself didn't know it had existed. Only 6 issues came out, but it's the only one that came out every two weeks. It was written in an interesting, somehow more Western style and came with free stickers—very unusual.

In PC Club I like Boyan Spasov's section “Format C,” with its humorous articles and parodies—for example, what would happen if The Matrix came to life in Bulgaria. For me this is a much more sterile publication, designed to be more profitable and to pull in advertising. At first it was a partnership with the newspaper Monitor, and it took writers from PC Mania and Computer.

At some point PC Club became Gameplay because of a trademark dispute. It started being published by Haykom, which assembled a team that had previously worked at Workshop. Some kind of coup took place there in 2006, and the writers who left moved to Gameplay. The result was a serious publication, professionally executed, with the most modern design.

Did you know that the mains voltage in Bulgaria wasn’t always 220 volts? Or that a fascinating Bulgarian computer game from the early ’80s turned into… a prophecy with its very title? What did the first Bulgarian electric scooters look like? And could the “hipsters of the ’60s” who rode them also get themselves a radio-TV-gramophone… provided they could carry 120 kilograms on their shoulder?

Once again we set off through the colorful history of Bulgarian technology with the most precise and captivating guide. For 15 years now, Anton Orush has been gathering a sea of information (and exhibits) about its past and present. His incredible life, worthy of a novel, was one of the first digital stories.

His new book, Proizvedeno v Bulgaria (Made in Bulgaria), came out recently, and you can buy it here.

So here we go, boarding the time machine for 5 stops back in history: 5 fascinating stories from the past of technology in our lands.

1. Kill the Power!

We start with… the wall socket. Did you know that until not so long ago, the voltage in Bulgaria’s grid was far from the values we know today?

Before the early 1960s, in Sofia it was 150 volts! That was simply the standard introduced by the Belgian Electric Company for Sofia and Bulgaria, which in 1908 bought the rights from the previous electrification concessionaire and took on the job of continuing what had been started. That is why electrical appliances made in the 1950s were designed to run on this voltage. And,

if you wanted to use your stove or washing machine on a 220-volt grid, you had to get yourself a step-down transformer like this one:

This device was put into production by the Stroitel workers’ production cooperative in Sofia, designed specifically to make older appliances backward compatible with the new standard. It’s very simple! You plug the device’s cable into the mains, and the other free socket, labeled “150,” is for the cord of your beloved old “thing”—a toaster, for example (or rather a “rusk maker,” as people called it back then). And that’s it! It can power appliances of up to 600 watts.

2. The Radiogramophonotelevision

After our close encounter with electricity, it’s time for some entertainment!

This story begins in the mid-1960s, in the Samples and Exhibits laboratory of the Chief Designer’s Department at the Light-Current Plant in Sofia. All sorts of new products were created here before going into production.

In those years Bulgaria took part in dozens of trade fairs on several continents—in Leipzig, Hanover, Thessaloniki, Algiers, Barcelona, Cuba, Izmir, Harare and who knows where else. Samples and Exhibits built all the prototype television sets, to see whether a trial batch was worth making.

In 1964 the designers decided on something truly big! For the Plovdiv International Fair, they built the first radio-television cabinet in Bulgarian history. It contained not only a Simfonia radio receiver and an automatic record player, but also a widescreen Kristal 59 television set! And

the record player could be loaded with several records and would play them one after another.

The radio-television cabinet with record player was given the working name Balkan. It weighed over 120 kilograms! It was approved and ended up at the Plovdiv Fair in 1964, on the second floor of the pavilion of Elektroimpeks, the state electrical export company. “They put on a Tchaikovsky symphony, and it turned out wonderfully pleasant, with fantastic sound—it poured through the whole pavilion,” Anton says.

Two of the photos show the cabinet. The radio and record player sit one above the other on the left, the TV is on the right, and between them runs a sliding door, like on a wall unit. Only 5 or 6 of these sets were ever made, and we’re lucky that our guide to the past can show us one!

3. A Joystick for Connoisseurs

A Bulgarian PlayStation from the ’80s? Wow!

Next up is the first Bulgarian game controller for the Pravets—the Bulgarian-made personal computer of the socialist era—from 1982/83. It was intended mainly for games on the 8-bit Pravets 8M, 8S, 8A and so on. In English, this kind of gaming device is called a paddle.

We see a plastic case with a potentiometer on top and a small button on the side; the player holds the gadget between both hands. They came in sets of two, the idea being one for each player.

Can you imagine playing a game by turning a potentiometer—the little wheel like the volume knob on a tape recorder or the brightness and contrast knobs on the TVs of the day?

Turning left or right is the equivalent of pressing an arrow key. If the two players are opponents in a tennis match, the racket moves left or right to meet the ball. In the game Neptun, the spaceship moves horizontally, and turning the potentiometer steers it left or right.

The “Bulgarian joystick” was also used to play Tetris!

With this potentiometer, though, the choice of games was limited, because the player couldn’t move the hero or the ship along the other axis—up and down.

On the left side you can see a small button—it’s for “shooting,” and in Tetris it drops the block into the chosen spot.

4. Mr. Gorbachev…

“Tear down the wall”… Yes, these are Reagan’s words shortly before “the Wall” fell, but they are also the almost prophetic name of a Bulgarian 8-bit computer game from 1982.

The floppy disk with the game came as a gift with a book—a guide to working with a computer.

Tear Down the Wall could be launched from a floppy disk or a cassette by typing the command RUN. When we do that, the following meaningful words appear on the screen:

The character holds a tennis racket, and you have one ball. Your task is to knock down a brick wall with it; you control the racket with a controller like the one above.

Before you start playing, the computer asks you to type your character’s name. You press RETURN and see the playing field on the screen, along with the words:

TO START THE GAME, PRESS THE BUTTON ON THE GAME DEVICE.

At the bottom of the screen appear the points you earn whenever you manage to hit a brick with the ball and knock it out of the wall. The deeper you get, the more points you earn per brick.

5. Scooter.bg

Today electric scooters are an undeniable fashion… even a marker of social divides. But did you know that half a century ago there were already Bulgarian prototypes?

In 1972, at the Research Institute for Engines and Automobiles (NIPKIDA), engineers built the first Bulgarian two-wheeled, single-seat electric vehicle—the ElRo 72 (from “electric roller”), meant for trips around town.

The first photo shows us what this very prototype looked like—it is also from 1972, and the two-wheeler in it is called an “electroped.” This is the original mock-up. The resemblance to a bicycle is obvious—the rider reaches the brakes through levers on the handlebar grips.

The ElRo 72 was powered by two 12-volt lead-acid batteries with a total capacity of 150 Ah. Its electric motor had a rated power of 0.6 kW and ran at 4,000 rpm.

The scooter weighed 52 kilograms, and up to 167 kilograms with both batteries and the rider.

For the scooter to travel at different speeds with the same torque, the motor has to run at different revolutions. That’s why the batteries were connected in parallel and in series through contactors. So at a supply voltage of 24 volts, the motor drew a current of about 30 A.

Let’s ride! First we insert and turn the key behind the handlebar. Then we twist the right handlebar grip, which acts as the controller. Once we’re moving, we can change speed with it (like the throttle on a motorcycle).

The top speed of the first Bulgarian electric scooter was 30 km/h, and its range was about 70 km.

We have a headlight! And a bell… The ElRo 72 had 3.5 x 8″ pneumatic tires (you pump them up). The rear suspension was rigid and the front one hinged. To keep the scooter light, the side panels were made of fiberglass. This speaks of an effort to make the design up to date for its time.

Did you enjoy the trip? It’s worth carrying on! For the biggest floppy disk, the history of Bulgarian electronic chess and the “Copying Device”—six more forgotten treasures of Bulgarian technology—read here.

And for true connoisseurs there’s the new book by our guide, Anton Orush—Made in Bulgaria. You’ll find it here.

Can we change the world around us? Our country, the world... simply by writing online about what moves us?

We can. Here is the strongest proof I have ever come across.

“It's like talking to a ghost,” the man across from me says of our meeting. But he doesn't look like a ghost to me. He looks like a regular Sherlock, lanky, in a checkered cap and a checkered jacket. Later, as we talk, he reminds me more of another famous literary hero, a certain hidalgo.

Sitting opposite me is the legendary blogger Chergar—an old Bulgarian word for a nomad, a wanderer—who created unforgettable texts and hoaxes that still hold a place of honor in our digital folklore and collective memory. The author of the site neverojatno (Bulgarian for “unbelievable”), known at a certain point also as “Bazikileaks,” from the Bulgarian word for a prank. Dedicated to “The Truth As It Could Have Been!?”

But how did an anonymous blogger become a frequent topic of conversation among politicians and journalists? And how did one of his texts lead to... the resignation of the Bulgarian government, and at that... without him wanting or expecting it?

Ordinary Folk*

*The subheadings are also titles of texts by Chergar

He is an engineer by profession. He travels often; his work takes him to different towns, and he spends several years abroad as well. He has no home of his own; he moves around and rents, together with his family and his elder son, who is grown up today.

The first years of the new millennium. Back then, as today, many things divide us as a society, but one unites us almost without exception. The feeling that the political system doesn't work, that the public structures of our state could be more orderly. That our rulers are not up to the job, and the “ordinary man” can change nothing.

“They're all scoundrels, the ones and the others,” as another hero puts it—Bai Ganyo, the archetypal Bulgarian boor from Aleko Konstantinov's 1895 satire, and far from a hidalgo. Precisely because he is used to the old proverb that “the sharp sword won't cut the bowed head,” he could never move on...

Justice Asleep

“I started out of pure social discontent that had no outlet,” Chergar recalls. “It was all a joke; it turned out to be fun to write completely made-up texts about something that had happened. Later I discovered that this way I was writing exactly what stirred me inside.”

But why did he decide to do it under a pseudonym? “I know that people are strongly influenced by who is writing, what kind of person they are, what their position in society is. I wanted to write and see the reaction to the writing itself, whether there would be any at all. Are there people who are troubled and angered by the same problems? That the institutions don't work! Would someone say, ‘yes, that's right,’ or ‘what is this nonsense?!’ That's why I decided to write anonymously.”

He chose the made-up name because of his way of life, and also because he has a soft spot for distinctive, strong, half-forgotten Bulgarian words. In those years the WordPress platform was gaining popularity, it was easier than ever to start a blog, and that is what our hidalgo did...

“It is precisely the discrepancy between the accounts of eyewitnesses and the mutated portrayal of our everyday life that is the main thread in Chergar's work,” the publisher writes in a 2011 collection of his texts. “Political hypocrisy, judicial bias, administrative incompetence and journalistic straining are often at the center of public debate, but nothing comes of it.”

The Last Battle for Bulgaria!

Well, it definitely turns out that people care about these topics, that many think like him and recognize themselves in his words. At that time social networks had not yet exploded as content platforms; we lived in the era of blogs and of media outlets that were only making their way onto the web.

From the very beginning Chergar put up a header that clearly states that every post on the site is invented by him. In Aesopian language he writes texts that we would rather take for essays. He enters the world of the made-up, of fiction; the real author is clearly named everywhere, but... even in the days before mass Facebook, you know, people didn't always read carefully. Here's what I mean.

Vasil Levski's Last Letter

Have you read “Vasil Levski's last letter”? It is in quotation marks for a reason, although to this day you can find excerpts from the “document” in an impressive number of sources, including official ones. Levski, the Apostle of Freedom, is Bulgaria's most revered revolutionary, hanged by the Ottomans in 1873, and the letter's words echo fifteen years later on social networks and are read aloud at official events. For their force and the spirit of the Apostle, they are quoted in the media. One evening, at the peak of its fame, they rang out on what was then the most watched television program—Slavi's Show, the late-night talk show of the entertainer Slavi Trifonov. Online you can find the opinions of our best-known historians, who took the time to examine the “document” and explain why certain discrepancies make it impossible for it to have been written by Levski himself... It would also become a main source in one of the great debates over whether the words “whoever liberates us will also enslave us” belong to the Apostle, since they were otherwise only retold by Zahari Stoyanov, the revolutionary and chronicler of the liberation struggle.

“You who are robbed, dishonored and lied to by our present-day rulers, do not think that our work ends with liberation alone. No, that is where it begins. (…) Do not be deceived that those who hold the money also hold your future, for they took that money from you, and yet you bow to them and raise them up like the sun before your eyes.”

It is said so plainly—would Levski have written about “our present-day rulers”? Exactly: this is one of the first texts Chergar wrote. Under the glaring header stating that only the author's own words are published on this site.

Yes, he made an effort to make it sound in the spirit of the Apostle, and included many verbatim quotes. But not with the idea of fooling anyone into thinking it was a real document.

Apocryphal Reality

“For a very long time I studied his work. I had almost all the books ever published, and I went deep into his way of thinking, at least as I see it,” Chergar says. “I wrote this letter at a time when I was a victim of the system. There are injustices, you see them, but there's no one to tell. Even if you tell, they won't pay attention, or they'll do something pro forma. That's how the letter was born, from an inner impulse.

The idea was never for it to be taken as truth! It's clear everywhere that it's fiction. I didn't want to forge anything! I wanted to make people think, to fight against the injustices they see...”

The “letter” continues its triumphant march online, being discussed and used as an argument. A quick search showed that over the past year it has been reposted on Facebook at least a hundred times as authentic, with tens of thousands of likes. There is even a group with thousands of members calling on people to drop it into the ballot box instead of a ballot paper at the next election without a choice. So... it has fulfilled its role, or hasn't it? Where is the line between the essay and altered history once the criterion has been lost?

Do you still think it is artificial intelligence that lies to us or manipulates us... or is the natural kind more important—critical thinking, fact-checking? Even of sources, which can also mislead: quite a few media outlets have published the “letter.”

Three Chain Gangs of Optimists and Burdencredit

“But how, foolish man, do you expect your life to get better when you make not a gram of effort to fight even the small injustices in your life, and instead wait for someone else to do it for you?” Chergar writes in another of his posts, this time in the name of Paisius of Hilendar, the monk whose 1762 history of the Bulgarians sparked the Bulgarian National Revival. “No one will come and provide you with a normal life, since you yourself have chosen slavery—to be a slave to the television, to the politicians, to the banks, to the advertisements, to civil servants and institutions.”

“Gradually it became my favorite pastime to pick a famous person and write an interview with them,” the blogger adds. “Not in order to deceive! That was never the aim. The aim was to have my words, my view, expressed through someone else's authority. From the response I understood that quite a lot of people see things the same way. There is great inner discontent in them, and they feel relieved when they find out that others see things the same way too.”

Few of the people he knows in those years are aware that the engineer is the blogger Chergar. Friends often recommend his texts to him as genuine. “Did you hear what this minister said, what kind of interview Umberto Eco gave?”

Bulgaria After the Bulgarians

A few years later the engineer is working in Greece, from where he publishes texts such as “Greeks appeared on Syntagma Square with a placard reading ‘Quiet, don't wake the Bulgarians’” and a speech by the Greek prime minister about our country. Both are reposted by a number of Bulgarian media outlets and quoted in the news. At one point even Prime Minister Boyko Borisov announces that he will demand an apology from the Greek prime minister for his words.

“This shows where our politics and our political class are. They are at an absurd, knee-jerk level. Not only have we let these people govern us, we keep doing it year after year,” Chergar reflects.

And speaking of our former prime minister, here we come to the climax.

Boyko's Journey Through the Torments

February 16, 2013. You can guess where the news appears: “The power distribution companies issued a joint statement: ‘It's your own fault.’” At that moment electricity prices have just been drastically raised, and the “statement,” in rather salty language, says that the energy companies are not to blame for this and people should hold their rulers to account.

Well, the next day the letter is reposted by the leading media, and a protest against the new prices gathers in the center of Sofia. People are angry; it wouldn't take much for trouble to start. And just then, on that hot, chilly February evening, one of the organizers indignantly reads out through a megaphone the letter written by Chergar. The situation explodes, and the protesters attack the police. There are fights, blood. Mere hours later the prime minister announces that he is handing in the government's resignation, a few months before the end of its term...

“It was staggering! I never expected such a thing,” Chergar recalls. “And I realized how sad it is to see how easily and visibly some people manipulate others, because they think it brings them some influence at the moment, some benefit, helps them stand out. People very easily fall victim to manipulation!”

I often ask my guests whether words will ever lose their power. And this story seems to answer once again. ChatGPT could hardly capture the spirit of the times the way Chergar managed to. Who knows whether an algorithm could even foresee how a text in the good classical spirit of satire, created to share an emotion and to make people think, can turn into a tool, a weapon for manipulation and propaganda...

Is there a way to learn to protect ourselves, to bring back critical thinking? Especially in times when artificial intelligence creates works indistinguishable from human ones?

“People need to think, but they have been placed in a completely different environment, something unfamiliar and new to them,” Chergar believes. We are definitely not coping with it, especially at the frantic pace of the ever newer new. That, however, is far from a reason to stop trying...

Chief Directorate for Combating Public Enlightenment (GDBOP, the acronym of Bulgaria's organized-crime police)

“Many of you know hundreds of chalga lyrics and the names of actors from countless soap operas, yet you don't know the names of your neighbors, nor have you read in your whole wretched life even one real book. O, foolish and degenerate man! (…) The world has no need of blind followers; they serve only to bring about a slave's lot.”

Chalga, for the record, is Bulgaria's brash pop-folk. But are these words Paisius's or Chergar's? Perhaps after everything so far you'll guess, but what about some poor archaeologist who comes across them after a century or two worn down by the technological transition?

Even more important, in my view, is something else—the spirit of self-expression, the desire to change the world around you, to not be afraid to stand up against injustice, which to the superficial eye might look like tilting at windmills.

A decade ago Chergar stopped writing actively. On the one hand, the algorithms of social networks had already arrived, choosing for us what to read and what matters. And, in his view, also silencing alternative, opposition voices.

Populism, Lobbyism and Fascism

On the other hand, he wrote and wrote, his texts gained cult status, and yet it seemed... everything stayed the same. The same problems, the same quarrels, even the same personalities keep circling in our political space, while the real problems of people remain off to the side, away from the spotlight.

“I decided I had written everything that moved me. I saw what the response was, what the result was. I saw that everything repeats itself. That those who govern, as well as those who fight for power, can wait for years for their time to come, and they do. Both the ones and the others are stubborn and shameless. And however you expose their true face, they don't worry much. Because they don't see who could take their power away. For that reason I decided it would be a waste of time to continue. I hit the moment when it was possible, and I stirred up some trouble in the system, at least as I see it. Anything more would have been just out of stubbornness, I'm well aware, and I don't like wasting my time.”

Young People

That doesn't mean we should stop hoping, does it? That it might be possible to develop as a nation to the point of building a political elite we can be proud of?

According to Chergar, the ball is at the feet of the young. They are always the ones who are fired up, who think they can change something, and sometimes they succeed. Once a person runs into very hard situations and accumulates life experience, he settles down. The natural time comes to make way for those to whom the future belongs.

Should we expect the next Chergar from Generation Z, which seems less excited about politics than about TikTok?

Chergar says it depends more on the family, and gives the example of his elder son. The boy was unhappy with the school administration, and his father, inspired by a Stephen King story, gave him the idea of starting an anonymous school newspaper to write about everything that was wrong—with the relations between teachers and students, with hygiene, in the cafeteria. His son was more withdrawn, didn't feel comfortable among his classmates, and decided to give it a try.

“The teachers were shocked. They reprimanded him for damaging the school's reputation. They told him they would call in his parents. Fine, let them call me in... but they didn't. Still, my son and I talked it over and decided to change the newspaper, to make it less extreme. Before he knew it, my son gained authority among his classmates, everything turned around, and it worked out just like in Stephen King. They tried to intimidate him; he didn't give in. In the end the principal decided she could make money from a school newspaper project, and it came through, but... there was no one to write. Guess whom she invited... But my son refused.”

The Facebook Society Is Leading Us to Anarchy

When the war began, Chergar asked his boy whether the prestigious school he attends had any position on everything happening in the world. “Because you are living through quite a turning point. ‘No.’ Don't you talk about it? During the Vietnam War there were many protests against it. Not for one side or the other—for peace; it's the best medicine! ‘What can we do?’ You can do anything! I showed him how to create a nonexistent organization that would carry out activities. We sent letters to world leaders calling for peace. I'm trying to show him that it's not true that he can't do anything. If young people have the desire, have an idea, have something they believe in and want to achieve, they should always make the effort.”

Real life is outside social networks, Chergar says. “Because we think we communicate through them, but they are more like indoctrination into the correct point of view. For example, there is no debate there at all about education, something very important, especially given technological development. That debate can only happen in real communities, created by people who get together, talk, discuss, make proposals... My personal opinion is that changing the world through social networks is an illusion. We'll just sink into a fake world. And we'll miss the real one.”

There's the Will—No Results?

“In this gray landscape the ideas of bloggers flicker like colorful mirages, but quickly sink into the information hurricanes of the web,” reads the foreword to my guest's book.

To my mind, the path to making sense of it all lies in stories; they are the colorful mirages. Chergar himself offered to tell his, and if you, too, see a powerful digital story around you, I'd be glad if you helped me tell it here.

“We have let external factors influence us entirely, shape our thinking. We wait for someone to tell us what is right and wrong. It isn't that hard to decide what is right. Every person can change something!” the famous online hidalgo says as we part. And I so want him to be right, and to see more and more examples like this...

If our conversation with the blogger Chergar has intrigued you, you can see its continuation live on Sunday! Together with the historian Alexander Moshev, Chergar will be a guest at an event hosted by Digital Stories.

On May 11 (Saturday) at 5:30 p.m. it's time for the talk “A Different History.” As part of the Sofia Science Festival, at Sofia Tech Park we will discuss how technology is changing our relationship with the past. For more information and tickets, click here.

– How did you end up at MIT? And at the beginning of the century, no less, when far fewer Bulgarians had the chance to study in the US…

– My brother and my cousin had already left for the US, and they encouraged me to apply. They helped me prepare by convincing me to take part in programming competitions and to develop my skills in a variety of directions related to information technology. Also to build my own projects—something that wasn't an obvious requirement back then.

And one more thing—MIT was the only university that offered full financial aid through scholarships and loans. All the other technical universities offered only scholarships, which weren't enough to cover all the costs.

– What did programming look like as a profession at the beginning of the century?

– Very different from today. It was a cool profession that quickly became the talk of the town during the first “dot-com boom.” Back then the requirements for getting started were more fundamental than they are today: you had to dig deep into mathematics, logic, database architecture and so on.

Specific programming skills came second, and it was expected that a programmer could learn a new language whenever necessary.

I've always been impatient and focused on getting things done rather than on doing them perfectly. That made me a good fit for startups that want to create value and solve problems while keeping the processes running smoothly. I think that with the modern tools of the software industry, my style may be quite applicable today.

– Especially with the help of AI tools… You started your career as a programmer, but then moved into management and entrepreneurship. How did that change come about? When can a programmer turn into a successful entrepreneur?

– When the programmer realizes that managers aren't just dead weight… or at least not all of them. I'm joking. But back then it really did seem to me that managers were often useless, that with all their talk they only slowed down the development process.

To get rid of that inefficiency, I decided to try managing the projects I was working on myself. Over time I became convinced that I could help teams be more productive and put more passion into their work by sincerely sharing the business priorities and constraints with them. By getting into the decision-making process, its logic, and why those decisions had been reached. Once we set out on this path of curiosity, together we learned to reach the highest levels of business decisions and those related to customers. It is precisely

solving these problems with the help of a motivated team that is the essence of entrepreneurship.

– And it's precisely this skill that brought you back to Bulgaria as part of the INSAIT team. What are the steps toward having more successful startups?

– People are the key component!

With basic qualities like persistence, determination and the right education, backed by a growing ecosystem. I believe Bulgarians have the mindset needed to be successful entrepreneurs.

“Ecosystem” is a somewhat overloaded term that's easy to abuse. In my view, though, there are four key elements that still need deliberate improvement:

• People who have founded, worked at and exited startups and can serve as role models and mentors for the next generation of entrepreneurs.
• Educational and research institutions led by top experts, focused on real world-class problems and equipped with the right technological resources. INSAIT is still at an early stage of its development, but many other educational and research institutions can contribute to this as well.
• Policies that encourage entrepreneurship through tax breaks, grants and a simpler process for starting a business.
• Access to capital: enough funding opportunities, including through angel investors, venture capital firms, government subsidies and crowdfunding platforms.

– Clearly there's a lot of work to be done on each of these points… Do you think there's a chance that Bulgaria will have more software product companies than companies that simply supply specialists?

– Yes, it's possible, but

such a transition will take at least a generation, and only if it becomes a national goal.

– What are INSAIT's next big steps in this direction?

– It's important that we keep growing, that we provide more and more opportunities for deep tech research, for education, and for helping startups grow and collaborate. INSAIT is also a unique opportunity to attract more political commitment and public attention.

– Is there a software field or technology in which Bulgarians stand out for their skills?

– I can't generalize; in my view nationality, Bulgarian or any other, isn't the deciding factor in what someone is good at. The only country where I can say there is measurably distinctive technological know-how is Israel, with cybersecurity.

I would say that Bulgaria has a strong tradition in teaching the fundamental sciences—mathematics, physics—especially at a few incredible schools.

The problem, however, begins after high school: in recent years many of the most talented students have chosen to continue their studies outside Bulgaria.

There are quite a few Bulgarian ventures I follow with particular interest; lately among them are Team-GPT and LatticeFlow.

– Petar Tsankov has been my guest, with many fascinating details about LatticeFlow's work. While we're on the subject of startups… do you believe that, as Sam Altman says, the moment is coming when unicorns can be created by a single person?

– If we look far enough into the future, plain inflation will turn every startup into a unicorn… But more seriously. Sam Altman is talking about a time when every role in a company can be fully replaced by AI agents. I doubt I'll live to see that, because in the foreseeable future there will be new roles needed for a startup to succeed.

– Why does it seem we still haven't discovered all the uses of large language models in everyday life and business?

– The technology has only been available since 2023; it's been popular for a little over a year.

As Yuval Noah Harari says, artificial intelligence is still at the amoeba stage.

We have yet to see how far it will go and how economically applicable it is; right now things are moving at breakneck speed. The good news and the bad news at the same time is that evolution is now measured in months, not centuries. In my view, we still haven't seen human intelligence engage on a large scale with new ideas about how to use the artificial kind in different industries and in every aspect of our daily lives.

– Which are the most exciting and important applications you're looking forward to?

– One of them is the removal of language barriers. Specifically, the need for people to spend years of their lives learning new languages just so they can work and communicate with others. This trend started a long time ago, but now we're already seeing real-time translation from any language into another, both written and spoken.

Another trend, in my view, is personal assistants: they will become hyper-personalized, and we'll be able to trust them the way we trust ourselves. They could take over a large share of the everyday tasks we find boring. At the same time, they'll be our thinking partners, with access to enormous amounts of data and computing power. In this way

they will help us invent, create and validate new, even bigger and bolder ideas.

– I often write about both of these directions too—about translation and about assistants. I'm convinced we have technologies we still need to talk about a great deal, so that they help us move forward. But how do we convince the majority of people, who still don't believe we're living through an AI revolution?

– Change is hard for all of us, especially when things develop so drastically in such a short time. But it's a natural process. Seventy percent of people are always the ones who need more time to embrace change.

Personally, I see no reason to force anyone; in the end everyone will encounter the effects of the AI revolution and will follow the people who appreciated them first.

– That, however, brings risks too. For example, those who appreciate them first are always mostly tech people, and I think specialists from every field should take part in such important topics. Here we are, once again on the verge of handing a powerful technology to one or a few big players who will set the rules. Are we doomed from now on to bow to OpenAI's dominance?

– No, in my opinion we're not. There are many other foundation models, and

innovation in this field is only just beginning to explode.

The pioneers in almost every industry rarely manage to keep their lead for long, because they struggle to adapt to and/or adopt deep technological innovations quickly.

– How much better can AI technologies get? Are we close to the limits of large language models?

– I believe we're far from the peak. Harari's words, which I mentioned, apply in my view to large language models like GPT as well. Fine-tuning the models and providing highly specialized context will produce models that will amaze us for generations.

– People in which professions can feel secure about their jobs over the next five years?

– I think there are quite a few, but the most obvious are those involving physical labor and innovation that relies on human intuition. You'll find them in construction, agriculture, sports, medicine.

We mustn't forget about robotics, though.

I believe we haven't yet seen the revolution in that field, and breakthroughs comparable to those in the world of artificial intelligence are on the way there.

Robotics has been a subject of scientific interest for decades, but its progress has been held back by technological limitations that are gradually falling away.

– You also have a professional interest in applying artificial intelligence to medicine. Why does the expected big news there seem to be so slow in coming?

– Current legislation in the healthcare sector is extremely inefficient, overregulated, and takes a one-size-fits-all approach. It's far too restrictive to stimulate rapid, meaningful progress. I hope some countries will seize the opportunity to combine AI and innovative legislation with investment in order to lead the new generation of medical discoveries, which could reach patients in record time. But I'm certain of this:

when that happens, we may unlock new records in longevity and solve many of the social challenges related to an aging population, elder care and retirement.

– What will the medicine of the future look like?

– Much better than today, I hope, with a focus not on treating the main symptoms but on the causes and on preventive medicine. The insurance system will also have to evolve drastically in that direction. Here too, unfortunately, development is heavily constrained by regulation.

– What do you dream of?

– Of a society in which all people are good. Of a world in which we don't waste human potential on lies and disinformation. Where there's no room for people who follow their egocentrism and their sick dreams at the expense of others…

– Quite poetically put, especially for someone with more than 20 years of experience in the world of technology… It's no accident that I, too, keep thinking we need to bring these two directions together. Thank you for this conversation!

A director, rapper and podcaster meets a journalist, programmer and writer. A conversation with the roles of host and guest swapped… and although there are only two of us (plus, of course, one more wonderful podcaster), it turned out that these combinations of three callings apiece hold some interesting nuances.

The podcast 2&200 is a classic of the genre and shows why this form of conversation is turning eyes and ears back toward shared words today.

Play the video

We continue the conversation for admirers of Kusturica and/or Dostoevsky and/or Marx. With Orlin Milchev, once known as MC ATILA, a man able to pierce with words and questions. He is also a director, and last year saw the release of his debut feature film, The Art of Falling. A guest with an unexpected view of the big issues of today, interwoven with technology.

The “Scourge of God,” the epithet of Attila the Hun, has long ceased to be a single hero; it is what we have created online. But what is looming ahead?

– Have we forgotten how to use language as a medium of art?

– It's as if the internet first compressed language into short phrases of 100 or so characters, then even fewer, and then into entire chat conversations with almost no words at all, just abbreviations.

Now we communicate with emoticons and GIFs. I'm not saying it's bad. It's something like an Egyptian renaissance from the future.

– But wasn't the Word supposed to be in the beginning?

– Images are actually older and more natural as a form of communication,

language is a relatively recent invention. A virus, maybe. We really think in images and symbols, not in text.

Cormac McCarthy has a fine essay on this, “The Kekulé Problem.” Still, I find it sad that we are drifting away from the skill of defining our thoughts in the best possible way—not merely effective, but graceful. Literature. A living, blazing language that pins you down like headlights on a dark street.

One of my favorite authors once said that it isn't the plots but the language that lies at the heart of the great works of literature. All the stories have already been told, but how the words will tremble—that changes everything. I hope I'm wrong, but it seems to me that this understanding of language and text is disappearing from our everyday lives, and without it we are simply lost, blind.

Writing and speaking masterfully will become a rare, astonishing act from another time,

one that few will devote themselves to. Something like violin virtuosos, or sculptors carving life out of marble. Some rare and beautiful glass bead game. We'll see.

– I don't know, I actually think style is nowhere near enough. Though it's interesting that today the style of a description determines how well artificial intelligence will handle a given task. I'd like us to talk about art; you touch on many of its different forms. Is it harder today for art to move us, to stir our feelings?

– There's no shortage of clips with little monkeys, sweet dogs and ducklings in our feeds. They're moving, at least to normal people. But that isn't art. Chaplin's The Kid still moves us today, still stirs our feelings, but there's so much more there. Layers, a palette of relationships, sarcasm, warmth, self-irony, social commentary… in short,

moving us and stirring our feelings is only a small part of art's potential.

I don't think it's harder. But we definitely want it faster. Right away. And clear. No confusion, no questions, no ambiguity. If you're going to move me, move me decisively and with pathos—I'll sob. If you're going to make me laugh, make it punchy and extreme; I want to fall off my chair.

We're losing the habit of giving time to a film, a book, an album, a painting. Of deciphering. Of looking not for what is expected of us, but for what we're being asked. Of getting lost in order to find ourselves.

– Literature was once a form of protest, of social criticism; later rap took on that role. Is there art that criticizes today, art that can bring change?

– Literature, visual art, cinema, rock, rap—they can say whatever they like; that's the whole point. When they're good, the criticism comes through some personal, emotional experience. Through means that immerse you in another world and leave you to think and compare on your own. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanisław Lem come to mind immediately. Vonnegut. Eduard Zahariev, the Bulgarian film director. Pink Floyd. Warhol. Rakim.

Aesthetics matter, the language, the drawing… and the viewer's participation. Otherwise it's propaganda, some soulless social commentary that shouldn't be called “art.” But there is a need for it, as long as you truly know why and against what you're protesting. Oh, and as long as you do it beautifully, play with the audience a little.

In my view, art can't bring change. At best it can uplift the spirit, on a personal level.

But on a social level—probably not.

Nor should it, thank God. It's an expression of processes, not their creator. People are more complex, and they change very, very slowly and with great difficulty. But art can be a fine momentary mirror of a person or a society. It can also be whatever else it wants…

– Is it really true that it can't bring change? I don't want to stop believing in that; otherwise few other things make sense. At least I'm sure it can give our lives meaning. It hardly makes us happier, at least not on its own, and a study came out recently in which Bulgarians once again turned out to be the unhappiest people in the EU. What stands in the way of our happiness most of all today?

– The idea of happiness as a state that, once reached, is permanent and all-encompassing. In general,

“happiness” is such a strange word, a trap of language.

What exactly does it mean—pleasure, or security, or calm, or pleasant excitement, or maybe an endless stream of endorphins and serotonin, or some supreme contentment, eternal idleness? Or forever doing your own thing, nonstop novelty? Or that one perfect moment stretched into eternity… None of these seems to be quite “happiness.” What if it's all of them at once? Impossible, because they exclude one another.

It's a messy business. We have desires, we have dreams, then new ones, and even if we spent all day doing nothing but propagating our kind and eating pastries, we'd still find a way to break something, just to see what happens. Dostoevsky writes something like that in Notes from Underground.

The other huge problem is the whole “happiness industry” that floods us with images of eternal bliss. Most often an island, a beach, a woman or a man, a cocktail… and then: “Buy this deodorant and you're practically there!” At least that's how you'll feel, they promise. And our brain watches and can't tell the difference.

It buys the deodorant, smells nice, but it's not an island with a babe. And so it suffers.

Then it buys something else. That's how we go on.

Coca-Cola doesn't sell sugary water; it sells the idea that you and your family are together and not fighting, while the white-bearded man with the reindeer travels toward you, smiling. And he drinks Coke. And instead of “Ho-ho-ho!” he says “Co-co-co,” almost like “Co-ca-Co-la.”

– Does a world in which algorithms can create a personalized film just for you, by your favorite director, with your favorite actors, sound like a dream come true or a nightmare?

– A nightmare. A claustrophobic one, at that. In the sense of being locked inside a fixed notion of a given artist, of his possibilities or development, and of a given art form.

My favorite artists are alive, dynamic, changing.

Art is a snapshot of someone's reality or fantasy. An algorithm will copy well what already exists as an original, I'm convinced of that. But to create the next work, and one as complex as cinema… it might, but it's unlikely to be any good.

Cinema is a universe; it contains all the arts, mythology, the social issues of its time. Good directors understand exactly what they've made only at the very end, that's how complicated it is. A film passes through many people in the process of its making, each with their own depth, experience, sensibility…

No, no, there's no way, at least not yet. But I'd watch, just to see. The future is intriguing.

– And what do you think the future of the way we “get supplied” with information looks like?

– Frightening. Once we calmly searched online in order to know. Now we have to check a source ten times—fact-checking, double-checking and so on. Not to mention the powerful forces that tirelessly and purposefully produce disinformation with a specific goal, from political propaganda to the scientific kind.

All of this has a very real effect on society.

Fake news spreads across profiles like a nasty rash after a hookup in a lousy bar.

People repeat it to each other, then they vote. The mass arrival of deepfake videos is just ahead. Not to mention the use of artificial intelligence in this field. The internet will get totally messed up. But we have no choice other than to make the effort to get properly informed.

The simplest principle: cross-check sources, ones with a reputation, however few of them are left.

– This is definitely one of my big themes, and the rash metaphor… I don't want to say it “touched me,” but I find it very apt. In my view the ball is in the media's court; it's time they found inspiration and ideas in the formats that manage to create meaningful content today. I find the examples of Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan interesting. Do you think podcasts are journalism?

– Ours isn't. It's just a conversation, with every risk of saying something very stupid or relatively smart from time to time. A journalist asks questions; we'd rather just chat with the guest or among ourselves.

There are all kinds of podcasts; it's a vessel that anyone can fill with their own thing. And if it's interesting or important to someone else, it'll get watched. Our formula at 2&200 from the very start has been to be honest, to think out loud and not to take ourselves too seriously. It's just a podcast.

– And one made with emotion, a personal touch and courage, all things that I think help the genre. I can vouch for that too, having been lucky enough to be a guest and to talk, including well outside my comfort zone. We talked a lot there about the notorious bubbles and echo chambers, about the problems they create, which I believe lie at the root of today's great divisions. Will we ever get out of our bubbles?

– Well, they're nothing new or scary. Grouping together is an evolutionary principle; it has always existed. There's nothing wrong with being among people who share your understanding of the world, art, politics, morality. It's great that the internet lets us find such like-minded people easily.

I was a teen when the internet arrived, and I remember the time before it. It's damn awful to feel alone and misunderstood, not to know where your people are. In that sense I like bubbles, and I think it's generally good for a person to be among people of their own kind.

But I recommend taking walks through other people's bubbles. Expeditions. Just to see whether there's something there for you that you don't know or haven't come across. Again, as with information, it's a matter of conscious effort. Saying to yourself: “Hey, what are those people over there talking about? Let me go and hear or see! It's probably dumber than ours, but you never know.”

– What could help us start talking about the important things again, instead of just getting riled up against each other?

– First of all, accepting that there is such a thing as Facts and Objective truth. Rejecting relativism—“everyone decides for themselves”? Well… no. Stopping the claim that when our opinion is personal, it can't be challenged with arguments and evidence from the other side. Not hiding behind little words like “patriotic,” “of the people” and so on, which long ago lost their historical unifying meaning and acquired only a political one.

Then we can talk calmly, normally, without emotion—standing on the concrete slab of verifiable facts, not on “that's just how I feel it.” And decide what's best for the country, the future, life and so on. What our real problems are—how high to plant the flag, or how high the corruption reaches… for example.

– What are the best things technology has brought us? And what do you think are the biggest problems it has created for us?

– For me, 90 percent good things. Access to music, film, books, events and people. The chance to express myself in a whole bunch of ways, and for what I do to easily reach anyone who's interested. Whatever I do—music, film, a podcast—it can't help being tied to the internet and technology. And that's great, because otherwise it would be so much harder.

The bad ones… Hmm, for me at least, it's assorted silly squabbles, downright ridiculous. And a bit more stress over things you have zero power over and that don't matter all that much anyway. I think that's about it.

Twenty-two modern incubators and five ambulances, specially equipped to help premature babies. That is how big today's guest is. Thanks to him, premature babies in many regions of the country have a far better chance of surviving and avoiding complications.

He trains volunteers for situations the state could not handle on its own. He runs first aid courses for children and their parents alike.

He isn't Santa Claus, but he also has a beard and he is also tired, and that is the mood in which I meet Lazar Radkov. Our conversation is for the DEV.BG podcast, where I have the good fortune to host some of the episodes. And this time, many of the words are worth reading.

Play the video

Miracles can be the result of the work of any one of us. Anyone can change the world and the environment around them. And when people brought together by the desire to create find a little support and join forces, they can change their surroundings too. Is this the path that will lead us forward as a nation and pull us out of the role of the poorest and unhappiest?

If there is anyone who can convince us, it is Lazar Radkov.

– Today hundreds of thousands of people collect bottle caps because you managed to inspire them to do it, but how did it start? When did you decide that doing something professionally wasn't enough and that you needed something different too?

– It goes quite a long way back. I was into sports, into coaching. I have a sports club, and my colleagues still pay a large part of my bills. We help people with a more sedentary lifestyle improve their health, their fitness, the way they feel and look. We help them fight the things that hurt. Through that work I was invited to give lectures to schoolchildren and students. I have always had some inner need to give, to be useful with what I do, to help people, to make their lives a tiny bit better.

In 2013 things with the club were going well, but I felt I needed to do more, to contribute. I realized that I was living well, I was happy with my life and with the people around me. And when a person “gets on top of their expenses,” as a nice Bulgarian saying goes, when they pay their bills and have a roof over their head, they're warm, they have internet… On Maslow's pyramid they feel fine, their base is covered.

What's left is to try and do something for others too, for the environment, for the world.

So that we leave it a tiny bit better, more meaningful. It's important to take care of your own well-being and that of your loved ones, but if I'm doing well and living in a palace while all around me there's a swamp and a garbage dump, there's no way I can be happy.

– But why did you turn to campaigns for collecting bottle caps in particular?

– This cause wasn't invented in Bulgaria, and I didn't invent it either. Seven or eight years before us there was a big cause called “Caps in Action”: a boy and a girl collected caps to buy wheelchairs.

A bottle cap is extremely small and simple, it takes up no space. You can easily slip it into your pocket and feel a little better that you're doing something good, however small.

But when many people do it, big things happen. In six years we have already recycled 1.3 million kilograms of plastic!

Probably more than a million Bulgarians take part. More than 95 percent of people don't make any particular effort. Whether you throw the cap into the trash can or put it in the little container makes no difference. You empty the trash can when it's full. The one with the caps you take to the square twice a year, or you leave it in your apartment building and someone takes it. It costs you nothing in time, energy or resources.

But when a person does something tiny, they feel they are doing good. As a friend of mine says, once you've kept the cap, you won't throw the bottle on the street. We feel good, we feel part of something bigger, we feel that we're helping.

More than 85 percent of people who took part in our surveys say that since they started collecting caps, they have also started sorting their waste. Nearly 90 percent notice more litter on the ground, it catches their eye, and every now and then they pick up a piece of trash and throw it away. So one tiny, meaningful thing leads you down a completely different path, more constructive and meaningful: the path of doing good.

– We all have the urge to be useful, but often it's persistence that we lack. What's your recipe for not giving up?

– If I give up, what would I do?

There have been many hard moments. I've talked about some of them; most only I know about. When something burns inside you, there's no way you can give up.

When someone asks me, “I want to start a cause, to help with something, can you point me in the right direction?” I answer, “Why should I point you anywhere, man? Don't you live in Bulgaria? Take a walk, look around, there are thousands of things that need improving, that need support, entire social groups, entire sectors.”

The IT sector is one of the few that work well, because there are almost no regulations.

– Still, how do you start? If I've never done it before, and the idea comes to me to help with something, to be useful, as it did for you, what's the next step?

– I'll tell you about some of the things we do, and then we'll see how you can contribute.

In 2017 we discovered that in many hospitals in smaller towns the incubators were 30 or 40 years old, so we pointed the “Caps for the Future” campaign in that direction. Even the Ministry of Health didn't have that data.

Then my colleagues and I realized that

we are all quite unprepared for any kind of extreme situation,

and during COVID that became obvious after just one week of lockdown.

We have no idea how to give first aid, what to do in earthquakes or disasters, how to avoid violent situations, how to protect ourselves and our loved ones. So I gathered colleagues and we started running trainings like that.

Last year I found out that nobody teaches this to children at school either. At the beginning of the year we launched a first aid training campaign. In the very first term we trained more than 4,000 children, and by New Year I plan for that to reach about 10,000. These are children in Plovdiv, Pazardzhik, Sofia, Stara Zagora and Pleven, and I'm looking for partners in other cities.

A year ago we launched the “Volunteer Clubs for the Future” initiative. We have them in more than 30 towns. The idea is to connect people who are active and constructive and want to meet others like them. They want to do something, but they feel alone.

In quite a few towns it worked out incredibly well: they ran tree-planting campaigns and clean-ups, they went into schools, they organized large-scale clean-ups. Along the way they ignite other people.

The stronger a person's energy, the more it draws others around them.

Another important area: in a big disaster, however well prepared the state is—we saw it in Turkey after the earthquake—there are never enough people, and there have to be trained volunteers for firefighting and emergency rescue, equipped and drilled, who can go out and help on the ground. We already have “Rescue Clubs for the Future” in eight towns. We hold drills and gather equipment.

One more thing we do entirely with our own money is free checkups in villages where there are no doctors. In many villages our volunteers from the clubs for the future, who are medical professionals, travel and do basic tests: we measure blood pressure and blood sugar, do ECGs, all of it in consultation with doctors.

– The list is quite long… I don't know how you find the time for all of it, but there are many paths. When you decide to do good, you can help in many ways: with money, with your time, with training.

– Yes. For example, we raised money and we're going to buy chainsaws. We need people with off-road vehicles, with garages where we can keep these things. We need funds; there are never enough, that's for sure.

Something that has started taking its first steps in our country in recent years is volunteering and civil society. The two are inseparable; one can't exist without the other. Civil society exists when people realize that for anything to change, it has to come from our own efforts. It won't come from the politicians, it won't come from outside, from God.

Yesterday I was in Varna, and a girl was telling me she was trying to gather volunteers. “Very few people, it's hard going.” You don't need many people, this isn't a banquet. You need a few, but motivated ones.

Every change is made not by the majority, but by a small, motivated, well-trained group of people.

With will, with brains, with skills, the people who want to change something somewhere do it. It doesn't matter in what field; you need small, well-coordinated, united groups of people. That's why I try to build units of 10 to 15 people who are like a family, so that when there's an alert, at least half of them go out and respond.

The moment a person enters the world of volunteering, they enter a different dimension. There, people go and do something not because they expect someone to pay them or thank them, not because they expect something in return, but because they know something needs to be done, that it's the right thing. They see that somewhere there's a need, a problem, a shortage, an injustice, and they go and help, giving their time, their energy, sometimes their nerves and their health. Yes, there are fewer such initiatives than in Western Europe, because it's much easier to give yourself to these things when you've made it economically than when you don't know whether you'll manage to pay your bills at the end of the month.

In volunteer circles you can see people giving themselves to something bigger than they are. Even if what they do is a drop in the ocean, they know it has to be done, snowflake by snowflake.

They throw millions, billions of snowflakes, but there is one that finally makes the avalanche.

Things happen through accumulation, through grinding away, through working with other people, and there's no other way, no shortcut.

– In a way, I've chosen my own form of volunteering through telling digital stories. Because I think that's what I do best: start conversations on important topics, make people think. I heard on another podcast that one of your favorite books is Stranger in a Strange Land. So I wondered: don't you often feel like a stranger in a strange land when you talk about these things?

– When a person tries to cultivate a wild wasteland, untilled ground, it's perfectly normal to be lonely at first. Of course, I'm not saying Bulgaria is a wasteland, it's just that we have underdeveloped sectors. In volunteering we only have organizations here and there; you can think of two or three. There are hundreds, but they operate at a local level. It's perfectly normal, when you do things that don't exist or are little known, to feel alone and misunderstood.

I won't lie to you that it doesn't gnaw at me, that it hasn't stung me over the years, but I think in the last year or two I've managed to accept it. Okay, I'm trying to do something that's poorly developed and not popular, but there's meaning in it. When I truly believe something is important and needed, I have an inner motivation; I simply know I have to do it. I won't develop the whole sector, I won't fix the state. But I will do something.

Besides, I love developing new things, building new environments. Back in the day, before I started writing articles on personal training, there were mostly gym trainers who were huge bruisers and gave everyone the same exercises. Competitive bodybuilding suits a very small percentage of people; most people need to feel their bodies, to be able to move well, to perform movements properly. The approach is completely different, both in the training and in the attitude.

I love doing things that aren't popular. The moment they start becoming popular, it gets overcrowded and I turn to something new. I love spending a lot of time alone, spending time in the forest. I live in Knyazhevo, a neighborhood at the foot of Vitosha in Sofia: ten minutes walking uphill or five or six running and I'm in the forest, clearing my head. I avoid thinking of myself as Michael, the man from Stranger in a Strange Land; he was a superman with superpowers. And nobody knows my flaws, my weak and dark sides and my fears better than I do.

– You say volunteering is largely tied to living standards. But isn't it more about national psychology? I've seen many people give their last few leva to a cause.

– That it's tied to living standards is a statistic. But it's also national psychology, a culture that we have to develop and change.

Culture doesn't change by itself, but as a result of the efforts of many people over a long period of time.

Our national psychology was built over centuries and millennia, and it won't change easily. Small changes happen within a decade. It's like a glacier, moving in one direction a few centimeters a year: the culture, the national psychology, the values.

There has to be a vector that keeps pushing, slowly, slowly. People think we'll vote for the right people and they'll come and fix everything… It won't happen. A friend of mine says politicians are the emanation, the quintessence of what we are as a society.

I believe very strongly that civic initiatives can have an enormous influence in changing the way people think. Of course, it happens over a long period; you just have to keep the fire going and hold the direction.

I believe very strongly that in a society there are three main centers of gravity: politics—there's no way around it, man is a political animal—and business, where the goods come from. When the third is missing, these two grow together, and you get monopolies, political umbrellas, corruption. But when the third center appears—civil society—it shifts the point of gravity between the other two and starts to balance them.

– Do you never tell yourself, “It's none of my business”?

– A coach I used to follow, Scott Sonnon, told this story: “When I saw something that wasn't okay, that was broken, that needed improving, as a younger man I would say to myself that somebody should do something. But if I say that, I see myself as ‘nobody.’ I am ‘somebody,’ you are ‘somebody.’ Everyone who sees an injustice is ‘somebody.’ I see this here and now and I can do something—not solve the problem, but do something that makes the situation at least a tiny bit better. Tell people about it, bring people in, and together improve this thing.”

Was anyone aware in 2017 that in dozens of towns the incubators were from the last century? We found out by chance, some volunteers with ideas, enthusiasts, and we started pushing. In 2017, one incubator; in 2018, two; in 2019, 19 incubators. And we replaced them! At the beginning of 2020 we set ourselves the goal that there should be no hospital in Bulgaria whose newest incubator was from the last century. That's now the case.

Then we discovered there were no pediatric ambulances: there were two in Sofia, donated by other causes. In 2019 we announced the campaign; I researched companies, requirements, equipment. In 2020 we donated the first one, and we've reached the fifth. Each of these ambulances serves several provinces, and together they now cover all of Bulgaria.

Now we're going to help several dozen towns in Bulgaria with equipment again. We bought the first off-road ambulance, then the second. We'll buy fire engines so the volunteer units can support the fire service.

I have a small business that pays my bills. I don't drive a Bentley, I don't live in a gated complex in a 300-square-meter apartment; I rent. In 2020 my car was even stolen, and I drive a friend's car; I need to get a new one.

I don't ask much of life for myself; I have the things I want. If I went for a massage a bit more often, I'd feel better. But the problem there isn't financial, it's purely organizational. It's something I've been trying to work on in recent years.

I can't escape my own irresponsibility toward myself.

I believe a person should help where their heart points them. If it's forced, the satisfaction won't be as strong. Let people look for a cause that truly resonates with them.

I learn a lot from the people around me, and I believe everyone can contribute to the people around them, to people in need, if they feel it inside. It has to be right here, in your heart, in your little soul. If you really feel a little flame, a little warmth, and you're wondering whether you can or can't… If you're wondering, do it. If you're wondering, you definitely can!

Watch the full conversation with Lazar Radkov here:

Play the video

– How was the idea for Bulgarian Science born?

– We started 17 years ago, my twin brother and I, when we were just 14. We made a website that talked about science in a way we felt was missing from the education system. I spent more time in the library than at school, especially from eighth to twelfth grade.

In eighth grade I discovered books—the people around me simply showed me that there were other, very important things that nobody talked about in class. But where do you get books when you have no money? At the library! I sat in the reading room all day, carried on at home in the evening, returned them, took new ones. In a single year I went through several library cards because they filled up.

That’s when I thought there must be lots of people like me who enjoy reading about science, and so my brother and I made the site.

I taught myself to program!

We were very poor, and I had to save for months to buy a single book on programming.

This was 2004–2005, and the library didn’t have them yet, because they were very specialized and expensive.

And I learned—you literally read the code, write it down on a piece of paper, then open Notepad and start, without seeing what works how or what’s wrong. Programming happens in a very different way now…

– Back then websites looked very different too. There wasn’t even WordPress…

– That’s right. I wrote the site in PHP, we had to write the articles and publish them ourselves, exactly the way WordPress does it now. The MYSQL databases,

I built the whole thing on my own, and then… forgot programming.

My brother and I took on the content. The idea was to start with a magazine—that was the spirit of the times, the big international magazines were just arriving. We had to do everything ourselves; we had no money at all. We caught a hosting promotion and invested, literally, the few leva we had saved from our lunch money.

We set up a forum—before Facebook, forums were very active. Ours came to life quickly. Scientists dropped in, lots of people registered and started posting, and we reached hundreds of posts a day.

The online magazine got going and grew popular among scientists too. We even received our first donations! We were still schoolkids—imagine seeing 10 leva (about $5.50) arrive… Wow, how cool is that! Without our noticing, it started getting more serious; we set about building a more serious site, with more information…

– Listening to you, the story reminds me a lot of that of Bulgarian History. They too started as schoolkids, almost as a joke. Until there comes a moment when you feel that things are serious and require the next, bigger step. What did that moment look like for you?

– There was one. We came to Sofia, I enrolled at university, and we started working on projects. We created a nongovernmental organization. And although there really are similarities, our focus isn’t quite the same as Bulgarian History’s. What we do is a kind of news content about what’s new in science.

Alas, globally too there is much less interest in these topics.

The strongest is in astronomy, but it’s still a far cry from the interest in Bulgarian history.

But the moment came for us too, when we asked ourselves: “OK, is this what we want to be doing?” We would have had to sell ourselves and the ideology we started with in order to do other things that were more in demand, but we told ourselves there was no way. So eight years ago I took over Bulgarian Science entirely.

I decided I would give a few years of my life to see whether I could achieve something bigger here. And I still waver about all of it, because there are many hard months that shake everything.

Even so, every year we reach more people, we expand and improve the content, we make more and more documentaries and interviews, we publish more issues.

That has a price, which isn’t financial—it’s measured in the life you give to the cause.

– Why do you think there’s so much interest in history, while we can’t spark the same interest in space?

– Look at the political situation. The easiest way to manipulate people and build parties is through history and nationalism. It’s about using history. In my view, the least educated are the easiest to manipulate on these subjects. The people who have Botev and Levski—the heroes of Bulgaria’s 19th-century struggle for liberation—tattooed on their bodies know the least about our history. They’re exactly the ones who would jump into a fight against the very truths Botev and Levski fought for.

For me, that’s the problem—our education is at a very low level.

That made me the person I am now. Fighting against that system, I didn’t go to school but to a place where I read every day. It changed my views on education, and that’s why I keep doing it all my life, ever since eighth grade, and now I’m 35.

Over the past five years I’ve read more than 150 books on marketing and business so I could figure out how to “sell” science for free. If I were selling sofas, it would be much clearer how, but

“selling” knowledge to people who have never been interested in knowledge is terribly hard.

“Selling” is in quotation marks here—the goal isn’t for them to pay, but to pay attention. To set aside five minutes of their lives to watch or read something related to science. And that’s the hardest part—creating the content so that it’s accurate and understandable. That’s the other side of the coin, because if you write about history, you can say: “He went there, they beat him up, and he came home.”

Now try explaining what dark energy and dark matter are…!

– I know very well what you mean; I’m lucky not to have to “sell” my technology pieces to support my family. I now have almost 300 Digital Stories, and the most read of them is called “Where Do the Bulgarians Come From?”, and it doesn’t even give an answer… How can we turn this around?

– Nobody gives a damn in the long run, and it shows. More than 30 percent of students are functionally illiterate.

The dropout rate is formally going down, but the number of dropouts is by no means small. The real data stays hidden from the people who should be tackling it. The statistics keep getting prettier because we look at the numbers that suit us instead of fighting the problem head-on.

There’s a program called Education under the Ministry of Education and Science. It hands out 1.3 billion leva just to solve problems like these! Huge sums, given to programs that report their “successes” with data that does nothing for the students or for society.

– By those same statistics, more and more young people finish school, and then entire graduating classes get a 2—a failing grade—on the matura, Bulgaria’s school-leaving exam. What went on in that school for every single one of them to fail literature?

– And then some of them will go on to university, waste their time there, and say, “I’ve got a diploma, I can do this.” But what you can do and what your diploma says are totally different things.

We started a campaign with films about business and science, about how

to motivate young people that it makes sense to study so you can work at a good company, create something, above all in engineering.

Last week we interviewed a company. They told us they had racked their brains for a long time and finally decided to hire 90 Uzbeks, whom they train and who become experts, even engineers. Separately, they train people from India and Nepal. Because they’ve thrown up their hands and decided there’s no way in Bulgaria.

We keep saying we have no prospects, no manufacturing—that’s not true! We have factories, and they have no one to hire!

Most students today couldn’t tell you which continent Uzbekistan is on, what its capital is, or which countries it borders. So what are we doing? Some kind of education that’s useful… to whom? We can’t staff our own factories, our own production here, yet we don’t want the Germans and the Americans to come; we want to do it ourselves. Then who is going to work, and at what?

There are programs, there’s money in the system, but where does it go?

– Have you ever regretted taking on Bulgarian Science?

– No! I don’t know the alternative. What I do has given me a lot. It has taken from me, but it has given me a lot too.

– Which results over these years are you proudest of?

– We’ve managed to show a lot. In Bulgaria the good comments stay silent, and hate rules social media instead.

There are countless stories. Many students win awards, write, draw, make videos related to science. We motivate so many young people who learn about various scholarships, apply, travel. We’ve run training and exchange projects in Europe and taken hundreds of people to different countries—to see things and take part in various programs.

Last year our content as a whole had 29 million reads on social media. We attract new people, and we’re developing a podcast too. We reach people, and I can see they’re interested—genuinely interested! They buy mugs with chemical formulas, they buy the magazine, take out subscriptions, donate to schools, and schools themselves want to work with us.

Even a kindergarten wants us to put on a science festival.

That’s exactly how a love of science should grow. It’s something alive—science is everything!

It’s reading the thick books, but also looking through a telescope, a microscope. Seeing, touching, changing things, doing stuff with flasks. A child doesn’t need to build a huge reactor or accelerator, but with Lego, a robot, a microscope or a telescope, a real desire to do science can be kindled.

– I see it in my own kids. I think it works, and your experience proves it—there are more and more platforms like the Science Festival, Ratio… But how much of it happens online? Because on the web it’s much harder to capture attention.

– Yes, that’s the hardest part—reaching people in the feed. Here it’s quite peculiar: there’s disinformation, political interests, economic ones. What takes the most time is creating and promoting the content.

– How can a presentation about dark matter look sexy? And should we even make it sexy?

– In my view, science IS sexy! The point is to explain it.

How do we make it so that it isn’t sexy to be a mutra—a thick-necked gangster type—a bouncer, dumb and crude?

Because the values have been turned upside down: chalga, Bulgaria’s flashy pop-folk, has become the luxury. It used to live in seedy taverns; today it’s in expensive restaurants and clubs. To look like a chalga singer you need a lot of money and a plastic surgeon. I see it every day.

Chalga is the luxury, and science is the poverty. It shouldn’t be that way, but for far too many years people said there was no money in science—if you’re a scientist, you’re poor. If you do science, you’re stupid, doomed. Why didn’t you choose the good life, driving a new Mercedes, with a hot blonde by your side? Something must be wrong with you if you don’t want that. It’s not true!

Explaining and showing that science is sexy is, sadly, a need that didn’t exist before. I know many scientists who earn very high salaries, create startups, run projects worth millions, but we don’t hear about them, society doesn’t know about them, because it isn’t sexy. And they couldn’t care less about talking about how many millions they do or don’t have.

– The sector I work in is a case in point. The INSAIT institute, for example, which is already creating startups, successful people and a lot of added value for the country.

– Exactly, and more and more scientists from abroad are coming there. But there are many other fields too. Even in energy we have good examples involving renewables. In medicine we have results in epigenetics and in vaccine development. But they help more abroad.

Here, people en masse don’t even believe in vaccines. And it shouldn’t be a matter of belief, any more than whether I believe I have eyes. Do you believe it? “Yes, because I’ve seen them in the mirror.”

As a species, we most often believe things we can take in with our senses, which is why fake news spreads so well.

“Did you see the man who set foot on the Moon?” “Well, no.” “I didn’t see him either, so he didn’t set foot there.”

That’s how it goes in many other sectors; science is more timid. We have a new telescope at Rozhen, Bulgaria’s national observatory in the Rhodope Mountains, and serious achievements in astronomy too. We have developed science and a very good environment for research. The problem isn’t even money anymore, it’s people.

– Next you’ll be telling me the Earth isn’t flat… So which scientific breakthroughs do you dream of writing about on the site?

– I’d like to see how science is done on the International Space Station. And why not a base on the Moon, as a step toward other planets? It isn’t that far off at all!

We don’t realize what Musk has achieved—he made space accessible, for sending up cargo, for people to travel. Humanity used to rely on Soyuz rockets, but the technology is different now; everything happens far more reliably. And somehow that news never quite reached Bulgaria.

– I also think space has been so underrated in recent years. Once upon a time every kid dreamed of becoming a cosmonaut.

– What happens in particle accelerators is unique too. At CERN and other places around the world, new physics is helping us understand dark energy, dark matter, black holes, the cosmos.

Alas, that takes much more understanding. As individuals we need much more information to be able to understand each next stage.

And since the subject matter is complex, we as a society fail to grasp it, because there isn’t enough information.

Here’s another example—coal-fired power plants, green technologies, the energy transition… What are the arguments for and against? Even national television, which is funded by our taxes, doesn’t produce useful content on these topics! Are renewables a bad thing? Should we shut down the coal plants?

If there are any interviews at all,

they’ll give every point of view, including some Uncle Ivan who counts the stars or reads the future in a frog’s entrails.

To me it’s madness—you turn on the news and get flooded with nonsense. The scientific point of view isn’t there, the experts aren’t there. Knowing who the authority in a given field is.

– I think we got here because the media followed the feed, and today they no longer have the power to change things.

– They do, they do! The Eurobarometer shows that more than 90 percent of Bulgarians watch television every day.

– Facebook is the deciding factor, at least in my bubble.

– Outside Sofia things are different; television in Bulgaria remains a serious force. Maybe in France, Germany or Britain the feed matters more.

In Bulgaria, I think this is one of the problems—the state has the power to change things but doesn’t, and it’s the same with education. Bulgarian National Television (BNT) has four channels! What if at least one of them were for culture and education? The funding is there, the journalists, the equipment, the history, the culture. That really gnaws at me! One of those channels could be devoted to science, education and culture…

– Where does Bulgarian Science go from here?

– Toward creating more video content. We’ve invested in a new studio, and I want us to make more short documentaries that explain and tell the stories of scientific processes and phenomena.

The magazine too. Our subscribers are on a separate network, and we also have a mobile app. That’s our focus—

to give people more and to show that science makes sense.

We keep trying to convince ministries and scientific organizations that talking about science makes sense.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s through us or whether they set up their own Facebook page or YouTube channel—it’s very easy now. The big universities have their own faculties of journalism, media, studios better than those of the big TV networks… but they don’t use them!

That’s my goal—for them to start doing it. For there to be more talk about science!

– Your great cause is for technology to help solve social problems. Why did the internet, which was conceived as the most democratic environment there is, start creating horrifying inequalities? From the handful of big companies that set the rules to entire civilizations having almost no access to technology.

– Naturally, the quick answer is capitalism.

But the internet is also very interesting in that anyone can write on it. Yes, in some countries access is controlled, it is not absolutely democratized, but there are still huge opportunities for everyone to have access, to create things in the online space, to exchange information.

The serious problem really is that there are a few companies that monopolize not only the online space but also our attention. When we use the internet, so much is concentrated in four or five platforms that it is very hard for strong alternatives to develop. A terrible amount of money is constantly being poured in the States into creating platforms like these. Even if they have no good business model, they pour in

huge sums so that they grow as much as possible, and only then start monetizing their users.

In my view, that is one of the reasons we have such giants, which are sponsored and subsidized by investors in the US for quite a long time. And suddenly, once they reach a large scale, they start using that huge base of people they have as users. I think that is a serious problem.

– And with the advance of artificial intelligence, it looks as though it will only get deeper. How do you think we can get out of it?

– One option is to use open-source technologies, to support solutions created for non-commercial purposes, and to defend them.

The problem is that with artificial intelligence right now

there are almost no academic developments or other projects that can compete with what the big companies publish.

Simply because it takes enormous funding and computing resources, very few companies can afford to develop such huge models, and it becomes much harder for new players to come in.

We can support alternative solutions that are not based on what the big companies create. For example, there is a company in Ethiopia developing an alternative to Google Translate for the Ethiopian languages. They work with a specific focus on their own community.

The other option, of course, is regulation—through the European Union's AI Act, for instance. The problem there, naturally, is that the lobbies are terribly strong and push through whatever matters to them. So again there is a big risk that the rules imposed will simply serve the interests of the big platforms.

– Sadly, everything suggests it will turn out that way. “Social entrepreneurship” sounds a bit like an oxymoron in our part of the world—to me, too, the two words very often seem to contradict each other. How do you manage to combine them?

– For me,

the best option is to find a social project that is sustainable and can earn its own money.

Otherwise, social ventures very often fall into a vicious cycle in which they keep chasing funding organizations or jumping from program to program. It was very important for me that we be independent, that we decide for ourselves what programs we want to run, where to grow, and not depend on the interests of whoever is funding us.

For example, since last year everyone in Bulgaria suddenly rushed to provide funding for Ukrainian refugees. It really was important; a lot of people need support. But several organizations that were funding our courses suddenly said we could not bring in other refugees, that we had to run them only for Ukrainians. It was extremely unpleasant. We work with many different migrants, and telling some of them, who are in an even more vulnerable position, that we cannot include them because they are not from Ukraine was nothing other than racism, plain and simple.

For me, the freedom to decide who we work with is the most important thing, and I am very glad we do it this way.

– How many people work for your company today?

– Since it was founded, we have worked with 1,000 people. Not all of them are actively working right now—about 200 are on projects at any given moment.

Things are growing, but at one point we decided to stop expanding quickly and focus on the people we already work with. We constantly get interest in new pilot projects, more organizations get in touch with us. There is a lot of interest, but right now we do not have enough work for everyone, and that is our biggest problem.

– Which countries are those 200 people in?

– The largest groups are in Syria and in Bulgaria, and we have smaller ones in Afghanistan, Egypt and Lebanon. We recently ran pilot projects in Moldova and Ukraine, but only for training. We also have new small teams in Colombia and Venezuela. We tried out a team from the Philippines for a specific project, too. And two fairly large pilot projects are coming up in Kenya and Uganda, under the International Labour Organization.

– Doesn't it make things harder that people are so scattered? Wouldn't it be easier if, say, they were concentrated in two countries?

– Given that everyone works online and remotely, it does not create all that many obstacles whether they are in one country or in fifteen. One problem is time zones, but that is not so hard to solve; the other is internet access.

For us it is even good to have people in different countries, because some of our clients care about knowing that different groups are working on the data rather than it being concentrated in a single demographic group. Because that would lead to some kind of bias in the processing.

– Is it hard to communicate with so many different cultures?

– We do not work with people individually; we always have a local manager who runs the team. We try to choose our managers carefully, so that we share the same mission and they also have a strong interest in this industry. Only in Bulgaria, since we are the local managers ourselves, do we communicate directly with the people.

– What do they earn?

– We try to use the same rate for all countries, one that is normal in Bulgaria. We pay 4 euros an hour, which is good here, superb in countries like Syria and Afghanistan, and quite low in others. That also limits us—we cannot start working in Germany or the US. But in a very large part of the world, that rate suits people.

– In the end, we are talking about not particularly skilled labor that practically anyone can do after some training, right?

– That is the idea—for it to be an accessible type of work that anyone can do, whether or not they speak English, whether or not they can use a computer. Something like

an introduction to the online world, with the idea that the person will then look for their next job.

It does not always work out. Many of the people who started with us in 2017 kept working for quite a few years, even though we tried to encourage them to look for other work. It is simply hard to find something you can do from home, with flexible hours.

– Are there people whose lives this kind of work has changed, who then moved on and up?

– Not one has become, say, a programmer, which would make a nice story. When I was founding the organization, one of my ideas was for it to be a coding school for people in need. But not everyone is cut out to be a programmer—not everyone finds this kind of work attractive, and not everyone has that kind of thinking. So I decided to go for something simpler that would be open to all kinds of people.

We have worked with one Iraqi woman from the very beginning, and she is incredibly hardworking. Even though her English is not very good and at first she struggled with the computer, she is very rigorous in everything and always ready for new work. Through her, her husband started working for us, and then her daughter too. At one point she became the only person earning money in the family, since her husband retired. She kept working for us and in the meantime enrolled to study biology—something she had long dreamed of.

Two other girls from Iran were part of our English and computer-skills courses, and even back then it was clear they were tremendously smart and capable. One was only 17, the other 19; they have been working with us for four years now and have grown professionally. One is the coordinator of all our projects, the other handles our training platform. I can see even better things ahead of them.

– How long do you think humans will remain part of developing artificial intelligence? Because more and more data is being found through automated processing, and annotation is becoming less necessary…

– There will definitely still be a need for people. Maybe not exactly for data annotation, but with somewhat higher-level skills. Some tasks are already very easy for artificial intelligence, but new ones keep appearing. We are on the crest of that wave and always stay one step ahead of the systems, so that we can train the next system in the skills we need.

When we started in 2017, we annotated photos—where there is a person, where there is a car. Right now

we do a similar kind of annotation, but on three-dimensional point clouds,

which is considerably more complex, labor-intensive, and requires even more data.

We also do a lot of annotation of medical images, where it is not enough just to describe what you see; it is also a matter of expertise. We have a team of doctors who do those annotations. The tasks for the people who have to train artificial intelligence keep getting more complex, but those people will certainly be around in the future too.

– When an algorithm is trained on particularly sensitive data—for example, to recognize child pornography—does that mean people first have to sort through an enormous number of images, or is there another way?

– We do not work in that area; that is a very heavy type of data. But unfortunately, that really is the way. The other is to train age-detection models that can then be applied.

But even when you already have a trained system, there are always cases that are not very clear-cut, and there still has to be a person to moderate them.

There are still huge teams doing data moderation, including in Bulgaria. Especially on platforms with user-generated content, users constantly adapt to the platform's rules and try to find loopholes. And the moderators have to stay alert, one step ahead.

– What other interesting data have you had to deal with?

– For example, we work on a project for autonomous cars.

You have thousands of frames, and specific things on the road have to be annotated. The big problem there is that the images contain a huge number of cars but far too few of the rarer road users, like motorcyclists, cyclists and skateboarders. That is why algorithms find them harder to recognize, and it is very complicated to balance the data and extract only what will be useful to the system.

We have a very interesting project on detecting different types of litter on beaches, which we do with the British government. They collect drone photos of the shoreline, with the idea of then analyzing what kinds of waste are on the beach and, as a result, recommending which plastics should be restricted.

It is a very complex project, because you have a catalog of 100 different types of waste that you have to recognize and categorize. Even if you have one tiny fragment, you have to figure out whether it comes from a fishing net or from wood, and if it is plastic, what kind. That also required quite a lot of training for the annotators themselves, so they would understand how to describe the images. The problem of balance between classes is very hard there too, because there are far too many images of one type of waste and far too few of another.

– How does thermography work? And how can it help us catch diseases early?

– It's based on the fact that the body is warmer where there is more blood, and the other way around. There is a relatively small number of causes that affect local blood circulation. Most often, the reason for warming is inflammation—more blood, nutrients and immune cells are directed to the spot. What we feel with inflammation—warmth, discomfort or pain—is due to the increased blood supply. Another cause is the presence of tumor cells—they feed and also “pull in” more blood.

If an area is colder than usual, the cause is very often a blockage or narrowing of a blood vessel. Or a spasm—for example, I observed it myself, exactly three weeks after the start of the project. I had a small grain of sand in my kidney and

they couldn't diagnose me. Yet on the thermal images the spasm was clearly visible!

Our main focus over the last two years has been to use the images to find blockages or narrowing of blood vessels, which happens in the arteries of the arms and, above all, the legs. This very often leads to severe complications such as the loss of a limb.

It can also be a sign of a future heart attack or stroke.

At the same time, there are very few fast and accessible methods that can show it precisely and early enough, and people rarely get to a vascular specialist in time.

– For many years you and your team have worked on image recognition. How did you turn to healthcare?

– Since 2012 at Imagga we've been working on analyzing photos with AI, and we established ourselves as a pioneer. At the start of the pandemic, on March 19, 2020, a young entrepreneur and a medical scientist contacted us. They told us they wanted to develop an app that would recognize COVID with a thermal camera on a mobile phone. It was the period when nobody knew what should be done, and everyone wanted to help.

The idea of a COVID test was dropped very quickly, because there was no way to get access to the patients—you could only go in to them in hazmat suits. But we found the concept very interesting, so we bought a few thermal cameras, started handing them out to friends who had COVID, and watched. It turned out that you really could see interesting things. The very concept of preventive medicine won us over quickly.

You have some condition—acute or chronic—and you can monitor it and see the changes before you feel them. Our body often masks symptoms until they become so hard to hide that they come to the surface. From an everyday point of view that's a good thing, but it means problems go unnoticed until they reach an advanced stage.

Gradually we became convinced that this technology has enormous potential, and we concentrated on it.

– Besides narrowed blood vessels, your technology is also being applied to the early detection of breast cancer. How did you arrive at these particular conditions?

– Because access to patients was so difficult, we joined an industry organization—the Bulgarian Cluster for Digital Solutions and Innovation in Healthcare—where we met Novartis Oncology, and they became interested in how the method could be applied to breast cancer. It turned out to be one of the most promising areas, because when there are tumor cells, they grow and feed more aggressively, and that increases the blood supply.

In this area one of the standards is the mammogram, but it's used for older women—the tissue density has to be lower for it to work accurately. So we concluded that thermal medicine could be very useful for early screening.

For purely administrative reasons, it took a year and a half before a research collaboration was officially signed. That's why we're only now starting to image patients and train algorithms in this area.

– How did you bring a physician and researcher like Prof. Ivo Petrov onto the team?

– We met in September 2021. Besides being a cardiologist, he is also a vascular specialist, focused on various minimally invasive procedures for restoring blood supply—not cutting off the limb, but doing everything possible to break up the clot and widen the narrowing. At first he was a bit more conservative, but he took the idea with an open mind, and they began preventively imaging patients who came in with complaints.

At some point

he and his team became even more enthusiastic than we were, as they began to see how clearly this approach reveals a problem—

it becomes clear where the problem area is and how severe the blockage is. We've already imaged more than 820 patients, and we keep adding between 3 and 10 every day. We're preparing for a clinical study of the already trained algorithm, applied to the analysis of new patients, including from different ethnic groups. We plan to run it both in Europe and in the US, and we'll be waiting for approvals from the EMA and the FDA. That's how we'll prove the method's diagnostic value. The very way we process the thermal signal and visualize it turns out to be quite convenient for specialists.

– What sets your method apart?

– In the long run, our deep expertise in analyzing images with artificial intelligence. We also do good image segmentation—we separate background from object and focus where it's needed. That way, with fairly basic hardware, you can see a very detailed snapshot of blood circulation.

Our software itself is also very convenient. There are other similar programs, but they usually require quite expensive thermal cameras—between $5,000 and $20,000. We use “pocket” cameras for $400.

What's more, we're in advanced talks with a Bulgarian company that is very strong in manufacturing thermal hardware, and there's a prospect of developing our own camera.

Our concept is to capture the temperature of different parts of the body, analyze what is normal, what the deviations are and what they tell us.

This is very important for enabling much broader use—so that you don't need a person trained to read the images, but the software does it.

At some point we want it to become something you keep at home, like a thermometer. But far more sophisticated—tracking your condition and the changes and, if needed, alerting your GP and/or your treating physician.

– Then we'll be able to take meaningful selfies, though with a thermal camera rather than a phone… This kind of technology is in every airport, and a change in temperature is an obvious symptom that has been known for as long as medicine has existed. Why hasn't science pursued this direction more actively until now? Was the measuring technology simply not good enough?

– I think so. Let me use an analogy with image analysis methods, what we do at Imagga. They've existed since the 1970s; in the 1990s there was huge interest, a very strong algorithmic foundation and science, but the hardware wasn't powerful enough and there wasn't enough content.

Smartphones appeared at the start of the century, and that created a much bigger context—billions of photos began to be generated every day. Since modern methods are based mainly on machine learning, they need very large volumes of data to find patterns and anomalies. So it was only in 2010–2013 that the boom in visual recognition technology came.

I believe the same thing is happening with thermography. As Prof. Ivo Petrov says, it has existed as a method of medical diagnosis since

Hippocrates, who said that “if this part of the body is warmer than it should be, there is a problem. If it is colder, there is also a problem.”

In other words, medicine has known for millennia that body temperature is an indicator of health. Thermographic equipment was first used in medical diagnosis in the 1970s, initially as a complementary method for diagnosing breast cancer alongside mammography. But it turned out not to be reliable enough on its own. With the appearance of quite a few alternative medicine centers using thermography, it gained a reputation as an unscientific discipline. Many small studies were done, but so far no one has carried out a large enough study—let alone one relying on mobile cameras.

This is very important, because it changes the context. You don't need a stationary machine in the doctor's office, but something every patient can have, even in the least developed and most remote regions.

So it's the combination of several things: thermography is mobile; since 2017 there has been mobile thermography of good enough quality; and artificial intelligence and image analysis technologies have advanced a lot overall. That gives us great confidence that something precise can be built, rather than a fantasy or “quackery.”

These are the things we've taken on.

We believe we are very well positioned to be pioneers in the whole field of thermography plus AI.

We hope not only to be the ones who prove it, but also the ones who manage to scale it up enough to be useful to the largest possible number of people.

– As an experienced entrepreneur, where do you see the biggest risks of it not working out?

– Right now the biggest brake is regulatory approval. As I mentioned, thermography is viewed a bit skeptically; in 2019 the American FDA even issued a warning against claims that it can be used on its own to diagnose breast cancer.

We are certain that the technical and product implementation of this technology will happen; the question is rather how long regulatory approval will take,

since quite a few things have to be proven from scratch—something completely new, from a technological and scientific point of view, on a serious scale.

From a commercial point of view, it depends on what diagnostic methods emerge in the meantime in the therapeutic areas we're focused on, and whether any of them might make our application pointless. But so far we're seeing very good acceptance from specialist physicians.

Another factor that might prevent the method from going mainstream is that a change in temperature isn't only a sign of a vascular blockage—it can also indicate inflammation, and we have yet to analyze to what extent the causes can be told apart.

But from an entrepreneurial point of view, the possibilities of using this method to diagnose many different conditions are enormous. One by one, of course, worked out and scientifically proven. We're not standing on one leg that, if potentially cut off by another method, would make us lose everything.

– When the pandemic began, there were forecasts that the medical technology sector would suddenly explode, that many new methods of diagnosis and treatment would start taking hold. But for now nothing like that seems to be visible. Are they still accumulating because there's little data, or will there be no such phenomenon at all?

– We listen to a lot of startups pitch; some of them are a little ahead of us, others behind. And we say to ourselves, as technically literate people and as human beings: “What cool things are being made, what things are coming!” It doesn't matter at all whether they're competitors—in most cases they aren't. They analyze portable ultrasound images, pick up certain biomarkers and detect conditions through them.

In my view, one possible answer really is the delay caused by the need for accumulation. It's tied to what slows us down most seriously as well—the whole process of regulatory approval. Vaccines were the only thing that took quite a shortcut through it, since approving them with relatively little research was considered extremely urgent.

There haven't been any specific, large-scale changes that would help technologies in this field develop faster. But it's a fact that COVID and all its socioeconomic, political and other effects gave the impulse for a wave that, I think, we'll see reach the shore a little later because of these longer regulatory cycles.

In this wave there will be many new successful methods of diagnosis and treatment. They'll be more accessible financially and logistically, and that matters, because even in the most developed countries diagnosis is a big problem and there aren't enough programs for preventive care.

Let's not forget that the effect of treatment varies enormously depending on the stage at diagnosis. Take breast cancer: five-year survival drops from over 95 percent to under 28 percent between detection at stage 1 and stage 4!

– Amid the huge buzz around ChatGPT, we keep talking about how it will leave us jobless and whether it will destroy us. Meanwhile Bill Gates writes that it will fundamentally change, above all, education and healthcare, by allowing much wider access.

– Artificial intelligence is a technology that, given a sufficient volume of data, can draw the right statistical conclusions. This allows every kind of structured information in the healthcare system to be analyzed in some way—to raise a signal, to extract knowledge. Whether we're talking about the whole healthcare system or a subsystem, analyzing different kinds of trends, some of them hidden, or about the level of the individual patient.

If there's an electronic medical record with structured data, it can help the patient be diagnosed much more accurately. Home diagnostics in all sorts of forms—under the watchful eye of a supervising physician, of course. But what is a mission for us is much easier access to healthcare and much greater efficiency of the process.

There are dozens of areas where artificial intelligence can help. Put most simply, it can replace at least the initial need for human intelligence to step in—wherever some kind of pattern or repetition has to be recognized. Healthcare is complex and different in every country, and in some economically developed countries such as the US it is extremely expensive and not socially oriented enough.

Technology can change the way we take care of our health as a civilization.

– I read that you dream of becoming a unicorn—not with a $1 billion valuation, but by saving a billion people. Do you think it's possible?

– We don't rule out the valuation either—if we can help that many people, it will be much bigger too. But we've never thought about how to make as much money as possible. When it comes to healthcare, we find that rather tasteless.

Let me go back to the beginning. At first the idea was for Imagga to help with its technology and expertise; in the first weeks of the COVID lockdown we were all shut in our homes and had nothing else to do.

But gradually a very strong vision took shape of how people all over the world, from every group—economic, geographic, races, genders—will have such a thermal camera at home, and it will help them understand much more easily when they have a health problem.

We really want to help by sparing a billion people suffering. And we connect it with their families too—when one person is ill, everyone around them suffers.

We believe the thermal camera can be “the next thermometer,” only with a far greater positive effect on the patient's health. Unfortunately, all healthcare systems today are reactive—they respond to a problem instead of preventing it. We believe we can change that!

– You follow Bulgarian ventures in information technology closely. Where do you expect the biggest news to come from?

– The sector connected with artificial intelligence will grow, as it will everywhere in the world. A lot of money will certainly vanish, but the big winners—the new Google, Facebook and Apple that will define the next ten years—will be AI companies. I expect this to keep developing in Bulgaria too.

But in my view something else matters more. Today is the best moment to start a startup. I expect big news from everyone who is saying to themselves right now: “I want to start something of my own, to do something meaningful.”

Right now the bigger companies are letting people go, and capable people are coming onto the market, ready to build the next big thing. I watch the ideas that surface, and I truly think that

in a crisis people are at their strongest, and that's where they are best tempered.

I'd like everyone wondering whether to give it a try to hear me. Be brave!

It could be a company that offers services—you learn a lot there too, it's just that the growth can't be as big. That's a business you buy at one value and sell, at best, for two or three times more.

It's a different story, though, if you're developing your own product. At the start of 2020, SMSBump grew from 20,000 to 50,000 users in less than six months, and with a team of just 25 people. That's huge! When you work with professionals devoted to an idea, things work out. A good additional incentive, for sure, is the chance for people to get a share of their own. That makes a big difference at the moment the company reaches and even exceeds its goals.

– You're currently at the helm of NitroPack, a company that helps websites be faster. I tried the plugin myself—my site is built on WordPress, and your add-on definitely made everything faster.

– If we open the Core Vitals Technology Report that Google generates and compare NitroPack with the other technologies on the market, we'll see that our product stands out with a competitive advantage. This is official data collected from Google Chrome users. The difference between our platform and the rest is more than visible. Thanks to it, we cut in half the volume of information that travels across the network, which speeds up page loading.

But that's not all. When we started out, our focus was on loading speed; now we're building on that with the whole experience of visitors to your site. Helping businesses meet the requirements of Core Web Vitals—a set of metrics chosen by Google that show how usable a website is.

– Let's go further back, though. How was the idea born?

– It really is a long story. In 2011 we founded our first company, iSense, which soon became iSenseLabs. We added “labs” because we decided it would be a laboratory where we test different things and see which ones work.

For a long time we built websites with OpenCart, a free, open-source e-commerce platform. We chose it because we judged that it had big, untapped potential.

And also to try to make those sites better and better. That's how we wrote the first version of NitroPack in 2013—

it was the very first plugin that could improve a page's speed score in Google.

Right at that time Google realized that a slower website gets in the way of a good user experience, and decided to encourage site owners to check how fast their sites were and, if needed, to take action.

While we were in OpenCart, we rose to the point of working with companies like Facebook, Amazon Pay and Mastercard. Until 2019, NitroPack faced almost no competition on the platform. Gradually we realized we had outgrown the category we were operating in, and we decided to open our products up to all platforms of the Shopify, Wix and Weebly kind, which were growing faster than the market. In 2017, after a number of quite big projects we managed to deliver in OpenCart, we saw that we were first in sales and outselling everyone from second to sixth place combined!

– And apparently it was time to move on…

– Yes, it was a privilege for us to be in the lead, but… after about 20 seconds you say to yourself: OK, but how do we help more online businesses? How do we survive on this platform if we're limited by its small market?

We were in a market that wasn't growing the way we wanted. So we decided to take two of our best and most-used products—SMSBump and NitroPack. They, too, were positioned mainly in OpenCart and had no room to grow.

I'm very glad these two solutions bring real value to users. One is about marketing, the other more about website speed.

– How did you settle on those two in particular?

– Until then we used a licensing model—you buy a piece of software and use it. Well, we threw that down the drain and decided to build two “software as a service” products. It was almost spontaneous. We went to Google Trends, typed in some keywords, saw which platform was growing how, and that was it. Later it became clear we had made the right decision.

We chose the SaaS model with WordPress, with the idea that our application would integrate with more than one platform. We put six years into research and development, but it was worth it.

We launched NitroPack as a SaaS product in 2019, and in 2020 Google introduced Core Web Vitals, aiming to measure the real experience of website visitors. It's a comprehensive system that collects much more data, and they added specific metrics. We were the first company to embrace this approach, and we shifted our focus. We managed to apply all our knowledge to these requirements.

– That's fairly specialized programming. You're not just looking for programmers with traditional front-end or back-end skills; you need people with deep knowledge. Is all of this developed by Bulgarians?

– Only Bulgarians—the colleagues who have been at the core of the product from the very beginning. Right now we're 53 people, most of them based in Bulgaria, and we recently opened an office in the U.S. In WordPress we started from zero, and today we have nearly 200,000 customers.

The goal is to reach 1,000,000 active websites over the next three years.

– Speed is definitely very important for every website today; I've gone into the subject myself. Still, what makes your project so different? And what are the next steps?

– What sets us apart from the other solutions on the market is the way we measure loading speed—namely, through the eyes of the visitor.

We believe a website is fast only when its visitors experience that speed. We focus on the data Google Chrome shares from real visitors. That's how we manage to find an effective fix for slow pages and help online brands increase their sales.

A defining trait of NitroPack is innovation. The technology we use to optimize fonts and images achieves drastically better results than all the others.

Not long ago we were invited to Google's annual Google I/O conference—something amazing!—and it definitely showed us we're moving in the right direction. We met with companies like Disney, Bank of America and Cloudflare. The conference had 1,500 participants, and partners like us were less than 10 percent. We were the only Bulgarians and the only product from our sector. A really cool feeling that gave me extra courage that we're on the right track.

Core Web Vitals are an important metric, even with the advance of artificial intelligence. There's a joke: “If you want to hide a dead body, the right place is the second page of Google.” Everyone opens the results on the first page, and that's directly tied to a site's speed and the other ranking factors.

Right now we're doing a series of webinars with Google on these topics. How these metrics relate to real business measures. How to improve them and how that would affect conversions, the time a user spends on the site, the number of pages they visit before placing an order.

– Having grown and sold your first venture so successfully, isn't it tempting to do the same with NitroPack?

– We've already had several offers, but we turned them down. Because we believe we can build a much larger business. The problem we're solving is quite big, and big problems have complex solutions.

What we learned from the Shopify ecosystem is that

people prefer pushing buttons to writing code.

That's what we want to do with NitroPack 2.0—a very simple platform for people who aren't programmers.

Yes, it's tempting. But we don't look at every venture from the angle of what to do in order to sell it.

– You started with 140 ideas and picked two. Is that the hardest stage—choosing the venture that will turn out to be successful? How do you recognize it?

– When we were choosing, we were guided by which of the ideas we thought would have the biggest impact, so that we could become a cool, sustainable company able to work with the best talent in Bulgaria. We looked for the ideas with the greatest potential to create a big product, and the ones we were personally most passionate about. After a lot of conversations we concluded it was precisely these two.

Now, with so much experience, working in an organization of 1,000 people, we've certainly seen the other side, where very thorough analyses, financial models and research are done. Decisions aren't as straightforward and take a good deal longer. Our model was much simpler. Looking back, it worked—but that doesn't mean that when you have to make a very important decision and have the chance to work with all those smart people who specialize in research and financial modeling, it isn't better. On the contrary, we've seen it work brilliantly, but

when it comes to startups, I think less is more. Sometimes you just need one or two metrics plus your gut.

– What do you think is the path for the sector to create more products, to have more startups? Right now it's dominated by service companies, whereas this way we create a product that wins abroad.

– In my view, the path is for

people to be more open to risk and to the unknown on a personal level. To believe in themselves,

that they can make something with high added value. Not just to cut down trees in the forest and sell them as timber, but to make furniture out of them—that's where the high added value is.

We have more and more product companies that are succeeding; it's enough to mention Telerik, Payhawk, SiteGround, GtmHub. When you see a company that started in Bulgaria reach a valuation of a billion, you say to yourself: “OK, someone has done it, so I can too.”

I think all the knowledge people gain in service companies can very easily be carried over into building products.

Israel started out the same way, as an environment with lots of services, but over time it reoriented itself completely toward a product economy. At some point programmers become so expensive that being a service company simply doesn't add up. I'm very happy to see examples of companies that are raising the level of the whole market here.

For me, the path is more publicity, more conversations and more visibility for the companies

that create a product, whether or not it's backed by investor interest. More sharing of failure stories and more investment. I'm very glad that in recent years there have been many funds in Bulgaria investing in products, and I think it's a matter of time before we shift from a service economy to a product one.

Some send satellites into space, like EnduroSat; others are like Dronamics; but most don't involve hardware, only software. It's not that hard to create a product. All great artists, at the start of their careers, began by copying, by drawing inspiration, by borrowing. It's not a wrong way to start with the idea: “I see this product, I use it every day, but there's something I don't like about it. I think I can sell it better, make it prettier, add an important feature, build a much better relationship with customers, or point it at a different segment of the market.”

You can always find some niche to specialize in—it's not even that hard!

– You mention storytelling. I also think it's very important, and yet it still isn't happening. Most people you meet on the street have never heard of Telerik or Payhawk. Why is it so hard for our sector to talk about itself?

– I'm glad there are media like yours, The Recursive, Trending Topics—specialized media we didn't have five years ago! I see that mainstream media, too, are gradually starting to bring these topics to the fore.

It's important for people to hear that it's possible to do something so colossal. Young people have access to a sea of information; the question is for it to be shared in the channels they care about.

These stories are starting to reach classrooms, to reach someone scrolling through Instagram while wondering whether to move back to Bulgaria. Everything comes through layering. And through finding the right formats.

We've reached the point where we don't read. We're learning to optimize for time, because sooner or later we realize it's the most precious thing. For me, we simply need to present the stories in different formats, in the right way. If we succeed, I think the media will be the first to catch the trend and put it on a pedestal.

That, I think, should be the leitmotif—the people who don't stop.

The moment you stop, life stops too. When you stop watering beautiful flowers, they die. You have to do it every day, little by little, for them to grow. That's how our ecosystem will blossom, too.

– What does May 24 mean to you? Do you celebrate it in any special way?

– It has always been hard for me to pin down what I feel on that day, because that is when people usually say pompous things about the Bulgarian language and utter grand words. It receives the kind of attention it lacks for the other 364 days of the year. The moment May 24 arrives, everyone suddenly remembers their beautiful native tongue.

That’s why I see a certain hypocrisy in those majestic speeches.

I rarely post anything on the Kak se pishe? Facebook page on May 24 itself, because I think it would sound clichéd. For me, love of a language is expressed in an honest attitude toward it. And in seeing it and accepting it as it is right now.

Let’s not forget that, after all, the main function of any language is communication; through language we talk to each other. Its secondary role and function is to be a mark of national belonging. My words will probably sound scandalous precisely in the context of May 24, but as I said, this is what love of one’s native language means to me—to look at it honestly and say frankly what you think of it.

– And what do you frankly think of it?

– It is the language in which I can best express my thoughts and feelings. I suppose every person has a language in which they feel at home, and if I had to make some kind of appeal on May 24, it would be:

Let’s use the Bulgarian language in a way that keeps us feeling cozy at home!

– Still, historically it is telling that such a day exists at all; I, at least, haven’t heard of an equivalent in other cultures. It’s no accident that there is a constant debate about whether it should become a national holiday…

– I see sense in that. But on the other hand, I’m afraid that a holiday that truly unites us all, such a bright date, would once again be exploited, soiled and trampled in the mud. Maybe that’s why I wouldn’t want it to become a national holiday.

We are specialists in desecrating what is sacred.

– Last time we talked about spelling and about the story of Kak se pishe? This time I’d like to talk about words. Do you have favorite words that are disappearing, that aren’t used so often anymore?

– Yes, recently I used the word „боравя“ (boravya, “to handle, to wield”), and I asked myself: how many young people today even know what it means? They probably don’t use it; it may already be slightly archaic, and most would say “make use of something.” But how many young people would know what it means if they heard it out of context?

– It definitely carries nuances, too. I wouldn’t say it’s a full synonym of “make use of.”

– I don’t think absolute synonyms exist—words always have their own nuances. But in many cases one word can be successfully replaced by another in a given context.

Sometimes I think about certain words we have started using in a distinctly English manner. “Literally,” for example. That word is used so often in Bulgarian, and not in its actual meaning. You can’t say “literally” and then use a word figuratively. In informal English, “literally” is used for emphasis, but in Bulgarian, at least in the standard language, we still shouldn’t use it that way.

Yesterday my husband was watching a football match on television. I was listening with half an ear, but I noticed that the commentator used the word “literally” in every third sentence. At one point I felt sick and said that if I heard “literally” one more time, I’d go to the other room. And my husband asked, “Will you literally go?”

Clearly it was a filler word in the commentator’s speech. Those are the words we have to watch out for, especially in speech. In writing, when we reread the text, we will probably notice that a certain word appears too often, but in speech our self-control has to be greater.

There is something else, too: English is much more tolerant of repetition, especially of pronouns—that is a grammatical necessity and there is no way around it. Whereas

Bulgarian is not so tolerant, and you have to be careful, especially with filler words.

– Why do we seem less inclined to coin new words today? My attention was recently drawn to this topic by an interview with the translator Rada Gankova, which provoked quite a few comments.

– I have thought about why, when some new concept enters the language and we need to name it, we use the English word instead of trying to forge a Bulgarian one. I can think of two reasons, though there are surely more. One is that

in our time new concepts flood in at a terrifying speed, and we don’t have time to invent so many words.

I would say new concepts appear every day. It takes time to think, to come up with Bulgarian words and to establish them gradually. It can’t happen in a day—launching them into the public sphere and having them accepted immediately.

Besides, we Bulgarians have always had a certain affinity for what is foreign and—I hope this doesn’t sound exaggerated—even a reverence for it. Perhaps it’s a matter of national psychology; perhaps it is also connected to the fact that for so many centuries we had no state of our own. But

we look at what is foreign as something better, something that will show us in a better light if we adopt it.

Let’s remember how, as far back as Krivorazbranata tsivilizatsia (Misunderstood Civilization), the 1871 comedy by Dobri Voynikov, Monsieur Margaridi spoke in “Frenchified” words while Anka and Madame Zlata imitated him. This is nothing new. Perhaps we believe that foreign words will practically elevate our speech, will make us look smarter, better informed, up to date.

There are languages—among the Slavic ones, Polish is one—that are more flexible, more open, and for them this capacity for self-renewal through creating new words is inherent. To Bulgarian, word-making seems somehow alien, especially today.

– In technology, at least, there is a third factor: communication is constantly conducted in English, and it is very hard to switch contexts between languages. For instance, the term стринг (string), meaning a text-type variable, has an exact Bulgarian translation—низ (niz). I have yet to meet a programmer who uses that word, even though it is logical and pleasant-sounding.

– Yes, that is also a very important factor. If, for example, a Bulgarian uses English most of the time at work, he will be inclined to use more English words when speaking his native language, especially on professional topics. It will simply be easier, and he won’t have to wonder, “Now how was that in Bulgarian?”

Our sense of language is built to make things easy for itself. As a rule, if you have a hard way and an easy way to do a job, you’ll choose the easy one. It’s the same with language.

– Proof of your second explanation, I think, is the fact that many Bulgarians living abroad speak with fewer loanwords and have a richer vocabulary, because they miss the language. They have a kind of reverence for Bulgarian.

– I think their self-control is much greater, too. I suppose that, living abroad, they realize how strong the influence of the foreign language is, and they make a deliberate effort to preserve their native one. Some time ago an acquaintance of mine who works in the European institutions told me that there is also the fear of falling behind the trends in contemporary Bulgarian. Because, being abroad, they don’t have such direct contact with the language.

– I really like your initiative to choose a word of the year. The whole world does it, and no one here had thought of it. What made you start?

– Precisely the lack of such a ranking in Bulgaria. For many years I wondered why we don’t have a “word of the year,” why such rankings exist for English, German and Spanish, while here there is no institution to take it on. Abroad it is usually done by specialists, by linguists at prestigious institutions. It was exactly that gap that made us—Doroteya Nikolova and me—get it started.

The same thing happened, by the way, with Kak se pishe?; that’s how the site began, too. Only there the absence was felt far more acutely. Because we can live without Words of the Year, but without a reliable site where you can check how a word is spelled or where a comma should go, it is harder to cope with your own writing.

I am very glad the media took an interest in Words of the Year. When an initiative like this appears, it stirs public curiosity. In my view, it is not only natural but necessary:

for society to see itself reflected in the words it has spoken most often during the year, because they say a great deal about what has happened,

and about how people make sense of it, what they have given more importance to.

– They are also a kind of signpost for the media—showing what really matters to people.

– This year we already had a partner in the media monitoring and analytics system Sensika. The company’s specialists processed an enormous body of texts published in 2022—more than 11 million—and presented us with a ranking of the words in the media. There was a large overlap with the people’s ranking, but differences too, of course.

– Which words surprised you by making it into that ranking?

– I wouldn’t say I was surprised; the words that rose to the surface were the ones Doroteya and I expected from people—“war,” “inflation,” “elections,” “Ukraine”. Among the words most used in the media, for example, was “price” instead of “inflation,” meaning the topic of inflation was apparently presented through rising prices. Of course, the word’s high frequency in the media was also due to the fact that last year the price of natural gas and fuel was crucial for society and was accordingly widely discussed.

In fact, one word in the media ranking did surprise us—“child.” It made us wonder to what extent children truly represent a value, how important they are in our society, and how much the topic is abused. Because that, too, can happen in the media, as a way to attract attention. Articles are pushed out about problems involving children, and in this way they play on people’s sensitivities.

– And which words did you miss? Ones you hoped would appear in the ranking, but didn’t…

– I very much missed the positive words, although there were some after all—“help” and “support” turned out to be among the top fifteen in the media ranking, and that, of course, gave us hope. We have to keep in mind the broad meaning of words, though, because last year’s publications were often about military aid and support with weapons.

“Volunteers” was the positive word in the people’s ranking. That made us happy.

– But that, too, is proof that good things in our country don’t happen naturally—from Kak se pishe? to treatment for sick children, to planting trees and providing care for the elderly. Instead of institutions doing their job, volunteering leads the way…

– On the one hand, it’s good that people get involved, that they do something personally, giving their time, contributing even modest sums. But on the other, volunteers stand out, and we see how important they are precisely when someone else is absent, when someone else hasn’t done their job properly.

– Since you study language in the context of the media, I find the vocabulary they use extremely poor. They fall into templates, chase knee-jerk reactions, and consider that an advantage.

– Like any contemporary person, I also get my news about current events from the media. To be honest, what strikes me is not so much the writers’ comparatively modest vocabulary. What worries me more is the growing number of articles that are machine-translated, after which minimal effort is put into bringing those texts in line with standard Bulgarian.

And this isn’t only about foreign words. The lexical system is by nature very dynamic, and changes in it are the most visible. We worry a lot that more and more foreign words are entering our vocabulary and that we are using them more and more actively, but that is a natural process and not so threatening. That isn’t what erodes the foundations of a language.

The foundations of a language are eroded when morphology and syntax are affected.

Lately I see quite a few English syntactic patterns entering Bulgarian precisely by way of machine translation.

On the other hand, I think it is possible for a language to undergo enormous changes in its grammar—that is, in its morphology and syntax—and still keep its essence. Bulgarian is an eloquent example of exactly that. In the distant past it was synthetic, and now it is analytic. Put most simply, this has to do with the presence or absence of cases. Synthetic languages have cases, analytic ones don’t. In them, the relations between words in a sentence are expressed in other ways—through word order, through prepositions.

Bulgarian went through exactly that kind of cataclysm. It lost its case system, yet it went on being Bulgarian.

So it is possible for radical changes to occur in the grammatical system without the language losing its identity. I don’t see anything alarming for the moment, but I will simply note that while I used to say the grammar of the language was intact, now I am rather less certain.

– What’s interesting is that the great progress not only in machine translation but in artificial intelligence as a whole became possible precisely through language. Searching for patterns in it brought machine learning its breakthrough. Did you expect something like this?

– It was to be expected that machine translation would become this good and that artificial intelligence would achieve such results. What worries me most is the speed at which all this is happening. Because if it were slower and more gradual, we could adapt, we could limit the damage, which I think is inevitable. But it is happening faster than we can adapt so as to use both artificial intelligence and machine translation wisely.

– Yet when it comes to the written word, we are rather more conservative. For a long time now it has been possible to check our texts for basic errors automatically, but that doesn’t happen even in the media. Isn’t that a sign that new technologies aren’t adopted so quickly when words are concerned?

– I see that these technologies can be used skillfully. In the European institutions, for example, machine translation is used, but there it is in the hands of conscientious specialists who check both the original and the resulting text very carefully. It is inherently easy for something to slip into such a translation that even the translator may later miss. Say, some contextual meaning isn’t caught by the machine translator, and the person doesn’t notice the mistake. Or an idiom might be translated literally.

There are many dangers, many hidden reefs.

However qualified the translator, there are always risks in using machine translation, whereas with unmediated translation it is harder to make such a mistake.

– As always with technologies like these, it comes down to common sense.

– Yes, common sense is exactly what both machine translation and artificial intelligence lack. But

what worries me far more than the lack of common sense is the lack of sensitivity.

Artificial intelligence lacks humanity. It lacks the ability to put itself in someone else’s place—empathy. And when it falls into the hands of malicious people, they can wreak havoc, alas.

– And we ourselves increasingly lack that empathy in online communication, the ability to put ourselves in another’s place.

– Yes, because we meet face to face less and less often, which is when we truly

can exchange not only words but also gestures, smiles,

see the expression of the person opposite and tell from it whether they approve of what we have said, whether they agree with our position. We can adjust our behavior when we see how the other person reacts, adjust what we had intended to say.

I miss such face-to-face meetings very much, and lately, whenever I can, I meet in person with people I could otherwise just talk to on the phone or write to online.

As much as technologies make things easier for us, as much as they help us and save us time, they rob us just as much. They deprive us of that purely human contact, of the chance to feel directly the other person’s gaze, reaction, smile.

Yes, we can add a little smiley emoticon, but it’s standard.

Whereas a human smile has nuances. Yes, you might object that there are entire collections of emoticons, but even so they cannot convey the nuances of human feeling.

– I wouldn’t object at all. Besides, online, words are more and more often turning into weapons we throw at each other and fight with.

– Yes, that’s true. The algorithms of social networks, which amplify certain voices, are troubling as well. We have seen their consequences—Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. There is no doubt that these became possible to a large extent through targeted campaigns in which certain voters were bombarded and their decisions were influenced in an unnatural way.

Words are the weapon, and aided by social media algorithms, they can do great damage.

– Logically, these problems will become more frequent and more serious, since manipulation techniques keep improving.

– What troubles me is the absence of any countermeasures. I wish we could find some way to resist this. We can’t just stand by with our arms folded. But

I don’t know how artificial intelligence, in which I see a potentially great evil, can be reined in right now.

No reasonable person can be against the development of technology—but for the benefit of people, for their well-being.

– That is exactly why I created this site, and for two and a half years now I have kept looking for different perspectives on these big topics. Honestly, I didn’t imagine either that things I was writing as science fiction would be happening just two years later.

– It’s the speed that is alarming, and with it a person’s inability to adapt so quickly. Yes, we are adaptable, but not that quickly adaptable.

– I think the media are to blame as well, because they don’t cover these topics competently; they chase events and rely only on superficial or translated texts.

– We have long been in a vicious circle. Most media chase the topic of the day precisely because people expect to hear and read about the topic of the day. Clearly, negative news draws human attention like a magnet, while positive news—not so much.

– Why is it getting harder and harder for us to talk to each other? To find common ground, for words to bring us together? Different generations, different tastes, different worldviews…

– As for generations in particular, interests are very different. Topics are very different. Many older people aren’t up to speed with new technologies, and I think that keeps them from getting information from a variety of sources.

But we live in very complex relationships, and an enormous number of factors affect everything. It’s hard even to explain things with two or three reasons.

– While in online communication we try to be brief and extreme. That way both arguments and nuances get lost.

– They get lost, and we can’t take in the complexity of the picture. Yes, time always presses on us, and when the picture in a given field is very complex, you have to spend a tremendous amount of effort and explain endlessly to someone who isn’t a specialist. You have to burden them with details, and they have neither the time nor the chance to hear you out. They themselves need a simpler explanation so that they can at least get a general idea of the problem and perhaps of its solution.

This is where the role of experts becomes important. When I need to understand what the problem is in a given field, I turn to the opinion of a specialist I trust, because I have no other choice.

When we can’t inform ourselves and form an objective opinion on our own, we trust a person whose impartiality and objectivity we have come to be sure of.

– And if we come back to the media and the words in them, it’s a pity that the journalist’s expertise—as someone competent to assess and present information—is gone. It no longer matters at all, now that anyone can be a journalist, now that we journalists ourselves don’t see ourselves as anything different.

– It seems that many people now avoid the journalistic profession. Quite a few people of quality avoid working in this field, which demands truly great resources, intellectual capacity and, not least, conscientiousness. I understand them.

– So do I… unfortunately. Thank you for this conversation!

– If you had to start out as an entrepreneur today, where would you head?

– Over the years I've thought a lot about what I would do if I had the choice. In entrepreneurship you usually start with some idea, then you modify it, conditions change and you adapt to the opportunities. But, broadly speaking, I would make a product—digital or physical. What matters is that you create something, whether it's software or a table.

– These days, though, it's somehow fashionable to link entrepreneurship with the digital world.

– That's true, and I don't think it's okay at all. Nor is the widespread idea that the IT startup ecosystem is the only one there is. In reality, an ecosystem can't function on its own, and this sector wouldn't exist without the others. So when I think about what to develop and how we should develop the Bulgarian ecosystem, I try to keep it balanced. Lately there's been a lot of talk about entrepreneurship and how startups happen, but a banitsa shop—banitsa being the cheese pastry Bulgarians eat for breakfast—is a startup too, and so is a confectionery workshop.

I talk to an awful lot of people who run traditional businesses, and I think it's a problem that in their world there isn't enough talk about how to start and how to grow. I often joke that at some point

we'll have lots of IT, lots of computers, and no salad on our tables,

because there will be no one to grow the tomatoes and serve them to us.

The focus of our group is balance—both physical, traditional business and digital.

– And yet it seems the digital world isn't “told” enough. I, for one, only learned what a startup is after I moved into IT.

– That's when I learned it too. Before that I was building companies and had no idea they were startups.

Because the IT industry is knowledge-based, because it develops very fast and because it's making enormous amounts of money globally right now, it can accumulate knowledge and use every modern means of communication.

It used to be like that with the banks, and before them with the industrialists. There is always one leading industry that makes the most money and talks about good practices. What I have always tried to do is

“steal” knowledge from all kinds of industries and apply what I've learned in all kinds of industries.

I think it would be useful for the startup ecosystem in Bulgaria to take good practices, in this case from the IT industry, and apply them in traditional business. They always have to be adapted, but my experience shows that it's possible and can be very successful.

Why isn't this talked about more?

In Bulgaria, we hardly talk about important topics anyway, and this one is no exception.

– Why is that? I have the feeling that the successes, and IT news in general, don't reach society. We argue and fight over whether to tear down a monument, not over the fact that we already have a company valued at a billion dollars.

– Things in technology happen faster than people can adapt, and adapting takes time. People have fears; this is something new. Besides, in Bulgaria there is still a mass culture of rejecting rich people.

I think a large part of society doesn't know how to react to news like this, that we have a billion-dollar company—whether it's good, whether it's bad, whether they're crooks who stole something, what exactly they do, the whole lack of understanding of what it means for a startup to become a unicorn. Even within the ecosystem, people don't understand that phenomena like this send ripple effects through the entire ecosystem.

Another explanation can be found in Bulgarian history: we had a brutal interruption of more than 40 years, under communism, of any business and entrepreneurial practice in Bulgaria. It's perfectly normal that, starting over, people need time to see it as something positive. It's a question of literacy, of time, of the right communication.

And for me it's very important that we talk to each other. I've been a newcomer to this industry for seven or eight years. Another thing that gets in the way is that speaking some complicated language, full of foreign words and abbreviations, is seen as very sexy and important, and that doesn't help make things understandable.

And sometimes people are simply afraid to ask. In the beginning I was the dumbest person in the room; I admitted it and I asked. I had no problem accepting that I didn't know. When you approach things that way, people are willing to share.

– I've read that Musk approaches things that way too—when he got into the rocket business, for example, he went in saying he knew nothing, and then quickly dug deep.

– I think the most important quality isn't knowing everything; that's impossible. The question is how fast you learn and how deep you go.

Musk is a very good example: he enters several industries he knows nothing about and then becomes the one who knows them best. The funniest thing is that it's not complicated, the approach is clear: you read, you ask, you learn, learn, learn… That's part of the problem—many people don't learn. I see doing business as part of a learning process, and I enjoy doing new things so that I can learn.

– You said we need to talk to each other more and more, but lately it seems ever harder for us to do so—between classes, between sectors, on a purely human level on Facebook. Why is that?

– Solely and only because we're afraid.

– What are we so afraid of?

– So many things. We humans are very productive at inventing things to be afraid of. We're afraid of making fools of ourselves. We're afraid someone will think we're dumber than we think we are. We're afraid of being insulted, of being hurt.

I think people drift away from being well because they run out of fear. Fears have to be challenged and healed.

– A survey came out recently showing that most young people are convinced the only way to succeed in Bulgaria is to have rich parents. How did we get here? Can we change this way of thinking?

– Yes, but it will take time. Young people today are the generation of the transition, the so-called transition from communism after 1989—I don't know where we're transitioning to, but we've been straddling it for quite a while, it's gotten a bit long.

– Almost like with Moses…

– Whether it'll take 40 years… we're on our way, 33 have already passed. I think this phenomenon is extremely negative for our whole society, and it's due to the fact that

many young people don't read and don't think critically.

A long time ago I did my own statistics: I took the list of the world's billionaires and analyzed how many of them inherited their wealth, how many had a university degree, what the patterns were. The list has grown a lot since then, but the trends hold. Self-made people are an overwhelming majority, and education is not a requirement.

We often look for excuses. Because it's easier that way, you tell yourself: “My parents aren't rich, so I won't be either. I'll wait for my next reincarnation.” That's not how it is!

Success, in whatever dimension, comes from persistence and hard work.

In Bulgaria there are the same, if not more, opportunities to build a successful business as anywhere else in the world. The question is whether you're enterprising.

There is no nation where everyone is in business, and that isn't the goal. But examples are very important, and in Bulgaria we have them both before 1944, when the communists came to power, and now.

– What are your favorite examples—from both periods?

– Before 1944, one of them is Burov, the interwar banker and politician. Also the industrialist Pencho Semov from Gabrovo, who built one of the largest textile factories of his time and is also known for his charity work.

For today's entrepreneurs I have many examples, from both the physical and the digital world. Without question the digital champions are my friends from Telerik, the Bulgarian software company, who are emblematic of our reality. Not only did they make the first big deal of their time, they created the ecosystem.

With Endeavor Global we did a study of the Bulgarian ecosystem using their methodology. Telerik's contribution shows up there visually, in pure mathematics. Its alumni have created more than 300 startups, and on top of that they fund companies.

For me, that's an example of how things should be done. You build a perfect company with a great culture. You leave it, but then you reinvest everything in Bulgaria, you develop the next generation of entrepreneurs and you teach people. And separately you set up a fund that develops the ecosystem.

Another favorite example of mine is Maksim Mitkov of Maxcom, the largest bicycle manufacturer in Bulgaria and the second largest in Europe. A man the media doesn't talk about, likable, calm. He has a turnover of 100 million euros, a manufacturing company, several thousand employees.

Ventures like these, over time and as they multiply, will change the environment in Bulgaria.

– You say most billionaires are unhappy people. Why?

– I know a few billionaires, but also quite a few millionaires, who are no exception. Because

they turn money, competition and the acquisition of material things into the goal and the only meaning of their lives.

When someone does that, whether it's for millions or for thousands, they become a slave to money. Money must not be your master. It has to be your servant—you use it to make good things happen.

It's a tool. Everything we do with it should be a means to something more meaningful, something bigger. When you upset the balance and lose yourself in the pursuit of money, it's hard to be happy.

– So what matters for being happy?

– That's the trillion-dollar question. Recently we had an event with Maria Laleva, and I deliberately provoked her because I knew what she'd say: “There's no such thing as happiness. It's all a path.” I'd rather say that

happiness is a state, but not a goal.

It's a choice, and a conscious one. You can't reach it unless you've developed a certain level of self-awareness, of consciousness, of perception of the world. Unless you have a sense of gratitude, of having enough.

We humans try to understand complicated things when in fact we don't understand the simple ones. When we value precisely those, we can be happy.

Happiness is seen as a grinning reality, slightly infantile—being in a good mood while others can't understand why. That's not it. It's when you're in harmony with yourself, no matter what's happening.

It's all in our heads, in how we perceive things.

– An essential component of happiness is health, and you say this topic is a great cause of yours. The problem is huge: Bulgarians are completely uninterested in their health, we don't take care of ourselves, we don't go for checkups. How did it come to this? Can we reverse the trend?

– Health is the foundation. I keep repeating this ugly statistic:

in Bulgaria, 120,000 people die every year. And that's without a war! It happens quietly, and nobody does anything.

I think it's very hard to be happy if you're not healthy—it's the foundation. And the necessary condition for being healthy is to educate yourself on the subject, to be aware and to take action.

We're used to the state taking care of everything; we expect every temporary leader to solve our problems—from grandmothers' pensions to every illness of every person.

In fact, responsibility for health is personal. If you love your children and your loved ones, if you want to be with them and give to each other, won't you make some effort to have more time on this Earth?

People don't have this perspective; they see their lives as the decision of some government or as an inevitable fate.

Fate exists, maybe it's not very avoidable, but the stupid things you do matter enormously. We're world champions in smoking and in alcohol consumption per capita. If you look at all these statistics, it's a living miracle that only 120,000 people die; apparently we're quite resilient.

I strongly believe in prevention, which comes through education and through talking.

Since we talked about happiness: in various rankings in recent years we've been number one or two in the world as the unhappiest nation. That's something I very much want us to change. Because it's a question of self-perception; for me, the first thing is to work on people's mindset, so that they start taking care of their health, which then becomes a perpetuum mobile and sets everything else in motion.

– Everything we've talked about so far goes through literacy, education and the media. I think we need a new kind of media, suited to our times, and we still don't have it. Do you think a working model will appear soon?

– The media are a classic example of a transition between a traditional and an old business model. I think new solutions are appearing—you're a medium yourself, podcasts are a very serious medium for the new generation, Facebook is a medium, although not the best example. Abroad there are successful examples of media with their own focus that rely on people willing to pay for quality, genuine information.

In Bulgaria, what I believe has to happen, and we have a historical tradition in this direction, is an organization in the spirit of the buditeli, the enlighteners of the Bulgarian National Revival, with a non-material goal.

Nothing is free, but content is what really matters.

Sooner or later, the media that bet on the truth will succeed.

– To finish, let's go back to the world of technology. What do you think of all the recent buzz around artificial intelligence, around the notorious ChatGPT?

– The new thing right now is a working interface: a technology that isn't new, but that makes what already exists usable and visible to the general public. I think this is a long-awaited big change. It's always like that with new technologies—you know something will come of it, you know that's the direction, but exactly how it will happen, nobody knows.

– Do you think we can seize this chance and, through the INSAIT institute, become a regional leader, as Prof. Martin Vechev aims for?

– There are opportunities for our ecosystem, but these things really don't happen by chance. That's what I like about the word “ecosystem”—you don't get an apple all at once, like with 3D printing. First you have to find the right soil, sow, water, graft, tend the saplings until you get to the apple. The road is long, but I think this is the right direction. IT business is a very broad concept, but artificial intelligence sits very high up. You can't develop it without people with very serious scientific knowledge.

It's big news that we have a Bulgarian doing the work of a buditel, who decided to do the hard thing: to bring the knowledge he gained abroad back to Bulgaria. In fact,

all the good things 100 years ago happened exactly this way

—people went to Vienna, to Paris, to London, to the centers of knowledge and practice of the day, then came back and applied what they had learned here.

INSAIT is one of the very few examples where everyone backed the idea—the government, big foreign companies and the Bulgarian ecosystem.

What happens every day shows more and more that

this isn't a dream, it's a plan, and it's working despite everything.

Fortunately, Martin is Bulgarian: he doesn't give up easily, and the unpleasant things around him don't impress him or put him off.

Will artificial intelligence change the world and Bulgaria? Certainly; it's a technology of very great power. I hope that we humans manage to use it and master it to our advantage, rather than let it slip from our hands and wipe us out. The future will tell…

– Lately, because of ChatGPT and GPT-4, all eyes have turned to artificial intelligence. What made these models so significant?

– ChatGPT is the first mass-market artificial intelligence model: in 5 days it passed 1 million users, in 2 months it passed 100 million, and today it is used by more than 1 billion people around the world. Growth like that has never been seen before. From a technical point of view, ChatGPT is not a fundamental breakthrough: it is a GPT-3 model fine-tuned to give the answers people prefer.

– Do they stand a chance of changing the business world?

– Yes, it's inevitable. What isn't obvious is that these models won't actually change the industries around us directly.

These models are not accurate or reliable enough in practically any business field.

For example, we shouldn't use ChatGPT for financial advice or to diagnose diseases. The latest research has shown that in 75 percent of applications ChatGPT falls behind “specialized” models trained to solve problems in medicine, finance and other industries. That's exactly why we call the GPT-X models “foundation” models—they provide a good base, but they need to be fine-tuned on high-quality data and examples before they can be used in industry.

– Could today's huge interest play a nasty trick on the field? After peaks like this, every technology goes through a slump, a winter. Do you think something similar could happen here?

– No. Artificial intelligence has been developing since 1950 and has already been through two winters—in the '80s and the '90s. Today the technology is moving en masse into every industry and every home.

The world will look quite different in the coming years; there's no going back.

What's new about artificial intelligence is the speed at which the technology is developing, which I think will reveal a number of unknowns. And it will surprise even the experts.

– 1,100 scientists and entrepreneurs, among them Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk, tried to halt the creation of new artificial intelligence models for 6 months. Is that necessary?

– No. It's impossible to stop the development of this technology, and a move like that would only lead to less transparency and models built behind closed doors, which would open up far more serious risks for us. What we can do is accelerate progress on the security and reliability of these models. That is precisely the problem that I and the people at LatticeFlow, ETH and INSAIT have been working hard on for more than 7 years.

– How did LatticeFlow manage to advance so quickly? And why did you decide to keep growing in Sofia?

– The company's success comes down to the uniqueness of our technology, which offers practically limitless business potential in this fast-growing field, and to the proven interest of tech giants like Siemens and government organizations like the U.S. Army. We launched the company in 2021 with initial funding of $2.8 million, and at the end of 2022 we added another $12 million to speed up development and grow the team in Sofia.

Building high-tech products like LatticeFlow requires not only business and product teams but also close collaboration with world-class research teams. INSAIT made it possible for companies like LatticeFlow to grow in Sofia. We have this kind of collaboration with ETH Zurich, where we developed the original technology, and now we're going to apply the same model in Sofia.

It's used in every high-tech hub in the world. It needs to be shown that it works in Bulgaria. It's the

only way our IT industry can jump to the next level,

where products are not only built but also invented, where there are strong people who can attract the big tech giants like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

To be on the artificial intelligence map, it isn't enough to understand how this technology works; you have to work on its next generation and publish research papers at the world's top venues in the field, like ICML and NeurIPS.

– How was the idea for a startup like this born?

– It all began with the creation of the first method for verifying the safety and reliability of deep neural networks. Prof. Vechev pointed me to a new result from researchers at Stanford and Oxford who had developed a method for validating neural networks. Interesting as the method was, it became clear that it only worked on impractically small AI models.

We quickly reached an “aha moment” when we realized how we could scale the concept dramatically and validate the huge artificial intelligence models—the ones industry actually wants to use. We discussed the idea and started work that same day, bringing PhD students from Prof. Vechev's group into the project.

In a few days we built a prototype, and then the first results came. We presented the paper at IEEE Oakland Security & Privacy, the most prestigious security conference in the world, and another 40 to 50 world-class research results followed. That turned ETH Zurich into a major center for secure and reliable artificial intelligence, which sparked strong interest from industry and set our business contacts in the field in motion. It was important to act fast, because it was obvious this was an important topic that people were working on intensely.

You're competing with hundreds of thousands of scientists all over the world. The race is brutal.

– Definitely! ChatGPT, facial recognition, image generation—the wonders in this field keep multiplying…

– The applications keep multiplying, and companies are ever more actively developing models to solve real problems. This accelerated even further with the arrival of generative models for text and images. The fundamental problems around creating reliable and secure artificial intelligence for industry remain—these models must not only work well in the lab but also perform reliably when solving real problems in medicine, finance and manufacturing.

Even though we know how to train models that achieve good accuracy on test data,

things aren't so rosy once we apply them to new, real-life examples.

Creating new models that work reliably requires properly selected and labeled training data. Models have to be retrained and corrected if they don't perform well in certain situations. New phenomena not encountered during training have to be spotted, along with a host of other complex problems.

– For example?

– Here's a problem from practice: a model that detects skin cancer. In most of the images where the patient has cancer, there are marks from a surgical pen, made to measure the size of the mole and track its growth. This misleading correlation between the presence of surgical markings and skin cancer fools the model! Instead of learning to recognize the disease, it learns that surgical markings are a sign that a mole is cancerous.

– What solutions does LatticeFlow offer on this front?

– Our platform automatically finds these gaps in the AI's knowledge and lets you fix them before they lead to problems. It's important to note that deviations like these simply can't be found without automation, because you're dealing with enormous datasets and complex mathematical models. That's exactly why we automate the process.

Our first product automatically “diagnoses” the data to detect problems with its quality. It makes it quick, efficient and easy to find and fix problems related to data annotations, missing data from certain situations, removing misleading correlations and more.

Our second product automatically finds the situations in which a model doesn't work well. For example, even though a skin cancer detection model achieves more than 90 percent accuracy on average, on part of the data that can drop sharply—below 30 percent, say.

Our product finds the models' blind spots—the places where they are most at risk of getting it wrong.

– And then all this is corrected by hand, is that right?

– The specialist developing the model chooses which correction to apply, but the correction itself runs automatically across the entire dataset. That matters, because fixing such problems by hand is hard and expensive. For example, if the data is systematically mislabeled, it's impractical for the specialist to correct it example by example; that would take months. Our product automatically shows which data is mislabeled and applies the necessary correction. So instead of months and hundreds of thousands of dollars, it takes 1 to 2 minutes.

– I've read that your clients already include the U.S. Army, Germany's Federal Office for Information Security, huge companies like Siemens…

– Yes, every company and government organization that uses artificial intelligence models needs our platform. We have clients from different industries. Among them are the leading players in automated inspection of car damage, who offer these products in the insurance sector. We also work with the leader in artificial intelligence for automated analysis of sports such as soccer, basketball, baseball and others. For all these clients, our platform is key to building models that work reliably.

– How did you end up raising money… without even looking for it?

– The investors found us before we were officially looking for investment. I was in the U.S., talking about how the product and the demand for it were developing. The investor who went on to lead the round realized that there was strong market demand for our product and that we didn't have enough technical people to work with our clients. Because of that shortage,

we found ourselves turning down Fortune 100 companies,

because the engineers developing the product had to step in and help onboard new clients. That's how we got to the point where we jumped ahead of the normal funding cycle and received a new $12 million early to accelerate our growth.

– What kind of people will you be looking for in Bulgaria?

– The plan is to be 40 people by the end of this year. We're looking for people for all kinds of positions—product designers, product managers, technical sales, marketing.

– In which directions of AI do you see the biggest breakthroughs coming soon?

– We're seeing applications in ever more unexpected fields, which is a sign of how widely these technologies are spreading around us.

We're even talking about companies that make parquet flooring and train models to arrange the different wooden boards automatically.

I think that within 2 years artificial intelligence models will become a big part of our everyday lives. Their safety is becoming an ever more pressing topic. At the end of April this year we announced the first service for validating the safety and reliability of artificial intelligence and began the first audits of models used by major Swiss banks. The service makes it possible to validate models against the regulations and standards being developed by the European Union and the U.S.

Our mission is to help companies build a new generation of reliable artificial intelligence, which will allow these technologies to be widely applied.

The potential to become a world leader in this important field is practically limitless.

That's exactly why we want to create something truly significant and big!

– Could your project also be used by technologies like OpenAI's much-talked-about models? How could it be useful there?

– Yes. OpenAI's models, as well as their open-source alternatives, are fine-tuned by companies on new datasets so they can be applied in industry. They provide a good base for creating specialized models, experts in specific industry problems. Beyond that, our product uses these foundation models to work more efficiently—for example, to explain why a model doesn't work in certain situations.

– Where are the limits of what this kind of technology can do?

– It's important to understand that these models are smarter software with which we can solve a wide range of problems. At this stage we are in control of the technology. That doesn't mean we can afford to underestimate it. On the contrary, I believe this “smarter” software will fundamentally change the world around us.

– I've been writing about science and meeting scientists for 20 years. And it still feels very strange to me to talk with a researcher like you about billions, about business… It's a very different paradigm.

– That's normal for scientists working in high-tech hubs like Stanford and ETH Zurich, where research is systematically turned into billion-dollar companies. During the fundraising, for example, I spoke with Prof. Christopher Manning of Stanford. He is one of the world's best-known experts in natural language processing. To my surprise, he joined the conversations with one of our investors to help them with their due diligence on LatticeFlow. Instead of asking me technical questions, as I expected, he was interested in the clients, the market, the development cycle…

– What sets apart Bulgarians working in AI?

– We have a serious culture of studying the exact sciences, like mathematics, physics and computer science. I think that's thanks to strong high schools and teachers in these fields, who turn out well-prepared people.

Unfortunately, the situation is different when it comes to education after high school, so many of these minds choose to do science outside Bulgaria. So although we have strong technical teams for building products, we don't have enough people to come up with which products to work on.

This is especially true in new fields like AI—in practice, Bulgaria doesn't exist on the world map of this kind of technology. We have no developments or results at the world-recognized conferences on these topics.

In my view, though, Bulgaria has excellent preconditions for becoming a high-tech hub. I think the mentality of entrepreneurs in Eastern Europe is closer to the American one—people think big, without limits, with more risk and more courage.

I see the people who start companies here; they want to conquer the world. I really love that mentality!

On top of that, we have low taxes, which are extremely attractive for building a business. And now we have INSAIT, which attracts world-class scientists. I see no reason why, with good development, we shouldn't significantly overtake the West in these fields, as Singapore, Switzerland and Israel have done.

– What are the most important skills a ninja mom needs?

– One of my sons came up with the nickname. He used to draw comics—he must have been seven or eight—and the characters were his father, his brothers and me. He drew me as a ninja. I'll admit I felt a little hurt. I thought: “Oh, why couldn't he draw me as a princess, or as Wonder Woman, say, instead of some ninja?” So I asked him, and he calmly explained that I was a ninja because I was fast, quiet and

on top of everything, I always catch him when he's plotting some mischief.

So apparently those are the qualities.

The nickname caught on because, I think, all mothers recognize themselves in it. When we have to, we become brave and fast, and nothing can stop us—ninja moms. The rest of the time there's no harm in being ladies, or housewives, or whatever anyone wants to be.

– And how do the most important skills of a ninja dad differ?

– Fathers today are far more present in their children's lives than they were twenty or thirty years ago. I've seen this positive change in our own dad at least, and the blog and my page let me stay in touch with hundreds, not to say thousands, of parents.

It used to be accepted that women raised the children, even though they worked too. Fathers… it was good, it was a gift from God, if they decided it was proper to “help” around the house. Other men even looked down on it.

For me, a real ninja dad is one who is present in his child's life not just as the person who takes them to the movies once a week. He takes part in all the countless obligations on an equal footing with the mother.

– How has the internet changed parenting?

– It's much easier to find all kinds of information and different points of view and to sift out what suits you. It's much easier to find people with similar interests and make friends with them, and not only virtual ones.

There are downsides, of course. One of them is

the pursuit of perfect parenting and the guilt of not measuring up to your role models.

But with time, quite naturally, that corrects itself and the fake role models fall away.

Another downside is that parents now worry not only about whom their child might meet on the street, but also on the internet. Every era comes with new problems. And with new solutions.

– Tell us some interesting stories from readers who've reached you online.

– There are hundreds of them, but I can say one thing about all of them—our family stories and the readers' alike.

Even the most unpleasant, embarrassing and confusing situation isn't so terrible if, some time later, you can tell it at the table and laugh about it with friends.

That point of view has helped me a lot over the years. That's why I always tell it to mothers and fathers when they share a problem.

The kid threw up on the dog and the dog ate it? Your husband's favorite sweater shrank? You dropped the car keys in the washing machine? You brushed your teeth with hair-removal cream because you were so sleepy you couldn't see what you were doing?

Imagine telling it to a group of friends and everyone laughing, you included. Well, yes, it's unpleasant, but it's also terribly funny. Like 90 percent of all the little things we get worked up about at home.

A friend once

told me I was as patient as an ox. To this day I don't know whether it was a compliment.

Patience may well be a parent's most valuable quality. But don't worry—even if you don't have it, like it or not, you'll develop it.

– Should we protect children from technology?

– No. They live in a world that is technological and will only become more so.

Protecting them from technology is like not teaching them to read so they won't read some bad book

and go down a bad path. Not protect them, no, but we do have to teach them to use it to their benefit, not their harm.

– When does using the phone as a babysitter become a problem?

– You mean giving the child a phone so they won't make noise, say when you're at a restaurant or a bank, right? I've done it, of course. But yes, it becomes a problem when there's no sense of measure. Same as with the TV and everything else. “The dose makes the poison” is a good principle, and not only in pharmacy.

– Your eldest son is a programmer. When did you realize that's what he'd do? How did you take it, given all the stereotypes around this profession of ours?

– I always knew he'd work with something to do with computers. He was practically glued to the computer, and not just playing games but making things—it interested him.

He talked me into letting him build me a website, just like that, so he could learn. At one point he enrolled in psychology—now that did surprise me. But his father and I never stopped him or talked him out of anything. All knowledge is useful and sooner or later it comes in handy.

– What's behind the success of your site?

– Lots of people write well and lots of people have something to say. Let's say my great talent is gathering such people together.

– Your children belong to quite different generations, so you have perspective. What changes most—in qualities, interests, worldview?

– I can speak for my own children; I don't know whether these observations hold in general. But it seems to me that

they're becoming more and more independent and standing up for themselves more and more, and from an earlier age.

They're much better informed—they know what's dangerous for them. Recently my husband was trying to persuade the boys to go to their youngest brother's match. It was a very interesting dialogue; I laughed out loud. After hearing him out, one of them told him he was manipulating them with “guilt tripping,” and the other added there were also elements of “gaslighting.” Our eldest son still comes when his father asks. I don't know what the youngest will answer when he grows up. I don't know whether that's good or bad. But I wish I'd once had the chance to defend my position like that in front of my own parents, who were quite strict and always right, even when they were wrong. I'm at peace knowing my children will never let anyone manipulate, boss or use them. That's not a bad thing.

– Has online advice been useful to you in raising your children?

– Yes, of course, both online advice and books. But always in moderation and always with critical thinking. It's good that the information is there; being able to sift through it is priceless.

– And what's the most destructive advice you've come across?

– The most awful advice I ever got was from my father, who was a very loving and responsible parent, but also a strict one. They never hit me or anything like that, but I was always afraid of them, which isn't the same as respect. Let me get back to the question. My first son was a gentle child, and I had a lot of help with him. The second, though, has always been a kid with character, and once he stood up to his grandfather. And then

my dad said: “You have to break him while he's little. Children are broken when they're small.”

And I looked at him in astonishment: why on earth would I want to break my child? Can't he just be stubborn? People are different, after all. I don't want a broken child.

After that I stopped leaving the kids with my mother and father. I was worried they might go and break him on me. With good intentions, of course. They weren't bad parents, just rather conservative.

Still, I owe some of the good traits in my character to their mistakes, so it isn't so terrible for parents to make mistakes. We're most likely making mistakes as parents too, but that will only become clear a good while from now.

– Can the mother-in-law, that legendary villain, turn into… a friend?

– She can. My son's mother-in-law and I became best friends. And the funniest part is that our children divorced, but the two of us stayed friends. Which, of course, isn't a must—sometimes you click with someone, and with someone else you may not get that close; it's a matter of character and interests, too. But even if there's no friendship, there has to be respect and consideration. That part is a must.

– Is the institution of the grandmother still alive?

– What a lovely question. Grandparents are a source of fascination for children. And the other way around. They're a leap into a completely different time and generation. I think contact between grandparents and grandchildren is equally good for everyone involved. And in that sense—yes, the institution is alive.

It has changed a lot, because very few grandparents take an active part in raising the children—not only because people rarely live in the same town these days, but also because the grandparents are still working. But whether you see your grandchild every day, every week, or just take them somewhere on vacation in the summer, that contact is important and rewarding.

I hope all mothers and fathers get the joy of a grandchild. It really is very different.

– Why are there so few women in politics and in leadership positions in Bulgaria? We've never had a woman president or an elected woman prime minister…

– Because to a large extent we're traditionalists. Once we had workmen over. I work from home, so we decided I'd deal with them—keep an eye on them, give them tasks. On the first day they came to ask where my husband was. I said he was at work, but why? They wanted to ask him something about a shelf. I answered them, and they still insisted on asking him. It was very strange; I've rarely felt discriminated against, but those workmen, otherwise very polite, did exactly that. They treated me as if I were feeble-minded and couldn't tell them where to mount a shelf. How do you imagine

those people voting for a woman president, when they don't think a woman can judge where a shelf should go?

– I have two little ones, aged two and five. What should I never, ever say to them?

– Oh, may they be healthy and well!

I never tell mine that they won't be able to manage something.

Even when I'm not sure they'll manage, I don't tell them. Even when I'm sure they won't, I don't tell them. Let them try. And it's amazing how often they do far better than we expected. Sometimes I think our children turn into good people not because of us, but in spite of us.

– What's the best thing about having lots of children?

– The best thing is that the emotions are always mixed, and even if you're worried about some particular story with one of the kids, at the same time there will always be joy about another. And

it's never boring, never ever. You live several lives at once.

– What's the strongest argument for not stopping at one or two children? Does the motivation always have to come from within?

– I don't know how this will sound, but I don't talk anyone into having children. However a person feels about it, that's how it should be. It's not something we should do under pressure because society or our mothers are pushing us. The only thing I can say is that

I don't know a mother or father who has held their baby and said: “Ugh, why did I ever have you, go back where you came from!”

There are probably some like that; I just don't know any. But it isn't easy either. A friend once accused me of making it look easy. It isn't. Not for me either. Only you manage, and not just manage—you have a pretty good time along the way.

– As someone who has contributed personally… how do we get out of this wretched demographic crisis?

– Maybe a good step would be for people to feel more secure. Bulgarians love children. But we have no sense of security—we don't trust our healthcare or our education, nor are we confident our children will grow up in a safe environment. Maybe if we had that kind of peace of mind, people would have more children.

Around me there are many families with more than two children, but they're all people with professions and businesses that give them some independence to raise their kids without relying on the state. We manage in spite of the state, not with its help. Maybe if we had a state you could rely on, more people would have children. God willing, that will happen too.

– They say “little children, little problems; big children, big problems.” Is there any truth to it?

– It's the plain truth. And it's rather unfair, because I used to imagine: there, now they'll finish school, go off to study, and I'll stop thinking about them. There, now they'll finish university and I'll stop thinking about them. Now they'll get married and I'll stop thinking about them.

But you never, ever stop, and there's always something to worry about with them.

In that sense the saying is true. As for independence, though—it gets easier and easier. And time, too: there's a huge difference between the time and care a baby demands, when you have to be available 24/7, and a teen who just needs a full fridge and clean clothes. And for you to be available whenever they deign to talk to you or sit down to watch a movie together once every few days.

– Do you have any favorite kids' sayings about technology?

– When my eldest son, the programmer, was little, he had a limit on how many hours he could spend at the computer. And he kept repeating how unfair it was—I remember his little face, those angry blue eyes, the knitted brows, the pouting mouth. He'd say: “One day, when I have a child, I'll never, ever limit them in anything.”

Guess how it turned out? My grandson Bobby wasn't even allowed to watch TV until he was two. I laugh a lot at those memories.

– Can we teach artificial intelligence to be funny?

– We're trying, but it doesn't come easily to it.

– Won't blogs become redundant now that ChatGPT can already give us even the most convoluted recipe?

– It's entirely possible they'll become redundant. People write books with artificial intelligence, paint pictures and so on. But I don't know a single creative person who's genuinely worried about it.

– Soon technology will allow children to grow in artificial wombs. As an experienced parent, how does such a future strike you?

– Very gentle on mothers. Why not? I believe in science.

– I recently came across an article from about ten years ago that said 3D printing would be everywhere: we would be building houses, printing human organs and transplanting them. Why hasn’t that happened yet?

– I think it is happening, but I don’t see it as a single stage. It’s a process that began long ago with the invention of 3D printers, and it’s still going.

Houses are already being printed—there are huge machines that lay down fast-drying cement layer by layer.

The technology is used in engineering and in biotechnology. The first bladders and the first ureters have been made; there are already an iris and a cornea. All of this is happening! Maybe not at the pace we’d like, but sometimes the challenges simply turn out to be bigger than the dreams.

– Which achievements in this field impress you?

– What impresses me about 3D printing is the incredible flexibility. It inspires me enormously—you can create anything, from car parts to all sorts of everyday knickknacks. Instead of buying a fridge magnet, I print one at home, and at a much higher quality.

I’m impressed by the limitless possibilities and the repeatability—with a printer like that you can make 10 identical things at once, which multiplies what you can do. You can change your business overnight. You don’t have a factory that makes one specific thing; you have the freedom to change.

When COVID came, for example, I switched to face shields. I started making them right away, and thanks to that I was able to keep supporting myself as an entrepreneur.

– Today you mainly work on anatomical models made with 3D printing. The idea came to you when you were a medical student.

– That’s right. I don’t like getting up early, and by the time I got to the university I had no chance of getting hold of the specimens, as we call them. The bones you study anatomy on.

On top of that, the bones in use are decades old. You pick up a skull and it’s chipped all over, because it has been handled for so long. Half its structures are simply gone. A student takes it, the teaching assistant comes over and says: “Imagine this structure here, and that one there…”

Am I studying medicine, or am I at art school, that I have to imagine things?

The university’s specimens are becoming less and less usable, which creates serious problems in teaching. That’s when it occurred to me that 3D printing could produce extremely accurate models for students to learn from. Then I did some research, found out the problem is far from just a Bulgarian one, and decided this was a pretty good opportunity.

– You named your prototype Oscar. What lies ahead for it?

– I want Oscar to become the most popular model of a human skull in the whole world. It’s better than all the other prototypes because it’s a 100 percent anatomically accurate copy—you can observe more than 400 structures on it. Its precision is under 1 mm; I’m the first to have made it that accurate. Most people underestimated it as a business, but I think it’s an incredible opportunity.

There’s also an augmented reality app that goes with it. I can show the structures right on the skull itself, so the student can examine them.

What sets the approach apart is the scanning itself, and then printing at a very fine resolution—0.2 millimeters. And, of course, the marketing. Because when you create a good enough product, it can be copied. The next question is who will sell it better. When all of these come together, you get a complete, innovative approach to creating this kind of biotech product.

– How many Oscars does the world need?

– In Europe alone there are 520 universities, with more than 700,000 students starting medical school every year. I work on the project with love, and I know it will succeed.

Oscar is already used at 5 universities—3 in Bulgaria and 2 in Romania—and this summer I plan to make that ten times as many.

It’s made of polylactic acid, a starch-based polymer, the most standard material in 3D printing. The innovation here isn’t in the technology itself but in the model it uses. Anyone can print a skull, but not everyone can print one like Oscar, because nobody else has such a precise model.

It’s a copy of a specific human skull, but I decided to name it this way because of the wordplay—os is Latin for “bone,” and the name is popular and easy to remember. And if it’s painted gold, it becomes a “Golden Oscar”…

– Before that you worked on bioprinting. Progress there seems slower. What’s harder—replicating the structure or the building material?

– The hardest thing is printing the blood vessels that feed the tissue, which is why only small prototypes are being printed at the moment. To make them bigger, you need 3D-printed blood vessels. The difficulty lies in printing the endothelial cells that make them up, because they are very sensitive and the procedure is complicated. NASA announced a $1 million competition for the person or team that creates the first printed blood vessel, because they believe it will be a big step toward taking humanity to another planet.

– Will we one day be able to print brain cells, or a whole brain?

– Yes, definitely! There’s a great book, The Terminal Experiment, in which the author writes about copying human consciousness into digital form. In other words, we will be able to print brain cells, but so what? What’s interesting about them isn’t the cell itself, but the connections they form with each other through synapses.

With brain tissue, the value lies in the psyche. That’s where its expression and its function are. Anatomically speaking, it isn’t like printing a blood vessel. Blood vessels have a clear function—a tube that “delivers” blood from one place to another. Brain cells are very different.

It will be possible, but the question is: what good will it do?

– Transferring our consciousness, for instance? That would certainly change how we see ourselves, and death… Except we still don’t understand exactly how the brain works.

– Logically speaking, the whole psyche, all of thinking, is just neural circuits—a complex of cells communicating with each other to give birth to a thought. If we could take cells and print them into a damaged area so that its function is restored, that would be interesting. But it’s still far too complicated.

Everything will be printable one day. The questions are when, and what the point will be.

– What are the next steps in this field that you can’t wait to see taken?

– The organs that can most effectively solve the problems of tissue rejection in chronic diseases. The kidney—more people suffer from chronic kidney disease than anything else. Then liver cirrhosis, which affects a large part of the population.

We can divide organs into three levels of complexity. The first are flat organs—that’s skin, and it’s no coincidence that the first successes were with skin. The next level is hollow organs, a closed surface—the stomach, the bladder, a blood vessel. The third level of complexity is the so-called parenchymal organs, which have a more intricate structure.

I can’t wait to see the first people with a transplanted 3D-printed kidney, heart and liver, and that will certainly happen within 10 to 15 years.

But the brain… that will raise a lot of ethical questions. If we print a brain, some neurons that start communicating with each other, that means consciousness, a new person.

Big dreams and big goals are the strongest incentive for maximum technological progress.

– Sadly, I think few people today are driven by motives like that.

– Unfortunately. What drives the modern person? Fear. And ambition born of some trauma. Being ambitious means running away from something, not running toward something. Which is a problem. In my view,

a person’s main driving force should be inspiration, not fear.

When a person isn’t self-aware, they can’t recognize what drives them, and they’re run by the algorithms programmed into their mind. Even a man of 50 or 100, if he isn’t self-aware, is an algorithmic child, with an extra algorithm added here and there if something more apocalyptic happened to him—a trauma, the death of someone close.

Awareness is the key issue. When a person is self-aware, they can truly make decisions.

– Will 3D printing be the next paradigm that dramatically extends human life?

– Average life expectancy keeps rising thanks to advances in medicine. But I don’t know why it has to be dramatic.

– Because we want to live, we’re in no hurry to go, everyone wants to make it to 200…

– Depends on whom you ask. A young person wants to live 200 years, but ask the elderly, ask people close to death. Many of them feel tired, they’ve had their fill of life, they feel they’ve completed all their missions. And they’re ready to change the form in which they exist, because the energy of this world is never lost, it only changes form.

– I’ve seen hundred-year-olds who still want to live. Maybe that’s part of the secret of how they got there.

– Exactly.

The length of your life, the Buddhists say, is determined by your desire to live.

– Is that why our nation is so unhealthy, that we don’t take care of ourselves?

– I think the reason is hyper-professionalism. It leads to suffering in the other areas of life. I believe that

a balanced way of life is the key to a long life and to high levels of happiness.

A balanced life means investing your time and attention in 4 areas—your professional life, your own personality, your family and friends, and your spiritual growth. The reason for much of society’s suffering, including physical suffering, is, I think, that we neglect the other areas. Why?

Because of the motivation produced by the hooks of the capitalist way of thinking.

Because right now it isn’t cool to be healthy, to be balanced. It’s cool to be super-successful, to have the flashiest car, to be a super-professional. You have to have your own business, lots of money, seminars. Above a certain threshold of financial stability, your life doesn’t change, even if you have more money. But you forget that.

– Speaking of motivation, you graduated not long ago. What kind of people go into medicine today? What motivates them?

– Most of them aren’t self-aware either. When you’re 18, how well do you know what you want to do? Dreams and ideals. You’ve seen how cool it is to be Dr. Shepherd from Grey’s Anatomy, you want to help people, your parents support you.

Why did I decide to study medicine? I had an emotional reason, a rational reason and an ego reason. The ego reason was that I pictured how cool it would be to walk around hospitals in a white coat with the power to help other people. I only realized that much later. The rational motive was curiosity. I was curious to find out how the processes in the human body work. It’s so interesting! Why is poop brown, why is blood red? Why do we breathe, why can’t we survive without oxygen? Questions like that were going around in my head.

And the emotional reason was that I saved a little child from certain death, completely by chance. It was in front of my apartment building—his mother carried him out in her arms, and I happened to be in the right place at the right time. He had “swallowed his tongue” because of a high fever; he’d had a seizure and his mother had found him like that. When something like this happens, you have to lay the child down and tilt the chin up—that opens the airway and helps him.

– Of all the questions you used to ask yourself, which ones can medicine still not answer?

– The biggest one, I think, is:

What is the meaning of human life? Yes, medicine has one answer—to reproduce yourself.

But that isn’t enough for a self-aware person. We see it as something primal—the point is to pass your genes on, to be a messenger of the future. Beyond that there are plenty of other questions: how does a person’s psyche exist? How does a personality take shape? How does a group of neurons physically create something immaterial?

How is a person’s inner world created, their beliefs? The human brain has always been fascinating, of course. It’s a pretty good computer.

The way it structures and processes information is very efficient, and there’s still no computer that comes close to it.

– Have we evolved in any way as a species because of technology?

– Yes, the way we take in information has changed. But biological change is slower. Biology always follows physiology, which in turn follows the psyche. I believe a person’s way of thinking can even determine their physiological phenomena—it’s called somatization. In any case, when we talk about evolution, we have to say it unfolds over very long periods of time—10,000, 20,000, 30,000 years—before you see a noticeable difference. What can you see in 200 years? Nothing.

As for biological evolution, in recent years it has shown itself in the significant extension of human life expectancy. We’re paying more and more attention to the brain, and perhaps

once machines take over a large part of physical labor, we’ll start getting weaker and weaker,

because there won’t be any need for strength. And more and more self-aware and intellectual.

What did a person think about 200 years ago? How to feed themselves—the focus was on the first level of Maslow’s pyramid. Today you have all your basic needs met, so the evolution of society is focused on self-improvement. More and more attention goes to the psyche, to psychology. Hyper-professionalism, education, learning.

As we become more and more self-aware as a society and as a race, we’ll move to the next level—we’ll start caring not about ourselves but about something bigger. That awaits us within 50 to 100 years.

– Could artificial intelligence overtake us as the dominant species?

– I think we’ll learn from it, if we’re wise enough. We shouldn’t be afraid of it; we should learn how to use it. I’ve thought for a long time about what will be valuable over the next 5 to 10 years. Until now it was having information—knowing things so you could do things. That’s no longer the case; what matters is asking the right questions. Because ChatGPT knows more than you do—what matters is how you ask it.

Then comes the role of critical thinking, because of information overload and disinformation. These are the two valuable skills of the person of the near future—they

have to ask questions and verify that information.

For that, they need skills and knowledge different from what we had before. But it’s important to realize that you can take advantage of technology instead of being in conflict with it. To see the opportunity, not the problem. Opportunity gives you wings; the problem weighs you down.

– These technologies are expected to change medicine dramatically, in drug development, for example.

– Exactly. Artificial intelligence is already 10 times better at reading X-rays than a lab technician. Lab technicians will disappear.

– And doctors? Will GPT make a good GP?

– No. That’s one of the last professions that will disappear. Those are the ones tied to creative thinking. The mechanical will disappear. What will last longest is everything connected to art and everything that involves empathy.

Where is there empathy? With teachers, with doctors.

50 percent of treatment isn’t giving you the medicine, it’s taking the right medical history and suggesting to you that you’ll get better,

even in the placebo effect.

The question is when people will trust a machine to heal them. But that will happen eventually too. Even though machines will be far more successful at surgery, people will still be distrustful. Because we’re social animals; we want to see empathy. When machines learn to give it to us, then we’ll trust them. And they will learn…

– Do you think you’ll ever practice medicine?

– I don’t know—why not? What does it mean to be a doctor? To help. I help a lot of people. I fulfill my mission as a doctor, I just don’t do it in the operating room or by prescribing medication. I help people’s psyches by giving them an example, a direction, and I help future doctors become better through Oscar.

I’ve had a lot of inner conflicts. For a long time my family didn’t support me in what I was doing, either. It was very hard for me to cope with that and to find something to lean on within myself. But I follow my heart, not my brain.

The brain is a machine—a wonderful servant but a very bad master. The brain is incredible at calculating processes, at doing things efficiently and in a structured way. But it isn’t good at making the big decisions about your life. You can’t choose a wife just like that, rationally. You see a person, they haven’t said two words, and they either attract you or repel you. That’s something more, something the brain can’t understand. It’s another sense—intuition. Modern society badly underestimates it! Because the brain doesn’t understand it, and it can’t be proven.

– Isn’t it interesting? We’ve known for millennia that the heart pumps blood and holds no emotions, yet the metaphor lives on.

– Because it’s part of us. We know it’s true, but we deny it. Two hundred years ago people thought a solar eclipse was magic, because the brain couldn’t explain it. So what did we do? We made things up.

Modern science denies many things simply because it can’t explain them yet, and that’s normal.

The point is to be neither overly positive nor overly negative. You have this intuition—use it.

Where do fears live? In the brain. Being afraid is so inefficient. You experience real physical suffering over something that hasn’t happened. Isn’t that silly?

Big decisions shouldn’t be made out of fear. The heart is never afraid. Great people before us have performed feats like that, and great people after us will too. Because they did it through courage, not through ambition. Be brave!

What happens when 1,000 volunteers, most of them from the world of information technology, roll up their sleeves to build something that could change our society?

I’ll let you in on it: the result of this experiment is positive, and it lays the foundations of a platform that can literally save lives. This digital story is meaningful, and it shows that when different people join forces, backed by a dose of typical Bulgarian stubbornness, they can work real miracles.

Podkrepi.bg—podkrepi means “support” in Bulgarian—is a platform that went live only recently. It raises money for worthy causes of every kind, and it takes no commission. The money is channeled honestly and transparently, and that is guaranteed not only by the open face of the whole idea but also by the well-known guarantors who stand behind every cause.

The platform was built through the hard work of volunteers, but it is also turning into a social experiment of sorts. It grew out of a good idea that sprouted online and refused to die, despite the countless obstacles it met along the way. And it still promises bigger news to come…

If next to every good programmer…

…there stands at least one more, they will surely find something to quarrel about, and if a third one shows up, the first two will come up with some especially rude meme to mock him with for months. At least that is how you might imagine relations in the guild work if you wander into the community’s most popular Facebook group—DevBG.

And yet it was right there, almost two years ago, that a post appeared which started this story.

October 2020: on national television it becomes mercilessly clear that HelpKarma, one of the most popular donation platforms, has been grossly misusing the money it collects. A huge share of it has gone into the pockets of its founders, which taints the whole venture and threatens to stain the entire ecosystem of giving.

And that can be a matter of life and death, especially in our country, where institutions clearly don’t work the way they should and, very often, a person or a group of people need help simply to survive.

Many calls follow for a new place that would restore trust in giving. In DevBG, the group’s administrators post an appeal for anyone willing to join the discussions. To get to work, as volunteers, building a new platform and promoting it. To let people who set money aside for good causes know that their donations go where they are meant to.

The road to hell…

…is paved with badly written code. And good ideas easily fall victim to their collision with reality.

Fortunately, and unexpectedly for many of us, Podkrepi.bg is already accepting donations for its first causes today. The venture has taken its critical first steps and shown that it is possible. That a platform of this scale can be built on a voluntary basis by a group of people from different professions, united by a cause.

At the start, in just a few months, no fewer than 1,000 volunteers signed up, says Georgi Ivanov. He is an entrepreneur and a marketing and HR specialist, with serious experience in large software projects and in communication within the popular programmers’ group. He has been part of the core from the very beginning, one of the people who never gave up—and, as he is keen to point out, there are quite a few of them. (You can read about everyone who contributed significantly to the venture here.)

So people responded quickly, and from a remarkably wide range of professions. The sign-up form asked them to list their skills in detail so the organization could run as smoothly as possible. Programmers signed up—specialists in all sorts of technologies—along with people experienced in marketing, designers, managers, financiers, lawyers, doctors…

Which, on the one hand, is wonderful: a system like this certainly needs the work of every one of those professions. But most of them have little room to contribute until at least a first version of the product exists, until the people who build the software platform itself have done their job. Yes, the programmers…

2 + 2…

…sometimes equals far more than the usual answer. The way this story unfolded proves it. But not at its beginning, when the sum of the work of the supposed 1,000 professionals who had signed up and agreed to help was approaching zero.

“We didn’t realize what we were up against,” Georgi admits today. “When we saw how many people had signed up, we decided that was more than enough. We didn’t realize that half of them had roles that wouldn’t have any work for at least a year. The others were real beginners who couldn’t be useful without a core of experienced specialists. And to top it off, a battle broke out over which technologies to use.”

The first difficulties came when the technologies for building the platform had to be chosen. As someone who earns his living in exactly this field, I can tell you that today there are countless technical solutions that have to fit together like a puzzle to build such a multilayered project. And the trouble often lies in the fact that programmers specialize in one technology and can’t be particularly useful outside it.

At first the team decided to look for an unconventional answer to this first big problem: a modular system that would use different programming languages and technologies, so that each volunteer programmer could contribute with whatever he or she knew.

It quickly became clear, though, that the idea couldn’t work and was only paving the way for even greater chaos. So the team settled on using the tools already familiar to as large a part of the team and the registered volunteers as possible.

“We thought there were more than enough people willing to help. But most volunteers showed up once, did one or two small things and vanished. We were probably part of the reason—at the start there was serious chaos that we didn’t manage to sort out fast enough. But none of us had any experience working with such a large team of people who had never met in person and were working remotely. Besides, most of the active volunteers could spare two or three hours a week, and it turned out that 15 to 20 of them got about as much done as one full-time person,” Georgi says.

“Out of those roughly 1,000 who signed up, a core of 10 to 15 people eventually formed, plus another 20 to 30 who took an active part at different times. People watching from the sidelines wondered, ‘What are these guys dawdling around for so long?’ without realizing the nature of volunteer work, or that it’s not just a matter of coding a platform—you have to build a whole organization to maintain it, develop it and expand it.”

Iliya built himself a hut…

…and we all know how that turned out, as the old Bulgarian saying about best-laid plans goes, but it must have been easier for him, since he took on the hard job alone. It turns out that keeping enthusiasm alive is much harder than giving birth to it.

“It’s hard, because you can’t hold anyone accountable for volunteer work. Obviously it isn’t people’s first priority. You have a family, a job, and the moment a real problem comes up there, of course you’ll turn to it at the expense of the volunteer project,” Georgi reflects.

The team holds online meetings every Wednesday at 7 p.m., discusses how things are going and makes decisions. There are hard stretches when only a few are left “pulling” the thing forward while the rest are swept up in the daily grind. At some points only three or four of the 1,000 volunteers take part. On top of that, all of this happens against the backdrop of the pandemic; the team has met in person only twice.

But what matters is that the spring never runs dry, not in the December holidays nor in the timeless lull of summer. There is always someone to carry the work on, even when the others are squeezed by circumstances. “There were a few people who simply wouldn’t let the energy die. And whenever they sensed that work was pressing on someone, another person would step in right away. We have no leader, we’re all equal, and the credit is shared equally,” Georgi says.

The situation became critical in January, when the venture fell seriously behind schedule. That was when SoftUni, a large Bulgarian software academy, came in as a partner, connecting the team with 12 hand-picked graduates who both learned in a real environment and, through their hard work, helped make things happen. Thanks to the experience they gained, almost all of these interns had found jobs within just two months.

If you’re afraid of bears…

…you don’t go into the software business, to bend the Bulgarian proverb about staying out of the woods. And if you’re afraid of hate, you don’t post in the DevBG forum (I am, I confess).

The people behind this platform, however, are not. And so, little by little, things got going. In each area a core of sufficiently experienced specialists emerged to bring order. Many of them are company founders who can afford a bit more flexibility in their working hours and have seen enough to know what needs to be done.

The software side of the project is open source, and anyone can join in. To the team’s surprise, even two Indians and a Japanese developer contributed lines of code. And one of the modules is entirely the work of… a 12-year-old programmer, a student at SoftUni!

So today the other volunteer professionals are also bringing their experience to bear. The platform is raising donations for its first five causes. And here comes the next big step: selecting the campaigns that will receive support.

To earn more trust—on top of all activities being tracked and documented in detail, with full accountability—the Podkrepi.bg team meets every organizer in person and, when needed, visits on site. Various expert councils, medical and technical among them, are being formed right now, and a new feature is that every campaign has guarantors.

On the one hand, these are people who have already worked with the organizers and want to back them; on the other, they are sometimes celebrities who can help with their popularity. Among the first on the list are the singer Grafa, the rapper Ustata and “the Superhuman” Georgi Nenov (you’ll find the campaigns here).

A friend in need…

…is still being sought; it’s always good to have even more friends.

“The project was a big bite to chew, and it still is,” says Georgi Ivanov. “From the very beginning, our idea wasn’t simply to code a platform and set it loose to live online. Most of us have experience in this field, and we know you have to build a serious organization behind a project like this, and only then can it start working.”

One of the next big goals is for Podkrepi.bg to reach more people and for the media to spread the word, so the machine starts turning. According to Georgi, this will begin to happen naturally once the first campaigns are successfully completed. “Trust is earned through transparency and results—it’s not enough for people just to hear about us and see us. In this field trust is extremely hard to earn, but it’s everything. It is our main motivation, and it’s the goal of the project: to restore trust in kindness, in fundraising campaigns and in charitable organizations.”

At some point a few people will probably be hired full time, but until then everything keeps running on volunteer work. The team still needs help; right now the most sought-after are people with experience as front-end and back-end developers (the technologies used are listed here), DevOps engineers, project managers, as well as marketing specialists and people experienced in evaluating and monitoring campaigns.

Unity makes…

…and so, here it turns out that it really does make strength, just as Bulgaria’s national motto promises!

“For me, the most impressive thing about this project is that people who didn’t know each other came together and managed to turn all that energy of hating and ‘how dare they be so brazen,’ of grumbling and complaining, into something that builds. The biggest thrill isn’t so much that the platform appeared as that we created a serious organization standing behind it, and as long as we’re alive and well, I have no doubt it won’t disappear in a year. I’m very pleasantly surprised by this civic experiment, and I’m really curious to see how far it will go,” Georgi Ivanov sums up.

So now the ball is in each of our courts. Take a look at the first projects; maybe you’ll find something that moves you. You can join as a volunteer, or persuade the company you work for to become a regular donor. As long as you have the will, there are many ways to help.

Sometimes, in defiance of stereotypes and negative expectations, when we are together, miracles really do happen.

– On Friday, world-class AI scientists are coming to Bulgaria—people who have achieved impressive things and who are only beginning to draw the outlines of tomorrow. What arguments do you use to convince them to come?

– Of course, I know many of them through my professional work and personal contacts. But more importantly, these people want to have an impact on society. They already see INSAIT as the only unit similar to the ones they know, but this time in Eastern Europe, and that is the main reason they are in Sofia.

The interesting thing here is that

all top universities and labs today work in a very similar way,

whether they are in the States, China, Switzerland or Israel. In Eastern Europe, INSAIT is the first institution with the ambition to work this way.

Most of these scientists are mentors in the doctoral program; they see the enormous gap and, at the same time, the enormous potential, and they want to help.

– Why is this really the first venture of its kind in Eastern Europe? Was it very hard to create, did it require the joint efforts of the state, business and scientists, or had it simply not occurred to anyone that it was possible?

– These centers function in a very complex way, and in Eastern Europe in general the know-how for structuring them just isn't there. In Bulgaria, for example, we have hubs, clusters, all sorts of units, but they have nothing to do with real world-class research and innovation.

The other reason is that it takes gigantic effort for something like INSAIT to get off the ground here at all.

I have been working very actively on this project for four years now, and it is almost like a second full-time job. And yes, this kind of work can't be done with advisers from abroad; it takes hands-on work on the ground. The way these institutions operate is intricate, and if one piece shifts out of place, the system doesn't work.

The third thing is timing—the right moment, when both the state and society want it. In my view, the situation in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe is such that big companies are already arriving and people increasingly want something like this to happen. We want to move closer and closer to Israel, Singapore, Switzerland, and no one has come up with any other way to do that than institutions like INSAIT.

– Based on your experience, what is the image of Bulgarian IT scientists in the West? Does it help?

– If we're talking about top innovation, Bulgaria isn't on the map at all. At the top scientific conferences in machine learning, for example, there are no papers from Bulgarian institutions, while a single lab at a top university might publish 10 or 15. Bulgaria has the image of a good technical nation, but not of a place where the technologies of the future are invented.

– And yet at the same time there are Bulgarians in every big company and research unit; we'll see plenty of examples at the conference…

– That's true, but as a percentage there are far fewer Bulgarians at top universities and R&D units than, say, Israelis or people from countries with a similar population. On the whole,

we are still living off the image created in the communist era,

of a good technical nation, of strong olympiad competitors at school level. That is very important and we must build on it, but it is far from enough, and that is why institutes like INSAIT are needed.

– From here on, what are the biggest risks that things won't work out?

– There are many, of different kinds. For example, the laws on the development of academic staff are outdated and inadequate for modern science and innovation. Outdated legislation can prevent us from working at the speed we need to. Institutes of this type move extremely fast;

they are closer to startups, but on a much larger scale.

And if you can't reach that speed, there's no way you can be competitive.

Then comes the image of the country—how easy it is to attract top scientists, top students, top investors. That is a test not only for INSAIT but for the whole country. What the healthcare is like, the quality of the air, of the schools, the tolerance toward foreigners, the absence of corruption. That is perhaps the hardest part: attracting people to Bulgaria.

And the third is the danger of a lack of understanding—for instance, the government failing to appreciate that this is the most strategic project for Bulgaria in the last 30 to 40 years, one with the potential to raise Bulgaria's image in the eyes of the world.

The key question is whether the state will keep standing more and more firmly behind this venture,

and whether it will present and position it abroad the right way.

– Understanding is a very interesting point. The sector is very enthusiastic, but are we managing to catch the attention of people outside it? Because in Bulgaria this sector has a somewhat hard time finding common ground with the rest of society.

– As President Rumen Radev said at the opening,

INSAIT has managed to connect many different parts of Bulgaria's fragmented ecosystem:

four different governments, entrepreneurs, top Western companies such as Google, AWS and VMware, Bulgarian companies such as SiteGround, the best Bulgarian university and many others.

The next task is for that understanding to reach people outside the sector, and that matters because, in the end, INSAIT is the way we will keep our children in Bulgaria. Better education makes children stay in Bulgaria and come back from abroad. INSAIT is proving that this is possible by attracting some of the strongest Bulgarian students. This is in the interest of the whole nation.

– What is the next big goal?

– Soon we will hold an event devoted solely to INSAIT and its connection with society and education; there are many topics in Bulgaria where disinformation reigns and which need explaining.

For example, for many parents and children it is not clear how to continue their education after 12th grade. What happens, what they should do, what the real prospects are and what to optimize for. And these are topics that concern all of society.

– Isn't it a problem that much smaller generations are reaching higher education, while the sector suffers more and more from a shortage of people?

– Bulgaria has many development strategies, but not a single one is followed. In Israel, for example, there is a very clear system for where good students should go—to their top universities. In Bulgaria it's not like that: there's no strategy, the universities are on the whole considerably weaker, and chaos sets in.

One of INSAIT's missions is to bring order to this chaos, so that

the status of the scientist, of the researcher, becomes something different.

So that these become prestigious professions, as they are in the West. Then children will be much keener to pursue them, too. To that end, INSAIT will certainly reach down to the level of schoolchildren as well, so that this movement toward real science, toward knowledge, can start much earlier.

– But either way, we have far fewer people, compared with neighboring countries, for example.

– We're not that few. Israel and Switzerland are no bigger than us in population or territory, yet they manage to be among the leaders in the world of technology. One of the good things about INSAIT is that it works in a field that doesn't require huge initial investment, as other fields do, and change can come considerably faster.

– The idea is to cover all areas of information technology and artificial intelligence. Wouldn't it have been easier to try to specialize in something specific?

– That's dangerous, because if you concentrate on one or two areas, you may fail to attract top people because of the risks we talked about.

– Your project seems to carry the force of a revolution. But revolutions are rarely the work of scientists.

– I do science, but I'm also an entrepreneur. When you're on the other side and working at a top university like ETH Zurich, where there are thousands of applicants for a single program every year, it becomes very clear that without something like INSAIT, Bulgaria simply has no chance of being competitive.

A country can easily reach some average level and sit there. But for the next level of knowledge, education, research and innovation, without an institution like INSAIT, we don't stand a chance.

I know many people in the ecosystem; everyone sees how fragmented everything is and that it doesn't work the way it should. As an entrepreneur, that motivates me to do something that will bring change. We have enormous potential, but it needs to be channeled.

Foreigners won't do it for us; we have to do it ourselves, we Bulgarians.

When they come, they say how wonderful it is, but then they leave.

To succeed, we need to keep two things apart: when we talk among ourselves in Bulgaria, we should honestly name our problems and solve them, and abroad we should always promote ourselves in the best possible way.

In this field, Bulgaria should be among the top 5 countries in Europe, even the top 3—we have that potential. With INSAIT we will find out whether we manage to use it or not.

– I read a wonderfully fresh story—that the idea for Dronamics was born while your brother was studying in the Netherlands. And you wondered… how to send him a tin of cheese. Is that really how it happened?

– That’s exactly how it was. I was visiting him and we were talking about the little drones Amazon was developing—how on earth would they reach homes in Sofia, past dangling internet cables, neighbors who open your mail, kids with slingshots, glassed-in balconies. A few months later we spoke on the phone and he asked me: “When are you coming to visit again, so you can bring me more cheese?” I couldn’t be bothered, so I cut him off the way an older brother cuts off a younger one: “Leave me alone.

You’re an engineer, aren’t you? Build a drone and I’ll send you some.

But don’t bug me, I won’t be coming anytime soon.”

Then we started thinking: “Okay, fine, Bulgaria is close to the Netherlands, but you’d need something that flies and can last around 2,000 kilometers. So it has to be a bit bigger. It definitely can’t run on batteries; it needs some kind of normal fuel.”

Around the same time I had just come back from a trip to India. My smartphone broke and I asked my hosts to help. They recommended a website—Flipkart, similar to Amazon but local. There are no addresses there, just a field for “nearby landmark,” and I had to pick a school that probably had 10,000 children. For one more dollar, delivery was next day. The guy came, sent a text message five minutes early and somehow found us. I was very impressed and told myself: yes, those little Amazon drones won’t work in Bulgaria, but they won’t work in India either. There, even the big brands need 11 days to get from one end of the country to the other. A different kind of delivery makes much more sense.

– Which is what Dronamics actually goes on to offer… When did things get serious?

– When the idea was born, we first discussed it with some of my brother’s professors—whether, if we built a machine the size of a two-seater plane, but without a cockpit and a whole bunch of parts that aren’t needed for cargo, it would be cheaper to produce. Was all of this achievable?

They encouraged us, and meanwhile I dug into the economics. I came across plenty of data on how urbanization is bleeding smaller towns dry. One World Bank study made a particular impression on me: if a developing country improves the state of its transport infrastructure, that has a bigger positive effect on its economy than any other measure or policy.

In other words, all those ideas—privatize, cut taxes—nothing has an effect like simply unclogging the arteries so that blood reaches even the smallest organ and it doesn’t wither. That encouraged us even more, because

the truth, when it comes to moving goods, is not inside the city,

where you have lots of couriers and a hunger for jobs; the problem that needs solving lies between cities.

– Today it’s believed that all your big competitors are years behind you. How did you end up in such a strong position? How come you have a stronger product than Amazon? Is it only because they headed in the wrong direction?

– Nationality played a big role.

If we’d been Americans from Stanford, we’d not only have raised much more funding, we’d also have had much more competition.

Aviation is a terribly hard business. A program for a new machine in this class can take as long as ten years. Certification for passenger transport is brutal, and for cargo there wasn’t even a regulatory framework.

At some point all the big companies took wrong turns. They thought the last mile of delivery was the most expensive and that it was important to develop that. A bit like with autonomous cars. Nobody says anymore that they’ll be here next year; people talk about five to ten years.

In aviation it’s supposedly simpler, you have lots of space. But when you’re small and take off vertically, you don’t have much thrust. Besides, if you’re in an urban environment, you have obstacles of every kind. Electricity and batteries haven’t grown much at all in capacity, and their supply chain is very unstable.

A while ago we announced a partnership with DHL. Two months later they shut down their own small-drone project—they had worked with universities in Germany and gone through four generations. An example of an organization that said: “This is a super-complicated problem, we can’t solve it, let’s look at something else.” Whereas the other big organization, Amazon, decided that it was a super-complicated problem but that until it succeeded it wouldn’t try anything else.

– So the competition has no way of catching up with you soon?

– There will certainly be competition. That’s why our ambition is to position ourselves as a logistics company, so that if someone does catch up with us technologically in the future, we can buy their machines too. But until that moment comes, we’ll put every resource we have into extending our lead.

Cargo is the most thankless industry imaginable, because it’s the most price-sensitive, and new technologies are by definition more expensive. That’s why it makes more financial sense for everyone to balance the value by building “passenger flying cars” and then ripping out the seats to put cargo in, rather than saying, like us: this aircraft is only for cargo, and that’s all we’ll build it for.

As the saying goes,

do today what others won’t, so that tomorrow you can do what others can’t.

That’s what we decided too: we can see this is the future, we’re hugely confident in it, and we don’t care about the others. And we found ourselves in the position of first player in the sector. Now the goal is to stay first.

– What are the next big steps?

– Our program of ground and flight tests continues, and once those are finished we’ll be able to start commercial operations. We’ve already announced manufacturing partners in Australia, we’re about to announce some in Europe, and we’re in negotiations with several more regions. We’re producing the first units in Bulgaria, but the idea is for other companies to manufacture locally while we are their sole operator. To grow from here as a logistics company and an airline.

The most important thing was to have a working prototype, because aviation is a very hard business with very thin margins. I think it was Richard Branson who said:

The easiest way to become a millionaire is to be a billionaire and own an airline.

– What are the biggest risks that things won’t work out from here on?

– The more we work, the more the risks shrink. The initial risk with startups is the team. We’ve managed to build a very solid team of 150 people, about 100 of whom are in Bulgaria. The product risk—whether the idea works at all—will very soon fall away; we’re very confident of that, because we’ve already been through a whole bunch of tests. There’s regulatory risk, which has already been resolved: for three months now we’ve had a license to operate in Europe.

Next comes market risk—whether the market wants the product at all. Right now we’re at the stage of collecting orders. Our customer buys a certain tonnage at a certain frequency on a certain route. And even with current pricing, which will improve significantly,

there’s far more demand than we can supply, which is why we need as many manufacturing partners as possible.

What mainly remains is operational risk, which arrives once commercial operations begin. Making sure we hit the targets we’ve set for flights.

– Is the idea to have regular flights, or dynamic ones only when a particular shipment is needed?

– We’ll start with regular flights at first. Otherwise a customer would have to buy a whole flight even to send 2 kilograms from Sofia to Varna. So we’re starting with a schedule, and in a year or two we’ll also be able to do more flights on demand.

– If everything goes as expected, isn’t there a risk of “overloading” the sky? Of starting to cause problems for civil aviation too?

– We don’t think so. People constantly say the skies are very crowded. Even before COVID, when aviation froze completely, there were about 100,000 flights a day around the world. And there are 2 billion cars on Earth! Even if just 10 percent of them travel every day, that’s 200 million cars moving on just one plane, and only along tiny little “hairs” of it—the roads.

Yes, they’re slower, moving at 80 km/h rather than 800, but the difference with the air, where you have countless planes, remains huge. One of the problems today is specific points—at a mega-airport like Atlanta, for example, you need slots. The other thing is that air traffic control isn’t automated; you always need a human in the loop.

Of all those 100,000 flights, more than 80 percent are commercial aviation, which flies mostly above 10,000 meters. A two-seater Cessna “climbs” no higher than 3,000 meters; above that you need oxygen. While we fly at most up to 7,000 meters, so we operate in one huge empty space.

On top of that, our business model is to land at smaller airports—in Haskovo, Targovishte, Burgas, Varna. If our destination is Frankfurt, we’ll land at some small airport there, not the international one. There’s lots and lots of room for more machines in the sky. As long as everything is automated, you can guarantee that reactions will be very fast.

– One operator will be able to control 12 “black swans” at once. How is that possible?

– Before we even started, we did careful research on this. It turned out that in the military sphere—at that point the only place with large drones—one operator can monitor and control up to 15 machines at once. And that’s in a military context, when they have to constantly watch what’s happening. Whereas in the cargo world you’re traveling from Sofia to Varna, you’ve set the coordinates. Everything is deterministic, you can program it and step in only if there’s some exception, if something out of the ordinary happens. So we’re only starting at 1:1, we’ll move on to 1:12, and later one operator will be able to control many more.

– Your drone is called the “Black Swan.” Isn’t a black swan something many people associate with something negative? A sudden event that changes things, but not in a particularly good direction…

– Yes, during the global financial crisis of 2008 there was a lot of talk about The Black Swan, Taleb’s book. But our inspiration came from elsewhere. In the Middle Ages it was something like the Bulgarian “when the wooden clogs bloom”—a way of saying something doesn’t exist, like “when pigs fly.”

Then, around 1700, sailors discovered black swans in New Zealand, and the meaning of the phrase in Western Europe changed.

Something everyone thinks is impossible turns out to exist.

We knew we were starting such a project from Bulgaria, where no aircraft had been built for 70 years, where there were no trained people and no established supply chain. That it would be very, very hard. We knew what an American startup would do—first put an autopilot on an existing plane to validate the model. But we saw that this had already been done back in 2010. It clearly doesn’t work, because you’re using very expensive machines built for people, not cargo—small, cramped, with high maintenance costs.

And we told ourselves: so we need to skate not to where the puck is now, but to where it will be later.

Our aircraft has to be cheap to build and cheap to operate,

just one of the two isn’t enough. We named it that to remind ourselves that what we’re doing is actually super hard. So the engineers wouldn’t despair on the tough days.

Today our aircraft burns under 7 liters of fuel per 100 kilometers, carries 350 kilograms on board and flies at almost 200 kilometers an hour. A “flying banicharka.” But we’re also lucky that the technologies we use couldn’t have been created until about ten years ago. Neither in terms of computing power nor materials. So we’re the first company in the world to take advantage of the most modern things in the industry.

– Usually, with startups, everything ends in an exit—either a sale or going public. What would make you sell the company?

– It’s hard for me to imagine such a scenario. We simply want to do this. Being bought isn’t the optimal plan; we’re more likely to list on an exchange, most probably in the U.S., since that’s the most dynamic market and the one with the highest valuations. The idea is for that to happen in three to five years, with my brother and me continuing to run the company. We’ve put in so much time, desire, energy and work—I don’t think there’s anything else at all we’d want to do.

– Is it hard for two brothers to work together?

– For us it’s useful. Our families are different, but we’re very, very close, we grew up together. We trust each other completely, and on the other hand—an incredible bonus in any partnership—our areas of expertise complement each other. From the very beginning we’ve had a well-established respect for each other’s field.

– You told each other you wouldn’t shave until your venture succeeded, since beards really annoy you and that would give you extra motivation. But what’s the criterion for success—when will you shave?

– When the big aircraft lands successfully for the first time. So we expect to shave before the end of the year. I can’t wait—this month marks eight years with beards…

– I hear your next idea is to look toward space…

– We’re building a business that is generative. Surely, if we manage to pull this off in such a hard sector, other horizons will open up too. Humanity will always want more, faster, farther, so space really is the next goal.

– I wish with all my heart that things turn out the way you imagine them, and I’d be glad to do another interview just about space.

And you yourself… what do you dream of?

– That in 2100, when they rank the most significant companies, we’re number one. The one that contributed the most with something positive. Not Tesla, not Apple, but us. Companies lasting a long time is not a given at all… but dreams have to be ambitious!

With every year we grow more desperate about the political state of our country. Disappointed, disgusted, with less and less hope that there is anyone we can vote for without regretting it afterward.

That is why strazha.bg—Strazha means “The Watch”—is such a meaningful venture, and one created, what's more, by young people unburdened by prejudice. In just a year the platform has drawn serious interest and keeps offering more and more possibilities. Reminders that politics is not just the people on television, but all of us.

Thanks to the project, we can see what the person we ourselves sent (or plan to send) to the National Assembly, Bulgaria's parliament, said and how they voted at any moment. We can check whether they keep their word and deserve our trust. We can search a vast database of payments made by every state institution over the past 16 years.

“Democracy is not just a slogan!” reads the motto of this venture. Not only its existence, but also how effectively it works depends on all of us. And now we have a valuable weapon with which anyone can put it into practice.

Me and the Robot

A democracy enthusiast—that is how Blagoslav Mihaylov describes himself. Now 26, he has spent the past year pouring all his efforts into the Strazha project, because he believes we all need an impartial platform like this.

After finishing school, he left for Sheffield and specialized in artificial intelligence. Although he found the subject interesting, he decided he did not want to build a career in the field.

“To work in artificial intelligence, you have to go through a PhD and then hope to land a job at one of the big corporations. And I simply didn't want to be part of the system,” Blagoslav recalls. “And I started thinking: this field comes from our dream of creating something in our own image. At some point I realized I didn't understand people well enough. That I had spent so much time understanding numbers, formulas and algorithms, but not how human society is put together.”

The Right to Vote

He felt something was missing abroad, and after graduating he came back to Bulgaria. He spent four years educating himself in various fields and thinking over what he wanted to do. That is how he arrived at the idea of an impartial civic platform, and in June 2021 he got to work.

“I've always believed in technology, and I began to wonder how it could be used to transform the social sphere—for example, to change politics.”

10,849,598 roll-call votes over the past 13 years, 541,831 speeches from the rostrum by 1,409 members of parliament from 2001 to the present. This enormous body of information is now available to anyone at strazha.bg.

The concrete idea came from his friend Friedrich Krepiev, the platform's co-founder, who is now studying medicine in Germany. He was inspired by a similar venture in Germany, which is also where the name comes from. Abgeordnetenwatch can be translated as “parliament monitoring,” but also as “watching, tracking, guarding.”

Power to the People

At first the problems were purely technical. Officially, there is plenty of information on the National Assembly's own website, but it is extremely awkward to process. That is exactly the problem other platforms ran into when, before Strazha, they tried to make the database of speeches and votes accessible.

Blagoslav found the solution thanks to his experience as a programmer. All the other platforms relied on downloading (in “professional” jargon, “scraping”) the data with slow and inefficient scripts. The young man, however, noticed that the parliament's new website was built so that requests to its servers were made in a standardized way. In other words… “without meaning to,” the developers had made all the data on votes and the transcripts of sessions available in a convenient form. Nobody had simply noticed it before.

And so processing the data became possible, and Strazha stood guard. When the last National Assembly began its work, the platform even managed to initiate changes to the rules of procedure, under which voting data is now published with only a one-day delay.

Why does all this matter? Because now we can check everything done by “our man,” the one we sent with our vote to represent us and forge laws. On top of that, you can make fascinating comparisons of how the votes of different parliamentary groups line up. When anomalies appear—things hinting that decisions were made “the other way”…

I Am the State

And speaking of “the other way,” this is Blagoslav and his like-minded colleagues' main, fundamental goal—to create a platform that is completely transparent and independent. Each of them has his or her own views and political preferences, but when it comes to Strazha, the goal is an entirely impartial look at the data.

“The fact that this project was created outside the party environment is its main advantage,” says Blagoslav. “The idea from the very beginning was an initiative of the people, for the people, funded entirely by people, not by grants or funds. Entirely civic.”

The platform relies on microfunding and does not accept donations above a certain amount. Precisely because its whole philosophy is aimed at each of us, at the “ordinary” voter who will appreciate what he or she gets. It seems to be working, because in recent months the number of donors—giving symbolic but regular sums—has been growing fast.

Of the People and for the People

Blagoslav's next big step was to build a convenient search form for SEBRA, the state's electronic payment system. Now his plan is to prepare a similar solution for the state budget—how funds are planned and how they are spent, year after year. All the necessary data is there, and this feature will soon appear on Strazha too.

“Imagine what it feels like when you can see the state's payments the way you see your own online banking. Suddenly it tells you that the state isn't something so complicated, it's just bigger and has more money to distribute. I think a possibility like that seriously changes the way we perceive the state. We get inside that black box, we make it transparent, and we can see what's in it,” Blagoslav adds.

Another personal motivation for him is to try to change the way politics is talked about in Bulgaria. “When people talk about it, they usually grumble; they perceive it on a purely emotional level. Nobody thinks rationally, and that's the only sensible approach. I think the problem isn't the people, it's the environment we live in, and that's what we have to change. The natural task of every politician is to do whatever it takes to keep and expand his power.”

That is exactly why, according to Blagoslav, the big problem is that we cannot judge politicians' morality, only how well they can simulate it. And that is where Strazha comes in, as a way to track it.

A Man of the People

“I believe real change happens when a society's culture changes,” says Blagoslav. “The biggest problem in Bulgaria is that people don't believe in anything. Many think the world is driven by some conspiracies, and if you believe everything is rigged, you'll never do anything. The world doesn't ‘work’ like that; a lot of things happen completely chaotically.”

The solution, in his view, lies in the exact opposite approach: giving people ever greater access to impartial information. “Of course, I'm not the first to realize this, but I think Strazha's contribution lies in a different understanding of things. We don't see transparency simply as publishing arrays of data, but as citizens being able to reach them quickly and easily, open them and quickly find what they're looking for.”

In a way, he also sees the venture as an entrepreneurial experience, a business of sorts that relies on a broader mass of users. “People support ideals, unlike companies,” says Blagoslav. “As a programmer, I see things more systematically. I don't talk about morality, about abstract things; I look at how a system works and how it could work better.”

In his view, the key goal of most other NGOs is not to meet people's needs but to win new projects and funding, and that is predetermined by the mechanism through which they exist. Besides, most of them are aimed at academia, at making search convenient for researchers, but not for every voter.

Servant of the People

He does not see it as a problem that when we vote, we always choose the lesser evil. “A person can approve of someone's policies without even liking the politician. If you're one of those people who don't vote, who grumble all the time, for whom nobody is good enough, you're simply not a factor. And then the ‘bad guys’ win. That's why I think we should be more pragmatic and vote on the basis of reason. In the end, the lesser evil is also the greater good. Not choosing is a choice too, but it's usually the worst one, especially in politics.”

One of the big challenges, according to Blagoslav, is to draw the next generations into politics as well. Because it is the young who are always more inclined toward change, toward reform, even toward idealism. “Many people are still looking for a savior; others are still fighting some imaginary communists. I was born in '96; obviously that doesn't work for me. I think: can't we leave these things behind? Stop with the past and finally look to the future?”

There is still a place for left and right in politics today, Blagoslav believes. But to get to that argument, the dialogue first has to move to the next level. “One side says, ‘Stop, you'll break the economy,’ and the other says, ‘Let's make the economy better for everyone.’ And those debates are important; there's room for them. Whereas in Bulgaria the debate goes, ‘You're thugs.’ ‘No, you're thugs.’ And I think: Let's get past this and talk about some real problems? Clearly you're all thugs, but let's at least do something so we can live better.”

It is in an attempt to bring pragmatism back into the process that one of Blagoslav's next big ideas is to let every person use the platform to have a direct line to “their” member of parliament. To ask questions, to share ideas. But for that to happen, pragmatism and dialogue have to return to the political table, and the next National Assemblies have to have longer and more meaningful lives.

O People????

We know the minimum number of swallows it takes to make a spring. It is not one, and it is not two. And yet every step that restores our trust in the system and allows us civic oversight is worthwhile. Especially when it rests on solid foundations and on people who value their independence.

And then… beyond the deeds, all that remains is to dream that more steps like this will help us have a far more meaningful political class, that democracy will stop being just a slogan, and that running the state will be in the hands of the competent and the honest. Yes, all this may sound like a utopia, but it is precisely to utopias like “freedom,” “democracy” and “kindness” that we owe our greatest steps forward as a civilization…