Picture an eight-year-old girl landing in Brussels from Albania, not speaking the language, with no seat at any table in sight. Now picture that same girl walking into the Brussels Parliament as an elected official.

In this episode of Off Script, hosts Naina Madan and Elizabeth Kuiper sit down with Kristela Bytyçi, Brussels Regional Deputy elected in June 2024. From a childhood shaped by migration to nearly a decade inside the European Commission, her path to public life is anything but ordinary.

The conversation covers identity and belonging, what pushed her from the outside of politics to the inside, the backlash women in politics still face, AI and who it leaves behind, and how you stay genuinely good in a system that can wear you down.

Honest, warm, and free of the usual political spin.

From Google, to a global exit, to building Belgium's next founders.

We asked him where AI takes us next, and challenged him on topics he equally pushed back on.

Coming soon to Off Script.

Picture an eight-year-old girl landing in Brussels from Albania, not speaking the language, with no seat at any table in sight. Now picture that same girl walking into the Brussels Parliament as an elected official.

In this episode of Off Script, hosts Naina Madan and Elizabeth Kuiper sit down with Kristela Bytyçi, Brussels Regional Deputy elected in June 2024. From a childhood shaped by migration to nearly a decade inside the European Commission, her path to public life is anything but ordinary.

The conversation covers identity and belonging, what pushed her from the outside of politics to the inside, the backlash women in politics still face, AI and who it leaves behind, and how you stay genuinely good in a system that can wear you down.

Honest, warm, and free of the usual political spin.

Almost everyone thinks they understand climate change. The science has not become less certain, but the conversation around it keeps shifting, and one new player is changing the maths fast: artificial intelligence.

In this episode of Off Script, Naina and Elizabeth are joined by Dr. Audrey-Flore Ngomsik, who holds a PhD in Physical and Analytical Chemistry from Sorbonne University and is the CEO and co-founder of Trianon Scientific Communication. She is President of the Belgian Entreprenoires, Vice-President of Brussels' Climate Experts Committee, and a board member of the European Policy Centre.

Together they get honest about the AI question most people skip. Every query you send draws on a data centre that burns power and drinks water to answer you, and a single request can use roughly ten times the energy of a typical Google search. Yet the same technology is accelerating progress on things like vaccines. Audrey argues that AI is here to stay, so the real work is learning to live with it wisely: choosing smaller, university built tools over the biggest players, funding sustainability instead of endless scale, and remembering that everyday habits like one meat free day a week still add up. She also shares the thinker who shaped her view, Vandana Shiva.

No tidy conclusions. Just better questions.

Listen to our podcast, and keep listening, keep questioning, and keep the conversation human.

That's exactly what we're doing in Season 2 of Off Script.

One thing kept coming back in every conversation we had last season. AI. So this season we stopped avoiding it. The first half, we go straight at big tech. No hype, no fear, just the honest conversation. The second half, we turn to the part nobody checks. What is all of this doing to our wellbeing?

We have five guests lined up to help us answer exactly that.

We're Naina and Elizabeth, and this is Off Script. Curious by nature, human by choice, comfortable with the uncomfortable.

New episodes are coming. Follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you listen, and come find us on Instagram for updates along the way.

Keep listening, keep questioning.

Europe likes to believe race is an American problem. But close to 50 million people of an ethnic minority background live in the EU, nearly 40 percent report facing discrimination, and the institutions that collect data on everything else collect almost nothing on this.

This week we sit down with Ophélie Omnès, a lawyer and lobbyist working at the intersection of EU law and inclusion. Naina comes to this one conflicted, as a woman of colour who questions why race is still the frame we keep returning to, and the conversation goes somewhere honest from there. Why the discomfort. Who benefits from keeping it vague. And whether naming these categories keeps them alive.

Keep listening, keep questioning.

Is Europe losing its voice? For decades it has been building digital markets, creative industries and entrepreneurial ecosystems, and yet in a world dominated by American tech giants and Chinese manufacturing power, a generation of European entrepreneurs is asking whether they need to leave for Silicon Valley or Shanghai to be taken seriously.

In this episode of Off Script, Elizabeth Kuiper and Naina Madan sit down with Alain Heureux, a serial entrepreneur, business angel and innovation leader who has been building companies and ecosystems across Europe since 1984. Alain led the IAB in both Belgium and Europe and today runs the Virtuology Academy, training leaders at companies like Saint Gobain, Etex and BNP Paribas.

Together they ask what European sovereignty really means in practice, whether Europe's diversity is its greatest strength or the thing holding it back, and what it actually takes to keep the continent innovative. Alain makes the case for big European brands reinvesting in their own cities, the way Philips reinvented Eindhoven into a thriving tech hub that now creates thousands of jobs, points to what universities like Munich's TUM are getting right, and argues that we should be teaching entrepreneurship to young people from the start. Underneath it all sits the bigger question: how do we stay human in the age of AI?

His reading recommendation for anyone thinking about where we go next is the work of Yuval Noah Harari, because before we talk about technology, we have to talk about people.

📚 Recommended: Yuval Noah Harari's books 🎙️ Listen and follow Off Script wherever you get your podcasts.

Keep listening, keep questioning.

Fewer than a thousand journalists are meant to keep watch over decisions that shape the lives of 450 million Europeans. So what happens to democracy when trust collapses, disinformation outruns fact, and AI can manufacture a convincing lie in seconds?

In this episode of Off Script, Elizabeth Kuiper and Naina Madan sit down with Lise Witteman — investigative journalist, head of Follow the Money's EU desk, and author of Who's Watching Brussels? Lise has spent years following the money trails most people never see: suitcases of alleged cash, conveniently deleted messages, and the watchdogs who, at the crucial moments, could only watch from inside their cage.

Together they get into the questions that matter right now — why it was small investigative newsrooms, not big tech or legacy media, that held leaders like Orbán to account; how you tell what's true when trust has eroded; whether social media is journalism's greatest tool or its biggest enemy; what the rest of the world does better; and what Europe actually needs to build to own its information landscape, not just its infrastructure.

A sharp, honest conversation about truth, trust, and why independent journalism is the content that gives Europe's democracy its meaning.

📕 Who's Watching Brussels? by Lise Witteman

English → https://shop.ftm.eu/products/whos-watching-brussels-lise-witteman

Nederlands → https://winkel.ftm.nl/products/wie-let-er-op-brussel-lise-witteman

New episodes of Off Script regularly. Keep listening, keep questioning.