Show Notes
Feeling lost in a crumbling world? In Future Discontinuous, hosts Misha Glenny and Eva Konzett explore global challenges with top thinkers. From climate tech to geopolitics, they seek answers to whether humanity can reverse decline or face conflict. Join them to navigate uncharted waters with hope.
Our hosts Misha Glenny is the Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences and one of the BBC’s most distinguished correspondents, as well as the presenter of the highly-praised podcast How to Invent a Country. Eva Konzett is a renowned editor and reporter for Vienna’s leading news magazine, Falter. Future Discontinuous: Smart Talk with Smart People is a co-production of FALTER and the IWM Vienna. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Future Discontinuous
At the turn of the 20th century, Vienna was the capital of an empire in decline. Yet the city was a hotbed of intellectual cross-pollination, spawning new ideas and scientific innovations across fields ranging from physics and economics to psychoanalysis and the arts.
In this episode of Future Discontinuous, hosts Misha Glenny and Eva Konzett are joined by international relations scholar Ayşe Zarakol to rethink where global order comes from—and why it may now be coming apart. Drawing on her book Before the West, Zarakol challenges the familiar story that modern international politics begins with Europe and the Peace of Westphalia. Instead, she traces earlier Eurasian world orders built around empires rather than nation-states, focusing on the Mongol and Chinggisid models of sovereignty that organized power around rulers, households, and fluid realms rather than fixed borders. The discussion explores how these Eastern orders structured political competition across Asia, how their influence reached Europe through rivalry with the Ottomans, and how ideas of centralized authority took hold long before the modern state system.
Few historians illuminate the inner workings of Soviet and Russian foreign policy with the clarity and archival depth of Sergey Radchenko. Drawing on unprecedented access to Communist Party documents, Radchenko has rewritten key chapters of the Cold War, tracing the ambitions, insecurities, and delusions that drove leaders from Stalin to Gorbachev, which still echo in Vladimir Putin’s Russia today.
There is no shortage of critical commentary on the dizzying pace of developments in artificial intelligence. Yet, few do it as astutely as Karen Hao, whose award-winning book, Empire of AI, unveils the inner workings of OpenAI and the tech sector more broadly, shining a light on an industry marked by both grandiose proclamations and notorious secrecy. In this episode of Future Discontinuous, hosts Misha Glenny and Eva Konzett revisit some of Silicon Valley‘s foundational myths and trace the ever-increasing impact of AI on our lives. Together with their guest, they examine how OpenAI has become the multi-billion-dollar empire it is today, discuss the differences between AI doomers and AI boomers, and take stock of the environmental costs of the data centers mushrooming around the globe.
Often considered ‘the value of values,’ freedom is increasingly interpreted in negative terms as the absence of interference, especially by prominent figures on the right. Historian and author Timothy Snyder argues that in order to achieve true freedom, we must ask about the moral and political structures required for human societies to flourish. In this wide-ranging conversation with Snyder, hosts Misha Glenny and Eva Konzett explore topics such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the many shades of freedom, and the importance of the humanities in helping us navigate the present.