The Vietnam Weekly Podcast

Today’s guest is Nguyen Khac Giang, a Visiting Fellow at the Vietnam Studies Programme of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. He’s a repeat guest as well and joined me for a similar year-end conversation in 2024. We covered the administrative restructuring and its broad impacts, increasing private sector involvement in the economy and infrastructure, General Secretary Tô Lâm’s foreign po...

Today’s guest is Chris Tran, a content creator, a Vietnamese language educator, and more. We discussed the storm relief fundraising campaign he is a part of, how such campaigns are perceived, the resilience of people here, his work with The Ba Lô Project supporting Vietnamese deported by the Trump administration, the importance of preserving the Vietnamese language, and more. Donate to typhoon rel...

Today’s guest is Anaïs Ca Dao van Manen, author of ‘ Vietnam: The Cookbook ,’ which features 445 recipes from across Vietnam, including dishes from ethnic minority groups. Phaidon is releasing the book this Wednesday, October 22. She’s also the founder of Yeshi , the casual Taiwanese restaurant with two locations in HCMC that some listeners are likely familiar with. We talked about Anaïs’s culinar...

Today’s guest is Elizabeth Ai, writer and director of the documentary New Wave . We discussed the deeply personal nature of the project; how New Wave music provided a safe space for young people who didn’t consider themselves fully Vietnamese, but also weren’t fully accepted by America; the rewarding challenges of producing the movie through the pandemic and having her first child; and more. Follo...

Today’s guest is Vân Vương, Saigon Children’s Head of Fundraising & Communication and a key organizer of the upcoming U-GO Far: Vietnam - Cambodia Cycle 2025 . The first edition of the ride, held last December in partnership with U-GO and ISF Cambodia , raised over US$50,000 for female students in Cambodia in Vietnam. We discussed the U-Go program and Saigon Children’s involvement, the first U Go...

Today’s guest is Joshua Zukas, a travel writer who has been based in Vietnam for over a decade, writing guidebooks, creating audio tours, and contributing stories to publications like The Economist. His latest Vietnam guidebook, for Bradt Guides, will be published later this month. We discussed the process of writing a comprehensive guidebook on such a fast-changing country; unique aspects of the...

Today’s guest is Daniël Stork, the outgoing Consul General of the Netherlands in Ho Chi Minh City. We discussed the tight economic relationship between Vietnam and the Netherlands, the EU’s largest foreign investor here; the shared water-related challenges the countries face thanks to their river deltas; major takeaways from his four years in the country; reflections on the art and LGBTQ communiti...

Today’s guest is Celine Ventalon , CEO and founder of Émer , the menstrual underwear company based in Ho Chi Minh City. We discussed what menstrual underwear is and how it can benefit both women and sustainability efforts, the reasons why she created Émer, social and workplace stigmas that her team is working to address, how they approach the owners of factories with majority female workforces, wo...

Today’s guest is Rich McClellan , Founder & Principal of RMAC Advisory and former country director of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in Vietnam. He’s an expert in public policy, investment, and economic reform across emerging markets. We covered The Economist ’s much-discussed recent cover story on Vietnam, the country’s international finance center ambitions, Resolution 68 and its foc...

Today’s guest is Michael Rosen, the principal founder of Vietnam’s first independent whisky distillery, Về Để Đi . We discussed Về Để Đi’s background and why he pursued making whisky, what single malt means, the response to building a Vietnamese whisky brand and the growing prominence of brands from other non-traditional markets like Taiwan, the biggest surprises - good and bad - so far, the proce...

Today’s guests are Thomas Jakobsen, Managing Director at Indochina Energy Partners ; and Angus McEwin, Managing Director at Monsoon Carbon . We discussed the key points of revised PDP; progress on transmission and the national grid; LNG development; current issues and opportunities around solar and onshore wind; Renewable Energy Certificates and voluntary carbon credits and their place in Vietnam’...

Today’s guests are Dr. Nguyễn Thùy An, Historian and Labor Education Professional at the University of Maine, specializing in the history of U.S. foreign relations and Vietnamese history; and Dr. Sean Fear, Lecturer in International History at the University of Leeds, whose research focuses on the Republic of Vietnam. We discussed progress on reconciliation between Vietnam and the U.S., which took...

Today’s guest is Minh Nguyễn, curator at Dogma Collection in Ho Chi Minh City. We discussed what Dogma Collection is, the socioeconomic context of socialist realism propaganda created from 1945 to the mid-1980s, the use of digitally rendered versions of this art for the upcoming reunification anniversary, the state of the contemporary art scene in HCMC and Vietnam more broadly, the exhibition ‘ A...

Today’s guest is Robyn McGuckin, Executive Director of P4G , who joined from Hanoi, where the 2025 P4G Vietnam Summit begins this morning. We discussed P4G’s goals and approach, the hurdles faced by many climate tech startups and the so-called ‘valley of death,’ the interface between climate tech startups and government, P4G’s national platforms, their nine partner countries, P4G’s success stories...

Following the announcement of President Donald Trump’s shocking 46% reciprocal tariff rate on Vietnam, I wanted to get a quick initial reaction from return guest Kyle Freeman, a Partner at Dezan Shira & Associates who leads the International Business Advisory team and the firm's North American client services desk in Asia. Kyle was on the show in January when the trade situation between Vietnam an...

Today’s guest is Khang Vu , a visiting scholar at Boston College with a Ph. D. in International Relations with a focus on East Asian Security from Boston College. Vietnamese foreign policy is one of his key areas of expertise. We discussed Vietnam’s success in avoiding Trump tariffs thus far, the planned China-backed Lao Cai-Hai Phong railway, Vietnam’s history of dealing with territorial disputes...

Neal Bermas is founder and chairperson of STREETS International , a social enterprise based in Hoi An that offers a fully-supported 14-month culinary and hospitality training program to disadvantaged and vulnerable youth living in poverty We discussed STREET’s focus on the hospitality sector, its functioning as a social enterprise, the demographics of the young people who receive support and the c...

Today’s guest is Kyle Freeman , a Partner at Dezan Shira & Associates who leads the International Business Advisory team and the firm's North American client services desk in Asia. We discussed the latest tariff threats coming from President-Elect Donald Trump, how Vietnam benefited from U.S. trade policy during his first administration, Vietnam’s exposure to potential trade remedies given its hug...

Today’s guest is Nguyên Lê , an entertainment writer, copy editor, translator, and occasional screenwriter. He’s written for publications including /Film , The Houston Chronicle , Film Threat , and Paste Magazine . He’s also a member of both the Houston Film Critics Society and the Hollywood Critics Association - one of the few Asian members in their ranks. We discussed how Nguyên got into movies,...

Today’s guest is Huê-Tâm Jamme , an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning. Huê-Tâm explores the effects of new technologies on space and society, especially on how people move, work, shop, and socialize in cities - and she has extensive research experience in Vietnam. We discussed her theory of ‘productive frictions’ in urban areas; th...

Today’s returning guest is Nguyen Khac Giang, a Visiting Fellow at the Vietnam Studies Programme under the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. He was on the show in March for a conversation about the anti-corruption campaign, and he’s one of my go-to voices for insight into Vietnamese politics. We discussed the legacy of arguably the most consequential political year in modern Vietnamese h...

Today’s guest is Daniel Nguyen, the founder of Sông Cái Distillery . We discussed his background in community development in the United States and rural Vietnam; Sông Cái’s mission as a case study for adding value to agriculture unique to Vietnam; the relationship between ethnobotany, land value, and forest preservation; creating value for smallholder farmers through grains and botanicals not prev...

Today’s guest is Katie Nelson, a climate change researcher at the International Rice Research Institute - or IRRI - in Hanoi. We discussed the role of agriculture - and particularly rice farming - in Vietnam’s greenhouse gas emissions, the importance of reducing methane emissions to reach international climate change goals, efforts to mitigate methane production in the country’s rice sector, the a...

Today’s guest is Wessie Ling , a Professor of Transcultural Arts and Design at London Metropolitan University and Director of The Centre for Creative Arts, Cultures and Engagement, or CREATURE. We discussed China’s influence on fashion-making in Southeast Asia, from the fabric supply chain through design and sales; how fashion designers in the region feel about this influence and how these sentime...

Today’s guest is Jason Lusk, Managing Partner at Clickable Impact and co-author of the recently released Vietnam Climate Tech Funding Ecosystem Report 2024. We discussed why Clickable Impact and New Energy Nexus created this first-of-its-kind report, what ‘climate tech’ means in the Vietnam context and why funding for it has lagged behind the country’s other tech sectors, areas of climate tech poi...