The Burn Bag Podcast

In this episode of The Burn Bag, Gal Beckerman joins us to explore what it means to be a dissident in an age of conformity, fear, and authoritarian drift. Drawing on themes from his new book, How to Be a Dissident, Beckerman reflects on the people who refuse to betray their conscience — from historic rebels and moral witnesses to ordinary individuals forced to decide whether silence is still an option.

This conversation goes b...

In this episode, The Burn Bag speaks with Dr. Gary Slutkin, a physician, epidemiologist, former World Health Organization official, and founder of Cure Violence Global, about a provocative idea: what if violence is not simply a problem of crime, morality, or politics, but a contagious epidemic?

Drawing on his decades of work fighting tuberculosis, cholera, AIDS, and community violence, Dr. Slutkin explains how violence spreads throu...

In this episode of The Burn Bag Podcast, A’ndre Gonawela sits down with Zhengyu Huang — former President of the Committee of 100 and author of Rethinking China — to examine the assumptions driving U.S. policy toward China.

The conversation covers U.S.-China competition across trade, technology, national security, and Taiwan, while examining where current policy debates may benefit from what Zhengyu believes are mor...

For decades, wars targeted oil fields, pipelines, ports, and power grids. But in March 2026, that logic appeared to change when Iranian strikes reportedly targeted commercial cloud infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, damaging data center facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and disrupting digital services used by millions.

What happens when data centers become wartime targets? How vulnerable is the infrastructure power...

As geopolitical tensions spill into the Indian Ocean, smaller states in South Asia are finding themselves on the frontlines of crises they did not choose. From the sinking of an Iranian vessel off Sri Lanka’s coast to mounting pressure from major powers and a region-wide scramble for energy, countries like Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bangladesh, and Nepal are navigating an increasingly complex strategic environment.

In this episo...

In this episode of the Burn Bag Podcast, A'ndre Gonawela is joined by Mira Rapp-Hooper, a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and former Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director at National Security Council, to break down the structural forces reshaping the global order.

Rapp-Hooper explains how the international system is undergoing a fundamental transition driven not just by political leaders like Don...

Who is Mojtaba Khamenei — Iran's new Supreme Leader? Who was the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?

In this episode of the Burn Bag Podcast, A’ndre Gonawela is joined by Vali Nasr, the Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and one of the leading scholars of Iranian politics and Shia leadership structures.

Nasr breaks down the power structure of the Islamic Republic following ...

As the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran escalates following the February 28 strikes, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper joined A'ndre for a quick chat to assess how the conflict is unfolding and what may come next. Esper discusses how President Donald Trump and his national security team may be evaluating the campaign, the strategic objectives behind the strikes on Iran’s leadership and military infras...

In this episode of The Burn Bag, A’ndre Gonawela sits down with former NSC Senior Director Javed Ali to unpack the rapidly escalating crisis between the United States, Israel, and Iran following the February 28 strikes that reportedly killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the ongoing exchanges of fire.

They examine how Tehran is likely interpreting the strikes, why this moment differs from past U.S.–Iran flar...

Iran is at a critical juncture as it faces a wave of nationwide protests driven by economic strain, political frustration, and societal exhaustion. In this episode of The Burn Bag, A'ndre Gonawela is joined by Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, to explore the internal fractures within Iran's regime and the potential for change.

As tensions between Washington and Tehran escalate, the risk of military confront...

Syria is at a pivotal moment. After the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the country’s new leadership under President Ahmed al-Sharaa is working to reunify a fractured state — and the biggest test is unfolding in the northeast, where the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have operated autonomously for nearly a decade.

In recent weeks, a fragile ceasefire and phased integration agreement has put Syrian Interior Ministry ...

In this episode of The Burn Bag, A’ndre Gonawela is joined by Dr. Iulia Joja, Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute, to examine Russia’s strategy in the Middle East in 2026 following major setbacks in Syria and Iran. The conversation breaks down how Moscow is adapting after the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Iran’s military losses and internal unrest, and growing U.S. pressure across the reg...

In Part Two of this conversation on Venezuela, The Burn Bag turns to the present — and the shockwaves following U.S. strikes and the arrest of Nicolás Maduro.

Host A’ndre Gonawela is joined again by Tony Frangie Mawad, a Venezuela-based journalist and political scientist, to examine how the United States’ intervention reshaped Venezuela’s political landscape overnight. The conversation explores how power is b...

In this episode of The Burn Bag, host A’ndre Gonawela is joined by Tony Frangie Mawad, a Venezuela-based journalist and political scientist, to unpack how Venezuela reached its current moment. Long before U.S. strikes and regime collapse, Venezuela’s trajectory was shaped by the rise of Hugo Chávez, the ideology of Chavismo, and the steady erosion of democratic institutions under both Chávez and his successor Nicolás Ma...

In the final episode of The Nuclear Threshold, A’ndre speaks with Alexandra Bell, President & CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and one of the leading U.S. diplomats behind recent efforts to strengthen arms control and reduce nuclear risks. Building on the technical and command-and-control foundations laid by Laura Grego and Steve Fetter, this conversation shifts to the political and diplomatic fault lines that...

In the second installment of The Nuclear Threshold mini-series, we turn from missile defense to the human side of nuclear risk — the people, protocols, and split-second judgments that determine whether nuclear weapons are ever used. While deterrence is often framed as a stable system, history tells a far messier story: false alarms, malfunctioning sensors, training tapes mistaken for real attacks, and leaders operating under ...

The Nuclear Threshold is a three-part Burn Bag mini-series exploring how deterrence, defense, and diplomacy shape nuclear risk in the 21st century. Across three conversations with leading experts, we examine why technological optimism often outpaces reality, how fragile human systems sustain deterrence, and whether diplomacy can still prevent catastrophe in an increasingly unstable world.

In this first episode, astrophysicist Dr. La...

As the fragile Gaza ceasefire wavers amid renewed airstrikes and mutual accusations of violations, President Donald Trump insists that “nothing will jeopardize” the truce his administration brokered with Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey. Yet the violence on the ground has cast doubt on whether this agreement marks a turning point or just another pause in a long and bitter conflict. To understand what’s at stake, The Burn ...

RE-RELEASE: This episode was originally released in February 2025.

In this episode, Dr. Anthony Fauci joins A'ndre for an in-depth conversation about his decades-long career in public health and his experiences leading the U.S. response to some of the world’s most pressing infectious disease challenges. Dr. Fauci reflects on his early work during the HIV/AIDS crisis, the evolution of treatments that saved millions of lives, an...