Varn Vlog Podcast
1) Socialism, Anti-Politics, And Power Today with Joseph Sciortino
A lot of people call it populism, but the engine driving today’s politics is anti-politics: the organized channeling of frustration without a stable program for governing. Joseph Sciortino of the Rabb...Show More
2) Rewriting The Chumash War with Joe Payne
A “small revolt” doesn’t topple an institution—people do. We dive into the 1824 Chumash uprising and show why it belongs with the era’s great revolutions, not the margins of a mission field trip. With...Show More
3) Pierre Bourdieu, Academic Power, And Class Reproduction with Daniel Tutt
In Part 2 of our series on intellectualls, Daniel Tutt returns to talk Bourdieu. Start with the feeling that “merit” is natural and fair—and then watch it fall apart. We take Pierre Bourdieu’s sharpe...Show More
4) Language, Brains, And The AI Mirage with Eli Sennesh
What if today’s most powerful AI systems are closer to a free-floating hippocampus than to a thinking mind? We dive into the messy borderlands between neuroscience, semiotics, and political economy to...Show More
5) Jamie Merchant on the Many, Many Current Crises
Jamie Merchant, the author of Endgame, joins us to talk about the current chaos. Start with the spectacle and you miss the structure. We step past the daily outrage to map Trumpism as a regime built b...Show More
6) Rent-Seeking, Platforms, And The Myth Of Techno-Feudalism with Alex Hochuli
What if the “techno-feudalism” boom is a symptom of our confusion rather than a diagnosis of the age? We sit down with Alex Hochuli (Bungacast, American Affairs) to interrogate the feudal metaphor and...Show More
Rent-Seeking, Platforms, And The Myth Of Techno-Feudalism with Alex Hochuli
1:30:50 | Dec 22nd, 2025
7) Liberalism At The Brink with Dillion From Untrodden Podcast
Politics feels louder than ever and somehow emptier too. We open the hood on liberalism—what it claims to be, how it actually behaves, and why Trump’s rise didn’t just bend norms but exposed tensions ...Show More
8) Why Capitalism’s “Mute Compulsion” Isn’t The Whole Story with Nicolas D. Villarreal
Start with a simple question: if investment drives productivity and growth, what happens to a society that keeps choosing consumption over capacity? We trace a straight line from Marx’s core mechanics...Show More
Why Capitalism’s “Mute Compulsion” Isn’t The Whole Story with Nicolas D. Villarreal
2:28:08 | Dec 11th, 2025
9) America’s Battle Over The Intellectual with Daniel Tutt
What if America’s “anti-intellectualism” isn’t a decline in smarts but a culture built to distrust theory? We trace that paradox from Puritan moral rigor and pragmatist “cash value” truths to the post...Show More
10) Why Easy Answers Fail: From Riots To Reproduction And What Comes Next with Heatwave Magazine
The hardest problems don’t fit into a slogan. We invited the editors behind Heatwave Magazine to unpack why national fixes can’t solve planetary crises, why tariffs and “reindustrialization” won’t res...Show More