Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Podcasting since 2021 • 372 episodes
Varn Vlog
Latest Episodes
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 sharpest tools—habitus, field, cultural capit...
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Season 2
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Episode 53
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2:50:46
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 ask what LLMs really do, why they feel auth...
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Season 2
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Episode 52
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2:02:53
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 by a new insurgent fraction of capital—tech o...
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Season 2
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Episode 51
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2:02:59
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, Americ...
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Season 2
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Episode 50
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1:30:50
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 baked into the system. With Dillion from Unt...
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Season 2
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Episode 49
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1:50:25
Fan Mail
If you wish to understand Bataille in the Post Structuralist context, refer to Rosalind Krauss’ definitive analysis of Bataille, Documents and Surrealist photography, The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press).
San Francisco, California
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