Varn Vlog

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 historian-journalist Joe Payne, we map how three missions became a battleground for emancipation, how labor withdrawal and horse control shattered the mission economy, and why a four-pound cannon and a privateer raid still echo through California’s historical memory.We zoom out to the age of independence to read Alta California against Mexican constitutional turmoil, counter-revolution, and the casta system that structured everyday power. You’ll hear how Franciscans trained militias they couldn’t control, why disease and livestock were imperial weapons, and how Chumash technology—canoes, acorn processing, shell currency—supported dense settlements and regional politics that Spanish officials struggled to categorize but quietly feared. The story doesn’t stop at the gates: inland flight, alliances, and repeated uprisings helped doom the mission system itself.We also confront how the past is staged. Rebuilt missions and tidy exhibits often freeze the Chumash at contact and sideline their leadership, while modern policy offers “sanctuaries” offshore and roadblocks on land. Joe details present-day sovereignty fights, internal debates over identity, and the promise of Chumash-run cultural centers that tell a living story in their own voice. Along the way, we question European categories like nation and state, challenge simplistic gender readings, and make room for complexity without losing the plot: indigenous history is ongoing, and this revolution still speaks to power, place, and who gets to define both.If this conversation expands your map of California, share it with a friend, subscribe for more deep dives, and leave a review telling us the biggest myth you were taught about the mission era.Send us a text Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to BitterlakeSupport the showCrew:Host: C. Derick VarnIntro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.Intro Video Design: Jason MylesArt Design: Corn and C. Derick VarnLinks and Social Media:twitter: @varnvlogblue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.socialYou can find the additional streams on YoutubeCurrent Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian

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 capital, symbolic power—and use them to expose how universities, media, and taste quietly reproduce class while insisting it’s all about talent. From Homo Academicus to Distinction to the Algeria studies, we clear up the biggest misconceptions: cultural capital is more than style, symbolic violence is more than rude behavior, and habitus is embodied history adapting to shifting fields.Our conversation travels through the crisis of the scholarly habitus—leisure packaged as labor, prestige buffered by adjunct exploitation—and the awkward truth that DEI can deepen stratification when it diverts resources and legitimizes existing hierarchies. We connect Bourdieu’s hysteresis to today’s culture wars: fields change fast, bodies adapt slow, and the resulting frustration feeds irrationalism. His study of Heidegger becomes a cautionary tale about stalled elites and seductive anti‑rational philosophies. Meanwhile the working class loses a stable habitus in a gigged‑out economy, making organizing harder and resentment easier to weaponize.We balance Bourdieu with a Marxist insistence on production and power. The best use of his map is practical: reveal the hidden rules, rebuild class independence, and design para‑academic and organizing projects that out‑perform the academy on rigor and relevance. Expect clear definitions, concrete examples, and straight talk on credentialism, elite infighting dressed as populism, and why making class legible again is the first step toward changing material life. If you’ve ever felt the system deny its own history while sorting your future, this conversation will give you language—and a plan—to push back.If this resonates, follow the show, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review with the sharpest insight you took away. Where do you see symbolic power at work today?Send us a text Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to BitterlakeSupport the showCrew:Host: C. Derick VarnIntro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.Intro Video Design: Jason MylesArt Design: Corn and C. Derick VarnLinks and Social Media:twitter: @varnvlogblue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.socialYou can find the additional streams on YoutubeCurrent Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian

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 authoritative, and where their limits begin. Along the way, we explore how humans negotiate meaning in real time while models operate in a frozen field of correlations, why that matters for education and writing, and how the surveillance stack turns our lives into tidy sequences for machines to memorize.Together with our guest, we unpack grid cells, place cells, and the hippocampus as a vivid analogy for sequence modeling. Then we press on the big claims: can a next-token engine think, or does it merely interpolate? Why do these models stumble on math unless we bolt on tools? And how did the training corpus—heavy with ad copy, business speak, and now model-made text—nudge outputs toward a bland, consensus voice that can be tuned to institutional aims?None of this unfolds in a vacuum. We follow the money to examine power costs, chip monopolies, and a rush to constant capital that favors server farms over genuine productivity gains. The result looks like a bubble stitched to state-capital priorities and fragile cloud infrastructure, not an inevitable march toward “superintelligence.” If planning is back on the table, we argue it needs new objectives: replace the one-size value function with interpretable quotas for health, learning, resilience, and ecological limits, and design cybernetic feedback that respects agency instead of erasing it.Curious about a future where meaning stays alive and tools stay honest? Listen, share with a friend who’s wrestling with AI’s promises and pitfalls, and leave a review to tell us where you stand.Send us a text Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to BitterlakeSupport the showCrew:Host: C. Derick VarnIntro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.Intro Video Design: Jason MylesArt Design: Corn and C. Derick VarnLinks and Social Media:twitter: @varnvlogblue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.socialYou can find the additional streams on YoutubeCurrent Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian

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 oligarchs, private equity, and venture investors—who are eager to smash norms, rewrite rules, and route public money through tariffs, defense contracts, and boutique industrial policy. Their rise squeezes out the old asset-management establishment, pushes it toward the Democrats, and locks the opposition into a politics of “normality” that cannot mobilize the base or contest power.We trace the media’s role in this shift: a long slide from public-service reporting to algorithmic engagement that rewards emotional spikes and partisan framing. Biden’s term tried to stabilize the system with CHIPS, infrastructure, and managed globalization, but even light-touch AI regulation, the SVB collapse, and worker pushback inside tech drove Valley elites rightward. Meanwhile, the stock market’s euphoria masks a real economy straining under a profitability crisis. AI’s massive data-center build may juice capex and energy demand, but unless it raises productivity broadly, we’re sitting on a bubble that deepens monopoly dynamics without delivering shared growth.Zooming out, we argue we’re living through a new state-capitalist era with less capacity: the government takes bigger stakes, centralizes power in the executive, and leans on tariffs as revenue, even as planning expertise and administrative muscle erode. The postwar managerial state—Keynesian levers, technocratic confidence, public legitimacy—is gone. That’s why policy-first left populism keeps hitting a wall. Without a living, rooted class subject, electoral surges can’t endure. We sketch a different route: rebuild working-class civil society—mutual aid, cultural institutions, education, and cross-sector networks that bridge immigrants, service workers, industrial remnants, and professionals. Strategy begins where the regime is weakest: in the social substrate it can’t manage or monetize.Hear candid takes on the investor realignment behind Trumpism, the AI bubble loop, why Democrats are structurally stuck, and how to make organizing matter when the state can’t—or won’t—govern for the whole. If this resonates, share it with a friend, subscribe, and leave a review to help others find the show.Send us a text Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to BitterlakeSupport the showCrew:Host: C. Derick VarnIntro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.Intro Video Design: Jason MylesArt Design: Corn and C. Derick VarnLinks and Social Media:twitter: @varnvlogblue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.socialYou can find the additional streams on YoutubeCurrent Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian

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 make a sharper case: we’re living through total capitalism’s decay, not a return to lords and serfs. That lens helps make sense of platform tolls, anti-market monopolies, surveillance, and institutional rot without pretending we’ve exited capitalism’s basic relations of production.We trace why the feudal story resonates—unfreedom feels real—then test it against history. Feudalism meant manorial production, oath-bound sovereignty, and overlapping legal orders; our world runs on consolidated states, global supply chains, and platform intermediaries that convert risk into reliable rents. The better comparison is peripherization: practices once common in the periphery now shape the core, from precarious work to state-enabled accumulation. That shift helps explain why labor leverage has collapsed despite rising public sympathy: dispersed service shops, automated production, and logistics-dependence blunt traditional organizing power.China enters as Rorschach test: state capitalism, social credit, and surveillance make the feudal label tempting, yet the core logic remains capitalist, steered by growth imperatives and legitimacy management. We explore AI’s forked path—job-displacing windfall or costly stagnation—and why care-economy fixes won’t build a livable future on their own. If everyone secretly wants social democracy back, we ask what could replace the vanished conditions that once made it possible.The conversation ends with “dark hope.” Drop the costume drama, name the system we have, and fight for a directly political project that builds capacity: housing, grids, industry, and public institutions that actually work. Speak against oligarchy in terms a broad public can hear. If you’re ready to trade clever metaphors for concrete ambition, hit play, share with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show.Send us a text Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to BitterlakeSupport the showCrew:Host: C. Derick VarnIntro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.Intro Video Design: Jason MylesArt Design: Corn and C. Derick VarnLinks and Social Media:twitter: @varnvlogblue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.socialYou can find the additional streams on YoutubeCurrent Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon, Buddy Roark, Daniel Petrovic,Julian