The HBS co-hosts are diligently at work prepping for Season 16 so, in the meantime, enjoy this "Minibar" episode from Jennifer Kling explaining the merits and demerits of employing Hanlon's Razor in our everyday lives! Full episode notes available at this link : https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/hanlons-razor --------------------- SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes! SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here ! (Or by contributing one-time donations here...
Jun 06, 2026•17 min•Season 15Ep. 1
While our co-hosts are on a short break between seasons, enjoy this REPLAY episode of one of our favorite conversations from Season 15 with Dr. Robert T. Valgenti , philosopher and professor at the Culinary Institute of America , who dropped by the hotel bar to chat with us about food, the “gastronomic event,” the ethics and politics of cooking and eating, and what it means to be human. Bon appétit! Full episode notes available at this link : https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/food ------------...
May 29, 2026•1 hr 3 min
What does it mean to say that visibility is a trap? Why does the simple awareness that we might be watched work on us so effectively that we end up policing ourselves better than any guard ever could? And if disciplinary power now operates through every camera in every pocket and every satellite overhead, is there anywhere left that isn't already inside the panopticon? For the final episode of Season 15, we close out the season with a deep dive into Michel Foucault's "Panopticism" from Disciplin...
May 22, 2026•58 min•Season 15Ep. 225
Somewhere in the last forty years, quantification stopped being one tool of economic governance among others and became the whole operating system. Inside the firm, shareholder value crowded out almost every other account of what a company was supposed to be for. In macroeconomic debate, GDP figures got promoted from diagnostic instrument to final verdict on whether things were going well (never mind what was happening to the people who couldn't afford the rent). Public agencies and universities...
May 15, 2026•57 min•Season 15Ep. 224
So what exactly is an asshole? Is it a settled character type, or just a way of behaving that anyone might fall into on a bad day? Why does asshole behavior provoke us as it does, and why does it seem so much harder to resist now than it once was? If assholes are produced by social conditions (and they appear to be), what conditions produce them, and which ones might produce fewer? This episode takes Aaron James's 2012 bestseller, Assholes: A Theory , as its central provocation. James defines th...
May 08, 2026•59 min•Season 15Ep. 223
What happens to a skill when you stop needing it? In this episode, we're talking about the quiet, subtle erosion that happens when technology simply takes over a task and the human capacity for it begins, almost imperceptibly, to fade. This is de-skilling: a phenomenon with deep roots in the history of labor and capitalism, newly urgent in an age of GPS, generative AI, and algorithmic everything. The questions de-skilling raises run deeper than nostalgia for shop class or handwriting. What exact...
May 01, 2026•1 hr 1 min•Season 15Ep. 222
Few topics generate more heat and less light than war crimes — and few topics deserve more careful philosophical attention right now. When a sitting American president has publicly threatened to destroy an entire civilization in a social media post and the language of "domestic terrorism" is being stretched to cover political opponents, the legal and moral categories we use to talk about what's permissible in war are under extraordinary pressure. Today we're asking: what counts as a war crime, w...
Apr 24, 2026•55 min•Season 15Ep. 221
Violence is everywhere right now... or is it? When you press people to define "violence," you'll often find that their grasp on the concept is slippery at best. We think we know what it means, but that certainty tends to evaporate the moment someone asks whether a slur counts as violence, or a system that denies you healthcare until you die counts as violence, or refusing to recognize someone's existence does. A lot of our most heated disagreements about violence happen prior to the moral disagr...
Apr 17, 2026•1 hr 6 min•Season 15Ep. 220
Philosophy has always been drawn to the question of what's possible, what could be, what might have been, and what we might yet become. In a political moment when the distance between the world as it is and the world as we want it to be feels especially stark, the tools philosophers use to navigate that gap — thought experiments, counterfactuals, ideal theory, and fiction — have never felt more urgent or more contested. Whether we're arguing about moral responsibility, political justice, or the ...
Apr 10, 2026•52 min•Season 15Ep. 219
The word "fascism" gets thrown around a lot these days, sometimes so freely that it starts to lose its edge. But what would it actually mean to develop a philosophy of anti-fascism, a sustained, rigorous intellectual framework for understanding how fascism takes hold and what might inoculate us against it? That question feels newly urgent in a political moment when the ideological infrastructure of authoritarianism is being actively rebuilt, and when the thinkers who laid the groundwork for that...
Apr 05, 2026•57 min•Season 15Ep. 218
We are living through a peculiar moment in the long, complicated history of humans and mind-altering substances. After decades of prohibition and stigma, psychedelics have staged a remarkable comeback — not just in underground culture, but in university laboratories, clinical trials, and mainstream news. Researchers are exploring psilocybin and MDMA as treatments for depression and PTSD, and a growing number of philosophers are asking whether the altered states these substances produce might tel...
Mar 15, 2026•1 hr•Season 15Ep. 217
Philosophers have had many conceptions of the future–metaphysical, eschatological, ontotheological, dialectical, fatalistic, idealist, materialist, and more–and these in turn have been central to discussions of free will and determinism, freedom and constraint, hope and despair. But our guest Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School, is against all of them! For him, what emerges from Heidegger’s thinking of ecstatic temporality is a radical focus on our historicity, ...
Mar 07, 2026•1 hr 1 min•Season 15Ep. 216
There have been many reports in the last several years of a growing trend of estranged families in the United States. For those who make the decision to go "no contact" (or "low contact") with their family members, the response from non-family members can be a mixed bag of support and judgment... often independent of the person's reasons for making that choice. What’s going on with the contemporary phenomenon of people going low or no contact with their family members? Is such a decision morally...
Feb 27, 2026•56 min•Season 15Ep. 215
This week, our co-hosts are joined at the bar by Dr. Robert T. Valgenti , philosopher and professor at the Culinary Institute of America to talk about food, the “gastronomic event,” the ethics and politics of cooking and eating, and what it means to be human. Full episode notes available at this link : https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/food --------------------- SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes! SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here ! (Or by cont...
Feb 20, 2026•1 hr 3 min•Season 15Ep. 214
Anonymity is usually sold as a kind of freedom: the ability to speak without fear, to move through public space without being tracked, to test ideas and identities without immediate consequences. In this episode of Hotel Bar Sessions , the co-hosts pull up stools to ask whether anonymity actually liberates—or whether it more often dissolves responsibility. Starting with Plato’s Ring of Gyges (and the old moral stress test, what would you do if no one could see you? ), the conversation traces a f...
Feb 13, 2026•1 hr 4 min•Season 15Ep. 213
Catastrophe usually sounds like a synonym for disaster—but in this episode, it’s treated as a philosophical concept: a “downturn” that scrambles a world’s legibility and forces a basic question— what can still be believed now? Starting from Greek tragedy (where catastrophe names a plot’s turning point), the conversation traces how ruptures—ancient, modern, natural, political—expose finitude and test the limits (and complicities) of inherited frameworks of reason. From there, the episode pivots i...
Jan 30, 2026•57 min•Season 15Ep. 212
What do we mean when we talk about intelligence —and who, or what, gets counted as intelligent in the first place? In this episode of Hotel Bar Sessions , our co-hosts pull up stools at the bar to tackle the idea of intelligence(s) as a plural, contested, and deeply political concept. Starting from a working definition of intelligence as the capacity to navigate a domain toward ends, the conversation quickly fans out: human intelligence, non-human animal intelligence, machine intelligence, and e...
Jan 23, 2026•1 hr•Season 15Ep. 211
Why do AI's fabricated memories "feel" so true? Hotel Bar Sessions is currently between seasons and while our co-hosts are hard at work researching and recording next season's episodes, we don't want to leave our listeners without content! So, as we have in the past, we've given each co-host the opportunity to record a "Minibar" episode-- think of it as a shorter version of our regular conversations, only this time the co-host is stuck inside their hotel room with whatever is left in the minibar...
Jan 16, 2026•34 min•Season 14Ep. 3
What happens when we follow the letter of the law, while refusing to cooperate with its spirit? Hotel Bar Sessions is currently between seasons and while our co-hosts are hard at work researching and recording next season's episodes, we don't want to leave our listeners without content! So, as we have in the past, we've given each co-host the opportunity to record a "Minibar" episode-- think of it as a shorter version of our regular conversations, only this time the co-host is stuck inside their...
Jan 09, 2026•12 min•Season 14Ep. 2
What can the body, in pain, teach us about the hilarity of our own finitude? Hotel Bar Sessions is currently between seasons and while our co-hosts are hard at work researching and recording next season's episodes, we don't want to leave our listeners without content! So, as we have in the past, we've given each co-host the opportunity to record a "Minibar" episode-- think of it as a shorter version of our regular conversations, only this time the co-host is stuck inside their hotel room with wh...
Jan 02, 2026•13 min•Season 14Ep. 1
How might "oppression" be best understood as a "cage"? This week the HBS co-hosts take a deep dive into a true classic of feminist philosophy: Marilyn Frye’s 1983 article “ Oppression .” We unpack Frye’s understanding of oppression and argue about some of Frye’s more infamous examples, such as her claim that men holding doors open for women is sexist. Is she really correct that oppression can occur in the absence of the intent to oppress? Or do people have to know what they’re doing to commit op...
Dec 26, 2025•55 min•Season 14Ep. 210
"Nostalgia" is a portmanteau coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer , combining the Greek nostros (homecoming) and algos (pain, ache). Hofer was a medical student, and he invented this term to describe a kind of melancholia, a somewhat depressive state–- and so, from its inception, "nostalgia" was viewed as a mood disorder. For the Romantics, it was a sentimentality for the past, the good old days of yore, combining the sadness of loss with a joy that that loss is not complete or total. Nostalgia is a...
Dec 19, 2025•53 min•Season 14Ep. 209
Bad arguments are nothing new, so why does it appear as if they have become so pervasive in public discourse? When we watch so-called "debate" videos with titles like "Conservative professor DESTROYS woke student" or "Liberal pundit OWNS Conservative Senator," are we actually watching a rational debate? Is anyone learning anything in these exchanges? Or, as is most likely, are we watching the performance of a well-reasoned debate, absent any concern for the truth whatsoever? The ancient Greeks h...
Dec 12, 2025•56 min•Season 14Ep. 208
This week’s episode takes Cory Doctorow’s term “enshittification” and uses it as a diagnostic for late-capitalist life, not just for tech platforms but for democracy, higher education, and work more broadly. Our co-hosts unpack Doctorow’s three-stage model—platforms start out good to users, then pivot to serving business customers, and finally squeeze both users and customers to extract maximum value for shareholders—and argue about whether this is really a new “platform logic” or just old-schoo...
Dec 05, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Season 14Ep. 207
Many of us think of resistance as "protest," communicative acts aimed at fighting injustice, and done with others in public. But what happens when that kind of resistance isn’t possible or safe? When showing up, or waving a sign, or making a public speech might get you jailed, or silenced, or disappeared? Is it possible to resist oppression without following Western scripts surrounding protest? This week, we are joined by guest Dr. Tamara Fakhoury (University of Minnesota) to talk about her conc...
Nov 28, 2025•57 min•Season 14Ep. 206
What does it mean to be “well-adjusted” in a society that might itself be profoundly unwell? And when we use therapy-speak to explain everything from bad relationships to bad politics, do we risk losing sight of moral responsibility for bad behavior altogether? Is self-knowledge even possible in a world built on historical and political denial? Grab a drink, get comfortable, and join us for a little collective introspection — no copay required! Full episode notes available at this link : https:/...
Nov 21, 2025•58 min•Season 14Ep. 205
This week’s episode of Hotel Bar Sessions brings political theorist Laura K. Field (author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right ) into the bar to talk about the intellectuals cranking the rhetoric up to eleven while insisting they’re just “doing Great Books.” We follow the trail from Straussian seminar rooms and conservative think tanks to Trump rallies and “no kings” protests, asking what happens when a self-styled aristocracy of the mind decides liberal democracy is played out. F...
Nov 14, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Season 14Ep. 204
The imagination has regularly been subordinated to so-called "rational" or "scientific" models of thought. This week, we're joined by Stephen T. Asma (Columbia College, Chicago), who argues that imagination has deep, perhaps pre-linguistic, roots that ought to be recovered. What if we re-centered the powers of imagination, rooted in imagistic thinking and bodily gestures (like dance), instead of dismissing them as mere "fancy"? Drawing on the esoteric tradition, Asma leads us through an interest...
Nov 07, 2025•58 min•Season 14Ep. 203
This week’s episode of Hotel Bar Sessions on the topic of comedy is a gut buster, not least because one of your co-hosts pretends to be a stand-up comedian at night-- the only job for a philosopher that pays less than being an adjunct professor! Comedy is a historically and philosophically rich topic, starting with primitive hominids drawing penises on cave walls. Our cohosts' begin with Plato, then try to anticipate what Aristotle might have said about comedy (it would not have been funny!), be...
Oct 31, 2025•1 hr•Season 14Ep. 202
How do we choose the "hills" that we're willing to die on? Are we actually willing to DIE on them? If not, what would it take to convince us to climb back down the hill and compromise? This week , our co-hosts are digging deep into the question of our "deepest commitments," trying to find where there is room for compromise, and where the lines we draw are ultimately un-crossable. Full episode notes available at this link : https://hotelbarpodcast.com/episode-201-the-hills-we-die-on -------------...
Oct 24, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Season 14Ep. 201
