PODCAST · education
Hotel Bar Sessions
by Leigh M. Johnson, Jennifer Kling, Bob Vallier
A podcast where the real philosophy happens.
Episodes
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MINIBAR: AI's Alien Mind (with Leigh M. Johnson)
In early September, OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra. Most of the headlines were about benchmarks and the model's unsettling talent for finding and exploiting security flaws on its own. A smaller story got far less attention. Days before its launch,The Information reported that Astra uses a technique...
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MINIBAR: Derrida's First Lecture Series (with Bob Vallier)
In this very special "Minibar" episode of Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, co-host Bob Vallier gives us both a sneak peak into and the historical context surrounding the recent English translation (by Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault) of Jacques Derrida's very first lecture series from academic…
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David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water"
For the final "deep dive" of Season 16, the HBS co-hosts have selected an unusual text to ground our conversation, namely, a commencement speech by novelist David Foster Wallace entitled "This is Water" (delivered at Kenyon College in 2005). In it, Wallace provides a uncannily accurate (if...
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Boredom
We've talked about the attention economy more than once on this podcast, and the diagnosis hasn't changed: nearly everything around us is built to capture our attention and then sell it. What we haven't asked is what all that scrambling is supposed to be rescuing us from. The answer, it turns…
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Sikh Ethics (wtih Keshav Singh)
Over the past several decades, Anglophone philosophy has been trying to remember that it wasn't born in Athens. Syllabi now include Confucius and the Buddha, journals run special issues on Africana and Indigenous thought, and "global philosophy" has become a recognized field. Yet, one of the...
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Confidence Men (with Landon Frim)
Con men: From the sophists of ancient greece to the current grifter in chief, philosophy has been at odds with them for millennia, and given their success, it seems like it’s been a losing battle. Some of their success is because, as one famous grifter remarked, there’s a sucker born every…
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Fashion
You are wearing an outfit right now. Maybe you chose it deliberately this morning, or maybe you grabbed it off the floor, but either way it is currently saying things about your class, your gender, your politics, your relationship to the very idea of caring how you look. Roland Barthes argued…
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Betrayal
There are plenty of ready-to-hand moral sanctions for lies told and promises broken. We know how those wrongs work, we know what the apologies sound like, and we know, more or less, how to move on from them. Betrayal is different. Ask anyone who has been betrayed and they'll tell you: the apology...
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The Q Word
At the beginning of April, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed from Ben Appel titled "I'm Gay, but That Doesn't Make Me Queer." On the last day of Pride Month 2026, the New York Times followed with an op-ed by Matthew Vines titled "I'm Gay, Not Queer. It Matters." Both were written by…
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Failure
We live in an age with a curiously cheerful relationship to failure. But that optimism was built for a world that no longer quite exists. For three generations now, doing everything right-- getting an education, holding down a full-time job, following the sensible plan-- has stopped reliably…
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Multi/Race/Less/Ness (with Jon Ivan Gill)
Our guest for this episode, Jon Ivan Gill (Gustavus Adolphus College), argues in his recent book, Multi/Race/Less/Ness (Bloomsbury, 2025) that race is trauma. Not that race "causes" trauma, but rather that the assignment of metaphysically fixed and static racial categories to people is itself a...
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Trust
Surveys say we're living through a "trust crisis," and some version of that has been true since at least the '70s. Confidence in the press, in the courts, in public health agencies, in elected officials, in one another has been down, and still going down. At this point, mistrust reads as our...
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The Right to Die
When Leigh's cat Sugar was dying of congestive heart failure, the vet's office offered her something almost no human being will ever be offered: the chance to hold her, to tell her she was loved and thank her, and to be present while a doctor helped her die without pain, without fear, and not...
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Rules
What's the difference between a rule that describes the world and one that governs it? Leigh, Jen, and Bob start with a complaint about Robert's Rules of Order and end up in the deep end: the categorical imperative, the social contract, the rule of law, and what it would mean to live without any...
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Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Sense (with Nathan Widder)
Gilles Deleuze is multifaceted and his works seemingly heteroclite, which has made it difficult to assess what a “Deleuzian” philosophy may be, even if there are a host of philosophical concepts that bear his signature. Most secondary works on him tend to approach him through one of his works on...
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Disorienting Cisgender (with Perry Zurn)
We are living through the most intense public argument about gender in living memory, and somehow managing to conduct it without agreeing on what the most basic terms mean. The word cisgender — or just cis — is either standard vocabulary on HR onboarding documents and medical intake forms or,...
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Sports
Sports are one of the few remaining arenas of public life where tens of millions of people voluntarily agree to care about the same thing at the same time. As the World Cup reminds us every four years, sports can build identities, drive economies, organize civic loyalties, and transform old...
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MINIBAR: Mythos, Fable, Farce (with Leigh M. Johnson)
In the spring of 2026, Anthropic released to the public what it described as its most capable AI model to date... and then the U.S. government shut it down seventy-two hours later. That subsequent sequence of events, both strange and almost operatic in its timing, is the kind of thing we might...
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MINIBAR: Art and Phenomenology (with Bob Vallier)
We tend to think of art as something you look at — a canvas on a wall, an object behind velvet rope, something that holds still while you decide what you think of it. But a tradition in contemporary art has spent the better part of sixty years insisting that this picture is wrong. The artwork…
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MINIBAR: Hanlon's Razor (with Jennifer Kling)
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:...
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REPLAY: Food (with Bob Valgenti)
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...
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Foucault's "Panopticism"
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...
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Goodhart's Law
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...
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A**holes
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…
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De-Skilling
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...
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War Crimes
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…
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Violence
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...
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Possible Worlds
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…
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Strange Bedfellows: Adorno and Strauss (with Jeffrey Bernstein)
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...
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Philosophy on Drugs (with Justin Smith-Ruiu)
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…
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Against the Future (with Simon Critchley)
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…
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Family "No Contact" (with Kiran Bhardwaj)
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......
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Food (with Bob Valgenti)
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...
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Anonymity
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...
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Catastrophic Philosophy
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...
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Intelligence(s)
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…
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MINIBAR: Algorithmic Nostalgia (with Leigh M. Johnson)
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...
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MINIBAR: Uncivil Obedience (with Jen Kling)
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...
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MINIBAR: Pain (with Bob Vallier)
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,...
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Marilyn Frye's "Oppression"
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...
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Nostalgia
"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…
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Sophistry
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...
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The Enshittification of... everything?
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...
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Quiet Resistance (with Tamara Fakhoury)
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...
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Therapy
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…
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Furious Minds (with Laura K. Field)
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...
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Imagination (with Stephen T. Asma)
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...
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Comedy
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...
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The Hills We Die on
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...
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Meet the NEW Co-Hosts!
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...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
A podcast where the real philosophy happens.
HOSTED BY
Leigh M. Johnson, Jennifer Kling, Bob Vallier
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Hotel Bar Sessions have?
Hotel Bar Sessions currently has 272 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Hotel Bar Sessions about?
A podcast where the real philosophy happens.
How often does Hotel Bar Sessions release new episodes?
Hotel Bar Sessions publishes regularly with 272 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Hotel Bar Sessions?
You can listen to Hotel Bar Sessions on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Hotel Bar Sessions?
Hotel Bar Sessions is created and hosted by Leigh M. Johnson, Jennifer Kling, Bob Vallier.
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