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Hotel Bar Sessions

Leigh M. Johnson, Jennifer Kling, Bob Vallier

A podcast where the real philosophy happens.

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  • 21 episodes
  • weekly
  • Avg 54 min
  • English

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Episodes 21

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  • S16 · E235
    Friday · 55 min

    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 did nothing, the explanation did nothing, and the well-meaning friend who said "you should have known better" only made it worse. Something more is wronged in a betrayal than any rule of the relationship, and that something reaches backward as well as forward. Every remembered kindness becomes suspect. So does your own judgment about where to put your trust next time. In this episode, the HBS co-hosts try to name that surplus wrong, and they don't agree on what they find. Is betrayal something that happens in the world, or is it a feeling that only the betrayed person can author? Can you be betrayed by someone who told you it was coming, or by someone forced to do it? What about the self-betrayals we're ordered into, or the ones our own bodies commit? Grab a drink and join us as we pick up where our conversation on trust left off and figure out why nobody wants their last words to be "Et tu, Brute?" Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/betrayal --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S16 · E234
    August 21 · 56 min

    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 white, cisgender gay men, and both made the same argument: the hard-won gains of the gay rights movement are now endangered by queer people, queer politics, queer theory, and maybe even the word "queer" itself. Most public responses treated this as a quarrel over vocabulary, as if the authors had merely declined a label that others remain free to adopt, but what the op-eds actually proposed is a trade, in which some letters of the alphabet community purchase their safety by cutting loose the people who make "normal" nervous. The HBS co-hosts are not inclined to take that deal. But refusing it requires answering some hard questions: what does "queer" name, exactly, when it can function as a slur, an identity, a coalition, and a verb? Who gets to decide when a wound-word has been reclaimed, and who is still entitled to flinch at it? If queering something means exposing the instability of the categories we call normal, what happens when we point that lens at politics itself? Grab a drink and join us as we take the bait, talk back to the op-eds, and explain why normal was never all that normal to begin with. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/theqword --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S16 · E233
    August 14 · 1 hr

    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 buying a house or a secure retirement. When a single failure can be genuinely ruinous, the advice to dust yourself off and "fail fast, fail forward, fail better" starts to sound like a privilege reserved for those who can already afford it. So what actually is failure? Who who sets the standard? Is failure really as generative as we like to tell ourselves, or is that a comforting story that only holds up when the stakes are low? Can a person fail at life, or only in it? And if our failures have become so devastating that no one dares risk them, is the fix a better attitude toward failing, or a world that stops punishing people so severely for it? This week, we take seriously the possibility that our growing dread of failure is a rational response to a world that has made failing unaffordable. The real answer, we suggest, may be less about how to fail better and more about how to build a world where other people's failures aren't so ruinous. Grab a drink and join us as we fail our way through Beckett, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Camus toward some clearer sense of what it means to fall short — and toward imagining Sisyphus, if not happy, then at least clear-eyed. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/failure --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S16 · E232
    August 7 · 56 min

    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 trauma. Gill contends that we are coerced to accept the limitations imposed by racial categories, which not only severely restrict our life possibilities, but cause us to fundamentally misapprehend the dynamic, ever-changing, and ever-evolving reality of human being and human identity, which is always in flux. In an innovative reformulation of well-worn race-abolitionist positions, Gill rejects racial categories as "useless abstractions" and refuses to adopt them as identifiers. While acknowledging that he cannot stop others from identifying him racially, he recommends to the rest of us what he calls "multi/race/less/ness," a dynamic category (inspired by Whitehead's process philosophy) that provides more breathing room for navigating the often suffocating metaphysics of race. Grab a drink and join us for this frank and substantive exchange, with many significant disagreements unpacked along the way about what is and is not worth preserving in the category of "race," and how. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/multiracelessness --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S16 · E231
    July 31 · 1 hr 3 min

    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 default civic posture. And yet here we all are, getting through our days by handing out trust more or less constantly and mostly without noticing. We tell a friend something we'd rather nobody else knew. We take what the pharmacist gives us without looking it up. We drive over the bridge, trusting that it will hold. So what is trust? A calculation about how somebody is likely to behave, or something closer to a relationship that can absorb being let down without collapsing? What separates trusting a person from merely depending on one? And why does betrayal land as a different order of injury than disappointment, when the practical damage can be identical? Whenever the day arrives that we are post-Trump, and it will arrive, plenty of us are going to demand that our institutions and, in some cases, our own friends and relatives earn our trust back. It's worth working out ahead of time what we'd actually be asking for. A change in their behavior? Or a decision on our part to lower our guard? Because for a lot of people, distrust is hard-won knowledge about how things really go, and being told that it's a lapse in civic virtue tends to land badly. Grab a drink and join us as we try to work out whether trust is something you decide to give or something that happens to you. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/trust --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S16 · E230
    July 24 · 1 hr 1 min

    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 alone. Afterward, Leigh's first thought was, I hope my death is this good. Most of us won't get one. We will die in a hospital bed, wired to machines, running up a bill somebody we love will inherit — and almost nobody says that's what they want. Meanwhile, the last year of an American life is the most profitable one, and a dignified death has quietly become a luxury good. Is there — should there be — such a thing as a "right to die," the dark companion of the right to life we all assume we already have? We already honor a patient's refusal of life-sustaining treatment; we let people sign DNRs, decline resuscitation, have the respirator removed. Is there any principled reason to honor that autonomy everywhere except the one place a person tries to use it? What is the "sound mind" requirement actually screening for, given that wanting to die was long treated as disqualifying all by itself? And can we talk seriously about dying with dignity inside a system that barely guarantees anyone the right to live with dignity? Grab a drink — no hemlock cocktails, please — and join us as we ask what it would take to receive the deaths we already afford our pets. Content note: this episode discusses death, dying, end-of-life decision-making, euthanasia, and suicide throughout, at times in personal terms. In the U.S., the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/righttodie --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S16 · E229
    July 17 · 57 min

    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 rules at all. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/rules --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S16 · E228
    July 10 · 1 hr 1 min

    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 the canonical philosophers, arguing, for example, that Deleuze is and always was a Nietzschean or a Bergsonian or a Spinozist. But these seem to miss what it means to be properly “Deleuzian.” What would it mean to read Deleuze “conceptually” and systematically across all of his works? Is there some unifying thread that not only gathers together his philosophical concerns, but also shows us how to read all of his monographic works from start to finish and reveal what a Deleuzian philosophy is? Our guest today, Nathan Widder of Royal Holloway University, proposes a possible way to navigate this dilemma. For Nathan, the concept that constitutes this guiding thread is the concept of sense. From his earliest published work–an essay reviewing Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence–to his two magni opei (Difference and Repetition, and the aptly named The Logic of Sense), the concept of sense is, according to Nathan, the organizing conceptual principle that drives all of Deleuze’’s analyses and animates his philosophical questioning. So, what is the concept of sense in the work of Deleuze? What does he mean by it, and how does it organize his philosophical project? These are the questions we tackle in this week’s episode – and if you’’e worried that you do not know much about Deleuze, worry no more, because neither did we. But thanks to Nathan and his new book Deleuze and the Logic of Sense (SUNY Press, 2026) we all learned a lot – and so will you. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/deleuze --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S16 · E227
    July 3 · 56 min

    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, depending on where you live and who holds power at the moment, possibly a slur, possibly banned from government buildings, possibly both at once. The word has been around for thirty years, but its history is largely unknown to the people who argue or legislate against it. What most people are currently fighting about today is a simplified, mainstream version of the concept that traveled a long way from its origins before arriving in the culture war. In this episode, we sit down with Perry Zurn, Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. Zurn's new book, Cisgender: Disorienting a Category (Duke University Press, 2026), is the first sustained philosophical and historical account of how the term cis entered the gender lexicon, where it came from, what it was supposed to do, and what it has actually done. Drawing on unplumbed archives, interviews with early trans community figures, and parallel conversations in Argentina and Brazil that predate the American discourse, Zurn argues that cis is more useful as a name for a set of norms and privileges than as a description of any person's inner life. Moreover, the category, when pressed hard enough, begins to unravel in philosophically generative ways. Grab a drink and join us as we pull apart a word everyone uses, almost no one can define, and that is more radical, more contested, and far more philosophically interesting than the version currently being banned from Twitter. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/cisgender --------------------- SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes! SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/cw/hotelbarsessions (Or by contributing one-time donations here: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/donate/) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website (hotelbarpodcast.com) for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts through our "Contact Us" page on the website! Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S16 · E226
    June 26 · 58 min

    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 geopolitical wounds into something that at least resembles a game. Whether you played Little League, follow your city's team with religious devotion, or find the whole spectacle baffling, sports have philosophical stakes that run deeper than the scoreboard. What actually makes something a sport — and does the answer matter? What does that tell us about fairness, rules, and what it means to win? Can fandom build genuine community, or is it just tribalism? And when institutions like the NCAA funnel the passions sports inspire into donor pipelines and broadcast deals, what gets lost and who gets exploited? Grab a drink and join us as we step onto the field with Aristotle, Iris Marion Young, William James, and Bernard Suits to find out whether the philosophy of sport is worth playing. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/sports --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S15 · E3
    June 19 · 30 min

    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 genuinely call "unprecedented." It was also a crystalline illustration of something philosophers have been decrying for decades, namely, the difference between performing ethical responsibility and actually exercising it. What does it mean to reason morally about the risks of a technology about which we do not yet fully understand its potential future impacts? Given that a very small number of decisionmakers will shape the conditions of life for everyone else for the next several decades, what do they owe to the people who will bear the consequences of those decisions without having had any say in them? When "ethical AI" has become a brand strategy rather than a careful, historically-informed and theoretically-grounded practice, how do we hold anyone accountable for the gap between what they say and what they do? Grab a drink and join our co-host Leigh M. Johnson as she asks us to consider exactly how sloppy the current "AI ethics" discourse is, what moral reasoning actually requires. and why the people who most need to be doing it seem to be the ones least interested in the task. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/mythosfablefarce --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S15 · E2
    June 14 · 35 min

    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 isn't the object. It's your body moving through the space it creates. In this minibar episode, Bob Vallier draws on his work in phenomenology to make the case that some of the stranger, more provocative, and occasionally illegal-by-contemporary-standards experiments in post-war art are best understood not as aesthetic puzzles to be solved but as invitations to notice something you're always already doing: being a body in a world that pushes back. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/artandphenomenology --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S15 · E1
    June 6 · 16 min

    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: 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • May 29 · 1 hr 2 min

    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 “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 --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S15 · E225
    May 22 · 58 min

    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 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 Discipline and Punish. Bob walks us through the architectural innovation at the heart of Foucault's argument: Jeremy Bentham's prison design, in which a single guard tower makes every prisoner visible while keeping the guard himself unseen. From there the conversation turns to what panopticism looks like in our own moment — Princeton's recent return to exam proctors, Elon Musk's brief tenure at DOGE and the IRS data he walked away with, the meta-glasses recording strangers on the street, and the hundred thousand satellites now orbiting overhead. Jen presses on why disciplinary power is scarier than sovereign power, precisely because it arrives dressed as benevolence. Leigh asks whether digging in on privacy in the digital age is already a losing bet that concedes too much to the logic of surveillance. Grab a drink and join us as we ask who exactly is watching the watchers... and whether any tolerated margin of criminality is left in which to hide. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/foucault --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S15 · E224
    May 15 · 56 min

    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 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 were quietly retooled around audit regimes and key performance indicators imported from the private sector. The labor process itself now runs through dashboards that watch workers in real time and convert what they do into figures someone in a different building can rank against last quarter's. Whatever the explicit politics of the moment, almost every institution we pass through has been redesigned to produce numbers, and to be evaluated and disciplined by them. Goodhart's Law, the 1975 observation by economist Charles Goodhart that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure," was originally a narrow point about central banks losing their grip on whatever indicator they picked to control. In the half-century since, it has quietly become a more acute diagnostic of late-capitalist life. If our institutions are now built to hit numbers, regardless of whether they're still doing the things those numbers were supposed to track, what exactly are those institutions for anymore? Who benefits from rule by metric, and who gets to decide which metric counts? Once the dashboard has been built into the architecture of political economy itself, what would it even look like to push back against it? Grab a drink and join us as we ask what our institutions were supposed to be for, before they all became scoreboards. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/goodhartslaw --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S15 · E223
    May 8 · 59 min

    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 (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 the asshole as someone (almost always a man) who "systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people." The HBS co-hosts work with this definition and push on it where it falls short. Bob makes the case that contemporary capitalism, supercharged by the compare-and-contrast machinery of social media, has transfigured a vice into a virtue: in our current moment, assholery is increasingly mistaken for strength. Jen draws on Rousseau's distinction between amour de soi and amour-propre to ask what social conditions cultivate the asshole disposition. And Leigh asks what we can do, practically, in our classrooms and in our daily encounters, to make environments less hospitable to assholes in the first place. Grab a drink and join us as we try to figure out what makes an asshole an asshole — and what, if anything, can be done about the apparent abundance of them in our current moment. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/aholes --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S15 · E222
    May 1 · 1 hr

    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 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 exactly is a skill — and is there a meaningful difference between a skill and an ability? What do we lose, as individuals and as a society, when skills atrophy not through disuse but because the infrastructure for practicing and valuing them has quietly disappeared? And when the skills at risk are not just practical ones but moral ones — the capacity for judgment, for ethical perception, for democratic reasoning — what then? Our co-hosts trace the concept from Harry Braverman's Marxist critique of industrial labor through Aristotle's account of practical wisdom, Matthew Crawford's defense of manual knowledge, and Shannon Vallor's argument about moral de-skilling in the age of new technology. They take on education, writing, ChatGPT, and the rather uncomfortable possibility that Plato's critique of writing may be the oldest entry in the de-skilling literature. Grab a drink and join us as we exercise a few skills that may themselves be at risk: long-form attention, nuanced argument, and the stubborn human habit of thinking things through. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/de-skilling --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S15 · E221
    April 24 · 55 min

    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 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, who can commit one, and what happens when the people with power to commit them face no meaningful consequences? In this episode, our co-hosts take up the full weight of the concept of "war crimes." We trace the legal architecture of the Geneva Conventions and the contested terrain of just war theory, and press hard on the edges where the law goes murky: the moral equality of combatants, the "human shields" problem, the limits of international enforcement, the delicate distinctions drawn between "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing," and all of the states and leaders implicated by this murkiness. As you'll notice throughout the conversation, this is Jen's wheelhouse — she is, after all, Director of the Center for Legal Studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, whose research centers on just war theory, international relations, and the ethics of war and peace — and her expertise gives the conversation a precision and urgency that the moment demands. Grab a drink and join us as we try to tread carefully through the minefield-laden terrain of this unfortunately urgent topic. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/war-crimes --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

  • S15 · E220
    April 17 · 1 hr 6 min

    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 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 disagreements we may have which actions count as violent. Our core disagreements are conceptual ones, and we're usually having them without realizing it. What, if anything, ties physical force to structural oppression? Is there a definition of violence capacious enough to hold both together without becoming so broad it is evacuated of meaning altogether? When the word "violence" gets attached to something, what exactly are we expecting people to do — morally and politically? In this episode, the HBS co-hosts work through these questions with many disagreements (but no fisticuffs!) along the way. They take up Hegel's argument that recognition is a life-or-death struggle, and Hannah Arendt's claim that violence is always a symptom of political failure. They look at the way entertainment media trains us to see violence as cleaner and more effective than it ever actually is, and how actions that involve "bodily harm" might constitute the easiest, but least satisfying, definition of violence. Leigh reflects on her year directing the M.K. Gandhi Institute Institute for Nonviolence and why she's no longer the pacifist she was then. Jen, as past President of Concerned Philosophers for Peace, draws a sharp line between caring about peace and believing violence is never warranted. Meanwhile, Bob wonders why Americans are not more violently opposed to their lack of basic social securities, like healthcare. Grab a drink and join us as we slow the word "violence" down and look at what it actually means, and what it does an does not accomplish in our language and lives... all from the relatively safe place of the hotel bar! Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/violence --------------------- 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!) BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here. Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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