Hotel Bar Sessions

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 out, is boredom. Nobody pays cash to be bored and no app is designed to deliver it, yet a small but noticeable number of young people are now trading smartphones for flip phones and forming "Luddite clubs," as if boredom were something you had to go out of your way to find. Boredom appears to be unbearable and endangered at the same time.So what, if anything, is worth defending in it? Is the boredom of the DMV waiting room the same thing as the boredom of a committee meeting, or the boredom of a long walk with nothing to look at? If boredom really does free up the mind for reflection and imagination, doesn't that mean we've stopped being bored the moment the good stuff starts? And when people praise the restful, restorative kind of boredom, are they describing an experience available to everyone, or a luxury only some of us can afford?No guest this week, just three co-hosts who turn out to disagree about nearly all of it. Bob comes to the defense of boredom by way of Heidegger's "profound boredom" and Kierkegaard's advice to rotate your pleasures like crops. Jen keeps returning to Aquinas and the medieval worry that boredom is a failure to train one's own mind, which makes it something closer to a vice. Leigh confesses that she is allergic to the whole thing and cannot find anything good in boredom that isn't secretly a description of its cure. Along the way you'll hear about racing raindrops on a school bus window, camp kids left to their own devices, Dorian Gray, and why immortality might be the most boring thing imaginable.Grab a drink and join us as we spend an hour trying to say something interesting about the one thing nobody can sell you.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-239-boredom/---------------------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 ★

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 world's largest religious traditions, with a scripture that is entirely philosophical poetry meant to be sung, has been almost completely absent from that expanded conversation. Sikhism gets left out not because it lacks a systematic ethics, but because almost no one working in Anglophone philosophy has bothered to look.This week the HBS co-hosts are joined by Dr. Keshav Singh, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and author of the new (and open-access) Cambridge Element Sikh Ethics. Keshav works in ethics and epistemology, and his recent research uses the tools of analytic philosophy to reconstruct Sikh moral thought on its own terms rather than forcing it into categories the Western tradition already decided were the important ones. He walks us through the two levels of reality, the three terms he refuses to translate (hukam, haumai, sachiara), the "Five Thieves"(vices), and why running off to a mountaintop to seek enlightenment would be, by Sikh lights, a moral failure.Grab a drink and join us as we find out why truth is higher than everything, but truthful living is higher still.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/sikhethics---------------------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 ★

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 minute.  We’ve seen then in many guises–snake oil salesmen, televangelists, self-help gurus–but there are three today–Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, and Andrew Tate–who’ve not only taken the grift to new levels, but also, in so doing, revealed the grift–or rather, disclosed the bad metaphysics and bad politics that make the con possible. This disclosure is precisely what is analyzed in a new book by philosophers Landon Frim and Harrison Fluss--Confidence Men: Peterson, Musk, Tate and the Duping of the American Mind (Penguin 2026).  We’re delighted to be joined today by Landon, who helps us understand better what con men are, why they are more than mere liars but rather “enemies of the truth,” why they are most frequently con men, what their philosophical worldview is, the role capitalism plays in the con, and what “good metaphysics” and “good politics” are needed to undermine their efforts and mitigate the conditions of possibility for their continued success.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/conmen---------------------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 ★

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 that this is what separates fashion from “mere clothing.” Fashion is clothing that has become a language, and the fashion industry is the institution that keeps everyone manufacturing new meanings each season so that garments become obsolete long before they wear out. The genius of the system is that it sells this obligation as “taste,” as “freedom.” Your closet feels like self-expression, while functioning as a subscription service. If fashion is a language, can anyone refuse to speak it? The jeans-and-hoodie crowd, the Amish, and the uniform-wearers of the world would like a word, and one of your three co-hosts (Leigh) is firmly among them.This episode also asks why the same hoodie signifies differently on different bodies, what hair straightening reveals about assimilation and power, how gay men built an entire covert semiotics out of ties and handkerchiefs before Stonewall, and who is actually paying the price, in labor and in landfill, for clothes designed to die young.Grab a drink and join us as two fashion-literate philosophers try to convince their unfashionable friend that nobody, no matter how committed they may be to their hoodie, ever really opts out.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/fashion---------------------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 ★

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 ★