Hotel Bar Sessions

The HBS hosts do NOT agree to disagree! On the first day of co-host's Leigh's classes, she  warns her students against (what she calls) “lazy relativism.” The example she gives is of a conversation in which two people have been at odds for a while, they suspect that they are not going to come to an agreement on the matter at hand, and so one of them says: “yeah, agree to disagree” or “everybody has different opinions on this” or, worst of all, “what’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me.”That last iteration, in particular, is an expression of the kind of  “lazy relativism” we're discussing in this episode.When people repeat this dictum of “what’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me,” might it be that what they’re really meaning to communicate is “this is a hard conversation that has come to an impasse, I don’t want to argue with you about it anymore, but I also don’t want to offend you by appearing disrespectful”?Today, we're talking about why lazy relativism seems to be the go-to disposition for so many when encountering a disagreement, what exactly is “lazy” about it, and whether or not there are non-lazy forms of relativism.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/lazy-relativism-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts discuss Coppola's classic treatment of Nixon-era surveillance and paranoia.Released in 1974, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation is often hailed as one of the defining films of the post-Watergate era, a film dealing with surveillance, conspiracy, and paranoia. While it is definitely about that in many ways, it is also an interesting study of a particular kind of subject, and a particular ideal of subjectivity. Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul is a man who endeavors to be an island, to have no connections with anyone, and to focus just on the pure technical details of his work, without thinking about its larger implications. “It has nothing to do with me” is his general attitude, even as he wrestles with the implications of his work. Lastly, through its use of sound and surveillance, it is a film which asks the question of both its characters and its viewers, what does it mean to know something? What is the connection between fear and knowledge, desire and knowledge?Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-91-hbs-goes-to-the-movies-the-conversation-1974-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

While the HBS hosts are taking a break between Seasons 6 and 7, we're re-playing some of our favorite conversations you might have missed. Enjoy this REPLAY episode from Season 5 on "The Public Intellectual" with special guest, Eddie Glaude, Jr.Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr. is the James S. McDonnel Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Princeton University, and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He is also on the Morehouse College Board of Trustees. He frequently appears in the media, as a columnist for TIME Magazine and as an MSNBC contributor on programs like Morning Joe and Deadline Whitehouse with Nicolle Wallace. He also regularly appears on Meet the Press on Sundays. Combining a scholar’s knowledge of history, a political commentator’s take on the latest events, and an activist’s passion for social justice, Glaude challenges all of us to examine our collective American conscience.This week, the HBS hosts chat with Dr. Glaude about the role and the history of the public intellectual in America, the difference between the public intellectual and the “thought-leader” or “influencer,” and what it takes to be a public intellectual in the 21st Century.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-61-the-public-intellectual/----------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, make sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

While the HBS hosts are taking a break between Season 6 and Season 7, we're re-playing some of our favorite conversations you might have missed. Enjoy this NSFW episode from Season 2, in which our co-hosts parse the difference between obscenity, profanity, and vulgarity! Full episode notes at this link:http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-20-vulgarity/ ----------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, make sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast.You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts are on break between Seasons 6 and 7, so we're REPLAYing our Season 5 episode on "YouTube's Alt-Right Rabbit Hole."In this episode, we interview Caleb Cain (@FaradaySpeaks) about his experience of being radicalized by the al-right internet.n June 2019, the New York Times featured a story about Caleb Cain, entitled “The Making of a YouTube Radical.” That piece was meant to highlight the subtle, severe, and devastating IRL effects of YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which has been proven many times over to promote what (in internet slang) is called “red-pilling”—that is, the conversion of users to far-right beliefs. Today, we’re talking to Caleb Cain, a person who has been down the alt-right rabbit hole and somehow found his way back out of it, and we want to introduce our listeners to a first-person account of how right-wing radicalization actually happens on the internet, how it is sustained, and how it might be combatted.Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-68-youtubes-alt-right-rabbit-hole/-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts are on break between Seasons 6 and 7, so we're REPLAYing our Season 2 conversation with David Gunkel about robots and robot rights.The HBS hosts interview Dr. David Gunkel (author of Robot Rights and How To Survive A Robot Invasion) about his work on emergent technologies, intelligent machines, and robots. Following the recent announcement by Elson Musk that Tesla is developing a humanoid robot for home use, we ask: what is the real difference between a robot and a toaster?Do robots and intelligent machines rise to the level of “persons”? Should we accord them moral consideration or legal rights? Or are those questions just the consequence of our over-anthropomorphizing robots and intelligent machines?Full episode notes available at this link.-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts consider the merits and demerits of the red pill/blue pill option.The Allegory of the Cave (a section from Plato's longer dialogue entitled Republic) is one of the most famous and widely referenced passages in the history of Western philosophy. Many, even those who are not "professional" philosophers, are at least noddingly familiar with Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Yet, those who have never had the opportunity to read it may wonder: what does Plato actually say in the Allegory of the Cave? What are the details of this strange story? Which ones of them matter? Is there a right or wrong way to understand this allegory? This week, the HBS hosts are taking a long stroll through the text of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, parsing what is actually said within it, and taking time to entertain diversions into its contemporary reformulations (e.g., in films like The Matrix and They Live).Should we all be motivated to exit the "cave," despite the pain involved in doing so? Or, alternatively, is there a way to justify choosing to remain in the cave?Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-90-the-allegory-of-the-cave-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

In a passage that could be considered the motto of our historical moment, Fredric Jameson writes "It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination." Why does capitalism seem so inescapable? Why do we see it not just as an economic system that came into existence at a particular time, and will end at some point as well, but as a reflection of some fundamental truth about the world and ourselves–what Mark Fisher calls Capitalist Realism? At the same time, given Jameson’s allusion to the weakness of our imagination, might we be missing the way that capitalism is already mutating, changing into something else, not a revolutionary transformation into communism, but into a kind of digital feudalism in which we pay rent in information to a new class of tech overlords just to survive? How can we both imagine alternatives to capitalism and recognize the transformations it is already undergoing?In other words, can we evict the capitalist that lives rent free in our head, or at the very least start charging it rent. Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-89-late-capitalism-2-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts try to figure out how much of the ChatGPT panic is warranted.There seems to be a real panic among not only the professoriate, but also employers, about what ChatGPT is doing to "kids these days." The concern in higher education is that ChatGPT makes cheating easier and, by extension, the worry among employers is that all of the college-educated candidates they might interview in the coming years are really not as "college-educated" as they may appear on paper. Is this panic justified?ChatGPT, no doubt, represents a major advance in publicly-accessible artificial intelligence software. ChatGPT, also without doubt, makes "cheating" easier for college students and makes the "misrepresentation of one's skill-sets" easier for employment candidates. However, ChatGPT is also a genuinely novel learning/working tool that is practically unprecedented in its sophistication.  Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-88-chatgpt-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

The HBS hosts confront the inevitable.It is most obviously true that we are all going to die. The very fact that anything is alive seems to entail that it is going to die. Death confronts us as an ultimate cancellation and nullification in the face of which one might ask, “what does it matter if I am going to die?” The chorus in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus says that the best thing is never to have been born at all. This is especially true if one’s life is filled with suffering and then death. Kant, not able to provide a reason why living is so great, simply says that it is the parents’ job to reconcile their children to existence! On the other hand, we have the 20th century philosopher, Martin Heidegger, arguing that we will only be authentically what we are when we take on our own death as the possibility that is the condition of our existence.  Co-host Rick Lee is fairly confident that death is "stupid." As he notes, when a loved one dies, our thoughts do not go to authenticity but to the fact that it sucks and is painful that there is now a hole, a gap, in my world that cannot possibly be made good again. It’s no wonder that people turn to the hope or wish that all will be made right again in the end. So, he asks: “what is death?” and what is the “meaning" of death?Full episode notes available at this link:https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-87-death-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions.  ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★