Hotel Bar Sessions

We recorded this episode of Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on the eve of the midterm elections, so the ballot is never far from the conversation and these questions reach well past any single election. However, we did not know how dramatic November 2, 2026 would turn out to be. Well done, American voters! Every election season brings the same advice: hold your nose and choose the lesser of two evils. We reach for it to explain why we stay on platforms we can’t stand, and why decent people sign on to serve leaders they fear. Over time, settling for the less bad option started to look like moral maturity. If you pick the less bad of two bad options, have you done something good? Is there a real line between the very bad and the evil, and can evil come in smaller and larger portions? When the best available choice still causes harm, what do we owe the people who pay for it? And does the habit of settling for the lesser evil keep us from ever getting better options? Grab a drink and join us as we try to figure out whether the lesser evil is still an evil, and what to do with the regret either way. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/lesserevil --------------------- 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 ★

In July 2024, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. United States that a president cannot be prosecuted for official acts, and it drew the boundaries of “official” wide enough that the federal cases against Donald Trump were simply dropped after the election. Two years later, federal agents are seizing a sitting congresswoman’s phone, and the administration the ruling protected is the one conducting the investigation. Meanwhile, close to two million people sleep in American jails and prisons on any given night, and exactly one Wall Street executive went to prison for the financial crisis that cost millions of families their homes. “Equal Justice Under Law” is carved above the Supreme Court’s front door. It has never described what happens inside. What if the problem runs deeper than a few bad rulings or timid prosecutors? If treating everyone the same in a country this unequal is one of the ways the powerful slip free, what should we want instead? Can we ask for harsher punishment of elites without feeding the machinery that built mass incarceration? And who gets to decide which crimes count as attacks on democracy itself, when the people doing the deciding are elites too? Our guest is Jacob Abolafia, Leigh’s colleague in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. Jacob studies the history of political thought from ancient Athens to the present and is the author of The Prison before the Panopticon: Incarceration in Ancient and Modern Political Philosophy (Harvard UP, 2024). We dig into his Yale Law Journal Forum essay on Trump v. United States, which argues that democracies once understood that the powerful need watching, and that a democratic criminal law would go easier on ordinary people and harder on the few whose crimes threaten self-government. Grab a drink and join us as we ask who gets to stand above the law, and what it would take to haul them back down. Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/elite-impunity --------------------- 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 ★

Most of us know what it’s like to want to do something good and then, on realizing we can’t do it perfectly, do nothing at all. You put off calling a struggling friend until you can give them your undivided attention, and the call never happens. In this Minibar episode, Jennifer Kling pulls up a stool on her own to take a hard look at advice so familiar we’ve stopped hearing it: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Jen draws on Alexis Shotwell’s critique of moral purity and Iris Marion Young’s account of shared responsibility to ask when “good enough” counts as a real achievement and when it works as a polite defense of an unjust status quo. Along the way, she considers who pays for our compromises and why solidarity can’t wait for any of us to become perfect allies. Grab a drink and join Jen as she makes the case for the imperfect phone call. [NOTE TO LISTENERS: As is our custom on this podcast, we release "Minibar" episodes between seasons, to ensure that you're still getting fresh, new content every week. Be sure to stay tuned for Season 17, which begins October 30!) Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/minibarjen --------------------- 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 ★

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 called "recurrent depth," which lets the model do some of its reasoning in internal loops that never get written down anywhere a human can read. AI safety researchers have spent the past year treating a model's visible "chain of thought" as one of the few windows we have into what it's doing, and some of them started referring to the new technique Astra used as "opaque recurrence." OpenAI's own system card admits to "a substantial decrease in chain-of-thought monitorability," and its chief scientist (Jakub Pachocki) followed up with an essay describing what the lab has built as "An Alien Mind." In this Minibar episode, Leigh M. Johnson pulls up a stool alone while Jen and Bob are off doing whatever it is they do when they're not talking to her, and asks: What were we actually looking at all this time when we asked AI models to "show thinking"? If a model shortens its reasoning the moment it's told a monitor is watching, is its chain of thought a window into its mind or a confession written for an audience? When a company describes its product as something that simply grew beyond anyone's understanding, who is left holding the responsibility? And if we have never been able to read each other's minds either, what would it mean to govern machines the way we've always governed one another? She reads Jakub Pachocki's "An Alien Mind" alongside Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy" and Foucault's account of confession and panoptic power. She also draws on Zvi Mowshowitz's reading of the Astra system card and Timnit Gebru's long-standing warnings about regulatory capture. Grab a drink and join our co-host Leigh as she asks what transparency can mean for a machine that has learned to tell its watchers what they want to hear, and why a thought with effects but no trace looks a lot like a haunting. [NOTE TO LISTENERS: As is our custom on this podcast, we release "Minibar" episodes between seasons, to ensure that you're still getting fresh, new content every week. Be sure to stay tuned for Season 17, which begins October 30!) Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/minibarleighai --------------------- 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 ★

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 year 1960-1961-- before Derrida became "Derrida"-- entitled To Think is To Say No (Fordham UP, 2026). In this new book, over the course of four lectures, Derrida considers a short aphorism from French philosopher Émile-Auguste Chartier (commonly known as Alain) and, in the course of doing so, provides us our first glimpse into the philosophical techniques that would eventually come to be known as "deconstruction." Grab a drink and join Bob as he situates the first publicly recorded insights of baby Derrida! [NOTE TO LISTENERS: As is our custom on this podcast, we release "Minibar" episodes between seasons, to ensure that you're still getting fresh, new content every week. Be sure to stay tuned for Season 17, which begins October 30!) Full episode notes available at this link: https://hotelbarpodcast.com/minibarderridabob --------------------- 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 ★