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 point), the conversation traces how ruptures—ancient, modern, natural, political—expose finitude and test the limits (and complicities) of inherited frameworks of reason.

From there, the episode pivots into a philosophy of catastrophe: the work of making horrors intelligible by clarifying the structures that made them possible, while also asking what catastrophe demands ethically—what must never happen again, and what that imperative requires of living, thinking, and teaching after rupture.

Finally, the episode debates philosophy as catastrophe: whether certain ideas don’t merely respond to downturns but actively produce them by breaking prior worlds of sense—recasting what counts as knowledge, power, nature, and the human. The conversation closes with an unsettling contemporary candidate: LLM-generated “philosophy papers” as a potential wheel-smashing shift in how philosophy is produced, circulated, and evaluated.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/catastrophic-philosophy
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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.

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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 a working definition of intelligence as the capacity to navigate a domain toward ends, the conversation quickly fans out: human intelligence, non-human animal intelligence, machine intelligence, and even the question of whether rivers, mountains, or viruses might exhibit their own forms of intelligent “fit.” Our co-hosts wrestle with familiar philosophical fault lines—rationality versus embodiment, instinct versus understanding, adaptation versus explanation—while keeping a sharp eye on the troubling history of intelligence as a ranking device tied to exclusion, hierarchy, and power.

Drawing on phenomenology, feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, AI ethics, and everyday examples ranging from crows to chatbots, the episode asks what’s really at stake when we measure, compare, or deny intelligence. Is intelligence best understood as a single scale, or as an ecology of overlapping capacities shaped by bodies, environments, and worlds? And if machines are already intelligent in their own way, what follows for how we understand ourselves?

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/intelligences

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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, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!

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 opportunity to record a "Minibar" episode-- think of it as a shorter version of our regular conversations, only this time the co-host is stuck inside their hotel room with whatever is left in the minibar... and you are their only conversant!

AI engineers and designers are currently, and rightly, focused on minimizing the deleterious effects of AI's three primary "memory problems"-- hallucinations, catastrophic forgetting, and bias-- but in this Minibar episode, HBS co-host Leigh M. Johnson argues that none of these problems can be design-engineered away. They are, according to Johnson, baked-in and unavoidable structural elements of any language-based system reliant on an archive.

Borrowing from Jacques Derrida's work on archives, language, and memory, Johnson argues that we should think more seriously about the manner in which LLM's outputs come to us cloaked in the garb of memory. We take AI hallucinations, for example, to be true because they inspire in us a feeling of nostalgia... something that we could have remembered, perhaps even should have remembered, but didn't.

Or didn't we?

Tune in for the first episode of Season 15 on January 23, 2026!

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/minibar-algorithmic-noslagia
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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, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!