I can’t be sure who’s still regularly checking in on this blog, but those of you who are have surely noticed that I’ve shifted my energies from blogging to podcasting over the last year. Beginning in November 2020, I did a 22-episode run of my first podcast BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, in which I interviewed philosophers, filmmakers, and tech-savvy intellectuals about the technology, philosophy, morality, and politics of the Netflix series Black Mirror. Each episode of BMR was dedicated to parsing through one episode of Black Mirror, and I think we ended up with a lot of smart and interesting conversations when the series finally concluded. (It only concluded because we ran out of Black Mirror episodes to talk about!) I more or less “hosted” the Black Mirror Reflections podcast on this blog, so you can find all of the episodes in this blog’s feed, or by clicking the “Black Mirror Reflections” tab in the top menu, or at this link.
BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS was a real lifesaver last year. It provided me an opportunity to reach out to other philosophers and to have engaging, smart, and provocative conversations about things that I was interested in at a time when I felt thoroughly trapped and completely isolated in my pandemic bubble. Even though I did all of the BMR interviews and recorded all of the episodes via Zoom, there was a world of difference between sitting in an hour-long Zoom session with one of my BMR guests and the 30 other hours a week I was Zooming for classes, committee meetings, and whatever those lame “virtual happy hours” were supposed to be. In the end, I was really happy with the BMR podcast in terms of its final content but, on reflection, I realized it was a very amateur podcast in terms of audio production and distribution. After it concluded, though, I had definitely caught the podcasting bug, so I committed myself to creating another podcast… but not without learning the (technical) ropes first!
[Insert a couple of months of audio engineering autodidactism, way too much money spent on hardware and software, and many long hours of annoying my partner with conversations about potential podcast ideas!]
Here’s what I knew for sure in terms of what I wanted to do next: I definitely wanted to do a “philosophy” podcast, but I didn’t want it to be too inside-baseball. That is to say, I wanted to cover topics that were philosophically interesting, but maybe not so obviously capital-P Philosophy in the way that academics might reckon it. I didn’t want listeners to feel like they were required to have a deep familiarity with academic Philosophy to “get” what was going on in the conversation, and I definitely didn’t want to require listeners to do homework in advance just to understand why what we were talking about was important or interesting.
I also didn’t want to do a podcast where I just blathered on in front of a mic, alone. So I knew I was going to need co-hosts, but I also knew I needed co-hosts that could talk about philosophically interesting topics in a not-too-inside-baseball way, and who were open-minded enough to have an expansive and non-prejudicial sense of what was “philosophically interesting.”
Was this even possible?
It was possible, but it 100% did NOT just ‘work itself out naturally.’ Well, the idea of it did work itself out naturally– in fact, over a few margaritas with my partner one night!
After recruiting my Season 1 co-hosts,
Ammon Allred and
Shannon M. Mussett, who were absolutely perfect for this experiment in every way, we still needed a podcast title and “concept.” Then, one night, after several margaritas, I was telling my girlfriend about the kinds of conversations that philosophers have when they go to a conference and then meet up at the hotel bar at the end of the day to shoot the shit. I told her I wanted the podcast to capture those exact kinds of conversations, where everyone orders a drink, cuts loose a little, realizes they’re in the one space that they can be in– maybe only once or twice a year– where (in my experience) the
real philosophy happens. She turned to me and said, “That’s what you should call the podcast: Hotel Bar Sessions.”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how HBS got its name. (Thanks, Kassandra Line!)
The rest of HBS did not work itself out so easily. There was a lot still to learn about the limits of Zoom recordings– remember that we were still trying to co-host a podcast with three remote hosts during a pandemic– and none of us had any idea, really, how much work it was going to take to set up all of the infrastructure (website, SM feeds, YouTube channel, monetization options) necessary for properly “launching” a new podcast. That was a LOT of work. And it was a lot of work that we were doing remotely, while some of the co-hosts were managing families and all of us were managing our psychological health one full year into a pandemic lockdown and with no vaccine in sight.
But we did it. We put out 15 super high-quality content episodes– covering everything from nostalgia to metrics to the Philosophical Canon to freedom– in
Season 1 of Hotel Bar Sessions. And I am very proud of the work we did.
Unfortunately, at the end of Season 1, the original HBS team’s scheduling got too difficult to coordinate and I had to find new co-hosts… but, fortunately, when I started digging around for replacements, I hit the GOLDMINE!
Season 2 of Hotel Bar Sessions launched four weeks ago, and we’re going strong. My new co-hosts are
Dr. Charles F. Peterson (Associate Professor and Chair of Africana Studies and Director of the Gertrude B. Lemie Teaching and Learning Center, Oberlin College) and
Dr. Rick Lee (Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University). You can read their own account of themselves on the HBS Co-hosts page
here.
Rick and Charles tick all the boxes: they’re insanely smart, they’re broad-minded, they’re amazingly generous interlocutors, and they are both flat-out hilarious. Season 2 of HBS is more raucous (and raunchy, at times) than Season 1, but it’s also better produced, since we switched to a triple-ender recording format. We’ve updated and streamlined our
website, we’ve maintained the same
Facebook,
Twitter, and
YouTube profiles, and we’ve still got the same
Gmail address, so definitely like, follow, subscribe, and email us whenever you want!
A few things have changed in Season 2, other than the co-hosts. We now have a regularly-occurring segment of “Rando Facts” in each episode (which we provide, or so we claim, as a “public service to our listeners” to help them spice up their cocktail party conversations!). Also, the Season 2 episodes are, by and large, NSFW. (We cuss like sailors!) And, because our areas of philosophical expertise don’t overlap completely, I think you’ll find that there is a lot more genuine engagement and friendly disagreement between the co-hosts in Season 2.
HBS Season 2, like HBS Season 1, is scheduled to run for 15 episodes, and we’ve got a great line-up of conversations coming over the next few months. I don’t anticipate another change in co-hosts at the end of this season– then again, I didn’t anticipate it at the end of Season 1, either!– but let’s keep our fingers crossed that Frangelica, our Season 2 bartender, keeps heavy-pouring the drinks and Rick and Charles remain their coarse and chatty selves!
FWIW, there are a lot of great philosophy podcasts out there
doing real philosophy. (I’m a big fan of
The Partially Examined Life,
What’s Left of Philosophy?, and
The UnMute Podcast, but you should find your own!) I’ve always been a champion of public-facing philosophy, and I think that philosophy podcasts are the best thing public philosophers have going (other than op-eds). But we’ve got to find the signal in the noise– YES I’M LOOKING AT YOU, NOISY-ASS BLATHERER, JORDAN PETERSON!– and the only way to drown out the noise is to SUBSRIBE, SHARE, PROMOTE, and DONATE to philosophy podcasters who you think are doing good work.
I hope you’ll give Hotel Bar Sessions a listen and I hope you’ll
subscribe,
follow,
like/share, promote, and
donate to us… but, even if HBS is not your jam, take a minute to check out the
long list of philosophy podcasters who are out there doing good work.
Going forward, I’ll be posting new HBS episodes to this blog, so you can listen to us here, too.
