For the final “deep dive” of Season 16, the HBS co-hosts have selected an unusual text to ground our conversation, namely,  a commencement speech by novelist David Foster Wallace entitled “This is Water” (delivered at Kenyon College in 2005). In it, Wallace provides a uncannily accurate (if disheartening) description of the mundaneness of everyday “adult” life, then uses it as a springboard to issue his call for each of us to resist the exact manner of thoughtlessness it inspires. We have a choice, Wallace argues. We could, rather, train our attention and imagination on the specific people with whom we share all of the events that constitute “life before death” and, in doing so, free ourselves from the kind of default solipsism that makes us miserable. 

Wallace’s essay is not only a reflection on vicissitudes of human life, but also on the liberatory power of education– specifically, liberal arts education— that is perhaps even more urgent to hear now, in our late-capitalist attention economy, than it was almost twenty years ago when he originally delivered it. The essay opens with a joke about how fish don’t know what water is. Because it is the very milieu in which they exist, it remains ever at the level of “the given,” that is, it never appears as something to reflect upon. If we are the fish, what is our “water”? Can we change the water, or only how we swim in it?

Grab a drink and join us in this episode as we practice paying attention and keep reminding ourselves that “this is water.”

Content note: The final segment of this episode includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling with depression or other mental health issues, help is available. In the US, call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. Outside the US, findahelpline.com lists crisis services by country.

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers, ideas, texts, etc.:

• Katie Dippold, Widow’s Bay (TV Series, 2026)
• Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Paris (Sortir à Paris, September 22, 2026)
• Hotel Bar Sessions, “Episode 105: The Master/Slave Dialectic”
• Hotel Bar Sessions, “Episode 165: Kant’s Categorical Imperative”
• Hotel Bar Sessions, “Episode 90: The Allegory of the Cave”
• Hotel Bar Sessions, “Episode 225: Foucault’s ‘Panopticism'”
• David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
• “This is Water” [TEXT AND AUDIO]
• “This is Water” [viral VIDEO] 
• Edmund Husserl, Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book
• The natural attitude and the phenomenological reduction (epoché)
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
• Solipsism
• Hotel Bar Sessions, “Episode 238: Sikh Ethics (with Keshav Singh)”
• Eidetic variation
• Rational autonomy
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
• Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844)
• Martin Heidegger
• Georges Bataille
• Louis Althusser
• Gilles Deleuze
• Stoicism
• Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Serenity Prayer”
• Special Commission, Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences (Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, 2026)
• Professors say Vanderbilt report misrepresents their work (Inside Higher Ed, June 10, 2026)
• Patricia Armstrong, “Bloom’s Taxonomy” (Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching)
• Hotel Bar Sessions, “Episode 235: Betrayal”
• Hotel Bar Sessions, “Episode 233: Failure”