bull session

plural bull sessions

1. idiomaticAn informal discursive group discussion, often one where politics, economics or current events are discussed.

   "We had the usual bull sessions about solving the world's problems or what would be the result of something," recalls Breidbart.

   2002, Sam Williams, Free as in Freedom, →ISBN

   3 more examples

   For instance, if you were having a bull session in somebody’s room, and somebody wanted to come in, nobody’d let them in if they were some dopey, pimply guy.

   1951 July 16, J[erome] D[avid] Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, →OCLC, page 217

   There's an old joke that I used to hear occasionally on British television shows: "It's not theft—it's socialism!" I couldn't help but think of it repeatedly as I read this paper on self-organizing institutional arrangements among pirates, which bears some disturbing similarities to an hours-long anarcho-capitalist bull session.

   2008 February 15, Megan McArdle, “Piracy: a symphony of spontaneous order”, in The Atlantic, archived from the original on 05 Dec 2025

   NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine ordered reviews of SpaceX and Boeing. Apparently this was planned before the whiskey-and-weed bull session on The Joe Rogan Experience.

   2018 November 30, Elizabeth Lopatto, “Why so many people think Elon Musk is a hero — or a villain”, in The Verge, archived from the original on 08 Nov 2020