The Uncommon Wisdom Podcast

FEB 24, 2026

Is morality reducible to evolution and culture? Adam Rochussen and I discuss

Please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thank you, as always, for reading and listening.About the AuthorJimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University working on ignorance, ethics, cooperation and God. Before that, he taught at University of Maryland, Georgetown, and Towson University. He loves classic rock and Western, movies, and combat sports. He lives with his wife, a lawyer, at the foot of the Superstition Mountains. He also abides.A few months ago, I sat down with a cancer immunologist from the Salk Institute, Adam Rochussen, to discuss the relationship between ethics and evolution and we we quickly found ourselves in deep waters. Adam advanced a strongly Dawkinsian view: morality, at its core, is an evolved biological trait—a gene-level adaptation that helped our ancestors cooperate and propagate. Ethics, on his account, is the cultural and philosophical overlay: our attempt to formalize and rationalize those inherited instincts. Veganism became our central test case. Adam argued that some forms of ethical veganism are a misapplication of evolved compassion, especially our tendency to anthropomorphize animals whose “cuteness” hijacks psychological mechanisms originally tuned for protecting kin.I pressed him on what philosophers care most about, namely normativity. Even if evolution explains why we have moral instincts, does it explain why some actions are wrong regardless of survival outcomes or gene frequencies? Our discussion ranged through birth control, demographic decline, self-sacrifice, and Peter Singer’s drowning child argument. If morality is whatever survives evolutionary selection, what work is left for ethics? Is philosophy merely describing biology in slow motion, or does it supply genuine critical leverage over our inherited moral psychology? We didn’t settle the matter—but the tension itself is illuminating. Nothing was settled in our discussion, but it was a fun exchange nonetheless.Adam Rochussen is a <a target="_blank" href="https://journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/138/15/jcs264258/368781/First-person-Adam-Rochussen">postdoctoral fellow</a> at Salk Institute for Biological Studies working on cancer immunotherapy. He has a great Substack, <a target="_blank" href="https://adam.rochussen.xyz/?utm_campaign=profile_chips">Fruits of Eden</a>, where he writes about biology, philosophy, and politics, and is always provocative.Please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thank you, as always, for reading and listening. Get full access to Uncommon Wisdom at <a href="https://jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe</a>

82 MIN

FEB 11, 2026

Will AI replace markets? A conversation with economist Pete Boettke

Please like, share, comment, and subscribe. It helps grow the newsletter and podcast without a financial contribution on your part. Anything is very much appreciated. And thank you, as always, for reading and listening.About the AuthorJimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University working on ignorance, ethics, cooperation and God. Before that, he taught at University of Maryland, Georgetown, and Towson University. He loves classic rock and Western, movies, and combat sports. He lives with his wife, a lawyer, at the foot of the Superstition Mountains. He also abides.In this conversation with George Mason University economist, <a target="_blank" href="https://economics.gmu.edu/people/pboettke">Pete Boettke</a>, we explore Friedrich Hayek’s enduring relevance to debates about markets, socialism, and artificial intelligence. Boettke explains Hayek’s core insight that prices are not mere accounting tools but communication devices that coordinate dispersed and evolving knowledge in a world of fallible agents. The discussion moves from the socialist calculation debate and the “anarchy of the market” critique to the question of whether large language models change the game. So, although AI excels at aggregating and summarizing existing information, Boettke argues that it operates within fixed parameters and cannot replicate the open-ended and generative character of market processes. AI may amplify human productivity, but it does not eliminate the need for decentralized coordination in a dynamic and creative economy.Peter Boettke is a Distinguished University Professor of Economics at George Mason University, the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism, and the Director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Get full access to Uncommon Wisdom at <a href="https://jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe</a>

84 MIN

DEC 9, 2025

Will AI crush higher education?

Please like, share, comment, and subscribe. It helps grow the newsletter and podcast without a financial contribution on your part. Anything is very much appreciated. And thank you, as always, for reading and listening.About the AuthorJimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University working on ignorance, ethics, cooperation and God. Before that, he taught at University of Maryland, Georgetown, and Towson University. He loves classic rock and Western, movies, and combat sports. He lives with his wife, a prosecutor, and family at the foot of the Superstition Mountains. He also abides.AI has the potential to change everything. Why not higher education? Few colleges and universities—with exceptions—appear to be taking AI seriously. So, I decided it was time to take charge and interview people on the cutting edge of AI and higher education, but with distinct visions of the future. <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/4890710-hollis-robbins">Hollis Robbins</a> is <a target="_blank" href="https://profiles.faculty.utah.edu/u6043188">Professor of English</a> and Special Advisor for Humanities Diplomacy at the University of Utah. Her Substack, <a target="_blank" href="https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/">Anecdotal Value</a>, is a gold mine for forward thinking about AI, higher education, and a pedagogy for the future. <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/11936936-bryan-caplan">Bryan Caplan</a> is <a target="_blank" href="https://economics.gmu.edu/people/bcaplan">Professor of Economics</a> at George Mason University and author of the book <a target="_blank" href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/the-case-against-education?srsltid=AfmBOoovMbc89cETlmo8mB6tomn_-8rzDPqx5aHTtloUUcITOnfHsREQ">The Case against Education</a>. His Substack, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.betonit.ai/">Bet on It</a>, is a repository of economic thinking and contrarian takes.In this interview, Hollis Robbins treats AI as the first real threat to the university’s old claim to be the keeper and distributor of knowledge. Once students can learn faster, earlier, and on their own, the value of a semester suddenly looks arbitrary. What is left in her view is the ‘last mile,’ the part of education that AI can’t reach because it lives in the edges of expertise, in the unpublished, the contextual, the unsettled. Bryan Caplan pushes the opposite direction: most students are chasing a signal. And most universities are more invested in preserving graduation rates than in cultivating minds. Better tools won’t change that. Better incentives will.I push them both on whether any of this really counts as disruption or whether we’ve simply been here before with smarter software and bigger promises. My modest worry is that collapses often arrive late and suddenly, and almost never on schedule. Hollis thinks AI finally forces institutions to confront their inefficiencies; Bryan thinks the system’s dysfunction is exactly what keeps it together. The exchange leaves a picture of a sector stuck between real intellectual value and performative bureaucracy.Please like, share, comment, and subscribe. It helps grow the newsletter and podcast without a financial contribution on your part. Anything is very much appreciated. And thank you, as always, for reading and listening. Get full access to Uncommon Wisdom at <a href="https://jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe</a>

80 MIN

DEC 2, 2025

Should straight people play gay characters? Kurt Blankschaen and I discuss

Please like, share, comment, and subscribe. It helps grow the newsletter and podcast without a financial contribution on your part. Anything is very much appreciated. And thank you, as always, for reading and listening.About the AuthorJimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University working on ignorance, ethics, cooperation and God. Before that, he taught at University of Maryland, Georgetown, and Towson University. He loves classic rock and Western, movies, and combat sports. He lives with his wife, a prosecutor, and family at the foot of the Superstition Mountains. He also abides.I recently sat down with <a target="_blank" href="https://www.kurtblankschaen.com/">Kurt Blankschaen</a> (Philosophy, Daemen University) to talk about his new paper, co-authored with <a target="_blank" href="https://www.travistimmerman.com/">Travis Timmerman</a> (Philosophy, Seton Hall University), in the Journal of Moral Philosophy (‘<a target="_blank" href="https://brill.com/view/journals/jmp/aop/article-10.1163-17455243-21050019/article-10.1163-17455243-21050019.xml">Acting Out</a>’), on whether straight actors may permissibly play queer characters. It is one of those questions that looks trivial—just hire the best actor—until you realize that the public conversation is tangled up in worries about representation, lived experience, and online pressure campaigns that can force young performers to out themselves before they are ready.What I wanted to understand, and what we worked through over the course of the conversation, is why this debate got so moralized so quickly. Kurt and Travis argue that the real philosophical pressure point isn’t Who has the right identity? but What makes a portrayal good? Their distinction between performer authenticity and character authenticity is doing the real work here. You can have the “right” identity and still give a crappy performance. You can lack the lived experience but, through preparation, consultation, and craft, portray a character with real depth. Acting is a skill, not an autobiographical disclosure.If you insist that only queer actors can play queer characters, you get three bad results: you risk outing closeted performers; you shrink the available talent pool to the point of absurdity once intersectionality enters the picture; and you block actors, whether straight or queer, from roles they’d otherwise excel at. Because Hollywood is already a brutal, low-probability career lottery, the idea that “missing out on a part” is a distinct moral harm is less compelling here than it would be in ordinary employment contexts. But it still matters when people are treated unfairly, regardless of their sexuality.Finally, I also pressed Kurt on cases like obesity, disability, conservative Christians, and other groups that either lack media sympathy or are represented through caricature. Why do some identities get treated as inviolable while others get ignored or mocked? There is no neat answer. History and politics shape which groups we treat as requiring authenticity, and those patterns aren’t always consistent.An overall great conversation!Please like, share, comment, and subscribe. It helps grow the newsletter and podcast without a financial contribution on your part. Anything is very much appreciated. And thank you, as always, for reading and listening. Get full access to Uncommon Wisdom at <a href="https://jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe</a>

59 MIN

NOV 24, 2025

Where is AI headed? A conversation with a philosopher and an economist

Please like, share, comment, and subscribe. It helps grow the newsletter and podcast without a financial contribution on your part. Anything is very much appreciated. And thank you, as always, for reading and listening.About the AuthorJimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University working on ignorance, ethics, cooperation and God. Before that, he taught at University of Maryland, Georgetown, and Towson University. He loves classic rock and Western, movies, and combat sports. He lives with his wife, a prosecutor, and family at the foot of the Superstition Mountains. He also abides.I had anxieties about AI and the future. So I decided to sit down with <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/35728647-cyril-hedoin">Cyril Hédoin</a> of <a target="_blank" href="https://cyrilhedoin.substack.com/">The Archimedean Point</a> to hash out our thoughts together. Talking with Cyril, I kept coming back to two linked worries: displacement and disempowerment. He traced his path from institutional economics into philosophy and admitted the same professional anxiety: AI doing more and more of the work we once took to be distinctly human. Neither of us thinks anyone can predict the labor-market fallout. The historical record makes forecasts laughable. But he’s right that whoever owns the AI infrastructure will hold enormous economic power, and that is a shift worth taking seriously.Cyril’s worry about “uniformization” struck me. If people increasingly rely on broadly similar models for writing, thinking, and making decisions, the range of genuine variation shrinks. Because these systems are trained to be agreeable, even sycophantic, we risk reinforcing the worst aspects of our epistemic bubbles.We ended on the personal terrain: loneliness, synthetic intimacy, and the temptation to treat AI as a partner or companion. I don’t think this becomes the norm soon, but the cultural pressures are obvious. It feels like relational junk food—immediately gratifying, ultimately hollow. Yet there is a genuinely hopeful angle too. If used well, AI might revive a kind of <a target="_blank" href="https://jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/p/synthetic-socrates-teaching-assistant">synthetic Socratic method</a>—an always-on dialectical partner that sharpens arguments rather than dulls them. The real question is whether we use the tool without quietly surrendering ourselves to it.Please like, share, comment, and subscribe. It helps grow the newsletter and podcast without a financial contribution on your part. Anything is very much appreciated. And thank you, as always, for reading and listening. Get full access to Uncommon Wisdom at <a href="https://jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe</a>

47 MIN

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