The Uncommon Wisdom Podcast

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 postdoctoral fellow at Salk Institute for Biological Studies working on cancer immunotherapy. He has a great Substack, Fruits of Eden, 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 jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe

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. Hollis Robbins is Professor of English and Special Advisor for Humanities Diplomacy at the University of Utah. Her Substack, Anecdotal Value, is a gold mine for forward thinking about AI, higher education, and a pedagogy for the future. Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and author of the book The Case against Education. His Substack, Bet on It, 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 jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe

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 Cyril Hédoin of The Archimedean Point 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 synthetic Socratic method—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 jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe

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.In this episode of the Uncommon Wisdom Podcast, host Jimmy Licon talks with professor, theologian, and author Joshua Ryan Farris about the nature of the soul and consciousness. They examine the debate between materialism, which sees mental states as purely physical, and dualism, which holds that there is more to the mind than the brain. Farris critiques materialist arguments, highlighting the gap between brain states and subjective experiences (qualia), and drawing on thought experiments like Frank Jackson’s “Mary.” We also discusses near-death experiences as possible evidence for dualism and responds to common materialist appeals to neuroscience, causal closure, and simplicity, offering listeners a rich, accessible overview of this philosophical divide. Do not miss out!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 jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe

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.Many people believe that free speech is dead (or on life support) in higher education. My guest for this episode—Assistant Professor of Business, Matt Burgess—disagrees, arguing instead that not only is one’s speech freer in higher education than many other places, but that freedom may strengthen as political polarization burns itself out. Matt and I also discuss why higher education would be advised to reform itself and how integrity and principled stances remain good signals of integrity and sincere engagement. Our conversation in this episode is based on Matt’s wonderful article of the same title.Matthew Burgess is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Wyoming. He works on issues related to economic growth futures and their implications for the environment and society, political polarization of environmental issues, and mathematical modeling of human-environment systems, especially as it relates to natural resource management and conservation. He runs the Substack newsletter Guided Civic Revival and podcast Grounded, Not Divided.Uncommon Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Uncommon Wisdom at jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe

China is shrinking demographically and economically (relative to the United States). Some cheer this development, thinking it lowers the chance of military conflict with the United States and her allies. Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, Michael Beckley, the author of the recent and excellent book, Danger Zone, argues that the opposite is true: for the next five to ten years, a fading China will likely be even more dangerous. The United States and the West would do well to keep that in mind. So, for the next few years especially, the United States is in the danger zone.Uncommon Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Uncommon Wisdom at jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe

Become a paid subscriber. This Substack is a labor of love, but the coffee it takes to write the Substack ain't free. Did I mention I'm a poor professor? Thanks! ☕In a world in which only the present moment exists, travel to the past would be impossible, no? And perhaps even suicidal since time travel in such a universe would be leaving the whole of reality? Steven and I begin the episode by debating these questions. (You can find Steven's original article here, my reply here, Steven’s counter here, and my final reply here). Our conversation then turns to the question of abortion and father's rights, why luck is a myth, and the disastrous effects of AI on teaching in higher education. And just like myself, Steven likes to work on topics that come from left field—the baseball examples help too!Steven Hales is Professor of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. He also is the author of, account other books, The Myth of Luck: Philosophy, Fate, and Fortune. Uncommon Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Uncommon Wisdom at jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe

Become a paid 💰 subscriber. This Substack is a labor of love, but the coffee ☕ it takes to write the Substack ain't free. Did I mention I'm only a poor professor? Thanks! 🙏This post is experimental. It is an AI-generated podcast with two ‘hosts’ discussing a published article on mine—which I no longer endorse, but which is fun to discuss regardless—arguing that procreation (having children) is wrong most, if not all, the time. You can find a copy of the published article HERE. It was also the subject of a reddit thread a few years ago HERE.I checked the audio for accuracy, but the level of rigor ain't great. In any case, if you would prefer to listen to audiobots — that sound like NPR hosts — discussing my work in an easy to understand and digest format, then listen away!If subscribers like this feature, then I will add it as a regular on Uncommon Wisdom. If so, then let me know in the comments. Enjoy!Uncommon Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Uncommon Wisdom at jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe

Consider becoming a paid 💰 subscriber. This Substack is a labor of love, but the coffee ☕ it takes to write the Substack ain't free. Thanks! 🙏This post is experimental. It is an AI-generated podcast with two ‘hosts’ discussing a published article on mine on the implications of moral mediocrity on how just a society can be. You can find the official article linked HERE. I have checked the audio for accuracy, though the level of rigor is somewhat lacking. In any case, if you would prefer to listen to audiobots — that sound like NPR hosts — discussing my work in an easy to understand and digest format, then listen away!If subscribers like this feature, then I will add it as a regular on Uncommon Wisdom. If so, then let me know in the comments. Enjoy!Uncommon Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Uncommon Wisdom at jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Prof. Morris and I discuss the problem of evil, skeptical theism (God’s reasons are beyond our ability to understand), and how to think about suffering in a Christian context. We also discuss her recent paper on the topic, and her book on the basics of Christian philosophy. Prof. Morris is an associate professor of instruction in the philosophy department at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. She received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 2010. Her current research interests are philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and the intersection thereof.Uncommon Wisdom is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Uncommon Wisdom at jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Eric and I discuss his theory of jerks, moral mediocrity, death bed regrets, the extent of our conscious experience, and much more! Eric Schwitzgebel is Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Riverside. He works on topics in the philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, and moral psychology. He has many publications to his credit. Get full access to Uncommon Wisdom at jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Robin and I discuss the nature of prediction (read: betting) markets, how they originated, how they work, and how such markets could be used to solve any number of social and policy problems we face.Robin Hanson is associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. Get full access to Uncommon Wisdom at jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, Antony and I discuss inflation and shortages, monetary and fiscal policy, and whether, in the long term, the bankruptcy of the Federal government would be something positive. Antony Davies is Associate Professor of Economics at the Palumbo Donahue School of Business at Duquesne University. His research interests include econometrics, public policy, and consumer behavior. Davies has authored over 150 op-eds for, among others, the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Investors Business Daily, and New York Daily News. Get full access to Uncommon Wisdom at jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com/subscribe