Beer and Conversation with Pigweed and Crowhill

What happens when the people hired to solve a problem have an incentive to keep the problem alive?Pigweed and Crowhill start with the famous Cobra Effect: the British tried to reduce the number of cobras in India by paying people for dead snakes, only to encourage people to breed more cobras. From there, the conversation turns to Pigweed’s Paradox: organizations created to solve problems can eventually become dependent on tho...

Pigweed and Crowhill drink and review Big Red Norm American Red Ale and review *Run Hide Fight: Infidels*, the new action movie from the Daily Wire.Critics have called the movie Islamophobic and propagandistic. Is that fair? The guys consider where the movie exaggerates, where its critics may have a point, and whether its basic premise reflects uncomfortable realities that Western societies would rather ignore.That leads to a broad...

More than 60 years after Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty, how should we judge the results?Pigweed and Crowhill drink a homebrewed "Texas Imperial Brown Ale" and take a look at Johnson's creations -- the Great Society and the War on Poverty -- and discuss the ideas behind them. How much progress against poverty was already underway before the programs began? Did welfare programs create incentives that weakened families? And...

It’s another P&C Five for Five: five topics, five minutes each.

Pigweed and Crowhill start with a Festbier and then race through ...

* Personalized pricing,

* The mania for renaming things,

* What the most common words in rap and country music say about the cultures behind them,

* The controversy over maps that make Africa look too small, and

* The growing effort to separate the T from the LGB.

Then, after the timer runs ...

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Pigweed and Crowhill look back at the attacks, where they were when they happened, and what America did in response.They revisit the confusion and fear of that day, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, expanded government surveillance, immigration, and America's complicated relationship with Islam. They also ask why, a quarter-century later, alleged 9/1...

For the first time in decades, rap has disappeared from the top of the charts while country music is surging. Has rap simply exhausted itself—or is something bigger going on?Pigweed and Crowhill trace rap's evolution from the relatively harmless early days of hip-hop to gangster rap and increasingly explicit music, and compare its treatment of sex, crime, rebellion, and regret with rock and outlaw country. Why does Johnny Cas...

We tend to think of democracy as the natural state of a modern society. But what if it's actually a historical anomaly that depends on a surprisingly fragile set of conditions?In this episode, Pigweed and Crowhill discuss what makes democratic government possible in the first place: trust, civic virtue, respect for the rule of law, acceptance of political defeat, shared cultural assumptions, and responsible government. From the Ame...

The Lindsay Clancy trial ended with a hung jury after one juror refused to join the other eleven in voting for acquittal. And then things got really interesting.Pigweed and Crowhill discuss the remarkable reaction to the holdout juror, the outrage that he wouldn’t go along with the majority, the revelation that he was a black man, and the media’s efforts to identify him and dig into his personal life. What does it say a...

Giants are everywhere. They appear in fairy tales and mythology, in the Bible, in ancient legends, and even in modern stories from Afghanistan.Why are stories about giants so common? Crowhill, Longinus, and Pigweed explore the Nephilim of Genesis, Goliath and the giants of Canaan, the famous Cardiff Giant hoax, and the bizarre modern legend of the Giant of Kandahar.Then they ask a more practical question: Could a 12- or 15-foot hum...

For this installment of P&C’s Shortcut to the Classics, we turn to one of America’s earliest great writers: Nathaniel Hawthorne.We discuss four of Hawthorne’s short stories — “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” “The Birth-Mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and “Young Goodman Brown” — and find a surprisingly consistent vision running through them. C...

What if civilization didn't begin the way we thought it did?

For generations, the standard story was fairly straightforward: hunter-gatherers settled down, developed agriculture, built permanent communities, and eventually created cities, temples, art, writing, and civilization.

Then archaeologists discovered Göbekli Tepe.

Built around 9,500 BC in what is now southeastern Turkey, Göbekli Tepe is more than 5,000 years older than the Su...

What happens when people stop believing the justice system will deliver justice?

Pigweed and Crowhill start with the banned movie Citizen Vigilante, but quickly move into a much bigger question: Why do vigilante stories become popular when people believe crime is out of control and the authorities aren't doing their job?

From Charles Bronson and Falling Down to Batman, John Locke, the social contract, and the state's supposed monopol...

Pigweed and Crowhill drink and review Cape May Brewing Company’s Coastal Evacuation Double IPA and ask a deceptively simple question: When are we going to live on Mars?Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Tesla, and even the Boring Company can all be understood as pieces of his larger vision of making humanity a multi-planetary species. And there’s a compelling argument behind it: Earth is humanity’s single point of failure....

On their recent trip to Mexico, Pigweed, Crowhill, and Longinus read Greene's novel set in Mexico -- a moral thriller about the relentless pursuit and persecution of a Catholic priest during the Mexican civil war. A paramilitary group has outlawed the Catholic Church and is executing the clergy. A humdrum, milquetoast, "whiskey priest" is on the run, and a determined officer is trying to hunt him down. He's stuck between duty and a...

Who was the greatest man who ever lived? Yeah, okay, Jesus. But who was called "the greatest man" by his enemies? That would be our first president, George Washington, who was declared the greatest man who ever lived by none other than his rival, King George. Why? Pigweed and Crowhill dive into that topic, and explore the amazing life and legacy of George Washington. But first, they drink an IPA inspired by ... Iron Maiden? What do...

Pigweed, Crowhill, and Longinus are back from Mexico with stories to tell. The trip takes them from the beach town of Sayulita to the sprawling metropolis of Guadalajara and finally to Tequila—where the agave fields are endless, the distilleries are fascinating, and the tour bus gets considerably livelier on the way home.Along the way, they encounter mariachi bands, Mexican craft beer, cobblestone streets, scooters that would...

Why do some cultural fads disappear while others hang around long after everyone seems to have moved on?Pigweed and Crowhill drink and review a hazy IPA and ask, “Are we still doing this?” From pronouns in bios, COVID-era leftovers and land acknowledgments to climate alarmism, corporate virtue signaling, Pride Month, recycling and other remnants of the great cultural craziness of the past several years, they run through...

Pigweed and Crowhill review two versions of the same old ale and tackle Helen Andrews' provocative argument that much of what we call “wokeness” can be understood as the feminization of our institutions.As women have become majorities in fields such as education, law, publishing, and human resources, Andrews argues that traditionally feminine priorities — empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over c...

America needs more data centers to power AI -- but communities across the country are starting to say, "Not here."

In this episode of Beer and Conversation with Pigweed and Crowhill, we explore why counties and states are putting the brakes on new AI infrastructure. Data centers promise billions of dollars in investment, but they also consume enormous amounts of electricity, require vast tracts of land, generate noise, and create su...