Beer and Conversation with Pigweed and Crowhill

Do you believe in free will?Well… what choice do you have?Pigweed and Crowhill tackle one of philosophy’s oldest problems: Are we really making choices, or are our decisions simply the inevitable result of physics, biology, genetics, experience, and everything that happened before?Pigweed makes the case for determinism, tracing the chain of cause and effect from billiard balls all the way back to the Big Bang. Crowhill tries to defend free will — first considering Cartesian dualism and quantum uncertainty, then asking whether a purely physical description of the human mind can ever be a complete explanation of rational thought.Along the way, they wrestle with some harder questions: What does “free will” actually mean? Does being influenced make a choice less free? Could everything be determined while we still genuinely make decisions? And if nobody could have done otherwise, what happens to moral responsibility, punishment, praise, blame — and regret?Plus: Laplace’s Demon, Thomas Aquinas, compatibilism, Jonathan Edwards, the French Revolution, egregores, a suspicious-looking IPA, and perhaps the greatest philosophy joke ever told.👉 Subscribe for honest talk, thoughtful commentary, and beer reviews.🍺 Visit us at: pigweedandcrowhill.com📬 Email the show: [email protected]

Modern humans have been around for roughly 300,000 years. Civilization, agriculture, cities, writing, and most of the things we associate with modern human life are much more recent.So what were we doing all that time?Pigweed and Crowhill start with the Eemian, a warm interglacial period roughly 125,000 years ago when the climate was comparable to, and perhaps warmer than, today's. If anatomically modern humans were already around, why didn't they build cities, develop agriculture, or create civilizations?From there, the conversation ranges through ice ages, changing sea levels, lost archaeological evidence, human adaptation, ancient technology, and the possibility that anatomically modern humans weren't yet cognitively modern in quite the way we are.And then, inevitably, it's off to Conspiracy Corner: lost Eemian civilizations, Atlantis, UFOs, and the possibility that the aliens have actually been humans all along.Plus: pumpkin beer. Because it's October.👉 Subscribe for honest talk, thoughtful commentary, and beer reviews.🍺 Visit us at: pigweedandcrowhill.com📬 Email the show: [email protected]

It’s another five-for-five episode of "Beer and Conversation with Pigweed and Crowhill": five topics, five minutes each. Or at least that’s the theory.After sampling a Kölsch-style ale from Frost Beer Works, Pigweed and Crowhill start with the strange but true story of the Confederados — Southerners who left the United States after the Civil War and established communities in Brazil.Then they review a decidedly unimpressive neighborhood bar, try to decipher Maryland’s remarkably opaque Question 3, and wade into the delicate subject of whether husbands and wives have some obligation to remain attractive for one another.Finally, the five-minute rule gets tossed aside as they turn to the upcoming midterm elections: the House, the Senate, the races that could determine control of Congress, the importance of kitchen-table issues, and why voters so often behave in ways Pigweed and Crowhill simply cannot understand.Five topics. Five minutes each. More or less.👉 Subscribe for honest talk, thoughtful commentary, and beer reviews.🍺 Visit us at: pigweedandcrowhill.com📬 Email the show: [email protected]

Everyone knows Frankenstein—or thinks they do.Pigweed, Crowhill, and Longinus visit Baltimore’s Chesapeake Shakespeare Company for a stage adaptation of Mary Shelley’s *Frankenstein*, and discover a production that gets surprisingly close to the original novel.They talk about the remarkable summer at Lake Geneva when an 18-year-old Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori challenged one another to write ghost stories; how the play moves back and forth between Mary’s life and the story she created; and why Shelley’s creature is so different from the lumbering Hollywood monster most of us know.The real creature is intelligent, articulate, powerful, sensitive—and terribly lonely. Is he really the monster of the story, or is Victor Frankenstein?Along the way: the beautiful and unusual Chesapeake Shakespeare theater, the “Year Without a Summer,” the origins of the modern vampire story, Romanticism, a bit of disagreement over the play’s treatment of Mary Shelley, and Voodoo Ranger’s Halloween Slasher IPA.A great play based on a great novel.And poor monster.Happy Halloween!

What exactly is Christian Science? Is it related to Scientology? Why did a religion that distrusts conventional medicine once attract hundreds of thousands of followers—and what does it actually mean to say that matter, sickness, and even evil aren't ultimately real?Pigweed and Crowhill dig into the strange history and theology of Christian Science, beginning with Mary Baker Eddy and the religious ferment of 19th-century America. They explore Eddy's remarkable recovery from a serious injury, her ideas about spiritual healing, the Christian Science view of physical reality, and why rejecting doctors may not have seemed quite as crazy in the 1800s as it does today.Along the way, the conversation wanders into Protestantism, the Second Great Awakening, terrible 19th-century medicine, the Matrix, simulation theory, modern physics, religious freedom, medical treatment of children, and the question of whether Christian Science makes any more sense once you understand what its adherents actually believe.Plus: Crowhill serves up his homemade “Double Major Doppelbock,” an 8% dark, rich beer brewed for a family wedding.Beer and Conversation with Pigweed and Crowhill: two guys, a couple of beers, and whatever happens to be on their minds.👉 Subscribe for honest talk, thoughtful commentary, and beer reviews.🍺 Visit us at: pigweedandcrowhill.com📬 Email the show: [email protected]

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 those problems for their own survival.Along the way, we get into Goodhart’s Law, teaching to the test, government agencies scrambling to spend their budgets, Soviet nail factories, Wells Fargo’s fake accounts, nonprofits that can never declare victory, and the strange things that happen when a useful measurement becomes the goal itself.The larger lesson: incentives rewrite behavior. Before creating a policy, metric, department, or organization to solve a problem, ask what behavior you’re actually rewarding.And, of course, there’s an Oktoberfest beer involved.👉 Subscribe for honest talk, thoughtful commentary, and beer reviews.

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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 broader conversation about Islamic extremism, assimilation, multiculturalism, the limits of tolerance, and the strange political alliances between Islamists and Western progressives. Plus: Would the Founding Fathers really have celebrated today's version of religious diversity?👉 Subscribe for honest talk, thoughtful commentary, and, of course, beer.🍺 Visit us at: pigweedandcrowhill.com📬 Email the show: [email protected]

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 after trillions of dollars in spending, what did America actually get in return?Along the way, they discuss Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, wealth creation versus wealth redistribution, the decline of two-parent families, the changing political loyalties of black voters, and a question that applies to far more than government programs: Should a policy be judged by its intentions, or by its results?👉 Subscribe for honest talk, thoughtful commentary, and, of course, beer.🍺 Visit us at: pigweedandcrowhill.com📬 Email the show: [email protected]

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 out, they stick around for a little more on pronouns, the role of comedians as modern court jesters, and an unlikely candidate for Man of the Week: King Charles.

Pour yourself a beer and join the conversation.

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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 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed still hasn't been tried.What did America get right after 9/11? What did it get disastrously wrong? And after 25 years, have we actually learned anything?Plus, an Oktoberfest beer and the important distinction between Märzen and Festbier.📬 Send us your thoughts: [email protected] 🌐 More episodes: pigweedandcrowhill.com👍 Like, subscribe, and tell a friend