014 Bridging the Culture Gap with Dr. Batja Mesquita and Simon Ager

Dr. Batja Mesquita is a social psychologist, an affective scientist, and a pioneer of cultural psychology. She is the author of "Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions." In this episode's first interview, KMO and Batja discuss:

• 03:10 – Batja's background and story
• 04:26 – What's WEIRD about Western countries
• 05:46 – US vs Netherlands: cultural differences
• 10:30 – Translating emotions between cultures
• 32:48 – Batja's take on the KMO's interview with Rich Firth-Godbehere
• 36:08 – The nature-culture dichotomy

Our second guest, Simon Ager, is the founder, developer, and proprietor of Omniglot.com, an online encyclopedia of languages and writing systems. In this episode's second interview, KMO and Simon discuss:

• 47:40 - Learning Japanese writing
• 51:58 – Change in language learning methodologies
• 52:33 – Writing scripts on Omniglot
• 53:16 – Tolkien's invented languages
• 54:32 - Sonja Lang's Toki Pona
• 55:48 – Emojis
• 57:20 – Making random changes to the Klingon grammar official
• 58:18 – Languages, pidgins, creoles, and dialects
• 59:18 - Mastering accents as adult learners
• 1:01:37 – Watching foreign media and acquiring fake accents
• 1:06:23 – Omniglot's unusual pedigree as a one-man linguistic orchestra

Host and Guests:

• KMO: @Kayemmo | en.padverb.com/kmo
• Dr. Batja Mesquita: @batjamesquita | www.batjamesquita.com | Wikipedia
• Simon Ager omniglot.com/aboutme.htm | @Omniglossia