According to Donald Trump, the best words come from--Donald Trump! What if he's right? What if his 4th grade vocabulary is actually changing expectations of public discourse? What if 77 words are really all that's needed from a president? Episo

Can Words Be Divine? (S1E9)

Jul 8th, 2018

Religious texts speak of wonder, miracles and the soul. But it gets better: do the words themselves have power? We talk with Matthew Stackhouse, a pastor, teacher and speaker on theology about the power and sanctity of words, as well as the spe

Fighting Words-America's Second Amendment

May 22nd, 2018

In June of 1971, US government agents shot an NRA member in his home. This event started a change in language and politics that exposed deep beliefs about guns in America, changes that ultimately established an individual right to a gun. Base C

Does Love Translate?

Apr 30th, 2018

Love: verb or noun? Concept or action? The answers to these questions sometimes elude us, and looking across cultures we find evidence that the thinking behind these words might just be substantially different. We learn from Poets, Translators

Massage of the Soul: What Drives Comedy?

Mar 21st, 2018

Tokyo Comedians Aziz Vora, Evans Musoka Luseno, Hagar and others guide us on a journey to discover the universal joke. They help us understand what it's like to write and tell jokes in a foreign country, often in a foreign language. Surprising

Words Create Worlds

Mar 8th, 2018

Bill Wood's stories have delighted audiences in America for almost 30 years. Basecode joins Bill on a journey to discover why and how we tell stories, starting with a shocking premise taken directly from an unexpected source. Topics include: th

Bonus

English Isn't Very English

Feb 23rd, 2018

The Germanic Language called English developed over 1,600 years mostly through the conquest of Britain by waves of European Invaders. This bonus episode was made at the request of listeners and is partly a history of English and partly a love n

You, I, Everything Else: The Language of AI

Feb 20th, 2018

As Artificial Intelligence develops languages on-demand, what can we learn from human languages to predict how AI will evolve? We look at Japanese, Swahili and English for a deeper understanding of how machines are creating more language than h

Under The Influence of Language

Feb 6th, 2018

When we look at how people convert thinking into language, a surprising result appears: not all cultures think in the same way. Deeper investigation shows that your language may actually determine what and how you perceive events in the first p

Blame Aristotle for Fake News

Feb 1st, 2018

Almost 2,500 years ago, a greek professor defined the rules for establishing Truth. The logic he required for thinking placed ideas and reasoning over facts. By looking at a culture new to deductive reasoning, we investigate how individuals and

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