Decoding the Gurus - Mind, Culture & Visual Illusions: Dorsa Amir and Chaz Firestone on Visual Illusions

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

In this academic-themed interview episode of Decoding the Gurus, Matt and Chris sit down to chat with Dorsa Amir and Chaz Firestone (@chazfirestone) about their recent paper 'Is Visual Perception WEIRD? The Müller-Lyer Illusion and the Cultural Byproduct Hypothesis.'In a conversation that serves as a welcome tonic to the endless lamentations of the gurus about academic groupthink and closed-minded silos, Dorsa and Chaz discuss the interdisciplinary nature of their work, debates around universal vs. culturally specific psychology, and the strength of evidence that visual perception varies between cultures. We also learn about the dangers of being STUPID: Studying Topics Uninformed by Prior Investigations in the Discipline, and attempt to uncover just how much Chaz enjoys popping balloons.A fun one that might even leave you a little bit more optimistic than usual!LinksAmir, D., & Firestone, C. (2025). Is visual perception WEIRD? The Müller-Lyer illusion and the cultural byproduct hypothesis. Psychological Review.Dorsa's Homepage and Mind and Culture Lab.Chaz's Perception & Mind Lab Homepage, his instagram, and his BJJ victory video.Decoding Academia 33: The Great Müller-Lyer Debate from Fish Tanks to Eye OperationsMickey Inzlicht's Substack on the Paper and the Debates around it.Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?. Behavioral and brain sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.Lucca, K., Yuen, F., Wang, Y., Alessandroni, N., Allison, O., Alvarez, M., ... & Hamlin, J. K. (2025). Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large‐Scale, Multi‐Lab, Coordinated Replication Study. Developmental Science, 28(1), e13581.

Hello and welcome to theoding the Gurus, a special interview edition with Matthew Brown, the psychologist who is usually here and I won't be interviewing him, me, the cognitive anthropologist of sorts, and with us two researchers, academics that we recently covered their paper on decoding academia. This is Dorsa Amir and Chas Firestone. And the paper we looked at was, is visual perception weird? The the Mueller-Larr illusion and the cultural byproduct hypothesis, which we'll talk about a little bit. But hello, Dorsa and Chaz. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much. And one thing is that normally whenever we try to get like the bios of people, because they're on academic sites. They're always like a year or two out of the it. So we can't deny just ask people to briefly introduce themselves because then they will be mysterious. So like I think Dorsey, you're associate professor.

Assistant professor. Assistant professor. So yeah. See? So yeah. But I noticed that was, I think, this year, last year. Yeah, yeah. I'm just going to stop my first year. So I sometimes get introduced on podcasts as postdoctoral research. And I'm like, no, that was like eight years ago.

But there is a website that says that. So yeah, Doris, maybe you first. So what's your current position and academic background in general? Sure, yeah. So I'm Dorsa Meir. I am an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University in the United States of America.

My background is actually in anthropology. So my PhD and my bachelor's are both in anthropology. And I transitioned over to psychology. So I would describe myself as a developmental psychologist that's anthropologically inclined. I primarily study cognitive development and decision making across cultures. And by the way, I think Manvir, we were talking to Manvir Singh recently, and he mentioned

you you came up in the conversation about the Shuar. I think, yeah. So there you go, Matt. There's a connection. Just, it was that door set. Yeah. And there's another theme with our podcast, because we've got you as well, who's nominally an anthropologist, but acts like a psychologist. There's more than me, Matt. Well, that's right. We'll let Chas introduce himself But then then I want to ask these guys about those the tension between those disciplines if there is a okay. Hmm Chas So I'm an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University, which is in Baltimore, Maryland I also have an affiliation in the philosophy department and And I've sort of been connected to philosophy a bit

in my career as well. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. I'm super into philosophy, especially philosophy of cognitive science. And the research questions I get the most excited about are the ones located right at that intersection. And this one that we're here to talk about today

happens to be an example, I think. It's at the intersection of quite a few fields, definitely including those two. Yeah. Chaz, by the way, just a random question. But do you do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu? I do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, yes. Okay. I was just curious because when I was doing my deep opposition research on the both of

you, I was looking on YouTube and then there was like a competition match. I was like, is that the same? How many people are called Chaz Firestone? It should be this team. Listen, so there you go. Yeah, that YouTube video you watched, who won it? Who won the competition? I believe it was you, Avery.

I think it was you, yeah, it might have been. Yeah, yeah, listeners, if they want. But I was just curious, just checking that I, I mean, it looked very like you and I had to see him. So it should be. Hold up the belt, Chaz. Hold up the belt. Go on. Wow, that's like a wrestling belt, like WWE wrestling belt at the back right.

Yeah. I did present in Jiu Jitsu for about eight years in the past, but not anymore. So, yeah, I don't have any belt though. But feel free to ask your relevant academic question. All right. All right. Well, okay. Before I do, I just got to address the elephant in the room, which is Chaz Firestone's awesome name. It sounds like it should be saving the galaxy or something. Dorsa, you've got a lovely name too.

I think it is that both of your names are better than my name, which is incredibly boring bog standard as Chris would say, but no, no, put that aside. Um, yeah. Like, so. Chaz, you're untainted by anthropology, which is good, but you dabble in philosophy. Hmm. That's so good. But, but, but also like, uh, at the, you know, both, both of your papers, I think, actually, I say both,

because I've been looking at another one too. They both deal, I guess, with some of those tensions between universal cognitive things and particular culturally determined things. And yeah, is that a topic that interests you, Dorsa? Yeah, absolutely. And it's one of the reasons that I found myself in psychology, because I've always been really interested in cognition, but also from this cross-cultural perspective, which I think anthropology has always been a pioneer

in kind of leading the way into that world. But I think, and maybe Chaz would describe himself the same, I think of myself more as a cognitive scientist more broadly, maybe in the classical sense. If we think of the origin of cognitive science and, you know, the Sloan hexagon that some of you might be familiar with, you know, one of the vertices of that hexagon is anthropology. And there's a reason that anthropology is there,

because it provides this kind of natural experiment laboratory, going out there and really trying to figure out, what are the conditions under which we see these cognitive processes? What are the types of things that penetrate cognition and what things don't? And I think without that, you always have this question of, is this really

something about the human mind, or is it about the mind in this specific setting? So one of my secret missions that I talk about is, is kind of reintegrating anthropological inquiry into cognitive science more broadly. And it's kind of been historical, historical accident of sorts that anthropology and cognitive anthropology has been left by the wayside a bit. Yeah, that's fantastic.

And I guess comparative psychology psychology too, you know, where we compare ourselves to animals or now we can do it with AIs as well, provides even other angles as well. Yeah. Doris, I had the chance, you as well can chime in, but if this is like something you know about, I'm kind of curious about about like, whenever you make efforts to cross disciplinary boundaries, right, like to introduce quantitative kinds of evidence in social and cultural anthropology spaces, or vice versa, right, like emphasize for psychologists that they should get out of their like labs and their MTurk samples and whatnot, then there's resistance on both sides.

But I'm curious, do you experience more from either side? Is there an issue where anthropologists think you're leaning too heavily into quantitative and developmental type studies or vice versa? Is it psychologists who are more resistant to cross-cultural kind of things? That's interesting. I will say I'm a bit more of an optimist. I feel like there is this tension and there is this kind of tightrope to walk. But I feel like I've been able to make positive connections in all of these fields and really be able to focus on the strengths that these different approaches bring. I do feel a little bit bicultural maybe,

like I'm a dual citizen. And there's always this little question of, well, what tribe is she from? But I don't really subscribe to that. And it's never really been a problem personally for me. I find it really professionally enriching to be able to look across these different perspectives and find out what's in the middle.

And I think it's been really both personally and professionally fun to be in this space. Sounds maybe the same thing applies with you, with like philosophers. So something I found is that I think intellectually, the road from one discipline to the other, sort of like the traffic patterns look a little different.

So the philosophy to psychology direction, at least for me, has involved like importing questions from philosophy into psychology. So trying to sort of articulate and then answer a question that philosophers are asking or have been asking for a long time, but that psychology just sort of hasn't really just sort of discovered as an interesting question. And then through some careful work and leading an audience through arguments or through some research traditions

or helping psychologists understand that actually there's something really interesting there, including interesting distinctions that philosophers are especially good at making. But I think it takes some work and some framing to really get psychology audiences to understand why some question that could initially sound somewhat obscure from philosophy is actually quite scientifically interesting.

Whereas in the other direction, it might be more like what you'd think, getting philosophers to think of empirical evidence as relevant to the questions they're interested in. And there I think empirical evidence sometimes is and sometimes is not relevant. And so in the cases that it isn't, don't try to shoehorn something in there that doesn't belong. But in the cases where it is, say, hey, this question that looks like it maybe kind of interacts with empirical data really ought to. And at least the area of philosophy

that I have the most experience with in terms of just sort of collaborations or making some progress, like becoming integrated into those communities, is philosophy of cognitive science, which is so already connected to scientific work itself that I find that community to be pretty welcoming of empirical data. Yeah. Actually, this is a comment rather than a question, sorry. But it's great to hear you guys say these things because one of the perennial refrains

we hear on the internet is, well, first of all, academia is totally stuffed. You may or may not have heard this, but it's terrible in every respect, totally corrupt, riddled with politically correct nonsense. The work mind virus. And one of the many sins is apparently that we're all ultra specialists in our tiny little silos. And I just don't think it's true. Yes, there's tension there, right? Because it's difficult to go out. You need to specialize to some degree. But most of the guests on our podcast are like you guys, which is cross-disciplinary

and getting information from all over the place. I think one thing to add about this is that to do this kind of work successfully, I think a crucial ingredient is to respect the questions and traditions of each discipline, not necessarily just take them all on board just as they are, but know what you're getting into And it can go wrong when it's one discipline trampling on the territory of the other. It can go wrong when you're a scientist who bounds into some philosophy seminar room and just says, just blabs about free will or consciousness with no understanding of the millennia of discussion and distinctions that are made in that seminar room. And it's just like, what are you even talking about?

But then the same thing can happen in the other direction. And in Doris' case and in my case as well, I think we both have training in the two disciplines that we try to integrate across. And I think that matters. It matters that you can sort of enter one field or the other and at least sort of look like you belong and speak the language that helps sort of get you in the door and helps you be seen as sort of like someone who might belong. Dorsa, you wanted to chime in.

I was going to say this is a great moment to introduce this other acronym that I coined. The acronym is STUPID, Studying Topics Uninformed by Prior Investigations and the Discipline. Oh, good. And I feel like that's exactly what Chaz is talking about. I hope it catches on. So we try to not be stupid. Yeah, that's, that is a big issue. Not, not just in discipline, it's like in informed by any previous

information about a topic, the type of people we cover in the podcast have an approach we could, which could be charitably described as like autodidactic. They kind of think that their self-generated thoughts on an issue are perhaps the most important thing. But I'll just say also in passing that in my PhD studies, the department was an anthropology department that was split. Like there was a clear split between the cognitive and evolutionary side of it and the social and cultural anthropology side. But all of the first year PhD students were forced to like be in the same class

and present their research together. And it was, it was very eye opening because like in my case, I had a background in social anthropology. So I could understand, you know, what kind of critiques or questions they were going to raise. But it was quite clear that people that were coming from like, human sciences or whatever, had never encountered those kinds of questions. Like whether you think the questions are good or not, it was an experience and people not being

able to translate across disciplines particularly well in some cases. So that was an interesting experience and we're for that on the podcast. That's our controversial stats. So yeah. Okay, enough comments from us. Let's turn to this paper. Many of our listeners would have heard our previous coverage of it and indeed read the paper, is visual perception weird? The Mueller-Lyer illusion and the cultural byproduct hypothesis. So how did you guys come to work on this question together? Well, this is a research question that has been in the field for a very long time. And it's been in the field in multiple disciplines so this illusion the Mueller-Lyer illusion which is just you

know two lines on a page is very significant in two completely separate literatures and yet in very big ways in those two literatures. So in the field of vision science which is where a lot of my training is is in there's just a ton of research on trying to understand this illusion. It's a very old illusion. There are theories of how this illusion arises, what else it says about how visual processing works. And that research tradition is really just concerned with, you know, making variations

of this thing, showing it to people in different circumstances, showing it sometimes to non-human animals, showing it to people with vision that works differently than sort of healthy, normally intact vision, and just using it as a sort of case study to understand how visual processing works. And then in parallel, and I really mean in parallel, there's so little crosstalk between these two literatures, it also has had this really interesting status in the field of anthropology and even in sociology, where there has been all this interest in cross-cultural differences in the strength of this illusion.

And that tradition actually goes back over 100 years, but was especially like very much ignited by a study around a half century ago by a team of social scientists who published a very prominent paper and also eventually a book where they collected data from thousands of participants in over a dozen societies around the world and discovered that there appeared to be a lot of variation in the strength of the illusion. And it became a real sort of

like lodestar in thinking about cross-cultural variation in the mind in general because if something as basic as visual perception could change in this load star in thinking about cross-cultural variation in the mind in general, because if something as basic as visual perception could change in this sort of culturally specific way, then just, you know, that basically sounds like the whole mind should change in that way. But what was really interesting is that you just wouldn't get these two research traditions in the same room together. So the cross-cultural sort of the anthropology community wasn't paying a ton of attention to the sort of nitty-gritty

psychophysics and vision science, but the vision science wasn't really paying attention to the anthropology either. So if you would attend a vision science conference and someone would say, oh the Mule-and-Liar illusion, that thing that doesn't exist in this foraging population, the vision scientists would look at you like, huh? You know, that's not how we think this thing works. And I'll shut up in a second and let Dorsa take over. But Dorsa and I actually were in grad school together and knew about our own sort of areas and then we're excited to learn about the others' area. And it was interesting to discover this discrepancy. And so we both were very interested in this and actually have been interested in it for

over a decade. And it was only recently that we sort of put our heads together and tried to write something. But that thing very much involves uniting and sort of bringing into conversation with one another two very different research traditions. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's nice. Our story of us as graduate students actually really nicely mirrors exactly this history of debate that Chas said nicely summarized here. So while I was getting my PhD in anthropology, Chas is getting his PhD in psychology. I met Chas and other folks in the psychology department

as the first year. And I think actually, Chas, maybe this is my first year that I was there since 2013 that we started having this conversation. And we actually had this real life moment where I said, oh, yeah, the Malorra Larry, that thing that varies across cultures. And Chad's like, what are you talking about?

And so we started kind of looking into it. And in fact, I think I even pitched running it among some of the populations that I worked with that first summer, which we ultimately didn't get to do. But we had been chatting kind of informally about what ultimately ends up being this paper for over a decade and toying with this idea and messaging each other back and forth occasionally when we'd see someone publicly

cited and be like, look, it's at the forefront, people are still using this. And this evolved into us saying, okay, let's actually sit down and formally write up all of these assorted thoughts that we've been collecting and musing about for so long. And let's actually put it to paper. So this is the result of this very long period of thinking and marinating. So we'll try not to reprise the paper in too much detail, but just to jog people's memories a little bit. I think you heard our opinion of it. We thought it was incredibly convincing. You guys essentially gave five independent refutations of the cultural variability hypothesis. Did you want to maybe... First you, Chase, could you give us a condensed version of that? Sure. So the idea... Let me say first what the cultural bio-biological hypothesis is, but very briefly, that there are a lot of ways to think about

cross-cultural variation. The idea that's been sort of the most captivating both to us and to the field at large is the idea that this illusion, which is in every perception textbook you've ever seen, is actually the result of your cultural upbringing. It's not something that you would be born with, it would not exist if not for the fact that you're exposed to certain regularities in your life. One of the popular stories for what kinds of regularities those are is regularities associated with carpentry,

so right angles and straight lines, although that's not the only proposal. There are proposals that involve exposure to Western art or just any other sort of artifact, but something that you might only see or see more of in Western culture. The cultural bipartisanship hypothesis sort of subsumes all of those possibilities

and is the idea that whatever the explanation, it's something about what you see in your life that creates this illusion. And that's supposed to explain why the illusion is strong and robust in those of us who live in so-called weird societies, western societies, educated, and so on, and not in various other societies, including a foraging population in the Kalahari Desert and so on.

And some approaches to trying to decide this question would look at empirical data about cross-cultural variation, and we do that in our paper a bit. But the approach that Dorsa and I took was really to take a step back and say, suppose you just sort of set aside the cross-cultural data, is this even a hypothesis that sort of makes sense in the first place? And the more you know about cognitive science, the more you know about those spokes, the vertices on the hexagon that Dorsa mentioned earlier, the more it just shouldn't make sense to you that this illusion arises from experience. Because if you've been paying attention to the whole body of research on this illusion,

there are findings that are just utterly anomalous if you thought this thing arose from experience. And they include the fact that non-human animals like guppies see this illusion. And they're not Western educated, industrialized, rich, democratic guppies. They're just fish in a fish tank. And you get this illusion in touch, not just in vision. You get this illusion with curvy lines and not just with straight lines where it's supposed to be straight lines that are causing it. There's some really interesting modeling evidence that's sort of difficult to summarize, but that shows that just ordinary objects in the natural world, where the natural world

is hills and grass and plants and rocks, sort of obey the regularities that are proposed to create this illusion on their own. And then personally I think the most, the most sort of just powerful piece of evidence is this incredible study from a group at MIT. They have this project called Project Prakash, which is the Sanskrit word for light, and it's a humanitarian and scientific project that offers free cataract surgery to needy children in North India. Cataracts are a disorder of the lens that make your lens cloudy.

It's possible that someone older in your life has cataracts, or you might have a pet who has cataracts, but it's also possible to be born with them. And, you know, in the United States, a baby born with cataracts would be born blind, but this is like a curable blindness, and so they would be given an artificial lens and then go on to see fairly normally. But in parts of the world where this is prohibitively expensive, there are people with curable blindness, and this project cures the blindness of children who have congenital cataracts. And then on the first day that they can see, shows them the Mueller-Lyer illusion and discovers

that in fact they see the illusion. The illusion works on them. And these people not only have they never seen carpentry, they've never seen anything. And they see the illusion on day one. And so those are our five arguments. I gave five sources of evidence just now, but I sort of mixed them up with each other. But if you know those things, then this carpentry idea, you should come in very skeptical of

that. You should think, could it really be that this thing arises from experience? And Doris and I thought that the answer just really seemed to be no. And then another project for us was to try to account for the data that appears to say yes. Yeah, and that was very fun. I'll just add, it was basically, I

felt like a historical detective going through cold. We were looking at data from like 1901. I was looking up and creating spreadsheets from these yellowing pages from some archive. It was very fun. And this is also when I discovered. So I'll just add a little fun note here. So we went all the way back to almost like 1901, actually.

I think this is the first study we looked at by rivers, looking at the molar layer across these populations. And one thing I kept noticing, and I kept pointing this out to Chas, I was like, it's so weird. He just like reports some means and then is like, see, they're different. And I was like, why are there no statistical tests? And that's when I discovered that the t-test wasn't invented yet. So what we did was actually code all that data and run like a t-test and some

ANOVAs on it to actually do the analysis that they couldn't do in 1901. And we found some pretty mixed results. And in fact, most of the comparisons were not significant, even though the means look very different. So that was a very fun experience. Yeah. But it also involved all the way back to 1901, but really tracing the history of this argument through these papers, some of which, you know, my library didn't even have access to all the way through the Segal et al. data set that we really, I mean, I read that book a couple of times, frankly, and we had all these sticky notes. We were sending screenshots back and forth.

We really did a deep dive into this and we uncovered, I think, things that would be probably viewed as questionable research practices, whether they were implicit or explicit. I mean, at the very least, not up to the methodological rigor of science in 2025. And also, one thing that we, I think, as a field have kind of ignored or maybe not paid much attention to is that there is this argument, for instance,

that carpentry matters in potentially producing this illusion. And what I found looking back at this data is actually, they measured the effect of the molar lyre and the susceptibility to it pretty well. They were pretty careful to some degree with coming up with controls and trying to standardize things. But their predictor, which is carpentry,

it's just the opposite. I mean, forgive me saying this, but it's just vibes, right? So one of their questions was, how similar is the culture you're working in to Europe or America? How entrenched are they in Euro-American ways? This weird subjective single responder, I mean, it's just a mess of a construct. And if you actually look at the tables, which we did

and we reproduced, I think there is what's become almost like this mythical idea that there are these cultures where there's just no rectangularity at all. They live in circular huts, et cetera. If you look even at these samples and how they're described in the ethnographies, there's tons of evidence for rectangularity actually.

And even, I mean, Chaz and I joked about this, like even if it's a circular hut, if you're looking directly at it, you're seeing how it, like there is quite a lot of rectangularity in these cultures, even in their own ethnographies. And as one of our lines of evidence even suggests, natural scenes are enough to produce these same types of illusions. So it frankly doesn't even or shouldn't even matter what shape the houses are built in, right? It's much more complicated. And I

think much less compelling than I originally believed it to be. Yeah. I think one thing that Dorster discovered, and that was really, I mean, it was maybe shocking to me, but on reflection, I don't know how shocking it should have been, is that it turns out that the secondary literature really exoticized these communities in a way that just didn't match the first-hand data that you could collect. So Dorsa would dig up all these incredible quotations of what's really there, and there would be huts and literal you know, literal carpentry all over the place.

And then you would see these descriptions from later discussions of these cultures that would say they have no corners in their society. They have no sharp objects. And like we have this, some of this happens in snarky footnotes in our paper, but there are like, you can juxtapose, you know, modern day as it were, researchers saying, no sharp objects in this society. And then the society that they're describing turns out to be very well known for this like incredible spear that like was an influential spear in the whole continent. And the supposedly no sharp objects society was like really good at like metalwork to

make the tip of the spear perfectly, excellently sharp. And just you see this mismatch and you and you you sort of I don't know at least in my case get a little bit sad for how the world sees these cultures and sort of others them in various ways Yeah, and and as you showed it, it doesn't matter anyway, because the more like illusion holds with curves, right? So But actually I want to ask you one thing and then I'll pass over to Chris when I was got a battery of questions for you.

But like probably the single finding that you reviewed that blew my mind the most was that this effect holds up in Braille, right? Because like you guys, I initially thought the cultural impact was quite plausible, or just experience was a plausible drive. What I vaguely know about how hypercomplex neurons and stuff develop, and you see there's

various kinds of adaptivity in the neural links going on, my gut feeling was, yeah, I can see that. It's going to be conditioned on your visual experience. You totally demolished that for me throughout the paper. But then my fallback was, okay, it's a general purpose heuristic for distance perception. I suppose that was my own personal fallback theory. Then it felt to me like the Braille finding just ruined that. So Kit, can I ask you guys, what is your opinion?

What is your gut feeling about what causes it? So there's another hypothesis out there that can make the Braille finding a bit less mysterious. So here's the idea. So your visual system is not really one thing. It has various subprocesses for different functions that it carries out. And these different processes are often

sensitive to information from different frequencies. So some bits of visual processing really care about fine detail and let high frequency information in. So you could call that high pass filtering. And some processes care about lower frequency informationquency information, and that's low-pass filtering, so letting in cruder, lower-frequency, you could even say kind of like blurrier information. And so one way to think about the Mueller-Lyer illusion in vision and in touch is that it's almost like

what you would get if your vision were blurry. So suppose that your vision were very blurry and suppose that your touch were very blurry. Imagine that we had a Mueller-Lyer illusion made of putty and we smudged it around. Eventually you might get into a situation where the central line is sort of getting smudged together with the flanking lines. And when the flanking lines extend beyond, right, they extend wider than the central line, then the central line and the flanking lines kind of smudge together in various ways, right? And that would be the sort of touch equivalent of blurring.

And if you think of some of these phenomena as the result of this low pass filtering, then it makes sense in vision and in touch. And in fact, I think in your earlier episode you were both talking about being a bit amazed that you can get this illusion in the foraging pattern of ants. That also can be explained by that sort of low-pass filtering. So the way that this ant study worked is the researchers made a Mueller lyre illusion out of honeydew and then dropped a bunch of ants on them and looked at where the ants went to eat the honeydew. And then basically, if you then remove the honeydew or the ants ate all the honeydew

or you just imaged all the ants without the honeydew, the ants themselves sort of behaved in a Mueller lyre illusion-y way, which is to say there were a wider segment of ants on the central line for the inward-facing arrowheads than the outward-facing arrowheads. But if you think of the ants themselves as a kind of low-pass filter, they're sort of smudging themselves on the illusion, then you can get them doing that too. Now, it's not clear that this explains everything. There are some versions of the illusion that almost seem like you can make them with attention,

but I think that's the account that does the best job at capturing the most of the Mueller liar phenomena, including even the Braille one that is otherwise kind of puzzling. Great explanation. Thank you. Yeah, that's helpful. Like Matt said, I have a bunch of questions, but I'm aware of your time constraints.

So I'm gonna double parallel some of them, but in a good way. So the first one, I think you guys already addressed it, but I'd be interested just to hear, especially Doris, in your case. You know, I think Matt and I might have had a similar sense of the literature that, you know, we were sympathetic to the notion of this varying across cultures. So I'm interested if initially you expected the results to be, the kind of cross-cultural variability of results to be validated or you were initially skeptical.

So after you go into the research, as you described, I can see why skepticism would grow. And if you are aware of the other literature that Chas was referencing, but if you're coming from, you know, more of the background that we would share, I feel like you would be more sympathetic. But so I'm interested in that. And then the second thing is given what a central topic this has been or an illustration used in like comparative cross-cultural psychology and culture-centered accounts of like, you know, social reality.

When you were addressing that, was that something that like made you hesitant to kind of come out, you know, because the paper is quite strongly critical of the evidence base, and obviously that's going to write up fellers. Or is that something that you enjoy and there's part and parcel of science, personality thing? So I'm just curious about your initial motivations and reaction to our reason for delving into this. Yeah. So as I mentioned, you know, my training is in anthropology. It was in biological anthropology. And I had come across this, I think probably in the weird paper, which was a really important

paper for my career. I'll just add, you know, a lot of the work that I do and my interest in this, this cognition anthropology fusion was, was really spurred by that. And I think it was just one of those things that I was like, Oh, interesting. And didn't really look under the hood of, uh, and it wasn't until I met Chas and started learning more about, you know, all these delightful studies that he just outlined for us that you start to think, oh, maybe I was a little hasty at this conclusion. And actually there's a lot of insight to be gained by taking seriously what they're doing and how they're doing it.

And I do think this is going back to this theme that we talked about, right? When you're entering into a new field, I think deferring to the expertise and the accumulated wisdom of that field is important to really taking seriously what they bring to the table. And so I think Chas frankly disabused me of this belief pretty quickly, I would say,

throughout the course of one conversation. And I learned that it was one of these things that I've just kind of taken on board without having truly the skill set or toolkit to evaluate it at the threshold that I think maybe needs to be evaluated. And there's lots of other things that fall into this, right? Like Meyers-Briggs or the tongue map I found out is fake. There's all these things that you just kind of learn and

you're like, oh, I'll just add it to my trivia booklet. That's interesting. But I think this was really one of those things that is actually, it's quite sophisticated, it's quite complex. There's a lot going on under the hood. And once you start peering in, it's quite sophisticated, it's quite complex, there's a lot going on under the hood and once you start peering in it really doesn't hold up, I think, to that level of scrutiny. And I think that was part of our reason for wanting to write a paper like this is because we recognized that we were coming from these two different traditions, both of which have been, I think, hugely influential, especially in their own rights, but that there is so much space in the middle and we figured that there'd be other people who are just as interested in these topics,

who are interested in going on this journey with us of how we really came to hold the beliefs that we believe. And we tried to set it up in a way where it was like, come on this adventure with us. We're just gonna lay out all these lines of evidence that we've come across. You can come to your own conclusion. And I think ultimately at the end we say,

and go out and test it. If you go out and find evidence that this really is something that varies across cultures, I think that's, as I said recently, it's big if true. That would be very interesting. If you can convince me with compelling evidence that it occurs, I will change my mind. I don't have

a lot of ego, you know, sunk into this. I just thought that this was a really interesting, underexplored question at the nexus of all these really interesting lines of research for centuries, potentially. Is there any interest in not saying you guys have to do this, but given the response, you know, there was the back and forth on Twitter with Joe Henrik and so on. But as you said, it seems like a kind of thing that can be simply resolved with pre-registered, high powered, nice cross-cultural studies. So maybe it wouldn't even be as free as this,

but is there any plan for an adversarial collaboration or just a collaboration, as the case could be to just get high-quality data that would speak to it? Because if it turned out that it was robust and was empirically demonstrable, then that would be very interesting, because it would be like a mystery in a way. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm personally open to it.

I think that the main ask that I would have is that it be conducted in a way that's rigorous and up to the standards of this kind of question. And I think, again, coming from a field that was less knowledgeable about vision science for sure. So for instance, I had not thought that deeply about what visual illusions are and the fact that they are tracking different processes.

They're not interchangeable. So if I go out with a battery of visual illusions and I say, look, vision is influenced by culture. Someone like Chas, who is well versed in this would say, well, let's unpack what you're saying, right? Are you saying there are low level visual processes that are influenced by culture? Are you saying there are these higher order processes

like attention? Cause some of those are not quite that paradigm shattering. Right? So finding that people allocate attention differently. So let's see, we look at a bisable image or we look at a scene. And maybe Chaz sees one thing first and I see the other. Or he attends to talk about these old studies.

Like, I look at a fish and you look at the seaweed in the background. That's totally reasonable. That's really interesting. I don't think it upends anything fundamental that we think about cognition, right? Those are the types of things, in fact, that culture probably does penetrate and should penetrate.

Just to clarify your point there, perhaps it'd be helpful to be specific. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but is it the case that like the perception of color, fine shades of color, blues and greens and so on, is that dependent on the culture's language, the words for carving up the color spectrum? Is that a good example of that?

That is a good example. I bet Chaz has a great answer to this because I'm sure he gets this question a lot. It's super controversial. So there are some really influential studies that appear to show just the thing that you mentioned, Matt. So one example is that in Russian the word for light blue and the word for dark blue are not like in English two variants of blue but are as we say lexicalized. So there's like a whole other word for light blue than there is for dark blue. And there's an idea that because maybe light and dark blue are more conceptually and linguistically distinct among Russian speakers than they might be among English speakers, they're also

more perceptually distinct. And you can better tell the difference between light blue and dark blue. And there's a paper that seems to show that. And it's not a paper that has the problems with it that you would find in this very old cross-cultural work, for example. And yet, it's extremely difficult to interpret, including for just the reasons that Dorsa mentioned. So if you take a close look at some of this work, what you'll find, for example, in the

paper that I have in mind, in this case at least, is that the Russian speakers who are better at making this light blue, dark blue distinction than the native English speakers actually perform worse or slower overall compared to the English speakers, even though they're somehow better at that distinction. And that's a bit odd and a bit puzzling, but it's the kind of thing that might be happening if they're using a different strategy. So suppose that the way they do a task that involves distinguishing light blue and dark blue is they go ahead and name them and they say, oh, that's this one, that's this one, and they sort of slow down and do this.

Maybe that's just a different way of approaching the task, and it leads them to perform differently, but it's not clear that the colors actually look different to them. And that's usually the thing that we're interested in. Not, do you approach this task with a different strategy than these other people do? Which, like Dorsa says, if that's the thing we're looking for, there's no shortage of evidence that people take different strategies or conceptualize some tasks differently

in all kinds of different circumstances. The four of us do that too. What we wanna know is, are you seeing this likely the way I am? And we can't actually answer that question using the methods that are typically used. of us do that too. What we want to know is, are you seeing this light blue the way I am? And we can't actually answer that question using the methods that are typically used. Well, I can see why you guys are interested in philosophy because I could see how these percepts are kind of, you start getting at, how do you find out whether the subjective

experience of one person is different from the other, qualia and nonsense like that. Well, but even without developing something as exotic as Qualia, like vision science does have methods for getting as close as any other field can get to those questions, the questions of percepts. We actually do have some methods, not for getting at the thing in itself, what is the raw feel of this light blue, but modeling where that blue fits into color space

and looking at some abilities you have with respect to that blue and some other blue, asking whether you get a different after image from that blue than you do from some other blue and so on. There are techniques that at least represent sort of the state of the art individual psychophysics, and they're not the kinds of techniques that someone brings in their suitcase with them to these foraging populations in the Kalahari Desert. And so earlier Chris said, oh, could we resolve this simply by pre-registering our studies? And I'm more pessimistic about that, but not because I'm pessimistic in general, just because

the question is so hard. And it's not just, oh, if we say how many people we're going to run into dance and don't exclude these subjects and make sure we're using the right stats, then just do the same thing we did before and this time it'll be good. You actually just have to overhaul how you approach these questions. Yeah, I think that, you know,

I've seen studies where like recently, you know, like there was a very large scale effort, a many labs study to replicate one of the early social evaluation and infants studies, right? That got a null result. And like, that was just replicating the simplest experiment from one of the earliest papers. And it was like an undertaking that took five years and, you know, produced a great paper at the end with an overall null result. And so I'm optimistic it can be done, but not optimistic that it's something that

would require a small amount of effort from people. So Doris, actually I had a follow-up question, Beast. I saw your TED talk also about adolescent play and modeling of child learning in weird and non-weird cultures and different approaches and things that might have changed recently. And it did make me think, because you mentioned earlier as well, that this kind of corrective that came up with the weird paper, right, essentially arguing that for those not familiar with it, that social sciences, particularly psychology and other social sciences were drawing too heavily from Western samples, and particularly

undergraduate, highly educated samples like North America and Europe primarily. And that this meant that we were documenting undergraduate Western psychology in some respect rather than including the wide variability of people around the world, or at least maybe we were, but we can't claim that on that sample. And that seemed like a useful corrective, an important corrective, and I think had good impacts on the field. But I also have had myself this mixed feeling that it has led in certain respects to what I regard as like a dichotomous binary between weird and non-weird. Now, I know the original researchers have disavowed that, but when there is papers of books that also

imply that weird psychology is a component of the scientific method developing historically and capitalism, right? Like to me, that does seem to like potentially recapitulate this, you know, East versus West binary. And I'm kind of curious based on like the paper and the other work that you've done with Child Play. How do you feel about this kind of, you know, framing of weird versus norm weird and the impact it's had? Is it like a useful thing or a poison challenge?

Or yeah, I just, I have mixed feelings about it, but I'm curious what you think. Yeah, so just to go back to this point, I mean, I think to quote the original authors of this, the acronym itself, for instance, was really supposed to be kind of a consciousness raising idea, right? It's not something to be dis-amalgamated. It's not something to be, you know, this weird, non-weird

binary was really not the point. The point was, which I think is still holds today, that we are drawing from a very specific sub-population of a sub-population and then making all these grand theories about the human mind. I do think that we do tend to get caught up in things that are a bit easy. And we like these binaries. That's just what the human mind does. And even this example of the molar layer, it's really quick. It's really effective.

It can fit on one slide for your Psych 101 class. We are drawn to these kind of easy explanations that just get the point across very quickly. But then we can become a victim of that as well. So certainly I think this binary between weird and non-weird, I don't think has been, you know, some people are adopting it and maybe not thinking too deeply about what they're doing or why. There's also this kind of like runaway selection in evolutionary biology, they call it Fisherian

selection, where there's just more and more cultural sites now. So it's like, now we're studying empathy across 50 countries. And this idea that if you just keep adding countries, potentially things will get more and more impressive or better. But I think what you do when you keep doing that is you just lose resolution. And I think this is where anthropology has really

made this point, the cultural context of what you're doing. And you introduce, I think, a lot more sources of potential error, especially when it comes to your inferences. So I think being, especially as a cognitive scientist, really thinking deeply first about what am I even predicting here? And just to plug a paper that we're working on now with this

is with my collaborator Benjamin Pitt, who's in a similar space and research as I am, we're writing a paper about thinking hard about the ways in which culture can actually shape cognition. So when we say culture shapes cognition, it influences this. What are we actually saying? Can we be a little bit more specific? And we outline a number of ways in which theoretically,

culture could do something. So this cultural thing, this input that you're exposed to could have no effect. It could prune a process entirely. You're exposed to something, not exposed to something else. Now you're just on track A, and track B dissolves. Alternatively, you could think about culture privileging track A over track B, but track B is still there.

I can train you back into it. If you move, you can learn it, et cetera. And then in the fourth version, it's culture actually producing a cognitive strategy or practice that didn't exist before. It's entirely culturally dependent. Now, what's interesting in writing this paper, I was really trying to evaluate some of the common arguments

and some of the cases in the literature where people have actually said culture irreparably shapes this cognitive process in some way. And really, the best example I could find of people making that argument recently and strongly is with the Mueller liar, in fact. I really couldn't find many other cases in literature where someone claims that culture has

that degree of strength, like that much influence over something like a core cognitive process. A lot of it is, I think, and I've convinced myself in writing this, I think a lot of it is more like privileging, right? Culture kind of pushes you towards some things, but it's not like you completely lose the ability to do this other thing.

Maybe it shapes how you focus or pay attention, but you can learn how to do something else. And I think it was a nice kind of meeting point between these two research lines, right? Or I think this argument that culture is kind of fundamentally shaping in this way, right? In terms of pruning out something. You see this illusion or you don't.

It's a cultural byproduct. Some cultural inputs are actually producing it. That's actually a very strong argument that I don't think exists, or at least I didn't come across with that degree of strength in other examples. Yeah, I was teaching a class yesterday and talking about an example when we tried to collect data at a Japanese fire-working festival.

And there were two issues there. There's the potential issue around, like, because the measure that we were trying to use was like a kind of simple trust task, but it requires that the people want to get more money. And the cultural norm was actually they wanted to reduce the money. So they were like asking, which one is the one will have less money? I'm like, no, no, no, that's like one. I'm not supposed to tell you until like the, you could just pick whatever you want,

but the whole logic part relies on like people wanting to be getting more money. Right. But you could present that as like, oh, this is a Japanese cultural value. But actually, I think it's more like if you did it at a church or something as well, you'd probably get the same results. So you have methodological application issues and then also interpretation and the influence of culture. So it's not easy. In general, I think is the case. And it probably is, like you said,

that there's a lot of instances where these are helpful things for thinking through. But we probably should think more about what we're wanting to claim and that kind of thing. That's probably the most important issue and one that receives relatively less attention. Matt, you're looking pensive.

Actually, just a question for Chas, I think. I took a look at another paper you've written in 2016, Cognition Does Not Affect Perception. And we're not going to have time to go into this properly at all. But you know, it just struck me this is, you know, it's got a similar vibe, I think, to what you're also been working on. I mean, I don't want to use the word debunking, but you are popping balloons a little bit in terms of marshalling evidence by something that's wrong. And Chris is also of this temperament.

He loves doing this. Science obviously needs that. Psychology has had a bad run in terms of getting ahead of our skis and thinking things are true and proceeding as if they are true without really checking. Do you think this is an important thing we should be doing more of? Well, it's true that this wasn't my first rodeo in terms

of taking on a literature that was fairly widely accepted and trying to show that you might not want to think about it that way anymore. But I will resist the debunking label a little bit, like maybe for the following reasons. So there's a lot of ways for a hypothesis to be wrong. And some of them are boring. One way that your hypothesis can be wrong is that, oops, in my code I had a minus sign instead of a plus

sign, or oops, I just didn't run enough subjects or something like that. And I think that these hypotheses are wrong in interesting ways. The hypothesis is super interesting, the refutation of it is super interesting, and everyone comes away, hopefully, if your ego isn't so attached to it, having learned something, right? And it's really interesting to think through what it would mean for this like fundamental visual process or phenomenon to be culturally determined. What would that amount to? We have to get precise on what we would mean by both the phenomenon and cultural determination and what counts as culture, and you know that's a whole exercise in itself. And then it's worth thinking really hard about like

what kind of evidence is gonna be relevant to answering that question. Of course there's the cross-cultural evidence but as we've shown in our paper, in Dorsand my paper, there's a lot of other evidence that's relevant too. And it might not have occurred to you. Let's test guppies, right? It might not have occurred to you. What about people who have these very unusual developmental trajectories in their own visual perception? But then once it's pointed out to you, you kind of think, oh my gosh, that guppy stuff has been under our noses. It's so relevant. Why didn't we bring that to bear? And again, yeah, you come away learning a lot. And so that's sort of my feeling about these sorts of

projects. I will say that it's true that you found that other paper. I also enjoy inflating balloons, popping some and inflating others. And there are lots of projects that I'm really excited about that involve, almost like I was saying in the intro, bringing in new questions from other fields and sort of almost trying to create new literatures within psychology. We have some projects in our lab that are about the perception of silence. That is a question that philosophers have been interested for a very long time and that

psychologists have not been interested in so recently. We have projects about consciousness, you know, projects about sort of the difference between high level vision and low level vision, comparisons between human and machine vision, and all of those involve inflating balloons. But it's true that when there's an idea out there that you see everyone around you accepting and that you feel you have some reason to think a different take should be out there, it's quite tempting to go ahead and articulate that take

and hopefully you do it in a way that is like enjoyable for everyone to read and doesn't feel like trashing the thing, right? So something that I really hope comes through in this paper. And then I think you mentioned and that Doris and I, you know, in debriefing the previous episode really appreciated is that like the discussion is charitable, right? Like at least we try to be like we do our best to sort of like make the cultural byproduct hypothesis sound really good before then saying why we think it's wrong.

And what would be a shame is if like people who were drawn to that hypothesis, read our paper and like didn't recognize themselves in our description of them. But by and large, that's not been the case. The reception, I know you mentioned the possibility of ruffling feathers. I mean, there are some feathers that have been ruffled, but for the most part, I mean, you know,

you mentioned Chris having taught this stuff before and you don't seem very ruffled, right? Like you think, oh, you oh, I taught this thing, but actually, what do you know? This is cool. And I think that's been the reaction. When people on Twitter have said, oh, got to rewrite this part of my class,

they didn't say, and that sucks. They said, rewrite this part of my class. How exciting. And I think that's the right way to think about it. I've got a question that is a bit broad, maybe to finish up with as well. And it does relate to this in a way. So on the podcast here, we're often

dealing with a caricatured version of academia that's being attacked, which is everybody is close-minded. There's a central dogma that everybody receives. And 90% of universities are focused on gender studies kind of topics. That's the image in the kind of content that we usually deal with. And we know that's not true. We're working academics as well.

But it is also the case that now in America, science is currently facing genuine challenges. Academia is being targeted by the current administration. And you two are like working scientists also in the context of, you know, ongoing reproducibility crises and these kinds of things. So I'm just curious about like, I mean, obviously, Matt and I really like your paper and your other work has been really interesting. You're both younger researchers, right? At the start of careers or middle of, I don't know where people are in careers, but like, how are you feeling about academia and doing research in America now? Are we, me and Matt, like kind of stuck in culture war framing

and like the on the ground reality is nothing has really changed or is there actually concerns or how do you feel about it in general? Do you want to go to Arsene or should I? I'm ready to think about it, yeah, you can go. I mean, I see things changing around me in the Trump administration kind of way,

not in the sort of, in that other way where you were saying we know it to be an illusion that there's just consensus all over the place. It's almost hilarious to imagine that. All we need is to agree with each other and yell at each other about being wrong about everything. It's just the idea that we all look around the room and say, yep, yep, and you're right, and you're right, and you're right. A, it would be incredibly boring, and B, it's so the exact opposite. It's not academic standard. No.

You know why I dedicated my life to this intellectual pursuit? To just blindly agree with everything everyone says around me all the time. But no, on this other issue, it sure is changing. This semester or this past semester, I was the chair of a search committee that could have hired a new colleague and brought them into our department, and that search was canceled due to changes in funding that are coming into our university. And that's someone's career, that's someone's life that could have changed in one way and

didn't. And that actually happened across our university and is happening across many other universities in the United States. And it's no good. The way we learn about the world around us is by studying it. And that's what scientists do and other academics do. And if you value knowing what's happening around you and what came before you and how to live a good life and how to organize society

and how to understand what the effects of some economic policy will be and all the other things that academic study, you need to support those things. You need to fund them. You need to find value in them. And that is precisely what is under attack politically right now. Yeah, totally understandable.

OK, so what's next for you guys? You got to do more, not pricking balloons, but more critical type research. Did you have anything else in a similar vein? I'm sure you got dozens of projects with students and stuff going on, but is there anything anything particularly like to mention? Sure. Yeah, so I think a lot of the recent projects in the lab that I'm interested in are really about mapping the space, this exact kind of research topic that we've been all discussing, which is how does culture

shape cognition? So we have questions ranging the entire spectrum of things that we think are probably unlikely to be influencing cognitive processes all the way to potentially producing new ones. And I find that very exciting, actually, because I think all of those are equally valuable in some way. I think what I've been trying to do, especially in some

of the work that I'm involved in now, is maybe bring attention to questions that we have ignored or not paid much attention to. So one of the things that I'm really interested in is child development from a child's perspective and unveiling what I often refer to as adult centrism in science, where the constructs that we study, the questions that we ask, all of those things

are created by adults. And we tend to think of children as these little vessels that are inheriting information from adults because adults are the real movers and shakers and really trying to bring light to these understudied kind of subpopulations. So that's one of the new areas I'm really interested in developing further.

On my end, thinking about cross-cultural influences on anything is new for me in a way that it's not new for Dorsa. And so there's a question for me how much I'll continue working on something like this. I will say like this has been one of my favorite collaborations in my entire career. And so any excuse to work more with Dorsa is one that I'll take. I do think that, you know, this won't be the end for us because when you make a statement like this out there in the literature, people respond and then it's not very sporting to say, oops, actually, moving on, not talking about this anymore.

So probably there'll be some replies of some kind. There will be papers that say, I'm here in Firestone, set out this claim and here we respond with do ba-ba. And then we'll have to reply to that probably, or at least have some opinion about it. For me, just like in my career and sort of just projects that I'm excited about, this theme of integrating questions from philosophy and psychology really is something that's very important to me, both like as an intellectual project and even as like a kind of sociological project.

So I'm involved with some other collaborators, including a philosopher named Kevin Landy, in like organizing workshops at different conferences that bring philosophy to those workshops. So one of those is called Phi Vis, Philosophy and Vision Science, so P-H-I-V-I-S, and that's a satellite meeting of the Vision Sciences Society. I also, with a colleague here at Hopkins named Ian Phillips, he's basically become a sort of co-principal investigator of my lab. He's a philosopher who has sort of become a psychologist also. And we now kind of run our lab together and really try to draw on each other's expertise

to sort of do things together that neither of us could have done alone. And some projects I mentioned earlier on the science of visual awareness and on silence would not have been possible otherwise. And then one other thing I'm really excited about is a collaboration with another philosopher here named E.J. Green, and he and I have become recently the co-directors of a group here called the Foundations of Mind group.

And we even have a website, mind.jhu.edu. And it's a group, sort of an affinity group of researchers at Hopkins that are all interested in foundational questions about the mind. And those could be philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, it could be humanists of other kinds as well, even people in computer science. And just if you care about these sort of like very big picture questions, this is a group that would welcome you.

And we've been hosting some events. We had an event recently on the question of innateness and just how to think about that from a sort of 21st century way. And you mentioned career stage stuff, something that's become important to me as I've been a professor for another year or two and another year or two and so on is not just sort of trying to write the papers I wanna write

but also trying to make little sort of, be a bit of a sociological and intellectual influence on the kinds of work people do in the field. And so making room for interdisciplinary work like this is something that's become a bit of a sociological and intellectual influence on the kinds of work people do in the field. And so making room for interdisciplinary work like this is something that's become a bit important to me so that new researchers coming up can say, oh, there's a venue for me to do this kind of thing. Or there's a workshop where I could be featured if I do that kind of thing.

And so maybe it does pay to do this interdisciplinary kind of thing. Because I think many of us, I'm sure maybe this is your experience, I know this has been Doris's experience just having known her for a while, and this is usually my experience as well, there's lip service paid to interdisciplinarity. And then when you actually are staring the interdisciplinary person in the face, your institution discovers that you don't fit in the boxes that they made for you. And oops, sorry, I know we said we wanted someone like you,

but we don't know where to put you or something like that. And so I think just showing that it's possible to do this kind of stuff successfully can get institutions to want to do more of that and really see how it can work and see how you can make the department affiliations work and the employment work and the tenure homework. And so that's something that I care about a lot and that I know Dorsett does too with her in terms

of their work. Oh, that's an unusually positive note to end the episode. Oh, for us, usually we finish saying, well, that was terrible, but, you know, next week we'll look at another terrible thing. So this is good optimism. I realized as you're a little bit confused because you've spent a lot of time around philosophers. And as a result, you think there's interdisciplinary work in academia or that people are actually cared about debating things. But we'll allow that to go past. We know none of that occurs. It is all the book mind fire has been shoveled into people's minds. That's all academia is for. So you're disillusioned, but that's probably philosophers' fault.

But we really did enjoy the paper and also reading actually your broader work. And like on the serious note, I do really value the kind of approach that you guys embody. And I think it's a good illustration of cross-disciplinary work and critical scholarship like being productive so thank you for coming on and talking to us and we'll be happy to talk to you again about like future research if you didn't find this too historic. Thanks so much for having us. Thanks for having us. This was really fun. Thanks guys. I'm going to be a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a

little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a You