 We're joined here now by Julia Galiff of Rationally Speaking Podcast Fame and also now the Center for Applied Rationality. That's right Chris. I moved out to the Bay Area after years in New York to found a new organization called the Center for Applied Rationality or CIFAR for short. I'm the president and what we do is we teach people about the science of cognitive biases, systematic errors that our brains make when we try to reason or make decisions, which science has learned a lot about over the last 30 to 40 years of research, but in our classes we don't just teach people about the science and what the biases are, we spend most of the class training them to avoid making those biases and specifically training them to see how they're relevant to issues in their own lives and practicing habits of good reasoning and good decision making on issues in their own lives. Now where do you do these teachers? Do you go to schools? What do you do? So we hold retreats, they're four-day retreats currently for adults but we're just starting to hold retreats for high school students as well. And the format's pretty simple, it's about six hours of class a day with a mixture of classes on reasoning and on decision making. So some of the classes will have people practicing doing really rough probability estimates in their heads because the human brain's not very good at understanding probability and risk. Some of the classes are more focused on decision making so they'll focus on biases that can have a huge impact on the decisions people make about their careers or their relationships or their health. So for example, there's a bias called the availability bias where when you're making a decision you focus only on the most salient or vivid aspects of the decision and not on necessarily the representative aspects. So in my life I was considering being a professor years ago and when I thought about what it would be like to be a professor and whether I would want to do it, I thought about how great it would be to discover a new phenomenon in economics or how good it would feel to be up on stage accepting an award for my work, which even if those things happened they don't constitute anywhere near the majority of the time you spend as a professor. And so what I should have been thinking if I had been practicing more rational decision making methods is thinking about what constitutes the bulk of your time as a professor and how I would enjoy grading papers and doing the more mundane aspects of research and teaching and going to meetings and such. So that would be one of the case studies that we would have people practice on for a decision that they themselves were facing. So do you think it was a bad idea for me to take this gig doing these interviews because I wanted to get rich and famous? Ah, sorry. Okay. Famous, maybe. So which TAM is this for you? This is my third TAM. And what keeps you coming back for more? Oh, TAM is just a blast. I mean, first of all, the speakers they have are just fantastic and they span a range of more like critical thinking, rationality, more hard science, more social issues and I really love the range that they've been bringing in. The panel that I moderated this year, I've always been moderating panels of TAM. This year it was on techno-optimism, so I was looking at various possible future technologies like artificial intelligence or advanced AI, nanotechnology, life extension and my panel was discussing how optimistic we should be about these technologies actually developing. And obviously, check out Julia on Rationally Speaking Podcast and where can they find out about the Center for Applied Rationality? So our website is AppliedRationality.org. You can find out all about when our next workshops are going to be, all the new initiatives we're launching and you can also donate. We just got our 5-1-C3 status and we really appreciate donations, especially to bring students out to our workshops because it's always better to teach people about rational decision making before they've made major irreversible decisions in their lives. So we're especially focused on the youth and we could really use your support in bringing those people out to our classes. Well best of luck to you. Thanks for joining us at TAM. Thanks very much. Great to see you Chris.