Good Guys To Know

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  So many of our listeners may be asking why a good guy to know should know about the game of golf.  Well golf is a sport you can play for the rest of your life.  The old saying goes, that the greatest thing you can do in golf is shoot your age. Also, more than any other recreational activity, golf is a game that can help you get ahead in your profession.  Every office has a group of guys that goes golfing on Friday afternoons.  And more often than not, those guys are the bosses.   So when and if you get a chance to play with that group, you don’t have to be a great golfer, but at the very least you need to know basic golf etiquette.

  There is a common misconception that computer hacking is a bad thing.  Computer hacking is not necessarily evil and comes in many forms.  The hacker community generally recognizes 2 or 3 different kinds of hackers.  All have different motivations, different strategies, and different worldviews.   Black Hat Hackers (crackers) Black hat hackers, or crackers as they are often referred to, are the types of hackers we all envision and see in the movies.  These guys (and gals) are bold, powerful, and just want to break stuff.  Black hat hackers often come in the form of younger kids (script kiddies) who rely on other people’s code plus some homemade “optimizations” to cause problems for other programs/computers/websites.  These hackers are driven by the fun and the power obtained from causing these programs to bend to their newly imposed rules.  Although this type of hacking can technically become very lucrative, stealing credit card numbers isn’t the way it’s done.  The black hat hacker is underground, and deals with an underground sort of clientele.   White Hat Hackers White hat hackers, as you may have guessed, are the polar opposite of the black hat hacker.  These hackers use their powers for good, and fend off the evil black hats as their full time gig.  White hat hackers will end up in a government job or working at a bank to help plug up security risks that the black hats may try to exploit.  Interestingly enough, a lot of these white hats came from the dark side.  Many white hat hackers were evil in their younger, immature days.   Grey Hat Hackers Grey hat hackers are again, exactly what you might imagine (something tells me a computer genius didn’t come up with this nomenclature).  These hackers walk the fine line between good and evil, often times breaking things that may cause harm, but they do it to prove a point, or to make the world a better place.  This is often where we run into “hacktivism”.  Hactivism is the advancement of political or personal ideologies by hacking into an “enemy” system.  The recent outbreaks of Anonymous and LulzSec are great examples of hacktivism.   Perek Grows up As a devoted Apple fanboy, I love rolling around in the comfort that is virus-free-computers.  The Mac simply doesn’t get them (yet).  In trolling through the numbers though, it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that Apple just doesn’t have a big enough market share to warrant an attack.  Why attack something that will gain you almost no visibility?  Windows has the most users and therefore is under the most attack.  As apple rises in popularity, so will the viruses and hacks.  So buy one now before they get too popular!   In The News The news is blowing up with computer hacking in recent months/weeks/days/hours.  Some major h4ck5 are taking place at some of the most secure points on the interweb.  The CIA, the Senate, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Public Broadcasting, ATM Networks, all of these are being hacked into and data is being posted all over the place.  The culprit?  Well, if they knew, it wouldn’t be happening.  But, a group of hackers under the organization name of LulzSec is taking lots of the credit.  LulzSec is (was) a group of apparently 6 hackers wreaking havoc in the online world.  I’d give you a link to their website but to be honest I’m a bit scared going there myself.  IF you’re interested, Google it (unless Google got hacked).  You can also find out more on some other obscure websites like the New York Times.   Now – change your pants, and try this Reading all this stuff freaked me out.  And a hack ratio of 75% within the Good Guys To Know is high enough to get me to take action.  The most common places you or I will get hacked are our email programs or Facebook.  Here are a couple links that show you how to check if you’ve been hacked, and what to do about it. [...]

in my quest to find a noble cause for the proceeds from our Swear Jar challenge, I thought I’d revisit a topic I was pretty excited about back in college; micro-lending. It’s one of these ideas that everyone seems to love, and is a compelling story as one step that could be taken to start eliminating poverty in the third world. As with a lot of stuff I thought was great in college, after researching with a little bit more of a skeptical mindset, I found that it may not be the silver bullet I used to think it was for ending poverty, but I still think it has its place, despite criticisms, and I still think it’s a great vehicle for the GoodGuys to invest in. So let’s start out with the broad description of Micro-Finance. Micro-Finance is providing financial services to very low-income individuals or groups that traditionally do not have access to conventional banking services. This is stuff we, in the west take for granted: Having a safe and secure place to hold your money (savings), having a way that you don’t have to pay for everything in cash (checking), paying small regular payments in order to make sure a disaster doesn’t destroy your finances (insurance), and finally, a way to purchase things up front, and pay for them later (credit). Micro-credit/micro-lending is generally understood as providing small loans to borrowers that live in poverty, and is designed to spur entrepreneurship.  The idea is that small amounts of capital can mean big opportunity for the poor to improve their situation. Here is one example of a micro-borrower that couldn’t make a profit with his water-selling business, and $360 microloan allowed him to buy an underground water tank and start turning a profit and growing his business. So these are borrowers that conventional wisdom would say are horrible credit risks. They generally have no collateral that the bank can go after if they default, their income is shaky at best, and they usually don’t have access to other financial services that we take for granted. Savings accounts, insurance, etc. Also, there’s an economy of scale issue in that there are costs to banks to servicing loans. If you were a bank, would you rather do the paperwork, research, followup on one $5000 loan, or one hundred $500 loans? So enter micro-lending institutions; banks that specialize in lending to these types of borrowers. There is a lot of literature out there, and many different setups that I don’t really want to get into. Some banks require borrowers to form groups to “keep each other honest,” some banks focus on lending to women because they have been shown to have lower rates of default, etc. Because these loans are so expensive to service, borrowers are usually expected to pay a higher interest rate that we, in the US, would expect. Shout out to listener Chris, who actually develops web-interface tools to analyze different data from microfinance institutions. Using his dataset, it looks like these banks yield upwards of 30% on their loan portfolios. This may seem a little extreme to charge a borrower 30% APR on a loan, but the alternative sources of credit to these borrowers typically charge even more. There are reports of loan sharks charging upwards of 100%/month. The final piece of the puzzle is that since it’s hard for banks to make money on these loans, several non-profit groups have cropped up that work to finance these loans through the local banks like Kiva.org. Kiva allows individual lenders from all across the world to “donate” as little as $25 towards a loan to an entrepreneur in another country. Kind of like adopting a foreign child, you are adopting, in this case, a small business. It truly is an investment, so when/if the borrower pays back the loan, you can re-invest, or pull your money out. An important point to remember, though, is that this still costs money, so the borrower themselves is still paying an interest rate that goes towards recouping[...]

We’ve all said it before; “We put a man on the moon!  Why can’t we figure out the solution to ________ ?” Well, The X-Prize Foundation aims to solve those problems by enticing our brightest minds with, what else, money.  This week the Good Guys discuss the merits and achievements of the X-Prize Foundation.  From space flight to life extension to alternative energy, the X-Prize just may be the future of human innovation, and it behooves a Good Guy To Know to understand why.   SpaceShipOne alone and with her mothership, White Knight:   The X-Prize Foundation Ansari X PRIZE Archon Genomics X PRIZE Google Lunar X PRIZE Progressive Automotive X PRIZE Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X challenge Methusela Foundation M Prize Virgin Galactic        

Behind every good guy to know is a good girl to know.  In this podcast we introduce you to the secret society of Pick Up Artists, masters in the game of picking up women, by interviewing a local PUA named Slim.  Mitch reviews the Yahoo! answers challenge and Perek introduces a challenge that may prove costly for the foul-mouthed…  ”Don’t hate the player, hate the game!” To take a look at all of our Yahoo! answers responses, head to these links: Mitch: http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/activity?show=TQOsBMRKaa Geo: http://answers.yahoo.com/activity?show=dXd4zXCJaa Perek: http://answers.yahoo.com/activity?show=93f6a9yraa Chad: http://answers.yahoo.com/activity?show=4561t23aa4  

The prisoner’s dilemma is a great example of game theory.  In figure 1 you can see the generalized form of the payout structure for 2 individuals (vertical and horizontal) either cooperating and telling the truth (C) or defecting and not confessing (D).  If you are interested in learning more about the prisoner’s dilemma, the wiki on the subject is a great place to start!  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner’s_dilemma   FIGURE 1:  Prisoner’s Dilemma Figure 2 shows a similar payout structure to the standard prisoner’s dilemma as it applies to the decision/law ceasing cigarette advertising on television.  As you can see in the bottom right quadrant, one effect of the ban was to allow both companies to retain more profits without fear of the other company capitalizing by advertising. This example is based on the youtube video here, where you can see a bit more of a detailed look at the concepts involved. FIGURE 2:  Advertising   The Survivor example is one of my favorites ever.  I doubt Richard had any idea exactly how accurate his decisions were on a purely statistical level.  This is a great way to show how naturally we all process this data.  A Good Guy To Know should realize how powerful this kind of thinking can be!  This chart was taken from the game theory textbook Games of Strategy (Dixit, Skeath, Reily Jr., 2009). FIGURE 3:  Survivor Survivor Game Tree   Lastly, here is a youtube video of some simple game theory and how powerful it can be, even when all players know the rules.  I love this video…      

A good guy to know strives to find common ground on controversial issues.  I recently read in Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, it’s usually not worth it to fight someone on something they aren’t going to change their mind on. If you really want to win someone over to your ideology, you need to start from a place you can both agree on. So when I decided to do a podcast on the problems with American education, I wanted to try to find some facet of the discussion where there could be some common ground. Education has always been a controversial issue, but in the last several years, with the decline of American students’ performance relative to other nations, and more recently, with all of the excitement in Wisconsin, people are looking for answers on how we can make our system better. So I came across this McKinsey study that focuses on one central question; “Who are we, as a society, attracting to the teaching profession?” Which begs the next question, “What does this mean for the students?” The study systematically compares this to who other countries are attracting to the teaching profession, as well as whom we attracted to the teaching profession 40 years ago. Disclaimer: I have many people very close to me that are teachers and I am pretty sure they are all awesome at it. This post/podcast is meant to summarize McKinsey study and get people talking about one possible way we could improve education. As with any study, there are always many individual exceptions to the trends, (but it’s still valuable to think about the trends) Before I dive into the McKinsey study, we need to make 3 assumptions; Great teachers get results no matter what. Many studies since the 1970’s have shown that the greatest predictor of student success is the quality of their teacher. There is an awesome American Radio Works documentary where one guy says something like, “A great teacher could teach in a cave and still get great results.” Other things are important; family support, poverty, class size, resources, etc. But these pale in comparison to teacher quality. “Success” is hard to measure, but for the purpose of this study, the only real way to measure student “success” is by looking at test scores. Unfortunately, it’s the best way we have to quantify how much students achieve. There is so much more learning and growth happening that doesn’t show up on test scores, but we aren’t going to be able to have any sort of meaningful discussion if we don’t have some sort of indicator of how effective a teacher is. Student test scores become more valuable when they are used comparatively, i.e. compare a student’s score at the beginning of the year, compared to the end of the year and see how much they learned. Not a perfect measure of success, but it’s what we have. Finally, we need to assume that test scores (think ACT/SAT) of graduating college seniors mean something, too. Yes, yes, I know some people are bad test takers, and there are really smart people that do poorly on these standardized tests. But at some level, high performance on these tests indicates higher achievement in whatever profession that graduate chooses. Again, I’m sure there are a million exceptions to the rule, but overall, high test scores tend to point to higher aptitude indivuals, who tend to exhibit higher performance in the real world, no matter what profession.   So by now you can probably guess where this is going, remember, we are trying to answer the question “Who are we attracting to teaching, and what does this mean for students?”  So McKinsey focused on students in the top third of their graduating classes. (Sample size was 900 “top-third” students and 525 current teachers that came from the top-third) They found that of today’s graduating college seniors planning to become teachers, 23% come from the top third of their graduating class (by SAT scores). I went one step further and found data on the average SAT scores for inte[...]

Say ahhh! In this podcast, our resident Dr. Puffer teaches you how to make the most out of your next visit to the doctor. The Good Guys discuss just how valuable a paper clip can be and Perek introduces a challenge to test who is the most savvy Wall Street trader!   Think you have what it takes to out hustle the GGTK crew on the Wall Street trading floor? Put your (fake) money where your mouth is and join us in this scintillating competition! https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/Public/Members/Register.aspx?partnerTournamentID=6358

Every Good Guy should have a Good Joke on deck.  Nothing is worse than being in a group when someone says – “anyone know any jokes?”, and silence follows.  Consider yourself in good shape after we fire tons of jokes at you in this episode.  This episode was recorded on top of mount everest (Denver)  with all the Good Guys in attendance.  We always have a great time when we’re in the same room, even when we eat garbage meat.  We hope you like at least one of these jokes and keep in in your repertoire for later.  Geo introduces a challenge that could prove profitable…    

Every Good Guy needs to know at least a little something about real estate. This episode the Good Guys invite realtor Josh Aberson on the show to discuss common mistakes, recommended practices, and other great info on buying your first house. We recap on the year long challenges and go over how much we all enjoyed the yoga challenge. Mitch introduces a new “offal” challenge that’s sure to make you cringe. www.joshaberson.com The Real Estate Rant

Like complaining about your crappy airline experiences? Mitch tackles the history of airline deregulation and tries to convince The Good Guys that things are not as bad as you think, and why everyone should LOVE baggage fees. We crown the king of the nerds as there is a clear winner from last episode’s pi challenge. Chad conjures up painful memories of elementary fitness tests with this episode’s challenge. Pi Challenge: Learn the Major Memory System to translate long series of numbers into phonetic sounds Secret weapon: http://www.sweetscape.com/010memorizer/ Mitch’s original mnemonic “story” (NSFW) Perek’s “piem” Main Pillar: Here is the quick analysis Mitch did on the price of the average airline ticket, as it relates to the underlying price of crude oil, one of the largest expenses that ticket prices need to cover: Source: Bureau of Transportation Statistics Source: inflationdata.com *The airfare prices are in 1995 dollars, and the crude oil prices are in 2010 dollars. The point of this isn’t to compare dollars to dollars, but to show that over the past 15 years, airline prices have gone down compared to the CPI, while oil prices have sky-rocketed. Remember that fuel prices now comprise 30-40% of airline’s expenses. Next Challenge: Yoga

This episodes the Good Guys take on a bit of a lighter subject and play a game of Would You Rather. The results of the citizenship tests are in and I think everyone who participated is glad that it was not an official test. Lots of listener feedback and a new challenge from Perek that will challenge your brain and teach you one of the nerdiest party tricks known to man! Links about Pi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi http://www.eveandersson.com/pi/digits/

This episode we talk about Money. What is “Money” and where does it come from? How does that translate into what we see with money today? The Guys try out a couple new things and go over some details about their paleo diet challenge. Geo, ever the patriot, provides a fun and enlightening challenge. Email questions and comments to us at goodguys@goodguystoknow.com. Be sure to listen closely to the challenge – there is a reward for our loyal listeners! Think you are a better U.S. citizen than the Good Guys?  Prove it by taking our very own GGTK Citizenship test at http://www.nerdtests.com/mq/uttake.php?id=79360

Are you, like Mitch, a little socially awkward?  In this episode the Good Guys discuss a number of interesting studies that show how the mind plays tricks on you.  You can use these studies to be the most fascinating guy at your next awkward holiday party!  Find out who won our $25 gambling challenge and also which Good Guy is the speediest on the Dvorak keyboard.  Finally, we each introduce our special 1-year challenges! - Brochet Wine Study – How wine experts didn’t notice they were served the same glass of white wine. One glass with food coloring! - And a nice blog entry of the wine studies for those of us who aren’t crazy science geeks - Blink – By Malcom Gladwell; how we make snap decisions and how these can either be meaningful, or fool us - Malcom Gladwell outlining how to do the “Triangle Challenge,” and trick your friends into giving you money based on how fragile their judgement is! - Wikipedia on the history of New Coke - Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think – By Brian Wansink – Packed with cool studies about food and why/when/how we eat. - Priceless – By William Poundstone – Why do prices end in .99? I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but forward was great.