For every second you deliberately hold your breath, you get 25 cents. There is no limit to how often you can do this during the day. However, this will now be your only source of income for the rest of your life. Do you accept?

Your task, if you choose to accept it, is to watch all 811 episodes of the Simpsons over the span of 16 consecutive 24-hour days. If you do so, you'll get $10M.

Note that each episode is on average about 22.5 minutes long, so that the total length of the series is about 18,247.5 minutes (or about 304.125 hours, or about 12.67 days).

After watching each episode you will be given a brief four-question quiz just to make sure you were paying attention. The quiz will be easy and should take about a minute, raising the total time to about 317.64 hours / 13.24 days. You must get 75% or higher on each quiz or you will be ejected without payment.

This should give you about 2.76 days (66.36 hours, or about 4h9m a day) to sleep, eat, go to the bathroom, etc. You will be sequestered in a facility and not allowed to leave without forfeiting the payment. You are not provided any reading materials, viewing materials, or access to the internet, aside from what is necessary to watch episodes of the Simpsons.

You can communicate with loved ones via teleconference, but this will eat into your time and will be monitored closely. Any discussion of the Simpsons will have you thrown out of the experiment.

Finally, the weirdos who are paying you are flexible as to when you start, but you will be responsible for taking time off work (if you work). And yes, this must be done over a single 16-day span, which once started cannot be interrupted without forfeiting the money. This includes issues outside of your control (e.g. injury, earthquake, death of a loved one).

Do you think you'll be able to do it? How miserable would you be?

You are given as much time as you want to prepare, flights to whatever African country you want, a vehicle and accommodation (a small hut with basic necessities) will be provided in whatever city you choose if you accept.

The rules are simple:

1. You must do it alone, you can get advice, resources and guidance from anyone you choose but only you can be within 1 mile of the Hippo when you make contact or you don’t receive the money.
2. You must make skin to skin? contact with the Hippo. The Hippo doesn’t have to see or acknowledge you for it to count. It must be a common Hippopotamus, Pygmy Hippos dont count. The Hippo must fully grown. You are given a magic camera and if you take a picture of the Hippo the camera will tell you if it is fully grown and acceptable for the challenge. The contact can be as brief as you like, there’s no timer.
3. To make the challenge difficult, any vehicle you use cannot be within 1 mile of the Hippo when you make contact either, to prevent a drive by Hippo touching. If it is within 1 mile and you make contact you will not receive any money so you must be certain.
4. The Hippo must be completely wild, if the Hippo has made skin contact with humans before or shows any signs of domestication the contact will not count.
5. The Hippo must be awake and cannot be lying down. In water is also fine.

The question here is, do you think you could survive this mission? They are territorial and could kill a human with ease. You also have to worry about other potential deadly wildlife you might encounter on said mission as well. Would you risk it for the money?

Edit for context:

An adult Hippo weighs about 6000 lbs on average or 2700 kg.

Your home? Your neighbourhood? Front page of the paper? Stock market prices?

You get $1 million if of you don’t shower or brush your teeth for a year. If you pick don’t shower, you can’t swim, use wipes, if it rains you have to get undercover in 10 seconds or you lose. You can use deodorant and or perfume/cologne.
If you pick not brushing your teeth, you can’t use gum, mouthwash, floss or wipe them with a napkin. Tongue scraper is ok.

You are offered the grand sum of $10 million tax free dollars, paid directly into your bank account. Once the money is credited to your account, the game begins. You can start spending the money as soon as you wish. You may spend the money, but you may not move the money anywhere.

Every time you say or write the word "the," $1,000 is taken out of your account.

You must play this game for ten years.

If you manage to go over the $10 million, you will still OWE $1,000 every time you say or write "the," at least until the ten years have passed.

Saying or writing "the" in another language also counts against you.

At the end of the ten year period, the game ends. You are either left with whatever remains of your $10 million, or you are in serious debt which you must repay or go to prison.

Do you want to play? What strategies will you use to avoid using "the"?

- The transformation takes 5 minutes after a cat enters the 10-meter radius. The car will growl loudly in the process. It reverts 1 minute after you leave the radius.

- The cats only attack you. They ignore everyone else.

- They can open doors, climb walls and swim. You can't stop them from entering a room.

- A cat you injure returns to full health after 1 minute, so you can't win by fighting.

- You can pay $10/minute for the Catnip Shield. Cats can no longer grow to tiger size

- You can pay $6/minute for the Cat Whisperer mode. You can freeze one cat for 5 seconds, once per minute.

- You can deactivate this curse anytime, if there are no cats within 100 meters of you.

- You can reactivate after deactivating for $2 million.

Would you take this curse?

EDIT
Whelp, I’m an idiot. Clearly I have no clue how investing works. I thought you spend money when investing.

Good job people, you have beat the Genie!

—————————-

assuming you made it to the tenth year, regardless of what type of attempt you came up with to avoid prison, it is irrelevant.

He/she replaced your most valuable item and seemingly carefully placed it in another spot.

Seemingly used your toilet & toiletpaper aswell.

You can't call the authorities because in this hypothetical situations state, you are the authority.

As far as is known, it’s only possible to visit the past, but it’s impossible to change it at all, and the time travelers say that for them you being placed in the oubliette has already happened for them. They also present evidence of you being placed in the oubliette beyond just their word, presenting whatever you would consider sufficient evidence to be convinced that you will be placed in the oubliette in your future and the time travelers past. The time travelers explain that the reason you’ll be placed in an oubliette will be because the leader of your country, at the time, just feels like placing someone in an oubliette, and will have randomly selected you to be placed in an oubliette.

How do you react to this information?

£100 a day every day no questions asked if you can eat and keep down one meal.

You must consume one bowl of a cereal.

Easy enough right?

The catch is that this cereal must contain one serving of the highest sugar % available cereal and instead of milk you must use a 50 50 mixture of sweetened condensed milk and creamer.

You can choose whatever brand of cereal and condensed milk and creamer but it must be one that has the highest sugar % per serving.

Upon completion, $100 will instantly be deposited into your bank account.

You must keep it down for at least 8 hours or you lose the money and the deal disappears forever

Any health complications are yours to deal with

Are you accepting?

One morning, you wake up in an unfamiliar room. In front of you, there's a holographic screen showing what appears to be a video conference. Below it, you see some documentation, written in bad, machine translated English.

According to the documentation, you were selected a part of Random Jurors Group of the Emergency Galactic Council. It notices that because you're from a pre-FTL civilization and don't yet know about the Council, you will forget that you were here once you return.

The current Council, it says next, was convened because of alarms raised by the workers of the pre-FTL observervation station on planet 6982189067 (this is followed by a short description of the planet and its civilization, and from it you understand that it's talking about Earth). These observers report that one of their human-disguised agent that were descended onto the planet to interact a little bit with humans and write down important notes, started to blatantly break the rules. In the past 5 */*some weird time units*/*, they have been using their technologies to try to significantly change the way humanity lives (change in what way, is not specified), and are now actively continuing, without responding to requests.

The galactic law says interfering with self-development of pre-FTL civilizations, as well as letting them know about the galactic society, is strictly prohibited.

About a half of the council members vote that the rebel should be eliminated with a precisely materialized explosive, in a way that it will look like an assassination by a human and, most importantly, it will vaporize most internals of the rebel's body, which are, while very made very similar to human ones, still differ enough for human pathologists to notice something is wrong in case they see them.

Another half says this too risky, because fabricating this assassination will also require to set up another human as the assassin, which are all also interferences with pre-FTL civilizations. They say, even with advanced personal technologies, disguise and cunning, the rebel won't be able to single-handedly change the structure of a whole civilization until his lifespan ends.

Because of the tie in the regular council, the Random Jurors Group was convened. They are random sapients, even including pre-FTL ones, selected from all over the galaxy by independent computers, that are provided the chance to vote from their own planets (you, for example, are now "here" in your sleep via a link established by the observation station).

Do you vote for or against the elimination?

You, wherever you currently live and whoever else currently lives there find yourselves being teleported backwards two hundred years in time to 1826, starting at the same spot your home currently stands. You've been left a note by a race of time travelling aliens, apologising for the mix-up and assuring you a portal back to the present will open at that same spot in the short span of... 40 years (it's short from their perspective).

Your home will land in the same spot it is currently, unless the terrain is unsuitable or another building sits there in 1826, in which case it will teleport to nearest piece of open land. If your home is part of a larger building, this part will be extracted and teleported safely to the ground with any necessary foundations, so don't worry about immediately falling and dying.

How do you think you would handle this situation? And what do you think the odds are that you or anyone with you makes the 40-year return trip?

You're offered $10 million, tax-free.

In exchange, everyone you've ever met receives a short, completely honest description of what you initially thought about them.

It includes family, friends, coworkers, exes, and complete strangers.

You cannot edit the descriptions, explain them beforehand, or choose who receives them.

Everything gets delivered at the same time.

Would you take the money, knowing that some relationships might never recover?

You are in a lottery pool with multiple people. It could be coworkers, family, friends, or a combination of them.

You each have been pitching in and regularly pooling together to play the lottery. The current lottery has reached well into the 9 figures ($100 million+) and the drawing is tomorrow. All your pool’s tickets are already bought and everyone in the pool has received photo of the pool’s tickets.

That night before the drawing, a mysterious supernatural stranger appears in front of you and reveals to you that your pool will win tomorrow’s lottery because one of the numbers in your pool’s tickets is the winning numbers. He will not specify which one.

By almost any metric, your share in the pool will allow you to be set for life and retire.

Given this revelation, which would you rather?

1. Be happy and content to be soon to be an equal winner with your fellow pool participants.

or

1. Go out the next day before the drawing to buy at least one other duplicate set of numbers of your pool’s tickets to guarantee at least a 50/50 split or more of the jackpot going to you alone in addition to your share in the pool. (Just know that there is a chance that this anomaly of multiple duplicate sets of numbers being purchased that contained the winning numbers might be picked up on and publicly scrutinized.)

How are you going to proceed and why?

If you accept, the money is instantly deposited into your bank account tax free no questions asked.

However, every qualification you’ve ever earned in life will instantly be revoked.

Drivers license/College or university degree/ masters/ doctorate/ operating licenses etc.

Any and all qualifications/certificates you have will instantly be revoked.

You are free to reapply and get them back but that could take time and money that may not be worth it.

Would you accept the deal?

Edit: Seems like I’ve heavily overestimated the values of qualifications in 2026 😭

You get 1 million dollars every year but everybody else can read your mind in a 100 meter radius.

1. There isn't a button, everybody in a 100 meter radius will just automatically get access to your mind whether they like it or not.

2. Also this isn't just like all your active thoughts you are thinking, this is everything going on in your mind at that very moment: Thoughts, images, memories, everything.

3. There is no limit (So technically you can launch a mind attack)

4. You get the money at the end of every year (So just doing this for free the first 364-365 days)

It's a one-shot thing per pet on both sides. You can't take from the same current pet's lifespan twice, and you can't bring the same dead pet back twice or for longer. You can only use this for pets that you can reasonably define as being / having been "yours", though shared ownership does count.

The circumstances of the live pet's death are unchanged, they just happen a day sooner than they otherwise would have.

When the week is up, the revived pet simply disappears (painlessly for it).

Neither pet automatically knows you've done this. If they happen to be a smart enough species / individual to understand it, they are not "magically" prevented from learning it, they just don't automatically know.

Do you take this deal?

Swap every persons biological gender to the opposite Or swap everyone’s nationality to something random. Families are not consistent.

From meeting them for the first time at the hospital. Entering kindergarten, middle school, high school, prom, first day of university, graduations, weddings, birthdays, your daughter celebrating her pregnanc and all other future major events?

The deal:

• Works for any job. Office worker, nurse, trucker, chef, CEO, it doesn't matter.

• Same hours you work now, but you get double your current pay, forever.

• There are only 12 videos, and they loop forever. Yes, including the one where Dave from Accounting learns about workplace boundaries. Every. Single. Day.

• You have to actually watch. No phone, no second screen, no headphones.

• Every 30 minutes there's a pop quiz. Fail it, and you lose that day's pay.

• You can quit and go back to your old job anytime, but you can never switch back.

Do you take it? And how long do you think you'd last before you snap?

(Asking while I'm literally sitting through one right now.)