Bonus 11 - Strategies 2

HA. "You have to wear a mask 6 months out of the year..." Welcome to 2020 guys!

Lord Rancid

The large fella and the cave scenario is perhaps most interesting if you just keep upping the number of people that will be saved. Killing him to save one person? No go. Killing him to save ten people? Tempting. Killing him to save one hundred people? Seems like a solid yes. After that we have established who you are and it's just - as Winston Churchill taught us - haggling over the price.

I'm still astonished by the ubiquity of going back in time to kill Hitler when you can accomplish the same good without killing him. So you have this time machine and you use it to make Hitler's childhood a lot nicer and pull him out of some nasty situations so that while he still might be a jerk, he isn't a genocidal lunatic. Annnnd you end up with an even more nasty world conqueror. Thank goodness we still have a time machine.

Please keep these Strategies shows coming! You both are so creative and funny, and this is a great new venue for that.

In your "one sentence", you definitely wouldn't want to advertise or identify yourself in any way... Just try to imagine how many people would sue you, on how many different grounds, in every country on earth.

Didn't Star Trek: Insurrection explore the topic of what inevitability happens on a planet exclusively populated by nice people? They have kids and there's no guarantee that the kids will be as nice as their parents. Once they start in with the extreme plastic surgery it's game over for utopia.

I feel like a planet of "not nice" people, with time, would find it very easy to declare war on the "nice" planet on the pretence of needing their resources. It could make for an interesting book if the proper scale is taken into account.

Sebastian Tonewo

Maybe Lying Vincent Price could make a guest appearance on strategies? Hmm....

Lovin the strategies shows!

Robert Curtin

My power level increases to new and transcendental heights every time we are blessed with a Fifer whisper.

The Strategies concept is sui generis and could easily be a fun and entertaining podcast on it’s own. The only problem is that Chad and Chris are both so sweet, kind and loving that they always come up with the most altruistic answer to any of the scenarios. If only we could have the input of evildoers, like, say, the smoking man from the X-Files, Nyarlathotep, Vladimir Putin or the My Pillow guy.

Was that The Amazing Kreskin in your outro?

feedergoldfish

These strategies shows remind me of the Book of Questions fad, and especially Tom Weller's parody version ("The Book of Stupid Questions") that my nerdy high-school friends and I delighted in ("You are on an airplane and an attractive stranger offers you a thousand dollars to go have sex with them in the restroom. Do you take an out-of-state check?")

Also, unlike said religions you could directly observe the being choosing who It decides is nice and what parameters It uses to define "nice." Not much room for "interpretation" there.

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

When I was in grade school, my parents were briefly pulled into a certain multilevel marketing scheme associated with the US Secretary of Education's family. They would invite friends over and spring a dry-erase-board presentation on them. My best friend's parents just left. Eventually, though, my parents realized they were spending more going to pep rallies than they were making selling cleaning products and snack food.

"I'm going to be nice so I can get to the utopia planet" is more or less the motivation of adherents to many major religions who manage to find excuses not to be nice, so I'm not sure it would improve the average person's behavior--although on the other hand it might be different if you could actually see tourist photos of the place.

I've basically fallen into a pattern where home meals mean either pizza or tacos, so I agree that pizza's at least a candidate. Would pizza have to be a specific set of toppings? Or if you choose "tacos," does it have to be "ground beef tacos in soft corn tortillas with guac" forever?

I met Matt Parisi in passing once before I started noticing references to him on the podcast. His close, special relationship with Leonard Nimoy perhaps explains the way he instantly recognized my girlfriend's T'Pring cosplay.

The "one sentence" question is really sticking with me. Does a global event people could use as proof a god, or their god, exists really benefit mankind? I envision a wave of fanatism and war that leads earth into a new dark age. You guys might be more optimistic for humanity than I am.

David Halstead

So when you say the one sentence that everyone hears does it get translated, or do they just hear you in English?

David Halstead

How fast is the water rising? I don't suppose the Winnie the Pooh strategy of putting him on a diet would work.

Ben Gilbert

“You're so nice. You're not good, you're not bad, You're just nice. I'm not good, I'm not nice, I'm just right. I'm the witch. You're the world.” - Stephen Sondheim

Ben Gilbert

I love these shows and wish you did them more often. As for the fat guy I would try to use the knife to widen the opening. Short of that push him back in so the others can get out? The he can just stay there. Just a head. Feed him mackerel.

But if all the nice people got to go to terraformed Venus, then all that would be left on Earth would be a bunch of not-nice people victimizing everybody weaker than them. Which means that anybody who was *actually* nice would choose to stay on Earth to help alleviate all the injustice. So Venus would end up being exclusively populated by people who weren't actually nice, but were good enough at faking it to trick you into taking them there. What I'm saying is, you're gonna end up having to blow up Venus like three years after you get done fixing it.

Ethan Cordray

Chris, here. There are other ways for the water to get in and out, just not big enough for a person to escape.

But who makes better pancakes? Kurt Russell or Wilbur Whateley?

This just made me laugh a lot. You sounded like two 14 year old boys in your secret den. But, strangely, not irritating. *fond mum face*

Beccameriel

100% agree, I've always thought the whole "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" is just dishonest, armchair philosophical hogwash.

Pizza would be the most versatile One Food surely. Also after listening a bit more I change my One Food to an In-N-Out burger, animal style. They're the best. In-N-Out did a pop up food truck here in Singapore last year but I refuse to queue for an hour for food so despite my longing for an animal style burger I gave it a pass.

I would keep my global broadcast power secret for fear that terrorists or others desperate to get their ideology out would kidnap and torture me until I blanketed the earth with propaganda.

Jeff C. Carter

If Matt Barisi (sp?) isn’t a Patron, could we hook him up with a day pass? I’m dying to know if he’d really unfriend Chris for that sandwich.

gaminette

First bonus show after upping my pledge. Worth it.

Couldn’t you just shove the big guy back in, get the other five out, and then let him bring up the rear with his head above water? Then the question becomes whether or not the big guy’s willing to give up a little face real estate or take a broken nose to save five lives and what kind of jerk would HE be to say no?

The Screaming Moist

Damn. I was hoping you'd cover the scenario I left under the last episode like this. I gotta say, something Chad said irked me. Talking about the marine rehashing of the Trolley Problem, he referenced the idea that one person might have more value to society, such as being "destined" to cure cancer. I have to say, the notion is revolting; a human life has the value of a human life, no more, no less. The only way a person can be ascribed more or less value is SUBJECTIVELY, such as if the fat man is a good friend of yours and you couldn't hurt him to save six strangers--or if the six strangers all had shaved heads and swastika tattoos, and were very blatantly expendable within your own system of values. But all things being equal (IE everyone being an unmarked stranger) there is no "more" or "less" value here. All you know is that they're all people, and the very fact that you don't and CAN'T know what they would do if they live means hypotheticals for or against carving the speedo-wearing Thanksgiving turkey cancel each other out in their sheer uncertainty. It's purely a matter of whether or not you view actively ending a single life or passively allowing six lives to end more upsetting.

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

Could you just leave Venus the way it is but send all the not-nice people there? Then the nice people wouldn't have to move and it wouldn't leave the Earth and all its creatures in the hands of the not-nice people. ......or would that make me a not-nice person?

Years ago, a friend of mine got into one of those pyramid schemes and asked me to go to a meeting she was hosting for someone else in this “company” to try to make sales - she just needed warm bodies so it wouldn't be too awkward. It was one of the more depressing experiences of my life. It was me and one other guy in this basement apartment listening to this sales guy talk about how he believed in this product (and the "multilevel marketing" scheme that went with it) so strongly that he had sold the business he'd built up over years to get the money to buy into it. The product was a phone with a video screen. It was 2011 and Skype, FaceTime, etc. were widely used. There was a video with Donald Trump endorsing the product and a lot of information about how successful associates worked one day a week and could afford mansions and yachts and private jets. Neither I nor the other guest wanted anything to do with it, and the sales guy got increasingly desperate. He started talking about how he was doing this for his kids. He had one of the video phones set up as a display, but didn’t have anyone we could video chat with. I swear to christ I looked into that sales guy’s eyes and saw only the chasmal emptiness at the heart of everything staring back at me. I remember that night vividly. I left shaken. I would sooner gnaw off my own arm than sit through another one of those things even if it was Will Smith and Alfonso Ribeiro and Alfonso agreed to do the Carlton dance and teach it to the rest of us. There’s only so much soul destroying evil a person can take in one lifetime.

You could wear a Chad Fifer mask.

Steve

I got pulled over doing a u-turn in Washington DC. I wasn't sure it was illegal but I didn't argue with the cop, just apologised and said I was on my way to the airport to get a plane. That was true, although it was to Indy, not back to the UK. I just got away with a verbal warning.

Steve

I love the Strategies shows, keep 'em coming! People were looking at me funny while I was laughing to the show in grocery store.

umm the sentence that everybody can hear superpower: does everyone hear it in their own language? Otherwise a few billion people going "Who is this yank yapping in my ear?" or "Why does god sound like a podcaster?"

Sooo...if the fat guy was wedged into the cave, wouldn't he be a cork keeping the water from flooding the cave? I mean you can still cut him up if you had a personal grudge or if you felt like murdering someone for giggles, but honestly I think the folks will be OK.